On What Christ Requires

Q. What response did Christ require?
A. Christ commanded us to believe in him and to keep his commandments.

Before turning to the content of Christ's commandments in the next post, it is worth taking a look at this question in particular and acknowledging just how much it needs to be contextualized. Before that, I'll be honest that I hate how this question is framed, and especially what it leaves out, particularly in comparison to older catechisms and the larger Anglican, and, indeed, Christian tradition.

So, first of all, what is it that I hate about how this question is framed? Quite simply put, it reads as allowing Pelagianism, that ancient heresy that stated that human beings retain the capacity to, with enough hard work and dedication, merit salvation through their own effort. It makes salvation not something that comes through God's free gift, but merely through a knowledge dump: we just didn't know what God demanded of us, and Christ comes to reveal that information. At most, perhaps, divine assistance is offered to those who just don't quite have the fortitude to muscle through on their own.

What's worse, this potential for works righteousness as the path to salvation ironically also slides into the potential for a historic pattern of Christian antisemitism as well. By placing this much-reduced set of laws that Christians have to follow in order to obtain salvation, as compared with the much more expansive set found in Torah, it has the potential to reinforce the idea that Judaism had become a religion that so developed its legal tradition as to make it unworkable for people, burdening them with "legalism" and making salvation unattainable to most. Christ, on this account, simplifies things by stripping it down to a much more manageable set of commandments to follow. "Look, there are really only three things you're going to have to do rather than the hundreds that were previously heaped on you," this position seems to say. The other option, here, it would seem, is that God previously held humanity to simply too high a standard, realized they couldn't do it, and then eased the legal burden. Such may lessen (maybe) the potential antisemitism but it does so at the expense of dramatically over-anthropomorphizing God, turning the one who transcends all created reality, all space and time, into a kind of moral scientist. Both moves deserve more careful unpacking than I can give them in a single post; flagging them is enough for now to show what's at stake in reading the catechism's answer apart from its larger context.

But, you may say, are these not expectations lifted from Scripture? Indeed they are, and we don't want to say that they are irrelevant. Acts 16:31 and Romans 10:9 make clear that belief in Jesus as Lord/Messiah (Christ) is involved in salvation, and Jesus does indeed give these commandments, something that probably matters a great deal if he is indeed believed in as Lord! This is how we get to the issue of there not being enough framing, there actually being too little and not too much in the question and answer in our current Catechism. If we look, for instance, at the Catechism from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, we see a similar set of expectations but with more added.

The confirmand is asked, "Dost thou not think that thou art bound to believe, and to do, as they have promised for thee?" to which the answer is given, "Yes, verily; and by God's help so I will" (577). Then, after affirming the need to follow the Ten Commandments and the duty to love God and love neighbor, the Catechist interjects: "My good Child, know this; that thou art not able to do these things of thyself, nor to walk in the Commandments of God, and to serve him, without his special grace; which thou must learn at all times to call for by diligent prayer" (580). The point is that we are unable to follow Christ's commands and the demands of the law through our own power; the issue was never of volume or even of principle but of natural capacity. The capacity to fulfill the requirements of salvation themselves relies upon God's unmerited grace and assistance. Significantly, heading off the quite reasonable thought that even our belief itself constitutes in some way a "work," the 1928 Catechism states that God's help is required even there.

While the question and answer in the current Catechism have stripped out the more robust and explicit affirmation of our inability to either believe or fulfill Christ's commands without divine assistance, I think it still correct to assume that this is implied by those other sources of doctrine in the Book of Common Prayer (we remember, after all, that the definition of doctrine for the Episcopal Church is "the basic and essential teachings of the Church" which are "found in the Canon of Holy Scripture as understood in the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds and in the sacramental rites, the Ordinal and Catechism of the Book of Common Prayer" [Constitution and Canons, IV.2]).

A brief survey of several such places will have to suffice. We find first of all the clear affirmation of the need for God's help in fulfilling the expectations of baptismal living in the Baptismal Covenant (303–4). The traditional version of the Decalogue also has us asking God to "incline our hearts to keep this law" (317–18). And, beyond the Prayer of Humble Access, affirming that we are, of our own power, unworthy to even approach the table of the Lord, the first Rite I eucharistic prayer affirms both that remission of sin comes through "the merits and death of thy Son Jesus Christ, and through faith in his blood," and that we are "unworthy, through our manifold sins, to offer unto thee (God) any sacrifice" (Book of Common Prayer 335–6). We can assume that if we are unworthy to even offer sacrifice, we are, a fortiori, unable to fulfill the demands of the law of our own power.

Thus, while it is arguable that collects are included in "the sacramental rites" (they are certainly said during the Eucharist, but also said beyond it), the theology of the baptismal covenant and of the Eucharist affirms the numerous occasions in such prayers where our inability to fulfill God's commands on our own is highlighted. For instance, on the Fifth Sunday in Lent, we pray, "Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise." Just a few weeks earlier, on the Third Sunday in Lent, we say that "we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves." And on the Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany we pray the most explicit acknowledgment of the theology of the 1928 Catechism and our need for divine grace to keep the commandments, saying, "O God, the strength of all who put their trust in you: Mercifully accept our prayers; and because in our weakness we can do nothing good without you, give us the help of your grace, that in keeping your commandments we may please you both in will and deed."

Now, one thing that remains genuinely up for grabs in the tradition is exactly how much divine grace is necessary for our belief or following of Christ's commandments. This is going to be a necessary oversimplification—each of these positions has internal variation and contested boundaries—but one can see in the Anglican tradition both the possibility of monergism, the idea that God alone accomplishes our salvation, that our efforts contribute nothing to salvation (the view associated with Augustine, Luther, and the Calvinist Reformed tradition), and synergism, the view that we in some way can cooperate with God's grace, that we in some sense and to some degree contribute to our salvation through cooperation (the view associated with the Orthodox and Arminian Reformed/Anglican traditions). There are then some traditions, such as Wesleyan Arminianism and most Catholicism, that can debatably be placed on either side depending on who is making the argument and what aspect of salvation is under consideration. Anglicanism has had proponents of all three variations, with Reformation-era Anglicans like Cranmer most on the monergist side, many Caroline Divines most on the synergist side, and the rest of the tradition often falling on a continuum between. What is not up for debate anywhere along this continuum, though, is that God's grace is a necessary component of human salvation and capacity to fulfill Christ's commands.

All of which to say: while I still hate how this question and answer are framed, allowing us without the larger context to plausibly accept heresy (now why Pelagianism is heretical and indeed harmful will have to wait for another post), the larger context of what the Episcopal Church believes, both in its contemporary accepted sources of doctrine and from Anglican tradition, shows that what this really means to affirm is that we are called to believe in Christ and follow his commandments, but this is only possible in some way through the power of God's grace.