Athanasius and the necessity of the incarnation.

Unveiling the depth of Athanasius’s Christology for today’s church.

“La statue de Saint-Anathase,” Église de la Sainte-Trinité, Paris, France

Among the most important theological voices the modern church is urged to recover is that of Athanasius of Alexandria, the 4th-century Egyptian bishop whose impassioned defense of orthodox Christianity stemmed the brewing tide of dissidence within the early church. Known for his staunch articulation of trinitarian doctrine, which played a pivotal role in the Council of Nicaea in 325, Athanasius’s theological contributions are, perhaps, only exceeded by his pastoral resolve. Although he is often remembered for his refutation of heretics, especially Arius and his ilk, Athanasius possessed a deep-seated care for the souls whom he served. This is best exemplified through his signal treatise, On the Incarnation, which was a lodestar for orthodox Christology amid the stir of divergent interpretations concerning the identity of the Son of God and remains a substantial mainstay for ongoing ecclesiological renewal and development.

What makes On the Incarnation so resonant is its seamless blend of robust theological precision with spiritual metaphysics, resulting in a work that intersects the necessity and the mystery of the incarnation of the Son in the person of Jesus. Consequently, Christ’s mysterious assumption of flesh and blood, which is the heart of the Christian confession (1 Tim. 3:16), is mined not to unkink its inscrutability but to demonstrate its inevitability and indispensability to the hope of redemption. “So the Word of God came himself,” Athanasius writes, “in order that he being the image of the Father, the human being ‘in the image’ might be recreated” (63). To reconcile a creation ensconced in sin, the Creator became a creature to vanquish the specter of death and inaugurate a new era of incorruptibility. Athanasius puts it like this:

For the Word, realizing that in no other way would the corruption of human beings undone except, simply, by dying, yet being immortal and the Son of the Father the Word was not able to die, for this reason he takes to himself a body capable of death, in order that it, participating in the Word who is above all, might be sufficient for death on behalf of all, and through the indwelling Word would remain incorruptible, and so corruption might henceforth cease from all by the grace of the resurrection. (58)

In that way, then, Athanasius’s work coheres with the biblical revelation of the Christ of God as the church’s peerless priest. This corresponds to Chapters 4 and 5 of the Epistle to the Hebrews, wherein the writer unfurls the legitimacy of Christ’s claim to the priesthood, which imbues believers with the conclusive hope of his vicarious ministry. Just as the Levitical priests were selected from among their brethren and “appointed to act on behalf of men in relation to God” (Heb. 5:1), so, too, was the Son of God made like his brothers (Heb. 2:17) so that he could be appointed to serve as their representative before the Father. The simultaneity of Christ’s divine and human natures is, therefore, understood as a paramount ingredient in God’s initiative to reconcile the world to himself (2 Cor. 5:19). To that end, Athanasius’s treatise serves as a bastion against the currents of skepticism and relativism that pervade modern theological discourse, compelling those within the church to reclaim the mantle of theological orthodoxy and to embrace the transformative truth of Christ’s incarnation.

Works cited:

St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, translated and edited by John Behr, Popular Patristics Series (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary, 2011).