MetaCatholic

(Part of a series on the 39 articles of the Church of England, which so far includes an Introduction, Article I, update, Article II, Article III)

First, let me note two recent posts of mine on the resurrection. One engages with a lecture by Tom Wright, the other engages with a post by April DeConick. Both those conversations are relevant to discussion of the fourth of the 39 articles. I summarise the main points I argued there:

• The resurrection of Jesus is an eschatological event that happens in our history.
• It has no historical cause, so it is not strictly speaking an historical event.
• It leaves historical footprints: the empty tomb, and the believing church, so we may properly speak of it as an event in history..
• Jesus’ body is transformed from the body of his earthly life. The resurrection body is not physical in the sense it was before.
• We should neither minimise the eschatological nature of the event  nor should we minimise its happening in history

Given that as my basic position, it is unsurprising that I find myself with serious questions about the wording of the article:

IV. Of the Resurrection of Christ
Christ did truly rise again from death, and took again his body, with flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the perfection of Man’s nature; wherewith he ascended into Heaven, and there sitteth, until he return to judge all Men at the last day.

There are significant and positive affirmations here: the reality of the resurrection, and Christ’s not leaving behind human nature, but taking it into God’s own triune life in such a way that our created human nature is now in no sense alien to God, but may find its proper home in God’s eternal presence. The article also affirms the completion of that work with that brief “sitteth” and the place of Christ as final judge, when humanity is measured by the one who has shared our weaknesses.

There is, however, some curious phrasing, and an odd apparent omission. The differences in the relevant section of the Augsberg Confession highlight these:

[he] truly rose again the third day; afterward He ascended into heaven that He might sit on the right hand of the Father, and forever reign and have dominion over all creatures, and sanctify them that believe in Him, by sending the Holy Ghost into their hearts, to rule, comfort, and quicken them, and to defend them against the devil and the power of sin.

First, the omission is any sense of activity by the ascended Christ. When the article is set beside the Lutheran document, that “sitteth” looks remarkably passive. In one sense, of course, spelling anything out gets us into serious difficulties. We can only speak temporally of Christ’s “actions” in eternity, so that whatever we say will be inadequate. Nonetheless the experience in time of the Church is of the Lord of the Church active within its life, and the article is curiously muted about that.

By contrast there is the, to my ears frankly bizarre, expansion of the Lutheran view on the resurrection. Christ “took again his body, with flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the perfection of Man’s nature.” (A recent post by Peter Kirk took this even further by adding blood to the mix.). Now if the intent is to state in the strongest possible terms that what we truly are as humans has an eternal  home in God, because all that makes us human is taken by Jesus into the fullness of the divine life, then I want to agree. But I honestly can’t get my head round this way of trying to say it, and think it is at best misleading.

In the longest scriptural discussion of the resurrection, Paul is at some pains to stress that one’s body (which seems to stand in part for one’s actual real existence) needs to be appropriately constituted for one’s domain. In that particular discourse, flesh and blood belong to this existence, but not to that of the kingdom (1 Cor 15). Paul concludes:

What I am saying, brothers and sisters, is this: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Listen, I will tell you a mystery! [i.e. revealed secret] We will not all die, but we will all be changed (1 Cor 15:50-51 NRSV)

The article seems to me to so minimise that transformation, that it is barely visible. Paul is relatively reticent about his affirmations, but is positive both that the earthly stuff of the body will be transformed into another spiritual kind of stuff, and that the transformed body will share a continuous identity with what it was before. Just as for us, so for Jesus (or vice versa), resurrection implies both continuity and discontinuity. The problem with the article is that there is no discontinuity, just a temporary blip of death in the same body. It seems to me, here, both to state less than Paul (no discontinuity) and more than Paul (ascribing flesh and bones to the body).

I don’t know enough to be certain, but find myself wondering whether this odd statement is prompted by disputes over the location of Christ’s body in eucharistic doctrine. At its simplest, Lutherans wished to speak of Christ’s body as ubiquitous and so conjoined with the bread and wine in every celebration of the Eucharist, Calvinists denied this in favour of its single heavenly location. This would tie in with the so-called Black Rubric of the 1552 Prayer Book (scroll to the end):

And as concernynge the naturall body and blood of our saviour Christ, they are in heaven and not here. For it is agaynst the trueth of Christes true natural bodye, to be in moe places then in one, at one tyme.

I will eventually get to the articles dealing with the Eucharist, so I’m not going to get into the sacramental debates here. But this idea that Christ’s resurrection body is a “natural” body (natural??!!) that can only be in one place at one time, and that place is heaven, would seem to point to one explanation for the article’s wording. It perhaps also helps explain that rather inactive “sitteth”. It makes some sense to see them together, and realise that some serious category confusion is going on between temporal and eternal existence. Heaven is not a place like earth, eternity is not a moment in time. Christ is not  confined to sitting around as though his Father’s right hand is some kind of waiting room for the parousia, but is present to and for the world in the working of the Spirit. Where this article (when read in conjunction with the rubric) goes badly wrong is in ascribing the temporal physical limitations of the incarnation to the ascended and eternal Lord.

We can affirm with the article the transformation in history of the body of Jesus from death to life, leaving the tomb empty. We can affirm the identity of the one who was born of the Virgin Mary and crucified under Pontius Pilate, to be the very same identity who was raised by the Father. But we must, I think affirm with Paul, and against the article, that there is indeed a real transformation that takes place between the one and the other, and see in it the first bodily expression of eschatological promise that all creation will be so transformed as to be fitted for living in the fullness of the divine presence.