Sermon Tone Analysis

! Contending for Our All

The Life and Ministry of Athanasius

2005 Bethlehem Conference for Pastors

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By John Piper February 1, 2005

 

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Athanasius was born in AD 298 in Egypt and became the bishop of Alexandria on June 8, 328 at the age of 30.

The people of Egypt viewed him as their bishop until he died on May 2, 373 at the age of 75.1 I say he was “viewed” by the people as their bishop during these years because Athanasius was driven out of his church and office five times by the powers of the Roman empire.

Seventeen of his 45 years as bishop were spent in exile.

But the people never acknowledged the validity of the other bishops sent to take his place.

He was always bishop in exile as far as his flock was concerned.

Gregory of Nazianzus (330-389) gave a memorial sermon in Constantinople seven years after the death of Athanasius and described the affections of the Egyptian people for their bishop.

At the end of the third exile from his homeland, when Athanasius returned in 364 after six years away, Gregory tells us:

amid such delight of the people of the city and of almost all Egypt, that they ran together from every side, from the furthest limits of the country, simply to hear the voice of Athanasius, or feast their eyes upon the sight of him.2

From their standpoint none of the foreign appointments to the office of bishop in Alexandria for 45 years was valid but one, Athanasius.

This devotion was owing to the kind of man Athanasius was.

Gregory remembered him like this:

Let one praise him in his fastings and prayers . . .

, another his unweariedness and zeal for vigils and psalmody, another his patronage of the needy, another his dauntlessness towards the powerful, or his condescension to the lowly. . . .

[He was to] the unfortunate their consolation, the hoary-headed their staff, youths their instructor, the poor their resource, the wealthy their steward.

Even the widows will . . .

praise their protector, even the orphans their father, even the poor their benefactor, strangers their entertainer, brethren the man of brotherly love, the sick their physician.3

One of the things that makes that kind of praise from a contemporary the more credible is that, unlike many ancient saints, Athanasius is not recorded as having done any miracles.

Archibald Robertson, who edited Athanasius’ works for the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, said, “He is . . .

surrounded by an atmosphere of truth.

Not a single miracle of any kind is related of him. . . .

The saintly reputation of Athanasius rested on his life and character alone, without the aid of any reputation for miraculous power.”4

Then he goes on with his own praise of Athanasius:

In the whole of our minute knowledge of his life there is a total lack of self-interest.

The glory of God and the welfare of the Church absorbed him fully at all times. . . .

The Emperors recognized him as a political force of the first order . . .

but on no occasion does he yield to the temptation of using the arm of flesh.

Almost unconscious of his own power . . .

his humility is the more real for never being conspicuously paraded. . . .

Courage, self-sacrifice, steadiness of purpose, versatility and resourcefulness, width of ready sympathy, were all harmonized by deep reverence and the discipline of a single-minded lover of Christ.5

!!!! Athanasius—The Father of Orthodoxy—Contra Mundum

This single-minded love for Jesus Christ expressed itself in a lifelong battle to explain and defend Christ’s deity and to worship Christ as Lord and God.

This is what Athanasius is best known for.

There were times when it seemed the whole world had abandoned orthodoxy.

That is why the phrase “Athanasius contra Mundum” (against the world) arose.

He stood steadfast against overwhelming defection from orthodoxy, and only at the end of his life could he see the dawn of triumph.

But in a sense it is anachronistic to use the word “orthodoxy” this way—to say that the world abandoned orthodoxy.

Was it really there to abandon?

Well, biblical truth is always there to abandon.

But “orthodoxy” generally refers to a historic, or official, or universally held view of what is true to Scripture.

Was that there to abandon?

The answer is suggested in the other great name given to Athanasius, namely, “Father of Orthodoxy.”6

That phrase seems to say that orthodoxy came to be because of Athanasius.

And in one sense that is true in regard to the Trinity.

The relationships between the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit had not received formal statement in any representative council before the time of Athanasius.

R.P.C. Hanson wrote, “There was not as yet any orthodox doctrine [of the Trinity], for if there had been, the controversy could hardly have lasted sixty years before resolution.”7

The sixty years he has in mind is the time between the Council of Nicaea in 325 and the Council of Constantinople8 in 381.

The Council of Nicaea established the battle lines and staked out the deity of Christ, and the Council of Constantinople confirmed and refined the Nicene Creed.

The sixty years between was war over whether the Nicene formulation would stand and become “orthodoxy.”

This was the war Athanasius fought for 45 years.

It lasted all his life, but the orthodox outcome was just over the horizon when he died in 373.

And under God this outcome was owing to the courage and consistency and work and writing of Athanasius.

No one comes close to his influence in the cause of biblical truth during his lifetime.9

The war was sparked in 319.

A deacon in Alexandria named Arius, who had been born in 256 in Libya, presented a letter to bishop Alexander arguing that if the Son of God were truly a Son, he must have had a beginning.

There must have been a time, therefore, when he did not exist.

Most of what we know of Arius is from others.

All we have from Arius’ own pen is three letters, a fragment of a fourth and scrap of a song, the Thalia.10

In fact he proved to be a very minor character in the controversy he unleashed.

He died in 336.11

Athanasius was a little over 20 when the controversy broke out—over 40 years younger than Arius (a lesson in how the younger generation may be more biblically faithful than the older).

Athanasius was in the service of Alexander the bishop of Alexandria.

Almost nothing is known of his youth.

Gregory of Nazianzus celebrates the fact that Athanasius was brought up mainly in biblical training, not philosophical.

He was brought up, from the first, in religious habits and practices, after a brief study of literature and philosophy, so that he might not be utterly unskilled in such subjects, or ignorant of matters which he had determined to despise.

For his generous and eager soul could not brook being occupied in vanities, like unskilled athletes, who beat the air instead of their antagonists and lose the prize.

From meditating on every book of the Old and New Testament, with a depth such as none else has applied even to one of them, he grew rich in contemplation, rich in splendor of life.12

This was the service he was to render for 45 years: biblical blow after blow against the fortresses of the Arian heresy.

Robert Letham confirms the outcome of Gregory’s observation: “Athanasius’ contribution to the theology of the Trinity can scarcely be overestimated. . . .

He turned discussion away from philosophical speculation and back to a biblical and theological basis.”13

In 321 a synod was convened in Alexandria, and Arius was deposed from his office and his views declared heresy.

Athanasius at age 23 wrote the deposition for Alexander.

This was to be his role now for the next 52 years—writing to declare the glories of the incarnate Son of God.

The deposition of Arius unleashed 60 years of ecclesiastical and empire-wide political conflict.

Eusebius of Nicomedia (the modern Izmit in Turkey) took up Arius’ theology and became “the head and center of the Arian cause.”14

For the next 40 years the Eastern part of the Empire was mainly Arian.

That is true in spite of the fact that the great Council of Nicaea came down for the full deity of Christ.

Hundreds of bishops signed it and then twisted the language to say that Arianism really fit in the wording of Nicaea.

!!!!

The Council of Nicaea (325)

Emperor Constantine had seen the sign of the cross during a decisive battle 13 years earlier and was converted to Christianity.

He was concerned with the deeply divisive effect of the Arian controversy in the kingdom.

Bishops had tremendous influence, and when they were at odds (as they were over this issue), it made the unity and harmony of the empire more fragile.

Constantine’s Christian advisor, Hosius, had tried to mediate the Arian conflict in Alexandria, but failed.

So in 325 Constantine called the Council at Nicaea across the Bosporus from Constantinople (today’s Istanbul).

He pulled together, according to tradition,15 318 bishops plus other attenders like Arius and Athanasius, neither of whom was a bishop.

He fixed the order of the council and enforced its decisions with civil penalties.

The Council lasted from May through August and ended with a statement of orthodoxy that has defined Christianity to this day.

The wording today which we call the Nicene Creed is really the slightly altered language of the Council of Constantinople in 381.

But the decisive work was done in 325.

The anathema at the end of the Creed of Nicaea shows most clearly what the issue was.

The original Creed of Nicaea was written in Greek, but here it is in English:

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of all things visible, and invisible.

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father the only-begotten, that is, of the essence of the Father (ek tës ousias tou patros), God of God (theon ek theou), and Light of Light (kai phõs ek phõtos), very God of very God (theon alëthinon ek thou alëthinou), begotten, not made (gennëthenta ou poinëthenta), being of one substance with the Father (homoousion tõ patri); by whom all things were made in heaven and on earth; who for us men, and for our salvation, came down and was incarnate and was made man; he suffered, and the third day he rose again, ascended into heaven; from thence he cometh to judge the quick and the dead.

And in the Holy Ghost.

And those who say: there was a time when he was not; and: he was not before he was made; and: he was made out of nothing, or out of another substance or thing (ë ex heteras hupostaseõs ë ousias), or the Son of God is created, or changeable, or alterable; they are condemned by the holy catholic and apostolic Church.

The key phrase, homoousion tõ patri (one being with the Father),was added late on the insistence of the emperor.

It made the issue crystal clear.