The Legacy of Athanasius of Alexandria

Fortress Press sent me their latest catalogue, and in it I spy a book I overlooked when it was first published just over a year ago: Thomas Weinandy and Daniel Keating, Athanasius and His Legacy: Trinitarian-Incarnational Soteriology and Its Reception (Fortress, 2017), 144pp.

About this book the publisher tells us the following:

Athanasius was a fiery and controversial bishop from Egypt, driven from his See no less than five times. Yet, his work served as a keystone to the settlement of the central disputes of the fourth century, from the Trinitarian and christological debates at Nicaea to the formulation of the divinity of the Holy Spirit. In this volume, Thomas G. Weinandy, OFM, Cap., and Daniel A. Keating introduce readers to this key thinker and carefully illuminate Athanasius's crucial text Against the Arians, unfolding the Trinitarian and incarnational framework of Athanasius's paramount concern: soteriology. The authors provide, in the second part, a robust map of the reception and influence of Athanasius's thought-from its immediate impact on the late fourth and fifth centuries (in the Cappadocians and Cyril) to its significance for the Eastern and Western Christian traditions and its reception in contemporary thought. Herein, Athanasius is presented for today's readers as one of the chief architects of Christian doctrine and one of the most significant thinkers for the reclamation of the Trinitarian and christological theological tradition.

Come, Let Us Eat Together

The German Catholic bishops recently gave that reliably tiresome hysteric Rod Dreher another chance to collapse on his fainting couch in response to matters he's too lazy to understand with anything like detail, context, or intelligence. The bishops floated some proposals for the vexed question of eucharistic hospitality in mixed Catholic-Lutheran marriages. I have read reports of the German proposals and they would very strongly seem to vary in such slight ways from the Ecumenical Directory published by Rome (in 1967 and updated in 1993) as to be insignificant and unworthy of any comment, least of all by people who see the sky falling every time they wake up.

If the question of eucharistic hospitality is to be treated seriously, then a book forthcoming next month will aid in that important task. Edited by George Kalantzis and Marc Cortez, Come, Let Us Eat Together: Sacraments and Christian Unity (IVP Academic, 2018), 250pp. is a collection with some very prominent contributors.

On the Catholic side, we have chapters by Thomas Weinandy and Matthew Levering, inter alia; the Protestant Matthew Milliner, a dynamic young scholar of Byzantine Christian art, also has a chapter; and then on the Orthodox side we have chapters from Bradley Nassif and Paul Gavrilyuk.

About this book the publisher tells us:

As Christians, we are called to seek the unity of the one body of Christ. But when it comes to the sacraments, the church has often been―and remains―divided. What are we to do? Can we still gather together at the same table? Based on the lectures from the 2017 Wheaton Theology Conference, this volume brings together the reflections of Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox theologians, who jointly consider what it means to proclaim the unity of the body of Christ in light of the sacraments. Without avoiding or downplaying the genuine theological and sacramental differences that exist between Christian traditions, what emerges is a thoughtful consideration of what it means to live with the difficult, elusive command to be one as the Father and the Son are one.