Warhammer Ancient battles - armies of antiquity by Allen Curtis, Jervis Johnson, Nigel Stillman, Michael Perry

Show description

The character of the evidence has TT PRAEPARATIO EVANGELICA 12 constrained many histories of the development of doctrine in the first three centuries to rely on such extrapolation, and hence to underemphasize or even to distort the doctrine being taught within the church of the time. Therefore the discovery of even so slight a tract as the Paschal Homily of Melito of Sardis compels a deeper sensitivity to the relation between apologetics and proclamation. There is also reason to believe that while treatises against heresy and defenses of the faith against Jewish and pagan thought were written down in order to be circulated, among the faithful and perhaps among the gainsayers, much of the positive instruction of the people was confined to oral presentation.

Its later counterpart in the Latin church, the Sentences of Peter Lombard, included in its third book a treatment of the virtues created by grace. The two branches of theology were not permanently separated until the work of the seventeenth-century Protestant theologian, Georg Calixtus, but the distinction between doctrine and life had been in force long before that division of labor was effected. Our opening definition requires more detailed specification. Christian doctrine is the business of the church.

The risks involved in this procedure are obvious. If the sermon of Paul on the Areopagus were the only surviving scrap of evidence about his teaching, it would be impossible to extrapolate the theology of his epistles from this pericope. The character of the evidence has TT PRAEPARATIO EVANGELICA 12 constrained many histories of the development of doctrine in the first three centuries to rely on such extrapolation, and hence to underemphasize or even to distort the doctrine being taught within the church of the time.