Читать книгу On the Thirty-Nine Articles - Oliver O'Donovan - Страница 8

(Articles 1, 2)

The Thirty Nine Articles begin with five articles on the doctrines of the Trinity and the incarnation.

We may observe in the first place a certain perfunctoriness about them. It is not simply that out of thirty nine, five seems few for the basic proclamations of the Christian faith, nor even that these five are, compared with some of the others, on the short side. The suggestion of perfunctoriness is conveyed also by the very traditional way in which they are expressed. The language of the first two and of the fourth is drawn largely from the Augsburg Confession, which was in turn content to use the long-hollowed terminology of the patristic and mediaeval Church. The first article of the Augsburg Confession begins: ‘The churches in our fellowship teach with remarkable unanimity that the decree of the Council of Nicaea about the unity of the divine essence is true and to be believed without doubt.’It goes on to condemn Manichaeans,Valentinians,Arians and Eunomians – all of them heresies from the fourth century. The early Reformation wished to appear not only orthodox but also traditional in what it said about God and Christ. In the vast intellectual upheaval of the period there emerged, among other disturbing trends, a renewed Unitarianism. The churches of the early Reformation responded to this simply by aligning themselves with the Catholic tradition. They did no major new theological work on the doctrines of God and Christ.

At the same time, while we may observe how traditional and perfunctory the first five articles are, we must not miss the significance of the fact that they are the first five articles. Even if the English Reformers had nothing new to say about God and Christ, they were not to be discouraged from saying something old. We should be struck by their concern to subordinate the controversial material of the later articles, pressing and urgent as it was, to a restatement of the primitive gospel message. The Church of Ireland Articles of 1615 and the Westminster Confession of 1647, though they deal more fully than the Tudor Articles with the doctrines of God and Christ, nevertheless do not place them first. Following the pattern set by the two Swiss Confessions of 1536 and 1566, they begin with a section on what we would now call theological method, the doctrine of revelation and Holy Scripture. It is a defensible order and much more modern in its assumptions; but it is hard not to feel that the Tudor theologians had a true Christian instinct in putting God before method. ‘There is but one living and true God.’ Is that not the right way for a Christian to begin stating his faith – however much he may wish, as a theologian, to comment on methodological questions at a later stage? The whole theological undertaking arises from the simple affirmation of a believer: ‘I believe in God.’

God comes first; the revelation of God in Jesus Christ comes second. Again, it could as well have been arranged the other way round. It would be more in the style of the twentieth century to begin with Jesus of Nazareth, and move backwards from him to what he shows us about God. Perhaps Article 1 might have begun, as did Zwingli’s Articles of 1523, ‘The sum of the gospel is, that Christ, the Son of the living God, made known to us the will of his heavenly Father, and that his innocence redeemed us from eternal death and reconciled us to God.’In the order of knowledge that sequence is correct. The Christian claims to know what he knows about God, because God has made himself known in Jesus. ‘No one knows the Father except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.’ (Matt. 11.27). But in the order of reality things are the other way round. Jesus does not exist in or for himself.‘The Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever he does, that the Son does likewise.’ (John 5.19). There is a priority of the Father to the Son. The Son exists for the Father, and is oriented towards him. For the Anglican Reformers, who were deeply concerned with epistemological questions, reality, nevertheless, was, in the last resort, more important even than knowledge itself.

The article begins by declaring God’s unity and transcendence in a series of epithets which owe more to the philosophical vocabulary of Platonism than they do to the vocabulary of the Scriptures. The earliest attempt at explaining and defending the Christian faith were made in an intellectual context dominated by what we normally refer to today as ‘Middle Platonism’, a popular philosophy derived, though at some remove and with other influences, especially Stoic, from the writings of the great Athenian philosopher of the fourth century BC. Early Christian thinkers found it convenient to use Platonic terminology because it expressed two points about the being of God which they found constantly emphasized in the Old Testament, and especially in the prophets: that God is one, and without rival, and that he far transcends every image, mental or physical, that we may make of him. Christian thinkers pointed out that Platonic philosophers shared the prophets’ hostility to crude anthropomorphic ideas of God. The world we know is full of things that come to an end; but God has no end and no beginning, he is ‘everlasting’. The world we know is full of things that are limited spatially by their bodies, of things analysable in terms of their constituent elements, of things subject to other forces than themselves; but God is ‘without body, parts or passions’. The key term is ‘infinite’. We are ‘finite’, limited. God is ‘infinite’, unlimited. Whatever bounds our imagination may put upon God (because we are used to thinking only of things that are bounded in one way or another), those bounds must be removed.

However, that does not mean that all we can do towards speaking of God is to pile up a series of negatives: God is not this, not that, not the other. If this were the case we could think of him only as a mystery, an impenetrable darkness on the edge of our experience of which no knowledge of any kind was possible. But God can be known, not because he is the kind of object that our knowledge can accommodate of itself, but because he has made himself known to us by his own will to be communicative.‘I do not speak in secret, in realms of darkness, I do not say to the sons of Jacob,‘Look for me in the empty void’ (Isa. 45.19). Thus we can say more than that God is ‘infinite’. We can say that he is ‘of infinite power, wisdom and goodness’. We can use these terms ‘power’, ‘wisdom’, ‘goodness’ – not, of course, imagining that God is powerful merely like a powerful man, or wise merely like a wise man, or good merely in the way that human beings are good; but, nevertheless, with confidence that these are correct terms through which to approach the reality of God, because God has made himself known to us as the Lord, the one from whom no secret is hidden, the source of all good.

It must be conceded that the negatives create a cool impression, and that our first impression of God is that of distance. Does such a way of presenting God respond adequately to the gospel of God’s self-disclosure in Jesus Christ?

We may reply, in the first place, that such assertions, cool as they may be, are not themselves without evangelical implications. It is a commonplace in popular theological discussion that an ‘abstract theism’ is something very different from a vital evangelical message. This opposition has a validity in its proper place, but it can be all too facile. It is clear that the vital evangelical message itself will be gravely weakened unless it makes (in some form or other) the assertions that are made here by the via negativa. The gospel tells of a God who shows his love to us in Jesus Christ. But such a tale is idle unless this loving God is the ruler of the universe. To say that God is one assures us that the God who shows love to us in Christ is the only God there is, and will not be supplanted by some alien force who was not made known in Christ and does not love us. To say that God is without body tells us that the divine love which was locally and particularly circumscribed in the bodily life of Jesus is everywhere, that in meeting the man Jesus we meet the one who is equally accessible to every time and place. To say that God is without parts is to deny that he is a product of historical composition, and so susceptible to dissolution: the processes of historical coming-to-be and going-out-of-existence did not produce, and cannot remove, this God who loves us in Jesus. And to say that he is without passions means that his purpose cannot be deflected by any force anywhere from the resolve to show us love. Here, too, in these words – whether well expressed or ill – is the gospel that should gladden our hearts and comfort us.

For without the proper tension between the transcendence and the incarnate nearness of God, there can simply be no gospel at all. If anyone finds comfort in asserting, ‘God is near’, ‘God shares our human weakness and limitations’, ‘God is vulnerable to the same accidents and griefs as we are’, this comfort is founded upon its being God of whom these things are said. There are, after all, many millions of our fellow human-beings of whom these things are also true; and the consideration of this fact offers us no comfort at all. The power of these assertions depends upon the tension that they embody, and on the wonder that they evoke. They trade on the traditional understanding of the godhead as their subject that their predicates may strike us with the greater force. To recognize and articulate this tension is the task of theology. To exploit the rhetorical power of these assertions while refusing to allow their presuppositions, is to permit theology to become the slave of pathos.

But our reply must go further. We must satisfy ourselves that the use of these particular phrases, these cool, philosophical negatives, conjuring up the distance between God and all created things, does not detract from the assertion of God’s nearness and care for us in Jesus Christ. And here there are two distinct issues to be considered: first, whether the tradition of speech which the Articles follow is inherently capable of making a strong assertion of the incarnation; and second, whether the Articles themselves, which are merely one example of this tradition, make good use of it and succeed in articulating the Christian faith in salvation.

Modern objectors to the via negativa take especial offence at the denial of passion to God. The Stoic concept of impassibility, they maintain, could never express the biblical concept of God present in the sufferings of Jesus Christ. We may usefully ask why this denial in particular sticks so uncomfortably in the throat. Why not object to the denial of body (which might seem to imperil the incarnation) or of parts (which might put the Trinity in question) or of limits (which might cast doubt on Christ’s death)? The reason is that the objection speaks from its own philosophical milieu, which bears no closer relationship to biblical Christianity than did the Stoic milieu which first spoke of the divine apatheia. It is rooted in the romantic idealism of the nineteenth century, with its claim of infinity and universality for the passionate spirit. If the pre-theological provenance of terms or ideas is, of itself, sufficient to incriminate them in the eyes of Christian believers, then, it would seem, modern objectors to God’s impassibility stand in no better case than its ancient defenders. But such an assumption betrays an undialectical literalism of mind; and we should not hesitate to admit that terms and ideas from various philosophical backgrounds may properly serve the theologian in his attempt to speak obediently to the revelation of God in Christ. The question is: what can he do with this term or idea? Talk of the negative attributes of God will have to he assessed by its usefulness in its Christian context, by the service it renders to those who intend to proclaim God incarnate in the suffering Christ; and not abstractly, by what it might have meant to a non-Christian Stoic, or by what it might irrelevantly suggest to a modern reader unfamiliar with the classical Christian tradition.

Here we may say quite simply that at its best the negative tradition serves theology well, by establishing one pole of the tension between subject and predicate that must be preserved in any statement of the gospel. As an example of this we may give the famous paradox of Athanasius: apathôs epathen, ‘impassibly – he suffered!’ It was the impassible Word of God who hung and suffered on the cross, totally identified, through the human nature which he had made his own,with the suffering that belongs to humankind.I do not know how the miracle of God’s love can be stated adequately without some such paradox; nor do I see any future in the denial of divine impassibility other than the loss of evangelical tension, and so of the gospel itself. The romantic divinizing of feeling-as-such must tend to replace the message that God became man, with the message that man, by the intensity of his spiritual passionateness, has become god.

This must serve to defend the appropriateness of the negative tradition upon which the Articles draw. As to their own success in using it we need not be too definite, nor rule out differing judgements. Inevitably the reader must allow for their self-imposed role as summary of essential points, and not expect too much in the way of proclamatory enthusiasm.

There is, however, one observation to be made in their favour which again has to do with the order in which Cranmer has set out his material. The Articles are unusual among sixteenth-century doctrinal formularies in grouping the treatment of God, Trinity and incarnation together in the early articles. The convention was to put the doctrine, of the Trinity at the beginning with the doctrine of God, and then proceed, by way of the creation, fall and original sin, to reach the incarnation in its historical sequence. Both orders are, of course defensible. The more usual one shows a most creditable concern to treat the incarnation seriously as history; but it tends to leave the doctrine of the Trinity hanging in the air,an appendage to the doctrine of God which must be retained for no particular reason or internal logic. The English order ensures that the statement of God as triune is immediately developed in terms of Jesus of Nazareth. Thus the connexion is strengthened between faith in the Trinity and faith in Christ as saviour. The dry post-Nicene formula of three persons in one substance, pure and eternal, is seen to be pregnant with Christmas, Easter and (though as an afterthought) Pentecost.

The Trinitarian and Christological formulae of the first two articles are the deposit left within the Western Church by the Nicene, Constantinopolitan and Chalcedonian Councils of the fourth and fifth centuries, a deposit which ensured (and still ensures, despite mutual suspicions about the way in which these phrases are interpreted) a sense of common Christian faith uniting the churches across the East–West schism, a factor which has been of incalculable importance to the stirrings of ecumenical rapprochement in our own century. Yet Western theologians of our own generation do not read these formulae without at least a slight sense of embarrassment. How much of this embarrassment is justified?

Some of it, no doubt, may be due to the same suspicion of alien philosophical terms which we have already observed in connexion with the negative attributes of transcendence. (We should note, however, that in both Trinitarian and Christological formulae an important part is taken by a word with no pre-history as a technical term in Hellenistic philosophy: hypostasis, translated ‘person’ in the Latin West.) Some of it may be due to the simple fact that these phrases, the product of passionate and profound intellectual searching, have been hardened into definitional formulae, with a normative role for the faith of multitudes who neither wish, nor would be able, to enter into the thinking which produced them. There is an intellectual gauntness about their skeletal structure, so difficult to reclothe with its original flesh and blood; yet it is not an accident of history that these phrases have been held as dogmatic norms, for the Councils, at least, which gave them their authority, intended them for such a role. With these circumstantial difficulties, however, we could live without too much discomfort. The general sense of unrest which surrounds the Trinitarian and Christological formulae today has deeper roots.

Our thought about Christ must conform itself to the event of revelation, to what happened as God disclosed himself in Jesus. That event is the subject of the four gospels, which take the form of narratives. This form is not arbitrary or inessential; it is the only correct way to speak of what God has done in Christ, because it is a deed of God, and not simply the being of God, which constitutes the datum of Christology. The four gospels relate the event of divine self-manifestation in the way most appropriate to it. Even of Saint John’s Gospel this is true, despite its beginning with a developed announcement of the incarnation of the Word; what the reader is shown (though from the point of view of one who has already foreseen the end) is the event of disclosure as it happened, the triumphing of light over darkness. For theology to comprehend the revelation of God in Christ is to trace and to retrace this disclosure, from before Easter to after it; not, of course, in feigned ignorance of Easter, as though we did not know where the story tended, but allowing Easter to achieve historical depth, as the moment at which God’s dealings with Jesus were crowned with completion. There can be no cheating of history, no bypassing of the first dawning of the mystery. Is this to adopt a destructive historicism, which collapses all categories of being and reality into events? We are familiar enough with such a conclusion – but we have no reason to embrace it. It is enough to say that being – this being, at any rate, the being of God – is apprehended through events which God has set in train, and that theology neither can, nor should wish to, emancipate itself from recapitulating these events, as the creed itself, for all its ontological definiteness, is still prepared to do. If it is true that Jesus is the incarnate Word of the Father, it is equally true that thought comes to this acknowledgement through retracing the steps of revelation. Christology, of course, must come to rest in being,and not simply in event; nevertheless, it is itself a train of thought, and not simply a set of conclusions.

This is forced upon us by our reading of the New Testament. The growing dissatisfaction of modern theology with a formal doctrine of God and Christ cast solely in terms derived from the prologue of Saint John’s Gospel has been prompted, above all, by the biblical studies of the past century and a half. (Not, of course, that the formal doctrine ever comprised the whole of what the Church, which has also an exegetical and homiletic tradition of teaching, had to say on these themes.) Such a strictly Nicene and Chalcedonian framework allowed no room for important biblical categories. We need only think, for example, of how the title ‘Son of Man’ lost its apocalyptic eschatological significance, central to its use in the recorded teaching of Jesus, and was misunderstood as though it represented one half of two-natures doctrine; and of how the title ‘Son of God’ was taken to represent the other half, losing all echoes of the Messianic kingship from which it sprang.Yet this dissatisfaction was really addressed to a restrictive use of the Nicene and Chalcedonian formulae, rather than to the formulae themselves. It represented a justified demand that the terms of Christian discussion should be widened to respond to the whole witness of Scripture, not an impugning of these conceptions as such.A fashion in recent years has been to speak of complementary approaches to Christology, ‘from above’ and ‘from below’. The terms are unfortunate in themselves, since they suggest a kind of weighting of our thought to one side or the other of the two-natures doctrine – thus failing to get beyond the Chalcedonian conception on the one hand while treating it entirely arbitrarily on the other! But there is a true perception lying behind them. What ought to be said (and perhaps is really meant by these phrases) is that Christology must grasp the pre-Easter moment together with the post-Easter moment of revelation, and must allow them to interpret each other in a true dialectic, so that our doctrine of Christ achieves its proper historical dimension. Mystery is the disclosure of hiddenness into perspicuity. To speak only in categories of perspicuity distorts and conceals the mystery.

Yet we must speak also in categories of perspicuity; not only of the appearing of being, but of the being which appears. To refuse this step is to refuse belief in revelation itself, and in Jesus as the disclosure of the Father. If we collapse all being into event, then there is no event of revelation; for revelation is an event which concerns some being which is not itself an event. Perhaps we must say, further, that without being there is no event whatever, but only ‘process’, a movement without reference in reality beyond itself. Certainly, a Christology which is shaped upon the New Testament will find itself required, precisely in order to do justice to the event of God’s self-disclosure, to take its stand on the ground of post-Easter perspicuity and to state what it is that has been disclosed. In taking its stand on this ground, it will not have to move one step beyond where the New Testament authors (including the synoptic evangelists) were prepared to stand – though it may make its position more systematically precise than they did. And perhaps it is at this pole of Christological thought that precision and discipline is most necessary, the formulation of normative guidelines most helpful. For it is here, if we are not careful, that undisciplined speculation and fancy can grow wild, where the willful projection of human abstractions can obscure what God has shown us of himself. It is here, where the incomprehensibility of God is offered to understanding, that we may most easily take flight into cheap dialectic out of a kind of mental panic. Here, then, we need to be directed in careful and ordered terms to what we may say about the being of God and Christ in responsibility to the Scriptures.

And there is always a risk – perhaps a heightened risk, when the depth of Christology is taken seriously, and its force is so much more evident – that we will back away in unbelief. It would be wrong to hide the fact that some of the discomfort which the classical formulae evoke in our age is simply due to our unbelief (in which theologians participate with other Christians, no more and no less), and that what they say, as well as what the New Testament says, has occasionally proved too much for some of us. It may, of course, be that the very way in which theological study has been approached and carried through is so self-consciously determined by scepticism that its conclusion in unbelief, the puzzled shake of the head and the wondering lift of the eyebrow, seems to have been carefully planned from the outset. But who can say that this has always been so? Belief and unbelief are mysterious, just as the revelation itself is a mystery. And in this fact lies our hope, in this unbelieving age, that for any individual or for the Church at large the prison-bars may yield at the divine touch – an event which is not itself founded on reason, but is the foundation for reason, just as unbelief is not the conclusion of reason, but the starting point which determines its direction.

Where, then, does unbelief affect us? Curiously (it may seem) not in the statement that God was in Christ – not in that statement as such, but in the claim for Christ’s pre-existence as the eternal Word of the Father. In comparison with this fundamental stumbling-block for belief, other difficulties (such as with the virgin birth) appear no more than symptomatic. The statement of Christ’s pre-existence is, of course, a statement of perspicuity; it belongs to the conclusion, not to the beginning of the event of revelation. For all that it speaks of the beginning before the beginning, that beginning to the story was not our beginning but God’s, and so disclosed to us at our end like the divinity of Christ with which it is implicated. Yet it is easier to believe in the divinity of Christ than in his eternal pre-existence. Why? Because the notion of a God-in-becoming is not uncongenial to the deepest intuitions of humanism, which has applied the attributes of infinity to the process of time and to the history of mankind. Already in the radical monophysitism of the fifth century there was breathed the shocking idea of a‘one nature after the union’, a new divinized humanity and humanized divinity which, as it were, rendered obsolete the old humanity and divinity which had been known. And out of this Christological seed has sprung much that is modern. A humanity aspiring to transcend itself will feel at home with the paradoxical combination of infinity and innovation. History itself, no longer bounded by the eternal, has taken the eternal into its own changeability by masterful self-transcendence. The Divine Man can as easily be a symbol of this titanic hope as an affront to it. But the Incarnate God, the divinity who has taken humanity into his own unchangeability and is eternally the same – there is a stone of stumbling to the mind shaped by modern historicism, an unmalleable symbol, an uncompromising offence.