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The Sovereignty of Jesus and the Sovereignty of God
By Philip E. Devenish

However new our concerns may be today, and however different our own conceptual resources may be from those of the people who first encountered Jesus, we continue to be faced with certain basic questions that are strictly identical to those that shaped the "faith of the apostles." How we are to understand the metaphors of both the sovereignty of God and the sovereignty of Jesus is one of these questions.

SAVING FAITH AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY

What Protestant theology has traditionally called properly "saving faith" occurs whenever people who encounter Jesus take him to be positively decisive for the ultimate meaning or basic orientation of their lives. Early traditions that we can identify from both canonical and extracanonical sources indicate that people bore witness to events of this kind having occurred during Jesus' life. Later traditions indicate that people claim to have had such saving encounters with Jesus following his death as well. Indeed, people throughout the history of the church up to the present day have made and continue to make this same claim. In other words, people who claim to have encountered Jesus, whether before or after his death., also testify that these encounters have definitively shaped their fundamental approach to life; they claim that, through such encoun- ters, they have participated in saving faith. Then, as now, such witnesses to revelation contain both the criteria for and the content of an understanding of the sovereignty of God that claims to be not only properly Christian but also While such witnesses to saving faith characterize the earliest Christian traditions, basic questions also arose very early. Does faith of this kind true.

Philip E. Devenish is Senior Minister of First Congregational Church of Webster Groves in St. Louis and Iranslator of a collection of essays by Willi Marxsen titled Jesus and the Church: The Beginnings of Christianity (I992).

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really ever occur at all (see Luke 18:8b)? Is it ever possible to identify such faith, whether in others or in oneself (see, for example, Matt. 7:1; 13:30)?

However puzzling and even controverted its character, saving faith has been consistently understood to imply a distinction of some kind to account for both the saving reality that Jesus is taken to reveal, namely, God, and for Jesus' role in revealing God. While the logic of saving faith as a subjective genitive (faith's own logic) calls for an account of how Jesus sovereignly reveals God, the logic of saving faith as an objective genitive (the logical structure of faith) calls for an account of how God as revealed in Jesus is sovereign to save. In other words, the claims to decisive encounters with Jesus that have always constituted the witness to properly saving Christian faith provide us not only with exactly what but also with all we need in order to understand and to assess any claims made concerning "the sovereignty of Jesus" and "the sovereignty of God." For, on the one hand, by specifying the purpose of these encounters, namely, to save, such witnesses also at least imply the character of the two sovereignties at issue. And, on the other hand, in assuming that those whom these encounters involve do not presently share in but rather stand in need of the sovereignly saving activity to which they testify, these claims imply that nothing more than the need for such an encounter is required in order savingly to take part in it.

"Not only must the modes of sovereignty claimed for Jesus and for God go together, but those implied by sin and claimed for grace must go together as well. "

Claims about the sovereignty of both Jesus and God for saving faith imply what we might call a twofold fit to the event of Christian revelation. First, Jesus and God must fit each other. Only to the extent that these two elements of revelation are not found to be discrepant from each other can one justify claiming that they belong together. Then, there must also be a second fit between Jesus and God on the one hand and the needs of the person who receives them on the other. Once more, only insofar as ontic datum and noetic need belong together may, one claim that the reality encountered through Jesus really is the "God of our salvation." In short, not only must the modes of sovereignty claimed for Jesus and for God go together, but those implied by sin and claimed for grace must go together as well.

Unless Christian doctrine is expounded in such a way as to take these mutual interconnections into account and to display them coherently, one or more of three things may go wrong. In terms of the loci of classical dogmatics: (1) The mode of sovereignty of the encountered Jesus for saving faith ("of the sources of salvation" and "of the means of salva-

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tion") will be discrepant from that of God ("of God" and "of the grace of the Holy Spirit"). In other words, "the grace of Christ" and "the grace of God" will not fit together. (2) The significance of Jesus will turn out to be independent of both the event of encounter and its end of saving faith ("of the person of Christ in himself" as separable from "of the office of Christ for us"). That is, Jesus will prove to be in no sense necessary to "the salvation of the world." (3) The sovereignty of either Jesus or God for saving faith (in the inclusive doctrine of grace) will be presented as separable from the need for saving faith ("of human existence" and "the state of corruption"). In other words, grace and sin will not belong together. Finally, such failures coherently to display the meaning of Christian witness raise questions of its truth.

QUESTIONS ABOUT THE SOVEREIGNTY OF JESUS AND OF GOD

However one may understand the norms of Christian theology and the relations among them, the ultimate source of such critical reflection must be the putatively saving encounters with Jesus that generate its irreducibly Christian subject matter. In this respect and in this sense, Christian theology must be and must seek to remain christocentric or christomorphic in its effort to clarify the fit between the modes of sovereignty inherent in the saving activity of Jesus and of God. The Christian theologian must begin with "meeting Jesus" and must not stray from this.

Our access to the experience of saving faith on the part of those people who purport to have been decisively affected by Jesus in a positive way, whether before or after his death, is mediated to us through claims concerning these encounters. These claims express people's own interpretations of what meeting Jesus means to them, and they do so for the sake of inviting others to a similarly positive response. As we now realize, we have direct, albeit always hermeneutical, access only to people's interpretations of their encounters with Jesus and, through him, with God, not to these encounters themselves. Moreover, this applies equally to all periods of Christianity, from the earliest testimonies we can reconstruct of the "faith of the apostles" to witnesses of people who call themselves Christians today.

Furthermore, we need always to seek to distinguish what these witnesses testify to from how they testify to it. Such witnesses all seem to testify to a divine initiative that leads to a change or transformation that they claim to have experienced in their own lives. This is the point (Sache) of these claims. In expressing this point, all such witnesses make use of a variety of approaches and concepts, which we can understand through study of the literature and culture of the period in which they were produced.

The interpretive resources that people employ in witnessing to their encounters with Jesus, and with God through Jesus, include ways of conceiving and of attributing sovereignty both to Jesus and to God in accounting for the role each is taken to play in saving faith. Such concepts and approaches may fit these encounters themselves more or less well. It is not important that these interpretive resources themselves derive from such

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encounters (indeed, they could not all do so, there being no distinctively Christian language). It is important that they fit the encounters they are used to express and to explain.

It is striking how many early Christian texts directly address this issue of the fit between what is said and what is meant. Even more striking for our purpose are the respects in which certain early Christian thinkers explicitly seek to correct what they take to be misleading approaches to and inappropriate interpretations of the modes of sovereignty involved in encounters with Jesus. For instance, virtually all New Testament scholars now understand the Gospels of Mark and John to make use of complex polemical strategies to counteract contemporary "divine man" (theios aner) and "miracle" (dynamis, semeia) theories employed in presenting encounters with Jesus. By implication, such critical strategies also oppose and seek to correct the treatments of divine power and activity that such theories presuppose. In other words, the author of Mark and at least one primary shaper of the Gospel of John judge there to be an unacceptably poor fit between these contemporary theories and the so.vereignty of Jesus and of God that they take to characterize encounters of saving faith.

"On the basis of what they claim to be their encounters with Jesus, witnesses such as Paul, the author of the Gospel of Mark, and at least one influential shaper of the Gospel of John argue explicitly and in sustained fashion against approaching and presenting the sovereignty of Jesus and of God by way of accepted theories of miracle, power, and authority."

Likewisein the Corinthian correspondence, Paul employs a wide variety of rhetorical strategies to distinguish what he understands to be the mode of Jesus' and God's sovereignty in authorizing his own claim to apostleship, from that which he takes his opponents to present to prove theirs. Claims to authority and proof imply relations of sovereignty. Similarly, in Galatians, Paul contrasts his own interpretation of the mean ; ing and manner of God's sovereignty in Christ to what he understands as mistaken views of these matters. Indeed, the New Testament and other early Christian literature are replete with attempts to counter and to correct accounts of the sovereignty of both God and Jesus that they take to fit poorly with the point and saving effects of encounters with Jesus. Such explicitly controversial treatments of miracle, proof, and authority, in particular, provide us with some of our most important and reliable, if also indirect, evidence for understanding what it means properly to grasp and accurately to articulate the fit between the sovereignty to be claimed for Jesus and that to be attributed to God.

It is, then, neither especially surprising nor, perhaps, merely coincidental that criticisms in our own day of certain conceptions of the sovereignty

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both of God (as, for instance, claims concerning patriarchy) and of Jesus (say, those concerning hierarchy) either arise from or make reference to issues of authority and power. For, even among the earliest witnesses to which we can gain access, there is explicit controversy regarding the meaning of sovereignty for Christian faith and life. In sum, on the basis of what they claim to be their encounters with Jesus, witnesses such as Paul, the author of the Gospel of Mark, and at least one influential shaper of the Gospel of John argue explicitly and in sustained fashion against approaching and presenting the sovereignty of Jesus and of God by way of accepted theories of miracle, power, and authority. Both these and later Christians judged that a variety of contemporary notions simply did not fit what they took to be their own experience of meeting God through meeting Jesus.

For all this, we should not expect and, indeed, we do not find in such early Christian authors anything like either a systematic critique of these theories or a constructive alternative to them. These were not their primary purpose, which was rather to witness to the saving activity of God they had encountered in meeting Jesus. But this should neither trouble us nor deter us from making explicit what they left implicit in pursuing their own concerns. Moreover, today both Christian theology and the church, each in its own way and for its own distinct purposes, do need such a critique and constructive account of what it means to speak of the sovereignty of Jesus and the sovereignty of God. And in working these out, one can build on the approaches that early Christians like Paul, Mark, and John laid down. While a comprehensive account of this sort is beyond the scope of a single essay, we can at least summarily identify the basic confusions in standard theories that prevent interpreting the sovereignty of Jesus and of God as these New Testament writers seem to mean to do. And we can then build on clarifications that arise there from to sketch the outlines of a constructive alternative that provides a better fit with their account of saving faith through encountering Jesus.

THE SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD

The standard theories of miracle, proof, and authority that some early Christian thinkers opposed rest on two basic assumptions, each of which proves to be confused and false. One of these is purely conceptual, the other strictly theological.

The most basic purely conceptual assumption of such theories concerns the relation between the notions of activity and ability. This assumption is that what an agent, whether divine or nondivine, can be said to be able or to have the power to do, can be determined independently of what it makes sense to say :it does. To the contrary, what it makes sense to say that an agent can do depends on its making sense to say that the agent does this. For instance, if it makes no sense to say, "Philip sits on his head" (as it does not, since the phrase "sits on his head" is meaningless and therefore can refer to no activity), neither does it make sense to say that Philip either can or cannot sit on his head. "Sitting on his head" is not an activity that the agent Philip can properly be said either to possess or to lack.

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When, in the Gospel of John, Jesus is presented as revealing Nicodemus' failure to understand "how anyone can be born after having grown old," the conceptual basis for such confusion is that not being able to be born in this way is due not to a lack of ability on Nicodemus' part but to the putativeactivity of "being born after having grown old" being something that it makes no sense to speak of Nicodemus doing (John 3:4). In other words, attributions of ability derive conceptually from or are parasitic upon those of activity, as is implied by this Johannine dialogue.

This point is vital to employing both the more metaphorical language of "sovereignty" and the more technical terminology of "omnipotence" or "divine 'power" in a consistent way. For such notions are systematically ambiguous. Each can refer, and each is often used to refer, either to the exercise ofan activity or to the capacity for such exercise. Because abilities are analytically dependent for their meaning upon activities, usage of the former, grammatically modal type of concept must always be controlled by that of the latter. Otherwise, as is common in standard miracle theory, what is taken to be capable of being done can be asserted independently of the meaningfulness, hence of the possibility or impossibility, of the activity in question.

"What, therefore, these early Christian thinkers mean by 'divine' is 'what has saved me.' In other words, 'God' properly means 'the agent whose activity I have encountered as transformative in meeting Jesus.' "

It would seem to be the evangelist Matthew, for instance, who has Jesus say to his disciples, "Nothing will be impossible for you," not even causing a mountain to "move from here to there" (17:20). Granted that hyperbole is a particular rhetorical strategy, Matthew nonetheless takes over a confusion typical of contemporary miracle theory in presenting "the power of faith." Were the conceptual relation of ability and activity attended to, other strategies could be employed that neither imply so-called paradoxes of omnipotence nor generate them.

It is not surprising to find that this point about the logical relation of concepts 'I of activity and ability both finds expression in and receives corroboration from the process of concept formation. Summarizing for the Galatians: what it means to encounter God through meeting Jesus, Paul declares, "For freedom Christ has set us free" (5:1). What he alleges to be decisive is what he takes God to have done and to be doing by way of the activity of setting free. What he ought, therefore, to say that God is able to do in this regard is to be understood precisely. by inference from such activity. And, in fact, summarizing once more, this time to the Corinthians, Paul does assert precisely that "God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance" (2 Cor. 9:8). In the same vein, what Paul typically

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takes God to be able to do is to do again what he takes God to have done before (see Rom. 11:23; 14:4). Here, attributions of ability are derived from experiences of activity.

The most basic, strictly theological assumption that distinguishes the approach of certain early Christian thinkers from the theories they sought to counter concerns what we may call the criterion of ascribing divinity or "what makes God `God.' " What early Christians do, in fact, typically claim to encounter through meeting Jesus is activity of an initiatory and causal kind that they express in many ways (for example, in verbal nouns such as forgiveness, justification, reconciliation, redemption, sanctification, healing, love) and that dogmatics has sought to epitomize through the inclusive doctrine of grace. Moreover, it is precisely because these early Christians judge this activity to have transformed them in a certain way, namely, in a personally transformative or saving fashion, that at least some of them speak of what they take to be the agent of this transformation as divine. What, therefore, these early Christian thinkers mean by divine is "what has saved me." In other words, "God" properly means "the agent whose activity I have encountered as transformative in meeting Jesus." Activity of this kind is the criterion for ascribing the term divine; it is what makes its source "God." This is the point of God-language of this kind.

"What a person grasps through being encountered by God in meeting Jesus is precisely the depth and character of one's own ongoing opposition to God's causal activity-one's own sin. "
It is evidently because they were persuaded that contemporary approaches to miracle, proof, and authority fit poorly their own encounters with Jesus and conformed inadequately to the criterion of saving activity these implied that various Christian thinkers opposed them. They were convinced that such approaches either obscured the point of these encounters or missed it altogether. In short, as they understood them, these approaches were merely conventional; they failed to credit that it is the kind of saving activity they took themselves to have encountered in meeting Jesus that makes God "God."

In contrast, the basic criterion for ascribing the category of divinity in conventional theories of miracle, proof, and authority is the assumption that the exercise of divine activity guarantees its own result. We may call this interpretation of divine activity and its exercise the notion of "divine control," namely, that if God acts upon individual x so as to bring about state of affairs y, this state of affairs cannot fail to result.

However, encountering Jesus persuaded some Christian thinkers that God's initiatory activity towards them in no way guaranteed their own cooperation with it. To the contrary, they witness that they experience

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themselves continually opposing the purposes to which they take such divine activity to be directed, both in their own self-understandings and in their activity of word and deed. Only rarely, if indeed ever, are they "coworkers with God" (1 Cor. 3:9; 1 Thess. 3:2). Indeed, they testify that what a person grasps through being encountered by God in meeting Jesus is precisely the depth and character of one's own ongoing opposition to God's causal activity-one's own sin. For this reason, unless one's conviction of sin at any of the moments in question be completely illusory, one does prevent God's grace from accomplishing its saving purpose at that moment. In short, the price for asserting divine control is either the denial of sin or the acceptance of a criterion for understanding what makes God "God" that does not fit encountering Jesus.

At least as important as this argument from the reality of sin is its obverse, namely, a corresponding argument from the reality of saving faith. To the extent that encounter with Jesus does result, from time to time, in saving faith, such a phenomenon entails real and, genuinely cooperative activity in some sense on the part of the person for whom meeting Jesus is positively decisive. That human activity should initiate such faith there is no reason to assert. Meeting Jesus may disclose, rather, that such human activity occurs only ever in response to an initiatory activity encountered in that meeting, an extra nos that, because of its transforming character, one may properly ascribe to God. For all this, such divine activity may make the causally efficacious difference it does make in a relatively, rather than an absolutely, determinative manner. It may influence but not control resultant states of affairs; no guarantee is involved, at least so far as evidence 'and warrants are drawn from the experience of both sin and saving faith. In short, whether it makes sense to say that God exercises control over faith (or sin) or, parasitically upon this, that God can do so, as it seems it does not, certain early Christian attempts to counter conventional theological approaches to miracle and authority seem to imply that Christian theology has no interest in doing so. However, to my knowledge, the history, of classical Christian dogmatics discloses no sustained attempt to pursue such a line of analysis.

Moreover, just as it is grace, the saving activity of God as encountered in Jesus, from which concepts of divine ability, power, or sovereignty are to be derived so also it is the activity of human beings in response to such divine initiative, that is, either faith or sin, from which corresponding concepts of human ability must be derived in order to be both relevant to and warrantable by encounters with God through Jesus. In the one case, so far as I am aware, such an approach to the definition of divine power (whether expressed in terms of sovereignty, omnipotence, or almightiness) has only rarely been assayed and then never been consistently carried through. In the other, such human ability can be defined in the technical terminology of classical dogmatics as "the power of deciding either way" (liberum arbitrium utriusque) and this precisely "with regard to spiritual matters" (in rebus spiritualibus). For only ability of this sort matters, and such ability alone can be conceptually derived from the always responsive

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human activities of sin and saving faith alike. However, due to neglect of the conception of divine activity on which it rests, such an attribution as this to human 'beings of the ability only ever responsively to reject or to accept the influential initiative of saving grace has also been universally neglected in Christian dogmatics.

Other, conceptually more derivative notions pertaining to divine power or ability would need to be specified along these lines. Thus, through encounter with Jesus, early Christian thinkers testify that they themselves experience divine activity as favor to the self-deceiving and undeserving, a favor they are now to share as an opportunity for others. To think, then, in conventional terms of God as withholding from any person such favor as had been enacted towards them, that is, as refraining from and, thereby, depriving others of the grace they judged they needed themselves, could have no basis in encountering God in meeting Jesus. To attribute to God even a capacity to refrain from the exercise of grace would be to ascribe to God what could only be the secondarily derivative ability to deprive others of just that primary, saving activity that they judged they had encountered themselves. Such a conventional attribution of divine freedom is not only different from but precisely contrary to what, in their view, makes God "God" and is, therefore, without possible warrant in their own encounters with God through Jesus.

Other ways of thinking and speaking of God also require testing for a proper fit with encounters with Jesus. On the assumption of divine control and of the absolutely determinative interpretation of causation that divine control presupposes, people could speak of God as acting to permit sin, just as to withhold grace. But such a concept turns out to be similarly confused. For, if to permit sin is to refrain from preventing it, then permitting sin, like withholding grace, is a merely privative failure to act in a controlling fashion on God's part, rather than such positive activity.

On the basis of encounters with God through Jesus, controlling activity in its primary mode, classically termed "efficacious," as well as in the derivative mode of prevention (though not, it turns out, in such merely privative forms of refrainment as withholding and permission) is ascribable not, as in conventional approaches, to God but, rather, to human beings! For each responsive instance of human activity does absolutely determine its own resultant state (whether of sin or salvation). And it is for this reason that each such act of sin prevents the initiatory influence of grace from succeeding in its saving purpose in any given moment. The sinner does, in this sense, resist grace (as, in such an act of faith, a person cooperates with it). So, too, the derivatively modal concepts resistibility and irresistibility prove to apply not to God in relation to human beings but, rather, to human beings in relation to God. In the moment of its active occurrence, human sin is irresistible by God and, to express the point by way of a doubly derivative modal concept, precisely invincible.

A systematic elaboration in technical concepts of such an approach to the doctrines of God and of grace, on the one hand, and of human existence and of sin and faith, on the other, would seem to be what is needed to cash

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out the metaphor of divine sovereignty in ways that better fit encounters with God through Jesus than do the contemporary theories and conventional assumptions that some early Christians opposed. It would also show that certain notorious, classical theological aporias are not revealed divine mysteries but, rather, humanly generated muddles.

The Sovereignty of Jesus

Our discussion of what is needed to explicate the metaphor of the sovereignty of God has disclosed that, if we are to employ such language in ways that fit encounters with Jesus, we must undertake a basic critique of classical assumptions and a similarly basic reworking of the constructive proposals that follow from them. For, such classical treatments more nearly reflect conventional theological views brought to these encounters than they do critical approaches shaped by them. What is the situation we face when we turn to the explicitly christological issues of unpacking what it means to speak of the sovereignty of Jesus?

To answer in summary terms: While the basic structure of classical christology fits poorly the datum it means to interpret, its content fits this datum well. This situation is possible because, while the content of classical christology does prove to derive from encounters with Jesus, its structure, from which this content is logically independent, does not. To explain.

Traditional recognition of the formally mediatorial character of the several offices of Christ indicates that the reality of Jesus consists in his role, which is to communicate rather than to constitute saving grace. In other words, what is taken to be at issue is a putatively salvific relation between two terms, one of which, Jesus, is intrinsically communicative in character. This relation fits well the testimony of those early Christians from which we have taken our lead. For they witness to a relation with Jesus, encountered as word and deed, calling them to the response of faith. By contrast, when it regards this putatively saving relation between Jesus and human beings as the "work" derived from the "person" of Jesus, classical theology abstracts from a relation between Jesus and people to posit a second and logically independent datum of the relation between Jesus and, God. In short, the Jesus encountered by people as the call to respond in faith to God's saving grace that had been regarded as the primary datum of interpretation is now presented as derived from a Jesus encountering God and responding to God's grace himself. However, this position riot only makes what had been primary derivative, it also introduces as primary a second datum that is logically independent of the first. And the same basic structural confusion is only repeated in modern variations when Jesus' faith in God replaces his sinlessness. In both instances, doctrines meant to treat God's redemption of human beings in Jesus now treat, in addition and as its basis, Jesus' own lack of the need to be redeemed.

For all this, because inferences regarding the person of Jesus are logically independent of the activity of the person Jesus, inconsistency in

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the basic structure of classical christology need not adversely affect its content. For, insofar as the significance of Jesus consists in communicating grace, it is an activity, a putatively salvific relation, that is at issue, not inferences regarding the ability to communicate grace or the source of this activity.

If we now turn to the content that Jesus is taken by classical christology to communicate, and specifically to the meaning of sovereignty this content implies, we observe the quite remarkable phenomenon that these fit the critical presentations of writers such as Paul, Mark, and John much more closely than classical presentations of divine grace and sovereignty fit the views of such early Christian witnesses. In other words, despite the conceptually serious technical faults of classical christology, explicit (even if derivative) attention to Jesus has served to counter the influence of the merely conventional elements in the classical doctrines of grace and of God. For all of the apparent paradoxes they produce, doctrines regarding the "state of exaltation" are taken not to negate the "state of humiliation." In other words, the explicitly revisionary approach to the saving grace of God outlined above is ascribed to the person of Jesus-but solely to his human nature, and this by the most various means, by way of the doctrine of the "communication of natures" (communicatio idiomatum), itself specified always only negatively.

To conclude; it is the encountered Jesus who, to a greater or lesser extent, saves both classical christology and the classical Christian doctrine of God, so-called, from themselves. To the extent that people have clung to the Jesus witnessed to by certain early Christian authors, conventional assump- tions have found the critical correction these writers appear to have intended, and the sovereignty ascribable to the grace of God has been ascribed in a way that fits the sovereignty of Jesus.