Athanasius And The Goodness Of God

From Patheos:

Athanasius and the Goodness of God


November 10, 2010








By Daniel Harrell



At Patheos' Preachers Portal, we would like to assemble "Monday Sermons," sermons that might be of interest to pastors who are typically preaching their own sermons on Sundays. These Monday sermons, we thought, should be rich and challenging, willing to deal with the profound questions of faith, and yet also educational in a way that equips and inspires for the sermon to come in the week ahead.



Reverend Dr. Daniel Harrell preached until recently at Boston's famed Park Street Church and is now Senior Minister at The Colonial Church in Edina, Minnesota. His series preaching through the Church Fathers struck us as an excellent way to offer a sermon for pastors, a model of theological education from the pulpit, and a way to keep that seminary education fresh!



Below is his introduction to the series - Church Fathers ABCs -- and the first installment.



Introduction



For fourteen years I have preached an annual sermon series on the Church Fathers, those personalities who over the early centuries of church history fashioned our faith and codified that which we have come to embrace as orthodox Christianity. As there have been numerous noteworthy Church Fathers (and Mothers) it seemed sensible to tackle them a letter at a time.



My rationale for taking an annual peek at these people comes from my own conviction that our faith derives in no small part from the faithful personalities who've lived it and wrestled with it through crucial moments in church history. While we Protestants may not venerate these important people as saints, we cannot separate their contributions from our own doctrines and practice. We may hold to sola Scriptura (the Bible alone as source of authority), but interpreting and obeying the Bible necessarily stands on the interpretive and obedient shoulders of past believers and thinkers. Tradition is the memory of the church. And as Augustine argued, we are who we are only through our memories.



Patristic scholars will rightly note that I have exceedingly stretched the notion of "church father" beyond its proper boundaries. Technically, to be a Church Father, you had to live in the first five centuries A.D. But seeing this is a blog for Protestants (which means that our grasp of church history generally reaches back only as far as C.S. Lewis and Karl Barth), I tend to dispense with such technicalities. Enjoy.



Daniel M. Harrell, PhD



Minneapolis, Minnesota



Church Fathers Starting with the Letter A: Athanasius



Ever had something awful occur in your life just to have someone come along and say something like: "It's probably for the best" or, "something good will come out of this"? Makes you want to punch them. A college classmate of mine died years ago and his father recalled how at the hospital some folks from church came to offer comfort by encouraging him to try and find some good in his son's death. This father later wrote that he wished these friends would have simply cried with him. The truth is that life can just pretty much suck sometimes and attempts to forage for something good from those times amounts to little more than stage one denial. Yet in such times the oft-quoted passage from the book of Romans does come to mind: "We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him" (8:28). Is this true?



Athanasius definitely thought so. The Bible is clear that God is good. Working from the biblical premise and borrowing logic from Plato, Athanasius concluded that God being essentially good as well as the source of all goodness would never be envious regarding anyone. He would not deny anyone their best. God being good, Athanasius wrote, cannot "be miserly, selfish or ungenerous regarding anything nor begrudging of anyone their existence but rather would wish everyone to live." This conclusion, that a good God begrudges no one life, served as the crux of Athanasius's contention not merely that God can do you good, but that He can do nothing else.



Athanasius was born in Alexandria, Egypt around 293. The story goes that as a boy he was swimming in this river along with some of his friends when, mimicking what he'd seen done in church, Athanasius started dunking his friends under water in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. A bishop happened by and upon observing the baptismal frolic grew alarmed that young Athanasius may perchance have been using the Lord's name in vain. Calling him over, the bishop was prepared to scold him severely. However, upon examination he discovered Athanasius to be quite the precocious young lad and thoroughly orthodox. The baptisms were pronounced legitimate. Athanasius's swimming buddies must have been stunned to discover that their playful submersion had actually served as their religious consecration.



The bishop promptly whisked Athanasius off to parochial school where his preparations for the priesthood began in earnest. Athanasius grew to become one of the giants of the church primarily due to his work in defining and defending the doctrine of the Trinity over against the heresies of the 4th century. Ordained a deacon upon completion of his studies, he went to work as secretary to the bishop of Alexandria. It was from this office that he dove into the thick theological fray that culminated in the Council of Nicea in 325. At Nicea, Athanasius opposed Arius, an Alexandrian priest who advanced the doctrine known as Arianism. Arianism reduced the divinity of Christ by deducing that God could not share His divine nature with anyone else since to do so would have meant an impossible division of His person. Accordingly, Jesus Christ was a "sub-deity," the highest of all creatures, but still just that, a creature, subordinate to God the Father. Jehovah's Witnesses still hold this position. Opposing this heresy, Athanasius formulated the homoousian doctrine, still maintained, which declares that the Son of God is of the same divine substance as God the Father.




Athanasius was promoted to bishop of Alexandria around 328. The Arian controversy raged on with each side fighting to win the favor of the Roman emperor Constantine the Great. The Arian Party was influential enough to succeed in getting Athanasius kicked out of the country five times. Yet this did not deter him. Possessing a forceful and even brash personality, Athanasius railed against his adversaries extending little charity and even less wiggle room to their heretical leanings. His conviction and dogged persistence eventually led to the formulation of the Nicene Creed and a final triumph over the Arians. Athanasius labored in relative quiet for the last few years of life and died on May 2, 373.



In one of his earliest works, On the Incarnation, Athanasius delineated a second foundational theological affirmation: Christ "was made man that we might be made like God." Why? Only a man who was God could restore separated and sinful humanity to full union with God. Why was such restoration desirable? Why would God not just pitch the recalcitrant and ungrateful sorts aside? Because a God who is good begrudges no one life. It is as St. Peter wrote, "God wants no one to perish but everyone to come to repentance" (2 Pet. 3:9). The goodness of God led to His creation of all things in the first place. "Begrudging existence to no one," Athanasius wrote, God "has made all things out of nothing by His own Word, Jesus Christ our Lord."



However, being made out of nothing, creation's substance was in essence unstable -- weak and in flux. As creation rather than the Creator, it unavoidably devolved toward the nothing from whence it was formed -- a condition physicists describe as entropy. Yet because the goodness of God who begrudges no one life extends beyond mere creation to the sustaining of that creation, He intervened in order to prevent its decline. This was especially the case as it concerned humanity. Of all He had created, Athanasius wrote, God had special pity "upon the human race. Seeing that by virtue of the condition of its origin it would be unable to persist forever, God gave it an added grace, a further gift. Rather than simply creating people as He did all the irrational creatures on the earth, He made them after His own image, giving them a portion even of the power of His own Word. Having as it were a kind of reflection of the Word, and being made rational, people were made with the ability to abide forever in blessedness, living the true life which belongs to the saints in paradise."



Athanasius scholar Alvyn Pettersen notes, "Like the rest of creation being made from nothing, creaturely humanity was prevented from lapsing back into nothingness in and through the gracious providence of a good God." However, this gracious providence did not operate to negate human volition. Athanasius argues that God knew "how the human will could sway to either side." Therefore in anticipation of their fickleness, God placed people "into His own garden, and gave them a law: so that, if they kept the [added] grace and remained good, they would enjoy the life in paradise without sorrow or pain or care besides having the promise of immortality in heaven. But if they transgressed and turned back, and became evil, they would no longer live in paradise, but be cast out of it from that time forth to die and to abide in death and in corruption."



This life of paradise went beyond carefree immortality -- it included intimate community with others as well as with God. In the latter case, unfortunately, such a relationship proved problematic. It was kind of hard for created people to have much of an intimate relationship with One who is by nature invisible, incomprehensible, and uncreated. Therefore "God," Athanasius wrote, "Who has the power over all things, when He was making the human race through His own Word, seeing the weakness of their nature, that it was not capable in itself to know its Maker, nor to get any idea at all of God. . . .Taking pity, on the human race, inasmuch as He is good, God did not leave them destitute of the knowledge of Himself, lest they should find no profit in existing at all. . . . Nay, why did God make them at all, if He did not wish to be known by them?"




Athanasius asserted that God's good will is for people to delight in knowing Him and to that end He reveals Himself constantly and in many different ways. At the same time, in line with true godliness, the relationship could not be coerced but only offered to humanity's free choice. This was the risk. People may not want it. God, unwilling to deny human freedom, nevertheless accounted for its volatility by providing garden boundaries within which the free relationship might develop. Yet humanity transgressed the boundaries and opted for death and corruption. Under normal circumstances, such rejection of God should have rendered humanity hopelessly reprobate. Sinning against an infinite God is infinitely bad.



Yet God's goodness that begrudges no one life would not be compromised even here. As God's goodness is unchangeable and unlimited, it is not subject to increase or decrease in spite of how it is treated. What was God to do in the face of humanity's free choice? Athanasius posed the question rhetorically: "As the rational creatures were wasting and such works in course of ruin, what was God in His goodness to do? Allow corruption to prevail against them and death to hold them fast? If so, what was the profit of their having been made to begin with? For better were they not made, than once made, left to neglect and ruin." The incessant goodness of God, which envies no one life, was jealous for life even for the transgressor and the sinner.



Remember Athanasius's core contention: Not only can God do you good, He can do nothing else. Thus God's goodness compelled Him not to abandon people but to accommodate Himself to their incapacities, now further marred by sin. Athanasius wrote that people, "having rejected what was good . . . [were] not able to recognize God as ordering and guiding all that is. Therefore He takes to Himself . . . a human body, and unites Himself with that, in order that since men could not recognize Him [before], they should not fail to know Him [now] . . . human as they are, they would be able to know the Father more quickly and directly by a body like theirs and by the divine works wrought through it, as they considered that the works done through it were not human but God's."



Out of sheer goodness that begrudges no one life, the Creator stooped unambiguously to the level of the creature. "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us . . . " (John 1:14). God's purpose has always been the same, not to leave humanity destitute of a life-giving relationship with Him. Since God had done the stooping, humanity's inability to know Him now could not be due to faulty revelation. The problem now was faulty perception. Sin had rendered us blind. The obstacle to God's goodness magnified. Therefore, Athanasius asserted, the mission of the incarnation intensified. God's goodness begrudging no one life turned its face toward Calvary.



Why couldn't God have surmounted the obstacle of sin by divine fiat and have foregone the gore and agony of the cross? Why couldn't God simply have forgiven us as we forgive each other? If someone wrongs you, do you insist on death by crucifixion in order to atone for the transgression? I say I'm sorry; you forgive me. Surely God in His sublime goodness and by virtue of His divine nature could execute by executive order absolution of sin without sacrifice and blood? Yet Athanasius maintained that such absolution merely returned people to a pre-lapsed state, a hollow condition from whence you would simply sin again (which our experience confirms). Consequently, human history would have become no more than a sorry spiral of sin and absolution circling around and around right down the toilet.



A radical overhaul was required, a removal out of our sorry spiral. Here emerges second Athanasius's grand affirmation, "Christ was made man that we might be made [like] God. He manifested Himself by a body that we might receive the idea of the unseen Father; and He endured the insolence of men that we might inherit immortality." Athanasius concludes: "For this cause the Savior reasonably put on Him a body, in order that the body, becoming wound closely to the Life, should no longer, as mortal, abide in death, but, as having put on immortality, should thenceforth rise again and remain immortal. For, once it had put on corruption, it could not have risen again unless it had put on life. And death likewise could not, from its very nature, appear, save in the body. Therefore Christ put on a body, that He might find death in the body, and blot it out. For how could the Lord have been proved at all to be the Life, had He not revitalized what was mortal?"




It's as we read in Romans: "If the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through His Spirit that dwells in you" (8:11).



This "life to your mortal bodies" applies not only to the hereafter, but to the here and now. Christians believe the trajectory of history to be a new convergence between heaven and earth, between the creation and its Creator.



This is how in the ongoing trials and tribulations of this life even unto death, Athanasius could insist that somehow God is still getting His good way. Indeed He is always working all things toward that perfectly good end. He can do nothing else. French philosopher Simone Weil, who knew much of the horrors and miseries of life, once observed, "At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being." This is what keeps us going. It is our hope -- yet it is not a hope based upon wishful thinking -- but upon the very character of a good God who begrudges no one life, real life in union eternally with Him.



Daniel M. Harrell is Senior Minister of The Colonial Church, Edina, MN and author of How To Be Perfect: One Church's Audacious Experiment in Living the Old Testament Book of Leviticus (FaithWords, 2011). Follow him via Twitter, Facebook, or at his blog and website.