God Could Not Not Save Us

God Glorifies Himself in the Human: A Christological Anthology

God Glorifies Himself in the Human: A Christological Anthology

1. God Glorifies Himself in the Human (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christology Lectures)

2. He is God, He is All Things (Melito of Sardis, On Pascha)

The third selection for the anthology is from Athanasius’ On the Incarnation §3-4, 6. Again, if you’re unfamiliar with the text, you would do well to start with Fr John Behr’s lectures:

For God is good, or rather the source of all goodness, and one who is good grudges nothing, so that grudging nothing its existence, he made all things through his own Word, our Lord Jesus Christ. Among these things, of all things upon earth he had mercy upon the human race, and seeing that by the principle of its own coming into being it would not be able to endure eternally, he granted them a further gift, creating human beings not simply like all the irrational animals upon the earth but making them according to his own image (cf. Gen. 1.27), giving them a share of the power of his own Word, so that having as it were shadows of the Word and being made rational, they might be able to abide in blessedness, living the true life which is really that of the holy ones in paradise. And knowing again that free choice of human beings could turn either way, he secured beforehand, by a law and a set place, the grace given. For bringing them into his own paradise, he gave them a law, so that if they guarded the grace and remained good, they might have the life of paradise—without sorrow, pain, or care—besides having the promise of their incorruptibility in heaven; but if they were to transgress and turning away become wicked, they would know themselves enduring the corruption of death according to nature, and no longer live in paradise, but thereafter dying outside of it, would remain in death and in corruption…. 

Perhaps you are wondering for what reason, having proposed to talk about the Incarnation of the Word, we are now expounding the origin of human beings. Yet this too is not distinct from the aim of our exposition. For speaking of the manifestation of the Savior to us, it is necessary also to speak of the origin of human beings, in order that you might know that our own cause was the occasion of his descent and that our own transgression evoked the Word's love for human beings, so that the Lord both came to us and appeared among human beings. For we were the purpose of his embodiment, and for our salvation he so loved human beings as to come to be and appear in a human body. Thus, then, God created the human being and willed that he should abide in incorruptibility; but when humans despised and overturned the comprehension of God, devising and contriving evil for themselves, as was said in the first work, then they received the previously threatened condemnation of death, and thereafter no longer remained as they had been created, but were corrupted as they had contrived; and, seizing them, death reigned… 

For these reasons, then, with death holding greater sway and corruption remaining fast against human beings, the race of humans was perishing, and the human being made rational and in the image, was disappearing, and the work made by God was being obliterated. For as I said earlier, by the law death thereafter prevailed against us, and it was impossible to escape the law, since this had been established by God on account of the transgression. And what happened was truly both absurd and improper. It was absurd, on the one hand, that, having spoken, God should prove to be lying: that is, having legislated that the human being would die by death if he were to transgress the commandment, yet after the transgression he were not to die but rather this sentence dissolved. For God would not be true if, after saying that we would die, the human being did not die. On the other hand, it was improper that what had once been made rational and partakers of his Word should perish, and once again return to non-being through corruption. It was not worthy of the goodness of God that those created by him should be corrupted through the deceit wrought by the devil upon human beings. And it was supremely improper that the workmanship of God in human beings should disappear either through their own negligence or through the deceit of the demons.

Therefore, since the rational creatures were being corrupted and such works were perishing, what should God, being good, do? Permit the corruption prevailing against them and death to seize them? What need was there for their coming into being at the beginning? It was proper not to have come into being rather than to have come into being to be neglected and destroyed. The weakness, rather than the goodness, of God is made known by neglect, if, after creating, he abandoned his own work to be corrupted, rather than if he had not created the human being in the beginning. For not making him, there would have been no one considering the weakness, but once he made him and created him out of nothing, it was most absurd that his works should be destroyed, and especially before the sight of the maker. It was therefore right not to permit human beings to be carried away by corruption, because this would be improper to and unworthy of the goodness of God.

A few reflections:

1. Notice, first, that God’s goodness is for Athanasius beyond lavish—endless, utterly unstinting, infinitely generous and generative. For him, God only ever does good, no good is left unrealized, and in the end all things are brought to their better-than-good fullness.

2. Athanasius does not simply say God is good, however. He immediately corrects himself to say God is the source of all goodness. Why? Because simply saying God is good implies goodness is something apart from who God is and how God relates to us, a kind of condition for God. And because it therefore sets a limit on goodness itself—as if what we can know as good is all there is to God’s goodness! Again, for Athanasius, God is always better than good, exceeding abundantly beyond what we can ask or think.

3. For Athanasius, it is not possible to talk about salvation apart from talking about creation, not only because God’s purpose in salvation is bound up with God’s original, originating purpose but also because God’s care is not for some creatures among the many but for all things as one—because, again, all things really are one in Christ, who is the Father’s Beloved.

4. In Athanasius’ theology, death, not hell as we imagine it, is the end God has to save us from. And God does indeed have to save us from it. Both because God loves us, and because God cannot be false—to himself or to us. The motive, then, for the incarnation is both God’s devotion to God and God’s devotion to us. But those are not two separate devotions and that motive is not simply a feeling God has; they are simply names for how God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit!

5. Are there things that are unworthy of the goodness of God, as Athanasius says? If so, how would we know what they are? And what are we to do with the fact that the Scriptures sometimes seem to attribute such things to God? These are bottom-line, line-in-the-sand questions. How we answer them decides in advance every other question we ask. Athanasius would have agreed with Origen (both, remember, are from Alexandria): Everything said about God in the sacred texts, even if it at first it seems unfitting, must be understood in ways “worthy of a good God.” If Scripture says God is angry or regretful (as, say, Genesis does), then that must be true in a way far more unlike than like what we know as anger or regret. Here’s Origen again: “Do not suppose that God’s regret has some sort of relationship to the regret of those who have regretted… His regret is a homonym to our regret.”