St. Athanasius on the Incarnation

Catholic Saints

Augustine Institute

History

4.8 • 907 Ratings

🗓️ 22 August 2022

⏱️ 20 minutes

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Summary

Join Dr. Ben Akers and Dr. Elizabeth Klein as they discuss the early Church Father, St. Athanasius. A bishop and Doctor of the Church, St. Athanasius is remembered as the great defender of the Nicene Creed. He was exiled five times from his own diocese under four different emperors. A great teacher, his writings are accessible to both beginners and experts in theology, writing works that serve different needs in the Church—intellectual, spiritual, and devotional. In this episode, Dr. Ben Akers and Dr. Elizabeth Klein dive into his biography and do a quick overview of his monumental work, On the Incarnation. Watch Catholic Saints on FORMED. Sign Up for FORMED. Support this podcast and the Augustine Institute on the Mission Circle.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute,
0:09.1	an Apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and to Form Now. My name is Dr. Ben Acres. I'm the chief content officer here at the Augustin Institute. And my special guest today is Dr. Elizabeth Klein, who's a professor of theology at the graduate school that we have here at the Augustine Institute. Thanks for joining me.
0:36.3	Thanks for having me. Well, today we're going to be talking about one of our saints.
0:39.1	A very popular series that we've had here on Form Now's is following the liturgical year of different
0:45.9	saint days that we celebrate. Today we're going to celebrate one of the great saints at the very
0:50.1	beginning of May, St. Athanasius. Yeah, I'm so glad you asked me to talk about St. Athanasius. I love Athanasius. He's one of the first early church fathers I read when I was
0:58.3	sort of getting interested in theology, and I still assign Athanasius' work called On the
1:02.9	Incarnation in my creed class every year. It's not that thick. I have a copy of it here, but it's not thick with type of text, but the theology is so rich.
1:13.0	Yeah, so Athanasius wrote this work basically to explain the reason for the incarnation,
1:17.2	why did God become man? And he really lays it out in a very systematic way, a way that I think
1:22.8	is inviting and easy to follow. And we don't know necessarily the date that Athenius wrote it,
1:27.0	but a lot of people think that this is one of his first works, is that he might have written
1:30.0	it in his 20s. And so it's very impressive. I always say to my students who are in their 20s that,
1:34.9	you know, this is the bar. That's right.. Let's go some of the historical contexts,
1:44.3	and then we'll dive into the text. What are his dates? So we get a sense of what is living.
1:48.4	Yeah, so Athanasius lived from around 297 to 387 in his 80s. And he lived through the great
1:58.4	Aryan controversy. So some of our viewers might have heard about the
2:01.8	Aryan controversy. So this was a really important early church controversy over the divinity of Christ.
2:06.5	So is Jesus really, really God in the way that God the Father is God, or is he kind of a semi-god,
2:11.9	or is he an angel? Or how does that kind of work? And so Athanasia lived through that period,
2:16.8	and he was Bishop of Alexandria during the Aryan controversy.
2:20.5	So this is in Egypt?
	...

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