On the Incarnation: Chapter Two

Welcome to chapter two! Let’s see what Athanasius had to say about God’s work of creation and what it has to do with the incarnation of Jesus.

He opens the chapter with what is almost a truism: over the years, lots of different people have had lots of different things to say about the universe and its origins. The same is true today. Pick a religion—any religion—and it has some explanation of how the universe began. And in every religion there are moral deductions to be made from the origin of the universe; our author here is about to allude to that. But before I leave the first paragraph, I notice that Athanasius speaks of those holding unbiblical beliefs about creation like this: “many have held different opinions, and as each one wished, so he decided it.” There’s a slight accusatory tone coming out of his mouth, if I’m not mistaken. It’s probably warranted.

Because there are moral imperatives—truths about right and wrong that require human action or restraint—which come from the nature of creation, it’s important how we believe creation occurred. Take for example the Epicureans Athanasius mentioned in paragraph 2. They were a sensual bunch—they were the, “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” crowd. “The senses exist to be gratified,” they would say. They didn’t believe in some grand moral order or design because they believed the universe spontaneously sprung into existence without a mind to guide its genesis. If the universe spontaneously popped into existence and we possess the senses to enjoy it, why not use them with reckless abandon? Clearly that’s what our senses are for, and there is no one there outside of or above the world to tell us otherwise. We’re just part of a random and amoral universe in which we should gratify our senses until we die. 

But that doesn’t make sense, does it? Athanasius points this out: the universe appears to be a finely tuned system of intricate, interworking parts. If everything sprang into existence spontaneously with no mind behind it, there is no explanation for how those systems were put into place! Everything that exists would be similar if it was spontaneously generated, because there would have been no mind to say, “this should fit with that, this should work with this, this is created to do this with this other thing over here.” The world as we know it doesn’t make sense if you try and conceive of it as being the product of spontaneous generation. No, there must be someone behind it who designed it. If there's someone who designed it, that someone decided how it ought to work. That "ought" means anything against the design is wrong. Thus we have morals. Athanasius called the person behind this design, “God,” and we agree with him. 

Then Athanasius jumps on Plato (who, by the way, got close to some pretty important truths many times). Plato and his folks believed that God made the world, but they didn’t believe he created it—which is an important distinction. They believed that God created the world out of preexistent matter. In their mind, way back in eternity past—which is a busted concept since eternity is timeless by definition but go with me here—both God (or the gods to the Greeks) and unformed matter existed. The matter was just that—matter, mindless and shapeless. And whatever deity there was took that mindless and shapeless matter and made the world out of it. Athanasius points out that to believe this, you have subjected yourself to what may be an unintended consequence: your god has become weak! He needs something else in order to do his work. If he doesn’t have unformed matter with which to make, he’s become like a carpenter with no wood: impotent.

As a sidenote, there’s another unintended consequence Athanasius didn’t mention. To believe this, you force yourself into a situation where you drift toward pantheism. Pantheism is the belief that everything which exists possesses the attribute of being divine, or at least partly divine. How does this work? Well, God is who he is because he is the only one who is, no matter what. That’s how he introduced himself to Moses: “I AM.” That seems like a weird name until you realize the stunning claim God made to him and the attribute he intended to highlight about himself. God is the only thing in the universe that exists with no dependence on any other thing. Every other being or object in the universe exists by virtue of someone bringing it into existence. Only one being exists with no dependencies, and that being is the God of the Bible. But what if you extended that divine attribute to one other thing—the matter behind creation itself? What if it possessed absolute existence as well? It would share what both Christians and Jews believe to be one of God’s greatest, if not the greatest, attributes. A case could then be made that the stuff the universe is made of is also God, which would mean everything made of it is also, in some way shape or form, divine. What kind of difference does that theological leap—the belief that everything which exists is a small part of God—make? Hinduism is on line one and would like to speak with you.

The final paragraph—and I may be wrong on this, but it’s what I think—may be useful in other contexts but isn’t as useful to us here. Athanasius wrote it in order to refute heretics who had departed from the orthodox Christian belief in a biblical creation at the hands of the Father. They were introducing the idea that someone other than the Father, some other divine or divine-ish being, had created the world. In the age we live in now, the most likely situation in which you believe a different God created the world is one in which you are not a Christian in the first place. I’ve never run across someone who claimed to be a Christian and simultaneously believed someone other than the Father created the world.

To end this chapter, Athanasius draws attention to the words of John in John 1:3: “All things were made through Him (Christ) and apart from Him not even one thing was made.” It’s a short few sentences at the end, but they’re important to sum up the ideas in the chapter, which we can do like this: 

1. The universe did not spontaneously pop into existence out of nothing. There’s too much order for that to make sense.
2. The universe was created by God out of nothing, not merely fashioned by God out of something else which was also preexistent. If that were the case, we’d have a weak god or we’d be gods.
3. The all-powerful God of the Bible created an ordered universe out of nothing, and he did it through the agency of the Son, because “all things were made through Him (Christ), and apart from Him not even one thing was made.” Ask yourself: if God created the world through the Son in the first place, who do you think he’d fix it through if and when it broke? That’s where we’re headed! 

Thoughts? Let’s hear them in the comments!