VI WHAT OUGHT MAN TO BE?

SIN AND SALVATION … 137

The necessity of sin … 137

The concept of the Fall … 140

The Jewish background … 140

Transvaluation of the Jewish idea of the fall … 142  

The concept of sin in the Gospel … 143

-in the teaching of Paul … 144

-in the teaching ofthe Apostolic Fathers … 146

-prior to the teaching of Augustine … 147

-in the teaching of Augustine … 148

-in the Reformation  … 152

-in modern Christian thought  … 153

The concept of redemption  … 157

Christianity is the religion of redemption … 157

The nature of Christian salvation … 161

NOTES AND REFERENCES  … 167

VI

WHAT OUGHT MAN TO BE?

SIN AND SALVATION

The necessity of sin

Perhaps the most fundamental axiom that a thinking Christian believes it is necessary to hold is that sin is. Every presentation of Christian doctrine known to me sets out from this simple, yet tremendously charged, assertion. Bishop Leslie Newbigin’s Sin and Salvation (1956) is a case in point. Newbigin is a renowned exponent of Christianity, much respected for his propagation of it in India. The book was first published in Tamil and addressed to actual or potential converts. It is not, in other words, a documented scholarly study; it is rather, as it is meant to be, a straightforward presentation of the Christian message and its promise for mankind. Its first chapter, ‘What do we mean by Salvation?’, opens: ‘Wherever and whenever we look at man, we find that he is hill of self-contradiction’ (p.11). It goes on to describe this ‘self-contradiction’ of man in nature, in society, in himself, and in the creation as a whole, where it is rebelliousness against God. This, then, is the strategy of Christianity’s appeal—a straightforward laying out of the most basic premise of the whole system first: ‘sin is’.

What does this assertion mean? That men and women sin, individually, collectively, and do so a good deal perhaps: this is a commonplace observation and has no consequences for Christianity either as a religion or as an ethos. Sin of this sort is contingent: an individual sinful act that has happened might not have happened in that way if the sinner’s circumstances had been different. No, when the Christian says ‘sin is’, sin refers to a necessary condition. ‘Sin is’ means that sin is rooted into our very nature as human beings. All human beings have sinned and will sin, with the single exception of Jesus in his dual divine-human role as attributed to him by Christian doctrine. There cannot be, Jesus Christ apart, a sinless human being. Newbigin: ‘Sin is something which is seated at the very center of the human personality ... The human race as a whole is corporately guilty of sin … is under the power of sin.... Even the newborn does not start with an equal freedom to do good or evil. It does not start like a balance evenly held, but with one side heavily weighed down.... Even in its own nature, there is a bias towards evil…. There is no part of the human race

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which is free from sin.... no part of man’s nature which is free from sin’ (pp.24, 37, 38, 40).

No Christian thinker will disagree with Bishop Newbigin on this point. But what grounds are there for it? How can such wholesale condemnation of creation and of the human race be justified? Does human goodness have no reality at all? It does, but only a contingent, not a necessary, reality. It is sin or evil that is necessary. This is the most fundamental premise of the Christian doctrine of man and history, indeed, of all Christian theology. It provides the starting-point of the Christian faith as a whole: the necessity of sinfulness in human nature is the ground on which is based the redemption of human nature by divine intervention. Bishop Newbigin writes movingly: ‘The Word of God is enough to create the heavens and the earth and all that is in them, to rule the stars and to check the raging of the seas’. Then, directing attention to the dramatic scene of Jesus before the crucifixion, he goes on: ‘But now look at another picture. The son of God, the Word of God made flesh, kneels in the garden of Gethsemane. He wrestles in prayer. His sweat falls like great drops of blood.... That is what it costs God to deal with man’s sin. To create the heavens and the earth costs Him no labor, no anguish; to take away the sin of the world costs Him His own life-blood’ (p.32).

The Christian lament over man’s sinfulness is bound to have in it a note of enthusiasm and delight. For if according to the dogma, the sinfulness of man is the cause of Jesus’ advent, the whole of Christian faith, the whole of being Christian, depends upon it. If God made the decision to intervene after man’s Fall into sinfulness, then the Fall is the blessed occasion which prompted an outpouring of divine love and mercy. If, on the other hand, God’s intervention was planned from eternity, then man’s Fall is that equally fortunate event which fulfilled the divine plan.¹ Had man remained good, moral, obedient and faithful to God, he would have upset the divine plan and compelled God either to alter His plans or to force man to sin in spite of himself. It is difficult therefore for a Christian to condemn human sinfulness unequivocally.

One would expect the most fundamental premise of any theistic religion to be: ‘God is’. To this any Christian will readily agree but with the additional fundamental premise that, also, ‘sin is’. For a Christian, ‘God is’ without the addition ‘sin is’, is an assertion empty of specifically religious meaning. To say only ‘God is’ is like saying ‘truth is’ or ‘being is’ or ‘value (goodness) is’—with the implication that sin ‘is not, that sin is lacking in reality, an illusion. The religious meaning of ‘God is’ requires, for a Christian, that sin also and equally ‘is’. And this religious meaning of ‘God is’ in Christian belief has a history; it was arrived at by elimination of rival views. The view that sin (evil) is ‘untruth’ or ‘non-being’ was held by Christian Gnostics and pantheists—a view partly revived in the modern doctrine known as ‘Christian Science’.² The view that goodness is ‘real’ and sin (evil) is merely ‘apparent’ was recognized by scholastic Christianity under the

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influence of the Aristotelian thesis that ‘goodness’ and ‘being’ are equivalent. But these rival views failed to determine the direction of mainstream Christianity. Gnosticism was repudiated as a heresy—despite its contribution to the propagation of the faith in the early centuries and to the systematization of Christian thought.³ Catholicism still holds to the scholastic view taught by Thomas Aquinas—but only so far as that view embraces the natural world. As regards the world of human nature, the moral world, the ‘reality’, the logical and philosophical ‘priority’, of evil is re-asserted.

Christianity is not satisfied with the axiom that ‘God is’, that God is good and all that proceeds from Him is good, because it holds that besides being good, the very nature of God is ‘three-personed’. It regards Jesus Christ (one of the three) not simply as God but as definitive of the nature of God. It is important to be clear about this. According to Christian belief, God is not God not ‘fully’ or not ‘properly’ or ‘not yet’ God, except as Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ is the ‘God son-of-God’ who became incarnate, was crucified, and arose from the dead: all of which is believed to have been an event in history. But how can a historical event constitute God? The Jesus-event, answers Christianity, was predestined from the beginning, and so is co-eternal with God. Christianity finds it necessary to assert that God is a God in whom Christ is. But to do so means that God is a God in whom Jesus (God) would be incarnate, crucified, and resurrected. The actual life and mission of Christ is, in other words, of the Essence of the Godhead. (Evidently, the Divine Essence is both transcendental and empirical, according to Christian dogma.)

Unless the necessity, the universality, of human sinfulness is pre-supposed, the mission of Jesus Christ (as understood by Christianity) loses its point. Now, since the mission of Jesus Christ as universal redeemer is a necessary part of what defines God as God (as understood by Christianity), the necessity of human sinfulness has also to be a presupposition of God being God.

The argument usually put forward to get round this blasphemous conclusion that, somehow, human sinfulness is there before God so that God can then be God-the-redeemer, is a subtle one. It holds that Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity, has two aspects: one as redeemer, savior; the other as the ‘Word’, co-eternal with God, the Creator. Through the Word, creation comes to be. This is surely valid. God is, and an aspect of His nature is the all-creative Word—the one aspect of God, His creation, which is an object of direct human knowledge. No Muslim, nor Jew, nor Christian, could refuse to accept this. But the problem is that, from the Christian’s viewpoint, this is an inadequate (incomplete) understanding of God, An absolutely necessary aspect of the nature of God is His Self-giving in Christ which, as we saw, defines (for the Christian) the true God: God is not truly God without the Self-giving Christ aspect. And for that aspect, human sinfulness must be presupposed necessarily. The argument that Christ is both Word (creator) and redeemer does not resolve the problem, it

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merely re-states it in different categories. ‘Sin is ’ has to be accepted as an axiom separate from the axiom ‘God is’, if ‘God’ has to be (as Christianity maintains) the self-giving Christ. This comes close to accepting two separate realities—one good, the other evil. And, once more, there is a historical background to this difficulty of Christian doctrine: Christianity’s contention and competition with Manicheanism and Zoroastrianism.

The Manichean ‘heresy’ was that good and evil are separate divine powers, rooted in the very structure of reality which is the scene of titanic struggle between them. The struggle is an even match until a mysterious (i.e. incomprehensible) cataclysm at the end of the world establishes good as victorious. Zoroastrianism attempts, though unsuccessfully, a rational explanation of the final collapse of evil. The collapse is ascribed to the malignant powers of nature which evil itself brought into the world for use against the good god. The explanation honors man by engaging him in the battle of the gods which is always raging, rather than leaving -him merely a passive spectator. As Mithraism, or the religion of precisely this refined moralism, dualistic Zoroastrianism was one of the most formidable rivals of Christianity in the early centuries of its life.⁴

The Fall is the most familiar Christian defence against the conclusion that sin is an absolute, from the beginning, in the same way that God is an absolute, from the beginning. According to this doctrine, sin entered the world when, being free to choose, Adam and Eve chose to rebel against God. In response, God willed and put into operation His plan for mankind’s salvation. But such a plan, after the Fall, is obviously incompatible with the eternity of Jesus Christ. To get round this problem, Christian theology postulates a devil, or pre-Adam source of evil, and traces this to an event in heaven (the fall of the angels) where it loses itself in the labyrinths of Jewish apocryphal literature. Despite the availability of this argument, the Fall remains in Christian thinking the central explanation for the existence of in particular, human sinfulness. The Apostolic Fathers give it an important place in their teaching. It remains Christianity’s best defence against collapsing into the Manichean or Zoroastrian dualism to which its doctrine leads. While the defence is not an adequate one, the importance of the Fall idea is such that we must give due attention to its genesis and rise in Christian thought.

The concept of the Fall

The Jewish background

The humiliations of the Exile, then the internal divisions and treacheries of the post-Exile period in Judah, the whole long history of the Jews’ suffering—invasions, defeated insurrections, dispersals with greater and more intense suffering still—had a profound influence on

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their consciousness. Late Judaism found it hard to believe that God was all-benevolent and good to the Jews, given the reality of their situation. Out of its dismay at the apparent betrayal of the dream of righteous victory for the people of the covenant, late Judaism developed the idea that all men are evil. Not that this or that Jew is unjust, or betrays his tribe, or exploits his fellow-Jews, nor that some human beings are evil, but that all are evil:

If thou, Lord, shouldst mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand? (Psalms 130:3)

And enter not unto judgement with thy servant; for in thy sight shall no man living be justified.

For the enemy hath persecuted my soul; he hath smitten my life down to the ground; he hath made me to dwell in darkness, as those that have been long dead. Therefore, is my spirit overwhelmed within me; my heart within me is desolate’. (143:2-4)⁵

An insight into the Jews’ own plight was first generalized to all mankind, and then explained by heredity. Inheritance by children of their parents’ qualities was an observable reality, so too the consequences of upbringing. And thus the lamenting psalmist could condemn both nature and nurture: ‘Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me’ (Psalms 51:5). This is not quite, but is nearly, the Christian thesis that human nature is inherently, inevitably sinful. It is near enough to have provoked in Jewish consciousness the thought that the apparent universality of human sinfulness implies a conflict between man and God’s purpose for man. Speculative minds began to look for an explanation. The Jews had not always lived in their present, afflicted state; there had been a blessed time, a Judahic Paradise, of ideal harmony between Jahweh and his favored people. Present afflictions might be attributed to the dreadful events culminating in the defeat and exile of 586 BE, but as ‘iniquity’ and ‘sin’ were felt to encompass the Jews from birth, the displeasure of Jahweh must have been incurred at an earlier stage of Jewish being. Jewish consciousness therefore scanned its Scriptures for some cataclysmic event that would explain the entry of evil into the world.

The first fruit of this endeavor was the story of the fallen angels. This story was not fabricated, but it was interpreted, so as to solve, for the Jews, the issue in question. The first six verses of Genesis ch.6 as they now read serve as a prelude to the Deluge story. In fact, they come from another document which has no mention of the Deluge. For, in Numbers 12:33, descendants of the giants, or fallen angels, are said to have been in Palestine at the time of Joshua’s invasion; whereas in the Deluge story, they are said to have all been destroyed. The ‘RJP’ who, according to Kuehnen and Wellhausen, edited together the prophetic and priestly parts of the Hexateuch, must have found fit to prefix to the Deluge story a part of the bene ha Elohim (sons of the gods) and nephilim (giants) story in explanation of how evil and wickedness came into the world and gave rise to the Deluge.

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The full details of that story cannot be got out of Genesis: they must be sought where they have survived, in the apocryphal literature (see the Ethiopic Book of Enoch, chs 12-36). And it is in this literature that the origin proper of how evil began was shifted from the story of the angels to the story of Adam and Eve. The problem was, however, that with Genesis 6: 1-6 prefixed to the Deluge story, the angels story could not now explain evil after the Deluge. For, according to the ‘finished’ Deluge narrative, only Noah and his family survived and did so because they were ‘good’: how could evil spring from their ‘good’?

The problem was solved in the Book of Jubilee (dating from the second century BE) by dropping the angels story in favor of the Fall from Paradise (see in particular 3:17-35 of Book of Jubilees). This transference was not an instantaneous one but a gradual process. Hints, more or less direct and to the point, may be found throughout apocalyptic literature (for example, in the Book of the Wisdom of Solomon, 2:23). By the time of the Ezra apocalypse (the Book of Esdras) which scholars date as contemporaneous with Christ, the Adam-Eve story had definitely replaced the angels story as explanation of the origin of evil, in the world. It was this story that Christianity adopted largely under the influence of Paul (Romans 5:12, ‘By one man entered sin... ’)

Transvaluation of the Jewish idea of the Fall

The Adam story in Genesis 3:1-24 contains no evidence whatever for the thesis that all of mankind are inherently, inevitably sinful. Adam and Eve transgressed and were punished for it: Adam was set to toil for a living, Eve to suffer the pains of childbirth. How can this support the Christian thesis? The sin to be called sin must be a moral failure. How can a moral failure become a natural failing? The whole point of the ethic of Jesus is that it located (and focused) moral choice and moral worth upon the individual person. The punishment for the sin, according to the Christian thesis, extends to all men. How can this make sense in the light of Jesus’ teaching, as recorded in the Christians’ own scripture, that the worth or unworth of an action, whether it is to be praised or punished, are functions of the condition of the individual will which willed that action? Even if all men do sin, is the will of each in every act of sin equally blameworthy? And then, there is the act itself-the tasting of ‘the tree of knowledge of good and evil’ which is the ‘tree of life’ (Genesis 3:5, 22, 27). This does not, on the face of it, appear to be an ‘immoral’ act worthy of the consequence that, thereafter, all mankind shall carry the guilt of it. Before we turn to the interpretations of this event which were needed to support the Christian thesis, it is worthwhile, by way of contrast, to recall the presentation of the same events in the Qur’an.

The contrast between the Genesis treatment of the Adam story and that of the Qur’an is quite revealing on this point. Far from being the father of sin, the Qur’an regards Adam as the father of the prophets.

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He received his learning directly from God, and in this he was superior to the angels to whom he taught the ‘names’ (i.e. essences, definitions) of the creatures (2:30-2). God commanded him to pursue the good (20:116-19) as well as to avoid evil, evil being the nature of the tree whose fruit he was forbidden to eat. The identification of the tree as ‘the tree of life’ and of ‘knowledge of good and evil’ is neither God’s nor Adam’s, but the work of the Genesis editors. They branded the knowledge of good and evil as evil in order to monopolize access to that knowledge, for these editors were priests. Aware of these priestly editions, the Qur’an calls this identification a lie which Satan contrived especially to tempt Adam because Adam longed to know and pursue the good. Satan, the Qur’an tells, enticed Adam saying, ‘O Adam, shall l show you the tree of life and power eternal?’ Adam ate of the tree and committed a transgression and an evil deed. But God corrected him and he atoned and was rightly guided’. Adam, therefore, did commit a misdeed, that of thinking evil to be good, of ethical mis-judgement. And Satan, in the Qur’anic view, is the evil thought suggesting itself to man that he may give it real-existence (4:118-20; 114:3-6). Adam is the author of the first human mistake in ethical perception, committed with good intention, under enthusiasm for the good. It was not a fall but a discovery that it is possible to confuse the good with the evil; that the pursuit of good is not straightforward. This is a decisive advance in man’s self-perfecting, in his realizing of God’s command to do good and avoid evil.⁶

The concept of sin in the Gospel

We must begin by noting that, as far as the Synoptic Gospels are evidence, Jesus himself did not hold the view that human nature is inherently sinful. The Gospels contain no teaching on the genesis or the necessity of evil.⁷ Christians of course know this. They argue that, although Jesus did not expressly state human beings are sinful by nature, he acted, lived and died, as if he believed that to be the case.

What this means is that; given that Jesus’ words cannot be used in explicit support of the Christian doctrine, his life-as-teaching will be so interpreted.

Jesus’ famous saying ‘Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand’ (Matthew 4:17, Mark 1:15) is addressed to the Jews, but even if addressed to all mankind, does it in any way mean that that which should be repented is the guilt of being human, and not actual, particular sins of will or deed? Similarly, the parable of the unmerciful servant (Matthew 18:23-5), the petition for forgiveness in the ‘Lord’s prayer’ (Luke 13:1-5), and other such instances, cannot easily be made to support the Christian doctrine. ‘For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders...’ (Matthew 7:11; 12:16-19; 15:19; Mark 7:21-2; Luke 13:13; 6:43-5) does not mean that every human heart is necessarily full of ‘evil thoughts, murders…’, but that ‘evil thoughts, murders…’ in the world are located in the ‘heart’, the inner will, and

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should be tackled in that place. The rabbinic doctrine that the Creator had separately implanted a yeser ra’, an ‘evil genius’ in the heart of every newborn baby is absent from any records we have of Jesus’ teaching. That or any similar doctrine that implies that the heart has evil implanted in it from birth is, in our view, incompatible with Jesus’ conception of God’s nature as goodness.

The concept of sin in the teaching of Paul

What Jesus did not furnish, Paul was ready to offer to Christianity.⁸ For, according to Paul, Christ is God, incarnate, crucified, and resurrected that man may be saved from the predicament of sin. But if there is to be any redemption at all, there must be something from which it may take place. This ‘something’ he contributed to Christian dogma.

Paul wrote to the Church at Rome, and repeated what he had had to say to the Church at Corinth. ’Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned...’ (Romans 5:12, 1 Corinthians 15:21). ‘By one man’s disobedience many were made sinners’ (Roman: 5:13-19). Evidently, Paul is here thinking of sin as a kind of hereditary disease which is transmitted to the whole of mankind. The necessary concomitant of sin is physical death, whose universality and inevitability are beyond question. But Paul also says, in this text, that the disease did not break out with all its venom between Adam and Moses because, until the latter, there was no Law, no Torah (Romans 5:13-14). The Law was given by God only in order to be violated: ‘The Law entered that the offence might abound’ (5:20) The reasoning is blasphemous to a non-Christian: God sent the Law that it may be violated, that all men may sin; for if all men do sin, so Paul reasons, then will God send His son Jesus as Messiah to bring about redemption.⁹

The nature of the disease which all mankind have inherited from Adam is double. In one strand, Paul fully agrees with Genesis that Adam’s sin was that of obtaining knowledge of good and evil. He shares with the editors of ‘J’ their pessimism, their condemnation of all civilization as a mistake, their rejection of culture, refinement and knowledge. In a passage replete with significance as to his attitudes towards Hellenic culture, Paul says: ‘For it is written, l will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world’?’ (1 Corinthians 1:19-20). This is a twisting of the words of Isaiah (29:14; 33:18; 44:25) which were meant to express the Jews’ joy at the sudden turn of events in their favor: Cyrus had risen to power, challenged and defeated, against all expectation, Jewry’s arch-enemy, Babylon, and was disposed towards liberation and repatriation of the Jews. Isaiah’s condemnation was of the ‘wise’ men of his day who were predicting the invincibility of Babylon and the permanence of the Jews’ exile. Paul construes it to mean an outright condemnation

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of all wisdom and culture that has not yet bent its mind and reason to the merging (his) Christian dogma; ‘For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness’ (1 Corinthians 1:21-3). There is a clear understanding in Paul’s mind that Hellenic culture is to be opposed by the new sectarianism and dogma.

In another strand, Paul describes the nature of the disease which found its way to man through Adam’s sin as inquinamentun, or physical defilement and pollution. The devil, in the form of a serpent, had tempted Eve; and by so doing, he passed disease of the flesh, impurity of body, to her who then transmitted it to Adam and by him to all mankind. In support of this view, the New Testament is said to furnish two kinds of evidence. The first, based upon 2 Corinthians 11:3 and 1 Timothy 2:14 implies a concept of sin as beguilement, the former specifically indicating seduction. Thus, the ‘inquination in question is here taken for granted. It is only warned against or deplored. The other kind of evidence consists in outspoken condemnation of the body, of its life, of its natural activity and indeed extends to the whole realm of nature and the real world. It is against the whole order of creation and nature, that Paul has directed his invective: ‘The creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will, but by the will of him who subjected it [i.e. Adam]... For we know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now’ (Romans 8:19-22). The Fall had sinister effects not on man alone, but on the whole of nature. The conviction that nature was corrupted by the Fall has acquired apocalyptic proportions; and Paul here accepts this piece of rabbinic exaggeration willingly.

Some Christian scholars interpret this gloomy proclamation as reference to the bloody struggle for survival in nature.¹⁰ By others, Paul is understood to be expressing the inseparability of man’s predicament from that of the whole of nature.¹¹ Whichever was Paul’s true intention, the significance of the assertion and its place in his theology remain the same. The widest extension of sinfulness is needed if man is to be the utterly powerless creature that the atonement doctrine requires him to be. In either case, however, it is sheer contrivance in the service of the doctrine. Not only man but the whole of nature is corrupt and sinful, necessarily, and in need of the savior. Paul’s zeal for this idea, in disregard for sense or historical truth, took him still further. He even presented the heavens as peopled, buffeted and tormented by evil spirits and messengers of Satan (2 Corinthians 12:7, 2:110, 1 Thessalonians 2:18; 1 Corinthians 7:5; Colossians 1:20; Ephesians 2:2).

Paul shows no awareness of the problem we meet in later Christian thought, namely that God holds us responsible for the instincts, desires, lusts, and wills that He Himself has given us at our birth. Paul

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merely affirms the fact of this natural predicament of man without ever suggesting that behind it there was once an ‘original righteousness’. Indeed, though this predicament is condemned outright, it is hard to find in Paul’s Epistles anything in direct support of an ‘original guilt’ notion. In Paul, the rabbinic hatred of man and nature (in the Jewish background)—the very opposite of Hellenic humanism and naturalism—has been moved to passionate intensity by belief in Jesus as redeemer. And yet, though this passion reaches heights of genius, it does not have (nor does it appear to need) a systematic clarity in its concepts. Thus, we find intense condemnation of human instincts, appetites, desires, not because they are human as such, but because they produce human transgressions of the law.¹²

The concept of sin in the teaching of the Apostolic Fathers

The intellectual climate of the first two Christian centuries¹³ was dominated not by this Pauline-anti-Hellenism, but by the humanistic, rationalistic, and naturalistic ideas of Hellenism. Perhaps the only common ground was the idea of a dualism in human nature. Both Paul and the Apostolic Fathers would agree that the body is earthly, wicked, bent upon sin and evil, the matrix of unfaith, error, vice, and passion. But, whereas Paul was content to condemn the body and hope for salvation through the ‘blood of the cross’, the Apostolic Fathers put some faith in the power of reason to govern, to orient, the body towards the higher interest of salvation—although reason alone might not be able to constitute a harmonious, well-balanced being, worthy, beautiful, and valuable for its own sake.

This dualism was eloquently expressed in the imagery of the Shepherd of Hermas. Man and all ‘the creatures of God, are two-fold’ (Mandate 8:1). Two angels dwell in man: ‘of righteousness’ and ‘of wickedness’. The good angel’s advice must be heeded; the bad angel’s seductive voice silenced (Mandate 6, 2:1-5). While the body obeys the soul and is its blameless instrument, it is not unworthy of reward for faithful service: ‘Having served the spirit blamelessly, [the flesh] should have some place of sojourn, and not seem to have lost the reward of its service. For all flesh in which the Holy Spirit has dwelt shall receive a reward if it be found undefiled and spotless’ (Similitudes, 5, 6:7). The body has no purpose except as an instrument to the soul, which will one day ‘bear witness’ to how the body served (Sim., 5, 7:1). Despite their awareness of the extent of evil in their time, despite their condemnation of a world committed (foolishly) to the pursuit of lower values, the Apostolic Fathers have none of the flesh or self-mortification ideology of the Dark Ages.¹⁴

Against the view that the order of the body is that of a passive object, one-directionally determined by the soul, Hermas makes a defilement of the body a defilement of the Holy Spirit and hence worthy of death and eternal damnation. With lovely sanity, he ends Parable 5 by counselling ‘Keep... both pure [the soul and the body] and you shall

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live to God’ (Sim., 5, 7:2-4). Indeed, he even suggests that the body is good in its own right if not corrupted but preserved in its God-given purity and excellence: ‘lf no wormwood be put into the honey [the body], the honey is found to be sweet, and becomes valuable to the master’ (Mandate 5, 1:5).

In his preference of good works to fasting, Hermas condemns asceticism, futile self-mortification. ‘God does not wish such a vain fast’ dissociated from actual works of righteousness in the real world outside of self (Sim, 5, 1:3-4). For Hermas and, in a greater or lesser degree, for all the Apostolic Fathers, the be-all and end-all of ethics, the ‘sufficient reason’ for salvation is good works.

This difference between the dualism of Paul and that of the Apostolic Fathers stems from a deeper and wider gulf between them on the nature of sin and salvation. Sin, they held unanimously, is not innate, The newborn baby is not a fallen creature. By nature, man is created good—a view apparent in their understanding of the ‘image’ or ‘likeness of God’ in man (see above, pp.112ff.). They therefore reasoned that if man is created good at birth, the Fall (which they all take for granted) must come when he is adult and consciously chooses evil. Sin, they concluded, is not original, but acquired.

1 Clement is the only text of the period which offers to explain how sin is acquired and of how ‘the Fall’ takes place anew in the case of every individual.  The attainment of power, means, well-being and happiness put a strain upon individuals and their relationships—envy and jealousy are aroused and through them ‘death came into the world’. Man’s nature is such that it cannot take any great measure of happiness without becoming warped. This, Clement continues, was the case with Cain and Abel, Esau and Jacob, Joseph, Moses, and even pillars of the Christian Church like Peter and the Martyrs. Without exception, in all these cases, somebody achieved eminence, ‘waxed fat and wicked’, engendering envy and jealousy in himself and in others. Acting enviously, the jealous sinned and brought about calamity and death.¹⁵ Though 1 Clement is the only text to treat this issue, its line of thought is characteristic of all the Apostolic Fathers’ writings—some of which enjoyed canonical authority for a time. As Christian scholars also concede, there is no doctrine of the Fall, as it later developed, in the works of the Apostolic Fathers.¹⁶

The concept of sin prior to the teaching of Augustine

Until Augustine, the ideas of Paul regarding the innate sinfulness of man, caused by his descent from Adam, the dire consequences of whose Fall embraced heaven and earth, lay dormant in the mind of Christianity. Faint echoes of them were surely heard, but no clear or systematic assertion. As in the development of the concept of the ‘image of God’, the key figures in the transition from Hellenic to Augustinian attitudes to the Fall were Tertullian and lrenaeus. To these two, we need to add the name of Origen.

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Origen, like his fellow-Christians and Jews in gnostically-minded Hellenic Alexandria, began by understanding Scripture allegorically. He read the Genesis account of the Fall with a mind already determined by Plato. Plato had taught (in the Phaedrus) that man suffers a pre-natal fall when his soul, before being joined to the body at birth, becomes ‘individualized’. Plotinus explained this individuation as a series of concentric emanations which become less pure and worthy the further away they stand from the creative center, the divine logos. Philo, before Origen, had popularized this Plotinian explanation and applied it to Hebrew Scripture.¹⁷ Origen was true to this Alexandrine culture.¹⁸ His rationalism required that suffering be deserved, or else it would be unjust of the Creator to inflict it. And since man suffers from the very start of his life, he must have merited that suffering in a pre-natal state, incurred by some misdeed in a previous life. In this way he provided Christianity with its first idea of locating the origin of evil outside the world of creation and time. Original sin belongs to a state of being beyond time; within time, it touches the living individual not as defilement and guilt- but as frailty or weakness, not depravity, but privation. Even this much rationality was enough to incur the wrath of his bishop, Demetrius.

Origen was condemned and discharged from his duties as head of the catechistic school. He moved to Caesarea where he became acquainted, for the first time, with the ritual of infant baptism. It was during this period of his life, in order to justify infant baptism, that he came to hold a modified sort of ‘original sin’ doctrine.

Tertullian, by contrast, was opposed to infant baptism on the rational grounds that baptism was futile unless received with conscious understanding (On Baptism, 18). However, he believed explicitly in the necessary corruption of the soul. He had the bizarre idea (which he presented, with the agreement of Gregory of Nyssa, in his De Anima, chs 23-41) that the soul is passed from parents to child in the sexual act—and the parents’ sinfulness is thus transmitted! The rationality of his opposition to infant baptism aside, Tertullian hated with a bitter passion all the works of mind and spirit which antiquity had produced. He was, alas, too willing to forget the forgiving gentleness of Jesus, too ready to consign, in the cruelty of a written text, much of non-Christian humanity, and the fruit of their labors, to the flames.¹⁹

The concept of sin in the teaching of Augustine

It is commonly held that Augustine crystallized his views on the subject of sin in his controversy with Pelagius. The Pelagian ‘heresy’ is then offered as an excuse to explain away the appalling extremism of Augustine’s arguments.²⁰ In fact, the whole of Augustine’s doctrine of man had appeared by 396-97, his first year as Bishop of Hippo, in De Diversis Quaestionibus ad Simplicianum. Augustine himself referred to this treatise in self-defence against the charge that he had changed his doctrine.²¹ It contains the essential outlines of his whole

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Philosophy²² and pre-dates by more than a decade the ‘news that Pelagius had been attacking a sentence of his in the Confessions, after which the ‘fierce controversy issued...’.²³ Thus, the historical truth is that it was Pelagius who reacted to Augustine and not the latter who rose to defend Christianity against ‘heresy’.

The real theologian of Pelagianism²⁴ was Julian of Eclanum, who advocated and practised clear, systematic thinking about morals and God. Because Augustine answered him, as it were, sentence by sentence, it is possible to reconstruct his doctrine. Julian felt that, to settle their theological differences, they should ‘weigh and not count opinions’ (Augustine, Contra Julianum, 2:35). Where his antagonist proposed choice and deliberation, Augustine opposed with authoritarianism and the impenetrable, irresistible mysteries of grace.

Julian’s theology has been ably summarized in eight points by Harnack (1901, vol.5, pp.191-203). (1) God is absolutely just; everything He does is essentially good. Man, His creature, is good. There is no being that is evil, or sinful, as such. (2) Man’s greatest and inalienable endowments are his discerning reason and his freedom of choice which no wrong choice can damage irreparably. Sin is choosing the opposite of that which reason judges good. (3) The appetites of the body are not sinful in themselves but good, as God, their Maker, is good. Sin consists in the knowing, willful abuse of those appetites. Marriage is intrinsically good. (4) Upon birth, and before becoming involved in such abuses, every man is in the state of Adam before the Fall, endowed with a ‘natural holiness’ which consists of reason and free will. (5) Adam sinned through his wrong choice, just as we do today. The consequence of this sinning is not death which is simply the natural order of the world, but damnation which, if incurred at all, is incurred by the individual person in question. (6) The idea of ‘original sin’ transmitted through procreation is false and blasphemous. It is false because there can be no sin without free choice and will; and blasphemous because it implies that God is unjust in regarding the innocent as guilty, and malevolent in making them sinful. (7) The grace of God is precisely this natural endowment of man, the proper use of which has made many Christians, as well as non-Christians, perfect. Or, it is God’s revelation of the ‘ought’, or the law, so as to assist man’s reason in its deliberation and guide its choice. Or, it is the grace of Jesus, who like God’s revealed law, is enlightenment and teaching (illuminatio et doctrina) through his own example. (8) Grace is directly proportional to man’s merit. Otherwise, if it were granted to the non-righteous as to the others, God would not be just.

That, in brief; is Pelagianism as articulated by Julian of Eclanum. It is the belief of all sane people, Christians or others, as evidenced in the normal conduct of their lives. This is certainly true of Western Christendom and modern times as a whole: the English saying ‘God helps those who help themselves’, also the motto of Pelagian ethics, has an equivalent in every tongue. It accords in every way with the ethic of

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Jesus, and proceeds from the same assumptions and aspirations. And it is against this that Augustine poured out his genius.

Setting out from the Genesis story of Adam, Augustine began by insisting that it be taken literally, and when taken literally, it became the only basis of the Christian doctrine of man.²⁵ Augustine read Genesis to imply a pre-Fall nature of ‘original righteousness’. In this state, argued Augustine, Adam knew neither sickness, nor age, nor death,²⁶ moreover he had the ability to not sin (posse non peccare)²⁷ and he had intellect incomparably superior to man’s after the Fall.²⁸

But how then could Adam sin?

Adam sinned not out of weakness, Augustine argues, but out of willful disobedience.²⁹ In his treatise On Faith, he describes the act as the sin of pride, infidelity, homicide, spiritual fornication, avarice and (anti-climactically) theft (the fruit did not belong to him).³⁰ Following Paul (Romans 5:12), Augustine affirms that the sin ‘has passed to all men’. He distinguishes the vitium or physical aspect from the reatus or liability, but declared both communicable by heredity. The sin (as vitium) is bodily desire, expressed (even originating) in the sexual appetite which is vicious. Man is ‘born in sin’ in the most literal sense because the sexual act is sinful³¹—that is why Jesus was born of a virgin.³² (Marriage he claimed not to condemn as an institution, only excessive (‘irrational’) satisfaction of the sexual appetite.)³³ In another passage, with not much logic, he describes the actual indulgence of bodily desire (actus) as incurable by baptism, whereas the liability and responsibility for bodily desire (reatus) is curable by baptism.³⁴

Except for God’s grace, the necessity of such sin must drive any person to ruin. Under this doctrine, the person is not free but is, instead, inevitably subject to sin: Augustine is most explicit on this point.³⁵ He insists upon it in order to account for the absolute human need for grace. To account for man’s guilt, to make man responsible for the Fall, Augustine has to grant man some measure of free will. Quite willing to have his cake and eat it too, Augustine quotes Paul’s ‘When ye were the servants of sin, ye were free from righteousness’ (Romans 6:20),³⁶ and settles into conceptual juggling. One sort of freedom (libertas) was lost in the fall; this was our freedom to do good or evil. The other sort (liberum arbitum), free will, survived the Fall: it is the freedom we have to do good—there is no freedom to do evil. (Only the saints and God are above frailty and loss and so, presumably, wholly ‘free’.)³⁷

Interestingly, Augustine again resorts to Paul (Hebrews 7, esp. vv.9-10) to explain how ‘original sin’ is transmitted. The upshot of the obscure argument being that because every human being is, in a sense, ‘in the loins’ of Adam, every one inherits his sin. Only those escape liability whom God chooses to let escape: Augustine accepts this as divine justice. The rest are all a ‘mass of perdition’.

Doubtless, Augustine’s personal experience shaped and influenced his ideas. J. Burnaby, who defends Augustine wherever possible, Cannot follow him in his total condemnation of man’s natural life, of pro-

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creation, of the unbaptized little innocents. He refers to the last, unfinished work of Augustine’s (the terrible invective Against Julian as well as against all humanity) ‘melancholy reading’ (Augustine, 1938 edn, p.239; see also Cave, 1949, pp.95-6). At the age of seventy-three, Augustine asked: ‘Why should you be surprised that they [i.e. unbaptized infants] will be with the devil in eternal fire?’³⁸ Besides this, there is the brutality of Augustine’s illicit relationships with women. Nowhere in the Confessions is there the least hint, not even in the long fourteen-year relationship with the woman who was mother of his only son, of any emotion except lust. In the Solilaquies, he states that he never expected from such relationships anything except ‘enjoyment of voluptuousness’.³⁹ Having himself known nothing of that loving companionship in which body and soul participate, Augustine condemned the whole of human earthly life:

Banished [from paradise] after this sin, Adam bound his offspring also with the penalty of death and damnation, that offspring which by sinning he had corrupted in himself as in a root; so that whatever progeny was born from himself and his spouse—who was the cause of his sin and the companion of his damnation—would drag through the ages the burden of original sin... through manifold errors and sorrows, down to that final and never-ending torment with the rebel angels... So the matter stood, the damned lump of humanity was lying, prostrate, nay, was wallowing, in evil; it was ever falling headlong from one wickedness to another; and, joined to the faction of the angels who had sinned, it was ‘paying the most righteous penalty of its impious treason.⁴⁰

In Augustine’s judgement, there can never be a virtuous non-Christian: a non-Christian is not chaste though he has been chaste, not charitable though he has been charitable.⁴¹ This absurd argument is based by Augustine on Paul’s ‘Whatsoever is not of faith is sin’ (Romans 14:23). In its proper context this statement cannot have meant what Augustine makes it mean. In the context of the ethic of Jesus it can only mean that whatever has not come out of the radical self-transformation which comes by loving God with heart, soul, mind, is liable to be sinful. In Augustine, it has become twisted to justify Christian separatism, Christian ‘election’.

The doctrine of sinfulness is, in Augustine, at its systematic best. Pelagianism had won over practically the whole West when Pelagius, Caelestius and Julian went to Africa. But Augustine applied for and (according to some, by not very scrupulous means) obtained the help of the Emperor to enforce his doctrine upon the churches of the Empire. Even the Pope of Rome was not in favor and had to be made to agree by means of imperial pressure. The empire, or the West, was in the mood to accept Augustinian Christianity. It triumphed in the tractoria of Tosimus, at the Council of Trent, and in its emphasis on infant

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damnation as introduced by Thomas Aquinas,⁴² it affected the Reformation.

The concept of sin in the Reformation

The Reformation gave a new vigor to the doctrine of sin, as well as a new seriousness. As regards this doctrine, Luther and Calvin differed little, if at all. Both rejected the old distinction between man’s ‘supernatural’ (pre-Fall) and ‘natural’ (post-Fall) gifts—the ‘natural’ gifts being those which existed before but also survived the Fall. For both Luther and Calvin, the Fall was not a decline from ‘supernature’ to ‘nature’, but from ‘supernature’ to ‘sub-nature’, to total depravity.

According to Luther, the Fall deprived man of the faculty to know, love, and serve God. When the Synergist Lutherans under Victorinus Strigel suggested that human faculties were not lost but only paralyzed by the Fall, the Lutheran Church cried ‘Murder to the Pelagians,’ and came down upon them mercilessly in the Formulary of Concord, the official document of the Lutheran Church: ‘They also are likewise repudiated and rejected, who teach that our nature has indeed been greatly weakened and corrupted because of the fall of the human race, but nevertheless has not altogether lost all goodness relating to divine and spiritual things… For they say that from his natural birth man still has remaining somewhat of good however little, minute, scanty, and attenuated this may be’⁴³. The affirmation that ‘man’s will hath some liberty to work a civil righteousness, and to choose such things as reason can reach unto’ is withdrawn again: man’s will ‘has no power to work the righteousness of God, or a spiritual righteousness; because the natural man receiveth not the things of the spirit of God’ (the ‘Confession of Augsburg’), The Formulary had asserted that ‘fallen man possesses no more power of loving God or turning towards Him than a stone, a tree-trunk or a piece of mud’ (2, s.24), How can God’s message through Jesus reach ‘a piece of mud’? We marvel at the extreme language; but it is calculated. And the calculation is (like Augustine’s) to present man as wholly passive to the sudden influx of ‘grace’ which is, therefore, from man’s viewpoint, mysterious, inscrutable, irrational. The Formulary elaborates (1, s.11):

it is affirmed that original sin in human nature is not merely that total lack or defect of virtuous powers in spiritual things which pertain unto God; but also that into the place of the image of God which has been lost there has succeeded an intimate, grievous, most profound and abyss-like, inscrutable, and indescribable corruption of the whole nature and of all the powers of man, most chiefly of the superior and principal faculties of the soul, corruption which infects the mind, intellect, heart, and will. Wherefore after the Fall man receives from his parents by heredity a congenitally depraved impulse, filthiness of heart, depraved concupiscences and depraved inclinations.

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Luther follows Augustine in the misinterpretation of Romans 14:23, like him condemning non-Christians in whatever they do (‘Apology to the Confession of Augsburg’). In Calvin’s view, likewise, non-Christians cannot be virtuous although they may look (to Christians) as though they were not wholly depraved: a non-Christian who acts virtuously is either doing so out of hypocrisy or mechanically, as God’s puppet. All this is explicitly stated in Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, where the familiar word of gloom rules every judgement: man’s nature is saturated through and through with bodily lusts—a ‘seed-bed of sin, odious and abominable to God’; ‘the whole man, from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot, is so deluged, as it were, that no part remains exempt from sin and, therefore, everything which proceeds from him is imputed as sin’. Calvin, like Luther, distinguishes ‘original’ from ‘actual sin’, the latter being merely the ‘epiphenomenon’, the ‘hideous efllorescence’, of the other.

Both Calvin and Luther carried the logic of Augustine’s doctrine to its inevitable conclusion; a purely deterministic theory of salvation. In his treatise against Erasmus, Calvin wrote: ‘God foresees nothing contingently, but that He both foresees, determines, and actually does all things, by this unchangeable, eternal, and infallible will’.⁴⁴ Then, in case there should be any doubt about the implication of what he has just said, he adds: ‘By this thunderbolt the whole idea of free will is smitten down and ground to powder... All things which we do, even though they may seem to us to be done mutably and contingently... in reality are done under the stress of immutable necessity...’ Calvin’s predestinarianism arises from the belief that God was the cause of the Fall. God caused Adam to fall, this reasoning holds, simply in order to bring about what God had already written since eternity: that men should, whether they will or no, fall into the party of the damned, except that since the days of Jesus, a small minority have fallen, also whether they will or no, into the party of the blessed, the saved.

The concept of sin in modern Christian thought

Formal Christian thought in modern times differs in one significant respect from formal Christian thought in its earlier centuries; there is a vast chasm between the formal doctrine, the official line as it were, and the actual consensus of Christian believers. And this is especially true of the doctrine of sin. The overwhelming majority of Christian believers, in the home or office or factory or place of leisure, live and behave as if they were sure that human life and human nature are basically good, sure that nothing is perfect, but sure that the effort to make things better is worthwhile. And yet contemporary Christian theologians continue to assert the old doctrine with almost total unanimity. They continue to elaborate on the inherent, necessary sinfulness of human beings, as if oblivious, even immune, to what the Christian laity really believe—assuming that how they have lived, for some centuries now, is a guide to what they really believe.

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Here and there one hears variations; but they are all variations on the same theme—Augustine’s. In Catholic Christendom, the field is still dominated by the thinking of Thomas Aquinas who, as we noted subscribes to the whole of Augustine’s doctrine of sin, with the one amendment of a ‘limbo’. Aquinas added the concept of limbo to rescue unbaptized infants from the hell to which Augustine had committed them. Jacques Maritain, a prominent teacher of contemporary Catholic philosophy, expounds a Thomism unamended except for more carefully nuanced and shaded categories; ‘Man carries the burden of original sin and he is born dispossessed of the gifts of grace’ (Maritain, 1939, p.2). This is qualified with the addition; man is ‘not indeed corrupted in the substance of his being, but wounded in his nature’ (p.2). The pessimism of the Augustinian original is alleviated by some hope in that man ‘is traversed by the calls of actual grace... and thus hears within him even here below the truly divine life of sanctifying grace and of its gifts’ (p.3). But pessimism is the more decisive, dominant mood. In his argument against the socialist hope of a kingdom of justice and humanity in the world, he writes: ‘Grant to every claim he makes for the regime of his future society but add that even in the most perfectly, justly, and humanely organized socialist state man will be subject to evil and misfortune because these are in him’ (p.47). The doctrine of sin, as we have shown, is required in order to place man in absolute need of the ‘mysteries’ of grace. In other words, the doctrine is not built upon, or derived from, any experience of human nature as it is; rather, it is contrived to prepare the ground for the Christian dogma of salvation through God’s Self-sacrifice. The doctrine is not coherent with reality; it is coherent with another doctrine. The Christian, Maritain believes, can never ‘rest anywhere save where his God is nailed upon a cross’.

The assessment of man among Protestants remains where the Reformation put it: under the dominion of Augustine’s mood and his ideas. The arguments behind the ethics of Luther and Calvin are still shared by all, even the most ‘liberal’, Protestant theologians.⁴⁵ In a classic work, H. Richard Niebuhr, argued that human nature should be ‘converted’ (i.e. oriented) to the presence and Will of God; if that nature were absolutely evil it could not be ‘converted’, only ‘recreated’. But, again, this sign of hope fades, as the imagination relapses into the familiar thesis; man’s nature ‘is not bad, as something that ought not to exist, but warped, twisted, and misdirected... It is perverted good, not evil; or it is evil as perversion, and not as badness of being’ (H.R. Niebuhr, 1952, p.194). And lest there should remain any doubt, the ‘conversion’ is ‘to redeem man in the body and in the history which began with his creation’ (p.235; italics added).

Besides these examples of ‘liberal’ Protestant thought, the field is dominated by ideas of directly Augustinian color, by Luther and Calvin, refined by Kierkegaardian notions of ‘dread’ (the fear of freedom of moral choice) and ‘existence’ (which is synonymous with ‘fallenness’, the state of being in ‘dread’).  The works of Karl Barth,

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Emil Brunner, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, C.H. Dodd, D.B. Baillie, and the late Bishop Temple, are pre-eminent. And all, without exception, hold the doctrine of man’s inherent sinfulness. They do so because they cannot otherwise uphold the dogma of redemption by divine sacrifice. Barth, for example, opens his section 60, a full l50 pages of macabre condemnation of human nature, with the clear and solemn statement of how the doctrine of sin ‘enables’ the doctrine of grace: ‘The verdict of God pronounced in the resurrection of Jesus Christ crucified for us discloses who it was that was set aside in His death, the man who willed to be a God, himself lord, the judge of good and evil, his own helper, thus withstanding the lordship of the grace of God and making himself irreparably, radically and totally guilty before Him both individually and corporately’ (Barth, 1960, vol.4, pt 1, p.385).

‘As the message of redemption is the center of the Biblical message so also it contains, as a negative presupposition [sic] the knowledge of sin… Sin can only be rightly understood in the light of the Christian revelation... We can only see what sin is, what man is as sinner, in the light of the Christian revelation which effects the transition from the state of ‘being-a-sinner’ to that of ‘being redeemed’ (Brunner, 1952, vol.2, p.89). Brunner’s commitment to the doctrine of sinfulness is frank and explicit: ‘Before God everyone is a sinner, and all that one does, says or thinks is sinful’ (p.112). But he has the additional merit of clearly understanding and being able to state frankly what that doctrine is for: ‘Apart from the doctrine of the Fall it is impossible to understand Sin as the presupposition of the New Testament message of Redemption. Only fallen humanity needs a redeemer’ (p.90).

Paul Tillich differs only in describing ‘sin’ as ‘estrangement’ from God (see Tillich, 1951-57, vol.2, pp.44-51). The ‘estrangement’ is caused by ‘unbelief’, ‘hubris’ (arrogant pride) and bodily appetites and lusts (‘concupiscence’). As we saw earlier (pp.125ff above) in the discussion of man’s being in the ‘image of God’, Tillich sees creation and Fall as the same event. As soon as creation comes into existence, it is ‘estranged’ from God, it is no longer ‘good’. However, Tillich also wants us to believe that creation, before it exists, is ‘good’: ‘creation is good in its essential character’ (p.44). Creation in existence is ‘sinful’, but in essence ‘good’. But how can we possibly know anything about creation before it exists? How can we attribute any positive value to the life of man on the basis that, before creation, before he exists, he is ‘good’?

Tillich does tell us that ‘the leap from essence to existence is the original fact;... it has the character of a leap and not of structural necessity. In spite of its tragic universality, existence cannot be derived from essence’ (p.44). More simply put, all this means is that although all existence is ‘estranged’, the essence remains ‘good’, that it became ‘estranged’ but need not have done so. In different terms: God is ‘good’; the creation is not ‘good’; God still remains ‘good’. But there is no dispute with the assertion that ‘essence’ is unconditioned,

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absolute, in itself always ‘good’. The problem is with why all of existence should be always in itself ‘estranged’. If existence is only partly or temporarily ‘estranged’, if only some people (or all people only sometimes) are ‘estranged’, then those who are not ‘estranged’ stand in no need of a redeemer to die for them.

Reinhold Niebuhr (194l) derives his inspiration on the subject from the concept of ‘dread’ in Kierkegaard; his chapter on ‘Sin and Man’s Responsibility’ concludes with Kierkegaard’s words. Niebuhr is aware of, and delights in, paradoxes: ‘The Christian doctrine of original sin with its seemingly contradictory assertions about the inevitability of sin and man’s responsibility of sin is a dialectical truth which does justice to the fact that man’s self-love and self-centeredness is inevitable, but not in such a way as to fit the category of natural necessity. It is within and by his freedom that man sins. The final paradox is that the discovery of the inevitability of sin is man’s highest assertion of freedom’ (Niebuhr, 1941, p.263). The sophistication of the argument is illusory. Niebuhr is saying that the proof of man’s freedom of will is the inevitability of sin. An individual can deny God, disobey His commands, and sin mightily, willfully: common sense suggests that this experience is proof of human freedom of will. But Niebuhr is saying something else: namely, that the proof lies in the fact that the individual must sin (inevitably). That an individual can sin does make that person aware of being an ethically responsible agent before God whose commands can be refused. That an individual must sin puts that person in dire need of outside help in order to avoid sin. Though he pays lip-service to the idea of human freedom, Niebuhr in fact advocates the necessary sinfulness of human beings, just as Christian dogma requires him to do. And so we find him saying with Kierkegaard: ‘The concept of sin and guilt is so basic and necessary that it presupposes the individual as individual. There is no concern for his relation to any cosmic or past totality. The only concern is that he is guilty’ (p.263).

D.M. Baillie’s argument in God was in Christ (1961, pp.204ff) does not pretend to the sophistications of Niebuhr. On the contrary, he states the doctrine of sinfulness with a frankness equal to that of Brunner’s. He begins by telling us that God had a plan for man’s destiny, but that this plan did not materialize. ‘Something has gone wrong,’ he writes (p.203), ‘the organism somehow failed to function as one body’, and was splintered into many self-centered individuals turned away from God and ‘bent inwards upon themselves’: ‘that is what is wrong with mankind’ (pp.204-5). Once committed, the evil has become necessary. Into its heritage, he asserts, ‘every new child is born and by it he is shaped from the start, so that as he grows into a self-conscious moral personality… he is already infected with the evil’ (p.205). It is impossible for man to pull himself out of this evil by his own efforts, the more he tries the more immersed he becomes and the more he sinks. Baillie goes further. Echoing Karl Barth, he adds that

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to think of oneself as able to pull oneself out of sin by one’s own efforts is the highest sin there is (p.206).

These are examples. The theme behind them all is the same. Human nature is corrupt, originally and always. Even under grace, as in the life of a baptized Christian, human nature remains corrupt. The function of grace is not to remedy this corruption now, but later, in heaven, or the after-life. Such is the Christian consciousness: withered by the mortal misery of an existence shot through with sin, it is predetermined to receive the blessing. But as long as that consciousness is in nature, alive, the blessing is a promise, is not-yet. It awaits in an after-life. We turn now to Christian salvation to understand what it consists of and how it brings about the desired transformation.

The concept of redemption

Christianity is the religion of redemption

Christianity is rightly called ‘the religion of redemption’, Every religion describes mankind as standing in a predicament, then offers a means out of that and into a state it calls desirable and blessed. Christianity is special in that it has made redemption its be-all and end-all; it has made redemption a part of its very definition of the nature of God; and it has interpreted the whole history and meaning of creation as being focused on what it claims as the one final redemptive event. We will better understand and appreciate the implications of the Christian emphasis on redemption if we compare the concept of redemption in Islam.

God’s revelation of the Qur’an to His Prophet Muhammad, is also understood by Muslims everywhere as a unique, comprehensive and final, redemptive event. But a closer look will reveal that this event and the understanding of redemption in Christianity are widely different. It was not the First time that God was revealing His Holy Book. For the ‘Holy Book’ is a body of ideas, a sublime expression of God’s Will addressed to human beings for them to understand and act upon. He had revealed it to Abraham, to Moses, to Jesus, and to an unknown number of prophets of other peoples, before revealing it to the Prophet Muhammad. The last was the most perfect and complete; but the revelations God had sent to other prophets were of the same quality in being also divine. All of them contained the essence and core of God’s true religion, though they may have been relational to the peoples, periods, and places in which they came. Islam, therefore, calls these other revelations ‘Islam, the true religion of God,’ and calls the men to whom it was revealed ‘Muslims’. Neither the prophets of the past nor their revelations are any less genuine than the Prophet Muhammad and the revelation to him. It is to emphasize and safeguard this status that the last revelation was declared by God as one among others, though the last and most complete. This rehabilitate: the pre-Muhammad

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religious experience of mankind, grants it a unique autonomy and dignity and establishes between it and Islam a relation of shared purpose, content and identity. By contrast, the uniqueness of the Christ revelation, in the Christian understanding of it, sweeps aside the pre-Christ religious experience of mankind as an inadequate (or inferior or temporary) means leading up to itself. Certainly, Christianity holds that it is the real, living God, ‘its’ God, that revealed Himself to Abraham and to Moses. But it also holds that God did not communicate the

Christ-revelation to either. He commanded them, and they obeyed; but they could not and did not know the ‘true’ intent of His mind, His message to man, which is the person of only Christ. Even the Judaic prophets of the high style, Isaiah and Jeremiah, had, according to the Christian view, but the smallest glimpse of what God was about. No prophet has ever had the essence of the Christian revelation revealed to him by God. One and all were, in the Christian view, inferior instruments, of the Christ-revelation. No revelation before Jesus’ is worthy of the name ‘Christian’; and however Christianity may honor Abraham and Moses, the uniqueness of its revelation never permits it to call them ‘Christian’ as Islam calls them and Jesus, ‘Muslims’. Christianity’s Christ-revelation is one event, the essence of which had never been revealed before. The Christ-revelation is the redemptive act of God. Islam too holds that the revelation to the Prophet Muhammad is the redemptive act of God. As the Christ-revelation redeemed man from bondage to sin, so the revelation to the Prophet Muhammad redeemed man from bondage to shirk, (association of false gods with God), or kufr (ungodliness, unfaith). However, the redemptive effect of the revelation of the Qur’an is only an effect; it is not constitutive of Islam. Islam grants that to be redeemed is positively to be redeemed from something evil, undesirable, unworthy. It grants that to be so redeemed is good and necessary; but such redemption is not the end-all. There is yet the task of doing and achieving the good. This is why Islam does not identify itself as the religion of redemption. It claims to redeem; but having redeemed, it passes over to the task of doing the Will of God, and seeking to bring about positive results. This character of Islam implies that it regards redemption as the passage from the present danger of ‘determination’ by false values or non-values to a neutral state. Passage from that state to one in which ‘determination’ is by right value, requires different powers and is always conditional upon the first transition. The first, however, does not necessarily imply the second.

Christianity, likewise, is not satisfied with a redemption which means only the first transition, but it regards redemption by Christ as necessarily meaning both passages. It argues, rightly, that nobody can stay in the neutral zone, but must either move forward into the region of positive action or lapse back into the region of sin. To be redeemed at all, one must make both journeys. Genuine as this argument may appear, it is confused. For though no one may actually remain in the neutral zone, and must pass on into the second without lingering, that

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neutral zone is indispensable for our understanding of religious experience. It is, of course, not a real, physical space or time, but a state of transition between ‘redemption from’ and ‘redemption for’. Granted that the Christ-revelation has achieved both, they cannot be lumped together as one. Christianity, historically, cannot but assert Jesus’ redemption of man and then exhort man to obey a thousand and one commandments of God whether summarized in the single imperative ‘love’ or elaborated in volumes of ‘canon law’.

And yet, although Christianity can never do without exhortations to virtue, it must insist that it is the religion of redemption. It does so because it feels that in the redeeming act of Jesus Christ, man’s greatest battle, his war, against the greatest evil, sin, has been won once and for all. This is why for a Christian, the very fact that he is Christian, that is to say, the very fact that he recognizes Jesus Christ as redeemer, weighs heavily in the scales. It gives him the assurance that he is ‘saved’, already ‘passed’ deep into the second zone, and not merely lifted out of the first. This is why Christianity is stubborn in refusing to accept a redemption that is only a ‘redemption from’. This is why it maintains, against ordinary sense, that passage from the first zone necessarily implies passage into the second. Despite evidence to the contrary—as authoritative as Paul’s ‘Work out your salvation with fear and trembling’ (Philippians 2:12)—Christianity must maintain that the Christ-event did in fact achieve complete salvation, redemption-for as well as redemption-from. We shall return to the question of why it must be so later. For the moment, let us accept that it is so, and because it is so Christianity is entitled to call itself the religion of redemption.

Islam offers no immediate recompense to a convert. On the contrary, it tells him point blank that acceptance of Islam puts him only in the neutral zone and lays out before him the arduous road of the Sharīʻah, or Divine Law, which he has yet to tread in order to lift himself out of the neutral zone by his own efforts. The very name of the faith, ‘Islam’, is an active verb, meaning to subject oneself in obedience to the divine commands, to carry them out. Such a usage is impossible in English, indeed impossible in Christian religious consciousness. One does not become a Christian by ‘christ-ing’, nor by the imitatio Christi; but by believing that Jesus is the Christ. Therefore, whereas the Muslim comes out from his encounter with God conscious mainly of the fact that the greatest task lies ahead in the test of ethical conduct, the Christian comes out from his encounter with God satisfied, relieved that the greatest task is behind him. True, he comes out feeling that he has now become God’s ‘fellow’ and this imposes duties upon him. Nonetheless, because he feels he has now entered the ‘fellowship’ of Christ, he stands reassured that this new status will favorably affect anything he may do. At any rate, on the basis of his new fellowship with God, he regards his ethical burden and vocation as substantially different from those of the non-Christian. The common argument that morality is everywhere the same, that the

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difference between the ‘ought’ of a Christian and that of a non-Christian is only one of outlook, robs redemption of the power and reality claimed for it. If proper conduct by a Christian and proper conduct by a non-Christian are the same conduct, then the redemption is only a different way of seeing what morality is, what ‘proper’ means. To be redeemed would then mean to think differently about morality, and the Christ-event would be the teaching that brought about the difference in thinking—a conclusion vigorously rejected by Christians. No; Christians insist that redemption is a real, substantial change in the self; an end and not a means only. That is why the committed Christian is by nature complacent, a passivist, a proclaimer of an event past, whereas the committed Muslim is a moral activist, seeking and determining a future.

Redemption in Christianity is also seen as an integral, constitutive demonstration of the very nature of God. We noted earlier that the Christ-revelation was a unique event to which every other divine act was mere prelude. It is the event for which the whole history of creation has been the introduction and instrument. Indeed, it is the event for which creation itself was the necessary (nonetheless subordinate) condition. For Christianity holds that Jesus Christ is God and that he is God i.e. co-eternal with God, not as Father or Holy Ghost but as Christ. This clearly means that the Christ-revelation was not an event (even the most important) in history, but the event for the sake of which there has ever been any history—any creation—at all. For God to be Christ in eternity, means that a plan has existed in eternity in which God, as Jesus, shall be baptized, anointed, crucified, and resurrected. This is why the Christian feels that what came to pass in the Christ-event was the revelation of divine nature. It was not God merely commanding something to be done; nor, as in Islam, communicating His Will to man, but revealing the divine nature itself as it is relevant for man.

Islam too, one may argue, regards the revelation to the Prophet Muhammad as the most important event in history, and claims that it is eternal. Nonetheless, it should be noted at once that Islam entertains no illusions about an eternity of the Prophet’s person. When the Prophet lay dead in his house before burial and some Muslims (including the great ‘Umar al-Fārūq, future second Caliph) began to murmur that Muhammad did not die, Abu Bakr al-Siddīq, the first Caliph, reprimanded them: ‘O Muslims,’ he said, ‘if you are worshippers of Muhammad, then know that Muhammad is dead, But if you are worshippers of God, then know that God is alive and never perishes’.⁴⁶ That which Islam regards as eternal is the Qur’an, its truth, which is the body of meanings, of values, which express the Will of God.

The Christian revelation, on the other hand, has determined for Christians the nature of God Himself. A body of commands, of meanings, of truths can be the Will of God; their eternity is derivative from God’s. They are not ‘co-eternal’, not eternal with God, but

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eternal as His Attributes, His Will, His Command. Only God, God the One, is eternal in the strict sense. Whatever else is eternal is so only derivatively. Christianity, on the other hand, eternalizes the revelation of Christ not as a body of ideas that may be God’s Will, but as the Christ-event. This is a real event, and its subject a real person who was born, ate, slept, and died, like any other human. Obviously, this cannot be eternalized as a derivative of God; and Christianity consistently argues that ‘Christ’ is not the Will of God, nor His Command, nor His Idea, but God Himself, or rather God co-eternal with God. Christianity is compelled to this doctrine precisely because what it eternalizes is a real person and a real event. A real person may be coeternal with God, but not derivatively eternal without violating the law of identity. To violate the law of identity in this instance would be to lapse into polytheism. That is the reason why Christianity, insisting that the Christ-event is eternal, became embroiled in the insuperable difficulties of its Trinitarian theology. But understanding the Qur’an as eternal as the Will of God enabled Islam to preserve a thorough and strict monotheism.⁴⁷ Christianity, then, holds the view that the Christ-revelation is the supreme moment in the Godhead itself, however complicated the implications of this position may be, and however curiously the various denominations of Christendom may have attempted to interpret them.

The nature of Christian salvation

Redemption presupposes something from which man is redeemed. That something was explained in the survey, in the first part of this chapter, of the history of the Christian doctrine of man’s necessary sinfulness. We observed how sin grew in Christian consciousness from being the particular sinful act of a particular person to the predicament of being man at all, and then to the whole of creation. This extension of the concept of sin is matched by the extension of the concept of redemption.⁴⁸ The two are correlated. The higher the Christians elevated Christ, the more absolute evil had to become from which mankind (and nature) were said to have been redeemed. This necessary correlation, empirically demonstrable and obvious to the reader of the histories of both concepts, casts a shadow of suspicion on the legitimacy of the exaltation of both sin and Christ. There is, in that exaltation, something of the mechanical and arbitrary: consider, for example, Origen’s enlarging salvation to include the fallen angels or, earlier, Paul’s: ‘all things... whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven [have been reconciled]... through the blood of his cross’ (Colossians 1:20).

The most universally held notion of what redemption is from, is death. But ‘death’ too underwent in this context a similar extension of meaning. In the Old Testament, physical death was the greatest evil (for example, Psalms 6:4-5), and a long life the greatest blessing (Psalms 91:16). Redemption was then conceived of as the granting by

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God to man of a long life with plentiful harvests, children and property (Psalms 128).

Christians claim, however, that the Old Testament shows, in addition, a deeper understanding of death and redemption. The evil to be delivered from is sin, or moral alienation; and redemption is restoration to a life of ethical goodness. This is true only under the Christian interpretation which purges the Old Testament of its racism. Viewed objectively, the so-called moral element in the Old Testament is a blatantly racist favoritism. But if ‘Israel’ means a God-determined, new community of good men and women, rather than the racist society of an Ezra, then the Christian claim is surely right. It is in the New Testament that, as both the objective scholar and the Christian agree, this deepening of the meaning of death and restoration take place, The New Testament attitude to suffering, for instance, exemplified in 2 Corinthians 12:9-10, is evidence of the deepening in question. No Old Testament Prophet could have said such words as these:

And He said unto me: ‘My grace is sufficient for thee: for My strength is made perfect in weakness.’ Most gladly, therefore, will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore, I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecution, in distresses for Christ’s sake, for when I am weak, then am I strong.

Another aspect in which redemption radically differs in the New Testament from the Old Testament is that the former conceives of it as present, as a blessing to be immediately dispensed, not as a distant event to take place at some future time. For the racist it was necessary to conceive of redemption as a historical event which can come only in the fixture. But in the interiorized ethic of Jesus, every person may be redeemed immediately who satisfies the requisite of radical self-transformation. To the Christian, salvation, though historically a past experience, is re-lived in his daily act of worship. For him, redemption is an entry into the divine fellowship which nothing can interrupt or prevent. It is necessary, once he has committed the act of faith; and this necessity is at the root of his complacency. It is inseparable from the concept of redemption as a fait accompli, as something already substantially achieved.

Christians⁴⁹ usually add, in addition to these observations, that their concept of redemption is special in being grounded in the sheer mercy of God. It is not a reward after judgement, the outcome of a universal ‘if…then’ command, whereby God grants in strict justice a promised recompense. This is characteristic of some aspects of Judaism but is the special distinction of Islam. Islam, too, teaches the mercy of God. The most frequently called-upon name of God in Islam is al-Rahmān, i.e. the merciful, and after it, is al-Rahīm, the always mercy-giving. But God’s mercy does not necessarily run counter to justice. He is merciful and just. Where mercy and justice conflict, justice is always the higher value in matters pertaining to creation as a whole. For if

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creation is to stand, it must be an orderly one. A cosmos cannot be a cosmos unless it is based upon justice; however mercy may temper justice in individual occasions, it cannot be the basis of the whole. Nor is there truth in the Christian claim that, in God, mercy is ‘higher’ than justice. True, the Christ-event does point to the very high place mercy occupies in the hierarchy of divine attributes. But it is not evidence that mercy is the highest, or as the claim goes, that it is the very nature of God. There must be a higher principle which requires that God would enable or create the Christ-event. The statements that ‘Sin had to be counteracted’ ‘man had to be ransomed’, ‘Jesus had to die and be resurrected if redemption is to be’, imply (and are impossible without) some such higher principle. That principle is justice. Justice, therefore, is the more conditioned, and hence, the higher value.

According to some, the death of Christ is a suffering which has been justly inflicted upon the man, Jesus Christ, as the voluntary representative and type of mankind, in satisfaction of an obligation or debt owed by mankind for their sin. The act of Jesus is sacrifice; the act of God the Father who sent Jesus is mercy, and the act of God who demanded that the Father do something in expiation, is justice. All the other qualities of the Christ-revelation are subordinate to this, that God demanded it as retribution and that Jesus carried it out as expiation. But this view presents great difficulties.

The first difficulty is that this theory of redemption and of justice as a whole, implies that pain—of whatever level—is an adequate retribution for moral evil. From a purely Christian point of view, pain should never be returned for evil, however great that evil. From an ethical point of view, to inflict pain is an injustice, a disturbance of the flow of life which cannot, by nature, undo any previous disturbance. Even the educational value of inflicting pain is questionable. On the spectator’s side, it can brutalize the spirit. On the sufferer’s side, the value of extreme pain is realized only very rarely, since most people are broken by such experiences and inhibit them. Where it is realized, however, it is purely a personal value, exclusively apprehended by the sufferer alone. It is hard therefore to see how the pain of crucifixion is supposed to work either as a retribution for ‘original sin’ or as a way of undoing ‘original sin’.

The second difficulty is presented by the vicariousness of Christ’s suffering. If it is moral evil that is to be atoned for—and it surely is in this case understood to be moral—then nobody can atone for anyone else’s sin. A moral evil, which is a determination of the inner self of the moral subject, cannot be touched, let alone expiated, by anything external to that self, be it another man or God. Such expiation begins and ends within the soul of the evil-deer. Nobody can do it for him. Christianity does require repentance as the first and necessary condition of redemption.⁵⁰ However, it also demands faith, understood as an act of will, to be followed by obedience. But if an individual’s repentance is complete, sincere, etc., then by that very achievement, what-

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ever is necessary for the expiation and salvation of that moral subject has been achieved also: Christ’s act of expiation is then superfluous.

According to another view, however, the Christ-revelation achieves redemption by giving mankind the most perfect (divine) example of obedience to and faith in God, of repentance and expiation of sin. Mankind is moved by the appeal of that example, to realize like obedience, faith, repentance, and expiation. In other words, the value of the redemptive act of Jesus is holly didactic. This has been the view of liberal Christian thinkers of every generation.⁵¹

Even the opponents of this didactic view do not criticize it as false but as inadequate, thus tacitly recognizing the element of truth it contains. The didactic value of the Christ-revelation may not be limited to Jesus’ condemnation at the hands of the Pharisees, but should apply equally to all his sayings and actions. His life came to a crisis and consummation in the events of Good Friday, but the nature of the moving power that issues from one realization of value is not different from that which issues from another, however they may differ in intensity. Both belong to the same mode of being. Moreover, this view correctly understands the ineffably personal character of repentance and of moral transformation which is what we have discovered to be the essence of the ethical breakthrough of Jesus.

But if the didactic approach is right, then ‘redemption’ is a teaching by the best of teachers; and Christ is not the savior who saved and salvation not assured by faith alone.⁵² Conversion to Christianity, would then mean the judgement that Jesus’ way is the right way. It is not something mysterious that happens to the convert, but a change of mind which he achieves. Christianity could not then be the religion of redemption, but a ‘way’. Jesus could not then be worshipped as redeemer or savior, but would be revered as a saint, genius, inspired man—in short as the Prophet Jesus whom Muslims revere.

It would be wrong to understand the didactic value of Christ’s life on earth simply as a body of precepts, given explicitly or implicitly. Besides such precepts, the greater value of the teaching of Jesus is constituted in his life lived and witnessed. He apprehended values and expressed them in life as well as in words—the values shone forth, as it were, from the real-instances in which they were witnessed and affected the witnesses directly and immediately. This is no slight strategy, but the most affective and therefore the most powerful. The person of a hero does far more to affect people in favor of heroism (the value he has realized in his heroic acts) than a library of conceptual analyses of these values, however elaborate; one work of art does more to affect people in favor of its aesthetic value than any number of theoretical dissertations on aesthetics. Jesus was a supreme master of this strategy. His teachings do not use concepts to produce a direct conceptual grasp of the values in question but, poetically construct in the imagination a picture of the real-instance of value, and then enable that imagined real-instance to produce, like any other real-instance, an intuition in the whole person, of the value realized. This power of

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expression and person that Jesus had is, undoubtedly, derived from the power of the Will of God—insofar as God’s Will is comprehensible to man and concerns him—and that is what we mean when we acknowledge that Jesus was divinely inspired, not just inspired. That Jesus exercised this power is not grounds for regarding him ‘as’ God or even as ‘other’ than man. Other prophets, heroes, saints and geniuses have exercised the same kind of power, each according to the degree and values that each realized in life.

Value has a power to leap out of the real-instance in which it is realized and touch the consciousness of a witness. Deeply affected or ‘determined’ by that value, the witness feels impelled to enact it in a new real-instance. This process is called in Arabic ta’addi and refers to the ‘transitiveness’ of virtue and of the good. And certainly it is this ‘transitiveness’ which Horace Bushnell had in mind in his explanation of what he misnames ‘the vicariousness of Jesus Christ’s sacrifice.’⁵³ Bushnell set out to find a rational interpretation of the idea that Jesus suffered ‘vicariously’ on behalf of mankind. How could one individual (innocent in this case) be ‘substituted’ for the guilty multitude and suffer punishment in their place? After an inspired description of the events of the Christ-revelation, Bushnell concludes that in a spiritual religion such as Christianity, ‘substitution’ can only take place on a moral, and not a real or literal, level. The ‘substitution’ of Christ should not be understood legally but morally. Therefore, the proper analogy for what happened in the Christ-event is not a law-court but a family where personal relationships are such that individuals do, out of love, suffer ‘for’ others. Bushnell draws on the experience of identification of lover and beloved. Indeed, he finds this principle not only pervading the whole range of human experience (Bushnell, 1866, vol.1, p.53), but exemplified everywhere in the universe. It is then a cosmic law, he concludes, and the moral order of creation is based on the principle of ‘vicarious sacrifice’ whose symbol and index is the cross and which is a perfection of God, a divine attribute, from eternity (p.73).

Obviously, Bushnell’s enthusiasm for the discovery of the transitiveness of moral values has mingled with a Christian zeal to justify the savior thesis. lf we look more closely at the lover-beloved relationship, we can see why and where this zeal is misplaced. First of all, it is the lover who is ‘determined’ by the moving appeal of values realized in the beloved and not the other way round. As lover, he is ‘the higher potentiality’; whereas the beloved is ‘the higher actuality’. In this relation, the beloved, as higher actuality, moves and ‘determines’ the lover who, as higher potentiality, is moved and ‘determined’. The beloved is the doer; the lover is the sufferer. The beloved does not suffer any ‘determination’ in this process unless he or she loves in turn, and thus reverses the flow of moving appeal from one pole to the other. The love relation between humans usually involves both these directions at once, but not necessarily. (The Majnūn—Layla relation

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which Arabic poetry has made famous is not an unusual, and certainly not unique, phenomenon.)

In the case of Jesus Christ, there is no doubt that he loved mankind. But there were very, very few persons in his life by whom he was ‘determined’ in the sense of suffering, as higher potentiality, ‘determination’ by their higher actuality. Jesus, let us say, had too much to give, to teach. Even the men and women he most loved will have realized only some of the values that he esteemed. Jesus knew and ‘loved’ the values themselves as such directly and immediately. He did not need to seek them in real-instances in the world. He was a prophet of God, and as prophet, it was his peculiar power and distinction to see what God revealed to him immediately. It is then far from precise to say that Jesus loved human beings. What he loved was not real-existent human beings but ‘humanity’ in the sense of what human beings ought to become.

Thus, it is more accurate to say that Jesus was the beloved, rather than the lover. And he was beloved precisely because ‘humanity’ was realized in him, and he was its real-instance. As the beloved, he is the higher actuality, the agent. The men and women who saw him saw in him the real-instance of high moral value. In consequence, they were higher potentialities in whom the radical inner transformation took place. There is no rational sense, therefore, in which Jesus may be said to have suffered vicariously. Jesus was the beloved, the doer, not the lover, the sufferer. Bushnell’s desire to deduce ‘vicarious sacrifice’ from the transitiveness of value, and his attribution of it to the God-head whose Will is pure actuality, are exaggerations prompted by his saviorist inclinations.

Redemption, as a real event, cannot be moral or spiritual. If it takes place, if the ‘substitution’ of innocent Jesus for guilty mankind is accepted, it is accepted really, ‘legally’. It cannot be accepted as an ‘idea’. Then, if it has taken place, it cannot leave any room for further endeavor to be saved. If it did happen that Jesus died for man, and man’s sins are paid for once and for all, what need is there even for repentance, indeed, for being a Christian at all? In this scheme of things, man is a moral puppet. He is saved but not by his own agency, just as he has sinned, compelled by the necessity of creation being what it is. As a puppet, it is no wonder that the Christian who acts consistently with the logic of the doctrine, is vulnerable to spiritually fatal attacks of ethical complacency. It ought not to be denied, for instance, that what Christendom has allowed itself to do to the non-Christian world during the last five centuries, (not to speak of the earlier centuries after the Nicene Council in 325) is one effect of that self-righteousness which belief in a savior engenders and cultivates. From this dark shadow that accompanies the doctrines of necessary sin and mysterious salvation, there is no escape except in paradox. The shadow, in individual and collective life, cripples the moral imagination so that with all the power in the world to do good, that power creates only more intractable problems for itself And in the face of

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the dark realities that we all inhabit, what light enters from such assertions as these: man is indeed saved, but he has still to save himself, his debt (for ‘original sin’) is paid, yet he remains indebted.

Notes and references

Notes

¹           The Gospels were written at a time when Christians could look back and glory in the Cross as ordained by the purpose of God’ (D.M. Baillie, 1961, p.181). In thus answering the question, ‘Why did Jesus die?’, the author is tacitly acknowledging that the Gospels were written at a time when their authors had already fallen under the influence of the transvaluation of Jesus in Christian doctrine. If so, it is only natural that that doctrine would shape their accounts of the life and teaching of Jesus. This makes those accounts less trustworthy as records of the life-events of the historical Jesus—a conclusion which seems not to trouble Baillie.

²           For authoritative presentation of the teachings of Christian Science, see Science and HeaIth by Mary Baker Eddy (the founder of the sect); the book is, for adherents, holy scripture on a level with the Bible and read in their churches as liturgy.

³           A good case can be, and has been, made that gnosticism directly inspired the Fourth Gospel and a fair portion of the corpus of Pauline and other Apostolic pronouncements. See Rudolph BuItmann, 1958, vol.2, pp.3-92.

⁴           Plutarch spoke highly of the system of morals which the Zoroastrians had deduced from this divine struggle (De Isis et Osiris). For the teachings of Zoroastrianism see, in addition to the Zend Avesta and the encyclopedic literature, J.H. MouIton, 1917; Otto G. Wesendonk, 1933; and J. Duchesne-Guillemin, 1948.

⁵           This and the previous quotations from Psalms are assigned by some scholars to the Persian or early Greek period (see Briggs, 1906, vol.2, p.4). Moses Buttenwieser attributes this psalm to late pre-Exilic times, but is careful to view it in opposition to ‘the blind materialism of the degenerate masses... from the rise of Amos [circa 760] down to the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC’ (Buttenwieser, 1938, p.186), The ‘degenerate masses’, however, are themselves the Jews and he does not elaborate upon the nature of their degeneracy. For our argument, therefore, his and similar evidence remains besides the point.

⁶           For a fuller comparison than is here possible, see Faruqi 1963.

⁷           This is the considered judgement of N. P. Williams, foremost Christian authority on the doctrine of the Fall. (See note 16 below, p. 169).

⁸           Before his conversion, Paul, whose pre-conversion name was Saul, was an arch-conservative Jew, a Pharisee in full alliance with that Sanhedrin which condemned Jesus to death. He was commissioned by that body to prosecute the disciples of Jesus and stamp out the danger that threatened

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to split Jewry. That he distinguished himself in his work is clearly shown by the New Testament account of his conversion (Acts 9:1-27). On a trip to Damascus for which he volunteered in order to bring ‘slaughter against the disciples of the Lord’ (Acts: 9:1), he suffered a stroke which left him blind but during which he saw a vision of Jesus. Acts reports that Jesus had asked him, ‘Why persecutest thou me?’ Consternated, Paul retorted, ‘Who art thou, Lord?’ to which Jesus answered, ‘l am Jesus whom thou persecutest’. Suggesting that Jesus had overpowered Saul, Acts adds that Jesus exclaimed, ‘It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks’ (9:4-5). Paul’s contribution to Christian doctrine on this subject is found in a number of passages in his Epistles. The most relevant are Romans 5-7 and 1 Corinthians 15, and Galatians 5.

⁹           That this was Paul’s reasoning in this passage is also held by Williams, 1927, p.32, where he writes: ‘The doctrine of man and of sin which underlies the whole passage (Romans 5:12-21) should now be sufficiently clear. Man derived from Adam… by physical heredity, the poison of suppressed sinfulness which during four millennia or thereabout... from Adam unto Moses… was unable to find its natural outlet in law-breaking, because there was no law to break. The Mosaic Law was then applied to mankind, as a son of sharp, stinging fomentation, designed to bring this innate but suppressed poison up to the surface of the individual consciousness, so that it might discharge itself in the shape of actual sins. Sin, having been thus externalized and concretized, could then be dealt with on forensic lines, by means of a judicial atonement and acquittal’.

¹⁰          William Sanday and A.C. Headlam, 1920, for example; p.212; ‘There runs through his [PauI’s] words an intense sympathy with nature in and for itself He is one of those like St Francis of Assisi to whom it is given to read as it were the thoughts of plants and animals. He seems to lay his ear to the earth and the confused murmur which he hears has a meaning for him: it is creation’s yearning for that happier state intended for it and of which it has been defrauded’. An instance of poetic impressionism that long ago bid farewell to either common sense or scientific fact.

¹¹          This is the interpretation of N.P. Williams. He gives it after rejecting, for the same reasons as we do, the anthropomorphic conception of nature presented in Sanday and Headlam, 1920, pp.158-9.

¹²          Yet Paul did call Jesus a man ‘in the likeness of sinful flesh’ and asserted that God, ‘for sin, condemned sin in the flesh’ (Romans, 8:3) which imply that flesh is in itself sinful and evil. This is usually explained as meaning a condemnation of the flesh on account of its natural tendency, or impulse, to transgress the law. That this ‘tendency’ can be the source of art, heroism, genius, that it can be ‘cultivated’ and ‘oriented’ is an idea altogether absent from Paul whose mind runs here in perfect accord with Manichean dualism of mind and body.

¹³          There is disagreement among scholars as to the dates of the various writings that have come down to us from the hands of the Apostolic Fathers. They arc: 1and 2 Clement, or the first and second letters of Clement of Rome to the Corinthians; the letters of Ignatius of Antioch to the Ephesians, Magnesians, Trullians, Romans, Philadelphians, Smyrneans

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and to Polycarp; PoIycarp’s letter to the Philippians, the Martyrdom of Polycarp; The Didache, an anonymous teaching of the twelve apostles; the Epistle of Barnabas; an anonymous Epistle to Diognetus; and the Fragments of Papias. For texts and critical introductions see Kirsopp Lake, 1917; L. Schopp, 1948. The classical treatment of their chronology is to be found in Adolph Harnack, 1893-1904.

¹⁴          There is a passionate, sweeping denial of the worldly world in 2

Clement (5:5, 6:3, 7). But this denial has less to do with the asceticism that Western Christianity was to develop in the next century than with a wholesome calculation of the misery and pain in this world that the pursuit of false values entails. Clement goes on: ‘How great torment the pleasures of the present entail’ (2 Clement 10:4; 20:4).

¹⁵          1 Clement’s quotation (17:4) of Job 14:1, ‘No man is clean from defilement, not even if his life be but a single day’, constitutes no evidence to the contrary. First it is a misquotation, and neither the true intent of Clement nor whether or not he really quoted that passage can be ascertained. Job 14:1 reads as follows: ‘Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble’. Further on in the Epistle, Clement quotes more of Job in what seems to be an attempt to deprecate man’s life, being, and innocence, ‘For what can mortal man do,’ he writes, ‘or what is the strength of him who is a child of earth... Shall a mortal be pure before the Lord... Yea [Clement adds in a fit of exaggeration] the heaven is not pure before him’ (1 Clement, 39:4). But no sooner has he said all this than he gives the cause of all this human unworth: ‘He [God] breathed on them [men] and they died because they had no wisdom." Wrath destroyed the foolish and envy putteth to death him that is in error’ (1 Clement, 39:6-7). The lack of wisdom, foolishness, envy, and error are all after-birth developments and make sin acquired, rather than innate. Secondly, in its context, all Clement’s quotation of Job 14:1 purports to say is that man’s need for humility is universal and eternal. Even the perfect (such as Job and others were), so runs Clement’s thought in this section, have recognized the need for humility—don’t you too, men of Corinth, need to be humble?

¹⁶          See Williams, 1927, p.177, n.3, where he confirms, after surveying the alleged allusions to a Fall doctrine in the Apostolic Fathers: ‘None of these allusions... yields any testimony to the existence of a Fall-doctrine’ and feels compelled to conclude (p.178): ‘on the whole, the proportion which the various ideas of the Faith bear to each other in such sub-Apostolic literature as actually survives does roughly represent the balance of the collective mind of Christendom as it existed during this epoch’.

¹⁷          For a masterly presentation of this work of Philo, see Harry A. Wolfson, 1947, vol.1 ch.1.

¹⁸          Consider, for example, his De Principiis 2, 9, where, refusing to attribute malevolence or inconsistency to the Creator, he asserts, in typical Plotinist fashion, that the creatures constitute a Henad or Unity illuminated by the divine logos, in virtue of their identity of nature and operation.

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¹⁹          The concluding chapters of his De Spectaculis are alluded to by Gibbon in his Decline and Fall (1913 edn, ch.15, n.73; vol.2, p.27). Gibbon begs the reader’s leave not to quote the ‘infernal description’. Knowing the addiction of the ancients to spectacles of the arena, Tertullian wrote: ‘If the literature of the stage delight you, we have literature in abundance of our own—plenty of verses, sentences, songs, proverbs… Would you have also fighting and wrestlings? Well of these there is no lacking, and they are not of slight account... Would you have something of blood too? You have Christ’s... Happy in the heavenly kingdom, they [the Christians] shall behold the tortures of the damned, in order that their own happiness may be more delightful... Yet there remain other spectacles, that final and eternal day of judgement, that day unlooked for by the nations, that day scoffed at of men; when so great a legacy of antiquity, and so many births, shall be swallowed up in one tire. How vast will be the spectacle on that day! How I shall admire, how I shall laugh, how I shall rejoice, how I shall exuIt, when I behold so many proud kings and fancied gods, groaning in the lowest abyss of darkness; so many magistrates, who persecuted- the name of the Lord, liquefying in fiercer fires than they ever kindled against the Christians; what wise and famous philosophers glowing in the same hot flames as their disciples., so many celebrated poets, trembling before the judgement seat... of an unexpected Christ! Then must we hear the tragedians speak more loudly, cry more piercingly, when the tragedy is their own; then must we recognize the comic actors, looser than ever when loosened by fire; then must we behold the charioteer all glowing in his chariot of fire, then must we contemplate the athletes displaying themselves not in the gymnasium but in the flames, unless even then I should rather not look at them, but feast my insatiable eyes upon those that have raged against the Lord... What praetor or consul or pagan priest in his munificence will give thee the chance of gazing on such a sight, of exuIting in such joys? And yet even now—at this hour—we have them by faith in the picturing of our imagination...’ (De Spectaculis, chs 29-30, 1925 edn, vol.3, p.91).

²⁰          Others excuse Augustine’s terrible notions as the excesses of the kind of man whom William James (Varieties of Religious Experience, ch.8) called ‘twice born’ as opposed to the sane and cool reasoning of the ‘once born’.

²¹          See De Dono Perseverantiae [On the gift of perseverance], written in 428-29, ch.55, ‘Testimony of His Previous Writings and Letters’ in Schalf, 1887 (hereafter cited as NPNF), vol,5, p.548; De Praedestinatione Sanctorum [On the predestination of the saints] written in 428/29, ch.8, ‘What Augustine wrote to Simplicianus, Successor of Ambrose, etc.’ in NPNF vol.5, p.501.

²²          It is in this treatise that peccatum originale first enters Christian thought and terminology to mean original sin and guiIt (originalis reatus). Here too that we first meet the appalling concept of mankind as massa peccati (or a mass or lump of sin) doomed to poena mortalitatis (the punishment of death). Here too that we first meet the vigorous irrationalism characteristic of Augustine’s work and style. He raises the

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question of how and why God selects a few to be baptized (and thus saved) but leaves the rest unbaptized (and therefore damned). And then he answers the question by appealing to ‘mystery’, to man’s ‘innate incapacity to understand’.

²³          ‘Augustine’ in Cross (ed.) 1957.

²⁴          My authority on Pelagius has been Harnack, 1901, vol.5, pp. 191-203. Most of the material available on the Pelagian controversy has been written by the orthodox and so must be taken cautiously. However, we are fortunate in having some of Pelagius’ own writings, which Alexander Souter edited and published (Souter, 1922-31).

²⁵          De Genesi ad Litteram 6:30-6, 39; 717; quoted in Norman P. Williams, 1927, p.360.

²⁶          De Genesi ad Manichaeos, 218; De Genesi ad Litteram, 6:36, 936, 9:10, quoted in Williams, 1927, pp.362-4.

²⁷          On Rebuke and Grace, 33, NPNF, vol.5, p.485.

²⁸          Contra Julianum, 511, quoted in Williams, 1927, p.361.

²⁹          Contra Julianum, 1:71, quoted in Williams, 1927, p.364.

³⁰          The Enchiridion, 45, NPNF, vol.5, 3, p.252.

³¹          On the Merits and Remission of Sins, 1:57, NPNF, vol.5, p.37.

³²                      Contra Julianum, 5:52, quoted in Williams, 1927, p.366.

³³          See in this regard On Original Sin, 39-43, NPNF, vol.5, pp.251-2.

³⁴          On Marriage and Concupiscence, 1:8; 1:29; 1:20-21, NPNF, vol.5, pp.271-5; and 2:25 in NPNF, vol.5, p.292.

³⁵          On Man ‘s Perfection in Righteousness, 9th Breviate, ‘Hath God given man an evil will?’ NPNF, vol.5, p.161; The Enchiridion, 13, 30, NPNF, vo1.3, p.34. On Man’s Perfection in Righteousness, 9th Breviate, NPNF, vol.5, p.161.

³⁶          Against Two Letters of the Pelagians, 125, NPNF vol.5, p.378.

³⁷          Contra Julianum, 1:100, 102, quoted in Williams, 1927, p.369; The City of God, 22:30, NPNF vol.2, p.510.

³⁸          Contra Julianum, 3:199. Williams (1927, p.377) describes a woodcut prefixed to the tenth tome of the Benedictine edition of 1700 containing Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings and meant to illustrate the passage, Contra Julianum, 1:39: ‘It depicts the interior of a church... On the right... is the baptistery where the bishop is plunging a naked infant into the font; this infant is evidently one of the elect, for the Holy Spirit is represented as a dove descending upon him in a stream of supernatural glory... On the left... another christening party is seen, suddenly halted with expressions and gestures of honor and dismay... in their midst, a nurse holds the corpse of an infant, who was being brought to baptism but has that very moment unexpectedly died... and whose soul must therefore be presumed to have gone straight to hell in virtue of original sin. The picture is surmounted by a scroll bearing the inscription... [translated, the Latin reads: ‘One is accepted, the other is rejected; for great is the grace of God, and truly pronounced the justice of God…  the context adds... But why this one rather than that? Inscrutable are the judgements of God’]. When the whole theory is so horrible, it is perhaps a small matter that it

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appears to assume a purely mechanical view of the efficacy of infant baptism’.

³⁹          Soliloquies 1:18-21, NPNF, vol.7, pp.543-4.

⁴⁰          The Enchiridion, 26-27; NPNF vol.3, pp.246. (The translator has diluted the ferocity of Augustine’s words: the equivalents of ‘damnation’ and ‘damned’, for instance, are rendered as ‘punishment’ and ‘punished’.)

⁴¹          On the Proceedings of Pelagius, 34, NPNF vol.5, p, 198.

⁴²          Thomas Aquinas borrowed the Pelagians’ concept of a limbo for children in order to place unbaptized infants outside of hell, which he thought was too cruel a fate for them. ‘Limbo’ won immediate acceptance throughout Western Christendom, as witness the popularity of the limbo motif in Western poetry throughout the centuries. As regards everything else, Thomas’s thought follows that of Augustine. This is confirmed by the foremost modern advocate of Thomism: ‘Mediaeval theological thinking is dominated by St Augustine notably in the position taken up by Augustine in opposition to Pelagius. And in this the Middle Ages were purely and simply catholic and Christian... When the men of the Middle Ages professed this conception of the mystery of grace and freedom, they were professing purely and simply a conception which is Christian, catholic, and orthodox. At the apogee of mediaeval thought St Thomas theologically elaborated the solutions discerned by St Augustine’ (Maritain, 1939, pp. 3-4).

⁴³          Formulary of Concord of the Lutheran Church, 1, 23. See same in Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics (‘Confessions-Lutheran’) or Williams, 1927, p.-428.

⁴⁴          De Servo Arbitrio, 1 s. 10, quoted in Williams, 1927, p.434.

⁴⁵          G.E. Harkness is ‘liberal’ to the point of being regarded as shallow in Christian theological circles. This harsh judgement of her colleagues is, most likely, due to her deviation from the doctrine of sin. She writes: ‘Any attitude or act in which one rebels against, or fails to be adequately responsive to, the love commandment of Jesus is sin’ (1952, p.95). This, apparently, is not a definition of ‘sin’ but of ‘a sinful act’. That this is not the case, but that it is a definition of ‘sin’ is corroborated by the second definition: sin ‘is self-love and self-centeredness’, the opposite of Jesus’ first commandment, which she gives later. On the same page, we also read that ‘to be a sinner... in God’s eyes, requires enough maturity, knowledge, and freedom to enable one to make moral choices. This is why a little child... is not a sinner, and sin is ‘original’ only in the sense that the natural self-centeredness of childhood, if uncurbed, becomes sinful as the individual matures to the point of responsible decision’. However, Harkness’ colleagues might argue that her insistence on defining ‘sinful act’ rather than ‘sin’ is always open to the qualification that all men necessarily perform sinful acts. Similarly, her insistence upon the requirement of responsibility and moral choice for an act to be sinful, is always open to the further qualification that Adam was responsible and the child has inherited from him not the sinful act, but the guilt arising therefrom. In other words, Harkness evades the issue rather than resolves it. Another

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‘liberal’ thesis suffering from essentially the same shortcoming is A.C. Knudson’s The Principles of Christian Ethics (1943, see esp. ch.4) which, together with his The Doctrine of Redemption (1933) is perhaps the sanest work on Christian ethics in the literature of orthodox Christianity. But even here, the bias in favor of the doctrine of sin persists. After denying the necessity of sin (‘necessary moral evil is not moral evil. We cannot then regard sin as part of the world scheme planned by God’ p.269), he writes; ‘He [God] has not only made the commission of sin possible, but in the highest degree probable—indeed, almost certain... The human world must be regarded as morally in a fallen state’. What can it mean to say that God has made human sinfulness ‘almost certain’?

⁴⁶          Ibn Hishām, 1955 edn, pp.682-3.

⁴⁷          Some orientalists have criticized Islam for asserting the divine origin of the Qur’an alleging that such assertion precludes any literary or higher criticism which is essential. But Islam has never prohibited literary or higher criticism of the Qur’an. On the contrary, the Qur’an openly challenged the Muslims and non-Muslims to criticize, or even imitate, any of its verses. The discipline of Arabic literary criticism derives its principles from the literary forms of the Qur’an which remains the highest ideal of literary Arabic. Nonetheless, the sciences of the Qur’an have always included disciplines which seek to analyze its language into Arabic and dakhīl or gharīb (borrowed non-Arabic words and phrases), the Qurayshi and non-Qurayshi Arabic, and its verses into equivocal and unequivocal, abrogating and abrogated, literal and metaphorical, problematic and apparently-contradictory, etc., etc. The science of tafsīr (exegesis) includes such disciplines as the analysis of the situational contexts in which the Qur’anic verses were revealed (time, place, and cause of revelation, shāʻn al-nuzūl), of distinguishing the new revelations from those which were known to previous Prophets, etc., etc. A glance at the table of contents of, for example, al-Itqān fī Ulūm al-Qur’ān by Jālal al-Dīn al-Suyūtī, would satisfy the most fastidious historian of criticism. When the Christian orientalist is not impressed with all this scholarship, it means that he has been looking for a different kind of criticism altogether, perhaps for the kind which the Bible underwent during the last one hundred years. But even here, all the criticism which has been built around the New Testament, for instance, is surpassed on the Islamic side by Muslim criticism of the Hadith. The science of the Hadīth stands without parallel in the whole history of criticism, and has given rise to disciplines such as ‘ilm al-rijāl (the science of biography) and ‘ilm al-isnād (the science of reportative narration), unique in the history of thought. The ahādīth of the Prophet, having been subject to edition, change, and outright forgery, are comparable from the standpoint of literary criticism to the traditions of Jesus reported in the Gospels. But whereas New Testament criticism did not come about until the nineteenth century, Hadīth criticism had bloomed magnificently in the eighth and ninth centuries. The Old Testament has also been subject to the same criticism and this has led to startling conclusions, not the least of which are those which shattered the old view of revelation, and prophethood, the Biblical construction of early Jewish

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history, and-forced an allegorical interpretation of morally unacceptable narratives. Now Muslims and others have looked in vain for any passages in the Qur’an, whether in its reportative news (akhbār) or in its narratives, that suggest the slightest need for such revision. And the challenge has stood for fourteen centuries. The orientalists’ persistent question—where did the Qur’an get its ideas of past history and other religions—is not precluded by the divinity of its status. For the Qur’anic revelation has for the most part been situational, and the investigation of which problems of spirit and/or history Revelation came down to refute, add to, resolve, or judge, is an old question with all exegetes. From the beginning, the divinity of the Qur’an has rested, and has been understood as resting, on the sublime, numinous quality of its religious and moral message, the divine sublimity of its language being merely an additional accompaniment of divine speech. But this is precisely the position which Christian criticism has been and still is struggling to achieve in favor of the Bible.

⁴⁸          For a well-documented account of the growth of this notion in Christian consciousness, see Hastings Rashdall, 1920. (Also useful: J. Riviere, Le dogme de Ia redemption: essai d’étude historique, 1905; J.K. Mozley, The Doctrine of the Atonement, 1915; R.S. Franks, The History of the Doctrine and the Work of Christ, 2 vols, 1918.)

⁴⁹          Notably, R.W. Dale, 1875; Scott Lidgett, 1887.

⁵⁰          Matthew 3:2; 4:17; Mark 1:15, 6:12; Luke 13:3, 5; 15:17-20; 17:3, 4; Acts 2:38; 3:19; 8:22; 17:30; 26:20; etc.

⁵¹          McLeod Campbell, 1886, W. Adams Brown, presenting Campbell’s thesis, writes in the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics (‘Expiation’): ‘What is necessary, if mankind is to be saved, is that some man shall be found who shall estimate at its full heinousness the significance of human sin, shall accept in filial deference and submission the consequences in suffering and pain which this sin has inevitably brought in its train, and so shall set in motion those moral influences by which other men, following his example, shall be drawn to a like repentance. This is what happens in the atonement of Christ. In the spirit in which He met His suffering and death we have the supreme revelation of the true attitude which man should take toward sin. Christ on the cross identified Himself by sympathy with suffering humanity, He utters in reverent submission His Amen to God’s judgement of sin, and so, for the first time, exhibits in the most impressive way the condition upon whose fulfillment alone forgiveness depends’ (Campbell, p.117). In this generation, this is fundamentally the view of Albert C. Knudson (1933, pp.352ff.) who writes (p.378): ‘The suffering love of God awakens an answering love in the heart of men; and thus they are redeemed in the only way that anyone can be redeemed, namely, by moral transformation’. For a still more advanced view of redemption as a purely didactic phenomenon, sec Charles Allen Dinsmore, 1906.

⁵²          This has been the view of Hellenic Christianity, which a significant number of early Christians held in opposition to that branch of Paulinism which later became the dogma of the orthodox. From the earliest times,

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gnosticism, as the contemporary expression of this Hellenism, welcomed Jesus as teacher or exemplar, as the conveyor of a revelation which can by nature not deviate from the path of reason. To be a Christian, this view held, is to participate in Jesus; and to do so is to participate in his message, which it equated with reason itself, rehabilitating the Hellenic ideal of wisdom (which Paul had pulled to the ground), and ancient philosophy and the philosophers themselves whom it regarded—without the advantage of a special concept therefor—as hunafā’ (the Qur’anic term for pre-Islamic Muslims) (See F. Cayré, 1945, vol.1, pp.10ff; Adolph Harnack, 1957, pp.60-1; J.F. Bethune-Baker, pp.328-29.) This was the view of most of the Fathers of the Church, among whom Justin Martyr, Clement of Rome, Clement of Alexandria, and Hermas deserve special mention. In the Middle Ages this same Christian nationalism, complemented with mysticism, made a comeback with Peter Abélard in the eleventh century. Abélard held that those who are ignorant of the Gospel and hence do not believe in Jesus Christ commit no fault. This implies that the salvation which Jesus brought was not something necessary to being human not necessarily binding on all humans. For that which becomes binding only upon being known cannot be necessary. Jesus’ redemption therefore was not an already accomplished fact but an invitation to accomplish a fact, and this invitation becomes binding only upon being known. Evidently then, if Jesus’ redemption was an invitation to man to save himself, its nature must be ‘ideational’, that is, something to be taught and learnt, not a ‘mystery’.

When sectarian orthodoxy questioned Abélard on this matter, alleging that no matter how moral human acts may be, every person is damned who died without having known the Gospel, Abélard answered: ‘This un-belief in which these men die is sufficient for their damnation, even though the cause of that blindness, to which God abandoned them, is not apparent to us (Abélard, 1935 edn, ch.7, pp.42-3). This lapse into irrationalist orthodoxy however, was only apparent. Reaching back to Justin Martyr, Abélard quickly denied all advantage to irrationalism by defining unbelief in a novel manner. The unbelievers, he argued, are those non-Christians who violated the moral law, who did not do the bidding of their philosophers and wise men. As to those who practised philosophy Abélard wrote: ‘We find that their lives, as well as their doctrine, express to the greatest degree evangelical and apostolic perfection, that they deviate but little or not at all from the Christian religion, and that they are united with us not only by their ways of life, but even in name. For we call ourselves Christians because the true wisdom, that is, the wisdom of God the Father, is Christ’ (Epitome theologiae Christianae..., quoted in Etienne Gilson, 1955, p. 162). For Abélard, the work of Jesus is not the impassable barrier which sects the saved apart from the damned once and for all. From faith to reason and from reason to faith was for him an easy passage which he, like the wise philosophers of antiquity, crossed many times (1955, p.163).

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⁵³          Bushnell (1866) was following the same line of thought to be found in McLeod Campbell (1886), and pursued in this century by Knudson (1933) and by Harkness (1952).

References

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Baillie, D.M. (1961) God Was in Christ. An Essay on Incarnation and Atonement, Faber, London.

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Bethune-Baker, J.F. (1958) An Introduction to the Early History of Christian Doctrine, Methuen, London.

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Harnack, Adolph (1957) Outlines of the History of Dogma, trans. E.K. Mitchell, E. Benn, London.

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Williams, Norman P. (1927) The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin. An Historical and Critical Study (Bampton Lectures, 1924), London.

Wolfson, Harry A. (1947) Philo, 2 vols, Harvard University Press.

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