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.

 

Pride and Lust

The sixth month of the year is upon us.  This is the month formerly known as June.   It took that name from Juno who in Roman mythology was the queen of the Olympian gods, the equivalent of Hera in Greek mythology.  That her name has been supplanted is not a belated effect of the triumph of Christianity over classical paganism, alas, but a sign of the waning influence of Christianity in Western Civilization, the name given to what used to be Christendom after it was taken over by liberalism.  A few decades ago a day in this month was set aside by liberal neo-pagans for the celebration of every sort of, well, what Jorge Bergoglio recently called “frociaggine” to the rage of his cult of progressive fans.  There are those who think such language should not be used even in quoting another.  My response to such a Mrs. Grundy can be found in the Anglo-Norman motto of the Order of the Garter, “honi soit qui mal y pense which means “shame on he who thinks evil of it” (although I prefer the older, if slightly less precise, translation “evil to him who thinks evil of it”).   Should that prove unsatisfactory, the only thing I have to add to it is, from the mother tongue of both Bergoglio’s own language and the Italian he was speaking when he uttered the word quoted, “futue te ipsum”.  I will not provide a translation, suffice it to say it was probably what King Edward III was saying silently in his head to those to whom he originally uttered the chivalric motto out loud.   At any rate, it was the celebration, in other words, of all the letters of the alphabet soup.  Then, deciding that a day was not enough, they expanded it to a week, and then the whole month.  Somewhere along the way the word that at one time denoted a glad, cheerful, even merry disposition but which had been hijacked by the alphabet soup gang as a self-designation was dropped from the title and so it simply became “Pride.”  

 

I have observed several times in the past that when it was shortened to “Pride” the lesser of two sins was dropped and the greater retained.   Indeed, what was retained is the name of the greatest of all sins.   The famous Seven Deadly Sins are Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony and Lust.   Of these sins – actually vices, since these denote habits or ongoing attitudes rather than single acts – the one with which the dropped “Gay” would be associated is Lust, which is associated with Sloth, Avarice, and Gluttony at the lower end of the spectrum.  Each of these is a vice in the strict Aristotelean sense of the word – a natural appetite indulged in to excess, and susceptible of various perversions.   Pride and Envy are linked at the other end of the spectrum.  These are the Satanic sins, the sins by which Lucifer fell and evil began its parasitic infestation of God’s good creation. 

 

I wrote about this at length last year in an essay entitled “The Season of Hubris.”  This essay is intended to be supplementary to that one rather than a repetition of everything I wrote there so I encourage you to read the two together.  

 

With regards to the contrasted sins of Pride and Lust a few observations are in order.  The first of these is that Pride’s being the worst of the Seven Deadly is the ultimate answer to those who think that sin is something that resides in the body alone and is not found in the mind or soul.  Plato, in his Politeia, a dialogue aimed at providing an account of dikiaosune (justice), has Socrates and his interlocutors construct a hypothetical ideal city.   The assumption behind this experiment is that the city-state is like a larger-scale man and that therefore it is easier to understand justice in the individual soul by seeing it writ large in a city.   Thus in Plato’s ideal city-state the philosopher-kings who love wisdom rule the producers who love money through auxiliary enforcers who love honour, and these classes respectively represent the reason, the appetites, and the will in the soul.   In the justice of the rightly-ordered soul the reason governs the appetites through the will.   The truth of the Christian revelation does not oppose this description, but assigns it to natural justice.   Original justice, with which man was created, included natural justice but it also included a higher spiritual justice which was a grace given through the indwelling of the Holy Ghost.  Both were lost in the Fall and while natural man can attain a type of civic justice that approximates natural justice while falling short of it as it was in man’s original antelapsarian state it is only through the grace made available by the redemption accomplished by Jesus Christ that man can be made spiritually whole and just.   When St. Paul describes the state of unredeemed fallen human nature as sarkos (the flesh) this indicates both that in the fallen state the lower sensual part of human nature, the appetites of which  Plato wrote, which is supposed to be governed by the higher rational part of human nature, instead exert a rebellious dominance over the soul and that the entirety of human nature, body and soul, which is supposed to be governed by God, the indwelling Holy Ghost, is instead in rebellion against Him and in the absence of His indwelling presence spiritually dead.  While the Platonic concept of the rightly-ordered soul can be seen in this it should not be taken as teaching other Platonic ideas that are incompatible with Christian truth such as the idea that certain heretics that the Church struggled against in the early centuries of the faith derived from Plato as to evil being entirely and only a property of matter, and therefore the body, and that it did not touch spirit, and therefore the soul.  In Christian truth, including the epistles of St. Paul who wrote “we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Eph. 6:12), sin and therefore evil, began in the spiritual realm with the rebellion and fall of the devil who then tempted man.  The worst sins that a person can commit are not those that consist of indulging the sensual appetites to excess and thereby binding in chains of slavery the rational soul that ought to be governing and moderating the appetites and thereby cultivating the cardinal virtue of temperance.  The worst sins are those that take place strictly in the soul in its rebellion against God and refusal to submit to Him in humility.  The foremost and worst of these is Pride.

 

This should not be taken as detracting from the seriousness of the sin of Lust which is, after all, still one of the Seven Deadly.  Which leads to the next observation.  While Pride was closely connected to Envy, the second of the Seven Deadly sins, in the fall of the devil it was closely connected to Lust, in the fall of man.   Or rather, since Lust, as distinguished from Gluttony and Avarice in the Seven Deadly Sins, clearly means immoderate desire of a specifically sexual nature, it was closely connected to “Lust” in a broader sense of immoderate desire in general.  The Lust in the Seven Deadly Sins as well as Avarice, Gluttony, and Sloth if conceived of as immoderate desire for rest, are each specific examples of this broader sense of Lust.   This is the sense in which St. John used the word – twice – when he wrote “For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.” (I Jn, 2:16)  The Greek word for Lust in this verse is epithumia. (1)

 

The two Lusts and the Pride identified in this verse are precisely the means employed by the devil to tempt Eve to sin.   This is evident in how Moses describes her response to the serpent’s temptation:

 

And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. (Gen. 3:6)

 

First she saw “that the tree was good for food” meaning that she desired the forbidden fruit for food.   This is the “lust of the flesh” which includes Gluttony as well as Lust proper.   Then she saw “that it was pleasant to the eyes” and so desired it with the “lust of the eyes.”   Finally, she saw that it was “to be desired to make one wise” which is a desire that appeals to the “pride of life.”   So it is that by inspiring Pride and Lust together, the enemy wrought the Fall of man.

 

This observation would not be complete without noting that the devil attempted this a second time with very different results.   When he came to Jesus after He had been fasting forty days in the wilderness and said “If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread” (Matt. 4:3) this was an attempt to stir up the “lust of the flesh.”  When he took Jesus to the pinnacle of the Temple in Jerusalem and told Him “If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone” (Matt. 4:6) it was the “pride of life” that he sought to use.  When he took Jesus to a mountaintop and showed Him the kingdoms of the world and their glory and said “All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me” (Matt. 4:9) the “lust of the eyes” was the means he sought to employ.  In each of these the Second Adam triumphed where the first had fallen.  That St. Luke was inspired to record these temptations in a slightly different order with the last two reversed is perhaps to be explained as making the parallel with the temptation of Eve stand out more by presenting the temptations in the same order as in Genesis.

 

So it was that Lust and Pride brought about the Fall of man and so, appropriately, one of the first things recorded in the accounts of the Redemption of man in the Synoptic Gospels is the Saviour’s successful triumph over these temptations.  In the Genesis account of the Fall, however, Pride stands out as playing the larger role in the temptation.   That Pride was what had previously brought about the tempter’s own fall can be deduced from the Old Testament passages in Isaiah and Ezekiel traditionally regarded as alluding to his rebellion and is explicitly stated in the New Testament by St. Paul in 1 Tim. 3:16.  When the deuterocanonical Wisdom of Solomon states that “through envy of the devil came death into the world” (Wis. 2:24) this has been interpreted as meaning either that Envy was involved alongside Pride in the devil’s own fall or that it was his motive in tempting Eve.  In a popular Medieval account of the fall of the devil these interpretations are united.   The school of Alexander of Hales attributed this account to St. Bernard of Clairvaux in his commentary on the book of Jonah (2).   St. Thomas Aquinas also attributes this account to St. Bernard in the commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences that he wrote to complete his master’s degree in theology at the University of Paris. (3)   According to this account the Incarnation, in which humanity would be raised to the highest honour by being joined to deity in the Hypostatic Union of the Son of God, was revealed to Lucifer, whose Pride rebelled at the thought of a lower order of being so being elevated above him and so out of Envy he sought to thwart the outcome by enticing man to sin.   Robert Grosseteste, the thirteenth century Bishop of Lincoln and Oxford University administrator and professor, gave the following approving statement of the account without mentioning its author:

 

Accordingly—and this seems truer than the above-mentioned way—the fall of the angel had happened because from the beginning it was proposed to the angel that the Son of God made man must be believed for justice and must venerated and adored with that adoration that is latria.  For if by this faith and not otherwise the angels had had salvation, this faith would not have been at any time denied to or kept hidden from the angels, but from the beginning it would have been proposed and manifest to them all.  From the beginning, it seems, the Devil refused through pride to offer this faith, despised the man who ought to be adored above him, and disdained receiving justice from him.  The Devil thought him unworthy, envied him, and coveted his singular excellence; through this envy, by which he envied the God-man and hated him, he was a murderer from the beginning, because “whosoever hates his brother is a murderer” (1 Jn 3.15).  So the Devil did not remain in the truth of faith and salvation offered to him. (4)

 

Peter Lombard, the Italian theologian and Bishop of Paris who was a contemporary of St. Bernard provided the following account of the devil’s envy in tempting man to sin:

 

ON THE DEVIL’S ENVY, BY WHICH HE CAME TO TEMPT HUMANKIND.  And so the devil, seeing that human beings were able to ascend by the humility of obedience to that from which he had fallen through pride, envied them.  He who through pride had previously become the devil, that is, the one who has fallen below, by the jealousy of envy was made satan, that is, the adversary. (5)

 

While to the extent that they go beyond what can be gleaned directly from the Scriptures these accounts must be reckoned as speculative they are not wild speculation.   Note that in each account Pride is the root of Envy.  Envy, in these accounts and in the Seven Deadly Sins, must not be thought of the way the word is often used today as a mere synonym for jealousy (in the sense of wanting what someone else has, not in the sense of zealously guarding one’s own to the point of constantly suspecting others of trying to take it).   It does not mean merely coveting what belongs to someone else but hating another person to the point of seeking that person’s destruction for having what one in one’s Pride erroneously thinks is rightly one’s own.

 

Which brings us to our final observation.   Outside the alphabet soup gang the earliest support for turning the sixth lunar cycle of the year into a celebration of the deadliest of the Seven Deadly Sins came from what is commonly called the Left.  Historically, the Left has usually been thought of as the political expression of an economic movement, socialism, that is best described as the second worst Deadly Sin of Envy wearing the mask of the greatest Theological Virtue, Charity or Love.  Since the expression “Love is Love” (6) associated with the celebration of Pride, similarly uses the mask of Love to cover the Deadly Sin of Lust, this is ironically appropriate.  Of course the mainstream “Right” has largely jumped on the Pride bandwagon today, but this is to be expected from the mainstream “Right” which has little use for King, Church, tradition, family, hierarchy, chivalry and all the other good things the Right was traditionally supposed to stand for and is little more than yesterday’s liberalism, which is to capitalism what the Left is to socialism, just as capitalism is to the Deadly Sin of Avarice what socialism is to the Deadly Sin of Envy.  All that can be said for it is that at least the Avarice doesn’t hide behind a mask the way the Envy of socialism does.  Its face can be plainly seen in all the businesses who have sworn their allegiance to the Deadly Sin of Pride in order to make a quick buck by selling merchandize emblazoned with the symbol of God’s covenantal promise not to destroy the world with another Flood employed in defiance of Him and His Truth which is the only Truth.

 

 

(1)   This might surprise those more familiar with our Articles of Religion than the Greek text of the New Testament.   Article IX “Of Original Sin or Birth Sin” says that the “lust of the flesh” is “called in the Greek, phronema sarkos.” This is not the expression used by St. John in his epistle, but the expression used by St. Paul in the eighth chapter of Romans and which is rendered “carnal mind” in the Authorized Version.  That Archbishop Cranmer et al. had Romans 8:7 and not 1 John 2:16 in mind is evident from how the Article goes on to say “which some do expound the wisdom, some sensuality, some the affection, some the desire, of the flesh, is not subject to the Law of God” with the last clause being a direct reference to the verse in Romans.   The English Reformers seem to have interpreted the “carnal mind” of Romans 8:7 as being identical to the “lust of the flesh” of 1 John 2:16.  While the interpretation may be correct, it is rather a stretch to render phronema as “lust”.  “Mind, spirit” is the primary definition for this word given by Liddell and Scott, and “lust” is not one of the definitions provided.  Interestingly “high spirit, resolution, pride” is a secondary definition.   The portion of the Article in which this appears is the final section which articulates the Reformation position on concupiscence, namely that it is sinful in itself, and that it is not eliminated by regeneration.  Concupiscence is the Anglicized version of the word usually used to translate the Greek epithumia in Latin, although it is not the word used to mean Lust in the Latin list of the Seven Deadly Sins (that word is Luxuria).  Rome clumsily condemned the Reformation position in the fifth session of the Council of Trent – her wording suggests that sin has a “true and proper nature” or “essence”, which, of course, conflicts with the truly Catholic understanding that sin and evil do not have a true essence or nature but are present as defects in that which was created good and so are absences, or non-things rather than things in themselves, an understanding that Rome herself otherwise affirms – but the disagreement is largely semantic.  The Reformers and Rome did not use the word concupiscence with the same meaning.   The Reformers used it to mean desire for sensual sin qua sin, by which definition, of course, it is as Article IX (and Article II of the Lutheran Augsburg Confession) assert, itself sinful.   Rome used it to mean natural sensual desire and this, as Rome said, is not sinful in itself, but only when it is disordered and immoderate.   As for Rome’s seeming position that regeneration eliminates all inherited sinfulness it is difficult to take it seriously.   Its could only be harmonized with all the experiential evidence to the contrary by claiming that by His redeeming work, Jesus Christ merely returned man to the same precarious state he was in prior to the Fall rather than placing him on more solid footing, a claim which might be consistent with the stick-and-carrot soteriology to which the Reformers so rightly objected in the Roman teaching of the sixteenth century but which is hardly consistent with the Catholic Christian truth that God’s Son is the Last Adam the effects of Whose work to redeem and rescue us and place us in a state of abundant grace far exceed the ruinous effects of the sin of the First Adam.  E. L. Mascall’s remarks on Article IX and the effects of regeneration on Original Sin in Christ, the Christian, and the Church: A Study of the Incarnation and Its Consequences (Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 2017, originally published in 1946), 83-88 are well worth reading on this matter.

(2)   A Reader in Early Franciscan Theology: The Summa Halensis, edited and translated by Lydia Schumacher and Oleg Bychkov, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2022), 202.

(3)   St. Thomas Aquinas, Scriptum super libros Sententiarium III, D. 1, Q. 1, A. 3, Ad 7.

(4)   Robert Grosseteste, The Cessation of the Laws, translated by Stephen M. Hildebrand (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 171 (3.2.3).

(5)   Peter Lombard, The Sentences: Book 2, On Creation, translated by Giulio Silano, (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2008), 90 (D. XXI, 1.1).

(6)   This expression is amusingly absurd to anyone with even the most basic classical learning.   The statement “Philia is Agape” does not mean the same thing as “Storge is Eros” and you would have statements with yet different meanings if you swapped either term in either statement for either term in the other and even if you just reversed the terms in the statements – “Agape is Philia” is a defensible statement in a way that is not true of “Philia is Agape” because Agape includes Philia or perhaps better is a specialized form of Philia.  Yet each of these terms means Love and this is not merely a matter of English being a less rich language than Greek, nor is it a case of equivocal uses of Love, such as when “bark” means both the sound that a dog makes and the outer layer of a tree trunk.  Even Eros means sexual Love rather than sexual Lust and is not merely a synonym for epithumia, as can be demonstrated by trying the experiment of reading the speeches about Eros in Plato’s Symposium and substituting epithumia or Lust for Eros or Love.  C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves (London: Geoffey Bles, 1960) is the best treatment of these terms, how they differ, and how they relate to each other, in English.

 

 

 

 

Substitution

 

If you have read much of the theological works of the older school of Reformed theologians you have probably encountered numerous references to the sophistry of the Socinians.   These were the followers of the thought of Faustus Socinius and his uncle Lelio.  These were a pair of sixteenth century Italian Renaissance humanists who went much further than the Magisterial Reformers or even most of the Anabaptist radicals.   They rejected the basic Christian faith as confessed in the ancient Creeds and taught a form of unitarianism.

 

Faustus Socinius also formulated a set of basic arguments against the penal substitution theory of the Atonement that have been used by those who object to that theory ever since.   These are found in his De Jesu Christo Servatore (Of Jesus Christ the Saviour), first published in 1578.   The penal substitution theory is one of the theories that purport to explain how the Atonement works.   It is not itself, nor is any other such theory, de fide, that is to say, a basic tenet of the faith once delivered unto the saints.   That Jesus died for us and rose again, and by doing so rescued us from our plight as sinners helpless to save ourselves, is de fide.   While the Apostles’ Creed includes the basic historical facts of the Gospel without commenting on their larger meaning, the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, the standard of orthodoxy for the entire Church since her first two Ecumenical Councils, affirms that Jesus:

 

for us men and for our salvation
came down from heaven,
and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary,
and was made man;
and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered and was buried;
and the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures,
and ascended into heaven,
and sitteth on the right hand of the Father;
and he shall come again, with glory,
to judge both the quick and the dead;
whose kingdom shall have no end.

 

That the entire Gospel history is of events done for our salvation is the import of the first italicized phrase, that His death by crucifixion was particularly so is the import of the second.  This basic fact is de fide, the various theories purporting to explain how it works are not.  

 

The penal substitution theory is that in the Atonement the guilt for our sins was transferred to Jesus, He took our punishment in our place, and His righteousness is on account of this transferred to us.   This was the understanding of the Atonement stressed by the Protestant Reformers and like all the other theories it is drawn from certain Scriptural texts.   The most obvious ones are 2 Corinthians 5:21 “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him”, 1 Peter 2:24 “Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed” and the verse in the Old Testament book of Isaiah to which St. Peter there alludes, Isaiah 53:5 “But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.”

 

It is not uncommon for those Catholics – by Catholics I mean those who profess the faith of the ancient Creeds, accept the conciliar interpretation of that faith as developed in the first millennium prior to the Great Schism, and who are part of a Church in organic descent from the Church in Jerusalem, rather than those who are in communion with the Patriarch of Rome – who reject the penal substitution theory to cite the Socinian arguments against them.  It is difficult not to suspect that the real issue these have with the theory is their dislike of the men who promulgated it in the sixteenth century.   Among Anglo-Catholics, for example, that is to say Catholics according to the above description who belong to Church of England, the broader Anglican Communion, or one of the various Anglican groups that are not in communion or full communion with the Church of England/Anglican Communion due to her apostasy into liberalism, acceptance of the Socinian arguments against penal substitution was far more common after the Oxford Movement of the 1830s than before.  This is likely explainable by a change in Anglo-Catholicism brought about the Oxford Movement.  Earlier Anglo-Catholics, like the Caroline Divines, had no problem regarding themselves as Protestant as well as Catholic and were not biased against the Reformers.  The Oxford Movement introduced a romantic view of Rome as the model that exemplifies Catholicism and with it came a more negative attitude towards the Protestant Reformers.  Ironically, by contrast with either Roman Catholics or Anglo-Catholics of the anti-Reformer type, the Catholics of the East, the Eastern Orthodox, are more likely to see penal substitution as the logical outcome of the development of Roman theology on the Atonement since the Schism.   Dr. Luther and John Calvin, in their view, merely took the satisfaction theory put forward by St. Anselm of Canterbury in Cur Deus Homo? (Why Did God Become Man?) and reframed it legal terms rather than those of the feudal honour system.  St. Thomas Aquinas in his discussion of satisfactory Atonement in his Summa Theologica had refused to so translate the theory, otherwise his version of the theory was scarcely distinguishable from that of the Reformers.

 

Whatever one’s view of the Protestant Reformers, or for that matter the penal substitution theory of the Atonement, those who confess the Catholic faith ought to think more carefully about using the Socinian arguments against penal substitution.  Faustus Socinius did not confess the Catholic faith and was a Unitarian.   His arguments are defensible within his framework.   They fall apart within the Catholic framework.

 

Take, for example, his moral argument against penal substitution.  This argument states that it is unjust to punish an innocent person for crimes he did not commit and unjust to acquit a guilty person, therefore penal substitution is doubly unjust.  This argument sounds pretty strong to a lot of people because in the vast majority of circumstances it is true that to punish an innocent person and let a guilty person off is an injustice.   It is not so strong when applied to the Atonement.   Not when we believe confess the Catholic faith of the ancient Creeds.   For according to the orthodox faith, Jesus Christ is both God and Man.   As the Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, He is God of the same substance or essence with the Father, from eternity.   In time He became Man, “not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh: but by taking of the Manhood into God” as the Athanasian Symbol puts it.  So He became a real Man in time, and will be a Man eternally, but without ceasing to be God.   The significance of this is that He Himself is the One against Whom men’s offences have been committed.   If Person A were brought before a Judge and proven to be guilty of a crime it would indeed be an injustice if the Judge were to look into the gallery, see Person B sitting there, and declare that while Person A is guilty, he is sentencing Person B to pay for it.   It is an entirely different situation when the Judge, the Offended Party, and the Innocent who pays for the crime of the guilty – and voluntarily, I might add – are all the same Person.   This situation would never arise in a human court of law since, human imperfection being what it is, we do not generally allow a judge to rule on a case in which he is one of the parties, but no such objection can be made to the infinitely Perfect Being doing this.

 

Which brings us to Socinius’ forgiveness argument.  The penal substitution theory, he argued, depicts salvation as a cold courtroom transaction rather than a warm, loving act of forgiveness.   This, however, raises the question of what exactly forgiveness is.   If someone does you a harm and you forgive him this means that you abandon your right to retaliate and harm him back.  If you borrow a large sum from a bank and the bank forgives the loan that means that the bank has abandoned its right to demand repayment and you no longer owe the money.  Other examples could be endlessly multiplied, but in each one forgiveness has this common element – the offended party who forgives the offender absorbs the costs of the harm done.  Or to put it another way, the offender party pays for the harm done by the offender.  This is perhaps clearer in the example of the forgiven bank loan.   Therefore, for God to do what the penal substitution theory of the Atonement says He did, to take human nature Himself and become a Man, as the Party against whom man has offended with his sin, and to pay the penalty for the sins of the world Himself, is not contrary to the idea of God forgiving man but the very definition of forgiveness perfectly illustrated.

 

Socinius also argued that the penal substitutionary theory cannot be right because the penalty paid by Christ differs from the one exacted from sinners themselves if they reject His salvation.   While this might seem like a valid point it is so only superficially.  The penalty sinners pay if they reject the salvation obtained for them by Jesus Christ.  It is to be eternally barred from the Kingdom of God, and hence from the Beatific Vision, the highest Good for which they were created and for which their nature yearns even if they refuse to acknowledge it.   This punishment is what it is, however, not because it is the legal penalty incurred by their temporal sins in their short lifetimes.   It is what is, because to enter the Kingdom of God and attain the Beatific Vision, their character must become such in which all the spiritual as well as earthly virtues are perfected.   Someone whose character is less than that would make a Hell out of Heaven were he to be admitted.  To reject Jesus Christ is to reject the only way provided for a sinner to attain that perfection.   That is why those who do so face endless punishment.   While the Scriptures do not address the matter directly it can be inferred that those who enter the place of everlasting punishment do so unwilling even then to humble themselves, repent of their sins, and seek the forgiveness of God and remain unwilling forever.  God being infinite in mercy, if this were not so, their punishment would not be what it is.  This is what C. S. Lewis had in mind when in The Problem of Pain he wrote “I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside. I do not mean that the ghosts may not wish to come out of hell, in the vague fashion wherein an envious man ‘wishes’ to be happy: but they certainly do not will even the first preliminary stages of that self-abandonment through which alone the soul can reach any good. They enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded, and are therefore self-enslaved: just as the blessed, forever submitting to obedience, become through all eternity more and more free.”  To pay the penalty for man’s sin so as to redeem him and restore him, Jesus Christ did not have to endure the endless suffering of those who forever reject His grace, although the case can be made that being infinite He was able to suffer in a limited time what the damned suffer in eternity.   He paid the penalty that was set for sin at Creation – death.   That He could pay that penalty for all people with a single death is, of course, due to His being both infinite God as well as perfect Man.

 

Another objection that one often hears that is somewhat similar to the last mentioned is that we still suffer and die.   If Jesus by His suffering and death paid the penalty for our sins why do we still suffer and die?   The answer to this is while suffering and death remain the consequences of sin in that we endure them as we never would had we never sinned they are no longer for us punishments for sin.   That Jesus has removed this aspect from death is the import of this famous passage of St. Paul’s towards the end of his discussion of resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15:

 

O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Cor. 15:55-57)

 

By taking our sin upon Himself and enduring death for us, He removed the sting of death, it is no longer for us a punishment for our sins.  This is why, for believers at least, death is often referred to as falling asleep in the New Testament.   It is temporary rather than the permanent second death to which the damned consign themselves in their rejection of Christ. “One short sleep past/we wake eternally/and death shall be no more/death thou shalt die” as John Donne put it.   More than this, by removing the penal aspect of suffering and death, Jesus Christ freed them up to serve higher purposes.   This is related to the Patristic concept that Jesus had to enter into every aspect of human existence in order to redeem it.  Against the heresy of Apollinaris of Laodicea, who taught that Jesus did not have a human nous or mind since He had no need of such being the Divine Logos, the Fathers declared that what Christ’s having a full human nature, including a human mind, was necessary for salvation.  As St. Gregory of Nazianzus famously put it, Το γαρ απρόσληπτον και αθεράπευτον, “that which is not taken up is not healed.”   Of course it is not merely the removal of the penal aspect of suffering and death that redeems them for higher purposes, the positive side to that is that Jesus by suffering and dying sanctified suffering and death.

 

This last point is an important one when it comes to approaching the Atonement of Christ.   There is a reason the Atonement is de fide but no one theory of it is.  No one theory can capture all that Jesus did for us in all of its many facets.   In the penal substitutionary theory the vicarious aspect of Christ’s death and sufferings, clearly present in the Scriptures but shamefully neglected in long periods of Christian history, was brought to the forefront.   It is, as we have seen in this essay, consistent with ancient faith.   It should not be regarded as the only facet of Christ’s saving work.   Nor should it be isolated from other Christian truths that provide the context in which it makes the most sense.   One obvious example is the corporate union of believers with Jesus Christ.   That believers are united to Jesus Christ is stressed in the New Testament.   This is why the Church is called the “body of Christ” in which He is the head and we members.  Viewed in the context of this truth, neither the substitutionary aspect Christ’s death nor the imputation of His righteousness can be regarded as the “legal fiction” that critics of these theories maintain them to be.  We become one with Christ and in this His death and righteousness become ours.   It is also through this union that we are gradually made to conform to Christ in our personal character is accomplished.   When we remember that it is through our union with Christ that His death and righteousness become ours and our eventual perfect conformity to His character is being accomplished by the Holy Ghost there is no need to fear that we have separated justification from sanctification.   That St. Paul in Romans 6 and Galatians 3 identifies baptism as the instrument through which the Holy Ghost accomplishes our union with Christ also provides necessary context.   A point on which the Protestant Reformers can legitimately be faulted is that they, probably unintentionally, helped usher in an era in which Christianity was increasingly interpreted through an individualistic lens.   That St. Paul made a point of identifying baptism through which one becomes a member of the visible, outward, community of the faithful that is the Church, as the means through which union with Christ is effected by the Holy Ghost in the very epistles in which he explains at length that faith rather than works is the means by which we personally appropriate the grace of God and salvation in all of its aspects, is important to remember.  Jesus Christ, despite evangelicalism’s insistence on the unbiblical phrase “a personal relationship with Jesus Christ” to summarize what it means to be a Christian, founded a faith community not a do-it-yourself, go-it-alone faith.