The present volume describes the rich and complex world in which Ausonius (c. 310–395) lived and worked, from his humble beginnings as a schoolteacher in Bordeaux, to the heights of his influence as quaestor to the Emperor Gratian, at a time of unsettling social and religious change. As a teacher and poet Ausonius adhered to the traditions of classical paideia, standing in contrast to the Fathers of the Church, e.g., Jerome, Augustine, and Paulinus of Nola, who were emboldened by the legalization, then the imposition, of Christianity in the course of the fourth century. For this position he was labeled by the 20th-century scholar Henri-Irénée Marrou a symbol of decadence. Guided by Marrou’s critical insights to both his own time and place and that of Ausonius, this book proposes a hermeneutic for reading Ausonius as both a fourth-century poet and a fascinating mirror for his 20th-century counterparts.

How the Jewish and Christian communities that emerged in the early Roman Empire navigated a ‘Hellenistic’ world is a longstanding and unsettled question. Recent scholarship on the intellectual cultures that developed among Greek speaking subjects of Rome in the so-called Second Sophistic as well as models for culture and competition informed by mathematical and economic game theories provide new ideas to address this question. This study offers a model for a kind of culture-making that accounts for how the cultural ecosystems of the Roman Empire enabled these religious communities to win legitimacy and build discourses of self-expression by competing on the same cultural fields as other Roman subjects. By considering a range of texts and figures—including Justin Martyr, Tatian, the ‘second’ Paul of the Acts of the Apostles, Lucian of Samosata, 4 Maccabees, and Favorinus of Arelate—this study contends that competing for legitimacy enabled those fledgling religious communities to express coherent cultural identities and secure social credibility within the complex milieu of Roman Imperial society.

The 3rd century theologian Origen of Alexandria has traditionally been famous for his belief in universal salvation. Yet, Origen is also famous for his insistence on moral autonomy, the fact that God allows each creature to freely choose to move in the direction of good or evil. How can these two beliefs not result in a paradox or logical inconsistency in Origen’s theology, as many contemporary scholars suggest they do? This book explores the intersection between moral autonomy and God’s foreordained universal salvation in Origen’s writings. Origen was, in fact, aware of the apparent contradiction between these two ideas. He nevertheless stipulated that God can achieve universal salvation without violating a soul’s freedom of choice. God accomplishes this through his foreknowledge of future voluntary possibilities, which God then prearranges into a sequence leading to God’s desired outcome.

One of the distinctive characteristics of the writings of Ambrose of Milan is his frequent and lengthy borrowings from the works of Philo of Alexandria. He treated the 1st-century Jewish philosopher as an authoritative predecessor and made use of his works to a far greater extent than any other Church Father did. This study seeks to fill a lacuna in the current scholarship by investigating Ambrose’s use of Philo in his collection of letters, focusing on a set of three letters concerning the topic of the Genesis creation account (Ep. 29, 31, & 34 [PL#43, 44, & 45]). In all three cases, Ambrose fielded questions on the Six Days of Creation (Hexaemeron) by drawing upon Philo’s treatise De opificio mundi. Each of these letters is undeniably Philonic and yet uniquely Ambrosian. This study seeks to clarify why Ambrose found Philo to be particularly valuable in spite of his Jewishness and also to investigate how Ambrose interpreted, adapted, and ultimately re-created his source.

Despite being the first extended defense of the divinity of the Holy Spirit written in Latin and influencing the Trinitarian theology of Augustine of Hippo, Ambrose of Milan’s On the Holy Spirit (De Spiritu Sancto) has received little scholarly attention. Not only does this book provide the first full study of Ambrose’s De Spiritu Sancto, but it also suggests that rhetorical theory significantly influenced argumentation in fourth-century Trinitarian controversies, though this has been overlooked in modern scholarship.

This book explores the concept of Knowing God and the Knowability of God from an interdisciplinary theological perspective, against the backdrop of celebrating 500 years of Reformation. Approaching the issue from the perspectives of their respective theological disciplines, contributors reflect on what it means to know God, how people of faith have sought to know God in the past, and indeed whether, and to what extent, such knowledge is even possible. The project team approached scholars from different disciplines in theology, affiliated with the Evangelische Theologische Faculteit, Leuven in Belgium, to reflect on the topic. This provided the faculty with the opportunity for fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration and reflection as we attempted to look at the same topic from the vantage point of our own subject and expertise. Although we all come from the same institution, and are bounded by our common motto Fides Quaerens Intellectum, we have allowed ourselves to roam freely within the flats of the castle of theological inquiry and have enjoyed meeting each other in the courtyard and beautiful gardens on the occasion of our interdisciplinary seminars each year. The authors do not promise to provide in this book a coherently designed interdisciplinary approach. The authors promise to show you the beauty of each of our disciplinary rooms within the castle. The authors also show you their own dialogicality, and even paradox, but also their own dialogical harmony. This book will be of utmost value to anyone seeking to explore the question of ‘Knowing God’, or even the ‘Knowability of God’, from the perspective of all the main classical subdisciplines in theology (e.g. Old and New Testament Studies; Church History; Systematic Theology; Practical Theology and Missiology).

In his Commentary on Daniel, the earliest extant Christian commentary, Hippolytus interprets the deeds and visions of Daniel against the backdrop of contemporary Roman persecution and eschatological expectation, thus providing much information about Christian affairs in the early third century. Throughout the commentary Hippolytus further discusses his distinctive Logos theology and also makes mention of various liturgical practices evolving baptism, anointing, the celebration of Easter and perhaps the date of Christmas.

This study advances a suggestive reading of Justin Martyr's Apologies as a subjective appropriation of the forms and practices of the Roman system of petition and response. It offers an historical contextualization of the Apologies within both contemporary administrative culture and the wider literary environment. It compares the Apologies with extant Roman-era petitions, using this comparison to shed light on Justin's transformations of the genre and their communicative significance. Using the heuristic metaphor of performance, it suggests that Justin performs in the Apologies the genre of the administrative petition, but he performs it multiply, as an integral part of a hybrid literary composition that weaves together apologetic and protreptic discourses in a way that finds precedent in the genre-bending literary strategies of the Second Sophistic. Justin's hybridization of the administrative petition is a uniquely stylized performance by a Christian philosopher and literary aspirant, one that both activates the form's potential for administrative redress and exploits it as a daring enactment of voiced injustice and Christian disclosure.

This book serves to correct the now accepted understanding of Irenaeus’s theodicy. This assumption of Hick’s theodicy as legitimately “Irenaean” remains due the gulf between Irenaean scholarship and discussion of the problem of evil. The present work offers a bridge between the two to allow for the continued discussion of both theologian’s distinct views.

This volume contains an English translation and introduction to Hippolytus of Rome's Commentary on Daniel and his Chronicon. Both works are the first writings of their kind. The commentary is the earliest extant Christian commentary on a book of the Bible and the Chronicon is the first extant Christian historical work.

This book examines the doctrine of providence as it appears in the works of the North African Latin apologist, L. Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius.

This book proposes a model for explaining unity and diversity in early Christianity that centers about a clear confessional identity, allowing both extreme expressions of diversity of texts and traditions while explaining the exclusion of teachers, texts, and traditions that deviated from the confessional norm.

The first English translation and study of St. Hippolytus' fascinating, early third-century commentary 'On the Song of Songs'. Important for the history of biblical interpretation, rival identities of early Christians, liturgy, and mystagogy in the pre-Constantinian church.

Ephrem, the most celebrated writer of the Syriac Church, presents a wide range of theological themes and images that are characteristic of fourth-century Syrian Christianity. A significant theme that no one has yet studied in Ephrem is the concept of sickness and healing. This book presents the significance of healing theology and the ways in which the healing of man - spiritually, mentally, and corporally - is highly valued by Ephrem. The main part of the book deals with the causes of spiritual sickness and the process of healing, and the way in which Ephrem places them in the divine history of salvation.

This book deals with the works of the anti-Chalcedonian hagiographer, John Rufus, and traces the basic motives behind the opposition against the council of Chalcedon in the fifth century through an attempt to reconstruct a specific anti-Chalcedonian culture. As part of the eastern monastic culture, it considered itself a counter-culture guarding purity of ascetic conduct and orthodoxy from being defiled by the perverseness of the majority. Reading John Rufus' hagiography, we find ourselves in the midst of a cosmological warfare between good and evil, where the great heroes of the anti-Chalcedonian movement enter into history as God's warriors against the rebellion of demons and heretics.

Ephrem the Syrian is known as one of the greatest Christian poets and as a unique author whose mode of thought is usually described as “symbolic.” In this work, Kees den Biesen explores the literary, intellectual, and theological mechanisms at work in Ephrem’s writings with the specific aim of identifying the exact nature of his “symbolic thought” and evaluating its contemporary relevance. Den Biesen elaborates a comprehensive approach that integrates a variety of methods into a genuinely theological methodology. He then proposes his own comprehensive understanding of the nature and merits of Ephrem’s symbolic thought.

This book examines the development of Augustine of Hippo’s theology of the Jewish people and Judaism. Formulating a typological association between the biblical figure of Cain and the Jews, he crafts a highly intricate theology that justifies and even demands the continuing presence of Jews and their religious practices in a Christian society. Such a theology emerges out of his highly original interpretation of Genesis 4:1–15 and yet mirrors and theologically justifies the reality of Jews and Judaism in the late Roman Empire.

The prayer of the heart is an early Christian contemplative tradition of striking profundity and beauty. Christian authors of the Greek- as well as the Syriac-speaking world placed the heart at the center of a mystical theology that viewed the body as a God-given instrument of divine ascent and the relational setting of Christian existence as an important means of experiencing God’s abiding inner presence. This work sheds light on the Syrian church’s approach to the mystery of the divine encounter.

The suffering woman, Blandina, emerges as an archetypal figure of the martyrs of Lyon. This slave-woman ultimately arises to engage in battle with the powers of the Roman Empire. Through the application of Bowen Family Systems Theory and the writings of Michel Foucault the book explains the function of anxiety, and the dynamics at work in the system that result in the failure of Roman authority to use power to quell the rise of Christianity. The reactions of those who might appear to be the most powerful are essential in gifting power to this lowly slave.

Aphrahat the Persian Sage, (fl. 337-345 C.E.), was a Syriac Christian author who wrote twenty-three treatises entitled The Demonstrations. This book examines “temple” as a key image for Aphrahat’s theological anthropology. The temple is central for both Jews and Christians; it is the place of sacrifice, meeting, and communication with the Divine. For Aphrahat, the devout Christian person may be a micro-temple which then allows one to encounter the divine both within oneself and through a vision ascent to the heavenly temple.

Early lists of bishops, identified by Walter Bauer as "literary propaganda," mark critical points in the development of the doctrine of the apostolic succession of bishops. This study delves into the political struggles surrounding the lists and the doctrine they served to define. Ecclesiastical politics in each case reflects the threat to the bishop's authority and clarifies the meaning of apostolic succession in the Church's development. This social history approach, examining the function of the literature within its historical circumstances, reveals how theology developed from politics. The development is as gripping politically as it is illuminating theologically.

This book, on the pneumatology of Origen's Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, illustrates the centrality of the Holy Spirit for his theological project. As both God's exitus into the world and humanity's reditus to God, the Spirit forms the crucial link between Origen's doctrine of God and his spiritual anthropology. Origen's images for the Holy Spirit, understood in the context of second century concepts of 'spirit,' convey the intersection of theology and anthropology in his thought. This book explores Origen's understanding of the multiplicity of spirits found in the Scriptures, with particular emphasis on the Holy Spirit as pivotal to God's outreach into the world.

Buchan’s work is an examination of the theological use of the doctrine of Christ's descent to the dead in the works of Saint Ephrem the Syrian (ca. 306-373 C.E.). Ephrem's conception of Christ's descent to Sheol provides us with an important and distinctive vision of the significance of this salvific event. Ephrem's use of Semitic and non-Western poetic forms and structures as a mode of theological discourse, coupled with his preference for imagery and symbolism rather than definition, resulted in a variety of vivid depictions of Christ's descent to Sheol. The doctrine is shown to be an integral and multifaceted component of Ephrem's theology.