On the Incarnation of Christ by Athanasius | Navigating the Classics

Hi, I'm John Snyder. I'm with Media Gratia and we are offering a new series of podcasts that we wanted to tell you about. It's called Navigating the Classics. These will be released quarterly and not weekly and they are longer than our normal podcast, the whole council podcast.

And in these podcasts, we will have a group of guest speakers join me and we will take one of the significant books from Christian history, usually one that is prior to the Puritan movement. Not one that maybe everyone would feel comfortable reading.

Maybe they feel it's a bit daunting. One that is more difficult than usual to read. And in 90 minutes, we try to walk through the book explaining the significance that it had in Christian history and the practical application for today as well as giving you a kind of a bird's eye view of what the author discusses.

The first book we're working through is the book by the early church father Athanasius and the book is entitled On the Incarnation and we hope you enjoy it as much as we did. I'm here today with Steve Crampton and Jamie Crampton, his son, and we're going to discuss a book by Saint Athanasius On the Incarnation.

But before we do, in case you are not familiar with Steve from previous podcasts, I want Steve to introduce himself again and Jamie, if you'll tell us a little bit about yourself.

I'm Steve Crampton. I've been a member of this church for many a year and I practice law for a living but have long enjoyed the old books and the classics. I'm Jamie Crampton and his son and this.

Was my pastor growing up. I was both brought to Christ and then called to the ministry under his ministry here at Christ Church and I'm now a pastor at Parish Presbyterian Church in Franklin, Tennessee.

Why the Classics and the Council of Nicaea Matter

Well guys, thanks for joining us today. We're going to look, as I said, at a really great book, one of the great classics of Christianity but perhaps a book that you haven't read before. And we started, this is our first try at this, and so we picked the smallest book in the world, Athanasius On the Incarnation.

It actually is a very, to the point, brief treatment of the incarnation and yet it played a profound part in Christian history and we want to look at that. We're going to look at Athanasius himself, something about the context in which he wrote, and then Jamie, we've given him the lion's share of the work to walk us through the key aspects of this book.

What's so significant about the book? And then we'll try to kind of pull it all together at the end after our discussions to say, well, what are the strengths and what are the weaknesses and who's this book suited for?

And I think that we might find it surprising what the book really is about. So Jamie, give us an introduction to the man himself. Well, one of my favorite facts about Athanasius is that he was a short, thin man.

That's significant. We could just end right here. Right. That's all we need to know. Yeah, he's a godly. God used him. And he's from Alexandria, Egypt. He was born, we're not quite sure the date of his birth, but right around 300 A .D., so we're going back 1 ,700 years, and died in 373 A .D., so lived about 73 years old, three years.

And as a young man, he was a secretary of his pastor, who they called the Bishop of Alexandria, and went to the Council of Nicaea. And do you want to talk about? Yeah, let's talk about Nicaea. The Council of Nicaea.

When we talk about church councils, as a Baptist, I did not grow up hearing about church councils. Probably the only time I heard about church councils, even in college, a Baptist college, was it tended to be maybe from a bit of a negative perspective, you know, where Luther is arguing against his opponents, and they're, you know, pulling out their historical documents and saying, this council said this, and Luther points out, yes, but it disagreed with another council, and my authority is higher than all.

It's the Scripture, which is certainly true. And we don't want to ever move away from that fundamental, you know, stubborn attachment to the authority of Scripture, soul of Scripture. It is not only is it, you know, without error, it is completely sufficient for the Christian life.

And yet, God does give us teachers, and that means present-day teachers, but it also means past, and we benefit from that. But a council is something more. It's more than just one great teacher, one theologian, you know, a Luther, a Calvin, a Jonathan Edwards writing on a topic.

It is a gathering in the ecumenical councils. It is a gathering of all the churches at that time in Christendom, leaders from them all gathering together to answer a question that has been raised by an error.

Jamie, earlier on when we were discussing, you know, how to approach the podcast, you mentioned that these doctrines didn't begin when the council ended. So 325, we had the Council of Nicaea. So 326, the church is told you need to believe that Jesus is fully God, truly God, and truly man.

No, it was believed long before the council, but it was clarified at the council because there were those in the churches who were rising up teaching a false view of this, and Jamie, you compared it to people starting to run off a cliff.

And so, you feel that you need to build a fence, which wasn't there before. The path was there, but the fence is there to say, don't go down this road. This is a road that leads to destruction. It's.

An error. Yeah, so the councils are clarifying, crystallizing what's already been there, but if you don't have somebody coming up offering an alternative that's off the rails, over the cliff, there's no need for all the churches to come together and set it down and attack it, or address it at any rate.

And the other thing I wanted to add to what you were saying, John, is you don't need a council on every point of doctrine. You need a council on the really important, crucial, what's primary versus what's secondary.

We allow a lot, and I think Athanasius is an example we'll probably get into, where there's a graciousness, the Christian charity extended to those who disagree with us on certain minor issues. But when they come to the fundamentals of the faith, we need to address those and make it clear what do we really believe, what does Scripture teach, right?

And the errors are not those...this is the other thing in my experience prior to really diving into the councils, is, well, since we've had all those councils and over history the church has addressed various things, it's all settled, it's all done, there's basically no more heresy today.

But in fact, of course, the old serpent comes back again and again in maybe a little bit different form, a little different mask today, but those errors creep up again and again. So it behooves us both to study Scripture, but also to know what the wisdom of the ages has taught us through those councils.

With the Council of Nicaea, there were.

Some things that were unique. First, it was the first ecumenical or, you know, kind of church-wide. So we don't have issues where one set of churches in one region of the, you know, Roman Empire or whatever are, you know, we don't have East versus West at this point.

They're coming together, generally speaking, leaders from the various regions to discuss a significant issue in understanding the Trinity, particularly the relationship of the Son to the Father, and, you know, how they would answer Arius's error, where Arius says the Son is a God.

He is, He at a point in time, God the Father, the God, so to speak, creates the highest of creation, His Son. His Son is a God, but He is not quite God in the same way that the Father is. He is certainly not of one essence with the Father, and, you know, and from the Son then comes all other creation, and so when the church began to hear these things, there was alarm, you know, and for a while there was a, you know, you can go back to original sources and see the letters back and forth between the theologians and the pastors and the bishops, and finally a council was called.

So it's unique in the sense it's the first, you know, just church-wide council, but it's also the first council that was called under the influence of a Roman emperor, and so we have the strange element added here.

The state power is now pro-Christian. Constantine, we're not discussing Constantine, the quality of his Christianity, but he is as officially pro-Christian. When Constantine grabs power from the other men, you know, there were three men left to divide up the Roman Empire.

He conquers his two rivals. When he conquers and he believes that Christ has given him this victory, he is pro-Christianity, and he, as a shrewd politician, he sees that one way to bring the divided empire together is to have Christianity be the glue, but if that's going to work, we can't have two factions.

We can't have Arians and then Orthodox, so we need to heal the rift in the Christian church, and for that purpose, he calls a council. In 325 AD, 230 bishops get together in the city of Nicaea, which is in present-day Turkey, and they discuss this whole issue.

So in this council, basically, you have Arius's view of Christ being a god but an inferior god, and then you have the other side, and we can say Athanasius's view, but it's not just Athanasius. Athanasius certainly is at the center of forming a more biblical description of the relationship of father to son, but let me read an example of Arius's view, and this is from a book called Turning Points by Mark Noll.

Mark Noll is a Christian historian, and this is a very interesting book. It just talks about key points, or he calls it decisive moments in the history of So he talks about the council of Nicaea, but one of the things that Arius did was he wanted to make the doctrine clear and simple, and he wanted to remove the mystery to some degree, and we'll talk about the danger of that in a minute, but before we do, another thing he did was he popularized his theology by putting it to music, and it reminds me of what Charles Wesley said to John Wesley when the Wesleyan Methodist movement was getting moving, and Charles said to John, you can write the sermons and the theology books and tracts for the movement, and I'll write the hymns, and at the end of our lives the people will believe what they sang, not what they read, because oftentimes we do pick up our theology from what we sing in church, and of course that's biblical to a certain degree, where Paul talks about the place that singing has in teaching each other.

Well, listen to the translated, this is in English, of course, not in Greek. This is Arius's hymn. The uncreated God has made the Son, a beginning of things created, and by adoption has God made the Son into an advancement of himself, so he's adopted him after making him.

Yet the Son's substance is removed from the substance of the Father, not of one essence. The Son is not equal to the Father, nor does he share the same substance. God is the all-wise Father, and the Son is the teacher of his mysteries.

The members of the Holy Trinity share unequal glory. Interesting. So that was a way that the common man could just kind of grab hold of, what do you believe? Oh, well, our church loves Arius. Well, what does he believe?

Well, this is our favorite hymn at our church, and you could sing to him and teach. Now, guys, I mentioned that Arius was desiring to make, according to Mark Knoll, make the doctrine of the Trinity less mysterious, maybe more simple, easier to get a handle on.

What is the danger we find throughout Christian history when that's a man's approach?

I would say we wrestle as created, rational beings, right? I think made after the image of God certainly includes that rational faculty. And Scripture, again and again, I marvel as I reread even from the first pages of Genesis how God goes out of his way to stoop down to us and explain, here is, for instance, the law for, you know, obeying your parents.

Well, why should I do that? And he gives you a reason. You know, I destroyed the Amalekites. Why? Because, and he explains to us. So he wants us to understand. And then we, in our hubris, I would say, take our rationality and try to superimpose it on Scripture in parts where the Trinity is very difficult to really understand.

And so, Arius, I think you could say, and I think historians agree, his motivation was good. He wants to make it understandable. We are creatures of reason, and so let's dumb it down, as it were. So what we end up doing is doing violence to those things that God has set forth that are incomprehensible in many ways for us.

And that's why the council has to come together and defend what is a truly critical part of understanding and worshiping the true God. Who God is must be faithful to Scripture more than it's faithful to reason itself.

Yeah, I think that one thing we see through history is, so let's say we have two things expressed in Scripture that seem to be a paradox. There's an apparent contradiction, and the contradiction is solved in the infinite wisdom of God, but it rises above our intellects.

As Steve said, it's not anti-rational. So an example we were talking about, and I got, I remember reading Sproul's small pamphlet on this on the Trinity. He mentions the fact that Christianity is not irrational.

It's not against the brain. You don't have to leave your brain at the door in order to exercise faith. It does not go against what we understand as, you know, logical or rational, sensible, you know. And here's the example he gave.

Sproul said, if we said that there are three persons in the Trinity, but also we have to say there is only one person in the Trinity, that's irrational. It doesn't make sense. It contradicts. So that would be irrational, and we reject it.

But if it says, if the Scripture says there are three persons, but one substance, one being, one God expressed in his three persons, that is not irrational, but that is something that is above reason in the sense that we did not come to that understanding through studying the nature and creation and, you know, the creation, the way we're made and say, now there must be one God, but I believe he is expressed himself in the existence of three persons.

So that's not an irrational statement, but it is something that had to be revealed. It's actually quite simple when you look at the Bible. How do you develop this doctrine? There are accusations of, this is philosophy.

These guys are saying one substance, three. Where are they getting this language from Scripture? It's not there. It's actually quite simple. All throughout the Bible we're told, how many gods are there?

There is one God. Very simple, Deuteronomy chapter 6. But then we learn the Father is God, and the Son is God, and the Spirit is God. And the Father is not the same as the Son, and the Son is not the same as the Spirit.

And so they're left quite simply just looking at Scripture and saying, for us to hold these two truths that we learned from God, revealing himself, we're left with this doctrine of there is one God, but there's relationship within the Godhead.

And it's not wrong to want.

To understand that as best we can, right? And hence the doctrine of the Trinity.

The Trinity, Mystery, and Rationality

Yeah, and I think that there's a couple of things we could say that throughout history have helped men in these areas. One is just the issue of knowing the God behind the mystery. So we are like little children that don't fully understand our Father because he's an adult and we are an infant.

We often use the illustration at church here. We are like infants who have not yet learned to crawl. In fact, we're like the little baby that if you put him on his stomach, he can lift his head up, and Dad comes home from work.

Maybe the child's brain starts to recognize the certain sounds that come. So there's the car door, there's the front door, there's Mom. Hi, honey. Hey, how are things? Great. Dad walks past and you see as an infant his shoes and the I figured Dad's out.

I know everything there is to know about Dad's. Well, they might think they have, but they have not. There's so much more. So there is a sense in which knowing the God behind the mystery, we trust him because of the work of grace in our soul.

I know him personally. I have tasted of his kindness. I have experienced his faithfulness. And so when I come to those great mysteries, it doesn't shake me. I humbly embrace the fact that I have a limited understanding, but I know the person behind the mystery, and so I don't feel the pressure to make Christianity more reasonable for the guy next to me.

Another thing is an example that I read from a man that comes much later in the late 18th, early 19th century, a man named Charles Simeon, a wonderfully used minister in the Church of England in England.

And Simeon said when he came to the paradoxes of Scripture, he said what most people do is let's say we have one truth stated over here, 100 true, and then another truth state over here, 100 true.

So three persons, one God. He said what people tend to do is try to bring those in closer and to reconcile them by reducing what the Scripture says on both sides. So if we think of it kind of simplistically, let's take 50 and 50 and we'll kind of, we'll reduce those great statements and we'll make them where we can kind of pull them together.

And he said that that's absolutely the wrong approach. What we do is we fully embrace the boldest, strongest statements that Scripture gives at each end of the spectrum and then by grace we stretch, you know, in a sense beyond our brain's ability and we hold both at the same time and we say I cannot bring them closer and yet they are both true and I refuse to reduce the Scriptural statements on either side.

And in that, you know, the Christian finds, you know, a path of safety. And that's exactly what Arius did. It was, I grasp this one truth, God is one. Jesus is God. It says that too. Well, I'm going to slide that one further away.

He's not really God in the same sense that the Father is. He's not eternal. He's not omniscient. The Father is and he brings Jesus into some sort of relationship as God. Yeah, so the big statement about one God is held and the affirmation that Jesus is true God is reduced, you know.

And then, oh, well, that's not such a hard thing to imagine now, you know.

And I would add there is in our, as I say, kind of a hubris. Well, reason is in some sense my God and reason says you can't have one God, three gods. Ergo, I will take God the Father and reduce Christ in order to make it fit in my little understanding of rationality.

Well, we haven't even gotten to the book yet. So let me read the Nicene Creed, the parts that deal particularly with Athanasius' statements about the sun and that reject Arius' statements. The Nicene Creed was actually finalized a number of years later in 381.

They tweaked a few elements, but for the most part, what was said was left unaltered. And these are the significant parts for our talk. I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible, and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten, so very different from Arius, not created, the only begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, light of light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made, who for us men for our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary and was made man and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate.

He suffered and was buried, and the third day He rose again according to the Scriptures and ascended into heaven and sits on the right hand of the Father. And He shall come again with glory to judge the quick and the dead, whose kingdom shall have no end.

And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified. So that's kind of the key parts for our discussion.

So, Jamie, why don't you take us back to our author? Well, Athanasius was there probably in his early to mid -20s at this council, and he wasn't one of the pastors or the bishops that was gathered from the Roman Empire.

He was just a secretary. So he's there. He witnesses everything taking part, and when he comes back to his hometown, his pastor dies a couple years later. So he's in his early to mid -20s, and he becomes the pastor or the bishop of Alexandria, Egypt.

Constantine, shortly after this, softened on Arius, and Arius made some sort of statement of faith, and he brought him back in. But Arius came back to Athanasius' hometown, Alexandria. And Athanasius said, you're not welcome back in this church, into the communion of this body.

And so now, Athanasius is at odds with his emperor Constantine, and he was exiled. And this was one of five different times that he was exiled in his ministry, and he was living away from his hometown for 18 years of his 45 years in ministry.

So for Athanasius, these things weren't just, I'm a theologian. I like heady academic things. I like writing. For him, this was something that is life and death, and he's willing to suffer for it. So he really drinks the riches of these doctrines.

I think that we see that quality in his book as well. Like Spurgeon said, I prefer the books that smell like prison, meaning the authors suffered. They may have been in prison, like John Bunyan, or who suffered persecution in other ways, like Luther or Calvin.

But I think that when we read men who were writing, and their lives were at stake. As you mentioned before our podcast, Calvin writing to men who would be taking these truths back to France, and his summary of the biblical teaching, the Institutes.

Really, these men were carrying truths that were, humanly speaking, a death sentence. So what do you do? Well, you don't waste a lot of pages. You get right to the point, and you give them things that men can risk everything on.

And so the directness and the simplicity is really helpful. And that is something that another.

Author calls attention to, C .S. Lewis. Yes, if I can kind of set up the actual substance of the book with a tremendous, one of the best introductions in all of literature, it seems to me, that C .S. Lewis wrote to this book.

And Lewis takes us back to the first question, why in the world should we read old books at all? You know, there's plenty of modern books, and we moderns, obviously, are so much smarter than the guys of the past.

Why waste our time? And so Lewis takes us to task, in the one sense, with kind of a false sense of humility to say, well, we can't understand the old books. We'll just read the commentators and those that summarize them for us, because who are we to, you know, leave it to the experts kind of thing.

And Lewis points out, for one, let me quote one part of his intro, the simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said. But hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism.

You know, sometimes the commentators are much more confusing than the original source. And the other thing is what we have loosely referred to as the test of time. The old books have stood the test of time.

What does that mean? Well, it means, in a context of Christian books in particular, that they have undergone the scrutiny of the ages of different generations that have read these books, criticized them, as we will do here toward the end of this podcast, and yet found them worthy of rereading, of reprinting, of consideration for us as moderns.

And the other thing that Lewis points out that I think is so pertinent for us today is every age has its own set of prejudices, biases, and, frankly, blind spots. And the problem with a blind spot is you can't see it.

So we don't know what our own blind spot might be. And yes, the ancients were not perfect either. They made many mistakes. But the significance Lewis points out is they're not our mistakes. So we have the privilege of looking back at what they lived through, wrote, considered, and put forth for our consideration that have a different set of mistakes than ours and help us, as Jamie put in some of his introductory notes here, rub off the hard edges of our own time and our own thinking.

And we benefit so greatly from considering it from that different perspective. And the other thing that Lewis kind of glories in, and I think rightly so, is when we read somebody like Anathanasius, in spite of the differences, in spite of the prejudices, and even constrictions of his own day and age, and even the way he writes, what comes through is the beauty of the unity of the faith.

His perspective is different, his words and so on are different, but it is the same glorious God that we serve, and we can really identify with that faith, and I think grow in our own faith as a result of reading his take on, and as you all point out, the fact that he lived and was willing to die for that faith brings a richness to bear that we really would do well to benefit from.

And one last point in his intro, he points out that there is sometimes a hesitation to say, well, I only read devotional books, and this, after all, is kind of a doctrinal thing, and we tend to think of it as dry and musty and academic and scholarly.

Lewis says, I believe that many who find that nothing happens when they sit down or kneel down to a book of devotion would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.

So the takeaway is sometimes the doctrinal book can have a wonderful devotional effect on us that a devotional book might not really offer us. So all kinds of good reasons to.

Read the ancients. I find that the rubbing off our rough edges, I got the best picture of that in 2020. We were in Michigan, shut down in our home for a couple months, not seeing anyone else for about four weeks solid where it's just our family.

And I talked to one of my pastors later, and he said, when we get together at church just on a weekly basis and have conversations, our own problems and tendencies and errors, we bump into each other and rub them off.

And if we're by ourselves for four weeks, whatever your tendency is, whatever your wart is, you just grow and grow and grow and there's no one to check you. And at the end of 2020, I saw all of my own problems kind of under a magnifying glass.

And when we finally got to get together in church again and see each other, those start, you know, they start disappearing. We're sanctifying, God uses each other to sanctify us. And I find the same thing reading old books.

It's our generation has sharp edges and we're bumping into other generations and you have the.

Iron sharpening iron. May I play off of that too? One other point, I mean, there's several, but one that I'll mention here that Lewis makes is a wonderful illustration. It's like when we just start reading the moderns today, we're starting at 11 a .m. in a conversation that actually began at 8 a .m.

As we record this, we're the day after Thanksgiving and we've had the privilege of having our family home with us, most of them anyway. And one of the things that we love to do is just get around the kitchen table and enter into discussions about all kinds of things.

And invariably I find myself being the one that's joining late and I'm going, okay, wait a minute, that doesn't make any sense. But all of you guys are laughing and carrying on like that's the funniest thing ever.

What did I miss? Well, we're missing something when we come in and read the moderns only and don't hear from the folks like Athanasius that started this conversation about Christ so many hundreds of years ago.

Athanasius on Creation, Incarnation, and Re-Creation

Well, Jamie, why don't you lead us through this.

Book and just help us to understand what are the key arguments and the really important things that are essential for us? Yeah, I'll start with a quick outline of, here's kind of a map if you're just to look at the book.

It is very short. This copy looks longer. It's about 90 pages, but it's big words and small pages. But it's only about 90 pages. It's a quick read, only a few hours. But I'll give you a roadmap of his argument.

And he's a very good writer, which is one of the benefits of reading the great books. It's not just, he's really smart, so there's no way I'm going to understand him. Well, because he's so brilliant, he's easy to understand.

But his argument, he essentially starts, goes from creation to re-creation and says, God created all things by his word. And this translation capitalizes the word. God created all things through his son.

And so he spends the first three sections dealing with God created all things through the word, and especially he creates man in his image. And he talks about the words. It's a reflection of Jesus, the word.

And so he says, this is how God works. He reveals himself. He creates. He does his work through the son. And having laid that groundwork, he goes into the incarnation and says, well, how is God going to re-create or redeem this creation the same way that he's always done it?

Through his word, who acts and reveals God to us. So then he goes into, well, why the incarnation? And he later deals with accusations from the Greeks saying, why didn't God just give us a book? We have Plato.

We're intelligent. We can just reason our way out of our problems. And Athanasius said, well, our problem isn't that we haven't had God revealed to us. It's everywhere. If you look up, God's being revealed.

If you look at creation and the animals that we're living with, God's being revealed. If you look at the seasons, God's being revealed. If you look at yourself, God is being revealed. But we're not just saved by knowing the right things.

And so Athanasius said, we have this dilemma that comes from this, we're in corruption and death and we cannot get ourselves out. But the dilemma is not in us. The dilemma is in God who spoke the truth and said, if you eat this fruit, if you sin against me, you will die.

And then Athanasius said, but God is also good. He goes through all this work to create these creatures in the image of his son. And would a good God simply create us? We fall and he destroys us and that's the end.

He said, well, what kind of creator would do that knowing that's all that's going to happen? So he said, God resolves this dilemma by bringing the incarnate word to banish death, the penalty of our sin and create us anew.

And the second reason that he gives for the incarnation is that we have lost the knowledge of God. And he said, by refusing to look up, I love that description of sin. God is revealing himself everywhere, but we refuse to simply turn our chins and look up stiff necked, the language of scripture.

And in this section, Athanasius sounds just like J .I. Packer in knowing God. And he just says, what's the point of our existence? What's the purpose of being alive and reasoning if we cannot know God?

So there's nothing. So the other dilemma that comes in is God created us in his image so that we could worship him. And now we have all these images of God, images of the word of God that are despising God and not knowing him and losing the reason of their existence and the joy that they can have.

And so what does he do? He sends the incarnate image of the father so that we can know God. So those are the two reasons he gives for the incarnation. That's sections 4 to 19. And then he moves on to the death of Christ and said, well, why is this reasonable?

So Athanasius is writing to a new convert and saying, well, why did Jesus have to die? And he said, well, the first is we owed the debt of death. And God, the word offers his body in our place to settle the debt.

And then he goes through all these objections to the specifics about the death of Christ. Well, why on a cross? That's a shameful thing. Why couldn't he have died some other peaceful, maybe a sickness that he dies instantly of a heart attack.

Why does he do this honorable? Yeah, something honorable. And it says he could not die of natural weakness. Athanasius said, he becomes man, he has this temple of a body, but it's inhabited by capital L life.

So Athanasius said he couldn't have died unless someone else inflicts this death on him. And so why does he allow the Jews to kill him? Well, he died for others. And he gives this analogy of a wrestler.

He said, if you have a strong wrestler that says, I am life, I am strength, I challenge any of you. And they say, well, we pick this man. No, not him. Anyone but him. I'll wrestle this scrawny, short, thin man over here.

And I'll show you how strong I am. He said, well, you have no confidence in the strength of that wrestler. And he said, Jesus came to this earth to his enemies and said, you pick, you name the worst death you can think of.

I will take that death and destroy it. And he dealt with other examples. Why not die in private in honor? And Athanasius said, the whole point was the resurrection and conquering sin and death and the wrath of God.

And if Jesus had died in private, and then the house comes out and said, he died, but he's raised from the dead. Everybody would have said, that's a great story. None of us will believe you. There's no evidence that this man actually died.

So Athanasius said, Jesus chose a public death so that everybody, the whole world was ringing with the sound of the death of Jesus. And then three days on the third day, he comes again, showing that he's conquered death.

So these objections he deals with and Athanasius finished with a Christian statement of Jesus had to take our curse. Well, how do you take a curse? Well, the Old Testament tells us you take the curse of God by hanging on the tree.

Cursed is everyone that hangs on the tree. And so Athanasius said, he took that curse and broke down this wall that separated us from our maker, from God. So those are the reasons for the death of Christ.

And Athanasius, it's very helpful, just deals with simple questions that I often haven't thought to ask, but here's some objections to it. And also the question, well, why does he raise the third.

Day? Why not the first day, the second day, the 21st day or whatever? What does he say about that?

He said, well, it couldn't have been the second day. And then he said, he just swooned. I mean, that's actually still going today, the swoon theory. Well, he wasn't gone that long. So Athanasius said it had to be a substantial period of time, but not too long because then they would have said, do you remember that guy, Jesus that died?