On the Incarnation

What do you think of when you see the words 'new life'? Many Evangelical churches bear the name. What do you think we mean by it? My impression is that we think of restored relationships through Christ. I get the feeling that the phrase new life, in the Evangelical usage of it, is meant to appeal to people who have really screwed up their old lives and realize it. Drug addicts and alcoholics need new life. In my mind's eye, when I go to the generic "New Life Community Church" I imagine myself worshiping next to a man in his fifties. His face is worn more than his age justifies. He still has hair but it is greying and thinning. Stubble on his cheeks reveals that he has not shaved in several days. His T-shirt prominently displays a picture of a muscular Jesus crowned with thorns and lifting a cross, it reads, "The Lord's Gym... His Pain, Your Gain." I see the edge of a now indiscernibly worn tattoo stick out along his arm just below the sleeve of the shirt. He sings passionately, though not particularly loudly, in a somewhat hoarse voice and never opens his eyes until we sit down and the offering is collected. If you have lunch with him after the service and ask him what his testimony is, he will tell you about a life filled with motorcycles, women and whiskey that ultimately proved to be empty. Now his life is filled with Jesus. To me this man is the personification of what an Evangelical means when they talk about new life. It is a truly beautiful picture to me. I love that God offers forgiveness and a relationship with Him in Christ, even to those who wander far from Him in their youth.

New life in this sense, as a restored relationship with God, is something that I don't want to demean. What I've learned from the work I've just read is that perhaps we should mean, not something other, but something more when we speak of new life. In Athanasius' On the Incarnation he writes to a new Christian convert about what he takes to be the central tenet of Christianity.

For those of you who are unaware of who Athanasius was let me take a little time to introduce you. He was among the first generation of Christians to see the end of the Roman persecutions. He began his career in the church as a deacon under Clement, the patriarch of Alexandria. After Clement's death, he became the patriarch. The majority of his career was spent defending the catholic faith expressed at the council of Nicaea against what we now know as Arianism. Lewis eulogized Athanasius fittingly when he wrote, "His epitaph is Athanasius contra mundum, 'Athanasius against the world...' He stood for the Trinitarian doctrine, 'whole and undefiled,' when it looked as if all the civilised world was slipping back from Christianity into the religion of Arius - into one of those 'sensible' synthetic religions which are so strongly recommended today and which, then as now, included among their devotees many highly cultivated clergymen. It is his glory that he did not move with the times; it is his reward that he now remains when those times, as all times do, have moved away." (p. 9)

However, this book was written almost ten years before Nicaea. In its time, nobody would have thought of it as a "scholarly" work. It was written to a new convert to Christianity as an introduction to who Christians believe Jesus is. Something truly great about this book is that he speaks both more simply and more profoundly on this topic than I could even hope to do justice to. The faith he would eventually spend his life defending is here, which is another remarkable thing about this book. His tenacious belief in the divinity of the Word was not a response to the Arian crisis, it was already "in his blood" so to speak.

There are several translations of this work available. I recommend the translation by a religious of C.S.M.V in the Popular Patristics Series, published by St. Vladimir's Seminary Press. The cheapest way that I found to own this (and I ardently recommend you put it at the top of your list for books to buy) is to go to St. Vladimir's website and buy it directly from them. But enough of these preliminaries, I hope my words do even scant justice to the few facets of this literary jewel that I will write on.

The primary question that Athanasius is attempting to answer is, "Why did the Word become flesh?" He begins with the Word's motive: the Eternal Word of the Father, the agent through whom everything was created did this out of love for humanity towards the end of our re-creation (pp. 25 - 26). This motif of Christ as both the fitting creator and re-creator of the universe holds the book together like. We need this re-creator because of the Fall. Our sin has allowed death and corruption mar us, God's image bearers. Now instead of the life and immortality we once drew from the Giver of life, we die and become corrupt (ie. rotten). This death and corruption is not merely a physical condition, while it remained unchecked, it came to be a defining characteristic of every aspect of our being. The fall makes us not only physically mortal and susceptible to sickness (though this is certainly his emphasis in the work), but morally corrupt and prone to continue sinning. The Fall set us on a course towards non-being in every aspect.

Now what could a good God do in light of this? For Athanasius, the Incarnation is the only fitting answer to this question. While he briefly considers other possibilities and rejects them, the Incarnation of the Word of God uniquely meets both God's necessity to be consistent in what He has declared (if you eat of the tree you will surely die) and in His design for us to be made in His image. The Word of the Father took a truly human body and inhabited it so he could be considered truly human. His death for all of us and his resurrection in triumph over death give us the possibility of eternal, incorruptible life. Our recreation through the work of Christ, both Word of the Father and truly human, is the most fitting way for death to be abolished.

Not only did the Word re-create the image within us through his death and resurrection, but he also recreated the image before us which we stubbornly and wantonly overlooked. God had given us three means of learning about him, all of which humanity neglected. We had nature, prophets and the Law, but have neglected each of these so completely that we are no longer able to look at them and see God, not because of any defect in them, but because of that inward corruption eating away at our very existence. Since our senses had become so "earth-bound" that we no longer looked to Earth's Maker, the Word became a man and walked among us. This shows us not only his genuine humanity in that the Word meets us "on our level" in the Incarnation, but also His divinity, for no other means, besides God's self-revealing work in the Incarnation, would meet our need to know and relate with our creator.

Christ's death gives us another way to look at Christ's work as the Incarnate Word. He is both an offering to death and the victor over death. In Athanasius' words, "Here, then, is the second reason why the Word dwelt among us, namely that having proved His Godhead by His works, He might offer the sacrifice on behalf of all, surrendering His own temple to death in place of all, to settle man's account with death and free him from the primal transgression. In the same act also He showed Himself mightier than death, displaying His own body incorruptible as the first-fruits of the resurrection." (p. 49). This simultaneous sacrifice on account of and triumph over death changes the way in which Christians look at death. While for the world death is "the end," Christians look beyond death with an assurance for the resurrection.

Athanasius anticipates questions that debate the fittingness of a dying God: If the Word became man to die in place of all, why not do it privately? Athanasius responds that if the Incarnate Word had merely let his body grow old and die in a bed, it would have seemed that he succumbed to something inherent in His nature. The one who healed others would be shown unable to heal himself.

Why not avoid death altogether? Is it not weakness to be condemned by others and hung on a cross? It is not weakness for the Word to undergo death, for he came precisely to overpower it.
Should not the Word died in at least an honorable way? Is it not unfitting for the Word to undergo death on a cross (as an executed felon)? A good wrestler does not demonstrate his strength and skill by overpowering mediocre foes. The Word, by accepting the challenge of the worst that death could contrive, shows that there is no power remaining in death at all.

Next Athanasius takes a question from a believer: Why did the Word die on a cross rather than some other way? Athanasius' response nears poetry that I am simply unable to do justice to in a paragraph. The details of his death make up a sort of dance that displays His atoning work. It is to bear the curse of the Law by undergoing an accursed death upon a tree. We are called through his outstretched arms, one to the Jews, the other to the Gentiles; calling them both to become one people in Him. By dying upheld in the air, the domain of the "prince of the power of the air," he makes a way through Satan's domain.

Finally, Athanasius describes Christ's resurrection as the display of his victory over death. However, this is a victory that doesn't stop with Christ. We are able to participate in it. Athanasius points to the Christian martyrs, some of whom he probably knew personally as an example. They rushed to meet death when all of the world cowered before it in fear. He also goes to some lengths to prove the resurrection to his readers.

So new life... what is it? New life is what Christ our King came to give us. Of course part of that life is a renewed relationship with our Maker, but like Athanasius said: our repentance could have given us that, if it were simply a matter of a transgression. Christ's work deals not only with our transgression of the Law, but also with our corruption. Christ conquered death, plain and simple. New life is not simply entering into a new relationship, but being made into a new creation.

I don't know what I'll be writing on next. It will depend on what my assignments are for my next class..