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The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: seeking the Face of God. By Robert Louis Wilken. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004, 368 pp., $19.00.
Robert Louis Wilken, William R. Kenan Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Virginia, has long been one of the preeminent patristic scholars in the English speaking world, and arguably the dean of American specialists in the thought of the early Christian Fathers. In The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, Wilken shows how early Christians thought about what they believed. He distille his vast knowledge and love for the early church, and especially its most potent and insightful thinkers, into a work that is often almost poetic in expression and deceptively accessible-its straightforward narrative form often belies the deep, rich background and knowledge Wilken brings to the task.
Wilken's expressed intention for this book, as reflected in the title, is to show, via its formative bishops and theologians, that Christianity is "inescapably ritualistic," "uncompromisingly moral," and "unapologetically intellectual." For all that is Christian, the life, the community, the high moral call, Christianity is a "way of thinking about God, about human beings, about the world and history." What Wilken wants to show in the lives of the early, formative Christian theologians is that, for Christianity, thinking is part of believing. For that reason he aims to portray the pattern of Christian thought as it took shape in the early Christian centuries.
As Wilken explores this pattern of early Christian thought, he points out early on that it was always grounded in reflection on the Church's sacred book, inspired Holy Scripture, but with reflection that was inevitably Christ-shaped and redemptocentric (the regula fidei). But Wilken here approaches patristic thought by a series of doctrinal foci, early bishops and/or theologians whose insightful Christian reflections on that particular question, issue, or doctrine was formative for the church as a whole. Important to the argumentation are Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Athanasius, Basil of Caesarea, Ambrose, John Chrysostom, and Cyril of Alexandria....