Samuel Johnson: Forsaking the Fount of Wisdom: Christ’s “Preexistence” in Athanasius

A question of considerable gravity continues to roll through recent generations of scholarship on early Christian history: was early Christology high or low?This paper reconsiders one of this topic’s most decisive—if not divisive—subjects: the preexistence of Christ. The typology follows with fair consensus: the “high” Christology school proposes that belief in Christ’s preexistence developed early (often forming a history of continuity between the New Testament and Nicaea); the “low” Christology school proposes that it did not (forming a history of discontinuity). Habitual divergence between the discourses of New Testament studies and Patristics has only further aggravated the question, a mutual neglect that has submerged the two camps’ shared line of inquiry. Following a selective introduction to reconstructions of the development of “preexistence” Christology in contemporary NT scholarship (Part 1), I will propose a way through the two-school impasse by offering a close reading of key portions of Athanasius’s Orationes contra Arianoson the figure of divine Wisdom (Part 2). The essay will demonstrate that Athanasius’s position firmly resists reduction to the “high” vs. “low” binary, and may—surprisingly—share more characteristics traditionally associated with the latter. I will conclude by proposing that the subtlety of Athanasius’s understanding of Christ’s preexistence suggests that one need not presume an intrinsic discontinuity between the NT and Nicaea, and that abandoning the categories of “high” and “low” may in fact provide a way for a more accurate (even continuous) reconstruction of the development of early Christology.