
Athanasius of Alexandria: His Life and Impact
Early Church Fathers
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Narrated by:
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Peter Matthess
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By:
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Peter Barnes
About this listen
Until his death in 373, Athanasius was the most formidable opponent of Arianism in the Roman Empire. Ultimately, for him, this fight was not a struggle for ecclesial power or even for the rightness of his theological position. It was a battle for the souls of men and women.
Athanasius rightly knew that upon one’s view of Christ hung one’s eternal destiny. As he wrote to the bishops of Egypt in 356: “as therefore the struggle that is now set before us concerns all that we are, either to reject or to keep the faith, let us be zealous and resolve to guard what we have received, bearing in mind the confession that was written down at Nicaea.” By God’s grace, his victory in that struggle has been of enormous blessing to the church ever since.
©2019 Christian Focus Publications (P)2023 Christian Focus PublicationsThe first thing to clarify is that this wonderful short treatise would hardly be suitable for the average Christian Joe: it’s complex, often highly esoteric and scholarly, with a litany of quotations from every source imaginable, even Edward Gibbon if you please! The audiobook does not, and could not easily have laid on a bibliography though some of the authors quoted are far better known among theologians than others.
These remarks apply to the actual text only: the opening blurb is definitely parties pris so skip all that and treat the text proper for what it is; a very fair, thoroughly researched and concise account of a rather controversial but important personality in the jungle that was the 4th century church. I wrote a short article on Athanasius for my own church several years ago from a liberal standpoint, but would have been forever grateful to have had a resource like this short book to fall back on. Barnes has seen fit to include some of the best and most apt quotations from contemporaries of his subject, many in full and not without humour. In the matter of the impact of Athanasius, Barnes is fair and the concluding words of his book, another quote from Athanasius himself, sum up the spirit of this whole brilliant work.
Well balanced and researched
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