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Fathers of the Church

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The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Fathers of the Church

 

the traditional designation of the most prominent leaders of the Christian church from the second through eighth centuries; they formulated its dogmas and its organization.

In Roman Catholicism the principal church fathers were Ambrose of Milan, Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory I the Great. In the Orthodox Church they were Athanasius of Alexandria, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, John Chrysostom, and John Damascene. The church regards as fathers only those whom it has canonized as saints and whose teachings are acknowledged to be orthodox. Accordingly, such prominent early Christian thinkers as Origen and Tertullian are not included among the fathers of the church.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
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This chapter is divided into a series of subchapters: Through His Incarnation, the Son of God reveals to us the true value of man; The Cross--the key to the mystery of Christ's love; God loves each of us equally: The multiple revelation of Christ's love for us; God's ultimate goal is man's benefit; The multitude of man's sins does not preponderate God's love for him; Love for God and love for one's neighbour; The Spiritual life is a life of partaking in love, in God; The Church Fathers on the Soteriological significance of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ's descent into hell; Christ the Saviour's descent into hell.
Some of Maximos s most philosophical works were written in reply to questions he received about the writings of earlier Church Fathers. His 'Ambigua' were written over a number of years in response to these questions and provide explanations of somewhat unclear wording in the writings of St Gregory the Theologian.
The church fathers treated such topics as the vocabulary of deification or the place of theosis in divine economy with slight differences; the book exposes these details.
To this end the author collects evidence to uncover Greco-Roman and Jewish attitudes towards sex and marriage in the early centuries of our era and examines documents of the early church fathers pertaining to virginity, marriage, and sexual activity.
I do not recall too many instances where the apostles, the early church fathers and subsequent great Christian thinkers and believers hesitated to make their positions clear, although not necessarily consistent.
The Vatican made no secret of how the Church fathers expected the faithful to vote.
Along with frequent detours to questions of evidence, Varghese's first section, which he calls "Montage," skillfully summarizes early Christian doctrine and devotion to Mary, including quotations from Church fathers and the typological traditions of Mary as a New Eve and the Ark of the Covenant.
Business ethics grew out of attempts to reconcile Biblical precepts, canon law, civil law, the teachings of the Church Fathers, and the writings of early philosophers with the realities of expanding economic activity.
For the ancient Church Fathers, the sixth day of creation and the Day of Pentecost were deeply connected.
Yet the distinction between the two media is an artificial one, and the resulting selection in KV an arbitrary slice of the earliest textual evidence for the Church Fathers. Our earliest witnesses of many texts and authors are in fact parchment fragments, while there exist many other parchment fragments contemporary with their papyrus counterparts.
Nicholls, now a Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the University of British Columbia, is encyclopedic in his reach, traversing first-century Judaism and the emergence of Christianity through the early church Fathers. He considers medieval and modern manifestations of Antisemitism, secular and religious, and wrestles with contemporary manifestations of both Antisemitism and anti-Zionism.
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