Who Was Athanasius, and Why Does He Matter

A popular claim holds that Christians did not believe Jesus was God until a council of bishops voted it into existence in 325. The story of Athanasius, a fourth-century bishop of Alexandria in Egypt, is a good place to test that claim. He defended Jesus’s full deity from the opening of John’s Gospel, against a rival reading taught in his own city, before the council met. That settles where the belief came from. It leaves a harder question: what does a Christian actually mean by confessing that Jesus is fully God?

Most of this guide works on that second question. You will read the passage Athanasius read, set his interpretation beside the one he opposed, and follow his reasoning about why the difference matters for salvation. Then you will test that reasoning against other Scripture and write your own explanation. Alone, it takes about an hour. A group can use one long session or two shorter ones, breaking after the section on the two readings.

The vocabulary you need

Three terms carry the discussion, and confusion usually starts when they blur.

• Deity means being God. To say Jesus is fully God is to say he is God in the same sense the Father is God, and no creature at all.
• Incarnation means “taking on flesh.” It names the event in which the eternal Son became a human being while remaining God.
• Arianism is the view taught by Arius, a presbyter in Alexandria. It held that Jesus was a human being who became godlike.

The confession this guide explains is the one Jude 3 teaches: Jesus is fully God and fully man, the eternal Son who took on flesh. It sits inside the doctrine of the Trinity, one God in three persons, co-equal and co-eternal. Calling Jesus God identifies the Son as one of the three persons who are the one God.

Church historian Dr. John Tyson describes Athanasius’s achievement in these terms. He says Athanasius helped the church understand Jesus as “both God and a human being at the same time.” Then he adds the part that matters most for this study: “And not to give up on either side of that.” Every step below protects one side or the other.

Step one: read the passage before anyone interprets it

Tyson places the opening of John’s Gospel at the center of Athanasius’s conviction, describing him as someone who “studies the scriptures intently so that he can feel confident in his own mind of the truthfulness of what he’s telling others.” Begin where he began.

John 1:1-3 reads: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.”

John 1:14 continues: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”

Read both slowly, aloud if you can, and write short answers to these prompts.

1. Where is the Word “in the beginning”? Is the Word made at the beginning, or already there?
2. Verse 1 makes two statements about the Word and God. Write each one separately. How can both be true at once?
3. According to verse 3, how much of creation was made without the Word? What does that imply about whether the Word belongs to creation?
4. In verse 14, who is the subject of “was made flesh”? Is it a man who becomes the Word, or the Word who becomes a man?

The fourth prompt is the hinge. The grammar runs in one direction: the Word, already identified with God in verse 1, is the one who becomes flesh. Keep your answer for the next section.

Step two: two readings of one sentence

Athanasius and Arius read the same words and drew opposite conclusions. For Athanasius, Tyson explains, John 1:14 meant that “the second person of the trinity became a human being.” God, existing before all time, entered human life.

Arius read it the other way around. In Tyson’s summary, Arius held that Jesus’s divinity “was a kind of purification of his humanity.” Jesus was a man who grew more and more godlike until the word “divine” fit him.

Be fair to Arius. A view spreads because it offers something real, and Tyson names the appeal: “it brought Jesus a lot closer to us in terms of our human situation.” On this reading Jesus grew in grace, strength and spirituality, the way believers hope to grow.

A practice in fair restatement

1. In two sentences, write Arius’s reading of John 1:14 as persuasively as you can, including its appeal.
2. In two sentences, write Athanasius’s reading the same way.
3. Return to your answer to prompt four. Which reading follows the grammar of John 1:14, and which has to reverse it?
4. Check both against John 1:3. Can a being who rose to godlikeness also be the one by whom “all things were made”?

For groups: have two people read their Arius restatements aloud before anyone discusses Athanasius. If the group laughs at the Arian view, it has not understood why it spread. Ask whether anyone found the Arian Jesus attractive, and why.

Step three: why the difference is more than words

A common assumption is that bishops fought over fine distinctions with no effect on ordinary faith. Athanasius thought the opposite. Tyson states his objection plainly: “if you go with the divinity of Jesus in that way, you wind up losing something that’s very important, his ability to save us from our sins.”

The argument runs in steps. If Jesus is a human being who climbed toward God, he is an example who shows a path upward. An example helps only the person able to follow it. Salvation, in the Christian account, requires someone to act in our place before God. So the Arian Jesus leaves us with, in Tyson’s words, “a human being who can challenge us to be like him, but cannot stand in our place.” What Athanasius saw at stake, in Tyson’s account, was a sin offering “as a covering for the sins of all people all time forever.”

Picture a swim coach on the pool deck demonstrating strokes perfectly. That helps a swimmer who is already swimming. A drowning person needs someone in the water. The comparison shows the gap between an example and a rescuer, but it breaks at the decisive point: any strong swimmer can be a lifeguard. Athanasius’s claim is that the rescue sin requires is one only God can perform, carried out by one who shares our human nature. The passages below test that claim.

• Isaiah 43:11: “I, even I, am the LORD; and beside me there is no saviour.”
• Psalm 49:7: “None of them can by any means redeem his brother, nor give to God a ransom for him.”
• Hebrews 2:17: “Wherefore in all things it behoved him to be made like unto his brethren, that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make reconciliation for the sins of the people.”
• Colossians 1:16: “For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him.”

Tyson ties Athanasius’s case to John, not to these verses, so treat what follows as a test of his reasoning. Isaiah says the LORD alone saves. The psalm says no human being can pay another’s ransom to God. Read together, they rule out a Savior who is only human, which is exactly what the Arian reading offers. Hebrews then adds the other requirement: the one who makes reconciliation had to be made like his brethren in all things. A Savior who meets all three passages must be God and also truly one of us. Compare Colossians 1:16 with John 1:3 and ask whether Paul makes the same claim John does.

Athanasius summed up the hope in a line Tyson cites: the Son became what we are so that he might make us what he is. Tyson spells out what that includes. Through faith in Christ’s death and resurrection, believers are transformed, share more and more in his holiness in this life, and hope to be raised like him and be with God.

The misconception to watch for

People who grasp that Jesus is fully God often overcorrect. They picture a Jesus who only seemed to grow, tire or suffer. That was not what Athanasius defended, as Tyson’s phrase “not to give up on either side” makes plain.

Luke 2:52 says: “And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man.” The Arians were right that Jesus really grew. Their mistake was making growth the source of his deity. In the confession Athanasius defended, the growth belongs to his true humanity, and the deity belongs to who he was before Bethlehem. The Word took on a full human life while remaining fully God.

Tyson admits the limits here: “we could make ourselves crazy trying to explain how that happened.” The confession states who Jesus is without claiming to describe the mechanics. Being unable to picture something fully is different from finding it contradictory.

Back to the opening charge

The strongest form of the objection deserves a direct hearing. An emperor was involved. Tyson reports that Constantine, wanting Christianity to hold his empire together, sent letters and representatives to Alexandria to press for a resolution before the council met. The creed also put the faith into formal wording that the church had not used before. Tyson himself says that in Athanasius’s early years the matter “wasn’t a done deal,” with no councils or creeds yet. Does that mean the doctrine was manufactured under political pressure?

Weigh what the source shows and what it does not. It shows that Athanasius and Arius were already defending rival readings of John 1 before Constantine intervened, and that the creed, in Tyson’s words, was “kind of an organized profession of faith, but it’s also a teaching tool,” summarizing what Athanasius and Alexander already taught. It shows that imperial interest pointed toward unity rather than toward Athanasius’s view: Tyson says Constantine was “much more interested in unity,” later readmitted Arius on what Tyson calls “kind of weasel words,” and removed Athanasius as bishop when he refused to accept Arius back. Tyson’s own judgment is that “political entanglements were not particularly good for the church.” The source does not survey what every earlier Christian community believed, and it does not examine the creed’s specific technical vocabulary. Those questions need other evidence.

Now apply one question to each item below: could this event have produced the belief that Jesus is God, or could it only respond to a belief already present?

• Athanasius and his bishop Alexander teach from John that the Word who was God became flesh.
• Arius teaches that Jesus became godlike.
• Constantine presses the Alexandrian church to settle its dispute.
• Some 310 bishops, by Tyson’s count, meet at Nicaea in 325.
• The council writes a creed.

Discussion questions

1. Tyson reports that Christians asked, “And if we say Jesus is God, how does he save us?” Why might someone answer that question without ever thinking about Jesus’s deity? What changes when the two are connected?
2. The Arian Jesus felt closer and more imitable. Is there a way of talking about Jesus in churches today that keeps the example and quietly drops the rescuer? What does it sound like?
3. Which do you find easier to lose sight of, Jesus’s full deity or his full humanity? What habits of reading or worship push you toward one side?
4. Your answer to prompt four carried much of the weight in this guide. How confident are you in it now? What would someone need to show you to change your reading?
5. If you had to teach the full deity of Christ to a twelve-year-old using only John 1:1-14, what three sentences would you say?
6. Lisa Fields, reflecting on Athanasius dying before the question was finally settled in 381, observed that God “will continue the work with or without us.” How does that sit with the cost Athanasius paid for holding this belief?

A practice for the week

Write one paragraph explaining what it means to confess Jesus as fully God, for a friend who thinks the idea was invented later. Use John 1 as your only Scripture. Then test it twice. Could an Arian agree with every sentence? If so, it is not yet saying enough about his deity. Does it leave room for Luke 2:52? If not, it has lost his humanity.

To go further, Tyson points readers to Athanasius’s own book, On the Incarnation, in a readable edition introduced by C. S. Lewis. Read its opening chapters with your paragraph beside you, and see where Athanasius makes the case better than you did.