ABSTRACT
There can hardly be a more comprehensive subject than that of the relation between God and creation. Our particular focus in this chapter will be to investigate this theme with specific reference to the relation between divine transcendence and divine immanence, which is to say, the relation between God’s otherness to the world and God’s positive involvement and engagement with the world. To justify this focus, we need to anticipate our interpretation of Athanasius by saying that we find in the Alexandrian bishop a quite conscious emphasis on the convergence of divine transcendence and immanence. This emphasis on the simultaneity of divine otherness and divine nearness to the world is central to Athanasius’s conception of the relation between God and the world. Before we proceed in the succeeding chapters toward a detailed interpretation of this emphasis through an analysis of his own works, our aim in this chapter is to contextualize the Athanasian vision in light of its Hellenistic and Judeo-Christian background. In general, we want to show very briefly that the problem of relating divine transcendence and immanence was a lively one in Hellenistic philosophy which, especially in the development of “Middle Platonism,” was resolved through differentiating absolute transcendence and divine immanence by assigning these qualifications to distinct entities. In contrast, we find in the scriptural witness the conception that divine involvement in the world does not detract from transcendence but is in fact a function of and a demonstration of God’s transcendence. Thus in the biblical perspective divine transcendence and immanence are convergent, both movements being united in the conception of a God who paradoxically reveals his majestic greatness through his
liberating and beneficent involvement in the world. The tension between Hellenistic and Judeo-Christian conceptions of the relation between divine immanence and transcendence is apparent in the theology of the Apologists but finds a certain resolution in Irenaeus, who uses philosophical terms and categories while vigorously reinstating the biblical emphasis on divine greatness as conceived in terms of God’s involvement in the world. Within such a context, then, the purpose of this chapter is to present Athanasius as continuing this Irenaean tradition.
