Sometimes I hear evangelicals claim that Christmas matters, but that Easter is the most important day on the Christian calendar. Their argument is that without Easter (by which they usually mean the crucifixion), there is no forgiveness of sin, no eternal life in the presence of God, no redemption from the flames of hell. Therefore, Easter—not Christmas—should be given the primary place of prominence among our holy days.
I wonder what Athanasius of Alexandria, the great defender and father of Christian orthodoxy, would think of this claim.
Athanasius became the bishop of Alexandria right around 328 A.D., shortly after his spirited and eloquent defense of the deity of Jesus carried the day at the Council of Nicea. That defense was no doubt strengthened by the fact that some years earlier he had written a book on the subject, now a classic in Christian literature, called On the Incarnation. You might say that it was also the first classic book written on the subject of Christmas, seeing that Christmas is the story of God taking on human flesh (or becoming incarnate) to save humanity.
But before he could develop his theology of the incarnation in this little book, Athanasius first had to lay out the problem which the incarnation was meant to solve. Those who are unfamiliar with his writing may be surprised to hear how he defined this problem, since it doesn’t sound like the gospel summary we often hear in church.
Athanasius begins by describing mankind at its start. According to the great bishop, mankind was not made inherently immortal. Indeed, “by nature, of course, man is mortal, since he was made from nothing.”1Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation, translated by Sr. Penelope Lawson (Sea Harp Press, 2022), 44. However, “the grace of their union with the Word [the divine pre-existent Son] made them capable of escaping from the natural law, provided that they retained the beauty of innocence with which they were created” through “constant contemplation” of God.2Ibid., 44–45. In short, they had the gift of immortality, but that gift was conditional on their union with the pre-incarnate Christ. Otherwise, they would fall away from that union and therefore succumb to death.
Of course, we know what happened next. Adam and Eve lost their focus on God and their gaze was diverted elsewhere. Sin followed. This meant disunion from the Word with the result that they turned “back again according to their nature; and as they had at the beginning come into being out of non-existence, so were they now on the way to returning, through corruption, to non-existence again.”3Ibid., 44. In short, “the human race was in process of destruction.”4Ibid., 47.
Athanasius rightly described it as “monstrous and unfitting,” even “unthinkable that God should go back upon His word and that man, having transgressed, should not die.” But the alternative was no better: “it was equally monstrous that beings which once had shared the nature of the Word should perish and turn back again into non-existence through corruption.”5Ibid.
Thus, we have God’s dilemma set before us by Athanasius in the clearest of terms:
“Surely it would have been better never to have been created at all than, having been created, to be neglected and perish… It was impossible, therefore, that God should leave man to be carried off by corruption, because it would be unfitting and unworthy of Himself.”6Ibid., 48.
God made us for union and eternal life with Himself. Yet, through sin, we had lost access to that union. The result which followed was inevitable: death, corruption, ruin, perishing… nonexistence. God had already promised severe consequences for sin; but it was also not His intention that His creation should come briefly into and then suddenly “out of existence,” as if His chief handiwork—the bearers of His image and likeness—had no value.7Ibid., 50. Mankind could not, apart from the Word which gave us life, face death and manage to survive… but, ah, perhaps there was the answer!
In hindsight, we can see what the wicked rulers of this age (1 Cor 2:8) could not—that God’s solution was to “bring the mountain to Mohammed”—to bring the now seemingly unreachable Word down to the creation which had turned its face away from Him by “stooping to our level in His love and Self-revealing to us.”8Ibid.
Now, the crucifixion and resurrection were of course an essential part of Jesus’ mission in Athanasius’ telling. After all:
“…corruption could not be got rid of otherwise than through death; yet [Jesus] Himself, as the Word, being immortal and the Father’s Son, was such as could not die. For this reason, therefore, He assumed a body capable of death, in order that it, through belonging to the Word Who is above all, might become in dying a sufficient exchange for all, and, itself remaining incorruptible through His indwelling, might thereafter put an end to corruption for all others as well, by the grace of the resurrection.”9Ibid., 52.
Jesus thus became our substitute—our champion to battle death on our behalf—but more than our substitute, He became a participant in human nature so that we might defeat death with Him. As the bishop wrote, “He surrendered His body to death instead of all… so that in His death all might die… [and He might] make them alive through death.”10Ibid., 51.
However, Jesus conquering death was the completion of a process begun in the incarnation. Were it not the divine Son who had hung on the cross and been raised three days later, His death would have been to no effect. And the incarnation is nothing less than the “union of the immortal Son of God with our human nature [by which] all men were clothed with incorruption in the promise of the resurrection.” Athanasius reasoned that just as mankind had solidarity with Adam in his death, “by virtue of the Word’s indwelling in a single human body, the corruption which goes with death has lost its power over all.”11Ibid., 52. In short, “He restored the whole nature of man.”12Ibid., 53. The hymn-writer Charles Wesley apparently also saw the same theological import of the incarnation that Athanasius did. Thus he wrote, in “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” that the message of the angels at Jesus’ birth was in essence “God and sinners reconciled.”
Let us summarize Athanasius’ train of thought, which is the logic of the incarnation and therefore of Christmas itself. Mankind was made with the potential for immortality, given only that we remained in union with the divine Word—God the Son. When that union dissolved through sin, the results were predictable—the loss of life and our slipping back into nonexistence. Without our union with the Word, nothing else could reasonably be expected except annihilation. But Christmas gives us the first piece of the really good news—the divine Word has taken on human nature. God, the very source of life itself, has assumed our mortal flesh to heal it.
Let’s not miss the significance of this act and pass immediately to Easter—as essential to this story as Easter is. God Himself took on human flesh. This act not only lays the groundwork for Christ’s death and resurrection, it is in some sense salvific in its own right—if the Word has joined Himself to us again, doesn’t that mean that the death of death is all but guaranteed?
The meaning of Christmas then, from the perspective of Athanasius—that great bishop and the father of orthodoxy—is this: the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is life eternal if and only if we are in Christ. And we can only be in Christ because the Word came to dwell with us, born of the virgin Mary, in a little town called Bethlehem. And that, according to Athanasius, is what Christmas is all about.
