Dissident Dispatches

by Andrew Fraser

  Conclusion

  It seems, therefore, that the dichotomy posited by Dodd between the realized eschatology of the Gospel of John and the futurist eschatology of Revelation has always been a rather contrived red herring. Already in the Prologue to the Gospel of John one finds a cosmology that “was dynamic, teleological and eschatological rather than static and ideal”. According to John Painter, the use throughout John’s Gospel of dualistic language sharply separating light from darkness, death from life, and heaven above from earth below necessarily “implies a dynamic teleology/eschatology”. The “Prologue itself shows that the reception of the incarnate λόγος [logos] was only partial. He was received only by a minority, 1.10–13. Thus the pervasive darkness remains even if his coming has enabled a minority to break free of the darkness”. A future eschatological judgement that will overthrow the powers of darkness is not mentioned in the Prologue but “sits quite comfortably in relation to it and is demanded to resolve the problem of the prevailing darkness”. Painter notes that “Jesus’ language about ‘coming again’ (14.1–4)…should not be dissolved into the coming of the Spirit”.483 Dodd, of course, did just that. He also downplayed the apocalyptic significance of John 5:27–29 in which Jesus declares that “a time is coming and has now come” in which the resurrection of the dead and the final judgement will accompany the parousia of the Son of God.484 Clearly, Revelation 22:20 simply re-affirms that covenantal promise of an imminent apocalypse when Jesus says, “Yes, I am coming soon”.

  The question left unresolved here is: Why is neither the theological academy nor mainstream Protestantism willing to give a sober and respectful hearing to those who advocate covenant eschatology in a conscientious and scholarly manner? The short answer is that considerations of partisan, institutional, and ethnic interest have been mobilized in order to stigmatize proponents of covenant eschatology. Many persons of standing in churches and theological seminaries charge preterists with heresy out of an exaggerated respect for creedal orthodoxy. Others make even more toxic accusations of the worst possible offence against political correctness: anti-Semitism.485 The inevitable consequence has been to confine contemporary Christian thought within limits prescribed by those with a vested interest in the doctrinal status quo.

  To put it bluntly, the current state of mainstream theological discourse on eschatology in the Johannine literature is a scandal. Biblically defensible critiques of the still-future eschatology of creeds and confessions which themselves do not (and cannot) claim to be the infallible Word of God are placed beyond the pale.486 Such a persistent pattern of arrogant indifference and active intolerance towards conscientious dissenters should shame those who confess the Christian faith for a living, whether in church or in academe.

  10: How Does Jesus Save According to Athanasius?

  Introduction

  “Jesus saves”! That once-ubiquitous slogan is still a staple of evangelical Christian rhetoric. Its meaning, however, is far from self-evident. Most people probably take it as a promise that, if they put their faith in Jesus, their sins will be forgiven and they will go to heaven when they die. Such an interpretation emphasizes a personal experience of communion with God in a spiritual realm far removed from earthly cares and concerns. A much more communitarian, this-worldly, explanation of how Jesus saves can be found in the ancient “theological anthropology” of Athanasius of Alexandria (296–373 AD).487 While deeply conscious of the need for every individual Christian to live “a life of strenuous effort, renunciation, and voluntary self-control,” Athanasius was convinced that the incarnation of God as the man Jesus Christ entailed the re-creation of mankind at large.488

  In short, Jesus “was incarnate that we might be made god”. He “endured the insults of human beings, that we might inherit incorruptibility”.489 In effect, the incarnation produced an ontological change in the nature of mankind. “To be a Christian,” according to Athanasius, “is to be joined in the Spirit to the flesh appropriated by the Son of God”. He recognized “that the end point of the incarnation and redemption accomplished by Christ is the formation of a community”. He did not conceive salvation as an invisible event confined to the inner life of individuals; he understood the Christian life as an ongoing public process of “deification” (or “divinization”). The reality described by Athanasius as “deification” or “making God” (theopoiēsis) was visibly re-shaping the cultural life of countless communities throughout the known inhabited world of his own day. Christians engaged “in their deifying disciplines together — together…being molded according to the pattern of the Word through study of the Word”.490 The old mankind steeped in sin and corruption was dead; a new, divinized, race (Greek: ethnos, genos, laos; Latin: genus, nation) of Christians had come to life in the here and now.491

  Death in Corruption

  Deification enables mankind to defeat death through participation in the life of the risen Christ. But only if the Son of God were truly divine can “humankind’s salvation be ensured. The one in whose image humankind was created must be the same one in whom humankind is recreated”.492 Athanasius drew on Scripture to establish that God “made all things through his own Word, our Lord Jesus Christ”. He invoked the authority of the apostle Paul in citing Hebrews 11:3 to establish that “the worlds were framed by the Word of God, so that what is seen is not made out of things that appear”. Clearly, it was fitting that the recreation of the world be “accomplished by the Word who created it in the beginning”. It was more difficult for Athanasius to explain why the Word of God “appeared to us in a human body for our salvation”.493 After all, even if one acknowledges the divinity of Jesus Christ it does not follow that he was bound to become a man in order to “save” mankind. And from what was Jesus saving mankind? Athanasius’ answer to that question is twofold: death and ignorance.

  The salvific work of Christ was God’s response to the double-edged dilemma inherent in the creation of mankind in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). Men were given “a share of the power of his own Word, so that having as it were shadows and being made rational, they might be able to abide in blessedness”. But God knew that “the free choice of human beings could turn either” towards the good — in which case “they might have the life of paradise” — or towards wickedness. In case of transgression, men would “no longer live in paradise, but thereafter dying outside of it, would remain in death and in corruption” (cf. Genesis 2:16–18). Athanasius is concerned not just with the physical death experienced by every human being, good or bad, but to the spiritual corruption, or sin-death. He contends that transgression of God’s commandment plunged mankind into the state of nature inhabited by irrational creatures who have never known God. “Thus, then, God created the human being and willed that he should abide in incorruptibility”. Man was created in the image of God but human beings “so turned away from God and so darkened their own soul, that they not only forgot the concept of God but also fashioned for themselves others instead”. They worshipped “the creation rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:25).494

  By honouring things which do not exist men rejected the ontological foundation of their own existence. In other words, “when human beings were bereft of the knowledge of God and turned to things which exist not — evil is non-being, the good is being, since it has come into being from the existing God — then they were bereft also of eternal being”. Men received “the previously threatened condemnation of death” when they “despised and overturned the comprehension of God, devising and contriving evil for themselves”. The history of mankind from creation to the incarnation was a story of continuing “corruption unto non-being”.495

  Men “transferred the honor due to God to wood and stones and every material object”. With the growth of “impiety and lawlessness…neither God, nor his Word, was recognized, even though he had not hidden himself invisibly from human beings”. On the contrary, as “the negligence of human beings descended gradually to lower things,” God sent the law
and the prophets so that “they might have instruction from those close by”. Athanasius pointedly observes that “the law was not only for the Jews, nor on their account only were the prophets sent: they were sent to the Jews and persecuted by the Jews, but they were for the whole inhabited world a sacred school of the knowledge of God and the conduct of the soul”. But men refused to “raise their gaze to the truth, but sated themselves even more with evils and sins”. Although human beings were made to live in communion with God, all the nations of the known inhabited world fell into a state of sin-death, or non-being, “so that they no longer appeared rational, but from their ways of life were reckoned irrational”. What, then, “was God to do”?496

  Life in Christ

  It was open to God to “[b]e silent before such things and let human beings be deceived by the demons and be ignorant of God”…But then what need was there in the beginning for human beings to come into being in the image of God”? Athanasius answered that even an earthly king “does not permit the lands established under him to pass to and serve others, nor does he abandon them to others”. God will simply not “allow his own creatures” to “led astray from him and serve things that do not exist”. To ensure that “those who had once partaken of the image of God” should not be destroyed, God needed “to renew again the ‘in the image,’ so that through it human beings would be able once again to know him[.] But how could this have occurred except by the coming of the very image of God, our Savior Jesus Christ”?497

  One might suppose that the grace of being born a rational “being in the image was sufficient to know the God Word, and through him the Father”. But men had rejected the contemplation of God, “seeking God in creation [genesis] and things perceptible, setting up for themselves mortal humans and demons as gods”. It was for this reason that “the lover of human beings and the common Savior of all, takes to himself a body and dwells as human among humans and draws to himself the perceptible senses of all human beings”. The Word became flesh “so that those who think that God is in things corporeal might, from what the Lord wrought through the actions of the body, know the truth and through him might consider the Father”.498

  The God Word was “both born and appeared as a human being, and died, and rose again, dulling and overshadowing by his own works those of all human being who ever existed, so that from wherever human beings were predisposed, from there he might raise them and teach them of his own true Father”. He “came to save and to find that which was lost” (Luke 19:10).499 Athanasius taught that “we would not have been delivered from sin…unless it had been human flesh by nature that the Word put on…so also the man would not have been deified unless the Word who became flesh had been by nature from the Father and true and proper to him”.500 The very nature of the human body was transformed by the incarnation: “it was no longer corruptible by its own nature but because of the indwelling Word of God it became immune from corruption”. For that reason, the incarnate Son of God “offered the sacrifice on behalf of all, delivering his own temple to death in the stead of all”. He showed “himself superior to death, displaying his own body as incorruptible,” thus becoming “the first-fruits of the universal resurrection”.501

  For Athanasius, the resurrection of Jesus Christ was not simply a once-for-all event which took place in the first-century Palestine. Nor does it point only to the still-future apocalyptic end of the age. It appeared self-evident to Athanasius that Christ’s triumph over death continued to reverberate in his own life-time. Salvation history was still a work-in-progress. Indeed, even “the salvific work of the Incarnate Son” had first to “progress within his own humanity and only then, after he himself had been made perfect and so deified, are human beings, by being joined to him, able to progress themselves in the process of deification”. According to Thomas Weinandy, the Gospel of Luke (2:52) refers to this process “when it speaks of Jesus ‘advancing’. While the Son became man, he only, as man, gradually became more progressively deified and so manifested his divinity”.502 Athanasius’ “radical incarnational view of redemption” suggests that “the sanctification of the human race” was developing in a similarly progressive fashion in and through the growth of the Christian society spanning the known inhabited world. His account of the renewal or recreation of mankind suggests “that the soul is remade by some kind of actual contact with the Logos, an unmediated and direct contact with the Word of God”.503 By exploring the nature and consequences of that contact we can understand the appearance of a new race of Christians on the world-historical stage in the fourth century AD as a case study in theological anthropology. We can also begin to explain how and why the process of deification went into reverse in the novus ordo seclorum inaugurated by the American and French Revolutions.

  On the one hand, Athanasius’ account of how Jesus saves reflects a rarefied intellectual spirituality “which emphasizes the mind’s participation in God through the mediation of Christ’s own ‘mind’ or νους”.504 On the other hand, Athanasius knew that “salvation is a divine work done humanly”. He saw “the real proof of Christ’s resurrection” in “the testimony of his followers — Christians no longer cower in the face of death”. Instead, “they know that ‘Christ trod it down as dead’. Thus, the soteriological significance of Christ’s death is found in the witness of his followers”. At bottom, Athanasius was more interested in the salvific effects of the cross and resurrection— “humankind’s divinization in all its various facet” — than he was in “the cause of these effects”.505

  It was clear to Athanasius that the Saviour had destroyed death because he was “daily displaying the trophies against it in his disciples”. After all, “if one were to watch men and women and young children rushing and leaping towards death on account of their devotion to Christ, who is so silly…as not to understand and reason that it is Christ, to whom human beings are bearing witness”.506 Christ’s victory over death was manifest in the rise of the Christian politeia in late antiquity. “Athanasius used politeia frequently to encompass “both the individual Christian life and the church” as “the heavenly civic life”. He saw the “unification of the church as part of the eschatological work of the Son, the completion of the story of Israel”507 :

  For since the Savior works so many things among human beings, and daily in every place invisibly persuades such a great multitude, both from those who dwell in Greece and in the foreign lands, to turn to his faith and all to obey his teaching would anyone still have doubt in their mind whether the resurrection has been accomplished by the Savior, and whether Christ is alive, or rather is himself the Life?508

  Conclusion

  The problem for us, of course, is that neither the practice of “inner-worldly asceticism” perfected in the monastic life nor the pursuit of Christian martyrdom feature prominently in the lives of young boys and girls in the “post-Christian” West. No doubt such practices generated myths and symbols vital to the successful ethno-genesis of a new race of Christians in the ancient world. But, in the long run, they relied too heavily upon the work of the Holy Spirit to carry the burden of baptizing the emerging nations of early medieval Christendom. In the middle ages many European peoples had their own distinctive experience of divinization. In those days, it became apparent that it is not the Spirit only that bears earthly witness to the truth as Athanasius seems to suggest;509 rather “there are three that bear witness on earth: the Spirit, the water, and the blood and these three agree as one” (1 John 5:8).

  In the geopolitical context of the late Roman Empire, Athanasius’ vision of the perfect model of the resurrection life understandably privileged the deification of those who pray. But the self-sacrificial spirit of martyrs and virgins by itself cannot sustain a Christian civilization. Experience in both feudal Europe and the contemporary Western world suggests that the communitarian process of deification must incorporate as well those who fight and those who work. The blessed consequence in the Golden Age of medieval Christendom was a c
ollective way of life ordered by a Christian politeia which unified all three orders into a symphony of power and light glorifying their Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ.510

  In the present Iron Age, however, those who work and those who fight soon lost contact with both the Spirit and Christ’s living water as their historic communities were dissolved into the bloodless anonymity of a global socio-economic system. The materialistic enchantments of Mammon have been substituted for the heavenly civic life of Christian nationhood. Unfortunately, thus far at least, those who pray have greeted the accelerating de-divinization of the European peoples with little more than pious platitudes affirming that in some invisible, ineffable, and wholly unpredictable manner “Jesus saves”! The theological anthropology of Athanasius explored the close and continuing connection between salvation history and collective ways of life. Today theology is a “therapeutic” enterprise all-too-often seeking personal salvation for each and every human psyche through the power of positive thinking.511

  Postscript

  The lecturer in this course on Christology, Dr Ben Myers, awarded this essay a Distinction grade. He made the following comments:

  Parts of this essay are excellent — the comprehensive overview of Athanasius’ theology, the attempt to situate that theology within a 4th century context, etc. I also appreciate your intention to bring Athanasius’ perspective to bear on contemporary problems. But at the end it turns out to be other perspectives (with no clear connection to Athanasius) that are used. Medieval feudal orders are interesting in their own right, but you just haven’t demonstrated the connection to Athanasius or to his own Egyptian (ie non-European!) context. The key concept of a “new race” seems important for the argument of this essay, but you didn’t explain whether (and, if not, why not?) that concept is used by Athanasius.