The Mystery of Chirst: Life in Death

By John Behr
St. Valdimir's Seminary Press

Several years ago I was in a museum in Brussels that featured several of the nation’s famous Flemish tapestries. The scenes were of landscapes, battles, family histories and biblical events. While I was standing there looking at one which depicted the story of creation from Genesis, my father told me to look behind to the other side. There I saw a gnarled and incoherent mess of colored thread. My father said something to the effect of, “There’s the other side of creation. The stuff the Holy Spirit hovered over.” For whatever reason, that moment with my dad stuck with me, but now, after reading The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death by John Behr, that experience in the museum many years ago has taken on a theological significance. How that is exactly takes a little explaining.

Behr begins with a quote from Kierkegaard: “We only understood life backwards, but we must live forwards.” This he takes as the starting point for his discussion on what “doing theology” in the manner of the Apostles and Fathers is exactly about, which, he argues, is often misunderstood or rejected today. He writes

Most modern expositions of theology exemplify Kierkegaard’s observation that we understand backwards, yet fail to take adequate account of this fact. That is, they begin with the results of the theological debates of the early centuries, especially Trinitarian theology and Christology, but separate these theological formulas from the way in which they were in fact learned and from the exegetical practice, the manner of using scripture, in and through which they were articulated.

So by starting with the wrong premises of a fixed Scriptural canon or defined dogma we are drawn away from the true hermeneutical lens of the crucified Christ and replace him with our own ideas of him, usually the result of post-Reformation debates about authority or post-modern debates about “the real meaning of the text.”

Such historicism, secular or Christian, either presupposes what it is trying to debate and understand, thus missing the Christological nature of scriptural interpretation inherent to the Apostles and Fathers, or it rejects the search as too far removed from the sources to allow for any encounter with truth (which can be argued away through various deconstructions concerning socially constructed meaning and linguistic contortions). Or, to return to my museum experience, it is assuming that the image on the tapestry, if it is to even be trusted as a representation of something true, is obvious and always known, not understanding the process of working from the back to the front, even though the Apostles and Fathers had only known the gnarled threads until the crucified Lord opened the scriptures to them in the breaking of the bread (Luke 24). So for the Apostles and Fathers, only God can reveal His ways to mankind and it is in the context of the broken bread, the Eucharist, that we encounter Christ, which rightly proclaims His death until He comes again (1 Corinthians 11:26). As Behr observes
It is these two complimentary ways, the engagement with the scriptures and the sharing in the Lord’s meal…that Paul specifies that he had received…and then handed down to later generations.

Our scientific and historic methodologies, useful as they are, must not be used as first principles in our encounter and understanding of God, even if we are the recipients or byproducts of a tradition that encountered God crucified in the flesh. Only by seeing the crucified Lord as the starting point for understanding salvation’s meaning could the Apostles and Fathers retrospectively grasp the meaning of the Jewish scriptures. Christ is read into the Old Testament; or, rather, the Old Testament is read out of Christ. Christ’s revealed meaning of His death is the rainfall that brings the scriptures to bear fruit. And without His Spirit, the veil will remain over our eyes when we read Moses and the Prophets, as it does for those who put their preconception of God before the revealed nature of his death and resurrection, serving as “a stumbling block for some and foolishness for others,” as it does most strongly for Muslims who claim that God would never be caught dead in a body, ironically limiting God to transcendence.
From this hermeneutical lens of Christ, Behr draws out the implications of such an approach as found in the Fathers and Apostles. First, Christ’s death is already a victory, not the unfortunate event that had to happen in order to get to the resurrection, and much less the necessary Anslemian price to pay in order to satisfy the wrath of the angry Father. “The empty tomb is the confirmation of the victory wrought upon the cross. Christ’s exaltation, the lifting up spoken of by Isaiah, is precisely his exaltation on the Cross…” As the Orthodox sing each Pascha, “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death.” And it is in the context of his victorious suffering that he is revealed as I AM, the Christ of God that mere flesh and blood cannot reveal to us (John 8:28).

Secondly, Behr extends the centrality of the crucifixion of God to the very premise of creation, which leads into an insightful discussion about the nature of sin, death, free will and grace. He argues convincingly from the scripture and Fathers that the incarnation and crucifixion were the original intent of God when He created us. Christ is the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world, the revelation of God and the purpose of our creation. Thus the cross is the axis mundi, around which the world turns and history unfolds. Again, God’s incarnate suffering is the main point and “for this we were created.” Therefore the Fall is part of the economy of history, and history is a part of the economy of salvation. Again, the Fall is not the mistake that made it necessary for God to take upon himself our wounded nature, as if it were a backup plan that God came up with after He recovered from the initial shock of Adam and Eve’s fruit debacle. It is the felix culpa.

This is a point worth lingering on a bit more since it gives us an insight into the Apostle’s way of “doing theology” often so foreign to our own. Karl Barth once remarked that Calvin’s main problem was in the fact that in the end he separated Jesus Christ from God. I didn’t fully understand this until I thought about it in conjunction with Behr. This is something that I tend to do when I assume that the crucifixion didn’t have to happen. It is looking at history in a manner foreign to the Apostles and Fathers. To quote Behr:

But to do this [separating God from Christ] would be to envision creation without Christ, a creation in which, had human beings not sinned, there would have been no need for Christ. In short it would posit a hypothesis or first principle other than Christ himself, who, as the crucified and exalted Lord, opens the scriptures so that we can see the whole of creation and its history in his light. On this basis, the apostle Paul can view the sinfulness of human beings- and even the very creation of Adam, “as a type of the one to come,” and the light which shone in darkness- within the overall plan of God which culminates in the Passion of his Son. “For he has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will, according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth…the eternal purpose which he has realized in Christ Jesus, our Lord” (Eph 1:3-11).

Thus the Apostles worked backwards to understand the Old Testament, their only scriptures, and the very foundation and purpose of the world in the light of Christ crucified and exalted. “‘Salvation history’ is written from the perspective of the cross [unlike historical narratives about how it ‘really happened’], with its totality- creation, human sinfulness, the giving of the law, the preparation, and the work of salvation- simultaneously revealed in and through the proclamation of the crucified and risen Christ, the eternal plan of God.”

A third point Behr emphasizes is the role of the Church as our Virgin Mother, with the Virgin Mary, the Theotokos, as the symbol of this bringing forth of God into the world while still betrothed, again working backwards form the crucifixion, or from the “tomb to the womb.” While defining ecclesiology as such was not of primary concern to the Apostles or earliest Fathers (not until St Cyprian perhaps), the lived reality of the Church as their Mother was continually observed. Through our baptism and regular participation in the Eucharist, they posit, the Church gives us birth and nourishes our new life in Christ crucified and exalted, as we are united to his death in the hope of the glory to come, provided we suffer with him (to paraphrase St Paul). By giving full ontological meaning to the Church as the very body of Christ, moving it beyond a vague feeling in my heart regarding an invisible connection with other Christians, Paul and our fathers in the faith challenge us to be united in faith and love, sharing one Eucharist and one baptism.

For myself, the dominical prayer that all be one is imperative and central, since the unity of the Church is that of one bride (Christ is no polygamist after all), and Behr challenges me to rethink the “least common denominator” approach to the question of “What is Church?” If all of creation takes place for the sake of knowing and experiencing Christ crucified and exalted, and if the Apostles and Fathers have handed down by their blood this proper understanding, then perhaps I can give them more credit than I often do in relation to the question of sacraments, episcopacy and liturgy. Certainly the denominations can do a better job at manifesting this oneness of the Bride based upon a closer understanding and incorporation of the Patristic liturgical mind.
Lastly, Behr takes up the command to glorify God in our bodies. In a way it is the answer to the question “So what?” after reading the previous chapters. Just as Christ crucified is the center of life’s meaning and the revelation of God’s character, so our own participation in this death and life must be based upon our own small deaths and bearing of the cross. This section includes an extensive discussion on the nature of the passions, sin, death, grace, will and the resurrection–all of which are questions that engage in the importance of the material body as equally spiritual and essential to our humanity, as it is to Christ’s. The struggle to manifest the victory over sin and death, by the grace of God, comes down to our own cross bearing with the promise of glory and rest for those who finish the race.

In conjunction with this book, I would heartily recommend reading Marianne Thompson’s The God of the Gospel of John, Martin Hengel’s The Cross of the Son of God, Oskar Skarsaune’s Incarnation: Myth or Fact?, as well as the works of St. Irenaeus, the latter being extensively discussed by Fr. Behr’s work.

John Behr is a priest of the Eastern Orthodox Church, Dean and Professor of Patristics at St. Vladimir’s Theological Seminary, editor of the seminary’s theological journal and its Popular Patristics Series, as well as the author of several books and dozens of articles.