Even before one touches on the theology, a knowledge of the life and career of Athanasius is vital to understanding how and why the church developed the way it did; and also to seeing how theological debates are always complex – as complex as the historical situations in which they occur.

After a period of radio silence, Mrs Peel, formerly of The Department of Academic Avenging at WTS and ‘talented amateur theologian,’ dropped me a line last week, bringing my attention to the latest New Perspective on Paul and suggesting that, as I was clearly falling behind my chosen leadership role model, she would be willing to start a new sect for the purpose of worshiping me as the reincarnation of Athanasius. Not a good idea: such would clearly be against the OPC Book of Church Order and thus not really a viable option. Nevertheless, the allusion to Athanasius is pertinent because I am spending this summer trying to finish up an introduction to his life, thought and legacy for Michael Haykin’s new series on patristic authors.

Why are Athanasius and his time of relevance to the modern church? I want to outline this in a number of posts. I start here with the wider context.

First, because he lived during one the most important centuries for the Christian church, the fourth. This was the century which witnessed the cessation of imperial persecution and the rise of Christianity as a mainstream, socially respectable phenomenon. This brought in its wake challenging new questions about what exactly it meant to be a genuine Christian. Up until this time, persecution had provided the context in which suffering for one’s faith became something of an ideal and even an aspiration. Now such suffering was no longer in steady supply nor supplied by the state, the question of what a genuine Christian looked like became rather pressing.

Second, because the fourth century also witnessed the rise of formal, institutional church power over against that of individual, charismatic laymen – the eras that produced men such as Tertullian and Origen were to be a thing of the past. Further, the century also witnessed the rise of the power of the bishops over others.

In Alexandria, Athanasius’s stomping ground, the issue became acute early in the century when a theological struggle developed between a presbyter, Arius, and the bishop, Alexander. The controversy over the status of the Son was, of course, theological and had much to do with the legacy of doctrinal loose ends from the third century; but theological debates are never just theological and there was much in this matter, initially at least, that also spoke of the struggle between models of church power, pitting centralized structures against those that were more decentralized and diffuse. In this context, Athanasius’s ability to harness the power of the rising monastic movement (itself a response to the new-found respectability and comfort which Christianity was enjoying) was crucial not simply for the ultimate triumph of Trinitarianism but also for the power of the Alexandrian bishops and the way of operating ecclesiastically which found its most dramatic articulation in the career of one of his successors as Bishop of Alexandria, Cyril, in the following century.

In other words, even before one touches on the theology, a knowledge of the life and career of Athanasius is vital to understanding how and why the church developed the way it did; and also to seeing how theological debates are always complex – as complex as the historical situations in which they occur.

In the next post, we will look at the challenges Athanasius poses to the biographer.
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Carl Trueman is Professor of Historical Theology and Church History at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia, Penn. Used with permission from Reformation21.