Cypriannic Ecclesiology

St. Cyprian of Carthage, as I recently noted, continues to hold sway over a great deal of ecclesiological thinking both East and West. His notions of ecclesial order and jurisdiction have been more than a little influential across the entire Church. Now from Allen Brent, who has reviewed books in the past for Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies and is the author of such important earlier studies as Political History of Early Christianity, we have

Allen Brent, Cyprian and Roman Carthage (CUP, 2010), 382pp.

About this book, Cambridge University Press tells us:

Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus believed fervently that his conversion experience had been a passage from the darkness of the world of Graeco-Roman paganism to his new vision of Christianity. But Cyprian's response as bishop to the Decian persecution was to be informed by the pagan culture that he had rejected so completely. His view of church order also owed much to Roman jurisprudential principles of legitimate authority exercised within a sacred boundary spatially and geographically defined. Given the highly fragmented state of the non-Christian sources for this period, Cyprian is often the only really contemporary primary source for the events through which he lived. In this book, Allen Brent contributes to our understanding both of Roman history in the mid-third century and of the enduring model of church order that developed in that period.

I very much look forward to reading this and seeing it reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies.