Evangelicals have become interested in retrieving the Christian tradition in recent years. There are likely several reasons for this, but two related issues stand out. First, evangelicals have developed a renewed interest in questioning their own biblical, theological, philosophical, and ecclesiological depth. Second and relatedly, evangelicals have renewed their interest in their relationship to the Christian past to answer some of these questions. In this essay, I propose that Athanasius of Alexandria is one helpful recourse for evangelical retrieval, especially regarding the scriptural witness to the triune God.¹“Retrieval” means different things to different people. For the purposes of this essay, I will define retrieval as the act of reading and understanding figures and ideas from the past as a way to apply encouragement and/or correction for renewal in today’s church. To understand those who have come before us, we must do responsible, humble historical theology that understands figures in their own context and idiom. In order to apply their insights for encouragement and/or correction today, we must carefully consider the strengths and weaknesses in our own context and idiom, so that we can advance the gospel today with the help of treasures of old. I flesh out the idea of retrieval and shared sensibilities more fully in Brandon D. Smith, Taught by God: Ancient Hermeneutics for the Modern Church (Brentwood, TN: B&H Academic, 2024).

In what follows, I will compare Athanasius’s theological and exegetical sensibilities to our own, showing that though he is a far distant figure in the span of time, he is a close companion for our own theological and exegetical pursuits. I use the word “sensibilities” intentionally to point to certain theological and exegetical presuppositions (spoken and unspoken). So, I do not propose that we must wholeheartedly agree with every theological or exegetical conclusion that Athanasius—or any other church father, or any other human being alive, for that matter—comes to. I am only asserting that we share common sensibilities in our approach to Scripture, oftentimes more so than we might expect as modern evangelicals. As we discuss Athanasius’s approach to reading Scripture in the fourth century post-Nicene debates against so-called “Arian” groups, we will see that Athanasius’s theological and exegetical sensibilities can be instructive for us, in part because of the sensibilities we share with him.

I will begin this essay by briefly surveying evangelicals’ theological and exegetical sensibilities. I will also address potential concerns about retrieving patristic theology and exegesis and judge whether certain suspicions about patristic theology and exegesis are valid. Then, we will delve into the post-Nicene controversy and engage with Athanasius’s ruled reading strategies and trinitarian exegesis contra subordinationism as a test case for evangelical retrieval. Finally, we will consider how particular aspects of Athanasius’s theological and exegetical sensibilities can help encourage and correct our own today.

1. The Church Fathers and Hellenistic Suspicion

At the turn of the twentieth century, Adolf von Harnack famously asserted that soon after the close of the New Testament era, Christianity became infiltrated by Hellenistic philosophy and began formulating “dogma”—an authoritative set of doctrines that were more influenced by Hellenistic philosophies than the teachings of the historical Jesus.²This concern was by no means unique to Harnack. Another influential figure and contemporary of Harnack, Wilhelm Bousset, set out a similar path, though he saw Hellenism as a problem infiltrating the New Testament era itself, not merely the post-apostolic reception of it. Wilhelm Bousset, Kyrios Christos (Abingdon, 1970), 13. For Harnack, dogma increasingly rested in the hands of authoritative teachers and creeds rather than the common Christian layman, detaching the church from the Bible and its primitive roots. This development of dogma was swift and totalizing, according to Harnack:

A complete fusion of the old faith and theology [or dogma], one that tranquillised the minds of the devout, was not consummated till the fourth, strictly speaking, indeed till the fifth century…. But from the end of the second century up to the closing years of the third, the fundamental principle of philosophic theology had naturalised itself, in the very faith of the Church.³Adolf von Harnack, History of Dogma, trans. James Millar, 7 vols. (Williams & Norgate, 1894–1899),3:5.

Notice the timeline Harnack offers here: “philosophic theology,” as he calls it, crystallized in the fifth century as the Roman Catholic Church began lording dogma over the laity was already making its home in the Christian faith within a brief century after the New Testament writings.⁴See also Adolf von Harnack, Bible Reading in the Early Church, trans. J. R. Wilkinson (Williams & Norgate, 1912). At the very core of Harnack’s complaint is the concern that the faith founded on the historical Jesus had been shipped to the Hellenistic world, stuffed full of artificial “dogma” by increasingly hierarchical and exclusivist ecclesiastical structures, and then sold back to the people as though it was still the “old faith” of the Bible.

Due to his ardent rejection of “philosophy” and systematizing biblical claims into theological categories, Harnack ended up with no real place for supporting some of the basic orthodox beliefs of Christianity that evangelicals hold so dear. For example, he rejected the doctrine of the Trinity; discarded the Gospel of John; cast large swaths of doubt on the extraordinary claims of the Synoptic Gospels; emphasized a gospel focused on inner change and moral action rather than God’s radical salvific grace for sinners; underemphasized ecclesiology at the expense of academic concerns; and questioned the overall assumption that the Bible is divinely inspired and without error.⁵In briefer form, see his arguments in What Is Christianity? trans. Thomas Bailey Sanders (Harper, 1957).

Of course, recent patristic scholarship has roundly rejected Harnack’s claim that early Christian theology was more concerned with some sort of Hellenized “philosophic theology” than Scripture—or that this dichotomy even existed. In a recent lecture, Lewis Ayres noted that “talking about a Christianity prior to Hellenism makes little sense” because the world of the New Testament had already experienced Hellenization long before the first century. For example, Jews already spoke and were being educated in Greek, and there already existed a Septuagint—which, of course, is quoted in the New Testament.⁶Lewis Ayres, Christological Hellenism: A Melancholy Proposal (Marquette University Press, 2024). See especially pages 15–30. For evangelicals to wholesale reject “Hellenism” as a mere imposition on Christian faith is to reject early Christian life and thought and consequently portions of biblical writings—as Harnack ultimately did.

While Harnack is not a household name for many today, his ghost still haunts some evangelical theological houses. Many of his concerns above match basic evangelical concerns, especially the importance of access to Scripture and an aversion to ecclesiastical dogmatic overreach. And there is no doubt that his presuppositions are ingrained in many of us through academic and ecclesial training.⁷The popularization of this concern comes through many avenues and to varying degrees. One example is its appearance in the theologies of scholars popular with evangelical pastors, scholars, and students. See for example William Lane Craig, “Is God the Son Begotten in His Divine Nature?,” TheoLogica 3.1 (2019): 22–32, and Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament’s Christology of Divine Identity (Eerdmans, 2008), 59. I intend to return to this point toward the end of the paper, but only after we take time to examine Athanasius’s critique of the subordinationists as a test case. In particular, we will look at two overarching themes in Athanasius’s writings that evangelicals can readily retrieve: (1) ruled readings of Scripture and (2) the resulting trinitarian exegesis. Then we can ask, is the Harnackian suspicion true of Athanasius?

2. The Trinity and Ruled Readings in Athanasius

2.1. Ruled Readings of Scripture

The first avenue for retrieving Athanasius is his practice of implementing ruled readings of Scripture. Because evangelicals value a whole-Bible hermeneutic that recognizes the divine inspiration and unity of the Old and New Testaments, we share this sensibility with Athanasius and the earliest theologians. We can define ruled readings as certain theological-exegetical rules or sensibilities that constrain theological-exegetical results. One might think of Irenaeus’s famous “rule of faith” or “canon of truth” (κανών της αληθείας) in his Epideixis, commonly known as The Demonstration of Apostolic Preaching, which asserted that right interpretive conclusions would not violate Scripture’s description of the unified work of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit or the unity of Scripture itself.⁸Irenaeus, Epideixis 6. The fact that κανών (“canon”) is sometimes translated as “rule” might be incidental but is actually informative: biblically-faithful ruled readings must do justice to the whole canon of Scripture. Heretics have their own ruled readings, to be sure, but they are judged based on their canonical-continuity.

Of course, Athanasius did not write a hermeneutics textbook, nor did he ever explicitly describe his exegetical “method.”⁹See James D. Ernest, The Bible in Athanasius of Alexandria (Society of Biblical Literature, 2010), 1–42. That said, there are certain ruled readings evident in his works, perhaps most notably what he called the “scope” (σκοπός) or “character” (χαρακτῆρα) of Scripture and the Christian faith:

This is the scope [or purpose] and character of Holy Scripture…. It contains a twofold account of the Savior; that he was and is God, the Son, being the Father’s Word and Radiance and Wisdom; and that afterwards, for our sake, he received flesh from Mary, the Virgin and God-Bearer, and was made man. And this [scope] is to be found throughout all the inspired Scriptures, as the Lord himself said, “Search the Scriptures, for they testify about me.”¹⁰Orations against the Arians 3.29. English translations of Orations against the Arians are mine.

This ruled reading is a basic implementation of what has become known as “partitive exegesis”—the assertion that Scripture speaks about Christ doubly, as both divine and human.¹¹This is no doubt influenced, in part, by the anti-“Arian” polemics that characterize much of his work, though this emphasis also shows up in less obviously anti-“Arian” works like Against the Pagans and On the Incarnation; James D. Ernest, “Athanasius of Alexandria: The Scope of Scripture in Polemical and Pastoral Context,” VC 47 (1993): 341. Athanasius here makes the case that all of Scripture’s claims about Christ can be summed up in predicating of him either divine or human attributes and operations. While it would be an overstatement to assert that Athanasius’s entire exegetical “method”—if he truly has one—can be boiled down to this christological “scope,” it nonetheless serves as an integral type of ruled reading for him. Any interpretation that would deny or minimize either Christ’s divinity or his humanity—and, by extension, the necessity of the incarnation for salvation—would be clearly at odds with a key theme of Scripture. It would, indeed, be out of “character.”

So if the preponderance of scriptural evidence points to the divinity of the Son, then any isolated text that may seem to indicate otherwise should be reconsidered in light of the whole Bible. Athanasius asserts, then, that the subordinationists are unable to understand and interpret Scripture properly. Why? Because they prooftext individual, isolated passages rather than see any particular passage’s place in the broader scriptural context centered on Christ, the eternal Son who became man. In other words, the subordinationists claimed to be “biblical” by stacking up passages, but they actually needed a ruled reading of Scripture that was more canonically faithful to constrain their exegesis. If their version of a ruled reading was assuming that the Son was created, then they need to rethink their “rule” because it was clearly at odds with certain parts of Scripture. Like Irenaeus before him, Athanasius continued the tradition of following ruled readings that took into account the unity of God and the unity of Scripture. The subordinationists ultimately failed on both counts.

A prime example of this mistake is their insistence that Proverbs 8:22–25 taught that God created the Son before creating all other things.¹²See e.g., Athanasius, Defense of the Nicene Definition 26. In the LXX, v. 22 reads κύριος ἔκτισέν με ἀρχὴν ὁδῶν αὐτοῦ εἰς ἔργα αὐτοῦ and v. 25 reads πρὸ τοῦ ὄρη ἑδρασθῆναι πρὸ δὲ πάντων βουνῶν γεννᾷ με. Both ἔκτισέν (“created” or “founded”) and γεννᾷ (“born” or “begotten”) were at the center of this debate. Both Athanasius and the subordinationists agreed that the Son is the “Wisdom” spoken of in these passages but disagreed about his relationship to the Father. For the subordinationists, the Son should be thought of as a mediatorial figure between God and creation; for Athanasius, the idea that God could create a Son and thus become Father implied mutability in God. Moreover, Athanasius argues, Scripture teaches a Creator-creature distinction, so Arius’s view that the Son has a unique divine-creature nature separate from the Father’s violates basic biblical metaphysics. As he says in Against the Arians,

But if he is Son—as the Father says and the Scriptures proclaim—and the Son is none other than what is begotten from the Father, and what is begotten from the Father is his Word, Wisdom, and Radiance, then what is there to say but that, in claiming, “There once was no Son,” they, like robbers, strip God of his Word and proclaim that he was once without his own Word and Wisdom, the Light was once without radiance, and the Fountain was once barren and dry?¹³Athanasius, Orations against the Arians 1.14.

Athanasius gathers several biblical texts together to make a rather clear rebuttal: to say that the Son was created is to say that the Father was once mute without his “Word” (John 1:1–3), dumb without his “Wisdom” (Prov 8:22; 1 Cor 1:24), and dull without the “Radiance of his glory” (Heb 1:3). Further, they must say that the “Fountain of salvation” (Isa 12:3; John 7:37–38) was once dry. Since these texts rule out the idea that the Son could be created, Athanasius offers alternatives that fit within the scope of Scripture.

Not only does he critique their exegesis, he accuses them of relying too much on the Greeks rather than Scripture because of their emphasis on God as ἀγέννητος (“unoriginate”).¹⁴Athanasius, Orations against the Arians 1.30. Though they accuse Athanasius similarly of using non-biblical words like homoousios (“of one substance”), he asserts that non-biblical terms are useful only if they truly represent what the Bible actually teaches: “even if the words are not as such in the Scriptures, yet … they contain the sense and communicate it to those who have ears that are whole and hearken unto piety.”¹⁵Athanasius, Defense of the Nicene Definition 21. English translation from Khaled Anatolios, Athanasius, The Early Church Fathers(Routledge, 2004).

Athanasius sees no issue with using a non-biblical word or concept, but it must be critically appropriated—it cannot cut against the grain or “sense” of Scripture. Most notably, Athanasius points out that

he did not teach us, “When you pray, say, ‘Our Unoriginate in heaven’” but rather, “When you pray, say, ‘our Father in heaven.’” And it was his will that the summary of our faith should be upheld the same way by calling us to be baptized, not in the name of the Unoriginate and Originate, nor in the name of the Creator and Created, but in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.¹⁶Athanasius, Orations against the Arians 1.34.

Since the subordinationists used “Unoriginate” to deny eternal fatherhood and sonship in God by separating God from all other things, Athanasius rejected its usage in favor of the baptismal formula, which is both biblical and in line with the church’s triune worship in baptism. So, far from Harnack’s accusation of a Hellenistic and/or dogmatic imposition, Athanasius first and foremost carefully constructed ruled readings and theological presuppositions from Scripture and the Christian faith itself. Any time a non-biblical word or concept was used, it had to pass the test of scriptural congruence and Christian practice.

2.2. Trinitarian Exegesis

Reflecting on the points above, Frances Young concludes that Athanasius “mapped the groundwork” for later trinitarian debates with these arguments.¹⁷Frances M. Young, Scripture in Doctrinal Dispute (Eerdmans, 2024), 47. Indeed, this christological “scope” was so central to his theology and exegesis that he employed it as part of his defense of the Holy Spirit’s divinity in his letters to Serapion. He saw the Pneumatomachian error—that the Holy Spirit is a creature—as the same basic hermeneutical mistake as christological subordinationism, because both groups ignored the totality of scriptural witness about the Creator-creature distinction and the Son and Spirit’s place on the Creator’s side.¹⁸See, e.g., Letters to Serapion concerning the Holy Spirit 2.2.2–7. Ernest, “Athanasius of Alexandria,” 343 also points out this relationship and adds another example from Defense of the Nicene Definition 13–14.

So, the second avenue for retrieving Athanasius is his trinitarian exegesis. Within Athanasius’s “scope” of Scripture is the affirmation that the Son is divine, which helps him develop a trinitarian exegetical argument. This affirmation of the Son’s divinity is not forced into the text but something he sees as evident in the totality of the scriptural witness. As such, he deploys this ruled reading in various biblical texts in his detailed and sometimes winding discourses against the subordinationists. In the interest of time and space, we can look at one obvious example of this rule being applied: the debate over the meaning of Christ as the “firstborn.”

In his third and culminating discourse against the so-called “Arians,” Athanasius brings in biblical text after biblical text to show how their reading of Scripture leads to their heretical position.¹⁹For more on the fourth oration once attributed to Athanasius, see R. P. C. Hanson, “The Source and Significance of the Fourth ‘Oratio contra Arianos’ Attributed to Athanasius,” VC 42 (1988): 257–66. In the midst of an extended reflection on the meaning of John 14:10—“I am in the Father and the Father is in me”—he notes that the subordinationists draw on the “firstborn” language from places like Colossians 1:15 and Hebrews 1:6 to say that the Son is created. But he saw their view of the Son as the “firstborn” as too myopic, too overshadowed by a dogged commitment to the Son’s creation, so he points out other biblical passages, titles, and descriptions that must be considered alongside the “firstborn” passages.

First, he highlights their critique of equating the Father and Son according to nature in John 14 (and elsewhere). The “Ariomaniacs”²⁰He uses the word “Ἀρειοµανῖται” in Orations against the Arians 3.1. say, according to Athanasius, “‘How can one be contained in the other and the other contained in that one?’ or ‘How can the Father, who is greater, be contained in the Son?’”²¹Athanasius, Orations against the Arians 3.1. As Athanasius points out, this goes back to their assumption that the Son’s existence must be related to creation, since sons must come after their fathers in time and a sequence of generation. But, as Athanasius points out, they do not understand the meaning of John 1’s picture of a true Father and true Son, Hebrews 1’s description of the Son as “the radiance of God’s glory and the exact expression of his nature,” and Colossians 1’s description of the Son as “the image of the invisible God.”²²Athanasius, Orations against the Arians 3.1. If the Father and Son are truly Father and Son, they must share the same nature and all the entailments therein, and these titles and descriptions reinforce their shared nature.

Second, in light of these titles and descriptions, Athanasius says that “firstborn” cannot simply mean that the Son was created by the Father. If the Son is created, then he is creature, not Creator, which violates plain biblical teaching. Again, the “scope” of Scripture will not allow a denigration of the Son’s divinity or a hierarchy of divinity. However, the “scope” also affirms that the Son is truly human. Athanasius never denies the humanity of the Son in the incarnation, of course, but he continues to remind the subordinationists that the Son’s humanity must be upheld alongside the affirmation of his divinity. He offers the following alternative interpretation:

The Son is not called the Firstborn because he is counted among creation, but as proof of the creation and adoption of all things through the Son. Just as the Father is First, so also [the Son] is first as the image of the First. And because the First is in him, and he is also begotten from the Father, in him all creation is created and adopted.²³Athanasius, Orations against the Arians 3.9.

Put simply, the “firstborn” language shows that he is equal to the Father as his Son by nature and thus shows that he is worthy of bringing sons and daughters into God’s family by adoption. “Firstborn” ranks the Son above creation rather than ranking him merely with creation among creatures, as the subordinationists thought. This argument also, then, affirms Athanasius’s larger point about John 14:10—to say that the Son is “in” the Father is to say that they share the same nature. This better accords with the context of both John’s Gospel and the broader scriptural witness, an umbrella under which “firstborn” must be understood.

Once again, contrary to the Harnackian suspicion about foreign impositions on the text, Athanasius debunks the subordinationist heresy through a comprehensive, whole-Bible hermeneutic that takes seriously all of its claims about the Son. As I mentioned above, we as modern evangelical interpreters are often beholden to the post-Enlightenment sensibilities of scientific inquiry and psychoanalyzing historical figures. This often leads us to Harnackian sensibilities of over-isolating biblical authors and books from another, a nervousness about anything that might “impose” on studying the subject (in this case, Scripture), and having a suspicion about the extent to which we can treat Scripture as a unified witness. For different reasons and in a different idiom, the subordinationist groups of the fourth century had the same myopic view of exegesis. But as evangelicals whose foundational sensibilities ultimately rest in affirming the doctrine of the Trinity and Scripture as a unified witness to the triune God, we have much more in common with Athanasius. Indeed, he is in part the source of these evangelical sensibilities.

3. Evangelical Sensibilities and Patristic Retrieval

I once had a student who, upon being assigned Athanasius’s On the Incarnation, emailed me the following: “I am struggling to write a review of this book because I feel like it is too basic. I already know and affirm everything in here.” Aside from pointing out his youthful hubris, I reminded him that part of why Athanasius feels so familiar is because evangelicals are theologically downstream from him. Much of what we take for granted both in our understanding of Scripture and our trinitarian theology is owed in part to Athanasius’s work; however, evangelicals often pick-and-choose doctrines from the past that we enjoy, often without appreciating the methodology that led early theologians to their conclusions. Rather than steal the answers from Athanasius’s theological test, we can learn how he studied for it by studying his methodology and theological-exegetical works. Let us return to Harnack (or his ghost) as a test case.

On the one hand, evangelicals could agree with some of Harnack’s sensibilities. We can certainly join him in celebrating the Reformation’s re-emphasis on Scripture and the ability for people to read the Bible for themselves. We could also sympathize with the concern that theology can run the risk of imposing categories on Scripture that are not, well, scriptural. We could undoubtedly agree with his desire to see Christianity centralized on an understanding of the real, historical Jesus.

On the other hand, as evangelicals, we should also be concerned about where these sensibilities led him (and have at times led us). Harnack in the end did not tackle what we might deem understandable concerns with a retrieval of the Christian past or even a return to the divinely-inspired Scriptures. Instead, Harnack turned away from biblical and historic Christianity to the modern, post-Enlightenment emphases of personalized religion and historical-critical assumptions about history. Admittedly, Harnack is an extreme case, but I do not think it is a reach to conclude that, at least in part, Harnack’s suspicion of the Christian tradition cut him off from one of the main resources he could have used to answer his concerns. Though we may not affirm many of his conclusions, we can certainly see how his sensibilities have negatively impacted modern evangelical thought and practice.

Now, it is true that Athanasius’s writings contain no concerns about the late medieval Catholic Church’s abuse of tradition or sacraments. He also had no meaningful concept for a distinction between systematic theology and biblical studies and, thus, no misgivings about the reliability of the Gospel accounts of the historical Jesus. And, of course, we should not expect him to—he was not alive for nor showed any prophetic insights about these controversies. In this way, his historical distance from us makes him less understandable and perhaps even less appealing to us than a modern man like Adolf von Harnack. However, when comparing Athanasius’s sensibilities with our own, we should be able to see by now that he shares more with us than Harnack. In light of this, below are four ways to retrieve Athanasius as modern evangelicals.

First, we as evangelicals should take note of how ruled readings can help us better understand and articulate the unity of Scripture and the doctrines therein. We already apply ruled readings in our interpretation, even if somewhat unconsciously, through certain confessional commitments, ecclesiological traditions, and personal convictions. Instead of pretending as though we can shed ourselves of theological presuppositions or external influences, we should rather embrace critically-appropriated, scripturally-congruent categories to help us read and teach the Bible better. Retrieving Athanasius gives us more tools for our interpretive toolbelt and offers further insights into all sorts of biblical and theological issues that we might otherwise miss with a narrow focus on reconstructing historical minds and moments.

Second, we should take note of the cosmological rootedness of Athanasius’s theology and exegesis. He takes seriously the Creator-creature distinction present in Scripture, understanding its power to affirm the Trinity and rule out false teachings. We as evangelicals still wrestle with allowing other religions to inform our biblical cosmology, assuming that mediatorial figures in Second Temple Judaism or “divine councils” in other religions are imported into Scripture. Rather than assuming that Scripture is primarily reliant on other religions’ metaphysics (as modern historical-critical scholars do) or allowing pagan metaphysics to rule our theology (as the subordinationists did), we can take seriously the biblical data drawn out by Athanasius above and see that there is the triune God and all things in relation to God, as John Webster famously said.²⁴John Webster, The Domain of the Word: Scripture and Theological Reason (T&T Clark, 2012),58.

Third, we should take note of the deeply exegetical foundation of Athanasius’s trinitarian theology. He does not merely collate a bunch of prooftexts to make his point but rather brings these texts into conversation to demonstrate their logic and coherence. It is true that some in the biblical studies community are sometimes far too unsympathetic to retrieval; however, it can also be the case that those of us doing retrieval are sometimes too sympathetic. So we should be careful not to repristinate the past or spend more time teaching the doctrine of others—Athanasius, Aquinas, or whomever else—than teaching the doctrine from the Scriptures. We should not recommend retrieving Athanasius for his own sake, but rather because he models something closer to our own hearts, namely, a love for Scripture and a desire to formulate theology consistent with it.

Fourth, we should take note of Athanasius’s apologetic impulse. We saw above that his ruled readings and trinitarian exegesis serve, in part, as a counter to false teaching. He is unafraid of using Scripture to critique false doctrine, largely by applying exegetical practices like ruled readings to teach “the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27). Ruled readings and trinitarian exegesis do not simply serve to teach the church right reading and belief—though this is important—but they also show the church how to combat false teaching. Even today, various groups flood front doors and mailboxes with rehashes of these ancient heresies of subordination and uncritical assimilation of other philosophies. In Athanasius, we have theological and exegetical resources “to contend for the faith that was delivered to the saints once for all” (Jude 3).²⁵A special thanks to Adonis Vidu and Winston Hottman for their helpful feedback on an earlier draft/presentation of this article.

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