The Soteriological Grammar of Conciliar Christology

165 The Thomist 78 (2014): 165-88 THE SOTERIOLOGICAL GRAMMAR OF CONCILIAR CHRISTOLOGY1 KHALED ANATOLIOS Boston College Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts T HAS BECOME customary in recent theology to presume that the primary linguistic and logical components of soteriological doctrine are metaphors, none of which are doctrinally normative, which give rise to distinct “models” for depicting the mystery of Christian salvation. The “Salvation” article in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology makes a statement that is typical in this regard: The Christian church has never made a single theory definitive for the meaning of atonement, and has rather relied upon a series of metaphors for understanding the work of Christ, derived from different social contexts.2 1 An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the Thomistic Circles Conference, "Jesus Christ, True God and True Man: The Promise of Chalcedonian Christology," at the Thomistic Institute, Washington, D.C., on October 6, 2012. I am grateful to all the conference participants for the discussion that followed the presentation of this paper and especially to Robert Imbelli, Bruce Marshall, and Thomas Joseph White, for their helpful comments. 2 Paul S. Fiddes, “Salvation,” The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology, ed. John Webster, Kathryn Tanner, and Iain Torrance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 180-81. It is interesting to note the progressive development of this approach, which can be illustrated by reference to three influential treatments that appeared in the last century. In his classic work, Christus Victor (Gustaf Aulén, “Die drei Haupttypen des christlichen Versöhnungsgedankens,” Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie 8 [1930]: 501-38; Eng. trans., Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of Atonement, trans. A. G. Herber, S.S.M. [London: SPCK, 1930; repr.: Eugene, Ore.: Wipf & Stock, 2003]), Gustaf Aulén speaks of “the three main types of the idea of the atonement”: what he calls “the classic idea” which is that of Christus Victor; the I 166 KHALED ANATOLIOS It is of course undeniable that the lexicon of Christian discourse, beginning with the Scriptures themselves, contains a variety of characterizations of both the negative features of human life considered apart from Christ’s salvific work and the positive transformation that this work effects. Nevertheless, even a cursory consideration of the development of the core doctrines of Christian faith should prompt us to question whether an adequate treatment of Christian salvation can restrict its focus to these metaphorical representations without reference to the Trinitarian and Christological dogmatic framework which normatively regulates their authentic meaning. By exemplary contrast, the Church Fathers indeed did use a multiplicity of images and metaphors to characterize Christ’s salvific work, but underlying these was always a Christological framework that identified the content of salvation as the unity of humanity and divinity in Christ by which humanity was enfolded in the life of the divine Trinity. We already find a full articulation of this Christological-soteriological framework in Irenaeus’s second-century work, Against the Heresies: The Lord is most compassionate and merciful and loves the human race. Therefore, as I have already said, he caused humanity to cling to and be united Latin or Anselmian idea; and the subjective idea. But for Aulén, these are not alternative or complementary paths to the same mystery. Rather, the Christus Victor idea is the true one that reigned throughout the New Testament and the patristic period, then became occluded by the rise of the Anselmian doctrine until it was retrieved by Luther. On the other hand, the Latin and subjective approaches are simply distortions of the authentic proclamation of salvation in Christ. In contrast, H. E. W. Turner’s The Patristic Doctrine of Redemption: A Study of the Development of Doctrine during the First Five Centuries, published some two decades later (London: A.R. Mowbray & Co., 1952) contends that there is “no single theory” (114) of the doctrine of redemption in the patristic era. Turner identifies four main approaches to depicting the salvific work of Christ: illumination (Christ as Teacher); sacrifice (Christ as Victim); victory over demons and death (Christus Victor); and deification. In his concluding lines, Turner makes some tantalizing remarks about the first three streams being “partial significances of...