Introduction

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth. JOHN 1:14

Every Sunday, in churches of almost every tradition, Christians stand and say that Jesus Christ is “of one substance with the Father”, or “of one being with the Father”. Most of them have never heard of the man who more than any other kept those words in the creed. His name was Athanasius. He was bishop of Alexandria for forty-five years, and he spent seventeen of them in exile, driven from his city five times by four different emperors. He was accused of murder, sorcery, treason and sacrilege, and hunted by soldiers through the Egyptian desert. What he would not do was sign a statement of faith he believed to be false. That refusal, held for half a century, is a large part of the reason the church still confesses that the One who died on the cross was God.

He was an African. That needs saying plainly at the outset. Athanasius was born in Alexandria, on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt, around the year 296 or a little after. He grew up in a Greek-speaking city, but he knew the Coptic-speaking Egypt of the villages and the desert as well, and when the empire turned against him it was Egyptians who hid him. He is one of the great fathers of the whole church, East and West; he is also, first of all, a son of the ancient African church of Alexandria, the church that claimed Mark the evangelist as its founder and gave the world some of its first great Christian teachers.

Why he still matters

Athanasius matters because he saw, earlier and more clearly than almost anyone, what is at stake in the question, Who is Jesus Christ? In his day a popular and persuasive teacher named Arius was saying that the Son of God, though the highest and noblest of all creatures, was nevertheless a creature — that there was a time when He was not. It sounded reverent. It could quote Scripture. Athanasius saw that it emptied the gospel. If the Son is a creature, then God has not come to us at all. He has only sent the best thing He had made, and we are still on our own.

He also matters because he wrote one of the most readable books of the ancient church. On the Incarnation is short, unhurried and plain, and sets out with a kind of glad astonishment why the Word of God became man. And in The Life of Antony he told the story of an Egyptian hermit, a book that did more than any other to spread the monastic life through the Christian world and played its part in the conversion of another African, Augustine.

The one thread

If you look for the single thread that runs through everything Athanasius taught and suffered, you find it in a sentence from On the Incarnation that the Greek church has never stopped quoting: “For He was made man that we might be made God.” We shall come to that sentence in its own chapter, and read it carefully, because it is easily misread. But its meaning is simple enough. God has come the whole way down. The Word who made us has taken a real body, lived a real life, died a real death and risen again, so that we, who were sliding back into the nothing we came from, might share His life.

For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich. 2 CORINTHIANS 8:9

Every part of his teaching is that thread followed out. Creation is good because the Word made it. Salvation must be the Word’s own work, because only the Maker can remake. The Son and the Spirit must be fully God, or we are not truly joined to God. And the desert monks, fighting in the strength of Christ, are the proof that the victory is real.

How this book is arranged

The second chapter tells his life. The sixteen that follow each take one of his key teachings. Six follow the argument of On the Incarnation, from the Word made flesh through the cross and the resurrection to the great saying about being made God. Two take up the doctrines he defended for fifty years, the full divinity of the Son and of the Spirit. Two more give his answer to the pagan world. Four draw on The Life of Antony, and the last two turn to the Scriptures and to the cost of standing for the truth.

Each chapter ends with application points and a prayer. Athanasius would have approved. He closed On the Incarnation by telling his reader that no one can understand the things of God without a pure life, and that the searching of the Scriptures needs a soul made clean. Doctrine, for him, was never an idle matter. So read a chapter, stop at the questions, and pray.

Reading him with care

This is not a book of hero-worship. Athanasius was a fighter, and fighters leave marks. Several matters must be named plainly.

First, he could be savage towards his opponents. He called the Arians madmen and enemies of Christ, and rarely allowed that they might be sincere. Some of that heat was earned; much of it would not be allowed in a Christian argument today. Second, his enemies accused his supporters in Alexandria of intimidation and violence against rival Christians, and at least one surviving papyrus letter from the time seems to support part of that charge. The evidence is contested, and many of the accusations against him were plainly invented; but a fair reader should know that the charge exists, and should not assume that the side that was right about the Son of God was always right in its methods. Third, On the Incarnation contains a long and harsh argument against the Jews of his day, written in a tone that Christians who know the later history of that tone cannot read without sorrow.

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:21

Beyond these, The Life of Antony is full of demons, visions and miracles that must be read with discernment, and it prizes the ascetic life in ways many Protestant readers will question. And the language of being “made God” is easily misunderstood if torn from its setting. Each of these is taken up where it belongs.

None of this is said to diminish him. It is said so that you can trust the rest. Where Athanasius stands with Scripture — on the Word made flesh, on the cross and resurrection, on the full divinity of Christ, on the courage to hold the truth when it is unpopular — he stands like a rock, and the whole church has stood on him since.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Say the words of the Nicene Creed slowly this week and ask yourself which phrases you have been saying without meaning.

2. Write down in one sentence who you believe Jesus Christ to be. Then ask whether your prayer and worship treat Him as that.

3. If you have never read an early Christian writer, resolve to read On the Incarnation for yourself, a few sections a day.

4. Think of a teacher you admire who has been harsh or wrong in some matter. Practise naming the fault honestly without throwing away the truth he taught.

5. Set a regular time to read one chapter of this book, and do not move on until you have prayed its prayer.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus Christ, eternal Word of the Father, You came the whole way down to where we were, and You did not come half-heartedly.

Thank You for Your servant Athanasius, who would not let Your glory be made smaller, even when it cost him his home and his safety.

Where he was faithful to Your Word, teach me through him; where he was harsh or wrong, give me grace to see it and to do better.

Show me again who You are, and let me worship You as God, now and always. Amen.