Challenging Athanasius on the Divine Dilemma
The great Church Father Athanasius describes a "Divine Dilemma" that isn't quite biblical
The Garden of Eden narrative ends in tragedy but with a promise of hope. God has given humanity the promise of salvation, that the child of the woman would crush the head of the Serpent and undo the disorder caused by sin. The central narrative question from this point on is “When and how is God going to fulfill this promise?” This central question will hang over the entire Old Testament history until the coming of Jesus.
However, advocates of penalty substitution formulate the narrative conflict of the Bible differently. Referring to it as the “Divine Dilemma,” the writers of Pierced for our Transgressions state:
“God must find a way to restore his creation to its original goodness, without compromising his promise that sin will bring death. His truthfulness requires it. Any adequate account of salvation must therefore answer this question: How can God save sinful people from death while remaining faithful to his promise to punish sin?”
To be fair, formulations of the salvation narrative similar to this go way back in Church history. The great Church Father Athanasius in the 4th century describes the Divine Dilemma this way in his work On the Incarnation:
“It would, of course, have been unthinkable that God should go back upon His word and that man, having transgressed, should not die; but it was equally monstrous that beings which once had shared the nature of the Word should perish and turn back again into non-existence through corruption.”
On the Incarnation is a brilliant work. But I think there is a flaw here. The problem with these descriptions of the Divine Dilemma is that there is no indication in the Bible that God has compromised on His promise that sin will bring death, or on His promise to punish sin. Adam and Eve eat of the fruit and they die immediately. They are instantly in a state of spiritual death. God then institutes the punishment of physical death on Adam and Eve and all their offspring, which comprises all of humanity. God also multiplies the pain of childbearing and the toil of work as disciplinary judgments, and then exiles humanity from the Garden and from His Presence. We see God’s judgments all over the rest of the Bible, and we experience such judgments in our own lives as well. There is no question of whether or not God is going to be faithful to His promise to punish sin. So, the Pierced for our Transgressions authors give a wrong description of the central problem of the Biblical narrative. These writers are somehow under the illusion that humanity is not dead in our sin, and not under the judgments of God. They seem to be in denial of Paul’s description of the human problem in Ephesians 2, that we are dead in our trespasses and sin, born “children of wrath” into a world that is already under the judgments of God. Paul says also in Romans 1 that the wrath of God has been revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who have suppressed the truth in unrighteousness. The problem that penalty substitution has is a failure to take the sin of humanity and the wrath of God seriously enough.
The only promise that the reader feels unfulfilled at the end of Genesis 3 is “Who is the child of the woman who will crush the serpent and restore the created order?” The question is “God, when and how are you going to fulfill your promise to save us,” not “When are you going to fulfill your promise to punish us?”
The Divine Dilemma is not, as penalty substitution would have it, that God is caught between His desire to save humanity and His promise to punish humanity. The Divine Dilemma is rather along the following lines: Given the self-destructiveness of sin, it seems that humanity is damned regardless of whether God acts in blessing or in wrath. So what is God to do? Here is why I summarize things this way:
If God acts in wrath to destroy sin, then He will destroy humanity also, for all humanity is infected with sin. However, if God acts in blessing to restore sinful humanity, humanity will continually pervert His blessing through sin to their own increased torment. Imagine you are a parent of a teenage son who has a serious drug addiction. Every good that you do for him is used as a way to further the drug habit that is destroying him. If you give him time away from the house, if you give him an allowance, if you give him time alone, if you let him take the car out, all will be used to obtain drugs. How do you do good to someone who only uses it for their own harm? That is what God is up against. Whether God acts in wrath or blessing, humanity is destroyed either way. And isn’t this the dilemma we face when someone sins against us? One the one hand, how do we show mercy without enabling or encouraging sin, and on the other, how do we reject the sin without rejecting the sinner? We can summarize the dilemma in two questions:
(1) How is God going to eliminate sin from His creation without eliminating sinful humanity?
(2) How is God going to bless humanity with restoration from sin’s destruction, when sinful humanity can only pervert this blessing to their own destruction?
God faces a similar dilemma regarding Israel, as we will explore more in the next chapter. God has promised to bless all nations through Israel (Gen 12:3), but Israel is an exceedingly wicked nation, just as wicked as all the other nations. So how is God going to remain true to His promise to bless all nations through Israel, thus proving Himself just, yet not let the world be polluted by Israel’s sin? If God acts in wrath to destroy Israel, then he will fail to save the world through them, He will fail to be a just God who keeps his promises, and the rest of the nations will see God as incompetent (Exodus 32). But if God continually blesses sinful Israel, then Israel will pollute the nations of the world with their sin. So what is God to do?
What God could do is only bless those who are righteous, those who are uninfected by sin and who will not pervert the blessing and further sin’s destruction, and then only pour out wrath on sinners. That seems like what our basic conception of justice would have Him do: bless the righteous and condemn the wicked. But there are two problems with this. One: there is no one righteous. Not even one. Second: a perfectly righteous person does not need the blessing by which sin will be undone, because the person has no sin in the first place. So, only a righteous person can be given such a blessing of restoration, but only those destroyed by sin actually need it. The only answer, then, is that the blessing to restore the world goes to a perfectly righteous person who will undergo all of the destruction sinners have wrought upon themselves. And this is just what God sets in motion.
First, to destroy sin once and for all, God exiles humanity from the Tree of Life and consigns them to physical death whereby sin will be extinguished. That is the purpose of physical death; it is the means by which God destroys our sin. Physical death is how God cuts us off from the creation that we are continually perverting by our sin. It is like the parent that ceases to give allowance to the son that continually uses it to buy drugs. The Bible goes as far as to say that “He who has died is free from sin (Romans 6:7).” In order to be free from sin, we have to die with Christ and in Christ. Physical death, with Christ and in Christ, is the process by which sin is “condemned in the flesh” (Romans 8:3). This is why, even after becoming Christians, we still commit sins until the day of our death. It is the death of our sinful flesh that will finally end our sin.
Second, to restore us from sin and death, God gives humanity the promise and blessing of restoration, which He calls His covenant. This promise can only be fulfilled and blessing only be fully received by a perfectly righteous person, and so God Himself becomes the righteous person in Jesus Christ. Only those who have suffered sin’s destruction need to be restored, so Jesus undergoes our death with us. In sum, God institutes a death and resurrection process to destroy our sin and remake us in perfection, and He Himself undergoes this process with us in the person of Jesus Christ. Thus, in Christ our sin dies and we are remade.