By Schubert Ogden
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All the Churches throughout the Roman Empire were so many witnesses that the Incarnation has established human society upon this deep and eternal basis and that there is none other upon which it can be established (The Church as a Family: 29). |
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\[T\]he Bible \ [is\] the history of the establishment of a universal and spiritual kingdom, of that kingdom which God had ever intended for men, and of which the universal kingdom then existing in the world was the formal opposite (_Kingdom of Christ_,1:254f.). |
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Of your relation to this Church you cannot rid yourselves, any more than you can change the law under which your natural bodies and the members of them exist. |
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We are children of God; Christ, by taking our nature, has assured that title to us (Lincoln's Inn Sermons, 1: 89). |
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Troubling to me in such statements is the constitutive, not to say causal, significance with respect to salvation apparently attributed to "the Incarnation," Christ's' "taking our nature," or "the perfect humanity of Christ." But, of course, I, too, could, and would, say that Jesus Christ _is_ constitutive in "the establishment of a universal and spiritual kingdom," if by that is meant, _not_ the invisible church of the chosen, but rather "the kingdom of Christ," or what I should distinguish as the _visible_ church of the called, which; I take it, is also what Maurice intends to say. Moreover, although he can speak -- – as it appears, indifferently -- – of "the Atonement" as "the foundation of its \ [_sc._ the universal Church's\] being" and of its being "grounded upon our Lord's incarnation," he also typically goes on to say something like, "and ultimately resting upon the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit," or otherwise refers to the trinity, as distinct from the incarnation and the atonement, as the church's _ultimate_ foundation (_Kingdom of Christ_ \ [1838\], 1 :58; \ [Ev. ed\], 2: 1). Still, the trinity itself, in its way, belongs to "the order of the _manifestation_ of salvation," as distinct from "the order of its _constitution"_ (Boff). And the question remains whether Maurice's appeal to it as the ultimate ground isn't really consistent, after all, with what is, in intention, a monistic inclusivist position, or whether it is to be understood as more like my distinguishing between constituting authentic existence itself and constituting what Christians believe and attest to be its decisive between constituting authentic existence itself and constituting what Christians believe and attest to be its decisive re-presentation.
In any case, I stand by the judgment I expressed earlier (Notebooks: 15 August 2007) that neither Maurice's appeal to the trinity nor anything else he says has anything like the clarity of Tillich's distinction between "symbol" and "symbolized," and thus between "the redeeming action of God" and the "experience of the unconditioned-transcendent," of which talk of God's redeeming action is "itself a symbolic expression."
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