FATHERS AND HERETICS: SIX STUDIES IN DOGMATIC FAITH, WITH PROLOGUE AND EPILOGUE, BEING THE BAMPTON LECTURES FOR 1940

I am shocked that book has not been reissued, owing not only to the author's genius and wit but to the subject matter itself. Fathers and Heretics is the in my mind one of the best introductions to the personalities and ideas at play in the early Church. What you come away with from this very well written and accessible text is a broadening of your appreciation and understanding of what it means to believe in Christ. We sometimes tend to understand our beliefs as immediately drawn from Scripture, without the intermediaries of Fathers and heretics who have greatly shaped what we mean by theology. Our faith does not live in a vacuum and it is historically conditioned. What Prestige shows is that, if you are in line with the Fathers, you are in line with the revelation of God in Christ, and you owe them a big `thank you' for their defense of the faith once delivered to the saints. For in reality, we do not believe what we believe from a virgin reading of the Bible; we are conditioned. And if you are in line with the heretics (most of whom were honest men who sought what was true, but unwilling to be open to being wrong), you are in good modern company, but not in the Church, since the great heresies for the earlier periods have resurfaced under new names, with the fundamental philosophical or theological errors are the same. Either way, we are very much `done unto'. Topics include the following: - Tradition, or the scriptural basis of theology - Callistus, or faith in a divine savior - Origen, of the claims of religious intelligence - Athanasius, or the unity of God - Apollinaris, or divine irruption - Nestorius, or redeemed humanity - Cyril, or one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism - Eros, or devotion to the sacred humanity - Index Also highly recommended is Prestige's God in Patristic Thought, Beginning to Read the Fathers, The Fathers of the Church, Expanded Edition, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600), Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes, Evangelicals and Tradition: The Formative Influence of the Early Church (Evangelical Ressourcement: Ancient Sources for the Church's Future) and Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism (Gifford Lectures Series). The Cruelty of Heresy: An Affirmation of Christian Orthodoxy is also very useful, as are the works of Georges Florovsky. Enjoy!