What have you found on Vyrso.com?

[fgh]

Since it's virtually impossible to locate the few [in some sense] 'Catholic-interest' books on Vyrso, I've long thought that it would be a good idea to start a thread where we could tip each other off when we find something. This is what I have found so far (actually, in many cases it was MJ who first found them; I'm just putting together the list):

• My Big Book of Catholic Bible Stories
• Exploring the Origins of the Bible: Canon Formation in Historical, Literary, and Theological Perspective
• Reading the Old Testament with the Ancient Church: Exploring the Formation of Early Christian Thought
• Beginnings: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives
• God’s Many-Splendored Image: Theological Anthropology for Christian Formation
• For Us and for Our Salvation: The Doctrine of Christ in the Early Church
• Athanasius
• Christian Apologetics
• Death and Afterlife: A Theological Introduction
• The Priority of Christ. Toward a Postliberal Catholicism
• Return to Rome: Confessions of an Evangelical Catholic
• Unlearning Protestantism: Sustaining Christian Community in an Unstable Age
• Evangelism after Christendom: The Theology and Practice of Christian Witness
• Monk Habits for Everyday People: Benedictine Spirituality for Protestants
• Cloister Talks: Learning from My Friends the Monks
• Peace be with You: Monastic Wisdom for a Terror-Filled World
• New Monasticism: What It Has to Say to Today's Church
• Popes & Bankers: A Cultural History of Credit and Debt, from Aristotle to AIG
• Is the Reformation Over? An Evangelical Assessment of Contemporary Roman Catholicism
• It Happened in Italy: Untold Stories of How the People of Italy Defied the Horrors of the Holocaust
• God and the Oval Office: The Religious Faith of Our 43 Presidents
• Johann Sebastian Bach
• The Great Books Reader: Excerpts and Essays on the Most Influential Books in Western Civilization
• Eyes to See
• Defiant Joy: The Remarkable Life & Impact of G. K. Chesterton
• The Quotable Chesterton: The Wit and Wisdom of G.K. Chesterton
• J.R.R. Tolkien
• From Homer to Harry Potter: A Handbook on Myth and Fantasy

(I also saw some books on the theme of "Catholic turned atheist/agnostic turned 'Christian'", but I left those out...)

Not 'Catholic-interest' in any particular way, but I just found it and it sounds interesting:

• Strangers and Neighbors: What I Have Learned About Christianity by Living Among Orthodox Jews

Note: I haven't read any of these, or even looked at the Amazon reviews, so these aren't recommendations, just a help for Catholic-minded people to find titles that might interest them.

Sorry for the lack of links.

[laylitur]

Thanks for the list - I had only found four of them and there are some others that I recognize. I have to get an agenda written for tomorrow morning's St. Vincent de Paul meeting (I have to get up 3 hours early ... so much for being a night owl.) but I'll give some reviews tomorrow.

[fgh]

Yeah, I guess the "many cases" was more true before I got the bright idea of searching for words like 'pope', 'monk', 'chesterton' and 'tolkien', and turned up quite a few more than I had found earlier ('catholic' and 'orthodox' I had checked long ago). I did believe I had more than four from you, though. Now, if everyone tries to think of 'Catholic' words to search for, we might turn up a few more still.

I've also sent an e-mail to Andrew, asking him if he can do something about the absurd lack of tagging. Only one of these books is tagged as 'Catholic' (plus two as 'Orthodox'). How are we poor minority users supposed to find anything? And if we can't even find the books, we certainly won't buy them, which means a) that Logos and the publishers lose money, and b) that Logos and the publishers believe there is no demand for 'Catholic' books, which in its turn means they won't be in a hurry to add any more. Don't expect anything from Andrew soon, though. It seems he's managed to get himself a nice long Christmas vacation.

Don't talk about night-owling! I came back from three weeks in Israel earlier this month, having gotten myself into nice habits of getting up early in the morning. That lasted about two weeks, I think, then I was back to making night into day... Of course, daily Mass is a great incentive to getting up early. Don't have that luxury around here...

Looking forward to reviews.

[fgh]

What I found out today was that there's a Nelson Christian Encounters series, which includes the Bach and Tolkien titles above, as well as:

• Saint Patrick
• Saint Nicholas
• Saint Francis
• Galileo
• Fyodor Dostoevsky
• several others (Austen, Bunyan...)

Unfortunately, only two of these are tagged with the series name, so if you want to look at them all, I suggest an Amazon search.

I also found a Nelson Ancient Practices Series, with at least the following titles:

• Finding Our Way Again: The Return of the Ancient Practices
• The Liturgical Year: The Spiraling Adventure of the Spiritual Life
• In Constant Prayer
• Sabbath
• The Sacred Meal
• The Sacred Journey
• Fasting
• Tithing: Test Me in This

The reviews I saw didn't look too promising, though.

• The Vow: How a Forgotten Ancient Practice Can Transform Your Life

doesn't seem to be part of the series, but looks similar.

Then we have:

• God in Dispute: "Conversations" among Great Christian Thinkers (go look at the Amazon TOC for this!)
• The Consequences of Ideas: Understanding the Concepts that Shaped Our World
• The Church History ABCs: Augustine and 25 Other Heroes of the Faith
• Ten People Every Christian Should Know
• A Daybook of Prayer: Meditations, Scriptures and Prayers to Draw Near to the Heart of God
• Seeing What Is Sacred: Becoming More Spiritually Sensitive to the Everyday Moments of Life
• The Secret Holocaust Diaries: The Untold Story of Nonna Bannister

Corrections of the OP:

• I was wrong about Strangers and Neighbors: What I Have Learned About Christianity by Living Among Orthodox Jews: the author is Catholic, so it's definitely 'Catholic interest'. And it's got 10 5-star reviews on Amazon, from both Jews, Catholics and other Christians (plus a 3-star, but that's about delivery).
• Eyes to See seems to have two volumes.

And if you're suffering from Logos addiction, you can always try Is There a ‘Buy Button’ in the Brain? 

(I'm bound to have forgotten something. When I hit the Post button, the software had logged me out and I lost every word I had written! That didn't make me too happy...)

[David Ames]

Posted by: fgh
When I hit the Post button, the software had logged me out and I lost every word I had written!

Have you tried composing off line and then doing a copy and paste into the 'box'?

[laylitur]

What I found out today was that there's a Nelson Christian Encounters series, which includes the Bach and Tolkien titles above, as well as:

• Saint Patrick
• Saint Nicholas
• Saint Francis
• Galileo
• Fyodor Dostoevsky
• several others (Austen, Bunyan...)

Unfortunately, only two of these are tagged with the series name, so if you want to look at them all, I suggest an Amazon search.

I also found a Nelson Ancient Practices Series, with at least the following titles:

• Finding Our Way Again: The Return of the Ancient Practices
• The Liturgical Year: The Spiraling Adventure of the Spiritual Life
• In Constant Prayer
• Sabbath
• The Sacred Meal
• The Sacred Journey
• Fasting
• Tithing: Test Me in This

The reviews I saw didn't look too promising, though.

• The Vow: How a Forgotten Ancient Practice Can Transform Your Life

doesn't seem to be part of the series, but looks similar.

Then we have:

• God in Dispute: "Conversations" among Great Christian Thinkers (go look at the Amazon TOC for this!)
• The Consequences of Ideas: Understanding the Concepts that Shaped Our World
• The Church History ABCs: Augustine and 25 Other Heroes of the Faith
• Ten People Every Christian Should Know
• A Daybook of Prayer: Meditations, Scriptures and Prayers to Draw Near to the Heart of God
• Seeing What Is Sacred: Becoming More Spiritually Sensitive to the Everyday Moments of Life
• The Secret Holocaust Diaries: The Untold Story of Nonna Bannister

Corrections of the OP:

• I was wrong about Strangers and Neighbors: What I Have Learned About Christianity by Living Among Orthodox Jews: the author is Catholic, so it's definitely 'Catholic interest'. And it's got 10 5-star reviews on Amazon, from both Jews, Catholics and other Christians (plus a 3-star, but that's about delivery).
• Eyes to See seems to have two volumes.

And if you're suffering from Logos addiction, you can always try Is There a ‘Buy Button’ in the Brain? 

(I'm bound to have forgotten something. When I hit the Post button, the software had logged me out and I lost every word I had written! That didn't make me too happy...)

My apologies ... I'll look for a setting for that.

[laylitur]

• Reading the Old Testament with the Ancient Church: Exploring the Formation of Early Christian Thought

This book is very clearly written from an Evangelical perspective, philosophically beginning with the Reformation.

CONTENTS




 Abbreviations

 Preface

 Introduction



 1. Christian Scripture before the New Testament

 2. The Struggle concerning the Law in the Second Century

 3. Reimagining the Exodus

 4. The Gospel in the Prophets

 5. Praying the Psalms

 6. Living in the Text



 Epilogue

 English Sources for Exegetical and Homiletical Works
of the Church Fathers


Ronald Heine, Reading the Old Testament With the Ancient Church: Exploring the Formation of Early Christian Thought (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2007).

The introduction is a history of the understanding of the OT as Christian Scripture - Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, English Deists, Locke ....

A sample:

THE CHURCH HAS never been without Scripture even though the Pauline epistles, the earliest writings that constitute our present New Testament, were not composed for two or more decades after the resurrection of Jesus. The remaining writings that make up our New Testament were written in the second half of the first century, some near the end of that century. It would be at least another century before most of these writings were placed together to constitute a recognized canon of Scripture in the church. Yet the writings we call the New Testament, which are our source of information about the beginnings of the Christian movement, indicate that the apostles and evangelists regularly appealed to Scripture to substantiate their teachings about Jesus of Nazareth and other subjects of vital importance to their faith. These references to Scripture are all to what we call the Old Testament, which the early church referred to simply as the “Scriptures.”1 This chapter will briefly examine these early Christian references to the Scriptures. In addition, it will survey the translations in which the early Christians read their Scripture.



The Scripture of Christians in the First Century AD
The very earliest Christians were Jews by birth. Their Scripture had always been what we call the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible. When they became Christians they continued to use these writings as their Scripture. They did not consider following Jesus to conflict with the faith they had learned from the Old Testament. Jesus was the fulfillment of the hopes they found expressed there.
All references to Scripture in the New Testament are to the Old Testament. 2 When Paul says that “Christ died on behalf of our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures,” he means in accordance with what the Old Testament Scriptures say about the Messiah (1 Cor. 15:3–4).3 When Luke says that Paul entered the synagogue in Thessalonica and “reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and declaring that the Christ must suffer and rise from the dead,” he means that Paul reasoned from the Old Testament Scriptures (Acts 17:2–3). The same is true in Luke’s report that Apollos refuted the Jews in Achaia by “demonstrating from the Scriptures that Jesus is the Christ” (Acts 18:28). And when Paul reminds Timothy that he has known from childhood the sacred writings that can instruct him for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus and then adds, “All Scripture is inspired of God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for instruction in righteousness,” he is talking about the Old Testament (2 Tim. 3:15–16).
The phrase “it is written,” which appears so often throughout the New Testament to introduce Scripture, always introduces statements from the Old Testament. It appears frequently in the four Gospels to show the connection between particular aspects of Jesus’s ministry and words found in the Old Testament. These connections range from statements regarding the place of Jesus’s birth, through specific deeds during his ministry, to his final suffering on the cross. Luke uses the phrase to introduce a statement from the Psalms justifying the choosing of an apostolic replacement for Judas after the latter’s suicide (Acts 1:20). Luke indicates that Paul used the phrase to connect the second Psalm with the resurrection of Jesus in his sermon at Antioch of Pisidia (Acts 13:33). Paul grounds many of his most characteristic doctrines in Old Testament Scripture joined with his understanding of God’s action in Christ. These doctrines include the bondage of all humanity to sin (Rom. 3:10–20), the importance of faith in salvation (Rom. 1:17), justification through faith (Romans 4), the stumbling of the Jews and the salvation of the Gentiles (Rom. 9:33; 10:15–21), and his doctrine of the two Adams (1 Cor. 15:45). Paul thought that the events narrated in the Old Testament were recorded to instruct and encourage Christians (Rom. 15:4; 1 Cor. 10:11).
Luke asserts that it was Jesus who taught his followers that the Old Testament was a book about himself. At the end of his Gospel, Luke reports that the risen Jesus walked with two disciples on the road to Emmaus and “interpreted for them what was written about himself in all the Scriptures,” meaning, of course, the Old Testament Scriptures (Luke 24:27). Just before his account of the ascension, Luke again relates that Jesus taught his disciples that the law, the prophets, and the psalms all contained material about himself. This final instruction that Jesus gave to his disciples, according to Luke, states that the suffering and resurrection of the Messiah were related in the Old Testament. It also asserts that the Old Testament contains the announcement that the message of repentance and forgiveness of sins was to be proclaimed “to all nations” in Jesus’s name (Luke 24:44–47).
There can be no question that the Old Testament was the Scripture of the earliest Christians and that they read it in terms of Christ. This was completely natural for them because they did not consider themselves to be distinct from the Jews. They believed that Jesus was the fulfillment of the promises made to the fathers in the Old Testament; therefore, their beliefs about him were completely compatible with their Jewish faith. When Philip heard the Ethiopian reading from the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, Luke says that Philip started “from this Scripture,” that is Isaiah 53, and “proclaimed Jesus to him” (Acts 8:35). Paul declared to the Roman Christians that the gospel he preached had been “proclaimed in advance through” the “prophets in the holy Scriptures” (Rom. 1:2). The writings of the Old Testament were joined with the Christian message in a seamless connection in the minds of the earliest Christians. They could not have conceived of the possibility of Christian faith without the Old Testament. It was essential to their understanding of who Jesus was, what his life, death, and resurrection had been about, and what he wanted them to do as his followers.



Christian Scripture in the First Half of the Second Century AD
The use of the Old Testament as the only Scripture of the church continued throughout the first half of the second century. The books that make up our New Testament had all been written by this time, but there was as yet no definitive list of which books and letters would constitute what we call the New Testament canon. What Christians of the first half of the second century looked to as authoritative Scripture was still the Old Testament.
The Apostolic Fathers
The writings called the Apostolic Fathers, which include the works of Ignatius, Barnabas, Polycarp, Clement, and the Didache use the term “Scripture” almost exclusively in reference to the Old Testament. These documents show awareness of most of the writings that were later included in the New Testament. Statements or phrases are drawn from works that later formed the New Testament, but, with two exceptions, no New Testament writing is referred to as Scripture or put on the same level with Old Testament Scripture in the Apostolic Fathers. A similar phenomenon is found in the works of Justin Martyr, who wrote in the middle of the second century.
The two passages in the Apostolic Fathers where the term “Scripture” is used in reference to a statement found in the New Testament appear in the writings known as 2 Clement and Polycarp’s Epistle to the Philippians. Second Clement, which may have been written in the middle of the second century or slightly later, refers to Jesus’s statement that he came to call sinners rather than the righteous (Matt. 9:13 and parallels) as Scripture. The saying follows a citation from Isaiah and is introduced as “another Scripture.” The exegetical remarks concerning the passage in Matthew are introduced with the same formula that introduces those following the Isaiah citation. The two citations are treated as standing on the same level. The fact that the statement in question is a saying of Jesus may account for this (2 Clement 2.4). Polycarp’s Epistle to the Philippians, the other writing among the Apostolic Fathers using the term “Scripture” of something in the New Testament, is dated around AD 135. In this epistle Polycarp joins Psalm 4:5 and Ephesians 4:26 and refers to the two as “these Scriptures” (Epistle to the Philippians 12.1).
The writing known as 1 Clement, which may date from the last decade of the first century, quotes from the words of Jesus twice, introducing them simply as “the words of the Lord Jesus” (1 Clement 13.1–2; 46.7–8). The same document paraphrases the words of 1 Corinthians 1:10–13 and identifies them as coming from “the epistle of the blessed Paul the apostle” (1 Clement 47.1–3). The author also imitates 1 Corinthians 13 with phrases and ideas drawn from this text without giving any indication of his source (1 Clement 49). Ignatius, bishop of Antioch of Syria in the first quarter of the second century, certainly knew at least some of the Pauline epistles. In his own Epistle to the Ephesians he refers to the Ephesians as “initiates along with Paul . . . who mentions you in Christ Jesus in every epistle” (Epistle to the Ephesians 12.2). In other places Ignatius draws phrases from various New Testament writings, predominantly Pauline epistles, but gives no indication that he is drawing the phrases from these documents.4
Much of Polycarp’s Epistle to the Philippians, which was written a few years after Ignatius’s letters, is a collage of phrases drawn from writings found in the New Testament. The source of the phrases, however, is never mentioned. Polycarp knows that Paul had written a letter to the Philippians, for he notes that Paul had labored among them and had praised them “in the beginning of his epistle” (Epistle to the Philippians 11.3). As I noted above, Polycarp also quotes a part of Ephesians 4:26 and refers to it as “Scripture.”
The Didache, which should probably be dated near the end of the first century or early in the second, presents an interesting phenomenon. It appears to draw heavily on the Gospel of Matthew,5 but never mentions Matthew. The introductory formulas, “Scripture says” or “it is written,” do not appear in the document even though there are a few quotations from the Old Testament. The one formal introduction of an Old Testament quotation is, “This was spoken by the Lord,” which introduces a quotation from Malachi (Didache 14.3). Phrases and statements drawn from writings that make up our New Testament outnumber those taken from the Old Testament in the document. This may be because the document claims to be the “teaching of the twelve apostles,” and the New Testament writings were considered to be the works of the apostles.
These Christian documents from the first half of the second century all show clear evidence of knowledge of most of the writings that would form the New Testament. There is an apparent general reluctance, however, to place these writings, which were considered to come from the apostles, on the same level with Old Testament Scripture. Second Clement, which, as I noted above, introduces a saying of Jesus found in our Gospels as “Scripture,” may indicate a moving away from this reluctance in the mid-second century. The author supports one of his teachings by saying that it is declared by “the books and the apostles” (2 Clement 14.2). The “books” would appear to refer to the writings of the Old Testament and the “apostles” to either writings or oral traditions stemming from the apostles.
The Old Testament still holds the privileged position of Scripture in the writings of Christians in the first half of the second century. When Clement writes to the Corinthians, he refers to their study of the “sacred Scriptures.” These, he says, are “true” and come “through the Holy Spirit.” The examples he then calls to the attention of the Corinthian church from these “sacred Scriptures” are all from the book of Daniel (1 Clement 45). He does something similar a little later, again referring to “the sacred Scriptures” and “the oracles of God.” The specific passages he points to in this instance come from Exodus and Deuteronomy (1 Clement 53). It has been noted that Ignatius shows little interest in the Old Testament, quoting it only three times.6 Nevertheless, two of the three quotations are introduced by the traditional formula “it is written,” which was used for introducing Scripture. The Epistle of Barnabas is saturated with quotations from the Old Testament. These quotations are sometimes introduced by such formulas as “the prophet says” (Epistle of Barnabas 6.2), or “Moses said” (Epistle of Barnabas 10.1). The traditional formulas, “it is written” (Epistle of Barnabas 5.2; 15.1) and “Scripture says” (Epistle of Barnabas 4.7; 5.4), are also found throughout the epistle introducing Old Testament quotations. Barnabas appears to have considered 1 Enoch as Scripture also, for he once introduces a quotation from this book with the “Scripture says” formula (Epistle of Barnabas 16.5).7
Justin Martyr
The status of the New Testament writings in relation to the concept of Old Testament Scripture is the same in Justin as it is in the Apostolic Fathers. Justin, however, wrote in the mid-second century.
While Justin alludes to numerous writings found in the New Testament he does not mention any by name. He attaches the apostle John’s name to what he refers to as a revelation prophesying that those who believe in Christ will celebrate a millennial reign in Jerusalem (Dialogue 81.4). This is probably a reference to our book of Revelation. Justin refers several times to what he calls the “memoirs of the apostles.” His quotations from these memoirs are usually parallel to material found in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. He states that the memoirs are called Gospels and that they are read along with the prophets in Christian worship (1 Apology 66.3; 67.3). I noted above that a saying of Jesus was treated on a par with Old Testament Scripture in 2 Clement, which probably is to be dated from the mid-second century. Justin’s statement that readings from the memoirs were included along with readings from the Old Testament prophets in worship also shows that material that makes up our present Gospels appears to have been considered equal in status to Old Testament Scripture by the mid-second century.
When Justin speaks of Scripture, however, he means the Old Testament, as numerous passages in his Dialogue with Trypho demonstrate (e.g., Dialogue 23.4; 37.4). He asserts that Trypho refuses to confess that Jesus is the Messiah, “as the Scriptures demonstrate” (Dialogue 39.6). In another passage he claims that the Old Testament Scriptures belong more truly to the Christians than to the Jews because “we obey them,” he says, “but you read them and do not understand their meaning” (Dialogue 29.2). Justin claims to find the entire Christian message about Christ in the Old Testament Scriptures. “For I have demonstrated,” he says, “how Christ has been proclaimed by all the Scriptures as king, and priest, and God, and Lord, and angel, and man, and chief in command, and stone, and child who has been born, and one who has first suffered, then ascended into heaven, and who is coming again in glory in possession of an eternal kingdom” (Dialogue 34.2).



The Version of Scripture Read by the Early Church
The Septuagint
The Scripture read by the majority of early Christians was a Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament known as the Septuagint. Very few Christians of the first four centuries read the Old Testament in the Hebrew language in which it had been written. The Hebrew language was spoken only in the environs of Jerusalem in the earliest Christian period. In the remainder of Palestine, Aramaic, the language the Jews had spoken in captivity in Babylon, was used. It is likely that Greek was also widely spoken in Galilee. Certainly most of the non-Jewish converts to Christianity outside Palestine spoke Greek. Of the authors of the New Testament writings, Paul, Mark, Matthew, and John show evidence of knowledge of the Old Testament in Hebrew, though their quotations tend to follow the Septuagint.8
Among the church fathers, only the Greek-speaking father Origen, in the third century, and the Latin-speaking father Jerome, in the fourth century, learned Hebrew in order to work with the Hebrew text of the Old Testament. Nevertheless, Origen’s numerous exegetical and homiletical works on the Old Testament depend on the Septuagint version. He produced a massive scholarly work on the text of the Septuagint called the Hexapla. In this work Origen placed in six parallel columns the Greek text of the Septuagint, three other later translations of the Old Testament into Greek, the text of the Hebrew Scriptures, and a transcription of the Hebrew Scriptures into the corresponding sounds in the Greek language. In the column containing the Septuagint, Origen inserted an asterisk (*) to show where the Septuagint lacked something that was in the Hebrew text and an obelus (†) before words that did not appear in the Hebrew text. When Jerome produced his new Latin translation of the Old Testament based on the Hebrew text, the older Latin versions that were based on the Septuagint continued to be preferred by most in the church. Jerome himself seems to have done much of his translation of the Hebrew, with the text of the Septuagint, as revised by Origen in his Hexapla, close at hand.
The Septuagint was to the early church what the King James Version of the Bible was to the English-speaking Protestant church from the middle of the seventeenth century to well into the second half of the twentieth century. It was the version read in the services of the church; it was the version from which those who were candidates for baptism were instructed; and it was the version on which the studies and debates of the church’s scholars were based. It was, in short, the church’s Bible. The Septuagint was not, however, a translation produced by the Christians. It was a translation done by the Jews prior to the Christian era to provide an understandable text of Scripture for those multitudes of Jews whose mother tongue was Greek.


Ronald Heine, Reading the Old Testament With the Ancient Church: Exploring the Formation of Early Christian Thought (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2007).

[laylitur]

• Beginnings: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives

This is a book I have in dead tree format and definitely recommend for people interested in the interpretation of the creation stories. Not a fit for the 24 hour day crowd.

Contents



And There Was Evening: A Preface
 The Authors under Review
 The Questions We Pose
 A Word about Language
 Acknowledgments


1. And There Was Morning: An Introduction
 The Text and Its Journey
 Silence and Irruption: First References to Genesis
 Summary
 Philo: A Coda
2. At the Birth of Christian Reflection: Paul and the New Testament
 Paul in Context
 Paul and Scripture
 Paul and the Paradise Narrative: Sin and Death
 Paul and the Paradise Narrative: Gender and Marriage
 Paul and the Evangelists
 Postscript: The Pastoral Epistles
 Conclusions
3. Recapitulation: The Second-Century Apologists
 The Scriptures of the People
 Justin Martyr
 Melito of Sardis
 Theophilus of Antioch
 Irenaeus of Lyons
 Conclusions
4. Senses of Scripture: The World of Origen and the Origin of the World
 Tertullian
 Origen
 Conclusions
5. Paradise, Whatever That May Mean: The Cappadocians and Their Origen
 Cyril of Jerusalem
 Athanasius of Alexandria
 Enshrining Origen: The Philocalia
 Basil of Caesarea
 Gregory of Nazianzus
 Gregory of Nyssa
 Conclusions
6. These Are the Generations: Concluding Observations
 Scripture and Exegesis
 The Hexaemeron
 Paradise
 Allegory, Type, Myth, and History
 The One Thing Needful


Appendix: Genesis 1–3 and Genesis 5:1–5
List of Abbreviations
Bibliography


Peter C. Bouteneff, Beginnings: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2008).

  Melito on Genesis
Genesis 1–3 is Melito’s foundation for the beginning of creation and of the human person. Like Justin, he establishes the continuity of identity between the one who created the world and the one who was born of the Virgin, an identity that comes to the fore in the final verses:


   It is he that made heaven and earth
   and fashioned man in the beginning,
   who is proclaimed through the law and prophets,
   who was enfleshed upon a virgin,
   who was hung upon a tree,
   who was raised from the dead
and went up to the heights of heaven,
   who sits at the Father’s right hand,
   who has power to save all 
   through whom the Father did his works from
beginning to eternity. (PP 104)


He therefore understands Christ to be the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end (PP 105; cf. Rev. 1:8; 21:6).
As for the connection with Genesis 1 and 2–3: in stanzas 81–86 Melito, addressing the Jews, states that it was Christ who formed and named Israel and that he, the firstborn of God, divided light from darkness, controlled the deep, spread out the firmament, and lit up the luminaries. Melito also traces the genealogy to Adam: “It was he [Christ] who chose you and guided you / from Adam to Noah, from Noah to Abraham, from Abraham to Isaac and Jacob and the twelve patriarchs” (PP 83).
Melito reads Genesis 1–3 as a harmonious whole: “When God in the beginning made the heaven and the earth and all things in them by his word  he fashioned from the earth man, and gave him a share of his own breath” (PP 47). He mentions that paradise was east of Eden and cites the divine command concerning the tree. When Melito describes the transgression, he notes that the human person is “naturally receptive of good and evil, as a clod of earth is [receptive] of seed from either side” (PP 48). Adam (here simply called  is a symbolic figure, then, marking the beginning of the genealogy and humanity; elsewhere Melito says that Christ’s hands “formed you [the Jews] from the earth” (PP 79, emphasis added). Adam, then, is neither a holy, perfected figure nor pathetic. He is neutral, nonaligned.
But when Adam tasted of the tree, although he lived a long life, “he was dissolved and sank into the earth.” His legacy is “not chastity but promiscuity, not imperishability but decay, not honor but dishonor, not freedom but slavery, not royalty but tyranny, not life but death, not salvation but destruction” (PP 59). These pairings identify chastity, imperishability, freedom, royalty, and immortality as characterizing the vocation of the human person. They do not imply that  ever embodied or actualized these attributes. And, much as Genesis 1–11 describes the matter, “the destruction of men upon earth became strange and terrible. . . . They were seized by tyrannical sin” (PP 50). Melito goes on to describe the generalities of human sin and some ghastly (and bizarre) particulars, such as mothers cannibalizing their children and incest (with an enumeration of seemingly every possible permutation of kinship).
The result of this rampant and systemic sin is that death divides body from soul. The body falls back to the earth from which it is taken; the soul is confined in Hades, so that “there was separation of what fitted beautifully”; and the human person “was being divided by death,” so that “desolate lay the Father’s image” (PP 55–56). This mode of death is what necessitates the coming of Christ and his own death in the flesh. Melito’s list of “types” for Christ significantly omits Adam, even though the types do extend back to Adam’s son: Abel (who was murdered), Isaac (bound), Joseph (sold), Moses (exposed as a babe), David (persecuted), and the prophets (who suffer) (PP 59).38 Lovers of typology though they were, in their surviving texts neither Justin nor Melito identified Adam as  (type of the coming one; cf. Rom. 5:14).
Additional relevant material appears in a short fragment found in a tenth-century Georgian manuscript whose attribution to Melito is likely but far from certain.39 After quoting a mangled version of the postlapse curse on Eve, Adam, and the serpent, this homily says that “the same three [Eve, Adam, and the serpent] made sin.” It goes on to link the tree through which sin came and the tree through which salvation came, closing with a series of lines glorifying the latter. But other than in this fragment, which may imply a human and satanic conspiracy in “making” sin, Melito does not suggest that Adam and Eve cursed humanity, which otherwise would have lived sinlessly. Nor does he follow Justin in emphasizing human free choice. But his work, which is either a homily or a ritual text, should not be expected to tease out all the implications.
As we have seen, the paradise narrative retained an etiological function for Melito. It represented the beginning of an ever-widening cycle of sin as well as the foundation of the patriarchs, kings, and prophets who all are  for “the mystery of the Lord.” As types, or models of the reality revealed in the church, they fade from significance in Melito’s understanding of Scripture. Adam, however, in his genealogical role, does not.


Peter C. Bouteneff, Beginnings: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2008).

[laylitur]

• God’s Many-Splendored Image: Theological Anthropology for Christian Formation

I have recently purchased this but I've not read it yet. However, given the author of the Forward, I assume it has to be good.

Contents



Foreword by Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Freedom
2. God and Christ
3. Spiritual Perception
4. Virtues and Humility
5. Royal Dignity
6. Embodiment
7. In the Created World
8. Arts and Sciences
9. Community
Conclusion
Select Bibliography


Nonna Verna Harrison, God’s Many-Splendored Image: Theological Anthropology for Christian Formation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2010).

The Model and the Image

Early Christians read the Bible in Greek, and when Genesis 1:26 spoke of humankind being made in the image and likeness of God, they connected this verse with Greek philosophical ideas. Platonists thought that the visible and tangible things in the world were images of transcendent, invisible models. They believed that the image derived its beauty and structure from its model. Moreover, its very being was directly connected to the model, though image and model seem to belong to different levels of reality altogether. Yet the model was in contact with the image and made it what it was.
Early Christians borrowed these Platonic concepts and adapted them to their own faith. They believed that because we as human beings are made in God’s image, God himself has been our model from the time we were first created. This is a great gift and a great privilege. It means that God has given us something of his beauty and excellence. He is the direct source of our authentic human identity, since the image of God is what defines us as distinctively human. Greek philosophers thought the aim of human existence was to follow God, or become like God, and Christians agreed, though they understood these goals in their own way. It was possible to imagine such a lofty goal because, if we are God’s image, the very core of our being is directly connected to him, and he always remains connected with us, creatively renewing his own image in us.
The divine image thus establishes us in a relationship with God. This relationship defines the core of who we are and is the foundation of everything else the divine image and likeness in the human person can become. Gregory of Nyssa reflects on how this happens in a homily on Matthew 5:8, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God” (NRSV). He begins by asking himself how it could be possible to see God since there is no one who will see God and live (see Exod. 33:20). Because Gregory emphasizes the absolute mystery of God, he wonders what we can hope to see. First, he says that everyone, even non-Christians, can see God’s handiwork in the created world and thus know something of the Creator. But then if people are pure in heart, he asks, what more can they see? In answer, he explains the connection between perceiving God and having God within oneself. He begins by comparing it to the difference between knowing about health and actually being healthy:
 The Lord does not say that knowing something about God is blessed, but to possess God in oneself. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” He does not seem to me to be offering God as an instant vision to the one whose spiritual eye is purified. But what the grandeur of the text proposes to us is that which the Word [i.e., Jesus] sets out more directly also to others, when he says that the kingdom of God is within us [Luke 17:21]. From this saying we may learn that the person who has purified his own heart from every tendency to passion [that is, unruly emotion] perceives in his own beauty the effulgence of the divine nature.1
Gregory then explains that we can find God within ourselves because from the beginning we have been created in the divine image. God is the model and we are, at least originally, the copy. This is why humans are able to perceive God by looking within themselves and there finding his image: “The measure of what is accessible to you is in you, for thus your Maker from the start endowed your essential nature with such good. God has imprinted upon your structure replicas of the good things in his own nature, as though stamping wax with the shape of a design.”2
In ancient times, people signed documents by putting hot wax on the paper and pressing into the wax a seal carved with their unique design. The wax then bore the seal’s imprint and showed that the document was theirs. Gregory uses this example to illustrate the meaning of the divine image. God is like the seal, and our human nature is like the wax that shows forth the same design as God, but on a smaller scale.
Notice that the wax receives the imprint by direct contact with the seal, and the copy receives its likeness to the model by direct contact with it. So God is present within his image, making it to be an image of Godself. This point becomes clear later in the same paragraph when Gregory moves on to the example of the sun and a mirror, as we shall see. The very same light that shines from the sun also hits the mirror, is present in its radiant surface, and shines forth from it.
Why, then, do we not easily see God’s beauty and goodness in ourselves and in everyone we meet? Gregory compares the image to a mirror and explains that it is covered with dirt. God’s light shines onto the mirror, and then the same light is reflected by it. But this does not happen when the mirror is dirty: “Evil, however, overlaying the Godlike pattern, has made the good useless to you, hidden under curtains of shame. If, by conscientious living, you wash away once more the filth that has accumulated on your heart, the Godlike beauty will again shine forth for you.”3 Gregory uses heart in the biblical sense, not as the center of sentimentality but as the inner human being. He then employs the image of polished iron, which can function as a mirror when not covered with rust.
 When iron is stripped of rust by a whetstone, what once was dull itself shines as it faces the sun and gives forth beams and shafts of light. So also, when the inner human being, which is what the Lord calls “the heart,” has wiped off the rusty filth that has spread by evil decay over its form, it will again recover its likeness to its model and be good. What is like the good [i.e., God] is surely good.4
That is, once we are restored from our fallen condition to holiness through repentance, we can see God’s likeness within ourselves. One cannot stare at the sun but can see its rays in a mirror. This is how the pure in heart see God, whom the saints cannot see and live. “Therefore,” Gregory concludes, “the one who looks at himself sees in himself what he desires, and so the pure in heart becomes blessed, because by looking at his own purity he perceives the model in the copy.”5 And part of what this person sees is that the purity within his or her heart is God’s own purity and has come to him or her as a gift.
Gregory shows how the image of God in which we are made is what enables us to be in relationship with God and grow in that relationship. The divine image makes possible participation in the life and goodness of God. Moreover, this participation enables the vision of God because, as Plato and with him many in the ancient world believed, “like is known by like.”6
According to early Christian writers, from the beginning God created humankind in God’s own image, thus establishing a relationship with human beings as a defining characteristic of who they are. Yet humans fell, breaking that relationship. The fall did not eradicate the divine image but instead, in Gregory of Nyssa’s metaphors, covered it with dirt or rust. So God sent his Son Christ, who became human in order to restore the divine image in all of humanity. The rest of this chapter will discuss early Christian ideas of how we were created in the image of God and of Christ, how we fell away from our task of becoming like God, and how God restores us in Jesus Christ.


Nonna Verna Harrison, God’s Many-Splendored Image: Theological Anthropology for Christian Formation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2010).

[laylitur]

• For Us and for Our Salvation: The Doctrine of Christ in the Early Church

Here I have to admit that my prejudice - can anything good come after such a horrid cover?

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: “Who Do People Say That I Am?”: Christ’s Crucial Question

1 In the Beginning Was the Word: Christ in the Early Centuries

2 In Their Own Words: Select Documents from the Early Centuries

3 The Triumph of Athanasius: The Battle for Christ at Nicea

4 In Their Own Words: Select Documents from the Fourth Century

5 The Wisdom of Leo the Great: The Battle for Christ at Chalcedon

6 In Their Own Words: Select Documents from the Fifth Century

Epilogue Jesus: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Glossary

Appendix 1: The Doctrine of Christ in Scripture

Appendix 2: A Guide for Reading the Church Fathers

Notes


Stephen J. Nichols, For Us and for Our Salvation: The Doctrine of Christ in the Early Church (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2007).

However the book itself is not bad as an introduction - although there are places I'd want to double check before I quoted him. But this isn't an area I know much about so I may be being over cautious.

CHRISTOS AND COBBLERS

Mr. Christ. At least that’s the answer from the child in the Sunday school class to the teacher’s question concerning the one born in a stable in Bethlehem. In the child’s scheme of things, Jesus was the first name, Christ was the last. And, as his parents had taught him, he added the Mr. out of respect.
Of course, in the case of Jesus, Christ is not the last name, it’s a title. However, many, even those who should have known better, missed this. To them he was Jesus of Nazareth, or Jesus, the son of Joseph, the ancient versions of last names.1Acknowledging Jesus as the Christ, however, requires a great deal. The Greek word Christos means “anointed one” and is the counterpart to the Hebrew term meaning “Messiah.” Designating Jesus as the Christ requires that one see him as the long-awaited Messiah, the anointed one of God, who would be the redeemer and deliverer of the covenant people. That Jesus assumed the title Christ in both word and deed is undeniable. That those in his day and in the centuries following his birth denied him as the Christ is undeniable too.
The denial of Jesus as the Christ began among the leaders of the Jewish community. Jesus of Nazareth disappointed them as a candidate for the Messiah. He lacked charisma and gravitas, not to mention an army. The Israelite nation was faced with occupation by the Roman Empire, and Jesus failed to fulfill their dreams of a conquering Messiah. The Jewish leaders’ rejection of his claim to be their Messiah may be clearly seen in the exchange with Pontius Pilate. When that official ordered an inscription on the cross that would signify Christ’s crime as claiming to be “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews,” the Jewish leaders demanded that it be changed to read that he claimed to be the king of the Jews. Jesus claimed it, but they certainly did not want him. Pilate refused to change it (John 19:19-22).
One group in particular that was influenced by Jewish teachings denying the deity of Christ was the Ebionites. We don’t know much about this group. Epiphanius, the fourthcentury bishop of Salamis and later Cyprus, claims that Ebion founded this group. This may be a creative fiction. Other church fathers offered their own explanation of the name. The term likely comes from the Hebrew word for “poor.” They were the “poor” disciples. Later opponents of them would use the name sarcastically to refer to their less than stellar mental capabilities, calling them “poor” thinkers. We also speculate that this group probably arose in the first century, likely coming into prominence after the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. The Ebionites were scattered from Jerusalem and Israel and congregated initially in Kochaba but soon spread throughout the empire. Scholars further tend to see this group as an extension of the Judaizers, the faction that Paul contended with in his Epistle to the Galatians. They were in effect trying to be Jewish Christians, not quite ready to accept the teachings of Paul or the book of Hebrews or John. All of which is to say that they were falling short of what constitutes true Christianity. It appears that the Ebionites were unable to sustain themselves in walking this tightrope between Judaism and Christianity. By the middle of the 400s they had virtually become extinct, some migrating to Judaism, others affirming orthodox Christianity.2

HERESY
The English word heresy is a transliteration of both the Greek and Latin word. The Wycliffe Bible may contain the first occurrence of the English word, merely transliterating it from the Latin Vulgate at Acts 24:14. It occurs several times in the New Testament, initially meaning “sect” or “school of thought.” The Sadducees and Pharisees are termed a sect in Acts 5:17 and 15:5. The term is also used to speak of the Christians themselves in Acts 24:14 and 28:22. In the epistles the term is used to refer to groups that are causing division in the church, such as the ESV translation of the word as “factions” in 1 Corinthians 11:19. By the later epistles, especially 2 Peter, the term comes to mean divisive groups within the church that are promoting false teaching.In 2 Peter 2:1 the ESV translates the term as “heresies,” which are destructive and are brought into the church by false teachers. This particular heresy in 2 Peter centers on Christ. In the early church, teachings that went against Scripture were considered heresy, usually at synods. Once Christianity became legalized in the Roman Empire, a charge of heresy not only meant excommunication from the church but could also bring legal ramifications. As the church formulated and finalized the creeds, especially the Nicene and Chalcedonian Creeds, there became rather fixed and firm boundaries between heresy and orthodoxy. Augustine once said, in a rather lengthy letter dealing with heresy, that heretics “prefer their own contentions to the testimonies of Holy writ” and that they consequently separate themselves from the true, universal church.

Most of what we know about the Ebionites comes from the writings of the church fathers against them. Irenaeus mounted the first sustained refutation of them. He, in fact, was the first to use the name “Ebionites” in print, around 190. Hippolytus and Origen would later contribute their own refutations. The Ebionites viewed Christ as a prophet, and some of them even accepted the virgin birth. But they all denied his preexistence and consequently denied his deity. Eusebius, the first church historian, writing in 325, put the Ebionite heresy succinctly: “The adherents of what is known as the Ebionite heresy assert that Christ was the son of Joseph and Mary, and regard him as no more than a man.” While viewing Jesus as a mere man, the Ebionites nevertheless exalted Jesus as one who kept the law perfectly, and as a group they stressed the keeping of the law in order to attain salvation. Like the Judaizers of Paul’s day, they insisted on circumcision. Their faulty view of Christ led to a faulty view of Christ’s work on the cross. Their misunderstanding of the incarnation led to a misunderstanding of the atonement. They did not grasp the fact that Christ is the God-man who is for us. This fact makes all the difference for our salvation.3
Another and more sophisticated view that denied Christ’s deity circulated in the early church. This view, called adoptionism, held that God adopted the human Jesus as his son after he was born, either at Jesus’ baptism or at his resurrection. When the one God descended on the human Jesus, Jesus became the son of God and became the Christ, filled with divine power. Eusebius refers to this as “Artemon’s heresy.” We, however, know nothing of Artemon beyond this brief reference. Later proponents of this teaching include Paul of Samasota (third century) and Theodotus (c. 190). Theodotus the Cobbler—to distinguish him from the other Theodotuses in church history—arrived in Rome around 190 and began spreading adoptionist teachings. The church excommunicated Theodotus, and his followers floundered. Paul of Samasota was able to gain a little more traction due to his being bishop at Antioch. Around 260 he was declared a heretic for his adoptionist view in a synod at Antioch. Eusebius gives us the report: “The other pastors of the churches from all directions, made haste to assemble at Antioch, as against a despoiler of the flock of Christ.” It was in the course of dealing with his teaching in three different synods that the term homoousios came into play (much more on this term, which means that Christ is of the same essence as the Father, in Chapter 3).4


Stephen J. Nichols, For Us and for Our Salvation: The Doctrine of Christ in the Early Church (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2007).

[laylitur]

• Athanasius

This is a volume of the series Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality. I like the series, I like the book.

Contents






 Cover
 Series Page
 Title Page
 Copyright Page
 Dedication
 Epigraph
 Series Preface
 Acknowledgments
 Introduction: Scripture and Metaphysics (in the Augustinian Mode)


1. Evangelizing Metaphysics
2. Types, Terms, and Paradigms
3. The One God
4. Beginnings: Word and World
5. Middle: God for Us
6. End: God Made Man, Man Made God


 Epilogue
 Notes
 Selected Bibliography
 Index


Peter J. Leithart, Athanasius (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2011).

Typology

Much of Athanasius’s work interpreting biblical texts occurs in polemical treatises. He refutes Arian interpretations of particular texts, rubs Arian noses in texts that Arian theology had difficulty explaining, and draws theological conclusions from Scripture concerning the nature of the Son, the Triad within the Godhead, and the character of redemption. The anti-Arian treatises are the works of Athanasius most relevant to a discussion of Athanasius’s views on Scripture and metaphysics, and much of this chapter will focus on what Athanasius draws from Scripture concerning these theological and quasi-philosophical issues, and what tools he uses to draw such conclusions. In these works, Athanasius focuses on specific words, gathers proof texts from various places in Scripture, and applies some of his characteristic hermeneutical ideas to unscramble a confused Arian interpretation. His approach is largely “deductive.”[59]
Yet we cannot focus wholly on polemical treatises without distortion. Athanasius was a bishop, and though he spent a large segment of his episcopacy away from Alexandria writing polemics and apologetical works, much of his biblical exposition took place not in theological dispute against heresy but in preaching and teaching within the church. What Athanasius said to his congregation on a Sunday morning is largely irrecoverable—largely, but fortunately not completely. In addition to his anti-Arian treatises, Athanasius left behind a body of pastoral and personal letters and a handful of sermons, in which we gain a glimpse of the bishop’s general approach to biblical teaching and exposition.[60] In them we see the heart of Athanasius’s biblical interpretation. He reads Scripture christocentrically, that is, typologically.[61] The Bible is about the Word of the Father made flesh. Once we have seen that, we will be in a position to evaluate more accurately what is going on even in the “deductive” readings of his polemical treatises.
Typological readings appear in many of Athanasius’s Festal Letters, annual public encyclicals circulated to exhort his congregation to prepare for the celebration of Easter.[62] According to Athanasius, the Christian celebration of Easter was rooted in the history of ancient Israel. The ancient Pascha was the redemption of Israel, and thus it typified in an especially dramatic way the redemption of the world through Jesus, the Passover Lamb who goes to the cross and rises again at Pascha. Athanasius repeats the typological truism that all the old rites and institutions are but shadows dispelled now that the reality of Christ has appeared, but he gives this particular concreteness by emphasizing the fall of Jerusalem. While Judea and Jerusalem stood, “there were a type, and a lamb, and a shadow, since the law thus commanded,” but now that the city “since the coming of our Savior, has had an end, and all the land of the Jews has been laid waste,” then “there must of necessity be an end of the shadow” (Festal Letter 1.7–8).
In place of the shadows, Christians enjoy the reality, a new exodus, a new Moses, a new feast. Following this Moses and “rejoicing in afflictions, we break through the furnace of iron and darkness, and pass, unharmed, over that terrible Red Sea” so that we can sing “with Moses” the “great song of praise” (Festal Letter 3.5). As Israel was delivered by blood, so God “made the world free by the blood of the Savior”; as Pharaoh was conquered, so “He has caused the grave to be trodden down by the Savior’s death, and furnished a way to the heavenly gates free from obstacles to those who are going up.” Citing Romans 5, Athanasius declares that “death reigned from Adam to Moses,” but the word of the new order is, “Today you shall be with me in paradise” (Festal Letter 5.3).
Jesus, in short, is “everything at once to us”: shepherd, high priest, way, door, feast, holiday, and Passover sacrifice.[63] Everything hidden behind the veil of the temple is now summed up and openly manifest in the incarnate Son:

 He it was who was expected, He caused a light to shine at the prayer of the Psalmist, who said, “My Joy, deliver me from those who surround me”; this being indeed true rejoicing, this being a true feast, even deliverance from wickedness, whereto a man attains by thoroughly adopting an upright conversation, and being approved in his mind of godly submission towards God. For thus the saints all their lives long were like men rejoicing at a feast. One found rest in prayer to God, as blessed David, who rose in the night, not once but seven times. Another gave glory in songs of praise, as great Moses, who sang a song of praise for the victory over Pharaoh, and those task-masters (Exod. 15). Others performed worship with unceasing diligence, like great Samuel and blessed Elijah; who have ceased from their course, and now keep the feast in heaven, and rejoice in what they formerly learned through shadows, and from the types recognize the truth. (Festal Letter 14.1)

Though the Festal Letters are rich christological meditations, the bishop cannot keep himself from exhortation. Typology is not only about the transition from the Old to the New, from shadows to the Eternal Light that has come in Jesus, but also about the way the faithful must respond to the Light. Christ imprinted himself on the events and institutions of Israel, and now that he has fulfilled those types he is impressing his character on the church. By hearing, believing, and doing the feast, Christians are made over into the image of the Lord. In terms of the later medieval fourfold method, or “quadriga,” allegorical typology immediately entails hortatory tropology.
Athanasius emphasizes this by repeatedly drawing attention to the requirements for the “true feast” of Christians. “What else is the feast,” he asks, “but the service of the soul? And what is that service, but prolonged prayer to God, and unceasing thanksgiving?” (Festal Letter 3.2). Like Judith and Esther, who gained victory after devoting themselves to fasting and prayer, Christians overcome “the devil, that tyrant against the whole world,” not through fleshly feasts but through “an eternal and heavenly one” (Festal Letter 4.2–3). To prepare for this feast, “we should approach such a feast, not with filthy raiment, but having clothed our minds with pure garments.” That means that “we need in this to put on our Lord Jesus, that we may be able to celebrate the feast with Him.” Clothing ourselves with Christ means loving virtue, hating wickedness, pursuing temperance, and avoiding lust; it involves open-doored hospitality and open-handed generosity, as humility dispels pride (Festal Letter 4.3). The Christian feast “does not consist in pleasant intercourse at meals, nor splendor of clothing, nor days of leisure, but in the acknowledgment of God and the offering of thanksgiving and praise.” Such feasting is possible only to the saints, those “who live in Christ” (Festal Letter 7.3), the Christ who is the true feast, the giver of the Spirit who binds and harmonizes the festive assembly (Festal Letter 10.2).


Peter J. Leithart, Athanasius (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2011).

[laylitur]

• Christian Apologetics

The worst I have to say about this volume is why is the second volume available in dead tree form and not Vyrso. (Okay, I have a free review copy of the 2nd volume).
Highly recommend.



Contents

Introduction to the Two-Volume Work

Part 1. The Early Church: The Struggle for Vindication
Part 1 Introduction

1. Biblical Texts

2. Aristides

3. Justin Martyr

4. Athenagoras

5. Irenaeus

6.Tertullian

7. Origen

8. Athanasius

9. John Chrysostom

10. Augustine

Part 2. The Middle Ages: The Church Becomes Established
Part 2 Introduction

11. Boethius

12. Peter Abelard

13. Anselm

14.Thomas Aquinas

15. Raymond Lull

16. Girolamo Savonarola


Wiliam Edgar, K. Scott Oliphint, William Edgar et al., Christian Apologetics (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009).

Sic et Non

Perhaps his best-known text, Sic et non (1120) will not be reproduced here. Much of its contents overlap the Ethics or Know Yourself, which we will reproduce. Meaning “Yes and No,” or, perhaps more accurately, “For and Against,” Sic et non is a unique and influential work addressing the problem of apparent and sometimes real contradictions, particularly in regard to ethical direction. For example, one finds many contradictory statements in the directives of the church fathers. In the medieval world to which Abelard belonged one needed to assume that the fathers spoke with authority. Therefore most of the time their words could not be portrayed as real or final contradictions. How, then, might one explain them?
There may be many grounds for what could appear contradictory. As we saw above, one may use different terms with the same basic content, perhaps for variety and to avert boredom. A writer may use generalizations so that simple folk can understand. Approximations may be more helpful than absolute precision would be. Poetical language is often more compelling than simple prose. One father may quote another who is in error. Or the conflict between their writings might be real. In this case the reader must learn to choose the truer statement.
Abelard boldly states that the fathers may err. He cites the case of Peter the apostle when he was admonished by Paul for succumbing to Jewish ceremonial traditions discarded by the gospel (Gal. 2:11–14). Augustine wrote the Retractions discussed in the previous section. Even though the fathers were imbued with great authority, readers should scrutinize their writings before accepting them as true. Abelard’s own followers were expected to do this with his writings. Otherwise no discussion would be possible, but only rote learning.
The exception to this freedom to criticize is when one is reading the Scriptures. If while studying the sacred writ one comes across a difficulty, it is possible that the original writer did not err but that the scribe who copied the manuscript missed something. Abelard also recommends that we simply admit that the passage may be hard to understand.
Sic et non was likely a student manual to impart the art of debate and creative discussion. Following Aristotle, Abelard believed that doubting led to deeper examination, and deeper examination led to truth.


Ethics, or Know Yourself

Both the Dialogue between a Christian and a Jew and the Ethics were written sometime between 1136 and 1139. Both concern the placement of ethics, or the study of morals, in relation to various methods of evaluation. They center on the question of the summon bonum, the ultimate good.
The Ethics has the alternate title Know Yourself, with a bow to Socrates. The purpose of this text is to study “the defects or qualities of the mind which dispose us to bad or good actions” (prologue). It is a detailed study of motivation. Questions are posed, such as whether there can be an inclination to evil, whether physical defects can contribute to sin, whether unintended consequences are culpable, and the like. The significance of this work for apologetics is its defense of God’s sovereignty over a world full of moral ambiguity. For example, though Judas the betrayer was motivated by evil, God used it for the greater good (Rom. 8:32). “God considers not the action, but the spirit of the action,” Abelard says (chap. 3).
In the intricacies of the text, Abelard introduces us to fine distinctions that have for their goal to understand moral worth in relation to the basic motivations and predispositions of moral agents. Abelard put great emphasis on personal intentions. They became almost the sole measure of the true moral value of an action. Pushed to an extreme, his approach could lead to speculation. Abelard is credited with anticipating some of the more contemporary discussions in ethics in a way his scholastic successors did not.


Ethics


The Beginning of Master Peter Abelard’s Book
Called “Know Yourself”


Book I

(1) We call “morals” the mind’s vices or virtues that make us disposed to bad or good deeds.
(2) Not only are there the mind’s vices or goods, but also the body’s. For example, weakness of the body or the strength we call vigor, sluggardness or nimbleness, lameness or walking erect, blindness or sight. That is why when we said “vices” we prefixed the words “the mind’s,” in order to exclude such bodily vices. Now these vices (that is, the mind’s) are contrary to virtues. For example, injustice to justice, laziness to perseverance, immoderateness to moderation.
On Mental Vice Relevant to Morals
(3) But there are also some vices or goods of the mind that are unconnected to morals and don’t make a human life deserving of censure or praise. For example, mental obtuseness or a quick wit, being forgetful or having a good memory, ignorance or knowledge. Since all these things turn up among reprobates and good people alike, they are irrelevant to the make-up of morals and don’t make a life shameful or respectable. Thus when we said “the mind’s vices” above [(1)], we were right to add, in order to exclude such morally irrelevant vices, the words “that make us disposed to bad deeds” that is, they incline the will to something that isn’t properly to be done or renounced at all.
What Difference Is There between a Sin and a Vice Inclining One to Evil?
(4) This kind of mental vice isn’t the same as a sin. And a sin isn’t the same as a bad action. For instance, being hot tempered—that is, disposed or easily given to the turmoil that is anger—is a vice. It inclines the mind to doing something impulsively and irrationally that isn’t fit to be done at all. Now this vice is in the soul in such a way that the soul is easily given to getting angry even when it isn’t being moved to anger, just as the lameness whereby a person is called “lame” is in him even when he isn’t limping around. For the vice is present even when the action is absent.
(5) So also the body’s very nature or structure makes many people prone to wantonness, just as it does to anger. But they don’t sin by the fact that they are like this. Rather they get from it material for a fight, so that victorious over themselves through the virtue of moderation they might obtain a crown. Thus Solomon says, “The long-suffering man is better than the mighty man, and the one who rules his mind than the capturer of cities.” For religion doesn’t think it shameful to be defeated by a human being, but by a vice. The former surely happens to good people too, but in the latter we depart from goods.


Wiliam Edgar, K. Scott Oliphint, William Edgar et al., Christian Apologetics (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009).

Okay - there is a problem with the series ... it should be 6-8 volumes. So much is left out.

[laylitur]

• Death and Afterlife: A Theological Introduction

Okay, this is the last one that I own - I haven't had time to read it but browsing, it looks like its worth a read ... but not sure I'll do a lot of rereading.

CONTENTS




  Introduction




1. Underworld, Soul, and Resurrection in Ancient Judaism

2. Death and Afterlife in the New Testament

3. Death and Afterlife in the Christian Tradition

4. Scientific Challenges to Afterlife

5. Near Death Experiences

6. On the Soul

7. Resurrection

8. Justification and Judgment

9. Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell

10. Dying Well


  Notes

Terence Nichols, Death and Afterlife: A Theological Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2010).

Views of the Soul in the Bible and in Christian Tradition

We saw that there is a range of views on the soul in the Old and New Testaments. Furthermore, especially in the Old Testament, the understanding of the soul developed over time. In the early texts we find the notion that the shade of the dead person survives in the underworld (usually called Sheol). The shades are ghostly survivals of persons that possess no life force but are sufficient to carry on personal identity in the underworld. In late Jewish apocalyptic literature, Sheol was regarded as an intermediate state where the dead await the resurrection, where the good are rewarded, and where the wicked are punished. In Judaism of the New Testament period, generally, the Pharisees and the Essenes taught that the soul survived bodily death and was reunited with the body in resurrection, whereas the Sadducees denied both the resurrection and the survival of the soul.
There are a variety of beliefs in the New Testament also, and notions of the soul are not well developed. A number of texts, however, point to the widespread New Testament belief that personal identity can survive bodily death. This is the most natural interpretation of Jesus’s saying “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt. 10:28). It is the most natural way to interpret the parable of the rich man being punished in Hades and Lazarus resting in Abraham’s bosom, and of the souls of the dead martyrs in Revelation 6 calling out for justice. It is the most natural way of interpreting Jesus’s promise to the dying thief on the cross: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43). When the risen Jesus appears to his disciples in Jerusalem (Luke 24:37), his disciples think they are seeing a ghost or spirit: “They were startled and terrified, and thought they were seeing a ghost” (pneuma; RSV: “spirit”). Even Joel Green, who generally denies the existence of a soul, comments: “It is difficult not to see in the disciples’ responses a dualist anthropology; accordingly, in their imaginative categories, they were encountering a disembodied spirit, a phantasm.”7 The disciples’ reaction, then, is evidence for the prevalence of the view in the New Testament period that personal identity could exist in a disembodied state. There are many other such passages, especially if we acknowledge that the word “spirit” (pneuma) can sometimes, like “soul” (psyche), refer to the spirit of a person that survives bodily death. Thus while dying, Stephen prays: “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” (Acts 7:59). At least two passages in Paul’s letters imply the possibility of personal existence outside the body (see chap. 2, above).8 In sum, then, there is considerable evidence in the New Testament that there was a widespread belief that persons can survive as souls or spirits outside the body, even though the nature of that state was not clearly worked out.9
Again, there is a range of views about the soul in the Christian tradition. Some thinkers, such as Tertullian, thought of the soul as composed of a subtle material substance. Most thinkers, however, thought of the soul as immaterial. Origen and Aquinas thought it was the form or formative principle of the body. What is clear, however, is that from very early times, at least by ca. 200 CE, there is a widespread belief that the soul survives bodily death and awaits the resurrection. Perpetua, in 202 CE, had a vision of her dead brother, Dinocrates, and prayed for him. Afterward, she had another vision in which he was comforted. The Letter to Diognetus, dated about the end of the second century or the beginning of the third, states: “The soul dwells in the body, but is not of the body. . . . The soul, which is invisible, is confined in the body, which is visible. . . . The soul is enclosed in the body, but it holds the body together.”10 Thinkers as diverse as Tertullian and Aquinas held that the soul was the seat of reason and of free will in the person. Virtually all thinkers thought of the soul as carrying the identity of the person from the death of the body until the resurrection. Finally, from early times it was thought that the souls of the martyrs enjoyed the full presence of God in the afterlife. Aquinas held that the blessed in heaven enjoyed the beatific vision, and therefore a direct vision of God.
Thus from the Bible and the Christian tradition, we can gather several affirmations concerning the soul:


   1. It is the seat of consciousness and awareness.
   2. It is the seat of personal identity and carries personal identity forward from the death of the body into the resurrection.
   3. It is the seat of intelligence, reason, and understanding.
   4. It is the seat of freedom (i.e., free choice).
   5. It is capable of knowing God directly, at least in heaven. This is evident in the affirmation that the souls of the martyrs behold God in heaven.


We will consider all of these as we develop a theology of the soul in the remainder of this chapter.


Terence Nichols, Death and Afterlife: A Theological Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2010).

[fgh]

Great work! -- but that looks like seven to me, not four. 

One question:

This is a volume of the series Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality. I like the series, I like the book.

You say you "like the series". To me that implies you've read more than one volume. Yet I find myself unable to locate any more published volumes, even on Baker's own site. Are there any?

Btw, you must have done some Amazon reviews for Logos books. How about cutting and pasting them into Logos new review function some day when you have time?

[fgh]

If anyone is interested, the two Eyes to See volumes are in the $3.99 sale.