Anglicans believe in the necessity of the Passion of Jesus Christ for our redemption. The cross is essential. As is the Resurrection. But Anglicanism has tended to focus on the Incarnation – God taking on human flesh, human reality, and indeed, material reality more generally – as being itself salvific. The emphasis on sacramentalism in the last post is grounded in the Incarnation.
“Not having, as did the Continental Reformers, a preoccupation with the doctrines of justification or predestination they [Anglicans in the century after the Reformation] followed the Fathers of the Nicene age in treating the Incarnation as the central doctrine of the faith. Indeed a feeling of the centrality of the Incarnation became a recurring feature of Anglican divinity, albeit the Incarnation was seen as St. Athanasius saw it in its deeply redemptive aspect.”
– Michael Ramsey (1904-1988), The Ancient Fathers and Modern Anglican Theology, Sobornost, Winter-Spring 1962
“Every thing,
which God would ever do, must have been unchangeably present to the Divine
Mind. To think of the Incarnation, as only a remedy for Adam’s fall, is to
imagine changeableness in God. There can be no afterthought in God. God must
have eternally known and provided for it. The All-Holy Soul of Jesus must ever
have been the Object of his choice. It must have been the centre of His
Creation, the Primal conception of His Mind, when He willed to put in act what
He ever had in mind. The central idea of His Mind, that, wherein things in
heaven and things in earth were to be united, was a Human Soul.”
– Edward
Bouverie Pusey (1800-1882), Eleven Addresses during a Retreat of the
Companions of the Love of Jesus, Adress III. ‘God’s Love for each soul in the
Incarnation’
“What does the
Church think of Christ? The Church’s answer is categorical and uncompromising,
and it is this: That Jesus Bar-Joseph, the carpenter from Nazareth, was in fact
and in truth, and in the most exact and literal sense of the words, the God ‘by
whom all things were made.’ His body and brain were those of a common man; his
personality was the personality of God, so far as that personality could be
expressed in human terms. He was not a kind of demon pretending to be human; he
was in every respect a genuine living man. He was not merely a man so good as
to be ‘like God’—he was God.
Now, this is
not just a pious commonplace: it is not a commonplace at all. For what it means
is this, among other things: that for whatever reason God chose to make man as
he is—limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—[God] had the
honesty and courage to take his own medicine. Whatever game he is playing with
his creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing
from man that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself gone through the
whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the
cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of
pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When he was a man, he played
the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well
worthwhile.”
– Dorothy
Sayers (1893-1957) The Greatest Drama Ever Staged, from ‘The Whimsical
Christian’
“God does not
give us explanations; we do not comprehend the world, and we are not going to.
It is, and it remains for us, a confused mystery of bright and dark. God does
not give us explanations; he gives us a Son. Such is the spirit of the angel’s
message to the shepherds: ‘Peace upon earth, good will to men . . . and this
shall be the sign unto you: ye shall find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes,
and lying in a manger.’
The Word of
God brings upon human pain and strife the consolation of eternal love.”
– Austin
Farrer (1904-1968), The Essential Sermons
“In Athanasius’
words, ‘He became man that we might become divine,’ so that we might share in
the life of God and consequently that the life of God might be in him. Yet the
Redeemer is not a gnostic Christ imparting the secrets of divine wisdom, who
could indeed be a heavenly figure in human disguise. The mystery of our
redemption is something altogether deeper than that. It proceeds, not from the
outside by illumination, but from the inside by participation. We need
transformation, not information.”
– John
Polkinghorne (1930-2021), The Faith of a Physicist
“God’s love
has no bounds. It seeks to preserve the integrity and goodness of all creation
regardless of how far God must reach down into the constructs of human hate to
do so. The freedom of God that is expressed in life is always connected to
love. It is God’s very love for life that serves as the motivating force for
all that God does. Because of God’s love for creation, God has entered into
human history. God’s very movement in human history is defined by the love of
God.”
– Kelly Brown
Douglas (1957 - ), Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God
“The
stupendous theme [of Christianity is] that God’s ultimate purpose for the human
race and for the whole material universe is that they should be taken up into
Christ and transformed into a condition of unimaginable glory, and that it is
for this that God took our human nature, in which spirit and matter are so
mysteriously and intricately interwoven.”
– E. L.
Mascall (1905-1993), The Christian Universe
“United with
Christ our humanity is purified, healed and elevated—saved from sin and its
effects (anxiety, fear, conflict and death)—as a consequence of the very
incarnation through which the life-giving powers of God’s own nature are
brought to bear on human life in the predicament of sin. Humanity is taken to
the Word in the incarnation in order to receive from the Word what saves it.”
– Kathryn
Tanner (1957 - ), Christ the Key
“Humanity is
humanity suffering from fear and distress, conflict with others, anxiety before
death, betrayal and isolation, separation from God—all the qualities of
death-infused, sin-corrupted life that require remedy. The cross then typifies
the character of human life that the Word becomes incarnate to reverse by
making its own; incarnation does not distract attention from the cross but sees
all the struggles of Jesus life as the Word made flesh in light of it.”
– Kathryn
Tanner (1957 - ), Christ the Key
“How can I
matter to him? we say. It makes no sense; he has the world, and even that he
does not need. It is folly even to imagine him like myself, to credit him with
eyes into which I could ever look, a heart that could ever beat for my sorrows
or joys, and a hand he could hold out to me. For even if the childish picture
be allowed, that hand must be cupped to hold the universe, and I am a speck of
dust on the star-dust of the world.
Yet Mary holds
her finger out, and a divine hand closes on it. The maker of the world is born
a begging child; he begs for milk, and does not know that it is milk for which
he begs. We will not lift our hands to pull the love of God down to us, but he
lifts his hands to pull human compassion down upon his cradle. So the weakness
of God proves stronger than men, and the folly of God proves wiser than men.
Love is the strongest instrument of omnipotence, for accomplishing those tasks
he cares most dearly to perform; and this is how he brings his love to bear on
human pride; by weakness not by strength, by need and not by bounty.”
– Austin
Farrer (1904-1968), A Faith of Our Own
“There is a phrase associated with two of the greatest Anglican thinkers of the last generation, Michael Ramsey and John V. Taylor: ‘God is Christlike and in him there is no unChristlikeness at all'. What is seen in Jesus is what God is; what God is is the outpouring and returning of selfless love, which is the very essence of God’s definition, in so far as we can ever speak of a ‘definition’ of the mystery.”
– Rowan Williams (1950 - ), Tokens of Trust
“Christ has
taken humanity to himself, and so every man and woman and child in the world is
loveable and infinitely precious. And, in response, men and women can treat
each other–whatever their race or color–in the light of Bethlehem; or they can,
in rejecting the human dignity of their fellows, reject their own dignity too.”
– Michael
Ramsey (1904-1988), Through the Year with Michael Ramsey, Margaret Duggan,
ed.
“One of the
most convicting aspects of Christianity, if we try to see it in terms of our
own day, is the contrast between its homely and inconspicuous beginnings and
the holy powers it brought into the world. It keeps us in perpetual dread of
despising small things, humble people, little groups. The Incarnation means
that the Eternal God enters our common human life with all the energy of His
creative love, to transform it, to exhibit to us its riches, its unguessed
significance; speaking our language, and showing us His secret beauty on our
own scale.”
– Evelyn
Underhill (1875-1941), The School of Charity
“It was human
nature, not a human person, that God the Son united to himself when he became
man. Thus, both the state of fallenness and the state of redemption appertain
in the first place to the human race as such, and then to individual men and
women as members of it; and this does not mean that God is not interested in us
as individuals, but that he is interested in us as the kind of individuals we
are, namely members of one another.”
– E. L.
Mascall (1905-1993), The Christian Universe
“The
Only-Begotten, having shone upon us from the very Essence of God the Father,
and having in His own Nature all which the Father is, became Flesh according to
the Scriptures, having, as it were, mingled Himself with our nature, through
the ineffable concurrence and union with this body which is from the earth.
Thus He, by nature God, was truly called and became a Heavenly Man (not
‘bearing God,’ as some say who do not accurately understand the depth of the
mystery, but) being, in one, God and Man, that having, in a manner, co-united
in Himself what by nature was far apart and alien from all sameness of nature,
He might make man to communicate in and partake of the Divine Nature.”
– Edward
Bouverie Pusey (1800-1882), Eirenicon
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10. Committed to Belonging and to Being the Church as the Body of Christ
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