Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Leading Evangelical Scholar Reviews “Defending Constantine”.

The Emperor has for many reasond got slandered in history. Much of this was because of an anti Catholic agenda. The theory or storyline for so long was that we had wonderful pure Christianity until the Emperor came along and "invented" the Catholic Church.

Now this talking point has suffered a good bit because of the internet. The ability to have access to so many Church Fathers show that no matter what you think about the Catholic Church the doctrines and structure was very much evident before he arrived on the scene.

That being said there was a need for a well done book to put the myths to rest. It what was perhaps one of the most important books dealing with Christian history this decade so far that this has been done. That is Defending Constantine by Peter Leithart.

A leading Evangelical has done a series of posts as a review of the book that I recommend. See Dr. Ben Witherington III’s Review of Dr. Peter Leithart’s “Defending Constantine”.

These links should be of interest to the Christian and non Christian alike.

Dr Witherington and Mr Leithart have also had quite a exchange over something that is touched on in the book. That is the Christian attitude toward war and pacifism. I intend to engage those post later because the subject of "What happens when God commands Genocide " appears to be a hot topic in some quarters of the net.

2 comments:

Andy said...

This book is in my wish list on Amazon.com. Can't wait to get to it.

James H said...

I def want to read the whole thing. He also gets in a theme that The Emperor real contribution was ending Sacrifices which he things is a EPOCH moment in Western Civilzation