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Athanasius of Alexandria: His Life and Impact

Early Church Fathers

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Athanasius of Alexandria: His Life and Impact

By: Peter Barnes
Narrated by: Peter Matthess
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Summary

Until his death in 373, Athanasius was the most formidable opponent of Arianism in the Roman Empire. Ultimately, for him, this fight was not a struggle for ecclesial power or even for the rightness of his theological position. It was a battle for the souls of men and women.

Athanasius rightly knew that upon one’s view of Christ hung one’s eternal destiny. As he wrote to the bishops of Egypt in 356: “as therefore the struggle that is now set before us concerns all that we are, either to reject or to keep the faith, let us be zealous and resolve to guard what we have received, bearing in mind the confession that was written down at Nicaea.” By God’s grace, his victory in that struggle has been of enormous blessing to the church ever since.

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Peter Barnes has done a very great service to the whole church and to history, and not exclusively to the Evangelicals who evidently commissioned this series on the church fathers. Indeed, if all these short expositions prove to be of this quality they may even nurture a generation of ministers able to reach out across the barriers that divide us today.
The first thing to clarify is that this wonderful short treatise would hardly be suitable for the average Christian Joe: it’s complex, often highly esoteric and scholarly, with a litany of quotations from every source imaginable, even Edward Gibbon if you please! The audiobook does not, and could not easily have laid on a bibliography though some of the authors quoted are far better known among theologians than others.

These remarks apply to the actual text only: the opening blurb is definitely parties pris so skip all that and treat the text proper for what it is; a very fair, thoroughly researched and concise account of a rather controversial but important personality in the jungle that was the 4th century church. I wrote a short article on Athanasius for my own church several years ago from a liberal standpoint, but would have been forever grateful to have had a resource like this short book to fall back on. Barnes has seen fit to include some of the best and most apt quotations from contemporaries of his subject, many in full and not without humour. In the matter of the impact of Athanasius, Barnes is fair and the concluding words of his book, another quote from Athanasius himself, sum up the spirit of this whole brilliant work.

Well balanced and researched

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