On the Thirty-Nine Articles. Oliver O'Donovan
as though of a theophany. It is given a thematic development in the contrast made by Saint Paul between the ‘living body’ (psuchikon) and the ‘spiritual body’ (pneumatikon) (1 Cor. 15.44) and in the distinction made by the First Epistle of Peter between Christ’s death ‘in the flesh’ and his coming to life ‘in the spirit’ (1 Pet. 3.18).
Theology is here presented with a double temptation. On the one hand it may stress the qualitative difference of the two events to the point where the resurrection ceases to be an event at all within the framework of time and space, or at best is a purely mental event within the disciples’ consciousness. This assists the project of unifying the whole, by giving the resurrection a merely noetic or explanatory function, but at the cost of overthrowing the character of redemption as history. The resurrection adds nothing further to the fact of the crucifixion, but simply expounds the inner meaning of the crucifixion within God’s purposes. Such an approach, essentially gnostic in inspiration, has enjoyed a good deal of favour in the present century. The other temptation, bred of a resistance to gnostic leanings, is so to emphasize the moments as distinct and successive that their intelligible unity is lost sight of; the resurrection becomes the cancellation of the crucifixion, the crucifixion nothing more than a work of wicked men which God has cancelled, not something which could happen ‘according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God’ (Acts 2.23).
Article 4 sets out in resolute fashion to rebut gnostic spiritualizations. Christ ‘took again his body, with flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the perfection of man’s nature’. Do those flesh and bones, we must wonder, protest too loudly? Can the theologian insist so strongly on flesh and bones when he is warned by Saint Paul that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God? What he must say, certainly, is that Christ took again his body; and that, surely, is the force of the words spoken by the resurrected Christ: ‘a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have’ (Luke. 24.39). Nor need he shrink from the bodily continuity implied in that ‘again’, since the empty tomb is a central element in the gospel narrative. Yet a human body is something more than its material constituents, and what became of those constituents in the resurrection of Jesus’s body is a question on which some reticence might be appropriate. It is striking that Cranmer makes so little concession to the words of 1 Peter 3.18, ‘made alive in the spirit’, a verse which (as we shall shortly see) was in his mind as he drafted these Articles, though it has left no trace on our present text. Is not the difficulty that he could not see how to make concessions to 1 Peter without making concessions to Gnosticism - a difficulty shared with some modern Gnostics?
But this difficulty arises from a false step which has gone before it: the absolutizing of the flesh-spirit distinction into a dualism of what a later idealism would call phenomenal and noumenal. It is not used in this absolute way by the writers of the New Testament, who speak of the resurrection as ‘spiritual’ not to exclude the physical and material, nor to remove it from the phenomenal to the noumenal, but to point to the transformation of the material. If we are to speak rightly of Christ’s resurrection, we must speak of an event which is ‘bodily’, in that it concerns the material being of the Jesus who died, and yet ‘spiritual’ in that it does not conform to the laws and normative patterns of material existence, but transforms the material in ways that require a different phenomenology and a different pattern of perception.
Cranmer then adds that Christ took ‘all things appertaining to the perfection of man’s nature’, that is to say, to a complete humanity (the Latin is integritatem), which made no concessions to a gnostic preference for the spiritual. It is not simply to be taken for granted that it was human nature which Christ brought back from death. Here, too, Cranmer casts a line back, relating the triumph of Easter to what has gone before it: to the incarnation, where he ‘took’ human nature, and to the crucifixion where he bore its curse. The resurrection, too, then, is part of the history of that humanity, borne by our representative, whose vindication and perfection here is not for himself alone but on behalf of all men. To see the vindication of Christ as the vindication of his humanity is to see Easter as the climax to those other moments, which are more obviously moments of identification with humanity. There was one aspect of Good Friday then, which Easter did not cancel: it did not cancel the representative ‘for us’, but rather confirmed it, and brought it to its intended conclusion. ‘He was crucified for our sins, and raised for our justification’ (Rom. 4.25).
And so we look back to what Article 2 tells us of Good Friday, in words taken more or less verbatim from the Augsburg Confession. Is there here a line thrown forwards? Does the Reformers’ account of the cross expect Easter as its conclusion? It has often proved difficult for western theologies of the atonement to achieve this connexion convincingly. Anselm’s mighty interpretation of the cross had little place for Easter, and Schleiermacher made what was in effect a confession of failure, on the part of the Anselmic tradition as well as his own romantic recasting of it, when he concluded that ‘it is impossible to see in what relation [the resurrection] can stand to the redeeming efficacy of Christ’ (Christian Faith 99.1). Of Luther better things can be said, though it is not easy to draw out from him a systematic clarification of how the two events belong together. Neither is our short confessional statement clear on the matter; but it does offer an important hint.
It gives two reasons for Christ’s death: ‘to reconcile his Father to us, and to be a sacrifice’. That is, Christ’s death accomplishes a movement in God and a movement in man. The movement in man is described as a ‘sacrifice’. The full range of overtones which the concept of sacrifice carried in the Levitical law, and the wider range which it was later to acquire in romantic theology, were not known to the Reformers. We will read Cranmer and his mentors from Augsburg correctly if we understand the word to convey a simple Anselmic idea: the ‘sacrifice’ of Christ is the reparation made to God’s honour for the infinite offence of sin, the ‘sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction’, as it is expanded in the eucharistic prayer, the ‘redemption [that is purchase price], propitiation and satisfaction’ of Article 31. Man in Christ makes an offering, the only perfect offering that he can make.
The movement in God, on the other hand, is not an Anselmic idea. Here, too, Anselm and Schleiermacher (two interpreters of the atonement so often contrasted) are at one. Neither could easily accommodate the notion of a change in God’s attitude, and it is for just that reason that neither can explain the connexion of the cross with Easter. For neither of them does the sequence of death and resurrection represent anything in God. Although the two interpret the cross very differently, they both see it as the perfect act of virtue by which the Redeemer accomplishes (or displays) the true relating of man with God. It is primarily a redemptive act, secondarily the matrix of our redeemed status (or consciousness). But in patristic thought the cross had been seen the other way round, primarily as a participation in the human plight, and secondarily (but only because it led to the resurrection) as a redemptive act. In the one case it is Christ’s cross before it is ours, in the other it is ours before it is Christ’s. But if Christ’s death is (as the Fathers thought) an identification with man’s plight, not (as Anselm maintained) simply a prevention of it, then we have conceived death in its relation to sin, as the expression of divine wrath. The negative judgement of God on man is no longer merely threatening, but actual (even though only emblematically) in the fact of common death; and the favourable judgement of God on men is an overcoming of wrath, just as the life and hope of man is an overcoming of death. When the Reformers speak of the ‘reconciling of [the] Father to us’ they have in mind that the sequence of death and resurrection corresponds to a sequence in the judgement of God, and so they point us to the fulfilment of the cross in Easter.
If we speak in this way of the overcoming of divine wrath by divine favour, we will, of course, bear in mind what we said in the last chapter about sustaining the tension of paradox when speaking about God. We will speak of such a change in God only in the context of his unchangeableness, and we will speak of his wrath only in relation to the primacy of his love, the great Yes, pronounced on creation from the beginning, of which the No is merely the reverse side, the hostility of the Creator to all that would uncreate. We will speak of the wrath of God, as we speak of the suffering of God, dialectically; and we will not be too disturbed by objections which are themselves undialectical. Happily we are now rediscovering (is this not one undeniable strength of the Theology of Liberation?) that love which has no wrath on