We Are Witnesses of These Things

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Reclaiming Resurrection from the Dead - Easter

Introduction

Two days have brought us here. Maundy Thursday, we witnessed the last supper, then on Good Friday, we watched at the foot of the cross and learned that God’s most powerful act took the form of powerlessness. On Holy Saturday, Christ descending into the realm of the dead was nothing less than divine solidarity extended to its limits, the love of God embracing the place where God might be thought to be most absent. Holy Saturday insists that nothing has been missed. Now, Easter makes its claim upon us, and the claim is bodily.

Made in a garden. Made to locked doors. Made on a beach at daybreak around a charcoal fire. Made with breath to a face. Made with fingers plunging into wounds that did not heal after death.

It should not need saying. That the resurrection is bodily is for too much of contemporary Christianity either an embarrassing excess that must be explained away or an optional metaphor that the serious believer needn’t much bother themselves with. The accounts offered in lieu tend to fall into one of two groups. Spiritual-only: Jesus rose in that his cause lives, his memory persists, his Spirit abides, his influence echoes in the lives of those who loved him. Newer and dressed in the dignified language of science, it is the resurrection of consciousness: personal identity persisting as information or awareness beyond the death of the material body. Both arrive at something recognizable as Christ. Neither arrives at the Christ presented by the New Testament.

This essay is an argument for another way. The Anglican tradition at its best has kept it from the start. The risen Christ has a spiritual body, with definite form and feature. He is the same person who died on the cross. The wounds are still there. The transformation is real and the continuance is real and the two go together because the resurrection is the action of the Spirit upon the whole person.

The wounds revealed to Thomas provide the image we will use to explore this claim. Jesus' wounds. The ones Thomas wants to see and Jesus offers to show. The wounds are the image on which this whole doctrine swings. They will take center stage here and return at the end, transformed.

I. The Anglican Grammar of Resurrection

Anglican theology starts with the same instinct its made its decisions about the cross and evil. False choices rejected. The cross was not a divine child sacrifice or a sentimental moral example. Holy Saturday was not a liturgical pause or an undifferentiated burst of triumph. The resurrection is neither spiritual survival nor brute physical resuscitation. Anglican theology reads Scripture squarely. Prays the resurrection into existence in its liturgy. Celebrates and lives the resurrection through its sacramental life. Embodiment has never been in doubt. But neither is flesh and blood forced back into the categories of a pre-Easter body.

Michael Ramsey sets out the Anglican position, insofar as there is a unified Anglican position, most precisely in The Resurrection of Christ.1 Ramsey insists on the reality of the event. The reality of Jesus’s body. A body, note, that has been transformed, but not to the point where ordinary human experience and recognition are suspended. The disciples knew him. Recognition matters: He who appears is Jesus who was crucified. Mary recognizes the voice that calls her name. The disciples on the road to Emmaus know him in the breaking of bread. Thomas is invited to thrust his fingers into the holes. Spiritual-only interpreters frequently remark that these disciples didn’t know Jesus was risen until after the appearance. Not here. Here, the continuous, bodily identity of the risen Christ is the starting point.

And because it is continuous, the crucified Christ is still here. Jesus’s wounds are still here.

II. The Spiritual-Only Position and Its Failure

Jesus’s body was raised, but in a spiritual sense, it has an ancient precedent. Docetism claims that Jesus only seemed to be embodied, only seemed to suffer, and only seemed to die. The Church was quick to identify it as gospel-destructive and didn’t hesitate to label it a heresy. If Jesus did not physically die, then the cross is a theater. If the cross is the theater, there was no solidarity on Calvary. If there was no solidarity, there is nothing solid to be done with on Holy Saturday and Easter morning, which simply brings an empty triumph.

Spiritual-only takes a subtler form today. It allows that Jesus might well have suffered, but denies that the resurrection touches his body. Disciples see Jesus and hear his voice but do not touch him because the vision is identified as a grief vision, or as the slow dawn of realization that Jesus’s message lives on beyond him, or as the founding experience of the post-Easter church whose shared certainty that Jesus has been vindicated is itself the resurrection. Rudolf Bultmann’s fingerprints are all over much of this material2.and for similar reasons. The language of resurrection becomes mythological language for a spiritual reality that, if it exists at all, doesn’t require an empty tomb.

Anglicanism cannot say that. As with Docetism, the reasons are traditional and sentimental but run much deeper than that. They are theological and structural.

The spiritual-only resurrection undoes creation. Salvation is uncoupled from the body and, therefore, from creation. Jesus may rise as a spirit or a cause, but the body that died remains unredeemed flesh. Matter is left on the sermon editor's chopping block at the moment that the doctrine of creation most needs to embrace it. William Temple argued that Christianity is the most materialist religion of all the great traditions precisely because it has a doctrine of resurrection that insists the new creation takes bodies as seriously as the old one did.3 Anglicanism has no option but to agree.

It cannot make sense of the empty tomb. Anglican scholarship emphasizes the historicity of the tomb narratives. The earliest adversaries of the resurrection did not say “it wasn’t empty.” They offered another explanation for why it was.

The spiritual-only resurrection begins with the resurrection and works backward to spiritualize salvation. Finish the trajectory, and the redemption of the body doesn’t matter. Miracles can’t be trusted. What matters is minds. Minds that briefly inhabited bodies. Anglican sacramental teaching becomes a drag on a functional framework that has already decided that bodies don’t matter.


III. The Consciousness-Only Position and the Luminarchist Move

The second family of alternatives offers greater contemporary prestige. Its vocabulary is drawn from neuroscience and the philosophy of mind, which have become the regnant framework for speaking about persons in the modern West. On this view, personal identity is constituted by consciousness, memory, pattern, and information. The person is the pattern, and the pattern in principle need not depend on the specific substrate that originally instantiated it. Death dissolves the substrate; resurrection, on this reading, is the reconstitution of the pattern in a new form, or its continuation in some non-material medium, or its absorption into a universal field of consciousness from which individual identity may persist or emerge.

This position has the advantage of engaging seriously with the question of personal identity after death, and it takes consciousness as irreducible rather than dismissing the inner life of the person. It is, in this sense, more honest than a purely materialist eliminativism. For those engaged in the kind of science-spirituality, this family of ideas is the natural language of the contemporary resurrection discussion. Consciousness is held to survive; the person continues; something that might be called resurrection is affirmed.

The diagnosis must be made precisely here. This is the luminarchist move applied to the resurrection. Luminarchism, as my framework names it, is the theological error of collapsing transcendence into immanence by treating the creature's experience of something greater as an experience of the system's own depth rather than an encounter with what genuinely precedes and exceeds the system from without.4 In the resurrection context, the luminarchist move preserves the phenomenology of personal survival while evacuating its bodily content. The person continues, the consciousness persists, the information endures, and the body, the particular flesh-and-blood particularity of this human being, is shed as the irrelevant substrate.

I offer five diagnostic questions to press this directly. On the luminarchist resurrection, salvation is elevation into a higher informational or conscious state rather than the healing and restoration of persons in their embodied particularity. The body is treated as a temporary substrate for consciousness rather than the permanent dwelling of the Spirit. The risen Christ becomes a pattern reconstituted rather than a person bodily vindicated. And the church that celebrates this resurrection is no longer gathered around the broken and given body of the one who was raised; it is gathered around a communal experience of surviving consciousness. In the end, because cells do this naturally, there is no Jesus except for the human one who may have stumbled upon some of the spiritual realities of the cosmos thousands of years ago. That is not the Anglican belief.

Thomas Nagel's observation is relevant here. Neo-Darwinian biology, and by extension the philosophy of mind that grows from it, operates in the third-person register.5 Consciousness is irreducibly first-person. The consciousness-only resurrection attempts to honor that first-person reality by preserving it beyond death, and in doing so, it takes a step the strict materialist refuses. The Anglican tradition affirms that step. Persons are irreducible. Identity is real. The inner life matters to God. Where the tradition must press further is the question of what that inner life is inner to. The consciousness-only resurrection answers: inner to itself. The Anglican tradition answers: inner to a body that is itself the image of God and the dwelling of the Spirit, and therefore inner to a person whose bodily particularity is held by the God who made it.

Austin Farrer's grammar of double agency is illuminating here.6 God acts through creaturely causes without being identical to them. The resurrection is God's action upon the body of Jesus, transforming it without dissolving it. This is neither resuscitation, the mere reanimation of a corpse, nor dematerialization. It is the Spirit's action upon matter, glorifying the particular body of this particular person. The agent is God; the patient is the whole person, body and soul together. To strip the resurrection down to the survival of consciousness is to remove the patient, leaving only the agent acting upon nothing that was ever materially real.


IV. The Classical Position: Spiritual Body with Individual Form

Paul's letter to the Corinthians provides the most sustained New Testament treatment of what the resurrection body is and is not.7 His controlling image is the seed and the plant: what is sown is transformed into what is raised. There is genuine continuity; it is the same seed that becomes the plant, and genuine transformation; the plant exceeds the seed in ways the seed itself could not anticipate. The spiritual body (soma pneumatikon) is the body as fully animated by and expressive of the Spirit, the body as God always intended the body to be.

Several features of Paul's account are theologically decisive. First, the resurrection body is individual. Paul does not describe the absorption of individual persons into a universal body or a collective consciousness. The same person who dies is the person who is raised. Second, the resurrection body is transformed. It is raised in glory, in power, in incorruption. The limitations and vulnerabilities of ordinary creaturely embodiment are overcome. Third, the resurrection body is the first fruits of a general resurrection: Christ's resurrection inaugurates the transformation of creation, the new creation in which all things will be made new. These three revelations must be balanced within any conception of the resurrection.

The Gospel resurrection narratives fill out Paul's account with specific detail, and the detail matters. The risen Jesus eats. He is touched. He walks, he speaks, he breathes on the disciples, he cooks breakfast. These are all bodily acts. At the same time, he appears in a locked room. He is recognized and then disappears at Emmaus. Mary Magdalene mistakes him for a gardener until he speaks her name. The body that does these things is the same body that died and is the same body now beyond death in a manner that exceeds ordinary creaturely limitation.

Rowan Williams, in his reading of the resurrection appearances, notes that the disciples recognize Jesus rather than deduce him.8 Recognition is a category that requires continuity of identity. One can only recognize what one has previously known. The disciples do not conclude from the evidence that this is Jesus; they know it is Jesus. The knowing precedes the reasoning. That kind of recognition belongs to a person, to an embodied person whose voice, face, gestures, and wounds are the basis on which recognition is possible.

The wounds are the center of the doctrine. They are, precisely, the marks of continuity. The risen Christ is the crucified one, raised. The wounds remain in the glorified body as the permanent testimony that this is the same person, that the cross was real, that the suffering was real, that the death was real, and that God's answer to all of that reality was transformation rather than replacement. The scars of Calvary are carried into the new creation. They are glorified.

This has profound implications for the Anglican theology of evil developed in my Holy Saturday essay. If the wounds remain in the risen body, then suffering leaves a permanent mark upon the person that even resurrection does not erase. God's answer to evil is the transformation of the particular person, wounds and all, into glory. The victims of history are raised as themselves. The traumatized are raised with their histories held and healed. The ones who suffered are the ones who are vindicated.


V. The Sacramental Confirmation

Anglican theology has always understood the Eucharist as the place where the resurrection is most fully encountered within ordinary creaturely time. The one who is crucified and risen makes himself known in the breaking of the bread. The Emmaus story makes this clear: the disciples do not recognize him in the conversation on the road. They recognize him in the fractio panis, in the moment when his hands break the bread, and he gives it to them.9

That eucharistic recognition confirms the bodily resurrection at the liturgical level. The Eucharist is a bodily action: hands are extended, bread is taken, broken, and given; the cup is shared; the body and blood of Christ are received through the material elements. If the resurrection were the survival of consciousness only, there would be no particular reason for this enactment. A meditation, a visualization, a communal remembering of Jesus's teaching would serve just as well. The reason the Church has gathered around this table, in this bodily way, is that the risen Lord who meets them here is the same Lord whose body was given and whose blood was poured out on Calvary, and who was raised in that same body on the third day.

The Prayer Book expresses this with characteristic restraint and precision. The eucharistic prayer does not speculate about the mechanics of Christ's presence. It draws the gathered assembly into the reality of the one sacrifice, made once for all, and prays that we who receive the body and blood of Christ may be filled with his grace and heavenly benediction.10 I name this Civitas Eucharisticus in my book Embodied Liturgy.

The grammar is participatory: we are drawn into Christ's death and resurrection through the material signs of bread and wine. The beauty of the action, the specificity of the elements, the embodied gathering in a common place — all of this is required because the resurrection it enacts is a bodily resurrection.

VI. Resurrection, Luminarchism, and the Fate of the Image-Bearer

The three positions surveyed in this essay correspond to three different anthropologies, and the anthropology at stake is nothing less than the doctrine of the image of God. The spiritual-only resurrection implicitly locates the image of God in the soul or spirit, with the body as instrument or container. The consciousness-only resurrection similarly locates the image of God in the pattern of consciousness, with matter as the disposable substrate. Both positions effectively answer the question of what the image-bearer is by saying: the inner life, the consciousness, the soul, and the body is a vehicle the image-bearer rides until death.

Anglican theology answers differently. The image of God is borne by the whole person. The body is the image of God. The body that was formed from the earth, animated by the breath of God, sustained by food and water and rest, vulnerable to pain and death, that body is the bearer of the divine image and therefore the object of divine redemption.

The luminarchist move in its resurrection form is the substitution of the pattern for the person, the consciousness for the creature. It preserves the phenomenology of personal survival while evacuating the creaturely particularity that is the actual object of God's love. God so loved the world, the kosmos, the material creation, the specific persons in their specific bodies, that he gave his only Son. The resurrection confirms that God's love extends to the body, that the material creature is held by God even through and beyond death, that the image-bearer is vindicated in the fullness of what they are.

This is the load-bearing wall that the consciousness-only resurrection removes. When the body is shed in the act of resurrection, the implicit theology of creation is that the body was always provisional, always the lesser part, always destined for dissolution. And if the body is destined for dissolution, the sacraments that convey grace through material signs are at best pragmatic accommodations to creaturely limitation rather than genuine vehicles of divine action. The Incarnation, the permanent assumption of matter by the Word of God, is undermined at its root. The Word that took on flesh is depicted as eventually releasing that flesh as an outgrown form — precisely the conclusion Chalcedon was framed to prevent.

VII. The Disabled God and the Permanent Wounds

In 1994 Nancy L. Eiesland published The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability, and the argument she makes is an illuminating confirmation of what I am offering.11 Eiesland reads the resurrection appearances in Luke with attention to a detail that traditional theology has tended to spiritualize away: the risen Christ who stands among the disciples still bears the wounds of crucifixion in his hands and his feet (Luke 24:39-40). These wounds are permanent features of the glorified body. They are shown, touched, and declared. Eiesland names this the "Disabled God," not as provocation but as precision. The risen Christ enters the new creation bearing the marks of impairment, and in doing so he shares permanently in the bodily experience of those who live with disability, pain, and the stigma of non-"normative" bodies.

This presses directly on the central argument of this essay. If the wounds are permanent in the glorified body, then the glorified body is the body of one who was impaired,  pierced, broken, marked by trauma, and that impairment is carried forward into glory rather than erased by it. The transformation of the resurrection does not produce a body conformed to a cultural standard of physical wholeness or normativity. It produces a body in which the wounds of a particular history are permanently written, glorified, and shown. The Disabled God is the risen Christ, and the risen Christ is the Disabled God.

Eiesland's philosophical and literary sources illuminate this claim from several directions. She draws on liberation theolog, particularly Gustavo Gutierrez's preferential option for the poor, extended to those marginalized by bodily difference, and on feminist theology's insistence that the body as actually lived, rather than the body as idealized, is the site of theological encounter.12 She draws on the social model of disability developed by Michael Oliver and Vic Finkelstein, which reframes disability as a sociopolitical condition produced by the interaction between impairment and environments designed for normative bodies, rather than a medical deficiency to be cured or a spiritual burden to be borne.13 She draws implicitly on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodiment, which insists that the body is the ground of all perception and experience rather than an instrument the self employs.14 Together, these sources allow Eiesland to argue that "wholeness" is a category of justice and social integration within the body of Christ rather than the absence of impairment, and that the church's tendency to equate healing with cure has misread both Scripture and its own sacramental life.

The implications for Episcopal liturgical practice are substantial, and the tradition has been moving, unevenly, toward receiving them. Eiesland's work calls for radical eucharistic inclusion: the table must be physically accessible, the eucharistic assembly must be ordered around the actual bodies present rather than idealized notions of what bodies should be able to do.15 The rites for healing in the Prayer Book tradition have been increasingly interpreted as ministries of wholeness rather than the expectation of cure. The laying on of hands, the anointing with oil, and the prayers for the sick are the church's solidarity with those who suffer rather than transactions for the removal of impairment. The Disabled God confirms this reorientation: solidarity is prior to cure, and the risen Christ does not present himself to the disciples as one whose wounds have been healed. He presents himself as one whose wounds have been glorified.

The church's reception of Eiesland's theology has been uneven, yet in some parts genuinely engaged. Disability studies in theology has grown substantially in the decades since The Disabled God appeared, producing a generation of scholars, Sharon Betcher, Amos Yong, Thomas Reynolds, and others, who have extended, critiqued, and deepened her work.16 Anglican and Episcopal communities have been among the more receptive, partly because the sacramental tradition already insists that bodies matter to God, and partly because the Eiesland reading of the resurrection appearances fits naturally within the framework this essay has been developing: the wounds are real, permanent, and revelatory.


VIII. The Guardrail: Eschatology

Eiesland’s insight should be received with a qualification that she herself does not consistently apply to her work, and Anglican theology is well-suited to providing. The risk at the precipice of disability theology (as with liberation theology more broadly) is that it becomes a realized eschatology: the resurrection is first and foremost an imperative for social change in this world, and the eschatological aspect (the risen body as the first fruits of the new creation; the promise of what will happen to all bodies at the general resurrection) gets subsumed by a social program of inclusion and accessibility. When that happens, grace gets smuggled out by ethics, and the resurrection gets reduced from what God does to the body of the crucified to what we decide to do with our neighbors who’ve been marginalized.

Anglican theology maintains the tension that a realized eschatology releases. The eucharistic community is the true foretaste of the kingdom, but true foretastes come with genuine obligations: those who gather around the table of the Disabled God are called to see that table accessible to all, that the gathered community visibly reflects the body of Christ in its full human diversity, that the ministry of healing is pursued without the implicit judgment that impairment is a problem God will fix before the person can be whole. Those are true obligations, and Eiesland rightly asserts them.

At the same time, the eucharistic community is a foretaste, not the thing itself. The risen Christ, whose wounds are permanent features of the glorified body, is the first fruits of the general resurrection, which is still future. The disabled body, the body in chronic pain, the body bearing marks of trauma, the body damned by society for failing to match some cultural ideal of wholeness, all of these bodies await the transformation that Jesus’ body underwent on Easter morning. Their particularity, their personal history, their wounds will not be dissolved by the new creation; they’ll be held by God and glorified.

This is the work of God in the eschaton, and no program of social inclusion (how faithful and necessary it may be!) replaces or constitutes it.

Our guardrail on disability theology is this: the resurrection initiates our inclusion, it does not get its justification from our inclusion. God raised up the Disabled God, wounded, particular, marked body of Jesus crucified, and therefore every wounded, particular, marked body on earth is declared to be held by God, loved by God, destined for glory in its full creaturely particularity. The social and liturgical obligations that reality precipitates are as real and urgent as they come. But they are the fruit of the resurrection. Received by grace. Enacted in the body of Christ that is made present in the church. Consequences of the resurrection, not the meaning of it. The meaning of the resurrection is still what God did to the body of Jesus on the third day, the first fruits of a creation where all things, bodies included, will be made new.

Within an eschatological Anglican grammar, Eiesland’s disability theology sheds light rather than destabilizes this essay’s argument. The permanent wounds of the Disabled God teach us that God will raise up every person in their particular bodily history. Our eucharistic obligations toward those with disabilities flow from and confirm that in the gathering assembly, we must embody that truth, a foretaste of what is to come. But the eschaton reminds us that the foretaste is not the feast itself; that even our most faithful embodied response to the risen Christ awaits the day when every wound will be glorified, every body vindicated, and the new creation displays what God always meant for bodies to look like.

IX. The Wounds Reclaimed

At the outset of this essay, the wounds of the risen Christ were proffered as the central image: the marks Thomas asks about and Jesus exhibits. Proof that the one standing in the upper room is the same one who hung on the tree. Over the course of the argument, those wounds have accumulated significance. Let me take a minute at the end to try and draw them back together again at a different weight than they began with.

The wounds began as proof of identity, evidence that the one raised was the same who died. They now bear the weight of the whole theological project. The wounds present on the glorified body say that the transformation God does not come at the expense of our particularity. Our particular selves, with our particular histories. The risen Christ declares that the body is the indispensable bearer of personal identity, such that even the glorified body does not give that up. It says that God’s response to evil, suffering, and human rebellion is vindication: the wounds will still be there, but they will be glorified wounds on the hands that now bless us.

Lastly, the wounds declare this: if these wounds remain on the risen Christ, every wound suffered by every human body is secure in God's hands. Carried in the glorified body of the Son of God, who will one day come again to transform every wound into its glorious future. The resurrection isn’t the end of the story, but its beginning: the first fruits, the penultimate act of the new creation. What God did to Jesus’s body on Easter morning is the sign and promise of what God will do for all the bodies of those who belong to him by baptism into death and resurrection.

They will be bodily raised as themselves, history and wounds included. They will be glorified as the distinct image-bearers they were created to be. They will be eternally secure in the love of the God who made them.

Good Friday showed us that God will not refuse to enter into every mode of human powerlessness. Holy Saturday showed us that no silence is too great for God to inhabit. Easter morning shows us that there is no human death that will have the last word over the bodies that God loved into being. On the cross, God was crowned with the powerless rather than the powerful. In the silence of the grave, God raised up the body of the crucified rather than abandoning it. On Easter morning, God declares every wounded body to be a glorified body.

In each of these, God is acting with the same love, for the sake of the same creation, and in the body of the same Son.

It is the third day. He is risen.



*This essay is largely taken from several of my books and offered here in a new form.

Footnotes

1 Michael Ramsey, The Resurrection of Christ: An Essay in Biblical Theology (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1945). Ramsey's insistence that the resurrection is both genuinely bodily and genuinely transformed remains the most precise Anglican formulation of the position developed here.

2 Rudolf Bultmann, "New Testament and Mythology," in Kerygma and Myth, ed. Hans Werner Bartsch, trans. Reginald H. Fuller (London: SPCK, 1953). Bultmann's demythologizing program remains the intellectual ancestor of most spiritual-only resurrection positions in mainline Protestantism.

3 William Temple, Nature, Man and God (London: Macmillan, 1934), 478. Temple's claim that Christianity is the most avowedly materialist of all the great religions is an affirmation of the theological significance of creation and embodiment.

4 This diagnostic category is developed across the apologetics series. For the full five-question instrument, see the FRAMEWORKS reference document.

5 Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 35.

6 Austin Farrer, Faith and Speculation (London: A. and C. Black, 1967), 62-66. Farrer's account of double agency provides the grammar for understanding God's action in and through the creaturely without abolishing the creaturely.

7 1 Corinthians 15:35-49. Paul's seed-and-plant analogy is the most sustained scriptural account of transformation-in-continuity, and Anglican theology has consistently returned to it as the structural spine of resurrection doctrine.

8 Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1982), 43-47. Williams's phenomenological analysis of recognition in the resurrection appearances remains essential reading for any Anglican engagement with the topic.

9 Luke 24:30-31. The Emmaus account is the paradigmatic eucharistic recognition narrative in the Anglican tradition, and it has shaped both Prayer Book theology and Anglican homiletics on the resurrection since Cranmer.

10 The Book of Common Prayer (New York: Church Publishing, 2007), 335-336.

11 Nancy L. Eiesland, The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), 58-60, 70-75, 99-101, 114-116. Eiesland's reading of Luke 24 as the textual ground for the "Disabled God" is the single most important contribution in disability theology to the doctrine of the resurrection, and it arrives here as a confirmation of the bodily resurrection argument rather than a revision of it.

12 Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, trans. Caridad Inda and John Eagleson (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1973). Eiesland extends the preferential option from economic marginalization to the marginalization of non-normative bodies.

13 Michael Oliver, The Politics of Disablement (London: Macmillan, 1990). The social model distinguishes impairment (the bodily condition) from disability (the social and environmental barrier), relocating the problem from the individual body to the systems that exclude it.

14 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962). Merleau-Ponty's account of the body as the ground of all perception rather than an instrument of the self provides the phenomenological basis for Eiesland's insistence that the body as actually lived is the site of theological encounter.

15 Eiesland, The Disabled God, 114-116. Her specific eucharistic recommendations include architectural accessibility, adaptation of liturgical gesture and posture, and the revision of healing rites to emphasize solidarity rather than cure.

16 Sharon Betcher, Spirit and the Politics of Disablement (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007); Amos Yong, Theology and Down Syndrome: Reimagining Disability in Late Modernity (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2007); Thomas E. Reynolds, Vulnerable Communion: A Theology of Disability and Hospitality (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2008). Reynolds's development of "vulnerable communion" is particularly consonant with the Anglican sacramental tradition.




Bibliography

Betcher, Sharon. Spirit and the Politics of Disablement. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007.

Bultmann, Rudolf. "New Testament and Mythology." In Kerygma and Myth, edited by Hans Werner Bartsch, translated by Reginald H. Fuller. London: SPCK, 1953.

Doyle, C. Andrew. Embodied Liturgy: Virtual Reality and Liturgical Theology in Conversation. New York: Church Publishing, 2021.

Doyle, C. Andrew. Bedeviled and Beloved: An Anglican Naming of Evil, Responsibility, and Hope. Manuscript.

Eiesland, Nancy L. The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994.

Farrer, Austin. Faith and Speculation. London: A. and C. Black, 1967.

Gutierrez, Gustavo. A Theology of Liberation. Translated by Caridad Inda and John Eagleson. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1973.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 1962.

Nagel, Thomas. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Oliver, Michael. The Politics of Disablement. London: Macmillan, 1990.

Ramsey, Michael. The Resurrection of Christ: An Essay in Biblical Theology. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1945.

Reynolds, Thomas E. Vulnerable Communion: A Theology of Disability and Hospitality. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2008.

Temple, William. Nature, Man and God. London: Macmillan, 1934.

The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church. New York: Church Publishing, 2007.

Williams, Rowan. Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1982.

Yong, Amos. Theology and Down Syndrome: Reimagining Disability in Late Modernity. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2007.

Reclaiming the Harrowing of Hell

 

Holy Saturday, Trinitarian Love, and the Anglican Confrontation with Evil

Introduction

Among the articles of the Apostles’ Creed, few are as neglected, or as theologically explosive, as the confession, “He descended into hell.” For many Anglicans, this clause is recited liturgically but seldom explored doctrinally. Yet in an age marked by systemic injustice, traumatic loss, social fragmentation, and acute experiences of abandonment, the Church’s relative silence regarding Christ’s descent has left a notable gap in its theological account of evil. Anglican theology, shaped by restraint and proportion, has often preferred to speak of evil in moral and pastoral terms (sin, injustice, corruption, brokenness) without always pressing into its cosmic, eschatological, and Christological depth. 

This post argues that reclaiming the doctrine of the harrowing of hell, especially through Rowan Williams’s reading of Hans Urs von Balthasar, offers Anglican theology a profound and necessary resource for confronting evil. The descent into hell is far more than an optional mythological appendix to the Creed. It is a revelation of divine love in the depths of godlessness. It reframes the problem of evil, treating it less as an abstract puzzle to be solved than as a reality into which God has descended. In doing so, it grounds Christian hope in God’s presence within evil and victory through it, rather than in escape from evil.

The central claim of this essay is that the harrowing of hell reveals the deepest truth about God and evil: that God’s love is such that it can sustain itself even in the place where God seems absent, and that this capacity is rooted in the eternal, self-giving life of the Trinity. In recovering this doctrine, Anglican theology can move beyond moral description toward a fully Christological and Trinitarian account of evil, one that names its horror without granting it ultimacy.

I. Anglican Grammar and the Naming of Evil

Anglican theology begins with a certain grammar. We refuse to absolutize evil; and, we refuse to trivialize evil. Evil is not some sort of rival metaphysical principle. But neither is it illusory. Evil is parasitic upon the good. Evil is distortion of the good which God has made. Article I of the Thirty-Nine Articles rules out any dualistic cosmology when it says that God is “the Maker, and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible.”  Evil has no self-subsisting ontology. It is privation, corruption, and disorder within creation.

Yet this metaphysical restraint stops well short of moral trivialization. Anglican theology insists that evil must be named truthfully and responsibly. Evil is too important to trivialize and too horrible to sensationalize.

Theology will not exhaustively explain evil, or make it completely intelligible in a way that defuses its horror. But it must enable moral judgment: to discern evil as violation and aberration, to define responsibility without reduction, to nurture hope without evasion. This Anglican grammar finds liturgical expression in the Prayer Book. The General Confession confesses both sin of commission and sin of omission: "We have done those things which we ought not to have done; and we have left undone those things which we ought to have done."  Such language assumes that evil is real, that not only individuals but communities can be lost and in need of repentance, and that grace does not need to be denied. Evil is not simply private vice; it is social distortion, institutional sin, and ancestral captivity.

Yet Anglican theology will not be complete if it stops at moral and pastoral categories. Moral theology can chart evil’s ways. But dogmatic theology must address the issues of death, abandonment, the powers, and the silence of God. This is precisely where the doctrine of the descent into hell becomes critical.

II. Scriptural Background: Descent, the Dead, and the Defeat of the Powers

The descent ad inferna is hardly some late truncation added onto the gospel. It grows out of a network of scriptural texts that have been read together by the Church for centuries. The most straightforward texts are 1 Peter 3: 18-20 (“He was killed in the flesh but made alive in the Spirit, and in the Spirit he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison”) and 1 Peter 4:6 (“the gospel was preached to the dead”). These passages are brief and mysterious, yet they provided early Christians a language for discussing Christ’s work among the dead. 

Acts 2 is just as important. Peter quotes Psalm 16 and declares that Christ “was not deserted to Hades, nor did his flesh see decomposition” (Acts 2:27, 31). Christ truly experienced the state of death, but death could not contain him. Ephesians 4: 8-10 echoes this language of Christ going “down to the lower regions of the earth,” before ascending to fill all things. Matthew 12: 40 even quotes Jonah’s three days in the belly of the fish as a type of the Son of Man who will be “in the midst of the earth.” Romans 10:6-7 alludes to a going down “into the abyss.” None of these passages in and of themselves contain a fully developed doctrine. Together they make up the biblical foundation that supported the Church’s confession.

One important distinction must be made at this point. When classical Christian theologians write that “he descended into hell,” they are not necessarily picturing Christ going to Gehenna in order to suffer as the final state of the damned. More frequently, they use language that refers to Hades or Sheol: death, the state of those who descend into death. Acts 2 uses the language of Hades specifically. This matters because “hell” for modern readers typically means final damnation, while patristic and creedal usage often referred more generally to the underworld, the grave, the realm of death. Understandably, the two meanings are blurred together by the traditional English translation. But the descent was about Christ’s full experience of death and his entry into the realm of death. It is not about speculations on infernal torment

And yet Scripture does not portray death in merely neutral terms. Death for Paul and the apocalyptic writers is part of the powers structure. Sin, death, flesh, and principalities are all tangled together. Death is a force that sustains the powers that be. Christ’s descent therefore has implications not only for the souls of the dead, but for his confrontation with death itself, and the powers that oppress his creation. Any Anglican recovery of the harrowing of hell will have to avoid sanitizing evil into moralism. Evil is systemic, supra-personal, and demonic. It’s seldom dramatic, but often entrenched in falsehoods, fear, domination, and the casual acceptance of death.

III. Creeds, Articles, and Prayer Book: The Anglican Witness

For Anglican theology to reclaim this doctrine, it must be demonstrated that this teaching belongs both to the Anglican formularies themselves and to general Christian tradition. The Apostles' Creed confesses that Christ "descended into hell." Article III of the Thirty-Nine Articles is even more explicit: "As Christ died for us, and was buried, so also is it to be believed, that he went down into Hell."  That statement matters. It shows that the descent is more than poetic or optional language; it is part of Anglican doctrinal identity.

Anglican reserve must therefore resist becoming theological amnesia. Moderation is one thing; silence where the formularies have spoken is another. If Article I helps locate evil within a non-dualistic doctrine of creation, Article III insists that Christ’s saving work extends into the depths of death itself.

The Prayer Book reinforces this witness. Holy Saturday is more than a blank day between Good Friday and Easter. It is the Church’s day of waiting at the tomb. The liturgical materials of the triduum, along with the burial rites and paschal collects, form the Church to inhabit silence, burial, expectation, and hope. One collect asks that all who have been “baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ” may continually put away the old life and take on the new.  Another prays for the departed by invoking the God “whose days are without end, and whose mercies cannot be numbered.”  The Prayer Book does not elaborate a detailed theology of Christ’s descent, but it gives the Church its atmosphere: death is real, burial is holy, waiting is faithful, and hope persists.

IV. Patristic Memory and the Harrowing of Hell

The early Church treated the descent as a central dimension of Christ’s victory, far from a minor afterthought. In the East especially, the icon of the Anastasis depicts Christ breaking the gates of Hades and raising Adam and Eve from their tombs. This image compresses an entire theology of salvation into one scene: Christ enters the place of captivity and seizes humanity by the hand.

The Fathers vary in language and emphasis, but several themes recur. Christ descends because he has truly died. He descends because salvation must reach those under the power of death. He descends because the scope of redemption answers the scope of the fall. And he descends because only what is assumed can be healed. Balthasar’s appeal to Irenaeus’s principle, that only what is endured is healed, intensifies rather than invents this patristic instinct. 

The ancient Holy Saturday homily preserved in the Liturgy of the Hours captures the tradition at its most arresting: “What is happening? Today there is a great silence on earth, a great silence and stillness, a great silence because the King sleeps.”  Here Holy Saturday is neither mere absence nor pure triumph. It is silence under tension. Christ enters the domain of death, seeks Adam, and wakes the sleepers. The East typically stresses the victorious harrowing; the West often dwells longer in burial and waiting. Anglican theology, precisely because of its historical capacity to receive from East and West alike, is well placed to let both notes sound.

V. Holy Saturday and the Theology of Waiting

Holy Saturday occupies an ambiguous place in Christian theology. Situated between the horror of the cross and the joy of the resurrection, it is often treated as a liturgical interval rather than a theological event. Hans Urs von Balthasar resists that tendency. In Mysterium Paschale, he argues that Holy Saturday is central to Christian soteriology because it names the interval in which Christ’s solidarity with the dead is disclosed in its fullest depth. 

Riyako Cecilia Hikota’s study of Balthasar is especially helpful here. She argues that Balthasar seeks to recover the “in-betweenness” of Holy Saturday as a day of transition, waiting, and hidden redemption.  Holy Saturday is thus neither a mere appendix to Good Friday nor a diminished Easter. It has its own theological weight. The Church waits; Mary waits; the world waits. Salvation includes event and outcome, and also interval, suspension, and silence.

This matters immensely for any theology of suffering. Good Friday has its cry of dereliction. Easter has its proclamation of victory. Holy Saturday alone gives dogmatic dignity to unresolved grief, delayed meaning, and trust without sight. It is the day on which faith exists without manifestation. That makes it indispensable for Christian reflection on evil. Many forms of suffering are suspended rather than dramatic. Many wounds endure on Saturday.

VI. Balthasar and Rowan Williams: Presence in Godlessness

Balthasar’s account of Holy Saturday remains controversial, but it is fruitful precisely because it forces the Church to take with utmost seriousness the claim that Christ truly entered death. On his reading, the descent is more than a triumphant proclamation delivered from a place of untouched sovereignty. It is real participation in the condition of the dead, solidarity with those who are lost, and radical obedience extending even into the silence of death. His notorious phrase about the “obedience of a corpse” is intended to prevent any suggestion that Christ merely appears to die while remaining untouched by what death means for human beings. 

Rowan Williams’s reading of Balthasar is especially valuable because it locates this descent within a robustly Trinitarian framework. In “Balthasar and the Trinity,” Williams argues that the divine “hiding” manifested in the cross and Holy Saturday is no collapse of deity but a disclosure of what divine love eternally is.  God is made loving by no external suffering. Rather, because God is eternally self-giving love, God can be present in abandonment without ceasing to be God. The Father’s self-giving to the Son, and the Son’s eternal reception and return in the Spirit, constitute a life of ecstatic self-donation. The descent into hell is therefore no emergency improvisation within God. It is the historical manifestation of an eternal Trinitarian truth.

This bears directly on the problem of evil. If evil is experienced most acutely as godlessness, abandonment, and the collapse of meaning, then Holy Saturday declares that there too divine love can be. This arises from no confusion of evil with good, and from no illusion that abandonment is less than real. It arises because God’s love is strong enough to inhabit even its apparent opposite. In Williams’s rendering, God is most deeply revealed where God appears most absent. 

VII. Provision, Presence, and Power

The tradition of the harrowing of hell may be helpfully summarized under three headings: provision, presence, and power.

First, provision. The descent addresses a perennial theological question: what of those who died before Christ, or outside the visible historical reach of the gospel? The biblical hints in 1 Peter and the patristic imagination of Christ liberating the righteous dead express a fundamental conviction that God’s saving action is constrained by no historical accident. The descent is a sign of divine generosity and of the wideness of mercy.

Second, presence. Christ descends because he is fully present to the dead. He sends no mere message; he becomes one of them. The pastoral force of this is profound. There is no place of bereavement, despair, hidden suffering, or death that lies beyond Christ’s solidarity.

Third, power. The descent is also an act of victory. Christ’s presence among the dead is transformative presence. Death’s dominion is invaded from within. The risen Christ who declares in Revelation that he holds “the keys of Death and Hades” does so as one who has entered that realm and shattered its claim to finality.

The Eastern image of the harrowing captures this vividly. Christ stands above the ruined gates of Hades and raises Adam and Eve. The victory is representative, communal, and cosmic. Salvation is the undoing of humanity’s captivity, rather than the rescue of isolated souls.

VIII. Descent, Baptism, and the Church’s Participation

The doctrine of the descent belongs to sacramental theology and ecclesiology as much as to Christology. Christians are incorporated into Christ’s death and resurrection in baptism. Romans 6 speaks of being “buried with him by baptism into death,” so that believers may walk in newness of life. Hikota rightly notes that Holy Saturday gives distinctive shape to Christian discipleship because the baptized are drawn into Christ’s passage through death toward resurrection. 

This matters because the descent concerns more than what Christ did once in the realm of the dead. It also names the pattern of Christian existence now. The baptized live in-between: the old life has been judged, the new life has begun, but glory remains hidden. In that sense, Christian life bears the mark of Saturday. It is lived between accomplished redemption and unveiled fulfillment. Believers endure suffering, temptation, delay, and loss under the sign of a victory that is already real yet fully unseen. Holy Saturday becomes a grammar for discipleship, rather than a curiosity.

IX. The Universalism Question

Any serious account of the descent must face the question it seems naturally to provoke: if Christ descends to the dead and if no place is beyond his reach, does this imply universal salvation?

The doctrine carries no such requirement. It certainly expands the horizon of hope and forbids constricted accounts of grace. It insists that Christ’s saving action reaches into death itself and warns the Church against presuming narrow limits to mercy. But it falls short of dogmatically establishing that all are in fact saved. Hikota’s study shows that Balthasar’s treatment of Holy Saturday raises precisely this question while refusing a simplistic resolution. 

Anglican theology can speak here with clarity and reserve. The harrowing of hell authorizes hope, rather than presumption. It calls the Church to trust the wideness of divine mercy without dissolving judgment into sentiment. Evil lacks ultimacy, and judgment remains real. The descent therefore deepens Christian hope while preserving moral seriousness.

X. Anglican Retrieval and Doctrinal Proportion

The Anglican tradition is particularly well suited to retrieve this doctrine because of its capacity to hold together truths often pulled apart. The via media at its best is disciplined proportion rather than compromise. The classical Anglican inheritance repeatedly described its theological temperament in terms of measure, breadth, and synthesis rather than reduction.  That is precisely what a doctrine like the descent requires.

An Anglican retrieval of the harrowing of hell should therefore do several things at once. It should affirm the scriptural roots of the doctrine without claiming more explicitness than the texts provide. It should honor the creeds and Article III without treating every later theological elaboration as equally binding. It should recover the patristic and liturgical imagination of the Church, especially the East-West interplay of victory and waiting. It should welcome Balthasar and Williams as powerful modern interpreters while distinguishing the doctrine itself from any one constructive account of it. And it should press the doctrine into pastoral service for an age in which evil is experienced as wrongdoing and also as dereliction, trauma, systemic death, and spiritual desolation.

In that respect, Balthasar should be received constructively but with care. Hikota’s work is helpful precisely because it shows both the richness and the difficulty of his account.  Anglican theology can profit from his seriousness about Holy Saturday and from Williams’s Trinitarian clarification without pretending that every feature of Balthasar’s interpretation is identical with the whole tradition as such.

XI. Holy Saturday and the Anglican Confrontation with Evil

The doctrine of the descent into hell transforms the Anglican account of evil because it prevents two equal and opposite failures. First, it prevents the Church from minimizing evil. Death, abandonment, the powers, and hell itself are more than mere metaphors for ordinary disappointment. The descent assumes that evil reaches into the deepest structures of existence. Second, it prevents the Church from granting evil ultimacy. The whole point of the descent is that Christ has entered precisely what seemed most closed to God and broken it open from within.

This is why the doctrine matters now. Modern discourse often oscillates between therapeutic reduction and apocalyptic sensationalism. Evil is either psychologized away or magnified into an all-explanatory category. The harrowing of hell offers a more disciplined Christian grammar. Evil is real, devastating, and frequently hidden in habits, institutions, and public powers. It can be demonic as well as social, structural as well as personal. Yet it is no rival principle and claims no final word. Christ has gone to its furthest horizon.

For Anglican theology, this means the Church can speak of evil with greater honesty and greater hope. It can say that God refuses to remain distant from the victims of history, the dead, the traumatized, or those who experience only silence. God in Christ has entered there. And because Christ has entered there, no human darkness is finally godless.

Conclusion

The clause “he descended into hell” is far from a marginal detail of the Creed. It is a revelation of the deepest truth about God. It declares that God is creator, judge, and redeemer, and also the one who enters into the darkest realities of creaturely existence before God: death, abandonment, silence, and the domain of the powers.

To reclaim the harrowing of hell is to give Anglican theology a fuller grammar for naming evil and a deeper dogmatic ground for hope. It is to say that evil is real, dreadful, and deeply embedded in human life, but holds no claim to ultimacy. God has gone where death reigns. Christ has entered the realm of the dead, borne the silence of Holy Saturday, confronted the powers, and shattered the gates from within.

This doctrine also teaches the Church how to live. Christian existence is more than Good Friday suffering or Easter jubilation. Much of it is lived on Saturday: in silence, in burial, in waiting, in trust without sight. Yet this waiting carries no emptiness. It is sustained by the knowledge that Christ has already gone ahead into the abyss and returned with the keys.

To confess that Christ descended into hell is therefore to confess something greater than the truth that no place lies beyond God’s reach; it is to confess that there is no depth of death, evil, or abandonment into which divine love is unable to descend. And that is why evil, however terrible, can never be the final truth of the world.

Bibliography

Balthasar, Hans Urs von. Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990.

The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church. New York: Church Publishing, 2007.

Doyle, C. Andrew. Bedeviled and Beloved: An Anglican Naming of Evil, Responsibility, and Hope. Manuscript.

Hikota, Riyako Cecilia. And Still We Wait: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theology of Holy Saturday and Christian Discipleship. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2018.

More, Paul Elmer, and Frank Leslie Cross, eds. Anglicanism: The Thought and Practice of the Church of England, Illustrated from the Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century. Milwaukee: Morehouse Publishing, 1935.

Vatican. “From an Ancient Homily for Holy Saturday: The Lord’s Descent into Hell.” Accessed April 4, 2026.

Williams, Rowan. “Balthasar and the Trinity.” In The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar, edited by Edward T. Oakes and David Moss, 37-50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Calvary from the Book of Common Prayer and Anglican Episcopal Perspective

Introduction

Yesterday I was visiting with an old friend and the subject of the cross came up. As I reflected on the conversation (for the two of us were of a similar mind) I have to say that many people are not of the same mind on the cross, nor have we ever been historically. Nevertheless, as we have traveled our way from the earliest church disciples, authors, patristics, catholic, Anglican and Episcopal road, I find that it is worth saying that there is a center stream which I am going to try and piece together below for those interested in just such a meditation on this Good Friday.

Where does this come from? Well, I could not have done all of this work in one night, though I was quite fixated on the topic. I have pulled together 30 years of teaching on the subject, several of my favorite authors, writing from a couple of books I have already published and stitched them together. The truth is there is probably a whole book of material by this point in one's ministry. I hope you find this good theological food to eat on this day of fasting.

The Anglican Theology of the Cross

From within Anglicanism have come traditions decidedly more protestant, decidedly more catholic, universalism, unitarianism, and perhaps even deism. To some degree I would argue these still represent very live options in our pews today. For the priest and the theologian it behooves us to strive to do better and wrestle with the issue at hand at a deeper level and well within our own tradition instead of appealing constantly to the traditions of others.

Properly understood, the Anglican theology of the cross does not begin with theory. It begins with a story: the story of our Lord of glory lifted up upon a hard tree of wood and there glorifying God by his shameful death. By this dreadful enthronement upon the cross, the truth about God, about the world, about sin, about power, about love is revealed. 

Anglicanism has never fit comfortably with those who would press this mystery into a single explanatory framework. Instead Anglican Christians have received the cross through scripture, prayed it through liturgy, preached it through pastoral concern and inhabited it through sacramental living. Anglicanism has produced a theology of the cross that is both catholic and reformed, biblical and doxological, beautifully restrained yet fiercely bold.

The cross is that place where the obedient Son completes the will of the Father, where sin is judged, where death is vanquished, where the Church comes into being and where the life of this world is restored.

The Prayer Book tradition makes clear this point immediately. Anglican theology is never merely an abstract intellectual exercise; Anglican doctrine is doctrine prayed. The liturgy of Good Friday reveals this: the Church comes not to rationalize away the offense of Calvary but to kneel before it in worship. There the cross is venerated as that whereby “the whole world is lifted up to salvation, life, and resurrection.”¹ This liturgical instinct is vital and decisive. Anglican theology of the cross does not shrink away from the shame of Golgotha, neither does it sentimentalize it. Anglicanism dares to confess that here, in abandonment and humiliation, in blood and thirst and pierced flesh, the very victory of God is being wrought.

This is why the Church does not turn away. It lingers at the foot of the cross because there the community in faith beholds the deepest truth of God’s self-giving love disclosed. 

Scripture shapes this doctrine. The tortured servant of Isaiah, Psalm 22’s lament that becomes praise, the Letter to the Hebrews sermon on Christ’s final self-offering, and John’s sublime passion narrative all find convergence in Anglican understandings of the cross.² 

In John we see a detail especially formative for Anglican reflection: on the cross, even in his agony, Jesus is glorified. Jesus does not simply happen to crucifixion. He is sovereign in his surrender. Pilate may think that he is killing off a threat to imperial authority, but in reality he proclaims the truth from a rooftop: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews” (John 19:19). The irony is theological. Those who seek to judge Jesus on that hill outside Jerusalem will find themselves judged by him. Anglican theologians have made much of this Johannine motif. 

New Testament scholar Raymond Brown argues that while the Synoptics frame Jesus’ death with cosmic disturbances, John locates the sign within Jesus’ own body.³ Brown then draws this out with John 7: 38–39 and the evangelist’s firm conviction that Jesus cannot be glorified apart from the gift of the Spirit. Anglican theology refuses to divorce Jesus’ glorification from the work of the Spirit. One reason is sacramental: the crucified Christ is not merely remembered by his people; he is the fount of the Church’s life. From his side come the signs of baptism and Eucharist, the sacraments through which the crucified and risen Lord draws his people into communion with his own divine life.

But Anglican theology typically places the cross within the broad narrative of salvation history. It is impossible to understand the cross apart from the doctrines of incarnation, resurrection, ascension, Pentecost, and participation in Christ through the sacraments. 

Jesus does not die upon the cross as though he were a third-party bystander. He does not die upon the cross as though some sad accident of history had befallen him. Jesus does not die upon the cross as though fate had turned against this exceptional teacher. He dies upon the cross because he is the eternal Son of God made flesh and gives his life for the world. Anglican theology has repeatedly affirmed that the gospel story cannot be summed in mere abstractions; rather, the central truth of salvation is the birth and life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”⁴ As such, the cross reveals the triune God at work in history for the sake of his creation. The Father gives his Son; the Son receives that gift and offers himself up; and the Spirit is poured out in salvation. To speak properly about the cross we must therefore speak trinitarianly.

Which is why Anglicanism has historically been leery of certain views of atonement which narrow our vision to a singular dimension or one that jars against other central convictions about the doctrine of God. It is difficult for Anglicans to say along with some thinkers that God the Father forced or even dragged his reluctant Son up a hill to be murdered. Such an understanding tears at the very nature of God and suggests that God is divided against himself. I have pointed this out a number of times in my own writing comparing God's command to not sacrifice Isaac. 

It does not mean that Anglicans shy away from substitutionary language; indeed most would affirm that Christ dies “for us,” in our place and on our behalf. What it does mean is that Anglicanism tends to view substitution in light of the whole biblical canvas of imagery: sacrifice, victory, representation, recapitulation, covenant, healing, divine humiliation and self-offering.⁵ Anglicanism does not indulge in a vocabulary of chaos. Instead, it remains remarkably faithful both to Scripture and to the church’s classical doctrinal grammar.

We see this especially in the Epistle to the Hebrews. Christ offered once for all a single sacrifice for sins, by which he entered once for all “into the holy places not made with hands that are eternal.”⁶ But how does Craig Koester summarize the Johannine impact upon Hebrews’s sacrifice? “On the cross Jesus changes the situation between God and humanity: God no longer allows our past and present sins to stand against us.”⁷ I think Anglicanism would receive this gently. We do not think of the cross as one sacrifice among many possible sacrifices nor do we see it as purely an example of paitent endurance. Rather, we confess the cross to be that through which and in whom our reconciliation with God is accomplished.

The Anglican preacher desires above all else to drive home these truths of new life and new creation that issue from Calvary. Article XXXI insists that we affirm the sufficiency of the cross without reservation precisely so that Christians might live better lives and bring more fully into being the kingdom for which Christ died.

In fact Anglicanism does connect the cross deeply with our moral lives as creatures made in God’s image. To say that “the offering of Christ once made” suffices should always issue forth in grateful obedience. Those who bear the image of God must remember that their crucified Lord entered into our suffering, not to exempt us from pain but to enter into our innermost pain with the love of God. Article XXXI makes sure we do not slight the centrality of the cross to Christian discipleship.

Anglicans treasure Article XXXI because it sets both the sufficiency and finality of Christ’s work in clear terms without denying the breadth of biblical imagery surrounding atonement. Article XXXI does not attempt to provide a comprehensive mechanical account of how atonement works, it simply insists that it does! That is classic Anglicanism: saying whatever must be said about the doctrine of salvation while remaining reticent in those secondary matters open to Christian disagreement.

In other words, the Anglican via media should not be mistaken for compromise. Anglicanism typically eschews reduction. Anglicanism can affirm with Anselm that sin is serious disorder and must be satisfied for because we are in desperate circumstances; it can affirm with Luther and Calvin that Christ bore what we could not bear; it can affirm with Athanasius and Augustine that Christ has defeated both death and the devil. It can affirm with Irenaeus that all of creation finds its recapitulation and healing in Christ, and it can affirm with the Prayer Book that cross of Jesus Christ is the wood from which our joy is made.

Consider the very important Anglican theology given to us by way of Fleming Rutledge. Rutledge rightly recovers the biblical language of penal substitution, but tempers it with victory language and substitutionary language without collapsing it into reductionist penal theory.¹⁰ Anglicanism is not about creating novelty within theology; it’s about refusing to accept bad false choices in theology.

We might call this depth patristic also. Anglican theology at its best recognizes itself to be continuous with Christian antiquity.¹¹ Anglican historians More and Cross highlight this particularity when they describe the Anglican tradition as relentlessly returning again and again to the doctrines of the Incarnation and Eucharist as the inexhaustible center of the Christian life, drawing heavily from the resources of Irenaeus and Athanasius.¹² Athanasius and Irenaeus also shape Anglican understandings of the cross. Athanasius will not treat the cross as mere divine fiat or judicial puppet show; the cross is where the incarnate Word enters into death to destroy it. Irenaeus sees in Christ the obedient one who undoes the disobedience of Adam and reaches down to heal all things. Anglicanism has drunk deeply from these wells and therefore keeps the cross locked within the larger narrative of God’s activity for the world.

The cross of Christ is the place where true power makes itself known by taking the form of the powerless.

Nor does Anglicanism believe the cross is a purely spiritual or internal resource for private believers. The cross of Jesus Christ is public, communal, and cosmic. The Son of God is crucified between two criminals by an unholy alliance of empire fueled by crowd psychology and political expediency. The principalities and powers stand exposed before the cross of Christ. Episcopal theologian William Stringfellow speaks often of what he calls the “moral reality named death.”¹³ Fallen human authorities make much of death; they enshrine falsehood as normalized truth; they make evil seem inevitable. But the cross unmasks every last lie. The Roman executional device for barbarians becomes the true throne from which the Judge of every earthly tyranny comes to wield his power. We are a people of institutions and this is hard but a true cruciform revelation.

The Church must never forget that the cross shattered the sword. To proclaim the cross is to proclaim that love bears the violence of evil away and transforms it from within. Good Friday demands the proclamation of Easter as surely as Easter calls believers back to worship the Lamb who was slain.

Which is why the cross is central not only to Anglican theology, but Anglican discipleship and ethics as well. To take up one’s cross is no mere platitude of pious spirituality. The pattern of the Christian life is shaped by Calvary. Anglicanism has been cautious of those who would romanticize suffering, however. Anglicanism affirms the cross not because suffering is wonderful but because the crucified God shows us what love must look like: humble, obedient, sacrificial, healing, and life-giving love.¹⁵ To be crucified with Christ means that Christians now live for others through sacrificial love, not to earn our redemption, but to share in the life of the redeemed but are unable to do so apart from the Eucharist. 

Anglicanism has been remarkably consistent in affirming both the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ on Calvary and the real liturgical participation in that one sacrifice by means of the Church’s Eucharistic celebrations. The theology of the Prayer Book with regard to the Eucharist is deeply anamnetic, sacrificial, and participatory. We do not repeat Calvary when we celebrate the Eucharist; rather, we are brought by the power of the Holy Spirit into the reality of Calvary. The one who is crucified and risen makes himself known in the breaking of the bread.

A final pastoral word is fitting. Any theology of the cross that remains merely conceptual has not yet learned its deepest lesson. The crucified Christ does not explain all suffering, nor does he make grief less bitter in the moment it is endured. What he does offer is something more profound: the assurance that suffering is not a place abandoned by God. In Christ crucified, God has entered the furthest reaches of pain, shame, loneliness, and death. For those who suffer, this does not remove the wound at once, but it does mean that no sorrow is borne in utter solitude. Beneath the shadow of the cross, lament may still be spoken, tears may still fall, and unanswered questions may remain. Yet Christian faith dares to hope that even there, especially there, the love of God has not let go.

Therefore, the cross cannot be far from the center of Anglican theology in our church and whatever we are speaking about. It is biblical, creedal, patristic, reformed, catholic, and pastoral. At the foot of the cross we remember that we do not have the final word about God. But we know this: the last word from the cross in John’s Gospel is not despair but triumph: It is finished” (John 19:30). Brown is correct that for John this is first and foremost a declaration of victory.¹⁷ By his death on the cross the ruler(s) and powers of this world have been judged.

The radiance of the glory of God is veiled that day behind wood, rain, and scourging; the Son of God is lifted up upon the tree and still we say, “This is our King!”

Footnotes

1 “ Good Friday Liturgy, Article VII ,” The Book of Common Prayer. Oden notes, “In line with this strong biblical theology of the cross, Anglicans will never set aside the incarnate Lord at Calvary. What happens on Calvary is no mere example; it is the definitive act of God for the salvation of the world.” Oden, Feasting on the Word (Vol. 1), 292.

2 Anglican theology might be uniquely poised to combine these four strands. They are all present in Scripture; they all point towards Christ’s glorification on the cross.

3 Brown, The Death of the Messiah, 646.

4 CP Article XXII.

5 Scripture itself includes sacrificial imagery alongside victory motifs (See 1 Cor 15:53-54). Scripture also uses covenant language to describe what Christ has done (Rom 3:24).

6 Hebrews 9:24.

7 Koester, Hebrews, 339.

8 Dietrich Bonhoeffer once memorably quipped, “When Christ calls us, he calls us to follow.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together .

9 CP Article XXXI.

10 Rutledge brilliantly synthesizes penal substitution, Christus Victor language, and substitutionary atonement language without collapsing into penal atonement theory proper. Fleming Rutledge, The Hidden Life of God.

11 That is not to say that Anglicanism claims to perfectly embody every nuance of patristic theology.

12 More and Cross, Anglicanism.

13 William Stringfellow, “The State and Christianity.” http://www.stringfellowcenter.org/?cat=10.

14 As someone who has worked with victims of clerical sexual abuse and human trafficking it is difficult to speak much about evil without thinking of real human faces and flesh-and-blood sufferers.

15 While the cross clearly does shape the love of God, God’s love is not defined by the cross. God so loved…

16 John Stott’s The Cross of Christ remains one of the best guides to faithful preaching of the atonement.

17 Koester, Hebrews, 340.

Bibliography

Brown, Raymond E. The Gospel according to John XIII–XXI. Anchor Bible 29A. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970.

The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church. New York: Church Publishing, 2007.

Doyle, C. Andrew. Bedeviled and Beloved: An Anglican Naming of Evil, Responsibility, and Hope. Manuscript.

Koester, Craig R. Hebrews: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. Anchor Yale Bible 36. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.

More, Paul Elmer, and Frank Leslie Cross, eds. Anglicanism: The Thought and Practice of the Church of England, Illustrated from the Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century. Milwaukee: Morehouse Publishing, 1935.

Quantin, Jean-Louis. The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of a Confessional Identity in the 17th Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Rutledge, Fleming. The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015.

Stott, John R. W. The Message of Romans: God’s Good News for the World. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994.

Stringfellow, William. An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land. Waco, TX: Word Books, 1973.