The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign
Showing posts with label Origen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Origen. Show all posts

Friday, August 22, 2025

Who is the Heretic?

The sequel to my essay “Catholic and Protestant” to be entitled “Catholic Not Roman” is, as it was when I mentioned it in my last essay “Justification and the Hierarchy of Truth”, about half to three quarters written.  That it has not advanced any further than this in over a month is due to the fact that the twelve books that I have been reading during this time each is potentially relevant to the topic and so I thought it best to defer completing the essay until I had finished reading all of them.

 

In the mean time, a controversy has developed on social media that is remarkably similar to that between myself and those against whom I have been arguing in this series of essays.  What I have been arguing in this series, remember, is that the first tier of Christian truths, those that are de fide, essential to the faith, are the Catholic truths, this is to say, the truths that have been confessed by the Church in all places and all times since they were deposited with the Apostles.  These are the truths confessed in their most basic form in the Apostles’ Creed, in a more nuanced form to guard against the heresies of the fourth century (primarily Arianism) in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed more commonly called the Nicene Creed, and in their fullest so as to guard against any error regarding the Trinity or the Christological errors addressed by the Definition of Chalcedon in the fifth century in the Quicumque Vult or Athanasian Symbol.1In the early twentieth century, in response to those who were peddling a theology revised to accommodate the presuppositions of post-Christian liberal philosophy, conservative Protestants began calling themselves “fundamentalists.”  This term indicates that one is standing for the “fundamentals” and the fundamentalists had to identify what the “fundamentals” were.  While different lists were drawn up, the one that was most influential in the movement was the list of five fundamentals published by conservative Presbyterians in 1910.  Instead of drawing up a new list they would have been better to say that there are twelve fundamentals – the twelve articles of the Creed.2 The teachings of Rome against which the Reformers protested in the sixteenth century are not Catholic truths because most of these are unique to Rome and not taught by the other ancient Churches and none of these is confessed in the ancient Symbols.  Neither, however, are the doctrines of the Reformation, and while I would say that the distinctives of Rome that the Reformers opposed are errors and the doctrines central to the Reformation are truths, these must be regarded as secondary truths to those confessed in the ancient Symbols.  I have been arguing this against those who maintain that the Reformation doctrine of sola fide is itself “the Gospel” and that therefore those who do not confess the Reformation doctrine do not have the Gospel even though they confess the Creed which contains the truths that St. Paul identifies as the Gospel in the Scriptures (1 Cor. 15:3ff).

 

Recently, the online personality who goes under the handle “Redeemed Zoomer” was accused of heresy by James White for saying that someone does not have to confess sola fide and penal substitution to be a Christian and that Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy are Christian.  The controversy has been conducted through at least two social media platforms, that formerly known as Twitter and that still known as Youtube.  Both individuals belong to the big-R Reformed branch of Protestant theology, although to different denominations within that branch.  Redeemed Zoomer is a Presbyterian.  James White is a Reformed Baptist.  Both could be described as apologists and in the case of White, who is the director of Alpha and Omega Ministries, he is so in a professional capacity.  Five years ago I addressed arguments from two of his books in an essay entitled “Black and White.” 3 My opinion of his apologetics can be summarized in the words of Shania Twain, “That don’t impress me much.” 

 

It was Redeemed Zoomer’s Youtube response to White’s accusation on 19 August that brought this to my attention.4It is an excellent response, and he covered much of the same ground that I did in “Justification and the Hierarchy of Truth”, such as that we are justified by faith in Jesus Christ not by faith in sola fide and the Heidelberg Catechism’s use of the Apostles’ Creed to define the content of the Christian faith.  He also did an excellent job of showing that White had accused him of heresy, not for denying a true doctrine or teaching a false one, but for saying that two doctrines that he himself affirms and regards as important – sola fide and penal substitutionary atonement – are important but not so of the essence of the faith that one cannot be a Christian without them. 


I have not said anything about penal substitutionary atonement in my series, but will address it now.  That “Christ died for our sins” is, of course, de fide.  It is the first thing mentioned in St. Paul’s definition of the Gospel in 1 Corinthians 15, and is the fourth article of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds.  “Penal substitutionary atonement”, however, is not merely the belief that “Christ died for our sins” but a specific explanation of what this means. 

 

The simplest way of demonstrating how one can affirm that “Christ died for our sins” without necessarily holding to penal substitutionary atonement is by contrasting penal substitutionary atonement to the theory that is closest to it.  That would be the satisfaction model of the atonement.  It was expounded in the treatise Cur Deus Homo which St. Anselm began working on in his first year as Archbishop of Canterbury and which he completed in 1098 AD.  As indicated by the title5, St. Anselm’s subject was the reason for the Incarnation.  It was not necessary, St. Anselm argued, that God become Man, in the sense that He was under some kind of external compulsion to do so, since God is never under external compulsion, but it was “fitting” or “suitable”6, because man’s sin was an offence against God’s honour for which restitution ought to be made before man can be forgiven but since man has no resources sufficient to satisfy the demands of God’s honour, only by God becoming Man could said satisfaction be made.  St. Anselm wrote this in the early days of the East-West Schism – the mutual excommunication of Rome and Constantinople had taken place less than fifty years previous – and his satisfaction model of the atonement gained widespread acceptance in the West.  The difference between it and the penal substitution model is that the satisfaction model explains the vicarious nature of the atonement in terms of offended honour, the penal substitutional model explains it in terms of strict, courtroom, legal accounting.  This difference is not such that the Christianity of those who understand the atonement in terms of St. Anselm’s model can be denied.

 

Penal substitutionary atonement, therefore, is not the only way in which one who faithfully confesses that “Christ died for our sins” can understand these words.  While we should be wary of going too far in the other direction and saying that any theory or model of how the Atonement works is acceptable, St. Paul’s expression “died for our sins”7 is certainly broad enough to include both the penal substitution model and the satisfaction model from which, from a historical perspective, the penal substitution model developed.  Indeed, while both of these models develop the image of vicarious suffering found in such verses as 2 Cor. 5:21 and 1 Pet. 2:24 and 3:18 this is not the only imagery the New Testament uses of Christ’s death.  Origen explained the Atonement in terms of a ransom paid, and while this explanation created problems if the metaphor was pressed to the point that the question of to whom the ransom was paid was raised, which was one of the reasons St. Anselm found it deficient, it too is an image taken directly from Scripture.  “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God; Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 3:23-24).   “Redemption”, here, translates the genitive form of the word ἀπολύτρωσις, which is derived from the word λύτρον which means “ransom” and which occurs twice in the NT in Matt. 20:28 and 10:45, both of which record the same saying of Jesus that He “came not be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.”  Nor is Rom. 3:24 the only occurrence of ἀπολύτρωσις in reference to Christ’s death.  Eph. 1:7, Col. 1:14, and Heb. 9:15 all use it this way. The ransom model, therefore, despite the problems when it is pressed, cannot be legitimately said to be an unacceptable explanation of the Atonement that invalidates a confession of faith that “Christ died for our sins.”

 

White, therefore, is as wrong in declaring Redeemed Zoomer to be a heretic for saying that penal substitutionary atonement is not of the indispensable essence of the Christian faith as he is declaring him to be a heretic for saying the same about sola fide.

 

Indeed, by making this accusation James White has demonstrated himself to be a heretic.  Heresy is what you get when you put so much stress on one truth that this truth becomes distorted and other truths are downplayed or denied.  Praxeas, Noetus and Sabellius so stressed the unity of God that they denied the Personal distinctions between Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, conversely, Arius so stressed these distinctions that he denied that the Son was of One Being with the Father.  The Docetists has so stressed the deity and the spiritual nature of Jesus Christ that they denied His humanity, teaching that He merely “appeared” to be human, Apollinaris did not go that far, but in his dotage he stressed Christ’s deity to the point of denying that Jesus had a human mind. Under Theodore of Mopsuestia, the Antiochian School of Theology stressed the distinction between the divine and human natures of Jesus Christ to the point of teaching that there were two Sons, the divine Son of God and the human Son of Man, inhabiting the same body, the heresy which bears the name of Nestorius of Constantinople who was condemned for it in the fifth century.  Conversely, disciples of Nestorius’ opponent St. Cyril took their teacher’s stress on the unity of the Person of Christ to the point of denying a distinction between His two natures.  If truths as important as the deity of Jesus Christ, His humanity, the unity of God, the distinction between the divine Persons, the distinction between Christ’s natures and the unity of His Person, all of which are de fide, can each become a heresy by exaggeration, then Reformation doctrines can certainly become heresies by exaggeration, and that is exactly what happens when someone makes doctrines such as justification by faith alone and penal substitutionary atonement, important in themselves as they are, to be so important that their denial negates the Christianity of those who confess the truths that are confessed as de fide in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds.

 

Redeemed Zoomer is in the right and James White is wrong.  For his sake, let us pray that he repent of his heresy and acknowledge that the truths of the Reformation, important though they are, must take second place to the truths that are of the essence of the Christian faith, the Catholic truths of the ancient Creeds and embrace the fundamentalism that is true Catholicism and the Catholicism that is true fundamentalism.

 

 

1 The term “creed” comes from the Latin word credo/credimus (“I believe”, “we believe”).  The Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds are called such because this is the first word in each in their Latin text.  Symbol is the earlier designation of these “rules of faith”.  Since the Quicumcque Vult (“Whosoever will”) is written in the third person rather than the first person, Symbol is a more accurate designation for it than Creed. ↩


2 Interestingly, this corresponds with the number of booklets in the series The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, edited by A. C. Dixon, Louis Meyer and R. A. Torrey and published between 1910 and 1915.  This is only a coincidence, the number of number of booklets was not intended by the editors to indicate the number of fundamentals, nor did each booklet focus on a single truth.  In later editions, the essays were rearranged and bound into four volumes.↩


3 https://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2020/08/black-and-white.html↩


4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkiyVxT6o5Y↩


5 If understood as a question the title means “Why did God become Man?” and as a statement “Why God became Man” or “Why the God-Man”.  Either way, it clearly identifies the reason for the Incarnation as the subject of the treatise.↩


6 The Latin word St. Anselm used is the source of our word “convenient” which no longer means “fitting” or “suitable” in an absolute moral sense but in a sense relative to the purposes of the individual for whom something is “convenient.”  It retained its original sense, however, as late as the early seventeenth century and should be understood in this sense when encountered in the Authorized Bible.  This concept of “fittingness” or “suitability” became very important in Scholasticism because it allowed for intelligent discussion of the question of God’s motivations. ↩


7 ὑπὲρ τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν ἡμῶν↩

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Friday, August 2, 2024

The Pauline Authorship of the Epistle to Hebrews

 

Objections and Answers

 

The arguments against St. Paul’s authorship of the epistle to Hebrews are incredibly weak as is almost inevitably the case for opinions that claim the consensus of Modern scholarship.  Thomas R. Schreiner, the James Buchanan Harrison Professor of New Testament Interpretation at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and author of the commentary on Hebrews in the Evangelical Biblical Theology Commentary (Bellingham: Lexham Press, 2015) provides three such arguments. 

 

The first of these is “in Paul’s 13 letters he identifies himself by name, thus the absence of a name in Hebrews renders it doubtful that Paul wrote the letter.”  This, in my opinion, is the only reason there has ever been any question about the matter. 

 

Here is why it is a weak argument.  While St. Paul mentions his name more than once in several of his epistles (both to the Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Colossians, both to the Thessalonians, II Timothy and Philemon), the place where it occurs consistently in each of these and all his other acknowledged epistles is the first verse where it can be found as the first word in the opening salutation.  This is not unique to St. Paul.  SS James and Jude begin their epistles with such a salutation in which their names come first, followed by a description of themselves, then an identification of to whom the epistle is addressed.  St. Peter begins both of his epistles this way.  St. John includes such an introductory salutation in his second and third epistle, but does not include his name but rather identifies himself only as “the elder.”  St. John’s first epistle, however, does not contain an introductory salutation.  There are only two epistles in the New Testament in which this is omitted.  Hebrews is the other.  Since the entire customary section of the epistle in which St. Paul’s name can be counted on to appear in his other epistles is omitted entirely from this one, the absence of his name is much less of an argument against his authorship than it would have been had the introductory salutation appeared without his name or with a substitute for it as in St. John’s epistles.  

 

Schreiner’s second argument is “stylistic arguments should not be relied on too heavily since the Pauline corpus is so limited. Still, the polished Greek style of Hebrews doesn’t accord with what we find in the Pauline letters.”

 

This is the strongest of his three arguments.  Note however, his own caveat against relying too much upon this kind of argument.  There are other reasons than the size of the Pauline corpus for why this argument should not be given too much weight.  For one thing, this is frequently grossly exaggerated.  There are plenty of similarities as well as differences between the Greek of Hebrews and that of the acknowledged Pauline corpus.  The claim that Hebrews presents a fine-tuned argument of a superior type to that found in St. Paul’s other epistles does not hold up if the comparison is to Romans.  The acknowledged Pauline epistles were written over a period from the early 50’s until close to the Apostle’s death around 65 AD (II Timothy).  They vary in the degree of polish to their Greek style.  The ones in which he himself describes his speech as “rude” (II Corinthians 11:6, in a context that alludes back to the beginning chapters of I Corinthians) are among his earliest.  The more polished ones, such as Philippians, are among he later Prison Epistles.  This needs to be taken into consideration in contrasting style because after a decade of practice in writing epistles, which he had spent planting Churches in Greek cities in the company of some polished Greek speakers, it is to be expected that his style would become more polished. His own earlier reference to his speech as rude, however, should not necessarily be taken as meaning that he could not speak or write polished Greek.  It would be rather odd for this to be the case of someone with his education raised in Tarsus.  In the Corinthian epistles his point seems to be, rather, that he is not relying upon clever rhetoric to persuade but on the power intrinsic to the Gospel, which suggests a deliberate choice to speak plainly rather than the inability to speak otherwise. 

 

Moreover, there is no reason to think that St. Paul, who we know made use of amanuenses for his epistles, might not have made use of St. Luke in an advisory or editorial capacity to polish up his Greek on this occasion.  The evidence that supports Pauline authorship tells us that if St. Paul was the author, the epistle was written after his first imprisonment in Rome.  That St. Luke accompanied St. Paul to Rome we know from the book of Acts, in which the arrival at Rome like the voyage is told in the first person plural (Acts 28:16).  That St. Luke was with him in Rome at the very end we know from II Timothy 4:11.  Therefore, when writing the epistle to the Hebrews, St. Paul would have had at hand a companion who was quite capable of polishing up his Greek style as it is similar to the style he used in his own two books.  Indeed, that something very much like this took place appears to be hinted at by Origen, whose teacher St. Clement of Alexandria was the first to comment on the stylistic differences between Hebrews and the other Pauline epistles.  St. Clement thought that St. Paul wrote the epistle in Hebrew and that someone else translated it into the Greek text that has been handed down.

 

Schreiner attempted to argue that this is not what Origen was saying but David Alan Black’s misinterpretation of Origen.  He wrote:

 

David Alan Black, however, argues Origen believed Paul was the author but someone else was the penman. Black’s interpretation of Origen should be rejected. It has been shown that when Origen speaks of who wrote the epistle he was referring to the author, not merely the secretary. Hence, the notion that Origen believed Paul was the author fails to persuade.

 

While he provides a reference to David L. Allen’s commentary on Hebrews to back up his claim that Black is wrong about Origen, here is the entire quotation of Origen from Eusebius in context with bold added for emphasis:

 

In addition he makes the following statements in regard to the Epistle to the Hebrews in his Homilies upon it: That the verbal style of the epistle entitled ‘To the Hebrews,’ is not rude like the language of the apostle, who acknowledged himself ‘rude in speech’ (2 Corinthians 11:6) that is, in expression; but that its diction is purer Greek, any one who has the power to discern differences of phraseology will acknowledge. Moreover, that the thoughts of the epistle are admirable, and not inferior to the acknowledged apostolic writings, any one who carefully examines the apostolic text will admit.’ Farther on he adds: If I gave my opinion, I should say that the thoughts are those of the apostle, but the diction and phraseology are those of some one who remembered the apostolic teachings, and wrote down at his leisure what had been said by his teacher. Therefore if any church holds that this epistle is by Paul, let it be commended for this. For not without reason have the ancients handed it down as Paul’s. But who wrote the epistle, in truth, God knows. The statement of some who have gone before us is that Clement, bishop of the Romans, wrote the epistle, and of others that Luke, the author of the Gospel and the Acts, wrote it. But let this suffice on these matters. (Eusebius, Church History, 6.25.11-14).

 

Since Origen lived in the late second to mid third centuries the ancients to whom he refers must go back very far.

 

Origen made reference to Hebrews in numerous other works and consistently identified St. Paul as the author, including in multiple places in his magnus opus, On First Principles.  See, for example, his Letter to Africanus, 9.  David Alan Black was quite right in saying Origen thought St. Paul to be the author of Hebrews.

 

If the objection be made that St. Paul did not do this with his other epistles, including his final epistle, II Timothy, to this the answer can be made that Hebrews was written to a very different audience than that to which St. Paul was accustomed to write, to Jewish Christians outside of his own jurisdiction (Gal. 2:7-8) for whom he could not rely upon his own Apostolic authority in the way that he did with Gentile Christians in Churches under his jurisdiction which he for the most part had planted, which provides ample reason for him to have made use of the resource of St. Luke that we know was available to him.  That he did not do so in writing to St. Timothy is easily enough explained by the fact that he would have felt no such need in writing to a close companion.

 

Schreiner’s third argument is “the writer separates himself from the original eyewitnesses in Heb 2:3.  Paul, by way of contrast, emphasizes repeatedly his authority as an apostle of Jesus Christ and refuses to put himself in a subordinate position to the apostles and eyewitnesses. This last reason, in particular, rules out the notion that Paul was the author.”

 

Schreiner seems to think that this is the deathblow to the claim of Pauline authorship.  It is no such thing.  In fact, it is explained by a factor that I already identified in my response to Schreiner’s second argument.  The epistle of Hebrews was written to Jewish Christians.  In his epistle to the Galatians, St. Paul writes that he was the Apostle to the uncircumcision – Gentiles -, as St. Peter was the Apostle to the circumcision – Jews.  Therefore, as author of Hebrews St. Paul would have been writing to those whom he acknowledged as belonging to St. Peter’s jurisdiction rather than his.  Therefore, the occasion called for a very different approach than trumpeting his own Apostolic authority as he did especially when it was challenged, as is the case with the epistles to the Corinthians, or when there was a need to establish his equality with the other Apostles as when, in the epistle to the Galatians, the ruling of the Council of Jerusalem in which the other Apostles backed up his position, was still in the process of being circulated throughout the Churches.  That Hebrews 2:3 if written by St. Paul is compatible with Galatians 1:11-12 can be seen in the fifteenth chapter of I Corinthians.  In the third verse St. Paul speaks of his gospel as “that which I also received” which brings Hebrews 2:3 in, and in the eighth verse he testifies to his own witness to the central Gospel fact of the Resurrection.  Note the “first of all” in verse three and the “last of all” in verse eight.  The thoughts of both Hebrews 2:3 and Galatians 1:11-12 are here united in a single passage.  Look at the wording of St. Paul in Hebrews 2:3 “and was confirmed unto us by them that heard him.”  What was delivered unto him by the Twelve confirmed what he had already received directly from Christ.

 

Pauline Thought and Style in Hebrews

 

That these arguments against Pauline authorship are far from being persuasive I trust that I have demonstrated.  I will now move on to making the positive case for the Pauline authorship of the epistle.  Since so much has been made of the difference in Greek style between the text of Hebrews and the text of the acknowledged Pauline corpus I will start by noting textual similarities between these.  This will not be an exhaustive treatment but will focus on the biggest similarities.  For those interested in Greek Paulisms in Hebrews I refer you to David Alan Black’s book listed in For More Reading below.


First I will make what ought to be an obvious observation.  While pointing out that letter X and letter Y both contain word Z does not amount to conclusive proof that letter X and letter Y were written by the same person it is stronger evidence for that conclusion than pointing out that letter A contains word C while letter B does not is for the conclusion that letters A and B were written by different people.  Pointing out that the expression “flesh and blood” appears only five times in the entire Bible, all in the New Testament, once spoken by the Lord Jesus (Matt. 16:17), thrice in acknowledged Pauline epistles (1 Cor. 15:50, Gal. 1:16, and Eph. 6:12) and the final time in Hebrews 2:14 is stronger evidence that St. Paul wrote Hebrews than the argument that the Lord Jesus is repeatedly called a priest in Hebrews but not once in the rest of the Pauline corpus is against the Pauline authorship of Hebrews.  This would be the case even if there was not a glaring explanation of St. Paul’s heavy use of the word in one epistle and non-use of it in the others.  Writing to Jewish Christians, in Hebrews St. Paul is making the case for Jesus as the fulfilment of all to which the Old Covenant pointed, the Priest of the heavenly tabernacle Who offered Himself there as the one sacrifice that could actually accomplish that which the Levitical priests and the sacrifices of bulls and goats could only prefigure.  Writing to Gentile Christians, St. Paul emphasized their full inclusion in the New Covenant alongside Jewish Christians accomplished by Jesus Christ in His death in which the Law was removed as a divider between Jew and Gentile.  Speaking of Jesus as Priest was necessary to the argument in Hebrews but not to that in the other epistles.

 

The similarities between Hebrews and the other Pauline epistles go beyond expressions which appear in both, however.  Take the warning passages in the epistle to Hebrews for example.  There are five of them in total, the first of which being the very verse (2:3) that some think is the definitive evidence against Pauline authorship, the second is the extended quotation and commentary on the Venite in the third and fourth chapters, the third being the favourite passage of those on the Arminian side of a debate I have no intention of getting into here (6:4-8), the fourth occurring at the spot where the main argument has been wrapped up and the shift into practical application is beginning (10:26-31), and the fifth being 12:14-29.  The way these appear, punctuating the flow of the main argument, closely resembles the warning passages in the acknowledged Pauline corpus (1 Cor. 6:9-10, Gal. 5:19-21, Eph. 5:5-7).  Now these last warning passages consist of a list of types of people or the behaviours that characterize them who will not inherit the Kingdom of Heaven.  The warnings in Hebrews are against apostasy and more specifically the apostasy of falling back from Christianity into a Judaism that does not acknowledge Jesus as the Christ.  This is precisely the sort of difference we would expect given the difference between those addressed and the nature of the case being made to them.  That there are more of these in Hebrews than the other epistles can be explained by the fact that they are far more directly connected to the purpose of the epistle than is the case with the others.  Nevertheless, they share with the other Pauline warnings the feature of being followed by a positive exhortation based upon the Apostle’s confidence that God’s grace in those to whom he is writing is greater than the evils against which he is warning them.  Compare Hebrews 6:9 with 1 Corinthians 6:11 and Galatians 5:22-25.

 

Or consider the ending of the warning passage in Hebrews 10.  Verse 38 begins with a quotation from Habakkuk “the just shall live by faith” that is used by St. Paul in Romans 1:17 and Galatians 3:11 but by no other New Testament writer.  This is followed by the final words of the warning in the remainder of the verse, then by the confident assertion “But we are not of them who draw back unto perdition; but of them that believe to the saving of the soul” in the next verse, the final verse of the chapters, which segues into an extended discussion of faith in the next chapter that includes a definition of faith (v. 1), a declaration of the necessity of faith (v. 6), and a catalogue of Old Testament figures that emphasizes all that they were able to accomplish by faith.  Notice what is said about Noah in verse 7 “By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house; by the which he condemned the world, and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith.”  Could there be any expression more Pauline than this?  While Johannine literature also emphasizes the role of faith in salvation, St. John prefers the verbal form to the noun and the concept of salvation that he stresses in connection with believing is everlasting life.  It is St. Paul who talks about the righteousness that is by faith. Think about how he addresses this in Romans.  After having shown salvation to be unattainable through works, whether one is under the Law like the Jews, or under his own conscience like the Gentiles, because with or without Law all have sinned, he returns to the thought with which he began the discussion in 1:16-17, and declares that “now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets; Even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe” (3:21-22, italics mine).  In the following chapter he connects this thought with heirship just as in Hebrews 11:7, albeit speaking about Abraham rather than Noah (Rom. 4:13).  There are other variations on this wording throughout Romans with “righteousness which is of faith” occurring again in verse 10:6.

 

From start to finish, important concepts from the acknowledged Pauline corpus reappear in Hebrews.  In Hebrews 1:2 the Son’s instrumental role in creation is mentioned “by whom also he made the worlds” and then connected in the following verse with the Son’s being the image of the Father “Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person.”  These thoughts are similarly connected in Colossians 1:15-16 where they are presented in the reverse order, although different words for image are used.  Indeed, the next phrase in Hebrews 1:3 about the Son’s sustaining or preserving all things in being “and upholding all things by the word of his power” has a parallel, albeit a more loose one, in the continuation of the thought in Colossians “And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.” (v. 17) Hebrews then goes on to say “when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high” and a similar reference to His atoning work occurs right before the Colossians passage “In whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins.” (v. 14) If we look at the larger context of the Hebrews passage we find that just before the mention of Christ’s role in creation, it is said that God has appointed Him “heir of all things” and a few verses later the Son is called the “firstbegotten.” (v. 6) The Colossians passage calls the Son the “firstborn of every creature” (v. 15) and the “firstborn from the dead” (v. 18).  The same word πρωτότοκος that is rendered “firstbegotten” in Hebrews is rendered “firstborn” in the two verses in Colossians.  It needs to be stated that it is not temporal beginning but the position or status, with rights and authority, that is indicated by this word in these verses.  This position/status which is called “preeminence” in Col. 1:18 is the overarching theme of both passages.

 

This is not like the lengthy parallel passages in the Synoptic Gospels.  The Evangelists each wrote his own account of events in the same life.  A great degree of overlap is to be expected.  Even the parallels between Jude’s epistle and the second chapter of II Peter are a different case.  Both are denunciations of false teachers and it is likely that SS Jude and Peter were talking about the same specific false teachers.  In Hebrews and Colossians what we find are the same doctrinal concepts about Jesus and the fact that we find them all in association with each other in one place in both epistles is stronger evidence that St. Paul wrote both than if all of the concepts from Hebrews had been found separately and interspersed throughout St. Paul’s other writings. Compare this to the reference to the Son’s sitting down at the right hand of God. This recurs throughout Hebrews (8:1, 10:12, 12:2) and it also recurs throughout St. Paul’s acknowledged corpus (Rom 8:34, Eph. 1:20, Col. 3:1).   On its own this is a much weaker argument for Pauline authorship of Hebrews than the parallels between Hebrews 1 and Colossians 1, especially since it is referred to by many others as well (Jesus in His trial before Caiaphas, St. Peter and the other Apostles in Acts 5:31, St. Luke in reference to St. Stephen’s vision in Acts 7:55, and St. Peter in 1 Pet. 3:22 also mention it).  Taken with the Hebrews/Colossians comparison, however, the multiple references in both Hebrews and St. Paul’s other epistles provide additional corroborating evidence.

 

Also note that while the instrumental role of the Son in creation is also emphasized by St. John in the prologue to his Gospel, St. John speaks of Him there as the Word, as part of his larger allusion to Genesis 1 in which God speaks everything into existence.  In Hebrews as in Colossians, He is spoken of as the Son.

 

In the second chapter of Hebrews we find a passage (vv. 9-18) that has parallels throughout St. Paul’s corpus.  Jesus’ journey to Exaltation through Humiliation unto death (v. 9) is discussed here as in Philippians 2:5-11, His destruction through death of death personified in the devil (v. 14) brings to mind 1 Corinthians 15, note especially verse 26, and when Hebrews 2:16 says “ but he took on him the seed of Abraham” remember that it is St. Paul who identifies the seed of Abraham with Christ in Galatians 3:16.

 

At the end of chapter five of Hebrews we find a lengthy rebuke of the intended readers for being less mature in their faith than they ought to be.  Jesus has just been referred to as a “high priest after the order of Melchisedec” (v. 10) and of Melchisedec the epistle says “Of whom we have many things to say, and hard to be uttered, seeing ye are dull of hearing.” (v. 11) Immediately after this the epistle says:

 

For when for the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need that one teach you again which be the first principles of the oracles of God; and are become such as have need of milk, and not of strong meat. For every one that useth milk is unskilful in the word of righteousness: for he is a babe. But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil. (vv. 12-14)

 

There is one other passage in the New Testament that is very similar to this.  St. Paul also rebukes the Corinthians for their immaturity, saying that he needs to feed them with milk when they should have moved on to meat.  Here is the passage:

 

And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal, even as unto babes in Christ. I have fed you with milk, and not with meat: for hitherto ye were not able to bear it, neither yet now are ye able. For ye are yet carnal: for whereas there is among you envying, and strife, and divisions, are ye not carnal, and walk as men? (I Corinthians 3:1-3)

 

No Anonymity

 

Perhaps the most important similarity between Hebrews and the rest of the Pauline corpus, however, is the final verse.  That verse is “Grace be with you all. Amen.” (Heb. 13:25).  A version of this ends every single Pauline epistle in the New Testament, usually in the last verse, sometimes in the penultimate (1 Cor. 16:23 for example).  This is the simple version of it.  The most complex is the familiar Trinitarian Grace from 2 Corinthians 13:14, “
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all. Amen.”  The significance of this is a) again, all St. Paul’s epistles end with this, b) no epistle attributed to any other author ends with this and the only other book to end with it is Revelation which is not an epistle and was written long after St. Paul’s death, and most importantly c) St. Paul tells us what this means.   The first two epistles St. Paul wrote are I and II Thessalonians.  These were written shortly after the events of Acts 17:1-10 in which St. Paul on his second missionary journey had come to Thessalonica, preached in the synagogue, established a Church in the house of one Jason, then fled to Berea after trouble was stirred up by those in the synagogue who did not believe assisted by “certain lewd fellows of the baser sort” (v. 5) Not having had time to properly instruct the Thessalonian Church, St. Paul wrote the first epistle shortly after his flight, then wrote the second epistle when word came to him that the Thessalonians had received a letter purporting to be from him and claiming that the Second Coming had already occurred (II Thess. 2:1-2).  Therefore, he ended this epistle with instructions as to how they could tell a real epistle of his from a false one.  Every epistle of his would end with a salutation that he would write himself (without an amanuensis) and it would be the Grace. “The salutation of Paul with mine own hand, which is the token in every epistle: so I write.  The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.” (II Thess. 3:17-18).

 

This means that St. Paul did identify himself as the author of Hebrews after all.  The grace at the end is his signature.  The verses prior to that strongly indicate his identity as well.  He was writing from Italy (13:24), and would travel to them with St. Timothy who had just been set free if he were to make the journey shortly (v. 23).  The wording reads like a short version of the wrap-up to any Pauline epistle (and the brevity of it is noted v. 22).  Earlier in the epistle he wrote “For ye had compassion of me in my bonds, and took joyfully the spoiling of your goods, knowing in yourselves that ye have in heaven a better and an enduring substance.” (10:34). He had been in bonds, clearly had been set at liberty if he was contemplating making a trip to them with St. Timothy, and was in Italy.

 

If that were not sufficient proof, St. Peter also identifies St. Paul as the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews.  Here is St. Peter writing at the end of his second epistle (and his life):

 

And account that the longsuffering of our Lord is salvation; even as our beloved brother Paul also according to the wisdom given unto him hath written unto you; As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction. (II Pet. 3:15-16).

 

We see from this passage that St. Paul had written to the same people to whom St. Peter was writing.  These were the same people to whom he wrote his first epistle (II Pet. 3:1).  These were “the strangers scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia” (I Pet. 1:1), i.e., diaspora Jews in Asia Minor who had become Christians (v. 2).  None of the thirteen epistles that begin with St. Paul’s name were written to these.  This could not be an allusion to a non-scriptural epistle because St. Peter identifies it as scripture.  The epistle he is talking about contains “things hard to be understood.”    While this is not necessarily what St. Peter is alluding to, note that Hebrews says of things concerning Melchisedec that they are “things hard to be uttered” (5:11) but utters them anyway a couple of chapters later (7:1-10).  Presumably something hard to utter is also hard to understand.  Finally “the longsuffering of our Lord is salvation” is the minor theme of Hebrews.  The major theme, of course, is that the first and lesser Covenant has been fulfilled – made full or complete – by that of which it was merely the shadow, the greater New Covenant.  The minor theme, however, is there in all the warnings as the reverse complement of the idea that if neglecting or violating the first Covenant had severe consequences, so much worse will be the consequences for neglecting the salvation offered in the New Covenant, which salvation has come at last, after and in despite of all the sin and rebellion, because of the patient, longsuffering, grace of God.

 

At a future date I may follow this up with an examination of the Patristic evidence that was only touched in the Objections Answered section.

 

For Further Reading

 

David Alan Black, The Authorship of Hebrews: The Case for Paul (Gonzalez, Fl: Energion Publications, 2013).

 

Christopher Wordsworth, On the Canon of the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, and on the Apocrypha, Eleven Discourses Preached Before the University of Cambridge, Being the Hulsean Lectures for the Year 1847 (London: Francis & John Rivington, 1848), “Lecture VIII” 200-243.

 

There is a chapter in a seventh century commentary on Hebrews which also presents a very strong case for Pauline authorship that answers many of the arguments “the consensus of Modern scholarship” finds so convincing before there ever was such a consensus but it is against my principles to recommend anything by someone who supported the Puritan revolt against King Charles I which was the mother of all left-wing revolutions.

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Friday, January 19, 2024

The Foundation of the Creed

 

The Creed is Christianity’s most important statement of faith.   By contrast with Confessions like the Lutheran Augsburg Confession, the Reformed Belgic Confession, or our Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion which are lengthy statements of how the Christian faith is understood and taught by particular communions or denominations within Christianity, the Creed is Catholic, which means that it is the statement of the basic faith of all Christians everywhere in all times.   In the earliest centuries of Christianity multiple different versions of it could be found in different regions of the Church.   In the fourth century an Eastern version of the Creed was modified in the First Councils of Nicaea (325 AD) and Constantinople (381 AD) into the Creed that remains the most truly ecumenical (belonging to the whole Church) to this day.  What we call the Apostles’ Creed is a shorter and simpler version that also dates from the earliest centuries.   The name Apostles’ Creed comes from the traditional account of its origin – that it was drawn up on the first Whitsunday, the Christian Pentecost the account of which is given in Acts 2, by the Apostles (including Matthias) themselves with each contributing one of the twelve articles.   This account is ancient – St. Ambrose and Rufinus of Aquileia both made mention of it at the end of the fourth and beginning of the fifth centuries.   The Apostles’ Creed as we know it today is slightly modified from the version these men knew which is the Creed that was used in baptism by the Church in Rome at least as early as the second century in which it was quoted by St. Irenaeus and Tertullian.   The early attestation to the traditional account indicates that there is likely truth to it, although such truth as there is to it must apply either to the Roman Creed as St. Irenaeus and Tertullian knew it or perhaps more likely to an earlier version that became the template of both the Roman Creed and the Eastern version that was adapted into the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.  

 

Religious liberals in their efforts to purge Christianity of all that is essentially Christian have made much out of the fact that none of the articles in the Creed is an affirmation of the “fundamentalist” view of the Bible.   It is true, of course, that nothing like “and I believe in one Holy Bible, verbally inspired by God, infallible and inerrant in every way” can be found in the Creed.   It is also true, however, that it was never thought necessary to include such an article because it is assumed as underlying every single article that is confessed in the Creed.   What liberals dismiss as the “fundamentalist” view of the Bible is more accurately described as the Catholic view of the Bible – that which has been held by Christians, throughout the whole Church, in all regions and ages, since the Apostles. 

 

Some liberals disparage the “fundamentalist” view of the Bible as being too literalist.   What is excessive literalism to a liberal is not necessarily excessive literalism to a normal, intelligent, Christian, however.   When Psalm 91:4 says “He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust” nobody takes this as proof of God literally having avian characteristics.   If anybody were to interpret this verse that way this would be regarded as excessive literalism or hyper-literalism by every “fundamentalist”.   When, however, the final chapters of each of the Gospels give an account of the tomb of Jesus being found empty on the Sunday after His Crucifixion and of His followers encountering Him in His restored-to-life body, liberals think it excessive literalism to understand these as historical accounts of Jesus having actually come back to life.   To a liberal, any reading of these accounts as meaning anything more than that His disciples felt Him present with them after His Crucifixion is excessively literal.   The reality, of course, is not that the “fundamentalist” interpretation is excessively literal but that the liberal interpretation is insufficiently literal.   The Catholic view of Biblical truth is that it is more than literal, not that it is less than literal.   In addition to the literal sense of the Bible, there is also the typological sense (for example, Moses led Israel up to the border of the Promised Land but could not lead them in, it was Joshua, who had the same name as our Lord and Saviour, who brought them into the Promised Land, illustrating that the Law cannot bring anyone to salvation, only the grace of the Gospel of Jesus Christ can do that), the tropological sense (when a practical moral for everyday living is illustrated from the text), and the anagogical sense (in which truth about the eternal and the beyond is gleaned from texts that literally pertain to the temporal and to this world, somewhat the opposite of “immanentizing the eschaton”).   In traditional hermeneutics and exegesis, however, each of these senses rests upon the foundation that is the literal sense.   Get rid of the literal sense and each other sense collapses.   Therefore, when you hear someone explain these other senses in such a way as to disparage the literal sense, you are not hearing the Catholic understanding of the Bible but rather liberalism trying to pass itself off as Catholicism.

 

Other liberals disparage the “fundamentalist” view of the Bible for its conviction that the Bible is inerrant.   James Barr, for example, a Scottish liberal “Biblical scholar” who a few decades back wrote several anti-fundamentalist diatribes, maintained that the problem with “fundamentalism” was not its literalism but its commitment to inerrancy which led it to adopt interpretations that in his opinion were less literal than the text warranted.     Biblical inerrancy, however, is not just a “fundamentalist” view but the Catholic view of Christianity.   The Christian faith has always rested upon the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, i.e., the Old and New Testaments.   The books of the New Testament have been regarded since the earliest days of the Church as belonging in the same category into which the Apostolic writers of the New Testament place the books of the Old Testament, books in which God is the Author speaking through the human writers.   God does not make mistakes, the Bible as His written Word is infallible and therefore inerrant.    Those who like Barr claim to find mistakes in the Bible can only do so by elevating some other source of information and making it out to be a more reliable source than the Bible by which the reliability of the Bible can be measured.    They purport, by measuring the Bible against these other standards, to prove it to be less than infallible and therefore merely a collection of human writings.    Their conclusion, however, is the necessary premise for measuring the Bible against some other standard to begin with.   If the Bible is not merely a collection of human writings but what the Church has always maintained it to be, the written Word of God, there can be no more reliable standard against which to weigh it.   Indeed, all other standards against which Modern critics of the Bible purport to measure the Bible, are of admitted human origin and fallibility.   Modern man’s attempt to debunk the infallible truth of God’s Word is just one big ultimate example of the petitio principia fallacy.  

 

The Catholic view of the Bible is that God spoke through the human writers of the Old and New Testaments in such a way that the Bible is one book with a single Author and that since that Author can make no mistakes His book is infallible and inerrant.   This is what Jesus Christ Himself claimed for the Scriptures when He declared that “scripture cannot be broken” (Jn. 10:35) and that “till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled” (Matt. 5:18), when He answered the devil’s temptations with “it is written”, and when He rebuked people like the Sadducees for their ignorance of the Scriptures (Matthew 22:29).   This is what the Apostles claimed for the Scriptures, (2 Tim. 3:16, 2 Pet. 1:21) including their own writings (1 Cor. 14:37, 1 Thess. 2:13-15).   This is what the Church Fathers claimed for the Scriptures beginning at the very beginning with Clement of Rome (1 Clement 45:2-3).   While the Fathers’ belief in the Bible as the inspired and infallible Word of God is more often displayed in their usage of the Bible as the authority for proving doctrine than in discussion of it as a doctrine in its own right notable examples of explicit statement of this faith include St. Irenaeus’s affirmation of the inspiration and perfection of the Bible, (Against Heresies, 2.28:2), St. Justin Marty’s statement of his conviction that no Scripture contradicts another (Dialogue with Trypho, 65), Origen’s comparison of those who think there are such contradictions to those who cannot detect the harmony in music (Commentary on Matthew, 2), and St. Augustine’s running defense of the truth of the Scriptures in his letters to St. Jerome include the statement with regards to the canonical books of Scripture “Of these alone do I most firmly believe that their authors were completely free from error” (Letters, 82).

 

While the Catholic (or “fundamentalist”) view of the Bible is not explicitly affirmed as an article in the Creed this is because it is implicit in all of the articles, each of which affirms a basic truth of the faith that we know to be the faith the Apostles received from Christ because it is recorded as such in the Bible.   It was not left without direct allusion in the ecumenical and conciliar version of the Creed which follows St. Paul’s declaration of the Gospel in 1 Corinthians 15 in affirming of Christ’s resurrection that it was “according to the Scriptures” and which affirms of the Holy Ghost that He “spake by the prophets”.   The verbal, plenary, inspiration, authority, and infallibility of the Bible as God’s written Word, therefore, is the unspoken, unwritten, article that is the very foundation of the Creed.  

 

Earlier we discussed how some liberals use the accusation of excessive literalism in order to evade the truths of orthodox Christianity.    Both excessive and insufficient literalism can lead to serious error or heresy, although in the case of liberalism its insufficient literalism is merely a mask to hide its essential nature which is rank infidelity or unbelief.   The articles of the Creed are helpful in demonstrating the proper limits of literalism.   Each of the articles is a literal truth the denial of the literal truth of which amounts to unbelief in the Christian faith.   The passages which speak these truths are the clearest in the Scriptures.   These are the passages to which the perspicuity of the Scriptures, that is to say their plain clarity so that laymen can understand them, so emphasized by the Reformers and ironically illustrated by the absence of words like perspicuity from the Bible, refer.   Any attempt to use the allegorical, tropological or anagogical senses to explain away the literal meaning of the passages in which the truths of the articles of the Creed are found is a serious abuse of these hermeneutics for these truths are also the truths to which these other senses of Scripture generally point in passages that are less clear.

 

Affirmation of the literal truth of each and all of the articles of the Creed, in both the Apostles’ and Nicene-Constantinopolitan versions, including the unspoken foundational article of the inspiration and infallibility of God’s written Word, remains the best safeguard of orthodox Christian truth against heresy.

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Friday, March 31, 2023

The Fourth Article – The Passion of Christ, the Salvation of Man

In our examination of the third Article of the Christian Creed we noted that grammatically it was the beginning of a long relative clause.   In the Latin of the Apostles’ Creed the relative clause includes the third through seventh Articles.   This is not reflected in the English translation in the Book of Common Prayer which inserts a sentence break after the fourth Article.   In the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed the third Article begins with a definite article that functions in this context as a relative pronoun and is the subject of all the Articles from the third through the seventh.   In the conciliar Creed this is not a subordinate clause within the sentence that starts in the second Article in the Greek, however, because it has a sentence break at the end of the second.   Interestingly, here the English translation eliminates the sentence break.   These punctuation variations do not affect the meaning of the Creed. Whether it is a subordinate relative clause, a separate sentence, or even broken into several sentences, everything from the Incarnation in the third Article to the Second Coming in the seventh is affirmed about Jesus Christ, the Only-Begotten Son of God.

 

We also observed that the conciliar Creed includes a declaration of the end that motivated the Son of God to come down from Heaven, become Incarnate as a Man, and do all that is affirmed of Him in these Articles.   This is the clause rendered in English as “for us men and for our salvation” found immediately after the definite article/relative pronoun.   As we saw, this statement was well placed in the third Article about the Incarnation because it was the Incarnation that made possible everything else the Son of God did for our salvation.   Now we shall look at the fourth Article which speaks of how the Incarnate Christ accomplished our salvation.

 

Compared to the other Articles we have seen there is very little difference between two versions of the Creed.   The Latin of the Apostles’ Creed is passus sub Pontio Pilato, crucifixus, mortuus, et sepultus which in the English of the Book of Common Prayer is “suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried.”  The Greek of the conciliar Creed is Σταυρωθέντα τε ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν ἐπὶ Ποντίου Πιλάτου, καὶ παθόντα καὶ ταφέντα which in English is “and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; he suffered and was buried”.     “Suffered” and “crucified” switch places in the two Creeds, the Nicene-Constantinopolitan specifies that He was crucified “for us” whereas the Apostles’ spells us out that He “died”, otherwise the only difference is that in the conciliar Creed each thing that is affirmed of Christ is joined to the others in the Article by a copula while in the Apostles’ they are put in a list and separated by commas with only one copula.    Passus and its Greek equivalent and cognate παθόντα which both mean “he suffered” are the source of the word “Passion” which we use to designate all the suffering Jesus Christ submitted to for our sake. (1)

 

Another noticeable contrast between this Article and those which preceded it is the absence of precise language chosen to avoid specific errors.   With one exception it affirms merely the basic historical facts of Christ’s suffering and crucifixion under Pontius Pilate, His death and His burial.   The exception is the words “for us” in the Nicene Creed.   These words are an assertion of the soteriological significance of these events but the most basic and simple such assertion possible.   That God gave His Son to be our Saviour, that He saved us by dying for us, and that therefore His death was for us, is something upon which all Christians are in agreement.   It is over how Christ’s death accomplished this that there has been disagreement.     The New Testament is not silent on this question, but it uses many different types of language and imagery to explain Christ’s saving work.   The language of redemption depicts Christ’s death as a price paid to liberate man from slavery, that is to say, slavery to sin, death and the devil.   The language of sacrifice declares Christ’s death to be the final and effective sacrifice to which all the sacrifices of the Old Testament pointed.   The language of reconciliation speaks of Christ’s death as bringing God and man, separated by man’s sin, back into harmony.   The language of satisfaction depicts Christ’s death as a propitiation or expiation that appeases God for the offence that is man’s sin.   The language of substitution speaks of Christ as taking our sins upon Himself and bearing them in our place.   The New Testament uses each of these languages and all of this different imagery tells us that the answer to the question of how Christ’s death saved us is multifaceted.   It is good, therefore, that in the Creed, the basic confession of the Christian faith, the what of Christ’s death for us is affirmed without commentary as to the how.

 

This was probably not intentional on the part of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Fathers.   At the time significant controversy over what we now call the theory or model of the Atonement was still centuries away.   Indeed, the history of theological debate over this matter is often thought to be divided into two periods, pre-Anselm and post-Anselm.   Anselm was the thirty-sixth Archbishop of Canterbury who held the See from 1093 to 1109 AD, shortly after both the Great Schism between the Western and the Eastern Churches and the passing of the English throne to the Norman dynasty of William the Conqueror.   About five years into his term in the Archbishop’s office, on the eve of the transition from the eleventh to the twelfth centuries he completed a work entitled Cur Deus Homo? (Why Did God Become Man?).   In this work, Anselm challenged what he believed to have been the main way in which the Atonement had been understood prior to him, i.e., the ransom model.   According to this model, Christ’s death was a ransom price paid by God to purchase the liberation of man from the bondage to sin, death, and the devil into which he had fallen in the Garden.    The extent to which this model was accepted before Anselm is debatable.   It is certainly found in the writings of Origen of Alexandria who lived in the third century.   St. Gregory of Nazianzus, one of the Cappadocian Fathers of the fourth century, the century that produced the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, notably opposed it.   Anselm’s objection to this model was that it made the death of Christ into a payment God made to Satan and thus suggested that the problem to which the Atonement was the solution was that someone, either us or God, owed a debt to Satan.   Sin is indeed depicted as a debt in the New Testament but the debt is owed by man to God not by anyone to Satan.   Anselm, who lived in feudal times, understood this to be a debt of honour.   Man had offended God’s honour by sinning and thus owed Him satisfaction.   .   By dying for us, Christ satisfied God’s honour, and so won for us reconciliation and forgiveness.    This is called the satisfaction model of the Atonement.  Since the understanding of the Atonement that has prevailed in the Roman Catholic Communion since Scholasticism has been Anselm’s model as interpreted by St. Thomas Aquinas, and the penal substitutionary model of the Protestant Reformation is Anselm’s model translated by John Calvin, a trained lawyer, from the honour language of feudal society to the legal language of contract society, (2) Anselm’s model can be said have dominated Western Christianity ever since.    The pre-Anselmic understanding of the Atonement remains the understanding in Eastern Christianity which broke Communion with Western Christianity a few decades prior to Anselm.   It would be a mistake, however, to think of the Eastern view as being predominately the ransom model.   The Eastern understanding includes the ransom model – it is found in their Divine Liturgy of St. Basil the Great – but other understandings of the Atonement are included elsewhere in the Eastern liturgy.

 

None of these models or theories are affirmed in the Creed – neither are any of them denied or rejected.   About a century ago a Swedish Lutheran bishop and theologian named Gustaf Aulén wrote a short influential book in which he argued that before Anselm the Church held to what he called the “classic view” of the Atonement which he claimed was taught in the Bible, by the Church Fathers and by Dr. Martin Luther.   This view has come to be called “Christus Victor”, which was also the title of Aulén’s book, and it basically is that the Atonement was a strategic military victory by Jesus Christ over sin, death, and the devil which brought about the liberation of those whom these forces of evil had held captive.   Of all the models that have been proposed this is the closest to being one that can claim to be affirmed in the Creed but this is only because it is not what Aulén purported it to be, an explanation of how Christ’s death saved us, but rather a re-wording of the assertion of the fact that it does.   Everyone who affirms the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds will affirm that in His death and resurrection, Jesus Christ triumphed over sin, death, and the devil (3) and set mankind free.   This includes, however, all those who think of the Atonement primarily as a ransom, as well as those who think of it primarily as satisfaction or substitution.    The weakness of Aulén’s book was that he treated his “classic view” as mutually exclusive with what he called the “Latin view” i.e., Anselm’s satisfaction and Calvin’s penal substitution models.   These are not mutually exclusive, and in his attempt to prove that they were, Aulén made claims which very much conflicted with Nicene orthodoxy.   He treated the Law as one of the enemies that needed to be defeated alongside Satan and sin in flat contradiction to St. Paul in the epistle to the Romans.   He argued that the satisfaction model made the Atonement into an act of man directed towards God rather than an act of God directed towards man, an argument that had both Nestorian and Docetist implications.     

 

Indeed, the most common objections to the satisfaction and substitution models that have been raised over the last century have rested upon assumptions that conflict with Nicene orthodoxy.   Think, for example, of the popular complaint that these explanations of the Atonement amount to “cosmic child abuse”.    Nicene orthodoxy is that Jesus Christ is God Who became a Man and Who is thus both God and Man.   Those who regard the substitutionary model of Atonement as speaking of a God Who is guilty of “cosmic child abuse” implicitly assume Jesus Christ to be neither God nor Man.  For if Jesus Christ is what the Nicene Creed says He is, “God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, being of one substance with the Father” then the satisfactory and substitutionary model of the Atonement does not tell the story of a God Who refused to forgive men their sins unless an Innocent third party unjustly suffered instead but the story of a God, rightly offended by sin, Who becomes a man in order that He might Himself pay the penalty of sin on behalf of those who offended Him.

 

The late Eastern Orthodox Metropolitan Kallistos Ware suggested a number of helpful questions for evaluating theories of the Atonement.   The first of these was “Does it envision a change in God or us?”   Since the problem for which Christ’s death is the solution is in us, sin, rather than in God, a sound understanding of the Atonement requires that change us rather than God.   This might seem to be the point where Anselm’s model and those derived from it fail the test but this is only the case if the language of analogy that we use to speak of God is taken far more literally than it was ever intended to be.   If we take the language of Christ’s death as a propitiatory sacrifice that appeases God by satisfying His wrath, language which is used in the Scriptures themselves, at its most literal, then we will have a theory in which the Atonement works by effecting a change in God.  God is angry at us because of our sin, Christ’s death takes care of that, so that God is no longer angry at us anymore.   What we need to recognize is that while wrath or anger in us is a passion that stirs up in response to things other people do this is not what the wrath or anger of God is like.   When the Scriptures speak of the wrath of God they use the human passion as an analogy to speak of how God in His holiness, righteousness, and justice always looks upon sin.   It is not something that our sin stirs up in God, it is not an emotion or a passion, it is how God in His unchangeable goodness sees sin.   Therefore, when we speak of Christ’s death as appeasing God’s wrath, this too is analogous language.   We do not mean that Christ’s death effects a change in God so that His wrath is gone because that would mean that the immutable holiness, justice, and righteousness of God which reject and punish sin are gone, which would mean that God becomes less than perfectly Good, and this cannot be.   The language of appeasing God’s wrath is as analogous as the language of God’s wrath and it means that that which does the appeasing, Christ’s death, removes from us that which is the object of God’s wrath, our sin.   As long as we remember that the analogies and metaphors that we use to explain God in human terms have a point beyond which their literalness should not be pushed lest they cease to be helpful then there ought to be no problem with our using the various models – ransom, sacrifice, satisfaction, substitution, etc. – drawn from the very words of the New Testament to explain how God by becoming a Man and dying for us, saved us from the bondage of sin and death.

 

When it comes to confessing our faith in the Creed, however, it is sufficient that we confess the fact that Christ “suffered (for us) under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried”.

 

(1)     This is why oratorios in which the text of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ betrayal, arrest, trial, scourging, and crucifixion are set to music are called Passions (J. S. Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion and St. John’s Passion are examples), plays in which these events are acted out are called Passion plays, and Mel Gibson titled his film depicting the events of Good Friday The Passion of the Christ.

(2)     In Anselm’s model it was God’s honour that was offended by sin.   In John Calvin’s model it was God’s justice.   In both versions of this model the Atonement works by satisfying God.    In Anselm’s model God, having been satisfied by Christ’s Atonement, forgiveness man rather than punishing man for offending Him.   In Calvin’s model God’s justice is satisfied because Christ took the punishment due man on man’s behalf.   Otherwise they are the same basic concept.  Contrary to what is often asserted against the Protestant model the idea of the Atonement as Christ taking man’s punishment for him was not invented new in the sixteenth century.   The language of substitution is found in the New Testament – St. Paul uses it in 2 Corinthians 5:21, St. Peter uses it in 1 Peter 2:24 – and even in the Old in Isaiah 53:6, as well as in all the most important Church Fathers.   Where Calvin’s model is susceptible to the charge of novelty is its explanation of substitution in strictly legal terms.   By contrast, none of the New Testament or Patristic references to Christ taking our punishment for us place it in the context of a cold, formal, legal transaction.   St. Paul’s reference in 2 Corinthians, for example, places it in the context of reconciliation.

(3)     Except perhaps those liberals who try to disguise their liberalism by limiting it to truths not affirmed in the Creeds.   The Creeds are not intended to be exhaustive and comprehensive statements of all Christian truth.   Rev. Austin Farrer explained well the difference between the sort of truths that made it into the Creeds and those that did not:   “Christians profess a creedal belief in God and resurrection to eternal life.  They do not profess such belief in the devil or in everlasting torment.   The doctrine of hell has certainly found a place in authoritative statements of Christian teaching; it has never formed part of a creed properly so called (the Athanasian creed is not a creed, whatever it may be).  Try the experiment of tacking on to the Apostles Creed or the Nicene ‘and in one devil, tempter and enemy of souls; and in damnation to hell everlasting.’   Now say the whole creed and see what it feels like.  I can promise you it will feel pretty queer; and the queerness will be due to a swapping of horses in midstream; you jump from one act of belief to a different sort of act, when you pass from the God-and-heaven clauses to the devil-and-hell clauses.  The belief which is expressed by creedal profession is a laying hold on the objects of belief; or still more, perhaps, a laying of ourselves open to be laid hold of by them.  But there is no question of our laying ourselves out to be laid hold of by hell or by Satan.  That cannot be the object of the exercise.  Christians may believe there is a hall.  They do not believe in hell as they believe in heaven.  For they do not put their faith in it.” (Saving Belief, 1964, pp.150-151).   Liberalism, as the term is used in religion rather than politics, is the unbelief generated by Modern rationalistic philosophy, crept into Churches and sects, disguised as an updated form of belief.   The classic example is the liberal who claims that he believes in the resurrection of Jesus Christ in a sense, but that sense does not include Jesus’ body having been re-animated and leaving the tomb, thus the liberal’s “belief” is actually unbelief.  A more subtle form of liberalism is the kind that is careful not to contradict or redefine the Creed like this, but which feels free to reject anything and everything not included by the Creed, and which more specifically throws out or disregards all the most negative truths of Christianity like the devil and the sinfulness of man.   It would be difficult for someone who holds to this kind of liberalism to affirm the Christus Victor view of Christ’s saving work, however, because they have thrown out everything over which Christ could have been Victor.

 

 

 

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