Christ, spirit and atonement

International Journal of Systematic Theology

Volumn 3, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 83-93

  McFarland, Ian ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149138082     PISSN: 14631652     EISSN: 14682400     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1463-1652.00052     Document Type: Article

References (9)

1. Kathryn Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), p. 85.
2. See William C. Placher, The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking about God Went Wrong (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996), p. 125.
3. See Alan Spence, 'Christ's Humanity and Ours: John Owen', in Persons Divine and Human: King's College Essays in Theological Anthropology ed. Christoph Schwobel and Colin E. Gunton (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1991), p. 80.
4. Sehleiermacher writes: 'The Redeemer, then, is like all men in virtue of the identity of human nature, but distinguished from them all by the constant potency of his God-consciousness, which was a veritable existence of God in Him.' F.D.E. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, ed. H.R. Mackintosh and J.S. Stewart (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1928), p. 94.
5. Spence, 'Christ's Humanity and Ours', p. 95;
6. cf. Colin E. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1991), pp. 69-70.
7. '... it is only through the Spirit that the human actions of Jesus become ever and again the acts of God'. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, p. 68.
8. Tanner makes this same point as follows: 'Because the [human and divine natures] occur on different planes, so to speak - the leading of a human life on a horizontal plane, the assumption of this whole plane of a human life by the Word on a vertical plane - they neither supplement nor replace one another.' Kathryn Tanner, 'Who is Jesus'?: Christological Conundrums', Scottish Journal of Theology Lectures, 1999.
9. As Pannenberg points out, this largely economic understanding of the Spirit's work is disastrous for trinitarian doctrine: 'If the Spirit were not constitutive for the fellowship of the Son with the Father, the Christian doctrine of the Spirit would be a purely external addition to the confession of the relation of the Son to the deity of the Father.' Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, p. 268.