How does Christmas & the incarnation fit in the salvation story?

“Christmas is important, but Easter is decisive” – Arsène Wenger

This quote from Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger of course concerns the structure of the football season: the periods of Christmas and Easter are packed with games and while they are both important, the results at Easter have more impact than those at Christmas because they are nearer to the end of the season. It is also, ironically, why Arsenal haven’t won a title for quite a while (sorry Arsenal fans!)

It is also a quote which sufficiently describes the view of many Christians’ atonement theology, and has often been used by football loving Christians to prove the point. Influenced significantly by an Anselmian theory of justification, Western Christianity in particular, from the Middle Ages onwards, has largely conceived of salvation in terms of the work of God in Christ and in particular the work of the cross. In (a simplified view of) Anselm’s theory of atonement, situated within the context of the feudal Europe of his day, God is the equivalent of a noble land-owner whose honour has been violated by the sin of those lower in social status to Himself, i.e.: humanity. What needed to happen to appease God’s desire for retribution was an equivalent offering for what had been taken from God by sin. The answer of course comes in the person of Christ who dies to pay the debt we owe. According to Anselm:

‘Hence it was a necessity that God should take man into the unity of his person, so that one who ought, by virtue of his nature, to make the repayment and was not capable of doing so, should be one who, by virtue of his person, was capable of it.’

For a number of years now I have had significant issue with the substitutionary conception of atonement (for an excellent critique of penal substitutionary atonement in particular see ‘Past Event, Present Salvation’ by Paul Fiddes). The danger in this understanding of redemption or salvation is that it is an impersonal transaction performed above our heads a bit like a Maths equation: 1 (sin) – 1 (Jesus on the cross) = 0 (no sin). Yet, in my unease with this theory there was little in my mind to take its place – how, if we reject substitution can we conceive of God’s saving work in Christ?

I recently read an essay by patristic scholar Brian Daley (1) which really helped my thinking on this matter, so I thought I’d try and summarise his argument in case anyone else has has experienced similar theological soteriological quandaries! (I am not claiming any original thought of my own here, and all patristic references appear in Daley’s essay with source footnotes.)

Daley begins by recollecting a conversation with a fellow theologian who asked him why in the classic Western conception of atonement God needs to redeem creation through an incarnate Son. Surely in ‘a soteriology [understanding of salvation] resting on the conception of redemption as a restorative transaction between God and humanity, provided the initiative for the transaction comes from God and God is its recipient, why does the agent of the transaction need to be God’s incarnate Son?’ Daley acknowledges other orthodox early Fathers occasionally argue along similar lines to Anselm, but ultimately he suggests that if salvation is God’s initiative, the incarnation is not logical or necessary, but contingent on God’s volition. If God wanted, could He not have achieved the same purpose through an Arian sub-divine saviour?

The answer to his friend’s question, according to Daley is to revisit the patristic understanding of soteriology which he argues is not solely focused on the work of Christ but on the person of Christ:

‘Western soteriology since the time of Anselm typically takes redemption as something Jesus has done for us by his actions, above all by his death in innocence on the cross…[whereas] Patristic soteriology, both Eastern and Western, tends to see redemption as already achieved in that personal union of God and a man – a union beginning in Jesus, uniquely rooted in him, but ultimately involving every human being willing to accept this new identity of human divinity or divinised humanity as their own future.’

This links to the original topic of this blog: the theology of Christmas. It is my guess that while many Christians (especially evangelicals) have an understanding of Christmas being important, this importance is based not in itself but in the Easter symbol of the cross. If I was asked why the incarnation was important for most of my Christian life I would probably have said that it was important because it was what needed to happen in order for Jesus to eventually die on the cross, a necessary but soteriologically irrelevant as an event in itself.

Arsene Wenger: part-time theologian?

After exploring the different biblical images of salvation (e.g. eschatological fulfilment of Israel’s hope (Rom. 13.11; John 4.22) and liberation (Rom 3.24; 1 Cor.1.30), etc.), Daley suggests that in the Patristic understanding they are all attempts to show that the work of Jesus in his life, ministry and even death can be seen in the context of the ‘unsurpassable source of freedom and life’ of the new humanity in Christ Jesus. In other words it is for a positive conception of freedom (freedom for…) that Christ has set us free (Gal 5.1), not a post-modern ‘absence of something else’ freedom.

He then continues to discuss the various ways the early church Fathers used the biblical imagery as a foundation for different ways of speaking of the salvation found in Christ. For example: revelation and the image of God – it was in the incarnation that God that made the invisible God visible (Col. 1.15) and where he began perfecting humanity to newness of life. So, ‘the saving importance of this revelation [of God in Christ], for Irenaeus, is that the ultimate source of enduring life, for creatures, is nothing less than to see the glory…of God’ – to partake in the divine nature (2 Pet. 1.4) or as Augustine puts it: ‘participate in his immortality and righteousness’. Irenaeus suggests:

‘For as those who see the light are within the light, and partake of its brilliance, so those who see God are in God, and receive of his splendour. But this splendour vivifies them’

And:

‘When the Word of God became flesh,…he both showed forth the true image, by himself becoming what was his image, and he re-established the likeness in a stable way, making the human being resemble the invisible Father, by means of the visible word.’

Athanasius, too, suggests that in the fall we lost the image of God manifested in our inability to know God, restored in the revelation of God in Christ’s person:

‘What, then, was God to do? What else was to be done, save the renewing of that which was in God’s image, so that by it human beings might once more be able to know him? But how could this come to pass, save by the presence of the very image of God, our Lord Jesus Christ?’

Another image of Christ’s redemption of humanity is seen in the ideas of ‘cleansing’ and ‘healing’. Both Athanasius and Augustine are cited as proposing that the incarnation of the Word not only reveals God but ‘gives life to the body’ (our bodies).

Essentially, what is important to recognise is that dealing with sin is not the only purpose of salvation. The redemption of humanity through the life of God fully manifest in the incarnated Word of God (Jesus) requires the redemption of our nature itself, not just the removal of what has corrupted it. Christ Jesus is this new humanity, and this begins in earnest at the incarnation and the first Christmas. According to Daley a theme running through the various Patristic understandings of salvation is that it ‘is not simply something Jesus achieved or earned for the human race by acting on our behalf, as an appointed agent of mediation between humanity and God. Rather, they [the Fathers] all presuppose that salvation…is first of all something Jesus brought about in his own person, and that our change of status or relationship to God, our restored health and well-being as creatures of God, has already begun in what happened to Jesus.’ The cross has dealt with the source of sin, but its effects are still visible in our lives (like after a tumour has been taken out, but the effects are still shown). As Rom. 5.10 puts it: ‘For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of His Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!’ Salvation is more than dealing with or being acquitted of sin – it is the invitation to something new, namely new life. The incarnation is the beginning of this transformed human nature, the place where human and divine natures meet, and the resurrection is the final perfection, both being intrinsically linked.

It is not just our individualised nature that is redeemed, however, but the corporate life of the church. For both Athanasius and Cyril of Alexandria for example, the body of Christ the Church is an outcome of participating in the divine life of Christ.

Perhaps the one slightly weak aspect of the essay is precisely absence of the thing Daley is trying to escape from (the same for me in my unease with substitutionary atonement): a sense of the objectivity of what was achieved in the cross of Jesus. According to Daley ‘the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ are of course seen as inseparable stages in his incarnate history, revealing in fullness what the incarnation means, but they are not considered saving events in isolation from his whole life as Word made flesh.’ Patristic writers do not simply disconnect redemption from the cross, but ‘For most of them, rather, it is the “self-emptying” of the eternal Son and Word (to use the terminology of Phil. 2.5-11) – his taking on the “form of a servant” in place of “the form of God”, the whole course of divine self-humiliation that leads to death on the cross but begins simply in his birth as a normal, vulnerable human being.’ Saying the cross is simply the last stage and highest expression of what Christ was already achieving in his life of self-emptying may go too far for some who see a more decisive biblical picture of how sin is dealt with.

Yet this simply underlines the paradoxical nature of any atonement theology: none can really claim to hold the entirety of the truth and like so much of theology, we need different aspects of seemingly contradictory theories to move tentatively towards truth. Personally, however, I am significantly indebted to Daley for reclaiming the salvific importance of the incarnation and Christmas in my own understanding.

So this advent, as we anticipate the glorious day of Christ’s birth, see the Christmas message as more than a simple utilitarian act of God building towards the main event which is the cross, but in all its mystery and beauty somehow as the beginning of the final union of God with humanity, in deep connection with the cross and resurrection as opposed to a necessary preliminary tag-on. Rather than simply laying everything down and the cross and not picking anything up (as I fear we evangelicals are often guilty of), an understanding of Christ’s person (beginning in the incarnation and perfected in the resurrection body) being the locus of salvation is a better foundation on which to base the concept of new life as well as freedom from sin. This also provides a more adequate understanding for why the incarnation took place as opposed to a substitutionary atonement theory. It is why we can sing about ‘Emmanuel’, God with us, and ‘God and sinners reconciled’ at Christmas and not only at Easter, and it is why Daley chose Eph. 2.14 as the title of his essay: ‘He Himself is our peace’.

(1) Brian Daley, “’He Himself is our peace’ (Ephesians 2.14): Early Christian Views of Redemption in Christ', in The Redemption, ed. Stephen T. Davis et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 149-76