On the Thirty-Nine Articles. Oliver O'Donovan

and compassion. Speech about the wrath of God is, in certain quarters, back in fashion. But such speech will lead us into a perilous fanaticism unless it extends to the reconciliation of divine wrath, and makes it the terminus of its thought, as it is the terminus of the biblical witness, to speak of God’s favour. The God of the Psalms, ‘who is angry every day’, has become favourable to mankind in Christ. He has not been banished, replaced by another and milder God - which would leave him and his anger dangerously unaccounted for, liable always to break out in rebellion at the behest of some religious passion. He has been reconciled, and therefore (from this point we can now say it) he has shown himself more truly and completely as the God who always was favourable to man in Christ, whose daily anger was never other than a zeal for the integrity of his beloved.

      Here, then, is one way in which we are invited to see the two successive events, death and resurrection, linked, not arbitrarily as a mere reversal, but teleologically. The wrath of God gives way to his favour, in acknowledgement of the perfect sacrifice. This link should, in principle, be made clearer when we speak of the moment which stands between the two events, acting as a noetic connexion which interprets each in terms of the other: the descent to the dead. (‘The dead’ - for so we should translate the Latin ad inferos, avoiding the conventional English equivalent, ‘hell’.)

      As the Elizabethans left it to us, this Article simply affirms, in a manner designed to rebut docetic qualifications, the full reality of Christ’s death. The Word of the Father was identified in every way with man’s mortality, draining the cup to its dregs. And, as we have seen, such an affirmation is helpful, in that it qualifies the Anselmic inclination to treat the cross as a voluntary act of heroism, giving it the appearance of a new, pioneering achievement, rather than the suffering of an age-old fate. Yet Cranmer’s original Article was, perhaps, even more helpful (though it raised more problems, to which we shall return shortly). It attempted to express the saving significance of Christ’s death (as death, and not simply as heroism) by referring to the teaching of 1 Peter 3.19 (and 4.6) that the gospel was proclaimed to the dead. ‘The body lay in the sepulchre until the resurrection: but his ghost departing from him, was with the ghosts that were in prison, or in hell, and did preach to the same, as the place of S. Peter doth testify.’ The central meaning of the descent to the dead is that Christ’s identification with mankind in death is at the same time a proclamation of God’s favour, to those who are already dead, and so also to those who have still to die. The link between the cross and the resurrection is explicit. Already the conquest of death is preached. By making himself one with us in the darkness of God’s wrath, Jesus brings us out from darkness into the light of God’s favour. And in particular he brings those long dead: the place of Saint Peter speaks of the generation who died in the primaeval flood, because they, alone among all generations, had no symbolic prefiguring of the Paschal Mystery to instruct them. They stand appropriately for all who have died without hearing the message of hope. To all who have lived and died in every age the one perfect work of identification and vindication extends its summons to rise from the grave and be alive for evermore.

       This last point leads us naturally to consider how the Reformers understood the relation between the death of Christ and the incarnation.

      The point about the crucifixion which the Reformers were anxious above all to maintain - and here we must include the whole Reformation and not simply the English branch of it - was that this single happening was decisive for all history. ‘The offering of Christ once made is the perfect redemption, propitiation, and satisfaction for all the sins of the whole world’, states Article 31. And in that sentence the most important phrase is ‘once made’, echoing the repeated hapax, ‘once for all’, of the Epistle to the Hebrews. As we are reminded by the situation of this statement - it occurs in Article 31 and not in Article 2 -the immediate occasion for the Reformers’ contention was the controversy over the Eucharist. But we would be short-sighted not to see behind the eucharistic controversy a much more important issue about the shape of history. The Reformers were striving to achieve a Christocentric idea of history. We see this not only in their battle against the concept of the Mass as repeated sacrifice, but also in their struggle for the authority of Scripture over tradition. That is why the legacy of the Reformation, though remote in many of its interests from ourselves, is of vital importance to us - for whom the battle between Kierkegaard and Hegel has shaped, and still shapes, our theological era.

      In modern terms, what the Reformers defended was an eschatological conception of the work of Christ: that in his death and resurrection the end of the age was present; that his sacrifice is equally valid and equally immediate to every age, and not to be accounted for simply as the immanent product of one age and the inspiration of successive ones. To claim so much for Christ’s death, of course, is implicitly to make the claim for his person. It raises the question of how we may so speak about Christ as to support the weight that is put upon these climactic events. We look, then, for a Christological statement which will suggest the eschatological character of Christ’s appearing, a statement such as might have been modelled on the opening words of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the foundation for the ‘once for all’ which echoes throughout that book: ‘In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things.’

      We look in vain. The Augsburg Article which Cranmer followed took a conservative line, adopting the Anselmic principle that what was needed to sustain an understanding of the work of Christ was a Chalcedonian two-natures Christology: only man should make satisfaction, only God could. The Chalcedonian formula, then, introduces the clause on the atonement, and only the phrase ‘never to be divided’ (inseparabiliter coniunctae) distantly evokes a sense of historical finality. Furthermore, the effect of interposing the two-natures formula between the main verb ‘took man’s nature’ and the clause ‘who truly suffered …’ is to distance the first from the second. The incarnation itself is no longer part of the story, but a preface to it, establishing the Christological conditions for the atonement. Contrast this with the sense of movement in Philippians 2.5ff, where the birth ‘in the likeness of men’ is the first step in the twofold self-emptying of the one who was in God’s form (controversially enough to many modern minds); or, again, with the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds. The coming of the Christ must itself unloose the climax of history; it is the breaking-in of the Kingdom of God, the coming of the Son of Man. It is true enough to say that only man should make satisfaction, only God could do so. But must we not say more than this, if we are to give the ringing affirmation of Article 31 its proper foundation? Must we not say that only the new man, ‘the last Adam’, can represent all mankind in the offering of a new and acceptable sacrifice to God? And that only the coming of God’s Kingdom can reconcile and recreate the world-order once given and now lost?

      For the meaning of Christ’s resurrection is that the renewal of all creation has begun. In a body that represents the ‘perfection’ of man’s nature we see the first-fruits of a renewed mankind and a sign of the end to that ‘futility’ which characterizes all created nature in its ‘bondage to decay’ (Rom. 8.19-21). There are two aspects to this renewal, which have to be kept in a proper balance. On the one hand we must not understand the newness of the new creation as though it implied a repudiation of the old. The old creation is brought back into a condition of newness; it recovers its lost integrity and splendour. In the resurrection appearances of Jesus the disciples were offered a glimpse of what Adam was always meant to be: lord of the elements, free from the horror of death. On the other hand, restoration is not an end in itself. Adam’s ‘perfect’ humanity was made for a goal beyond the mere task of being human; it was made for an intimacy of communion with God. The last Adam, in restoring human nature, leads it to the goal which before it could not reach, brings it into the presence of God’s rule, where only the one who shared that rule could bring it. And so it is that the moment of triumph divides into two moments, a moment of recovery and a moment of advance. The resurrection must lead on to the ascension: ‘Do not hold me’, said Jesus to Mary in the garden on the first Easter morning, ‘for I have not yet ascended to the Father’ (John 20.17). In the Western Church we speak of God’s deed as ‘salvation’, emphasizing the aspect of recovery and deliverance from sin and death. In the Eastern Church they speak more commonly of theosis or ‘divinization’, emphasizing the advance beyond simple restoration to communion with the divine nature.