Tuesday, November 10, 2009

the divinity of man and the humanity of God...

This on Athanasius and his creed from John White Chadwick in his admirable study of Unitarianism, "Old an New Unitarian Belief" published in 1894.

"The Unitarianism of Arius in the fourth century, so often treated as a novel heresy, was, in fact, the swan-song of the Unitarian orthodoxy of the earlier Church; and swan-songs are not sweet. His doctrine, while it saved the unity of God, saved nothing of "the excellency of Christ" for human nature. Indeed, the Athanasian doctrine, which triumphed over Arius, at Nicaea, in its identification of Jesus with God, while still affirming his humanity, was a doctrine much more honorable to human nature than that of Arius, which made Jesus a being sui generis, as far as possible removed from man, as near as possible to God, short of identity. The attractiveness of Athanasius — whom you must not associate with the seventh-century Athanasian Creed, but with the fourth-century Nicene — for many Unitarians is in virtue of the fact that they find in him a blundering expression of " the divinity of man and the humanity of God," and of the one substance of all uncreated and created things."

blessings

1 comment:

Bill Baar said...

...whom you must not associate with the seventh-century Athanasian Creed...

How many of us at risk of that mistake?

Few; and that's sort of a sad thing.