Source: http://tamedcynic.org/tag/on-the-incarnation/
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 19:16:12+00:00

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§10-12: Teacher of Abundant Life or Secretary of After-Life Affairs?
One of the deficiencies in arguing that Jesus (only) comes to die for our sin is that it leaves no redemptive room for the life and teaching of Christ.
His birth and life are just prologue.
Only Jesus’ death matters for salvation.
It comes as no surprise then that for many Christians our lives are only prologue as well, possibly interesting but not essential.
In §10-12 of On the Incarnation, Athanasius begins to take up a theme held by his fellow Church Fathers; namely, that salvation begins not on Good Friday but on Christmas Eve, for the eternal, macro goal of creation is theosis, the joining together of the infinite and the finite, of humanity with divinity. But therein lies the problem for Athanasius- not our guilt but our inhumanity.
Because of sin, we’re not sufficiently human to be joined together with life of the Trinity.
We no longer resembles the image of God so joining with God is an impossibility. Our image needs to be repaired.
And this is where Athanasius finds a redemptive purpose for the teaching of Christ that many common takes on the cross neglect- and not just the teaching of Christ; this is how Athanasius views the purpose of the prophets in the Hebrew Bible too.
A lot of times we throw around the phrase “made in the image of God,” as a way to dismiss others without sounding bigoted.
But…what if we took it seriously?
It’s easy to saw when looking at children, or Mother Theresa, or Nelson Mandela. But what about Stalin? Or Attila the Hun? Or Sarah Palin?
There are people we see everyday and when we look at them the image that stares back at us could not look anything less like God. Or perhaps its not even the face of someone else – maybe its the face that gazes back from the mirror that shows no sign of God’s likeness.
Athanasius took the phrase “made in the image of God” seriously.
And Athanasius knew something about images.
Once when he had run afoul of the emperor he had to flee Alexandria and hide in the tomb of an Egyptian mummy. He would have been surrounded by once beautiful painting – paintings that had faded. Painting that had flaked and cracked. Paintings that were worn away by the elements.
Athanasius imagined that what we see in the prophets – what we see in the life of Israel – what hear from Scripture – was an attempt to repair, to repaint our portraits. Moses and Isaiah, Daniel and Miriam, Jacob and Ezekiel, they all briefly saw God.
They saw what the original subject of the portrait looked like. They caught a glimpse of God’s likeness and returned to their people.
But its hard to reproduce a painting from memory.
Whatever restoration they attempted was second hand at best.
A vague reflection, a vague memory of the original.
In Jesus – in God made flesh, “God with Us,” the original subject – the likeness of God is made flesh.
In Jesus we can look upon God and can, through him, restore our image.
In the life of Jesus the perfect image of God is manifest – made available to all of us.
When Mary looked at the baby she had carried for 9 months, when Joseph looked at the son he would raise, that he would love and take care of – when they looked at Jesus they saw God’s image for the first time.
In Jesus’ life and faithfulness, in his words and deeds, we discover not only the image of God in which we were created but also the possibility of our own image.
Here’s a pop quiz based on the first 10 sections of Athanasius’ On the Incarnation.
A) Far away from us with God’s back turned against us because we are sinners and God is holy.
B) Nearer to us than we are to ourselves because even prior to the Incarnation the Word imbues all things in creation and holds them in existence.
Bonus: What does it say about us that we typically think of God as remote?
A) Suffer God’s wrath in humanity’s stead.
B) To pay the price, suffering sin’s penalty for us.
C) To die our death and, in doing so, exhaust Death of its power over us.
D) To demonstrate God’s holiness by demonstrating the wages of sin upon the cross.
Bonus: What does it say about us that we interpret the cradle and the cross punitively when Genesis 1 speaks of death as sin’s consequence in no such tones?
Bonus: Why do we literalize scriptural metaphors like ‘debt’ when the Church Fathers felt free to use them without explaining exactly how they worked.
A) For us to get right with God through right actions.
B) To describe for us the ideal human life which will be possible only in the Kingdom.
C) To show us what we should do because Jesus told us to do it.
D) To reveal the means by which our tarnished humanity may be restored in God’s likeness.
Bonus: Why do so many of our understandings of how Jesus saves us on the cross have little place for the life and teaching of Jesus?
You don’t really need the answer key do you?
§6-7: Does the Cross Mean God Breaks His Post-Flood Promise?
These short sections of On the Incarnation brought two different, disparate movies to mind.
The first film is last spring’s Noah starring Russell Crowe (#4 on Jason’s Man Crush List). I watched it with my boys until the scene just after the Flood when things felt like they were about to get a little rapey on the boat and I pressed pause.
No wonder God promises never to do such violence again.
Reading Athanasius’ account of the incarnation, it hit me that the way we often speak of the cradle and the cross would have God break that post-Flood promise.
If Jesus is born in order to suffer the punishment we deserve, as we so often sing and say, then doesn’t God- at least symbolically- renege on his promise never to flood the earth again?
How is God killing all but a few of creation by water substantively different than saying Jesus was tortured the torture all of humanity deserve in God’s eyes?
Is it just a matter of quantity versus quality? Is God off the hook because he only kills Jesus this time?
Noah and these thoughts came to mind because in §6 of On the Incarnation I was struck by the different tenor with which Athanasius speaks of the Word’s coming.
Due to the corrupting nature of death, Athanasius writes that the creation made by the Artificer was disappearing; in fact, you could follow Athanasius’ logic and argue that prior to the incarnation ‘humanity’ no longer existed.
Athanasius notes that it would be ‘monstrous’ if God, Goodness itself, turned out to be a liar. Once set in motion, Death spread inexorably, not as a punishment, but more like a disease that infection’s allowed to set in.
If we deserve restoration as God’s creatures, if God must restore us if he is to be worthy of his goodness, then the question turns from one of why to how.
How is God to restore us?
While Athanasius doesn’t dismiss the value in repenting, repentance itself does not protect the veracity of God’s words in the Garden. Death is the problem. God said we would die and our repentance can’t undo death.
What’s more, repentance does not set us on a permanent course back to incorruption. We can’t say we’re sorry all the way back to Eden.
As Athanasius puts it, ‘…repentance [does not] call men back from what is their nature- it merely stays them from acts of sin.’ Put differently, ‘I’m sorry’ from creatures who are now less than creatures doesn’t cut it.
Death, which prevents us from living a fully human life, a life in God’s image, is the problem.
The only way to restore humanity then is for a true human life to be lived. For a true human life to suffer death and, in dying, triumph over death. This is a key different between Athanasius and many popular notions of cradle and cross.
For others, the incarnation is instrumental; it’s simply the means by which God gets to the end of the story- the cross- where the suffering Christ can elicit our repentance.
For Athanasius, the incarnation is the means and the end in itself. The Word taking flesh is like the antidote for which resurrection from death is the full and final cure.
To reference the promised second movie, the Word taking flesh is like Aslan’s rumored arrival in Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Aslan’s landing in Narnia alone begins to melt the White Witches’ snow long before the Christ-like lion suffers death on the stone table.
His coming alone initiates healing.
§2-3 Are We Chiefly Sinners or Children?
Take a random stranger, walking down the street.
Look at them. What do you see?
Do you see a sinner, deserving of God’s wrath punishment?
Or do you see a creature, made by and loved by God?
I recall my Jedi Master, Dr. Robert Dykstra, posing that multiple choice to us as an aside one semester at Princeton. The question was one that had been put to him by the chair of his ordination committee.
I remember thinking: Damn, slick response.
In §2-3 of On the Incarnation Athanasius begins to unspool his case that the second argument not only makes for better pastors, it makes for a better God. He does so by linking together creation and incarnation, cross and new creation all as one single work grace.
In my own little cul-de-sac of the Christian tradition, United Methodism, we spend a lot of time parsing and divvying up, labeling and sequentially ordering, the many forms or movements of God’s grace.
We memorize on individuated flash cards.
Among Methodist ordinands, there’s even a terrible likening of the ‘stages’ of God’s grace to a house with a front porch as though the mystery of God’s sharing of God’s own life with us is analogous to a Thompson Creek commercial on 106.7 The FAN.
For Methodists, ‘prevenient’ (from the Latin- our lone moment of slumming it with the papists- for ‘to come before’) grace is the work of God which comes before your Christian conversion. It’s the grace by which God gives you sight to recognize and character to accept the (real) grace God does in Jesus Christ the Cross.
Contrary to Methodists, Athanasius would countenance no such divisions or distinctions when it comes to God’s unmerited work among us. For Athanasius, everything, every last single damn thing, is completely gratuitous.
Viewed from the Artist’s perspective, it’s all the same grace.
Before and after make no sense when it comes to grace. Seeing the Cross as the ‘amazing’ grace is to make a category mistake for it obscures that you likewise don’t deserve for the Creator to hold you in existence at every moment of your existence.
To so argue, Athanasius roots his understanding of the incarnation where others seldom even give a passing glance, with the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.
In §2 Athanasius contrasts creatio ex nihilo with the two rival views of his day.
On the one hand, there was Plato who believed that ‘God’ had created from pre-existing materials- which would’ve meant that ‘creation’ in some sense was eternal.
On the other hand, there were those who believed that the Supreme (remote) Being would not have deigned to create the world; therefore, creation was the result of exalted, subsidiary being(s).
The former view, Athanasius argues, would imply that God is not an Artificer, creating from things which did not exist, but is more like a mechanic or tradesman, crafting-not creating- from the stuff around him. And hence something less than thoroughly, sheerly gratuitous.
The latter view, Athanasius points out, renders Jesus something less than divine.
For Christian speech to be intelligible, neither view is acceptable.
The Word which created must not be distinct from the Word which comes in the flesh, but the Word which took flesh from nothing in Mary’s womb must also have created originally from nothing.
Lest grace be something less than constitutive God’s very character, which would make creche and cross something more like a change in God’s mood.
The One God created gratuitously, every thing from no thing.
But the Word was with God, present, at creation.
Therefore the Word is God.
It names it all because the only reason for a creation from nothing is that there can be no reason. It’s all gift. And so the only ‘reason’ is that God desires to share triune life. Just as each moment in Jesus’ ministry is but a part of what it means for Jesus to be incarnate, each moment after creation is an episode in the large, seamless drama of God bringing us into union with God.
So it’s true that, within that drama, there are chapters in which Dr. Dykstra’s first possible answer is demonstrably true. We are sinners worthy of wrath. But if the Word made flesh also made everything ex nihilo, then the bigger, truer, older answer is B.
We are completely gratuitous creatures of the Creator and, thus, loved as precious children.
Why does God takes flesh in the first place?
Does God become incarnate in Jesus in order to die upon the cross; so that, we can be saved from our sins?
Is Christmas merely instrumental? Is the Incarnation just the means by which humanity pays the sin-debt owed to God, satisfying God’s wrath against us in the process?
Or is the Incarnation we celebrate at Christmas itself salvific in some way? Is humanity in some measure saved simply by God assuming our humanity?
For all you theology nerds, church geeks and preachers desperate for sermon ideas, I invite you to join me this Advent in reading and reflecting upon the Church Father Athanasius’ short essay On the Incarnation.
A bishop in the early 4th century and a leader against the Arian heretics (those who did not believe that the fullness of God dwelt in Christ) at the Council of Nicaea, Athanasius’ work On the Incarnation is one of the very first texts of developed Christian theology.
Plus, its short. 40 pages.
Print it out and after you’ve stuffed your face like the pilgrims of yore, get to reading.
Starting the week of 12/1 we’ll go at a 10-15 page pace a week.
Each week of Advent I’ll post my thoughts on what we’ve read, the context behind it and why it matters for thinking about and following Christ today.
Bobby Ray Hurd, House Church Planter at Simple Church and the smartest dude I ‘know’ on the interwebs.
So read, listen, and send me a thought or question via email or the Speakpipe on the screen.
“Because the true story of the world has been lost in the seemingly endless epic of sin, Christ must retell- in the entire motion and content of his life, lived both toward the Father and for his fellows- the tale from the beginning.
Want to know just how important those two sentences are for making sense of Christmas, Good Friday, the teachings of Christ and our hands-on embodiment of them for others?

References: §10

§6
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§2
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