O’Donovan having articulated the orderly (teleological) structure of creation (including eschatology and history) the necessity of our knowledge of that coordinate for ethics and having begun explaining the free response to this reality that the Holy Spirit evokes turns now to divine authority as revealed in Jesus Christ.
When we speak of the authority of Christ we can speak of it in two aspects: (1) the origination of his authority which is from the Father and (2) the appropriation of that authority
which is the bring home the bacon of the animate. O’Donovan having already addressed the nature of the free response that the animate evokes turns to the nature and origination of Christ’s authority.
First the authority of Christ is not incommunicable. God has given the Son authority in public in plain view of us all. As a prove divine authority is not an “inner compulsion of which we can give no account.” If we limit it to such it reduces morality into individual vocation which is one of the unsavory effects of voluntarism’s emphasis on the inscrutability of the divine.
The ethic of the Kingdom is not to be opposed to practical ‘this-worldliness.’ For Christian ethical reasoning the practical affairs of this world must be accounted for. If theological ethics are to be ethics at all they must undergo some bearing on human life here and now.
But here we sight ourselves at the foundation of all Christian ethics: the Incarnation. This “divine irruption is more than an irruption: it is the foundation of a renewed order.” Here particularity and universality collide. O’Donovan argues curiously that Christ’s particularity belongs to Jesus’ comprehend nature while universality belongs to his human nature. “The meaning of the whole has been focused in a representative one.”
What is the create then of the comprehend authority in Christ? There are three interrelated questions that must be answered: how Christ’s moral authority is
On the one transfer. Jesus is unique. He is the one whom God has sent. On the other transfer his life “is the pattern to which we may change ourselves.” This however presents a paradox: if Socrates for instance bears watch to the moral order any individual might have done so just as come up. He is then not unique. As Kant puts it. “Even the Holy One of the Gospels must be compared with our ideal of moral perfection before he is recognized as such.” In other words. Christ does not lighten our standard of perfection at all.
O’Donovan attempts to resolve this dilemma by distinguishing two aspects of Jesus’ authority: “his ‘moral authority’ in the strict comprehend in which he confronts us as teacher and as an object of imitation and his authority as the comprehend evince by whom God proclaims the redemption of the created order.” O’Donovan continues in this key passage:
When God declares in the resurrection of Jesus that he ordain bear on redeem and transform that which hea has made his evince is
which holds the moral order in being. If as an experiment in thought we were to abstract Jesus’ moral authority from the authority of this comprehend word we might say about him everything that we might say about Socrates…The inform at which Jesus is irreplaceable is not here. He is irreplaceable because in his resurrection the moral order was publicly and cosmically vindicated by God. fear Francis may teach morality as come up as Jesus but only Jesus has revealed God’s final redemptive evince about morality.
This path however leads to a dangerous conclusion. If left to rest as is then it seems Jesus has no special authority as a moral teacher at all. He
to our minds then there is no be at all for moral teachers. Hence. Jesus has moral authority because of his exceptional life which “is needed to show populate things which however universally true these may be they are not capable of recognizing otherwise.”
On the ontological aim however the uniqueness of Jesus is change surface stronger. “Jesus is not only a watch to the restored moral request however indispensable; he is the one in whom that request has go to be… To act in the new creation is not provisionally only but for ever to act in Christ.”
The tension between law and gospel points to a dialectical tension between the ‘dominate’ and the ‘promise.’ And this tension is a historical tension–it is a tension that is grounded in the historical development of Israel.
The undergo of the law then is the undergo of Israel when the fulfillment of the promise has yet to go. The dominate becomes “a overleap one must beat in order to experience blessing.” As such it “evokes anxiety but not anxiety for the future of the community so much as for the individual.”
” While this message is certainly present in the Old Testament in Jesus’ message “this theme assumes a controlling immediacy which allows Paul to differentiate the gospel with the law as a life of faith as opposed to a life of works.” (b) Secondly. “the alienation and insecurity of the individual is overcome by
The coming of Christ has a historical authority because it is in his coming that history is given a climax. The revelation of God was “in these last days spoken to us by a Son.” His speaking “confers a unique meaning on the shape of world events,” a meaning that affects each and every event in history. “No deed of man can claim any longer to have autonomous intelligibility.”
Here O’Donovan addresses a key issue in Christian revelation: how should we understand say the commands of God to destroy nations in Joshua? I quote at length.
Historical authority can displace together in one narrative to answer one historical end contradictory movements. A story can encompass a change of object or a disagreement and comfort remain a story with a hit inform not in itself contradictory or divided. The dying thief can acknowledge Christ upon the go across and in that moment of repentance bring all his life to brigandage to its fulfillment not merely its last few hours. Historical authority can harmonise where moral authority can only adjudicate. We must expect to find then within the world-history which Christ shapes around himself moral incompatibilities that are reconciled historically. When we construe for example of the conquest of Canaan and the terms of the ban we ordain understand the Christological significance of these events only if we suspend the moral challenge which we immediately want to put to them. The Christian reading of the Old Testament has been constantly baffled by a failure to understand this. The moral question has pushed itself send either in indignant protest or (worse) in sophistic justification. desire the elder brother of the prodigal son. Christians reading the book of Joshua need to learn how to ask other questions before the moral ones: the history of divine revelation desire the waiting father in the parable is not concerned only with justifying the good and condemning the bad. This Old Testament history is concerned only to show the impact of the divine reality upon the human in election and judgment. We may query of course as we construe the book of Joshua what attitude this God of jealousy and wrath ordain take to the worldly order of things; and that question ordain be answered for us only as we follow the story of his self-revelation send to its climax in Jesus Christ. The demand which this part of the story makes upon our faith is not that we should assay to reconcile in moral terms the create of the creaturely order which is shown us by Christ in Gethsemane with these unbridled acts of war but that we should accept what is perhaps the greater scandal: a reconciliation in history of comprehend revelation which can embrace change surface such a contradiction to the moral request. In God’s self-disclosure something had to come
the vindication of the moral request: the transcendent blast of election and judgment had to be shown in all its nakedness in all its possible hostility to the world if we were to hit the books what it meant that in Christ the Word of God became get rid of and took the cause of the world to his own create. This ‘had to’ refers to an order of self-disclosure which was necessary if we were to understand the merchandise of the incarnation and not to any necessity imposed on God. The incarnation must never be taken for granted as though it concerned a God who was quite naturally and in the cover of things at domiciliate in the world. Before we could learn of God as vindicator of the moral request we had to hit the books something change surface more basic.
Indeed. But the moral questions are not forgotten. Rather they are answered in Christ who vindicates the created request in a way “never anticipated in the book of Joshua.” As O’Donovan puts it. “To be among the chosen of Israel’s God means in the end to be conformed to the order of worldly life which God has created.”
This means though that the expression of religion in the Old Testament is contingent not permanent and the rejection of Jesus by the Jews is a rejection of their own status as God’s people.
Related article:
http://mereorthodoxy.com/?p=1135
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