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Walter Lowe on Christ and Salvation

Walter Lowe, emeritus professor of systematic theology at Candler School of Theology, Emory University, has written an essay on Christ and Salvation in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology.

Lowe sets out to develop a fresh approach to Christology and soteriology that addresses what he perceives to be limitations imposed by classic and modernist approaches to sequence, economy and negativity. He points out that modernist studies of Christ and salvation begin with human need, developing a schema of salvation, before outlining a Christology to suit. Classic approaches, on the other hand, hold unexamined assumptions around the human condition before rolling out a schema of salvation.

Lowe draws on his familiarity with Freudian analysis and psychotherapy to critique contemporary models of evangelism that begin with the subjective human experience.

Sequence - analyses of the human condition and need
1 acceptable description of common human experience with emphasis on problems or discontents
2 specific diagnosis of phenomena in terms of underlying condition
3 general recommendation
4 specific remedy

Lowe points out that this sequence, when applied to the general recommendation of salvation and specific remedy of Christ, is problematic. What happens when Christ doesn’t fit the problem? Furthermore, this approach to salvation is inevitably grounded in negativity, searching for need, offense or deficit. The radical good of the gospel may become overshadowed by the negativity.

While classic systematic theologies do not begin with such sequences and economies, it is common for Christology and soteriology to be preceded by consideration of sin and its effects on humanity. These approaches, Lowe suggests, are flawed by the quasi-hydraulic nature of their economy. God’s offering of Jesus as ransom is in response to humanity being captured by Satan. God’s infinite justice is offended in a way that can only be assuaged by a divine gesture of justice.

Lowe points out that if the distorting nature of sin is to be taken seriously, we as theologians need to treat their systems with humility, recognising that our predetermined understanding of the human condition is by its very nature limited.

In a section relating to alternatives to modernism Lowe juxtaposes the Jewish apocalypticism described by M.C. de Boer and the Christus Victor doctrine espoused by Gustaf Aulen. De Boer had contrasted the forensic apocalyptic pattern (in which wilful rejection of the Creator God had led to punishment by death) and the cosmic apocalyptic pattern (in which the people of the earth had become idolatrous and would ultimately be defeated by God’s historical intervention). God’s intervention in each case called for human response. The giving of the law called for faithful obedience. The impending intervention of God called for perserverance. Aulen’s central theme of Divine conflict and victory picked up motifs from New Testament thinking that would have been influenced by the apocalyptic paradigms.

Lowe admits that the apocalyptic approach has been seen as mythological and dualistic, largely by those who had taken monistic and evolutionary perspective in tune with modernism. Lowe points however to the Karl Barth’s 1919 commentary on Romans as a Christian form of postmodernism, a critique of the un-intrusive God of theism who left alone the sovereign self-possessed human subject. With such forms of postmodernist theology available Lowe suggests that it was time to explore again alternatives to both the unexamined economies of classic doctrines of atonement and the fickle particular sequences of atonement formed in tune with modernist thought.

Lowe suggests that the logic of cosmic victory is to overthrow the very notion that God’s act of salvation can be contained within any economy. This speculation is linked to J. Louis Martyn’s framing of Paul’s Letter to the Galatians in a specifically apocalyptic context of the present evil age being invaded by the new creation brought about by Christ. This is not another example of what Lowe has previously described as ‘quasi-hydraulic’ effects. The Christ event itself becomes the reality in which all else is interpreted. Paul is described as opposing dualisms and economies which may attempt to contain the radical impact of the Christ event.

Lowe concludes by drawing on and expanding upon Derrida’s concept of presence to develop a model of Christological revelation. The very presence of God in the finite life of Jesus is perhaps the heart of the apocalyptic event. Lowe is aware of the temptations to draw conclusions about individual appropriation of that Presence, focusing on whether or not an individual is saved or how one is saved. The focus, rather, is to be on the glory of God.

Lowe’s final comments relate to the danger of any over arching vision becoming tyrannical. His purposes in writing are not to eliminate metaphors of atonement, exchange and substitution, but to place them in a context in which their claims for dominance are moderated by the cry of the people.

Walter Lowe here is recovering a number of understandings that have been muted by modernist reductions of salvation and Christology. By going back to the narratives of the Jewish people, with their apparently dualist apocalyptisms, Lowe has attempted to re-engage with the metaphor of intervention. Doctrines of atonement, once thought to be outdated or irrelevant to the human condition, can be revisited in the light of a new creation that resists attempts to form tyrannical metanarratives.