LATC 2018 – Nature, Grace, and the Christological Ground of Humanity

Rought notes on Marc Cortez’s LATC 2018 Plenary Talk

---

Christology as basis for establishing anthropology

• Hedgie the Hedgehog
  • Why should Hedgie be seen as paradigmatic?
• Establishing that JC is perfect human – how can we make the jump to making claims about true humanity….

Irenaeus as a conversation partner for thinking why JC should be the basis for our theological anthropology

• Humans are made in the image of God
• Jesus is the True image of God

How does Irenaeus unpack this? What are the implications? Four Claims

1. TA must be rooted in the embodied humanity of Christ
2. TA must be rooted in the eternal identity of the son
3. TA must recognize the ontological and epistemological priority of Christ over Adam
4. TA must be studied in such a way that does not completely bifurcate nature and grace (I did not fully catch this 4^th point)

 

Claim 1

• The very idea of an image requires an embodied form – the son must have a visible and determinate form
• The body is intrinsic to the Imago Dei – Man not a part was made in the likeness of God. The perfect man consists of the comingling of soul and flesh
• The fashioning of the human flesh is intimately connected to Christ – Humanity is patterned according to the pattern of the incarnate Christ
• The imago is Christological in the sense that we see the reality that all persons are directed towards the Triune God
• No biblical passages prove this but there is biblical warrant

 

Claim 2

• What does it mean for I to claim that human nature in the manger is logically prior to the humanity in Genesis 1?
  • Means archetype of humanity exists eternally even though it has not been instantiated
  • Maybe it’s a divine idea – maybe Christ is the historical idealization of that idea
  • I never posits an eternal idea…. The archetype of humanity is always the person of JC himself (Does a Gnostic background inform why he never did this?)
• Schleiermacher & James Dunn
  • Jesus just is the idea of humanity – the driving person behind the act of creation
  • This however may overshadow the son’s existence in eternity
• The Son’s identity has been shaped eternally in virtue of the incarnation

 

Claim 3

• Adam does not simply prefigure Christ – Adam was consequent on Christ – his humanity has been shaped by the archetype which is Christ
• There is at least one sense in which Christ is ontologically dependent upon Adam
• For JC to be fully Human he had to receive his humanity from Adam – to claim J could have received a different kind of humanity – would be problematic for our salvation – he would be instantiating a new kind of humanity rather than recapitulating the humanity which started with Adam
• How come – looking at the ontologically secondary being (Adam) wouldn’t be a good way to figure out what humanity is all about?
• I thinks we need to maintain C’s epistemological priority?
  • I says because Adam wasn’t perfect…. They are not yet complete and hadn’t fully grown yet
  • Even though Humanity was created in the image in the beginning we don’t truly see what humanity is until the advent of Christ
  • “Adam and Even give only a dim impression of what it means to be in the image of God.” – Boersma
• Does this approach do justice to the canonical form of the biblical message about Humanity?
  • Don’t we already know what it means to be human when JC is born? The logic of cannon and creed seems to indicate we already know what it means to be human prior to the incarnation
• We can know other things about humans….
  • Studying humanity in general can and should provide some insight into humanity (learn about the Mona lisa by studying a replica) – move is complicated by falleness of humanity (someone wrote all over the mona lisa)
  • The developmental account does not denigrate the fact that we can know something about humanity from stages prior to the incarnation. (Studying Marc Cortez as a 7^th grader can give you some info about Marc Cortez today). This means we shouldn’t neglect the study of Humanity in its history prior to Christ

 

Claim 4

• Doesn’t lead us to distinguish between Nature and Grace
• This developmental model provides some basis for interdisciplinary studies of human nature
• In addition to understanding humanity through the lens of the natural – we are required to study humanity in the state of Grace too

 

Conclusion

Although Hedgie might be the cutest hedgehog to ever walk the earth – it seems reasonable to claim that not hedgehog forms the epistemological or ontological basis for all other hedgehogs.

 

On I’s view of the Imago Dei we have something very different with the embodied humanity of JC. We have the actualization in history – the archetype – of humanity. For I that is the only adequate ground upon which to base a theological conception of the human person.