The Shape of Soteriology: Studies in the Doctrine of the Death of Christ 9781472550057, 9780567292902

Citation preview

PREFACE Most books have a flight-path, however long or short, with stops along the way, which provide their own stimulation and yield their own harvest of enriched friendships; and this one is no exception. It began its journey as the Laidlaw Lectures, delivered at Knox College, Toronto, in 1987. From that time, Jan and I remember with affection the kindness of the late Principal, Donald Corbett, and of his wife, Tamiko; all the Faculty who so generously entertained us; and particularly Jamie Laidlaw, a member of the founding family of the Lectureship, who claims ancestral connections with Craigellachie, Banffshire. The next destination was Union Theological Seminary, Richmond, Virginia, 1988, the venue of the Sprunt Lectures, where we were the guests of the President, Dr Hartley Hall IV, and renewed old friendships with Professor John Leith and his wife, Ann, and with members ofthe Facultywhom we had met on several previous visits. But there was to be further mileage for the Lectures, as they came to form part of the course in Theology, in session 198889, for the degrees of BD and MTheol in St Mary's College, St Andrew's University; and in session 1991-92, in New College, the University of Edinburgh, as part of the course known as 'ST2B', the Dogmatics section of second year Systematic Theology. The warmly expressed good wishes of the members of ST2B proved to be a great sustenance and comfort in the illness which overtook me shortly after the end of the course. I had some difficulty in assuring them that the illness was a case ofpost hoc, but definitely not ergopropterhoc. From the very varied stop-overs, and from the different reactions to them by the different audiences, it has to be said, the

CHRIST'S DEATH AND OUR REDEMPTION

Anyone approaching the study of the death of Christ, and seeking for a definitive understanding of the classical words of St Paul (I Cor 15.3), 'Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures', encounters an immediate stumblingblock. It is this that the Church has not saught to canonise any specific theory of the death of Christ as it strove so earnestly to do with its doctrines of God and ofthe Trinity, in the NicaeoConstantinopolitan Creed, and with its doctrine ofthe Person of Christ in the Chalcedonian Creed. By contrast, the manner in which the death of Christ, particularly in relation to the forgiveness of sins, is referred to in the credal and later confessional statements of the Church and the Churches is singularly frugal, very varied, and nowhere approaches the sophistication which the doctrines of God and of the Person of Christ achieve at the hands both of the orthodox and the heretical expositors.The point is made twice over by J.N.D.Kelly in Early Christian Doctrines, Fifth Edition, London, 1977: 'The development of the Church's ideas about the saving effects of the incarnation was a slow, long drawn-out process. Indeed, while the conviction of redemption through Christ has always been the motive force of Christian faith, no universally accepted definition of the manner of its achievement has been formulated to this day. Thus it is useless to look for any systematic treatment of the doctrine in the popular Christianity of the second century' (p. 163);and 'The student who seeks

THE MODELS OF SOTERIOLOGY

Introduction We concluded the last chapter with the comment that despite the variety of soteriological theory, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this variety had one distinguishing feature, and it constitutes a second respect in which the history of soteriology differs from that of christology. O n the one hand, we are aware that the models of christology comprise a very rich mixture not only of biblical terms, such as, Son of Man, Son of God, Jesus, Christ, the Lamb of God, and so on, but also certain metaphysical terms originating in Greek philosophy, such as hypostasis and physis, enshrined in the Chalcedonian creed, and all its variants and deviants. This mixture has been further enhanced in modern times through the addition of concepts derived from such philosophies as existentialism and process, and such system-builders as Tillich ('New Being') and Teilhard de Chardin ('omega point'). So, on the other hand, when we turn to examine soteriology in a similar way, we are not quite prepared for the fact that, by contrast, the images, figures, concepts, metaphors or, as I shall prefer to call them, 'models' (for reasons to be discussed later) are almost all exclusively biblicalin character and origin. What we have witnessed in the history of the Church's thinking about the death of Christ has been the quite remarkable capacity on the part of such models to root themselves in a vast variety of heterogeneous cultures, and to find comprehensible

3

THE LOGIC OF THE MODELS

The review of the models of soteriology which we have just completed is the point at wh.ich so many theological studies of the death of Christ both begin and end, these models being thought to be all that is required for the definition of the theories of the death of Christ, and their enumeration being regarded as forming the sum-total of soteriological analysis. But if we are to pursue such analysis to the degree of elaboration which Congar desiderated, several steps remain to be taken. We shall begin by asking two questions, which arise as soon as we reflect upon these models, not so much in terms of their individual emphases, and of the respects in which they differ from one another as we have so far been doing, as in respect of the logic under which they all operate insofar as they hold a place in soteriology. The first question is: how are these models related to one another? The second is: how are they collectively related to the death of Christ, the event which they describe, and which they are designed to communicate to us?

I. How are the models related to one another? Though it is not a question which is extensively examined in studies of soteriology, it follows very naturally upon the consideration of the variety of the models. In the event it is quite surprising to discover just how many the possibilities are, and the very proliferation of them will heilp to extend our understanding of

5

T H E NATURE OF FORGIVENESS

I. In the foregoing examination of the models and their appropriate logic, of the sotcriological prepositions and their adjectival conceptualisations, and of the other media which relate the past event of the death of Christ to men and women today, it will not have gone unnoticed that the word 'forgiveness' has appeared but rarely. So, despite the contemporanisers, the relaters and the universalisers, all of which, as we saw, had the plain intention of 'earthing' the different ingredients of the once-for-all event of the crucifixion in the lives and hearts of generations then unborn, there has remained a hiatus. The actual consequences for these generations has not been spelt out in the terms of forgiveness, as distinct from the modular concepts which formed the nuclei of the theories of the atonement, which made such forgiveness possible. It is as ifwe had to extend St Anselm's classical statement to read, 'To this end was he made man that he might die - and that men and women through that death, might receive forgiveness'. This chapter, therefore, could well be sub-titled 'atonement and forgiveness', for our purpose now is to try to sketch the relationship between the two. Nor could there be any more fitting manner in which to round off that previous examination, for it is the whole design of atonement, as has just been said, that men and women should come to know and be renewed by, the redeeming love of God in Jesus Christ