Saint Athanasius

I have, over the years, read a fair amount of the ancient writings of the Romans, Greeks and other ancient peoples (both Christian and pagan) and unlike most people I enjoy reading that kind of stuff

One of the works I read some time back was On The Incarnation by Saint Athanasius. Athanasius was born around 296 AD in Egypt which was then part of the Roman Empire, and he died on 2 May, 373 AD. Though his name is unfamiliar to many modern Christians, he is one of the most important Christians in all church history excluding the Apostles.

There is (was) a famous saying about him that went like this "Athanasius contra mundum" or in English "Athanasius against the world." Athanasius was a minister of the Gospel in the Church of Alexandria, Egypt and he suffered greatly for his faith in our incarnate and risen Saviour, Jesus Christ.

Not long after the Roman Emperor Constantine made the Christian faith a legal religion within the empire, he and a number of the emperors who followed him abandoned the orthodox faith for a terrible anti-Christian heresy called Arianism. This anti-Christian faith derived its name from another minister by the name of Arius. Arius taught a malicious heresy in which he denied that Jesus was God incarnate and instead he taught that Jesus was himself created (Jehovah’s witnesses are modern Arians) . A great council of the Church was called to look into the teachings of Arius. At this Council of Nicea both Arius and his views were declared to be anathema.

The Roman emperor Constantine's kinsman, Eusebius of Nicodemia, was a minister and he was also a follower of Arius. Eusebius swayed the emperor away from the biblical position to the Arian view. Constantine and those who followed him used their power to defend and promote the deadly heresy. Many Christians crumbled under this pressure. But Athanasius never wavered. It seemed, at times, as though this small Egyptian (he was nicknamed the Black Dwarf) was the only one in the Church unwilling to bow before the crushing, imperial might of Rome. He was, because of his faithfulness to the truth, exiled five times from Alexandria, where he was bishop. This happened to him because he would not accept the false teachings of Arius which the emperors insisted on.

Athanasius stood for the faith even though it meant his life would be in grave danger. He would spend much of his adult years in exile far from his home, far from the church and people he loved because he would not bow and compromise his faith in Jesus Christ.

Throughout the Scriptures God calls on His people, time and again, to “remember,” but we live in an age of forgetfulness. Most Christians today have no knowledge of who Athanasius is, what he did or why. We are far poorer in many ways, because we commit the sin of forgetfulness. We need to know Bible history (which few Christians do) and the history of Christ’s Church of which we are apart.

Much of what we take for granted today and think to be doctrinally clear cut is only so because we sit on the shoulders of giants in the faith like Saint Athanasius. We should know these things.

Dominus vobiscum,
Kenith