The Fatherhood of God from Origen to Athanasius (Oxford Theological Monographs) [Paperback]

Peter Widdicombe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 18, 2001 | Series: Oxford Theological Monographs

The fatherhood of God has had a central, if increasingly controversial, place in Christian thinking about God. Yet although Christians referred to God as Father from the earliest days of the faith, it was not until Athanasius in the fourth century that the idea of God as Father became a topic of sustained analysis. Looking at the genesis of Athanasius' understanding of divine fatherhood against the background of Alexandrian tradition, Widdicombe demonstrates how the concept came to occupy such a prominent place in Christian theology.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"[A] very readable work....Widdicombe's thoroughness gives the book a synthetic dimension that some other treatments of Origen and Athanasius lack: the reader has a clear sense of both Origen's and Athansius' theologies of God over-all, and how the specific doctrine of the fatherhood of God figures in each of those theologies....[A] work of first-class scholarship."--Theological Studies

"The author must be thanked for his clarity of style and his determination not to `wear his learning heavily'....The work is well crafted, accurate and useful at the right level of study."--Regent's Review

"A technical but eminently lucid investigation....This book should be required reading for those who seek to dismiss traditional Christian language about God as Father and Son without first understanding what its classic formulations meant to those who articulated them."--Religious Studies Review

"I would highly recommend this book."--Pro Ecclesia

"Subtly, this is a very good book. It is a good book because of its clear, sure-handed scholarship."--Church History

About the Author

Peter Widdicombe is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario.

Product Details

• Paperback: 316 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (January 18, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0199242488
• ISBN-13: 978-0199242481
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,572,490 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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This review is from: The Fatherhood of God from Origen to Athanasius (Oxford Theological Monographs) (Paperback)

This work traces the image of divine fatherhood in the Alexandrian tradition from Origen to Athanasius. While devoting five chapters to the former and four to the latter, Widdicombe also deals in two intervening chapters with the significant Alexandrians in the generations separating them: Dionysius, Theognostus, and, more importantly, Arius. Following Rowan Williams, Widdicombe believes that Methodius sets the stage for Arius by sharpening of the distinction between God and the created order in his criticism of the Origen's doctrine of creation. Looking to the present theological concern for gender-specific language related to God, Widdicombe argues in a postscript that Father-Son language is integral to the Christian understanding of God as historically developed and that the figures with whom he is concerned "avoid drawing on the biological or the psychological and sociological dimensions of human fatherhood" in a way that would tie their theology of divine father to the Patriarchal institutions of their society.

Widdicombe states that "For Athanasius, the word Father signified that the divine nature was both inherently generative, giving life to the Son and through him to all other things, and inherently relational, a relation of Father and Son in which mutual love is eternally both given and received" (3). In giving divine fatherhood this importance, Athanasius evidences his indebtedness to Origen. Indeed, a thread of continuity linking the two is their insistence that, since fatherhood, an essential aspect of the godhead, is a correlative term, it implies an eternal generative relationship to the divine Son. Both men also taught that human salvation is fundamentally a process of being brought into the inner life of the Trinity through adoption as sons. Widdicombe thus argues that, for Origen no less than for Athanasius, Trintarian theology is grounded in soteriology. With regard to Origen, he states that, "The Son is a model for our knowing and loving God, and therefore must be a subject of knowledge and love and have a hypostatic existence comparable to ours" (90).

Widdicombe shows how Origen, even while drawing on Middle Platonic understandings of the ineffability and unnamability of God, took Plato to task for being insufficiently radical in his understanding of God's transcendence. Plato allowed that some few people could attain knowledge of God, even if doing so was very difficult, but, according to Origen, Christians do not believe that human understanding can reach God at all, even though such understanding is potentially accessible to all, not just to Plato's few, through grace mediated by the divine hypostases. Even while opening up the possibility of the knowledge of the many, Origen still made full entry of the divine Father-Son relationship depend on a protracted process of moral and intellectual purification. Thus, "We come to know God as Father through a step-by-step progression to the status of adopted sons and thus to a share in the eternal relationship of the Father and the Son. Origen portrays this progression as a spiritual pilgrimage from the condition of fear, servitude, and ignorance which characterizes the Lord-servant relationship to that of filial knowledge and love which characterizes the Father-Son relationship. This pilgrimage involves a corresponding development in our moral behaviour: as we become morally pure, we grow in our knowledge of Wisdom and in our degree of sonship" (93). An implication of this human entry into the divine Father-Son relationship is that "God has not begotten justice once for all time, but is continuously generating justice in each good human act" (97-98).

Drawing principally on the Contra Gentes, De Incarnatione, and Contra Arianos I-III (Widdicombe follows Christopher Stead in regarding Bk. III as genuine), discusses how Athanasius understood God as Father, related the Father to the Son, and described human salvation in terms of an entry into their relationship. Widdicombe shows that Athanasius takes for granted much that Origen had to establish: the notion that Fatherhood implies generativity and love, the noncorporeal and transcendent character of divine fatherhood, the fact that it defines relations both in the Trinity and with us as sons by adoption. Unlike Origen, he does not understand salvation in terms of a gradual, stage-by-stage process of moral and intellectual purification.

Widdicombe makes a good case for his argument for continuity between Origen and Athanasius. He also demonstrates how both men were genuinely constrained by their respect for the evidence of the Bible in how they dealt with the difference the incarnation makes in the possibility for humans to enter into the divine Father-Son relationship. While it is fundamental for Origen to insist, against Marcion, on the identity of the God of the Old Testament with the God of the New Testament, nonetheless, "The weight of the biblical evidence constrained him to identify the historical event of the incarnation as bringing to us the decisive knowledge of God as Father. Although he is adamantly opposed to the notion that there is an ontological disjunction between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament, he perceived an epistemological disjunction between the two Testaments. The incarnation effects and ontological change in human nature, remaking us as sons, and thus it essentially transforms our relationship with God" (117). Similarly, Athanasius, for whom the Son's taking on human flesh enables us to partake of divine being through the gift of the Holy Spirit at baptism, is constrained by the references to being filled with the Spirit and divinized in the Old Testament to admit their possibility before the coming of Christ.

Widdicombe's monograph is consistently well written and well argued, exhibiting a mastery of primary and secondary sources. Inevitably, the reviewer might wish that he had conceived his book slightly differently, giving more attention, say, to the Origen's use of the correlativity argument in relation to Creation and less to the title of the first chapter of De Principiis. Likewise, it might have been valuable to begin the study with an earlier Alexandrian, Clement of Alexandria, and to have discussed how Athanasius' ideas about human participation in the divine sonship play out in the Life of Arius. Even so, Widdicombe has made a significant contribution to our understanding of the Alexandrian tradition and its continuing relevance.

Joseph W. Trigg