on the incarnation: ch 9

Today we finish up our reading of St. Athanasius’s book On the Incarnation. Now, I realise that I am skipping a few chapters, but Athanasius urges the non-student reader to move from chapter 5 to the conclusion; chapter 9.

All that we have looked at together, for Athanasius, is a very basic introduction to the faith.

Here, then, Macarius, is our offering to you who love Christ, a brief statement of the faith of Christ and of the manifestation of his Godhead to us. This will give you a beginning, and you must go on to prove its truth by the study of the Scriptures. They are written and inspired by God; and we, who have learned from inspired teachers who read the Scriptures and became martyrs for the Godhead of Christ, make further contribution to your eagerness to learn.

Basic statement of faith in Jesus Christ? There are many things that Athanasius has said which are far beyond what most Christians today would be able to say. But this tells us how bankrupt our faith really is. We simply think that we can sit back and simply ‘believe’.

The question then is, “Believe what?”

“Believe what I have written,” says Athanasius. “Believe what we have learned from the scriptures.” The ancient church fathers talked about a ‘rule of faith’ through which all of scripture was to be read. They argued that there were so many ways to misunderstand what was being said in the scriptures that we had to approach them with a certain set of beliefs.

This rule of faith was not to be something random, or some collection of our favourite Bible verses. The rule of faith is the teaching of the church regarding the scriptures.

More than this, though, is the understanding that purity and holiness is required in the Christian life, even for proper understanding of the Bible.

But for the searching and right understanding of the Scriptures there is need of a good life and a pure soul, and for Christian virtue to guide the mind to grasp, so far as human nature can, the truth concerning God the Word. One cannot possibly understand the teaching of the saints unless one has a pure mind and is trying to imitate their life.

So, living a holy life, for Athanasius, is not just about giving ourselves back to God for what he has done for us, but it is about trying to live a life that allows for God to speak to us. For us to truly understand what God is telling us in his Word, we need to be holy and pure.

Yikes! Puts a whole new perspective on learning from scripture.

on the incarnation: ch 5

Today we come to the fifth chapter of St Athanasius’s work On the Incarnation. We have seen that it was necessary for Jesus to come down to earth in order to reveal God to his people; to turn them back from the path of destruction that they are travelling on. He also needed to come and die on the cross to provide victory over death which had trapped humanity in its grip. Of course, Jesus would not have conquered death had he remainded dead. However, when Jesus rose from the dead he proved that death wa no longer the victor.

The Son of God after three days showed His once dead body immortal and incorruptible; and it was evident to all that ir was from no natural weakness that the body which the Word indwlty had died, but in order that in it by the Saviour’s power death mightbe done away.

The final proof of this fact was the way that believers have changed their attitude toward death. The apostles no longer feared death as the ultimate end. They no longer cowered in the corner hoping that they would not be discovered and put to death. Instead, they came out boldly, accusing the religious leaders of wrongdoing. Putting their very lives on the line, most of them eventally losing them for their faith. They were no longer frightened about death.

But now that the Saviour has raised his body, death is no longer terrible, but all those who believer in Christ tread it underfoot as nothing, and prefer to die rather than to deny their faith in Christ, knowing full well that when they die they do not perish, but live indeed, and become incorruptible through the resurrection.

This conquest of death comes from none other than Jesus Christ. It is only through his death and resurrection that we have surety that death is not the end. But if someone doubts the resurection even after considering the fact that his followers have utterly changed their attitudes towards death. Athanasius urges us to take a look at how Jesus seems to still be at work in the world.

The Savious is working mightily among men, every day Hi is invisibly persuading numbers of people all over the orld, both within and beyond the Greek-speaking world, to accept His faith and be obedient to His teaching. Can anyone, in face of this, still doubt that He has risen and lives, or rahter that He is Himself the Life? Does a dead man prick the consciences of men, so that they throw all the traditions of their fathers to the winds and bow doen before the teaching of Christ?

Since Jesus is at work in the world, he must be alive.

He it is Who in these latter days assumed a body for the salvation of us all, and taught the world concerning the Father. He it is Who has destroed death and freely graced us all with incorruption through the promise of the resurrection, having raised His own body as its first-fruits, and displayed if by the sign of the cross as the monyment ot His victory over death and its corruption.

on the incarnation; ch 4

Today we pick up our series on St. Athanasius’s book On the Incarnation.

It seems strange in this time of Advent to think about Jesus’s death, but this chapter deals with just that subject. Athanasius told us the reasons God came down in human flesh, and reminds us that he did it to provide redemption AND to renew the knowledge of God in humankind. Both of these are displayed in his death on the cross as well.

Thus, then, God the Word, revealed himself to men through His works. We must next consider the end of His earthly life and the nature of His bodily death. This is, indeed, the very centre of our faith, and everywhere you hear men speak of it; by it, too, no less than by other acts, Christ is revealed as God and Son of God.

For Athanasius, the cross screams of God’s self revealing nature. He had to suffer a public execution because he could not die on his own (how could he get sick when he healed others?). He also could not avoid the plotting of the Jews, because he had come to defeat death, and to do that by absorbing it in himself. More than this, however, he could not avoid death, because he came to bring new life; the resurrection.

The supreme object of His coming was to bring about the resurrection of the body. This was to be the monument of his victory over death, the assurance to all that He had himself conquered corruption and that their own bodies also would eventually be incorrupt; and it was in token of that and as a pledge of the future resurrection that He kept His body incorrupt.

His death provided the evidence that the curse had been lifted (cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree), and to break down the dividing wall within humanity.

We see the fitness of his death and of those outstretched arms: it was that He might draw His ancient people with the one and the Gentiles with the other, and join both together in Himself. Even so, He foretold the manner of His redeeming death, “I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men to myself.”

Through Jesus death on the cross, he defeated the ‘prince of the air’ because he was raised in the air on the cross to suffer and die. By this, he reopened the road to God through the heavens. Jesus did not need this new road, but we did.

No, it was we who needed it, we whom He Himself upbore in His own body–that body which He first offered to death on behalf of all, and then made through it a path to heaven.

In the incarnation, Jesus made himself corruptible, so that he could die, and through his death accomplish these amazing things.

The glory of it is staggering.

The logic of it, incomprehensible.

Even so, there are things that we ‘know’ to be true, or that we take on faith based on the say so of someone we really trust, even though our gut and everything in the world tells us the opposite.

I guess that is what faith is all about.

on the incarnation; ch 2 and 3

Last week, as we began our walk through St. Athanasius’s On The Incarnation, we saw that God created everything good, but by turning away from God, humankind became the source of their own corruption. Now, moving farther and farther away from God, they were in the process of destruction.

Man, who was created in God’s image and in his possession of reason reflected the very Word himself, was disappearing, and the work of God was being undone.

This left God with a bit of a dilemma. God could not go back on his word so that humankind, though sinning against God, should not die; but it is equally unthinkable that we, who once shared the nature of the Word, should be destroyed and turn back into non-existence through corruption.

Surely it would have been better never to have been created at all than, having been created, to be neglected and perish; and besides that such indifference to the ruin of His own work before His very eyes would argue not goodness in God but limitation, and that far more than if He had never created man at all.

For Athanasius, God is in a bit of a pickle. In order to express his goodness, he has to do something about this incredible work of creation called humankind. He could not allow them to continue on the road they had chosen. But if he does not allow them to perish, to suffer the consequences of their actions, then he would be going back on his word; something God must not do so as to express his justice.

So, God seems to be stuck. He has to express his goodness by saving his creation which is being destroyed, but he also has to express his justice and allow it to be destroyed.

Repentance on the part of humankind would not solve the problem either. True repentance causes people to stop sinning, but it does not deal with the corruption that has come as a result of the sins.

[O]nce the transgression had begun men came under the power of the corruption proper to their nature and were bereft of the grace which belonged to them as creatures in the Image of God.

What–or rather Who was it that was needed for such grace and such recall as we required? Who, save the Word of God Himself, Who also in the beginning had made all things our of nothing? His part it was, and His alone, both to bring again the corruptible to incorruption and to maintain for the Father his consistence of character with all. For He alone, being Word of the Father and above all, was in consequence both able to recreate all, and worthy to suffer on behalf of all and to be an ambassador for all with the Father.

For this reason, then, the incorporeal and incorruptible and immaterial Word of God entered our world.

So, according to Athanasius, Jesus, the Word, came into the world to do two things; to recreate in humankind the image of God, saving us from the corruption began in the garden, and to maintain the consistency of God’s character, to release him from this dilemma between grace and judgement.

This He did out of sheer love for us, so that in His death all might die and the law of death thereby be abolished because, when He had fulfilled in His body that for which it was appointed, it was thereafter voided of its power for men.

Our corruption could not be erased other than through death, or else God’s character could not be maintained. For God said that if we ate of the fruit we would die. Through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the image of God was being restored in humankind.

[B]y the offering of His own body He abolished the death which they had incurred, and corrected their neglect by His own teaching. Thus by his own power He restored the whole nature of man.

For Athanasius, this is not a single action, or an instantaneous renewal, just as the corruption was not an instantaneous destruction of the image of God.

For by the sacrifice of His own body He did two things: He put an end to the law of death which barred our way and He made a new beginning of life for us, by giving us the hope of resurrection.

This is, however, only one of the reasons why the Word became man, according to Athanasius. When God created humankind, he created them with the ability to know him. He made them in his image so that they might be able to “perceive the true image of God, the Word himself, and through him to apprehend the Father; which knowledge of their maker is for men the only really happen and blessed life.

But, humankind through away this ability to know God through this image.

Men, foolish as they are, thought little of the grace they had received, and turned away from God. They defiled their own soul so completely that they not only lost their apprehension of God, but invented for themselves other gods of various kinds.

As a safeguard against the absolute loss of apprehension of God, he filled the world with his works so that we might be able to perceive our God in them. On top of this he sent prophets, and gave them a law so that if they did not look around and see God, they would still be able to learn about him from the people who surrounded them.

Even though God had done all this, humankind still decided to turn away from God and ignore his gracious works. We were consistent in ’suppressing the truth in unrighteousness’ as the apostle Paul says, and were determined to forget about God and keep ourselves in ignorance.

So, in order to renew the knowledge of himself that was lost in the corruption of his image, God’s image came down in the form of Jesus Christ.

Wherefore, in all naturalness and fitness, desiring to do good to men, and Man He dwells, taking to Himself a body like the rest; and through His actions done in that body, as it were on their own level, he teaches those who would not learn by other means to know Himself, the Word of God, and through Him the Father.

For Athanasius, then, Jesus, the Word, the second person of the Trinity, was incarnated, took on human flesh, for two reasons. First, he had to do away with sin and death, which could only be done by dying the death himself and then coming back to life in the resurrection. Second, Jesus came to give us the knowledge of the Father himself. He came to renew the image of God in us, so that we might be able, once again, to enjoy knowing the Father.

on the incarnation; ch 1

In this chapter, St. Athanasius outlines the creation and fall of mankind. He makes it plain that we need to remember the creation is done by the same God, with the same agent, as that of salvation.

The renewal of creationhas been wrought by that self-same Word who made it in the beginning. There is no inconsistency between creation and salvation; for the One Father has employed the same Agent for both works, effecting salvation of the world through the same Word Who made it in the beginning.

For Athanasius we must begin with the creation and fall because they outline the reason for the incarnation. Without the fall, without the wilful disobedience of humanity, the incarnation would not have been necessary.

It was our sorry case that caused the Word to come down, our transgression that called out His love for us, so that He made haste to help us and to appear among us. It is we who were the cause of His taking human form, and for our salvation that in His great love He was both born and manifested in human body.

For Athanasius, the incarnation was only necessary because of our sin. There have been some who have argued that the incarnation may have happened even if we did not sin. There would have been a necessity, not for Jesus to die for our sins, but to make himself fully known to us. However, this would not have been necessary. Before we walked away from God, he walked with us in the garden during the cool of the day. Adam and Eve lived directly in God’s presence.

The fall, for Athanasius, was a beginning of the reversal of what God had done in creation. When God created mankind, he did it with the intention that they would live forever with him (provided they followed his commandments). But in going against his will, we became enslaved to death, and started the process of becoming entirely corrupt. Our corruption severed the union we had with the Word; the Lord and giver of life. This left us in a very poor position.

This, then, was the plight of men. God had not only graciously made them out of nothing, but had also graciously bestowed on them His own life by the grace of the Word. Then, turning from eternal things to things corruptible, by counsel of the devil, they had become the cause of their own corruption in death; for, as I said before, though they were by nature subject to corruption, the grace of their union with the Word made them capable of escaping from the natural law, provided that they retained the beauty of innocence with which they were created.

So, humankind, but not following the commands of God, seems to have thwarted the plan of God; to have people he created in his image live with him in sweet communion for all eternity. They, by their actions, had become the process of destruction of the very good work of creation.

This, according to Athanasius, is the result of the creation and the fall.