seeing in a mirror dimly

Have you ever wondered how Christ was all present, yet located locally in Jesus Christ of Nazareth? Have you ever wondered how Christ continued to uphold the universe yet walk around Jerusalem? Or, how did the fulness of deity dwell bodily in Christ (Col. 2:9)? In other words, how do we uphold the deity and the humanity of Christ?

This is quite a monumental subject, and something which I admit to be quite the learner about.  Yet, I think this doctrine of the Extra Calvinisticum is of crucial importance for Christology.

Usually attributed to John Calvin (by the Lutherans due to the debate on the ‘Real Presence’ in the Lord’s Supper), this is a very important and orthodox doctrine that I’ve been reading about lately.  Basically it states that in the Incarnation, God the Son retained his divine properties such as omnipresence, omniscience and immensity, and therefore Christ was not confined within the limits of a creaturely human. In other words, Christ was not less than divine nor less than human.  Later reformed theologians used the dictum: finitum non capax infinitum (the finite cannot grasp, or exhaust the infinite) to describe this.  The reverse is also true: the infinite God grasps finite human nature in the Incarnation.

One great passage in Calvin where this is explained is here:

“For even if the Word in his immeasurable essence united with the nature of man into one person, we do not imagine that he was confined therein.  Here is something marvelous: the Son of God descended from heaven in such a way that, without leaving heaven, he willed to be borne in the virgin’s womb, to go about earth, and to hang upon the cross; yet he continuously filled the world even as he had done from the beginning.” Institutes II.13.4

As E. David Willis shows in his excellent study on the Extra Calvinisticum, this doctrine has undeniable orthodox catholicity – so much so, that Willis thinks a better term might be the Extra Catholicum! We find this doctrine in Cyril, Athanasius, Augustine, John of Damascus, Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas and the reformed orthodox in the 16th and 17th centuries.  I’ve listed these quotes and others, here.

One area which this doctrine is helpful is in protecting against kenotic theologies which claim that in the Incarnation, Christ emptied himself of divine properties such as omniscience or omnipresence.  This seems to be a mistaken exegesis of Philippians 2, where the reference to ‘emptying’ is taken to refer to Christ losing particular attributes, rather than referring to the general movement of descent from heaven to earth as a man.  The Extra protects Christ’s divinity by insisting that whilst fully man, Christ nevertheless filled the universe with His presence.  And although His glory was veiled within human flesh, he was still nevertheless utterly glorious as the fully divine second person of the Trinity.  Paul Helm describes this as follows:

“The Logos, as Calvin liked to say, in true Chalcedonian fashion, ‘remains what He was’; what happened was that at the Incarnation, while continuing to exist eternally in the form of God, the logos, in Incarnation, took the form of a servant.”  Calvin’s Ideas, p64.

The other area where the Extra Calvinisticum is very important is with respect to Christ as God’s revelation.  Without a doubt, Christ is the true revelation of God.  He is the true image of God (Col. 1) and the exact imprint of God (Heb. 1).  There is no other way to know the Father except through Him (John 14:6).  Yet, the Extra Calvinisticum supports revelation extra Christ – for instance, Scripture and General Revelation.  In other words, as Muller puts it:

“Christ, the God-man, the center of everything we can say about salvation, is not the center of everything we can say about God, and not even the rule for everything that we can say about the Word in its work of creation, providence and revelation.  The extra-Calvinisticum allows, therefore, both for a genuine revelation of God in nature, accomplished by the Word extra Christum or, as the fathers would have said, the Logos asarkos, and a special revelation of God focused soteriologically upon but not restricted to the person of Christ, the Logos ensarkos.”  Richard Muller, The Barth Legacy: New Athanasius or Origen Redivivus? A Response to T.F. Torrance.

As I see it, the Extra Calvinisticum brings great and helpful benefits to our understanding and love of God.  Firstly, it protects Chalcedonian Christology by preserving the humanity and deity of Christ against kenotic Christologies which empty Christ of His true divinity.  Secondly, it preserves General Revelation by admitting true revelation beyond the flesh of Christ (of course, sadly the unregenerate man suppresses the truth of God’s revelation as per Romans 1).  Thirdly, this brings some sense to the confusions surrounding the term ‘Christocentric.’  It insists upon a Soteriological Christocentrism whereby Christ is the beginning and center of Salvation (which is historically orthodox), yet banishes the idea of a Principial Christocentrism which insists that Christ (not Scripture) is the beginning, ground and center of all doctrine of God (which is not historically orthodox).  The danger of the wrong-headed idea of a Principial Christocentrism, Muller says is that: ”… it becomes a Christological reductionism, a ‘Christmonism,’ as some have labelled it.”  Muller, The Barth Legacy. p691.

All in all, I think that the Extra Calvinisticum is a wonderfully catholic and orthodox doctrine which frees us up from dangerous ideas about God, and allows us to rejoice in the greatness of our divine Saviour’s Incarnation which led to His gracious redemption of us!

This short little journal entry of John Frame’s has some nuggets of gold for the ordinary preacher, though it mightn’t be everyone’s cup of tea!

8/8/99: On another subject: what is preaching, anyway? I don’t mean the preaching of the OT prophets, or Jesus, or Peter at Pentecost, or Paul on his missionary journeys. I mean the preaching we hear every Sunday morning. You see, this “ordinary” preaching is not quite the same as the others, though to be sure there are similarities. The preaching of the prophets, apostles, and Jesus, was specially inspired of God, for one thing. Ordinary preaching is not, or at least doesn’t have to be. And the apostolic preaching was usually out in the open, not in a gathered worship service of God’s people. And its themes are almost entirely judgment and/or grace. It is evangelistic in thrust. When we gather in church, of course, we need to hear the Gospel again and again; but we are not in the position of those in the marketplace. We have believed, and we need to hear what Scripture says about living the Christian life.

All the Reformational emphasis on the power of the preached Word seems to transfer what Scripture says about the marketplace preaching of the apostles to the ordinary preaching of the church. Reformation theology built a huge theological construct on this equation: the Second Helvetic Confession even said, “the preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God.” We have spent a lot of time talking about heralding and so on. But were the Reformers and we right to make such an equation between the extraordinary and the ordinary? Maybe so. But the issue hasn’t been studied much, and somebody ought to do it.

Some have found the origins of ordinary preaching in the Synagogue, or in the great occasion when Ezra expounded the Law to the returning exiles and the Levites “gave the sense.” So the essence of this kind of preaching is biblical exposition. This is closer to the mark, in my view. We don’t know if the church followed the synagogue pattern in the very beginning of its existence. 1 Cor. 14 looks like something rather different. Eventually, things did settle down, and something like a Christian synagogue did develop. But note that if this is the model we are to follow, we cannot bring into ordinary preaching all that Scripture says about preaching being the saving power of God, being a heralding of redemption, about the preacher as God’s special representative, and so on. There may something in all that, but it needs to be shown.

So far as I can see at the moment, Scripture never commands us to preach sermons in church, or in synagogue either, for that matter. At least the kind of sermons we are accustomed to. 1 Cor. 14:26 does refer to a “lesson” (didache) taught in the worship service, but it says very little about the character of that teaching. In general, Scripture doesn’t tell us anywhere to preach on a single text (even the inspired preaching of the apostles fails to do this), or to have just one sermon per service. It doesn’t tell us that every sermon has to be by an ordained officer, and by only one. It doesn’t forbid drama as a means of communication. It doesn’t tell us we must always preach on the history of redemption as opposed to “moralistic” ethics. It doesn’t appoint the preacher to be an official herald of the coming age. Indeed, it doesn’t tell us much of anything. Thus it seems to me that we have great freedom.

I do think we should have sermons in church, simply because believers and visitors alike need to hear God’s Word. But I think there can be a simplicity about ordinary preaching. It does not have to be something dreadfully complicated that requires enormous theological sophistication. It’s simply teaching one another what the Bible says. So it seems to me that the teaching of preaching can be simple too.

There are many maxims in homiletical texts. But in my estimation, there are only four rules: (1) make it biblical, (2) make it clear, (3) apply it correctly to the congregation, (4) make it interesting. I wish we could focus on these rules in the teaching of homiletics. But instead, the students have to focus on the Reformation theology of preaching and to master the biblical theology of texts. (Why BT and not ST or ET?) They learn methods of preparing sermons that require maybe 40 hours for each message. Their applications are not very practical, usually not much more than “Isn’t Christ great?” and ”Repent and believe.” (As a bottom line, that hardly fulfills the promise of profundity made by the Redemptive-Historical method.) And most students never do learn to communicate. So many Reformed Christians turn to the Grahams, Swindolls, and others, people who were taught preaching (usually by a mentor) without all the theological elaboration.

Perhaps some of our failure here stems from our pride, our wanting to be seen as preaching more profoundly than mere fundamentalists, and with much better scholarship. And as God’s poetic justice would have it, the result is often less rich, less interesting, less penetrating, and less clear than many mere radio preachers. We should be able to do better, perhaps by setting our sights lower.

Well, Steve and I are having our first planning meeting for 2010! It’s going to be exciting – we’ve got grand plans for interviews, new types of podcasts, give aways, and more web stuff for the poddy! … It’s going to be good!

We’d also love to hear your thoughts: what’s good? what’s bad? who should we interview? should we make the episodes longer or shorter? should we have intro/outro music in any other genre than hiphop!? …. We’d love to hear anything on how we can better help people!

Here’s the breakdown of stats for 2009 – we had 6859 total downloads! Crazy.