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The Interaction of
Christology
&
Pneumatology
Soteriology
of Edward
Irving
in the
Jim Purves*
In this article we will examine the interaction of
Christological
and Pneumatological
models
present
in the
soteriology
of Edward
Irving. We
begin by looking
at the
general
context of
Irving’s theological development
and
presentation,
then
go
on to
compare Irving’s
Trini- tarian, ontological perspective
to the more recent and better known approach
of Karl Barth.
Irving’s Theological Development
How can we best
approach
a discussion of this colourful and contro- versial
figure, preching
in a manner so well reflective of the Roman- ticism of his
day
and whose fame,
by
the
mid-1820’s,
had
spread
not only throughout
the
city
of London,
drawing many
to
sample
the eloquence
of his
pulpit,
but also north to Scotland,
attracting
the atten- tion of Kirk folk in his native land?
Irving’s
fascination with
premil- lenial
questions,
of
itself, provoked many
to react
against
his
quickness of intellect and
passion
in
homily, easily
branded as an
arrogance
of spirit;
while these
aspects
of his work and character do not
occupy
our attention, they
were not irrelevant factors in
conditioning
the
response made to him in issues of more substantive
theology
in
which,
as we shall
see, Irving
demonstrated a remarkable
originality
and
maturity
of thought.
The London
ministry
of Edward
Irving (1792-1834) began
in 1822. He
preached
a series of sermons on the
Trinity
from the end of
1825, these sermons came to be
printed,
with revision and additions made in the
light
of
criticism,
in
1829,
as the first volume of
Sermons,
Lec- tures, and Occasional
Discourses. In 1830 he printed a more
apologet- ical
work,
The Orthodox and Catholic Doctrine
of our
Lord’s Human Nature, followed
by
a third work on the
humanity
of Christ, The Opinions Circulating Concerning
Our Lord’s Human
Nature, Tried by the Westminster
Confession of Faith.
In the
latter,
he claimed that the Westminster
Confession,
the canon of Scottish
orthodoxy, agreed
with his own
teachings.
With the
support
of his
congregation, Irving sepa- rated from his adversaries in the
Presbytery
of London in
1830,
the year prior
to his fourth and final work on the
humanity
of
Christ, Christ’s Holiness in the Flesh: The Form, Fountain
Head,
and Assur- ance to us
of Holiness
in Flesh. One of Irving’s last
publications
was a
*Jim Purves is presently completing a doctoral dissertation on the Pneuma- tology
of the Charismatic Movement at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland..
1
82
sustained
humanity
or The
Baptism
Irving’s perceptions
which stood astride
assurance,
in Scottish
century,
piece
of reflection on the work of the
Holy Spirit
in the
of
Christ,
and its
implications
for us, The
Day of Pentecost
with The
Holy
Ghost
(1831).1 I
evolved in a period of
development
theology
the
gap
between the
ecclesiastically enforced
rigors
of Bezan Calvinism, as
systematized
for
Reformed, Scottish Faith in the Westminster Confession of
Faith,
and the
heady vapors
of
enlightenment thought which, by
the
eighteenth
were
fertilizing
Scottish
philosophical, legal
and economic minds. The sentinels of
accepted theological orthodoxy
were slow to thaw. As late as 1718, over what
might
seem to us a pastoral issue, the doctrine of
the church was
brought
into conflicts reminiscent of the great
Scholastic debates of the Middle
Ages
in the Marrow Contro- versy.
This took
place during
the
years
identified with
Irving’s
written
works,
the
early 1830’s,
he and such friends as McLeod
Campbell
and A. J. Scott were
encountering
a religious establishment which had vested its
identity
in a theological
in a matrix or
theologoumena,
centered on the Westminster Confession.
significant
system,
expressed
most
the resistance of
Presentation
For
Irving,
Irving’s Theological
the
soteriological
character of Jesus’ mission
was,
from
rary,
charismata tological teaching
strands of
Christology is
usually
overshad-
the
outset,
interwoven with the
complementary
and
Pneumatology. Here, Irving’s understanding
owed
by
one of two extraneous factors. On the one hand, there are the more
widely publicized Christological
conclusions of his
contempo-
McLeod
Campbell
of Row,
concerning
the vicarious
humanity
of Jesus and its universal
application
as the
ground
of man’s salvation. On the
other, stands
the
notoriety
ascribed to
Irving
in his
handling
of
in his London
congregation,
the association of his
pneuma-
with the outbreak of
glossolalia
on the West Coast of Scotland in 1829 and his
advocacy
of immanent,
premillennial parousia
and the later formation of the Catholic
Apostolic
Church. All these too
easily
obscure the critical
place given by Irving
to the interre- lation of
Christology
and
Pneumatology
of the Word of
God, who became
human for our sake. We see this cor-
of
Christology
and
Pneumatology
autumn of
1828,
The Doctrine
of the
Incarnation
mons. In the
preface
to this
work,
he contends
relation
Longman of
in the
Soteriological
mission
in a work
printed
in the
Opened
in five ser-
1 Further biographical material on Irving can be had from the following studies: Gordon
Strachan, The Pentecostal Theology of Edward Irving London: Darton,
& Todd, 1973; Arnold Dallimore, The Life of Edward Irving: Forerunner
the Charismatic Movement Chicago, IL: Moody Press, 1983; and William S. Merricks, Edward Irving: the Forgotten
Giant East Peoria, IL: Scribe’s Chamber Publications, 1983.
2
83
that it was manhood fallen, which he took up into His Divine person, in
order to prove the grace and the might of Godhead in it; or, to
use the words of our Scottish Confession, that His redeeming flesh was, in its
proper
nature, mortal and corru?tible, but received immortality and
incorruption from the Holy Ghost.
Integral
to Irving’s Christological perspective, provokingly radical as it
appears
to be, is an
equally important Pneumatological
assertion: while the human nature
possessed
of Christ was the same
corruptible flesh as his mother
Mary,
it was
by virtue of the Holy Ghost’s
quickening and inhabiting of it….
pre-
served sinless and incorruptible.
In other words,
Irving’s Christological
affirmation as to the
incorrupt- ibility
of Christ’s flesh does not stand alone but is qualified pneumato- logically.
The work of the
Spirit
sustains and validates
Irving’s
Chris- tological
assertion as to the
corruptibility
of Christ’s
humanity:
it is not simply
an
appendage
to it.
For
Irving,
the
soteriological
action
applied
to us
through
the event of the Incarnation has,
integral
to
it,
an
understanding
of the
Spirit which is more than that of an
agent
in the
conception
of Jesus, or even an implicit vinculum
caritatis,
a “bond of love” between the Father and the Son.
Instead, Irving
stressed the
dynamic
nature of the Incarnation as the
reality
of God’s
economy
manifest towards
us,
in the
Being
of both the Son and the
Spirit, joined
in
harmony
of action.
Consequent- ly, Irving
sees Christ Jesus not
simply
as the “son of God made
flesh”, but rather as the
predicate
of the Triune God’s
dynamic
involvement with humankind in and
through
the
Incarnation, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Thus,
in
speaking
of the
Spirit’s
work in the divine con- ception,
he states:
Now every act of the Holy Ghost is an act of the Father and the Son, from whom the Holy Ghost proceedeth. The Holy Ghost worketh noth-
of Himself, but worketh the common
In the of this
pleasure of the Father and the Son.
ing
creation, therefore, body of Christ of the woman’s substance, there is an act of the Father’s will and a word of the Son assenting
thereto 4
The Interaction of
Christology
and
Soteriology
Irving’s
insistence on
maintaining
a
Christology,
the
sustaining
of which
required
an
explicit, pneumatological operation,
allowed him to
legitimize,
in his own
understanding
at
least, his attack on what appeared
to him as the neo-Docetism of the Bezan
Calvinists, the ac- cepted orthodoxy
of his time.
Irving perceived
that Christ’s
humanity
2Edward Irving, The Doctrine of the Incarnation Opened, 3.
3Edward Irving, The Doctrine of the Incarnation Opened, 4.
4Edward Irving, The Doctrine of the Incarnation Opened, Sermon 3, p. 122.
3
84
was, like ours, able to sin
(posse peccare).
Further than
that,
he accepted
the Westminster Confession of Faith’s affirmation of total depravity. Through
all
this, however,
he saw that the
Spirit
is
vitally active in sustaining Jesus in His
unspoiled
communion with the
Father, while
sharing
the
experience
of
humanity’s
sinful
deprivation.
Conse- quently,
in Christ’s Holiness in the Flesh: the form and fountainhead of all
holiness
in flesh, Irving
can
state,
Now, forasmuch as Christ has always this
bom of
spiritual generation, being
God, and begotten by the Holy Ghost, he always had that consti- tution of
constituted as ours is being
which the Scripture calleth holy; yet our nature still, and
after it hath been begotten of the Spirit; -human nature in the state of regeneration.5
It is the person of the Son of God acting within the limits of manhood, and so becoming the Son of man, ever consenting to become man, and ever brought thereinto by the Holy Ghost, who,
upon finding himself a man, doth find himself at once a spiritual and fleshly man, bom of God and bom of flesh, whereby he sanctified the latter by the hand of the former; and so approveth himself worthy and able, as man, to use the Holy Ghost,
for the destruction of sin in the flesh, and the defeat of temptation
from the devil and the world.6
in
Irving,
of the
Spirit
.
How can we best construe this
relationship
and the
Logos
in that salvation which is
brought
to us
through
Jesus Christ? Two
points
should be noted in our consideration.
Firstly, Irving’s emphasis
on the role of the
Spirit
in the life of Christ could
possible
be mistaken as a failure to grasp the
centrality
of Jesus as the Son of God
incarnate, leading
to the accusation that
Irving pre- sents a Father-Spirit
binitarianism, reducing
and
ignoring
the
centrality of the Son.
However,
it is evident from the
polemical
debates entered be
Irving
in the later
1820’s, revolving
around that
very
issue of the Son of God’s full
participation
in the human condition in and
through the
Incarnation, that he
perceived
the essential
reality
of God to be conjoined
with
humanity through
the
indwelling
of the Son in human nature. What we need to
recognize
in
Irving
is that he maintained a Christological orthodoxy,
but wedded it to a vital
emphasis
of our ontological
interaction not
only
with the Son
of
God but also with the person of the Holy Spirit
in the
soteriological
event.
In
this,
Irving
can be understood as
offering
an alternative to Augustine’s
Trinitarian
system,
which had come to dominate Western Christendom’s
perception
of God’s
perichoretic identity,
as
Father, Son and
Holy Spirit. Augustine’s model, presenting
the
Spirit
as the mode of relation between the Father and the Son, is founded on an analogical projection
of God’s immanent
self-being.
This contrasts
5Edward Irving, Christ’s Holiness in the Flesh, The Form, Fountain Head, and Assurance to us of Holiness in Flesh (Edinburgh: John Lindsay, 1831), 8.
serving, Christ’s Holiness in the Flesh, 9.
4
85
with
Irving’s approach,
which roots our
perception
of God’s Trinitarian nature in the
economy
of God’s revelation as it is met through
Jesus. Colin Gunton makes a similar
point
in a recent article where, commenting on Augustine’s perception
of the
Trinity,
he notes
the problem with the trinitarian analogies as Augustine presents them is that
upon the doctrine of the Trinity a
of the divine threeness which owes more to they impose
conception
neoplatonic philosophy than to the triune economy, and that the outcome is, again, a view of an unknown substance supporting the three persons rather than being constituted their relatedness.7
by
In the
Augustinian
model,
where the
Spirit
is construed as “the bond of
love” between the Father and the Son, it
appears
to follow of necessity
that a stress on the
ontological centrality
of the Incarnation will lead to a diminution in
emphasis
and
understanding
of the
Spirit’s s work in the
soteriological
event.
This,
it is
suggested,
is attested to in the direction of
post
Reformation
developments
in Reformed Pneu- matology,
where the
Spirit’s
work has been
largely
reduced to the role of an
epistemological agent
in human
cognitive appropriation
of Christ as Savior and
Lord,
an
ontology
of the
Spirit’s
economic
reality being either lost or obscured.
Irving,
on the other
hand,
redresses this weak- ness
by helping
us to focus on the
complementary
actions of both the Son and the
Spirit
in the actus salus of Jesus Christ’s life and
ministry.
Secondly,
it is too
easy
to assume that
Irving’s understanding
of Christology’s soteriological significance
is the same as that of his contemporary,
McLeod
Campbell,
where McLeod
Campbell’s empha- sis,
on
Christology
as the
key
to
soteriology,
has tended to dominate discussion in the
relationship
of
Christology
and
Soteriology
in the dawning
of
post-Calvinistic
Scottish
theology.
Where recent debate has often
raged
between the
proponents
of atonement
through
“vicar- ious
humanity” expressed through
the Incarnation or
by “propitiation” centered on the crucifixion,
Irving
has been
largely ignored
as
having a valuable contribution to
make,
in
apparently avoiding
the
rejection of the
propitiatory understanding
of Westminster
soteriology,
while at the same time
attacking
the narrowness of its
Christological understanding.8
7Colin Gunton, “Augustine, The Trinity and the Theological Crisis of the West,” Scottish Journal of Theology 43, (1990) 45-46.
8Unfortunately, posterity would not notice this aspect of his with the affront thought, being pre- occupied of Irving’s apparent affirmation that Christ’s
was sinful. Even the apologist A. B. Bruce of renown for a harsh con- humanity Glasgow, hardly
servatism, would opine that Irving’s “theory of ‘redemption by … that original sin should be ascribed to Christ; for original sin sample.’ is a vice of fallen requires human nature; and the doctrine that our Lord’s human nature was fallen means, if it means anything, that it was tainted with original sin.” . (The Humiliation
of Christ [1876], 253-54.)
5
86
or the
Baptism
with the
Holy
Ghost, where
Irving
We see this in The
Day of Pentecost,
can affirm that
penalty inflicting
Christ’s work in flesh satisfied God’s
justice against sin; it paid the
of natural life’s transgression; it shewed forth God’s holiness in
death upon the world….9
guage . ‘ Campbell,
magnum
logical debate,
we
might
[1856]:
a trait
which,
How is it that
Irving appears
at ease in retaining allusions to the lan-
of sacrifice and
propitiation?
Could it be that, unlike McLeod
his
soteriology
is built
upon
a base, where salvation is con- ceived of in both
Christological
and
Pneumatological terms,
rather than in
Christological language
alone?
Certainly,
there is an
absence, in
Irving,
of the critical tones which McLeod
Campbell
uses in his
opus,
The Nature
of
the Atonement
given
the
sharpness of Irving’s tongue against
his critics in the Christo-
have
expected
if he had been
opposed
to these terms.
Campbell expresses
his revulsion not
only
at limited
but at the notion of
“propitiation”
the wrath of an
angry God:
an attempt to make God gracious … would, indeed, be difficult to believe
in.10
atonement,
It
is,
perhaps,
interpreting opens riology
that there
appears
to be no
the
presence
of a
from the structures of
Reformed
not without
significance
such rhetoric in
Irving’s writing; nor, significantly,
developed Pneumatology
in
Campbell’s.
In
Irving,
we meet with a radical
departure
inherited
soteriological concepts present
in the
Scottish,
tradition. We see this
by
the manner in which he deals with the inter- action of
Christology
and
Pneumatology through
the actus salus in the life of Christ.
By reviewing
the salvific
significance
of Christ’s
life,
it in both
Christological
and
Pneumatological terms, Irving
the
way
for a fresh
understanding
of the
Spirit’s
role when sote-
meets
anthropology,
in the
application
of a new
pneumatologi- cal model in
explaining
how salvation
through
Christ is
applied
to the life of men and women now.
in The
Day of
Pentecost
the
Holy
Ghost.
Irving distinguished
Holy Spirit,
found in the life of Christ and
applicable
action is found in the
generation
of Christ Jesus
through
the Incar- nation, which is paralleled in us by regeneration.
the
sustaining, by
the
Spirit,
of the human life of Christ,
paralleled
for
This is demonstrated
burgh :
or The
Baptism
With three
stages,
or
actions,
of the
to us. The first
The second action is
9Edward Irving, The Day of Pentecost or The Baptism with the Holy Ghost
John
(Edin-
Lindsay, 1831), 5-b.
10McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, 17.
6
87
us in our “nourishment
upon
the flesh and blood of Christ.”11 The third action is found in the
baptism
of Jesus in the
Jordan, leading to the Church’s
baptism of
the
Holy Spirit. Irving’s
conviction was that the church of his
day
has erred in not
looking
for the action of the Spirit
in this third
stage.
But this did not make the Church “unChris- tian”,
for it
participates
in the first and second
stages
of the
Holy Spirit’s
action in the life of Christ. This third
stage
would
bring
the full share of the
Holy Spirit’s powers,
as poured out at Pentecost,
to the extent of this body’s power to contain, and of the world’s power to
bear the sight and the hearing of them
This
significance,
here,
is in the method
Irving adopts
to
distinguish between the
actuality
of our
present appropriation
of Christ’s
saving act, through
the work of the
Spirit,
and the
ontologically prior reality in the salvific event of Christ Jesus Himself. We see
Irving bringing this about
by distinguishing
between
Pneumatological
and Christo- logical elements,
as
they
relate to us as the
objects
of God’s
grace, centered in the salvific event of Jesus Christ’s own life and
ministry. The
advantage
in
Irving’s approach
can best be seen if we introduce a distinction between the actual and the real.
FATHER
t Actual
‘l’ Real
‘l’
t ME
< >
‘l’ JESUS
Actualized
by
the The
reality
of the Christ
event,
Holy Spirit
in its
actual, historical incidence
The real
participation
is that which is true of the
person
of Jesus Christ,
in His
particularity.
Our actual
participation
is founded
upon the
reality
of
ontological
union between
humanity
and God in the Incarnation,
in the
particularity
of Jesus Christ.
However,
there is a contingency
in the realization of that
actuality
for us. Such
actuality
is found
through
our
ontological participation
in the
Spirit, proceeding
11 Irving interprets
this
sacramentally:
here we see the genesis of the sacramental
high,
theology which would be developed in the Catholic Apostolic Church, which owed so much to the
theological perspectives of Irving.
l2ln,ing,
The Day of Pentecost, 36.
7
88
basis, person
and immediate
meeting
with
God,
in
uniqueness reality
from the Father. This
dynamic
the
Holy Spirit,
is
expressed by
us
through our faith
in Jesus Christ. In the
saving
action of God
upon humankind, allowing
the differen- tiation of the real and the
actual,
we can affirm that the
ontological
in the
meeting
of God and humankind in the
reality
of the
of Christ
Jesus, is attended by factors of historical incidence, which are
peculiar
to the revelation that is in Christ Jesus and the
of His life.13 At the same time it is
equally
true that this
is only effected for us when it is actualized in our lives
through the action of the
Holy Spirit.
.
The
significance
we
compare
tarian and Christocentric dialectical
of the
dynamic
of both Trini-
central to
Irving’s action of God toward us
through
the
of the
Salvation as an
ontological category
of
Irving’s
schema becomes more immediate when
his method to that of the
great exponent
soteriology,
Karl Barth. In one sense the
theology
of Barth echoes the
emphasis,
understanding,
event of the Incarnation. Where it differs is in the
perception Spirit’s soteriological significance.
This is restrained in
Barth, due to his use of
Augustine’s analogical
model of the
Trinity,
and his convic- tion that our
perception
of the
Trinity
must be based not on the economic event of God’s self
revelation, but
on the
prior, ontological immanence of God to and within Himself, 14
Barth, especially
in his earlier
work,
was at pains, in the face of anti- trinitarian
thinking,
to establish the total
identity
between the
Trinity and the Oneness of God. For
Barth,
it arose that
concept
However, the
Holy Spirit
it is to the one single essence of God, which is not to be tripled by the doctrine of the but to be in its that there
Trinity, emphatically recognised unity,
also belongs what we call today the “personality of God.” … [a
which,
of itself] is a product of the struggle against modem naturalism and pantheism.l5
does this excuse his affirmation that the manifestation of
must be added as something special, as a special act of the Father or the Son or both, to the givenness of the revelation of the Father in the Son. … This special element in revelation is undoubtedly identical with what
part
l3pne
aspect of the forensic significance
of the Cross; another the Christus Victor motif, emphasized by Gustaf Aulen. These and other aspects of the which
atonement,
are
of
contingent
Christ’s
upon the Christological reality of the Incarnation, are no less
soteriological mission than the Incarnation itself. All are integral to the actus salus.
l4Al?ough
Barth did contend that the Economic served as a model for his
of the Immanent: Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975) 1/1 p. 479.
15Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 1/1 p. 403.
understanding
8
89
the NT usually calls the Holy Spirit, as the subjective side in the event of revelation.16
Barth’s
usage
of the
Augustinian
vinculum
caritatis, married to this type
of
language
which comes close to
subsuming
the
Spirit
to a sec- ondary role,
demonstrates how hard it is not to see the
ontology
of the Holy Spirit
as
contingent
and
secondary
to that of the Father and the Son when an
attempt
is made to
posit
a relational model of God’s Being prior
to the economic
reality
of the actus salus.
Barth’s insistence on
interpreting Pneumatology through
the
spec- trum of
Christology
and his maintenance of the
Augustinian
vinculum caritatis leads to a weakness in the
very
area in which
Irving
demon- strated
strength, through
his
rejection
of the
Augustinian
schema. That is,
Barth exhibits a reticence in
distinguishing
between
(a)
the
prior, ontological reality
which is found in the interaction of
Christology
and Pneumatology
in Christ
Jesus;
and
(b)
the
actuality
of salvation
pro nobis,
in
applying
the
soteriological significance
of Christ to us now. For
Barth,
this can
only
be
expressed
in Christological
terms,
with the work of the
Spirit
subsumed within his
Christology.
The
difficulty
that many
have had in
understanding
the
specific place that faith plays
in Barth’s scheme of salvation is possibly reflective of the fact that
faith, as an
epistemic
creation of the
Spirit,
can
only
be viewed
by
Barth from a
Christological perspective
and is
easily
lost from
sight.
This stands in contrast to
Irving,
whose
prior
distinction between the onto- logical significance
of the
Spirit
and the Word Incarnate in the soterio- logical
mission of Jesus Christ allows him to differentiate between the role of the
Spirit
in the
reality
of Christ and the
Spirit’s
work in the actuality
of our
appropriating
the benefits of the atonement at the
pre- sent time.
Further, Irving
is able to do this without
sacrificing
the integrity
of this
Christological
model.
Conclusion
The
contemporary significance of Irving’s thought
in these matters is twofold.
Firstly, Irving’s
insistence that he was
possessed
of a Reformed
theology
invites further reflection
by
Reformed
theologians who are
seeking
to address the relation of
Christology
to
Soteriology within the context of Trinitarian debate.
Irving’s approach
is of
special significance
in that it
challenges
the
implicit assumption
that the Augustinian perspective
of the
Spirit
as the vinculum caritatis between the Father and the Son is both the orthodox and most
appropriate means of
expressing
a
proper,
Trinitarian
understanding
of the
Spirit and His work.
Secondly,
there is a need to review current attitudes to
Irving
as a possible
forefather of Pentecostal
“theology”, especially
where his pneumatological perspectives
have been seen as a
potential
base in
16K?1 Barth, Church Dogmatics 1/1, 514.
9
90
teasing
out issues which arise in the debate over the
legitimacy
of charismatic phenomena.
There remains,
despite
the literature
recently generated
on
Irving,
no clear association between the
theology
of Irving
and that of the later Pentecostal or Charismatic movements which,
in
starting
from a phenomenal rather than a theological founda- tion, have tended to
adopt
the
theological
frameworks out of which their
experience
has been bom. In this, the most obvious contrast lies in the
emphasis given,
in these late
movements,
to the
experience
of the individual. For
Irving,
the main mode of
Pneumatological expres- sion and
interpretation pro
nobis is found in
ecclesiology,
not anthro- pology.
The
experience
of the individual is not
Irving’s starting point. Experience
and
phenomena may
well be
integral
to God’s
activity
in our
lives, however, a proper
perspective
on the
Spirit’s activity
in our lives is to be founded
upon
the
relationship
of the
Spirit
to the Word Incarnate,
rooted in the
particularity
of Jesus of Nazareth.
Irving’s approach
calls us to reappraise our
understanding
of
religious phenom- ena in terms that
express
and
correspond
to the
reality
of God as Trinity
and the nature of the Trinitarian involvement with humankind.
10
