Georges Florovsky is the mastermind of a "return to the Church Fathers" in twentieth-century Orthodox theology. His theological vision--the neopatristic synthesis--became the main paradigm of Orthodox theology and the golden standard of Eastern Orthodox identity in the West. Focusing on Florovsky's European period (1920-1948), this study analyzes how Florovsky's evolving interpretation of Russian religious thought, particularly Vladimir Solovyov and Sergius Bulgakov, informed his approach to patristic sources. Paul Gavrilyuk offers a new reading of Florovsky's neopatristic theology, by...

This study describes the origin, development, and crisis of the German nineteenth-century project of theology as science. Its narrative is focused on the two predominant theological schools during this period, the Tubingen School and the Ritschl School. Their work emerges as a grand attempt to synthesize historical and systematic theology within the twin paradigms of historicism and German Idealism. Engaging in detail with the theological, historical and philosophical scholarship of the story's protagonists, Johannes Zachhuber reconstructs the basis of this scholarship as a deep belief in the...

Blaise Pascal's account of the cognitive consequences of the Fall is clearly set out by William Wood in the first book on Pascal's theology to appear in English in more than forty years. Wood's central claim is that for Pascal, the Fall is a fall into duplicity. Pascal holds that as fallen selves in a fallen world, human beings have an innate aversion to the truth that is also, at the same time, an aversion to God. According to Pascal, we are born into a duplicitous world that shapes us into duplicitous subjects, and so we find it easy to reject God continually and deceive ourselves about our...

In this study, Mark McInroy argues that the "spiritual senses" play a crucial yet previously unappreciated role in the theological aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar. The doctrine of the spiritual senses typically claims that human beings can be made capable of perceiving non-corporeal, "spiritual" realities. After a lengthy period of disuse, Balthasar recovers the doctrine in the mid-twentieth century and articulates it afresh in his theological aesthetics. At the heart of this project stands the task of perceiving the absolute beauty of the divine form through which God is revealed to...

Georges Florovsky is the mastermind of a "return to the Church Fathers" in twentieth-century Orthodox theology. His theological vision--the neopatristic synthesis--became the main paradigm of Orthodox theology and the golden standard of Eastern Orthodox identity in the West. Focusing on Florovsky's European period (1920-1948), this study analyzes how Florovsky's evolving interpretation of Russian religious thought, particularly Vladimir Solovyov and Sergius Bulgakov, informed his approach to patristic sources. Paul Gavrilyuk offers a new reading of Florovsky's neopatristic theology, by...

Knowledge, Love, and Ecstasy in the Theology of Thomas Gallus provides the first full study of Thomas Gallus (d. 1246) in English and represents a significant advance in his distinctive theology. Boyd Taylor Coolman argues that Gallus distinguishes, but never separates and intimately relates two "international modalities" in human consciousness: the intellective and the affective, both of which are forms of cognition. Coolman shows that Gallus conceives these two cognitive modalities as co-existing in an interdependent manner, and that this reciprocity is given a particular character...

God Visible: Patristic Christology Reconsidered considers the early development and reception of what is today the most widely professed Christian conception of Christ. The development of this doctrine admits of wide variations in expression and understanding, varying emphases in interpretation that are as striking in authors of the first millennium as they are among modern writers. The seven early ecumenical councils and their dogmatic formulations are crucial way-stations in defining the shape of this study. Brian E. Daley argues that the scope of previous enquiries, which focused...

This study provides an account of Augustine's understanding of prayer and its importance to his theology by drawing on his practices as monk and bishop.