On the Thirty-Nine Articles. Oliver O'Donovan

allowed no room for important biblical categories. We need only think, for example, of how the title ‘Son of Man’ lost its apocalyptic eschatological significance, central to its use in the recorded teaching of Jesus, and was misunderstood as though it represented one half of two-natures doctrine; and of how the title ‘Son of God’ was taken to represent the other half, losing all echoes of the Messianic kingship from which it sprang.Yet this dissatisfaction was really addressed to a restrictive use of the Nicene and Chalcedonian formulae, rather than to the formulae themselves. It represented a justified demand that the terms of Christian discussion should be widened to respond to the whole witness of Scripture, not an impugning of these conceptions as such.A fashion in recent years has been to speak of complementary approaches to Christology, ‘from above’ and ‘from below’. The terms are unfortunate in themselves, since they suggest a kind of weighting of our thought to one side or the other of the two-natures doctrine – thus failing to get beyond the Chalcedonian conception on the one hand while treating it entirely arbitrarily on the other! But there is a true perception lying behind them. What ought to be said (and perhaps is really meant by these phrases) is that Christology must grasp the pre-Easter moment together with the post-Easter moment of revelation, and must allow them to interpret each other in a true dialectic, so that our doctrine of Christ achieves its proper historical dimension. Mystery is the disclosure of hiddenness into perspicuity. To speak only in categories of perspicuity distorts and conceals the mystery.

      Yet we must speak also in categories of perspicuity; not only of the appearing of being, but of the being which appears. To refuse this step is to refuse belief in revelation itself, and in Jesus as the disclosure of the Father. If we collapse all being into event, then there is no event of revelation; for revelation is an event which concerns some being which is not itself an event. Perhaps we must say, further, that without being there is no event whatever, but only ‘process’, a movement without reference in reality beyond itself. Certainly, a Christology which is shaped upon the New Testament will find itself required, precisely in order to do justice to the event of God’s self-disclosure, to take its stand on the ground of post-Easter perspicuity and to state what it is that has been disclosed. In taking its stand on this ground, it will not have to move one step beyond where the New Testament authors (including the synoptic evangelists) were prepared to stand – though it may make its position more systematically precise than they did. And perhaps it is at this pole of Christological thought that precision and discipline is most necessary, the formulation of normative guidelines most helpful. For it is here, if we are not careful, that undisciplined speculation and fancy can grow wild, where the willful projection of human abstractions can obscure what God has shown us of himself. It is here, where the incomprehensibility of God is offered to understanding, that we may most easily take flight into cheap dialectic out of a kind of mental panic. Here, then, we need to be directed in careful and ordered terms to what we may say about the being of God and Christ in responsibility to the Scriptures.

      And there is always a risk – perhaps a heightened risk, when the depth of Christology is taken seriously, and its force is so much more evident – that we will back away in unbelief. It would be wrong to hide the fact that some of the discomfort which the classical formulae evoke in our age is simply due to our unbelief (in which theologians participate with other Christians, no more and no less), and that what they say, as well as what the New Testament says, has occasionally proved too much for some of us. It may, of course, be that the very way in which theological study has been approached and carried through is so self-consciously determined by scepticism that its conclusion in unbelief, the puzzled shake of the head and the wondering lift of the eyebrow, seems to have been carefully planned from the outset. But who can say that this has always been so? Belief and unbelief are mysterious, just as the revelation itself is a mystery. And in this fact lies our hope, in this unbelieving age, that for any individual or for the Church at large the prison-bars may yield at the divine touch – an event which is not itself founded on reason, but is the foundation for reason, just as unbelief is not the conclusion of reason, but the starting point which determines its direction.

      Where, then, does unbelief affect us? Curiously (it may seem) not in the statement that God was in Christ – not in that statement as such, but in the claim for Christ’s pre-existence as the eternal Word of the Father. In comparison with this fundamental stumbling-block for belief, other difficulties (such as with the virgin birth) appear no more than symptomatic. The statement of Christ’s pre-existence is, of course, a statement of perspicuity; it belongs to the conclusion, not to the beginning of the event of revelation. For all that it speaks of the beginning before the beginning, that beginning to the story was not our beginning but God’s, and so disclosed to us at our end like the divinity of Christ with which it is implicated. Yet it is easier to believe in the divinity of Christ than in his eternal pre-existence. Why? Because the notion of a God-in-becoming is not uncongenial to the deepest intuitions of humanism, which has applied the attributes of infinity to the process of time and to the history of mankind. Already in the radical monophysitism of the fifth century there was breathed the shocking idea of a‘one nature after the union’, a new divinized humanity and humanized divinity which, as it were, rendered obsolete the old humanity and divinity which had been known. And out of this Christological seed has sprung much that is modern. A humanity aspiring to transcend itself will feel at home with the paradoxical combination of infinity and innovation. History itself, no longer bounded by the eternal, has taken the eternal into its own changeability by masterful self-transcendence. The Divine Man can as easily be a symbol of this titanic hope as an affront to it. But the Incarnate God, the divinity who has taken humanity into his own unchangeability and is eternally the same – there is a stone of stumbling to the mind shaped by modern historicism, an unmalleable symbol, an uncompromising offence.

      2

       The Passion and Triumph of Christ

      (Articles 2-4)

      To expound the story of mankind’s redemption in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is the most weighty task entrusted to theology, and also the hardest. The list of theologians who have done it well is a short one. In the terms set by our own text, we may focus the difficulty like this:- In Articles 2-4 there are five narrative moments which may be singled out within the story: ‘the Son … took man’s nature in the womb of the blessed Virgin’; he ‘truly suffered, was crucified, dead and buried’; ‘he went down into hell’; he ‘did truly arise again from death’; ‘he ascended into heaven, and there sitteth’. How is the theologian to account for this sequence of moments in such a way that they make one story of one redemption? We are familiar enough with theories of the cross which have no place for Easter, with theologies of resurrection which can make no sense of the ascension, with talk about incarnation which does not need a Paschal Mystery. But good theology should be able to treat of all these moments distinctly, while showing how they are one act of God and not several. In doing so it will also have to distinguish the different ways in which these moments interact with the events of history. For although they make one story of one act, which took place in history under Pontius Pilate, they do not all have identical event-characters. At either end of the sequence there are happenings which have, as it were, one foot in and one foot out of history; they are the beginning and the end of the sacred drama, and beginnings and ends always stand in a strange half-transcendent relation to the events which the bound. In the centre we have a moment which makes the least contact with the time-space of history; and on either side of it, two Moments which constitute the Paschal Mystery itself, the death and resurrection of Christ, complementary and equally weighted to make a genuine sequence of events, yet different from each other in the way in which we say that they ‘happened’.

      Let us begin at the centre, with the crucifixion and resurrection. From the beginning of the apostolic preaching, these two moments are announced as a narrative sequence, linked by the time reference ‘on the third day’, and so complementing one another and constituting a story in themselves, of how God intervened to overthrow death. ‘This Jesus ... you crucified andkilled ... But God raised him up’. (Acts 2.23f). And yet it is already clear that these two happenings, differentiated as they are by the human and divine subjects of the verbs, are also different in kind. This can be seen in the resurrection-narratives of the gospels, which, though they speak of actual and material