The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God
by Robert Louis Wilken
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003
(400 pages; $29.95, hardcover)
reviewed by Mike Aquilina
Sooner or later, every thinking Christian discovers the duty to study the Church Fathers. It presents itself as a matter of religious literacy, if not a debt of ancestral piety. They fought the first culture wars; we should at least learn from them. They died for our faith; we should at least honor their memory. Now comes the dean of America’s church historians to turn our duty to pleasure and our debt to our profit.
Robert Louis Wilken has produced a masterly appreciation of the Fathers in The Spirit of Early Christian Thought. And it is an unabashed appreciation. Longtime readers of the professor of the . . .
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