Introduction

I submitted this paper to Dr. Gerald Christianson on Nov. 22, 1985, as part of my work at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg in a course entitle “The Early Church and its Creeds.”

Paper

As Christians began spreading the Gospel, persons of both Hebrew and Greek heritages listened, and in listening, appropriated the Good News: God became incarnate out of love for humanity, died on a cross to atone for its sins, rose from the dead, and appeared. But in grasping that story, persons, particularly those of Greek mindset, sought to reconcile conceiving of an impassible God with believing in a creating, revealing, and redeeming God. One strikingly effective approach utilized the concept of the Word, the Logos, as is evinced in the prologue of the Gospel of John, in which the Logos is identified with the Christ: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father” (John 1:1,14).

Just why the Logos became incarnate is the subject of St. Athanasius’ apology, On the Incarnation. Here he states God created humans “out of nothing by his own Word,…after his own image, giving them a portion even of the power of his own Word” (St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word, trans. Archibald Robertson, in Christology of the Later Fathers, ed. Edward R. Hardy, Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1954, p. 58). But sin and death entered creation through the work of the devil (p. 60). Addressing this state, St. Athanasius says, “Again, it were unseemly that creatures once made rational, and having partaken of the Word, should go to ruin, and turn again toward nonexistence by the way of corruption” (p. 61). To remedy this “unseemliness,” the Logos became incarnate and effected the atoning act.

St. Athanasius summarizes his doctrine of the atonement in a statement variously translated as “[The Word] was made man that we might be made God [or divine]” and as “He was humanized that we might be deified” (p. 107). This divinization St. Athanasius likens to the subject of a painted portrait coming to restore the damaged and marred work, saying, “in the same way also the most holy Son of the Father, being the image of the Father, came to our region to renew [humans] once made in his likeness…” (p. 68). Renewing God’s image in humanity requires a two-fold act of atonement, as humanity’s fallen nature is two-fold: “On the one hand [humanity] has become subject to corruption and is declining towards eternal death. On the other hand [humanity] has lost the true knowledge of [its] Creator and is obsessed with the pursuit of visible and material things” (F[rederick] W[illiam] Dillistone, The Christian Understanding of Atonement, Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1968, p. 49). Thus, for St. Athanasius, the incarnate Logos atones for humanity by divinizing it, by returning it from corruption to incorruption and from ignorance to knowledge of God.

The atonement necessarily falls to the Logos to perform; only the Logos can achieve the restoration of incorruption to corrupt humanity. As St. Athanasius states, “For being Word of the Father, and above all, he alone of natural fitness was both able to re-create everything and worthy to suffer on behalf of all and to be ambassador for all with the Father” (p. 63). The Logos recreates humanity in God’s image of incorruptibility by his very nature: “And thus he, the incorruptible Son of God, being conjoined with all by a like nature, naturally clothed all with incorruption, by the promise of the resurrection” (p. 63). The Logos did not endanger himself in this endeavor, as “the incorruptibility and indestructibility of the Word are beyond question. Hence even the offering of His assumed body to death was entirely possible seeing that His own restoration to life was assured and all others could gain the hope of resurrection through Him” (Dillistone, p. 49). The Logos submitted to death only insofar as the body of the incarnate Logos died; the Logos did not die (St. Athanasius, p. 63). But this death effectively atoned, restoring the incorruptible, because “as an offering and sacrifice free from any stain, straightaway he put away death from all his peers by the offering of an equivalent” (p. 63).

St. Athanasius then finds support in Scripture for contending the Logos necessarily must be incarnate to pay the debt humanity has incurred. He cites Hebrews 2:10: “For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through suffering.” Further, he supports, with Hebrews 2:14-15, the Logos’ assuming a body to restore incorruptibility to humanity: “Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same nature, that through death he might destroy him who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage.” Thus does St. Athanasius develop and support his doctrine of the atonement by the incarnate Logos as, in part, the divinization of humanity through returning incorruptibility to those corrupted by the devil.

The second aspect which deifies humanity, for St. Athanasius, is restoring knowledge of God from ignorance of God. Again, the Logos must perform this operation, as St. Athanasius notes, “none other could teach [humans] of the Father…save the Word, that orders all things and is alone the true only-begotten Son of the Father” (p. 74), and again, “[God] makes [humans] after his own image and after his likeness; so that by such grace perceiving the image, that is, the Word of the Father, they may be able through him to get an idea of the Father, and knowing their maker, live the happy and truly blessed life” (p. 65). This process of re-educating humanity in the knowledge of God, while intimately bound to the incarnation of the Logos, also manifests itself in the work of the Logos while incarnate, most particularly in his atoning act on the cross. St. Athanasius writes, “They who would not know him from his providence and rule over all things may even from the works done by his actual body know the Word of God which is in the body, and through him the Father” (p. 69). Commenting on this, one critic notes, “Only the Logos who is the Creator could recreate [humanity] in the image of God and restore the knowledge of God. No [human] could do this, since all [humans] were in ignorance of God” (E.P. Meijering, Orthodoxy and Platonism in Athanasius Synthesis or Antithesis?, Leiden, Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1974, p. 47).

Towards the end of the work, St. Athanasius again ties together the concept of the incarnate Logos restoring knowledge of God to persons through his atonement on the cross: “…let [one] marvel that by so ordinary a means things divine have been manifested to us, and that by death immortality has reached to all, and that by the Word becoming man, the universal providence has been known, and its giver and artificer the very Word of God” (p. 107). Here St. Athanasius summarizes the other facet of his doctrine of the atonement, namely that part in which, through the Logos’ work of dying on the cross, humanity again grows in awareness of the knowledge of God restored out of ignorance. As St. Athanasius presents his apology in his work On the Incarnation, then, his doctrine of the atonement develops a two-fold approach to a single process. To restore the fallen creation, the Logos must become incarnate, become human, that humanity might become divine. The Logos recreates the image of God in two ways: restoring humanity from corruption to incorruption and re-educating humanity from ignorance to knowledge of God. As St. Athanasius states:

Consistently, therefore, the Word of God took a body and has made use of a human instrument, in order to quicken the body also, and as he is known in creation by his works so to work in man as well, and to show himself everywhere, leaving nothing void of his own divinity and of the knowledge of him (pp. 99-100).

This is his doctrine of the atonement by the Logos incarnate.