First published in 1988, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God is still considered by many scholars to be the finest work on the Arian Controversy. Examining scholarly works on the Controversy and many original texts, Professor Hanson, provides a clear understanding of how the traditional and historic doctrine of God as the Holy Trinity reached its most mature and enduring form. The author is not primarily concerned to defend the orthodox position itself, but rather to discover and examine the formation of that orthodoxy. The history of the events - the Councils, the interventions of the Emperor, the rivalries of sees, the behaviour of bishops, the varying fortunes of the different schools of thought and their leaders - is interwoven with the progression of thought and doctrine during the sixty years of the Controversy. Professor Hanson sees the problem of the reconciliation of two concepts which were both part of the very fabric of Christianity - monotheism and the worship of Jesus Christ as divine.

In Ignatius of Antioch and the Arian Controversy, Paul R. Gilliam III contends that the legacy of the second-century martyr Ignatius of Antioch was one battleground upon which Nicene and Non-Nicene personalities fought for their understanding of the relationship of the Son to the Father. It is well-know that Ignatius’ views continued to live on into the fourth century via the long recension of his letters. Gilliam, however, shows that there was much more to Ignatius’ fourth-century presence than the Ignatian long recension.

Ephrem the Syrian was one of the founding voices in Syriac literature. While he wrote in a variety of genres, the bulk of his work took the form of madrashe, a Syriac genre of musical poetry or hymns. In Bible and Poetry in Late Antique Mesopotamia, Jeffrey Wickes offers a thoroughly contextualized study of Ephrem’s magnum opus, the Hymns on Faith, delivered in response to the theological controversies that followed the First Council of Nicaea. The ensuing doctrinal divisions had tremendous impact on the course of Christianity and led in part to the development of a uniquely Syriac Church, in which Ephrem would become a central figure. Drawing on literary, ritual, and performance theories, Bible and Poetry shows how Ephrem used the Syriac Bible to construct and conceive of himself and his audience. In so doing, Wickes resituates Ephrem in a broader early Christian context and contributes to discussions of literature and religion in late antiquity.

This is the first volume to attempt a comprehensive overview of the evolution of the 'Arian' churches in the Roman world of Late Antiquity and their political importance in the late Roman kingdoms of the 5th-6th centuries, ruled by barbarian warrior elites. Bringing together researchers from the disciplines of theology, history and archaeology, and providing an extensive bibliography, it constitutes a breakthrough in a field largely neglected in historical studies. A polemical term coined by the Orthodox Church (the side that prevailed in the Trinitarian disputes of the 4th century C.E.) for its opponents in theology as well as in ecclesiastical politics, Arianism has often been seen as too complicated to understand outside the group of theological specialists dealing with it and has therefore sometimes been ignored in historical studies. The studies here offer an introduction to the subject, grounded in the historical context, then examine the adoption of Arian Christianity among the Gothic contingents of the Roman army, and its subsequent diffusion in the barbarian kingdoms of the late Roman world.

This book is a study of what African Christians living in Britain believe about the Holy Spirit.

This volume in the ongoing Late Antique Archaeology series draws on material and textual evidence to explore the diverse religious world of Late Antiquity. Subjects include Jews and Samaritans, orthodoxy and heresy, pilgrimage, stylites, magic, the sacred and the secular.

This book constitutes the second volume of a three-volume study of Christian testimonies to divine suffering: God's Wounds: Hermeneutic of the Christian Symbol of Divine Suffering, vol. 2, Evil and Divine Suffering. The larger study focuses its inquiry into the testimonies to divine suffering themselves, seeking to allow the voices that attest to divine suffering to speak freely, then to discover and elucidate the internal logic or rationality of this family of testimonies, rather than defending these attestations against the dominant claims of classical Christian theism that have historically sought to eliminate such language altogether from Christian discourse about the nature and life of God. This second volume of studies proceeds on the basis of the presuppositions of this symbol, those implicit attestations that provide the conditions of possibility for divine suffering-that which constitutes divine vulnerability with respect to creation-as identified and examined in the first volume of this project: an understanding of God through the primary metaphor of love (God is love); and an understanding of the human as created in the image of God, with a life (though finite) analogous to the divine life-the imago Dei as love. The second volume then investigates the first two divine wounds or modes of divine suffering to which the larger family of testimonies to divine suffering normally attest: (1) divine grief, suffering because of betrayal by the beloved human or human sin; and (2) divine self-sacrifice, suffering for the beloved human in its bondage to sin or misery, to establish the possibility of redemption and reconciliation. Each divine wound, thus, constitutes a response to a creaturely occasion. The suffering in each divine wound also occurs in two stages: a passive stage and an active stage. In divine grief, God suffers because of human sin, betrayal of the divine lover by the beloved human: divine sorrow as the passive stage of divine grief; and divine anguish as the active stage of divine grief. In divine self-sacrifice, God suffers in response to the misery or bondage of the beloved human's infidelity: divine travail (focused on the divine incarnation in Jesus of Nazareth) as the active stage of divine self-sacrifice; and divine agony (focused on divine suffering in the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth) as the passive stage of divine self-sacrifice.