The History of Christian Thought, Volume 1 (Justo Gonzalez, 1987)

Thanks to a head cold which is turn aggravated an old back injury, I had more time than usual to read and nothing soothes a malady like reading about the ancient Christian heresies. It was three years ago that I found myself working in a seminary library with little to no theological education. In fact, in the past I had been pretty vocal about my preference for history over philosophy. Anything involving religion and philosophy really needs to have an historical component to get me interested. Right from the get-go Gonzalez states his intention to construct his three-volume history in such a manner. He easily could have adopted an achronological approach, working in themes, but that would have been far harder for me to follow. Especially when it comes to the early years, I think those who would have preferred a theme-based structure don't suffer too badly.

Before reading this, most of my exploration of the pre-Chalcedon patristics era was in two books by Bart Ehrman (see How Jesus Became God, and the other was Lost Christianities, read a few years back before the blog) and a Thomas Cahill's Desire of the Everlasting Hills. Also, from a history viewpoint, I knew theological debates (crossed with chariot racing) caused a lot of political turmoil, as chronicled in A Short History of Byzantium by John Julius Norwich. Justo Gonzalez is much better than any of these books (mainly by virtue of intent) at grouping various modes of thought, from the apostolic Fathers through the Trinitarian and Christological controversies. Also, the "heretics" are not branded as such by the authors. Although he doesn't endorse their views, he helps readers to understand how heretics certainly didn't see themselves as heretics, and he explains how they came to the conclusions they did. Overall, this is definitely a work targeting early students of theology and religion, so it isn't watered down into "popular" literature, but it also doesn't bury the readers in an avalanche of undefined Greek and Latin terminology.

I was directed to this series by one of the more scholarly-oriented clergy at my church, so I thank him for the advice. He was a little torn between this and Jaroslav Pelikan's own five-volume work. I will sample that one a little later this year, so stay tuned for that one.