3. Athanasius Contra Mundum

hello fourth century the years from 300 to 400 last week we did a little bit of an incursion into the fourth century at least getting up to the moment of the Nicene council and we talked a little bit about Constantine and the role that he played at that point and so we'll kind of assume that background as we go along the guy that we want to consider this morning is athenais shoes and as I say the nickname that has been associated with him is contra mundum against the world he was born in 296 he died in 373 his early life he was born in Alexandria which was probably one of the majors well certainly one of the major cities of the world at that time maybe one of half a dozen that were the prominent centers of population but Alexandria was especially important for its academic centers it had become as we were saying last week something like the Neo Athens kind of the academic world had migrated there and that's where a Phoenicians was born he was born into a fairly wealthy family his family however was Christian strong deep Christians and so Athanasius grew up from the very earliest memories that he had in a home in which he was taught the Bible taught the lessons of the New Testament and Old Testament and so on and was quite conversant in all of this there is an incident that's recorded that took place when he was 10 years old in which he was out with some friends of his playing Church I don't know how many kids play Church these days you know but that's what these kids were doing and they happen to be down by the water Chris Alexandria is right on the coast as you probably know and so they had plenty of water to work with and Athanasius and his buddies are down there about ten years old and they're playing church and in particular they're playing the sacraments the sacrament game you've heard of that haven't you and so as they're doing so the bishop of the church in Alexandria whose name is Alexander makes it easy to remember Alexander of Alexander is walking down the sidewalks are like the Centennial Trail you know going along and he sees these kids down playing Church and of course he's impressed and interested in that because he immediately recognizes what's going on so kind of out of out of sight but able to hear what's happening he listens in and he hears a tenacious administering the sacrament of baptism and he doesn't with perfect accuracy this is a fairly lengthy liturgy that was recited in connection and he says the whole thing perfectly concluding of course with i baptize thee in the name of the Father and the son of the Holy sir and solid Alexander was just astonished at how the gravity and the kind of dignity with which the nation's did this as a 10 year old boy so a little bit later he calls Athenee she's over to himself and has a little conversation on the park bench there and begins to inquire of him he doesn't he'd never met this boy before then and as he talks to him he's increasingly impressed because Athanasius has already memorized large tracts of the Bible as a remarkable skill not only of reciting it but of understanding it at 10 years old he was already showing considerable theological and philosophical acumen so Alexander thought to himself this boy needs a little special attention and he actually approached the parents to see if the parents would be willing to surrender their son in a sense into a special catechetical program that Alexander would run for him and a few others in which they would be given much more specialized and advanced training in Christian things well the parents were delighted at that opportunity for their son and so from that point on Athanasius began a rigorous study of the Bible of theology of the Church Fathers and even a philosophy and history and so on in the school that was run by Alexander and this was quite a respectable program that he went through and over time Athanasius so distinguished himself and excelled really above others that were this school that gradually he became the chief assistant to Alexander so by the time he was about twenty years old he was constantly with Alexander he was sort of the guy that would give him advice and counsel like a personal secretary but he also of course had his own native genius that he brought to the table and this became quite a lasting friendship an important relationship through the years so that's all taking place in the early days of Athanasian last week we were talking about the events that led up to the Nicene council which took place in 325 and this would be of course when Athens was about 30 years old the Nicene council was precipitated by a character named arias we talked a little bit about him last we just alluded to him arias was trained in the school of Paul of Sam asada and we discussed just briefly last week some of the central beliefs of Paul of Samos Adam main thing he believed that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah but disbelieved that it was appropriate to say Jesus is God or equal to God or any such thing he's a created being he's a highly elevated man he's worthy of our deep respect and reverence but not really worship you see and so that was the teaching of Paul of Samos adda the church had eventually decided Paul was way too far off the mark but later a kind of second or third generation descendant in a sense of Paul of Samus Atta was this guy by the name of arias arias had taken the basic views of Paul but made them much much more sophisticated really much more palatable he was a quite competent Bible teacher he was very knowledgeable well-educated quite articulate and persuasive he was an attractive man I know you can't tell it by looking but trust me and he had developed some kind of following well he shows up in Alexandria where Alexander of course is the Bishop of the church and because no one knew any different they sort of admitted areas to be a teacher and he did that he was participating as a teacher in the church in Alexandria in these years running up to the time of the Nicene council there was one occasion when Alexander was talking to the gathered clergy in a meeting there and discussing various points of Christian understanding and arias politely raised his hand in the middle of this discussion to correct Alexander at one point and the correction that arias offered was kind of like a very tiny nuclear explosion in the mind of Alexander because what areas questioned was whether it was quite right to say that Jesus was absolutely equal to God that wasn't Jesus rather to be understood as the first perfect expression of God's creation and that tiny little adjustment of course for Alexander was the difference between a message that takes you to heaven and a message that takes you to hell I mean he did not have any time for that so he detected that he didn't get into an open controversy with him then but he did call him aside later and as a result of further conversations he actually determined that arias was teaching a heretical form of the Christian faith and through a kind of governmental option of the church at that point had arias banned now what that means is that arias was free to teach because this was a time of religious tolerance but he was no longer free to teach as an authorized representative of the church you see and that's what areas wanted he wanted to have the sanction of the church upon him as he taught and that's what he lost at this point so that all takes place in a just two or three years before the moment that we're dealing with so these are this is kind of a brief outline of Arian teaching it is with us to this day you can go out right now in the you know neighborhoods of Spokane and find people that will believe this this is not anything that has gone away but it's basically this number one God alone is eternal not son not the spirit there is one god behind this is what's called hard monotheism hard monotheism is a radically kind of singularity in understanding the nature of God no Trinity no plurality God is one and only one this would be the kind of view of God that you would typically find in traditional Jewish understanding and in Islamic religion and so this was Arian view and by the way we'll come back to this story later so I'm just giving you a little teaser right now but it's pretty clear that Muhammad as a teenager was taught by Arian Christians in the 600's and it seems quite clear that that's where he got his ideas that there is one God radical monotheism that Islam itself in some ways can be traced back to the Aryan understanding I'll save a defense of that or for the discussion of it for later but just this hard monotheistic view is point one Arius maintained that God creates everything voluntarily we don't mind that that's good Orthodox Christianity so that's okay the reason arias includes this and his teaching is because he's reacting to the Greek kind of Gnostic view that we mentioned last week in which God sort of creates without meaning to he just creates by the nature of who he is this goes back to Aristotle's God the unmoved mover you've heard of that haven't you Aristotle's God doesn't mean to create he just does because what else is he supposed to do you know he's not trying to he's not even really quite aware of it the old description of Aristotle's God as he spends eternity contemplating his own navel have you ever heard that you know just reflecting on himself because Aristotle had him sort of in a metaphysical straightjacket well that was kind of the Greek idea that God just emanates creation eternally without necessarily having much awareness of it or interest in it and arias repudiates that and we say at this point Amen arias you've got one right answer we'll give you credit you know one point in your quiz so that's okay god alone he says is unbegotten he notices of course how frequently the word baguette is used in the Bible and he notices that whenever it's used it tends to mean to bring into being something that did not dare to for exist Abraham begat Isaac Isaac begat Jacob and what part of begat Arius asks don't you get to begat means this becomes point four to create and he notices of course the most famous verse in the Bible says God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son and Aires feels that he's on very safe ground here biblically this is where he's a big improvement over Paul of Samus Atta Paul sort of was fast and loose with the biblical texts arias you have to give him credit was really laboring to be faithful to the Bible we don't think he was quite faithful enough but he was certainly trying to take biblical teaching and seriously and of course at this point he thinks you know the angels are on my team here Jesus is said to be begotten to beget throughout the scriptures means in some sense to bring into being ergo you know there you are so he surmises from all of this that what actually happened was that God created an independent substance that God then used to create everything else a kind of first perfect creation that becomes as it were the hammer and tools in the hands of God to create the rest of the universe this original created substance is called the logos in the New Testament the Sophia the wisdom in the Septuagint version of the Old Testament wisdom proverbs chapter 8 if you're familiar with that text the idea is that there is this that God brings into being his wisdom his great reason as it were and it's through that that everything else is created and so the logos has the very high status of being the first and perfect creation of God also called therefore the Son of God you see so areas here thinks that he's put together a pretty reasonable understanding of who Christ is while preserving a monotheistic theology he thinks he's giving Jesus right the requisite credit for being who you know what we need to recognize him to be and yet still not confusing a kind of plural God or some sort of polytheism or some such thing in the theology of the day and so this is arias idea he says of the Sun that the Sun is a perfect creature and that the Incarnation involves the unification of a human body with the logos again Paul of Sam asada had rejected logos notice that arias incorporates that he's more biblical than Paul Paul rejected the prologue to John's gospel arias believes he's affirming it Paul of Sam Asada had the notion of adoptionism that God adopted Jesus at his baptism area says no he was the son of God from his mother's womb that even at his conception it was the divine logos in union with a human body and that that's who Jesus was now you have to say on a scale of 1 to 10 if Paul is a Masada was a 2 then arias was about a 5.3 you see in other words he's moving in the right direction he's still a heretic but less of a heretic than Paul of Samus Atta was and the way he presented it was so subtle and so sophisticated and persuasive that many people were sort of drawn in and so arias began to get quite a following after he was banned in this little Synod that took place there in Alexandria arias left Alexandria and traveled throughout the Christian world of the Mediterranean and gained an extraordinary following thousands upon thousands of Christian people were drawn in to the Arian form of gianna t it solved a problem because the church had always wrestled how do we understand Christ you see it is a bit of a dilemma isn't it biblically the Bible never says Trinity it never says one essence three persons or any such thing we have an idea biblically that there is one god and we have an idea that Jesus is to be worshipped and we have an idea that Jesus himself prays to God and how do you put that together you see in the church in its early years was trying to figure that out and it did seem that Arius came along with a plausible explanation and so he gets this kind of following and it really does create a rather kind of upsetting Cold War in the church at that point well Constantine you recall from last week defeated his brother-in-law licinia's and took control of the East and that was in 324 and of course as he inherited now the entire Roman Empire the first big problem that he had on his plate was that Christians were at each other's throats over this Arian controversy and Constantine himself as a Christian and so he's faced with his rather strange pickle that what's he going to do with these Christians who can't seem to figure this out Constantine was not a theologian and in fact he does not come into this debate really tilting either way as near as we can tell he wasn't sure what the right answer was but he wanted the church to get on the same page he understood that the welfare of the Empire not to mention the church required that somehow there be a consensus that would become the official understanding of the church and in that interest Constantine convened then the following year in 325 the Council of Nicaea and I see if you ever wonder where it was in the northwest corner of Turkey it's right off the coast of Marmora there at that little sea that separates Asia from Europe and so it was a central location Constantine you know paid the airfare for all of these people to make it to Nicaea put them up in the kind of swanky hotels around town and so he really did spare no expense hoping that as a result of this time together that they could reach some kind of consensus there's a very interesting scene that takes place in church history in the opening session of the Council of Nicaea Constantine now the Roman Emperor the most powerful man in the world walks into this opening session and there's 318 bishops from all over the major cities of the Christian world at that time all of the major churches were represented there and through these bishops there was also present in the same room a group of people who were survivors of the persecution that had occurred under Diocletian that was only by the way about 20 years earlier we talked about diocletian's persecution last week these people of course many people were killed in that persecution these were survivors but people who bore the marks in their bodies of the tortures that have been inflicted during that time there were people who had had eyes gouged out people with dismemberments of various descriptions horrific persecutions and these people had stood firm in the face of that kind of pressure and now of course at this juncture in church history were highly respected and were treated more or less as kind of the elite you might say in the Christian world it's special people who had gone through and not collapsed under the pressure of persecution Constantine walks into this meeting and after an initial greeting he walks over to this little group of people who were sitting there in a kind of special place by themselves and he literally bowed the knee before them and then he got old went over and touched each one of them he kissed the the the empty sockets where eyes had been gouged out he touched and kissed each one of them showing the deepest affection and appreciation and recognition of what they had been through now that in itself I think is significant but the significance is much more than that because here is Constantine do you realize this is the man who embodies in him self now the Caesars of Rome the most powerful man in the world stands there symbolizing Julius Caesar Augustus Caesar Caligula Nero Claudius Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Pius and a host of others all of these who had been the enemies of Christ are now somehow embodied in this man who boughs the knee to Christian Saints and threw them to Christ himself who'd a thunk it and yet here we are at a moment in history when the kings of the earth are bowing the knee and recognizing the universal rule of the Lord Jesus Christ it's really quite a remarkable moment so Constantine recognizes them he then gives an opening speech to the council Constantine was a was participating in this council he was present for most of it he didn't try to influence it exactly but he was sort of a cheerleader he was always trying to move these people in the direction of some sort of consensus you know and he gave an opening speech I won't read the whole thing it's too lengthy but the spirit of it is captured in this short quote Constantine said quote I rejoice to see you here yet I should be more pleased to see unity and love among you I urge therefore beloved ministers of God to remove the causes of disagreement among you and to establish peace and off we go weeks of ugly wrangling I'm not going to sugarcoat this if you'd been there you would be appalled you would think you were at the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church I tell you the political infighting the smoke-filled rooms the back yo D of backside deals the knife's in the back it was just unbelievable I loved it the Nicene Creed so celebrated may be one of the most celebrated Creed's in all the tree of the church was the product of one of the most amazing exercises in politics that you could possibly imagine they did not just get together and have prayers and nice little Bible studies and floating down out of heaven came the nicing it just didn't happen that way not at all you know the reason I love it is because it gives me such encouragement I know that you know many of us as Presbyterians are really disturbed to say the least about some of the things that are going on in the Presbyterian Church aren't we no matter where you are on the issues you're disturbed but I tell you there ain't nothing new in it the church has been in a sense wrestling with these kinds of issues or others like them and tearing itself apart you might think down through the years down through the centuries you wonder how in the world the institution even survives to me it is a great truth that God is on his throne and Jesus has not gone out of business that there even is a church in the world today not alone the fact that in spite of its dysfunctional sort of paralysis in its own politics the church to this day remains without any question the institution that has been more singularly responsible for good in this world than any other more hospitals have been built more schools have been started more injuries have been treated diseases have been healed at the hands of the Christian movement in history than any other institution that can be documented without any big problem how do we do that how can we be so at loose ends disorganized and really appalling and at the same time accomplish so much good answer Jesus this is Sunday school and that is the answer and so I'm very encouraged by the ugliness of the Nicene Council and I hope you can appreciate something of why anyway it was wrangling Athanasius was one of the critical players in this whole process he was running from room to room place to place taking notes cutting deals working his tail off but all of this was in the interest of protecting a true Orthodox understanding he was not prepared to make any compromises at the point of those things that were essential to Christian understanding but he was a wonderful mediator and he did everything he could to try to move this process to a affirmation that he really felt represented a biblical understanding and so at the end of several weeks in fact 2 or 3 months actually of this kind of process we get the Nicene Creed you're all familiar with it some of you have grown up in churches that use the Nicene Creed this is probably not the version you used this is the original Nicene Creed produced by the 325 Council of Nicaea it was substantially modified later and in 381 a new Nicene Creed was produced true to the content of this one but made more liturgical II acceptable this one is a little bit harsh and so the creed that was revised and reflected kind of more of a liturgical useful Creed came in 381 Council of Nicaea it is sometimes called the Athanasian Creed because atha nations himself was so important and instrumental through the next several years in helping the church get finally to the point that it would affirm it without question but anyway the original Creed is the one you have before you here notice it's Trinitarian arrangement by the way this is readily available online you know if you want the real text of it you can just pop that up without a problem but just to notice that the first three paragraphs are the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit the word Trinity is never used but that it is Trinitarian is simply accepted there's no question about it the final paragraph the fourth one then is the pronouncement of an anathema against those who depart essentially from the content of this Creed it reads we believe in one God the Father all governed and creator of all things visible and invisible no controversy there so not much is said this is the basic affirmation of God the Father then of course most of the attention on the second level and in one Lord Jesus Christ the Son of God begotten of the father as only begotten so at this point taking seriously Arius affirmation err insistence that Jesus has to be understood has begotten but then it continues that is from the essence of the father the word essence is Lucia if you recall a couple of weeks ago we talked about Sibelius ISM and Lucia homo Lucia the substance the essence of the Father God from God light from light true God from True God begotten not created see this language God from God light from light came from sibelius a heretic the church said sibelius we like the words you've used we don't like the meaning you've attached to those words we're going to use your words thank you very much we're going to repudiate however the theology behind the words and substitute rather a distinctively Trinitarian theology because we believe the words are accurate when understood in the right theological context you see and so those words are incorporated and have been part of Christian confessions down through the years of the same essence of the Father through whom all things came into being again allowing areas his insistence that God creates through Christ but that's no denial that Christ is at the same time of one essence with the Father you see both in heaven and earth who forest men and for our salvation came down and was incarnate becoming human that's quite important what the Nicene council finally came to realize I think correctly is that arias was not simply denying the deity of Christ he was also denying the humanity of Christ denied the deity of Christ was obvious the humanity of Christ was denied because if it must if it requires of a person to have a body and a soul to be human and if in fact Christ had body and logos then where Christ had logos and the rest of us have a soul at that point he's also not human so what Ares has created is sort of a what's called sometimes a tertian quid a third alternative neither God nor man some were in the middle some kind of strange hybrid and the conviction of Alexander in particular and Athanasius for sure was that our salvation hinges on Christ being truly human as well as truly God he has to somehow or other be both he has to bridge the gulf between God and man by somehow having one foot in each side that is incredibly mysterious how that can be the case but it does seem to be precisely what the Scriptures teach us about Christ and so that's what the that's what the Creed is trying to protect and does so at least at this stage pretty effectively he suffered and the third day he rose ascended into heaven he will judge to come to judge both the living in the dead and in the Holy Spirit holy spirit gets kind of a little bit of short shrift in this one and that's another point that was clarified in the a Phoenician Creed 50 years later more of a paragraph is devoted to the Holy Spirit it seemed a little abrupt to you know to just kind of drop that in like an afterthought and so that's where that was left there was there was so much to debate concerning Christ they just didn't have the energy or the time to do anything with the Holy Spirit so they include him to be truly Trinitarian but that's about the end of the story then this final paragraph but those who say once he was not he was not before his generation he came to be out of nothing or assert that he the Son of God is of a different hypostasis or you see ah those are kind of philosophical words meaning substance or that he is of a creature or changeable or mutable the Catholic and Apostolic Church on mathematize as them which is pretty strong language and again the Athanasian Creed it later softens that up churches that recite the Nicene Creed week by week typically would you know that's a little jarring and you want something that is somewhat more acceptable in a liturgical setting so anyway that was the Nicene Creed as I say Athanasius was 30 years old at the Council of Nicaea and this was really the beginning of his career for the next 50 years from 326 to 373 Athanasius had to put up a incredible defensive wall against the attacks that were brought to bear against the Nicene Creed the Aryans themselves were officially banished but they didn't go away they continued to at this point openly affirmed that the Council of Nicaea had gotten the wrong answer that the church was going off the rails and that the true understanding of things was represented by the Aryan approach and they continued to preach and teach and influence people to great effect so that even though the Nicene Creed you would think would have put an end to it in some ways it was actually a springboard to a much greater kind of vociferous his expression of aryan Christianity for the next several years Aryans were banished but they continue to teach Athanasius became the Bishop of Alexandria in 328 just three years later when Alexander died he was an elderly man already at the Nicene Council and Athanasius was the heir apparent and more or less took over that role in his mid-30s arias was a brilliant politician and of course Constantine was never all that deeply principled he I think was a Christian but I don't think he was a great theologian and he was just trying to figure out you know some way to kind of keep everybody together here and arias played an interesting little ploy he basically repented he apologized for having caused so much difficulty to the church he really came across as a man who was trying to sweeten up his disposition a little bit and Constantine bought it and so even though arias did not change his theology at all he didn't make any adjustments he did kind of do this more or less pretentious kind of humility and repentance and Constantine bought it and communicated to Athanasian that he thought area should be reinstated to which Athanasius said over my dead body and it almost came to that so all of a sudden there was a conflict now a significant conflict between Athanasius and Constantine and this took place just as we're kind of rolling into these latter years of that decade Athanasius was then falsely accused arias it seems pretty clear or at least people close to him began to circulate rumors that Athens was doing horrible things torturing people all you know just kind of things that were absolutely not substantiated and there's not even a shred of evidence that any of this was true but it is the rumor mill and you know it's like Stalin said you tell the big lie enough times people will believe anything and that's what was going on and so the big lie was being told about athenais and as a result of that in 3:35 Constantine himself banished Athanasius and he was removed from his office as Bishop of the Church of Alexandria and sent into a kind of exile that lasted for three or four two years Constantine died in 337 Athanasius was reinstated but then the son of Constantine a man by the name of Constantius in 339 reinstated the banishment so once again Athanasius is banished and this time it's for several years and he's kind of put in a little sort of house arrest situation all this time he's laboring he's doing everything he can but of course he's lost his position of authority in the church he's banished again under Constantius a few years later between 356 and 362 and at this point there was a threat on his life which was a credible threat and so Athanasius actually went to Egypt and hid out with some Egyptian monks in the desert there living a very Spartan life in that situation trying to avoid the evils that were out against him Julian the apostate the only non-christian Emperor to rule Rome after Constantine continued this banishment and did even more to try to catch up with atha nations and put him to death Etha nation remained in the Egyptian desert and then under an emperor named Volans in 365 to 366 Athanasius was once again banished he was reinstated and banished in other words five times through his career this time he hid in a cemetery which happened to be the cemetery where his father himself had been buried some years earlier so my point is a venetie's all during these years at risk of life and limb is willing to put it all on the line simply for a point of theology you know please get that here is a man who believes that theology is important enough that it's that you're you're willing to put your life on the line for it and Athanasian itself is a great example of someone who believed that right down to his toenails he died in 373 as I say and his life of course earned him that little description contra mundum which was inscribed on his gravestone at the time of his death all during these years reads in spite of this kind of tumultuous treatment he was getting he produced voluminous amounts of theological writing the most important of them I'll just mention a couple one is called the life of st. Anthony which was a biography of a character from an earlier time this is important because it was one of the most important writings that that influenced st. Agustin to become a Christian he read this and he was deeply moved by it for reasons we'll mention when we get to the life of Augustine he also was the first guy to really publish what became the final form of the New Testament canon the New Testament Canon had been in play for some time there was a core a set of books that were not disputed the so called homologous the books that were not disputed but then there was a peripheral set of books like revelation james ii peter jude and so on hebrews that were called the anti-lag amana these were the books that were disputed some communities recognized some and not others and so it continued to be a little bit of a dispute a sifting process was going on Athanasius is actually the first one who publishes and defends the canonical approach that we use in our Bibles the 27 books that are the New Testament that we have it was it was affirmed by the church in 397 at the Council of Carthage but at the nation's public that that was important probably his best-known and most important work was however called on the incarnation of the Word of God this is well worth reading and it's readily available and it's just inspiring from start to finish it gives you an insight into the Christian Church at that time and the great faith of Athanasius who sees even in the tumultuous circumstances of his own life the hand of God and speaks so eloquently to his faith and conviction that God is at work there was a republic of this some years back and CS Lewis wrote the preface to it and one paragraph out of this preface is actually worth the price of admission all by itself so I'd like to read this to you this is CS Lewis now in his preface to on the Incarnation by Athanasius Lewis says quote for my own part I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books and I rather suspect that the same experience may await many others I believe that many who find that quote 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 that's inimitable CS Lewis and I think there's some great truth to it there's a lot of devotional drivel floating around appealing to popular Christian consumption and my own opinion I think probably the opinion of many of this room is that we'd be much better off to be reading more substantive stuff than this kind of syrupy devotional frosting that tends to be disseminated let me just give you one sample paragraph to hopefully kind of whet your appetite with respect to this work Athanasius writes quote since the Savior came to dwell in our myths not only does idolatry no longer increase but is getting less and gradually ceasing to be similarly not only does the wisdom of the Greeks no longer make any progress but that which used to be is disappearing and demons so far from continuing to impose on people by their deceits and Oracle givings and sorceries are routed by the sign of the Cross if they so much as try on the other hand while idolatry and everything else that opposes the faith of Christ is daily dwindling and weakening and falling the Savior's teaching is increasing everywhere worshipped in the Savior who is above all and mighty even God the word and condemn those who are being defeated and made to disappear by him when the Sun has come darkness prevails no longer any of it that may be left anywhere is driven away so also now that the divine epiphany of the word of God has taken place the darkness of idols prevails no more and all parts of the world in every direction are enlightened by his teaching it's doubly remarkable when you consider this life story of athenais shoes who's hiding out you know from people who want to kill him writing these sweeping affirmations the Christ is ruling and the kingdom is being built and in fact things are heading in a good direction inevitably Christ will be glorified in history so it really is quite encouraging for us who sometimes have the same kinds of misgivings about our own moment in history the legacy of athenais shoes is largely that he championed Orthodox Christianity for 50 years in many ways the very fact that Trinitarian Christianity which I firmly believe is the correct view of the biblical instruction survived is owed humanly speaking to the courage and the constancy of Athanasius the Aryans were finally defeated but only after the death of athenais shoes it finally took place at the Council of Constantinople in 381 which was some 10 years after the death of this great Christian man his lasting legacy then of course Athanasius contra mundum let me return you to this text here for our Sunday School lesson this morning in second Timothy just briefly three little points Paul is in this dungeon probably feeling a bit the same way atha Nations did on occasion and listen to what Paul says remember Jesus Christ raised from the dead a descendant of David that is my gospel for which I suffer hardship even to the point of being chained like a criminal Paul is in Chains because of theology it's his affirmation about Christ a descendant of David this one whose message is the content of that which saves us Paul says is my Gospel I've met people occasionally who've said something like this well I don't need theology all I need is Jesus that's sweet I don't need theology I just need Jesus I haven't been asked that question or I haven't had that statement made too many times in my life but a few times there have or something like it and I always glad to hear it because the first question I ask is who is Jesus and of course as soon as a person makes one word a response to that they have just embarked into the discipline of what theology it's not that some people do theology and some don't friends we are all theologians every one of us in this room is a theologian of some sort some people do theology well some people do it poorly but no one does not do it Paul was in prison because of his theology Anthony sheis was in battle because of his theology theology matters what you believe about the Lord Jesus Christ matters and so it is well you know it is behaving to us is that the right word that we be concerned about our theology second little point Paul says for which I suffer hardship even to the point of being chained like a criminal Paul was chained like a criminal Athens was chained like a criminal to some degree through his career and I think I can hazard to say that each of us in this room has at least from time to time felt that we were chained in some sense or other probably for most of us it's never been a literal chain in a literal prison but you know sometimes things happen that make us feel impotent make us feel helpless make us feel chained sometimes it can be relational sometimes it can be financial sometimes it can be you know various setbacks in a variety of ways health issues whatever and it can be very discouraging to believe that the ability we have to do the things we need to do has been deeply impaired by these chains which bind us and Paul knew something of what that felt like and yet notice what he says the Word of God is not chained that verse is one that is worth emblazon on your wall if not literally at least the wall of your mind the Word of God has not chained the Word of God is sharp and powerful more powerful than a double-edged sword the Word of God is the sword that comes out of the mouth of the writer on the horse revelation 19 the Word of God is the rod that shatters the nation's that rise up against him the Word of God is the powerful tool by which God's people are said to reign on earth not because they have political authority not because they have immense wealth not because they have a lot of influence to peddle but because God has been pleased through his word to change the course of history his word will not return to Him void and his word is not chained and so even though you may feel chained and even though you may feel sometimes impaired by circumstances please believe and understand even in those moments as you incorporate God's Word into your life speak it believe it read it stand on it make it the central theme of who you are God can do abundant things through unexpected circumstances even like a counselor my scene

Channel: Bruce Gore

Views: 33,366

Rating: 4.8507462 out of 5

Keywords: Athanasius, contra, mundum, Bruce, Gore, Nicene, Creed, Council

Id: oe0V9s5VlIk

Length: 48min 4sec (2884 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 03 2015