Pattern or Person

David Yeago makes this important comment about Luther’s “catholic” turn after 1518: “For Luther after 1518, Christ is central not as pattern but as person; we are saved by the faith that acknowledges his authority, competence, and willingness to rescue those who call upon him. The gospel that is proclaimed and sacramentlaly enacted in the church is a word that calls us to put all our trust in this particular person, Jesus the Son of Mary; thus who Jesus Christ is and where he gets the authority to promise such astounding things become the central theological questions.” Yeago contrasts this with a “kind of unitarianism of the Holy Spirit, for which Christ would finally be only the productive archetype in which the dynamic pattern of the Spirit’s transforming grace is displayed.” He asks the obvious question: “Would such an exemplarist soteriology really need to confess Christ as a divine person who has assumed true human flesh?”

Simple enough, but a point that is lost on many contemporary theologians. Christ as pattern rather than person helpfully describes a central emphasis, and a central distortion, in Milbank’s Christology, for example. Christ tends to be reduced to the pattern that is non-identically repeated in the life of his body.