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.

The attractions of Arianism

What made Arianism so attractive, and might make it so in its modern versions?

Arianism can be exegetically convincing; and certainly, it was consistent to the form of rationality that pervaded in its own time.

But more than this: Arianism was and is a theology which is built up around one's own experience of the invisibilty and intangibility of God. We long indeed for God to be close and evident, to have him tangible in the way we would like to have him tangible; to be able to identify the hot breath of the Spirit on our faces, to feel, really feel the closeness of God in the instances in which we live.

The tangibility that God offers us - his entry into our world is rather disappointing in comparison to this. God the only begotten Son has made him known, walking among us for a short stretch some time ago now. However much the witnesses to him say they are passing on to us that which they have seen with their eyes and touched with their hands, it seems a long way removed from us. It is easy to stare at the flat page of the Bible, to sit through the dull sermon and the uninspired singing, to pray prayers into a remorseless ceiling, and fail to be convinced that God really is with us and active to save.

Arianism is a counsel of despair, then. It keeps the eternal God at an arms length, because he sure feels like he is at arms length. We even create dogmas that convince us that this is true: that because we feel it to be the case, it ought to be the case. Deity could not and would not live among us - it would be a travesty if it did so. We cannot be so arrogant as to claim to have true knowledge, of a personal kind, of the divinity himself. We can only gaze at this Christ, this bridge built - yes made - across the chasm between us and the true God, which we have to steel ourselves to somehow step onto, not ever assured than when we set out on the journey we have stepped into the heart of God himself.

It is despairing: but it is also, attractively, a way to remove the suggestion that God is uncomfortably near - that he is breathing down our necks. It is frightening to think that, if the true God is really among us in Jesus Christ, then the consequences of mistreating his manifestations will be extremely grave. It is frightening to think that the person next me in the pew, whom I have ignored these long years and even secretly despised, actually has life in God himself. It is worrisome to consider that that church that I helped to divide is not only the body of Christ, but that the body of Christ is itself included in God.

[thanks to Kosta Milkov!]