In the Christian History class I’m teaching, we recently covered portions of Athanasius, On the Incarnation. I love this text because it provides an “eastern” take on human nature, the fall, and the incarnation. Athanasius presents human fallenness as a sort of conundrum for God. If God created humanity out of love, and provided humanity with the grace of His law of love, what could God do when humanity turned away from love and embraced the dissolution of death? Athanasius’ answer is that the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ were a necessary response flowing from God’s character and purposes for creation.
I call this an “eastern” approach because it emphasizes God’s being as prior to God’s will. Of course, Athanasius wasn’t arguing against Divine freedom. Athanasisus was not suggesting that God was compelled to redeem fallen humanity by some power or force that is higher than Godself. But God’s will to redeem us, for Athanasisus, is so intimately connected to God’s character that Athanasisus could present our fall as a Divine dilemma and could speak of the “impossibility” of God not redeeming humanity:
As, then, the creatures whom He had created reasonable, like the Word, were in fact perishing, and such works were on the road to ruin, what then was God, being Good, to do? Was He to let corruption and death have their way with them? In that case, what was the use of having made them in the beginning? Surely it would have been better never to have been created at all than, having been created, to be neglected and perish; and, besides that, such indifference to the ruin of His own work before His very eyes would argue not goodness in God but limitation, and that far more than if He had never created men at all. It was impossible, therefore, that God should leave man to be carried off by corruption, because it would be unfitting and unworthy of Himself.
Athanasius’ approach is subtly different from “western” approaches that prioritize God’s freedom. The “western” approach emphasizes, correctly, that God was not compelled to create, nor was He compelled to redeem. God’s “reasons” for creating and redeeming are finally inscrutable to us and are grounded in God’s glory. Creation shows God’s glory, redemption shows God’s glory — and reprobation shows God’s glory as well. For thinkers such as Augustine and Calvin, the fact that many or most human beings rebel against God and are finally not redeemed glorifies God by demonstrating God’s holiness and justice. The “why” question — why would God need to demonstrate His glory in a way that results in the damnation of most of the creatures created in His image — is often set aside in these “theologies of glory” as impertinent. The “reason” is that God, precisely because He is God, is utterly free to do as He wills.
Anyone who knows my theological leanings will know that I find full-blown “theologies of glory” repugnant. A God who is pure will is a God who cannot really be “loved” or “trusted.” That is not the God of scripture or of Christian faith. (It is not even, I think, really the God of Augustine or Calvin, even if they can be read to trend in that direction). That is the pantheon of Canaan, the Ba’als and Molechs who consume and must be worshiped because they consume.
A very perceptive student pointed out during our classroom discussion of Athanasius, however, that Athanasius also offers a theology of glory. Notice that Athanasius says it would have been “unfitting” and “unworthy” of Godself for God to allow His created image to ruin itself. For Athanasius, the glory of God is His love, and the love of God is His glory. In the terms of contemporary philosophical theology, for Athanasius, God’s being is ontologically prior to God’s “will,” such that there is finally no separation between God’s love, justice, power, and will. God saves because He is God. If we are reprobate, it is only because we reprobate ourselves.
This, of course, still leaves us with some enormous questions. If God knew we would turn away from created grace and towards decay, and if God knew that some, perhaps most, would persist in the way of decay, why would he have created us at all? The Augustinian dual response of inscrutability and glory must here return: we can’t really know because we are not God, but we can say that in any case God’s glory is demonstrated in the end. Yet, with Athanasius, we can say this in a way that understand God’s “glory” as coextensive with His “love.” Whoever is reprobated, if anyone is finally reprobated, if even many or most are finally reprobated, it is not in any way because God determines even one human person’s reprobation. Impossible as it is to fathom, it is all, finally, love.