Theopedia

Athanasius

Overview

Athanasius (ca. 295/300-373 A.D.) was bishop of Alexandria, Egypt, in the fourth century.1 He opposed Arianism throughout his life and was deposed from his see five times for it, becoming, in one historian’s assessment, “perhaps the strongest defender of the creed of Nicaea.”2

Life and Ministry

Athanasius served as secretary to Alexander, bishop of Alexandria, who was the first to object publicly to the teaching of the presbyter Arius that the Son had a beginning and was not eternal with the Father.3 Athanasius accompanied Alexander to the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, where roughly 220 to 300 bishops, convened by the emperor Constantine, produced a creed describing the Son as “of the same substance with the Father,” a phrase specifically worded to rule out the Arian reading of “begotten” as merely “made.”4 Nicaea did not end the controversy, which continued for decades afterward.5

Athanasius succeeded Alexander as bishop of Alexandria and spent the following decades in repeated conflict with Arian-sympathizing emperors and bishops, exiled and restored as imperial favor shifted; he was deposed from his see five times in total.1 His most historically significant non-polemical work is his thirty-ninth Festal Letter of 367, which lists the same twenty-seven books that make up the New Testament today and declares them canonical.1

Theological Contribution

In his Orations against the Arians, Athanasius argues from the Father’s own eternal, self-existent nature to the Son’s: if Scripture teaches that the Son shares the Father’s essence, and the Father is eternal and uncreated, then the Son must likewise be eternal and uncreated rather than a creature brought into being in time.6 Arguing against the Arian slogan “there was a time when the Son was not,” he wrote:

For, whereas it is proper to men to beget in time, from the imperfection of their nature, God’s offspring is eternal, for His nature is ever perfect… But if He is Son, as the Father says, and the Scriptures proclaim, and “Son” is nothing else than what is generated from the Father; and what is generated from the Father is His Word, and Wisdom, and Radiance; what is to be said but that, in maintaining “Once the Son was not,” they rob God of His Word, like plunderers.7

Athanasius grounded his defense of the Nicene term homoousios in Scripture’s own use of father/son language for the Father and the Son, arguing that the term names a biblical concept rather than importing a foreign philosophical category: “What is from the essence of the Father, and proper to Him, is entirely the Son.”8 He also turned the charge of Greek influence back on his opponents, arguing that an Arian Trinity in which “a Monad was first, and afterwards by addition it became a Triad” was itself the more Greek, Neoplatonic doctrine of God, against the Nicene confession of “the blessed Triad as unalterable and perfect and ever what It was.”9

Athanasius drew out two practical consequences of the question at stake. First, redemption: because only God can overcome death, a merely creaturely Christ, as Arius taught, could not save humanity from it. Second, worship: Christians worshiped Christ as God, and if he were in fact a creature, that worship was idolatry. Athanasius argued that Christ is rightly worshiped precisely because he is “not a creature, but a distinct offspring of the substance of the God who is worshiped, and is a Son by nature.”10

Historical Significance

Herman Bavinck repeatedly cites Athanasius’s Defense of the Nicene Definition, On the Opinion of Dionysius, and Against the Arians in his own exposition of the Trinity and the divinity of the Holy Spirit, treating him as a primary source for the patristic formulation of homoousios.11 The eighteenth-century Particular Baptist theologian John Gill likewise cited Athanasius extensively across his commentaries and polemical writing, including his defense of the eternal generation of the Son and his historical account of the sudden death of Arius.12

Related Doctrines

Athanasius’s defense of Nicene orthodoxy underlies the doctrines of the Trinity, the deity of Christ, and eternal generation of the Son, and stands opposed to Arianism. The Athanasian Creed bears his name traditionally, though it was not written by him.

References

  1. Steven Tshombe Godet, “John Gill: Patristic Scholar,” in “The Trinitarian Theology of John Gill (1697-1771): Context, Sources, and Controversy” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2015), 149. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Ronald E. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine: Introducing the Essentials of the Ancient Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), 75. ↩

  3. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine, 68. ↩

  4. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine, 73-75. ↩

  5. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine, 75. ↩

  6. Craig A. Carter, “The Biblical Character of Pro-Nicene Theology,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 7. ↩

  7. Carter, “The Biblical Character of Pro-Nicene Theology,” chap. 7. ↩

  8. Carter, “The Biblical Character of Pro-Nicene Theology,” chap. 7. ↩

  9. Carter, “The Biblical Character of Pro-Nicene Theology,” chap. 7. ↩

  10. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine, 75-76. ↩

  11. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, “Triune God and Counsel” (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011). ↩

  12. Godet, “John Gill: Patristic Scholar,” 149-50. ↩