This must also lead then to reconceiving our understanding of salvation, they argue. Salvation is to be understood as being welcomed into the trinitarian perichoresis, the “divine embrace of love.” Let's unfold this statement.
[Part 13 in a series on New Wine and systematic theology, drawn from my research master thesis Life to the Full. From Creation to Re-Creation, VU University 2014]
Reconceiving salvation: Welcomed into the Divine Embrace
Both with
Moltmann and Pannenberg, then, their reconceiving of the Trinity leads to a
reconceiving of the relationship between God and the world, and to new
perspectives on salvation. Through his salvation, God communicates himself.
Salvation is to be understood as being welcomed into the trinitarian perichoresis, the “divine embrace of
love.” But what does this mean? How are human beings supposed to “participate”
in the divine perichoresis? What is
the substance of salvation?
Moltmann: Salvation of the World in the Passion
of God
In
traditional theology, Moltmann asserts, the doctrine of the opera trinitatis ad extra expressed what
God means to the world. But this doctrine was incapable of expressing what the
world means for God. The concept of the divine perichoresis is capable of doing that. It sheds light on how the
essence of the triune God is all about loving relations, about self-giving
love, in a deeply reciprocal way. As much as this is true for the opera trinitatis ad intra (God’s inward
actions), it is for the opera trinitatis
ad extra (God’s outward actions), Moltmann asserts, because God’s character
and identity are expressed in his outward actions.[1]
God’s
relation with the world, then, reflects God’s inner being. It truly is a
living, two-way relationship, Moltmann argues. It must have a reciprocal
character - after all, a purely one-sided relation would not be a living
relation at all. [2]
Moreover, as it reflects the intratrinitarian perichoresis, it must be aimed at mutually self-giving love,
rejoicing in one another, glorifying one another, permeating one another.
Love finds
fulfilment and bliss when it is returned. Likewise, the love of God for his
creation and the love of creation for its Creator, finds fulfilment and bliss
when they are reciprocal. God not merely wants to communicate himself to himself (in the eternal
divine life), he wants to communicate himself
to his creation as well.[3] God desires to dwell in his creation and to
fill the whole earth with his glory.
When God
created man “in the image of God” (Genesis 1:2f; Psalm 8), this meant both a
destiny and a promise. Man was meant to abide in God, rejoice in him and
glorify him, as God desired to dwell in man, rejoice in him, and glorify him.
But creation had to await the appearance of this “true man” that truly
corresponds to God, in him this destiny would come true. The intimacy between Jesus and the Father, their reciprocal,
self-giving and glorifying love, is the divine embrace of love that people are
invited into.
Moltmann thus
sees a tight connection between God’s perichoretic
being and the salvific work of the Son.
“If the Son becomes ‘man’ that is to say, the image of God -
then he communicates his responsive love to those who are destined for manhood
and womanhood - destined, that is, to be the image of God; he gathers them into
his relationship of sonship to the Father and communicates to them his own
liberty, which is above the world. In this way the incarnate Son glorifies the
Father in his world and perfects humanity’s creation, which destines men and
women to be the image of God.”[4]
Salvation,
then, principally means to be taken up in
Christ’s relation of sonship to the Father and to be transformed into his
image, to become human as God intended human beings to be. This is
dependent on the work of the Spirit, by whom human beings are to be
“resurrected into a new life” with Christ.
This
“eschatological work of the Spirit” can’t be interpreted merely spiritually in
some Neo-Platonic or gnostic way, Moltmann argues, but it comprises the bodily, earthly, material reality. The experience
of the Spirit is quite distinct from “human forms of spiritualization and
sublimation”, Moltmann asserts (without further explanation), and it is “always
a physical experience.” It is “physical resurrection, physical transfiguration,
and transformation of the physical form of existence.”[5]
It is a resurrection into the freedom of God, incomplete as it will remain in
the present age.
With the
resurrection, transfiguration, transformation and glorification of Jesus, the
general outpouring of the Spirit “on all flesh” begins.
“In the Spirit people already experience now what is still to
come. In the Spirit is anticipated what will be in the future. With the Spirit
the End-time begins. The messianic era commences where the forces and energies
of the divine Spirit descend on all flesh, making it alive for evermore. In the
activity of the Spirit, consequently, the renewal of life, the new obedience
and the new fellowship of men and women is experienced.”[6]
It is
through the indwelling of the Spirit, that “the completion and perfecting of
creation of human being and all things” begins, “which makes them the home of
the triune God.” Through the indwelling of the Spirit that God as a matter of
speaking “comes to be at home in his own world.” [7]
It is through the indwelling of the
Spirit, then, that salvation is brought about - salvation that means to be
welcomed into the divine perichoretic life, bringing fulfilment of being.
This remains incomplete until the end of times. But when the Kingdom of God is
consummated and fully will be the “Kingdom of Glory”, human beings will
experience “the unhindered participation in the eternal life of the triune God
himself, and in his inexhaustible fullness and glory.”[8]
Again,
Moltmann’s presentation is problematic for several reasons. He does not explain
how the Son “communicates his
responsive love” to men and women, or how
he “gathers them into his relationship of sonship to the Father.” Instead of
the traditional notions of Christ’s atoning work that is to be appropriated by
faith and conversion, Moltmann rather suggests a universal completion of creation - in Christ, and through a
universal outpouring of the Spirit “on all flesh” (suggesting “all mankind”).
Clearly, Moltmann does not want to restrict the scope of salvation to those who
profess Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, but propagates a universal salvation that flows from the basic structure of his
theology.
Furthermore,
his account of “the completion and perfecting of creation of human being and
all things”, making them “the home of the triune God” can be read from a Reformed or Evangelical perspective, but his
language and imagery is too reminiscent of Bloch’s philosophy to ignore.
Likewise,
the unreserved way in which Moltmann
speaks of “the unhindered participation in the eternal life of the triune God
himself” - suggesting a deification in which the finite becomes infinite
(or perhaps rather entailing the becoming immanent of the divine) - must be
understood rather from Moltmann’s philosophical frame of reference than from
Biblical theology.
Pannenberg: Life in the Spirit
We already
saw how Pannenberg - in his argument on the unity of God - affirmed that the
historical relations of God to the world cannot be external to the interior life
of God. God is fulfilled through his relationship to the world, as the world
freely submits to him and acknowledges his reign, responding to his love in the
pattern of the Son, in the Spirit. In contrast to Moltmann, however, Pannenberg
maintains the sovereignty of God, as this fulfilment depends on the triune God
himself, on his faithfulness to his creation. [9]
Likewise, human beings – created in the trinitarian image of God - can only
find fulfilment through their perichoretic
relationship with God.
Like
Moltmann, Pannenberg argues that this occurs through the indwelling of the Spirit (thus understanding salvation in
pneumatological terms). Pannenberg comes very close to Moltmann, but in
contrast to Moltmann he emphasizes that this Spirit of sonship is given only to
“Christians”, to those who are “obedient to Christ”, and participation in
Christ is mediated by the Spirit to “believers.”[10]
According to
Pannenberg, then, salvation flows from
the inner being of God and must be understood as being welcomed into the divine
trinitarian life, through the indwelling of the Spirit. It is bound up with
the Kingdom of God[11], as
salvation means to enter into the Kingdom and to participate in the rule of God
in the world. The new life of believers is the “life in the Spirit.”
As we have
seen, Pannenberg agrees with Moltmann that the Bible does not allow a merely
spiritualized interpretation of what this “participation in the Kingdom of God”
means. Messianic salvation is about wholeness of life, addressing issues of
social injustice, violence, oppression, alienation, bondage, sickness and
death. Through the indwelling of the
Spirit, creaturely life will be made whole as it participates in the divine
trinitarian life and the Kingdom of God. This wholeness of life “cannot be
achieved, however, in the process of time”, Pannenberg asserts, more carefully
than Moltmann (and his utopian, revolutionary inspiration) - it “depends on the
future”.
“The focusing of salvation on the eschatological future of
God stands in critical opposition to all achievement of human life in this
world alone, for in striving for self-fulfilment in this world, we close
ourselves off to God and his future.”[12]
Previously:
Part 12: Salvation & the Trinity (1): The Divine Dance of Love - Reconceiving the Trinity
Footnotes
[1] Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 98-99.
[2] Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 98.
[3] Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 108, 117.
[4] Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 118.
[5] Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 123-124.
[6] Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 124.
[7] Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 125.
[8] Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 222.
[9]
Pannenberg, ST I, 438.
[10] For
instance Pannenberg, ST I, 266; ST II, 397-403. Also explicitly so, ST III, 604, “The inbreaking of the
present of the coming kingdom is granted to others also insofar as they accept
the message of Jesus and open themselves to his work.”
[11] The final
chapter of his Systematic Theology,
on the consummation of creation in the Kingdom of God, Pannenberg puts it as
strongly as this, “God and his lordship form the central content of
eschatological salvation”(ST III,
531).
[12]
Pannenberg, ST II, 399. At the same
time – upholding the tension between the “already” and “not yet” of the Kingdom
of God - Pannenberg asserts that the apostle Paul is clear that “in and by
Jesus future salvation is opened up for believes and can be attained now” (ST II, 400). “Hence the presence of the
Spirit also means already the overcoming of sin and death. If sin and death are
to be finally overcome only in the eschatological consummation, victory over
them is already in process in the present work of the Spirit, and above all in
his presence as a gift in believers” (ST
III, 553).
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