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Explores biblical spirituality and the challenging gifts of brokenness.

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 describes how creeds originated in instruction before baptism and have their roots in the New Testament itself. She then shows how the rise of Gnosticism and a tendancy towards fragmentation in the church made a clear statement of faith necessary, as well as outlining the various controversies which led to particular words and phrases being included in the creeds as we now have them. She then describes the construction of the great Christian doctrines of the Trinity and incarnation.

Explores how teachings of the church fathers can be applied today, despite the differences in our intellectual and ecclesial environments.

This collection of articles first brings together a number of working papers which were significant in the development of Frances Young's understanding of patristic exegesis, studies not included in her ground-breaking book, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (1997), though paving the way for that work. Then comes a selection of papers on theology, church order and methodology, the whole collection constantly returning to themes such as the fundamental connection between theology and exegesis, the significant role of reflection on language, metaphor and symbol, and the creative interaction of early Christianity with its cultural and intellectual environment. These studies demonstrate the author's scholarly approach to patristic material, whereby careful attention is paid to actual texts from the past; but they also reveal the groundwork for her own theological explorations in the very different intellectual environment of the present.

Thoroughly engaging and full of insight, 'Virtuoso Theology' examines the Bible and biblical criticism in a startlingly illuminating way. Frances Young sees the Bible as a divine composition, a piece of music accessible to varying interpretations. From that premise she is able to compare the various performancesÓ involved in the church's understanding of Scripture. From the formation of the historical canon to modern biblical criticism, various approaches to the Bible have served different purposes. As in a musical interpretation of a score, these approaches are not necessarily correct or incorrect, but taken together, they strive to bring Scripture to life - from the question of textual authenticity to the experience of transcendent truth. As in an orchestra, diverse instruments merge to create something larger than the sum of their individual parts, enabling us to hear a more complete biblical message. An astutely appreciative approach to the contributions of biblical criticism by a leading church historian.

Created as a companion guide to a Patristics textbook, From Nicaea to Chalcedon surveys a variety of writings to have occurred during one of the most significant periods in the formation of the Church, from 265-466. It does not aim to cover the subject as a textbook would, but aims to delve deeper into some of the characters who were involved with the Church or the Councils during this period. Beginning with Eusebius of Caesarea and the first council of the Church at Nicaea, and ending with Theodoret of Cyrrhus, who is thought to have changed his view of Christology after the watershed Council of Chalcedon, this unique text surveys some of the most influential characters to have shaped Church history and the formation of doctrine. Surveying a mixture of significant literary figures, laymen, bishops and heretics this book presents biographical, literary-critical and theological information about each. They are chosen either because they are important to the history of doctrine, or because new material about them has thrown light upon their work, or because they will broaden the reader's understanding of the culture and history of the period or of live issues in the church at the time. Structured in five parts, each part deals with a period of time and a sequence of characters, so the book is easily followed in chronological order. Added to this, is the double bibliography, which in this edition is fully updated. Bibliography A details those texts in English of the original texts of antiquity, whilst Bibliography B provides details of publications in English, French and German which have appeared since 1960-2004 on or about the characters discussed in the body of the text.

This celebratory volume in honour of Frances Young draws on and develops the multifarious hermeneutical interests evident in the body of her work. Its overall thematic motif, to highlight concerns which impacted on her work, is the symbolic use of 'wilderness.' This multi-disciplinary volume begins with an in-depth analysis of her work by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. The first part of the volume has biblical and early Christian literature as the focus, and deals with, among other topics, Jesus' encounter with people of impairment, biblical figures such as Miriam, gospel portrayals of mountains, experience of wilderness in the lives of Maori and Jewish people, the temptation of Jesus as interpreted at different times, and the redefinition of asceticism in Syrian Christianity. The second part of the volume addresses theological concerns, with essays which advocate wisdom as a potential mode for doing theology, engage with the radical Christian writings of 17th and 18th centuries, revisit the problem of sin, highlight the latent Christological motifs in the novels of Tolkien, and draw attention to the significance of the Quranic Jesus.

Frances Young, who won high critical acclaim for her deeply committed book, Sacrifice and the Death of Christ, seeks to convey the excitement of the theological quest, the excitement of studying the Bible, the excitement of wrestling with what might seem outmoded and irrelevant ways of thinking and discovering that there is a chiming with experience. She offers a study of atonement as a demonstration of the possibilities. It stems from a deep preoccupation with suffering and its meaning, the outstretched arms of the crucified Christ, the image of the woman in travail. But this suffering and pain is the prelude to new birth, to vision and hope, to the feast of the kingdom. New birth and new creation, she sees, lie at the heart of the Christian message; and our own growth depends on the painful but rewarding labor of appropriating the Bible and our Christian heritage through critical reflection.

The subject of Christ's sacrifice on the Cross has mainly been treated in the context of general discussions of Atonement theory. This is inevitable, but when it occurs, his sacrifice tends to be confused with theories of substitution, satisfaction, and propitiation, in which case its nature is understood according to 'a priori' assumptions concerning the proper rationale of sacrifice. The result of this situation is that, according to their own convictions, historians of the Doctrine of the Atonement have either tended to accept sacrificial language in the Greek Fathers as evidence of the presence of the later Western theory of atonement, at any rate, in germ; or they have dismissed it as no more than the use of traditional Christian expressions which do not represent the real Doctrine held by the authors with whom we are concerned. In addition to this, the treatment of sacrificial language as one of the modes of expressing Atonement has meant that, in modern studies, the subject of Christ's sacrifice has been divorced from consideration of the sacrificial worship and service of the Church.... The aim of this study is to try to correct the balance, to emphasize the importance and diversity of sacrificial concepts in the theology and life of the early Eastern Church, and so to throw light on the usually confused treatment, not only of Christ's atoning death, but also of the sacrifice of the Eucharist. from the Introduction