HOME | 1: The Church | 2: The Messianic titles | 3: The Doctine of the death of Christ
WE have now in some measure clarified the meaning of the affirmation that
the evangelical facts took place
"according to the scriptures."
We have been able to answer with some degree of precision the question,
"What scriptures?"
We have examined the principles of selection and exegesis employed.
In what now follows I shall try to show that the fundamental and regulative
ideas of Christian theology as it meets us in the New Testament arise directly
out of the understanding of these scriptures in relation to the evangelical
facts.
In the application of testimonies, from the Old Testament,
it is a fundamental postulate that the Church is the true, and ultimate, people
of God,
the heir of the divinely-guided history of Israel,
which emerged out of the crisis in which God visited his people in judgment
and redemption.
Out of this conviction arose the whole Christian doctrine of the Church.
It explains the extraordinary confidence and audacity with which a small group
of obscure individuals embraced such an immense task as that which the early
Christian community undertook, and to so large an extent carried through.
In imaginative reconstructions of the first age of the Church we have often
been presented with the picture of a group of puzzled Galileans huddled together
for mutual support and encouragement, and coming to form one of the many groups
or sects within the Jewish community, without any idea that they were anything
more, until with the gradual emergence of other similar groups a kind of esprit
de corps arose, and persecution drove them into closer association, and
so by degrees they achieved a doctrine of the one Church, as it meets us, for
example, in the Epistle to the Ephesians.
A study of the primitive testimonia shows that this picture is out
of focus.
From as early a stage as we can hope to reach (presupposed already by Paul)
the primitive Christians were aware that they belonged to the new "Israel
of God," which had emerged, as the prophets had always said it would,
out of judgment and disaster.
It was the true ecclesia, or people of God, by definition single and
unique, one in all the earth.
The universality of the ultimate people of God is an integral feature of the
final denouement in various prophetic passages,
notably in those of Joel, Zechariah, and II Isaiah.
If the precise position of Gentile believers in the Church was at first somewhat
ambiguous, this ambiguity is already present in the prophecies.
Paul forced the Church to draw the logical conclusions from its doctrine of
the new "eschatological" Israel,
but it is highly improbable that he invented that doctrine.
Nor is it likely, although his wider outlook gave him an acuter sense of the
paradox involved in attaching the attributes of the ultimate people of God
to a community of "the weak, the ignoble, the despised— sheer non-entities" (cf. I
Cor.i.27-28), that he was the first to be aware of the paradox.
For the first Christians the emergence of the Church as the new Israel was
sheer miracle from the hand of God
("It is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes," Ps.cxviii.23; Mk..11,
etc.).
In plain fact, its foundation-members were disgraced and discredited men until
the risen Christ raised them up.
We ought never to forget this:
it is pertinent to all our discussions about the nature of the Church.
If then the whole episode of the beginnings of Christianity is to be understood,
as the first Christians understood it, in the light of prophecy,
what happened was that the existing Jewish community ceased to represent the
true Israel of God,
as the embodiment of His purposes for mankind,
and its place was taken by the Christian ecclesia.
The new community did not take this historical position
because its members were wiser, more virtuous, or more capable than their Jewish
contemporaries,
but because they had been the objects of an act of God.
The crucial moment in the whole episode, and its operative centre, was the
passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
It is in Him that what is essential in the prophecies of the true Israel (the
Servant of the Lord, the Son of Man) found fulfilment.
In Him the whole Israel of God was incorporate.
Its destiny was wrought out in His experience.
In Him the people of God was judged, died and rose to newness of life.
Thus whatever may be predicated of the Church is predicated of it only as its
members are incorporate in Christ as their "inclusive representative."
Hence the Pauline "in Christ" is strictly congruous with primitive
Christian conceptions.
To be "crucified with Christ,"
to be "risen with Him":
these ideas are no inventions of Paul's fertile genius,
and certainly no mere rhetorical flourishes.
That is what the Church is, by definition.
Each of its members is such by virtue of this koinonia with Christ.
Similarly, the Johannine conception of the vine and the branches comes directly
out of primitive Christian thought;
and in fact out of Ps.Ixxx,
which was an important source for testimonies;
for it speaks of a "Son of Man" who may also be represented as the
vine which God himself brought out of Egypt and planted.
There is some likelihood that at a date earlier than the Fourth Gospel the
idea had already entered into the liturgy,
if the eucharistic prayers in the Didache are indeed early
(as they almost certainly are, whatever date we assign to the compilation);
and it may have been through the liturgy that it entered into Johannme theology.
The foundations of Christology have been sought in various directions.
The foundations of the Church's Christology can more hopefully be sought in the application of prophecy in the earliest period accessible to us, because this represents the way in which the first witnesses found the clue to the meaning of events, and of words and deeds of their Master, which admittedly had eluded their understanding in His lifetime.
If we scrutinize the scriptures which formed the main sources of testimonia,
a remarkably small proportion of them are found to be explicitly
"messianic,"
either in the sense that they contain the title "Messiah" ("the
Lord's Anointed"),
or that they can be shown to have received a messianic interpretation in pre-Christian
Judaism.
The outstanding titles which are transferred from prophecy to the kerygma concerning
Jesus are "Son of Man" and "Servant."
It is noteworthy that neither of these titles came to be of first-rate importance
in the developed theology of the Church.
Both belong characteristically to the primitive stage.
The title "Son of Man" is often said to be the title of the
"apocalyptic Messiah" of pre-Christian Judaism.
The sole evidence for this figure is in the so-called "Similitudes of
Enoch,"
i.e. chapters xxxvii-lxx of the Ethiopic Book of Enoch.
These chapters have not so far been found in any of the now fairly extensive
Greek fragments of the Book of Enoch.
There are three different Ethiopic expressions which are supposed to be equivalent
to the single Greek expression which we translate "Son of Man";
whether they can all be accepted as such is not fully clear.
Nor is their precise meaning certain.
Some take them to be other names for the personage otherwise called "the
Elect One";
others as denominating a personification of "the elect" (plural).
Lacking a Greek text, we cannot be certain how much of this part of the Ethiopic
Enoch genuinely represents an earlier original.
Where we are able to test the Ethiopic text in other parts of the work, it
does not suggest great confidence.
Until we know more about this, it cannot be accepted as certain that the Similitudes
are pre-Christian at all.
However this may be, the Similitudes are in any case an isolated and probably
eccentric authority for the association of the title "Son of Man"
with an "apocalyptic Messiah," and cannot be used with any confidence
to elucidate the New Testament.
There are three passages in Scripture containing the term "Son of Man,"
and three only,
[The frequently recurrent "Son of Man" in Ezekiel
may no doubt have been in the minds of early Christians,
but proof that it was so is lacking in the New Testament.
Ezekiel does not appear to have been a primary source of testimonies.]
which can be proved to have been employed for testimonies:
Ps.viii, Ps.Ixxx and Dan.vii.
Of these, Dan.vii and Ps.Ixxx are about the fortunes of Israel,
first oppressed, humiliated and all but destroyed by the enemies of God,
and then delivered and raised to great glory by his power and mercy.
In Ps.viii the "son of man" (in parallelism with "man")
is simply man as such,
man in his weakness and insignificance,
yet "visited" by God,
and by his merciful ordinance "crowned with glory and honour."
There is a clear analogy with the "Son of Man" of Ps.Ixxx and Dan.vii,
[It is not always observed that the implication of the vision
of the beasts and the figure "like a son of man" is that there has
been a period in which the beasts (the pagan empires) were rampant, and the
son of man (the people of the saints of the Most High) was oppressed;
nor must this vision be separated from that in ch.ii.
Now the tables are turned.
The beasts vanish and the Son of Man is supreme;
as in Ps.viii man, by God's merciful ordinance, is given sovereignty over
the animal creation.
To say, as it is often said, that the Old Testament knows nothing of a suffering
Son of Man is inaccurate.]
which speak of Israel, under the similitude of a human figure,
humiliated into insignificance until visited by God and raised to glory.
In these three passages, therefore, the "Son of Man" is a figure
representative of a community,
which may be Israel, as the people of God,
or mankind, as "visited" by God.
If we take seriously the universality of the "eschatological" people
of God,
then the idea of humanity as redeemed by God's grace may be recognized
in both.
The New Testament use of the title "Son of Man" for Christ results
from the individuation of this corporate conception.
"In Christ," mankind is delivered and exalted by the visitation of
God,
and becomes a people of the saints of the Most High.
The term
"Servant (of the Lord)" is used of Christ in primitive kerygmatic
passages (Acts
iii.13, 26, iv.27,
30),
[It has been argued that the use of the term παῖς in
such passages is secondary,
since it comes out of the LXX, and consequently implies a Hellenistic Christianity.
Upon this I would remark
It is presupposed in the application of almost every
verse of Is.lii.13-liii.12,
as well as of several verses from other "Servant" passages, to Christ,
in places covering almost all New Testament writings.]
and it long survived in liturgical usage.
In the relevant passages of II Isaiah its meaning oscillates between the individual
and the corporate.
The Servant is either a pure personification of Israel (or of the faithful
remnant of Israel),
like the Son of Man of Daniel and probably of Ps.Ixxx,
or else he is an individual whose experience in humiliation and in glory is
vicarious;
or in other words,
who fulfils representatively the destiny of Israel in suffering and in resurrection
to newness of life.
In the New Testament this ambiguity is overcome.
The role of the Servant in its completeness is personally enacted by Christ
crucified and risen,
but His experience is no less corporate.
In Him the people of God passes through disaster to glory.
The possibility of a real (and not either abstract or fictitious)
"representation" of the many by the one is given in the idea of a
voluntary act of self-sacrifice such as is adumbrated in Is.liii and made actual
in the self-sacrifice of Jesus.
As Servant, he deliberately associates himself with sinful humanity and offers
his life as λύτπον ἀντὶ πολλῶν (Mk.x.45).
It appears, then, that it is a central feature of the Christian idea of Messiahship
that the Messiah is "inclusive representative" of the people of God,
which in His person passes through the experience of death and resurrection
by which it secures existence as an actual community of living men.
Christology, it is not too much to say,
is rooted in the understanding of the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus
in the light of a combination of the ideas of Son of Man and Servant.
[As we have seen, it is not quite accurate to say that the
Old Testament knows nothing of a suffering Son of Man;
but it is only when he is identified with the Servant that the sufferings of
the Son of Man can be considered redemptive.]
This combination of ideas can be traced to the most primitive period accessible
to us.
This conception of the Messiah as the "inclusive representative" of
the people of God is combined with another view which sets him over against
God's people as its Lord or anointed King.
Here the idea of messianic kingship, as found notably in Ps.ii and Zech.ix.9,
forms the basis for Christology.
The title "king" itself is seldom directly applied to Christ,
except in the Passion-narrative,
where it is rendered inevitable by hard historical fact.
Yet there are passages which betray the familiarity of the idea among early
Christians.
(Note especially Mt.xxv.31-34,
where the Son of Man is also the King; Rev.xix.16;
and the curious passage Acts
xvii.7 , which suggests a reason why we do not find the title more frequently
in our authorities;
to these we must add passages which speak of the "kingdom" of Christ,
or of the Son of Man:
Mt.i.41, I
Cor.xv.24.)
At the crucial point, the kingship of Christ is emphatically dissociated from
the messianic kingship as understood in popular Judaism of the time.
In Mk..35-37 the
Messiah Son of David, that is to say, the expected political sovereign of Israel
in the legitimate line, is expressly distinguished from the person addressed
in Ps.cx.
Historically, no doubt, this psalm was written for a victorious prince.
But the first century,
no longer at home with the oriental imagery of the psalm,
could not understand the expression "Sit thou at my right hand"
as applicable to any earthly prince.
The throne of God is in the spiritual realm;
to sit at His right hand is to share His spiritual authority.
Accordingly, the expression "till I make thy enemies the footstool of
thy feet" was interpreted as referring to the spiritual powers of evil,
overcome by Christ through His cross.
In this sense it was early associated with Ps.viii.5-6
(see I
Cor.xv.25-27, where the two passages are cited in close connection;
cf. also Heb.i.13, ii.9).
So understood, Ps.cx.1 supplied the standing formula for the exaltation of
the risen Christ,
which is an inseparable article of the kerygma in all its forms
and passed thence into the Creed:
He sitteth at the right hand of God.
Now, this passage, Ps.cx.1, speaks of the Person seated at God's right
hand as "Lord."
And it was this appellation, rather than "King," which came into
use to designate the Messiah when he is set over against the People of God
as its sovereign Ruler.
[Occasionally we find archon or archegos as
alternative equivalents for "king,"
Acts v.31, Rev.i.5;
somewhat differently, Acts iii.15, Heb.ii.10, .2;
but kyrios seems to have over-shadowed all other such titles from the
beginning.]
It has been widely held that the use of this title is due to the familiar use
of the Greek κύριος in pagan cults of the
Hellenistic world,
[The question of the origin of such Hellenistic usages needs
more attention that it sometimes receives.
It is not Hellenic, but owes something, apparently, to Egypt and to Semitic
sources.
It is not certain that the κύριος of
the LXX is a pure piece of Hellenization
or that it was entirely without influence upon certain Hellenistic circles.
See my book The Bible and the Greeks, pp. 8-11.]
and consequently that it is not primitive.
[In any case, as I observed with reference to παῖς,
the idea that we could get back to a primitive period when there were no Greek-speaking
persons in the Church is chimerical.]
There can be little doubt that various Hellenistic usages affected the development
of the idea of Christ as Kyrios in early Christian theology and even
in the New Testament itself.
But since the title "Lord" is given to Christ in a testimonium which
is as clearly primitive as anything we have, it seems unnecessary to go farther
for the origin of the usage, however it may have been extended and enriched
in meaning from other sources.
In primitive Christian messianic doctrine, then,
there are these two inseparable moments:
the Messiah is identified with the People of God as their "inclusive representative":
he is set over against the People of God as sovereign Lord.
We may find here a basis for a large part of the developed Christology of
Paul.
His doctrine of the heavenly Man, or Second Adam, has behind it the primitive "Son
of Man" Christology.
The heavenly Man is the "new man"
which the believer assumes in becoming a member of the Church,
and the "perfect man" into which the entire Church grows up (Col.iii.10-11; Eph.iv.13).
Hence the Church is the "body" of Christ;
in two senses:
the Church is the body of Christ in such a sense that it can be said,
As the body is one and has many members,
so also is Christ (I Cor..12), or,
We being many are one body in Christ (Rom..5),
i.e. Christ is in some sort identified with the body;
Christ is distinguished from the body as its "Head,"
the seat of authority over the whole (Eph.i.22-23,
etc.).
As such he is Κῦριος.
This title has in Paul a greatly extended range,
but it clearly starts from Ps.cx.1,
which he links inseparably with Ps.viii.6 in the passage about the heavenly
Man in I
Cor.xv.25-27.
In the Epistle to the Hebrews the same fundamental scriptures recur, and in
the same combination.
In the great Christological affirmation with which the epistle opens,
the Lord at God's right hand (i.13)
and the Son of Man crowned with glory and honour because of the suffering of
death (ii.9)
are inseparable aspects of a unitary conception,
and they are linked with more narrowly messianic testimonial from II
Sam.vii.14 and Ps.ii (i.5).
This writer, however, has brought out a feature of Ps.cx. not apparently noticed
at an earlier stage:
the Lord at God's right hand is also "priest for ever after the order
of Melchizedek."
Reflection upon this has led him to the idea of the two orders or planes of
being, represented by the two priesthoods,
that of Aaron and that of Melchizedek,
and hence to a highly original doctrine of Christ as the eternal High Priest.
This doctrine is worked out on Platonizing lines,
but its starting point lies clearly within the primitive body of testimonies,.
In the Fourth Gospel, again, the idea of the Son of Man is fundamental,
and while it has absorbed elements from Hellenistic thought about the heavenly
or "essential Man"
it is at bottom the concept which results from a combination of Ps.viii, Ps.Ixxx, Dan.vii,
and Is.liii.
The ideas of corporate representation and of glory through suffering, which,
as we have seen, are regulative from the first,
here receive highly original treatment.
In particular,
the evangelist brings into full clarity the truth that the Servant is
"exalted and greatly glorified" (Is.lii.13,
LXX) in his sufferings and death,
and that it is through dying that he incorporates men in himself,
that they may all be one.
(Jn..32, xvii.21).
[See my book. The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, pp.
247-248.]
These brief pointers must suffice to indicate the way in which even the most
original and individual developments of Christology in the New Testament remain
rooted in the primitive body of testimonies from the Old Testament, considered
as declaring "the determinate counsel of God," now fulfilled in the
evangelical facts.
It is often assumed that there was a time when the Church could think of
the cross only as a disaster retrieved by the resurrection, and that only subsequent
reflection found a positive meaning in it.
It is impossible to deny that this may have been so;
but if there was such a period, it is a period to which we have no access.
At the earliest stage to which the evidence enables us to go back, Jesus is
already thought of as the "Servant" of Is.lii.13-liii.12,
whose death in utter obedience to God is for the redemption of the "many," and
issues in glory and exaltation.
This scripture at once suggests two moments in the meaning of the death
of Christ,
The Servant incorporates in himself the whole people of God;
his death therefore is their death;
his resurrection their resurrection.
His death therefore is vicarious,
or more properly representative.
As such it is an "offering for sin."
It expiates sin by exhausting its consequences.
It is to be observed that this representative character of expiatory sacrifice
is intrinsic to the whole idea of such sacrifice.
Such a sacrifice (in ancient thought) is valid in so far as there is solidarity
between victim and worshipper.
The second Isaiah, and after him the early Church, do complete justice
to this antique idea in the process of sublimating or "etherializing" it.
There is a further point.
In Is.xlii.6, xlix.8,
the Servant is "given for a covenant of the people."
Although in lii.13-liii.12 his
death is not connected with the establishment of the covenant,
the connection is easily made.
When the scriptures of the Servant of the Lord were brought together with other
prophecies,
as with that of Zech.ix,
where the King who comes in humility to liberate the prisoners and to speak
peace to the nations is associated with the idea of the "blood of the
covenant,"
then it was almost inevitable that the death of the Servant should be thought
of as a covenant-sacrifice.
Through his death a covenant was established by which a "people of the
saints of the Most High" came into being—
a people incorporate in the Servant as Son of Man, and drawing its character
therefrom.
The fact that another of the regulative testimonial—
Jeremiah's prophecy of the New Covenant—
gave the forgiveness of sins as an essential feature of that covenant,
made it again an easy step to connect the Servant's "offering for
sin" with the covenant-sacrifice.
[We have seen that the combination early entered into liturgical
expression:
see Mt.xxvi.28,
as compared with other forms of the Words of Institution.]
This connection of ideas, in fact, provides the basis for the whole New Testament
doctrine of the atoning death of Christ, so variously developed in Paul, the
Epistle to the Hebrews, and the Gospel and Epistles of John.
This doctrine, though it ramified in all directions, is an integral part of
the earliest Christian theological thinking to which we have access, and no
afterthought.
[It is noteworthy that the nearer we approach to the earliest
attested starting point, the less support is to be found for a purely "Abelardian" interpretation
of the Atonement.]
Both these ideas are metaphors drawn from ancient ritual,
and as such the most expressive metaphors the mind of antiquity could command.
But it is of the greatest importance that both these metaphors entered into
Christian theology through a medium which gives them the reality of personal
action.
The picture of the death of the Servant in Is.lii.13-liii.12 has traits drawn
from the ritual of expiatory sacrifice,
but it emerges as a picture of human and personal self-sacrifice.
It is because he is God's loyal Servant
that he voluntarily bears the sin
of the many,
pours out his soul unto death,
and makes intercession for the transgressors;
and that God accepts his self-sacrifice as an "offering for sin" through
which the many are redeemed.
This crucial feature, of voluntary self-sacrifice, has passed fully into the
New Testament employment of this scripture for the explication of the death
of Christ.
Through all elaboration of sacrificial metaphors,
all our New Testament theologians—
Paul,
the author to the Hebrews,
and John alike—
constantly emphasize the obedience of Christ (obedience, says Paul,
like that of a δοῦλος)
as the operative factor in His sacrifice.