Part  II – Exposition

 

Chapter  I – Article  I

 

      I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.—Apostles’ Creed.

 

      I believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.—Nicene Creed.

 

      Whosoever will be saved : before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholick Faith.

      Which Faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled : without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.

      And the Catholick Faith is this : That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity;

      Neither confounding the Persons : nor dividing the Substance.

      For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son : and another of the Holy Ghost.

      But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one : the Glory equal, the Majesty co-eternal.

      Such as the Father is, such is the Son : and such is the Holy Ghost.

      The Father uncreate, the Son uncreate : and the Holy Ghost uncreate.

      The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible : and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible.

      The Father eternal, the Son eternal : and the Holy Ghost eternal.

      And yet they are not three eternals : but one eternal.

      As also there are not three incomprehensibles, nor three uncreated : but one uncreated, and one incomprehensible.

      So likewise the Father is Almighty, the Son Almighty : and the Holy Ghost Almighty.

      And yet they are not three Almighties : but one Almighty.

      So the Father is God, the Son is God : and the Holy Ghost is God.

      And yet they are not three Gods : but one God.

      So likewise the Father is Lord, the Son Lord : and the Holy Ghost Lord.

      And yet not three Lords : but one Lord.

      For like as we are compelled by the Christian verity : to acknowledge every Person by himself to be God and Lord;

      So are we forbidden by the Catholick Religion : to say, There be three Gods, or three Lords.

      The Father is made of none : neither created, nor begotten.

      The Son is of the Father alone : not made, nor created, but begotten.

      The Holy Ghost is of the Father and of the Son : neither made, nor created, not begotten, but proceeding.

      So there is one Father, not three Fathers ; one Son, not three Sons : one Holy Ghost, not three Holy Ghosts.

      And in this Trinity none is afore, or after other : none is greater, or less than another ;

      But the whole three Persons are co-eternal together : and co-equal.

      So that in all things, as is aforesaid : the Unity in Trinity, and the Trinity in Unity is to be worshipped.

      He therefore that will be saved : must thus think of the Trinity.—Athanasian Creed.

 

I.  Of Faith.

      In the first Article of the Creed, or rather of the three Creeds, we have two words, and, if we include the term ‘Creed’ itself, three, to express our relation toward the subject matter of revelation which forms the Church’s Creed.  We say, in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, ‘I believe’.  In the Athanasian Creed we say, ‘Whosoever will be saved : before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholick Faith.’  And we call the synopsis of that Faith a Creed.  Hence we must begin our dogmatic exposition of the Creeds with an investigation of the precise meaning of the three words, ‘belief’, ‘faith’, and ‘creed’.  It is always of advantage to us, as well as a work of interest, to examine the etymon of a word whose exact meaning we are seeking, that we may grasp the idea which lies at its root.  Let us therefore inquire into the derivation of these three words, ‘belief’, ‘faith’, and ‘creed’, before we attempt to define ‘faith’.

      ‘Belief’ is akin to the German ‘glauben’.  It comes from the Anglo-Saxon ‘geleafa’, which is cognate to the middle low German ‘gelove, gelof’, to the middle high German ‘geloube’, and to modern German ‘Glaube’, which is itself derived from ‘galaubs’, dear, valuable.  The root is the same as in ‘lieben’, to love; ‘loben’, to praise; ‘geloben’, to promise, or vow; and the underlying idea seems to be that of accepting a thing willingly, and holding it fast approvingly, as something which is valuable.

      ‘Faith’ is of course derived from the Latin ‘fides’, which is akin to the Greek πίστις, derived from πείθεσθαι; the root meaning is ‘to bind’.  Thus the underlying idea here is that of allowing oneself to be persuaded or convinced.

      ‘Creed’ comes from the Latin ‘credere’, which is akin to the Greek κρατειν, derived from the Sanskrit ‘krat-dha’, to give trust, to confide; the notion of confidence or trust being predominant in the word ‘Creed’.  It is evident from this brief consideration of the root meanings of these words that they do not exclusively refer to acts of the intellect, but frequently also to the affections and to the will.

      With these ideas before us, let us attempt to express what we mean by ‘faith’.

      Faith has been most briefly defined as ‘assent on authority’, that is, the acceptance of a proposition as true, not because we perceive its truth, but because we have confidence in the person who tells us it is true.  There is also bound up in the idea of faith the further notion that the assent is in itself good and to be desired.  Hence faith is not solely an act of the intellect, but an act in which the will has part, for the act of the intellect is induced by the will, the assent of the intellect to what is true in the proposition being determined by the assent of the will to what is good in it.1

1Cf. Wilhelm and Scannell, vol. i. pp. 112–114.

      Thus far our definition of faith would apply as much to this virtue in the natural order as in the spiritual.  Indeed the natural virtue of faith is one of the most important factors in human conduct, for most of our actions are influenced by natural faith.  The child in the process of learning at first accepts everything without question on the authority of its teacher.  Afterwards it comes to know the value of that authority and to find out where it perhaps was in error; but learning would be impossible without the exercise of the natural virtue of faith.  So, too, the man entering a business or profession has to begin with faith, accepting the experience of others as the basis of his own ventures.  Sometimes he finds he was justified in doing so, sometimes the reverse; but while there is always an element of uncertainty in the human testimony which is the authority upon which, in the natural order, faith has to rest, yet life in this world could not go on without it.

      If we now turn from the virtue of faith as we find it in the natural order to supernatural or divine faith, to faith, that is, as a theological virtue, we shall find that while, like natural faith, it is ‘assent on authority’ to truths which we cannot of ourselves know, yet it differs enormously from natural faith in several most important particulars:

      1. The motive of faith, that is, the authority on which it rests, is altogether different, for instead of being human testimony, which is liable to error, it is the authority of God Himself.  Hence the element of uncertainty is eliminated, and divine faith rests upon absolute certitude, upon the authority of God Himself.

      2. The sphere of supernatural faith is different, for, instead of being confined to this present life, it is enlarged to comprehend the things of Eternity.

      3. In the subject matter, or the object of faith, there is again a difference, for, instead of the opinion of men, theological faith has for its object the revelation of God.

      4. The act of divine faith, too, differs from human faith especially in this, that the authority which exacts it must also make it possible by cooperating in its production.  Hence, in addition to the acts of the intellect and will, there must also be the action of divine grace; and this is what we mean when we say that faith is in the first place the gift of God.  Grace must enlighten the intellect and inspire the will so as to impart a supernatural character to the act of faith.

      From this it follows that there are three subjective causes of faith:

      1. The intellect: S. Paul says, ‘Now we see through a glass, darkly’;1 but this act of vision certainly refers to knowledge, and therefore to the intellect; for S. Paul goes on to add, ‘Now I know in part.’

11 Cor. 13:12.

      2. The will: For an act of faith is elicited not only by the intellect, but also by the dominion of free will which can command assent or not.  This too we learn from Holy Scripture, for we read, ‘If thou ... shalt believe in thine heart ... for with the heart man believeth unto righteousness.’1  The word ‘heart’ as used in Holy Scripture does not designate the seat of the affections as with us (these are spoken of as the ‘bowels’2), but is often used of the will as the source of action.

1Rom. 10:9, 10.                   2Phil 1:8.

      3. Grace: An act of faith cannot be perfected without grace, which illuminates the intellect and inspires the will, for we learn from the lips of Christ Himself, ‘No man can come to Me, except the Father which hath sent Me draw him’.1  And S. Paul also teaches us, ‘By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God.’2

1S. John 6:44.                      2Eph. 2:8.

      Having now some conception of what we mean by the word ‘faith’, we must next observe that faith is used in more than one sense.  It is used subjectively of the faith by which we believe, and objectively of the faith which we believe.  When we say in the Athanasian Creed ‘it is necessary that he hold the Catholick Faith’, we are using the word ‘faith’ objectively, and mean by it that which is really the object of faith, the revelation of God.

      In its subjective sense, too, we must distinguish between the act of faith, by which we believe, and the virtue of faith, which enables us to make that act.

      Before we proceed to the dogmatic exposition of the faith which is contained in the Creeds, it will be well to draw attention to the principles upon which the doctrines of the Church, that is, the Articles of the Faith, are set forth by the Church.

      We have already pointed out that the subject matter of faith, and therefore of the Creeds, is that which has been revealed by God.  But, it may be asked, when, by whom, and to whom was it revealed?  And the answer is very simple and explicit: It was revealed on the Day of Pentecost, by the Holy Ghost, to the Holy Apostles, and through them to the Church of Christ.  In the Old Testament dispensation, revelation was partial and imperfect, but on the Day of Pentecost was fulfilled our Lord’s promise that He would send from the Father ‘the Spirit of Truth’,1 Who should abide with the Church for ever,2 Who should teach the Church all things,3 and should guide the Church into all truth.4

1Cf. S. John 14:17; 15:26; 16:13.                   2S. John 14:16.

3S. John 14:26.                    4S. John 16:13.

      This divine revelation given at Pentecost was a sacred ‘deposit’ which was to be kept intact, for S. Paul solemnly pronounces ‘accursed’ whoever, whether angel or man, should preach any other gospel;1 and S. Jude considers it needful for the common salvation to exhort his readers that they earnestly contend for the faith which was once [for all, άπαξ delivered unto the saints.’2

1Cf. Gal. 1:8.                 2Jude 3.

      This deposit was handed down at first orally,1 then committed to writing; but both the oral and written deposit were the result of the inspiration of the Holy Ghost.

12 Tim. 2:2.

      The revelation once for all given is then the source of all the Church’s doctrine, and the two concurrent streams are Tradition and Holy Scripture, the written and unwritten Word of God.  Of these Tradition is the older, since it existed before Holy Scripture was written, and indeed is referred to in Holy Scripture: ‘Hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our Epistle.’1  The Church appeals to the Holy Scripture to prove her Tradition, and declares that all things necessary to salvation are contained in, or may be proved from, Holy Scripture.

12 Thess. 2:15.

      We must therefore clearly understand that every doctrine of the Church is implicitly contained in the deposit given at Pentecost, and that the Church has no power to add any new doctrine.  Her work under the promised guidance of the Holy Ghost is to interpret and unfold this revelation once given, as the needs and controversies of the age require.  And further, we must remember that ‘the Church hath authority in controversies of Faith.’1

1Article XX.

      The Church exercises her teaching office, in unfolding and interpreting the faith once delivered, in two ways:

      1. The one extraordinary, which is used only on rare occasions and when required by serious necessity, as in an OEcumenical Council, when the Church defines Articles of Faith and puts forth Creeds.

      2. The other is her ordinary method of promulgating truth, that is, through the consentient teaching of her pastors and the ordinary practice of the Church itself everywhere.

      Hence, in this exposition of the Creeds, our aim must be to bring to bear on the different Articles of the Creed the Church’s teaching as gathered from her councils and the writings of her best theologians.

 

II.  Of God.

      God is the Supreme Being, without beginning, without end, without cause, absolutely perfect.  He is incomprehensible and ineffable, and therefore no human intellect can fully grasp what He is, and no human language can adequately describe Him.  Natural religion, however, is sufficient to enable man not only to know of God’s existence, but to know much of God Himself, for S. Paul tells us that ‘the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead.’1

1Rom. 1:19, 20.

      To the Christian, however, there is another channel of knowledge incomparably greater than the evidence of nature or the teachings of natural religion.  We mean, of course, the Incarnation, through which God has revealed Himself to man, and has also revealed that to know Him is life eternal.1

1S. John 17:3.

      This knowledge of God which is life eternal, and therefore the knowledge above all things to be desired and sought, does not depend on accurate comprehension of theological propositions in which the nature of God is described, but upon that living faith whereby the most ignorant may know God with the knowledge which our Lord tells us is life eternal.

      i.  We must not, however, on this account neglect to learn all that we can about God, for a clear grasp of what God is may be of very great value to us in the practical experiences of spiritual life, especially in the two special exigencies of great trial and of earnest prayer.

      A great trial or sorrow is a very real testing of our knowledge of God.  If we are ignorant of God’s real nature, there is the danger of substituting for the God who created us and all other beings, a God who is the creation of our own imagination.  How often one, weighed down by crushing sorrow or misfortune, utters the complaint, ‘God is cruel in dealing thus with me.’

      The frequency with which we see those in trouble rebelling against God is an illustration of the importance of right views about God, for if we believe that God is Love, it is impossible that God can be cruel.  We might as well accuse the sun of being the cause of darkness as to accuse God of being cruel.  Darkness is caused by the earth turning away from the sun; in light there can be no darkness.  Suffering is caused by man turning away from God – that is, by sin; not necessarily the sin of the man who suffers, but by the sin which is in the world, and to undo the results of which the Son of God died on the Cross.

      If we believe in God’s Omniscience, that He knows our trials and sorrows; in God’s Omnipotence, that He can help us to the uttermost; and in God’s Love – it would be impossible to rebel against God, impossible not to trust God.  Rebellion against God implies either ignorance in regard to God’s nature or lack of any real belief in God at all.

      Again, in that universal necessity of all spiritual life, earnest prayer, a little consideration will show us that a realisation of the same three attributes, God’s Omniscience, Omnipotence, and Love, are the bases of all true prayer.

      ii.  Our first conception of God is derived from that natural knowledge which, while it falls short of supernatural faith, is often the preparation for it.  Creation is a revelation of God, of God’s Wisdom and Love and Power.  Hence by analogy, and yet most truly, we may hold that the perfections found in creation are a faint reproduction of the perfections of the Creator.  Taking this as a basis, theologians teach us that there are three methods by which we may arrive at the natural knowledge of God.

      1. The Positive Method, or Way of Causality.  From the order and beauty of the world we conclude that the perfections we find in creatures exist in the Creator, and this, aided by God’s revelation of Himself in Holy Scripture and through the Incarnation, enables us to know the positive attributes of God.

      2. The Negative Method, or Way of Removal.  By this we deny that the imperfections which we see in creatures exist in God their Creator; for, since God is pure actuality (using the word actuality’ as opposed to potentiality), it is impossible to conceive of any imperfection in Him.  These negative attributes, which we arrive at by denying the imperfections found in creatures, are the attributes of Simplicity, Immutability, Eternity, Immensity, Infinity, etc.

      3. The Method of Excellence, or Way of Eminence.  By this we recognise that whatever perfections there are in the creature must exist in the Creator, only in a more exalted manner; so that we say that God is All-Powerful, All-Wise, All-Holy.  ‘These three methods have been illustrated from the three principal fine arts.  The painter produces a picture by transferring colours to the canvas; the sculptor executes a statue by chipping away portions of a block of marble; while the poet strives to realise his ideal by the aid of metaphor and hyperbole.’1

1Wilhelm and Scannell, A Manual of Catholic Theology, p. 166.

      iii.  In speaking, however, of God’s attributes, we must most carefully bear in mind that for lack of a better term we are using a word which is most misleading when applied to God.  The word ‘attribute’ in ordinary language signifies something added to a person or thing, so that we can conceive of the person or thing apart from the attribute.  This, however, is not true of God, since God’s attributes are really God’s Essence, and God could not part with any attribute without ceasing to be God.  For example, if we could think of God laying aside for a period the attribute of Omnipotence or Omniscience, we should have to think of other attributes being thereby destroyed; for if God at one time possessed something which He did not possess at another, He would be more perfect at one time than at the other.  Hence we should destroy God’s attribute of Perfection.  In the same way we should also destroy His attribute of Immutability, for we should be introducing the idea of change into the Godhead.  It is important to realise this, because of certain false teaching in regard to our Blessed Lord’s kenosis, or self-emptying, which is prevalent among some of the sectarian bodies on the Continent.  This is really a revival of an ancient heresy, which in a modified form has been taken up by some teachers in England, though probably it has met with very little general acceptance.

      iv.  Besides those attributes of God which we can learn from natural religion, revelation tells us much of God’s nature, both by the names of God in the Old Testament which reveal certain characteristics of the Godhead, and also by special attributes upon which the writers of the new Testament dwell.  For example, S. John tells us that God is Spirit, that God is Light, and that God is Love; and though we may learn all these three from natural religion, yet the fullness with which S. John treats of these attributes adds much to our knowledge of God.  In our Lord’s discourse with the woman of Samaria we meet with the first ‘God is Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.’1  Here we have not only a revelation that God is Spirit, but from this attribute is deduced the true character of religious worship, that it must be spiritual and sincere.  In regard to this passage we may observe that the text should not be translated as in our version, ‘God is a Spirit’, for that would make God one of a class, whereas the expression ‘God is Spirit’ separates God absolutely from all material limitations.

1S. John 4: 24.

      Again, when S. John says, ‘God is Light, and in Him is no darkness at all,’1 we have an illustration here of the application to God’s attributes of all three methods of Causality, Removal, and Eminence; moreover, taken in connection with S. John’s treatment of this attribute, we see that it implies self-revelation.  Light reveals, and He who is light is self-revealed.

11 S. John 1:5.

      Again, S. John tells us ‘God is Love’.1  We have both the revelation of an attribute and an adumbration of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, for if God is Love He must be a social Being; for as God’s attributes are His Essence, and as God is unchangeable, there must always have been an object of His love, before that in the beginning of time God’s love overflowed in the work of Creation.  Hence S. John’s treatment of this attribute (which might have been learned imperfectly from natural religion) helps us to the grasp of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, and explains to us the cause of Creation.

11 S. John 4:8, 16.

      v.  In proceeding to the consideration of God’s attributes, it will be well to investigate which of our conceptions of God are the most fundamental, and to begin with those.

      1. There can be no doubt that our most fundamental conception of God is that which we learn from His revelation to Moses of His name ‘Jehovah’, ‘I am that I am’, the Self-existent One.  The majority of theologians define ‘Aseity’ or Self-existence as the metaphysical Essence of God.  Aseity (from the Latin words a se) affirms that God is Self-derived, that He is the Uncaused necessary Being, and in this is involved all else that is true concerning Him.

      2. The next most fundamental conception of God is that to which we have already referred as revealed in S. John’s Gospel, that ‘God is Spirit’, and this involves the two great properties of spirit, Intelligence and Will.

      (a) The Infinity of God’s knowledge we express by the word ‘Omniscient,’ by which we mean that all objects of knowledge are at all times actually present to God’s consciousness; nothing is so minute as to escape His Omniscience; and yet this does not imply the perception of many separate things, but that His Unity enables God to see all things that are or can be in all their relations to each other, actual and possible.

      (b) The Will of God.  We mean by ‘will’ that faculty which chooses among objects which the intellect brings before it, selecting some and rejecting others.  It is also a function of the will to aim at an end and consciously to choose means for its attainment.  The primary object of the Will of God is the Divine Essence.  Creatures are its secondary object.

      In treating of the Will of God Peter Lombard distinguishes between the Will of God’s good pleasure, or His secret Will, which is the internal action by which God wills anything, and His revealed Will, by which He shows by some outward indication that He wills anything.  Of these the first is always fulfilled, the latter is sometimes unfulfilled.

      The same idea has been otherwise put by S. John Damascene, who distinguishes between the Antecedent and the Consequent Will of God.  When God wills anything without regard to circumstances, as, for instance, when He wills all men to be saved, this is the Antecedent Will (θέλημα).

      When, however, God wills anything with a view to certain circumstances, the contrary whereof He would will, were not the circumstances what they are, as when He wills all men to be saved on condition that they cooperate with His grace, but, this condition being unfulfilled in some, He wills them to be lost – this is His Consequent Will (βουλή).

      The first or Antecedent will emanates from the goodness of God and is conditional; the second or Consequent Will embraces His Justice as well as His Mercy, taking account of man’s free will, and is absolute.

      (c) Perhaps the next attribute in order of our conception is that of God’s Perfection.  As God is an absolute Being, so is He also absolutely all that He can or ought to be by His nature.  He is therefore essentially perfect, and is self-sufficient for His own Perfection.  He possesses in Himself, without any internal evolution or external influence, absolute and entire Perfection, and this Perfection is the principle, the measure, and the object of all other perfections of the creatures, which are indeed perfections only in so far as they resemble and participate in the Divine Perfection.

      vi.  God’s attributes, for convenience of treatment, have been variously arranged, as into positive and negative attributes, physical and moral, communicable and incommunicable, absolute and relative.  We shall follow the first division.

      Under the head of God’s positive attributes come especially His Unity, Love, Wisdom, Holiness, Goodness and Mercy, Justice and Truth.  While these are internal attributes, the external, positive attributes are Omnipotence and Omniscience; and the negative attributes are Simplicity, Infinity, Immutability, Eternity, and Immensity.  As there is often misconception in regard to the negative attributes, it will be well to point out what we mean by each.

      1. God is Simple.  God’s Simplicity is referred to in the First of the Articles of Religion in the words, God is without ‘parts or passions.’  The Latin is ‘impartibilis et impassibilis’.  But ‘impartibilis’ means ‘incapable of division’, and ‘impassibilis’ ‘incapable of suffering.’  Hence God’s attribute of Simplicity implies, on the one hand, that God is immaterial and incorporeal, and on the other that there can be in Him no kind of composition, and that consequently every difference between potentiality and actuality, or between realities completing each other, is excluded from our idea of God.

      2. When we say that God is Infinite, this follows from His Aseity, from His being uncaused, for the limitation of an effect is the result of its having a cause.  Negatively, we mean by the Infinity of God that the limitations which bind us do not confine Him; and positively, that every perfection is possessed by God absolutely and exhaustively.

      3. God is Immutable, that is, He cannot change; for if He could change, He must change from a more perfect to a less perfect state, or vice versa; hence change would imply imperfection in God, and would contradict His attribute of Absolute Perfection.  His Immutability also proceeds necessarily from His Simplicity and Unity, for a thing is said to be changed in regard to time or form, neither of which enters into the account of the Divine Essence, which is absolutely Simple and One.

      4. God is Eternal, and the word ‘Eternity’ is sometimes inaccurately understood as that which has no end, but strictly it signifies that which exists necessarily, and has neither beginning, end, nor change.  ‘Eternity’ is distinguished from ‘Immutability’ in that ‘Immutability’ is only the negation of change, while ‘Eternity’ expresses duration and perseverance in Essence, together with the negation of measure.  Eternity therefore is to time what Immensity is to space, and both belong to God necessarily, because He is Infinite and Self-existing.

      5. God is Immense, and, as we have seen, His Immensity is closely allied to His Eternity.  In the ninth verse of the Athanasian Creed, ‘The Father Incomprehensible, the Son Incomprehensible, and the Holy Ghost Incomprehensible,’ the word ‘Incomprehensible’ is a translation of ‘Immensus’ in the original Latin Creed.  God is Immense or Incomprehensible, because He is independent of all conditions of space, so that He is present in all space; not by extension, as a material body; not definitely, as the soul of man is present in his body, for both of these modes imply limitation; but God is wholly everywhere, that is, He is present by His Essence everywhere.  God’s Immensity follows from His Infinity as that does from His Aseity.

 

III.  Of the Holy Trinity.

      Of the internal life of the Godhead natural religion can tell us nothing. For this we must depend entirely upon revelation, as unfolded and interpreted by the Church under the guidance of the Holy Ghost.

      In the Old Testament the first great revelation in regard to God’s nature is the Unity of the Godhead.  ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord.’1  Surrounded on all sides by polytheism, the Jews bore consistent witness to the Oneness of God.

1Deut. 6:4.

      Here and there in the Old Testament we find adumbrations of the Trinity, but it is not until God manifests Himself in the Incarnation that the inner life of the Godhead is revealed to the Church in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.  This doctrine is one of those absolute mysteries which human reason by itself could never have discovered, or even have thought possible.  It is probably one of the chief of those ‘deep things of God’ of which S. Paul tells us, ‘No man knoweth, but the Spirit of God,’ but that ‘God hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit.’1  In other words the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is purely a matter of revelation, but, having been revealed, it becomes an Article of Faith which enables us to explain, develop, and correct the erroneous views of God derived from natural theology.

11 Cor. 2:10.

      While the term ‘Trinity’ is not found in the New Testament, the doctrine of Three Persons and One God is abundantly revealed throughout; so that S. Augustine, finishing his great work upon the Holy Trinity with a prayer, in it appeals to Holy Scripture as he addresses God thus:1 ‘O Lord our God, we believe in Thee, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, for the Truth could not say, “Go, baptize all nations in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” unless Thou wast a Trinity;2 nor wouldest Thou command us to be baptized, O Lord God, in the Name of Him Who is not the Lord God; nor could it be said with utterance divine, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord thy God is One,”3 unless Thou wast so a Trinity as to be One Lord God: And if Thou, O God, wast Thyself the Father, and wast Thyself the Son, Thy Word Jesus Christ, and Thy Gift, the Holy Spirit, we should not read in the writings of Truth “God sent His Son”;4 nor couldest Thou, O Only Begotten One, say of the Holy Spirit, “Whom the Father will send in My name”;5 and “Whom I will send unto you from the Father.”’6

1S. Aug., De Trinitate, lib. xv. cap. xxviii. 51; Migne, P. L. xlii. col. 1097, 1098.

2S. Matt. 28:19.                   3Deut. 6:4.

4S. John 3:17.                      5S. John 14:26.              6S. John 15:26.

      The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is as follows: In the Unity of the Godhead there are three Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, really distinct in Person, yet in all respects co-equal and of one substance.  The Father is unbegotten, the Son begotten of the Father, the Holy Ghost proceeding from the Father and the Son.  In God all things are common to the three Persons, except where there is the opposition of relation, that is, in those peculiar characteristics which make them to be severally Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

      i.  In the Internal Life of the Blessed Trinity we may notice:

      1. That the Essence, Substance, or Nature of God is One, so that while there be three Persons in the Godhead there are not three Gods.

      2. In the Divine Essence there are two Processions, that of the Son and that of the Holy Ghost.  The word ‘procession’ means the origination of one thing from another.  Where the thing originated is not really distinct in essence from the principal which originated it, the procession is termed ‘Immanent Procession’.

      (a) The procession of the Son or Word from the Father is called a ‘Generation’.  The Son proceeds from the Father by an act of the intellect, and this act is termed ‘Eternal Generation,’ by this we mean not only that there never was a time when the Father existed without generating the Son, but also that the act of Generation is a continuous act; so that if, as some heretics teach, there was during the historic life of the Incarnate Word on earth a separation between the Father and the Son, both Father and Son would have ceased to be, inasmuch as, the act of Generation being interrupted by the separation, there would have been no Son, and there being no Son there could have been no Father.

      (b) The Holy Spirit proceeds Eternally from the Father and the Son, not as from two Origins, but as from one, and not by two Spirations, but by one Spiration.  He proceeds therefore by an act of the will, and as we have no name for this procession suggested by what occurs in man, and as the act of intellect by which the Father generates the Son is virtually distinct from the act of will by which the Father with the Son breathes forth the Holy Spirit, the general word ‘Spiration’ (breathing) is used for this procession of the Holy Spirit.  ‘Active Spiration’ is used to describe the act in the person from whom he proceeds; ‘Passive Spiration,’ the result in Him who proceeds.  As the Holy Spirit, like the Son, is not distinct in Essence from the Father, from Whom He proceeds, this also is a case of Immanent Procession.  The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father only as from the Source, Fountain, or Beginning.  He is the Eternal Love of the Father and the Son, mutually breathed forth by them, and is, as it were, the Bond of Union in the Eternal Trinity.  As the Father is the Manifestation of the Power, and the Son of the Intellect, so is the Holy Ghost of the Will of the Deity.  Our Lord, in reference to the temporal mission of the Holy Ghost, speaks in the same verse of His proceeding from the Father and being sent by Himself: ‘But when the Comforter is come, Whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of Truth, Which proceedeth from the Father, He shall testify of Me.’1

1S. John 15:26.

      3. Thus there are in the Godhead three distinct Persons, so that while Each is severally God and Lord, and possessed of all the divine attributes which (as we have seen) are identical with the Divine Essence, they yet are distinct in Person, so that the Father is not the Son or the Holy Ghost, nor is the Son the Father or the Holy Ghost, nor is the Holy Ghost the Father or the Son.

      4. There are also in the Godhead four Relations.  By the term ‘relation’ we mean a condition or order which arises from the contemplation of a being which we contemplate simultaneously with another being which is in some respects distinct from it.  One is then said to be related to the other.  The first is called the ‘subject’ of the relation, the other the ‘term’; and that by which the relation is constituted the ‘foundation.’  For example, the relation of two brothers or of a father to a son is in each case founded on parentage.

      Since the Nature of God is One, the three Persons can be distinguished by nothing but their Relations; and as each of the two processions gives rise to a relation between the Principal and him that proceeds, there are therefore four Relations; for in each procession we may consider the Relation of the producer to the produced, and of the produced to the producer.  Thus between the Father and the Son we have the Relation of Paternity and Filiation, while the second procession, that of the Holy Ghost, furnishes the Relations of Active Spiration and Passive Spiration.

      5. There are also in the Holy Trinity five Notions.  That by which one of the Divine Persons is distinguished from another is called a ‘notion’, because it makes the Person ‘known’.  Thus it belongs to the first Person only to be Unproduced and to be Father, the second Person alone is Son, and together with the first Person is the Spirator (or Breather), and the third Person is the Spirit (or Breath).  Thus the five Notions are Innascibility, Paternity, Filiation, Active Spiration, and Passive Spiration.

      ii.  In treating of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity we must be very careful on the one hand to preserve the Unity of the Godhead, and on the other hand to avoid Tritheism.  The doctrine of the Perichoresis, Circuminsession or Circumincession – all of which words signify the act of settling round about a place (περίχωρος, circum-insideo or circumincedo) – is the doctrine which specially guards the Holy Trinity from Tritheism.  It expresses the co-existence and presence of the Persons of the Holy Trinity in one another by reason of their identity of Nature and Essence; as our Lord said, ‘I am in the Father, and the Father in Me.’1  And again, ‘He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.’2  And again, ‘I and the Father are One’.3

1S. John 14:11.                    2S. John 14:9.                3S. John 10:30.

      These passages prove:

      1. The distinction of Persons as against Sabellians.

      2. Their equality as against Arians.

      3. The Oneness of their nature as against Tritheists.

      iii.  The two chief errors regarding the Holy Trinity into which men have fallen are Sabellianism and Tritheism.

      1. The first of these confounds the Persons, and so denies the Trinity, by asserting that they are only three names, modes, or characters of one Person.  This doctrine is sometimes called ‘Patripassianism’, for it taught that it was really the Father Who suffered on Calvary.

      2. The opposite error is Tritheism, whereby men have held that in the Trinity are three Substances in all things similar, as if there were three Deities.  In the present day the more extreme Kenotists or teachers of our Lord’s ignorance are practically Tritheists, in that they teach separation between the second Person, or the Word, and the Father, and thus, by destroying the Unity of the Godhead, they make a plurality of Gods.1

      1These definitions are taken almost verbatim from the author’s Catholic Faith and Practice, vol. i. pp. 13–18.

      These two errors are refuted in the Athanasian Creed in the fourth verse: ‘Neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance.’

      iii.  At the risk of some repetition it will be well to state a little more fully these two sides of the doctrine of the Trinity: that God is One, but that in that Unity there is a threefold distinction of Personality.

      1. In speaking of the Unity of the Godhead we must not be content merely with the idea of numerical unity, which the word at first suggests.  When we speak of One God, of course we exclude the idea of plurality; and this was the first monotheistic revelation of the Old Testament, that God had no compeer, no rival.  But this by no means exhausts what we mean by the Unity of the Godhead.

      From numerical unity we pass to individual unity, as when we think of ourselves as individuals, on the one hand separated from all other individuals, and on the other hand identically one through all the experiences of our life, so that the old man and the boy are linked together in the individual unity of one life.  This conception of unity also we must apply to the Unity of the Godhead.

      But there is a higher and more complex idea of Unity bound up with our conception of personality.  Among the many ideas which go to make up our conception of personality, the three most prominent perhaps are self-consciousness, a power of will, and a self-sufficiency.1  An examination of the last is disappointing and humiliating as regards human personality, since the more we investigate the more we find that man is not ‘self-sufficient and lacking in nothing,’ that as a social being he is dependent on others for the completion of his personality in many ways, but especially in love.  Here, where man fails in personal unity, God’s Unity is Perfect in the Holy Trinity, for God is Love, and in the Internal Life of the Godhead that Love is ever satisfied.  His is the One and Only Self-sufficient Personal Nature.

1Aristotle’s αύταρκης και ουδένος ενδέης.

      In all these ways, then, we must insist upon the Unity of God, only applying to it the Method of Supereminence, and realising that the various aspects of unity which we recognise in ourselves exist in the Godhead supereminently.

      2. God, then, is One; we cannot too carefully insist on this; but in the Substance of the Godhead are three distinctions, three hypostases, three Persons.  Since, however, we do not use any of these three terms, ‘Substance’, ‘Hypostasis’, ‘Person’, in their ordinary sense, we must here examine the theological meaning which attaches to the terms used in speaking of the Holy Trinity.

      (a) The word ‘Trinity’, the Greek Τριάς, is found for the first time in the writings of Theophilus of Antioch (180), who refers to the first Triad of the days of creation as types of the Trinity (Τριάδος) of God, of His Word, and of His Wisdom.1  A little later the Latin Trinitas is found in the writings of Tertullian.2  After this it is used as a recognised theological term.

1Theoph. Antioch, Ad Autolycum, ii. 15; Migne, P. G. vi. col. 1077.

2Tert., Adv. Praxeam.; Migne, P. L. ii. col. 158.

      (b) We have already called attention to the heresies which distracted the Church in Rome towards the close of the second century during the episcopates of Victor and Zephyrinus.1  Amongst others, Theodotus and Praxeas, representatives of opposing Christological theories, were active.  The former taught that Christ was a mere man; the latter seems to have been the originator of that heresy which is called ‘Patripassianism’ from its doctrine, and ‘Sabellianism’ from its principal teacher.  It was to confute these heresies that the terms ‘Substance’ and ‘Person’ were coined.

1Cf. Zahn, The Apostles’ Creed, pp. 33–54.

      Against the Sabellians, who accepted the doctrine of the Divinity of Christ, but denied His personal distinction from the Father, and accused those who taught the doctrine of the Trinity of Tritheism, Tertullian uses the word ‘Substance’, asserting that the Son is of one Substance with the Father.1  The Greek fathers used two words to express the Nature or Essence of the Godhead communicated to the Son and Holy Spirit, viz. ουσία and υπόστασις.  Clement of Alexandria, Justin Martyr, and Origen use ουσία in this sense.  Ύπόστασις is found in Dionysius of Rome, Gregory Thaumaturgus, and Athanasius.

1Tert., Adv. Praxeam. ii.; Migne, P. L. ii. col. 157.

      While defending the Unity of the Godhead against Tritheism, it became also necessary to define, as against Sabellianism, the distinctions in the Godhead, and theological writers found it difficult to agree upon the word to represent this distinction.  Some Greek writers (as Hippolytus) used πρόσωπα, although this was given up, on account of its equivocal meaning, for υπόστασις.

      In the West Tertullian, the first Latin father, had coined the word ‘Personae’,1 and this word has prevailed in the Church’s vocabulary.  But we must carefully investigate in what sense these words were used.  There are two Greek words, ουσία and υπόστασις, with their Latin equivalents, ‘Substantia’ and ‘Persona’.  If, however, we have regard only to the etymon of the words, we see that υπόστασις is the Greek equivalent of ‘Substantia’, although theologically ‘Substantia’ has been made to correspond with the Greek ουσία (essentia), while an entirely new word, ‘Persona’, has been chosen to represent υπόστασις.  This word ‘Persona’ was used first by Tertullian, and later tentatively by S. Augustine, but it was really Boethius who introduced it into the Church’s vocabulary of theological terms, defining ‘Persona’ as ‘the individual substance of a rational nature’.2

1Text., Adv. Praxeam. vii., xii.; Migne, P. L. ii. col. 161, 167.

2Boethius, De Persona et Duabus Naturis, iii.; Migne, P. L. tom. lxiv. p. 1343.

      Όυσία differs from υπόστασις theologically in that ουσία signifies the generic nature, and υπόστασις the specific nature, of a thing.  Hence ουσία is used for the Essence, Substance, or Generic Nature of the Godhead, while υπόστασις is limited to the distinctions in the Godhead which the Greeks called ‘Hypostases’, and the Westerns ‘Persons’.  This word ‘Persona’, which has passed into the theology of the Church, was at first received with suspicion, and, as we have observed, its Greek equivalent πρόσωπα was abandoned; for, if we have regard to the etymon of ‘Persona’, a mask or character, it would be precisely the word which the Sabellians would wish to use; while, if we take it in the modern sense of personality, as indicating self-consciousness and a power of will, it might seem to imply that in the Holy Trinity there were three Beings, having three distinct Wills, and therefore three distinct Gods.  While we have no other word to use, and the word ‘Persona’ has much to commend it, we must very carefully guard ourselves against both of these heretical misapplications of the term.

 

IV.  Of the Father Almighty.

      i.  The word ‘Father’ may be used in this Article either essentially or personally.  If it be used essentially, it refers to the three persons of the Holy Trinity, as when we speak of the Fatherhood of God; but if it be applied personally, it has regard only to the first Person of the Holy Trinity, as when we speak of the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

      1. The word ‘Father’ is applied essentially to God in respect to all creation which comes from Him; since as a Father He made and sustains all His creatures.  So we read in Isaiah, ‘Doubtless Thou art our Father, though Abraham be ignorant of us, and Israel acknowledge us not: Thou, O Lord, art our Father, our Redeemer; Thy name is from everlasting’;1 and in Deuteronomy, ‘Is not He thy Father that hath bought thee? hath He not made thee, and established thee?’2

1Isa. 63:16.             2Deut. 32:6.

      2. God, too, is essentially the Father of all Christians whom He has adopted in Christ as His children.  So S. Paul says, ‘Ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.  The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God.’1

1Rom. 8:15, 16.

      ii.  The name ‘Father ‘ is personally applied to the first Person of the Holy Trinity, for this is His proper name. He is termed Father’ in respect to His Only Begotten Son, the second Person of the Holy Trinity; for, as Rufinus says, ‘ When thou hearest the word “Father “ understand the Father of the Son, Who is the image of the aforesaid Substance. For, as no one is called “Lord” unless he have a lordship or a slave to order, and as no one is called “Master “ unless he have a disciple, so the Father can in no way be spoken of but as having a Son.’1  And S. Gregory of Nazianzus says, Father is not a name of substance, or of action, but of relation. It indicates the relationship the Father has to the Son, or the Son to the Father.’2

1Rufin. in Expos. Symb.; Migne, P. L. xxi. 335–386.

2S. Greg. Naz., Orat. xxix. (xxxv.); Migne, P. G. xxxvi. cal. 96.

      Again, we must carefully observe that the Father is the Principle or Άρχη, not only as regards creation, for this He shares with the other persons of the Holy Trinity, but He is the Principle in the order of origin in respect of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  He is the Fountain (Πηγή) of the Supersubstantial Deity.  Himself underived, from Him the Son derives Generation, and the Holy Ghost Procession.

      iii.  The Father Almighty.  The word translated ‘Almighty’ (παντοκράτωρ) does not so much signify that God is able to do all things as that nothing can be done apart from Him, that He is the Source of all Power, that He upholds and maintains in being all things, whether spiritual or material; and this Power, in so far as it is personal, He communicates to the Son and to the Spirit, so that we say, ‘So likewise the Father is Almighty, the Son Almighty, the Holy Ghost Almighty: and yet there are not three Almighties, but one Almighty.’1

1Athanasian Creed, v. 13.

 

V.  Of Creation.

      Maker of heaven and earth.  This clause, as we have seen in our historical investigation of the Creeds, was not found in the earliest forms of the Apostles’ Creed, but was introduced apparently to meet certain Gnostic heresies.

      i.  The Gnostics were divided into

            1. Monarchianists, and

            2. Dualists.

      1. The Monarchianists, who believed in one Principle of all things, were openly Pantheistic, and held not only that God is All, but that all is God;

      2. While the Dualists believed in two Eternal Principles, spirit or mind and matter.  From the latter developed Manichaeism.  Both alike are refuted by this clause in the Creed; for God is the Maker of all things, visible and invisible, spiritual and material.

      1. He is in all things by Immanence, yet the universe is not God.  God is All, but all is not God.

      2. And as against Manichaeism, He is the Maker of all things visible (that is, material) and invisible.  There was no room for any Demiurge who made matter.

      ii.  In this Creation we may recognise three divisions:

      1. Things invisible, that is, of pure spirit.  In this category we place the angels, all of whom were subjected to trial, and some of whom fell and became devils.

      2. Things visible, that is, things purely corporeal, the material substances of which the universe is made up.

      3. A composite Creation, that of man, possessed of a material body and an immaterial soul and spirit.

      iii.  The Church does not put forth any particular view in regard to the method of God’s Creation, and indeed she has suffered much from the speculations of theologians concerning the Mosaic Cosmogony which at one time were considered to have her authority; so that, when they were overthrown by scientific investigation, their destruction seemed to threaten the overthrow of the Church’s teaching.  Revelation teaches us clearly that God is the Creator and Conservator of all things, that is, that God not only brought us and all things into being by an act of Creation, but that He preserves us in existence by a distinct exercise of His Divine Power; so that if God were to cease to act upon us as the cause of our being, we should at once cease to exist.  This Divine Action, by which our life and that of all the creatures is preserved, is called ‘Conservation’.

 

Chapter  II – Article  II

 

      And in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord.—Apostles’ Creed.

 

      And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God; begotten of His Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God; begotten, not made; being of one Substance with the Father; by Whom all things were made.—Nicene Creed.

 

      For the right Faith is that we believe and confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and Man.—Athanasian Creed.

 

      As we have already treated of much of this Article under the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity, we shall confine ourselves to an examination of such parts only as were not there considered.

 

I.  Of Jesus Christ.

      i.  Jesus, the human name of our Blessed Lord, was bestowed upon Him through the revelation of an angel, both to S. Mary1 and to S. Joseph.2  ‘Jesus’ is the Greek form of the Hebrew name ‘Joshua’,3 or ‘Jeshua’,4 a contraction of ‘Jehoshua’,5 which signifies ‘Help of Jehovah, or Saviour’.

1S. Luke 1:31.                     2S. Matt. 1:21; cf. also S. Luke 2:21.

3Num. 14:6.                        41 Chron. 24:11.                        5Num. 13:16.

      This name of Salvation in the Creed is a Confession that our Lord is the Saviour of the world:

      1. ‘Inasmuch as He hath revealed to the sons of men the only way for the salvation of their souls,

      2. ‘And has wrought this same way out for them by the virtue of His blood obtaining remission for sinners, making reconciliation for enemies, paying the price of redemption for captives, and

      3. ‘Shall at last actually confer the same Salvation ... upon all those who unfeignedly and steadfastly believe in Him.’1

1Pearson, On the Creed, p. 149.

      ii.  Christ.  As ‘Jesus’ is the proper name of our Saviour, so ‘Christ’ is the title of His office.  It is the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew ‘Messiah’ and signifies ‘The Anointed One’.  Under this title our Lord’s coming was foretold by the prophets of old, so that the Jewish people looked forward to the coming of the Messiah as the culmination of their blessings and the realisation of their brightest hopes.  They, however, entirely misunderstood the real significance of these prophecies.

      The title ‘Christ’ refers to the anointing of our Lord’s Manhood by the Holy Ghost, thus appointing Him as the Son of Man to the threefold office of Prophet, Priest, and King; for each of these was consecrated by Unction.  Thus, to take only one example of each, we find King Saul anointed by Samuel at God’s command.1  We observe the consecration to the Priesthood was also by Unction.2  So, too, of the Prophetic office (though probably not universally) in the case of Elisha.3

11 Sam. 15:1; 16:12. 2Exod. 40:15.                31 Kings 19:15, 16.

      If we turn to our Lord we find not only the prophecy in the Old Testament that He was to be the Messiah or Anointed One, but the fulfillment of the prophecy in the New Testament.

      1. In regard to the Prophetical office our Lord claims this when, after reading the prophecy of Esaias, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He hath anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor,’ he adds, ‘This day is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears.’1

1S. Luke 4:18, 21.  Also cf. Isa. 61:1.

      2. Again, at His baptism, ‘The Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon Him, and a voice came from heaven, which said, Thou art my beloved Son; in Thee I am well pleased.’1  This has been regarded as the Unction to the Priesthood; for it was the beginning of His ministerial work.

2S. Luke 3:22.

      3. In the fullest sense He assumed His Royal Power after His Ascension, though it was typified by his riding into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, in fulfillment of the prophecy of Zechariah, ‘Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: He is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.’1

1Zech. 9:9.

      These instances, however, were only typical manifestations of the Unction of the Son of Man as Prophet, Priest, and King.  The actual anointing took place at the moment of His conception, and the agent was the Holy Ghost, as the Angel Gabriel revealed to Mary: ‘The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.’1

1S. Luke 1:35.

      So S. Peter in his address to Cornelius says, ‘God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power.’1

1Acts 10:38.

      The; Unction of the Holy Ghost, while given first and in its fullness to our Blessed Lord, flows down upon all His members, as was prophesied in the Psalms, ‘Behold, how good and joyful a thing it is: brethren to dwell together in unity.  It is like the precious ointment upon the head, that ran down unto the beard: even unto Aaron’s beard, and went down to the skirts of his clothing.’1

1Ps. 133:1, 2.

      The Unction of the Church’s Head, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, flows down to His members, to every baptized Christian, and all alike, as members of Christ are partakers in a measure in His three offices of Prophet, Priest, and King.

      1. In Baptism, and especially in Confirmation, we are anointed with gifts of the Holy Ghost to enable us as prophets to teach, not only by our words, but in our lives, the Gospel of Christ.

      2. We are, too, S. Peter tells us, ‘An Holy Priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ.’1  And again he says, ‘Ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people.2

11 S. Peter 2:5.                    21 S. Peter 2:9.

      There is a priesthood of the laity, a privilege, and therefore a responsibility; the privilege, S. Peter tells us, of offering spiritual sacrifices.

      The great privilege of every Christian is to offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Altar.  If we realised this, how we should throng the churches at the celebration of the Holy Eucharist to exercise our priestly privilege and to plead the sacrifice of the death of Christ; for this, as our Catechism tells us, was the first end for which the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper was ordained.1

      1Why was the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper ordained?  For the continual remembrance of the Sacrifice of the death of Christ, and of the benefits which we receive thereby. – Church Catechism.

      Then is added the privilege and duty of offering with the Sacrifice of the Altar, ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and lively sacrifice.

      3. But not only are we a Priesthood, but a Royal Priesthood.  So we read in the Revelation that ‘Jesus Christ hath made us kings and priests unto God and His Father.’  And if we are kings, surely it behoves us to live worthy of our lineage, not only outwardly comporting ourselves as the children of God, the King of kings, but inwardly cultivating those virtues which belong to our royal estate; for the Psalmist tells us, ‘The King’s daughter is all glorious within: her clothing is of wrought gold.’1  Within glorious, through the Unction of the Holy Ghost, in the possession of His gifts; and without, clad in the raiment of good works, which are the fruits of the Holy Spirit.

1Ps. 40:13.

 

II.  Of the Only Begotten Son of God.

      We have already treated of the Eternal Generation of the Only Begotten Son, God the Word, in the life of the Holy Trinity, and in the next Article we shall consider His Generation in time through the operation of the Holy Ghost upon the substance of the Blessed Virgin, by which He became Man.  There remains, therefore, only that we should here notice the epithets which are applied to God the Son in this second Article of the Creed.

      i.  In the Apostles’ Creed He is called the Only Son; in the Latin, ‘Unicum’, and in the Greek, μονογενη.  Here we are reminded that our Lord’s Sonship differs in kind, as well as in degree, from ours.  He is Only-Begotten by Eternal Generation, and therefore of the same substance as the Father, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God; begotten, not made; by Whom all things were made.

      We are God’s sons by creation, and, better, by adoption through membership in Christ, born again, or regenerate by the Holy Ghost; for ‘Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God.  That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.’1

1S. John 3:5, 6.

      ii.  We must further briefly explain the doctrine of the ‘Subordination’ of the Son, which we gather especially from a passage of S. John and another of S. Paul, viz: ‘I go unto the Father: for My Father is greater than I’;1 and, ‘When all things shall be subdued unto Him, then shall the Son also Himself be subject unto Him that put all things under Him, that God may be All in all.’2

1S. John 14:28.                    21 Cor. 15:28.

      We must approach the study of these passages with a clear grasp of the fundamental truth that in the Godhead there is and can be no inequality; for as we confess in the Athanasian Creed: ‘In this Trinity none is afore, or after other: none is greater, or less than another; But the whole three Persons are co-eternal together; and co-equal.’

      This disposes of all the Arian misinterpretations of these passages which would overthrow the Divinity of Christ and destroy the true doctrine of God.  We find in the Church two schools of interpretation which are in no sense contradictory, and indeed must be combined in order that we may obtain a full view of the Church’s teaching in regard to this mystery.  Western theologians, dwelling on the fact that both passages refer especially to the Incarnate and Mediatorial Life of our Blessed Lord, explain the inferiority or subordination only of our Lord’s Manhood.  Of this we have the best exposition in the Athanasian Creed: ‘That our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and Man; ... Equal to the Father, as touching His Godhead: and inferior to the Father, as touching His Manhood.’  Eastern writers, however, take these passages of our Lord’s Essential Deity, and while pointing out that it in no way implies any subtraction from the Essential Deity of the Son, show the subordination consists in the truth that the Son’s life is derived from the Father’s, as Bishop Pearson puts it: ‘The Father hath Essence of Himself, the Son by communication from the Father.’1  The Father being the Source and Fountain (Άρχη and Πηγή) of the Godhead, the Son derives His Being from Him, and this is expressed in the Nicene Creed in the words, ‘God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, begotten, not made.’

1Pearson, On the Creed, Art. i.

 

III.  Of Jesus Christ our Lord.

      Throughout the Old Testament the word which is rendered in our version ‘Lord’ is ‘Jehovah,’ and in the Septuagint this is uniformly translated by Κύριος, the New Testament word for ‘Lord.’  Thus ‘Lord’ implies the possession of supreme dominion as God.

      The title ‘Lord’ belongs to each of the three Persons of the Holy Trinity, as we say in the Athanasian Creed: ‘So likewise the Father is Lord, the Son Lord: and the Holy Ghost Lord.  And yet not three Lords: but one Lord.’  We, however, apply it especially to the Second Person, following the teaching of S. Paul: ‘For to us there is but one God, the Father, of Whom are all things, and we in Him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by Whom are all things, and we by Him.’1  And, Wherefore I give you to understand, that no man speaking by the Spirit of God calleth Jesus accursed; and that no man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost.’2

11 Cor. 8:6.             21 Cor. 12:3.

      Essentially, then, Christ is Lord, inasmuch as He is God, and has dominion in common with the Father and the Holy Ghost.  Vicariously, He is Lord through the Incarnation, for after the resurrection He said to His Apostles, ‘All power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth.’1  And we read in the Epistle to the Ephesians that God put all things under His feet, and gave Him to be the Head over all things to the Church.’2

1S. Matt. 28:18.                   2Eph. 1:22.

      By the title ‘Lord,’ as applied to our Saviour Jesus Christ, we express our sense of our Lord’s absolute dominion over us.  He claims to rule with a mightier sway than any earthly sovereign ever dreamed of, for He claims to rule not only over the bodies, but over the thoughts and in the hearts of His subjects.  S. Paul, in recognition of this prerogative, loves to call himself the servant, that is, the bond-slave (δουλος) of Jesus Christ.  And when we speak of Christ as our Lord, if we realise what we are saying, we are confessing our faith in His absolute dominion over us, and therefore professing our entire love and loyalty to Him.  If Jesus Christ is our Lord, then all that we have, and all that we are, we lay at His feet, realising that the noblest duty of life is to render Him loving and loyal service.

 

Chapter  III – Article  III

 

      Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary.—Apostles’ Creed.

 

      Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary.—Nicene Creed.

 

      Furthermore, it is necessary to everlasting salvation: that he also believe rightly the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ.

      For the right Faith is, that we believe and confess: that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and Man;

      God, of the Substance of the Father, begotten before the worlds: and Man, of the Substance of His Mother, born in the world;

      Perfect God, and perfect Man: of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting;

      Equal to the Father, as touching His Godhead: and inferior to the Father, as touching His Manhood.

      Who although He be God and Man: yet He is not two, but one Christ;

      One; not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh: but by taking of the Manhood into God;

      One altogether; not by confusion of Substance: but by unity of Person.

      For as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man: so God and Man is one Christ.—Athanasian Creed.

 

Of the Incarnation.

      In this Article of our Creed we approach the doctrine which is the very keystone and foundation of all our Faith.  For it is in the Incarnation that all the doctrines of Christianity centre, and through it alone that they can be understood in their true relation to one another.  To take some examples — The doctrine of God is revealed to us in its fullness only through the Incarnation; without it, we may be Theists, but we can know nothing of the inner life of God, nothing of the Holy Trinity.

      Again, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit in His work in the Church has to be studied in relation to the Incarnation, for it is as the Spirit of Christ that He operates in the Church, the Agent of Her Sacraments, the Bestower of those gifts of Grace, all of which are extensions to us of the Incarnation.

      Then, too, the doctrine of the Atonement can only be rightly understood in its relation to the Incarnation.  Isolated from it and regarded by itself, it becomes, as we know from centuries of bitter experience, a stumbling-block both to the reason and to the moral sense of man.  Viewed as the necessary outcome of the Incarnation in its relation to sin, we see it to be the most stupendous manifestation of God’s Love, the crowning act of His Mercy.

      I.  As the doctrine of the Incarnation is the central truth of Christianity, so has it been attacked most frequently by heresy, and defined most accurately by the Church.  No less than four of her OEcumenical Councils, and those the four greatest, were chiefly devoted to the refutation of error and the establishment of truth in regard to the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ.  The doctrine itself is expressed most briefly and most perfectly in one short clause in S. John’s Gospel, ‘The Word was made Flesh’,1 and it is to the development of this glorious theme that S. John’s Gospel and his Epistles are devoted.

1S. John 1:14.

      The doctrine is thus stated in the second Article of Religion: ‘The Son, which is the Word of the Father, begotten from everlasting of the Father, the very and eternal God, and of one substance with the Father, took Man’s nature in the womb of the blessed Virgin, of her substance: so that two whole and perfect Natures, that is to say, the Godhead and Manhood, were joined together in one Person, never to be divided, whereof is one Christ, very God, and very Man.’

      i.  It is natural to ask, What was God’s purpose in the Incarnation?  Why did it take place?  Was it merely the remedy for man’s sin, or was it part of God’s original purpose in creating, that is, would it have taken place if Adam had not sinned?

      These questions have always been discussed by theologians, but we must recognise that the answer can only be a matter of theological opinion, since we have no clear revelation on the subject further than that the Incarnation was caused by God’s love, for we are told that God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’1

1S. John 3:16.

      Of the two schools of opinion, one is generally known as the Thomist and the other as the Scotist, from the two great theologians who championed the respective views.

      S. Thomas Aquinas takes the view that the Incarnation was the remedy for sin, and therefore, considering all the blessings which it brought with it, he speaks of Adam’s fall as the ‘Felix Culpa’.

      Duns Scotus, his Franciscan opponent, points out that it is unseemly that the greatest work of God should have been done as the result of a sin of the creature, and finds in Holy Scripture many indications that the honour of God Incarnate is the real end of all creation.2

1Cf. Prov. 8:22; Col. 1:15; 1 Cor. 2:7.

      While the Thomist view has been the more prevalent in the past, the Scotist is the one which seems to be held by most English theologians of the present day, not only for the reasons we have mentioned, but because it gives such a consistent explanation of all God’s work in creation and redemption.  However, as we have said, neither view can be considered as in any sense de fide.

      ii.  The fact of the Incarnation may be stated thus: The Incarnation was the taking of Manhood into God, not by a fusion of the human and divine natures, but by the uniting of both (while each nature was kept perfectly distinct) in the one Person of the Word, the Eternal Son of God, the Second Person of the ever-blessed Trinity.  The Agent in the Incarnation was the Holy Ghost, the instrument the blessed Virgin Mary.  The means was the operation of the Holy Ghost upon the substance of the blessed Virgin, by which act the Word became the Son of Man, without being the son of a man; and so took into Himself humanity without taking Adam’s state of original sin.

      This Virgin birth is not only an Article of Faith in the Church, but it also commends itself to our reason as the only way, so far as we can see, by which the purpose of the Incarnation could be accomplished and humanity taken into God apart from the taint of sin.  The Creed tells us that our Lord was made ‘Man’, not ‘a’ man.  It was manhood, not a man, human nature, not a human person, that the Son of God took into union with Himself, and it is of the utmost importance to any clear understanding of the Incarnation to grasp this.

      By ‘human nature’ we mean all those qualities which the race has in common.  By a ‘human person’ we mean a separate individual, possessing that distinct and sovereign power of action in the soul to which we give the name of ‘Personality’.

      Adam did not transmit to his descendants his own personality, for that is incommunicable, but his nature.  No human being can part with his own personality or share it with another.  When Adam begat sons and daughters he passed on to his offspring his own nature, but his personality remained exclusively his own for ever, and his descendants had each their own personality.

      Personality, then, is no essential part of human nature, but human nature is organised on a new personality in every individual.  It is therefore not so difficult to understand that in order to cut off the entail of that tainted moral nature which we derive from Adam, and to make the hypostatic union of the Divine and human natures possible, the germ of humanity, which was derived from Adam through the blessed Virgin, was vitalised by the direct operation of the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Life-Giver.

      Moreover, our Lord’s human nature, instead of being, as with us, united to a new human personality, was taken up into the Personality of the Word.  Thus, all that was essential to humanity was taken up by the second Adam, and the differences between our Lord’s humanity and ours – that He had no human Father, no human Person, and no sin – are none of them differences which touch in any way the integrity and perfection of His human nature.

      II.  It was around the Incarnation that the first great battle for the Church’s orthodoxy was fought.  When, at the conversion of Constantine, the Church was freed from the long series of persecutions which had been almost conterminous with her life, the Evil One, who had failed in his attempt to stamp out the Church by force, attempted to corrupt it by error, and one after another those heresies arose which were dealt with by the first four OEcumenical Councils.

      i.  First, there was the Arian heresy, which, denying the truth that Christ was really God, attacked the perfection of His Divine Nature.  This was refuted by the Council of Nicaea (325), which defined His Divine Nature in the Creed which we call the Nicene Creed, by declaring Him to be ‘Of the same Substance as the Father’ (ομοούσιον τω πατρί).

      ii.  Then came a reaction, and Apollinarius, while accepting the Nicene decree respecting the Divine Nature of our Lord, went to the other extreme and denied the reality and perfection of His humanity by asserting that He had no human soul (or νους), its place being, as he held, supplied by the Divine Person of the Word.  Thus he really denied the πνευμα in man’s trichotomy.  Now this was taking away from the integrity of our Lord’s human nature, since a human or rational soul is an essential part of humanity, and is indeed that which differentiates men alike from angels and the brute creation.  This heresy was condemned by the second General Council, that of Constantinople (381).

      iii.  Next there arose the heresy of Nestorius, who, while accepting the decrees of Nicaea and Constantinople concerning the two Natures of our Lord, taught that He had also two Persons, a Human Personality as well as a Divine Personality, thus denying any real union between God and man in the Incarnation.  He was strenuously opposed by S. Cyril of Alexandria, through whose efforts he was condemned by the third OEcumenical Council, that of Ephesus (431).

      iv.  In opposition to Nestorianism, Eutyches taught that as there was but one Person, so there was also but one Nature in our Lord, and that this one Nature was a sort of fusion of the human and Divine and the formation of a third composite nature.  This heresy was condemned by the fourth, and in some respects the greatest, of the General Councils, that of Chalcedon (451).  In the dogmatic decree of this Council, drawn up at its fifth session, four words were used to define the relation of the two natures, which have ever since been the bulwark of the Faith in regard to this doctrine: ασυγχύτως, ατρέπτως, αδιαιρέτως, αχωρίστως.

      The whole passage is as follows: ‘Following therefore the holy fathers, we all teach with one accord one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, Perfect in His Godhead and Perfect in His Manhood, True God and True Man, consisting of a reasonable soul and of a body, of one Substance with the Father as touching the Godhead, and of one Substance with us as touching the Manhood, like unto us in everything, sin excepted, according to the Godhead begotten of the Father before all time, but in the last days, for us men and for our salvation, according to the Manhood, born of the Virgin Mary the Godbearer, one and the same Christ, Son, Lord – only begotten, confessed in two natures, without confusion, without change, without rending or separation; while the difference of the natures is in no way denied by reason of the union, on the other hand the peculiarity of each nature is preserved and both Concur in one Person and Hypostasis.’1

1Hefele, vol. iii. 348.

      It will be observed that Arianism and Apollinarianism were at opposite poles, the one denying the Perfect Divinity, the other the Perfect Humanity of our Lord; and the same opposition is found in Nestorianism and Eutychianism, the one, while admitting two natures, requiring also two personalities; the other admitting but one personality and one nature.

      Hence the Catholic Faith is, that there are in our Lord two whole and perfect natures, the human and the Divine, distinct and yet united hypostatically in one Divine Personality in the Eternal Word, the Son of God.  This is most accurately expressed in that portion of the Athanasian Creed which we have placed at the head of this Article.

      III.  There still remain some few points to be considered in connection with the doctrine of the Incarnation.

      i.  We have seen that the Incarnate Son of God is True Man, although He had no man for His father.  The function that ordinarily falls to the father was in this one case performed by the direct action of God, Who can always produce by His own power whatever effects are ordinarily the result of secondary causes; hence the Holy Ghost was the Agent of the Incarnation.

      ii.  As Man, however, Christ was the Son of Mary, and His body was nourished within her exactly in the same manner as in the ordinary process of gestation; so that Christ was the true Son of Mary.

      iii.  The human soul of Christ was created and infused into that body at the first instant of its existence, and in the same instant the Divine Word assumed His human nature.  It is of the utmost importance that we should realise the truth, that from the first moment of its conception the Holy Thing which was conceived was the Son of God.1  To hold otherwise would be to assert that for a certain period there was within the womb of Mary a man-child having his own personality, which personality was in some way lost or destroyed when the nature was assumed by the Word, for it is de fide that there was but one person in Christ.

1S. Luke 1:35.

      S. Fulgentius emphatically says: ‘Be most firm in your belief, and admit no doubt, that the flesh of Christ was not conceived in the womb of the Virgin before it was assumed by the Word.’  From this it follows that the dignity to which human nature was raised, on its assumption by God, involved the consequence that Christ was man from the first instant of conception; from the first Christ was sanctified by grace, had the use of free will, was capable of merit, and enjoyed the clear vision of God.  His body grew as the bodies of other infants grow, but His soul was not hampered in its operations by the imperfections of the body which it informed.

      iv.  Christ’s human nature was in no sense subject to original sin, for this, by the Divine decree, is transmitted to those only who have for their father a child of Adam; and Christ had no human father.  A higher reason for the sinlessness of Christ is found in the substantial union of humanity with the All-Holy God.

      v.  Since the will is the principle from which the actions of a rational creature spring, it follows from the presence of two wills, human and Divine, in Christ, that His actions fall into three classes:

      1.  His union with human nature did not prevent the second Person of the Blessed Trinity from exercising all the powers of the Divine Nature, including the Divine Will.  The Divine Will in Christ was the Will which created the world, and which unceasingly maintains creatures in existence and in the exercise of their powers.1

1Col. 1:16, 17.

      2. Another class of actions in Christ proceeds wholly from the human will, and proves that He was truly Man.  For instance, to weep is purely human.

      3. The third class consists of those acts in which both wills have part.  These are called the theandric acts.  We have examples of this class of actions whenever our Lord was pleased to work His miracles by the use of some material instrument, as when He put clay on the eyes of the man born blind and bade him to go and wash in the pool of Siloam.1  Neither the clay nor the washing could have had any efficacy apart from that which the Divine Will gave them.  Yet it was in obedience to the human will that our Lord’s hand moved to take the clay and apply it.  Here, then, we have an illustration of what may be termed theandric action.

1S. John 9:6, 7.

      The healing of the Centurion’s servant, on the other hand, would come under the first class, where the human will had no direct physical part in the working of the miracle.

      vi.  Again, we must call attention to the fact that the human nature of Christ was not only assumed by the Divine Word in the first instant of its existence, but that this hypostatic union is permanent, that it never has been and never will be severed, for we read of ‘Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, and today, and for ever.’1

1Heb. 13:8.

      vii.  As there is a circuminsession in the Blessed Trinity, so in the Person of the Incarnate Word we perceive something similar which we call the ‘Communicatio Idiomatum,’ that is, the communication of idioms, properties, or characteristics.  Under this head theologians have decided certain rules of language which must be carefully observed by those who wish to speak with accuracy in regard to the doctrine of the Incarnation.  Such concrete names as ‘God’ and ‘Man’, ‘Son of God’ and ‘Son of Man’, denote the Divine or human nature as borne by the Person of the Word, but not the nature alone; but abstract words, such as ‘Godhead’ and ‘Manhood’, denote the natures themselves.  From this it follows that concrete words referring to either nature may be used whenever the subject spoken of is the Person of Christ; so that we may say of the Son of Mary that He is God, or that He is Man, indifferently; but we must not say that the Humanity is God, or that the Divinity was born.  Again, we may say that God suffered and died, but not that the Godhead suffered and died.

      viii.  One of the most difficult questions in regard to the Incarnation concerns the knowledge of Christ.  It is clear that our Lord possessed three different sorts of knowledge:

      1. Christ as Man from the first moment of His existence enjoyed the beatific vision by which He saw God as He is.  This follows from the substantial union between the two natures and from the dignity of true Son of God enjoyed by Christ as Man; and this vision was never interrupted.

      2. We are taught, moreover, that Christ as Man, in virtue of His union with the Godhead, had every Divine Perfection which was not incompatible with His state, and especially that His human intellect was perfected by the fullness of the knowledge which is called ‘Infused,’ that is, knowledge which is not acquired gradually by experience, but is poured into the soul by God.  That He had such knowledge the Scriptures clearly teach, for they tell us that on Him rests the Spirit of Wisdom and Understanding,1 and to Him God giveth not the Spirit by measure.’2  This infused knowledge by its very nature of course did not admit of increase.  At the same time it was limited by the finite capacity of a human intellect.

1Isa. 11:2.               2S. John 3:34.

      3. Besides these two methods of knowledge, Christ also acquired knowledge by the natural use of His faculties, and it is of this S. Luke speaks when he tells us that Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man.’1  This increase was in knowledge acquired experimentally or by the use of His human faculties, as distinguished from the ‘infused’ knowledge of which we have spoken.

1S. Luke 2:52.

      There are difficulties in regard to these different methods of knowledge in our Blessed Lord which have led to much speculation among theologians, and have brought some perilously near to heresy.  An attempt to solve such difficulties has resulted in a theory that our Lord, in becoming Incarnate, laid aside His attribute of Omniscience, and so was really ignorant of many things, needing to ask and to find out as other men.  In its more extreme forms Kenotists have taught the possibility even of error in our Lord’s knowledge.

      Such speculations go by the name of the κένωσις, from the word εκένωσεν used in S. Paul’s description of the Incarnation: ‘Who, being in the form of God, counted it not a prize that He was on an equality with God; but emptied Himself (εκένωσεν) by taking upon Him the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men.’1  These theories are found especially in Germany and France and Denmark, in various more or less objectionable forms.  They may be traced through Lutheranism back to an early heresy put forth by a man named Beron, who lived probably in the fifth or sixth century, and was answered in a treatise, Contra Beronem, of which we have some eight fragments; the name of S. Hippolytus has been attached to them, although they certainly are not his.

1Phil. 2:6, 7.

      This heresy has been amply met by the fathers and great theologians of the Church, and not one theologian of repute can be cited on its side.  In its more extreme form it overthrows the Divinity of our Lord, for, as we have already pointed out, God’s attributes are God’s Essence, and if our Lord in His Incarnation parted with any of His attributes, He would have ceased to be God.  The whole question is a very mysterious one and is best left a mystery.

      ix.  We shall close our treatment of the Incarnation by pointing out that as our Lord was Perfect God and Perfect Man, there were in Him two Wills, the human and the Divine Will.  This we have already touched upon in treating of the three modes of action in our Lord; but as the Church was harassed for a long period by the Monothelite heresy, in which even a Pope was involved (Pope Honorius having been condemned and anathematised by the sixth OEcumenical Council, the third of Constantinople [681]), it will be well very briefly to touch upon it.

      The Monothelites, who were really Eutychians or Monophysites in disguise, held that there was in Christ only one Will, the Divine Will, and one operation.  The Catholic Doctrine is, that as Christ had two natures, so there were in Him two wills and two modes of operation, for since He was Perfect God and Perfect Man, He possessed that which belonged to the perfection of each of these natures; but to will belongs the perfection of His human soul, and therefore there must be in Him a human will.  This human will, however, was always in absolute conformity with the Divine Will, as He says in the Gospel of S. John, ‘My meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me, and to finish His work.’1

1S. John 4:34.

      Here we leave this great doctrine of the Christian Faith, at the risk of repetition emphasising the fact that unless it be clearly grasped, there is a danger lest all the other doctrines of Christianity should be either misunderstood or their true proportion lost.

 

Chapter  IV – Article  IV

 

      Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried. —Apostles’ Creed.

      And was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; He suffered and was buried.—Nicene Creed.

      Who suffered for our salvation.—Athanasian Creed.

 

Of the Atonement.

      The Incarnation and Atonement are often spoken of as the two foundation doctrines of Christianity; and while in a sense this is true, yet the division is scarcely logical, since we cannot separate the Atonement from the Incarnation without running great risk of treating it so disproportionately as to make it, not only overshadow, but almost contradict other Articles of the Faith.

      I.  We have a striking instance of this in the position which the Atonement occupied in the theological systems of the Reformation.  Instead of the Incarnation and Atonement being made the two fundamental doctrines of Christianity, the Atonement was practically made the one and only dogma necessary to salvation; and its various aspects (many of them true in themselves) were so exaggerated as not only to make them contradict other Articles of the Faith, but to be inconsistent with our moral conceptions of God Himself.  The danger began not only with isolating the Atonement from the Incarnation, but confining it to the transaction upon the Cross, by which, according to the teachings of most of the Reformers, the debt of sin was paid, the wrath of God appeased, and the salvation of man secured.

      Luther and his followers were able to quote many passages from Holy Scripture in which the reconciliation of man with God is ascribed to the shedding of our Lord’s precious Blood or to His death upon the Cross; but their mistake lay in regarding this as a forensic transaction entirely separated from all that had gone before of our Lord’s life of love and obedience.

      While the fact that we were redeemed by the precious Blood of Christ shed upon the Cross is one of the most precious truths of Christianity, it was so taught in the sixteenth century as to represent an angry Father gloating over the sufferings of His innocent Son, exacting a vicarious satisfaction, which was a crude substitution of the innocent for the guilty, and which involved a division of will in the Holy Trinity, the Father being regarded as personifying anger and vindictive justice, the Son as love and patient suffering.

      By such a view man’s moral nature was outraged, and the question was asked, Is this consistent with belief in a God Who is Love?  Can this be reconciled with the idea of justice which God has implanted in human nature?  And many of the attacks upon Christianity have been based upon this view of the Atonement.

      These difficulties are, at least to a great extent, removed, if we see in the Atonement the necessary working out of the Incarnation in meeting and overcoming the problem of human sin.  So far from there being any division in the Holy Trinity, the Father representing the anger of God, and the Son the Love, the Atonement, like the Incarnation, is the work of all three Persons of the Holy Trinity: ‘For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.  For God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through Him might be saved.’1

1S. John 3:16, 17.

      Besides, the reconciliation of God and man does not take place through any change in God, Who is Immutable, but through that change in man which enables him to respond to the love of God and to appropriate the blessings of redemption.  So far from the Atonement being confined to the transaction upon the Cross, that great Act was but the culmination of all that had gone before, the life of unwearied Love, of perfect Obedience, of absolute conformity to the Will of God, which found its final and supreme expression in the voluntary sacrifice upon the Cross.

      We may notice that, while of all writers of the New Testament S. Paul treats most fully of the doctrine of ‘Redemption through the death of Christ,’ yet in his great passage on the Incarnation he associates it most closely with that stupendous mystery, for he says, ‘Who, being in the form of God, counted it not a prize that He was on an equality with God: but emptied Himself by taking upon Him the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men; and being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself, becoming obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross.’1

1Phil. 2:6, 7, 8.

      II.  The ideas which go to make up the doctrine of the Atonement are so complex that we must be content with affirming certain truths which are clearly taught in Holy Scripture, recognising that, if our conceptions are paradoxical, it is because they are fragmentary, and that the meeting-point where they are reconciled is often beyond the range of our finite vision.  We must recognise that even in this life faith has for its property obscurity, that ‘Now we see in a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.’1

11 Cor. 13:12.

      Then we must remember that in the doctrine of the Atonement we are not helped by the decrees of OEcumenical Councils; that, while it was clearly held by the fathers of the early Church, and found an expression in all the Creeds, yet it was not, like the Incarnation, the battle-ground of heresy; so that we are not helped by OEcumenical decrees or even by theological treatises.

      i.  Indeed, the history of the doctrine is such as to prevent us from claiming for any particular theory of the Atonement the authority of the Church.  The ante-Nicene fathers, with the exception perhaps of S. Irenaeus and Origen, can scarcely be said to have had any theory on the subject.  There is no trace in their writings of the Reformation doctrine that our sins are imputed to Christ, and His obedience imputed to us; or that God was angry with His Son for our sakes, and inflicted on Him the punishment due to us.

      On the contrary there is much in these fathers which expressly negatives this line of thought.  The Incarnation is invariably and exclusively ascribed to God’s Love, and, where Christ is said to suffer for us, the word υπέρ, ‘for our sake,’ not αντί, ‘in our stead,’ is always used.  They ascribe the most real and vital efficacy to the sacrifice of Calvary in restoring us to life and immortality, but without attempting any precise explanation of how this result is brought about.  The obedience of Christ is dwelt upon as an integral part of His redeeming work, but a special virtue is assigned to His death and His Blood.

      S. Barnabas and S. Ignatius are the first to speak of the conquest over Satan, which in the hands of S. Irenaeus and Origen becomes the basis of a distinct theory of satisfaction.

      ii.  From the fourth century two tendencies, divergent, but not necessarily contradictory (since both are often found in the same writer), manifest themselves in the treatment of the Atonement.  The theory of Origen, that our Lord’s death was a ransom paid for our deliverance from the power of Satan, who, Origen taught, had obtained an actual right over man through sin.  This theory of a ransom, with its three subsidiary ideas,

      (1) Of Satan’s claim to a payment,

      (2) Of a deceit being practised on him,

      (3) And of the necessity of compensation, practically held its own till the time of S. Anselm, and indeed is found in Peter Lombard half a century later.

      S. Anselm’s great work Cur Deus Homo marks a new departure in the history of this doctrine.  He expressly and unreservedly rejects the theory of a ransom paid to Satan by the death of Christ, on the principle that it contradicts the Omnipotence and the Goodness of God to suppose that He can recognise any right of evil and injustice in His own world.  S. Anselm does not deny that there was a certain fitness in the devil being overcome by the wood of the Cross, as he had overcome men by the wood of the Tree of Life.

      For it he substitutes the theory of a debt due to God, which debt, the sinner being unable to pay, must be paid by One who is both God and Man; hence the necessity of the Incarnation, which would not suffice of itself, but must find its culmination in the obedience even unto death, the death of the Cross.  Such were the pre-Reformation theories in regard to the Atonement.  We have thus briefly reviewed them only to show that no theory on this subject can be claimed to be in any sense de fide.1

1Cf. Oxenham, The Catholic Doctrine of the Atonement, pp. 112–178.

      III.  From the Atonement as a theory discussed by theologians we turn to the Atonement as a fact revealed in Holy Scripture, and one of the fundamental doctrines of Christianity.

      In five different places S. Paul speaks of the reconciliation of the world, or of men, to God.1  The word translated ‘Reconciliation’ (καταλλαγή) as its fundamental idea ‘to effect a change or exchange,’ and is especially used of change in a person from enmity to friendship.  As we have observed, this change must take place in man, not in God; it is man who is reconciled to God, not God to man.  In three of the passages quoted the means by which this reconciliation is effected is indicated:

1Rom. 5:10, 11; 11:15; 2 Cor. 5:18, 20; Eph. 2:13–18; Col. 1:20, 22.

      1. As the death of the Son of God.  ‘For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.’

      2. As the blood of Christ.  ‘But now in Christ Jesus, ye who were sometimes far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ.’

      3. As the blood of Christ’s cross.  ‘For it pleased the Father that in Him should all fullness dwell; and, having made peace through the blood of His Cross, by Him to reconcile all things unto Himself.’

      In these passages the word ‘Reconciliation’ is actually used, but there are very many others in which man’s redemption is referred to our Lord’s sacrifice or death upon the Cross.1

      1S. John 3:14, 15; 1 Thess. 5:9, 10; 2 Cor. 5:14, 15; Gal. 2:20; S. Matt. 20:28; Rom 8:32; Eph. 5:2; Eph. 5:25; Titus 2:13, 14; 1 S. Pet. 3:18; S. John 10:11, 15, 18; S. John 15:13; Rom. 5:6, 8; 1 S. Pet. 2:24; Rom. 5:10; Eph. 2:16; Col. 1:21, 22; Phil. 2:8, 9; Heb. 2:14, 15; Heb. 13:12.

      We can learn much about the Atonement not only from Holy Scripture, but from that other book of God’s Revelation, human nature; for where we find certain fundamental ideas universal in mankind, we may assume that those ideas were implanted by God, that is, that they are a witness to something which human nature needs or desires.  Now we find three fundamental conceptions in regard to the doctrine we are considering, which are practically universal in human consciousness.  There is:

      1. The sense of sin in the human soul.

      2. A fact almost as universal, the existence of sacrifice as a means of approaching God.

      3. A recognition of God’s attributes of Mercy and Truth, of Love and Justice.

      1. If we examine the first, the sense of sin, we find everywhere a twofold conception of the effect of sin upon the soul.  First, a sense of alienation from God, Who is the Source of all true life; and flowing from this, when the consequences of this separation from God are realised, an intense longing for a reconciliation, and yet with a conviction that sinful man can do nothing to accomplish this reunion with the Divine Life.  Secondly, an even more deeply grounded conviction of guilt, which involves, when it is analysed, the recognition of an external power against whom the sin has been committed, and also an internal feeling that we deserve punishment.

      2. The second universal fact to which we would call attention is the existence everywhere, where religion can be traced, of some sacrificial system.  Reaching back to the gates of Paradise, and extending as far as man’s investigations of the religions of the world, everywhere we find in some form or other the idea of sacrifice; and bound up with this we also see two ideas corresponding to the twofold conception of sin.  The sacrifice is regarded

      (a) As a means of reconciling man to God, and so doing away with the alienation which sin had caused; and

      (b) As the means of removing the guilt and punishment which sin had involved.

      3. In addition to these we find in man’s notion of God’s relation to sin two prominent ideas, or rather a recognition of two attributes of God, which are manifested in His dealing with sin – the attributes of Love and Justice, or, as they are sometimes regarded, of Mercy and Truth.  Here we meet one of the paradoxes of the doctrine of the Atonement, for throughout Revelation God is spoken of on the one hand as a God of Love and Mercy, and on the other hand of Truth and Justice.  In the following passage these attributes are combined: When God passed before Moses He proclaimed, ‘The Lord, The Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.’1

1Exod. 34:6, 7.

      IV.  In addition to these three fundamental ideas which we trace everywhere in human nature, we must ask what is the essential idea of sacrifice itself.

      i.  We have seen that its effects are twofold, remedying the twofold effects of sin: the sense of alienation from God, and of guilt incurred.  But we must not confuse the effects of sacrifice with its motive or essential idea.  While sacrifice has come to be associated with the expression of a sense of sin, the very opposite appears to have been its original and essential conception, for sacrifice appears at first to have been the expression of that love which sprang from man’s original relation to God as His creature and child, the outcome of that union between God and man which was broken by sin.

      Love existed before sin stained the human heart, and sacrifice in its essence is the effort of the human heart to express its love.  We see this still, for sacrifice always is associated with love.  The love of the mother for her child, what sacrifice it demands – of thought, of sorrow, of time, of strength, of pain!  The love of man and woman, hallowed in holy matrimony, begins with sacrifice and demands sacrifices as long as it continues in this world.  Under the hallowed blessing of the Church, that love issues in the one giving to the other everything – heart, thoughts, life.  So our love for God is shown best and first by sacrifice.  It has been thought that perhaps the skins, with which God clothed Adam and Eve as they left the Garden of Eden, tell of beasts slain and offered in sacrifice as symbols of the life derived from God, and thus in a figure given back to Him.

      When the shadow of sin fell upon the earth, sacrifice became associated with the ideas of sin and penitence; but these are secondary ideas, and even these bear witness to the same fundamental idea of love; for there is no real penitence apart from love.  Contrition is sorrow which has its root in the love of God.  So that even in man’s sinful state sacrifice bears witness to the root of love still left in the human heart.  Men may offer sacrifice to propitiate God, to expiate sin, but beneath all is the fundamental conception of love, the longing for restored union with God.

      ii.  At a certain definite point in human history we find these fundamental ideas of sacrifice gathered up into the Mosaic code and distinctly expressed under sacrificial laws which, as we now see, pointed to and prepared the way for the one supreme and only perfect Sacrifice by which the world was to be redeemed, the Sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ upon the Cross.  This is so absolutely evident to the Christian that no one can adequately treat of the Atonement without studying it as foreshadowed in the Jewish sacrifices.

      In these, as indeed in the sacrifices of natural religion, we find two distinct parts, an inward and an outward part, not always present together, but always and necessarily united in order to constitute a perfect sacrifice; and the theological expression, ‘Verum et proprium sacrificium,’ bears witness to this.

      1. The inward part.  Sacrifice first finds expression in the human soul in inward acts, that is, in certain thoughts, religious emotions, and acts of the will. The very law of man’s nature, however, requires that these inward feelings should be expressed by outward actions, since man consists not only of soul but also of body, and must worship God with his whole being. Sacrifice therefore demands outward actions, expressive of inward feelings and beliefs. The inward part, in a sense, is the more important, and may indeed be called the true sacrifice, inasmuch as without it there can be no true sacrifice. Yet this inward part alone is not a sacrifice properly so called.

      2. The outward part.  The sacrificial action, which alone can constitute a sacrifice, in the proper sense of the term belongs strictly to the outward part.  While it ought to signify or express the inward feeling, yet it gains its character not from this, but from the authority by which it was instituted, which authority must come from God.

      Hence, where the inward part is wanting – as, for instance, when the offerer approaches without right dispositions – there is a proper sacrifice, but not a true sacrifice.  To constitute a true and proper sacrifice both parts must be combined.

      We see in the history of religion the tendency and the danger of dissociating these two parts.1  To have the outward without the inward leads to mere formalism, the body of religion without its soul; while to have the inward part without the outward ignores half man’s nature and produces a religion which is dumb, in that it has no means of expressing itself.

1Cf. Mortimer, Studies in Holy Scripture, pp. 94–108.

      In the books of the prophets we find the sternest denunciations of mere formalism in sacrifice, and passionate appeals to the Jews for those interior dispositions which make the sacrifice acceptable to God.  ‘To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me?  saith the Lord: I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he goats. ... Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto Me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies.’1

1Isa. 1:11, 13.

      ‘I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.’1  ‘The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise.’2

1Hosea 6:6.             2Ps. 51:17.

      These passages do not mean that God by them abrogated the sacrifices and incense which He had Himself commanded to be offered, but that He declared His detestation of the mere outward act of obedience unaccompanied by the true spirit of religion.

      In our Blessed Lord we find every sacrificial idea fulfilled in its utmost perfection.  The inward part, the true sacrifice, began with the first moment of His incarnate life.  The loving obedience, the desire to do His Father’s will, to accomplish His Father’s work, was ever present in our Blessed Lord’s life on earth, was ever seeking opportunities to express itself.  Our Lord had always clearly before Him that supreme moment in which this inward disposition was to find its outward expression in a sacrificial action upon the Cross of Calvary.  His most precious Death not only fulfilled the law of sacrifice revealed through Moses, but was an offering of such infinite value that by it the world was redeemed.

      When we speak of the sacrifice of the death of Christ we must remember that this includes those inward dispositions which made the offering a perfect, that is, a true as well as a proper sacrifice.  It was not the act of dying alone, but it was the life of love and obedience also which constituted our Lord’s perfect sacrifice.

      iii.  We may observe that in our Lord’s sacrifice He fulfilled the various stages and sacrifices set forth under the Jewish law.

      1. First, the dedication of the victim by the offerer.  If his offering be a burnt sacrifice of the herd, let him offer a male without blemish: he shall offer it of his own voluntary will at the door of the tabernacle before the Lord.’1  The dedication of the offering in our Lord’s case has been variously seen in the institution of the Holy Eucharist, and in the great high-priestly prayer in S. John’s Gospel, where our Lord says, ‘For their sakes I consecrate Myself’; and also in the Garden of Gethsemane, ‘O My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me: nevertheless not as I will, but as Thou wilt.’2

1Lev. 1:3.                2S. Matt. 26:39.

      2. The identification of the victim with the offerer: ‘He shall put his hand upon the head of the burnt offering; and it shall be accepted for him to make atonement for him.’1

1Lev. 1:4.

      The victim under the law was a mere symbolical substitute for the offerer, but we must clearly realise that our Blessed Lord was in the truest sense representative of the human race.  The Jewish victims were irrational creatures distinct from the person of the offerer.  In Christ, on the contrary, the gift offered up is included in the Person of the offering priest.  It is His living, human flesh, animated by His rational soul, and therefore, in the language of Scripture, a spiritual (πνευματική) and rational (λογική) offering.  Hence the sacrificial victim offered by Christ is not a merely symbolic but a real and equivalent substitute for mankind, on whose behalf it is sacrificed.   Besides, Christ was a victim of immaculate holiness, as we read: ‘The precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot.’1

11 S. Pet. 1:19.

      Hence, under this head we may see that there was a real identity between the victim and the human race, for whom the victim was offered; and further, that the sacrifice was that of a sinless Man, and gained its infinite value from the hypostatic union, in that it was also the sacrifice of the Son of God.  In placing his hand upon the head of the burnt offering the offerer expressed a transference to the victim not only of his sins, but of the inward disposition which alone could make the sacrifice acceptable to God.  So in the sacrifice of the Cross our Lord not only bore the sins of the world, but offered in will His whole life, all His acts, all the devotion of a sinless and perfect life.

      3. The effusion of blood.  In the Jewish sacrifice, while the slaughtering of the victim was a part, the presentation of the blood was the essential act of the sacrifice.  Some have supposed that the slaughtering of the victim was merely for the purpose of obtaining the blood which was to be offered.  Others, with deeper appreciation of the mystery, see in the act of death a recognition of the penal consequences of sin, and a special character therefore given to the blood – that, as the life was in it, and the life was offered, it was a life which had passed through death, a life which had paid the debt due to sin.

      Here we come to the most important sacrificial action under the Jewish code.  The blood by the Levitical law was sprinkled seven times before the veil of the sanctuary,1 the veil, that is, which separated the holy place from the Holy of holies, and which signified that the way into the holiest of all was not yet made manifest,2 free access to God being barred by man’s sin; for within the Holy of holies was the Mercy-Seat, symbolical of God’s presence.

1Lev. 4:5, 7.                        2Heb. 9:8.

      Into the Holy of holies, and therefore into the presence of God, the high priest alone, the representative of the people, entered once a year.  The fact that, although the blood of each victim was sprinkled towards the veil, it still remained unmoved, signified that the blood of the legal victim was not able to take away the effect of sin typified by the veil, that is, separation from God.

      The priest then put some of the blood upon the horns of the altar of sweet incense which was in the holy place of the tabernacle of the congregation; after which he poured all the blood of the victim at the bottom of the altar of burnt offering which was at the entrance of the tabernacle of the congregation.  This symbolic act seems to mean that the blood had been offered and had failed to remove the obstacle which barred free access to God.  Some of the blood was then put on the horns of the altar to plead for the individual offerer, and the rest was poured at the bottom of the altar in token that it was powerless to take away the effect of sin.

      In our Blessed Lord’s sacrifice on the Cross we have brought before us both the slaughter of the victim and the presentation of the blood.  As all the blood of the victim was used in the sacrifice, so our Lord there shed all His precious Blood for us.  But what the blood of the legal victim could never effect was at once accomplished by the precious Blood of Christ, for (unlike the sprinkling of the blood before the veil of the tabernacle) the effect of the shedding of our Lord’s Blood was seen in the rending of the veil of the temple, thus showing that the sacrifice was efficacious, accepted by God for the pardon of man’s sin, and that the way of access to God was opened.

      There seems to be no other possible explanation of the rending of the veil of the temple.  That veil had always stood as the symbol of separation from God.  Once a year the high priest, the representative of the people, entered within it, to signify that the day should come when the true representative of humanity would enter for ever into the presence of God, through His own blood, and so become THE WAY1 by which man might freely approach God.  When therefore our Lord, ‘by His one oblation of Himself once offered,’ made upon the Cross ‘a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world,’2 we are explicitly told by all three of the Synoptists that ‘the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom.’3

1S. John 10:9; 14:6.              2Consecration Prayer.

3S. Matt. 27:51; S. Mark 15:38; S. Luke 23:45.

      4. There is but one ceremony of the sacrificial rite still to be noticed, the cremation of the victim, which in the case of the burnt offering was wholly consumed upon the altar, while in that of the sin offering only certain parts of it were burnt.  This action expressed the idea of the sacrifice ascending as a sweet savour before God.  It was fulfilled in our Lord’s sacrifice upon the Cross, in that it was the great act of love of God for man, and in the fires of Divine love the sacrifice was consumed.  So S. Paul says, Christ also hath loved us, and hath given Himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savour.’1  In this text the terms are distinctly sacrificial, and the words ‘a sweet-smelling savour’ evidently refer to the burnt offering of the Jews.  On the altar of the Cross, therefore, the victim was consumed in the flames of Divine love.

1Eph. 5:2.

      Thus we see that in our Lord’s sacrifice all the various stages and processes of the Jewish sacrificial code were accurately and precisely fulfilled.  There remained, however, after the offering of the sacrificial act, its effect, the fruits of the sacrifice, Christ’s merits, His great intercession in heaven, and on earth His sacrificed body, the food of man.  These points, however, will be better treated under our Lord’s ascended life.

      V.  It may be well to pause here to gather up the principal elements in our Lord’s Atonement and Sacrifice.

      1. First, there is the element of Propitiation.  This is the distinct teaching of Holy Scripture, for S. Paul, writing to the Romans, speaks of ‘All them that believe’ as Being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in His blood, to declare His righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God’;1 and S. John says, ‘If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: And He is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.’2  And again, ‘Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.’3

1Rom. 3:22–25.                   2S. John 2:1, 2.              31 S. John 4:10.

      If we ask what gave to the death of Christ its propitiatory value, we may answer in S. Bernard’s words, ‘It was not His death, but His willing acceptance of death, which was pleasing to God.’  At each moment in death, as through life, our Lord’s human will was exerted to keep Himself in union with the will of God.  It was not a mere submission once for all, but a series of voluntary acts of resignation and obedience.  This was that spirit of sacrifice which God asks, and which cannot be found in any offering of sinful man.

      A further element of propitiation may be discerned in the death of our Lord, for the law of righteousness, which, in the justice of God, demands not only obedience in the present, but expiation for the past.  The value of our Lord’s propitiatory sacrifice, then, lay not only in His perfect obedience, the union of His human will with the will of God throughout His whole life, but also in its satisfaction of God’s justice, the payment of the debt incurred by sin, the propitiation of the Divine wrath against sin by the death on the Cross, the acknowledgment of the justice of God’s judgment on sin.

      To these two considerations we must add a third – the frequent declarations of Holy Scripture, that it was necessary, that it behoved, Christ to die, point to something exceptional in His death; and there can be no question that death was a necessary factor in the idea of sacrifice for sin, and that the ceremonial of the slaying of the victim points to an expiatory significance in death itself.

      2. Another element greatly misunderstood in regard to the Atonement is the vicarious character of our Blessed Lord’s sufferings.  It is indeed on this that cavillers have founded their charge of injustice and immorality in the Church’s teaching of the Atonement, for they say, How can it be just that an innocent person should suffer for a guilty one?  How can the Justice of God be satisfied with such a substitution?

      Without pretending to make this mystery clear, we may point out three things which remove some of the difficulties involved in it.

      (a) First, the circumstance that the Victim was a self-offered one, a willing victim, makes the greatest difference in regard to the question of injustice to the sufferer.

      (b) Secondly, the principle of vicarious suffering is one which is to be found in life and nature always; the mother suffering for her child, the father paying his son’s debts; but in these cases, as in the great fact which they illustrate, the vicarious suffering is of no moral advantage to him for whom it is borne, unless he distinctly appropriates it to himself by an act of his own.  So, too, the mediation which obtains mercy for the criminal is ineffective, unless it produces also a change in him.  In like manner, the vicarious suffering of Christ for our sins is of no value to us as individuals, unless we appropriate the merits of His passion by using the means of grace which flow from it.

      (c) Thirdly, we must bear in mind that the substitution implied something more than a mere artificial relation between the Victim and him for whom He suffered.  Our Lord Jesus Christ was our Representative, as we have already pointed out, from the fact that He had taken human nature into Himself; and this human nature was so real and so perfect that He was involved, so to speak, in all the consequences of the sin which is so tremendous a factor in human life – even the enduring of the very sufferings and death which in us are the penal results and final outcome of sin, but which in Him were the instruments of His free sacrifice.

      Here is the true vicariousness of the Atonement, which consisted not in the mere substitution of His punishment for ours, but in His offering the Sacrifice which man had neither the purity nor the power to offer.

      3. Another element of the sacrifice of Christ is its power to restore the broken union between God and man, both by reconciling us to God and by reconciling God to us: the first by delivering us from the sin which separated us absolutely from God; the second by conveying to us the Divine gift of life which had been forfeited by sin.

      By the imparted righteousness of Christ through the Sacraments, and the appropriation of these through the cooperation of the human will, man is enabled, as it were, to weave into his very character the righteousness of Christ, and so to obtain ‘the wedding garment required of God in Holy Scripture.’

      The sacrifice of our Blessed Lord which was once for all offered on the Cross (for the Cross is the only absolute sacrifice) is perpetuated, not repeated, in a memorial sacrifice instituted by our Lord Himself the night before He died, the Holy Eucharist.  In this sacrifice He is mystically immolated in an unbloody manner.

      This sacrifice is not a repetition of the sacrifice of Calvary, but is identical with it; for it is altogether the same in its nature as that which our Lord offered upon the Cross.  For there is offered the same Lamb of God Who on the Cross offered Himself to take away the sins of the world, the same Body which was born of Mary and crucified on Calvary, the same precious Blood which was there shed, and there is present the same Priest (though now acting mediately) and the same Victim.

      It has its differences, but they belong not so much to the essence of the sacrifice as to the mode in which it is offered.  On the Cross our Lord offered visibly to God His Body and His precious Blood; in the Eucharist He offers, under the form of the bread and wine, that Body which is no longer visible to our earthly eyes (because it possesses the qualities of a resurrection body, that is, it has been glorified), but which will be visible to us when we, like Him, are risen from the dead.  On the Cross He Himself ‘immediately’ as High Priest consecrated a sacrifice of expiation.  In the Eucharist He is still the Priest, but ‘mediately’, through the priest of the Church.  On the Cross there was an actual immolation of the Lamb; it was a bloody sacrifice.  In the Eucharist there is a mystical immolation; it is an unbloody sacrifice; for, by the operation of the Holy Ghost, the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ, but in this there is no bloodshed, nor pain, nor death.

      Thus the Atonement is a culmination of the Incarnation, but it requires the Resurrection and Ascension for its completion, for its effects or fruits to be produced.  These fruits are conveyed to us chiefly through the Sacraments, by which the merits of the Sacrifice of Christ are applied to individuals.

      While our Lord offered His Sacrifice for humanity, to take away the sins of the world, yet for the individual there must be a real personal union with Christ in order that he may appropriate these benefits, that is, there must be not only a participation in sacrificial rites, but that inward disposition which is necessary to every true sacrifice.1

1Moberly, Atonement and Personality, chaps ii. and iii.

 

Chapter  V – Article  V

 

      He descended into hell; the third day He rose again from the dead.—Apostles’ Creed.

 

      And the third day He rose again according to the Scriptures. —Nicene Creed.

 

      Descended into hell; rose again the third day from the dead.—Athanasian. Creed.

 

I.  Of our Lord’s Descent into Hell.

      This clause is first found in Western Creeds in that of the Church of Aquileia as given by Rufinus, who points out that in his day it was not in the Roman Creed.  The influence of S. Ambrose, who was the moving spirit of a Council held at Aquileia in 381 (presided over by S. Valerian, Bishop of Aquileia), has led some to associate its introduction with S. Ambrose.  It is, however, found, though not in the same words, in the early Creed of Jerusalem as given by S. Cyril.1  It is also found in the Athanasian. Creed.

      1‘He descended to the regions beneath the earth, that from thence also He might redeem the just.  For, tell me, wouldest thou that the living should enjoy His grace, and this when most of them are unholy, but that those who from Adam have been for a long while imprisoned should not now obtain deliverance.’ – S. Cyr. Hier., Cat. iv. 11; Migne, P. G. xxxiii. col. 169.

      i.  The word ‘hell’ in this place does not represent a place of torment.  It is the equivalent of the Greek ‘Hades’, of the Hebrew ‘Sheol’, and of the Latin ‘infernum’, ‘inferna’, or ‘inferos’.  (The last word is used in the present form of the Apostles’ Creed and in the Athanasian Creed.)  ‘Hades’, the Greek form, is frequently used in the New Testament, and is carefully distinguished from ‘gehenna’ and other words implying torment or punishment.  It simply means the abode of the departed, and, so far as the word itself is concerned, implies nothing as to their state of happiness or misery, although Hades is now seldom used for the abode of the lost.

      With this Article of the Creed we associate certain passages of Holy Scripture: ‘For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit: by which also He went and preached unto the spirits in prison; which sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water.’1

11 S. Pet. 3:18, 19, 20.

      ‘Moreover also my flesh shall rest in hope: because Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt Thou suffer Thine Holy One to see corruption. ... He, seeing this before, spake of the resurrection of Christ, that His soul was not left in hell, neither His flesh did see corruption.’1  ‘Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with Me in Paradise.’2

1Acts 2:26, 27, 31.               2S. Luke 23:43.

      Of these passages the first is the most difficult of interpretation, and while it clearly tells us that our Lord by the Spirit went and preached unto the spirits in prison, there is not sufficient consensus in regard to its precise meaning to enable us to use it.  Of the other two passages we shall speak later on.

      As the word ‘buried’ was probably introduced into the Creed to refute the heresy of the Docetae, who asserted that our Lord was only in appearance dead, so probably the words ‘descended into hell’ may have been directed against the Apollinarians, whose heresy (that our Lord had no human soul) was dealt with in the Council of Constantinople (381), and is also refuted in the words of the Athanasian Creed: ‘Perfect God and perfect Man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting.’

      That we may clearly understand the relation in which our Lord’s Body and Soul stood to His Divine Person after His death, and the reason that His flesh did not see corruption, we may observe that in Christ were two unions, one personal or hypostatic, the other vital.  In regard to the first, the Divine Person of God the Word was personally united to our Lord’s human nature, that is, to His Body and Soul, and this union, which can never be severed, is called the Hypostatic union.

      Besides this, as man, a vital union existed between our Lord’s Body and Soul.  This of course was severed at the moment of death, but death could not interrupt the Hypostatic union, so that our Lord’s Body while it lay in the tomb was still hypostatically united to the Person of God the Word, and, in the same way, His Soul in the Intermediate state retained its full personal relation to God the Word.

      Our Lord’s descent into Hades, while a very mysterious revelation, is an important one.  It is generally held that in addition to the fulfillment of all the conditions of humanity (one of which is for the soul after death to pass into Hades), the object of our Lord’s descent into hell was to free the souls of the patriarchs and the holy dead of the Old Testament, according to the prophecy of Zechariah: ‘By the blood of thy covenant I have sent forth thy prisoners out of the pit wherein is no water.  Turn you to the stronghold, ye prisoners of hope.’1  These, the Western Church teaches, were in the Limbus Patrum (‘Limbus’ means a fringe, hence the borderland of Hades or hell).  This would correspond with the Paradise which our Lord promised to the penitent robber.2  It was so called because it was a place of rest and joy, though the joy was imperfect.  In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus3 our Lord speaks of it as ‘Abraham’s bosom,’ using the Rabbinical name.

1Zech. 9:11, 12.                   2S. Luke 23:43.             3S. Luke 16:23.

      ii.  In this Article of the Creed we profess a belief in an intermediate state, in regard to the existence of which Holy Scripture is quite clear, though it tells us but little about its nature and conditions.

      We must observe, first, that the intermediate state was altogether changed by our Lord’s triumph over death; so that terms and ideas which might be gathered from the Old Testament, or even the New Testament before our Lord’s Ascension, can no longer be used in the same sense after it.  For the Christian the Intermediate state is not Abraham’s bosom, for this was a Rabbinical name which implied association with the patriarch Abraham as its highest privilege.  Neither can we accurately term it ‘Paradise,’ although it is very commonly spoken of under this name.  The word ‘Paradise’ occurs three times only in the New Testament: in the passage which we have quoted, where our Lord promises it to the penitent robber; in the Epistle to the Corinthians, where S. Paul, describing his visions, tells us that he was ‘caught up to the third heaven,’ and ‘that he was caught up into Paradise.’1  The third passage is in the Book of Revelation, ‘To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the Paradise of God.’2

12 Cor. 12:2, 4.                    2Rev. 2:7.

      In the first passage ‘Paradise’ does refer to the Intermediate state, because our Lord was there.  The promise was, ‘to be with Me in Paradise.’  But when our Lord left the Intermediate state and rose again from the dead, and ascended into heaven, that state was no longer Paradise, for our Lord was no longer there.

      In the second passage it seems quite evident that S. Paul is not speaking of the Intermediate state, for Paradise appears to be equivalent to the third heaven; and in the last passage there can be no doubt whatever that the Paradise which S. John is describing is heaven itself, for the same imagery is used twice1 in the last chapter of Revelation, which contains the fullest description of heaven.

1Rev. 22:2, 14.

      Tertullian is commonly quoted as using the name ‘Paradise’ for the Intermediate state.  This is quite incorrect, as he most distinctly confines Paradise to martyrs only, making it the altar of heaven, under which S. John saw the souls of them that were slain.1  All other souls he most positively consigns to a place under the earth.  His words are, ‘You must suppose Hades to be a subterranean region and keep at arms’ length those who are too proud to believe that the souls of the faithful deserve a place in the lower regions. ... How is it that the region of Paradise, which was revealed to S. John in the Spirit, and lay under the altar, displays no other soul in it besides the souls of the martyrs?’2

1Cf. Rev. 6:9, 10.    2Tert., De Anima, cap. lv.; Migne, P. L. ii. col. 744–746.

      The term ‘Intermediate state’ is used in two senses, generally for the abode of those who are not lost, but who have not attained to the vision of God; hence a state intermediate between heaven and hell.  In this sense it is used by Catholic theologians.  Others, however, by ‘Intermediate state’ understand the state of all between the moment of death and the day of judgment.  These do not generally admit that any of the saints have attained to the vision of God, or are in heaven; so that for them ‘Intermediate state’ would include the lost as well as the saved, in fact all souls that have departed this life, whether in grace or in sin.

      Before we speak of the three principal views of the Intermediate state we must draw attention to the doctrine of the particular judgment which is practically held by all theologians. It is that at the moment of death the soul is in some way judged and its future decided. This seems absolutely necessary if we believe the soul to be conscious after it leaves the body; for, if conscious, it must either go to a place of preparation for heaven, if saved, or to the abode of the lost, if not saved. But this involves a judgment. This particular judgment does not, however, in any way supersede the general judgment at the last day, and is only for the purpose of deciding the state of the soul when it leaves the body.

      iii.  In regard to the Intermediate state there are, and have been, three principal views:

      1. The Eastern Church teaches that at the moment of death all souls pass either into heaven or into hell; though they hold that neither the just nor the wicked receive the full recompense of their deeds before the final day of judgment.’1  For them there is no Intermediate state, as their greatest modern theologian says: ‘According to the Orthodox Church, there is after death no intermediate class at all between those who are saved and go to heaven, and those who are condemned and go to Hades.  There is no particular intermediate place where the souls of those, who before their death were penitent, are found and become the object of the Church’s prayers.  All these souls go into Hades, from whence they can be delivered only by the prayers of the Church.’2

1Conf. Orth., Quest. 61.

2Macaire, Theologie Dophatique Orthodoxe, vol. ii. p. 729.

      Bishop Macarius, at one time rector of the Theological Academy at St. Petersburg, afterwards Patriarch of Moscow, is the author of the principal modern work on the Dogmatic Theology of the Greek Church.  His book, which was written in Russian, may be had in an authorised translation in Greek, and has also been translated into French.  In the French translation the words which we have rendered into ‘Hades’ are ‘en enfer’ and the context shows that he means the place of the lost, for he explicitly excludes any intermediate class or intermediate place between heaven and hell.

      It is quite true that there are now in the Greek Church, and have been in the past, some who have held a very different doctrine from this, viz. that no souls pass either into heaven or hell until after the day of judgment.  This, we may observe, is precisely the opposite to what Macarius says; and, while held by some individuals, it is not borne out by the authoritative declaration of the Greek Church or by its service books, as is well shown by Leo Allatius.

      While the Easterns explicitly rejected the doctrine of Purgatory, their own view does not differ greatly from it, for they consign all imperfect souls to a place of torment, from which ‘those who before leaving this present life have repented, but have not had time to bring forth fruits meet for repentance ... have still the possibility of attaining an alleviation of their sufferings, and even a complete liberation from the chains of Hades.’1  This is accomplished by the prayers and alms of the faithful, and especially the offering of the holy sacrifice.  Where this differs from the ‘Western doctrine of Purgatory is in that the Western Theologians distinguish between the abode of those who are lost and those who are being purified, and teach that the object of the sufferings of Purgatory is to satisfy the justice of God; while the Easterns make the sufferings depend upon the fact that, while the soul began really to do penance upon earth, it had not time to complete its work of penance before God called it away.

1Macaire, ibid. p. 103.

      2. The second view starts with the assumption that no souls can pass into heaven, that is, into the Beatific vision, before the day of judgment.  Its adherents call the Intermediate state ‘Paradise’ and in it place all the faithful dead.  This view is held by some in our own Communion.  It is not a modern error; indeed, there have been traces of it in almost all ages; but it was reserved for Pope John who died in the year 1334, to set it forth in the form of a definite doctrine.1  It was condemned, and John is said to have recanted.  His view was especially that the saints would not enjoy the Beatific vision of the Holy Trinity until after the last day.  This is contrary to the teaching of the great majority of theologians, and indeed no great name can be quoted in its support.

1Fleury, Hist. Eccles. liv. xciv. chap. xxi.; tom. xix. p. 479, ed. Paris, 1740.

      3. The ordinary Western view is, that at the moment of death those who are lost pass at once into hell.  Those who die in a state of grace, but not free from imperfection, pass into a state of purification, and when they have become perfect enter heaven, that is, into the Beatific vision.

      All three views practically admit of some form of purification in the Intermediate state, the Western view in addition teaching that as soon as the soul is ready for the presence of God it passes into that presence.  All alike, however, teach that after the day of the general judgment, when the soul is reunited to the body, there will be an increment to its joy, even though it has already entered upon the Beatific vision.1

      1The author would venture to refer, for a fuller treatment of this mysterious subject, to his Catholic Faith and Practice, part ii. pp. 330–452.

 

II.  Of our Lord’s Resurrection.

      i.  The importance of the doctrine of our Lord’s resurrection may be gathered from its prominence in the teaching of the Apostles.  The preaching of S. Paul at Athens is summed up in the words, ‘He preached unto them Jesus, and the resurrection.’1  This clause contains his whole Gospel.

1Acts 17:18.

      In the choice of an apostle to fill the place of Judas S. Peter sums up the apostolic office in the phrase, ‘One must be ordained to be a witness with us of His resurrection.’1  And in his first sermon on the day of Pentecost he twice refers to the resurrection of Christ in the words, ‘Whom God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death: because it was not possible that he should be holden of it.’  And, ‘He seeing this before spake of the resurrection of Christ, that His soul was not left in hell, neither His flesh did see corruption.’2  And indeed throughout the Acts and the Epistles3 the references to our Lord’s resurrection show that it was regarded as a fundamental doctrine of Christianity.

1Acts 1:22.              2Acts 2:24, 31.

      3Acts 1:3; 3:26; 4:10, 33; 10:40; 13:30; 17:3, 31, 32; 23:6; 25:19; 26:23; Rom. 1:4; 4:24, 25; 6:4, 9; 8:11; 1 Cor. 15:15, 17; Phil. 3:10; 2 Tim. 2:8; 1 S. Pet. 1:3; 3:21.

      In each of the four Gospels also it is the culmination of the Gospel record, the Ascension being referred to only in a few words by S. Luke and S. Mark (if we accept the last verses as belonging to S. Mark), and finding no place in S. Matthew and S. John.

      In a sense the resurrection of Christ is indeed the fundamental doctrine of Christianity, for without it, as S. Paul says, our faith is vain and we are yet in our sins, and they which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished.1  It was a proof of our Lord’s Godhead and of the truth of His words, ‘No man taketh it (my life) from Me, but I lay it down of Myself.  I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again.’2  And, ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’3  It was also a pledge of our own resurrection.

1Cf. 1 Cor. 15:17, 18.                       2S. John 10:18.              3S. John 2:19.

      It has been objected that others have been raised from the dead both in the record of the Old and New Testaments: the son of the widow of Zarephath by Elijah,1 the son of the Shunammite by Elisha,2 the dead man raised to life by contact with the bones of Elisha;3 and in the New Testament, the daughter of Jairus,4 the son of the widow of Nain,5 and Lazarus.6  But these were only raised in their natural bodies, and died again.  Our Lord arose in His glorified body, and death had no more dominion over Him.7

11 Kings 17:22.                    22 Kings 4:34.               32 Kings 13:21.

4S. Luke 8:54.         5S. Luke 7:14.               6S. John 11:43.              7Rom. 6:9.

      Others rose in their natural bodies to live for a while longer a life under the conditions of the ordinary life of this world; but our Lord’s risen body possessed the properties of a glorified body.  It was impassable; death had no more dominion over it.  It was all glorious, although on account of His apostles’ weakness our Lord veiled this glory when He appeared to them.

      S. Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians teaches us that this was one of the properties of the resurrection bodies.1  It was subtile, in that it could pass through closed doors and through the stone of the tomb.  And it was agile.  As a spiritual body it could pass from place to place with the swiftness of thought.  It did not need the ordinary supplies of food, though our Lord did eat in order to convince His disciples of His physical identity.2

11 Cor. 15:43.                      2S. Luke 24:41–43.

      ii.  It is not necessary here to investigate all the evidences of the fact of our Lord’s resurrection.  We may, however, notice the incredulity of the witnesses and the abundant character of the evidence which S. Paul adduces.  Unbelievers, in denying the fact of our Lord’s resurrection, often do not deny the historical witness of the apostles and other disciples, but say that they were credulous and had been led to expect a resurrection, whereas the Gospel narrative shows us that precisely the opposite was the fact; not one even of the apostles, apparently, expected our Lord to rise again.  Even S. John was only convinced when he entered the tomb and beheld the grave-clothes; and the two disciples who walked with our Lord to Emmaus, while they bore witness to the testimony of the women at the sepulchre, showed no signs of accepting it.  They felt probably, with the apostles, that their words were idle tales.  Indeed, each of the Evangelists expressly tells us that at first they believed not.1

1S. Matt. 28:17; S. Mark 16:11; S. Luke 24:11; S. John 20:9.

      S. Paul, in his great treatise on the resurrection, in the first Epistle to the Corinthians, takes special pains to marshal the evidence for the fact of our Lord’s resurrection before he goes on to deduce from that fact its moral consequences for Christianity.  He points out that our Lord ‘was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve: after that, He was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep.  After that, He was seen of James; then of all the apostles.  And last of all He was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time.’1

11 Cor. 15:5–9.

      S. Paul thus shows that at the time when he wrote this Epistle to the Corinthians there were more than two hundred and fifty witnesses of the resurrection still alive, and that there had been over five hundred.  Upon this fact he bases the hope of our own resurrection from the dead, and from it he deduces certain great moral consequences in the lives of Christians, that a belief in the doctrine of the resurrection must lead to a life of righteousness.

      iii.  But besides this, we observe that a special work in man’s salvation is associated with our Lord’s resurrection, the great work of justification: ‘Who was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification.’1  And, ‘If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.’2

1Rom. 4:25.             21 Cor. 15:17.

      Justification is the most important event in Christian life, for it is the act by which sinful man is changed from an enemy to the friend of God; from a child of wrath to a child of God; from the natural man to the spiritual man.  As S. Paul describes it, ‘If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.’1

12 Cor. 5:17.

      We see, therefore, that it is the most glorious privilege conferred upon us by God through the merits of Christ, and especially associated with His resurrection.  Justification consists in the remission of sin and in the infusion of grace, and is thus both a forensic act and a spiritual process within the soul.  Yet these processes are not two, but one, as the illumination of space and the dispersion of darkness is one and the same thing.1

1Forbes, Explanation of the Nicene Creed, p. 231.

      The word ‘to justify’ (δικαιουν) in the New Testament does often mean, not to make, but to pronounce just, by legal sentence; but we must remember that for God to declare a man just is to make him just, for God’s voice effects what it says, as we read, ‘He spake the word and they were made; He commanded, and they were created.’1  So that this imputation of righteousness to the sinner, or declaring him to be just, makes him just, for when God declares a fact He makes it a fact by declaring it.  This surely is the teaching of all Scripture. In the beginning God said, Let there be light: and there was light.’2  Our Lord said to the leper, ‘Be thou clean’, and the leprosy departed.  He commanded the evil spirits, and they obeyed.  God’s word is in all cases an instrument of His deed.  When He utters the command, ‘Let the soul be just’, it becomes just, although we must carefully observe the conditions and means of its justification.

1Ps. 148:5.              2Gen. 1:3.

      Luther invented a doctrine of justification which is absolutely immoral.  He taught that a man was justified by being declared and reputed righteous, the merits of Christ being made over to him by what we may term a legal fiction; so that, according to Lutheran theology, man is not made righteous, but simply reputed to be righteous by a sort of legal fiction, his sinfulness remaining, but being covered as with a cloak by the righteousness of Christ.

      Indeed, the Lutheran school teaches the strange paradox that God’s calling us righteous implies not only that we are not, but that we never shall be righteous; that is to say, that a thing is not, because God says it is, that the solemn averment of the living and true God is inconsistent with the fact averred, that the glory of God’s pronouncing us righteous lies in His leaving us unrighteous, and this in spite of the statement, ‘I will not justify the wicked.’1

1Exod. 23:7; cf. 34:7.

      While there is a sense in which righteousness is imputed (or reckoned) to us, it is because it is also imparted to us.  The merits of Christ are the meritorious cause of our righteousness, but they are really ours by impartation, not fictitiously ours by imputation only.  In a derived sense, but a most true one, the term ‘justification’ is used for actual righteousness, since this is the result of being justified; for since justification consists in the renewal of the soul of man, that renewal is justification.  Thus justification and sanctification are substantially the same thing, though the same thing viewed from two different standpoints.

      1. We will now give a brief definition of justification.  Justification is not only the remission of sins, but also sanctification, or the renewal of the inner man by voluntary acceptance of grace and of the gifts which it imparts; so that a man, from being unrighteous, becomes righteous; from being at enmity with God, becomes a friend of God and ‘an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven.’

      Here we notice four things:

      (a) That the negative element of justification is the remission of sins.

      (b) That the positive element is sanctification, an inward renewal.

      (c) That the means of justification is the voluntary acceptance of it.

      (d) That its effect is to make a man righteous, the friend of God, and an inheritor of heaven.

      2. Hence we may say that there are five causes of justification:

      (a) The final cause.  This is threefold, namely, the glory of God, the glory of Christ, and the salvation of the justified.

      (b) The efficient cause.  This is the mercy of God, Who freely cleanses and sanctifies us, sealing and anointing us with the Holy Ghost, the pledge of our eternal inheritance.

      (c) The meritorious cause, which is the passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who on the Cross redeemed us, making satisfaction for our sins to God the Father.

      (d) The instrumental cause.  This is primarily the sacrament of Baptism, but does not exclude other sacraments as instruments of justification.

      (e) The formal cause, which is the righteousness of God; not the righteousness by which God is righteous, but that by which He makes us righteous, that which He imparts to us.

      3. To this we may add that the internal instrument or means of justification is faith, and that justification consists

      (a) In the remission of sins.

      (b) In the bestowal of grace, that is, infusion of sanctifying or habitual grace, which inheres intrinsically in the soul.

      4. The effects of justification are:

      (a) That it renders us pleasing to God and makes us His friends, for our Lord said, ‘Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you.’1

1S. John 15:15.

      (b) It makes us children of God by adoption, and therefore inheritors of heaven.  By the term ‘adoption’ we distinguish between ourselves and our Lord, Who is the only begotten Son of God by generation.  We are accepted in Him, and therefore, as it were, adopted into the family of God.

      (c) Justification makes us partakers of the divine nature, for we read, ‘Beloved, now are we the sons of God, but it doth not yet appear what we shall be; but we know that, when He shall appear, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as He is.’1  And, ‘Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises; that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruptions that are in the world through lust.’2  And again, ‘Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for his seed remaineth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is born of God.’3  Here grace is spoken of as the ‘seed of God’, or ‘seed of Divinity’, and as a seed virtually contains a new plant like the first, so grace has in itself the virtue of making us God-like.

11 S. John 3:2.                     22 S. Pet. 1:4.                31 S. John 3:9.

      (d) By justification the righteous man is made the temple of the Holy Ghost and of the Holy Trinity.  This indwelling is common to the three Persons of the Holy Trinity;1 but notwithstanding in a special mode it is referred to the Holy Ghost, because the work of sanctification, which is common to all three Persons, is attributed particularly to Him Whose special mission it is to sanctify the sou1.2

1S. John 14:23; 1 Cor. 6:19; 3:17.

        2For further study of the difficult but important question of Justification the reader is referred to the author’s Catholic Faith and Practice, part ii. chap. ix.

 

      4. We must further notice that in Holy Scripture our Lord’s resurrection is closely associated with our own spiritual resurrection.  S. Paul says, ‘If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above. ... For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.’1  And in our Baptismal Office we are told that ‘Baptism doth represent unto us our profession; which is, to follow the example of our Saviour Christ, and to be made like unto Him; that, as He died, and rose again for us, so should we, who are baptized, die from sin, and rise again unto righteousness; continually mortifying all our evil and corrupt affections, and daily proceeding in all virtue and godliness of living.’2  And the very act of Baptism administered by immersion, in which the catechumen descended into the water and came up again out of it, was considered to typify the death and resurrection of that Lord with Whom he was now mystically united by Baptism.

1Col. 3:1, 3.             2Public Baptism of Infants.

 

Chapter  VI – Article  VI

 

      He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty.—Apostles’ Creed.

 

      And ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father.—Nicene Creed.

 

      He ascended into heaven, He sitteth on the right hand of the Father, God Almighty.—Athanasian Creed.

 

Of the Ascension, Session, and Reign of our Lord.

      The Ascension of Jesus Christ into heaven is the last of those glorious mysteries of redemption, which in the Apostles’ Creed are associated with the historic life of our Blessed Lord, and are commemorated on five great days of the Church’s Year.  On the Feast of the Annunciation we celebrate our Lord’s Conception by the Holy Ghost; on Christmas Day, His Birth of the Virgin Mary; on Good Friday, His suffering under Pontius Pilate; on Easter Day, His resurrection from the dead; and on the Feast of the Ascension, His glorious Ascension into heaven.

      I.  The Ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ was the exaltation of humanity, the joyous consummation of the work begun on the Feast of the Annunciation, the end of the humiliations and sufferings of the Son of Man, the final triumph of goodness; and yet it tells of the continuity of life, for it was the same Jesus, the Son of Mary, Who had lived and died on earth, Who was exalted into heaven.  That life of sorrow but of wondrous beauty finds its fruition in a better world than this, but it is the same life; death has not altered it, it has only freed it from the trammels of earth.

      And the Ascension inaugurates our Lord’s reign of blessing.  S. Luke tells us, ‘He lifted up His hands, and blessed them.  And it came to pass, while He blessed them, He was parted from them, and carried up into heaven.’1  The last sight of Him is with His hands raised in blessing; and so we now live under the benediction of those uplifted hands, for ‘When He ascended up on high, He led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men,’2 the first and greatest of the gifts, that which He had promised, the gift of the Holy Ghost, the Paraclete, and through His operation in the Church, all other spiritual gifts and graces, the Sacraments, and all the treasures of the Church.

1S. Luke 24:50, 51.              2Eph. 4:8.

      II.  Of our Lord’s three offices as Prophet, Priest, and King, the first is now exercised only through the teaching office of His Church on earth, but our Lord’s Priestly and Kingly offices abide still in heaven.  It was said of Him in prophecy, ‘The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit Thou at my right hand, ... Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.’1  And this passage forms the basis of the explication of our Lord’s Royal Priesthood in the Epistle to the Hebrews.2  It will be seen from a study of the Epistle to the Hebrews that the Melchizedekan priesthood is contrasted with the Levitical priesthood.

1Ps. 110:1, 4.                       2Heb. 5, 6, 7.

      In the first place, Melchizedek combined the two offices of priest and king, for we read that he was ‘king of Salem’ and ‘the priest of the Most High God’;1 so that he foreshadowed our Lord’s double office in His heavenly life.  The Epistle to the Hebrews shows that the priesthood of our Lord was prefigured in the priesthood of Melchizedek before the legal covenant had any existence.

1Gen. 14:18.

      From this the writer draws a contrast between the universal and eternal nature of Christ’s priesthood and the local and transitory character of the Levitical priesthood.  He contrasts, too, the sacrifices which were offered daily by the Levitical priests, and yearly by the high priest (which by their very reiteration implied their imperfection), with the one, full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction once offered by our Lord on the Cross for the sins of the whole world.

      III.  The two points upon which the writer of the Epistle especially dwells with regard to our Lord’s sacrifice are:

      (1) That it was offered once for all, and being perfect, in that it effected its purpose, needs not to be repeated; and

      (2) That its merits live on in heaven in the great Mediatorial work of Christ, upon His throne of glory.

      In the priesthood of Melchizedek we may notice:

      (1) Its universal character as contrasted with the national character of the Jewish priesthood.

      (2) That the only offering implied is one of bread and wine.

      The Fathers, from Clement of Alexandria1 and S. Cyprian2 downward, have assumed that the bread and wine were the materials of a sacrifice offered by Melchizedek, and S. Jerome3 distinctly states that they were offered for Abraham.  The account in Genesis is not so explicit, and the fact that in the Epistle to the Hebrews the gifts of bread and wine are not mentioned Bishop Westcott thinks very significant, as indicating that Melchizedek is represented as priest, not in sacrificing, but in blessing, that is, in communicating the fruits of an efficacious sacrifice already made.

1Clem. Alex., Strom. iv. 25; Migne, P. G. viii. col. 1369.

2Ep. ad. Caecil. lxiii. 4; Migne, P. L. iv. col. 376.

3Jer., In Matt. xxii. 41; cf. also xxvi. 26; Migne, P. L. xxvi. col. 167 et 195.

      If we adopt the opinion that the bread and wine had already been offered in sacrifice, it falls in well with the view of our Lord’s Intercession, that He is now in heaven pleading and dispensing on earth the fruits of His sacrifice once offered on the Cross.

      Furthermore, in regard to our Lord’s sacrifice, we are told ‘He hath no need daily ... to offer up sacrifices ... for this He did once for all (εφάπαξ) when He offered up Himself,’1 but that being holy, guileless, undefiled, separated from sinners, and become higher than the heavens,’ He is able to save to the uttermost them that come unto God through Him, seeing that He ever liveth to make intercession for them.2

1Heb. 7:27.             2Heb. 7:24, 25.

      There is here not only no mention of the offering of sacrifice, but this is explicitly excluded by the statement that He ‘hath no need daily to offer up sacrifice’ either ‘for Himself’ or ‘for the people’, ‘for this He did once for all, in that He offered up Himself.’  This certainly seems purposely to exclude from the idea of Intercession or Mediation the offering of any actual sacrifice in heaven, and to show that it is based upon, or is the fruits of, the one sacrifice offered once for all upon the Cross.

      IV.  In addition to our Lord’s Priesthood being ‘after the order of Melchizedek’, the Epistle sets it forth as fulfilling the office of the Jewish high priest, and draws certain comparisons and contrasts between our Lord’s work and that of the high priest on the Day of Atonement.

      i.  The office of a priest is to offer sacrifices.  The special function of the high priest was once a year to enter into the Holy of holies, thus foreshadowing our Lord’s entry into heaven as our great Intercessor.

      On certain great public occasions, as on the Day of Atonement, the high priest offered the sacrifice; but it may be questioned whether this was not rather on account of his dignity, and the representative and public character of the service on that day, than from any special power inherent in his office, as high priest, to offer sacrifice.  The special function of the high priest, as we have said, appears to have been confined to entering into the Holy of holies, wearing the breastplate on which were written the names of the tribes of Israel, and thus appearing in the presence of God for the people.

      We may perhaps illustrate this by a comparison of the offices of priest and bishop in the Christian Church.  It is the office of a priest to offer the Holy Eucharist, and, though on representative and public occasions the bishop would naturally be the celebrant, no one supposes that he thereby imparts any greater efficacy to the sacrifice offered than if it had been offered by a priest, since a bishop celebrates the Holy Eucharist not as bishop, but as priest.  The function peculiar to the episcopate is to administer the sacraments of Holy Orders and Confirmation.

      ii.  In the Epistle to the Hebrews the action of the Jewish high priest in the ritual of the Day of Atonement is put in parallel with our Lord’s atoning work and His ascension into heaven, and our attention is directed both to the likeness and to the contrast between them.  We find that the points of resemblance (chiefly in chapter ix.) are four:

      (1) The entry into the Holy of holies of the high priest alone.  So we as priests offer the sacrifice which Christ has commanded us to offer, but He alone has entered within the veil.

      (2) ‘Not without blood,’1 that is, not apart from blood (χωρις αίματος).  We observe here how carefully the inspired writer avoids the phrase ‘with blood’ (μεθ αίματος), since in this the high priest differs from our Lord in His entry, as is afterwards noted.

1Heb. 9:7.

      (3) ‘To appear in the presence of God for us.’1  The Fathers speak of the very presence of our Lord’s humanity at the right hand of the Father as His Intercession, and they point out that this Intercession is not merely verbal prayer.  Surely this too is typified by the fact that the high priest within the veil uttered no words, but bore upon his heart the breastplate engraved with the names of the tribes of Israel.

1Heb. 9:24.

      (4) The multitude waiting without for the high priest’s return.  So we are told of our Lord that He ‘shall appear a second time apart from sin for them that wait for Him unto salvation.’1

1Heb. 9:28.

      The points of difference and contrast are even more strongly emphasised.  They are chiefly three:

      (1) That whereas the high priest entered into the Holy of holies many times, and with the blood of many victims, our Lord ‘once for all at the close of the ages hath been manifested to disannul sin by the sacrifice of Himself.’  This contrast is dwelt upon again and again and brought out by the use of άπαξ and εφάπαξ.1

1Heb. 7:27; 9:12, 26; 10:10.

      (2) That our Lord did not, like the high priest, enter a holy place made with hands, but into heaven itself.

      (3) That whereas the high priest entered with (εν αίματι αλλοτρίω)1 blood not his own, our Lord entered through (δια δε του ιδίου αίματος) His own blood.

      1 εν with the dative in general use is applied to that with which one is furnished, which he brings with him.  Cf. Winer, part III. 48.

      Thus the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews would teach us, that as under the Jewish law things were atoned or reconciled by the application of the blood of the sacrifice which had been offered, so the application of the precious Blood of Christ, shed and offered once for all upon the Cross, avails for ever as a propitiation and for the cleansing of sin.

      iii.  We may sum up, therefore, the principal points of the argument of the Epistle.

      1. That our Lord’s offering of Himself was made once for all upon the Cross.

      2.  That His entrance into heaven was through His Blood, not with it, as in the case of the high priest.

      3. That the fruits of His sacrifice are to be seen in His work of Intercession.

      This work of Intercession is simply our Lord’s appearance in the presence of God for us, for Christ is entered ‘into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us.’1

1Cf. Heb. 9:24.

      The Fathers consistently explain our Lord’s Intercession in this way: We read in S. Chrysostom, ‘Do not then, having heard that He is a priest, suppose that He is always offering sacrifice, for He offered sacrifice once for all, and thenceforward sat down.’1

1S. Chrys., In Heb., Hom. xiii. 3; Migne, P. G. lxiii. col. 107.

      Theodoret says, ‘But Christ is now a priest sprung from Judah according to the flesh, Himself not offering anything, but acting as the Head of those who offer.  For He calls the Church His Body, and through her exercises His priesthood as man, but as God receives those things which are offered.  For the Church offers the symbols of His Body and Blood, sanctifying the whole lump by the first-fruits.’1

1Theod., In Ps. 109:4; Migne, P. G. lxxx. col. 1773.

      Euthymius Zigadenus writes, ‘These [the Levitical priests], indeed, offered sacrifice daily throughout their whole life, but Christ offered sacrifice once for all.’  And again, ‘His very human nature therefore pleads with the Father on our behalf.’1

      1Euthym. Zig., In Heb. 7:27; 7:25.  Speaking of the last passage Bishop Westcott writes: ‘Euthymius here expresses the true conception of the Lord’s Intercession with singular terseness and force.’

      Turning from the Greek to the Latin Fathers, Primasius expresses this idea thus: ‘In this Intercession it is affirmed that as true and eternal High Priest He shows and offers to the Father, as our pledge, man taken into Himself and for ever glorified.’  And again, ‘But He intercedes for us in this very fact, that He took human nature for us, which He continually presents to the Father for us.’1

1Primas., Ad Rom. 8:34; Migne, P. L. lxviii. col. 466; cf. In Heb. 7:25, ibid. col. 731.

      And S. Gregory writes, ‘To intercede for man is for the only begotten Son to present Himself as man in the presence of the co-eternal Father; and to plead for human nature is for Him to have taken that same nature into the exaltation of His Divinity.’1

1S. Greg., Moral XXII. xvii. 42; Migne, P. L. lxxvi. col. 238.

      Our Lord’s Intercession as sacrificial may be spoken of as a virtual sacrifice, because it depends upon the sacrifice of the Cross; but it is not an actual sacrifice, because there is in it no sacrificial act.  Some modern theologians speak of our Lord as ‘standing at the celestial altar to offer sacrifice in heaven’, but, according to the Fathers, His glorified Humanity itself was the heavenly altar, and He could not possibly have stood at it, and the only sacrifices offered thereon were the sacrifices which His Church on earth offers in union with the one sacrifice of Himself.

      Our Lord’s High Priestly action in heaven, like that of the Jewish high priest on the Day of the Atonement, is to intercede.  His Priestly action goes on in the Church through His priests in offering the Holy Eucharist, as Theodoret in the passage just quoted so clearly states.  Both the Eucharistic sacrifice and the Intercession depend upon the sacrifice of the Cross, which is the only absolute sacrifice.  Their chief difference is that in the Eucharist there is a sacrificial action – the separate consecration of the bread into our Lord’s Body, and the wine into His Blood; while in our Lord’s Intercession in heaven there is no sacrificial action whatever.  He is the Sacrifice in heaven as He was on the Cross, in a passive sense, the Lamb slain to take away the sins of the world; but it is only in the sacrifice of the Eucharist on earth that the sacrificial action is now found, and the Eucharist is only a commemorative or relative sacrifice, depending absolutely upon the sacrifice of the Cross, of which it is not a repetition but a perpetuation.

      While the Holy Eucharist and the Intercession in heaven alike rest upon the Cross as their foundation, they have a most real relation to one another, in that the Body present in the Eucharist is the glorified Body which reigns at the right hand of God in heaven.

      V.  In heaven our Lord not only exercises His office as Priest but as King.  This is especially brought before us in the proper Psalm for Ascension Day, ‘Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in.’1  And in the Old Testament there are many prophecies of our Lord’s Kingly office, while in the Gospels our Lord constantly speaks of His kingdom; and in the Nicene Creed we profess our faith ‘that of His Kingdom there shall be no end.’  Our Lord reigns at the right hand of God, that is, exercises His royal prerogatives as Son of Man, as He says in the Revelation, ‘To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with Me in My throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with My Father in His throne.’2  His Kingly functions are the expansion and final consummation of God’s kingdom among men.  He exercises them as Head of the Church, ruling through His Church, and through her bestowing His Royal gifts upon men.  In Him we see humanity enthroned, raised to its highest position, and realising its most glorious hopes.

1Ps. 24:7.                2Rev. 3:21.

 

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