On the Thirty-Nine Articles. Oliver O'Donovan

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

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       The Passion and Triumph of Christ

      (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 СКАЧАТЬ