Kirjahaku

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.

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.

What is the destiny of the human soul in this life and the next? Dare we hope to “see God face to face,” or will our vision of God remain forever filtered “through a glass, darkly”? In this remarkable volume, Rowan A. Greer turns to the New Testament, the church fathers, and later writers to throw light on their own visions of the human soul. He suggests that Augustine of Hippo and Gregory of Nyssa represent two distinct strands of Christian thinking that find expression later in writers such as John Donne and Jeremy Taylor. Greer, who has trained two generations of historians and theologians in the rich thought of the early church, has succeeded in writing a volume that is both full of original scholarly insight and, by virtue of his elegant writing, accessible to laypeople and non-specialists.

Many of the controversial religious debates of our day grow out of disagreements about how to interpret scripture correctly. Is it a historical or theological text? How do we address the apparent contradictions? In Anglican Approaches to Scripture, the sequel to ATB Book of the Year Christian Hope and Christian Life, Greer shows the multi-layered Anglican tradition of what scripture is and how it is to be interpreted.