PART III
The Christian Doctrine of Salvation
INTRODUCTION
There are two points of view from which the whole body of truth concerning Jesus Christ can be I approached and interpreted. As we have already suggested, the beginning of the distinction between them is to be observed even in the New Testament, in the different emphases which are characteristic respectively of St. John and of St. Paul. From the first or Johannine point of view, the truth that is in Jesus is primarily the self-revelation of God. From the second or Pauline, that truth is primarily the way of salvation for man. From the first point of view the doctrine of the incarnation is the centre and starting-point of Christian theology. The atonement is derivative from it, and the eschatological doctrines concerning the ultimate destiny of the human soul tend to appear, as it were, on the circumference of Christian theology, since they are concerned with those elements in the revelation which are most remote from our present experience. But from the second point of view the main doctrines of Christian theology are seen in a different perspective. The atonement, as God’s redeeming act for man=s salvation, now becomes the centre and starting-point. The incarnation is seen as the method of the atonement; and the end, of which the incarnation is the means, is found in the fulfillment of God’s saving work in the life of the world to come.
Thus, from the second point of view the problems of eschatology appear as more immediately urgent than they do from the first. For, as long as we are thinking strictly of God’s self-revelation in Christ, it is no doubt reasonable and right to say that, while we know by faith what has been revealed, we must be content to leave in God’s hands what will be revealed in the unknown future. “It doth not yet appear what we shall be.” But, when we are thinking of God’s saving act in Christ, the future end and fulfillment of that act is of primary importance for our theology, and we need some more definite assurance concerning what is not yet, but will be. That. is why St. Paul’s teaching on eschatology, with all its perplexing varieties, is more definite and explicit than St John’s.
If therefore we take the doctrine of the atonement to be in its essence the theological exposition of God’s redeeming action in Jesus Christ, we find that it must inevitably lead into some doctrine of those “last things” in which God’s action towards man reaches its ultimate goal. For myself I cannot but feel that Christian theology has on the whole failed to do justice to this logical connexion, and that some classical treatises on the doctrine of the atonement are gravely incomplete, because they do not face the eschatological issues which are raised by the very nature of the doctrine itself. No doubt we do well to emphasize passages in the New Testament which warn us that there is much we cannot know about the ultimate destiny of man, and much that lies hid in the counsels of God. But, just because the gospel of atonement and redemption is so central in the New Testament as a whole, there are truths about that ultimate destiny which it insists on affirming with the voice of divine authority; and what it teaches as to the terrors of divine judgement is but one aspect or element in that final universal triumph of God which is the very issue of salvation.
In any exposition of the Christian doctrine of the atonement it seems natural, and perhaps inevitable, to start from what I have called the Pauline point of view, rather than from the Johannine. Accordingly I propose at this point, not to consider by itself that clause of the creed which speaks of Christ’s sufferings and death for man, but to join with it those clauses which speak of resurrection, judgement, and the life of the world to come. We shall therefore view the doctrine of the atonement as one element in the whole Christian doctrine of salvation, which includes the consideration of the evil from which man needs to be delivered, of the means of that deliverance, of the life which is its final issue, and of the possibility and consequences of rejecting it.
Chapter XIX – Problem of Salvation and its Conditions
The idea of salvation implies that of deliverance; and deliverance means deliverance from something. Salvation is salvation from evil, and the doctrine of salvation is closely connected with what we are accustomed to call “the problem of evil”.
1. THE RELATION OP EVIL TO SALVATION
We rightly speak of the problem of evil as the greatest obstacle to Christian belief in God. But we must not forget the complementary truth that, if there were no problem of evil, there would be no need of salvation, and no doctrine of a redeeming God at all. Berdyaev’s words on this subject are worth quoting.
In the historical development of the human consciousness faith in the divine arose just because men experienced great sufferings and felt the need of freeing themselves from the power of evil. The existence of evil is not only the obstacle to our faith in God, for it is equally a proof of the existence of God, and the proof that this world is not the only nor ultimate one. The experience of evil directs man’s attention towards another world by arousing in him a discontent with this. It is pessimism and not optimism which lies at the bottom of religious experience and the religious consciousness. Our natural world is apparently in the victorious grip of the inane; for it is dominated by corruptibility and death, animosity and hatred, egoism and discord. Man is overwhelmed by the meaningless evil of the whole of life. In religion and in faith he turns towards the world of meaning, and receives strength from that world where love triumphs over hatred, union over division, and eternal life over death.1
1Freedom and the Spirit, pp. 158 sq.
It would, I think, be equally true to put Berdyaev’s point the other way round, and say that the problem of evil only exists in relation to the conceivability of some sort of salvation. If no thought of a world wholly better than this ever arose to kindle immortal longing in man’s heart, evil would cease to be a problem, and man would be a purely natural animal, content on the whole, like other animals, to accept the conditions of life as he finds them. When all apologists have said their say, it remains true that man’s fundamental discontent is God’s most universal witness; and discontent implies some sort of effort after some kind of salvation.
But neither of the two terms, “evil” and “salvation”, represents a quite simple idea, the concrete meaning of which is the same for all. There are manifestly different conceptions of salvation in the religions of the world; and the differences between them are largely determined by different conceptions of the fundamental evil from which deliverance is sought. Among primitive peoples, no doubt, evil is largely, though perhaps never wholly, identified with physical discomforts. In that case good hunting, good crops, and victory in war constitute the essence of salvation, even if the giver of salvation be thought of as a divine and spiritual being. Throughout the Old Testament Jehovah’s salvation or redemption is closely connected with the thought of deliverance in war from human enemies and oppressors. Spiritual and intellectual development brings deeper insight into the real nature of evil. Civilized and philosophical man has to face the perplexing question: what is the fundamental evil from which I must pray to be delivered? According to his answer to this question his conception of salvation is determined.
Experience and reflexion seem to show that there are four possible answers to it: (1) death, i.e., the negation or destruction of life; (2) pain, i.e., uncomfortable living, the evil of feeling; (3) ignorance or error, the evil of the intellect; (4) sin or moral wrong, the evil of the will. Generally it may be agreed that all four of these are genuinely evils, and that a complete salvation, if such were possible, would deliver us from all. But the history of thought and belief shows wide differences of opinion as to which is the fundamental form of evil, on deliverance from which man=s main endeavour is to be concentrated; and from these differences the characteristic contents of the various doctrines of salvation are in great measure derived.
In endeavouring to answer the great question about evil, the Hellenic world on the whole wavered between the first and the third of the answers given above. At the beginning of the Christian era the more popular Gentile religions of the Empire undoubtedly regarded death as the chief of evils, and correspondingly identified salvation with the attainment of immortality. Corinthian converts needed St. Paul’s reminders that “the sting of death is sin”, and that “the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death”.1 Nevertheless, the philosophy of the Platonic tradition has always inclined to make ignorance or error rather than death the devil of its creed. Plato, and even Aristotle with certain reservations, taught that moral delinquency is caused by lack of knowledge or intelligence. The pain of life, they suggested, only seems unendurable to the ignorant or unphilosophic; and even death could be treated as an event of little moment by one who had trained himself to intellectual communion with eternal verities. According to the Platonic gospel salvation essentially consists in the philosopher’s vision of the unchanging perfection behind and beyond the ceaseless movement of phenomena. This general conception of salvation has lived on in much modern idealism, and it has exercised a powerful influence on the theology of the Catholic Church.
11 Cor. 15:56, 26. Cf. also Heb. 2:15.
Buddhism, on the other hand, has fastened on pain as the fundamental evil in the world. Pain, it teaches, is caused by unsatisfied desire; and, since the basic desires of human nature are incapable of any final satisfaction, salvation must consist in the systematic eradication of desire from the soul. The preoccupation with the problem of pain forms a link between Buddhism and much of the more popular philosophy of the modern West.
Meanwhile Judaism and Christianity, receiving at this point some support from Stoicism, have steadily insisted that sin or moral wrong is the true fount of all evil, the one enemy to be fought without compromise or truce, in deliverance from which all salvation is to be achieved even through the willing acceptance of pain and death. In its doctrine of deliverance from sin through Christ Christianity stands unique, and the essential characteristic of its soteriology is expressed in the simple and profound affirmation of the Apostles’ Creed, “I believe in the forgiveness of sins”. Thus the Christian doctrines of the atonement, judgement, heaven and hell, are all alike unintelligible except in relation to the presupposition that the radical evil in the world is sin. Our next task therefore must be to explain and justify this presupposition.
2. EVIL AS PAIN AND AS WRONG
As we have seen, the Christian conception of the fundamental nature and source of evil places Christianity at once in opposition both to the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle and to the religion of Buddha. Of its opposition to Plato and Aristotle little need be said at this point. The whole tendency of our time is anti-intellectualist, and the doctrine of salvation by knowledge or pure reason finds few disciples. It is sufficient to notice that, from the strictly Platonic and Aristotelian point of view, no divine act of atonement is either necessary or possible as a means of salvation. To Plato and Aristotle what is required for salvation is not the forgiveness of sin, but the dissipation of error; and, even if salvation were to come from God, it must take the form, not of an atoning incarnation, but of a theophany.
The case is different in regard to Buddhism. For in the humanitarian culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the view that pain or suffering is the essential and radical evil has become ever more widely prevalent. And this fact gives a more direct relevance to some general remarks upon the Buddhist conception of salvation.
According to Buddhism, in its apparently most original and authentic form, the pain from which salvation is sought is essentially the fruit of those unsatisfiable desires which are inherent in human nature. Life in this world consists in the ceaseless activity of cravings for which the universe affords no final satisfaction. Therefore, concludes the Buddhist, the way of salvation must be found in the extirpation of these cravings, which involves the disappearance of the distinct personal life of the individual. Belief in Karma prevents the Buddhist from suggesting suicide as a way of escape. The suicide’s unhappiness would be only continued and intensified in a further life on earth. Desire can only really be overcome by a long-continued moral and spiritual discipline. By this discipline the soul gradually realizes that all men’s valuations of earthly things as good and evil are alike illusory, and it finally enters into a state of complete calm and detachment which henceforth nothing can disturb. The true way of escape from suffering, and the nature of the goal, the Buddha himself realized after long search in a moment of illumination as he sat in meditation under the Bo-tree. He might then and there have entered Nirvana never to return. But we are told that he conquered this last temptation, and came back into the world, out of pity for the suffering multitudes who knew not the way of deliverance. Thus he became an evangelist and founded a religion.
In the philosophy of authentic Buddhism moral and intellectual valuations are retained, and indeed emphasized, up to a point; but in the end they are subordinated to the supreme value of release from pain. A discipline of unselfishness is certainly enjoined, yet only so that in the end the self as subject of desire may be utterly extinguished. The final virtue to be retained is a love which seems to be more akin to compassion than to the Christian agape. Compassion simply recognizes the fact of suffering in others, and moves us to show them the way of escape, without taking the side of right against wrong. Unlike agape, it involves no exercise of the will to make a better world, and no devotion to any person for his own sake. Again, Buddhism may commend the zeal for truth, in so far as “right belief” is part of its holy eightfold path, and all personal prejudice is to be rigorously excluded. Yet this zeal is only a stage in learning the complete detachment which sees even the strife between truth and falsehood as an illusion born of desire. Mr. Valiant-for-Truth could find no place in the Buddhist heaven.
There is an evident coherence in logic between the fundamental judgement that pain or suffering is the radical evil and the denial that the distinctions between right and wrong, true and false, are in any way absolute or ultimate. At both points the sophisticated and sceptical humanitarianism of the modern West, which at least in Britain and America still survives the new gospels of nationalism and communism, shows itself more akin to Buddhism than to Christianity. It shows a genuine zeal to alleviate the sufferings of humanity, and to provide the opportunity of a healthy and happy life for all, while at the same time it assumes that all our ideas of an absolute right and wrong in conduct, and of an absolute truth and falsehood in belief, are but illusory projections of our own desires, which tend on the whole to create suffering rather than to relieve it. At the same time the differences between Buddhism and modern humanitarianism are no less strongly marked. The Buddhist identifies suffering with the whole process of natural existence. “Birth is suffering; death is suffering; presence of the hated is suffering; age is suffering; sickness is suffering; absence of the loved is suffering; to wish and not to get is suffering; briefly, the fivefold nature by which beings cling to existence is suffering.”1 Accordingly the Buddhist seeks salvation in escape from the unending cycle of birth and death and temporal becoming. The humanitarian, on the other hand, believes that suffering can be sufficiently eliminated, and the basic desires of humanity reasonably satisfied, by some scientifically directed process of social reform. He therefore looks for salvation in some Utopian society of the future. Nevertheless, for the humanitarian, as for the Buddhist, salvation is essentially salvation from pain, and it is to be achieved by purely human effort.
1The first of the Four Noble Truths delivered by the Buddha.
It is exactly on these points that Christianity joins issue. And, after all, there is grave difficulty in carrying to its logical conclusion the doctrine that pain or suffering as such is a greater or more radical evil than moral wrong. Consider some of the events which are most apt to cause men to form such a judgement. An earthquake or a flood spreads death and misery among a whole population; or a young life, on which hope is centred, is suddenly struck down by accident or disease. Let us notice first that the problem of pain, rationally regarded, is certainly no more acute in the former ease than in the latter. It is mere confusion of thought to suppose that when a great many eases of terrible pain occur together at one time and place, the actual amount of pain caused is really greater than in the same number of cases occurring singly and at intervals. The problem of pain is really no more, and no less, perplexing in a Japanese earthquake or a Chinese flood, than in all the other untimely and distressing deaths which have occurred severally since the world began. But what is it that really shocks us in all events of this kind? We say to ourselves not simply, “This thing is agonizingly painful.” We say, “This thing is utterly cruel and senseless and unjust; it shows that there can be no goodness ordering the world at all.” In other words, what causes our worst distress is precisely the fact that our moral sense is outraged by such happenings. When we are greatly moved by any evil, it is as a moral evil that we instinctively condemn it. We are thus unwilling witnesses, even against ourselves, that we regard the fundamental essence of evil as moral.
That very modern writer, Mr. Walter Lippmann, sees this truth clearly, and bases upon it an acute and logical argument.1 All great disasters, he admits, lead us to pass a moral judgement on the ordering of the universe, and such judgements are accompanied by a sense of the absolute character of moral evil. Nevertheless, these judgements and the sense of absolute moral evil which accompanies them, are in his view entirely mistaken; for the objectivity claimed by moral valuation is only an illusion produced by the projection of man=s own desires. Our moral condemnation of the universe is in reality only our way of expressing our disappointment at the discovery that things are not ordered as we should like. And once this acknowledgement is made, “the problem of evil” begins to disappear. For the whole difficulty arises because of our desire to impute to the universe itself, or to the god who rules it, purposes like our own. To get rid of this desire and of the illusion which it causes, as Mr. Lippmann proceeds to point out, alters radically the nature of evil itself. For, as we now see, “evil is not a quality of things as such; it is a quality of our relation to them. A dissonance in music is unpleasant only to the musical ear.” And a little later on Mr. Lippmann adds, unwarily as I think, the coping stone and logical conclusion of his whole argument. “Evil exists only because we feel it to be painful.”2
1A Preface to Morals, pp. 216 sqq.
2Lippmann’s doctrine of evil therefore appears to be essentially the same as that of Hobbes. But he ignores all the trouble taken by subsequent philosophers to show that Hobbes was wrong.
Be it so. Then the most obvious way to get rid of the crying evils of the universe, is to cease to take them to heart. Cease to feel them, and all will be well indeed. Why make such a fuss over a child mangled in a street accident or born with a hopeless and incurable disease? Enjoy all you can, cease to heed the rest; you will have solved the problem of evil once for all, and find the world an admirable place. But is such the counsel which Mr. Lippmann really means to urge? Of course not. He is an ardent social reformer with a moral zeal not only for getting rid of pain by the handiest means but also for helping his fellows to lead a really virtuous and honourable life. The truth is that Mr. Lippmann, like many of our modern sceptics, is at once far too good a man and too confused a thinker to accept the consequences of his own reasoning. He really intends his book to be a preface to morals, and not, as his own logic would suggest, their epitaph.
What, then, is the true conclusion to be drawn from our instinctive feelings of outrage and indignation at the terrible disasters of life? Grant, for the sake of argument, that pain or unhappiness is the greatest of evils. It will still be found that the greatest unhappiness springs from the disappointment of our moral nature. It is not sheer pain which distresses us most, but the meaning of moral evil which we read into it. Therefore, fundamentally and on the whole, it is truer to say that the world is painful and distressing to us, because it appears to be immoral, than to say that it appears to us to be immoral, because it is painful and distressing. And there are only two remedies conceivable for the distress. Either we must stifle altogether the demands of our moral nature; or else we must persevere in the faith that the universe is such as somehow in the end to provide satisfaction for those moral demands of which it has itself somehow been the cause. It is precisely because Utopias, whether classical, humanitarian, or communist, seem to offer some promise of such satisfaction that they seem to be worth striving for. Consider merely the question whether they will be sufficiently pleasant, and their attractiveness begins to wane. After all, as Aldous Huxley has convincingly shown, there are few things more distressing than the spiritual boredom, called by medievalists acedia, which no brave new world can exorcize.
3. NO PURELY MORAL SALVATION
Hitherto we have tried to give some justification for the Christian view that evil has a moral root, and that salvation must mean fundamentally salvation from wrong, and not merely from suffering or pain. This proposition holds good whether salvation is to be salvation of the world itself, or rather salvation of human souls out of the world. But it does not of course follow that a full acceptance of the truth thus stated is of itself sufficient to bring salvation; and we have now to argue that it is not. Acknowledgement of the nature and authority of right is not enough to deliver us from wrong. There is no hope of salvation in mere moral philosophy.
Our moral consciousness assures us of two fundamental truths: first, that the world of our present experience does not satisfy our moral demands or fulfill our moral ideals; secondly, that part of its unsatisfactoriness is due to the moral defects of the human will and the wrong actions of men. What hope then can the pure moralist provide to be the object and motive of our moral endeavour? Two kinds of answer to this question have been attempted, which we may distinguish as (1) the stoical, and (2) the utilitarian.1
1I use both these terms in a loose and popular sense, merely as convenient labels. What I mean by them will I hope be made sufficiently clear in the following paragraphs.
(1) The former assumes that we must not look for any “new world”, however achieved, in which the conditions of life will be radically different from what they are now. It is utterly uncertain whether the future will fulfill any hope of this kind; and in any case the right should be done purely for its own sake, and not for any good consequences to the world at large which may be supposed to follow from the doing of it. The only hope of salvation, therefore, to which we may rightly cling, is the satisfaction of our own moral nature in the act of doing our duty for its own sake. The harmony of our will with the moral law is its own reward.
Obviously this is a disappointing gospel to the benevolent; but it is also open to two further objections which from a strictly moral point of view are more serious:
(a) It simply cuts the root of what most men today would take to be the noblest form of heroism. It is impossible for a man to sacrifice himself wholly in a great cause, unless he believes that the sacrifice will not be in vain, that it will really promote the end for which it is made. The really unselfish man is less interested in doing his own duty than in furthering the cause for which he is content to give his life. And if that cause has a large or possibly a universal range – as for instance the good of humanity as a whole – self-sacrifice in it demands some faith that the universe is such as to respond in the end to that effort of which self-sacrifice is the supreme expression. In giving his life as a ransom for many, Jesus believed that God would provide that the life so given was not thrown away. Take away all such faith from human endeavour after a better world, teach that the only sure hope for the good man is the satisfaction he must find in doing his duty whatever the issue, and inevitably the finest heroism is robbed of its motive. The moral ideal of stoicism in all its forms, noble as it may be, is inherently self-centred.
(b) Secondly, the general doctrine which we have described as stoical is evidently defective as a gospel of salvation, in that it offers no hope to the man whose past failures or inherited weaknesses have so oppressed his mind or impaired his will, that he is in practice powerless to do what his conscience tells him that he ought. This ancient problem of morality is one which the medical psychologists of today still find it impossible to solve without the help of religion. The ethics of stoicism ignore it.
(2) The other attempt to offer salvation in terms of moral philosophy is that which we have described as utilitarian. Utilitarianism (in so far as it promises “salvation” at all) assumes that moral effort will be rewarded in the end by the bringing into existence of some better world or state of life in the future. This is the hope which has inspired both the evolutionary philosophy of such thinkers as Herbert Spencer and the dialectical materialism of the Marxists. The salvation which such philosophies offer is of course a hope only for human society; they do not suggest that individuals now alive can reach the promised land. But there is no doubt about their power to elicit heroic devotion from individuals in the service of humanity; and in this respect they have some advantage over the more “stoical” doctrine already considered.
Nevertheless this kind of hope turns out on examination to be profoundly unsatisfactory – and that apart altogether from the well-founded suspicion that it can never be realized. It is morally unsatisfying. For in proportion as the conditions of the future Utopia fulfill all that is demanded of them as the goal of effort, it seems that under those conditions the heroism needed to bring them into existence will be unnecessary, and will be succeeded by a natural happiness which, whatever its attractions, is altogether inferior in moral value. The devotion of Marx himself seems to be worth far more than the life of that classless society which he thought was its goal. Is the heroism of the ages to produce nothing better than an age in which men are content to improve and elaborate the happiness they enjoy, until they also pass into the unknown?
It must be added that a similar objection applies with equal force to certain conceptions of “heaven” which have discredited the Christian faith in the eyes of many who were not far from the Kingdom of God. Unless our eschatology be a good deal more profoundly Christian than that of Paley, our doctrine of heavenly salvation may lay itself open to the charge of seeking to reward virtue with a happiness which is intrinsically of less value than itself. That difficulty is one which the stoic at least escapes. It constitutes a problem for theology to which we shall return. But, apart from the Christian revelation, the problem of salvation confronts the moral philosopher with an insoluble dilemma – either a hope which spoils unselfishness, or no hope which can inspire it.
Chapter XX – The General Significance of the Atonement
It is precisely at the point we have now reached that the relevance of the Christian doctrine concerning evil and salvation begins to declare itself. According to Christianity moral good and evil, as states of will, are of infinitely greater importance in themselves than any pleasure or pain, happiness or unhappiness, which are states of feeling. And yet the supreme good in the universe is not the virtue of a being who either fulfills or requires the fulfillment of the law of duty recognized by conscience, but rather the love which spontaneously gives itself for the good of others, and finds its fruition in the complete communion of spirit with spirit. The dogma of the Trinity teaches that the absolute perfection of that communion is in the eternal God alone. But God created man “in his own image”, in order that man the creature, by reflecting in himself the creator’s love, might enter into the joy of eternal communion in God and with God. Therefore according to Christianity the fundamental evil in man, though it is moral in quality, is not the transgression of any sovereign law considered as such, but rather the selfishness, the pride, the πλεονεξία, which by rejecting love rejects also eternal life.
1. THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF MAN’S END
By these considerations all Christian teaching about evil and salvation are determined. Man’s personality is indeed a tiny finite image of the infinite Godhead. It is capable of loving freely. The statement implies that man=s personality consists in a relatively independent mind and will, which can pass their own judgement as to what is true and false, good and evil, select and devise means to the attainment of the chosen end, and, as they do so, influence and direct both the minds and wills of other men and also beings of a lower order which they become able to dominate more completely. Man’s is a personality which can experience and understand the meaning of parenthood and ownership, and so exercise purposive control, rightly or wrongly, over what belongs to it.
And therein precisely lies man=s danger and temptation. For after all there is but one absolutely independent mind and will, only one father and owner of all, whose love is truth and goodness, and whose purpose in the end all things must serve. Therefore the creation of man involves a self-limitation on the part of God. Man as creature is absolutely dependent upon God; yet as bearer of the creator’s image he is relatively independent of him.1 Whether it be by a fall or a rise, he is as God knowing good and evil, as God in exercising control over his own for a consciously apprehended and chosen end. But this relative independence is not God’s end for man. It involves a condition of tension, and of various possibilities arising out of the tension, which cannot be an end at all. The end is that God should be all in all, that his self-limitation should cease, when man has freely surrendered himself and all he has to the God who has not only loved him but allowed him to share his love. Man’s independence, therefore, in so far as it is real, exists to be given up. His true freedom is the freedom of his self-surrender. And in the free surrender of all and every independence he enters at last into the glorious liberty of God’s children.
1To be like God is to be independent of God. This is an impossible situation. In that fact lies the whole paradox of the Christian doctrine of the creation of man.
The accomplishment of that self-surrender in spiritual creatures is the final cause of the creation, and of the age-long process of finite life through time. Therefore the world bears fruit of itself, first the plant and the animal, then man. And therefore man himself lives and grows and learns the meaning of truth and goodness, of fatherhood, ownership and creative power. He becomes. as it were a limited god himself, so that in the really Godlike freedom of love he may surrender himself and his petty divinity to the one God who gave them. “When the fruit is ripe, straightway he putteth forth the sickle because the harvest is now come.” That is why all things in this world are transient. They must be cut off, in order that fruit, which has been grown in time, may be garnered in eternity. In the moment that the created spirit of man comes to its perfection, then birth and death, growth and decay, progress and decadence, the whole rhythm of this world, the rhythm which is this world, are no more. The end is neither annihilation nor endless living, but eternal life.
2. SIN
But, because man is a self‑determining yet finite creature, he may spoil his own growth and change the harvest into a bonfire of rubbish. He is initially endowed with a self-conscious separateness both from God and from nature; and therein lies the opportunity both for his free self-giving and for his selfishness. And selfishness is sin.
The essence of sin therefore is much more closely connected with the new emergence of human self-consciousness than with any survival of animal instincts in man. The mere animal, just because it is not conscious of itself as a separate being over against God and the world of nature, is as incapable of selfishness as of self-sacrifice. We can of course observe in animals the germs of both, as their behaviour seems to be directed now to the gratification of the individual=s appetite, and now to securing the survival of the species at the individual’s expense. But what is peculiar to man is his consciousness of himself as a separate personal entity choosing his own ends and directing conduct towards their realization. At once the gratification of desire becomes self-gratification, just as its opposite becomes self-repression. More and more as lie develops in civilization, man is desperately aware of himself as influencing all he knows and all he seeks, and most of all when he tries his hardest to take objective views and to act impartially. The very speech in which he expresses truth remains obstinately full of personal pronouns, however many words, or substitutes for words, modern logicians may utter in an unknown tongue.
It is in the conscious self-reference of all man=s thought and action, rather than in the animal basis of his appetite, that the occasion of sin and selfishness resides. Natural creatures, like the lily and the raven, are natural just because they are not self-conscious. Man, because he is so self-conscious, can never be just natural. He must either rise to the unselfishness which is supernatural, or else sink into an artificiality, a hypocrisy or a self-indulgence, of which nature at least is innocent. Every artistic monstrosity with which man has defaced God’s earth is witness to the fact that man is called to rise above nature, and that, if he will not rise above, he must inevitably fall below it. It is the pretentiousness and fundamental insincerity of bad art which is its universal condemnation. The ancient and modern forms of the philosophical doctrine of Protagoras, that man is the measure of all things, have the same mark of the parvenu who is pretentious because he is uneasily doubtful of his own status. And the exaggerated humility of our logical analysts as to man’s capacity for reaching truth seems to have a not very different origin. To use the now popular language of psychology, it looks like a “defence mechanism” hiding the “inferiority complex” which self-conscious man feels when he is called to a knowledge too excellent and wonderful for any natural creature to attain to.
The truth is that in human nature, as we know it apart from Christ, the personal self-consciousness of which we have been speaking is inseparable from some degree of personal selfishness. That fact constitutes the real strength of the Buddhist doctrine that salvation is to be found only in Nirvana. But it is that fact also which the Church seeks to account for in its doctrine of original sin. From the beginning of his history man has failed to treat his godlikeness as a gift from God to be used and developed in God’s service and finally surrendered in the spirit of the love which gave. On the contrary man, because of his godlike capacity, has “snatched at equality with God”.1 He has sought to be himself the measure of all things, the standard of all values, and to gain and keep for himself everything which ambition leads him to desire. Or else, realizing the empty folly of such pride and covetousness, he has tried to deny his high calling altogether and to seek contentment in a purely natural happiness which the creator will not suffer him to find. Therefore God’s world and the laws of nature have become in large measure hostile to him. To the soul tainted with selfishness goodness itself appears as an imposed law of duty, hard, irksome and obscure. Physical death takes on an altogether new aspect of horror. All the pain and disappointment, of which man=s experience is full, are seen, at best, as incentives to his own effort to overcome them, or as vindictive penalties for his failure to do right. At worst they are taken as a proof that God=s goodness is a delusion, and morality but a yoke of manmade custom. The uncertainties of our temporal lot become occasions for self-centred anxieties about the future, from which, it seems, we can only escape by cultivating a stoical apathy to all that happens. And, since selfishness darkens the mental eye no less than it corrupts the will, no intellectual revelation could have availed to make man see the truth. At best the greatest of non-Christian saints and thinkers have been enabled dimly to guess and hint at the true meaning and end of human life. For God has never left himself without witness, nor man wholly without grace.
1See the comments previously made on Phil. 2:6 in Chapter IX.
3. THE RELEVANCE OF THE ATONEMENT
But the Christian gospel of the atonement meets man’s need with the one really relevant message of deliverance and salvation. Not only does it declare that the ultimate truth is the truth of God’s love. Such a declaration by itself could never have carried conviction, in either sense of that word, to fallen mankind. The Christian gospel presents, as evidence of the truth, the fact that by a supreme act of love God in Christ has put himself at man’s side to suffer with him and for him in his sinful condition, and so to win from him the free response of penitence which is the first condition of salvation through forgiveness. By that same act God in man, and man in God, has vanquished the powers of evil and exalted human nature to God’s throne by the complete self-sacrifice. In Christ first the purpose of the original creation has been accomplished, and the life of the world to come has been made not only a future hope but also a present reality.
The gospel of the atonement is so simple in its total effect that its essence can be grasped by the least theologically minded of Christians; yet at the same time its doctrinal implications are so many-sided that libraries of exposition cannot do justice to its inexhaustible meaning. At the present stage we must try to make clear some of the main aspects in which the doctrine of the atonement shows us the life and work of Jesus Christ as the true and sufficient remedy for the evil of the world, when, by the light of Christ, we see that evil in its true colours.
(1) The atonement primarily consists in a divine act of loving and gracious condescension. Whereas man has sinned by self-assertion, self-exaltation, “snatching at equality with God”, God in Christ redeems man by “self-emptying”, self-humiliation, putting himself on an equality with man. There can be no Christian doctrine of the atonement apart from the Christian doctrine of the incarnation. Some of the early Fathers taught that the incarnation was itself the atonement. The main tradition of theology regards the atonement rather as the effect of the incarnation accomplished through the cross. In any case the incarnation and the atonement together make clear the tremendous paradox of Christianity that the true path of ascension begins with an immeasurable descent; and God alone, who “came down from heaven” and “descended into hell”, could reveal and open up that way.
(2) In its relation to sin the atonement recognizes the fundamentally moral nature of evil, and at the same time provides a more than moral way of salvation, because it expresses God’s love in a message of free forgiveness, which brings good even out of the evil of sin itself. Strict morality condemns the wrongdoer, and justifies the doer of right. But in strict morality, as both St. Paul and Kant in their very different ways have made plain, there is no gospel for the sinner. Morality may indeed provide a rough and ready way of purging an offence by undergoing punishment. But forgiveness, strictly speaking, is not a moral conception at all. If an offence be not fully purged, morality requires further penalty; if an offence be fully purged, there is nothing left to be forgiven. The law may temper justice with mercy; but it knows nothing of free and absolute forgiveness. To this day the law of England, which is severely moral in its theoretical foundations, reserves the expression “free pardon” for the one case where it is obviously a fiction, viz., the case of an innocent man found to have been convicted by mistake, who thereupon receives a “free pardon” from the Crown.
But the gospel of the atonement puts the whole problem of right and wrong in a new light. Wrongdoing is seen not merely as a breach of law, but also, and more fundamentally, as a rejection of God’s love. Now, if a man realizes his wrongdoing to be essentially an offence against another=s love, he knows at once two things: first, that no punishment by itself can ever purge its guilt; secondly, that he is penitent for what he has done. For he cannot realize what it means to have offended against love, unless the awakening response of love within him reveals it; and that is penitence. But, if what he has offended against is the perfect love of God, his penitence is met by free forgiveness. And this forgiveness does something different from, and better than, merely abolishing his guilt; it does something more even than restore him to that fellowship with God which he had forfeited. It converts the repented and forgiven sin into an actual stepping stone by which he has been raised, and can be raised further, into a recognition of God’s goodness which could never have been his apart from the sin. The greatest of all the triumphs revealed through the cross – and apart from this greatest triumph no full doctrine of salvation is possible – is to overrule sin itself for some good end, to produce out of it some good which could not otherwise have been. “O felix culpa quae tantum et talem meruit habere redemptorem.” Certainly the truth in that cry of gratitude transcends morality altogether. Yet those who think it wrong to utter it have not understood the fullness of the gospel.
(3) In relation to the problem of pain also the atonement has its characteristic message. It need hardly be said that, apart from the Christian revelation altogether, positive value must be assigned to much of the pain which we experience. Biologically regarded, pain is nature’s warning against danger, and a constant incentive to effort and progress. Sensitiveness to pain is the condition of advance in evolution. Again, morally regarded, pain has a value, both as retributive and as deterrent, which few would altogether dispute; and it is an essential element in the conditions which train us for the more heroic virtues. Nevertheless it is evident that the values thus generally and legitimately found for pain fail altogether to justify the place which it holds in the order of this world. Theodicies conceived on the level of justice, which try to represent this world merely as a hard school of righteousness, are notoriously impotent.
But the Christian theodicy, though it affirms the value of justice, does not stop short at it. God, it declares, has prepared for man some better thing than the reward of hard-won virtue and the punishment of vice. Man is to realize that victory of love through self-sacrifice which for the finite creature is eternal life. The presence of selfishness in human nature makes the self-sacrifice inevitably painful; and the sympathy, which in the end is the way of redemption, begins by causing extension of the pain. But the revealing act of Christ’s atonement makes it clear that all the manifold sorrows and disasters of life, even those which seem at first sight most evidently to contradict belief in God’s goodness, at least afford some opportunity to the Christian to be made like his Saviour in suffering, and thereby to be made partaker in that whole redemptive activity whereby self-sacrifice avails to redeem mankind and lift it up to God. Here below love displays itself at its greatest and highest in willingly accepted suffering even unto death. Christ the incarnate showed that once for all. It is for the fullness of such a revelation that all the evils of this present world provide the opportunity. And therefore it is not unreasonable to suppose that a world order, in which pain and death are universal, and are more acutely felt in proportion as true progress is made, may be the order fitted to be that through which love wins its universal victory, and from which it rises again in glory. Thus, while the world order which we know with all its miseries can never be made to satisfy mere justice, the greater paradox may still be true, that through the atonement it may be found in the end to have proceeded from God’s love.
(4) To complete our general and preliminary survey of the relevance of the atonement to the evils of this world, we must say a few words in conclusion about its relation to death. The atonement of the cross would not be complete apart from the resurrection. For not only is the resurrection the guarantee that Christ’s living presence and power are with his followers for ever; it is also the sign that in him God’s love, in man and for man, has won the final victory over death and through death. The victory is not merely over death, but also through death; for it is the victory of self-sacrifice, and self-sacrifice could not be complete apart from the death which seals it. Moreover our Lord’s victorious self-sacrifice was not achieved in order to make our own unnecessary, but to make it possible. Because in the nature of things the full triumph of self-sacrifice can only be won through death, therefore, and for no other reason, the Christian is obliged to believe in the reality of the world beyond the grave, in the life of the world to come.
It is vital to perceive that the really Christian belief in a future heaven is based simply on faith in the fulfillment of the atonement, Christ’s work of love. It does not concern itself primarily with the reward of virtue, nor even with the obligation of a righteous God to fulfill his promise to his chosen. It does not postulate an imaginary heaven in order to provide some redress for the real injustices of earth. And its motive is as far as possible removed from that self-assertive rebellion against death to which Matthew Arnold attributed the hope of immortality when he wrote of the
Stern law of every mortal lot,
Which man, proud man, finds hard to bear,
And builds himself I know not what
Of second life, I know not where.
Grist’s Grave.
No, the question for the Christian is simply this: is the atoning work of Christ really victorious, or is it not? It is belief in the resurrection, following on the sacrifice completed in death, which enables him to answer Yes. And, so answering, he submits himself to the law of the cross. No final or perfect good is attainable in this world at all. For only by the sacrifice which death seals can the work of love be brought to finality. No doubt St. Paul taught that even on this side of physical death the Christian dies spiritually and rises again to newness of life in Christ. Since the resurrection and exaltation of Christ the life of the world to come has begun to be really present and active already. But St. Paul would also have said that the spirit is not the whole man, and the present spiritual resurrection, still imperfect while the spirit is hampered by the mortal and sin-stained flesh of this world, can only give a dim foreshadowing or foretaste of the future glory.
And thus it is that Christianity, alone among the religions and philosophies of the world, succeeds in eliciting from death, i.e., from the actuality of dying, a unique value, so that it is found to make a positive and necessary contribution to the perfection of created life. Other philosophies of immortality suggest either that death is in some way unreal, or that it constitutes merely a release for the spirit through the dropping off of the material body. Not so Christianity. To it dying is an essential part or moment in that act through which love accomplishes the self-sacrifice which issues in eternal life. And thus physical death, in all its terrible universality, becomes for the Christian a sacrament of the spiritual truth that, because it is love which saves, life must be lost before it can be fully won.
So, finally, the Christian “heaven” is not the world of Utopian or Elysian fantasy which mocks the hopes of the utilitarian moralist, and provokes the righteous scorn of the stoic. It is not a sphere of being where the labours and sorrows of earth find a questionable compensation in perpetual ease. Neither must the painful process of self-sacrifice accomplishing itself through death be thought of like a ladder, which, having enabled us to scale the heights, may forthwith be kicked away. The Lord’s risen body, as we are told in a symbol, bears for ever the marks of his cross. Heaven is the unimaginable state of being where souls made perfect in the sacrifice of love find their eternal fruition in the communion of Christ’s Body. There, it is truly said, pain and death “are no more”. Yet we may also say that they have not been simply annihilated. They are no longer imposed or endured; but, having been once for all accepted and passed through, they remain for ever, as it were, present in the memory of eternal life as elements which contribute to its essential joy. As for sin, its exclusion from heaven is of course absolute; yet even so, were it forgotten or in process of being forgotten, the deepest note of thanksgiving would be excluded also.
The Christian, therefore, who believes in salvation through Christ’s atonement has a much deeper and fuller hope than that of any future state of bliss in which the evils of our present life will recede into an ever dimmer and more distant past. It is indeed impossible for us adequately or completely to relate eternal life to that which is temporal. But we do well to think of “heaven” simply as the final accomplishment of the work of Christ’s love, the hope of which quickens us to sacrifice, rather than as the reward of our loyalty, the hope of which taints our sacrifice with selfishness. It is thus that Christian faith transcends the moralist’s dilemma – either a hope which spoils unselfishness, or no hope which can inspire it. St. Paul, in driving home the lesson of Christ’s resurrection to his Corinthian converts, speaks not at all of the reward of our labour, but only of its fruit. “Be ye therefore stedfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord; forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.”
Chapter XXI – Theories of the Atonement
We have now to consider more closely what we are to say of that historical doctrine of the atonement which in varying forms has, together with that of the incarnation, made up the very substance of the Christian’s creed. But the doctrine itself cannot be rightly understood without some appreciation of the preparation for it which we find in the religion of the Old Testament.
1. THE OLD TESTAMENT PREPARATION FOR THE ATONEMENT
Nowadays many scholars maintain that the Old Testament records not so much the development of one religion as the story of the conflict between two, the prophetic religion and the priestly. The two religions, they would say, are irreconcilable in principle, though the deuteronomic writers and the later prophets effected an unsatisfactory compromise between them. I think these scholars are probably wrong if they assert that the great pre-exilic prophets actually intended to condemn all sacrifice as such, and to allow it no legitimate place at all in the worship of Jehovah. Whether the prophets would have done so, if they had followed out all the implications of their own revolutionary theology, is another question. From the point of view of logical analysis rather than strictly historical description, the opposition between priest and prophet amounts almost to a conflict between two religions.
The two religions, it is to be noticed, are differentiated from one another by their treatment of sin, no less than by their estimate of sacrifice. The prophetic religion rejects sacrifice as a remedy for sin altogether. Nothing can avail but a changed way of life. The priestly religion, on the other hand, especially as it expresses itself in the post-exilic parts of the Pentateuch, sets forth an elaborate code of ritual sacrifice, the chief aim of which is to expiate the sins both of individuals and of the nation as a whole.
Many modern theologians have been inclined to see in the prophetic religion alone the Holy Spirit=s preparation for the coming of Christ. They regard the sacrificial slaughter of animals as nothing but a degrading superstition and a relic of heathenism. Yet such a judgement is surely one-sided. In denying all value to the priestly religion, it ignores at the same time the characteristic defect in the prophetic.
It is a noteworthy fact that the theology of the prophets, though in one respect it is predestinarian and Augustinian, in that it tends to refer all events alike to God’s will as their cause, is in another respect distinctly libertarian and Pelagian, in insisting that the chosen people, and the individuals which compose it, can always obey God and be righteous, if they will. All the sinner has to do, say the prophets, is to change his manner of life; and they assume without question that he can, if only he will make the effort. That is why sacrifice is so unnecessary, and may be so wrong. It is either a superfluous addition, or else a substitute, for the obedience which God demands and man is quite able to give. “What doth God require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”1 Micah almost speaks as if it were an easy task. “God,” so runs the prophetic message, “is quite ready to forgive the past, if you will now forsake your sins and do right. The sins of the fathers will not be visited on the children if only the children will not follow their father’s bad example.” But there is no message of any divine power to change the heart or reform the will. “Come, and let us reason together, saith the Lord. Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land.” That is all the gospel Isaiah knows. Jeremiah and Ezekiel certainly look forward to a dim and distant future, when God will at length give his rebellious people a new heart. Meanwhile they only proclaim that God=s people can do right, if they will; and continued disobedience is met only by deterrent threats of doom. The prophets know nothing of original sin. And their implied doctrine of free will does not do justice to the facts.
1Micah 6:8.
On the other hand, the priestly religion, which produced the sacrificial code in the Pentateuch, treats sin less as a matter of personal choice and responsibility than as a taint or defilement with which the sinner is, as it were, infected. The taint of sin inevitably cuts a man off from God’s favour; but sacrifice has been appointed by God’s own merciful ordinance for the removal of the taint and the restoration of the sinner. Hence from one point of view the priest may be said to have regarded sin as more deeply ingrained than did the prophet, inasmuch as he acknowledged that the individual could not by any personal act of will get rid of it. Yet on the other hand the priest provided the more readily accessible remedy, since it is easier for sinners to offer sacrifice than to reform their lives. No doubt the whole sacrificial system was inseparable from superstition and unworthy ideas of God. The denunciations of the prophet and the criticisms of the moralist are not unjustified. And yet in three ways the priestly religion pointed towards profound truths which the prophets ignored.
(a) Sin is not merely a matter of personal choice, nor does it end with merely personal guilt. To use the clear and convenient terms of Latin theology, there is an element of vitium and of macula, as well as of reatus, in sin. There is about it something analogous to a taint, disease, or infection, which weakens the will and impairs its power to do right, and which blinds the conscience so that it does not see what it is right to do. A further remedy is needed than exhortations to do right combined with the promise that God will forgive the past if the sinner will now mend his ways. There is in the sacrificial system an indication of that truth which the prophet in spite, and partly because, of his clearer vision of God=s righteousness could not perceive.
(b) The priestly religion did not represent God as simply waiting for man to reform himself, before he could deliver him from the consequences of his sin. Imperfect, crude, and superstitious as the doctrine of sacrificial expiation necessarily was, still the Pentateuch presents such expiation as a means ordained by God to reconcile sinners with himself, which required only such simple action as the sinner was really able to perform. It is true that we cannot but notice in the ritual code of Leviticus a falling away from the spiritual heights which are reached in the prophetic books. And yet in Leviticus there is a note of pastoral care and tenderness for erring souls, which is absent from the great prophets.
(c) Corruptio optimi pessima. It may be that the whole blood-stained history of sacrifice represents the corruption of an indestructible instinct of the human spirit, which impels man to believe that he cannot have perfect communion with God except through the offering of life in death. The Christian fulfillment of that instinct lies in the revelation that the response to God’s love in the creature which bears his image must consummate itself in the completeness of voluntary self-sacrifice. Nothing of course could be further from the moral and spiritual height of such a doctrine than most of the beliefs associated with sacrifice in pre-Christian religion. Yet sacrifice may still have been a blind and degraded testimony to the truth that what God ultimately requires from man is more even than righteous conduct according to his laws, it is the absolute devotion of man’s self. The moral meaning of the term “self-sacrifice” may seem to have as little connexion with the ritual sacrifices of antiquity as it has with the jargon of modern commerce which speaks of “goods offered at a sacrifice”. And yet the use of the same word in all cases is not a pure equivocation or a mere accident of speech. Everywhere “sacrifice” expresses the notion of gain through loss, of the best won through the surrender of the good, or of life attained through death – it is the characteristic term of that “dialectic” –which lies at the heart of the moral and spiritual experience of mankind.
The pious Jew knew well that to see God’s face is the ultimate fulfillment of man’s blessedness, and yet that in this world man cannot see God and live. The problem thus presented penetrates to the depths and heights of man’s religious consciousness. The Christian answer to it is that he who believes on the incarnate Son has both seen God and died to himself in order to live anew in Christ. But even before Christ came there was a dim prophecy of that revelation, a prophecy which the prophets themselves never uttered, in the pathetic attempts of the priest to use a life, which had been made to pass through death on the offerer’s behalf, as a means of removing sin and establishing communion between man and God. Later on we shall have occasion to notice in greater detail how it was that the characteristically Jewish conception of sacrifice constituted a true praeparatio evangelica.
2. THE FACT OF THE ATONEMENT IN THE NEW TESTAMENT
We pass from the Old Testament to the New. Doubtless there are in the New Testament diversities and developments of theological interpretation. Traces may be found, especially in St. Luke and Acts, of a primitive Christianity which had not yet begun to understand Christ=s death as the sacrifice for human sin. But one conviction is universal, and apart from it no Christian document could have been written. Through the coming of Jesus the Christ, God, by an act of forgiving and redeeming love, has touched man’s heart in a new way. A new communion between God and man has been established, a new Israel has been born. Through Christ both the defect of the prophetic religion has been made good, and the need for priestly sacrifices done away. For now Christians are delivered from the powers of evil, and set in a perfect relation to God as their Father. In Christ both the vitium and the reatus of sin are overcome. The atonement is a fact. The danger which besets the early converts is lest they should exaggerate, or rather misinterpret, the finality of what has been already achieved, so as to suppose that Christians can no longer really sin or really have to die. They have to be warned that there is a conflict still to be waged and a victory to be won, although in Christ they have that fellowship with God which makes the issue certain.
3. FOUR TYPES OF ATONEMENT THEORY
The various theological theories, in which the Church’s teaching on the atonement has expressed itself, are simply attempts to answer the great question: How has Christ wrought this great change in man’s relation to God, of which Christian life and faith are themselves the evidence? Why and how has the coming of Christ made all this difference? We will begin by distinguishing in a quite general way four main types of answer which have been given.
(a) Some have said, “It is because Christ brought God’s message of forgiveness, and his human life revealed God’s fatherly love in a way which has stirred man=s heart to fresh repentance.” This answer leads to what we may call the “subjective” or “moral” theory of the atonement.
(b) Some have said, “It is because God in Christ has won the victory over all the forces of evil, sin, and death, and has broken the power of the devil over man.” This answer leads to what we may call (using Bishop Aulén’s terms) the “classic” or “dramatic” theory.
(c) Some have said, “It is because Christ as man has borne the penalty for sin in man’s behalf, and thus made it possible for God to forgive man freely.” This answer leads to what we may call the “juridical” theory.
(d) Some have said, “It is because Christ, the Son of God who is also the sinless man, has offered through death that life of perfect human obedience and self-surrender, which, having died, becomes the universal expiation and cleansing power for sin-stained souls.” This answer leads to what we may call the “sacrificial” theory.
Of course, elements which belong to more than one of the types of theory which I have distinguished have often been combined with one another; and the classification is to some extent arbitrary. On the other hand, theological controversy has intensified the opposition between different types, so that they are often represented as quite antagonistic to one another. Nevertheless, if we start from the fundamental and cardinal thought of God’s act of love in Jesus Christ, and then follow the lines of the classification just suggested, I think we can reach a reconciling point of view, from which each type of theory is seen to make its essential contribution to the truth, although no one theory, nor any number of theories, can be sufficient to express its fullness.
4. THE SUBJECTIVE THEORY
A sharp dividing line is often drawn between the first type of theory, the subjective, and all the others, which are called “objective” in opposition to it. The ground of the opposition may be stated thus. According to the subjective theory the life and death of Jesus Christ in themselves effect nothing except the clear declaration of something which has always been true, viz., the fatherly and forgiving love of God for man. Thus the effect of the atonement, and the change wrought by it, begin only when human souls perceive through the life and death of Jesus Christ the truth of God’s love, and are moved thereby to repentance. In contrast with this doctrine the other theories maintain that the life and death of Jesus Christ in themselves brought into being some new relation, which did not previously exist, between man and God, and that of this newly established relation Christians by faith receive the benefit.
The line of division seems clear enough; but further reflexion will tend to blur it. We will begin by echoing Rashdall’s praise of Abélard, the classic exponent of the subjective theory.
At last we have found a theory of the atonement which thoroughly appeals to reason and to conscience. There is of course nothing absolutely original in the idea. St. Paul is full of the thought. It is set forth in its simplest and purest form in the Johannine writings. It occurs over and over again in the fathers. Whatever else they teach about the death of Christ, they all with one consent teach this – that it was a revelation of the love of God, intended to call forth answering love in man. The theory of Abélard does but isolate and emphasize the element in the preaching of the atonement to which in all ages it has owed its moving and saving power. Whatever were men’s theories about the grounds on which the death of Christ became necessary, it was the love exhibited by Christ in submitting to that death which has really moved the heart, touched the conscience, and regenerated the life of believers.... “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” And, if he who so lays down his life is taken as representing and revealing the character of God, then no other way of ending the earthly life of him in whom God made this supreme self-revelation could so fully embody and symbolize the fundamental thought of Christianity that God is love, nor is any event in the history of the world so calculated to awaken and stimulate that repentance for sin upon which the possibility of forgiveness depends.1
1The Idea of the Atonement, pp. 360 sq.
The eulogy is true, and finely expressed. But let us grant that the essence of the atoning value of Christ’s life and death lies in the fact that they are a declaration or demonstration of God’s love for man. Still we must press the question, how was God’s love demonstrated by that life and death? And then we begin to see that the subjective theory is by itself insufficient, on its own premisses, as an account of the atonement. Two lines of criticism suggest themselves.
(a) If Christ’s life and death are in themselves merely a revelation or display of God’s love, they cannot reveal or display that love which Christian thought has at its highest attributed to God. The love of the living and redeeming God can only be fully revealed and displayed in a divine God. If all we can say of Christ’s human life and death is that they symbolize God’s constant love, and not that they are God=s own act, then the love which they symbolize is after all something different from what the highest Christian faith has held God’s love to be. But if, on the other hand, the life and death of Christ symbolize God=s love because they truly are God’s act, we cannot think of that divine act as a mere gesture which effects nothing beyond the declaration of what was already true before it happened. A revealing gesture is something much less than an act of power.
(b) If the nature of sin and its effects in man are really such as we have taken them to be, a simple display of love, which is not an act effecting something of which man in his sinful condition can avail himself, could not have met man=s need, and therefore would not have been a full demonstration of God’s saving love. Doubtless, in so far as sinful man retains the ability to see and choose the good when it is shown to him, the revelation of love on the cross constitutes by itself the most powerful motive to impel him to do so. And it would be worse than folly to belittle the wonder of the conversions which the revelation of the cross has wrought in this way. Nevertheless, the trouble expressed in the seventh chapter of Romans and in the familiar tag, “video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor”, bears witness to a more subtle influence of sin which no mere revelation can dispel. As long as a theologian finds the prophetic conception of sin to be adequate, he may also be satisfied with the subjective theory of the atonement. But to one who understands the power of sin as St. Paul understood it, that theory can never express the reality of God’s saving act in Jesus Christ.
The truth is that to accept fully Abéard’s affirmation that the cross is the supreme manifestation of God’s love for man must, if we follow out its implications, carry us beyond Abélard’s theory of the atonement.
5. THE CLASSIC OR DRAMATIC THEORY
In what then does the objective element in the atonement consist? How did the life and death of Christ in themselves establish a new relation between man and God, of which man by faith receives the benefits? According to the so-called “classic” theory, God’s love by the cross and resurrection of Christ has won a great and final victory over all the powers of evil; these powers have been deprived of their dominion over man, and man by faith ill Christ is henceforth established in a new and triumphant life of communion with God; even in this world “he tastes the powers of the world to come”.
Undoubtedly language and ideas of this sort have always been familiar to Christian orthodoxy, although, as Bishop Aulén1 points out, from the Middle Ages onwards their full meaning and value have been obscured. That the language in question stands for some vital and central truth, hardly any Christian perhaps would seriously deny. But by itself it lacks precision. It has the great merits of declaring that the atonement is throughout God’s work, and of safeguarding the truth that God was in Christ Jesus reconciling the world to himself. But it is not easy to see how and with what degree of exactness the notions of conflict and victory over an enemy are to be applied. On the one hand, we may take quite seriously the personification of the powers of evil which is at first sight suggested. But if we suppose that such powers have held mankind in bondage, and have now by Christ’s death and resurrection been utterly and finally defeated, it is hard to explain the remarkable vigour which they still apparently display even within the life of the redeemed community of believers. On the other hand, we may take the victory of Christ to mean simply the victory of perfect holiness over all temptation and tendency to sin, a victory which takes away death=s sting and makes death itself the gate of immortality. In that case the enduring power of evil over those who have not yet attained Christ’s holiness is fully accounted for; but the way in which Christ’s victory benefits them requires further explanation. If that victory is no more than a demonstration of the fact that the perfect holiness of love must always triumph over sin and death, it would seem that it provides for us only a supreme example and a moving appeal; and thus our theory of the atonement becomes in principle “subjective” after all.
1Christus Victor.
Our criticism therefore of the “classic” theory is not at all to suggest that it is false, but rather to point out that, like the subjective theory, it is incomplete. We need to know more of what exactly Christ’s victory was. The old forms of the classic theory, that the victory was won by means of a ransom paid to the devil to release mankind, or by deceiving the devil as with a baited hook, certainly supply the lacking precision; but they have never commended themselves for long either to the reason or to the conscience of Christians.
6. THE JURIDICAL THEORY
We turn to the third type of atonement theory, that which suggests that Jesus Christ as man bore the penalty for human sin, or offered satisfaction for it, in our stead.1
1For the purposes of this quite general discussion Anselm’s careful distinction between poena and satisfaction need not concern us.
There seems to be no reason in principle why Christ’s vicarious suffering of the penalty for sin should not be regarded both as a demonstration of God’s love for man, and as a means of his victory over sin and death. For, to quote Harnack’s criticism of Abélard, “is not that love the highest which, by taking the penalty upon itself, reveals at the same time the greatness of the absolution and the greatness of the cancelled guilt?”1 And again, if Christ’s bearing of the penalty is the divinely purposed ground of the exaltation of his manhood to God’s throne and of our own deliverance from the power of evil, may we not truly say that it is the method of God’s victory in Christ? Indeed, it is only when they are thus interpreted that juridical theories of the atonement can have any legitimate place at all in Christian theology. Notoriously the weakest point in the doctrine of St. Anselm, who first stated the juridical theory in a precise form, is that its logic seems to attach too exclusive an importance to the part played by Christ’s manhood in the atoning work. According to this doctrine it is as man that Christ bore the penalty and offered satisfaction for human sin. Thus the vital truth that the whole act of atonement proceeded from God’s love is liable to be obscured, and the notion is suggested that Christ’s sacrifice propitiated God in a way which is quite alien from the thought of the New Testament. Juridical theories must be interpreted in the light of the classic theory, if they are to be made acceptable.
1I take the quotation from J. K. Mozley, The Atonement, p. 133.
St. Paul’s language in several places1 does undoubtedly indicate his belief that Christ on the cross bore the penalty for sin on our behalf. But, if he had been pressed on the point, he would not, I think, have hesitated to declare that it is God’s love which in Christ has provided a way of deliverance from his own wrath. He would certainly have agreed that we must interpret all juridical language about the atonement in the light of the principle that both the cross and its effects are the work of God’s own love.
1E.g., Gal. 3:13; 2 Cor. 5:21.
Granted then that we are to understand the juridical theory as expanding the classic, and not at all as contradicting it, we have still to ask the question: how far and in what way may we believe that Jesus Christ on the cross endured penal suffering in man’s stead?
We must not forget that the theory which we are now considering is in principle juridical rather than sacrificial. It was developed by the Latin theologians of the Middle Ages from the hints contained in St. Paul’s Epistles. It is true of course that St. Paul does use sacrificial language about Christ’s atoning death. But whenever he or any other New Testament writer suggests that Christ bore our sins or the penalty for them, the implied thought about the atonement is juridical, and is really irrelevant to religious ideas which underlay the sin-offerings of the Pentateuch. For there the victims sacrificed for sin were not regarded as bearing the sin, nor as receiving in death the penalty for sin in man’s stead. On the contrary, they were held to be pure from sin, and therefore their blood availed in expiation. The only victim believed to bear the sins of the people was the scapegoat; and exactly for that reason the scapegoat was not sacrificed, because as a sin-bearer it was accursed and could not be offered to God. The body hanged on a tree was certainly not sacrificed.1 And even in Isaiah 53 there is no close or obvious connexion between the words, “the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all”, and the later prophecy, “when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall prolong his days”.2 In considering therefore the doctrine that Christ bore our sins on the cross, we do well to dismiss all sacrificial notions and analogies from our minds.
1Gal. 3:13; Deut. 21:23. 2Isa. 53:6 and 12.
Can we, then, at all apply the notion of penal substitution to Christ’s atoning death? Not if we understand the word “substitution” strictly; and that for two reasons.
(a) It is impossible to maintain that the sufferings which Christ voluntarily endured for man’s sin were the same as those which sinners would have had to endure and must endure if they remain unforgiven, but which through faith in Christ they escape. In what could such suffering endured by Christ, and to be endured by the unrepentant sinner but not by the faithful Christian, consist? It cannot be physical death, or the pain connected with it; for these Christians still have to undergo. And as to any other and more terrible sufferings, to which we may believe that Christ submitted, it is impossible to equate these with any which we can suppose to fall on the guilty and the unrepentant. However we interpret the cry, “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” it can hardly be denied that the suffering here expressed is that of a love which feels itself deserted by God – and that is precisely the kind of suffering which the hardened sinner could never know.
(b) Again, a substitute, strictly speaking, is one who acts or suffers in order that the person whose place he takes may be free to do what he would have done, had he not been under the obligation of which the substitute has relieved him. In other words, the person for whom the substitute acts or suffers is affected by the substitution only negatively, in so far as he is relieved of something which otherwise he would have had to do or undergo. Thus, in the old story of Genesis, the ram was sacrificed as a substitute for Isaac, simply so that Isaac need not be sacrificed. Now I venture to affirm that no Christian has ever really believed that Christ on the cross bore the penalty for sin strictly in substitution for the sinner. In so far as there was any real substitution, the purpose of the crucifixion must have been that the sinner might be unaffected by the cross, except in so far as he would be released from enduring the penalty for sin. But no Christian can seriously affirm that the cross had any such purpose. On the contrary, Christ died in order to raise the sinner from the death of sin to the new life of repentance and fellowship with God.
We conclude therefore that we must not seek to interpret with any logical exactness language which speaks of Christ as having suffered instead of the sinner. Indeed, such a saying as “One died for all, therefore all died”,1 excludes the idea of substitution strictly understood, and signifies rather representation. As we shall see, the notion of Christ’s death as representative is best interpreted as belonging to the sacrificial theory of the atonement rather than to the juridical; but it is probable that St. Paul never made any clear distinction in his own mind between the two. The language of substitution then is but an imperfect attempt to express the truth that in the crucifixion the divine love showed itself willing to endure to the uttermost for man the terrible consequences of sin which in justice should have fallen on the sinner. Christ, we may truly say, endured for us and on our behalf, though not strictly instead of us, what we could never have endured for ourselves.
12 Cor. 5:14.
This vicarious suffering of the divine love moves us to penitence as nothing else could; and it also reconciles our conscience to the fact that the world is not ordered on the principle of the justice which demands that pain should fall on the sinner in proportion to his guilt, and happiness reward the righteous in proportion to his merit. It may even be true that, if we reckon in terms of quantity of pain endured, the innocent and the penitent always suffer more because of sin than the guilty and the hardened. Who shall measure the suffering which evil inflicts on one who loves much, against the suffering of an unrepentant sinner punished for his crime? Which suffered more, St. Peter when he went out and wept bitterly, or Judas when he went away and hanged himself? Pains, like pleasures, differ in quality, and a merely quantitative comparison is fallacious. That is why the justice of rewards and punishments is never really satisfactory. But he who through the atonement understands the law of vicarious suffering, will know why it is that justice, at least in this world, seems so incomplete. It is in order that love by self-sacrifice may win its greatest triumph of redemption.
Nevertheless, in the light of the atonement the law of justice still stands unshaken as a moral principle; and it is the main purpose and value of the juridical theory to emphasize this truth. It is only when the sinner acknowledges that the sufferings which another bears for him were justly his own due, that he can know the penitence which brings salvation. Christ’s atonement therefore does not make the law of none effect. It establishes the law, even while it goes beyond it and exposes its imperfection. Because Christ on the cross suffers what the sinner cannot suffer and yet what it is just that the sinner should suffer, therefore the cross becomes the ground and cause of the penitence which enables the sinner to be forgiven and restored. Justice is satisfied, because the penitent sinner at last recognizes the righteous authority of its law. Love triumphs over justice, because the sinner is delivered from doom. What he has to suffer henceforth is transformed from mere punishment into a discipline gladly accepted because by it he is made one with Christ.
The elaboration of the juridical theory, which brings out this aspect of the atonement, is appropriately the work of Latin-speaking theologians. The mind trained under Roman influences realizes that the impersonal and impartial law of justice must somehow be vindicated. Traces of this conception of the majesty of justice are to be found in St. Paul, especially in Romans; but it is certainly not characteristically Jewish. To the Jew justice was not an abstract and impartial law. Rather it meant the concrete vindication and deliverance of one person, and the concrete condemnation and overthrow of another. The Jew realized all values only in concrete and personal terms. It was his supreme and unique achievement to make religion the establishment of a personal relation to a personal God. But the terms in which he thought were apt to be too narrowly personal. In his triumphs he was constantly guilty of what the Greeks called επιχαιρεχαχία,1 in adversity he was always apt to become “a man with a grievance”. It was left to the Latin mind, in its theology of the atonement, both to vindicate the full majesty of God’s justice and also to utter the cry in which justice is forgotten, “O felix culpa.”
1I.e., literally, “rejoicing over the evils of another”. The “taunt-songs” of the prophets and psalmists would have shocked Plato.
Yet it seems that the juridical theory of the atonement, as we have sought to expound it, remains by itself incomplete. For, according to the only interpretation of it which we have been able to accept, it is still in principle a “subjective” theory. For the atonement is represented as producing its redemptive effect only by stirring man to penitence through his recognition of what Christ has suffered for him. In itself therefore the cross remains only a manifestation or demonstration of God’s love; in itself it leaves unchanged the relation between sinful man and God. The actual change in that relation begins only with man’s penitence which the revelation of the cross produces. St. Paul gave objectivity to his doctrine of the atonement by combining elements of the sacrificial theory with those which belong properly to the juridical. Later theologians have found a strictly objective element within the juridical theory by suggesting that Christ, by bearing the penalty for human sin, actually turned away God’s righteous wrath and so changed God’s attitude to man. But this doctrine is not only theologically intolerable, it is also quite alien from the thought of the New Testament. In the New Testament Christ’s life and death are said to reconcile man to God, but never God to man. It remains for us therefore to consider what is the distinctive contribution of the fourth type of atonement theory, the sacrificial.
7. THE SACRIFICIAL THEORY
Unlike the others, the sacrificial theory finds a systematic and coherent exposition in the New Testament itself, viz., in Hebrews. But two circumstances have combined to prevent this Epistle from taking the place which is its due in the theology of the atonement.
(a) The first is the persistent mistake of supposing that sin-offerings must somehow have been intended to propitiate God by the killing of a victim in the offerer’s stead, an idea which has been a source of endless confusion in the exegesis of the New Testament. The truth is that such an interpretation of sacrifice is characteristic of heathen, and not of Jewish, religion. The ram sacrificed instead of Isaac is of course a case of substitution. But in the form in which the story has come down to us, the object of the sacrifice is not propitiation; it is simply a proof of Abraham’s obedience. In the New Testament, moreover, the story is never mentioned in connexion with Christ’s sacrifice, although the author of Hebrews cites it as a type of resurrection.1 Again, in the law of the firstborn there seems to be another ease of an animal victim substituted for a human life;2 and in the story of David there is an unmistakable allusion to a sacrifice intended to propitiate God.3 But these have nothing to do with the sin-offerings of the later law. Scholars now seem to be fairly agreed that the object of the sin-offerings was expiation rather than propitiation, and that the victim was regarded as the offerer’s representative rather than as his substitute. The intention was that the blood, or offered life, of a sinless victim should cleanse the offerers, or things used in worship, from the defilement of sin. The sacrifice thus changed the relation of man to God by operating directly, not upon God, but upon man.4 Dodd has argued powerfully that the word ιλάσχεσθαι and its cognates, which in heathen writers almost always signify propitiation and are sometimes so rendered in the English Bible, nevertheless usually in the Greek Bible signify expiation.5 The Object of the verb ιλάσχεσθαι is usually, not God, but sin; and in the New Testament the verb is never used with God as its object. Be that as it may, the author of Hebrews clearly understood the object of sacrifice for sin to be the cleansing away of defilement by the blood of a sinless victim.
1Heb. 11:17–19. 2Exod. 13:13. 31 Sam. 26:19.
4I do not, of course, mean to exclude the idea that it was the blood of a life offered to God which effected expiation.
5See his Commentary on Romans, pp. 54 sq.; also J.T.S., Vol XXXII, pp. 352–60.
(b) The second reason for the failure to do justice to the theory of the atonement set forth in Hebrews is of a different kind. As we have already noticed,1 the austerity of the author=s religious temperament makes him reluctant to use the Pauline language of love and grace in connexion with God. Although he clearly teaches that Christ is the divine Son through whom the worlds were made, he presents the earthly life of the Son only as the life of perfect human obedience culminating in the death on the cross. The connexion of Christ’s self-sacrifice with love, divine or human, is never explicitly made, and has to be supplied by an extension of the author’s thought.
1See above, Chapter XII.
What, then, is the essence of his theory? We may render it somewhat freely as follows.
The real intention of the old sacrifices for sin was that the blood of an unblemished victim, representing a stainless life offered to God in death, might be applied so as to remove defilements caused by sin, in order that man might draw near to God in worship, and communion between man and God be established. In these sacrifices the victim was offered by a priest who was appointed by God to represent the people before him. But the ordinances of the old covenant were imperfect for two main reasons.
(a) The lives of the victims were unstained by sin only because, being animals, they were innocent. The only blood, or sacrificed life, which can really avail to take away sin is that of one who has conquered temptation. It was therefore in the nature of the case impossible that the blood of bulls and goats could ever cleanse man’s conscience.
(b) The animal victims were sacrificed against their will. But the only life which can really avail for cleansing, is a life which has undergone death in free and perfect obedience to God. It must therefore be self-offered. In the perfect sacrifice for sin, priest and victim must be the same person.
A further requirement for a perfect sacrifice remains to be noted. The life offered, while it must not be below the level of human capacities, nevertheless must not be strictly superhuman. Only the life which has conquered temptation in man’s own nature can thereafter apply to that nature in other men a fully sanctifying power. The one therefore who is to be the perfect priest and victim must himself be human.
At all these points the Epistle exhibits the perfection and finality of Christ’s atoning sacrifice. He is the God-appointed priest and victim who offered himself to God for us. He was a man, tempted in all points as we are, yet without sin. He was completely obedient to the Father’s will even unto death. And thus he made his death to be the one all-sufficient sacrifice of the perfect human life, which, having passed through death, becomes the one availing power for sanctification. The blood of Christ’s offered life is sprinkled on our sin-stained consciences. It enters our souls and cleanses them with its own triumphant purity, so that we also can draw near to God and offer ourselves in a like obedience.
Christ, then, has indeed done something for us which we could never have done for ourselves. In that sense he has suffered vicariously. But there is no hint of substitution in the thought. Christ’s sacrifice avails for us because the sanctifying blood, the symbol of his offered life, is sprinkled upon us his people, and restores to us that communion with God which enables us to follow him who is our forerunner and pioneer as well as our high priest. Nor is there any suggestion that Christ’s sacrifice has propitiated God. For the perfectly obedient life self-offered avails to change, not God’s attitude to man but man’s attitude to God, and to remove the barrier between man and God which man=s sin has erected.
Thus interpreted the theory of Hebrews supplies a firm basis for the doctrine of an objective element in the atonement. We are enabled to see in Christ’s death something in principle more than the most appealing display of God’s love for man; we now see it as the means whereby Christ’s offered life becomes the power of a perfect and glorified manhood, which from the unseen world can penetrate and transform human souls. Christ has actually opened for us a new way into heaven, and made available a new power to enable us to tread it. True, temptation, suffering and death lie before the Christian still. What the Schoolmen called the poenalitates praesentis vitae1 are not removed; the Christian’s obedience still has to be made complete by his submission to them. Yet the atoning sacrifice of Christ has in itself made a real and objective difference, beyond the mere revealing of God’s constant love. It has made available for Christians communion in and with that perfect humanity of their representative and high priest, which has already through its sacrifice entered the heavenly world.
1These poenalitates are distinguished from the poena, or direct punishment, for sin, as those “penal conditions” of life in this world, to which even the redeemed and forgiven must submit.
The one conspicuous point of incompleteness in the atonement theory of Hebrews is its failure to make evident how the whole work of atonement is from beginning to end the act of God’s love. We miss in Hebrews just that vital element which St. Paul and St. John so clearly supply. The reason for this defect is probably to be found, as we have suggested, in the author’s temperament. Perhaps, moreover, he regarded his theory of the atonement as a supplement to Pauline theology, and thought it the less necessary to reaffirm explicitly that aspect of the truth which St. Paul had already made unmistakably clear.
8. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
There is a real and important distinction between “subjective” and “objective” theories of the atonement. The former see in the atoning life and death of Christ only the demonstration of a divine love which had been real from the beginning; they find the saving effect of that life and death only in the penitence to which the sinner is freshly stirred by what they reveal. “Objective” theories, on the other hand, see in the atoning life and death an act which in itself effects a change in the relation of man to God; and according to them this change is antecedent to the faith and penitence whereby the sinner is made partaker of its benefits. Each of these two broad types of theory is specially relevant to a particular conception of the nature of sin. Those theologians who think “subjective” theories sufficient are on the whole those who, like the prophets, regard sin mainly as a matter of personal reatus, i.e., as something for which the sinner is personally responsible as a free agent. Those, on the other hand, who maintain “objective” theories are on the whole those who see in sin a corrupting vitium, a moral or spiritual disease in human nature which man’s will is powerless to overcome. It was as a vitium or taint that the priestly religion of sacrifice treated sin, though very often it failed to distinguish between a taint that really affected man’s moral and spiritual being, and one that was a matter merely of ceremonial uncleanness.
It is obviously consistent with this analysis that among types of “objective” theory we should have found the most satisfactory to be that which most clearly bases itself on sacrificial ideas, and finds in the sin-offerings of the Old Testament a true foreshadowing of the atonement. Juridical theories, we have suggested, can only defend themselves against theological criticism by abandoning the claim to be “objective”. But this point is easily obscured by the failure to distinguish clearly between ideas and language which are properly juridical, and those which are properly sacrificial.
When, however, the juridical and sacrificial theories have been distinguished from one another, and each expressed in its most acceptable form, there seems to be no good reason for holding them to be mutually exclusive. The truth that the cross shows the willingness of divine love to suffer the consequences of sin in man’s behalf, need not exclude the further truth that on the cross the sinless manhood was offered so that, having passed into the heavenly world, its sanctifying and life-giving power might be available to sinful man. This latter doctrine is robbed of all unethical and quasi-magical implications, if it be recognized that the new power thus made available only becomes actually availing when it is humbly and thankfully received as God’s gift. When it is thus received, what it bestows is the grace of Christlike life.
Taken then in conjunction with one another, the truths of the juridical and sacrificial theories do but give greater precision to the truth of the “classical” theory that by the cross God in manhood has won the victory which redeems mankind from the powers of evil. And thus, finally, the fullest truth is found in the great principle vindicated by Abélard that the cross is the supreme demonstration of God’s love for man.
Chapter XXII – The Last Things (General)
In the previous chapters we have considered the Christian doctrine concerning the evil from which man is to be saved and the relevance of the gospel of the atonement to his need. We must now turn our attention from the way of salvation to its end.
In the two great traditions of thought and experience, the Hebraic and the Hellenic, which have principally influenced Christian theology, we find two quite different ways of conceiving the relation of the perfect world to this world in which and from which we crave salvation. The first employs mainly the symbols of temporal relation, the second those of spatial.
1. TWO WAYS OF CONCEIVING THE PERFECT WORLD
No doubt the Hebrew religion, like all others, started with a spatially conceived distinction between heaven above, God’s dwelling place, and the earth below, the abode of men. Nevertheless, the notion of God’s covenant and promise, which is the peculiar feature of the Hebrew religion, constantly turned the eye of faith towards the future. In the earlier prophetic writings it would seem that the hope of God’s chosen is strictly temporal, and is directed to a blessed time when God will grant to future generations of Israelites the glories of an earthly empire. When this hope waxed dim, some prophets and sages tried vainly to show that God rewarded the righteous individual with happiness and prosperity before his death. But the common facts of human experience have always been too strong for theodicies of this kind. And finally, in the age of the apocalyptists, the wonderful persistence of the pious Jew’s hope in Jehovah led Hebrew theology to make a new cosmic distinction of equal importance with that between heaven above and earth below, viz., that between this present age or world and the age or world to come. This present age is that of imperfection, strife, and suffering, in which the righteous remain for the most part “poor and needy”. But this age will come to an end, the whole world order will be changed, and the universe refashioned by a great intervention of God. Then there will be a new heaven and a new earth. Death will be no more. Those who have been loyal to Jehovah in this age will rise again from the tomb to partake of endless happiness, and those who have been his enemies in this age will also rise again to an endless punishment. In this way the state of being, which in the popular language of Christianity is called “heaven”, is conceived as wholly future; but, properly speaking, this state is to be identified, not with heaven, but with the new heaven and the new earth which belong to the age or world to come. At the same time, the original spatially conceived distinction between heaven and earth endures in Hebraic thought and is never abolished. For the whole hope of Israel depends on the belief that Jehovah, the creator and ruler of all, abides in his heaven throughout all ages, and thus brings his purposes to fulfillment. It has been left for a modern philosopher to place all perfection so entirely in the future as to declare that God himself has not yet come into being.1
1S. Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity.
Hellenic thought, on the other hand, developed quite differently the same primitive distinction between heaven above and earth below. The most complete and effective contrast to Hebrew eschatology is found in Platonic idealism. To Plato there is no perfection strictly in the future. History has no end or goal; it was indeed commonly conceived by Hellenic thinkers as consisting of an endless series of revolving cycles, each of which left things at its close very much as they had been at the beginning. Plato speaks of the perfect world as εχει (there), opposing it to the ένθαδε (here) of our present experience. But, though he does not believe in time, Plato does not take even his spatial metaphors very seriously. His real thought is that the perfect world is the world of changeless and eternal reality behind and beyond phenomena. Of this world our spatio-temporal experience is in part a moving image and in part a veil. Salvation depends on the power of the philosopher-saint to penetrate behind its illusory appearances and to gaze on the vision of the eternal. The perfect world must be already real: it is indeed the only full reality. But the knowledge of it is still future for the individual, in so far as the latter is not yet sufficiently freed from illusion to apprehend it. And the seeker after truth may look forward to the death of his material body as an event which will deliver him from what still holds his spirit in bondage to the world of sense.
2. CHRISTIAN ESCHATOLOGY
When we pass to Christian eschatology, we find that in the New Testament at least the Hebraic type of thought is predominant. To the first generation of Christians the resurrection of Christ was the sign that he was shortly to return from heaven in glory to bring in the new age or world, and to wind up the present age in judgement. It is true that in Hebrews and St. John’s Gospel and First Epistle the expectation of the second coming has passed into the background; and in Hebrews especially there are unmistakable traces of Alexandrian Platonism. On the whole, Hebrews emphasizes the thought of Christ as our pioneer who has opened the way into the unseen world which we are to follow. St. John speaks mainly of our present communion with the living Christ which has already given us eternal life in him. Yet, even where Hellenic influence is present in the New Testament, it is only superficial. New Testament writers do not look forward to a long, still less to an unending, future of temporal history in imperfect worlds. Nor do they ever hint that the imperfection of this world makes it illusory. What to the author of Hebrews is partial or shadowy is a partial or shadowy indication of what God is hereafter to bring to pass, rather than, as it was to Plato, the veil of a reality timelessly present. The characteristic thought of the New Testament is that with the resurrection of Christ the great cosmic change, which is to be consummated in the age to come, has already begun. That is the real reason why the exact date of the end does not matter to Christians. For in their communion with the risen Lord they already partake of the life of the new world. In the Christian community the powers of the age to come are already at work. At present the powers of evil in this age are resisting desperately. But the conflict is, as it were, “too hot to last”; and the Christian can await the issue in confident loyalty, without anxiety as to the precise length of time involved.
The actual course of history has disappointed the general expectation of the first Christians as to the temporal nearness of the end. And the eschatology of the Catholic tradition has had perforce to adapt itself to the facts. Belief in the second advent of Christ, the final judgement, the general resurrection, and the consummation of all things as the future goal of history has been retained; but these have come to be thought of as “a divine far-off event”, indefinitely postponed. Meanwhile the note of urgency, so characteristic of the New Testament, has been preserved by a doctrine of particular or individual judgement at death. At death the destiny of the individual soul to salvation or perdition is fixed for ever. There can be no “second chance” in the hereafter. But it does not follow that the condition after death of all saved souls, nor perhaps of all lost souls, will be the same. The souls of saints are admitted at once to heaven and the vision of God, and they await the final day with Christ in glory. Others of the saved must be purified from sin by sufferings of longer or shorter duration or of greater or less intensity in the intermediate state of purgatory. On the other hand, in the case of the lost it has been found impossible to distinguish clearly between their state before and after the last day. But later theology has speculated much as to possible differences in their final condition. In the Roman Catholic Church it is now held to be at least a legitimate opinion that those who have failed of salvation without having incurred the guilt of grave sin on their own part will attain to a state of what may be called “natural happiness”, though they are cut off from heaven and the vision of God.
It is evident that in all such speculations as to graded distinctions in the condition of souls after death, whether in the intermediate or in the final state, there is no word of scripture to which appeal can be made. They tend, in spite of orthodox insistence that the main issue of salvation or perdition is settled at death for every man, to make us think of the last things as but the culmination of a universal process which is now going on, and which for immortal souls is continued after death. The end then appears as that ideal state of equilibrium which would exist when every soul has reached its own fit and proper place in the universe and there is no further cause of movement. Such a notion has obvious affinity with the general thought of Hellenism that the order of the universe depends less on the personal will of a God who achieves a purpose through the history of his creation, than on an impersonal principle of reason which, as the immanent law of reality, fulfills itself everywhere. To the religion of the Catholic mystics, influenced as it was by neo-Platonism, the idea of the last day at the end of history appears to be almost wholly irrelevant.
Quite different is the fundamental idea underlying the eschatology of the New Testament. In it the end means essentially the manifest victory of God, the re-creation of the universe so as to be the perfect expression of his goodness, and the consummated glory of those whom faith in the risen Christ has already delivered from the powers of evil in this present world.
No doubt this thought of the final victory is closely connected in the Bible with that of the last judgement, and in some apocryphal writings the latter thought overshadows the former. The apocalyptists looked forward to a universal judgement, pictured as a great assize, at which God’s loyal servants were to be rewarded with everlasting happiness in the new world, and the wicked consigned to everlasting torment. To some of the latest of these writers, who lived shortly before or even at the beginning of the Christian era, it seemed that the vast majority of mankind must incur the latter doom. To the author of 2 Esdras in the Apocrypha the last day appeared even more as an hour of doom for sinners than of real victory for God. Pictures of a not very different sort have found their way into certain chapters of the Revelation, and from this source they have been taken up and reproduced by orthodox artists and teachers in the Christian Church. The detailed imagery of the last day with which medieval painting has made us so painfully familiar is entirely derived, through the Revelation, from the apocalyptic writings of the later Judaism. There is nothing in it which is distinctively Christian, except what is from another point of view the least Christian feature of all, viz., the representation of Jesus Christ as the judge who consigns the bulk of mankind to everlasting torment.
Nevertheless, the really ultimate event to which the Bible as a whole looks forward is not so much a last judgement as a final victory of God. God cannot fail. In the end he must accomplish his whole purpose and fulfill all his promises. Such is the faith in which the Bible was written. The second coming is to be the manifest completion of God’s universal triumph, and the final deliverance of his chosen into glorious communion with himself. Certainly this triumph involves the utter discomfiture of every enemy, and the punishment of every disloyal servant; nor is there any hint that Christ’s reign will ever be universally acknowledged before he comes again. But, outside the passages in Revelation already mentioned, the only allusion to everlasting punishment is in the parable of the Sheep and Goats in St. Matthew.1 St. Paul, even when his anger against the Jews is fiercest, never speaks of anything more than “aeonian destruction”.2 In St. Paul’s mind the last judgement is clearly the penultimate, rather than the absolutely ultimate, event. The end is when the last enemy has been destroyed, and Christ shall deliver up the Kingdom to God the Father, that God may be all in all.3 As for the teaching of Jesus, it is sufficient for our present purpose to point out that he bade his disciples look and pray for the hallowing of the Father’s name and the coming of his Kingdom as in heaven so on earth. And where should we seek to learn his real mind upon this subject if not in the Lord’s Prayer?
1Matt. 25:41, 46. It would be very hazardous to attribute the exact equivalent of the expression χόλασις αιώνιος to Christ himself.
22 Thess. 1:9. The absence of any suggestion of everlasting torment is the more remarkable, because St. Paul is writing under the stress of passionate emotion caused by Jewish slanders at Thessalonica, and it is hard to deny a note of vindictiveness in his language.
31 Cor. 15:24–8.
We conclude therefore that “the last thing” for the Christian is something different, not only from the ultimate reality or perfectly rational order as conceived by Hellenic idealism, but also from the future world as pictured by Jewish apocalyptists, in which the endless felicity of some human souls is made to correspond with the equally unending misery of others. Final judgement there must be; but there must also be something beyond it, viz., the fulfillment of God’s purpose in a universe which in every corner mirrors and expresses the praise of his goodness. That purpose cannot finally be fulfilled in a world where the sentences of pain decreed by justice are equally unending with the gifts of love. We must picture the final world as one in which every enemy has been destroyed, rather than one in which enemies are kept perpetually alive by God’s judgement in order to be perpetually cut off from his mercy. The world to come must be a world in which judgement and penalty are past.
3. THE PROBLEM OF THE FUTURITY OF THE WORLD TO COME
The obvious difficulty – and indeed impossibility – is to find any terms in which the ontological relation of the world to come to this world can be adequately expressed. The life of the world to come must be future in more than that purely subjective sense which is suggested when we suppose that that life can be entered at any time by a soul sufficiently purified to apprehend the eternal. For the Christian this supposition is but a half-truth. For, though God is indeed eternal and communion with him is possible for his saints at any time, yet the full glory of the world to come does not exist to be apprehended until God’s purpose in his whole creative and redemptive work has been fully achieved. On the other hand, the world to come cannot be simply future, in the sense that its arrival can in principle be dated, though the date is unknown. For in that case the world to come would be thought of simply as another temporal world, and not really as eternal at all. What is eternal cannot be related to what is temporal in simply temporal terms. Yet a Christian, who believes in the reality of the eternal God’s purpose and work through time, cannot dispense altogether with temporal terms when he thinks of their accomplishment.
4. THE MEANING OF THE WORD “LAST”
We are thinking about “the last things”; and there is an ambiguity in the meaning of the word “last”, of which we may do well at this point to remind ourselves.
It may mean “last in time”, and this is at least part of the meaning which we usually give to it in speaking of “the last things”. But it only needs a little reflexion to show that the notion of something which happens strictly last in time is self-contradictory. For if we think of it as happening in time at all, we must go on to think of a time when it will have happened, and therefore of something coming after it. Yet the notion of an unending series of events in time is equally unthinkable, if we try to give to the notion a concrete and not a merely mathematical significance. It is really only a negation which marks our inability to think of something absolutely last. No doubt we may agree to call “last in time” any event which our minds at their furthest stretch cannot penetrate beyond. But even then, so long as we think of that event as in time, it remains one among all the other events which have happened since the world began. There seems to be no reason why what is last in time should as such have any special priority in importance. Suppose a millennium or golden age is going to arrive on earth at some future date, let us say A.D. 100,000, and that we agree not to ask what is going to happen afterwards: why should this age, because it comes afterwards, be supposed in any way to outweigh or make worth while all the other ages of suffering and toil and sin which went before? I have never heard a serious answer to this question attempted by any of those who make a religion of mere social reform or revolution. Nor on the other hand do I understand how far those who believe in a literal second coming of Christ on earth really regard this event as one historical happening, viz., the last, among all others. They certainly seem to attribute to it an importance which merely as an event in time it cannot carry.
There is, however, another and a fuller meaning which the word “last” bears in common speech. Like the word “final”, it may refer not simply to that which comes after everything else, but to that which completes a process by bringing it to its purposed end. In so far as the last event in a series is the one which fulfills the purpose which has directed the series throughout, it ceases to be merely one event among the others, and acquires a unique importance of its own. But clearly it derives that importance from what is beyond the mere series of events considered as such, and the nature of the special relation which is thus established between the last event and the others is determined by the nature of the purpose in the fulfillment of which the series ends.
Two illustrations will make clear the application of these abstract statements. The last or finishing touch given to a work of art does not at all derive its special importance from the fact that it happens to come after all the others, but from the fact that it completes the whole. In this case the purpose is only fulfilled if all the touches from the first to the last make a simultaneous contribution in their effects to the whole work which they have produced. Thus the series of acts by which a work of art is made, if it is considered merely as a temporal series of events which succeed one another, cannot account for the work of art at all. The second illustration is of a different kind. Suppose a man who is in London purposes to get to Edinburgh. His travelling from one place to the other is again a series of successive events of which the last, viz., his arrival in Edinburgh, may be said to have the special importance of fulfilling the purpose. But in this case the particular events which preceded the last make no present contribution to that fulfillment. If the man arrives in Edinburgh, his purpose of getting there is fulfilled, no matter which of the many possible routes he may have followed. The journey is a mere incident of the past, which has no further importance for the purpose as soon as Edinburgh is reached. We may express the difference between the two kinds of purpose exemplified in the two illustrations by saying that while the artist’s purpose is expressive, the traveller’s is merely efficient: the process of the artist’s work aims at expressing something, whereas the process of the traveller’s journey aims merely at effecting something. But both cases have this element in common. The last event or act, which achieves the purpose, is as much a beginning as it is an end. It does not really achieve the end, unless it initiates a fulfillment: that is why it derives its special importance from what is beyond the series of events of which it is the last. A work of art destroyed in the moment of completion could hardly be said to fulfill the artist’s aim. A traveller who dropped dead as he set foot on Waverley platform could hardly be said to have achieved his purpose in going to Edinburgh.
We may therefore formulate the following conclusions. When the word “last” is used in relation to purpose, “the last thing” does not denote simply or mainly the thing which comes after all others in a series, but that which fulfils the purpose of the whole. And fulfillment means not merely the end of a series, but also the beginning of that state of achievement or perfection which is relative to the purpose of the series. The things then which Christian theology calls “the last” are so called mainly because they fulfill the purpose of this world process by bringing into existence that state of perfection which the Creator originally designed. Whether or no they may be in part regarded as being themselves events in the temporal or historical series, they derive their importance from what is beyond that series; and their relation to all events, or all other events, in the series is determined by the nature of the Creator’s purpose. For man they mark the transition from temporal effort or imperfection either into the full fruition of eternal life or into the irrevocable loss of it. It is not for nothing that the last and most eschatological book of the Bible closes with the vision of the new Jerusalem.
5. SUGGESTIONS OF A CHRISTIAN METAPHYSIC
What, then, a Christian metaphysic asks of us is to try to conceive the whole reality of the time process in relation to the Creator’s purpose, the inception and fulfillment of which lie beyond that process. Time is real, not an illusion, because God really has a purpose in creation, and really works to fulfill it. But, because the purpose and work are God’s, they have an absolute fulfillment which is beyond time. The fulfillment of human purposes is always in time, which is only another way of saying that it is always relative and imperfect and never final. Every such fulfillment is the beginning of another purpose, and no satisfaction is complete or enduring, while life goes on. The artist who has finished one work, loses interest in it and puts it aside to begin another. The traveller who wants to go to Edinburgh, wants to do something else as soon as he gets there. God, we humbly believe, wants to do something in and with this world; the doctrines of impassibility which will not permit such an affirmation, we must reject. So far, therefore, time is real even to God. But God’s work must reach a fulfillment and satisfaction which are absolute and complete; and therefore we must say, in spite of the apparent contradiction, that time is not a final reality to God.
The relation of “the last things” to the historical process and events of this world is determined by the nature of the Creator’s purpose. His purpose is to express his own goodness in the created world. Therefore in the fulfillment of purpose the past events of the process are not simply left behind, but abide in making their contribution to the goodness of the final whole. Nevertheless, this world being infected and corrupted with evil, the divine purpose can only be achieved by an act of re-creation and through the breaking up of this world order in order to establish another. On the other hand, this breaking up cannot be an act of sheer or absolute destruction; for even the first imperfect and sin-stained creation must enhance the glory of the perfect world which is to be – God does not fail, and he saves this world, though he judges and condemns. It is this fundamental antinomy which the Christian doctrines of redemption, final judgement, and resurrection strive by their symbolism to reconcile. This temporal world is a world of growth, which is in itself good and expressive of its creator’s goodness, and is yet marred by evil everywhere. At the last therefore the growth must be altogether cut off, so that the harvest may be garnered and the tares burned. There can be no gradual evolution or transformation of this world into the next, or of the temporal into the eternal. And yet the harvest of eternity is the harvest reaped and garnered from this world, in which and for which the Son of God was content to die. And those who by faith in him are willing to surrender all this world=s life and goodness in the spirit of his love, are those in whom the life and fellowship of the world to come are already real. Thus by the act of willing sacrifice, which is the supreme expression of love, the inevitable death, which is the judgement on this world=s universal and sinful imperfection, is converted to be the means of resurrection into the glory of the world to come, which includes the restoration and perfection of all that in this world’s life was truly God’s creation.
Meanwhile we have to remember that real time is measured, not by clocks or calendars or astronomical statistics, but by the process of God’s work. According to Genesis the “days” of creation are constituted by what God does in them, and in the Bible generally the word “day” often means, not the interval between the rising and the setting of the sun, but rather some notable occasion, especially one on which God’s work is revealed. The greatest of God’s works revealed to us, the work which takes all the time of history, is in his dealings with man. The greatest “moments” or “days” of that work are marked by the creation of man in God’s image, by the incarnation and resurrection of the Son of God, and by the final establishment of God’s perfect kingdom in which the redeemed are glorified for ever.
If we may take the foregoing paragraphs to represent in more abstract terms something of the truth which the eschatological imagery of the Bible symbolizes, it is evident that the notions of a last day and a second advent in the future are not to be understood literally at all. Nevertheless these notions stand for a vital truth which Platonism can never express, viz., that the end of salvation is achieved by God’s completing act in a fellowship of redeemed souls in a universe which is at once a new world and the perfection of the old. And what Christ has revealed as the nature of God’s purpose throws some light on the problem of the futurity of the world to come. From one point of view the end must be deferred, until the fruits of Christ’s atoning work in this world can be fully reaped, or until, to use St. Paul’s words, the πλήρωμα των έθνων be brought in.1 But on the other hand the imminence of the end, which is more constantly emphasized in the New Testament, symbolizes that for each individual and generation “the time is short”. Men must repent and accept the gospel, or the opportunity of salvation will have gone by for ever. If we measure the duration of God’s whole work by our reckoning of historical time, it seems that it takes a length of time which perhaps hardly even astronomers can compute. But we may not therefore infer that there remains for each generation of human souls, even if we postulate life after physical death for them all, an indefinitely long future in which further opportunities will be given or other avenues to salvation opened. Just because the life of the world to come transcends all human measurements of temporal sequence or relation, the end, which in general human history is indefinitely distant, is in spiritual reality incalculably close. For God’s final appeal and offer of salvation have been made in Christ. No further opportunity can be imagined. Response must be immediate, or it may be too late. In spiritual reality time is to be measured by God’s work. And in the cross and resurrection of Christ his last act for man’s redemption has been wrought, his last word spoken. There remains on man’s part either acceptance or else rejection of a work of love, which, because it is final and all-sufficient, can never be repeated or renewed. However long history may last in years Anno Domini, the eternal world has drawn finally near to man in Christ. Because there is nothing left for God still to do in redemption, “the last time” has already begun; and the true duration of its opportunity is not to be measured in terms of general history, but rather by the fact that in the risen victorious Christ the world to come already confronts the soul. Nevertheless, we may still say that, as long as the time of this world endures for any soul, its opportunity endures also; for the God revealed in Jesus will never remove the chance of penitence from those who in time may still be changed.
1Rom. 11:25. The Greek words, meaning “full number or complement of the Gentiles or peoples”, are not exactly translatable into English.
Chapter XXIII – Judgement and Final Condemnation
Let us agree that all Christian teaching about “the day of judgement” has the value of a parable, and not that of so-called “literal truth”. Nevertheless, the theologian is not absolved from the duty of seeking to determine, as closely as he can, wherein the essential truth of the parable consists.
1. THE NOTION OP TRIAL INAPPLICABLE TO THE LAST DAY
How far is imagery derived from human law courts at all applicable to God’s final treatment of human souls? The operation of justice in a law court contains three distinct stages. First, there is the trial, in which the actual facts concerning which judgement is to be passed are as clearly as possible established. Secondly, there is the verdict, which is the judgement proper, pronouncing the guilt or innocence of the person or persons whose conduct is being tried. Thirdly, there is the sentence, which enforces the verdict by the punishment, more or less severe, of the guilty party.
The moment we seek to draw any analogy between such legal proceedings and God’s final action towards men, one fact is immediately evident. The trial, as a process separate from the facts to be tried, is necessary only for the due information of judge and jury. It is needed only because judge and jury are men limited in knowledge and discernment. Where God is judge, no such trial is thinkable at all. And it is to be remarked that in the gospel parables which are usually supposed to have an application to the last judgement, there is no hint of any trial at all, except that sometimes the accused person=s own words are made to manifest the justice of the verdict. In the parable of the Wheat and Tares it is assumed that at the time of harvest there is no difficulty in separating the tares from the wheat; and in that of the Sheep and Goats the story begins with the separation of those to be condemned from those to be saved already made. According to the general teaching of the New Testament the real time of human trial is now. In so far as it is concerned with trial, judgement is present rather than future. The gospel inevitably tries every soul to which it is brought, and the soul is inevitably discriminated towards salvation or condemnation according to its response. The real trial is not a process which takes place after the facts of the case have happened; it is a process which accompanies the facts as they happen, constitutes their eternal meaning, and determines their abiding consequences. Once the process of human response to God is complete, once its character in any human soul is finally fixed, there is no place left for anything but God’s verdict. And the verdict is inevitable; it must be what it is. To talk of a merciful verdict is nonsense. The God of love cannot treat the ultimate rejection of love as though it were not rejection. Otherwise he would be as unloving as unrighteous.
2. VERDICT AND SENTENCE
The relation of verdict to sentence raises a more difficult problem for theology. How far can we suppose that the verdict of the last judgement may issue in a sentence of punishment? In order to answer this question, we must first ask, what is the significance and function of punishment in human society?
In human society unchecked wrongdoing inevitably leads not only to general unhappiness but finally to the dissolution of the society itself. It is arguable that a similar result follows in the ease of the individual wrongdoer. In so far as it does so, spiritual pain and death may be regarded as consequences of sin, in the same way that physical pain and death are consequences of disease. But this analogy between the physical and the moral life, though it may be true, is incomplete. For sin, being a moral and not a physical phenomenon, is not related to its results simply as cause to effect. Sin, in so far as it involves guilt (reatus), is a free act of choice on the part of a responsible agent. And therefore its disastrous consequences, in so far as they fall upon the sinner, may be viewed, not merely as effects of his wrong action, but also as just punishment or retribution for it. And they may still be so viewed, even if they are at the same time natural effects of the sin, and do not arise from the intervention of any agent who has the express purpose of punishing. When a self-indulgent man suffers from the results of his self-indulgence, or a habitual liar finds that others will not trust him, the suffering is in each case truly a punishment for sin, though it is also a natural and inevitable consequence of it.
On the other hand, punishment inflicted by a deliberately punitive act differs from the “natural punishment” just described in having something about it which is at once artificial and dramatic.1 It is not in the same way an effect produced by wrongdoing; and the pain inflicted seems to be a sort of symbolic representation of that inevitable consequence which will righteously overtake the wrongdoer in the long run, if he persists in wrongdoing. Because lawfully inflicted punishment always has this artificial and dramatic character, it can never be justified solely as retribution. Retributive indeed it must be: otherwise it would not be punishment. But, in order to be justified, it must have some other aim as well. That aim may be to deter the wrongdoer from his evil way, while there is still time to save him from pursuing it to the end. Or it may be to deter others from following his bad example, and so to safeguard the society of which he is a member. Or it may be publicly to declare that the society as a whole is on the side of righteousness, and is able to maintain its cause. But in every case the justification for the inflicted punishment is incomplete, unless the punishment has some purpose looking towards a future in which the cause of righteousness needs vindication. If there be no such purpose, if punishment be solely retributive and looks only towards the past, then there is no justification for any artificial or dramatic infliction of it. Apart from the forward looking purpose of punishment, the wrongdoer had better be left to suffer in the end from the consequences of his own acts.
1I am conscious that my whole discussion of punishment, and in particular this and the following sentence, owes much to what I have learned in conversation from Sir Walter Moberly, who, it is to be hoped, will soon give us the fruits of his long study of the subject.
Now punishment which is absolutely final, as is that associated with the last judgement, cannot have any forward looking purpose. Being therefore wholly right and just, it must be simply the inevitable consequence of the sinner’s own acts and of the character which they have formed in him. Thus there can be no thought of any intervention of God to punish at the last day. God’s final verdict, because it is final, must be also his sentence. The verdict of condemnation does but declare the truth, and its consequences, whatever they may be, need no further act to enforce them.
3. THE NEW TESTAMENT ON DIVINE INTERVENTION
It is fundamentally in accordance with the theology of the New Testament to affirm that the purpose of God’s intervention in human affairs is always to save and deliver, although the salvation and deliverance may involve the condemnation and destruction of those who resist God. St. John states a great principle of doctrine in the words “God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved.”1 Professor Dodd has argued convincingly2 that St. Paul, on the whole, understands the divine Wrath, not as the personal attitude of God towards sinners,3 but rather as a sort of dramatic symbol for the operation of those divinely ordained laws of the universe according to which sin brings punishment upon itself as its consequence. Dodd’s argument is based on St. Paul’s use of the word όργη. His general conclusion may be supported by pointing out that whereas St. Paul can speak of the end of sinners as being the death which sin “works” (i.e., produces), or which is “the wages of sin”, he could never speak of the end of the redeemed as being a life which anything in them either produces or deserves. On the contrary eternal life and salvation are the free gift of God’s love, the direct result of his personal action in intervening to deliver. Passages which seem to attribute to God a similarly personal activity in intervening in order to punish, must surely be understood as expressing in a vivid and dramatic way the truth that by the operation of the spiritual and moral order of the universe sin must in the end bring the punishment of destruction upon the sinner’s head. Even the medieval doctrine of hell might be justified as a dramatization of this sort, were it not that its pictures of unending torment seem to suggest a directly false idea of God. Such pictures have certainly proved to be on the whole ineffective. It is really impossible to make Satan cast out Satan, even by using him to terrify men out of their sins. St. Paul, it is to be noticed, only speaks of delivering a sinner to Satan as a disciplinary measure with a remedial purpose.4
1John 3:17. 2See his note on Rom. 1:18.
32 Thess. 1:6 to 10, seems to be an exception, though the word όργη does not occur there.
41 Cor. 5:5; 1 Tim. 1:20.
The significance of Christ’s own teaching upon this subject must be estimated by its general tenor, due allowance being made for the doctrinal tendencies and interests which are characteristic of each evangelist.1 On the whole our Lord seems to have accepted the eschatological imagery with which his hearers were familiar, and certainly to have avoided all appearance of palliating the terrible consequences of sin or of minimizing its danger. But his main purpose seems to have been to change radically men=s ideas of what the sin is which God’s judgement most utterly condemns. He sought, not to make God’s punishment of sin seem less real or terrible, but to convince men that it is sins against love which are most in danger of it. It was those, he suggested, who were most willing to consign others to God=s wrath, who in reality themselves stood nearest to its doom. Such sayings as “Forgive, and ye shall be forgiven”, “Condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned”, represent the main principle which he strove to bring home to man’s conscience.2
1A good example of the kind of allowance needed occurs in the use of the phrase about “weeping and gnashing of teeth”. In Luke 13:28, the expression is clearly part of an ad hominem retort to Pharisaic opponents. “There shall he the weeping and gnashing of teeth (with which you threaten others) when you shall see ... yourselves thrust out.” In St. Matthew’s Gospel the phrase seems to have become a piece of general eschatological imagery inserted by the editor whenever he thinks it appropriate to enforce the point of a saying or parable.
2A hindrance to our understanding of the New Testament arises from the fact that in English the words “damn” and “damnation” (when they are not simply “bad language”) are restricted to an exclusively theological and eschatological meaning. There are no such words in the Greek New Testament. But the full truth is not conveyed by the substitution of the words “condemnation” and “condemn” in English versions, so long as these words are still contrasted in the reader’s mind with the theological terms they have displaced. From a theological point of view it would have been better (though on literary grounds it was impossible) if the Revisers had written the words “damn” and “damnation” wherever the Greek words occur which are now rendered “condemn” and “condemnation”. In that case they could have rendered the saving in Luke 6:37, “Damn not, and ye shall not be damned”, and, though the Greek word is χαταδιχάζειν and not χαταχρίνειν, perhaps the rendering would have brought out an aspect of our Lord’s real meaning.
Special difficulty is also caused by Mark 9:43B8. Here the language about the worm and the fire is borrowed from the concluding verses of Isaiah, where it depicts a horrible state of corruption, but not of torment Our Lord’s words seem to suggest a parable, that, just as the refusal to amputate a diseased limb may result in the corruption of the whole body, so the refusal of self-denial (in the ordinary sense of that word) may result in the total corruption and dissolution of the personality. In any case there is no suggestion of everlasting torment.
We conclude, therefore, that the ultimate issue of the rejection of God’s love must be God=s final abandonment of the soul to the consequences of its own corruption. In the Gospel of St. Matthew God’s final doom on his unrepentant people is pronounced in the words, “Your house is left unto you”, αφίεται υμιν ο οίχος υμων.1 And the prayer of Charles Wesley’s hymn, “Leave, ah, leave me not alone”, is not to be distinguished in meaning from the petition of the Litany, “From everlasting damnation, good Lord deliver us”. The soul which suffers that doom will inevitably perish in the final passing away of the sin-tainted world with which it has chosen to identify itself. It is only man’s failure to appreciate the terrible meaning and possibility of such a fate, which excuses the Church for painting it in the most lurid colours it could devise, even at the risk of marring its own gospel.
1Matt. 23:37. The word “desolate”, ερημος, was almost certainly absent from the original text.
4. THE DOCTRINE OF UNIVERSALISM
But is the death of final separation from God a real possibility? This question brings us face to face with the doctrine of universalism, i.e., the doctrine that since no soul can have been created for final condemnation, no soul can in the end be lost.
The Christian arguments for this doctrine are powerful, and must be fairly heard. They depend, not, as opponents of the doctrine usually suggest, upon sentimental humanitarianism, but on logical inference from the sufficiency of the atonement. If the cross is really “a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the whole world”, then universal salvation must be a real possibility. And, if it be a real possibility, must it not ultimately be a fact? The really ultimate purpose of God, as we have already argued, is not judgement but victory; and his victory means the redemption of creation, the refashioning of it into a new world which perfectly expresses and embodies his goodness. To that end he sent his Son into the world, not to condemn but to save it. In so far then as the final result is not salvation but condemnation, is not his purpose frustrated?
It is no answer to say that still God’s righteousness may be vindicated in condemnation. For the essence of the atonement is to reveal the power of a love which is more than righteousness. The Christian must think of the world to come as that state of being in which the self-sacrifice of Christ is ultimately found to be not in vain but triumphant. How can that consummation be fully realized, if any soul finally reject God’s love, so that Christ died for it in vain? Or, if it were not for all men that Christ died, where is the catholic gospel?
Moreover, when we turn to Scripture, it seems that St. Paul’s great argument from history, sketched in Galatians and elaborated in Romans, leads to something like universalism as its logical consequence. The argument is that, since God’s promise of salvation was given before the law, fulfillment of the law cannot be a condition of receiving the promise, and the condemnation, which the law justly brings upon man, cannot make the promise of none effect. In other words, since God’s first word is promise, not law, his last word must be salvation, not judgement. Perhaps this interpretation of St. Paul’s logic may seem to go too far beyond what he actually says. But it is at least remarkable that, whenever St. Paul draws a comparison and contrast between the effect of Adam’s sin and that of Christ’s atonement, he cannot help dwelling on the superior power and efficacy of the atonement in a way which leads straight to a universalistic conclusion. “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.”1 “As through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the one shall the many be made righteous.”2
11 Cor. 15:22. The universalistic implication can be avoided by interpreting the words to mean, “As in Adam all that are in Adam die, even so in Christ shall all that are in Christ be made alive.” But the antithesis would rather lose its point, if only a tiny fraction of those who are in Adam will ever be in Christ.
2Rom. 5:19.
Nevertheless, it cannot fairly be said that the main trend of the New Testament is towards universalism. Its writers and, according to their report, Jesus himself are far too constant in their warning that men may finally reject even the universal gospel which Christ brought and the apostles proclaim. And the warning that the gospel may finally be rejected seems often to pass into the prognostication that many will finally reject it. In any case it would contradict the very essence of the gospel to suppose that God will ever compel a soul to salvation; and therefore the presentation of his final offer of salvation in Christ must impose upon the soul an absolutely critical choice. It is on the critical character of that choice, as well as on the reality of God’s forgiving and redeeming grace, that the New Testament principally insists. Christ would return no direct answer to the question, “Are there few that be saved?” But he did say that the gate was narrow, that it was not the many who were finding it, and that to postpone the effort to enter might be fatal.1
1Matt. 7:13, 14; Luke 13:23 sqq.
In view of what can be said on both sides, we must concede to the universalist that it is at least legitimate to hope that no soul will finally be lost, and that the final issue of God’s work will be, not the redemption of some souls out of the world, but the redemption of the whole world which is the object of his love. Such universal redemption may be said to be the antecedent purpose of God’s atoning work in Christ, and we dare not set limits to what the cross may achieve. Nevertheless, we must also admit the reality of the possibility, and the justification for the fear, that God’s antecedent purpose will never be achieved fully. For, in the nature of the case, the fullness of achievement must depend upon a response in each individual soul which can never be compelled and which, so far as our present experience goes, is being by many definitely refused. No doubt the very fact that even in those who do respond the response is still imperfect, is a ground for believing that in those who refuse to respond the refusal is still incomplete. Further, we may surely affirm with confidence that God would never have created man, if the main issue of that creation were to be the condemnation of man. But, for the rest, we must leave ultimate possibilities open in the case of individual souls, and retain only the certainty of our faith in God’s power and goodness. Even confidence in the ultimate triumph of God’s love does not entitle us to regard as assured truths all the inferences which our limited logic may draw from it. Hope is not knowledge, and it is only perfect love which can legitimately cast out fear.
Chapter XXIV – The Hope of Resurrection
Even the summary account of Christian eschatology which we are here attempting requires us to say something further in explanation of the Christian affirmation of belief in the resurrection of the dead. For no article of the Creed is more liable than this to offend the intellectual conscience, especially in an age which finds such difficulty in believing in any life after death at all for the individual soul.
1. TWO PRINCIPALS IN CHRISTIAN BELIEF
The essential meaning of the Christian affirmation in this matter involves two fundamental principles or postulates which we will discuss briefly in turn:
First, that the object of ultimate hope is communion with the eternal God, and not any prolongation of human lives as such.
Secondly, that the way in which this hope is to be finally attained, as well as the true significance of its attainment, are more adequately symbolized under the figure of resurrection, than by any doctrine which asserts simply the immortality of the soul.
2. LIFE AFTER DEATH AND THE RELIGIOUS DOCTRINE OF IMMORTALITY
In dealing with the first of these two principles, we must begin by making an important distinction. When we say that we believe in “life after death”, we may have either of two quite different ideas in mind.
(a) We may be thinking of the answer to the question, does the soul or personality of a man go on existing when the body dies? This is a perfectly intelligible question but it has no self-evident connexion with any particular belief about God. Many believers in God reject belief in the immortality of the soul. And on the other hand some have believed in the immortality of the soul, while rejecting belief in God. Moreover, it is to be observed that to say that the soul survives the death of the body is not necessarily to say that it is immortal; for it is quite conceivable that it might perish afterwards. The evidence for and against survival, as distinct from immortality, may be investigated from a strictly scientific standpoint, which excludes both metaphysical and religious presuppositions altogether.
(b) On the other hand, it is possible to regard belief in human immortality as a religious belief founded upon some faith in the being of God. And when we thus approach the subject from the religious side, the fundamental question which we ask about life after death has a quite different context and significance. Almost all religions attribute immortality or eternity to the God of their worship, while at the same time they indicate to man some way of entering into some sort of communion or fellowship with God. And thus the thought is bound to arise that man himself may somehow be made partaker of the immortality or eternity which is properly divine. The question then asked about life after death ceases to be, Is the human soul by nature such as to survive the death of the body? and becomes rather, Is the human soul capable of rising into or receiving a higher kind of life which is somehow akin to God’s? In the affirmative answer to that question we reach the religious doctrine of immortal or eternal life for man. It is not based upon the nature of the human soul simply as such, but upon a relation which exists or may exist between the human soul and God. Nor could it be proved to be true by the most complete evidence conceivable that in fact every human soul survives the death of the body.1
1The most such evidence could do would be to remove one a priori objection to the religious doctrine of immortality, viz., the objection that, since the soul or personality must perish with the body, no kind of immortality for man is possible. Whether this objection ever ought to be removed in this way, is another question.
3. THE TEACHING OF THE BIBLE ON LIFE AFTER DEATH
Having made this distinction clear, we turn to the teaching of the Bible. Its most obvious feature perhaps is the lack of any positive information as to what happens to the human soul when the body dies. In the Old Testament indeed there are many passages which roundly deny that the human soul continues after death in any life worth having. And even the New Testament, for all its emphasis on the glorious hope of resurrection, gives no kind of answer to the questions asked by those who are interested in spiritualism or what is commonly called “psychical research”.
Why is there at first so much negation, and at last so little information, in the Bible? The question has deeply perplexed sincere Christians who long for some definite knowledge about the condition of dear ones departed.
When Lazarus left his charnel-cave
And home to Mary=s house returned,
Was this demanded – if he yearned
To hear her weeping by his grave?
“Where wert thou, brother, those four days?”
There lives no record of reply,
Which, telling what it is to die,
Had surely added praise to praise.
Behold a man raised up by Christ!
The rest remaineth unrevealed;
He told it not; or something sealed
The lips of that evangelist.
Tennyson, In Memoriam, XXXI.
Tennyson’s question is certainly not to be answered by suggesting doubts as to the historical value of the Fourth Gospel. But the distinction previously drawn between survival and eternal life may afford us more help. From first to last the Bible is chiefly concerned to teach us that our faith and hope must be in God, that it is on God’s Kingdom, not on personal survival and its particular phases and circumstances, that our aims and affections should be set.
Already in the Old Testament it is very significant that when the psalmists deny most explicitly any value to the life of the departed spirit, they immediately pass on to declare that just for that reason their hope is more firmly fixed on God.1 There seems to be good reason for thinking that the picture of Sheol as a prison for unsubstantial wraiths, a picture which represents the orthodox belief of Israel before the Captivity, was originally intended to discourage a false spiritualism or cult of departed spirits which led men away from the worship of Jehovah. It was to Jehovah’s seers and prophets, not to the witches and wizards who professed to raise the ghosts of the dead, that the loyal Israelite should go for guidance. It was when Saul could get no answer from God through prophets, dreams or divination, that he turned in despair to the witch of Endor.2 Only after the Captivity, when idolatry and necromancy have ceased to be dangers, do we find a new hope of the afterlife taking shape dimly in the Hebrew mind. And this new hope is based wholly on the all-pervading presence and power of Jehovah. The faith is at last dawning that never and nowhere in the universe can the faithful be really “cut away from God’s hand”, not even by death or the bars of Sheol itself. “Though I walk through the valley of deep darkness, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me.”3
1See, e.g., Pss. 30:9–11; 39:6–8. 21 Sam. 28:6.
3Ps. 23:4. See also Pss. 73:22–5; 139:7–11, and Job 19:25 (R.V. Margin).
In the New Testament Christ’s reply to his Sadducean questioners carries on the same line of teaching. That there is life beyond the grave, he tells them, is proved when God says to Moses, “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob”; for God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.1 In other words, a man has abiding life, in so far as the living Jehovah is really his God. For God’s faithful servants, therefore, there can be no imprisonment or empty existence among the shades. For “the gates of Hades” (or the bars of Sheol) do not prevail against the life and fellowship of God’s own ecclesia.2 This is the great conclusion which the Bible reaches. The immortality of man is the gift of the living God who conquers death. Of that the Bible assures us; but it does not answer our questions about what happens to the soul when the body dies. And it would be difficult to cite any text outside the Apocrypha which suggests that the soul of man is by the necessity of its own created nature immortal.
1Matt 22:31B3; Mark 12:26B27. Luke (20:38) makes an addition to the saying, which is apparently a gloss derived from 4 Macc. 7:19, 16:25, and which obscures the point. The words added are “for all live unto him”. But the point is not that all live unto God, but that those who are truly God’s must have abiding life. See Easton’s Commentary, ad loc.
2This surely is the most natural explanation of the saying to St. Peter in Matt. 16:18. I cannot resist the speculation that this whole saying, recorded only by St. Matthew, represented originally words spoken by our Lord to St. Peter when he appeared to him after the resurrection. Placed in that context, the saying gains a clearer and greatly enhanced significance. It is on St. Peter as penitent and believing in the resurrection that Christ founds the fellowship of his Church against which the gates of Hades shall not prevail. But this is of course only a speculation.
4. RESURRECTION
And yet, if we are content to leave at this point our account of the Christian hope for the individual, we shall still have almost ignored what is perhaps the most characteristic feature of the Christian gospel. For we have said nothing of the difference made to the religious doctrine of immortal or eternal life by the Christian teaching of the resurrection.
No leading idea in human religion has had a more complicated and paradoxical history than that of resurrection. In pagan thought it is connected with myths of a dying and rising god or goddess, which apparently have their origin in the cycle of the seasons, the death of winter followed by the rebirth of spring. But such legends as that of Persephone seem to have little direct relation, either historical or ideological, to Christian belief. The latter springs out of Judaism. And in Judaism the religious idea of resurrection appears in its crudest and most materialistic form. It came into being as part of the eschatological expectation conceived by Jewish apocalyptists at a time when all hope of a national redemption wrought by natural means seemed destined to final disappointment. The apocalyptists sought to re-establish faith in God’s guidance of history with visions of a purely supernatural event. They spoke of a great theophany at the end of the age when men were to rise again with their material bodies from the tomb in order to receive the reward of their deeds in everlasting felicity or torment. Compared with such fantasies, the language of Psalm 139 and the Platonistic teachings found in the Book of Wisdom seem to convey a much more worthy and spiritual idea of immortality. And at first sight it appears to be merely a disaster that the Church should have felt herself obliged to repel the most sympathetic minds in the pagan world by retaining in her creed a clause which speaks of the resurrection of the body or the flesh. Doubtless that clause was retained because of the Church’s belief that her Lord’s body had actually been raised from the tomb. But was that belief itself originally due to a misunderstanding, inevitable perhaps to minds brought up on Jewish notions of eschatology, but none the less fatal to a truly catholic interpretation of the gospel?
Such a conclusion is only superficially attractive. Of course as long as resurrection is understood, as it was understood by Jewish apocalyptists, to mean simply the restoration of life by divine fiat at some moment of time after death, it remains a crude and primitive notion, on a lower level altogether than the nobler forms of the Hellenic belief in the immortality of the soul. But when an attentive reading of the New Testament has enabled us to perceive that Christ has given to the idea of resurrection the quite new meaning of life restored and glorified through and by means of death, we see also that he has made it the symbol of a deeper truth than any which a doctrine of mere immortality can express. Christianity must indeed sublimate and spiritualize the belief in resurrection which was part of its heritage from Judaism. And yet the Jewish notion, crude and fantastic as it originally was, contributes through Jesus a vital element to Christian faith and hope which the Hellenic doctrines of immortality wholly lack.
For this belief in resurrection, throughout its strange and chequered history, stands for the great truth inherent in Jewish eschatology, that the change from earthly to heavenly life is not and cannot be a gradual process of ascension, in which the falling away of the material body is merely a further liberation of the soul; rather it is a process of increasing tension and conflict leading to a crisis in which the earthly man must wholly die in order wholly to receive life. What is true of this whole age or world order, which must pass away in the new creation of the world to come, is true also of the individual organism which is a man – it also must wholly die in its present earthly state in order to receive from God that full and heavenly glory of which its created nature has made it capable. The gateway to the heavenly and eternal life is the self-sacrifice which Christ first accomplished only through his death, and in which he enables Christians to follow him. And thus in Christ the universal fact of physical decay and death becomes for man, as it were, the sacrament of the inward and spiritual truth that life must be wholly surrendered before it can be wholly won.
To use the now fashionable term, the progress of the earthly life towards the heavenly is inherently dialectical. In the more concrete and illuminating language of the gospel, it is a story of exaltation won through humiliation, of gain through loss, of having through giving, of power through suffering, of victory through defeat, of joy through sorrow, of holiness through common sharing, of glory through shame, of life through death. And the reconciliation of all these antinomies is in the simple yet world transforming fact that God is love, the love which decrees that the Son of Man, who is also the Son of God, must suffer in order to reign and save. That is the supreme truth which Jesus taught; and Calvary, the empty tomb, and the visions of the glorious body bearing the marks of the cross, mean that in his own person he has proved the truth to be true indeed.
That is why the resurrection of Christ has a truly eschatological significance. It is the sign, not that a holy manhood survives death, but that by the humiliation and self-sacrifice of the Son of God the deadliness of death has been overcome, and the kingdom of heaven opened to all believers. In the crisis which that gospel inevitably brings to every soul which hears it, the world to come itself, together with its living Lord, is already at the doors.
From another point of view the essential difference between believing in the resurrection of Jesus and believing merely in the immortality of his personal spirit or soul, is clearly seen the moment we seek to apply to his case the language which the author of the Book of Wisdom uses about the souls of the righteous. “In the sight of the unwise,” he writes, “they seemed to die”, and he implies thereby that their death was apparent only. Can we imagine St. Paul using such words of Christ? If he had done so, his gospel would certainly have caused no scandal in the Gentile world. On the contrary it would have been received with much sympathy, not least in philosophical centres such as Athens. To suggest that Christ’s death was an appearance, and not a full or ultimate reality, would have removed all the offence of the cross; but it would have removed also the essence of the gospel. For to the Christian the death on the cross, with all its circumstances of shame, was not less real, not less vitally important for faith, than the resurrection of which it was the condition. The reality of the resurrection balanced and transformed the reality of the death; both realities were equally essential to the new salvation that was in Christ. Therefore the fullness of the gospel required the emptiness of the tomb. And it was better that the intelligentsia of the Gentile world should continue to be alienated by crude beliefs about the final resurrection, which St. Paul and St. John1 failed to banish from the Church, than that the gospel should be lost by being assimilated to religious philosophies which had no room for the true value of Hebraic eschatology.
1The author of Hebrews hardly says anything explicitly about the resurrection; but his teaching in 2:5–9, is well worth examining in connexion. (See above, end Chapter 12.)
Christian theologians today are still in quest of a metaphysic which will do full justice to the Easter gospel. But, in the light of the experience and thought of the centuries, they should be able to see rather more clearly than their forefathers what is the real heart of the problem.1 So far as it concerns the destiny of the individual soul, the essence of the Easter gospel consists in declaring in Christ the correlation between the completeness of the surrender of life to God and the completeness of its restoration in glory. By that great correlation or antinomy (whichever we like to call it) the Christian’s hope of life eternal is determined. All that lives in this world must really die. But this fact of mortality may be made the opportunity for entering into the service and the self-surrender of the Son of God; and, by so entering, this mortal personality of ours, and not any supposedly undying part of it, must at the last through death put on immortality. To be made partaker of Christ’s life here and hereafter, as in heaven so on earth, is what the Christian means by life eternal. Only through Jesus Christ, yet through Jesus Christ in the commonest as well as in the holiest things, he claims to have fellowship with the eternal God. We dare not say how far on the other side of physical death a soul may have opportunity for completing a self-surrender which on this side it hardly seemed to have begun – just as we cannot say how far Christ’s greatest saints had been received into the life of heaven even before in the body they crossed the narrow stream. But this much surely we know, that whenever, and not until, a man’s surrender of himself to the God of love has been altogether accomplished, he attains the end of his being; and that end is not death but life.
1The Christian metaphysician who seems to me to penetrate most deeply to the root of the matter is N. Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, Pt. III. c. I.
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE CHURCH
INTRODUCTION
The consideration of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit brings into the mind a multitude of theological problems, very various from one another, yet all of them vitally important to Christian thought. Controversies about authority and freedom, dogma and experience, the ecclesiastical and personal aspects of religion, the relation of the Church to the world, and the distinction between the sacred and the secular, must all find their solution somewhere in the truth of which the doctrine of the Holy Spirit is the expression. Small wonder that it should be often said that the greatest need in the theology of our time is for a clear and comprehensive exposition of this doctrine. Yet neither perhaps is it any great wonder, if it is impossible to point to any single treatise on the subject which can satisfy our requirements. The Holy Spirit is the Lord, the giver of life. And the nature of all life, and therefore of its giver, can only be learned gradually by living. In its widest range the doctrine of the Holy Spirit is nothing else than the doctrine of the manner and method of the presence and activity of the living God in his created world. And how can any knowledge of man discern or express clearly the being of him who is not even its object in the same sense that the incarnate Son is its object, but is himself the source of vital knowing and the light in which objects are truly known? Here, then, the theologian is at a great and special disadvantage. He may be well content if he can help both himself and others to avoid false simplifications of doctrine and to enter a little more fully into the Spirit=s fellowship.
I need hardly say that, in the brief sketch which is all that I can offer here, I shall not attempt even to touch on all the questions which require discussion. I shall seek only to draw out certain implications of scriptural teaching which the Christian needs specially to bear in mind as he confronts the confusions and perplexities of the modern world. And to two subjects I shall give particular attention. The first is the relation within Christianity of religious to secular activities, and the second the doctrinal foundations on which rests the Christian conception of the nature and function of the Church as a society upon earth. The first suggests a problem specially urgent in an age which tends to regard religion as a special department in man=s increasingly many-sided life, while misunderstandings and differences of view as to the second are a principal hindrance to that Christian reunion towards which the Holy Spirit today is surely directing our efforts. Perhaps also it will appear that the two subjects, in spite of their difference, are not unconnected. For each leads to the consideration of a special aspect or expression of the Spirit=s unity.
Chapter XXV – The Relation of the New Testament to
the Old in the Doctrine of the Spirit
The Greek word translated “spirit” in the English New Testament is of course πνευμα, and the same word in the LXX represents “spirit” in the English versions. In classical Greek πνευμα means wind, air, or breath, most commonly the last. Occasionally it is used in a metaphorical sense, as we use the word “spirit” today, for a temper or state of mind. But it has no special connexion with anything divine or supernatural, nor is it set in opposition to matter. Classical Greek has no word corresponding in significance with what we mean by “spiritual”.
1. THE MEANING OF THE WORD “SPIRIT” IN THE OLD TESTAMENT1
1I am not myself a Hebrew scholar, and am indebted throughout this section to Dr. Wheeler Robinson’s The Christian Experience of the Holy Spirit, pp. 8–14. See also the same author’s Religious Ideas of the Old Testament.
In the Greek Bible, on the other hand, the word πνευμα has from the beginning different associations. In the LXX it is used to translate the Hebrew ruach. Ruach means originally wind; but in the earliest documents of the Old Testament it means wind as the manifestation or sign of a mighty invasive power, not human but supernatural. Dr. Wheeler Robinson writes, “The primitive and fundamental idea of spirit (ruach) in the Old Testament is that of active power or energy (ενέργεια, not δύναμις), power superhuman, mysterious, elusive, of which the ruach or wind of the desert was not so much the symbol as the familiar example.” 1 Originally, indeed, it was the idea of power supernatural or daemonic, rather than strictly divine. Its operation was seen in all phenomena in which men or creatures seemed to exceed their natural powers, whether for good or evil. Its essential character is perhaps best understood in the saying of Isaiah that the horses of the Egyptians are flesh and not spirit.2 Ruach is responsible for the feats of judges, the inspiration of prophets, the skill of Bezalel, the wisdom of Joseph, the faithfulness of Caleb.3 But it is also evil ruach that divides Abimelech from the Shechemites, and makes a people unfaithful to its God.4 The only place where ruach is quite clearly personified is in the story of Micaiah, where a lying Spirit is said to have deceived the optimistic prophets.5
1Wheeler Robinson, op cit., p. 8. 2Isa. 31:3.
3See Exod. 31:3; Gen. 41:38; Num. 14:24.
4See Judges 9:23: Hos. 4:12, and 5:4. 51 Kings 22:21.
When the Hebrew people attained to a clearly conceived monotheism, all supernatural powers were believed to be under the sovereign control of Jehovah. Ruach then comes to be thought of more definitely as the activity of the one living righteous and merciful God. And, since for the Hebrew God=s presence always means God=s activity, the Spirit and the presence of God are in the later parts of the Old Testament almost identified, whether the presence is thought of as universal or in particular relations. Thus in the fifty-first Psalm the prayer, “cast me not away from thy presence”, has as its parallel clause, “take not thy Holy Spirit from me”. In the one hundred and thirty-ninth we read, “Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or, whither shall I flee from thy face?” In one or two passages of the prophets the presence of God with his people is understood to imply that his Spirit dwells in their midst.
The Hebrew words for the breath and “breath-soul”, which constitute the principle of life in man, are neshamah and nephesh. There are one or two passages in the early documents of the Hebrew Bible where the word ruach is applied to purely human energy,1 but even there it means energy and not soul. After the exile, when it had become established doctrine that Jehovah was the creator of man and had breathed into him the living soul, the word ruach becomes to some extent synonymous with nephesh, but it still conveys some suggestion of its old associations with the supernatural.
1Judges 14:19; 1 Kings 10:5.
2. PRINCIPAL POINTS IN THE OLD TESTAMENT DOCTRINE OF THE SPIRIT
Four points in the Old Testament conception of the divine Spirit are specially important for our purpose.
(a) The Hebrew ruach is as far as the classical Greek πνευμα from suggesting our modern contrast between spirit and matter. We have already noticed Isaiah’s contrast between “spirit” and “flesh” in reference to the Egyptian horses. He implies not that, if the horses had been spirit, they would not have been tangible and material, but that in that case they would have been endowed with supernatural powers which in fact they lack.
(b) The original associations of the word ruach are with a definitely supernatural energy, not with anything natural or merely human.
(c) In connexion with God the word ruach always suggests energetic action rather than immanence. It represents an invasive, rather than a pervasive, power. Even in Psalm 139, where the omnipresence of God’s Spirit is clearly affirmed, the conception of it is different from that which appears in the Hellenistic Book of Wisdom in such sayings as “Thine incorruptible Spirit is in all things”, and AThe Spirit of the Lord hath filled the world.”1 The psalmist is thinking of God’s care and guidance of the soul in all conceivable situations, not of a divine element within the being of all creatures.
1Wisd. 12:1; 1:7.
(d) While the word ruach has no definitely Messianic associations, there are passages in the Old Testament which prepare the way for them. Once or twice prophets speak of God’s Spirit as dwelling with or among the chosen people to guide and direct them.1 At an earlier point2 we noticed that the Bible often applies the same language to the whole people of God that it does to the person of the Messiah. And in at least two passages of Isaiah3 the Spirit of the Lord is represented as resting upon an individual king or prophet in a special manner, which may be said to invite Messianic interpretation. Finally, there is one most noteworthy passage where the Spirit is mentioned in an eschatological connexion, and it is promised that God at the last will pour out of his Spirit upon all flesh, and even upon the servants and handmaids among his people.4
1Hag. 2:4 sq.; Isa. 63:10 sq. 2See above, Chapter IX, § 4.
312:1 Sq; 61:1. 4Joel 2:28 sq.
In conclusion, a few words may be added upon the use of the adjective “holy” in connexion with “spirit” in the Old Testament. The expression “holy spirit” occurs only thrice in the canonical books.1 Throughout the Old Testament the word “holy” denotes primarily the awful separateness which is characteristic of God and of the things or persons which are set apart to belong to him in a special way. In connexion with “spirit” therefore, it may be said to emphasize the essentially divine and supernatural character of the spirit, and the separateness of its activity from everything common or ordinary.
1Ps. 54:11; Isa. 63:10, 11.
3. CONTRAST OF THE NEW TESTAMENT WITH THE OLD
It is from Hebraic rather than from Hellenic sources that New Testament writers derive their fundamental conception of what the word πνευμα means. So much, in the light of modern scholarship, may be taken for granted; and later on we shall have occasion to notice how the associations of the word ruach cling to early Christian thought about God the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless, the most striking characteristic of the New Testament doctrine of the Spirit is one which sets it in contrast with that of the Old. In the Old Testament the Messianic connexions of the doctrine are dim and slight. In the New Testament, on the other hand, it is broadly true to say that there is no teaching about the Spirit of God except in direct connexion with the life and work of the Messiah Jesus. The suggestion of the omnipresence of the Spirit which we find in Psalm 139, to say nothing of the Book of Wisdom, has no parallel in the New Testament. It is only in connexion with the Logos, as in the Prologue of St. John=s Gospel, that universal presence and activity are there spoken of. The Holy Spirit is mentioned only in three connexions; first, as the Spirit who brought about the conception of Jesus, and at his baptism descended and thereafter abode upon him; secondly, as the inspirer of the prophets who foretold his sufferings and triumph as the Messiah; thirdly, as the guide, teacher and source of power in the fellowship of the Church and in its individual members.
It is this apparent limitation of the Spirit’s activity which is the cause of such grave difficulty to the liberal-minded Christians of modern times; and it may have seemed hardly less unreasonable to intelligent Jews and pagans of the first century. But at least nothing bears clearer witness to the profound and entirely unique impression produced by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus upon those who first believed in him. And we shall best understand the true significance of the New Testament doctrine of the Spirit, by examining more closely its relation to the person and work of Jesus in the thought of the two great theological apostles, St. Paul and St. John. It is only in the light of their thought that the fragmentary indications of the Synoptic Gospels, and the rather naïf affirmations of Acts, become intelligible.
Chapter XXVI – The Holy Spirit in St. Paul’s Theology
1. ST. PAUL’S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
To St. Paul the outpouring of the Spirit in the Christian community through the resurrection of Jesus Christ is a great fact which takes its place in the philosophy of history which is unfolded in Romans.1 St. Paul thinks of history as the story of the operation of God’s purpose to redeem and save fallen mankind in Jesus Christ. From the first God’s method is the choosing or calling out of certain individuals and their descendants to hold a special place of trust in preparing the way for the salvation which is to come when the time is ripe. Pre-Christian history is the record of repeated restrictions in the number of the elect by the rejection (whether due to their own fault or not) of many of those who at first sight seemed to have been chosen. Originally the promise is given to Abraham that in his seed all nations shall be blessed. The choice of Abraham and his seed implies the present rejection of the Gentiles; yet the promise looks forward to their ultimate salvation. Next, the successive rejections of Ishmael and of Esau make it clear that only some even of Abraham=s descendants are to constitute the chosen people. Afterwards, in the period of the prophets, it appears that even among the children of Israel the majority is rejected, and only a faithful remnant left to carry on the true succession. Finally, even the faithful remnant is reduced to but one man, Jesus, who is the promised Saviour. Thus all fail and fall under condemnation. Jesus alone, the Son of God who was born of Abraham’s seed according to the flesh, is perfectly obedient to God’s will even unto the death of the cross. And in him and through him God’s original promise of blessing to all the nations is now being fulfilled. By his resurrection Jesus has become the head of a new redeemed humanity and people of God, who in him receive the promises, and are destined to bring blessing and salvation to the whole human race previously rejected for its sin. The history of God’s dealings with men, which up to Christ’s coming had been mainly a story of successive rejections and exclusions is now to become a story of successive inclusions and incorporations through the preaching of the gospel. There is still a process of divine selection. But now it is seen to be a selection mainly towards equal acceptance and salvation, and not towards equal rejection and condemnation.
1I must acknowledge my indebtedness in this paragraph to Dodd’s Commentary on Romans (Moffatt Series).
Such is the theological interpretation of history which in St. Paul’s mind formed the rationale of his missionary labours. And bound up with it is his whole conception of the gifts and work of the Holy Spirit. “The Holy Spirit” meant to him primarily the active principle and power of that supernatural order which will be fully revealed and expressed at the last day when all things will be transfigured into conformity with it in the world to come. By the resurrection of Christ manhood in him has already entered into that order. This is the beginning of the fulfillment of God’s promise to man. Its immediate effect is a wholly new outpouring of spiritual life and power among the believers who constitute the new redeemed mankind, the head and representative of which is Christ. Through this power of the Spirit flowing from the risen Christ, the spiritual world, the world to come, is in one way already present. “We have,” says St. Paul “the first-fruits of the Spirit.”1 But on the other hand, as regards their bodies at least, Christians are still in that flesh which belongs to the natural, unredeemed, unspiritual world. That flesh Christ has left behind; Christians as yet have not. Therefore their resurrection is still only partial at best. They wait in hope for the fullness of spiritual transformation. Meanwhile the manifestation of the Spirit in the Church marks the fact that God’s purpose has reached the penultimate stage of its fulfillment. The gospel of God’s grace in Jesus Christ is carrying with it round the world the present advent of that new life in the Spirit, into which God’s forgiveness now freely incorporates those who under his righteous law had previously been condemned.
1Rom. 8:23.
2. THE RELATION OF THE SPIRIT TO THE GLORIFIED CHRIST
It is against a background of such ideas, Jewish in Origin yet transformed by Christianity, that St. Paul’s theology of the Spirit is to be viewed. I cannot think that it is of very great importance to settle the vexed question whether St. Paul thought of the Holy Spirit as a divine being personally distinct from Christ. On the whole, it is probably truer to say that he did than that he did not. St. Paul often uses language which personifies the Spirit; and, although the presence of Christ and the presence of God’s or Christ’s Spirit in believers seem to be for him practically synonymous and interchangeable expressions, he yet avoids any actual identification of the Spirit with Christ. There is indeed one passage where this identification appears to be explicitly made; but its obscurity and the uncertainty of the text make it a very unsafe foundation on which to build any interpretation of St. Paul=s thought.1
12 Cor. 3:17, on which see commentators. Hort’s conjectural emendation, ου δε πνευμα χυριον, is extremely probable.
The truth is that the questions which agitated later theology in its endeavour to define the relation of the Spirit to the glorified Christ do not seem to have interested St. Paul. What matters to him is that, since in Christ’s resurrection man has been recreated and raised into the fully spiritual order of the new world, the Spirit of God has now begun to exercise in the society of the redeemed that new immanence and transforming power which will finally be manifest in the whole universe. The Spirit brings to men the powers and gifts of the new world into which Christ’s manhood has been raised. At present, it is true, man’s body and, as I think St. Paul would have added, his natural soul (ψυχή) also are still fleshly, and belong to this present unspiritual world. But there is also in man’s nature a spiritual element, a πνευμα As man’s spirit by faith responds to the call of the gospel, the Spirit of God takes hold of it in the power of the new creation, so that the man is now enabled to live after the spirit, even though he still has to live also in the flesh, as long and in so far as he is in this world. In the end will come to pass “the redemption of the body” also, i.e., its complete spiritualization, “which means our full sonship”.1 Meanwhile, to live in Christ is to live in and according to the Spirit;2 the body of which the believer is a member being Christ=s, and the Holy Spirit being the animating power which unites the body and all its members to Christ whose body it is.
1Rom. 8:23 (Moffatt’s translation).
2Strictly to preserve St. Paul’s thought, I should perhaps write “in the Spirit and according to the spirit”.
3. THE KOINONIA OF THE SPIRIT
So far we have been dealing mainly with the meaning of the term “the Spirit,” in St. Paul’s theology. But perhaps his most important teaching is concerned with the concrete nature and content of the Spirit’s work in the Christian society. In what definable way does the life of that society differ from that of the old Israel, and reveal its newness because of its possession of “the first-fruits of the Spirit”?
The answer to that question is, I believe, essentially contained in St. Paul’s great phrase, η χοινωνία του αγίου Πνεύματος, the communion of the Holy Spirit. The phrase may be translated in various ways, and more than one meaning may well have had a place in St. Paul’s thoughts. But at least the idea of a common sharing in the Holy Spirit is not to be excluded; and it is that idea which supplies the answer to our present question.
In the Old Testament the Spirit of God is usually thought of as a power coming suddenly upon men and leaving them again. Sometimes it is suggested that the Spirit remains more permanently with an individual leader; and, as we have seen, one or two passages in the prophets indicate a continuous dwelling of God’s Spirit among his holy people. The nearest approach to the thought of a common sharing in God’s Spirit is to be found in the eschatological prophecy of Joel already referred to, which we find quoted in Acts as having begun to have its fulfillment at Pentecost.1 It is indeed a striking fact that the early Church should thus have found the fulfillment of this prophecy in its own life. But to St. Paul the idea of the koinonia of the Spirit means something more profoundly new even than the appearance of abnormal gifts among the humble rank and file, “the servants and the handmaids”, of God’s people. St. Paul’s central thought seems to be that the new presence and power of the Holy Spirit constitute the very life of the Christian society as a corporate whole.
1Acts 2:17; Joel 2:28.
Modern scholars suggest that the use of the word “body” (corpus, σωμα) to denote a society or “body corporate” is originally derived from St. Paul=s conception of the Church as the Body of Christ.1 Be that as it may, St. Paul certainly does think of the Christian ecclesia as really constituting a body, and as such living with a single life which is the gift of the Spirit. It is significant that nowhere in the New Testament, except in a single text of St. Luke’s Gospel,2 is it suggested that Christians ought to pray for the Spirit. It is assumed that Christians have the Spirit (by his aid they pray), and the receiving of that gift is essential to membership of the Church. From Acts we should gather that the laying-on of hands, by which the gift was normally imparted, was accompanied by some distinct experience or phenomenon which made the fact of the reception unmistakable. But to St. Paul the koinonia of the Holy Spirit means something more, and something other, than the reception of a particular and immediately recognizable gift by each individual Christian. It means, as can be seen from a study of 1 Corinthians 12 and 13, that the Spirit permeates the whole body or organism which is the Christian society, so that all endowments, offices and functions which are useful in the life of the community, and not only those which seem in themselves to be supernatural, are lifted to a new and higher status because they are to be traced to the same Holy Spirit as their source and to be exercised by his power. Every member in a body, even the least “comely” or conspicuous, must live with the same life; and in the Christian body that life is wholly the gift or the presence of the Spirit himself. It is manifested, not only in the apparently supernatural, but also in raising the apparently natural and commonplace to a new spirituality and dignity, because what is natural and commonplace also has its necessary and appointed place in the whole body of Christ, who is the head of the new humanity.
1See Dr. A. E. J. Rawlinson’s essay, “Corpus Christi”, in Mysterium Christi.
2Luke 11:13. Metthew’s version of the saying (7:11) contains no reference to the Holy Spirit.
Moreover, having in 1 Corinthians 12 emphasized the diversity of gifts which the one Spirit bestows, St. Paul proceeds in the next chapter to speak of “the more excellent way” of love. He does not say that love is one, even the highest, among the Spirit’s gifts. Rather it is the universal accompaniment of all, apart from which none can be truly spiritual. For it is love, and love alone, which makes each spiritual gift to be, not a mark of some special superiority or privilege in its possessor, but a contribution which the individual supplies to the common life of all. Thus it is love which makes possible a true koinonia of the Holy Spirit, because it makes the results of his special gifts to be common property for the good of all. Therefore, whatever of the Spirit’s gifts may prove to be temporary or variable, love must endure the same. And, because it is the very spirit of community itself, it will be less transformed in its final fulfillment even than faith and hope. Therefore it is greater than they.
Finally, it is because the koinonia of the Holy Spirit is to him the essential characteristic of the Church’s new life, that St. Paul, especially in Colossians, so strenuously resists the gnostic type of heresy which would have divided Christians into two classes, the one of illuminati or really spiritual mystics, and the other of still carnally minded believers who could only be taught the truth in parables and made to obey ceremonial rules. To admit a double standard in Christian faith or conduct seemed to St. Paul a fundamental contradiction of the gospel. The common possession of the Spirit made all Christians equal. But this equality did not, in St. Paul’s mind, invalidate the principle of authority in the Church, whereby some were divinely appointed to rule over others. For the same Spirit who set apart some to rule and teach sanctified others in learning and obedience, while all together learned and obeyed in Christ.
4. KOINONIA AND HOLINESS
We have spoken of what St. Paul meant by communion in the Spirit of God. But we have not yet penetrated to the paradox which lies in the fact that the Spirit, whose presence and gifts are thus commonly shared, is and remains holy. The paradox is fundamental in Christian thought and life, whether or not St. Paul was himself fully aware of it.
Just as in English the words “communion” and “common” are cognate, so in Greek the word χοινωνία is allied to χοινος, which means “common” or “unclean”, the very opposite of άγιος, “holy”.1 And the connexion is not purely verbal, but has a basis in ideas. In the Old Testament the notion of the holiness which is the essential characteristic of God excludes the notion of a common sharing. The holiness of God means his awful, mysterious separateness. The holiness of God’s chosen people meant that they were separated and set apart from all the nations. The holiness of the inner shrine in the Temple meant that it might not be entered by all and sundry even of the holy people, but only by the high priest once a year. But a careful study of Biblical theology shows that, with the gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church, the whole connotation of the term “holiness” has undergone a subtle but far-reaching change. The characteristic of the Christian society is common participation in the Holy Spirit. Thus within the Church the fencing off of the inner shrine has disappeared. And this change, which so profoundly affects the relations of God’s chosen people to one another and to God, affects also their relation to the world outside. For the holy people no longer in principle excludes the Gentiles, or no longer only suffers them to enter if they first become Jews by circumcision. It is a company in which all, Jew and Gentile, bond and free, Greek and barbarian, are to stand on a common and equal footing, first as alike sinners, and then as redeemed members of Christ’s body to which the Spirit gives its common life. It is on this conviction that St. Paul’s conception of the catholic mission of the Church depends.
1Cf. Jer. 31:5 (R.V. with margin) for the double meaning of the Hebrew verb translated “enjoy (as common)” or “profane”.
With this thought in mind we can perhaps interpret more widely the Pauline philosophy of history which we have already described. Christ’s resurrection followed by the gift of the Spirit is the great turning point in God’s historical dealings with men. At this point, as it were, the movement of holiness changes its direction. Before, it was a movement away from the common world towards the awful separateness of God. God’s Spirit came upon certain men chiefly to separate them from others, and though he gave them a message to other men foretelling future redemption, the message in the immediate present was mainly one of condemnation. This movement of holiness is typified by the fact that in the Old Testament the centre of religious interest is in journeyings towards Jerusalem, and the establishment of the holy people with their separate worship in that holy and separate place. But after Pentecost all is changed. The earthly Jerusalem, which was before the centre of religious attraction, now becomes a centre of diffusion or a base of operations, which is soon left behind for good. Missionary journeys into the Gentile world take the place of pilgrimages towards the holy place where God has caused his name to dwell. The representatives of the twelve holy tribes have become twelve apostles sent out with a gospel to mankind. The movement of holiness has become a movement from God through his apostolic Church out into the common world. That is the difference which Pentecost has made.
And what was the cause of Pentecost? The New Testament teaches us to find it in the incarnation. The changed direction of the movement of holiness has its origin in the fact that in Jesus Christ the holy God took upon him the common flesh of the sons of Adam. God the Son himself came forth, as it were, from his separate heavenly shrine into the common world to tabernacle among men, and to suffer with them and for them. From that act of divine love the new koinonia of the Holy Spirit is ultimately derived.
Chapter XXVII – St. John’s Doctrine of the SPIRIT
In all essentials the identity between St. Paul’s and St. John’s teaching about the Holy Spirit is remarkable, the more so because the language which each apostle uses to express it is so distinctly characteristic of himself.
1. THE AGREEMENT BETWEEN ST. JOHN AND ST. PAUL
Corresponding with St. Paul’s suggestion that God=s election was at last narrowed down to the one person Jesus Christ who entered a universally sinful world to become the head of a new spiritual humanity, we have the teaching of St. John’s Gospel that before the crucifixion the Holy Spirit abode upon Jesus alone, and that it was only after the resurrection that the Holy Spirit was given to the apostles. Both St. Paul and St. John agree in assuming that all true Christians have the Spirit as Christ’s gift; both teach that the Spirit is the living means of communion with the risen Lord, that the gift of the Spirit implies the present indwelling of Christ, while yet the Spirit is in some measure personally distinct from Christ, and that the most essential mark of spiritual communion with Christ is love rather than more apparently supernatural phenomena – of which latter indeed St. John makes no direct mention. All this unanimity is indeed striking. And Bishop Gore has asked whether some such teaching of Jesus about the Spirit as is recorded in the fourteenth and fifteenth chapters of St. John’s Gospel must not have been already current in the Church when St. Paul wrote.1
1The Holy Spirit and the Church, p. 113 sq.
One very familiar passage in St. John’s Gospel requires a special mention at this point, because it is often taken to imply the universal presence or immanence of the Spirit in all sincere seekers after God – a notion which, whatever its truth, is, as we have already seen, quite foreign to the pneumatology of the Bible as a whole. “The hour cometh and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such doth the Father seek to be his worshippers. God is spirit; and they who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” 1 Preachers on this text often seem to forget two points which are essential for its correct interpretation. Jesus is clearly speaking of a time to come in the immediate future when true worship will be possible in a way in which it has never been possible before. The new possibility will come with the gift of the Spirit, a gift, which as St. John’s Gospel clearly teaches, was not bestowed until Jesus had been glorified on the cross, and was then bestowed only on those who had believed on Jesus. Again, just as “spirit” here means a divine gift of the crucified and risen Christ, and not an attitude of the human heart or mind, so “truth” (as always in St. John) means the divine, transcendent, and Christ-revealed reality, and not human sincerity of intention. God is spirit, and God is truth. It is only those who are in God who can fully worship God; and only those are in God who come to him through Jesus Christ, and receive thereby the power to be his sons. These will soon worship the Father in spirit and truth in every place to which the gospel spreads. But neither the Temple at Jerusalem nor the holy mountain of the Samaritans will remain centres of God’s worship. The Samaritans worship blindly. The Jews have a knowledge of the true God; but they will soon seal their rejection of him whom God has sent to them. Therefore, although salvation starts from the Jews, it will not remain with them.
1John 4:28 sq. See also the two preceding verses.
The main point, then, of this discourse is, in St. John’s mind, not the delocalization of worship (though this is implied), but its coming transformation and spiritualization through the gift of the Paraclete who will establish Christian believers in a relation of sonship towards God. The whole thought is thoroughly in accord with St. Paul’s interpretation of history, although the language in which it is expressed is not Pauline.
2. THE PARACLETE AS INTERPRETER OF THE INCARNATION
There are however important points at which St. John’s doctrine of the Holy Spirit differs in emphasis from that of St. Paul. These correspond to the different points of view from which the two apostles regard the incarnation. The first concerns the work of the Holy Spirit in interpreting the incarnate life of Christ.
Early Christian apologists were constrained to account for the fact that, although Jesus Christ was not only the Messiah but actually the divine Lord of the Church’s worship, the truth of his person and mission had not been recognized until after his death. In the third century Celsus could still use the taunt against Christians that their Jesus during his lifetime has not been able to persuade even his own disciples. In St. Paul and St. John, respectively, we can trace clear indications of the two ways of dealing with this difficulty which Christian theology must always employ.
To St. Paul, as we have already seen, the earthly life of Jesus was in itself a veiling, rather than a revealing, of the Godhead.1 The revelation proper begins with the resurrection, when Christ is known “after the spirit” and no longer “after the flesh”. During the earthly life the divinity was concealed, because the divine glory had been put off in that unimaginable act of loving self-humiliation whereby he who was before “in the form of God” took upon him “the form of a servant”. This is the line of thought which is carried to extremities in Kierkegaard’s doctrine of “the divine incognito”.
1See above, Chapter X, § 8.
St. John suggests a different way of expressing the truth. To him, Jesus the incarnate Logos was already in his earthly life the full revelation of the Godhead. He who had seen him had seen the Father. Yet the meaning of the revelation could not be grasped in any full way until the Paraclete had come to enable those who had already believed on Jesus to know him truly. And this gift of the Spirit could not be bestowed until Jesus had been glorified on the cross and gone back to the Father. Not until then could the disciples be in Christ and he in them, as all along Christ had been in the Father and the Father in him.
But, according to St. John, now that the Spirit is given, his work is to enable the Christian with the spiritual eye to see God not only in Jesus exalted to heaven but also in Jesus as he lived in Palestine under Herod and Pilate. That is why St. John wrote his “spiritual Gospel”.1 The earthly life of Jesus is not to St. John, as apparently it was to St. Paul, a necessary stage in God=s redemptive work which has now been left behind; it remains for ever that which has revealed, and still reveals, the eternal Word of God to men. Jesus is not changed even by his resurrection; he is but withdrawn from outward sight, so that the Spirit may enable believers to know him better as he both was and is.
1The purpose here attributed to St. John accounts for many of his alterations in detail or St. Mark’s narrative.
Thus it comes about that St. John emphasizes more than St. Paul the personal distinction of the Holy Spirit from Christ. To St. John he is definitely “another comforter”, αλλος παραχλητός. For it needs another helper, sent by Christ and as divine as himself, to enable the human soul truly to apprehend Christ as God and Friend. To St. John the Christ of the flesh has not passed into the Christ of the Spirit, as St. Paul’s language might sometimes seem to suggest: rather, it is the Spirit, another than Christ, who enables the believer, in contemplating the past facts of the visible outward incarnation, to realize the abiding presence of the incarnate.
3. THE SPIRIT, THE CHURCH, AND THE WORLD
Another contrast which the student of the New Testament cannot but feel between St. Paul=s and St. John’s theology of the Spirit, lies in the absence in St. John of that note of missionary urgency which is so characteristic of St. Paul. The absence of this note in St. John is clearly connected with his comparative disregard of time and lack of interest in the future.1 Not a word is said in the Johannine books about any duty of Christian love towards those who are outside the Christian brotherhood. “The whole world” is painted in the blackest colours as “lying in the evil one”. Christians are forbidden to love it,2 and even in the great high-priestly prayer of the seventeenth chapter of the Gospel, Christ himself excludes the world from the scope of his petitions, and prays only for those whom God has given him out of the world. As to any work of the Holy Spirit outside the Church neither St. John nor St. Paul gives any hint whatever.
1See above, Chapter XI, § 2.
21 John 5:19 and 2:15.
Yet this apparent restriction of the love which is spiritual life only represents one side of the Johannine picture. It is St. John who wrote, “God so loved the world ...” In the next verse we read that “God sent not his Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world through him might be saved”. This affirmation is repeated in the solemn discourse which concludes and sums up Christ’s public teaching, and it is reiterated in the First Epistle. Again, in the Gospel Christ declares, “I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me”, and “I give my flesh for the life of the world.”1
1John 3:16 sq; 12:47; 1 John 4:14; John 12:32; 6:51. Cf. also 1 John 2:2.
We cannot escape the contradiction. We may solve it practically, as St. Paul solved it, by trusting to God’s work in time. We may think of the Church as a small body chosen out of the world, yet destined somehow to include it. We may think of God’s love focused or concentrated, as it were, at particular points, so that its power from those points of concentration may operate the more widely and effectively. But St. John does not think in these temporal and practical terms. He states the contradiction flatly, saying that the world is what God loves and sent Christ to save, and yet that Christians must not love it, that Christ at the last did not pray for it, and that he saves his loved ones from it.
The only positive suggestion which St. John makes about the missionary activity of Christ’s Church is that it is an activity of attraction. The light of grace and truth shining from Christ through his Church into the world draws men to itself; and those especially who “do the truth” will come to it. But the parable of the shepherd going out to seek the lost is not Johannine; and St. John gives little hint of that great change of direction in the movement of holiness, which we found to be indicated in St. Paul=s interpretation of history. The truth is that St. John is not interested in the movement of history at all. Or rather, perhaps, we should say that for him the incarnation has manifested once for all the whole meaning and end of that movement. It is the Spirit’s work, not to complete or change the movement, but to interpret the already given revelation of its meaning and end.
4. THE SPIRIT AND THE FLESH
But it would be a great mistake to suppose that, because St. John shows such a strong tendency to view history sub specie aeternitatis, he is really any nearer in his thought than St. Paul either to Platonic or to Cartesian idealism. To him the word πνευμα is still primarily a translation of ruach, that mysterious supernatural energy, the conception of which was derived from the desert wind. And to him the fact that the Spirit abode upon Jesus in the flesh is not less important than the fact that the Spirit was imparted only after Jesus had been raised from the dead.
St. John’s use of the term “the flesh”, though from a certain point of view it is more ambiguous than St. Paul’s, nevertheless avoids a difficulty which must have confronted St. Paul, if he had worked out more fully his doctrine of the incarnation. St. Paul uses the term to denote “unredeemed human nature”, usually with a suggestion of its hostility to “the spirit”. Because “the flesh” suggests to St. Paul something inherently sinful, he does not speak categorically of Christ having come in the flesh, but uses a phrase such as “in the likeness of sinful flesh”. Clearly St. Paul has no intention of conveying any docetic suggestion, that our Lord’s material flesh was unreal or not fully natural and human; but, owing to his own habitual use of terms, he cannot speak simply of Jesus coming in the flesh without seeming to imply some sinful element in him. And there is here a real difficulty for the Pauline metaphysic, with which St. Paul never directly deals. For according to him the flesh in which Jesus lived his earthly life was free from taint of sin, and yet it was the flesh of this world and not of the world to come. St. John, on the other hand, though he does use the term “the flesh” to denote unredeemed nature, or nature unquickened by the Spirit, nevertheless never speaks of it as being in itself sinful, and therefore he has no difficulty in laying the greatest emphasis on the unqualified statement that Jesus came in the flesh.
At this point the discourse to Nicodemus1 is of crucial importance for understanding St. John=s doctrine. “The spirit (or wind) bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth. So is everyone that is born of the Spirit.” As commentators point out, the saying, in its context of teaching about spiritual rebirth, is strikingly reminiscent of the words of Ecclesiastes, “As thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit (or wind), nor how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child, even so thou knowest not the work of God.”2 Just before Jesus has said to Nicodemus, “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”
1John 3. 2Eccles. 11:5.
Now, whether St. John did or did not believe in the fact of the Virgin Birth, he must unquestionably have believed that Jesus was born of the Spirit. But equally certainly he did not believe that, while the Lord=s spiritual personality was born wholly of the Spirit, his natural body was born simply of the flesh. To St. John no such dichotomy was conceivable. To him everything was spirit which comes from the Spirit and moves with Spirit-given life; and this description might apply to material as well as to immaterial things. “The flesh” when contrasted with “the spirit” is just nature as yet unquickened by the supernatural ruach of God. As the instrument or expression of “spirit”, “flesh” may or may not be what we should call “material”. According to St. John Christ’s body before the resurrection was certainly material. In the post-resurrection appearances he seems to suggest that it might reassume on occasion the characteristics of materiality. In the discourse in which Christ speaks of his flesh as the heavenly bread, what is meant by “the flesh” is certainly something immaterial, except in so far as the eucharistic element may possibly be referred to.
Christ’s words to Nicodemus, therefore, as understood by St. John, mean that his whole life on earth, because it was Spirit-born and Spirit-led, was wholly mysterious in its origin, movement and goal to those whom the same Spirit had not quickened. That is why Christ is so completely misunderstood by the Jews, only somewhat less completely by Nicodemus, and even misunderstood to a great extent by the believing disciples. “Ye know not whence I come, nor whither I go,” says our Lord to the Jews; and even when he speaks differently to his disciples just before his passion, he receives the reply from one of them, “Lord, we know not whither thou goest, and how know we the way?1 But with the gift of the Spirit the illumination of the disciples’ minds begins. The meaning of sayings, obscure when they were first uttered, is understood afterwards by the Spirit’s help. And by the same help the disciples recognize Jesus “come in the flesh” to be not only the Messiah of the Jews but the eternal “Word”, and “God only-begotten”.2 Thus the Spirit-born life of Jesus, which to the natural man resembles only the force of an aimless wind blowing he knows not whence or whither, appears to a man caught up into its movement by the same Spirit, not as a wind, but rather as a steady light shining in a dark world, a light which the darkness could not overtake or overpower, because it shines from the eternal reality.
1Cf. John 8:14 with John 14:4, 5. 2Almost certainly the right text in John 1:18.
Nevertheless the light is still Jesus come in the flesh. To that truth the true Spirit is witness, and no spirit which does not confess it is of God.1 Thus St. John rejects all gnostic heresy. And the truth implies that fellowship with Christ is to be found not so much in mystical experiences as in the acts of righteousness and, above all, of brotherly love in which the disciples obey their Lord=s command.
11 John 14:2, 3.
Chapter XXVIII – The Doctrine of the Spirit in the Modern World
In modern times the expressions “the religion of the spirit” and “spiritual religion” have usually been connected with one or both of two general ideas.1
1In this section I have tried to develop thoughts suggested by Bishop Gore, The Holy Spirit and the Church, pp. 1–7.
1. MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRIT
The first is the idea of a general movement in human life towards the realization of other and higher values than the biological values which may be denoted by such phrases as “the survival of the species or race” or “the control of physical environment”. Philosophy, art, and morals, the quest of truth, beauty, and goodness, are in some sense universal activities among men. And these are felt to be in a special sense activities of the spirit, lifting man above immediate interaction with physical environment into a realm where he seeks to realize something of eternal worth. Moreover, the comparative study of religions has shown that these activities of the spirit are almost inseparable from notions about God or a divine being, which take very various forms and yet seem to show at least a certain unity of movement or appetition in man’s soul towards a life higher in kind than that of his physical nature. From this point of view, then, the phrase “religion of the spirit” may denote all man’s effort after the higher life through any and all of his spiritual activities, with whatever theological doctrines or beliefs these may happen to have been associated.
Those who take such “a religion of the spirit” to be the true religion of mankind cannot accept any exclusive claim made on behalf of any one religion to present any unique or final revelation. To them every creed expresses more or less imperfectly some partial aspect of truth, and every sage or saint or creative artist some partial aspect of the Spirit’s life. Jesus may indeed hold the first place among the religious geniuses of the world. But to speak of Jesus Christ as “the one name given under heaven whereby we must be saved”, or to think of him as the only-begotten Son of God is to confine the spirit=s activity in a quite unjustifiable way. Christians, it is suggested, should abandon their exclusive and intolerant attitude, and be content to join on an equal footing with the adherents of other creeds in the common search after the fuller truth and the higher life.
There are however many to whom the expression “the religion of the spirit” conveys a rather different idea or set of ideas. To them it speaks not so much of a universal movement in human nature as of a universal opposition in religion between the inward and the outward, the spiritual experience and the ritual form. Among those who make much of this opposition are many who would quite clearly make for Christianity an exclusive and paramount claim such as is rejected by those who see in Christianity only one example among many of a universal movement of the human spirit. The opposition between inward and outward, between the freedom of personal religion and the authority of ecclesiastical forms and rules, constitutes the very raison d’être of certain Christian Churches or denominations, such as the Society of Friends. But many also, who understand the expression “religion of the spirit” in essentially the same way, are but loosely attached to any form of what is known as “organized religion”, and some would not call themselves “Christians” at all.
We have then here two distinct objections which are brought against the main tradition of Christian orthodoxy in the name of “the religion of the spirit”. The first, brought forward by those whom we may call “immanentists”, accuses orthodoxy of seeking to limit a divine activity and self-revelation which are present everywhere in the spiritual effort and quest of man. The second, brought forward by those whom we may call “anti-formalists”, accuses orthodoxy of seeking to mechanize a divine activity which is essentially living, free, and personal. No doubt the two objections are often found to coalesce, or to be confused, with one another. But the distinction between them is important. The first has a pantheistic tendency by no means generally characteristic of the second, which is associated rather with individualism. Moreover, immanentism readily allies itself with doctrines of evolutionary progress, and is by no means indifferent to the general movement of history – it has been much influenced by the philosophy of Hegel. On the other hand, anti-formalism, being in the main individualistic, has no similar interest in history. To it, Christianity means following the teaching of Jesus as interpreted by itself; and to that interpretation the Old Testament is mainly an embarrassment. In this sense anti-formalism may be said to be radically unhistorical.
Finally, we must notice a third way of understanding the phrase “spiritual religion”, a way which has arisen within the tradition of Christian orthodoxy itself. This way is especially characteristic of the piety developed by the Counter-Reformation in the Church of Rome. But it has its counterpart in the reformed Churches, and its special features have been accentuated by the modern tendency to regard human life and activity as consisting of a number of autonomous, separate, and more or less independent departments, of which religion is one. The kind of piety of which I am now speaking seeks to train and develop “the spiritual life” as something in principle quite separate from all secular or “worldly” activities. It does not at all disparage the outward forms and ceremonies of religion – rather it emphasizes their importance. But it uses them mainly in order to strengthen and cultivate a purely religious or spiritual experience, which exists as something complete in itself over against all man’s natural and human relationships towards his fellows. It tends to think of communion with God, when the phrase is used in the strict and proper sense, as being confined to this devotional experience, and not as something to be realized in all the relationships of human living. No doubt those who thus think of the spiritual life are generally eager to maintain that it cannot flourish apart from Christian conduct in natural relationships, and that the Christian vocation of many is in secular affairs. But they suggest that, since such relationships and affairs belong to this world, what is done in them can influence the spiritual life of devotion only from outside, however beneficial and indispensable the influence may be, whereas in the devotional life alone are we permitted to enter the divine communion which is the true and other-worldly end of human living. This doctrine is in extreme opposition to the tendency of more secularly minded Christians to regard religion mainly as a means of helping men to do their duty in their ordinary avocations. And it thus creates a special kind of antithesis between religion and morality, the supernatural and the natural, the life of the spirit and the life of the world, which seems to demand a more attentive consideration from Christian theologians than it has so far received.
2. THE CHALLENGE TO ORTHODOX THEOLOGY
Thus in many different ways modern conceptions of spiritual life and spiritual religion offer a challenge to the Church”s doctrine of the Holy Spirit. And it is a challenge which traditional expositions of that doctrine hardly enable us to meet. When we survey the history of the Church”s theology, we find that the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, when compared with Christology, plays on the whole a minor and, in regard to the questions we are now asking, a not very illuminating part. In patristic times discussions of the doctrine seem to have been largely concerned with attempts to define the dogma of the Trinity, which lead us into a region where all human thought is baffled, as indeed the Fathers themselves were well aware. Later on, at any rate in the West, the doctrine tended to become identified with theories of ecclesiastical order and authority, which to those who reject the dogma of infallibility cannot appear, whatever their value, to do justice to the truth concerning the Holy Spirit=s guidance of the Church. The special application of the doctrine to the inspiration of Scripture raises questions with which we need not here concern ourselves – except to say that in no connexion is it more obvious that views, once universally held and authoritative, have had to be revised. And, finally, we cannot forget melancholy records of religious movements which seemed to manifest the Spirit’s Operation, and yet were crushed into insignificance or driven into heresy or schism, because an ecclesiastical system left no room for the exercise of their gifts.
It is indeed difficult to deny that the perplexing nature of the problems which confront Christian theology today is due in no small measure to the long-continued failure of orthodoxy to give adequate expression in thought and action to that doctrine of the Holy Spirit which it has all along acknowledged to be one of the chief articles in its creed. It may be that one of the chief tasks of the theologian today is to go back to the New Testament and seek to reinterpret the apostolic message concerning the Holy Spirit’s work.
3. THE SPIRIT AS INTERPRETER OF CHRIST
Let us consider first the objection raised by immanentism, that Christian orthodoxy seeks to confine the Spirit’s operation by the exclusive claims which it makes on behalf of Jesus Christ.
It is undoubtedly true, as we have already seen, that the New Testament does speak as though the presence of the Holy Spirit were a gift passed on by Jesus Christ only to his Church, which thus enters upon a quite new life in him. On the other hand, the New Testament not less clearly affirms a universal presence and operation of the same God who through Jesus Christ has given the Spirit to believers; and a chief work of the Holy Spirit himself is to enable them to see the Jesus of history as the self-manifestation in the flesh of the eternal Word who is God=s agent in creation and the universal light of men. Both these complementary truths are emphasized by St. John; and at this point he especially must be our teacher.
In speaking of revelation, the theologian must distinguish between the revelatio, or act of revealing, and the revelatum, or reality revealed. Considered as an act of revealing, the Christian revelation has a definite beginning at a particular time and place in history, and continues to operate through the historical life of a particular society. The act begins in the historical life of Jesus, and is continued through the operation of the Spirit in the Church. On the other hand, considered as reality revealed, the content of the Christian revelation has no beginning, end, or limits in space and time. For what is revealed both by the historical life of Jesus and by the Spirit in the Church is nothing other than God’s eternal presence and his perpetual work in all times and places. Now, when we consider this antithesis between the revealing act and the revealed reality, the historical life of Jesus Christ appears, according to St. John, on both sides of it. On the one hand it is the beginning of the great divine act which reveals God’s eternal nature and constant operation in and towards his created world. On the other hand, through the Holy Spirit it is itself revealed as the life in the flesh of him who is identified with the eternal Word and only begotten Son of God. But the work of the Holy Spirit is thought of as belonging only to the revealing act. The Holy Spirit is revealer, not the revealed. That is why his work appears as starting only from the historical life of Jesus, and as being in this way historically limited.
Thus a double truth is safeguarded, and two opposite errors avoided. If, because we acknowledge the historical Jesus to be the revealer of God, we seek to hold and contemplate him only as he was in Palestine, then we are, like Mary Magdalene in the garden, endeavouring to cling to him only as he was, not as he eternally is; we are trying to rest in that faith which the disciples had before the crucifixion, and we are rejecting his own gift of the Spirit who would lead us into all the truth. This has been the error of much medieval devotion to the Crucified, and, in a different way, of much Liberal Protestant devotion to “the Jesus of history”. It is that error which gives its sting to historical criticism of the Gospels. But if, on the other hand, we claim to have the Holy Spirit’s revelation, without acknowledging that this revelation starts from the historical life of Jesus only and that the Spirit is his gift, then by implication we deny God=s absolutely single and final act of self-manifestation in this world. Forthwith, then, we are at the mercy of vague or occult doctrines of divine immanence; the light is not in us; and we can retain no firm grasp of the truth that God is agape. This is the more deadly error of gnosticism, immanentism, and much Catholic modernism.
With the prologue of St. John’s Gospel before his mind, the Christian must always attach a high value to the comparative study of religions. In every quest and achievement of the human spirit, not only even in religion, the same God is partially and dimly apprehended and revealed; and the Christian will expect that the Holy Spirit will teach him, through his comparative study, a fuller understanding of his own faith in Christ. But, apart from the life of Jesus, the eternal Word is apprehended apart from his own great and final self-revealing act. The Christian therefore cannot place his own creed on a level with others, as though, like them, it were but a partial and relative expression of truth. For it is only the light of Jesus who gave the Spirit and whom the Spirit ever more fully reveals, that enables the Christian to discern and judge and learn from the partial truths in other faiths. Even if his study obliges him in candour to abandon a traditional doctrine which previously seemed to belong to Christianity itself, he will abandon it only because of the Spirit’s interpretation of what the cross must mean to him in the sphere of the intellect. If the cross itself be not the light of the eternal and absolute truth, then the Christian’s whole standard in judging what is partial, and his whole inspiration in seeking to learn, are made illusory and void. Christian breadth of mind is born of no easygoing or sceptical relativism, but of that sure knowledge of Christ through the Spirit, which enables him to see signs of his presence and work in hitherto unrecognized and unlikely places. Did not the Spirit himself teach St. John the meaning of the fact that in his historic incarnation the Son of God seemed to come out of Nazareth, and was only rejected in Jerusalem? How many would-be orthodox teachers have forgotten, and still forget, St. John’s warning to orthodoxy! The Church’s most Searching critic will always be the Spirit whom Jesus gave to be her inward guide and the interpreter of himself.
4. THE HOLY SPIRIT AND HISTORY
We turn next to consider the objection of anti-formalism that Christian orthodoxy seeks to mechanize the operation of the Holy Spirit by associating it with outward forms. With part of this objection we shall be concerned in the succeeding chapters. Part of it belongs to the subject of the theology of the Sacraments, which is outside our scope. But in part also it is an objection in principle to the idea that the operation of God’s Spirit is to be found in his selection of a particular people or outwardly organized society to be in its historical development the guardian of his spiritual gifts and the dispenser of them to mankind. The anti-formalist gives an essentially individualistic application to the principle of the free operation of the divine, life-giving Spirit. Everywhere, at all times, in all varieties of historical circumstance, and apart from membership in any particular society, God’s Spirit touches the individual heart and raises it to fellowship with himself. The life of Jesus is the supreme manifestation of this universal truth. To this manifestation the legacy of Judaism in the Church is a hindrance rather than a help. We understand the message of Jesus best, when we take it out of the merely Jewish context which was inevitably its historical Setting. And to the spiritual Christian the true Church on earth should appear, not as a society of baptized persons acknowledging a particular creed or confession, but rather as the company of all individuals, some of them perhaps quite isolated, who have realized the great truth that Jesus in his loneliness came to teach, that God is their Father and men their brothers.
This kind of anti-formalism is not acceptable to the Biblical scholars of today, who are apt rather to ignore the precious half-truth which it contains. But to answer it in terms merely of Biblical scholarship inevitably begs the fundamental question which it raises. We may perhaps find a more profoundly relevant answer in a free rendering of the thought which underlies the historical philosophy of Romans.
God works out his universal purposes of love and grace through history, through historical movements and events, and not merely by illuminating individual souls. In a sinful world this truth implies that he selects particular peoples and societies as chosen vessels to which he commits a special gift of spiritual life, so that, when the gift has been developed for a time within its vessel, the vessel itself may be broken, in order that the treasure within may be more widely diffused. But since the chosen vessels are themselves, with one exception, made up of imperfect and selfish humanity, they in part refuse their office. The natural consequence of this refusal must be the progressive loss and disappearance of the gift itself; for the talent buried to be retained must in the end decay. But the divine love does not suffer this process to complete itself. Always through the breaking up of one culture or order or civilization, and the apparent loss of its gifts, it brings about a fresh concentration of its gifts in a new vessel from which a greater spiritual treasure may be diffused.
The process in many manners and degrees repeats itself ceaselessly in history. But in one particular historical process the meaning and end of all history are revealed. This is the process of which the Bible is the record, and that which the Bible records is the very sacrament of God’s historical dealings with mankind. The people of Israel was God’s chosen vessel, the Christ-nation, above all others. To it “the oracles of God” were entrusted, so that, when it had learned in its isolation the truth of what had been committed to its charge, in the end all nations of the earth might be blessed through the disappearance of its own separate entity and the diffusion of its gifts. But God’s people, so the story runs, did not live up to their high calling. They desired the promised greatness for themselves; but they refused submission to the law of God’s righteousness, which was the condition of true attainment. So the prophets and their followers within Israel are made “the holy remnant” of a people which has forfeited its holiness. But even the prophetic message itself is confused with baser elements, and, after proclaiming confusedly a future hope of redemption, it dies away. The more uncertain voice of the apocalyptists succeeds that of the prophets, and the Pharisaic movement maintains the observance of God’s law with a narrow-minded zeal which in the end only obscures God’s purpose. God’s gift to his people seems to be lost. Then, and not till then, the great miracle can happen. God=s own arm in history brings salvation, where man has failed. The treasure of God’s grace, lost among his people, is wholly concentrated in the one man Jesus, who is God’s Christ indeed, not only an individual but the one human representative of all God’s people. And now God’s love has created the one human vessel which completely expresses and embodies it. Those to whom Jesus comes – so the terrible logic of sin works itself out – reject or, at best, forsake him. The chosen vessel is broken in death. But the breaking of that vessel, willingly accepted by it, is the sacrifice which is God’s victory. In Jesus God’s purpose for man is at once revealed and fulfilled. And from his glorified manhood the power of the Spirit comes to found a new society, a new people of God on earth, which can carry the redeemed life of fellowship with Christ to all mankind. Because that society arises out of the incarnation and still works in this world, it must have its outward Organization and external limits; the Church on earth is still a historical and a visible institution. Through and in it, though not confined by it, Christ’s Holy Spirit works. But, as indwelt and guided by the Spirit, the Church knows once for all the end of history, the end of the world, and the end of its own being, that by its fellowship in Christ=s self-sacrifice to God mankind should be redeemed. Corrupted by sin and torn by schism, the Church on earth still knows, and can never wholly forget, whence it comes, whither it goes, and what it exists to do. It exists that the world may know that the eternal God who once for all in history revealed himself, suffered, and triumphed in the Christ who created it, is the God of love.
5. THE KOINONIA OF THE HOLY SPIRIT IN THE CHURCH
There is, however, still a final question to be asked; and, as we consider it, we must bear in mind all three conceptions of “the religion of the spirit” or “spiritual religion” which we have described as current in the modern world, and especially perhaps the third, which we said was characteristic of the piety produced by the Counter-Reformation. What is the peculiar treasure recognizable within the body of the Church, which can justify us in speaking of the Church even now on earth as the society of the redeemed humanity living with the life of “the world to come”? Imperfect as that Church is, and full of the sins which have always marred all other humanity than that of Christ himself, how can we say that in it alone the Spirit dwells with his gifts of the new and heavenly life? To answer that question we shall turn once more to St. Paul’s great phrase, the koinonia of the Holy Spirit.
One essential paradox of Christianity consists in the fact that, although when viewed from outside it is one of the religions of the world, when it is known from within, it is not a religion at all, nor even the true religion only, but something inherently more than religion; it is a whole social life of communion in God among men, a communion which embraces both sacred and secular activities and is altogether transfigured by the pervading presence of God’s love. The life of heaven itself is the life of perfect community and communion. In a sinful world, on the other hand, the life of the holy soul is primarily one of separation.1 Because it lives in communion with God, it is separate from sinners; and, because the God whom it serves is the lover of all, that separation brings with it pain such as no sinner can experience. This separation of holiness, and the pain which it brings, were realized in Jesus the crucified in whom God’s Spirit fully dwelt. But, because the self-surrender of Jesus was complete, his manhood has been raised to heaven, and, with a new operation derived from that manhood, the Holy Spirit establishes among men a new communion and fellowship on earth, in which the members realize not only their separation from the world, but also, though dimly and partially yet truly and positively, the communion which will be fulfilled in the world to come. The sin of the world has entered deeply into the society in which that communion and fellowship have begun to be granted. Sometimes it has dragged down that society to lower levels than any to which natural society can sink. The sin of the world in the Church is blacker than the sin of the world outside. Yet still the principle of the Church’s life is supernatural. It binds all kinds of men together in an equal fellowship, where each through love contributes something to the good of all, because, not in spite of, his special gift, calling, and characteristics.
1If we try to conceive the life of this world, as it might have been apart from sin, the life of souls in it would still be relatively a life in separation. For the initial separateness of the finite self is a condition of that free self-surrender whereby alone it can enter eternal life. It is this initial freedom of separateness or freedom of choice which also makes possible sin, the willful refusal of self-surrender.
True, the differentiation of functions subordinated to the common good is a principle which even Plato thoroughly understood. But the love which sees in every fellow citizen a brother for whom Christ died, and in every differentiated function a gift of the one Spirit whom Christ imparts – that Plato could not understand, because Jesus had not yet been glorified, nor the Spirit given. Therefore in The Republic the philosopher-saints, who are the aristocracy of Plato’s ideal state, are obliged reluctantly to leave the contemplative pursuits in which their real interest lies, in order to do the practical work of government. Plato suggests that they will govern disinterestedly, just because they are reluctant and govern only from a sense of duty, while their hearts are elsewhere. Such other-worldliness, though it has sometimes played a not ignoble part within the Church itself, is fundamentally non-Christian. There is quite literally a world of difference between Plato’s Republic and St. Paul’s conception of the body of Christ. And however little the real fellowship of the body has prevailed even in the Christian Church, it is clear that apart from the Church it could not exist. The operation of the Spirit in the Church is not identical with the omnipresent activity of the creative Word; it is the operation of the Holy Spirit who has now become the life of a fellowship which is common as well as holy, because he unites men to the Christ who has redeemed common manhood and raised it into the heavenly world.
6. THE KOINONIA AS SPIRITUAL
What then precisely do we mean by the word “spiritual”, when we use such phrases as “spiritual life” and “spiritual experience”? To many the answer to that question will seem plain enough. To them spiritual life and experience constitute that particular part of all human life and experience, in which God or divine being is the direct object of consciousness: or, to say the same thing in other words, the spiritual life of man is that part of his life in which he is apprehending, or seeking to apprehend, God’s presence and reality in direct relation to his own soul. Some such definition is indeed perfectly legitimate, and even, for certain purposes, necessary. Its main point is to make spiritual life and experience one clearly distinguishable activity among the many which make up the life and experience of man as a whole. It may be that some men lack spiritual capacity, either completely or almost so, as some men appear to lack a moral sense. But it would of course be grotesque to suppose that spiritual life and experience, thus understood, are confined to the adherents of any one religion.
On the other hand, the Christian theologian, though he will accept and use for certain purposes some such definition as that just suggested, still cannot be content with it. His faith is that God’s own supreme revelation of himself to man does not consist in any disclosure made in the “spiritual experience” of men in general, or of some particular men, or even of one. That revelation took place when God by the action of the Holy Spirit became incarnate in the whole life of one whole man; and, as the result of that incarnation, the same Holy Spirit joins one body of men in and through all their activities to him who was incarnate and is now their head. Therefore in the Christian community, and there alone, all human life is in principle made spiritual. All definitions of “spiritual life”, which make it one activity among others, begin to break down. And in that fact precisely consists the truly supernatural character of the Church as belonging to God’s new creation. In “the world to come” there can be no separability of sacred from secular, spiritual from material, supernatural from natural. And the Christian Church reveals and prophesies the life of the world to come just in so far as in it already such separations are transcended. It is inherently impossible that the lives of those who are called technically “religious”, or even religion itself as one activity among others, should in themselves be sufficient for the task. The separations of which we have been speaking can only be overcome (in so far as here below it is possible to overcome them at all) in a community where men of different callings, sacred and secular, are together sanctified in Christ’s love which penetrates to every corner of human life.
To sanctify secular avocations or occupations in the Christian way is not to ignore, nor even to diminish, their inherently non-religious character. The artistic and scientific work of Christians ought not to be disguised sermons, though of course there must be in the Church a religious kind of art, just as there must be a scientific study of religion. Christian art and science and industry and any other right and useful activity we can name, are those which fulfill that distinct and proper function in the whole fellowship which God=s love has appointed for each. It is in their non-religious character that the Holy Spirit sanctifies them and those who engage in them, “as he distributes his gifts to each man severally as he will”.
In this world religion must always remain one distinct function and activity among others within the community, if only because it differs from the rest in representing the ultimate goal and significance of all. And just for that reason there must always be some, and only some, who find in religion their special vocation; although none can be genuinely a Christian in his nonreligious activity, unless he also shares personally in Christian prayer and corporate worship. It is only in heaven, or in the world to come, that there can be no temple at all, since there the universe is God’s Church, and all distinction between sacred and secular obliterated. Here below it is otherwise. Yet even here below it is the Church’s task, precisely because it is “other-worldly”, to make nonreligious activities into holy callings, in which (and not merely by means of which) communion with Christ is to be sought and found. The χοινωνία αγίων (communion in holy things), which is the Church’s glory, is but a vain glory apart from the αγίασμος χοινων (sanctification of common things) which it implies. But all the time we must remember that lives spent mainly in nonreligious affairs could not be thus “in Christ” without the witness borne by those other lives of ascetic or missionary or pastoral devotion in which the same love makes more manifest the marks of its cross.
7. THE CHURCH AS EXCLUSIVE TO BE INCLUSIVE
Perhaps the cardinal error in what has passed for orthodoxy, both in the Middle Ages and in the Counter-Reformation and also sometimes in the reformed Churches, has been to emphasize the reality of the supernatural (which is sometimes almost identified with the spiritual) in such a way as to fix the dividing line between it and the natural. Thus it is that today orthodoxy finds itself confronted by philosophies which deny that any real difference exists, and suggest that the supernatural and the natural (and perhaps the spiritual and the material) are but two universal aspects of one world – doctrine which leads many theologians to disparage or condemn philosophy. But Christian philosophy would teach that in Christ and in his Church the supernatural, in order to redeem the natural, crosses the dividing line and will finally abolish it.
It follows from this philosophy that the Church must be exclusive from one point of view, but only because it is inclusive from another. Only in the Christian community is that operation of the Holy Spirit found which derives full redeeming power from the incarnation and the cross of Christ. Only there can exist the true χοινωνία αγίων which is also the αγίασμος χοινων. But because it is in this respect that the Church is exclusive, the Church is seen to be potentially all-inclusive also. For there is nothing in nature which cannot in the Church’s fellowship be made into a holy and acceptable offering to God. The Church’s supernatural life is in itself a holy communion; its sacrament is a holy act which is also a sharing in common. And therefore its relation to the world is expressed by the similar paradox of its titles “holy” and “catholic”, separate and yet all-inclusive. The Church can be in truth both holy and catholic, because it is also apostolic, sent from God into the world with the gospel of the world’s redemption. In this world its holy fellowship exists for the sake of those who are still outside it.
Chapter XXIX – Freedom and Authority in Faith
The modern revolt against the recognition of authority in the sphere of religious belief is a remarkable phenomenon. For it is evident that in matters of belief, no less than in matters of conduct, freedom is inseparable from the acknowledgment of law. In conduct an unrestricted licence of the individual to do what he pleases issues in an anarchy where no one is free to have a life worth living. And, indeed, the very notion of moral freedom implies some conception of a law of right which is valid for all. Similarly, in the sphere of belief the refusal to admit the authority of any universal law of truth destroys the meaning and possibility of intellectual freedom. For if there be no one truth imposing its own inherent authority upon all, every protest made in the name of reason against the tyranny of dogma loses its point, and there is no essential sin against truth, when a government, whether ecclesiastical or secular, seeks to produce a unanimity convenient to itself by a rigid control of education and all the means of disseminating information to the people.
1. THE GENERAL RELATION OF AUTHORITY TO FREEDOM
It is to be noticed that in a society where a body of unanimous belief is thus manufactured, the principles of authority and of freedom disappear together. For the true exercise of authority is inherently different from compulsion. Authority operates not by compulsion but by obligation. And compulsion and obligation, far from being synonymous terms, really exclude one another. In so far as I am simply compelled to believe or do anything, that belief or action has no obligation for me; it is meaningless to say that I ought to believe or do it. In so far as I have been compelled to make a promise, the question whether I ought to have made it cannot arise, and no moralist would say that I am under any obligation in respect of its fulfillment. It is true that, when the obligation imposed by authority is disregarded, authority may be supported by force. But force is at most the sanction of authority, not its proper exercise. On the other hand, obligation, which is imposed by authority as such, presupposes a certain freedom or spontaneity on the part of him who obeys it. Authority and freedom therefore are strictly correlative.
2. RELIGION AND DOGMA
Such a statement of abstract principles, however, does not take us far towards the solution of any concrete problem. Our immediate concern is with the sphere of religion. And here it must be observed that the exercise of authority in matters of faith is characteristic only of those higher religions in which personal belief is held to be more important than mere cultus. Primitive religion on the whole is content with prescribing correct procedure in worship, and concerns itself very little with what the individual may or may not actually believe. And, when primitive religions are developed in a polytheistic civilization, this comparative indifference to personal belief readily becomes the basis for an apparently broadminded toleration. The religion of classical Athens, for instance, knew nothing of dogma. It is difficult to suppose that the orthodox Aristophanes really believed in Zeus even as much as did Socrates the heretic. Later on, the Roman Empire extended religious toleration more widely than the city-states of Greece. It was for external nonconformity rather than for any theological conviction that both Jews and Christians found themselves suspect even under a government which sheltered so many varieties of religious experience and creed. The imperial authority would not have concerned itself about their personal beliefs, if they had readily conformed to the accepted rituals, especially those connected with Emperor worship. But Christianity at least could not reconcile itself to a religious toleration based upon a divorce between faith and cultus. And in this respect Islam followed in the same steps. When a religious society claims to be the trustee of a revealed truth which imposes an obligation upon the belief of all men, it must exercise a definite authority in matters of faith which can make no terms with an easygoing Rimmonism. Dogmas are products of catholic and evangelical religion; and such religion cannot but produce them.
3. AUTHORITY AND FREEDOM IN CHRISTIANITY
The specific nature of Christianity, however, gives special characteristics to its insistence upon the principles of authority and freedom in faith, characteristics which we can trace clearly within the New Testament itself. On the one hand, the essence of its gospel is the report of certain facts, attested by witnesses, together with a theological meaning attributed to those facts. For this reason Christianity is bound to attach a peculiar importance to the element of authority in faith, since it must present an authoritative message concerning facts to be accepted and believed on the word of apostolic testimony. That is why its truth cannot rest either on strictly logical demonstration, or on a merely spiritual vision or mystical insight which is independent of any particular happening in history. It is for the same reason that the authority of the apostles as witnesses and messengers of the gospel was of necessity a fundamental element in the faith of the primitive church. On the other hand, it is no less certain that part of the essential content of the primitive gospel was the imparting of the gift of the Holy Spirit to all believers. There was one Spirit, as there was one body and one Christ. It was the Spirit who gave the Apostles utterance, and made their message to be the word, not of men, but of God. It was the Spirit who confirmed the word with signs following. But the gift of the Holy Spirit was shared by all; it was bestowed through the word and work of the Apostles, but it was in no sense confined to them. The reception of the Holy Spirit by all was the very sign, prophesied by Joel,1 of the coming of the new age, with which the gospel of the Messiah was concerned.
1See Acts 2:16 sqq.
Thus it is that the doctrine of apostolic authority in the New Testament is balanced by the doctrine of the spiritual liberty of the Christian. The gift of the Spirit to uncircumcised believers declares their deliverance from bondage, not only to sin, but also to the Mosaic Law. From the Spirit they receive manifold new powers, illuminations, and guidances, which the apostolic authority must teach them to discern and recognize, but not disparage or restrain. The Spirit in the Christian laity must not be quenched.
4. ST. PAUL’S CORRELATION OF AUTHORITY AND FREEDOM
Such were the conditions of the problem with which we can still watch St. Paul grappling as we read his epistles. He must at all costs maintain his authority as the divinely appointed trustee of the gospel, inferior to no other. Any attempt to discredit his commission, or to alter the essential content of his gospel, must be unsparingly denounced. But it is precisely that same gospel, and nothing else, which gives spiritual liberty to men. Christian freedom, expressed in the cry, “Abba, Father”, is the only true freedom; and it is limited only by the fact that it is Christian. The law of Christianity is that no inspiration, however apparently supernatural, can be genuine, which denies the Lordship of Jesus or offends against love. On the other hand, all activities, however lowly, which serve the life and welfare of the Christian body, are to be esteemed as spiritual gifts. In thus interpreting the meaning and application of the gospel, St. Paul claims apostolic authority; for it is only under the law of such a gospel that Christian freedom can exist. To the principle of religious toleration, as understood by the Roman or the British Empire, St. Paul would never have dreamed of applying the word “freedom” at all. True, he acknowledged and prized a secular freedom, his Roman citizenship. But this freedom meant to him a precious privilege, enjoyed under Roman law, which slaves and many others had not. In the same way his Christian freedom meant an infinitely greater treasure of heavenly citizenship, which those not in Christ inevitably lacked. It did not occur to him to interpret freedom negatively as characterizing a sphere in which authority refrains from operating and regards variations as indifferent. To him the spheres of authority and freedom were the same.
5. OPPOSITION OF AUTHORITY TO FREEDOM IN THE LATER CHURCH
The correlation between the two principles, which St. Paul thus attempted to establish in the Christian Church, was no doubt always imperfect, and did not long endure. Very soon the conviction of the Spirit’s presence in the whole body of Christians, and the vivid sense of new liberty which that presence gave, began to fade. The Church began to include multitudes for whom St. Paul’s conceptions of the koinonia of the Spirit and of the freedom with which Christ set us free, meant but little. Still, the Church maintained its unity and extended its frontiers by loyal adherence to its bishops as guardians of the tradition of the faith. But the bishops did not regard their apostolic ministry in quite the same way as St. Paul. They were not for the most part missionaries creating new churches with the gospel of a new age. They were trustees concerned mainly to keep intact the tradition committed to them, and to define it further when compelled to do so by the misinterpretations of heretics. Hence faith came gradually to be identified less with the laying hold on a new life in Christ than with orthodoxy, or correct opinion, concerning him. The test of such orthodoxy was assent to propositions. The authority of the bishops, and finally of the Pope, determined the form of the propositions to which assent should be required. In these circumstances freedom was no longer felt as the release from external ordinances into the glad consciousness of being at home in the universe, the God of which had adopted Christians as his children. The freedom of faith came rather to mean the right or licence of the individual to speculate wherever authority had not already prescribed the answer to the question asked. And the Spirit’s guidance was normally identified with the authoritative definition, not with the free speculation. Thus freedom and authority, instead of being correlative, became opposed to one another. Their provinces were conceived as mutually exclusive; and the covenanted guidance of the Spirit was found within the province, not of freedom, but of authority. Such was the position already approached in patristic times and definitely reached in the Middle Ages.
It would take far too long to discuss the relations between authority and freedom in faith as they were variously conceived in the bodies which severed themselves from the Roman communion at the Reformation. Suffice it to say that any return to the model of the New Testament was largely illusory or transient. Most of the reformed Communions, though not all, quickly established an orthodoxy of their own, according to which assent to formulae remained the necessary test of faith, although the formulae of course differed in content from those which the medieval Church had imposed.
6. MODERN LIBERALISM AND THE REACTION AGAINST IT
What is from our present point of view a much more radical revolution took place in the nineteenth century, when a thoroughgoing attack upon orthodoxies of every kind was made in the name, not of free faith, but of free thought. “The truth shall make you free” is the scriptural saying which had expressed the ancient notion of Christian liberty through the Gospel. “Freedom shall give you truth” was in effect the motto of the new Liberalism. Its immediate aim was to import into theology those principles and methods of experimental science which had recently established the great doctrine of evolution. Let the Church cease to bind the intellect with any creed or dogma; let the human mind be encouraged to regard nothing as fixed or certain in the sphere of belief; then the truth will gradually emerge out of a healthy conflict of unfettered opinions among those who acknowledge themselves to be only seekers. Such was the new gospel which challenged the Church’s right to exercise any authority in faith at all. The opposition between authority and freedom which orthodoxy itself had created was turned against it, somewhat as in the parable the separation which Dives made between himself and Lazarus was turned against him in the end. The provinces of authority and freedom remained separate; but now the operation of the Spirit was found to be wholly within that of freedom. Unfortunately, even the Christian exponents of undogmatic religion failed to perceive that the liberty which they proclaimed to the captives of dogma was something very different from that which the Bible had associated with the acceptable year of the Lord.
Today it would be waste of time to dwell on the mistakes of Victorian Liberalism. We should be concerned rather to acknowledge and maintain those elements in Christian truth which it re-emphasized. For in any case events since the great war have remorselessly exposed the futility of its pathetic trust in human nature unevangelized and unredeemed. In the last twenty years the pendulum of human inclination has swung violently back again from the side of evolutionary democracy to that of revolutionary despotism. Many have found in the iron discipline of Communist or Fascist parties something of that sense of freedom in common self-dedication which characterized original Christianity. Meanwhile the reformed Churches themselves seem to hesitate, bewildered between a pacific humanism which neglects the element of supernatural judgement or crisis in the gospel, and a prophetic zeal which would purge from it the last trace of the “sweet reasonableness” (επιείχεια) commended even by St. Paul.
7. A RETURN TO FIRST PRINCIPLES
We must go back to first principles. The claim of Christianity to make men free depends upon the truth of its gospel. That gospel is essentially a message concerning certain historical facts and their meaning in relation to God and man. The Church exists to declare that message to mankind and to manifest the new life of freedom and fellowship which belief in it makes possible. The message, because of its nature and content, can only be accepted by what St. Paul called “the hearing of faith”; and correspondingly there must be apostolic authority in the Church to make clear what the essential and permanent content of the message is. In one sense at least it is true that salvation is by faith only; but it has been left for the non-Christian psychologist to explain the meaning of that great principle to be that it does not much matter what a man believes in, provided that he believes in it enough. The Christian message is that to believe in Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, sets free the soul; and the freedom depends on the divine authority of those who declare the message. It is, moreover, a freedom in the communion of the same Spirit who, according to Christ=s promise, will always maintain in his Church the authoritative witness to the truth of the gospel, which is Christ himself. Creeds and dogmas are but formulated statements which are needed as visible signs of the continuity and permanence of the witness. Apart from the interpretation given to them by living minds which they guide, they would have no authority, and indeed no significance, at all.
8. FUNCTION OF CREED AND DOGMA IN CHRISTIANITY
If, then, creeds and dogmas are to be rightly used as a means of enabling Christians to stand fast and grow in their liberty, two principles must constantly be remembered:
(a) Creeds and dogmas are not the object of faith, but its expression with reference to its object. What they express is faith in God and in what through Christ he has both revealed and done, not assent to a number of several propositions. In the past a cardinal mistake of orthodoxy has been to treat creeds, not as standard expressions of the Church=s faith, but as test formulae to be imposed on individuals for their assent. Now it is inherently impossible to test faith by assent. A man may genuinely assent to any number of these propositions about God without having any spark of faith in God at all. So far as assent goes, St. James’s affirmation stands, that the devils also believe. No doubt the majority of those who have found the Christian creeds easy of assent are not devilish persons at all, but only unthinking or conventionally minded. Yet it is not good that these should be readily welcomed into the Church’s fellowship, while those whose intellects are active and possibly over-scrupulous should be excluded, because they cannot conscientiously assent to some particular proposition which a formal creed either contains or implies. The Church ought not carefully to strain out gnats of intellectual unorthodoxy while it eagerly swallows whole camels of worldliness and spiritual pride – the leaven of the Sadducees and Pharisees. The wrong thus indicated is widely recognized. But so long as creeds are regarded as tests for assent, there is no remedy for it, except to substitute for the creed some vaguer formula to which everyone who desires to call himself a Christian can assent without difficulty. And such a formula would certainly be even more valueless as a test of faith in the gospel to which the Church exists to bear witness.
On the other hand, if creeds and dogmas generally are regarded as standard expressions of the Church’s faith, then the Church can gladly welcome into and retain in her fellowship anyone who honestly desires to live and grow in the knowledge of the gospel which these standards define and safeguard, even though certain particular propositions in them may at present excite dissent rather than assent in his mind. It may well be that such dissent must disqualify the individual in question from being accredited as a teacher of the faith. But there is no reason why he should not be recognized as a faithful disciple, if he sincerely intends to take Jesus for his Lord, and, as a member of the Christian society, to learn more of the faith which it professes. The creeds and dogmas of the Church then challenge his understanding to enter more deeply into the mystery which they declare. If the Chalcedonian formula had never received authority, the mystery of the gospel might long ago have been explained away.
(b) The second principle is more directly concerned with the koinonia of the Holy Spirit. There must be men of apostolic authority in the Church who are specially commissioned to maintain, in its fullness and purity, the essence of the gospel which the Church declares. But Christians ought to acknowledge also a spiritual gift in those who criticize traditional doctrines, either with the moral zeal of an Amos or with the intellectual acuteness of a Socrates. There is no valid reason why the authorities concerned to maintain the truth of the gospel should take disciplinary action to silence such men in the Church, even if they consider their teaching mistaken, provided it proceeds from sincerity of faith in Christ, and claims only the authority which belongs to it as such.
There is indeed a Christian justification for the criticism of tradition, viz., the conviction that the intellect, as well as the heart, is called to take its proper share in the self‑sacrifice which is the way of salvation. The true sacrifice of the intellect consists, not in cutting reason’s throat with the knife of revelation, but rather in the loyal acceptance of unpleasant and even disturbing facts in the ultimate assurance of faith that all truth, however unedifying at first sight, must in the end reveal the same God who was manifest once for all in Jesus. It is exactly by submitting itself to learn and take account of facts as they are, without imposing upon them its preconceived ideas of what they ought to be, that the Christian intellect is trained in the self-denial by which it also enters God’s Kingdom. If the intellect has not the utterly sincere love of truth, it can never learn the full truth of love. And just for that reason there must be those within the Church whom the Spirit of Jesus himself inspires to follow the love of truth first, even when the truth of love seems for a while to be endangered thereby. Criticism so inspired, even when it challenges doctrines that seem to many Christians fundamental, can have no taint of pride or desire for notoriety. It is part of the cross of the Christian critic that he should be lauded in the public press for his courage and candour. The courage of the surgeon, who hurts because he would heal, craves no praise from men. Simply because its inspiration is Christian and acknowledges Christ’s law of love, room must be found for drastic criticism within the spiritual liberty and communion of the Church, even at the cost of difficulty and tension. The Spirit operating in the whole body will prove its truth or falsehood when patience has had its perfect work.
It is indeed manifest in history that the most effective and thoroughgoing criticisms of apparently catholic doctrines and practices have appealed to the principles of Christianity itself. Christians have often been, and still are, effectively attacked for not being Christian enough, never for being too Christian. The fact that Christianity is always its own severest critic is one proof that it is indeed the final and perfect religion for mankind. And the way for the Church to keep and manifest her divinely ordained authority in faith is not to adopt measures of repression whenever the critic’s voice is raised, but rather to trust the one Spirit to reconcile within the freedom of his own fellowship the diverse gifts of which he is the author.
Chapter XXX – The Historical Foundation of the Church
Up till now we have been dealing mainly with the spiritual nature of the Church as constituted by the koinonia of the Holy Spirit. We must now turn our attention to questions more closely connected with its outward organization. For the Church of Christ on earth and in history has always a religious organization with a system of government, appointed officers, and characteristic rites. We can have no complete doctrine of the Church until we have related this fact to the spiritual essence of the Church=s being.
Considering the Church then as a historical and organized society, we must first ask the question, who founded it, and when?
1. THE PROBLEM RAISED BY HISTORICAL CRITICISM
Up till quite recent times no Christian would have hesitated in his main answer to that question. Jesus Christ himself, he would have said, founded the Church by giving a definite commission to his apostles before his ascension, and by fulfilling his promise to bestow the Holy Spirit. And, if we trust the historical accuracy of every statement in the Gospels, there can be no doubt whatever about the matter. The words to St. Peter, “Upon this rock I will build my Church”, those to the Eleven, “Go ye and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost”, the high-priestly prayer in St. John’s Gospel, and other texts, furnish explicit evidence which is abundantly sufficient.
The historical studies of modern scholars, however, require us to make allowance for the fact that in some cases the traditional record of the Lord’s words has been influenced by the desire and need of the early Church either to claim dominical authority for its institutions or to explain the relevance of Christ’s teaching to a situation which arose subsequently. And this influence is most clearly traced in the First and Fourth Gospels. Few scholars would now maintain that the bulk of the Johannine discourses represents exactly reported words of Jesus. The evidence that in the primitive Church baptism was performed in the name of the Lord Jesus makes it very unlikely that Christ actually commanded his apostles to baptize in the name of the Trinity. And many would regard it as almost equally improbable that during his ministry on earth he used the actual expression “my Church” with the meaning implied in the saying which St. Matthew records as uttered to St. Peter.
2. DID ST. PAUL FOUND THE CHURCH?
Such considerations, combined with the modern tendency to emphasize the eschatological element in the teaching and thought of Jesus, have led some students of Christian origins to a conclusion absolutely contradictory of the Church=s main tradition. Jesus, they say, had no thought of founding any Church on earth at all. His whole mind was dominated by the expectation of the almost immediate end of the world. He never even considered the need of making provision for a society to carry his gospel out into the world. We must therefore suppose the true founder of the historical Church to have been St. Paul. St. Paul professed to derive his commission and his gospel entirely from the risen Christ. To the Lord’s historical ministry prior to the crucifixion he attached, it is alleged, but little positive importance. Because he was the first Catholic as well as the first Protestant, he involved himself in bitter controversy with the original disciples, who regarded their religion merely as a form of Judaism which claimed that Jesus was the true Messiah. On the main issue of the controversy Paulinism triumphed. Thus it was that Christianity, which had originally been a special form of Jewish Messianism, became the new religion of a new Church. The next generation of Christians glossed over the breach between the Christianity of Jesus and that of Paul, by attributing to Jesus himself such words and acts as would represent him to have been in historical fact the founder of the Church and the religion which bore his name.
No doubt this theory, in the precise form in which I have stated it, is already old-fashioned. The most recent scholars are generally agreed that the controversy between St. Paul and St. Peter, of which we catch echoes in Galatians, cannot have been concerned with such fundamental issues as the old Tübingen school of critics suggested. St. Paul’s attack upon St. Peter was based on the contention that St. Peter’s action at Antioch in giving way to the Judaizers was false to his own acknowledged principles. All the evidence both of Galatians and Acts goes to show that St. Peter and St. Paul were in principle on the same side in the Judaistic controversy. Moreover, it is perfectly clear that a Gentile Christian congregation had been founded at Antioch before St. Paul went there. The admission of uncircumcised Gentiles to the Christian body was originally the work of St. Peter and St. Stephen, and not of St. Paul. Finally, as we have already seen, it involves a radical misunderstanding of St. Paul’s whole teaching to suppose that he attached little importance either to the ministry and sayings of Jesus before the crucifixion or to the central tradition about Jesus which he had received from “those who were in Christ before him”. The idea that St. Paul inaugurated a new religion, essentially different from that of the original disciples, is seen on examination to be entirely baseless.
Nevertheless, the atmosphere of scepticism produced by attempts radically to reconstruct and rewrite the whole story of Christian origins still persists. And, although it is impossible here to deal in any adequate way with the problems of strictly historical study, it belongs to our doctrinal purpose to sum up the basic evidence on which the Christian belief must rest that Jesus Christ in historical fact founded his Church on earth. For the nature of this evidence must affect our doctrine of the Church=s nature.
3. IN WHAT SENSE JESUS FOUNDED THE CHURCH
When the New Testament is re-examined in the light of modern studies with such absence of bias as a Christian can command, the following conclusions seem to emerge.
(a) The theory that the whole substance of Christ’s teaching was determined by the expectation of the immediate end of the world will not stand the test of fair-minded criticism. In fact it is St. Paul and not our Lord who occasionally allowed such an expectation to influence his ethical teaching. St. Paul enforced his regulations about marriage by emphasizing the shortness of the time now left.1 Jesus based his condemnation of divorce on a divine law which existed before Moses. Similarly the most “unworldly” principles of conduct laid down in the Sermon on the Mount are commended not at all on the ground that the end is near, but on the ground that in following them Christ’s disciples will be acting as their heavenly Father has always acted from the beginning of time towards both the good and the evil among men. It may be added, though it would take far too long to discuss the point, that much of Christ’s teaching about the Kingdom, both in his parables and elsewhere, can only be made consistent with an exclusively eschatological outlook by a strained and artificial exegesis.
11 Cor. 7:29. Contrast Mark 10:5 sqq.
(b) On the other hand, there is singularly little direct indication that Jesus regarded it as part of his mission to found any religious organization upon earth which would supersede the institutions of Judaism. The Judaistic controversy in the apostolic Church is witness that the apostles themselves were in doubt how far and in what sense Christianity must form a quite new organization which could dispense with the ordinances of the Law and the institutions of the synagogue; and this hesitation is quite intelligible, if the main substance of Christ’s teaching was what the Gospels represent it to have been.
But this consideration is double-edged. For it also shows how little the Pauline conception of the Church has been allowed to influence the record of Christ’s words and acts. It is really remarkable that documents which reached their present form so long after St. Paul’s victory had been definitely won, should show so little trace of any attempt to claim the direct authority of Jesus for the positions St. Paul had maintained in controversy. The very fact that the Gospels make no attempt to show that Jesus gave any definite or explicit teaching as to the future Church and its relation to Judaism, should make us more confident in relying upon the evidence which they do provide that Jesus founded the Church.
(c) The evidence of St. Paul’s Epistles and of Acts supports the Gospels in their affirmation that Jesus appointed a group of twelve men to be specially near to himself and to be his missionaries to others, and that these twelve were at the beginning chosen out of a larger body of disciples, and were assumed, at any rate after the Lord’s death, to possess special authority within that body. The significance of the number is not really lessened by doubts which exist as to one or two of the original names, by the peculiar authority of James the Lord’s Brother in the Jerusalem Church, or by the fact that St. Paul claimed an authority not inferior to that of the Twelve. The number is an indication of the fact, manifest in many ways all through the Gospels and in the New Testament as a whole, that in claiming to be the Messiah, the fulfiller of God’s promises to Israel, Jesus knew himself sent to reconstitute the chosen people, Israel, on the basis of a new relationship to God which must supersede the Mosaic Covenant. The choice of twelve means that the new Israel, the Israel which has received the Messiah, is making a fresh start from the twelve apostles, as the old Israel started its history from the twelve sons of Jacob.
(d) The word ecclesia, translated “Church” in the English New Testament, was not a new one to Jewish ears. In the LXX it meant “the congregation” of Israel, and it is so used in St. Stephen’s speech in Acts. Nor did the Christian Church ever claim to be a quite newly founded society. By St. Paul, as doubtless by all other Christians, it was identified with Israel, the chosen people, living under a new dispensation now that the Messiah had appeared.1 There were doubts how far the old dispensation was in practice to be regarded as obsolete before the final appearance of the Christ in glory. The Judaizers, though not St. Peter, appear to have thought that the Mosaic Law must still remain binding upon Christians for the present. But all Christians made the tremendous claim that they, in recognizing Jesus to be the Messiah, from henceforth constituted the true Israel, and were the inheritors of the promises made to the fathers. The Jews who rejected Jesus were no longer to be recognized as true Israelites at all. In this sense at least the Christians from the beginning claimed, and rightly claimed, to be the new Church or ecclesia of God, historically founded by Jesus Christ himself with the appointment of the Twelve.
Having made this affirmation we may be quite ready to admit that the further organization of the Church as a society quite distinct from the old Israel was a matter of subsequent development, as to which no express directions were given by the incarnate Lord. We can trace the initial steps of this development in the Pauline Epistles and in Acts.
1Professor Dodd points out to me that the Messianic idea is always correlative with the idea of a Messianic community which is “the people of the Saints of the Most High” (Dan. 7:27), the people of the New Covenant (Jer. 31:31 sqq.). The numerous sayings of Jesus implying the rejection of the old Israel which rejected him, make it necessary to postulate a new Israel. And the reference to the “twelve thrones” (Mt. 19:28, Lk. 22:30), and that to “the covenant” at the Last Supper (Mk. 14:24), almost prove that in some sense or other Jesus intended his apostles to he the nucleus of the new Israel.
4. CONCLUSION AS TO THE CHURCH’S NATURE
What then we can be sure of is this. From Pentecost onwards the Christian ecclesia existed under apostolic leadership as constituting the true Israel of God which had begun to receive the promises made to the fathers. It was a spiritual society in that it had received, and continued to confer upon fresh converts, the gift of the Holy Spirit from the risen Lord. The common sharing of this gift by all its members was a distinctive mark of its new life as the ecclesia of the new age, the company of those who were already being saved (σωζόμενοι). It soon became apparent that Jew and Gentile alike were to be made recipients of this gift, and that Gentiles were not to be brought first under the old covenant by circumcision and observance of the Law.
The Church, however, was not “a purely spiritual society”, if that expression is taken in its modern sense as implying that all outward rites were optional, or that leadership in it was not an office but a matter of occasional inspiration. The Church practised baptism and the laying on of hands as its ceremonies of initiation. It observed the breaking of bread or the Lord’s Supper as a solemn memorial of, and means of communion with, the Lord Jesus Christ; and its acknowledged ministerial leaders were the apostolic company which Jesus had at least begun to constitute before his death, and which he afterwards accredited as witnesses of his resurrection.
Chapter XXXI – Order, Orders and Unity in the Church
We have argued that the Church from its original foundation was not “a purely spiritual” society, but in a real sense an organized body, however elementary that organization may have been at the start. The further doctrine of the Church’s nature, which is more and more clearly seen to be the main issue whenever possibilities of reunion between the existing Churches are discussed, depends upon the answer to the question: What is the essential relation between that outward structure which makes the Church an organized society in the view of the world at large, and the spiritual reality which all agree to be, in the deepest and most ultimate sense, the Church itself? Or, more particularly, do any outward unity and continuity of organization in any way constitute the unity of the Church, or are they outward even in the sense of being external to that unity?
1. UTILITARIAN AND ORGANIC VIEWS OF CHURCH ORDER
Many and voluminous as are the answers given to that question, there are, I believe, only two which do not ultimately evade it. These two are quite opposed to one another, and the essential contrast between them can be quite shortly expressed by the use of a rather crude analogy. The first answer conceives the relation of the Church to its external order or organization to be somewhat analogous to the relation of a man to his clothes. The second answer conceives that relation to be analogous rather to that of a man to his body.
The point of each analogy requires some amplification. A man, we may say, always needs clothes of some kind; and some kinds are more convenient than others. Moreover some are more suitable for one occasion, some for another. A man therefore is well advised to change his clothes according to the occupation of the moment or according to the climate in which he happens to be living. Again, clothes wear out from time to time, and need to be renewed with some change of form and material. In the same way, there are many Christians who hold that some form of outward order or organization is indeed always necessary for the Church on earth, but there is no one form and no external continuity which ought to persist always and everywhere. There is no need for unity and continuity of external order, save as a matter of expediency; and variation at different times and in different places in also expedient. There are many types of Church order or “polity” in the world today. But it is quite wrong to dispute about them as though any one type could represent a sacred principle to which the Church is bound in all circumstances to adhere. For episcopalianism to claim a special divine authority for all time, is merely disastrous. It may well have been the best form of polity to hold the Church together in the early centuries, and as such it may claim to have had a divine sanction. But it does not follow that it is the only right form of Church polity today.
On the other hand, let us consider the relation of a man to his body. It is evident that a man is his spiritual and mental self in a stricter sense than he actually is his body. It is evident again that the spiritual element in a man=s being is infinitely more important than the physical. Moreover, the range of a man=s spiritual and mental activity is not wholly confined by his material body; for otherwise he could not even be aware that his body limits him. Finally, we must admit that the body develops and grows with the man. And yet the man=s very life is bound up with the body, and his unity with its unity, in a way which makes his relation to his body quite different from his relation to his clothes. Any breach in the unity and continuity of the living body is a maiming or mutilation of it, and an injury to the man himself. There are many Christians who conceive in some analogous way the relation of an outward order and organization to the spiritual essence of the living Church. They do not identify the Church=s being with the outward order in the same sense that they would identify it with fellowship in Christ. They do not regard the unity of the outward order as comparable in importance with the unity of the spiritual fellowship. They do not confine the spiritual fellowship within the limits which the outward order necessarily marks out. They admit that the outward order has developed to a great extent and elaborated itself in history; they will readily agree that in subordinate matters there must and ought to be wide variation in polity and ritual, and that to many of these the analogy of “clothes” is entirely applicable. But they still maintain, even to the scandal of those who do not agree with them, that the Church was originally founded as an organic unity upon the ministerial government of the apostles, and that to preserve an outward unity of order in unbroken continuity with the original apostolic constitution is essential to the Church’s very being. Breaches in that unity and continuity have now manifestly taken place; but these are comparable to lesions in a body, rather than to changes of clothing. Therefore it is an imperative duty to restore the broken unity in outward things.
2. THE ORGANIC VIEW TO BE PREFERRED
We have then two different conceptions of the relation of the Church’s outward order or organization to its spiritual being. Let us call the first the utilitarian view and the second the organic. The utilitarian view can be made extremely persuasive, and I do not think that it can be actually disproved by Scripture. It is not excluded either by the Johannine allegory of the vine and the branches or by the Pauline simile of the body and its members. It is widely held today by Free Churchmen, though hardly by a majority in the reformed Churches, and it is implied in the doctrine held by many Anglicans that episcopacy is of the bene esse, but not of the esse, of the Church.
Nevertheless, apart from deeper considerations of philosophical theology, there are two objections to the utilitarian view which appear likely to prevent it from ever becoming the view of more than a minority in the Church as a whole. The first objection is constituted by the mere historical fact that the view was hardly even thought of before the Reformation, and on questions of the fundamental nature of the Church the appeal to history cannot but remain powerful. In the second place, historical studies are constantly confirming the conclusion that the utilitarian view can claim no direct and positive support from the New Testament. As we have seen, the Church did not in fact come into being as a purely spiritual society for which all matters of external polity and organization were questions simply of occasional expediency. Such a notion was as completely absent from St. Paul’s mind as it was from that of his Judaizing opponents. And the utilitarian view presupposes a radical separation between “inward” and “outward” of a kind which, whatever its justification, is foreign to the thought of the New Testament as a whole.
3. TWO INTERPRETATIONS OF APOSTOLICAL SUCCESSION
If then we are to take what we have called the Organic view of the Church’s outward order, we are obliged to give some positive answer to the question, What in the history of the Church appear to be those essential elements in the unity and continuity of its organization, which must be loyally preserved or restored in any genuinely catholic scheme of reunion? And at this point we are bound to recognize an undeniable fact, that from the second century onwards to the Reformation the outward sign and guarantee of the Church’s unity was acknowledged to be the succession of bishops, holding office by due appointment and consecration, who safeguarded the tradition of faith handed down from the apostles and were in a true sense their living representatives. At the present time perhaps a majority of the Christians in the world still maintain the importance of this succession of bishops as constituting one essential feature in the continuous unity of the Church’s order. This recognition of episcopacy as essential need not necessarily imply that Churches of non-episcopal polity have not retained or restored other elements in the Church’s true and catholic order which have been lost or obscured where the episcopal succession has been kept. But it is at least extremely difficult to maintain the “organic” view of the Church’s order, unless one is prepared to admit that episcopacy is in some way essential to that order. And in order to determine in what way it is essential, we must examine in some detail the doctrine generally known as that of “the apostolic succession”.
The phrase “apostolic succession” is in itself obviously vague; and in fact two quite different meanings have been given to it, which it is vital to distinguish:
(a) According to the first interpretation the succession is primarily a transmission of duly constituted authority in the Church, an authority exercised by those who hold office in a continuous line reaching back ultimately to the apostolic authority of the apostles themselves. By those who hold this interpretation the transmission of authority is of course believed normally to carry with it a more personal gift of divine grace to enable the bearer of the office to exercise it in accordance with Christ’s will. But the essential succession is a succession in spiritual office and authority.
(b) According to the second interpretation the succession is primarily the transmission of a peculiar gift to the individual by means of a particular sign, viz., the act of episcopal consecration, whereby the gift and the power to transmit it have been handed down in an unbroken line from one of the original apostles. Those who hold this interpretation of course believe that the gift normally carries with it both the authority of an office in the Church and the grace to exercise it in accordance with Christ’s will. But the peculiar gift itself is neither a divine grace nor the authority of an office in the Church. By scholastic theologians, as we shall explain later, it was defined to be an indelible character, which could not be lost, and might therefore always be transmitted, by one who had once received it.
For convenience, let us call the first interpretation the authoritarian, and the second the indelibilist, view of the gift transmitted in apostolic succession. It is not difficult to show that it makes a great deal of difference to our whole doctrine of the Church which of these two views we hold. The difference is chiefly seen at two points:
(a) If we take the first or authoritarian view, obscurities as to what exactly happened when the monarchical episcopate established itself at the end of the first century, do not greatly matter, and do not affect the reality of the succession. All that the view obliges us to suppose is that there was some sort of transmission of authority from the apostles to men who were to be responsible after their death for maintaining the purity of the faith and the order of the Church. The evidence certainly seems to show that something of this kind took place. This transmission of authority was directly or indirectly the historical origin of the episcopal government which was universally recognized in the Church before the end of the second century. And it may be reasonably argued that the episcopal order, handed down from the second century, still represents the true organic continuity of apostolic authority in the Church.
If on the other hand we take the second or indelibilist view, then a breach at any point in the actual line of consecrations starting from the apostles, destroys the succession. And if we are to hold that that succession still exists in the Church today, we are obliged to maintain an assurance as to what happened in the apostolic and sub-apostolic period, which the historical evidence does not appear to warrant.
(b) Again, if we take the authoritarian view, then clearly the bishop=s whole power to act episcopally depends upon the office he holds within the one body of the Church. He may lose that office, if he falls into schism or if for any valid reason he is deposed. And, according to the authoritarian view, when the office is lost, the power to exercise the functions of the office must be lost also. In the extreme case, if a bishop becomes apostate and is severed from the Church’s body, it is, from this point of view, monstrous to contend that he can still perform valid sacraments and ordinations. For validity of orders depends upon the unity of the whole body within which holy orders are conferred and exercised. The succession of authority in the continuous line of bishops is the very mark of the Church=s outward and visible unity. If the unity is broken by schism, the authority cannot continue unimpaired in two separated lines of succession. And if a bishop be deemed to have been cut off from the one body of the Church altogether, he cannot be deemed to retain anything of the authority which he received through his place in the succession.
On the other hand, if we take the indelibilist view, very different conclusions follow. According to this view the essential thing which the bishop received at his consecration in the apostolic succession is a mysterious gift or power which henceforth is irrevocably his. Neither schism nor apostasy nor excommunication can affect his possession of it. And since it is this gift or power which enables him to exercise truly episcopal functions, he can continue to exercise them, even when he is in schism or excommunicate. Thus it is possible that another body may be originated, which is in schism from the Church of Christ, and yet retains unimpaired the valid ministry and sacraments which exist to be the very marks and organs of the Church’s visible unity.
4. APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION IN THE EARLY CHURCH
In the second and third centuries the Church universally held a doctrine of apostolic succession through bishops, especially through the bishops of the great sees, such as Rome, Alexandria and Antioch; but it had no occasion to define that doctrine with any theological precision. In general it was held that the true Catholic Church consisted of all those local Churches which were in communion with the great sees, the bishops of which were manifestly the chief guardians of the apostolic tradition. Those who separated themselves from that communion were deemed to be outside the Church. In the fourth century further definition was made necessary by controversy on the question whether those who had received baptism in schismatic bodies should or should not be baptized again when they were received back into the Catholic Church. In the third century Cyprian had held the view that schismatic bodies could not minister true or valid sacraments; and he therefore required rebaptism. But in A.D. 314 the Council of Arles decided for the Western Church that baptism performed in schismatic bodies with due form and matter was valid, and that therefore rebaptism was wrong. St. Augustine1 then took the vital step of extending the argument in favour of the validity of schismatic baptism so as to make it cover schismatic ordinations. He argued that, since a man, once validly baptized, cannot lose his baptism, neither can he lose his power of conferring baptism on others: and in the same way a man, once validly consecrated as bishop, cannot lose either his consecration or his power of conferring orders. The fundamental principle of St. Augustine’s reasoning was that the sacraments are everywhere the same, whether inside or outside the Catholic Church, and that their validity depends, not on any worthiness in the minister, but simply on the fact that it is Christ who uses him.
1I take this brief account of St. Augustine’s teaching on this subject from C. H. Turner’s essay n Apostolic Succession in The Early History of the Church and the Ministry (Second Edition), pp. 179 sqq.
Here we have the historical origin and foundation of what we have called the “indelibilist” view. Nevertheless when St. Augustine himself actually speaks of apostolic succession, he clearly means by it a succession from holder of office to holder of office, not from consecrator to consecrated. Hence, however inconsistently, he still confined apostolic succession to the one body of the Catholic Church.
5. THE DOCTRINE OF ROMAN CATHOLICISM
The doctrine which St. Augustine maintained in the controversy about rebaptism afterwards became the orthodoxy of the Western Church. Scholastic theologians have given it more precise definition and logical consistency. According to them the sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation, and Holy Orders confer not only grace but also something which is called indelible character. This gift of indelible character supplies the reason why the same person must never in any circumstances receive any of these sacraments twice. For the character is given once for all, and it is necessarily and inevitably conveyed by the performance of the sacrament. Unlike grace, its reception does not depend upon any right disposition in the recipient. And, unlike the authority belonging to an office, it cannot be lost with the loss of the office.
In the case of the sacrament of Holy Order, the character is held to consist in the potestas ordinis, the power belonging to the order. In the case of the bishop this potestas enables him to confer holy orders upon others; and, inasmuch as the character is indelible, he retains this power unimpaired, even though he become excommunicate. It is evident that the logic of this doctrine postulates what we have called the “indelibilist” view of the apostolic succession: the essential thing transmitted by this succession is the indelible character of the episcopate.
Thus, while the Church of Rome maintains that only those belong to the body of the Church who are in communion with the Pope, it admits nevertheless both the possibility and the fact that many Christians who are outside that body still possess true orders and true sacraments. Such, according to Roman Catholic theologians, is the position of the Eastern Orthodox Church, but not of the Church of England; for the Church of Rome denies the reality of the apostolic succession in the Anglican bishops, denies that they possess the character of the episcopate, and denies therefore that they can perform valid ordinations.
6. THE “BRANCH” THEORY OF SOME ANGLICANS1
1Very few, I think, now hold it in this extreme and logical form.
Some Anglicans are so convinced of the injustice of these denials, and of the strength of the case that can be put forward on Roman Catholic principles for the validity of Anglican orders, that they are inclined to adopt those principles, with one modification, in order to demonstrate their case. They would accept the principles from which Roman Catholics argue, except in so far as, being Anglicans, they are bound to reject the doctrine that communion with the see of Rome is a necessary condition of belonging to the body of the Catholic Church. These Anglicans therefore find themselves obliged to formulate what is in fact a new doctrine of the grounds on which a Church professing Christianity is to be judged to be inside or outside the body of the Catholic Church. Those Churches are to be judged within the body, which retain, together with the profession of the Christian faith, that apostolic succession which gives their bishops the episcopal character and so ensures the validity of their orders and sacraments. When two such Churches are not in communion with each other, the schism between them may be called internal since both Churches belong to the one body of the Catholic Church. On the other hand, the schism between a Church that retains the apostolic succession, and one that does not, is to be called external, inasmuch as the latter is outside the body of the Catholic Church altogether.
But this particular theory of Catholicity seems to be really untenable for three reasons:
(a) Its claim to be catholic in any historical sense is hard to justify. There is no ancient authority to which it can appeal, and it is in fact rejected by the main tradition of both West and East.
(b) The theory involves the paradoxical consequence that, whereas great Protestant Communions have no valid sacraments except baptism and are outside the body of the Catholic Church, nevertheless “a wandering bishop”, who has received the episcopal character but holds no office or authority in any Christian body, can confer the orders of the Catholic Church upon anyone he chooses, and thereby start a new “branch” of the Catholic Church itself.
(c) Whereas it seems reasonable to suppose that holy orders derive their validity from being the orders of Christ’s Catholic Church to which they belong, this theory must maintain on the contrary that valid orders make Catholic the Church in which they are administered. The question whether particular ordinations are or are not valid is first settled apart from the consideration whether they were or were not administered within the body of the Catholic Church; and then the decision on this point is made to settle the question whether the Church in which these ordinations were administered is or is not “Catholic”. Such a method of procedure is fundamentally absurd.
The conclusion seems to be that, for Anglicans at least, it is impossible reasonably to maintain the Augustinian arguments which lead to what we have called the “indelibilist” view of the apostolic succession.
7. THE WAY TO REUNION
What then can be made of the alternative or “authoritarian” view? Two different lines of inference from it are logically possible.
(a) The first is represented by the rigorist doctrine which was in fact championed by St. Cyprian. Since it belongs to the nature of the Church to be organically one, schism within the Church is, strictly speaking, impossible. If the Church appears to be divided into two bodies, actually one of these bodies must be the true Church, and the other not. Therefore the “orders” and “sacraments” of the latter are not true orders or sacraments at all. I do not know that today the theologians of any Church maintain this view strictly; but in the abstract its logic is unimpeachable.
(b) The rigorist doctrine however does not exhaust the logical possibilities of the “authoritarian” view. We may affirm that there is schism within the one body of the Church. Because such schism breaks the Church’s outward unity of order, it is a grievous sin, and it is indeed contrary to the very nature of the Church itself as Christ created it and wills it to be. But still we may admit that such schism does in fact exist. Just because, therefore, the divided Churches still remain parts of the one body, they must all alike suffer from the lesion by which they are divided. And part of what they suffer is seen in the fact that no one Church, as divided from the others, can retain or transmit in all its fullness that tradition of one faith and one order which the apostles bequeathed to their successors in the government of the Church. According to this view, the apostolic authority of every bishop is in some degree impaired by the fact that he can no longer act as a member of one visibly united episcopate. To that extent the validity of all the orders that exist in modern Christendom is defective. But if the apostolic tradition of order is not retained in its fullness even by those who cling to the succession through duly consecrated bishops, it seems reasonable to conclude that everywhere in Christendom the retention of that order is a matter of divers portions, manners and degrees. Once it is frankly admitted that every divided Church, which maintains the Christian faith, is in schism and yet is within the body of the Church Catholic, the hope of a genuinely catholic reunion may be reborn.
For what, from this point of view, is the remedy for schism? Assuredly not that those who still preserve among themselves essential elements in the apostolic tradition of order should treat them as of little account, or regard their retention as a mere matter of expediency and not of principle. The remedy for schism is that the divided Churches should take counsel together how best they may recombine within the single order of one Church those elements both of order and of freedom which are characteristic of their several traditions, so that in this way they may supply one another’s defects in the restored unity of the body. Progress along these lines, though slow, seems to offer the best hope for the future. But the main purpose of the foregoing statement has been to make clearer some of the main issues in a problem where they are specially apt to become confused.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
To compile anything like an adequate bibliography on all the subjects treated in this volume would be a formidable task which, if achieved, would unduly prolong the length of the volume itself. The following short list of representative books is, however, offered in the hope that it may be of some help to students by way of suggestions for further reading. Not only the selection, but also the classification of the books selected, has been a matter of some difficulty. A particular book may be relevant at two or more points which my arrangement of subjects has separated from one another. I have, however, classified my list so as to correspond roughly to the different Parts into which this volume is divided, and I have put most of the more general books under the list of Part I.
PART I (AND GENERAL)
BAILLIE, J.: Our Knowledge of God (O.U.P.).
BERDYAEV, N.: The Destiny of Man (Centenary Press).
DE BURGH, W. G. : From Morality to Religion (Macdonald & Evans).
DEMANT, V. A.: The Religious Prospect (Muller).
DEVAN, E.: Symbolism and Belief (Allen & Unwin).
FARMER, H. H.: The World and God (Nisbet).
GARVIE, A. E.: The Christian Doctrine of the Godhead (Hodder).
GILSON, G.: The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy (Sheed & Ward).
GORE, C.: Belief in God (Murray).
HEADLAM, A. C.: Christian Theology (O.U.P.).
HODGSON, L.: The Grace of God in Faith and Philosophy (Longmans).
HÜGEL, F. VON: Essays and Addresses in the Philosophy of Religion, 2 vols. (Dent).
INGE, W. R.: God and the Astronomers (Longmans).
MATTHEWS, W. B.: God in Christian Thought and Experience (Nisbet).
CC: The Purpose of God (Nisbet).
NYGREN, A.: Agape and Eros (S.P.C.K.).
OMAN, J.: The Natural and the Supernatural (C.U.P.).
SELWYN, E.G. (ed.): Essays Catholic and Critical (S.P.C.K.).
STREETER, B. H.: Reality (Macmillan).
TAYLOR, A. E. The Faith of a Moralist, 2 vols. (Macmillan).
TEMPLE, W.: Nature, Man, and God (Macmillan).
WEBB, C. C. J.: God and Personality (Allen & Unwin).
CC: Divine Personality and Human Life (Allen & Unwin).
CC: Problems in the Relations of God and Man (Nisbet).
PART II
BELL AND DEISMANN (edd.): Mysterium Christi (Longmans).
BRUNNER, E.: The Mediator (Lutterworth Press).
CREED, J. M.: The Divinity of Jesus Christ (C.U.P.).
DODD, C. H.: History and the Gospel (Nisbet).
CC: The Apostolic Preaching and its Developments (Hodder).
FORSYTH, P. T.: Person and Place of Jesus Christ (Hodder).
GORE, C.: Belief in Christ (Murray).
GRENSTED, L. W.: The Person of Christ (Nisbet).
HODGSON, L.: And Was Made Man (Longmans).
MACKINTOSH, H. R.: The Person of Jesus Christ (T. & T. Clark).
MOZLEY, J. K.: The Incarnation (Bles).
CC: The Impassibility of God (C.U.P.).
PRESTIGE, G. L.: God in Patristic Thought (Heinemann).
RAVEN, C. E.: Jesus and the Gospel of Love (Hodder).
RAWLINSON, A. E. J.: The New Testament Doctrine of the Christ (Longmans).
CC (ed.): Essays in the Trinity and the Incarnation (Longmans).
SELLERS, B. V.: Two Ancient Christologies (S.P.C.K.).
TEMPLE, W.: Christus Veritas (Macmillan).
THORNTON, L. S.: The Incarnate Lord (Longmans).
PART III
AULÉN, G.: Christus Victor (S.P.C.K.).
BAILLIE, J.: And the Life Everlasting (O.U.P.).
BRABANT, F. H.: Time and Eternity in Christian Thought (Macmillan).
CAMPBELL, MCLEOD: The Nature of the Atonement (Macmillan).
GRENSTED, L. W. (ed.): The Atonement in History and in Life (S.P.C.K.).
HICKS, F. C. N.: The Fulness of Sacrifice (Macmillan).
HÜGEL, F. VON: Eternal Life (T. & T. Clark).
MOBERLY, R. C.: Atonement and Personality (Murray).
MOZLEY, J. K.: The Atonement (Duckworth).
RASHDALL, H.: The Idea of the Atonement in Christian Theology (Macmillan).
TAYLOR, A. B.: The Christian Hope of Immortality (Bles).
TAYLOR, V.: Jesus and His Sacrifice (Macmillan).
CC: The Atonement in the New Testament (Epworth Press).
THORNTON, L. S.: The Atonement (Bles).
WILLIAMS, N. P.: The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin (Longmans).
VARIOUS AUTHORS: Man and Eternity (Burns Oates & Washbourne).
PART IV
ADAM, KARL: The Spirit of Catholicism (Sheed & Ward).
BARRY, F. R.: The Relevance of the Church (Nisbet).
BERDYAEV, N.: Freedom and the Spirit (Centenary Press).
FLEW, R. N.: Jesus and His Church (Epworth Press).
GORE, C.: The Holy Spirit and the Church (Murray).
HEADLAM, A. C.: The Doctrine of the Church and Reunion (Murray).
HEBERT, A. G.: Liturgy and Society (Faber).
KIRK, K. E.: The Vision of God (Longmans).
RAMSEY, A. M. The Gospel and the Catholic Church (Longmans).
RAVEN, C. E.: The Creator Spirit (Hopkinson).
ROBINSON, H. W.: The Christian Experience of the Holy Spirit (Nisbet).
STREETER, B. H.: The Primitive Church (Macmillan).
SWETE, H. B. (ed.): Essays on the Early History of the Church and the Ministry (Macmillan).
WILLIAMS, CHARLES: The Descent of the Dove (Longmans).
WILLIAMS, N. P. (ed.): Northern Catholicism (S.P.C.K.).