If you haven't read Athanasius' De Incarnatione (On the Incarnation), do. It's available in an inexpensive paperback edition, with the classic introduction by C S Lewis, from SVS Press. In all thy getting, get this book.
Athanasius is a master of pulling out the implications of the Incarnation for soteriology, or salvation. If Christ was not fully human, he couldn't save us. To save men and women, God had to become man, put on flesh, and then, in his death and Resurrection, raise that flesh from sin and death. On the other hand, Christ also had to be fully God, because only God had the sort of life that could meet death and overcome it. More to the point, fellowship with God was the point for which humans were created, so Christ as God saves us from death and brings us into a participation in God (2 Peter 1:4). As Athanasius puts it "God became man that man might become god."
But my point is not so much the incarnation, as Athanasius' method. Doctrine matters, Athanasius asserts, because truth matters, and Christ is the Truth. Doctrine and life go hand in hand. What you believe matters, because, what you believe will find expression in your life. Or to say it the other way around, the way you live is an indication of your true beliefs. And if you believe wrongly about salvation, Athanasius asserts, that will have real-life, real-world consequences. Salvation is a direction. One is headed toward God because one has been saved. But if one believes wrongly about God, one will not, as it were, head in the right direction. One will take a path leading away from God.
This is why Spong cannot say that Christ is not really born of a virgin, or not really raised bodily from the dead, and not face serious consequences not only in terms of soteriology, but in terms of the here and now. (One wants to ask of Messr Spong how he knows what he knows about the virgin, and whether he's extrapolating from extreme prejudice. Funny thing, though Spong has always refused to put his beliefs and assertions to the test via debate and written response. I wonder who's really afraid of being proven wrong here, Spong or the fundamentalists he consistently bashes in his strawman arguments? But I digress.) As one author has put it, heresy is cruel. It is cruel because it lies. It promises something which it does not deliver: life. The Tradition of the Church in that it participates in the Truth who is Christ, gives life and gives it abundantly. It is the easy yoke which gives rest.
We moderns don't like to be told what to believe. We somehow think that if we don't have freedom to believe what we want, we are somehow not authentic. But the question is not a matter of freedom from, but a matter of freedom for. Freedom does not only consist in freedom from restraint, it also consists in freedom for something. God has built in that we can choose to believe what we want. We are free from constraint. But we are not free from the consequences and implications of our belief. That would be true inauthenticity: to believe something but not participate in its reality, good or ill. Instead we are free for a purpose: free to participate in the life of God. But to do so we have to be on the pathway that leads to God. To find that pathway we must believe it exists, and that by following it we will find the God whom we seek. But there is only one pathway to God: Christ. And whatever we may believe, if we do not follow that pathway, we will not find God. Because utlimately by not following that pathway we reveal we do not believe. And God is not so cruel as to make us inauthentic by not allowing us the consequences of our belief.
Posted by Clifton at January 17, 2003 01:36 PM | TrackBack