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Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 June 2007

Lewis Ayres
Lewis Ayres
Affiliation:
Emory University
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Extract

It is a privilege to have the opportunity for such extended reflection on my book Nicaea and Its Legacy. No doubt some authors feel that their manuscripts are truly finished before they are published: I am one of those who merely abandons a manuscript to the copy editors when other pressures demand an end to hostilities. It should be no surprise, then, that I have always envisaged Nicaea as a snapshot of a moving landscape, not just in the ever-growing body of scholarship on the fourth century, but also in my own thinking. Accordingly I will begin here as I was invited to do in our discussion at Harvard, by offering an account of what I think Nicaea accomplishes and of some areas in which the book needs further work.

Type
ARTICLES
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 100 , Issue 2 , April 2007 , pp. 141 - 144
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Sarah Coakley for her generosity in organizing the conference from which this issue of HTR has been produced, as well as for her comments on an earlier draft of this essay. I would also like to thank Mark DelCogliano, Rebecca Lyman, Andrew Radde-Gallwitz, and Medi Ann Volpe for their comments. It should be noted that throughout this paper my concern is with readers of the fourth-century controversies who have overt theological commitments and ends in view. There are many other scholars of the period for whom the debates I engage here will be initially uninteresting. It remains true, however, both that such scholars find themselves implicated in scholarly opinions driven (to a greater or lesser extent) by modern theological concerns, and that many assumptions about the explanatory power of social-historical theories are themselves deeply theological in nature. Hence it may well be that awareness of these discussions is of importance across the field of early Christian studies.