The Incarnation and Atonement – Article  II

      This Article dates from 1553 and is based on the Lutheran Confession of Augsburg, through the medium of the 13 Articles.  In 1563 the words “begotten ... Father” were added from the Confession of Wütemburg.  Its object was to oppose the revival of ancient heresies on the Person of Christ by Anabaptists.

      § 1. The Son took man’s nature in the womb of the blessed Virgin. – The Church’s teaching on the Incarnation, as on the Trinity, was gradually formulated by struggle with error.  Once again her aim has always been to be faithful to all the facts, not in any way to speculate for the sake of speculation, but to guard the truth in all its fullness.  From time to time explanations were put forward, most attractive from their simplicity and their harmony with popular ideas, but the Church was compelled to say “no”, because their attractiveness was gained at the cost of ignoring or explaining away certain of the facts.  So the Church was driven to think out and state, in the best language that she could find, all that she understood by the Incarnation.

      (a) When we turn to Scripture and study the Person of our Lord we are confronted with three main facts.

      (i) Our Lord lived as true man.  His contemporaries, friends and enemies alike, had no doubt of His humanity.  He grew, not only in body, but in mind and soul (Lk 2:40 and 52; Heb 5:7–9).  He displayed human needs, hunger, thirst, weariness and the like (Mt 4:2, Mk 4:38, Jn 4:5–7-etc.), and human emotions, anger, wonder, sorrow, sympathy, etc. (Mk 3:5, 6:6, 14:33–34; Lk 7:9; Jn 11:33–34, etc.).  He prayed and exhibited a true human faith in the Father (Mk 1:35, 14:33, Lk 9:28, Jn 11:41–42, 17; Heb 5:7, etc.). He was tempted and experienced the trials of uncertainty (Mk 14:33, etc., Mt 4:1, etc., Lk 12:50, Heb 2:18, etc.).  He won a real conquest over temptations.  He displayed a true human obedience to the will of God as made known in the Law.  He attended the public worship of the Synagogue and Temple and submitted to the Baptism of John (Mt 3:15, Mk 1:21, Lk 2:42–49, etc.).  He could be disappointed and disobeyed (Mk 1:45, 4:40, etc.).  He asked questions for the sake of information and confessed to ignorance on one point at least (Mk 9:21, cp. 11:13, Jn 11:34, Mk 13:32, etc.).  In short, though our Lord lived a perfect human life, perfect at each stage of its growth, still it was a human life: there was real development, real dependence upon His fellowmen, above all, real submission and self-surrender to the Father.

      (ii) On the other hand, as we have seen, the impression made by our Lord on those who knew Him was of one who was more than man.  He made a divine claim, and His claim was proved true by the Resurrection.

      (iii) Yet, most certainly He was one Person.  His life was in all ways a unity, far more so, indeed, than our own lives, which are broken and distracted by conflicting aims and desires, and by the struggle between a higher and lower self.†

      (b) When the question of the true divinity of our Lord had been settled, controversy shifted to His Person.  The point at issue was no longer wethwe He was “of one substance with the Father” – all parties were agreed on that – but the relation between His divinity and His humanity.  How could Jesus Christ be both the Eternal Son and Word of the Father, and also truly man?

      (i) Apollinarius, Bishop of Laodicea, had been a vigorous opponent of the Arians.  Possibly it was in opposition to their Christological teaching that he was led to construct his theory of the relation between the divine and human natures in Christ, which came into prominence between A.D. 370 and 380.  More probably he wished to correct some current theories of the Incarnation which appeared to him either to reduce our Lord to a highly inspired man or to introduce a dangerous duality into the Incarnate life.  He held that, if the Lord’s humanity were complete, we should have to suppose that He possessed two wills, one divine and infallible, the other human and essentially “free” to sin.  There could be no union between two such wills without the violation of the nature of one of them, and since the rational will is the directing principle in a person, the possession of two wills would destroy the unity of the Incarnate.  Christ therefore had no human mind (νους), to be the seat of rational deliberation and choice; His mind and will were those of the divine Word, who took to Himself in the Incarnation only a human body and an animal soul or animating principle.  The divine Word Himself was the sole mind and will of the Incarnate Christ.  Only so, Apollinarius believed, could the unity of His Person and the redemptive sinlessness of His will be understood.  Christ was ούτε άνθρωπος όλος ούτε θεος αλλα θεου και ανθρώπου μίξις.  The Church saw that this theory contradicted many of the facts of our Lord’s earthly life. [The “heresy of the Apollinarians” was condemned at the Council of Constantinople in 381.  Apollinarius and one of his followers had been previously condemned at Rome in 377.]  It left no room for growth in mind or soul or for the building up of a human character.  It abolished the possibility not only of sin but of temptation.  Further, such a view lowers human nature by regarding it as unable to become the means of God’s self-revelation.  Not only does it regard the higher part of human nature as intrinsically sinful, but it leaves it unredeemed, and it is just this higher part which is most truly human, as being that which differentiates man from the animals.  All that Christ assumed was the animal side of man.  If, as was constantly urged against ApoIlinanus, “what was not assumed was not redeemed”, man’s will, the ultimate seat of his sinfulness, was left unredeemed by Christ.  To our modern minds the theory of Apollinarius is wholly repugnant.  We know that all human consciousness, such as acts of thought, will and desire, are conditioned by functions of the body.  What purpose could a body serve when there were no real processes of human thought or will to be realized through it?†

      (ii) As a reaction from Apollinarianism there arose the explanation of the facts known as Nestorianism.  Nestorius was Bishop of Constantinople.  Whether he himself was at any time, or at all times, a “Nestorian” is a question for ecclesiastical history.  It is enough to state here that he was condemned for the views that bear his name, and that, undoubtedly, there were those who held them.  The School of Antioch had come to represent theology of a marked type.  This school represented what we should call today historical theology.  Its first aim was to discover the literal and grammatical meaning of Scripture; to ask, What did the authors mean to say?  In dealing with the earthly life of our Lord it started, like the Synoptic Gospels, with the human and natural elements of that life, and then went on to see the divine and supernatural shining through them.  The most famous representative of this school was Theodore.  Bishop of Mopsuestia.  Approaching the problem of the Person of Christ from the human side, he laid stress, in opposition to Apollinarianism, on the complete humanity of our Lord.  He taught that each of the two natures of Christ was personal.  An impersonal nature was an absurdity.  How then did God indwell in Christ?  The answer given was, through moral union, through unity of will.  He postulated a divine agent and a human agent, united completely and yet freely.  Each remained distinct and unconfused.  “We say that the person (πρόσωπον) of the Man was perfect, and perfect also the person of the Godhead? [It is however by no means simple to determine what Theodore, and later Nestorius, meant by the term here translated “person”.]  Thus, God dwelt in Jesus of Nazareth as in a temple, or as in saints or prophets.  Theodore speaks of it as madness to compare the indwelling of God in Christ with His indwelling in the Saints.  But it was different – infinitely different – in degree only: it was the same in kind.  So he prefers to speak of the conjunction (συνάφεια) of the two natures in Christ, not of their union.  This conjunction is compared to the union between man and wife, who are made one flesh.  So the human life of Jesus Christ was the life of a man selected by God’s foreknowledge, to be taken from the mother’s womb into the most intimate and indissoluble union with the divine Word.  He was άνθρωπος θεοφόρος.  All through His life He revealed a complete moral sympathy with the divine will, so that men could see God perfectly in Him.  Through the cooperation of the divine Word with the unfaltering loyalty of His human will He advanced to the most perfect holiness, which was consummated at the Ascension.  Theodore claimed thus to preserve the unity of Christ’s Person and yet leave room for free moral development.  Nestorius did little more than repeat his teaching.  As often happens, the controversy centred round a catchword, in this case the use of θεοτόκος [“Mother of God” is not quite a fair translation of this Greek word.  It means rather “she who gave birth to Him who was God.”  The emphasis in the Greek word is on the deity of the child rather than on the motherhood of Mary.] to denote the mother of Jesus Christ.  Nestorius denied her the title on the ground that it suggested the divine nature of her Son was derived from her.  His opponents defended its use as witnessing to the truth that He, whom she bore, was none other than the eternal Son of God.

      Nestorius’ solution has its merits.  It preserves the reality of Christ’s human example and sympathy.  But for all his protests, it reduces our Lord to a superlatively inspired man, the chief of the saints.  He is man side by side with God, not God in and through man.  There is not the oneness of a single personal life, but the concord of two persons.  Nestorianism is fatally inconsistent both with facts of the Gospel and of Christian experience.  The Christ of Nestorius could have no right to make the unbounded personal claims for Himself that our Lord made.  In the saints there is no confusion of personality between themselves and God.  They are always conscious that their message is other and greater than themselves.  They point men away from themselves to God.  Jesus Christ drew men to Himself.  The Nestorian Christ cannot rightly be worshipped: at most we can assign to him that reverence that we pay to holy men.  Further, Nestorianism undermines the whole basis of redemption; it rests content with a conception of salvation that has fallen below the level of the New Testament.  Christ becomes at most an example and a teacher.  But He can bestow on us no power to realize in ourselves His example.  By His unique closeness of union with the divine Word He can save only Himself.  He cannot impart to us a share in that union.  It is just because Christ is more than a single human individual that His perfect humanity can be the source of new life to us.  His death is not an act outside us, like, say, the death of Socrates or any other good man, only because it is not simply one of our fellowmen who died.  What we need, and what Christ has proved Himself to be, is a redeemer, one who restores and quickens the soul from within, and one who can save from sin.  Nestorius was rightly condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431. [The interpretation of the Christological teaching of Theodore and Nestorius remains a disputed question.  Some modern estimates would be more favourable than that given in the text above.  Undoubtedly Theodore and Nestorius believed themselves to be maintaining the unity of Christ’s person as well as the fullness of His two natures.]†

      (iii) At the opposite pole of thought is Monophysitism or Eutychianism.  The school of Alexandria had come to represent a theology in many ways opposed to that of Antioch.  Their method was that of “dogmatic” as contrasted with “historical” theology.  Like the Gospel of S. John, the started from the divine side our Lord’s pre-existence as the Word of God, an went on to regard His human life as a self-manifestation of God in time.  Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria, had been the great opponent of Nestorius.  In his anxiety to safeguard the unity of Christ’s Person he used the phrase, μία φύσις του λόγου σεσαρκωμένη. [Cyril believed the phrase to come from a writing of Athanasius.  Unhappily, the writing is really a work of Apollinarius passing itself off under the name of Athanasius.]  By this he meant that the Word of God in all the fullness of His divine nature had become personally Incarnate.  There was only one centre of personality in Christ, namely, the personality or the Word, which gave personality to the human nature.  The human nature had not a separate personality of its own.  Cyril expressed this unity of the two natures in a single person by phrases such as ένωσις κατ’ ουσίαν και καθ’ υπόστασιν or εκ δύο φύσεων εις.  Such language was easily misunderstood.  After Cyril’s death, Eutyches, an abbot at Constantinople, and a follower of Cyril, taught that our Lord was of two natures before the union between them but union only of one nature.  This could only be taken to meant that at the Incarnation the human nature was absorbed in the divine and did not exist in the Incarnate in its proper characteristics.  The later developments of Monophysitism [Those later known as Monophysites were united in rejecting the formula of Chalcedon (“two natures”).  Some of them merely maintained Cyril’s terminology (“one nature”) and were as orthodox in the substance of their teaching as he was; others developed views of our Lord’s humanity which denied it all forms of corruptibility and passibility (See Tixeront, vol. iii, c. iv.)] showed to what lengths this theory might go in the direction of “docetism”.  Our Lord’s humanity is reduced to a mere outward appearance, the veil of His divine glory.  All the facts of our Lord’s earthly life that make Apollinarianism impossible, make Eutychianism impossible.

      (c) The teaching of Eutyches won a temporary triumph at the Robber Council of Ephesus (449), but the decision was finally reversed at the Council of Chalcedon (451).  There a dogmatic epistle from Leo, Bishop of Rome, known as the “tome of Leo”, was read and recognized as the expression of orthodoxy.  Eutyches was in it directly refuted, Nestorius indirectly.  Leo was a Western, with all the Western impatience of philosophical subtleties and disputes about the precise difference between “nature” and “person”.  He dealt with the whole question from a practical point of view.  All that he was concerned to secure was a full recognition both of the true divinity and true humanity of our Lord.  As a pastor, he was quite clear that what men needed was a mediator between God and man, who Himself remained both.  The influence of Leo was ultimately decisive, and the witness of the Council of Chalcedon to the Church’s faith was set forth in the following definition:

      “Therefore, following the holy fathers, we all, with one consent, teach men to confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and the same perfect in manhood, truly God and the same truly man, of a rational soul and body, of one substance with the Father according to His Godhead and of one substance with us according to His Manhood, in all things like to us except sin, begotten from the Father before the ages according to His Godhead and in the last days born of Mary the virgin, the theotokos for us and our salvation, according to His manhood, one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only-begotten, being made known in two natures, without confusion, without conversion, without division, never to be separated (ασυγχύτως, ατρέπτως, αδιαιρέτως, αχωρίστως), the distinction of natures having been in no way abolished through the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved and meeting in one person and one hypostasis (πρόσωπον και υπόστασιν).”

      The language of our Article is in large part identical with this, and is so framed as to exclude all the ancient heresies.  The Son ... of one substance with the Father excludes Arianism.  Man’s nature ... two whole and perfect natures excludes Apollinarianism.  In one person, never to be divided excludes Nestorianism.  Two whole and perfect natures, that is to say the Godhead and the Manhood ... very God and very Man excludes Monophysitism. [The decisions of the four great Councils may be summed up in the four adverbs, αληθως, τελέως, αδιαιρέτως, ασυγχύτως.  Our Lord was “truly” God as against Arius, “completely” man as against Apollinarius, “indivisibly” one Person as against Nestorius, both God and man “without confusion” as against Eutyches (Hooker, V. 54, § 10.)]†

      The question still remains, What is the value of the formal theological definitions of these Councils today?  The language used by the Church in her attempt to state the doctrine of the Trinity, “One substance, Three Persons,” and still more, the language used at Chalcedon about our Lord’s Incarnation, “Two natures and One Person,” is often attacked as useless or worse than useless today – a mere encumbrance, due to the Hellenization of Christianity.

      In reply, let us begin by reminding ourselves that the primary object of such language was not to speculate, but to rule out speculations that were seen to be destructive of the purity and completeness a the faith.  The formulas have a lasting value.  The ancient heresies all represent certain permanent tendencies of the human mind.  In every age men, when faced with the mystery of the Incarnation, have inclined towards a line of solution that leads ultimately to Nestorianism or Monophysitism.  We naturally pay greater attention to those facts that interest us and are disposed to ignore others that make a less forcible appeal.  Here, as elsewhere, our personal leanings need to be corrected by the more complete experience of the Church.

      The average healthy Englishman has an Antiochene mind.  What attracts him is our Lord’s character.  He admires His life of doing good, His courage in facing death for the sake of duty, His self-sacrifice and the like.  He regards our Lord as an inspiring example, a leader in the life of faith, but little more.  Accordingly, the English mind is easily satisfied with the conception of our Lord as a good man, with whom God dwelt.  The need of something deeper, of inward renewal and salvation, is hardly realized.  So, teaching that is practically Nestorian is quite common among us.

      On the other hand, a view of our Lord that is practically Apollinarian or Monophysite tends to prevail wherever devotion to our Lord as the divine Saviour is not balanced by a study of the Gospels.  It is the typical danger of a theology based upon worship divorced from the moral life.  If Nestorianism appeals to the masculine independence of the respectable Englishman, Monophysitism appeals to the emotions of the devout worshipper.  It is to be found in our hymns and, e.g. in the cult of the Sacred Heart.  In England today we are living in a reaction from teaching about our Lord that was practically Monophysite.  Protestant piety no less than Catholic devotion had come to lay such exclusive stress on our Lord’s divine work as practically to ignore His humanity.  Now, the reality of His humanity, His human growth and sympathies, have been, as it were, rediscovered.  His human life has been made to live before our eyes.  In the joy of realizing afresh our Lord’s humanity, men have been tempted to lose hold of His divinity.  But we must not live in reactions.  The Church’s duty is to hold together both sides of the truth, as essential for the completeness of the Christian life.  The formula of Chalcedon at least rules out one-sided presentations of the truth that would impoverish the Christian life.  “Of one substance with us according to His manhood” secures for us all that Nestorianism can offer.  “Of one substance with the Father according to His Godhead” secures all that Monophysitism can offer.  The primary object of the Council’s decision was pastoral, to warn men off paths that must lead astray and to send them back to study the Gospels for themselves with the right presuppositions.

      Still the fact remains that in modern theology the formula of Chalcedon is often criticized and set on one side as valueless or even a hindrance to Christian faith.  Before we examine its permanent value let us remember that it is the facts that are of supreme importance; not the formula that expresses them.  If today, in the light of modern knowledge, we can express all the facts more adequately in some new formula, we are at liberty to do so.  If, for instance in view of modern psychology, we come to hold that “person” and “nature” are indistinguishable, that is not being. disloyal to the Catholic faith.  The objection to nearly all, if not all, modern attempts hitherto made to restate the truth about the Person of Christ, is not that they are modern, but they ignore or explain away some of the facts.  Often, indeed, they are only the old heresies in a new guise, and today as of old the Christian consciousness feels their inadequacy.  In attempting to restate the truth, part of it is allowed to escape.

      The complaint is made that “the formula merely stated the facts which constituted the problem; it did not attempt a solution.  It was therefore unscientific; and as theology is the science of religion, it represented the breakdown of theology.” [Foundations, p. 231.  Cp. p. 230.  “Their formula had the right devotional value; it excluded what was known to be fatal to the faith; but it explained nothing.” (W. Temple).  But see his later work, Christus Veritas, cc. vii and viii.]  We may fairly reply that if the first part of this assertion is true, it is really the highest praise.  The function of a council is not to strike out a new line in theology.  Its primary duty is to witness to the faith once for all delivered, and to decide whether a particular teaching is in accordance with it or not.  If the Council “stated the facts which constituted the problem” so as to rule out once for all attempted solutions that did not cover all the facts, it performed precisely the service that a Council exists to perform.  It is the place of theologians, not councils, to frame a theology.  All that the Council could declare is that hitherto their efforts had not proved successful.  In the interests of the Gospel the Church was obliged, not indeed to explain the problem of the unity of God and man in Christ, but to insist positively that there was the problem to be solved.

      Again, the formula of Chalcedon was of necessity expressed in terms of the philosophy of the day.  There was at that time a single dominant philosophy.  This philosophy viewed the world and experience “statically”.  It thought out questions in terms of “nature” and “being”.  It asked what a thing was in its essential nature.  Our minds today view the world “dynamically”.  We think in terms of “life” and “movement”.  We ask not simply what a thing is in itself, but what it does and how it acts.  Hence modern theologians often complain that the formula of Chalcedon throws no light on the problems that the Incarnation raises for our minds today.”*  It leaves us with a divine nature and a human nature side by side, without any attempt to show how they were united in a single life.  To us the “divine nature” is not something stationary, but the sum total of divine energies and activities that constitute the divine life.  God is God not simply by what He is but by what He does.  So, too, we think of human nature not as something that exists readymade, but as something that is progressively realized through acts of choice in a human life.  So we ask, If Jesus Christ is God, how could His divine powers and activities leave room for a truly human life, for that mental growth and development, and for that building up of a human character of which Scripture speaks?  Or again, How if He was divine could He possess a true human consciousness?  For us the problem is in large part a moral problem, a problem of will.  To speak of a “divine nature” and a “human nature” as if they were fixed quantities ignores the whole question of the will.  Such terms are, indeed, not necessarily moral at all.

            [*This is the main point of the criticisms of Dr Harnack which are repeated by Dr Temple in Foundations, e.g. “The spiritual cannot be expressed in terms of substance at all.”  “The ‘substance’ of the Greek Fathers, whether divine or human, has the material, not the spiritual characteristics.”  “Substance theology inevitably ignores the will and with it the moral problem,” etc. (pp. 231–233).  For criticism of this position see C.Q.R. Oct. 1915, p. 1.]

      We cannot deny that these objections are well-founded: but what do they show?  Simply that Greek theology inevitably approached the whole question from a different standpoint from our own.  Our approach tends to be dominated by psychology.  Psychology discusses and explains the manner in which I come to feel and know.  It investigates my states of consciousness and the processes by which I attain knowledge and perform acts of choice.  But psychology has its limitations, though it sometimes forgets them.  It cannot explain ultimate realities.  It can describe what I do and how I do it, but it is unable to tell me what I am.  That is a question not for psychology but for metaphysics.  If my feelings and thoughts are not a mere series of passing illusions, they imply behind them an “I”, which, indeed, has no consciousness apart from them, but is yet not identical with all or any of them.  The words “life” and “movement” imply that there is an abiding something that lives and moves.  Accordingly, we must assert that the questions that have been raised about the life and person of Jesus Christ are not simply psychological but also metaphysical.  There is, for instance, such a question as that of His pre-existence.  It is unreasonable to blame the formula of Chalcedon because it gives to these metaphysical questions a metaphysical answer.  In effect it says, “If we assume the life and redeeming power of Jesus Christ as true, if we grant that He has made men one with God, what do these experiences presuppose as a necessary condition of their truth?  They presuppose that He was in the full sense God and in the full sense man.  If you deny either that He was perfect God or that He was perfect man, then Christianity falls to the ground.”  The vocabulary of metaphys* must be static : to condemn it for being static is to condemn mhysics for being itself. [The metaphysician, as it were, takes a section of experience, abstracting life and movement.  In abstracting these he necessarily abstracts the activity of the will.  His language, therefore, is bound to appear non-ethical and static.]  But it is not necessarily either unspiritual or materialistic.  Greek philosophy was not so incompetent as is sometimes assumed.  ουσία is not unspiritual at all.  The formula does not attempt to define either the “divine nature” or the “human nature”.  It only asserts that, whatever they are, Jesus Christ possessed them.  Nor does it attempt to explain how it was psychologically possible for our Lord to unite the two in the living out of His earthly life.  It leaves the field open for modern philosophers to do this if they can.

      What we may fairly criticize is not so much the decisions of Chalcedon in themselves, as the Tome of Leo and other theological writings that prepared the way for those decisions.  These do attempt to deal with our Lord’s life and person psychologically. [Cp. Weston, The One Christ, pp. 70 ff.]  We must admit that the predominant theology of the Church did not do full justice to the complete humanity of our Lord or to the facts of the Gospel narrative that attest His complete humanity.  As we have seen, a vital part of the humanness of human nature is that it comes to completion through growth.  On its moral an spiritual side this growth is conditioned by acts of will and choice.*  In our study of our Lord’s human life, we must leave room for real mental and moral effort, for spiritual progress and development of character.  He was able to sympathize from within with the doubts and difficulties of our finite minds and with our moral struggles.  This is where Alexandrian theology tended to fail. [Cp. Westcott’s criticism of Cyril.  “Under his treatment the divine history seems to be dissolved into a docetic drama” (S. John, p. xcv).]  Even in the writings of S. Leo, our Lord’s conduct and His conquests over temptation are in danger of being viewed solely as an exercise of divine power.  The full humanity of our Lord’s bodily needs and actions only receives unreserved recognition.  The activity of His human reason and will, of just that part of our human nature which is distinctively human, and by which we transcend animal life, is practically ignored. [For the manner in which theologians explained away clear statements, e.g. of our Lord’s ignorance, as man, see Gore, Dissertations, p. 130 ff.]  Hence, our Lord’s moral life tends to become a mere appearance.  But the human goodness, as we know it, can only be attained by real effort of will.  If our Lord’s human life was exempt from this moral struggle, if His obedience to the Father’s will was achieved by the automatic employment of divine power, then so far our Lord’s life was not human at all.  But the Gospels lend no support to any such suggestion.

            [*It is customary to speak of our Lord’s human nature as “impersonal”.  The phrase is unsatisfactory, but it was intended to guard the truth that the humanity which our Lord assumed had no independent personality.  The Word did not unite Himself to an individual man but gave personality to the human nature that He assumed.  Hence our Lord’s manhood as assumed by Him and as progressively realized in His human life was most truly personal.  For a valuable note on hypostasis, “person” and “personality”, see Essays on the Trinity and the Incarnation, p. 392.]

      Again, Greek theology treats of the actual living out of our Lord’s life in a way that breaks up its unity.  It is one thing to insist that He was and is both God and Man.  We must equally insist that He is “one Christ”.  Our mind revolts against any attempt to parcel out His activities among His two natures,* to say that He did this as God, that as Man.  Such an attempt leaves us with no continuous human life at all.**  The Gospels give us no hint of any such double consciousness.  In all His conduct our Lord was fundamentally one.  The view criticized ignores the mutual kinship between the divine and the human.  Man was created in the image of God.  Thus God could express Himself in and through a human life without any contradiction of the divine nature.  Our Lord’s divinity and humanity were not, as it were, placed side by side.  He was not only God and Man, but God in Man and Man in God.  Probably when we think of God our imagination dwells too much on what we may call His physical attributes, omnipotence, omniscience and the like, and we tend to make them independent of the love and righteousness which constitute His inmost being.  Greek theology was greatly hampered by the dogma that God cannot in any way suffer.  Cyril and Nestorius were at one in their desire to insist that in the Incarnation our Lord’s Godhead was exempt from all suffering.  No doubt there is a true and important sense in which God is “without passions”.  But we may question whether the unqualified denial that God can suffer is not a pagan rather than a Christian dogma: a legacy from heathen philosophy taken over by theologians without due scrutiny, and needing to be corrected by the bold anthropomorphisms of Scripture.  We must distinguish between physical and moral suffering.  If God is love, love must be capable of moral suffering.  So we can hold that our Lord, in all the humiliation of His Cross and Passion, was active in His divine no less than His human nature.  We can see God there as truly as in His acts of power.  For where were love and righteousness more perfectly and more victoriously love and righteousness than in the Crucified?  If God is love and holiness, then on the Cross we see God most truly, though He be self-restrained under the limitations and infirmities of manhood.  Let us remember that God’s. omnipotence in all its forms is not the omnipotence of bare power, but the omnipotence of love.  It is to be seen in the fullness of self-sacrifice as truly as in the unspeakable majesty of a theophany.

            [*Thus Leo can write: “To hunger, to thirst, to be weary, and to sleep is evidently human.  But to satisfy five thousand men with five loaves and to give to the Samaritan woman living water, ... to walk on the surface of the sea with feet not sinking, and to allay the swelling waves by rebuking the tempest, this, without doubt, is divine.”  “It belongs not to the same nature to say ‘I and the Father are one’, and to say ‘the Father is greater than I’.”  Leo is attempting to safeguard the reality of the divine and human natures, each with its distinct operation, but the result is strangely different from the impression made on us by Scripture.  We notice how all the human acts quoted belong only to the body.  There is no adequate recognition of the activity of the reason and will.  (For a more favourable view of Leo’s meaning as interpreted by another of his treatises, see R. V. Sellers, Two Ancient Christologies, p. 249.)

            [**A certain attempt at unity was made by the theological device known as the communicatio idiomatum, by which, owing to the union of the two natures in a single Person, it was held possible to transfer names and titles appropriate to one nature to the other in virtue of this unity of Person, to say, e.g. “God died for men” instead of “He who was God died for men”.  So long as it is simply a question of titles such a practice is harmless, but it has proved theologically dangerous.  It has come to suggest that the divine and human natures were fused into something neither divine nor human, but a strange compound of the two, that the Godhead was converted into flesh, as the Athanasian Creed expresses it.]

      So, too, Man is most truly man in so far as He lives in that union with God for which He was created.  The truest human life is the work both of God and Man.  The more intimate the union, the more perfect the human life.  The divine does not annihilate or supplant or curtail the human: rather it raises it to its highest perfection.  In our Lord we see this perfection of human life.  That life was the work of God in Man and Man in God.  God could be most really God under the conditions of and within the sphere of the human.  Man could be most completely man in perfect union with the divine.  We cannot, therefore, draw hard and fast distinctions within the unity of our Lord’s earthly life.  “In all things He acts personally; and so far as it is revealed to us, His greatest works during His earthly life are wrought by the help of the Father through the energy of a humanity enabled to do all things in fellowship with God?” [Westcott, Hebrews, p. 66.]  To sum up, the Fathers’ psychology was crude and unsatisfying, even though their metaphysics were sound.*

            [*We may compare the criticism of Dr Moberly (Atonement and Personality, pp. 96–97).  “The phrase ‘God and man’ is, of course, perfectly true.  But it is easy to lay undue emphasis on the ‘and’.... In His human life on earth, as Incarnate, He is not sometimes, but consistently, always, in every act and in every detail, human.  The Incarnate never leaves His Incarnation.  God, as man, is always, in all things, God as man. ... Whatever the reverence of their motive may be, men do harm to consistency and to truth by keeping open, as it were, a sort of non-human sphere or aspect of the Incarnation.  This opening we should unreservedly desire to close.  There are not two existences either of, or within, the Incarnate, side by side with one another.  If it is all Divine, it is all human too.  We are to study the Divine in and through the human.  By looking for the Divine side by side with the human, instead of discerning the Divine within the human, we miss the significance of them both.”]

      The objection, however, still remains, that even though some static and metaphysical language has a right and necessary place in any formal statement of the Church’s belief, still the phrases, both of the Creed of Nicaea and of the formula of Chalcedon, are Greek metaphysics.  It was, indeed, inevitable that the Greek Fathers should employ the categories of their own day, but why should we be bound to them?  Let us frankly admit that we are not tied down to any particular metaphysical system.  But it is very doubtful whether, even if we put aside all historical associations, a change is either possible or desirable.  After all, there are certain fundamental ideas that are common to all thought. “The ideas of substance or thing, of personality, of nature, are permanent ideas, we cannot get rid of them; no better words could be suggested to express the same facts.” [Gore, Bampton Lectures on the Incarnation, p. 105.  Cp. The Reconstruction of Belief, pp. 848 ff.]  The ideas of the Fathers need not be the less permanent because they are Greek.  They are not limited to any particular type of metaphysics.  Indeed, they are largely ideas that common sense demands.  Some such ideas as “divine nature” and “human nature” are implied in the very notion of an Incarnation.

      Further, we are coming increasingly to see how, not only in broad outline but in detail, the divine providence had been preparing the world for the coming of Christ.  This preparation was religious, social and intellectual, the work of the Jew, the Roman, and the Greek.  We cannot but suppose that the forms of thought as “Christ” or “Son of Man” under which Christ revealed Himself to His contemporaries were part of the divine scheme.  He took them and filled them with a new and richer content.  We may equally believe that the thought forms of Greek philosophy were no less providentially designed that through them the Church might express to the world the wealth of her new life, filling them with a new and richer content.  We cannot, therefore, lightly let them go. [We must not be too much influenced by the fact that the Church’s formularies need to be explained to men today.  The technical terms of all science can only be understood by those who are ready to take some pains to learn the science.  A theology that could be completely understood by the man in the street in five minutes would be very shallow.]

      Lastly, the dogmatic language of the Church is confessedly inadequate.  We know little about our own life, still less about the life of God.  Even psychology cannot help us here.  If we throw over the language of Chalcedon, we must find some substitute.  Where is it to be found?  To which school of modern philosophy are we to turn?  For they are many.  To choose any one would be to identify Christianity deliberately with one particular philosophy – the very charge that their critics bring against the Greek Fathers.  The men who agree in their contempt for Greek theology as a rule agree in little else.  The Church has to deal with practical needs.  If the formula of Chalcedon has the right value for Christian devotion and leaves full scope for all modern investigations the Church may well claim to hold fast to it until there is at least some possibility of a restatement that would win general acceptance.

      (d) How can we best conceive of the Incarnation?  Perhaps our best starting point will be some such thought as that expressed in S. Paul’s phrase, “He emptied Himself.”  We must beware of language that might suggest that our Lord was God before and after, but ceased to be God during His Incarnate life on earth.  He laid aside not His Godhead but His glory.  He willed to live a real human life, to know our condition no longer simply by divine intuition from without, but from within by passing through a real human experience.  By an act of His divine omnipotence He willed to restrain His divine attributes so as to render this possible. [Our Lord did not part with such essentially divine attributes as, e.g. omnipotence or omniscience; rather, it was His own omnipotent power that restrained His omnipotence, His own almighty wisdom that devised the means for sharing our human ignorance.]  The subject of the whole human experience was the divine Word Himself.  In pondering over the mystery of the Incarnation we shall get more assistance by thinking along the lines of love and sympathy than along the lines of abstract logic.  The essence of sympathy is putting oneself in another’s place: in the case of one less educated or less developed this must involve a deliberate holding back of our wider knowledge. [Cp. Gore, Dissertations, p. 219; Ottley, Doctrine of the Incarnation, ii. pp. 291–2.]  Perhaps some such example as this, inadequate as it is, is the nearest that we can get to a real understanding of His self-humiliation.  We can dimly conceive that by a single supra-temporal act of choice the Eternal Word willed so to restrain His divine attributes as to render a true human life and experience possible.  If we believe that God is love, there is nothing in such a conception that violates the central being of God.  Many of the objections that are brought against such an idea are at bottom objections against the possibility of a real Incarnation at all.  If we are ready to grant the possibility of an Incarnation, we must also grant that there will inevitably be much in it that we cannot fully understand.  The whole question of the relation of time to eternity is involved.*  We cannot conceive what time means to God or reconcile historical sequence with His eternal consciousness.**  Nor can we possibly understand what change the Incarnation made in the life of the Trinity.  All we are told is that the “coming of the Son” corresponded to a sending by the Father, and that He was made man through the power of the Spirit.  In the act of divine self-sacrifice the Father and the Spirit had their part no less than the Son. [Cp. Moberly, op. cit. p. 167.]†

            [*E.g. How could our Lord be at one and the same time living on earth and performing His cosmic functions?  Was He, as Proclus, preaching against Nestorius, said, “In His Father’s bosom and in the womb of the Virgin; in His mother’s arm and on the wings of the wind; worshipped by the angels in Heaven and supping with publicans on earth?”

            [**Cp. the following statement: “It is not meant that the Logos was withdrawn from God and occupied by the Incarnation.  We err if we think of the Logos as only capable of one activity at a time.  The Logos is capable of all the activity of God.  God was the same elsewhere as if there had been no incarnation, and the Logos was meanwhile as truly as ever the medium of God’s relation with the universe....  The Incarnation is not a division of God.  The truth is rather this: that the God of infinitely varied activity added to His other self-expressions the act of becoming man – an additional form of activity in which He could engage without withdrawing Himself from any other” (Clarke, An Outline of Christian Theology, pp. 294–295).]

      (e) Special difficulties arise when we consider (i) Our Lord’s human knowledge; (ii) His temptation.

      (i) We can only conceive of God’s omniscience as a perfect knowledge raised above all the limitations that beset our own, as an infinite and immediate intuition into the inmost being of all that is.  But a real human experience includes the possession of human knowledge, attained by human means and able to be contained by the finite capacity of the human mind.  It would seem, then, that our Lord, in willing to become man, willed such a restraining of the divine knowledge as would render possible a true human experience.  Though our imaginations find it easier to picture a restraint of divine power, so as to allow of need and suffering and opposition and death, than of a restraint of divine knowledge so as to allow of ignorance and perplexity, yet at bottom the problem is the same in each case.  Our thoughts must be guided by moral rather than metaphysical considerations.  Above all, we must be true to all the facts of the Gospel narrative.

      In human knowledge we may distinguish two elements.  First there is that knowledge which we acquire step by step – “discursive knowledge”, as it is called – either by the operation of our mind, by processes of reasoning or argument, or else by receiving information from others.  This includes all facts of history or natural science.  Secondly, there is that knowledge which we call intuitive, gained not piecemeal, but by a direct and immediate perception.  This includes all sensations as of colour or pleasure, or, again, all judgments of moral and spiritual insight.  We see the truth, not as the conclusion of any argument or reflection, but with an immediacy and clearness that leave no room for doubt.  When we turn to the Gospels, we find that in the first kind of knowledge our Lord, for all we can discover, shared all human limitations. [Mk 11:1–4 (the instructions to find the colt) and Mk 14:12 (the man beating a pitcher of water) were probably pre-arranged signals.  Even if they were instances of unusual perception they could be paralleled from the lives of the prophets.]  “He grew in wisdom.”  He used the ordinary methods of investigation.  He asked questions to get information.  He could be surprised at unforeseen events.  The uncertainty of the future lay dark upon His soul.  He expressly declared that He did not know the day of His coming to judgment.  So, too, He accepted the current Jewish opinions about physical science or the books of the Old Testament, that He learnt from His human teachers.  On all such points it would seem that He lived and thought as a Man of His own day.

      But in the region of intuitive knowledge He showed a unique discernment.  He claimed an unfailing insight into the mind of God and sympathy with His purposes, an unclouded vision of divine truth.  He passed judgment on all questions of morality with the authority of one who saw the truth beyond dispute.  He could read the thoughts and the hearts of friends and foes.  He displayed an unerring perception of human character.  The realm of moral and spiritual truth held no secrets from Him.  His whole life and teaching were based upon this unique consciousness of God.  He bore witness in His example and His discourses to what He knew.  He revealed God by revealing Himself.  Even here we may not draw a hard and fast line between the human and the divine.  Among ourselves the power of moral and spiritual insight varies enormously.  It depends not on education but rather on holiness of life.  It is the pure in heart who see God.  In the case of the Hebrew prophets and others we get instances of men endowed with powers of spiritual perception that the normal man does not possess, yet that in no way destroy their humanity.  It is hard to set any limit to the moral and spiritual vision of a sinless human being.  So in our Lord’s case we may hold that here, too, the divine raised the human to its highest perfection.  Even under the limitations of a human life He enjoyed a true and adequate perception of God and of His own relation to God.  And this perception He imparted to His disciples so far as it could be expressed in the human language of His day.

      We believe that our Lord came for a special purpose.  He did not come to give us infallible information on questions of history, or criticism, or science.  God has given us the ordinary methods of attaining to truth on such points, if we will only use them.  Revelation is never given to save us trouble.  Rather Christ came to bring men back to God.  A real part of His saving work was to impart to men something of His own vision of the truth of God and to reveal the character of God and His purpose for man.  The fulfillment of this mission demanded not omniscience but infallibility within the limits of the task entrusted to Him.  Ignorance is one thing, error is another.  If in His incarnate life He willed to submit to the limitations of human knowledge, yet He showed Himself aware of those limitations.  On questions of moral and spiritual truth He spoke with the certainty of conviction: He claimed an infallible knowledge and appealed to His own life and character to prove the truth of His claim.  “Which of you convicteth me of sin?  And if I say truth, why do ye not believe me” (Jn 8:46).  The power to live a life, faultless in its active performance of duty both towards God and towards man, carried with it the right to declare without contradiction, the secret source of strength, whence that power was derived.  The truth of the life guaranteed the truth of the teaching.

      There is, however, one point on which it has been maintained that our Lord showed not merely ignorance but error.  He expected and taught others to expect His return to judgment and the end of the world within the lifetime of His own generation.  Subsequent events have proved this teaching false.  In support of this view the chief passages quoted are Mk 13:30, where “all these things” that shall be fulfilled in “this generation” at first sight would seem to include the final advent of the Son of Man predicted in vv. 24–27 (Mt 24:34 and Lk 21:32 are parallel passages); Mt 24:29, where the final advent is foretold “immediately after the tribulation of those days” i.e. the fall of Jerusalem (n.b. Mk 13:24 has “in those days”).  So, too, Mt 16:28 runs: “There shall be some of them that stand here which shall in nowise taste of death, till they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom” (Mk 9:1, “till they see the Kingdom of God come with power”).  At first sight these passages appear to suggest the fallibility of Christ.  But a closer examination of the Gospels makes any such conclusion at least precarious.

      (1) Our Lord expressly declared that as Man, He shared the ignorance of men and angels as to the time of His final advent (Mk 13:32 and probably Mt 24:36). [We may not unreasonably suppose that the actual moment of the end of the world and the final Advent is contingent upon human conduct.  Hence, inevitably, our Lord as man must be ignorant of its date (cp. also p. 285 ff.).]  It is therefore improbable that at the same time He should have predicted it as about to happen within a generation.  Further, much of His teaching beyond dispute assumes a long interval before His last coming.  The Gospel is first to be preached to all the nations (Mk 13:10) and in the whole world (Mt 24:14).  In Lk 21:24 “the times of the Gentiles” are interposed between the capture of Jerusalem and the coming of the Son of Man.  We must not be too confident that we always know exactly what is meant by the “coming of the Son of Man”.  We are dealing not with English literalism but Oriental imagery.  In one sense Christ most really came in judgment at the fall of Jerusalem.  His words then received a first fulfillment in the lifetime of those who heard them.  They await a further fulfillment whose date and distance are unknown.  Above all, the primary aim of our Lord’s eschatological discourses was not to give a detailed forecast of the future, but to rouse the disciples to the duty of watchfulness.  They were to live as men in daily expectation of the Lord’s return and prepared to render an account to Him.

      (2) Here, if anywhere, we need to bear in mind that we have received our Lord’s words through human agency.  The discourse in S. Matthew is demonstrably a collection of speeches from different sources, probably not spoken at the same time but grouped according to subject matter.  The same is probably true of Mk 13.  Hence, it is precarious to judge any saying by its present context.  Again, the speeches have been translated from Aramaic into Greek.  It is the easiest thing for a reporter unconsciously to alter the exact wording, to add or subtract a shade of meaning, or to give precision to what was intentionally left vague.  If our Lord’s descriptions of His second coming were couched in dark and mysterious language, they may well have come down to us coloured by the presuppositions of those who heard them.  If we compare Mt 16:28 with Mk 9:1, Mt 24:3 with Mk 13:4, and Mt 24:29 ,with Mk 13:24, we can see how the first evangelist has made more definite the vaguer expressions of S. Mark, so as to bring out his own belief that the final coming of our Lord would follow immediately after the destruction of Jerusalem.  This definiteness demonstrates not the fallibility of Christ but of His interpreters.  It is clear that the early Church, including S. Paul, lived in daily expectation Of the Lord’s return.  This proves that His teaching did not exclude such an interpretation, but it does not prove that it was the true interpretation (cp. the misunderstanding recorded in Jn 21:23).  It seems to have been our Lord’s will that the Church should so live as to be prepared for His return at any moment.  In a very real sense He “came in power” in the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost.  In another sense He came at the fall of Jerusalem. [We can hardly imagine all that the fall of the city and the abolition of the Temple meant to a Jewish Christian.  It was a very shaking of heaven and earth and the fall of all that seemed most permanent.  It was the dawn of a new world.]  In an equally real sense He comes in all times of crisis whether for the Church or for the individual.  In every case His coming is a judgment, a blessing and an opportunity for those who are watchful, a condemnation of those who are not.  In the fullness of time there will be a last coming and a final judgment.

      (3) We must also bear in mind that our Lord spoke as a prophet.  He employs the imagery of ancient prophecy and contemporary apocalyptic.  We must therefore take account of the perspective of prophecy.  “Long ages of the future are foreshortened in a series of pictures which seem to be immediate and simultaneous, until the course of events shows that they represent successive ages of long duration and slow development.” [Kirkpatrick, Doctrine of the Prophets, p. 407.]  Because this is so we do not dare to call the prophet mistaken.  It may be that our Lord, as the last and greatest of the prophets, condescended to share their limitations and their mental outlook.  He has told us expressly that He, as Man, did not know the day or hour of His return.  But He had a clear vision of the certainty of that return, and that clearness He expressed under the symbol of nearness.  His utterances must be judged by the standard of prophecy, and as such they have in part received and in part await fulfillment. †

      (ii) In the Epistle to the Hebrews (4:15) our Lord is stated to have been “in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin”.  It has often been objected that such a statement is self-contradictory.  With us the sting of temptation lies not only in the solicitation from without but in our own inward affinity to evil.  It is the traitor within the camp that betrays us.  In the case of an unfallen human nature and a will that had never been weakened by consent to evil, this last element would be lacking.  How could evil make its full appeal?  Further, if Christ could not sin, His battle with temptation was, so to speak, a sham fight.  There was no fear of falling.

      Such objections are often urged, but if analyzed they rest at bottom on a misunderstanding of the meaning of temptation.

      When our Lord became man, He thereby rendered Himself subject to temptation.  God in Himself “cannot be tempted with evil” (Jas 1:13).  But in expressing Himself in and through the limitations of manhood and the feelings and conditions of finite human life “He deliberately put on – not, indeed, the personal capacity of sinning, but at least (if we may use the expression) the hypothetical capacity of sinning, the nature through which sin could naturally approach and suggest itself. ... There was, so far, in His human nature, the natural machinery for, or capability of, rebelling, that the reiterated negative ‘not my own’, ‘not myself’, does deny something. [Moberly, op. cit. p. 105.]  All free and finite existence contains the possibility of sin.  Selfishness exists potentially as soon as there exists a self that can set itself up in opposition to the life of the whole.  The fact of limitation carries with it the possibility of transgressing the limit. [Cp. Westcott, The Gospel of the Resurrection, c. ii. § 24.]  Again, in virtue of His human nature our Lord possessed certain needs and desires common to all men: not only the elementary desires of the body, for food, drink, rest and the like, but also the desires of our higher nature, as for sympathy and companionship, and the more intellectual desire to explore all the manifold possibilities of life and to taste a full and rich experience.  At any moment a being with such desires may find himself in circumstances when he has to choose between doing wrong in order to gratify them or leaving them ungratified.  All such appetites, in themselves morally neutral, may become temptations to sin when their satisfaction would conflict with the known will of God.  Here, too, our Lord was sensitive to temptation.  The nature of His temptations in large part corresponded to His vocation.  He was tempted to forward the Kingdom of God in ways that were not in accordance with the will of the Father, to do evil that good might come.  He was tempted to escape the pain and shame of the Cross.  He experienced the power of temptation in all its reality.  In one sense, no two men’s temptations are “in all points” the same, yet they agree in containing the essential elements of temptation.  No individual undergoes all forms of temptation.  So our Lord’s, though different in form very largely from our own, just because His work was unique, were as real and grievous to Him as our own are to us.  His possession of unique powers does not affect the point in question.  The moral struggle is concerned with the use to which we put the powers, great or small, which we individually possess.  Any power may be used either for the glory of God or for our own self-pleasing.  Nor, again, does sinlessness affect the ultimate and essential nature of temptation.  Our Lord, just because He was sinless, alone endured the full brunt of the assault.  The man who yields to temptation has not experienced its extremest force.  If, in God’s providence, our trials are proportioned to our capacity (1 Cor 10:13), our Lord’s conflict may well have been sore beyond our imagination.  Further, even in our own experience the temptations that come from sinless desires may be even more grievous than those that spring from our own past weakness. [It has been suggested, for instance, that the thirst of the traveller in the desert, which arises out of a sinless human infirmity, may be more fierce than the drunkard’s craving for strong drink.]  Our own part in yielding to sin may alter the form of our temptation but it does not make it essentially different.  A sinful disposition does make men more liable to fall, but it does not increase the pain of being tempted; rather it diminishes it, because it diminishes the antagonism to evil.

      Again, when we say that sin was impossible to Him, we mean morally, not physically, impossible.  He could not sin, not because anything external prevented, Him, but because He was Himself one in will with the Father.  Temptation is not sin.  It only becomes sin when the will fails to decide for the higher course or dallies with the temptation.  Our Lord never consented to the suggestion of evil.  By prayer and faith He overcame the tempter.  He condemned sin, not only by suffering for it, but by personally resisting and overcoming it.  His holiness was a real human holiness perfected through moral effort and conquest. [Cp. Gore, The Incarnation of the Son of God, pp. 165–167.]

      Lastly, here as always, Jesus Christ is the great redeemer.  What we need in our fight against sin is sympathy with us in all the pain and effort of resistance.  That our Lord can give us, since He resisted “even unto blood”.  What our fallen nature craves is sympathy with us in our falls.  That our Lord does not give, and it would be bad for us to receive it, since it would weaken us.  Our Lord’s true human sympathy is not lessened by His perfect holiness.  He felt the strain, as none other has ever felt it, of directing His will unceasingly along the hard path of duty, at the cost of pain to body, mind and soul.  It would seem that in the higher stages of the spiritual life, as evidenced by the saints, the pain of temptation lies less in the fear of defeat than in the hatred of all suggestion to evil.  As men grow in holiness, they grow in sensitiveness to the horror of sin.  The more holy the soul the more painful is all such temptation.  To our Lord it was more terrible than to others, just because He was sinless.  Hence, He can indeed feel with us in our moral conflict.  But though He can sympathize with us in our temptations, because He Himself was tempted, He can redeem us from sin just because He never sinned.  “If redemption is to be achieved the redeemer must stand free of moral evil.  As the source of victorious spiritual energy He must Himself be in utter oneness with the will of God.  The perfect moral health, the unstained conscience to which He is slowly raising others, must be present absolutely in His own life. ... Like to His brethren in all else, yet He is unlike them here.  Yet it is no paradox to say that such unlikeness makes His kinship perfect: for sin had made Him not more a man but less.  Sin dehumanizes, and by its entrance the perfection of His vital sympathy would have been increasingly lost.” [Mackintosh, The Person of Jesus Christ, p. 401; cp. Westcott’s notes on Heb 7:26 and 4:15.] †

      (f) The Virgin birth. – Our Article, following the Creeds, asserts that The Son ... took man’s nature in the womb of the Blessed Virgin, of her substance.  The Church has always understood such words as these literally, as stating that our Lord was born of a virgin mother, without the intervention of any human father.  Strictly speaking, it was our Lord’s conception, not our Lord’s birth, that was miraculous.  The term Virgin birth would be more accurately styled the “virginal conception”.*  Today this belief has been challenged by some who claim to be Christians.  They hold that it forms no integral part of Christian belief, that there is no satisfactory historical evidence for it, that the statement of it in the Creed must be taken as symbolically, not literally true, that is, as an allegory, not an actual fact, and that in any case the belief in it as an historical event has no particular value for Christian faith.  The main lines of argument in support of this contention may be summed up thus. S. Mark, S. Paul, and S. John are all silent about the Virgin birth.  This shows that it had no place in the earliest Gospel.  The evidence of the two Gospels of S. Matthew and S. Luke proves on examination to be historically worthless.  Similar legends told about great men can be quoted from other religions.  This suggests that the idea was borrowed by the early Christians and consciously or unconsciously fashioned into a story to symbolize Christ’s uniqueness.  Further, it is more fitting, and in accordance with what we know of God’s orderly working, that God’s Son should sanctify the ordinary processes of human generation and birth by entering human life in the same manner as ourselves.  Such a miracle would place Him apart from us.  By rejecting the historical truth of the story a spiritual faith is strengthened rather than weakened. [For a temperate statement of the case for rejecting the doctrine, see E. Brunner, The Mediator, pp. 322 ff.]

            [*It is important to distinguish between the Virgin-birth and the “Immaculate Conception”.  They are often confused in popular thought.  The “immaculate Conception” is the view that by a special miracle S. Mary was conceived and born free from any taint of original sin, that she might be the mother of Christ.  Its aim is to secure her sinlessness.  There is, however, no hint in Scripture or in any Father before S. Augustine that she was supposed to be sinless.  Even he only supposed her to be free from actual sin.  The doctrine stands on an entirely different footing from that of the Virgin birth.  It arose as a pious opinion, resting on a slender foundation of human logic.  In the Roman Church it was elevated to the rank of a dogma in 1854.]

      In reply we maintain that this Article of the Christian faith cannot be so lightly swept away.

      (i) There is a right order in approaching this question.  We do not expect a man to believe in the Virgin birth who does not believe in the divinity of Christ.  As a matter of simple history men did not believe Christ to be God, because He was born of a virgin.  Rather by a study of His life and character and by the experience of His redemptive power, they became convinced that He was a unique Person.  Then, believing Him to be a unique Person, they were prepared to believe, when they were told it on good authority, that He entered the world in a unique way.  We gather from the Acts and the Epistles of S. Paul that the apostolic preaching began with Christ crucified, risen and ascended.  Then came the study of His human life.  The apostles were primarily witnesses to what they had seen.  It was only when men had accepted Him as their Saviour and proved for themselves the power of His risen life, that in due time they were bidden to learn how that earthly life began.  Both then and now, the Virgin birth came first in order of time but last in order of apprehension.  Only so far as we have learnt for ourselves the uniqueness of Christ are we able to approach the evidence with the right presuppositions.  This, then, explains in part the so-called silence of S. Paul and S. Mark.  S. Mark’s Gospel has preserved for us what is probably an outline of the earliest Christian preaching as given by S. Peter at Rome.  To say that either the apostle or the evangelist did not know of the Virgin birth is precarious.  All that we have the right to say is that it was absent from the earliest preaching.  Such silence is only to be expected, when we consider the reserve that always surrounds the mystery of birth.  The blessed Mother would hardly have called public attention to such an event.  It may be that in her lifetime the secret was jealously confined to a few.  Again, when we consider the intimacy between S. Paul and S. Luke, it is hard to suppose that the former was ignorant of an event recorded by the latter.  There is no occasion in his extant epistles when we can say that he must have mentioned the Virgin birth if he knew of it.  It may well have lain in the background of his mind, when he spoke of God as “sending forth His Son born of a woman” (Gal 4:4) or of our Lord as the “Second Adam”, “the heavenly man”, the starting point of a new humanity (1 Cor 15:45–47).

      (ii) We must remember that the historical evidence for the event is more than that of two documents, the Gospels of S. Matthew and S. Luke.  Behind them stands the witness of the Apostles and the whole of the early Church.  It is incredible that if the Apostles had taught or were teaching that our Lord was the son of Joseph, there two Gospels should have been accepted without a protest.  No doubt, for a long time the majority of Christians did not know of the Virgin birth: many may have died without having ever heard of it.  But by the time of Ignatius it was accepted without question from Antioch to Ephesus (cp. Ignatius, ad Eph. 19, ad Trall. 9, ad Smyrn. 1).  He asserts the reality of our Lord’s birth against the Docetists, though it is worth noting that an ordinary birth would have afforded a far stronger argument for his purpose, if he could have taught it.  The story of the Virgin birth must have been made known on very good authority to win so soon such unanimous acceptance.  Later in the second century it has a place in the credal summaries which occur in the writings of Justin and Irenaeus.  This by itself proves that the Virgin birth was in full accord with the tradition of the early Church, and formed a part of its current catechetical instruction before the canonization of the Gospels.

      When we turn to the two accounts in the Gospels we are struck by their independence.  They agree in the main topic that they undertake to narrate, the Virgin birth, but they differ in detail.  There is no actual inconsistency between them, unless we read into either of them statements that are not there, but owing to our lack of knowledge it as not easy to piece all the details together.  “That an event is attested by two stories coming from different sources is usually regarded as affording a presumption of truth, not of falsehood.” [Armitage Robinson, Some Thoughts on the Incarnation, pp. 32–33; cp. the whole passage, pp. 31–41.]  In this case we have two independent witnesses, and the source of each account seems to lie in the traditions of the Jewish Church anterior to the fall of Jerusalem.

      Let us take S. Luke’s Gospel first.  With the possible exception of the governorship of Quirinius, we may say that the details of the framework of the story of the birth at Bethlehem have received support and illumination from modern archaeological discoveries. [See Ramsey, Was Christ Born at Bethlehem? and the commentaries on S. Luke by H. Balmforth (Clarendon Bible) and B. S. Easton (T. & T. Clark).]  This fact encourages us to trust S. Luke’s evidence about the birth itself.  It is agreed that behind his first two chapters lie very early sources, strongly Jewish in outlook, and showing no consciousness of the path of shame which Messiah had to tread.  The whole tone of the narrative suggests that it came from S. Mary herself.  The suggestion has been made to cut out 1:34–36, the verses that most clearly assert Mary’s virginity.  In defence of this excision there is no evidence whatever, internal or external. [A single Old Latin MS. (b) omits Mary’s question and transposes the text.  Cp. Box, Virgin Birth, pp. 223–225.]  It is a counsel of despair, only of importance as showing how far men will go to rule out evidence that conflicts with their own preconceived ideas about what the Christian faith ought to be.  It still leaves unsolved the problem of the prominence of Mary throughout these chapters if Joseph was the father.  Nor can we explain why she is so carefully styled virgin twice in v. 27. [Cp. also Lk 2:49.  The first recorded words of Christ seem to be a correction of His mother’s words, and imply that Joseph was not His father.]

      The account in the first Gospel is written throughout from the side of Joseph.  It is Jewish in tone through and through.  The writer is eager to search out Old Testament parallels to the events of the birth and infancy of One whom he regards above all as the Messiah.  To our minds many of these parallels seem far-fetched.  So much so, that it is clear that the writer did not invent the details of the story in order to fulfill Old Testament predictions.  The Jews had no special reverence for virginity as such.  Hence it is impossible to explain the existence of the story unless it was believed to be literally true.  It has been argued that the whole narrative is only an attempt to create a fulfillment for the prophecy of Isaiah 7:14.  The use of the Old Testament elsewhere by this writer lends no support to such a view.  There is at present no evidence that the Jews either applied the passage to the Messiah or expected the Messiah to be born of a virgin.  The Hebrew word in the text of Isaiah does not necessarily denote virginity. [The passage in Isaiah is one of the most obscure in the Old Testament.  Possibly it rests on an old myth found also in Rev 12:1–4, in which at a time of crisis a deliverer miraculously appears.  In this myth the mother may have been a virgin, and the LXX has παρθένος in the passage.  But the whole emphasis is laid on the person of the deliverer, not on the manner of his birth.  On the account in S. Matthew see MeNeile’s commentary.]  Again, in 1:16 there are traces of a reading “Joseph begat Jesus”.  Even if this should be correct, the word “begat” would be used in the same legal sense as elsewhere in the genealogy.  Joseph acted as our Lord’s legal father.  He was known as Jesus son of Joseph.  No alternative was possible.

      As regards the Gospel of S. John, his silence is a token of consent.  He certainly knew the synoptic Gospels, and at times corrects or explains or supplements them.  If he had disapproved of the narratives of the Virgin birth, he would have shown his disapproval.  But is he silent?  The language of 1:13 when he speaks of Christians as “born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God”, suggests an allusion.  The Virgin birth is both type and source of the spiritual new birth of the Christian.  If we adopt the reading ός ... εγεννήθη, following early Latin versions, the allusion becomes explicit.

      Before we leave the evidence of the Gospels, it is well to ask, If we reject their account of the Virgin birth, what is the alternative?  Our opponents reply “a birth in wedlock”.  But that is an alternative for which we have no evidence whatever.  The only non-miraculous birth for which there is any evidence at all is a birth out of wedlock.  In later days the current Jewish slander was that our Lord was the illegitimate child of Mary.  There are evidences for the existence of this slander within the Gospels.  Why did Mary accompany Joseph to Bethlehem?  Why was she in her condition repelled from the inn?  The whole story suggests something unusual.  In the genealogy, Mt 1:1–16, we find the names of four women only, three of whom were of bad character.  Their presence may well be a retort to current slanders about the birth of Christ.  The Gospel begins with a refutation of the Jewish attack on the birth of Christ, as it ends with a refutation of the Jewish denial of His Resurrection.  Again, in Mk 6:3, the people of Nazareth reject our Lord and say, “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?”  The wording is altered in Mt and Lk.  “To designate anyone the son of his mother, whether his father were dead or alive, is almost unknown in the Old or New Testament, and hardly occurs, if at all, in Rabbinic writers.  The words were clearly used by the people of Nazareth in an insulting manner; they were referring to rumours which existed as to our Lord’s birth.” [Headlam in C.Q.R., October, 1914.  See pp. 23–26.]  The same is the simplest explanation of the Jews’ retort in Jn 8:41, “We were not born of fornication, we have one father even God.”  Such an interpretation would suit admirably the irony of S. John.  All the evidence points to something unusual in the birth of Christ.  If this is admitted, the Christian conscience will not have much difficulty in deciding what, is the true explanation.  [The question has been raised, How could S. Mary have desired to restrain our Lord, as recorded in Mk 3:31–34, if she knew of all that is recorded in the stories of His birth?  Her estimate of His Person could hardly have been higher than S. Peter’s at Caesarea Philippi.  Yet he vehemently rebuked the Master whom he had hailed as Messiah.  She knew as yet nothing of the glory of the Resurrection.]

      (iii) The alleged parallels from the legends of other nations usually break down on examination.  Many, are demonstrably later than the Gospel stories and are probably echoes of Christian teaching.  Others are gross and carnal stories about the lusts of gods and heroes as different as possible from the Christian accounts.  We really cannot compare the narratives of the Gospel with these silly tales.  The prevalence of such legends does, indeed, witness to a widespread human instinct that the human race could not produce its own deliverer, but needed a divine impulse from above.  They would then embody an unconscious feeling after the truth enshrined in the actual Virgin birth.  As we have seen, the whole tone and outlook of the narratives is so Jewish that an admixture of pagan legend is incredible.  It is equally impossible to find any adequate explanation in Jewish ideas.  The only alternative is to regard them as an invention of Christian imagination.  But from the first Christianity claimed, as against heathen religions, to be the truth.  To suppose that Christians embodied their belief in the uniqueness of Christ in stories that bore the appearance of history, but were really only the work of pious fancy, is to charge them with an offence against one of the first principles of their religion.  We do, indeed, find in the ridiculous stories of the Apocryphal Gospels the later attempts of Christian imagination to picture the birth and childhood of Christ, and the contrast with the canonical Gospels is most instructive.  Such attempts were rejected by the Church as unhistorical.  They are valuable only as showing what manner of stories Christians invented when they were unhampered by facts.  In short, the Gospel stories cannot be treated as legends unconsciously imported or shaping themselves as the years went on.  They are narrated as literal history in the lifetime of those who knew the Mother of Christ.

      (iv) To assert that the story of the Virgin birth may be treated as symbolic, is to misrepresent the place of symbolism.  The clause “born of the Virgin Mary” is in no way comparable to such a clause as “He sat down at the right hand of the Father”.  When we are attempting to describe something that is outside earthly experience we can only employ the language of Symbol.  We are driven to use metaphors borrowed from this lower world.  It is apparent that words which have been coined to express earthly things are inadequate to express heavenly things.  In picturing our Lord’s ascended life, we can only do our best with human ideas and language.  The clause “He sat down at the right hand of the Father” is only our effort to portray the truth that the highest place of honour in heaven belongs to Him.  But when we are dealing with the Virgin birth we are dealing with an event that, on its physical side, lies within human experience.  Human language is as competent to express it as it is to express anything.  The language of the first century A.D. was as adequate as our language today.  To say that the birth narratives of the Gospels are only symbolic is in effect to say that they are untrue: it is not to reinterpret them but to deny them.  As a matter of fact, the Virgin birth can be supported by analogies from nature far more close than those that can be adduced in the case of some other miracles.  Parthenogenesis – to use the scientific term – i.e. birth from a female without the intervention of a male, is not an unknown phenomenon.  “The latest investigations show that parthenogenesis can be artificially produced by an appropriate stimulus in many animals in which it does not naturally occur. [Harris, Pro Fide, 2, p. xl.  For evidence of science, see pp. xxxviii–xli.]  Even among mankind there is evidence of a certain tendency to parthenogenesis.  Such scientific facts do not, indeed, abolish the uniqueness of the Virgin birth, but at least they show that. its principle is not incredible.  They in their measure support the literalness of the story.

      (v) The question, however, still remains, What is the spiritual value of the Virgin birth?  What moral need of man does it satisfy?

      Let us begin by admitting that we must not make a priori assertions about it.  We do not dare to say that such a birth was the indispensable condition of an Incarnation, or that by no other means could the entail of sin be broken.  All we claim is that the Virgin birth is in the fullest accord with the revealed purpose of Christ’s coming and with our own highest insight into that purpose.

      We may illustrate this by a comparison between the birth of our Lord and the birth of John the Baptist.  John’s was essentially a birth from the past.  In every sense he was a child of old age.  His parents were of priestly family, stricken in years, righteous in works of the law.  He summed up in himself and his mission both the strength and weakness of the Jewish nation.  Theirs was a work of preparation.  By the Law was given a knowledge of God’s righteousness, a conviction of sin, but not the power to live up to such knowledge.  So John could convict men of sin and baptize them with the baptism of repentance, but he could do no more.  He waited for one mightier than himself who should baptize with holy Spirit, the breath of new life.  But the birth of Jesus Christ of a young maiden of the tribe of Judah by the overshadowing of God’s power was in all ways the opposite of the birth of John.  Jesus Christ was neither physically; morally, nor spiritually the product of the past.  The physical fact was a parable and pledge of the moral and spiritual fact.  He brought into humanity what humanity could not achieve for itself, a new and undefiled stream of human life.  The entail of weakened will and perverted desire was broken.  The alleged parallels from other religions, so far as they really apply, witness to a dim consciousness of this need.  Men aspired to be liberated from the fetters of their past and to rise above their inheritance of weakness and shame.  Jesus Christ was the starting point, the re-creation of a new humanity, and not merely the summit of past evolution.  We dare not, indeed, affirm that without the Virgin birth this influx of new life would have been impossible.  But we can see how the creative act of God in the physical world was a most fitting counterpart of His re-creative act in the spiritual world.

      Again, if Jesus Christ was the natural offspring of Mary and Joseph, it is hard to see how we can regard Him as other than an individual human person.  In accordance with ordinary laws of nature the product of such union is in each case a single finite human personality.  Christ would therefore be at best an individual man exceptionally favoured by being taken into a unique relation with God.  In other words, we find ourselves face to face with a Nestorian Christ, who, as we have seen, cannot be the divine Redeemer known to Christian experience.  Again, we find Christ not simply a Son of Man but the Son of Man.  His humanity was a universal humanity raised above the limitations of sex and country.  He realized the ideal of East and West alike.  He combined the most opposite virtues.  In other words, the Virgin birth stands for this, that God did not simply reveal Himself through a single human Person, a Jew, but “that God once for all and completely incarnated Himself in humanity as His Son, and in that all-comprehensive act made all men His sons – potentially.” [Du Bose, The Gospel in the Gospels, p. 217.]  That is, Jesus Christ is not simply a unique example of manhood outside ourselves, to be admired from afar, but He is the truth of each one of us.  We may each find in Him our true self and the power of becoming our true self.  Once again, we do not assert that this was not possible without the Virgin birth; we are content to point out its moral fitness.  The spiritual and moral miracle of the existence of Jesus Christ demands an act of God not less unprecedented than the physical miracle.

      Lastly, our opponents claim that since a full Christian faith was possible in the earliest days without a belief in the Virgin birth, it is possible today.  But it is one thing to be ignorant of a spiritual truth, quite another thing deliberately to reject it, when it has been brought to light.  Undoubtedly individuals may abandon a belief in the Virgin birth and yet retain faith in our Lord’s divinity, but it is very questionable whether large bodies of people or the Church as a whole could do so.  The experience of the last century tends to show that when men give up a belief in the Virgin birth of Christ, they pass on to a view of His Person that is not that of the Catholic Church: it may be an up-to-date form of Nestorianism or an open Unitarianism.  It is significant that the only opposition to the Virgin birth in ancient days came from Ebionites and Gnostics, who refused to advance to the Catholic estimate of our Lord’s Person.  The real central miracle of Christianity that staggers the imagination is the Incarnation.  If we once believe that God Himself entered into human life and passed through a human experience, then a belief in the Virgin birth follows naturally and brings no new difficulty.  The historical Incarnation involves a break with the past and a new and unprecedented divine activity, beside which the wonder of the Virgin birth sinks into insignificance.†

      § 2.  The Article then proceeds to affirm the reality of the atoning work of Christ, “Who truly suffered, was crucified, dead and buried, to reconcile His Father to us, and to be a sacrifice not only for original guilt, but also for all actual sins of men.”

      (a) In any endeavour to enter into the meaning of the Atonement we must distinguish between the fact of the Atonement and attempted explanations of the fact or theories about it.  It is the fact that is of primary importance.  Through Christ crucified, Christians have found peace with God: they have tasted the joy of forgiveness for past sin: they have received new life and strength for the future.  “Being therefore justified by faith, let us have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom 5:1); “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 Jn 4:10; Christ “his own self bare our sins in his body on the tree, that we, having died unto sins, might live unto righteousness” (1 Pet 2:24).  These are three typical statements from the New Testament, all bearing witness to a common experience.  Christians were convinced that through Jesus Christ they had passed out of darkness into light.  The old sense of condemnation had passed away (Rom 8:1).  They had received a new capacity for righteousness and love and a new hope in living (1 Cor 6:9–11; Eph 2:12–13, I Jn 3:14, etc.).  Further, they were no less convinced that this experience might be shared by all men who would come to Christ in faith and repentance.  That this vivid conviction of new life in union with God was no passing fancy of the imagination was proved by their changed conduct and by the mutual love and holiness of the Christian fellowship.  This is the fact of the Atonement.  Through Christ crucified men of all ages have been brought into union with God.  The Gospel is in the first instance a proclamation of facts, the invitation to share the pardon and peace won by the Cross of Jesus Christ.  At the same time, Christians have quite rightly sought to understand the meaning of the Atonement.  As rational beings we are bound to think about what interests us most.  Hence the attempts to interpret the saving work of Christ in terms of human life and thought.  Such attempts are necessary that the Atonement may make its deepest appeal to the whole of our nature.  Just because it is a revelation of God, shedding light both upon the character of God and upon the needs and nature of man, we must strive to grasp the truth that it reveals and bring it home to ourselves.*

            [*The word ‘atonement’ by its derivation means simply at-one-ment, the bringing together of two parties that have been estranged.  (It is so used by Shakspere, e.g., Richard III, Act i. Scene 3.)  But in modern English, atonement has come to acquire the meaning “reparation” or “making amends”: so to our ears it tends to denote the means by which reconciliation is made possible, rather than the reconciliation itself.  In the A.V. “atonement” occurs only once in N.T. (Rom 5:11) as a translation of καταλλαγή.  The R.V. substitutes “reconciliation”.  In the O.T. the R.V. retains “atonement” in many passages.  The word so translated rather means “propitiation”.  The verb “kipper” comes from a root that means to “wipe clean”.  It is, however, always used figuratively.  Thus, it is used of propitiating a person, where the original idea may have been wiping clean a face that is blackened by displeasure.  It is also used in the passive of sin being “wiped out” or cancelled.  Elsewhere it is used of God wiping clean either the offence or the offender, where it practically equals forgiving.  In a legal sense it is used of a priest making propitiation (or atonement, R.V.) for a person or thing, i.e. wiping it clean by a propitiatory act.  In this last sense, at least, it comes to mean the process by which propitiation is made rather than the propitiation itself, that is, it corresponds with the modern use of “atonement” rather than with its original meaning.  (See Driver, Article “Propitiation” in Hastings’ D.B.  Since this was written, discoveries in Babylonia have made it clear that the root meaning of “kipper” is to “wipe clean” rather than to “cover” as used to be supposed.  Cp. e.g. Dr. Burney, J.Th.S., April, 1910, or C.Q.R., April, 1915, p. 55.)]

      (b) In Scripture the atoning work of Christ is most often expressed in language borrowed from the sacrifices of the Old Covenant.  There is probably no subject on which our ordinary ideas need a more drastic revision than on the meaning of sacrifice.  Modern research has shown that the fundamental idea of sacrifice is that of fellowship with God.  [Cp. S. Augustine’s definition of sacrifice: “Omne opus quod agitur ut sancta societate inhaereamus Deo.”  See the whole passage, De Civitate Dei, x, 5 and 6.]  Sacrifice is found all over the world and seems to spring out of a universal human instinct.  Its original meaning is still a matter of dispute. [Cp. E. O. James, The Origins of Sacrifice.]  From the nature of the case we cannot now discover who offered the first sacrifice or what he meant by it.  The practice may have originated independently at more than one place and not had the same meaning in every place.  All that we can do is to note the diverse ideas underlying it as found in historical times.  All evidence goes to show that sacrifice has no necessary connection either with suffering or sin.  In the case of friendly gods it was often a simple offering of food made as a tribute of respect or gratitude to the god, as to the head of a tribe.  In the case of unfriendly powers it may have been regarded as a bribe to go away and do no more mischief.  Again, primitive men claimed to hold communion with the god of their tribe by means of a banquet.  Religion, it must be remembered, in primitive times was a purely social concern.  The god was the god of the tribe or clan, not of the individual as such.  According to primitive ideas communion with the god was effected by eating with him at a common meal.  The god, like all the other guests, had his portion of food, which, it may be, was burnt that it might ascend to him.  In certain countries the food thus eaten – usually food of a special kind – came to be identified with the flesh of the god himself.  The vital union between the tribe and their god was renewed and strengthened by a physical feeding upon the life of the god.  These sacrificial meals were occasions of joy and boisterous merriment. [Cp. Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, Lect. VII, esp. pp. 254–263.]  Such festal meals are prominent in the earlier parts of the Old Testament.  But as the sense of sin grew, men felt that before communion with their god could be attained, the sin or defilement, often in primitive times regarded as physical rather than moral, must be expiated.  So the idea of sacrifice as a propitiation, an idea probably present in some degree from the first, was brought to the front.  Accordingly, in the later religion of Israel the sin offering came to be the most prominent.  The awakened conscience felt that sin had come between the soul and God and must be removed before communion could be restored.  Even so, the older forms of sacrifice, the “burnt offerings”, which primarily though not exclusively expressed gratitude or homage, and the “peace offerings”, which concluded in a social meal, still survived.  And up to the end certain sacrifices were retained which did not require the death or destruction of any victim such as the meal offering or the show bread.  In the light of such knowledge we can understand that since Christ by His death had made communion with God possible, that death was inevitably interpreted in the language of sacrifice.  Christ had achieved perfectly and for ever all that the old sacrifices had attempted to achieve.  In all ancient religions stress was laid on action rather than on belief.  What was done and the manner in which it was done was all that mattered.  No doubt certain general ideas lay behind the external rites of sacrifice, but they were vague and disconnected.  Sacrifice was offered to attain certain recognized ends, but there was no definite theory of sacrifice.  Hence the use of sacrificial terms to express the Atonement does not involve any single and complete theory about the Atonement.  It is as true to say that for the first Christians the full meaning of the ancient sacrifices was interpreted by the death of Christ as that the meaning of His death was interpreted by them.

      (c) Turning then to Scripture, we find our Lord not only predicting His death and passion but regarding them as the climax of His work.  He never viewed them as a failure or even as an interruption to His activity.  They had an essential place in His mission.  He came not to live only, but to die (e.g. Lk 12:50, Jn 12:23–24).  He always looked through death to the Resurrection (Mk 8:31, 9:31, 10:34, etc.).  He was constrained to die not by outward compulsion but by inward necessity.  The Scriptures declared His death to be the will of God (Mk 8:31, notice δει, 9:12, 14:21 and 49; Lk 24:25–27).  We ask to what passages of Scripture He referred.  Probably certain of the psalms, such as those on which He meditated upon the Cross.  Probably, too, the spiritual significance of the Old Testament sacrifices as ordained in the Law.  But the clearest passage is that of the Suffering Servant of Jehovah in Is 53.  The Servant takes upon him the sins of others (v. 6): his death is a sin offering (v. 10), making reconciliation for many (vv. 11–12), and is followed by a resurrection.  In Lk 22:37 He applies to Himself words from the description of the Suffering Servant.  It is in this sense, too, that “The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto but to minister” (i.e. as a servant) “and to give his life a ransom for many (λύτρον αντι πολλων)”,* i.e. to buy back lives forfeited by sin (Mk 10:45, cp. 1 Tim 2:6).  After His Resurrection in the first days of the Church our Lord is explicitly identified with the Servant (Acts 3:13 and 26, 4:27 and 30, cp. Mt 12:18).  His death upon the Cross is explained as the fulfillment of Is 53 (Acts 8:32–35).  This reinforces the evidence of the Gospels as showing that this interpretation of His Cross rests on our Lord’s own teaching.  The vision of the Transfiguration suggests that it was through meditation upon the Law and the Prophets that our Lord in His human consciousness learnt the divine necessity of His death (Lk 9:30–31).  At the Last Supper in the institution of the Eucharist our Lord clearly attaches a sacrificial value to His death.  He views it as inaugurating a new covenant between God and man by which remission of sins was secured to many (Mk 14:24, Mt 26:28, cp. Exodus 24:8).  He is in some sense the true Paschal Lamb.  As the blood of the Paschal Lamb protected Israel from the angel of death, so His atoning blood averts God’s judgment from those who take refuge in it.

            [*Λύτρον in LXX is used of the price paid to redeem a first-born son, whose life belonged to Jehovah (Num 3:46), or a slave (Lev 25:51), or a captive (Is 45:12).  We may compare the teaching of Mk 8:37.  When a man’s life is forfeited, he has nothing to give in exchange wherewith to buy it back.  The Greek word λύτρον may be the equivalent of either of two Hebrew words, one of which has definite sacrificial associations, being the substantive from “kipper”.

            The dominant theory of the Atonement in the Church until the time of Anselm, so far as it had one, was based on this metaphor of “ransom”.  The death of Christ was viewed as a ransom paid to the Devil.  This presses the metaphor too hard.  The word “ransom” is symbolical of the truth that Christ’s death has freed us from slavery, and that this freedom was purchased at a great cost.  But when we go on to ask, to whom was the ransom paid, we are pressing the metaphor beyond the limits of the truth that it was selected to express.  No answer can be given.  Israel was often said to have been ransomed or redeemed from Egypt.  Such language laid stress on the mighty exhibition of God’s power and the cost of redemption.  But obviously no ransom was paid to Pharaoh.  (Cp. Westcott, Hebrews, p. 297f.)]

      In the Epistles our Lord’s death is at once compared and contrasted with the leading forms of Jewish sacrifice.  In Eph 5:2 the completeness of His self-sacrificing love is expressed under the imagery of the Burnt offering.  In 1 Cor 10:16–21 and probably Heb 13:10 the simile is rather that of the Peace offering.  Christ the Victim is the food of His people.  More often His death is likened to the Sin offering (Rom 3:25 and 8:3, where περι αμαρτίας, according to the constant use of LXX, is the technical term for a sin offering.  1 Pet 2:24 and 3:18; 1 Jn 4:10, and Heb 13:11–12, an isolated passage standing apart from the general argument of the Epistle).  Throughout Hebrews it is interpreted by the sacrifices on the Day of Atonement.  Elsewhere He is regarded as the Lamb of sacrifice (1 Pet 1:19, Rev 5:6, etc., cp. Jn 1:29) and explicitly as the Passover Lamb (1 Cor 5:8, cp. Jn 19:36).  Further, the many passages that speak of the “blood” of Christ imply a similar idea of sacrifice (Rom 5:9, Col 1:20, Eph 1:7 and 2:13, 1 Jn 1:7, Rev 5:9, etc.).  In short, the whole of the New Testament is permeated by sacrificial thought and language, unfamiliar to our modern minds.  We need to get behind it to the ideas of universal human interest that it embodies.

      (d) When we consider the Old Testament sacrifices, three leading general ideas stand out and find fulfillment in the atoning death of Christ.

      (i) These sacrifices rest upon divine appointment.  They are means ordained by God Himself by which His people may be brought back into communion with Him or may realize such communion (cp. 2 Sam 14:14).  They are never viewed as a means of overcoming God’s reluctance to forgive, or as earning God’s favour.  So, in the New Testament the Atonement from first to last proceeds from the love of God.  “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself” (2 Cor 5:18–19).  ‘It was the good pleasure of the Father ... through him to reconcile all things unto himself” (Col 1:19–20, cp. Eph 2:4–6).  The Father is always represented as “sending” the Son to be the Saviour of the world (1 Jn 4:14, cp. Jn 3:16).  It was God who set forth Christ as propitiatory (Rom 3:25).  Any theory of the Atonement that misrepresents it as an appeasing of an angry Father by a merciful Son not only breaks up the Persons of the Trinity, but contradicts the whole tenor of Scripture.  The initiative of the Atonement is always represented as lying with the Father (cp. Rom 5:8).*

            [*It has been often urged that in parables such as the Prodigal Son forgiveness is in no way connected with the death of Christ.  We may reply: First, Christ, like any good teacher, teaches one point at a time.  Secondly, in such parables He was addressing men who were approaching God through Himself.  He could speak of the Father’s forgiveness unconditionally, because He had come from the Father to be and to do all that was needed to make possible that forgiveness.  We must remember that in the Epistles stress is laid above all on the Cross and Resurrection, and in the Gospels a very large proportion of space is given to the story of the death and passion.]

      (ii) We may divide the process of Old Testament sacrifice into three main portions, (1) The bringing of the victim to the altar, (2) The death of the victim, (3) The presentation of the blood before God.

      (1) The victim was brought by the offerer to the place of sacrifice.  It must be without blemish (Lev 1:3, etc.).  There the offerer laid his hands upon the victim’s head, perhaps to signify a very intimate connection between the offerer and the victim, and made confession of sin.  In the case of our Lord these preliminary actions fairly correspond to His life viewed as the approach to Calvary.  His life of obedience was, as it were, the bringing of the victim to the door of the tabernacle.  He came to do the Father’s will.  For that end a body was prepared for Him (Heb 10:5.  By His conquest of temptation He proved Himself a Lamb “without blemish” (Heb 9:14, 1 Pet 1:19).  He, as it were, laid His hand upon His own life by submitting to the discipline of suffering (Heb 5:8).  What in the case of the animal victim was involuntary and unconscious, was in Him voluntary and conscious.  Whereas in the old sacrifices the union between offerer and victim was no more than outward and conventional, Christ was Himself both offerer and victim.  Of His own will He gave Himself up to die.  His death came to Him in the path of duty and He accepted it as the Father’s will.

      (2) The victim was slain, not necessarily by the priest at all, since the slaying of the victim was not essentially a priestly act.  Perhaps the sole object of this was the setting free of the blood, “which is the life,” so as to be available for presentation to God.  Very possibly it contained also the acknowledgment that sin deserved death.*  Here, too, the New Testament draws the contrast between the involuntary suffering of an irrational animal and the perfect obedience of the Cross.  The death of Christ was the climax of filial obedience (Heb 5:7–9; Mk 14:36; Phil 2:8; Rom 5:19, etc.).  Our Lord voluntarily identified Himself with men, and willed to endure death on their behalf (Gal 1:4, 2:20, etc.).  As the representative of mankind He offered to the Father a perfect human obedience.  Obedience could do no more than die.  He made a perfect confession of sin and submitted to death as the due penalty of sin (2 Cor 5:21).  All that the old sacrifices prefigured, He perfectly and in actual fact fulfilled.

            [*Probably a majority of modern scholars would dispute this, and hold that there was no idea of transference of sins to the victim and of the victim suffering death as the penalty of sin.  Such an idea of penal substitution was certainly not carried through consistently, but very strong arguments can be adduced in its favour.  Some such thought underlies Is 53 (cp. 2 Cor 5:21 and 1 Pet 2:24), and is found in later Judaism.  See K.D.B. “Sacrifice”, pp. 340 and 342b, and Mozley, The Doctrine of the Atonement, p. 14ff.]

      (3) Then, when the blood was shed, the culmination of the sacrifice was reached in the manipulation of the blood by the priest.  In the sin offering it was sprinkled on the horns of the altar.  On the Day of Atonement it was carried by the High-priest within the veil and sprinkled on and before the mercy seat.  This was the essential act of sacrifice and could only be performed by the priest.  It signified not the infliction of death but the offering of life.  “The life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh atonement by reason of the life” (Lev 17:11).  The killing of the victim was a necessary means to this end; but still a means (cp. Heb 9:22).  Through the life thus liberated by death propitiation was made.  The sin was wiped out and communion with God restored.  The New Testament prefers to say that we are saved by the “blood” of Christ rather than by the “death” of Christ.  That is, we are saved by the life of Christ that was surrendered to God in death, and thus set free to be the means of our atonement.  Christ’s redeeming work did not end on the Cross.  It was consummated when as our high priest He entered into Heaven to present His life to the Father.  “While the thought of Christ’s blood (as shed) includes all that is involved in Christ’s Death, the Death of Christ, on the other hand, expresses only a part, the initial part of the whole conception of Christ’s Blood.  The Blood always includes the thought of the life preserved and active beyond death.” [Westcott, The Epistles of S. John, Note on “The idea of Christ’s Blood”, pp. 35–36.  Cp. Milligan, Resurrection, Note 56.]  This thought will be developed when we come to the Ascension.  We must not isolate the Cross from the Crucified if we wish to understand the meaning of the Atonement.  The Cross was indeed the necessary means of our salvation.  Only as having been slain, could Christ’s life become available for us.  But we are saved by a living Christ, not merely by something that He once did.  Here again the “blood” of Christ stands in contrast with the blood of victims.  The life of the victims was only conventionally alive after death.  But the life of Christ through death is a glorious reality.  He has become all that He now is through the Cross.  His “blood” is Himself, His own life.  As the “Lamb that hath been slain” He is the “propitiation for our sins” (1 Jn 2:2).

      The purpose of the Old Testament sacrifices was not exhausted by the removal of the sin.  The people were restored to full communion with God in order that they might continue in His service.  So the object of our Lord’s atonement includes far more than a bare forgiveness of sins.  We are saved in order that we may serve, and in God’s service find our true satisfaction.  We are redeemed from evil that we may become something good.  Through an abiding union with God made possible by Christ we are to live henceforth our true life as Sons of God.  Christ is to be to us day by day a living Saviour imparting to us through the Holy Spirit His own life.  As redeemed we are progressively to appropriate all the blessings of God’s people (1 Pet 1:4, cp. Rom 8:17).  No view of the Atonement can be satisfactory that ignores the work of the Holy Spirit in us, transforming us into the very likeness of Christ and sanctifying all our life.  We are to do all things “in Christ”.  As members of Christ we are to share the joy and peace that the Spirit brings (cp. Gal 5:22–23, Rom 14:17).  The Christian life here and hereafter is the goal for which we were saved.  “If while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more being reconciled, shall we be saved by his life” (Rom 5:10).

      (e) How then, it may be asked, can the Article speak of Christ dying “to reconcile the Father to us”?  Such language suggests that the Atonement wrought a change of mind in God towards us.  We must admit that in all the passages in Scripture in which the word “reconcile” is employed in connection with the work of Christ, the fact is expressed the other way round.  We are said to be reconciled to God, not God to us.  That is to say, the change, according to our use of the term, is said to be wrought in us, not in Him (Rom 5:10–11; 2 Cor 5:18–20; Eph 2:6; Col 1:19–22).  But even if the form of expression in the Article is not scriptural, the truth that underlies it is.  The Greek word (καταλλάσσω) translated “reconcile” simply means to reestablish friendly relations between persons. [Cp. Bengel on Rom 3:24  καταλλαγή est δίπλευρος et tollit (1) indignationem Dei adversum nos 2 Cor 5:19, (2) nostramque abalienationem a Deo 2 Cor 5:20.]  On which side the hostility exists is not determined by the word itself.  Thus in Mt 5:24 the grievance is on the side of the brother of the man who is about to offer a sacrifice.  Yet it is the man himself who is bidden “to be reconciled”.  In English idiom we should say that the brother needed to be reconciled.  The moment that we grasp that the Atonement is at bottom a personal matter, we can see that a change on one side inevitably carries with it a change on the other.  Further, we hear much in Scripture of the “wrath” of God, as a present and not only a future attitude towards sinners (e.g. Rom 1:18, Eph 5:6, etc.).  So, as unredeemed, men are said to be εχθροί “hostile” to God.  In some passages this may have a purely active sense, “hating God,” but in Rom 11:28 it is certainly passive, being opposed to αγαπητοί, “beloved,” and this suggests that a passive meaning cannot be entirely excluded elsewhere (e.g. Col 1:21, Jas 4:4).  Again, it is true that the New Testament never speaks of “propitiating God”.  “The propitiation is spoken of as being made in the matter of sin or the sinner....  That is, the sin is regarded as an obstacle to communion, which alienates man from God and is removed by the propitiation. [See Westcott, Epistles of S. John, p. 87.  Cp. C. H. Dodd, The Bible and the Greeks, c. v.]  On the other hand, such words as propitiation (ιλασμός) imply a person in the background.  Someone must be propitiated, and who, if not God? [Cp. Sanday and Headlam, Romans, p. 91.]

      But the real question goes deeper.  Since God is holy, His relation to sin must be one of active hostility, not of passive dislike.  It is impossible to think of God as not filled with unceasing energy against all that is evil.  That is the meaning of the “wrath of God”.  We are too apt to limit our picture of the divine wrath by the analogy of human wrath.  In the case of men anger has almost always an element of selfishness.  It springs not from a pure love of good and hatred of evil, but from mixed motives, pride, malice, and the like.  It is often arbitrary and personal.  But even so a true zeal for righteousness involves a certain fierceness against wrong.  “Neither doth he abhor anything that is evil” is a terrible condemnation of a man’s character.  In God His wrath is not a burst of feeling that overcomes Him and leads Him into actions inconsistent with His character.  It is rather one aspect of His abiding love, as it deals with the sin that opposes and wars against that love.  It is the reaction of God’s holiness against transgressions.  It is quite true that God’s love never changes.  But love that is incapable of moral indignation against all that violates and opposes love, or that is slow in putting forth a destroying energy against it, falls short of the highest love.  The Atonement does not create God’s love: as we have seen, it starts from that love.  But it does enable that love to act differently towards us by removing the sin that has impeded its free activity.  By repentance we do not change God’s will towards us, but we are changed ourselves, so that God can treat us differently; hence, from our point of view and in relation to us the attitude of God appears to change.  The principle on which He treats us is unchanged, but the treatment itself changes.  The mind of God toward sin is unaltered – it is our mind towards sin that has to be transformed, not His – but the change in ourselves makes possible a new personal relationship.  To say that He is reconciled to us represents a real fact of personal experience.  It expresses in the language of human friendship the conviction that through the Cross of Christ we have passed into the full light of God’s favour.

      (f) The question is often raised, Is the Atonement “subjective” [For a discussion of the application of the word “subjective” to theories of the Atonement, see K. E. Kirk in Essays Catholic and Critical, p. 255.] or “objective”?  That is, does its efficacy lie in the appeal of the Cross to our heart and conscience, or in some work that Christ did outside us?  The only true answer is that the Atonement must be both subjective and objective.  On the one hand we must remember that the problem of Atonement is very largely a moral problem.  If men are to be brought into full union with God, their characters must become such that they are capable of entering into this life.  The estrangement due to sin is not the result merely of a number of acts of sin, but of the state of mind and soul which issued in these acts.  Our Lord died not simply to save us from the penalty of sin but from sin itself.  Only men who have learnt to will what God wills, love what God loves, and hate what God hates, are able to enter into the fullness of the divine life.  Just as no friendship is possible between men of utterly divergent tastes and ideals, so fellowship with God is impossible so long as we are alienated from Him in our wills and affections.  The Atonement, therefore, must certainly be subjective in that it effects an entire change in us.  But we must also maintain that the Atonement is also objective.  By our sinful acts we have set free forces of desolation and disorder in the world.  The evil consequences of our acts are not limited to our own characters.  Mere penitence in us cannot undo the past.  Hence, a true atonement must not only change us, but, as it were, provide healing and restorative power by which the evil consequences of our sins in others and in the world at large may be repaired.  Again, though the Atonement is primarily a moral problem, as between persons, still we should hesitate to say that it was only a moral problem.  Our relation to Almighty God is more complex than our relation to our neighbour.  He is our Creator and Preserver and King, with an unconditional claim upon our whole lives.  Sin as against Him is something at once more rebellious and more unnatural than as against even the closest or the most authoritative of our fellowmen.  Human analogies at their highest go a very long way in attempting to understand the meaning of the Atonement, but it is rash to assume that they go the whole way.

      (i) Scripture quite recognizes the subjective value of the Atonement.  In Rom 3:25 ff. the Cross is viewed as the demonstration of the seriousness of sin.  It has made it possible for God to forgive us without the danger of seeming to be indifferent to sin (cp. 2:4).  It is an exhibition of the righteousness of God, bringing home to our conscience the awfulness of sin and showing up its blackness.  Elsewhere Scripture speaks of the Cross as manifesting the infinite self-sacrifice of God’s love (Rom 5:8).  We see God on the Cross bearing the sins of men (cp. 1 Pet 2:21 ff.).  Calvary is the disclosure in time of the wounds that our disobedience is ever inflicting upon the heart of God.  There we see the effect of our sins on the love of God laid bare.  In the light of such a revelation we cannot continue to go on wounding one who bears our blows so unresistingly and meekly.  His patient love must win our hearts and smite our consciences with shame.  By every sin that we commit we crucify Christ afresh (cp. Heb 6:6 and 10:29).  Thus the Cross leads us to repentance.  It arouses in us new and deeper sorrow for sin.  The love of the Crucified melts the stubbornness of our hearts.  The Cross is at once the declaration of God’s eternal willingness to bear with men and to forgive the penitent sinner and also the means of awakening penitence in us.  The Cross has proved itself able to draw out love and penitence and so to make men at one with God.  For the Cross is the supreme example of the purifying energy of self-sacrificing love.*

            [*Cp. Dinsmore, The Atonement in Literature and Life, pp. 232–233.  “As the flash of the volcano discloses for a few hours the elemental fires at the earth’s centre, so the light on Calvary was the bursting forth through historical conditions of the very nature of the Everlasting.  There was a cross in the heart of God before there was one planted on the green hill outside of Jerusalem.  And now that the cross of wood has been taken down, the one in the heart of God abides, and it will remain so long as there is one sinful soul for whom to suffer.”]

      (ii) On the other hand, the above view of the Atonement does not express the whole truth.  It does not do justice to all the language of Scripture.  From first to last Scripture grounds our acceptance with God not simply on what Christ was or taught, but on what He has done.  No doubt it is true that He could only do all that He did by being what He was.  But it is no less true that He has become the Saviour that He is today, by doing what He did upon the Cross.  All the language of sacrifice, all the phrases about the “blood” of Christ involve the belief that His death opened up new possibilities, and that on the Cross achieved an atoning act in some sense independent of its apprehension by us.  The Atonement is the divine counterpart in action to the “wrath of God”, which wrath a merely subjective view is obliged to minimize or explain away.  God is indeed love, but He is holy love, and such love when faced with sin can only issue in active antagonism.  Christ on the Cross is not only the patient sufferer, but by His acceptance of death acknowledges the justice of the divine wrath.  The death of Christ has a Godward as well as a Manward aspect, though we may find difficulty in entering into its meaning.

      From another standpoint the merely “subjective” view fails to satisfy the demands of our moral nature.  We need something deeper than even the fullest disclosure of God’s love; we need a transformation of the entire man from within, the infusion of new life and strength.  Though we may hesitate to set a limit to the redeeming influence of love, our mind and conscience demand that any revelation of love shall be in the closest relation to our own moral needs.  We feel that the Cross is more than a bare exhibition of divine love.  Why should the exhibition of love take that form? [“To die in order to display love, if there were no other adequate cause for dying, would be to reduce the Atonement to a mere pageant.”  Life of Bp. Edward Bickersteth, p. 408.]  At present in many quarters there is a prejudice against any doctrine of substitution.  Doubtless there have been gross and immoral doctrines of substitution.  Men have supposed that so much suffering was the penalty for sin and that the penalty was paid by our Lord’s suffering on the Cross, or that the Father was pleased by the mere quantity of suffering, not by the obedience perfected through suffering.  They have forgotten that Christ died not merely to save us from the punishment of sin but from sin itself.  But there is also a true and most valuable doctrine of substitution.  Scripture teaches most clearly that Christ came to do for us what we could not do for ourselves.  As our representative He offered to the Father the homage of a perfected human life, obedient even unto death, a full confession of the sinfulness of sin, and a willingness to endure that death which is its punishment.*  He did all this “on our behalf”, not that we might continue to be disobedient and impenitent, but that through Him we might have the power to do as He did.  He created a new possibility of human obedience and penitence which He imparts through the Holy Spirit to His members.  Thus His obedience and hatred of sin are not a substitute for our own in the sense that we need not trouble to acquire them.  But they are a substitute for our own in the sense that we could never have achieved them by ourselves, and only through Him are we now able to begin to achieve them.  As we shall see, God accepts us here and now in Christ, since, in Christ, there is the possibility of our becoming all that we ought to be.  Our present peace with God depends not upon the emotions aroused in us by the Cross of Christ, nor even in the promptings after holiness that the love of God awakens in us, but on what Jesus Christ is now and became through the Cross.  In a very real sense He was there made sin for us (2 Cor 5:21; 1 Pet 2:24).  He paid the price of our redemption, that through Him we might be reconciled to God.

            [*Cp. Sparrow Simpson, Reconciliation between God and Man, e.g. “The heavenly Father heard something entirely new upon the earth.  It was a human voice pronouncing perfect judgment on human sin; perfectly concurring in the judgment of the Father upon sin; gathering up and pressing into one and perfecting all the earth’s imperfect reparations; and offering a perfect sorrow for the sin of the world” (p. 128).  It is this truth that Article 31 and the Prayer of Consecration express, when they say that Christ made “satisfaction” for the sins of the world.  The term “satisfaction” is not scriptural but it represents an essential part of the teaching of Scripture on the death of Christ.]

      Note on the “Victory” theory. – Dr. Aulen’s book, Christus Victor (English translation 1931), drew fresh attention to this aspect of the Atonement.  He maintains that the theme of Christ’s work as God’s victory over sin, death, and the devil dominates the thought of the New Testament and the Patristic Age on redemption.  This may therefore be called the “classic” theory of the Atonement.  In contrast to this S. Anselm in the early Middle Ages for the first time gave a clear formulation of the “Latin” theory of a just satisfaction offered to the Father by Christ as man through His death.  In reaction to this Latin theory, based on legal ideas of justice and penitential works, there arose the Abelardian or “subjective” view of Christ’s death as God’s appeal to man to repent.  The characteristic defects of these two lines of thought do not appear in the victory theory, which makes no use of legal views of sin and satisfaction, and at the same time sees redemption as an objective work of the divine power and love.

      The merits of the “classic” theory as expounded by Aulen are clear.  It undoubtedly reproduces much of the thought of the New Testament and the Fathers.  It does not isolate the death on the Cross from the victory of the Resurrection.  It takes into account the corporate character of sin.  It insists that the work of redemption was initiated and carried through by God, who by Christ’s death and resurrection achieved the eschatological victory over all the powers of evil.  Room must be found for the element of victory in any complete view of the Atonement.  Our Lord’s perfect obedience was achieved at the cost of conflict.  Moreover, redemption conceived as the coming of the Kingdom of God, necessarily involved conflict with and triumph over sin, death and the devil, which all contradict the divine sovereignty (cp. Mt 12:28).  The Lord’s resurrection was thus the first-fruits of the victorious new creation of the last days; to participate in this new creation is for Christ’s members their eschatological hope, partially realized here and now in the life of grace.  No doctrine of Christ’s redeeming work can afford to neglect these points.

      But against Aulen it must be noticed that Anselm’s doctrine contained a truth, whatever defects may be found in his presentation of it.  The primitive conception of redemption included the idea of a sacrificial offering “for sin”, made to the Father by Christ as man’s Head and Representative [For a note on Christ as “man’s Representative” or “inclusively Man”, see Essays Catholic and Critical, p. 277.] from within the human race.  Just as no sacrifice for sin could be perfect without the conquest of sin, so the conquest of sin on behalf of mankind could not bring back man to God without a sacrificial acknowledgement of sin made by the Son of Man to the Father.  By itself the victory theory is therefore incomplete, and in some forms of its emphasis on a divine victory it is in danger of minimizing the significance of our Lord’s self-identification with man in the Incarnation.†

Articles  III–IV:  The Resurrection, The Ascension, and The Judgment

Article  III

      The need of a separate Article to deal with this portion of the Creed was due to the many and violent controversies that raged around it about the time of the Reformation.  Our present Article dates from 1563.  The previous Article of 1552 was more definite.  It clearly interpreted the descent as meaning that “The body lay in the sepulchre until the resurrection: but His ghost departing from Him was with the ghosts that were in prison or hell, and did preach to the same, as the place of S. Peter doth testify.”  Thus the Article took sides in the controversy by laying down a fixed interpretation of the clause in dispute.  Though this interpretation is undoubtedly right, it was thought wiser to leave the precise meaning of the descent undefined.

Article  IV

      One of the Articles of 1553.  Practically unchanged since.  It is worded so as to assert not only the fact of the Resurrection, but also the reality of our Lord’s risen and ascended Manhood in opposition to a form of Docetism, revived by the Anabaptists, which regarded our Lord’s Humanity as absorbed into His Divinity after the Resurrection.

      § 1.  In the A.V. unfortunately the same word “hell” is employed as the translation both of the Hebrew “Sheol” or Greek “Hades”, the place of departed spirits, and also of “Gehenna”, the place of torment.  In the R.V. this has been corrected.  “Sheol” or “Hades” is in itself a neutral term. [The Latin translation “Inferi” or “Inferna” is similarly neutral.  So was “Hell” in mediaeval English.]  By the time of our Lord popular Jewish belief had indeed come to regard it as a place of moral distinctions and as divided into two parts, [Our Lord employs this imagery in the parable of Dives and Lazarus (Lk 16:12).  We must not, however, claim His authority for the literal truth of the details.] the one “Abraham’s Bosom” or “Paradise”, the abode of the righteous, the other the abode of the wicked.  But generally speaking this last was distinguished from Gehenna. [See Salmond, Article “Hell”, Hastings’ D.B. vol. ii.]  In the book of Enoch, for instance, a composite work dating largely from the second century B.C., Gehenna is clearly a place of final punishment for the wicked, who are at present afflicted in a part of Hades until the day of judgment.

      Accordingly, by the “descent into Hell” we mean that our Lord’s human soul, after its separation from His body by death, passed into that state of existence into which all men pass at death.  In speaking about life after death at all we are driven to resort to symbolical language.  We know that the body remains, but that the real self is no longer active through it.  We naturally speak of the separation of the soul and body.  The men of our Lord’s day regarded Hades as a place situated underneath the earth, and the soul as literally going down to it.  By us such language can only be used metaphorically.  Whatever the mode of life be that is enjoyed by the self after death, we cannot help speaking of it in such metaphors as are derived from our present life in space.  We are compelled to imagine Hades as a “place”.  Since our Lord was truly Man, after death He shared man’s condition then no less than during His life on earth.  That is the only point on which we can be definite.  Thus in Lk 23:43, using current Jewish language, He promised to the penitent robber “Verily, I say unto thee, today thou shalt be with me in Paradise.”  He pledged His word that He and the robber would be sharing a common life, a life in which personality would not be obliterated, but “I” would remain “I” and “Thou” remain “Thou”, and in which recognition and fellowship would be possible.  He spoke of Himself and the robber as both alike enjoying one and the same “Park of God”.  Again, S. Peter applies to our Lord the words of Psalm 16:10 “Thou wilt not leave my soul in Hades, neither wilt thou give thy holy one to see corruption” (Acts 2:27).  After showing that they received no fulfillment in David himself, he finds their fulfillment in the Resurrection of Christ (v. 31).  It is clear that he regards our Lord as having been in Hades between His death on Good Friday and His Resurrection on the third day.  In S. Paul’s Epistles a probable allusion can be found in Eph. 4:9, “Now that he ascended, what is it also but that he descended into the lower parts of the earth? (εις τα κατώτερα μέρη της γης).  He that descended is the same also that ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things.”*  Others, however, refer the words to the descent to earth at the Incarnation.  But the most difficult passage still remains.  In 1 Pet 3:18 we read “Christ also suffered for sins once, the righteous for the unrighteous, that He might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened in the spirit” (πνεύματι i.e. our Lord’s human spirit; there is no reference to the Holy Spirit as the A.V. mistranslation suggests): “in which” (i.e. in His human spirit thus quickened at the moment of death) “also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison, which aforetime were disobedient, when the long-suffering of God waited in the days of Noah.”  Again, in 4:6 “For unto this end was the gospel preached even unto the dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit.”  These two passages must be taken together, and so taken, they leave very little room for doubt as to S. Peter’s meaning.  He teaches that at the moment of death our Lord’s, human spirit went to Hades, and during His stay there preached salvation “to the spirits in prison”, i.e. the souls of dead men, in a like mode of existence to His own.  In 3:20 special mention is made of those who rejected the warnings of Noah and perished in the flood (Gen 7:23–24).  But in 4:6 the “dead” must be the same as the “dead” in the previous verse, and include all who are not living.  Why then are the men before the flood specially mentioned?  Probably because they were typical of stubborn sinners; and there is some evidence that their salvation was a subject of discussion in the Jewish schools. [See Bigg. ad loc. “In the Book of Enoch ... will be found obscure and mutilated passages which may be taken to mean that the antediluvian sinners, the giants and the men whom they deluded, have a time of repentance allowed them between the first judgment (the Deluge) and the final judgment at the end of the world.”  See also his note on 4:6.]

            [*In the LXX of Psalm 63:10 τα κατώτατα της γης is used of “the lower parts of the earth”, i.e. Hades.  So in the LXX of Psalm 139:15 the same Greek is used to translate “the lowest parts of the earth” used metaphorically of the womb.  It is therefore at least possible that S. Paul is using a very similar phrase in the same sense and is referring to the descent into Hades as a proof of our Lord’s sovereignty over the underworld (cp. Phil 2:10).  See Armitage Robinson, ad loc. “The descent is to the lowest as the ascent to the highest, that nothing may remain unvisited.”  Probably in Rom 10:7 S. Paul is adapting the language of Deuteronomy to express this same idea.  “The abyss” would include Hades.  See Sanday and Headlam, ad loc.]

      The earliest Christian tradition, probably quite independent of this Epistle, supports the above interpretation. [The earliest allusion to 1 Pet 3:18 and 4:6 seems to be in a saying of “the Elders” quoted by Irenaeus (iv. 27, 2).  See Swete, Apostles’ Creed, pp. 57–60.]  This picture of Christ ministering to the departed made a great appeal to primitive Christian imagination.  Allusions to it are found as early as Ignatius, Hermas and Justin Martyr.  Till the time of S. Augustine no other interpretation was attempted.  In his earlier writings he accepted the current teaching, though he wrongly identified Hades with Gehenna. [E.g. de Gen. ad litt. xii. 61.]  Later, in a letter to Evodius, Bishop of Uzala, [Aug. Ep. 164.] he explained S. Peter as meaning that Christ was in spirit in Noah, when Noah preached repentance to the men of his day.  His authority lent great weight to this view in the Western Church, and it was adopted by Thomas Aquinas and many of the Reformers.  It was often combined, as even by Bishop Pearson, with the view that Christ having died “in the similitude of a sinner” went to Gehenna.  But it is unnatural and quite indefensible.  The interpretation that Christ preached to the dead fits in admirably with contemporary Jewish ideas and alone does full justice to the two passages taken together.  The only other possible interpretation of the “spirits in prison” would be to suppose that fallen angels are meant (cp. 2 Pet 2:4, Jude 6), but this introduces an idea quite alien to the context and breaks the connection between 3:19 and 4:6, besides using the word “spirit” in a different sense from the previous sentence (3:18). [See, however, E. G. Selwyn, The First Epistle of S. Peter, esp. Essay I, for a different view.  This essay gives a full discussion of the evidence and of the points at issue in the interpretation of these passages of 1 Peter.]  Still less can be said for Calvin’s idea that the descent into hell meant that in Gethsemane and on the Cross our Lord suffered all the agonies of the lost.  This confuses Hades and Gehenna, and supposes that the Incarnate Son of God was personally exposed to the wrath of the Father. [Cp. Pearson’s criticism: “There is a worm that never dieth which could not lodge within His breast; that is a remorse of conscience, seated in the soul, for what that soul hath done.”]

      The fact conveyed in the clause “He descended into hell” must be acknowledged by all who allow that our Lord was and is truly Man and that He really died.  The further interpretation of His Descent as a mission to the unseen world rests on the evidence both of Scripture and independent primitive tradition.  From the nature of the case too exact definition is impossible.  We can only speak of life beyond the grave in picture language.  The ministry to the departed cannot be attested by the evidence of eye-witnesses.  The only historical evidence that can lie behind our records and the tradition of the Church, would be words of our Lord Himself.  In the word from the Cross at least we get a revelation of the nature of the future life by one who claimed to know.  But the words of S. Peter hint at possibilities that must appeal to the highest in us.  The Descent into Hell stands for the truth that whatever condition awaits us after death, our Lord has been there before us and consecrated it by His presence.  It suggests that bodily death may be the moment of quickening into a more vigorous life and opens up vistas of a ministry for His faithful servants in the world beyond the grave more fruitful even than any ministry here.  Above all, it harmonizes with the instinctive belief of our hearts that Christ will in His own way reveal Himself to those who have had no opportunity of knowing Him in this life.  Though a formal statement of this Article of the faith was absent from the earliest creed forms, we may believe that the Western Church was rightly guided in including it in her developed statement of the faith.

      § 2.  (a) The Christian Church owes her existence to the Resurrection.  The Risen Christ is the centre of her life and teaching.  The Apostles were chosen above all to be witnesses of the Resurrection (Acts 1:8, 2:32, 3:15, 4:2 and 33, 10:41, 13:31, etc.).  For this task they were fitted by character and condition of life.  Their very limitations, their slowness of mind and lack of imagination rendered them all the more reliable as witnesses.  Their matter-of-fact outlook and practical turn of mind enabled them to give a straightforward and unanimous testimony to what they had seen.  They had neither the inclination nor the ability to construct theories or to adapt facts to suit preconceived ideas.  They impressed the world as having an intense belief in the truth of their message, based on their own observation.  So only an eyewitness could be selected to fill the place of Judas (Acts 1:22).  S. Paul, too, rested his apostleship in large part on the fact that he had seen the risen Christ (1 Cor 9:1, 15:8–9).  It is abundantly clear that the earliest apostolic preaching centred in the Cross and Resurrection, as interpreted by the Christian Church.

      In Scripture the chief lines of thought may be summed up thus:

      (i) In the early speeches in the Acts the Resurrection is regarded as the divine reversal of man’s judgment and as vindicating the Messiahship of Jesus of Nazareth (Acts 2:32 and 36 “God hath made him both Lord (κύριος) and Messiah (χριστός), this Jesus whom ye crucified”).  In the light of the prevalent interpretation of Deut 21:23 the Cross was regarded as a sign of God’s malediction.  To the Jew, therefore, it was a clear disproof of His claims.  It declared “Jesus accursed” (cp. 1 Cor 12:3).  The thought of a crucified Messiah was self-contradictory.  Hence the Resurrection was proclaimed as proving the Jewish idea false: it was God’s public attestation of the claims of the crucified (Acts 5:30–31).  To the apostles it was also the fulfillment of our Lord’s own predictions about Himself, thus proving His claims true (Mk 8:31, 10:34, etc., cp. Jn 2:22, 10:18).  So to S. Paul the Resurrection is the ground of assigning to our Lord full Messianic authority (Rom 1:4, cp. Acts 13:33).

      (ii) The Resurrection certified our Lord’s death as redemptive.  The apostles were able, out of the Jewish Scriptures, to explain the meaning and necessity of the death of the Messiah as foretold by the prophets.  They identified our Lord with the “suffering servant” of Is 52–53 (Acts 3:26, 4:27 and 30, παις “Servant” R.V., not “child” as A.V.).  The rising from the dead marked the acceptance of the sacrifice of the Cross.  It is, as has been well said, “the Amen of the Father to the ‘It is finished’ of the Son.”  The same thought of the Resurrection as the seal of our Lord’s atoning death is found in S. Paul (e.g. Rom 4:25, 5:10, 6:4; 1 Cor 15:17: 1 Thess 1:10, etc., cp. Heb 13:20). [Cp. Wcstcott, The Gospel of the Resurrection, c. i. § 56–59.]

      (iii) The Resurrection is regarded as the pledge of man’s resurrection (1 Cor 15:12 ff.; Rom 8”11; 1 Thess 4:14).  Not only do Christians here and now receive new life (Eph 2:5–9, Col 3:1) as sharing the life of the Risen Christ, but from the first (Acts 4:2) the Resurrection has been proclaimed as the assurance of a resurrection from the dead that will quicken the whole man and that is yet to come (cp. 2 Tim 2:18).

      (b) Our belief in the Resurrection of our Lord depends upon three main lines of evidence:

      (i) The appearances of the Risen Lord to many persons of different kinds, at different times and under different conditions.

      (ii) The empty tomb.

      (iii) The living experience of the Christian Church.

      (i) The earliest witness in writing is that of S. Paul.  In 1 Cor 15:3–9 he gives what is perhaps an official list of appearances.  Behind S. Paul is the witness of the whole Church.  He and all Christians were alike in their belief.  In fact the very existence of the Church at all presupposes the existence of a belief that Christ was risen.  The Resurrection had been put in the forefront of the apostolic preaching from the first.  It is implied in all S. Paul’s epistles.  In all four Gospels we have an account of the finding of the tomb empty.  S. Mark is unfortunately mutilated, but there can be no doubt that it went on to describe appearances of the risen Lord similar to those in the other gospels.  It is not easy to fit together all the accounts of the appearances on Easter morning.  There are apparent differences of detail.  This, however, increases rather than diminishes the value of the evidence.  It shows that we have the faithful testimony of independent witnesses, not the blind repetition of an official tale.  Witnesses of any event, especially when it was observed in a moment of intense excitement, tend to vary in detail.  Any judge would view with suspicion a too exact correspondence.  Equally important, too, is the evidence of the Acts.  The early chapters bear traces of a very primitive Christology.  We see the Church, as it were, feeling her way towards a fuller understanding of all that the Resurrection meant.  In 1 Pet 1:3 we seem to get a personal reminiscence of S. Peter’s own mind.

      (ii) All the Gospels record that the tomb was found empty.  Like the Passion narrative, the story of the Resurrection must have been put into shape in the oral stage of the tradition at a very early date.  In the written Gospels we can trace here and there embellishments of the narrative, notably in S. Matthew (e.g. the earthquake at the descent of the angel, the guard at the tomb, the resurrection of the saints).  But the discovery of the empty tomb on the third day is a basic element in the tradition.  Moreover, it is attested by independent and earlier evidence supplied by S. Paul, who in 1 Cor 15:3 f. reproduces the statement which he had himself received, viz., “that Christ died ... that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day ...”  This formal pre-Pauline statement, going back to a very few years after the events, implies by its reference to the burial that the Resurrection involved the empty tomb. [Since the statement is not S. Paul’s own, its interpretation is not affected by any view which he may be supposed to hold about the relation of the risen body to the fleshly body.]  Like the Gospels it refers to the “third day”.  We have in fact no trace of any primitive account of the Resurrection and its immediate sequel in the appearances which does not include a reference to the disappearance of our Lord’s body from the tomb.  The fact that the Gospels do not attempt to describe [The second-century apocryphal Gospel of Peter does not hesitate to describe the emergence of the risen Lord from the tomb.] the event of the Resurrection itself supports the veracity of this testimony about the discovery made by the women on Easter morning.

      (iii) From the first, Christians have manifested in their lives the power of the risen Christ.  It is clear that something remarkable must have happened to change the timid and weak disciples of Good Friday into the dauntless and courageous leaders of the Church that we discover in the Acts.  The apostles themselves ascribed their transformation to the power of the Resurrection.  So, too, we find the Christian Church observing the first day of the week as a memorial of the rising from the dead.  Sunday is a new institution.  It was not, it has never been and never can be the Jewish Sabbath.  In origin and meaning it is a purely Christian festival, a weekly remembrance of the Resurrection.  And the Christian service, the “breaking of bread”, was not a sad commemoration of a dead and absent Master, but a thanksgiving for the blessings imparted by a living and triumphant Saviour.  Christian Baptism again loses its distinctive meaning if Christ is not raised. [Cp. Rom 6:4, where the whole symbolism of baptism is worked out in connection with the Resurrection.]  The continued existence and vitality of the Church, her survival not only of attacks by enemies from outside, but of sloth and dissensions among her own members, prove that her life does not spring from a delusion.  In every age the enemies of our religion have always declared that it was about to pass away, but their expectations have never been fulfilled.  Once more Christians in all ages have claimed to hold communion with a living Lord and to receive from Him cleansing and strength.  It may be argued that the inner religious experience of Christians carries conviction only to those who share it, and they may be mistaken in their explanation of it.  But apart from the widespread consensus of testimony from men and women of every rank and class and country, we may point to a definite and persistent type of character produced in the lives of those who claim to depend on Christ.  The Christian character entered into the world as something new.  It startled and attracted Jews and heathen alike by its humility and joyousness, its new standard of values, and its reinterpretation of all human existence.  We do not appreciate the moral results of the Christian faith, because we have always lived in the midst of them.  But if we study pagan life as recorded in heathen literature or as found today in the Mission field, the contrast between the Christian and the non-Christian outlook on life is undeniable.  We may well ask whether those who are able to produce a new type of life and character, have not the right to say on what discovery it is based.  Christians have always pointed to the Risen Christ as the source of all their strength.  The world becomes an insoluble riddle, if the blessings of Christian faith are based on a fraud or a misconception.

      (c) Taking then the narratives of Scripture as they stand, what conception can we form of our Lord’s Risen Body?  It is obvious that our only evidence is the Gospels.  S. Paul’s language in 1 Cor 15 suggests that he possessed similar accounts.  His teaching on the nature of our own spiritual bodies is based on the nature of the Lord’s Risen Body.  Since the Resurrection is a unique event in human experience, there are no other instances with which to compare it.

      (i) The Resurrection was not simply the resuscitation of the body laid in the grave.  Our Lord did not return, like those whom He raised from the dead, to the old life.  Nothing has done more to hinder a belief in the Church’s doctrine of the Resurrection, than the idea that it teaches a mere reanimation of the material body.  For this erroneous idea Christians have been largely responsible.  The doctrine has often been stated in such a way as to imply a mere return to the old physical life.  In early and mediaeval times such a conception was natural and caused no difficulty.  We reject it not only because it conflicts with modern ideas but because it is inconsistent with the facts of the Gospel narrative.  These, when interrogated, make it clear that “the body with which our Lord rose from the grave though still a true body was not the same as that with which He died.” [Milligan, The Resurrection of our Lord, p. 31.]  A spiritual change had come over it.  It was no longer subject to our wants and limitations: it could pass through doors and disappear at will.  The door of the tomb was opened not to let the Lord out but to let the women in.  There was no witness of the actual resurrection.  If the implication of S. John’s record of the tomb be accepted, there would have been nothing to witness.  At the same time, though not subject to the limitations of our present life, the risen Lord could at will conform to them.  He walked and spoke, and even ate and drank (Lk 24, Mt 28, Jn 20:11 ff., cp. Acts 10:41).

      So in the appearances of the Risen Lord we have a revelation of another life, a manner of existence of a higher order than our own.  By the Incarnation God no longer instructed men through prophets and teachers about the meaning and purpose of human life, but Himself entering into humanity wrought out the perfect human example and disclosed the possibilities of man’s life on earth: in the same manner our Lord did not simply teach the immortality of man, but during the forty days actually manifested something of the glory of man’s future life by living it before men so far as earthly and temporal conditions allowed.  Thus the Resurrection is a new fact added to the sum total of human experience.  “The life which is revealed to us is not the continuation of the present life, but a life which takes up into itself all the elements of our present life, and transfigures them by a glorious change, which we can only regard at present under signs and figures.” [Westcott, op. cit. c. ii. § 21.]  A change had passed over the body, by which it had become wholly subject to the spirit, spirit-ruled and spirit-guided.  We know how in our present life the body constrains and hampers our spirit.  It grows weary and is not perfectly responsive to our will.  It ties us down to the laws of space and of this material world.  From all such limitations the Risen Christ is free.  He can express Himself perfectly through His body, as and when and where He wills.  He has not laid aside His manhood, but manifests within the circle of human experience a higher mode of human existence, hitherto undiscovered and unknown.*  “The risen body of Christ was spiritual ... not because it was less than before material, but because in it matter was wholly and finally subjugated to spirit and not to the exigencies of physical life.” [Gore, Body of Christ, p. 127.]

            [*Cp. Westcott, The Revelation of the Risen Lord. “Christ was changed....  As has been well said; ‘What was natural to Him before is now miraculous; what was before miraculous is now natural.’  Or to put the thought in another form, in an earthly life the spirit is manifested through the body; in the life of the Risen Christ the body is manifested (may we not say so?) through the Spirit....  The continuity, the intimacy, the simple familiarity of former intercourse was gone.  He is seen and recognized only as He wills and when He wills.  In the former sense of the phrase He is no longer with the disciples.” p. 8.]

      The precise relation of the risen body to that which was placed in the tomb, we cannot know.  The material particles that form our bodies are ceaselessly changing.  The identity of our bodies lies not so much in physical continuity as in the abiding relationship to the personality as its organ in the physical world.  What persists is not the matter of which the body is composed but the formula or law of which the body is the outward expression.  We believe that our Lord’s Resurrection is the pledge of our own.  As in His case, nothing that belongs to the perfection of our human nature will be lost.  All that our present body stands for will still be ours.  We shall possess an organism adapted for life under future conditions as the body is adapted for life under earthly conditions.  Our Lord’s body still bears the marks of the wounds (cp. Rev 5:6).  In Christ as in ourselves, the past still lives on in its permanent effect on what He is.  So we believe that all that we have become through moral effort in this life will endure in the life that is to be ours hereafter.*

            [*It is true that from about the time of S. Augustine onwards down to quite recent days, both in East and West, a materializing view prevailed.  The resurrection was taught to include a reassembling of the physical particles of the body.  But the Church has never formally defined its teaching on the subject and such a view can be reconciled neither with S. Paul nor with many of the earlier Fathers.  The retention of Origen’s phrase, “The resurrection of the dead,” as a substitute for the resurrection of the flesh, and the rejection in Western Creeds of “The resurrection of this flesh” are witnesses to a more spiritual view.  Further the insistence by many writers on the complete restoration of the body laid in the grave is coupled with an equal insistence on the wonderful change which will have come over it, which is really inconsistent with the idea of physical restoration.  This inconsistency is partly due to the clash between the intellect and the imagination.  The former demands a spiritual transformation.  The latter can only picture it in materialistic terms.  We repeat that the final court of appeal is to Scripture.  (For a complete study of patristic teaching, see Darragh, The Resurrection of the Flesh.)]

      (ii) The question still remains, do not the words of our Article, “took again His body with flesh, bones and all things appertaining to the perfection of man’s nature,” imply a very materialistic view of the Resurrection?  “Flesh and bones” suggest a physical resuscitation.  The answer is that the words are based on the words of the risen Lord in Lk 24:39 “A spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye behold me having”.  The Article, therefore, must be interpreted by Scripture and does not lay down any theory on the nature of the Risen Body.  At the same time, if it had been written today, it would probably have avoided taking such an expression of Scripture in isolation from other statements of Scripture that qualify it.  The purpose of the words is admirably summed up in the following phrase “all things appertaining to the perfection of man’s nature”.  The Risen Lord was not less perfect Man than before. [It is worth noting that the words are “Flesh and bones” not “flesh and blood”.  Bp. Westcott could write “The significant variation from the common formula ‘flesh and blood’ must have been at once intelligible to Jews, accustomed to the provisions of the Mosaic ritual, and nothing would have impressed upon them more forcibly the transfiguration of Christ’s Body than the verbal omission of the element of blood which was for them the symbol and seat of corruptible life” (The Gospel of the Resurrection, c. ii. § 20 note).  If this distinction holds, we may compare 1 Cor 15:50.  See also Milligan, op. cit. pp. 241–242.]

      Before we leave the question of the Resurrection we must bear in mind two great considerations :

      (1) The evidence for the Resurrection must be considered not in the abstract, but in the light of the character and claims of Christ.  Men sometimes speak as if the Resurrection of Jesus Christ would be on a level with the resurrection, let us say, of Julius Caesar or Judas Iscariot.  That is profoundly untrue.  To put it on the lowest level, we are dealing with One who has lived in the fullest union with God, who had done nothing amiss and who had trusted to God to vindicate Him openly.  If we accept the uniqueness of Christ, we shall be prepared to believe in His Resurrection, if there is good evidence for it.

      (2) Everything depends upon the presuppositions with which we approach the evidence.  Our final decision will rest on moral rather than on purely intellectual grounds.  No amount of merely external evidence can ever compel belief.  It is always possible in the last resort to evade or explain away the evidence for any historical event.  Much more is this true in the case of such an event as the Resurrection.  It is significant that all the appearances of the Risen Lord were made to disciples.  Our Lord did not reveal Himself to Caiaphas or Pilate.  As always, He would never compel belief by a miracle.  Such an appearance would have contradicted the whole principle of His earthly ministry.  Again, if the Resurrection was a fresh revelation of new life, such could only be given to those who were spiritually capable of receiving it.  Only believers had the power to apprehend its true meaning.  So today belief in the Resurrection depends not only on intellectual appreciation of the evidence but on moral sympathy with the life and teaching of Him who rose. [Cp. Mozley, On Miracles, Preface to Third Edition, p. xxiv: “The truth is, no one is ever convinced by external evidence only; there must be a certain probability in the fact itself, or a certain admissibility in it, which must join on to the external evidence for it, in order for that evidence to produce conviction.  Nor is it any fault in external evidence that it should be so; but it is an intrinsic and inherent defect in it, because in its very nature it is only one part of evidence which needs to be supplemented by another, or a priori premiss existing in our minds.  Antecedent probability is the rational complement of external evidence, a law of evidence unites the two; and they cannot practically be separated.”  The whole passage is worth reading.  It was the fault of much eighteenth-century writing to assume that the mind could be compelled to believe in the Resurrection by a careful marshalling of external evidence.]†

      (d) We may now examine explanations of the facts that contradict the Christian tradition.  Few today would support the “thief theory” that the disciples stole the body (cp. Mt 28:13).  The very existence of this theory among the Jews is an interesting piece of evidence in support of the empty tomb.  But it is psychologically absurd.  The whole conduct of the apostles forbids us to regard them as conscious imposters.  Why should they persist in a deception that brought them nothing but loss and danger?  Such a plot is always betrayed in the long run.  Willful fraud is utterly inconsistent with their holy lives.

      Fewer still would accept the “Swoon theory”, that Christ was not really dead, but swooned and recovered.  This makes not only the disciples but our Lord deceivers.  It is hard to see how a fainting and wounded form could convey any suggestion of a resurrection to a new and glorious life.  And what became of the recovered Christ?  When did He die?

      More plausible is the suggestion that the disciples were sincere, but were the victims of hallucination.  But this will not really stand close scrutiny.  Such hallucinations, as far as we can discover, obey certain general laws.  For instance, they imply expectation.  All the evidence shows that our Lord’s friends, so far from expecting a resurrection, were preparing to embalm His corpse.  The appearances were most unexpected and were received with incredulity.  Such a lack of faith is hardly likely to be an invention.  It cannot be said that modern psychology lends any support to this view, when the facts are tested.  As a rule, when visions and illusions once begin to get a hold, they tend to spread.  All the evidence goes to show that the appearances ceased abruptly at the end of forty days.  In short, even apart from the empty tomb, the “illusion theory” does not explain the facts.

      The most popular alternative today to the traditional teachings of the Church is the view that regards the Resurrection as a “purely spiritual truth”.  The disciples saw visions.  These visions were real – “telegrams from Heaven” – sent by God to assure His disciples that the Lord was alive, and to implant in them faith in victory of life over death.  The empty tomb and any idea of a bodily resurrection are unhistorical, the invention of pious fancy or materializing imagination.  Our Lord’s body went to dust in the tomb, as our own will.  His spirit survived as ours will survive.  Thus the Resurrection was entirely spiritual, to be discerned by the eye of faith.  There was no miraculous breach of the natural law, such as the ordinary view supposes.  On this view it is claimed that all that is of value for faith is retained, and Christian truth is lifted above any objections from the side of science or criticism.  Jesus Christ lives: that is all that we need to know. [For this view see: Kirsopp Lake, The Resurrection, or Streeter’s essay in Foundations.]

      Such a view may be stated so as to come very near the teaching of the Church.  But it falls short of the fullness of the Gospel.

      (i) We know of no preaching of the Resurrection in apostolic days that did not include the raising of our Lord’s Body.  The Gospels attest the universal outline of Christian preaching.  So, too, S. Paul quite clearly knew of the empty tomb.  S. Luke can put into his mouth an express allusion to it (Acts 13:29 and 35–56).  It is probable that this application of Ps 16:10 “Thou shalt not suffer thy Holy One to see corruption” was a commonplace of apostolic preaching (cp. Acts 2:27–31).  The same knowledge of the empty tomb is implied in 1 Cor 15:3–4.  S. Paul proclaimed “that Christ died ... and that he was buried ... and that he hath been raised on the third day”.  The mention of the burial here and elsewhere (e.g. Rom 6:4, Col 2:12) is gratuitous unless the resurrection is regarded as the reversal of the burial no less than of the death.  “The Death, the Burial and the Resurrection of Christ claim to be facts in exactly the same sense, to be supported by evidence essentially identical in kind, and to be bound together indissolubly as the groundwork of the Christian Faith.” [Westcott, The Gospel of the Resurrection, § 3.]  Just as the death and burial were historical events happening in the world of sense, so was the Resurrection.*  The attempt has been made to invert S. Paul’s argument.  He treats the risen Christ as “the first fruits of them that are asleep” (v. 20).  In our own case our bodies perish, yet our risen bodies are regarded as in a real sense continuous with them (vv. 42 ff.)  If the corruption of our present bodies does not destroy the continuity in our case, why is the risen Lord’s possession of a spiritual body inconsistent with a belief that His natural body went to dust in the grave?  This objection forgets that at the stage at which this Epistle was written, S. Paul still expected the Lord’s return during the lifetime of most of those to whom he wrote.  In his view the majority of the Corinthian Church would not taste of death at all.  At the Lord’s coming their present natural body would be transformed into a spiritual body.  So in their case as in our Lord’s their natural body would not see corruption.  The difficulty at Corinth had arisen about those who died.  As a result of their death, their condition was so obviously different from our Lord’s.  Men asked how, if the natural body perished, it could ever be transfigured into a spiritual body.  The analogy with the Risen Lord seemed to be broken.  The very existence of this perplexity points to a universal belief in the empty tomb.

            [*It has been objected that the view of our Lord’s Risen Body taken in these pages is no less contradictory to the main stream of Christian teaching than the Vision theory.  The later Fathers and mediaeval teachers unanimously taught the resuscitation of our Lord’s dead body.  A sufficient answer is to point out that our view is at least consistent with the facts of the Gospel story.  In the light of our modern knowledge we have been driven to re-interrogate Scripture, with the result that we have obtained from it a more spiritual view of the Resurrection.  On the other hand, the Vision theory is compelled to reduce the Gospel evidence to mere legend.  Our appeal is not simply to Christian tradition, but to Christian tradition as interpreting Scripture.]

      (ii) Any view that denies the bodily Resurrection is faced with the difficulty of accounting for the complete disappearance of the crucified body.  That this difficulty was felt early is shown by the Jewish story in Mt 28:11 ff.  If the body of Christ could have been produced by the Jews or Romans, the whole Christian movement would have collapsed.  If the body was not in the tomb, it must have been removed either by friends or foes; there is no alternative.  Either explanation involves us in a tangle of difficulties.  We may be perfectly certain that the authorities made every possible effort to discover the body and discredit the apostles.  The body would be recognizable for a considerable time and there would be the evidence of those who removed it.  It has indeed been supposed that the women went to the wrong tomb and found it empty.  The disciples apparently were sufficiently simple to neglect any further investigations, and the Roman and Jewish authorities too incompetent to make the slightest attempt to clear up the mystery.  Apart from other objections, any such theory that allows the finding of an empty tomb but holds that the Lord’s body went to corruption elsewhere, lands us with a very serious moral problem. [Many who accept the “objective vision” theory confess that they cannot account for the disappearance of the body, and plead that so long as they accept the truth of the appearances, they are not called on to do so.]  We are asked to suppose that the empty tomb had in the workings of providence an important place in convincing the world of the truth that Christ was alive, yet the belief in its emptiness was the result of mistake or fraud.  Our conscience revolts from the thought that God employs such means to impress upon the world a new and vital revelation.  No doubt illusion has its place in the divine economy.  But this would be no mere illusion due to the infirmity of the human mind or imagination, it would be, so to say, a deliberate deception on the part of the divine providence.

      (iii) On this view there was no Resurrection, only a survival.  Death conquered the body and death kept what is conquered.  There was no real victory over death, but merely a persistence through death.  Such would be a redemption not of the whole man, but only of his spirit.  The resurrection of the body assures us that all our being is redeemed and redeemable.  No element in our nature is lost.  The early Church rightly appealed to the bodily resurrection of Christ as setting forth the worth and dignity of the human body.*  It has a glorious future in store for it and therefore must not be defiled.  We, know of no human life apart from the body.  The bare survival of the spirit is not the Christian doctrine of immortality.  Further, if Christ’s body did not rise, the resurrection – such as it was – took place not on the third day, but on the afternoon of the death.  In fact it was completed at the very moment of death. [Incidentally the whole of the descent into Hades must be dismissed as not only mythical but meaningless.]  Christians were wrong in supposing foolishly that they kept Sunday as the weekly memorial of the Resurrection: they only kept it as the memorial of the first vision.  The persistent tradition of the “third day” merely shows the inexactitude of the Christian mind.  The true Easter-day is Good Friday.

            [*The New Testament also hints at the “cosmic” significance of the Resurrection of our Lord’s body.  It stands for the first installment of the redemption of the material creation, the pledge that the whole creation shall be brought back into harmony with God’s purpose.  We see in the Risen Lord matter fulfilling its true purpose as the vehicle of spirit (cp. Rom 8:19–22; Eph 1:10: Col l:20).]

      (iv) We thankfully allow that it is quite possible for men today born and bred in a Christian atmosphere to reject the bodily resurrection of our Lord and yet retain a true faith in Him as a living Saviour.  But it is very doubtful whether the first generation of Christians could ever have attained to such a faith, if His body had remained in the grave.  It is equally doubtful whether simple people today could do so.  There cannot be two creeds, one for the educated and one for the uneducated.  If we allow that the apostles and others saw visions and heard voices, how are we to test their validity?  We, indeed, after nearly two thousand years of Christianity can appeal to a wide Christian experience and to the moral fruits of a faith in the risen Christ.  The apostles could not do so.  The empty tomb supplied just that corroboration in the region of external historic fact, that was needed.  And today the plain man attaches most importance to historic facts.  That a thing happened gives it in his eyes a superior kind of truth.  He is not much attracted by bare ideas.  One great reason for the spread of Christianity among men and women of every class and condition, civilized and savage, educated and ignorant, is that it claims to rest on historic fact.  Destroy this foundation of historic fact and Christian faith might survive for a time, but it would not survive for long.  Once again it is claimed on behalf of the vision theory that it preserves the truth of the Resurrection and at the same time escapes the difficulty of supposing a break in the continuity of nature.  Is this claim true?  If the appearances were real and divinely caused, then they were miraculous.  The miracle is removed from the physical to the psychological sphere, that is all.  We are still left with a supernormal event, not the less so because it is in the region of mind and not of matter.  We may even go so far as to doubt whether, since all mental activity is conditioned by processes of the brain, the perception of such visions would not necessitate a unique and direct action of God in the physical sphere.  In short, the idea of a purely spiritual resurrection solves difficulties of imagination rather than difficulties of reason.  To the man who starts from an a priori view that miracles do not happen, it is as impossible as the traditional view.  It involves a very grave departure from the apostolic teaching.

      § 3. Christ ... took again His body, with flesh, bones and all things appertaining to the perfection of man’s nature, wherewith He ascended into Heaven and there sitteth.

      (a) There is no certain allusion to the Ascension in the Synoptic Gospels.  It is interpreted in the language of theology in the later appendix to Mk (16:19).  The exact meaning of Lk 24:51 is doubtful.  The words “and was carried up into Heaven” are omitted in א D and the earliest Latin versions, and therefore probably formed no part of the original text.  If they are omitted the verse only describes a disappearance of our Lord similar to His disappearance from the disciples at Emmaus (24:31).*  S. Luke preferred to reserve his narrative of the Ascension itself for his second volume.  He regarded it rather as the preliminary to the descent of the Spirit than as the final episode in the earthly life of Christ (cp. Acts 2:33–34).  His Ascension is foretold by our Lord Himself in Jn 6:62 and again after His Resurrection in Jn 20:17.  Only in the Acts is the visible act of final withdrawal described (1:9–11).  In the Epistles the Ascension is assumed rather than directly asserted.  For instance, in Eph 4:8–10 the words of Psalm 68:18 are paraphrased with reference to the gifts of the Spirit, “When he ascended on high, he led captivity captive and gave gifts unto men. ... He that descended is the same also that ascended far above all the heavens that he might fill all things.”  So, too, the quotation from an early Christian hymn given in 1 Tim 3:16 concludes with “received up in glory”.  Again, in 1 Pet 3:22 we find an unmistakable allusion to the Ascension: “Jesus Christ, who is on the right hand of God, having gone into heaven.”  Further, the Ascension is presupposed in every mention of our Lord’s priestly work and of His exaltation at God’s right hand (e.g. Phil 2:9–10; Eph 12:20; Rev 3:21, etc.).

            [*If the words be retained, the Gospel appears at first sight to place the Ascension on Easter Day.  This, however, is not a necessary inference.  S. Luke has little sense of time and there may have been a considerable interval between vv. 43 and 44 or again vv. 49 and 50.  The same difficulty occurs in the Epistle of Barnabas (15:9) which asserts “We keep the eighth day as a day of joy, on which Jesus both arose from the dead and after being manifested, ascended into heaven.”  This is probably a mere piece of clumsiness in expression.  Even the Creed runs “the third day He rose again according to the Scriptures, and ascended into Heaven.”]

      (b) In considering the Ascension we must distinguish between the outward and visible act of departure and its spiritual significance.  The outward event is narrated in Acts 1:9.  “As they were looking, he was taken up and a cloud received him out of their sight.”  We need not imagine that the Lord’s body rose aloft visibly into the sky and disappeared slowly into its depths, as Christian art has depicted it.  All that the narrative requires is a cloud hanging on the hillside a short way above where He and His disciples were standing, into which He rose.  We may contrast the story of the Transfiguration.  Then our Lord entered into the cloud and the cloud passed away leaving Him on earth.  Now He passed into the cloud and did not return. [Rackham, Acts, p. 8: “In the Old Testament the incomprehensibleness of the divine nature was typified by a cloud which hid Jehovah from human view: so now the human body of Jesus is concealed by the same cloud which is the cloud of the Shekinah or divine glory.  He is now ‘in glory’.”]  The whole constituted a sign marking this departure as different from His previous departures and expressing its finality.  Some visible sign was needed to assure the disciples that they were to look for no more manifestations of the Risen Lord.  Such an expectation would have distracted them from their work.  During the forty days they had been trained to live in the knowledge that at any moment He might appear among them.  Now that stage of their education was finished.  They had been made ready to go forth and wield authority.  The work for which they had been trained was about to begin.  The sign was understood by the disciples.  The expectation of any further visible manifestations of the Risen Lord ended abruptly.  They were content to await the descent of the Holy Spirit and to find in Him the pledge of the invisible presence of their ascended Lord.

      But this outward event was but the setting forth of a great spiritual truth, in the only manner intelligible to men of that day.  “The physical elevation was a speaking parable, an eloquent symbol, but not the truth to which it pointed or the reality which it foreshadowed.  The change which Christ revealed by the Ascension was not a change of place, but a change of state, not local but spiritual.  Still from the necessities of our human condition the spiritual change was represented sacramentally so to speak, in an outward form. ... The Ascension of Christ is, in a word, His going to the Father – to His Father and our Father – the visible pledge and symbol of the exaltation of the earthly into the heavenly.  It is emphatically a revelation of heavenly life, the open fulfillment of man’s destiny made possible for all men.” [Westcott, The Revelation of the Risen Lord, p. 180.]  Doubtless the Apostles regarded the earth as flat and heaven as a place above their heads.  They supposed that our Lord travelled there through space. Such a mental picture was consistent with itself and for many centuries presented no difficulty to reason. To-day such a naive conception is impossible, nor is it in the least a vital part of the Christian faith. Our Lord’s entrance into the fullness of His heavenly life obviously transcends all possible human experience. It can only be depicted in metaphor and symbol. The visible sign of His departure can be adequately described in earthly language and does not need restatement. Its spiritual truth must be reinterpreted in the best language that we can find. Difficulties about the Ascension arise not when we employ the simple realism of the first Christians, nor yet when we are whole-heartedly philosophic, but when we attempt to piece together fragments of the two positions. We must not be ‘philosophic in patches’. Heaven is a state of being, not a locality. The inner meaning of the Ascension is not a removal to another part of the universe infinitely remote, but rather the final withdrawal into another mode of existence. Just as the Incarnation did not involve a physical descent, so the return to the Father did not involve an upward movement in space.*

            [*Swete, The Ascended Christ, p. 8. “A conception which limits His ascent to any region however remote from the earth, or locates His ascended life in any part of the material universe, falls vastly short of the primitive belief; no third heaven, no seventh heaven of Jewish speculation, no central sun of later conjecture, meets the requirements of an exaltation to the throne of God.”  The language of Scripture is worth noting.  In Eph 4:10 He is said to have ascended “far above all the heavens”, in Heb 4:14 to have “passed through the heavens” (cp. 7:26).  So in Jn 16:28 He declares that He is about to leave the world (κόσμον, the world of created things).]

      (c) The language of Scripture suggests that the Ascension brought about no change in the condition of the Risen Lord.  He was glorified not at the Ascension but at the Resurrection.  The Ascension was a last farewell to the apostles, not a first entry into glory.  In Scripture the Resurrection and Ascension are always viewed in the closest possible connection (Acts 2:32–33, 5:30–31; Rom 6:8–10; Eph 1:20; Col 3:1; Heb 1:3; 1 Pet 1:21, 3:21–22, etc.)  “No sooner did He shake off the bonds of earth and take His place in the higher spiritual world to which He was ever afterwards to belong, than He may be said to have ascended into heaven.  When for a special purpose He again appeared to His disciples as they had known Him during His earthly ministry, He may be said to have descended out of heaven.  Wherever He was in that glorified condition which began at His Resurrection, there Heaven in its Scripture sense also was.” [Milligan, The Ascension of our Lord, p. 26.  Cp. Westcott, The Revelation of the Risen Lord, pp. 23–26.]  This helps to explain the absence of reference to the Ascension in the Gospels.  It was not separated in thought from the Resurrection. [For an attempt to distinguish between the Resurrection and Ascension, see Denney, Art. “Ascension” in Hastings’ D.B. vol. i.  There is no evidence whatever for a view that has been put forward at times, that our Lord’s body was being progressively spiritualized during the forty days.]  When we have once grasped the nature of our Lord’s spiritual body, the thought of the Ascension as from one point of view the counterpart of the Resurrection involves no new difficulty.

      (i) Obviously we can know nothing of the condition of our Lord’s manhood in His heavenly life.  All that we are concerned to maintain is that He is still fully Man.  As such He is the “Mediator between God and man” (1 Tim 2:5 R.V.).  “He has entered upon the completeness of spiritual being without lessening in any degree the completeness of His humanity.  The thought is one with which we need to familiarize ourselves.  We cannot, indeed, unite the two sides of it in one conception, but we can hold both firmly without allowing the one truth to infringe upon the other.” [Westcott, Historic Faith, Lect. VI.]  Nothing has been laid aside or lost which appertains to the perfection of man’s nature.  At the time of the Reformation Luther and certain of his followers maintained that as a result of the Ascension our Lord’s humanity had become omnipresent.  Against this doctrine known as “Ubiquitarianism” the wording of our article was devised a protest.  A humanity that is of itself and unconditionally omnipresent would hardly be human any longer.  As part of the created world it could scarcely attain to an attribute essentially divine.  Rather we may picture to ourselves our Lord’s humanity as a faculty that He possesses and through which He can still act in our world of space and time, whenever and wherever He wills so to do.  For us our body represents the organ through which we act upon our present environment.  Our Lord’s spiritual body was employed by Him during the forty days as the perfected instrument of His will through which He manifested Himself to the senses of His disciples and assured them of His personal identity.  Now, as ascended, He possesses all that the body stands for, inasmuch as He can still render His humanity active in our lower world at will.  Through it He disclosed Himself to S. Stephen (Acts 7:55) and apparently to S. Paul (Acts 9:3–5, cp. 1 Cor 9:1) and to S. John (Rev 1:13).  The Church has never had any difficulty in conceiving of Him as acting through His humanity in the Holy Eucharist in many places at the same time.  But this is not ubiquitarianism.  His manhood is not regarded as, so to speak, automatically omnipresent.  Rather in each case His activity is a direct act of will in fulfillment of His own promise and in answer to the prayers of the Church.

      (ii) The ascended Christ is both priest and king.*  As we saw [Above, under Article  II.] the culmination of the act of sacrifice was not the death of the victim, but the presentation of the blood “which is the life” before God.  So our Lord’s atonement was completed by the Ascension.  As on the great day of atonement the high priest entered within the veil to offer the blood (cp. Lev 16:12–16) Christ at His Ascension “entered not into a holy place made with hands, but into heaven itself, now (νυν, emphatic) to appear in the presence of God for us” (Heb 9:24).  He is still engaged in His priestly task and the Church awaits His return from within the veil (9:28).  “The entrance was made, as the sacrifice was offered, once for all: the whole period of time from the Ascension to the Return is one age-long Day of Atonement.” [Swete, op. cit. p. 42.  For a careful exposition of the symbolism see Gayford, J.Th.S. vol. xiv. p. 459 ff.]  So our Lord, by His presence within the veil, is now making atonement for us.  As the high priest uttered no spoken prayer but by his presentation of the blood made reconciliation for Israel, our Lord as our representative, clothed in our nature, having become all that He now is through His Cross and Passion eternally presents Himself to the Father.  He has, indeed, “somewhat to offer” (Heb 8:3).  He is Himself both priest and victim.  In the language of Rev 5:6 He is eternally “the Lamb as it had been slain”.  Our Lord is an abiding priest and an abiding sacrifice.  He pleads for us, not by anything new or supplementary that He now does, but by what he has become through His death.  The complete self-oblation of Himself once for all made on Calvary, lives on in His living unity of will with the Father.**  He ever lives unto God (Rom 6:10, cp. 5:10, “We are saved by his life,” cp. 1 Pet 3:21).  He is a priest for ever, not simply by commemorating a death that is past, but by the eternal presentation of the life that died.  As such by His very presence in our human nature He intercedes for us (Heb 7:25; Rom 8:34).  “The intercession of the Ascended Christ is not a prayer but a life.” [Swete, op. cit. p. 99.]  Through Him we have an abiding access to the throne of grace (Eph 2:13; Heb 4:14–16, 10:19 ff.).  His death and entry into Heaven took place once for all: as historical events they lie in the past and can never be repeated (Heb 7:27, 9:28, 10:12, etc.).  But the great priestly appeal lasts on.  The whole life and ministry of the Church proceed from the priestly life of the living and ascended Christ.

            [*Our Lord’s priesthood is not after the manner of Aaron, but of Melchizedek (Heb 6:20–7).  The difference does not lie in the function.  Qua priesthood, the two are identical.  Nor yet is the chief mark of difference that the kingship and priesthood are combined in one Person.  This is secondary.  Rather it is to be found in the fact that the one “abides continually” (7:3).  His priesthood is eternal and ideal.  The Aaronic priests are men that die: their priesthood is transitory.  Christ is a priest “for ever”.]

            [**“It is not the death itself which is acceptable to the God of life: but the vital self- identification with the holiness of God. ... It is the life as life, not the death as death; it is the life which has been willing to die, the life which has passed through death and been consecrated in dying, the life in which the death is a moral element, perpetually and inalienably present, but still the life, which is acceptable to God.”  “In that eternal presentation Calvary is eternally implied.  Of that life ... the “as it had been slain” is no mere past incident, but it has become, once for all, an inalienable moral element.”  Moberly, Ministerial Priesthood, c. vii. pp. 245 and 246.]

      (iii) Our Lord in Heaven is described as “sitting at the right hand of the Father”.  Such language is clearly metaphorical.  God’s right hand is the highest place of honour in Heaven.  The symbolism was borrowed from Ps 110:1, “Jehovah saith unto my lord” (i.e. a earthly king whether actual or ideal), “Sit thou at my right hand, until make thine enemies thy footstool.”  The verse had been quoted by our Lord Himself to bring home the inadequacy of the current conception of the Messiah, as the “Son of David”, i.e. a merely earthly king (Mk 12:36).  Before Caiaphas He claimed that He Himself would fulfill it (Mk 14:62 where it is combined with imagery from Daniel).  The Psalm in its original context is addressed to a Jewish king (perhaps Judas Maccabaeus or more probably an ideal figure of the Messianic king) who is bidden to share the throne of Jehovah.  Later on (v. 4) this king is declared to be by divine decree “a priest for ever after the manner of Melchizedek”.  The early Church from the first seized on this psalm and its phrases, sanctioned by the use of our Lord Himself, as being the least inadequate to describe the glory and functions of the Ascended Christ.  It is quoted by S. Peter on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:34), and the symbolism takes its place henceforth as a part of primitive Christian theology (e.g. Rom 8:34, Col 3:1, Heb 10:2, [Mk] 16:19, etc.).  Only in Acts 7:55 is the imagery modified.  S. Stephen cries “I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God”.  Christ is regarded as having risen up to succour His servant.  “Sitting at the right hand of the Father” clearly denotes authority and triumph.  God “made him to sit at his right hand in the heavenly places far above all rule and all authority and power and dominion and every name that is named not only in this world but also in that which is to come: and he puts all things in subjection under his feet” (Eph 1:20–22; cp Mt 2:18; Heb 12:2; Rev 3:21, etc.).  “Sitting” has also been taken to denote “rest”.  To this we may demur as an undue pressing of physical imagery.  The idea of rest is entirely absent from the psalm.  If the Ascended Christ rests it is only in the sense in which God rested from His labours on the seventh day, when He ceased to create.  Such rest was not incompatible with unceasing work (Jn 5:17).  The toil and sorrows of Christ’s earthly life, the Cross and Passion were indeed ended.  But the true antithesis to the pain and weariness of labour is not mere repose but a free and unfettered activity.  The life of the Ascended Christ is certainly not one of inactivity.  He “must reign till He hath put all enemies under His feet” (1 Cor 15:27).  He sits “expecting till his enemies be made the footstool of his feet” (Heb 10:13).  “Our Lord’s victory over the world in the days of His flesh was but an earnest of the longer warfare and the more complete conquest which are the work of His ascended life.  When He sat down at the right hand of power, it was not for a brief cessation from warfare, but for an age-long conflict with the powers of evil.  Sitting is not always the posture of rest.  Some of the hardest work of life is done by the monarch seated in his cabinet and the statesman at his desk; and the seated Christ, like the four living creatures round about Him, rests not day nor night from the unintermitting energies of heaven.” [Swete, The Ascended Christ, p. 14.]  As King, He reaps the fruits of His victory over sin and death through the battle that is being waged on earth against the forces of evil by His body the Church.

[11]     § 4. Until He return to judge all men at the last day.  (i) The idea of a future judgment was perfectly familiar to our Lord’s contemporaries.  The prophets from Amos onwards had taken up and purified the popular expectation of the “Day of the Lord”, a day in which Jehovah would intervene to vindicate Israel and scatter their enemies and His.  They had taught that such a coming must mean judgment.  It would be a day of condemnation of all that was unrighteous both in Israel and outside.  The same idea held a prominent place in the anonymous apocalyptic literature that had so large an influence upon Jewish thought between the cessation of prophecy and our Lord’s day.  The extent of this influence we are now only beginning to appreciate.  All such literature was inspired by, the hope of the restoration of Israel and the establishment of the Kingdom of God, through the direct and catastrophic intervention of God Himself.  Though there is considerable variety in detail, all such pictures include a judgment as a necessary prelude to the new era of happiness.  Usually the judge is God Himself.  Sometimes more than one judgment is described and the Messiah has a part in their execution.  In a portion of one of these apocalypses, the Book of Enoch, the universal judgment is assigned to a supernatural pre-existent Person “the Son of Man” who acts as God’s agent.  The importance of these facts is that they help us to reconstruct the background of popular religion in our Lord’s day.  We have to face the fact that the language of our Lord Himself and of the writers of the New Testament is largely the language of this apocalyptic literature.  When our Lord spoke of His return to judgment, He employed phrases and symbolism already familiar to many of His hearers.  He made use of current ideas and metaphors to describe His mission far more than we used to suppose.  Due allowance must be made for this when we attempt to understand their meaning.  We cannot suppose that popular expectations were embodied in a single consistent scheme.  Doubtless they varied enormously in different circles and were often loose and fragmentary.  But there did exist a definite circle of ideas in the popular mind, and prominent among these was that of a future judgment, ushering in the Kingdom of God.

      This same idea appears in the teaching of S. John Baptist.  In some sense he combined prophecy and apocalyptic in one.  He revived the personal appeal of the prophet, but the form of his teaching was in large part that of the apocalyptic writings.  He took the message that was stored up in the symbolic pictures of apocalyptic literature and by his preaching made it a living expectation in the hearts and minds of ordinary men.  He proclaimed the immediate approach of the Kingdom of God (Mt 3:2) and the advent of one mightier than himself who would execute the preliminary judgment (Mt 3:8–12; Lk 3:15–17).

      (ii) The new feature in our Lord’s teaching is that He claims that He Himself will return in glory to be the judge.  This claim permeates all His teaching.  It cannot be denied or explained away.  He proclaims that all men, Jew and Gentile alike, will give account to Him for their life here.  They will be judged by His standard.  Often this claim to judge is connected with the title Son of Man (e.g. Mk 8:38; Mt 25:31, 13:41, 24:37).  This title is probably used in an apocalyptic sense taken from the book of Daniel or the book of Enoch.  But it also includes the thought that it is in virtue of His humanity, as one who knows human nature from within, as “representative man”, that He will judge mankind.  The Father “gave him authority to execute judgment, because he is Son of Man” (Jn 5:27).  This truth is represented under a great variety of symbolism.  We have a whole series of parables, found chiefly in the first Gospel, emphasizing the certainty of His return and the need of preparedness.  His return to judgment is likened to a flood (Mt 24:37–39, cp. Mt 7:24) or a harvesting (Mt 13:30, and 41–43).  His coming will be sudden and unforeseen yet visible to all (Mt 24:27–28, enemies as well as friends (Rev 1:7).  He likens Himself to a thief (Mt 24:43, Lk 12:39), a bridegroom (Mt 25:1), a master of a household suddenly returning (Mt 24:44 ff., 25:14 ff., Mk 13:34, Lk 12:42).  Elsewhere He employs symbolical language borrowed from the Old Testament and frequent in later apocalypses, to describe the upheaval of the present order preparatory to His return and to picture the scene of judgment (Mk 13, Mt 24, 25:31 ff.).  The very wealth of illustration warns us against any too literal interpretation of details.  Many of the scenes are incompatible, if viewed as literal predictions, but each brings out some feature in the final catastrophe.  Beneath them all the claim to be the supreme and final judge of the world stands out clear.  Our Lord proclaims that He will return in the glory of the Father, in such a manner that none can escape or evade His coming and that all human life will be tested by His presence.

      (iii) In the earliest preaching the Lord’s return held a foremost place (Acts 10:42; 1 Thess 1:10, 4:14–17; 2 Thess 2:2 ff., etc.).  The news of judgment to come was an essential part of the Gospel that the Apostles proclaimed (cp. Acts 17:31, 24:25; Rom 2:15–16; 1 Cor 45; 2 Cor 5:10; Heb 6:2; 1 Pet 4:17, etc.).  The early Church believed that the Lord’s coming was to be expected very quickly, within the lifetime of many then living.  We can see the value of such a belief, in the providence of God.  Not only did it stimulate moral and spiritual earnestness.  Ultimate values and eternal issues were not obscured by the claims of earth, since this earth was held to be about to pass away.  But also it governed the development of Church organization.  The apostles had no conception that they were laying down rules or planning a constitution for a Church that was to last for some two thousand years.  All their administration was guided by the needs of some immediate demand or difficulty.  Hence the elasticity and adaptiveness of Christianity was preserved.  The Church was saved from a minute and rigid organization based on precise apostolic commands and therefore regarded as inviolable.  Such an organization, however perfectly suited to the needs of the apostolic age, would have been an intolerable burden to any succeeding age.  All through the New Testament we find broad principles laid down rather than detailed and formal rules.  “It may seem a paradox, but yet it is profoundly true, that the Church is adapted to the needs of every age, just because the original preachers of Christianity never attempted to adapt it to the needs of any period but their own.” [Sanday and Headlam. Romans, p. 381.  The whole note, p. 379–381, should be read.]

      Within the teaching of S. Paul himself we can trace a change of tone on the subject of the Lord’s return.  In his later epistles he dwells less upon the immediacy of His coming.  He seems able to contemplate a considerable delay.  He himself may expect to die first (cp. Phil 1:21–24, and contrast 1 Cor 7:26–31 and 1 Thess 4:15 “we which are alive”).  He dwells more upon the building up of the Church.  So, too, in S. John’s Gospel we find a marked absence of definitely eschatological teaching.  Its place is taken by the thought of the coming of the Spirit.  Even so, however, both in S. Paul’s latest epistles and in S. John the thought of a final judgment by Christ is never let go (2 Tim 4:1 and1:18; Jn 5:27–29, 1 Jn 4:17, etc.).  This suggests that our Lord’s teaching contained from the first certain elements which were appreciated more fully after a time and which tended to modify the expectation of His immediate return.

      (iv) If we ask how we are to conceive of the return of Christ and the final judgment, and what the “advent hope” means to us today, we must admit that as soon as we go outside the main truth, nothing is clear-cut.  The important fact for our present life is that we shall have each personally to render an account of our lives to Jesus Christ.  The standard by which we shall be judged is His and not the world’s.  The language of Scripture certainly suggests that this final judgment takes place not on the death of the individual but at “the last day”, after the general resurrection, and that it is shared by all mankind.  But though this may be the best way that we can express the truth for ourselves, we must remember that it may be hopelessly inadequate.  The varied symbolism in which the judgment is depicted in Scripture is at best an attempt to suggest to the mind spiritual realities that lie beyond our present human experience.  The whole question of time comes in.  Words like “before” and “after” may have no meaning in the life after death.  The apparent interval between death and the final judgment may have no real existence.  We cannot dogmatize on such points.  It is well, however, to bear in mind certain facts.

      (1) The imagery of Scripture is more consistent than we sometimes suppose.  The impossibility of imagining a gathering of all mankind at one place is obvious.  But though Scripture suggests this, it at the same time teaches that we shall all possess risen and spiritual bodies raised above the limitations of space.  The two thoughts must be taken together.

      (2) The judgment will not be the arbitrary assignment of future destinies.  Rather it will be the final and public declaration of what men have made themselves.  In His earthly life, as S. John’s Gospel makes clear, our Lord by His very presence among men as a Saviour, judged them.  He acted as a touchstone of character.  By their attitude to Him men showed themselves to be what they really were.  This same judgment or division is made at every great crisis or opportunity that befalls either nations or individuals.  Then in a real sense Christ comes and men reveal themselves by their behaviour towards Him.  Such an experience cannot leave man unchanged.  By their response they make themselves either better or worse.  Salvation rejected is condemnation.  If, then, this process of judgment is, so to say, automatically going on day by day, it leads us to expect a final judgment.  All men must by acts of choice be building up a character of some kind.  The coming of Christ in glory is a last great opportunity that none will be able to escape.  It will divide men by revealing what they have become.  In one sense Christ will judge.  In another sense men will judge themselves, in so far as they are prepared or not prepared to meet Him.  The justice and inevitableness of the sentence will be apparent.  The judgment will not change men.  It will show them to be what they are.

      (3) By this judgment the individual is assigned his place in the new order of things in accordance with his character and capacity.  From first to last Scripture speaks of men as divided into two classes, the saved and the lost. [Mysterious as this is it seems to correspond with the facts of human life.  See Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, vol. ii. pp. 65–69.]  It declares that at bottom all men must decide either for God or against Him.  At the same time our Lord seems to speak of gradations of reward and punishment (Lk 12:47–48, 19:17–19; cp. Jn 14:2 “many mansions”).  Every man is given that position in the new age which he has made himself capable of filling by his life in this age.*

            [*Heaven and Hell must be regarded as spiritual states with an environment which completely corresponds to them.  The secret of the bliss of Heaven is in the perfection of the soul’s relation to God.  An unholy man would find life in Heaven intolerable.  He could have no sympathy with it.  Hence the unavoidableness of Hell.  The essential nature of Hell would seem to be the failure to attain Heaven.  It is eternal loss, rather than eternal punishment.  The fires of Hell are those that are to be found within the human heart, anger, bitterness, self-will and the like, and the lusts that survive after the power for finding pleasure in their satisfaction has for ever departed.  Above all just as the joy of Heaven will consist in that full union with God for which we were made, so the loss of Hell is the loss of that union with God, for which sin and self-will incapacitate us (cp. 2 Thess 1:9; Heb 12:11).  Cp. von Hügel, Essays and Addresses (First Series), c. vii.]

      (v) The last day. – The conception of a last day which ends time and history raises many difficulties. [For a discussion of the nature of Time see F. H. Brabant, Time and Eternity in Christian Thought, and on the Biblical doctrine, see art. ‘Time’ in A Theological Word-Book of the Bible (S.C.M. Press).]  But it stands for important Christian convictions.  The created world as we know it had a beginning and will have an end.  Moreover, its end will not be a mere ceasing of existence.  Since it is God’s creation, He will bring it to its final end and purpose.  The “last things” will be a consummation of the present order in a new world in which God’s Kingdom is fully manifested.  For this day the Creation is “waiting” (Rom 8:19); it cannot come until the “sons of God” are “manifested” in their resurrection glory.  “The last day” therefore means also that there will be a fulfillment of God’s redeeming purpose in human history, which must run its appointed span in time until that purpose is complete and all the souls whom God intends to create have been through their earthly probation.  The end is a consummation both of nature and history in an eternal order.  To express these convictions we cannot dispense with the conception of “the last day”.  It stands for the seriousness and reality of all that happens in time, and also for the truth that the movement and meaning of all history cannot be understood from within history itself.  The “end” of history is in “the life of the age to come”, which is God’s fulfillment of His creation in “this age”.  To Christian faith the nature of the divine judgment and salvation which this fulfillment will bring are already known in Christ.  The Christian lives now as one who by his incorporation into Christ has entered on that eternal life which will be fully manifested when He “comes again with glory”. [For a valuable study of some questions relating to the Christian conception of history, see Quick, The Gospel of Divine Action.]†

The Holy Spirit – Article  V

      One of the new Articles added in 1563 by Archbishop Parker, based upon the Lutheran Confession of Würtemburg.  Its addition may be due to the revival of ancient heresies by the Anabaptists, or simply to a desire for greater completeness.

      § 1.  As we have seen, in the Old Testament the Spirit of God is simply God in action.  His distinct personality is not yet fully recognized.  The Old Testament conception has hardly been transcended in such passages as Lk 1:35 “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee”, and the teaching of John Baptist (Mk 1:8, etc.) “He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost”.  But in the teaching of Christ and of the New Testament generally language is used which implies clearly that He is both Divine and a Person.  His divinity can hardly be questioned.  “Blasphemy against the Holy Ghost” is the sin that “hath never forgiveness” (Mk 3:29, etc.).  To “lie to the Holy Ghost” is to “lie to God” (Acts 5:3–4).  It is the presence of the Spirit that makes the Christian the temple of God (1 Cor 3:16 and 6:17).  On the other hand His personality was less quickly grasped.  The word πνευμα [The attempt to distinguish between το πνευμα as meaning the Person and πνευμα without the article as meaning His gifts or operation, though great names can be quoted in its favour, seems to have no real foundation.] in itself may mean “wind”, or “spirit” or “spiritual influence”.  It is used alike of the Person of the Holy Spirit and of the gifts that He bestows.  It is employed also of a man’s “spirit”, which is a part or aspect of his personality.  Further, its use in the Old Testament and in popular heathen religious thought tended to a certain vagueness. [See C. H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, pp. 213 ff. for the use of the term in Greek thought.]  In its current use it might mean no more than a divine influence or endowment or one of the minor deities of polytheism.  But the language of Scripture goes beyond this.  It speaks about Him as a Person.  Christ can designate Him “another Advocate” comparable to but not identical with Himself (Jn 14:26, 15:26).  He is to perform personal actions, to “teach” and “bear witness”.  So in S. Paul’s writing He “maketh intercession with groanings that cannot be uttered” (Rom 8:26–27).  He “divides gifts severally as He will” (1 Cor 12:11, cp. the whole passage).  He can lead men (Gal 5:18) and be grieved (Eph 4:30).  Further, in baptismal formula (Mt 28:19) and Trinitarian passages (cp. 2 Cor 13:14) He is placed on a level with the Father and the Son, in a way that would be impossible, if He were no more than a divine influence.  We could not speak of “The Father, the Son and the Wisdom” or “the Power”.  The substitution of any such divine attribute shows at once the Personality of the Spirit.

      § 2.  When we turn to the early Church, the general mind of the Church is perfectly clear.  We find a vigorous belief in the Holy Spirit expressed in her life and worship.  She baptized in the three-fold Name and required of candidates for baptism an acknowledgement of the Holy Spirit no less than of the Father and the Son.  She included the Holy Spirit in her doxologies.  In the hymn of praise that is put into the mouth of the martyr S. Polycarp, glory is given to the Holy Spirit, together with the Father and the Son.  Whether actually spoken at the time of martyrdom or not, the words probably represent a familiar eucharistic thanksgiving.  At the same time the doctrine of the Holy Spirit was not yet formulated in the language of theology.  The presence and power of the Holy Spirit was a fact of Christian experience rather than an object of study and definition.*

            [*Cp. Swete, The Holy Spirit in the Ancient Church, p. 159.  ‘The devotional language of the early Church was in fact on the whole in advance of its doctrinal system.  Men like Origen still had intellectual difficulties in reference to the relation of the Spirit to the other Persons of the Holy Trinity; but they could nevertheless associate His name in their prayers and praises with those of the Father and the Son.  The worship of the Trinity was a fact in the religious life of Christians before it was a dogma of the Church.  Dogmatic precision was forced upon the Church by heresy, but the confession and conglorification of the Three Persons arose out of the Christian consciousness, interpreting by its own experience the words of Christ and the Apostles and the primitive rule of faith.”]

      So we are not surprised to find that in the first attempts to think out the position of the Holy Spirit there is not only a certain vagueness and indecision but also a real confusion of thought and the employment of language that in a later age would have been condemned as heretical.  Thus Hermas appears to identify the Holy Spirit with the preexistent divine nature of Christ. [E.g. Sim. IX. i. 1.  Pneuma and Spiritus are freely used by the Greek and Latin writers of the second and third centuries to denote the divine nature in itself.]  The apologists, Justin and Aristides, in their anxiety to emphasize the doctrine of the Logos, minimize the work and place of the Spirit. [E.g. Justin assigns the miraculous conception to the Word Himself, Apol. i. 33.]  Origen’s speculations show how the Church was feeling after a clearer understanding of the mode of the Spirit’s existence but had not yet attained it.*

            [*[Origen raises the question in this form.  Is the Spirit to be regarded as αγεννητός like the Father, or γεννητός like the Son, or is He to be ranked among the γενητά, that is, the beings who have come into existence through the Logos?  He is feeling his way to the later doctrine that the Holy Spirit is not like the Father the source of Godhead, nor like the Son “begotten of the Father”, but proceeds from the Father through the Son.  As yet he had no technical language in which to express his thought.  In placing the Spirit in the third class, among the γενητά, he laid himself open to the charge of ranking Him among the creatures.  His tentative speculations became dogmas with some of his followers in the fourth century.  See Swete, op. cit. pp. 127 ff. and pp. 163 ff.]

      Montanism in the latter half of the second century with its revival of prophecy brought to the front the reality of the Person and power of the Holy Spirit.  The movement was an exaggeration of a neglected truth.  It is significant that Tertullian, perhaps under Montanist influence, was the first to formulate the relation of the Spirit to the Father and the Son in language approaching that of later theology.  He even speaks of “One substance in three who cohere together”. [“Unam substantiam in tribus cohaerentibus,” Adv. Praxeam, c. 12.]  But here as in his general manner of formulating the doctrine of the Trinity, Tertullian was in advance of his age.

      § 3.  The final statement that the Holy Spirit is “of one substance with the Father and the Son” was a secondary product of the Arian controversy.  If the Son was, as Arius taught, a creature and not divine in the full sense, the Holy Spirit whom He sent must be even more creaturely and less divine.  But for the time the Arians did not press this point.  The centre of controversy was the Person of the Son.  The Council of Nicaea was content only to reaffirm belief in the Spirit.  But in 359 news was brought to Athanasius of certain Arians who had come to accept the Nicene doctrine of the Son, but still regarded the Holy Spirit as a creature, “one of the ministering angels and superior to the angels only in degree.”  These men he named “Tropici”, because they treated as τροπαί or metaphors all passages of Scripture that contradicted their own view.  He also speaks of them as πνευματομαχουντες whence they became commonly known as “Pneumatomachi”.  Against them he wrote the letters to Serapion setting forth the consubstantiality of the Spirit. [See C. R. B. Shapland, The Letters of S. Athanasius concerning the Holy Spirit.]  At the Synod of Alexandria in 362 an anathema was directed against those who “say that the Holy Spirit is a creature and separate from the essential nature of Christ”.  Meanwhile similar views were being put forth at Constantinople; about the year 360 Macedonius, the bishop of Constantinople, while accepting the divinity of the Son, denied that of the Spirit, saying that he was only a minister and a servant.  His followers became known by the name of Macedonians.  For the time Macedonianism was a real danger to the Church.  At a Roman Synod in 369 the appeal of the Macedonians was rejected and the full doctrine of the Trinity affirmed.  In 381 at the Council of Constantinople Macedonianism was expressly condemned.  This was an inevitable result of the defeat of Arianism.  The controversy about the divinity of the Holy Spirit did not involve any fresh issue which had not been already considered.  The doctrine of the Spirit was worked out by the Cappadocian Fathers.  There had never been any real doubt as to His divinity in the Church at large.  A creature would not be included in the Trinity.  Christians were convinced that His working within their own souls proved Him to be not less than divine.  But the Church did not wish to speculate.  Even S. Cyril of Jerusalem, writing about 348, after a full exposition of the work of the Holy Spirit discourages all speculation about His Person.  “Be not overcurious about His nature or hypostasis.  Had it been revealed in Scripture we should have spoken of it; what is not written, let us not venture to touch.  It is sufficient for salvation to know that there is a Father, a Son, and a Holy Spirit.” [Cat. xvi. 24.]  The Macedonian controversy that began not many months later obliged the Church to formulate her position.†

      § 4. What then is meant by the language of the Article, which speaks of the Holy Spirit as “proceeding from the Father and the Son”?  The technical term “proceeding” is used, simply because it is the language of Scripture.

      (i) In Jn 15:26 Christ says “When the Advocate is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth which proceedeth (εκπορεύεται) from the Father, He shall testify of me.”  Even under the Old Testament revelation men would have been prepared to assert that the Spirit of God in some sense proceeded from God.  But the New Testament makes it clear that the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost was a gift of the Ascended Christ.  He was sent not only by the Father but by the Son.  “I (εγώ) will send unto you” (cp. 16:7; Acts 2:33).  Further, Scripture calls Him not only the Spirit of God but the Spirit of Christ Himself (Rom 8:9; Gal 4:6; Phil 1:19; 1 Pet 1:10–11), and even the Spirit “of Jesus” (Acts 16:7), using our Lord’s human name.  In the coming of the Holy Spirit Christ Himself comes.  Through the Holy Spirit, Christ dwells in the Church and in the hearts of believers (Jn 14:16–18; Eph 3:16b–17).  It is through the reception of the Spirit that Christians are “in Christ”.  This truth, that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit not only of God the Father but of Christ lies behind the difficult passage 2 Cor 3:17–18.  “Now the Lord is the Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.  But we all with unveiled face reflecting as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Spirit which is the Lord” (R.V. mg. καθάπερ απο Κυρίου πνεύματος).  The presence and power of the Spirit known in the Church since Pentecost are the very presence and power of Jesus Christ.  In other words the new revelation of the Spirit is made as a sequel of the Incarnation.  “The Holy Ghost is mainly revealed to us as the Spirit of the Incarnate.” [Moberly, Atonement and Personality, p. 194.  Cp. the whole passage, pp. 194–205.  See also L. S. Thornton, The Incarnate Lord, c. xii, for a discussion of the distinction between Christ and the Spirit.]  He is not simply the Spirit of God in His absolute and eternal existence, nor the Spirit of God as putting forth the energy of creation, He is the Spirit of God Incarnate.  Through Him we share the saving power of Christ’s victorious humanity.  By His coming the perfect human life of our Ascended Lord is bestowed upon us.  This great truth is safeguarded by the assertion that He proceeds not from the Father only but from the Father and the Son.

      (ii) But the words as used in the Article mean more than this.  So far we have thought only about the “Economic Trinity”, i.e. God as active in redemption, God in His dealings with the world.  But we cannot but believe that the “Temporal Mission” of the Holy Ghost, as it is called, i.e. His descent as the Spirit of God Incarnate, corresponds to something within the “Essential Trinity”, that it rests upon and springs out of a relation within the eternal being of God.  About the eternal life of God we can know nothing except in so far as it is outlined in the Incarnation.  But we feel that the historical revelation of God through Jesus Christ as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, must depend upon distinctions and relations within the being of God.  When we strive to express such distinctions and relations we can only do so in language borrowed from the manner of the Incarnation.  Thus we speak of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity as Soil, and the Third as Spirit.  Further, if in time the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father and the Son, we can only express His relationship to the Father and the Son in eternity by the use of the same language.  For we have and can have no other.  Accordingly, Catholic theologians have always taught that the Father is alone the underived source of Godhead (άναρχος) and the Son derives His being by eternal generation from the Father.  Further, from the first it was held that the procession of the Spirit, like the generation of the Son, refers not only to His mission but to His essential life, that He derives His being from the being of God.  Some theologians taught that the Spirit like the Son received His Godhead immediately from the Father alone.  But the majority saw that just as His temporal mission was from the Father through the Son, just as the Holy Spirit who descended at Pentecost was the Spirit not only of the Father but of the Son, so within the eternal life of God He received His being not directly from the Father, but mediately through the Son.  The Divine Essence was conceived as eternally passing from the Father through the Son into the Spirit.  We may doubt whether there is any primary reference to this in Scripture at all.  The words of Jn 16:14 where the Spirit is said to receive the things of Christ, just as Christ received all that is the Father’s, would seem to refer primarily to the economic Trinity, though no doubt they hint at an eternal relationship.

      (iii) The dispute between East and West has centred not on the fact of the “double procession” but on the manner in which it is expressed.  S. Augustine formulated it in the words “proceeding from the Father and the Son” and this became the common language of the West.  The Constantinopolitan Creed – our so-called Nicene Creed – had always said only “Who proceedeth from the Father”.  The Church of Spain, in its conflict with Arianism on the one hand and Sabellianism on the other, was the first to introduce S. Augustine’s language into confessions of faith.  The words “Proceeding from the Father and the Son” had appeared in a profession of faith put forth by a Council of Toledo in 447.  It used to be supposed that they were first inserted into the Creed at the Council of Toledo in 589.  This, however, is doubtful.  Those who denied the double procession were indeed anathematized, but evidence seems to show that the text of the Creed was kept pure by the Council.  Their interpolation into the actual Creed was probably the work of copyists, under the influence of the anathema.  For a long time the addition remained unobserved and awakened no controversy.  It did not become a matter for public debate till the time of Charles the Great.  Even then Pope Leo III, though he accepted the double procession, deliberately rejected the addition to the Creed and set up in S. Peter’s copies of it without the addition.

      It is clear, however, from the protests of the Franks that the interpolated form had spread to Gaul and the question of the procession had begun to arouse controversy.  A dispute had arisen at Jerusalem between Greeks and Latins over the use of the new form of the Creed.  Rome herself did not accept the addition till after the final breach between East and West.  It is usually supposed that it was introduced by the influence of the Emperor Henry II, in 1014, along with the custom of repeating the Creed at Mass.  The arguments of the Eastern Church against the language “from the Father and the Son” were partly theological, partly historical.  It has been argued that it implies two independent sources of Godhead and so breaks up the unity.  This is untrue.  The Western Church means no more by it than Eastern theologians mean when they use the language “from the Father through the Son”.  S. Augustine was most careful to guard against any violation of the unity of the Godhead.  Again, it has been objected that it was inserted irregularly.  This is partly true.  We may reply, however, that the insertion was originally quite accidental and was very useful in dealing with heresy.  To set it aside now would run the risk of appearing to deny the truth that it protects.  All that the Western Church claims is to repeat the clause in a sense that is perfectly orthodox.  We do, however, admit that the clause has not Catholic authority: that it is unfortunate that any addition was made and still more unfortunate that, if any addition was judged to be necessary, it was not made in the form that would have been acceptable to East and West alike, namely “from the Father through the Son”. [Certain modern Greek theologians, however, would seem to be unwilling to use the words to denote more than the temporal mission from the Son.]  In itself it is certainly inadequate to justify any rupture between East and West.  We must remember, however, the real causes of division are to be found elsewhere, in political rivalry and jealousy between Rome and Constantinople.†

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