Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 296-373) was an African church father who refused to accept that Jesus was a created being. He held that the Son is fully God, stood with those at the Council of Nicaea in 325 who rejected the teaching of Arius, and was exiled five times rather than give way. He matters to Black Christians because his life is hard evidence that some of Christianity’s central convictions were argued out and defended in Africa.
This guide works from Chapter 3 of the Jude 3 Project curriculum Through Eyes of Color, “Early African Christianity.” It asks you to do what a careful historian does. Sort what the record shows from what later readers add to it. Read the Scriptures that sat at the center of the dispute. Build a timeline you can defend. You can work through it alone in one or two sittings, or with a group over a single longer session or two shorter ones. If you lead a group, ask people to read the first three sections before you meet, and save your time together for the timeline practice and the discussion.
Start with what the record can and cannot tell you
Begin with the curriculum’s own caution. It opens its section on Athanasius by admitting that “much has not been written about the early years of his life.” Keep that sentence in view, because the best-known story about his childhood comes from a later teller.
The curriculum, drawing on a Jude 3 conversation with Dr. John Tyson, recounts that the Bishop of Alexandria found a young Athanasius “playing church” with friends. The boy had preached a sermon and performed baptisms. When the bishop questioned him, he became convinced that the boy was not playing at all. He confirmed the baptisms and took Athanasius under his care to train him for ministry.
Treat this as a story carried by tradition and retold by a scholar. It is not a document from the day it happened. That does not make it false. It does mean it carries less weight than his own writings or the record of the council. A historian holds the two kinds of evidence differently, and so should you.
The curriculum then gives a description that fits his later life: “Though Athanasius was often overlooked because of his youth and small stature, he became a strong yet humble force in the church at Alexandria.” Notice where that strength showed itself. It was not in office or rank. It was in a theological argument about who Jesus is.
The question that divided Alexandria
The dispute did not come from nowhere. The curriculum names two honest difficulties that troubled early Christians. The first was monotheism. Jews and Christians confessed one God, and some feared that calling Jesus God meant drifting toward the many gods of paganism. The second was conceptual. How could divinity and humanity exist together in one person? The curriculum’s response is worth repeating, because it refuses to sneer at the people who asked: “Deep questions, right? Fair questions, too.”
Arius, a presbyter and popular preacher in Alexandria, offered a way out. As the curriculum presents his view, he taught that there was a time when the Son did not exist. The Son was the created son of God and God’s instrument in making the world. That let Arius keep a single God at the top and still give Jesus a high place. The price was that Jesus was no longer co-eternal or co-equal with the Father and the Spirit. He was subordinate.
Before you go further, state Arius’s position in your own words, as fairly as you can. Write two or three sentences that an Arian could read and say, yes, that is what I mean. You can only see why Athanasius resisted once you see why the alternative appealed to sincere people.
On why Athanasius would not accept it, the curriculum says that in his mind, stripping Jesus of any part of his divinity was “to strip Him of His ability to save the world.” This is the hinge of the whole story. The argument was about salvation, not about technical vocabulary. In On the Incarnation, which the curriculum excerpts at length, Athanasius reasons roughly like this. Human corruption could only be undone through death. The eternal Word could not die as God. So the Word took a real human body that could die. Because that body belonged to the Word who is above all, its death could count for all, and the resurrection could end the hold of corruption. If the Son were only a creature, his death would be one more creature’s death. It could not do what Athanasius believed the gospel claims it does.
Reading the texts Athanasius would not separate
Now go to the Bible yourself before taking anyone’s conclusion. Read John 1:1-14 slowly. The opening verse says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). Two verses later John adds, “All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:3). Then the turn comes: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14).
Observe before you interpret. Write down every claim John makes about the Word in verses 1-3. Then write down what changes in verse 14. Ask one question of verse 3. If every made thing came into being through the Word, does the Word belong in the category of made things? Many Christian readers have pressed John 1:3 against Arius in exactly this way. Treat that as an interpretation you are testing against the passage, not as a slogan.
Then read Colossians 2:9: “For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.” Put it beside Hebrews 2:14: “Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil.” The Colossians verse says the whole of God’s nature lives in Christ, and that it does so bodily. The Hebrews verse says why he shared our flesh: so that through death he might break death’s power. Compare that with the reasoning of On the Incarnation above. You will see that Athanasius was not inventing a new problem. He was following a line already present in these texts.
This is where the conviction reaches the present. Jude 3 teaches that Jesus is fully God and fully man, the eternal Son who took on flesh, and that the Trinity, one God in three persons, co-equal and co-eternal, is essential Christian doctrine. The curriculum states the link to salvation plainly: “If Christ were not fully human and fully divine, there would be no hope for us to be fully saved and renewed.”
Nicaea and the long aftermath
Here the chronology matters most, because the story is easy to flatten. As the curriculum tells it, the Roman emperor Constantine called church leaders from across the empire to Nicaea in 325, because the arguments over Christ’s nature were growing. Athanasius and others urged the council to reject the Arian phrases teaching that Christ had not always existed. Arianism was denied, and a creed was drafted to guard the church.
Watch the order of events and what it does and does not prove. The emperor called the meeting. That does not mean the emperor invented the belief. The conviction Athanasius defended was already being argued from Scripture and from the logic of salvation before the bishops gathered. The council gave that belief a public, shared form. Readers who claim Nicaea “created” the deity of Jesus have mixed up the date of a statement with the origin of a belief.
Nicaea also did not end the fight. The curriculum says the questions came back after Constantine’s death, and that “This would result in Athanasius being exiled a total of five times because of his unwillingness to waver in the matter.” A council’s verdict is not the same as a settled church. Athanasius spent decades defending a position that had already been formally affirmed. The curriculum compresses those decades into one sentence. The exercise below asks you to open it back up.
Practice: build the timeline yourself
This exercise takes about forty minutes alone, or longer in a group. You need paper, the curriculum chapter, and if possible a standard church history. The curriculum relies on Everett Ferguson’s Church History, Volume One, which makes a good place to check.
- Draw a line from 296 to 373. Mark only the dates the curriculum gives: his approximate birth, the Council of Nicaea in 325, the death of Constantine (find the year in your history), and his approximate death.
- Under the line, list each event and label its evidence. Use record for council decisions and his own writings. Use tradition for stories passed down, like the playing-church account. Use interpretation for later judgments, such as the claim, reported in the curriculum, that the church might have fallen to the Arians without him.
- Look up each of the five exiles. For each one, record when it began, who ordered it, and where he went. Note any place where your source disagrees with the curriculum’s summary, or adds detail it left out. A gap between two sources is not a scandal. It is how you learn which claims are firm.
- Finish by writing one paragraph that opens with the words What I can say with confidence about Athanasius is and completes the thought. Use only the items you marked as record.
For leaders: split the group in two. One half builds the line from the curriculum alone and the other uses a church history. Then compare. The conversation about why the lines differ is often the most useful part of the session.
Why an African church father belongs in your story
The chapter places Athanasius in a long line of African witnesses. That line runs from the Ethiopian official baptized in Acts 8 to Clement and Origen in Alexandria, Tertullian, Perpetua and Felicitas in Carthage, and Augustine in North Africa. Jude 3 holds that Christianity is not foreign to Africa. It has deep, ancient African roots, and African and African-descended believers do not have to choose between their heritage and their faith. The claim that Christianity is a white man’s religion does not survive contact with this history.
Keep the claim precise. Athanasius belonged to the church of Alexandria, a city on the African continent. The curriculum’s point concerns where the faith was rooted, argued and defended. It does not ask you to read modern racial categories back onto a fourth-century Egyptian city. You do not need to embellish the history. Accurate history is enough. It also carries no contempt for anyone, and the curriculum says so directly: “Now, this is not an attempt to throw shade at our European brothers and sisters. The same blood that was shed for us was shed for them.”
The deeper reason he matters is that his fight was over the center of the faith, not its edges. When someone today hears that Black Christians received a borrowed religion, they can learn that the confession of Christ’s full deity, which nearly every church still confesses, was defended at great cost by a leader of an African church. Jude 3 takes its name from the call to “earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 1:3). Athanasius did exactly that. On his motive, Through Eyes of Color says: “For Athanasius, contending against the heresy of Arianism was not a matter of being right; it was a matter of preserving the beauty and glory of the God who came down and put on flesh to provide salvation for all who put their trust in Him.”
Questions for discussion
- Restate Arius’s view as fairly as you can. What made it attractive to sincere believers, and where does it fail when you read it against John 1:1-14?
- Athanasius tied Christ’s deity to salvation. Follow his reasoning step by step. Which step do you find most persuasive, and which would a skeptic push on first?
- What is the difference between saying Nicaea defined a belief and saying Nicaea invented it? What evidence from your timeline bears on that difference?
- Which parts of the Athanasius story rest on record, and which on tradition? Does that difference change how you would tell his story to someone else?
- He kept defending a position the church had already affirmed. What does that suggest about how truth survives in a community over time?
- The curriculum says that “in order for us to competently contend for the faith against these lies, we must know our history.” What would knowing this history change in a conversation with someone who sees Christianity as a colonial import?
Carry one task out of this study. Find one person who believes Christianity came to Black people only through slavery. Before you offer them Athanasius, ask what they know about the church in Alexandria. Then tell them only what you marked as record on your timeline, and let the evidence carry the weight.