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Hymns Ancient & Modern - Frances M. Young

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94 pages

English

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In lucid and non-technical prose, Young demonstrates how and why the two most familiar Christian creeds - the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed - came into being. She aims to bring the creeds back to life again in the challenging and demanding contexts of contemporary life.

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Publié par	Hymns Ancient & Modern
Date de parution	21 avril 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780334048527
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0057€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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The Making of the Creeds

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, SCM Press
Text © Frances M. Young 1991
Preface © Gareth Jones 2002
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 334 02876 5
First published in 1991 by SCM Press 13–17 Long Lane, London EC1A 9PN This new edition published in 2002 Third Impression 2010
Typeset by Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk Printed by Norhaven A/S, Viborg, Denmark
Contents

Preface by Gareth Jones
Preface to the first edition
Introduction
1 The Making of the Creeds
2 One God, Creator of Heaven and Earth
3 One God and One Lord Jesus Christ
4 The Holy Spirit and the Holy Catholic Church
Note on the ‘filioque’
5 The Son of God Incarnate
6 For Us and for Our Salvation
Concluding Reflections
Time Chart

Glossary
Further Reading
Index
Preface
One of the best things that Linda Foster achieved during her time at SCM Press was to have the idea of producing an updated version of Alan Richardson’s Creeds in the Making. To John Bowden’s eternal credit, not only did he jump at the opportunity, but he also found just the right person for the job: Frances Young, the Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology in the University of Birmingham. Now Alex Wright has recognized all that hard work of ten years and more ago by including The Making of the Creeds in the SCM Classics list. Why?
The simple answer is that it is a marvellous book, the finest introduction to any area of Christian theology published in the 1990s. Frances Young was able to take the strongest qualities of Richardson’s original – its passion, clarity and scholarship – and pass them through the lens of contemporary intellectual debate. Young thereby added an extra layer of sophistication to the story of the development of Christian doctrine, an addition that caught the cool beauty of the early Church’s struggle with its understandings of the faith.
Pressed harder, I would argue that Frances Young brought three fine qualities to her study of the making of the creeds. The first was an understanding of the complexion of history as a form of critical inquiry. As Young herself wrote, ‘the fact that we tell the story means that we "create" history, and our own interests and concerns affect the process’. Young was able to bring to life the ways in which generations of Christians, together, struggled with how to understand such ideas as trinity and incarnation, at the same time demonstrating how our reading of their struggles also informs our own interpretation of doctrine. In the wrong hands such hermeneutic questions would be dry bones indeed; but Young revealed their social and ecclesial freshness as never before.
Young’s second fine quality was to map a bold theological reading of the development of Christian doctrine onto the story of councils and creeds, bishops and heretics. This reading arguably constitutes the lasting significance of The Making of the Creeds , and it is worth taking a few moments just to consider the book’s structure.
After a brief introduction and an overview of the period and issues, Young gives the reader five key stages in the development of Christian doctrine: thinking about God and the world; thinking about God and Jesus; thinking about the Holy Spirit and the Church; thinking about the incarnation; and thinking about salvation. I emphasize ‘thinking’ because the point of this structure is to make people understand how the early Church ‘thought’ its way through the implications of its belief.
Thus, thinking about God and the world, the ‘big picture’ of the meaning of creation and its relationship to that which is beyond this world, leads naturally to reflection upon Jesus Christ as the medium by which God and creation are joined. Thinking about Jesus leads to thinking about his authority as Christ, in the power of the Spirit, and the role that power has in establishing the Church. Thinking about the Church, the Body of Christ, makes us think about the incarnate Lord. And thinking about the incarnate Lord should make us think about the question of our own salvation.
What is so brilliant about Young’s exposition is the way in which she coaxes the reader to intuit not just the historical inevitability of this process, but also the need to own it theologically. It is not simply a matter of knowing what happened first and what happened next, she seems to be saying. It is far more a matter of realizing the economy of how and why things happened the way they did, and what that economy means for Christianity. And what this exposition argues for, gently and yet insistently, is the conviction that the development of Christian doctrine had to happen the way it did; there was a logic at work, and when you understand it as clearly as possible, then you understand that that logic is the logic of the cross.
The third quality is a consequence of the clarity of Young’s exposition, and it is what makes the book so successful as a guide for students. Not only does Young have a certain grasp of the historical facts and a sure understanding of the theological development of the early Church, she also has all the abilities of the born teacher to communicate history and theology in ways that take her readers deeper and deeper into the complexities of the narrative. SCM Press must have realized this, because they equipped the book with a series of charts, tables and glossary that make the development of patristic thought as straightforward as possible. If the time chart is singled out for attention, this is simply because, over two pages, Young manages to itemize every single patristic figure the student is ever likely to encounter – thereby neatly controlling one of the most baffling aspects of the study of this period.
Reading The Making of the Creeds again, we can detect something of the liberal élan that made Young a contributor to The Myth of God Incarnate , back in the 1970s: an insight into the accessibility and reasonableness of Christian doctrine, well taught and well understood. There is nothing here of the radical or reactionary 1990s, which have brought British theologians to a sharp, caustic appreciation of Christian theology. On the contrary, Young writes with a sense of its practical relevance, and she manages to convey both the intellectual and spiritual joy of knowing about the origin of the creeds.
One of my happiest memories of my time at the University of Birmingham is of Frances Young standing in a pulpit in St James’s Cathedral, Chicago, enthralling the congregation with her grasp of the biblical text, its history and its interpretation. That was 1995. I believe that readers of this new edition will have the same experience, and for that SCM Press are to be congratulated and thanked.
Gareth Jones
Professor of Theology
Canterbury Christ Church University College
November 2001
Preface to the first edition
The immediate occasion for writing this brief account was response to an invitation from John Bowden of SCM Press to produce an up-dated version of Alan Richardson’s Creeds in the Making , an invitation for which I have become the more grateful over the period in which it has been produced. For the genesis of a book is more profound than its immediate stimulus, and the challenge to put pen to paper has crystallized many things that had been long in solution, as well as having a number of side-effects by way of research papers and lectures along the way. To him, and the many students I have taught who have been enthused about the subject, this book is offered in gratitude, and in the hope that there may also be many informal students, particularly those unsure whether they are inside or outside the church, who will find assistance here in understanding what Christianity in its classical form is about.
Maurice Wiles assisted in the latter stages by reading and commenting on the draft, and for this and his long-standing help and encouragement I am grateful: he is, as it were, my academic father. Thanks are also due for practical assistance to Anne Bowen who typed up the three chapters written in my atrocious long-hand during a period of convalescence, and to Elnora Ferguson who produced the index.
November 1990
F RANCES M. Y OUNG
Introduction
This account of how classical Christian theology was formed has been put together in response to an invitation to provide a successor to Alan Richardson’s Creeds in the Making . 1 It was felt that, valuable though that book remains, scholarship must have moved on since he wrote it in the thirties. It is true that new evidence and new ways of looking at old evidence have modified the story somewhat. Yet the fundamental story and the main characters in it remain much the same. What has changed is the perspective and shape of the book.
Why the very considerable difference in approach? There are a number of major shifts, several of which relate to changes in the wider theological and intellectual scene. The first concerns the understanding of history. The nineteenth century challenged the ‘historicity’ of the Bible, and in response theological research became obsessed with the ‘facts’ and theological thinking with the declaration that Christianity is a historical religion. Tha