Why Study Patristic Theology?

This is my second attempt at starting a blog. I suppose my first attempt was successful in that I signed up and wrote something down, but seeing as how I only wrote something on it once, "success" might have some un-warranted connotations when it comes to what actually happened. I believe that my previous blog failed because it lacked clear enough mission. So I've honed this one down something very specific.

This blog will exist to explain the basic premises of theological works that I read so that it might interest the reader enough to pick up some of the works themselves. I will concentrate on patristic theology for three reasons. The first is that I hope to one day become a patristics scholar and this will give me an excuse to spend my free time reading more of that literature. The second is that I think patristic theology is, generally speaking, the most readable theology that there is. The third is that patristic theology is also quite often the most neglected theology in the Evangelical Christian circles I am in.

Just so you know, I'm not the only one who thinks this. C.S. Lewis, in his introduction to Athanasius' On the Incarnation brings up my second point above quite clearly. He says, "There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find something out about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium... He thinks himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator" (see On the Incarnation, translated and edited by a religious of C.S.M.V. with an introduction by C.S. Lewis, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press).

It is my hope that this blog will encourage you to read patristic theology in the spirit that Lewis sets forth in the above mentioned essay. I expect to write my first summary in the next week.