The Person of Jesus Christ (Hugh Ross Mackintosh)

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RamistThomist

Puritanboard Clerk
Mackintosh, Hugh Ross. Person of Jesus Christ. T & T Clark.

Mackintosh gives us a fine little devotional tract geared (if not always directly) around the full self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Theme: In Christ there is a perfect revelation of god the Father (Mackintosh 43). “It is always through redemption as an experience that revelation is vouchsafed.” What does Mackintosh mean by that? I’m not entirely certain. I can hazard a guess, though. God’s revelation towards redemption must engage the knower as subject. Perhaps. Or he could be saying that there is no revelation in the abstract. I certainly agree with that but I don’t think that is entirely what he has in mind. Or perhaps he means that Revelation is always revelation-to-me. I think there is more to Revelation than that, though one should certainly maintain the pro me aspect of God’s revelation.

The actual text is not long; maybe sixty pages. It is sandwiched between two chapters by Thomas Torrance. Thus, Torrance:

“The real nature of the Triune God becomes disclosed to us through the reconciling sacrifice of the Son and in one spirit we are given access to the Father and come to apprehend him in accordance with what he is in himself” (Torrance 72).

T. F. Torrance speaks of his time studying under Hugh Mackintosh: “Many a would-be theological student was converted in his classes.”

If the revelation of God in the New Testament is true, Jesus Christ must be in himself what he reveals. And if the message of salvation is true, what Jesus does for us must be what God himself does…Apart from a real identity or unity between revealer and the revealed, revelation suffers from a fatal discrepancy” (76, 77).

Conclusion: The book is a neat snapshot of Scottish Christianity in the early 1900s between the much-desired demise of Ritschlianism and the advent of Barthianism.
 
“The real nature of the Triune God becomes disclosed to us through the reconciling sacrifice of the Son and in one spirit we are given access to the Father and come to apprehend him in accordance with what he is in himself” (Torrance 72).

Raise that red flag. ;)
 
I get what people are trying to say with the archetypal distinction. That's fine. I'm not a Clarkian. But I've also been reading the Nicene fathers for about ten years now, and they have a much different grammar of thinking.

“The Son is the knowledge of the Father, but the knowledge of the Son is *in the father* and has been revealed through the Son” (Irenaeus 4.14.5).

Since the Act and Word of God are internal to his being, we may know God through the Act and Word in the inner reality of his being (Contra Ar. 1:9ff).

Further, if "ousia" is defined by biblical categories, then there is no problem with what I am saying.

Torrance: Ousia--not a static being but the living and speaking being (116). Athanasius preferred to use verbs when speaking of God (De Synodis 34). Ousia is to be understood in terms of the divine “I am.” Being-in-Act and Act-in-Being.

Athanasius says we can know the *fullness* of the Father's Godhead because he has communicated it to us in Jesus. The fullness of the Father’s godhead is the being of the Son (Contr. Ari. 3.5).

See also Contra Ar. 2.11, 3.1; Ad Serapion 1:14-17.
 
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