Chapter 12: Conclusion
12
Conclusion
Athanasius was bishop or patriarch of Alexandria for nearly half a century—forty-six years, to be exact. His episcopacy was incredibly productive from the standpoint of his influence and leadership in church and society. His prodigious literary output bequeathed the Christian church a wonderful legacy of theological and pastoral reflection. Athanasius’s exemplary service and theological acumen are all the more amazing when one recalls that more than seventeen years of his episcopate were spent in exile.
Regarding his personal character, we have found him to be a person of deep faith, stubborn and intransigent when it came to diverting from the truth (as he saw it). He seemed incapable of compromise, whereas lesser men and women all too willingly compromised theological clarity in order to save their ecclesiastical positions—if not also their lives. His willingness to speak truth to power, even to the Roman emperor, evidenced that same divine greatness that came to fruition in the Old Testament prophets. There was a passion for truth and a holy determination in him that allowed him to reach above what was then normally anticipated from a person of his race and station to rise to true greatness in terms of service and leadership. Deeply nurtured by his lifelong study of the Scriptures, Athanasius became an expert commentator and expounder of the Holy Book. His facility in biblical interpretation was evidenced as clearly in his polemical Orations Against the Arians as it was in his pastoral Festal Letters and Letter to Marcellinus. He was a man who loved the vistas provided by the Word of God and effectively communicated that luminous vision to others.
Someone has said that the impact of our work can sometimes be judged by the loyalty of our opposition, and to some degree that seems true of Athanasius. He had very able and dedicated opponents who seemed determined to stop at nothing to silence and remove him, and perhaps eventually cause his death. They vilified him with charges and countercharges that ranged from the absolutely incredible (such as murder and sorcery) to plausible outbreaks of violence leading to sacrilege. Were their charges against him based in fact? We have difficulty in knowing for certain from the distance of so many years. We do know that charges of abusing his authority and countenancing violence were so widely whispered that they were even reported by the secular Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus. Yet, the historical judgment of Adolf von Harnack seems more balanced than some of Athanasius’s critics (be they classical or contemporary): “If we measure him by the standards of his time, we can discern nothing ignoble or weak about him.”640 We also know that within a decade of his death, Athanasius had already earned the epithet “great”—bestowed by Gregory Nazianzen.
We have spoken of Athanasius’s theological triumph over the various other theologies of the fourth century as the victory of the Nicene Creed and its theology. And that has been a convenient way of summarizing his complicated theological perspective. We have read aspects of his theology, piecemeal, as we marched through the chronology of Athanasius’s life and works. While this is not the place to mount a full-scale summary of his remarkable theology,641 it is time to ask the more foundational question: “So what?” What difference does all this really make for the twenty-first-century Christian?
Like many contemporary readers, Athanasius sought to make serious and concerted reply to Jesus’s questions from the synoptic tradition: “Who do people say that I am? . . . Who do you say that I am?” (Mark 8:27, 29). This remains one of the central questions, if not the central question, of Christian faith. And by insisting upon the full humanity and full divinity of Jesus Christ, Athanasius urged that the Second Person of the holy Trinity was made soteriologically accessible to humanity through the mystery of the Incarnation. His dictum that Christ “became what we are to make us what He is” remains as an exemplary statement of the rationale for the Incarnation. Indeed, it remains difficult to reflect fruitfully upon the Incarnation of Christ without wittingly or unwittingly reflecting Athanasius’s earlier discourses upon the subject.
Athanasius realized that the theological struggle of the fourth century, which was largely played out and described as a controversy over Arianism, was really about the fundamental nature of the Christian God. He recognized that Arius’s Thalia—for all its supposed elegance and “singability”—was really an ode to an alien God. Where Arius’s God was viewed from the standpoint of Divine power and dominion over all things, Athanasius realized that the uniqueness of the Christian understanding of God was based on Divine self-giving and bestowal of Oneself upon others. The Christian God that Athanasius has bequeathed to us is a God who dwells in communion—a Trinitarian communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is also a God who takes expression in an incarnational communion with human beings through the sending of God’s Son into the world (John 3:16). His is a God who takes upon Himself weakness and suffering to alleviate sin and suffering in the world. In order to reconcile God and humanity, this means that, in the phraseology of the Nicene Creed, the Son must also be “very God of very God” and truly human. Hence, describing the relationship between the Father and the Son became a question of paramount importance, because that description added tremendous shape and texture to our understanding of the Divine nature as well as God’s redemptive involvement with the world. Hence, the soteriological and incarnational vision that he had established in his early work On the Incarnation of the Word of God formed the foundation of his later thought, and it remained constant throughout his life work. Even in his polemical anti-Arian writings Athanasius linked the Incarnation of the Word and the redemption of humanity with inseparable bonds.
To use the philosophical language of Alexandria, Arius’s God is more of a “monad” than a “triad”; his is a case of radical monotheism, which did not allow for the full deity of the Son of God and made little or no mention of the Divine Spirit. As One created by the Father, before all time (Prov 8:22), Arius’s Christ is a demigod, at best, and a creature at least. This fact completely changes the relationship between the Father and the Son, from one of mutuality and shared Divine identity to one of hierarchy, dominion and power. If the Father is greater than and different from the Son and sends the Son into the world, then it is not the same as God coming Himself; it is more like God sending someone else to do God’s work in the world. This is not a depiction of the Self-sending God of the New Testament. And this completely misunderstands, in Athanasius’s view, the true nature and the unique identity of the Christian God.
In Athanasius’s view, his fourth-century opponents also completely misunderstood the human dilemma and its Divine solution. The human dilemma is sin and disobedience, and so humanity needs a Savior, and not merely a Teacher or an Example to follow. This Savior, as Athanasius said powerfully, must share the bodily nature that we bear in order to be an adequate substitute for us on the cross of death. In dying for us, the Son covered our sin and destroyed our death. This was God’s own doing; it was a painful, suffering-filled Divine solution to the problem faced by our race and our world. It was only as the God-Man that Jesus Christ could be the saving substitute for sinful humanity. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14)—this means that in misunderstanding both God and Christ, Athanasius’s fourth-century opponents also misunderstood Christian salvation. For them salvation meant leading a moral life, being committed to God as Jesus Christ was. One’s salvation was both learned and earned. But for Athanasius the key to Christian salvation was that “He became what we are to make us what He is.” By faith and by the work of the Holy Spirit, Christ not only covers human sin but also recovers the Divine Image (Gen 1:26) in which all humans were created. Hence, God becomes incarnate to transform Christians and allow them to become “partakers of the Divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4). Salvation is more than moral behavior; it is even more than having one’s sins covered by saving faith in Christ and His cross; salvation is nothing less than having the Divine nature (image of God) restored within humans, so that we are “in Christ” and “Christ is in us,” and we become “new creatures” (2 Cor 5:17) from the inside out.
Athanasius’s reflections on the nature and person of the Holy Spirit were also integral to this process. These were reported in his Letters to Serapion and drew the Person of the Holy Spirit fruitfully into the theological conversations of the fourth-century church. In his insistence upon the full Deity, full equality, and full eternality of the Holy Spirit—along with the Father and the Son—he both prefigured and paved the way for the Trinitarian theology of the Council of Constantinople (381), which added the “Holy Spirit” clause to the Nicene Creed.
It was this Trinitarian vision of God, this incarnational, self-giving understanding of the Object of Christian faith, and the Incarnation of the God-Man, as well as this transformational understanding of Christian salvation, that Athanasius was fighting for in the fourth century. And it is my humble opinion that we should thank God for his persistence and perseverance in lauding this brilliantly biblical theological vision. By holding forth this Trinitarian, incarnational, Self-giving, transformational understanding of Christian faith, Athanasius established a theological legacy that was crucial in the fourth century and remains pertinent even down into our own times. For this reason, I join Gregory Nazianzen in calling Athanasius “great”—and I hope my readers will join him as well.
640. Harnack, History of Dogma, 3:62.
641. For readable and helpful summaries of Athanasius’s theological vision, see the following works: Anatolios, Athanasius: The Coherence of His Thought; McGill, Suffering: A Test of Theological Method; Pelikan, The Light of the World; and Weinandy, Athanasius: A Theological Introduction.