Crossway | 2022 | 272 pages (paperback) | $19.99 For the first decade of my life, I worshiped in an independent Baptist church in Smyrna, Georgia. I owe much to that church. It is, after all, where I came to profess Christ as my Savior and was baptized. But its doctrine of Scripture sowed the […]
Monday, 01 May, 2023 by Blake Adams
Blake Adams with Kyle Hughes Kyle R. Hughes (BSFS, Georgetown University; ThM, Dallas Theological Seminary; PhD, Radboud University Nijmegen) is an assisting deacon and director of catechesis at Christ the King Anglican Church (ACNA) and the inaugural Lower School Principal of The Stonehaven School in Marietta, Georgia. An experienced educator and accomplished researcher, he is […]
Sunday, 01 January, 2023 by Blake Adams, Kyle Hughes
I begin with a personal interlude. When I wanted to learn more about early Christian doctrine several years ago, I thought Jaroslav Pelikan’s celebrated The Christian Tradition was as good a place to start as any. Two-hundred pages in, I began to notice this oddly named fellow, Origen of Alexandria, seemed most frequently quoted and […]
Monday, 19 September, 2022 by Blake Adams
Ever eager to increase interest in early Christianity, I keep a running list of what I consider the best introductions on various subjects. (These may and have changed as new publications appear.) For early Christian philosophy, Karamanolis’s The Philosophy of Early Christianity; for liturgy, McGowan’s Ancient Christian Worship; for spirituality, Wilken’s The Spirit of Early […]
Monday, 27 June, 2022 by Blake Adams
Gospel Reading and Reception in Early Christian Literature, edited by Madison N. Pierce, Andrew J. Byers, and Simon Gathercole, is an anthology of articles dedicated to Francis Watson with an eye to further and refine his life’s work on the theological interpretation of Scripture. Watson’s scholarship was pivotal in wresting biblical studies from its “Berliner […]
Monday, 30 May, 2022 by Blake Adams
In 2020, InterVarsity Academic Press published an anthology on the history of evangelical biblicism titled Every Leaf, Line, and Letter: Evangelicals and the Bible from the 1730s to the Present. For this issue, Blake Adams interviewed Dr. Timothy Larsen, the editor of Every Leaf, Line, and Letter. Larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at […]
Monday, 02 May, 2022 by Blake Adams, Timothy Larsen
In 1934, a family played ping pong in their Georgian home near Chesterfield, England. One of the players accidentally stepped on the ball, crushing it, so the father went to the cupboard to find a replacement. There he met an ordeal, since the cupboard was filled with “an entirely undisciplined clutter of smallish leather bound […]
Wednesday, 16 March, 2022 by Blake Adams
On September 18, 2012, Karen King, a Harvard historian, presented to the attendees of an academic conference in Rome a newly discovered manuscript: a papyrus fragment the size of a business card featuring eight lines of text in Coptic. Each line was broken on both ends, as though the fragment had been incised from the […]
Wednesday, 19 January, 2022 by Blake Adams
In the mid-third century, King Ptolemy II, a known bibliophile, requested from Eleazar, the high priest of Jerusalem, a copy of “the Law of the Jews” for the library of Alexandria. According to the Letter of Aristeas, six translators were commissioned from each tribe for a grand total of seventy-two translators. They labored seventy-two days, […]
Wednesday, 01 December, 2021 by Blake Adams
In the former parts of this series (pt. 1, pt. 2, pt. 3), I laid out some basic features of Origen’s Christological exemplarism. More could be said, but Christological exemplarism is clearly an aspect of atonement in Origen’s thought; I say “aspect,” because it is not a “theory” to be marshalled against other theories. As […]
Friday, 22 October, 2021 by Blake Adams
The Crucified One In this third installment on the life and thought of Origen of Alexandria, I would like to take up a topic some may find troubling. So far, I have insisted on the significance of the “imitation of Christ” for Origen, but I have been imprecise. When Origen talks about imitating Christ or […]
Monday, 20 September, 2021 by Blake Adams
In the first article in this series, I introduced Origen of Alexandria, a third-century Christian teacher, and led with the question: Why would a third-century pagan convert to Christianity? Naturally, this is a large topic, since the incentives to convert in any era can be complex and often obscure, but Origen and other Church Fathers […]
Friday, 27 August, 2021 by Blake Adams