Of God and man: theology as anthropology from Irenaeus to Athanasius

221 Pages·2009·1.58 MB·English

by  Matthew Craig Steenberg

Of God and Man
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Of God and Man
Theology as Anthropology from
Irenaeus to Athanasius
by
MATTHEW C. STEENBERG
Published by T&T Clark
A Continuum imprint
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
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any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Copyright © Matthew C. Steenberg, 2009
Matthew Steenberg has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identifi ed as the Author of this work.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-10: HB: 0-567-03369-4
PB: 0-567-03370-8
ISBN-13: HB: 978-0-567-03369-7
PB: 978-0-567-03370-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed on acid-free paper in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham
Wiltshire
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword vii
Preface ix
Acknowledgements xi
Abbreviations xii
Introduction to an Anthropological Theology 1
Defi ning ‘Incarnational’ 2
From Christ to Image 7
Reading an Anthropological Theology 9
Methodology 13
Chapter 1
Linking Beginnings and Ends: Irenaeus of Lyons 16
The First Supposition: Humanity Created by God 22
Re-Thinking the Image 29
The Incarnate Christ as Iconic Paradigm 34
The Fashioned Image: The Composite of the Human Person 38
The Second Supposition: An Intentionally Economic Creation 41
Characterizing Irenaeus’ Anthropology: To Speak of God and Man 51
Chapter 2
Impatient Humanity: Tertullian of Carthage 55
Controversy in Interpretation 59
Compositional Elements in the Human Creature 64
Growing Impatient: The Economic Disfi gurement of the One Race 79
The Salvation of Impatient Humanity: Anthropology
Grounding Soteriology 88
Wedded to the Spirit: A Dynamic Anthropology of Growth 98
Chapter 3
A Changing Picture of Nicaea 104
Re-reading Nicaea 107
Nicaea’s Theological Contribution 115
A Nicene Contribution to Anthropological Theology? 126
vi Contents
Chapter 4
Baptized into Human Reality: Cyril of Jerusalem 128
What Mystery Immanently Comes? Baptismal Death, Life
and Enslavement as the Revelation of Human Nature 135
The Function of the Soul and the Defi nition of Sin 140
Who Works This Mystery in Me? From an Economy
of Sin to a Confession of Redemption 143
The Role of the Holy Spirit: Bearing the Life of the Son 149
Joined to the Suffering of Christ 151
Sacrament and Image: Theology Encountered Anthropologically 154
Chapter 5
Moving into Being: Athanasius of Alexandria 158
Incorruption, Corruption, Incorruption 162
The Soul’s Movement into Non-existence: Sin as Transformation 174
Image Renewed: Christ, the Spirit and the Sensibility of Salvation 179
Becoming Sons and Gods: Athanasius on the Concerns of Nicaea 186
Conclusion 190
Bibliography 192
Index 203
FOREWORD
As a research student in Oxford many years ago, I attended a meeting addressed
by a Russian monk from Mount Athos, Fr Sophrony, founder of a monastery in
England. The discussion was drawing to a close, and the chairman invited one last
question. A voice from the back row of the audience said: ‘Tell me, what is God?’
Fr Sophrony replied briefl y: ‘Tell me, what is man?’
For the Athonite starets, the two questions were inseparable. The mystery of
God and the mystery of our human personhood are not two mysteries but one.
Created as we are in the divine image, we come to an understanding of God the
Trinity through an understanding of our own selves. Authentic humanism and
faith in God are interdependent variables. If we affi rm the human, we affi rm also
the divine; if we deny God, we deny also our own humanness.
Such is likewise the primary insight that inspires the present work by the young
Orthodox theologian, Matthew Steenberg. He has already become recognized as
an expert on Irenaeus through his fi rst work, Irenaeus on Creation: The Cosmic
Christ and the Saga of Redemption. In this, his second major publication, he has
enlarged his scope, so that alongside Irenaeus he includes also Tertullian, Cyril
of Jerusalem and Athanasius. In all four of them, in varying ways, he discerns a
single master-theme. As he puts it, ‘The divine and the human are encountered as
one’. All theology must be understood as anthropology, and all anthropology as
theology; ‘the two can never really be separate’. In patristic writings from the
second to the fourth century – at least so far as Dr Steenberg’s four chosen authors
are concerned – there is what he terms a ‘unifying core’, and this ‘unifying core’
is the human person: ‘the human creature forms, for all our authors, the frame-
work for articulating theology’.
The inter-connection between the doctrine of God and the doctrine of human
personhood – between the two questions ‘Who is God?’ and ‘Who am I?’ – is
strikingly indicated in two short phrases. ‘In his unbounded love’, writes Irenaeus
concerning Christ the Word of God, ‘he became what we are, so as to make us
what he is’ (Refutation 5, preface). Yet more explicitly, Athanasius affi rms: ‘He
was made man, that we might be made God’ (On the incarnation 54.3). ‘He was
made man’: it is the aim of trinitarian theology and Christology to explore the
meaning of these words. ‘. . . that we might be made God’, or ‘might be deifi ed’:
that is the central topic of spirituality and mystical theology. Yet Athanasius unites
the two themes in a single sentence, comprising no more than six words in the
original Greek. As Dr Steenberg insists, the Fathers did not split up Christian
doctrine into separate compartments.
viii Foreword
Along with his conviction that theology and anthropology go together,
Dr Steenberg develops in this important book a second master-theme; and that is
the coherence and continuity of Christian doctrine from the second to the fourth
century. The progress of theological discussion during this period, he maintains,
‘is marked out by a remarkable spirit of continuity, even as it embraces profound
change’. In the past, histories of Christian doctrine often implied that trinitarian
theology did not really emerge in a specifi c way until the fourth century; more
particularly, they suggested that an interest in the Holy Spirit only came to the fore
in the last decades of that century. Dr Steenberg argues persuasively that already
in the second century we fi nd an anthropology that presupposes the coeternal
divinity of Father, Son and Spirit. Repeatedly he quotes Irenaeus’ words about
the Son and the Spirit as the ‘two hands’ of God the Father, ‘who are always
with him’.
It gives me particular pleasure that Dr Steenberg emphasizes the doctrinal
signifi cance of Cyril of Jerusalem, ‘one of the great non-Nicene post-Nicenes’, as
he puts it. Cyril, he says, is ‘an understudied voice’, who in the past has all too
often been ‘sidelined’, being treated as an author of interest only to liturgical spe-
cialists concerned with the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist. Dr Steenberg
shows that, on the contrary, Cyril has much to say about the human person as
bearing the image of God and, yet more fundamentally, about the Son’s relation
to the Father and the Spirit. He is not to be dismissed simply as a ‘pastor’ and a
‘catechist’ rather than a theologian, for his catechesis is always profoundly
theological.
The present work is a creative and original study, closely argued, that requires
and repays careful reading. It is based on an exact and detailed knowledge of
the patristic sources, but displays also a close acquaintance with contemporary
scholarship. It has helped me to look at familiar texts from the Fathers with new
eyes, and I am confi dent that it will do the same for many other readers.
Kallistos Ware
Metropolitan of Diokleia
PREFACE
This book aims to accomplish three interrelated, yet distinct, goals. The fi rst is to
explore the connection of an anthropology of the divine image (i.e. humanity
‘after the image of God’) to the developing articulation of God, confessed as
trinity of Father with Son and Spirit, between the second and fourth centuries.
The intention here is to investigate how these two realms, anthropology and the-
ology, are co-operatively engaged in the period, and particularly how the former
forms the context of the latter. By examining the implications of humanity bear-
ing God’s image in key authors from Irenaeus to Athanasius, I hope to demon-
strate that what scholars regularly consider doctrinal contributions peculiar to the
fourth century – refi ned conceptions of the trinity, and in peculiar refl ections
on the Holy Spirit – are current in the anthropological/theological exchange far
earlier, and that the character of these earlier discussions provides insights into
those later developments.
A second goal is to present the beginnings of a different reading of the history
of this period, given expression by these observations on the relationship of
anthropology and doctrinal theology from the second century onwards. While it
is not my intention to write a history of the era – I will focus primarily on ‘case
studies’ of four key fi gures, set in the context of the rise of the conciliar age –
nonetheless the observations made here present tools for a re-reading of various
presuppositions regarding that history.
A third and fi nal goal, which forms a kind of broader setting for the whole
project, is to begin to explore the thought of our early patristic sources outside
the bonds of customary nineteenth- and twentieth-century systematizations of
patristic exegesis, with their pre-conceived notions of doctrinal development
through the fi fth century. This is the kind of methodology that has told us that the
fourth century is about trinity, the fi fth about Christology, that doctrines of the
divinity of the Spirit are not signifi cantly developed prior to 381, etc. The limita-
tions of such analysis are more widely appreciated in these fi rst years of the
twenty-fi rst century, borne witness by the number of books and articles urging a
‘re-thinking’ or ‘fresh approach’. A selection of texts from the past few years in
particular have begun wide-ranging projects of reading early Christian thought
in creative ways, and have been of infl uence in what follows. My own approach
in this regard is explained more fully in the introduction.
These three goals intertwine throughout the volume. When one ceases to read
the early centuries as a series of authors writing within the confi nes of an imposed
doctrinal chronology, one discovers developed themes of trinity far earlier than