Notes
Notes
Chapter 1. Evangelizing Metaphysics
[1]. The opening pages of this chapter overlap considerably with my discussion of the origins of the Arian controversy in Defending Constantine (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2010), though in that book my focus is on Constantine’s role in the controversy. Recent scholarship presents a fairly radical revision of the fourth-century conflict—from the chronology of events and the reliability of sources, especially of Athanasius, to the context, background, and importance of Arius himself, the force of the Nicene formula, the effect of its creed, and the question of the relation of orthodoxy and heresy. The best recent treatments are found in Timothy D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 191–244; Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), chaps. 2–3; Rowan Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 29–91; R. P. C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy, 318–81 (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 13–273; T. D. Barnes, Athanasius and Constantius: Theology and Politics in the Constantinian Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 1–33; John Behr, Formation of Christian Theology, vol. 2, The Nicene Faith, Part 1 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004). Deft and still useful older treatments are found in Henry Chadwick, The Early Church, Pelican History of the Church (New York: Penguin, 1967), 129–36; W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), 492–517. For scholarship on Athanasius up to 1984, see Charles Kannengiesser, “The Athanasian Decade, 1973–1984: A Bibliographic Report,” Theological Studies 46 (1985): 524–41; studies since then can be found at http://www.athanasius.theologie.uni-erlangen.de/bibliographie. David S. Potter, The Roman Empire at Bay, AD 180–395, Routledge History of the Ancient World (London: Routledge, 2004), 401–22, is excellent on the history, but out of his depth on the theology.
[2]. The Melitian controversy is briefly summed up in Chadwick, Early Church, 124; Frend, Rise of Christianity, 493–94; Williams, Arius, 32–41. Potter, Roman Empire, 412, tells the story of the prison-house schism. Records list an “Arius” as a supporter of Melitius, and Frend, Rise of Christianity, 493, believes it is the same Arius who later emerged in conflict with Alexander, but recent scholars have doubted that the two are the same man (Williams, Arius, 40; Hanson, Search, 5).
[3]. Ever since I heard it from a student, I have thought of modalism as the “little hat” doctrine of the Trinity. According to modalism, there are no eternal distinctions among the persons; the persons are just roles, the “little hats” that the one God dons at different times for different purposes.
[4]. Williams, Arius, 86–91.
[5]. Aloys Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, vol. 1, From the Apostolic Age to Chalcedon (451), trans. John Bowden, 2nd ed. (Atlanta: John Knox, 1975), 138–49, 219. Ayres (Nicaea and Its Legacy, 21–22) cautions that Arius ought not be labeled an “Origenist,” since all sides of the debate were influenced by Origen and there were other influences at work on Arius.
[6]. Quoted in Hanson, Search, 6–7.
[7]. Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, 3 and passim, emphasizes the central importance of theories of “begetting” in the debate over Arius’s views.
[8]. Both sides of the controversy claim to be following the footsteps of the “Fathers,” and often with equal plausibility. This supports the contemporary view that the Arian controversy is not about the church defending a preexisting orthodoxy but is about the church groping toward orthodoxy.
[9]. Translation available online at http://www.fourthcentury.com/index.php/urkunde-chart-opitz/.
[10]. For discussions of the problems see R. D. Williams, “The Quest of the Historical Thalia,” and S. G. Hall, “The Thalia of Arius in Athanasius’s Accounts,” both in Arianism: Historical and Theological Reassessments, ed. Robert C. Gregg (1985; repr., Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2006), 1–36, 37–58. Williams responds to G. C. Stead (“The Thalia of Arius and the Testimony of Athanasius,” Journal of Theological Studies 29 [1978]: 20–52), who argues that the quotations of the Thalia preserved by Athanasius in the first of his Orations is, in Williams’s summary, a “mixture of paraphrase, expansion (designed to bring out the unacceptable implications of what Arius actually says), and fragmentation quotation,” and Stead turns to Athanasius’s list of the “Blasphemies of Arius” (On the Synods 15) as a more reliable guide to Arius’s own works. Williams’s article defends the reliability of Athanasius’s summary in On the Synods. Williams has more recently discussed the problems surrounding the dating and contents of the Thalia in Arius, 62–66.
[11]. See C. Kannengiesser, “The Blasphemies of Arius: Athanasius of Alexandria, De Synodis 15,” in Gregg, Arianism, 59–78, for a literary analysis of this text and an effort to tie Athanasius’s use of these quotations to the specific political circumstances of his time.
[12]. See Virginia Burrus, Begotten, Not Made: Conceiving Manhood in Late Antiquity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), who highlights the sexual insults and stereotyping in Athanasius’s rhetoric.
[13]. Williams, Arius, 98.
[14]. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 203–4.
[15]. Frend, Rise of Christianity, 497.
[16]. The most complete recent biography of Athanasius is Barnes, Athanasius and Constantius. Briefer biographical introductions may be found in Thomas G. Weinandy, Athanasius: A Theological Introduction (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007); Khaled Anatolios, Athanasius, The Early Church Fathers (London: Routledge, 2004); Alvyn Pettersen, Athanasius (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1995); M. C. Steenberg, Of God and Man: Theology as Anthropology from Irenaeus to Athanasius (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 158–62; Behr, Nicene Faith, 163–68.
[17]. Barnes, Athanasius and Constantius, 10.
[18]. Barnes (ibid., 11) notes that Athanasius cites Plato explicitly only three times, and each of the citations is to a passage that was well-known in antiquity. E. P. Meijering makes it plain that Athanasius uses the thought patterns and terminology of Middle Platonism, but the depth of this indebtedness is still a matter of dispute; see Meijering, Orthodoxy and Platonism in Athanasius: Synthesis or Antithesis (Leiden: Brill, 1968). Khaled Anatolios, Athanasius: The Coherence of His Thought (London: Routledge, 1998), 7–13, provides a lucid summary of the philosophical context.
[19]. This translation of Gregory Nazianzen’s Orations can be found at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/310221.htm.
[20]. Barnes, Athanasius and Constantius, 10–14, on the background of Athanasius as a lower-class biblicist. See also Hanson, Search, 239–73; A. H. M. Jones, Constantine and the Conversion of Europe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 153.
[21]. Barnes, Athanasius and Constantius, 21; Potter, Roman Empire, 422; Jones, Constantine, 155–56.
[22]. Jones, Constantine, 156–57.
[23]. Ibid., 160–63. Athanasius never completely denied the charges of breaking a chalice or of intimidation. His response to the chalice episode was usually that it did not matter since Ischyras was not a priest and therefore the chalice was not holy. Anyone with small children will recognize the maneuver, a denial that is as good as an admission.
[24]. Socrates, Ecclesiastical History 1.34, 96. See also Hanson, Search, 263.
[25]. Hanson (Search, 263) notes that we do not know why Athanasius was exiled. Ayres (Nicaea and Its Legacy, 103) says that the last straw was the charge that Athanasius threatened to interrupt the transport of grain from Alexandria to Constantinople. See also Jones, Constantine, 163–64.
[26]. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gubler (New York: Vintage, 1986), 32.
[27]. Raymond Van Dam, The Roman Revolution of Constantine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 257.
[28]. Anatolios, Athanasius, 14.
[29]. It is typical of the rhetoric of the period that Athanasius highlights the persecution he and his allies endured. Arians did the same, as did the Donatists and virtually every other heretical group. All sides believed that the true church is the suffering church and positioned themselves as the genuine heirs of the martyrs.
[30]. Four orations are extant, but only the first three are genuinely Athanasian. At one time Kannengiesser expressed doubt about the genuineness of the third oration, but he has since modified his views. See Anatolios, Athanasius, 246n74. On the date, see David M. Gwynn, The Eusebians: The Polemic of Athanasius of Alexandria and the Construction of the “Arian Controversy,” Oxford Theological Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 21–26, who concludes that a date during Athanasius’s second exile is most likely. Anatolios (Athanasius, 87) concludes the same.
[31]. Barnes, Athanasius and Constantius, 92.
[32]. Quoted in Behr, Nicene Faith, 165.
[33]. Quoted in ibid., 165.
[34]. Barnes, Athanasius and Constantius, 1. Anatolios, Athanasius, 33–39, discusses the various views of Athanasius through the centuries.
[35]. Anatolios, Athanasius, 35.
[36]. For an extended discussion of Athanasius’s rhetorical construction of the “Eusebian party,” see Gwynn, Eusebians. For a broader study of Athanasius’s use of rhetorical techniques, see G. Christopher Stead, “Rhetorical Method in Athanasius,” Vigiliae Christianae 30 (1976): 121–37. Gwynn neatly summarizes the results of the new scholarship: “The relative insignificance of Arius himself within the debates has been amply demonstrated, notably by Maurice Wiles, while Hanson among others has emphasized that the traditional image of a conflict between established ‘orthodoxy’ and manifest ‘heresy’ cannot be maintained. ‘On the subject which was primarily under discussion there was not as yet any orthodox doctrine. . . . [The controversy] is not the story of a defence of orthodoxy, but a search for orthodoxy, a search conducted by the method of trial and error.’ Furthermore the distortion inherent in Athanasius’s presentation of his foes has likewise been acknowledged, for ‘it was Athanasius’s great polemical success to cast his opponents as Arians’ [quoting M. R. Barnes and D. H. Williams]. No modern student of the so-called ‘Arian Controversy’ is now unaware of these problems of terminology and categorization. As Rowan Williams declares in his review of Hanson, ‘the time has probably come to relegate the term Arianism at least to inverted commas, and preferably to oblivion’” (Eusebians, 7). Ayres (Nicaea and Its Legacy) agrees that Arius was a marginal player (13) and argues that the central question was not about whether the Son was “God” but about the grammar of the use of the still-flexible word “God” (14), that the issue of how to understand divine generation played a crucial role (2), and that the debate was not between Origenists and anti-Origenists or between hellenizers and anti-hellenizers (20–21, 31–32), since all parties were indebted both to Hellenistic categories and to Origen. Behr draws the provocative conclusion that Christian orthodoxy is always about contemplating “the Christ who is still the coming one. The content of orthodoxy is not protological, but eschatological” (Nicene Faith, 15).
[37]. Williams, “Quest,” 25.
[38]. Ibid., 8.
[39]. Ibid., 9–10. Ancient followers of Arius are not the only ones who have had difficulty with this point. In their study Early Arianism: A View of Salvation (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981), Robert C. Gregg and Dennis Groh rest much of their account of Arius’s soteriology on the notion that the Son comes to knowledge and advances in glory and sonship (cf. 61–63). While that may have been the view of some “Arians,” it was not Arius’s view.
[40]. Anatolios, Athanasius, 25.
[41]. Ibid., 27–28.
[42]. After summarizing the objections to the term “Arianism,” Gwynn laments that “the assumption that it is possible to identify a theological position that can be described as ‘Arian’ remains highly persuasive, and no one has yet fully taken up the challenge that Williams laid down” (Eusebians, 7).
[43]. Maurice Wiles, Archetypal Heresy: Arianism through the Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
[44]. Williams, Arius, 86–91. Williams writes that before Constantine and Nicaea, “episcopal authority itself had its roots precisely in the experience of tradition, the continuity of teaching; yet it was one step removed from the authority of the theodidaktos in that it operated fairly strictly within the sacramental context. That is to say, it represented a focus of unity in a common practice of worship, centering upon the presence of the symbolic token of continuity and self-identity, the apostolically-validated bishop, rather than a focus on the personality of the teacher or of the distinctive ideas of a school” (86–87). Academic theology is defined by the charisma of the teacher; Catholic theology is institutionalized, ritualized, regularized, creedalized.
[45]. Gregg and Groh, Early Arianism.
[46]. Hanson, Search, 109–16.
[47]. M. F. Wiles and R. C. Gregg, “Asterius: A New Chapter in the History of Arianism?” in Gregg, Arianism, 132–38.
[48]. Adolf von Harnack, History of Dogma, trans. Neil Buchanan (New York: Dover, 1961), 1:17, quoted in William V. Rowe, “Adolf von Harnack and the Concept of Hellenization,” in Hellenization Revisited: Shaping a Christian Response within the Greco-Roman World, ed. Wendy E. Helleman (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994), 77–79.
[49]. Harnack, History of Dogma, 1:227–28, quoted in Rowe, “Harnack,” in Helleman, Hellenization Revisited, 83.
[50]. Adolf von Harnack, What Is Christianity? trans. Thomas Saunders (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), 207, quoted in Rowe, “Harnack,” in Helleman, Hellenization Revisited, 84–85.
[51]. Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God for Us: The Trinity and the Christian Life (San Francisco: Harper, 1973), 38–39.
[52]. Robert Jenson, “What Is the Point of Trinitarian Theology?” in Trinitarian Theology Today: Essays on Divine Being and Act, ed. Christoph Schwöbel (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 37.
[53]. Ibid. Other theologians have also discovered other anti-Hellenistic motifs in early Trinitarian theology. John Zizioulas (Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church [Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997]), for example, argues that the Cappadocians developed an unprecedented ontology of personhood.
[54]. Any assessment of Athanasius’s rhetoric must wrestle with Robert Loius Wilken’s contextually sensitive treatment of John Chrysostom’s anti-Jewish rhetoric in John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late Fourth Century (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2004).
Chapter 2. Types, Terms, and Paradigms
[55]. Of the many recent works on the subject, Kevin J. Vanhoozer, ed., Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005) and Daniel J. Treier, Introducing Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Recovering a Christian Practice (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008) provide good introductions.
[56]. R. R. Reno, series preface to the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible.
[57]. Ibid., 11–12.
[58]. Vanhoozer, “Introduction,” 20–22, in Dictionary.
[59]. The term is Frances Young’s in Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002), 40.
[60]. See chapter 6 for a discussion of Athanasius’s letter to Marcellinus on the Psalms, which focuses more on the transformative effects of reading Scripture. The commentary on Psalms attributed to Athanasius is now generally regarded as coming from another hand. See J. den Boeft’s review of M.-J. Rondeau, Les commentaires patristiques du psautier (IIIc–IVc siecles), in Vigiliae Christianae 41, no. 4 (1987): 294, where he notes that the commentary is pseudo-Athanasian. See also Christopher Stead, “St. Athanasius on the Psalms,” Vigiliae Christianae 39 (1985): 65–78.
[61]. This is acknowledged by Thomas F. Torrance, “The Hermeneutics of Saint Athanasius (Part 1),” Ekklesiastikos Pharos 52, no. 1 (1970): 446–68; see also Christopher Stead, “Athanasius als Exeget,” in Christliche Exegese zwischen Nicaea und Chalcedon, ed. J. van Oort and U. Wickert (Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1992), 183.
[62]. This challenges the assessment of Johannes Quasten, who wrote that “Athanasius had a predilection for the allegorical and typological interpretation of the Psalter in contradistinction to the more jejune exegesis predominant in his dogmatico-polemical writings” (Quasten, Patrology, vol. 3 [Westminster, MD: Newman, 1960], 38, quoted in Stead, “St. Athanasius on the Psalms,” 76). Athanasius does not confine his typological exegesis to the Psalms in the Festal Letters. The difference between the exegetical focus of the anti-Arian polemics and the letters has to do with the difference of intent. In the first, Athanasius is using Scripture to tear down Arianism and to build a positive Christology and theology; in the second, he addresses his congregation as their pastor.
[63]. Like many of the church fathers, Athanasius finds a type of the cross in Deut. 28:66 (“your life shall hang . . . before you”). See Gregory T. Armstrong, The Cross in the Old Testament according to Athanasius, Cyril of Jerusalem, and the Cappadocian Fathers (Tübingen: Mohr, 1979). Interpreting Deut. 28:66 in this way looks fanciful, but there is more to it than is first apparent. The curses of Deut. 28 culminate with the threat of exile, a curse that Jesus suffers on the cross.
[64]. Aaron’s robes are described as “garments . . . for glory and for beauty” (Exod. 28:2). Would Athanasius press the analogy to say that the Son’s investiture with flesh is investiture with the jeweled robe and ephod of humanity?
[65]. See also, “And as a wise architect, proposing to build a house, consults also about repairing it, should it at any time become dilapidated after building, and, as counseling about this, makes preparation and gives to the workmen materials for a repair; and thus the means of the repair are provided before the house; in the same way prior to us is the repair of our salvation founded in Christ, that in Him we might even be new-created. And the will and the purpose were made ready ‘before the world,’ but have taken effect when the need required, and the Savior came among us” (Discourses 2.77).
[66]. It is commonly recognized in recent scholarship that the debate between Arianism and orthodoxy is a debate about the meaning of Scripture. See Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 3. He notes also that philosophical concepts, when used at all, were not a replacement for exegesis but a means for elucidating the text of Scripture (277). See also Young, Biblical Exegesis, 31.
[67]. While I have made an attempt to use gender-neutral language where appropriate, when interacting with Athanasius’s works I have generally followed the wording used by Athanasius. It should be understood that masculine wordings are being used generically and are intended to encompass all of humanity.
[68]. Athanasius also points to qualifying purpose clauses in Jesus’s statements about his “coming,” citing John 6:38–40; 12:46; 18:37; 1 John 3:8 (Discourses 2.54).
[69]. Similarly, “Solomon, though a son, is called a servant, so, to repeat what was said above, although parents call the sons springing from themselves ‘made’ and ‘created’ and ‘becoming,’ for all this they do not deny their nature” (Discourses 2.4).
[70]. It might be possible to add Athanasius’s use of “touchstone texts,” such as 1 Cor. 1:24, John 10:30 and 14:10, to which Athanasius frequently returns and which serve as an internal canon that measures the right reading of the rest of Scripture. On this, see James D. Ernest, The Bible in Athanasius of Alexandria (Boston: Brill, 2004), 120.
[71]. For discussion of this concept in Athanasius, see Ernest, Bible in Athanasius, 142–51; Ernest, “Athanasius of Alexandria: The Scope of Scripture in Polemical and Pastoral Context,” Vigiliae Christianae 47, no. 4 (1993): 341–62; Torrance, “Hermeneutics of Saint Athanasius (Part 1),” 459–68; Hermann Josef Sieben, “Herméneutique de l’exégèse dogmatique d’Athanase,” in Politique et theologie chez Athanase d’Alexandrie, ed. Charles Kannengiesser (Paris: Beauchesne, 1974), 106–10.
[72]. Young, Biblical Exegesis, 43. Torrance, “Hermeneutics of Saint Athanasius (Part 1),” 461, agrees that Christ himself is the skopos.
[73]. The force of this rule has been discussed by scholars writing about the hermeneutics of Athanasius. See especially Ernest, Bible in Athanasius, 136–41, who attributes the phrase to Allen Clayton. See also Sieben, “Herméneutique,” 195–214; Charles Kannengiesser, “The Bible in the Arian Crisis,” in The Bible in Greek Christian History, ed. and trans. Paul Blowers (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 217–28; Kannengiesser, “The Athanasian Understanding of Scripture,” in The Early Church in Its Context: Essays in Honor of Everett Ferguson, ed. Abraham J. Malherbe et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 221–29; and Torrance, “Hermeneutics of Saint Athanasius (Part 1),” Ekklēsiastikos Pharos (1970–1971), in four installments. For all its virtues, Torrance’s series imposes a Barthian framework on Athanasius. Torrance detaches the res of revelation from the word of Scripture in ways that I think Athanasius would have rejected, and he attempts to explain his use of biblical paradigms while holding to Barthian scruples about natural revelation, scruples that Athanasius was far from sharing (see chap. 4 of the present work). See also the comments on Athanasius and Scripture in Thomas Molnar, Thomas F. Torrance: Theology of the Trinity (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 44–52. Though not focused exclusively on Athanasius, Michael Slusser, “The Exegetical Roots of Trinitarian Theology,” Theological Studies 49 (1988): 461–76, is a fascinating exploration of “prosopological exegesis” and its impact on developing trinitarian theology. I am skeptical that the tripartite rule functions as “a permanent concern of the Alexandrian interpreter” (Kannengiesser, “Athanasian Understanding,” 227) and suspect that it is anachronistic to plunder the writings of Athanasius for “methodological” insight. The controls on his exegesis are typically more theological than methodological, and common sense plays a more important role than any rules.
[74]. This kind of appeal to context is common in the Discourses. It is clear from the context that Peter’s words about the exaltation of the Son in Acts 2:36 refer to the incarnate Son (2.15.12; 2.15.15–17). If “house” is a metaphor in Prov. 9:1, should not the verb “create” also be taken metaphorically (2.19.46)? The claim that the God of Israel is “one” was directed at polytheistic idolaters who surrounded ancient Israel (3.24.7).
[75]. John Behr, Formation of Christian Theology, vol. 2, The Nicene Faith, Part 1 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004), 208–10. Khaled Anatolios, Athanasius: The Coherence of His Thought (London: Routledge, 1998), 71, agrees that the tripartite rule is a christological standard, highlighting the crucial event of the incarnation.
[76]. See Anatolios, Coherence, 98–100; Torrance, “The Hermeneutics of Saint Athanasius (Part 2),” Ekklesiastikos Pharos 52, no. 2 (1970): 99–103; Ernest, Bible in Athanasius, 151–59.
[77]. For an extensive discussion of Athanasius’s use of this image, see the lovely little classic by Jaroslav Pelikan, The Light of the World: A Basic Image in Early Christian Thought (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962).
[78]. I will take up the issue of impassibility more fully in chapter 5, in discussing the Word’s participation in the passions of the flesh. For now, it is sufficient to quote Donald Fairbairn: “In the mind of the early church, impassibility implied that God could not be adversely affected or damaged by anything we might do. We cannot ruin the fellowship within the Trinity or disrupt the purposes of God or cause his will to fail. But this does not mean that God cannot choose to enter our world by becoming human, to live a fully human life and to suffer as a man for our sakes.” Likewise, “God’s immutability means that his purposes do not change and that his love for his people is unchanging. . . . He is constant in his love toward us, and this is a drastically different concept of immutability than that of Greek philosophy” (Life in the Trinity: An Introduction to Theology with the Help of the Church Fathers [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2009], 176–77). Given these definitions, it is clear why Athanasius thinks of both immutability and impassibility in connection with temporality: for creatures, living in time means decay, weakening, corruptibility, the leakage of determination and devotion to life’s projects. Not so for God; to be timeless does not mean that he is incapable of interacting in time but rather refers, on the one hand, to his capacity to enter time without suffering time’s ravages and, on the other hand, to his ability to act in time without growing and advancing. Since God is wholly and eternally complete, since he has already from all eternity reached the infinite summit, the telos of existence, his entry into time is not an opportunity for self-improvement.
Chapter 3. The One God
[79]. Karl Rahner, The Trinity, trans. Joseph Donceel (New York: Crossroad, 1997). Lewis Ayres wisely points out that reports of trinitarian revival have been regularly announced since the beginning of the nineteenth century, noting that the difference this time around is that theologians are aiming not only to revive a forgotten orthodoxy but also to correct and purify what many have come to regard as a flawed tradition (Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004], 407).
[80]. Rahner, Trinity, 22.
[81]. This point is noted by David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 156.
[82]. Ibid., 168.
[83]. For Hart, theologians can avoid this danger only by insisting on divine apatheia. Without the doctrine of apatheia, the doctrine that God is perfectly God and perfectly beautiful and joyful and infinitely satisfied without creation, there is no distinctive Christian aesthetic: “God is good and sovereign and wholly beautiful, and creation is gift, loveliness, pleasure, dignity, and freedom, which is to say that God is possessed of that loveliest (and most widely misunderstood) attribute, ‘apatheia’” (ibid., 157).
[84]. Ibid., 158–59.
[85]. This is precisely the perspective of Athanasius. See chapter 5 below.
[86]. Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, 160.
[87]. I explore these issues more fully in chapter 5.
[88]. See especially Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God for Us: The Trinity and the Christian Life (San Francisco: Harper, 1973).
[89]. This from Karen Kilby, “Perichoresis and Projection: Problems with Social Doctrines of the Trinity,” New Blackfriars (October 2000): 2. I am working from a PDF version of the article in which the pagination does not match that of the published version.
[90]. Ibid., 4–7. In addition to Kilby, see Sarah Coakley, “‘Persons’ in the ‘Social’ Doctrine of the Trinity: A Critique of Current Analytic Discussion,” and Brian Leftow, “Anti Social Trinitarianism,” both in The Trinity, ed. Stephen Davis et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 123–44, 203–5. Coakley disputes the claim that the Cappadocians can be enlisted in support of a “social trinitarianism.” Leftow questions how social trinitarianism can claim to be both monotheistic and orthodox.
[91]. Rahner, Trinity, 106–7.
[92]. Ibid., 23.
[93]. John Behr, Formation of Christian Theology, vol. 2, The Nicene Faith, Part 1 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004), 3–4.
[94]. Ibid., 6–7.
[95]. This is the approach of some of the best scholarship on Athanasius, notably Khaled Anatolios, Athanasius: The Coherence of His Thought, Routledge Early Church Monographs (London: Routledge, 1998).
[96]. This point, often noted with regard to Athanasius, is made pithily by Thomas F. Torrance, “The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity according to St. Athanasius,” Anglican Theological Review 71, no. 4 (1989): 397: “Within his supreme incarnational perspective, soteriological and ontological factors were always combined in Athanasius’s development of the Nicene doctrine of God.” I would only add the qualification that, for Athanasius, these are not really separate factors “combined,” but simply facets of the bright jewel that is Christ.
[97]. Peter Widdicombe, The Fatherhood of God from Origen to Athanasius, Oxford Theological Monographs (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 160–61. The quotations cited are listed by Widdicombe.
[98]. Jon M. Robertson, Christ as Mediator: A Study of the Theologies of Eusebius of Caesarea, Marcellus of Ancyra, and Athanasius of Alexandria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 187; Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, 112–13.
[99]. Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 3 (London: William Pickering, 1827), 237.
[100]. For discussion of the philosophical background and the shift in which the Arian debate is caught up, see Rowan Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 215–29. Discussions of Athanasius’s views are found in Widdicombe, Fatherhood, 188–93, and Anatolios, Coherence, 50–51, 56, 104–9.
[101]. This terminology is used early in the Discourses but does not appear later in either this work or other writings of Athanasius. See Widdicombe, Fatherhood, 193.
[102]. Alwyn Pettersen, Athanasius (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1995), 246. For further discussion of the term, see Widdicombe, Fatherhood, 188–204; Anatolios, Coherence, 102–7, 141–46. This terminology makes it impossible for Athanasius to fall into the dangers that Rahner warns of, for if Son and Spirit are as integral to the meaning of the word “God” as goodness and justice, it is meaningless to construct a treatise on “the one God” except as a treatise on the Trinity.
[103]. On the debate about will, see C. Stead, “The Freedom of the Will and the Arian Controversy,” in Platonismus und Christentum: Festschrift für Heinrich Dörrie, ed. H.-D. Blume and F. Mann (Münster: Aschendorff, 1983), 245–57. Anatolios (Coherence, 121) nicely points out that the issue is really about not the origination (a quo) but the termination (ad quem) of creation. Being and will are one in God, but this does not mean that being and the things willed are one.
[104]. Williams, Arius, 228.
[105]. For discussion of Athanasius’s innovative use of theotēs, see Robertson, Christ as Mediator, 152–62.
[106]. A point noted in ibid., 145.
[107]. A lively recent translation is that of Edmund Hill, The Trinity (Brooklyn, NY: New City Press, 1991).
[108]. A portion of the first letter is translated in Khaled Anatolios, Athanasius, The Early Church Fathers, (London: Routledge, 2004), 212–33. See also the discussions in Thomas G. Weinandy, Athanasius: A Theological Introduction (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 103–19, esp. 114–17; Behr, Nicene Faith, 231–49; and Theodore C. Campbell, “The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit in the Theology of Athanasius,” Scottish Journal of Theology 27, no. 4 (1974): 408–40.
[109]. While the term “perichoretic” may be anachronistic, more Cappadocian than Athanasian, it captures, I believe, the substance of Athanasius’s thought.
[110]. Thanks to my student Stephen Long for the research assistance he provided in establishing this point.
[111]. Anatolios, Coherence, 53.
[112]. Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, 168–69.
[113]. Ibid., 169.
[114]. Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, The Triune God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 121.
[115]. I am dependent here on Thomas Weinandy, The Father’s Spirit of Sonship: Reconceiving the Trinity (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), and Mark A. McIntosh, Mystical Theology: The Integrity of Spirituality and Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).
Chapter 4. Beginnings: Word and World
[116]. God creates to demonstrate his love (Against the Pagans 41). Paul Kolbet (“Athanasius, the Psalms, and the Reformation of the Self,” Harvard Theological Review 99, no. 1 [2006]: 91) notes that, for Athanasius, God creates out of philanthropia, his love for men that are not yet created.
[117]. Khaled Anatolios, Athanasius: The Coherence of His Thought (London: Routledge, 1998), 48. See also George Bebawi, “St. Athanasios: The Dynamics of Salvation,” Sobornost 8, no. 2 (1986): 27, who distinguishes the Augustinian theory of “privation” from the Athanasian notion of evil as movement toward nothingness.
[118]. See Thomas Weinandy, Athanasius: A Theological Introduction (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 24. Athanasius’s construal of the Creator-creature relation is central to the argument of Anatolios, Coherence; see in particular 33–35, 39.
[119]. Anatolios, Coherence, 123.
[120]. Ibid., 53.
[121]. Jon M. Robertson provides a useful brief outline and discussion of the treatise in Christ as Mediator: A Study of the Theologies of Eusebius of Caesarea, Marcellus of Ancyra, and Athanasius of Alexandria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 139–51. I am using the text of E. P. Meijering, Athanasius: Contra Gentes; Introduction, Translation and Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 1984).
[122]. Anatolios, Coherence, 28.
[123]. John Behr, Formation of Christian Theology, vol. 2, The Nicene Faith, Part 1 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004), 171.
[124]. One of the strongest statements of this notion comes from Against the Pagans 41: “All created nature according to its own structure is fluid and dissolvable” and “lest it experienced this and the universe were dissolved again into non-being . . . having made all things and having given creation its substance through His own eternal Word, He did not leave it to be carried away by its nature and be afflicted, lest it be in danger of disappearing again into non-being, but as a good God He governs and establishes through his own Word, who is also God, the whole world, in order that creation illuminated by the leadership, providence and ordering of the Word could remain in existence, since it participated in the Word out of the Father and is helped by Him to its existence.”
[125]. Athanasius’s use of the Stoic image of the world as “body” has sometimes been taken as evidence of his debt to Stoicisim. More likely, Athanasius makes rather unsystematic use of images and metaphors from the general philosophical culture around him and does not intend the image as the Stoics understand it.
[126]. Conversely, if creation’s diversity makes up for lack in each part, and God has no lack, then God is in himself, as one God, all that the creation is in its multiplicity. The light of God is the infinite light of sun and moon and stars and all else.
[127]. G. D. Dragas (Saint Athanasius of Alexandria: Original Research and New Perspectives [Rollinsford, NH: Orthodox Research Institute, 2005], 29) picks up on this image, describing creation as a choir in which each thing sings according to its nature. Athanasius highlights the interdependence of created things also in Against the Pagans 27. He attacks the worship of creation by noting that no part of creation is self-sufficient: “If somebody takes the parts of creation by themselves and considers them separately, e.g., the sun alone, the moon separately, and on the other side separated from their mutual connection the earth and the air, the warm, cold, dry, and wet substance, then he will find that absolutely nothing is self-sufficient, but that they are all in need of each others’ help and that they subsist through each others’ support.” He illustrates again using sun, moon and stars, earth and water, the four elements.
[128]. This paragraph summarizes a number of the points made by Anatolios, Coherence, 62–67.
[129]. The question here is not about sin but about the state of creation before Adam’s fall. The question might be put this way: did God rig the world so that Adam, because of his created instability, had an inherent tendency toward sin, toward turning from God? If the creation is good, then it cannot include constraints that encourage sin. Sin must, of course, be possible, but it must not be inevitable.
[130]. Athanasius supports the conclusion that evil is non-being with a number of arguments, mainly negative. The only alternatives to the privation view are (a) evil is a substance but God did not make it, (b) evil is a substance and God did make it, or (c) some other creative being made evil (Against the Pagans 6). The first and last deny that God is Creator of all, the second that he is good. Only the privation view of evil is consistent with Athanasius’s doctrine of creation ex nihilo and the consequent strict distinction between Creator and creature.
[131]. Athanasius’s exposition of this point makes it difficult to avoid the conclusion that the incarnation would have happened without sin, despite his explicit tying of the incarnation to the fall. If the world is tipping toward corruption in itself and needs to be brought to stability, then that can only happen if the Word that sustains all creation forges a deeper bond with creation. For further discussion, see below, chapter 5.
[132]. For discussions of Athanasius’s own treatment of nature/grace, see Dragas, Saint Athanasius, chap. 2; Anatolios, Coherence, 55; Khaled Anatolios, Athanasius, The Early Church Fathers (London: Routledge, 2004), 40–42.
[133]. For a superb summary of the debate and Henri de Lubac, who lived at the heart of the storm, see Fergus Kerr, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians: From Neoscholasticism to Nuptial Mystery (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).
[134]. Michael Horton, God of Promise: Introducing Covenant Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006), 100.
[135]. Ibid., 96.
[136]. Ibid., 93.
[137]. Ibid., 92–93.
[138]. Ibid., 89.
[139]. Ibid.
[140]. Ibid., 84.
[141]. Ibid., 91.
[142]. See Alister McGrath, Iustitia Dei, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 38–55. O’Donovan’s discussion of book 19 of City of God is published in Oliver O’Donovan, Bonds of Imperfection: Christian Politics, Past and Present (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 48–72.
[143]. For an argument that civic and spiritual were much more closely integrated in Calvin, see J. Todd Billings, Calvin, Participation and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 177–84. Billings makes a plausible case that civic order is a theological concern for Calvin, but even in his account, justification and justice meet only at the margins.
[144]. These are the two opponents against which Matthias Scheeben directed his work on nature and grace. This will be discussed in more depth later in this chapter.
[145]. Instructive as it might prove, in this chapter I do not examine the politics and polemics of the twentieth-century debate itself, which Fergus Kerr characterizes as an outbreak of rabies theologica. My aim is more narrowly theological, and I examine the differing formulations of three Catholic theologians.
[146]. I have relied on the discussions of Scheeben in R. R. Reno, The Ordinary Transformed: Karl Rahner and the Christian Vision of Transcendence (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 95–101, and Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 1, Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1982), 104–17.
[147]. Joseph Scheeben, Nature and Grace (1861; repr., St. Louis: Herder, 1954).
[148]. Ibid., 49, quoted in Reno, Ordinary Transformed, 96.
[149]. Ibid., 16, quoted in Reno, Ordinary Transformed, 97.
[150]. Ibid., 42–43, quoted in Reno, Ordinary Transformed, 98.
[151]. Ibid., 27.
[152]. Ibid., 25–26.
[153]. Ibid., 30–31.
[154]. Ibid., 206, 296.
[155]. Ibid., 102–3.
[156]. Ibid., 109.
[157]. Ibid., 195.
[158]. Reno, Ordinary Transformed, 99–100. On Aristotelian premises, one must be one substance or another, but cannot be two at once. If Scheeben maintained his Aristotelianism and posited the human as a natural being, he would lose the supernatural; if man is a supernatural being, then nature would be absorbed and lost. Yet Scheeben wants to maintain both nature and supernature—what Reno calls an “amphibious” or “mixed” existence—and to do that he breaks out of the substance metaphysics at crucial points. Adoption thus involves a substantial change in the adopted sinner, but Scheeben roots this substantial change, against all Aristotelianism, in a “juridical act” that “preceded and created the new substance.”
[159]. Scheeben, Nature and Grace, 330.
[160]. Henri de Lubac, Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace, trans. Richard Arnandez (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1984), 33.
[161]. In his Dogmatik and other writings, Scheeben develops his christologically based “connubial” theology that highlights a marital union of God and humanity, Christ and Mary, the two natures of Christ. Out of these marriages emerges the marriage of grace and nature, of reason and faith, of body and spirit, of philosophy and theology. Nature, Scheeben claims, must be “in-formed” by grace, and, typically, Scheeben describes this in-formation as a kind of begetting, an implantation of divine seed in the womb of nature, which alone enables nature to be fruitfully energized. This christological center also marries the pure nature and supernature that Scheeben breaks apart in his earlier work. He recovers the patristic notion of the divine nature as an “information” of the human nature in Christ. According to Hans Urs von Balthasar (Seeing the Form, vol. 1 of The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, ed. Joseph Fessio and John Riches [San Francisco: Ignatius, 1989]), “As far as Christ’s human nature is concerned, this means that its ‘natural’ reality has a wholly ‘supernatural’ foundation. And for Christ’s total person the reverse holds: the supernatural miracle of two natures constituting one person is ‘natural’ in the sense that in this union all nature’s organic, moral, and matrimonial relationships find their highest form and fulfillment and indeed their ultimate ground.” For Balthasar, Scheeben ends with a “total healing of the sharp fracture with which Scheeben’s theology had begun” (114).
[162]. De Lubac, Brief Catechesis, 34–35.
[163]. Henri de Lubac, Augustinianism and Modern Theology, trans. Lancelot Sheppard (New York: Herder & Herder, 2000); The Mystery of the Supernatural, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Herder & Herder, 1967).
[164]. Matthew Levering points out that the issue is complicated by the fact that Thomas writes differently about these issues in different places in his vast writings. “Later interpreters have had trouble interpreting him on this point not due to ill-will or rationalism, but because of the divergence in what he says at various places” (personal communication, February 17, 2010).
[165]. Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles 3.57, quoted in de Lubac, Mystery of the Supernatural, 11.
[166]. Scheeben, Nature and Grace, 57.
[167]. Quoted in Reno, Ordinary Transformed, 117n55.
[168]. Ibid., 69.
[169]. Ibid., 69–70.
[170]. Ibid., 77.
[171]. Ibid., 42. De Lubac does concede that the terminology of natural/supernatural is not the most felicitous language to capture God’s self-gift in Christ. Quoting Vahanian, he writes, “One can certainly say that, just as the word nature ‘fails to indicate clearly the logic of freedom, so too the word supernatural does not fully express the reality of the communication that God makes of himself in Jesus Christ.’ These words, therefore, do not suffice to express the ‘personal and historic relationship’ in which ‘the Christian mystery’ consists.” Yet he believes that “there would be more than one difficulty in trying to eliminate their use completely” (Brief Catechesis, 40).
[172]. Ibid., 42.
[173]. Ibid., 52, quoting Medina.
[174]. Ibid., 61.
[175]. Henri de Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1988), 313–14. Thanks to my student Brad Littlejohn for pointing me to this reference.
[176]. De Lubac, Mystery of the Supernatural, 239–40.
[177]. Ibid., 105.
[178]. Anatolios, Coherence, 55.
[179]. See chapter 5.
[180]. See the superb summary in Anatolios, Coherence, 130–33, and Anatolios, Athanasius, 64–66.
[181]. De Lubac, Brief Catechesis, 49.
[182]. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 224. More fully, in neither Rahner’s description of the supernatural existential nor in his account of the natural Vorgriff “does self-transcendence denote the encounter with a concrete, recognizable other. Rather, in both cases the ‘intrinsic’ experimental side is reducible to a self-striving conatus away from finite limitations, while the infinite object sought for—esse, which the supernatural existential identifies as God—is still extrinsically separate as a ‘formal object.’ Our ‘entitative raising,’ insofar as it is a meeting with God, still appears to be something externally and authoritatively confirmed by the arbitrary fiat of a positive revelation” (224).
[183]. De Lubac, Brief Catechesis, 140.
[184]. Ibid., 83, 119–20.
[185]. David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 196.
[186]. Karl Rahner, Nature and Grace: Dilemmas in the Modern Church (Lanham, MD: Sheed and Ward, 1964), 136–37. It is the “definition” of created spirit that it cannot be “‘defined,’ i.e., ‘confined,’ like sub-human beings.”
[187]. De Lubac concedes that the terminology of “nature” and “supernatural” may not be the best way to express the content of Catholic theology, and he points to Paul’s distinction between “soulish” and “spiritual” existence as a biblical equivalent (Brief Catechesis, 27).
Chapter 5. Middle: God for Us
[188]. The latter position is briefly defended in T. D. Barnes, Athanasius and Constantius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 12–13. See also Jon M. Robertson, Christ as Mediator: A Study of the Theologies of Eusebius of Caesarea, Marcellus of Ancyra and Athanasius of Alexandria, Oxford Theological Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 139n3, for the view that the treatise was written during Athanasius’s first exile, around 336.
[189]. Written as a companion piece to the apologetic Against the Pagans, it is part of Athanasius’s defense of the rationality of the cross.
[190]. Throughout this chapter I use the anonymous translation of On the Incarnation, rev. ed. (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996).
[191]. I examine the role of the Word in preserving the original creation from corruption in the previous chapter.
[192]. That is, there is no “tension,” as sometimes popularly thought, between God’s justice and mercy. Such a tension is impossible in any case. Given the assumption that God is simple, his attributes are all identical to his essence, and each attribute is therefore ultimately identical to every other attribute. We must speak of this in qualified terms: God’s mercy is just, his justice merciful. For God, there are not two things mutually qualifying each other, but only God the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, who is wholly just-merciful, just as he is wholly good, holy, love. Athanasius locates the tension not among God’s attributes but within the apparently irresolvable commitments that he has made to creation: the threat to punish sin, which cannot be empty, and the resolve to preserve his creatures.
[193]. This runs contrary to a thread of popular evangelical and Reformed piety and theology. In stressing the gratuity of God’s grace, it is often said that, after Adam’s sin, “God could have condemned the entire human race to eternal hell. That would have been a proper display of His justice.” Heinrich Heppe states this position succinctly: “After man had impaired the covenant entered into with God [in Eden], it was in God’s power to punish him immediately with eternal damnation” (Reformed Dogmatics: Set Out and Illustrated from the Sources, rev. ed. [London: Allen & Unwin, 1950], 371). Athanasius takes the question back to creation: God showed a commitment to creation by the sheer fact of creating, and it would be unworthy of God’s goodness and faithfulness for him to take back that commitment.
[194]. Athanasius almost invariably links the incarnation to sin, as God’s faithful response to the destruction wreaked by Adam’s fall and the evils of his descendants. Yet much of the machinery is in place for the view later developed that the incarnation would have occurred without sin. First, Athanasius insists that human beings, while made sinless and good, are yet liable to corruption, and thus not perfected. If the human race is to be stable in its reception of God’s gifts, to remain (menein) in God’s love, it must be delivered from created corruption to incorruption. Second, Athanasius everywhere insists that only God is unchangeably himself. Creatures, which originate from nothing and are “in transit,” cannot be stable without divine help. Third, the only path that Athanasius leaves open for human beings to rise from corruptibility to incorruption, from instability to stability, from changeability and liability to fall into a state of impeccability, is through union with the stable, incorruptible, unchangeable, sinless God. Within Athanasius’s system, it is hard to see how this stability and incorruption could be communicated to human beings extrinsically, from “outside.” The grace of human perfection, even in a sinless world, must come to man through God’s union with flesh, so that the grace that perfects human creatures can become intrinsic to humanity. Therefore, even in a sinless world, Adam and his children would have reached perfection through the incarnation of the Word.
[195]. Christopher Stead states that “the great majority of scholars now agree that the two books against Apollinaris are not from his hand” (“The Scriptures and the Soul of Christ in Athanasius,” Vigiliae Christianae [1982]: 233–50). On the authenticity of the treatise, see George Dion Dragas, Saint Athanasius of Alexandria: Original Research and New Perspectives (Rollinsford, NH: Orthodox Research Institute, 2005), chap. 5, as well as an analysis of Dragas’s position in Stead, “Review of St. Athanasius contra Apollinarem, by George Dion Dragas,” 250–53. See also John R. Meyer, “Athanasius’s Use of Paul in His Doctrine of Salvation,” Vigiliae Christianae 52, no. 2 (1998): 152–59. Arius is commonly charged with being an Apollinarian himself, but see the contrary view of William P. Haugaard, “Arius: Twice a Heretic? Arius and the Human Soul of Jesus Christ,” Church History 29, no. 3 (1960): 251–63. Grillmeier takes the comparative absence of attention to the human soul of Christ as evidence for a Word-flesh model in Athanasius’s Christology; he argues that the human soul of Jesus plays no theological role in Athanasius and that this is the key point of his Christology (Aloys Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, vol. 1, From the Apostolic Age to Chalcedon (451), trans. John Bowden, 2nd ed. [Atlanta: John Knox, 1975], 308). The treatises against Apollinaris address a number of issues: there is a polemic against those who consider the flesh of the incarnate Son to be as uncreated as the Word himself, and an insistence that the flesh of Jesus suffered, accompanied by the equally strong insistence that he did not suffer in his divine nature. The writer offers several arguments supporting belief in Jesus’s human soul: he has to be soul in order to share our life and death; without a soul, his death is not the same as our death; if the soul is not renewed by union with the Word, then it can only be saved by “imitation.” This last point highlights the inner connection between Arian Christology and Pelagian soteriology. For the texts, see Later Treatises of St. Athanasius (Oxford: James Parker, 1881), available in full at Google Books.
[196]. Grillmeier argues that this text does not mean what it appears to mean, but his argument depends on a tendentious reading of the passage (Christ in Christian Tradition, 318–26).
[197]. Khaled Anatolios, Athanasius: The Coherence of His Thought (London: Routledge, 1998), 73.
[198]. J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (San Francisco: Harper, 1960).
[199]. See also Gen. 2:19; 9:4–5, 10, 12, 15–16. Later in Genesis, nephesh is used to describe human persons (12:5, 13) and eventually something closer to the soul as the seat of thought, desire, and intention (e.g., 23:8; 27:4).
[200]. Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, 315.
[201]. Grillmeier (ibid., 317) claims that the term organon summarizes the whole of Athanasius’s Alexandrian “word-flesh” Christology.
[202]. R. P. C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy, 318–381 (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1988), 448. Grillmeier makes a similar claim, with particular emphasis on the supposed absence of a human soul in Christ: “Athanasius displays a general tendency to weaken the character of certain of Christ’s inner experiences which might be attributed to a human soul so as to dissociate the Logos from them from the start. Thus Christ’s anguish was only ‘feigned,’ and not real anguish; his ignorance was no real ignorance, but only an ignorantia de jure, which was proper to the human nature from the start. Not only does such a qualification relieve the pressure on the Logos itself, but it also raises the possibility of representing the sarx of Christ as the subject of such affections as we should properly ascribe to the soul. As a result, we have Athanasius’s remarkable procedure of making the ‘flesh’ of Christ the physical subject of experiences which normally have their place in the soul” (Christ in Christian Tradition, 315). For a sharp refutation of Grillmeier, see Anatolios, Coherence, 70–73.
[203]. T. F. Torrance, “The Hermeneutics of Saint Athanasius (Part 3),” Ekklesiastikos Pharos 52, no. 4 (1970): 238, claims that Athanasius was combating the dualism of Christ and his works that he inherited from the Alexandrian tradition. See similar points made by Frances Young in “A Reconsideration of Alexandrian Christology,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 22, no. 2 (1971): 113; and Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002), 44.
[204]. So Anatolios, Coherence, 140. Anatolios argues that the center of Athanasius’s Christology is the fact that humanity, in its complete range of experience, is predicated of the Word because the Word has appropriated it.
[205]. This is central to Robertson’s entire argument in Christ as Mediator, but see the summary on 213–14.
[206]. The discussion in this paragraph depends on ibid., esp. 206.
[207]. Anatolios, Coherence, 146.
[208]. John Behr, Formation of Christian Theology, vol. 2, The Nicene Faith, Part 1 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004), 186. As Behr goes on to note, this also undercuts the “blood transfusion” interpretations of Athanasius. If “incarnation” means simply the Word becoming flesh, then Athanasius’s claim that we are saved through the incarnation sounds like a claim that we are saved by an infusion of divine stuff into a corruptible world. But if “incarnation” includes the life, death, and resurrection of the enfleshed Word, then Athanasius is saying that we are turned from death through the work of the Word, not merely by the presence of the Word.
[209]. Young, Biblical Exegesis, 44.
[210]. Khaled Anatolios, Athanasius, The Early Church Fathers (London: Routledge, 2004), 141, makes the same point. See also Robertson, Christ as Mediator, 145, citing Andrew Louth.
[211]. See Alvyn Petterson, Athanasius (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1995), 66: “Ignoring God is to God’s dishonor insofar as people who properly were created to live not only through God but for God now no longer live to God’s glory; but it is to their ruin. What then looks like God’s jealousy for himself is in fact God’s jealousy for humanity’s godly well-being.”
[212]. Arius, at least, did not teach this view. As noted in chapter 1, Arius himself believed that the Son, though a creature, was endowed from the beginning of his existence with all the perfections that a creature is capable of possessing. His glorification is thus not an advance from a low position. Yet Athanasius’s attack, though strictly inaccurate, is responding to Arian language and its use of Scripture. The Arians, after all, did use texts like Phil. 2 to rebut the orthodox claim that the Son was always with the Father and always shared full deity with the Father.
[213]. For my discussion of Hegel, I am indebted to Anselm K. Min, “The Trinity and the Incarnation: Hegel and Classical Approaches,” Journal of Religion 66, no. 2 (1986): 173–93. See also William Desmond, Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double? (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994).
[214]. Min, “Trinity and the Incarnation,” 184.
[215]. Ibid.; translated from Hegel, Die absolute Religion (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1966), 91.
[216]. Ibid.
[217]. Ibid.
[218]. Ibid., 186. Though Hegel is using the language of traditional trinitarian theology, his views are finally closer to Plotinus, who posits an original “One” who proliferates into multiples that are then reabsorbed by the One. Hegel’s main difference with Plotinus lies in his conception of “sublation,” according to which the Other or others are not simply reabsorbed but reabsorbed into the One without losing their otherness.
[219]. Ibid., 189.
[220]. Hegel, Die absolute Religion, 190.
[221]. Min (quoting from Hegel), “Trinity and the Incarnation,” 190.
[222]. Ibid., 191.
[223]. Ibid.
[224]. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 476.
[225]. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Lectures of 1827 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 468.
[226]. Richard Bauckham, “Jürgen Moltmann,” in The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology since 1918, ed. David Ford and Rachel Muers (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 153.
[227]. Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1993), xvi.
[228]. Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1993), 324.
[229]. Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, The Trinity: Global Perspectives (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 2007).
[230]. Ibid., 109.
[231]. Moltmann, Trinity and the Kingdom, 173.
[232]. Ibid., 174.
[233]. Moltmann, Crucified God, 222.
[234]. Moltmann, Trinity and the Kingdom, 106.
[235]. Ibid., 109.
[236]. Bauckham, “Jürgen Moltmann,” 215.
[237]. We might put it this way: God is the same God eternally. He is eternally the God who responds to my anguish at time X and to my elation at time Y. From all eternity, he is the God who responds to my frustrations and worry about a writing deadline at 9:39 on December 22, 2009, and he is the God who will respond, as the eternal God, to my elation once this writing project is safety to bed several weeks later. He is unchangeably the God who went to the cross on Good Friday, unchangeably the God who brought the Son from the grave by the Spirit three days later. I am indebted to my friend David Field for his formulation and for several very helpful conversations on these points. The particular illustration is, I admit, slightly autobiographical.
[238]. Robert Jenson, “Ipse Pater Non Est Impassibilis,” in Divine Impassibility and the Mystery of Human Suffering, ed. James F. Keating and Thomas Joseph White (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 119.
[239]. Ibid., 120.
[240]. Ibid., 124.
[241]. Behr, Nicene Faith, 227. See the similar analysis of Anatolios, Coherence, 152, 155.
[242]. Ibid., 228.
[243]. Robertson, Christ as Mediator, 209.
[244]. Anatolios, Athanasius, 80.
[245]. Behr, Nicene Faith, 227.
[246]. Anatolios, Coherence, 134.
Chapter 6. End: God Made Man, Man Made God
[247]. Athanasius writes of predestination only in this brief section of the second of his Discourses, and despite the inherent interest of this evidence of a pre-Augustinian and Eastern (!) theology of predestination, little has been written on the subject as it pertains to Athanasius. See F. Stuart Clarke, “Lost and Found: Athanasius’s Doctrine of Predestination,” Scottish Journal of Theology 29, no. 5 (1976): 435–50. Clarke calls attention to Barth’s quotation of the passage in The Doctrine of God, vol. 2 of Church Dogmatics, trans. G. W. Bromiley et al. (London: T&T Clark, 1957), 108–9. Clarke argues that much of the Augustinian tradition is quasi-Arian on predestination, since it does not consider that the Son is a full participant in the act of election and is the “foundation” of the Father’s choice. Instead, the Father is conceived of making a choice “secretly,” and the Son is seen as the agent who carries out the decree. This is a mischaracterization of the best of the tradition, however. For the Reformed tradition in particular, see Richard Muller, Christ and the Decree: Christology and Predestination in Reformed Theology from Calvin to Perkins (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008).
[248]. Khaled Anatolios, Athanasius: The Coherence of His Thought (London: Routledge, 1998), 138, notes that human beings are in the Father through the work of the Spirit.
[249]. Virginia Burrus, Begotten, Not Made: Conceiving Manhood in Late Antiquity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 42.
[250]. Throughout this chapter, I use the anonymous translation of On the Incarnation published by St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press (rev. ed., 1996).
[251]. For intriguing reflections on Athanasius’s notion of the cross as payment of a debt, see M. C. Steenberg, Of God and Man: Theology as Anthropology from Irenaeus to Athanasius (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 177, 182–83. The debt, Steenberg argues, is to the natural order itself; because of the corruptibility of created nature, all are “due to die,” all owe a death. There is a double payment in the cross: All human death is consummated by the death of the Son; he brings to a climax the history of death that is the history of our race. At the same time, the Son pays that debt, but because he pays it with the very flesh of the Word of God, he pays for all. The obligation of death is discharged and overcome.
[252]. Festal Letter 5.1, quoted in David Brakke, Athanasius and Asceticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 192.
[253]. In several places, Athanasius draws the line between Creator and creature as a contrast between nature and mimesis: “The Word has the real and true identity of nature with the Father, but to us it is given to imitate it” (Discourses 3.22; cf. Discourses 3.19). Thus his Christology and trinitarian theology form the foundation of his ethical exhortations and practice.
[254]. The entire discussion here is indebted to Brakke, Athanasius and Asceticism. Brakke convincingly argues that Athanasius’s revisions of Alexandrian spirituality were part of a “political” program to build and strengthen the church in Alexandria and throughout Egypt. The strategy was two-pronged: Athanasius maintained sharp boundaries between orthodox and heretical bodies (Arian or Melitian), and he worked to unify the various subgroups within Egyptian Christianity (ascetics like the solitaries, monks, and virgins, on the one hand, and common Christians, on the other). On the one hand, he enlisted the support of ascetics against heresy (see the excoriating speech of Antony against the Arians in Life of Antony) and presented ascetic practices as a model that Christians might emulate; on the other hand, he did not believe every Christian should be an ascetic and thus articulated a moderated asceticism for the married, working Christians of the city.
[255]. Brakke, Athanasius and Asceticism, 181.
[256]. See ibid., 171–73.
[257]. Quoted in ibid., 184. Brakke quotes from a fragment he identifies as a “Canonical Letter.” Athanasius gets the reasoning exactly backward. If the new covenant intensifies requirements for ritual purity, it is difficult to make sense of the purification of meats to which both Mark (7:14–23) and Luke (Acts 10–11) testify. The apostles do not look at the food restrictions of the Old Testament and say, “How much more . . .” Rather, the whole system of purity is transposed into a new key, so that defilement becomes not a ceremonial but a moral concern. Not marital sex but sexual immorality defiles.
[258]. I am relying on the translation of Robert Gregg, published in Athanasius, The Life of Antony (San Francisco: Harper, 2006), 16. Page references are to this edition.
[259]. Quoted in Brakke, Athanasius and Asceticism, 189.
[260]. On this epistle, see M.-J. Rondeau, “L’épître à Marcellinus sur les Psaumes,” Vigiliae Christianae 22 (1968): 176–97; Holly Taylor Coolman, “The Psalter for the Formation of Souls: How to Repent; How to Give Thanks; What One Must Say When Being Pursued,” Word and World 21, no. 3 (2001): 227–34; Paul R. Kolbet, “Athanasius, the Psalms, and the Reformation of the Self,” Harvard Theological Review 99, no. 1 (2006): 85–101. G. C. Stead, “St. Athanasius on the Psalms,” Vigiliae Christianae 39 (1985): 65–78, concludes that the Expositiones in Psalmos attributed to Athanasius is not in fact from his hand, largely based on the repeated use of the non-Athanasian phrase to prosōpon tēs anthrōpotētos, “the ‘person’ of the humanity.”
[261]. Gregg, Life of Antony, 86.
[262]. Ibid., 91, 92.
[263]. Ibid., 93.
[264]. Ibid., 94, 95.
[265]. Ibid., 112.
[266]. Brakke, Athanasius and Asceticism, 167, quoted in Kolbet, “Athanasius, Psalms,” 94. See also Rondeau, “L’épître à Marcellinus,” 188.
[267]. Gregg, Life of Antony, 112.
[268]. Brakke, Athanasius and Asceticism, 159. The texts cited in the discussion here are drawn from this work, 159n78.
[269]. The Greek title of the Vita Antonii includes the term politeia: “Bios kai politeia tou hosiou patros hēmon Antōniou.”
[270]. Anatolios, Coherence, 29; John Behr, Formation of Christian Theology, vol. 2, The Nicene Faith, Part 1 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004), 171.
Epilogue
[271]. “Worded” is Anatolios’s translation. See Athanasius: The Coherence of His Thought (London: Routledge, 1998), 142–43.