Athanasius’s stalwart defense of the full divinity of Christ in a world that was rapidly moving into a more rational direction earned him the epitaph Athanasius contra mundum (Athanasius against the world). This doesn’t mean he was the only dissenting voice. He had many named and unnamed supporters: his Egyptian flock, the monks who publicly backed and protected him, and many bishops in the Western Empire….

As we approach Christmas, it’s appropriate to reflect on Christ’s incarnation. This is what Athanasius, fourth-century bishop of Alexandria, Egypt, did in his treatise On the Incarnation of the Word. Expanding his explanation from Christ’s role in creation to His final glory in the second coming, he described quite clearly, from Scripture, why only God could reconcile mankind to himself and why He had to become man to do it.

Athanasius answered the first question by saying, basically, that since the problem is not just an individual sin but an actual corruption of man’s nature, the only possible remedy was a divine intervention by “the Word of God, which had also at the beginning made everything out of nought.”[1] As for the second question, he focused on 1 Corinthians 15:21, “For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead.”

C. S. Lewis was right in saying, in his introduction to a new translation of this work by Athanasius, that ancient authors are usually much clearer than their modern commentators. Reading Athanasius’s On the Incarnationthis advent season will both confirm Lewis’s statement and enrich our appreciation of Christ’s first coming.

Changes and Controversies

Born around the year 295, Athanasius grew up in challenging and rapidly changing times. In the early years of his life, he witnessed first the violent persecution of Christians under Emperor Diocletian and then the stunning conversion of Emperor Constantine to Christianity. By the time he was a teenager, Christianity had become an accepted religion in the empire. In fact, since Constantine professed to be a Christian, many embraced, at least formally, the same religion.

Athanasius was still young when Bishop Alexander, impressed by his intelligence, made him his assistant. In this capacity, Athanasius became increasingly aware of the danger the teachings of a priest named Arius were causing in the Alexandrian church. Finally exiled from Alexandria, Arius complained to his friend Eusebius, bishop of Nicomedia, of being “unjustly persecuted by Alexander the Pope, on account of that all-conquering truth of which you also are a champion.”[2]

What was this “all-conquering truth”? Unlike Alexander, who preached “God always, the Son always; as the Father so the Son,”[3] Arius taught that before the Son “was begotten, or created, or purposed, or established, He was not.”

Logically speaking, Arius’s teaching made sense. If Jesus was begotten of the Father, it is rational to say that he came after the Father. In Alexander’s position, Arius saw a danger of blending the Father and the Son into one, neglecting their distinctions. To emphasize his views, he created a catchy jingle, “There was when he was not.”

This local controversy soon spread outside the small boundaries of Alexandria, so quickly that Emperor Constantine became seriously concerned. People were actually fighting in the streets over this issue. Taking charge, in 325 he did what no previous emperor had ever done – he convened an empire-wide religious council of bishops and other delegates to resolve this matter. There were, of course, other items on the agenda (twenty in all), but this controversy took central stage.

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[1] Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word, 7, http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/2802.htm

[2] Arius, The Letter of Arius to Eusebius, Bishop of Nicomedia, Bible Hub, http://biblehub.com/library/theodoret/the_ecclesiastical_history_of_theo…

[3] Ibid.