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September 14, 2022 – Finding That Which Was Lost

September 14, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Athanasius of Alexandria is an early Church Father, considered one of the great “Doctors of the Church.” He is the first person to identify the 27 books we now consider the New Testament. He contributed to the theological integrity of the church by struggling against Arians, who maintained that Jesus of Nazareth was of a “distinct substance” to the father (which would violate the doctrine of the Trinity), as well several Emperors. This penchant for conflict for the truth earned him the title Athanasius Contra Mundum (or Athanasius Against the World). This week, we are going to pray through one of his works, On the Incarnation of the Word (or De Incarnatione Verbi Dei). The text itself is a companion to another one of his works, Against the Heathen (or Contra Gentes). In his first work, he is offering written arguments against pagan beliefs and practices. But in the work we’ll focus on this week, On the Incarnation, Athanasius beautifully writes of the basis of Christian faith and salvation: the incarnation of Jesus. I will offer an excerpt of the text (you can find the whole thing here), and try to bring to our immediate relevance to us today.

Today’s Bible reading

I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.—Ephesians 3:18-19

More thoughts for meditation

“God made humans in the Image of the Word, that thus they might know the Word, and through Him the Father.”

“God, foreseeing humans’ forgetfulness, provided also the works of creation to remind humans of him. Yet further, He ordained a Law and Prophets, whose ministry was meant for all the world. Yet humans heeded only their own lusts.”

“A king whose subjects had revolted would, after sending letters and messages, go to them in person.”

“A portrait once effaced must be restored from the original. Thus the Son of the Father came to seek, save, and regenerate. No other way was possible.”

“All man’s superstitions He met halfway; whether humans were inclined to worship Nature, Man, Demons, or the dead, He showed Himself Lord of all these.”

Athanasius offers a second reason for the incarnation. The first reason is so that God might save us: “putting away death from us and renewing us again.” And the second reason is so that God might make Godself known and seen to humans. The Word became Flesh so that we might know God.

Athanasius insists that from the moment of Creation, God sought to be known by those he created. First, God creates us in the image of the Word, so by knowing ourselves, we might know God. Athanasius wonders what the point of creation would be at all if God didn’t seek to known by what God created. But humans “wholly rejected God,” and more than that, made replacements for God in grave idols. In response to this, again to be known by humankind, God sent the Law and Prophets, but humankind was nevertheless “overcome by the pleasures of the moment and by the illusions and deceits sent by demons.”

But God persisted on being seen and known. Athanasius draws an analogy to a king who returns to his land in order to free it from being colonized. God has to come in person to save God’s blind people from their colonized land. God came to restore the image of God in humans. That “he might be able to create afresh the humans after the image.” The only way for God to do that was to come in person, to restore the image that was ruined. And Jesus did so by seeing what God was replaced with and demonstrating, indeed, that he was Lord over the false idols that humans worships. He appeared as a human so that humans might relate to him and know him and see him. The beauty of this is that we saw God through Jesus because he clothed himself in humanity to reveal to humanity the true image in which they were created. And though he accomplished salvation through his death and resurrection, it was through his life, “by what He did, abiding in it, and doing such works, and showing such signs, as made Him known no longer as Man, but as God the Word.”

Suggestions for action

As you read over Athanasius’s second reason for the incarnation, I hope that you can see God’s persistence in being known by God’s creation. That from the start, God wanted us to see God and God went to great pains to show us this truth. That persistence not only makes God a loving God, but it makes us worth loving too. God fought for us because of God’s own goodness, and also because of the goodness that God saw in us. Pray today that you can hold on to this truth today: God sees you as worth fighting for.

September 13, 2022 – None, but He Who had created

September 13, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Athanasius of Alexandria is an early Church Father, considered one of the great “Doctors of the Church.” He is the first person to identify the 27 books we now consider the New Testament. He contributed to the theological integrity of the church by struggling against Arians, who maintained that Jesus of Nazareth was of a “distinct substance” to the father (which would violate the doctrine of the Trinity), as well several Emperors. This penchant for conflict for the truth earned him the title Athanasius Contra Mundum (or Athanasius Against the World). This week, we are going to pray through one of his works, On the Incarnation of the Word (or De Incarnatione Verbi Dei). The text itself is a companion to another one of his works, Against the Heathen (or Contra Gentes). In his first work, he is offering written arguments against pagan beliefs and practices. But in the work we’ll focus on this week, On the Incarnation, Athanasius beautifully writes of the basis of Christian faith and salvation: the incarnation of Jesus. I will offer an excerpt of the text (you can find the whole thing here), and try to bring to our immediate relevance to us today.

Today’s Bible reading

Yet death exercised dominion from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam, who is a type of the one who was to come.—Romans 5:14

For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died.—2 Corinthians 5:14

For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being.—Hebrews 11:14

More thoughts for meditation

“Our creation and God’s Incarnation most intimately connected.”

“But men, having rejected things eternal, and, by counsel of the devil, turned to the things of corruption, became the cause of their own corruption in death.”

“The human race then was wasting, God’s image was being effaced, and His work ruined.”

“We have incurred corruption and need to be restored to the Grace of God’s Image. None could renew but He Who had created.”

“He takes a body of our Nature… He makes it His own, wherein to reveal Himself, conquer death, and restore life.”

“By being above all, He made His Flesh an offering for our souls; by being one with us all, he clothed us with immortality.”

In sections four to ten of On the Incarnation, Athanasius presents the first reason for the incarnation. Above, I’ve outlined the basics of his argument using his words, but now I want to unpack it more. For Athanasius, the incarnation and the creation are inextricably linked. God “gave us freely,” through the Word, through the incarnation, “a life in correspondence with God.” But human kind severed that relationship, “having despised and rejected the contemplation of God, and devised and contrived evil for themselves.” That is the problem that the Incarnation solves, that is the first reason for the Incarnation—to solve this dilemma: the gift God freely gave ruined rejecting “things eternal” turning to “things of corruption.”

Athanasius presents us with a conundrum that God is facing: “For it were not worthy of God’s goodness that the things He had made should waste away, because of the deceit practised on men by the devil. Especially it was unseemly to the last degree that God’s handicraft among men should be done away, either because of their own carelessness, or because of the deceitfulness of evil spirits.”

God is moved to save us, despite our “carelessness” or us being deceived because what God has made as good should not be away with. God is moved to love us because of who God is and who God created us to be. In order for us to return to who we were created to be, we need more than repentance. “None could renew but He Who had created.” The Word made Flesh, Jesus, was in a unique position to both suffer and recreate. So Jesus “comes in condescension to show loving-kindness upon us, and to visit us.” Jesus took the same pity on us that God did when God created us, Jesus extended the mercy, and “condescended to our corruption” and couldn’t bear to let death have the final word. He did this to keep us from perishing, while also preserving God’s good work. “He takes unto Himself a body, and that of no different sort from ours.”

Jesus takes on flesh, which removes death’s “holding-ground” among humans because the Word’s body came to dwell with them. Athanasius compares this to a king who comes back to his city, and no enemy or bandit can descend upon it any longer and subject it. The first reason for the incarnation is that “Word of God being made man has come about the destruction of death and the resurrection of life.”

Suggestions for action

Athanasius’s first reason for the incarnation is salvation. The Word became us to save us, to cancel our debt. Jesus clothed himself with a body that could be killed so that he might be killed on our behalf, and recreate us in his resurrection. The “logic” of this argument may be salient, but the romance of it is even more important. Forgiveness and reconciliation requires us to relate to the person we are forgiving and reconciling with. It requires us to become like them. Moreover, it costs us something, like it costed God something. And so while we are now free to forgive and reconcile, to repent and start over, without condemnation because of the work of Jesus on the cross, it still costs us something. It may cost us comfort but it could be something greater—our power, our privilege, maybe even our financial well-being. I hope that naming the cost itself will make it easier to forgive and to love one another, as God did us.

Pray that God may help you clothe yourself with the experiences of others, so that we can reconcile with one another, and truly develop a New Humanity in Christ, a recreated humanity, a new creation!

Yesterday was Flannery O’Connor Day.  Appreciate her off-kilter look at Southern Christianity at Celebrating Our Transhistorical Body.

September 12, 2022 – On the Incarnation of the Word

September 12, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Athanasius of Alexandria is an early Church Father, considered one of the great “Doctors of the Church.” He is the first person to identify the 27 books we now consider the New Testament. He contributed to the theological integrity of the church by struggling against Arians, who maintained that Jesus of Nazareth was of a “distinct substance” to the father (which would violate the doctrine of the Trinity), as well several Emperors. This penchant for conflict for the truth earned him the title Athanasius Contra Mundum (or Athanasius Against the World). This week, we are going to pray through one of his works, On the Incarnation of the Word (or De Incarnatione Verbi Dei). The text itself is a companion to another one of his works, Against the Heathen (or Contra Gentes). In his first work, he is offering written arguments against pagan beliefs and practices. But in the work we’ll focus on this week, On the Incarnation, Athanasius beautifully writes of the basis of Christian faith and salvation: the incarnation of Jesus. I will offer an excerpt of the text (you can find the whole thing here), and try to bring to our immediate relevance to us today.

Today’s Bible reading

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth.—Genesis 1:1

All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.—John 1:3

By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.—Hebrews 11:3

More thoughts for meditation

Athanasius begins his treatise on the incarnation by focusing on creation, first by refuting three competing viewpoints of creation, and then by retelling the biblical narrative of Creation (using Genesis, but also passages in the New Testament in order to incorporate Jesus into the narrative).

He argues against the Epicureans that because they believed “everything has had its beginning… independent of purpose” all of creation would be alike and not distinct. And that isn’t adequate to explain the diverse universe as he experiences it.

To the Platonists, he argues that their belief that “God has made the world out of matter previously existing and without beginning” makes God weak because God does not precede the material here, God simply organizes it. “He works at existing material, but is not Himself the cause of the material.”

Finally, to the Gnostics, he argues that their belief that the creator, the “artificer,” is distinct from the Father of Christ is manifestly disproven in the Bible (Matthew 16:4, John 1:3). After he deconstructs these arguments he moves toward his telling of the creation account.

“The true doctrine. Creation out of nothing, of God’s lavish bounty of being. Humans created above the rest, but incapable of independent perseverance. Hence the exceptional and supra-natural gift of being in God’s Image, with the promise of bliss conditionally upon his perseverance in grace.”

Athanasius retells the biblical creation narrative, naming God as the source of goodness, and crediting Jesus Christ as the creator (using John 1:3 and Hebrews 11:3). He writes that God has taken a “special pity” on the human race, one that he did not “barely create” us, but in a special way, in God’s image and “of the power of His own Word.” He says we now reflect the Word of God. But it wasn’t enough that God created us, God secured us by grace through the law, and gave them a place in paradise, in God’s own garden. If they kept the grace, the law, they stayed in paradise without “sorrow or pain or care.”

Suggestions for action

Looking back at Athanasius’ arguments against the contemporary theories of creation is interesting. Many of those philosophies are long-gone at this point, and some of his critiques don’t stand the test of time as they were corrected later on when we learned more about our physical environment. But what strikes me is that his retelling of the biblical narrative does remain sound. Though we know that eventually humans corrupt the creation by their own sin, there is a deep comfort to be found in being especially created by God, with attention, in God’s image, with the power of Christ. We know that Jesus fulfills the very law given to us by grace, and so now we can live in the paradise that begins now without “sorrow or pain or care” (but also with those things, in this strange in-between time that we live).

What stands between you and believing that God takes a “special pity” on you? Pray for the courage to believe that God did not merely create you, but made you with a unique care and gaze that names you as the beloved.

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