Abstract
McFarland’s account of God, creation in general, and of the incarnation in particular, is shaped by three fundamental convictions. First, “the incarnation is not best conceived as the solution to a problem . . . [but] instead more appropriately understood as the ground of our being” (p. 12). Referencing Col 1:15, McFarland holds that God’s determination to be Jesus enjoys logical precedence not only over the fall, but over all of creation. That is, God does not become incarnate for the sake of creation, but God creates because God has decided to be incarnate (p. 11).
Second, divinity is not visible. That God can nonetheless be seen in Jesus is exactly because in him God takes on that which can be seen: humanity. Therefore, McFarland quotes Martin Luther approvingly: “whoever wishes to deliberate or speculate soundly about God should disregard absolutely everything except the humanity of Christ” (p. 6). McFarland argues that the best way to unpack these claims is with “a Chalcedonianism without reserve” (p. 3). Chalcedonian Christology holds that when we perceive Christ, we perceive no other than the divine Word, but nothing other than a created substance, Jesus’s humanity. McFarland devotes an important part of his book to presentation of the Chalcedonian logic. Largely ecumenical in nature, with particular Lutheran or Orthodox accents as he attempts to solve some of the lingering puzzles of a Chalcedonian approach (such as the logos ansarkos and the interaction between Jesus’s divinity and humanity), this is one of the clearest contemporary analyses of Chalcedonian Christology that I am aware of.
Third, McFarland holds that a human life by definition is “bounded by birth and death” (p. 165). There is an intrinsic end to our lifespan. This assumption has important consequences for how he unpacks notions like resurrection and ascension and how he imagines the eschaton. Christ’s resurrection, ascension, and coming should not be conceived as further episodes in Jesus’s life. They are rather “three distinct dimensions of God’s eternal vindication of Jesus’ finite, human life as lived from birth to death” (p. 160). Christ’s resurrection, McFarland holds, “is not more of this life, but precisely the vindication of this life in its completeness” (p. 165). It is “the declaration that he lives, but in a new mode, as God lives—eternally and not in temporal sequence” (p. 167). Christ’s ascension, even while cast in the biblical narrative in terms of “temporal succession and spatial movement” (p. 169), should be understood as “a claim about the abiding power of Jesus’ human life” (p. 175). And Jesus’s coming means that his life, now lifted beyond time and space, “because it is God’s own, is lived as God lives: not in doing particular things (eating here, healing there, teaching somewhere else), but doing all things (e.g., upholding the whole of creation). In short, as risen, Jesus is supremely alive: the one who grounds, sustains, and empowers everything that is” (pp. 179–80).
McFarland’s book offers theology of the highest order that is well worth pondering. His approach is deeply rooted in classical theology, while well aware of contextual theological challenges. I believe the most challenging questions can and ought to be raised about the three convictions identified above—both with respect to what supports them and to how they relate to each other.
McFarland’s contention that God’s decision to become incarnate precedes everything else raises the question of the goal of incarnation. At some points, McFarland seems to suggest that the incarnation overcomes the ontological divide between the Creator and creation. At other places McFarland is clear that, as God’s primordial determination, the incarnation should not be conceived of as a solution to any problem at all. However, since God’s determinations are not arbitrary, even such primordial determination needs to be intentional. As far as I can see, McFarland never clearly identifies such intention.
It might be that the goal of the incarnation is embedded in the book’s second fundamental conviction: God wants to be seen, and since divinity cannot be seen, God assumes a visible nature. McFarland acknowledges that God can be known outside of Jesus. Before Jesus was Abraham, and Israel knew God without incarnation. But in Jesus God is known as the One who has been seen, something that was not yet given, even to Israel. However, if God wants to be known by being seen, I believe that God desires that knowledge to take the form of an interpersonal relationship. A desire to be seen implies a desire for intimacy, friendship, and love that goes beyond regular knowledge. If this is correct, it raises the question of how this desire relates to our eschatological future.
McFarland’s eschatological imagination is shaped by his conviction that there is an intrinsic end to our lifespan; therefore, nothing after Golgotha can count as a new event or action in Jesus’s life. It is not clear to me what supports this position. To be sure, the lifespan of a creature is by definition contingent, since creatures depend on God for their existence. But this does not imply that a creaturely life has to end; only that it could end. It could also be unending, if God so desires. McFarland seems to have a specific Christological argument in view when he insists that Jesus’s life has come to a close: if his resurrection, ascension and coming would inaugurate further stages in Jesus’s life, God’s self-revelation in Jesus would not be complete. Thus, McFarland worries that “it would be impossible to rule out further developments that might reveal God’s will toward us as perhaps not altogether gracious” (p. 169). But this brings us back to the importance of God’s intention to self-reveal through the self-giving act of incarnation. If the intention behind this decision is love and friendship, and if this is God’s first, fundamental decision in which all further divine relating to that which is not God is embedded, then there is no reason for McFarland to worry. Moreover, if God is after an interpersonal relationship of love and friendship, then this implies that God is after interpersonal interaction with God’s creatures. But if this is God’s intention for creation, it does not make sense to think that God would let death undermine the very thing God is after. If the goal of incarnation is to love and be loved, and the Creator God is able to sustain these loving relationships without end, why wouldn’t God do so? But this is what McFarland’s eschatological vision seems to amount to: God preserves God’s creatures, but as creatures who have been, whose life has come to an end. They are being preserved, but their agency is not. After all, if they had agency—if Jesus had eschatological agency—new events and experiences would be added to their lives and his, and this is something that McFarland explicitly rules out. Therefore: Cur deus homo? Why does God become human? And why do we? What is our chief end? If it is to become Jesus’s friends, I venture that eschatologically we may expect more than the preservation of the lived life, but rather the transformed continuation of the creature’s interpersonal loving interactions with the incarnate One.