Remembering Athanasius

May 2, marked the death of one of the great Church Fathers, Athanasius, in 373. Much of the church today gives very little attention to our Church Fathers, yet these are the shoulders that we stand on, shoulder that have given us the rich doctrines that we can now so easily access and rely on.  However, as believers, we need to understand that theology is always ongoing and we in the 21^st century need to also wrestle with the difficult questions that face us and go to the Scriptures for answers.  

His (Athanasius) most famous work is the De Incarnatione, the second of two closely linked treatises. In it he expounds how God the Word (Logos), by His union with manhood, restored to fallen man the image of God in which he had been created (Gen 1:27), and by His death and resurrection met and overcame death, the consequence of sin. Many scholars date the work before c.318, when Athanasius was still in his twenties, but others place it 15–20 years later. As bishop he was the greatest and most consistent theological opponent of Arianism. From 339 to 359 he wrote a series of works in defense of the faith proclaimed at Nicaea—that is, the true deity of God the Son. From about 361 onwards he especially sought the reconciliation of the large Semiarian party to the Nicene term homoousios (‘of one substance’), which they were reluctant to accept. The Council of Alexandria (362), under his direction, greatly furthered this end, by clearing up misunderstandings of the terms ὑπόστασις (translated ‘person’) and οὐσία (‘substance’). He also argued for the deity of the Holy Spirit in his Epistles to Serapion.

Bibliography:

F. L. Cross and Elizabeth A. Livingstone, “The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church”, 3rd ed. rev. (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 121.

You can also learn more about Athanasius in John Piper's, “Contending for Our All”