Ashish Vasandani’s Reviews > On the Incarnation > Status Update

In this section, Refutation of the Jews, Athanasius uses the similar tactic of using Old Testament prophecies to say that Christ has fulfilled them. Towards the end, he uses another argument that is is pretty interesting. After Christ, Jerusalem fell, no more oracles/prophets, no more kings, and the Gentiles abandoned their idols for the God of the patriarchs and Moses. What was left for their expected Messiah to do?

Athanasius, in this section, provides evidence for Christ’s divinity in not only the manner of his death and the events leading up to it, but also in the works done among Christians after his death. The two works that he highlights are the zealousness of death that all Christians have and the casting out of Demons and the disabling of idols. The supernatural seemed to be way more active and real then vs now.

Very cool, you can see the influences that this work had on later ideas of soteriology, particularly Anselm’s satisfaction theory of atonement. There is some idea of substitutionary atonement here, but it doesn’t seem to be explicitly penal substitution in the sense that just wrath is not involved. Instead, the reason seems to be that God needs to stay true to his word.

Finally got through the introduction