The Divine Dilemma
St. Athanasius on the Incarnate & Incorruptible Word of God2019 Nativity Feast Reflection #1
by Fr. Geoffrey R. Boyle
Feast of the Theophany of Our Lord and Savior Jesus ChristAnno Domini 2020, January 6
by Fr. Geoffrey R. Boyle
Feast of the Theophany of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ
Anno Domini 2020, January 6
Yet, true though this is, it is not the whole matter. As we have already noted, it was unthinkable that God, the Father of Truth, should go back upon His word regarding death in order to ensure our continued existence. He could not falsify Himself; what, then, was God to do? …What—or rather Who was it that was needed for such grace and such recall as we required? Who, save the Word of God Himself, Who also in the beginning had made all things out of nothing? His part it was, and His alone, both to bring again the corruptible to incorruption and to maintain for the Father His consistency of character with all. For He alone, being Word of the Father and above all, was in consequence both able to recreate all, and worthy to suffer on behalf of all and to be an ambassador for all with the Father.
For this purpose, then, the incorporeal and incorruptible and immaterial Word of God entered our world.”
~St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation
(St. Vladimir's Press, 1996), 32-33
Corruption is the movement towards non-existence, non-being, no-thing-ness.
But our Lord is the God who IS—I AM—in whom there is life and from whom everything that is has come to be (Jn. 1:3).
So, for something to corrupt, to reverse the course of being and become non-being, well, that’s just not how it is with God. And how much less so with those who were made in His image, after His likeness (Gen. 1:27). Corruption simply can’t be the end of man.
But this same God who IS—Yahweh—is also the truth (Jn. 14:6). And He cannot lie (Num. 23:19; Titus 1:2; Heb. 6:18). The Word He spoke to Adam—“for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Gen. 2:17)—must be fulfilled.
That’s the Divine dilemma. God must carry out His word and He must undo the corruption. But how?
St. Athanasius says it beautifully: “For this purpose, then, the incorporeal and incorruptible and immaterial Word of God entered our world.”
He didn’t enter our world as if He wasn’t already a part of it. But it was new. It was now in love—redeeming love. It was compassion that moved Him to take a body—our
body.
The only solution to this Divine dilemma was the offering of a body—His body—to the Father. His death means the end of death, the fulfillment of the Law, the reversal of corruption back to life. It also means that a sufficient exchange takes place. He takes what’s ours so that we might take what is His. Or, to say it a bit more Athanasius-ly, “He assumed humanity that we might become God” (93).
Of course, Athanasius doesn’t mean that the distinction between Creator and creation disappears. But He does mean that the image in which we were created is restored—by His taking our flesh and going to the cross, dying and rising for us.
“Naturally, therefore,” Athanasius says, “the Saviour assumed a body for Himself, in order that the body, being interwoven as it were with life, should no longer remain a mortal thing, in thrall to death, but as endued with immortality and risen from death, should thenceforth remain immortal” (81).
We Christians, through our Baptism into Christ, have been interwoven with life. As such, our corruption is reversing, our death is defeated, and our life is hidden with God in Christ. The Divine dilemma is solved. The Law is fulfilled, the Gospel upheld, and Christ lives for us.
Merry Christmas!
*Fr. Geoffrey R. Boyle
is Pastor of Grace and Trinity Lutheran Churches in Wichita, KS. He's the father of five and recently completed his PhD at the University of Toronto, studying Old Testament Biblical Theology.
**Originally delivered at the 11th annual Feast of the Nativity in the Year of Our Lord 2020 in Wichita, KS at The Ladder, headquarters for Eighth Day Institute.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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