MC Steenberg’s Of God and Man: Theology As Anthropology from Irenaeus to Athanasius concludes with the claim that for Irenaeus, Cyril, Tertullian, and Athanasius, “it is in and through the human, the anthropos in which the eternal Son is known, that God is disclosed to the creature, and by which the creature comes to know his God . . . . A genuine engagement with the incarnation means that theology is anthropology, since the Theos reveals himself as anthropos , and it is in the human that man sees and knows God.”  Thus “the human creature forms . . . the framework for articulating theology - whether theology informing cosmology, behaviour, sacramentalism, dogmatic trinitarianism or any other area.”

For these fathers, theology, centered on the incarnate Christ, is about the “articulation of the God encountered in the human.”