Friday, January 21, 2022

Khaled Anatolios on Athanasius's Defense of His Trinitarian Christology in light of Philippians 2:9 and Psalm 45:8

  

In the section of the Orationes with which we will now be dealing, Athanasius is occupied with refuting two Arian proof-texts, Philippians 2:9 and Psalm 45:8. The verse from Philippians reads, “Wherefore God has highly exalted him and has given him a name that is above every name,” while the Psalm verse runes, “Thou hast loved righteousness and hated iniquity; therefore God, even thy God, has anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows.” In both cases the Arain contention, as presented by Athanasius, is that these verses testify to the alterable nature of the Son and his advancement by grace. While Athanasius is of course concerned, in his response ,t to defend the unalterability of the Son, the fundamental issue for him is whether the role of the Son is to be seen as merely passive with regard to the exaltation mentioned in Philippians and the anointing spoken of in the Psalm. He discusses this question in terminology of “giving” and “receiving,” and the framework in which this question is to be placed is clearly that of the Creator-creature, or partaken-partaking distinction. The problem, then, in Athanasian terms, is this: to give is essentially a divine activity; to be given and to receive is essentially a creaturely stance; if, then, the Son is “given” a name above every other name (Phil. 2:9), and if he “receives” the anointing of the Holy Spirit (Ps. 45:8), does this not suggest that the Son is a creature and not the Creator?

 

In response, Athanasius reiterates that the Son as God, cannot be given anything. Rather, it is only the terminology of active “giving” that is properly applicable to the divinity of the Son. For “the Word of God is full and lacks nothing” (CA 1:43) and “what the Father gives, He gives through the Son” (CA 1:45). Therefore, the Son’s essential activity, as God, belongs in the sphere of divine giving. However, Athanasius also distinguishes between what can be spoken of the Son humanly, ανθρωπινως, “on account of the flesh that he bore,” and what is spoken of the Son divinely θεικως (CA 1:41). The distinction between “giving” and “receiving” is then articulated in terms of the distinction between the divine and human in Christ. In this way, Athanasius applies the terminology of “receiving” to the entirety of Christ’s human career, which is viewed essentially as a reception of grace. Christ, he says, received grace “as far as his humanity was exalted and this exaltation was its deification (ελαμβανε γαρ κατα το υψουσθαι τον ανθρωπον, υψωσις δε ην το θεοποιεισθαι αυτον)” (CA 1:45). From Athanasius’s perspective, it is of course essential to view this conjunction of divine giving and human receiving in such a way that a continuity of identity is maintained and the Son’s unalterabilty is thus safeguarded. So he sums up his Christology of “giving” and “receiving” with an emphasis on the unaterability of the Word, quoting Hebrews 13:8: “’Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and for ever,’ remaining unalterable, and it is the same one who gives and receives, giving as God’s Word, receiving as a human being (μενων ατρεπτος, και ο αυτος εστι διδους και λαμβανων, διδους μεν ως Θεου Λογος, λαμβανων δε ως ανθρωπος)” (CA 1:48). (Khaled Anatolios, Athanasius: The Coherence of His Thought [Routledge Early Church Monographs; London: Routledge, 1998], 156-57)