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Otto Bardenhewer's Patrology is certainly not the most recent work in the field. But sound judgment is never obsolete - Bardenhewer's concise, pellucid analysis of the church fathers is still valuable today, over a century after it was published. For generations, his work has been treasured by experts and novices alike for its penetrating insight and easy accessibility. Many fathers are given fuller treatment here than in any modern handbook. And today, every work cited in Bardenhewer's copious bibliographies has entered the public domain - what a boon to researchers of the information age!

A brief overview of the Fathers of the Church & their writings.

This most authoritative dictionary of Christian theology today offers a clear, up-to-date explanation of the meaning, origin, and history of key terms that teachers and students of theology need to know. Contains over 50 new entries and updated entries and references to reflect the latest scholarship and research. An index of names has been included.

The early centuries of the Christian era were marked by a variety of theological ideas in differing stages of development. Numerous theologians emerged with proposals about what the Christian church should believe and how theological ideas related to each other. Some of these theologians gained more prominent status and their ideas became sources on which others built. Patristic theology is thus a formative period, a yeasty time in which theological doctrines took on many stages of complexity. This outstanding handbook by a leading specialist in Patristic Theology provides students and scholars with easy access to key terms, figures, socio-cultural developments, and controversies of this period, extending to the ninth-century. McGuckin's introductory essay outlines the main intellectual issues in the early church. His concluding Bibliographic Guide Essay and General Bibliography also features a Website Resources Guide to assist readers with additional ways to study this period. The entries are written to help those with no previous theological knowledge understand the major dimensions of each topic. The result is an eminently useful, reliable, and unique resource.

Deification in the Greek patristic tradition was the fulfilment of the destiny for which humanity was created - not merely salvation from sin but entry into the fullness of the divine life of the Trinity. This book, the first on the subject for over sixty years, traces the history of deification from its birth as a second-century metaphor with biblical roots to its maturity as a doctrine central to the spiritual life of the Byzantine Church. Drawing attention to the richness and diversity of the patristic approaches from Irenaeus to Maximus the Confessor, Norman Russell offers a full discussion of the background and context of the doctrine, at the same time highlighting its distinctively Christian character.