Rowan A. Greer's Books

Broken Lights and Mended Lives

Theology and Common Life in the Early Church

By: Rowan A. Greer,William Caferro

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Broken Lights and Mended Lives

Theology and Common Life in the Early Church

By: Rowan A. Greer,William Caferro

A discussion by a broadly respected authority of the complicated relationship between theology and ordinary life in the early church. The first section of the book scrutinizes theology with a view to understanding its bearing upon Christian understandings of life (the theological &“stories&” of Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Augustine). The second section examines aspects of ordinary life and explores how Christians related them to religious ideas (the family, hospitality, citizenship, monasticism, and attitudes toward the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West). & This very learned piece of work, which reflects lengthy study of original texts as well as of the current and important secondary literature, is distinctive because it does not conform to the present reigning ideology: The author writes as a convinced Christian thinker. He believes that there is no such thing as a purely detached observer and that the best way of being critical and fair is to make no secret of one&’s presuppositions, but to face them so as to be able to discount them when necessary. This quality makes the work interesting and suggestive. The book is of importance to scholars and theologians and to all concerned with the early church.

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Page Count

254

Publisher

Penn State Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0271030151

ISBN 13

9780271030159

The Fear of Freedom

A Study of Miracles in the Roman Imperial Church

By: Rowan A. Greer

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The Fear of Freedom

A Study of Miracles in the Roman Imperial Church

By: Rowan A. Greer

By &"the fear of freedom&" Greer means the unconscious flight from the heavy burden of individual choice an open society lays upon its members. The miraculous represents a heavenly power brought down to earth and tied to the life of the community. Understanding how miracles were perceived in the late antiquity requires us to put aside the notion of a miracle as the violation of the natural order. &"Miracles&" for the church fathers refers to anything that evokes wonder. Rowan Greer is not concerned with conclusions about the truth or falsity of the miracles reported in the ancient sources. He is concerned with how the miracle stories shaped the way people understood Christianity in the fourth and fifth centuries. Once the Church gained the predominance in the Empire as part of the Constantinian revolution, most Christians thought that a new Christian commonwealth was in the making. The miracles associated with the cult of the saints (the martyrs and their relics) in the Christian Empire were part of this sacralization. In the Roman imperial church we find a tension between the Christian message, which revolved around virtue and the individual, and corporate piety that focused upon the empowering of the people of God. With Augustine we find Christian Platonism transformed into a &"new theology&" far more congruent with the corporate poetry that had by then developed. An emphasis upon grace and upon God's sovereignty fits a preoccupation with miracles better than the old emphasis upon human freedom and virtue and sets the stages for the Western Middle Ages and the cult of the saints, organized and made central to Christian piety. From a study of Roman imperial Christianity before the collapse of the West we discover the tendency to substitute one kind of freedom for another. Freedom as the capacity of human beings to choose the good does not, of course, disappear, but on the whole it is made subordinate to notions of God's sovereign grace and even to an insistence upon the authority of the church.

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Page Count

230

Publisher

Penn State Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0271039442

ISBN 13

9780271039442

Early Biblical Interpretation

By: Rowan A. Greer

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Early Biblical Interpretation

By: Rowan A. Greer

Discusses the history and diversity of early interpretation and the influence of Jewish traditions

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Page Count

224

Publisher

Westminster John Knox Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0664250130

ISBN 13

9780664250133

One Path For All

Gregory of Nyssa on the Christian Life and Human Destiny

By: Rowan A. Greer,J. Warren Smith

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One Path For All

Gregory of Nyssa on the Christian Life and Human Destiny

By: Rowan A. Greer,J. Warren Smith

In his writings and his career Gregory of Nyssa assumes many roles. He is a Christian Platonist, a spiritual guide for ascetics and those seeking the vision of God, as well as one of those who shaped the Trinitarian doctrine of God espoused at Constantinople in 381. But he is also a popular preacher and, paradoxically, someone unafraid of deeper speculations regarding the meaning of the Christian ideal. The translations in Part One illustrate these various concerns, but are not a sufficient basis for the thesis of Part Two, one that attempts to answer the question of how to describe the coherence of a thinker far from systematic. One solution is to appeal to Gregory's conviction that after this world all Christians, indeed all humans, will be united in diversity, and that this means that all are now on the one path to their destiny, however much their progress may differ. This answer does not pretend to solve all problems, nor does it rule out other approaches to Gregory's thought. But it locates Gregory's work in the liturgical and sacramental life of the church that includes ordinary as well as elite Christians.

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