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Jesus and Salvation
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Jesus and Salvation
by Fr. Robin Ryan CP
Soundings in the Christian Tradition and Contemporary Theology
(Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2015)
Book review by Fr. Martin Coffey, CP
Robin Ryan was inspired to write Jesus & Salvation[2] on the Christian understanding of salvation in response to an experience he had in Haiti in the summer of 2012.
There he witnessed the devastation and the misery of a people accustomed to unbelievable suffering. Onn is not sufficient. Something more is needed. This is what lies behind this wide ranging and rich overview of the very best in Christian reflection on the proclamation of salvation in Jesus Christ.
Fr. Ryan adopts a chronological approach to his treatment of salvation. In this way we are presented with the most compelling biblical, patristic, medieval and modern ways of presenting salvation. This is a huge sweep through millennia of thinking, writing and praying on the central mystery of the Christian faith in Christ as the savior of the world. We discover early on in this study that there cannot be any one final definition of salvation. The idea of salvation is rich and analogical. It is nourished on many biblical and other images and metaphors. It attempts to capture and express the unfathomable mystery of God and God’s loving care for a sinful and suffering people.
We Christians profess that Jesus died to save us but we are not always very clear about what he is saving us from or what difference this salvation makes in our daily life. At the end of this study we know why it is not possible to give a simple one dimensional definition of salvation. We also appreciate just how wide and deep is God’s saving love and how it penetrates every dimension of our existence, healing and transforming not only us but the whole creation. I think one of Robin’s objectives in writing this book was to free us from the anxious intellectual questions and abstract speculations about the nature of salvation and instead tries to convince the reader that God’s creative and saving love is being poured out over us continually and this becomes a motive for our praise and an endless source of delight.
Robin treats of all the classical ways of understanding how salvation was won for us. The early Church emphasized the salvific nature of the incarnation whereby Christ became poor in order that we might become rich or as many early teachers put it, he shared our human life so that we could share his divine life. Salvation is this wonderful exchange and is the cause of the new life Christians share with the risen Christ. This way of seeing salvation remains the most important for Orthodox Christians.
Western theology and spirituality has been greatly influenced by the thinking of St. Augustine who focused on the salvation of the individual sinner. Because of his dispute with the Pelagians, Augustine emphasized the sinful nature of every human being and the need to be saved by the grace of God. This focus on individual salvation has become the fixed preoccupation of Christian reflection ever since. Even new born babies need to be saved from the damning effects of original sin. Augustine insisted on human responsibility for rejecting God’s plan. This is in keeping with human dignity and human freedom. (It has always baffled me how this Augustinian line of argument insists that human freedom is powerful enough to reject God but the same human freedom is totally incapable, without the assistance of grace, of choosing God and doing good. This is the material for another book.) The biblical idea of salvation usually had the people in view and not the individual. Salvation meant a new way of life for the whole people who would at last experience the just rule of God and delight in God’s gift of Shalom or peace.
The most famous attempt to understand salvation is found in St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109). Anselm belonged to a new generation of Christian thinkers who valued reason and logic very much and he applied these to the question of salvation. He asked why did God become man in Christ and he answered that the Son of God became man to save us by taking our place in paying the price of our salvation. Robin Ryan helps us to appreciate Anselm’s difficult theology by setting it in the context of contemporary theological disputes with Jewish thinkers who considered the Christian doctrine of the incarnation and the crucifixion of the Son of God as derogatory to the dignity and impassibility of God. Anselm wanted to display the perfect logic and intelligibility of Christian faith. His aim is to convince his readers that it was fitting for God to act in this way.
Anselm paints a picture of God as the supremely good creator whose creatures, by sinning, have dishonored God and spoiled the beauty and order of creation. Salvation means the restoration of order and the just punishment of those who dishonored God. The demands of justice must be satisfied. It is not a matter of appeasing an angry God. God’s well ordered creation has been damaged and God has been dishonored. The key idea at work here is justice or the restoration of right order. God is supremely good and just. Justice requires restoration of order and of God’s honor. This requires that the sinner satisfies the demands of justice and accepts just punishment. The human being is incapable of offering appropriate satisfaction. It is beyond his finite capacity. The only possible outcome is the destruction of the sinner. But God is also merciful and does not exact the proper punishment from his sinful creatures but instead sends his Son who alone, because He is also divine, can satisfy the demands of divine justice.
The logic of Anselm’s argument suggested that the great and perfect God is someone who is easily offended by mere finite creatures and who demands an impossible satisfaction. Since finite and limited human beings were unworthy and could not offer sufficient satisfaction to satisfy the wounded honor of God, God decided to send his Son to offer a sufficiently worthy satisfaction. To modern ears this sounds like a very unattractive and easily offended God who is hard to reconcile with the Father revealed by Jesus in the Gospels.
Anselm’s theory of the atonement was greatly appreciated in an age that had rediscovered logic and tight argumentation as tools for penetrating the mysteries of God. The clarity and rigorous nature of Anselm’s argument attracted admiration and was felt to be compelling. Since then the fascination with rigorous logical argument in theological matters has lost its shine. Contemporary theology has become more attentive to the incomprehensibility of God and his mysterious ways. God is always more and greater than anything human logic can discover.
The great medieval theologians, as well as those of the Reformation, continue to reflect on the logic of salvation, why and how it happened. Thomas Aquinas showed his usual moderation in affirming the usefulness of different ways of talking about salvation. While he values Anselm, Aquinas puts more emphasis on Christ’s love as the motive and source of our salvation. Martin Luther had a life-transforming experience of the righteousness of God who freely saves us without need of our works. He was convinced that there is absolutely nothing we sinners can do to earn, merit or attract the merciful salvation of God. Salvation is wholly the free and loving initiative of God. Only God can save us and that was the work of Christ on our behalf. He suffered and died for us and so saved us. Because human beings are so radically disordered by sin, salvation is always beyond our reach and only Jesus can bring it to us and bring us to it.
John Calvin shared Luther’s convictions about the free gift of salvation. He developed the idea that Jesus took our place and endured the terrible but just punishment of sin as our substitute. Both reformers have a strong sense of the wrath of God directed against sin. Sin must be taken terribly seriously and in dealing with sin God is forced to go to extreme lengths to deal with it. The full force of God’s wrath could not have been endured by finite human beings. It would have meant eternal death. Only the Son of God could have survived the wrath of God and come through death to a new life in the resurrection.
These very powerful reflections on the nature of salvation have continued to influence millions of Christians in the various Protestant and Reform churches. They encourage a great sense of personal relief for having been spared the terrible wrath of God and also deep gratitude and reverence for Jesus who stood in our place. However, the underside of these ways of thinking about salvation is that God is seen as a demanding and harsh judge who is pleased to see his Son suffering and die to appease him. Some contemporary theologians have no hesitation in saying that this kind of theology leaves us with a monstrous view of God.
Ryan also explores a number of contemporary theologies of salvation. He gives clear and attractive summaries of Karl Rahner, Hans Urs von Balthasar and Edward Schillebeecks. After Vatican Counci II, these were three of the most influential Catholic thinkers. Rahner and Balthasar in particular gave rise to schools of theology that were in some respects complementary and in tension. Ryan greatly appreciates Schillebeecks detailed study of the New Testament references to salvation. In his writings, Schillebeecks lays bare the great variety of images and metaphors used by New Testament writers when talking about the saving work of Jesus. The New Testament does not give us one definitive way for understanding what is meant by salvation. Von Balthasar is a Swiss theologian who has dialogued with Reform theologians for years. I think it is possible to detect the influence of the Reform preference for the theories of blood sacrifice and penal substitution in his theology.
Robin seems to show a liking for Rahner’s approach which emphasizes God’s unchanging saving love for all of his creatures. The work of Jesus does not bring about a change in God but rather makes God’s love visible and effective for us in a new way. He applies the logic of sacramental causality to Jesus’s work of saving us. The sacraments are visible signs that make God’s grace active and effective in us. Jesus birth, life, ministry, suffering, death and resurrection make God’s saving love visible and effective in a new way for the salvation of the world.
I was particularly happy that Robin included powerful reflections on the cosmic dimension of salvation as well as it universal reach. We now see more clearly than ever how human existence is the outcome of an emerging universe and the long intricate process of evolution. In other words, human existence is intrinsically interconnected with the total story of the universe. Fr. Thomas Berry CP was a pioneer in exploring the importance of the story of the universe.
The Christian belief in the resurrection of the body must imply some kind of resurrection of all that goes into the making of the human body and that is the whole 13.7 billion year cosmic process from the so-called Big Bang until the end. Theology has not yet offered a satisfactory theory of how that might happen but at least we are now at last acknowledging the more complex truth of our nature as material beings that are part of a much larger cosmic whole. On the question of universal salvation, Robin presents the case of those who argue for the presence and action of God outside the boundaries of the Church. Vatican II had already opened the door to this kind of exploration in Nostrae Aetatae, the document on the Church’s relationship with non-Christian religions. The council declared that the Catholic church rejects nothing of what is true and holy in other religious traditions. Theologians argue that Jesus is truly the unique savior of all people but that the fruits of salvation can be accessed by non-Christians who sincerely practice what is good in their own religions and by following the dictates of their conscience.
I am grateful to Robin for gathering all this material in an attractive and very readable volume. The many authors he draws on offer us a great variety of ways of accessing the mystery and the beauty of God’s saving actions on our behalf and especially in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. His work is a masterful survey of Christian theology that ends with his own insightful theological reflections.
When I begin to think about the possible meanings of being saved, I do not think first of all about the theological speculations of the great teachers of the Church. I am immediately reminded of a little prayer that is said every day by millions of Catholics who recite the daily rosary. After each decade they pray, “O my Jesus, forgive me my sins and save me from the fires of hell . .” It seems to me that the ordinary Catholic is more conscious of the need to be saved from “the fires of hell” than any other kind of salvation. Robin belongs to the Congregation of the Passion whose principal ministry for more than two hundred years was preaching popular missions to the people. A considerable part of the popular mission was devoted to preaching on the Four Last Things – death, judgment, hell and heaven. This kind of popular preaching played a significant part in forming the Catholic imagination. I am thinking of the famous and terrifying sermon on hell in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Catholics lived in a world overshadowed by the prospect of severe judgment and punishment after death. Fear played a significant role in their life of faith and devotion and, more than that, it cast a dark pall over every aspect of their Catholic lives. I think it may have been influenced by a form of neo-Augustinian pessimism about human nature that was and still is fairly widespread in the Catholic Church.
I would have liked to see more space devoted to this very dark religious mindset and how it may have distorted people’s view of God and of salvation. I’m sure the imagery and emotional tone generated by this kind of preaching and popular piety persists in many places. It does not help people to open themselves to God and to welcome his generous and undeserved blessings. Before people can appreciate the riches presented in this book, I believe they may first need to be set free from older and more negative ways of seeing salvation.
There is another aspect of salvation that we find in the Song of Zechariah at the beginning of Luke’s gospel. Zechariah is praising God for God’s goodness in remembering the ancient promises and now acting definitively by sending a savior. Zechariah’s prayer says that the savior is one who “frees us from fear and from all who hate us”. On many occasions, Jesus responds to the pain of the disciples and the people in general by saying, “Do not be afraid.” In his words and deeds, Jesus addresses the fear of the people because he knows that so many of the evils affecting people have their origin in fear. Jesus has come to set the people free from the fear that enslaves them and that robs them of peace.
I have already alluded to the pervasive fear of eternal punishment in the fires of hell. But there are many other fears that destroy human life. Fear is often the source of jealousy, rivalry, hatred and violence. So many other evils have their root and source in fear. Fear of suffering and fear of failure make people do terrible things to protect themselves. I think part of the salvation people long for and pray for is the freedom from the fears that cripple and diminish their lives. Jesus is portrayed in the gospels as one who reached into people’s lives to deal with their fears.
Maybe Robin will take up some of these issues in his next book and help preachers avoid the more gross depictions of God and God’s justice. For now, I am delighted to recommend Robin Ryan’s two wonderful books. Each one gives us a rich and attractive account of the very best in Christian theology. Together they will nourish our thinking, praying and action as Christians committed to advancing the Kingdom of God by addressing the challenges of human suffering and the human longing for salvation.
God and the Mystery of Human Suffering
By Fr. Robin Ryan, CP
Jesus and Salvation
By Fr. Robin Ryan, CP
Creation and the Cross
By Elizabeth A. Johnson