Gorgias Studies in Early Christianity and Patristics
Publisher: Gorgias Press
Series Editorial Board: Dr. Carly Daniel-Hughes (ThD, Harvard University), Concordia University (Chair) Dr. Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Lauren (PhD, Brown University), Marquette University Dr. Adam Serfass (PhD, Stanford University), Kenyon College Prof. Ilaria Ramelli (PhD, State University of Milan), Sacred Heart Major Seminary Prof. Helen Rhee (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary), Westmont CollegeSeries Editorial Board: Dr. Carly Daniel-Hughes (ThD, Harvard University), Concordia University (Chair) Dr. Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Lauren (PhD, Brown University), Marquette University Dr. Adam Serfass (PhD, Stanford University), Kenyon College Prof. Ilaria Ramelli (PhD, State University of Milan), Sacred Heart Major Seminary Prof. Helen Rhee (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary), Westmont CollegeSeries Editorial Board: Dr. Carly Daniel-Hughes (ThD, Harvard University), Concordia University (Chair) Dr. Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Lauren (PhD, Brown University), Marquette University Dr. Adam Serfass (PhD, Stanford University), Kenyon College Prof. Ilaria Ramelli (PhD, State University of Milan), Sacred Heart Major Seminary Prof. Helen Rhee (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary), Westmont College
Gorgias Studies in Early Christianity and Patristics is designed to advance our understanding of various aspects of early Christianity. The scope of the series is broad, with volumes addressing the historical, cultural, literary, theological and philosophical contexts of the early Church. The series, reflecting the most current scholarship, is essential to advanced students and scholars of early Christianity. Gorgias welcomes proposals from senior scholars as well as younger scholars whose dissertations have made an important contribution to the field of early Christianity.Gorgias Studies in Early Christianity and Patristics is designed to advance our understanding of various aspects of early Christianity. The scope of the series is broad, with volumes addressing the historical, cultural, literary, theological and philosophical contexts of the early Church. The series, reflecting the most current scholarship, is essential to advanced students and scholars of early Christianity. Gorgias welcomes proposals from senior scholars as well as younger scholars whose dissertations have made an important contribution to the field of early Christianity.Gorgias Studies in Early Christianity and Patristics is designed to advance our understanding of various aspects of early Christianity. The scope of the series is broad, with volumes addressing the historical, cultural, literary, theological and philosophical contexts of the early Church. The series, reflecting the most current scholarship, is essential to advanced students and scholars of early Christianity. Gorgias welcomes proposals from senior scholars as well as younger scholars whose dissertations have made an important contribution to the field of early Christianity.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 319
ISBN: 9781463244620
Pub Date: 20 Dec 2022
Description:
Theology is the discipline that mainly explores what it means to know God. This book therefore explores the topic Knowing God, from an interdisciplinary theological perspective, against the backdrop of celebrating 500 years of Reformation which was celebrated in 2017. Approaching the issue from the perspectives of their respective theological disciplines, scholars ask what it means to know God, how people of faith have sought to know God in the past, and indeed whether, or to what extent, such knowledge is even possible.
The project team approached scholars from different disciplines in theology, affiliated with the Evangelische Theologische Faculteit, Leuven in Belgium, to reflect on the topic. This provided the faculty with the opportunity for fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration and reflection as we attempted to look at the same topic from the vantage point of our own subject and expertise. Although we all come from the same institution, and are bounded by our common motto Fides Quaerens Intellectum, we have allowed ourselves to roam freely within the flats of the castle of theological inquiry and have enjoyed meeting each other in the courtyard and beautiful gardens on the occasion of our interdisciplinary seminars each year. The authors do not promise to provide in this book a coherently designed interdisciplinary approach. The authors promise to show you the beauty of each of our disciplinary rooms within the castle. The authors also show you their own dialogicality, and even paradox, but also their own dialogical harmony. This book will be of utmost value to anyone seeking to explore the question of ‘Knowing God’, or even the ‘Knowability of God’, from the perspective of all the main classical subdisciplines in theology (e.g. Old and New Testament Studies; Church History; Systematic Theology; Practical Theology and Missiology).
Format: Paperback
Pages: 217
ISBN: 9781463244361
Pub Date: 15 Mar 2022
Description:
In his Commentary on Daniel, the earliest extant Christian commentary, Hippolytus interprets the deeds and visions of Daniel against the backdrop of contemporary Roman persecution and eschatological expectation, thus providing much information about Christian affairs in the early third century. Throughout the commentary Hippolytus further discusses his distinctive Logos theology and also makes mention of various liturgical practices evolving baptism, anointing, the celebration of Easter and perhaps the date of Christmas.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 253
ISBN: 9781463242800
Pub Date: 01 Oct 2021
Description:
The present volume describes the rich and complex world in which Ausonius (c. 310-395) lived and worked, from his humble beginnings as a schoolteacher in Bordeaux, to the heights of his influence as quaestor to the Emperor Gratian, at a time of unsettling social and religious change. As a teacher and poet Ausonius adhered to the traditions of classical paideia, standing in contrast to the Fathers of the Church, e.
g., Jerome, Augustine, and Paulinus of Nola, who were emboldened by the legalization, then the imposition, of Christianity in the course of the fourth century. For this position he was labeled by the 20th-century scholar Henri-Irénée Marrou a symbol of decadence. Guided by Marrou’s critical insights to both his own time and place and that of Ausonius, this book proposes a hermeneutic for reading Ausonius as both a fourth-century poet and a fascinating mirror for his 20th-century counterparts.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 417
ISBN: 9781463242572
Pub Date: 01 Jun 2021
Description:
The Orations against the Arians are an important landmark in the development of Christological and Trinitarian doctrine. The Orations contain extensive references to the Christian Scriptures and are steeped in rhetoric. The use of Scripture and polemical rhetoric against Athanasius' theological opponents, the Arians, is intricately interwoven.
This monograph offers a rhetorical analysis of the Orations against the Arians to demonstrate the interplay of scriptural reasoning and polemic in Athanasius' work. In this way, Boezelman's study provides a fresh perspective on the reception of John’s Gospel in the fourth century.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 292
ISBN: 9781463239183
Pub Date: 10 Dec 2020
Description:
Cline advances a suggestive reading of Justin Martyr's Apologies as a subjective appropriation of the forms and practices of the Roman system of petition and response. He offers an historical contextualization of the Apologies within both contemporary administrative culture and the wider literary environment, comparing the Apologies with extant Roman-era petitions, and using this comparison to shed light on Justin's transformations of the genre and their communicative significance.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 374
ISBN: 9781463241230
Pub Date: 31 Oct 2020
Description:
How the Jewish and Christian communities that emerged in the early Roman Empire navigated a "Hellenistic" world is a longstanding and unsettled question. Recent scholarship on the intellectual cultures that developed among Greek subjects of Rome in the so-called Second Sophistic as well as models for culture and competition informed by mathematical and economic game theories have provided new ideas to address this question. This study offers a model for a kind of culture-making that accounts for how the cultural ecosystems of the Roman Empire enabled these religious communities could win legitimacy and build discourses of self-expression by competing on the same cultural fields as other Roman subjects.
By considering a range of texts and figures - including Justin Martyr, Tatian, the "second" Paul of the Acts and Pastoral Epistles, Lucian of Samosata, the author of 4 Maccabees, and Favorinus of Arelate - this study contends that this competition for legitimacy served as a mechanism out of which those fledgling religious communities could develop cultural identities and secure social credibility within the complex milieu of Roman Imperial society.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 226
ISBN: 9781463239503
Pub Date: 31 Jul 2020
Description:
The 3rd century theologian Origen of Alexandria has traditionally been famous for his belief in universal salvation. Yet, Origen is also famous for his insistence on moral autonomy, the fact that God allows each creature to freely choose to move in the direction of good or evil. How can these two beliefs not result in a paradox or logical inconsistency in Origen’s theology, as many contemporary scholars suggest they do?
This book explores the intersection between moral autonomy and God’s foreordained universal salvation in Origen’s writings. Origen was, in fact, aware of the apparent contradiction between these two ideas. He nevertheless stipulated that God can achieve universal salvation without violating a soul’s freedom of choice. God accomplishes this through his foreknowledge of future voluntary possibilities, which God then prearranges into a sequence leading to God’s desired outcome.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 213
ISBN: 9781463240714
Pub Date: 09 Oct 2019
Description:
This book serves to correct the now accepted understanding of Irenaeus’s theodicy. This assumption of Hick’s theodicy as legitimately “Irenaean” remains due the gulf between Irenaean scholarship and discussion of the problem of evil. The present work offers a bridge between the two to allow for the continued discussion of both theologian’s distinct views.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 395
ISBN: 9781463240257
Pub Date: 23 Jul 2019
Description:
This book explores the apocalyptic influence upon the Two Ways metaphor in antiquity and more particularly the influence of the Two Ways in the Didache as veering from an apocalyptic worldview. The argument includes essential critical evaluation of the apocalyptic genre and assesses the apocalyptic features in ancient Two Ways texts. The predominant focus of the book will document and critically assess how the Didache veers from maintaining an apocalyptic worldview in its expression of the Two Ways (Did.
1–6).
Format: Hardback
Pages: 311
ISBN: 9781463206581
Pub Date: 03 Oct 2017
Description:
This volume contains an English translation and introduction to Hippolytus of Rome's Commentary on Daniel and his Chronicon. Both works are the first writings of their kind. The commentary is the earliest extant Christian commentary on a book of the Bible and the Chronicon is the first extant Christian historical work.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 289
ISBN: 9781463207236
Pub Date: 03 Oct 2017
Description:
This book examines the doctrine of providence as it appears in the works of the North African Latin apologist, L. Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 488
ISBN: 9781463206468
Pub Date: 09 Nov 2016
Description:
This book proposes a model for explaining unity and diversity in early Christianity that centers about a clear confessional identity, allowing both extreme expressions of diversity of texts and traditions while explaining the exclusion of teachers, texts, and traditions that deviated from the confessional norm.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 652
ISBN: 9781463202187
Pub Date: 20 Aug 2015
Description:
The first English translation and study of St. Hippolytus' fascinating, early third-century commentary 'On the Song of Songs'. Important for the history of biblical interpretation, rival identities of early Christians, liturgy, and mystagogy in the pre-Constantinian church.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 459
ISBN: 9781463203887
Pub Date: 18 Jun 2014
Description:
Ephrem the Syrian is known as one of the greatest Christian poets and as a unique author whose mode of thought is usually described as “symbolic.” In this work, Kees den Biesen explores the literary, intellectual, and theological mechanisms at work in Ephrem’s writings with the specific aim of identifying the exact nature of his “symbolic thought” and evaluating its contemporary relevance. Den Biesen elaborates a comprehensive approach that integrates a variety of methods into a genuinely theological methodology.
He then proposes his own comprehensive understanding of the nature and merits of Ephrem’s symbolic thought.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 282
ISBN: 9781463202668
Pub Date: 17 Jun 2014
Description:
Early lists of bishops, identified by Walter Bauer as "literary propaganda," mark critical points in the development of the doctrine of the apostolic succession of bishops. This study delves into the political struggles surrounding the lists and the doctrine they served to define. Ecclesiastical politics in each case reflects the threat to the bishop's authority and clarifies the meaning of apostolic succession in the Church's development.
This social history approach, examining the function of the literature within its historical circumstances, reveals how theology developed from politics. The development is as gripping politically as it is illuminating theologically.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 245
ISBN: 9781463202682
Pub Date: 17 Jun 2014
Description:
This book, on the pneumatology of Origen's Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, illustrates the centrality of the Holy Spirit for his theological project. As both God's exitus into the world and humanity's reditus to God, the Spirit forms the crucial link between Origen's doctrine of God and his spiritual anthropology. Origen's images for the Holy Spirit, understood in the context of second century concepts of 'spirit,' convey the intersection of theology and anthropology in his thought.
This book explores Origen's understanding of the multiplicity of spirits found in the Scriptures, with particular emphasis on the Holy Spirit as pivotal to God's outreach into the world.
