An Eastern Father for Western Chrisians: Athanasius's On the Incarnation as a Story Worth Telling

Teaching elective theology courses at a traditional Christian liberal arts college offers both joys and challenges. Perhaps the most obvious joy is that all of the students in class actually want to be there. Enthusiasm for the subject can thus be presupposed. The challenges are numerous. The most obvious is making doctrines that many will intuitively regard as so arcane as to be irrelevant appear as vitally important to a vibrant understanding of the faith as they truly are—dyothelitism is a good example. Another is the ecumenical nature of the audience: typically my classes are dominated by Protestants from various church backgrounds but there are always a small number of other traditions represented, usually Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic. This means that it is vital both to speak respectfully of traditions with which I have significant disagreements but also to encourage students from across the Christian spectrum to take the ideas and insights of others seriously as a means of enriching their own faith and grasping something of the beauty of the Christian faith as a whole.

One such area is Christology. Now, Protestant Christology, at least in its confessional forms as found in the Lutheran Book of Concord, the Anglican Articles, the Presbyterian Westminster Confession, and the Reformed churches Three Forms of Unity, is unabashedly Nicene and Chalcedonian. Yet the soteriological focus of Protestantism, particularly in its popular evangelical variety, has tended to focus on the atonement, particularly in terms of penal substitution, in a manner that can at times be misread as making the Incarnation merely instrumental to Christ’s death. Further, this emphasis can tend to make forgiveness of sins the essential heart of the gospel in a manner that tends to neglect other important aspects of the Bible’s testimony to Christ’s work. This perhaps is not always the case with the Resurrection, but it is certainly an accurate statement of Protestantism’s general lack of concern with the Transfiguration, the descent into the realm of the dead, and the Ascension.

A second area, connected to the first, is the overarching emphasis on sin as the problem afflicting the fallen human race. Any good Protestant knows that dealing with sin via the death of Christ is critical. Yet the Bible is clear that humans face a twofold problem. The moral issue is surely sin. But there is an existential problem too, that of death itself. And this is where Protestant students find help from the eastern tradition. Indeed, over years of teaching I have found that Athanasius’s little book, On the Incarnation, has proved immensely useful to Protestants seeking to enrich their own understanding of Christ’s work in a manner that is not typical of the evangelical resources to which they typically look for guidance.

The work helps on a number of levels. First, it is existentially engaging. The most painful experiences in life are surely those associated with the death of a loved one. Young students may not have been touched directly by such—although any class will always have a number for whom bereavement is not simply an abstraction—but all know that sooner or later death will take the life of someone close to them and leave them painfully and permanently reduced. Forgiveness of sin is vital; but knowing that death has been overcome is a powerful source of home in the midst of grief. And Athanasius’s literary testimony to the conquest of death in and through Christ is one of the most stunning statements of Christian doctrine ever penned.

This leads to the second point. On the Incarnation makes it clear to the reader that the classic doctrine of God is crucial to the church’s faith. Of course, it was written in the midst of the passionate and intense discussions surrounding the status of the Logos that dominated the middle decades of the fourth century. From a teacher’s perspective it is surely the single most concise statement of why those debates were not mere semantic quibbles but went to the heart of the identity of God and the question of whether Christ could actually save. The book is therefore vital to teaching students that doctrine, particularly the doctrine of God, is of immense practical importance. But it is also engaging because it drives home the dynamic power of God in fulfilling the promise of Ezekiel 34—that He Himself would be the shepherd of the sheep and rescue them from all evil.

This then brings us to the third point: in this text, Athanasius draws out the significance of the whole of Christ’s life for salvation. This is not something Protestantism at the level of its confessions has neglected. The use of the humiliation/exaltation motif in theology, along with that of the threefold nature of the mediatorial office, is a staple of sophisticated Protestant thought. But the popular Protestantism that is found in the pew has often been more at home with a simple focus on the death and resurrection of Christ as saving, with the Lord’s prior life fulfilling primarily didactic or exemplary purposes. The realization that the incarnate life of Christ involves the Logos manifesting Himself in human flesh and dealing with death on its own territory, so to speak, broadens the focus to the whole of the incarnate action of Christ, not simply the cross.

And that brings us to the fourth point: the realization that in the Incarnation it is not God who changes but it is the unchanging God who acts to bring humanity into a new relationship with Himself, and this is something my students find transformative. It is this, more than anything, that presses together the transcendent incomprehensibility of God and the grace of the amazing condescension of that God as He grasps that flesh which exists within space and time. This demands a complete reconceptualization both of the relationship of God to creation and of God to salvation. It requires that students reorient their thinking from a God who is there to serve as an empathetic therapist to a God who does not exempt us from the sufferings of this vale of tears but who yet crushes death beneath His feet.

One student told me last year that he had spent time reading Athanasius’s little treatise to his dying grandfather. It had, he told me, proved inestimably encouraging to both of them—to his grandfather, in knowing that the existential threat he now faced so imminently had already been decisively addressed by Him who made heaven and earth and rules by the Word of His power; and to himself for reminding him that what his grandfather was about to experience, and what awaited him at the end of his life, was not the end. God Himself had taken human flesh, died, and emerged victorious on the other side, holding the keys to Death and Hades. Athanasius, he declared, told a story worth telling. And it is one for which Western Christians can be truly grateful to the great Eastern Father.

Carl Trueman is a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.