Good friend Richard, helpfully reminded me in a comment to a previous post of this classic writing by Athanasius.
I have put off reading this for a little while probably out of fear of not being able to understand an ‘ancient classic’. CS Lewis addresses this in the forward of thefree online version I have just read with this statement:

There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about “isms” and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said. The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.

Well … I certainly understood these 54 pages more than some of the other stuff I have read! This is essential reading for understanding of the doctrine of incarnation.

Most of today I have taken time to catch up on some reading on the doctrine of incarnation and our response to euthansia.

I had a look through Complex Christ again and and read this in chapter 2 called “Inacarnation”:

The Church now seems to stand in the same place as God stood some 2500 years ago: misrepresented, accused of bigotry, portrayed as narrow minded and in love with power, only interested in buildings, ready to smite the dirty and sinful, over-occupied with sex, and ready to lend support for unjust wars … And so we must do as God did, as Christ comanded and exemplified: we must be born again. Become nothing, removed of strength and power and voice and means and language …

We must re-emerge and grow up again in the place we are meant to serve. Understand it, learn from it, be in it, love it, listen to it, wait 30 years before speaking to it. We must, like God, discard any thoughts that revolution is going to effect change in the Church or our world, and become dedicated to change by evolution.

Somehow those two paragraphs had not hit me first time I read them. As I read them today they seemed to strike with a new resonance and a new challenge to meet people where they are and wait to see what God might do.