Athanasius - One against the world

Athanasius of Alexandria | Contra Mundum They called him the Black Dwarf. He outlasted four emperors. Athanasius of Alexandria was a North African deacon, then a bishop, then a fugitive, then a bishop again, five times in a row. He was twenty-three when he wrote On the Incarnation, a book C. S. Lewis said still smelled like the second century sixteen hundred years later. He was a twenty-something standing at the back of the Council of Nicaea while three hundred bishops argued over one letter of the Greek alphabet. The iota. Same substance, or similar substance. He spent the next fifty years making sure the church did not lose that letter. Five emperors banished him. Soldiers broke down his sanctuary doors mid-service. Monks hid him in the Egyptian desert for six years and he kept writing the whole time. In 367, in his thirty-ninth Easter letter, he listed by name the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, the exact twenty-seven you carried in here this morning. He was sharp-tongued, politically ruthless, and impossible to work with. He was also right. This sermon is the fourth entry in the family album, and it picks up the moment the empire itself joins the argument. It asks the question Athanasius forced the fourth century to answer: is Jesus actually God, or the most impressive creature God ever made? It argues that one iota carries the whole gospel inside it, that a creature cannot save you, and that the same Jesus Polycarp died for, Ignatius wrote to, and Irenaeus defended is the same Jesus Athanasius would not soften for an emperor. Same substance, or no Savior at all. One letter. One Jesus. One stubborn Egyptian bishop. Scripture: John 1:1 | Colossians 1:19-20 | Hebrews 13:8