PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY NOVA LINGUA DEI: THE PROBLEM OF CHALCEDONIAN METAPHYSICS AND THE PROMISE OF THE GENUS TAPEINOTICON IN LUTHER’S LATER THEOLOGY IN FULFILLMENT OF THE PH.D. QUALIFYING EXAMINATION IN THE HISTORY OF DOCTRINE DAVID W. CONGDON JANUARY 12, 2011 Do not cite without express permission of the author Congdon 1 INTRODUCTION Scholars have long noted that Luther makes a decisive contribution to the debate over divine impassibility. That he speaks of God’s suffering and death is well-attested in the literature. The question is the precise nature of this provocative language. It is widely acknowledged that Luther’s theology exhibits a radicalization of the communicatio idiomatum: the properties of divinity and humanity are not merely communicated to the one person, but they are also shared, at least in some respect, between the natures. In one direction (from divine to human), the result is the genus maiestaticum (“genus of majesty”), employed by Lutherans within the eucharistic debates as the basis for Christ’s bodily ubiquity. This paper will instead focus on the communication in the other direction (human to divine), known as the genus tapeinoticon (“genus of humility”; from the Greek, ταπεινωσις).1 While scholars such as Paul Althaus and Marc Lienhard have mentioned this concept with respect to Luther’s christology,2 the notion of a genus tapeinoticon remains controversial and raises a number of complicated questions regarding the relation of Luther to the orthodox tradition associated with the Council of Chalcedon. There is a continual danger of reading the modern acceptance of divine passibility 1 “The phrase genus tapeinoticum . refers to a logical possibility treated under the more general heading of the ‘communication of attributes’ in post-Reformation theology. Whether it is instantiated in the ancient world or not is a question I would have to ask patristic scholars. The idea set forth in the phrase is that the union of divine and human in Jesus Christ has as at least one of its consequences a sharing by the divine in the being of the human such that human attributes are rightly ascribed to the divine. It was thus the polar opposite of the Lutheran genus majestaticum . In any event, both Reformed and Lutheran theologians identified the genus tapeinoticum as a strictly logical possibility which they rejected. They held that the idea of an ascription of human attributes to God was unthinkable largely as a consequence of their commitment to a concept of divine immutability that was itself controlled by the notion of impassibility.” Bruce L. McCormack, “Divine Impassibility or Simply Divine Constancy? Implications of Karl Barth’s Later Christology for Debates over Impassibility,” in Divine Impassibility and the Mystery of Human Suffering, ed. James F. Keating and Thomas Joseph White (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009), 175. 2 See Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther, trans. Robert C. Schultz (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 197; Marc Lienhard, Luther: Witness to Jesus Christ – Stages and Themes of the Reformer’s Christology, trans. Edwin H. Robertson (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1982), 339-41, 344-45. Among contemporary Luther scholars, Dennis Ngien has explored the theme of divine suffering most extensively. His main work on the topic mentions the genus tapeinoticon in two places. See Dennis Ngien, The Suffering of God According to Martin Luther’s ‘Theologia Crucis’ (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), 79, 81. Do not cite without express permission of the author Congdon 2 back into Luther and thus exaggerating his similarity to contemporary theology; but there is equally the danger of overemphasizing his dependence on the tradition and his late medieval context and so obscuring his creativity. As Heiko Oberman argued throughout his career,3 Luther occupies a turning-point in history: he stands between the medieval synthesis and the modern revolution, between the institutional fides catholica and the iconoclastic spirit of reform. Moreover, his unsystematic, occasional, and voluminous writings resist easy categorization. He nowhere offers a scholastic-like articulation of the communicatio idiomatum, with its corresponding genera, as in the later Lutheran dogmaticians. For these reasons, the notion of a genus tapeinoticon in Luther “must be used with care,” always recognizing that “one cannot always tie Luther down rigorously to specific categories.”4 The purpose of this paper is to assess the question of the genus tapeinoticon in the ancient church and in Luther’s later theology. Specifically, I will bring Luther into conversation with Cyril of Alexandria and the neo-Chalcedonian tradition, especially Maximus the Confessor and John of Damascus. By focusing on this particular genus in the doctrine of the communication of attributes—as opposed to looking more broadly at the theologia crucis—we can gain a more precise evaluation of Luther’s innovation with respect to the church’s tradition. Though Luther stands squarely within the “Alexandrian” school of thought associated especially with Cyril’s theology, he breaks with what I am calling the limits of its “Chalcedonian metaphysics.”5 That is to say, Luther breaks with the metaphysical presupposition of a priori definitions of divinity and humanity, defined in advance and in the abstract. He asserts instead the concrete reality of Jesus 3 See, e.g., Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil, trans. Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). 4 Lienhard, Luther, 339, 344. 5 Of course, Cyril and others within that tradition predate the Council of Chalcedon, and I do not wish to ignore their differences. I use the term “Chalcedonian” here as a shorthand way of referring to the attempt within the ancient church to maintain a single-subject christology while preserving the metaphysical distinction between the natures. In any case, Cyril’s approach to the problem is, I take it, the driving force and inspiration behind the Chalcedonian Definition, so it seems acceptable to refer to his theology as essentially Chalcedonian in retrospect. Do not cite without express permission of the author Congdon 3 Christ, the single divine-human subject, as the revelation of what it means to be God and human. It is on this christocentric basis that Luther advances a true genus tapeinoticon—albeit only implicitly, since he was not aware of the later scholastic distinctions. This paper will focus, in particular, on three of Luther’s later writings: his 1539 study of patristic christology, Von den Konziliis und Kirchen,6 and two of his later disputations, the 1539 Disputatio de sententia: Verbum caro factum est and the 1540 Disputatio de divinitate et humanitate Christi.7 These later writings lay the basic foundation for a genuinely postmetaphysical two-natures christology that advances beyond the ancient and medieval resistance to the genus tapeinoticon. The paper will proceed by (a) assessing the reasons for rejecting the genus tapeinoticon as articulated in the ancient church and in Lutheran orthodoxy, and (b) examining the historical contexts and theological developments within Luther’s later works—particularly as they relate to his disputes with the Parisian school of theology, Ockhamist nominalism, and Schwenckfeldian docetism—in order to demonstrate the way his “new language” and “new grammar” allow for the affirmation of a genus tapeinoticon. THE METAPHYSICAL RESISTANCE TO THE GENUS TAPEINOTICON IN CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA, NEO-CHALCEDONIANISM, AND PROTESTANT ORTHODOXY The genus tapeinoticon is situated within the larger context of the communicatio idiomatum, which is itself a subset of the communio naturarum. That is to say, within orthodox christology, the communication of properties (or attributes) is a function of the more basic 6 Martin Luther, D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimar: H. Böhlau, 1883-), 50:488-653; hereafter cited as WA (Weimarer Ausgabe). English translation published in Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehman, American ed., 55 vols. (St. Louis; Philadelphia: Concordia; Fortress Press, 1955-72), 41:3-178; hereafter cited as LW. The editor of the English edition explains the reason for translating Kirchen as “Church,” instead of “Churches,” on p. 8. 7 WA 39/2:1-33, 92-121. The English translation of the 1539 disputation on “the Word was made flesh” is available in LW 38:235-77. The 1540 disputation on Christ’s divinity and humanity is available in translation as Martin Luther and Mitchell Tolpingrud, “Luther’s Disputation Concerning the Divinity and Humanity of Christ,” Lutheran Quarterly 10, no. 2 (1996): 151-78; hereafter cited as DDHC. Do not cite without express permission of the author Congdon 4 communion of natures in the one person of the incarnate Son according to the unio hypostatica sive personalis. The notion of the communication of attributes has its origin in the fourth-century debates over Nestorianism, though the term (in Greek, ἀντίδοσις τῶν ἰδιωµάτων or κοινωνία ἰδιωµάτων) was not used regularly until the sixth-century neo-Chalcedonian debates. In Protestant scholasticism—building off the distinctions established in medieval scholasticism, and initially developed within a Reformational context by Martin Chemnitz in 15788—the doctrine gained a high level of systematic precision as it was subdivided into four genera: genus idiomaticum, genus apotelesmaticum (also called the communicatio operationum), genus maiestaticum (or auchematicum), and the genus tapeinoticon. The first genus refers to the predication of the attributes of both natures to the one person of Christ; the second refers to the fact that the singular operation of Christ’s mediatorial work applies to both natures; the third refers to a sharing of the divine majesty with the human nature; and the fourth refers to a sharing of the humility of the human nature with the divine nature.9 For both the ancient doctors and the 8 See Martin Chemnitz, The Two Natures in Christ, trans. J. A. O. Preus (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1971).