For de Lubac, ‘the unity of the Mystical Body of Christ, a supernatural unity, supposes a previous natural unity, the unity of the human race.’ (25) Humanity is a unity – it was created a unity, bearing the one image of God which does not differ from individual to individual but is one; in the Garden it fell as a unity; in his incarnation Christ took to himself not merely a human body but humanity, whole and entire; ‘Whole and entire he will bear it then to Calvary, whole and entire he will raise it from the dead, whole and entire he will save it.’(39); humanity as a unity will appear at the last, the glorious bride of Christ. In support of this assertion de Lubac brings to bear numerous quotes from the Church Fathers, such as this from Irenaeus:
…there is but one God the Father, and one Logos the Son, and one Spirit, and one salvation only for all who believe in him. … There is but one salvation as there is but one God. … There is one only Son who fulfills the will of the Father, and one only human race in which the mysteries of God are fulfilled. (Adv. Haereses)
Given this conception of humanity as a unity, de Lubac’s presentation of several points of Catholic dogma follows:
- Sin results in separation, not merely between God and man but among the members of humanity itself. ‘Where there is sin, there is multiplicity,’ Origen writes (In Ezech.); ‘Satan has broken us up,’ according to St. Cyril of Alexandria (In Joan.); Augustine writes, ‘Adam himself is therefore now spread out over the whole face of the earth. Originally one, he has fallen, and, breaking up as it were, he has filled the whole earth with the pieces.’ (In Psalm.)
- Redemption, conversely, consists not merely in God reconciling himself to the world but in the reunion of the fractured human race. Again, from Augustine’s commentary on the Psalms: ‘Divine Mercy gathered up the fragments from every side, forged them in the fire of love, and welded into one what had been broken… He who remade was himself the Maker, and he who refashioned was himself the Fashioner.’ This reunion is effected first in the Incarnation, which was ‘not a simple corporatio, but, as St. Hilary says, a concorporatio. He incorporated himself in our humanity, and incorporated it in himself.’ (37-38)
Responding to the criticism that this framework bears more of Athens than of Jerusalem, de Lubac writes that ‘in whatever degree a philosophical basis was necessary to the Fathers, were it Platonist or Stoic, their speculation was conditioned less by considerations than by the a keen realization of the needs of Christianity.’ (40) He delves into the Scriptural writings of Paul and John to argue that Hellenistic tendencies in the Fathers should be seen not as compromises, but as recontextualization of revelation itself. In particular, he draws attention to Paul’s vigorous assertions that Jew and Gentile are as one in the Body of Christ (and not simply ‘the body of Christians’), and to John’s characterizations of Christ as the Good Shepherd, gathering all the peoples of the earth into one flock, and as the mystical Vine in which all the branches find life. The chapter closes with a meditation on the image of the ‘“new man” that every Christian must “put on” as he puts on Christ.’ (45) It is, for de Lubac, an image under which the whole of dogma concerning the gathered people of God may be summarized – as he quotes St. Maximus as writing, ‘Putting on that new Man, whole and entire, who was created by the Spirit in the image of God.’ (Capitula theologica et oeconomica) ‘Behold him’, he writes, ‘”this new being in the world”, the masterpiece of the Spirit of God. Henceforth one living being grows under the action of a single life-force, and vivified by the one Spirit attains to the stature of perfection. Its scope remains God’s secret.’ (47)
Two things from this chapter stand out to me as particularly interesting. First, de Lubac notes that he is not so much calling for a change in doctrine, but in ‘outlook’ and praxis. ‘Instead of trying, as we do almost entirely nowadays, to find within each individual what is the hidden blemish… These Fathers preferred to envisage the very constitution of the individuals considered as so many cores of natural opposition. This was not taken as the first or only cause of sin, of course, but at least as a secondary result, “equal to the first”, and the inner disruption went hand in hand with the social disruption.’ (34-35) And again, ‘the redemption being a work of restoration will appear to us by that very fact as the recovery of lost unity – the recovery of supernatural unity of man with God, but equally of the unity of men among themselves.’ (35)
Secondly, de Lubac’s emphasis on the unity of humanity, including in salvation, undeniably raises a challenge to the reformation doctrine of limited atonement (though he does temper this somewhat by his last comment on the Body of Christ that ‘Its scope remains God’s secret.’). But the main force of this doctrine (and a reason many have taken to referring to as ‘definite’ or ’specific’ atonement) is not that God’s mercy is limited but, rather, that Christ’s sacrifice is entirely effective: he will not lose any that the Father has given to him (John 6:37), so that if any are not saved it cannot be that Christ died for them, but ineffectively. B.B. Warfield put it this way:
All has been done by Him. His saving work neither needs nor admits of supplementary addition by any needy child of man, – even to the extent of an iota. When we look to Him we are raising grateful eyes, not to one who invites us to save ourselves; nor merely to one who has broken out a path, in which walking, we may attain to salvation; nor yet merely to one who offers us a salvation wrought out by Him, on a condition; but to one who has saved us, – who is at once the beginning and the middle and the end of our salvation, the author and the finisher of our faith.
de Lubac writes in a similar vein that ‘Christ the Redeemer does not offer salvation merely to each one; he effects it, he is himself the salvation of the whole…’ (39) It seems that one way to understand the difference between de Lubac and the Reformers on the distinction between the invisible and visible church, discussed more extensively by de Lubac in the next chapter, may be to trace out the ecclesiological implications of their shared insistence on the effectiveness of Christ’s sacrifice, given their differing viewpoints on the universality of salvation.
