Читать книгу On the Thirty-Nine Articles - Oliver O'Donovan - Страница 9

(Articles 2-4)

To expound the story of mankind’s redemption in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is the most weighty task entrusted to theology, and also the hardest. The list of theologians who have done it well is a short one. In the terms set by our own text, we may focus the difficulty like this:- In Articles 2-4 there are five narrative moments which may be singled out within the story: ‘the Son … took man’s nature in the womb of the blessed Virgin’; he ‘truly suffered, was crucified, dead and buried’; ‘he went down into hell’; he ‘did truly arise again from death’; ‘he ascended into heaven, and there sitteth’. How is the theologian to account for this sequence of moments in such a way that they make one story of one redemption? We are familiar enough with theories of the cross which have no place for Easter, with theologies of resurrection which can make no sense of the ascension, with talk about incarnation which does not need a Paschal Mystery. But good theology should be able to treat of all these moments distinctly, while showing how they are one act of God and not several. In doing so it will also have to distinguish the different ways in which these moments interact with the events of history. For although they make one story of one act, which took place in history under Pontius Pilate, they do not all have identical event-characters. At either end of the sequence there are happenings which have, as it were, one foot in and one foot out of history; they are the beginning and the end of the sacred drama, and beginnings and ends always stand in a strange half-transcendent relation to the events which the bound. In the centre we have a moment which makes the least contact with the time-space of history; and on either side of it, two Moments which constitute the Paschal Mystery itself, the death and resurrection of Christ, complementary and equally weighted to make a genuine sequence of events, yet different from each other in the way in which we say that they ‘happened’.

Let us begin at the centre, with the crucifixion and resurrection. From the beginning of the apostolic preaching, these two moments are announced as a narrative sequence, linked by the time reference ‘on the third day’, and so complementing one another and constituting a story in themselves, of how God intervened to overthrow death. ‘This Jesus ... you crucified andkilled ... But God raised him up’. (Acts 2.23f). And yet it is already clear that these two happenings, differentiated as they are by the human and divine subjects of the verbs, are also different in kind. This can be seen in the resurrection-narratives of the gospels, which, though they speak of actual and material happenings, such as the eating of a meal by the lakeside or the touching of healed wounds in the upper room, speak of them mysteriously, as though of a theophany. It is given a thematic development in the contrast made by Saint Paul between the ‘living body’ (psuchikon) and the ‘spiritual body’ (pneumatikon) (1 Cor. 15.44) and in the distinction made by the First Epistle of Peter between Christ’s death ‘in the flesh’ and his coming to life ‘in the spirit’ (1 Pet. 3.18).

Theology is here presented with a double temptation. On the one hand it may stress the qualitative difference of the two events to the point where the resurrection ceases to be an event at all within the framework of time and space, or at best is a purely mental event within the disciples’ consciousness. This assists the project of unifying the whole, by giving the resurrection a merely noetic or explanatory function, but at the cost of overthrowing the character of redemption as history. The resurrection adds nothing further to the fact of the crucifixion, but simply expounds the inner meaning of the crucifixion within God’s purposes. Such an approach, essentially gnostic in inspiration, has enjoyed a good deal of favour in the present century. The other temptation, bred of a resistance to gnostic leanings, is so to emphasize the moments as distinct and successive that their intelligible unity is lost sight of; the resurrection becomes the cancellation of the crucifixion, the crucifixion nothing more than a work of wicked men which God has cancelled, not something which could happen ‘according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God’ (Acts 2.23).

Article 4 sets out in resolute fashion to rebut gnostic spiritualizations. Christ ‘took again his body, with flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the perfection of man’s nature’. Do those flesh and bones, we must wonder, protest too loudly? Can the theologian insist so strongly on flesh and bones when he is warned by Saint Paul that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God? What he must say, certainly, is that Christ took again his body; and that, surely, is the force of the words spoken by the resurrected Christ: ‘a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have’ (Luke. 24.39). Nor need he shrink from the bodily continuity implied in that ‘again’, since the empty tomb is a central element in the gospel narrative. Yet a human body is something more than its material constituents, and what became of those constituents in the resurrection of Jesus’s body is a question on which some reticence might be appropriate. It is striking that Cranmer makes so little concession to the words of 1 Peter 3.18, ‘made alive in the spirit’, a verse which (as we shall shortly see) was in his mind as he drafted these Articles, though it has left no trace on our present text. Is not the difficulty that he could not see how to make concessions to 1 Peter without making concessions to Gnosticism - a difficulty shared with some modern Gnostics?

But this difficulty arises from a false step which has gone before it: the absolutizing of the flesh-spirit distinction into a dualism of what a later idealism would call phenomenal and noumenal. It is not used in this absolute way by the writers of the New Testament, who speak of the resurrection as ‘spiritual’ not to exclude the physical and material, nor to remove it from the phenomenal to the noumenal, but to point to the transformation of the material. If we are to speak rightly of Christ’s resurrection, we must speak of an event which is ‘bodily’, in that it concerns the material being of the Jesus who died, and yet ‘spiritual’ in that it does not conform to the laws and normative patterns of material existence, but transforms the material in ways that require a different phenomenology and a different pattern of perception.

Cranmer then adds that Christ took ‘all things appertaining to the perfection of man’s nature’, that is to say, to a complete humanity (the Latin is integritatem), which made no concessions to a gnostic preference for the spiritual. It is not simply to be taken for granted that it was human nature which Christ brought back from death. Here, too, Cranmer casts a line back, relating the triumph of Easter to what has gone before it: to the incarnation, where he ‘took’ human nature, and to the crucifixion where he bore its curse. The resurrection, too, then, is part of the history of that humanity, borne by our representative, whose vindication and perfection here is not for himself alone but on behalf of all men. To see the vindication of Christ as the vindication of his humanity is to see Easter as the climax to those other moments, which are more obviously moments of identification with humanity. There was one aspect of Good Friday then, which Easter did not cancel: it did not cancel the representative ‘for us’, but rather confirmed it, and brought it to its intended conclusion. ‘He was crucified for our sins, and raised for our justification’ (Rom. 4.25).

And so we look back to what Article 2 tells us of Good Friday, in words taken more or less verbatim from the Augsburg Confession. Is there here a line thrown forwards? Does the Reformers’ account of the cross expect Easter as its conclusion? It has often proved difficult for western theologies of the atonement to achieve this connexion convincingly. Anselm’s mighty interpretation of the cross had little place for Easter, and Schleiermacher made what was in effect a confession of failure, on the part of the Anselmic tradition as well as his own romantic recasting of it, when he concluded that ‘it is impossible to see in what relation [the resurrection] can stand to the redeeming efficacy of Christ’ (Christian Faith 99.1). Of Luther better things can be said, though it is not easy to draw out from him a systematic clarification of how the two events belong together. Neither is our short confessional statement clear on the matter; but it does offer an important hint.

It gives two reasons for Christ’s death: ‘to reconcile his Father to us, and to be a sacrifice’. That is, Christ’s death accomplishes a movement in God and a movement in man. The movement in man is described as a ‘sacrifice’. The full range of overtones which the concept of sacrifice carried in the Levitical law, and the wider range which it was later to acquire in romantic theology, were not known to the Reformers. We will read Cranmer and his mentors from Augsburg correctly if we understand the word to convey a simple Anselmic idea: the ‘sacrifice’ of Christ is the reparation made to God’s honour for the infinite offence of sin, the ‘sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction’, as it is expanded in the eucharistic prayer, the ‘redemption [that is purchase price], propitiation and satisfaction’ of Article 31. Man in Christ makes an offering, the only perfect offering that he can make.

The movement in God, on the other hand, is not an Anselmic idea. Here, too, Anselm and Schleiermacher (two interpreters of the atonement so often contrasted) are at one. Neither could easily accommodate the notion of a change in God’s attitude, and it is for just that reason that neither can explain the connexion of the cross with Easter. For neither of them does the sequence of death and resurrection represent anything in God. Although the two interpret the cross very differently, they both see it as the perfect act of virtue by which the Redeemer accomplishes (or displays) the true relating of man with God. It is primarily a redemptive act, secondarily the matrix of our redeemed status (or consciousness). But in patristic thought the cross had been seen the other way round, primarily as a participation in the human plight, and secondarily (but only because it led to the resurrection) as a redemptive act. In the one case it is Christ’s cross before it is ours, in the other it is ours before it is Christ’s. But if Christ’s death is (as the Fathers thought) an identification with man’s plight, not (as Anselm maintained) simply a prevention of it, then we have conceived death in its relation to sin, as the expression of divine wrath. The negative judgement of God on man is no longer merely threatening, but actual (even though only emblematically) in the fact of common death; and the favourable judgement of God on men is an overcoming of wrath, just as the life and hope of man is an overcoming of death. When the Reformers speak of the ‘reconciling of [the] Father to us’ they have in mind that the sequence of death and resurrection corresponds to a sequence in the judgement of God, and so they point us to the fulfilment of the cross in Easter.

If we speak in this way of the overcoming of divine wrath by divine favour, we will, of course, bear in mind what we said in the last chapter about sustaining the tension of paradox when speaking about God. We will speak of such a change in God only in the context of his unchangeableness, and we will speak of his wrath only in relation to the primacy of his love, the great Yes, pronounced on creation from the beginning, of which the No is merely the reverse side, the hostility of the Creator to all that would uncreate. We will speak of the wrath of God, as we speak of the suffering of God, dialectically; and we will not be too disturbed by objections which are themselves undialectical. Happily we are now rediscovering (is this not one undeniable strength of the Theology of Liberation?) that love which has no wrath on its underside is not love at all; that mankind cries out to see the sharp edge of justice and truth as surely as he cries out for love and compassion. Speech about the wrath of God is, in certain quarters, back in fashion. But such speech will lead us into a perilous fanaticism unless it extends to the reconciliation of divine wrath, and makes it the terminus of its thought, as it is the terminus of the biblical witness, to speak of God’s favour. The God of the Psalms, ‘who is angry every day’, has become favourable to mankind in Christ. He has not been banished, replaced by another and milder God - which would leave him and his anger dangerously unaccounted for, liable always to break out in rebellion at the behest of some religious passion. He has been reconciled, and therefore (from this point we can now say it) he has shown himself more truly and completely as the God who always was favourable to man in Christ, whose daily anger was never other than a zeal for the integrity of his beloved.

Here, then, is one way in which we are invited to see the two successive events, death and resurrection, linked, not arbitrarily as a mere reversal, but teleologically. The wrath of God gives way to his favour, in acknowledgement of the perfect sacrifice. This link should, in principle, be made clearer when we speak of the moment which stands between the two events, acting as a noetic connexion which interprets each in terms of the other: the descent to the dead. (‘The dead’ - for so we should translate the Latin ad inferos, avoiding the conventional English equivalent, ‘hell’.)

As the Elizabethans left it to us, this Article simply affirms, in a manner designed to rebut docetic qualifications, the full reality of Christ’s death. The Word of the Father was identified in every way with man’s mortality, draining the cup to its dregs. And, as we have seen, such an affirmation is helpful, in that it qualifies the Anselmic inclination to treat the cross as a voluntary act of heroism, giving it the appearance of a new, pioneering achievement, rather than the suffering of an age-old fate. Yet Cranmer’s original Article was, perhaps, even more helpful (though it raised more problems, to which we shall return shortly). It attempted to express the saving significance of Christ’s death (as death, and not simply as heroism) by referring to the teaching of 1 Peter 3.19 (and 4.6) that the gospel was proclaimed to the dead. ‘The body lay in the sepulchre until the resurrection: but his ghost departing from him, was with the ghosts that were in prison, or in hell, and did preach to the same, as the place of S. Peter doth testify.’ The central meaning of the descent to the dead is that Christ’s identification with mankind in death is at the same time a proclamation of God’s favour, to those who are already dead, and so also to those who have still to die. The link between the cross and the resurrection is explicit. Already the conquest of death is preached. By making himself one with us in the darkness of God’s wrath, Jesus brings us out from darkness into the light of God’s favour. And in particular he brings those long dead: the place of Saint Peter speaks of the generation who died in the primaeval flood, because they, alone among all generations, had no symbolic prefiguring of the Paschal Mystery to instruct them. They stand appropriately for all who have died without hearing the message of hope. To all who have lived and died in every age the one perfect work of identification and vindication extends its summons to rise from the grave and be alive for evermore.

This last point leads us naturally to consider how the Reformers understood the relation between the death of Christ and the incarnation.

The point about the crucifixion which the Reformers were anxious above all to maintain - and here we must include the whole Reformation and not simply the English branch of it - was that this single happening was decisive for all history. ‘The offering of Christ once made is the perfect redemption, propitiation, and satisfaction for all the sins of the whole world’, states Article 31. And in that sentence the most important phrase is ‘once made’, echoing the repeated hapax, ‘once for all’, of the Epistle to the Hebrews. As we are reminded by the situation of this statement - it occurs in Article 31 and not in Article 2 -the immediate occasion for the Reformers’ contention was the controversy over the Eucharist. But we would be short-sighted not to see behind the eucharistic controversy a much more important issue about the shape of history. The Reformers were striving to achieve a Christocentric idea of history. We see this not only in their battle against the concept of the Mass as repeated sacrifice, but also in their struggle for the authority of Scripture over tradition. That is why the legacy of the Reformation, though remote in many of its interests from ourselves, is of vital importance to us - for whom the battle between Kierkegaard and Hegel has shaped, and still shapes, our theological era.

In modern terms, what the Reformers defended was an eschatological conception of the work of Christ: that in his death and resurrection the end of the age was present; that his sacrifice is equally valid and equally immediate to every age, and not to be accounted for simply as the immanent product of one age and the inspiration of successive ones. To claim so much for Christ’s death, of course, is implicitly to make the claim for his person. It raises the question of how we may so speak about Christ as to support the weight that is put upon these climactic events. We look, then, for a Christological statement which will suggest the eschatological character of Christ’s appearing, a statement such as might have been modelled on the opening words of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the foundation for the ‘once for all’ which echoes throughout that book: ‘In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things.’

We look in vain. The Augsburg Article which Cranmer followed took a conservative line, adopting the Anselmic principle that what was needed to sustain an understanding of the work of Christ was a Chalcedonian two-natures Christology: only man should make satisfaction, only God could. The Chalcedonian formula, then, introduces the clause on the atonement, and only the phrase ‘never to be divided’ (inseparabiliter coniunctae) distantly evokes a sense of historical finality. Furthermore, the effect of interposing the two-natures formula between the main verb ‘took man’s nature’ and the clause ‘who truly suffered …’ is to distance the first from the second. The incarnation itself is no longer part of the story, but a preface to it, establishing the Christological conditions for the atonement. Contrast this with the sense of movement in Philippians 2.5ff, where the birth ‘in the likeness of men’ is the first step in the twofold self-emptying of the one who was in God’s form (controversially enough to many modern minds); or, again, with the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds. The coming of the Christ must itself unloose the climax of history; it is the breaking-in of the Kingdom of God, the coming of the Son of Man. It is true enough to say that only man should make satisfaction, only God could do so. But must we not say more than this, if we are to give the ringing affirmation of Article 31 its proper foundation? Must we not say that only the new man, ‘the last Adam’, can represent all mankind in the offering of a new and acceptable sacrifice to God? And that only the coming of God’s Kingdom can reconcile and recreate the world-order once given and now lost?

For the meaning of Christ’s resurrection is that the renewal of all creation has begun. In a body that represents the ‘perfection’ of man’s nature we see the first-fruits of a renewed mankind and a sign of the end to that ‘futility’ which characterizes all created nature in its ‘bondage to decay’ (Rom. 8.19-21). There are two aspects to this renewal, which have to be kept in a proper balance. On the one hand we must not understand the newness of the new creation as though it implied a repudiation of the old. The old creation is brought back into a condition of newness; it recovers its lost integrity and splendour. In the resurrection appearances of Jesus the disciples were offered a glimpse of what Adam was always meant to be: lord of the elements, free from the horror of death. On the other hand, restoration is not an end in itself. Adam’s ‘perfect’ humanity was made for a goal beyond the mere task of being human; it was made for an intimacy of communion with God. The last Adam, in restoring human nature, leads it to the goal which before it could not reach, brings it into the presence of God’s rule, where only the one who shared that rule could bring it. And so it is that the moment of triumph divides into two moments, a moment of recovery and a moment of advance. The resurrection must lead on to the ascension: ‘Do not hold me’, said Jesus to Mary in the garden on the first Easter morning, ‘for I have not yet ascended to the Father’ (John 20.17). In the Western Church we speak of God’s deed as ‘salvation’, emphasizing the aspect of recovery and deliverance from sin and death. In the Eastern Church they speak more commonly of theosis or ‘divinization’, emphasizing the advance beyond simple restoration to communion with the divine nature. Both aspects are present; they are differentiated in the two steps of Christ’s exaltation.

Differentiated, but not therefore town apart. We cannot overlook the fact that of the four Gospels one, Saint Mark, has nothing to say about he ascension; two, Saint Matthew and Saint John, hint at it allusively; and only one, Saint Luke, narrates it as an event. In the theology of the Pauline epistles it remains, more often than not, undifferentiated from the resurrection. The ascension, we must judge, does not stand over against the resurrection as the resurrection stands over against the crucifixion; it does not add a new element to the story which was not present before, but unfolds the implications of what is present already in the resurrection. Are we, then, to agree with Barth’s statement that ‘the empty tomb and the ascension are merely signs of the Easter event, just as the Virgin Birth is merely a sign of the nativity’?1 No. For, as Barth himself elsewhere wished to say, what the ascension shows us of the meaning of Christ’s triumph is distinct: it is the mark which defines one side of the resurrection, the elevation of Christ to the Father, and therefore stands in contrast to the landmark which defines the other side, the empty tomb. In between them, holding the two boundary-marks together into one triumphant happening, are the actual appearances of the risen Christ throughout the forty days.

This raises the question of how we are to understand the ascension as an event. Can the statement, ‘he ascended into heaven’, stand alongside the statements, ‘he was crucified, died and was buried’ and, ‘on the third day he rose again’? However problematic the statement of the resurrection may seem to be, the problems posed by the ascension are of a much more fundamental kind. For ‘heaven’, ‘God’s throne’ and ‘the right hand of the Father’ are not places that can be mapped topographically within space. The verb ‘ascended’, like the verb ‘came down’ in the Creed, can refer to no form of spatial movement known to man.

The conventional modern metaphysic, which is a popularized version of Kant’s, knows of only one other way to interpret these terms of place and movement, to which a phenomenal sense is so evidently inapplicable. It refers them to a realm of noumenal or mental reality. This idealist solution, which has proved popular among twentieth-century theologians, is the foundation for the suspicion, which has often been voiced against them, that they have in mind the conversion of Christian faith into a species of humanism. For whatever is not susceptible to location within our universe of space and time is assigned to Mind; but Mind turns out in the end either to be, or to be extremely like, the human mind, vested, for metaphysical purposes, in the robes of infinity. Classical Christianity knew of another possibility. Space and time are dimensions of our created universe; but God is not located within them, but beyond, as a craftsman is beyond the dimensions of what he has made. Modern idealism itself, of course, posits a kind of ‘beyond’; but it posits it on the basis of that experience of transcendence which the human mind can know in thinking. The classical solution was not so ready to absolutize the experience of thinking. Even when it used it as an analogue, it understood that it must still point yet further ‘beyond’, for the thinking mind, too, belonged in the here-and-now of creation. We shall not go wrong, then, in saying that the classical concept of transcendence was objective at points where the modern one is subjective.

Even in speaking of the transcendence of space and time I have used a spatial term, ‘beyond’. In doing so I will not have been misunderstood; for when we use such terms in phrases of transcendence, ‘outside space and time’, ‘before time began’, or ‘above the highest heavens’, our context indicates clearly enough that it is not a spatial ‘outside’ or a temporal ‘before’, but a metaphysical one. Yet in thinking of transcendence we are forced to use these spatial and temporal analogues, because we are ourselves spatial and temporal creatures and cannot think apart from the dimensions in which we live. Our imaginations are visual. Indeed, it is a famous problem of philosophy that we cannot even think of time itself without thinking of it spatially, as a line, a circle, a flowing stream or something such. If we have difficulty in thinking even of time, in which we exist and which we experience immediately, without the aid of spatial images, it is not surprising that spatial images are necessary to help us think of what transcends space and time.

Christians believe that God, in the person of his Son, has established communication between his being and our created space-time order. How else can we speak of this communication except as ‘coming’ and ‘going’, as ‘up’ and ‘down’? We say that Christ ‘came down from Heaven’ and ‘ascended into Heaven’, yet do not think of the incarnation and ascension as journeys through space from one location to another, like a journey between the earth and the moon. As Athanasius said wittily: ‘When Christ sat on the right hand of the Father, he did not put the Father on his left.’2