(1)
Proper theological method
subsumes theological questions and doctrines under two correlative headings of
Christology and Triadology, for all properly theological doctrines would appear
to have christological and triadological implications. Any proposition, method,
or other statement which does not start directly and consciously from this
context does not go under the name of Christian theology.
All theology must therefore be
thoroughly grounded in the distinction of person and nature. Each of these
categories must be given equal weight and emphasis with the other.
Consequently, there are two basic ways in which this distinction may be lost.
On the one hand, person may be subordinated to nature in order of concepts to
such an extent that it becomes absorbed in it as a special kind of attribute of
nature. Within the context of the discussion on predestination and free will,
the apokatastasis implies just such a confusion, for the human nature of Christ
was seen to determine every human person's eternal bliss in spite of, and apart
from, the individual's gnomic reception of the grace conferred by Christ. On
the other hand, nature may be subordinated and confused with person, and to
some extent, defined as the aggregate of persons. The doctrine of the
limited atonement is perhaps an example of this process, for the human nature
of Christ is defined in terms of its efficaciousness for a predetermined number
of individual elect: Christ loses no one that the Father has given Him,
but raises them up at the last day.
. . .
(4)
In Christ’s human nature which
is consubstantial with all men, God humanly wills, decrees, and perfectly
fulfills the salvation of all men, for no human being is untouched by His Incarnation,
and nothing is detracted from His sovereignty as God is individual persons
choose not to accept salvation.
Nothing is lost to His
sovereignty as God Incarnate precisely because nothing is lost to the
perfection of His human nature; it retains its full integrity as human nature
despite the fact that individual persons reject Him. Hence, the
expression current in some evangelical circles, “once saved always saved”, bears a certain truth, if seen in this
context, namely, that all human nature, once assumed by Christ in its totality,
eternally abides in and with God by virtue of the Word’s hypostatic union with
it.
(5)
Christ, being truly
consubstantial with all men, truly died for all men, and this His atoning
Passion, Death, and Resurrection are in no way limited.
In turn, the doctrine of the
limited atonement may be reversed to show its hidden and heretical implications:
If not all men rise with the second Adam then not all die with the first Adam.
There would consequently be some men who, not being affected by the
consubstantiality of Christ's human nature, would not be consubstantial with
Him. Therefore, they would not be in Adam either. Not being in Adam, they would
have no need of Christ. This is a denial of the inheritance of ancestral sin,
and is therefore Pelagianism. The way out of this impasse is the distinction
between person and nature, and between the mode of the employment of the will
and the natural will itself.
Furthermore, if Christ's human
nature is efficacious in salvation only for a number of elected individuals,
then it would appear that Christ's humanity, insofar as it is
efficacious for those individuals, is united with them not naturally but only
by the object of their wills, since His human nature itself is not united with
them. This union only in object of will between God and man in Christ is
Nestorianism.
It would also appear that, on
this view, the human nature of the elected individuals gives nothing to
election, and Christ's human nature certainly does not, as it affects only the
elected individuals. Human nature therefore either has no will, which is a kind
of "anthropological" Apollinarianism, or it is merely ineffectual in
salvation ("soteriological" Apollinarianism). Christ's human decision
of salvation at Gethsemane is therefore illusory, and this is Docetism. (Joseph
P. Farrell, Free Choice in St. Maximus the Confessor [South Canon, Pa.:
St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 1989], 222, 224-25, emphasis in bold added)
