On the Thirty-Nine Articles. Oliver O'Donovan

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      1

       Faith in God and in Christ

      (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 СКАЧАТЬ