Well balanced and researched

Peter Barnes has done a very great service to the whole church and to history, and not exclusively to the Evangelicals who evidently commissioned this series on the church fathers. Indeed, if all these short expositions prove to be of this quality they may even nurture a generation of ministers able to reach out across the barriers that divide us today.
The first thing to clarify is that this wonderful short treatise would hardly be suitable for the average Christian Joe: it’s complex, often highly esoteric and scholarly, with a litany of quotations from every source imaginable, even Edward Gibbon if you please! The audiobook does not, and could not easily have laid on a bibliography though some of the authors quoted are far better known among theologians than others.

These remarks apply to the actual text only: the opening blurb is definitely parties pris so skip all that and treat the text proper for what it is; a very fair, thoroughly researched and concise account of a rather controversial but important personality in the jungle that was the 4th century church. I wrote a short article on Athanasius for my own church several years ago from a liberal standpoint, but would have been forever grateful to have had a resource like this short book to fall back on. Barnes has seen fit to include some of the best and most apt quotations from contemporaries of his subject, many in full and not without humour. In the matter of the impact of Athanasius, Barnes is fair and the concluding words of his book, another quote from Athanasius himself, sum up the spirit of this whole brilliant work.

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