The mystery of salvation...

It was back in 1996 that the Anglican church downgraded the concept of hell from ‘fire and brimstone’ to a more euphemistic ‘separation from God’. Since the Bible hadn’t changed, and God han’t seen fit to upgrade the holy book to reflect modern sensibilities, I wondered what evidence the church had found, in the last years of the old millennium, to warrant this re-writing of Christian doctrine. How did the debate go? I bought the relevant book, The Mystery of Salvation, compiled by the Doctrine Commission of the Church of England, to see if it would shed some light on the subject. I’m disappointed so far (I’m half-way through). Though obviously written in English, the writers seem to delight in being needlessly obscure. This paragraph - about the Trinity - is typical of the style.

“The formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity in its classic form as a result of the debates of the patristic period took place in close continuity with this New Testament emphasis. The doctrine insisted that all three trinitarian persons are truly and equally God, because it is as these three that God gives himself to us in salvation. If the incarnate Son Jesus were less than truly God or if the indwelling Spirit were less than truly God, salvation would be jeopardised. It would not be God’s gift of himself. The gift of the Son would be a gift of something less than God himself, and the gift of the Spirit would be a gift of something less than God himself. The divine activity in salvation - the gift of the Son and the gift of the Spirit - would not be the activity of divine self-giving that the New Testament witness sees in it. Salvation would be only the receiving of certain good things from God - forgiveness, immortality and so on - not the experience of the self-giving love of God. This argument from the nature of salvation was the really decisive argument for Nicene orthodoxy against all of the more or less Arian positions in the fourth-century controversies”.

Licensed this pic today of Drumburgh Castle, a fortified house in north Cumbria…