Athanasius says that “the words of human beings do not act.” Instead, “it is not by words but by hands that a human being works, for human hands have subsistence while words do not.” Hence, he is willing to adopt Irenaeus’s notion that the Son and Spirit are the two “hands” of the Father.
But human words do act. Which makes one wonder: How would Christology have developed differently if John Searle or J. L. Austin rather than Athanasius had stood contra mundum ?
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