Salvation
The most important soteriological model which nourished this increasingly focused theological reflection was that of healing and salvation through sharing, solidarity, and exchange.
The Way to Nicaea, John Behr
Who were the earliest men that the Church came to recognize as those who properly helped develop the tradition of the canon and the Gospel as described in the earlier posts? Behr will look at Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, and Ireneus of Lyon. Before coming to examine these in detail, a short retracement of the path thus far – the path in the book and the path in the post-apostolic Church and its theological development.
“Who do you say that I am?” This question caused serious reflection on just how and why Jesus Christ is called “the Word of God.”
This designation simultaneously denotes who he is, the word which he speaks, and the word that speaks of him – the revealer of God, and the revelation of God; medium and message: the separation of these only impoverishes both.
Attention would grow increasingly focused on Christ Himself, as true God and true man – the Word of God in the words of man. The Passion offered the focal point to recontextualize His being: the Prophet, the King, the Messiah, the High Priest, the Lamb, and the suffering servant – among many other titles and descriptions.
Each of these depicts an aspect of who He is, and all of these together continue to stimulate reflection – even today. When considering the work of salvation, reference will be made to the sacrificial nature of His death, reconciling us to God by His blood, and the didactic work of His teaching us about the saving knowledge of God.
We cannot preach Christ, learn of Christ, and form Christ in us, the believer, without having first reflected on the relationship of Christ to the Father and to the Holy Spirit. As I have mentioned before, we cannot love God or properly worship Him without knowing something of Him.
In this developing reflection ever greater attention was paid to particularly important or disputed passages of Scripture, cited in the manner of proof-texts, for the point was not to exegete Scripture itself, but to clarify its hypothesis and the canon by which it speaks of Jesus Christ.
In other words, we must be clear on who Christ is in order to properly exegete and in order to get at the core and true Gospel. In the face of perceived aberrations, the theological project almost from the beginning was to articulate the canon of truth as it regards the being of Jesus Christ.
The soteriological paradigm Christ offered was through sharing, solidarity, and exchange. There are two basic axioms that determined this model and the theological reflection of these first few centuries of the early Church.
The first is that only God can save. It is God at work in Christ, and Christ is the Word of God. The Gospel is a Gospel of God, not of man. The second axiom is that only as a human being can God save human beings. Per Behr, while forgiveness can be bestowed from afar, the enemy of death could not be overcome except by Christ voluntarily dying for all.
I am not so sure about even the forgiveness part. Yes, God could forgive as He chooses, but that’s not how He set up the system – at least it doesn’t seem to be the case to me. Sacrifices were repetitively required. Only the death of the one who did not have any fault for which to be condemned, one who did not owe God perfection, could suffice for forgiveness once and for all.
Just the same, could not God have physically restored man without Christ’s death and resurrection? Here again, He didn’t set up the system that way. Yet, I may be wrong on this…
Returning to Behr:
Christ, by sharing in the poverty of the human condition, enables human beings to share in the riches of his divine life, to become partakers of the divine nature.
“He became man so that we might become god.” So said St. Athanasius. “What is not assumed, is not healed,” per Gregory of Nazianzus. I guess returning to my point: the divine nature includes both perfect forgiveness and everlasting life, at least that’s how I see it.
In any case, these two axioms – only God can save, and only as a human being can God save human beings – would lead inexorably to Chalcedon (although, at least so far in my studies, it seems to me that the third council at Ephesus was sufficient). Along the way, various attempts to interpret the person of Christ, based on other soteriological paradigms, fell by the wayside – and from the fourth century onward, occasionally aided with political muscle.
But we are still in the second century. Some taught that Christ was merely a man who was adopted as the Son of God. Others would deny the human element – the First Epistle of John and the letters of Ignatius seem aimed at those who made such claims. Some would separate the divine from the human, as two distinct beings – the divine Christ and the human Jesus.
As diverse as these approaches are, they share certain important features.
First, they all attempt to circumvent God’s involvement with the Cross. Second, none of these really demonstrates God “with us.” Third, they impose a crude and materialistic approach to understanding the identity of Christ.
These all fly in the face of the hypothesis: the one and the same Jesus Christ is both what it is to be God and what it is to be man. And the source for this hypothesis was Scripture.
Theology developed by reflecting upon Scripture, but, as discussed earlier, it did so selectively.
Development was focused more and more on the disputed parts of Scripture. During this transition from Kerygma (to announce, to preach) to dogma, a certain reinterpretation of what was handed down did take place. The language and concepts of philosophy were used to focus on the Christological questions.
In this, there was the danger that the philosophical language used might overshadow the theological kerygma it was attempting to articulate or that the reflection might dissolve into mythology.
Conclusion
But the danger is more often our own; in concentrating on the details of ever more abstract theology, it is easy to lose sight of just what is being written about.
The Lord Jesus Christ, who came in the flesh. Hence, the question: who do you say that I am?
Again, you have reflected upon a vital question: what does it mean to be "saved": saved from what and for what? In his "Creeds in the Making", Fr, Alan Richardson notes that the Nicene Creed affirms that the Lord Jesus came to us men "for our salvation", but the Creed gives no "theory" of how salvation worked. Richardson gives instances of classic historical theories of salvation. The Ransom theory stipulates that when Adam sinned, the human race was enslaved by Satan, who needed a ransom price to be paid before setting us free. This ancient theory finds its way into popular piety in many ways, "to save us all from Satan's power when we had gone astray', as the Christmas carol puts it. St. Gregory Nanziansus suggests that the notion that Satan is owed anything is blasphemous. The Satisfaction theory, on the other hand, suggests that Adam's sin was an offence to God's honor, requiring an apology by Somebody able to do so, the eternal Son. The parable of the Prodigal Son, on the other hand, suggests that the Father could not have been that angered by Adam, since He goes out Himself to greet the prodigal. As we know, He is willing to offer His own Son to death: something that implies a different image of God than that of an angry, offended Lord. My belief is that Paul's image of the Lord Jesus as the New Adam might be the clue to what salvation is about: the obedience of Jesus "unto death" conforms to the Father's model of what He expected, to a lesser degree, but failed to get, of Adam. Salvation has to do, I think, not of a ransoming from Satan but a deliverance, as you say, from death, and a deliverance enabling us to proceed towards the theosis Adam forfeited.