Early Church Collection Volume 4

These are the voices that shaped Christian theology in its most volatile and formative moment. This volume captures the fourth-century church not as a monolith but as a forge: Gregory of Nyssa fights to establish the Holy Spirit's full divinity against those who would reduce it; Augustine, newly freed from the Manichaean heresy, launches a ferocious attack on their dualistic worldview while still wrestling with the ghosts of his past beliefs. Cyprian transforms the Lord's Prayer into an meditation on divine generosity and human dependence. When plague devastates a city, an anonymous preacher tells his flock that death for the Christian is not something to dread but to long for. Here too are the canons that settled the Pelagian controversy, Gregory Thaumaturgus's painstaking literal translation of Ecclesiastes, and Lactantius's Easter poem alive with spring imagery. For anyone who wants to see where doctrine actually came from not the polished creed but the passionate, sometimes desperate argument behind it this is an essential collection.