Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism
By Jaroslav Pelikan
My rating:Â 4 of 5 stars
One of the problems of the Protestant Christianity I am associated with is that, by and large, we are unaware of anything that happened prior to the Reformation. Its Evangelical subculture is even worse, often being unaware of anything that has happened more than ten years ago, or anything outside one’s own church. Thankfully, there has been a resurgence of patristic (church fathers) scholarship in recent years to help redress this imbalance.
This book by church historian Jaroslav Pelikan is an early harbinger of this scholarly resurgence, being published in 1993 as the text of his 1992-1993 Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology at the University of Aberdeen. The book focuses on the work of the Three Cappadocian fathers, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory Nazianzus, along with Macrina, the sister of Basil and Gregory of Nyssa.
Pelikan organizes the book into two parts. Part One looks at the natural theology of the Cappadocians in their apologetic engagement with the Hellenistic world as well as Christian heretics. Part Two considers “Natural Theology as Presupposition†looking at how these figures worked from their engagement with Hellenistic thought to the formulation of Christian doctrine through the intersection of natural theology and revelation. The chapters in each part parallel the other part focusing on classical culture, natural theology, the language we use to speak of God, our ways of knowing including the relation of reason to faith, the one and the many, the nature of the cosmos, how God works in time and space, humankind in God’s image, the good, the true and beautiful in our worship, and the “end†of all things.
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