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Creation and Redemption
– the One work of the One Word.
The Logos of the Cross
in Irenaeus and Athanasius.
We will begin, then, with the creation of the
world and with God its Maker, for the first fact that you must grasp is
this: the renewal of creation has
been wrought by the Self-same Word Who made it in the beginning. There
is thus no inconsistency between creation and salvation for the One
Father has employed the same Agent for both works, effecting the
salvation of the world through the same Word who made it in the
beginning. (Athanasius, De incarn. 1)
Introduction
‘The Logos of the cross’ has been ‘foolishness’ to philosophers of
every age. No
human wisdom can ever accommodate the crucifixion of the ‘Lord of Glory’. Carnal thinking demands that either
the One crucified is less than the Lord of Glory or that His cross
is less than a real crucifixion. Yet
‘God crucified’ is His power and wisdom and its uncompromising
proclamation is the duty of the Church in all ages. Thus the Scriptures warn us of the
battleground between the wisdom of the cross and the wisdom of men. The history of the Church, its
doctrines of Christology, of Creation and of Redemption, have fallen
along these contours.
In the sub-Apostolic period, this perennial threat of philosophy
has been called ‘‘the work of the Greek spirit on the soil of the
gospel.” The
characteristic fruit of this process was the divorce of redemption from
creation. This will always be the
case when the Scriptures are approached with the dualism of Hellenic
thought. Unless the philosopher
entirely reconfigures their categories of thought around the Word of God
they will never apprehend the good news.
‘The Word became flesh’
must either be the foundation of a theology grounded in the God-Man, or
the terms of this saving truth will be distorted beyond any Biblical
sense.
When the creative Word and the realm of flesh are considered to be
at odds, Christ’s Person and work cannot be appreciated. Yet, perhaps this is the wrong way
around. Christ, as He reveals
Himself in His word, judges our appreciation of ‘heaven and earth’, of
‘God and man’, of ‘time and eternity’, of ‘Spirit and flesh’. In encountering Him in His word and by
His Spirit we then understand the unity of creation and
redemption. We understand them as
united since Christ can only be known as both ‘Word’ and
flesh’, as both ‘the First and the Last’ and the One ‘who
died and rose again’. It is not simply that Christ’s work
is incomprehensible without the doctrine of creation – Christ Himself
demands to be known as the Creator who is crucified.
Here we grasp Paul’s resolve ‘to know nothing except Christ and
Him crucified.’ Christ – His exalted Person and
His submissive work – must be the foundation of thought. Christ and His work is not a
surprising metaphysical or ethical issue to be thought through via
doctrine grounded elsewhere. All
theology which begins elsewhere fails at the outset. If we are to resist the divorce of
creation and redemption, we must hold onto Christ as the Mediator of
both. To fail in this is to fail
to recognize Christ – to fail to be Christian.
Thus, against the heresies of the sub-Apostolic
era, it fell to theologians such as Irenaeus and Athanasius to uphold the
continuity of creation and redemption.
They were able to do so precisely because, for them, Christ and
His work was not a metaphysical conundrum but the Rock upon which they
built. Hart’s analysis of Irenaeus holds true for Athanasius also:
“[he made] the person of the Incarnate Son
his dogmatic starting point, rather than the dualistic framework provided
by the categories of Greek thought.”
These men were not concerned to hold creation and redemption
together in an abstract sense (so as to keep a balanced theological
ledger). Rather their commitment
to Christ as arche and telos of all things forced them to
think through creation and redemption as the work of the One Word of the
Father. Athanasius’ starting
point in De Incarnatione is instructive:
The first fact that you must grasp is this: the renewal of creation has been
wrought by the Self-same Word Who made it in the beginning. There is
thus no inconsistency between creation and salvation for the One Father
has employed the same Agent for both works, effecting the salvation of
the world through the same Word who made it in the beginning.
A ‘consistency’ in creation and redemption is not the outcome of a
well balanced systematics. The
consistency – in fact all theology, the Church, indeed the cosmos
– resides in Christ Himself. For
the Bishops of Lyon and Alexandria, Christ is our Logic – our Creator-Redeemer. For this reason they were able to
defend the coherence of creation and redemption in Christ. We will now look briefly at some of
their opponents.
Heresies
The early Church was assailed on all sides by those who claimed an
allegiance to Christ and to His redeeming work. Yet immediately the
question must be raised ‘Redemption from what? And to what? And by Whom?’
The answers given by Marcion (c.80 – c. 160) were disturbing. Christ saves us from the Creator God
of the Old Testament who is bad (viz. involvement with creation),
capricious, legalistic and not the Father of Jesus. The death of Christ purchases
salvation and His soul’s rising from death gives hope for our own soulish
afterlife.
The Gnostic Valentinus (in Rome from c. 136-165), provided
Irenaeus with his chief ‘whipping boy’.
He taught that the creator is not the Supreme Being but, as
Irenaeus caricatures, ‘the fruit of a defect’
existing in a long chain of deity (the pleroma) which kept the
created order at a great (almost by definition, unbridgeable)
distance. Christ is simply one
emanation from this pleroma who came to save the true pneumatikoi
from this material world through imparting secret gnosis.
Arius (c. 250 – c. 336), was perhaps the most serious threat to
orthodox Christianity because his account of Christ’s saving work was so
apparently Scriptural. The ‘what’
of the cross was set forth plainly.
Yet the ‘Who’ of the cross proved the decisive error. Arius committed the fundamental
mistake outlined above – that of deciding his doctrines of God, of man
and of creation in advance of considering the God-Man Creator. For him, the Divine Being is unitary
and without distinctions, must be un-begotten, can have no contact with
creation and can never partake in human (i.e. mutable) existence. Of course he could subscribe to none
of these views if Christ were his dogmatic foundation. Thus it fell
naturally to Athanasius, whose Christocentricity we have noted, to defeat
this terrible heresy.
Before we move on we ought to note that Arius’ account of
redemption fails, not only on the point of Christ’s identity but also on
the goal of this redemption. If
God and the created order are necessarily incompatible then Christ either
does not bring us true fellowship with God (so, for instance, Islam,
where paradise is exceedingly carnal and a place from which Allah is
conspicuously absent) or we partake in this fellowship only by escaping
the creation (e.g. – eastern philosophies and their influence on the new age).
We now turn to the teaching of Irenaeus and Athanasius.
Creation
Christ’s work does not begin with His baptism or His birth. From eternity He has been the One in
the bosom of the Father, loved by Him in the bond of the Spirit and
chosen as the Agent of all the Divine will and wisdom. This is His Person, and His work
begins with the Father and the Spirit on day one of creation.
For Irenaeus, even our individual formation in the womb
comes through Christ. The Father of Jesus
brought all things into existence from nothing
through His two hands
– the Son and the Spirit, His Word and Wisdom.
Each of these points is crucial for Irenaeus.
Firstly, that creation is wrought by Christ and from the very God
revealed in Christ, is, he considers, his chief weapon against all
heresies. This was just what Valentinus and
Marcion denied. For them, Jesus
of Nazareth could not be the revelation of the LORD God of Genesis. This material defilement was precisely
that from which they attempted to save the God of Jesus Christ. If Irenaeus could prove this point,
Valentinus and Marcion would be forced either to abandon Christ or their
false teaching. They could
certainly not continue their allegiance to the God of Jesus Christ
alongside a moral disdain (not to mention metaphysical incredulity) at
His creative work.
Secondly, it was vital to proclaim ex nihilo against those
who would put creation and Creator on a single continuum of being. Minns puts it well:
Creation does not share in the same substance
as God, in however attenuated and sullied a form. Rather, God is the only reality, the
only thing that really is, and over against God, called into
existence out of nothingness by God, and held in being, poised over
nothingness by God, is everything that God creates.’
The long chain of ‘go-between’ deities espoused by Valentinus’ pleroma
ought, in fact, to be infinite if they are truly to uphold the
transcendence of the Supreme Being.
Yet the distinction which Gnostics claim to exist between creation
and Creator is, in the end, a quantitative, not qualitative one. Only ex nihilo can ‘draw the
line’ in an absolute sense. Only
on the other side of this line can God be truly free and sovereign in His
dealings with creation. Only this
kind of free sovereignty can allow, simultaneously, the immanence which
God’s gospel proclaims.
The third point re-enforces the second – triune creation is
essential if God’s transcendence and immanence are to be
maintained.
“Because the Son and the Spirit are God, to
create by means of his two hands means that God himself is creating. This is accordingly a theology of
mediation which breaks through Hellenic doctrines of degrees of being. There do not, on this account, need to
be intermediate beings between God and the world, because the Son and the
Spirit mediate between the divine and the created.”
God Himself creates but He creates through the ‘Other’ who is His
Son and He perfects (or ‘disposes’ as he says in Demonstration. 5)
through the ‘Other’ who is His Spirit.
This triune theology of creation which Irenaeus propounded, which
Athanasius built on, and of which we are the heirs, is the only doctrine
which can make sense of the creation as truly other than God, yet belonging
to Him. The otherness in eternity
of the Son and Spirit is an otherness which very much belongs to
God. Yet through the ‘Other’ of
the Son and by the ‘Other’ of the Spirit is a way out into the great
‘other’ – creation.
On all these points, Athanasius was in agreement. The great advance which he won in his
day was to differentiate definitively between the Son’s eternal
generation from the Father and creation’s in-time manufacture. In securing this, Athanasius would
settle the question, ‘on which side of the Creator-creation ‘line’ does
the Logos belong?’
To Athanasius, Arius could be heard to ask, ‘why is there a time
when the creation was not
and not a time when the Son was not?’
‘What convincing distinction can be made between begetting and
creating?’
Athanasius answers that there is a crucial distinction between
what is begotten and what is willed.
Paternity is a matter of essence, not will. As soon as a father
has a son he is a father.
Therefore the Father has always been Father just as the Son has
always existed. Yet creating is a
matter of will not essence – one can be a maker before one
actually makes. Therefore, just
because God has always been Maker does not mean that there has
always been something that is made (i.e. creation). Having said all this, Athanasius can
say confidently that the Son is God in essence; creatures are what they
are by the will of God. The Logos
is firmly on God’s side of the ‘line’ and we are on the other.
It is not He who was created for us, but we are
created for Him.
It is this sense of creation ‘for Him’ to which we now turn.
The purpose of creation
…why should God have made them at all, if He
had not intended them to know Him? But, in fact, the good God has given
them a share in His own Image, that is, in our Lord Jesus Christ, and has
made even themselves after the same Image and Likeness. Why? Simply in
order that through this gift of Godlikeness in themselves they may be
able to perceive the Image Absolute, that is the Word Himself, and through
Him to apprehend the Father; which knowledge of their Maker is for men
the only really happy and blessed life.
The creature is willed by God out of His abundant goodness
as the overflow of His triune life.
Yet just as God does not will to be God alone,
so the creature is not brought into being in independence. Rather, as one made after the true
Image – the
eternal Word – the proper destiny of man is to participate in the divine
life. Man, in union with Christ –
who is Man among men
– is to be taken up to the Father, by the Spirit, and so to participate
in God. This participation is grounded in a knowing
of God, and this knowing is necessarily a Trinitarian dynamic.
Here
is the telos of creation – many brought into God in the Son.
It should be clear from this that creation is not, therefore, an
emanation, nor an inevitable existence alongside God. The creature is purposefully
willed by the Father as that which is ‘after’ His eternal Image Whom He
loves. His love for the creature corresponds to His love for the Son, for
when He beholds the creation He delights ‘in seeing the works made after
his own Image; even this rejoicing of God is on account of his own
Image.’
Crucially this means that God’s own integrity is bound up in the creation. To use the terminology of the previous
section, the Father has willed a commitment to the creation, in a
way analogous to His essential commitment to the Son. It is therefore unthinkable that the
Father’s creation should not fulfil the purpose which He has ordained for
it, for otherwise God’s “consistency of character with all”
is compromised. God must act lest
He “be conquered [and] His wisdom lessened.”
The need for re-creation (Athanasius)
In the world views circulating at the time of the early Church,
the problem of our relation to the divine was ontological: our very
physicality cuts us off from the divine life. The great ruptures occurred pre-creation (e.g. wars in
heaven) and these gave rise to this world. Against this, Athanasius maintained the Biblical account
that physicality is not the issue for the creature before
God. Indeed creation, as we have
seen, springs from the good purpose of God. The problem – that is, the fall – occurs after
creation. Thus it is humanity’s disobedience
that gives rise to the rupture between God and man: an ethical rather
than ontological problem. This
ethical obligation is owed to God precisely because He is the Maker and
Owner of creation. At the same
time, it is because God has placed man at the centre of His purposes as
vice-gerent over creation that this ethical rupture will have
consequences for the physical creation.
In this way Athanasius could take seriously our true problem
before God – sin – while at the same time observing the physical
consequences for the creation.
God’s covenant with ‘Man’ in the fullest sense of what God
intended for him,
was the operating system of creation. Disrupt this and you disrupt the
entire creative work.
Thus because of the fall, ‘the work of God was being undone.’
This ‘undoing’ is concentrated where creation itself was concentrated –
in man after the Image of God. In
rejecting the Word, mankind no longer knew God and instead pursued false
images (idols), not the true Image. Men made for incorruptibility and
participation in God were perishing under sin and enslaved to Satan.
Time and again Athanasius stresses how ‘supremely unfitting’
and ‘unthinkable’
it would be for the ‘All Good’
‘Father of Truth’
to allow His creation to run such a ruinous path. He also notes that humanity has no
resources within itself to remedy the situation. Thus God’s commitment to creation
demands a
reversal of the fall. Since the
fall was a ‘de-creation’ so redemption must be a re-creation. And if this is so, then the Creator
Himself must be the Redeemer.
Thus,
Creation
and redemption are held together by the One Divine Agent.
The need for recapitulation (Irenaeus)
Where Athanasius speaks of re-creation, Irenaeus speaks of
recapitulation.
Recapitulation (anakephalaiosis)
has been variously understood: to sum up, to go over the same ground
again, to unite under a single head, to restore to the original, to bring
to a climax, a spiral climb. All of these capture something of
Irenaeus’ meaning. Fundamentally, redemption is described
as God “recapitulating in himself his own handiwork.”
Thus “what we had lost in Adam – namely, to be according to the image and
likeness of God – that we might recover in Christ Jesus.” Christ achieves this by taking the
very flesh of Adam
– the head of the old humanity – and, going over the ground of Adam’s
history,
Christ achieves victory where Adam failed. Thus Christ can become the Head of the
true spiritual humanity to which we must belong. God’s creative work has moved in this
direction from the beginning, making Christ’s incarnate work completely
‘of-a-piece’ with His creation.
The goal of all God’s ways with the creation has ever been to sum
up everything under the Heavenly Man, Christ.
Thus, the humanity of Adam, for Irenaeus, was ‘sketched out’
expressly as that which must be filled out in Christ’s soma
pneumatikon:
“The Word – the Creator of all – prefigured in
Adam the future economy of his own incarnation. God first sketched out the ensouled human being, with a
view to his being saved by the spiritual human being. Since the Saviour was already in
existence, the one who was to be saved had to come into existence, or the
Saviour would have been Saviour of no one.”
Christ is ‘Saviour’ before the fall. Thus Minns must be right when he says
of Irenaeus’ theology:
“Adam’s sin conditions the salvation to be
worked by the incarnate Word but it does not call it into existence. For the earth creature does not come
to be in the image and likeness of God until God becomes flesh, until the
human being in whose image Adam was created stands on the earth.”
It would be anachronistic to call Irenaeus supralapsarian and
Athanasius infralapsarian yet these are roughly the sides on which they
fall in this later debate. For Irenaeus, Christ’s work is not simply
the answer to sin but a progression in the one dynamic story of
creation’s plerosis moving from Adam to Christ, from flesh to
spirit, from Eden to the New Jerusalem.
Thus,
Creation
and redemption are held together by the one divine goal.
The cross and resurrection
Both Irenaeus and Athanasius are commonly
accused of making the ‘bare fact’ of incarnation the sum total of
Christ’s saving work. Yet this is
unfair.
For Irenaeus, Christ’s filling out of Adam’s
distorted image means necessarily a “filling up [of] the times of
his disobedience”
In taking on Adam’s substance, He took on Adam’s curse – this He
satisfied at the cross, ‘propitiating indeed for us the Father, against
Whom we had sinned’
and ‘redeeming us by His own blood’. Having put Adam to death, the
resurrection then realizes Christ’s soma pneumatikon, bringing
about the true glorified humanity to which the redeemed will belong and
on which the new creation will be patterned.
For Athanasius, the curse of death
is a key consideration. Within the creation narratives comes a
decree from the Creator God who orders all things by His Word. The word of Genesis 2:17 must be
maintained lest God be proved false and, ironically, the serpent proved
true. Christ’s incarnation is
therefore that by which the Word can take a body capable of death “so
that in His death all might die, and the law of death thereby be
abolished.” Moreover this death is specifically a
sacrifice made
under God’s curse
and offered without blemish,
so as to be a ransom
freeing us from Adam’s ‘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.”
Thus neither Irenaeus nor Athanasius espouse redemption as a fait
accompli the minute the Word is united to flesh. While they both see the union of
divine and human as the goal of God’s creation-redemption purposes and
while the ‘Word become flesh’ is their sole hope for this union, the
‘bare fact’ will not do on its own.
The nature of Adam’s race requires much work to be done. Mankind must turn from idols to the
Truth, we must receive and truly own an active righteousness before the
Father, Satan has to be defeated, justice must be upheld, sin must be
dealt with, incorruptibility must be won. Thus, Christ’s divine teaching, His demonstrations of
authority over man, nature and the devil, His active obedience, His
suffering, His death, His resurrection and His ascension are all crucial
in order to accomplish redemption.
Yet, against those (especially the Arians), who would uphold the
necessity of these works yet deny the Person who worked them, it must be
maintained that the Agent of these works is God and the locus of their
working is man. These works are,
therefore, only effective because they are the works of the God-Man. Thus, for Irenaeus and Athanasius, the
incarnation is the necessary and sufficient cause of redemption,
but only when articulated as the full work of the Incarnate Word.
Creation and Redemption
Today the church struggles to relate creation and redemption
appropriately. When theologians
collapse the two together they fall for a universalism that betrays the
plain teaching of the Scriptures. When we sever creation from redemption
we preach a false gospel of escape from this world to a higher
plane. The latter danger is the
greater in evangelical circles.
In our pulpits the renewed creation is rarely preached. Instead an anaemic ‘heaven’ is held
out as the eschatological hope. The sacraments become Platonised, worship
becomes a-physical, Christology becomes Nestorian and the church is
rendered dumb on such vital issues as ecology and our Western obsession
with body image.
Again we maintain that such a church has not simply failed to
appreciate Christ’s work – it has failed to recognize Christ
Himself. The Christ of Scripture
is the ‘one Lord… through Whom all things came and through Whom we
live.’ The Church must hold together creation
and redemption because she herself is held together in Him Who is the
fulcrum of both.
We maintain that without a Christocentric doctrine of creation,
sin makes no sense. Only the sovereignty of a Creator Christ could
justify His definition of sin in John 16:9. Only sin against Jesus could possibly be forgiven by Jesus
(see Mark 2:1-12). Thus only
Christ as Creator can make sense of Christ as Redeemer. If He weren’t the Agent of Creation
then the incarnation would be an alien work effected by an alien
agent. “It would be the (albeit
benign) invasion of a foreign land.” Christ would not be the Good Shepherd
(at least not in the Biblical sense)
and the sheep He saves would not be His own
except by conquest.
Against this, Irenaeus must be heard again as he proclaims the
triune Creator’s good purposes for this world. Man ruling under God was the creation blueprint realized in
Christ, the Heavenly Man ruling under God in the redeemed creation. We find our place in this one economy
when we come to the Father through the Word made man. Crucially this
participation in God comes as we participate in the creation. Indeed the very telos of the
creation comes in this divinisation and this divinisation is located
nowhere else than in the creation.
We also must hear Athanasius as he holds out Christ as the divine
Agent of creation and redemption.
The incarnate work is nothing less than a re-creation of the
de-created cosmos disintegrating under the weight of sin and death. The Redeemer is therefore no-one less
than the Creator taking responsibility for His handiwork and making them
new.
When we fail to hold together these doctrines, Christ’s work is
entirely misunderstood. It is
either considered as a superfluous addendum to the telos of
creation or it achieves a goal subordinate to it, or it begins a work alien
to the creative intention or, worst of all, it is won as a salvation from
the created order (and perhaps even from the Creator). Yet none of these say what the
Scriptures insist and what Irenaeus and Athanasius knew must be
proclaimed. That is, that redemption
is the accomplishment of the one oikonomia theou encompassing both
creation and redemption.
Redemption is not an awkward adjunct but rather the accomplishment
and consummation of creation’s goal.
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