Articles  VI–VII – The Scriptures

Article VI

      This Article received its final form in 1571.   The first paragraph is based on a similar statement in the Article of 1553. The remainder of the Article was added in 1563, being based on the Confession of Würtemburg, except that the list of the Apocrypha omitted “The rest of the Book of Esther”, “Baruch,” “The Song of the Three Children,” “Bel and the Dragon,” and “The Prayer of Manasses”.  It was completed by the addition of these books in 1571.  Its immediate object was to state the position of the Church of England with reference to the use and extent of Scripture, against Anabaptists on the one hand and Rome on the other.

      (i) Certain among the Anabaptists regarded all Scripture as unnecessary.  An Article of 1553 describes them as those “who affirm that Holy Scripture is given only to the weak and do boast themselves continually of the Spirit, of whom (they say) they have learnt such things as they teach, although the same be most evidently repugnant to the Holy Scripture.”  In other words if men claim to be under the immediate guidance of the Holy Spirit, and to have received a personal revelation, does not this supersede Scripture?  Such a view implied a plenary inspiration of individuals, and opened the way for a chaos of interpretations, each claiming the authority of the Holy Spirit.

      (ii) The ambiguous language of the Council of Trent had appeared to regard Scripture by itself as insufficient, and to place tradition on a level with it as an independent source of doctrine.  In a decree published in 1546, and therefore before the compilers of this Article, it speaks of the “truth and discipline ... contained in the written books, and in the unwritten traditions, which, received by the Apostles from the mouth of Christ Himself or from the Apostles themselves ... have come down to us. ...  We receive and venerate these traditions, whether they refer to faith or to morals, with the same (i.e. the same as Holy Scripture) devotion and reverence inasmuch as they were dictated either by word of mouth by Christ Himself or by the Holy Spirit, and have been preserved by unbroken transmission in the Catholic Church”.  Such language at least suggested that part of the faith was to be found in Scripture and part in tradition.  Further, the same decree of the Council of Trent includes within the canon the majority of the books of the Apocrypha (Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, I and II Maccabees, and the additions to the books of Daniel and Esther) and regards them as of authority in matters of doctrine.

      This Article is not intended to stand alone.  It gives no answer to the vital question, Who is to decide what can be proved from Scripture?  This is answered in Art. 20.  Again, it deals only with the question of doctrine: questions of authority in matters of custom or ceremonies or organization are dealt with in Art. 34.

Article  VII

      This Article forms a sequel to the previous Article.  It was formed by Archbishop Parker out of two of the earlier Articles of 1553, with slight modifications.  It is directed against two opposite errors, both maintained by sections of Anabaptists.

      (i) Some rejected the Old Testament entirely, and claimed, in virtue of their illumination by the Spirit, to be superior even to the moral law contained in it.

      (ii) Others maintained that Christians were under obligation to obey the whole law contained in it, civil and ceremonial, as well as moral.  We read of strange attempts to set up a literal “New Jerusalem” in Westphalia.  The Calvinists were not entirely out of sympathy with this idea, as was shown by Calvin’s rule at Geneva.

      Against both these views the Article insists that the Old Testament represents a preparatory stage in one divine revelation and must be interpreted as such, in relation to the whole scheme of revelation.

      § 1.  The sufficiency of Scripture

      The position of the Church of England laid down in this Article is quite clear.  She does not require of a man as a condition of membership belief in any truth which is not contained in or cannot be proved from Scripture.  In the ordering of priests the question is asked: “Are you persuaded that the Holy Scriptures contain sufficiently all doctrine required of necessity for eternal salvation through faith in Jesus Christ and are you determined ... to teach nothing as required of necessity to eternal salvation, but that which you shall be persuaded may be concluded and proved by the Scripture?”*  We are bound to be faithful in declaring to men the “whole counsel of God” (cp. Acts 20:27) and to hold fast all that God has revealed (cp. 1 Tim 6:20), not leaving out or slurring over any truth that is inconvenient or unpopular.  But we are no less bound to respect the limits of divine revelation.  On many points it is quite possible for good Christians honestly to hold different opinions.  Ministers of the Church have no right to force upon men what are only conjectures.  To require men to accept as authoritative teaching for which there is no real evidence is to strain and weaken faith.  If men are asked to accept indiscriminately anything that individuals choose to teach, the inevitable result is that as soon as they learn the precariousness of part of the teaching, they reject not that part only but the whole.  The Church of England, therefore, holds up the Bible as the sufficient standard of Christian teaching and as the embodiment of all those truths to which the Church was formed to bear witness.  How can this position be justified?

            [*What is meant by “necessary to salvation”?  The phrase is intended in this context to refer to those who have a desire to hold and live by the Christian faith.  For them it is precarious to assume that they can obey the will of God and attain to eternal life with Him, if they are unwilling to accept in faith the truth that He has revealed.  To them the teacher is bound to set forth the whole Gospel as “necessary to their salvation”, as that which “a Christian ought to know and believe to his soul’s health”.  We need not take the phrase as settling questions about the destiny of the heathen who have not heard the Gospel or of those who are “invincibly ignorant” of it or conscientiously reject it.]

      (a) We must never forget that the Church existed and was at work in the world for many years before any single book of the New Testament was composed.  These books were written by members of the Church for members of the Church.  They presuppose a certain knowledge in those who read them, based upon oral instruction (cp. Lk 1:4; Rom 1:6–7; 1 Cor 11:23, 15:3: Heb 5:12–13; 1 Jn 2:12).  They were written not to create but to strengthen and educate faith.  No single book of the New Testament was intended in the first instance for unbelievers.  So today Scripture cannot be our earliest teacher.  It is the Church that points us to the Bible as differing from all other books and that gives us that elementary instruction by word and example in the Christian life without which the Bible would be largely unmeaning.  “For whatsoever we believe concerning salvation by Christ, although the Scripture be therein the ground of our belief; yet the authority of man is, if we mark it, the key which openeth the door of entrance into the knowledge of the Scripture.  The Scripture could not teach us the things that are of God unless we did credit men who have taught us that the words of Scripture do signify those things.” [Hooker, ii. c. 7, § 3.]  To most of us the beginning of our religion is the teaching of the Church as represented say by a parent.  In the earliest days preaching depended on the eyewitnesses and actual hearers of Christ.  The first Christians did not test what they heard by the New Testament, for that did not yet exist.  Rather as the books of the New Testament came one by one into their hands, they tested them by their conformity to the teaching of the apostles and those who heard them.  S. Paul did not go with a Bible under his arm and quote proof texts in support of the Resurrection.  Human nature, especially Greek human nature, was not one bit less inquisitive than it is today.  Questions would be asked, and he would answer them by relating the testimony of eyewitnesses: “Peter said this, John told me that.”  So we must not place the Bible in a false position of isolation and divorce it from the continuous life of the society within which it was written.  Behind the books of the New Testament stands the life and witness of the early Church illuminating and confirming them.  The great failure of much negative criticism today is caused by treating the books of the New Testament as if they came to us from some unknown source.  Passages which taken out of their context may be interpreted in more than one way, can only receive one interpretation when they are studied, as they were meant to be studied, in the light of a Christian life.  Since the New Testament was written for Christians, only Christians can fully understand it.  Bible and Church must go hand in hand.  The statement has been made that “the Bible and the Bible only is the religion of Protestants”. [It is inscribed on the tomb of Chillingworth.  It is only fair to add that he did not use it in the misleading sense popular among the less educated Protestants of today.]  Apart from the fact that a book cannot be a religion, it denies the intimate connection between the written word and the Christian community.  Like any other book, the Bible can only be interpreted aright by those who approach it with the right presuppositions, and those can only be attained by sharing in the life of Christian fellowship.

      (b) Christianity is not the religion of a book but of a Person. [Cp. Gore, The Incarnation of the Son of God, Lect. i.]  “Christianity is Christ” in a way that Buddhism is not Buddha or Mohammedanism Mohammed.  The centre of our faith is not the teaching of Christ but Christ Himself.  Behind Church and Bible alike stands the living Saviour.  Why then is the Bible placed in this supreme position?  The answer lies in its special relation to Christ.  The Old Testament is the record of the preparation of the world for His coming.  It shows the choice and education of the Jewish people.  They were called by God to a special task, and given a vision of His purpose which Christ alone could fulfill.  The Old Testament is the book on which His own religious life was nourished.  He reverenced it as the word of God and found Himself there.  So in the New Testament we have on the one hand a fourfold picture of the earthly life of Christ, a selection of His teaching and mighty works, the story of His death and resurrection, all given to us on the authority of eyewitnesses and approved by the consent of the early Church as correct.  We have further the earliest and most authoritative teaching of the Church itself.  The Epistles show us the Gospel as it was proclaimed in apostolic days, and all that the Ascended Christ proved Himself to be to the first generation of Christians.  They attest all unconsciously the fullness and vigour of the new life and hope that He had brought.  The Apostles are obviously witnesses of special importance.  They were trained by Christ Himself (Mk 3:14): they were promised special guidance by the Holy Spirit to remember and interpret His teaching (Jn 14:26, 16:13–14).  So the New Testament possesses a unique value from its close relationship to the earthly life of Christ, from the character and position of its writers and its intimate connection with the life of the early Church.  “It is self-evident to the mind that takes it in as a whole that the New Testament is a single movement of spiritual and Christian thought and life, and that it is complete and sufficient in itself.  It is equally certain that neither the succeeding nor any subsequent age had in it either the plastic capacity or the creative power to take for itself a living form such as Christianity easily, freely and naturally assumed in its initiative stage.  And therefore it was, to say no more, an act of practical wisdom to accept that first embodiment and expression of itself as in principle at least and in substance final and irreformable.” [Du Bose, Ecumenical Councils, p. 25.]

      (c) The question still remains, can we do what the Article assumes, be assured that it contains all necessary teaching?  May not some part have been omitted?  We can hardly appeal for an answer to any definite text of Scripture itself.  The very idea of such a collection of Christian writings did not yet exist when any one of them was being composed.  Each was written to meet a particular need at a particular time.  But we can fairly appeal to the feeling in Scripture itself of the greater security of the written word.  Christ habitually speaks of the Old Testament in such a way as to suggest that it is the adequate and authoritative embodiment of God’s revelation to the Jewish Church.  He finds in it the expression of the Father’s will (Mt 4:4, 7, 10).  He proves His own teaching from it (Jn 10:34, Mk 12:26–27).  He appeals to the written law as against unwritten tradition (Mk 7:1–13).  Again, in his preface to the Gospel, S. Luke refers to the greater certainty of the written word (Lk 1:4, cp. Jn 20:31).  The New Testament from end to end assumes that the revelation of God in Christ is final and complete.  Heb 1:1 ff. contrasts the fragmentary revelations of old times with the fullness of revelation in Christ.  It is “the faith once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3).  There cannot be a second Christ or a second Gospel (cp. 2 Cor 11:4, Gal 1:6–8, etc.).  That this message is adequately embodied in our Scriptures is shown by the testimony of the early Church.  It was the Church that gradually decided the canon of the New Testament, and we find no consciousness at any time that any part of its message had been omitted or misrepresented.  The Church did not in any sense create the Gospel.  It is always God’s word and not man’s, but the Bible is the Church’s record of it.  This view of the sufficiency of Scripture is for questions of doctrine the unanimous view of the early Fathers.  We can only give a few examples here.  “If any thing remains which Holy Scripture does not determine, no other third scripture ought to be received to authorize any knowledge, but we must commit to the fire what remains, that is, reserve it unto God” (Origen, Hom. V. in Lev.).  “The holy and divinely inspired Scriptures are of themselves sufficient to the enunciation of truth” (Athanasius, Contra Gentes, 1).  “In these alone the doctrine of salvation is contained.  Let no man add to or take from them” (Festal Epistles, ii).  “Believe those things that are written: the things which are not written, seek not” (Basil, Hom. 29).  “In those things which are plainly laid down in Scripture, all things are found, which embrace faith and morals” (Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, ii). [A long list of references could easily be compiled.  See Harold Browne on Art. 6, p. 141 ff.; Palmer, On the Church, c.]  The position taken up by this Article is in effect a return to antiquity.  It is supported both by the intrinsic nature of the New Testament writings and by the unanimous witness of the early Church.  We may add that if we believe that the Holy Spirit guided the Church in the selection of these books, we must believe that no vital part of the revelation in Christ was suffered to be lost.  The Apostles could hardly understand the importance of their witness for future ages.  They expected the immediate return of the Lord.  But their witness is all the more valuable because it is unpremeditated.  Just because they built primarily for their own time, they built the better for all time.  By the providence of God the Church was provided with a means of testing its faith.  It can return again and again to Scripture as the standard expression of its own life, formulated in times of the greatest vitality.

      (d) On the other hand, as we have already seen, Scripture needs the Church for its interpretation.  Not only is much of it hard to understand (Acts 8:31; 2 Pet 3:16), but its leading truths are not arranged in any definite order.  We need the right point of view.  One of the uses of creeds is to supply a simple scheme of truth.  From the first the Church has always attached great importance to tradition, not as alternative to Scripture, but as a means to its correct interpretation.  Tradition shows how the words of Scripture have been understood by the Church.  Thus, S. Vincent of Lerins ends his Commonitorium with the words: “We said above that this has always been, and even at this day is, the custom of Catholics to try and examine the true faith by these two methods: first, by the authority of the divine canon; secondly, by the rule of the Catholic Church; not because the canonical Scripture is not as to itself sufficient for all things, but because very many, expounding God’s word at their own will, do thereby conceive divers opinions and errors.  And for this cause it is necessary that the interpretation of the heavenly Scripture be directed according to the one only rule of the Church’s understanding; only, be it observed, especially in those questions upon which the foundations of the whole Catholic doctrine depend.”  It is in the same spirit that the canon of 1571 bids the clergy in their preaching “see that they never teach ought in a sermon, to be religiously held and believed by the people, except what is agreeable to the doctrine of the Old and New Testaments, and what the Catholic Fathers and ancient bishops have collected from the same doctrine.” [See Gee and Hardy, Documents Illustrative of English Church History, p. 476.]  The well-known saying “The Church to teach and the Bible to prove” sums up the position of the Church of England on this point. [On the Roman Catholic view of the authority of unwritten tradition, see Salmon, The Infallibility of the Church (1952 edition) c. v.; R. Hanson and R. Fuller, The Church of Rome, cc. iii and iv.]

      § 2.  The Canon of Scripture

      (a) The distinction made in this Article between canonical and non-canonical books raises in an acute form the whole question of inspiration.  We shall shortly give some account of the history of the formation of the Canon, but the deeper question still remains: does this historical distinction depend upon any intrinsic quality in the books themselves?  What is inspiration and how is it present in a unique form in the Bible?

      (i) We may begin by drawing a distinction between “Revelation” and “Inspiration”.  All knowledge implies both something to be known and a mind that can know it.  Revelation and inspiration correspond to these two sides of knowledge.  Revelation means the uncovering by God of some spiritual truth that man’s mind may apprehend it.  Inspiration means the quickening of the human mind and soul to perceive and understand what has been unveiled.  “In the act of revelation God unveils that which He desires men to know: in His act of inspiration He opens the eyes of men’s minds to see that which He has unveiled.” [Quoted by Watson, Inspiration, p. 24.]  The truth which is given and the power of grasping it both alike come from God.

      (ii) Neither the Bible nor the Church has ever defined inspiration.  It can be recognized rather than defined.  The nearest approach to any statement is in 2 Pet 1:20 “No prophecy of scripture is of private interpretation.  For no prophecy ever came by the will of men, but men spake from God, being moved by the Holy Ghost.”  In 2 Tim 3:16 the word θεόπνευστος is applied to the Scriptures, i.e. the Old Testament, and the passage should probably be translated “Every inspired scripture is also profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for instruction which is in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, furnished unto every good work.”  These passages suggest on the one hand that the writers of the Scriptures were directly moved by the Holy Spirit, and on the other hand that this inspiration was given to enlighten and instruct men in the way of obedience to the divine will.  Where spiritual truth is concerned God makes a revelation and inspires men to apprehend it in order that they may hear and obey His Word.  We shall therefore not look to inspired writings for infallible information on questions of science and history.  We have our natural powers of intelligent enquiry by which to investigate and obtain light on these questions.  God’s revealed and inspired Word is not intended to do for us what His natural gifts to us enable us to do for ourselves.  Moreover, in the context of a large group of writings such as the Bible we shall not expect that any one member or part of the group will give us the whole content of God’s revelation.  The form and content of the inspired message are limited by the capacities of those to whom it is in the first instance given; the individual writer will have his proper place with others who have also received illumination.  Thus we believe that four writers were each moved to compose a Gospel and so to give in different ways a fourfold witness to the truth of the Incarnate Life, and in the Old Testament “the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings” together preserve God’s revelation of Himself to His ancient people.

      (iii) All forms of inspiration presuppose two factors, and this is particularly true of all inspired religious insight.  There is first an inheritance of knowledge already embodied in some kind of corporate tradition.  The individual is born into a community which possesses a religion and he is taught its beliefs and customs.  He starts from the common consciousness, however much he may later modify or correct what he has received.  Secondly, within a living religious tradition there may arise from time to time individuals who with special gifts and prophetic insight permanently deepen and enrich the tradition or even by their influence turn it in new directions.  In the course of time what they first perceived may become part of the common stock of knowledge in the community and receive embodiment in newly shaped customs and institutions.  This general picture is true of the working of inspiration in the biblical writers, but here it takes on a special form.  Regarded from a purely historical point of view, the whole of the Bible is the literary deposit of the religious experience of a community with a continuous history and identity.  There are crises in the history, above all the crisis of the coming of the Messiah, and each crisis leaves a mark upon the tradition, but there is continuity too from the earliest to the latest of the biblical documents.  At each crisis appear prophetic figures.  In the Old Testament Moses and the canonical prophets are pre-eminent in the crises of their day, and they are followed by the law-givers, the priests, the prophetic historians and the wise men, who embody the prophetic insight in laws, cultus, wise sayings, and historical tradition.  So far the biblical tradition in its various phases is generally comparable to the history of other religious traditions.  But in fact the continuity and the movement here take on a form which is not paralleled elsewhere, and that in two particular respects.  First, the continuity exhibited in the Bible is not simply that of the story of a single nation with the phases of its religious experience, for the nation was destroyed in A.D. 70 and the continuity remained unbroken.  Nor is it that of a developing idea or complex of ideas, for the movement does not depend on the work of a series of great thinkers.  Rather the Bible claims to record a continuous and consistent series of divine acts specially related to the history of a chosen people, together with the interpretation of those acts which God made known to those whom He “called” or “raised up”.  The basic continuity lies on the divine side, in God’s will and purpose manifested in acts.  On the human side the continuity is not that of steady and consistent development and response; Israel often rejects the divine revelation and learns as a nation only when it has passed through judgment (e.g. the Exile).  Finally it rejected the Messiah when He came, but the divine purpose continued.  Secondly, the determining form of inspiration in the Bible is of a kind which demands a more exact description than “insight into spiritual truth”.  The prophets, for example, did not conceive their function as the preaching of higher spiritual ideas to their contemporaries.  They recalled them to knowledge of what God had done in and for Israel in the past; they discerned His present acts; and they announced that which He would do.  In all this they were aware of a consistent divine character and purpose; God’s acts revealed for them what He is and what He demands of His people.  In so far as they teach truths about the nature of God and the duties of man these truths are derived from an understanding of God’s covenant with Israel and are not separable from that understanding.  Similarly in the New Testament apostolic inspiration is the gift of insight into the supreme divine act in the life and death and resurrection of Christ.  For the apostolic writers everything turns on knowing and obeying the Word of God made flesh.  Throughout the Bible we have the record of God’s witness to Himself in the events of a particular history, interpreted and set down by minds which He enlightened to understand and expound it.  This is the kind of authority which the Bible itself claims.

      (b) We may now try to state more exactly what Christians mean by the unique inspiration of the Bible and by describing it as the “Word of God”.

      (i) Even the unbeliever can discern special qualities in the biblical books.  As literature they hold a high place among the great books of the world.  The philosophical moralist will find much to admire in many passages of the Bible, though some parts of its teaching on conduct may strike him as strange or even perverse.  Again, if placed beside the classical scriptures of other faiths and studied by the comparative method, the Bible will hold its own; its place after such a comparison may appear pre-eminent even to some non-Christian minds, if they have been nurtured in our Western tradition.  Yet none of these approaches will legitimately yield the conclusion that its authority for us is unique.  A comparative consideration of the merits of the Bible as literature, as morals, and as a great religious classic is useful for some purposes and perfectly legitimate; it may for some minds open the way to a more profound insight into its meaning.  But ultimately the inspiration of the Bible, as Christians understand it, can only be perceived and apprehended from within Christian faith.

      (ii) The reason for this lies in the nature of the contents of the Bible.  Its unity is found in its unique relation to Christ.  The Incarnation is for Christian faith the central and supreme event in history, and the New Testament records both the facts of the Incarnate Life and their revealing significance.  As described in the New Testament the life and work of Jesus Christ cannot be understood except as the climax and fulfillment of a preparatory revelation made to Israel and set forth in the Old Testament.  The whole Bible reveals one moving and consistent divine activity of revelation culminating in the Word Incarnate.  This unity is perceptible only to those who receive Christ in faith.  To them the Bible reveals the story of the divine self-disclosure in a particular history, as its meaning was interpreted by prophets and apostles standing within the actual course of that history.  Thus the Bible gives a knowledge of God which can be found nowhere else, for there is no rival account of what the Bible describes ; and it conveys a truth, which, once it is recognized as such, must take a supreme place in the mind and heart of the believer.*  The Scriptures are the unique Word of God because they are the only vessel containing this divine truth of which the centre and fullness is Christ.  Faith in Him as Lord and Saviour is inseparably bound up with the divinely ordered testimony of the Bible.  As the permanent witness to God’s truth, declared in God’s historical self-disclosure, the Bible in its parts and as a whole has been formed by the creative and illuminating work of the Holy Spirit, whose function it is to bear witness to Christ.  The claim that one canon of sacred writings bears unique testimony to God’s revelation is a challenge to faith.  But it is congruous with the divine choice of one people and the divine way of redemption by particular events.

            [*This does not mean that the truth given in the Bible is out of relation with other forms of truth.  As the Bible teaches, God is the author of Creation as well as of Redemption.  Our “natural” knowledge of our world and of ourselves, so far as it is accurate and complete, is a true knowledge of His creation and it comes to us through faculties which He has created.  But natural knowledge, e.g. scientific and historical, is never complete and is always in process of development.  We must not therefore expect that at any particular time every problem of its relation to Biblical truth can be solved.  But at all times the central truths of revelation and redemption will throw light on other forms of knowledge, and these truths themselves, having been grasped, by faith, need to be interpreted and set in order by the powers of our understanding.]

      (iii) The Church reads and hears the Scriptures not only as the record of that which has been revealed, but as the Word by which God speaks here and now to His people.  When the divine Word took flesh in Christ He came to judge and to save.  So the Word of God received and communicated by prophets and apostles before and after Christ was effective for God’s saving purpose.  By it the minds and consciences of those whom it reached were brought into a new relation with Him for judgment and salvation.  The written Word remains the permanent instrument by which God guides and renews His Church.  Through the inspired Scriptures the Holy Spirit today instructs, admonishes, and strengthens His people in that faith and life which He has created in them.  The Word in the Bible is made contemporary and living when the Church hears, studies and preaches it with a desire to receive and obey it.  So in her central act of worship the Church first hears the Scriptures and sums up their message in the Creed before proceeding to the sacramental celebration of Christ’s saving work.  In the doctrine and the life of the Church the Scriptures have manifestly been the constant source of reformation and renewal by recalling her to her fundamental faith and mission.  We must therefore believe that in the divine purpose the Scriptures were formed by the Holy Spirit to be an enduring organ of His guidance of the Church in all ages.  Without them the Church would be in danger of becoming separated from its roots.  At the same time it is true that the Scriptures are, now as in the past, addressed to the living community which is God’s people in Christ.  Outside the life of that community they may lose the power to convey the wholeness of their message to the separated individual or group.

      (iv) The inspiration of the Bible does not imply either that its meaning is self-evident or that it cannot be made the subject of thorough historical investigation.  Within the Bible itself we find its writers studying and pondering over the words of earlier prophets and teachers.  In the primitive Church of the New Testament period the Jewish scriptures were searched for their testimony to Christ, and ancient words took on a new significance.  The utterances of the prophets expressed in limited and often material images could now be understood in their last and final meaning in Christ.  The early Church put a considerable intellectual effort into the work of interpreting the Scriptures.  In every age the Church must study and teach as well as read the Scriptures, for the divine Word does not operate automatically in a quasi-magical way on minds unwilling to devote themselves to thought and investigation.  Again, the historical study of the Scriptures by the best critical methods available is legitimate and ultimately profitable for their understanding.  The historical origin of the books of the Bible is relevant to their interpretation, and so too is the manner in which they were composed or compiled, their relation to one another in sequence, and the similarities and differences of their expression, outlook and purpose.  It is part of the “historical” character of the Bible that its books were written at various times over a long period and bear the marks of the different circumstances of their origin.  Belief in inspiration does not give us any right to predetermine how the Holy Spirit must have operated, particularly in the Old Testament, to enlighten men’s minds “by diverse portions and in diverse manners”.  The theory of “verbal” inspiration was the result of such a dogmatic predetermination.  New critical methods and a more intimate knowledge of the ancient world have tended in some phases of modern investigation of the Bible to produce results which appear destructive.  The original meaning of important passages is seen to differ from their traditional interpretation; doubt may be thrown on the trustworthiness of important statements of fact.  On the whole it may be said that what appeared to be the more destructive results of some of the critical work of the last hundred years were ultimately due not so much to the assured conclusions of scholarship as to the theological pre-suppositions of the critics.  The work of analytical criticism is now more often combined with recognition of the underlying theological unity of the Bible, which stands out no less clearly when its books are studied in their setting in the ancient world.  The Christian critical scholar who approaches the Bible with intellectual integrity will often find that he comes upon baffling problems, but without denying the problems or forsaking the method he will have an eye prepared to see the signs of one Spirit informing the whole Scripture.†

      (c) How was the “canon” of Scripture formed?  Some account is needed to explain the position of the “apocrypha”.

      (i) The exact sense in which the term “canon” was first applied to the Scriptures is disputed.  Some have held that the word was used in the sense of “rule of life” (cp. Gal 6:16) and the books were called canonical as forming a rule of faith or life.  More probably the word simply denoted the “list” by which the contents were defined and “canonical” simply meant “on the list”.  κανονίζειν is applied not only to the books as a whole but to a single book.  But the other idea, if not present from the first, was soon suggested, and the Canon of Scripture came to be regarded as a standard to which an appeal could be made.  The whole conception is Christian rather than Jewish.  We must beware of arguing as if the Jews regarded their Scriptures as canonical in quite the same sense as the Christians. [The substantive κανών is found first in the writings of Amphilochius (380).  Athanasius in his Festal Epistle (367) speaks of the books of Scripture as κανονιζόμενα.]

      (ii) The Jews divided the Old Testament into three great divisions: (i) The Law; (ii) The Prophets (these included the “Former Prophets”, i.e. the historical books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings, and the “Latter Prophets”, i.e. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Twelve); (iii) The Writings (these included the Psalms, Proverbs and Job, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah and Chronicles and the five “rolls”, i.e. the Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes and Esther).  It is usually supposed that these three divisions correspond to three more or less distinct stages in the formation of the Old Testament Canon.  The traditions found in 2 Esdras 14 and 2 Macc 2:13 assigning the formation of the Canon to Ezra and Nehemiah respectively are historically worth very little.  The chief steps that we can trace in the process are these:

      (1) The publication of Deuteronomy in 621 B.C. is the first great landmark (2 Kings 23:1–3).  “We have here a solemn religious act by which the king and people alike ... accept the book read before them as expressing the divine will and take its precepts as binding upon themselves.  This is the essential meaning that, as applied to a book, is contained in the epithet ‘canonical’, which means ‘authoritative’, and authoritative because in its ultimate origin Divine.” [Sanday, ‘Bible’, E.R.E. ii. 565b.]

      The Law promulgated by Ezra and Nehemiah was substantially our present Pentateuch, with the possible addition of the book of Joshua (Neh 8–10).  If we allow for certain minor editorial changes and additions, the whole Law was probably canonical by then, i.e. 440 B.C.  It is significant that the Samaritans accepted only the Law as canonical.  The simplest explanation is that at the time that they formed their separate community the Canon of Scripture contained nothing else.

      (2) No doubt the collection of prophetical writings began quite early.  On the one hand, the failure of Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah to find a place in this section of the canon suggests that when they were composed, it was at least on the way to being closed.  On the other hand, the Chronicler treats the text of Samuel and Kings with great freedom, which equally suggests that by 300 B.C. they were not canonical in the full sense of the term.  The strange variations in the tax version of Samuel seem to carry this condition of things down even to a later date.  The earliest references to the “prophets” as a definite collection are found soon after 200 B.C.  In Ecclus 49:10 (180 B.C.), the “twelve prophets” are referred to as parallel to Jeremiah and Ezekiel.  So, too, Dan 9:2 (168 B.C.) quotes Jeremiah as authoritative.  The prophetic canon was therefore probably closed about 200 B.C.

      (3) The formation of the third section of the Canon is more obscure.  The earliest mention of any such collection is the prologue to Ecclesiasticus (130 B.C.), which alludes to “The Law, the Prophets and the other writings”.  The very vagueness of the language employed suggests that this last division was not as yet clearly defined.  On the one hand, the book of Daniel and certain psalms which are probably Maccabaean were admitted into it.  On the other hand, the so-called “Psalms of Solomon”, composed 70–40 B.C., failed to find admittance.  We may conclude, therefore, that this section of the Canon was closed about 100 B.C.  It is worth noting that in 1 Macc 7:17, Psalm 79 is quoted as Scripture.  But in any case the Psalms were the earliest of these writings to gain their position in the Canon.

      (iii) Among the Jews of Palestine the Canon of Scripture was thus practically closed during the first century B.C.  Edifying books were still composed and widely used and quoted, but there had grown up a refusal, at least on the part of the Rabbis, to place them on a level with the Scriptures.  Discussion as to the right of certain books to a place in the Canon went on into the second century A.D.  The most disputed were the Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes and Esther.  The idea of canonicity was expressed in Jewish language by saying that the Scriptures “defiled the hands”, i.e. rendered those who handled them ceremonially unclean, the object of this rule being to prevent irreverent handling.  The final stage in the settlement of the Jewish Canon was reached at the Council of Jamnia held about A.D. 90.  After the fall of Jerusalem Jamnia became the centre of Palestinian Judaism.  There the Canon of the Old Testament was for all practical purposes determined, and it included all the books in the English Old Testament and no others.

      But meanwhile from the middle of the first century B.C. the Hellenistic Jews, especially the Jews of Alexandria, did not follow the Palestinian Rabbis in the limitation of the Canon and the general treatment of the Old Testament.  Not only did they adopt a different arrangement of the books, but they interspersed among the older books many later writings.  These included books originally composed in Hebrew, such as 1 Maccabees, Ecclesiasticus, Tobit, Judith and Baruch and also books composed originally in Greek, such as Wisdom and 2 Maccabees and expansions of canonical books.  So the Alexandrian Canon was much wider than the Palestinian, and it has even been argued that the Alexandrians recognized no fixed canon at all.  They were ready to admit whatever they judged to be edifying.

      Accordingly the Christian Church found itself faced both with a larger and a smaller Canon.  When the first Christians broke away from Judaism they did not take with them a well-defined Bible.  It would seem that on the question of the canonicity they were content to defer to the judgment of Judaism.  Even as late as A.D. 170 Melito, Bishop of Sardis, travelled to Judaea to make a special list.  Within the New Testament itself all the books of the Old Testament are quoted as authoritative except Ecclesiastes, Canticles, Esther, Ezra and Nehemiah.  On the other hand, none of the apocryphal books is mentioned by name, though their language is in some cases undoubtedly in the mind of New Testament writers.  But the book of Enoch, which lies outside even the Apocrypha, is quoted as Scripture in Jude 14.  The main body of the Church went on using the Greek Bible and the Alexandrian Canon.  It was recognized, however, especially by learned men who were in touch with Judaism, that there was a more limited Jewish Canon.  S. Jerome, for instance, who knew Hebrew, took over the canon of his Jewish instructors.  Through his influence the knowledge of the difference between the Hebrew and Greek Bibles was kept alive.  The influence of S. Augustine on the other side obtained for the apocryphal books a definite footing.  Still all through the Middle Ages the more learned scholars drew a clear line between the Jewish Canon and the apocryphal books.  At the Reformation the Council of Trent abolished every shade of distinction between the books. [The fact that the Roman Church does not include in its Canon some of our apocryphal books (1 and 2 Esdras and The Prayer of Manasses) illustrates the point that “the Apocrypha” is not an undisputed and clearly defined whole, like the Old and New Testaments.]  Luther, following S. Jerome, separated the canonical from the apocryphal books, but gave the latter a place as “useful to read”.  Our Article, quoting S. Jerome, does the same.  The Calvinists rejected the Apocrypha entirely, and the English Puritans wished the Church to follow their example. [A relic of this Puritan tendency survives in the exclusion of the Apocrypha from all use in the Irish Church and in the inability of the British and Foreign Bible Society to supply complete Bibles.  They are forbidden to include the Apocrypha by their constitution.  The apocryphal books, since “the Church doth read” them, should be included in complete editions of the Bible.  The lectionary of 1922 and its more recent successors include lessons from the Apocrypha.]

      The word “apocrypha” is one that has had many meanings.  Originally it simply meant “hidden”, and “apocryphal” books were books containing esoteric teaching known only to the few.  The idea of such books was increasingly repugnant to the Christian Church and the word acquired a secondary meaning of “heretical” or “spurious”.  In the fourth century the word is applied in a different sense by S. Jerome, and comes to mean simply non-canonical.  “Quicquid extra hos” (i.e. the Hebrew Canon) “est, inter απόκρυφα esse ponendum.”  He uses it to include both those books that had previously been termed “ecclesiastical” and also those usually styled “apocryphal”.  It is from S. Jerome that the title “apocrypha” as we use it today comes.

      (iv) The formation of the Canon of the New Testament, like that of the Old, was a gradual process.  We may summarize its chief stages as follows:

      (1) The earliest stage was the informal collection by local Churches of writings of spiritual value.  These would include letters from Apostles and other leaders and probably collections of our Lord’s sayings and perhaps records of His life and death, that were recognized as coming from reliable sources.  A church like Corinth would preserve letters from S. Paul for future guidance.  Then local churches would interchange letters and writings.  “Ephesians” was probably in origin a circular letter with the name of the local church left blank to be filled in.  The words “at Ephesus” in 1:1 are absent from the two oldest MSS.  א B.  There is some evidence that Romans was also used as a circular letter without the addition of the last chapters.  In Col 4:16 the Colossians are bidden to hand on the Epistle to be read at Laodicea and in turn to read “the Epistle from Laodicea”, i.e. probably the Epistle to the Ephesians, which had been sent there first.  We can see then how the germ of a canon arose.  Churches compared notes about the sacred writings that they treasured.  They interchanged copies, and so in a sense each church came almost unconsciously to form its own canon.

      It is most difficult to ascertain how early the books of the New Testament won general acceptance in any given region.  Our earliest evidence is that of quotations.  In the earliest days we can hardly expect exact quotations from N.T. writings.  They had not yet attained their unique position.  Stress was still laid on oral tradition.  Phrases from set catechetical formulas still lingered in the memory of the writers.  There was as yet no conception of the duty of exact quotations from books that were not yet in the full sense canonical.  So it is most difficult to be sure what N.T. books were known to early Christian writers.  Our evidence does not become clear till the end of the second century.

      (2) The earliest definite mention of anything like a canon of Scripture is found in the case of the heretic Marcion (A.D. 140).  He formed a collection of S. Paul’s Epistles, rejecting the Pastorals, and added a mutilated version of S. Luke’s Gospel.  These alone he accepted as authoritative.  About A.D. 200 we find the Muratorian Canon, a fragment containing a list of books recognized as authoritative at Rome.  This is the earliest list of the kind that has survived: it need by no means be the earliest that was formed.  At the close of the second century we find in several writers the conception of a New Testament as a companion to the Old, and books from this new collection are cited as Scripture.  This does not necessarily imply that the limits of this collection were as yet fixed.  The Muratorian Canon includes the four Gospels, Acts, all the Epistles of S. Paul, the Apocalypse, two Epistles of S. John, S. Jude, and the First Epistle of S. Peter.  The Second Epistle of S. Peter is treated as doubtful.  “Some of the members do not wish it to be read in the church.”  It omits Hebrews, S. James, and one of S. John’s Epistles, presumably the third.  Hermas is to be read privately, but not in church. [The Muratorian fragment is given in Gwatkin, Selections from Early Christian Writers, p. 82 and Kidd, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Church, vol. i, p. 166.]

      (3) By A.D. 400 the Canon of the New Testament had for all practical purposes become fixed. Early in the fourth century. Eusebius gives a list of books as accepted by his contemporaries. [Eusebius, H.E. iii, 3 and 25, quoted Gwatkin, pp. 33 ff., Kidd, p. 235.]  He divides them practically into three classes: (1) the “acknowledged” books (ομολογούμενα), (2) the “disputed” books (αντιλεγόμενα), and (3) the “spurious” books (νόθα).  In the first class he places the four Gospels, Acts, the Epistles of S. Paul, the First Epistle of S. Peter and the First Epistle of S. John.  The Apocalypse he places with hesitation in this class, though he afterwards includes it with a similar hesitation in the second class.  It would also seem that he includes Hebrews among S. Paul’s Epistles as he does elsewhere, though he allows that its authorship is disputed by the Roman Church. [H.E. iii. 3.]  In the second class he places, as “recognized by most”, the Epistles of S. James, S. Jude, 2 and 3 John and 2 Peter.  Among the “spurious” he includes the Acts of Paul, Hermas, the Apocalypse of Peter, the Epistle of Barnabas, the so-called “Teaching of the Apostles”, and also perhaps the Apocalypse of John.  The Canon of S. Cyril of Jerusalem [Catechetical Lectures, iv. 33.] (A.D. 340) is the same as our own except for the omission of the Apocalypse.  The Canons of Athanasius [Festal Epistle, 39.] (A.D. 367) and Epiphanius [Heresies, c. 76.] are identical with our own.  At this time the chief point of difference was the acceptance of the Apocalypse.  It was rejected, e.g. by Gregory of Nazianzum and Amphilochius of Iconium.  A Synod of Carthage formally ratified a list identical with our present canon.  Its date may be either 397 or 419 and its authority extended beyond Africa.  This decision was confirmed by the Trullan Council in 692.  But in actual fact the final determination of the New Testament canon was probably due to other causes than the decisions of Synods.  In the West the influence of the Vulgate and in the East the agreement of a few leading and learned authorities carried great weight.  The decisions of Councils did but ratify current usage.

      So then we may sum up the history of the Canon by saying it was the gradual work of the collective consciousness of the Church guided by the Holy Spirit.  It was a task not only of collecting but of sifting and rejecting.  There was a real “inspiration of selection”.  “What a number of works circulated among churches of the second century all enjoying a greater or less degree of authority, only to lose it! ... It is certainly a wonderful feat on the part of the early Church to have by degrees sifted out this mass of literature: and still more wonderful that it should not have discarded, at least so far as the New Testament is concerned, no single work which after generations have found cause to look back upon with any regret.” [Sanday, Inspiration, pp. 27–28.]  It was a work in which all members of the body played their part.  The devotional taste of the multitude was guided and corrected by the learning and spiritual enlightenment of its leaders.  Their decisions approved themselves to the mind and conscience of the whole Church.  In the recognition of these books as forming an inspired Canon the belief that they were composed by Apostles or their disciples played a part.  The Church attempted to make historical judgments because her faith is based on history.  Not all books claiming to be by Apostles were accepted (e.g. The Gospel of Peter).  The final test was whether the book was recognized to bear the stamp of apostolic truth and to set forth the apostolic gospel.  This consideration applies to books which are now believed not to be directly apostolic in origin, e.g. S. Matthew’s Gospel.*†

            [*The language of our Article is apparently inconsistent.  It first defines as “Canonical” those books “of whose authority was never any doubt in the Church”, which if strictly interpreted would exclude the “Antilegomena”.  Then it gives a full list of N.T. and says “All the books of N.T., as they are commonly received, we do receive and account them for canonical.”  Westcott suggested that a distinction was purposely made between “Canonical” Books and such “canonical books as have never been doubted in the church”.  This would allow room for the opinions of reformers who rejected certain books, e.g. Luther rejected the Epistle of S. James.  More probably the language is simply careless and we may fairly hold that the appeal is made to the judgment of the whole Church as expressed in the final form of the Canon.  The disputed books were at most rejected by parts of the Church and their opinion was finally subordinated to the judgment of the Church as a whole.]

      (d) The relation of the Jewish Law to the Christian Church was an early problem.  On the one hand, Jewish Christians were reluctant to allow that even the regulations of the old law concerning food, etc., were no longer binding.  On the other hand certain Gnostics and the Marcionites rejected the Old Testament altogether, partly on the ground that its morality was un-Christian.  The Church refused to abandon the Old Testament and in various ways set about making a reply to Marcion.  Thus Irenaeus expounded the view that God’s revelation and commandments had been given to men by stages according to their capacities and needs.  He and other teachers developed the typological interpretation already begun in the apostolic Church, and by some, as by Origen and his school, allegorization in the manner of Philo was carried to extreme lengths.  At the time of the Reformation the new emphasis on the authority of the Bible revived the whole question of the Old Testament.  Some rejected it entirely “as a book nothing necessary to the Christians which live under the Gospel”.  Others again insisted on the obligation of the whole Jewish Law upon Christians.  Article VII replies by laying down (i) that the O.T. is not to be rejected as contrary to the New; (ii) that it looks forward to Christ.  God’s promises to the Jews are more than transitory; (iii) that we must draw a distinction between the civil and ceremonial law which are no longer binding and the moral law which remains binding.

      (i) “The Old Testament is not contrary to the New” because it is an earlier and preparatory stage in one single divine revelation.  To say that it is “not contrary to” does not mean that it has the perfection of the New.  In earlier times God allowed and even enjoined much that is imperfect and even, in the light of the higher standard of later days, wrong (cp. Lk 9:54 and the Sermon on the Mount).  He taught men gradually, as they were able to receive it.  We always need to remember that the Church does not accept the Old Testament by itself but only as fulfilled and supplemented by the New Testament.  Nearly all the popular objections to Bible morality are based on the fallacy of taking the Old Testament apart in isolation from its fulfillment and correction in the New Testament.

      (ii) It is perfectly true to say that the Old Testament offers salvation through Christ, though in a different way from the New Testament.  Although in the light of our modern knowledge the history of the Messianic hope has needed to be rewritten, yet it remains as real and true as ever.  The prophets and writers of the Old Testament voiced ideals and aspirations that they felt sure that a loving and righteous God must one day fulfill, just because He was loving and righteous.  They were inspired to feel their need of a Saviour.  This Messianic hope developed on several independent lines.  At one time it took the form of an ideal king of the house of David whom God would raise up to do the work that the actual kings were doing so badly (cp. Is 9:6; Ezek 34:23, etc.).  At other times it was a vision of God Himself coming to judge the earth, to overwhelm the enemies of Israel and establish a reign of perfect justice (cp. Ps 50; Is 59:16 ff.; Mal 3:1, etc.).  Elsewhere it appeared in the shape of the “suffering servant”, an idealization of a perfect Israel fulfilling God’s destiny for itself and so by its sufferings redeeming the world (Is 53).  In short, while other nations were content to look back to the past for a golden age, Israel was inspired to look for it in the future.  This glorious picture they attempted to portray in the highest terms that they knew.  In the hands of Israel’s prophets it took many shapes, a restored and perfect Jerusalem, a new and painless earth, a kingdom of perfect justice, an age of plenty.  The Messianic hope expressed itself in many ways, but all looked forward to the establishment of the Kingdom of God.  In this sense certainly “the fathers did not look only for transitory promises”.  These hopes and aspirations for the complete manifestation of His righteousness and sovereignty they were convinced that God must some day fulfill because He was God.  In a very wonderful way they all met and were fulfilled in Christ.  The Old Testament promised a deliverer, the New Testament records His coming.

      Again, the faith of Israel really carried with it a belief in a future life.  No doubt any such clear and definite belief only appears quite late in Jewish writings.  At first it would seem that the Jews regarded life in Sheol as a vague and shadowy existence, hardly worth being called life.  The proof of God’s favour was to be found in long life and prosperity in this world rather than in any reward in the next.  But quite early writings bear witness to a faith in God that was bound to issue ultimately in a belief in a future life worth the name.  In Mk 12:26–27 Christ shows that the language of early times carried with it implications that were only partially understood by those who employed it.  What the pious Jew really desired was life in union with God.  Such life possessed a positive character independent of time altogether.  Hence it is most difficult to be sure how much is meant by the language of many of the psalms.  Such psalms as the 16th and 17th, for instance, contain the principle of eternal life in conscious fellowship with God, but it is doubtful if they imply anything like a personal resurrection.  At the same time a belief that death could not destroy such fellowship was a deduction that faith in God must ultimately make and it is implicit in the psalmists’ language.  In the famous chapter of Ezekiel (37) the resurrection of dry bones signifies primarily the resurrection of the nation, not of the individual Israelite.  But Israel could not contemplate a future reign of God upon earth to be enjoyed only by that generation of Israelites then alive.  Therefore they were led to the belief that dead Israelites would be raised up again to share it.  The Messianic hope must be for the whole nation, not for one part.  This idea of a resurrection of the dead is found quite clearly in the late passage Is 26:19 and again in Daniel 12:2.  It is, as it were, being worked out in the book of Job (cp. 19:25–27).  Though it was rejected by the Sadducecs, it formed a part of common Jewish belief in our Lord’s day.  So we may say that the Jews only gradually came to hold explicitly a full belief in a future life beyond the grave, but that such a belief was contained from the first in their knowledge of God and God’s character.

      (iii) The difficult question of the O.T. Law is solved by making a distinction between the ceremonial and civil law on the one hand and the moral on the other.  The distinction is useful and no doubt corresponds with the decision of the Church made at the Council of Jerusalem, but we need to remember that it is utterly alien to the Jewish mind.  There is not one trace of it in O.T. itself.  To the Jew all alike was the Law of God: each part was equally divine and equally sacred.  If the first disciples more or less explicitly tolerated any such distinction it was because part of the law had been definitely abrogated by an act of God Himself, namely by the teaching of Jesus the Messiah, God’s authorized representative.  As such He had instituted a New Covenant by His death, under which Jew and Gentile can be saved not by obedience to the law but by faith in Jesus the Messiah.  Accordingly, as the Council of Jerusalem and the teaching of S. Paul in his Epistles, especially Galatians and Romans, show, the ritual and ceremonial law was regarded as abolished by One who had authority to abolish it.  The one sacrifice of Christ had made the ancient sacrifices superfluous and impossible; the New Israel under the New Covenant had its own rites of cleansing and initiation by which new members were incorporated into Christ.  The ceremonial law of the Old Testament could no longer be regarded as God’s command for Christians.  The civil law was the law of Israel as a nation.  In part it had fallen into disuse as a result of changed circumstances.  But in any case it was superseded by the law of the New Israel.  National distinctions were done away with.  Hence the civil law of the Jewish nation was binding at most on Jews.  There could be no longer any need for a Gentile to become a Jew in order to enter into God’s chosen people.  Faith in Christ was the sole essential condition for membership of the New Israel.  The case of the moral law was different.  It was an embodiment of God’s will for all men, a partial disclosure of the law of man’s true being.  As such Christ did not abolish but rather deepened and enforced it (cp. Mt 22:37).  The righteousness of His disciples was to exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees as being righteousness of heart and will and not only of act (Mt 5:20).  Further, Christians have a new motive, no longer a forced obedience to a law imposed from without, but a free and willing obedience springing from within, from a heart filled with the love of God.  This new motive demands an even more complete submission to the will of God than the old.  Accordingly we find in the Epistles abundant exhortations to Christians to live worthily of their profession by obedience to the moral law.  Rom 13:9, Eph 6:2, Jas 2:10, etc.†

The Creeds – Article  VIII

      One of the Articles of 1553, slightly altered.  It was composed as a protest against Anabaptists, who rejected all creeds.

      § 1.  The origin of Creeds.

      (1) From the first the Church required from all who wished to become her members, some public profession of faith in Christ.  Men whose hearts were touched by the apostolic preaching were urged to repent and believe and be baptized (e.g. Acts 20:21).  S. Timothy, probably at the moment of his baptism, had confessed a good confession in the sight of many witnesses (1 Tim 6:12).  In the Bezan text of the Acts we find such a confession put into the mouth of the Ethiopian Eunuch: “See, here is water; what doth hinder me to be baptized?  And Philip said, If thou believest with all thy heart, thou mayest.  And he answered and said, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God” (Acts 8:36–37).  The last two sentences formed probably no part of the original text as written by S. Luke, but they are quite early [They were known to Irenaeus (180).] and illustrate the practice of the Church at least in sub-apostolic times.  So, too, S. Peter speaks of the “interrogation” (επερώτημα) in connection with Baptism (1 Pet 3:21).

      (i) When we wish to go a step further and ask in what form such belief was expressed, the evidence is less clear.  Probably some quite short and simple form of words was in use, such as “I believe that Jesus is Lord”.  The primary aim of the earliest apostolic preaching was to create the conviction that Jesus of Nazareth who had been crucified was the Christ.  Men already possessed a belief in a Messiah: they were now bidden to identify the Messiah whom they expected with Jesus.  The use of some such simple formula is implied in passages of S. Paul.  “No man can say that Jesus is Lord save in the Holy Ghost” (1 Cor 12:3).  “If thou shalt confess with thy mouth Jesus as Lord and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.  For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation” (Rom 10:9–10, cp. Phil 2:11).  The same custom is also suggested by the First Epistle of S. John.  “Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God abideth in him and he in God” (4:15.  Notice the aorist, denoting a single definite act of confession.)  So, too, in 5:5 the context quite clearly points to a connection between the confession that “Jesus is the Son of God” and the coming by water, i.e. baptism (cp. also Heb 4:14).  The language of S. John suggests an alternative form of baptismal confession, “I believe that Jesus is the Son of God”, the phrase “Son of God” having primarily a Messianic meaning.  In short, all the evidence goes to show that from the earliest days Baptism in the name of the Lord Jesus was accompanied by a public acknowledgement of His lordship by the recipient.  Matthew 28:19 shows that before the end of the first century the confession of the three-fold Name accompanied baptism at least in some parts of the Church.  The earlier confession of Jesus as Lord or Son of God was thus embodied in a fuller formula which was everywhere adopted in the second century.  In these primitive confessions are contained the germs of our later Creeds.

      (ii) One of the connecting links between our fully developed creeds and the short and simple formulas of the apostolic Church may probably be found in the questions and responses that formed a part of the service of baptism.  The earliest precise evidence we possess about this service shows that these questions and answers were the form in which the threefold Name was invoked at the moment of baptism.  This may be illustrated from the rite as described in the Apostolic Tradition of S. Hippolytus of Rome (A.D. 220).

      “And when he who is to be baptized goes down to the water, let him who baptizes lay hand on him saying thus, ‘Dost thou believe in God the Father Almighty?’  And he who is being baptized shall say, ‘I believe.’  Let him forthwith baptize him once, having his hand laid upon his head.  And after this let him say, ‘Dost thou believe in Christ Jesus, The Son of God, Who was born by the Holy Spirit from the Virgin Mary, Who was crucified under Pontius Pilate and died, and rose again on the third day living from the dead, and ascended into the heavens, and sat down on the right hand of the Father, and will come to judge the living and the dead?’  And when he says, ‘I believe,’ let him baptize him the second time.  And again let him say, ‘Dost thou believe in the Holy Spirit, in the holy Church, and the resurrection of the flesh?’  And he who is being baptized shall say, ‘I believe.’  And so let him baptize him the third time.”

      This form of rite consisting of questions and answers at the moment of baptism was not a peculiarly Roman custom.  The evidence points to the conclusion that it was normal in both East and West in the first four centuries.  Thus Tertullian in Africa writes “We are thrice immersed giving a somewhat fuller answer than the Lord laid down in the Gospel.”  In the fourth century S. Cyril of Jerusalem describes the act of baptism by saying “ye were led by the hand to the holy font of the divine baptism ... and each one was asked whether he believed in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost and ye confessed the saving confession”.  There is no suggestion here that the candidate for baptism himself uttered a credal statement in or at the font.  The question of the minister with the assent of the candidate constituted both the invocation of the threefold Name and the saving confession of faith.  In the questions we have a tripartite interrogatory creed forming part of the actual rite of baptism.

      But, if at the crucial moment of the baptismal rite there took place this process of definite questioning, this clearly presupposed some considerable instruction of the candidates.  It is in this preliminary instruction that we find the origin of the fully developed creed forms.  In reading the Acts of the Apostles we cannot but be struck by the apparent scantiness of the teaching given to candidates for baptism.  Partly no doubt this was due to the inchoate form of the Church’s belief.  She was only making clear to herself, as the result of her growing experience, all that was contained in her belief in Jesus as Lord.  Moreover the first converts came almost entirely from Jews or from those under Jewish influence, to whom the fundamental truth of the Unity of God and His creation of the world would be already familiar.  But even within the New Testament we find hints of a more or less regular outline of Christian instruction.  The Roman Christians had obeyed the “form of doctrine unto which ye were delivered”, i.e. as unto a guardian (Rom 6:17).  S. Paul exhorted S. Timothy to “hold fast the form of sound words, which thou hast heard of me” (2 Tim 1:13, cp. also 2:8).  We may be sure that some statement of the main facts about the life and death of the Lord Jesus was always given, where necessary, before Baptism.  The early chapters of the Acts suggest that the Church possessed a common storehouse of proof-texts from the Old Testament, used to reconcile the Jewish mind to the unwelcome fact of a suffering Messiah.  In 1 Cor 15:3–7 we have something approaching an official list of Resurrection appearances (cp. also the later summary given in [Mk] 16:9 ff.).  In 1. Tim 3:16 we have a fragment of an early Christian hymn.  “He who was manifested in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of Angels, preached among the nations, believed on in the world, received up in glory.  In the New Testament generally we find abundant evidence of a tendency to crystallize fundamental points of belief in summary statements.  Sometimes, as in 1 Cor15:3–7, Phil 2:5–11, 1 Pet 3:18–22, these statements are purely Christological in content; others, as in 1 Cor 8:6, 1 Tim 6:13, 1 Pet 1:21 (cf. the opening greeting of some of the epistles) are bipartite in form.  In other passages, such as 1 Cor 12:4–6, 2 Cor 13:14, 1 Pet 1:2, there is evidence of an underlying threefold structure.  None of these are creeds in the sense of a fixed official and exactly worded formula; they all exhibit patterns of formulation which played a part in the final shaping of the creeds.  We must note that, then as now, similar patterns of statement would occur in the liturgical prayers of the Church.  By the second half of the second century we find these summaries tending to settle into one predominating form, namely, that with which we are familiar in the Apostles’ Creed, with an opening section on God the Father, a central and rather longer section on Jesus Christ and the events of His life, and a third section on the Holy Spirit, the Church and eternal life.  There is, however, no evidence that in the second or even in the early third century any one such profession of faith with a precise and sacrosanct wording was the officially recognized formula in any local church. [The variations in the creed-like formulas found in authors of the second century are not due to reluctance to quote the exact words of an existing official formula.  The rule of secrecy about the creed came in later with the practice of the traditio and redditio symboli.]  This stage was reached at some time in the third century.  During this century the course of instruction of catechumens took on a more settled sequence.  A few days or weeks before baptism the candidates were taught the words of the creed and its contents were expounded to them.  This was the traditio symboli.  Shortly before the baptismal service came the redditio symboli, when the candidate gave back the creed by repeating it in the presence of the Bishop or some other teacher.  In East and West alike with variations in detail this procedure was general in the fourth century.  The imparting and rendering of the official declaratory creed (“I believe”), with its careful and exactly preserved wording was thus the culminating, point in the preparation of the candidate for baptism; in the rite of baptism itself the interrogatory creed retained its central place.  The two forms of creed must have influenced one another in ways which we cannot follow in detail.  No doubt the declaratory creed ultimately took its tripartite shape because the baptismal questions were naturally constructed on the threefold Name.

      (iii) Accordingly we find in the fourth century the established use of official creeds in all the principal churches.  The wording of many of them can be reconstructed with reasonable accuracy and in a few cases they are exactly quoted.  Their general structure as developed out of the Trinitarian formula is identical; their details vary at different dates and places.  There is nothing to suggest that before the rise of the Arian controversy the local creeds were formulated, revised or supplemented with a view to excluding heresy.  Their purpose was to set forth positively the fundamental elements of the Christian faith for those who were entering on the Christian life in baptism.

      We can distinguish two main types of creed, Eastern and Western, corresponding in large measure to the difference between the Eastern and the Western mind.  The West was always practical, interested in facts rather than ideas.  The East was speculative, interested in ideas rather than facts.  The West was unable to speculate for itself and unwilling to pay great attention to the speculations of others.  It opposed error less from the love of truth in the abstract than from motives of practical Christianity and the wish to be free from the confusion and distraction of controversy.  The East delighted to think out the intellectual content of the Christian faith.  Hence, inevitably Eastern Christianity produced a crop of homegrown heresies, side by side with those heathen and gnostic errors that from the first had been the common enemy of the whole Church.  These characteristics are reflected in the later development of the creeds.  Western creeds are as a rule short, straightforward recitals of fact.  Eastern creeds add dogmatic explanations and interpretations.  The Western creeds on the whole remain closer to the original purpose of creeds, namely, to state positive truth.  The Eastern creeds necessarily betray a more obvious desire to exclude heresy and error.  Taking our so-called Apostles’ Creed as a typical Western creed and our so-called Nicene Creed as a typical Eastern creed, we may illustrate from them these tendencies:

      (a) We find the Eastern creeds giving the reason for certain facts, where the Western creeds are content simply to state the facts, even where there is no theological question at stake.  The Apostles’ Creed recounts our Lord’s birth.  The Nicene adds that it was “for us men and for our salvation”.  The Apostles’ Creed records the Resurrection on the third day, the Nicene adds that it was “according to the Scriptures”.  The Nicene explains that baptism is “for the remission of sins”.  Similarly Eastern creeds alone have “shall come again with glory”.

      (2) Again, the Eastern creeds tend to greater theological precision.  The Nicene, like other Eastern creeds, has “One” before God, and adds “Maker of heaven and earth”.  Though our Apostles’ Creed contains the latter clause, it was, as we shall see, a late addition, and the Nicene Creed amplifies this by adding “and of all things visible and invisible”.  It is characteristic of Eastern creeds to dwell on the life and work of our Lord before the Incarnation.  “The only begotten Son of God,” “Begotten of His Father before all worlds,” “Through whom all things were made.”  Clause is added to clause in order to insist upon His Divinity.  The Nicene addition “of one substance with the Father” was added only to Eastern Baptismal creeds.  The West felt no need of it.  In contrast with this the Western creeds go straight on from the mention of our Lord to the fact of His Incarnation and His death.  The theological interpretation of His death, “He suffered” though present in Eastern creeds from the first in order to exclude Docetism, was a late addition in the West.  The Nicene Creed further adds “Whose Kingdom shall have no end” to refute the heresy of Marcellus, and emphasizes the Divinity of the Holy Spirit “The Lord and the Giver of life” as against Macedonianism.  The only additions found exclusively in the West are “He descended into Hell” and “the communion of Saints”.

      (b) Hitherto we have dealt with creeds as local variations of a common type, framed for the sole purpose of the instruction and initiation of learners in the Christian faith.  At the Council of Nicaea. we find the first instance of the employment of a creed for an entirely different purpose, as a test of orthodoxy for teachers.  No doubt in earlier days from time to time appeal had been made to the creed as the rule of faith and as the evidence of conformity to primitive and apostolic teaching.  But such a use was only secondary and incidental.  At the Council of Nicaea we find for the first time a creed deliberately constructed for use as a test of right teaching.  This new creed was not intended to supersede existing creeds: it was called into existence for a new purpose.  Accordingly we get from this point onwards a new class of creeds, “conciliar” as opposed to “baptismal”.  The baptismal creed as being the personal confession of faith made by the individual, is naturally in the singular “I believe”.  The conciliar creed, as expressing the faith of an assembled body, is naturally in the plural “We believe”.  The employment of the singular is not a mark of Western as opposed to Eastern creeds, but is found in all baptismal creeds.  The distinction between conciliar and baptismal creeds is not absolute.  The former were built on the foundation of the latter.  The threefold structure is always retained and a conciliar can be adopted as a baptismal creed by the change of the plural into the singular.  But the action of the Council of Nicaea marks a revolution in the use of creeds.  [This is why we meet with “anathemas” for the first time at the end of the creed of the Council of Nicaea.  “The anathemas are there because and only because the creed is no longer the layman’s confession of faith but the bishop’s.  The old principle that the profession of belief of catechumens should be positive in character is not infringed: the Council has not even in view the case of the clergy, still less that of the faithful laity: to bishops alone belonged the office of deciding in the last resort what was Christian and Catholic and what was heretical, and therefore bishops alone should be called upon to guarantee their soundness in the faith by formal and solemn anathema of error,” Turner, History and use of Creeds, p. 28.]

      A third type of creed deserves mention, namely, private or individual theological confessions.  Such sit more loosely to the creed form and have in themselves no authority but that of the individuals who composed them.  We shall see that our so-called Athanasian really belongs to this third type.  The object of their existence is to state certain aspects of Christian truth which made a special appeal to their authors.

      § 2.  The Apostles’ Creed

      (i) We may now turn to the history of “that which is commonly called the Apostles’ Creed”.  Put shortly, the Apostles’ Creed as we use it, is an enlarged form of the Baptismal Creed of the Roman Church.  This “Old Roman Creed” is first found in Greek in a letter written by Marcellus of Ancyra about A.D. 340 to the Bishop of Rome and preserved in the writings of Epiphanius.  Marcellus had been accused of a form of Sabellianism.  In order to prove his orthodoxy he left with the Bishop of Rome a formal statement of his faith.  This was in reality the Baptismal Creed of the Roman Church, which we find some sixty years later described in the commentary of Rufinus.  It runs as follows:

      1. I believe in God (the Father) almighty

      2. And in Christ Jesus, His only Son, our Lord,

            Who was born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary,

            Crucified under Pontius Pilate and buried,

            The third day He rose from the dead,

            He ascended into Heaven,

            Sitteth at the right-hand of the Father,

            Whence He cometh to judge quick and dead.

      3. And in the Holy Ghost,

            Holy Church,

            Remission, of sins,

            Resurrection of flesh.*

            [*Our present text of Marcellus omits “the Father” in the opening clause and adds “eternal life” at the close.  These changes were probably due to the mistakes of copyists.  The Latin of Rufinus has “the Father” and omits “eternal life”, and Jerome expressly tells us that the Roman Creed ends with “Resurrection of flesh”.  Other authorities support this version.

THE OLD ROMAN CREED

            Credo in Deum patrem omnipotentem, et in Christum Iesum filium eius unicum, dominum nostrum, qui natus est de Spiritu Sancto et Maria virgine, crucifixus sub Pontio Pilato et sepultus; tertia die resurrexit a mortuis, ascendit in caelos, sedet ad dexteram patris, unde venturus est iudicare vivos et mortuos.  Et in Spiritum Sanctum, sanctam ecclesiam, remissionem peccatorum, carnis resurrectionem.

THE LATER APOSTLES’ CREED

            Credo in Deum patrem omnipotentem, creatorem caeli et terrae, et in Iesum Christum filium eius unicum, dominum nostrum, qui conceptus est de Spiritu Sancto, natus ex Maria virgine, passus sub Pontio Pilato, crucifixus, mortuus et sepultus; descendit ad inferna, tertia die resurrexit a mortuis, ascendit ad caelos, sedet ad dexteram Dei patris omnipotentis, inde venturus est iudicare vivos et mortuos.  Credo in Spiritum Sanctum, sanctam ecclesiam catholicam, sanctorum communionem, remissionem peccatorum, carnis resurrectionem, vitam aeternam.]

      The Latin version of the Old Roman Creed first appears in the commentary of Rufinus (A.D. 400), in which he compares the creed of his own Church of Aquileia with that of Rome.  This then we can take as our starting point.  By the middle of the fourth century the Old Roman Creed was in use in the form given above.  Two questions still remain.  How much further back can it be traced?  By what process of development did it assume the later form that we commonly call “the Apostles’ Creed”?  It was maintained by Burn and others that the Old Roman Creed went back to the early years of the second century.  There is nothing in its teaching to render this early date improbable, but in view of what has already been said about the development of credal forms in the second century we could hardly date the composition of this creed much before the end of this century, and perhaps it was only in the next century that it became the sole official creed of the Roman Church.  By the fourth century it was certainly well established, for its influence on the formation of other local Western creeds is apparent.

      Harnack and Kattenbusch held that the Old Roman Creed became the direct parent of the Eastern Creeds.  These, it was argued, could be traced back to a single model in the creed of Antioch, and this in turn depended on the Old Roman Creed which was introduced at Antioch after the deposition of Paul of Samosata in 272.  More probably the local Eastern Creeds developed in the second and third centuries independently of Rome and out of the same fundamental needs and practices of the Church.  In any case, the important fact is that they exhibit a similar outline of teaching with those of the West, though with some characteristic features of their own.

      (ii) When we contrast the Old Roman Creed with our present “Apostles’ Creed” we find that it has been enlarged by the following additions:

      “Maker of heaven and earth”

      “Who was conceived”

      “Suffered”

      “Dead”

      “Descended into hell”

      “God ... almighty” (On the right hand of God the Father Almighty)

      “Catholic”

      “The communion of Saints”

      “The life everlasting.”

Of these some appear in use in local creeds earlier than others.  “The life everlasting,” as we learn from Cyprian, had its place in a baptismal interrogation used in the Church of Africa as early as the middle of the third century.  The creed of Milan had “suffered” instead of “was crucified” by the close of the fourth century, when S. Augustine was baptized.  “Descended into hell” is found in the creed of the Church of Aquileia by the time of Rufinus (A.D. 400) and had previously appeared in an Arian creed drawn up at Sirmium in 359 and accepted at Ariminum.  The majority of the additions are found in the creed used by a certain Niceta or Nicetas, Bishop of Remesiana in the Balkan peninsula at the close of the fourth century.  His creed contained “maker of heaven and earth”, “suffered”, “dead”, “catholic”, “communion of saints”, “life everlasting”.  His diocese lay on the borderland between East and West, on the high road between Constantinople and Milan, then the chief city of the West, and we may reasonably suppose that these additions were in part due to Eastern influence.  Again, a creed form has recently been discovered which is probably a personal confession of faith sent by Jerome to Cyril of Jerusalem.  It contains practically all the additions in our present Apostles’ Creed or some equivalent expression.  Jerome came from much the same region as Nicetas, namely, Pannonia, and his creed forms a link between the Old Roman Creed and our present form.  Again, we find most of the additions more or less current in Gaul between the middle of the fifth and the opening of the sixth century.  We have sermons composed by Faustus, Bishop of Riez, for a time abbot of the great monastery of Lerins and by Caesarius, Bishop of Arles (died 543), and a letter written by Cyprian, Bishop of Toulon.  From these we gather that by the close of the fifth century the Gallican Church used a creed that differed from our Apostles’ Creed only by the omission of “maker of heaven and earth”.  It has been conjectured that the additions had travelled westwards from Pannonia through Aquileia and Milan to the south of France.  There they became diffused through the influence of the school of Lerins.  The Apostles’ Creed in the precise form in which we now repeat it is first met in a treatise of Priminius, a missionary bishop who had been for a time abbot of the Benedictine monastery of Reichenau and worked in France and Germany about 750.  But there are certain earlier creeds found in the Gallican Missal and the Gallican Sacramentary and employed in Gaul before 700 which contain all the additions but are marked by certain slight variations from our present form.

      If we ask the further question, how came our Apostles’ Creed to be substituted for the Old Roman Creed throughout the West and even in Rome itself, no certain answer can be given.  It is a surprising fact (for a fact it appears to be) that from the sixth until at least the ninth century Rome abandoned her own ancient creed and substituted the Nicene Creed in the instruction of her catechumens. [The interrogations at the moment of baptism remained unaltered, as the Gelasian Sacramentary shows, and closely resembled the Old Roman Creed, though in an abbreviated form.]  At some time between the ninth and the twelfth centuries Rome resumed the use of her ancient formula, now in the expanded form of the Apostles’ Creed, which was already prevalent in the Franco-German Church.  Having given her creed to the West in early days, the Roman Church took it back again, enriched by additions made by the Christian piety of others, and thus ensured its universal acceptance in the West as the sole baptismal creed.  [The only addition that needs explanation is “the communion of saints”.  The Latin “sanctorum communionem” is ambiguous.  Sanctorum may be either masculine or neuter.  Probably it is masculine, as it is so taken in the sermon of Nicetas, where the addition first occurs.  He explains the clause as the fellowship of holy men in one church.  “Saints” means “Christians”; it must not be limited to specially famous Christians, but includes living and departed alike.  It we take sanctorum as neuter, the “holy things” mean “sacraments”.  The fellowship in holy things is a visible sign of the communion of saints.]

      (iii) In what sense, then, may our creed rightly be styled “Apostles’”?  It clearly cannot have been drawn up by the apostles themselves.  It is found in a less fully developed form long after the death of the last apostle and its development into its present form can be traced.  It is true that Rufinus supposed that the Old Roman Creed was put together by an assembly of the apostles before leaving Jerusalem and had remained unaltered; but there is no trace of any such belief in other writers, earlier and wiser than Rufinus, [A similar belief in direct apostolic authorship is found in Ambrose and possibly in Jerome, who speaks of “symbolum ab apostolis traditum”.  Ambrose first applies the title “apostles’” to the Old Roman Creed.] including, for instance, S. Luke.  Still less credence can be given to the legend, found first in Priminius, that assigned the composition of our present creed to the twelve on the day of Pentecost, distributing with some difficulty a fair portion to each apostle.  It is possible that a belief of this kind gave rise to the title.  More probably, however, the name “symbolum apostolicum” or “symbolum apostolorum” is used in a wider sense.  It means no more than that the creed is a faithful summary of apostolic teaching and that its substance came from the apostles.  In an uncritical age the title was perverted to mean that the actual creed came readymade from the lips of the apostles.  Another possible explanation of the name is that it was the creed of the Roman Church, the one and only apostolic see of the West; hence the creed of the apostolic see came to be called the Apostolic Creed.

      (iv) The Apostles’ Creed has been for a thousand years the Baptismal Creed of the whole Western Church.  It has never been used in the East.  In our Prayer Book it is found in two slightly different forms.  First the ordinary form recited at Mattins and Evensong, found also in the Catechism.  Secondly, an interrogative form found in the Baptismal service and the Visitation of the Sick.  This last differs from the first in speaking of the “Resurrection of the flesh” instead of the “Resurrection of the body” and in adding “after death” to the last clause.  The Latin is “carnis resurrectionem”,* of which the “resurrection of the flesh” is the more correct translation.  The phrase is not Scriptural, but is quite early.  “After death” is an addition found in certain Gallican creeds, which failed to win a place in the final form of the Baptismal Creed.

            [*“Huius carnis resurrectionem” is even found in some early forms, but happily was not adopted.  The earliest Eastern creeds may have contained the phrase “the resurrection of flesh”.  But later Eastern creeds, perhaps under the influence of Origen, prefer “the resurrection of the dead”, as being closer to Scripture. We may wish the West had followed their example.  Cranmer’s translation of “carnis” by “body” may have been deliberate, to bring the phrase nearer to Scripture.  See Swete, J.Th.S., Jan. 1917.]

      § 3.  The Nicene Creed

      Our so-called “Nicene” Creed has a long and complicated history.  We may best begin with some account of the Council of Nicaea itself.

      (i) Our information about the proceedings of the Council is very inadequate.  In a letter to his own church written shortly after the event Eusebius of Caesarea related that he had produced to the Council a statement of faith which he quotes.  Included in this statement is what was evidently the baptismal creed in use at Caesarea.*  The letter, after saying that this profession of faith was received as orthodox, appears to suggest that the emperor wished the Council to make the statement its own, with the one addition of the word homoousios, though Eusebius, when he goes on to quote the Creed eventually formulated by the Council reveals the fact that this differed from his own in a number of other clauses.  Until recently it was generally held on the strength of Eusebius’ letter that the Creed of the Council was in fact a revised form of the Caesarean creed.  The key phrases “that is of the substance of the Father” and “of one substance with the Father” had been added to exclude Arianism, and a number of other changes had been made to give further anti-Arian emphasis.  It is, however, by the most recent investigators regarded as unlikely that the Council arrived at its own formulation by taking this creed as its basis.  Eusebius had a personal reason, not revealed in his letter, for presenting to the Council a statement of his faith; his orthodoxy had been seriously called in question by a Council held at Antioch a few months earlier.  The Creed of Nicaea differs from the Caesarean formula in a number of incidental and comparatively unimportant phrases which can hardly have been the result of deliberate alterations.  Probably the Council took as the basis of its new formula a baptismal creed from some Syrian or Palestinian church, closely resembling, but not identical with, that of Caesarea.

            [*This creed is an important instance of a local Eastern baptismal creed in use before the Council of Nicaea.  It runs as follows:

            “We believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible;

            And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Logos of God, God from God, light from light, life from life, Son only begotten, first-begotten of all creation, begotten before all ages from the Father, through Whom all things came into being, Who because of our salvation was incarnate, and dwelt among men, and suffered, and rose again on the third day, and ascended to the Father, and will come again in glory to judge living and dead;

            We believe also in one Holy Spirit.”]

      The Creed of the Nicene Council runs thus:

      “We believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible;

      “And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten from the Father, only-begotten, that is, from the substance of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father, through Whom all things came into being, things in heaven and things on earth, Who because of us men and because of our salvation came down and became incarnate, becoming man, suffered and rose again on the third day, ascended to the heavens, and will come to judge the living and the dead;

      “And in the Holy Spirit

      “But as for those who say, There was when He was not, and, Before being born He was not, and that He came into existence out of nothing, or who assert that the Son of God is of a different hypostasis or substance, or is created, or is subject to alteration or change – these the Catholic Church anathematizes”*

            [*Πιστεύομεν εις ένα Θεον Πατέρα παντοκράατορα πάντων ορατων τε και αοράτων ποιητήν·

            και εις ένα Κύριον Ιησουν Χριστόν τον Υιον του Θεου, γεννηθέντα εκ του Πατρος μονογενη τουτ εστιν εκ της ουσίας του Πατρός, Θεον εκ Θεου, Φως εκ Φωτός, Θεον αληθινον εκ Θεου αληθινου, γεννηθέντα, ου ποιηθέντα, ομοούσιον τω Πατρί δι ου τα πάντα εγένετο τα τε εν τω ουρανω και τα εν τη γη, τον δι ημας τους ανθρωπους, και δια την ημετέραν σωτηρίαν, κατελθόντα, και σαρκωθέντα, και ενανθρωπήσαντα, παθόντα και αναστάντα τη τρίτη ημέρα, ανελθόντα εις τους, ουρανούς, ερχόμενον κριναι ζωντας και νεκρούς.

            και εις το Άγιον Πνευμα.

            Τους δε λέγοντας Ην ποτε ότε ην, και Πριν γεννηθηναι ουκ ην, και ότι Εξ ουκ όντων εγένετο η Εξ ετέρας υποστάσεως η ουσίας φάσκοντας ειναι η κτιστόν η τρεπτόν η αλλοιωτον τον Υιον του Θεου, τούτους αναθεματίζει η καθολικη εκκλησία.

      This creed decisively excluded Arianism.  The two phrases relating to the divine substance meant that the Son shared in the being of the Father; “begotten, not made” ruled out the Arian assertion that our Lord was a creature.  It should be noted that the anathemas are an integral part of the Council’s statement, which thus differs in form from a baptismal creed though it is based on one.

      (ii) It will have been observed that there are important differences between this creed put out by the Council of Nicaea and our own so-called Nicene Creed.  The latter is usually known as the Constantinopolitan Creed (C), because at the Council of Chalcedon (451) it was quoted as “the faith of the 150 fathers”, i.e. the bishops assembled at the Council of Constantinople (381).  Since such records as we have about the proceedings at Constantinople are scanty and do not suggest the promulgation of any new creed, the connection of C with this Council is very obscure.  The prevailing view in this country has been that C was already in existence before 381 and was not, therefore, composed at the Council.  This was held to be proved by the fact that in the Ancoratus of Epiphanius, written in 374, a creed is quoted which is practically identical with C.  It was further maintained by Hort [In his Two Dissertations.] that Epiphanius obtained this creed from Jerusalem.  When Cyril, Bishop of Jerusalem, returned from exile in 362 he revised the baptismal creed of his Church and took the opportunity to insert into it some phrases from the Creed of Nicaea.  How then did C, originally emanating from Jerusalem, become associated with the Council of Constantinople?  It was suggested that Cyril, who was present at the Council, produced C in defence of his own orthodoxy, and his creed, having obtained the approval of the assembled bishops, was henceforward associated with them.  A further conjecture was that when Nectarius, an unbaptized layman, was elected Bishop of Constantinople during the session of the Council, this creed was employed as his baptismal confession and was then adopted as the baptismal creed of the imperial city.

      In this reconstruction of the history of C there is one point which is not likely to be shaken.  This creed is not an expansion of the Nicene formula, though from the time of Chalcedon onwards it was referred to as such; it has been formed by adding to some other baptismal creed certain Nicene phrases and some new clauses relating to the Holy Spirit.  Whatever was the place and occasion of its origin, C is a baptismal creed supplemented by Nicene phrases and in its third section expanded to combat Macedonian views.  Considerable doubt has, however, been cast on a vital point in the rest of the reconstruction outlined above.  The creed which originally stood in the Ancoratus of Epiphanius in the place now occupied in the existing manuscripts by C was most probably not C but the Creed of Nicaea.  If so, there remains no evidence to necessitate the view that C existed before the Council of Constantinople and the Jerusalem theory loses its main support.  Moreover, between 381 and the Council of Chalcedon there is no clear and certain reference to this creed, though references to “the faith of Nicaea” are frequent.  We might infer from this that C was a local baptismal creed first brought into prominence at Chalcedon and then first attributed to the 150 fathers of Constantinople.  This, however, would carry scepticism too far.  No-one at Chalcedon disputed the assertion that C had been put out by the 150 fathers.  This fact alone makes it virtually certain that the Council of 381 in some way gave its authority to this creed.  Moreover, the apparent silence about C between 381 and 451 is not necessarily so profound as at first sight it appears to be.  Dr Kelly observes [J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, p. 323.] that in this period “the description ‘the faith of Nicaea’ or ‘the faith, symbol or ekthesis of the 318 fathers’ was not necessarily applied solely to N (i.e. the Creed of Nicaea) in its pure authentic form.  It could equally well be used of a creed, local or otherwise, which was patently Nicene in its general character, while differing from N in much of its language.”  When the fathers of Constantinople are said (at Chalcedon) to have “set their seal to the same (Nicene) faith” they may well have done so by including in their doctrinal statement (which we do not possess) a creed which both contained the vital Nicene phrases and also amplified the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.  We may sum up by saying that recent investigation has renewed confidence in the ancient view that the Council of Constantinople promulgated and gave its authority to C.  Whether the Council composed the Creed [Badcock, History of the Creeds, c. xiii.] or, as Dr Kelly thinks more probable, adopted an existing liturgical formula is a question which must be left open.

      In any case, after Chalcedon C rapidly won its way in all the orthodox parts of the Eastern Church and even everywhere took the place in the baptismal rite which had previously been occupied by local creeds.  This position it owed partly to its intrinsic merits but largely perhaps to its connection with the now dominant see of Constantinople.  Just as the West received its baptismal creed from Rome, so the East received its baptismal creed from the New Rome.

      But this is not the most familiar use of the creed.  To the modern Christian the Creed of Constantinople is above all the creed of Eucharistic worship.  As we have seen, it sprang out of instruction given to candidates for baptism: it was deliberately amended to become a test of orthodoxy.  From the sixth century it has been used for a new purpose, as “the continuous doxology of the faithful, Sunday by Sunday”, in the Eucharist.  “To this position no other form of the creed ever aspired than that of Constantinople.  Alike in the Greek, the Latin and even the Coptic Churches, its majestic rhythm and its definite but simple and straightforward theology have marked it out as the creed of Christian worship” [Turner, op. cit. pp. 46–47.]  It is true that the beginning of this custom was not altogether happy.  It was introduced at Constantinople by the Monophysites, in protest against the definition of Chalcedon as a novelty infringing the sufficiency of the all-sufficient creed.  But the custom commended itself to the mind of the Church and spread throughout the Churches of the East.  Thence it extended gradually to the Churches of Spain, Ireland, and Gaul.  But it was not adopted at Rome until 1014, when Pope Benedict VIII was prevailed on by the Emperor Henry II to assimilate the use of Rome to that of Germany and the rest of Christendom.  Accordingly the creed, with the addition of the words “and the Son”, for the first time appeared in the Mass at Rome.  We can see the appropriateness of our present Western usage.  At the font the short and simple baptismal creed is sufficient: at the service which embodies the highest worship of baptized Christians there is a peculiar fitness in reciting the fuller confession of belief, which demands and is itself the product of a more matured faith, based upon a richer Christian experience.

      Our English translation is not altogether satisfactory. (i) The word “Almighty” as applied to the Father does not accurately represent the Greek “παντοκράτορα”, which means rather “all sovereign”.  The English “almighty”, which came in through the Latin omnipotens, as in the Apostles’ Creed, suggests “able to do anything”.

      (ii) “By whom all things were made” should rather be “through whom” (δι ου).  “By” in old English meant “through”.  The clause describes the Son as the agent of the Father in creation (δια as opposed to νπο) in accordance with the teaching of, e.g. Jn 1:3 and 10 and Heb 1:2b).

      (iii) “The Lord and Giver of Life”’ is an ambiguous rendering of the original, το κύριον και το ζωοποιόν.  “The Lord” is a distinct attribute and expresses the full divinity of the Holy Spirit.  A better translation would be “The Lord and the Life-giver”; or at least a comma should be inserted after Lord.

      (iv) The word “holy” was deliberately omitted by the reformers before “Catholic Church” not from any doctrinal reasons but because they supposed that it was absent from the best texts.  It is clear, however, that the omission is wrong, and “holy” should be restored, as in the Alternative Order of the Communion, 1928.†

      § 4.  The Athanasian Creed

      As we have seen, the Apostles’ Creed was not composed by apostles and the Nicene Creed did not originate at the Council of Nicaea.  So, too, “Athanasius’ Creed” is not the composition of Athanasius.  To begin with, it was beyond all doubt written in Latin, while Athanasius wrote in Greek.  Greek translations of it do indeed exist, but the clumsiness of their language and the variety of their renderings prove conclusively that they are translations and not original.  Further, the “creed” shows close affinity with the writings of the Latin fathers, Ambrose and Augustine.  Its origins, therefore, lie in the Latin-speaking church in a period subsequent to the death of Athanasius.  Again, strictly speaking, it is not a “creed” at all.  At best it is an individual profession of faith, framed probably to be an instruction and later on used as a psalm or a canticle.  It does not conform to the fundamental creed type arising out of the threefold baptismal formula.  It has not been expanded out of any simpler and earlier creed.  In doctrine it may be dependent on earlier creeds, but not in form.  The title of “Symbolum” was not given to it in early MSS.  It was styled rather “fides sancti Athanasii”.  So, too, it is found at its earliest appearance keeping company not with creeds but with the psalter or with canons or with miscellaneous dogmatic formularies to which were attached, with equal want of justification, the names of great theologians.  These last have all been forgotten: the “Quicunque” survives, and the reason may well have been, not only “the survival of the fittest”, but its actual lack of creed form.  “Other formularies failed to live, because they perpetuated the structure and arrangement, while destitute of the authority, of the creeds.  The ‘Athanasian’ formulary lived on, because it put the old truths in a new and effective setting: in other words, because it was a hymn about the creed, and not itself a creed at all.” [Turner, op. cit. p. 70.]

      (i) What then can be said as to date and authorship?

      The available evidence may be divided into two classes (a) internal, (b) external.

      (a) The nature of the heresies combated in the second half of the creed is consistent with an early date before Nestorianism or Monophysitism became prominent.  The language used about the two natures of Christ, e.g. “Perfect God and Perfect Man of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting, equal to the Father as touching His Godhead, etc.,” is opposed to Arianism and Apollinarianism, both of which denied to Christ the possession of a “reasonable soul”.  There is nothing in the whole statement that directly hits Nestorianism.  The language which insists upon the unity of the Person of Christ (e.g. “not two but one Christ”) can be found in the writings of S. Augustine and would be accepted by Nestorians in their own sense.  No doubt Eutyches did “confuse the substance”, and much of the language employed would oppose his teaching; but it would be equally suitable to oppose the teaching of Apollinarius.  In other words, no phrase in the whole creed compels us to suppose that the writer had ever heard of either Nestorianism or Monophysitism.  It has further been argued, e.g. by Waterland, that, if Monophysitism had come into existence, the writer would have avoided the expression “as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man, so God and man is one Christ”, because this was precisely the illustration employed by the Monophysites.  This argument, however, does not hold good, as a long list of Catholic writers can be compiled who all continued to employ the illustration even after the rise of Monophysitism.  The internal evidence does not carry us very far.  The argument from silence is always precarious.  The author may have refrained from combating Nestorianism or Monophysitism, not because they did not exist, but because he and those for whose instruction he wrote were not particularly concerned with them.  There is a limit to the number of heresies that can be controverted with profit in a single instruction.  All that we can say is that the doctrinal content of the “Quicunque” shows that the date of origin cannot be earlier than the last quarter of the fourth century, when Apollinarianism came under formal condemnation, and does not preclude, though it does not necessitate, a date earlier than the rise of the Nestorian controversy (428).

      (b) The external evidence falls into three divisions: (a) quotations, (b) MSS., (c) commentaries.

      (a) The earliest quotation from the “Quicunque” which can hardly be disputed, is in a canon of the fourth Council of Toledo in 633, which quotes largely from it as a recognized authority.  It is also quoted in a sermon found among the works of S. Augustine and for a long time attributed to Caesarius, Bishop of Arles (d. 543).  It is now, however, considered that the attribution is doubtful, but even if the authorship is unknown, unless the sermon can be shown to be later, we still possess in it a quotation dating from the sixth century.  Further, most authorities agree that there is a remarkable similarity between the undisputed writings of Caesarius and the “Quicunque”.  Again, we have the so-called “Trèves Fragment”, containing part of a sermon on the creed, which quotes from the “Quicunque”.  The Fragment was written about 730, but the sermon must be earlier, perhaps about 680, and therefore the “Quicunque” must be earlier still.  Other quotations can be found in anonymous sermons of the sixth and seventh centuries, but in all cases the exact date is uncertain. [It is interesting to note that the “Quicunque” had reached England by 798 since it is quoted by Denebert, Bishop of Worcester, on his election to the bishopric, as an authoritative formula.]

      (b) The earliest MS. of the “Quicunque” is the Codex Ambrosianus at Milan, written in an Irish hand.  It is assigned by experts to the end of the seventh or beginning of the eighth century.  Other early MSS. are the Codex Monacensis at Freising (eighth century), the Codex Petriburg at Leningrad (about 750) and Leidrat’s MS. at Lyons (about 800).

      (c) Besides these we have an independent source of evidence in early commentaries on the “Quicunque”, which witness to its existence in its present form.  The earliest is the “Fortunatus” commentary, which can hardly be later than 700 and may be much earlier, though our existing MSS. of the commentary are rather later.  Other commentaries belong to the ninth and tenth centuries: some may be earlier.  In any case the fact that the “Quicunque” was thought worthy of such commentaries shows that it had been widely known and used for a considerable time.  To sum up, our external evidence carries us back to the seventh century at the latest.  If we place it side by side with the internal evidence we get a date for the origin of the “Quicunque” between, say, 380 and 600.  Neither on the question of date or authorship is any certainty attainable.  All that we can do is to give some of the chief opinions that have been held.

      Waterland, in his Critical History of the Athanasian Creed, published in 1723, laid the foundation of all future criticism.  Mainly on internal evidence he held that the “Quicunque” was composed in Gaul between 420 and 430, and he assigned it to Hilary, Bishop of Arles (d. 449), a pupil of Honoratus, the founder of the monastery of Lerins, the great centre of learning in south Gaul, and later Bishop of Arles.  As we have seen, however, the internal evidence is perhaps less conclusive than Waterland supposed.

      Burn [Burn, Athanasian Creed, pp. 30 and 33.] agreed with Waterland as to the early date of the creed, assigning it to Honoratus himself.  He reinforced the previous arguments for an early date with strong arguments based on new evidence.  He showed that the “Quicunque” is exactly what would be needed against the teaching of Priscillian, Bishop of Avila in Spain (about 380).  Writings of Priscillian were discovered in 1885 and they prove that what he taught consisted of a mixture of Sabellianism and Apollinarianism.  These are just the two heresies that are most clearly opposed by the teaching of the “Quicunque”.  Further, he claimed that quotations from it occur in the writings of Avitus, Bishop of Vienne (d. 523), and of Faustus, Bishop of Riez (about 480).  There are undoubted similarities of thought and expression between the “Quicunque” on the one hand and the writings of Caesarius and Vincent of Lerins (d. 450) on the other.  So near do they come to it that each of them has been suggested as its author.  Two explanations are possible.  Either such language was in the air and both avail themselves of current theological phrases, which later on materialized into our “Quicunque”.  Or each was quoting from the “Quicunque” which they knew and respected as coming from an author belonging like themselves to the school of Lerins.  Burn held that the latter is the true explanation.  He believed that it “had been taught to him” (i.e. Caesarius) “from his early years and came as naturally to his lips as the phrases of our Church Catechism rise to our lips”, and that “it is easier to believe that Vincentius used the creed than that any one in a subsequent generation or century, of less exact scholarship, picked out his phrases and wove them into a document of this kind.”  He went on to point out that there are considerable parallels to the teaching of the “Quicunque” not only in S. Augustine but in S. Ambrose.  That is to say, the elements out of which it is composed were already present in the minds of the Church’s teachers.

      The great Benedictine writer, Dom Morin, proposed Caesarius as the author on the strength of the close parallelism of style and thought between the “Quicunque” and his works.  Dom Morin at one time altered his opinion and regarded the “Quicunque” as composed not in Gaul but in Spain, by a certain Martin, Bishop of Braga, at the close of the sixth century.  He accepted no quotation from it earlier than that in the canon of Toledo, and pointed to the existence of a large number of anonymous formularies of Spanish origin dating from the fifth century onwards, but he later returned to the view that it was composed in Gaul.

      In 1909 the Jesuit scholar, Heinrich Brewer, maintained that the “Quicunque” was the work of S. Ambrose.  This view has in recent years found more support than when it was originally put forward, and Burn himself in 1926 announced his acceptance of it. [See J.Th.S., vol. xxvii (1926) pp. 19 ff.  But Burn doubts whether the creed can have been intended by its author for antiphonal singing.]  The “Quicunque”, like the hymns of S. Ambrose, is anonymous.  It may have been intended for antiphonal singing which he introduced at Milan.  Its style and many of its expressions can be closely paralleled in his known works.  Certain of its phrases may go back to a letter addressed to Ambrose and others by the Bishops assembled in Constantinople in 382.  Brewer’s argument in favour of the Ambrosian authorship of the “Quicunque” is weighty, but it cannot be said to have closed the question, and some scholars still prefer to assign the work to a fifth- or sixth-century composer.

      (ii) The “Quicunque” falls into three parts: (a) a summary of the doctrine of the Trinity (vv. 3–25); (b) a summary of the doctrine of the Incarnation (vv. 26–38); (c) at the beginning and end, and in between these two large sections, we find warning clauses (vv. 1–2, 26, 27 and 40.)  We may take these in order.

      (a) This section on the Trinity is a summing up of the successive negative answers given by the Church to those attempts to explain the facts of the divine revelation in Christ, which she saw either to ignore or contradict some of those facts.  The early heresies either “confounded” (i.e. confused) “the Persons” by practically denying the distinction between them or else divided the substance by introducing a form of tritheism or polytheism.  As against Sabellianism v. 5 asserts the distinct Personality of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.  As against Arianism and Macedonianism, vv. 6–14 assert that whatever Godhead is, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost possess it equally: this is illustrated by selecting certain of the attributes of Godhead and assigning them to each Person in turn.  In v. 9 “incomprehensible” in the P.B. version, is a translation of the Latin immensus and means “above the limitations of space”; the word probably came in to the English version through a Greek translation, ακατάληπτος.  In vv. 15–20 the Trinity of Persons is asserted side by side with the counter-truth of the Unity of Substance.  In vv. 21–27 the modes in which the Three Persons possess the Godhead are set out in language taken from Scripture.  All through the primary object is to say “no” to ingenious speculations which explained away the mystery to mean either that the Three Persons are only three aspects of One God or that they are three separate divine Beings.

      (b) The second section deals similarly with the Incarnation.  vv. 30–33 emphasize alike Christ’s true divinity and His true and full humanity as against Arius and Apollinarius.  vv. 34–37 assert that the reality of His two natures did not destroy either the unity of His Person or the reality of either nature.  Apollinarians in their wish to avoid a double Personality had “confused the substance”.  vv. 38–46 are a simple statement of the facts and issues of Christ’s redemption.  Once again we find not speculation, but the attempt of the Church to preserve the whole truth, by rejecting explanations that in reality were inconsistent with some of the facts.

      (c) The minatory portions require more explanation.  Their interpretation depends upon the importance of the truth enshrined in the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation.  All Christians agree that Christ is the only Saviour.  The doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation were only formulated to safeguard that conviction.  The Church found in Christ the saving power of God Himself and hence was compelled to say “no” to all explanations that must in the long run undermine that truth.  Further, if we believe that Christ is the only Saviour, all who willfully reject Christ, so long as they reject Him, cut themselves off from the only source of life and health and therefore incur the risk of grave loss and injury.  These “damnatory” clauses are primarily a warning of the terrible consequences that must follow the rejection of Christ.

      Viewed in this light they are capable of a perfectly charitable interpretation, though it must be admitted that the English translation is inaccurate and harsher than the Latin original.  In the first verse “Whosoever will be saved”, which suggests to modern ears “Whosoever is going to be saved”, should be translated “Whosoever wishes to be sound” or “healthy”.  (Quicunque vult salvus esse.)  The Latin “salvus” may refer either to a present state of salvation (σωζόμενος) or to the final issue.  Examples of either sense can be quoted from contemporary ecclesiastical writers.  Again, “hold” (Latin teneat) would be better rendered “hold fast”, and in the following verse “keep” (Latin servaverit) would be better rendered “preserve”.  So the opening would run: “Whosoever wishes to be in a sound state, before all things it is necessary that he hold fast the Catholic faith: which except he preserve whole and undefiled, etc.”  This makes it clear that the clause does not invoke damnation on heretics or heathen, but is a warning to those who possess the Catholic faith not to let it go through indifference or slackness.  The words cannot apply to heretics or heathen who cannot hold fast or preserve what they have not got.

      Again, in v. 26 “He therefore that will be saved, must thus think of the Trinity” is not a fair rendering of the Latin “Qui vult ergo salvus esse: ita de Trinitate sentiat.”  “Must” in the sixteenth century meant little more than “should” and the whole sentence would more accurately run: “Let him then who wishes to be in a healthy state, thus think of the Trinity.”  In the following verse an even more serious mistranslation occurs.  “It is necessary to everlasting salvation that he also believe rightly the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ.”  “Rightly” came into our version through a Greek translation, which apparently the reformers took as the work of Athanasius himself!  This had ορθως, whereas the true Latin original has “fideliter”, “faithfully”.  To “believe faithfully” is not the same as to “believe rightly”.  It involves the will and heart and conscience and is a moral act of the whole personality, not merely an affair of the intellect.  Once again it is an appeal to the Christian to be faithful to the light that he has received.

      So, too, v. 40, “This is the Catholic faith, which except a man believe faithfully, he cannot be saved” (or rather be in a sound state), is no more than the assertion that without Christ the truest kind of life is impossible.

      What then are we to say of heretics and heathen who do not possess the Catholic faith?  On the interpretation given above they are not under consideration at all.  Christ is the only Saviour, but we believe that many who do not consciously believe in Him as yet, are unconsciously following His guidance.  Since He is the light that “lighteth every man”, all that is good and true in the world comes from Him.  Those men who follow the light that is given to them and live up to the best that they know are in reality disciples of Christ, though they may never have heard of Him (cp. Mt 25:31 ff., which would seem to refer to the judgment of the Gentiles, τα έθνη).  All that the Church teaches is that without Christ a man cannot be his best self.  We are sure that every man whom God has created and for whom Christ has died will have an opportunity of knowing Christ, if not in this world then in some other.  Whether that opportunity has yet been given in the case of any particular individual, we cannot say.  We dare not say of any man, even the worst, that he has rejected Christ.  It may be that in spite of a Christian home and education, Christ has been hidden from him by the sins and inconsistencies of Christians.  The Church has her calendar of saints: she has no roll of the lost.  God alone knows the secret of a man’s heart and whether Christ has really been presented to him.  Again, acceptance of Christ is far more than acceptance by the intellect of certain theological statements about Him.  The “Quicunque” itself makes this quite clear.  It exhorts us not to understand but to “worship” the Unity in Trinity and the Trinity in Unity.  It warns us that we shall be judged at the Last Day for our works.  “They that have done good, shall go into life everlasting.”  Its exhortations and warnings are addressed less to the mind than to the conscience and the will.  Experience shows that on the whole the greatest hindrance to the acceptance of Christ and His claims is not intellectual difficulties, but moral indifference and sloth or the cherishing of unlawful desires.

      But this position carries with it the conviction that the rejection of Christ involves loss.  Whether finally any will reject Christ altogether is a question to which Scripture hardly gives a definite answer.  While we dare not say dogmatically that any individual is finally lost, the teaching of Christ strongly suggests that there is such a possibility as that of final separation from Christ.  He could say of Judas Iscariot “It were good for that man, if he had never been born” (Mk 14:21).  So the language of the “Quicunque” “they that have done evil” shall go “into everlasting fire” and “he shall perish everlastingly”, if we substitute “eternal” and “eternally” (Latin “aeternum” and “in aeternum”) is simply a repetition of the language of Scripture.  Christ pictures Himself as bidding those on His left depart into “eternal fire” Mt 25:41 (πυρ αιώνον), and He explains this in v. 46 as “eternal punishment”.  The phrase “perish eternally” occurs in Jn 11:26 (cp. 2 Thess 1:9, “Eternal destruction from the face of God”).  Whatever Scripture means, the “Quicunque” means the same.  The whole teaching of Christ insists upon the importance of life on earth and on the far-reaching results of our conduct here.  Our mind rightly revolts from the thought of useless tortures prolonged through all eternity and from the pictures of the torments of hell to be found in mediaeval pictures.  But such conceptions are no essential part of the doctrine of eternal punishment. [Cp. Illingworth, Reason and Revelation, p. 120.]  Some have thought that all will ultimately become reconciled with God and be saved – the doctrine known as universalism.  But this lacks positive evidence in Scripture, and indeed is hardly consistent with certain statements in it.  Others, again, hold that since Christ is the source of all life, final rejection of Him must involve as its consequence, annihilation.  This view of “conditional immortality” can be supported by very strong arguments and to many minds appears the most probable answer to the problem; but it can hardly be proved from Scripture.  A view perhaps more consistent with Scripture is to suppose that there are, as it were, “degrees of salvation”.  It may well be that through suffering after death men will be brought to repentance, but that the consequences of their past will remain.  They will be in a lower state than they might have been, but yet they will accept their condition as just.  Punishment so accepted is still “eternal punishment”, but yet it has ceased to be torment. [In defence of mediaeval pictures of hell, we must bear in mind that it was only through such gross and literal representations of the consequences of sin that spiritual truth could be brought home to rough minds.]  But on such matters we can do little more than wonder.  God has not given us any answer to the many questions that we would wish to ask.  It may well be that our minds are as yet incapable of grasping the conditions of another world that lies wholly outside our present experience.

      Lastly it may be urged that though the “Athanasian Creed” may be interpreted in this sense, that was not the sense in which it was originally composed.  That may well be true.  It is quite possible that the author meant by “salvus” final salvation, and that he believed in the eternal damnation of all heretics and heathen and even rejoiced in such belief.  A cruel and barbaric age found small difficulty in cruel and barbaric ideas about God.  But even if this is so, the words of the formula admit of a perfectly Christian interpretation and we are not tied down to sixth century ideas about God.  The clauses rest on Scripture, and if our interpretation of Scripture has changed, then we can with perfect honesty change our interpretation of these clauses too.

      (iii) As regards the authority of this formula, let us frankly admit that it does not possess the same oecumenical authority as the Apostles’ and Constantinopolitan Creeds.  It has never been formally accepted by the Orthodox Church of the East.  It is found (of course without the words “and the Son”) in modern editions of the Horologion placed apart from the Hour offices, possibly because these were first printed at Venice under Western influence.  In the Russian service books it has been placed at the beginning of the psalter, perhaps since the middle of the seventeenth century.  But it never has been recited at any office and is at best treated as an estimable theological exposition.  Even its acceptance in this form would appear to be due to the belief that it was the work of Athanasius himself.  In the West it came to be recited at Prime, on Sundays according to the Roman use, daily according to the use of Sarum.  In the later middle ages Prime was frequently said by accumulation with other offices under the general title of Mattins.  The more devout lay people would attend Mattins on Sundays and holy days.  They would therefore be present at the recitation of the “Quicunque”.  How far they would attempt to join in or understand it is a different question.  Few would understand Latin and the poor could not afford a Breviary.  They would probably be occupied with their own private devotions.  Hence it was a great change when in 1549 the “Quicunque” appeared in English for recitation by the priest and people at Mattins on certain days, followed by the Apostles’ Creed.  In 1552 the number of days on which it was to be recited were increased.  In 1662 it was definitely made a substitute for and not an addition to the Apostles’ Creed.  Its repetition was required some thirteen times a year at Mattins.  This position assigned to it by the Reformers was due to the belief that it was a Greek Creed and the work of Athanasius.  Owing to the position which Mattins came to hold in the life of the ordinary English layman, the “Quicunque” assumed a prominence which was never intended and which has no parallel in any other part of the Church.

      The new rubrics relating to the use of the “Quicunque” in the revised Prayer Book of 1928 probably reflect with sufficient accuracy the present mind of the Church on this subject.  Its use becomes on all occasions permissive.  The first rubric says that it “may be sung or said” at Morning or Evening Prayer on Trinity Sunday, the Sunday after Christmas, and the Feast of the Annunciation, or else that the section relating to the Holy Trinity may be used on Trinity Sunday and the second section relating to the doctrine of the Incarnation on the other two occasions.  A further rubric suggests other feasts on which it may be used, and a revised translation is provided which takes account of the linguistic and textual points mentioned above.

      Permission is given to omit the “damnatory” clauses at the beginning and the end when the new translation is used.  To some these relaxations of the 1662 rubric may be welcome because they sympathize with the modern tendency to dislike dogma; the majority will think them right on broader grounds of liturgical and pastoral expediency.  We may believe that every clause in the “Quicunque” can fairly be interpreted in a sense agreeing with Scripture, and yet take account of the fact that its recitation has proved a stumbling block to many devout Christians.  It may not be wise to enjoin the frequent public use of a document which requires so much explanation and which, at the same time, cannot claim either the oecumenical authority of the Nicene Creed or an established place in the liturgy like that of the Apostles’ Creed, the ancient baptismal confession of faith.  The faithful adherence of the Church of England to the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation is fully expressed in other liturgical forms; it remains an obligation on her pastors to teach and expound the truths set out in the “Quicunque”.  As a summary for the use of the teacher it is of outstanding and permanent value.†

The Nature of Man – Articles  IX–X  and  XV–XVI

Article  IX

      Almost unchanged since 1553.  The words “which also the Anabaptists do nowadays renew” were originally present after “as the Pelagians do vainly talk”.  This sufficiently shows the object of the Article.  It is directed against the Pelagian views of Anabaptists.

Article  X

      The latter half of the Article comes from an Article of 1553 and is based on S. Augustine.  The first half was added in 1563 from the Confession of Würtemburg.

      The title appears at first sight unsuitable.  The Article does not deal with freewill but asserts the need of grace against Pelagian Anabaptists.  But in reality the connection is very close (v. below).

Article  XV

      This article dates from 1553.  Its exact object is not certain.  Probably it was directed against certain Anabaptists who denied our Lord’s sinlessless.  Others have held that it was aimed at the belief in the immaculate conception of the Blessed Virgin.  This is unlikely.  The belief was not yet de fide in the Roman Church.  The Articles usually are perfectly straightforward in their attack on views that they do not accept.  A much shorter and more definite Article would have sufficed.  Further, the Blessed Virgin was never “baptized and born again in Christ”.  Hence the former view is preferable.

Article  XVI

      This Article dates from 1553 with slight changes.  The present title is the third.  It is aimed at Anabaptist errors.

      § 1.  The true nature of man

      It is characteristic of the age in which our Articles were written that they hasten at once to speak of “the fault and corruption” of man’s nature.  “Man is very far gone from original righteousness,” i.e. as the Article of 1553 stated, “his former righteousness which he had at his creation.”  But we cannot understand man’s present condition unless we know something of man as he is in himself.  What is meant by that “original righteousness” which man has lost?  What is man’s true nature and what is his relation to God?

      (a) The phrase in the Article is an allusion to the picture of man’s life given in the opening chapters of Genesis.  The compilers of our Articles, no doubt, like all other men of their day, regarded these chapters as literal history, and Adam and Eve as historical persons.  Such a view today is impossible, but the religious value of these chapters has been increased rather than diminished by modern knowledge.  The Jews inherited from their ancestors a stock of common Semitic traditions about the origin of the world and of mankind.  As these were handed down from generation to generation, they were taken up by the prophets and under the guidance of God purged of their grosser elements and transformed into a vehicle of moral and spiritual truth.  In their present form these chapters come not at the beginning but rather towards the close of God’s revelation to Israel.  They are, as it were, the summing up of those great truths about the nature and purpose of human life that God had been teaching the people by His prophets through the centuries.  Israel had risen to a higher conception of human nature than that attained by any other pre-Christian religion.  God had given to the prophets a unique insight into the meaning of man’s relation to God, and into the true goal and purpose of our earthly life.  In Genesis we find these truths that God had revealed set forth in an ideal picture of man living as God made and meant him to be.

      Scripture, like science, represents man as the “roof and crown” of God’s creation (Gen 1:26, 9:1–7; Ps 8, etc.).  He is the link between nature and God, God’s vicegerent in the world.  On the one hand he possesses a body akin to that of the beasts and made, like theirs, of the dust of the earth (Gen 2:7 and 19, etc.).  Modern science tells us that our bodies are the product of long ages of evolution and are derived by physical descent from animal life.  They are not one bit the less either human bodies or the creation of God because they have come to be what they are as the climax of a long process and not as the immediate result of the creative word of God.  On the other hand, man is created “in the image of God” (Gen 1:27) by a special in-breathing of divine spirit (2:7).  No words could bring out more clearly the dignity and possibilities of human nature made “but little lower than God” (Ps 8:5, R.V.). [The superiority of man to the animals is shown in Gen 2:18–20.  Not one of the animals is found able to share Adam’s life and be a “help meet” for him.  Cp. also 1:28 ff.]  It is in virtue of this “image of God” in him that man is able to know and love God.  Like can only know like.  More particularly this image of God includes the possession of reason and will.  Man is able to do what the animals cannot do, understand and cooperate with the divine purposes.*  Further man was made for social life and development.  All these elements of human life have their place in the picture of the Garden of Eden.  Man is depicted as God meant him to be, at peace with himself, his neighbour, the world and God.  By congenial employment in active fellowship with God his faculties are trained and developed.  Did such a state of things ever exist in actual, fact on this earth?  We do not know.  We may regard these chapters either as containing an allegorical account of human life as it once actually was, or as an allegorical description of man’s life as God meant it to be, though His purpose was never historically realized.**†

            [*The possession of reason and will is implied by the imposition of a definite command and prohibition (2:15–17).  No animal is treated in this way.  Further, Adam learns to exercise his reason as infants today begin to exercise theirs by distinguishing things and giving them names (2”19).  The social nature of man is shown in vv. 18–25.  The family was to be the school of love, in which man was to learn to develop his social nature.  It has often been pointed out that in Scripture man begins in a garden and ends in a city.]

            [**“Whether or not the corrupted state of human nature was preceded in temporal sequence by an incorrupt state, this is the most vivid and natural way of exhibiting the truth that in God’s primary purpose man was incorrupt, so that evil in him should be regarded as having a secondary or adventitious character.  Ideal antecedence is, as it were, pictured in temporal antecedence.” – Hort, Life and Letters, vol. ii. p. 329.]

      (b) But for the Christian the supreme revelation of the divine purpose for man is to be found in Jesus Christ.  As Man He exhibited in their completeness all those powers that Adam is represented as exhibiting in some small and preparatory degree.  He lived in unbroken fellowship with God.  He displayed a perfect sympathy with the divine will and a perfect obedience.  He lived His human life as Son of God because man was created to live as son of God.  His human faculties were developed by the discipline of the home.  He displayed an unfailing love to all men.  Since man is made in the image of God, and God is love, man must be love too.  In His teaching He interpreted human life from within.  He knew what was in man, because He knew what was in Himself.  His perfect humanity held no secrets from Him.  The full meaning of “original righteousness” may be studied in Jesus Christ.  He alone fulfilled the destiny intended for man on this earth.  Further He recognized in every human being the capacity for this same life.  Alike in His teaching and in His behaviour He asserted the value of every human soul, just because it was human (cp. Mt 6:26, 12:12).  Christ came to bring light and salvation because man was made for light and salvation.  Because man was created in the image of God, he was called to live up to his position.  Finally, by His resurrection and ascension Christ became the first-fruits of a redeemed humanity and revealed man’s nature as destined for eternal life with God.

      (c) This Scripture doctrine of “original righteousness” rules out as un-Christian many widespread views of man’s nature.  It insists that every part of it is “very good”.  There is no necessary conflict between the lower and higher elements.  We can glorify God in our bodies no less than in our spirits (1 Cor 6:20, cp. Rom 12:1).  Even our highest activities are conditioned by bodily functions.  Every natural desire has a purpose to fulfill.  Man has been endowed with reason by which to guide his desires and with will by which to control them.  A holy life is not a life in which the body is neglected or ignored.  It is rather one in which all the powers of the body are subordinated to a single purpose, the will of God.  Our Lord’s example shows us a human body fulfilling its true function as the organ of a life consecrated to God.  Accordingly, the man who indulges any passion is not being “manly” in the true sense.*  True manliness consists in subduing all desires to the will.  Christian asceticism aims not at annihilating such desires but at reducing them to order (1 Cor 9:27).  The true Christian is not the man who has learnt to desire nothing, but the man who has learnt to desire the right things.  We must regard our bodies neither as evil nor as negligible.  Our Lord never belittled the dignity of the body or despised its needs.  A large part of His ministry was taken up in healing it.

            [*It is specially necessary to insist that sins of the flesh are not “natural” to man.  They are a violation of his true nature.  Impurity, for instance, is in the strict sense of the term “abnormal”, not because it is uncommon but because it destroys the balance of man’s constitution.  It violates the law of his being.  It is also anti-social.]

      § 2.  While the study of man’s nature in the light of Scripture discloses such magnificent possibilities, his actual condition is very different.  He is at peace neither with God nor with the world, nor with his neighbour, nor with himself.  This disordered state of his nature is what is meant by original sin.  Before we can discuss the meaning of such a phrase or the account of it given in the Article, we must understand the meaning of the word “sin”.     (a) No term is more frequently misused than “sin”.  The essential nature of sin depends upon our relation to God.  An act that is morally wrong, if viewed as committed against the laws of the state, is a crime: viewed as an offence against our neighbour, it is an injustice or an injury: viewed as offence against our own well-being, it is an act of folly or a piece of damage.  Only as committed against God is it a sin.  To an atheist the word sin has no meaning whatever.  Since the state has divine authority a crime is almost always a sin.  Since we are commanded to love our neighbour, to injure him is to disobey God’s command.  Since God’s law for us is not in any sense arbitrary, but expresses at once His will and the condition of our own highest welfare, an act committed against our own self is a sin.  But in every case sin involves a reference to God.  We may define sin as “personal hostility to the will of God”.  It is setting our will against His: actively disobeying His command or refusing Him the love and submission that we owe.  “Sin is lawlessness” (1 Jn 3:4).  The effect in ourselves is a dislocation of our inner life, a destruction of the balance and unity of our nature.  Sin issues in a divided self.  In relation to our fellow men sin is selfishness.  The law of God represents the common welfare of all men.  Disobedience results from the desire for some personal or private gain.  By setting aside God’s will we impair not only our own soundness but the soundness of the society in which we live.  So, then, sin is primarily disobedience to the known will of God, either by doing what we ought not to do or leaving undone what we ought to do.  It is often pictured as a disease, or a burden, or a stain, or again as an enemy attacking us.  All these metaphors express a truth, but they are far too external.  Sin is a condition of our own wills and so of our inmost selves.  The definite acts of sin that we commit are evidence of and spring out of this inward disposition, a heart turned away from God and a will divided and impaired.

      (b) How did sin originate?  Today we should confess that we find no ultimate answer to this question in Scripture.  Scripture represents moral evil as not originated by man or confined to him.  The compilers of our Articles no doubt regarded Gen 3 as a historical account of the commission of the first sin.  This has coloured the language employed, “The condition of man after the fall of Adam ...” (Art. X).  They regarded all men as literally the offspring of Adam.  Today such a view is impossible.  In this, as in the preceding chapters, we have an old myth that has passed through the hands of the Hebrew prophets and been transfigured so as to teach in the form of a story the meaning of sin.  It gives us not a historical account of the origin of sin but an inspired analysis of its meaning.  Its value lies not in its historical but its spiritual accuracy.  Through their own experience and the experience of the nation, the prophets had been led to see that sin is essentially disobedience to God.  This is wonderfully brought out in the picture of the taking of the forbidden fruit. [We notice first the recognition of God’s command by Eve as binding (v. 3), then the temptation that is allowed to find a response within.  The appeal is made to all sides of their nature.  The fruit is “good for food” – the lust of the flesh; “pleasant to the eye” – the lust of the eyes; “to be desired to make one wise” – the longing for a richer and fuller experience at all costs.]  Though no certain reference to this chapter occurs in the rest of the O.T. this same conception of sin is implied throughout.  The story awakens an echo in our own experience.  All we can say is that whatever the first sin was, in order to be sin at all, it must have involved, first a knowledge of a higher law binding on the will, and then the conscious choice of a lower course, by one who knew it to be the lower.  Our Lord in His teaching accepts and deepens the O.T. doctrine of sin.  He assumes sin but never explains its origin.  He calls us to deal in a practical manner with the sin in ourselves, by repentance and obedience.  It is more important for us to recognize the unsatisfactoriness of our present condition and the remedy for it than to know how it originated.  Jesus Christ came to save men from sin and to impart new life.  Through the obedience of His Cross He restores that fellowship with God which our disobedience has impaired.

      (c) This then is “actual” sin, personal antagonism to the known will of God.  But our Article speaks in the main of “original sin”.  The phrase is not Scriptural, but was used first by Tertullian.  It denotes not an act or habit but a condition of our nature.  “Original sin” is at bottom the attempt to express the fact that all men fall into sin.  “Original sin is, fundamentally, simply universal sin.  This is the fact which is at once the evidence and substance of it.  We know that if sin is universal, and if there is no instance of a human being without it, universal sin must receive the same interpretation that any other universal does, namely, that it implies a law in consequence of which it is universal.  Nobody supposes that anything takes place universally by chance, accident, or what we call curious coincidence....  This consequence applies just as much to the fact of sin in the human race if it is universal and this law we call “original sin”. [Mozley, Lectures and Theological Papers, p. 136.  The whole paper deserves most careful attention.]  Our Article appears definitely to associate this universal tendency to sin with the fall of Adam.  “Original sin standeth not in the following of Adam” (i.e. does not consist in the universal imitation of Adam’s bad example), “but it is the fault and corruption of the nature of every man, that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam; whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness and is of his own nature inclined to evil.”  As we have seen, we no longer believe in the historical existence of Adam, and such phrases sound strange to our ears.  But the truth of original sin is not in the least affected by any view that we hold about the historical value of Genesis.  The whole religious experience of Israel bore witness to the sinfulness of the human heart, and this fact of universal conviction of sin shaped the story of Genesis.  The story did not create the conviction, but the conviction the story.  A deeper insight into the holiness of God was always followed by a deeper sense of human unworthiness (Is 6:1–5; Jer 17:9; etc.).  Many passages in the Old Testament attest the universal sense of alienation from God (Ps 51:5, 14:3; Job 14:4, etc.).  So, too, in the New Testament, our Lord assumes the universal sinfulness of man (Mt 7:11).  He places in the universal prayer the petition “Forgive us our trespasses”.  He has no message for the “righteous” (Mk 2:17, etc.).  In order to enter the Kingdom of God repentance is always required (e.g. Mt 4:17).  Men need not simply to be made better but to be born “anew” or “from above” (Jn 3:1 ff.).  The Cross is the remedy for sin.  Our Lord died to give His life as a ransom for those who had forfeited their lives by disobedience (Mk 10:45, etc.).  “If we say that we have not sinned we make God a liar” (1 Jn 1:10, cp. 1:8), because all His dealings with us imply our need of a Saviour from sin.  The apostolic call for repentance receives its universal authority from the fact that “Christ died for our sins”.  It is true that S. Paul twice connects our sin with the fall of Adam (Rom 5:12–15; 1 Cor 15:22) following contemporary Jewish teaching.  But the theory did not create the facts: the facts demanded a theory.  S. Paul saw everywhere in the world of his day, among Jew and Gentile alike, the ravages of the sin that he knew in his own heart.  The teaching that “all have sinned” (Rom 3:23) was not due to a too literal interpretation of a Jewish allegory.  It was the result of his own observation, sharpened by the knowledge that God had set forth Christ crucified as the universal remedy for sin. [See Sanday and Headlam, Romans, p. 136 ff.]

      (d) Again, just because Jesus Christ is the revelation to us of what man was made to be, so He is also the final argument for the unnaturalness of our present condition.  He convicts of sin those who come to Him.  By placing their lives side by side with His, they realize the gulf between what they are and what they were meant to be.  The victorious sacrifice of the Cross and the Resurrection is the judgment as well as the salvation of the world.  “Christ in the truth of our nature was made like unto us in all things (sin only except) from which he was clearly void both in His flesh and in His spirit.  He came to be the Lamb without spot, who by the sacrifice of Himself once made should take away the sins of the world; and sin (as S. John saith) was not in Him” (1 Jn 3:5).  This is the unanimous teaching of Scripture (Heb 4:15, 7:26–27, 9:14; 1 Pet 2:22; 2 Cor 5:21). [In Rom 8:2 He is said to have come in the likeness of sinful flesh.  “The flesh of Christ is ‘like’ ours inasmuch as it is flesh ‘like’ and only ‘like’ because it is not sinful.” – S. and H. ad loc.]  The strongest argument is not the assertions of N.T. writers nor even isolated texts from the Gospels (e.g. Which of you convicteth me of sin?  Jn 8:46, cp. 14:30), but the whole impression that He made on others, the claims that He made publicly for Himself and the glimpses that we are allowed to catch of His inner consciousness.  He preserved an unbroken union with the Father (Jn 10:30).  As a rule it is the holiest men and those living most closely to God who are most conscious of their sinfulness and most deeply penitent.  He taught others to pray for forgiveness, but never did so Himself.  Even on the Cross, when His whole life seemed ending in failure, He utters no prayer for pardon.  He perceived that forgiveness was needed for His murderers, not for Himself.  Two passages have been quoted on the other side.  (i) “Why callest thou me good?  None is good save one, even God” (Mk 10:17).  Our Lord’s apparent refusal of the title “good” seems at first sight to imply a consciousness of sin.  But in the Greek the emphatic word is not “me” but “good”.  He was rebuking an emotional young man who was using extravagant language without thinking what it really meant, and had no true appreciation of the meaning of goodness.  (ii) The cry from the Cross “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mk 15:34).  Here the Greek would more accurately be translated “Why didst thou leave me?”  It was no random cry, but a definite quotation from a particular psalm.  It must be interpreted in the light of its context.  This psalm is the only one of its class that contains no personal confession of sin and it ends in a song of triumph.  The words imply unbroken trust in God and are an appeal that His help is long delayed.  They are evidence of our Lord’s unbroken faith, preserved even amid great darkness of soul.  The Resurrection was the divine affirmation that He had made the complete and acceptable sacrifice of the “Lamb without spot”.

      (e) Our Article goes on to describe “original sin” as “the fault and corruption of the nature of every man”.  It explains the fact that all men sin by laying down that all men inherit a common human nature that is corrupt inasmuch as it possesses a positive downward tendency to evil.  This statement can only be understood in the light of previous theological discussion.  No attempt was made to give any formal account of original sin until the time of Augustine.  The first traces of any controversy on the subject are to be found in the different views taken as to the origin of the human soul.  The Eastern Fathers and Jerome and Hilary in the West taught that each soul was created out of nothing by God and joined to a body derived from its parents.  This is known as “Creationism”.  It seems to reduce the “solidarity” of the human race to a merely physical fact.  Original sin on this view would lie in the body.  The Western Fathers and Gregory of Nyssa in the East taught that the human soul was derived from its parents.  Thus the first man contained within him all mankind.  On this view a transmission of a tendency to sin is intelligible.  The “vitium originis” – to use Tertullian’s phrase – necessarily affects all who are born of the common stock. [Origen explained original sin by the theory of pre-existence.  Men are really fallen spirits who fell in another world.  This view won little acceptance in the Church and lies outside the main stream of Christian thought.  It is maintained by theosophists.]  We may fairly hold that both views express a real truth.  In some sense every, human being is created by God.  Each human life is His gift, none the less His because mediated by human action.  Every man can say “God made me”.  On the other hand, no human life is an isolated unit: it would not be human if it were.  And that common humanity which we share with others includes far more than merely physical attributes.  It includes those moral, intellectual and spiritual capacities that distinguish man from the beasts, and can only be developed in society.

      Again, the early Fathers, Eastern and Western alike, took a hopeful view of human nature. [See N. P. Williams, The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin, Lect. iv.]  They laid no very great stress upon the “Fall” and its consequences.  They had no very clear or unanimous teaching about the origin of sin.  So far as they dealt with the results of the “Fall”, they held that man lost then a supernatural bias towards righteousness, comparable to the bias towards righteousness that follows from a good character.  Man was left weak but fundamentally sound.  Thus “original sin” would be a loss of higher goodness, a “privatio naturae”.  But with S. Augustine a darker view of the results of the “Fall” won considerable though by no means universal acceptance in the West.  Augustine regarded man’s original bias towards righteousness as natural.  Hence Adam fell below the level of his true nature and corrupted his entire posterity.  We inherit a nature that is not indeed entirely corrupt but yet has a positive inclination towards evil.  The result is more than a mere “privatio naturae”: it is “depravatio naturae”.  This teaching of S. Augustine was partly drawn out in conflict with Pelagius.  Pelagius denied any corruption of human nature at all.  He held that Adam’s sin injured no one but himself.  As we should expect, he was a creationist.  The widespread existence of sin he attributed, as our Article says, to the following of Adam’s bad example.  He was prepared to allow that some men even before the coming of Christ had lived free from sin.  Thus the existence of “original sin”, so far as he allowed that it existed at all, was due to purely external causes, bad environment, bad example and education and the like.

      At the Reformation these questions were again debated with great vigour.  Hence our present Article.  Mediaeval teaching on the whole had taken a moderate view of the effects of the “Fall”.  The Council of Trent was content to speak of “the loss of holiness and righteousness”.  On the other hand, Calvinists and many Lutherans pushed the teaching of S. Augustine so far as to assert the total corruption of human nature.  Our Article adopts a mediating position.  On the one side it clearly takes a gloomier view of man’s present position than the Council of Trent.  It follows S. Augustine so far as to speak of “the fault and corruption (depravatio) of the nature of every man, that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam, whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is of his own nature inclined to evil.”  It definitely repudiates the Pelagian idea that the “Fall” had no effect on man at all.  On the other side it carefully avoids the Calvinistic extravagance of saying “Tota depravatio”.  This would be obviously untrue.  If man were wholly corrupt he could not be aware of his corruption.  There would be no moral struggle within, no discontent with self or desire for better things.  The spirit would not lust against the flesh, as S. Paul tells us that it does (Gal 5:17). [So, too, our Lord appeals to the natural affection of parents for children and the like.  He rouses men to use their natural powers of reason and will.  Cp. also Rom 2:14–15.]  Nothing has done more to create a prejudice against the doctrine of original sin, than the idea that it means the total badness of human nature. [For a discussion between two modern theologians in the Calvinistic tradition of the question, how far the imago Dei remains in fallen man, see E. Brunner and K. Barth, Natural Theology, esp. pp. 22 and 40.  Cp. also D. Cairns, The Image of God and Quick, The Gospel of the New World, pp. 34ff. (a brief and illuminating discussion).]

      How can we regard the teaching of the Article today?  In the light of modern knowledge much of the old language seems unreal.  We begin by pointing out that “original sin” is not altogether a happy phrase.  If sin means a will hostile to God, sin in the strict sense can only be predicted of a person and not of a nature.  No part of our nature, no faculty that we possess can in itself be “sinful”.  It only becomes sinful when we exercise it unlawfully.  No created thing in God’s universe is evil in itself.  It only becomes evil when it is misused by a being who has free will.  We must avoid any mental picture of original sin that would represent it as an evil substance transmitted by inheritance in the same way as physical peculiarities are transmitted.  Hence the statement of our Article that original sin “deserves God’s wrath and damnation” is open to serious criticism.  Neither charity nor common-sense allow us to suppose that an infant who cannot choose between good and evil is personally exposed to the wrath of God because it will commit actual sin when it grows up.  The words of the Article are only true if we look at the matter in an entirely abstract way.*  No doubt S. Paul calls us “children” (i.e. simply “objects”) “of wrath” [Armitage Robinson, Ephesians, pp. 49–50.  The phrase contains no idea of inheriting God’s wrath, and “children” has nothing to do with infancy.] (Eph 2:3), because apart from Christ we cannot live up to the standard of a holy God.  But Scripture adds what the Article does not, that “original sin” is an appeal not only to God’s wrath but to God’s pity (e.g. Lk 19:10).  The mind of God is to be seen in Christ, who hated sin and loved the sinner.  The Article does, indeed, say that it is the “nature” rather than the person that deserves God’s wrath.  But a nature apart from a person is a mere abstraction.

            [*The best defence is that given by Dean Church, Life and Letters, pp. 294–295.  “The fact of what is meant by original sin is as mysterious and inexplicable as the origin of evil, but it is obviously as much a fact.  There is a fault and vice in the race, which, given time, as surely develops into actual sin as .our physical constitution, given at birth, does into sickness and physical death.  It is of this inherited sin, looked upon in the abstract and without reference to concrete cases, that I suppose the Article speaks.  How can we suppose that such a nature looks in God’s eyes according to the standard of perfect righteousness which we also suppose to be God’s standard and law?  Does it satisfy that standard?  Can He look with neutrality on its divergence from His perfect standard?  What He may do to cure it, to pardon it, to make allowances for it in known or unknown ways, is another matter about which His known attributes of mercy alone may reassure us; but the question is, How does He look upon this fact of our nature in itself, that without exception it has this strong efficacious germ of evil within it, of which He sees all the possibilities and all the consequences?  Can He look on it even in germ with complacency or indifference?  Must He not judge it and condemn it as in itself, because evil, deserving condemnation?”]

      On the other hand if we reject illustrations drawn from heredity in the physical world as misleading, the great fact of the solidarity of human nature still remains.  The unity of the race is moral and spiritual, not only physical.  Mankind is one in sin. [In all its forms Pelagianism is hopelessly individualistic.  It is contradicted today by our sense of corporate and national sin, as a spiritual force hostile to God, lying behind the sins of individuals, yet in some sense independent of them.]  Moreover, though we cannot inherit “sin”, experience shows that we do inherit dispositions and tendencies that easily become sin.  Children resemble their parents in certain tastes and characteristics which we label good and bad in themselves, apart from the actions in which they may or may not issue.  Further, in the moral and spiritual life it is by no means easy to draw a hard and fast line between heredity and environment and to say when the influence of one begins and the other ends.  In any case human nature does not come to us readymade.  It begins as a bundle of possibilities that need the life of the community for their development.  A purely individual human life is an impossibility.  If “original sin” seems unfair, we need to remember that the good tendencies and good dispositions of our nature come down to us by inheritance as well as its deficiencies.  The unity of race that conditions original sin, conditions also salvation through Christ.*

            [*It is a question whether S. Paul in Rom 5:12–21 asserts the transmission of a sinful nature from Adam.  “The view taken of the sin of Adam is not so much that thereby human nature was infected in itself .but rather that thereby sin, an alien power, got a footing in the world, and, involving all men in actual sin, brought death upon all.  This is very far short of the Augustinian doctrine of original sin, which appears to be a development of 2 Es 3:21, 4:39, rather than of anything to be found in N.T.  The language of S. Paul (“sin came into the world,” Rom 5”), leaves room for the communication of a sinful tendency, not only by heredity in the strict sense of the word, but also by all that interpenetration of the individuals by the race which makes it impossible to regard them as isolated atoms dependent only on birth for their characteristics.”  E. R. Bernard, art. “Sin”, H.D.B. iv. pp. 534b–535a.]

      But we have hardly yet got to the bottom of the problem.  The difference between sin and righteousness is in the last resort one of personal relationship to God.  As we saw, man cannot live his true life apart from that union with God for which he was made.  We cannot draw hard and fast distinctions between the natural and supernatural elements in man’s nature, simply because man’s essential nature is to live in fellowship with God.  By sin that fellowship has been impaired.  Hence man’s whole constitution has become disordered.  Apart from God the heart becomes cold, the will enfeebled, the mind darkened.  The result is that selfish desires lack control and the body tends to become master rather than servant.  We are unable to resist evil suggestions from without.  This would seem to be the root of original sin.  We are born into a condition of life in which our full union with God is broken.  To use the old language, original sin begins with a “privation”, a cutting off of the needed light and strength, and inevitably ends in a “depravatio”, a positive alienation of mind and heart from God. [Cp. the insistence of Aquinas (S. Theol II, I, cix.) that man is not only spoliatus gratuitis, but also vulneratus in naturalibus.]  For this condition we are not personally responsible.  Original sin in itself does not involve personal accountability.  We believe in original sin, not original guilt. [For the meaning which may be attached to “original guilt” see Doctrine in the Church of England, p. 63.]  As we have seen, it appeals to God’s pity.  It only becomes actual sin when of our own will we yield to temptation and choose the wrong.

      The latter part of the Article deals with a question that arose out of the discussion about the results of the “Fall”.  Experience shows that sinful desires remain even in the Christian after Baptism.  How far are these “true and proper” sin?  The Calvinists naturally said that concupiscence was sin.  The Council of Trent said that it was not “truly and properly sin but ... is of sin and inclines to sin”.  Our Article is purposely vague.  The allusion seems to be to James 1:14–15.  But the Apostle is clearly S. Paul.  The most probable reference is to “Rom 7:17 as expounded by S. Augustine.” [Kidd, Thirty-nine Articles, p. 127.]

      (f) The question still remains: “Is this view of sin consistent with the assured results of modern science?”  “Has it not been shown that man has risen, not fallen?”  It has been argued that so-called “original sin” is no sign of any estrangement from God or any corruption of our nature.  Rather it is a necessary product of man’s upward development.  It is the survival in us of passions and desires derived from our animal ancestry.  It is the “ape and tiger” within us.  Our consciousness of a divided self is only due to the fact that these animal instincts, once useful and necessary at an earlier stage for the preservation of life, are in process of being moralized.  If there has been “a fall” at all, it has been a “fall upwards”.  That is to say there came a time when man first exchanged the life of merely animal contentment and harmony for the life of moral struggle and effort.  He began to be aware, however dimly, of the distinction between a higher and a lower course of action.  He learnt to contrast his gross animal habits with the idea of what he ought to be and might become.  This new-born dissatisfaction with his former self was proof not of a fall but of an advance.  It marked the “passage from a brute life unconscious of moral distinctions to the spiritual consciousness of right and wrong”.  There are as many “falls” as “souls”.  It has been asserted: “Man never possessed the original harmony of his whole being such as the doctrine of an unfallen state requires. ... Sin is derived solely from the individual will and cannot be inborn; and the discord between flesh and spirit, lower nature and higher, animal propensity and rational morality, is no sign of a bias to evil but the inevitable outcome of man’s development.” [Tennant, Original Sin, p. 31.  For a full statement of this view see his larger book, Origin and Propagation of Sin.]

      Others, from a slightly different standpoint, would argue that sin is a necessary phase in the evolution of mankind, which is being outgrown.  No doubt we must admit that many sins are voluntary and deserve blame.  But sin is primarily a mistake.  The sinner is really seeking for God, but he is seeking for God in the wrong way.  Sin is only a temporary error.  Man finds out his mistake by the unsatisfactory consequences that follow his action.  He learns to condemn himself.  His higher self passes judgment on his lower self.  He turns again to the right road having learnt the lesson.  The “relics of our brute ancestry” in us, that is to say, the tendency to seek our own selfish ends instead of the common good are being gradually purged away as civilization and culture advance.  “Slowly, very slowly, the race is climbing the steep ascent.”  Ultimately in every member of the human race the ideal life will be attained.  Some such view of sin not formulated or put into words is exceedingly common today.  It may be stated in forms that, as far as they go, are perfectly Christian.  But the question is whether it accounts for all the facts of the moral life as we observe it in our own hearts or in the history of the world.

      (i) We may doubt whether the results of physical science throw any real light upon the problem of sin.  We have to deal with man as he now is, not with man as he once was.  We may recognize the continuity of all life on this earth of ours, but the fact still remains that man is no longer an animal.  We cannot interpret human life in terms of animal life.  That would be to interpret the higher by the lower.  All sound philosophy allows that a thing’s nature must be estimated not by what it once was but by what it by becoming has become.  An oak must be studied as an oak and not as an acorn.  We can speak of a baby as a little man but not of a man as a big baby.  At whatever stage distinctively human life first appeared, just because it was human life and no longer animal, new factors that were absent in animal life intervened.  Hence statements and conclusions that were valid on the lower level are no longer valid on the higher.  Take the case of the individual man.  As an infant he has no moral life: he is not morally responsible for his behaviour.  Yet when he comes to manhood he has become a rational and moral being.  We may not be able to put our finger on a definite moment of time and say that then moral life begins.  But the change has taken place.  The man is no longer an infant.  His adult life cannot be explained or expressed in terms of infant life.  No knowledge, however exact, of infant life, can be applied to adult life, because the new factors of reason and conscience have now intervened.  So in the development of the human race, we cannot draw a hard and fast line as to where human life first began.  It is enough to know that man has become a moral being.  The conclusions of physical science are absolutely valid within the sphere of facts that physical science studies.  But when we get to the moral life, new influences and powers appear, with which from its abstract character physical science can have nothing to do.  In this higher region its conclusions no longer possess unconditional validity.  Sin belongs to this higher region.  Physical science may explain whence we derive our animal desires and passions, but it can do no more.  Its authority stops short just where the real problem of sin begins.

      (ii) Sin in its true sense was not possible until man had reached the level of moral and rational life, however undeveloped he still was.  Man did not become conscious of sin when he first looked upon his former animal behaviour and marked its unsatisfactoriness in comparison with the new and higher ideal that was dawning upon his consciousness.  Rather he first became conscious of sin when he recognized the good and chose the bad instead.  We should agree with S. Paul that “sin is not imputed when there is no law” (Rom 5:13).  The fractiousness and cryings of an infant are not sinful or proofs of a fallen nature as S. Augustine supposed. [Cp. Aug. Confessions, i. c. 7.]  Science tells us that they are the natural result of evolution.  The child is not responsible for them.  A child can only commit actual sin when he has become conscious of some law as binding upon him and disregards it.  By this time he has ceased to be a subject that can be adequately studied by physical science alone.  The problem of original sin is the problem of universal sin.  Why is a wrong choice always made?  Not, how or why did we get the materials out of which to make it?  The difficulty is not that man possesses animal passions and desires that need strict control, but that these are perverted and misused as they are not in the case of animals, and that the will does not control them.  Universality of sin cannot be explained by universality of animal inheritance. [It is significant that in his last book, The Concept of Sin, Dr Tennant was driven to what is essentially the Pelagian position, namely, the denial of the universality of sin (p. 268).  His view of sin is far too individualistic.]

      (iii) The unsatisfactoriness of the attempt to account for sin as a byproduct of man’s evolution is seen more clearly when we consider those sins which are not sins of his animal nature at all.  To say that the drunkard and the profligate are really seeking for God though they are seeking for Him in the wrong place, has a certain air of plausibility.  In some sense they are seeking, or at any rate began by seeking, a satisfaction of self in their vices.  But when we turn to sins of pride and calculated cruelty, the plausibility disappears.  Is it possible to say that, for instance, a solicitor who deliberately schemes to take advantage of a client’s ignorance to steal his money, is doing no more than making a mistake in his quest for God?  To quote Dean Church again: “It is important to bear in mind that in speaking of sin and sinners we are apt to take as our type one particular class of sin, the sins of the ‘publican and the harlot’.  It is natural that revolting, ruinous and flagrant as they are, they should represent sin to our minds.  Yet there are sins more malignant and more difficult to conceive cured.  I can conceive of many of those poor creatures whom the world speaks of as lost blindly ‘seeking after God’.  It is difficult to me to conceive this of those who with full knowledge and all advantages prey on human happiness in one way or another, the selfish seekers of their own interest and pleasure.”  “Men forget the sins of character, of the Pharisees and of the wicked, wise conspirators against human good and happiness, who are eminently the Bible type of the sinners who have everything to fear.” [Life, p. 317.]  If men are honest with themselves they must allow that there have been times when they saw the good and knew it to be the good and willfully chose the evil.  That is no mere survival of animal instinct nor any error of judgment, it is deliberate rebellion against God.  Further, if Scripture is right in assigning the highest eminence to such virtues as faith, hope, charity, humility, meekness, purity of heart and the like, it follows that the contrary vices to these are the most grave, that is, those vices such as pride which have the least intimate connection with our animal nature at all.  We need to keep holy not only our bodies but our spirits.  Spiritual sins are as real as and more deadly than bodily sins.

      (iv) To say that man has risen, not fallen, involves serious confusion of thought.  No doubt man has made immense advances in material prosperity, and in knowledge and culture.  But such progress is not moral and spiritual progress.  In the picture of God’s purpose for man given in the opening chapters of Genesis, Adam is depicted as a naked savage, uncultured and undeveloped, but made for development in dependence upon God.  He is further depicted as innocent rather than holy: since holiness can only be attained by the conquest of temptation.  He is only making the first steps in the moral life, but as far as he went he was sound.  Goodness does not depend upon civilization or knowledge, nor yet upon the possession of any complex moral ideal.  It depends rather upon obedience to the will of God, so far as it is known.  A child or a savage may be on the road to holiness, by living the life that God means him to live under his present circumstances.  A learned and cultured professor may be unholy, simply because he does not live up to the best that he knows.  Neither Scripture nor science suggests that primitive man was perfect in the sense of fully developed and possessing great powers of will and intellect.  The idea, popular in the eighteenth century, that Adam in virtue of his unbroken communion with God was endowed with all knowledge, is wholly foreign to Scripture.  Rather man is represented as undeveloped, but all that he ought to have been at that particular stage of his development.  So far his nature was healthy.  He was advancing on the right lines.  He was beginning to attain holiness by obedience to the commands of God and the deliberate pursuit of good.  Man’s progress in the mastery of the world and in knowledge of many kinds has not been forwarded but hindered by sin.  We need only reflect how today man possesses the knowledge and the means to put an end at once to much of the misery and disease and vice of the world.  What is lacking is the will to make the effort and to endure the discomfort and trouble that the needful self-sacrifice would involve.  Throughout history man’s upward progress has been hampered by ineradicable selfishness and sloth.  Man has indeed risen but not with that uniform and rapid progress that we should expect.  God’s providence may overrule men’s sins and turn them to a good end.  Yet “there never was an evil action performed but a good one in its place would have led to better results”. [Dinsmore, Atonement in Literature and Life, p. 244.]  Further, man’s moral and spiritual progress has lagged behind his advance in material prosperity.  Civilization has brought with it new evils and new sorrows. [Cp. Tyrrell, Christianity at the Cross Roads, pp. 120–122.]  Every fresh discovery may be used either for the welfare or for the injury of mankind at large.  All depends on the moral character of those who use it.  Such knowledge in itself is non-moral. [In modern warfare we have seen all the resources of science being used for the destruction of human life.  Their perversion is due not to any external compulsion, but to the uncontrolled passions within man’s own heart.  War has only revealed on a large scale man’s inability to govern himself.]  We do not wish to deny that there has been a real progress in moral ideals outside as well as inside the Jewish and Christian revelations.  But there has not been a corresponding increase in the power or the will to live up to them.  The sins of today may be less brutal and more refined, but they are sins none the less.  Our ideals may have become more elaborate, but we have not become more holy.  Our union with God is still broken.  The human race shows no sign of outgrowing its sin.

      (v) The question is often raised, If man’s nature was ever perfect in the sense of all that God wished it at that time to be, how did temptation find any response within him?  We have already seen that all human existence must from its very nature include the liability to temptation.  Further, man was made in the image of God to render to Him a free love and obedience.  If then man was not to be a mere conscious machine, he must in some sense be free to refuse that love and obedience.  A love that is compulsory is not love at all.  Thus the creation of a being endowed with free will, must, as far as we can see, include at least the possibility of the misuse of that will.  If holiness can only be attained by the deliberate choice of good and the deliberate rejection of the lower, then the possibility of holiness includes within itself the possibility of something like a “Fall”.  The “Fall” may well have been a process, rather than a single act.  Further, Scripture and the teaching of Christ always suggest that behind the world lies a background of spiritual influences, good and bad alike.  Our Lord quite definitely speaks of personal agencies of evil, external to man but able to influence him.  Such ideas may not be popular today, but it is very doubtful whether we can explain the facts without them.  No doubt this does not solve the problem: it only pushes it a stage further back.  If we ascribe the first human sin to the suggestion of the Devil there still remains the question “Who tempted the Devil?  Whence did his temptation to sin come in the first instance?”  Here again we can only conjecture that the creation of any form of free and finite being, must involve the possibility of an attempt to win a false independence of God.  That is probably as far as human reason can go in attempting an intellectual solution of the problem of evil. [Cp. Sanday and Headlam, pp. 145–146; and A. W. Robinson, God and the World, p. 63 ff.]

      (vi) Lastly neither experience nor Scripture lend any support to the view that the progress of the human race is inevitable and necessary, or that it is in any degree assured apart from our own moral efforts.  History teaches us that nations, like individuals, do not necessarily grow better as they grow older.  There is no uniform advance towards perfection.  Sin does not only retard progress but brings down and degrades those who commit it.  The world is strewn with the wreck of nations that have fallen into decay and dissolution.  Christ teaches most plainly that the loss of present opportunities may involve not a mere temporary postponement of success, but a loss which is irretrievable.  He speaks of an “eternal sin” (Mk 3:29), a time when “the door was shut” (Mt 25:1–13).  He warns men in terrible language borrowed from the Old Testament of the worm that dieth not and the fire that is not quenched (Mk 9:43–48).  Present acts of choice carry with them results that endure far beyond this life.  We must “strive”, not only “seek”, to enter in by the narrow door (Lk 13:24–25) and there are few that find it (Mt 7:13–14).  The language may be metaphorical, but it must not, therefore, be explained away.  If language has any meaning at all, it shows that salvation is no easy or obvious thing.  Again, the New Testament never looks forward to a time when by gradual upward development this present world shall have become perfect.  Our Lord can contemplate the possibility that when the Son of Man comes He will not find faith on the earth (Lk 18:8).  Rather His teaching points forward to some sudden and violent catastrophe that shall usher in the new age and abolish sin.  The coming of God’s Kingdom in all its stages (and first of all in His own earthly ministry) involves a tremendous struggle with powerful forces of evil (the “kingdom” of Satan) which will cease only at the day of His final parousia.  That day is known to the Father alone (Mk 13:32).  The pictures of an ideal world whose fulfillment Old Testament prophecy located on this earth are in the New Testament transferred to a new heaven and a new earth.  The Christianity of the New Testament is not a ‘Christianity whose optimism is begotten of faith in this world ... whose courage and hope is maintained by the belief that the schism between the ideal and the actual will eventually be healed through an inherent vis medicatrix naturae, that the Kingdom of God is the natural term of a process of moral and social development.” [Tyrrell, Christianity at the Cross Roads, pp. 118–119.]  Moral goodness can never be the product of any mere necessity.  Spiritual progress can only be won by effort.  Such has always been the distinctively Christian belief and it is through such a belief that the victories of Christianity have been won.  If men come to believe on any large scale that sooner or later perfection must come automatically, that men by their sins can only delay the full realization of the purpose of God for the world, human nature being what it is, it is safe to predict that men will relax their efforts to do right and reform the world.  We can see the havoc wrought in the world by a view of sin other than that of Scripture.  Christian teaching has proved its truth by its practical results.  Christian leaders of all ages and classes have always insisted that repentance must be the foundation of a Christian life.  If sin is something less than disobedience to God, if there is no need to worry about our sins, then repentance is needless and indeed unmeaning.  Man needs at most an example or a teacher, not a Saviour, and historical Christianity has from first to last been based largely on error.†

      § 3.  (a) Grace [This section should be read with that on Sanctification, p. 209.  “Sanctifying grace” is a comprehensive term for the redeeming work of God in us through Christ and the Holy Spirit.]

      “We have no power to do good works; without the grace of God.”  In the language of theology grace means the power of God at work in ourselves (cp. Eph 3:7 “the gift of that grace of God, which was given to me according to the working of His power” and Eph 3:20 “the power that worketh in us”).  The Greek word χάρις began by meaning either “attractiveness” in an object or subjectively “favour”, “goodwill”, as, e.g. of a superior towards an inferior.  In the New Testament, especially in the Epistles of S. Paul, it acquires the additional meaning of “unearned favour”.  In Eph 2:3–7 God’s “grace” or “favour” is contrasted with His “wrath”.  It is often used to emphasize the free bounty of God’s gifts.  In Rom 4:4, 11:6, etc., that which is given by God’s “grace” is compared with what we earn by our efforts, that which is a debt or deserved.  The word is further extended to mean “the state of favour” which the Christian enjoys by God’s free mercy (Rom 5:2; 2 Cor 6:1, etc.) and even particular gifts (2 Cor 8:6–7; Eph 3:8, etc.).  It is thus in the New Testament well on its way to its later theological meaning of the power of God bestowed on us.  Grace is not something apart from God but is God Himself at work in us.  The opening words of the Article need explanation: “The condition of Man after the fall of Adam is such that he cannot turn and prepare himself, by his natural strength and good works, to faith and calling upon God: wherefore we have no power to do good works pleasant and acceptable to God without the grace of God.”  This might suggest that grace is only necessary because of the “fall”.  No doubt as sinners we need God’s grace in a special way.  But from the first man was absolutely dependent upon God.  As we have seen, the weakness of will that these words lament is due to the separation from God that sin brought. In our whole life, physical and moral and spiritual alike, we are entirely sustained by Him.  All the powers that we possess are His.

      The Article speaks of grace under two aspects:

      (i) We need “the grace of God by Christ preventing us that we may have a good will”.  This is usually called “prevenient” grace, i.e. grace that goes before (praevenire) or prevents us.  We may compare the collect that begins “Prevent us, O Lord,” i.e. start us.  The actual term “prevenient” comes from S. Augustine and was suggested by the Latin of Ps 59:10, “Deus meus misericordia eius praeveniet me.”  We need the prompting of God even to wish to do right.  All holy desires and aspirations are due to the work of the Holy Spirit within our hearts.  “It is God that worketh in us both to will and to work, for His good pleasure” (Phil 2:13).  Our Lord Himself said “No man can come to me, except the Father which sent me, draw him” (Jn 644, cp. Acts 1614, James 117). [Varied and remarkable expression is given to the doctrine of grace in many of the Prayer Book Collects, e.g. Easter II and V, Trinity VII, XII, XVII, XIX and XXV.]

      (ii) We need God’s grace “working with us when we have that good will”.  We pray to God not only to “prevent us with his gracious favour” but to “further us with his continual help”.  This is usually called “cooperating grace”.  This term again comes from S. Augustine.  It is based on such phrases as “Domino cooperante” in the Latin of Mk 16:20.  Not only does God’s favour show itself by “putting into our minds good desires” but also by continually helping us to “bring the same to good effect”.  Our need of cooperating grace is shown by such words of our Lord as “Abide in me”, “Apart from me ye can do nothing”.  S. Paul can say “By the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all, yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me” (1 Cor 15:10; cp. 2 Cor 3:5–6; 1 Pet 5:10).  [The Article is not directly concerned with the “good works” of the heathen, but its references to “faith” and to “the grace of God by Christ” would naturally suggest that “good works pleasant and acceptable to God” cannot be produced by non-Christians.  This was the view generally taken by S. Augustine on whose writings the Article is based.  See Art. XIII.]

      (b) Free will

      God’s grace needs to be met by man’s free will.  What do we mean when we claim that man’s will is free?

      (i) The popular idea of free will is that it means “I am equally able to do either of two opposite actions.  I can equally, e.g. speak the truth or tell a lie.  The more undecided that I am the more free I am.”  A little consideration shows that this idea is ludicrously false.  We are not really free when we are in a state of weakness and indecision.  The man who is not quite sure beforehand whether he can resist any given temptation, is not really free.  S. Paul describes such a state in Rom 7:15–24, “That which I do I know not: for not what I would that do I practise; but what I hate that I do.  But if what I would not that I do, I consent unto the law that it is good.  So now it is no more I that do it, but sin which dwelleth in me.  For I know that in me, that is in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me but to do that which is good is not.  For the good which I would I do not: but the evil which I would not that I practise, etc.” (cp. Gal 5:16–17).  But S. Paul does not call this state of vacillation and uncertainty “freedom”, he calls it “the body of this death” (Rom 7:24).

      (ii) So we can see that our wills are only really free when we can do what we wish.  True freedom is to have such mastery over myself that, e.g: I can always speak the truth.  Every time that we commit an act, our act helps to form a habit.  Our aim is by a constant repetition of acts to form the corresponding habit.  We are then really free.  We speak indeed of slavery to habits, but we mean by that slavery to bad habits.  The power of forming habits, which is the condition of our freedom, may be equally the condition of our bondage to evil.  It is obvious that freedom is not to be attained by the acquiring of the power to do any kind of actions but only right actions.  We are really free, when we have built up habits of acting in accordance with the will of God which is equally the law of our own nature.  We start with a certain indecision of the will – something like freedom in the sense that we discarded – in order that by repeated acts of right choice we may become free in the true sense.  “Our wills are ours we know not how, our wills are ours to make them thine.”  The saint is the freest person on earth, not because he can do good and bad equally at will, but because he has fixed his will in harmony with God’s will and is realizing the purpose of God for his life.  A man is free when he is able to do that in which alone he can find true satisfaction.

      (iii) When we speak of ourselves as free, we mean that we are the ultimate and responsible authors of our own conduct.  All political and social life rests upon the assumption of this responsibility.  Our sense of shame when we are caught doing wrong, our feeling of personal responsibility for our actions, our attempts to influence others for good by argument and appeal to their better selves, our efforts to improve the world, the system of punishment for crimes, all these have no meaning if man is simply part of a great machine.  No doubt strong scientific and philosophical arguments can be adduced in support of the position that man is the victim of his environment and that all his actions are really determined by external forces.  But the moment that we turn to practical life, by our judgments on others and by our own personal behaviour, we deny the validity of these arguments.  Of course our power of choice is limited at any time by many things, our environment, our training, our past actions, bad habits, inherited weakness and the like.  Nor is it claimed that we can act without motives of some kind.  All that we maintain is that man has the power of selecting and making his own motive and following it and that he is not simply the passive victim of the most violent desire.

      (c)  The relation of grace to free-will

      In the true life of man there is union of the grace of God and human free-will.  Each is necessary.  Without grace the will to do good would lack strength.  Without the man’s free will the action would not be the action of the man himself at all.  Grace and free will are not in any sense opposing forces.  Rather grace is the source and condition of all true freedom, enabling man to realize his true self.  In the actual life of the Christian the grace of God and our own natural powers are so united that we cannot separate in our consciousness what is due to the one from what is due to the other.  All that we can say is that all good thoughts, desires or actions involve both.  We may go further and say that “the very freedom of choice which grace affords can be used for the purpose of rejecting grace”.  The grace of God places new possibilities within our reach but it remains with ourselves whether they shall be actualized or not.  We possess “the melancholy power of baffling the divine goodwill”.  Grace has been compared to true charity, that does for men just what they cannot do for themselves and no more.  It does not pauperize us, but challenges us to do our utmost to respond to it.  Grace is never given to save us trouble.  God does nothing for us that we can do for ourselves.  He “helps those that help themselves”.  Grace releases the will from bondage and warms the heart and enlightens the mind, but we must trust to it and use it.  We are bidden to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God that worketh in us (Phil 2:12–13).  It is I who labour, yet not I, but the grace of God that is with me (1 Cor 15:10).  That is the paradox of the Christian life: like our Lord Himself it is both human and divine.  As the Article says the grace of God works “with us” not instead of us.  The position may be summed up in two sayings: “Qui fecit te sine te, non salvabit te sine te,” “Man without God cannot, God without man will not.”

      According as either side of the truth is exaggerated we get two opposite tendencies of thought.  The first dwells so exclusively on the share of God in our salvation, that it practically denies human responsibility altogether.  The second exaggerates the human side so as to put our need of God into the background.

      (i) The extreme form of the first error is what is known as Calvinism.  In the time of Elizabeth Calvinism was almost the dominant creed of the clergy of the English Church.  Its doctrines have had an enormous influence on our Articles both in what they say and in what they do not say.  Calvin himself did little more than push to its logical extreme one side of the teaching of S. Augustine.  S. Augustine, like S. Paul, had experienced a sudden and violent conversion.  Hence, inevitably, he was more conscious of the power of God in his own life and laid less stress upon the need of human effort.  He felt that God Himself had intervened to save him and had bestowed upon him a salvation that he could never have achieved by his own struggles.  God had entered into his life, rescued him from his former sinfulness and filled his heart with a passionate love of God that left no room for any lower desires.  It seemed to him that God had done all: he had done nothing.  This experience colours all his writings. [See Williams, The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin, Lect. V.  For the problem of grace and freedom in S. Augustine, see K. E. Kirk, Vision of God, pp. 335 ff.]  Calvin, taking hold of this side of his teaching, elaborated it into a formal system.  He taught that man in himself is wholly corrupt, possessing no moral freedom.  Till God’s grace comes, all our desires and acts are inevitably sinful.  When God’s grace comes its action is irresistible.  We do nothing at all, God’s grace does the whole work.  Why then are only a few transformed by God’s grace?  The only possible answer is that God by His own inscrutable and irresistible decree has chosen out from all eternity some men for salvation.  This choice is quite independent of any goodness or merit on man’s part.  Those upon whom God’s grace comes, the “elect”, must be saved: they cannot finally fall from grace.  The rest are left to their sin and its eternal consequences.  As a result of the “fall” all mankind deserved damnation, but by God’s free love “the elect” are redeemed from this.  Christ died not for all mankind but only for the elect.*

            [*Compare the Lambeth Articles which the Puritans desired to inflict upon the Church of England:

            I. God from eternity has predestined some to life, and some He has reprobated to death.

            II. The moving or efficient cause of predestination to life is not the foresight of faith, or of perseverance, or of good works, or of anything which is in the persons predestinated, but it is the sole will of God who is well pleased.

            III. The number of the predestinated is predefined and certain, it can be neither increased nor diminished.

            IV. Those who are not predestinated to salvation, of necessity will be damned on account of their sins.

            V. True, living, and justifying faith, and the sanctifying Spirit of God, is not extinguished, falleth not away, vanisheth not away in the elect, either finally or totally.

            VI. A man truly faithful, i.e. endued with justifying faith, is certain with the full assurance of faith, of the remission of his sins, and his eternal salvation through Christ.

            VII. Saving grace is not given, is not communicated, is not granted to all men, by which they may be saved if they will.

            VIII. No man can come unto Christ unless it shall have been given to him, and unless the Father shall have drawn him.  And all men are not drawn by the Father, in order that they may come to the Son.

            IX. It is not placed in the will or power of each man to be saved.]

      We must not shut our eyes to the merits of Calvin’s system.  It at least realized the sovereignty of God and the utter dependence of all human excellence upon Him.  It emphasized the truth that all good has its source in God.  It was logical and offered an explanation of certain problems in life, e.g. why some men are religious even under the greatest difficulties, while others who have every apparent advantage, are not.  Further, it gave to the men who felt that they were among the elect an extraordinary strength and confidence.  They were convinced that they had behind them all the resources of God, that God’s plan for their lives could not be thwarted.  They were ready to face death and danger in dauntless confidence, knowing that they were in the hand of God.  But these advantages were purchased at a terrible cost.  Calvinism forgot and allowed men to forget that God is essentially love rather than power.  It treated divine justice as something different from human justice.  It led inevitably to fatalism.  As we shall see, Scripture never teaches us that grace is irresistible or that we cannot fall from a state of salvation, and it always assumes that God wishes all men to be saved.  It has been well said, “The more grace that a man receives the greater becomes his capacity for doing right.  But it is always he who perceives and desires what is right. ... Grace is the perfection of individuality and not its abolition: the source of freedom and not its negation.” [Chandler, Spirit of Man, p. 154.]

      Further, Calvinism cast a gloom over the whole of human life.  All purely human activities, such as literature, art, science and the like, were discouraged as being tainted by the wickedness of man’s fallen nature.  Being treated as corrupt, they tended to become corrupt.  All the innocent gaiety of human life was not only ignored but condemned.  Religion was too often identified with dullness.  There was no grasp of the truth that the Incarnation has sanctified the whole of human life.  Calvinism was the doctrine of the Scotch Presbyterians and English Puritans.  After their failure to enforce it on the Church of England many of the latter separated from the Church because it was not Calvinistic.  Similar teaching has been maintained by many within our own Church and in the Roman Church.  In its completeness it would now be defended by very few, but traces of its teaching still haunt popular theology.  What is really Calvinistic teaching has often been confused with Christian teaching.  Many who have attacked or separated from Christianity have really attacked or separated from Calvinism.  Today it influences religion mainly by way of reaction.  We are tempted to ignore those truths about God that Calvinism distorted and placed in a false isolation.

      (ii) At the other extreme stands “Pelagianism”.  Pelagius was an excellent monk, by birth a Briton, who had always lived a decent life and known no great moral crisis.  He was offended by the prayer of S. Augustine “Give me the power to do what thou commandest and then command what thou wilt.”  “Give the power,” he cried: “Why! you have the power.” [Confessions, bk. x. c. 29, 31, 37, “Da quod iubes et iube quod vis”; cp. de Dono Perseverantiae, c. 53.]  From the best of motives he endeavoured to rouse men to a sense that everything depended on their own moral efforts.  He dwelt upon all that God expected from them.  But he was led into an extreme and quite indefensible position.  He taught that Adam’s sin had injured no one but himself.  Our will remained unaffected not only by original sin but even by our own past sins.  Infants at birth were in the same condition as Adam before his fall.  At any time our wills can resist sin.  Even before the coming of Christ there had been men who had used their free will so as to lead sinless lives.  So far as he acknowledged grace he identified it with our own human powers and such external forces as the example of Christ and the formal gift of pardon when we had sinned.  Universal or almost universal sinfulness was due only to the following of Adam’s bad example.  Pelagius’ view was perfectly logical, but he went upon ideas without considering facts.  He relied upon man’s bare sense of ability as if it were an infallible footing for the most complete conclusion. [Mozley, Augustinian Doctrine of Predestination, p. 64.]  He never got really down to the root of the question.  The difficulty is not simply “I want to be good and I can’t”: it is rather “I know that I ought to do this: I feel that I could do it if I wanted to do it: but then unfortunately I don’t want to do it or at least a large part of me does not want to do it.”  Pelagianism, however, is very common today.  It flourishes especially upon its own native soil.  The ordinary respectable Englishman is often a Pelagian at heart, though he has never heard of Pelagius.  Partly he has very little idea of God’s intense holiness and the absolute consecration and self-sacrifice that God requires of him.  He confuses the standard of Christ with the standard of decent society.  Virtues such as meekness and patience lie entirely outside his vision.  He does not even desire to acquire them.  Those qualitites that he most admires, courage, fair play, truthfulness, he supposes that he can achieve by himself, if he will only make the effort to do so.  As soon as a man awakens to a sense of the meaning of holiness as opposed to respectability, he learns his need of God’s help and ceases to be a Pelagian.

      (iii) Since this is the relation of grace to free will it follows that a man may fall from a state of grace either through sloth or active disobedience.  From quite early days some held that any man who fell into “deadly sin” after baptism, was guilty of “sin against the Holy Spirit”.  Such sin our Lord pronounced to be unforgivable.  They argued therefore that a man who fell into deadly sin not only could not be restored to communion by the Church (locus paenitentiae), but also could not expect forgiveness from God (locus veniae). [Views of this kind were held among others by the Montanists, Novatianists and Donatists.  Some held that though the Church could not restore to communion those who had once lapsed, still God might finally grant them His forgiveness.  That is, they allowed to them a locus veniae but not a locus paenitentiae.]  This teaching was revived by the Anabaptists and is directly contradicted by our Article.

      The distinction between “venial” and “deadly” sin rests on 1 Jn 5:16–17.  S. John, while insisting that “all unrighteousness is sin”, speaks of “a sin unto death” [αμαρτία προς θάνατον, i.e. a sin, the natural issue of which is death.] as contrasted with “a sin not unto death”.  This distinction was already familiar among the Jews.  Originally the phrase meant quite literally a sin punishable with physical death, such death being a final exclusion from Israel.  Then it came to be used of any offence that morally deserved similar punishment.  Hence S. John employs the phrase for sin that excludes a man from fellowship in the Divine society.  As thus separated from the Body of Christ, he can no longer be prayed for as a fellow Christian. [C. H. Dodd, The Johannine Epistles, ad loc.]  The distinction between “deadly” and “venial” sin has a practical value, but we cannot draw a hard and fast line between them.  What is venial for one man under certain circumstances, may be mortal for another under other circumstances.  Only God can know the full measure of guilt that attaches to any particular act of sin.  It is not the outward act by itself but the motive and character lying behind it that count.  On the other hand, common sense tells us that in the abstract certain sins are more serious than others.

      Our Lord’s teaching on “sin against the Holy Ghost” has been the cause of much misunderstanding.  In Mk 3:28–30, Mt 12:31–32, the Pharisees who deliberately assigned Christ’s works of mercy to Beelzebub, are warned of the danger of “blaspheming against the Holy Spirit”.  Those who commit this sin, are “guilty of an eternal sin” (Mk 3:29, R.V.) and never have forgiveness.  In Lk 12:10 similar language is used, but the context is entirely different. [For a commentary on these passages see C. K. Barrett, The Holy Spirit and the Gospel Tradition, pp. 103 ff.]  In their present context the words about blasphemy against the Holy Spirit can only refer to Christians who publicly deny Christ under fear of punishment.  In each case the sin is not simply a single act, still less a sin of the tongue, but a state of mind.  It would seem to be the willful refusal to recognize and welcome goodness, when it is seen to be goodness.  The assertion that Christ’s works of mercy were due to Beelzebub was evidence that the Pharisees were in danger of falling into such a state.  So, too, the public repudiation of Christ by Christians would equally be evidence of the beginning of such a state.  Unless there is a change of mind the position must become hopeless.  If men see and know the good and from hatred or cowardice deliberately call it evil, no more can be done.  If such conduct is persisted in, the whole moral nature is warped and the power to discern truth is forfeited.  So a character is formed that from its very nature renders forgiveness impossible.  If this account of “sin against the Holy Ghost” is true, it is clear that “not every deadly sin after baptism” even approximates to it.

      There are, however, certain passages in the Epistle to the Hebrews that were taken, e.g. by Origen, to teach that those who had fallen into deadly sin after baptism could not be restored to communion by the Church.  The most important is 6:4–6, “For as touching those who were once enlightened” (i.e. probably baptized, φωτισθέντας) “and tasted (γευσαμένους) of the heavenly gift and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost and tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the age to come, and then fall away (παραπεσόντας), it is impossible to renew them again unto repentance, the while they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh (ανασταυρουντας) and put him to an open shame (παραδειγματίζοντας) (R.V. mg.).  Here a study of the tenses employed brings out the meaning of the passage.  So long as men go on crucifying the Son of God afresh and putting Him to an open shame, in spite of their past baptism and Christian privileges, nothing can be done to renew them again unto repentance.  But there is not a word to say that if they forsake their sin and turn to God they may not be renewed unto repentance. [Cp. Westcott, ad loc., “The apostasy described is marked not only by a decisive act, but also by a continuous present attitude, a hostile relation to Christ Himself and to belief in Christ; and thus there is no question of the abstract efficacy of the means of grace provided through the ordinances of the Church.  The state of the men themselves is such as to preclude their application.”]  The same holds good in reference to 10:26–29.  Here also the “fearful expectation of judgment” applied to those who after knowing the truth and having rejected Christ, go on sinning (αμαρτανόντων).  Nothing is said of the impossibility of repentance.  So, too, in 12:14–17, as the R.V. makes clear, what Esau sought diligently with tears and failed to find is not a “place of repentance” but the “blessing”. [For a different interpretation of the passages in Hebrews, see K. E. Kirk, The Vision of God, Lect. iii. section v.  See also Lect. iii and iv for evidence that in the early centuries certain sins were considered to be irremissible by the Church, i.e. to involve lifelong penance and exclusion from communion.  Even when the rigid discipline applied to these sins was modified in the third century, it remained for a long time the general rule that a second penance was lifelong.]  These passages, in short, are not an assertion that no forgiveness is possible for post-baptismal sin, but an exhortation not to put off repentance too late.  The failure to find pardon depends not on God’s unwillingness to grant it, but on the sinner’s refusal to comply with the conditions necessary for obtaining it.

      Again, it follows from a right understanding of grace that “After we have received the Holy Ghost we may depart from grace given and by the grace of God we may arise again and amend our lives.”  The Calvinists taught that a man who had once received grace, even if he fell away for a time, must in the end arise again and amend his life.  This was known technically as a belief in “indefectible” grace.  Such teaching is plainly contrary to Scripture and to experience.  S. Paul had beyond dispute received the Holy Ghost, but he never supposed that his position was therefore secure apart from his own moral efforts (cp. 1 Cor 9:27; Phil 3:12).  The grace of God may be received in vain (2 Cor 6:1; Gal 5:4; Heb 12:15) or even resisted (Acts 7:51; Mt 23:37).  So, too, Saul in the Old Testament certainly received grace, but ultimately fell away (cp. 1 Sam 10:6–9 “God gave him another heart”).  Our Lord also taught that the salt may lose its savour (Mt 5:13) and the good seed begin to grow but be choked (Mk 4:19), and the branch in the vine bear no fruit and be burnt (Jn 15:6).  We may rejoice that the efforts of the Calvinists to change “may” into “must” were unsuccessful.†

Salvation – Articles  XI–XIV  and  XVII–XVIII

Article  XI

      In its present form this dates from 1563 and is much fuller than the corresponding Article of 1553.  Many of its phrases are borrowed from the Lutheran Confession of Würtemburg, others from the earlier Confession of Augsburg.  Hence the avoidance of Lutheran exaggerations is remarkable.  It avoids saying that a man is justified when he believes himself to be justified.  N.B. “by” = “through” (Latin per).  There is no “Homily on Justification”.  The real title is a “Homily of Salvation”.

      § 1.  “Justification by faith”

      (a) The source of such words is to be found not in any abstract theological attempt to analyze the spiritual life but in the living experience of S. Paul.

      (i) He uses such words as “justified by faith” in order to describe to others the change that had taken place in his own life.  As a pious Jew he had striven for years to win peace with God by his own efforts.  He had tried to fulfill God’s will by a complete obedience to the Jewish Law as the revelation of that will.  Outwardly he had succeeded.  He can write “if any other man thinketh to have confidence in the flesh, I yet more ... a Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the law a Pharisee ... as touching the righteousness which is in the law, found blameless” (Phil 3:4–6, cp. Gal 1:14).  But he did not find peace.  The more earnestly that he strove to earn God’s favour, the more conscious he became of his inability to satisfy the demands of an all-holy God.  A perfect obedience to the law of God required absolute holiness not only in outward act but in inward motive and thought.  The law could not help him to attain but could only convict him of not having attained it (cp. Rom 7:7–8).  God seemed to him to stand over him as a taskmaster or judge, whose just demands he could never satisfy.  He felt himself always condemned as coming short of God’s standard.  Just because he was honest with himself and unwilling to be content with a low standard, he felt that through the law God was bringing home to him the fact of his sinfulness (Rom 5:20; Gal 3:19).  However hard he tried, his best endeavours fell short of what God commanded (Rom 3:19–20, 4:15, 7:9 ff.). [It is possible that S. Paul became clearly conscious of his true spiritual state under the Law only after he had accepted the Gospel.]  After his conversion an utter change came over his life.  Through his surrender to Jesus Christ and his acceptance of His free offer of salvation, he found peace with God.  “There is now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus” (Rom 8:1) was an echo of his own experience.  He felt himself no longer condemned by God but “justified” or acquitted.  He no longer strove to earn or deserve his own salvation by “works of the law”, but accepted it as a free gift of God’s grace won by Jesus Christ and offered freely to all who would commit themselves to Him (Rom 5:1–11, 8:1–11; Gal 2:16).  He knew himself to be no longer a slave toiling at the impossible task of attaining a perfect holiness, but a son of God (Gal 4:28–5:1).  His acceptance rested not on his own efforts but on the work of Christ.  His religion was based not on what he had done and was to do for God, but on what God in Christ had done for him.  There was no waiting.  God accepted him just as he was: he had closed with God’s offer of forgiveness.  His pardon was not made conditional on future improvement.  His acceptance was free and immediate and complete.  Henceforth it was his duty to live up to the position that had been bestowed upon him.

      The best illustration of the experience that S. Paul wishes to express is the parable of the Prodigal Son (Lk 15:11 ff.).  The Son is not only received back but freely forgiven and treated with all honour.  He is not placed in any ambiguous position until it is seen whether his repentance is genuine and lasting.  The Father assumes that it is both, because that is the best means of ensuring that in actual fact it will be both.  What matters is the change of attitude on the part of the son: his willingness to return, to trust himself to his father’s mercy and to close with his offer.  He is restored to the position of son and called to live up to that position.  He has not to earn it, but the restoration is the free act of his father’s love.  In S. Paul’s language the son is “justified”, i.e. forgiven and accepted, acquitted and treated as righteous.

      (ii) We may now turn to examine the actual language used by S. Paul.  In the opening words of the Article it is assumed that to “justify” (δικαιουν) means to account righteous.  It is properly a legal or “forensic” term, to “acquit” and in itself says nothing about the actual state of the person acquitted.  He is “treated as righteous” whether in point of fact he is righteous or not.

      (1) In the LXX δικαιουν is used to translate a Hebrew word which means “to do justice for a person”, “to treat him with justice” (e.g. 2 Sam 15:4), and so, on the assumption that he is in the right, to “acquit”, e.g. in Exod 23:7 God says “I will not justify”, i.e. acquit, “the wicked”.  In Is 5:23 the prophet reproves those “which justify the wicked for a reward”, i.e. receive bribes to acquit the guilty.  It is also used in a wider meaning of showing or proving righteous. In Jer 3:11 “Israel has shown herself more righteous” than Judah (cp. Ezek 16:51–52).

      (2) So, too, in the New Testament the word is used with the same meaning, e.g. in Mt 11:19 and Lk 7:35 “Wisdom is justified of her children” or “her works” = wisdom is vindicated or proved to be righteous by them.  In Mt 12:37 “By thy words thou shalt be justified” is opposed to “By thy words thou shalt be condemned”.  In Lk 10:29 the lawyer wished to “justify” himself, i.e. to vindicate his position.  In Lk 18:14 the word is used almost in a Pauline sense.  The publican goes home “justified”, i.e. forgiven by God and accepted.

      (3) The word is most common in S. Paul, being used, as we have seen, to express his own inner feeling of acceptance with God as contrasted with his former feeling of condemnation.  In his Epistles there is no instance where the word must mean “make righteous” and several where the context proves that it means “acquit” or “treat as righteous”.  Thus, in 1 Cor 4:4 he writes, “I know nothing against myself, yet am I not hereby justified: but he that judgeth me is the Lord.”  Again, in Rom 4:5 we find: “But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is reckoned for righteousness.”  Here it is expressly stated that the person justified has nothing to show in the way of meritorious acts: his one asset (so to speak) is faith, and this faith is taken as an “equivalent for righteousness”.

      So then from the point of view of scholarship the meaning of δικαιουν is quite clear.  [We may add that while verbs in -οω that are derived from adjectives with a physical meaning, have the sense of “making”, as e.g. χρυσόω = I make golden, verbs derived from adjectives with a moral meaning, have the sense of “accounting as” or “treating as”, e.g. αξιόω, account worthy, not I make worthy.  Thus the sense of δικαιόω is naturally I account righteous.]  It is a forensic term, used to express the initial act by which God pardons and accepts a man.

      Yet at the time of the Reformation the meaning of to justify was hotly disputed, and today the official theology of the Church of Rome holds it to mean “to make righteous”.  The words of our Article show that the Church of England on this point takes sides with Luther against the Council of Trent.  “We are accounted righteous before God” is taken as the equivalent of “We are justified by faith”.  In the earliest days of the Church no controversy arose about this point.  The question of justification first came into prominence in the Pelagian controversy.  S. Augustine, writing against Pelagius, asserted that all man’s holiness was due to the free grace of God.  He used justification to mean not only man’s forgiveness and acceptance with God, but also an actual infusion of righteousness.  “It is true ... that S. Augustine in one place admits the possibility of interpreting it either as ‘making just’ or ‘reckoning just’ (De Spiritu et Litera, § 45).  But though he admits the two interpretations as far as concerns the words, practically his whole theory is that of an infusion of the grace of faith, by which men are made just.” [Sanday and Headlam, p. 150.]  This erroneous view was no doubt assisted by the form of the Latin word “iustifico”.  In mediaeval theology justification was regularly taken to include an infusion of grace, and this view was confirmed by the Council of Trent.  So in the interpretation of the Church of Rome justification includes not only free acceptance by God but also the first stage of sanctification, an imparting of actual righteousness.  Our contention is that in Scripture it simply means being placed by God in a right relation to Himself.  This is no doubt only a beginning.  It is to be followed by sanctification, the actual impartation of holiness.  It may be argued with truth that justification and sanctification can only be separated in thought rather than fact: that in actual experience God’s word of pardon coming as an unspeakable surprise and striking home to the soul does quicken the possibilities of good that a man possesses.  But the distinction is not only theologically sound but practically valuable.  The moment that we open the door to the idea of a man’s own actual righteousness having any place in God’s act of forgiveness we are preparing the way, as mediaeval theology shows, for a return to those ideas of earning salvation by good works against which S. Paul’s language is a protest.  We are making God do what the Prodigal’s Father did not do, give a place to some actual attainment of righteousness, however small, as a condition of acceptance.

      (iii) Again, what does S. Paul mean by faith?  The Greek word πίστις may be used either in an active or passive sense.  It may mean either “trustfulness, the frame of mind which relies on another” or “trustworthiness, the frame of mind which can be relied on”. [Lightfoot, Galatians, p 152–153.]  In the LXX the verb πιστεύειν is used to translate the Hebrew verb “to trust”, as e.g. in the text often quoted by S. Paul “Abraham believed in the Lord: and he counted it to him for righteousness” (Gen 15:6), while πίστις is used in the passive sense as = trustworthiness.  It is not used in the active sense, as Hebrew possessed no corresponding word for trustfulness.  Only in S. Paul’s other favourite text “The just shall live by his faith” does the active idea seem to become blended with the passive.  “Constancy under temptation or danger with an Israelite could only spring from reliance on Jehovah.” [Lightfoot, Galatians, pp. 152–153.]  In the New Testament though the passive sense is found, the active predominates.  It is used in many shades of meaning, just as πιστεύειν may be used in different senses.  With an accusative (πιστεύειν τι) it means to believe that a thing is so.  With a dative of a person (πιστεύειν τινί) it means to believe what a man says.  With εις or επί (πιστεύειν εις τινά or επί τινι ) it means to believe in a person. [See Moulton, Grammar of N.T. Greek, pp. 67–68.]  So πίστις may have every shade of meaning between bare intellectual assent to a proposition and unconditional self-surrender to a person.  In S. Paul’s own writings it has many meanings.  In its highest sense it means not only belief in God’s promises but enthusiastic self-committal to a person.  It is above all a personal relationship, the attitude of a child to his father.  The true son not only believes his father’s promises, but, accepting all that his father has done for him in the past and relying upon the same love for the future, desires to respond to all the claims that his father’s love makes upon him.  That was the attitude of Abraham towards God (Rom 4:3) and of the Saints of the Old Covenant (Heb 11:3 ff.).  In the case of the Christian it is mediated by Jesus Christ.  S. Paul calls it either “faith in Jesus Christ”, Rom 3:22, 26 (cp. 1 Jn 5:13, etc.), or faith in God the Father who raised Him from the dead, Rom 4:24; Eph 1:20 (cp. p 1 Pet 1:21).

      We can see now why S. Paul speaks of being justified by (i.e. through) faith.  Religion is a personal matter between the soul and God.  “Faith” is the one possible attitude for intercourse between the soul and God, just as it is for intercourse between the child and his father.  It involves the looking towards God in Christ, the trustful acceptance of His free pardon and the desire to live a life of fellowship with Him.  It is far more than the assent by the intellect to certain truths.  It involves the whole man.  It demands a venture of the will, the readiness to throw in our lot with Christ “to be ruled as well as to be saved by Him”.  By our act of self-surrender we are placed in the right relation to God, that of sonship.  From another side, faith is, so to say, getting into correspondence with Christ, reaching out the hand to receive the gift that He has won and is waiting to bestow.  It is like the action of the woman with the issue of blood (Mk 5:25–34).  The healing power was there but it needed her own act to get into touch with it.  It was an act of belief in Him.  So it is in virtue of this turning to Christ, this personal relation to Him begun by our act of surrender that we are justified or accounted righteous.

      (b) The objection may be raised: “if we are justified by faith, if God treats us as righteous though we are in real fact far from righteous, is not there a touch of unreality about it?  Is not our salvation made to depend on a legal fiction?”  We must remember in the first place that though “justification” is no doubt a legal term in origin, it is only used by S. Paul because it corresponded with an experience common to himself and to his converts.  They felt that through Christ they had passed from the darkness of God’s condemnation into the sunshine of God’s favour.  Again, it may be said that all forgiveness contains an element of fiction.  Forgiveness means that the man who forgives treats the offender as better than he really is.  It also rests on the assumption that the person forgiven can be changed.  The moment that we pass from the relation between persons as it is felt to be in actual life, and try to express the act of forgiveness in legal or any other language, it tends to appear unreal if not actually immoral.  Further, the sense of unreality in “justification” tends to disappear when we bear in mind that justification is only the beginning.  The new relationship to Christ begun by our act of self-surrender is not any passing or momentary fact.  It is a relationship that we are to maintain all through our lives.  We have by a deliberate act of our whole being put ourselves into touch with the one Saviour, the one cure for our disease.  Justification through faith might with equal accuracy be styled justification through union with Christ.  So long as we remain in union with Him our progress in holiness is assured.  Through Him we shall one day become all that we ought to be.  But – and here comes the grand news of justification – God does not wait till all this has been accomplished.  He accepts us here and now, just as we are.  He treats us as righteous in anticipation of the day when we shall be righteous.  He sees us not as we are but as we are becoming.  “Deus patiens quia aeternus.”  Justification is only the beginning, but since it is God who begins, the, result is assured and only human willfulness can hinder it.  So it is that S. Paul after dealing with justification in the first chapters of the Epistle to the Romans, passes on to the “mystical union” of the Christian with Christ in chapter 6.  The story of the Prodigal Son closes with the readmission of the wanderer to his home and his restoration to all the privileges of sonship.  But we cannot suppose that the Father is indifferent to his son’s future behaviour.  It is assumed that he is to live and grow in that home life to which he has been readmitted.  “There is no condemnation to them that believe and are baptized,” as Art. IX says, even though they are far from holy, not because God has favourites or passes over in one man what He condemns in another.  It is rather that penitence and faith represent a new attitude of the person to God.  If we have repented of our sins and are honestly trying in dependence upon Christ to overcome them, we have done all that we can.  Our dependence on Christ is the guarantee that we shall one day be perfect.  The merits of Christ could have no possible influence on God’s view of us, if we were separated from Him.  But so long as we are living “in Christ”, i.e. in vital union with Him, His merit has everything to do with us.  He is in a real sense responsible for us: we have handed ourselves over to Him.

      This doctrine is, as the Article says, a most wholesome doctrine and very full of comfort.  If our acceptance with God depended upon our having attained to a certain standard of holiness, we could never be quite sure that we had reached it: God would always seem to be standing over us as a critic and a judge.  But the knowledge that God justifies us saves us both from hard thoughts of God and from morbid brooding over our own weakness and failures.  It bids us look not at our very unsatisfactory selves, but at God and God’s love and mercy as manifested in Christ.  This attitude is the only sure foundation of a joyous and happy faith.  Much of the gloominess of religious people is due to a neglect of “justification by faith”.

      (c) Our Article states that we are justified “by faith only”.*  The exact phrase is not in Scripture, but it must be taken to mean just what S. Paul means when he says that men are justified by “faith apart from works of the law” (Rom 3:28).  We have indeed an apparent contradiction between the teaching of S. Paul and S. James on this point.  S. James can write “What doth it profit ... if a man say he hath faith, but have not works? can that faith save him?” (2:14).  “Faith if it have not works is dead in itself” (v. 17).  “By works a man is justified and not only by faith” (v. 24).  Both argue from the same text (Gen 15:6) with apparently opposite conclusions.  S. Paul finds in Abraham an example of one who was justified by his faith in God: S. James the example of one “who was justified by works in that he offered up his son Isaac upon the altar”.  There is evidence that the text about Abraham was a standing subject for debate in Jewish schools.  But when we get below the surface it is clear that the real difference between them is small.  They were in temperament and outlook very different types of character, as the whole tone of their writings shows.  Further, they were dealing with different types of error from a practical point of view.  Thus to S. James “faith” meant “intellectual assent”.  “Thou believest that God is one: thou doest well, the devils also believe and shudder” (2:19).  Faith here corresponds to what S. Paul calls knowledge in 1 Cor 8:1.  But faith to S. Paul means, as we have seen, personal adhesion.  Again, when he speaks of “works”, S. James is thinking of Christian activities, what S. Paul calls “good works” (e.g. in Eph 2:10).  S. Paul is always ready to admit that faith if genuine will show itself in acts of love and service.  He speaks of faith as “working” or “active through love” (Gal 5:6).  On the other hand, when he speaks of “works”, S. Paul means “works of the law”, i.e. works done to earn God’s favour and viewed as deserving a reward.  Again, both use “to justify” in a forensic sense, but S. James has in view the final judgment (e.g. 2:14), S. Paul the initial act by which the soul is placed in right relation to God.  Both have a practical end in view.  S. James wishes to rebuke a barren orthodoxy, divorced from life; S. Paul is opposing a Jewish legalism, the spirit of the Pharisee who supposed that by the excellency of his works he could earn God’s favour.  In view of the familiarity of the question as a subject of discussion among the Jews, we cannot be sure that either had read the other’s epistle.  It is not certain which is the earlier.  Either might quite well be rebuking a perversion of the other’s teaching.  There is no real contradiction between them.

            [*“Sola fide” may suggest two erroneous ideas.  (1) That faith can exist in isolation from any other Christian virtue or spiritual act.  But faith in Christ’s saving work cannot exist without some beginning of repentance for sin, of desire for sanctification and of love for God.  (2) That life in the Church and the use of the sacraments may be superfluous or dispensable.  But the New Testament assumes that faith, baptism and incorporation into Christ in the Church are inseparable aspects of one spiritual fact.]

      This doctrine of justification by faith, almost forgotten during the middle ages and rediscovered at the time of the Reformation, was inevitably exaggerated and distorted in the reaction from mediaeval theology.  The language of our Article is most cautious and avoids all exaggerations.

      (i) There was a tendency on the part of the Lutherans, in their desire to exclude all human merit, to fall into what is known as “solifidianism”, and to argue that man is saved by “faith only” in the sense that good works are not only unnecessary but positively harmful.  They stated that a man was justified if he believed himself to be justified.  To look for any fruit in a changed life was to deny the truth.  That this is not the meaning of “sola fide” in Article XI is shown by the following Article.  This declares that “good works ... do spring necessarily of a true and lively faith; in so much that by them a lively faith may be as evidently known as a tree discerned by the fruit.”

      (ii) Again, we must notice the careful distinction in prepositions.  Faith is the instrument or means of justification.  We are justified per fidem or fide.  But we are justified propter meritum Christi; the work of Christ is the ground of our acceptance with God.  The doubled preposition (propter meritum Christi non propter opera et merita nostra) makes it clear that the Article contrasts the merit of Christ with our own works.  Luther pushed his teaching so far as to say we are justified, “propter fidem”.  But God does not account us righteous as a reward of our faith any more than as a reward for any other excellency that we display.  That would be to return to salvation by works.  The saving power of faith resides not in the man who believes, but in the object of the faith, namely, Jesus Christ, the Almighty Saviour on whom it rests.  Further, S. Paul teaches us that faith itself is God’s gift (Phil 1:29), and we should thank Him for it (Col 1:3–4).

      (iii) The mediaeval theologians had distinguished between fides informis, i.e. a bare intellectual belief, and fides formata, i.e. a faith informed or quickened by love.  Accepting the distinction Luther argued that the first was sufficient for justification: the Council of Trent naturally argued for the latter.  The Article ignores the whole question.  The moment that we grasp that faith is faith in a person the difficulty disappears.  In actual practice as between persons, we can hardly separate faith and love (cp. Gal 5:6).  Faith brings out more fully the side of trust and dependence.  But in actual life we cannot trust ourselves wholly to a person whom we do not love, and love must involve trust.

      (iv) Again, Luther in his attempt to explain justification spoke of “an imputed righteousness”.  God, he laid down, can treat us as righteous because Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us and our sins are imputed to Him.  This is a “legal fiction”, and happily our Article, like Scripture, is silent about it.  Language is still used, e.g. in some of our hymns, that speaks of us as “clothed with Christ’s righteousness” as with a garment.  The metaphor is an attempt to picture the truth that at any moment in our lives we fall short of God’s perfect holiness; we must trust not in our own achievements, but in God’s mercy through Christ.  He represents what we still wish to be rather than what we actually are.  The metaphor expresses a real truth, but is far too external.  We cannot put on righteousness like a garment.†

Article  XII

      One of the four new Articles added by Parker in 1563.  It aimed at striking a mean between (i) Roman over-estimate of good works as earning merit and forgiveness; (ii)Lutheran under-estimate of good works, leading to “solifidianism” and “antinomianism”.

      “Solifidianism” is the belief that we are saved by a bare faith.  “Antinomianism” is the assertion that the Christian is free from any restraint even of the moral law.

      N.B. – “Good works” is a technical term for Christian activities.

Article  XIII

      Unchanged since 1553.  Its object was to condemn the scholastic theory of congruous merit.

      It is important to notice that the title does not correspond with the opening sentence.  “Works before justification” is not equivalent to “works done before the grace of Christ and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit”.  The title must give way to the text of the Article.  There is abundant evidence in Scripture that God’s grace is given to men before justification.  God’s grace was at work in the hearts of those who heard S. Peter on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:37) and in the heart of S. Paul when he was converted (9:11).  But in each case justification came later (cp. 2:38, 9:17–18).  So, too, in the case of Cornelius, the workings of God’s grace preceded by a long interval of time his acceptance of Christ (cp. 10:2 ff.).  Hence works “done before the grace of God” is much narrower than “works done before justification”.  The real difficulty of the Article lies in the addition “forasmuch as they spring not of faith in Jesus Christ”.  This seems to rule out the efforts of good and conscientious non-Christians.  The following answer was suggested in a letter of Dr Hort.  “The principle underlying Article XIII seems to me to be this, that there are not two totally different modes of access to God for men, faith for Christians, meritorious performance for non-Christians.  There is but one mode of access, faith; and but one perfect, and, as it were normal faith, that which rests on the revelation in the person of Jesus Christ.  But faith itself, not being an intellectual assent to propositions, but an attitude of heart and mind, is present in a more or less rudimentary state in every upward effort and aspiration of men.  Doubtless the faith of non-Christians (and much of the faith of Christians, for that matter) is not in the strict sense ‘faith in Jesus Christ’; and therefore I wish the Article were otherwise worded.  But such faith, when ripened, grows into the faith of Jesus Christ; as also it finds its rational justification in the revelation made through Him.  Practically the principle of the Article teaches us to regard all the good there is in the world as what one may call imperfect Christianity, not as something essentially different, requiring, so to speak, to be dealt with by God in a wholly different manner.” – (Life and Letters, vol. 2, p. 337.)

      It is, however, doubtful whether Hort’s answer meets the difficulty.  The “works” of which the Article speaks must be such as are prima facie “good”; otherwise there would be no point in insisting that they are nevertheless not “pleasant to God” and do not deserve grace.  If we say that all the good works or aspirations of both Christians and non-Christians spring in some sense from faith, no works done “before the grace of Christ” would be left for the Article to refer to.  The Article seems in fact to be stating the normal view of S. Augustine that good works which do not spring from explicit faith in Christ are “empty” and as he says in one passage, in peccata vertuntur, omne enim quad non est ex fide peccatum est (Contra duos Ep. Pelag. IV, 14. Cp. Enarr. in Psalm. 31, 2, 4).

      W. Temple, Nature, Man and God, p. 417 f., after saying that this Article is “unfortunately, even calamitously expressed”, gives a constructive statement.

Article  XIV

      Almost unchanged since 1553.

      Object: to condemn “works of supererogation”.

      § 2.  Sanctification

      (a) In our Articles there is no direct teaching on Sanctification.  There is no mention of the continuous work of the Holy Spirit in us after justification nor of the practical holiness of life that God requires.  So the doctrine of justification is left unfinished.  Art. XII comes nearest to any teaching on this subject, and Arts. XIII and XIV deal with certain difficulties connected with it.

      God’s ideal for us is absolute holiness.  “Ye shall be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5:48 R.V.).  Nothing short of that is the object of Christ’s redemption.  While we are justified by faith at the beginning of our Christian life, we shall be judged by our works at the end (2 Cor 5:10, etc.).  Good works are the necessary fruit of that life lived in union with God of which justification is the initial act (cp. Mt 7:16–30, etc.).  If faith is all that S. Paul means by it, it must expand into action.  A man who has accepted forgiveness through Christ, out of very gratitude to His Saviour, must try to serve Him and by serving Him to become like Him.  We are to “follow after ... the sanctification without which no man shall see the Lord” (Heb 12:1–4).  Justification apart from sanctification remains incomplete.  [It is significant that at the beginning of Rom 6 S. Paul assumes that those who are justified will have been baptized.  Baptism is for him the sacrament both of justifying faith and sonship and also of our incorporation into Christ, by which we die to sin and rise to new life in Him.  (Cp. Gal 3:25, 26.)  We enter on the justified and the sanctified life at the same moment.  Compare Hooker, Eccl Pol V, lvi, 11, “Thus we participate Christ partly by imputation, as when those things which he did and suffered for us are imputed unto us for righteousness; partly by habitual and real infusion, as when grace is inwardly bestowed while we are on earth, and afterwards more fully both our souls and bodies made like unto his in glory.”  The whole passage from which these words come deserves study.]  Any teaching on the Atonement that regards it merely as a work wrought by Christ outside ourselves is grievously inadequate.  Nothing has caused more misunderstanding about this doctrine than the neglect in popular preaching of the truth of our union with Christ and the resulting work of His Holy Spirit within ourselves, as an essential part of His Atonement.  As the hymn says “He died that we might be forgiven”, but it goes on to add “He died to make us good”.  The latter is as essential as the former.  Christ did not die only to save us from the punishment of sin, but from sin itself.  He came to deliver us from the weakness of our fallen nature and from slavery to bad habits.  He is the source of new life.  Through the Holy Spirit He imparts to us His own perfect human nature – that perfect humanity which He built up by His life of obedience and consummated by His death.  The will of God is our sanctification (1 Thess 4:1–8), the complete subjection of all our powers of will and heart and mind to God’s Holy Spirit.

      Accordingly, in our Christian life everything turns upon our realizing our membership with Christ, on our self-identification with Him.  We are to do all things “in Christ”.  Our growth in holiness may be called equally either the work of Christ or of the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit did not come to take the place of an absent Christ, but in His coming Christ Himself comes too.  “I will pray the Father and he shall give you another Advocate that he may be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth. ... I will not leave you desolate, I come unto you” (Jn 14:16–19).  It is through the Spirit that the Ascended Lord dwells in the Church and operates in believers (Rom 8:1–11).  The gift of the Holy Spirit is the seal of membership in Christ and acceptance by God (Eph 1:14, 4:30, etc.).  The presence of the Spirit is the presence of Christ (cp. 2 Cor 3:17–18).  “We know that he (i.e. Christ) abideth in us by the Spirit which he gave us” (1 Jn 3:24).  It is through the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost that the Atonement is to be not an act outside ourselves, but a real transforming of our personality within, “Calvary without Pentecost is not yet Calvary in vital relation to ourselves.”  We may view the work of the Holy Spirit within us in two ways.

      (i) Through Him we daily die to sin.  The whole life of Christ was a dying to sin: this attitude to sin was perfected and consummated on the Cross.  By that death He revealed and identified Himself with the mind of God towards sin.  His whole attitude to sin was the perfection of that attitude to sin which God requires in us.  Only the sinless can have a perfect antagonism to and hatred of sin.  Every sin that we commit blunts our capacity for seeing sin in its true light and hating it as we ought.  Our sins become a part of ourselves.  It is “I” who chose and enjoyed the thing that was evil and there still remains in me the latent capacity of enjoying the evil thing.  The Cross of Christ stands for that utter abhorrence of and resistance to sin which God requires in us, but to which we cannot attain.  Our penitence in order to be perfect must rest upon and include such a complete antagonism to sin. [Dr Moberly speaks of Christ as “the perfect penitent”, i.e. as realizing that attitude towards sin which in us would be penitence.  He maintains that only the sinless can be perfectly penitent.  The difficulty in this use of the term is that “penitence” in ordinary usage implies the sense of personal responsibility for sins committed.  See, however, W. H. Moberly’s Essay in Foundations.]  That is just what we cannot achieve.  So we reach the position, that God requires of sinners true penitence, and just because we are sinners we are incapable of true penitence.  Here we need the power of the Holy Spirit.  He brings into our life a new capacity for penitence.  Through the Holy Spirit we are to die to sin.  Our sinful self is to be done to death.  S. Paul speaks of us as crucified with Christ.  “I have been crucified with Christ” (Gal 2:20).  As members of Christ we share His Cross.  “Our old man was crucified with him” (Rom 6:6).  Through the Cross of Christ “the world has been crucified unto me and I unto the world.”  “They that are of Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with the passions and the lusts thereof” (Gal 6:14, 5:24).  Crucifixion is a slow and painful process.  Our old sin-loving self was, so to speak, nailed to the Cross when we first believed in Christ and accepted Him as our Saviour.  But it is not yet dead, and like a crucified man will take a long time to die.  But its death is assured, so long as we do not take it down.  Christ has nailed it to the Cross and it cannot survive.  So through the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit our old self is slowly being crucified or done to death.  We are “becoming conformed unto his death” (Phil 3:10).  Christ’s attitude to sin is being made our own, we are learning to hate sin as He hated it.  We look forward to the day when the old self will be actually dead, slain by the power of the Cross of Christ infused into us through the Holy Spirit and made our own.

      (ii) But there is also the positive side.  It is not enough to be perfected in penitence, to grow into the mind of Christ towards sin.  We must also be perfected in holiness.  As the old self dies, the new self – the Christ-self – is being built up.  We are not only to die with Christ but also to rise with Him (cp. the whole passage, Rom 6:1–11).  We are to realize in ourselves “the power of His Resurrection” (Phil 3:10).  The death of Christ was the consummation of His filial obedience to the Father.  He “Through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish unto God” (Heb 9:14).  All through His earthly life, by repeated and unfailing acts of obedience and right choice, He had built up a perfect human character.  He had grown “in favour with God” (Lk 2:52).  “Though he was a Son,” yet He “learned obedience by the things which he suffered.”  That is, as His life continued, new opportunities were given and new temptations overcome.  He was ever learning the fullness of perfect obedience (Heb 5:8–10, cp. 10:8–-10).  On the evening of His Passion He could say “I glorified Thee on the earth, having accomplished the work which Thou hast given me to do” (Jn 17:4).  The Cross represented the climax of human obedience, the utter submission to the Father’s will, the complete surrender of self.  “He humbled himself, becoming obedient even unto death, yea, the death of the Cross” (Phil 2:8).  So through the Holy Spirit we are to be built up into the likeness of His perfect obedience.  Christ is to be found in us.  We are to learn to say with S. Paul “I have been crucified with Christ; yet I live; and yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me” (Gal 2:20).  When sanctification is complete, the old self will be dead and the new man will be found in the image of Christ (Rom 8:29).  We shall have become our true selves in Christ.  The secret of the Christian life is “Christ in you the hope of glory” (Col 1:27).

      As we have seen, God does not wait until this has been accomplished.  He accepts us here and now.  But so long as our union with Christ is maintained, the end is certain.  Seeing that it is God “which began a good work” in us, we may be confident that He “will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ” (Phil 1:6).  Hence S. Paul can look forward and speak in anticipation of it as already accomplished.  Thus he can write, “If any man is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things are passed away; behold they are become new” (2 Cor 5:17), though it is clear that in actual fact a great deal of the old man was still left in the Christians of Corinth.  So, too, in Col 3:1–4 he tells the Colossians in the same breath “ye died and your life is hid with Christ in God”, and also that, as having been raised with Christ, “they must seek those things that are above.”  So in Eph 1:3 God has “blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ”.  That is to say, God views us and we are to view ourselves as identical with the perfected saints that we hope one day to become.

      Our final destiny is to enjoy God for ever and to be made like Christ when “we see Him as He is” (1 Jn 3:2).  So the new life, born in baptism and growing in Christ by grace, is to reach its fulfillment in the resurrection life of the age to come, for the resurrection too will be the work of God’s “Spirit that dwelleth in us”.  The Christian will then have become all that he was “made” in baptism, “a member of Christ, the child of God and an inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven” (The Catechism).  By incorporation into Christ through the Holy Spirit we are, S. Paul says, already the children of God and joint heirs with Christ.  In the life to come we shall receive our full adoption and inherit the glory of those who are conformed to the image of God’s Son (Rom 8:11–30).  The salvation or supernatural end of man in God’s purpose is the life in which sin and death are finally conquered and God’s people are gathered to Him in the heavenly Jerusalem.  This is only another way of saying that the members of Christ’s body are to be made like Him, that by adoption in Him and union with Him they are to be raised to the glory which His own victorious humanity now enjoys in heaven.

      (b) We have already seen that “good works” are the necessary fruit of “a lively faith”.  As representing our best efforts to please, God accepts them though Christ.  The kindness of the Philippians to S. Paul is “an odour of a sweet smell, a sacrifice acceptable, well-pleasing to God” (Phil 4:18).  We are “created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared that we should walk in them” (Eph 2:10).  Titus is bidden to show himself “an ensample of good works” (Tit 2:7).  S. Paul always appeals to the commonsense of his converts against the perversion of his teaching known as “antinomianism”, that is, the doctrine that since our salvation from first to last depends on the grace of God, we need make no effort to observe the moral law.  “The more that we sin, the more opportunity for the grace of God to forgive” (cp. Rom 6:1 ff.).  This error reappeared at the Reformation.  Our Article employs needlessly harsh language about good works.  It may be perfectly true in the abstract that “good works which are the fruits of faith and follow after justification cannot put away our sins and endure the severity of God’s judgment”.  Since we are imperfect, our noblest actions bear the mark of our imperfection.  As being tainted by sin they cannot endure the judgment of an all-holy God (Rom 3:23, cp. Is 64:6).  But religion is a personal matter.  God is our Father.  To use the best illustration, the presents that a small child brings to his parent may be intrinsically worthless, but are very precious to the parent as tokens of the child’s wish to please him.  So our good works may be full of imperfection but yet acceptable to God as an expression of our desire to serve Him.  Of course they cannot earn or deserve our forgiveness.

      (c) As we saw, our salvation can only be realized by the cooperation of our wills with the grace of God.  Our own effort, therefore, plays a real part in obtaining it.  Further, all salvation is social.  The right use of grace benefits not only the user but his fellow men.  The saint saves not only his own soul but forwards God’s purpose for mankind.  Under God he is a real means of saving others.  Humanly speaking, if he had failed to do his part, not only he but others would have suffered loss.  Hence, from one point of view, salvation is acquired as the result of “good works” and holy living, in the sense that without them it would not have been acquired.  The Church, as a whole, has won through the labours of the saints blessings that without them she would never have enjoyed.  This truth is fully recognized in Scripture.  The welfare of one member of Christ affects all the members (1 Cor 12:26, cp. Rom 12:5).  It is the supplication of a “righteous” man that avails much (Jas 5:16).  S. Paul speaks of his work and sufferings as being endured for the salvation of others (2 Cor 1:6, cp. 12:15; Eph 3:13; 2 Tim 2:10).  Further, in Col 1:24 he writes, “I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake and fill up on my part that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh, for his body’s sake, which is the church.”  These words mean more than that he suffers as Christ suffered, or even that Christ in a real sense suffers in His members’ sufferings on earth (cp. Phil 3:10 and 2 Cor 1:5).  They mean what they say.  S. Paul asserts that his own sufferings have a real place in affecting the salvation of the world.  In the case of the individual Christ’s sufferings need to be filled up by our own self-identification with them (cp. 1 Pet 4:1 with Bigg’s note).  We must take up our Cross and be crucified with Him.  So in the case of the world, Christ’s sufferings need to be filled up by the sufferings of His members.  As Christians can forward the salvation of others by their intercessions, so they can by their sufferings. [Bp. Lightfoot, in his note on Col 1:24, distinguishes between Christ’s sufferings as “satisfactoriae” and as “aedificatoriae”.  He maintains that we fill up the sufferings of Christ merely in forwarding His Kingdom, not in any sense in making atonement.  Such a distinction is quite arbitrary and implies a view of the atonement as a transaction effected entirely outside human life.  Cp. Chandler, Cult of the Passing Moment, p. 106 ff.]  As prayer for another is no substitute for his own personal faith and repentance, but rather a means of forwarding them, so the sufferings of the saints are not a substitute for the penitence of sinners, but a means through which such penitence may be brought about.  There is such a thing as vicarious suffering, but never vicarious sanctification.  But without vicarious suffering there would be little sanctification in the world.  It is these two truths, first, that our sanctification demands our own effort, secondly, that by our efforts we can help forward the sanctification of others, that, however distorted, underlie the whole doctrine of merit as held in mediaeval times, and attacked in Articles XII–XIV.

      (i) The idea of “merit” is found quite early in the writings of Tertullian. [See Bethune Baker, Christian Doctrine, pp. 353–355.]  He taught first that a man could “satisfy” God by doing what he knew to be His will and by not doing what God has forbidden, or, in the case of falling into sin, by voluntarily taking upon himself an equivalent amount of punishment.  In this latter case the “satisfaction” may be attained by alms, fasting, or the like, and above all by martyrdom.  Such suffering is of the nature of an expiatory sacrifice.  It balances the debt due to God.  Further, if this suffering exceeds the amount required, the superfluity counts as “merit”.  It is reckoned as a “good work” and so to say places God in our debt.  Secondly, he taught that in many matters God has left man free to choose between a higher and a lower course.  No man may do what God has forbidden, but if he takes advantage of God’s permission to follow his natural inclinations he does not commit sin.  If, on the other hand, he does not take advantage of God’s permission and takes the highest course of all – what God wills, instead of what God merely allows – then he earns merit in the sight of God.  This teaching was carried a step further by Cyprian.  He held that in certain cases it is possible to acquire an amount of merit more than sufficient to deserve even the highest reward of heaven.  In that case, the surplus may be passed on to benefit others, through an act of God’s grace done in answer to the prayers of the saint, though the benefit is always conditioned by the state of the recipient.  In these ideas we have in germ the mediaeval teaching on merit, on works of supererogation and on indulgences.

      (ii) In mediaeval times it had come to be accepted that in some sense good works carried “merit”: further, that the merits of the saints were available to make up the deficiencies of others.  This being the current belief and practice of the Church, the duty was laid upon the Schoolmen or School-authors mentioned in Art. XIII, to place the whole system on a rational basis.  The Schoolmen were the systematic theologians of the middle ages.*  Their object was with the aid of the newly discovered philosophy of Aristotle to reconcile faith and reason.  Taking the doctrine and discipline of the Church as they found them, without questioning their origin or validity, they strove to present them as a symmetrical whole, agreeable to reason no less than to faith.  Their task was not criticism nor the discovery of new truth, but the harmonization of the old.  Their achievement took the form of “sums of theology”, weaving into a consistent and orderly system, complete even in the minutest detail, all that the Church had seen fit to say or to do.**

            [*The Schoolmen were the successors of the Fathers.  Usually S. Bernard (d. 1115) is styled the last of the Fathers and S. Anselm (d. 1109) the first of the Schoolmen.  The change of name marks a very real change of aim.  “Doctores they claimed to be, not Patres; not, as fathers, productive; not professing to bring out of their treasures things new, but only to justify and establish things old.”  See Trench, Mediaeval Church History, Lect. XIV.]

            [**The most famous is the Summa of S. Thomas Aquinas (1270), still the standard work of theology on the whole in the Roman Church.  Scarcely less famous in their day were the writings of Albertus Magnus (1280), Bonaventura (1274) and later William of Occam and Duns Scotus.]

      The Schoolmen explained the idea of merit by a distinction.  They argued that the case of Cornelius showed that human free will could go a certain way in its own strength in turning towards God.  Such an effort done by man’s unaided power did not indeed deserve a reward, but it was fitting that God’s liberality should reward it.  In technical language it earned merit not as a matter of debt, but “of congruity” (de congruo), i.e. “of fitness”.  This is repudiated in Art. XIII.  On the other hand, good works done by the aid of grace deserved a reward.  They earned merit “de condigno”, as a matter of debt. [We may compare the illustration that is often given.  “A servant deserves his wages ex condigno: he may deserve support in sickness or old age ex congruo.”]  This is attacked in Art. XII.

      Before we criticize the whole idea of merit, it is only fair to remember that the scholastic doctrine of merit can only be fully understood and judged as a part of a very complex and intricate system of theology.  It is there balanced by statements of a very different nature.  But popular religion is unable to make subtle distinctions.  What is attacked in our Articles is the use made of the scholastic teaching in popular religion.

      The mediaeval idea of merit is abstract and artificial.  Our Lord in His teaching no doubt uses current Jewish language about the rewards given by God to those who serve Him.  But in so doing He transforms the whole idea of reward.  It becomes qualitative rather than quantitative.  “Since opportunities are a divine gift (Mt 25:14), service is a mere duty which cannot merit reward (Lk 17:9 ff.).  Reward, therefore, becomes free undeserved grace and is pictured as great out of all proportion to the service rendered (Mt 19:29, 24:47, 25:21, etc.).  This teaching really eliminates the idea of reward altogether.” [McNeile on Mt 5:12:  The whole note deserves reading in this connection.  On the motive of reward in the Gospels, see K. E. Kirk, Vision of God, Lect. 111. Sect. iv.]  In other words the reward is not something external that can be abstracted from the man who receives it.  It is primarily an inward quickening of soul, a new capacity for service and a closer union with God.  Further, the whole idea of “merit”, in the sense of running up a debtor and creditor account with God, is utterly unChristian.  “Merit lives from man to man, and not from man, O God, to Thee.”  For our whole life, for every power that we possess as well as for every opportunity of exercising it, we are utterly dependent upon God.  He has an absolute claim upon all our life.  Nothing that we can do can give us a claim against Him.  Hence not only is the “reward” that we receive from Him non-transferable, but from the nature of the case even the holiest saint can never possess any “merit” that belongs to him, as it were, in his own right and can be transferred to another’s account.  Our personal relationship to our Heavenly Father cannot be expressed in terms of arithmetic.

      The theory of congruous merit attacked in Art. XIII does indeed represent in a distorted form the great truth that any effort that we make will be met by God with an ever-increasing supply of grace.  It is most surely congruous with the character of God to bestow more abundant grace on those who are unconsciously striving to serve and know Him.  But this, like all God’s gifts, is freely given.  His grace is so magnificent a gift that we could never deserve it by the excellence of our own efforts.  Further, the scholastic theory is frankly semi-Pelagian.  It denies the need of prevenient grace.  This is illustrated by the case of Cornelius.  His prayers and alms were certainly good works done before justification.  But equally certainly they were not done apart from God’s grace.  From first to last his salvation was due to divine grace.  The whole idea of having to earn God’s grace by making a good start in our own strength flatly contradicts S. Paul’s teaching on Abraham (Rom 4:1–4, cp. 9:11–13).

      So, too, with the idea of “merit de condigno”.  As we saw above, even our best efforts come far short of perfection.  They cannot “deserve” or “earn” our acceptance or anything else.  At the same time, it is sure at all times that the more fully we respond to God’s calls, the more grace He bestows.  But the right to expect this grace depends on the unfailing generosity of God, not on any excellence residing in our own works.

      At the Council of Trent the phrases “merit de congruo” and “merit de condigno” were entirely avoided.  The need of prevenient grace was clearly asserted.  On the other hand, the assertion that “all works done before justification ... are truly sins or deserve the hatred of God” was anathematized.  Still the idea of “merit” was retained, and today, in spite of the balanced statements of her theologians, the Church of Rome in her ordinary teaching and practice never seems able to get away from the idea of accumulating merit by good works.  There are large portions of S. Paul’s Epistles which find no place in her teaching.  On this point her teaching is un-Catholic.  Popular Protestantism, with its insistence – often exaggerated insistence – on the freeness of God’s salvation, bears witness to a portion of Catholic truth that Rome ignores.

      (iii) In close dependence on mediaeval views about merit came the idea of “works of supererogation”, [The term “supererogation” comes from the Latin versions of Lk 10:35.  Quodcumque supererogaveris = ό τι αν προσδαπανήσης.  Erogare = to disburse money; supererogare, “to pay over and above”.] i.e. “voluntary works over and above God’s commandments”.  We have seen that as early as Tertullian a distinction was drawn between what God “permits” and what God “wills”.  It is not sin to do what God permits, but it is meritorious to do what God wills.  In defence of this distinction the chief passage alleged is 1 Cor 7.  Here S. Paul permits marriage, but “by reason of the present distress”, encourages celibacy.  “Concerning virgins I have no commandment (praeceptum) of the Lord, but I give my judgment (consilium)” (cp. also 2 Cor 8:8 and 10, where we find a similar contrast between “commandment” and “judgment”.)  On the basis of this text a formal distinction was made between “precepts” and “counsels”.  “Precepts” were commands of God binding upon all men, which it was sin to disobey.  “Counsels” or “Counsels of perfection” were, as it were, recommendations, which it was not necessary for a Christian to follow.  Such refusal was not sinful.  Such “counsels” would include poverty, celibacy, the monastic life and the like.  The performance of these, as being over and above God’s commandment, would earn merit for those who performed them. [On “precepts and counsels” and “the double standard”, see K. E. Kirk, op. cit., esp. Lect. V.]

      The words of our Article on this subject are perfectly justified.  No one can render to God more than he is bound to render, for God has a claim on the whole life of man.  There is a very real truth that underlies the distinction between “precepts” and “counsels”.  Some laws of God are binding upon all Christians without exception, as Christians.  But there are other duties to which all Christians are clearly not called, as, for instance, the ministry.  Those, however, who receive a call from God to one of these special duties, are bound to obey at the peril of their souls.  The “counsel” has become a “precept” for them.  They do not earn merit by complying, but they would disobey God by refusing.  This principle is clearly seen in the case of the rich young ruler (Mk 10:17–30).  The command to sell all that he had was clearly not a command to do “a work of supererogation”.  “One thing thou lackest” shows that his life still came short of God’s purpose for him.  Further, the command was an “ad hominem” command.  Our Lord did not give it to all His disciples.  By refusing it the man did not simply fail to earn merit, but he endangered his entrance into the Kingdom of God at all (v. 23). [In S. Matthew’s account of this incident (19:16–21) a distinction appears to be made between what is required for “entering into life” and for “being perfect”, i.e. a “double standard” is suggested.  See K. E. Kirk, op. cit., p. 69.]  Neither in S. Paul nor in the Gospels can any basis be found for “works of supererogation”.  Lk 17:10 quoted in the Article is perfectly clear.

Article  XVII

      An Article of 1553 with slight alterations.  The whole question of Predestination was a burning question at the time.  The most important point to notice is that it keeps to the language of Scripture throughout.  The similarity between the Latin of the Article and the Vulgate is especially close.  The chief passages on which it is based are Rom 8:23–30, 9:21 and Eph 1:3–11.

Article  XVIII

      Unchanged from 1553 except in the form of the title.  The “et” in the opening sentence was omitted in 1563 and restored in 1571.  It would seem to connect it with the last clause of Art. XVI.

      § 3.  Predestination and Election

      (a) Under these theological terms there lie two great problems.

      (1) How can we reconcile God’s omniscience with man’s responsibility?  If God when He creates a man foreknows that he will go wrong, is not God responsible for his sin in creating him?  How can a God of love create a man who will never enjoy that happiness and union with God for which mankind was made?

      (2) What do we mean when we speak of God’s elect or God’s chosen?  To what are they chosen, some privileged position or eternal life?  Has then God got favourites?  Why are others not elect?  Are they outside God’s love?

      The questions were violently debated at the time of the Reformation.  In some form they exercise the minds of all men.  Historically, three main solutions have been given.

      (i) S. Augustine in his controversy with Pelagianism formulated his views on this question.  In dealing with him we need to remember that they are coloured by his own strong religious experience.  He felt that quite apart from any merit of his own God had called him.  God’s grace had come into his life, bringing with it a new power to love and serve God.  He was convinced that God had a purpose of love for him from all eternity and that God’s grace was enabling him to fulfill it.  In the light of this he faced the question “Why is the gift of this transforming grace given to some and not to others?”  His own case showed that it was not earned by any goodness.  Hence he answered that we cannot know.  It depends on God’s will alone.  By God’s decree, without any reference to future conduct, some are chosen as “vessels of mercy” to redemption, others are simply left as “vessels of wrath”.  He himself went no further, but some of his followers carried his views to the logical conclusion that these last were definitely predestined to sin and evil.  God’s elect are kept faithful to Him by fresh supplies of grace, which endow them with the gift of “perseverance”.  This again is a mystery beyond human comprehension.  Perseverance to the end is a sign that a man is predestinated to eternal life.  The purpose of God for His elect cannot fail.  S. Augustine had to explain away such texts as “God willeth that all men should be saved” (1 Tim 2:4), as meaning only that God, as no respecter of persons, willed some men of every age and class to be saved.

      (ii) Calvin did little more than systematize this view and draw out its full implications (v. above).  This doctrine – apart from personal experience – is based upon one side of S. Paul’s teaching especially Rom 8 and 9, such as 8:28–30, “We know that to them that love God all things work together for good, even to them that are called according to his purpose.  For whom he foreknew, he also foreordained to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the first among many brethren : and whom he foreordained, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified.”

      Again, in discussing why Jacob was chosen and Esau rejected even before they were born and had done anything good or bad (9:11), and pointing to it as evidence of the freeness of God’s choice, he adds, “What shall we say then?  Is there unrighteousness with God?  God forbid.  For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.  So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that hath mercy.  For the scripture saith unto Pharoah, For this very purpose did I raise thee up, that I might show in thee my power and that my name might be published abroad in all the earth.  So then he hath mercy on whom he will and whom he will he hardeneth.  Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he still find fault?  For who withstandeth his will?  Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God?  Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why didst thou make me thus?  Or hath not the potter a right over the clay, from the same lump to make one part a vessel unto honour and another unto dishonour?  What if God, willing to show his wrath and to make his power known, endured with much long-suffering vessels of wrath fitted unto destruction: and that he might make known the riches of his glory upon vessels of mercy?”

      The general impression gained by reading such a passage in isolation at first sight is favourable to something very like Calvinism.  Exclusive stress seems to be laid on the power of God and the mysteriousness of its working.  But a closer study corrects any such impression.  S. Paul is speaking here primarily of nations, not individuals.  Jacob stands for the nation of Israel and Esau for Edom (cp. 9:25 ff.).  Again, S. Paul avoids saying that God Himself prepared vessels of wrath unto destruction: he only says that “God endured vessels of wrath fitted into destruction”.  He does say explicitly that God “prepared vessels unto glory” (v. 23).  But no doubt from one point of view he would even say that God formed vessels unto wrath, just as he says above that God “hardened Pharaoh’s heart”.  In such language, he speaks as a Jew.  The Jews, ignoring all intermediate causes, assigned all that happened to its ultimate cause, viz. God.  A Jew would say equally that God hardens a man’s heart or that a man hardens his own heart; that God fits a man for wrath or a man fits himself for wrath.  For the process of hardening is due to one of God’s laws, the law of character, and in this sense is the work of God.  The man acts, and his actions produce the result that God’s law renders inevitable.  Even so it is worth noting that God’s delay in manifesting His power in punishment is due to His “long-suffering” (cp. Rom 24).  More important still, these passages cannot be taken by themselves.  They represent only one side of S. Paul’s teaching.  Elsewhere He speaks of God’s love for all men and of the natural love in man for what is good.  His exhortations assume the truth of man’s responsibility.  We cannot isolate one step in a long and involved argument such as that of the Epistle to the Romans and base a complete theology upon it.

      (iii) In opposition to Calvinism, Arminius, who taught at Leyden about 1604 (and therefore after the date of this Article), formulated views previously held by many.  He taught that God predestines to eternal life certain men because He foresees that they will use their free-will aright and be faithful to the grace that is given them.  This view is called “praedestinatio ex praevisis meritis”.  A very similar view was held by many of the Fathers; in fact, so far as any doctrine on the subject was formulated at all in the Church, it was Arminian even in the West until the time of S. Augustine.  In the East Augustinianism never won general acceptance.  The only, text that offers any support to such a view is Rom 8:28–29.  The great majority of Greek commentators take “according to his purpose” to refer not to God’s purpose but to man’s purpose “in accordance with man’s free act of choice”.  This is impossible.

      Again, the word “foreknew” in the next verse has been pressed in an Arminian sense.  But the word must be understood in accordance with Biblical usage, and means “took note of”, “fixed His regard on” with a view to selection for some special purpose.  The strong point of the Arminian view is that it lays stress on human responsibility, and on the truth that sufficient grace is given to all.  Its weak point is that it appears to make God’s election not a free gift, as S. Paul tells us it is, but a reward earned in advance by man’s own efforts.  Further, it does not really escape the harshness of Calvinism.  Predestination according to foreseen merit logically implies condemnation according to foreseen failure.

      (b) We need to bear in mind that Scripture insists upon three great thoughts.  (i) God has an eternal purpose of love for all nations and individuals whom He has made.  (ii) Salvation and grace are from first to last the gifts of God’s free bounty.  (iii) Man is responsible to God for his conduct.

      (i) Whatever God has done or is now doing for us, He eternally intended to do.  The Gospel is the mystery or secret “which hath been kept in silence through times eternal, but now is manifested” (Rom 16:25).  God “called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before times eternal but hath now been manifested by the appearing of our Saviour, Christ Jesus” (2 Tim 1:9–10, cp. Tit 1:2).  God, by creating a human life, has in some sense made Himself responsible for it.  A God of love and justice must have a purpose of love for every single being whom He creates, in the fulfillment of which the created being will find his true satisfaction.  In this sense all must be predestined to life.  It is this thought that, rightly grasped, has such great moral power.  A man needs to feel that he has behind him not only his own efforts but God’s eternal love: that God has a place for him to fill: that nothing can happen to him from outside without God’s knowledge and permission: that it is God’s will for him that he should do right and realize his best self.  The success of our life must depend not simply on ourselves but on God’s purpose of love.

      (ii) God’s purpose for us is to be realized through union with Himself.  This union is brought within our reach through Jesus Christ.  It was God’s eternal purpose to sum up all things in Him (Eph 1:10).  “It was the good pleasure of the Father ... through him to reconcile all things unto himself” (Col 1:20).  His redeeming work was no afterthought.  He was from all eternity God’s elect or chosen (Is 42:1; 1 Pet 2:4), “the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev 13:8).  When we are made members of Christ we share His election.  We are “chosen in Christ out of mankind”.  It is God’s purpose to bring us “by Christ to everlasting salvation, as vessels made to honour”.  “He chose us in him before the foundation of the world ... having foreordained us unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of the glory of his grace, which he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved” (Eph 1:4–5, cp. 2:4–7).  The glorious position, “sitting in the heavenly places with him in Christ Jesus,” is, as S. Paul’s language shows, not the reward of our own merit, but God’s free gift.  He chose us, not we Him.  The initial act is God’s, not our own (1 Pet 1:1–2).  How is it then that all are not chosen or elect?  The answer lies in the thought that God works out His purpose for the world gradually.  No one can deny that spiritual graces and opportunities, no less than temporal, are unequally distributed (cp. Lk 12:47–48).  Under the old Covenant Israel was by God’s choice an elect nation.  To them God granted a special revelation of Himself.  They were His people (Deut 7:6, etc.).  They had many spiritual advantages that the other nations did not have.  So today the Christian Church is the new Israel (Gal 6:16; Phil 3:3): it has inherited the unique spiritual privileges of the old Israel.  The Christian has spiritual advantages that those outside do not as yet enjoy (1 Pet 2:2–10; Heb 13:10).  The Christian, like the Jew of old, is elect, or, to put it in modern English, selected, not because God arbitrarily saves one man and passes over or condemns another, but because God’s plan is to save men through men.  The privilege of being elect carries with it the duty of using the advantages bestowed for the good of others.  Abraham was chosen that ultimately in him “all the families of the earth might be blessed” (Gen 12:3).  Israel was chosen to do a work for God for the ultimate benefit of the whole world (Is 49:5, 60).  Every Christian is called upon to say with our Lord Himself “For their sakes I sanctify myself” (Jn 17:19).  The Church is the Body of Christ through which the world is to be won back to God (cp. Eph 3:8–11).

      (iii) Accordingly, either a nation or an individual may at this moment not be elect for one of two reasons.  (a) Their opportunity may not yet have come.  As the Article says, God’s spirit works in due season.  (b) Their opportunity may have come and been rejected (cp. Acts 13:46).  In Scripture the “reprobate” are not those doomed to eternal damnation by some arbitrary decree of God, but those who disobey the light that is given to them (Rom 1:28; 2 Cor 13:5).  Thus Scripture seems to show that election is primarily to privilege, but such, if rightly accepted and used, is the means to eternal life. God’s purpose is that it shall be so used.  There is the very closest connection between election and salvation.  We are chosen according to God’s purpose, not to any merely earthly destiny.  But whether we attain it, or no depends upon ourselves.  Such election is God’s method of leading us to salvation, but it needs to be made sure by our own efforts to live up to it (2 Pet 1:10, cp. Col 3:12).  Attempts have been made to show that election is necessarily to eternal life.  Our Lord’s words are quoted “Many are called but few chosen”, where “called” refers obviously to privilege and “chosen” to final salvation, and the two are distinguished.  But there is nothing in this contrary to what we have said above.  Everything depends on the context in which the terms are used.  In 2 Pet 1:10 they are identified: here they are contrasted, and “chosen” refers not to this life but to the day of judgment, when God’s award depends upon the right use of the opportunities bestowed upon those who are called.  No doubt it is God’s purpose of love to bring those who are chosen in Christ to salvation: only our own sloth or willfulness can thwart this.  But as long as we live here we need care and watchfulness (cp. 1 Cor 9:27).

      (c) We may ask, Is this the teaching of the Articles?  There is nothing in the Articles that contradicts it, but the general impression produced is not the same.  The reason is that the Articles give only one side of the teaching of Scripture.  They deal with salvation entirely from God’s side and ignore man’s cooperation.  The complementary side of the teaching of Scripture is passed over in silence.  Our relation to God is a very complex one.  If we consider all the metaphors by which our Lord illustrates it, we get a very long list.  God is our King, our Master, our Judge, our Shepherd and above all our Father.  To gain a true proportion we must take into account all these.  This group of Articles is practically based upon one and one only, and that the most severe.  God is viewed above all as “a Lord Chief-Justice” or a “moral connoisseur”.  His Fatherly love for the souls whom He has made, His personal dealings with us, our response and all the nobler side of human nature are ignored.  Hence the chilly and unreal feeling of these Articles.  There is nothing untrue in them, but rather a want of proportion.

      (d) Behind all these questions lies the problem of the relation of God’s omniscience to man’s free will.  This in turn is only one part of the standing mystery of the relation of the finite to the infinite and time to eternity.  A definite solution is obviously impossible.  Even if the human mind were competent to grasp truth, a large portion of the facts obviously lie outside any human experience.  On such questions moral insight can go further than merely intellectual skill.  The teaching of Scripture on such points can hardly be reduced to a system.  It is always practical rather than speculative.  Scripture holds before us two great counter-truths – first, God’s absolute sovereignty (cp. Rom 9:20 ff.), and secondly, man’s responsibility.  Our intellects cannot reconcile them.  So far as we can reconcile them at all it is by right action and vigorous moral life.  Each truth finds its complete fulfillment in the moral life of Jesus Christ.  We must not shut our eyes to either side of the truth, because it conflicts with our theories.  The difficulty reaches its climax in such a case as that of Judas Iscariot.  He was elect (Jn 6:79).  We cannot but suppose that our Lord called him, because he had certain powers that he might have employed in the work of an apostle and that there was a work in the purpose of God waiting for him to do.  On the one hand Christ has the moral insight to foresee his coming fall and its awful consequences (Mk 14:18 ff.).  On the other hand Judas is regarded as personally responsible.  Up to the end Christ does all in His power to save him (Mt 26:50; Lk 22:48).  We may not think that such efforts were in any sense unreal or that it was not God’s purpose that he should live up to his privileged position.

      Most theologians, no doubt, have held that God’s omniscience is such that He possesses an accurate knowledge of every detail of the future and can foresee who will use the grace given to them.  Others, however, hold that though God is indeed omniscient, He can only know what is knowable, and that by creating man with free will He Himself introduced a certain element of contingency into the course of the world’s history.  For instance, Martensen writes:

      “The contradiction which has been supposed to exist between the idea of the free progress of the world and the omniscience of God, rests upon a one-sided conception of omniscience, as a mere knowing beforehand and an ignoring of the conditional in the divine decrees.  An unconditional foreknowledge undeniably militates against the freedom of the creature, as far as freedom of choice is concerned; and against the undecided, the contingent, which is an idea inseparable from the development of freedom in time. ... But such an unconditional foreknowledge not only militates against the freedom of the creature, it equally is opposed to the idea of a freely working God in history.  A God literally foreknowing all things, would be merely the spectator of events decided and predestined from eternity, not the all-directing governor in a drama of freedom which He carries on in reciprocal conflict and work with the freedom of the creature.  If we would preserve this reciprocal relation between God and His creatures, we must not make the whole actual course of the world the subject of His foreknowledge, but only its essential import, the essential truth it involves.  The final goal of this world’s development, together with the entire series of its essentially necessary stages, must be regarded as fixed in the eternal counsel of God; but the practical carrying out of this eternal counsel, the entire fullness of actual limitations on the part of this world’s progress, in so far as these are conditioned by the freedom of the creature, can only be the subject of a conditional foreknowledge, i.e. they can be foreknown as possibilities, as Futurabilia, but not as realities, because other possibilities may actually take place. ... While God neither foreknows nor will foreknow what He leaves undecided, in order to be decided in time, He is no less cognizant of and privy to all that occurs. ... His knowledge penetrates the entanglements of this world’s progress at every point; the unerring eye of His wisdom discerns in every moment the relation subsisting between free beings and His eternal plan; and His almighty hand, His power, pregnant of great designs, guides and influences the movements of the world as His counsels require.” [Mortensen, Dogmatics, pp. 218–219.]

      We may compare with this a passage from James’ Will to Believe (p. 181).

      “Suppose two men before a chessboard – the one a novice, the other an expert player of the game.  The expert intends to beat.  But he cannot foresee exactly what any one actual move of his adversary may be.  He knows however all the possible moves of the latter; and he knows in advance how to meet each of them by a move of his own which leads in the direction of victory.  And the victory infallibly arrives, after no matter how devious a course, in the one predestined form of checkmate to the novice’s king.”

      It may be that such mental pictures are as near as we can get to a systematized understanding of God’s plan as it is revealed in Scripture and experience.  We must maintain God’s sovereignty.  He knows all the possibilities that His universe contains.  He is always able to overrule history to His purpose.  But it may be that it rests with human choice and effort to determine by which of many possible roads the goal shall be reached.  Modern thought is increasingly dissatisfied with the idea of life as the mere unrolling of a previously determined system and insists on the part played by the free exercise of rational purpose.  Choice has in a very true sense a creative power, since it determines the line along which evolution shall go forward.  No doubt when acts are past we can trace them back to the causes that produced them: as we look back on them now they seem to be the one and inevitable result of those causes.  But that does not show that the possibility that was actually realized was the only possibility before us at the actual time of choice.  Our consciousness seems to point the other way.  We must believe, however, that God’s infinite love and power and wisdom can never be baffled or defeated in the final issue.

      (e) The moral effect of the doctrine of Predestination

      The meaning of the second paragraph may be put thus:

      (i) On the one hand a knowledge of God’s eternal purpose for us is a challenge to us to live up to it (cp. the closing sentence of the first paragraph).  As Dr Mozley says, “The sense of predestination which the New Testament encourages is connected with strength of moral principle in the individual. ... No idea can be more opposed to Scripture or more unwarrantable than any idea of predestination separate from this consciousness and not arising upon this foundation. [Augustinian Doctrine of Predestination, pp. 44–45.]  Again, God’s election is a call to us to pass through those stages of the moral life which are the appointed road to sanctification and to use the means of grace that God has ordained.  As Hooker says, “There are that elevate too much the ordinary and immediate means of light, relying wholly upon the bare conceit of that eternal election which notwithstanding includeth subordination of means, without which we are not actually brought to enjoy what God secretly did intend: and therefore to build upon God’s election, if we keep not ourselves to the ways which He hath appointed for man to walk in, is but a self-deceiving vanity.” [Hooker, V. c. 60 § 3.]

      (ii) The second half of the paragraph points out the dangers of brooding over the idea of predestination, dangers that were only too apparent at the time of the Reformation.  If a man believes himself to be eternally lost by God’s decree, then he may either be led to despair and possibly suicide, or he may decide that as he is to be damned anyhow, he may as well deserve it by having a good time during his life here.  We hear of men taking their lives out of “desperation”.  Others, again, who believed themselves to be saved by the decree of God, claimed to live a life of unbridled license since nothing could destroy their election.  Thus, whether a man felt himself to be lost or saved he might be thrust “into wretchlessness (i.e. recklessness) of most unclean living”.

      (f) If the opening paragraph of the Article might suggest a Calvinistic interpretation, the last two sentences effectually dispel it.  They deny the Calvinistic doctrine of “particular redemption”, i.e. that Christ died for the elect only.  “We must receive God’s promises in such wise as they are generally (i.e. universally, for all men) set forth in Holy Scripture.”  The reference is to such passages as 1 Tim 2:4.  The second sentence runs “In our doings that will of God is to be followed, which we have expressly declared to us in the word of God.”  This rules out a view current at the time among certain Anabaptists that God had a secret will besides His will revealed in Scripture, and that this secret will might cancel the revealed will.  Thus God’s promises of salvation offered to all might not ultimately be valid. [It is worth noting that today the moral difficulty for most men lies not in the apparent inequality of opportunities for attaining heaven, but rather in the inequality of opportunities in this present life.  The centre of gravity has shifted from the other world to this.]

      Art. XVIII at first sight seems hardly consistent with this last statement.  It appears to deny salvation, e.g. to the heathen and those who have never heard of Christ.  But this was not in the mind of those who composed it.  It is aimed at a particular set of people at a particular time.  The Latin title “De speranda aeterna salute” shows that it is aimed at those who have the opportunity of being Christians.  Two alternatives are possible: (i) That it was aimed at those who hoped to win salvation by joining some religious order (here called a law or sect), and observing its rule of life. [See Dixon, vol. v. p. 397.]  (ii) That it is aimed at Anabaptists, who rejected Christ as Saviour and treated any definite Christian belief as unimportant.  In any case it raises a wide question: if belief in Christ is essential to salvation, what are we to say of good heathen or those among ourselves who reject the Christian faith.  The answer is this: Christ claims to be the one and only Saviour (cp. Acts 4:12).  “God gave unto us eternal life and this life is in his Son.  He that hath the Son hath the life and he that hath not the Son of God hath not the life” (1 Jn 5:11–16).  But the Church never dares to say of any man that he is finally lost.  Those who do not yet know Christ or who die without knowing Him will not “be saved by the law or sect they profess”.  There is no Saviour but Christ.  But we trust that in His own way and at His own time, He will make Himself known to them.  Those who are faithful to the highest that they know are unconsciously serving Him even now.  There are many unconscious Christians (cp. Jn 10:16).  Christ is the “Saviour of all men, specially of them that believe” (1 Tim 4:10). [On the question of the operation of the grace of Christ outside the visible economy of the Church, see E. L. Mascall, Christ, the Christian and the Church, p. 149.]  In the parable of the sheep and the goats, those who have observed simple moral duties of love and kindness have really been doing them to Christ, and they seem to be the heathen (τα έθνη, Mt 25:32).  All that we must insist on is that men are bound to do their utmost to attain to further truth, and, when it is found, to live up to it and to the claims that it makes upon them (cp. Jn 7:17).†

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