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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
Liberal theology since Harnack has failed to make much sense of the patristic axiom, ‘Not assumed is not healed’. Harnack is severe: ‘The mystical doctrine of salvation and its new formulas had not only no Scriptural authority in their favour, but conflicted also with the evangelical idea of Jesus Christ.’ More recently Maurice Wiles questioned the cogency of the axiom, negatively on the grounds of difficulties in the idea of ‘divinisation’ and of the corporate nature of salvation, but positively on the grounds of a quite different understanding of what salvation means. ‘If salvation be thought of in personal terms’, he argues, ‘then its effective outworking is through the experience of divine grace in the human soul. Whatever media may be involved, the locus of salvation is the sphere of ordinary personal existence in which God establishes fellowship with man.’
page 481 note 1 Harnack, A., History of Dogma, tr. Mitchell, (London, 1893), p. 208.Google Scholar
page 481 note 2 Wiles, M., The Making of Christian Doctrine (Cambridge, 1967), p. III.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
page 481 note 3 Kelly, J. N. D., Early Christian Doctrines (London, 1958), p. 173.Google Scholar
page 482 note 4 Harnack, op. cit., p. 207.
page 483 note 5 Robertson, A., Select Writings of Athanasius (London, 1801), p. 1.Google Scholar
page 485 note 6 A commonplace of the ancient world; but Athanasius' understanding of the nature of idolatry is far from commonplace.
page 487 note 7 Jenkins, D., The Contradiction of Christianity (London, 1976), p. 143.Google Scholar
page 487 note 8 Wielenga, B., It's a Long Roadto Freedom (Madurai, 1981), pp. 142f.Google Scholar
page 487 note 9 e.g., Kelly, op. cit., p. 172; cf. p. 176.
page 487 note 10 Wiles, op cit., p. 106.
page 489 note 11 Bonhoefier, D., Letters and Papers from Prison (London, 1953), pp. 108f (letter of 8th June 1944).Google Scholar
