The influence of Greek ideas and usages upon the Christian church
Edwin Warren Hatch was an English theologian. He is best known as the author of the book Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages Upon the Christian Church, which was based on the lectures he presented during the 1888 Hibbert Lectures and which were edited and published following his death.
From Preface:
The Hibbert Trustees cannot add this volume to their series without a few lines of grateful acknowledgement. It is impossible to forget either the courteous readiness with which the accomplished author undertook the task originally or the admirable qualities he brought to it. When he died without completing the MS. for the press, the anxiety of the Trustees was at once relieved by the kind effort of his family to obtain adequate assistance.
The public will learn from the Preface how much had to be done and will join the Trustees in grateful appreciation of the services of the gentlemen who responded to the occasion. That Dr Hatch’s friend, Dr Fairbairn, consented to edit the volume, with the valuable aid of Mr Bartlet and Professor Sanday, was an ample pledge that the want would be most efficiently met.
To those gentlemen, the Trustees are greatly indebted for the learned and earnest care with which the laborious revision was made,
some contents:
Lecture I: introductory -- The problem: -- How the church passed from the sermon on the mount to the Nicene creed; the change in spirit coincident with a change in soil -- The need of caution: two preliminary considerations -- 1. A religion relative to the whole mental attitude of an age: hence need to estimate the general attitude of the Greek mind during the first three centuries A.D. -- 2. Every permanent change in religious belief and usage rooted in historical conditions: roots of the gospel in Judaism, but of fourth-century Christianity -- the key to historical -- in Hellenism -- The method: -- Evidence as to process of change scanty, but ample and representative as to ante-Nicene Greek thought and post-Nicene Christian thought -- Respects in which evidence defective -- Two resulting tendencies: 1. To overrate the value of the surviving evidence -- 2. To under-estimate opinions no longer accessible or known only through opponents -- Hence method, the correlation of antecedents and consequents -- Antecedents: a sketch of the phenomena of Hellenism -- Consequents: changes in original Christian ideas and usages -- Attitude of mind required -- 1. The demand upon attention and imagination -- 2. Personal prepossessions to be allowed for -- 3. Need to observe under-currents, e.g. -- (a) The dualistic hypothesis, it is bearing on baptism and exorcism -- (b) The nature of religion, e.g. its relation to conscience -- History as scientific study: the true apologia in religion -- Lecture II: Greek education -- The first step a study of the environment, particularly as literary -- The contemporary Greek world an educated world in a special literary sense
The book details : Author: Edwin Hatch Publication date:1892 Company: London, Edinburgh, Williams and Norgate
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