New Horizons in Patristic Theology: A Survey of Recent Work

Abstract

Since the period between the two world wars the study of the Fathers has gradually taken a new direction. In the first place, the age of the masters was past; their brilliant, all-embracing structures laid the foundations, it is true, of the modern critical age, while at the same time they have left us with a profound sense of dissatisfaction. Many of the great classics of patristic scholarship of the past attained the level of universal statement only by means of a swift and perhaps over-hasty reading of the evidence — a good example of this would be some of Harnack's monumental work — and so there remains the endless task of revision, of the painstaking work of filling in a mosaic of detail, without which the broad vision of truth is unattainable. In the second place, ours is a perhaps more historico-critical attitude towards some of the areas of patristic doctrine. Although it is hazardous to make a generalization, it may be said that the modern approach to the Old and the New Testament is apt to be widely divergent from that of many of the Fathers of the Golden Age; and our task is rather to understand the techniques which they used in solving their exegetical problems.