Defender of the deity of Christ
Athanasius attended the Council of Nicaea as a young deacon and spent the following forty-five years defending its confession that the Son is homoousios — of the same being as the Father — against an Arian party that at times held the emperor, most of the bishops and the machinery of the state.
He was exiled five times, for a combined seventeen years. The phrase Athanasius contra mundum — Athanasius against the world — comes from this period. His short book On the Incarnation, written in his twenties, remains one of the clearest statements of why God had to become man in order to save man.
His Easter letter of AD 367 contains the earliest surviving list of exactly the twenty-seven books of our New Testament, with no additions and no omissions.
The full biblical teaching on the person and nature of Jesus Christ — fully God and fully man, one person, two natures — and why every part of that formula was fought for.
The doctrine that distinguishes Christianity from every other monotheism: what it claims, what it does not claim, how Scripture builds it, and why it is not a contradiction.
Why the cross was necessary, what happened there, and the several biblical pictures of it — substitution, victory, ransom, example — and how they fit together.
What Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus and Chalcedon actually decided, why the arguments mattered, and what the creeds are for.
Ethiopia, Egypt, Nubia, Persia, India and China had established churches centuries before most of Europe. The strongest answer to "Christianity is the white man's religion".
The first Christian emperor is blamed for inventing the deity of Jesus, choosing the Bible and replacing the Sabbath. What Constantine actually did, what he did not do, and what imperial favour gave and cost the church.
Tracing the doctrine through Scripture and the pre-Nicene church — with the documentary evidence that ends the "invented at Nicaea" claim.