Regaining Our Footing From Past Followers
A Feature Review of
Early Christian Theology: A History
J. Warren Smith
Hardcover: Eerdmans, 2026
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Reviewed by Alden Bass
When teaching theology to undergraduates, I often introduce classic Christology through Christmas songs. “O Come All Ye Faithful” by John Francis Wade quotes the Council of Chalcedon almost verbatim, and lines like Charles Wesley’s “veil’d in flesh, the Godhead see, hail th’Incarnate Deity” retain the archaic metaphysical language of the first Christian theologians, the Church Fathers. Warren Smith shares this strategy: he opens his Early Christian Theology: A History by quoting these two songs, and one of his chapters is titled “Ransom Captive Israel.” This theological language remains in circulation a millennium later, hymned by millions of carolers each Yuletide. The Wesley and Wade examples also show that Patristic theology is not limited by confessional boundaries: one writer was a Methodist, the other a Catholic. All branches of the global Church look to the patristic period as a touchstone and source of doctrine, however differently they weigh its authority against scripture, later councils, or the magisterium. Early Christian theology is the shared ground on which we all stand.
Smith has spent his career teaching this patrimony to divinity students at Duke University – the book, dedicated to them, grew out of his Early Christianity courses – and has published widely across both Greek and Latin patristics. He is also an ordained United Methodist minister, which gives him a pastor’s perspective on these texts. This book is the work of someone who has not only taught and studied these ancient texts, but also lived inside them, trying to make sense of them on their own terms and trying to communicate their significance both to the academy and the church. He is careful to specify in the first paragraph that this book is a work of history rather than theology. Yet the best kind of theology – theology that speaks truths about God, humanity, and our world with contextual specificity – begins with an understanding of the original situation in which the Christian system first emerged.
In practice, writing as a historian rather than a theologian means Smith surveys the whole landscape of early Christian thought and not just the ground occupied by the historical “winners.” Minority Gnostics, Manichaeans, Arians, Donatists, and Pelagians get their say alongside orthodox titans like Irenaeus, Athanasius, and Augustine. Though the Nicene tradition occupies the bulk of the narrative, Smith does not focus exclusively on those figures. He patiently works through different positions, explaining how each group came to believe what they did and acknowledging that a different outcome at a given council or debate might have left us with a very different “orthodoxy” today. There was no pure “deposit of faith;” doctrine develops in ways no one could have charted in advance, mushrooming out of practical, pastoral pressures rather than a foreordained system.
That initial refusal to impose order after the fact is reflected in the structure of the book. The volume is organized by theological themes but still follows a loose chronological development through each chapter. The opening two chapters cover background matters of worship, scripture, and the response to pagan culture in the first century. The analysis of doctrine proper begins with Chapter Three, which treats creation and the Fall. There follow five great chapters on the Trinitarian and Christological controversies that consumed the fourth century – this is the heart of the book. Shorter chapters on atonement, the problem of evil, free will and election, deification, and eschatology round out the contents. If these latter areas receive less attention, it’s only because they were not yet major issues in this period. There’s no sustained treatment of eucharistic theology, for example, because that controversy doesn’t erupt until the ninth century (and doesn’t become deeply divisive until the Reformation). Likewise, what we’d now call “atonement theories” remain relatively undeveloped at this stage.
Chapter Three, on the Fall and its effects, illustrates how Smith captures the diversity of the early Church while maintaining a narrative thread. He examines five different accounts of the Fall – comparing them, pointing out the relationships between them, and explaining how a consensus gradually emerged. For the Gnostics, creation and the Fall were the same event; matter is evil, and to be made material was already to have fallen. Ireaneus disagreed. Humans were created not fallen but unfinished, meant to grow into maturity the way a child grows into an adult. What looks like failure in Eden is really just adolescence. Origen’s account is stranger: he held that rational souls pre-existed the material world and that the Fall occurred before its creation. The physical world was actually the result of sin, which he understood as a loss of focus on God, a cooling of our love for him. Gregory of Nyssa, though an admirer of Origen, was more protective of creation’s original goodness. He linked the Fall to gendered bodies, albeit in a confused way. The division of male and female was meant to blunt the effects of mortality brought on by sin, yet the sexual passions generated by gender difference contributed to the first sin. Augustine, writing from North Africa, argued that sin is rooted in the intellect and will, not the body. His account came to be known as “original sin,” and though contested by Pelagius and others, it became the dominant version of the story in the Latin West. This potpourri of theological readings is a sample of the tremendous diversity in this period, all of which remains available for constructive theological work today.
Smith offers a dispassionate history of early Christian thought, one which attempts to fairly present the variety of thinkers and positions across the ancient world. A history like this could easily end where so many have ended before – with Augustine’s City of God, the closing of patristic theology and the opening of the great medieval synthesis. In the final chapter on eschatology, Smith does engage Augustine’s now familiar views on death, the life to come, and the punishment of the wicked. Yet rather than end there, Smith closes with a sustained engagement with the doctrine of apokatastasis – universal salvation and the restoration of all things – in the works of Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus Confessor. A history characterized by generous inclusion fittingly gives the last word not to the West’s great systematizer but to two Greek voices arguing that condemnation might not have the final word in God’s own story.
Wade and Wesley wrote their patristic-inflected carols in the 18th century, in a moment when the English church was recovering ancient Christian writings. The retrieval of this tradition was viewed as a bulwark against Enlightenment modernity. In moments of crisis and uncertainty, the church has always sought to regain its footing by returning to the Church Fathers. Smith’s magisterial work helps us do that again. It will become the standard one-volume introduction to patristic theology assigned in seminaries and graduate programs for the next generation. It’s a massive work, weighing in at 500 pages, and densely argued, but the prose is elegant and the story is well told – one need not be a seminarian to tackle it or to gain a richer appreciation for the central claim of our shared faith, expressed so well in Wesley’s carol: “Peace on earth and mercy mild, God and sinners reconciled.”
Alden Bass
Alden Bass teaches theology at Oklahoma Christian University.
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