Thursday, March 15, 2018

Athanasius compares the incarnation to a king entering a city




I got started last Sunday preaching through chapter 8 of the confession “Of Christ the Mediator.” To prepare I’m reviewing Athanasius’s On the Incarnation (using the volume in the Popular Patristics Series from SVS Press).

Athanasius compares the incarnation to a king entering a city:

You know how it is when some great king enters a large city and dwells in one of its houses; because of his dwelling in that single house, the whole city is honoured, and enemies and robbers cease to molest it. Even so it is with the King of all; He has come into our country and dwelt in one body amidst the many, and in consequence the designs of the enemy against mankind have been foiled, and the corruption of death, which formerly held them in its power, has simply ceased to be. For the human race would have utterly perished had not the Lord and Saviour of all, the Son of God, come among us to put an end to death (35).

JTR

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