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The Vicarious Life and Death of the Mediator: Perhaps the most
fundamental
truth which we have to learn in the Christian Church, or perhaps rather relearn since we have suppressed it, is that the Incarnation was the coming of God to save us in the heart of our fallen and depraved humanity, where humanity is at its wickedest in its enmity and violence against the reconciling love of God. That is to say, the Incarnation is to be understood as the coming of God to take upon Himself our fallen human nature, our actual human existence, laden with sin and guilt, our humanity diseased in mind and soul in its estrangement or alienation from the Creator. jt: The first man Adam was a living soul; the second
Adam is a life
giving Spirit. We can know that he endured God's
wrath on the cross as
penalty for our
transgression. However, this business about human
nature is speculative.
This is a doctrine found everywhere in the early Church in the first five
centuries, expressed again and again in the terms that the whole man had to
be assumed by Christ if the whole man was to be saved, that the unassumed
is unhealed, or that what God has not taken up in Christ is not saved.
jt: By the second century the early Church had gone
into heresy as
prophesied by the apostle Paul (Acts 20:29) Note: that
it would be people
from among their own selves who would arise speaking
perverse things.
The sharp point of those formulations of this truth lay in the fact that it
is the
alienated mind of man that God had laid hold of in Jesus Christ in order to
redeem it and effect reconciliation deep within the rational centre of
human
being." (The Mediation of Christ p39) TFTorrance
jt: The mind of man is alienated because of his 'heart
condition' BUT
the promise is "But this shall be the covenant that I
will make with the
house of Israel after those days saith the Lord, I will
put my law in their
inward parts and write it in their hearts; and will be
their God and they
shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every
man his neighbor
and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord; for
they shall all know me,
from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith
the Lord (Jer 31:33)
You can not put new wine in an old
wineskin.
I would suggest that this understanding of the Incarnation is the centre
out
of which we ought to engage in all of our thinking concerning both the
Nature
of God and the nature of God's Gospel. When we speak of one we are
alreading
tipping our hand on the other. Blessings
jt: This understanding of the incarnation is not what
scripture teaches so why
would we make it the center of our
thinking?
judyt
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