(This post is one of a sporadic series on the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles)
This revised series is turning out to be even more sporadic than I thought! But it’s time to turn some attention towards the second of the articles. This is the first of three on the Son, and like that on God it seeks to locate Anglican theology in the mainstream classical tradition.
II. Of the Word or Son of God, which was made very Man
The Son, which is the Word of the Father, begotten from everlasting of the Father, the very and eternal God, and of one substance with the Father, took Man’s nature in the womb of the blessed Virgin, of her substance: so that two whole and perfect Natures, that is to say, the Godhead and Manhood, were joined together in one Person, never to be divided, whereof is one Christ, very God, and very Man; who truly suffered, was crucified, dead and buried, to reconcile his Father to us, and to be a sacrifice, not only for original guilt, but also for all actual sins of men.
There’s both a clear borrowing (as there often is in the articles) from the Augsburg Confession, but also some interesting differences:
Also they teach that the Word, that is, the Son of God, did assume the human nature in the womb of the blessed Virgin Mary, so that there are two natures, the divine and the human, inseparably enjoined in one Person, one Christ, true God and true man, who was born of the Virgin Mary, truly suffered, was crucified, dead, and buried, that He might reconcile the Father unto us, and be a sacrifice, not only for original guilt, but also for all actual sins of men.
The Anglican article places a greater stress on the eternal begetting of the Son, and his consubstantial being with the Father before borrowing the latter part of the Lutheran wording. It also comes second, whereas in the Lutheran form, an article on original sin comes between that on God, and that on Christ. There is, I think, something important in this concentrating on the Trinity before moving too quickly to the ordo salutis. The Son is defined by who he is in relationship to the Father before he is known in relationship to the human situation.
The doctrine of the Trinity is about God and God is not just about us. God is God, irrespective of any “us” to whom he might be our God. The ways in which the classical tradition holds to this, in its dogged insistence that God’s existence is not like any other existence. God is not bounded by the space which defines our existence, nor is he constrained by time’s arrow. This classical affirmation can sit uncomfortably with the shape of biblical narrative where God is often anthropomorphised and narrated as living in history. (The clash is sharpest around the idea of impassibility.) Yet it is also implicit at least in some of the claims in second Isaiah or Job, for example.
I think it possible, at least, that modern readings of the Scriptural text apart from this tradition can actually do the Church a disservice. The affirmation that God is who God is, eternal Trinity, outside of time and space, and irregardless of our existence or relationship to Godself, is needed, I think, in some crucial areas of Christian thinking today. It helps us mount an argument against reducing our talk of God to Feuerbachian projectionism, and in resisting any idea that a non-realist theology is either Christian or sophisticated. It helps us see how (supposedly feminist) rewordings of God’s name to “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer” and the like (which may supplement traditional language) are inadequate when they stand alone, for they frame Godtalk purely in terms of God’s relationship to creation and humankind, and not on God as relationship in Godself. And it helps us see how shallow it is when so much of our praise and worship is about how God makes me feel.
So far, so good. I do, however, have a problem with the second part of the article. It is undoubtedly right to link incarnation and atonement, but I do find myself running into problems with the way in which it does so. Is it really appropriate to say “to reconcile his Father to us”? Among the stronger Pauline statements are these (all NRSV) which are very much about us being reconciled to God:
- Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood (Rom 3:24-25 – even if ἱλαστήριον is read as propitiation, it doesn’t change the status of God as initiator))
- For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life. (Rom 5:10)
- All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. (2 Cor 5:18-19)
- through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross. (Col 1:20)
The predominant direction of reconciliation, is of our being reconciled to God, by God, through Christ, and not of God being reconciled to us. The language of the article is, at best, careless, and such language gives an unfortunate apparent authority to some versions of atonement theory that divide God’s work from Christ’s. (Equally, the fuller statement of the BCP’s prayer of consecration gets the emphasis right by locating the initiative in God’s “tender mercy”.) I am uncomfortable with all statements of penal substitution that both get this direction wrong, and seem to lose the unity of the Godhead by pitting bad-cop Father against good-cop Son. But God, Father Son and Holy Spirit, is united in working for the restoration and completion of creation through the reconciliation of all things in heaven and on earth.
This correction, however, should not detract from the main thrust of the article, which emphasizes the incarnation of the eternal Son as the undergirding presupposition of any reconciliation or atonement. In full accord with the classical tradition: Christ’s Work depends on his Person. Unless he is fully God, he cannot bring us to God, unless he is fully human he cannot bring us to God.
Nor, because he is both the God who has made all, and the brother of all who share his flesh and blood, can there be any limited atonement. This sacrifice is “not only for original guilt, but also for all actual sins of men.” Neither state of sinfulness nor actual sin lies outside the scope of God’s work in Christ, precisely because the focus of belief is God the Son, and not the human predicament.
When our ideas about atonement focus too much on either the problem of sin, or the mechanism of salvation, they are not only likely to go wrong, but they may become sources of distortion (like limited atonement) or shibboleths of doctrine (like penal substitution being treated not as one model but the explanation). When, like this article, they focus on the identity of the Saviour, then their scope is enlarged, and our confidence is placed in the one who brings us to God, and not our grasp of any mechanism by which we might get there. We are, as others have said, saved by God, not by our grasp of doctrine.
Comments on this entry are closed.
{ 1 trackback }