novello - death as a privilege

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Death As Privilege Author(s): Henry L. Novello Source: Gregorianum, Vol. 84, No. 4 (2003), pp. 779-827Published by: GBPress- Gregorian Biblical PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23581396Accessed: 20-10-2015 18:32 UTC

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Gregorianum 84, 4 (2003) 779-827

Death As Privilege

A fundamental tenet of the Christian faith is that redemp tion of a fallen humanity is redemption through the execution of

Jesus Christ at our hands.1 It is held that by way of this redemp tive death of the incarnate Son, fallen humanity is delivered from

the «dominion of darkness» (Col 1,13) and is transferred to the

kingdom of the Son in whom we have the unconditional «for

giveness of sins» (Col 1,14; Eph 1,7; 1 Cor 15,3; Mt 26,28; the

Nicene Creed). Since the powers of death in the world have been

vanquished by Christ's death, those baptized into his redeeming death are liberated from the forces of darkness for true freedom, that is, they are empowered to live a pilgrim life of authentic

humanness in the Spirit. This true freedom (our originai identity as created imago Dei) takes the form of imitating Christ's total

abandonment to the Father in love, which is to say that we are no

longer our own (cf. 1 Cor 6,19) and thus we are able to fulfil the

divine law of love for the sake of a fallen world. In short, the

'This emphasis serves to draw attention to the inadequacies of two common

theories of redemption to be found in the Christian tradition. (i) The Father did

not positively will the execution of his Son; Christ does not suffer God's punish ment and wrath against sin in our place (Luther and the Reformed tradition). (ii)

Nor did Christ make satisfaction for God's honour which was injured by sin

(Anselm). One of the main problems with this theory is that God is reconciled to

the world, not the world to God; that is, God is the object of the act of reconcilia

tion, not the subject, in which case only indirectly does Christ act for us sinners.

On a more positive note, Anselm held that God's justice requires one of two

things: aut poena autsatisfactio (either punishment or satisfaction). Since it is not

God's will to destroy sinners, only the way of satisfactio remains. But once theol

ogy began to think along the lines of God's reconciliation with the world, it would

eventually abandon the alternative aut poena aut satisfactio, as evidenced in

Luther's christology.



780 HENRY L. NOVELLO

Christian faith holds that by our being conformed to the person of Christ, in the Spirit, we realize our true freedom or originai identity as «partakers of the divine nature» (2 Pet 1,4).2

But what becomes of these basic claims of Christianity when we take stock not only of the enduring all-pervasive reality of suffer

ing, injustice and death in the world, but also of the fact that we bap tized Christians continue to struggle against our deep complicity with the powers of sin and death in the world and we must stili face the inevitability of our own death? What is more, how can we hold to the claim of universal redemption in the crucified and risen Lord when the majority of the human population are not baptized into the Christian faith? When we take account of ali these pertinent facts, where are we to look for the full manifestation and actualiza tion of the saving significance of the basic tenet that Jesus Christ died for ali in order that ali will be made alive in him (cf. 1 Cor 15,22)?

There is no doubt that the sheer force of the negative experi ence of humanity in the twentieth-century has helped to push

2If participation in the divine nature is by way of our being conformed to the

person of Christ, if to follow Christ is to be summoned to an intimate attachment

to his person whose mystery is rooted in his modus of being-related to the Father in unfathomable love, a love which is totally open to ready encounter with others to the exclusion of none, then this personalist conception of Christ's representa tion is best conveyed by speaking of participation in Christ's divine identity. The

emphasis on the person of Christ serves to underline two important things. (i) The depth of the divine participation in the human condition, which is revealed

by the fact that Christ bears the imprint of humanity's inhumanity: the One who

is excluded keeps himself related to his rejectors, he freely accepts death at our

hands and entrusts himself wholly to the Father in a final prayer of forgiveness for the sins of the world (1 Jn 2,2). When put to the test, Christ clings to the Father, he

does not resist evil or turn against anyone in judgment; instead, in freely hearing the complete heartlessness of others he remains faithful to the Father's saving will

so that he can bring a fallen world home to God (cf. Jn 6,37-40). (ii) Christology should be taken as the centrai focus of Christian theology, and, moreover, this

christology needs to be interpreted dynamically and relationally in terms of

encounter, which in turn is to be interpreted in terms of a mutuality of sharing: that is, in the person of Christ the living God meets humanity in an «admirable

exchange» of natures. This will be discussed further below in section 3. For the

notion of participation in Christ's divine identity, see Frans Jozef van Beeck, «Ten

Questione on Christology and Soteriology» in Chicago Studies 25 (1986) 269-78, at

271; and God Encountered: A Contemporary Catholic Systematic Theology, Voi. I, San Francisco, 1989, 159-60, 172.



DEATH AS PRIV1LEGE 781

theological reflection toward the thinking of new thoughts about a suffering, crucified, and buried Messiah who, according to the Chalcedonian formula, is consubstantial with the Father as to the

divinity and consubstantial with us as to the humanity, sin

excepted (DS 301) .3 Theology today can no longer give support to the

preaching of a gospel which bypasses the cross and tomb of Jesus Christ as loci of divine passibility and death, thus it must return once

again to the gospel to «hear» afresh the scandalizing story of Jesus of

Nazareth, the Messiah, who «was crucified in weakness» (2 Cor

13,4)." By hearing the gospel story afresh, the story of God's self-giv

3 In the Reformed tradition, three theologians in particular have rethought the story of a crucified and buried Christ: (i) Karl Barth argues against the con

ception of God on the basis of a general abstract ontology, an externally deter

mined metaphysic of pure, static essence; the starting-point must be the actuali

ty of dynamic, triune being as self-unveiled in Jesus Christ. On the basis of this

revelation Barth has formulated a very different theological ontology - God eter

nally makes space for time, there is no disjunction between God's «being» and

God's «act», God can die as a human being so that suffering, death and negativity are «taken up» into the triune being, and God's immutability consists in remain

ing God while subjected to passibility; (ii) Jiirgen Moltmann goes further than

Barth by postulating death in God, not mereiy the passion of God (divine passi

bility). The death and burial of Christ is a story of God against God, the death of

the Son introduces death into the Godhead, but this is not the death of God, since the Father and the Spirit do not die!; (iii) Eberhard Jiingel is the theologian of the

grave of Christ, for he goes beyond the «passion of God» or «death in God» to

embrace the «death of God» as the story to be told by the Christian community. For a comprehensive treatment of these three thinkers, see Allan E. Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday, Grand Rapids

(Michigan), 2001,181-257. In Roman Catholic theology, Hans Urs von Balthasar is

the theologian of Holy Saturday, for his christology is centred on the mystery of

Christ's «descent into hell» - the emphasis falls on the «passive» character of Holy

Saturday which serves to underscore Christ's complete solidarity with the dead.

See Mysterium Paschale, Grand Rapids (Michigan), 1993, 148-88; Credo:

Meditations on the Apostle's Creed, Crossroad, 1990; and «The Descent into Hell»

in Chicago Studies 2312 (August, 1984) 223-36. In this essayl will take the Barthian

view that ali negative reality has been assumed or «taken up» into the triune

being, a position which does lend itself to talk of death in God, but talk of death

of God is far more problematic to my mind.

4This recalls Karl Barth's methodology of hearing, or, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer

put it, christology begun in silence. By adopting such a methodology, Barth was

able to radically rethink immutability and divine ontology in light of the cross and

grave of Jesus Christ.




ing encounter with the world in the man Jesus of Nazareth, we allow ourselves once again to be drawn into the life of Jesus which culmi nates in the triduan narrative of cross (Good Friday), grave (Easter

Saturday), and empty tomb (Easter Sunday), without in advance

pronouncing what is possible and what is not in the drama of the divine-human relationship. Theological reflection must begin by considering the question that Jesus addresses to us (Who do you say that I am?) and allowing the disturbing word of a crucified and buried Messiah to subvert our preconceptions about what God's

possibilities, and our own, might truly be. For theology, we need to remind ourselves, is the servant,

not the master, of the Christian story; and while it is true that doctrine serves to safeguard the story by lending it conceptual precision, at the same time doctrine may also betray aspects of the gospel story or allow the Word to lose its vitality and power by subjecting it to our axiomatic presuppositions. Most pertinent for the purposes of speaking in our own day of a living God who is present and intimately involved in the affairs of human histo

ry, is to rethink both the tradition of divine impassibiiity and how to insure that the life of Jesus retains its credibility as a truly human life in essential relatedness both to the Father and to

humanity.5 If Jesus is not portrayed as a human person, then does

5 Frans Jozef van Beeck, for example, in his work Christ Proclaimed:

Christology as Rhetoric, New York, Toronto, 1979, chs. 10 & 11, proposes that it is better to think of Jesus's union with the Father as «attitudinal», which is to say that the Logos is best conceived as modus essendi (a mode of being) rather than a divine hypostasis. He suggests that the inner quality of the first homoousion is

Jesus' total receptivity to, and thus complete surrender to, the Father (his modus of being-related to the Father), and the inner quality of the second homoousion is

Jesus' free self-giving in a total gratuitous, and sympathetic identification with the concrete human condition (Jesus' modus of being-related to the Father is the basis of his being-related unreservedly to us). The doublé homoousion, then, must not be interpreted as the attribution of two separate, inert «natures» to

Jesus, for such an understanding results in Jesus being separated from us. Jesus'

divinity is not an inner core of his person, but a modus of being-related to the Father and to us, so that the proclamation of his uniqueness does not alienate us from his person but rather relates Jesus to us. On such a view, Jesus' modus essen di reveals the divine nature as pure grace, and human nature is held to be not a closed system, not a definitively known quantity, but rather «an unfolding and

emerging reality» (449) in relation to the living God. Human nature, in other



DEATH AS PRIVI LEGE 783

it not become problematic to maintain that the Word has a posi tive affinity with ali the realities of human life, including the nega tive reality of suffering, evil, and death?

In light of the above remarks, this essay intende to propose that theology would do well to move towards thinking of the event of our own death as profoundly salvifìc and as the privi leged locus where the fundamental tenet that Christ «died for ali» so that «ali will be made alive» in him, will be made good. This line of reflection will expose the inadequacy of the traditional Catholic description of death as separation of the soul from the

body.6 Karl Rahner and Ladislaus Boros have already criticized the traditional description of death on the grounds that it fails to

appreciate that death is not purely passive, but also a personal act in which the self determines his/her eternai destiny.7 While there are notable differences in the theologies of death formula ted by Rahner and Boros, for the purposes of this essay what is

important to note is that both affirm personal choice as the truly «last thing», since they regard fulfilment as se//-fulfiiment. But should not Jesus Christ crucified and risen, the eschaton in per

words, must be deflned in terms of openness to the transcendent and the world, in terms of receptivity to God. The proposai of van Beeck, which builds on the

work of Piet Schoonenberg, is consistent with Karl Rahner's assertion that grace be understood in terms of formai causality, not efficient causality, and christology be done in an evolutionary view of the world.

6It will also expose the inadequacy of Protestant thinking on death which is

governed by the biblical doctrine of the general resurrection of the dead, so that

there is, generally speaking, no adherence to the notion of the separation of the

immortai soul from the mortai body, no doctrine of particular judgment or of the

interim state. Death, then, tends to be viewed as total death until the general res

urrection; in the meantime it is held that one's personal history is preserved in the

divine memory (this idea has been referred to as «recapitulation» theories). Paul

Tillich, Charles Hartshorne, Eberhard Jiingel, and Wolfhart Pannenberg, for

example, have ali developed this idea in different ways. 'Karl Rahner, On the Theology of Death, Herder & Nelson, 1961; Ladislaus

Boros, The Moment ofTruth: Mysterium Mortis, London, 1965. Both authors draw

on Heidegger's notion of Dasein as «being-unto-death» to expound their thoughts on life in its self-transcending dynamics. For Rahner, death is a personal act in

which we determine ourselves totally before God, while Boros, building on

Rahner, hypothesizes that in death an awakening of consciousness occurs by way of encounter with Christ, and hence death is held to be the moment of final deci

sion about one's eternai destiny.




son, and the Father's most intimate self-gift to our fallen world, be upheld as the truly «last thing»? And when the fundamental

tenet that the unconditional forgiveness of sins is through the

death of Christ at our hands is set in relation to the understand

ing that we suffer death as the «wages of sin» (Rom 6,23), then is

it not reasonable to suggest that in the event of our own death, as

a dying into the redemptive death of Christ, our sins are forgiven and personal guilt is removed so that the power of death (separa tion from God) is broken and «new» life shines forth in the Spirit of the risen One?

Granted the legitimacy of these questions, I believe that the

ology needs to reflect further on the mystery of death in terms of

the gift of dying into the redemptive death of Christ.8 The refer

ence to death as «gift» serves to effectively discredit the notion of

death as se//-fulfilment by bringing to centre stage the main

themes of non-fulfilment, incompleteness, and the passivity and

powerlessness of death. In such a perspective, what becomes

apparent is that it is only by the creative-saving power of God's

self-bestowal in grace, revealed in the risen One, that we mortai

sinners can hope for a final fulfilment beyond the dead-end of

death. The truly «last thing» is therefore not personal choice, but our being inviolably conformed to the person of the risen Lord

through whom ali things have been created (Col 1,16; Heb 1,2) and death has been transformed into the glorified life which

belongs to «the fullness of time» (Eph 1,9-10). When we appreci ate what is truly the last thing in the matter of our eternai destiny, then it becomes evident that centrai to a rethinking of the

problem of hell and universal salvation is the issue of the nature and role of human free-will in the process of our being drawn up into the very life of God as the final end of the human.

When we turn to the New Testament, we find there only one instance of the term apocatastasis panton (Acts 3,21) where it

refers to the fulfilment of the covenant promise to the people of

Israel. It is interesting to note that despite this fact, Brian E. Daley

"The notion of death as gift has been explored by Jacques Derrida in a recent

work, The Gift of Death, tr. David Wills, Chicago, 1995. See also Tony Kelly's arti

eie, «The Gift of Death» in Compass Theology Review 31/1 (1997) 37-42.



DEATH AS PRIVILEGE 785

has shown the extent to which this theme was important in

patristic eschatology.9 Joseph Ratzinger, however, commenting on Origen's doctrine of apocatastasis, and expressing a common

position on this matter, maintains that it has an inadequate understanding of evil, and that while such a doctrine may be the

logicai outcome of a neo-Platonic system of thought, it certainly cannot be upheld as the logicai conclusion to be drawn from the

scriptures where human free-will and moral responsibility are treated with the utmost seriousness.10 But there are others, such as

John R. Sachs, who arrive at a notably different conclusion, insist

ing that what really motivated patristic theologians such as Clement and Origen of Alexandria, Gregory of Nazianzus, and

Gregory of Nyssa was their «conviction about the infinity and

incomprehensibility of God's goodness and mercy, revealed and bestowed in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ».11 The hope that ali will ultimately be saved (1 Tim 2,4), in other words, should not be regarded as founded on the philosophical currents of their

time, but on the faith conviction regarding God's unfathomable

compassion and goodness manifested in the Christ-event. While this essay is not the place to examine the complex

thought of Origen, nonetheless it will be well to point out some of the main axes in his thought to illustrate that the circumspect use of his theology is not warranted. An appropriate place to begin is with the importance that he attaches to the Pauline text about the subjection of ali things under Christ who, when the end

comes, shall deliver the kingdom to the Father (1 Cor 15,23-28). The last enemy to be destroyed according to this text is Death,

* Brian E. Daley, The Hope of the Early Church: A Handbook of Patristic

Eschatology, Cambridge, 1991. 10

Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatologie: Tod und Ewiges Lehen, Regensburg, 1977, 177.

" John R. Sachs, «Apocatastasis in Patristic Theology» in Theological Studies

54 (1993) 617-640, at 640. It should be noted that arguments for an apocatastasis are developed in different ways given that the issue is inextricably tied to other

main issues such as the authority of the Bible, divine predestination and free-will, retributive punishment and the nature of God, the understanding of evil, and the

relatjonship between God's justice and God's mercy. Cf. Richard J. Bauckham's

article, «Universalism: A Historical Survey» in Themelios4l2 (1979) 48-54.




and presumably, therefore, the powers of death; that is, the Devil

or the demons.12 It is not clearly stated in Origen's writings that Death refers to the Devil, although there are many instances where Death is identified with sin and the Devil, which is consis tent with the fact that Origen viewed redemption in the tradi tional sense as a victory over the «powers» of evil in the world. The destruction of the last enemy does not mean, to Origen's mind, that its substance will perish, but that «the hostile purpose and will which proceeded not from God but from itself will come to an end».13 Things which are brought into existence by God can not suffer the destruction of their substance, in which case the last enemy will be destroyed in the sense of no longer being an

enemy. The subjection of ali things under Christ is therefore

interpreted positively by Origen as the transformation of the hos tile will of the enemy. When ali creatures endowed with free-will will have returned to God so that God's reign will be universal, then God will be «ali in ali» (1 Cor 15,28). This accordingto Origen is what is called apocatastasis. But there can be no certainty about this, given the key role that Origen assigns to creaturely free-will. As Henri Crouzel puts it, «If Origen added anything to what Paul said in 1 Cor 15,23-28, it could only be a great hope».14

Since the Tradition had no clear teaching to offer with regard to the beginning and end of the history of salvation, Origen turned to two facts that he could be certain of because they are rooted deep in the life of the Christian community, namely, God's

providential love manifested in Christ and human free-will, and he used these to formulate a possible explanation of the origins (the theory of the pre-existence of souls) and the end (the apoca tastasis to come) of the world.15 In the attempt to find a vantage point that will assist us to see something of the unity in Origen's complex writings, these two axes of God's love and human free will suggest that we must not look to the speculative order but to

12 See Henri Crouzel, Origen, trans. A. S. Worrall, Edinburgh, 1989, 262-63. 13 De principis III 6.5. See also ibid., 262. 14 Henri Crouzel, Origen, 265. 15 Jean Daniélou, Origen, trans. Walter Mitchell, London, New York, 1955,276

289, offers a treatment of Origen's eschatology based on these two main axes.




the concrete realm of Christian life. Origen, in other words, spoke as one who had encountered Christ, he was first and foremost «a witness to Christ by the way he lived».16 To witness to Christ is to embrace the cross as the paradigm for ali Christian life directed toward perfect union with God in Christ - martyrdom is seen as the practical enactment of the cross.17 The cross is «not merely an ethical example of pious death for believers», however, but «the

beginning of an ontological victory of God's love over evil and the devil in a new and perfect creation».18

In Against Celsus, where Origen refutes certain charges that the pagan philosopher Celsus had leveled against Christianity, he

presente us with his understanding of the nature and meaning of the cross. What is stressed in this work is that it is due to the human reality of Christ, that is, in virtue of his human weakness, that the Logos speaks effectively to us sinners and thus brings about our conversion to the good.19 When it comes to discussing the key role that human free-will plays in submitting to the

Logos, it is therefore not surprising to find that Origen is keen to stress that God does not force or manipulate with respect to our salvation. In other words, it is appropriate to talk of the persua sive, not constraining, power of God's infinite love and goodness. Each one of us «simply by the exercise of his freedom will choose what the Logos wills», with the result that the perfection of the

16 Ibid., 314.

17 Only recently have theologians began to rediscover the thought of Origen

in a discussion on the cross of Christ, after a long history of officiai ostracism. See, for example, the following two essays by Peter J. Gorday in the collection of essays entitled The Cross in Christian Tradition: From Paul to Bonaventure, edited by Elizabeth A. Dreyer, New York, 2000: «Becoming Truly Human: Origen's Theology of the Cross», 93-125; «The Martyr's Cross: Origen and Redemption», 126-146.

Gorday acknowledges the efforts not only of the historians Jean Daniélou and

Henri Crouzel who have argued forcefully that the effects of Origen's Platonism

have been exaggerated from ancient times to the present, but also of thinkers

such as Hans Urs von Balthasar and Henri de Lubac who have attempted a criti

cai retrieval of Origen's thought for the present. la John Sachs, «Apocatastasis in Patristic Theology», 621. 19

Against Celsus, 2.9. Cited by Peter J. Gorday, «Origen's Theology of the

Cross», 105.




Logos will be attained as our final end.20 Yet given that God's desire is that sinners should submit to God's love of their own accord (centrai to which is the theory of educative punishments both in this life and in the life to come), then talk of a final restoration of ali to the originai good can only be expressed as a firm hope, not as a dogmatic certainty.21 This firm hope goes hand in hand with Origen's understanding of the radically open ended nature of the history of salvation, that is, he sought to dis

pel the view of an impersonal, closed, static world of endless repe tition where there is no process of growth and development underpinned by God's creative goodness:

He wanted to contend for a radically open-textured world and

open-ended future for that world, with the goodness and trustwor

thiness of God as an absolute foundation...Powerful ethical striv

ing, then, is simply real life, life truly lived, for it is the mark of one

who believes in, and has been grasped by, the truth of the nature of

things -

by the good God...We must not, therefore, be misled by

Origen's Platonism. While it is indeed the case that he saw this ethi

cal striving worked out in the redemptive purification of the soul,

through its liberation from the body and through an inward con

templation of the purely incorporeal God, it is also true that he saw

in the success of this striving the transformation of life on earth,

the institution of a more just, more godly, order of things. As the

martyr seizes the wheel of history, it turns from the direction of lies

toward the truth.22

It is interesting to note that Origen's understanding of a God who allocates ruin to no one, so that the possibility of hell rests with human free-will, is the most common position to be found

20 Against Celsus 7.72. Cited by John Sachs, «Apocatastasis in Patristic

Theology», 628. 21 That ali punishment serves an educative purpose is thoroughly biblical,

note. At the centre of the Old Testament we have the theme of the covenant and God's unswerving faithfulness to the promises of the covenant. The infinite

patience and forebearance of God who lovingly chastises his people will in the end wear down the resistance of hardened hearts and turn them towards the liv

ing God. 22 Peter J. Gorday, «Origen and Redemption», 141.




among contemporary theologians on the issue of hell. What is even more interesting is that in patristic eschatology Origen was not the only one to expound a firm hope in the final salvation of ali: before him Clement of Alexandria and after him both Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa ali spoke in their respective ways of an apocatastasìs at the end of time. Yet it is most notable that none of these theologians were the subject of the officiai

condemnations of the Synod of Constantinople (543) and the Second Council of Constantinople (553). Furthermore, when we turn to examine the anathemas against the Origenists, the first canon (DS 403) clearly indicates that the particular officiai con

cern was to condemn the doctrine of the pre-existence of souls as

incompatible with the orthodox faith of the Church.23 What we

must appreciate when dealing with the anathemas of 543 and

553, as Jean Daniélou concludes in his analysis of Origen's work, is that «what the Church rejected in Origen's theory was not the

doctrine of apocatastasìs itself», which is biblically grounded in

texts such as Ephesians 1:10, «but the Platonist distortion of it».24

This conclusion is bolstered by the fact that the anathemas do

not condemn Origen directly - although his name does appear in

the eleventh canon (DS 433) of Constantinople II - but are aimed

explicitly at the Origenistic monks of that time who had repro duced the christology of Evagrius of Ponticus.25

The foregoing discussion of the main axes that are dis

cernible in Origen's thought serves to illustrate the key issue with

which any inquiry into the controverted theme of apocatastasìs will have to grapple: how to reconcile the reality of human free

23 The theory of the pre-existence of souls which are sent down into bodies as

punishment for sin not only degrades the human body but also undermines the

unity of body and soul as constituents of one person. 24 Jean Daniélou, Origen, 288-89. 25 At the beginning of the sixth century Evagrian Origenism emerged as a strong

teaching in the communities founded by St. Sabbas in Palestine. They envisaged not

only a spherical, ethereal risen body, but also the abolition of material reality in the

world to come, and the complete absorption of ali created spirits into an undifferen

tiated unity with the divine Logos. The Emperor Justinian drew up a series of canons

(DS 403-411} against the Origenists which were subsequently approved at the Synod of Constantinople in 543 and later confirmed by Pope Vigilius.




will and moral responsibility before God, on the one hand, and God's ineffable universal saving love made manifest in the Christ

event, on the other. This basic Christian conundrum is evident in the New Testament where we find many texts which talk of God's universal saving will in Christ, yet these universalist texts must somehow be brought into relation with the separationist texts which

uphold the final accountability of the human person before the liv

ing God.26 After wrestling with this basic conundrum, Origen held a firm hope (not a professed doctrine) in the final efficaciousness of the persuasive power of God's infinite goodness and mercy. While he

portrayed divine punishments as essentially remediai and educa

tive, nonetheless he realized that certainty about the conversion of the demons and impenitent humans is not attainable; it is simply not possible to reconcile ali the statements of Scripture. In the after math of the condemnations of 543 and 553, however, even the lan

guage of hope in the salvation of ali in the fullness of time fell by the

wayside as theological reflection tended to place more emphasis on divine judgment and eternai reward or punishment.27 In the West, the extremely pessimistic view of Augustine in regard to eternai pun ishment in hell for the majority of humankind became the domi nant teaching, and persisted righi through to medieval scholastic

theology where hell and its eternai tormente were defended on the basis of the demands of God's mercy and justice, as reflected in the work of Thomas Aquinas.28

26 While there is only one instance of the use of the term «apocatastasis panton» in the NewTestament, namely, in Acts 3,21, nevertheless tnany texts convey the uni

versal scope of the Christ-event, such as: Romans 5,12-21, 11,32; Ephesians 1,10;

Philippians 2,10f; Col 1,20; Titus 2,11; 1 Timothy 2,4f, 4,10; Hebrews 9,27f; 2 Pet 3,9; John 6,37-39,12,32,16,33,17,2. The separationist texts include Matthew 13,24-30,36 43, 47-50; 18,23-25; 22,1-14; 25,1-13, 31-46; Luke 16,19-31; Romans 2,2-11; 1

Corinthians 3,11-15; 2 Corinthians 5,10; 2 Thessalonians 1,5-10, as well as the refer

ences to «Gehenna» (Mt 3,12, 5,22,18,9), «eternai ftre» (Mt 18,8), «furnace of flre» (Mt 13,42, 50), and «outer darkness» (Mt 8,12, 22,13).

21 John R. Sachs, «Current Eschatology: Universal Salvation and the Problem of Hell» in Theological Studies 52 (1991) 230.

28 The eternity of punishment is defended by Augustine at great length in The

City ofGod, 21.17-21. While the Augustinian view that God draws good out of evil

(O felix culpa'.) should, I think, be upheld as a fundamental principle (which

points to a processive view of God's good purpose for ali things), serious problems




But in contemporary theological reflection, there has been renewed interest in the theme of apocatastasis, which indicates that an important truth of the Christian faith has been in danger of being lost and that the pessimistic exaggerations of much past theology and popular piety have been in need of correction. Stili, most contemporary Catholic theologians refuse to embrace a doctrine or theory of apocatastasis, not only because they feel bound by magisterial teachings on hell (which, it must be borne in mind, are hypothetical anyway!), but also because they view such a doctrine as problematic with regard to the reality of human free-will and the need to accept human responsibility before God. Thus most, recognizing God's universal saving will revealed in the Christ-event, insist on the hope that ali will some how finally come to glorious union with the living God.

In this essay I shall first present the magisterial teaching on

hell, which needs to be set in relation to the Catholic teaching on the primacy of grace in order to interpret it properly, as well as

present the general consensus existing today amongst Catholic

theologians on this issue. I will then proceed, in the second section, to offer moral

spiritual (pastorali reasons for pursuing an inquiry into the issue of hell and apocatastasis. In the third section, I will rely on the

assertion that the Christian faith has a radically doxological essence in order not only to suggest why the theme of apocata

stasis has persisted down the ages and will inevitably continue to

prompt theological reflection in the future, but also to show that the point of departure for christology must be the presence of the risen One in the Spirit.

The understanding of the basic openness and dynamic nature of the structures of Christian faith that arises out of this

arise however when Augustine claims that this happens only in the minority while the majority are predestined to the condemnation of eternai punishment

(City ofGod, 21.12). Aquinas, like Augustine, defìnes evil as the privation of good [Summa Centra Gentiles, 3.14) and he employs the aesthetic principle (Summa

Theologica 1, q. 48, a.5), but he even goes so far as to claim that the happiness of

the blessed is ali the greater when they behold the suffering of the damned which

they have escaped - see Summa Theologica 3, Suppl., qq. 94, 97-99.




assertion will lead to the affirmation of theology as fundamental

ly hermeneutical and to a brief discussion of the significance of the notion of «fusion of horizons» in the formulation of a theolo

gy of death as the privileged locus of the gift of «admirable

exchange» of natures in the person of Christ. Finally, I will con clude with a summary concerning God's saving justice as the

«paradox of grace», which can serve as a basic framework for

undertaking a broader treatment of the research topic presented in this essay.

Magisterial Teaching: The Possibility ofHell in Centrasi to the Reality ofHeaven

When we turn to the magisterial teaching with regard to hell, what we find is the consistent concern of the magisterium down the ages to affirm that the souls of those who die in a state of mortai sin will suffer the torments of hell.29 In our own day, this

magisterial teaching has been upheld both by a document issued

by the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith con

cerning matters of eschatology (1979), and a document issued by the International Theological Commission regarding issues in

eschatology (1992).30 The short document of 1979 reiterated the traditional magisterial teaching with respect to hell when it declared that there is «eternai punishment for the sinner who will

29This teaching goes back to the condemnation of the Origenists at the Synod of Constantinople in 543, which stated that the punishments of the demons and the impious will have no end (DS 409, 411). Much later in 1215, IV Lateran declared that the dead will rise and receive, according to their works, eternai reward with Christ or eternai punishment with the devil (DS 801), while II Lyons in 1274 taught that those who die in a state of mortai sin or with originai sin go immediately to hell but suffer different punishments (DS 858). Pope Benedict XII, in his Benedictus Deus (1336), reaffirmed that the souls of those who die in a state of mortai sin go immediately to hell (DS 1002), as did the Council of Florence in 1439 (DS 1306) and the Council ofTrent in 1547 (DS 1539, 1543, 1575).

30 The 1979 document is entitled Recentiores episcoporum synodi. For an

English translation, see The Reality after Death, in Vatican Council II: More Post Conciliar Documents, ed. Austin Flannery, Collegeville, 1982, 500-4. The Commission's document is entitled De quibusdam quaestionibus actualibus circa

eschatologiam. The English translation is in The Irish Theological Quarterly 58

(1992) 209-43. This document will be referred to as Questions in Eschatology.




be deprived of the sight of God», and that this punishment will have «a repercussion on the whole being of the sinner».31 The whole tone of this document, it is important to note, is pastoral, for it addresses a contemporary situation in which elements of «the baptismal creed necessary for the coherence of the faith» and inextricably connected «with important practices in the life of the Church» are gradually being eroded away.32 The element in

question is the article of the Creed regarding life everlasting and therefore everything in general after death (individuai and col lective eschata), ali of which is seen as indissolubly related to the

present life of Christian conduct and liturgical worship. The

importance of this final article lies in that it expresses «the goal and purpose» of God's intention for humanity and the world. The Sacred Congregation expressly recognizes that the faith of the Church requires and is enriched by theological research, but it warns that the work of theologians must proceed in a way which

safeguards what the Church teaches in the name of Christ. We can infer from this that theologians are not prohibited from seek

ing the «hidden meaning» in Scripture and the articles of the

Creed, provided that the coherence and practice of the faith are not undermined in the process.

The much lengthier document of 1992, which takes up again ali the eschatological issues mentioned in Reality after Death, lends its weight to the assertion concerning eternai damnation for the impenitent sinner, but it does so by explaining that this

possibility derives from the'fact that «friendship» cannot be forced upon us; that is, the offer of friendship always implies the

possibility of rejection. The possibility of «the free rejection to the

very end of God's Love and Mercy» means that the possibility of

hell, which «consists of deprivation of the sight of God», must be taken seriously.33 The intention of the Commission (much like the

31 Reality after Death, 502.

32 Ibid., 500. The pastoral concerti is underlined throughout by statements

such as the following: «It is obvious that doubt is gradually insinuating itself

deeply into people's minds» (501); «Ali this disturbs the faithful since they no

longer find the vocabulary they are used to and their familiar ideas» (501); «...the

faithful, who today more than ever are exposed to dangers to their faith» (503). 33

Questions in Eschatology, 234-37, at 236.




position of Origen reviewed above) is clearly to affirm the prima cy of God's grace which is offered to ali unconditionally, yet at the same time it wants to uphold the serious nature of human free will as a condition for obtaining salvation in God.

On this view, when the Church prays for the salvation of ali

people living, it is actually praying for the conversion of ali (cf. 1 Tim 2,4) since it believes that God's universal salvific will is an efficacious will. At this point the Commission reminds us that the Church «has never once declared the damnation of a single per son as a concrete fact».34 Yet despite this welcome reminder, the Commission could have enriched its document by acknowledg ing the distinction that Karl Rahner makes between the logicai status of statements about salvation (heaven) and those con

cerning damnation (hell): the former is a statement of fact or

reality, while the latter is a statement of possibility. Peter Phan, in his critique of Questions in Eschatology, suggests that one of the

consequences of this lack of contrast in the logicai status of state ments is that it does not allow the theme of apocatastasis to be discussed in an illuminating way.35 In fact the theme, which has been generating much theological interest recently, receives scant consideration from the Commission whose concern is to

mainly uphold the seriousness of human decisions and thus the

«genuine possibility» of hell as one's eternai destiny. In light of this real possibility of hell the Commission warns that «it is not

right - although today this is something which is forgotten in the

preaching at exequies - to treat salvation as a kind of quasi-auto matic consequence».36 While the Commission's desire to defend the real possibility of hell is indeed a legitimate one, nevertheless its message about the primacy and greatness of God's gracious intentions for the world would have been truly «good news» had it engaged far more willingly with current investigations into the real possibility of a final apocatastasis based on the reality of sal vation in the Spirit of the risen One.

34 Ibid., 236-7.

35 Peter C. Phan, «Current Theology: Contemporary Context and Issues in

Eschatology» in Theological Studies 55 (1994) 507-536, 516. 3e

Questions in Eschatology, 237.



DEATH AS PRIV1LEGE 795

Of further interest for the purposes of this essay are the Commission's statements about death. What is especially com mendable is that in addition to affirming the negative aspect of death as «the wages of sin» (Rom 6,23), the Commission is keen to draw attention to the «goodness of death» (drawing on the Eastern tradition) as «death in the Lord» (Rev 14,13).37 If definitive communion with the Lord (2 Cor 5,8) as the goal of the pilgrim life is through the passageway of death, then death must be seen as having a positive aspect as well. Up to this point ali is well and

good. Difficulties begin to emerge, however, when the Commission seems to restrict the message of a hopeful death

only to baptized Christians who strive to lead a holy life. But if Christ has destroyed death (in its full or integrai sense) by his

redemptive death, which allows us to think of our death positively as a dying into the death of Christ, then does this not suggest the need to investigate the real possihility of death as the gateway to communion with the Lord for ali, Christians and non-Christians alike? Given that in the Spirit ali are offered the possibility of par taking of the paschal mystery of Christ, then does this not imply the

possibility that in the Spirit ali «pass over» with Christ from death to «new» life? What is lacking in the Commission's treatment of death, in other words, is the recognition that the positive aspect of death as «death in the Lord» gives rise to a consideration of death itself as a profoundly salvifìc event. If death itself is held to be salvifìc in a definitive manner, then this in turn gives rise to reflection on the

mystery of death as the privileged locus for the actualization of the basic claim that Christ «died for ali» so that «ali will be made alive» in him (cf. 1 Cor 15,22).

There are other problems with the Commission's statements on death, most notably its failure to adequately appreciate the view that death affects the whole person. It does, admittedly, explicitly acknowledge that because the body and soul are essen

tially united, then the person is affected by death. But it fails to elaborate on how the soul is affected by death, contenting itself

to merely state that death must be accepted by Christians «with a

' Ibid., 226-29.




certain sense of penance» since death is the «wages of sin».38 In its desire to firmly reassert the immortality of the soul as a presup position for maintaining the traditional language of an interme diate state between individuai death and the general resurrection of the dead, the Commission's description of death fails to give due consideration to death as an event that affects the person in its totality.39 The main burden of the document clearly rests with the affìrmation of the intermediate state and the rejection of the

hypotheses of total death (e.g. Oscar Cullmann) and resurrection in death (e.g. Gisbert Greshake) which are seen as undermining the coherence and practice of the faith. The tenor of the document is such that it «falls short of declaring unambiguously that the doc trine of the intermediate state is a dogma of faith».40 Karl Rahner, for

instance, points out that the doctrine is not a dogma and he postu

M Ibid., 226. 39 When I say that we should acknowledge that death affects the whole per

soti, I do not mean to say by this that we should accept the Rahnerian position that death is a personal act in which the self determines itself totally before God

(fulfilment as se//-fulfilment). Rather, I mean to say that death is definitive not

only in biophysical or cosmological terms, but also anthropologically since the

disintegration of the physical body puts an end to the psychophysical processes of free engagement with the world. See the phenomenological analysis of death

by Frans Jozef van Beeck in God Encountered, Voi. 2/3, Collegeville (Minnesota), 1995, 131-46. Thus when I say that death affects the person in its totality, I mean that the person actually dies, in which case death cannot be a personal act of self fulfilment: only the gifted character of death as a dying into the death of Christ can save us from the dead-end of death and fulfil the empty vessel of our being with new life. This leads to a theory of resurrection in death. The gifted character of death, note, need not be seen as discrediting the transcendental analysis of

death, rather by contending that the person actually dies we are forced to consid er whether our notion of self-transcendence has gone far enough: self-transcen dence ultimately points to God's transcendence over death (God as Life-Giver).

The phenomenological analysis of death is supported by the scientiflc view of the person as a psychosomatic unity. See the collection of essays in Whatever

Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature, edit ed by Warren S. Brown, Nancey Murphy, and H. Newton Malony, Minneapolis, 1998, which favour the position of «nonreductive physicalism», and the collection of essays to be found in Neuroscience and the Person: Perspectives on Divine

Action, edited by Robert J. Russell, Nancey Murphy, Theo C. Meyering, and Michael A. Arbib, Vatican City, 1999), where the model of «emergentist monism» is advocated instead of nonreductive physicalism.

"Peter Phan, «Contemporary Context and Issues in Eschatology», 521.




lates that it serves as «an intellectual framework» for reconciling two series of affirmations that can only be grasped as being one.

fìrstly, the immediate blessedness or condemnation of the soul after death (the individuai eschata); secondly, the glorification of the body at the end of time (the collective eschata).41 The upshot of ali this is that even if one proposes a theory of resurrection in death, which entails a denial of the existence of the intermediate state as

taught by the magisterium, such a theory could stili be developed in a manner which incorporates the collective eschata and hence does not undermine the dogmas and practices of the faith.

The proposition offered by Bernard Prusak i,s an interesting case in point.42 After having shown that there exists a consensus

today amongst Catholic theologians on bodily resurrection and how it refers not to material particles being raised from the dead, but rather to the personal self/identity which develops through a lifetime of personal/bodily relationships within the physical world, he concludes that «there is need to develop a mediating position on the intermediate state».43 By applying the medieval distinction between particular and general judgment to bodily resurrection, he proposes the need to distinguish «a particular resurrection in death» from «the general resurrection of ali the dead» at the end of time. The former concept recognizes that the «self» brings its bodiliness with it beyond death, while the latter

concept takes into account the understanding that the risen self continues to have an impact on an unfinished history and

incomplete world. This implies that no personal identity will be

fully complete until the world is complete at the end of history. Put differently, one's relationship to the world will be fully inte

grated into one's personal identity with the completion of the his torical process. Such a mediating position on the intermediate state offers an effective response to the criticism that the theory of resurrection in death posits a final consummation while histo

41 Karl Rahner, «The Intermediate State» in Theological Investigations 17, trans. Margaret Kohl, New York, 1981, 114, 121.

42 Bernard P. Prusak, «Bodily Resurrection in Catholic Perspectives» in

Theological Studies 61 (2000) 64-105. 43 Ibid., 102.




ry is stili running its course, and it addresses the Commission's concern that the collective or community aspect of the final re surrection seems to disappear altogether in such a theory.

It is time to sum up. The documents of the Sacred

Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (1979) and the International Theological Commission (1992) concerning mat ters of eschatology reaffirm the traditional teaching that to die in a state of mortai sin is to go irrevocably to hell. It is most perti nent to note, however, that nowhere is the judgment made that

any particular person has died in a state of mortai sin. The fact that the Church has never once declared the damnation of a par ticular person as a concrete fact reflects the Church's deep appre ciation of the need to assign primacy to the unfathomable grace of God made known to us sinners through the paschal mystery of Christ. The concern of the magisterium is to uphold the existence of hell as a real possibility in order to underscore the seriousness of the free-will with which God has endowed us humans, and left at that. As Zachary Hayes succinctly states the matter, «The pos sibility of hell stands in sharp contrast with the reality of heav en».44 Hell, in other words, is not to be treated as a fact, as a certain

truth, for the status of «fact» belongs solely to the grace of heaven.

Hayes's statement expresses a general consensus existing amongst Catholic theologians today who treat the magisterial statements with respect to heaven and hell in terms of a basic

«asymmetry» which is seen as being continuous with the gospel of Christ.45 Talk of hell serves as a serious threat or warning about the dire consequences of freely estranging oneself from the offer of God's self-gift in Christ who is the Alpha and the Omega of ali that is (Rev 1:8). This affirmation of grace as the point of departure in

theology can be expressed differently by saying that there is one

predestination of ali thìngs to permanent union with the living

44 Zachary Hayes, «Hell» in The New Dictionary of Theology, eds. Joseph Α.

Komonchak, Mary Collins, and Dermot A. Lane, Wilmington (Delaware), 1987, 459. See also Visions of a Future: A Study of Christian Eschatology, Wilmington (Delaware), 1989, 186-9.

45John Sachs, in his article «Current Eschatology», 233-242, also talks of this

«asymmetry» which is the view commonly accepted by contemporary Catholic

theologians who have written on the subject of eschatology.




God through Christ. Within this «supralapsarian» framework of the divine economy of salvation, human free-will emerges as the

God-given capacity for encounter with God and thus as radically ordered to the final end of love of God. The possibility of hell is

thought of not as punishment inflicted by the sovereign Judge upon the obdurate sinner, but as the self-chosen state of estrange ment from the merciful God who constantly seeks after the sinner

(cf. Lk 15) so that he/she may truly repent, turn to the good, and realize his/her originai identity and full integrity of being in union with the living God (this was also the view of Origen).

But while the Commission is to be applauded for explicitly laying stress on the fact that the Church has never once declared the damnation of a particular person as a concrete fact, nonethe less there remain inherent difficulties with its document, not least of which is the scant treatment that the issue of apocatasta sis receives. The latter issue cannot be ignored because the Christian faith holds as a fundamental tenet that Christ shed his blood «not only for our sins only, but also for the sins of the whole world» (DS 1522, quoting 1 Jn 2,2). At the same time, however, the

magisterium teaches that baptism is the «instrumentai cause»

(DS 1529) of receiving the grace of redemption in Christ. But these two assertions clearly constitute a basic conundrum which illustrates the need to reflect at much greater length on how to

intelligibly uphold the universality of redemption in Christ: How does God's universal saving will manifested in Christ extend to the non-Christian world if baptism into the death of Christ is

necessary for personal salvation? The Commission, I believe, took a step in the right direction when it declared that death has also a positive aspect since it is a dying «into the Lord», but because of pastoral concerns it restricts this concept to practic ing Christians, hence the possible implications of this concept for the eternai destiny of the whole of humanity are not raised. Yet when we turn to consider some important declarations made

by Vatican II in respect of God's universal saving will and real

presence in the world, we find there some key pointers for hand

ling this basic conundrum and for developing the notion of death as dying «into the Lord» in such a way that it extends beyond the Christian world to embrace humanity as a whole. The declara tions to be singled out in the following paragraphs not only rein




force the primacy of grace, they also affirm the need to treat the risen One as the truly «last thing», so that what emerges is a

predominantly ontological language, not moral. To begin with, Vatican II states that those who «do not know

the Gospel of Christ or his Church», but listen to the «dictates of

their conscience» and strive, with the assistance of grace, to lead a virtuous life, whatever good or truth is found amongst them is considered by the Church «to be a preparation for the Gospel», hence they may attain eternai salvation (LG 16). The Council, in other words, recognizes that grace is accessible to non-Christians

(although the controverted question of whether baptism is neces

sary for salvation is passed over in silence), but these elements of

grace outside the Church are seen as ordered to the fullness of truth and salvation which is to be found only in the Church (this is made

very clear in UR 3). As ordered to the Church which is the «universal sacrament of salvation» (LG 1, 48), non-Christians can be seen as

incorporated into Christ who is the unique mediator between the

living God and a fallen humanity. A second and most important declaration of Vatican II in

relation to the universality of salvation in Christ states that «since Christ diedfor ali, and ali men are in fact called to one and the

same destiny, which is divine, we must hold that the Holy Spirit offers to ali the possibility of being made partners, in a way known to God, in the paschal mystery» (GS 22). The first thing to

appreciate here is that the Council says «in a way known to God»; it does not say «only to God», in which case we can think about it! The second notable thing is that implicit in this statement is the divinization theme characteristic of patristic theology, since talk of «being made partners» in the paschal mystery through the

power of the Spirit is tantamount to talk of participation in the divine nature, by grace, a theme which is explicitly stated else where by the Council (DV 2). But what is most pertinent here is that the Council concedes that in some mysterious manner,

through the power of the Spirit, even the unbaptized are offered the possibility of sharing in the glory of the risen One, of being «raised up» into the ineffable life of the triune God. It is further worth noting that the language used by the Council is primarily ontological, not moral, for what is affirmed is that ali human

beings are determined by «one and the same destiny» in the risen




Lord in whose person human nature has been inextricably joined to the mystery of the divine life. Το conclude, then, it is apparent that Vatican II reiterates the universal significance of the Christ event by emphasizing the themes of incorporation into Christ and his Church through the work of the Spirit who directs ali to the ontological fullness of being made partners in the paschal mystery.

Needless to say, the Council leaves aside the question of the manner in which ali may become partakers of the paschal mys tery. Such a question, however, is the proper domain of theologi cal inquiry, and the Council itself, in my view, alludes to a possi ble direction such an inquiry could take when it says that we are made partners in the paschal mystery by being «configured to the death of Christ», which is a unique death because Christ has

«destroyed death by his death» (GS 22), thereby offering us the

plenitude of life in the Spirit. In light of the fact that this life of ours is journeying inexorably towards the dead-end of death

(death is the horizon of human life), the message that we,

through the Spirit, are «configured» to the death of Christ is

indeed good news: death has been «destroyed» through the cru cified One.46 Such a message provides more than a basis for the

acceptance of death as the horizon of life and thus the accep tance of our non-fulfilment and incompleteness, however; it also

,fi Death here, as stated earlier, is to be taken in its full or integrai sense: it

refers not only to bodily demise or physical death, but also to moral or spiritual death which brings estrangement or separation from the living God. Christ was

put to death by the powers of sin in the world, but by means of his total and free

self-abandonment to the Father in accepting his unjust execution, Christ has

destroyed ali that separates us sinners from the Father. In Jewish apocalyptic

eschatology, which seems to have had considerable influence on Paul's thought, the term «death» in its full sense also entails the eschatological death (eternai

perdition) which will befall the wicked at the final judgment. See Martinus C. de

Boer, The Defeat of Death: Apocalyptic Eschatology in 1 Corinthians 15 and

Romans 5, Sheffeild, 1988, 83-84. In the perspective of Jewish apocalyptic, it is

precisely death in its full sense that marks this present evil age as radically differ

ent from the glorious age to come when death shall be no more. It is the language of death that expresses the disjunction between the two ages. That Paul adopts the same view is apparent, for instance, in the statement that «for as ali die in

Adam, ali will be made alive in Christ» (1 Cor 15,22).




serves to engender a life-long attitude of self-abandonment in faith as the basis of meaningful living as well as hopeful dying.47 It takes much effort to forge some meaning in this ambiguous, transitory, and anxious life of ours; we must be satisfìed with

fragments of meaning and goodness, yet despite this incom

pleteness we seek a totality, we yearn for something enduring which will render our life worthwhile and comprehensibie. To be

configured to the death of Christ is the basis of meaningful living not only because death as the horizon of life is now considered to be a hopeful happening in virtue of the fact that Christ has

already assumed our death, but also because the indwelling of the Spirit of the risen Christ bestows upon us the gift of true or

spiritual freedom (authentic identity) which empowers us in the here-and-now to imitate the life of Christ and fulfil the law of love for the sake of a world overshadowed by the powers of darkness. If we are mature persons, then we will accept that living is an exercise in dying regarded as a life-long attitude of self-abandon ment in faith; and, furthermore, the acceptance of death amounts to the acceptance of our incompleteness and the sur render of ali our fears and preoccupation with self to the One who alone can fulfil every desire of the human spirit, who alone can reveal us fully to ourselves «in an encounter that will surprise us with the gift of an identity with which we had been only dimly familiar».48

In light of the foregoing discussion of key statements made

by Vatican II in relation to the one inviolable destiny of humani

ty configured to the crucified and risen Lord, it seems reasonable to propose that theology today wouid do well to move toward an

47 This basic point is made by Frans jozef van Beeck in his phenomenological analysis of death to be found in God Encountered: A Contemporary Catholic

Systematic Theology, Voi 2/3, Collegeville (Minnesota), 1995, 131-46. The author, while acknowledging Heidegger's understanding of our being as a being towards

death, points out that such a view is also to be found in Paul who says, «I die every day» (1 Cor 15,31), and that this text is taken as the basis of the ascetical practice of «living as if dying every day» (Athanasius), of «keeping the memory of death

every day before one's eyes» (Macarius the Great), and thus of «making of our lives a practice for death» (Gregory Nazianzen) - see 156.

4" Ibid., 143.1 have added the emphasis.




inquiry into the saving significance of our own death when it is conceived of as the gift of dying into the unique death of Christ who has transformed death by his death, into new life. This par ticular direction of inquiry is implied, I would maintain, in the biblical notion (to which the Commission appeals in its docu ment Questions in Eschatology) of death as dying «into the Lord». The mystery of death conceived of as the gift of dying into the death of Christ holds the promise of being able to illustrate the

plausibility of the argument that in their very death non Christians are baptized into the death of Christ and thus are able to receive the gift of new life in Christ, through the Spirit who is the Giver of Life. The final condition of death, in other words,

emerges as the sacramentai situation par excellence, as the privi leged locus of the actualization of God's self-gift in Christ whose

humanity has entered fully into the dimension of God in his re surrection from the dead.49

A theology of death developed along these lines not only offers us a picture of how non-Christians can be affirmed as par taking of the eschatological grace of the Christ-event, through the Spirit, it also represents a challenge to the traditional view

point that one's eternai destiny is ultimately determined by per sonal decisions taken in the pilgrim life. On this traditional view, it is held that the sinner may remain unrepentant to the very end of the pilgrim life, hence we must hold to the possibility of hell for obdurate sinners. There can be little doubt that our experience of the present life makes plain the reality of unrepentant sinners who seem hell-bent on perpetrating evil. The violent end of the

Just One who suffered death on Calvary at the hands of a sinful world is the starkest confirmation for the Christian of the heart lessness of humanity. Yet it is precisely here, at the foot of the

™ A working definition of sacrament must be rooted primordially in the

humanity of Christ, not in the Church or in the individuai sacramentai rites. To

assert that Jesus' humanity is the very reason for sacramentality is to understand

sacraments as responding to the phenomenon of being human, that is, they are to

be understood from the standpoint of the relationship between nature and grace:

grace presupposes nature and brings it to perfection (Thomistic maxim). What the

individuai sacraments cause is an intensiflcation of an already present relation

ship. See, for example, K. E. Osborne, Sacramentai Theology, New York, 1988.




cross, that we must begin in silence to contemplate the manner in which God in Christ has redeemed us sinners from within the human condition.50 The gospel story clearly depicts the crucifix ion in relational terms as the Son's total self-abandonment in obedience to the Father's will, which is essentially an experience of unity with the Father in love (as the episode in Gethsemane makes clear): the Son freely takes upon himself the inhumanity of a

humanity estranged from God in a final prayer of forgiveness to the Father (Lk 23,34). The One who is rejected does not reject his rejec tors, but continues to represent them before the Father so that they might come to their final end of love of God (true freedom) through his personal mediation. In this manner what is actualized on the cross is the perfect union of the incarnate One's humanity with the Father which results in the formation of a «new» humanity perfect ly consecrated by the glory of God in his resurrection from the dead.51 This is to say that the «divinization» of humanity must not be regarded as already complete in the event of the incarnation of the Logos in the man Jesus; rather we are to think of the fife of the incarnate One in more dynamic and relational terms as culmina

ting in the triduan narrative of crucifixion, burial, and resurrection. The import of this perspective is that it makes us appreciate that the

assumption of humanity into the crucified One is a matter of «sus

50 It is Hans Urs von Balthasar who, more than any other Catholic theologian, has stressed that God in Christ wanted to experience the human condition «from within» so as to redirect it and judge it from inside and thus save it. Because of Christ's solidarity from within with those who reject ali solidarity, hell for von Balthasar is a christological concept which indicates that God is not to be thought of as absolute power, but as absolute love. See especially Mysterium Paschale, Grand Rapids (Michigan), 1993.

51 See, for example, Gérard Rossé, The CryofJesus ο η the Cross: A Biblical and

Theological Study, trans. Stephen W. Arndt, New York, 1987, 45, 108. The author

argues that Mark the evangelist, following the motif of the passio justi, wishes to focus upon the theological meaning of Jesus' cry on the cross: on the lips of Jesus himself, the cry is an interpretation of his death, that is, Jesus, the Messiah, has

completely assumed the human condition of estrangement from God of which the cross is the consummate sign. See also Frans Jozef van Beeck, Christ

Proclaimed, chs. 10 & 11, where it is argued that the dynamic interplay in the

gospel story between the identity of Jesus and his increasingly hostile surround

ings, which culminates in the cross, must remain the basis of the theological interpretation of the gospels. See also footnotes 2 and 5 above.




tained relationships» to ali those who condemn or abandon him to a torturous death. In this manner the crucified One becomes both our Representative before the Father, and the Father's

Representative before us sinners, so as to enable a wayward humanity estranged from the living God to be «drawn up» into the divine life of unfathomable love and therefore arrive at its true or ultimate destiny as created imago Dei.

To be created in the divine image means that the highest good of humanity is union with or love of God: «You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you».52 This fundamental desire of the human heart for union with God (the hunger for the beatific vision) is tantamount to

asserting that the first ontological status of humanity is not the

reality ofsin but its being created to stand in a relationship to God who created the world out of nothing (the world is completely dependent on God for its existence). From the standpoint of the

foregoing discussion regarding the actualization on the cross of the perfect union of Christ's humanity with the Father, we are now in a position to say that God has ontologically defined

humanity in the person of the crucified and buried One: that is, we humans are inalienably confìgured to the death of Christ who has destroyed death by his death, so that in the Spirit of the risen One there is already a «new creation» which anticipates the life of the world to come in the fullness of time. The need to treat the life of the incarnate One in dynamic and relational terms means that human «nature» must not be considered as a definitively known

quantity, that is, as a closed system; rather, we are to think of

humanity in terms of openness to transcendent reality and there fore as an essentially unfolding or emerging reality.53 What the

52 St. Augustine, Confessions 1.1. Because the goodness of createci nature is

axiomatic in Augustine's thinking, he stresses that sin is not in human nature, but

is an attribute of nature, that is, of flawed nature, and a flawed nature needs grace to realize its true end of libertas (spiritual freedom) which is given for the purpose of loving God. Grace must not be thought of as a mere antidote to sin, then, but

in relation to humanity's desire for union with God as its joyous fulfilment. 53 This means that salvation in Christ has to do with the attainment of a «high

er» nature. The fact that it is evolving nature that makes the humanum possible safe

guards against thinking of «nature» in essentialist terms, for this would imply that




redefinition of humanity in the person of Christ conclusively reveals is how deeply and indissolubly human nature is embed ded in the mystery of divine grace, that is, the mystery of God's love as pure self-giving. Through the person of Christ, the media tor between humanity and divinity, the world is drawn up into new life beyond every definition and every boundary.

As a concluding point, granted that the fullness of humanity and divinity in the person of Christ is to be conceived dynami cally and relationally as actualized in the culminating event of his total self-abandonment to the Father unto death for our sake, then this indicates, to my mind, that the patristic principle of «admirable exchange» of natures in Christ can be employed fruit

fully as a guiding principle in the development of a theology of death which intends to investigate the saving significance of our own death as already assumed by the unique death of Christ.54 When ali that has been said hitherto in this essay is set in relation

neither grace nor sin can affect the nature of humankind. This point is well made by Gabriel Daly, Creation and Redemption, Dublin, 1988, 132. See also Karl Rahner's

essay, «Christology Withln an Evolutionary View of the World» in Theological Investigations V, trans. Karl-Η. Kruger, London, 1966, 157-68; and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's work The Phenomenon o/Man, London and New York, 1959,182-88.

54 With respect to redemption in Christ, the Eastern tradition warns that it must not be treated in isolation from the very essence of patristic teaching

expressed by the exchange principle. This ensures that redemption is not reduced to the mere forgiveness of sins: it is the abolition of sin and death altogether which brings about our glorification or deification. See Vladimir Lossky, In the

Image and Likeness ofGod, Crestwood, New York, 1974, 103; Georges Florovsky, Creation and Redemption, Massachusetts, 1976, 103-4. The Church Fathers, from

Irenaeus on, never tired of using, in endless variations, the divinization theme:

«the Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ...out of his limitless love, became what

we are, so that he might make us what he is» (Preface to Book V Against Heresies). In Irenaeus, this exchange principle, in connection with the recapitulation motif, is displayed in its fullness: in becoming what we are, the Son has summed up and transformed the entire human condition, so that humanity is now drawn into

participation in the very life of God. Later versions of this principle, however, tended to lose some of this originai richness. In Tertullian and Hippolytus, for

example, the emphasis shifts to ethical instruction; in Clement of Alexandria the

emphasis lies on knowledge and thus learning how to become like God; while at the hands of Athanasius and the Cappadocians it is turned into a statement of the fullness of Christ's human nature (which tends to be rather statically conceived). See Frans JozefVAN Beeck, God Encountered, Voi. 1, 84-86.




to the exchange principle, then the proposition that suggests itself is that the event of death is best thought of as the privileged locusfor receiving the gift of'admirable exchange' ofnatures in the

person ofChrist. To be incorporateci into Christ's death has to do with the divinization, by grace, of human nature in his person. Thus in the final condition of death we can imagine ourselves as

entering fully into the paschal mystery of Christ and «passing» from death into new life in the creative power of the Spirit. The

newly embodied «risen» self can now be seen as exercising its freedom in a definitive manner in permanent union with God. The understanding that true freedom is underpinned by grace (this has been referred to as the «paradox of grace») serves to alert us to the need to reflect further on the role played by free-will in

entering into the eternity of God through the gateway of death.55 A theology of death developed along the lines suggested

above should not be taken as a direct denial of the magisterial teaching in regard to the possibility of hell as irrevocable separa tion from the living God. Rather, such a line of inquiry should be seen as an endeavour to delve into the «fuller» sense (sensus ple nior) of the meaning of the fundamental tenet that the salvation of the world is through Christ's unique death at our hands.56 It

55 Donald Μ. Baillie, in God Was In Christ, London, 1961, 114-118, 144-145, talks of the «paradox of grace» as the «centrai paradox» of the Christian life. It con

siste in ascribing to grace anything that is good in us, yet this does not amount to

the destruction of our freedom, rather our actions are never more truly free and

personal and human than when they are wrought in us by God's grace. The para dox of grace is given explicit expression in the writings of Paul (eg. 1 Cor 15,10 =

«though it was not I, but the grace of God which is in me») which Augustine used

in the development of his own thought against the Pelagians. The teaching of

Augustine is summed up in his famous prayer: «Give what you command, and

command what you will» (Confessions 10.29). For Augustine, grace works to illu

minate us sinners with divine truth (verum) and empower us with divine love

(bonum), so that the end of human free-will (liberum arbitrium = moral freedom)

is love of God and thus participation in the divine life (libertas = true or spiritual freedom). Since spiritual freedom is not attainable without the presence of heal

ing grace, then Augustine concludes that «when God rewards our merits, he

crowns his own gifts» (Confessions 9.34). 56 In respect of the transmission of divine revelation Vatican II declares: «The

Tradition that comes from the apostles makes progress in the Church, with the

help of the Holy Spirit. There is growth in insight into the realities and words that




should also be seen as a systematic attempt at elaborating an

intelligible basis for the contemporary Catholic position that it is our obligation to pray and hope that ali will «be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth» (1 Tim 2,4). The First Letter of Peter instructs us to be always prepared to give an account of the hope that is within us (1 Pet 3,15), thus we are obliged to provide an

intelligible defence of our hope that ali will ultimately come to know and love God. Such a defence can be mounted by building on the Catholic doctrine of grace and the radicai statements made

by Vatican II in regard to the «new» humanity to be found in the

person of Christ and the offer extended to ali of being made part ners in the paschal mystery of Christ, through the Spirit.

Moral-Spiritual Implications: The Imperative to Act in Such a Manner That Ali Will Be Saved

The Christian obligation to pray and hope that ali will be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth in Jesus Christ has

important implications for the Christian life in this world of ours where the reality of sin, fragmentation, division, death and into lerance is all-pervasive. The reflections of a thinker such as Hans Urs von Balthasar, for example, must be taken seriously when he

points out that when I am assured that hell is a fact, and that therefore it is populated, then the result is that I tend to fili hell

according to my taste and I place myself on the side of the saved from the torments of hell.57 A similar point is made by Hans Kiing when he explains that if I am convinced that people are con demned by God to the eternity of hell because they are heathens, Jews, or heretics, then I cannot fail to regard these categories of

people «as good for nothing, as unfit to exist, and unworthy of

are being passed on..». (DV 8). It is clear from this declaration that the Council

acknowledges that while God's revelation in Christ is definitive and unsurpass able, nonetheless this eschatological event is essentially unfathomable so that its

fuller meaning grows in history, under the guidance of the Spirit. 57 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dare We Hope «That Ali Men be Saved.»? trans. Dr.

David Kipp and Rev. Lothar Krauth, San Francisco, 1988, 190.




life».58 The result of such a conviction is that any sense of urgency in working towards a realized eschatology in human history is

seriously undermined since the kingdom of God is viewed as

only for observant Christians. When we turn to the New Testament evidence, the obliga

tion to pray and hope for the salvation of ali is most radically rooted in Jesus' commandment to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us (Mt 5,44). In the preceding command ment (Mt 5,39) Jesus had spoken of the need to passively and

patiently endure the evil person, that is, to forgo revenge, but in this commandment Jesus goes even further and demands that we actively engagé in love towards our enemies. The Christian

life, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer so keenly emphasized, is therefore characterized by the quality of the «extraordinary», the «pecu liar», that which is not «a matter of course».59 To love our enemies is clearly no ordinary love, it is not a love which can be realized within the realm of naturai possibilities, for it is the love of Jesus Christ himself, which is the way of the cross. The extraordinary quality of the Christian life is something which the followers of Christ do because it is a partaking in his passion which is the vie

tory of divine love over the powers of evil in this world of ours. In

light of the cross of Christ, the righi way to requite evil is not to resist it, otherwise evil will be heaped upon evil: «The only way to overcome evil is to let it run itself to a standstill because it does not find the resistance it is looking for».60 Of course this profound

insight goes against the grain of every naturai instinct and desire for self-preservation and self-maintenance by the exercise of

power, which is why those who passed by Jesus while he hung on the cross derided him: if he were truly the Son of God then he would come down from the cross; God would save him from his enemies and deliver him from his anguish (Mt 27,39-44). This biblical text indicates just how anthropocentric our understand

ing of divine power really is and why we find the proclamation of

58 Hans Kong, Eternai Lifel trans. Edward Quinn, London, 1984,167. 59 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, trans. R. H. Fuller, London,

Complete Edition, 1959, 126-138, at 136. 60 Ibid., 127.




the Messiah «crucified in weakness» (2 Cor 13,4) so scandalous and incredible. The God of the crucified Christ is a God whose

power is made manifest in the unfathomable depths of a com

passionate love which disarms evil by drawing its sting, a love which requites evil with good. This «extraordinary» quality of the Christian life is nowhere underlined more than in Jesus' demand that we love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.

This radicai commandment of Jesus leads us, in turn, to the consideration of another pertinent and fundamental point regarding the Christian life, which was also stressed by Bonhoeffer.61 To be followers of Christ does not mean that we fol low a universal law or adhere to an intelligible programme of ideals worth pursuing.62 Rather, to be a disciple of Christ is to be «summoned to an exclusive attachment to his persoti» which affects our whole existence.63 It is Christ who calls us, and we fol low him, which implies that grace (the gift of his person) and commandment (obedience) are to be regarded as forming an indissoluble unity. In order to stress this unity, Bonhoeffer for mulates two propositions which must be held together if we are to truly fathom the cali to discipleship: «only he who believes is

obedient, and only he who is obedient believes».64 These propo sitions intend to dispel any notion of a chronological distinction between faith and obedience to Christ's command, insisting instead that obedience is constitutive of faith, that faith only becomes faith in the act of obedience. The import of such a view for the issue under consideration in this section is that our faith

61 Ibid., 48-68.

62 There is a trend nowadays amongst many Christian moralists towards an

autonomous ethics which fails to recognize the primarily pneumatic under

standing of Christian morality: it is through the Spirit of the risen Lord, encoun

tered especially in liturgical worship, that we make our ethical choices in living out our union with Christ for the sake of the worid. See especially Bernard HAring, Christian Renewal in a Changing World, New York, 1964, 14-24; and Christian

Maturity, New York, 1967, 19-26. For a comprehensive treatment of the pneuma

tological aspect of the christological mystery, see Philip J. Rosato, «Spirit

Christology: Ambiguityand Promise» in Theo logicai Studies 38/3 (1977) 423-49. 63 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost ofDiscipleship, 49. Emphasis added. See also

footnote 2 above. 64 Ibid., 54.




will be unreal or inauthentic if we do not obey Christ's command to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, which

effectively amounts to the obligation to pray and hope for the sal vation of ali. The Christian life, as Paul emphasizes so strongly, is none other than the way of the cross. It will be well to listen to what Jerome Murphy-O'Connor has to say in a concluding reflec tion on crucifìxion in the Pauline lettere:

The attitude that Paul had to counter in Galatia and at Corinth

remains a perennial problem in the church. The temptation to

adopt a vision of salvation that will not make us look ridiculous,

and that can be defended by logicai arguments, is ever

present...Contemporary sermone and retreats emphasize discern

ment of the will of God...We put such emphasis on the will of God,

however, because it can be made anything we want it to be...For

Paul, the will of God is very simple, and this lack of ambiguity terri fies us. It mandates the following of Christ who is defìned by the

cross. This is the revealed will of God. We must exhibit the self-sac

rificing, empowering love that Christ showed in his crucifìxion. We

must bear in our bodies the dying of Jesus in order that the life of

Jesus may be manifested to the world. Crucifìxion is what makes a

Christian.65

This puts paid to the fear expressed by many that to empha size the need to pray and hope that ali will ultimately be saved is an inducement to laziness in our moral or ethical commitment.

Properly understood in accordance with the preceding para graphs, such a radicai hope arises out of the «extraordinary» quality of the Christian life as a life committed to the imitation of Christ in loving our enemies and praying for those who persecute us. The Christian life as the way of the cross necessarily entails the radicai hope of salvation for ali, and such a hope is constitu

tive of real faith given the essential unity of faith in Christ and

obedience to his radicai commandments. Far from being an

inducement to ethical laziness, then, the hope of salvation for ali

65 Paul Murphy-O'Connor, «'Even death on a cross:' Crucifixion in the Pauline

Lettere» in The Cross in Christian Tradition: From Paul to Bonaventure, New York,

2000,21-50, 43.




is actually inseparable from the moral imperative to act in such a

way that ali will be saved. If we truly live what we hope for as

Christians, then this hope «is not merely a hope that ali will be restored at some final point, but that already here and now, ali men and women are being saved».66 This hope, in other words, is a living hope which expresses itself in active discipleship, it seeks to make concretely present in our world that communion of love and justice which is the kingdom of God. By really living what we

hope for, by living the way of the cross of Christ for the salvation of a fallen world, we cannot be accused of cheapening grace: quite the contrary, we show by the loving sacrifice of our lives that the grace of God in Christ is costly grace.67

By way of a final point, the Christian obligation to pray and

hope that ali will ultimately be saved also serves to effectively safeguard the Christian faith against every form of particularism and elitism. It Comes as no surprise to read that John Sachs' endeavour to recover the theme of universal salvation in current Catholic eschatology is actually motivated by his concern to counteract what he describes as the «increasing apocalyptic lan

guage of hell» and the alarming growth of «fundamentalism, sec

tarianism, and integralism».68 The hope of universal salvation

constantly reminds us of God's unwillingness to abandon even one wayward sinner (Mt 18,10-14; Lk 15,3-7), of the fact that Christ's mission was centred upon the purpose of freeing people from the powers of darkness in which they are caught (Lk 11,20) so that they could become truly human persons in loving com munion with one another and with the living God, for the sake of the world. What Christ preached was the ultimacy of the king dom of God being made manifest in his very own person. He was not a hell-fire preacher, for the retributive justice characteristic of hell-fire preaching can, at best, bring about a momentary change in people through fear of punishment; it cannot truly change people because fear of retribution fails to engender a true conver sion of the heart.

s John. R. Sachs, «Current Eschatology», 254. 7 See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 35-47. B John R. Sachs, «Current Eschatology», 227.




The obligation to pray and hope for the salvation for ali, to sum up, must not he regarded as a fancifixl, speculative, and irrele vant hope. Inasmuch as such an obligation is constitutive of

faith, insofar as it is grounded in the believer's present experience of eschatological grace in Christ, then it must be held as legiti mate and integrai to Christian worship and life.69 If the Christian

hope of universal salvation arises out of the liturgical context of the believing community's faith experience, then this suggests that the Christian faith is to be regarded as having a radically dox

ological essence: the final end of ali things is the glorification of

God, in and through the person of Christ. The following section will discuss the doxological essence of the Christian faith with a view to further illustrating why the issue of universal salvation has persisted to evoke theological interest down the ages.

The Doxological Essence ofthe Christian Faith

It has been the Christian understanding from its earliest times that the primary context for the experience of the divine human encounter which elicits Christian faith is that of liturgical worship. At the beginning of the second-century, for instance,

Pliny the Younger writes in a letter to the emperor Trajan (110-113 C.E.) that the identifying mark of the early Christians was their

worship, and Jesus Christ was the one Name always invoked in the worship Christians offered to the living God.™ Pliny's letter to the emperor makes clear that Christian worship is characterized

by a theological dimension, that is, it has to do with the living God, and a christological dimension - there exists an «inextricable and mutuai bond» between Jesus Christ risen and the living God. It is the actuality of this «inextricable and mutuai bond» that originai

63 In an important essay by Karl Rahner entitled, «The Hermeneutics of

Eschatological Assertions» in Theological Investigations IV, trans. Kevin Smyth, London, 1966, 323-46, he persuasively argues that eschatological assertions are

statements about the future made on the basis of our present experience of faith

in Christ. 70 A comprehensive treatment of the doxological essence of the Christian

faith, which I follow here, is offered by Frans Jozef van Beeck, God Encountered, Voi. 1, 145-208.




ly establishes Christian worship, for the risen Christ present in the

Spirit evokes participation in his divine identity; that is, he calls us to imitate his total self-abandonment to the Father in love for the sake of a world estranged from the living God. Since it is the Spirit who prompts and sustains Christian worship as response to the

living encounter between Christ and his Father, then the Church's essential identity is not self-established but is to be understood as

responsive «encounter in ecstatic immediacy».71 The task of theology, it follows, is to guard the unfathomable

mystery of God revealed in the person of the crucified and risen One. Theology must not seek to unravel the mystery by bringing it down to the ordinary level of human experience and reason. As Bonhoeffer has so rightly pointed out, the ancient church medi tated on the mystery of Christ for centuries, but it always «imprisoned reason in obedience to Jesus Christ, and in harsh,

conflicting sentences gave living witness to the mystery of the

person of Jesus Christ».72 The mystery at the centre of Christian faith cannot be plumbed by reason; we can only bear witness to the mystery by way of the actus directus of faith directed toward the person of Christ who alone, says Bonhoeffer, is the «Real One». This is to say that the God of the Christian faith is not an abstract idea, but a concrete revelation, since it is faith in the per son of Jesus Christ who is really present in the here (space) and now (time) in the Spirit.73 The concretissimum of the Christian

message must therefore be placed in the reality which evokes and informs the act of faith: it is the reality of the presence of the risen Christ in the Spirit as he encounters the believer and prompts him/her to speak in worshipful surrender to the reality of the liv

71 Ibid., 161-63. 72 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, True Patriotism: Letters, Lectures, and Notes 1939-1945

from the Collected Works, trans. Edwin Η. Robertson and John Bowden, ed. Edwin

H. Robertson, New York, 1973, and London, 1973, 28.1 have added the emphasis. Cited by Ernst Feil, The Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, trans. Martin

Rumscheidt, Philadelphia, 1985, 28. 73 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christ the Center, New York, 1966, 43, 50-51. For

Bonhoeffer, ali attempts to reduce faith to human reflection represent nothing less than the thinking of the cor curvum in se (the «I» turned in on itself).




ing God.74 The upshot of ali this is that the resurrection must be

placed at the beginning of ali christology, for without the pre sence of the risen Lord in the Spirit there would not be any chris

tology at ali.75

According to the above perspective the essence of the Christian faith is participation in Christ's divine identity, that is, to be drawn up into Christ's total worship-abandon to the Father in love, which is tantamount to realizing our true freedom. This

understanding alerts us to the need not to deprive the faith of its richness by restricting the message of the gospel of Christ to the mere forgiveness of sins (soteriology); rather, theology must be committed to expounding the gospel message in a far more com

prehensive and aesthetic manner by setting it in relation to the divinization theme (christology), as expressed by the key patris tic principle of «admirable exchange» of natures in the person of Christ.76 A theology which is guided by the exchange principle (as formulated by Irenaeus of Lyons) will be quick to acknowledge that there is no theology without mysticism (the apophatic dimension of theology is highlighted), in which case the aim of

theology is not knowledge of God, but union with God ( theosis).77 On the cross, which is the climactic and culminating point of the divine «condescension», the incarnate Son gives himself up total

ly to the Father, and the Father gives up his Son for us ali (Rom 8,32), not merely for the forgiveness of sins but also for our glori

74 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, No Rusty Swords: Letters, Lectures, and Notes 1928

1936from the Collected Works, London, 1970, 306. 75 Frans Jozef van Beeck, in his work Christ Proclaimed, after having examined

the import of Bonhoeffer's thought for christology, reaches the conclusion that

«we must be careful to treat the resurrection really as the concretissimum» (251), which is to say that «the presence of Jesus Christ in the Spirit is the one reality that

may not be qualifìed» (253). 76 See footnote 53 above. 77 Vatican II recovered this patristic teaching when it declared that the living

Tradition is not a series of propositional truths, but an understanding arising out

of the «doctrine, life, and worship» of the People of God down the ages (DV 8). The

dynamic relatedness between worship, life, and teaching, is indicated by the

«rules of faith» and the «hierarchy of truths». See footnote 78 below.




fìcation or deification.78 The scandal of the cross reminds us that Christ does not abolish the power of sin in the incarnation, rather he willingly bears the sin of the world (rather than assumes it) on the cross as a free act of perfect love towards the Father and towards the world, so that death is overcome by Life. Given that salvation in Christ has to do with the ultimate divinization of

humanity and the world, then it must be regarded as having an

essentially integrai character which, note, corresponds to the

integrai character of death referred to earlier.79 An appreciation of the doxological essence of the Christian

faith helps us to understand why the theme of apocatastasis has continued to evoke interest and theological reflection down the

ages. If the Spirit evokes participation in the divine identity of the

78 The doctrines pertaining to the divine exitus or «condescension» (DV 13) are to be regarded as foundational for the Christian faith, that is, as constituting the «rules of faith» for interpreting the great Tradition in different times and dif

ferent places. Vatican II recovered the traditional theme of the «rules of faith»

(which can be traced as far back as Irenaeus of Lyons and which were later taken

up into the formation of the Creeds) in the form of the idea of a «hierarchy of truths» (UR 11). The doctrines treated in the divine «condescension» give expres sion to God's self-communication in creation and incarnation, culminating in the

cross, burial, and resurrection of Christ and the revelation of the Holy Trinity as

the gracious and ecstatic fulfillment of humanity and the world. 79 For death in its integrai sense (physical, moral, eschatological) see footnote

46 above. There are multiple levels in a person's ontological make-up which can

simply be stated by saying that the person is always a person in nature as well as a person in history. (i) To be in nature implies that our naturai desires and instine -

tual drives are to be regarded as the «raw materials of holiness» (Gabriel Daly); we

have a naturai desire for the beatific vision. Salvation here is thought of as the lib

eration of desires in the direction willed by God for evolving nature, but ultimate

ly it entails the assumption of an incorruptible nature, (ii) To be in history draws

attention to the fact that the person is the object of a sinful history of humankind

that impacts upon the determination of his/her free-will. The historical situation of sin (cf. Rom 5,12), however, derives from the personal sins of ali: we are com

plicit with the situation of sin in which we flnd ourselves. Salvation here concerns

the taking away of the sin of the world, which, note, implies that the forgiveness of personal sins is granted from the perspective of the conquest of the «powers» of sin which thwart God's good purpose for the world. It is not merely the indi

viduai sinner who is reconciled to God, but the entire history of a fallen world

(final causality is in view here). (iii) Both the naturai and historical realms are

directed toward an eschatological goal, namely, the ontological fullness of the

movement of creation as a whole in the glorified Christ; that is, the creation of a

«new heaven and a new earth» (Rev 21) in the fullness of time.



DEATH AS PRIVILEGH 817

risen Christ, if it prompts and sustains worship as response to the

living encounter between Christ and his Father, then this implies that in worship we are «drawn up» (Jn 12,32) into the ecstatic communion of the trinitarian event of eternai Love and are

empowered to fulfil the law of love (Rom 8,1-11) for the renewal of ali things (Acts 3:21). As a result of being elevated into mystical union with the living God, we receive insight into the mystery of the divine purpose «set forth in Christ» as a «pian for the fullness of time, to unite ali things in him» (Eph 1,9-10). In hearing wit

ness, then, to the mystery of Christ's perfect worship-abandon to the Father in the actus directus of faith, we come to believe that the world has been created through Christ (Heb 1,2; Rev 1,8), that it is fundamentally one in him, and that therefore salvation in Christ must be elaborated in terms of the ontological fullness of the movement of creation as a whole. Integrai to authentic faith which expresses itself in obedience to Christ's radicai command ment to love our enemies as the way of the cross, is the convic tion that ali men and women, of ali ages, are drawn up into the

paschal mystery of Christ, to the praise and glory of God. The

dogged refusai of the doctrine of apocatastasis to disappear alto

gether from theological reflection indicates that worshipping Christians down the ages have felt that a fundamentally impor tant truth of the Christian faith was being lost by promoting an

excessively juridical and forensic understanding of divine judg ment, and that what was required to redress the imbalance was an appreciation of the primacy and grandeur of the unfath omable divine compassion revealed in the risen Lord. The justice of God must be understood from the perspective of the total wor

ship-abandon of the man Jesus of Nazareth who is «the Christ of the Father compassionate».80

The problem with much of theology in the past was that it

tended to present the individual's personal choice as the truly «last thing», instead of the ineffable radicality of God's love and

compassion revealed in the life, crucifìxion, and resurrection of

Christ. As Tony Kelly has rightly stated about how theology has

80 Gerard Manley Hopkins, «The Wreck of the Deutschland», st. 33, in Poems,

eds. W. H. Gardner and Ν. H. MacKenzie, London, Oxford, New York, 1970, 62.




tended to treat personal choice as the really last thing: «The good news of the Father's unconditional love in giving to our world what is most intimate to himself, his Son and Spirit, has to share time with an equally present threat, the bad news of God's dire and impending judgment on human sinfulness».81 This state ment also serves to draw attention to the need to recognize that if justice is to be done to the gospel of Christ then it must be por trayed in essentially trinitarian terms, for the divine will to create and to save cannot be divided and exclusively appropriated by any one of the three persons alone: the divine will is common to ali three persons.82 This trinitarian structure of the divine-world

relation, which was already clearly in focus in the discussion above concerning the primacy of worship in the Christian life of

faith, puts into sharp relief the fundamental point that the divine counsel regarding creation and redemption is an eternai decree: the Son from ali eternity is «the lamb slain before the foundation of the world» (Rev 13,8; 1 Pet 1,19-20), and the Spirit imparts to us the fullness of deity appropriate to our being created in the divine image. From the vantage point of the one eternai decree of the triune God, eschatology, while seeking to give due respect to freedom of choice, must not absolutize it as the last thing in the

divine-human relation; rather, since Jesus Christ risen is the eschaton in person, then he is the truly «last thing» and thus the basis of our «exceedingly abundant hope» (Rom 15,13).of being «raised up» to permanent union with the triune God. If the ten

dency in theology is to make personal choice the last thing, then the inevitable result is to restrict Christian hope and render the outlook for universal salvation grim, notwithstanding the fact

81 Tony Kelly, Touching on the Infinite: Explorations in Christian Hope,

Melbourne, 1991,21. 82 As St. Athanasius succinctly puts it, «The Father creates ali, by the Word, in

the Spirit». St. Basii elaborates further by saying that the Father is «the primordial cause» of ali that has been made, the Son is «the operative cause», and the Holy Spirit is «the perfecting cause». This means that every divine operation which extends front God to the creation has, as St. Gregory of Nyssa puts it, «its origin front the Father, and proceeds through the Son, and is perfected in the ffoly Spirit». See the article by Christos S. Voulgaris, «The Holy Trinity in Creation and Incarnation» in The Greek Orthodox Theological Review 42/2-3 (1997) 245-58.




that the Church has never ventured to affirm the damnation of

any particular individuai. In the past, the most generous theolo

gy found itself caught in a bind: either God in Christ saves us mortai sinners without our free consent or with it. If without it, what becomes of our free-will? If with it, we must be really free to make our choices, thus the possibility of hell must be upheld.83

Theology must endeavour to transcend this impasse by shifting the focus in eschatological matters to a sustained reflec tion on the centrai paradox of the Christian life, namely, the para dox of grace, which arises out of the foundational claim that since Christ has destroyed death by his death, then the presence of the risen Christ in the Spirit liberates us from the forces of darkness for true freedom (love of God) in imitation of Christ, for the sake of the world. If we hold to the view, established in worship, that the essence of the Christian faith is not soteriology but christo

logy, then any attempi to unpack the meaning of the paschal mystery must proceed along ontological lines which presuppose a capacity and openness on the part of the human being for the

reception of God's self-gift in grace (as highlighted by the history of the incarnate One). We must proceed, in other words, by advo

cating a positive construal of the grace-nature relationship according to which the human being's first ontological status is not the reality of sin, but being created to enter into relationship with God, which is to say that the human being has a naturai

83 It is worth reiterating that ali this talk of human free-will is about what

Augustine called liberum arbitrium (freedom of choice or moral freedom) which

must not be confused with libertas (freedom to be or spiritual freedom). The lat

ter (love of God) is the goal of the former and can be realized only with the help of grace. Spiritual freedom is founded on the verum (truth) and the bonum

(good), thus Augustine views grace as working to 'illuminate' us sinners with

divine truth and 'empower' us with divine love, so that the end of free-will is par

ticipation in the divine life. This centrality of the love of God in Augustine's

thought had a profound influence on the Western mystics: humankind's highest

good rests in union with God. Finally, it must be noted that if spiritual freedom is

attained by the workings of healing grace, then this means that «when God

rewards our merits, he crowns his own gifts» (Confessioni 9.34). This is the para dox of grace in Augustine's thought, which in our own day has been stressed anew

by thinkers such as Donald M. Baillie.




desire for the beatifìc vision of God.84 The cross of Christ therefore

goes beyond the moral dimension of forgiveness of sins and removal of guilt (justification) to open up an extraordinary new

possibility for personal being in this world of ours: to be confi

gured to the death of Christ is to be «drawn up» into union with the Father through the Spirit (sanctification) and hence to become truly «alive» to the mystery of unfathomable grace as the ultimate horizon of human life. While the being of the human is a being towards death (Heidegger), the presence of the risen One in the Spirit compels us to look beyond death to an ultimate hori zon of gracious divinization in the life of the world to come.

It is this future-orientation of the Christian faith (the

«already» is intrinsically directed towards the «not yet») which accounts for the basic openness of the structures of the faith and therefore the need to interpret these structures in the context of

contemporary life, in order to understand the Christian faith. The

process of understanding has recently been described by various thinkers in terms of «event», that is, understanding is something which «happens» in a «fusion of horizons» where what was ini

tially «alien» to the interpreter is made his/her own in an act of

«appropriation».85 If understanding has an event character, then

it is to be regarded not as a way of knowing, but as a mode of

84 A positive construal of the grace-nature relationship takes grace as its exclusive point of departure, and is a prominent feature of the nouvelle théologie promoted by authors such as Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, Jean Daniélou, and Karl Rahner, who attacked the abstract notion of «pure nature» characteristic of

neo-scholasticism, and appealed to the recovery of the patristic roots of theology. There is no such thing as «pure nature« because grace is implied in the act of cre ation itself. Pope Pius XII, in Humani Generis (1950), was rightly concerned to address the potential misunderstanding of the nouvelle théologieby stressing the

gratuity of grace - while we humans have a naturai desire for the beatific vision, nonetheless we cannot make progress towards God without the gratuity of ele

vating grace. 85 The notion of «fusion of horizons» was coined by Hans-George Gadamer,

Truth and Method, London, 1979. David Tracy and Paul Ricoeur have developed theories which build on this idea. See Tracy's essay, «Hermeneutical Reflections in the New Paradigm» in Paradigm Change in Theology, eds. Hans Kiing and David

Tracy, Edinburgh, 1989, 34-47; and Ricoeur's essays, «The Task of Hermeneutics» and «The Hermeneutical Task of Distanciation» in Philosophy Today Π (1973) 97 142. The act of «appropriation» is Ricoeur's concepì of subjectivity.




being-in-the-world. The interpreter understands himself/herself in front o/the text, that is, in front of the world disclosed by the text, so that the role of subjectivity is seen as allowing the work and its world to enlarge the horizon of the interpreter's self

understanding. The meaning of a text, then, is fully grasped only when it is actualized in the life of the interpreter who appropri ates it, in which case the act of appropriation is pushed back to the end of the interpretive process. The doxological essence of the Christian faith lends its support to this argument inasmuch as by our being drawn up into the living encounter between the risen Christ and his Father, in the Spirit, an extraordinary new and mysterious horizon for the possibilities of personal being-in the-world is opened up to us and calls us to conversion.

Now, the hermeneutical theory which asserts that ontology forms the ultimate horizon of new understanding has repercus sions for how we envisage the role played by human subjectivity in the matter of our definitive salvation in the final condition of death. It is possible to portray the «fusion of horizons» that takes

place in death as dying into the Lord, as follows. Firstly, my hori zon is that of an incomplete and unfulfilled personal existence, of limited understanding conditioned by a particular culture or tra

dition, of fragments of meaning gathered in a temporal life that seeks a totality but ends in the emptiness of death as the reality of my creaturely finitude and corruptibility. Secondly, the hori zon of Christ is that of the ultimate meaningfulness and full

integrity of my personal existence in relation to him, the escha ton in person, who has already assumed my death into his saving death so that my finite and corruptible being may be 'drawn up' into union with the Father; it is the horizon of «new» relations to the totality of the living whole, of «new» life in the Spirit as the

reality of God's ineffable nature as pure self-giving in grace. What is apparent in the picture being painted here is that the fusion of horizons that takes place in the final situation of my death is another way of expressing the guiding idea, stated earlier, that death is best thought of as the privileged locus of the gift of «admirable exchange» of natures in the person of Christ. Not only life, but also death, now presents itselfas the locus of relationship or encounter with the living God. But having said this, it is even more important to appreciate that the final condition of death,




characterized as it is by powerlessness, is nothing like the pilgrim state where the active personal self can freely accept or reject God's offer of saving grace. Since there can be no properly human acts in the utter emptiness of death, this final condition is char acterized by total receptivity to God's self-gift in Christ.86 If we hold to a theological anthropology which asserts that the human has an innate desire for God as its ultimate fulfilment, which is tantamount to affirming that the human has an inviolable capac ity for the reception of God's self-gift in grace, then when we

apply this anthropology to the happening of death what emerges is the contention that it is precisely in the powerlessness of death that the human's receptivity to grace is actualized in its totality. In other words, death itself presents itself as a final condition corre

sponding to the real nature of grace as God's pure self-gift, which at the same time is to say that death is a situation corresponding to the real nature ofthe human person as the event of God's self

gift in grace. In the event of the fusion of horizons that occurs in the final

condition of death, we can envisage the self as fully awakened to its immanent «originai» identity as conformed to Christ, so that the act of «appropriation» is pushed back to the end of the salvi fic process of encounter with Christ, for such an act is possible only by actualizing the meaning of Christ as he addresses us «from within» the human condition which has been redeemed in his very person. The need to view the act of appropriation as

pushed back to the «end» of the process must not be taken to

imply that such an act occurs as a final stage of a chronological series of steps in the encounter with Christ. Two basic points already made in this essay can be recalled here to illuminate the

argument. Firstly, we saw that any chronological distinction made between faith and obedience in the pilgrim life (first faith, then obedience) must be rejected, for obedience is actually con stitutive of the actus directus of faith directed toward the risen

86 Because death comes to us as a biophysical failure, since it is something suffered by us which brings to an end our capacity for properly human acts, then we should recognize the passivity of death. There is much fruit in passivity, how

ever, when it is understood as receptivity to the Other.




Christ present in the Spirit. Το be a disciple of Christ is to be taken

up into the living encounter between Christ and his Father, which expresses itself in imitation of Christ's total self-abandon ment to the Father for the sake of the world. This talk of being «taken up» into the worshipful encounter between Christ and his Father brings us to a second related point made in this essay; namely, the need to appreciate that God's grace in Christ should not be regarded as the production of effects (efficient causality) but rather as the assumption or «drawing up» of humanity and the world into the ineffable triune life of God (formai causality). The emphasis here falls on the fact that since human nature is

radically open to God, as revealed by the event of the incarnation, then the goal of human self-transcendence is the portrayal of the divine nature, as evidenced by the glorification of Christ's

humanity. To be conformed to Christ through the Spirit who gives «freedom» is to participate in the ecstatic life of God as the human being's final end.

These two basic and interrelated points set the stage for the introduction of the Hegelian concepì of dynamic «moments» which can serve as an effective tool for demonstrating the manner in which we are to understand the act of appropriation of our ori

ginai identity in Christ in the final condition of death.87 According to this concepì, each moment in a hierarchical system is mutually and

dynamically related to the other moments, so that the verification of any one moment intrinsically refers to the other moments of the

system. In each of the moments, in other words, the other moments are present as part of its own inner make-up. Such a concepì, note, is fully compatible with the notion of integrai salvation in the per son of Christ, hence we can identify three dynamic moments in the

system of integrai salvation: the physical, the moral, and the escha

tological moment.88 In this system it is the eschatological moment

87 Frans Jozef van Beeck, in God Encountered, Voi. 1, 209-11, applies the

Hegelian concept of moments to the dynamic relatedness of the structures of

Christian faith (worship, life, and teaching). The principal moment in the hierar

chical structure is held to be that of worship, given the doxological essence of the

Christian faith. 88 See footnote 79 above regarding the various levels of a person's ontological




that serves as the principle moment since the other two moments are intrinsically directed toward it as their final goal of glorifying God. The reality of sin and death in the world is not the primary ontological reality, rather the deeper situation is that of our being created to share in the very fife of God, by grace. This is revealed with full force in the utter emptiness of death which is a situation

totally receptive to being filled by God's self-gift in Christ, the escha ton in person.

Hence in the fusion of horizons that takes place in the encounter with Christ in death, as a result of our death being drawn up into the 'integrai' death of Christ (which overcomes

physical, moral, and eschatological death), Christ reveals us fully to ourselves with the gift of an originai identity with which we had been only dimly familiar in the pilgrim fife. This definitive revelation of our originai identity, it must be appreciated, is

intrinsically tied up with the dynamic moments of integrai salva tion in Christ. This is to say that we must not think that Christ first reveals to us our true identity in his person and then we sub

sequently decide for or against his offer of salvation. Rather, by virtue of our death having been assumed into his saving death, of our being drawn up into his glorified humanity, we must think of

the dynamic moments of integrai salvation in Christ as constitu tive of the full awakening to our originai identity in his person. This means that the «act» of appropriation, which occurs by actu

alizing the meaning of the person of Christ as he addresses us in the final situation of death, is inextricably tied to the gift of true «freedom» through the Spirit, which is now exercised in the form of a newly embodied self (participation in Christ's glorified humanity), to the praise and glory of the living God.

God's Saving Justice

This essay has sought to bring attention to the need for

theology to reflect further on the fundamental tenet that

redemption of our fallen world is redemption through the death of Christ at our hands. The basic claim regarding the universal

saving will of God in Christ, which Paul expresses in the words, «for as ali die in Adam, ali will be made alive in Christ» (1 Cor

15,22), has long been a basic conundrum of the Christian faith




since baptism is regarded as necessary for the reception of God's

saving benefits in Christ. Vatican II, we saw, opened the door to a

rethinking of this fundamental issue along ontological lines when it declared that since Christ died for ali, and his death is a unique death because he has destroyed death by his death, then «we must hold that the Holy Spirit offers to ali the possibility of being made

partners, in a way known to God, in the paschal mystery» (GS 22). Granted that ali share in one and the same divine destiny by virtue of being configured to the death of Christ, this essay has attempt ed to illustrate the legitimacy of thinking of our own death - as

dying into the Lord - as having a profoundly saving signifìcance, and has proposed that further investigation into this eschatologi cal issue would benefit by employing the guiding idea of the situ ation of death as the privileged locusfor the reception ofthe gift of admirable exchange ofnatures in the person of Christ. On the basis of this guiding idea, death is portrayed as having an intrinsically positive aspect which serves to counteract the negative character of death (as loss of life and the «wages of sin»). In light of the

understanding that incorporation into the death of Christ has to do with the divinization of the human in his person, this essay has

argued for the need to consider the event of our own death as the locus where ali, baptized and unbaptized (for death emerges as a sacramentai situation par excellence), are «drawn up» into the glo rifìed humanity of Christ through the Spirit and receive the gift of «new» life in which human freedom is now exercised definitively in everlasting praise and love of God.

It is pointless with regard to the issue of universal salvation

in the risen One to appeal to forensic categories used in a human court of law, for salvation in Christ is not a matter of human jus tice, but of the justice of God, of the ineffable holiness of the divine Name. The justice of God revealed in Christ, the Just One, the Judge, represents a complete reversai of the human way of

administering justice. For in a worldly court, judgment tends to

be executed without respect for persons, and, moreover, it is

independent of the person of the judge who is merely an indif

ferent functionary, and as such has no face. By contrast, the

divine judgment is constituted by the unique person of Christ, the Judge, who has embraced and accepted ali human concerns

as his own, with the intention of bringing a fragmented and sin




fui humanity info union with his beloved Father. The justice of God must not, then, be portrayed in menacing and threatening images, but rather is to be given a positive determination since Christ the Judge is our Representative in whose person human nature has been elevated to the dignity of sharing in the very life of the triune God. To be judged by Christ is «a blessing which befalls humanity... [it] represents the valuation of humanity».89 The justice of God is a radically saving justice which sets the human person in right relationship not only to God as Father, Son, and Spirit, but also to humanity and the world as a whole.90

What transpired in the garden of Gethsemane, on the hill of Golgotha, and in the garden of the tomb of the Just One, indi cates just how indissoluble God's sovereign relationship to us humans really is; it moves us to reflect on what it actually means to be created in the divine image and likeness, to be the object of God's unfathomable love from ali eternity. In regard to the issue of universal salvation in Christ we would do well to ponder at

length the meaning of the Pauline utterance that «where sin

increased, grace abounded ali the more» (Rom 5:20), together with the statement, «For God has consigned ali men to disobedi

ence, that he may have mercy upon ali» (Rom 11,32). The reality of sin, as the doctrine of originai sin makes clear, is a universal

condition, which implies that humanity cannot be divided neat

ly into good and evil. In each and every one of us there is to be

make-up. The three dynamic moments of integrai salvation can be seen as corre

sponding to the three dynamic moments of the structure of the Christian faith:

the eschatological moment in the system of integrai salvation corresponds to the

moment of worship (praise and glory of God); the moral moment corresponds to the moment of life (imitation of Christ); and the physical moment can be seen as

corresponding to the moment of teaching (human nature raised to a dignity

beyond compare in the risen One). " Eberhard JOngel, «The Last Judgment as an Act of Grace» in Louvain Studies

15 (1990) 389-405, at 396. 90 See in regard to this point the essay by John O'Donnell, «God's Justice and

Mercy: What Can We Hope For?» in Pacifica 5 (1992) 84-95. The author presente biblical and theological perspectives of God's justice and mercy, and asserts that divine justice must not be thought of as «retributive» (Calvin), or «distributive»

(Aquinas), or «commutative» (Anselm), but rather as «saving» justice which «sets

the relationship between God and humankind aright» (94).




found an inextricable mixture of good and evil, hence we ali are in need of the grace of integrai salvation in Christ in order to attain personal integrity and arrive at our ultimate destiny in union with God. In the kind of theology of death that this essay has argued for, such grace is thought of as actualizing itself with

full force in the utter emptiness of death, for the condition of death truly corresponds to the real nature of grace as God's pure, unmerited self-giving in unfathomable love. It is precisely in the

abyss of death that the tenet of «new» life in the risen One assumes its most complete meaning.

69 Braesi Avenue Seacombe Heights 5047

Adelaide, Australia

Henry L. Novello

SOMMARIO

E' di dottrina cristiana il principio secondo il quale la redenzione del

mondo si realizza attraverso la morte di Cristo. Per meglio illustrare l'uni

versalità di questa morte redentrice, la teologia potrebbe riflettere mag

giormente sul significato redentore della nostra morte. Questa è concepita come un morire nel Signore: è infatti in virtù della sua morte (nel senso

integrale) che l'umanità peccatrice si ritrova in comunione con il Padre a

godere una vita «nuova» di vera libertà (amore di Dio); questo è il vero tra

guardo della condizione umana. Il Concilio Vaticano II (Gaudium et spes

22) ha aperto una via per ripensare il problema della redenzione universale

quando dichiara che la natura umana è stata innalzata ad una dignità sub

lime in Cristo e che lo Spirito offre a tutti la possibilità di partecipare al mis

tero pasquale. La morte, come condizione finale di incontro definitivo con

Cristo in cui riceviamo la pienezza dell'umanità creata a imago Dei, è una

situazione sacramentale per eccellenza. Tra incorporazione nella morte di

Cristo e «divinizzazione» della natura umana vi è un nesso strettissimo ben

espresso nel principio patristico di admirabile commercium. Sarebbe per ciò opportuno riflettere sulla morte come locus privilegiato attraverso il

quale l'umanità riceve in dono lo «scambio ammirabile» presente nella

persona di Cristo.

