John Paul II, Dominum et Vivificantem, 10
By calling God ‘Father’, the language of faith indicates two main things: that God is the first origin of everything and transcendent authority; and that he is at the same time goodness and loving care for all his children. God’s parental tenderness can also be expressed by the image of motherhood, which emphasizes God’s immanence, the intimacy between Creator and creature. The language of faith thus draws on the human experience of parents, who are in a way the first representatives of God for man. But this experience also tells us that human parents are fallible and can disfigure the face of fatherhood and motherhood. We ought therefore to recall that God transcends the human distinction between the sexes. He is neither man nor woman: he is God. He also transcends human fatherhood and motherhood, although he is their origin and standard: no one is father as God is Father.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, 239
Then I shall give you the gift of my love.
Song of Songs 7:13
The last two chapters contained a lot of ideas and perhaps you found them rather abstract. That is a challenge with doctrines, and an important fact about them. No teaching of the Church is meant to stand alone. Each one is meant to be applied in life, each one has a bearing on our need of God and his answer to that need. If you are becoming impatient for answers to pressing questions of ‘real life’, please bear with me a little longer. Life will get real soon enough, and we must gather enough resources to cope with it.
It is a little surprising that the Church has not attempted to define how we are saved by Christ. You can find plenty of models and theories, but no formal definition in the same way as the Trinity or the nature of Christ is defined. Most of the doctrines we have were evolved to support the claim that we are saved in Christ. For example, the dogma of the Assumption is all about Mary as Mother of God. This ancient title was thought up to bring home the divinity of Christ in popular Marian devotion. By bearing the God-child, Mary’s body was made specially holy. From earliest times, some Christians had believed that Mary was assumed into heaven (hence the marked lack of Marian relics), and Pope Pius XII chose to promulgate this officially at a time when many people were coming to wonder if Jesus was anything more than a gifted guru, a very holy man with good ideas. The special status of Mary was intended to underscore the very special status of her son.
The Assumption can seem to non-Catholics, and indeed to some Catholics, to be a bit of window-dressing: not really necessary, and a matter of taste to take or leave. But not so the claim of salvation. This is central to our faith. In fact, it is our faith; everything else is just corollary. Yet Christians have never been able to do more than come up with images and stories to try and describe this most important part of our religion. In some ways this is a failure, but in other ways it is quite encouraging. The reconciliation between God and human beings in Christ goes deeper than words can. It penetrates our human nature beyond sin and fall. Our doctrines are like the symptomatic description of a cold: sneezing, temperature, a tendency to be other than our usual, pleasant selves. Invisible to us is the action of the virus, and of the antibodies. The analogy breaks down because we can now describe viruses and antibodies. Perhaps it is more like trying to convey the meaning of a sentence without saying the sentence; we can never get behind words and symbols.
The earliest images and metaphors were very simple. The Cross was seen as the location of a great battle between Christ and the devil. In the resurrection we see the victory of Christ, who, like a modern marine detachment, has attacked the terrorist hideout and freed the hostages. The devil attacks Jesus, fooled by his human nature, only to be overwhelmed by the divine power concealed within. Such a way of thinking appeals to us strongly, since we naturally identify with stories. Writers such as Tolkien, Lewis and Stephen Donaldson give us the same myth in different terms. It closely relates to our own experiences of life as a struggle, sometimes with forces within us we do not understand or like very much.
The idea is sometimes more subtle. To say we are captive to the devil accords with part of our experience. But our sense of freedom and of choice leads to the idea that we also are in rebellion against God. As such, we incur the need for forgiveness so that we can escape due punishment. The debt we owe is too great for us to pay, and so God pays it in Christ taking upon himself the just deserts of our offences. It can be put more acceptably by saying that Jesus makes the sacrifice necessary to all true forgiveness. We also, however, have a sense of helpless choosing; that we know we will do the same bad thing over and over again. This is so despite all we know about God, Christ and ourselves. St Paul puts the problem in a way almost everyone can relate to from time to time:
I cannot understand my own behaviour I fail to carry out the things I want to do, and I find myself doing the very things I hate. When I act against my own will, that means I have a self that acknowledges that the Law is good, and so the thing behaving in that way is not my self but sin living in me … with the result that instead of doing the good things I want to do, I carry out the sinful things I do not want … In short, it is I who with my reason serve the Law of God, and no less I who serve in my unspiritual self the law of sin.
Romans 7:14–25
Paul’s predicament is that of someone who would dearly love to be able to swim the English Channel. Exercises, practices, diets cannot alter a basic inability to swim for twenty-odd miles. He just cannot do it. Nor can I, and nor can you, I would guess. Such a way of thinking leads to saying that there is something damaged about our very human nature. We know perfectly well what we are called to by God, but our daily experience can be more like that of fish trying to build a space rocket: just not what we are made for.
A more theologically respectable way of putting it would be to say that the image of God has been wiped out, or at least defaced, in us. Where we should reflect a true picture of God’s love, we produce a dim and scattered chaos. It is possible, though, to get this very wrong. One can think, for example, that the spirit is willing, while the flesh is weak. This truth is taken too far if we mean that we are good spirits trapped in a body of sin. St Paul sometimes says things like this, but not in this meaning. For him, the whole human, soul and body, is fallen; not something anyone with honest insight into themselves would dispute.
If our whole nature was fallen, our whole nature is restored in Christ. This is why the Church has always insisted on the full and real humanity of Jesus. The idea is that by contact with his divine nature, the human nature was revivified and restored. Some thinkers took this further to say that we become divinized in Christ, though it is never easy to say what that means. Christ became what we are, so that we may become what he is. Pressing the idea leads us to horrible complexities about Christ’s human soul, and how to square his real human knowledge with his real divine omniscience.
Fortunately we do not have to solve any of these; my money is on those fish beating us to it if we try. Each of the views outlined has its own problems and inconsistencies. The devil does not seem any less vigorous now than he was before; indeed, advancing human technology seems to give him a positive advantage. That God should slay his own Son to satisfy his just vengeance does not encourage one to approach the throne of grace. Jesus bearing the pain of our forgiveness is touching, but not always relevant if we ignore it, while his exalting of our nature seems to make our actions irrelevant. But I hope it is also clear that each of the views contains insight into our condition. For example, the satisfaction ‘theory’ in itself shows our reluctance to take seriously the parable of the Prodigal Son.
A problem these views have in common, perhaps, is that they are quite abstract. Undoubtedly we have a human nature, but it is not very tangible in itself. What is tangible is our collection of broken loves and fallen promises. Troops mopping up resistance after the decisive battle are just as vulnerable to individual bullets as they were before the victory. Knowing our forgiveness, we still sin. The question of what incarnation, death and resurrection have to do with us today still needs to be asked.