On the Thirty-Nine Articles. Oliver O'Donovan

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

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