Thoughts for Eastertide

 He is risen!

 

In each of the Gospel portraits of Jesus Christ the events of a single week occupy a sizeable portion of the text.  This is the week which began with His triumphal entry into Jerusalem, riding on a donkey in fulfilment of the prophecy of Zechariah, and thus publicly announcing Himself to the nation as the long-awaited Messiah.  This is the week which ended on the Sabbath in which in the visible world His body lay in the tomb in which Joseph of Arimathea had laid it while in the invisible world He in spirit had entered the other Kingdom of Death not as those who had gone there previously, a captive, but as a Conqueror. (1)  In this week, the week of Creation is recalled and fulfilled.  On the day corresponding to that in which God said “let there be light”, Christ, the Light of the World, announced Himself publicly.  On the day corresponding to that in which God made man in His Own image and so finished His work of Creation which He pronounced good, Jesus Christ just before dying proclaimed the word τετέλεσται (Jn. 19:30) which means “It is finished.”  The work He thereby proclaimed finished was the work of redemption, the work of propitiation, the work of Atonement, the work made necessary by man’s fall into sin.  Then on the day corresponding to that in which God rested from His work of Creation, His body rested in that borrowed tomb.

 

Last week was Holy Week, the week in our liturgical Kalendar devoted to special remembrance of this week of Gospel events.  It began with Palm Sunday, in which palms are waved and hosannas shouted in commemoration of Christ’s Triumphal entry.

 

On Maundy Thursday we were reminded of the Last Supper where the Sacrament of Holy Communion was instituted, where the New Commandment, “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another” (Jn. 13:34), so like those with which the Lord summarized the Law and yet so different at the same time, was given, and where the Lord Himself set the example of this by washing His disciples’ feet, an act ritually re-enacted on the day which takes its name from the Commandment. 

 

On Good Friday the Crucifixion itself was the focus.  In outward appearance, this was the opposite of the Triumph at the beginning of the week.  Instead of “Hosanna”, the crowd cried “crucify Him”, instead of riding into the city He had to carry His cross out of it.  Beneath the outward appearance, of course, this was His true moment of Triumph.  He had told His disciples from the moment St. Peter had confessed “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt. 16:16) at Caesarea Philippi that this would come, that it was for this purpose that He entered into the world, that this is what it truly meant for Him to be the Christ.  He had not come to bring political deliverance to the Old Testament nation, but to bring deliverance from the slavery into which the Fall of Adam had delivered all mankind, slavery to sin and death, and He could only do this by suffering and dying Himself.  Since St. Anselm, we in the West have tended to think of this primarily in terms of the payment of a debt.  Man owed a debt but had no resources to pay, God had the resources but could not pay the debt qua God, so He became Incarnate as a Man and the God-Man paid the debt on behalf of the world.  In the East, they tend to think of it more in terms of a hostage situation in which Death, man’s enemy, has held him captive and Christ, Who is stronger than Death and over whom Death has not even the usurped claim due to sin, allowing Himself to be taken by Death so that He could destroy Death from the inside and set the captives free.  Both ways of thinking about it are taken from Scripture.  Ultimately, Charles Wesley spoke for Christians East and West when he put it “Amazing love! How can it be, that Thou my God should die for me!”

 

Holy Saturday commemorates both the resting of His body in the Grave and His Descent (as Conqueror) into Hell.  Traditionally, the second of these themes received more emphasis in the liturgy of Holy Saturday.  That this is not the case today (2) is in part due to unfortunate liturgical revisionism that has been influenced by the even more unfortunate theological revisionism which is squeamish about anything having to do with Hell. (3)  The other part is that often the only service on Holy Saturday is the evening vigil which begins with the Holy Saturday themes but moves into the theme of the Resurrection.  The evening of Holy Saturday is, by the reckoning of time established in the week of Creation (4), part of the following day.

 

That following day, of course, is the most important day of celebration in the Christian Kalendar.  In the English-speaking world we call it Easter, similar to how the Germans call it das Ostern.  Those silly and foolish individuals who come creeping out of the woodworks around this time each year to denounce the celebration as “pagan” get most of their mileage out of this name.   Even if, however, their questionable etymology of the word were to be proven correct, their argument is still nonsense because the thing itself, the feast day, was around long before this name got attached to it. 

 

The Hebrew word פסח (Pesach) is the name of the most important feast day of the Old Testament religion.  It is called Passover in English and it is the day on which the Israelites remembered their deliverance from slavery in Egypt as told in the book of Exodus. By the time of the New Testament the Israelites were speaking Aramaic more often than Hebrew and in Aramaic פסח took on a final aleph to become פסחא.  In Greek, the language in which the New Testament was written and the primary language of the Church in the earliest centuries, this was transliterated into Πάσχα and at least as early as the second century this term was used for the Christian feast as well.  It retained this name in the North African/Western part of the Church where Latin superseded Greek as the primary language and in Latin it is spelled Pascha.  To this day, in the vast majority of languages the feast called Easter in English is called Pascha or some variation thereof and even in English we use the adjective “Paschal” to refer to things pertaining to Easter.

 

The history is clear.  The holiday did not begin as a pagan feast named Easter that was appropriated by the Church but as the Christian Passover.  This remains the essence of the feast regardless of what other names derived from the time of year in which it occurs became attached to it later in countries with Germanic languages.

 

Our silly and foolish friends if they are capable of pursuing their case any deeper than the superficial argument about the name may point out that the authorization for the Old Testament Passover, along with detailed instructions as to how to keep it, came directly from God, and ask where the similar authority for a Christian Passover is to be found.  The answer lies in what the New Testament teaches about the relationship between the events commemorated by the Old Testament Passover and those we commemorate in Holy Week leading up to Easter.

 

According to the New Testament, most especially the book of Hebrews, the Old Testament consists of types which prefigure or foreshadow the Gospel.  The blood sacrifices of the Levitical system were types of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, Who takes away the sin of the world.   The earthly Tabernacle/Temple was a figure of the Heavenly Tabernacle made without human hands.  Other examples, not spelled out the way these were in Hebrews, are just as clear.  Moses, for example, the Law-Giver, was allowed to lead the Israelites up to the Promised Land but he was not allowed to lead them in, that role was given to Joshua (5) in which can be seen prefigured everything St. Paul had to say, which was a lot, about how the Law cannot make one righteous before God, only the grace brought by Jesus Christ can do that.

 

The Old Testament Passover commemorated Israel’s deliverance from Egypt.  Israel had gone down into Egypt during the years of famine in which Joseph was the highest official in the land under Pharaoh whose favour he enjoyed.  They remained there four hundred years after which another Pharaoh, who feared rather than favoured the growing nation, had them enslaved.  Moses, Hebrew born but adopted into Pharaoh’s family, met God in the wilderness Who told him that He was sending him to Pharaoh to plead for Israel’s deliverance.  Multiple times Moses and his brother Aaron entered Pharaoh’s court with God’s demand that His people be set free, each time Pharaoh refused and a new plague fell upon Egypt.  In the final plague, the angel of death was sent to take the firstborn of every family in Egypt – only they, to whose door posts and lintels the blood of the Passover lamb had been applied, i.e., the Israelites, were spared.  Pharaoh then commanded Moses to take the Israelites and leave, only to change his mind again once they were gone and pursue them with his army to the Red Sea.  God opened a pathway for the Israelites through the Red Sea, then brought the waters down on the Egyptian army.

 

This entire event forged Old Testament Israel’s identity as a nation.  It also prefigured another, greater, deliverance.  The salvation of which the Exodus was but a type was not a deliverance from physical servitude but of spiritual servitude to sin.  Nor was it merely the deliverance of a nation but of the entire world.  This is the salvation accomplished by Jesus Christ on the Cross which event took place on the Old Testament Passover.

 

Since that of which the Old Testament redemption of Israel was a shadow has come to pass, we who believe in Jesus Christ look back to that rather than to the shadow.  That there would be an annual Christian Passover celebrating Christ’s redemption of mankind was settled very early in the Church.  When it is first mentioned as such in the writings of the second century, it is treated as having been long established.  This would imply that it is Apostolic in origin and, indeed, the Apostles were barely in their grave before a dispute arose not over whether there should be a Christian Passover but over when it should be held. (6) Those who held the Quartodeciman position argued that the Christian Passover should fall on the same day as the Jewish Passover (the fourteenth of Aviv/Nisan on the Hebrew calendar), others held that it should fall on the Sunday after.  Although the sides in the controversy tended to fall along regional and ethnic lines, there is clearly an underlying theological issue here of whether the Crucifixion or the Resurrection takes precedence.  The first ecumenical council of the Church, which met at Nicaea in 325 to address the heresy of Arianism, also ruled on this matter.  Ruling against the Quartodecimans the council determined that the Christian Passover would be held on the Sunday that follows the first full moon on or after the spring equinox. (7) 

 

The ruling of Nicaea I made it clear that the Christian Passover would be a commemoration of the Resurrection rather than of the Crucifixion although by this time Holy Week was starting to take shape with Good Friday being already firmly established. (8)   In this, can be seen a parallel to the decision made by the Apostles that the Church would meet on Sundays rather than on the Sabbath (Saturday).  That this decision was made, we know from the New Testament in which the Church is depicted as meeting on Sunday (Acts 20:7, 1 Cor. 16:2). Although neither the decision itself nor the occasion for it are recorded, the reason why Sunday as opposed to say Monday or Wednesday, was selected is quite obvious.  The Sunday after Christ was crucified on the Old Testament Passover, the women among His disciples went to the tomb to complete the burial which had been done in haste due to the onset of the Sabbath.  They found the stone that sealed the tomb rolled away, the grave clothes in which He had been buried folded up and empty, and an angel there to tell them that He was not there, He was risen.

 

The importance of Christ’s Resurrection cannot be overstated.  St. Paul explains it exquisitely in the fifteenth chapter of his first epistle to the Corinthians.   Against those who took the Sadducees’ position that there will be no Final Resurrection, He argued that if the dead do not rise then Christ is not risen, and if Christ is not risen we are without hope, but that since Christ is risen, then we know that the dead will all rise.  We are all dead in the first Adam because the sin by which he brought death into the world passed from him to all of us bringing death along with it.  Christ underwent death for us that He might remove the sting of death which is sin.  His victory over this final enemy is our victory, in Him, the last Adam, we are made alive.  His Resurrection was the firstfruits of the Resurrection in which we one day will all fully share even as we are to participate in it even now by walking in newness of life by faith.  His Resurrection, while in the same body in which He had died – He displayed the scars in His hands and side to His disciples – was not to the same life that He had left behind in dying, but to a new and higher kind of life which death can never touch.

 

In this we have a clue as to why the day of the week on which Christ rose was so important to the early Church that they set it both as their weekly day of corporate worship and the annual Christian Passover.  In the New Testament it is called the “first day” with reference to the week that follows.  The early Christians, however, also called it the “eighth day” in reference to the week which preceded it.  The week signifies the week of Creation, and, as we have seen above, this was especially true of the week of Jesus’ life and ministry on which the Gospels concentrate, the week we remember in Holy Week. What then does the eighth day that follows the seven which signify the Old Creation signify?

 

One early Christian writer described it as “a beginning of another world” (9).  St. Augustine argued that the Sabbath day of rest of the Decalogue was but a figure of the eternal rest to which the eighth day, revealed to the Christians in the Gospel, looks forward. (10)  The eighth day, then, is the day which comes after the seven of the Old Creation, the day of the New Creation, the life of which Jesus entered in His Resurrection, and in which we can share even before our own resurrection on the Last Day because we participate in His life as members of His mystical body, the Church.

 

How appropriate and how utterly unpagan is that annual Lord’s Day of Lord’s days, the Christian Passover of Easter in which after the reflection on our sin and mortality in Lent, culminating in our remembrance of the week which led from the Triumphal entry to Golgotha and the tomb, on the eighth day we joyously proclaim He is risen!

He is risen indeed.

 

Alleluia!

 

 (1)   The two Kingdoms of Death are the Grave in the collective sense, the place where the body is placed, and Sheol/Hades/Hell, where the spirits of the dead go.  When Jesus died on the Cross, His divine nature remained united to both His body in the Grave and His human spirit in Hades.  Jesus’s death, like any other human death, separated His human body from His human soul.  It could not separate either from His deity.  The Hypostatic Union in which the Eternal Son of God received a full and flawless human nature into His Eternal Person in the womb of the Virgin Mary the moment she said “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word” (Lk. 1:38) can never be broken.

(2)   In the West.  In the East, the Descent into Hell is still very much the focus of the liturgy of Holy Saturday.  Due to the difference between the Gregorian and Julian calendars, of course, the Eastern Holy Saturday and the Western Holy Saturday do not fall on the same day.

(3)   The Hell in the Descent into Hell, is the Hell referenced in note 1, vide supra, and not Gehenna, the place to which those who render themselves incurably wicked by rejecting Jesus Christ will be condemned at the Last Judgement.  That Christ did indeed descend there as confessed in the Apostles’ Creed is Scriptural despite the claim of certain evangelicals to the contrary.  St. Peter, in his sermon on the first Whitsunday (Christian Pentecost), quoted Psalm 16:10 and applied it to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ (Acts 2:25-31).  If the Resurrection fulfils “thou wilt not leave my soul in hell”, then Hell, again Sheol/Hades, is clearly where it was prior to the Resurrection.  There is no conflict here with Christ’s words to the dying thief “Today shalt thou be with me in Paradise” (Lk. 23:43).  Paradise is wherever Jesus Christ is.  On the original Holy Saturday, Hell itself was Paradise.

(4)   “And the evening and the morning were the first day” (Gen. 1:5)  It is because of this pattern in the Creation account that days in the sacred Kalendar of Christianity are counted sunset to sunset, as they are in the corresponding sacred calendars of Judaism and Islam, regardless of how days in the civil calendar are counted (midnight to midnight).  In the Bible itself, this is the one of three ways of counting days, and certainly the primary way in the Old Testament.  The other two are to count from sunrise to sunrise (morning/evening rather than evening/morning) and to count from midnight (only St. John does the latter, which is why the hours during the Crucifixion account in his Gospel differ from those in the Synoptics, which count from sunrise).

(5)   Joshua is the English spelling of a Hebrew name which, taken from Hebrew into Aramaic then Greek, becomes the name of which Jesus is the English spelling.

(6)   According to Eusebius the controversy broke out as early as the time of St. Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna in what is now Turkey and personal disciple of St. John the Apostle who was martyred around the middle of the second century.

(7)   This calculation formula translates the date of Passover in the Hebrew lunar calendar (Aviv/Nisan is the month of spring, the fourteenth is the Ides or full moon of the month) into an approximation in the solar calendar.

(8)   The commemoration of the Crucifixion on the Friday prior to Pascha/Easter is referenced as early as Tertullian.  The name “Good Friday”, of course, came much later. Note that this was no concession to the Quartodecimans.  The 14 of Aviv/Nisan in the Hebrew calendar, like the dates on the civil calendar, move across the week from year to year.  Commemorating the Crucifixion on the Friday before Easter, follows from commemorating the Resurrection on the day of the week on which it occurred.

(9)   The Epistle of Barnabas, 15.

(10)                       St. Augustine, Letter 55, 12-13.

Musical Conversations

The other week a colleague joked about my “out of date” taste in music.  It was five hundred years old he said.  I found this highly amusing.  I had been listening to the symphonies of Beethoven.  Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 in C major was first performed in Vienna in 1800.  His Symphony No. 9 in D minor, the fourth movement of which contains the famous choral setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy and which set nine as the informal upper limit for symphonies for future composers, (1) was first performed in Vienna in 1824.  Each of these, in other words, dates to the century before the last rather than five centuries ago.

 

Unintentionally, however, my friend illustrated the very point that I made in answer to him.  If the difference between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries is that irrelevant then the music in question cannot be tied to the era that produced it in the sense his criticism suggests. Classical music in the broad sense of the term can never be out of date because it is timeless.  This is, indeed, what the term classical implies when used of this kind of music.  This is why it persists as its label despite the potential for confusion (2) even though attempts are periodically made to find another.

 

Classical is not the only kind of music that possesses the quality of timelessness although it has a firmer title on it than any other.  There is a type of music, by contrast, that is notoriously time-bound.   That is the type of music that we usually refer to as pop.

 

Note that while pop is short for popular, pop music and popular music are not the same thing.  Popular music is the traditional complement to classical music.  It covers any kind of music that belongs to the popular or common culture through which a society’s identity is expressed, maintained, and transmitted.  Classical music belongs to the other kind of culture which rather than being inward-focused on group identity is outward-and-upward-focused on external reality and such things as Goodness, Beauty, and Truth.  Both kind of culture are necessary to have civilization and in a healthy society they have a symbiotic relationship in which each informs and draws from the other.

 

If popular music can be described as the music of the natural popular culture of a society, pop music is music that is artificially created and imposed upon the popular cultures of man societies.  While pop is sometimes thought of as one of many genres of music, like jazz, rock, and country, it is something else.  It is what you get when you apply the principles of industrialization - mass-production, mass-marketing, and mass-consumption - to music.  This is why it is dates from the moment it is created like no other kind of music is.  Everything produced and marketed for mass consumption has a shelf-life.  This is called planned obsolescence.  It is an inevitable consequence of mass production.  Unless you are producing something like food which cannot be used without also being used up, you will need to sell to the same customers over and over again, which means that you will either have be constantly redesigning and, at least in theory and the perception of your customers, improving your product or you will have to make an inferior product that wears out and needs to be replaced. The same principle by which automobile manufacturers and software companies operate applies to pop music which is why when you hear pop it you can usually tell the decade and often the very year it was recorded.

 

Timelessness on the one hand and being intentionally dated on the other are not the only ways in which classical and pop are each the antithesis of the other.  This is one of many reasons why the widespread notion that the relationship between the two is that of two different genres is utterly silly.  Neither classical nor pop is a genre, they differ from each other in kind at a far deeper level than that.  That this is so can be seen in the fact that both classical and pop each have their own genres and the nature of the genres of classical is very different from the nature of the genres of pop.

 

Since pop music is not itself a genre of music, but a category defined by how it is made and consumed, its genres are the different kinds of popular music to which the process of producing pop has been applied.  This process could in theory be applied to any kind of music, but some kinds of music are more susceptible to it than others.  Classical music is the most inoculated against it.  The closest thing to a pop version of classical would be something like a greatest hits collection of arias sung by the Three Tenors.  When a previous kind of popular music is turned into pop this creates a distinction between its traditional form and the form that is subsumed under pop as a genre.   The kind of traditional popular music that is most comparable to classical music in terms of musical depth, its extensive repertoire of strictly instrumental pieces, and how it is listened to is easily jazz which some think ought to be classified as classical rather than popular.  There is a pop version of jazz, although traditional jazz purists reject is as being real jazz, and it has a fairly wide reputation for banality. (3)

 

What I just said about traditional jazz purists is, of course, true of purists of any form of traditional popular music.  In the case of country and western music the associations that issue honours and awards have long tried to act as gatekeepers by granting minimal recognition to anyone who was come over to country from pop and shunning those who have gone the other direction in a way that would put the strictest Mennonite sects to shame. (4) These, however, are thinking of the distinction in terms of style and genre.  Although country and western has a traditional form that predates pop music in the sense we are using the expression here, its development from older forms of folk music in the American South was contemporaneous with the earliest phase in the conversion of music into a market product for mass consumption, the rise of radio.  While if you were to spend an hour or so listening to Hank Williams Sr., George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Johnny Cash, Claude King, et al, and then spend the same amount of time listening to whoever currently tops the charts on contemporary country radio, the difference will be obvious and the music of the second half of the experiment will likely sound like it has more in common with whatever is playing on the pop stations, albeit with a twangier sound and sung by somebody who is more likely to be wearing a cowboy outfit, than it does the music of the first half of the experiment.  That having been said, the irony is that those who would appear to us as the traditional country artists in this comparison, themselves for the most part – I think Hank Williams Sr. is the only real exception among the examples given - had their careers entirely in the period in which country music was indistinguishable from pop in terms of being a market commodity.  The C & W gatekeepers, therefore, are not so much traditionalist purists, as those interested in protecting the product of the Nashville brand of the industry from the Los Angeles brand.  

 

There are, of course, plenty of kinds of pop music that do not have traditional forms to contrast with their pop forms because they were created as pop music.  Obvious examples include any kind of music with words like “electro” or “techno” in the designation.  A more interesting case is that of rock music.  Like these later kinds, rock does not have a traditional, pre-pop form, although it has traditional roots in that as with its slightly older immediate predecessor rhythm and blues, older forms of popular music such as blues, jazz, and country were utilized like raw materials in its construction.  Unlike the types of later pop that wear their mechanical artificiality on their sleeves, rock, which when it first appeared as rock ‘n’ roll was largely coextensive with pop, has strove ever since to forge an identity that would distinguish it from pop.  Since rock’s identity both within pop and in the space it has carved for itself outside pop, is that of the voice of the rebellion of the young and ignorant, its non-pop form is not properly thought of as traditional rock but as the very antithesis of the traditional forms of other music that has been popified.

 

One thing that stands out about these different genres of pop music is that while they are quite distinguishable in style they are generally identical in form.  There are exceptions of course, but genres of pop music usually consist entirely of songs (5) which, while they vary in length, hover around a standard average length that not-coincidentally is that which is most accommodating for radio play.  Here is where the huge contrast between the genres of pop and the genres of classical is most evident.

 

Within classical music, genres are distinguished from each other in form as well as style.  Songs, although they may be incorporated into other genres such as arias in opera for example, are but one of many genres and far from the most important.  Other genres include but are far from limited to opera which consists of theatrical productions set to orchestral music in which the dialogue is entirely or almost entirely sung, oratorios such as Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion or Handel’s Messiah which are similar to operas but are not acted out, symphonies which are multi-movement (usually four) pieces composed to be performed by a full orchestra and which may or may not include singing, concertos in which either the orchestra or a smaller musical group provide accompaniment to the lead instrumentalist(s), chamber music which is itself more a genre of genres consisting of various types of pieces written to be performed by smaller instrumental ensembles such as a string quartet, ballets which as a music genre accompany the dances of the same name (Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and Nutcracker Suite for example), and incidental music written to be the background accompaniment to an ordinary theatrical play (Mendelssohn’s wrote such music for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream twice, his famous “Wedding March” (6) comes from the second version). 

 

It is pop music’s fundamental nature as the music manufactured for mass consumption that both limits it for the most part to a single form, with multiple styles and stamps it with a sell by date.  Since pop comes off incredibly poorly in these comparisons with classical, it is important to review at this point what we are arguing for and against, lest this come across as mere pop bashing.  We began by arguing for the timelessness of classical music against my friend’s dismissal of it as “old”, which led to the observation that pop is the kind of music that is dated out of necessity.  This in turn led to the comparison of how pop genres differ from classical genres, which was made in argument against a widespread but silly idea that pop and classical are themselves two genres or styles.  One of the unfortunate consequences of this silly idea is that it misleads people into thinking that they should seek the same kind of listening experience from both.  Someone who wishes to enjoy both pop and classical, however, needs to understand that they differ at a far more fundamental level than genre and that they are not intended to be listened to in the same way.  Pop music is designed to produce immediate and easy enjoyment.  It is the music of instant gratification that offers pleasure while making no demands.  Classical music requires something of you – the commitment of time, contemplative silence, and effort to actively listen – before it yields its rewards.  Yes, here too, pop comes off poorly in comparison to classical, but remember that the point is that there is nothing preventing you from enjoying both, provided you keep the difference in mind and listen to both accordingly.  A far more devastating comparison would be between pop music and traditional popular music, since pop essentially subverts popular music from doing what it is supposed to do.

 

That however, is a comparison to be explored in depth at another time.  Here I will introduce my third and final argument, by referring to another conversation of about a half a year ago.  I was introduced by another friend to someone he knew from seminary (a different one from the one I had attended).  Somehow the topic of music came up.  I think perhaps that I had been asked what my interests were after having expressed zero interest in any of the varieties of sportsball.  My friend’s friend recounted how when he was in seminary, his professors had warned about the evils of rock music and praised classical, and had then talked him into seeing an opera.  The opera he went to, however, was filled with masonic and occult symbols and basically the sort of thing that his professors, who were there watching and applauding, had warned about in rock music.  Asked if I knew which opera he was talking about, I answered “Die Zauberflöte” and was extremely amused to get the response “No, it was ‘The Magic Flute.’”

 

I did not bother to try and mount an argument about how the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was so inspired that it could elevate the spirit even when attached to subject matter completely unworthy of it as was the case with his last opera in whatever language you render its title.  If he did not already know this from the music itself, he is highly unlikely to learn it from anything I might tell him.  This conversation did, however, provide some insights about notions concerning music that are widespread in certain Christian circles and in expounding those insights I will come around to making that argument.

 

Many evangelical Protestants think that there is this sharp divide between the lyrics that are sung to music and the music itself and that the only thing that a Christian could reasonably object to in any music is the content of the lyrics.  A Christian, according to this way of thinking, and I use that term loosely, can legitimately object to a song that glorifies extramarital sex, violence, drug abuse, rebellion against parental and other lawful authority, crime, and the like, on moral grounds, but if the words are removed, can have no objection to what remains except insofar as it may bring to mind the absent lyrics.  For some evangelicals even this is too “judgemental.” 

 

The origins of this attitude are not difficult to explain since it is obviously a specifically evangelical version of the phenomenon in the wider culture of young people dismissing any criticism of their music from older generation.  The evangelicals who hold this view are responding to what might be called the fundamentalist approach which is to issue broad sweeping condemnations of pretty much every kind of music introduced since the 1950s as the devil’s music.  In the conversation I just related, my interlocutor can be taken as representative of the evangelical attitude and his professors of the fundamentalist.  Those holding the evangelical attitude regard theirs as the more intelligent of the two and speak smugly of those who hold the fundamentalist view.  I have known this to be inevitably the case and could fill the space I have allotted to this essay entirely with examples.  The smugness, I regard as entirely unwarranted.

 

It is easy to be smug about the fundamentalist view.  Sweeping blanket condemnations are difficult to defend intelligently precisely because they avoid making the distinctions that are the mark of intelligent criticism.  The evangelical position, however, is not that the fundamentalist view is too uncritical but rather that it is too critical, too judgmental.  The idea that the lyrics of a song might be objected to on moral grounds, but that the music itself cannot ignores the fact that aesthetic judgement, which evaluates the quality of art, is itself a form of moral criticism.  We don’t often think of it that way, but the standard for traditional aesthetic judgement is beauty, which belongs to the same part of the order of reality as goodness, the basis of moral criticism, and which is arguably goodness itself applied to the area of sensual appearance. (7)  Music, of course, is art made from sound and so is experienced audibly, as opposed to painting, sculpture, and other forms of art that are made to be experienced visually.  The evangelical view requires that such considerations be swept aside entirely and comes close to embracing, at least in the realm of philosophical aesthetics, an extreme subjectivism approaching nihilism that evangelicals, in theory at least, would reject in other realism.

 

What I have dubbed here the evangelical view, although the more conservative of self-described evangelicals sometimes approach what I have called the fundamentalist view, has in a way that is both interesting and revealing, been subjected to practical testing.  The music industry, taking the idea that music that Christians might object to on the grounds of the content of the words can be rendered “Christian” by substituting Christian lyrics – in the case of the group ApologetiX there is an extra dimension of literalness to this description because they basically do what “Weird Al” Yankovic does and substitute their own lyrics to well-known tunes – began producing “Christian” versions of rock, heavy metal, rap and pretty much any other kind of pop music to sell to the niche market of Christian youth.  This is collectively called CCM – Contemporary Christian Music.

 

Note that I used the word “pop” rather than “popular.”  This is because this could only be done with industry-produced music.  It would be absurd to try and create an artificially “Christian” version of traditional popular music because within such music sacred and even Gospel themes always had a natural place integrated with more this-worldly themes.  When, in 1938, Louis Armstrong recorded his jazz orchestration of the spiritual “When the Saints Go Marching In” nobody lifted an eyebrow.  It fit in with the rest of his repertoire naturally and the song has long been a jazz staple.   Indeed, you might find it easier to list the spirituals of this sort that did not become part of the standard jazz repertoire than those that did.  Nor do these comprise the entirety of the sacred element of traditional jazz.

 

Similarly when Hank Williams Sr. wrote and recorded “I Saw the Light” in 1946, it may have conflicted with his lifestyle but certainly not his music.  Indeed, country music would be completely unrecognizable from what it actually is, had Gospel themes not been there all along beside the prison, train, literal cowboy, drinking, pick-up truck, and cheating themes. (8)  Try to imagine Johnny Cash or Dolly Parton without the religious dimension of their music.  Tennessee Ernie Ford would have been almost reduced to a one-hit wonder.  Even today, long after county became largely popified, the biggest hit to date of Blake Shelton, currently married to pop star Gwen Stefani, is his 2019 “God’s Country”, a song about farm life that is packed with references to church, piety, and other similar themes. 

 

We have seen that rock music began within the sphere of pop music as rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s and then sought to establish a non-pop identity after the fact.   The early rock ‘n’ rollers came from other kinds of music that had a traditional sacred side.  In the case of Elvis Presley, he had strong roots in Gospel music and was indistinguishable from the country artists mentioned in the preceding paragraph in that he continued to sing and record Gospel to the very end of his life.  While he was not absolutely alone in this, he was far from being the norm either for part of rock’s quest to establish its own identity was to jettison the sacred element of the raw materials it drew from and to emphasize the elements that were least congruent with Christian faith.   Therefore, when the first “Christian rock” was made in the late 1960s, in was in accordance with the CCM model of imposing an external Christianity on a music that had become foreign, and in many cases, hostile to Christianity. (9)  The late Sir Roger Scruton wrote:

 

Recent criticism has paid much attention to the words. These often dwell on violence, drugs, sex and rebellion in ways that lyricize the kind of conduct of which fathers and mothers used to disapprove, in the days when disapproval was approved. But these criticisms do not, I think, get to the heart of the matter. Even if every pop song consisted of a setting of Christ’s beatitudes (and there are born-again groups in America - ‘16 Horsepower’ is one of them - that specialize in such things), it would make little or no difference to the effect, which is communicated through the sounds, regardless of what is sung to them. The only thing that is really wrong with the usual lyrics is what is really right about them - namely, that they successfully capture what the music means. (10)

 

What I have argued above concerning traditional popular music, that in it sacred themes traditionally and naturally have their place alongside non-sacred and so do not need to be artificially imposed on it the way it does on mass-produced pop music and on the anti-tradition of rock the way it is in the CCM model, is all the more true of classical music.  Sacred music is the very foundation on which the classical music tradition is built.  Plainsong, the unaccompanied simple melodies to which the liturgy was chanted in the Western Church of the first millennium of which the best known version is Gregorian chant, developed into organum by the addition of a harmonizing voice, which opened the door to more complex forms of polyphony which while it initially met with resistance from Church authorities due to concerns that it would place the text of the liturgy beyond comprehension eventually won acceptance.  The early history of classical music is the history of sacred music and after the Renaissance brought a renewal of interest in themes from pre-Christian antiquity and the Reformation brought about a breach in the external unity of the Western Church, the sacred remained at the heart of the classical tradition.  Mass settings written to accompany the singing of the ordinaries - the unchanging parts - of the Eucharistic liturgy (11) were written by all the major composers including the Lutheran J. S. Bach (Mass in B Minor) and Beethoven who wrote two (Mass in C Major and Missa Solemnis) despite having imbibed the rotten ideas of the so-called Enlightenment.  Oratorios, while usually written to be performed in the concert hall, were largely devoted to religious themes as in the examples already provided to which countless others such as Haydn’s Creation and Beethoven’s Christ on the Mount of Olives could be added.

 

Even more so than with traditional popular music, sacred music is integral to the classical music tradition so as to make the idea of “Christian classical music”, that is, a classical music upon which Christianity has been imposed from the outside, absolutely absurd.  Indeed, with classical, at least traditional as opposed to avant garde, we have the reverse of the situation with pop music and the CCM model.   I don’t know why the fundamentalist professors chose The Magic Flute as the work to introduce their students to classical music with.  BWV 1: Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern (How Beautifully the Morning Star Shines) written for both Palm Sunday and Lady Day which coincided at its first performance or BWV 82: Ich habe genug (I am content), a setting of Dr. Luther’s translation of the Nunc Dimmitis written for Candlemas or any other of Johann Sebastian Bach’s over 200 sacred cantatas would have been a better choice for the point they were trying to make.  Nevertheless, just as Sir Roger Scruton said that it is the usual and not the “Christian” lyrics that express the meaning of pop music, so the nature of classical music, especially in the hands of a true master like Mozart, is such that story and symbolism of his final opera can hardly be said to express its true meaning.

 (1)   More accurately, Gustav Mahler set the limit by claiming the ninth symphony to be cursed to be a composer’s last (as it was in his case as with Beethoven).  Joseph Haydn under whom Beethoven studies composition, wrote 106 symphonies.  “The Jupiter”, the final symphony of Haydn’s contemporary W. A. Mozart, is his 41^st.

(2)   With the subcategory that is called Classical to distinguish it from say the Baroque or the Romantic.  Haydn, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven are the names most associated with Classical proper.

(3)   Think of the kind of music that in popular stereotype  you are likely to hear when put on hold, or waiting in an elevator, or playing in the background in a large semi-fashionable department store of the type that are now mostly obsolete.

(4)  See the discussion of this in Ray Stevens’ memoir, co-written with C. W. “Buddy” Kalb Jr., Ray Stevens’ Nashville (2014).  Although Stevens’ roots are country (he grew up in Clarksdale, Georgia), early in his long career moved to Nashville, and ages ago earned his reputation as the “Clown Prince of Country Music”, his earliest recordings were released as pop.  He was not inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame until 2019.

(5)   A song, as evident from the noun’s etymological relationship with the verb sing, is a short piece in which words are sung.  In a song, the instrumental accompaniment is supposed to back and support the voice.  A song can be sung without accompanying music.  This is called a capella style.  The opposite, where the instrumental part is performed and/or recorded without a voice, is also usually called a song by extension, although it does not technically fit the definition.  Karaoke, in which a machine plays the music and you sing the words yourself, is one reason why this would be done.  Sometimes an ensemble might think a song sounds better without the words and record it that way.  This is quite rare in most forms of pop music because it conflicts with the whole making an idol out of the singer which is part of its modus operandi – think of the talent search shows that conspicuously advertise this in their titles – although it is not uncommon in pop jazz.  Since this is a note and not the body of the essay, I will provide an example that is not relevant at all but which I find amusing. In 1965 Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Band recorded the pop jazz “Spanish Flea” which became a bit hit. It had been written by the group’s percussionist Julius Wechter whose wife had written the lyrics.  The band, however, recorded it as an instrumental piece – at that point in time they rarely recorded any other way.  For a lot of people, their first encounter with the lyrics came in an unusual way. In an early episode of The Simpsons, “The Otto Show” which aired in 1992, Bart and Milhouse attend a concert of the parodic heavy metal band Spinal Tap that had appeared in a number of comedy venues and was featured by the late Rob Reiner in his 1984 mockumentary This is Spinal Tap (Harry Shearer, the voice of numerous Simpsons characters, portrays the bass player).  A riot breaks out but Homer, who had driven the kids to the concert and is waiting in the parking lot, is oblivious to what is going on even though the SWAT team descending on the rioters are visible all around him.  He is sitting in his car singing along to “Spanish Flea”.  That this song would not be likely to drown out a heavy metal concert or a SWAT-suppressed riot is the part of the joke everyone would be expected to get.  There is another part, however, in that while Homer could easily be assumed to be improvising based on the song’s title,  what he sings are the actual lyrics written by Cissy Wechter.

(6)   Mendelssohn’s is the older of the two most recognizable wedding marches.  He wrote his second orchestration of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1842.  The other most famous wedding march is the Bridal Chorus from Richard Wagner’s opera Lohengrin which was first performed in 1850.

(7)   For example, an argument for this point could start with the fact that beauty, goodness, and truth are categorized together as transcendentals, the properties of being.  Created being, however, ultimately points to its Creator, which is uncreated Being or God.  Uncreated Being differs from the being of His creation in several ways.  One is in created beings, essence, that which makes a created thing a certain kind of thing rather than a different kind of thing, and existence/being, which establishes a certain thing as a real example of its kind rather than merely the idea of it, are two different things.  In God, however, as our best theologians from St. Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas to E. L. Mascall have argued, existence and essence are the same thing.  Another difference is that created beings are finite, uncreated Being is infinite.  These are ultimately, however, the same difference, because infinity cannot be divided, which is the flipside to the fact that no number of finites can be added together to produce infinity.  Expressed theologically, this is the concept of divine simplicity, the indivisibility of God (He has no parts, the three Persons of the Trinity are distinct in Person but are each the whole of the same God not parts which add up to God), which requires that His properties or attributes are themselves not parts of God, but the whole of Him.  In uncreated Being, therefore, Goodness, Beauty, and Truth are each the whole of Being.  While this is not the case in finite, created, being, it has long been the case in philosophy that goodness does double duty, both as the general standard by which judgements of good, bad, better or conversely bad, worse, worst are made, and as a more specific application of that general standard.

(8)  If some of these seem incongruent with the message of the Gospel, remember that in traditional country music these things are treated differently than they are in rock music.  Cheating, for example, is not glorified in country, more often it is avenged, or becomes the excuse for the drinking, which is a possible exception to my point in this note, except that country is generally honest about the self-destroying nature of such behaviour.

(9)   I will say, however, that the song that best expresses what in my opinion is the genuine Christian take on those who have started this insane and unnecessary war in the Persian Gulf that threatens to escalate into a third World War – the president of the country built on the foundation of liberalism, one of the twin evils of Modernity, the other being communism, and the prime minister of the country which many North American Christians with bad theology foolishly think they owe uncritical support to because it shares the name of the covenant people of God in the Old Testament – is one recorded decades ago by a heavy metal band that deliberately forged an opposite-of-Christian image of itself.  The song is Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs”, the lyrics of which while credited to the entire band were mostly written by bass player “Geezer” Butler.  The final stanza is the most relevant.  “Day of mercy God is calling/on their knees the war pigs crawling/begging mercy for their sins/Satan laughing spreads his wings”.

(10)                       Sir Roger Scruton, “The Cultural Significance of Pop”, https://www.roger-scruton.com/articles/31-understanding-music/175-the-cultural-significance-of-pop

(11)                       These are the Kyrie, the Gloria, the Credo, the Sanctus/Benedictus and the Agnus Dei.

The Eleventh Article – The Resurrection of the Body

The eleventh and penultimate Article of the Creed is, like the one that precedes it and the one that follows it, a short and simple Article.  In the modified version of the old Roman Symbol that has come down to us as the Apostles’ Creed it consists of two nouns, a subject and a modifying genitive.  In the Niceno-Constantinopolitan version of the Creed the subject noun is the same with a different modifying genitive.  We shall find the same difference between the two versions when we come to the twelfth and final Article, except that in the eleventh Article it is a simpler swap of a single genitive noun for another whereas in the twelfth it is a complex expression, two words in the Latin, three in the Greek, that takes the place in the conciliar Creed of the single noun in the Apostles’.  There is one other difference between the two versions of this Article.   Here, as in the tenth Article, the Niceno-Constantinopolitan introduces a new verb to govern the Article.

 

The verb that introduces this Article in the version published by the second ecumenical council is προσδοκοῦμεν.  This word means “we expect.” In the Latin version where the copula implied by the Greek text is spelled out we find “Et exspécto.”  This means “and I expect.”  The change from the plural to the singular is not a Latin innovation.  In the liturgical version of the Greek text the singular is substituted for the plural here as it is with the previous verbs in the first and tenth Articles.   Archbishop Cranmer in the Book of Common Prayer, rather than use the English transliteration of the Latin, translated it as “and I look for” which is a better rendition because it retains the strong sense of anticipation present in the original that words like “expect” and “hope” have lost through weakening over the last few centuries.  When we looked at the tenth Article it was noted that the shift from “believe” to “acknowledge” (or “confess”) was not a shift from one verbal idea to a completely different one but from a verb that expresses an inner action to that which expresses its external complement (“For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation” Rom. 10:10).  Here the shift is one of temporal orientation.  To “look for” or “expect” is to express faith in that which is promised but yet to come.  Note the close relationship between faith and hope established in Scripture (1 Cor. 13:13, 1 Thess. 1:3, Heb. 11:1).

 

The noun that is the subject of the article is ἀνάστασις in the Greek of the conciliar Creed and resurrectio in the Latin of both versions, with the accusative forms ἀνάστασιν and resurrectionem being used because the Creed is a form of indirect discourse in which the nouns that are the subjects of the Articles are the objects of the first person verb(s).  Both the Greek and the Latin nouns were derived from complex versions of the verb for “stand” or “rise”.  In the Greek the prefix added to form the compound usually means “up.”  The Latin prefix means “back” or “again”, the second of these being the meaning it has here.

 

The modifying noun in the Apostles’ Creed is carnis, the genitive form of caro.  The use of this word rather than corporis, the genitive of corpus, may raise a few eyebrows.  Archbishop Cranmer rendered it “of the body” which would have been the literal translation had the original been corporis.  “Of the flesh” is the literal translation of carnis.  While “flesh” does in ordinary usage mean “the stuff of which the body is made” in theology it has a specialized meaning that is very different from this, a meaning established by the usage of St. Paul in his New Testament epistles. 

 

Consider Galatians 5:16.  In the Authorized Bible this reads “This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh.”  If this verse stood alone “the lust of the flesh” could be taken to mean “bodily desires” but the Apostle expands on it and in verses 19-21 lists several “works of the flesh.”  Although the list begins with things such as “Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness” that would be consistent with this interpretation it goes on to include items that would not such as “Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies” etc.   In some more recent translations other things are substituted for “the flesh” presumably in order to avoid confusion with the word’s more literal meaning. Examples include “your sinful nature” (New Living Translation), “your old nature” (Complete Jewish Bible), “the human nature” (Good News), “your corrupt nature” (God’s Word), “your sinful selves” (New Century) and others have added yet a further degree of interpretation to their translation by rendering it as “selfishness” (The Message) or “selfish” as an attributive adjective rather than a noun (Common English).  While all of these are over-interpretations in a translation – explaining that “the flesh” in this verse doesn’t mean the part of you that you can see and touch but the part of you that inclines and incite you to do bad things is the level of interpretation that belongs to hermeneutics and exposition not translation – they do give you the general idea of what “the flesh” means in its non-literal sense.  St. Paul, however, chose to speak of the inherited fallenness of human nature as “the flesh” for a reason, and explaining that reason is as much the job of the expositor as is explaining what “the flesh” means in such contexts.  Since over-interpreting in translation can only explain the one and hide the other, it basically is doing someone else’s job and doing it badly by leaving it half undone.

 

In the New Testament, σάρξ, the Greek equivalent of caro, is frequently contrasted with πνεῦμα (spirit).  The contrast begins with these words in their literal meanings. The spirit or breathe (the same word is used for both), is the invisible mover of the physical and visible, the flesh.  Most often σάρξ is used in its literal sense.  When St. John tells us ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο (“the Word became flesh”, Jn. 1:14) this is clearly with no implications of sinfulness, nor are there any such implications when Jesus referencing Genesis says that the man and his wife are μία σάρξ (“one flesh”, Mk. 10:8).  In contrasting the spirit and the flesh, however, the flesh is depicted as the weaker of the two.  See, for example, Matt. 26:41.  St. Paul tends to use “the flesh” in a sense that includes both flesh and spirit in their literal meanings and so means “human nature” in its entirely.  When he speaks of the flesh/spirit contrast he uses “the flesh” in this inclusive sense and it is not the human spirit that he is contrasting with the flesh, but the Holy Spirit.  In Romans 7, for example, where he contrasts his “inward man” that delights in the law of God with his “flesh” that serves sin, the “inward man” is depicted as his νοῦς (mind) rather than his πνεῦμα (spirit), so as not to create confusion when in the eighth chapter he sets forth the way of freedom from walking after the flesh as that of walking after the Spirit, clearly identified as “the Spirit of God” and “the Spirit of Christ.” (Rom. 8:9)  Similarly in Galatians 5 where the contrast with the “works of the flesh” is the “fruit of the Spirit”, the Spirit is the indwelling Holy Spirit. 

 

Therefore, when St. Paul speaks of “the flesh” as human sinfulness this should not be understood as meaning that sin originates from the physical side of human nature but rather that it originates from fallen human nature.  While σάρξ in its literal sense is interchangeable with σῶμα (“the body”) the Apostle normally restricts the sense of sinfulness to the one word.  The verses could be seen as exceptions to this rule, Rom. 6:6 and 7:24, contrast a past state or condition with that experienced after baptism and the liberating power of the Holy Spirit.

 

This brings us back to the question of the use of carnis rather than corporis in the Apostles’ Creed.  It reads this way in the oldest extent versions of the Creed.  St. Irenaeus, whose 2^nd century Against Heresies includes a “rule of faith” that is an early version of the Creed, has in the relevant place the phrase καὶ ἀναστῆσαι πᾶσαν σάρκα πάσης ἀνθρωπότητος or in Latin et resuscitandam omnem carnem humani generis which in the standard translation is “and to raise up anew all flesh of the whole human race” (1)   At the end of the fourth century Rufinus of Aquileia compared the Latin text of the old Roman Symbol to that used in his own Church and in both the phrase was exactly as it appears in the current Apostles’ Creed.   Earlier that century, Marcellus of Ancyra who was one of the Fathers at the First Council of Nicaea presented a Greek version of the Symbol to Julius I, Patriarch of Rome, in which the phrase appears as σαρκὸς ἀνάστασιν.  This strongly indicates “flesh” to be the original reading.  The evidence of St. Irenaeus may indicate it was the original reading not merely of what became the Apostles’ Creed but of the ur-Creed that was the ancestor of both versions.

 

St. Irenaeus also provides a clue as to why this word was chosen over the word for body.  The heresies that he addressed in his work are those of the type that today are collectively referred to as Gnosticism.  While the teachings of these groups varied enough that some have questioned the usefulness of the lump designation they all tended to disdain the material world and to regard matter as the unfortunate by-product of the passions of a lesser deity and the source of all evil in which the spirits of men are trapped and from which they need liberating.  Since the Gnostic concept of salvation involves this liberation the concept of a resurrection was abhorrent to them.  According to St. Irenaeus (and St. Justin Marty), the first of these and of all heretics, was Simon Magus (the Samaritan magician who tried to purchase the Apostolic power in Acts 8).  That this type of heresy had started up while the Apostles were still alive can be seen from the epistles of St. John where the heretics that he called antichrists were characterized by the denial that Christ is “come in the flesh” (1 Jn. 4:3, 2 Jn. 7).  St. Irenaeus’s “rule of faith” is found towards the end of his discussion of the Valentinians, one of the earliest of the Gnostic heresies.  It is reasonable to think that the word “flesh” was chosen for the Article about resurrection in order to take a clearer stand against this type of heresy.   The word could hardly have its specialized theological sense here as that would give the Article the nonsensical meaning of “the resurrection of the sinful nature.”  With no fear of confusion in that direction, using “flesh” instead of “body” guarded against the error of taking St. Paul’s “spiritual body” to mean “a body composed of spirit rather than matter.” (2)  Since “flesh” here is clearly used in its literal sense, which is interchangeable with “body”, the English is not a wrong translation. (3)   

 

In the Creed as published by the First Council of Constantinople in 381, the word νεκρῶν is used.  The Latin correctly translates this as mortuórum and in the Book of Common Prayer it appears, also correctly, as “of the dead.”  The difference between this version and the Apostles’ Creed is that the Apostles’ Creed identifies what will be resurrected, the Niceno-Constantinopolitan identifies who will be resurrected.   The use of this word does not raise the same sort of questions as the use of “flesh” in the other Creed. 

 

In the Athanasian Symbol, which is based on the Creed but expanded and structured differently, the section corresponding to the eleventh Article reads Ad cuius adventum omnes homines resurgere habent cum corporibus suis which in the Book of Common Prayer is translated “At whose coming all men shall rise again with their bodies” (the Canadian edition of the BCP substitutes the word “must” for “shall”).  The Symbol is traditionally attributed to St. Athanasian of Alexandria who fought Arianism in the fourth century.  Since the seventeenth century it has widely been considered to be later than this, usually sixth century although Daniel Waterland made a convincing argument for the early fifth.  Even if the attribution to St. Athanasius were correct this would still be in the period after other heresies had superceded Gnosticism as the primary opponents of orthodoxy and so the reason for using “flesh” rather than “body” was waning.  Nevertheless, the longer wording found here would effectively accomplish the same thing.

 

The resurrection confessed here is what is usually referred to as the General Resurrection.  It includes both the resurrection of the righteous, those who have been cleansed from their sins and justified by the grace of God in Jesus Christ, and the resurrection of the wicked, those who have rendered their souls incurably by final impenitent rejection of Christ.   Nevertheless, while both of these are included they are not included equally.  The place in the Creed where they are equal is in the seventh Article where they are implicitly in Jesus Christ’s Second Coming to judge “the quick and the dead.”   The resurrection of the righteous is very much what is in focus in the eleventh Article and the resurrection of the wicked is present merely as the inescapable background to the resurrection of the righteous.  This is evident from the fact that the resurrection is confessed as an object of faith.  “I believe” in the Apostles’ Creed does not merely mean “I affirm to be true”, although it does, of course, mean that but has the additional connotations of “I grasp these truths to myself and cling to them as my only hope in this life and eternity.”  In the conciliar Creed, as we have seen, the verb governing this Article is “I look for”, that is, “I look for in hopeful anticipation.”  The resurrection of the wicked to the condemnation of final and eternal exclusion from the blessedness of the righteous, while necessarily part of the General Resurrection confessed in this Article, can hardly be viewed as the object of these verbs in their fullest senses.  The appropriate way to confess belief in it is in the bare minimal sense of the word.  We believe, that is, we affirm it to be true, because both Testaments and especially the words of the Lord Jesus Christ declare it to us.

 

As an object of faith and hope, the bodily resurrection of the dead distinguished the religion of the True and Living God from heathenism even before the Advent of Jesus Christ.  Job, in one of the oldest books of the Old Testament, possibly the oldest, testified in the midst of his affliction “And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God: Whom I shall see for myself and mine eyes shall behold, and not another; though my reins be consumed within me.” (Job 19:26-27)  Although the Old Testament speaks of Sheol, an underworld so similar in conception to those of pagan mythology that it is rendered Hades in the Septuagint and in New Testament quotation, the Old Testament contains what pagan mythologies did not, hope of deliverance from it.  This is most observable in the Psalms and while “thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption” (Ps. 16:10) is a Messianic prophecy of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the resurrection of Jesus Christ is clearly depicted in the New Testament as the guarantee of the resurrection of all others.  By contrast, in pagan mythology deliverance from the underworld is generally depicted as something that heroes attempt and fail, as in the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. (4)  While pagan philosophers such as Plato explored the idea of the spirits of the dead returning to this world this was conceived of in terms of reincarnation not resurrection.

 

By the time of the New Testament a sect called the Sadducees had arisen which held only the books of Moses to be Scripture and which denied the doctrine of the General Resurrection.  Each of the Synoptic Gospels records Jesus demonstrating the truth of the resurrection to them out of the only books they recognized after they attempted to trip Him up with a garbled retelling of the story of the book of Tobit.  In St. John’s Gospel, Jesus early on identifies Himself as the One Whose voice will call the dead back to life. (5)  Later, when Lazarus dies, and He tells Martha “thy brother shall rise again” (Jn. 11:23) she understands him to speaking of the General Resurrection, “I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day” (v. 24) and He says of Himself in response “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die” (vv. 25-26) which, when asked if she believed, Martha responded with “Yea, Lord: I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world” (v. 27).  Her confession is identical to that of St. Peter at Caesarea Philippi (Matt. 16:16) and to the content of saving faith as identified by St. John later in his Gospel (Jn. 20:31).  The doctrine of the General Resurrection and Jesus’ role as the Agent in it is thereby made inseparable from the basic truths at the heart of the Christian faith.

 

We find this again in the fifteenth chapter of St. Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians.  This chapter begins with St. Paul declaring the Gospel that he preaches, “that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures” (vv. 3-4) which is followed by a list of eyewitnesses to the risen Christ (vv. 5-8). (6)  This leads into St. Paul’s argument against those who deny the resurrection of the dead.  If the dead do not rise, St. Paul argues, then Christ could not have risen, but since Jesus Christ rose from the dead, therefore the dead rise. (vv.12-20) The resurrection of Jesus Christ, an element of the Gospel itself, stands or falls with the General Resurrection, therefore.  St. Paul then goes into how Christ is the firstfruits of the resurrection of all, an argument that draws on the same parallel between Christ and Adam that he would later make in the fifth chapter of his epistle to the Romans.  By Adam death came upon all, in Christ all shall be made alive, (vv.20-23) something that is connected both here (vv. 24-28) and at the end of the chapter (vv.54-57) with Christ’s triumphant defeat of all of His enemies.

 

This chapter also includes St. Paul’s response to a hypothetical question about the nature of the body with which the dead are raised. (vv.35-55). Careless misreading of this passage has been responsible for many, perhaps most, errors regarding the resurrection both in the early centuries and in more recent ones.  We have already touched on some of this when considering why the Apostles’ Creed uses the word carnis rather than corporis.

 

St. Paul compares the resurrection to the planting of grain, a comparison that the Lord had previously used in reference to His own resurrection (Jn. 12:24).  He observes that the grain when it is planted is not yet the plant that will grow from it (1 Cor. 15:37).  He then observes that flesh comes in different kinds (v. 39) and bodies come in different kinds (v. 40-41), and states that in the resurrection of the dead, the body sown is different from the body raised (vv. 42-44).  “It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.” (v. 44) This verse does not mean, as many have misread it to mean, that the resurrection body is not physical or material.  The word rendered “natural” in this verse is ψυχικός (the neuter form with a final nu instead of sigma).  This word does not mean anything like “material” or “physical”.  It is derived from the word for soul, life, or mind from which word all of our English words beginning psych- are derived.  Yes, it is contrasted with “spiritual”, but both words are adjectives modifying the word σῶμα (body).  The idea of physicality or materiality is implicit in this word, the noun.  Consider the different types of bodies mentioned in verses 40-41.  They are all composed of matter.  The two adjectives are both derived from words that denote the immaterial side of human nature.  While these words they usually depict different aspects of that side it is not uncommon for them to be used interchangeably.  In 1 Cor. 15:44 the adjectival forms are used to create a distinction and since both basically refer to an immaterial force that animates and controls the body the distinction is between that which animates the body in this life and that which will animate it in the resurrection.  In the following verse Genesis is quoted about Adam having been made a ψυχὴν ζῶσαν (living soul) and the Last Adam (Christ) is said to be a πνεῦμα ζῳοποιοῦν (quickening or life-giving spirit). The distinction made by calling the pre-resurrection body “natural” or “soulish” and the resurrection body “spiritual”, therefore, is that in this life the body is animated by the life that was bestowed upon man in creation and which has come down from Adam and which has been corrupted by sin bringing death upon us all but in the resurrection the body will be animated entirely by the new life that Jesus Christ came to give us.

 

This also tells us what St. Paul’s use of the grain analogy that Jesus had used for His Own resurrection had hinted at and what the description of Jesus as the firstfruits of the resurrection states explicitly.   The final resurrection is the same resurrection that Jesus has already undergone.  It is not like the raising of Jairus’ daughter, the son of the widow of Nain, or Lazarus.  In these instances, prior to Jesus’ resurrection, the Lord returned these individuals to the same condition they were in prior to their death – life, but mortal life, susceptible to disease, decay, and death.  Jesus, when He rose from the dead, rose never to die again.  This is the resurrection for which we look.   One of the other differences between the present body and the resurrection body stressed in 1 Cor. 15 is that the present body is corruptible but the resurrection body – and the body into which the “quick” will be changed without undergoing death at the Second Coming (vv. 51-54) – is incorruptible (vv. 42, 50).

 

That Jesus’ resurrection is the pattern of the future resurrection for which we look is the final nail in the coffin of the idea that the “spiritual body” is not a physical body.  When Jesus appeared to the Apostles on the evening of His resurrection they were afraid because they thought they were seeing a ghost but He said “Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have” (Lk. 24:39) and after showing them His hands and feet gave them further proof by eating a piece of fish and a honeycomb (vv. 41-42).  Later He challenged St. Thomas who had been absent on that occasion to put his hand in the hole in His side (Jn. 20:27).  From this it is clear that Jesus’ resurrection body was a physical body, the same body in which He had been crucified, and recognizably so.  While it had been changed into a glorified, incorruptible, body with new capacities it remained a physical body.

 

St. Paul tells us in Romans and elsewhere that we can participate in the resurrection life of Jesus Christ in the here and now by the power of the Holy Spirit Who indwells us.  To fully share in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, however, when our bodies are transformed through death and resurrection or translation at the Second Coming to be like unto His, this is the first part of our hope which is our faith looking forward into the future.  We shall discuss the second part of that hope when we come to consider the twelfth and final Article of our Creed.

 

 (1)   St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, I.10.1.  Translation that of Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut in Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, 1885.

(2)   This is not mere speculation on my part.  Philip Schaff explained the use of “flesh” here as that “by which the ancient Church protested against spiritualistic concepts of the Gnostics” in his notes on the Apostles Creed in the second volume of The Creeds of Christendom.  This occurs in the context of discussing how earlier translations of the Creed had rendered it literally, the first change to “body” having been made in The King’s Book in 1543, and the literal reading retained even by Cranmer in the interrogatory version used in the order of Baptism and Visitation of the Sick.  Schaff spoke of the change to “body” in a tone of approval because flesh “may be misunderstood in a grossly materialistic sense.” Elsewhere (in the third volume of his History of the Christian Church) he mentions the disagreement in the early church between the “spiritualistic” interpretation of the resurrection body held by Origen et al., and the “more realistic” interpretation of Tertullian and the Apostles’ Creed, saying that the realistic interpretation was “pressed by” Epiphanius and St. Jerome in a “grossly materialistic manner” that in his opinion contributed to the development of the cult of relics.  This is obviously what he was referring to in his comment on the wording of the Creed. 

(3)   Roman Catholic English translations of the Creed also tend to use “body” rather than “flesh”, as for example, in the English version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.  Interestingly translations in some other languages (German and Armenian, for example) sometimes substitute the Niceno-Constantinopolitan reading for the Apostles’.

(4)   The interesting exception to this is the myth that was dramatized by Euripides in his play Alcestis.  The title character was the wife of the Thessalonian King Admetus, whom the Fates had allowed to outlive the day they had appointed for his death provided someone was willing to take his place.  The only person so willing was his wife.  Hercules, (Heracles in the original Greek), in the midst of his labours, arrives at the palace in the midst of the mourning right after Alcestis had died and learns, despite the king’s attempt to keep it secret, what had happened.  He departs, to return soon after with a veiled woman whom he had won in a wrestling match and hands over to Admetus.  When the king removes her veil, he discovers that it is Alcestis, whom Hercules had wrestled away from Death himself.  C. S. Lewis, like St. Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria, believed that God had been working among the ancient pagan nations albeit in a different way than He had been working in Israel to prepare for the coming of Jesus Christ.  Whereas St. Justin Martyr and Clement believed this preparation to have taken the form of the ancient philosophy that sprang from the “seeds of the Logo”, Lewis argued (especially in God in the Dock) that ancient mythology, although polytheistic and containing many other errors, grew out of the truths written into the natural world and since natural revelation comes from the same God Who ultimately revealed Himself in history in the events of the Gospel, that the truths myths point to find their ultimate fulfilment in Jesus Christ.  It would be difficult not to see how this applies to the myth of Alcestis.  However imperfect their depiction, the Greeks had somehow grasped that only the Son of the Highest God could defeat Death and release those who had been held captive by him.

(5)   John 5:25-29.  Verse 25 is likely referring to spiritual regeneration rather than the resurrection, but verses 27 to 29 clearly refer to the resurrection and Final Judgement.

(6)   The structure of the Gospel is that of two acts of Jesus Christ, each supported by two forms of testimony.  The two acts of Jesus Christ are that 1) He died for our sins, and 2) He rose again from the dead.  The Scriptures are the first testimony to each. The additional witness to Christ’s death is His burial.  The additional witness to His resurrection is the long list of eyewitnesses.