#thirtyninearticles

[davebinggeli]

Asserting the salvation of all

A number of Cranmer’s articles didn’t get included in the final 1571 Articles of Religion, including what Cranmer had to contribute in regards to eschatology. In these articles, Cranmer advanced no opinion regarding whether any member of mankind would be utterly condemned- a matter which rests with God. But he did react to the pretension that none would be. Why? According to O’Donovan: 

“For such an opinion has hedged its bets about Christ. It has claimed universal effects for the atonement, right enough, but only out of a certain nervousness that the atonement itself has not achieved true universality. What is God’s love to do, it has asked itself, if Christ has failed to incorporate the whole of mankind in his representative triumph? Why, then, those who have slipped through this net must be caught in another one! But it is not in that spirit that God has offered us his Son to represent us - not so as to leave it to us to decide whether Christ shall in fact be the last Adam or not. There before Pontius Pilate was that new mankind, there and nowhere else. No choice of ours can enhance or detract from the universality of that figure; no subsequent refusal can turn the future of redemption into another course. The question that is asked of us in our time is not: shall all mankind, then, be saved in Christ? - for that question has been answered by him in his time and does not need the living of our lives to answer it further. The question is this: shall we ourselves be saved with all mankind in Christ? For if we refuse and are lost, we have carried away no part of mankind with us to perdition, we have recorded no dissenting votes. Our time is of itself nothing, and represents nothing; but between the living of our lives and that eclipse of our time into nothingness, God has set his time, the day of Jesus’s resurrection.”

What a fascinating reworking of the discussion! 

[davebinggeli]

“Predestination to life is the everlasting purpose of God”

In comparing the Westminster Confession to Cranmer’s Thirty Nine Articles, O’Donovan shows that by placing the doctrine of predestination within the doctrine of creation, the Westminster Confession poses and answers the wrong question. Cranmer, however, places predestination within the doctrine of salvation and so avoids grappling with the question Westminster could not avoid (ie. ‘how can an omnipotent and transcendent divinity live in the same universe with a world of free agents?’). O’Donovan writes:

“The point at issue here is that the classic doctrine (of double predestination)  has undertaken to speak of God’s eternal purposes independently of the revelation of God in Jesus, on the basis of a concern which is purely theistic. The classic doctrine asks: how can an omnipotent and transcendent divinity live in the same universe with a world of free agents? Its answer cannot pass the test which must be applied to all theological utterances: do they show us the same God that is revealed to us in Christ? For the God who made the heavens and the earth and fixed the bounds of history is no other God than the one who showed himself, as he is, in Jesus. That consideration males it impossible to believe in the double decree - at any rate, if it is understood as a doctrine about creation. God did not make beings in order to curse them. There is a curse, certainly, which God pronounces upon man’s sin, and that means that there is the real possibility of God’s pronouncing final judgement against any man; but even that curse and that judgement are a sign of God’s goodwill towards the universe he has made, goodwill expressed as hostility to all that would unmake it. ‘The Son of God, Jesus Christ, was not Yes and No, but in him it is always Yes’ (2 Cor. 1.19). Thus the Article says - and having said it, has said everything there is to say - that predestination to life is the everlasting purpose of God.”

[davebinggeli]

‘Accounted Righteous before God’

The Reformer’s past-tense juridical language (‘accounted righteous’) easily led to the objection that the moral renewal of humankind was unimportant to them. This was especially the case in the context of progressive (or factitive) justification (ie. becoming righteous), dominant in mediaeval discussions. 

O’Donovan, though, points out the importance of the finality of the Reformer’s metaphor (it was, after all, taken from the Apostle Paul). Jesus, having been risen and ascended, denotes finality, completeness and victory!

“We must say that all is finished and complete. The sanctification of the many can do no more than realize the implications of what has already been accomplished. The coming of the Spirit to struggle with the flesh is simply a communication of the triumph that is won for all time. The doctrine of representation permits us to say no less and no more. What God does for the individual believer, then, is not a new and different work, a further ‘making righteous’, but an application of the one complete work, a ‘counting’ of this believer into the righteous Kingdom already established and in place. In saying that we are counted righteous, the Reformers did not challenge the link between salvation and wholeness; they challenged the restriction of salvation to the sphere of the individual soul. We cannot comprehend justification in terms of what God does for each soul; for what transpires within that private sphere is but the expression of a public work upon the widest cosmic front already achieved: the redemption of the human race.”