Monday 19 January 2015

In which Athanasius states the obvious and proves the resurrection



He begins with the obvious:

Dead men cannot take effective action; their power of influence on others lasts only till the grave. Deeds and actions that energise others belong only to the living. 

Ok. With you so far.

Well, then, look at the facts in this case. The Saviour is working mightily among men, every day He is invisibly persuading numbers of people all over the world, both within and beyond the Greek-speaking world, to accept His faith and be obedient to His teaching. Can anyone, in face of this, still doubt that He has risen and lives, or rather that He is Himself the Life? 

Does a dead man prick the consciences of men, so that they throw all the traditions of their fathers to the winds and bow down before the teaching of Christ? If He is no longer active in the world, as He must needs be if He is dead, how is it that He makes the living to cease from their activities, the adulterer from his adultery, the murderer from murdering, the unjust from avarice, while the profane and godless man becomes religious? If He did not rise, but is still dead, how is it that He routs and persecutes and overthrows the false gods, whom unbelievers think to be alive, and the evil spirits whom they worship? 

For where Christ is named, idolatry is destroyed and the fraud of evil spirits is exposed; indeed, no such spirit can endure that Name, but takes to flight on sound of it. This is the work of One Who lives, not of one dead; and, more than that, it is the work of God. It would be absurd to say that the evil spirits whom He drives out and the idols which He destroys are alive, but that He Who drives out and destroys, and Whom they themselves acknowledge to be Son of God, is dead. 

In a word, then, those who disbelieve in the resurrection have no support in facts, if their gods and evil spirits do not drive away the supposedly dead Christ. Rather, it is He Who convicts them of being dead. We are agreed that a dead person can do nothing yet the Saviour works mightily every day, drawing men to religion, persuading them to virtue, teaching them about immortality, quickening their thirst for heavenly things, revealing the knowledge of the Father, inspiring strength in face of death, manifesting Himself to each, and displacing the irreligion of idols ; while the gods and evil spirits of the unbelievers can do none of these things, but rather become dead at Christ's presence, all their ostentation barren and void. 


(Athanasius, On the Incarnation, ch 5)
 



Thursday 15 January 2015

Individualism is a bad thing, right?

 
Just today the archbishops of Canterbury and York attacked the rampant individualism in our society. It’s a problem, yes?

Well yes. And no.

Yes: As David Wells describes in the excellent God in the Whirlwind, the dominant way in which we understand ourselves has shifted from “human nature” – what we share in common -  to “selfhood.” With this shift comes an emphasis on our individuality to the extent that the only competent and qualified judge of my actions, character and circumstances is, well, me. With this shift comes a decline in the sense that we have a common share in something like human nature and that we might therefore have certain responsibilities and duties of care towards one another. And with this shift come many of the challenges to authority, the loss of enthusiasm for church structure, discipline, historical orthodoxy, etcetera etcetera. So yes, individualism is a bad thing.

And yet, as Richard Bauckham demonstrates in a paper on John’s Gospel, if we are going to think biblically there is a sense in which we must affirm individualism:

"The gospel of John is individualistic, rather emphatically so. It draws each individual out of whatever group they may use as a cover for evading responsibility and it invites each individual to respond to the Jesus who meets people where they are and deals with them in all their individual particularity. When the gospel transcends this individualism, as it does, it does not contradict it. The individual is not once again lost either in the collective or the divine. Rather true individualism is fulfilled in relationality and self-giving. This gospel leads us far, far away from the self-interested self-aggrandising atomistic ego-centrism that constitutes the individualism of our contemporary society."  (the full talk is available here).

The bible is individualistic and it is anti-individualism.

The same can be said for Paul of course, even though an emphasis on individual salvation in Paul has long been pooh-poohed as a projection of sixteenth or twentieth century angst back onto the first century apostle. Indeed Paul not only speaks of but embodies the themes Bauckham detects in John. Knowing himself to be an individual individually called by grace (“the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me” Gal 2:21, “me, the foremost of sinners” 1 Tim 1:15) he then gives himself for sake of the church as the servant of the Son and of his people.