The interpretation of Christ in Western faith and thought

The medieval development

The most-representative spokesman of the Western church on that question, as on most others, was St. Augustine. His deep understanding of the meaning of human sin was matched by his detailed attention to the meaning of divine grace. Central to that attention was his emphasis upon the humanity of Jesus Christ as humanity’s assurance of salvation, an emphasis to which he gave voice in a variety of ways. The humanity of Christ showed how God elevated the humble; it was the link between the physical nature of human beings and the spiritual nature of God; it was the sacrifice which the human race offered to God; it was the foundation of a new humanity, recreated in Christ as the old humanity had been created in Adam—in these and other ways Augustine sought to describe the importance of the Incarnation for human redemption. By combining this stress upon the humanity of Christ as the Saviour with a doctrine of the Trinity that was orthodox but nevertheless highly creative and original, St. Augustine put his mark indelibly upon Western piety and theology, which, in Anselm and in the reformers, sought further for adequate language in which to describe God’s deed of reconciliation in Jesus Christ.

During the formative centuries of Christian dogma, there had been many ways of describing that reconciliation, most of them having some precedent in biblical speech. One of the most-prominent pictures of the reconciliation was that connected with the biblical metaphor of ransom: Satan held the human race captive in its sin and corruptibility, and the death of Christ was the ransom paid to the Devil as the price for setting humanity free. A related metaphor was that of the victory of Christ: Christ entered into mortal combat with Satan for the human race, and the winner was to be lord; although the Crucifixion appeared to be Christ’s capitulation to the enemy, his Resurrection broke the power of the Devil and gave the victory to Christ, granting to humankind the gift of immortality. From the Old Testament and the Epistle to the Hebrews came the image of Christ as the sacrificial victim who was offered up to God as a means of stilling the divine anger. From the sacrament of penance came the idea, most fully developed by St. Anselm, that the death of Christ was a vicarious satisfaction rendered for humankind. Like the New Testament, the Church Fathers could admonish their hearers to learn from the death of Christ how to suffer patiently. They could also point to the suffering and death of Christ as the supreme illustration of how much God loves humanity. As in the New Testament, therefore, so in the tradition of the church there were many figures of speech to represent the miracle of the reunion between human beings and God effected in the God-man Christ Jesus.

Common to all these figures of speech was the desire to do two things simultaneously: to emphasize that the reunion was an act of God and to safeguard the participation of humanity in that act. Some theories were so “objective” in their emphasis upon the divine initiative that humanity seemed to be almost a pawn in the transaction between God in Christ and the Devil. Other theories so “subjectively” concentrated their attention upon human involvement and response that the full scope of the redemption could vanish from sight. It was in Anselm of Canterbury that Western Christendom found a theologian who could bring together elements from many theories into one doctrine of the Atonement, summarized in his book, Cur Deus homo? According to that doctrine, sin was a violation of the honour of God. God offered human beings life if they rendered satisfaction for that violation, but the longer a person lived, the worse the situation became. Only a life that was truly human and yet had infinite worth would have been enough to give such a satisfaction to the violated honour of God on behalf of the entire human race. Such a life was that of Jesus Christ, whom the mercy of God sent as a means of satisfying the justice of God. Because he was a true human being, his life and death could be valid for all human beings, and, because he was true God, his life and death could be valid for all of humanity. By accepting the fruits of his life and death, humankind could receive the benefits of his satisfaction. With some relatively minor alterations, Anselm’s doctrine of the Atonement passed over into the theology of the Latin church, forming the basis of both Roman Catholic and orthodox Protestant ideas of the work of Christ. It owed its acceptance to many factors, not the least of them being the way it squared with the liturgy and art of the West. The crucifix has become the traditional symbol of Christ in the Western church, reinforcing and being reinforced by the satisfaction theory of the Atonement.

Scholastic theology, therefore, did not modify traditional ways of speaking about either the person or the work of Christ as sharply as it did, for example, some of the ways the Church Fathers had spoken about the presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist. The major contribution of the Scholastic period to the Christian conception of Jesus Christ appears to lie in the way it managed to combine theological and mystical elements. Alongside the growth of Christological dogma and sometimes in apparent competition with it was the development of a view of Christ that sought personal union with him rather than accurate concepts about him. Such a view of Christ appeared occasionally in the writings of Augustine, but it was in men like Bernard of Clairvaux that it attained both its fullest expression and its most-adequate harmonization with the dogmatic view. The relation between the divine and the human natures in Christ, as formulated in ancient dogma, provided the mystic with the ladder needed to ascend through the human Jesus to the eternal Son of God and through him to a mystical union with the Holy Trinity; that had been anticipated in the mystical theology of some of the Greek Fathers. At the same time the dogma saved mysticism from the pantheistic excesses to which it might otherwise have gone, for the doctrine of the two natures meant that the humanity of the Lord was not an expendable element in Christian piety, mystical or not, but its indispensable presupposition and the continuing object of its adoration, in union with his deity. As a matter of fact, another contribution of the medieval development was the increased emphasis of St. Francis of Assisi and his followers upon the human life of Jesus. Those brotherhoods cultivated a more practical and ethical version of mystical devotion, to be distinguished from speculative and contemplative mysticism. Their theme became the imitation of Christ in a life of humility and obedience. With it came a new appreciation of that true humanity of Christ, which the dogma had indeed affirmed but which theologians had been in danger of reducing to a mere dogmatic concept. As Henry Thode and others have suggested, this new appreciation is reflected in the way painters like Giotto began to portray Jesus, in contrast to their Western predecessors and especially the stylized picture of Christ in Byzantine icon painting.

The Reformation and classical Protestantism

The attitude of the reformers toward traditional conceptions of the person and work of Christ was conservative. Insisting for both religious and political reasons that they were orthodox, they altered little in the Christological dogma. Martin Luther and John Calvin gave the dogma a new meaning when they related it to their doctrine of justification by grace through faith. Because of his interpretation of sin as the captivity of the will, Luther also revived the patristic metaphor of the Atonement as the victory of Christ; it is characteristic of him that he wrote hymns for both Christmas and Easter but not for Lent. The new attention to the Bible that came with the Reformation created interest in the earthly life of Jesus, while the Reformation idea of “grace alone” and of the sovereignty of God even in his grace made the deity of Christ a matter of continuing importance.

In the ideas about the Lord’s Supper set forth by Huldrych Zwingli, Luther thought he saw a threat to the orthodox doctrine of Christ, and he denounced those doctrines vehemently. As that controversy progressed, Luther interpreted the ancient dogma of the two natures to mean that the omnipresence of the divine nature was communicated to the human nature of Christ and that therefore Christ as both God and human being was present everywhere and at all times. Although he repudiated both Luther’s and Zwingli’s theories, Calvin was persuaded that the ancient Christological dogma was true to the biblical witness, and he permitted no deviation from it. All this is evidence for the significance that “Jesus Christ, true God begotten of the Father from eternity, and also true man, born of the Virgin Mary,” to use Luther’s formula, had in the faith and theology of all the reformers.

At one point the theology of the reformers did serve to bring together several facets of the biblical and the patristic descriptions of Jesus Christ. That was the doctrine of the threefold office of Christ, systematized by Calvin and developed more fully in Protestant orthodoxy: Christ as prophet, priest, and king. Each of these symbolized the fulfillment of the Old Testament and represented one aspect of the church’s continuing life. Christ as prophet fulfilled and elevated the prophetic tradition of the Old Testament while continuing to fulfill his prophetic office in the ministry of the Word. Christ as priest brought to an end the sacrificial system of the Old Testament by being both the priest and the victim, while he continues to function as intercessor with and for the church. Christ as king was the royal figure to whom the Old Testament had pointed while exercising his rule among men now through those whom he has appointed. In each of the three, Protestants differed from one another according to their theological, ethical, or liturgical positions. But the threefold office enabled Protestant theology to take into account the complexity of the biblical and patristic pictures of Christ as no oversimplified theory was able to do, and it is probably the chief contribution of the reformers to the theological formulation of the doctrine of the person and work of Christ.