Gerald Bray, "What Will Happen to God? {Part II)," Churchman 101.1

What will happen to God? Part II GERALD BRAY This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased These are famous words attributed to the Father, who, as the Synoptic Gospels record, pronounced them at the moment when the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus immediately after his baptism. The event is also recorded in the Fourth Gospel, but there we are told only that John the Baptist bore witness to the fact that Jesus was the Son of God. John's relative reticence is an argument in favour of granting him priority over the Synoptic account because it is so much less expansive on the subject of these extraordinary happenings. At the same time, John's account confirms that there is an important link between the Baptism of Jesus and the revelation that he is the Son of God. Students of early Church history may recall that Paul of Samosata was condemned at a Synod of Antioch in 268, apparently because he believed that the Baptism of Jesus was the point at which God adopted Jesus of Nazareth as his Son. The descent of the Holy Spirit, according to Paul's interpretation, was the seal which God put on this new relationship into which Jesus had entered. It is not difficult, of course, to see why Paul of Samosata should have fallen into this particular error. Paul was a firm believer in baptismal regeneration, and it seemed to him to be only logical that Jesus' baptism should have the same effect on him as it does on us. Jesus was therefore a man like us who acquired eternal life in the same way we do, by baptism. His uniqueness lay only in the fact that as a man he had never sinned, and therefore had earned the special grace which God had bestowed on him, whereas we are dependent on his mercy for forgiveness. Empowered by this grace, Jesus was able to live the kind of life and die the kind of death which would attract many more sons to glory, as they sought to experience the same grace of adoption which was first revealed in Jesus. It would not really be worth mentioning this rather strange heresy were it not for the fact that a curious version of it survives, and even flourishes, in academic circles today. Very numerous are the scholars, theologians and bishops who believe that the uniqueness of Christ consists mainly of the fact that he introduced mankind to a new type of religious understanding and experience. Usually this belief is coupled with the statement that Jesus himself drew nearer to God than any man before him or since, though Dennis Nineham, writing 22 What will happen to Ood? Part n in the Epilogue to that once-notorious symposium, Tht Myth of God Incarnate, at least had the honesty to say that this assertion did not follow logically from the former. and might still not be true. As he pointed out, there were many things about the teaching of Jesus-his views on hell, for example-which his heavenly Father could not have been well-pleased about, and we may legitimately wonder whether Jesus' rather cramped moral vision has not been superseded by quite ordinary people-Dennis Nineham, for example-in our own time. This modern form of adoptionism which, if pressed to its logical conclusion, would dissolve historical Christianity into contemporary spirituality, and remove the few remaining links between the Person of Jesus Christ and the modern Church, is a danger far greater than anything ever imagined by the likes of Paul of Samosata. We must combat it at the most fundamental level if we hope to survive as a witnessing community of believers in our modern world. How can we do this? We ought, I think, to begin with the Gospel account of the Baptism of Jesus, even though modern adoptionism has generally abandoned this starting-point in favour of the so-called 'Easter event'. According to the Fourth Gospel, when John the Baptist saw Jesus coming, he cried out: 'Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world'. This verse, which may be familiar in what seems to be a more appropriate, but which is in fact a less Biblical, sacramental context, makes a very clear statement about who Jesus is in relation to the rite of Baptism. It is my belief that the sacraments are intended as a means of preaching the Gospel. This belief of mine, is remarkably borne out in this verse, because John recognises immediately that his baptism is inapplicable to Jesus; indeed, he realises that the shoe, which he is unworthy to unloose, is really on the other foot-he is the one who ought to be receiving baptism from Jesus, not the other way round. The Fourth Gospel is so reticent at this point that it does not even say that John baptized Jesus; for this we must turn to the Synoptic Gospels which mention the same details, more or less, and also stress John's unwillingness to baptize the Son of God. Jesus, as Matthew records the event (3: 15), agreed with John's estimate of the situation but pressed him for baptism in order that he might be seen to fulfil all righteousness. Since there was no righteousness for Jesus himself to fulfil, this must be a reference to his atoning work as the Lamb of God, who became sin for us that we might be set free from all sin. The Baptism of Jesus is therefore both the beginning and the summary of his teaching message-that he had become a man on earth in order that we might be set free to reign with him in heaven. Moreover, by this act, Jesus revealed the meaning of John's baptism for repentance, which would find its fulfHment in the baptism 23 Churchman of blood at Calvary. We are now in a pos1t10n to understand, I think, that the extraordinary events which followed the Baptism of Jesus cannot be dissociated from the unique conditions which preceded it-indeed, which would have prevented it, had Jesus not intervened. It was precisely when Jesus demonstrated by this act who he really was and what he had come to do that the heavens were opened and the barrier separating earth from heaven was visibly and audibly penetrated. That the result should be the descent of the Holy Spirit in the form of the dove of pure sacrifice and by the voice of the invisible Father is only to be expected, because where the Atonement is preached, there the Trinity is also revealed. The Atonement is after all, a work of the Son of God inside the trinitarian Godhead; it is a sacrifice presented·to the Father, the effects of which are then brought to us by the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost-no longer the spotless dove, but tongues of fire to cleanse and renew the spirit of each believer. In the baptism of Jesus then, we are given a foretaste of the glory of heaven-we are given, in short, a revelation of God. From what the Gospels record, it must therefore be obvious that the Baptism of Jesus was in no sense the adoption of man into the Godhead. nor did it make the slightest difference to the relationship which the Son already enjoyed with his Father. The voice from heaven was not establishing the Sonship of Christ, but merely revealing it to the world, and confirming that the pattern of Incarnation was the one the Father had approved for the fulfilment of his plan. For although the Baptism of Jesus is tied to the fact that he is Son of God, we must never forget that it was in the human nature which he had assumed that this Son of God was baptized and commended by the Father. There is another ancient heresy, also called adoptionism, but associated with Elipandus of Toledo, an eighth-century Spanish bishop and his colleague Felix of Urge! who wanted to argue that though Christ was Son of God in his divine nature, he was only an adopted son in his human nature, a belief which effectively reduced the latter to an optional extra. No doubt Elipandus and Felix, as mediaeval male chauvinists, would have been shocked to see the female Christ crucified which was recently on display in the Episcopalian cathedral in New York, but in principle there is no reason why they should have been. Indeed, the idea of a female Christ is very prominent in mediaeval mystical literature, a genre which reflects a type of experience in which the physical world was most devalued. Elipandus and Felix were propounding a doctrine which ultimately denied the historicity of the Incarnation because it divided the unity of the Person of Christ manifested in his two natures. Once that happened, once it was claimed that the term 'Son of God' did not 24 What will happen to God? Part II really apply to the humanity of Jesus-or applied only in the sense in which it applies to us-the way was opened for the spread of a purely mystical, non-historical religion. That is precisely what happened! Today, we are familiar with this same process which we see developing all around us. Having demythologised the God-out-there, we are now remythologising the man-down-here. Nor should we be surprised that the remythologisation involves a considerable dose of the feminine. For having disposed of the agent of creation, who is the cosmic Christ of Colossians I: 16-17, we are driven inexorably towards the agent of procreation, and Christ becomes a woman as he did in mediaeval mysticism.

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