Christianity is a religion of
salvation. But in what does that salvation consist?
There have been no conciliar
or creedal statements about the precise manner in which our salvation is
achieved apart from the affirmation in the Nicaean - Constantinopolitan Creed
that it was for our salvation that Christ became incarnate. Nonetheless, it was
the question of salvation that was at stake in the Christological controversies
of the fourth and fifth centuries. However, these debates focussed upon the
agent of salvation.
What was at stake is
encapsulated by two axioms: the first by Athanasius of Alexandria who in
defending the full divinity of Christ asserted that “the Son of God became
human so that we might become God”[1]; the
second by Gregory Nazianzen who in arguing for the full humanity of Christ
insisted that “What has not been assumed has not been healed”[2].
But what is the source of this
intuition about the divinity of Jesus Christ? How did a group of good monotheistic
Jews come to affirm the divinity of a human being, and when they did, why did
they still insist that they were monotheists?
Going back through the layers
of interpretation and tradition, Christianity has its source in the Easter
experience. Those who encountered the Risen Christ experienced the sort of
forgiveness and reconciliation, wholeness and peace that only God can offer. The
reign of God that Jesus proclaimed in his earthly ministry had become fully
realised in the risen Christ.
And yet, while they
experienced Jesus as being in the realm of the divine – in God and of God – he
was still recognisable as the man they knew. This is significant. His
uniqueness was not swallowed up in the great ocean of the divine but preserved.
His humanity was not compromised through its identity with God but sublated / raised
/ exalted to it highest level.
Also central to the Easter
experience was the conviction that the fullness of life that Jesus now enjoyed
in God was also being offered to us. Throughout
the New Testament it is affirmed that through baptism we are “clothed in
Christ” (Gal. 3:27) in the hope that we might also share in his resurrection.
(Rom 6:4) We become daughters and sons in the Son, “sharers in the divine
nature” (2 Pet. 1:4).
In the risen Christ the
fullness of humanity and our own divine destiny was revealed. Christ is the head of the new creation who
summarises or recapitulates in himself the whole of creation. His coming is the
fullness of time (Gal. 4:4), the climax of human history. And so Christian’s
celebrate the Lord’s Day, not on the Sabbath, but on the eight day.
SO at the heart of the
Christian experience is an eschatological revelation and insight. The
definitive revelation of the divine is also a revelation of the fullness of
humanity. As expressed by Edward Schillebeeckx: “we do not have a pre-existing
definition of humanity — indeed for Christians it is not only a future, but an
eschatological reality”.[3] John
Macquarrie similarly argues, “humanity is something unfinished, even now coming
into being”.[4]
For Christians, therefore, Jesus in his humanity mediates and orients us
towards our divinity.
The nature of our salvation is
unable to be captured in a definitive way because ultimately it is God who is
our salvation. It is a thoroughly eschatological reality that defies all
attempts to define or capture it within a system. The hope to which the Easter
experience gave rise came to be expressed in a variety of ways according to
whatever conceptual apparatus was available. In the New Testament it came to be
expressed in a plurality of symbols: as a banquet (Lk 14:15-24); a wedding
feast (Mt 22:1-14; 25:1-13); the new Jerusalem “prepared as a bride dressed for
her husband” (Rev 21:2); or as the beatific vision as a face to face encounter
in which “I shall know just as fully as I am myself known” (1 Cor 13:12). None
of these images exhausts the content of that hope.
In the first few Christian
centuries the emphasis would seem to have been upon an eschatological abundance
that was best expressed through a plurality of symbols. Nonetheless, there was
a need to develop a more systematic understanding that situated the Christian
experience within a broader Hellenistic worldview.
SYSTEMATISING THE EXPERIENCE
The shape of ones theology depends
substantially upon the underlying metaphysical assumptions that one brings to
such an enterprise. In looking at the development of Christian theology I find
it a useful heuristic to identify two types of metaphysical orientation, by
which I mean models for understanding the whole. Put simply I would describe
them as a metaphysics of the past, and a metaphysics of the future, as an
attempt to describe where one looks for an understanding of the order of
creation. Was creation established in its perfection from the beginning or is
such perfection yet to be realized? In other worlds, do we find the ideal God
given order of things in the already created reality or is it still coming into
being, yet to be fully realized.
From a specifically Christian
perspective, these two different approaches seem to correlate with two
responses to another question, namely whether God would have become incarnate
if Adam had not sinned?
There are two traditions here.
The first associated with Irenaeus and Duns Scotus, the second with Augustine
and Aquinas.
THE HOLISTIC VIEW
The tradition associated with
Irenaeus is one that I believe most consistent with the central Christian
experience of salvation. Irenaeus holds that
TOWARDS THE
According to the second view,
the incarnation is simply a remedy for the misuse of human freedom which has
marred God’s original creation, even if the sin of Adam comes to be seen as a
“happy fault”. The very idea that Adam’s sin was a happy fault is, I feel, an
implicit acknowledgement that this approach does not really do full justice to
the incarnation. Nor does it do full justice to the eschatological reality of
salvation. According to this view, becoming is a fall from the perfection of
Being.
More significant, the
metaphysics of the Past tends to canonize the status quo. This brings us to the
question of sacrifice. Whether understood in Girardian terms of creating social
harmony through the scapegoat mechanism, or according to Nancy Jay’s analysis
where sacrifice seeks to constructs culture and male genealogies in opposition
to the messiness of nature there is emerging a broad consensus that at its
heart, sacrifice is about the maintenance of the social order. In both
instances, difference is dealt with in terms of binaries (exclusion and
opposition).
However, the early Christians,
as an eschatological community distanced themselves from this sort of traffic
with the divine. They understood that Christ had put an end to the need for
sacrifice, even if this end to sacrifice was often expressed in sacrificial
language.[6] It is
precisely because Christians did not sacrifice in the way that pagans
understood it that they were seen as a threat to the status quo and accused of
“atheism”. But, as Robert Daly has argued in his The Origins of the Christian Doctrine of Sacrifice the
“incarnational spiritualization of sacrifice that is operative in the New
Testament and the early church”[7], is
eventually superseded by “a secondary institutionalizing trend” which brings
about a return of sacrifice to the centre of the Christian imagination.
As Christianity became more
invested in the status quo it also became more invested in a metaphysics of the
past. Consequently, it also came to associate salvation more completely with
the death and sacrifice of Christ. How does this affect our understanding of
salvation and sexual difference?
PAUL, METAPHYSICS
We can already see in Paul the
tension between the sexual hierarchy in the present social order and the
eschatological transcendence of such hierarchy in Christ. Being in the world of
becoming is a problem for Paul. The problem for Paul is that while one remains
in the world, one remains bound by the values of the world. It is better
therefore not to marry or be given in marriage. Ultimately for Paul, it is the
sexual relation that produces sexual hierarchy.
Paul believed that the
transcendence of sexual hierarchy in Christ could only be achieved by what Lone
Fatum describes as an asexual and “eschatologically qualified asceticism”.[8] A woman
who was unable or unwilling to live according to this state remained bound by
“this world and its sexual hierarchy, belonging to a man before she may be said
to belong to Christ, and thus socially as well as theologically of course
dependent on the superior male in her relation to God”.[9]
How should we interpret this?
I think the best clue is offered by Philo, Paul’s contemporary and exemplar of
Hellenistic Judaism.[10] For
Philo, the essential self, what we would call the subject, is prior to gender
and universal. The division into the sexes (in Gen 2) as a creative act is
secondary and ultimately something to be overcome if we are to aspire to
reflect fully the image of the divine once more. [11]
This perspective is clearly
shaped by a metaphysics of the past where the ideal consists in that which was
established in the beginning. Difference is seen as something to be overcome or
disavowed, rather than part of the process of creation and transcendence
itself.
Sexual difference, according
to this metaphysics, can only entail a capitulation to the social order.
Transcendence consists in aspiring to the status of universal subject (which is
male) – to the original unity that precedes the realm of becoming. The body and
sexual difference must be overcome; otherwise anatomy does indeed become
destiny. With the metaphysics of the past the cross becomes central. Salvation as
a remedy rather than a promise as the eschatological insight of Easter is
displaced by the crucifixion.
FROM THE FUTURE
This is to be contrasted with
the metaphysics of the future, according to which difference becomes a value in
itself to be valued, nourished and preserved. The division into the sexes in
Gen 2 is a higher order of creation. Both creation narratives in Genesis
identify creation with the process of differentiation, and life with diversity.
Salvation as the eighth day of creation –
that is Easter – is not a return to the original unity but the
fulfilment of difference itself.
SEXUAL DIFFERENCE
We can begin to see how these
two basic orientations shape our reading of sexual difference. This heuristic
can also help makes sense of two very different responses to the fact of sexual
difference. My own sense is that a concern for sexual difference only becomes
essentialism when viewed from the perspective of a metaphysics of the past
whereby the God given order established in the beginning lays down the norms
for us to follow.
From an eschatological
perspective, however, difference far from becoming destiny becomes the very
condition of transcendence, of matter becoming spirit. The work of creation and
salvation is the work of differentiation (and mediation) in which we, in the
image of the creator, are called to be co-creators (and co-saviours).
Similar opportunities and
caveats apply to issue of the feminine divine. From an eschatological
perspective the feminine divine is a symbol that serves to orient women towards
an authentic transcendence that is grounded in the particular conditions and
finite limits of our existence. It continues the work of creation,
differentiation and mediation. And takes its cue, I believe, from the Easter
experience itself.
But if the feminine divine
lacks this eschatological orientation, or is beholden to a nostalgia for immediacy,
it also runs the danger of becoming ensnared by the metaphysics of the past.
[1] Athanasius, On The Incarnation, 54. 3.
[2] Gregory Nazianzen, Letter 101, to Cledonious.
[3] Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ: The Experience of Jesus as Lord. (New York: Crossroad, 1980) 731.
[4]
John Macquarrie, Jesus Christ in Modern Thought. (London:
[5] Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 4. 38. 1. Further, Irenaeus explains: “God had power at the beginning to grant perfection to man; but as the latter was only recently created, he could not possibly have received it, or even if he had received it, could he have contained it, or containing it, could he have retained it.” Against Heresies, 4, 38, 2
[6] David Power argues that in calling Christ’s death a sacrifice a certain violence is done to sacrificial language. “Words that Crack: The Uses of ‘Sacrifice’ in Eucharistic Discourse”, Worship, 53. (1979) 389.
[7] Robert, J. Daly, The Origins of the Christian Doctrine of Sacrifice. (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1978) 138
[8] Lone Fatum, “Image of God and Glory of Man: Women in Pauline Congregations”, in The Image of God: Gender Models in Judaeo-Christian Tradition, ed. Kari Elizabeth Børresen. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995) 78.
[9] Ibid., 79.
[10]
Daniel Boyarin describes as Philo as exemplary of “a Hellenistic Jewish
cultural koine throughout the eastern
[11] “He that was after the (divine) image was an idea or type or seal, an object of thought (only), incorporeal, neither male nor female, by nature incorruptible.” Philo, “On the Account of the World’s Creation Given by Moses”, para. 134, in The Loeb Classical Libraray: Philo, Vol. 1. (London: Heinemann, 1929) 107.