Catholicity and heresy in the early church /

Edwards, a lecturer in patristics at Christ Church, Oxford, is a leading scholar in the field of ancient thought. His numerous works include volumes in the "Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture" series and the "Ancient Christian Doctrine" series, both from InterVarsity Press. The present work is not a survey of early Christian theology. Rather, it is a revisionist challenge to long-held assumptions of mainstream scholarship in this field, showing how orthodox doctrine developed not by reacting to heresy, but by assimilating it. As the title indicates, the work's scope is limited to the early Church, analyzing key topics in emerging doctrine--Gnosticism, Irenaeus, Origen, Nicaea, and Chalcedon. While Edwards demonstrates skillful argumentation and a mastery of sources, he assumes a good deal of knowledge on the part of readers; this, along with the abstruse reasoning and technical vocabulary, will make the volume inaccessible to most undergraduates. For undergraduates, a more standard survey of early Christian thought is J. N. D. Kelly's Early Christian Doctrines (rev. ed., 1978). For graduate students, they are the early volumes of Jaroslav Pelikan's "The Christian Tradition" series: v. 1, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600), 1971, and v. 2, The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600-1700) (CH, Dec'74). Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students and faculty/researchers. J. P. Blosser Benedictine College