Customer Reviews

Church and Faith in the Patristic Tradition: Augustine, Pelagianism, and Early Christian Northumbria (Collected Studies Series, 521)

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This volume gives a series of fine studies on major turning points in early church history. Bonner traces the first real schism, the Donatist rebellion in North Africa, with its concerns about the requirements of church membership and the right of Christians to choose their own leaders. He follows the reasoning and concerns which led Rome's newly official state church to a series of painful choices. In response to a rebel, anti-colonial sect, the authorities basically denied the right of Roman subjects to choose or reject their appointed religious leaders. Bonner explores the ensuing series of fierce debates over sin and freedom, which altered the course of religious history for at least 1,500 years. With elegant dispassion he clarifies the clashes of thought and feeling behind the momentous events unfolding from North Africa to Northumbria.

--author of Correcting Jesus