Pocket History of Theology

Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
ACT I A Story Takes Shape
ACT II The Plot Thickens
ACT III The Story Divides
ACT IV Reforming, Revising and Rewriting the Story . .
ACT V An Unresolved Plot
Index
In response to the Christians' worship of Jesus, Celsus wrote: "It cannot be the case that God came
It may be fair to say that Ignatius's letters contain the first real Christian theology. Ignatius ex
of immortality" to justify belief in salvation as a sacramental process of theosis-"divinization" or
On a different level, Ignatius strongly emphasized Christian obedience to bishops. His letters frequ
To the Ephesians he wrote, "It is obvious, therefore, that we must regard the bishop as the Lord h
The Shepherd contains a series of visions and their explanations given by an angel to Hennas himself
First of all, believe that God is one, who created all things and set them in order, and made out of
Without doubt Justin Martyr (d. A.D. 162) deserves his reputation as "the most important second-cent
analogy of fire. The Son's (Logos's) generation from the Father in no way diminishes the Father beca
I confess that I both boast and with all my strength strive to be found a Christian; not because the
In the background of this thinking, of course, are Paul's reflections on Adam and Christ in Romans 5
Clement went to the extreme of identifying the ideal Christian as "the true Gnostic" or "the perfect
For Clement, any achievement of perfection is a work of God that comes about through the human perso
Wary of any use of Greek philosophy, Tertullian advised Christians to avoid rationalizing Christian
Some of Tertullian's statements about Christian faith and the nature of belief seem fairly extreme.
sense. However, Tertullian was using hyperbole to drive home his point that the most important knowl
substance" without body, parts or passions.'
One of Celsus's main arguments against Christianity was that the incarnation would necessarily intro
First, Origen attempted to solve the riddles of the doctrines of God and the incarnation by exploiti
Of course Cyprian did not invent this Christian ecclesiology (which would better be called "episcopa
Furthermore, Cyprian was one of the first church fathers to clearly and unequivocally affirm baptism
We believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible; And in one Lo
Attached to the end of the creed was an anathema, a brief statement of the heresy being denounced: "
the definition of God as Father, and "God's offspring is eternal, for His nature is ever perfect....
For Athanasius, denial of the eternal deity of the Son of God was a serious offense against the Fa
For Athanasius, the whole point of theology is to preserve and protect the gospel, and the gospel is
Gregory of Nazianzus, who presided over the Council of Constantinople, intuited thatifJesus Christ's
Cyril's favorite formula for expressing the incarnation was "God the Logos did not come into a rnan,
When word of the schism reached the emperor, he strongly pressured the parties to compromise. He sup
At the end of the Robber Synod in Ephesus, "the Bishop of Alexandria had every reason to be satisfie
Godhead and the same perfect in manhood, truly God and truly man, the same of a rational soul and bo
absolute helplessness and dependency of the human soul on the grace of God."'
seemed to him that God's action in his own experience of conversion was so overwhelming that he coul
except to sin."3
In spite of the inherited guilt of original sin and the inevitability of sinning, God's plans are no
In other words, for Augustine God alone is the all-determining reality, and whatever happens, incl
the law; since we are not able to do what the law commands unless we obtain strength to do it by the
Any other view, he argued, would weaken belief in our depravity and in the sole sufficiency of God
Augustine, Gregory wrote, "Even the predestination itself to the eternal kingdom is so arranged by t
For Gregory, "prayers, penance, masses, intercession, works-all are forms of human effort mediatin
What is it, then, that a person must do to activate grace so that he or she becomes one of God's ele
may involve guilt"
Leaders of the Western Church would not budge on the issue. Indeed, they condemned as heretical any