In the November issue of First Things RR Reno has a remarkable essay on the return of the Fathers (unfortunately its not online) - that within this, the first post-Christian generation of intellectual life at the university, we are seeing a "sudden popularity of the theologians and pastors, monks and bishops, martyrs and missionaries, who first fashioned a Christian culture nearly two thousand years ago. The Church Fathers are returning as agents of renewal, guiding us toward the biblical source of a truly Christian culture".
He notes the in-process publication (18 of the projected 28 volumes are out) of The Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture edited by Thomas Oden and published by InterVarsity. "The series presents a selction of patristic interpretations, organized around verses of the Bible. The result is a grand catena, a style of commentary in which the Bible is illuminated by a selection of short passages from such ancient interpreters as Augustine, Origen, Chrysostom and Basil."
"Popular in the centuries following the debates that culminated in the great ecumenical councils and creeds of the fourth and fifth centuries, catenae were used to reinforce and pass on the authoritative interpretations from the age of the Church Fathers. In this way, the imaginations of biblical readers were socialized into the patristic consensus about God, Christ, salvation, the Church, and sacraments. That a twenty-first-century evangelical press has gone forward with a project committed to this mode of retrospective, consensus-building biblical commentary- and that the project has met with striking success- says something important about our time."
I'm going to order these volumes and read them (I see they are available on Amazon) - and am going on a Benedictine mini-retreat from the debates here.
Reno:
"For Catholics and Protestants alike, the Fathers now return because they were the original agents of evangelization. They did not solve all the problems of theology, and they did not achieve a final conversion of culture. Nor did they produce a single, monolithic system of ideas. Instead, through innumberable treatises, homilies, debates, meditations, councils, and ecclesiastical rulings, they wove a fabric of arguments that thickened the truth of faith. They constructed Christendom, not as a particular arrangement of imperial power working in concert with church authority (though at points that was part of the process), but much more broadly as a way of life and habit of thinking that gave a satisfying Christian focus to the artistic and political, moral and intellectual, concerns and ambitions of their day. Struggling to find a voice after Christendom, contemporary Christianity is now slowly, haltingly calling for the help of those who first gave a culturally vibrant voice to the faith".
A final link - Mike Aquilina's excellent essay on the "Salt of the Empire" - an up close study of how the gospel spread from family to family, and block to block, and how the church organically grew in the first few centuries AD:
http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=17-04-038-f
He notes the in-process publication (18 of the projected 28 volumes are out) of The Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture edited by Thomas Oden and published by InterVarsity. "The series presents a selction of patristic interpretations, organized around verses of the Bible. The result is a grand catena, a style of commentary in which the Bible is illuminated by a selection of short passages from such ancient interpreters as Augustine, Origen, Chrysostom and Basil."
"Popular in the centuries following the debates that culminated in the great ecumenical councils and creeds of the fourth and fifth centuries, catenae were used to reinforce and pass on the authoritative interpretations from the age of the Church Fathers. In this way, the imaginations of biblical readers were socialized into the patristic consensus about God, Christ, salvation, the Church, and sacraments. That a twenty-first-century evangelical press has gone forward with a project committed to this mode of retrospective, consensus-building biblical commentary- and that the project has met with striking success- says something important about our time."
I'm going to order these volumes and read them (I see they are available on Amazon) - and am going on a Benedictine mini-retreat from the debates here.
Reno:
"For Catholics and Protestants alike, the Fathers now return because they were the original agents of evangelization. They did not solve all the problems of theology, and they did not achieve a final conversion of culture. Nor did they produce a single, monolithic system of ideas. Instead, through innumberable treatises, homilies, debates, meditations, councils, and ecclesiastical rulings, they wove a fabric of arguments that thickened the truth of faith. They constructed Christendom, not as a particular arrangement of imperial power working in concert with church authority (though at points that was part of the process), but much more broadly as a way of life and habit of thinking that gave a satisfying Christian focus to the artistic and political, moral and intellectual, concerns and ambitions of their day. Struggling to find a voice after Christendom, contemporary Christianity is now slowly, haltingly calling for the help of those who first gave a culturally vibrant voice to the faith".
A final link - Mike Aquilina's excellent essay on the "Salt of the Empire" - an up close study of how the gospel spread from family to family, and block to block, and how the church organically grew in the first few centuries AD:
http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=17-04-038-f
