In Front | Workbook: The Early Church and the Saving Work of Jesus

Grab your Workbook Journal!

[Record your answers in the workbook provided at the beginning of this course.]

Athanasius of Alexandria has been called the “Father of Christian Orthodoxy” and played a crucial role in the Early Church. One of the great Christian creeds, the Athanasian Creed, is named after him, and his Easter letter from AD 367 contains the first recorded list of the books of the New Testament as we know it. Read the following selection from one of his most important treatises, On the Incarnation, where he outlines the purpose and meaning of Jesus’ saving death. Athanasius’ view is somewhat typical of early Christians, but may appear unfamiliar to us today.

Maybe most striking is the fact that nowhere in this treatise does Athanasius mention forgiveness of sins. Instead he emphasizes two other connected reasons for the saving work of Jesus. First, he suggests Jesus became human and subjected himself to death in order to destroy death in humanity and join us to himself in resurrection: 

Thus, taking a body like our own, because all our bodies were liable to the corruption of death, He surrendered His body to death instead of all, and offered it to the Father. This He did out of sheer love for us, so that in His death all might die, and the law of death thereby be abolished because, having fulfilled in His body that for which it was appointed, it was thereafter voided of its power for men. This He did that He might turn again to incorruption men who had turned back to corruption, and make them alive through death by the appropriation of His body and by the grace of His resurrection. Thus He would make death to disappear from them as utterly as straw from fire.

The Word perceived that corruption could not be got rid of otherwise than through death; yet He Himself, as the Word, being immortal and the Father’s Son, was such as could not die. For this reason, therefore, He assumed a body capable of death, in order that it, through belonging to the Word Who is above all, might become in dying a sufficient exchange for all, and, itself remaining incorruptible through His indwelling, might thereafter put an end to corruption for all others as well, by the grace of the resurrection.

For naturally, since the Word of God was above all, when He offered His own temple and bodily instrument as a substitute for the life of all, He fulfilled in death all that was required. Naturally also, through this union of the immortal Son of God with our human nature, all men were clothed with incorruption in the promise of the resurrection. For the solidarity of mankind is such that, by virtue of the Word’s indwelling in a single human body, the corruption which goes with death has lost its power over all. You know how it is when some great king enters a large city and dwells in one of its houses; because of his dwelling in that single house, the whole city is honored, and enemies and robbers cease to molest it. Even so is it with the King of all; He has come into our country and dwelt in one body amidst the many, and in consequence the designs of the enemy against mankind have been foiled and the corruption of death, which formerly held them in its power, has simply ceased to be.

Second, Athanasius suggests Jesus had to restore the image of God in humanity and make God accessible to human senses, as we were no longer seeking God or his Word:

Men had turned from the contemplation of God above, and were looking for Him in the opposite direction, down among created things and things of sense. The Savior of us all, the Word of God, in His great love took to Himself a body and moved as Man among men, meeting their senses, so to speak, half way. He became Himself an object for the senses, so that those who were seeking God in sensible things might apprehend the Father through the works which He, the Word of God, did in the body.

Altogether, in Athanasius’ view, Jesus changes what it means to be human by foiling corruption and destroying death. By becoming human he empowers humanity through the “solidarity of mankind” to become like God and to be united to God as we were originally intended to be.

Source: “On the Incarnation of the Word,” Christian Classics Ethereal Library, accessed December 19, 2017, https://www.ccel.org/ccel/athanasius/incarnation.

4. How does Athanasius explain Jesus saving work? What images does he use in his explanation?

5. How is this view different from a prevailing view you’re familiar with?