Contending for our all

Defending Truth And Treasuring Christ In The Lives Of Athanasius, John Owen And J. Gresham Machen

John Piper

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781789740462
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Every Christian needs dependable role models to whom one can look for teaching and example. Many of the greatest role models have departed from this life, but their legacy lives on. Believers of this day and age can learn much about a godly life from saints of the past.
Athanasius, John Owen, and J. Gresham Machen are three such saints. Each stood for the truth of God's Word in the face of opposition-all out of a deep love for Christ and a desire for people to know God as he truly is. Popularity was not a concern, and they took no joy in controversy for argument's sake. However, these men were willing to suffer for the sake of guarding the sanctity of the gospel. Many threats, years of exile, deaths of loved ones, opposition from friends and authorities, sickness and pain-none of these setbacks could keep these three from maintaining their efforts for the furthering of Christ's Kingdom or quench their zeal for Christ himself.
John Piper's Contending for Our All gives us biographies of Athanasius, John Owen, and J. Gresham Machen-bishop, pastor, and seminary founder. In the life of each one, personal holiness was emphasized publicly and privately despite suffering. They were true soldiers for the sake of the cross, and each man offers life lessons for Christians today

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CONTENDING FOR CHRIST CONTRA MUNDUM

Exile and Incarnation in the Life of Athanasius

Best-Loved Bishop

Athanasius was born in A.D. 298 in Egypt and became the bishop of Alexandria on June 8, 328 at the age of thirty. The people of Egypt viewed him as their bishop until he died on May 2, 373, at the age of seventy-five.¹ I say he was “viewed” by the people as their bishop during these years because Athanasius was driven out of his church and office five times by the powers of the Roman Empire. Seventeen of his forty-five years as bishop were spent in exile. But the people never acknowledged the validity of the other bishops sent to take his place. He was always bishop in exile as far as his flock was concerned.

Gregory of Nazianzus (330-389) gave a memorial sermon in Constantinople seven years after the death of Athanasius and described the affections of the Egyptian people for their bishop. Gregory tells us that when Athanasius returned from his third exile in 364, having been gone for six years, he arrived

amid such delight of the people of the city and of almost all Egypt, that they ran together from every side, from the furthest limits of the country, simply to hear the voice of Athanasius, or feast their eyes upon the sight of him.²

From their standpoint none of the foreign appointments to the office of bishop in Alexandria for forty-five years was valid but one, Athanasius. This devotion was owing to the kind of man Athanasius was. Gregory remembered him like this:

Let one praise him in his fastings and prayers . . . another his unweariedness and zeal for vigils and psalmody, another his patronage of the needy, another his dauntlessness towards the powerful, or his condescension to the lowly. . . . [He was to] the unfortunate their consolation, the hoary-headed their staff, youths their instructor, the poor their resource, the wealthy their steward. Even the widows will . . . praise their protector, even the orphans their father, even the poor their benefactor, strangers their entertainer, brethren the man of brotherly love, the sick their physician.³

One of the things that makes that kind of praise from a contemporary the more credible is that, unlike many ancient saints, Athanasius is not recorded as having done any miracles. Archibald Robertson, who edited Athanasius’s works for Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, said, “He is . . . surrounded by an atmosphere of truth. Not a single miracle of any kind is related of him. . . . The saintly reputation of Athanasius rested on his life and character alone, without the aid of any reputation for miraculous power.”⁴ Then he goes on with his own praise of Athanasius:

In the whole of our minute knowledge of his life there is a total lack of self-interest. The glory of God and the welfare of the Church absorbed him fully at all times. . . . The Emperors recognized him as a political force of the first order . . . but on no occasion does he yield to the temptation of using the arm of flesh. Almost unconscious of his own power . . . his humility is the more real for never being conspicuously paraded. . . . Courage, self-sacrifice, steadiness of purpose, versatility and resourcefulness, width of ready sympathy, were all harmonized by deep reverence and the discipline of a single-minded lover of Christ.⁵

Athanasius: Father of Orthodoxy Contra Mundum

This single-minded love for Jesus Christ expressed itself in a lifelong battle to explain and defend Christ’s deity and to worship Christ as Lord and God. This is what Athanasius is best known for. There were times when it seemed the whole world had abandoned orthodoxy. That is why the phrase Athanasius contra mundum (against the world) arose. He stood steadfast against overwhelming defection from orthodoxy, and only at the end of his life could he see the dawn of triumph.

But in a sense it is anachronistic to use the word orthodoxy this way—to say that the world abandoned orthodoxy. Was it already there to abandon? Of course, biblical truth is always there to abandon. But orthodoxy generally refers to a historic or official or universally held view of what is true to Scripture. Was that there to abandon? The answer is suggested in the other great name given to Athanasius, namely, “Father of Orthodoxy.”⁶ That phrase seems to say that orthodoxy came to be because of Athanasius. And in one sense that is true in regard to the doctrine of the Trinity. The relationships between the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit had not received formal statement in any representative council before the time of Athanasius.

R. P. C. Hanson wrote, “There was not as yet any orthodox doctrine [of the Trinity], for if there had been, the controversy could hardly have lasted sixty years before resolution.”⁷ The sixty years he has in mind is the time between the Council of Nicaea in 325 and the Council of Constantinople⁸ in 381. The Council of Nicaea established the battle lines and staked out the deity of Christ, and the Council of Constantinople confirmed and refined the Nicene Creed. In the intervening sixty years there was doctrinal war over whether the Nicene formulation would stand and become “orthodoxy.”

This was the war Athanasius fought for forty-five years. It lasted all his life, but the orthodox outcome was just over the horizon when he died in 373. And under God this outcome was owing to the courage and constancy and work and writing of Athanasius. No one comes close to his influence in the cause of biblical truth during his lifetime.⁹

Arius Fires the Shot Heard ’Round the Roman World

The war was sparked in A.D. 319. A deacon in Alexandria named Arius, who had been born in 256 in Libya, presented a letter to Bishop Alexander arguing that if the Son of God were truly a Son, he must have had a beginning. There must have been a time, therefore, when he did not exist. Most of what we know of Arius is from others. All we have from Arius’s own pen are three letters, a fragment of a fourth, and a scrap of a song, the Thalia.¹⁰ In fact he proved to be a very minor character in the controversy he unleashed. He died in 336.¹¹

Athanasius was a little over twenty when the controversy broke out—over forty years younger than Arius (a lesson in how the younger generation may be more biblically faithful than the older¹²). Athanasius was in the service of Alexander, the bishop of Alexandria. Almost nothing is known of his youth. Gregory of Nazianzus celebrates the fact that Athanasius was brought up mainly in biblical rather than philosophical training.

He was brought up, from the first, in religious habits and practices, after a brief study of literature and philosophy, so that he might not be utterly unskilled in such subjects, or ignorant of matters which he had determined to despise. For his generous and eager soul could not brook being occupied in vanities, like unskilled athletes, who beat the air instead of their antagonists and lose the prize. From meditating on every book of the Old and New Testament, with a depth such as none else has applied even to one of them, he grew rich in contemplation, rich in splendor of life.¹³

This was the service he was to render for forty-five years: biblical blow after blow against the fortresses of the Arian heresy. Robert Letham confirms the outcome of Gregory’s observation: “Athanasius’ contribution to the theology of the Trinity can scarcely be overestimated. . . . He turned discussion away from philosophical speculation and back to a biblical and theological basis.”¹⁴

In 321 a synod was convened in Alexandria, and Arius was deposed from his office and his views declared heresy. Athanasius at age twenty-three wrote the deposition for Alexander. This was to be his role now for the next fifty-two years—writing to declare the glories of the incarnate Son of God. The deposition of Arius unleashed sixty years of ecclesiastical and empire-wide political conflict.

Eusebius of Nicomedia (modern-day Izmit in Turkey) took up Arius’s theology and became “the head and center of the Arian cause.”¹⁵ For the next forty years the eastern part of the Roman Empire (measured from the modern Istanbul eastward) was mainly Arian. That is true in spite of the fact that the great Council of Nicaea decided in favor of the full deity of Christ. Hundreds of bishops signed it and then twisted the language to say that Arianism really fit into the wording of Nicaea.

The Council of Nicaea (325)

Emperor Constantine had seen the sign of the cross during a decisive battle thirteen years before the Council of Nicaea and was converted to Christianity. He was concerned with the deeply divisive effect of the Arian controversy in the empire. Bishops had tremendous influence, and when they were at odds (as they were over this issue), it made the unity and harmony of the empire more fragile. Constant...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Sacred Controversy in Scripture, History, and the Lives of the Swans
• Chapter One: Contending for Christ Contra Mundum: Exile and Incarnation in the Life of Athanasius
• Chapter Two: Communing with God in the Things for Which We Contend: How John Owen Killed His Own Sin While Contending for Truth
• Chapter Three: Contending for Facts for the Sake of Faith: J. Gresham Machen’s Constructive Controversy with Modernism
• Conclusion: Contending for Our All: A Golden Opportunity for Love
• Our Prayer in a Time of Controversy
• A Note on Resources: Desiring God
• Index of Scriptures
• Index of Persons
• Index of Subjects