Athanasius
Recasts atonement as healing, not payment
The problem it faces
If salvation is essentially a legal transaction, it never reaches the deeper human catastrophe: a nature that has turned from its source of life and is unravelling into corruption and death.
The move it makes
He frames atonement ontologically. The Word takes on mortal human nature and, by uniting it to his own imperishable life, heals and re-creates it from the inside — covering death with life rather than settling a penalty.
The new problem it opens
Locating salvation in the healing of nature leaves the legal and moral side underspecified — how guilt is answered and where God's justice and wrath fit — the very data the later Western tradition refuses to fold into ontology.
My notes
Athanasius is where I turned to to keep my faith after PSA broke down in my head. It's a beautiful answer to the problem, and I'm obviously a big fan of it. In it, he claims that man is moving towards non-being (death) by virtue of his sins, which cause corruption that leads to death. There's a strong thread here that death is the natural consequence of sin, and not a necessary consequence imposed externally by God as a response to sin (as is the case in PSA).
That said, I do have one minor quibble with Athanasius, and it's in his divine dilemma. The dilemma arguably pits the goodness of God to redeem his image-bearers against the truthfulness of God to hold true to the sentance of death. The trouble is in it's relocation of the consequence of death from the natural world to a necessity by virtue of truthfulness. In doing so, it claims that God is self-bound by his statement to render death unto his image-bearers.
This is, to be sure, an inconsistency within Athanasius. Either sin leads to death inherently, or death is imposed externally, but it cannot be both at the same time. This ambiguity regarding the source of death can be seen as a microcosm of the same equation that Owen tries to balance in the 17th century.
One other note, and that is on the nature of immortality in man. Modern views tend to presuppose the inherent immortality of man. Indeed, it's this presupposition of immortality that is required to explain eternal conscious torment (and why modern proponents of annihilation call their view "conditional immortality"). Athanasius and Irenaeus held that immortality was a superadded gift of God, dependent upon man's attendance thereto, and not something inherent to the creature. Their argument is that man turned away from the source of life, and by negation, introduced death and corruption into themselves, leading to eventual mortality.
Where this sits
Upstream
- Irenaeus influenced
Downstream
- John McLeod Campbell ontological frame
- T. F. Torrance modern Athanasian