Church Fathers, Patristics, “Apostolic Fathers”
“Kevin Vanhoozer, the great hermeneutician… was going to deliver to serious, believing readers of Scripture a mere Christian hermeneutics, the hallway where the various denominations and reading cultures, more on that term in a moment, who read Scripture might find some hermeneutical unity amidst our never-ending theological cacophony.” - Mark Ward
“The first book is by far the richest for Christian devotion. Here Augustine distinguishes between things that should be ‘enjoyed’ (God alone) and those that should be ‘used’ (everything else, including Scripture, as a means to lead to God). He teaches his famous ordo amoris (order of loves)” - Churches Without Chests
“Interlacing representative, essential, mostly brief passages from Confessions with a breezy but incisive ongoing commentary… Dr. Kreeft navigates us through the mind of a man who, in changing his own world, helped lay the foundations for our own.” - Imaginative Conservative
“though the divide between mainstream American life and traditional Christianity is growing, we are not at the point where the Early Church started. Cultural hostility and social media cancellation campaigns aren’t the same as systematic persecution.” - 9 Marks
“They lived in a world with challenges and concerns that don’t feel as pressing to us. So they seem less equipped to help us with ministry. Yet Ford and Wilhite show how these pastors offer wisdom for contemporary pastoral practice.” - TGC
From DBSJ 21 (2016). Republished with permission. By John A. Aloisi. Read the series.
Adam’s first sin was a point of no return for the entire human race. Ever since that initial act of rebellion, all mankind has been born with the taint of original sin.33
David Beale, a longtime professor of historical theology at BJU Seminary, published his two-volume Historical Theology In-Depth in 2013. This is an outstanding work, and every pastor and interested Christian should use it as the “go to” text for a foundational explanation of key themes in historical theology.
Ignatius was the pastor of the congregation in Antioch, Syria. He was arrested for his faith by the Roman authorities, and taken under guard to Rome, where he is believed to have died as a martyr. Along his journey to certain death, Ignatius wrote seven letters to different Christian churches. One of these was written to the congregation at Philadelphia.
If you grew up in American evangelicalism, like I did, your grasp of church history, especially of the church fathers, may be relatively weak. Like a good fundamentalist, I grew up knowing all about D.L. Moody, George Whitfield, and Billy Sunday. I also had heard of Martin Luther and John Calvin, although I had more suspicion of them. But the church fathers were Roman Catholics from who knows when, and they didn’t have anything to teach me.
This idea, mind you, was “caught,” not “taught.” Church history has much to teach us, and the church fathers wouldn’t so easily fit into the mold of Catholicism as we know it. The early church fathers, especially, are worthy of study, and to them we owe thanks for an orthodox understanding and articulation of such important doctrines as the deity of Christ, the Trinity, and the deity of the Holy Spirit.
Basil of Caesarea (329-379 AD), a Greek-speaking Bishop in what is now Turkey, was so important a figure in the fight for biblical orthodoxy, that he is remembered as Basil the Great. He may be the most significant church father that most people haven’t heard of. Athanasius gets more notoriety for defending the Trinity contra mundum (against the world), but Basil was right there with him. Basil’s writings against the Arians, and his work On the Holy Spirit, helped to provide the church with some of the terminology that would eventually make up the orthodox definition of the Trinity: “one essence, but three persons.”
