to us in Jesus Christ. But such a tale is idle unless this loving God is the ruler of the universe. To say that God is one assures us that the God who shows love to us in Christ is the only God there is, and will not be supplanted by some alien force who was not made known in Christ and does not love us. To say that God is without body tells us that the divine love which was locally and particularly circumscribed in the bodily life of Jesus is everywhere, that in meeting the man Jesus we meet the one who is equally accessible to every time and place. To say that God is without parts is to deny that he is a product of historical composition, and so susceptible to dissolution: the processes of historical coming-to-be and going-out-of-existence did not produce, and cannot remove, this God who loves us in Jesus. And to say that he is without passions means that his purpose cannot be deflected by any force anywhere from the resolve to show us love. Here, too, in these words – whether well expressed or ill – is the gospel that should gladden our hearts and comfort us.
For without the proper tension between the transcendence and the incarnate nearness of God, there can simply be no gospel at all. If anyone finds comfort in asserting, ‘God is near’, ‘God shares our human weakness and limitations’, ‘God is vulnerable to the same accidents and griefs as we are’, this comfort is founded upon its being God of whom these things are said. There are, after all, many millions of our fellow human-beings of whom these things are also true; and the consideration of this fact offers us no comfort at all. The power of these assertions depends upon the tension that they embody, and on the wonder that they evoke. They trade on the traditional understanding of the godhead as their subject that their predicates may strike us with the greater force. To recognize and articulate this tension is the task of theology. To exploit the rhetorical power of these assertions while refusing to allow their presuppositions, is to permit theology to become the slave of pathos.
But our reply must go further. We must satisfy ourselves that the use of these particular phrases, these cool, philosophical negatives, conjuring up the distance between God and all created things, does not detract from the assertion of God’s nearness and care for us in Jesus Christ. And here there are two distinct issues to be considered: first, whether the tradition of speech which the Articles follow is inherently capable of making a strong assertion of the incarnation; and second, whether the Articles themselves, which are merely one example of this tradition, make good use of it and succeed in articulating the Christian faith in salvation.
Modern objectors to the via negativa take especial offence at the denial of passion to God. The Stoic concept of impassibility, they maintain, could never express the biblical concept of God present in the sufferings of Jesus Christ. We may usefully ask why this denial in particular sticks so uncomfortably in the throat. Why not object to the denial of body (which might seem to imperil the incarnation) or of parts (which might put the Trinity in question) or of limits (which might cast doubt on Christ’s death)? The reason is that the objection speaks from its own philosophical milieu, which bears no closer relationship to biblical Christianity than did the Stoic milieu which first spoke of the divine apatheia. It is rooted in the romantic idealism of the nineteenth century, with its claim of infinity and universality for the passionate spirit. If the pre-theological provenance of terms or ideas is, of itself, sufficient to incriminate them in the eyes of Christian believers, then, it would seem, modern objectors to God’s impassibility stand in no better case than its ancient defenders. But such an assumption betrays an undialectical literalism of mind; and we should not hesitate to admit that terms and ideas from various philosophical backgrounds may properly serve the theologian in his attempt to speak obediently to the revelation of God in Christ. The question is: what can he do with this term or idea? Talk of the negative attributes of God will have to he assessed by its usefulness in its Christian context, by the service it renders to those who intend to proclaim God incarnate in the suffering Christ; and not abstractly, by what it might have meant to a non-Christian Stoic, or by what it might irrelevantly suggest to a modern reader unfamiliar with the classical Christian tradition.
Here we may say quite simply that at its best the negative tradition serves theology well, by establishing one pole of the tension between subject and predicate that must be preserved in any statement of the gospel. As an example of this we may give the famous paradox of Athanasius: apathôs epathen, ‘impassibly – he suffered!’ It was the impassible Word of God who hung and suffered on the cross, totally identified, through the human nature which he had made his own,with the suffering that belongs to humankind.I do not know how the miracle of God’s love can be stated adequately without some such paradox; nor do I see any future in the denial of divine impassibility other than the loss of evangelical tension, and so of the gospel itself. The romantic divinizing of feeling-as-such must tend to replace the message that God became man, with the message that man, by the intensity of his spiritual passionateness, has become god.
This must serve to defend the appropriateness of the negative tradition upon which the Articles draw. As to their own success in using it we need not be too definite, nor rule out differing judgements. Inevitably the reader must allow for their self-imposed role as summary of essential points, and not expect too much in the way of proclamatory enthusiasm.
There is, however, one observation to be made in their favour which again has to do with the order in which Cranmer has set out his material. The Articles are unusual among sixteenth-century doctrinal formularies in grouping the treatment of God, Trinity and incarnation together in the early articles. The convention was to put the doctrine, of the Trinity at the beginning with the doctrine of God, and then proceed, by way of the creation, fall and original sin, to reach the incarnation in its historical sequence. Both orders are, of course defensible. The more usual one shows a most creditable concern to treat the incarnation seriously as history; but it tends to leave the doctrine of the Trinity hanging in the air,an appendage to the doctrine of God which must be retained for no particular reason or internal logic. The English order ensures that the statement of God as triune is immediately developed in terms of Jesus of Nazareth. Thus the connexion is strengthened between faith in the Trinity and faith in Christ as saviour. The dry post-Nicene formula of three persons in one substance, pure and eternal, is seen to be pregnant with Christmas, Easter and (though as an afterthought) Pentecost.
The Trinitarian and Christological formulae of the first two articles are the deposit left within the Western Church by the Nicene, Constantinopolitan and Chalcedonian Councils of the fourth and fifth centuries, a deposit which ensured (and still ensures, despite mutual suspicions about the way in which these phrases are interpreted) a sense of common Christian faith uniting the churches across the East–West schism, a factor which has been of incalculable importance to the stirrings of ecumenical rapprochement in our own century. Yet Western theologians of our own generation do not read these formulae without at least a slight sense of embarrassment. How much of this embarrassment is justified?
Some of it, no doubt, may be due to the same suspicion of alien philosophical terms which we have already observed in connexion with the negative attributes of transcendence. (We should note, however, that in both Trinitarian and Christological formulae an important part is taken by a word with no pre-history as a technical term in Hellenistic philosophy: hypostasis, translated ‘person’ in the Latin West.) Some of it may be due to the simple fact that these phrases, the product of passionate and profound intellectual searching, have been hardened into definitional formulae, with a normative role for the faith of multitudes who neither wish, nor would be able, to enter into the thinking which produced them. There is an intellectual gauntness about their skeletal structure, so difficult to reclothe with its original flesh and blood; yet it is not an accident of history that these phrases have been held as dogmatic norms, for the Councils, at least, which gave them their authority, intended them for such a role. With these circumstantial difficulties, however, we could live without too much discomfort. The general sense of unrest which surrounds the Trinitarian and Christological formulae today has deeper roots.
Our thought about Christ must conform itself to the event of revelation, to what happened as God disclosed himself in Jesus. That event is the subject of the four gospels, which take the form of narratives. This form is not arbitrary or inessential; it is the only correct way to speak of what God
