Augustine's Doctrine of Love
Chapter 8: The Incarnation
The meaning of love in the biblical faith is revealed in God’s actions in history through his relationship to Israel and the giving of his Son to the world that all things might be reconciled to him. Yet in the Church’s doctrine of the incarnation: the Person of Christ, and of the atonement:
the Work of Christ, the love of God seems rarely to be given central importance. The meaning of Jesus’ relation to God becomes debated as the relation of divine and human natures, and the traditional doctrines of atonement, except Abelard’s, are shot through with metaphors from law court, battlefield, and penitential office which express the theme of love only indirectly, if at all. What would happen to traditional doctrines if the love of God were made the criterion for our understanding who Jesus is and what he has done?
In this chapter we ask what it means to understand the relation of God and Jesus as an expression of love, and in the next chapter we try to give an account of atonement which takes love as its centre and substance.
Certainly to understand love in the Christian way is to grasp what God has done in Christ, and to see what God has done in Christ is to
understand love. We work within this circle not outside it, and do not claim a ready-made conception of love which unlocks all the mysteries of Christ. We are, however, insisting that however we interpret that mystery, our central clue is that God’s being is love and our human situation bears the need for the restoration and fulfilment of life in love.
Consider, then, this approach to the meaning of the incarnation. The Christian faith is that a decisive action of God in a human life has brought redemption, and has begun a new history of reconciled and fulfilled life. In Jesus Christ God has given what is needed to heal the disorders in the human spirit, and to inaugurate a new possibility for every life. Human history, and indeed the history of the whole creation, can now be understood from the perspective created by this action of God in Jesus.
The Church has never considered this assertion as self-interpreting.
There is always more to be said in exploring its meaning and mystery.
The New Testament itself grew out of continuing reflection on the meaning of Christ. Faith has sought understanding, not to dispel the mystery, but to keep it from false interpretation, and to find its coherence with a critical rational understanding of existence. Is the Christian assertion about Jesus Christ the imperialism of one more
parochial faith, or does it really fulfil man’s search for understanding? Is the meaning of God’s presence in Jesus removed from all human
understanding, or does it display a connection with the structure of every man’s search for himself and for God?
We must first state our presuppositions about our knowledge of Jesus and the redemption accomplished in him.
(1) THE HISTORICAL JESUS
We are speaking first of all about an historical person, Jesus of
Nazareth, who lived and died in Palestine about the years 4 B.C. to A.D.
30. We date our Christian era from him. It is in this life, lived out on the soil of a small country in the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea, that the central act of God’s dealing with human history took place. Such is the Christian assertion. Our knowledge of this action of God is bound to concrete historical data. The New Testament speaks about one who was born, grew, lived and taught, encountered religious and political
opposition, and was crucified in the punishment often meted out in his time to criminals and to those charged with political subversion.
What can we know about Jesus of Nazareth? The records about him are the result of decades of remembrance, the preaching of a new faith, the growth of a tradition and its interpretation, in which categories are used which come from several Judaic traditions and from Greek and
Hellenistic religion and philosophy.
The position I accept is that the Gospels are a synthesis of faith and fact and the two elements cannot be completely separated by any human research or reflection.1 This can also be expressed in John Knox’s terms, that Jesus was remembered, he was interpreted, and he was known still.2 The Gospel record of Jesus is the witness to the meaning of life as held in the living memory of the community, and communicated in a process of tradition, reflection and interpretation.
When we speak of Jesus Christ, therefore, we are speaking of Jesus as the Church has re-examined, criticized, and reflected upon its
remembrance of who he was. The fact that it is an historical memory of an actual person is as much a part of the remembering as are the great Christological reflections, such as the identification of Jesus with the Logos, the Eternal Word of God in the Creation. The words reported in the Gospels as spoken by him are there because Jesus spoke these or similar words, or words which gave rise to other words — yet we never have indisputable proof that he said this and not that. Certainly the New Testament record shows that Jesus’ words have been added to, qualified and reinterpreted.
Every interpretation of Jesus of Nazareth grows out of the meaning of his life as it is rooted in history, but it is a history which has the memory and growth of a tradition as an ineradicable part of that history. It is impossible therefore to separate all the original empirical facts from later interpretation. We must try to read the New Testament as an account of what the man Jesus of Nazareth was heard, understood, and recognized to be by those who had their faith reborn through his impact upon them, either directly or through the hearing of the Gospel message preached.
It is a fair question why we need to bother with historical criticism at all if in the end we cannot separate faith and fact. The answer is that it is necessary in order to keep faith from taking flight from history and creating a picture of the Christian revelation which distorts historical fact. For example, New Testament criticism has enabled us to keep the picture of Jesus of history from becoming historically unintelligible when Jesus’ self-interpretation as given in the Fourth Gospel cannot be integrated with the self-interpretation we find in the Synoptic Gospels.
In Mark’s Gospel, to take one instance, Jesus keeps the Messianic secret to himself until almost the end; in John it is proclaimed publicly from the beginning.
Again, there is always the danger of treating the suffering and death of Jesus as a purely ‘spiritual’ action, resulting from ‘sin’ but without concrete historical causes. Historical research points to the facts of the resistance of the authorities to his message of judgment, Jesus’ concern for the poor, and his strictures against the exploiters. Historical research expresses the fidelity of the Church to history. When the question is raised about the ‘historicity of Jesus’ the meaning of the question requires discussion with the secular historian and a recognition of his methods.
We recognize and hold to the historical sources of the Gospel, but we are dealing with the meaning of Jesus as person and that is never something wholly objective. Practically all historical writing contains interpretation of motives which go beyond direct evidence. We have no picture of the inner life of Jesus save a few hints, and we should not try to reconstruct it. We cannot know Jesus’ precise conception of the messianic mission, but only that he did not set the question of messiahship aside in preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom.
The nature of our knowledge of the historical Jesus, and the meaning of the phrase ‘the historical Jesus’, is indeed a critical issue for theology in our century. The interpretation given here of love as the meaning of the incarnation does not depend on any one solution of the problem of historical knowledge, but is, I believe, compatible with every view which accepts the main outlines of modem historical criticism and its methods. We shall now try to see if by focusing attention on love as the centre of the Gospel, we can gain a viable interpretation of the meaning of the Incarnation.
(2) THE PROBLEM OF TRADITIONAL CHRISTOLOGY
It is well known that the traditional doctrine of the person of Christ was developed as an answer to the question, ‘How are the human and the divine nature together in one Person?’ In the context of the word
‘nature’ there was partly the Hebraic contrast of God the Lord with man his creature, subject to the passage of time and death. There was also the Greek metaphysical contrast between the eternal, divine, unchanging being of God and the temporal, finite mode of being of the world.
The Church Fathers saw clearly what was at stake. God must be fully present in Jesus else there is no real redemption. That is why Arianism
was rejected. Christ was of one substance with the Father. But also Jesus has to be fully man, else there is no redemption, for our human
condition must be penetrated to be redeemed.
The struggle to find a proper Christological language was not, therefore, a meaningless debate; but an attempt to guard the truth of the Gospel by finding terms which would not compromise either the divine or human side of the incarnation. The formula achieved at Chalcedon succeeded at least in setting the boundaries within which Christological thought must move. The two natures, divine and human, are together, unmixed,
unconfused, inseparable, and undivided in one Person. The one Person is Jesus Christ, the Eternal Son, the second person of the Trinity who has taken human nature upon himself.
I have said this marks the boundaries within which Christological
thought must move, but let us add a qualification, so long as the terms of the problem are set in the relationship of two metaphysically contrasted
‘natures’ defined as the Greeks conceived them. We can now see that the entire discussion in the first centuries was dominated by assumptions about divine and human nature which are open to question. It is a fact, for example, that on both sides of the dispute between the Alexandrines and the Antiochenes there was a constant fear of introducing any
element of suffering or temporality into God. The Antiochenes,
Theodore of Mopsuestia and Nestorius, had perhaps the stronger sense for the humanity of Jesus. They wanted to assure his moral personality, and the reality of his humanity which grew in wisdom and stature. They looked for formulas for joining divine and human which would protect full humanity. The relation of God and Jesus was a union of grace, Theodore said, which is analogous, though only analogous, to the union of love in marriage.3
From their point of view one of the Antiochenes strong arguments was that they were protecting theology from any suggestion of God’s
involvement in temporality or suffering. He is joined in a moral union, in fellowship with Jesus, but he is not, so to speak, metaphysically touched by the suffering of the man. The Alexandrines by contrast were accused of having to accept in their formulation the view that God has assumed the suffering of man for the one Person is a union of the two natures.
Cyril of Alexandria saw the problem acutely, and it is most instructive to see him struggle with it. If Jesus Christ, the God-man dying upon the
Cross, is ‘the One Person (hypostasis) incarnate of the Word’, then is not God there suffering and dying? Cyril’s answer which we have
already quoted shows how desperately the Fathers sensed this dilemma.4 God allows himself the signs of grief though he remains really
impassible. It may strike us of a later time as curious that so much effort was expended to make certain that Jesus’ death on the cross could not really mean suffering for God. The reason lies in the Greek conviction that only a God who is beyond all movement, impervious to all
influence from beyond himself, and therefore free from the possibility of suffering can really be God.
We need not deny that something important is being protected here; but is it being wisely protected? Suppose we reverse the Greek assumption and hold that God’s capacity to involve himself in the suffering of his creatures and of his incarnate Son is the supreme manifestation of his divinity. His suffering is the exhibition of his perfection, which is not that of impassible being but of love which cannot be impassible.
With all respect to the Chalcedonian achievement it strangely sets the theme of divine love to one side in arriving at the agreed upon formula.
It is true that the Chalcedonian statement begins with a rehearsal of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed with its affirmation of God’s
becoming man for our sakes, and this is recognized as the action of divine love. Yet curiously little is said about the mode of redemption in the discussion, and nothing is said about the love of Father and Son in the formula of the incarnation.
What is wrong here is not that metaphysics has replaced confessional theology. It is that a metaphysics in which love between God and man cannot be intelligible is presupposed in the very attempt to say that God has shown his love in taking the form of a servant, and sharing our human lot even to death.
If love constitutes God’s being, and if man is created in the image of God, then the key to man’s being and to God’s being is the capacity for free, self-giving mutuality and concern for the other. This leads us to fundamental convictions about the meaning of the incarnation.
(3) JESUS AS GOD’S ELECT MAN
In the New Testament faith Jesus is God’s Elect Man. He is the beloved Son made flesh. The life and death of Jesus are set within a specific
action of God. Here we have the New Testament parallel to the Old Testament faith in which election love appears in the creation of the covenant relationship. God elects his Servant, his Beloved.
The conception of the incarnation as an act of grace appears early and persists throughout Christian history even though it seems close to adoptionism, the condemned heresy which held that God selected the man Jesus at a particular time in his career to become the Christ. St.
Augustine, for example, boldly says:
The Saviour, the Man Christ Jesus, is Himself the brightest illustration of predestination and grace. Every man, from the commencement of his faith, becomes a Christian by the same grace by which that Man from his formation became Christ.5
Augustine is not, to be sure, committed to adoptionism by this accent on the electing grace of God giving his Messiah to the world. The New Testament thinks of election as hidden in the mystery of God’s purpose.
‘He chose us in him before the world was founded’ (Ephesians 1: 4).
The whole of Jesus’ life is the expression of the divine action. He has a vocation, a summons from God, to respond to the divine will as the one who incarnates God’s love.
We noted the distinction in the Old Testament between God’s election love by which he establishes his covenant with his people and his chesed, the love which becomes compassion, forgiveness and
redemptive concern for his people in dealing with their faithlessness. In the New Testament account of the incarnation both aspects of the divine love are present. God’s election love is his love of the Son, and through him his call to abundant life for all his people. There is an ancient discussion in theology as to whether God would have become incarnate had there been no sin. St. Thomas Aquinas obviously finds the view attractive although he concludes, on biblical grounds, that it was because of sin that the Word was made man. He immediately adds, however, ‘And yet the power of God is not limited to this ; — even had sin not existed, God could have become incarnate’.6 The incarnation fulfils the purpose of the good creation. It is the expression of God’s creative will to raise up his people and establish his Kingdom.
But the history of man is the history of the good creation invaded by sin.
The love which becomes incarnate as Jesus takes upon himself the
suffering of the world is the merciful, compassionate love of God. The meaning of incarnation incorporates the taking on of the burden of sin.
Paul boldly says Christ was made to be sin for us (2 Corinthians 5: 21).
The love which God expresses in Jesus is love taking the form required by the situation it meets. The creative divine love becomes suffering, redemptive love for the sake of the world. The spirit of love required a new form to meet man’s need.
So far we are speaking of the incarnation as the action of God’s
prevenient grace. God who has created man now enters human life in a new way to transform it, but it remains human life. Jesus, the incarnate Lord, is real man. How the union of God and man can be understood so that the humanity is not merely a form or appearance has been the most difficult issue in Christian theology.
Let us see what happens to our conception of the incarnation if we say that the relation between God and Jesus is determined by love.
Love means to will the freedom of the other, the acceptance of the consequences of relationship to another, and the vulnerability which goes with that acceptance. If there is real humanity in the incarnation, then there is a real human will with human freedom. It may be remarked that the Church had to face very early the issue of whether there was one will or two in the incarnate Lord, and the Sixth Ecumenical Council finally affirmed in 680 that the two natures involve two wills.
This doctrine that love is the meaning of the divine-human relationship in the incarnation leads to a way of interpreting the incarnation. The union of God and man in Jesus Christ is the communion of God with the man Jesus. It is a communion in which the deity of God and the
humanity of Jesus are joined in the freedom of love. God in his grace created a humanity which becomes responsive to him and committed utterly to him. This communion enacted in concrete history discloses the mystery of love in God’s being. It is the mystery symbolized in the Trinitarian language of God as Father, Son, and Spirit. Jesus of Nazareth as known in the experience of the Church is the human exemplifier of the spirit of God.
We must remember our limitations in speaking about the incarnation.
The New Testament does not reveal the ‘inner life’ of Jesus. In his great book, The Communion of the Christian with God, Wilhelm Hermann fails to be convincing when he tries to say that the Christian knows in