Athanasius and the Goodness of God

November 10, 2010 by Daniel Harrell

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Yet God's goodness that begrudges no one life would not be compromised even here. As God's goodness is unchangeable and unlimited, it is not subject to increase or decrease in spite of how it is treated. What was God to do in the face of humanity's free choice? Athanasius posed the question rhetorically: "As the rational creatures were wasting and such works in course of ruin, what was God in His goodness to do? Allow corruption to prevail against them and death to hold them fast? If so, what was the profit of their having been made to begin with? For better were they not made, than once made, left to neglect and ruin." The incessant goodness of God, which envies no one life, was jealous for life even for the transgressor and the sinner.

Remember Athanasius's core contention: Not only can God do you good, He can do nothing else. Thus God's goodness compelled Him not to abandon people but to accommodate Himself to their incapacities, now further marred by sin. Athanasius wrote that people, "having rejected what was good . . . [were] not able to recognize God as ordering and guiding all that is. Therefore He takes to Himself . . . a human body, and unites Himself with that, in order that since men could not recognize Him [before], they should not fail to know Him [now] . . . human as they are, they would be able to know the Father more quickly and directly by a body like theirs and by the divine works wrought through it, as they considered that the works done through it were not human but God's."

Out of sheer goodness that begrudges no one life, the Creator stooped unambiguously to the level of the creature. "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us . . . " (John 1:14). God's purpose has always been the same, not to leave humanity destitute of a life-giving relationship with Him. Since God had done the stooping, humanity's inability to know Him now could not be due to faulty revelation. The problem now was faulty perception. Sin had rendered us blind. The obstacle to God's goodness magnified. Therefore, Athanasius asserted, the mission of the incarnation intensified. God's goodness begrudging no one life turned its face toward Calvary.

Why couldn't God have surmounted the obstacle of sin by divine fiat and have foregone the gore and agony of the cross? Why couldn't God simply have forgiven us as we forgive each other? If someone wrongs you, do you insist on death by crucifixion in order to atone for the transgression? I say I'm sorry; you forgive me. Surely God in His sublime goodness and by virtue of His divine nature could execute by executive order absolution of sin without sacrifice and blood? Yet Athanasius maintained that such absolution merely returned people to a pre-lapsed state, a hollow condition from whence you would simply sin again (which our experience confirms). Consequently, human history would have become no more than a sorry spiral of sin and absolution circling around and around right down the toilet.

A radical overhaul was required, a removal out of our sorry spiral. Here emerges second Athanasius's grand affirmation, "Christ was made man that we might be made [like] God. He manifested Himself by a body that we might receive the idea of the unseen Father; and He endured the insolence of men that we might inherit immortality." Athanasius concludes: "For this cause the Savior reasonably put on Him a body, in order that the body, becoming wound closely to the Life, should no longer, as mortal, abide in death, but, as having put on immortality, should thenceforth rise again and remain immortal. For, once it had put on corruption, it could not have risen again unless it had put on life. And death likewise could not, from its very nature, appear, save in the body. Therefore Christ put on a body, that He might find death in the body, and blot it out. For how could the Lord have been proved at all to be the Life, had He not revitalized what was mortal?"

It's as we read in Romans: "If the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through His Spirit that dwells in you" (8:11).

This "life to your mortal bodies" applies not only to the hereafter, but to the here and now. Christians believe the trajectory of history to be a new convergence between heaven and earth, between the creation and its Creator.

This is how in the ongoing trials and tribulations of this life even unto death, Athanasius could insist that somehow God is still getting His good way. Indeed He is always working all things toward that perfectly good end. He can do nothing else. French philosopher Simone Weil, who knew much of the horrors and miseries of life, once observed, "At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being." This is what keeps us going. It is our hope -- yet it is not a hope based upon wishful thinking -- but upon the very character of a good God who begrudges no one life, real life in union eternally with Him.

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11/10/2010 5:00:00 AM

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About Daniel Harrell

Daniel M. Harrell is Senior Minister of The Colonial Church, Edina, MN and author of How To Be Perfect: One Church's Audacious Experiment in Living the Old Testament Book of Leviticus (FaithWords, 2011). Follow him via Twitter, Facebook, or at his blog and website.

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