Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Pages in great condition. No notes or highlighting. Dustcover has some wear. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> The author has here set himself the task of un ing the basic origins and development of Christian doctrine in the east. What really was the influence of current Greek philosophy on Christian thought? How did Christian doctrine come to take the form it did? In his thorough investigation of these and similar questions the author brings the reader into contact with an alien thought-world from which we are now separated by a very wide gulf and shows us that the rise of Christian theology was not just ‘the hellenisation of Christianity’ but was the outcome of long developments of which the encounter with philosophy was only one. As the trans- lator-editor John Austin Baker makes very clear in his Postscript however the range of problems and questions tackled (and sometimes resolved sometimes not) by these 2nd and 3rd century thinkers and their freedom in an approach ‘not yet hobbled by a required respect for a mass of previous decisions’ all this gives many aspects of their thought both a permanent significance bridging the gulf of time and a relevance to questions that are subjects of live debate in the present day. Scholars will value this book for its detailed conspectus and analysis of one of the most crucial and least under- stood periods in the development of Christian doctrine and it will be indispensible to anyone who sets out to teach or learn in this field. As with the previous volume important revisions and improvements have been made in the course of translation. (SP)