Novitas Christiana: Die Idee des Fortschritts in der Alten Kirche bis Eusebius by Wolfram Kinzig

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS629 White's book, namely, that which concerns Rome on the one hand and especially the Near East on the other. For it seems evident that, apart from the opposition of other religious groups in micro-Asiatic environments and generally in Near Eastern rural centers, Christian communities had freer access to accumulating real estate properties and private ownership of goods and proper religious buildings earlier than this might have been possible in Urbe, where the center of imperial government seems to have had a heavier hand on control, if not on persecution. Indeed, the argument ofpersecution should have been set forth in more express terms in this book. Probably, for Rome, materials so broadly investigated in the two volumes by Charles Pietri, Roma Christiana, could have been better utilized. The same is also true of Friedrich Wilhelm Deichmann's Einführung in die christliche Archäologie (1983), which contains an accurate and very detailed account especially of the situation in the Near East and related enclaves. Likewise no reference to PaulyWissowa 's Realencyclopädie appears in these pages, although it is still useful in many respects. Mistakes in citations of Italian titles are more frequent than of German. But these are minor flaws in an admirable work. Giovanni Montanari Archives of the Archdiocese ofRavenna-Cervia Novitas Christiana: Die Idee des Fortschritts in derAlten Kirche bis Eusebius. By Wolfram Kinzig. [Forschungen zur Kirchen- und Dogmengeschichte, Band 58] (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. 1994. Pp. 702. DM 198,-.) While there is a vast literature on the concept of progress, the author in his Habilitationsschrift from Heidelberg maintains that most of the scholarship on the subject is defective because there has not been a deep and thorough study of the early Christian notion of progress. This work proposes to fill that lacuna. He defines progress as an advance of mankind for the better, whatever the cause. He begins by exploring the literature on the subject dating from the past two centuries. Thoughts of progress were rare in pagan antiquity, nor were they, as defined here, to be found in Scripture. While it is clear that Jesus' coming was something new, Kinzig feels that the thought of progress remained foreign to Jewish-Christian thought through the end of the first century. Christian apologists were torn between two tendencies. The thought of emphasizing Christian newness was tempered, if not sometimes extinguished, by the need, in view of ancient presuppositions, to stress the antiquity of Christianity. This was done by underlining Christianity's continuity with Judaism . The fading of eschatological expectation in the second century led to the need for theorizing about the continued existence of Christianity in time. 630BOOK REVIEWS The basic framework for doing this was that of two covenants of God with his people, with the second constituting progress over the first. At this point, starting with Irenaeus, Kinzig begins his detailed analysis of the idea of salvation history as progress. The Montanists raised the possibility of ongoing revelation. For Tertullian, this took the form of a more stringent discipline by means ofwhich the Church would become progressively better. But these ideas did not receive general acceptance. He shows how Clement, Origen, and Arnobius all contributed to the growth of the idea of salvation history as progress, but, for them, this was primarily a justification of Christian origins. The author sees the culmination of the development of the Christian idea of progress in the work of Lactantius and Eusebius at the beginning of the fourth century. The defining event of this time was, of course, the conversion of Constantine. The Church was psychologically unprepared for this great turnabout, but, he insists, the work of authors like Origen had laid the theoretical foundation for the conclusions drawn by Eusebius. The latter did not politicize theology; rather, he formulated a theological politics. For Eusebius, the Constantinian empire emerged as the vanguard of a God-directed progressive development. The Christian empire became an anticipation of God's kingdom. Since Eusebius had little interest in eschatology, one can conclude that this progress would not stop soon but would continue in this world for a long time to come. Kinzig concludes with a modest amount of editorializing...