Religion
Revealing the cracks Martin Sullivan
When St Paul's was washed a few years ago everyone was delighted, The building shone in splendour and at night with the floodlights playing upon it the Cathedral emerged in its pristine splendour. But there were interesting side effects. Despite the fact that Ludgate Hill is a smokeless zone the atmosphere is .still polluted with fumes from taxis, buses, lorries and cars which stream past day and night. St Paul's is already in need of another bath. A more sinister aspect has also been revealed. The removal of the grime, in some places four to six inches thick, has revealed the sorry state of some of the stonework. We can now see the cracks and the decay formerly hidden from our eyes. There is a moral here. Scholars have lately taken the ancient and solid edifice of Christian doctrine ahd teaching and examined it closely and minutely. They have used tools sharpened to a high degree of precision and by removing Layers here, by probing there, and by actually removing a substance in another place, they have shown us a building which while still structurally sound is in need of repair and restoration.
We could look at several areas which have been subjected to this thorough exploration, but I want
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opeczawr October 12, 1974 now to take just one of them. The problem of the two natures of Christ, His humanity and His Divinity, was finally settled in formula promulgated in the fifth century. The building, as it were, was completed. The Council of Chalcedon produced a formula which was finally accepted throughout Christendom. Some of the terms of it are worth repeating; 'one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-Begotten, recognised in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation, the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics ot' each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person and subsistence.. Wash the words, modernise their meaning and the cracks appear. There are those who begin by asserting Christ's perfect manhood, and insisting upon his limited knowledge. He was a child of His time who escaped none of the vagaries of human nature, except one. He was declared to be sinless. What does this mean? If we accept that He did not commit obvious and blatant sins, we must also test Him by His own judgement with His searching demands in the Sermon on the Mount. Here He probed the roots of a motive and exempted no one. Did He exempt Himself'? He took the old Law and drove a coach and four through it. Murder became nurtured anger, and adultery sexual thoughts entertained and enjoyed. Can anyone really say that He has been tempted unless he has come across a traitor in the Kingdom of his mind and has had to
• deal with this fifth columnist? If His earthly pilgrimage was like ours what part did His subconscious play? Most Christians are unwilling to face up to these consequences; they are Docetists whose Christ has one foot on earth and the other in Heaven and His leverage is based above rather than below.
On the other hand, while an over-emphasis on Christ's divinity is misleading so is an undue insistence on His humanity, We could be left with that and nothing else. To go back to our original metaphor, we may sacrifice genuine repair work for decorative embellishments. To reduce Very' God .to Very Man is to abandon the claim that only God can save, and to substitute a perfect man who is like Him. Nor, on the other hand, should we accept the popular view, shared by most churchmen, that we are redeemed by perfect God who is like a man. This is ultimately a flight from harsh reality. The old formula from Chalcedon is not p prescription, it is orily a diagnosis and a survey. It does not give answers, but only a warning, an indication of the nature of the problem. It states that our Saviour is God and none other, and that He effected our salvation by entering fully and unreservedly into the human arena. Any attempt to deal with this issue which falls short of this fundamental assertion is defective. Can a man believe this today and translate it into terms he can acceptand by which he can e? Martin Sullivan is Dean of St Paul 'a
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