With thanks to Revd. Saliba for his kind permission the following article is now available on-line in PDF:
Issa. A. Saliba, "The Bishop of Antioch and the Heretics," The Evangelical Quarterly 54.2 (Apr.-June 1982): 65-76.
Click here for the link.
Thanks to Dr Varner's kind permission the following article is now available on-line in PDF:
William Varner, "In the wake of Trypho: Jewish-Christian dialogues in the third to sixth centuries," The Evangelical Quarterly 80.3 (July 2008): 219-236.
Click here to read.
With thanks to Dr Watts for his kind permission the following article is now on-line in PDF:
Craig M. Watts, "The Humanity of Jesus in Justin Martyr’s Soteriology," The Evangelical Quarterly 56.1 (Jan.-Mar. 1984): 21-34.
Click here to read the article.
The following article is now available on line here in PDF format.
David F. Wright, "Christian Faith in the Greek World: Justin Martyr's Testimony," The Evangelical Quarterly 54.2 (Apr.-June 1982): 77-87.
The following article is available on-line in PDF. Click here for the link.
David E. Aune, "Early Christian Biblical Interpretation," The Evangelical Quarterly 41.2 (April-May 1969): 89-96.
My thanks to Professor Aune for his kind permission.
The following article is now available in PDF:
A. Skevington-Wood, "The Eschatology of Irenaeus," The Evangelical Quarterly 41.1 (Jan.-Mar. 1969): 30-41.
The following article is now available on-line in PDF.
T.V. Philip, "Authority of Scripture in the Patristic Period," Indian Journal of Theology 23.1-2 (Jan.-June 1974): 1-8. Click here to read.
The following article is now on-line in PDF:
Marvyn H. Harper, "The Study of Church History," Indian Journal of Theology 6.2 (April-June 1957): 39-52. Click here to read.
The following articles is now available in PDF:
Donald F. Hudson, "The Attitude of the Apologists to Non-Christian Religions," Indian Journal of Theology 6.1 (Jan.-Mar. 1957): 15-18. Click here to read.
The following article is now available in PDF:
V.C. Samuel. "Some Facts About the Alexandrine Christology," Indian Journal of Theology 11.4 (Oct.-Dec. 1962): 136-142. Click here to read.
The following article is now available in PDF:
D.M. Davey, "Justin Martyr and the Fourth Gospel," Scripture 17 No. 40 (Oct. 1965) 117-122. Click here to read the article.
The following article is now available on-line in PDF:
James M.G. Purves, "The Spirit and the Imago Dei: Reviewing the Anthropology of Irenaeus of Lyons," The Evangelical Quarterly 68.2 (Apr.-June 1996): 99-120.
If you find this article helful, please leave a comment. Not only is this an encouragement it will also help others to find the entry in the search engines.
The following article is now available in PDF:
Donald Macleod, "God or god? Arianism, Ancient and Modern," The Evangelical Quarterly 68.2 (Apr.-June 1996): 121-138.
The following article is now online in PDF:
Colin J. Hemer, "The Manchester Rotas / Sator Square," Faith and Thought 105.1&2 (1978): 36-40.
My thanks to the Trustees of Tyndale House for their kind permission to reproduce this article.
The following articles are now available on-line in PDF:
John W. Drane, "Gnosticism and the New Testament 1," TSF Bulletin 68 (Spring 1974): 6-13.
John W. Drane, "Gnosticism and the New Testament 2," TSF Bulletin 69 (Summer 1974): 1-7.
My thanks to Professor Drane for his kind permission to reproduce these articles.
With new academic year due to begin in the next few weeks I thought it would be good to update my visitors on recent and forthcoming developments across the “Theology on the Web” websites.
Over the last few months I’ve been experimenting with different formats for the articles I upload. Since I began in 2001 I’ve scanned, OCR’d and then proof-read all the articles that I’ve placed online. This produces very clear text and very small file sizes, but it does have the disadvantage of being very time consuming as well as introducing typos.
The situation is at present that I have a full-time job in a Christian charity, a wife and three little boys, so website work must be confined to my lunch hour or late evenings. Although I received over a million visitors each year only 4 of these support the work regularly on a monthly basis. The two advertisers who paid for space on the websites have decided not to renew this year. All this means is that while I still hope to do this work full-time on the sites at some point there is no prospect of this in the near future on the basis of current funding levels. If you would like to support the development of the sites I suggest a number of ways of doing so here.
This has led me to change the format of the articles I upload to scanned PDF’s with OCR’d text. These retain the original layout, can be searched, cut and pasted and appear in search engines. They can be produced very quickly (I could scan and place online an entire book in a few hours) but the file size is around 15-20 times larger a word-processed version. A few people have complained about this change, but I would rather have the material available now rather in several years time (if ever) even if the format does not please everyone.
I have recently completed the entire 11 volumes of the Bulletin of the Evangelical Theological Society and will be integrating the articles into my site in the next few weeks. Vox Evangelica (which I began working on in 2006) should be complete by the end of next week. I have recently completed a table of contents for the Theological Students Fellowship (TSF) Bulletin (UK) and a number of these articles are now online. Anvil journal recently allowed me to publish around 27 of its articles and these are appearing as permissions from the authors are received. I am now working on a table of contents for Themelios (1962-1974) when it was published by IFES. I hope to be able to place many of these articles online as well in due course in partnership with Tyndale House and the Gospel Coalition.
Due to my present workload the launch of this site has been put back until sometime next year.
That’s all for now. Remember to subscribe to the site feeds to received the latest news. Thanks for visiting!
The following book is now available in both PDF and iPaper formats:
The following article is now online in PDF:
Frances Young, "Christian Attitudes to Finance in the First Four Centuries," Epworth Review 4.3 (Sept. 1977): 78-86.
This is very interesting article on a neglected subject - well worth a read.
Anyone who has studied church history will be familiar with the works of Henry Chadwick, particularly his book The Early Church, which is still a standard textbook on many courses, remarkably so, as it was first published in 1967. It was therefore with a great sense of loss that I read of his death today in The Telegraph. The Guardian's obituary can be viewed here.I have created a new group on Facebook called Theology on the Web. I am hoping that it will serve both to raise the profile of my websites and provide a forum for visitors to provide feedback on current and future projects. Feel free to sign up.
The following article is now on-line in PDF:
F.F. Bruce, "Church History and Its Lessons," J.B. Watson, ed., The Church: A Symposium. London: Pickering & Inglis, Ltd., 1949. pp.178-95.
George Santayana famous said that "Those who fail to learn the lessons that history teaches, are doomed to repeat them". It is therefore helpful to some of the lessons that Church History can teach today's Church regarding the form and ministry of the Church, the Church's relationship to the State and the Church's mission.
The following article is now on-line in PDF:
Arthur W. Klem, "Tertullian: Victim of Caricature," Bulletin of the Evangelical Theological Society 5.4 (Fall 1962): 103-108.
Tertullian has always been a target for misrepresentation. Arthur Klem's article seeks to set the record straight.
The following Ph.D. thesis is now available on-line:
Chris Gousmett, "Shall the Body Strive and Not be Crowned? Unitary and instrumentalist anthropological models as keys to interpreting the structure of Patristic eschatology," PhD. Thesis, University of Dunedin, NZ, 1993.
My thanks to Dr Gousmett for reformatting his thesis and allowing me to place it on-line.
Abstract:
It is possible to discern a structure underlying the myriad details of Patristic eschatology through the use of two anthropological models, a unitary model, which sees the person as a unity of body and soul, and an instrumentalist model, which locates the person in the soul, which uses the body as its instrument. This latter view makes possible a judgement and entry into the appropriate eschatological state immediately after death, while the unitary view requires the resurrection to occur first. Some who held a unitary view (notably but not exclusively the Syrians) thought that the soul slept until the resurrection, while others held that the soul experienced pleasure or pain in anticipation of their future rewards or punishments to be received after the judgement.
The unitary anthropology is correlated with a positive assessment of bodily life, including marriage and sexuality, and (particularly during the first few centuries) expectation of life on a renewed earth in the eschaton following a millennium of peace.
The decline in millennialism, rise of asceticism, and glorification of virginity and denigration of marriage, as well as an eclipse of the centrality and significance of the resurrection of the body, are correlated with an instrumentalist view. Bodily life was often seen negatively, as the occasion, if not the source, of sin, and even innocent bodily gratification was shunned as a hindrance to the communion of the soul with God.
There is no direct correlation with the frequent contrast between the “resurrection of the body” and the “immortality of the soul” and the structures of Patristic eschatology. Many who held to a unitary anthropological model thought the soul immortal (although earlier Patristic writers rejected this concept), but also stressed that eschatological life also required the immortalisation of the body through its resurrection.
Those who held to an instrumentalist anthropological model mostly thought the soul was innately immortal, and provided sophisticated philosophical arguments for this view. However, it was the idea that the person was located in the soul, with the body as its instrument, that is the determining characteristic for the structure of their eschatology.
These ideas provide the background to the interpretation of Psalm 1:5, which in conjunction with John 3:18 was taken to mean that neither the saints nor the obdurate wicked would face the judgement on the last day. Others took Psalm 1:5 to mean that the wicked would not be judges, as they were wont to do during life. While there is no direct correlation between these interpretations of Psalm 1:5 and the two anthropological models discussed, it is not possible to understand the reasons for these interpretations without considering the influence of these models on Patristic eschatology.
Patristic anthropology and eschatology was shaped by the synthesis between pagan thought and Christian thought. The negative assessment of bodily life can be traced to pagan influences, and the consequences are considerable even today. Only by repudiating the method of synthesis can an authentically Christian anthropology and eschatology be developed.
The following articles are now on-line in PDF:
Graham Keith, " Patristic Views on Hell - Part 1," The Evangelical Quarterly 71.3 (1999): 217-232.
Abstract:
Graham Keith, "Patristic Views on Hell - Part 2," The Evangelical Quarterly 71.4 (1999): 291-310.In this period the doctrine of the last things was yet to be worked out in detail. Apart from the resurrection of the dead and the final judgment, no orthodox consensus was established. With such a climate Origen tried to extend the church’s teaching. He tied the traditional idea of a final judgment to God’s long-term strategy for the restoration of souls (or intelligences) after they had declined from the contemplation of God. In the process he produced a speculative and controversial picture which revolved round the willing subjection of all things to God. All God’s judgments were essentially corrective. This meant that Origen at least considered the possible salvation of the devil and his angels. But his treatment did leave several inconsistencies. This was probably of more use to the church than a systematised dogmatic statement, because it focussed the mind of the church on certain key issues on which it had to work out a biblical consensus.
In his approach to the doctrine of Hell Augustine was influenced in part by a desire to address pagan doubts about the scientific possibility (d a body being in a state of everlasting torment. But an even greater concern was prompted by various pleas within the church to tone down the Scriptural evidence for an eternal Hell. Augustine believed that if any of these pleas were accepted, dire pastoral consequences would be involved.
Alongside his response to the various critiques of Hell, Augustine laid much stress on the seriousness of Adam’s original sin. He also rejected the Platonist view, effectively endorsed by Origen, that all divine punishments are essentially corrective. Augustine felt no need to give a detailed rationale for God’s justice, which he saw as a datum of revelation and a matter of faith for the believer. It was, however, a weakness in Augustine (and the patristic period generally) that he was content to work with a model of divine anger which stripped it of any passionate element. This foreclosed the possibility of tying God’s wrath more closely to the outworking of God’s justice.
The following article is now on-line in PDF:
Graham Keith, "Can Anything Good Come out of Allegory? The Cases of Origen and Augustine," The Evangelical Quarterly 70.1 (1998): 23-49.
Though allegory is regarded with suspicion in churches today, it was enthusiastically embraced by many in the early church, including Origen and Augustine, the subjects of this paper. Origen believed not only that an allegorical interpretation was demanded by inconsistencies and absurdities in the literal text of Scripture, but that Scripture itself enjoined this hermeneutic. It was God’s way of stimulating believers to a maturer faith and discipleship. The rule of faith gave a framework in which error could be avoided.
Augustine shared Origen’s respect for the church’s traditional teaching. He differed, however, in the essentially aesthetic qualities he found in allegory. This was a technique he believed would give added pleasure to any worthwhile work of literature. He was also happy to accommodate a variety of suitable meanings in some passages of Scripture since he felt that human words were limited and sometimes obscure.
With their use of allegory, Origen and Augustine raise the question how do particular passages of Scripture set in a specific time and environment relate to the things that are unseen and eternal? They did, not, however, provide a suitable rationale to justify the various connections they made through allegory between diverse parts of the Bible.
