To be genuinely Christ conditioned is to be a true Christian theologian. To be a speculative theologian, that is a purely metaphysical theologian, is to go beyond the Word of God, which runs contrary to the Protestant ‘Scripture Principle,’ and a radical commitment to a Theology of the Word of God. To find a genuine Christian theologian of import in the history of interpretation is not always an easy task. There are many who claim the name of Christ—and I am not doubting their salvation in any way—but then fill up their respective theologies with straw that has been cultivated and grown under the sun, rather than the Son. Even so, there are theologians, from the beginning of the Church, who genuinely operated with and from a Christologically conditioned lens; Athanasius, Cyril, Irenaeus spring immediately to mind in the patristic period. As we look for modern theologians, or even contemporary ones, who we might look to as docents of a Christology theology, Karl Barth and Thomas F. Torrance, come immediately to mind.
Here is an example of what a genuinely Christian theologian sounds like:
To see the truth of this, we have only to cease trying to ignore the free grace of God in Jesus Christ. We have only to cease trying to make use of “natural” theology and therefore anthropology. Illusion always results when we seek light on the human nature from any other source than the man Jesus Christ. To do so is to trifle with the fact of sin. It is to dig leaking wells. It is to entangle ourselves in conjectures and reinterpretations. It is again to seek final refuge in oblivion. The profound unrest concerning our corrupted nature and our forfeiture of time remains unassuaged. The only real way to meet it is His protest against our contradiction, which is also His protest against its consequences and therefore against our perishing, against the possibility that His creature will cease to be His creature. This divine protest is the rock on which we take our stand when we count on it that there is a human nature preserved for man in spite of his fall, and therefore a true and genuine being of man in time. There is no other ground on which we can seriously make this claim. But on this ground the claim can and must be made seriously.[1]
For the genuinely Christian theologian, as Barth rightly underscores, to be a theologian at all entails a recognition of the fact that we are aimlessly subhuman without being in union with God’s humanity for us in Jesus Christ. In the passage from Barth above we can see the influence of Athanasius on his doctrine of sin: “against our perishing, against the possibility that His creature will cease to be His creature.” There is the notion of transience, of dissolving into the nothingness that sin is that Barth sees as the groundlessness of a sinful humanity. And so, what becomes necessary, not for God, but for us, is that humanity re-becomes humanity in and through the resurrected and re-created humanity of Jesus Christ. It is here, as Barth rightly intones, that humanity comes to have the type of solidity required in order for God’s creatures, us, to be able to think and know God rightly; that is, from a center in Himself for us in the Logos ensarkos (Word enfleshed). This is the fault that Barth rightly recognizes in the theologizing of the schoolmen: viz., they fail to grapple deeply enough with the subterranean impact that the fall has flung humanity into. There is no solid ground to think God from when humanity is stuck in the abyss of a fallen soil. And so, as God knows for us, in order for us to truly know Him, and thus participate with Him in His triune and eternal life, humanity must be re-taken from the fallen soil, and placed in the heavenly soil of God’s Kingdom in Christ. It is only on this ground wherein a genuinely Christian theology can obtain and thus endure. As Paul has noted, by the Holy Spirit, “For no man can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.”
[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2 §47 [520] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 84.