Chapter
THE PARADOX OF
ATHANASIAN SOTERIOLOGY
Itdoes not require deep and protracted study
in the Athanasian corpus to notice the paradox
cal nature of his soteriology of écorotnas.
Modern theological biases and habits have dis-
posed Christians to be uneasy with, if not
shocked by, such language, and the context of the
emphasis which Athanasius placed on deification
‘makes it all the more striking; itis this concept of
salvation which requires that the Son be fully
divine: in the Nicene phrase, “very God.” For
Athanasius, deification was the raison d'étre of
Nicaea. We have learned to accept the “sublime
paradox” of the Incarnation, that “God became
‘man? but Athanasius coupled the converse with
it as its justficati
(onvepsinnoev, iva fyeis BeonoinPiner).” This
formula of Greek Patristic theology, of which the
Bishop of Alexandria became the leading propo-
nent, subsequently lapsed into desuetude in
Western Christianity, which finally rejected it
outright as heretical,
n: “that man may become God
‘The Creator-Creature Dichotomy
‘As an outgrowth of Nicaea, but especially
since Augustine, Christian orthodoxy has firmly
held to a theology which stressed the transcen-
dental nature of God. Subsequent theology has
always tended to take refuge in the safety of the
apophatic. Ultimately itis impossible for human
nature to have any direct knowledge of God, or
even of his attributes, for man is entirely different
from his Maker and exists on a completely differ-
ent plane of being. Existence in the full sense
belongs to God alone, who has “necessary being,”
while man has only “contingent being;” his exis-
tence is totally dependent upon the will of Deity
‘Thus God is fotaliter alite, since a firm ontolog-
ical gulf forever separates the Divine from the
human, the Creator from the created.’
This theme, which was so central to
‘Augustine, has been reiterated throughout
Christian history, from Aquinas to Calvin, from
the Westminster Confession to Vatican I, and is
expressed in extreme but logically consistent
form by the neoorthodox theologian Emil
Brunner:
There is no greater sense of distance than
that which lies in the words Creator
Creation. Now this isthe first and the Funda-
mental thing which can be said about man:78 * Deifcation: The Content of Ath
He isa creature, and as such he is separated
by an abyss from the Divine manner of
being. The greatest dissimilarity between two
things which we can express at all—more
dlssimilar than light and darkness, death and
life, good and evil—is that between the
Creator and that which is created.
This theology, of course, did not spring into
full maturity from the pen of Augustine, but was
the culmination of a long doctrinal develop-
‘ment, to which Athanasius was a contributor. We
have examined his anthropology in some detail
in Chapter If, but have reserved until now a spe-
Gific discussion of his doctrine of God.
For Athanasius it was “an admitted truth
about God” that he is self-sufficient and com.
plete in himself Furthermore, God is immateri-
al as well as incorporeal, invisible and untouch-
able, and has power over all the universe, being
transcendent to it.’ This transcendence is espe