Sunday, January 1, 2023

Notes from Albert Schlitzer, Redemptive Incarnation

  

. . . Christ as Priest exercises perfectly His mediatorial office. In the name of mankind He worships God to the full measure in which God deserves to be worshipped. As a man and in the name of all mankind, Christ acknowledges that He, a man, is nothing, apart from God. As the new Head of the human race, the Second Adam, He gives mankind back to God. This recognition of God’s supreme dominion, and the total yielding up of one’s self to the Supreme Being consequent upon that recognition, are at the very core of religion. It constitutes, in fact, what is called the virtue of religion. For religion means a binding back to God, a return of the creature to God, where he belongs. Religion, then, is nothing less than right order. With good reason St. Thomas argues that it is a form of the virtue of justice. Christ, fulfilling perfectly the obligation woven into the very nature of man stands out above all men as The Religious, The Just Man.

 

As Priest, Christ faces God in the name of man; as Priest He also faces man in the name of God. He exercises His priestly office by giving man the gifts of God and even the gift of God Himself. Truly Christ is the one Mediator, the center, the point of meeting between God and men, because He is God and man. He is the Pontiff, that is, the Bridge between God and men. Through Him God comes to man. God will come through no other way. Through Him man goes to God. There is no other way for man to reach God or to worship Him.

 

The priestly or sacerdotal character of Christ, therefore, shows clearly how completely dedicated is His life. A life that is initially dedicated to the Father; a life that is totally dedicated to mankind.

 

Sacredness thoroughly pervades the office of the priest. The term “sacerdotal” frequently used as the equivalent of “priestly” indicates plainly the sacredness of the work of the priest. The priesthood authorizes a man to handle sacred or holy things. God is essentially holy. No other being is holy or sacred except by reason of some relationship to the All Holy. Whatever belongs to God is holy. It can belong to God either because it is God’s gift to man, or because, through God’s sanctification and generous acceptance of it, it becomes man’s gift to God for the sake of adoring and pleasing Him. The sacred office of the priest, then, is bi-polarized, bringing down God’s blessings to man, and carrying up to God what man owes to Him.  (Albert Schlitzer, Redemptive Incarnation: Sources and Their Theological Development in the Study of Christ [3d ed.; Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1962], 262-63)

 

Martin Luther desired to give all glory to Christ, but thought this required that he deny any good in man. As a matter of fact, however, his conception of the manner in which Christ’s redemption is applied to individuals belittles Christ’s redemptive action and robs Him of His true glory. Christ did not come to destroy life, but to give it, to increase it. His glory does not need the reduction of man’s action to nothingness, but rather in the transforming and validating of it through giving him internally a share of His own life and merits. One does not truly glorify the action of the Creator by denying all true being and causality in creatures; rather the glory of the Creator consists in communicating a share in His being and in His causality. Similarly, one does not truly glorify the all-sufficiency of the Redeemer’s satisfaction and merits by refuting to recognize genuine expiation and merit in the redeemed. Rather, the glory of Christ requires the recognition that Christ through His work for us enabled us to share in His work. The meaning of those who are justified in Christ in no way adds to the value of the merits of Christ, no more than the being and action of the finite creature add to the being and action of the infinite Creator. Just as the Creator’s action is in the creature so that he may act, so the merits of Christ are in the Christian to enable him to merit and make amends for his sins before God. Since this is the ultimate purpose of Christ’s redeeming action for us, we can safely say that Christ’s merits are incomplete without our merits. This seems to be implied in the saying of St. Paul, “He was reconciled you in His body of flesh through His death, to present you holy and undefiled and irreproachable before Him . . . I rejoice now in the sufferings I bear for your sake; and what is lacking of the sufferings of Christ I will up in my flesh for His body, which is the Church . . . “

 

This true meriting on the part of the Christian and through the merits of Christ is understandable only on the basis of the intimate union between Christ and the redeemed. Christ spoke of this intimate union under the figure of the vine and the branches: the vine communicates its own vitality to the branches. St. Paul inspired b the Spirit of Christ speaks of this same intimate union between Christ and Christians under the figure of a human body: Christ is the Head, we are the body, His members. The life which is in the “Head” expresses itself through the body: “In him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead . . . and In him . . . you have received of that fullness. In him, too, you have been circumcised with a circumcision not wrought by hand, but through the putting off of the body of the flesh, a circumcision which is of Christ . . . And you, when you were dead by reason of your sins, and the uncircumcision of your flesh, be brought to life along him, forgiving all your sins . . . Indeed he has taken it completely away, nailing it to the cross . . .(He who is) united to the head, from whom the whole body, supplied and built up by joints and ligaments, attains a growth that is of God.” (Albert Schlitzer, Redemptive Incarnation: Sources and Their Theological Development in the Study of Christ [3d ed.; Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1962], 307-9)

 

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