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.

 

Catholic and Protestant

 

The Anglican Church is both Catholic and Protestant, although the liberalism that has become far too prevalent in the Church in both England and North America is neither Catholic nor Protestant nor, for that matter, Christian, but is rather a revisionist theology that borrows Christian terms and redefines them to fit the ideas of the post-Christian secularism that “Western Civilization” adapted after ceasing to be Christendom.  While orthodox Anglicans of both high and low varieties are usually okay with the expression “Reformed Catholic” some Anglo-Catholics are as allergic to the term Protestant as some evangelical Anglicans, those who share some traits of what I call Hyper-Protestantism, are of the term Catholic.

 

I maintain that we ought to embrace both words, albeit with the caveat that they are properly defined.

 

“Protestant” requires the most definition. It has become a rather vague term, designating any ecclesiastical group not in fellowship with the Roman See except those who parted ways with Rome prior to the sixteenth century like the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox or whose breech with Rome was based on new innovations Rome introduced after the Council of Trent like the Old Catholics.  Used this way, it conveys little to nothing in the way of positive information about what these groups believe.  For the term to be meaningful rather than useless it needs to be defined in a way that identifies beliefs that all Protestant groups hold in common.  This requires that it be less inclusive than is the current norm.

 

The words that we would most naturally use as substitutes for “Protestant” come with their own sets of difficulties, however.  “Reformed,” while it sounds better to the ear than “Protestant” and taken literally is a precise statement of what we mean when we say the Anglican Church is Protestant, that is, that is has undergone a “Reformation”, comes with a problem that is the opposite of that attached to “Protestant.”  It is too precise.  Especially when it is spelled with a capital R, it identifies a specific ecclesiastical tradition, that which emerged from the Reformation in Switzerland and as a theological term it indicates the system associated with the Reformed Church, and in particular the interpretation of predestination adapted at the Synod of Dort.  While a sort of Calvinism was probably the predominant theology among Anglican clergy of the last half of the sixteenth century and there was an attempt to enshrine this in the official theology of the Church by appending the Lambeth Articles to the Articles of Religion this attempt ultimately failed because it went against the overall spirit of the first Elizabethan era which was to avoid committing the Church to either side in the disputes between the mainstream traditions of the continental Reformation.  This meant that the slight slant towards the Swiss Reformed tradition that had been introduced late in the reforms under Edward VI was removed by the reforms under Elizabeth I. Examples of this can be seen in the revision of the Articles of Religion into the current Thirty-Nine from the Edwardian Forty-Two and the dropping of the black rubric from the Elizabethan editions of the Book of Common Prayer.

 

In the sixteenth century “Protestant” was largely a term of abuse used by the Roman See and its adherents for the Reformers and their followers.  Their own preferred self-designation was “evangelical” but as with the term “Reformed” little would be gained by substituting this for “Protestant.”  By the twentieth century, especially in North America, this term had come to have a rather different set of connotations than in the sixteenth century.  It has connotations of pietism, puritanism, revivalism and an approach to religion centred on personal experience of the type that the sixteenth century Magisterial Reformers would most likely have denounced as the enthusiasm and extremism associated with those they dubbed Schwärmerei.  Alternately it can suggest a revised version of fundamentalism that is less separatist (good) but also far more willing to compromise on the infallible authority of Scripture (bad). 

 

There is also the problem that the self-application of this term by the sixteenth century Reformers and their followers was based on the mistaken idea that they had recovered a Gospel that the Church had lost.  The Gospel is clearly identified in the New Testament as the message that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures and the testimony of eyewitnesses.  It is at the heart of the faith confessed in both the Apostles’ and Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creeds as well as the Athanasian Symbol, along with the basic truths that identify the Christ proclaimed in the Gospel (that there is one God, Who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and that the Son, while remaining fully God, became truly Man, by taking unto Himself a whole human nature through His miraculous conception by the Holy Ghost and birth of the Virgin Mary).  It was never lost by the Church.  If the Reformers recovered anything it was the Pauline doctrine of justification, but this is not the Gospel.  The Pauline doctrine of justification – that it is by faith and not by works, or as the Reformers put it, by faith alone – is a doctrine about the Gospel, but it is not the Gospel itself.  The Gospel is Christocentric – it is about Jesus Christ. Justification by faith and not works is anthropocentric – it is about us, and how we receive the benefit of what the Gospel proclaims.  To claim that justification by faith alone is itself the Gospel is to place us rather than Jesus Christ at the centre of the Gospel.

 

Rather than abandon it for these alternatives, it makes more sense to retain “Protestant” with a proper definition.  The definition need include no more than two positive affirmations of belief.  The first is that the Bible as God’s written Word is the authoritative standard of truth to which the Church’s doctrine and tradition must conform.  The second is that the salvation which Jesus Christ accomplished for us in the events proclaimed in the Gospel is in all of its aspects given to us freely as a gift which we receive by faith rather than by our works.  

 

“Catholic”, as stated, requires less definition.  This is the ancient term – the first recorded use of it is in the writings of St. Ignatius of Antioch who was martyred early in the second century – that designated the whole Church as distinguished from the Church in a specific location (the Church in Rome, the Church in Galatia, and so forth).  It is the Greek word for whole – which is also the root from which the English word whole is derived – with the prefix kata attached as an intensifier.  In addition to designating the whole Church, the early Christians used it to distinguish the true faith from heresy.  This is how the term is used in the Athanasian Symbol, in, for example, its first statement “Whosoever would be saved needeth before all things to hold fast the Catholic Faith.”  Used this way, it is basically synonymous with orthodox, but note that the usage of Catholic as orthodox is derived from the meaning of Catholic as whole.  The Catholic faith, the orthodox faith, does not include doctrines that are particular to one place or one time, but is the faith confessed by the whole Church of Christ.  As. St. Vincent of Lerins famously put it is the faith confessed “everywhere, in all times, and by all.”

 

“Protestant” and “Catholic”, so defined, should not be thought to be at odds with each other.  A Catholicism that is defined by what is believed and practiced by the whole Church, in all times and places, rather than what may be particular in one place and time, will not include such things as mandatory celibacy for clergy, restricting Communion to one kind for the laity, an intermediate state for the faithful prior to the Final Judgement that resembles hell except in that it is temporary, supererogatory works and a treasury of merit, indulgences and dispensations, that are innovations of the Roman Church from after when she and the Churches of the four ancient Patriarchs of the East broke fellowship with each other at the end of the first Christian millennium.  These things have never been part of the faith and practice of the Eastern Churches.  The Protestantism that rejects these on the grounds of their being unscriptural is not rejecting anything that can truly be said to be Catholic.  That having been said, there are ideas commonly thought to be “Protestant” that are at odds with Catholicism properly defined.  Examples of these include a) the idea that the true “Church” is not an organized community/society but an aggregate term for speaking of all people who considered as individuals are Christian believers, b) the idea that ecclesiastical government (episcopal, Presbyterian, congregational) is adiopha rather than of Apostolic provenance, c) the idea that when Holy Communion is said to be an anamnesis or memorial of the Lord’s death this means a depiction in the present of an event in the past rather than the means given to us by grace whereby we partake in time of the Lord’s sacrifice which has been taken out of time and into eternity by His offering of Himself in the Tabernacle built not with hands in Heaven, d) the idea that baptism, the sacrament of entry under the New Covenant corresponding with circumcision under the Old, unlike the New Covenant itself is less inclusive rather than more and should therefore be withheld from the infants of Christian parents, and e) that when the Son of God “was made flesh and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father)” so that He could say to St. Philip “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father” this did not effect a fundamental change from when God said to Israel through Moses under the Old Covenant “ye saw no manner of similitude on the day that the LORD spake unto you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire.”  Just as none of the beliefs and practices that Rome introduced after the Schism and which Protestantism rejected is truly Catholic, so none of these ideas that conflict with what is truly Catholic should be considered essential to what is truly Protestant.  That all of them are wrong is demonstrable from the Scriptures.[1]

 

Rather than picking “Protestant” or “Catholic” to describe our Church, orthodox Anglicans should embrace both terms, defining “Protestant” so as to include the supreme authority of Scripture and the freeness of the gift of Christ’s salvation received by faith[2] but to exclude ideas that conflict with what is truly Catholic in that it belongs to the faith and practice of the whole Church since the earliest times and defining “Catholic” so as to include what belongs to the faith and practice of the whole Church from the earliest times but to exclude those distinctly Roman errors rightly excised from our English Church in the Reformation.

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[1] That a) is wrong is evident from both the Greek word for Church, ekklesia, which denotes a group that has met or assembled, and from how the New Testament uses the word – it is always a visible community of Christian believers, never just a convenient way of speaking of X, Y, and Z Christians, regardless of whether they have ever met.   With regards to b), the episcopal polity is clearly of Apostolic provenance in the New Testament – the Apostles themselves, along with those invited to share in their governance such as SS Timothy and Titus, are the bishops in the sense of the governors of the Church, presiding as the top tier of a ministry which like that of the Old Testament Church has three tiers, the middle being that of the presbyters and the lower tier the deacons.  That the Apostles were the governors and the New Testament was written while they were still alive is the reason the word bishop had not yet become the official designation of the governors and is sometimes used of presbyters.  This is a seer/prophet matter and does not negate the New Testament’s clear testimony to the Apostolic provenance of the ecclesiastical government found in all ancient Churches prior to the sixteenth century.  With regards to c), look up every occurrence of anamnesis in the Bible, LXX Old Testament and New Testament.   In none of these does it mean something intended to call something from the past to our mental recollection.  That Christ died in time, but took His sacrifice out of time and into eternity by offering it in the Heavenly Tabernacle is a key theme of the epistle to the Hebrews.  With regards to d), that baptism takes the place of circumcision can be demonstrated from Colossians 2:11-13 and that the New Covenant is more inclusive than the Old is rather the point of Christ’s commission to take His Gospel and baptize all nations, as well as of St. Paul’s frequent comments about the Old Testament Law, which distinguished Israel from other nations, being removed as a “wall of partition” between them.  That infants, circumcised on the eight day under the Old Covenant, would not be excluded from baptism under the New, is the only reasonable inference from this and is basically explicitly stated by the Lord when He rebuked His disciples from not allowing the infants to be brought to Him.  The words quoted from St. John’s Gospel in e) ought to be sufficient to rebut it.  Obviously the Incarnation changed everything.  The arguments that St. John of Damascus and St. Theodore the Studite advanced against the iconoclasts and which won out in the seventh ecumenical council were built firmly upon the foundation of the Incarnation.  While Christians who adopt iconoclasm like to think they are walking in the footsteps of King Josiah and that Christians who reject their iconoclasm are tainted with pagan idolatry, in reality the iconoclasts have adopted a position typical of monotheistic religions that reject the Incarnation.

[2] When Dr. Luther said that justification is by “faith alone”, by “alone” he excluded only what St. Paul had already excluded in Romans and Galatians, our own works, and for the very reason St. Paul gives for excluding these in Romans 4, that if it were by works it would be a wage paid to us rather than a gift freely given.  Faith is the hand by which we receives the freely given grace of God and in this function it is indeed alone in that nothing else we do can either do this instead of faith or alongside faith.  This does not exclude the sacraments as means of grace, as ought to be evident from what Dr. Luther, Calvin, and our own Anglican formularies have to say about them.  In the giving of a gift, two hands are always involved, the hand of the recipient and the hand of the giver.  The sacraments are the hand of the Giver working through the means of His Church.  Nor does it say anything about any other function of faith, such as its being one of the three elements of basic Christian character alongside hope and Christian love.  Nor is it some sort of ontological statement.  This adequately answers any reasonable objection someone might try to make to it on the grounds of theology that is actually Catholic.  When Rome anathematized it in the Council of Trent, and the Eastern Church rejected it as found in the Confession of Cyril I Lucaris, what they rejected was the idea that someone can gain acceptance before God by getting all of his intellectual ducks lined up properly while living however he pleases. This, however, is not what Dr. Luther meant but is rather a form of salvation by works in which visible outward works have been replaced by invisible inner works.  The Protestant doctrine can only be properly understood as speaking of faith as the hand that receives the gift of salvation.  That salvation is a gift we receive rather than something we earn or achieve for ourselves is a Catholic truth that both the Roman and Eastern Churches traditionally affirm, a fact one needs only look at the early history of the struggles against the rigorist schismatics the Donatists and Novatians and against the heresy of Pelagius to discover, but it had become badly obscured, especially at the popular level, in the Roman Church by the end of the fifteenth century.

Orthodox Christology and the Athanasian Symbol

 

The upcoming Sunday is Whitsunday which is the Christian Pentecost that looks back on the day the Holy Ghost came down upon the Apostles as they were waiting in the Upper Room following the Ascension.   It is the successor in the Christian Kalendar to Shavuot or the Festival of Weeks, the Jewish Pentecost, which is often thought of as looking back to the giving of the Law.   While it is not explicitly stated that this is the reason for the Festival in the Old Testament the timing is right.  Shavuot falls fifty days after the Jewish Passover, hence it's having been called Pentecost in the Greek-speaking ancient world.   Whitsunday falls fifty days after the Christian Passover, Easter, commemorating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Forty days after the Resurrection came the Ascension and then ten days after the Ascension, fifty after the Resurrection, the Holy Ghost came upon the Apostles.

 

Whitsunday is one of the days appointed in the Book of Common Prayer for the Athanasian Creed to be recited instead of the Apostles’ Creed in Morning Prayer or Matins as is the Sunday after Whitsunday known as Trinity Sunday.  This rubric, along with the one that says that Morning and Evening Prayer should be available in every parish on a daily basis, are ones the Church ought to take more seriously.   It would be a great corrective to the doctrinal decay of the present day.

 

The Athanasian Creed, or more properly, since it is not in the form of a Credo, an “I believe” confession of faith but is rather in the form of a Quincunque Vult declaration of what must be believed by “whosoever will be saved”, the Athanasian Symbol is the longest of the three ancient Symbols.   Whereas the Apostles’ and Nicene-Creeds follow a Trinitarian structure – three sections, the first about the Father, the second and largest about the Son, and the third about the Holy Ghost and His earthly ministry through the Church – the Athanasian Symbol has two parts.   The first and longest is a thorough statement of the doctrine of the Trinity so as to exclude any possibility of confusing the Persons or dividing the substance.   The second part is a statement of the doctrine of Jesus Christ.   While the Christological section of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, the Creed which under ordinary circumstances is supposed to be used in a service of Holy Communion, adequately protects against Arianism, the main heresy against which the Church contended in the fourth century in which this Creed was developed, the Athanasian Symbol is a welcome supplement for it incorporates the safeguards of the doctrine of the Hypostatic (Personal) Union of Jesus Christ against Nestorianism and Monophysitism, the heresies against which the Church contended in the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon in the fifth century.   The Christological portion of the Athanasian Symbol begins like this:

 

For the right Faith is that we believe and confess: that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and Man;

God, of the Substance of the Father, begotten before the worlds: and Man, of the Substance of his Mother, born in the world;

Perfect God, and Perfect Man: of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting;

Equal to the Father, as touching his Godhead: and inferior to the Father, as touching his Manhood.

Who although he be God and Man: yet he is not two, but one Christ;

One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh: but by taking of the Manhood into God;

One altogether, not by confusion of Substance: but by unity of Person.

For as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man: so God and Man is one Christ.

 

The statement that He is “Perfect Man: of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting” guards against the heresy of Apollinaris of Laodicea, the fourth century heretic who in his zeal to oppose Arianism taught that Jesus was less than fully human, that in Him the divine Logos took the place of a human νοῦς or mind.  Hence the reference to “a reasonable soul” as well as “human flesh.”   Jesus’ eternal divine nature did not take the place of anything missing in His human nature, He was perfect in both of His natures.   Therefore He had a human “reasonable soul”, that is a soul with a mind that reasons, that knows things by learning through experience and drawing deductive conclusions like any other human being, as well as His omniscient divine nature in which He knows everything because as God to be omniscient is not something different, added on, or accidental to His just being.  His human nature was complete, differing from ours only in that it was enhypostatic and sinless.   Enhypostatic means that His human nature did not belong to or comprise a self other than His divine Self, if this were otherwise, the Nestorians would have been right and He would have been two persons sharing the same body, instead of One Person, which would be something closer to the idea of possession than of Incarnation.   A self is not a component of human nature without which it would not be complete and completely human like a body or a human soul.   Of course a nature cannot exist without a self, but the self is the owner of the nature, that to which the nature belongs, and in the case of Jesus’ Christ’s complete human nature, the self to which it belonged was always the Self of the eternal Son of God.   Nor does His sinlessness indicate that He lacked something necessary to make Him human, quite the contrary.  Sin, although we talk about it as if it were a thing, something that has positive existence in us, something that was added to our nature at the Fall, because human language is such that if we didn’t talk about it this way it would be difficult to talk about it at all, is not actually a thing, with positive existence, added to our nature, but rather a deficiency, the hole where something we lost in the Fall used to be, something that exists in us only in a negative sense, as an absence or shadow.  Specifically it is the absence of the quality of rightness, of being right or just, in our thoughts, words, and actions, singular and habitual.   When we say that Jesus was sinless, we are saying that He lacked a lack, that the absence that is there in all of us of the rightness that ought to be there was itself absent in Him, meaning that the rightness that ought to be there in us was present in Him, and that therefore His lacking sin really means that He was completely human in a way that we in our fallen estate are not.

 

In the twentieth century, Gordon H. Clark and Cornelius Van Til, two of the conservative Presbyterian theologians who followed J. Gresham Machen in opposing the apostasy of the Presbyterian Church of America and Princeton Theological Seminary when these bodies abandoned the nineteenth century Presbyterian orthodoxy of Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield, had a famous controversy over the relationship between divine and human knowledge.  Van Til took the position that God’s knowledge was qualitatively different from man’s knowledge, Clark took the position that it was merely quantitatively different.  To explain further, suppose a truth, let us say that all dogs are animals.   Clark maintained that this truth as known by both God and man, is the same known truth to God as it is to man, except that God knows it more thoroughly, knows all of its details, knows every type of dog for example, everything implicit in it, and everything consequential to it.  The truth, however, is the same truth for man as it is for God, and the knowledge of it is the same knowledge.   The difference between man’s knowledge and God’s knowledge, to Clark, is that man’s knowledge is limited, that he knows certain finite truths and can add to his knowledge, truth by truth, but this can never approach God’s knowledge, because God knows all truths, and so His knowledge is infinite, which the finite can never approach because infinity is indivisible and so no amount of finites can ever add up to an infinite.   Van Til maintained that God’s knowledge differs from man’s in more than this, that it is qualitatively different in that each truth is different to God than it is to man, with God’s knowledge of it being the true knowledge, of which  man’s knowledge is only an approximate resemblance.   While each man’s most zealous adherents, such as Greg Bahnsen for Van Til and John W. Robbins for Gordon Clark, maintained the controversy long after its originators had passed, others less partisan have come to suspect that the two men were talking past each other.  Clark’s position is grounded in the idea that truth is truth and that it is the same for everybody, an idea that seems to have been jettisoned today, but without which the basic laws of logic – the law of identity, the law of non-contradiction and the law of the excluded middle - fall.   Van Til’s position is grounded in the idea that God is incomprehensible by man and that in speaking truth of Him, neither univocal (the bark of the Doberman, the bark of the Rottweiler) nor equivocal (the bark of the Doberman, the bark of the tree) language can convey truth but only analogical which is neither univocal or equivocal but shares aspects of both enough so that something meaningful and understandable can be conveyed through it about the infinite Being that is beyond the comprehension of human minds.  Clark and Van Til, being strict Calvinists, would have abhorred the thought, but both would have benefited from a thorough grounding in Thomistic theology and philosophy for both of their starting points were stressed and harmonized in the thinking of the Angelic Doctor.   Furthermore, they would have benefited from looking at the Patristic consensus on the difference between divine and human knowledge as formulated in the struggles of the orthodox Fathers against heresies such as Apollinarianism.   Divine knowledge is indeed different from human knowledge in more ways than the mere quantitative but the difference is between the omniscience of the simple, uncreated, Being Whose essence and every attribute are the same as His very existence and the finite knowledge of composite, created, beings who must attain and accumulate what they know, truth by truth, fact by fact, over time.

 

Other errors that have plagued Christianity in recent centuries could have been avoided by more attention to the Athanasian Symbol and the words “One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh: but by taking of the Manhood into God.”   Take, for example, kenoticism.  This error takes its name from the Greek word rendered “made himself of no reputation” in Philippians 2:7 in the Authorized Bible.   The English Standard Version, which is the apostate liberal Revised Standard Version as modified for Crossway Publishers by a committee that included enough evangelical celebrities like J. I. Packer and Wayne Grudem as to persuade the gullible into thinking a liberal translation had thereby been turned into a conservative and faithful one, renders it “emptied himself” in the American edition as do the ASV, NASV, and NRSV.  The New Living Translation renders it “he gave up his divine privileges.”  The NIV has “made himself nothing” as does the UK edition of the ESV.   Now, “empty” is not a wrong translation of κενόω when it comes to word-to-word translation, it is the basic, literal, meaning of the word.   Contextually, however, in Phil. 2:7, the meaning is that of the Authorized Bible.  It is not that the Son of God underwent an ontological emptying in which He divested Himself of His deity, part of His deity, or even His “divine privileges.”   Think of the words of Jesus to Nicodemus in John 3:13 “And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven.”   He declared there that He was in heaven even as He was on earth speaking to Nicodemus having come down from heaven.   Clearly there was no ontological divesting of His deity or any of His divine attributes, which in orthodox theology are not accidental in God, but all belong to and indeed are equivalent to His very essence.   St. Paul in Philippians 2 was not talking about an ontological change in the Son of God but His humility in taking to Himself another nature, a far less exalted nature, a created nature, and undergoing all the experiences appropriate to that nature and indeed everything that human nature experiences as a result of its debasement through the Fall into sin even though the human nature He took unto Himself was not so debased.  Kenoticism is the interpretation of Phil. 2:7 as meaning that Jesus underwent an ontological emptying of at least part of His divinity in order to become truly man.  It is usually thought of as beginning with Erlangen School neo-Lutheran theologian Gottfried Thomasius around the middle of the nineteenth century.  Another major proponent of it was Charles Gore, Bishop of Oxford, a liberal (in the sense of embracing the so-called higher criticism, rejecting Biblical infallibility, and trying to make the Christian faith conform to so-called scientific theories built upon the unsound foundation of anti-Christian naturalistic presuppositions) Anglo-Catholic (“liberal Anglo-Catholic” ought to be as absurd an expression as “liberal fundamentalist” since pre-Oxford Movement high churchmen were the most reactionary – as always I mean that as a positive compliment – wing of the Church, and the Oxford Movement began as a reaction against liberalism).   The sound orthodox doctrine, however, is that of the Athanasian Symbol.  The Incarnation was “not by conversion of the God head into flesh”, which is what an ontological kenosis would amount to, but “by taking of the Manhood into God.”   The divine nature, the Godhead, is simple and immutable.  It does not change.   Being infinite and simple, it is indivisible with no composite parts.  No attributes can be separated from it as accidental, each are the very essence of the Godhead.   The Son of God, the Second of the Three Persons Who each possess the whole of the one Godhead in the Trinity, took to His Self another nature, a complete human nature, so that from the moment of the Incarnation – His conception – He has subsisted in two modes simultaneously, as fully God and fully Man.

 

 

That Jesus Christ is “One altogether, not by confusion of Substance: but by unity of Person” is a necessary corrective of two opposing errors in the main branches of continental Protestantism.   In the early days of the sixteenth century Reformation, Dr. Martin Luther accused the Swiss branch of the Reformation of Nestorianism.  This was because Ulrich Zwingli of Zurich who was the leading Swiss Reformer for most of the period in which Dr. Luther led the Reformation in Germany in defence of his memorialist view of the Lord’s Supper argued against the Real Presence of Christ in the Sacrament on the grounds that Jesus’ body, and His human nature in general, has a local presence which is currently in Heaven, preventing it from being on the altars of all the parishes in Christendom.   Dr. Luther was a strong defender of the Real Presence, the strongest among the Protestant Reformers, and this issue was what prevented the success of the Marburg Colloquy of 1529 which sought unity between the German and Swiss branches of the Reformation and at which both Luther and Zwingli were present.  Zwingli died two years after the failed Colloquy and five years after that French Reformer, John Calvin, published the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion and was persuaded by William Farel to move to Geneva and lead the Reformation there.  Calvin, while he rejected Zwinglian memorialism, held to a spiritual view of the Real Presence rather than the more literal view of the Lutherans who concluded that the difference between his view and Zwingli’s was more nominal than substantial.  That Calvin in rejecting the Lutheran view borrowed Zwingli’s argument based on the local presence of the body of Christ lent its support to this conclusion.  Thus, Calvinism became as suspect in Lutheran eyes as Zwinglianism of, if not outright Nestorianism, a Nestorian tendency.

 

That this Nestorian tendency actually exists in the tradition of Reformed thought is undeniable today although it was not remotely as evident in the sixteenth century.  In our day, a leading “orthodox” Reformed theologian, the late R. C. Sproul, accused the hymn writer Charles Wesley of bordering on Patripassionism (the heresy against which Tertullian wrote his Against Praxeas, it would later be renamed after Sabellius, and is essentially the modalist view of the Trinity, that the Three Persons are not Three Persons but three names or offices of the same Person) for the line in his beloved hymn And Can It Be that says “that Thou my God shouldst die for me.”   Sproul’s accusation against Wesley, however, did not reveal actual Patripassionism on the part of the hymn writer, who by no means confused the Persons of the Trinity, but rather Nestorianism on the part of the one making the accusation.  It was the human nature of Jesus that died, Sproul argued, not His divine nature.   This is a fundamentally Nestorian argument.  Natures do not die.  Persons die.  Jesus, the Person Who is the eternal Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, died.  That means that when He died, God died.  He was able to die because in the Incarnation He took to Himself a second nature, human nature, which was mortal, that is to say, capable of death, as His divine nature, which is immortal, incapable of death, is not.   The death the Son of God experienced, therefore, was a human death, but it was the human death of a Person Who is fully God, which is why Wesley’s line is legitimate.   Since the human nature and divine nature of Jesus both belong to the same Person in which they are eternally united it is legitimate to predicate of that Person whatever is true of either nature even when speaking about Him in terms of the other nature.  This is called the communicatio idiomatum, the communication of properties or attributes, a Scriptural example of which can be seen in the verse quoted earlier from Jesus’ discussion with Nicodemus.  Note that He calls Himself “the Son of man” when stating that He is, that is in the present at the time when He was speaking to Nicodemus, in heaven.  Sproul’s Nestorianism was particularly troublesome in that it expressed itself as taking exception to something that is arguably the entire point of the Christian message – that in the Incarnation, and in the suffering and death the Son of God was able to experience because of the Incarnation, God entered into the plight of humanity and redeemed and sanctified it by His sharing in it, that God imposed no suffering upon mankind as a natural or juridical consequence of sin that He had not determined to go through Himself to redeem us.   It has been more common among the Reformed of the last century or so, to revive Nestorianism in its original form, the rejection of the honorific of “Mother of God” for the Virgin Mary.  Nestorius rejected this honorific, or rather its Greek original Θεοτόκος (literally, God-bearer, but because τόκος refers to bearing in the specific sense of bearing children rather than the more general sense, it means Mother of God) and based his rejection on the fact that Jesus received His human nature from Mary rather than His divine.  The problem with his reasoning, a problem so serious that it was condemned as heresy in the Council of Ephesus, is that the Person to Whom the Blessed Virgin gave birth was One Person Who is both God and Man, and while He did not receive His deity from her, she is still the Mother of the Person Who as the Son of God is God, and therefore the Mother of God.  The Nestorian tendency in the Reformed tradition did not manifest itself in this form until recently because Zwingli, Bullinger, Calvin et al. in the sixteenth century all had a higher, more Catholic, Mariology than their twentieth and twenty-first century successors.  Note that while the revival of the Nestorian rejection of this honorific has not been limited to the Reformed among Protestants of the last couple of centuries, the Reformed are the only ones among this renaissance of Nestorianism who claim to care about the Patristic orthodoxy of the early Ecumenical Councils.

 

Dr. Luther, therefore, was correct in perceiving a Nestorian tendency in the Reformed tradition.  Unfortunately, in responding to it he opened the door to a different sort of error.   In the fifth century, after Nestorianism was condemned at the Council of Ephesus, an opposite heresy called monophysitism developed among those who were most vehement in their rejection of Nestorianism.   Monophysitism, as the name suggests, is the idea that after the Incarnation, Jesus Christ was not just One Person, but had only one nature.   Those who adopted this position pointed to a line in the writings of St. Cyril of Alexandria, who had led the orthodox side at Ephesus, which they interpreted as saying that the Incarnate Christ had only one nature but this was a case of a term not having yet attained its settled meaning in theology.   Before the Council of Chalcedon issued its definition, clarifying the doctrine of the Hypostatic Union of the two natures in the one Person of Jesus Christ, the word φύσις was not the settled word for “nature” but was used with other meanings, sometimes interchangeably with ὑπόστασις which was the settled (1) theological word for person in Greek. (2)  This seems to be how St. Cyril was using the term.   The monophysites, particularly the Eutychians who followed Eutychius of Constantinople, however, taught that in the Incarnation Jesus’ human nature was sort of absorbed into His divine nature    This is what was condemned as heresy at Chalcedon.  Dr. Luther did not revive the error of Eutychius.   He did, however, in response to Zwingli and Calvin, draw some unfortunate conclusions from the communicatio idiomatum.

 

Dr. Luther’s position is often misunderstood.   When he responded to the claim that Jesus’ body cannot be literally present in the Sacrament because it’s local presence is in Heaven by saying that since in Jesus the divine and human are inseparably united Jesus’ human nature is present everywhere His divine nature is, this was not his explanation of how Jesus is present in the Sacrament but his rebuttal of the argument that Zwingli and Calvin built upon the local presence of the body of Christ.   In other words, by maintaining that through its union with His deity Jesus’ human nature was in a sense omnipresent he was responding to the claim made based on the local presence of Jesus’ body in Heaven by saying that the local presence is not the only presence that Jesus’ human nature has, as is assumed by the Zwinglian and Calvinist position, rather than saying that it is through this particular other presence that Jesus is present in the Sacrament.  Many of Dr. Luther’s critics on this point do not get beyond their objections to his claim for a sort of omnipresence for Jesus’ human nature to see that what he meant by Jesus’ Sacramental Presence was a third kind of presence that was neither the local presence of Jesus’ body nor this omnipresence that he claimed was shared from Jesus’ deity to His humanity.   It is this claim of a shared omnipresence that concerns us here, however.

 

In the orthodox doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum the attributes of Jesus’ divine nature and those of His human nature are shared, not with the other nature directly, but with the Person Who is Subject and Owner of both natures.  Had Dr. Luther limited his talk of Jesus’ divine attributes being shared with his human attributes to His omnipresence his position, depending upon how he further explained it, would not necessarily contradict the orthodox viewpoint.   Indeed, it is logically necessary that if the divine and human natures have since the establishment of the Hypostatic Union in the Incarnation been inseparably united that wherever Jesus is both of His natures in some sense are which translates into Jesus’ human nature being in some sense omnipresent.   The question, however, is what is that some sense?  Obviously that sense is not that the local presence of His human body and soul have been extended infinitely.   While omnipresence as an attribute of the Godhead is not a local presence but a presence that transcends the limits of locality it would be wrong to say that this omnipresence now belongs to Jesus’ human nature qua His human nature.  That would require that either the omnipresence of His Godhead has passed from His divine nature to His human nature or that it has been duplicated in His human nature.  Divine attributes can neither be duplicated nor alienated from the divine essence.   The sense in which Jesus’ human nature can legitimately be said to be omnipresent is that because it is inseparably united with His divine nature it is present everywhere the divine nature is present in the divine nature.  Thus, the Lutherans are right in maintaining that what they call the Extra Calvinisticum, the idea that Jesus as God is present in places where He as Man is not present, is wrong, but they themselves are wrong in thinking that because everywhere Jesus is present He is present, since the Incarnation, as both God and Man, that His omnipresence has passed from the omnipresent nature to the locally present nature so that the locally present nature is now omnipresent in se, rather than that through the inseparable union of the two natures in the Person of Jesus Christ, both are present wherever that Person is present, in the nature that is omnipresent.  Unfortunately, the Lutheran misunderstanding of the communicatio idiomatum goes beyond this, for the Lutherans also claim that omnipotence and omniscience have become part of Jesus’ human nature as well as His divine nature.   That Jesus’ human nature must in some sense be omnipresent is a logical requirement of the Hypostatic Union because the doctrine forbids the separation of the two natures and if Jesus were somewhere present without His human nature there His divine nature would be separate from His human nature.   No such logical requirement can be deduced with regards to His omnipotence and omniscience.

 

Again, the Athanasian Symbol declares that Jesus is “One altogether, not by confusion of Substance: but by unity of Person” and it is important to consider these words in the light of the preceding words “One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh: but by taking of the Manhood into God.”   Sometimes the One Person of Jesus Christ is spoken of as if He were the product of the Incarnation as if His Person was what you get when you add His deity to His humanity.   This, however, would make Him a created and composite person.   His Person, His Self, His Ego is eternal.  He has always existed with the Father Who eternally begat Him and with the Holy Ghost Who eternally proceeds through Him from the Father.   In the Incarnation, without changing Who He eternally is, the Son of God, the Divine Logos, or What He is, Very God of Very God, of one substance with the Father, He united to His eternal Person a perfect, created, human nature so that the same eternal Person Who eternally existed as God, now and forevermore exists also as Man.

 

Given the number of basic Christological errors prevalent today we would do well to follow the liturgical use of the Athanasian Symbol as prescribed by the Book of Common Prayer.

 (1)   I have used the word “settled” here where most writers would probably use the word “technical” because I do not like to speak of “technical terms” in theology, the word “technical” having connotations closely associated with Modern ways of thinking and doing things that I am very much opposed to importing into theology.

(2)   Before ὑπόστασις was settled on as the Greek equivalent of the Latin persona and these terms became settled as the Greek and Latin designations of what it is that makes the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost three, it had itself been used as a synonym for οὐσία, the Greek word for “being” or “essence” – in God, although in no created being, essence is identical to being or existence – which is the word that designates what it is that makes the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost one.  The original synonymy of ὑπόστασις and οὐσία can still be seen in the term used in Latin theological writings as the equivalent of οὐσία.   This is the word substantia, from which our English word substance that in older theological English was always used for these terms is derived.  If you break this word down into its component parts sub (under) and stantia (from stans, a participle form of sto, stare, meaning “to stand”) these correspond to the component parts of ὑπόστασις.  The point of bringing this up is to illustrate that it is important to pay attention, when the important terms of theology are used in the early centuries, to when they are used.  When they are used in conciliar definitions, at least the definitions of those councils received by the larger Church as truly ecumenical, as φύσις was at Chalcedon, they can be taken as from that point having their settled meaning.  This meaning should not be automatically assumed for earlier uses.  The term ὁμοούσιον was used in the Nicene Creed in the fourth century to indicate that the Son shared the same essence, substance, being with the Father.   Those who objected to the term at and immediately following the First Council of Nicaea were not all Arians who objected to the idea that it was being used to express.  Their concern was that a generation or so prior it had been used with a very different meaning, a Sabellian one, by, for example, Paul of Samosata.  While politics had as much or more to do with the time it took for the Nicene consensus against Arianism to be finalized in the Church it was only through this finalization that ὁμοούσιον attained its settled meaning and the danger of it being taken in a Sabellian sense passed.