| A Brief Review of
Early Christian Thinkers: Reviewed by Maria Drews. |
With one foot in the Biblical text and another in our modern world, church history gets stepped over all too often. Yet tracing the development of Christian theology from the apostolic age to today provides an important understanding of how Christian thinking developed and matured, interacting with culture and time, weathering heresies and seeking unity. Like setting out on a journey, the first steps of Christian thought in the apostolic age were important for setting the direction and method of Christian thinking for the church.
In Early Christian Thinkers: The Lives and Legacies of Twelve Key Figures, edited by Paul Foster, twelve leading scholars explore the writing, theology, setting, impact, and study of important thinkers as they strove to create an intellectual account of faith in the first four centuries of the church. The book covers well-known church fathers, such as Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Origen, as well as lesser-known thinkers, such as Tatian and Hippolytus of Rome, while thankfully including one early church mother, Perpetua.
Irenaeus wrestled with confronting heresies before the canon of Scripture was set, when opponents could refute the truth by calling the authority of Scriptures themselves into question. Clement of Alexandria wrestled to put the Christian faith into philosophical terms that could be understood by critical Greek pagans, to the vexation of Christians insisting on the sufficiency of ‘bare faith’. The strength of this volume lies in these summaries of the thinkers’ theological work, showing how they wrestled to formulate their thoughts in challenging cultural and historical environments. As the editor Paul Foster notes, the study of these thinkers “provide ongoing insights into the manner in which robust doctrinal, ecclesiological and ideational differences can be negotiated,” providing rich examples for the church in our own challenging postmodern context (xix).
Yet readers beware. In a volume penned by a variety of scholars, there is also a variety of content and quality. Some chapters become bogged down over the study of the study of early Christian thinkers, and except for the select few interested in the debate over the original language of Tatian’s Diatessaronic (are you not dying to know if it was written in Syriac or Greek?), the excursus into scholarly debates can become tedious. And while the subdivided chapters each dedicated to one early thinker make the book organized enough for readers to easily jump in, as well as an accessible reference to have on hand, it takes the early thinkers out of the larger narrative of history, obscuring their impact on each other and their setting. Throughout, assumptions of previous knowledge of church history can send novice readers to Wikipedia more than they may like. Yet, for the interested reader, Early Christian Thinkers will provide a rewarding wealth of knowledge on twelve important figures in the early church and an introduction into the scholarship surrounding their study, while provoking questions of our methods of negotiating doctrinal, ecclesiological, and ideational differences in our own context.
C. Christopher Smith is the founding editor of The Englewood Review of Books. He is also author of a number of books, including most recently How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church (Brazos Press, 2019). Connect with him online at: C-Christopher-Smith.com
 Reading for the Common Good From ERB Editor Christopher Smith "This book will inspire, motivate and challenge anyone who cares a whit about the written word, the world of ideas, the shape of our communities and the life of the church." -Karen Swallow Prior Enter your email below to sign up for our weekly newsletter & download your FREE copy of this ebook! |
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