Atonement and Incarnation: An Essay in Universalism and Particularity

In this book Vernon White explains how the historically particular event of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ can have a 'saving' significance for everyone, regardless of whether or not they have heard about the event or whether they consider themselves to be Christians. Although this is a traditional Christian claim, it has come under great pressure over the last hundred years, and White's aim is to defend the claim without relying on some discredited explanation from the past or offending the moral and conceptual sensibilities of a postEnlightenment age.

ATONEMENT AND INCARNATION

ATONEMENT AND INCARNATION An essay in universalism and particularity

VERNON WHITE Director of Ordinands, Guildford Diocese Rector oj Wotton and Holm bury St Alary, Surrey

The right of the University of Cambridge to print and sell all manner of books was granted by Henry VIII in 1534. The University has printed and published continuously since 1584.

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge New York Melbourne

Port Chester Sydney

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Delhi Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www. Cambridge. org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521400312 © Cambridge University Press 1991 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1991 Re-issued in this digitally printed version 2008 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data White, Vernon. Atonement and incarnation: an essay in universalism and particularity/Vernon White. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0 521 40031 7 1. Atonement. 2. Incarnation. 3. Christianity and other religions. 4. Jesus Christ-Person and offices. I. Title. BT265.2.W49 1991 232'.3-dc20 90-44132 CIP ISBN 978-0-521-40031-2 hardback ISBN 978-0-521-40732-8 paperback

For Jim Hickinbotham, much respected teacher, colleague and friend

Contents

Introduction

page i

1 The claim 2 On having lived too long and seen too much 3 The work of Christ (On trying to conceive how 'things are not as they were') 4 Two recent contributions 5 Creating an atonement model 6 The person of Christ (On trying to conceive how the Word became Flesh) 7 A moral demand: conditions for real reconciliation 8 Anthropocentricity, imperialism, and evangelism: an ethical postscript Notes Bibliography Index

8 15 26 42 51 69 87 107 117 127 132

IX

Introduction

The universal claims of the Christian Faith are not easy to sustain. It is sufficient merely to spend some time sitting at a roadside cafe in a busy, cosmopolitan city, watching the world go by. It is a big world, with too many people. It stretches the imagination a long way to think how God could have significant personal interest in every individual. It is even more difficult to think of that interest in the highly specific terms of some traditional Christian claims. How can God be conceived as actively working to bring every individual into a personal relationship of reconciliation and love with himself, through Jesus Christ? It does not matter whether we are watching the world in Coventry or Calcutta; only a tiny fraction of the passing crowds will have the opportunity seriously to face that claim, let alone respond to it. Countless millions of human individuals, supposed to be made in the image of God and destined at least for the opportunity of this kind of 'saving relationship', appear to pass through time and space with nothing of the sort. Then there is also the unfathomable expanse of the universe beyond this world. How are we supposed to imagine our little local Christ event reconciling all that?

It is true that we could discuss such doubt in purely psychological terms, as some passing metaphysical vertigo, confined only to susceptible star-gazers of a certain temperament. But the hard questions it provokes cannot be dismissed so lightly. The growing urgency of the question as to how a particular event could have universal significance is not limited to the existential torments of a few individuals: it is

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firmly rooted in the history of ideas and the public concerns of theology. F. W. Dillistone, for instance, traces the pattern in The

Christian Understanding of the Atonement.1 At the end of his survey

of atonement ideas he notes that the smaller our world is, the bigger we conceive the scope of reconciliation. So it should not surprise us if the reverse is also true, that the bigger our world, the more limited that scope of reconciliation. Thus in a limited Graeco-Roman view of the universe it was possible to see Christ's work as affecting the reconciliation of the whole cosmos: whereas in the ' expanded' view of the universe in the twentieth century, Christ's work is only conceived with any confidence as affecting the souls of individuals. One has only to think of Bultmann to take the point - though the seeds of this might even be found anticipated in Origen.2 That the universe really has 'expanded' (in our perception) is a well-charted phenomenon, occurring in a variety of ways. There has been the pressure from astronomy which provoked the fundamental shift away from a geocentric view. We know we do not lie at the centre of the universe in any straightforward physical or geometric sense; and we know that the vast spaces of the universe which so appalled Pascal are even vaster than either he or our Chalcedonian forebears could have conceived. Even more important, time and space within earthly history are perceived to be a bigger and more complex reality than previously realized. The combination of physical travel, historical, and pre-historical research has opened up vast tracts of human experience which appear to be untouched and untouchable by the Christ event. It is a potent, widespread, and irreversible addition to our perception, as disillusioning as the discovery that Father Christmas could not possibly reach every child that ever was. Stir in with the mixture the critical scrutiny of the social and psychological sciences, and the cumulative effect is clear: it is, of course, to relativize all claims to universal spiritual significance of any particular historical event. In the light of all this it is easy to see why it has become much more credible to limit the claim of Christ's reconciliation to a

Introduction

3

given believing soul in a particular context, rather than try to sustain it for the whole world. Dillistone's summary statement is pertinent: '"from the eternal cosmos to the existential moment" seems an apt title for the story of man's long enquiry about the possibility of reconciliation'. True, the existential moment is not now so fashionable as it was, nor is the soul of man so happily detached from his whole being-in-relation-tomaterial-and-social-reality. But the essential point remains that the scope of Christ's reconciliation is now most often limited to particular and not universal spatio-temporal reality. To give but one example: in his chapter on ' The Work of Christ' in The Remaking of Christian Doctrine* Maurice Wiles proposes that there need be no more to the meaning of the passion of Christ than the following: first, a revelation of the character of God; secondly, an historical phenomenon effective in the transformation of people's lives. Thus he has no wish to deny that it concerns only the 'comparatively small proportion of mankind which has heard of and responded to the preaching of the cross'; to claim anything more would be ' chasing a will o' the wisp'. 4 One of the most important issues which leads to this kind of position is the familiar problem of giving a credible account of how anything like universal reconciliation is effected by an historically particular event or person. The difficulty of articulating the ' mechanics' of atonement theory, especially when that atonement has all mankind as its object, is notorious. Together with the conceptual difficulties of the doctrine of incarnation itself, with which it is integrally connected, it constitutes an internal pressure from within Christian theology to abandon the claim to universal significance - to add to these general pressures from outside, of an expanding universe. So herein lies the agenda of this book: I wish to address the crisis of credibility, and defend the besieged claim that the particular event of Jesus Christ does have universal saving significance. In a previous book I dealt primarily with the bare conceivability that God is universally and specially active in the world.5 Here I propose to concentrate more on the saving nature of that activity, and the coherence of rooting it in the

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particularity of the- Christ event. More specifically, I will examine and defend the claim that the particular event ofJesus Christ is constitutive of universal saving significance, rather than being merely demonstrative. It is the conceptual (and moral) possibilities of such a claim with which I am chiefly concerned, rather than the provision of empirical evidence for it. The format of the book follows this largely defensive strategy. After a brief restatement of the traditional claim the major chapters will offer an outline of some of the chief pressure points on it, and the kind of defensive moves which may be offered. Some of these clearly compromise the claim beyond recognition: they are not so much a defence as an outright surrender. Others prove more promising. But a further chapter will also propose some more positive grounds for lifting the siege. It will suggest that there is moral impetus behind the traditional claim. All this might seem an ambitious agenda for a short book, since it will necessarily take us into areas of major doctrinal controversy (the doctrines of atonement and incarnation in particular). I must therefore stress that it is by no means offered as a systematic survey of soteriology and Christology as a whole. It is intended only as an extended essay on some aspects of the contemporary debate, chiefly from the point of view of AngloAmerican analytical theology. Some other obvious limitations should be mentioned at this stage. The book deals for the most part with conceiving the possibility of salvation, through Christ, for all individual persons. It does not deal with communities, nor the wider natural order. This is not for one moment to deny the extent to which people are constituted by their social and natural context, and therefore the extent to which God works through and for that context. It simply reflects the need to limit the scope of a short book - and the assumption that the individual as such is nonetheless a most important subject of salvation (a point which will be picked up again in the final chapter). Also, the book is written primarily as an exercise in Christian self-understanding within the normal terms of reference of traditional western (academic) theology. As such it does not set

Introduction

5

out to claim the authority of any specific experience of dialogue with other religions, nor of any other specific kind of experience or Sitz im Leben. No doubt certain kinds of experience have contributed towards it, consciously or unconsciously (in which roadside cafes may be included!), and I certainly do not wish to claim exemption from the conditioning and limitations that implies. However, its most obvious context and conditioning is that which I have acknowledged, viz. the western academic tradition. It therefore lays no claim to be anything other than a contribution to academic theology. Such academic theology I take to be a worthwhile, but limited, part of theology as a whole (which must include many other 'adjectival 5 theologies to be a whole).6 But it is also as such that it does purport to be a genuinely theological (and philosophical) task, not merely psychological. This means that I am not simply in the business of finding ways and means of reassuring doubters, but of critically evaluating the credibility of key beliefs. This is a note of warning which needs to be sounded whenever we are dealing with a crisis of credibility. For if the primary aim was simply to bolster psychological security the procedure would be clear, but quite different: we would operate within an acknowledged and highly circumscribed set of presuppositions on behalf of an equally well-defined community, appealing to some specific common experiences to validate our conclusions. This would be a contribution to maintaining an effective 'plausibility structure': i.e. a close social context of like-minded believers to reinforce a particular belief, and to help provide an interpretative framework of supporting beliefs to deal with contrary pressures and to ' filter' the experiences into reassuring uniformity. Such a procedure can undoubtedly work, in the sense that if we are given effective social support we can be maintained within almost any conceptual framework and language game, keeping virtually any particular belief immune from attack. Thus it is psychologically perfectly possible, even for someone well-versed in history and much-travelled in the world, to maintain a belief in the universal significance of the particular

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Christ, whether or not the conceptual framework can really stand up to scrutiny. This is the position still of many missionaries who, while ostensibly facing some of the conceptual pressures at their most acute, receive them filtered out harmlessly through their supporting plausibility structure. And not only does such a procedure work: we also have to acknowledge that we all do depend on such structures to some degree and, arguably, we can know nothing without them. The Christian tradition as a whole is itself such a plausibility structure, however 'open-textured' (so I am by no means claiming to dispense with, or stand above, such a way of knowing). Yet I must re-emphasize that this procedure is not the intention of this book. There is a significant difference between devising arguments simply to keep us psychologically secure within a tightly defined ' sub-structure' of Christian tradition (such as Biblical or Credal fundamentalism), and genuinely exploring the conceptual and theological possibilities of maintaining certain key beliefs outside the confines of such substructures. It is this latter task with which I am concerned. It is theological and philosophical in a way that the former is not, for it is part of the theological task as such that we are bound to move both diachronically and synchronically through a variety of worlds (within the Bible itself we move through Hebrew and Greek worlds, inter alia). It is also a more realistic task. For few of us are so sealed off within just one single structure that we feel no draughts from outside, and few structures are so well organized that they contain no internal strains at all. And in any case, even if it were possible to achieve such cosiness, I presume none of us would wish to buy psychological certainty at the expense of theological integrity. The point should also alert us to the danger of evaluating this or any crisis of credibility by seductive appeals to what is believable or unbelievable in the purely socio-psychological sense that a sub-group within the history of Christian tradition has, or has not, managed to hold a certain belief. In that sense we should not be beguiled by taking Dillistone's observations, quoted earlier, out of context. They helpfully trace connections

Introduction

7

between general world-views and what has been believed about the scope of reconciliation, and this gives some indication as to what has been believable. But only to the extent that such a belief continues to demonstrate itself as theologically compelling and conceptually tolerable are we entitled to move beyond the neutral observation that such and such has been believed, to the evaluation that it may still be believed. For better or for worse it is this latter task which this essay attempts to address. Of course the criterion ' theologically compelling' and its relationship with 'conceptually tolerable' begs enormous questions about the nature of revelation and tradition, indeed the whole question of theological authority. For this book, however, I shall offer no long preamble explaining its presuppositions in this respect. Concepts of theological authority are often better justified by their use than by their explanation. We shall therefore move directly from method to substance.

CHAPTER I

The claim

The traditional claim, that the particularity of the Christ event is constitutive of universal reconciliation, has been made consistently in theological history, and it is well worth noting how it is located at some key points in the tradition. This fact that, hitherto, the claim has been maintained through a developing tradition and through different intellectual and social contexts, is not much disputed. But a brief survey of some of its clearest expositors is still offered here, simply to put down a marker. Although rudimentary it will help guard against any temptation to minimize the weight of tradition behind the claim, either by ignoring it or by some sort of veiled hermeneutical attack ('it never really meant that'). To begin with this means noting its origin, in its clearest and most insistent expression, in the Pauline literature of the New Testament. As our introductory comments have made clear it will obviously not be sufficient merely to repeat a Biblical claim in order to settle the matter. Nevertheless, we can only start there, whatever constraints a 'small world' view may have imposed upon it. For there is no doubt that the New Testament, and St Paul in particular, came to see reconciliation through Christ as a divine work on the widest possible scale. Whereas in the Old Testament reconciliation and restoration normally have special significance in terms of a politically coloured hope of a restored Israel, in the New Testament apokatastasis (reconciliation as restoration) is considered 'less in the context of Jewish political hopes... than in that of the universal significance of the Christ event'. 1 Katallasso (or apokatallasso)2 is even more explicitly linked with universal themes: ' God was in 8

The claim

9

Christ reconciling the world': 3 'world' (kosmos) here refers to the Gentile world; and ' in him [Christ] all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell...and through him to reconcile all things': 4 'all things' (tapanta) here being even wider in scope. The background to Pauline thought here, as elsewhere, is that of a cosmic catastrophe having affected all things, which then naturally implies that the creator of all things, in Christ, must be the reconciler/restorer of all things. However, it is interesting to note that, in spite of this background, the concern for a universal reconciler is also an insight which presses against expectation. It is not as though there is some clear prior conception of the universal need for reconciliation. Rather, the sense of this need is crystallized, even generated, by the particular event of Christ. E. P. Sanders is clear about this. 5 The solution precedes the problem: 'his [Paul's] conclusion that all the world... equally stands in need of a saviour springs from the prior conviction that God had provided such a saviour... There is no reason to think that Paul felt the need of a universal saviour prior to his conviction that Jesus was such. ' 6 If this is the case then the vision of God's reconciling work amongst Gentiles, and even amongst 'all things', was not primarily the confirmation of a ready religious hope, a seed falling on already fertile soil, but as intrusive and persuasive an insight as the Damascus road experience of Christ himself. This is worth noting simply because it serves to underline the force of the early conviction about universality. Martin Hengel reinforces the point in a different way. While he finds much in the ancient world which resonates with the general linguistic and religious categories of the New Testament message of atoning sacrifice, he is also impressed by its novelty in just this respect: 'the Christian message fundamentally broke apart the customary conceptions of atonement in the ancient world and did so at many points. For example, it spoke not of atonement for a particular crime, but of universal atonement for all human guilt. ' 7 If we then enquire further into the means and nature of this reconciling work of Christ we are faced with other kinds of large claims. Reconciliation is not merely by the propitiation of

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an angry deity, or the payment of debt by symbolic sacrifice, but by a 'new creation'; 8 it is not by 'ignoring' sin,9 but by 'making just': 10 for Christ is our 'wisdom, justification and sanctification'.11 In Christ, therefore, the effects of sin and the disruption it causes are not merely nullified ritually, but dealt with effectively. Moreover, this all-embracing work in us is achieved through his own identification with every aspect of our being: he is made flesh (Johannine theology), and 'made like us in every respect' (Epistle to the Hebrews). What is implied is therefore a universal significance not only in the sense that it is addressed to all peoples at all times and places, but in the extent of what is achieved and the manner in which it is achieved. In Christ, God reaches effectively into every category of being, and every corner of time and space, even those areas where the organic entail of sin and evil normally lives on. It is in the context of a passage about the means of reconciliation that Paul concludes: ' there is nothing in death or life... in the world as it is or the world as it shall be, in the forces of the universe, in height or depths - nothing in all creation that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus'. 12 At the same time, of course, this large claim is always grounded in the particularity of the Christ event. However widely its significance ranges, it is constituted 'once for all' and 'by the shedding of his blood'. It is in him that the fullness of God came to dwell, and through him that all things are reconciled by the shedding of his blood. A large claim, but balanced on a narrow pivot. That is the paradox. Yet its huge scope and significance was not seriously questioned by orthodoxy for many a century. On the contrary, through notions like Irenaeus' doctrine of recapitulation the claim, if anything, is enlarged still further. Christ reconciles by 'gathering u p ' all dispersed peoples, backwards as well as forwards in time, reaching back to Adam, recapitulating in himself the whole sequence of mankind and sanctifying each in turn, in order to leave nothing untouched. J. N. D. Kelly comments: ' Running through almost all the patristic attempts to explain the redemption there is one grand theme which...

The claim

11

provides the clue to the fathers' understanding of the work of Christ. This is none other than the ancient idea of recapitulation which Irenaeus derived from St. Paul, and which envisages Christ as the representative of the entire race. ?13 Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory Nazianzen all emphasize the wide scope of Christ's work in a similar way, operating with a tacit neo-Platonic notion of the consubstantiality of all men, whereby Christ gains access to our humanity by his own. Gregory Nazianzen's celebrated tag summarizes a pervasive and influential stream of early thought: 'the unassumed is the unhealed'; and since Christ assumed all human nature, then it is all accessible to his healing. Equally, the unlimited scope of Christ's victory over all external forces which might bar the way to reconciliation is affirmed without hesitation. Satan's bondage through the work of Christ is a common theme. Admittedly the earlier Fathers did not dwell much upon the precise means through which the particular event of Christ achieved these widespread benefits. But some sort of constitutive relationship between them was assumed. This is clear as early as Justin. For although he places much emphasis on the 'merely' revelatory, illuminating, and exemplary power of Christ, he also goes further. God in Christ does not only bring new knowledge and inspiration: his life, death, and resurrection is also a salvific achievement; Christ's suffering and death (in particular) procures the salvation of mankind by a kind of 'earning'. 14 Such were some of the affirmations made within the relatively small world of the early centuries. Later, when we move into the feudal world which Anselm addressed, we find that this too could sustain similar claims. Anselm's positive explanation of why (and how) God saved through Christ arises from a polemic, and defence, against two contemporary strains of thought, both of which generated a response which illustrates the same basic point. First, he questioned the dominant teaching of the French Schools, which were insisting that the devil had rights over mankind, and which therefore interpreted Christ's victory as a

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bargain to win back those rights from the devil. In contrast to this Anselm insisted that salvation is achieved by a direct transaction between God and man, made effective through the one man Jesus Christ. Redemption is compared to the action of a King faced with guilty subjects, who offers pardon to them all on the basis of service rendered to him by this one innocent man. Since this service is greater than the offence of all the others it is counted as adequate repayment of God's violated honour. Furthermore, such a transaction can only be carried out by God becoming such a man to offer such a service. So it certainly provides a constitutive role for the particular man Jesus Christ. It also implies potential universalism as the outcome: although Anselm seems to think that only a few (mostly monks!) are likely to present themselves worthily to receive this pardon, the logic of the explanation does open up possibilities for all, in principle.15 But also, Anselm was reacting to Jewish criticism about the concept of incarnation (the unbelievers referred to at the beginning of Cur Deus Homo are probably Jews). Their familiar complaint was that the doctrine affronts the honour and dignity of God. Here too, however, Anselm's reaction roots his soteriology all the more firmly in the particularity and pivotal nature of Jesus Christ. As we have seen, he has turned the criticism on its head. It is precisely because God became man that he is able to satisfy his honour, and so redeem mankind. The constitutive act of God in Christ is gloried in, not grudged. The claim here is obviously clothed and coloured vividly in feudal images, and for that reason undoubtedly needs restatement. But it is certainly not the case that the feudal world actually created the basic claim at the heart of it. On the contrary, Anselm's basic claim could almost certainly be stripped of its feudal clothing and still survive in recognizable form. It therefore stands in the history of Christian thinking about soteriology as something much more than a museum piece.16 Another notable soteriological milestone comes in the later Middle Ages. It is another kind of statement of the claim, created out of the anxious soul of Martin Luther. In many

The claim

13

respects it is cast in very different terms, but it is still recognizably a claim about universal significance arising out of a narrow pivot of particularity. As with Justin before him, it is true that much of Luther's religious and theological insight had to do with the epistemological and revelatory significance of the cross.17 But again there is more. In one important concept in particular he takes us with just as much conviction into the ontological and constitutive realm. For Luther the cross of Christ effects a mysterious and wonderful ' exchange' (commercium admirabile): Christ took our sin that we might possess his righteousness. This is not unique or original to Luther. 18 But in expounding it he is specially clear that Christ effects salvation for all, in some sense, as well as demonstrating new insights into God's character. The same concern emerges in Luther's very personal quest to find relief for his conscience. 'The soul is nailed to the Cross with Christ', 19 and by this he does not mean simply that Christ is the exemplar of a tempted or expiatory man: ' Luther held that on the Cross something happened that pertains directly to all mankind, that something happened there to mankind. ' 20 It is also given expression in Luther's strong sense of Christ's victory achieved over evil forces, which Gustav Aulen picks up as his most distinctive and dominant 'classic' theme: 21 it must be God in Christ actually engaging with evil, not merely a demonstration of how any man might fight and win.22 Such then is a brief history of the claim sketched out in just a few of the various forms that the ancient world and the medieval world imposed upon it. It is the possibility of a universal salvation constituted, not just illustrated, by a particular event, clearly maintained in the pre-modern period. And should we find it surprising that this focus on a particular event remained central, and largely unchallenged, for so long? I do not think so. The power of the particular exerts a curious compulsion and persuasive power. It is imaginatively satisfying, if nothing else, to be able to grasp that the act of God in a particular moment of history is constitutive of everything else. It resonates with our natural perceptual and experiential

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affinity with the particular, which seems to hold for the human mind as such rather than for any particular stage of its history. We are well acquainted with the fact that we relate better to life in delimited village communities, rather than seamless ribbon developments; we see more in a portrait than we do in a movie; we are naturally inclined to see more meaning in the pivotal points of birth, marriage, death, as compared to the generality of the daily round. That said, however, we should return to the warnings sounded in the introduction. Psychological cosiness is an unreliable criterion of theological truth. And this is especially true when the claim in question arose in a world perceived differently to our own, even if it has travelled rather well until our time. The question returns with full force: how are we still to believe it? For the pressure to reconceive such a claim, in our world, is extremely powerful - and psychological or imaginative criteria alone will not be enough to resist it.

CHAPTER 2

On having lived too long and seen too much

The pressure against a traditional soteriological claim I wish to deal with here is the point already alluded to in the introduction. Human history and pre-history is longer than we thought. It reaches back across far greater tracts of time than our forebears realized. Creation myths, aetiological legends, and beguiling genealogies masked the true extent of our origins. We have lived a long time, yet all this time, inhabited by all those people, seems to have been untouched by Christ - at least as far as any evident, acknowledged, empirical criteria are concerned. We also see further around us in the present. The explosion of transport and travel which has been unleashed on the Christian world in modern times has introduced us to a vastly populated array of non-Christian cultures - each with their own long history - in which, again, there appears little or no acknowledged evidence of the influence of the Christ event. It is a bitter irony for the traditional Christian claim. Because of this ever increasing access to wider and wider areas of history and geography a concept of universal history has become more and more thinkable - but at the very same time the idea that it could be determined and dominated by anything as particular as the Christ event becomes less thinkable. The point is stated forcibly by William Barrett: The idea of world history was born of the European mind at a time when Europe itself was spreading its power to the four quarters of the globe. We, who are so used to it, forget how novel this idea was and how late in its appearance. The voyages of the fifteenth century, and the continued explorations and settlements that followed, opened the 15

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whole world to European civilisation. Hitherto history had been local or tribal, limited to particular peoples or empires. By the eighteenth century, the age of enlightenment could envisage all humanity and the whole earth as the theatre of a single drama.1 But Barrett then goes on to point out that religious ideals, specifically of the Reformation, could not easily be regarded as the determinative influence on this world history (only modern science and technology could lay claim to that with any credibility). Barrett may have overstated his point when he claims that the idea of world history originated with the Enlightenment. But the chief point remains that it certainly took hold then, and at the same time rendered the particular claims of Christianity problematic. Even more disturbing to the traditional Christian claim is the positive evaluation we are bound to give to this vast and ever increasing non-Christian world. Where Christ has had no evident, acknowledged, influence there is nonetheless much good to be found, including many of the signs we would normally associate with the business of reconciliation, grace, and salvation. Such signs may be scattered and ambiguous, but then so they are in Christendom (for we have to acknowledge only a very sober estimate of reconciliation within Christendom over the past 2,000 years). As far as empirical evidence for a religious claim like 'reconciliation' is concerned it therefore appears more reasonable to suppose such a claim is relative to a particular culture, and less credible to claim that it is the universal monopoly of Christ. Such is the pressure which is liable to relativize the traditional claim, and contribute to John Hick's theological 'Copernican Revolution' whereby we no longer claim that Christ is the necessary centre of salvation. 2 One possible response is to point out that these sorts of pressure are not different in kindfrom those which our Christian Fathers might have faced. To them the past may indeed have seemed less daunting, less of a 'strange country', and there may have seemed less of it, but there was still some sense of its irretrievability. And although the Mediterranean world was indeed a smaller world, it still contained many inaccessible and unchristianized peoples. Moreover, even from the beginning, even in St Paul himself, we can detect some positive evaluation

On having lived too long and seen too much of life outside Christ. There is his speech on Mars hill, for instance, or his acknowledgement of ' the law written on the hearts of the Gentiles'. 3 In that sense it is not necessary to claim that the expansion of these worlds has been anything other than a matter of degree, creating new psychological conditions for belief, but no decisively new logical or theological conditions. Yet when we are dealing with empirical matters we are bound to acknowledge the force of cumulative evidence. Differences of degree count for more when they are piled up high. We can hardly underestimate this empirical shock of tasting and seeing so much ' reconciliation' outside Christ, and so little in Christ. It would be disingenuous to respond to these pressures merely by suggesting that nothing really has changed. SOME DEFENSIVE STRATEGIES

A more obvious response is to stress the eschatological dimension of the fulfilled work of Christ. Because the full effects of reconciliation are 'kept in heaven' then we should not expect to see it all empirically realized in this world, either within or beyond Christendom. So even though only a few of us are fortunate enough to experience a foretaste of Christ's work within our small corner of time and space, that has little or no bearing on his access to everyone else beyond time and space. The Patristic (and Lutheran) preoccupation with Christ's victory over the devil provides a specific example. To the extent that the main effects of the victory are conceived more in the heavenly realms than in our earthly history, then faith can assert its universal significance without fear or favour from historical evidence (or lack of it). The empirical base of the Christ event itself may then become merely a point of intersection between history and eternity, briefly displaying the eternal victory at a point in time, but not constituting it for time. Karl Barth comes close to this, and whether or not it is an entirely fair exposition of Barth himself, Heinz Zahrnt's disapproving comments about him describe this kind of position rather well: 'The basing of the events of salvation upon a timeless event in the perfect tense results for Barth in an

17

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irreparable loss of concrete reality. He no longer sees the revelation of God as a drama enacted between God and man... but only as an "enlightenment" about an event which has long since taken place in eternity. ' 4 Appeal can also be made to other non-empirical aspects of the work of reconciliation. God's satisfied honour and our remitted guilt are the most striking examples. If they are conceived as necessary conditions of reconciliation, achieved by the work of Christ, they can in principle determine the ultimate destiny of peoples of all time and space, without requiring any obvious empirical reference in human experience to verify or falsify them. Historically these notions have shaped one of the most influential strands of atonement theory, as we have seen. It runs through Anselm's Cur Deus Homo, fashioned out of a feudal culture, and continues in the persistent juridical doctrine of penal substitution, still favoured by conservative evangelical piety. Of course, these kinds of responses are very vulnerable to criticism, already indicated by Zahrnt's comments about Barth. A complete retreat to eternity to explicate the reconciling work of Christ is not going to satisfy, by most theological (and philosophical) criteria. It is open to the familiar charge that we are resorting to ' pie-in-the-sky-when-we-die'; also to the more rigorous positivist challenge of empirical verification. More seriously, it raises the question of why God bothered at all with the creation of space and time, when all that matters is worked out in eternity: why should God concern himself with time if he is not going to work significantly in time? As regards nonempirical concepts of honour and guilt, they can raise their own acute moral and theological problems when they are incorporated in certain atonement theories, as we shall have cause to see. In fact none of these counter considerations need be decisive, except against a caricature of the positions I have outlined. Obviously it will not be satisfactory to conceive reconciliation completely in terms of eternity. But to allow that the visible and experienced fulfilment of Christ's work will require the perspective of eternity is not likely to offend. The Kingdom is not

On having lived too long and seen too much yet, as well as now. The consummation of all things when God is ' all-in-all' is an eschatological vision. And most theodicies have always required this.5 The chief safeguard here is that we conceive the fulfilment in eternity as an internally related outcome of divine activity in history, rather than as a merely external addendum to it. Roughly speaking, it is the difference between a piano instructor offering his pupil the experience of playing a magnificent concerto after practising the scales together, and offering him sweets. Neither outcome is obvious from within the experience of learning the scales, but the former is internally related to it in the way the latter is not. It certainly meets the theological requirement that there should be some point to this world (the scales). It also eases the positivist challenge, in so far as there is some discernible (though still not obvious) relationship between empirically observable activity in this world and the final eschatological goal. (Incidentally, the analogy could be pressed further, if we wished. If the instructor were also to offer his own rendering of the concerto in the middle of the lessons, both to illustrate and constitute the possibility of his pupil's performance later, then we have some sort of model specifically for the incarnation.) As far as the other non-empirical aspects of reconciliation are concerned, we shall indeed be admitting the force of some objections to the atonement theories with which they are most closely associated. But again, this should not imply that all nonempirical aspects to reconciliation fit into such unacceptable moulds. There are some conditions for reconciliation which do have to do with the remission ('undoing') of guilt, which are at least empirically ambiguous, and which can be expressed in a morally defensible way (a claim to which I shall give substance in later chapters). In short: there are some longstanding resources, chiefly in eschatology, which can be brought to the defence of the traditional claim about the universality of Christ's work, particularly to ease its empirical embarrassment. And although they carry their own risks, they still deserve proper deployment in any discussion about that traditional claim.

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However, there is another kind of defensive move which has more to do with soteriology, which avoids the danger of evacuating too much of the divine action to eternity, and more specifically helps defuse the challenge posed by the positive values of other religions. It rests on the very sound observation that salvation (including its reconciling effects) is constituted primarily by divine action, not by human knowledge of that action. The point is that an action may have an effect where the identity of the agent is unknown or unrecognized (as an unconscious man may be saved from the sea by a stranger he never knew). Thus the anonymous reconciling work of Christ may be effective far beyond the bounds of Christendom. Indeed, some of the positive reconciling values of other religions may be Christ, the logos spermatikos, under another name. This emphasis on the effective action, rather than the knowledge of the agent, is an important if obvious point. Clearly it bolsters the case for grounding universal possibilities of salvation in particular events. For while particular events are only accessible qua knowledge to the limited number of people who cluster around them (or the preaching of them) in space and time, their effect could, in principle, be universal. Dramatic analogies make the point best: Macbeth's encounter with the witches, to take just one instance, broods over the whole play, affecting his relationship with every character and the meaning of every event of the plot. Nor is this a defence simply conjured up under recent pressures. From the beginning there have been hints that Christ may be present in situations where he is not immediately recognized as such. Hence the element of surprise in many Gospel parables. And it was as early as the second century that Justin Martyr developed the notion of the logos spetmatikos, expounding the Johannine claim that Christ is, in some sense, a 'light which enlightens every man'. Yet in spite of its importance this point has not always been allowed its full force in shaping the history of Christian thought. One reason for this has been the dominance of the central theological category of revelation to designate God's activity towards us, where 'revelation' is naturally associated

On having lived too long and seen too much with 'giving knowledge'. Happily, this inflation of epistemological categories of divine action has been checked in recent years, and just because the point is so important it will be worthwhile briefly to chart this process and the reasons for it. The seeds of the change are to be found in the Enlightenment and the rise of Biblical Criticism (which can here function, uncharacteristically, in indirect support of traditional claims). Under pressure from rationalism and Biblical Criticism, the medieval concept of revelation primarily as unique and authoritative communication of knowledge has given way to a concept of it primarily as the event of divine self-giving.6 In general terms the same shift is acknowledged by William Temple; 7 by Barth and Brunner in their insistence that revelation has to do primarily with Christ and not the words of the Bible;8 and by Niebuhr and Pannenberg. 9 As already indicated, the shift is undergirded by sound theological considerations. As long as revelation is a central category of divine activity, and as long as it is understood chiefly as the communication of knowledge, then it implies that response and faith are primarily a matter of knowing things. This tends to intellectualize faith. It implies that our predicament is ignorance, and salvation is by knowledge. None of this sits happily within the Biblical tradition. 10 But if revelation is dethroned from its place of primacy, or reconceived more as an event of divine self-giving, then it implies (more properly) that some action has been undertaken for our salvation, such as an act of reconciliation to remedy a broken relationship. Carl Braaten puts the matter thus: 'If the ignorance of man stands in the centre, then the fact of revelation [in its epistemological sense] relieves that plight; but if man's guilt is the problem then not revelation but reconciliation must become the theological centrum. ' n Admittedly some caution is required in describing this trend. It would be quite false to imply that revelation has been reconceived in any single, coherent, doctrine which commands general consensus. Not least, there is the fact that some kinds of events require interpretation to be effective: it is not likely to make much sense to talk of the event of divine self-giving (or

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reconciliation) without some knowledge of the agent's identity at some stage. So some concept of revelation as knowledge is actually integral to the concept of revelation as saving action, even if it is not the defining category of God's dealings with us all here and now (Braaten prefers to use the concept of 'salvation' as the primary and inclusive category 12). This in turn provokes further debate as to the nature of that interpretation, such as it is here and now. Either some selfauthenticating, self-interpreting quality has to be claimed for some events (as with Barth and Brunner 13 ), or else some speech act is deemed necessary14 - each option in turn vulnerable to further critical questions.15 Moreover, as James Barr has pointed out, as far as the Bible is concerned the category of 'event' (or even 'interpreted event') will not exhaust all the material which relates to divine speech and activity: what about wisdom literature? There is also a more general underlying epistemological problem for those who, while acknowledging that explicit knowledge of the historical Christ is not necessary for salvation, concede the need for some implicit knowledge. Karl Rahner is a formidable contemporary champion of' anonymous Christianity', but does not escape this tension. In a recent and very rigorous study of his Christology the point is forcefully made that Rahner is caught between the need to find general criteria of significance for salvation (accessible to all), and the desire to maintain the constitutive necessity of the particular Jesus Christ. It leads him 'in some contexts... to say that we not only need not but cannot know ourselves to be oriented towards an absolute saviour except in connection with explicit faith in Jesus Christ'. In other contexts, for example when he is arguing for an anonymous Christianity, he seems to say that 'we can grasp and affirm ("pre-thematically", but consciously) this orientation apart from any explicit knowledge of Jesus Christ'. 16 All this should be taken as a salutary qualification to an oversimplified account of the shift from revelation as knowledge to revelation as saving action, and a reminder that it brings with it its own agenda of theological and philosophical issues to be dealt with.

On having lived too long and seen too much Yet while the problems of knowledge cannot simply be dispensed with, it remains true that the primary and inclusive category by which we understand God's dealings with us in space and time has to do with saving events. The theological considerations at stake, mentioned above, remain decisive. And this being the case we should recall how germane it is to our main discussion. For such a theological shift clearly could help rescue our besieged claim: if the particular events of Christ's work could be conceived as effective for salvation in the widest possible arena of space and time, apart from explicit human recognition, then we have secured a credible account of traditional claims which do not founder so easily on the empirical evidence of the wider non-Christian world. Revelation conceived primarily as saving knowledge must either insist on the uniqueness of the Christ event and limit the possibility of salvation to those who know it, or else it is forced to deny that uniqueness in order to widen the scope of potential salvation. But revelation conceived primarily as saving action is saved the embarrassment of such a dilemma. Braaten again: 'No adequate grasp of the significance ofJesus Christ is possible as long as revelation is the leading explanatory concept. If the special status of Jesus Christ must be explicated by the term "revelation" then we are driven either to deny that God reveals Himself elsewhere... or to reduce Jesus Christ to the level of other revelations.'17 He goes on to say that we must rather see that 'something new happens in Christ, the act of reconciliation'. Of course, the actual task of conceiving such a saving act, grounded in particular events but with potentially universal effects, is not easy. It is the very difficulty of this task which constitutes the other major pressure point on the traditional claim, to which we shall shortly turn our attention, and which is the chief concern of this essay. Before that, however, there is a further point of clarification which may be necessary to secure this defence against misunderstanding. The whole point of this shift is that it encourages us to think of Christ's anonymous reconciling activity within non-Christian contexts. But it does not follow that the religious truths found within those other religions and

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ideologies are, ipso facto, essentially the same as those found within historic Christianity; nor that such truths must naturally find their goal and fulfilment in historic Christianity. Within the vast (and increasing) literature generated by the comparative study of religion there are few serious attempts to convince us that all religions offer the same truths (certainly when the meaning of' truths' includes cognitive claims related to metaphysical dogmas and historical facts). On the contrary, there are many aspects of religious belief which are clearly incompatible in these terms. As such there can be no complete fulfilment of any one system of belief by another - not without considerable remainder. To claim otherwise and attempt to subsume one set of truths within another more inclusive system will almost certainly falsify or patronize the former. It was just this tendency which was illustrated in the early missionary conferences of this century, particularly at Edinburgh 1910, and notably expressed in J. N. Farquhar's highly acclaimed The Crown of Hinduism:18 what was aimed as a more generoushearted theology of inclusiveness, recognizing the positive value in Hindu religious truths as steps towards final fulfilment in Christ, risked offensiveness by implying that only a Hindu who did not really believe in Hinduism could be religiously fulfilled. In fact this last point simply serves to further highlight the crucial issue: ' knowledge' must not supplant' effective action' as the defining characteristic of Christ's work; epistemology must not hijack ontology. As long as salvation is defined primarily by belief and knowledge, then the evidence that Christ has been decisively active in non-Christian religions must obviously include some significant signs of compatibility in those terms - and the effort to demonstrate that is almost bound to falsify or patronize. But when the saving efficacy of Christ's work is conceived primarily in action, then there is no such strain on the evidence. For we would expect there to be varied and sometimes conflicting belief systems, as surely as any action in the world is bound to be variously interpreted (and often distorted). It is to be expected that the agent may be unrecognized and misunderstood. Therefore religious 'truths'

On having lived too long and seen too much do not have to cohere in straightforward evolutionary or other logically compatible relationships. And one should certainly add, following Hendrik Kraemer's lead to the later missionary conference at Tambaram in 1938, that historic Christianity also distorts and misunderstands the work of Christ - lest Christian patronizing merely be replaced by Christian arrogance.

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CHAPTER 3

The work of Christ [On trying to conceive how 'things are not as they were'') In his book The Doctrine of the Atonement Leonard Hodgson claims that we need 'an objective atonement wrought once for all by God in the history of this world, in virtue of which things are not as they were'. 1 In other words, a particular event has constituted a widespread, if not universal, change in things. We have already noted that such a notion certainly belonged to traditional Christian claims for Christ: we have seen that New Testament images include the notion that potentially universal reconciliation is constituted conce-for-all' by something as particular as ' the shedding of his blood'; Gregory of Nyssa, Anselm, and Luther amongst others all echo this sort of assertion in their different ways. As Hodgson himself puts it, they see the atonement not as an illustration of an eternal truth, but as 'something accomplished, something done'. But it is precisely that variety of ways in which the claim is asserted which highlights a teasing problem. How is this accomplishment to be conceived ? For every model of atonement which purports to explain its ' mechanics' is vulnerable to serious criticism. Moreover, there are sound reasons why such criticism has become more pressing than ever. Maurice Wiles, as so often, is succinct in his summary of the point, actually quoting Hodgson himself to illustrate it.2 He cites four pictures of atonement which have been common currency from the early Christian centuries to the present day: as a victory over Satan; as meeting the just demands (i.e. the fixed penalty) of divine law; as the offering of a sacrifice; and as the reversal of the sin of Adam. Each has been used to explain how a particular event could constitute the possibility 26

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or actuality of universal reconciliation, but each (claims Wiles) now founders in precisely that respect. He considers first the victory over Satan: as long as Satan is conceived as a particular personification of evil then some particular moment could, in principle, be conceived as a decisive victory (the fact that this seems empirically incredible in a world with little evidence of such a victory would have to be dealt with via some eschatological resolution, as already indicated in the previous chapter). But the more popular demythologized Satan of contemporary thought would not be conceived in such a particular way: 'he' is present (and needs defeating) in every psychological and sociological manifestation of evil. How, then, could a particular historical event constitute such a defeat? Then there is the notion of a fixed penalty of the divine moral law which must be paid to satisfy the demands of justice. It would seem to imply an objectified view of law standing beyond God, to which he himself is also bound. But it has become a familiar retort that we should see the law instead as the will of God relating personally and flexibly to every situation, rather than mechanically to the situation as a whole. As such it has no fixed penalty which could be met on our behalf, but requires instead our personal engagement with him. It is hard to see how a particular historical event could help in this respect. Furthermore, the model has depended heavily on a strict retributive logic of punishment (applying Augustine's analogies of metaphysical balance to concepts of divine justice, as indicated in chapter 7). But this has come under increasing pressure from utilitarian and humanitarian critiques of retribution - and the usual positivist critique of any trace of metaphysics. In its Anselmian form (the satisfaction of divine honour, as well as justice) it has also been subject to the critique of cultural relativism: feudal notions of honour which can be 'paid off' simply do not make sense any more. Cultural change is also considered the reason why sacrifice is no longer an adequate model. As long as some such principle as ' without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness' is declared then some sort of constitutive necessity for the cross of

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Christ can be conceived. But if the principle itself is culturally conditioned it is unlikely to convince. It could well be restated in some general form such as ' dealing with sin and evil is always a costly business', but then would most naturally imply a general application: i.e. that reconciliation is achieved by costly action in general. It offers no explanation of how or why it should be achieved by one particular and specific sacrifice. Finally, reconciliation has been conceived as a reversal of the sin of Adam. But of course this is only a reason for sustaining the traditional claim as long as Adam's sin is conceived as a particular historical event. Once the story of the fall is reconceived as a truth about all human experience, any appeal to the criterion of' fittingness' or parallelism pulls the story of redemption in the same direction: it requires constitutive divine activity in all human experience, not just in one particular event. For Colin Gunton, the common, corrosive critique which strains all such models arises from the legacy of the Enlightenment.3 Directly, and indirectly, it is Locke's confidence that morality may be widely known without unaided reason, and Kant's insistence on the autonomous capacity of every moral agent to realize the moral demand, which has undermined the role of Christ's constitutive saving efficacy. More specifically it can be easily seen how the major models of atonement buckle precisely under certain kinds of rational and moral criticism normally associated with the Enlightenment. This is just what lies behind Wiles' (and others') comments. Given a 'rationalistic' reduction of devils and demons to social and psychological disorder, it is a short step to deny all meaning to the metaphor. As we have seen, it certainly makes the notion of an historically decisive victory harder to conceive. In the same way we have already noted (and will develop further in chapter 7) that a moral critique can be offered of penal satisfaction for divine justice and honour: thus all models associated with this notion of satisfaction, which do tend to be clear constitutive models, become vulnerable at that point. Gunton likewise lays blame on Enlightenment assumptions for the demise of sacrificial metaphors and models, which also tend

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to have a strong constitutive core meaning. They are held to have been generated by the language of the Old Testament cult, now superseded by ethical concerns. Again, it is a moral critique which is being offered.4 The constitutive models are also brought under strict scrutiny by what Paul Avis calls the 'second enlightenment' of the human and social sciences of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These purport to explain the 'objective' nature of what has to be dealt with by God through the particular act of atonement as merely a psychosocial projection or construction of subjective reality. Avis writes: The themes of guilt and punishment which figure so centrally in atonement theories are prime candidates for clarification from these disciplines. The concept of reification, whereby psychosocial structures are projected onto the screen of'external' reality and treated as objective entities, is readily applicable to atonement theories that talk of sin, guilt, the moral law, the wrath of God, satisfaction and separation as though they were three-dimensional physical objects that could be measured, weighed, run into and moved about.5 Of course, this summary hardly does justice to the complexities of a well-mapped debate. There is much more to be said for - and against - these and other models of atonement, and Gunton himself offers this, as we shall see later. But this much does suffice to show the chief point of pressure: the explanation of how a particular event could constitute a universal, or at least widespread, change is precarious. And this is clearly an additional point to that of the previous chapter. We are not concerned now with the empirical embarrassment of failing to show clear evidence of this change in practice. We are failing to conceive how such a change could be brought about in principle, at least in the way that has been traditionally claimed for it. DEFENSIVE STRATEGIES

An increasingly common solution to the problem of conceiving a coherent means of salvation has been to deny its particularity. To be more precise, it is the constitutive nature of the particular event of Christ which is denied (or quietly omitted), while the

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revelatory nature of it is all the more firmly asserted. By constitutive I mean that salvation in some sense depends on the occurrence of the Christ event; that its occurrence is a divine achievement which includes but goes beyond the revelation of divine character; and that this achievement is significant for the whole of humanity. To omit this constitutive aspect of the claim, while still managing to convey many of the traditional concerns of orthodoxy through its revelatory impact, is a subtle move and bears out previous remarks that the role of revelation is multifarious in recent trends, and still powerful. It is an omission which certainly does cut a tempting path through some of the conceptual tangle already indicated. Equally, it makes a crucial compromise in order to do so, and it is specially important to realize this when the negative point is so well hidden in positive concerns. This is not only true of the more obviously subjectivist and exemplarist trends in those theories of atonement which flourished earlier this century.6 A trace of it may even be found in that apparently robust defence of objective, substitutionary, and juridical atonement theory: James Denney's The Death of Christ.1 Paul Avis' provocative estimate of Denney is this: 'a theory that ostensibly sets out to establish the objectivity of an atonement in which there is something accomplished and achieved for our salvation which could not be attained in any other way turns out to be simply a rather more profound version of the subjective theory'. 8 More recently there was D. M. Baillie's influential God Was in Christ. This provides a striking example of the more specific point about obscuring the possibility of Christ's constitutive role by concentrating on other positive concerns. Baillie is anxious to deny that the cross was merely an 'accidental symbol of a timeless truth' (as an abstraction is), and stresses that it is a real appearance in history of an atonement which has a widespread effect throughout history: ' an eternal work of atonement, supratemporal as the life of God is, but not "timeless" as an abstraction is; appearing incarnate once, but touching every point of history, and going on as long as sins

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continue to be committed and there are sinners to be reconciled'.9 But this begs the question as to whether that incarnate appearance is constitutive of the eternal atonement, or only illustrative or revelatory of it. It simply is not clear from the surrounding discussion. To talk of the 'appearance' or (as elsewhere) the 'incarnate part' of the eternal reality affirms the revelational value of the Christ event, but does not necessarily require anything more. Baillie gets nearer to allowing some constitutive role for the event when he writes ' the incarnation not only... gives us the Christian view of God, but also... it gives us that outcropping of divine atonement in human history which makes his mercy effectual for our salvation'. 10 Yet even this remains ambiguous. In what sense is it the atonement throughout history which makes God's mercy effectual, and in what sense that particular 'outcropping'? And since there is no further explanation of whether and how this atonement is made effectual, rather than merely demonstrated to be such, by the historical events, then we can hardly take it to be central to his thesis. The book was a major exposition of incarnation and atonement, sometimes hailed as an effective modern restatement of traditional claims, but in fact it was already sliding out of clear commitment to the constitutive role of the historical Christ event. Much the same has to be said of existentialist restatements, such as John Macquarrie's Principles of Christian Theology}1 In his chapter on reconciliation and historical revelation he certainly addresses the question at issue. A universal reconciling work (connected with the doctrine of creation) is affirmed, and this is specifically revealed in the particular event of Christ, but there is no clear claim that the Christ event constituted the possibility of such reconciliation: It is not that, at a given moment God adds the activity of reconciliation to his previous activities, or that we can set a time when his reconciling activity began. Rather, it is the case that at a given time there was a new and decisive revelation of an activity that had always been gong on, an activity that is equiprimordial with creation itself.12 Macquarrie is at pains to stress the significance of this particular

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revelation. It is a 'paradigmatic' manifestation, and therefore a 'focussing', and a 'symbol' of Being. It is the 'high-water mark' of God's providential activity. It is 'decisive for faith' (i.e. for human response). In that sense a revelatory event is constitutive of faith, and, therefore, indirectly of salvation. It is not merely illustrative but creates possibilities — and we shall see later how others have developed and deepened this strong view of revelation that Macquarrie offers. On the other hand, Macquarrie is equally anxious to avoid any sense that this event was necessary: we must not be 'tempted to...suppose that some particularly complex happening was necessary for God to be able to accept men'. It is 'once-for-air only in the sense that any historical event is unique. 13 As with Baillie, there is some ambiguity here. In expounding a demythologized ' Classic' theory of atonement he does claim that something has to be done for man, and this is achieved by Christ when the reconciling activity of God is brought into creation 'in a new and decisive manner' which 'focusses and spearheads' the work of God. But he offers no further explanation of whether or how this depends on the historical particularity of the Christ event, except in the sense that it is specially revealed there. The most promising hint he offers is in the notion of the corporate nature of Christ. If reconciliation achieved in Christ is carried forward (and back) to the rest of humanity by some ' re-presentation' of Christ in us, or us in him, then we have at least a suggestion of Christ's constitutive role. But this remains allusive and is not easily squared with his clear denial, quoted above, that we should not look for any necessity in the Christ event. Certainly the trend is not universal. Elsewhere, and particularly in continental theology, the constitutive nature of the Christ event is strongly defended, in a way which goes beyond the constitutive nature of revelation for faith. Karl Barth is its most notable and consistent exponent: he focusses fiercely on the particularity of Jesus Christ as the condition of divine 'work': ' I t is the particular fact and the particular way that Jesus Christ is very God, very man, and very God-man

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that he works, and he works in the fact, and only in the fact, that he is this one and not another.' 14 In fact for Barth too much of this divine work does have to do with a revelatory and epistemological purpose: the incarnate Son goes into a 'far country' as a revelation of God's glory.15 Yet it is also a substitutionary event. Jesus Christ takes our place as 'judge, judged, justice and judgement'; he is perfect penitent for us. 16 So there is certainly some kind of constitutive salvific achievement envisaged here, in addition to its significance as revelation. On the other hand, when Barth himself raises the question of how this event can be for us, when we are separated from it by time and space, he answers that this question is not the real problem.17 The very fact he raises the question in that form reassures us that Barth is backing the traditional claim. But it has to be said that his unwillingness to answer it in the same form does little to ease the pressure it imposes on the claim. Karl Rahner also addresses the claim, again with apparent confidence. But confidence is not clarity, and Rahner is a case in point. The most obvious translation has Rahner strongly affirming this claim: 'the death of Jesus and consequently his passion as a whole is a necessary constitutive element in the eschatological word of God's self-promise to the world as its absolute future'; 18 and we depend on that event in the sense that' through Jesus it is precisely possible... that I can really do the highest thing which can be expected at all from a human being'. 19 But he himself admits that it is not easy to explain how this is so.20 Once again it does not greatly ease the pressures we are dealing with. Nor does it check the trend in English theology. Admittedly, in the next chapter I shall refer to two recent contributions from English theology which have taken note of some continental material, and which are clearly concerned to put in a word for something like the traditional claim. But when we consider some of the most influential names of the recent Anglo-American world, the likes of Wiles and John Hick, there is no sign at all that the trend has been reversed. On the contrary, it is all the more explicit. In order to deal effectively

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with both suffering and sin there is no good reason to suppose God depends on the instrumentality of the Christ event. Quite the opposite. With regard to suffering both Wiles and Hick see historical particularity as a handicap, not a help. For Hick, 'if [God's] knowledge and understanding of human existence depended upon his having become incarnate on one occasion, it would be a much less full knowledge and understanding than is possible if he has a total awareness of his creation'. 21 For Wiles, because suffering is not a single shareable entity, but concrete and particular to individual experience, then God's suffering in Jesus does not constitute his suffering in the rest of humanity. Thus, 'the truth or otherwise of that conviction [God's self-identification with human suffering] is not determined by the truth or otherwise of a different order of divine self-identification in the person ofJesus. There does not seem to be any ground for claiming that the former is either causally dependent on or qualitatively transformed by the latter.' 22 With regard to sin, they acquiesce in the inadequacy of the various models mentioned above, and therefore dismiss any idea that ' the death ofJesus transformed God's relationship to man, and caused or enabled God to accept and love his sinful human children'. 23 Their solution is clear. For Hick, the Christ event is b u t ' one of the points at which God has been and still is creatively at work within human life3, whose vividness is that of a 'visible story', not an 'additional truth'. 24 For Wiles, it is 'in some way a demonstration of what is true of God's eternal nature'. 25 It is also an event which is an effective cause within history to transform some people's lives, a kind of constitutive role, but restricted to limited historical causation. To look for an elusive 'something more', for some sort of metaphysical achievement, is to chase an illusion; it is, as we have already seen, to chase only a 'will o' the wisp'. In these essays the move from the fully constitutive to the revelational nature of the Christ event therefore becomes uncompromising. God in no sense required the Christ event for his purposes of reconciliation. Indeed, in a further twist to the tale, both Wiles and Hick add that God did not need such an

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event even for revelational purposes. Hick is too sensitive to traditional associations between revelation and final salvation to assert that the Christ event is a unique revelation, for fear of implying limited possibilities of salvation (the point noted in our previous chapter). Wiles is equally sensitive to the historical fact that the character of God as loving and forgiving had already been grasped (e.g. in Hosea) apart from the Christ event.26 Nonetheless, both happily grant that the Christ event is a revelation, even though not uniquely so in every respect, and they certainly deny that it is that 'something more' of traditional claims. The most that can be clearly rescued for the constitutive nature of the particular Christ event is that, qua revelation, it helps constitute the possibility of true faith (Macquarrie), and has had a positive effect on some post-firstcentury history (Wiles). In that sense, and in that sense only, ' things are not as they were' in virtue of the Christ event. But in neither case is any claim being made that this is a constituent for salvation on which we all depend. So what should be said of this kind of response? It is nothing if not understandable. Some of the wider theological issues associated with the conceptual difficulties of the traditional claim have already been referred to, and they make this move attractive. A particular event does not easily give rise to a universal scope of reconciliation; it is also often associated with an objectified view of human guilt and an impersonal view of divine justice, requiring a change in God's attitude to save us from both; moreover, as we have seen, it is hard to express the notion of a particular constitutive action without implying it is a necessary means of salvation — and theologians are rightly reluctant to ascribe necessity to God's saving action: we are not surprisingly warned against the temptation to construct 'too elaborate a theory of atonement, or to suppose that some particularly complex historical happening was necessary for God to be able to accept men'. 27 This trend clearly sidesteps these theological pitfalls, as well as avoiding the general conceptual problem of relating particular events to universal effects.

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Yet I still have to register dissatisfaction both at the reasons for the trend, and at its final solution. It is, I believe, an unwarranted compromise of an important claim brought about more by a kind of failure of theological nerve, and a certain sleight of hand, than by genuinely irresistible pressures. For while fully accepting there are difficulties in articulating models of particular actions constituting universal effects, there is also the danger that we are being manoeuvred into making the task harder than it need be. For a start, to claim that a particular action is constitutive of universal reconciliation need not imply it is the only significant place of action. It may rather be taken as that action which constitutes the possibility of all other actions of the agent concerned. More specifically, we are not required to offer a model of how a particular event changes God's attitude to all people; the point need only be to conceive that a particular action enables (makes effective) God's saving action to all. Furthermore, just because a particular action is a constitutive means of universal possibilities it does not follow that it has to be a necessary means. There may be a number of possible means of constituting an achievement, particularly in the realm of creative and interpersonal actions, so that as long as more than one means can be deemed fitting, no single action must be deemed necessary {pace some expositors of Anselm).28 All this simply means that we should not be too readily driven to dilute an important part of the traditional claim just because its original colours have been painted over more luridly than they really warranted. More positively, the case that it is an important claim, not to be lightly abandoned, can be made as follows. First, a preliminary point may be made on the revelationist's own ground. For in fact there is no doubt that even a revelatory view of the Christ event gains greater depth and credibility from the kind of incarnational categories which normally belong to the constitutive view. We should consider again the claim that the Christ event is a revelation of the character of God, specifically in the sense that the Christ event is only an ' illustration' of the means of

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salvation. This would be the far point of the trend to revelationary views (not actually reached by the likes of Baillie and Macquarrie, but perfectly compatible with a merely revelationary view). It would warrant the claim that God saves in general in a manner like that in which Christ gave himself. It grants us a picture of God active throughout all human existence in a Christ-like manner. But then we should be aware that it provides this picture only by abstracting from a concrete event some general qualities of self-givingness, forgiveness, love, etc., and then applying them to the character of God's action towards us. As such we are at one remove from the nature of that action for us, and therefore at one remove also from the identity of the agent. In Christ we are confronted only with a likeness of divine action in general, not the divine agent himself in his action towards us. It therefore strictly limits the significance of the event even qua revelation. An analogy might help. One can say in general that a wife saved her husband through her loving acceptance of him at times of great stress in his job. One can go further and say that her love was like the way a mother will give up her time and talents to look after a handicapped child. But this is still an illustration and therefore an abstraction from the concrete reality of what she actually did for her husband to save him. Only if we can also say that she stayed up all night to soak up his angry frustrations, confronted the people at work responsible for his failures, and so on; only when we have access to her concrete actions are we really in touch with her, and the nature of her relationship with him. In other words, it is the actual constitutive actions within a relationship which bring us to a full grasp of who the agent is, rather than the idea of what he or she is like. Therefore only if God has in some way constituted his action towards all of us (existentially) by a particular, concrete event (in history) are we licensed to know and speak of his identity more directly, and so to relate to him more effectively in our experience. An historical particular greatly enhances the possibilities of revelation and faith. In this at least Macquarrie, amongst others, would agree: the Christ event is 'decisive for faith5, and fairly orthodox

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incarnational language will be appropriate and even necessary to support such a view (the agent must really be there in the event). Once this much is conceded, it is quite clear that the further slide to mere illustration is arrested. A non-incarnational illustration of the character and purposes of God simply does not give such effective access to that character; it does not reveal as effectively. Of course this may not be a decisive objection, in the sense that we are not always entitled to what we may wish for. We may well have to put up with indirect access to an elusive God. But we should at least make this point sharp enough to counter inconsistency, and hold the non-constitutivists more rigorously to the logic of their own position. For it has to be said that some of those who are most cautious of admitting the constitutive presence and action of God in Christ are most confident in asserting the character of God revealed there; they proclaim his self-giving love and forgiveness, not as faint, elusive analogies, not as abstractions drawn from the likeness of God, but as if we do have epistemological access to some concrete, constitutive act of God. In short, there is not a little theology within this trend which tends to be linguistically and epistemologically parasitic on a view whose necessity it denies. However, all this is to argue ad hominem. Since we have already severed the link (in this life) between epistemological and soteriological necessities, to argue the epistemological and revelational inadequacy of non-constitutive views is hardly sufficient to meet the point at issue. Even if a particular incarnational action is granted as constitutive for certain possibilities of faith for some (which includes knowing and response), that is not yet to establish its full significance for universal reconciliation (which includes the possibility of final salvation for all). The Christ event may well be constitutive of our capacity to grasp and relate to God's final purposes, but why is it important to maintain that it has yet a further role as previously defined: namely, in the actual achievement of those purposes, and in achieving them universally, not just in those who know of the event? For it is in these two ways that the fully constitutive claim is defined in tradition, and denied in this recent trend.

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In one sense the only proper answer to a question posed in such a way is that it is important to maintain the truth. If it is true, that is enough. Whether it is true will depend mostly on the authority granted to the traditional claim, but also on the extent to which it must be reconceived under the various pressures outlined already, or whether it can sensibly withstand them. It will therefore depend on the possibility of finding a coherent and credible model to express this 'further role' demanded by the constitutivist claim. Then, of course, if we are given such a model, we shall find weighty theological advantages attaching to it. These should be evident already from the preceding discussion. Not only will it provide ready continuity with the tradition, it will also safeguard soteriology against the problems intrinsic to the revelationist's revision: namely, the tendency to portray salvation as attainable through knowledge (an intellectualist and Pelagian tendency), and the consequent de facto tendency to ration salvation to those few privileged to know (ironically, the very tendency identified with some constitutivist models). Thus we must shortly turn to this major positive task, of sketching out an atonement model which adequately conveys the constitutivist claim, while resisting the cumulative pressures against it, which is the task of chapter 5. Before turning to this task in detail, however, it may be helpful first to offer here a basic summary of what will be proposed and then in the next chapter to take note of two more recent contributions to the debate which help push our thoughts in the same direction. The heart of the model to be proposed rests on what might be called the criterion of moral authenticity, and goes something like this: unless and until God himself has experienced suffering, death, and the temptation to sin, and overcome them, as a human individual, he has no moral authority to overcome them in and with the

rest of humanity. If this is accepted, then the Christ event becomes a constitutive action (for God) in his reconciling activity throughout history, in the sense that it helps form an essential ingredient in God's moral character. This is a perspective which Brian Hebblethwaite brings to

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bear on the Christ event, especially in respect of how God deals with suffering: Only if we can say that God has himself, on the cross, ' borne our sorrows' can we find him universally present 'in' the sufferings of others. It is not a question of'awareness' and 'sympathy'. It is, as Whitehead put it, a matter of the 'fellow-sufferer who understands'. This whole dimension of the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, its recognition of the costly nature of God's forgiving love, and its perception that only a suffering God is morally credible, is lost if God's involvement is reduced to a matter of 'awareness' and 'sympathy'.29 Hebblethwaite also hints at something similar for sin. He duly launches an attack at the more obviously unacceptable atonement models, implying briefly that he is on the side of non-constitutivists ('it needs to be stated quite categorically that God's forgiving love does not depend on the death of Christ, but rather is manifested and enacted in it'), 30 but then goes on, more suggestively: 'It is precisely because the Spirit who converts our hearts and builds up our life in the Spirit is the Spirit of the crucified God that God's forgiveness and our reconciliation have the profoundly moral quality that has been the real inspiration of Christian piety down the ages. ' 31 What we might also go on to suggest is an even stronger form of the argument. This proposes that in Christ God does not only constitute for himself a kind of moral authenticity. He also fulfils certain experiential conditions which equip him to appropriate that moral authenticity in an effective way. That is, in the business of bringing suffering, sinning, humanity to reconciliation and redemption, it is not only morally congruous that God should enact this himself as a human individual: it is also an experiential prerequisite for being able to achieve it in the rest of humanity, and for the rest of humanity to achieve it through him. Hebblethwaite might be hinting at this too: The specifically Christian insight is that this too, the movement from creation to God, takes place in God, through the humanity of Christ, and derivatively through ourselves... it is the incarnation which not only brings God to us, but creates the conditions in which our own response to him can be made... God incarnate also himself constitutes

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the perfect human response, by incorporation into which we are enabled to respond.32 There is, I believe, considerable intuitive force in this kind of appeal. Divine experience as an individual (historical particularity), as distinct from his experience merely 'alongside' individuals (existential universality), is crucial in the saving enterprise. It may be deemed constitutive of saving efficacy, not only revelatory of it. Of course, such a claim begs important theological questions. We are bound to ask again whether this sort of claim will inevitably pass from the moral and experiential ' authenticity' or 'congruity' of the Christ event, to its necessity? I have after all used the word 'prerequisite', and this may seem to make the position precarious in just this respect. Does it imply that God's experience was deficient before or apart from the Christ event, thus adding to it, and compromising classical attributes of divine perfection and impassibility? These are just some of the questions which need to be dealt with in working out a supporting atonement model in more detail, which will be attempted in chapter 5. Next, however, we should consider those two recent contributions which help prepare the ground so well.

CHAPTER 4

Two recent contributions

In addition to Brian Hebblethwaite's comments, two more extensive and systematic treatments of atonement theory also lend support to reverse the trend I have noted. The first, already referred to, is Colin Gunton's The Actuality of Atonement (1988). As we have seen, a main contention of the book is that various forms of rationalism bequeathed by the Enlightenment have eroded our confidence in metaphors as 'means for the advance of knowledge and understanding', and that atonement metaphors have suffered acutely in this process: All the main ways of spelling out the saving significance of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus contain a considerable metaphorical and imaginative content... The result is that the doctrine of the atonement, dependent as it is upon a particular historical story and the way it has been transmitted, has been a favourite candidate for rational criticism. The main images have been argued or refined away, leaving conceptions of the atonement which place the emphasis not on the significance of what happened with Jesus, but on the response of the believer.1 Gunton's concern is therefore to rehabilitate key atonement metaphors, to show that they still carry significant meaning about God's saving action in Christ - as a victory, a demonstration of justice, and a sacrifice. However, in each case a transformation of meaning is required for the metaphors to do their job: i.e. to convey knowledge of a 'real' action of God in Christ in these various ways.2 The nature of that real action is expounded in relation to the three metaphors. The cross is 'really', not metaphorically, a victory, because it reveals a new dimension of the nature of 42

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human life: namely, that evil forces are deprived of power by good, not evil, means. This is also a revelation about the nature of the world, not just of human life. Moreover, it reveals God as a saving God, and enables us to speak of him as such: ' We do not, in telling the story of Jesus, merely narrate a series of tales which may or may not illuminate contemporary life on earth... We are given a real but limited knowledge of the action and therefore of the being of God through the way in which Jesus does the conquering work of the Father. ' 3 Thus, although the cross is not taken to refer to a particular battle against ' literal' demons, nor to a clever deceit of a personified Satan, the metaphor of victory still stands for a real achievement, by God in Christ. Regarding the legal metaphors ofjustice, Gun ton holds with P. T. Forsyth and Barth that the cross is a real judgement on sin. It 'lays bare' aspects of the human condition and judges them much as a court decision declares a verdict of guilt. And God in Christ takes this judgement on himself. In so doing he provides a means of demonstrating that his free forgiveness is not offered out of moral indifference. On the contrary, it shows that real reconciliation between persons demands that moral guilt is faced and exposed. The metaphor of a legal verdict and bur just deserts before the law is therefore interpreted according to the dynamics of personal reconciliation, but it retains its power to convey how God 'really' acts to combine moral seriousness and mercy.4 The metaphor of sacrifice receives similar treatment. Although it needs to be translated and transformed from the cultic context, it does not thereby become redundant, leaving only the residue of a reductionist Christology about an exemplary human life. On the contrary, it carries immense power to convey the meaning of a highly significant offering to God: ' When, then, we tell the story of Jesus we do not narrate simply the tale of a true, Spirit-led, human being, touched but unpolluted by the disseminated corruption through which he passes, but of a human offering of life to the Father, concentrated and overflowing.'5 It is a total self-giving and orientation to the love of God which is also, therefore, ' an expression of the unfathomable power and grace of God'. 6

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This summarizes, and somewhat telescopes, Gunton's much richer exposition of these metaphors, and there is no doubt that he plunders their wealthy resources to good effect. He certainly attempts to demonstrate how we may conceive the reality of God's action in Christ, in these three ways, when 'real' is taken in contrast to 'merely illustrative'. It is not only an inspired human picture of victory, justice, and sacrifice: it is an actual divine achievement of these things. On the other hand it is less clear how far we may take the reality of this achievement in the widest sense we require, namely as constitutive of universal possibilities of salvation. A careful reading of Gunton shows that the main thrust of each transformed metaphor is still divine achievement to reveal truths about the human condition and the divine nature. Such truths may themselves constitute new possibilities, but they are not necessarily constituted apart from our knowledge of them. In the passages quoted the cross reveals the nature of victory; as a court declares a verdict of guilt, so the cross lays bare certain aspects of our condition; and as a concentrated self-offering it is also an expression of the grace of God. As such it still stands largely in line with Macquarrie's view that the Christ event is decisive (even constitutive) for understanding, faith, and response, but not so clearly in any sense beyond that. Such, as I have said, is the main thrust. But it is not all. Close reading also suggests Gunton wishes to push us further, however sketchily it is expressed. For even within the exposition of these metaphors, he does begin to trail the colours of a more robust constitutive view. Within the metaphor of victory he acknowledges an eschatological dimension, such that ' the past victory is guarantee [my emphasis] of a future consummation'. 7 Within the metaphor of legal judgement he follows Barth approvingly when he states that 'it is not simply a matter of showing something to be so. Because it is the action of the eternal Son become man, it is also a redemptive action taking place [for us] '.8 And in the passage already quoted, the cross is therefore a place where God provides the means of free forgiveness. Within the metaphor of sacrifice, drawing here on Edward Irving, it is even more explicit:

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Because Jesus, the Word madeflesh- and not just 'a human being' as some theologically impoverished translations have it - gave his life, all life takes its being from him. 'Life we hold of the purchase of Christ's sacrifice made from the foundation of the world' (p. 295). The metaphor is thus stretched almost to breaking point: a sacrifice from eternity, taking place in time and returning to eternity with Jesus' resurrection and ascension.9 There is not much more than the bare bones of a claim here, and even that is allusive. But there is a little more flesh to them in the following chapter on 'The Atonement and the Triune God5. There it becomes apparent that Gunton has been deliberately suppressing the question of a full constitutive claim until this point, for tactical reasons.10 But now he does ask clearly about the way in which the 'victory, justification, and sacrifice of a man... at the same time takes up into itself and realises the life of [all] the creation'; the question of whether and how Jesus is substitute and representative for us all; put another way, whether the ' real evil of the real world is faced and healed ontologically in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus'. 11 Gunton certainly thinks that there must be some sense in which this is true. If not, he fears a slide back into merely exemplarist, subjective, and Pelagian doctrines of salvation which, as I have already indicated, associate easily with nonconstitutivist views. He therefore asserts a christological solution in which Jesus Christ is both substitute (doing for us what we cannot do for ourselves) and representative (enabling us to follow after him), in the victory, judgement, and sacrifice required for full salvation.12 He also immediately acknowledges some of the difficult questions which arise from such christological and soteriological claims. These are the familiar questions to which I have already alluded: how do we conceive the inclusion of all humanity in Christ? And why is there not more empirical evidence of this reconciling power now, visible in all (or at least some) humanity? In the first area Gunton takes us just a little further. He refers to the doctrine ofenhypostasia, which 'teaches that the humanity

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ofJesus takes its particular character from the fact that it is the humanity of the eternal Word'. 13 And, just because it is the eternal Word's humanity, it 'carries with it significance for the rest of humankind'. How is this? The explanation depends on identifying Jesus as the creative Word, and on a ' trinitarian bedrock': if Jesus is the 'one through whom all things are created', then he is related, simply as a matter of fact, to all creation; for ' to be part of the creation means to be related to the Father through the Son and in the Spirit'. 14 Yet it remains sketchy in the sense that no further conceptual elaboration is offered either of how we identify Jesus with the eternal Word, or of how we conceive the relation of all things to him. What Gunton does assert is the possibility of living 'as if this relation were not real' - and this accounts for the limited empirical effects of the Christ event (the second of the two questions raised). He insists that the relationship has to be 'realised', and 'to take concrete form in time and space'. 'The ontological relationship of creator and created, grounded in the Word and reordered in the enhypostatic humanity of Jesus, must become ontic^ He then points to the 'Community of Reconciliation' (the Church) as that concrete locus of the reordered relationship, and the place where the language lives; where the metaphors have ' taken shape and maintained their currency'. 16 Yet of course this move still leaves largely unexplored the nature and significance of the universal ontological relationship, which spreads far beyond the bounds of the Church. Indeed, it returns us to the position with an emphasis we were seeking to transcend (though not exclude): namely, the Christ event conceived primarily as constitutive of a community of faith and response, by virtue of its revelatory impact. The further question as to how we may conceive Christ constituting universal saving possibilities is acknowledged by Gunton, as we have seen, but not pursued. He points us down this path, but chooses to concentrate on others, suggesting there is still more work to be done if we are to rehabilitate a fully constitutivist view.

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Paul Fiddes likewise offers a recent systematic treatment of atonement metaphor and associated theories. Past Event and Present Salvation (1989)17 is a comprehensive and thorough survey of the issues raised. It offers a similar transformation of metaphors. Christ's sacrifice is associated with enabling our self-offering;18 the demands of justice are met because the verdict of the cross enables a penitential spirit to reorder us in right relationship with God; 19 Christ's victory enables our struggle against existential forces of personal and social evil. 20 These tend to be personalistic reinterpretations of the metaphors. Fiddes also points out that they carry the metaphors over into a subjective emphasis: Christ's work enables our response. And it is a strong and persuasive argument of the book that the full meaning of salvation must include that actual subjective effect in us: i.e. there is not much sense to justification without some sense of sanctification built into it. 21 Fiddes also shows the strong case which can made out for the saving efficacy of the Christ event even when conceived as revelation. Like Gunton he follows Macquarrie, in this at least, that Christ's demonstration of a victory is more than imparting knowledge and the provision of an external example: 'The victory of Christ actually creates victory in us. In the first place there is the power of revelation. The act of Christ is one of those moments in human history that "opens up new possibilities of existence". Once a new possibility has been disclosed, other people can make it their own, repeating it and reliving the experience. ' 22 He offers the example of mountain climbing. Once it has been achieved by a pioneer climber it is perceived, and indeed becomes, possible for others. The same point is developed in a subsequent chapter on the nature of love. There he follows first Reinhold Niebuhr, 23 and then R. S. Lee's Freudian theories of the ego and super-ego, 24 to show that healthy reordering of ourselves is significantly enabled, not just imitated, when we are confronted and identify with the story of Christ. There is not just an 'apprehension' of truth in revelation and faith, but also a 'power'; 25 there is a 'link between perception of truth, or what is real, and the transformation of the self'.26 Thus 'the story and image of

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Christ... can transform the mind... The effect of revelation is much deeper than a mere moving of emotions.' 27 This is a helpful and salutary reminder that revelatory and exemplary accounts of Christ's saving work are not to be written off as entirely ineffectual. As we have been taught by Macquarrie, they can have a constitutive meaning, which certainly needs to be incorporated into any adequate overall account of atonement theory. But Fiddes himself is not content with this alone, nor with a wholly subjective transformation of the metaphors. He is concerned throughout the book (unlike Gunton) to test each image and metaphor against that precise question which concerns us most: namely, the claim to that kind of objectivity which insists that the process of salvation here and now in some sense depends on the Christ event, and how we may conceive the nature of that dependence. 28 For while its saving power as revelation is important, it is not sufficient an explanation of this claim. I have already indicated why it is insufficient. The tradition claims more (as Fiddes acknowledges). It claims more because the merely revelatory power of a particular historical event is restricted in scope, both in time and space. It would seriously compromise the universality of the divine potential to save. Thus Fiddes pushes us to further dimensions of meaning in the Christ event - which are highly suggestive and not unlike the preliminary outline of the position offered at the end of our previous chapter. He pursues the full constitutive claim, and introduces two complementary lines of theological thought to help meet it. The first is to suggest that the Christ event brings something new to God's experience. In some sense it changes God. This is not a change in God's attitude (e.g. from wrath to love), he hastens to add, but it is ' something new in the divine experience of the world and himself'.29 So whether it is conceived as a sacrificial experience of personal obedience and self-offering, or as the experience of perfect penitence, or victory over sin, it is a divine journey which actually 'increases' his experience. Fiddes is bold and quite explicit about this, and hints strongly

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that it 'enables' God himself in his saving work, especially when interpreting the legal metaphor of justice: A God who journeys like this can enter a new depth of the human predicament when a Son so intimately bound to him in obedience suffers desolation, and makes response from that abyss...This 'new experience' for God is the truth behind the 'objectivity' of the theory of penal substitution which declares that something has happened for God the Father as well as for human beings at the Cross.30 He goes on to stress again that this is not a change in attitude, nor a 'necessity thrust upon him': but it is an expression of his own free decision to save. The second line of thought then joins this experience of God which was achieved in history to our experience in the present. This is done by the simple expedient of stressing the role of the doctrine of the Spirit. Because the crucified Jesus is 'more than the memory of the Church'; because he is also carried into human hearts and minds by the Spirit; so the response (i.e. experience) within God which is Jesus' experience may be joined to our response. The Spirit communicates the divine personhood of the Logos to our natures. This is Fiddes' exposition of Moberly, Schleiermacher (and Athanasius).31 But it is also something he finds and develops directly out of St Paul's teaching on the Spirit. 32 There he finds incorporation language in conjunction with spirit language: the Spirit includes us in the body of Christ. Moreover, there are images of the Spirit which 'enable us to think of the reconciling work of God reaching into the whole creation'. He cites Romans 8 where all creation is groaning in travail juxtaposed with the image of the interceding Spirit, and the Spirit as the breath or wind of God, blowing where it wills. Here, then, are two lines of thought which Fiddes offers, and which provide a definite hint of how the saving work of God, achieved in Christ, must be conceived in such a way that it reaches far wider than the conscious knowledge or explicit faith of some human individuals or communities. For although he does not bring these two lines of thought together in quite the stark way that I am proposing and intend to consider further, it is a short step to do so: God ' equips' himself in Christ with

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an experience he then offers universally through the Spirit of Christ. It is another and even more promising contribution in the direction I wish to travel. Yet here too he leaves much more work to be done. For what he does not attempt to do is to explore further some of the conceptual assumptions underlying his theological proposals. For instance, he asserts 'new' experiences in God, but does not develop the question as to whether this becomes part of the eternal character, reaching forwards and backwards, or whether God, like us, is temporally conditioned and confined to successive 'tensed' experiences. He also asserts, as already quoted, that God the Father is so intimately bound to the Son that the Son's experience is a new experience for God; also that the Spirit proceeds from the Son as well as the Father. No doubt this is careful and sensitive christological and Trinitarian language. But it does still beg further clarification as to how we may conceive the experience of Christ to be, in some sense, also the experience of the Godhead. The question of whether we can and should think of some personal identity between Jesus of Nazareth and the Godhead cannot be sidestepped: if 'they' are subject of the same experiences, then must they share a common personal identity? Likewise, when Fiddes elsewhere asks for further clarity about the 'causative link' between the present act of God and his act in Christ he asks the right question. 33 But his own Pauline answer is so cast in Biblical categories that the underlying conceptual questions remain. More work is still in order, and the following chapters will suggest some of the ways in which this can be carried out.

CHAPTER 5

Creating an atonement model

It is commonplace to insist that no single atonement model will do justice to every Biblical image and theological concern. What follows is no exception. It is but a brief outline of one possible picture of how God saves through Christ, drawing on various strands of Scripture and tradition, but making no claim to exhaust all of them. As will now be apparent, the point of it is to help demonstrate that there are ways of conceiving how universal possibilities of salvation may be constituted by the particular event of Christ, without inflicting unacceptable violence on our moral, theological, and conceptual sensibilities. As far as traditional models are concerned I have already offered a cursory indication of their chief characteristics, and their vulnerabilities. Since Gunton and Fiddes, amongst many others, have dealt with them so fully, I do not intend to add more than passing reference to them, but will concentrate instead on this attempt at another, positive, picture. In doing so, it should be clear by now what we are bound to look for: a soteriological achievement in the Christ event which includes, but goes beyond, revelation, and which creates possibilities for all time and space. I take it for granted that we should also be alert to all the traditional concerns of atonement theory on the way: that is, we require a model which also illuminates the paradox of salvation by divine grace, yet involving our cooperation. As Baillie has it: ' not I but the grace of God, yet truly I'. We should start by formulating, in the light of preceding discussion, a more precise form of the question we are trying to answer. It might go something like this: what is it about any 51

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particular act that could constitute possibilities for the effectiveness of every other act the agent undertakes in relation to other agents throughout

time and space? This is a form which safeguards the universality of divine action, as well as the uniqueness of the particular. Put in this way it is easy to see how some possible answers reflect various strands of the traditional atonement models. A particular act could constitute universal redeeming possibilities because it effects a changed attitude in the agent. Thus God achieves something in Christ which enables him to change his attitude for ever after (and before). As we have seen, this is reflected in Anselmian theory, and especially in its more modern, though distinct, counterpart of penal substitution: the Christ event pays off a particular debt, the scales of justice are balanced, God need no longer exact retribution, and mankind can go free. Alternatively, a particular act could constitute universal redeeming possibilities because it effects a changed attitude in the objects of the action. Thus God achieves something in Christ which enables us to change our attitude, so that he can relate to us differently ever after. This could be conceived externally, by the example of Christ which stimulates repentance and reform. Or it could be conceived internally by some de facto change in us which is not empirically observable, but in virtue of which we are ' counted' different, by being mystically caught up in the perfection of Christ. The former is the way of Abelard (in part) 1 down to Wiles, the latter (under various guises) from St Paul to Karl Barth. Or else a particular act could constitute universal redeeming possibilities, not because it effects a changed attitude in the agent (God), nor in the objects of the action (us), but because it deals with a third reality come between God and mankind. That is, it achieves a victory over evil forces, and both God and man are free to relate without their malevolent interference. This, of course, is the battle cry of Gustaf Aulen's ' Classic' theory, reflected especially in the earliest Fathers, and in Martin Luther. No doubt, as I have already conceded, some versions of all these, properly qualified and defended, can and should take

Creating an atonement model their place in the galaxy of complementary atonement models. But because their limitations are so clear, let us also consider this alternative which I have already begun to sketch out in the preceding chapter. A particular act could constitute universal redeeming possibilities because it equips the agent with certain qualities or experiences which 'qualify' him to relate more effectively to the objects of his action. More specifically, it qualifies him to engage in the full meaning and demands of reconciliation; included within that is the capacity to elicit change within personal agents, whatever their experience, and without violating their freedom. Thus God in Christ takes into his own divine experience that which qualifies him to reconcile, redeem, and sanctify in his relationship with all people everywhere. To adapt one of Fiddes' pictures: it is something like the mountain guide who first crosses a difficult terrain himself, in order to equip himself to take across all who will follow him. It is a journey we could not make apart from him, yet must make. It is, of course, the journey of dying to self and living wholly to God - through temptation, suffering, and death itself. That, in embryo, is the kind of model which the preceding discussion has brought to gestation. It must now be further expounded, clarified, and defended. FURTHER EXPOSITION

First, a further preliminary word about the nature of reconciliation and salvation in its full sense, which will help fill out the picture. 'Full sense', in terms of content, scope, and means of salvation, is important, for we should always resist the temptation to shortchange the concept simply in order to make it more conceivable. I take it that we are not to be meanminded about the divine achievement. I have already indicated in the introduction that the discussion will have to be limited to the reconciliation of human individuals. But even in these terms the scope is large, and can be wrongly restricted. That which must happen in relation to us for the divine ideal to be realized is not just the divine word

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of forgiveness, not just that we should be 'counted' righteous by some kind of legal fiction, nor even 'made' righteous by divine fiat which bypasses all human involvement (such an event would, arguably, replace one person by another, rather than redeem the existing person; it would also render this whole creative enterprise redundant since we might just as well have been made thus in the first place). Rather, it is that we should actually become righteous, in the sense that we relate rightly to God and each other in every respect. In traditional theological terms it requires sanctification as well as justification. In Gospel terms, this entails dying to self and living to God. It requires a turning away from all self-centredness which excludes others, and freely relating with love, worship, and respect to God, humankind, and our environment, in due proportion. It is Rahner's 'highest thing which can be expected'. Only so shall we, as well as God, be satisfied, since our nature is so constituted by God to be ultimately satisfied with nothing less. This is the proper end of all human existence, a morally and religiously coloured eudaemonism, a true and worthy 'hope of happiness'. 2 It is, I imagine, relatively uncontroversial as a hope within the Christian tradition, even if we have to look to the eschaton for its fulfilment. Fiddes has already reminded us of it, and rightly so.3 So all this has to happen. It has to happen (or at least to begin) under the human conditions of creatureliness, of sin, suffering, contingency, and mortality. We have to be involved in its happening, if it is to have meaning to ourselves and not to some other self or some automaton, and yet we cannot possibly achieve it ourselves. Such is our human condition, as well as our hope. Therefore such also is the divine task and its clear parameters. It follows how the particular divine act in Jesus Christ can indeed be seen as a prerequisite of his achievement of all this, universally, in us. God in Jesus consistently and perfectly did the very thing which must happen in all of us: he died to self and lived to God. He does this as an individual human being under the normal conditions of a finite, fallen world, 'learning'

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faith as a fragile mortal. Having done this as an individual (entailing historical particularity), his spirit (transcending spatial and temporal particularity, having access to all time and space) can relate that achievement to every other individual. Because the spirit of Christ which is in and with us, potentially or actually, in time and eternity, is the ' experienced' spirit of the perfected man Jesus, the possibility of our ultimate perfection is established. The fact of the resurrection (though not necessarily the precise nature of it) thus becomes a vital ingredient in this model. For the resurrection stories demonstrate that continuing life and accessibility of the risen, 'experienced' Christ (bearing the marks of his experience) in various modes, from the upper room to Pentecost: this is necessary to the full soteriological work. As St Paul claims, if Christ is not raised we are still in our sin; because he is raised then all can be brought to life. It also follows that the possibility is truly established by grace. In living the perfect human response to God, God does in Jesus Christ the thing we cannot do ourselves, yet must do; it is the life which now can be lived in us, but only through that act in Christ. Following from this it is also possible to develop the model to illuminate the 'causal joint' between the spirit of Christ and the spirit of men. The most obvious analogies are drawn from intimate interpersonal relations where we gain some inkling of the process required. For even between fellow human beings, limited on both sides by the masks and constraints of imperfect spiritual and physical expression, a close relationship can significantly change one or both parties. More specifically, and especially in a parent—child relationship, the experience of the one may draw the other through into the same maturity, whether it is the business of learning to swim or learning to pray. At the same time, provided that the relationship is a healthy and non-manipulative one, there is no question of the one violating the other's personal integrity: the changed party who has been brought through to new dimensions of being will want to say precisely ' not I but the grace of another... yet still I'. So how much more might this process be conceived as

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effective when one of the parties is the spirit of Christ, operating without the encumbrance of his own spatio-temporal limitations, and at the most intimate level of relationship. It should be clear, therefore, that this kind of process is not achieved merely by imitation of an external exemplar: it is precisely by the dynamics of close personal union at every level of being (unconscious as well as conscious) that this occurs. It is not just by one individual's efforts to follow another, but by some sort of ' incorporation' into another person that we are changed. Just as our identity, individually and collectively, is chiefly determined by the interaction of self and other selves (rather than merely by ourselves and other objects of our perception), so will our capacity to change also be determined in the same way. THE MODEL AND THE TRADITION

Clearly I make no claims for complete originality for this kind of model. It is, for a start, a possible elaboration of Hebblethwaite's comment already quoted: ' I t is the incarnation which not only brings God to us, but creates the conditions in which our own response to him can be made...God incarnate also himself constitutes the perfect human response, by incorporation into which we are enabled to respond'. 4 It also draws on a number of soteriological images and concepts from Scripture and throughout the Christian centuries. A summary of them would include the following. Beginning with Scripture, the model should certainly count as a possible exposition of some of the soteriology of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Having established the divine identity of Jesus in the first chapter, chapter 2 vv. 10-18 expounds the divine way of salvation through Jesus. The opening phrase of v. 10 'it was clearly fitting' (literally, ' it becomes God': a rare form for the New Testament) stops short at claiming logical necessity for this way, but equally stresses its appropriateness to a Jewish readership for whom it is likely to be startling, to say the least. This fitting way is then expounded precisely in these terms: the God through whom all things exist brings things to their proper end and fulfilment by entering into the same conditions as they

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inhabit and being perfected himself through those conditions (of suffering (v. 10, v. 18), death (v. 14), and sinfulness (v. 17)). It is actually said to be Jesus as 'the leader' who does this, rather than God himself, but then the whole point of the first chapter was to establish the identity of that leader as the one through whom all things exist (v. 2), the very stamp of God's being (v. 3). The fact that this divine act requires first that he shares human experience is reiterated insistently, in terms that a Jewish readership could relate to: just as a priest brings his people to perfection within the terms of the Jewish sacrificial system in virtue of being 'of one stock', so Jesus is our 'brother' (v. 11); or, to change the analogy, just as children of a family share the same flesh and blood, so Jesus shared ours (v. 14). The further point that this divine experience then becomes the means by which we are ' brought to glory' is made explicit in respect of death and suffering: ' since he himself has passed through the test of suffering, he is able to help those who are meeting their test now' (v. 18). It also clearly refers to God's dealing with sin, since the illustration from the sacrificial system is drawn from the Day of Atonement ceremonies: the High Priest goes into the Holy of Holies to expiate the sins of the people. The model also draws inspiration from Pauline thought. In general terms it is thoroughly Pauline to assert that God's act in Christ achieves the full demands of salvation, sanctification as well as justification, through grace, and by virtue of our intimate union with him. It parallels our union with Adam, and just as that first union has determined sin and death, so the second 'undoes' its effects and determines righteousness and life instead. 1 Corinthians summarizes succinctly: 'you are in Christ Jesus by God's act, for God has made him our wisdom, our righteousness, our sanctification and redemption' (ch. 1 v.

3°)The notion of this intimate union is especially important in St Paul's soteriology, generating a variety of terminology to express it. We are members of 'one body', in 'one spirit', 'Christ's', and 'in Christ'. All these express, in E. P. Sanders' words, a participatory union, which is crucial to any under-

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standing of how we are saved. He sums up Pauline atonement theory thus: We see... that the prime significance which the death of Christ has for Paul is not that it provides atonement for past transgressions (although he holds the common Christian view that it does so), but that, by sharing in Christ's death, one dies to the power of sin or to the old aeon, with the result that one belongs to God. The transfer is...from one lordship to another. The transfer takes place by participation in Christ's death.5 C. F. D. Moule has also drawn attention to the significance of this notion, more specifically for Christology than for soteriology.6 This arises most obviously when the nature of the union is expressed in the terminology of' us in Christ' rather than ' Christ (or his spirit) in us' - a point we shall be returning to shortly. However, the chief point that Moule makes in the service of Christology remains apposite for the model of soteriology which we have offered: in some way or other the significance of Jesus was grasped in the Pauline epistles as a 'corporate person', an historically particular person to whom we all can (and must) nevertheless be joined as part of an 'organic whole'. 7 When we move to Patristic attempts at soteriology it is striking how some of these same features emerge as the dominant theme. In the pervasive theory of recapitulation, already noted, a chief rationale of the incarnate life is to ' pass through' or 'experience' every aspect of human being in order to 'sanctify' it for us all.8 The precise means by which Christ communicates his sanctified experience to the rest of mankind may be conceptually obscure, requiring some sort of Platonic notion of consubstantiality and real universals (which treats human nature as a generic whole), but the general assertion of what is achieved, and how, is clear enough. And it is certainly not an isolated idea. J. N. D. Kelly makes this quite plain in the passage already quoted: Running through almost all the patristic attempts to explain the redemption there is one grand theme which, we suggest, provides the clue to the Fathers' understanding of the work of Christ. This is none other than the ancient idea of recapitulation which Irenaeus derived

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from St Paul, and which envisages Christ as the representative of the entire race... Because He is very God and identified himself with the human... the victory He has obtained is the victory of all who belong to Him.9 Later christological controversies produced similar soteriological spin-offs in much the same vein. One of the most celebrated is that dictum of Gregory Nazianzen's, already cited: 'the unassumed is the unhealed'. 10 In his reaction to Apollinarian Christology, in which Christ did not assume a human soul, Gregory complained that this would leave every human soul unredeemed. The principle seems to be precisely that of our model: in order to deal effectively with the human condition in general God 'must' himself enter into every aspect of that condition in Christ. Wiles properly warns against reading out of this principle any soteriological argument for the strict necessity of incarnation, not least since its main thrust (in context) was to establish the full humanity of Christ,11 not his divinity. But his -formulation of the logical structure of the principle by no means excludes it: it reflects the general truth that 'you can't do anything effective about something without entering into that kind of relationship with it which is appropriate to your intended objective'.12 On its own this is too general and platitudinous a principle to prove anything much at all, but it is certainly congruous with our proffered model. Of course, such strands from Scripture and the early Fathers, though significant, are selective. I have already made clear that there is no claim by this model to be all-inclusive. It is true that other categories of law, justice, penalty, and remission tended to dominate atonement theory, especially in the creative periods of the Middle Ages and Reformation, until the end of the eighteenth century. And although such categories are by no means incompatible with this model, they have tended to generate the rather different pictures of penal and sacrificial substitution, already noted. But key features of our model have never been entirely absent. For instance, there are highly suggestive passages in Luther's theology of the cross which expound the passion and death of Christ as a kind of perfect penitence: the effort of

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resisting temptation in order to live wholly for God is a kind of analogue in a perfect man for repentance in the imperfect. The incarnation then becomes, in this highly specific sense, the means by which God goes through the painful business of repentance, as well as the general business of learning faith as a man. The point is, once again, that God in Christ is doing everything that we have to do, but cannot, in order to do it in and for us. Then in the profusion of writing about the atonement in the nineteenth century and at the turn of this century there was new emphasis on the personal nature of reconciliation, which revived the notion that God requires not simply satisfaction conceived impersonally according to the scales of justice (as a paid penalty), but actual penitence and right relationship between persons. There must be a perfect human response, not merely an appropriate punishment. This naturally focussed attention on the earthly experience of Jesus as the locus of this response which was then retrospectively and prospectively communicated to the rest of mankind. J. McLeod Campbell is a case in point. He appeals to what God in Christ 'felt' in making his perfect response as a perfect penitent. While he stops short at ascribing consciousness of sin itself to Christ he does insist on a kind of analogy to the experience of sin, precisely as the prerequisite of Christ's capacity to draw us out of it by some sort of personal relationship.13 And R. C. Moberly's Atonement and Personality was more explicit in proposing Christ's experience as a kind of perfect penitence to aid our imperfect attempts (it was a view dismissed at the time as full of grave difficulties,14 and more recently as merely a valuable metaphor,15 but may well prove to have more mileage in it if we can sustain our model here). Then there is also the work of P. T. Forsyth, who expounds a similar concern for the personal nature of reconciliation in his extraordinarily powerful (and rather neglected) The Work of Christ}% Likewise, H. R. Mackintosh stresses that the death of Christ must convey the forgiving love of God by being actually reproduced within us: 'it has no power to reconcile when regarded purely externally as an event of bygone history'.17

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But it is Barth, again, who has provided the most extensive account of reconciliation, in which the particular nature of the Christ event is expounded as a crucial ingredient in God's experience (God's 'history'), so that it also may become in some sense the necessary history of humanity: ' what we men must suffer... can be suffered for us only by God Himself as man: if, that is to say, it is to take place validly and effectively for us all'. 18 To be sure, Barth is always anxious to assert the divine freedom: God is not to be bound by any necessity. But he has nonetheless chosen to constitute his — and our — salvation history in this way, through Christ. This has been only a cursory canter through some traditional soteriology — but enough, I trust, to demonstrate a thread of real, if varied, connections with our model. COUNTERING THE OBJECTIONS

A chief objection will be that this model requires us to believe that, apart from the Christ event, the eternal God would lack certain 'experiences' which enable him to save. This might seem to imply divine inadequacy. Classical divine attributes of immutability, impassibility, omniscience, and perfection are called into question. As long as God is conceived as existing only in time, knowing the future only as potential, not experiencing it as actual, then it would indeed be hard to deny these implications. Before the Christ event certain experiences such as resisting temptation, dying to self, living by faith through suffering as a human individual, were unknown to God except as future possibilities. To rescue him from the charge of ontological deficiency we would then need to employ devices of special pleading, appealing to the unique nature of divine potentiality. That is, we would need to show that, within the structure of divine reality, the potential to become a human individual and undergo such experiences is equivalent to its actuality. But we would have to admit that this is a strained defence, both logically and theologically. It is not easy to see how a potentiality can be equivalent to its actuality without already

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collapsing into it.19 And if God already contained the requisite experience within his 'potential', the actuality of the Christ event then becomes, once again, merely demonstrative — a ' visual aid' of the divine reality under conditions of creation rather than a constitutive element of it. We would be back with an event of merely epistemological, not ontological, significance in the economy of salvation. However, if God is also conceived existing in eternity (i.e. transcending time), we are in a better position to stake out a defence. If our past, present, and future are experienced by God in something like an extended specious present (differentiated 'spatially' as before and after, but not temporally), then his experience in and as Jesus Christ is always a constitutive part of the divine nature. This aspect of divine nature is only the case because God was in Christ at a particular point in space and time but, by the same token, it is always the case. So we are not being asked to conceive divine reality as ever having been significantly changed, added to, or 'improved'. Such a view of divine eternity is frequently dismissed, sometimes quite ferociously, as wholly untenable on both conceptual and more general theological grounds. It has become increasingly unfashionable, rejected not only (predictably) by process theologians, but even amongst their more conservative critics.20 It is held to be incompatible with divine personhood, divine action, creaturely freedom, the reality of change, and so on. And of course it does strain the limits of language and theological imagination, requiring not a little special pleading itself. But the criticism usually arises from a negative definition of divine eternity as sheer timelessness within God, also implying that God can have no experience of temporality within his creation. In fact neither aspect of the definition is necessary to a doctrine of eternity. It certainly does require that some part of the structure of God's experience transcends our sequence of past, present, and future, but need not exclude some real divine presence within our temporality as well; nor does it have to exclude some kind of temporal experience within the divine experience.

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If this seems to imply a serious contradiction, for example that God both does and does not experience our future as future, then we must again admit that language and imagery will be strained: we have to conceive different textures of divine experience coexisting within the same divine reality without falsifying each other. Yet it is hardly surprising if some special pleading is required to describe the structure of divine reality, and the pressures to do so are enormous. With due qualification a concept of divine eternity not only can be developed, but must be. Elsewhere I have offered a more detailed account of both the possibility and necessity of speaking of God's eternity in this way: it is actually a prerequisite, not an obstacle, to effective, free, and personal interaction between God and the world in universal terms. 21 I am now simply pointing out how helpful it is also in sustaining an adequate doctrine of the particular divine action in Christ. A further difficulty which arises specifically from invoking a concept of eternity in relation to this model is its effect on the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, and the notion of divine freedom in the whole creative enterprise. If God's experience within creation is conceived as a constituent aspect of his eternal nature, are we then bound to conceive creation itself as, in some sense, co-eternal, and are we also bound to conceive God as, in some sense, depending on the world? In fact I see no additional difficulties for the doctrine. It is no more difficult to conceive God freely deciding to constitute some aspect of his own nature and experience at point ' x ' within his continuum of'before and after', than it is to conceive him freely deciding at time ' t ' within his temporal experience. The question of how we can conceive this as a free act, as distinct from a necessary act, would belong to both if it presents a problem at all. At this point it may also be pertinent to note that these kinds of objections can be turned on their head. Although they are cast in conceptual form they may also mask some more general, tender, religious sensibilities. They may betray a religious unease at any thought of a God who uses human experience to 'complete' his own. But if this is the case the stark alternative

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provides a telling rejoinder: is it more acceptable to speak of God using us or of ourselves using God? Following Barth, Robert Jenson answers, rhetorically, thus: What role does God play in our lives? It is an inevitable but wrong question. We shall be freed from it only by captivation to the right question: what role do we play in God's life?22... The story is not our story with a role for Christ. The story is Christ's story with roles for us. To state the most audacious of Barth's propositions straightaway: the God-man Jesus Christ, as a historical event, is the ontological foundation in God of all reality other than God.23 Jenson finds 'space' within God for human experience by appeal to the Cappadocian doctrine of the Trinity, and authority for this in Jonathan Edwards as well as Barth.24 But whether or not he is deemed to have sufficiently developed his doctrinal authority and conceptual framework, the force of his polemic is clear enough: far from implying divine inadequacy, it may be a metaphysical and religious compliment to deity to conceive God taking up human experience into his own. But there are other possible objections. There is, for instance, the familiar complaint brought against Irenaeus' doctrine of recapitulation. God did not in fact take all human experience into his own in Christ: just because it was a particular incarnation it was strictly limited, excluding the experience of womanhood, old age, marriage, mass communications, etc., and all the peculiar colouring with which these categories of experience bring to sin, temptation, sorrow, and joy. Therefore he did not adequately equip himself to 'help those meeting their test now'. However, this a curiously wooden and unconvincing argument which is easily deflated by any common sense phenomenology of human experience. There are key aspects of human experience common to virtually any individual life, and these are precisely the features which equip us to share a common humanity. These are (to borrow from analytical terminology) kind-essential experiences. They include selfconsciousness, awareness of other persons, an awareness of finitude, death, and individuality, having a sexual identity (whether clear or confused), suffering, temptation, and

Creating an atonement model imagination. To have experienced these as an individual, under any particular contingent circumstances, is to be able, in principle, to relate to other human individuals. To relate effectively and 'savingly' will then depend, not on the wide range of particular circumstances experienced, but on the emotional, mental, and spiritual penetration achieved within those kind-essential experiences. This is a point which creative writers often grasp better than theologians. Agatha Christie's Miss Marple stories illustrate the point well enough: life in St Mary Mead has quite enough depth for her amateur detective to relate to any problem, whatever its limitations in breadth. G. K. Chesterton displays the same common sense in defence of family life: 'The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. ?25 It is also a common testimony of much literary critical thought: 'wide experience does not always mean deeper experience' (C. H. Sisson, commenting on the poetry of Christina Rossetti26). Yet another and more difficult issue does still stand. Granted the adequacy of the divine experience in the particular and individual person of Jesus Christ, there remains the problem of making that experience universally accessible. By what conceptuality, or underlying metaphysic, are we to describe the union of Jesus Christ with the rest of time and space? If it is deemed insufficient merely to restate Biblical notions of 'participatory union', 'solidarity', or 'corporate personality' where do we turn to expound it? As already noted, it was easier for the Greek Fathers. Gregory of Nyssa, like Athanasius, could employ the categories of Platonic realism. Because human nature was conceived as a universal in which all individuals participate, then Jesus Christ's perfect human nature can determine ours; the consubstantiality of all mankind, our participation in a real universal, provides the metaphysical conditions in which the one perfect man can determine every other member of the species. The trouble is that we no longer believe in real universals in quite the same way. So far I have appealed briefly to the doctrine of the freeranging spirit of Christ, unfettered by spatio-temporal limita-

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tions, who is able to indwell and relate effectively to the rest of humanity. This expounds an effective causal joint as between persons, but depends on conceiving unlimited accessibility by the divine agent. I am aware, however, that this alone is not really meeting the point: it proposes a theological solution to a philosophical appeal (and even in theological terms draws heavily on only one perspective of the Biblical images, which have as much, or more, to do with us in Christ as Christ's Spirit in us). To provide the conceptual apparatus is another task altogether. Yet it is by no means an impossible one. If for the moment we grant that the personal identity of Jesus Christ is also the identity of the eternal God, then the problem of his personal accessibility to all individuals is none other than the problem of conceiving any universal and specific divine action in the world. This is the task attempted in The Fall of a Sparrow, where I have argued a detailed proposal for conceiving effective divine action in relation to every event, and therefore in relation to every individual. The conception depends chiefly on defining divine agency by a qualified analogy of human agency. God is conceived as carrying through his intentions through every natural, social, and psychological event of our lives, analogously to the way in which we carry through some of our intentions both through our own bodily movements and by acting through other events and agents (albeit in a much more limited way). God's agency is therefore conceived as causally effective in working through natural and human agencies in a modified form of Austin Farrer's model of double agency. The causal joint between divine and human agencies is opaque to the normal tools of empirical sciences, but no less real than the causal joint between human intention and physical action. Considerable qualification and modification is required to sustain the analogy without it collapsing into crude Cartesianism, and if it is to do justice to God's universal scope of action - but that is just what The Fall of a Sparrow attempts. Granted, therefore, that God may be conceived as intentionally active in every level of reality and through every event, and once we conceive of God as the ' God-who-bears-

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the-experience-of-Christ, then there is no further problem in explicating Christ's accessibility: if all kinds of events bear the action of God towards us, and since his identity is in his action, then they bear Christ himself. Moreover, by this appeal to a universal and special divine activity we have also picked up the other side of the Biblical images: we are ' in' Christ, as much as he is in us, in so far as we are caught up within the nexus of events which bear his action (and identity). This is still an intimate union of a different order to our union with other individuals, precisely because of God's capacity to 'annex' every event of our personal life, both at the sub-atomic level in the sub-structures of our being, and in the external world of our environment: ' whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?' Granted this degree of accessibility, all that was said before about the causal joint of personal interaction, and its potential effectiveness, is provided with its underlying conceptual credibility. A related but more specifically theological objection might also be raised about the universalism of this picture. This would not be an objection, presumably, about the universal scope of Christ's work and availability; nor, therefore, about the universal possibility of present and final salvation. But it could be an objection to any implication that such work is always and entirely effective in the sense that all individuals will ultimately be saved. The penultimate chapter on the moral logic of reconciliation will further fuel such suspicions. Obviously this will not count as an objection for all. There is some sense in which we must believe that all things will be reconciled, and that God will be all-in-all, and that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow. And we should be glad to believe this. But because there is also no unequivocal Biblical guarantee that 'some sense' includes every individual, and much which suggests it does not, I would simply plead not only my own agnosticism about this matter, but also the intrinsic agnosticism of this model. Strictly speaking it requires only that the possibility of salvation is (and must be) offered to all through Christ.

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Certainly chapter 7 takes us further. It implies that full and final reconciliation does require the recreation of all evil consequences into greater good, and that the highest good includes the free repentance of the will of offenders. But then it is always theoretically possible to accept that the highest aim will not be wholly fulfilled, since freedom is equally prized, while still insisting that its possibility is fully constituted by the Christ event, and is constantly pursued by God by means of that event. Whether it is theologically satisfactory to accept such an account of divine sovereignty and creative responsibility may be left for others to decide. Here, then, are some of the possibilities for expounding and defending a soteriology based on this model - but with one crucial area of potential controversy remaining: it does take an enormous amount of Christology for granted on the way. Not least, it requires that the man Jesus and the eternal God share a common personal identity, as subject of the same incarnational experiences. It presupposes a strictly defined doctrine of incarnation, not necessarily so easy to live with. So it is to this we now turn, to see whether the pressures it imposes on traditional claims may also be eased.

CHAPTER 6

The person of Christ {On trying to conceive how the Word became Flesh) When it comes to self-understanding Christian theology is no stranger to tough tasks. It will always be difficult, almost perverse, to keep struggling with an uncompromising theodicy. Equally, it has always been hard to conceive a doctrine of incarnation. We are not in an entirely new situation if we find the doctrine under pressure. Moreover, to require a doctrine so specifically defined as to allow the eternal God and the historical man Jesus to ' share a common identity as the subject of the same incarnational experiences', and to promulgate this in the late twentiethcentury aftermath of idealism, empiricism, and positivism, invites even greater difficulties. Separately and cumulatively these intellectual fashions have formed a heady brew. It is easy to see why some deem the traditional doctrine of incarnation to have been irredeemably poisoned by them. Although at odds with each other in many respects, all these trends have had a common consequence for christological method, which Pannenberg popularized in his observation that it has changed from 'from above', to 'from below'; that is, instead of asking how the transcendent God could become man (or a man), we should ask how a man (Jesus) could show us God. They have also resulted in common (reductionist) christological conclusions. Thus an idealistic philosophy which attempts to embrace the whole of reality within a single scheme of interpretation will interpret all particulars as expressions of this unifying category. Theologically this dissipates the absolute distinction between God and the world; therefore any particular within the world

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is capable of exemplifying the unifying spirit of God; Jesus is then seen as the chief exemplar, leading us to God by actualizing more fully that divine spirit which is imperfectly exemplified everywhere else. In these terms perfect humanity would be the complete expression of divinity (and the sense in which he is God incarnate differs from the rest of us only in degree, not in kind). Even more important has been the empirical spirit of scientific and historical enquiry which by contrast insists only on what is knowable in concrete, verifiable, and falsifiable terms. In the nineteenth century in particular this led to the critical study of the historical Jesus, leaving the untestable edifice of faith erected about him in a separate and vulnerable category. It is a well-known story. It was powerfully reinforced by the burgeoning evolutionary spirit of the same age. This directs our attention to the causal sequence of things. By offering a full account of how all other natural and historical phenomena emerge from their environment and antecedent causes, the presumption is created that the life of Jesus can be similarly explained. We can understand him without reference to divine causation 'from outside'. In so far as there is divine presence in Jesus of Nazareth it is not to be put in any fundamentally different category to God's action in anyone else. This presumption betrays the familiar but curious alliance between idealistic holism and empirical atomism, nearly always with the same consequence for Christology. John Robinson exemplifies this in The Human Face of God when he reflects (empirically) on the nature of human personhood, and (idealistically) on its implications for the nature of Jesus of Nazareth. His point is that if we accept that all true human persons emerge out of a whole complex web of antecedent causes and relationships, both biological and social, reaching right back through the whole genetic inheritance through the whole evolutionary process, and if we accept that this is a unifying principle applicable to all reality, then we cannot brook exceptions in the case of Jesus without denying his true humanity:

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No-one can just become a man out of the blue; a genuine man (as opposed to a replica) can only come out of the process, not into it...The fact that I, a human being, might decide to experience life as a dog — and to know nothing, even of my fellow men, except through the limitations of a canine nervous system - does not make me a dog.1 What does make me a dog, therefore, is to be born a puppy from canine parents which themselves are fully heirs and transmitters of all the evolutionary forces which shape the canine reality.2 We are therefore presented with an historical Jesus who could not have been brought about by any fundamentally different category of causation (such as a virgin birth). God may well have brought forth a man to image himself out of the common evolutionary process, but has not himself entered into the process as a man. The coup de grace has been supposedly administered by those who have also drawn attention to the nature of mythological language in which the stories of Jesus are couched. To understand this language is to understand the reasons why the story has been told 'from above5, with unique categories, implying a difference of kind and not merely of degree — and to show that these are mistaken reasons. The chief point is simple:3 to live within a first-century world-view where there is no knowledge of natural causation, no clear conception of divine activity through (rather than instead of) natural causes, is to be bound to interpret striking events in a certain way, viz. as unique acts of God breaking in to the world from outside at particular points in history and nature. And this is just what we find in the Biblical stories. Creation is described as a particular and supernatural act of God. Salvation through Christ is described in the same way, with the same kind of language. It is inevitable, but mythological in the sense that what it tells as a particular supernatural event is in fact a general truth about God's relationship with the world. Creation is told as a particular supernatural event, but is in fact occurring through natural events. Salvation is told through the story of an historical incarnation, but is in fact a truth about God's

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existential relationship with all of us all the time - of which Jesus is simply a supreme exemplar. Once recognized for what it is this ' mythological' language may then be demythologized, as Bultmann has done before, and thereby neatly solves the dilemmas. We do not need to struggle with the metaphysics of a unique kind of God-Man, brought into the world by unique divine action, for there was no such thing: the tradition which proclaimed him such was inevitable within its own world-view, but mistaken. Instead, Jesus is represented with the compelling virtue of simplicity, requiring no new and mystifying categories. He is a man, shaped as we are, through the whole world process. He is different only in degree, in the sense that the same Spirit of God who indwells all people dwells more fully in him. He is a man more open and responsive to God than others, but always a man in relationship to God, rather than God as man relating to God,

It is not hard to find explicit champions of this sort of Christology. Geoffrey Lampe talks of Jesus' 'perfect and unbroken response to the Father', alongside a 'continuous incarnation of God as Spirit in the spirits of [other] men'. 4 John Hick describes him as a man ' marvellously open to God, living consciously in the divine presence and responsively to the divine purpose'; but he was not God, for ' to call Jesus God... is to use poetic (or if you like "mythological") language which...is misused when it is treated as a set of literal propositions'.5 Equally, the position emerges in writings purporting a more orthodox intent, but which actually reveal the same fundamental shift, however subtly conveyed: a shift from representing God as the man Jesus to God in the man Jesus, by virtue of his particularly open response.6 DEFENSIVE STRATEGIES

The attraction of this Christology is clear. As H. P. Owen succinctly says, it accurately states the effects of the incarnation but not the fact of it.7 That is, the exceptional life of the historical Jesus and his effect in the minds of his disciples as the Christ is accounted for, but there is no need to concoct a unique

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metaphysic for him. Owen himself is not representing this as an advantage. Many others would. Its disadvantages are also apparent. It fails to meet the advanced claims of Colossians and St John's Prologue, where pre-existence implies 'something more', and where the Word is described not merely as divine (theios) but as God (theos). It might seem to be diminishing the divine initiative: if it is the evolutionary structure of the world which has generated the perfect response of the man Jesus, then God did not intervene in Christ but had to wait for him. Yet it has to be said that these kinds of criticisms pack little punch. Much of the New Testament witness sits quite comfortably with a 'merely' spirit-filled Jesus. And where it does not then we might simply be encountering the inevitable pressure of mythological language, as explained before. As far as initiative is concerned, the complaint just is not fair. Both Norman Pittenger and John Robinson, for example, are at pains to point out that God may still be deemed to have so ordered the ' evolutionary' world that its generation of Jesus is designed according to God's prior intentions. What, then, about the fact that this Christology will not sustain that constitutive atonement model which I have been presenting? Is this the decisive defect? Could we reject a Christology on the grounds that it fails to support a satisfactory atonement model? If the world has only thrown up one perfect response throughout its whole history, this is little help to the rest of us; the mere example ofJesus is at best sobering, at worst depressing, certainly not saving. Arguably, if the soteriology does not save, then its Christology is suspect. However, we cannot simply appeal to soteriological inadequacy. If traditional incarnation founders badly in its own right, on historical and conceptual grounds, then it is unsatisfactory to rehabilitate it solely on soteriological grounds. This would be especially unconvincing when its chief alternative, the spirit Christology, satisfies at least some historical and theological requirements rather better. In any case, in terms of this discussion it would be to fall prey to a circular argument, proving nothing: if the difficulties surrounding the doctrine of

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incarnation are a serious pressure point against a constitutive soteriology, then the importance of that soteriology cannot be wheeled in to bolster up the doctrine of incarnation. Thus we are compelled rather to look again at the incarnation itself, abstracted for a moment from its wider theological context. CONCEPTS OF INCARNATION

The temporary abstraction of the concept of incarnation from its wider context has its dangers.8 But at least it limits the field of discussion to more manageable proportions: as a subject it is not even as big as ' Christology'.9 The particular claim that the eternal God shares a common personal identity as subject of the same incarnational experiences as Jesus of Nazareth is even more restricted in scope. It is a specific requirement within a doctrine of incarnation. It implies a particular view of personal identity, which should be shown to be defensible in principle, apart from its actual exemplification in the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth. And although historical investigation about Jesus of Nazareth is undoubtedly an important ingredient in Christology, the enquiry here into certain limited conceptual possibilities does also have a role to play. In fact there has been something of a swing in fashion over recent years which goes some way to supporting these possibilities. Traditional concepts of incarnation, entailing quite strict identity claims, are being resurrected (more by philosophers than by theologians10). David Brown's The Divine Trinity is a case in point. Although the scope of the book as a whole is wide-ranging, he devotes a substantial part of it to considering the coherence of two traditional concepts - or models - of incarnation: the Chalcedonian doctrine of ' twonatures', and the kenotic theory. Both these models claim more than the spirit Christology of recent years. They claim more than the Christology of Robinson, Pittenger, and the supposedly orthodox Baillie,11 all of whom offer a concept of intimate relationship between the eternal God and the man Jesus, even an identity (or at least indescernibility) of wills; but none of whom offer a concept with identity of experience.

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Brown attempts to show that two-nature and kenotic models can provide just that. 12 In the first instance he insists that personal identity ('that which makes us who we are') is decisively constituted by the subsequent history of the foetus rather than the emission of sperm. Therefore 'the common modern conceptual objection that such a birth [i.e. a virgin birth] would call into question his entitlement to be called human is a nonsense'. 13 Here he is presumably tilting at Robinson's point, quoted earlier. This is an arguable point, but one I am not particularly concerned to pursue. Our chief concern here is not with defining conditions for true humanity. Even if a human sperm is considered a necessary condition for true humanity, our limited task is independent of that conclusion. We are looking for the conceptual apparatus by which a human person (however constituted) may be deemed to share the identity of the eternal God: more precisely, to be subject of the same experiences. To say that this is provided by a unique activity of the Spirit (or Logos) from birth may indeed be the beginnings of a theological answer, but it needs greater philosophical definition if it is going to satisfy in terms that the question is set — and this is true whether this divine causation replaces the activity of a human sperm or unites with it. 14 Brown does purport to provide just such an apparatus. A revised Chalcedonian model of two-natures is coherent, he claims, in the following terms. The human person of Jesus of Nazareth is united to the second person of the Trinity (the eternal God) in such a way that there is 'some kind of ontological bond between two centres of consciousness'.15 Schizophrenia and brain-splitting operations provide analogies, for in these cases we should probably talk of one person, and a common personal identity, even though there are two ' centres of consciousness'. The analogy breaks down at the point where these centres of consciousness are dissonant and disintegrated. In the case of the incarnation it needs to be corrected by an insistence that there is a harmony and reciprocal ' flow' from one to the other. This, of course, sets off some familiar historical and theological hares

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for the chase: if the human nature of Jesus receives from the divine nature of the Logos, does this not overwhelm his humanity and run counter to the historical evidence of his limited knowledge? If the divine nature receives from the human then, as Aquinas is so aware, do we not compromise divine impassibility? and so on. As already indicated, I am not so concerned by the latter point. Brown himself deals with it in effect by allowing passibility in some sense in the divine nature of the incarnation, though his actual words admit only 'impassibility in another sense'. The former point is best eased by another analogy (preferred by Brown), which also helps cement the centres of consciousness into one person with a common identity. This is the analogy of internal dialogue within our own nature between our conscious and subconscious selves. As the conscious and subconscious selves accept workings from each other without destroying their respective natures, so in the incarnation the human nature ' experienced and still experiences, to the maximum extent compatible with it remaining a human nature, all the internal life of God the Son in his trinitarian relations, and the divine nature, again to the maximum extent compatible with it remaining a divine nature, all the experiences of the human nature'. 16 Brown then goes on to specify the limits of compatibility. The crucial ingredient of this model for our purposes is that it allows God in his incarnation to be 'directly affected by human experience in some sense beyond that of merely knowing that certain things are happening'; it is 'not just a flow of knowledge, but also a flow of shared experience'.17 He actually uses the phrase we require; 'it involves being the subject of the experiences [in much the same way that we are the subject of our physical pains]', though the divine nature then 'transforms them' through a wider 'perspective'. The incarnation therefore provides a certain distinctive way of knowing for God. Although Brown does not press the soteriological connections, indeed deliberately and strangely suppresses them,18 they are irresistible as far as our own thesis is concerned. Conceived

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in this way, the incarnation provides a mode of knowing and experiencing, absorbed at a point in human history, to inform the eternal divine nature and omniscience. The eternal God is thus 'equipped', through the incarnation, in his saving enterprise. Another recent attempt to defend the coherence of a kind of Chalcedonian concept of incarnation is T. V. Morris' The Logic of God Incarnate.™ He proposes a 'two-minds' view of Christ, which he traces back in embryo to Gregory of Nyssa and other of the Fathers,20 and which clearly has its similarities with Brown's 'two centres of consciousness'. There is the eternal mind of God the Son and also an earthly consciousness. The former contains, but is not contained by, the latter: an 'asymmetric accessing relation between the two minds', in which the divine mind had full access to the earthly, but the earthly no access to the divine apart from special instances. As far as I can see this does not necessarily conflict with Brown's insistence that the ' flow' is reciprocal ' to the maximum extent compatible with each nature remaining itself',21 as long as we are speaking of the access allowed during the actual historical period of incarnation. Faced with the objection that we cannot say what it means to attribute two minds to one person, he too offers some analogies. There is the analogy of the computer with its two information systems linked asymmetrically; or the experience of the dreamer aware of his dream; or (like Brown) the bisection of the brain into its two hemispheres, or the experience of multiple personalities in certain kinds of schizophrenia, where ' one personality has full and direct knowledge of the experiences had, information gathered, and actions initiated, by... the other'. 22 It should be noted how this last quotation again feeds most happily into our soteriological requirements. But how tightly defined are these conceptions? Both admit the analogies are only partially successful in defending that notion of 'some kind of ontological bond' (a palpably vulnerable phrase) between the two centres of consciousness/ two minds. Even Brown's preferred picture of the relationship between the conscious and unconscious selves tends to draw its

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strength from the experience of dis-integrated and unhealthy human experience, where the two selves are most obviously distinct by virtue of being in conflict - hardly the most comfortable referent for the divine experience. On the other hand, the appeal to analogy in religious language does not stand or fall on exact comparison with the analogue in every respect. It should always allow for the imaginative extension of some aspects of the analogy, and the suspension of other aspects. Thus there is plenty of room here for taking the proffered analogy as suggestive, without claiming everything for it. For instance, to have to allow an element of dis-integration within the divine experience, analogous to that which we experience between our conscious and unconscious selves, is not necessarily embarrassing. Particularly if we allow the experience to be modified by the wider perspective of divine eternity, it can function in much the same way as Jesus' human sufferings: it actually becomes a vital ingredient in the divine omniscience; it is a means of entering into the full range of experience, including the disintegrating effects of sin, finitude, and human contingency. Likewise, there is some limited value in analogies provided by brain research. There is a rich resource here, which can be plundered in a number of ways, without claiming too much for them or depending on detailed experimental findings which may subsequently be overturned. In the first instance it can simply help sustain the general point that personal identity is not necessarily defined by a single, unitary system of consciousness. A clear analytical statement of this (by Thomas Nagel) is worth quoting in full: An intact brain contains two cerebral hemispheres each of which possesses perceptual, memory, and control systems adequate to run the body without the assistance of the other. They co-operate in directing it with the aid of a constant two-way internal communication system. Memories, perceptions, desires and so forth therefore have duplicate physical bases on both sides of the brain, not just on account of similarities of initial input, but because of subsequent exchange... Even if we analyze the idea of unity in terms of functional integration, therefore, the unity of our own consciousness may be less clear than we had supposed. The natural conception of

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a single person controlled by a mind possessing a single visual field, individual faculties for each of the other senses, unitary systems of memory, desire, belief, and so forth, may come into conflict with the physiological facts when applied to ourselves.23 As I have just indicated, it is important to acknowledge the provisional and controversial nature of this kind of statement. The experimental research on which this physiology is based is developing all the time, and opinions vary. There are wellestablished differences in the nature and function of the two hemispheres, and some of these may be more fundamental than Nagel's picture allows. Thus some have maintained that the minor hemisphere has unconscious functions only (with consciousness centred either in the left hemisphere alone, or in the brain stem, or in the 'person as a whole'). 24 More commonly, a modified position is suggested, in which the minor hemisphere is granted some elementary forms of subjective awareness but not the ' higher' forms of self-awareness which normally qualify a system as a 'person'. 25 Furthermore, as Nagel himself admits, such a model generates conceptual difficulties, as well as providing a useful physiological referent for speaking about them. The relationship between person and mind (or two minds) is shown to be more complex than we thought, but hardly 'solved'. On the other hand, notable work on brain bisection by Roger Sperry firmly endorses the basic possibility of two separate mentalities, and more than confirms the philosopher Nagel's basic contention that we may have within ourselves a much more complex model of personhood than hitherto supposed.26 And while the conceptual questions opened up at this interface of brain research and the philosophy of mind may have no easy or obvious answers, they are certainly suggestive for theological reflection. Given the physical separation of the two halves of the brain and then the hypothetical transplant of one half into another human body, we should provoke these apparently bizarre and disturbing questions: 27 In which body would ' I ' survive? Either, both, or neither? As soon as 'my' experience is divided, does my personal identity cease? Or does it only cease if the two experiences are never reunited ? Or is it

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an indication that we should abandon the language of personal identity altogether, proving it to have been a chimera (as Derek Parfitt thinks) ? Alternatively, are we bound to posit a transcendent ' I ' , potentially aware of both streams of experience, in which case 'where' do we locate this curious Cartesian entity? The response to these questions will depend on philosophical predisposition, as well as on future developments in brain research.28 But while I cannot here presume to offer any definitive answer I can point out the tantalizing theological parking place where some of these questions may come to rest. As we have seen, they obviously release new possibilities of speaking intelligibly about a ' two-minds' theory of incarnation. They also point inexorably to the doctrine of the Trinity, where we have a complex definition of divine personal identity which can accommodate the notion of diverse streams of experience (separated in the incarnation) being reunited in a transcendent 4 1 ' . Thus not only a Chalcedonian doctrine of incarnation but also a traditional Trinitarian doctrine likeperichoresis, generated so long ago under pressure from Scripture and reflective experience, and in such a foreign conceptual climate, may yet have more mileage to do in the latter part of the twentieth century. Then we should also consider the kenotic model for incarnation. This can also offer an orthodox conception of incarnation, more or less distinct from Chalcedonian models, depending on the interpretation given to it by its exponents. The kenotic model lays special claim to our attention in the sense that it too, duly defined, could provide a reasonably coherent basis for our soteriology. Indeed, Brown, who makes no decisive choice between the two models, makes the particularly pertinent claim (for our purposes) that the kenotic model ' would enable God to experience directly the human situation in a way that is impossible on TNC [two-natures Christology] \ 2 9 If this is so it is obviously promising territory to explore. Briefly, kenotic theories conceive ofJesus Christ as the second person of the Trinity who lays aside divine attributes. As Jesus

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of Nazareth he has a purely human nature: not so much the 'God-Man' of Chalcedonian orthodoxy, as the 'God-whobecame-Man'. In this case the chief conceptual problem has to do with identity questions in this sense: how can we assert the personal identity of the pre-existent divine Logos, the man Jesus, and the post-existent eternal Christ? Here again we are bound to touch on vast acreages of philosophical reflection about personal identity and the mind. It is a contentious field of reflection. Here I can hope only to indicate the sort of route across the minefield which the model implies. The pieces can be picked up elsewhere.30 In the first instance it will imply that personal identity does not depend on bodily continuity. This means that it does not require that any particular body must continue (though it may require some kind of embodiment). Rather it will depend chiefly on continuity of character and memory. Secondly, it will require some sort of moratorium on memory for the whole period of the incarnation, and a constraint on character according to the stage of human development achieved during the incarnation. The first requirement on its own is sustainable, however arguable, in the present field of debate. Since Locke defined personal identity as reflective awareness 'extended backwards to any past action or thought' 31 there has been sophisticated support for this view, though more latterly it has been a minority report. A person is essentially the connected sequence of his consciousness, conceivable independently of any particular body. Of course the position has had to be carefully refined. I f ' I ' am still to be the same ' I ' of past experiences even when I forget them, then we have to allow that it is a criterion of personal identity only that I could in principle remember, not that I necessarily do in practice. In other words, although the psychological or physiological mechanism of reflective memory may have broken down, or been interrupted, at certain stages in our experience, there still exists a possible relation between the reflective subject and past reflections on experiences. Anthony Quinton further refines the relation as follows: if sets

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of mental states are connected to each other by being temporally juxtaposed, if they reveal a similar character, and if the latter include at least elements of the former (an 'ancestral relation'), 32 then we are entitled to posit a relation of identity. Bodily criteria of identity, he goes on to say, are neither sufficient nor necessary: the idea of a person reincarnated, or as a ghost, is not self-contradictory.33 Such elaboration of Locke's basic position leads us into even more complex manoeuvres. They are necessary to outflank the logical possibility of duplication (i.e. more than one person claiming to remember the same experiences, after brain bisection), and the more fundamental assumptions of materialism.34 As far as the former is concerned, we should have to add a further criterion to secure identity, already noted in discussing the two-natures theory: namely, the eventual reunification of the two separated streams of experience in a 'transcendent' subject continuous with both. Without that we should concede there were two persons from the moment of duplication, and that continuity of memory and character are necessary but not sufficient criteria of personal identity. Regarding the materialist's case I suppose the battle has to be fought out at the level of basic rival assumptions. That is, we should have to make a clear distinction between matters of epistemology (how personal identity is known), and metaphysics (what it consists in), allowing primacy to the latter and letting it determine what counts as good evidence for the former. This is not the place to develop these elaborations in any detail, but there is enough here to show how they help to ease the second, somewhat problematic, requirement of the kenotic model. Prima facie it seems perverse to insist that on the one hand the identity of Jesus and the eternal Word is defined by psychological continuity, and on the other hand crucial constituents of psychological continuity like memory and character have to be held in abeyance in some way for the period of the incarnation. Yet as soon as we realize that it is only the capacity to recollect at some stage, not the actual recollection of all experiences at every stage, that is required; if we grant that it is

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only (at any one stage) a juxtaposition of experiences in some form of ancestral relation that defines continuity of character; then the concept of a foetus, developing into a man, who is also the same subject as the eternal Word, is not so perverse after all. As may be expected, kenoticism does not convince everyone, not even those with a concern to defend the coherence of orthodox incarnation concepts.35 But there is certainly enough here with which to join battle. It is not self-evidently nonsensical. It also has the arguable advantage of being less vulnerable to the results of historical criticism. It means there is no embarrassment in uncovering evidence of human limitation in Jesus of Nazareth, nor in failing to uncover evidence of specifically divine attributes. For Jesus was not a God-Man, whose hybrid divinity and humanity were supposed to modify and mark each other in an historically verifiable way. He was simply and solely the man that God chose to be. 36 In fact to take this last statement seriously could be to extend the logic of kenoticism to the point where it suggests a further model of incarnation, of startling simplicity. This would involve drawing again on the definition of personal identity as constituted by the ultimate connectedness of experience. If we then conceive the eternal experience of the Logos as intentionally 'joined on' to the earthly experience of Jesus of Nazareth (appropriately suppressed in memory and character 'for the duration'), the result is a connected sequence of experience, divine and human, constituting one person. This may be distinguished from adoptionism. Granted that the life ofJesus of Nazareth was foreseen and foreordained from all eternity to be part of the divine sequence, then there is not, and never was, a personal identity 'Jesus' simpliciter, which had to be brought into relation with the Logos, or adopted, or absorbed, into the divine being. There has only been the person of the Logos, of which a certain sequence of experiences were lived out in entirely human terms (the parameters of which we denote by the name 'Jesus', much as we describe the 'blue phase' of Picasso by a different term than his other phases). It is much more like a restatement of the doctrine of anhypostasia - but by drawing on new definitions of personal

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identity it sidesteps the pitfalls of the old doctrine.37 It does not imply that Jesus Christ lacked human personality. It does insist that such personality did not exist 'on its own', but only as a connected part of the history of the divine person of the Word. Christology as a whole, as I have already admitted, deserves much more than this. Here I have offered only a bare sketch of some incarnational concepts, and I have attempted no historical argument of the kind that Brown has elaborated. But then I am not concerned to chase the tail of a circular argument for ever. If the event of Jesus Christ has as a matter of fact generated a compelling soteriology (in faith and experience); if such a soteriology suggests or even ' requires' the eternal God to be the subject of individual human experience; and if that can be shown at least to be thinkable - then we have contributed something to the overall coherence of the constitutive nature of the Christ event. And that is just what we have attempted to show. These notions of incarnation offer a serious conceptual structure by which we can think of the divine person experiencing life as a human individual. By showing how two minds or two modes of experience can properly belong within the same personal identity, with access to each other diachronically or synchronically, then we do indeed demonstrate the christological implications of our soteriology to be thinkable. I have already indicated that this is only a very small ingredient in the much wider argument (which I have not attempted) for accepting Jesus of Nazareth in particular as the unique locus of such divine experience. This would involve Biblical and historical argument, and the testing of religious experience. Such work would also be necessary fully to support the specific claim that God's experience as Jesus Christ is then made accessible throughout, and beyond, all time and space, in the manner previously described. Yet I wish to emphasize again that this limited exploration of conceptual possibilities is still a very important part of securing those wider arguments and maintaining the traditional claims in the face of some of their critics.

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For the fact is that the pressure of conceptual difficulties, though not always so evident for those who enter the christological debate at an historical or hermeneutical level, still has its effect. One important example is to be found in the arguments of the 'Myth' School, to which I have already alluded. By the application of radical cultural relativism they encourage us to relegate all suggestions of constitutive christological soteriology to the museum of outmoded worldviews. And nothing of what I have offered here decisively refutes that. Yet all theological decisions are influenced by the pressure of a variety of cumulative arguments, and the position of the demythologizers is no exception: they have been enticed down the path of this kind of demythologizing, not just on hermeneutical grounds, but also because they have found the conceptual core of the traditional christological and soteriological claims so unpalatable. As the opening essay in The Myth of God Incarnate complains (about the difficulties of conceiving Christ's divine and human wills, and the nature of his knowledge): 'When one is asked to believe something which one cannot even spell out at all in intelligible terms, it is right to stop and push the questioning one stage further back. Are we sure that the concept of an incarnate being, one who is both fully God and fully man, is after all an intelligible concept?' 38 Such a complaint deserves to be heard, and that is why this kind of discussion has its place. It means that if anything here has helped to neutralize the conceptual poison of an orthodox Christology, then we have made some significant defence after all. Together with the preceding chapter which also endeavoured to sweeten the theological (and moral) taste of traditional soteriology it aims to set the cumulative argument in reverse - in support of the traditional constitutive claim of the Christ event. Now, however, I propose a change in temper, to a less defensive tone. There are some more positive reasons to advance the claim with which we began. I do not just mean the standard appeal to tradition, but a relatively independent imaginative tug and moral impetus to lend further support to that tradition. There are reasons, already implicit in the

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discussion so far, which suggest that the experience given in the particular event of Jesus Christ is precisely the kind of experience which 'must' be available to affect the whole of humanity, knowing or unknowing. What follows therefore spells out something of the moral force behind the claim.

CHAPTER 7

A moral demand: conditions for real reconciliation

The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ constitute a particular experience for God which is then offered throughout all time and space with the potential to 'save' all peoples. This is the theological claim which I have suggested is still entirely thinkable, even in the larger world we now inhabit. What I now wish to do is take a central and crucial aspect of this saving, namely that reaction to evil which aims at reconciliation, and test it against our natural moral intuition. This will yield a powerful moral impetus behind the claim that the particular experience achieved in Christ must be universally available in some way. In other words, there is something within the moral logic of the meaning of salvation which positively drives us towards a universal application of this particular experience. To set the scene in this way, certain basic moral and theological assumptions are made, as follows. As all major atonement models struggle to convey, salvation implies a deliverance from evil in all its various guises. Since we are all both victims and agents of evil it must mean some adequate reaction to, and overcoming of, evil within ourselves and from outside ourselves. Salvation also implies a positive goal; that for which we are being saved. As Fiddes stresses, this goal is love: right relationship with all around us; at its widest this implies right relationships with each other, as social groups, with our environment, and with God himself. Thus the crucial moral issue to be analysed deals with the kind of reaction which ought to be made to evil (chiefly moral evil, for the purposes of limiting the discussion). It also follows 87

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that a central ingredient in the reaction must be something like ' reconciliation' - where reconciliation means both a process and a goal, achieved precisely by a morally adequate response to evil. The moral-theological nexus of soteriology can therefore be focussed in the form of two interrelated questions. (i) What sort of criteria constitutes a morally adequate response to evil? (2) Granted that reconciliation is at least one important part of the answer, how do we specifically understand reconciliation in a morally (as well as theologically) adequate way? Since we are looking for some relatively independent moral impetus to back theological claims, it will be important to consider these questions in places where 'natural' morality meets with, but is not entirely determined by, religious concerns. I therefore propose to look at them first, briefly, through the literary imagination of Dostoevsky, in the wellknown dialogues of his novel The Brothers Karamazov; then through a more general discussion of that most pervasive response to moral evil - the notion of retribution, particularly as it appears in practical moral philosophy. The chief point of the discussion will be to allow the moral demands of reconciliation to become clear apart from a specifically theological determination. Various points of congruity (and incongruity) with theological positions will simply be noted on the way. To the question of what ought to be the response to moral evil the natural assumption of the most sympathetic character in The Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha, is indeed 'forgiveness', and 'reconciliation'. But there is a long hard path to be travelled before we are allowed to accept that. We are first powerfully provoked to reject it — through the passionate argument of his brother Ivan. Having described some of the most hideous acts conceivable (the torture of innocent children), he issues this challenge to Alyosha: I do not want a mother to embrace the torturer who had her child torn to pieces by his dogs! She has no right to forgive him! If she likes, she can forgive him for herself, she can forgive the torturer for the immeasurable suffering he has inflicted upon her as a mother; but she has no right to forgive him for the sufferings of her tortured child.1

A moral demand: conditions for real reconciliation And of course it is clear that he is making a moral point: ' she has no right... '. So we must take note. Why does she have no right? The most evident reason is that evil, hurt, injury, disruption have repercussions beyond the sensibilities of any one injured party, so that even if forgiveness is forthcoming from him or her, it is inadequate. Thus if we grant that forgiveness and reconciliation involve something like the will to accept the evil consequences, and the effort to recreate the situation for good, then we can grant that it is possible (in principle) to forgive for ourselves, but we cannot forgive for all the others affected. The mother cannot forgive for the child, therefore she cannot fully forgive. This means that all human forgiving is necessarily deficient. It is not just that, through weakness of the will, we do not bring ourselves to forgive; it is also that, through our finitude, we cannot, for we cannot enter into the experience of another to accept the pain and make the effort to recreate for them. Therefore we have no right to claim to forgive. This, in itself, is a purely negative point. But is also sets the agenda for making the positive point about that kind of adequate reconciliation which is morally demanded. It implies certain criteria for morally adequate reconciliation, namely that it must involve universal scope of action. If we could enter into every interlocking situation and experience, accepting the pain and effort involved in forgiving and creating good, then we can adequately forgive in any one particular situation. Here of course it is easy to make some theological connections. If Christ is able to do that, and we are 'in Christ', then on that basis (but on that basis alone) forgiveness is possible. Indeed, not surprisingly, the pious Alyosha responds with just this claim: You said just now, is there a being in the whole world who could or had the right to forgive? But there is such a being, and he can forgive everything, everyone and everything, and for everything, because he gave his innocent blood for all and for everything. You've forgotten him, but it is on him that the edifice is founded, and it is to him that they will cry aloud: 'Thou art just, O Lord, for thy ways are revealed'.2 This, incidentally, is no isolated comment, significant only for

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the understanding of the character of Alyosha. On the contrary, it represents Dostoevsky's own mature convictions. It is the solidarity of'each and all', and all in Christ: the Orthodox concept ofsobernost, which constitutes his own deepest response to Ivan. 3 But even now we are not permitted to posit this too quickly or cheaply. Whatever Dostoevsky's own personal beliefs, the drama of the narrative he has created certainly does not allow Alyosha to get away with it so easily. For Ivan responds with the celebrated 'Legend of the Grand Inquisitor', in which Christ is once again rejected, although respected. Also, earlier in his speech to Alyosha he had already considered the notion of some eschatological harmony in which 'the mother will embrace the torturer who had her child torn to pieces by his dogs, and all three will cry aloud: "Thou art just... O Lord!", and then, of course, the crown of knowledge will have been attained, and everything will be explained ' 4 — and had rejected it. It is not precisely a rejection of Alyosha's Christ-centred resolution, but it remains unaffected by any such appeal since it appears to be based on an absolute refusal to believe that any kind of future harmony could justify such present sufferings. Thus: 'I renounce higher harmony altogether. It is not worth one little tear of that tortured little girl', and so on. Moreover, we should note that another point has been added here, so that there are two distinct issues. It is one thing to insist that we cannot and should not forgive because we cannot effectively enter all the relevant situations and experiences in order to fulfil the full demands of reconciliation. It is another to claim that we should not forgive because some experiences are simply too appalling ever to be forgiven. Ivan's speech seems to convey the force of both points, realistically confused in the passions of a single character. But should they be separated ? And is Alyosha refuted on the second, even if it is allowed that the first is met through his Christ figure? In fact it is doubtful whether they can be separated. I suggest that the logical and psychological force of the second derives its validity from the first. So if the first point could be met (through appeal to some sort of christological/

A moral demand: conditions for real reconciliation eschatological perspective), then the second would prove to have been dependent on it. That is, if it were possible to fulfil the full demands of universal reconciliation (i.e. if the mother could enter into the child's pain and, in some unimaginable way, use it to recreate a greater good for the child as well as for others), then there is no such thing as an evil too appalling to forgive.5 To sustain this, the point here would be that in any genuine act of reconciliation the child is not just being compensated. Mere compensation might indeed be inadequate, for by the normal laws of proportion there might never be compensation sufficient to outweigh certain kinds of pain; also, compensation implies a discrete view of experiences, separated by time, whereby the painful experience is left inaccessible and unredeemed in the past, and as such can always be deemed 'unjustifiable'. But reconciliation of the kind which creates greater good out of the evil for all concerned relates the pain as means to the end of greater good, and in that sense 'justifies' and transforms the significance of the past. A similar point will emerge later, when we come to the deficiencies of retribution. Yet even if this last point is not accepted, the chief point remains clear, as we accept Ivan's implicit challenge. If it is granted that reconciliation is to be attempted at all, then it must involve as wide a scope of action as possible. This offers an answer to our initial question: it is the kind of thing that ought to happen in response to evil, and it helps to define a morally adequate notion of reconciliation. We now turn more generally to the concept of retribution, so often deemed to be the kind of reaction which is morally necessary in response to moral evil. Concepts of retribution have long haunted religious and secular morality, and although the winds of fashion have from time to time blown them out of favour there is always a new conservatism ready to commend their come-back. I now wish to show that, to the extent they are morally inadequate, this is precisely because they make us too content with limited notions of reconciliation. The first thing to establish is the distinctive meaning of

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retribution, since the term is not always used clearly or univocally. This is not surprising when a term is used in such a variety of contexts as social, criminological, and interpersonal relationships; equally, just because it is so widely used, it will be necessary to range across all these contexts to determine any common distinctive thread of meaning. In most discussions retribution takes place as an alternative or complement to various other well-defined theories of punishment. These are familiar.6 There are reformative theories which aim at reforming the offender; deterrent theories which aim at averting or reducing future offences; and ' denunciatory' theories which aim at making a moral point, marking the fact that the offence matters. The question is whether there is anything distinctive in retributive theory in relation to these others; whether it means anything more or other than reformation, deterrence, and denunciation. This is not always evident. Sir Walter Moberly's classic treatment of the subject in The Ethics of Punishment1 highlights the problem. He describes a retributive reaction against offence as, above all, a reaction against offence. That is, not against damage or hurt per se, but damage wrongfully inflicted, implying an agent of the damage whose will is capable of moral evil. As such the reaction cannot be limited to destroying the hateful cause of hurt, conceived impersonally; it must be a reaction which deals with an offending personal will. Such a reaction will be characterized by personal anger rather than impersonal hate; it will be more strenuous than the purely vengeful destructive response, because it will seek to create the specific (and more difficult) pain of shame, rather than pain for its own sake. It is the difference between our reaction to a sinner and a poisonous snake. The offender must 'suffer the particular pain of seeing the hideousness of his present self'.8 This explains and justifies the meaning of retributive reaction in terms of the worth of the offender as a person and his right to be treated as a responsible person: a concern which has a long and honoured pedigree in various forms from Aristotle to Hegel to C. S. Lewis. It seems to me entirely satisfactory. But of course it also underlines precisely this problem of separating

A moral demand: conditions for real reconciliation out a distinctively retributive meaning. For in fact we have here some kind of quasi-reformative meaning in disguise: the reaction against the offender is actually for the sake of the offender; it is for his own moral well-being that he 'sees the hideousness of his present self. Other versions of the same basic theme draw more specifically on theories of social contract, yet highlight the same problem. By virtue of his citizenship (or even humanity) an offender has consented, in some general sense, to a system which has to react against offence in order to maintain conditions of order and survival. So the imposition of a penalty treats him as part of this general social system of rights and duties. It is his right and due to be treated as such, because his interests in the social system are thereby served. As such one might even say he is honoured in receiving the penalty, though it would be facetious to suggest he himself must experience it in these terms. Yet of course the same point must be made: if this is supposed to be retribution it is hardly distinctive. It has collapsed into a subtle mixture of utilitarianism and reformation: it is for the sake of society, and the offender's place in it, that he is punished. Moberly does offer some other avenues of thought. For instance, he insists that reaction to offence must take into account social consequences (damage to others), and the transgression of objectively conceived standards, not just the perverted will of the offender. And while retributive reaction cannot literally deal with objective harm already done, it can and does act as a sign-post, to offender and society alike, to symbolize the awful consequences of offence. Yet it is hard to see how even this goes beyond a denunciatory-reformative view. However, he also offers an interesting analysis, more obliquely, through the historical reaction of 'outlawry'. An offender like the Biblical Cain is deemed to be an outlaw. That is, he forfeits all rights in society because of his social transgression, and thereby restores a kind of balance in relation to society and its standards. Having taken rights from others, his own are taken from him. The effect and intention of this

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may be utilitarian, and specifically for deterrence; it may also be denunciatory, giving public expression to the seriousness of moral standards and social contract, and giving satisfaction and reinforcement to responsible members of society; but its underlying rationale is distinctive, for it is an attempt to restore balance, by exercising some sort of distributive justice in terms of the giving and taking away of rights. While Moberly himself does not develop this notion of balance with any great enthusiasm, it nevertheless penetrates to the truly distinctive meaning of retribution. It too can claim its own honourable pedigree. It receives one of its most classic statements in St Augustine's picture of metaphysical balance: If there were sins and no consequent misery, that order is... dishonoured by lack of equity... The penal state is imposed to bring [the universe] into order. Indeed it compels the dishonourable state [of the sinner] to become harmonized with the honour of the universe, so that the penalty of sin corrects the dishonour of sin.9 Key words here are order, equity, and harmony. Offence disrupts order by creating inequity. Punishment restores order by producing an equitable state of affairs, which is harmonious and honourable. The notion of harmony especially alerts us to the fact that this is a moral version of Augustine's wider aesthetic principle, namely that perfection is established or restored by an overall balance between light and shade. The aesthetic good is constituted not so much by the absence of darkness, pain, and suffering, but by their proper relationship to the good, to light, and joy, creating a whole effect which is unequivocally good.10 A working definition of the distinctive meaning of retribution therefore emerges. Retributive reaction to offence is good, and has meaning, in so far as it harmonizes, corrects imbalance, and restores order. It must occur not just to deter others, not just to underline the moral seriousness of the offence, not just to bring the offender to a proper and painful sense of shame, but because retributive suffering just is the proper balance to sin: it sets it in proper relief; it ' harmonizes' it in terms of the overall standards, structures, and fabric of the moral universe. Things

A moral demand: conditions for real reconciliation are set right by retributive suffering in the way in which a whole canvas is set right when its black spots are painted into the shadow of a sunlit landscape. Conceived in this way it therefore becomes a necessity, a categorical moral imperative: it has to happen, whether or not the offender is reformed by it, for his sin remains a moral blot on the landscape until the balancing suffering is introduced in this way. If necessary, these essential elements can be restated in more concrete social terms, without depending on unfashionable metaphysics and aesthetic analogies. One attempt to explore the area in such terms is to be found in an article by Richard Burgh.11 Beginning with his feet firmly on the ground of actual social relations he points out that any offence unfairly accrues benefits - of goods, money, freedom of action, personal satisfaction - at the expense of others upon whom unfair burdens are correspondingly imposed - such as deprivation of goods, money, infringement of freedom, violation of privacy and selfrespect, and so on. A principle of equity and distributive justice must therefore react to this situation, says Burgh, by imposing comparable burdens on the offender 'thereby restoring an equitable distribution of benefits and burdens which existed prior to the offence'. It is a helpful analysis. It does indeed demonstrate how the penal suffering of the offender (i.e. the imposition of burdens on him), set against his offence (his imposition of burdens on others in unfairly acquiring benefits from them) establishes a kind of balance in terms which have some concrete social reference. It also highlights another important principle in the meaning of retribution, namely the attempt to restore the status quo. To the extent that offence has disrupted a prior balance of benefits and burdens, then it is a balance of the same which must be restored, and is restored, by penal suffering. In this way evil is 'annulled', at least symbolically —a common theme of retributivists: 'Retributive punishment is designed to restore the status quo ante. Its advocates hold that evil calls and cries for obliteration... this insistence on annulment is an essential of a retributive view of punishment.' 12 Moreover, though this is not Burgh's chief concern, he is

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drawing attention to that other mark of retribution, the notion that something is being paid back. In restoring a balance the penal sufferer is paying back something he has taken away. Again, this may be conceived in various ways: materially, so that the thief is required to return the goods he has taken; or 'spiritually', so that he must also pay back something of the victim's lost peace of mind, freedom, sense of security, and so on; even metaphysically, so that he must also pay back the respect and honour due to standards he has violated (in so far as standards are objectively conceived as the will of society — or of God). All this is reparation, to restore the status quo ante. And where such reparation is strictly impossible (how do you pay back 'lost peace of mind'?) then an equivalent is invoked: either a material compensation for a spiritual loss, or, more frequently, an equivalent loss imposed on the offender; his own freedom or peace of mind is removed. Thus by redistribution of benefits and burdens balance is restored by literal or symbolic reparation. And we may note in passing that all this has explicated not only the meaning of retribution but also of desert, a concept which is all too often produced triumphantly, but tautologously, to explain retribution. An offender deserves to be punished, i.e. punishment is due to him, just because the penal suffering which weighs him down is thereby weighing down the balancing scales of distributive justice. But how does such a concept stand up to scrutiny? There are some obvious limitations. For a start, retributivists need to be wary of the claim that they restore the status quo. Formally it is true a kind of balance is restored. But substantively, when we ask what has been balanced, it is not the status quo. There is indeed a new balance of suffering, after retributive action has been taken, but that was not the original state of affairs: the burden imposed on the offender is only a symbolic equivalent of the lost benefit of the victim; it is not the same thing. Furthermore, even if a state of affairs could be restored without recourse to symbolic, compensatory equivalents, it is still hard to see this truly reproducing the status quo ante. Materially perhaps it is possible: returned goods do constitute a true

A moral demand: conditions for real reconciliation mirror image of the goods before they were stolen. But spiritually and personally this is not the case: the business of giving back devotion and faithfulness to a partner with whom one has previously been unfaithful can never truly restore the original relationship. It might conceivably create a better relationship, but never the same; never a mirror image. Metaphysically we might say the same, if we allow ourselves to talk that way at all: even if violated standards are restored they would always be the standards-which-had-been-violated-andrestored, just as the personal relationship would always be the relationship-which-had-been-broken-and-mended. The pastness of life may indeed be transformed by present and future events, but it can never be either exactly reproduced or erased. All this alerts us to the possibility that a truly adequate reaction to offence, and to broken relationships of various kinds, is unlikely to be found in the vain attempt to mirror the past. We shall return to this later. Suffice to note now that here too there are obvious resonances in theological thought. Humankind having sinned, God's reaction does not purport to return us to the original Eden; we are en route for a redeemed creation, a new heaven and earth. However, the more serious critique of retributive reaction lies less in the fact that its own aims are unrealistic than in the fact that they are morally suspect. Certainly, the formal concepts of equity and balance do normally count positively in our 'natural' moral intuitions. However, as soon as we recall that we are necessarily talking of a balance of damage and suffering, the notion that this is good in itself is far less easy to see. By what 'mysterious piece of moral alchemy', as H. L. A. Hart puts it, is the balancing combination of the two sets of suffering (i.e. that caused by the initial sin, and that caused by the retributive reaction) 'transmuted into good'? 13 It is true that consequences have been redistributed, and others introduced, to achieve parity of suffering. But how is this a 'good' dealing with the sin? How is it even effective as a way of dealing with sin? It is strange moral alchemy indeed, to which we are still entitled to ask the question why is it good?, or 'how does it put things right?'. The retributivist can only reply that it

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simply is so, for he is defending an a priori moral truth: equally distributed suffering just is a moral good. As such it is strictly unanswerable — and indefensible — except by appeal to intuition. It may be true, but it is not easy to distinguish from the equally unanswerable assertion that straightforward retaliation is a moral good. The same basic criticism may be cast in more familiar form by emphasizing how this inadequacy of retributive logic demonstrates itself pre-eminently in personal contexts. Certainly, if reality were constituted only of impersonal systems of weights and balances, or even artistic systems of form and colour, then balance, harmony, and equity might well be applied adequately across the board. Any reaction which restored balance would be moral within the terms of the system. But personal life is not like this. As we have seen, the special texture of personal realities forces the formal retributivist logic into reactions which are, perforce, symbolic and compensatory, rather than truly restoring the status quo, and it has already been noted how this demonstrates fundamental limitations even from within the retributivist system. It also demonstrates the specifically moral inadequacy of the system itself, when the personal context is stressed. Any instance of interpersonal relations will suffice as an illustration. If I offend my wife by unfaithfulness and she reacts retributively, she (or someone else) must make me suffer an equivalent sense of deprivation, shame, hurt, and so on, and this is supposed to be good in itself, a dealing with evil by restoring a balance, whether or not it has produced any moral change in me or changed the nature of our relationship. But of course it is nothing of the kind. While burdens conceived as consequences have been equally distributed, so in those (impersonal) terms there is a kind of balance. But in personal terms nothing is dealt with whatsoever. My intentional offence against her remains crying out like the blood of Abel from the ground; the sin remains; nothing of the relationship is dealt with or restored. What now of the positive implications of this critique? If retribution (as defined) is inadequate, wherein lies a proper

A moral demand: conditions for real reconciliation reaction to offence and disrupted relationships? It follows as a corollary from the discussion so far that an aim which would be both realistic and moral must be recreative rather than restorative. Since, as we have seen, all that can be restored is a formal principle of balance, which turns out substantively to be a balance of burdens, reaction to offence should aim to make a new kind of good instead of seeking a return to the old; since it does not adequately deal with evil just by fairly distributing its consequences, it must aim to forge new kinds of consequences out of evil. This restates the point raised earlier under pressure from Ivan Karamazov's challenge: mere compensation leaves past evil unredeemed, whereas the creation of new goods out of past evil transforms its significance, and therefore ' deals' with it more effectively. This makes most sense (and this is its strength) in a personal context. The evil of marital unfaithfulness and its consequences remain even when the husband has been made to suffer its equivalent. It is properly dealt with only in so far as its consequences are used to create a new kind of moral situation, namely when a repentant partner is chastened into paying back a new and better kind of love, healing to both. This 'undoes' the offence by creating something new and better out of it; it is the destruction of evil through recreation and redemption, rather than the fantasy and nostalgia of restoration. Reaction to offence is moral, therefore, as the intended catalyst to this kind of event. Certainly we can have no guarantee of succeeding with this kind of intention in practice. Yet we instinctively acknowledge its moral sufficiency as a reaction to offence by ceasing to press the action if it is achieved. That is to say, if man and woman, parent and child, are reconciled and recreated in a better, deeper relationship, we accept that there is nothing left to do - whether or not the recreative reaction has entailed more or less suffering than that caused by the original offence. Once the relationship is restored through the pain of repentance the wife is unlikely to feel morally obliged to insist her husband still sweep the floors for six months more, as exact reparation. This confirms that quantifiable balance of burdens is not the

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sufficient and determinative criterion for moral reaction: it is certainly not an end in itself. But we must be rigorous to be fair. Might there still be some other reason why the floors should be swept? For instance, what about some recognition that recreation in the personal context has not yet redeemed the wider consequences of the offence, to the children, to marital standards in wider society? Might not floor-sweeping be the symbolic equivalent of dealing with these? This takes us squarely into the social context, and alerts us to the fact that there is also a trans-personal element in disrupted relationships, largely in the 'knock-on' effect of an ever widening circle of consequences, which also requires some sort of reaction (precisely Ivan Karamazov's point). And it is harder to see how a recreative logic can cope with this. After all, how can a mugger be dealt with in such a way that it recreates better things not only for his victim, but for the outraged relatives, for other youngsters who ape the example of violence, for the intangible harm to neighbourhood trust and violated social standards at large? Should he not be still sweeping floors as symbolic repayment for all that he cannot recreate, betraying the need for a retributive logic after all? The question succeeds, however, only by sleight of hand. For a start, these are only limitations in practice, bounded as we are by the constraints of space and time. If we could again move into a theological and eschatological context, the criminal could be, in principle, an instrument of recreation for all the wider consequences of his action; he could be brought face-toface with all the indirect victims of his crime as a personal recreative agent for them all: the trans-personal element personalized. In principle he could, like Edwin Muir's Judas, take ' the long journey backwards' (which is, of course, really

forwards).1*

There is also sleight of hand in terms of practice here and now. It is plainly unfair to tax this particular reaction to evil with its practical limitations. After all, recreative action largely fails in practice just because any finite and limited human endeavour has only a finite and limited success in dealing with evil. Indeed, in practical terms, we barely deal with it at all in

A moral demand: conditions for real reconciliation the sense of undoing it; we mostly attempt only to restrain it, which is why so much social reaction to offence appeals quite rightly at a pragmatic level to the principle of denunciation and deterrence. And one might well add that recreative attempts are not wholly inconceivable even in practice: there has been some recent success in bringing criminals face-to-face with victims, personalizing social crimes, and thereby recreating life for both offender and victim. On a larger scale it has long been the case that the public recantation of some offenders (in the Watergate affair, for instance) can and does release recreative power in society as a whole. The logic of recreation is not nonsense, even in practice, though strictly limited in application. While we are in the social context, however, we should concede one important sense in which the likely relative failure of recreative action would justify the reinstatement of a retributive logic. It arises out of a familiar point: as many critics of reformative views have rightly pointed out, the principles of desert, understood as balance, at least provide a measurable limit to reforming zeal. In a social context at least, given our human limitations, there is a time when we should stop punishing, even if there is not yet any evident recreation, and the principle of balance is as good a yardstick as any for that time. In this sense we should let a retributive logic prevail, as a concession to our human limitations. But we should note that this still does not count as a moral justification of why we punish; rather, only as a pragmatically based limiting principle on how much we punish. And here we are bound to put down another theological marker relating quite specifically to atonement theory. For this last point betrays the fact that retributive logic actually demands a less strenuous reaction to evil than recreative logic. It is satisfied with less. In much theological discussion the opposite is often assumed: it is assumed that only if God acts retributively, and only if atonement theory is constructed out of retributive necessity, only then can justice be done to the seriousness of sin and God's anger against it. This is central to many conservative theories

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of penal substitution which rest on an instinctive interpretation underlying the exegesis of three strands of atonement language: 1 Propitiatory language - which implies the need to satisfy the righteous anger of a holy God. 2 Juridical language - which implies the need to satisfy the demands of justice. 3 Substitutionary language - which implies that this satisfaction is made by another instead of us. And prima facie it certainly does seem that a prior retributivist logic fits naturally into these Biblical concerns and theological categories, to explicate the atonement and the basis of reconciliation: God's anger burns until the demands of justice, conceived as a balance of suffering for sin, are met; and either because we are unable to suffer sufficiently to balance the books, or because God's love intervenes, this distribution of penal suffering is placed entirely on Christ in our stead: his is the symbolic or equivalent reparation for what we do not or cannot pay back ourselves. Yet in fact precisely the contrary is true. If the retributivist logic is replaced by a recreative logic, these Biblical concerns surrounding the Christ event will fare better, not worse. A recreative logic actually does more justice, not less, to the wrath of God, because, as already indicated, it takes a more ' strenuous' reaction to deal with the redemption of a whole situation, compared to the limited notion of mere retributive balance, or even mere destruction. Furthermore, as such, it finds wrath and justice wholly compatible with the aims of love, and does not have to trade them off against each other, as does the logic of retributive penal substitution. As so often, the theological point is frequently grasped better through literary imagination than by professional exegetes. No one has understood this better, or expressed it more graphically, than George MacDonald, the Scottish preacher and writer, and mentor to C. S. Lewis: 'God's vengeance is to destroy sin - to make the sinner abjure and hate it; nor is there any satisfaction in a vengeance that seeks or effects less... God grant us his vengeance.' Yet also: 'Nothing is inexorable but love...For

A moral demand: conditions for real reconciliation love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. Where loveliness is incomplete... it strives for perfection... Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved... must be destroyed. And our God is a consuming fire. ' 15 The point is expressed dramatically in the climax of his fantasy Lilith, where the very incarnation of evil is relentlessly pursued for redemption long past the point of retribution.16 It is both a strenuous wrath and a strenuous love indeed, the two being one and the same thing. So much for wrath, clearly not compromised in the least by abandoning retributivist categories. Equally, these categories can lay no special claim to substitutionary language. On the contrary, recreative logic has its own special aptness within a kind of substitutionary framework. For if God's reaction to evil in Christ's suffering, death, and resurrection is recreative; if, as St Paul states, he is indeed our 'wisdom, justification and sanctification';17 if'all things are reconciled through the shedding of his blood' ;18 then all this could only happen precisely if it happens first through the one who transcends (as well as participates in) the limitations of a finite and fallen condition, and so only derivatively and by incorporation can it happen in us as his heirs and beneficiaries. This was precisely the point of our proposed atonement model in chapter 5. We should therefore beware of a longstanding and erroneous presupposition that only a retributivist logic can properly interpret and sustain such Biblical notions as propitiation, and juridical and substitutionary images. A recreative logic, and all that it implies about the universal scope of divine action, fares better on the very ground where theological retributivists normally take their stand. It is also a logic which echoes authentically through the tradition, quite apart from its specific strength in atonement exegesis. From its embryo in the Irenaean doctrine of recapitulation, already mentioned, through to Schleiermacher, and summed up in William Temple's dictum this century that sin must be 'transformed by the new context of the future', there is a consistent stream of theological thought which insists

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on this recreative pattern of salvation in the assault on sin and evil. Such are some of the more immediate theological implications arising from the point that retribution sets limits to punishment. In terms of the way we should order our own juridical reaction to evil in human affairs, as already conceded, retributive reaction could still therefore be of great practical use, but this provides no reason to smuggle it back as a general justifying principle of why we punish. The point remains that reaction to offence is only properly justified by its recreative intention. Although it may properly include elements of denunciation and deterrence as means to recreation, and even retribution as a pragmatic limiting principle, this merely reinforces the point: every aspect of the action should be either a metaphor of recreation or a stage on the way to it. We return therefore to the clear positive implication arising from this general discussion about retribution: namely, that the only adequate 'undoing' of past disruption involves the attempted recreation of something new. This, of course, reflects precisely the pattern we have found to be so important in God's own experience in Christ, and which lies at the heart of most atonement models, including our own. It is exemplified throughout the incarnate life, and pre-eminently in the cross and resurrection. God overcomes evil, and achieves reconciliation, first by experiencing the consequences of it, both in terms of his own temptation to live for self, and in terms of the assault of other people's selfishness on him. But then, by his perfect response through such human experience, by dying to himself and living wholly for God and others, he fashions a unique relationship out of it; he is made perfect through suffering, and rises with the capacity to make others perfect through theirs. Or, as we have it in other language, the meaning of justification (right relationship) includes the prospective meaning of sanctification. We should also be clear what else has emerged from the analysis of retribution, and the positive meaning of recreation. It has been made apparent that such a recreative rationale, if it is going to be credible, must involve the attempt to recreate

A moral demand: conditionsforreal reconciliation the whole situation affected, not just the perverted will of the offender. To deal adequately with any particular disruption or offence, of past or present, entails so much more than the formal balance of suffering to mirror the balance of the past: it means forging good out of all the interlocking consequences as they reach outward, ripple-like, in time and space. The grave limitations to achieving this in practice which we have acknowledged merely draw our attention more compelhngly to this pressing principle: reconciliation of any particular requires universal scope of action. It is a moral demand of any adequate reaction to offence and disruption. In analysing the concept of retribution we therefore find ourselves echoing Dostoevsky's perception: the inadequacies of retribution as a response to evil have proved the reverse side of Ivan's savage attack on the inadequacies of reconciliation. The moral deficiency of both lies in their limited scope of action through time and space. Reaction to evil fails unless it is rooted in some sort of universal reconciling agency - an agency which can enter personally into all interlocking time and space to reshape all the interrelated consequences of any evil for greater good. So this thoroughly reinforces the initial answer given to our questions posed at the beginning of this chapter. What must happen in response to moral evil is the kind of reconciliation which is potentially universal in its recreative possibilities. This demonstrates so clearly the moral impetus behind our atonement model. Forgiveness is only finally and fully possible, only morally complete, through a kind of universal providence. And that is just the traditional claim: forgiveness is fully possible only through the Christ figure, both historically particular and 'cosmic'. Specifically, it is made effective through the Christ who, having achieved in his own particular space and time the reshaping of appalling evil into greater good, takes that recreative activity throughout the whole universe. Thus we are recalled to the point at issue in the discussion as a whole. In chapter 5 the proposal was made that salvation, considered as God's overcoming of evil and his positive

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faithfulness and obedience in Christ, is then extended throughout all time and space. In this chapter, a general consideration of what moral demands must be met in any serious reaction to evil reinforces the point. The particular experience of effectively recreating evil into good, achieved by God in Jesus Christ, must be achieved universally for moral credibility to be satisfied. Moral intuition here meets theological claim, and sends it on its way rejoicing.

CHAPTER 8

Anthropocentricity, imperialism, and evangelism an ethical postscript

A moral impetus behind a theological position is all very well, and probably a necessary condition of commending any serious theology. But it is hardly a sufficient condition. On the contrary, just because of strong moral backing a theology is just as likely to arouse suspicion and wariness as well. Justifiably so: in so far as religion is bound to believe it is right (in the moral as well as factual sense), then it is always liable to be tyrannical in its expectations and ethics. This is a conspicuous and contemporary danger. It is, moreover, especially associated with theological positions such as that I have been outlining, where a universal concern is rooted in a particular event of revelation. And since I take it that ethical implications of theological positions do matter, it behoves us to look at them, however briefly. At the very least we must be sure that there is no necessary route from what seemed to be sound soteriology to what turns out to be bad ethics. One possible area of criticism arises out of the observations with which we began, regarding the expanding size of our world: more particularly, our new understanding of the size of the universe. For it is not just that there are so many people. There is also so much time, space, organic, and material reality beyond and apart from humankind. That is the clear and largely undisputed claim of relatively recent geological, biological, and astronomical discoveries. Such knowledge appears to dethrone individual man, and even the species. It puts us all into a soberingly small frame within the overall perspective. What is man except (as Troeltsch put it) 'a breath 107

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on a cold window pane', appearing and disappearing in a moment, and without great significance? Yet in this book's exposition of a constitutively Christcentred soteriology all the rest of reality has largely been overlooked. It has concentrated exclusively on the reconciliation of mankind, and particularly individual man. It has not properly dealt with God's purposes for all things (ta panta). I pleaded in the introduction that this simply reflects a limited scope for a short book. But the question may still linger: does it also betray a fundamentally flawed anthropocentric theology, leading to an anthropocentric ethic in which mankind justifies the destructive exploitation of the rest of the natural order? I believe not. Certainly it must be granted that any adequate doctrine of creation should include a positive assessment of the whole natural order; it should also be granted that any comprehensive doctrine of redemption should include some account of how all things are reconciled. All consequent ethics should therefore include value judgements and prescriptions relating to the natural world. But I am content that all this could well be added to, and arise out of, the narrower confines of the particular theological issue we have been pursuing. The universal scope of Christ's work need not be limited to humankind. More specifically, even the constitutive basis of a particular incarnation could be developed to relate to the wider natural order. We could, for instance, propose that God ' must' have entered into a perfect human experience of the natural order as a constitutive necessity in its redemption, in an analogous sense to his redemption of the human world. For if we grant that the proper meaning and purpose of a tree or hill, the lilies of the field or the birds of the air, depends on a total web of right relations and right perceptions within the whole world, including the human world, then we may grant the incarnation a role in creating the possibility of those right perceptions and right relations (as well as right interpersonal relations). This just touches on an area of discussion which goes a long way beyond the brief of this book. So I must again insist that it is simply for the sake of limiting the field of discussion that we

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have confined the question of reconciliation to mankind, and particularly individual man - as being the most (but not only) significant category in the hierarchy of created value. Yet do even these last apparently modest assumptions, of human superiority and the importance of the individual within the species, need justification? They do. They actually require vigorous defence against those who see no special value in mankind; those who deny the unique importance of the individual; and those who are wary of any concept of a hierarchy of value. There are a number of issues here. 'Speciesism' and individualism are separable in principle, even though they are often found living comfortably together within the same moral framework. Likewise, while there is often a common utilitarian basis for criticizing them, there are also different kinds of argument employed variously against different forms of speciesism and individualism.1 So any detailed and adequate response to the critique obviously lies beyond the scope of this book. Yet if we cast the issues in their most general terms we could still reasonably claim some sort of common basis to the criticism: the rejection of any hierarchy of value and human individualism is normally made in favour of some sort of ethic of collective equality. And we should then be aware that the ethical implications of a general framework of collective equality are themselves vulnerable to criticism. In fact they are, arguably, far more serious and notorious than those associated with assuming some sort of hierarchy of value. We must not allow ethical unease to be unfairly associated with only one theological or philosophical position. For as soon as an ethic of collective equality is characterized, even in general terms, it quickly becomes clear how vulnerable it is. It has to have as its goal some sort of vision of right relations of all parts within the whole. In itself this is unexceptionable. But this may also mean that no part is accorded the status of'end', but each part is equally means to the overall stability, order, harmony, of the whole. This sounds acceptable as a basis for ordering an impersonal web of

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interrelating parts (in a machine, for example). But as a moral basis for ordering reality which includes personal life it becomes intolerable. It justifies treating individuals as means. It returns us instantly to the moral force behind Ivan Karamazov's complaint where, in the legend of the Grand Inquisitor, Dostoevsky sets up a thinly veiled critique of the Church Authorities of his day (and other days) which operated on precisely this basis: for the sake of overall stability and harmony of the whole they have to crush individual freedom of thought and expression by appeal to 'miracle, mystery and authority'. In the narrative drama of the book such a system re-crucifies a returning Christ. Moreover, as we have seen, Ivan Karamazov puts the same complaint against God himself, not just the Church. For he perceives that most theodicies work the same way. They appeal to an overall harmony of freely won salvation in heaven to 'justify' the senseless torture of individual children. Other imaginative writers perceive the same point, often with powerful dramatic clarity. The danger is exposed with equal force and vividness in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon. Here the context is Marxist ethics, not the Church's. The 'whole' is not the harmony of the Church (or even heaven), but the relentless march of History which ' must' conform to dialectical laws towards its Utopian goal where all flourish together. This is another way of elevating right relations within the whole as the sole and sufficient end of right behaviour, which therefore consists in perceiving the operation of these laws and acting in accordance with them. In the narrative of the book a party man, who has devoted his life to this task, finds himself imprisoned for standing in the way of these laws. He should submit. There is no trace of Kantian ethics in the system to save him; no sense that he can be a valuable 'end' in himself, over against the impersonal system. And of course the story judges this to be morally unacceptable. In his prison cell the obstinate fact of the hero's self-consciousness, his unique individuality, his ' I '-ness, intrudes. It calls into question this whole basis of collective value and priority upon which he has built his life. The 'I'-ness is

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something which he had been trained to consider a 'grammatical fiction... with the shamefacedness with which the Party had inculcated about the first person singular'. 2 But in the narrative it takes on the moral force of concrete reality, not grammatical fiction. It is the only thing which stands between himself as an 'end' and the remorseless logic of the whole. Although neither of these novels is concerned specifically with the relative value of the human species within the natural order, they both offer powerful critiques of collectivism in general, and certainly collectivism within the human world. Within that area of concern, the message is clear. Whilst the arguments of some characters leave it theoretically open to us to dismiss individualism as egocentric and (by extension to other areas of concern) to dismiss speciesism as anthropocentric,3 the actual drama of the stories makes us face the disturbing ethical consequences of such an attitude. They are the infamous consequences of a collectivist ethic which blurs the distinction between personal and impersonal reality, and reduces persons to a cog in a machine. Perhaps even more significantly, from a theological perspective, such an ethic means abandoning the quest for a really adequate theodicy in which no individual is ultimately sacrificed as means to the end of some greater good (and it is notable that those most sensitive to the dangers of anthropocentricity dismiss the quest for such a theodicy as egocentric).4 In complete contrast I believe we must see that quest as morally essential, forcing us to take Ivan Karamazov's complaint with utmost seriousness, even though we have to admit there is no easy answer to him.5 He has a right to question both God and inadequate theodicies precisely because the human individual is so important. It is that unique importance which should hold us to the quest. However, even if this is granted, it still exposes the theology of the traditional claim to another point of potential criticism, on ethical grounds. Granted that humanity, and individuals, are central (though not exclusive) to God's redeeming concerns, it is another matter to claim that one particular member of it, and those who follow him, are central. In short, does not Christ's constitutive role imply Christian arrogance, opening

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up a Pandora's box of religious tyranny and imperialism? Religions so easily become ' licensed insanities' when they claim to embody a necessary and constitutive path to salvation.6 It is a point upon which I have already touched in chapter 2 - and a point which I hope to have already thoroughly defused. The distinction made in that chapter between epistemological and ontological necessity in Christian soteriology is crucial. Regarding access to truth it means that the non-Christian world can and does know religious truths. Some will be compatible with those of the Christian world, some will not. But since all religious truth will have been filtered through, added to, and distorted by the medium of social, historical, and cultural pressures, there is no undiluted and absolute criterion against which to test that truth. The historical event of Jesus Christ can remain pivotal, without for one moment claiming epistemological purity or exclusiveness. It may be a unique focus of religious truth without for one moment denying that the light is also scattered further afield. Such light will not only demand recognition in its own right, it may well illuminate and correct the distortions which collect even around its focus. Thus mutual respect, dialogue, and redefinition are not only permitted but positively required. In the language of recent studies of Christian theology and other religions, we are operating with a form of 'inclusivist' paradigm.7 Therefore there is no route to crass Christian imperialism here. Regarding the soteriological significance of religious truths, it means something similar. Knowledge of the Saviour is not a necessary constituent of being saved: not, that is, in this life, and not in the sense that historical knowledge about the events of Jesus of Nazareth is required. What may be required is the kind of personal humility and responsiveness which will accept the anonymous Saviour's gift (a responsiveness which may not necessarily be ultimately found in everyone, as already indicated): but then this could well be mediated and enabled through the positive values of another religious or humanitarian tradition. There is therefore no possible mandate for imposing historical knowledge on the non-Christian world as if

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it is a prerequisite for final salvation, nor for denying that it is a world through which God can bring its people to salvation (still, of course, through Christ). Yet what of that ontological necessity, the consistent claim of this theology that all salvation is still, precisely, through Christ? Is there not here still some cause for ethical unease? Might it not breed unseemly Christian superiority and insidious selfrighteousness, so easily spilling over into coercive or repressive behaviour? It might. It has certainly done so in the past, and may still do so in the present. But there are two points which mitigate the charge. In the first instance I suggest it has done so chiefly because of an unholy alliance with a theology of epistemological necessity. The divorce is essential, and must be frankly admitted, without embarrassment. But the more important point is a point of principle, which Kraemer and others have long since made, and which must be taken seriously. Although the historical Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew, and although Christendom has baptized him to such a large extent (until recently) in western culture, the saving event and achievement of Christ belongs to neither Jewish nor western nor any other race or culture or religion exclusively. Of course, we only have historical knowledge of this Christ event through the medium of the Christian religion, and this gives a special significance to Christendom.8 But as I have been insisting, this is not, nor ever should have been, the significance of exclusive spiritual insight, nor of soteriological efficacy. It is not the religion of Christianity which saves, but the particular and cosmic event of Christ. This event ' had' to be founded in some particular, historical, time and space, for all the reasons already discussed, and was therefore bound to generate a unique historical body of witness to it. But it belongs to, and affects, the whole world. If Christendom truly grasped this, it would assume the role of a humble servant of the world, rather than aspiring to be its arrogant master. Does this then reduce the role and significance of the Christian Church to an inessential historical accident? Strictly speaking it is true that the logic of our position implies that,

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were there no historical knowledge of the Christ event and no human agency to transmit it, it would still have saving efficacy. Christ would still be applying his incarnational experience throughout all time and eternity to ' reconcile all things' — anonymously. In fact this is no embarrassment, since a radical doctrine of salvation by grace should always be prepared to live without that sort of human mediation. Yet of course this does not marginalize the role of the Church in God's purposes for the world. If anything, it releases it. It means that it can be a (contingent) vehicle of Christ's reconciling work without the burden of an absurd theology: namely, we do not have to believe that other people's final fulfilment depends wholly on our faithfulness in preaching the Gospel effectively. Few can seriously believe that without being either crushed by a sense of impotence, or driven by guilt. The point is, it is a belief that need never have been attempted. Moreover, the Church is still a distinctive vehicle of that reconciling work, albeit not strictly necessary, for it will always have the unique role and privilege of bearing witness to the historical Christ. To be able to name and testify to the ultimate agent of all reconciling work now brings a vital ingredient of full and final salvation into history. Even if every knee shall ultimately bow at the name ofJesus (whether or not they heard it in Church), the anticipation of that now is a glorious privilege. It is something like the experience of a child rediscovering long-lost (or never known) parents; parents who saved the child, let us say, from the chaos of a war, by pushing it onto a train to freedom, even as they were separated. The event had its effect without knowledge; but gaining the knowledge of it is still a highly significant part of final fulfilment. The preaching of the Gospel therefore remains a truly eschatological event, with all the self-authenticating quality that implies. Evangelism, far from being superfluous, becomes (at best) a profound act of sharing and generosity, bringing crucial elements of final fulfilment into the present. To be sure, it remains a tantalizing puzzle why some get to know this now, and others have to wait for eternity. That is but one small part of the wider problem of all inequality (and

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therefore of theodicy). If there is an answer which we can understand now it will presumably have something to do with creating the economy of love and all that implies: there has to be space for giving and receiving in all things, including knowledge. But even if this is opaque or unconvincing the crucial point remains, namely that the task of evangelism is retained, even enhanced, without having to bear the strain of intolerable underlying assumptions. A similar point may need to be made about the significance of all other human striving to bring the Kingdom into this present world. Although crucial conditions for the possibility of reconciliation have been uniquely constituted by God in Christ, this does not for one moment release us from the responsibility of co-operating in ' actualizing' it here and now. By social action as well as by faith and prayer we are morally bound to help bring all aspects of reconciliation (not just knowledge of the divine act) into the present. All acts of love and reconciliation, including political acts, are in that sense, eschatological events. Again, any particular contribution we may make to the saving work may not have the status of strict necessity in terms of final fulfilment: from the perspective of eternity God is able to use other means if we fail. But we are under no less an obligation for that. On the contrary, it releases the possibility of a purer moral motive for good action: we are free to do right as a response of gratitude; to ' love because he first loved us'. Many of these last points obviously require further work. For this book, however, the aim has remained much more modest. I have simply and solely sought ways to conceive how the Christ event might be constitutive of God's saving action for all people in, and beyond, the whole world of space and time; ways of believing an ancient claim in a modern world. In so doing I hope to have answered with a very traditional Christian affirmative, a persistent question. It is Iris Murdoch's question in Bruno's Dream: 'does something happen for forgiveness? Or is it just a word?' 9 It has long been a crucial Christian answer to affirm that something does have to happen.

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It has to be something from beyond our own resources as well as something within ourselves. It is the Christ event, rooted in a particular moment in history, spreading throughout all time, space, and eternity, which still claims our attention. I see no reason to abandon its persistent claim. On the contrary I hope to have helped show how it can still be expressed with genuine moral, conceptual, and theological coherence. We do not have to trade the compelling psychological power of the particular for intellectual and moral credibility. In this area of doctrine at least, credibility arises precisely from particularity. In order to touch the whole world effectively, God did indeed enter deeply and uniquely into one part of it.

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1 F. W. Dillistone, The Christian Understanding of the Atonement (Nisbet, Welwyn 1968). 2 See Robert Hamilton, The Monodic Quest, in Journal of Theological Studies, 38, 1 (April 1987): 'The Kingdom began to be presented as an event that would take place only in the soul of the individual believer.' 3 M. F. Wiles, The Remaking of Christian Doctrine (SCM, London, 1974)4 Ibid., p. 81. 5 Vernon White, The Fall of a Sparrow (Paternoster, Exeter 1985). 6 Cf. David Ison, Academic Theology and Adult Theological E d u c a t i o n , i n British Journal of Theological Education, 1,3(1988). 1

THE CLAIM

1 See 'Reconciliation', in New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, m (Engl. edn, ed. C. Brown, Paternoster, Exeter 1978). 2 Col. 1:20, 22; Eph. 2:16. 3 2 Cor. 5:19; see also Rom. 11:15. 4 Col. 1119, 20. 5 E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, Section 5 (SCM, London 1977). 6 Ibid., p. 444. 7 Martin Hengel, The Atonement (Engl. transl., SCM, London 1981), p. 31. 8 2 Cor. 5:17. 9 Rom. 3:25, 26. 10 Ibid, 11 1 Cor. 1:3c 117

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12 Rom. 8:38, 39. 13 J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 4th edn (A. & G. Black, London 1968), p. 376. 14 Justin, Dial, 41, 1; 134, 5ff. 15 See R. W. Southern, St. Anselm and his Biographer (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1963), pp. iooff. 16 Ibid. See also J. M. Mclntyre, St. Anselm and his Critics: A Reinterpretation of the Cur Deus Homo (Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh 17 See, for example, A. E. McGrath, Luther's Theology of the Cross (Blackwell, Oxford 1985), ch. 5. 18 Ibid., p. 173. McGrath points out that Luther is here drawing on a late medieval Augustinian tradition. 19 Resolutions 11558, 5ff (1518). 20 Heinrich Bornkamm, Luther's World of Thought (Engl. transl., Concordia, St Louis 1958), p. 173. 21 Gustav Aulen, Christus Victor (Engl. transl., SPCK, London 1930). 22 See especially Luther's commentary on Galatians 3:13. 2 ON H A V I N G L I V E D T O O L O N G AND SEEN T O O MUCH 1 William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization (Anchor Press, Garden City, New York 1978), pp. 171-2. 2 John Hick, God and the Universe of Faiths (Macmillan, London 1973)3 Acts 17 :i6fT; Rom. 2:14, 15. 4 Heinz Zahrnt, The Question of God (Engl. transl., Collins, London 1969), p. 113. 5 See John Hick, Evil and the God of Love (Macmillan, London 1966: Fontana, 1968). 6 See John Baillie, The Idea of Revelation in Recent Thought (Oxford University Press, London 1956). 7 William Temple, Nature, Man and God (Macmillan, London 1934), esp. pp. 322, 316. 8 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics (Engl. transl., T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh 1936-53), 1:1, esp. pp. i24ff; Emil Brunner, The Divine-Human Encounter (Engl. transl., SCM, London 1944), p. 73. 9 H. R. Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation (Macmillan, New York 1941); W. Pannenberg, Dogmatic Theses on the Doctrine of Revelation, in Revelation as History (Engl. transl., Sheed and Ward, London 1969). 10 See F. G. Downing, Has Christianity a Revelation? (SCM, London

Notes to pages 21-g

11 12 13 14

15

16

17 18

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1964): Downing points out the difficulty of using such a concept as revelation (when it means communicating knowledge) logically and coherently: it suggests 'making clear', 'removing obscurity', yet the content of what is supposed to be revealed is still the divine mystery. He questions whether there is a Biblical basis for such a concept: is it not rather implied that God remains hidden to the end (see chapters 2 and 3 especially) ? This goes further than Baillie's point that the Bible has no concept specifically of revelation as the communication of supernatural knowledge: Downing claims the whole notion of'making clear' is unbiblical. Like most provocative theses it may have attempted to prove too much to make its point. Nonetheless, it contributes a useful cutting edge to the process of reconceiving the concept of revelation. Carl E. Braaten, History and Hermeneutics {New Directions in Theology Today Vol. 11) (Lutterworth, London 1968), p. 14. Ibid., p. 15. Barth, Church Dogmatics, 1:1, pp. 213ff; Brunner, The Divine-Human Encounter, pp. 59ff. See, for instance, W.J.Abraham, Divine Action and History (unpublished doctoral thesis submitted to the University of Oxford 1977), ch. 2, pp. igff. See, for example, R. W. Hepburn, Christianity and Paradox (Watts, London 1958), chs. 3 and 4; also B. Mitchell, The Justification of Religious Belief (Macmillan, London 1973), esp. chs. 6, 7, and 8, pp. 142-8. Bruce Marshall, Christology in Conflict (Blackwell, Oxford 1987), p. 40. For comments on, and exposition of, Rahner's 'anonymous Christianity' see ibid., p. 71 n. 71. Braaten, History and Hermeneutics, pp. 14, 15. J. N. Farquhar, The Crown of Hinduism (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1930). 3

THE W O R K OF C H R I S T

1 Leonard Hodgson, The Doctrine of the Atonement (Nisbet, London 1951), pp. 149-50. 2 Wiles, The Re-making of Christian Doctrine, ch. 4. 3 C. E. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement (T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh 1988). 4 Ibid., p. 116. 5 Paul Avis, The Atonement, in Geoffrey Wainwright (ed.), Keeping the Faith: Essays to Mark the Centenary of Lux Mundi (SPCK, London 1989)-

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6 See, for example, the debate in R. C. Moberly, Atonement and Personality (John Murray, London 1901), and Hastings Rashdall, Dr Moberly's Theory of Atonement, in Journal of Theological Studies, 3 (1902), pp. 178-211, and The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology (Macmillan, London 1919). 7 James Denney, The Death of Christ, (Tyndale Press, London 1911). 8 Avis, The Atonement, p. 132. 9 D. M. Baillie, God Was in Christ (Faber, London 1961), p. 90. 10 Ibid., p. 201. 11 John Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology (revised edn, SCM, London 1977). 12 Ibid., p. 269. 13 Ibid., p. 314. 14 Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV:I, p. 128. 15 See G. W. Bromiley's exposition in An Introduction to the Theology of Karl Barth (T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh 1979), pp. i8iff. 16 Barth, Church Dogmatics, VI:I, pp. 23iff. 17 Ibid., vi: 1, p. 287. 18 Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations (Engl. transl., Seabury & Crossroads, New York 1961-83), xvm, p. 140. 19 Rahner, Schriften zur Theologie, xv, p. 245; quoted in Marshall, Chris to logy in Conflict, p. 102. 20 Rahner does attempt some sort of explanation: the Christ event does possess a 'type of causality' for salvation; it is not just an illustration, but a kind of final causality. However, this is most confidently described in theological categories, rather than philosophical: it has causal efficacy as a 'sacramental sign'. And as such the explanation is still somewhat opaque. See Theological Investigations, xvi, p. 214. 21 John Hick, Evil and Incarnation, in Michael Goulder (ed.), Incarnation and Myth (SCM, London 1979), p. 81. 22 Wiles, Remaking of Christian Doctrine, p. 72. 23 Hick, Evil and Incarnation, p. 79. 24 Ibid., p. 82. 25 Wiles, Remaking of Christian Doctrine, p. 79. 26 Ibid., pp. 7iff. 27 As quoted above: see n. 13. 28 See Michael Roots' discussion, Necessity and Unfittingness in Anselm's Cur Deus Homo, in Scottish Journal of Theology, 40, 2 (1987), pp. 211-30. 29 Brian Hebblethwaite, The Moral and Religious Value of the Incarnation, in Goulder (ed.), Incarnation and Myth, p. 94. 30 Ibid.

Notes to pages 40-g 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., pp. 95, 97. 4 TWO RECENT CONTRIBUTIONS 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, pp. 17-18. Ibid., p. 52. Ibid., p. 80. Ibid., p. 113. Ibid., p. 140. Ibid., p. 141. 7M., p. 81. Ibid., p. i n . / M . , p. 137: Gunton is quoting from p. 295 of The Collected Writings of Edward Irving, v, ed. G. Carlyle and Alexander Strahan (London 1865). Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, p. 155. Ibid., p. 165. Ibid., pp. 165-6. Ibid., p. 169. Ibid. Ibid., p. 170. Ibid., p. 173. Paul Fiddes, Past Event and Present Salvation (DLT, London 1989). Ibid., p. 79. Ibid., pp. i35ff. Ibid., pp. iO4ff. Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 136, quoting Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology, p. 324. Ibid., p. 147; Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, 11 (Nisbet, London 1941), pp. 59-64. R. S. Lee, Freud and Christianity (Penguin, Harmondsworth 1967). Fiddes, Past Event and Present Salvation, p. 147. Ibid., p. 148. Ibid., p. 150. Ibid., pp. 25ff. Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. no. Moberly, Atonement and Personality; F. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (Engl. transl., T. & T.Clark, Edinburgh 1928); Athanasius, Contra Arianos 2.59. Fiddes, Past Event and Present Salvation, pp. i66ff.

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33 Ibid., p. 153. 5

C R E A T I N G AN A T O N E M E N T

MODEL

1 Though some Abelard scholars stress other, more traditional, aspects of this atonement theory: see, for example, R. E. Weingart, The Logic of Divine Love (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1970). 2 Helen Oppenheimer, The Hope of Happiness (SGM, London 1983). 3 See above, p. 47. 4 Hebblethwaite, The Moral and Religious Value of the Incarnation, p. 97. 5 Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, pp. 467-8. 6 C. F. D. Moule, The Origin of Christology (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1977). 7 Ibid., p. 86. 8 Irenaeus, Haer, 3, 18, 1; 2, 22, 4: cited in Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, p. 173. 9 Ibid., p. 376. 10 Gregory Nazianzen, Epistle 101. 11 M. F. Wiles, The Unassumed is the Unhealed, in Working Papers in Doctrine (SCM, London 1976), ch. 9. 12 Ibid., p. 116. 13 J. McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement (Macmillan, London 1878; J. Clarke, London 1959), pp. i36ff. 14 J. K. Mozley, The Doctrine of the Atonement (Duckworth, London 1915), p. 196. 15 Avis, The Atonement, p. 141. 16 P. T. Forsyth, The Work of Christ (Hodder & Stoughton, London 1910; Fontana, 1965). 17 H. R. Mackintosh, The Christian Experience of Forgiveness (Nisbet, London 1927). 18 Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV:I, p. 553. 19 See Richard Creel, Divine Impassibility (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1987), p. 67. 20 Ibid., chs. 5 and 6. 21 White, The Fall of a Sparrow chs. 4 and 5. 22 Robert W. Jenson, The Christian Doctrine of God, in Wainwright (ed.), Keeping the Faith, p. 38. 23 Ibid., p. 47 referring to Barth, Church Dogmatics, 11:2, pp. 86, 109-214; ran, pp. 44-103. 24 Jenson, The Christian Doctrine of God, pp. 38ff. Cf. Jonathan Edwards, Miscellanies (MS Yale Univ. 741).

Notes to pages 65-75

123

25 G. K. Chesterton, On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family, inP. J. Kavanagh, The Bodley Head G. K. Chesterton (Bodley Head, London 1985). 26 G. H. Sisson (ed.), Christina Rossetti, Selected Poems (Carcanet, Manchester 1984). 6

THE PERSON OF C H R I S T

1 J. A. T. Robinson, The Human Face of God (SCM, London 1972), pp. 43, 108-9. 2 Ibid., pp. io8ff. 3 The best summary of this is not in The Myth of God Incarnate itself, but in a collection of essays published earlier in Cambridge: see M. F. Wiles, 'Does Christology Rest on a Mistake?' in S. W. Sykes andj. P. Clayton (eds.), Christ, Faith and History (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1972). 4 G. R. Lampe, God as Spirit (Clarendon, Oxford 1977), ch. 4. 5 John Hick, The Second Christianity (SCM, London 1983), pp. 26-32. 6 See, for example, Baillie, God Was in Christ. 7 H. P. Owen, Christian Theism (T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh 1984). 8 See, for instance, T. V. Morris, The Logic of God Incarnate (Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1986), which has been criticized for theological and historical insensitivity, precisely because it concentrates on conceptual considerations in abstraction from these others. So claims Kenneth Surin in Theology, 733 (Jan. !987)> P- 539 Cf. Christoph Schwobel, What Are Philosophical Problems in Christology? (unpublished paper given at the Christian Philosophers' Conference, Oxford 1987). Following Schubert Ogden's analysis of Christology as ' Christology of Witness' and ' Christology of Reflection', incarnation is but one element within the former (a 'master story'), and a way of relating the two 'by a conceptual account of the relations between God, Jesus Christ and humanity'. 10 See Schwobel, What Are Philosophical Problems in Christology?; cf. Morris, The Logic of God Incarnate; David Brown, The Divine Trinity (Duckworth, London 1985); also Richard Swinburne, Could God become Man?, in Geoffrey Vasey (ed.), The Philosophy in Christianity (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1989). 11 Robinson, The Human Face of God; Norman Pittenger, The Word Incarnate (Nisbet, Welwyn 1959); Baillie, God Was in Christ. 12 Brown, The Divine Trinity, pp. 236ff.

124

Notes to pages 75-83

13 Ibid., p. 124. 14 Brown's view is that a kenotic model requires virgin birth, and a two-nature doctrine does not: see ibid., p. 123. 15 Ibid., p. 261. 16 Ibid., p. 263. Cf. also Swinburne, Could God become Man?, who also appeals to a concept of the divided mind, based on a Freudian model. 17 Brown, The Divine Trinity, p. 264. 18 Ibid., pp. 228, 249 n. 6. 19 Morris, The Logic of God Incarnate. 20 Ibid., pp. iO2ff. 21 Morris defines this elsewhere in the book in terms of individualessences and kind-essences: see ibid., ch. 3: Divine and Human Existence. 22 Ibid., p. 106. 23 Thomas Nagel, Brain Bisection and the Unity of Consciousness, in John Perry (ed.), Personal Identity (University of California Press, 1 975)> P- 243. Brown also quotes from Nagel in similar vein: see The Divine Trinity, p. 262, quoting from Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1979). 24 See J. C. Eccles, The Understanding of the Brain (McGraw-Hill, New York 1973). 25 See, for example, L. De Witt, Consciousness, Mind and Self: The Implications of the Split-Brain Studies, in British Journal of Philosophy and Science 26 (1975), pp. 41—7. 26 R. W. Sperry, Changing Concepts of Consciousness and Free Will, in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 20 (1976), pp. 9-19; and Science and Moral Priority (Blackwell, Oxford 1983). 27 Cf. David Wiggins, Identity and Spatio- Temporal Continuity (Blackwell, Oxford 1967); also Derek Parfitt, Personal Identity, in Perry (ed.), Personal Identity, ch. 14. 28 Cf. Perry (ed.), Personal Identity, also Sydney Schoemaker and Richard Swinburne, Personal Identity (Blackwell, Oxford 1984). 29 Brown, The Divine Trinity, p. 271. 30 See, for instance, Anthony Quinton, The Soul, in Perry (ed.), Personal Identity, ch. 3. 31 John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ch. 7, section 9, p. 27. This chapter/section first appears in the 2nd edition of 1694. 32 Quinton, The Soul. 33 Mid. 34 See, for instance, the debate between Swinburne and Schoemaker, Personal Identity.

Notes to pages 83-95

I2

5

35 See Morris, The Logic of God Incarnate, pp. 8gff. He sees two defects in kenoticism: (1) an unsatisfactory account of the modalities of the divine attributes; (2) specifically, it means abandoning a substantive metaphysical account of divine immutability. 36 Cf. Jenson, The Christian Doctrine of God, p. 47. 37 See Barth's discussion of anhypostasia in Church Dogmatics, 1:2, p. 178; also Marshall's discussion in Christology in Conflict, pp. 172fF. 38 M. F. Wiles, Christianity without Incarnation?, in Hick (ed.), The Myth of God Incarnate, p. 5.

7

A MORAL D E M A N D : C O N D I T I O N S FOR REAL RECONCILIATION

1 Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (Engl. transl., Penguin, Harmondsworth 1958), p. 287. 2 Ibid., p. 288. 3 See A. Boyce-Gibbon, The Religion of Dostoevsky (SCM, London 1973)4 Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p. 288. 5 Cf. Richard Swinburne, Responsibility and Atonement (Clarendon, Oxford 1989), p. 89: 'if there is an endless life after death, in which the wrongdoer can meet his victim, then I am inclined to think that a wrongdoer will always have adequate opportunity to make atonement for any wrong, however bad'. Swinburne's emphasis lies more heavily on atonement through reparation, repentance, apology, and penance, but the appeal to an eschatological perspective is essentially the same as ours. 6 E.g. H. B. Acton (ed.), The Philosophy of Punishment (Macmillan, London 1969); R. J. Gerber and P. D. McAnany (eds.), Contemporary Punishment (Notre Dame, London 1972); Nigel Walker, Punishment, Danger and Stigma (Blackwell, Oxford 1980). 7 Sir Walter Moberly, The Ethics of Punishment (Faber, London 8 Ibid., p. 112; cf. Peter Winch, Ethics and Action (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1972), for whom this kind of reformation is actually a defining characteristic of retribution: ' it is only if an individual is able to make his punishment illuminative of his past actions that it becomes moral and the concept of punishment retributive'. Cf. also M. Paton, Can an Action be its own Punishment?, in Philosophy, 54 (1979). 9 Augustine, On Free Will, i n , ix, 26. 10 Augustine, Confessions, vn, 13. 11 Richard Burgh, Do the Guilty Deserve Punishment?, in Journal of Philosophy, 79, 4 (1982).

126

Notes to pages 95-115

12 Moberly, The Ethics of Punishment, p. 119; but see also chs. 7 and 8. 13 H. L. A. Hart, Punishment and Responsibility (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1968). 14 Cf. n. 5 above. 15 George MacDonald: An Anthology, ed. C. S. Lewis (Geoffrey Bles, London 1946), 107, 2. 16 George MacDonald, Lilith (Ballantine Books Ltd, London 1971). 17 1 Cor. 1130. 18 Col. 1:20. 8

A N T H R O P O C E N T R I C I T Y , I M P E R I A L I S M , AND E V A N G E L I S M : AN E T H I C A L P O S T S C R I P T

1 See Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1979). 2 Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (Jonathan Cape, London 1940). 3 See James M. Gustafson, Theology and Ethics, 1 (University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1981; Blackwell, Oxford 1981). 4 Ibid. 5 See White, The Fall of a Sparrow, ch. 7. 6 Cf. John Bowker, Licensed Insanities (DLT, London 1987). 7 See Gavin D'Costa, Theology and Religious Pluralism (Blackwell, Oxford 1986). 8 Cf. L. Newbigin, The Finality of Christ (SCM, London 1969): the debate on this issue between Kraemer and Newbigin is usefully summarized and evaluated in D'Costa, Theology and Religious Pluralism, pp. 74-5. 9 Iris Murdoch, Bruno's Dream (Penguin, Harmondsworth, London 1987)-

Bibliography

Includes all main published works referred to in the book; excluding literary and fictional works, and secondary references to ancient texts. Acton, H. B. (ed.), The Philosophy of Punishment (Macmillan, London 1969) Avis, P. D. L., The Atonement, in G. Wainwright (ed.), Keeping the Faith: Essays to Mark the Centenary of Lux Mundi (SPCK, London

1989) Aulen, G., Christus Victor (Engl. transl., SPCK, London 1930) Baillie, D. M., God Was in Christ (Faber, London 1961) Baillie, J., The Idea of Revelation in Recent Thought (Oxford University

Press, London 1956) Barrett, W., The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a

Technological Civilization (Anchor Press, Garden City, New York 1978) Barth, K., Church Dogmatics (Engl. transl., T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh 1936-53) Bornkamm, H., Luther's World of Thought (Engl. transl., Concordia, St Louis 1985) Bowker, J., Licensed Insanities (DLT, London 1987) Braaten, C. E., History and Hermeneutics {New Directions in Theology

Today Vol. 11) (Lutterworth, London 1968)

Bromiley, G. W., An Introduction to the Theology of Karl Barth (T. & T.

Clark, Edinburgh 1979) Brown, C. (ed.), New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology,

in (Paternoster, Exeter 1978) Brown, D., The Divine Trinity (Duckworth, London 1985) Brunner, E., The Divine-Human Encounter (Engl. transl., SCM, London X 944) 127

128

Bibliography

Burgh, R., Do the Guilty Deserve Punishment?, in Journal of Philosophy, 79, 4 (1982) Campbell, J. McLeod, The Nature of the Atonement (Macmillan, London 1978; J. Clarke, London 1959) Creel, R. E., Divine Impassibility (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1987) D'Costa, G., Theology and Religious Pluralism (Blackwell, Oxford 1986) De Witt, L., Consciousness, Mind and Self: The Implications of the Split-Brain Studies, in British Journal of Philosophy and Science, 26 (1975) Denney, J., The Death of Christ (Tyndale Press, London 1911) Dillistone, F. W., The Christian Understanding of the Atonement (Nisbet, Welwyn 1968) Downing, F. G., Has Christianity a Revelation? (SCM, London 1964) Eccles, J. C , The Understanding of the Brain (McGraw-Hill, New York 1973) Farquhar, J. N., The Crown of Hinduism (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1930) Fiddes, P., Past Event and Present Salvation (DLT, London 1989) Forsyth, P. T., The Work of Christ (Hodder & Stoughton, London 1915; Fontana, 1965) Gerber, R. J., and McAnany, P. D. (eds.), Contemporary Punishment (Notre Dame, London 1972) Gunton, C. E., The Actuality of Atonement (T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh 1988) Gustafson, J. M., Theology and Ethics, 1 (University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1981; Blackwell, Oxford 1981) Hamilton, R., The Monodic Quest, in Journal of Theological Studies, 38, 1 (April 1987) Hart, H. L. A., Punishment and Responsibility (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1968) Hebblethwaite, B. L., The Moral and Religious Value of the Incarnation, in M. Goulder (ed.), Incarnation and Myth (SCM, London 1979) Hengel, M., The Atonement (Engl. transl., SCM, London 1981) Hepburn, R. W., Christianity and Paradox (Watts, London 1958) Hick, J., Evil and the God of Love (Macmillan, London 1966; Fontana, 1968) God and the Universe of Faiths (Macmillan, London 1973) Evil and Incarnation, in M. Goulder (ed.), Incarnation and Myth (SCM, London 1979) The Second Christianity (SCM, London 1983) Hodgson, L., The Doctrine of the Atonement (Nisbet, London 1951)

Bib liography

12 9

Ison, D., Academic Theology and Adult Theological Education, in British Journal of Theological Education, 1, 3 (1988)

Jenson, R. W., The Christian Doctrine of God, in G. Wainwright

(ed.), Keeping the Faith: Essays to Mark the Centenary of Lux Mundi (SPCK, London 1989) Kelly, J. N. D., Early Christian Doctrines, 4th edn (A. & C. Black, London 1968) Lampe, G. R., God as Spirit (Clarendon, Oxford 1977) Lee, R. S., Freud and Christianity (Penguin, Harmondsworth 1967) McGrath, A. E., Luther's Theology of the Cross (Blackwell, Oxford 1985) Mclntyre, J. M., St. Anselm and his Critics: A Reinterpretation of the Cur Deus Homo (Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh 1954) Mackintosh, H. R., The Christian Experience of Forgiveness (Nisbet, London 1927) Macquarrie, J., Principles of Christian Theology (revised edn, SCM, London 1977) Marshall, B. D., Christology in Conflict (Blackwell, Oxford 1987) Mitchell, B., The Justification of Religious Belief (Macmillan, London 1973) Moberly, R. C , Atonement and Personality (John Murray, London 1901)

Moberly, W., The Ethics of Punishment (Faber, London 1969) Morris, T. V., The Logic of God Incarnate (Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1986) Moule, C. F. D., The Origin of Christology (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1977) Mozley, J. K., The Doctrine of the Atonement (Duckworth, London Nagel, T., Brain Bisection and the Unity of Consciousness, in J. Perry (ed.), Personal Identity (University of California Press 1975) Mortal Questions (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1979) Newbigin, L., The Finality of Christ (SCM, London 1969) Niebuhr, H. R., The Meaning of Revelation (Macmillan, New York 1940 Niebuhr, R., The Nature and Destiny of Man, 11 (Nisbet, London 1941) Oppenheimer, H., The Hope of Happiness (SCM, London 1983) Owen, H. P., Christian Theism (T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh 1984) Pannenberg, W., Dogmatic Theses on the Doctrine of Revelation, in Revelation as History (Engl. transl., Sheed and Ward, London 1969) Parfitt, D., Personal Identity, in J. Perry (ed.), Personal Identity (University of California Press 1985)

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Paton, M., Can an Action be its own Punishment?, in Philosophy, 54 (1979) Pittenger, N., The Word Incarnate (Nisbet, Welwyn 1959) Quinton, A., The Soul, in J. Perry (ed.), Personal Identity (University of California Press 1975) Rahner, K., Theological Investigations, xv, xvi, and xvm (Engl. transl., Seabury & Crossroads, New York 1961-83) Rashdall, H., Dr Moberly's Theory of Atonement, in Journal of Theological Studies, 3 (1902), pp. 178-211 The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology (Macmillan, London

}

Robinson, J. A. T., The Human Face of God (SCM, London 1972) Roots, M., Necessity and Unfittingness in Anselm's Cur Deus Homo, in Scottish Journal of Theology, 40, 2 (1987) Sanders, E. P., Paul and Palestinian Judaism (SCM, London 1977) Schleiermacher, F., The Christian Faith (Engl. transl., T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh 1928) Schoemaker, S., and Swinburne, R., Personal Identity (Blackwell, Oxford 1984) Singer, P., Practical Ethics (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1979) Southern, R. W., St. Anselm and his Biographer (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1963) Sperry, R. W., Changing Concepts of Consciousness and Free Will, in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 20 (1976) Science and Moral Priority (Blackwell, Oxford 1983) Swinburne, R., Could God become Man? in G. Vasey (ed.), The Philosophy in Christianity (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1989) Responsibility and Atonement (Clarendon, Oxford 1989) Temple, W., Nature, Man and God (Macmillan, London 1934) Walker, N., Punishment, Danger and Stigma (Blackwell, Oxford 1980) Weingart, R. E., The Logic of Divine Love (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1970) White, V. P., The Fall of a Sparrow (Paternoster, Exeter 1985) Wiggins, D., Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity (Blackwell, Oxford i9 6 7) Wiles, M. F., Does Christology Rest on a Mistake?, in S. W. Sykes and J. P. Clayton (eds.), Christ, Faith and History (Cambridge 1972) The Remaking of Christian Doctrine (SCM, London 1974) The Unassumed in the Unhealed, in Working Papers in Doctrine (SCM, London 1976)

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Christianity without Incarnation?, in J. Hick (ed.), The Myth of God Incarnate (SCM, London 1977) Winch, P., Ethics and Action (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1972) Zahrnt, H., The Question of God (Engl. transl., Collins, London 1969)

Index

Abelard, 52, 122 Abraham, W.J., 119 Acton, H. B., 125 Adam, 10, 26, 28, 57 adoptionism, 83 anhypostasia, 83

Anselm, n - 1 2 , 18, 26-7, 36, 52 anthropocentricity, 107-111 Apollinarian, 59 Aquinas, 76 Aristotle, 92 Athanasius, n , 49, 65, 121 atonement, 3, 4, 9, 18-19, 26, 29-32, 35, 40, 42, 45, 47, 51-68, 73, 87, 101-5 Augustine, 27, 94, 125 Aulen, G., 13, 52, 118 Avis, P. D. L., 29-30, 119-20, 122 Baillie, D. M., 30, 32, 51, 74, 120, 123 Baillie, J., 118-19 Barr, J., 22 Barrett, W., 15-16, 118 Barth, K., 17-18, 21-2, 32-3, 43-4, 52, 61, 64, 118-20, 122, 125 Bible, the, 6, 8, 21-2, 51, 56, 59, 65-7, 71, 80, 84, 102-3 Bornkamm, H., 118 Bowker, J., 126 Boyce-Gibbon, A., 125 Braaten, C , 21-3, 119 brain research, 75, 77-80 Bromiley, G. W., 120 Brown, C , 117 Brown, D., 74-7, 80, 84, 123-4 Brunner, E., 21-2, 118-19 Bultmann, R., 2, 72 Burgh, R., 95, 125

Campbell, J. Mcleod, 60, 122 Cappadocian, 64 Carlyle, G., 121 Chalcedon, 2, 74-5, 77, 80-1 Chesterton, G. K., 65, 123 Christie, Agatha, 65 Church, 46, 49, n o , 113-14 Clayton,}. P., 123 creation, 15, 31, 45-6, 49, 62-3, 71, 108 Creel, R. E., 122 cross, the, 3, 13, 27, 30, 42-4, 49, 59, 104 D'Costa, G., 126 DeWitt, L., 124 Denney, J., 30, 120 devil, 11-12, 17, 26-8, 43 Dillistone, F. W., 2-3, 6, 117 Dostoevsky, F. M., 88, 90, 105, n o , 125 Downing, F. G., 118 Eccles, J. C , 124 Edwards, J., 64, 122 enhypostasia, 45

Enlightenment, the, 16, 21, 28, 42 epistemology, 20, 22, 24, 33, 38, 62, 82, 112-13 eschatology, 17, 19, 27, 33, 44, 90-1, 100, 114, 115

eternity, 17-18, 20, 45, 62-3, 114-15 ethics, 107-10, 113 evangelism, 114-15 evil, 13, 27, 42-3, 47, 52, 68, 87-9, 91-2, 95, 98-106 evolution, 70-1, 73 existentialism, 3, 31 faith, 21, 32, 35, 37, 44, 46-7, 49, 60-1, 70, 84, 115 132

Index fall, the, 28, 54, 103 Farquhar, J. N., 23, 119 Fairer, A. M., 66 Fiddes, P., 47-51, 53-4, 87, 121-22 forgiveness, 27, 35, 37-8, 40, 43-4, 54, 60, 88-91, 105, 115 Forsyth, P. T., 43, 60, 122 Freud, S., 47, 124 Gerber, R. J., 125 Goulder, M., 120 grace, 16, 43-4, 51, 55, 57 Gregory Nazianzen, 11, 59, 122 Gregory of Nyssa, 11, 26, 65, 77 Gunton, C. E., 28-9, 42-8, 51, 119, 121 Gustafson, J. M., 126 Hamilton, R., 117 Hart, H. L. A., 97, 126 Hebblethwaite, B. L., 39-40, 42, 56, 120-2 Hebrews, Epistle of, 10, 56-7 Hegel, G. W. F., 92 Hengel, M., 9, 117 Hepburn, R. W., 119 Hick, J., 16, 33-5, 72, 118, 120, 123, 125 history, 2, 5, 13-16, 30-1, 37, 47, 49, 7o, 73. 83-5, 110, 114 Hodgson, L., 26, 119 idealism, 69-70 impassibility, 41, 61, 76 incarnation, 3, 4, 31, 38, 40, 56, 58-60, 68, 69-86, 108 individualism, 4, 109-11 Irenaeus, 10, 58, 64, 103, 122 Irving, E., 44, 121 Ison, D., 117 Jenson, R. W., 64, 122, 125 John, St, 10, 20, 73 justice, 27-8, 42-4, 47, 49, 52, 60, 94-6, 102

justification, 10, 45, 47, 54, 57, 103-4 Justin, 11, 20, 118 Kant, I., 28, 110 Kavanagh, P. J., 123 Kelly, J. N. D., 10, 58, 118, 122 kenosis, 74, 80-3 Koestler, Arthur, n o , 126

Kraemer, H., 25, 113, 126 Lampe, G. R., 72, 123 Lee, R. S., 47, 121 Lewis, C. S., 92, 102, 126 Locke, J., 28, 81-2, 124 love, 1, 10, 35, 37-8, 40, 47-8, 60, 87, 99, 102-3, ll5 Luther, M., 12-13, 17, 26, 52, 54, 59, 118 McAnany, P. D., 125 Macbeth, 20 MacDonald, George, 102, 126 McGrath, A. E., 118 Mclntyre, J. M., 118 Mackintosh, H. R., 60, 122

Maquarrie, J., 31-2, 35, 37, 44, 47-8, 120-1

Marple, Miss, 65 Marshall, B. D., 119-20, 125 Middle Ages, 12, 59 Mitchell, B., 119 Moberly, R. C., 49, 60, 120-1 Moberly, W., 92-4, 125-6 Morris, T. V., 77, 123-4 Moule, C. F. D., 58, 122 Mozley, J. K., 122 Muir, Edwin, 100 Murdoch, Iris, 115, 126 myth, 15, 71-3, 85 Nagel, T., 78-9, 124 Newbigin, L., 126 Niebuhr, H. R., 21, 118 Niebuhr, R., 47, 121 Ogden, S. M., 123 omniscience, 61, 77-8 Oppenheimer, H., 122 Origen, 2 Owen, H. P., 72, 123 Pannenberg, W., 21, 69, 118 Parfitt, D., 80, 124 particularity, 1-2, 8, 10-15, 2O> 26-7, 29, 31-6, 48, 52, 55, 62, 64-5, 87, 113, 116 Pascal, B., 2 Paton, M., 125 Paul, St, 8-11, 16, 49-50, 52, 55, 57-9, 103

134 Pelagian, 38, 45 perichoresis, 80

Perry, J., 124 personal identity, 68, 75-8, 81-4 Pittenger, N., 73-4, 123 Plato, 11, 65 plausibility structure, 5-6 positivism, 18-19, 27, 69 propitiation, 9, 102-3 punishment, 60, 92-105 Quinton, A., 81, 124 Rahner, K., 22, 33, 54, 120 Rashdall, H., 120 recapitulation, 10-11, 58, 64 reconciliation, 2-3, 8-11, 16-23, 2 ^J 31-2, 34-6, 39, 43, 53, 60-1, 87-106, 108-9, 114-15 Reformation, the, 16, 59 religions, other, 5, 16, 20, 23-4, 112 reparation, 96, 99, 102 repentance, 52, 60, 68 resurrection, 11, 45, 55, 104 retribution, 27, 52, 88, 91-105 revelation, 7, n , 20-3, 30-8, 42-4, 47-8, 51, 107 Robinson, J. A. T., 70. 73-5, 123 Roots, M., 120 Rossetti, Christina, 65 sacrifice, 10, 26-8, 42-5, 47, 57 sanctification, 10, 47, 54, 57, 103-4 Sanders, E. P., 9, 57-8, 117, 122 Satan, see devil Schleiermacher, F., 49, 103, 121 Schoemaker, S., 124 Schwobel, C , 123 science, 16, 70 Scripture, see Bible sin, 10, 13, 27, 29, 34, 39-40, 48, 54, 57-8, 60, 64, 78, 94-5, 97, 101-2, 104

Index Singer, P., 126 Sisson, C. H., 65, 123 social science, 2, 6, 27, 29 Southern, R. W., 118 speciesism, 109 Sperry, R. W., 79, 124 Spirit, 40, 43, 46, 49-50, 65-7, 72-5 Strahan, A., 121 substitution, 18, 30, 33, 45, 49, 52, 59, 102-3 suffering, 34, 39-40, 53-4, 57, 64, 78, 90, 94-9, 102, 104 Surin, K., 123 Swinburne, R., 123-5 Sykes, S. W., 123 Temple, W., 20, 103, 118 theodicy, 19, 110-11, 115 time, temporality, 17-18, 50, 61-2, 91, 114 Trinity, the, 46, 50, 64, 75-6, 80 Troeltsch, E., 107 universalism, 8-9, 12-13, 15, 19-20, 44, 46, 48, 55, 65, 67-8, 87, 105 utilitarianism, 27, 93, 109 Vasey, G., 123 victory, 11, 13, 17, 26, 28, 42-5, 47-8, 52,59 virgin birth, 71, 75 Wainwright, G., 119, 122 Walker, N., 125 Weingart, R. E., 122 White, V. P., 117, 122, 126 Whitehead, A. N., 40 Wiggins, D., 124 Wiles, M. F., 3, 26-8, 33-5, 52, 59, 117, 118, 120, 122-3, I 2 5 Winch, P., 125 Zahrnt, H., 17-18, 118