Category Archives: Christology and the Trinity

Official: the risen Jesus has blood

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Last year I was surprised by the controversy generated by my post asking Does the risen Jesus have blood? Somehow it seemed obvious to me that he did, that his risen body was made up of flesh, bones, blood etc like normal human bodies.

So I was interested to read today John Richardson quoting from Article IV of the Thirty Nine Articles of the Church of England:

CHRIST did truly rise again from death, and took again his body, with flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the perfection of Man’s nature, wherewith he ascended into Heaven, and there sitteth, until he return to judge all Men at the last day.

(Corrected to the capitalisation printed in the Book of Common Prayer, also “wherefore” corrected to “wherewith”.)

So (reading “wherewith”) it is the official doctrine of the Church of England that the risen and ascended Jesus has a body “with flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the perfection of Man’s [sic] nature”. Now blood, especially the blood of Jesus, is certainly not a part of the evil sinful nature, and so is a thing “appertaining to the perfection of Man’s nature”, and so is included in the risen and ascended body.

Of course I realise that not all my readers accept this Anglican formulation. I myself do not consider it binding in any sense, certainly not if it goes against Scripture. But this formulation shows that the 16th century divines who wrote these articles shared my opinion on this matter.

Also, it continues to be strange to me that Doug Chaplin, and Anglican priest, expounded this article and continued the discussion with denials that the risen Jesus had real material body parts. If Jesus was raised from the dead not as a body but only as some kind of immaterial ghost, what does that do for our faith?

Packer denies the Trinity?

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The following passage from J.I. Packer’s 1973 classic Knowing God was quoted by Marilyn in a comment on the Complegalitarian blog, and I have checked and slightly corrected it from my 1975 copy (p.64):

It is the nature of the second person of the Trinity to acknowledge the authority and submit to the good pleasure of the first. That is why He declares Himself to be the Son, and the first person to be His Father. Though co-equal with the Father in eternity, power, and glory, it is natural to Him to play the Son’s part, and find all His joy in doing His Father’s will, just as it is natural to the first person of the Trinity to plan and initiate the works of the Godhead and natural to the third person to proceed from the Father and the Son to do their joint bidding. Thus the obedience of the God-man to the Father while He was on earth was not a new relationship occasioned by the incarnation, but the continuation in time of the eternal relationship between the Son and the Father in heaven. As in heaven, so on earth, the Son was utterly dependent upon the Father’s will.

Thus Packer’s way of teaching the eternal subordination of the Son is to claim that the Son has a “nature” which is different from that of the Father, according to which it is “natural” for him to do one thing and “natural” for the Father to do something else. Note that in the context Packer is clearly referring to the divine nature of the Son, not his incarnate human nature.

Doesn’t that conflict with the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, according to which the Father and the Son have the same divine nature (homoousios)? Doesn’t it contradict these extracts from the Athanasian Creed?

we believe and confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and man. God of the substance of the Father, begotten before the worlds; and man of substance of His mother, born in the world. … Equal to the Father as touching His Godhead, … One altogether, not by confusion of substance, but by unity of person.

Doesn’t it go against Philippians 2:6, where we read that Christ Jesus was “in very nature God” (TNIV)? In orthodox Trinitarian thought, the pre-incarnate divine nature of Christ is not some second-class divinity, not a “nature … to acknowledge the authority and submit to the good pleasure of the first [person]”. No, it is the same nature, substance or essence (ousia) as that of the Father.

Perhaps Bishop Ingham is right to accuse Packer that “that he has publicly renounced the doctrine … of the Anglican Church of Canada”, which presumably still requires him to ascribe to the Apostles’, Nicene and Athanasian Creeds. In fact, of course, Packer wrote the words in question long before he moved to Canada, so perhaps he should never have been licensed to minister there.

For the orthodox view, I quote the church father Basil as quoted here:

We perceive the operation of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to be one and the same, in no respect showing differences or variation; from this identity of operation we necessarily infer the unity of nature.

Giles and Sunlyk head to head on the Trinity

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Already this month Nick Norelli has posted about the Trinity at least a dozen times, mostly in connection with his Trinity Blogging Summit. I have not yet had time to read most of these posts. But I have read one of the first of these dozen posts, Giles’ Reply & Paulson’s Response, which I quote in full here:

Following Matt Paulson’s critique of Kevin Giles’ Trinitarian theology came a reply from Giles and a response from Paulson. I have not yet read either of these but will probably post some thoughts when I have done so.

Now Matt Paulson is apparently the real name of Phantaz Sunlyk, whose discussion of the eternal subordination of the Son I recently critiqued. I did not respond earlier to Nick’s post quoted above as I was waiting for him to read and post his thoughts on the reply and the response. But he has not yet done so, although some of his commenters have, and Nick’s own contribution to the blogging summit is relevant. So now I am myself reading the reply and the response, and the comments, and posting my own thoughts here.

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Phantaz Sunlyk on the Eternal Subordination of the Son

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Nick Norelli continues his discussion of eternal subordinationism in the Trinity, which I reported earlier, by posting a link to a critique of Kevin Giles’ work by Phantaz Sunlyk (a.k.a. Matt Paulson). In fact the link that Nick posts is incorrect; this is the correct link.

Sunlyk’s paper is long and complex. I have skimmed a large part of it, although I skipped most of part III and part VI. At this point I can make the following necessarily provisional comments. To summarise, Sunlyk has made some telling criticisms of Giles’ work, although he fails to understand its thrust because of his unfamiliarity with the viewpoint Giles is interacting with. But in fact Sunlyk upholds Giles’ main point concerning the Trinity, that the relationship between the Father and the Son should not be understood in terms like “The Father commands, and the Son obeys.”

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Calvin: "God shall cease to be the Head of Christ"

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This is a follow-up to my recent post on the doctrine of eternal subordination within the Trinity and the related discussion at the Complegalitarian blog. This doctrine has recently become popular among complementarians, many of whom also call themselves Calvinists and so presumably value the teaching of John Calvin. Recently at the CBMW Gender “Blog” (in fact not a real blog because there is no opportunity for discussion) Calvin was listed among ten theologians who, it was claimed, held to this doctrine. Wayne Grudem, in his Systematic Theology (as quoted by Molly), takes this further, claiming that

the idea of eternal equality in being but subordination in role has been essential to the church’s doctrine of the Trinity since it was first affirmed in the Nicene Creed, … it has clearly been part of the church’s doctrine of the Trinity (in Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox expressions), at least since Nicea (A.D. 325).

But can this claim be substantiated? I will not attempt to discuss all the ten theologians’ views. But in a comment on Complegalitarian Suzanne (apparently not Suzanne McCarthy) found a quote from Calvin which clearly shows that he did NOT believe in the eternal subordination of the Son. I have verified the quote from my own copy of Calvin’s Institutes, 2.14.3 (vol. 1 p. 486 in my copy, in the translation by Battles), and here I quote part of what Suzanne quoted with some additional text to introduce it, with my own emphasis:

That is, to [Christ] was lordship committed by the Father, until such time as we should see his divine majesty face to face. Then he returns the lordship to his Father so that – far from diminishing his own majesty – it may shine all the more brightly. Then, also, God shall cease to be the Head of Christ, for Christ’s own deity will shine of itself, although as yet it is covered in a veil.

In other words (and this is confirmed by reading the context), it is clear that to Calvin the distinction in honour between Christ and God the Father is only a temporary one which will cease when Christ has “discharged the office of Mediator”, that is, completed his saving work by bring his people to glory. Thus Calvin clearly shows that he believes in the temporary rather than eternal subordination of the Son.

If, as Calvin teaches, God shall cease to be the Head of Christ, that means that 1 Corinthians 11:3 is only a temporary teaching. So, if this verse is given the weight that many complementarians put on it, the “headship” of a husband over his wife (whatever that might mean) is also only temporary and will no longer be applicable in the eternal kingdom of God.

Subordinationism, the Trinity, and gender relations

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Nick Norelli offers a thoughtful review of Kevin Giles’ book The Trinity & Subordinationism: The Doctrine of God & the Contemporary Gender Debate. I have not read the book, but this makes me want to.

But I cannot accept the way that Nick seeks to dissociate the two issues which Giles links in this book, subordinationism within the Trinity and complementarianism in gender relations. I cannot comment directly on the arguments Giles uses to link these matters. But the counter-arguments which Nick comes up with are to me very unconvincing.

Nick claimed that my first comment on his blog pointing out the weaknesses of his argument “completely lacked merit”. To be fair, I had accused him of “expound[ing] bad theology”, so I can’t complain at receiving a robust response. But here I bring my comments to a wider audience for it to judge between us.

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Rev Sam on the Virgin Birth

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Just before Christmas I caused a bit of a storm with some of my comments on the Virgin Birth. I have now just found that my fellow Essex blogger Rev Sam (hat tip to yet another Essex blogger, Paul Trathen) has spent much of the Christmas season (that is, in our shared Anglican tradition, the twelve days from Christmas to Epiphany) writing an extended series on The Marginality of the Virgin Birth. In this series he makes a number of the same kinds of points which I made, but in greater depth, and gives sensible and clearly argued reasons why he cannot believe in the literal virgin birth of Jesus, although otherwise he holds to orthodox Christian teaching. While I don’t agree with everything that Rev Sam says here, I much appreciate his take on these issues.

Jesus is not a demigod

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According to Greek mythology, Heracles (the Latin Hercules) was the son of a god, Zeus, and a human mother. This made him in some sense a demigod, a person who was partly divine and partly human.

Orthodox Christian theology has decisively rejected the idea that Jesus Christ is a demigod in this sense. At the Council of Chalcedon in 451 a definition of the faith was agreed with the following words about the two natures of Christ:

one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, recognized in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person and subsistence, not as parted or separated into two persons, but one and the same Son and Only-begotten God the Word, Lord Jesus Christ

In other words, Jesus is not half divine and half human, but fully God and fully man, without any kind of confusion or change in the natures, while also being one person.

While this definition does not explicitly rule out the idea that God the Father or the Holy Spirit took the role of a human father in the conception of Jesus, it certainly makes it more difficult to hold. Christians have often been accused of believing that Jesus is the product of a sexual union between God and Mary, but this has never been orthodox belief. I would conclude (along with John Robinson and Arthur Peacocke) that this Chalcedonian definition tends to support, without actually requiring, the kind of controversial explanation of Jesus’ virgin birth which I put forward yesterday.

Fully human and born of a virgin

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A few days ago James McGrath of Exploring Our Matrix took a comment that I left at MetaCatholic and made it into his Quote of the Day. This has led to some discussion, partly because people took my comment in a rather more sexually explicit way than I had intended.

James has in fact made several recent posts on the seasonal topic of the virgin birth. I agree with his point that the child Immanuel in Isaiah 7:14 is not Jesus and the mother is not stated to be a virgin.

James also quotes concerning the virgin birth from Arthur Peacocke, who I knew as Dean of my Cambridge college when I was an undergraduate. Peacocke wrote:

for Jesus to be fully human he had, for both biological and theological reasons, to have a human father as well as a human mother … it was probably Joseph.

Indeed. Continue reading →

Does the risen Jesus have blood?

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This is the somewhat arcane question which has been raised on the b-trans e-mail list, and is also related to my post on Hebrews 2:14 at Better Bibles Blog and to Lingamish’s response to that post.

The discussion started when I objected to a proposed rendering “mortal humanity” in Hebrews 2:14, to replace or refer back to the literal “flesh and blood”. My issue was that “flesh and blood” refers to humanity in general, not just to mortal humanity but also to the resurrection bodies which Jesus has and which we will have. But I was surprised that my suggestion proved so controversial. Here I hope to show that Jesus’ resurrection body has blood, and that this is important for our salvation.

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