We need our Athanasiuses

The rejection of Arianism may have made Christian language more complex; but at least it has militated against an intellectual complacency in the face of the unsettling effects of the gospel…Theology continues to need its Ariuses. – Rowan Williams, 1983


Athanasius’s gift was that he could see exactly what was at stake: he recognised what was being lost in the Arian way of putting things. His passion was for human souls, and for their salvation, primarily. So this was not an abstract debate for him: he could see that salvation itself was what mattered.

Four things:
1) God is mystery, but God reveals himself, in Christ Jesus. The unknowability of God is no longer simply inaccessible. As Williams says, 'there is no overplus of 'unengaged' and inexpressible reality, nothing that is not realized in and as relationship, in God'. In Jesus we are given God, not merely a piece of him. If we are to hold God as mysterious and respond in awe and wonder and speechlessness, it is to be from our worship and thankfulnes: a kind of visceral negative theology, far from the rational negativity of Arius.

2) God reveals himself in Jesus to truly save. If you took the Arian seriously, what account could you give of the salvation of human people? (see quote)..Athanasius once said ‘God became man in order that we might become God’ – that is, that we might share in the life of God himself, God become one of us. (see 1 John 3:2 - ‘we shall be like him’). If Christ was not fully God, how could we ever be assured of God’s saving of us? How could we ever know God in a saving way?

3) God dies for us on the cross. Athanasius could also see that the cross itself does not work if you describe it Arian terms. If on the cross we have a lesser God then how we can not say that there we see nothing but divine child abuse, a torturing of the innocent Son by his commanding Father? Rather, if we understand the cross according to orthodox teaching, then we will understand that the victim was a willing participant in the salvation of the world in his own death. The Son submitted, but did so from a position of free equality with the Father.

4) The love of Christ is truly God’s love. This has huge pastoral ramifications of course, but also practical ones: because here in the submission of the Son to the Father without a loss of equality of being or dignity we see in essence the nature of Christian love. [See Allison quote] The love that Christ expressed on the cross was divine love: and it is the love we are called to echo in our relations too.

Athanasius was a curmudgeonly genius: perhaps we ought to say, that much as we ‘need’ our Ariuses, those who will ask the right questions, we also need our Athanasiuses: those who will remind us that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself; and that in Christ we truly and fully have the eternal God.