Evangelicals and the Early Church

"This unusually interesting volume combines bracing historical engagement with rare theological wisdom. Its chapters carefully explore why, how, under what conditions, and how much contemporary evangelicals should try to appropriate guidance from the first Christian centuries. A particularly helpful feature is the paired chapters that promote the best kind of respectful give and take on contested or difficult questions. The book is a gem of edifying insight."

-Mark Noll

Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History, University of Notre Dame



"Here is a collection of essays that invites the reader to wrestle along with the authors over the query why evangelicals have not embraced more fully the early church as part of their theological and ecclesiastical legacy. It is certainly a question of importance. The appropriation of the early church by essentially free-church segments of contemporary Christianity remains at the experimental stage however much momentum it has gained over the last twenty years. Of varying degrees valuable insights are offered in this book with which pastoral and academic leadership needs to grapple for the future of evangelicalism."

-D. H. Williams

Professor of Patristics and Historical Theology, Baylor University



"In 1994, Mark Noll threw down the gauntlet in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind challenging evangelical churches to overcome anti-intellectualism and broaden their engagement with a variety of intellectual traditions, not only in theology, but in other disciplines in the humanities and sciences. Surely one sign of an opening of the evangelical mind is the expanding interest over the last decade among evangelical scholars in the Catholic and Orthodox theological traditions of late antiquity and their value as a resource of Biblical exegesis and theological reflection. Evangelicals and the Early Church, as a collection of excellent essays by evangelicals about the relevance of patristic thought for evangelicals, is invaluable both for evangelicals wanting to integrate early Christian theology into a distinctly evangelical articulation of the Gospel and for non-evangelicals interested in understanding the state of the evangelical mind at the beginning of the twenty-first century."

-J. Warren Smith

Associate Professor of Historical Theology, Duke University



"Why should evangelicals be concerned about the post-New Testament church? This volume addresses this fundamental question in several ways: by probing the reasons why earlier evangelicals focused on the church fathers, by examining some of the pitfalls of relying on the patristic period, and by reflecting in detail on the relation between Scripture, the church fathers, and evangelical identity. This book offers a rich and varied exploration of the value of patristic studies for twenty-first-century evangelicalism. It is a pleasure to recommend it."

-Donald Fairbairn

Robert E. Cooley Professor of Early Christianity, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary



"Professors Kalantzis and Tooley and the scholars they have convened dare to ask: Is the recent fascination with the early church among some evangelicals merely the latest fad of consumerist religion or is something more profound at work? This rich collection of essays demonstrates the breadth of engagement in Patristic thought and practice among some of the leading voices in evangelical Christianity. They prove the title is not an oxymoron."

-L. Edward Phillips,

Associate Professor of Worship and Liturgical Theology,

Candler School of Theology, Emory University