Franciscan Penance Library

THE INCARNATION AND THE CROSS

Part II of Professor Joseph Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity deals with Jesus Christ.  At this point Professor Ratzinger examines the two major ways in which Christianity has viewed Jesus Christ.  In the history of the Christian faith two divergent lines of approach to the contemplation of Jesus have appeared again and again: the theology of the Incarnation, which sprang from Greek thought and became dominant in the Catholic tradition of East and West, and the theology of the Cross, which based itself on St. Paul and the earliest forms of Christian belief and made a decisive breakthrough in the thinking of the Reformers. The former talks of “being” and centers around the fact that here a man is God and that, accordingly, at the same time God is man; this astounding fact is seen as the all decisive one.  All the individual events that followed pale before this one event of the one-ness of man and God, of God’s becoming man.  In  face of  this they can only be secondary; the interlocking of God and man appears as the truly decisive, redemptive factor, as the real future of man, on which all lines must finally converge.

The theology of the Cross, on the other hand, will have nothing to do with ontology of this kind;  it speaks instead of the event; it follows the testimony of the early days, when people enquired, not yet about being, but about the activity of God in the Cross and Resurrection, an activity that conquered death and pointed to Jesus as the Lord and as the hope of humanity.  The differing tendencies of these two theologies result from their respective approaches.  The theology of the Incarnation tends toward a static, optimistic view.  The sin of man may well appear as a transitional stage of fairly minor importance.  The decisive factor, then, is not that man is in a state of sin and must be saved; the aim goes far beyond any such atonement for the past and lies in making progress toward the convergence of man and God.  The theology of the Cross, on the other hand, leads rather to a dynamic, topical, anti-world interpretation of Christianity, which understands Christianity only as a discontinuously but constantly appearing breach in the self-confidence and self-assurance of man and of his institutions, including the Church.

Thus, we have Catholics who can emphasize that the Church was founded by Jesus Christ who was true God and true Man.  Protestants, on the other hand, can emphasize the fallen nature of humanity and the sinfulness even of the Church.  Thus, they do not see it of great importance to be within the Church founded by Jesus Christ.   Professor Ratzinger does believe that there is an ultimate unity between the two approaches.  For we have found that the being of Christ (“Incarnation” theology!) is actualitas, stepping beyond oneself, the exodus of going out from self; it is, not a being that rests in itself, but the act of being sent, of being son, of serving.  Conversely, this “doing” is not just “doing” but “being”; it reaches down into the depths of being and coincides with it.  This being is exodus, transformation,  so at this point a properly understood Christology of being and of the Incarnation must pass over into the theology of the Cross, and become one with it;  Conversely, a theology of the Cross that gives its full measure must pass over into the Christology of the Son and of being.  We can see that the Incarnation and the Cross go together.  The Incarnation of Jesus Christ as true God and true Man would not mean much for us without the Cross.  But it is also of critical importance who it was who died on the Cross for us.

Professor Ratzinger next describes another antithesis which has arisen in Christianity.  In the course of the historical development of faith in Christ, two aspects of it, which people became accustomed to call “Christology” and “soteriology”, visibly parted company.  The former term came to denote the doctrine of the being of Jesus, which was treated more and more as a self-contained ontological exception and thus transformed into an object of speculation concerning something special, incomprehensible, and confined to Jesus alone.  Soteriology then came to denote the doctrine of redemption: after dealing with the ontological crossword puzzle---the question of how man and God could in Jesus be one---people went on to inquire quite separately about what Jesus had done and how the effect of his deed impinges on us.

Professor Ratzinger then describes the major Christian explanation of the redemption of humanity by Jesus Christ.   This is called the “satisfaction theory”. In other words, why did Jesus Christ need to go to the Cross and die for our sins?  This “satisfaction theory” is the explanation of the redemption developed by St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109).  The main lines of his argument may be summarized as follows: By man’s sin, which was aimed against God, the order of justice was violated beyond measure and God infinitely offended.  Behind this is the idea that the measure of the offense is determined by the status of the offended party; if I offend a beggar, the consequences are not the same as they would be if I offended a head of state.  The importance of the offense varies according to the addressee.  Since God is infinite, the offense to him implicit in humanity’s sin is also infinitely important.  The right that has been violated to such an extent must be restored, because God is a God of order and justice; indeed, he is justice itself.  But the measure of the offense demands an infinite reparation, which man is not capable of making.  He can offend infinitely---his capacity extends that far---but he cannot produce an infinite reparation; what he, as a finite being, gives will always be only finite.  His powers of destruction extend farther than his capacity to reconstruct.  Thus between all the reparations that man may attempt and the greatness of his guilt there remains an infinite gulf he can never bridge.  Any gesture of expiation can only demonstrate his powerlessness to close the infinite gulf that he himself opened up.

Is order to be destroyed forever, then, and man to remain eternally imprisoned in the abyss of his guilt?  At this point Anselm moves on to the figure of Christ.  His answer runs thus: God himself removes the injustice; not (as he could have done) by a simple amnesty, which cannot after all overcome from inside what has happened, but through another expedient: the infinite Being himself becomes man and then as a man---who belongs to the race of the offenders yet possesses the power, denied to man, of infinite reparation---makes the required expiation.  Thus the redemption takes place entirely through grace and at the same time entirely as restoration of right………His view has put a decisive stamp on the second millennium of Western Christendom, which takes it for granted that Christ had to die on the Cross in order to make good  the infinite offense that had been committed and in this way restore the order that had been violated.

While this “satisfaction theory” is quite powerful and takes into account important biblical insights, it also has problems associated with it.  It is not hard to see that, in spite of all the philosophical and juridical terminology employed, the guiding thread remains that truth which the Bible expresses in the little word “for”, in which it makes clear that we as men live not only directly from God but from one another and, in the last analysis, from the One who lived for all.  And who could fail to see that thus in the schematization of the “satisfaction” theory the breath of the biblical idea of election remains clear, the idea that makes election, not a privilege of the elected, but the call to live for others?  It is the call to that “for” in which man confidently  lets himself fall, ceases to cling to himself, and ventures on the leap away from himself into the infinite, the leap through which alone he can come to himself.  But even if all this is admitted, it cannot be denied, on the other hand, that the perfectly logical divine-cum-human legal system erected by Anselm distorts the perspectives and with its rigid logic can make the image of God appear in a sinister light.   While this theory points out the love that God has for us and the love we should have for each other, it does place God in a very legalistic light.  This is a common feature of theological theories.   They may be helpful in many respects, but could also have problems in other respects.   Of course, St. Anselm’s “satisfaction theory” does bring to light the terrible evil associated with sin.  This is an evil which our modern Western society wishes to ignore.

--Jim Nugent, CFP