Truth Unites - Does Lutheran Christology Make Sense?

Episode Date: February 5, 2025

Gavin Ortlund offers a critical appraisal of a Lutheran Christology from a Reformed perspective. Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville. SUPPORT: Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites FOLLOW: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://truthunites.org/

This video is going to be a critical appraisal of a Lutheran Christology from a reformed perspective. I'm reformed. My church is broadly reformed. They're fairly ecumenical. Now, let me say at the beginning, I love the Lutheran tradition, and I love Lutherans, and the last thing I want to do is give offense to Lutherans. I learn so much from this tradition. In my heart, all I have toward the Lutheran tradition is admiration, you know. So this criticism will be coming from a place of respect, not just for the great theologians that I draw from so much, like Martin Kempnitz and Gearhard and so many others, but also for the great giants of the faith, like Richard Wormbrand, one of my great heroes. So this will be a respectful

critique, but I think it's okay to just, you know, try to lay out, here's where we differ. Here's where we have differences. Protestantism is an umbrella term. It's not referring to a singular institution or church, though it's often unfairly framed that way. So the different Protestant traditions are free to just talk through and work through here's where we differ. One thing I've noticed lately is that it's tremendously trendy for the low church evangelicals to get just demolished. People just love to, like, Redeemed Zuma and others just love to attack the evangelicals. Like, that's the problem. So the Catholics get a lot of criticism.

The evangelicals get a lot of criticism. But sometimes these more intermediate historic Protestant traditions like Lutheranism or high church Anglicanism get like a free pass. I don't know, you know, nobody criticizes them, it seems like. So, you know, I guess I could say, but I think these traditions have some of their own eccentricities. And with all due respect, I think the area of Christology is one where the Lutheran position seems to me to be very eccentric and novel. And I'll explain why I think that in this video, even though nothing here, we're not talking about heresy. Okay, we're talking about different extrapolations from and interpretations of Chalcedon. Within that stream, but what's the most faithful? I'll talk about that.

I'll explain, but just to be clear here, we're not talking about first rank differences. But this matters, and it's interesting and it's important. So let's get into it. I'll explain it as clear as I can, even though it's the end of a long day and my brain is tired, the odds that I misspeak somewhere will be pretty decent. The issue that comes up between the Lutherans and the reform, in the realm of Christology is with the communication of attributes. You may have heard this phrase. I'll give a definition from the Dutch theologian Hermann Bavink. In the incarnation, the two natures, along with their attributes, were communicated to the one person and the one subject who can therefore be described with divine and human language. So this is why we can say,

Jesus is the one in whom all things hold together. Or I can say, God became a baby. Or I can say, God died. These are theologically correct statements because attributions of either nature can be made to the singular person, right? So just refreshing here, everybody, you're getting up to speed on Christ or the doctrine of Christ. We have two natures and one person. The human nature, the divine nature, but only one person. Two and one. The two nature is the one person, just like in the Trinity, you have the one being and the three persons. Now, so that I of the communication of attributes, we all agree on that. The reform tradition, but here's where we differ. The reform tradition, and I will argue the earlier lowercase C Catholic tradition,

affirm a communication of attributes as mediated by the person. The issue at stake here is whether there's a communication of attributes directly between the two natures themselves, or more specifically whether some attributes get communicated from the divine nature of Christ to the human nature of Christ, such that you get results like the ubiquity or omnipresence of Christ's human flesh. Let me explain this. This is what Luther introduces, and I do think, again, it's a novel and eccentric idea within the theological tradition, but let's allow Luther to speak for himself. I'll try to be fair. I have great respect for Luther as well. He says, the unity of the two natures in one person is the greatest possible so that they are equally predicated and

communicate their properties to each other as if he were solely God or solely man. So the words there you see to each other convey the manner of the communication in this construal of communication of attributes. Now for Luther, this is really important because without this, we divide the person of Christ. He says, if you could show me one place where God is and not the man, the person is already divided. Now, Luther, so what he will speak of the human nature and the divine nature is intertwined, and there will even be language that you can find of the divine nature being, say, crucified, or the human nature being, say, worshipped.

I'll put up one example of this. say this man created the world and this God suffered died and was buried, et cetera. Now, so just to really be clear here, it's one thing to say, I worship Jesus. It's another thing to say, I worship Jesus's human nature. Similarly, it's one thing to say God died on the cross. It's another thing to say the divine nature of the son of God died on the cross. Now, maybe there's a way to understand some of these statements more favorably in Luther, because he does try to qualify this by saying It's not the human nature in the abstract that, say, creates the world. But still, this language is very bold, and it doesn't seem to be how theologians had communicated

about the communication of attributes prior to this. In his introduction to a 1540 treatise on Christology that Luther wrote, Christopher Brown writes, whereas the scholastics had understood the communication of attributes to involve predication of the attributes of each nature to the human person. Luther insists on the communion of attributes between the natures within the unity of the person. I don't know if you're as tired as I am as you're watching this video, or a lot of people watch videos like me and we're on the fly. If you really want to get the crucial nuanced distinction between a Lutheran view and

reform view, that quote really sums it up succinctly. So you can go back and look at it on the screen and read that again. This is a good way to state the contrast here with Luther's view. communication between the two natures rather than mediated through the person. And this is what the Book of Concord seems to follow here. After quoting statements like this from Luther, it says, we regard it as a pernicious error when such majesty is denied to Christ according to his humanity. And you can read that full quote if you want.

So one of the consequences that's going to come to sort of hold sway within Lutheranism from all of this is the affirmation of the so-called genus Myostaticus. according to which the human nature of Christ is clothed with divine attributes. So you got a communication between the divine nature and the human nature, and the human nature is receiving some, though not all, attributes. So attributes like omnipresence or omniscience are sometimes held to be communicated to the human nature of Christ, but not attributes like eternity or infinity. and we'll talk about this a bit, though, a worry of arbitrariness that comes in here a little bit.

But I also want to try to honor the complexity here. Luther's thought is developed by those who come after him, and there's dispute about how much it develops beyond him, and there's also diversity in the Lutheran tradition that persists for some time on some of these particular questions of how to understand this. So, for example, on the question of Christ's use of divine attributes during his lifetime, you have the Tupingen school following Johann Brenz and the Geeson School, where I just was a few weeks ago in Geeson, really cool place, awesome theological school. If you were watching from the seminary there, hello again, good to see you, following the Geeson schools following Martin Kemnitz. So this has to do, basically, this dispute in the Lutheran tradition has to do with Christ's divine attributes like omnipresence, whether they are

communicated to the human nature of Christ absolutely from the moment of the incarnation, or relatively based upon the will of the Son of God. So, for example, sometimes you'll see, like Keminitz will say that this doesn't occur until later in Christ's glorification, this kind of thing. Nonetheless, leaving room for these differences in some way or another, the human flesh of Christ is omnipresent, or at least participates in the omnipresence of the Son of God in some way. And if that sounds weird to you, you're on the right track. That is very strange. Human beings are not omnipresent.

So what does it mean to say the human nature of Christ is omnipresent? If it seems strange to say, well, how can a human body be everywhere? You're not misunderstanding to ask this question. The first worry that comes up is how do we square this with Chalcedonianism? the Christology of the 5th century, the fourth ecumenical council, and in particular, the words I put in red here, that the two natures of Christ are without confusion. Now, let me be clear here that I am not saying that the Lutheran view is outside of the Chalcedonian tradition. I think Lutherans are Christians. I think they are well within this, you know, an orthodox

Christology. I think we are having a debate here about how to interpret Chalcedon and what is the most faithful way to develop the categories of Chalcedon. In the church history, in the 16th and 17th centuries especially, sometimes the debate between the Lutherans and the reformed gets pretty heated, and sometimes they don't always interpret each other's statements in a charitable way, according to their orthodox intentions. So you'll find the Lutherans saying that the Calvinists are Nestorians, and I'll explain that word in a second, and the Calvinists are saying that the Lutherans are monophysites. And this is where ecumenical theology is not wishy-washy. Ecumenical theology is simply, sometimes it can be that, of course, but a lot of times it's

simply a way to come back and say, did we misunderstand them? What were the intentions of the other side? And how can we understand their statements in their best light? And when we do that, we come back, we say, okay, these are two different traditions that are orthodox in their intentions. They're trying to develop Chalcedon. But there are worries here. And the worry with, from the reform side is that in the Lutheran understanding there is confusion. The two natures of Christ are not held without confusion, but they, they tend to kind of blur in in weird ways to each other. Let me explain how Calvin develops this worry as an example. So he's parsing Christology in between these two errors, which I'll now explain. Nestorius on the one side

and Utiquis on the other. So Nestorius thinks there's two. persons, and that's heretical, and Utiquis thinks there's one nature, a kind of hybrid nature, a kind of divine human melding together somehow. And that's also a heresy in the early church, and Calvin is saying it's no more permissible to commingle the two natures in Christ than to pull them apart. This might be the hallmark emphasis of the Reformed Christology, the distinctness of these two natures, which is why we'll explain, we'll address the, at the end of the of this video, it will address the worry of this, is this two Nestorian? But Calvin is saying the Lutheran view fails to preserve the two-ness of the natures. And instead it results in some sort of intermediate

being, which is neither God nor man. Let me read a longer explication of his concern. From the scripture, we plainly infer that the one person of Christ so consists of two natures that each nevertheless retains unimpaired its own distinctive character. And they will be ashamed to deny that Utiquis was rightly condemned. It is a wonder, they do not heed the cause of his condemnation, removing the distinction between the natures and urging the unity of the person. He made man out of God and God out of man. What sort of madness then is it to mingle heaven with earth, rather than give up trying to drag Christ's body from the heavenly sanctuary? There's some of the heated language. right? But this is the concern. He's saying, you're taking God over here and man over here. These are

distinct. They're united in one person, but they're still distinct. And you're melding them together and ultimately becomes a kind of hybrid between some ubiquitous human flesh is a kind of quasi-divine humanity. It's, we're losing the distinctness of human and divine. And this is how the later reformed theologians will come along and express the concern as well. Turriton says, real union of natures does not take away their difference. And what he goes on to argue is basically you need to have the difference to have a genuine union. Two things cannot really be united unless they are distinct things to be united. And his concern as well is you end up with a weird kind of hybrid blend of human and divine with respect to the natures of Christ. Now, again,

I'm trying to clarify here. These are where the concerns are going. But that is not is not fair to the Lutheran position to say they fully land there. The Lutherans are not monophysites. They don't actually say there's one nature. So what I'm trying to draw attention to here from Calvin and Turriton is worries it's going too far to that, not that it goes all the way into that. But the worries are real. I mean, the worries here that this basically ruptures the full integrity of the human nature as human. Okay, humans aren't omnipresent. Now, the conviction that divine attributes are not communicated to the human nature does seem to be a point on which the reformed have a great deal of pedigree in the tradition and agreement with the Roman Catholics.

In Thomas Aquinas, for example, I've gone into this in my treatment of the Eucharist in various places. He and Calvin are agreed on some points. One of them is that Jesus' human flesh is locally present in heaven. You can read this passage from the suma as one explanation of that. I've talked about that a little more elsewhere. As far as I can tell, Luther's view does seem to be novel. I know that this is protested, and I know that the way Lutherans will often argue is that this is an extension, a logical extension out of certain things that you see in the patristic era. But the view itself, you know, so people try to get it from John Damascus and other statements about the harmony and cooperation of the two natures and this kind of thing.

But harmony and cooperation is one thing. A direct communication between the two natures resulting in ubiquitous human flesh or human flesh that somehow can participate in ubiquity or omnipresence. This is strange. It does seem to be novel to Luther, and you can sometimes find Lutheran theologians acknowledging that. Here's one Lutheran theologian who calls it the new and inconvenient opinion of ubiquity. Sometimes it's called the doctrine of ubiquity, and it does seem strange. Part of the concern here that we'll come up to is just with biblical language. So the general way that scripture speaks of the ascension is Christ going away or going into heaven, just as the second coming is described as a descent from heaven. And you can harmonize

that language with the doctrine of ubiquity, but it just seems less natural. It kind of seems like this is just the way the scripture ordinarily speaks of the body of Christ. It's either here or it's there. There's also a challenge with respect to omniscience. For example, Mark 1332, the son not knowing the day of the return traditionally was predicated to the human nature, just as you'll have the passages about Jesus growing in wisdom. This is said with reference to the human nature. That's how they are traditionally interpreted for the most part. So this is why you'll have...

So, you know, if there's a communication of attributes between the divine and human nature such that the human nature is actually omniscient, another claim you'll sometimes see, then you have to have some other explanation for a passage like Mark 1332. And this is why, on the one hand you have Brenz, who's arguing that what Luther intended

is that Christ's humanity was ubiquitous from the moment of the incarnation, whereas chemnets and others are going to say, no, it's after that. And you'll also have this distinction between people saying the use of attributes versus the possession of attributes. So they'll say, well, sure, Christ possessed omniscience in his human nature. He just didn't always exercise that attribute. But the worries there are this, is this leads to conodacist tendencies. Canosis is the idea that'll come up later. Now, again, the 16th and 17th century Lutheran Scholastics don't like canosis. But a lot of people, Berkauer and Bart and many others, raise this concern that this distinction between Christ's use of certain attributes versus his possession of them tends toward that

and ultimately leads toward that later in church history. That seems problematic making that kind a distinction. Now, so all of this, you kind of look at this and you say, this just seems like kind of a weird idea. This doesn't seem like how the tradition functions. It doesn't seem very intuitive to the biblical language about the body of Christ. And it just doesn't seem necessary. Like, why would we say the human nature is omnipresent? I know this is disputed, but if we were to ask, why does this view come about? I do think the presenting motive does seem to be the Lord's supper. It does seem, I know people don't agree with this, but it really looks like it's the theological needs of the Eucharist that are driving the Christology here. So let me put forward what I would say is a

better alternative from the reformed tradition. Christ is one person. Christ has two natures, such that the human nature is local and finite, and the divine nature is infinite and omnipresent. there is absolutely no bestowal of omnipresence or any other properly divine attribute onto the human nature from the divine nature. It doesn't work like that. The human nature is just a human nature. And humans aren't omnipresent and humans aren't omniscient and so forth. So you have one person who's both omniscient and omnipresent with respect to his divine nature

and limited with respect to his human nature. Now, the question that comes up in the opposite direction is, okay, you're worried about some monophysite tendencies over there among the Lutherans, but doesn't this tend toward Nestorianism? And also, isn't this just, how does this square with the law of non-contradiction? How can one person be both infinite and finite? So let's address that to finish the video. This is the concern that is sometimes raised from the 16th and 17th century Lutherans to the scholastic, to the reformed.

And they're saying their position is controlled by this principle that the finite cannot grasp the infinite. And the label that they give for the reform position is the extra Calvinisticum, a Latin phrase meaning Calvin's outer or Calvin's beyond, which simply means that the incarnate son of God was not limited to his human flesh. But in the year 10 AD, in the year 15 AD, etc, he continues to uphold the universe and fill the universe, even while he's incarnate. He remains infinite during the incarnation. The second member of the Trinity does not cease to be infinite and omnipresent. He's not contained or circumscribed by the human body, even though there's a true union with the human nature. But this label for this idea, extra Calvinisticum, is given, it's not something the Calvinists came up with. This is a label from the Lutherans, and it could be misleading, both because it thinks in terms of spatial categories, hence,

the term extra, a lot of assumption gets smuggled in with that word extra. We'll come back to that in a second. But also by identifying it as just Calvin's doctrine, the extra Calvinisticum. And basically, I would just say this is not just Calvin. I would say, again, I think Calvin's view is just basically the mainstream historic view. A really good book on this. It's very dated right now, but David Willis in the 1960s, wrote a book about on the Extra Calvinisticum, and basically what he says is you might as well call it the extra Catholicum. And he draws attention to explicit assertions of this doctrine in Thomas Aquinas, Gabriel Beale, John of Damascus, Augustine and Origen, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Athanasius,

Cyril of Alexandria. Here's an example from Athanasius. Quote, the word was not hedged in by his body, nor did his presence in the body, prevent his being present elsewhere as well. When he moved his body, he did not cease also to direct the universe by his mind and might. His body was not for him a limitation, but an instrument, so that he was both in it and in all things, and outside all things, resting in the father alone. At one of the same time, here is the wonder. As man, he was living a human life, and as word he was sustaining the life of the universe, and his son, he was in constant union with the father. Now, Calvin is self-conscious

operating within this tradition of thought when he articulates in the institutes in two seminal passages, what will come to be called the extra Calvinisticum. You can see him interacting with Peter Lombard, for example, and other medieval discussions. And basically, I just think it's the case, with all due respect, that the reformed position on this is the one that has historical roots. And the Lutheran idea is more of a novelty. Now, try to be as fair as possible. This is tricky because Luther himself has language and sermons that sound kind of like this, this idea that, you know, the incarnation happens and the sun remains filling heaven and so forth. I'll give an example of this. But with this idea of the direct communication of attributes from divine to human

nature, the genus myostaticum, right, the ubiquity of Christ's human flesh, that, I do think that's a novelty so far as I can tell. I don't see that in the tradition, maybe just slightly prior to Luther at best, perhaps. Everything else it seems to be extrapolated out of. Whereas this robust emphasis upon these two distinct natures, its characteristic of the reform tradition, does seem like it's lowercase C Catholic. It goes back. But is it an historian? This is the worries is that this results in two different Christs, right? Two different gods. And the related concern is that kind of squashes the human nature of Christ. It's not a, is not a real, genuine human nature because basically you've got one Christ over here, the infinite, and another

Christ over here, the finite. Now what I've argued in my academic work on this is that these concerns dissolve upon deeper reflection on the creator creation relationship. And the basic, to cut to the chase and then we'll finish the video, the basic intuition is this. Why should it be that local and omnipresent means two persons? Why? Why? Why can't you have one person who is both local and omnipresent? Local with respect to his human nature, omnipresent with respect to his divine nature. The instinct that you can't have both is assuming a spatial construction of the incarnation and the creator creation relationship. As though in the incarnation, the Son of God somehow moved from one location to another.

So then he's sort of extra because he's both here and there, right? And this is why it's so unfortunate for the extra Calvinisticum to be understood in spatial terms. T.F. Torrance argues that this is the fundamental reason why the Lutherans, mistakenly from his vantage point, rejected the extra, because they're operating with a receptacle view of space as the place containing within its limits, that which occupies it. And he argues instead for a relational view of space and time, and he's doing all these interesting stuff with Einsteinian physics and stuff like that. But the basic point of this concern from the Lutherans is assuming a kind of spatial conception of the incarnation, I think is true, and I think it's the result of focusing

on just certain passages, these two seminal passages in the institutes where Calvin develops his understanding of the incarnation in spatial categories, but neglecting all throughout his sermons and his commentaries and other places where more frequently he'll portray the dynamics of the incarnation, not in spatial categories, but in more like governmental categories. So for example, he'll emphasize Christ's headship over the unfallen angels, continuing during his incarnation. He'll emphasize Christ's mediatorship of sustenance, basically Hebrews 1-3. This is happening during the incarnation. In his sermons, he'll emphasize Christ's divine majesty as continuing during the incarnation.

So, in other words, Calvin isn't just saying that the Son of God remains extra during the incarnation. He's saying he remains all that is divine. He's still sustaining the universe. He's still worshiped by the angels. Not one millimeter is reduced from the divine nature of the second member of the godhead during the incarnation. even while he assumes a human nature, nothing of divinity is subtracted.

And the reason that doesn't puncture the unity of his person is because he's not in two places at once. So here's a metaphor that I put out in my book, Theological Retrieval for Evangelicals. You can see it there for the longer case. Suppose an author writes himself into a story. Suppose Tolkien writes himself into Middle Earth. And J.R. Tolkien is now in the Shire walking around with Frodo and Mary and Pippin and so forth. had Tolkien done that, he would not for that reason have ceased to exist in Oxford. In fact, the whole existence in Middle Earth would depend upon him continuing to be in Oxford to write about

this. Nor has the unity of Tolkien's person been punctured. He's still one person, because Middle Earth and Oxford are not two different places. They're just two different realms altogether. In other words, it is a problem if you're trying to say you can be in Oxford in Cambridge at the same time, but it's not a problem to say one person can be both in Oxford and the Shire. And this is where I think this metaphor of an author and a story can maybe shed some light on the incarnation. So also, the Son of God can be both local with respect to his human nature and omnipresent with respect to his divine nature and just two distinct realities because Bethlehem and heaven are not two different places. So the key is the creator creation relationship.

And there's no Nestorianism here at all. But from this vantage point, the idea of an omnipresent human nature does continue to seem weird. If you were to put it in this metaphor, it would be like the Tolkien that's in the Shire somehow also needs to be everywhere else in Middle Earth or something like that. I make that metaphor, I extend that metaphor to make the case a little more fully in my book, or you can look at this video for a more devotional treatment of the extra Calvinisticum. But I hope that just, oh boy, we haven't resolved every question. This is massive.

But I hope it explains why I think a reformed account of Christology is a more faithful explication of the Chalcedonian tradition than a Lutheran one. whew, that's it. I hope I've not offended the Lutherans so much that they'll stop watching because my next video is going to be on penance, and I think they will like that one a lot more than this one, perhaps. Final comments, so hopefully this would be of use and I hope it's fair. Final comments, I'm working on the color, I'm working on different things with my videography.

Does it look better? Have you noticed a difference? Several of you asked about if I'm going to respond to Alex O'Connor. I've reached out to say, hey, do you want to do dialogue? So we'll see if we're going to do dialogue. hopefully that'll work. If not, maybe down the road, I don't know, we'll see. But I'm hoping that'll work out. I really like him and I like watching. I really enjoy talking with him, to be honest. That would just be a lot of fun. And what else was I going to say? If you want to support Truth

Unites, I'll put a picture of the website. It means a lot to me. It helps me execute some things I want to do. I want to be always transparent about the finances. I'm not in dire financial need, but support does really help. It enables me to basically get more help with things I need help with. So believe me when I say it is appreciated. All right, thanks for watching, everybody. Let me do what you think of this one. And the next video that will come out,

probably about five days after this or so on a Monday will be a video on penance, a Protestant appraisal of the Roman Catholic sacrament of penance. And so keep your eyes appealed for that. Thanks, everybody.