Three hundred years after Jesus ascended to heaven, the Council of Nicaea was still trying to figure out exactly who Jesus was. You may find yourself reading Athanasius and thinking that the divine incarnation of Jesus is an obvious point, only to realize that, at some point, it wasn’t so obvious. On the Incarnation was Athanasius’ second apologetic work, and in it he defends the Christian faith and tries to convince Jews and Greeks that Jesus was not a prophet or teacher but the Christ, the divine incarnation of God’s Word. The former was from the West and contended for the doctrine of grace against Roman moralism, while the latter came from the East and became a champion of orthodoxy against Arian attacks on the doctrine of the Trinity. Two names stand above all others in the history of the early Christian church: Augustine and Athanasius.
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