18 Jul In Brief: No Creature Could Save Us
Below is a summary of a presentation I delivered before a group of interested laymen and clergy on June 8th, in anticipation of submitting my first chapters for my upcoming book. While my notes are not exhaustive and not academically cited, the argument offered should suffice as a rudimentary analysis of the subject.
St. Athanasius, in his early Christological work On the Incarnation, takes great pains in his opening paragraphs to demonstrate the following: “None could renew but He who had created. He alone could recreate all, suffer for all, represent all to the Father.” (De Incarnatione VII.1) Athanasius’ insistence on this fact, that only the Creator can save us, is well-known. His most important opponents until the end of his life remain those who refused to call Jesus Christ “true God,” no matter how many other titles they bestowed to the Word. The conflict over the right to call the Word of God uncreated might seem, in our modern pluralism, more of a trifle and a demonstration of polemic patristics. For Athanasius nonetheless, his enthusiasm was unassailable, because for him the Gospel itself required an uncreated Redeemer.
The Gospel, despite its obvious place in Christian salvation as the necessary semantic content demanding belief, actually has very little in the way of specific definition in the New Testament. The Gospel message, namely, what embodies the whole salvific tradition delivered once and for all by Jesus Christ to His Apostles, is not well-boundaried. The closest we see to a definition is given by St. Paul in ♰ 1Co 15, where he reminds the Corinthian church that the Gospel entails three things he received: 1) Christ died (according to the Scriptures), 2) Christ was raised (according to the Scriptures), and 3) He appeared to witnesses. The passage continues to load the entire Christian theological system upon our belief in item number two, that is, the Resurrection. Without the fact of a Resurrection, we are the most pathetic of all mankind. Without belief in the Resurrection, we have no tether in the temporal to the eternal. The salvific quality of the Gospel hinges on the reality of the Resurrection, it seems.
My question, and really the question of any critically-minded modern, is to ask what the Resurrection actually communicates to us. Why would God choose to save us in this strange way? Was it really necessary that the Word of God die, and moreover, is it even fitting? Why was it necessary, as both Paul and Christ Himself affirm, that it happen according to the Scriptures? Why would the Resurrection require the Resurrected to be divine?
I shall argue that Athanasius’ refusal to acquiesce on the issue of the Word’s divinity is the key to understanding the Resurrection as it is understood in the Apostolic writings. The Resurrection itself is an icon of our re-creation by God, and the new creation motif undergirds the Gospel’s interpretation as expressed by the New Testament authors. Moreover, the Old Testament provides this very hermeneutic insofar as it also expresses, by the time of the return from Babylonian exile, the fact of the Creator’s involvement in the re-creation of the world. The account of creation itself harmonizes with the account of re-creation, such that they mirror one another. As we shall see, the Gospel’s content that gives us access to supernatural faith explicitly requires the binding agent of the new creation motif, which must posit the true divinity of our Creator.
Exodus from Egypt
While both the Old and New Testament go to great lengths to document the new creation motif as understood by the Jewish nation, we may be only familiar with the latter and not the former’s account. Yet in the ♰ 1Co 15 passage, the phrase according to the Scriptures cannot mean anything but the Old Testament. So the Old Testament must provide us the interpretive lens to designate what in the Passion and Resurrection shapes our salvation. I identify here three motifs that ought to be familiar to anyone who has studied the Old Testament as its emblems of new creation.
The most referenced event of the Old Testament is perhaps the liberation of Jacob’s descendants from Egyptian servitude. Its reference is almost always by way of divine utterance: “I AM the LORD your GOD, who led you out of the house of bondage and dry-shod across the Red Sea.” In these allusions to the Exodus, the event referenced is almost always the actual parting of the Red Sea, and not the preceding or successive events: not the plagues, not the fleeing by night (which is of special interest, considering its centrality in the Passover) and not even the Sinai encampment a month later. The parting of the waters, permitting Moses and the Israelites to pass by, is the symbol of God’s possession of Israel as a people, which is why He frequently reminds Moses of the event when delivering statutes or ceremonies to him. Much of the imagery used in the admittedly ancient Song of the Sea in ♰ Ex 15 harps on the birth of Israel as a nation in this moment, and the “heaping up of waters” imagery is an intentional reminder of ♰ Gn 1:9 and ♰ Jb 38, both descriptions of the Lord stopping up the primordial waters to separate it from the dry land concealed beneath.
The creation of Israel as a nation is intimately linked to God’s power as Creator, which makes it more obvious why ♰ Ps 95 (the one Psalm which is required to be sung every day) insists that “The sea is his, for he made it, and the dry land, which his hands have formed. O come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker! For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand.” We ought to worship God alone because He created everything alone, and moreover we ought to worship God alone because we are His chosen nation.
Post-Exilic Restoration
The next motif aligns along the single most influential event in the editorial history of the Old Testament: the Babylonian exile. Whether we take at face value the historical critical method, suffice to say that the compilation and revision of the Old Testament by the first century B.C. could not have happened outside of the long shadow cast by this monumental event. It is the defining moment for Israel, or rather Judea, as a nation. No other event receives so many warnings or predictions surround it, and as such we must pay special attention to its significance. We might easily recognize the echoes of this event earlier in the Old Testament’s chronological history. Much as Judea was exiled east for a grievous sin, so too was the ancestor of mankind, Adam, exiled east for a grievous sin; much as the united kingdom split apart and the northern kingdom was left slain, so too was Cain sent eastward for kinslaying. ♰ Gn 3-4 relates the primordial guilt of Adam and Cain to Israel and Judea; even so, the message is not centered on punishment and exile, but on recreation. ♰ Ez-Nh alludes to a despairing faction of Israelites repopulating the ruins of Jerusalem, intimidated by the prospect of starting over. How is it even possible, we might imagine them asking, to rebuild what has been cursed and toppled over? Yet it was to this very group that the major prophets address with the promise of God to restore His people. The two passages worth examining here are Dt.-Isaiah (esp. ♰ Is 65) and ♰ Ez 37. The latter half of Isaiah’s prophetic writings are concerned with proving that God can regenerate anything because He generated it in the first place; because God is Creator, He alone has the ability to re-create. The raising of Israel from the “dung heap” is expressed in the apocalyptic terms of a new heaven and new earth, precisely because the God who made the earth has the power to remake it. The re-creation will be governed over by His anointed one, in this case Cyrus II of Persia, who shall oversee its reconstruction. Similarly Ezekiel’s vision of the Valley of Dry Bones most indubitably ties new creation between restoring a nation and resurrecting a person: the evidence God gives to prove He can restore Israel is to raise its dead from skeletons bleached by the desert sun. I’d also be remiss if I left out the speeches of the seven brothers and their mother in ♰ 2Mb 7, where the motif of new creation is made most explicit: the God who made heaven and earth from nothing shall raise His people from the dead.
The Faith of Abraham
Last among these Old Testament touchstones is the curious figure of Abraham, and the event called the Akedah: the Binding of Isaac. Abraham occupies a puzzling crossroads in ♰ Gn 11. Prior to his entrance on the Biblical stage, Torah has been cosmic in scope: the creation of the world, the ancestors of all humans, the global flood and then the confusion of all nations’ tongues. Without warning or reason the narrative focus shifts to one specific family, the kin and children of a man named Abram. From that point forward the entire Old Testament only ever speaks about that one family. In some sense this makes Abraham one of the most fascinating figures in the Bible, since he acts as a kind of pivot between God’s universal and particular attention. His response to God, that is, his response of faith, seems all the more critical since it is this faith that God links him to the rest of the world: all nations would be blessed or cursed in Abraham. This culminates in the frightening episode of Abraham sacrificing his only-begotten Isaac, the true test of his faith and the sign by which God ratifies His promise to him. The question becomes for us, faith in what? Faith in God obviously, but by what means? This is the same faith that the New Testament calls upon for human salvation by justification; this is the belief by which Abraham becomes the father to all. It is indeed the belief in resurrection from the dead.
While the Old Testament itself does not provide these clues explicitly, the New Testament amends its silence with its own explication. ♰ Hb 11:19 rather pointedly emphasizes that Abraham’s offering of Isaac was in fact because he believed God would raise him from the dead, an interpretation seconded by patristic sources. Paul’s analysis of the promise to Abraham in ♰ Ga 3 regards this faith as primary to the promise, such that Abraham was only able to have the promise ratified based on this faith and not by works. Paul also pairs Abraham’s belief in God who gives life to the barren woman with the same God who gives life to our bodies after we have died in ♰ Rm 4. Paul conjoins the language between barren parents sharing a “dead womb” with the dead body upon which God bestows new life. It is worth quoting ♰ Rm 4:17 entirely: “He believed [in one] who gives life to the dead and calls into being [onta] what does not exist [mē onta].” The metaphysical language here, comparing God’s creation of the “existing” from the “not-existing” beckons us to creatio ex nihilo in a moment, but first we must arrange what has been discussed thus far.
The Old Testament illustrates for us that new creation is a power proper to the Creator, who is God alone. Much as God created the oceans and the lands above them, He has also created the nations. As such, He is capable of making them anew. As He has raised up Israel from death, He might also do so for “many nations” for the whole human race, through the promise He made to Abraham’s seed. This seed is His Anointed, the Christ, but unlike the Christ He raised up to renew the Mosaic covenant, this would be an Abrahamic Christ. The Abrahamic character of the Messiah, as recognized in the Incarnation hymns of ♰ Lk 1:55,73, means that this resurrection unlike the one of Israel, shall be universal in its scope. Because this power to give true life to true creatures belongs to their Creator alone, again, God must be this new Messiah.
Reciprocity in Generation and Regeneration
The New Testament extends the motifs of new creation into the literal regeneration by which God saves us, and it is through this regeneration in the present that we may enter into the restoration of all things at the end of time. The dire warning that the current “evil order [cosmas]” is ending, per ♰ Ga 1:6,6:14 depicts a fading world inscribed in the Passion of Jesus, where the current cosmos suffers and cries out My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me? as it nears its death. At one and the same time, we have an eternal seal which makes manifest the new creation to come, as mentioned in ♰ Rm 1:16-18, which permits us to sow in the present what we might reap in the future, once again harkening back to the ♰ 1Co 15 passage.
One of the few symbolisms used more than once by Paul in his letters is that of the two Adams, the first Adam and the Last Adam in ♰ 1Co 15:43-50 and ♰ Rm 5:14-21. Not coincidentally, both of these passages deal with the mechanisms by which we are saved, inciting the reader to understand how the retrojection of the Last Adam into history makes present the eternity for which we now labor. As all sinned in the first Adam, all might be saved in the Last Adam, that is, Jesus Christ, and the pairing of the beginning and the end of mankind in this way cuts to a deeper root. The language Paul employs in both letters, as well his pairing of creation and re-creation in ♰ Rm 4 and even ♰ Cs 1:15-19, is meant to illuminate the relationship of our initial creation and our re-creation. One is analogous for another, because both have the same agent and the same purpose even if they form distinct acts and entail different means.
A few of these may be familiar to us already, as they are explicit connections made by New Testament authors. God created the cosmos for His own glory and self-disclosure; as such, God re-creates the cosmos for His own glory and self-disclosure. God created the cosmos through His Word and with His Holy Spirit; as such, God re-creates the cosmos through His Word and with His Holy Spirit. God created the cosmos out of His abundant love; God re-creates the cosmos out of His abundant love. God’s creation of the cosmos is a temporal analogue to the generation of His Word, and so it is with re-creation where we might be also called the children of God. What God creates is good and perfect, and what God re-creates is good and perfect. We may accept these as fair comparisons. Some of these reciprocal doctrines however place greater demands on our theology, as we might see in the doctrines of creatio ex nihilo and the contingency of the created order.
Creatio Ex Nihilo and Salvation by Faith
The force of Jewish monotheism, and thus the regard for this one transcendent God, requires that the Jewish people abide in a restrictive and rather peculiar doctrine, that of creatio ex nihilo. The ability to make the cosmos from nothing, that is, ontological nothingness or rather the absence of subject, is a function of the belief in a single first principle. The Hellenistic schools of philosophy struggled with this notion and often resorted to positing an eternal universe, or even multiple principles from which develop the great chain of being we observe here and now. However much Jewish thought took on this Hellenistic trend, serious Jewish philosophers concerned with subversion from the West doubled down all the more on this doctrine to repel Platonism (I defer to Fr. Torchia OP, 2020).
Two closely related ideas relate God’s power to create from metaphysical nothingness. Both are in service of this basic idea: God’s power to create from nothing stipulates that God also re-creates from “nothing” in an analogous sense. While it is certainly true that simply speaking, God does in fact re-create us from “some thing,” or rather, He is creating us anew from our former selves, the analogous sense of creatio ex nihilo in our re-creation merely requires that God initiate the process of creation and does not need anything substantial on our part to initiate it. We could bare this reality in Paul’s assessment of justification by faith in ♰ Rm 4. Because God calls to exist what did not exist, God calls those same creatures into a new existence, a renewed existence, by His grace. This is why the works of the law cannot save us, because God never needed preexisting matter to make us in the first place, so He does not need our works to make us into saints. Much as existence is a free gift, so is salvation. Even our act of faith by which God saves us is God’s own grace, and is not possible without His call or election.
We can also assess the Gospel contra Semipelagianism. To avoid a lengthy assessment of the doctrine, we can take McSorley CSP (1968) at his word when he identifies the Semipelagian position as a belief in man’s ability to approach God prior to and not as a consequence of God’s own initiative. The position here repeats in more subtle details the same problems as above: God initiates creation and not creatures, because creatures do not yet exist. Likewise, God initiates salvation and not creatures, for the related problem that creatures do not yet have a desire to know God. That very appetite begins with God’s efficacious call. We observe in many circumstances what happens when the doctrine of free will and creaturely contributions to their salvation take precedence over God’s power in creation: the doctrines of Joseph Smith, for instance, abandoned creatio ex nihilo at one and the same time as it enshrined univocal will between God and creatures.
God’s Freedom from Necessity
The last doctrine we must examine before returning to Athanasius’ dictum on the Word has us asking a strange question: can God do other than what He is now doing? The question was asked indirectly by Plato and was pressed by Abelard with far less discretion. The relationship between what God is doing, or rather what He has created, and what He could do or could have created forces us to examine how the real relates to the possible, and how God relates to necessity. Surprisingly this question extends into both the creation and the salvation of the cosmos, for reasons that shall become clear.
I must briefly appropriate Dr. Moonan (1994) and his evaluation of potentia Dei distinction to demonstrate. I need not, I think, present the subject in its entirety as it can be admittedly a difficult theological topic to grasp. It should suffice to summarize: there is a conceptual distinction between the things as they fit into a unified whole, and things as they are in themselves. It is certainly the case that there are pigs that grunt for instance, and while God could have made pigs that also fly, it is not something which fits into the current order of things given that there are no flying pigs. This is a statement about creatures and their relation to the Creator. While it is possible, while considering pigs on their own, that they might also have wings and fly, it is not possible given the state of affairs we currently observe. To say something like “God cannot make flying pigs” does not say anything about God really, but rather about a kind of creature. It is, in a loose sense, similar to saying “I cannot read that book” because I am preoccupied with another book. It says nothing about my capability to read the book itself. What fascinates us today is how the same question about possibility and God’s ability to create also extends into considerations about salvation. The question we asked earlier, whether God could have saved us in some other way, fits neatly into this distinction. The scandal and foolishness of the cross, as Paul writes in ♰ 1Co 1, was not the one option thrust upon God but rather was the method most fitting given the totality of the cosmos, in both time and place. While God could have saved us in a myriad other ways, given the present order of things and according to the Scriptures this was the mode of salvation necessary. Because, again, God made the order in which we currently exist, God could have fashioned a different order altogether, without constraint, which would have made another means more fitting.
The distinction we have drawn in potentia Dei however, as the name implies, only properly works when describing God’s activity. Creaturely activity, as Dr. Moonan shows in his own work, cannot be assessed in the same way. This is because the distinction is regarding a specific kind of relationship between the Doer and the thing done. It is specifically an act of creation wherein the Creator is beyond the limitations of necessity or conception. The act of creation described here is an activity unique only to a transcendent Being, because this Being cannot be described directly; rather, the fact we can only describe this activity in reference to the product of that activity is because the Creator is not an agent in a univocal sense, not a subject in any sense and is not a maker who needs instrument or subject to accomplish Its ends. It is outside the scope of language and the entire cosmos, because language serves to describe only the observable creation, and the Creator cannot be a creature if the Creator made all creatures. The example given earlier with reading a book is therefore an equivocation, because it is not a matter of finite attention, but a matter of infinity. When we therefore describe the reciprocity of our creation with our re-creation, we accept that one and the same Creator is creating, that both creative acts make the Creator beyond His own creation and that therefore this Creator is not Itself a creature.
A Comment on Theodicy
As a brief aside, I’d like to mention how God’s creative activity demonstrates a rather succinct response to the problem of evil. Existence itself is relative to God’s election, that is, His free choice to make this thing and not that thing. God’s election therefore in choosing to save this person and not that person, being a consequence of His free choice, is not dissimilar to His choice in making pigs that grunt and not pigs that fly. From this, we recognize that God’s response to evil is much the same as His response to nothingness: to create from it.
If we accept the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, as St. Augustine and St. Gregory of Nyssa so keenly demonstrate we also must go on to accept the additional Christian metaphysic of evil-as-privation. If there is only one first principle we call God, than evil is deficiency and in all regards does not exist as a substantial thing. This does not make our experience of evil not real, but rather identifies evil as parasitic, that evil itself is a defect and a disorder where there ought to otherwise be something perfect and ordered. But yet this doctrine of evil-as-privation becomes for us a glimmer of understanding God’s own response to evil. God creating us from nothing already proves that when God encounters metaphysical nothingness, He creates existence from it. Likewise when God encounters metaphysical nothingness as it appears in privation or defect, He does not occlude its presence but even makes good from it, thereby conquering it. This is a power only possible to God, as Paul explains in ♰ Rm 6. Much like in the beginning before anything was, God was able to make all that is, God brings greater good from greater evil. The Passion is the ultimate example of this, where the most horrific event ever to transpire in time or in eternity becomes the very means of the Resurrection, the greatest good by which all things are saved from corruption.
Resurrection Gospel
Salvation is really an ontological change, a metaphysical transformation at the hands of the One God. It is no coincidence that at the conclusion of his Gospel summary in ♰ 1Co 15:10, Paul states “by the grace of God, I am what I am.” The Resurrection of Jesus is the event that signifies and establishes the new creation, the change from what we once were to what we shall become: from sinners to saints and from evil to good. It is the creative work of God alone that can make something from nothing, and God alone can make children of Adam into children of God. The Resurrection is thus as significant an event in history as its origins in the first moment of time, setting forth the foretaste of a new and perfect order that accelerates into eternity. The Resurrection as we have seen could not have the effect that it does were it not worked by the hands of our Creator, and as Athanasius told us, only our Creator could make us new. This for us merits the very title of the Gospel, because the very belief in resurrection justified Abraham and provided for us our very host of witnesses who believed in God’s power to save by raising from the dead. “O death, where is your sting?” as the prophet writes, for the Son’s Resurrection is not merely proof of our own, but as Paul concludes, it is the very destruction of death and our change from living beings into life-giving spirits. The One who is Resurrected must be divine, because to be fashioned into images of God, the image of our own Resurrection must be completed by God, who raises us up again, not into a reversal of death into a continuity of life as it was before death, but something much greater: dispensers of grace, anointed with the Holy Spirit to become true children of God.