Month: June 2019

We are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ by Faith, and not for our own works or deservings: Wherefore, that we are justified by Faith only is a most wholesome Doctrine, and very full of comfort, as more largely is expressed in the Homily of Justification.

by Ben Crosby

When is the last time that you heard a sermon or Christian education session dealing with the question of justification? The Lutherans are fond of calling this doctrine the one upon which the church stands or falls, but for us Episcopalians the term ‘justification’ only appears once in the parts of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer which determine doctrine, namely, in the collect for Friday in Easter Week. Recently, however, the works of the Rev. Fleming Rutledge and Mockingbird Ministries have brought new attention to this theological locus (although Rutledge tends to prefer the term “rectification”). And for good reason! For the questions the doctrine of justification seeks to answer are central ones for Christian life and faith: How can we sinful humans stand before a perfectly good, perfectly just God? Where, exactly, do we look for our salvation from sin, as a power outside us that oppresses us and within us which twists even our most laudable projects away from love of God and service to neighbor? Article XI provides an answer: our salvation is found in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, not in anything we can accomplish or earn. God counts us as righteous because of Christ’s righteousness, which we participate in through faith. This answer, I hope to show, remains a vital one for the proclamation of the Gospel today.

First, a little history: the 1571 Article XI of the Thirty-Nine Articles is not the first time that an Anglican formulary dealt with the question of justification. The Ten Articles of 1536, the first doctrinal formulary put forth in the reign of Henry VIII, argue that justification is “remission of our sins, and our acceptation or reconciliation into the grace and favour of God” due to God’s mercy toward us because of the “merits” of Christ’s death for us. Thus far this is quite similar to the doctrine’s eventual form in Article XI of the Thirty-Nine Articles, but the Ten Articles stop short of unqualifiedly endorsing justification by faith alone: it is faith formed by charity that justifies. The 1543 A Necessary Doctrine and Erudition for Any Christian Man, the conservative “King’s Book” produced towards the end of Henry’s life, in fact explicitly rejects justification by faith alone: “no faith is sufficient to justification or salvation, but such a faith as worketh by charity.” It is not that a true faith will of necessity generate good works, as Article XII of the Thirty-Nine Articles will argue; rather, it is an argument that the the virtue of charity is in fact a necessary addition to faith for salvation.  Unsurprisingly, this position will come to be reversed in the more Reformed Edwardine Forty-Two Articles of 1553. A version of what will become Article XI of the Thirty-Nine Articles appears as Article XI of the Forty-Two Articles. Here an Anglican formulary states for the first time that justification is by “onely faith,” not faith in addition to something else. The article was then expanded by Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker for the 1571 Thirty-Nine Articles via an adaptation of the language on justification from the Württemberg Confession, a document drawn up by the Lutherans of Württemberg to set forth the Lutheran position at the Council of Trent. It is worth noting that in both its 1553 and its 1571 versions, this article is unique in that it references a specific Homily, the “Homily of Justification,” a title which, amusingly, is not a title of a homily from either the First or Second Book of Homilies. Commentators unanimously agree that it must refer to the Homily of Salvation from the First Book of Homilies, although some suggest that it may also intend to include the homilies immediately before and after as well.

To talk about justification in Article XI is necessarily to wade into some fairly technical theological terminology – imputation and infusion, formed and unformed faith, being declared righteous vs. being made righteous, and more – so it helps to keep in mind the core existential theological question: how can I be right with God? It may well be that many of us have lost the conception of our own sinfulness which gives this question its weightiness. Indeed, perhaps the closest we get to justification language in much contemporary popular theology is the truism that ‘God accepts us just as we are’ – a statement which can certainly be given an orthodox meaning, but also threatens to construe God as a sort of indulgent grandparent and minimizes the role of sin, personal and structural, in our lives and the lives of those we love. For me, it was my heavy involvement in left-wing political organizing in college which forced me to take sin more seriously. Lives shattered for no good reason by poverty or cruelty, my own inextricable participation in the structures of oppression I deplored, and my utter inability to set things aright for myself or those around me all made it crystal clear to me that moral evil in the world and in myself was more dire than the sunny prognosis most liberal Protestantism would suggest. Why shouldn’t God express wrath – not as an uncontrollable emotional response, of course, but as a settled hostility towards all that opposes God’s will for the wholeness of creation – given the state of the world, indeed of myself? And it is precisely at this point that the Gospel of justification by faith is good news indeed, for it tells us that we are saved not by our own efforts or our own deserving, but by the mighty act of God in Christ Jesus, graciously extended to us as we are grafted into Christ’s body in faith.

Now, it’s important to note that, Protestant caricatures to the contrary notwithstanding, the Roman Catholic Church never officially held the position that one is justified by one’s own good works alone, with no relation to divine grace – although it must be admitted that, in practice, fifteenth-century Roman Catholic theologian Gabriel Biel’s dictum that God rewards with grace those who do the good they can does come rather close. Rather, the Roman Catholic position, reaffirmed at Trent, was that the cause of justification was infused grace making the Christian righteous. Grace, on this account, is something like a substance which God gives to (infuses in) the human being, which enables the human being to actually live a virtuous life acceptable to God. There is nothing human beings can do that merits that gift of infused grace, although Roman Catholic theologians will argue that certain actions prepare people to receive grace or make it in some way fitting (though not strictly speaking owed) that they receive grace. This argument will be roundly attacked in Article XIII of the 39 Articles. On this Roman Catholic account, if one wants to speak of justification by faith, it must be justification by faith formed by the supernatural infused virtue of charity, never by faith alone. Justification, for the Roman Catholic, is the result of the sinner actually being made righteous by supernatural grace.

In contrast, then, Article XI argues in a manner consonant with both Lutheran and Reformed treatments that justification is a matter of being accounted righteous before God on the basis of Christ’s merits through our faith as an instrument. This is what’s typically known as imputed righteousness: God imputes Christ’s righteousness to us and sees us as joined to the merits of Christ’s own sinless life of self-offering to the Father. God doesn’t wait for us to become righteous in ourselves (through the gift of grace) and then declare that yes, we are indeed righteous, as in the Roman Catholic model. Rather, God accomplishes salvation once and for all in the life, death, and resurrection of our representative, our mediator, our advocate: Jesus Christ. It’s Christ’s righteousness attributed to us by faith, not our own, that saves us. Now, this position has historically been criticized as making justification a sort of legal fiction, in which God chooses to pretend that we are not really sinners and see Christ instead. Salvation happens, in a sense, over our heads; God just decides to say that we are justified without any actual change in our lives. It must be admitted that this criticism is not an entirely unfair one; there are Protestants who seem to hold this position or one very much like it. But I don’t think this is what the Article is getting at. Rather, it stresses the once-for-all nature of God’s justifying work – when Jesus says “it is finished” on the cross, he means it – and our salvation as an always-Christocentric participation in Christ and his victory. It is not that we now have to be made righteous outside of Jesus’ righteousness, in which case Christ’s life, death, and resurrection may be seen as a sort of prolegomenon which makes our salvation possible, rather than the content of our salvation itself. Rather, we come by grace through faith to participate in the righteousness of our representative Christ, who has already run the race for us, recapitulating the human life and undoing our every error and negligence in his life of perfect obedience. But so far from being a mere fiction, God’s counting us righteous in Christ is the most substantial change one could imagine: the sinner comes truly to participate in the life of Christ, to be joined with the rest of the family of believers into Christ’s body. The very God who called all that is into being with a word makes us righteous in Christ with a word! It’s true that the experiential content of this is not always clear, but to make salvation a matter of feeling saved or believing oneself to be advancing in virtue runs the risk of self-delusion. Moreover, it need not rule out sanctification, and indeed it must not: the life of the Christian is one of continued growth in virtue, but it is always Christ’s virtue and not some virtue that one could possess outside of Christ that one comes to express.

In the end, Article XI makes it clear that salvation is God’s work, not ours; that it is a salvation extended to us not by our own strivings but by God’s gracious gift of faith; that in being saved, the “merit of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” becomes in a sense our own (that is, it is accounted to us) as we are brought to participate in Christ’s righteousness. This is, I believe profoundly good news indeed, especially for those of us who know full well that, as Cranmer famously echoed Isaiah 53:6 in the Daily Office Confession, “we have strayed and erred from [God’s] ways like lost sheep.” God has saved us in Christ’s life, death, and resurrection; God is saving us in accounting us righteous in Christ; God will save us when He brings that good work to conclusion and we at last see God face-to-face. Thanks be to God!

No treatment of justification would be complete without what is in my view the most significant doctrinal pronouncement on justification since the sixteenth century: the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, signed in 1999 by the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation and subsequently endorsed by the Anglican Communion, the World Council of Reformed Churches, and the World Methodist Council. In this document, Lutherans and Roman Catholics endorse a differentiated consensus with regards to justification, admitting continued divergences in emphasis but suggesting that they can agree on enough that the anathemas of the Reformation period about justification no longer apply.

I could not imagine a better way to close this little essay than with a particularly lovely portion of that Joint Declaration:

In faith we together hold the conviction that justification is the work of the triune God. The Father sent his Son into the world to save sinners. The foundation and presupposition of justification is the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ. Justification thus means that Christ himself is our righteousness, in which we share through the Holy Spirit in accord with the will of the Father. Together we confess: By grace alone, in faith in Christ’s saving work and not because of any merit on our part, we are accepted by God and receive the Holy Spirit, who renews our hearts while equipping and calling us to good works.

Amen!

Ben Crosby is a postulate for Holy Orders in the Diocese of Massachusetts (Episcopal Church) and a student at Yale Divinity School with a background in labor and political organizing. He is interested in historical theology, liturgy, and the relationship between theology and social order, with a particular interest in the  ressourcement of classical Anglican theology. Follow him on Twitter: @benjamindcrosby

The condition of Man after the fall of Adam is such, that he cannot turn and prepare himself, by his own natural strength and good works, to faith; and calling upon God. Wherefore we have no power to do good works pleasant and acceptable to God, without the grace of God by Christ preventing us, that we may have a good will, and working with us, when we have that good will.

by Tyler Conway

Article X stresses the inability of human beings to choose what is good and acceptable to God, rendering humanity completely dependent on God’s grace. The point here is not concerned primarily with the debate of God’s sovereignty and human freedom as much as it is focused on the nature of the will in light of human depravity. In essence, Article X affirms what Martin Luther argued in his The Bondage of the Will (1525), namely that human beings cannot possibly, by their own strength or merit, have faith apart from the grace of God.

Simply put, at the heart of Article X is the fact that humanity can neither turn in faith to God nor do good works apart from the work of Christ within the believer. That said, it would be dishonest to suggest that the question of human freedom is not at all a contentious matter. It is therefore fitting to deal with some of the questions that may arise from what is presented in Article X. How are we to think of human free will? What exactly can be said of free will in light of our sinful nature? I will do my best to deal briefly with these questions, providing an alternative way for understanding human freedom that is in accordance with what is professed in Article X. I will then briefly touch on the issue of justification, though this will be the primary focus of Article XI. I do, however, want to clear up some confusion and highlight the dispute between Reformed Protestants and Catholics on the matter of human freedom and grace.

Now, human free will is no small subject. To say that humanity has no free will is to spark uproar, misunderstanding, and even denial. What Augustine and Calvin both suggest when using the term “free will” is that we are essentially free of all righteousness and enslaved to sin. Preferably, we should only use the term “to mock its empty name.”[1] John Calvin writes, “If anyone, then, can use this word without understanding it in a bad sense, I shall not trouble him on this account. But I hold that because it cannot be retained without great peril, it will, on the contrary, be a great boon for the church if it be abolished.”[2] Calvin continues by claiming that he personally prefers not to use the term altogether, and he advises others to do likewise since free will cannot account for good works. As Luther asks, “For what need is there of Christ and the Spirit, if we have good works and merits through free will?”[3]

Some may suggest that if human free will is abolished, so too then is reason. However, it’s important to note that neither human reason nor human will are completely and utterly abandoned. Even Calvin admits that while the supernatural gifts are extinguished, the natural gifts are corrupted, but still present. Human reason serves to distinguish between good and evil, though it must be emphasized that this ability is tainted by sinful nature. Regarding the will, Calvin writes, “the will, because it is inseparable from man’s nature, did not perish, but was so bound to wicked desires that it cannot strive after the right.”[4] Thus, while it is helpful to think of reason in this way, this does not avoid the fact that humanity lacks freedom. We may ask, “What then can we say of free will? Ought we to simply accept Calvin’s suggestion and dismiss the word entirely?”

Here, it seems appropriate to ask what we mean when we use the term “free will.” For many, the natural inclination is to think of free will as limitless potentiality regarding our choices and actions. In other words, we like to believe that the choices we make are entirely ours, innumerable, and free from any and all influence. However, as I understand it, such a notion of human freedom is somewhat misguided for it ignores the very real and unpredictable forces that play a role in our decision-making. The truth is, we are always captivated by something not wholly of our own will. More often than not, the choices we are faced with in life are the result of a prior series of events, most of which are completely out of our control from the very start. Of course, this is not intended to be an argument for determinism by any means, for even those convinced of a more open and free universe admit this much at least. Still, it’s an important point worth keeping in mind when approaching the meaning behind freedom.

Perhaps then no one is truly free in this sense. We are always enslaved to something, whether we like to think so or not. Yet, the emphasis behind Article X is that our sinful nature limits us entirely for we are enslaved to ourselves. To put it another way, we can only ever turn away from God unless God intervenes. For this reason, we cannot say much, if anything, about human freedom and capability. This was indeed Luther’s argument against Erasmus when he asserted, “It follows, therefore, that the free will, without the grace of God, is not absolutely free, but is immutably the captive and slave of evil, since it cannot, of itself, turn to good.”[5] We are either enslaved to our own sinful nature and inability to choose God or we are made free to turn to God by the power of His grace alone. With this in mind, perhaps there is a more helpful way to understand free will.

Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart (who, I might add, is not very fond of Calvinism) puts it this way: “A higher understanding of human freedom, however, is inseparable from a definition of human nature. To be free is to be able to flourish as the kind of being one is, and so to attain the ontological good toward which one’s nature is oriented; freedom is the unhindered realization of a complex nature in its proper end (natural and supernatural), and this is consummate liberty and happiness.” Hart continues, “The will that chooses poorly, then—through ignorance, maleficence, or corrupt desire—has not thereby become freer, but has further enslaved itself to those forces that prevent it from achieving its full expression.”[6]

Thus, we are incapable of choosing God apart from God’s gracious work precisely because we are not free to flourish as the kind of beings we are. We are not free to attain the ontological good of our nature since our nature is itself corrupted by sin. Thought in this way, the question regarding human capacity to arbitrarily choose from a range of limitless possibilities becomes moot and, frankly, uninteresting. Moreover, it appears that the concept of freedom can still be affirmed in a very real sense. Instead of disposing of the concept of freedom, we can choose to view freedom in light of who we were always meant to be as those created in the image of God.

Consequently, because faith and good works are an impossibility apart from God’s own doing, we are compelled to call faith itself a gift. We therefore echo with the Apostle Paul, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God” (Eph. 2:8).

Now, since Article X asserts all of these things about faith, works, and grace, it necessarily implies that no one is justified by his or her own good works. Despite the fact that the term “semipelagianism” gets thrown around loosely, both Protestants and Catholics rightly reject the error of Pelagius who denied original sin and grace.[7] Both have also rejected semipelagianism, which was condemned as heretical in the Lutheran Formula of Concord in 1577 and much earlier at the Council of Orange (529). The major issue at hand has primarily to do with the question of synergism—the notion that man can freely cooperate with God’s grace—and this is precisely what Articles IX-XIII reject.

Of course, it’s unlikely that this debate will ever be resolved, and some might even accuse the Roman Catholic Church of semipelagianism today. One reason for this may be due to paragraph 1730 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which states, “God willed that man should be ‘left in the hand of his own counsel,’ so that he might of his own accord seek his Creator and freely attain his full and blessed perfection by cleaving to him.”[8]However, to charge Catholics with semipelagianism because of this is, in my opinion, quite uncharitable to say the least.

Nonetheless, I make no apology for the differences between the Reformed and Catholic Church, but I do believe there is much in common worth celebrating on this important matter. The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification seems, to me, one such occasion for recognizing areas of agreement. As the Declaration affirms for both Lutherans and Catholics: “Together we confess: By grace alone, in faith in Christ’s saving work and not because of any merit on our part, we are accepted by God and receive the Holy Spirit, who renews our hearts while equipping and calling us to good works.”[9]

There is much more that could be said of justification, but that shall be dealt with more appropriately in Article XI. Suffice it to say, Article X leaves no room for human merit. Because of the foundation laid for us in Article IX on the matter of original sin, we acknowledge that humanity has no strength, no merit, and no freedom to earn God’s grace. Grace is freely given to us, allowing us to turn in faith to God and know true freedom. That is indeed good news.

Tyler Conway is a 2018 graduate of George W. Truett Theological Seminary. He is
currently serving as a hospital chaplain and resides in Waco, TX with his wife,
Karleigh. You can find more of his opinions at Theology Studio and The Augustinian.

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[1] McNeill, John T. Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion. Vol. 1, Westminster, 1960. pg. 266.

[2] Ibid. 266.

[3] Luther, Martin, and Edward Thomas. Vaughan. On the Bondage of the Will: to the Venerable Mister Erasmus of Rotterdam, 1525. 1823. pg. 209.

[4] McNeill, John T. Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion. Vol. 1, Westminster, 1960. pg. 271.

[5] Luther, Martin, and Edward Thomas. Vaughan. On the Bondage of the Will: to the Venerable Mister Erasmus of Rotterdam, 1525. 1823. pg. 120.

[6] Hart, David Bentley. The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? Wiliam B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2011. pg. 71.

[7] “Pelagius and Pelagianism.” CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Pelagius and Pelagianism, www.newadvent.org/cathen/11604a.htm.

[8] Catechism of the Catholic Church – Man’s Freedom, www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s1c1a3.htm.

[9] Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/chrstuni/documents/rc_pc_chrstuni_doc_31101999_cath-luth-joint-declaration_en.html.

Original sin standeth not in the following of Adam, (as the Pelagians do vainly talk;) but it is the fault and corruption of the Nature of every man, that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam; whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is of his own nature inclined to evil, so that the flesh lusteth always contrary to the Spirit; and therefore in every person born into this world, it deserveth God’s wrath and damnation. And this infection of nature doth remain, yea in them that are regenerated; whereby the lust of the flesh, called in Greek, φρονημα σαρκος, (which some do expound the wisdom, some sensuality, some the affection, some the desire, of the flesh), is not subject to the Law of God. And although there is no condemnation for them that believe and are baptized; yet the Apostle doth confess, that concupiscence and lust hath of itself the nature of sin.

by M. L. Harrison

Article IX understands one thing very well: that for a brand that all of us bear, original sin sure has a branding problem. One is, ironically, the strength of its current brand, iconic as the Apple logo: most popular discussions of original sin focus so much on the expulsion myth of Adam and Eve that it’s difficult to understand what the term original sin could possibly mean in any later context. Another problem with original sin’s “brand” is quite different, however, and if anything more troubling: the multiplicity of disparate things that get labeled “original sin” without reference to an underlying theology. Searching online news pieces for “[Name of Politician]’s original sin was,” my results include jurisprudential opinions, military action, legislative inaction, decisions about the economy, understandings of international relations, and racism (the politician’s or others’, depending).

Taken in aggregate, each of the “original sins” metaphorically evoked by journalists or pundits begins to hew to similar and very familiar contours: the label usually adheres to a moment of weakness (often motivated by prideful impercipience) out of which innumerable successive evils have ensued. Sometimes, as the examples above would show, the “original sin” is envisioned as a personality trait. We are accustomed to think or speak about literary characters in this way—“original sin” as analogue to hamartia—such that we might assert that Pandora’s was simply curiosity. At other times, “original sin” is construed as an action (Pandora choosing to open her eponymous box): explanations of original sin meant for children often move in this direction, making the key aspect of the story of Adam and Eve the first parents’ act of biting the forbidden fruit. Either way—letting a personality trait or an action be at fault—the popular understanding of original sin invoked by news pieces lets literary considerations overshadow what the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion represent to be the truth: that so far from being some trait or action unfortunate in degree or in certain unforeseeable circumstances, original sin is actually something innate and irreducibly bad.

Before getting to Article IX’s more specific definition of what, exactly, original sin is, a troubling question presents itself: what’s so dangerous about understanding original sin as we typically do? No one denies that human existence is rife with tragic ironies. No one denies that people have made and will always make mistakes. The risk of maintaining our understanding of the central problem in such terms, however, might be an encouragement to pride: a misconception that humans don’t really have any innate flaws; that Christians are simply caught in a strangely self-defeating myth they use to feel down about themselves. It is into just this welter of confusion that Article IX bravely steps, asserting that the problem of original sin “standeth not in the following of Adam (as the Pelagians do vainly talk)” but is in the lineage of Adam, the “fault and corruption of the Nature of every man.” Article IX seems to insist, in other words, that original sin is not a matter of action but of being, not a matter of personality but of essence.

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What use, one might wonder, to criticize humans for some way that they are? What could improvement look like? The answers to those questions were a matter of extensive speculation by some of the leading figures of monasticism, particularly following the revival of interest in the monastic life that accompanied and followed the tenth-century Benedictine Reforms. The Psalmist notes that humans were created only “a little lower than the angels,” after all; and if the difference between the ontology of angels and humans is the lack of some form of sin inherent to humanity—if we consider sin in fact to be part of human nature—then an embrace of “the angelic life” was also an experiment in attempting to escape the problems that original sin seemed to pose. For thinkers such as Anselm, “angelic life” was less an interesting way to try to live one’s religious aspirations so much as it was a solemn and urgent calling. It was thought that God’s original motive for creating humans was to fill a gap in the celestial hierarchy (forever circling the throne of the godhead) after the fall of Satan and his rebel angels. Humans, endowed with free will, would be able to choose their obedience and thereby fully and more completely merit a place of prominence in the heavenly host. Obedience, a cornerstone of cenobitic life given a place of great prominence in the Rule of St. Benedict, was among other things a powerful and ostensibly effective way of mitigating the dangerous implications of free will.

The other obvious difference that ascetic reformers saw between angels and humans—corporeality—posed a trickier problem; if the Scholastics had posed an open question about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, the answer for how many humans can do so has always been zero. And yet the physical world, as in the “three foes” formulation of “the world, the flesh, and the devil,” was bad in part for its base physicality: its very matter. No one disputed the inevitability of embodiment, of course, which in the language of Article IX affects “every person born into this world.” To the extent that “the world” was also overlaid by centuries of human relationships and human culture, however, it could at least partially be escaped. For just as Jesus went to the desert to pray and was waited on there by angels, inspiring early hermits and the inchoate communities started by the so-called Desert Fathers, the fuga sæculi enacted through literal retreat to the desert came to be associated with a sort of paradise. Later, far removed from the actual deserts of North Africa and Palestine as they were, the cenobitic houses of high-medieval Europe embraced this flight through allegory. That symbolic and abstracted understanding enabled them to see the rarified and restrained environment within their monastery walls as an echo of that desolate yet holy place: the paradisus claustralis or “paradise of the cloister.”

The foregoing snapshot of intellectual and institutional history isn’t actually addressed by the authors of the Thirty-Nine Articles, if it was ever really known. Yet a certain poignant irony attends the idea that at best a stylized paradise, ruled by little more than the unchanging rhythm of the canonical hours, was in a significant context and for a fairly long time the closest not a few humans felt they could come to the impassive state enjoyed by the parents of humanity—and that irony grows only greater when one considers that the pangs heralding the birth of Anglicanism included Henry VIII’s infamous Dissolution of the Monasteries (truly, as the collect puts it, “we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves”). Indeed, decrying the near-Pelagianism of any efforts to avoid original sin, the text of Article IX instead rings changes on the word “nature,” emphasizing the problem as not only embedded in the matrix of reality but transmitted like a plague, an “infection of nature.”  Some version of the word “nature” appears a total of five times in Article IX, in fact, with the more memorable “lust” appearing only three times. If they might not have approved of the proposed solution, then, the authors of Article IX seem tacitly to agree with earlier precedent (monastic or otherwise) in locating the majority of the problem of original sin with our rootedness in the physical world. Perhaps it is for this reason that the Article concludes by noting that original sin “hath of itself the nature” of sin properly so called, because unlike other sins it cannot be chosen. Who chooses to be born?

But, again, embodiment is just one facet of the problem identified by early Christians. Regarding the other major facet, free will, we learn from the Article that “the flesh lusteth always contrary to the Spirit,” never “subject to the law of God.” And although it is often dangerous to apply contemporary English semantics to Early Modern words, one’s first impression here is that the flesh takes an active pleasure in resisting the wishes of the mind. How might we better characterize this resistance? A cascade of near synonyms depending from a single phrase rendered in Greek as phronema sarkos reveals the difficulty of the question and the authors’ attempts to specify it: we learn that “some do expound” the term as the body’s “wisdom,” its “sensuality,” its “affection,” or its “desire,” the connotations for each translation moving (from first to fourth) across a spectrum whose poles might be the passive rationale of a plant at the one end and the active intelligence of a conscious animal at the other. In reality, of course—as science has helped to show—all of these senses could be said to obtain for the impulses of the body, giving a range analogous to the continuum of ways that scripture describes the nature of spirit (from wind to breath to Comforter and groaning intercessor, the last two particularly describing the third person of the Trinity). The Article’s cautiously capacious approach to characterizing the body’s ongoing resistance to spirit—is it an obstacle like a stone in the path of a plow, or is it simply wicked?—informs the use of Greek, which use at once places original sin in the realm of philosophical conundrums and also (or at least by the time the Episcopal Church adopted it) was used in schools to hide material “for mature audiences only” from pupils already versed in Latin: a figleaf (as it were) over sexual desire.

As I’ve attempted to sketch above, original sin has long been understood as something that partakes of biology but cannot be reduced to it. Similarly, we have seen, it is a problem with a philosophical nature that cannot be dismissed as a mere intellectual curiosity. It is a core principle throughout, not a strange detour from, the history of Christian thought. That having been said, it may sound somewhat chilling when Article IX intones that original sin merits God’s “wrath and damnation”; if monasticism’s embrace of the “angelic life” missed the mark a little for not being universally applicable, it was at least a response to the problem put forward in good faith. For the rest of us, there is the renewal of nature provided through the sacraments, since “there is no condemnation for them that believe and are baptized.” But even then, “yea in them that are regenerated,” the experience if not the sentence (of damnation!) stubbornly remains.

⁂

Some members of today’s clergy, faced with the daunting pastoral task of acknowledging original sin as a problem that no one merits yet that everyone seems unable to escape, have urged Christians to shift their consciousness of original sin to that of humans’ “original blessing” instead. God made the world and called it good, they might note; for that matter, medieval theologians similarly leavened their dark views regarding “the world” with a concomitant notion of the inherent “dignity of man.” We can commend this approach if it could help to wean our denominational culture away from a fear-driven insistence on early infant baptism to which some might still cling; it is hard to imagine Jesus of Nazareth holding with the idea that deceased unbaptized infants occupy a quasi-limbo, let alone the hell that “damnation” for the unbaptized would appear to merit. At the same time, by alluding to the Apostle Paul’s testimony (e.g. Romans 7:15), Article IX makes a plain case for the attendant confusion and despair when original sin is left unexamined—unlike the “thorn in the flesh” the same apostle refers to in 2 Corinthians 12—through the lens of faith. As 2 Corinthians 12:10 in particular suggests, a right appreciation of original sin leads to a right appreciation of the limits of human nature. Far from an impediment to human flourishing, then, it deserves to be a major focus of ongoing spiritual formation that only begins with baptism.

M.L. Harrison hails originally from Southern Virginia and received a Ph.D. in medieval studies in 2010 from Cornell University. He lives, works, worships, writes, and teaches in and around the District of Columbia. His writing can be found at retracery.wordpress.com.

The Three Creeds, Nicene Creed, Athanasius’s Creed, and that which is commonly called the Apostles’ Creed, ought thoroughly to be received and believed: for they may be proved by most certain warrants of Holy Scripture.

by the Rev. Rakgadi Khobo

It is not uncommon to hear a member of the clergy refer to the creeds as being outdated or having no relevance for us today. In the province of Southern Africa, the primary creed in our Sunday worship is the Nicene Creed. The challenges and issues raised about the creed relate to the Nicene Creed. Most of those who have raised objections to the creeds have rarely spoken to the truths contained in the creeds. The objections relate to the latest fashions, the language of the creeds, and political correctness.  To discard the creeds without having looked closely at the truths contained in the creeds would be akin to throwing the baby out with the bath water.

We have to begin somewhere in this task. The full title of the Articles of Religion provide some context to how we are to understand why these three creeds were chosen and not any other. The full title of the Thirty-Nine Articles reads as follows:

Articles Agreed upon by the Archbishops and Bishops of both Provinces, and the whole Clergy in the Convocation holden at London in the year 1562, for the avoiding of diversities of opinions and for the establishing of Consent touching true religion.

What is immediately clear from the title is that the bishops were looking to provide some guidance to the faithful, without necessarily being prescriptive in their guidance. The second thing that is clear in the title that helps explain why these three creeds were chosen is that the bishops wanted us to remain rooted in the true religion. This is not the place to go into detail about the true religion. The unity of the Church is protected by the Canons of the Ecumenical Councils, the rules of the Holy Fathers of the Church, and Holy Tradition. The existence of  the Anglican church is not meant to contradict the unity of the Church. The separation in our visible organization does not prevent us from being spiritually larger members of the one body of the universal Church, or from sharing the one head, Christ, and the one spirit of faith and grace. This unity is given visible expression by a single confession of faith, in the creeds and by communion in prayer and the sacraments.  Therefore, when the article says these creeds “ought thoroughly to be received and believed,” it is not just because the content of the creeds can be found in scripture. It is also because these creeds summarize the core beliefs of the universal Church.

All three creeds contains statements with regards to Christology, the filioque, the Father, and the Church. These statements should be understood as boundaries, rather than the path. These creeds did not come about because the early Church Fathers wanted to control  what people believed. Rather, as time passed different places had different credal statements, all professing the identical faith yet using different forms and expressions, with different degrees of detail and emphasis. These credal forms usually became more detailed and elaborate in those areas where questions about the faith had arisen and heresies had developed.

This is because historically there were many theologies with regards to Christ and the Holy Spirit. Some threatened to tear the Church apart. The influence of politics on the early church councils should not be taken lightly, as it has had bearing on the creeds we have today. That being said, we cannot deny the gifts the creeds have been in helping us remain united, and connected to the true Church. In the creeds the early Church left us with a thread of unity in the creeds, a common profession of faith. This was important as it allowed the Church to expand. 

“Ought thoroughly to be received and believed“

Article VIII falls under the category of Articles on the rule of faith. The three creeds mentioned in the article are the three ecumenical creeds accepted by the universal Church. The Nicene Creed was formally drawn up by the Church in 325 AD and 381 AD after great controversies developed in Christendom about the nature of the Son of God and the Holy Spirit.

A creed is a biblical account of faith, which involves knowledge, assent, and trust; indeed, these are three elements of a single act of faith involving the whole person who commits himself to God. This pertains to the importance of reason in engaging with the creeds. In the early Church there were many different forms of the Christian confession of faith; many different “creeds.” The need for theology and for the creeds arises from two basic facts. One is the nature of man as an intelligent being. To quote Anselm: “just because he is intelligens the Christian, of all men, has to learn to discern with agonizing clarity what is conceivable by him about God himself.” These creeds were always used originally in relation to baptism. Before being baptized a person had to state what he believed.

The creeds are part of our inheritance of faith. These creeds are historical and contextual by nature. What this means is that we cannot read into the creeds the knowledge and attitudes we have today, about faith, Jesus and God. Our judgment of the content and truths contained in the creeds needs to show respect for their historical context and social and cultural background, sensitivity for their grammatical and conceptual instrumentation, careful insights into the specific controversies in relation to which and the positions against which they were written in the first place.

The question before us is whether the theological truth-content of what is asserted in the creeds is exclusively tied to that setting. Take for example the following question from the Heidelberg Catechism:

Q. What is your only comfort in life and in death?

A. That I am not my own, but belong – body and soul, in life and in death – to my Saviour, Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood, and has set me free from sin. He also watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my Father in heaven; in fact, all things must work together for my salvation. Because I belong to him, Christ, by his Holy Spirit, assures me of eternal life and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.

From this brief example we see that  the truth of the statements asserted in this catechism does not depend on when they were said or asserted. They would be true for men and women living at any time, and in any place.

That being said, the creeds are exclusive beliefs, such that because they assert truth, excluding some things as false, those who deny the truth of these propositions must be regarded as mistaken. We cannot change that the creeds are historical documents written in light of a specific controversy. They are polemical and antithetical, and all truth formulated for polemical reasons is partial. Yet however incomplete and inadequate, the truth is in the creeds. With regards to the truth of revelation, and however important understanding the extra-linguistic context is for understanding the asserted propositions in that context, they are nevertheless true insofar as they state absolutely nothing that is false.

The creeds are reflective of the struggles the Church had to overcome in its early years. With the expansion of the Church came the need for the Church to set boundaries, for the Church to streamline its teaching. In our world of connectedness and where truth seems to be relative, it is important to recognize that the truths contained in the creeds were true when they were written as they are still true today. The claim that once something is true it is always true, forever true, and unchangeably true is not inconsistent with finding new ways of expressing the truth of dogmas when the need arises.

Jaroslav Pelikan rightly sees that “underlying the creedal and conciliar definitions of orthodoxy from the beginning have been three shared presuppositions: first, that there is a straight line . . . from the Gospels to the creed; consequently, second, that the true doctrine being confessed by the councils and creeds of the church is identical with what the New Testament calls the ‘faith which was once for all delivered to the saints’ [Jude 3]; and therefore, third, that continuity with that faith is the essence of orthodoxy, and discontinuity with it the essence of heresy.”

The goal of the creeds is to confess this same faith if possible more clearly than before and to articulate possible misunderstandings, confusion and mistaken opinions more accurately than before. The articulation of faith in intelligible words not only clarifies faith but becomes itself the means of deeper commitment of heart and mind. This should be done with care and careful consideration not to change the truth contained in the creeds, for as the Article says, “they may be proved by most certain warrants of holy Scripture.”

The Rev. Rakgadi Khobo is a priest in the Anglican Church of Southern Africa.

On the website for St Cyril they have done a full analysis of the biblical references to every statement made in the creed.

by Potter Cain McKinney

The Articles of Religion, especially towards the beginning, cover uncontroversial and, perhaps to some, uninteresting material.  Article VII, On the Old Testament, may be one such article. But its subject, the Old Testament, has so much depth, so much baggage, so much influence, that I cannot help but take every statement about it very seriously. In Appalachia and many other parts of America and the world, the Old Testament is our mythological corpus. Its tales capture the imagination of every child, religious or not, as would the best of Homer and Hesiod. I was not raised religious in the slightest, but even I knew many of the great stories and saw them as my reservoir of narratives by which I communicated to myself my own narrative, if we consider that to be mythology. In our adult lives we cite its laws or see them cited as guides for our nations, engaging with them whatever our political affiliation may be. So how we understand this collection of texts is extremely important: it might just be the most interesting and most dangerous book in the world.

The Elizabethan Church agreed on the following statement of understanding of the Old Testament in Article VII of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion:

The Old Testament is not contrary to the New: for both in the Old and New Testament everlasting life is offered to Mankind by Christ, who is the only Mediator between God and Man, being both God and Man. Wherefore they are not to be heard, which feign that the old Fathers did look only for transitory promises. Although the Law given from God by Moses, as touching Ceremonies and Rites, do not bind Christian men, nor the Civil precepts thereof ought of necessity to be received in any commonwealth; yet notwithstanding, no Christian man whatsoever is free from the obedience of the Commandments which are called Moral.

This Article does not seem to have ever been the subject of much dispute in the Church of England.  That’s because this Article puts forward a consensus of the Church’s tradition that even Catholics can and did agree with.  Understanding this Article, then, is to understand a key principle not only of Anglicanism but of all truly catholic Christianity.  We can distill it into three key and interrelated points:

Firstly, the Old Testament does not contradict the New.  Within Christianity, it would be nonsensical to say otherwise; if both are in some sense revelations of God, and God isn’t ever self-contradictory, then these two revelations of God likewise can’t contradict each other.  The two Testaments depict a single story of God’s action in the world, from creation to the end of time. This is probably obvious to most Christians, but some others frequently deny it. These others frequently compare the “God of the Old Testament” unfavorably to the “God of the New Testament,” or to claim that the Old Testament doesn’t “apply” to Christians, as if the testaments were written by two different deities.  This Article, and I’d say the New Testament, does not allow for such a view.

Secondly, the Old Testament is a testament to Jesus Christ just as the New Testament is.  The same “God of the New Testament,” the deity of mercy and charity manifest in Jesus, is the “God of the Old Testament” and offers that same mercy to the world in the Old Testament laws, stories, poetry, and prophecy.  When the authors of the New Testament proclaimed the Gospel, they looked to the Old Testament to do it, citing the “promises to our fathers, to Abraham and his children” as in the Magnificat, looking back to God’s acts in the midst of Israel as their foundation.  Christians today can look back to Joseph, who selflessly forgives his brothers for selling him into slavery out of jealousy (Genesis 50:15-21), God’s provisions for Israel in the wilderness, and many other stories of God’s love conquering our unfaithfulness. When the figures of the Old Testament heard God’s promises, and when God’s people read these stories, prophecies, psalms, and sayings, they were growing in union with the God who sent us Jesus.  Look in Acts 7 and you will read St. Stephen preach the Gospel by starting on the firm foundation of the Old Testament history of Israel. Likewise, the same method and foundation is present in Irenaeus of Lyon’s On the Apostolic Preaching.  All this indicates that the Apostles understood that the foundation of the Gospel and the context in which Jesus can be properly understood is the Old Testament and its history, promises, and hopes.

Thirdly, we must realize that the Law is still relevant to Christians.  The Old Testament isn’t relevant only because it teaches us the Gospel. The Law is, in part, still a manifestation of God.  Many Christians in history have reasoned that some laws in the Old Testament are different from others, placing them all into one of three categories: Civil, those laws which pertain to the governance of the Kingdom of Israel; Ceremonial, those laws that describe the functions and process of the Temple and the Priesthood; and Moral, those laws which mandate what is and is not ethically acceptable behavior towards God and neighbor.  These same thinkers figured that the since the Kingdom of Israel and the Temple priesthood no longer exist or factor into Christianity, the Civil and Ceremonial laws no longer apply to Christians. However, they reason that the Moral laws are not based on any standard other than the unchanging, eternal God. Therefore, these laws are still authoritative for Christians. This is the underlying logic that allows Christians to reason that mixed fabrics and food laws do not apply to Christians, but commandments such as “do not murder” and “do not commit adultery” still hold.  This is particularly important to stress because this is perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of traditional Christian interpretation of the Old Testament. When faced with the magnitude and specificity of the Law, it is easy for anyone to haphazardly arbitrate between all the commandments based on how relevant or tasteful it seems to us. So, we see some quote a particular passage to batter LGBT people, others quote another passage to win an immigration debate, but usually both parties deny the relevance of the other’s passage (though both tend to agree eating shrimp is okay).  This sort of behavior is fallacious: it is a manner of inquiry which is not fitting for what is being inquired into, namely, the Scriptures and God revealed in them. Christian interpreters traditionally sought to impose a standard based on the internal logic of Scripture itself, rather than any external standard such as relevance to our lives or personal taste, a principle we must adopt in any real inquiry, theological and otherwise.

These three principles were enjoined upon us in this Article by a synod of men five hundred or so years ago, but are they still useful for the Church today?  Were they ever true in the first place? Traditional Christian interpretation and use of the Old Testament has come under fire on many fronts in the past and today, and many merit serious attention.

The most obvious is that many do not find the Old Testament and the New Testament to be compatible.  As mentioned earlier, many see God depicted in the New Testament as a universally loving and inclusive God whose property is to always have mercy, while they see God in the Old Testament as jealous, capricious, even murderous.  One might also discern a difference between a God whose embodiment is an exceptional act in the Incarnation (disjointed from the Father as hypostasis) in the New Testament and a God depicted with anthropomorphisms quite frequently in the Old, or a God in whom there is no variability (James 1:17) and who is perfect (Matthew 5:48) and a God who is often shown as one who repents from and regrets past actions (Genesis 6:6).  These were observations relied on by the Gnostics, particularly a group known as the Marcionites, very early on in the history of Christianity, and by many critics of Christianity today. This latter and more philosophical concern regarding the appearance of anthropomorphism and possibility should not jostle us much: what issue can we reasonably take with anthropomorphic imagery for God if we believe God is most perfectly manifest in an anthropos, one truly human in every way?  When this human being, Jesus Christ, laments over the people of Jerusalem and cries out in pain on the cross, how can we take issue with God being shown as pained by interaction in and with a fallen world?  Christians who understand that Jesus is the premier manifestation of God for the world should have no trouble with such descriptions.

However, it’s another matter when we see God caught up in moral evils.  This moral accusation is perhaps the hardest to wrestle with in the traditional Christian interpretation of Scripture: how do we feel comfortable with depictions of God carrying out infanticide or genocide, or leading destructive military campaigns that put modern war crimes to shame?  These are explicitly contrary to how Jesus taught his disciples to behave, which I believe is in a non-violent and life-affirming manner. Nor is it how Jesus reveals God as one more likely to submit to evil, even to death, to ultimately undermine it and convert it to good, than to wipe it out directly.  I struggle with this still, but there is a way which I find useful to reconcile these stories with God revealed in Christ.

The first place we must look is towards the ancient tradition of allegorical readings of Scripture, following celebrated patristic interpreters such as Origen of Alexandria. Doing this, we would hold that the point of a story such as the Israelite invasion of Canaan isn’t that the Israelites slaughtered all the Canaanites on God’s command, but that God commanded and helped carry out the complete destruction of evil in ourselves under the symbol of a worldly war.  We can view each story that challenges us in such a way, looking to the guidance of the Spirit in doing so.  We then allow ourselves distance from the atrocity and can gain spiritual edification from it. The story becomes a means for communicating a spiritual truth which is a revelation of God, but the genocidal story is not the revelation.  This is a very popular way interpreters throughout history have applied our second principle of the Article and have found Christ in the spirit if not in the letter of the Old Testament.

Taking this route, however, will get us into trouble with the other sort of critics: those who challenge Christian readings of the Old Testament that discount the historical experience of its authors or the Jewish readers of Scripture today.  In many ways, I am this sort of critic, so on this front I will say that we should not, as Christians, interpret away the thoughts and cares of the Israelite authors of the Old Testament, even when we are severely challenged by it. Furthermore, as I elucidated above, it is fallacious to inquire into Scripture according to our own standards of relevance or taste and not the nature of Scripture of itself, which is a sure risk we face in allegorical interpretation understood by itself.  Scripture is, whether we like it or not, a subject both human and divine in nature..

How, then, can we respect the dignity of the authors and the nature of Scripture without attributing evil acts to God?  To do so, I believe we must extend the rationale of the article, not deny it. Just as the article teaches that Christ is manifest in the text and revelatory content of Scripture, we must also see God’s Christly logic in the act of revealing and inspiring Scripture itself.  

It was very common in the ancient Near East to write annals of war which gave extremely unlikely and hyperbolic accounts of kings and armies wiping out their enemies, not out of any disdain of the enemies so much as out of a desire to glorify the nation, their king, and their God.  For example, the Pharaoh Ramesses II wrote about himself single-handedly and totally defeating the enemy army at the Battle of Qadesh, not out of malice for the enemy but for the sake of his glory as a king and a god. The Israelites likely wrote about themselves in this way when they wrote in memory of their military conquests, and we know this was also done by their nearby neighbors.  So, we can reason that when God wanted to communicate his infinite divine glory sovereignty to the Israelites, he chose to condescend to what the Israelites understood glory to be, just as God condescended to be in human form as Jesus Christ for humans, as God condescends to us as sinners in Jesus’ capitulation to the cross, and as God condescends to showing and communicating grace to us creatures by means of bread and wine.  It is not the image of war violence but the divine glory that we need to see, and for the Israelites divine glory was best communicated by hyperbolic, violent stories of conquest, though for the modern reader this may be uncomfortable more than doxological.  

This is really the same principle of cultural relativism the Articles apply to the Civil and Ceremonial laws but applied to the stories of the Old Testament.  We can likewise apply this principle to the Moral laws, to the Prophets, to the poetry, and to the wisdom literature. Not only do we then have a hermeneutic which respects both the letter and the spirit of the Old Testament and both its divine and human authors, but we do so by following the ways of the past recorded in the Articles of Religion.  

The only failure in Article VII that I can detect is that it does not fully utilize its principles as it could.  But in utilizing them so, we gain a hermeneutic which allows Scripture to interpret itself, in cooperation with our reason and tradition, and allows the Holy Spirit to continuously fill and renew the letter of Scripture for the Church each and every day as our daily bread, a hermeneutic just like our Reformation forbearers hoped to pass down to us.

Potter Cain McKinney is a student and vestry member of Canterbury, The Episcopal Church at William and Mary, and a Sunday school teacher at Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg, VA.

by the Rev. Jordan Haynie Ware

There are surprisingly few things the Anglican tradition requires its ordinands to believe. While Twitterati might go on about the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection (beliefs I personally hold dear), the only belief we hold strongly enough that we require those presenting themselves for ordination to actually sign a document that is kept on file – forever – is that the “Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments [are] the Word of God, and … contain all things necessary to salvation.”[1] Or, in the words of Article VI: “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therin, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man[sic], that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.”[2]

You might be forgiven for giving this assertion a quizzical look. The Episcopal Church (and, to a lesser extent, the Anglican Church of Canada) are not exactly known as Bible thumpers. We certainly could never be accused of inerrantism. We are well known for the phrase “we take the Bible too seriously to take it literally.” But a literal reading, in addition to being literally impossible, is no prerequisite for the belief that Scripture contains all things necessary to salvation. Neither does such a belief require us to chain ourselves to Iron Age theology or Bronze Age beliefs. Taking Scripture seriously doesn’t lead to Bible thumping or require us to disavow modernity. The promise that Scripture contains all things necessary for salvation does not bind us into one rigid way of thinking, rather it frees us to engage with the very Word of God, secure in the promise that God has given us everything we need.

First, what does it mean to say that “Scripture contains all things necessary to salvation?” Surprisingly enough, it does not mean that “all things contained within Scripture are necessary to salvation.” Think of it this way: all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares; similarly, believing that everything essential to our understanding the love of God may be found within Scripture does not require us to, say, believe that the genocide order given to Joshua is essential to salvation. Martin Luther is supposed to have said, “The Bible is the manger which holds the Christ Child, and we should never confuse the straw with the baby.”[3] Just because there’s no documentation Luther’s the one who said this doesn’t mean it’s wrong. In the course of my three year journey through the Bible, cover to cover, as part of the Two Feminists Annotate the Bible podcast, we’ve uncovered a number of sections that I would call straw. The aforementioned genocide in Joshua. Laws requiring the stoning of rape victims if they don’t scream loud enough to be heard and rescued.[4] The adultery test in Numbers.[5] The household codes.[6]  Believing that Scripture contains all things necessary for salvation does not mean we believe all things within Scripture are necessary for salvation. This frees us up from the pressure of needing to believe in all of it or none of it, as the Fundamentalists would have us do.

And yet even this freedom is not enough for those of us who have experienced Scripture used against us as a weapon. The trauma that many women have experienced at the hands of those who quote 1 Timothy 2:11-15 at us when we dare to admit we might be called to preach. The trauma that the LGBTQ+ community has experienced at the hands of those who pull out Romans 1:25-27 to condemn them (ignoring, naturally, the very next words in Romans 2 which call upon the readers not to pass judgment on one another). While there may be freedom to be found in dispatching those strawy parts of the Bible, neither can we fall into the unfortunate habit of proof-texting. Proof-texting is the pulling of small snippets of the Bible out of context for the purpose of weaponizing them against one’s opponents.

Even within context, many Bible readers today struggle to understand the genre of Scripture. Most books of the Bible were never intended to serve as documentaries. The first readers of Genesis 1 never imagined a literal seven-day Creation; it was always intended to live in the genre of myth, of etiology, of explaining the care and order God put into place and the origin of the Sabbath.[7] Nor do many readers regard subtext. Paul’s letter to Philemon is positively dripping with sarcasm, but the 18^th and 19^th century slavetraders who used it to justify their perverse wickedness declined to notice it. Even today, one usually needs to lay out tens of thousands of dollars to attend a divinity school in order to discover the different audiences and purposes the four Gospel authors were addressing. Without careful guidance from experienced Bible scholars, many readers of John’s Gospel wind up expressing an anti-Semitism that lacks understanding of the circumstances under which the author was writing.[8]

The solution, however, is not to write off the Bible as outdated, implausible, no longer necessary for those who seek to follow Jesus. For we who believe that it contains all things necessary to salvation, continued wrestling with the text is required. In my years of study, I have found that the continual practice of reading, over and over again, constantly yields new insights. I read the Scriptures every day in praying the Daily Office. The canticles the app I use pairs with them opens new perspectives on the stories we’ve just read. Engaging in Lectio Divina encourages me to read short passages four times over, letting them wash over me. For Two Feminists Annotate the Bible, we divided the Bible up by narrative and engaged with each story on its own terms, as well as in dialogue with every story we’d heard before. Folks used to make fun of President George W. Bush for saying that he read the Bible every day. “Hasn’t he finished it yet?” smug liberals were known to joke. But Scripture invites us to read and re-read it, to examine it in fresh contexts, to set it in conversation with different voices, and consider its callings anew in every season.

Not least, of course, because the Church Fathers taught a hermeneutic in which Scripture interprets Scripture. Not every passage bears equal weight. Rather, St. Augustine taught that when confronted with passages we do not understand, we ought to pair them up with passages we do understand, that are clear.[9] When we read the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, we ought also to look at the words of Ezekiel that say, “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy”[10] and the fact that when Jesus speaks of those cities, he speaks of lack of hospitality, welcome, and listening to his messengers, not sexual behaviour, as the sin he has in mind.[11] Ezra commands the divorce of Israelite and non-Israelite families, but Ruth the Moabite is the grandmother of King David and the ancestor of Jesus. “Women should be silent in the churches”[12] but also “I commend to you our sister Phoebe”[13] because she is the one appointed to read the letter to the Romans to the Roman community from the pulpit. These contradictions don’t invalidate the authority of Scripture, they guide our interpretation and invite us into a deeper relationship with the God who gave us this Word. And ultimately, as Augustine says, “Whoever … thinks that he[sic] understands the Holy Scriptures, or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbour, does not yet understand them as he ought.”[14]

In order to build up this twofold love, readers of Scripture must read it in community. When we read it on our own, we risk reading ourselves – our biases, our privileges, our sins – into the text. We look sympathetically on characters whose sin we find understandable or socially acceptable (massive side eye at David and his defenders) and excoriate those who threaten our established worldviews (I promise, it never says Mary Magdalene was a prostitute, and even if she was: that would affect her status as Apostle to the Apostles how, exactly?). We must read the Word together with other readers to help challenge those biases. This practice is most effective when engaging folks unlike us. C.S. Lewis encouraged us to read old books, because the assumptions of the ages long gone are different than those of our own time. “Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. ….. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.”[15] Similarly, the Scriptures will be more fully opened to us when we engage with communities least like our own. If we are white, the work of the Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney and other Womanists, Dr. James Cone and other Black Liberation scholars will open new doors for us. If we are cis and straight, Matthew Vines, the Rev. Broderick Greer, and the Rev. Pauli Murray will be valuable interlocutors. Men? We at Two Feminists Annotate the Bible have got your back. Indigenous authors opened my eyes to a new way of viewing the Canaanite conquest, which I had previously not looked at terribly hard. Non-Christians are also valuable conversation partners, not because we seek to be convinced by them out of the faith in which we stand, but because the assumptions they hold about our holy book are not our assumptions. Anyone who has ever held conversation with a child knows that sometimes “Why?” can be the most powerful question ever asked. By engaging the perspectives of those least like us, we get comfortable with asking why instead of rubbing along without questioning how things came to be the way that they are.

The Scriptures contain all things necessary to salvation. But the responsibility is on us to find those things. And that responsibility is what demonstrates the holy freedom for which Christ has set us free. We are not straitjacketed into a party line, we are invited to share a story. And we are promised that that story, whatever else it may contain, contains all things necessary for salvation. There are no secret doors, no cheat codes necessary. God holds nothing back. It is that promise with which we are called to wrestle. It is that promise that we require our clergy to keep engaging with, even when it’s challenging. It is a promise expansive enough to allow for disagreement, as long as we stay at the table together. And so we never stop reading, until we meet the Word face to face.

The Rev. Jordan Haynie Ware is a priest, author, and podcaster whose passion for all things Anglican has led her to be characterized as “the Episcopal Leslie Knope.” She currently serves as rector at Good Shepherd Anglican Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, where she lives with her husband, a science museum manager. You can find more of her opinions about the Bible on the podcast Two Feminists Annotate the Bible and all things church at jordanhaynieware.com.

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[1] BCP 1979 p. 526

[2] BCP 1979 p. 868

[3] Hoad, Luci and Jordan Ware, Two Feminists Annotate the Bible. https://twofeministsblog.com/2016/10/23/2fab-bible-feminists-exodus-20-31/

[4] Deuteronomy 22:24

[5] Numbers 5:11-31

[6] Ephesians 5:22-6:9; Colossians 3:18-25

[7] Dolansky, Shawna, “Biblical Views: The Multiple Truths of Myths,” in Biblical Archaeology Review 42:1, January/February 2016. https://www.baslibrary.org/biblical-archaeology-review/42/1/10

[8] Zauzmer, Julie, “The alleged syngogue shooter was a churchgoer who talked Christian theology, raising tough questions for evangelical pastors,” in The Washington Post, 1 May 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2019/05/01/alleged-synagogue-shooter-was-churchgoer-who-articulated-christian-theology-prompting-tough-questions-evangelical-pastors/?utm_term=.c057085dccfe

[9] Augustine of Hippo, De Doctrina Christiana, book 2, chapter 6

[10] Ezekiel 16:49, NRSV.

[11] Matthew 10:14-15 and Luke 10:10-12.

[12] 1 Corinthians 14:34

[13] Romans 16:1

[14] Augustine of Hippo, De Doctrina Christiana, book 1, chapter 36

[15] Lewis, C.S., “On the Reading of Old Books,” Introduction to Athanasius’ On The Incarnation

Article V. The Holy Ghost, proceeding from the Father and the Son, is of one substance, majesty, and glory, with the Father and the Son, very and eternal God.

by Erin Risch Zoutendam

The presence of the Spirit in the opening verses of Scripture is as mysterious as it is powerful. In Genesis 1:2, we read that the Spirit of God (ruach elohim) hovers over the waters of the deep. Who or what precisely this Spirit is – the Hebrew word ruach can also mean breath or wind – is not immediately clear, and the uncertainty may already draw our minds to the puzzle that the Holy Spirit, unlike the Father and the Son, hardly seems to be a personal figure at all.

What is clearer is that the Spirit seems ready to bring order to the chaos, to the “welter and waste”[1] of the earth that is formless and void. John Calvin, who wrote so beautifully of the natural world, said of this passage that it shows “not only that the beauty of the universe…owes its strength and preservation to the power of the Spirit but that before this adornment was added, even then the Spirit was occupied with tending that confused mass.”[2]

Even then the Spirit was occupied with tending that confused mass. The church fathers, too, were thinking along these lines when they read Genesis 1:2, but with respect to the chaos of the human soul in addition to that of the natural world. Saint Jerome understood this passage to be a figure that pointed ahead to the sacrament of baptism, where the darkness and chaos of sin were dispelled by the Spirit-filled waters that brought new life.[3] What we see, then, is that the Holy Spirit’s activity is closely connected to life, and especially to spiritual life.

How and why the Spirit is so central to the Christian life is the question that lies behind the somewhat technical terminology of Article V. We will look at the three “movements” of Article V in reverse order, moving quickly at first and then lingering with the opening movement. We begin with the Holy Spirit – or Holy Ghost, in language derived from the Old English translation of the Latin spiritus – as very and eternal God.

That the Holy Spirit is “very God” is a positive claim: the Holy Spirit is, as the Nicene Creed says, the Lord, the Giver of Life. These titles belong to God alone. That the Holy Spirit is God is most evident in scriptural passages where the Spirit and the God are equated, or where the Spirit does work that only God does (Acts 5:3–4; Rom. 8:9–11; 1 Cor. 2:10–12, 3:16–17).

But the claim that the Holy Spirit is very and eternal God also tells us what the Holy Spirit is not. The Holy Spirit, as Oliver O’Donovan has pointed out, cannot – and must not – be “reduced without remainder” to the works of the Holy Spirit that appear in the Nicene Creed: the speaking of the prophets (and the writing and reading of the Scriptures), the life of the Church, the resurrecting power of grace.[4] The Holy Spirit, then, is not reducible to the power of God or the effects of God, nor to some vague cosmic force  – the Holy Spirit is very God.

The second movement of Article V makes the claim that the Holy Spirit is of one substance, majesty, and glory, with the Father and the Son. Here we see the foundational doctrine that within the Trinity there is both unity and distinction. William Beveridge, an eighteenth-century Anglican bishop, offered this gloss on Article V: “[T]he Holy Ghost is, hath, and doeth, whatsoever the Father or Son is, hath, or doeth.”[5] The same worship is due to the Holy Spirit as to the Father and the Son; the same works are worked by the Holy Spirit as are worked by the Father and the Son; and all attributes of the Father and Son – love, holiness, goodness, transcendence, immanence, eternality – are attributes of the Holy Spirit as well.

The third “movement” of Article V – the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son – is so simple and yet it is also the most difficult. So much hangs on this simple word, proceeds. It is one of the most opaque, one of the most troublesome parts of trinitarian doctrine – and yet also one of the richest.

The doctrine that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son (as opposed to only the Father) is known as the filioque, from the Latin for “and the Son.” This single word has been the site of much controversy between Eastern and Western Christianity. The procession of the Holy Spirit from both the Father and the Son has some support in the patristic tradition but was not present in the earliest versions of what we now call the Nicene Creed. The language seems to have first been added to the liturgy in late antiquity, and it was a point of contention between the East and West, with the East claiming that the West had “added” the filioque and the West claiming that the East had “deleted” it. The filioque contributed to the great schism between East and West in 1054 and it remains a sticking point for some today.

However, the filioque disagreement is less a substantive disagreement than it is a disagreement about where the theological “accent” is placed in trinitarian theology. In the West, the great thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas wrote: “If we take careful note of the statements of the Greeks we shall find that they differ from us more in words than in meaning.”[6] To say that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son is to emphasize the total equality – the theological term is consubstantiality – of the Father and the Son. Whatever the Father “doeth,” in the words of William Beveridge quoted above, the Son “doeth” also.

What then is this procession, sometimes called spiration, that has caused so much trouble? There is much to unearth in this one word; its simplicity both invites and resists straightforward interpretation. As we may have come to expect from the Christian life, the mystery of it all is often hidden in plain sight.

Historically, Christian theologians have suggested that the Holy Spirit’s procession – whatever it may be – indicates the very incomprehensibility and mysteriousness of the Holy Spirit.[7] The Son is begotten of the Father – that we can perhaps begin to understand. However, the Holy Spirit proceeds but is not begotten; this is much more mysterious. But of course, mystery in the Christian tradition is very often an invitation to go on talking, not to stop – so we can press a bit further into what procession might mean.

Whatever else it may mean, the procession of the Holy Spirit must be an indication of the relationship of the Holy Spirit to the Father and the Son. We might think of procession as coming forth or pouring out. Thus Christ says in John 15:26: When the Advocate [sometimes translated Comforter] comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from [ekporeuetai] the Father, he will testify on my behalf. The Holy Spirit, here given a very personal identity as the Advocate or Comforter, is not self-generated. The Holy Spirit comes forth, goes out, proceeds. We can think of this as one of the things that distinguishes the Holy Spirit from both the Father (who neither proceeds nor is begotten) and the Son (who is begotten but does not proceed).

The tradition has gone yet further though. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son and, in the words of theologian Gilles Emery, “proceeds in the manner of love.”[8] The Holy Spirit, then, is the bond of love that unites the Father and the Son. But we must be very careful, as Emery has noted, not to confuse the Holy Spirit with the act of loving. The Holy Spirit is, in Emery’s words, “Love in person.”[9] Gregory the Great framed it slightly differently but along the same lines in a Pentecost homily: “For the Holy Spirit himself is love.”[10] Our minds run also to 1 John 4:8: God is love. God is not an act of loving; God is love itself, God Godself is love. The Holy Spirit is Love in person.

What is love? Love, as the great mystical theologian Pseudo-Dionysius has said, “is a capacity to effect a unity, an alliance.” Love binds like things “in a mutually regarding union.”[11] In short, love draws the lover ineluctably toward the beloved, uniting the lover and the beloved, as anyone who has loved knows.

This, then, is the entrée into our own relationship with the Holy Spirit. It is – to begin to answer the question posed at the beginning of this essay – why the activity of the Holy Spirit is so essential to the Christian life. For while the Holy Spirit is first and foremost the Love between the Father and Son in person, the Holy Spirit is also the bond of love that draws us into and conforms us to the triune God.

The great Spanish mystic John of the Cross saw precisely this correspondence between the processional love of the Holy Spirit within the Trinity and the way we are drawn up into that same love by the Holy Spirit. Only a poet and a mystic of the caliber of John of the Cross could have phrased it so beautifully:

By His divine breath-like spiration, the Holy Spirit elevates the soul sublimely and informs her and makes her capable of breathing in God the same spiration of love that the Father breathes in the Son and the Son in the Father, which is the Holy Spirit Himself, who in the Father and the Son breathes out to her in this transformation, in order to unite her to Himself. There would not be a true and total transformation if the soul were not transformed in the three Persons of the Most Holy Trinity…[12]

We breathe the same “spiration of love” that the Father and the Son breathe in each other, and we do so by the power of the Holy Spirit. The witness of Scripture tells us the same: By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit (1 John 4:13).

We see the Spirit drawing us into the trinitarian life most clearly at the baptism of Christ (Matthew 3:13-17; Mark 1:9-11; Luke 3:21-22). Here all three persons of the Trinity are present and active. When Jesus rises from the waters, the Holy Spirit descends on him in the form of a dove and the Father pronounces Jesus the beloved Son. This is the model for our own life as Christians as well: at our baptism, we enter into a life in which the Spirit alights on us and dwells in us (Rom. 8:9). This leads directly into the whole of the Christian’s life – the dying and rising as described in Romans 8:11–17. The deeds of the flesh are put to death by the Spirit, and the Spirit raises us daily into our life as sons and daughters of God. Furthermore, the Apostle Paul writes, If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you (Rom. 8:11).

Theologian Eugene Rogers has described the way that the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives has tended to be marginalized. In becoming incarnate, Christ crossed the uncrossable distance between Creator and creature. But the Holy Spirit’s work seems much less appreciable: the Holy Spirit “crosses a distance of a different sort between the exterior history of the Son and the interior of the human heart.” The Holy Spirit makes present and real in each human life what the singular life of Christ accomplished. But, as Rogers observes, “believers tend to minimize the second distance and the Spirit with it. It’s just a few inches.”[13]

Anyone who has given a single moment’s honest glance to the hardness of her own heart knows that the conversion and conformation of the human heart to God is anything but negligible. The Holy Spirit accomplishes this task interiorly and exteriorly: by putting to death the deeds of the body (Rom. 8:13); through the teaching of the truth (John 16:13); through intercession on our behalf (Rom. 8:26–27); through the speaking of the prophets (Is. 61:1; Ez. 11:5; Acts 2:16-18), the life of the church (Acts 1:5, 4:31), the outpouring of God’s love in our hearts (Rom. 5:5). This gracious work of the Holy Spirit is distinctly trinitarian and amounts to nothing less than our salvation: as Sarah Coakley has put it, the Father, “in and through the Spirit, both stirs up, and progressively chastens and purges” our misdirected loves, and recreates and reforms our love in the likeness of the Son.[14]

Whether the Holy Spirit works on us from within or without, the grace is the same. In fact the internal and the external are at times indistinguishable, so subtle are the workings of the Spirit. Indeed, one might even say that the mysteriousness of the Holy Spirit is mirrored in the mysteriousness of the workings of grace in the human soul.

This work of grace is obviously not alien to the Father or the Son; rather the work of our reconciliation and conformation to God is common to the Trinity. But we nevertheless sometimes distinguish between the work of the persons of the Trinity in relation to each other, remembering that this is a manner of speaking that helps us better understand these relations. Calvin observed: “[T]o the Father is attributed the beginning of activity, and the fountain and wellspring of all things; to the Son, wisdom, counsel, and the ordered disposition of all things; but to the Spirit is assigned the power and efficacy of that activity.”[15]

The “power and the efficacy” of divine activity is thus the domain of the Holy Spirit. Hadewijch of Brabant, a thirteenth-century poet and mystic, saw in the working of the Holy Spirit all that is good in the world and expressed it in a more lyrical fashion than Calvin: the Holy Spirit, she wrote, “has inspirited all wise spirits, and all swift spirits, and all strong spirits, and all sweet spirits: he inspirits them all. His name is poured out over all the earth, over men at large, to sustain and lead each of them…”[16] The Holy Spirit, in Hadewijch’s words, “inspirits” whatever is good and like God. The wise, the swift, the strong, the sweet – whether in the human soul or in creation more broadly, this is the domain of the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life.

Erin Risch Zoutendam is a doctoral student in religion at Duke University. Her research focuses on the history of the Christian mystical tradition and the history of exegesis.

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[1] Robert Alter’s memorable translation of the Hebrew tohu wabohu. See Robert Alter, Genesis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 3 [Gen. 1:2].

[2] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 1.13.14.

[3] See, for example, Jerome’s Homily 10 on Psalm 76 (77) in The Homilies of Saint Jerome, trans. Marie Liguori Ewald (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2001), 68–78. Augustine, too, thought of the human soul when reading Genesis 1:2; see Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 274–78 [13.2–9].

[4] Oliver O’Donovan, On the Thirty-Nine Articles: A Conversation with Tudor Christianity (London: SCM Press, 2011), 38.

[5] William Beveridge, An Exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England (London: James Duncan, 1830), 196.

[6] Thomas Aquinas, De potentia, q. 10, a. 5, qtd. in Gilles Emery, The Trinity: An Introduction to Catholic Doctrine on the Triune God, trans. Matthew Levering (Washington D. C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2011), 142. My account of the filioque controversy has relied in several places on Emery’s.

[7] See Emery, The Trinity, 136–37.

[8] Emery, The Trinity, 137.

[9] Emery, The Trinity, 151.

[10] My translation of Homily 30. PL 76:1220.

[11] Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, in Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987),81 [4.12].

[12] John of the Cross, The Spiritual Canticle, in John of the Cross: Selected Writings, ed. Kieran Kavanaugh (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 280 [39.3].

[13] Eugene F. Rogers, Jr., introduction to The Holy Spirit: Classic and Contemporary Readings, ed. Eugene F. Rogers, Jr. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 1.

[14] Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 6.

[15] Calvin, Institutes, 1.13.18.

[16] Hadewijch, The Complete Works, trans. Columba Hart (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 101 [Letter 22.328].

Christ did truly rise again from death, and took again his body, with flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the perfection of Man’s nature; wherewith he ascended into Heaven,  and there sitteth, until he return to judge all Men at the last day.

by Sara A. Misgen

Article IV turns to a strong affirmation of the bodily resurrection of Christ. In line with both the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, as well as the testimony of Scripture (“He is not here, for he has risen as he said!” – Matthew 28:6), Article IV states that Jesus truly rose, not in appearance or metaphor, but actually, truly, with his bones and his body and blood.

There is challenge here for those of us in modernity, who might be tempted to brush off the resurrection of Jesus as an impossibility or simply as a story with meaning, rather than a fact. But there is great wisdom in this affirmation of the bodily resurrection, and it is the heart of the Christian faith. As the Apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15: “if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain … If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.” But it’s one thing to proclaim the importance of the resurrection, and another to spell out why it matters. At its core, the resurrection is vital for four central reasons:

First, the resurrection is the defeat of death.

This is probably best expressed by Paul as he continues his argument in 1 Corinthians 15:

But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being;  for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ.

As Paul helpfully lays out for us, the resurrection is something that impacts each one of us, because we all will die. But God does not desire death for any of us, instead wishing that we live. The resurrection shows that death is not the end of Jesus’s story, so it will not be the end of ours. Death is not the final word, but rather the penultimate one.

Second, the resurrection shows the importance of the body for Christian theology. Jesus is raised with “all things pertaining to the perfection of man’s nature,” as the article states, and this includes his flesh and bones. What the article is trying to show us with this statement is that our flesh and our bones belong to the goodness of what it means to be human. When God created humanity in the Garden of Eden, God declared them to be very good (Genesis 1:28). After the fall into sin (Genesis 3), aspects of what it means to be human changed and humanity is no longer in that state of original perfection. For thousands of years, theologians have debated and tried to figure out how sin has affected the human, and many of those answers centered on the body. The body has been thought to be an evil substance that weighs down our souls, that leads us to temptation and sin, and that impedes our spiritual lives. But the resurrection shows us that this is not the case. The fact that Jesus was raised to perfection in his body, with his bones and his tendons and his skin and his sweat and his beating heart shows us that our bodies are very good. They were created by God and they will be redeemed by God.

Through the resurrection of the flesh, God affirms our bodies as vital for what it means to be human. What’s more, God shows us that God loves our bodies, so much that humans should not be separated from them. Our bodies will go with us to the afterlife; they are part of who we are and we cannot exist as ourselves without them.

Third, the resurrection of the body is the source of our hope. The resurrection reminds us that God keeps God’s promises. Throughout the Bible, God promises redemption for his people. There are many dimensions to this redemption – including the redemption of the Israelites from bondage in Egypt (Exodus) and the social redemption of the outcasts, the enslaved, and the imprisoned (Leviticus 25:8-13) – but at the heart of it is God’s desire to redeem all of creation from the powers of sin, separation, and death that threaten all creatures, including the human. And from the very beginning of the Hebrew Bible, God has promised to overcome these powers, to defeat them and to bring all of Creation back to Godself. With the incarnation, Jesus’s ministry while on earth, and death, God is working to redeem everything. The resurrection shows us definitively that God is working against death, as God has promised. It stands as a testament to God’s creative work to bring all of creation to a perfected state, and it is the first stage in the fulfillment of God’s work to resurrect every human being.

Finally, Jesus’s resurrection shows us what our resurrected bodies will look like. Jesus is the firstfruits of all of us who will be raised, which means that our bodies will be like his when we are raised. Here, too, is another challenge for us: after all, Jesus is raised with the marks of the crucifixion, the  holes in his hands and feet and side (John 20:26-28). He bears the marks of his suffering, even as his body is raised to perfection by the Father and the Holy Spirit. Like Jesus, so many humans are also covered in scars – marks on our skin from wipeouts when learning to walk or ride a bike; the signs of cooking accidents or kitchen mishaps; the marks of injuries from events that we tell stories about or those that we have since forgotten. We also carry emotional scars from the times when we have been rejected, hurt, abused, unloved, and mistreated. And, if any of you are at all like me, you might wish for your scars to be erased, forgotten, and left behind.

But Jesus keeps his scars, and there is hope for us in that. It shows us that God redeems us along with our histories, along with the things that have marked us and shaped us. God does not start from scratch in the resurrection, does not erase our stories, but rather raises all of us, everything about us, and perfects us. God promises that there will be no pain and suffering in the resurrection (Revelation 21), while simultaneously telling us that we will still be ourselves. Our hope is that, like Jesus’s body and story, our bodies and stories can be made perfect and good by God. And the resurrection of Jesus is the guarantee of that promise.

Yet the resurrection is only half of what this article has to say – the second half deals with the ascension, when after forty days on Earth Jesus ascends to heaven, where, as the creeds tell us, he sits at the right hand of the Father and waits to judge humanity on the last day. Thinking about this can often lead us to the wrong image, as if Jesus is watching us and keeping a detailed list of everything that we do wrong, so he can hold it over our heads when he returns on the last day. But instead, if we think back to Jesus’s sufferings, we realize that he knows what it is to be human.

Jesus waits in judgment at the Father’s right hand, not as a distant observer, but as someone who knows firsthand what it is to be human. Jesus waits in judgment as someone who knows what it’s like to be hurt, in pain, frustrated, angry, and scared. He’s truly and fully human, even now, after the resurrection, having returned to the Father. And so we trust that Jesus will be a compassionate judge.

The ascension, too, is a beautiful picture of redemption. Right now, humanity is with God in heaven in the body of Jesus the Christ. And right now, God is with us, continuing to work on earth through the power of the Holy Spirit. This is our reality, and this too, should give us hope for the day when all of humanity is together with God, redeemed, resurrected, and restored to right relationship.

Article IV is, at its heart, about this hope. It’s about hope for our bodies, for our stories, for our friends who have died, and for the moments when we ourselves will die. Article IV shows us that God loves and cares about creation so much that death will not have the last word. The resurrection helps us to believe that God is faithful, that we have hope, and that all of us can be redeemed. Together with the ascension, we are reminded that Jesus will judge us knowing fully well all that being human entails. And we’re reminded that humanity is with God in heaven right now, even while God is with us here on earth. Article IV has much to teach us about the good news of God in Christ, and the church does well to listen.

Sara A. Misgen is a PhD student in Religious Studies at Yale University, where her research focuses on  descriptions of hell in early Christianity, apocalypses, gender, sexuality, and patristic eschatology. In her free time, she preaches, leads middle school youth group, and does all manner of church things at her Episcopal  parish in New Haven, CT.

As Christ died for us, and was buried, so also is it to be believed that He went down into Hell.

by the Rev. Canon Scott Gunn

This one will be tough for lots of people. Plenty of Christians don’t even believe in hell these days, and they certainly don’t give much thought to Christ’s descent into Satan’s hood. It’s a pretty ancient idea though, with solid scriptural warrant.

The first letter of Peter says,

For Christ also died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit; in which he went and preached to the spirits in prison, who formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water (1 Pt 3:18-20).

And also, in the fourth chapter, “For this is why the gospel was preached even to the dead, that though judged in the flesh like men, they might live in the spirit like God” (1 Pt 4:6).

You can see that Jesus Christ, while he was dead, proclaimed the Gospel to the dead and rescued them from Satan’s grasp.

People who say the Daily Office will know the teaching that Jesus Christ descended into hell from the Apostles’ Creed. This Article comes almost straight from the Elizabethan version (Rite I in the US prayer book) of the Apostles’ Creed, “He descended into hell”. Modern versions of the creed soften it a bit: “He descended to the dead.” Most worshipers these days, who come only to Sunday celebrations of the Eucharist, will have no clue about this doctrine, since it gets no mention in the Nicene Creed.

It does pop up, at least in parishes I serve, in a big way once a year. It is my practice to read (or to have the deacon read) St. John Chrysostom’s brilliant Easter sermon at the Great Vigil of Easter. It makes Easter all about Christ’s complete and utter victory over Satan in the harrowing of hell.

The Lord has destroyed death by enduring it.
The Lord vanquished hell when he descended into it.
The Lord put hell in turmoil even as it tasted of his flesh.

Isaiah foretold this when he said,
“You, O Hell, were placed in turmoil when he encountered you below.”

Hell was in turmoil having been eclipsed.
Hell was in turmoil having been mocked.
Hell was in turmoil having been destroyed.
Hell was in turmoil having been abolished.
Hell was in turmoil having been made captive.

Hell grasped a corpse, and met God.
Hell seized earth, and encountered heaven.
Hell took what it saw, and was overcome by what it could not see.

Wow. I don’t know about you, but I find it profoundly empowering to contemplate a God who would enter the depths of hell to liberate captives. A God who would defy Satan in hell will also enter into the depths of our humanity to free us from sin.

Unfortunately, lots of people deny the existence of hell, even though Jesus teaches about it and there’s clear biblical witness and church tradition to support its existence.

In the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew, Jesus teaches the parable of the sheep and goats. As you’ll recall, those who cared for the least “inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world” (Mt 25:34), while those who do not care for the least are told, “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Mt 25:41).

Matthew has many references to hell, for example this cheery gem from the tenth chapter, “And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Mt 10:28).

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not thrilled about hell, nor do I think it’s helpful to use hell as a blunt object to coax people into doing the right thing here on earth. I hope that God is generous at judgment day, since I cannot imagine what sins would merit eternal condemnation. But in the end, it seems to me that hell is a part of the package of God’s economy of salvation.

Of course, there’s a long history of avoidance of this doctrine. Some of the framers of the first American prayer book wanted to take “He descended into hell” out of the Apostles’ Creed, and they ended up making that clause optional. It didn’t fit with Enlightenment sensibilities. (Insert joke here about a long history of rampant heresy in the Episcopal Church.)

So, for what it’s worth, here’s my take on all this. It’s difficult to square the idea of hell with the idea of a loving God. Who would be in that hell? Fortunately, this decision is about our pay grade. And, in fact, I think it’s liberating to worship a God who enters the depths of hell to proclaim perfect love and freedom. A God who enters hell can also be present in Darfur. A God who defeats hell can defeat anything.

And this gets us to the main point of this article. Belief in hell is a necessary premise, but the teaching here is about the harrowing of hell. The sermon excerpt above from John Chrysostom poetically describes the power of this belief: Jesus Christ has vanquished all evil, including the bastion of Satan’s power. Jesus Christ has liberated captives in hell, which assures us that Jesus Christ can liberate us from our captivity to sin.

There is a well-known homily for Holy Saturday traditionally ascribed to Bishop Melito of Sardis (d. 180), in which he describes the moment Christ arrives into hell:

[Christ] has gone to search for our first parent, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, he has gone to free from sorrow the captives Adam and Eve, he who is both God and the son of Eve. The Lord approached them bearing the cross, the weapon that had won him the victory. At the sight of him Adam, the first man he had created, struck his breast in terror and cried out to everyone: “My Lord be with you all.” Christ answered him: “And with your spirit.” He took him by the hand and raised him up, saying: “Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.”

Indeed, when we confess that Christ has descended into hell, we also confess that he comes to us and calls us to new life and light.

Here are some questions on which we might meditate.

• In your experience, does the church talk about hell too much or too little?
• What does it mean for us — in our earthly pilgrimage — to contemplate Jesus Christ preaching to those held captive in hell?
• Might God’s mission to liberate humanity compel us, as the Body of Christ, to enter the places of “hell on earth” to preach and to practice liberation?

Let us pray.

We thank you, heavenly Father, that you have delivered us from the dominion of sin and death and brought us into the kingdom of your Son; and we pray that, as by his death he has recalled us to life, so by his love he may raise us to eternal joys; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen. (BCP, p. 224)

Scott Gunn is executive director of Forward Movement, a ministry of the Episcopal Church that inspires disciples and empowers evangelists. Before serving at Forward Movement in Cincinnati, he was a parish priest in the diocese of Rhode Island. You can find him online on Twitter (@scottagunn) or his blog, www.sevenwholedays.org. A shorter version of this essay originally appeared on the author’s blog as part of a 2011 Lenten series on the 39 Articles.

As Christ died for us, and was buried, so also is it to be believed, that he went down into Hell.

by the Rev. Dr. Will Levanway

Article III is in many ways unremarkable and uncontroversial. It simply states what was late included in the Apostle’s Creed that Christ ‘was crucified, dead, and buried: He descended into hell’ without additional interpretation beyond the ‘for us.’ The bluntness and the brevity of the article allows its interpretation to serve as an indicator of theological decisions and commitments made elsewhere about the economy of salvation. Necessary attention to that economy of salvation does not allow us to retreat into abstract or speculative meditation on doctrine but presses our nose to the grindstone of dogmatic work. What we think about the descent into hell shows us, whether we have thought them through or not, what decisions we have made about the nature, extent, and effects of Christ’s work.

Our current version of the article forces interpretive work upon us unlike the earlier version that offered a Scriptural citation: ‘As Christ died, and was buried for us: so also it is to be believed, that he went down into Hell. For the body lay in the Sepulchre, until his resurrection: but his Ghost departing from him, was with the Ghosts that were in prison, or in Hell, and did preach to the same, as the place of St. Peter doth testify.’ The current form of the article does not link the descent to hell to any particular passage of Scripture so that, as Pearson has it, ‘we may with the greater liberty pass on to find out the true meaning of this Article, and to give our particular judgment in it, so far as a matter of so much obscurity and variety will permit.’

To say that Christ descended into hell does not immediately make matters clear. Hell translates the Greek hades and the Latin inferi, but these words can take on a number of meanings ‘both in scripture and other writings’ signifying either a neutral place where departed spirits dwell or ‘the place of the damned.’ Christ’s descent can either be into the state enjoyed by all who die or it can be into a place of torment peculiar to the wicked. Where Christ goes is in fact inextricably tied up with what he does following his death. If he simply endures the separation of soul from body, for instance, then there is no need for him to descend into the place of punishment. However, if the descent into hell forms a part of his atoning work then he will need to endure the place of punishment as part of his salvific suffering.

Following Pearson’s lead, we can establish the limits imposed on our interpretation of the article by referring to a larger range of Scripture. The primary concern will be to see where he goes and what work he does there.

Four passages of Scripture need to be considered.

Ephesians 4.9: The apostle’s emphasis in this passage is on the ascent of Christ making the descent the necessary prelude to that ascension. The precise meaning of the phrase ‘lower parts of the earth’ is ambiguous and may simply refer to the earth itself without any reference to Christ’s state after his death. If it is taken to refer to Christ’s descent following his death, as Fleming Rutledge proposes, then the descent here should be taken as a triumphal defeat of the forces of hell by Christ before his ascent inaugurating his session. The passage is patient of such a reading but does not seem to require it.

Acts 2.25-31(Psalm 16.8-10): Peter quotes Psalm 16 to prove and to describe Christ’s resurrection from the dead. Unlike the passage from Ephesians, the reference here is clearly to Christ’s descent into hell after his death and before his resurrection. Peter does not give any insight into what it is Christ does there just that he does in fact go there. Litton puts the matter clearly: ‘If Christ’s soul was not left in hell, it must have gone thither.’ The parallel passage Acts 13.34-35 states the same fact—Christ does not stay dead—without providing information about what happens in the caesura between death and resurrection.

1 Peter 3.18-19: Here, at least, Peter does not simply locate Christ after his death. He describes what it is Christ does: ‘he went and preached unto the spirits in prison.’ While the preaching clearly takes place after his death, the proclamation does not clearly come before his resurrection. The proclamation to the spirits in prison takes place through the agency of the Spirit that makes Christ alive. The logic of the passage requires that the Spirit that gives life has in fact made Christ alive so that he can, in the power of the same Spirit, preach to those in prison. The passage clearly assumes some movement of Christ to the dead for the purpose of proclamation but does not clearly define the time when that preaching takes place.

1 Peter 4.4-6: Bicknell says of this passage and the one previous that ‘they leave very little room for doubt as to St. Peter’s meaning. He teaches that at the moment of death our Lord’s human spirit went to Hades, and during His stay there preached salvation ‘to the spirits in prison’, i.e., the souls of dead men, in a like mode of existence to his own.’ This interpretation presents a problem. The ‘dead’ in this passage may in fact be those who have given themselves over to the ‘excesses of dissipation.’ The gospel was preached to them so that judgment could take place, ‘that they might be judge according to men in the flesh.’ The proclamation here may be to the dead in either a literal or a metaphorical sense. Or it may simply point to the fact that this preaching and judgment took place when ‘in the Spirit Christ preached through Noah to disobedient that lived before the flood, who were spirits in prison when Peter wrote, and could therefore be designated as such.’ Who are the dead in this passage? Perhaps everyone in the afterlife, perhaps those given over to riotous living before the flood, or perhaps those contemporaries of Peter who were ‘dead’ in their sins.

The limits of our interpretation of the article, if we are stay within the bounds of Scripture, are that Christ did indeed descend into hell and that if he was active there it was in proclamation. What is clearly ruled out is any interpretation of Christ’s descent into hell where he endures punishment in that place. Christ enters hell after the victory of the cross, as one who comes to announce and to apply the power of that finished work.

What remains an open question is when he applies that finished work. One Reformed view of the when maintains that Christ comes to preach to the dead in the power of his resurrected and ascended body, ‘a rich, triumphant, and powerful preaching to the spirits in prison.’ This view avoids problems created by Christ’s activity when his body and soul and separated: how precisely does a disembodied spirit preach? is Christ himself without his body? Christ’s saving power is tied very closely to his particular human presence on this reading. The virtue of Christ’s passion follows on from the resurrection withholding its immediate effects during Holy Saturday. Thomas Aquinas, relying on a more fulsome set of divisions in the afterlife, draws a distinction between different ways Christ was present to those in hell. Christ was present to the entirety of hell and to all those who had died through the effects of the cross although this took different forms to different people. Some people, in hell ‘for unbelief and wickedness’ were put to shame, those in purgatory given hope, and those simply with original sin received ‘the light of glory everlasting.’ Christ’s soul, his essential presence, went into that part of hell meant for the just. He was present to them in the place through his soul and present in their hearts through his Godhead. Thomas draws a parallel between these various modes of Christ’s presence in his death and Christ’s ability to suffer in one part of the world while delivering the whole world. Thomas’s account maintains the Scriptural scope of the application of Christ’s work but may lessen the sense in which it is ‘proclamation.’

Both accounts are attempting to work out an account of the atonement that is in Schleiermacher’s terms mystical. A mystical view of salvation is one where Christ uses ‘effective speech’ to communicate his life to others and assume ‘them into the fellowship of that life.’ A mystical view of salvation is unlike a magical one that attributes salvation ‘to an influence not mediated by anything natural, yet attributed to a person’ or an empirical one that ‘admits a redemptive activity on the part of Christ, but one which is held to consist only in bringing about an increasing perfection in us.’  The magical view disconnects redemption form Christ’s human presence rendering the incarnation ‘a superfluous adjunct’ to a distant decree. The empirical view focusses on Christ’s human life without any communication of grace from Jesus. The mystical view, however, sees the life of Jesus of Nazareth within history as the specific place where grace is communicated: this man mediates God’s life to all. The focus is on the continued power of Christ’s human life in its infinite applicability to situations and places he is remote from. The Reformed view creates a means whereby he visits, and so ceases to be remote from, hell while Thomas describes a specific kind of causality effective despite the remoteness of a part of his humanity. The push for a mystical view of Christ’s work undergirds the accounts of the application of Christ’s work to the dead by creating means of contact. An account of Christ’s work among the dead is necessary, moreover, unless one consigns the dead before Christ to destruction or reserves judgment on all until some future date.

Christ’s descent into hell, then, raises a host of questions about the scope, mode, and power of Christ’s work upon the cross as well as its application. The effects of the work, however precisely we navigate the received tradition, clearly are not limited to this earthly life if the dead can be patient of his righteousness. The communication of that righteousness could be made distinct from the presence of some aspect of his human presence such as his soul, as in Thomas, if we are willing to separate the righteousness achieved in his human life from his humanity in order that it can be conveyed by his divinity. Richard Hooker makes precisely this move when he links predestination and baptism: ’Predestination bringeth not to life, without the grace of externall vocation, wherein our baptisme is implied. For as wee are not naturallie men without birth, so neither are wee Christian men in the eye of the Church of God but by new birth, nor accordinge to the manifest ordinarie course of divine dispensation new borne, but by that baptisme which both declareth and maketh us Christians.’ Hooker’s explanation links redemption in baptism to a specific willed act of Christ’s person effecting the communication to a specific person and their eternal predestination. Eternal predestination to redemption or destruction manifests itself in a history mediating that redemption or destruction. Christ’s work in hell follows when this link between eternal election and external vocation is maintained. If one severs the link between eternal and external vocation the incarnation becomes superfluous. The calling of the dead to redemption may take place in the descent or as part of Christ’s session at the right hand, but it flows out of the one man, Jesus of Nazareth, in his communication to those dead.

A pertinent example of Christ’s communication are his words on the cross: ‘And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.’ (Luke 23.43) Like his companion, Christ dies and descends into hell. Even in the place of death he does not lack his relationship to Father. He still includes others in that relationship of the Son to the Father at every point precisely because death does not break it. The repentant thief as repentant knows his conscious communion with Jesus to be paradise. Christ gives his blessedness to those who can receive wherever he is encountered even in hell. Origen describes this: ‘His only-begotten Son, for the salvation of the world, descended even to the lower regions and brought from thence our first parent. For know that the words to the robber ‘To-day shalt thou be with Me in paradise,’ were spoken, not only to him, but also to all the holy ones for whom He descended into the lower regions.’

If salvation comes through this man, Jesus of Nazareth, Christ must in fact do his work in hell. Anything else is just magic unable to make any real difference. We may have some difficulty explaining the mechanism for this redeeming work or of locating it explicitly in Scripture but it forms an integral part of Christian confession that maintains, as Hans Frei put it, that all reality ‘imaginable and unimaginable, good and evil, is referred to Jesus, God’s own Word, whose life and death on our behalf are adequate to protect us from the abyss.’ The fact that Jesus of Nazareth does this work of redemption, and the scope of this redemptive work is potentially infinite, is the suppositum that these various interpretations are accounting for in their descriptions of the descent into hell. To speak of the specific mechanics may be too much for us at this present time, as Brooke Westcott reminds us: ‘We are sure that the fruits of Christ’s work are made available for every man: we are sure that He crowned every act of faith in patriarch or king or prophet or saint with perfect joy: but how and when we know not, and, as far as appears, we have no faculty for knowing. Meanwhile we cling to the truth which our Creed teaches us.’

Will Levanway is a priest in the Church of England and curate at All Saints, Fulham. He received his PhD from King’s College London in Systematic Theology focusing on Richard Hooker and Friedrich Schleiermacher.