Christian Dogmatics: Volume 2

Introduction

Introduction Therefore, if any one is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. So we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We beseech you on behalfofChrist, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Cor. 5:17-21) So reads a central New Testament passage on the work of Christ which can stand as a theme for this locus. We are concerned here with what God did inJesus Christ, with the work rather dian the person of Christ. The distinction cannot be made absolutely. In the broadest sense, Christ is what he does and does what he is. Dogmatic convention has made the distinction, however, and it is useful to continue it, if for no other reason than that so much curiosity and effort are invested usually in the dogma of Christ's person that his work would be shunted off into a few remarks and footnotes were the two doctrines treated together. So with the caveat that person and work should not and cannot ultimately be separated, we treat here that part of the dogmatic tradition which has dealt with the work of Christ. There is no official dogma of the work of Christ—not in the sense in which one could speak of the dogmas of the Trinity, of the person of Christ, or even of justification in the churches of the Reformation. At best, one can speak of certain dominant doctrines, views, or motifs in different epochs. Yet the tradition bears witness to the tenacity with which the church has accorded a central place to Christ's work. The churches of the Reformation,forinstance, have looked on that work as the "chief article" on which everything rests,1 no doubt because of its importance for the doctrine of justification. To the Augsburg Confession, Christ "was crucified, died and was buried in order to be a sacrifice not only for original sin but also for all other sins and to propitiate God's wrath."2 The statement from the Augsburg Confession points to the major question for this locus: Cur deus homo} Why did God become a human person in the particular way manifest in the actual story ofJesus? What is accomplished 5 7 / THE WORK OF CHRIST thereby? What does Jesus do? We are concerned about the action and the passion ofJesus and what results from them, as distinguished from his being. Why must he be crucified and raised? If it is a doing, a work of Christ, and not just a being with which we are concerned, then it must have some result, some effect. What is that effect, and why is there just this form of doing to achieve it? Central throughout the discussion is the question of God's relation to the doing. Does God in Jesus do it for us, or does Jesus do it for God on our behalf? Is God propitiated, satisfied, or in some way altered by the event? Is God wrathful? Does God "need" Christ's work to become merciful? Or does God act on us through the event, changing us or the situation in which we find ourselves? Does God need the cross, or do we? Who is the real obstacle to reconciliation? God? Humans? Or some others—demons, perhaps? The dogmatic tradition of the church has attempted to answer the ques­ tion posed by Christ's work by means of various "theories," "pictures," "models," or "motifs" of atonement. The very proliferation of such patterns of thought has itself become a problem for dogmatics and poses a second question for this locus: What is or should be the relationship between these patterns and the thing itself, the actual story of Jesus? It seems fair to say that considerable confusion reigns. Since the time of Anselm the dominant theory in the West has been some version of "vicarious satisfaction'—the socalled objective view, also called the "Latin," or "penal" view. Christ satisfies what is demanded for salvation instead of us, thus "objectively" changing God. Yet such a view enjoys at...