“He, who made us both one...” Fathers, Tradition, and the Theology of “In-between”
- Writer: Fr Andrew Louth, edited by Nikolaos Asproulis
- Notes: 88 pages, 14X20
- Editor: Volos Academy Publications
- ISBN: 9786188645318
- Year: 2023
Traditionally, the Fathers have been used as an arsenal, from which weapons have been drawn to combat one’s opponent; from the fourth century, they have been used as authorities to defend positions against other positions, held to be in error, as departing from the tradition of the Church. The Ecumenical dimension of modern patristic scholarship abandons such polemical use and suggests a more fruitful way of using the Fathers: as a treasury, wherein we can find the riches of the Church’s tradition, handed down from the Apostles through the Fathers. […]It seems to me that the labors of patristic scholarship have changed the landscape of the Fathers of the Church. We now know them so much better, or at least we have the resources to acquire such knowledge. Some of the ways in which we have opposed the traditional categories of Orthodox and heretical only make superficial sense.
Fr. Andrew Louth studied Mathematics and Theology at the Universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh, while his thesis dealt with Karl Barth. After graduation he taught early Christian theology and patristics at the University of Oxford and early Medieval and Byzantine history at the Goldsmiths, University of London. He is now Professor Emeritus of Patristic and Byzantine Studies at Durham University while he taught, as Visiting Professor, Eastern Orthodox Theology at the Free University of Amsterdam. Andrew Louth was ordained a priest of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchal Diocese of Sourozh in 2003, and he serves a parish in Durham (UK), while he is editor of the journal Sobornostand member of the scientific committees of several international journals. His interests in research lie mostly in the history of theology in the Greek tradition, including also modern Russian and Romanian Orthodox theology.
