I find it quite remarkable that I am speaking on the Lordship of Jesus Christ to a group of Presbyterian seminary students. Why is such a topic even remotely necessary for our consideration? Whatever else Christianity asserts, surely its most incontrovertible doctrine is the Lordship of Christ. After all, we hold with Paul, do we not, that if we confess with our lips that Jesus Christ is Lord, and believe in our hearts that God raised him from the dead, we willbe saved. (Romans 10.10) Outside of the Lordship of Jesus Christ one wonders how therecould be any Christianity at all. Of course, we can debate what it means. There might be various legitimate informed opinions concerning an appropriate understanding of Our Lord's person and work. But that we might have to consider that he is Lord seems more fitting for a missionary context than a singularly Christian context.

So why did the conference organizers ask me to speak on this surely uncontroversial theme, as far as a group of evangelical seminary students should be concerned? No one has given me a reason for the given topic, but I can hazard some guesses. First, indeed, it is right always to recognize its centrality. Evangelicals are just as prone as anybody else to fall prey to an accommodation to secular culture -- we are sometimes just better at using our piety to mask it. We too, for all of our claims to evangelical belief and piety, like everybody else can fall short of the glory of God, and need to be reminded again and again that Jesus is Lord. We can never take the Lordship of Christ for granted -- but we must confess him daily and honor him in all we do. Second, there is a public debate abroad in the Church on this very topic. The longest debate in Pittsburgh Presbytery in recent memory was over the ordination of a candidate for ministry who insisted that Jesus is not the Lord, but a Lord. Amid legitimate moral concerns for inclusivity in a pluralistic religious culture, even within the church--especially within the church, perhaps -- absolute theological claims become increasingly problematic. In other words, our church has become a missionary context at the point of the most basic claim to Christian truth and identity. Third, I may be bold enough to say that I have spoken and written quite a bit lately on this topic, believing that the attack on the singular saving Lordship of Jesus Christ, and the corresponding loss of confidence in this among believers, is the real battle before us. The conference organizers might assume, therefore I have something to say. I hope I do not disappoint them, however, for I have nothing new to say, only the same old stuff that the Church has been trying to say for nearly 2000 years!

What follows is not terribly complex, but is said carefully, to the end that I affirm what is central to Christian faith: concerning Jesus Christ, there is no other name under heaven by which we may be saved. (Acts 4.12) We might rightly probe the meaning of this. But let us not doubt the singular incontrovertible personal particularity of its truth.

In my remarks on Saturday I will move from the Lordship of Christ to its dogmatic consequence, dealing specifically with the Christian apprehension of God as Holy Trinity. In my sermon on Sunday morning I lay out the utterly remarkable way by which we participate in the communion of the Holy Trinity through our union with Christ as we share through his Holy Priesthood in his own life before the Father. This, as we shall see, is the proper basis for the understanding and practice of discipleship. In sum, these three talks are a basic course in fundamental Christianity from a classical perspective. If I may borrow a title from Karl Barth,what follows over three talks is a dogmatics in outline.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his lectures on Christology used to insist that the primary Christological questions was not how? but who?. The how? question is both pragmatic and speculative. As a pragmatic question it insists on the primacy of utility: How is Jesus relevant to our problems? This question drives culture Protestantism as a religion of abstract ethical imperatives. As Bonhoeffer argued, however, this inevitably means the loss of the Person of God in Christ and the reduction of Christianity to a concern for means and ends. As a speculative question, asking how God could become human, I suspect it leads inevitably to Arianism in which Jesus is seen to be indeed more than an ordinary man, perhaps even as a uniquely endowed religious genius, but as still less than God, as a sort of third entity between God and humankind. This always arises when the church stumbles over the ontological identity between God and God's revelation in Jesus Christ.

It is only by keeping the priority of the who? question before us that we can go on to understand what he does for us and how he is present in the world. That is to say, questions of relevance and meaning are controlled by our understanding of who Jesus Christ is. Failure to begin with the right question, the who? question, leads inevitably to a reductionist Christology.

Let us look at how scripture leads us in theology to give priority to the question of who? over how? Caesarea Philippi figures only once in the gospel story, when, at the end of his Galilean ministry Jesus went north - Mark 8.27. On January 14, 1997, I was in Caesarea Philippi, now the modern are of Banyas, which is nestled on the terraced slopes at the foot of Mount Hermon, at the northern end on what today is known as the Golan Heights. Two things are interesting about the place. One is that out of a huge open-faced cave in the rock flows on of the principle sources of the Jordan River. The other is that the cave and the head of the river served as the site of three ancient pagan temples. First, there is a reference in Joshua 11.17 to a place called Ball-gad, below Mount Hermon, in the Valley of Lebanon. Ball-gad means "lord of fortune," and was likely the site of a Caananite shrine now excavated at the cave mouth. In Greek times, after the conquest by Alexander the Great in 332 BC, a temple was built there on top of the old shrine to Pan and the Nymphs, thus the district came to be known as Paneias. In Roman times, Herod had built a marble temple there in honor of Emperor Augustus, and renamed the city Caesarea. It later became the headquarters of the Tetrarch Philip, son of Herod, mentioned at lLuke 3.1, becoming known as Philip's Caesarea, the Caesarea Philippi, to distinguish it from the magnificent Mediterranean seaport of Ceasarea.

Why is this important? To Jesus' question, "Who do people say that I am?" we read the great declaration of Peter, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God," (Mat. 16.15//Mark 8.27-30//Luke 9.18-20). The conversation happens in the contest of three pagan temples serving as the backdrop. The question of the identity of Jesus as Lord is always a question that is put in the contexts of many claims to divinity. Or to put that positively: the affirmation of the Lordship of Jesus excludes other claims to divinity. Who really is Lord is the issue, Jesus Christ, or the gods of nature, of Greece or of Rome, or today of America, of power, of money or of our own ideological devising? Who do people say that the Son of Man is? That was Jesus' question to his disciples. That is the same question our Lord puts to us today, with many religions and many spiritualities and many philosophies as the backdrop.

I believe that the primary problem facing western Protestant Christianity arises out of the crisis in theology set by the loss of a clear understanding and acceptance of the Lordship of Jesus. From the left, the loss of clarity regarding the identity of Jesus Christ leads consequently to confusion with regard to the doctrines of the Holy Trinity, the atonement, and our union with Christ. From the right, the failure to understand the Christologically controlled dynamic nature of revelation reduces Christian faith to a biblicism in which biblical statements are confused with the truth to which they refer. Evangelicals are prone to forget that the first article of faith concerns Jesus Christ, not the nature of scripture. (See T. F. Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology, p. 16f.) The monument to all of this is sadly a disintegrating and doctrinally confused church. When all around us there is a profound sense of spiritual hunger that gives us an extraordinary evangelical opportunity, the church seems to have become a lifeless bugle that plays uncertain and indistinct notes (I Cor. 14.7-8). The church has lost confidence in and understanding of the core Gospel message: not our experience, and not scripture, but Jesus is Lord; Jesus fully and truthfully reveals God; and Jesus alone saves for no one comes to the Father except by him.

We face a crisis in our thinking not far different from the battle the church fought against the great heresies of the past On the one side stands cultural Protestantism, a well nigh 300 year process in which the gospel is accommodated and adapted tot he supposed truths of the culture, and in which an external epistemology controls what is allowable. The history of the modern broad church especially is traced by the move from canon to criterion, from God's means of grace to the philosophy of knowledge (see William Abraham, Canon and Criterion in Theology). Following Schleiermacher especially, epistemological criteria forced faith to become a private affair, a matter of subjective experience, albeit with a supposed connection to God. Schleiermacher's God is mute, alas. The result of this view s that there is not one but multiple experiences of God leading to many legitimate theologies, and a diversity of appropriate spiritualities and life styles. In such a scheme, inclusivity is the spouse of relativity, and the child of the great anthropological turn in theology that marks liberal Protestantism. I should add, too, parenthetically, that much contemporary evangelical Protestantism accepts the epistemological problem of modernity but deals with it by an appeal to an infallible scripture from which cast-iron truths are derived, rather than by an appeal to an infallible experience. It is forgotten that the truth of scripture resides solely in that to which uniquely and authoritatively it bears witness, and not in scripture as such.

On the other side stands the New Testament and classical Christian faith, with its central affirmation of the unique saving Lordship of Jesus Christ thought through in a thorough-going way. The answer given in Caesarea Philippi is a Gospel-goad that stabs inexorably into the flesh of culture Protestantism, liberal and conservative, demanding of us the response of Peter, "You are he Christ, the Son of the living God." On that basis alone can the church honor God and preach, teach and serve in faithfulness.

From the very beginning, and no less so today, the core issue that has concentrated the mind of the church has been to understand and proclaim with conviction the Lordship of Jesus Christ. The position taken on every other issue in doctrine, in practical faith, in ethics, and in ministry and mission, without exception, including the authority and canonicity and the nature of scripture, comes from our understanding and acceptance of the sole saving Lordship of Jesus, the only Son of the Father, and who alone is the Way, and the truth and the Life. One false move here and the whole system of Christian faith and life moves fatally off course. In the fourth century - the defining century for Christian doctrine - it boiled down to whether Jesus was God, 'of one substance with the Father,' as the Nicene Creed puts it, or whether Jesus only represented God, but was not Immanuel, God with us. The whole understanding of Christianity as God's salvation was at stake. Today this old debate has resurfaced in new ways with a particular force. We deny that Jesus Christ is one Lord among many others because we affirm that Jesus Christ is Lord of all, even of the means of our knowing him.

In the Fall of 1996, I sat with forty elected Presbyterians invited to share in a three-day roundtable on the future of our church. By the second day it was clear that the conference was deeply divided on the basis of faith. The issue was this: Is Jesus Christ uniquely Lord and savior, or is he Lord only of Christians? The fact is that John 14.6/Matthew 11.27 became the point of the debate among us. On the one side were those who acknowledge Jesus as Lord only of the church and of their hearts, but not Lord of all. In that view, God has many faces, and there are many roads home to God. On the other side were those who confess Jesus Lord of all, and who believe with the church catholic the gospel revealed in scripture and taught by the confessions that there is no salvation outside of Jesus Christ. The great declaration of Peter at Caesarea Philippi has again become the central issue for this season in the life of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Jesus' question to the disciples is again the question before the church: Who do you say that the Son of Man is? That conference had the power of epiphany for me for it demonstrated the depth of the theological divide over the central doctrine of Christian faith.

The question all of us must henceforth consider is whether in the church today there is the preaching and teaching of another Christ (2 Corinthians 11.4). Once again the church has to decide whether it believes the scriptural and confessional doctrine of the singular saving Lordship of Jesus Christ or whether it believes only that he is one of many representatives of God - maybe even the best, but not singularly savior and Lord. Clearly the latter view amounts to neo-Arianism. Whether in the fourth century or today, this is always a fundamental attack on the very heart of the New Testament and classical Christianity. It is also an attack on the first ordination vow ("Do you trust in Jesus Christ, your Savior, and acknowledge him Lord of all and Head of the church, and through him believe in one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit?" G-14.0405(b)(1)). Called into question is the reality of Christ as Lord of all, as the complete, adequate, and final revelation of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and as the only savior of the world. To put it bluntly, is the man Jesus God, or just a godly man? Is he divine Savior or merely a human religious genius? Is he Redeemer or only another teacher?

Jesus' question to the disciples at Caeserea Philippi confronts us today. As I have already noted, over fifty years ago Dietrich Bonhoeffer pointed to the priority of the Who? question over the How? question. A problem always arises when we get trapped into the priority of the How? question. The result of asking How? rather than Who? of Jesus is always reductionism because it is the wrong first question. We can only understand Jesus' life and ministry when we know who he is. The Who? question has to be the primary and controlling question. We can only come to an understanding of the significance of Jesus' life, death and resurrection for us when we know him as the Son of the Father who alone leads us home to God. It is because he is God with us in the flesh of our humanity - 'born of a woman, born under the law (Gal. 4.4) - that he is the one who brings God to us and us to God in the unity of his own priestly personhood and through our union with him by the bond of the Holy Spirit. If this is not so, Christianity as classically developed unravels - incarnation, Trinity, atonement, union with Christ, the sacraments, the church as the Body of Christ, and the resurrection as the future hope all slip away. With this dangerous doctrine slip, a religion of abstract nouns, moral example and relative truth replaces a religion of knowledge of God, relationship with God, and salvation unto eternal life. We affirm the faith of the church, revealed in the scriptures and taught in the confessions: Jesus Christ is Lord!

I want to make one brief final point that spells out the meaning or content of the Lordship of Christ: the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the message of the love and grace of God. Too often in recent years classical Christianity has been parodied by the theological left and misconstrued by the theological right. In a turn t philosophical idealism, the left wants to change the love of God into a generic concept with meaning apart from or only loosely connected to the historic incarnate Person of Jesus Christ. The right, on the other hand, often wants to restrict the love of God, insisting on a tone more harsh than gracious, more causal than covenantal. Both need to hear that the 'first tone' of the Gospel which catches the ear is the loving indicative that sums up the meaning of Jesus Christ and his atonement, "You are forgiven." With joy and gratitude to God I assert therefore the good news of the Gospel, "God is love."

On the one hand, and with my 19th century fellow countryman John McLeod Campbell, I want to say that the love of God is the cause of the atonement in Christ, not the consequence, and that this love is uniquely and savingly given for us in Jesus Christ. Blasphemous talk of the atonement as child abuse by an angry and vindictive God is a rhetorical device rooted in malicious misunderstanding of the love of God. On the other hand, against those who believe in the harsh God of hyper-Calvinism, I want to say that God does not need to be conditioned into loving us. Rather, "God so loved the world that he gave us the only begotten Son . . ." (John 3:16). The scriptures represent the love of God as the cause of our salvation, the atonement as the effect, and our repentance as the human response. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is that God's love is prior to law and God's forgiveness is prior to our repentance. Law must be obeyed and repentance and amendment of life are undoubtedly called for, but as consequences of the grace of God, and not as conditions for that grace.

These are the facts of salvation. I give thanks to God for this gospel and I rejoice in my call to teach it. These truths in my view are not negotiable. This is the center of the faith by which every other point of view or approach to theology must be judged. This is the content of the Gospel to be proclaimed. This is God's truth to be received with gratitude. I encourage you to be bold in your affirmation of Jesus Christ. "There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved." (Acts 4.12)