Recent studies have re-assessed Emperor worship as a genuinely religious response to the metaphysics of social order. Brent argues that Augustus' revolution represented a genuinely religious reformation of Republican religion that had failed in its metaphysical objectives. Against this backcloth, Luke, John the Seer, Clement, Ignatius and the Apologists refashioned Christian theology as an alternative answer to that metaphysical failure. Callistus and Pseudo-Hippolytus gave different responses to Severan images of imperial power. The early, Monarchian theology of the Trinity was thus to become a reflection of imperial culture and its justification that was later to be articulated both in Neo-Platonism, and in Cyprian's view of episcopal Order. Contra-cultural theory is employed as a sociological model to examine the interaction between developing Pagan and Christian social order.
Allen Brent is currently a Visting Professor and Research Fellow at King's college, University of London, engaged in a British Academy Funded research project on Early Christian iconography and epigraphy, with Professor Markus Vinzent. They are both working on a joint monograph exploring a new approach to the study of early Christian art. In the University of Cambridge he is a Senior Member of St. Edmund's College, and was recently awarded the prestigious higher degree of Doctor of Divinity by that University of whose Faculty of Divinity he is a member. From February 2012 he will be Professore Invitato at the Augustinianum (Lateran University), Rome
His website is http://www.allenbrent.co.uk
