Terms, concepts and people, in plain words first
I have views on plenty of this. Here, the job is to set out the positions fairly, not argue mine.
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Vocabulary. Mostly Greek and Latin words you meet in reading and need decoded before the sentence makes sense.
Reading a text for a meaning underneath the surface one.
On the timeline: Origen writes On First Principles and Against Celsus, c. 230 to 250
Associated with Alexandria and above all with Origen, who read scripture on a literal, a moral and a spiritual level. Antioch preferred to stay nearer the plain sense. Modern readers are usually taught to distrust allegory, though the line between it and typology is thinner than the textbooks let on.
Books in the Greek Old Testament that are not in the Hebrew Bible.
Catholic churches receive them as scripture and call them deuterocanonical. The Orthodox churches receive them too, on a slightly longer list and usually under a different name. Protestant churches do not, though the Reformers valued them for reading and early Protestant Bibles printed them. Jerome raised the question when he translated from the Hebrew, and Augustine disagreed with him about it.
Canon · Jerome · Septuagint
A defender. Someone who argues the case for Christianity to people outside it.
On the timeline: Justin Martyr writes the First Apology, c. 155
From apologia, a speech for the defence in court, which is how 1 Peter 3:15 uses it. The second century apologists, Justin above all, were writing to the emperor and to the educated public. Nothing in the word has anything to do with apologising.
A measuring rod. The list of books the church receives as scripture.
On the timeline: Athanasius lists the twenty seven books of the New Testament, 367 · The four gospels reach their written form, c. 65 to 100 · Marcion is expelled from the church at Rome, c. 144
The canon was recognised rather than decreed. Books already being read everywhere, and traceable back to the apostolic circle, settled into place over roughly three centuries. Athanasius in 367 gives the first surviving list that matches the present New Testament exactly.
Teaching someone the faith, usually before they are baptised.
The early church took it very seriously. The catechumenate could run for years, and it ended with a formal handing over of the creed. The Reformation catechisms, Luther's, Heidelberg and Westminster, are the same instinct put into print.
The doctrine of the person of Christ. Who he is, rather than what he did.
The classic split is between the person of Christ, which is christology proper, and the work of Christ, which is soteriology. The first five centuries are mostly taken up with the first question, and the great councils are the milestones along the way.
The Chalcedonian Definition · The hypostatic union · Soteriology
From credo, I believe. A short agreed statement of faith.
Creeds grew out of the questions put to people at baptism, and out of the rule of faith. The Apostles' Creed is western and later than its name suggests. The Nicene Creed comes from councils. The Athanasian Creed is neither by Athanasius nor from a council.
The doctrine of the church. What it is, who belongs, and who leads.
Most church splits are ecclesiological before they are anything else. The questions keep coming back in the same shape Cyprian and the Donatists met them in. Is the church defined by holiness or by grace? And does the failure of a minister invalidate what he does?
Reading your own meaning into a text. The thing exegesis is supposed to prevent.
Nobody sets out to do it. It is what happens when the conclusion is settled before the reading starts, and it is most dangerous when the conclusion is one you are fond of.
Assembly. The New Testament word we translate as church.
On the timeline: Pentecost, c. 30 or 33
In ordinary Greek it meant a civic gathering, citizens called out to decide something. The Septuagint uses it for the assembly of Israel, and that is the more important background. It never means a building.
The doctrine of last things. Death, judgement, resurrection, new creation.
Modern theology has increasingly argued that this is not an appendix at the end of the syllabus but a dimension running through the whole of it. The New Testament treats the last days as already begun in the resurrection and not yet finished, which usually gets called inaugurated eschatology.
Drawing the meaning out of a text.
Reading a passage in its own language, its own genre and its own setting, and letting it say what it says. It is slow work and there is no shortcut.
The theory of interpretation. The rules you are using, whether you know it or not.
Exegesis is the act of interpreting a passage. Hermeneutics is the account of how interpretation works at all. Everyone has one. The only question is whether it has ever been looked at.
Of similar being. One Greek letter away from homoousios, and the difference mattered.
The compromise party wanted to say the Son is like the Father in being. Gibbon sneered that the world was convulsed over a single letter. But the argument was about whether the Son is God or the highest of creatures, which is not a small distinction however small the spelling. Many who used the word were not Arians, and Athanasius himself treated them as brothers who meant the right thing badly.
Of the same being. The word Nicaea used to say the Son is God in the same sense the Father is.
On the timeline: The Arian controversy breaks out in Alexandria, c. 318 to 321 · The Council of Nicaea, 325
Nicaea picked a word that does not appear in the Bible, which was controversial then and still gets raised as an objection. The council's answer was that the Arians could agree to every biblical phrase while meaning something else by it, so a word was needed that they could not sign. It rules out the idea that the Son is merely very like God.
Arianism · Homoiousios · Ousia
A particular concrete existence. In trinitarian language, a person.
On the timeline: The Cappadocian Fathers, c. 360 to 395
It originally meant much the same as ousia, which is why the fourth century was so confused. The Cappadocians fixed the distinction. One ousia, three hypostases. In christology the word does different work again, because Chalcedon says the two natures meet in one hypostasis.
The proclamation. The core announcement the church made about Jesus.
On the timeline: The crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, c. 30 or 33
Set against didache, which is teaching. The kerygma is the news itself. Christ died, was buried, was raised, appeared. Scholars have tried to reconstruct its earliest shape from formulas buried in the New Testament, especially in 1 Corinthians 15.
Word, reason, principle. The title John gives Christ in his first chapter.
On the timeline: Justin Martyr writes the First Apology, c. 155
The term already carried weight in Greek philosophy, where it named the rational order of the universe. John takes it and says that ordering principle became flesh. Justin and the apologists used the overlap to argue that whatever is true in philosophy already belongs to Christ.
Being, or substance. What a thing is.
On the timeline: The Cappadocian Fathers, c. 360 to 395
In trinitarian language, God is one ousia. Latin renders it substantia, which is why the western creeds talk about one substance. Part of the confusion in the fourth century was simply linguistic. Greek and Latin speakers were using cognate words for different things.
Presence, or arrival. The New Testament word for the return of Christ.
In ordinary Greek it described the state visit of a king or a governor to a city, which fits the New Testament use better than the English word coming does. The city goes out to meet the ruler on the road and walks him in.
The study of the church fathers, roughly from the end of the New Testament to the eighth century.
The boundaries are a convention rather than anything natural. In the west the period is usually closed with Gregory the Great in 604, in the east with John of Damascus in the eighth century. Patrology strictly means the study of the writers and patristics the study of their thought, though in practice the words get used loosely.
The three persons of the Trinity living in one another.
Each person wholly contains and is contained by the others, and none of them loses what makes them distinct. The Latin equivalent is circumincession. It is the answer to the question of how three persons are one God without being three parts of God.
Person. The Latin word behind the three persons of the Trinity.
On the timeline: Tertullian writes in Latin, c. 197 to 210
Tertullian brought it in. It originally meant a mask, or a role, which has caused centuries of anxiety that it might suggest God playing three parts. It does not mean person in the modern sense of a separate centre of consciousness. Read it that way and you end up with three gods.
The doctrine of the Holy Spirit.
On the timeline: Azusa Street, 1906 · The Cappadocian Fathers, c. 360 to 395 · The First Council of Constantinople, 381 · Pentecost, c. 30 or 33
Nicaea in 325 said very little about the Spirit. Basil's On the Holy Spirit and the Council of Constantinople in 381 supplied what was missing. That pneumatology stays thin next to christology is a complaint modern theology keeps making.
The medieval fourfold sense of scripture. Literal, allegorical, moral and anagogical.
A four horse chariot, hence the name. The literal sense tells you what happened, the allegorical what to believe, the moral what to do, the anagogical what to hope for. Jerusalem is the worked example everyone uses. A city, the church, the faithful soul, and the heavenly city.
The ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, written LXX.
The doctrine of salvation. What God has done about the human problem, and how.
On the timeline: Athanasius becomes bishop of Alexandria, 328
It is tied at every point to christology. What you think Christ had to be depends on what you think had to be fixed. That is exactly the move Athanasius makes against Arius, and it is why the two doctrines cannot be studied apart.
God-bearer. The title of Mary confirmed at Ephesus in 431.
On the timeline: The Council of Ephesus, 431
The word says something about Christ before it says anything about Mary. If the one she bore is God the Son, then she bore God. Nestorius preferred Christotokos, and the council judged that this split Christ into two subjects.
Cyril of Alexandria · The hypostatic union · Nestorianism · Nestorius
Reading earlier people, events and institutions as patterns that point forward to Christ.
Different from allegory in that typology holds the historical events really happened and really do point forward, rather than standing in for something else. Adam and Christ. The exodus and redemption. The temple and the incarnation. The New Testament does it constantly, which is the main argument for its legitimacy.
The ideas themselves. Doctrines, methods, practices, controversies and movements.
Language about God is neither literal nor meaningless. It is analogical.
On the timeline: Thomas Aquinas writes the Summa Theologiae, 1265 to 1274
When we call God good, the word is not being used exactly as it is of a person, or the creator would be a creature. Nor is it being used with no connection at all, or we would be saying nothing. Aquinas' doctrine of analogy is the classic attempt to hold the middle ground.
The generation of Christian writers straight after the apostles.
On the timeline: 1 Clement, c. 96 · The Didache, c. 50 to 120
A modern collective name, not one they used. Clement of Rome, Ignatius, Polycarp, the Didache, Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas. They are not systematic theologians. They are pastors writing to churches under pressure, and that is what makes them worth reading.
Clement of Rome · Ignatius of Antioch · Patristics · Polycarp of Smyrna
The Son is the highest of creatures, not God in the full sense.
On the timeline: The Arian controversy breaks out in Alexandria, c. 318 to 321
Arius was defending the uniqueness of God, not attacking Christ. But if the Son is created then he shares in God rather than possessing divinity, and he cannot give what he does not have. Athanasius' answer is about salvation. A creature cannot save creatures.
Arius · Athanasius of Alexandria · Homoousios · 325 · Participation
Election rests on foreseen faith, and grace can be resisted.
On the timeline: The Synod of Dort, 1618 to 1619
Named for Jacobus Arminius, a Reformed minister trained in Geneva. His followers, the Remonstrants, put five points to the Dutch church in 1610 and the Synod of Dort answered each one. They are not semi-Pelagians. The Remonstrance affirms that a person can do nothing good without grace going before, and the argument is about whether that grace can be refused. Wesley later took up a version of it, which is why the Methodist and Reformed traditions still divide here.
What the death and resurrection of Christ actually accomplish.
On the timeline: Anselm writes Cur Deus Homo, 1098
The church has never dogmatised a single theory, which is unusual. Ransom, victory over the powers, satisfaction, penal substitution, moral example, recapitulation. All have been held, often together. The New Testament uses several images at once, and whether one of them is the controlling image is itself part of the argument.
Christus Victor · Penal substitution · Recapitulation · Satisfaction · Soteriology
Reading the Bible as one unfolding story, on its own terms and in its own order.
Different from systematic theology, which arranges everything by topic. Biblical theology asks what a book, or a stage of the story, contributes where it stands, and then traces the themes forward. Creation, exile, temple, kingship, covenant. It is the dominant method in a lot of current evangelical scholarship.
Covenant · Systematic theology · Temple and sacred geography · Typology
The 451 statement that Christ is one person in two natures, fully God and fully human.
On the timeline: The Council of Chalcedon, 451
It is the standard of christological orthodoxy for Catholic, Orthodox and most Protestant churches. It works largely by exclusion, ruling out the answers that had already failed, and it deliberately does not explain the mechanism. Not all churches received it, and the Oriental Orthodox split dates from here.
The cross as a victory over sin, death and the devil.
Prominent in the early church and in the east. Gustaf Aulen's 1931 book gave it the name and argued it had been wrongly displaced in the west, a historical claim that has been much disputed since. It reads the cross and the resurrection together as a single act of liberation. Many who hold it hold a substitutionary account as well, and do not treat the two as alternatives.
The German Protestants who refused to let the Nazi state define the church.
Formed in 1934 around the Barmen Declaration, against the German Christians who wanted the church lined up with the regime. Its record is mixed. Plenty of members opposed state control of the church without opposing much else, and only a minority went as far as Bonhoeffer.
A written statement of what a church believes, agreed and public.
On the timeline: The Augsburg Confession, 1530 · The Westminster Confession and Catechisms, 1646 to 1647
Different from a creed in being longer, later and usually denominational. Augsburg, the Thirty Nine Articles, Westminster, the Baptist confessions. Churches tend to write them when they have just divided, or are about to.
A critical name for the church's alliance with state power after Constantine.
On the timeline: Constantine at the Milvian Bridge, 312
The term is polemical, and it comes from John Howard Yoder and the Anabaptist tradition. Yoder's own denomination later documented his record of sustained sexual abuse and harassment of dozens of women over several decades, confirmed by a 2015 peer reviewed historical study. The word names the moment the church stopped being a persecuted minority and started having access to force. Whether 313 was a rescue or a fall is one of the oldest arguments in church history.
Turning. A change of allegiance, and in evangelical usage often a datable one.
On the timeline: The Evangelical Revival and the Great Awakening, c. 1730 to 1760
The tradition holds two things together. Sudden turnings, like Paul's and Augustine's, and the slow forming of people raised in the faith. Insisting that everyone must have the first kind has caused a great deal of unnecessary anxiety.
A gathering of bishops to settle a disputed question for the whole church.
On the timeline: The Council of Jerusalem, c. 49 · The Council of Nicaea, 325
The pattern goes back to Acts 15. Seven councils, from Nicaea in 325 to the Second Nicaea in 787, are received as ecumenical by both east and west. The Roman Catholic Church counts twenty one. Which councils count is itself part of the disagreement.
A binding relationship, sworn, with obligations, between God and a people.
The organising idea of much of the Old Testament, and the frame the New Testament reads it within. Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, and the new covenant in Christ. Whether these are stages of one covenant or genuinely separate arrangements is the fault line between covenant theology and dispensationalism.
Also called theosis. Sharing in the life of God without ever becoming God.
On the timeline: Athanasius becomes bishop of Alexandria, 328 · Athanasius writes On the Incarnation, c. 318 to 335
Athanasius' famous line is that he became human so that we might become divine. The claim is participation, not absorption. Humanity is taken into the relationship the Son has with the Father, by grace, and the line between creator and creature holds absolutely. It is central to Orthodox theology and it has been recovered in the west over recent decades.
Athanasius of Alexandria · Participation · Recapitulation · Soteriology
Athanasius' framing. God's justice requires death for sin, God's goodness will not abandon his image.
On the timeline: Athanasius writes On the Incarnation, c. 318 to 335
Repentance on its own cannot solve it, because repentance does not undo corruption. Only the Word, taking a body that can die, can satisfy the sentence and remake the nature at the same time. It is the engine of the argument in On the Incarnation.
Christ only seemed to have a body.
On the timeline: Ignatius of Antioch writes seven letters on the way to his death, c. 107 to 117
From the Greek for to seem. If matter is beneath contempt then God cannot really have taken it, so the suffering has to be an appearance. Ignatius attacks it hard on the way to his own death, and 1 John seems to have something like it in view.
The theory that the Pentateuch was put together from four earlier sources.
On the timeline: The rise of historical criticism, c. 1780 to 1900
The classical form, associated with Wellhausen, identifies J, E, D and P. The consensus behind it has weakened a great deal and few scholars now hold the original version. The underlying question, of how the Pentateuch came together, is still a real one.
A teaching the church has formally defined as binding.
Narrower than doctrine, which covers Christian teaching in general. The Trinity and the two natures of Christ are dogma. A great deal else is doctrine, held with varying degrees of confidence, and being able to tell the difference is part of growing up theologically.
Sacraments performed by unworthy ministers are invalid.
On the timeline: The Great Persecution, 303 to 311
The African church split over clergy who had handed scriptures to the authorities during the Great Persecution. Augustine's answer was that the sacraments belong to Christ and not to the minister, so their validity does not rest on the minister's holiness. The controversy also moved Augustine, who had opposed coercion, to defend the use of state force against the Donatists. He argued it from the parable's compel them to come in, and it was quoted for centuries afterwards to justify a great deal.
Christ has two wills, divine and human, and they do not compete.
On the timeline: Maximus the Confessor dies in exile, 662
Affirmed at the Third Council of Constantinople in 681. The human will of Christ is genuinely human and genuinely free, and it freely conforms to the divine. It is what Chalcedon was always going to require.
The Chalcedonian Definition · Maximus the Confessor · Monothelitism
The effort to heal the divisions between the churches.
On the timeline: The Second Vatican Council, 1962 to 1965
From the Greek for the whole inhabited world. Modern ecumenism grew out of the missionary movement, which found competing denominations impossible to defend on the field. The World Council of Churches and the Second Vatican Council are its landmarks.
Government of the church by bishops.
On the timeline: 1 Clement, c. 96 · Cyprian of Carthage is executed, 258 · Ignatius of Antioch writes seven letters on the way to his death, c. 107 to 117
Ignatius already assumes a single bishop with presbyters and deacons around him. Cyprian argued that the bishops together hold the church's unity. Whether the arrangement is divinely instituted or a practical development is one of the oldest questions between the churches.
The Son is begotten of the Father eternally. No before, no beginning.
On the timeline: Origen writes On First Principles and Against Celsus, c. 230 to 250
The answer to the Arian claim that begotten has to mean a start. Human begetting happens in time and produces a separate being. Divine begetting does neither. The Son is always Son and the Father is always Father, and neither of them becomes so.
A transatlantic Protestant movement marked by conversion, the Bible, the cross and activism.
On the timeline: The Lausanne Covenant, 1974 · The Evangelical Revival and the Great Awakening, c. 1730 to 1760
David Bebbington's four marks, conversionism, biblicism, crucicentrism and activism, are still the standard description. It grew out of the eighteenth century revivals, and it runs across denominations rather than being one.
And from the Son. A phrase the west added to the creed and the east never accepted.
On the timeline: The First Council of Constantinople, 381 · The East and West Schism, 1054
Does the Spirit proceed from the Father, or from the Father and the Son? There are two disputes here, not one. The east objects to the doctrine, holding that the Father alone is the source within the Trinity. And it objects to the procedure, because the west amended an ecumenical creed without an ecumenical council. Rome has since clarified that it does not mean the Spirit has two sources, and the creed is used without the phrase in some Catholic worship. It remains unresolved.
The church's decision to keep four accounts rather than blend them into one.
On the timeline: The four gospels reach their written form, c. 65 to 100
Irenaeus defended it with an argument from the four winds and the four corners of the earth that few now find persuasive. The decision itself has worn far better. Four portraits that differ in detail and agree in substance are harder to explain away than one smoothed narrative.
Whether, and in what sense, a person can choose God.
On the timeline: The Pelagian controversy, c. 411 to 431
Almost nobody in the tradition denies that people choose. The argument is about whether a will bent away from God can turn itself back. Augustine said no, Pelagius said yes, Erasmus and Luther fought it out again, and Arminius and Dort after them. Separating freedom from coercion and freedom of inclination takes most of the heat out of it.
Desiderius Erasmus · Grace · Martin Luther · Pelagianism · Predestination
Salvation by secret knowledge, and a creation that should never have happened.
On the timeline: Irenaeus writes Against Heresies, c. 180
A loose family rather than one system. What they share is a lesser and hostile creator god, matter as the problem, and an elite saved by knowing things. Irenaeus saw that the real issue was the story. The gnostics used Christian words inside a completely different plot.
Docetism · Irenaeus of Lyons · Marcionism · The rule of faith
Good news. Originally the announcement of a royal victory, or a new emperor.
The word euangelion was already in public use for imperial proclamations before the church took it. Applying it to a crucified provincial was a deliberate provocation. It names the announcement first, and only later became the label for the four books that carry it.
God's favour, given rather than earned.
On the timeline: The conversion of Augustine, 386 · The Second Council of Orange, 529 · The Pelagian controversy, c. 411 to 431
The word carries a lot of weight and it does not always carry the same weight. For Augustine it is the power that heals a damaged will. For the medieval schoolmen it can be something infused. For the Reformers it is above all God's disposition towards sinners. Read it carelessly across periods and you will confuse yourself endlessly.
Augustine of Hippo · Justification · Pelagianism · Prevenient grace
The command at the end of Matthew to make disciples of all nations.
On the timeline: William Carey and the modern missionary movement, 1792
Its force was disputed. Some held it had been discharged by the apostles, which is the view Carey wrote against in 1792. Read alongside Genesis 1:28 it also looks like the renewal of an original commission to fill the earth, which is how biblical theology tends to take it.
Historical study of a biblical text's sources, authorship, date and setting.
On the timeline: The rise of historical criticism, c. 1780 to 1900
Different from lower or textual criticism, which works out the wording. The methods themselves are ordinary historical tools. The controversy is about the assumptions they are sometimes carried out with, particularly where the conclusion about what can happen in history is fixed in advance.
The documentary hypothesis · The quest for the historical Jesus · Textual criticism
The two natures of Christ meet in one person. No mixing, no separating.
On the timeline: The Council of Chalcedon, 451 · The Council of Ephesus, 431
Chalcedon's four adverbs do the work. Without confusion, without change, without division, without separation. The first two protect the distinction of the natures, the second two protect the unity of the person. The definition is a fence, not an explanation.
The Chalcedonian Definition · Hypostasis · The Incarnation · Monophysitism · Nestorianism
The rejection of religious images, and the fight over them in the eastern church.
On the timeline: The iconoclast controversy, c. 726 to 843
John of Damascus answered that the incarnation changes the terms. God who could not be pictured has taken visible flesh, so refusing images comes close to denying that. The Second Council of Nicaea in 787 permitted them, drawing a line between veneration and the worship due to God alone. The Reformed churches later rejected images again, arguing from the second commandment rather than from christology. That is a different objection and it needs answering on its own terms.
Something credited to an account that did not earn it.
In Reformation theology, Adam's sin is imputed to humanity and Christ's righteousness to the believer. Critics call it a legal fiction. Defenders answer that it is no fiction if the person is genuinely united to Christ, which is why imputation and union with Christ belong together.
God the Son took a full human nature and did not stop being God.
On the timeline: The iconoclast controversy, c. 726 to 843
From the Latin for enfleshing. The claim is not that God appeared as a man, nor that a man was promoted to divinity, but that one person exists in two complete natures. Every christological heresy of the first five centuries is a simplification of this in one direction or the other.
Arianism · The Chalcedonian Definition · Docetism · The hypostatic union · Logos
Remission of temporal penalty for sin, and the immediate cause of the Reformation.
On the timeline: Luther posts the Ninety Five Theses, 1517
In theory an indulgence remits penalty, not guilt, and never forgiveness itself. In practice, by 1517, it was being sold with promises about souls in purgatory. Luther's theses attack the sale and the theology behind it. Trent later abolished the sale and kept the doctrine.
Being declared right with God.
On the timeline: The conversion of Saul of Tarsus, c. 33 to 36 · Luther posts the Ninety Five Theses, 1517 · The Council of Trent, 1545 to 1563
The central Reformation dispute. Is it a legal declaration on the basis of Christ's righteousness credited to the believer, or the act by which God makes a person actually righteous, begun at baptism and increased through life? Trent and the Reformers meant different things by the word, which is part of why they could not agree. In 1999 the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church signed a Joint Declaration concluding that the condemnations of the sixteenth century no longer apply to the other side's teaching as it is now stated. Not everyone on either side accepts that this settles it.
Imputation · Martin Luther · Penal substitution · Sanctification
God's reign, announced by Jesus as arriving in his own ministry.
The central theme of Jesus' preaching in the synoptics. The scholarly consensus of the last century is that it is both present and future, already begun and not yet finished, which is why the New Testament can speak of it in both tenses without embarrassment.
Those who denied the faith under persecution and later wanted to come back.
On the timeline: The Decian persecution and the lapsed, 250 to 251
The hardest pastoral problem of the third century, by a distance. Some had sacrificed. Some had merely bought a certificate. Some had handed over books. Whether and how they could be restored split churches, and it generated the doctrine of penance.
The relation between God's command and God's promise.
On the timeline: The Council of Jerusalem, c. 49
Luther made the distinction a key for reading the whole Bible, arguing that confusing the two destroys assurance. The Reformed tradition adds a third use of the law, as a guide for the Christian life, where Luther pressed hardest on its work of exposing sin. Both are trying to keep grace free without making obedience optional.
Rebuilding Christian belief on religious experience and modern knowledge.
On the timeline: Schleiermacher and liberal theology, 1799 to 1830
Begins with Schleiermacher and runs through the nineteenth century. The aim was to keep faith credible to educated moderns. Barth's judgement, formed by watching his teachers endorse the war in 1914, was that it had ended up talking about humanity in a loud voice.
Karl Barth · Higher criticism · Neo-orthodoxy · Friedrich Schleiermacher
The work of the people. The set shape of public worship.
On the timeline: The Book of Common Prayer, 1549, revised 1662 · The Second Vatican Council, 1962 to 1965
Every church has one, including the ones that insist they do not. The old tag lex orandi, lex credendi says the rule of prayer forms the rule of belief. That is a claim that what a congregation sings and says shapes what it actually believes, more than the sermon does.
The God of the Old Testament is a different and lesser god from the Father of Jesus.
On the timeline: Marcion is expelled from the church at Rome, c. 144
Marcion cut the Old Testament away and pruned the New down to a shortened Luke and ten letters of Paul. The church's rejection of him is one of the most consequential decisions it ever made. The temptation he represents has never gone away.
One, holy, catholic and apostolic. The four adjectives in the creed.
The Reformers added a second set of tests for a true church. The word rightly preached and the sacraments rightly administered, with discipline sometimes as a third. Both lists are attempts to answer the same question, which is how you tell.
From the Greek for witness. Dying rather than denying.
On the timeline: The fire of Rome and the first imperial persecution, 64 · The martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicity, 203 · The martyrdom of Polycarp, c. 155 or 167
The early church treated martyrdom as the fullest form of testimony, and read the martyr's death as conformity to Christ's. It also created problems. The prestige of confessors who survived complicated the question of who could forgive the lapsed, and some enthusiasts had to be talked out of volunteering.
The sending of the church, and increasingly understood as God's sending before it is ours.
On the timeline: William Carey and the modern missionary movement, 1792 · The Lausanne Covenant, 1974
The phrase missio Dei makes the point that mission is God's activity, which the church joins, rather than a programme the church runs. The modern missionary movement from Carey onward is why the world church looks the way it does. Its entanglement with colonial power is part of that account.
Father, Son and Spirit are three modes of one person, not three persons.
Also called Sabellianism, or in the west patripassianism, because it means the Father suffered on the cross. It is the most common accidental heresy in ordinary preaching. The water, ice and steam illustration falls straight into it, and the clover and the egg fall into the opposite error of making the persons into parts.
Withdrawal for prayer, work and discipline, alone or in community.
On the timeline: The Rule of St Benedict, c. 540
It began in the Egyptian desert with Antony and the desert fathers, partly as a substitute for martyrdom once persecution ended. Benedict's rule shaped the western form. Monasteries carried literacy, agriculture, medicine and libraries through the collapse of the western empire.
Christ has one nature, the human absorbed into the divine.
On the timeline: The Council of Chalcedon, 451
The opposite error to Nestorianism, and condemned at Chalcedon. The label gets applied loosely and often unfairly. The Oriental Orthodox churches prefer miaphysite, one united nature out of two, and modern dialogue has concluded that a lot of the split was linguistic.
The Chalcedonian Definition · Cyril of Alexandria · The hypostatic union
Christ has two natures but only one will. A seventh century compromise.
On the timeline: Maximus the Confessor dies in exile, 662
Proposed to win back the churches that had rejected Chalcedon. Maximus the Confessor argued that a nature without a will is not a nature, so a Christ with no human will has not truly become human, and Gethsemane stops making sense. He was mutilated for saying so, and vindicated after his death.
What can be known of God from creation and reason alone.
On the timeline: Thomas Aquinas writes the Summa Theologiae, 1265 to 1274
Aquinas held that reason can establish that God is, while what God is like needs revelation. Barth rejected the whole project, partly because he had watched it used to bless German nationalism. It is one of the live disputes of modern theology.
The twentieth century recovery of revelation, against liberal theology.
On the timeline: Barth's commentary on Romans, 1919, revised 1922
A label Barth disliked. The instinct behind it is that theology has to begin with God's self-disclosure rather than with human religiosity, and it went back to the Reformers and the creeds while still accepting critical scholarship. Barth, Brunner, and differently, Bonhoeffer.
Karl Barth · Dietrich Bonhoeffer · Liberal theology · Revelation
Christ is so distinguished into two natures that he risks becoming two subjects.
On the timeline: The Council of Ephesus, 431
Nestorius objected to Theotokos and wanted the divine and the human kept strictly apart. Whether the historical Nestorius held what was condemned in his name is genuinely disputed. The Church of the East, labelled Nestorian for centuries, has reached agreement with Rome on the substance in modern times.
The creed most churches say on a Sunday. Nicaea in 325, expanded at Constantinople in 381.
Strictly it is the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed. The 325 version stopped abruptly after the Holy Spirit and added a set of anathemas against Arian phrases. The 381 revision dropped the anathemas and filled out the article on the Spirit. The filioque is a later western addition and is not in the original text.
325 · 381 · Creed · Homoousios · Filioque
A rigorist party that refused to readmit those who lapsed under persecution.
On the timeline: The Decian persecution and the lapsed, 250 to 251 · The Novatianist schism, 251
Novatian was not obviously wrong about holiness and he still lost. The church judged that it had to have room for the failed. The same instinct comes back with the Donatists, and at various points since.
Human beings are born into a condition they cannot fix by trying harder.
On the timeline: The conversion of Augustine, 386 · The Pelagian controversy, c. 411 to 431
Augustine's formulation, worked out against Pelagius. It is not the claim that infants are guilty of particular crimes, but that the will is disordered from the start. Eastern theology tends to speak of inherited mortality and corruption rather than inherited guilt, and that is a real difference.
Right belief, or right worship. Both meanings are there in the Greek.
On the timeline: The East and West Schism, 1054
Defined at the First Vatican Council in 1870, and narrower than people assume.
On the timeline: The First Vatican Council, 1869 to 1870
It applies to formal definitions on faith and morals made by the pope speaking as universal pastor, and it has been invoked explicitly very rarely. It is not a claim that the pope cannot be wrong about anything.
Sharing in something that belongs by nature to someone else.
This is the concept doing the heavy lifting in patristic teaching about salvation. A creature can only receive divine life by participation, never possess it by nature. Athanasius' argument against Arius runs straight through it. A Son who himself only participates in God cannot hand participation on to anybody else.
Arianism · Athanasius of Alexandria · Deification · Union with Christ
Human beings can obey God by the exercise of their own will.
On the timeline: The Pelagian controversy, c. 411 to 431
Pelagius was a moral reformer appalled by lax Christians. His argument was that God would not command the impossible. Augustine replied that the will itself needs healing before it can want the good at all. The church sided with Augustine, at Carthage and then at Ephesus.
Christ bears the punishment due to sinners, in their place.
Developed by the Reformers out of earlier substitutionary language, and central to most evangelical accounts of the cross. Critics say it cuts the cross off from the resurrection and can set the Father against the Son. Defenders say the New Testament language of propitiation and curse requires it.
How the church deals with serious sin after baptism.
On the timeline: The Decian persecution and the lapsed, 250 to 251 · The Novatianist schism, 251
The third century had no ready answer and nearly split over it. Early practice allowed one restoration after grave sin, and that developed into repeated private confession. The medieval system of confession, absolution and satisfaction is where indulgences eventually grew, which is how the question ended up at 1517.
Renewal centred on the gifts and the present work of the Spirit.
On the timeline: Azusa Street, 1906
Usually dated from Azusa Street in 1906, though there were earlier stirrings. With the later charismatic movement inside the historic churches, it is the fastest growing form of Christianity in the world, and overwhelmingly a southern hemisphere one.
God's decision about salvation, made before anything else. What that means is the whole argument.
On the timeline: The Synod of Dort, 1618 to 1619 · Calvin publishes the Institutes, 1536, revised to 1559 · The Westminster Confession and Catechisms, 1646 to 1647
Held in some form by Augustine, Aquinas, Luther and Calvin alike. It is not a Calvinist invention. Arminians hold it too and define it differently, as God's determination to save those who believe. The divisions are over whether election is unconditional or rests on foreseen faith, and whether there is a matching decree of reprobation. Each side says the other cannot account for something. The Reformed say grace must be sovereign or it is not grace. The Arminian says a choice that could not have gone otherwise is not a choice.
Arminianism · John Calvin · Free will · Grace
Grace that comes first, so that a person can respond at all.
On the timeline: The Second Council of Orange, 529
From the Latin for going before. The Second Council of Orange affirmed that even the first stirring of faith is God's gift. Wesley made the idea central, arguing that God gives everyone enough grace to be able to respond, which lets him hold real freedom and total dependence at the same time.
Attempts to reconstruct Jesus by historical method alone.
On the timeline: The rise of historical criticism, c. 1780 to 1900
Albert Schweitzer's verdict on the first quest was that each scholar had looked down a deep well and seen his own face. Later quests have been more disciplined, and the third has taken Jesus' Jewishness seriously in a way the first never did.
Irenaeus' idea that Christ retraces the whole human story and gets it right.
On the timeline: Irenaeus writes Against Heresies, c. 180
From the Greek anakephalaiosis, summing up under a head, in Ephesians 1:10. Where Adam disobeyed at a tree, Christ obeys at a tree. Christ passes through every stage of a human life and makes each one holy. It is a way of saying that salvation restores and completes creation rather than replacing it.
Back to the sources. Read the classics and the Bible in the languages they were written in.
On the timeline: Erasmus publishes the Greek New Testament, 1516
Ad fontes was the slogan. Erasmus applied it to the New Testament and found that the Latin Vulgate did not always match the Greek. Humanism handed the Reformation its tools, even where the humanists themselves would not follow the Reformers.
Not the survival of the soul. The raising of the body.
On the timeline: The crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, c. 30 or 33
The Christian hope is bodily, and it is corporate, and it has a new creation attached to it. Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 argues that if Christ is not raised then the whole thing collapses, which is an unusually falsifiable claim for a religion to make.
God making himself known, rather than being worked out from below.
On the timeline: Barth's commentary on Romans, 1919, revised 1922
The usual distinction is between general revelation, available in creation and conscience, and special revelation in scripture and above all in Christ. Barth's whole project turns on insisting that revelation comes from God's side, which is why he was so hostile to natural theology.
A short summary of the Christian story, used as a guide to reading scripture.
On the timeline: Irenaeus writes Against Heresies, c. 180
Irenaeus and Tertullian appeal to it against the gnostics, who could quote scripture freely while telling an entirely different story with it. The rule is not a text set over the Bible. It is the plot of the Bible, held in advance, so that individual verses get read inside it.
Being made holy, over time.
The Reformers distinguished it from justification, which happens once and is complete. Keeping the two distinct without separating them is the perennial problem. Calvin's solution was to root both in union with Christ, so that neither can be had without the other.
Anselm's account. Sin dishonours God infinitely, and only the God-man can put it right.
On the timeline: Anselm writes Cur Deus Homo, 1098
Anselm argued from the feudal logic of honour and debt. Humanity owes what it cannot pay, God alone can pay it, and the debt is a human one, so whoever pays has to be both. It gets confused with penal substitution constantly, but that is a later and different argument, about punishment rather than honour.
The medieval school method. State the question, list the objections, answer, reply.
On the timeline: Thomas Aquinas writes the Summa Theologiae, 1265 to 1274
A way of working rather than a set of conclusions, and there were Protestant scholastics as well as Catholic ones. Its reputation for hair splitting is mostly unfair. The disputed question format makes you state the strongest case against yourself before you answer it.
The first move towards God is ours, and grace does the rest.
On the timeline: The Second Council of Orange, 529
A later and polemical label, coined in the sixteenth century, for the moderate position held in southern Gaul by John Cassian and others, who found Augustine's later teaching on predestination unbearable. The Second Council of Orange in 529 rejected the idea that the first move is human, while declining to follow Augustine all the way.
Scripture alone is the final authority, over councils and popes.
On the timeline: Luther at the Diet of Worms, 1521
Regularly misunderstood as scripture only, with tradition thrown out. The Reformers quoted the fathers constantly. The claim is about the final court of appeal, not about ignoring everything else. The version that recognises no authority but a private reading of the Bible is a later and different thing.
The view that the church replaces Israel in God's purposes.
On the timeline: The destruction of the Temple, 70
Held in various strengths across Christian history, and a major factor in Christian antisemitism. Romans 9 to 11 is the text that will not let the strongest forms stand. Most careful modern theology talks about the church being grafted in rather than Israel being replaced.
Arranging Christian teaching by topic into a coherent whole.
God, creation, humanity, sin, Christ, salvation, church, last things. It asks what the whole of scripture, read together and with the tradition, requires us to say on a given question. The risk is imposing a shape the texts do not have. The risk of not doing it is never saying anything at all.
Reading Eden, the tabernacle, the temple and the new creation as one connected pattern.
On the timeline: The destruction of the Temple, 70
Genesis 1 and 2 divide the world into regions and then fill them. The tabernacle repeats the pattern in miniature. Courtyard, holy place, most holy place. The prophets and then the New Testament read Christ and the church as the true temple. It is one of the clearest examples of biblical theology at work.
Working out what the original wording most likely was, from thousands of copies.
On the timeline: Erasmus publishes the Greek New Testament, 1516
Sometimes called lower criticism. No two ancient manuscripts agree in every detail, so the discipline compares them. The overwhelming majority of variants are spelling and word order. A small number are theologically interesting, and a few passages people know well are almost certainly later additions, including the ending of Mark and the woman taken in adultery. No central doctrine rests on a contested reading, which is a more modest claim than it is usually made to carry.
What has been handed on, and what authority it carries.
On the timeline: The Council of Trent, 1545 to 1563
From the Latin for handing over. Everyone has a tradition. The dispute is whether it stands alongside scripture as a second source, as Trent was read to say, or whether it is the church's accumulated reading of the one source. Newman and the twentieth century ecumenical conversations have narrowed the gap considerably.
One God in three persons, and none of the three is a part or a phase of God.
On the timeline: Tertullian writes in Latin, c. 197 to 210
The doctrine was not read off a single verse. It was worked out over three centuries as the church tried to say everything the scriptures say about the Father, the Son and the Spirit without contradicting the confession that God is one. The classic formula is one ousia, three hypostases.
Arianism · Homoousios · Hypostasis · Modalism · Ousia · Perichoresis
Augustine's picture of two communities, defined by two loves, mixed together until the end.
On the timeline: Augustine finishes The City of God, 413 to 426 · Alaric sacks Rome, 410
The earthly city is built by love of self to the point of contempt for God. The heavenly city by love of God to the point of contempt for self. Neither maps onto any visible institution, and that is the point. The church is not simply the city of God, and the state is not simply its rival.
Being joined to Christ, so that what is his becomes yours.
On the timeline: Calvin publishes the Institutes, 1536, revised to 1559
Central to Calvin, and increasingly recognised as the frame that holds justification and sanctification together rather than letting them compete. The New Testament phrase in Christ, which Paul uses over a hundred times, is the ground of it.
John Calvin · Justification · Participation · Sanctification
Scripture and worship in the language people actually speak.
On the timeline: The King James Bible, 1611 · Tyndale's English New Testament, 1526 · The Wycliffe Bible, c. 1382
A recurring flashpoint, from Wycliffe and Tyndale through to the Second Vatican Council. Andrew Walls' observation is that Christianity is unusual among world religions in having no sacred original language, and that its translatability is a large part of why it travels.
1549, revised 1662 · William Tyndale · World Christianity · John Wycliffe
What happens in the bread and the wine. The question that kept the Reformation divided.
On the timeline: The Didache, c. 50 to 120
Transubstantiation holds that the substance changes while the appearances remain. The eastern churches affirm the change and decline the Aristotelian machinery used to explain it. Luther held a real bodily presence in, with and under the elements. Calvin held a real presence by the Spirit, the believer lifted up to the Christ who is in heaven. Zwingli read the words as signifying, and made the supper the church's public pledge of allegiance rather than a bare memorial. Luther and Zwingli failed to agree at Marburg in 1529 and the Protestant world has been divided here ever since.
Huldrych Zwingli · John Calvin · Martin Luther · Liturgy · Orthodoxy · 1545 to 1563
The study of the faith as a genuinely global and mostly non-western thing.
On the timeline: The centre of gravity moves south, c. 1970 to now
Associated with Andrew Walls, Lamin Sanneh and Philip Jenkins. The central observation is that Christianity has shifted its centre repeatedly, from Jerusalem to the Mediterranean to northern Europe and now to the global South, and that translation into local languages is what makes that possible.
Who said it, when, and what they were arguing against.
Faith seeking understanding. He asked why God became man, and answered in terms of debt.
On the timeline: Anselm writes Cur Deus Homo, 1098
His ontological argument for the existence of God has been argued over for nine hundred years. Cur Deus Homo reframed the atonement around the satisfaction of honour, and it shaped western thinking about the cross more than any other single book.
Went into the desert, and accidentally started monasticism.
He heard the gospel command to sell everything, did it, and withdrew. Athanasius' Life of Antony became a bestseller across the empire and produced imitators everywhere, Augustine among them. Once persecution ended, the desert became a substitute for martyrdom.
Argued that the Son is the highest creature, and lost.
On the timeline: The Arian controversy breaks out in Alexandria, c. 318 to 321
He was defending the uniqueness and the otherness of God, not attacking Christ, and he was a serious reader of scripture. Almost everything we have of him comes through hostile sources, which is worth holding on to when reading about him.
Defended Nicaea for forty five years, and was exiled five times for it.
On the timeline: Athanasius becomes bishop of Alexandria, 328 · Athanasius lists the twenty seven books of the New Testament, 367 · Athanasius writes On the Incarnation, c. 318 to 335
His case against Arius is not philosophical but soteriological. Only God can save, and the Son cannot hand on a participation in God that he does not possess by nature himself. He also gives us the first surviving list of the twenty seven New Testament books.
The most influential theologian in western history, and the most personally revealing.
On the timeline: The conversion of Augustine, 386 · Augustine finishes The City of God, 413 to 426 · Alaric sacks Rome, 410
North African, classically trained, nine years a Manichee before he was a Christian, converted at thirty two, bishop for thirty five years. Grace, sin, will, time, memory, the church, the state. Everything the western church argued about afterwards runs through him, including a fair amount he would not have recognised as his.
Donatism · Grace · Original sin · Pelagianism · The two cities
Cappadocian, organiser, and the one who argued for the divinity of the Spirit.
On the timeline: The Cappadocian Fathers, c. 360 to 395
He wrote On the Holy Spirit, drafted monastic rules still used in the east, and built a hospital complex outside Caesarea for the poor. Theology and practical mercy in the same career, which the tradition has not always managed.
Wrote a short, humane rule that organised European life for a thousand years.
Prayer, work and study in balance, and an abbot bound to consult even the youngest brother. The moderation is the genius of it. Monasteries built on the rule carried literacy, agriculture and medicine through the collapse of the west.
Wrote the earliest Christian letter we have from outside the New Testament.
On the timeline: 1 Clement, c. 96
The letter to Corinth steps into a dispute over deposed leaders and argues for order and humility. The letter itself is anonymous. The attribution to Clement comes later. And whether it shows an early Roman primacy or just one large church advising another is still argued.
Legalised Christianity, summoned Nicaea, and changed the church's place in the world for good.
On the timeline: The Edict of Milan, 313 · Constantine at the Milvian Bridge, 312
His personal faith is debated. He was baptised only on his deathbed, which was normal practice at the time and is weak evidence either way. What is not debatable is the effect. Persecution ended, money and buildings arrived, and the church acquired a relationship with coercive power that it has argued about ever since.
Worked out what a bishop is for, under persecution, and was executed.
On the timeline: Cyprian of Carthage is executed, 258 · The Novatianist schism, 251
He led the African church through the Decian persecution and the mess that followed, argued that the bishops together hold the church's unity, and said there is no salvation outside the church. His disputes with Rome over baptism show that early appeals to Roman authority settled nothing by themselves.
Won at Ephesus, and was not gentle about it.
On the timeline: The Council of Ephesus, 431
His christology, that the one who was born, suffered and died is the divine Word made flesh, was vindicated at Ephesus and underlies Chalcedon. His methods are a genuine stain. He opened the council before the bishops who disagreed with him had arrived, and he spent heavily at the imperial court afterwards to keep the verdict. He expelled the Jewish community from Alexandria after riots. Whether he bears any responsibility for the murder of the philosopher Hypatia is disputed, and the source that accuses him directly is neither neutral nor contemporary. He later signed a formula of reunion with the Antiochenes that conceded more than his own supporters wanted.
Printed the Greek New Testament, then refused to join the Reformation he had helped cause.
On the timeline: Erasmus publishes the Greek New Testament, 1516
His scholarship exposed the places where the Latin Vulgate had drifted from the Greek. He wanted reform from the inside, and satire rather than schism. He and Luther eventually fought it out in print over the freedom of the will.
Wrote about costly grace, joined the plot against Hitler, and was hanged for it.
On the timeline: The Barmen Declaration, 1934
The Cost of Discipleship attacks cheap grace, forgiveness without repentance. Life Together came out of an illegal seminary. His prison letters, fragmentary and quoted out of context more often than not, ask what Christianity looks like in a world come of age. Executed at Flossenburg weeks before the end of the war.
Relocated religion in feeling, and became the father of liberal theology.
On the timeline: Schleiermacher and liberal theology, 1799 to 1830
He wrote for the cultured despisers of religion, arguing that faith is not first doctrine or morality but a sense of absolute dependence. Whether that rescued Christianity for a sceptical age or hollowed it out is still argued.
The Theologian. His five orations settled how the Trinity gets spoken about.
On the timeline: The Cappadocian Fathers, c. 360 to 395
Reluctant bishop, brilliant speaker, and the author of the line that what is not assumed is not healed, which is the decisive argument for Christ's full humanity. The east gave him the title The Theologian, and only two others have ever held it.
Basil's younger brother, and the most speculative of the three.
On the timeline: The Cappadocian Fathers, c. 360 to 395
He argued that because God is infinite, the soul's growth into God never comes to an end, an idea he called epektasis. He also wrote against slavery in terms almost nobody in the ancient world matched.
A monk who ran a starving city, reformed pastoral care and sent missionaries to England.
On the timeline: Gregory the Great, 590 to 604
His Pastoral Rule, on adapting care to different kinds of people, was the standard clergy handbook for centuries. He sent Augustine of Canterbury to Kent in 597. He is often taken as the last of the Latin fathers.
Ran a monastery that trained five bishops, and hosted the meeting that decided how the English would keep Easter.
On the timeline: The Synod of Whitby decides for Rome, 664
A Northumbrian noblewoman who became a nun in her thirties, she founded and ruled the double monastery at Whitby, housing both men and women under one abbess, a common pattern in the period. Five of her monks went on to become bishops. The herdsman Caedmon, later credited as the first named poet in English, was brought into the community after she recognised his gift. In 664 she hosted the Synod of Whitby, where the Northumbrian church chose Roman practice over the Ionan tradition on the dating of Easter and the shape of the tonsure, a decision that set the English church's trajectory toward Rome. Almost everything known about her comes from Bede's Ecclesiastical History, written decades later by a monk with his own view of how the story should end.
Reformed Zurich on his own, and split with Luther over the supper.
He read the words this is my body as signifying rather than being, and Luther would not have it. Their failure to agree at Marburg in 1529 kept the Lutheran and Reformed traditions apart. Zwingli died in battle two years later.
Wrote seven letters under guard, on the road to his own execution.
On the timeline: Ignatius of Antioch writes seven letters on the way to his death, c. 107 to 117
He presses the reality of Christ's flesh against docetism, and unity around the bishop against fragmentation. He begs the Roman church not to save him. He also gives us the first use of the phrase catholic church.
The first great biblical theologian, and the man who beat the gnostics.
On the timeline: Irenaeus writes Against Heresies, c. 180
He saw that the gnostics were not so much misquoting scripture as putting it inside a different story, and he answered with the rule of faith. One God, one creation, one redemption, summed up in Christ. His account of recapitulation still generates new work.
The fourfold gospel · Gnosticism · Recapitulation · The rule of faith
Burned at Constance, despite a promise of safe conduct.
On the timeline: Jan Hus is burned at Constance, 1415
A Czech preacher influenced by Wycliffe, who attacked corruption among the clergy. His followers pressed for communion in both kinds for the laity, which he endorsed from prison. Luther, accused of being a Hussite, read him afterwards and concluded that he agreed with him.
Translated the Bible into Latin from the original languages, and quarrelled with nearly everyone.
The Vulgate was the Bible of the western church for a thousand years. His insistence on translating from the Hebrew raised the question of the apocrypha, and he lost that argument to Augustine at the time. Translators now work from the Hebrew as he wanted, Catholic ones included. The canon question went the other way, and Trent defined the disputed books as scripture.
Apocrypha · Canon · Septuagint
A reluctant, systematic Frenchman with more attached to his name than he ever taught.
On the timeline: The Synod of Dort, 1618 to 1619 · Calvin publishes the Institutes, 1536, revised to 1559
He wrote the first Institutes at twenty six and revised it for the rest of his life. Whether predestination or union with Christ is the controlling idea is argued among his readers, and so is whether his successors developed him or distorted him. He did teach reprobation as well as election. In the trial of Michael Servetus he gave evidence for the prosecution and pressed for conviction, though the sentence was the city council's, and he asked without success for beheading rather than burning.
Golden mouth. The greatest preacher of the ancient church, and exiled for saying too much.
An Antiochene, so his exegesis stays close to the plain sense. His sermons on Matthew, John and the Pauline letters are still read for their pastoral seriousness. He was driven out of Constantinople for criticising the imperial court and died in exile. His sermons against the Jews of Antioch are violent even by the standards of the period, and they were put to terrible use long afterwards.
Defended icons, and summed up the whole eastern tradition to that point.
On the timeline: The iconoclast controversy, c. 726 to 843
His argument about images turns on the incarnation. God who could not be depicted has taken visible flesh, so refusing images is a way of being uneasy about that. His Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith is often taken as the close of the patristic age in the east.
Rode a quarter of a million miles preaching, and organised what became Methodism.
On the timeline: The Evangelical Revival and the Great Awakening, c. 1730 to 1760
An Anglican priest to the end, though his movement left the church after he died. He held prevenient grace and Christian perfection together, and his genius was organisational as much as theological. His brother Charles wrote the hymns.
Argued for scripture in English, and had his bones dug up and burned for it.
On the timeline: The Wycliffe Bible, c. 1382
He attacked clerical wealth, questioned transubstantiation, and set his circle to translating the Bible into English from the Latin. He was condemned decades after his death, when his remains were exhumed and thrown into the river Swift.
America's most formidable theologian, and far more than the one famous sermon.
On the timeline: The Evangelical Revival and the Great Awakening, c. 1730 to 1760
He is remembered for Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, which misrepresents him badly. His serious work is on the nature of true religious affections, and on beauty as a category in theology. He owned slaves, which his admirers were slow to say out loud. He was dismissed by his own congregation and died shortly after taking up a college presidency.
An anchoress who received sixteen visions in a few hours during a near fatal illness, and spent decades writing out what they meant.
An anchoress attached to a church in Norwich, where she lived enclosed for decades. Julian is probably not even her own name. It most likely comes from the church of St Julian where she was walled in, and nothing certain is known of her life before that. During a severe illness in 1373 she received sixteen visions of Christ's passion in the course of a few hours. She wrote them up twice, a short text soon afterward and a much longer, more theologically developed one perhaps twenty years later. The Long Text includes the disputed image of Christ as mother, and the repeated assurance that all shall be well, set alongside a serious account of sin rather than instead of one. It is usually called the earliest surviving book in English by a woman, though that claim, like the dating and authorship of the two texts, rests on evidence that is not fully settled.
A working philosopher who kept the trade after he converted, and died for the faith.
On the timeline: Justin Martyr writes the First Apology, c. 155
A village pastor who broke liberal theology and spent the rest of his life rebuilding.
On the timeline: The Barmen Declaration, 1934 · Barth's commentary on Romans, 1919, revised 1922
His Romans commentary insisted that God is not the highest human value but the one who addresses us from outside. He drafted Barmen against the Nazified church. The Church Dogmatics ran past six million words and was still unfinished when he died.
His Tome gave Chalcedon its language, and he talked Attila out of Rome.
The Tome of Leo states the two natures in one person with unusual clarity for a document written in the heat of a dispute. The bishops at Chalcedon are reported to have said that Peter had spoken through Leo, which the west has quoted ever since.
Taught her famous brothers everything, and left nothing of her own in writing.
Sister of Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa, and by their account the one who shaped them both. She turned the family estate at Annisa into a monastic community. In his dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection, Gregory presents her as the calm authority instructing him on death and resurrection, from her own deathbed. Almost everything known about her comes from Gregory's Life of Macrina, a hagiographic text written by a grieving and devoted brother, so the historical woman is harder to recover than the portrait. Even allowing for that, the portrait is substantial enough that she is sometimes called the fourth Cappadocian.
Tried to cut the Old Testament away from Christianity, and was thrown out for it.
He held that the creator God of the Hebrew scriptures was a lesser being than the Father of Jesus, and he produced his own shortened canon. Provoking the church into stating what it did receive may be his largest unintended contribution.
An anxious monk who found assurance in Romans and broke the western church.
On the timeline: Jan Hus is burned at Constance, 1415 · Luther posts the Ninety Five Theses, 1517 · Luther at the Diet of Worms, 1521
Justification by faith alone, the priesthood of all believers, the Bible in German, and a body of hymns still sung. He was also capable of appalling writing about Jews late in life, above all On the Jews and Their Lies in 1543, which the Lutheran churches have had to confront directly.
Lost his tongue and his right hand for insisting Christ has a human will.
On the timeline: Maximus the Confessor dies in exile, 662
His argument is that a nature without a will is not a nature, so a Christ with no human will has not truly become human, and Gethsemane becomes a performance. He was mutilated and exiled, and vindicated by a council nineteen years after he died.
Objected to calling Mary God-bearer, and lost his see over it.
On the timeline: The Council of Ephesus, 431
He was trying to protect the full humanity of Christ and the impassibility of God. Whether he actually held the doctrine condemned in his name is genuinely disputed. A long defence he wrote in exile, the Bazaar of Heracleides, survived in Syriac and reached western scholars early in the twentieth century, and it has complicated the picture considerably.
The most learned and the most controversial Christian of the third century.
On the timeline: Origen writes On First Principles and Against Celsus, c. 230 to 250
He wrote the first systematic theology, defended the faith against Celsus, and produced a vast body of work on scripture. Some of his speculations were condemned centuries after he died. Almost every later father, including his critics, used tools he had made.
Persecutor turned apostle, and the earliest Christian writer we can read.
On the timeline: The conversion of Saul of Tarsus, c. 33 to 36
A Pharisee of the diaspora. Educated, a Roman citizen, fluent in the scriptures he had been using against the church. His letters come before the gospels, and they are the foundation of most later theology of grace, the law and union with Christ. He is also the most consistently misread writer in the New Testament.
Argued that people can obey God if they choose to, and was condemned.
He was a moral reformer, appalled by lax Roman Christians who blamed their weakness on their nature. His logic was that God does not command the impossible. Some of his own writing survives, including a commentary on Paul, but he is mostly read through Augustine, which is not a neutral source.
Luther's calmer colleague, and the writer of the Lutheran movement's first systematic theology.
On the timeline: The Augsburg Confession, 1530
He drafted the Augsburg Confession and the Loci Communes, and he pressed for agreement where Luther pressed for clarity. His willingness to compromise made him suspect to hardliners on his own side once Luther was dead.
A living link back to the apostolic generation, burned as an old man.
On the timeline: The martyrdom of Polycarp, c. 155 or 167
Irenaeus says he was taught by John. The account of his death is usually taken as the earliest martyr act we have. His reply to the demand that he curse Christ, that he has served him eighty six years and Christ has never wronged him, is the line everybody remembers.
A nun who reformed her own order and wrote her visions down knowing the Inquisition was reading over her shoulder.
Granddaughter of a converso forced into public penance by the Inquisition, she entered the Carmelites as a young woman. She later led a reform, the Discalced Carmelites, back toward stricter poverty and prayer. She described her experience of prayer and ecstatic visions in The Interior Castle, and in an autobiography written partly because her confessors ordered it and partly to defend herself. Women who claimed direct experience of God were viewed with particular suspicion in sixteenth century Spain. She was investigated more than once by the Inquisition, and associates close to her were tried by it, though she herself was never condemned. In 1970 she became one of the first two women named a Doctor of the Church.
Gave the Latin west much of its theological vocabulary, then left the mainstream church.
On the timeline: Tertullian writes in Latin, c. 197 to 210
He coined or fixed trinity, person and substance in Latin, and asked what Athens has to do with Jerusalem while using rhetorical training from Athens to ask it. He ended up among the rigorist Montanists, which fits his temperament.
Put Aristotle to work for Christian theology on a scale nobody had attempted.
On the timeline: Thomas Aquinas writes the Summa Theologiae, 1265 to 1274
Grace does not destroy nature but perfects it, and reason can take you some way before revelation is needed. The Summa was left unfinished after an experience he would only describe by saying that everything he had written looked like straw.
Gave the English church its prayer book, recanted under pressure, then burned his hand first.
On the timeline: The Book of Common Prayer, 1549, revised 1662
His liturgical prose is among the finest in the language, and it was built to be said aloud over and over without wearing out. Under Mary he recanted several times, then withdrew the recantations at the stake and held his right hand in the fire.
Translated the New Testament into English from the Greek, and was executed for it.
On the timeline: The King James Bible, 1611 · Tyndale's English New Testament, 1526
His English is so good that much of the King James Version simply keeps it. He worked in exile and in hiding. Strangled and burned near Brussels, praying that God would open the king of England's eyes, which within three years the king's own Bible effectively did.