Athanasius and Basil — Michael Haykin

Well, I'm sure I expressed the feelings of apologia when I expressed thanks to you for having come out tonight and in previous weeks. And we have been thinking about the history of the Church, and our story has been brought up until the fourth century.

And in the previous two weeks, we have looked at something of the way in which the early Church began amidst persecution. We tried to set the context of the history of the early Church in the social, political, economic and larger context, as it were, of the Roman Empire.

And it's always very, very important to see that larger scene, as it were, in which the Church has travelled. And we saw how the Church came into conflict with the Empire, and there was persecution. And then we saw also something of the threats from within, not only the struggles from without with the persecution of the Empire, but also the struggles within, and we saw the struggle regarding monsonism.

And it opens up the question of the nature of the canon, and something we want to look at tonight, monsonism pleading, in many respects, for an open canon. We also looked at what was a more dire problem, really, the problem of Gnosticism, and the Church's struggle against a way of thinking that denied some cardinal aspects of the Christian faith.

And again, that has bearing upon the second lecture tonight, the issue of the canon, because Gnosticism wanted to reject the entirety of the Old Testament, portions of the New, and add, actually, to the New Testament, some of their own creations and writings.

And then last week, we looked at the whole scenario of what develops in the early fourth century, how the Church moves suddenly, and it is suddenly, it's not slowly, it's suddenly, from a position of being persecuted to a position of influence and power, from a position where it was dangerous to be a Christian in the Roman Empire, where the Church is now well on the way to becoming the dominant power in the Empire, and by the end of the fourth century, it would be dangerous to be a pagan.

And we saw how the central figure in that transformation, at least from a historical vantage point, is the man who we know as Constantine. And his embrace of Christianity, about which historians are divided, certainly has some very, very significant long-term development or impact, and the impact of that embrace of Christianity is still with us today.

And one would say that from the vantage point of the late twentieth century, Constantine's embrace of Christianity and the union of Church and State that it affected had negative long-term consequences.

At the time, it was not clear, and I would have argued it was not exactly clear what those consequences would be, but as history unfolded, it was probably not, in terms of the larger percentage, it was probably not a good thing that the Church found itself wedded to the State.

Well, the fourth century is a very important century. It's a turning point in the history of Church-State relations. It sets up a model of Church-State relations that prevails in the West down definitely to the eighteenth century, and its consequences are still with us.

Tonight we want to look at two other aspects of the fourth century, one that is very, very important, that deals with the Godhead, and the struggle for the deity of the Son and the Holy Spirit, the defense of the doctrine of the Trinity.

And the landmarks that are laid in the fourth century are still landmarks that we need to adhere to today, because they express Biblical truth. Please do not go away from these lectures this evening with the conviction that I am trying to elevate the Nicene Creed, which is what we're going to look at in some detail, to the status of Scripture.

It is not Scripture, but it capsulizes, or summarizes, in a compact form, the Biblical witness to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. And one of the great, I think, failings, and it's being changed in some respects, one of the great failings of evangelicals in our day has been the neglect of the doctrine of the Trinity.

We've taken it for granted, we've assumed it, and we should not have done so. The other lecture this evening is focused on the canon, and our thought there is going to be centered upon the evidences within the Scriptures themselves of authority.

And if there's one word that sums up the approach I want to make to the canon, it is that word, the authority of the New Testament writings, and so on. But first, though, in the first hour, the doctrine of the Trinity and its defense by Basil of Caesarea and Athanasius of Alexandria.

Now, one of the things that is central, and I want to begin with a Biblical basis, one of the things that is central to the proclamation of the Gospel in the first century is the affirmation, or the assertion, that Jesus is Lord.

Romans 10 .9, Paul asserts that salvation is rooted in this very fact, that one asserts or affirms or confesses Jesus is Lord, and that God has raised him from the dead. And there are those in our day who, when they approach this word, do so fairly skimpily.

They see it rather as a synonym for boss or master. But the word Lord, in the context of the early Church, has much deeper significance and richer implications. For instance, to confess Jesus is Lord is to confess that he is the one who bestows the Holy Spirit.

Acts 2, I'm going to be giving a number of references, some I will read, but others I will just cite the Biblical text and chapter and verse. Acts 2, verse 32 to 36, where the Apostle Peter is explaining what has taken place in the descent of the Spirit.

It is a fascinating passage, because Peter says almost next to nothing about the Spirit. His sermon is filled with Christ, and what he says is that this is the result of God having raised Jesus from the dead and made him Lord and Christ.

And as Lord, he has the power to give the Spirit. Now, any Jew raised and nourished on the Old Testament Scriptures would know that that is a prerogative of God alone. That only God, only one who is deity, only one who is divine can give the Spirit.

Or, again, Jesus, as Lord, is a proper recipient of prayer. Acts 7 is probably the most well-known example. Acts 7, verse 59, Stephen, in the context of martyrdom, he cries out to the Lord Jesus. Jesus is the focus of his prayer.

Again, any right-thinking Jew in that context would know only God is to be prayed to. Not any other, only God. 1 Corinthians 12, verse 8, that very well-known passage of the Apostle Paul as he is seeking relief from, presumably, physical discomfort, what he calls the thorn in the flesh.

And he asks the Lord, he says three times. And as the passage goes on, he receives the answer from the Lord Jesus. My grace is sufficient for you. My strength is made perfect, as it were, in your weakness.

And obviously the one to whom he is calling upon as Lord is the Lord Jesus Christ. In fact, the term Lord, in the New Testament, is a word that when any of the Greek-speaking Christians in those early days would have seen, their Old Testament Bible was what would have come to mind, because the words that we, the old King James, called Jehovah, or is more regularly translated today as Yahweh, the word for God that is given to Moses on Sinai.

In the Greek translation of the Old Testament, and the Greek translation of the Old Testament is pretty well the Bible of the early church. Most of the converts, as the gospel goes outside of Palestine, cannot read Hebrew or Aramaic, the two languages in which the Old Testament was originally given.

And what they read is the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament. And the word Jehovah, or Yahweh, in the Old Testament is translated by the Greek word Kyrios, Lord. My point is this, that when the early church gives the title of Kyrios, or Lord, to Jesus, it is using a word that is exclusively reserved in the Old Testament for the translation of the word Yahweh, or Jehovah.

In other words, it's a divine title. And so, and we could spend a lot more time looking at the New Testament, and to see the biblical basis for the doctrine of the Trinity. It is there, B .B. Warfield, great Presbyterian theologian of the earlier part of the century could say that the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ is all the way through the New Testament.

And he's right. Even a little passage, and let me just conclude one little passage and then move on into the fourth century. Even a little passage as the, when Jesus predicts the coming of the end. He says, on that day, the Son of Man will send out His angels.

And Warfield says, what does that little possessive pronoun, His angels, tell us about the Son of Man, or Jesus? Who is this one who owns angels? Who bids them do this, and they do it. Is He not a divine person and being?

And so the fourth century, as we move into it now, as it begins to defend the deity of the Spirit and the Son, and we want to focus our attention initially on the Son, and then move on to the Holy Spirit, is not doing something that is foreign to the New Testament.

It is bringing out and summarizing what is at the heart of the New Testament witness. That this one who is fully man is also fully God. Now down until the beginning of the fourth century, the deity of Christ is largely unquestioned.

If you look at the history of the Church, between the New Testament period to the beginning of the fourth century, there is very little struggle or debate about the deity of Christ. His humanity, yes, the Gnostics denied the humanity of Jesus.

But His deity is something that is largely assumed. But in the fourth century, there arose the teaching we call Arianism. A-R-I-A-N-I-S-M. Arianism. And the propagator of it, at least in its early form, is a man named Arius.

A-R-I-U-S. We know very little about his life prior to his appearance on the scene of history. This is typical of most of the early Church figures. It's reckoned he was born somewhere around 218. He's born in Egypt.

He's an Egyptian. Becomes an elder in the Church at Alexandria, presumably after he has studied in Antioch. There are a number of his letters that have been preserved. And in one of them he mentions studying under a man named Lucian of Antioch.

And Antioch would have been in what is now modern Syria. And so there is a period of time in which he is outside of Egypt. But he comes upon the scene of history around the year 318. When he begins to teach publicly in a church in Alexandria that there was a time when the son did not exist.

There was a time when the father was not the father because he did not have a son. There was a time when the words everlasting and eternal only belonged to the father. And they really do not belong to the son.

The son, he could say, is not everlasting or co-everlasting with the father. The son, he could say, was created by the father as a perfectly immutable creature. In other words, for Arius, the term God properly applies only to the father, not to the son.

He sent some of his teaching to the bishop of Alexandria, a man named Alexander. He is, you remember, Alexander of Alexandria. And Alexander of Alexandria's response was blunt and sharp and immediate.

The son is eternal, he emphasized, as eternal as the father. There was never a time that the father was without the son. As such, the son must be fully God. Arius was summoned by Alexander and a number of other key leaders in Alexandria to a meeting.

Basically, a private meeting where they wanted to find out his views in detail. Would he recant? He would not. Finally, a synod is called of around 200 bishops and elders in Egypt and Libya. Libya being the area, at least in the Roman nomenclature, of provinces next to Egypt, as you're moving west across North Africa.

And these 100 or so elders and bishops drew up a statement which condemned and repudiated Arius' views. Now, at this point, Arius could have had a number of options. One option was he could have recanted.

He could have recognized that a significant block of church leaders had rejected his teaching and maybe he should rethink and reconsider. He does another option, though, and that is he takes the controversy outside of Egypt and spreads it across the eastern Mediterranean.

He writes a letter to a man named Eusebius of Nicomedia. And Eusebius was a bishop in Nicomedia, which is in northern, northwestern Turkey today. And Eusebius had the ear of Constantine. He was, as you look at his career, a very worldly, wise churchman.

A man who took advantage of the sudden influence the church now had because of Constantine's embrace of Christianity. And Eusebius championed Arius' views. In fact, Arius disappears very early on in the whole discussion and struggle, and it's Eusebius of Nicomedia who is the main propagator of Arianism for at least another 10, 15 years.

Where and how Arius ends up, we really do not know for sure. One of the great opponents of Arianism, Athanasius, has a tract or a book on the end of Arius. And it's almost very similar to the sort of end of Judas in the book of Acts and the Gospel of Matthew.

But as, while the end of Judas is historically accurate and reliable, this tract by Athanasius, most historians have questions about whether or not Arius actually ended up dying the way that Athanasius purports.

But the key thing to note here is Arius disappears pretty quickly after becoming the focus of controversy. Eusebius of Nicomedia, a man of great influence at the court of Constantine, takes up the cudgels, as it were, for Arius.

Now what is especially difficult about the Arian controversy is the fact that Arius could actually use the term, as would his followers, use the term God of Christ. He could say, yes, the Son is God. But then when he was pressed, he's not God in the way the Father is God.

He's God in the sense that he is above all other creatures. He was the first of the Father's creation. He is perfect. He is immutable. He has never experienced any sort of fall or anything like that. In other words, he's like an angel.

But in the heart of Arius' thinking, the Son is a creature, even though he may be the highest of all creatures. Eventually, as this controversy moves out of Egypt and begins to envelop the Church in the eastern Mediterranean, eventually, in the summer of 325, a council is called at Nicaea.

Nicaea, the old way of spelling it was N-I-C-A-E-A. More recently, that little A-E combination has been dropped out of English, as I'm sure you're aware. Medieval, for instance, had it. And Nicaea is often simply spelled N-I-C-E-A.

A little village, not far from the contemporary Istanbul, what was once Constantinople. And about 220 bishops and elders came to this council. It's a very, very important council. Their fare, their accommodation, was paid by Constantine himself.

Constantine was deeply disturbed by this controversy, and his disturbance was based on the fact that he had embraced Christianity, and he believed it was going to be something that could unify the empire, and suddenly now he finds, at least from his vantage point, the Church rent in two.

And so he wanted to see a resolution of the problem. And in that council, there was eventually drawn up, in the summer of 325, the document we call the Nicene Creed. And on the notes that I've given you, if you turn into the second page, there is a page there with two creeds.

The Nicene Creed, and then a thing called, it's quite a mouthful, the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed. And I dare say, if you have ever been raised, if you've been raised as I was, I was raised Roman Catholic, and I remember repeating this creed, which was called the Nicene Creed.

Now the creed that has come down in the Roman Catholic Church, of the Orthodox Churches, the Anglican Church, I studied at Wycliffe College in Toronto, Evangelical Anglican School, and other denominational bodies also recite the creed, and call it the Nicene Creed.

The creed that is generally called the Nicene Creed today, is actually the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed. The real Nicene Creed, and there is very little difference between the two, as we will see, the real Nicene Creed is the first document there.

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible. The first article centers on God the Father. And you can see very clearly, if you recall when we went through the struggle against Gnosticism, and the place of Irenaeus, and Irenaeus' use of creedal statements to fight Gnosticism, you can remember that his creed, or his statement of faith, began the same way.

And that first article goes all the way back to the Church's struggle against Gnosticism. The assertion of one God, who is the maker of heaven and earth. And it's interesting today, I won't get into this in any detail, it's interesting today that that article again is under attack.

That if there is one article under attack, in the creedal statement here, it will be the first article, and the assertion of God as Father. And that could take us off into quite a discussion, and I'm not going to go there.

That's the first article. The second article is the critical one, and that deals with the Son. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten from the Father, only begotten, that is from the substance of the Father.

A better word for substance there is the word being. And this is an older translation, and the word substance actually was a word that was regularly understood as the word being. Today I'm not sure it conveys that idea, and I think a better translation would be the word being of the Father.

God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one substance, of one being with the Father, through whom all things came into being, things in heaven, things on earth, who because of us men and because of our salvation came down and became incarnate, becoming man, suffered and rose again on the third day, ascended into the heavens, will come to judge the living and the dead.

Now the last part of that article, just to indicate, again comes from the Church's struggle with Gnosticism. The Church is incorporating, as it were, some of its past struggles and insights and the affirmation of the true humanity of Christ, His incarnation, His suffering and dying, His ascension in the flesh to heaven, and so on is incorporated there in the last part.

The critical part, though, in the struggle against Arianism is the affirmation that the Lord Jesus Christ is from the being of the Father, and He is true God from true God. He is begotten, not made, of one being with the Father.

And Arian could affirm some of the statements there. He could affirm, for instance, that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. He could affirm that Jesus Christ is begotten from the Father. When he affirmed begotten, he would understand it to mean created.

He could affirm that Jesus Christ is the only begotten. He could affirm that Jesus Christ is God. But there are a number of statements here he could not affirm. And those statements go to the heart of the New Testament witness about the Lord Jesus Christ.

Who is Jesus Christ? He is the one who is begotten from the Father. What that statement is meant to convey is that while, as the statement will go on to affirm, that the Son shares all of the divine characteristics of the Father of God, there is one sense in which He is different.

In other words, there is in the Godhead, and at this point we're thinking only of the two, there are the two persons, the Father and the Son. They are not the same and identical. They share the same being, but they are not the same person.

This is very difficult, but it is central to the affirmation of biblical Christianity. The God whom we worship is one who is three, and yet one God. A God who is three in one. Three persons sharing one being.

And it is something, ultimately, I think, that we, in finite and fallen creaturehood, and our reason cannot fully, fully grasp. It should not surprise us. Because if God is to be God, He is to be expected to surpass our reason and our understanding.

And then the statement goes on to affirm that He is true God from true God. All that the Father is, the Son is. Except for this one point, the Son is begotten, the Father is not begotten. Now, if you ask and press them, what does that mean?

And I'm not sure, and I've read a lot in this area, I'm not sure I've ever come up with any of these early Church Fathers explaining it in a way that, yes, I can fully grasp what's going on here. What I think that this is doing, the statement begotten, is an affirmation of the personhood of the Son.

The Son and the Father are not the identical person. Remember when we looked at Tertullian, that also is heretical. This is a heresy of modalism. But the Son is truly God from truly God. He is begotten.

He is not made. He is not a creature. And this is the heart of the document. He shares the same being as the Father. He is one being or one substance with the Father. He is God, fully God, the eternal God.

And as Alexander of Alexandria said, and he was present at this council that drew up this statement, there was never a time the Father was not a Father. He was always with His Son. And the Son is eternal.

He is true God. The New Testament, again, if these men were asked, where does the New Testament affirm that? It affirms that in a number of places. Romans 9, 5, or the Apostle Paul says, talking about the Messiah coming from the nation of Israel, blessed God forever and ever.

He affirms it in Titus 2 .13. We are awaiting the coming of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. It is affirmed by the doubting Thomas. Poor man, he's had that epithet, doubting, for the last 2 ,000 years.

But he comes to faith when he falls at the feet of the one whom he had known as Jesus of Nazareth and confesses, my Lord and my God. And so the New Testament witness here is, I think, rightly and accurately summarized.

Now notice before we move on, there's that little third article, and we believe in the Holy Spirit. Nothing more said. And you might ask why. And the reason one would ask, the answer that one would be given is that the issue of the deity of the Spirit was not being debated.

Arius did not believe in the spirit's deity. Prest, he would say, that the Father created the Son, and then the Son created the Spirit, and then the Spirit of the Son created everything else. But it was not a center of debate, as it would become in the 360s and 370s.

In the 320s and 330s and 340s, the center of debate is the deity of the Son. And then the final statement, which is really not part of the creed, but is a kind of an appendix, rebukes or anathematizes, that's a very strong word, anathematizes those who say there was when He was not.

In other words, there was a time when the Son did not exist. Before being born, He was not. Or He came into existence out of nothing. They affirm that these statements applied to the Divine Son are biblically wrong.

Now, this should have ended the controversy. Constantine actually affirmed this, and said that this was, as far as he was concerned, the end of the discussion. It should have ended the discussion. But it did not.

And the debate will drag on for another 50 or so years. And part of the reason for the debate was, again, a man like Eusebius of Nicomedia, who could not confess this, but was a man who had significant influence with Constantine.

Within a few years of this creed being drawn up, within three years, in fact, one of the key men who had drawn this up, Alexander of Alexandria, had died. And he'd been replaced by a man who'd been a deacon, or Alexander's secretary at the Council of Nicaea, Athanasius.

One of the great theologians in the history of the Church. And he was a young man at the time. There was great debate as to whether or not this young man should be made the Bishop of Alexandria. Very, very important position of leadership.

He was probably a native Egyptian. He was North African. He was not Greek, as is often the thought. Greek is his native, is his mother tongue in many respects. But there is a clear indication that he is quite proficient in Coptic, which is the Egyptian language.

And he probably was North African. And he becomes the brunt of attack of the Arians. And he is pressed, after this creed had been drawn up, to receive Arius back into the Church. If Arius could confess this.

Arius could not. But Athanasius says on a number of those occasions, he says there was no way he was ever going to receive Arius back into the Church, unless he professed the Nicene Creed. In fact, he said if he was forced into this, he'd cut off the wheat supply of the rest of the Roman Empire.

Egypt was the breadbasket, much like the prairies have been for Canada. Egypt was the breadbasket of the Roman Empire. And the opponents of Athanasius, Arians, heard those sort of statements. And they went to Constantine, and they told him, Constantine has actually threatened to cut off the bread supply of the Empire.

Well, Constantine demanded Athanasius come and see him. Alongside that charge, there was one that was a lot more serious. And now I have to back up a little, and you need to follow closely. During the persecution, the Great Persecution, which we looked at last week, which came to an end in 312, but which raged in the eastern part of the Roman Empire for eight or nine years, there was a schism that took place in the Church in Egypt.

The schism was over. What happens? How should the Church deal with those who've denied Christ in the midst of persecution? In the year 306, 307, two leading elders in the Church in Alexandria were in prison and about to be tried for their faith.

One of them was Peter of Alexandria, the predecessor of Alexander. Another of them was a man named Malatius. And they got this fussing in the prison. What will happen when we emerge as a Church victorious from this struggle with the Empire?

And that alone tells you something of the confidence and optimism these men had. And they were going back and forth, and finally Alexander said, well, or Peter rather said, and they were talking about what should we do with those who've denied the faith?

And Peter said, well, we will treat them the way our Lord treated Peter. Those who confess repentance and is genuine, we will receive them back and welcome them back as brothers and sisters. Malatius said, absolutely no way.

Absolutely no way. We've gone through the heat of the fires of persecution. These people have denied Christ. Maybe God will forgive them, but we cannot extend that forgiveness to them in this life. They can never be fully embraced in the Church again.

The discussion in the prison cell got so heated that finally Malatius got up and drew a line in the dirt. And he said, everybody here who's on my side come over to this side of the line. And right there in the prison cell there was a schism.

Both Peter and Malatius died as martyrs. But the schism persisted. And the followers of Malatius, the Molescians, did not like Athanasius. Because Athanasius was the successor of Alexander. And Alexander was the bishop who succeeded Peter.

And they didn't like Athanasius. And so the Arians came to the Molescians and kind of got together. And the Molescians, theologically, were orthodox. But it's interesting how politics can make strange bedfellows.

And these two groups who didn't agree with each other theologically, and yet they had a common enemy in Athanasius. They agreed to fight him. And they concocted a story that Athanasius had actually had a Molescian bishop, Arsenius, murdered.

Well, that was a capital crime. So, Athanasius is taken off to Constantine. He's got two main charges against him. He's threatened to cut off the bread supply of the empire. And he's murdered a bishop.

Meanwhile, Athanasius's supporters have been scouring the countryside and they have found Arsenius holed up in a house, actually, in Alexandria. And they bring him into court with kind of a cloak over his face so nobody can see him.

So the charges are raised and Athanasius insists, yes, I threatened to cut off the bread supply of the empire and I stand by that. That if you insist, Constantine, that Ares has to be received back in the church, there's no way I'm going to receive him back into the church.

The other charge, well, the other charge is completely false. Those opponents say, well, give us proof. And lo and behold, they trot out Arsenius, pull off the cloak, and there he was. And that charge was thrown out of court.

But Constantine was so annoyed at Athanasius about the bread supply, he was exiled for three years. And he was sent to internal exile in northern, north-west-eastern France, what was then Gaul. It was the first of five exiles this man underwent for the sake of his defense of the deity of the sun.

Constantine died in 337. He was succeeded by a son, Constantius, who was a flaming Arian. He didn't like Athanasius either. He exiled him at least once, and then a second time descended upon Alexandria, determined to rid himself of this man who continued to defend the deity of the sun.

Again, remember the problem we looked at last week. What happens when the person who's ruling your country disagrees with you theologically? You're in danger of being persecuted. And Athanasius was being persecuted by a man who claimed to be a Christian, but was an Arian.

It's got a humorous twist to it. Apparently, Athanasius was preaching at a worship service in the church in Alexandria, and he was told that the police were searching for him. And he needed to get out right then and there.

And so he stumbles out the back door, gets into a boat, and he's heading down the Nile. Word gets to the police, yes, Athanasius is on the Nile, catch him. The police boat is coming down the Nile pretty fast, and it draws ahead of Athanasius' boat just a wee bit, and one of the police yell over to Athanasius.

Have you seen Athanasius? He obviously didn't know what he looked like. Athanasius yells back, yes, he's just ahead of you. And his boat actually was just a wee bit ahead of the police boat, and the police boat put on all speed, obviously with rowers, and Athanasius is able to escape.

Hides out in the desert for six years. Now why did Athanasius, and he went through an incredible persecution, persecution from Arians who were in power, why did he maintain his conviction that the Son is Holy God?

Well, a number of reasons. First of all, he believed that the Scriptures assert this. For instance, this is his reason from John 16 verse 15, the statement where Jesus says, all that belongs to the Father is mine.

Think about that. All that belongs to the Father is mine. If he is not Holy God, that is arrogance and blasphemy. All that the Father, that belongs to the Father is mine. Or John 17 verse 10, all, this is Jesus praying to the Father, all you have is mine.

Well, Athanasius says, it clearly indicates the Son shares all the divine attributes of the Father. The Father is light, he writes, the Son is radiance and true light. The Father is true God, the Son is true God.

Of all that the Father has, there is nothing which does not belong to the Son. A second argument that Athanasius made, and he's got quite a number of them, and you can read them in his writings, but a second argument that he makes is that in the baptismal formula, we are baptized into the name of the singular name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

He argues, and I think again rightly, from the singularity of the name, that this is one being into whom we are baptized. Strange it would be, he said, that if we are baptized into the name of God, a creature, if the Son is a creature, and a lesser creature, very, very odd.

He rightly sees that baptismal formula is more than simply a name that is pronounced over the one baptized, it is a declaration of faith. That whether you are committed to believer's baptism or infant baptism, is ultimately a declaration of faith in that one who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

In fact, I think a very strong case can be made that in the New Testament the name of God is Father, Son, or the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. And then thirdly, Athanasius rightly recognized that if the Son is not fully God, our salvation is in peril.

He rightly saw that in Scripture salvation is of God alone. All the way through Scripture is this affirmation. It is God who saves. There is no help in man. No help in creatures. It is God who saves. If the Son is not fully God, He cannot save.

In fact, I would venture to argue that Athanasius' defense of the deity, the Son, comes down to those two points. The one about the baptismal formula, and the one about the issue of salvation. Some historians, and not in recent years, but some older historians in the century, would look back at this debate and say, oh, this is all high-throne theology, trying to penetrate the secrets of the being of God.

No, it's not that at all. It's dealing with, what does it mean to be saved? How is a person saved? Who is the Savior? If the Son is not fully God, He cannot be Savior. And so the Church, the entire Church, owes this North African, or this Egyptian, an enormous debt.

He would die in 373, and not yet seeing the victory that would come. But he had paved the way for what becomes the Nicene, Niceno-Constantinople Creed, or the full affirmation of the Trinity. Now let me turn to that, and we'll have to deal with this very briefly, unfortunately.

His mantle falls upon a man named Basil of Caesarea. They never met, they corresponded. Caesarea, there were many towns called Caesarea, but the Caesarea of which we're talking is in Turkey, central Turkey, the Turkish highlands today, or the Anatolian highlands, in those days called Cappadocia.

And Basil of Caesarea came from aristocracy. Came from very different roots, one suspects, than Athanasius. Athanasius, probably lower middle class in his roots. Basil, definitely upper class aristocracy.

His grandparents on both sides had been persecuted. He had lost a couple of his grandparents as martyrs. In fact, all of his family property had been confiscated during the great persecution of 303 to 312.

Basil studied initially in the University of Athens, and he intended to become a teacher of rhetoric. One of the great professions in the ancient world. A profession like law or medicine would be today.

But he came back to his homeland in Cappadocia intending to set up shop as a great teacher of rhetoric. Rhetoric is the art of public speaking. And his sister, Macrina, who had been converted, began to share her faith with him.

And urged him to think about the faith as if the only hospitals in the Roman world were those attached to the Roman army. They were military, field hospitals. They were not hospitals for the average person.