Paul wrote, ‘‘They are justified without cost in his grace, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus. Him God set forth as a Mercy Seat (propitiator) by faith in his blood’’ (Romans 3:24–5, translation altered). Most modern interpreters reject the crucial issue by identifying Paul’s reference to the mercy seat ( i`lasth,rion) and blood as ‘‘cultic,’’ and therefore not originally from Paul—and in any case they assume it is superfluous to Paul’s point that grace is a gift received by faith. It was Nygren who recognized that resistance to translating Christ as ‘‘mercy seat,’’ which the word straightforwardly means, comes from likening Christ to Jewish temple furniture.4 But removing Christ from the temple furniture created an even greater temptation, which was to take Christ’s death merely as another sacrifice according to the law. But for Paul ‘‘without cost’’ (or to put it positively the ‘‘free gift’’) is some-thing, not just an idea like atonement, and what the gift gives is Christ as the mercy seat by his blood on account of whom there is redemption from the enemy and reconciliation with the Father.
Like the ark of the covenant, God’s presence is now promised in Christ’s cross: ‘‘There I will meet with you’’ (Exodus 25:22 NRS), however hiddenly, and the blood sprinkled on the mercy seat that was to turn away God’s wrath has now become eschatological—
a new world. Unlike the ark, however, Christ is set forth for all sinners, Jew and Gentile, to hear and see; the blood is not a token but a great cost —“redeemed me . . . not with silver and gold,’’ says Luther in the Small Catechism ‘‘but with his holy and precious blood and his innocent suffering and death.’’ It is faith that receives this blood (not the Father in heaven, or the law, or the devil), thus reversing and bringing to a halt all sacrifice that proceeds from sinners to God. Christ’s mercy seat comes down from God to sinners. The purpose clause follows immediately, ‘‘in order to present his righteousness . . . to declare at the present time that he himself is righteous.’’ That means ‘‘that thou mayest be justified in thy words’’ (Psalm 51 and Romans 3:4 deum justificare). Just as Paul said to the Corinthians: ‘‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation” (2 Cor. 5:19).
Two things happen for redemption and reconciliation of sinners. First, Christ became flesh and died once and for all on the cross, never to be repeated. Second, the preacher delivers the benefit of the cross by declaring the promise of forgiveness to sinners on account of that cross—repeatedly. With this cross and its preaching, redemption comes by not hearing your sin (because Christ has taken it), and reconciliation by hearing only Christ in faith who gives you his forgiveness. Thus the justification of sinners depends upon a scandalous exchange effected through incarnation, cross, and preaching: Christ takes your sin so it cannot accuse you and gives forgiveness so that you have his right-eousness to boast in, not your own. There is a communication that occurred first in Christ’s own person between Creator and creature, divine and human, that reverberates through the preacher to communicate God-in-flesh to his forgiven sinners, including them in the new, free, life of God’s favor.
Redemption is first a terrible, struggling battle Christ wages against his enemies in order to take away what belongs to you, the sinner. It is called various things in Scripture and theology, like ‘‘payment of debt,’’ sacrifice, buying a slave, pillaging the strong man’s house and the like. Yet all these boil down to Christ taking away that thing which identifies you as lost, bound, accused, that controls your life—which is sin and its sting: ‘‘The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law’’ (1 Corinthians 15:56 NRS).
Repeatedly, Luther announced in his sermons on John, that if redemption were to be done, whoever does it must have the power of God to save, and at the same time must have the sinner who needs to be saved. This sort of observation inspired the original doctrine of the communion of attributes among the Cappadocian Fathers which went through the fires of the Nestorian and Apollinarian controversies, and by means of the Tome of Leo was received as a settled confession of faith in the Chalcedonian for-mula (451): ‘‘one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, in two natures, unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, insepara-bly, the distinction of natures by no means being taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved and concurring in one Person and one hypostasis . . . .’’
However, there was a fault in this doctrine because it was a compromise and so erratic. With the confusion surrounding the various meetings and anathematizing (of either Cyril or Nestorius) in Ephesus thirty years before Chalcedon, there was bound to be a need to settle the Christological battles about how to preach Christ as human and divine, and Chalcedon attempted to do that diplomatically in a true, but limited expression of the Gospel.5 Chalcedon’s compromise creed was based on the Tome of St. Leo (449 AD). In it Pope Leo opposed Eutyches for mixing and blend-ing the natures of Christ. But a problem lurked in Leo’s concern (as it did in Nestorius’) that Christ not be contaminated by sin-ners or sin: ‘‘For we could not have overcome the author of sin and of death unless he who should neither be contaminated by sin, nor detained by death, had taken upon himself our nature, and made it his own.’’6 The Tome nevertheless established the Chalcedonian principle: One Person (prosopon), two natures (en duo physein) each having a distinct mode of action (active in its own way)—which always devolved into something like a free will. The perfectly passive righteousness which Luther would later reclaim was abhorred because it established complete intercourse between the justifying God and sinners instead of segregating them.
The difficulties with Leo’s Tome were seen from both sides of the Christological schools at the time. The Antiochians were con-cerned that the human not be subsumed and destroyed by the divine, but from Cyril’s Alexandrian view Leo gave weak state-ments like: ‘‘this birth in time in no way detracted from, in no way added to, that divine and everlasting birth,’’ and ‘‘Accordingly, while the distinctness of both natures and substances was preserved, and both met in one person, lowliness was assumed by majesty . . . .’’7 What Cyril was looking for was the hypostatic union which spoke not merely about ‘‘meeting’’ or ‘‘nothing changing about the divine,’’ or ‘‘indwelling,’’ and the like, but that this Logos-in-flesh did something new as one Person in order to accomplish salvation—that is, the gospel is truly new for the justifying God and sinners. The incarnation, with its hypostatic union of the person, could not merely be ‘‘preserving’’ things, or ‘‘in no way detracting’’ from previous natures; something new had to happen in Christ, or sinners would never be saved. The divine and the
sinner had—in some strange way—to belong together. Instead of Chalcedon and Leo’s Tome, the Cyrilians wisely wanted a reaffir-mation of Nicea with no further creed, but at Chalcedon the bishops plowed ahead to try another confession of faith. The com-promise formula worked to some extent, but there was a long crisis of substance categories that came to a head in the nine-teenth century, as formulated by Friedrich Schleiermacher in his Glaubenslehre (1821/2):
For how can divine and human be so subsumed under any single concept [like natures] as if both could be mutually coordinated as more precise specifications of one and the same universal; as, for example, even divine Spirit and human spirit cannot be compared in this way without confusion.8
Two ‘‘natures’’ implied that some greater category than God exists:
‘‘Nature’’ should be applied only to ‘‘a limited being existing in opposition to another.’’ ‘‘Nature’’ was being used as something bigger than God which could then divide up all of the cosmos into a divine type of nature and a human, like two unequal balls of clay. Worse yet, these two natures were presumed to be ‘‘in opposition to another.’’ This effort was doomed to failure;
incarnation does not mean that ‘‘human nature’’ was added to divine nature—or that Christ assumed ‘‘humanity’’ as a category.
The result has been a widespread abandonment of such basic teachings as the two natures of Christ in the church. Yet the problem was even deeper than this ‘‘substance’’ issue; it was the inability to sense how a communication could occur between God and sinner outside the law, the two being opposed in a cos-mic battle to the death. God, the justifier, and the sinner are united, but the unity is not original creation—but getting this communi-cation done required the death of God and a new creation.