by Joshua Shaw When we tried in a previous series to take in Eusebius’s apologetic argument against Plato at a glance, we skipped over a few passages in the middle of Book XIII (of the Praeparatio Evangelica). In this book Eusebius is slowly building his case against Plato by thoughtfully curating passages from Socrates’s last… Read More “[His] only care was not to please”: Eusebius’s Tribute to Socrates
Eusebius was up to a whole lot of things in his thousand-page tome, the Praeparatio Evangelica. One thing among them was to show his readers “the true tradition” of Biblical exegesis and Christian theology.[i] Eusebius was interested in origins and in the deep history of ideas; he was rarely content to get things second hand… Read More St. Paul the Platonist and True Tradition
“The end,” said Origen, “is always like the beginning.” St. Paul said it this way, “in Him and through Him and to Him are all things.” In Matthew Gaetano’s last post he quoted Francis Oakley’s comment on the dissonance between the “God of the philosophers” and the “God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” Following “the… Read More Broadening the Trail Blazed by Philo
by Joshua Shaw Eusebius calls Plato’s philosophy — and this is a fundamental move of the Praeparatio Evangelica (PE) — a “commentary on” or “interpretation of” (ἑρμηνεία) the Pentateuch. Eusebius is a little sloppy here, since the Pentateuch can mean Moses, or the whole Old Testament, or even, by extension, the authors of the New Testament… Read More Plato’s “Septuagint” and Alexandrian Judaism
by Joshua Shaw Roots, echoes, shadows, precedents – all good working ways to think about a series of posts which I intend to revisit and extend over the coming months (and years). I want to take a look at direct historical sources or, barring that, more widely representative or influential treatments of the theological themes… Read More Roots of Reformed Confession (I): Calvin on Election and Caution
by Joshua Shaw There is a lively debate (still ongoing) about whether Eusebius was always a Trinitarian, or whether he is best considered Binitarian (i.e., holding that there are only two persons in the Godhead) in the period prior to the Councils of the 4th century (325-381). The most important witness to the belief that… Read More Eusebius the Binitarian (?)
by Joshua Shaw Are oracles just nonsense or are they a real power for evil? Under either view Eusebius of Caesarea is convinced that pagan oracles are to be rejected, but the question is “on what grounds?” At first glance he seems to waver in his judgement; moreover, the prominent role that citations play in… Read More Evil Nonsense or Nonsensical Evil: Eusebius on Divination (I)
by Joshua Shaw In the Prolegomena to his dogmatics Bavinck treats at various junctures the relationship between science and religion. In the eighth chapter of his work (“Religious Foundations”), he examines Science’s (in the sense of Wissenschaft) prerogative to judge religion according to its own standards, an endeavour he deems to have failed by the… Read More Dead Intellectuals, Fruitless Morals: Bavinck on a Fully Human Religion
by Joshua Shaw In the previous two posts we began to look at the polemic against pagan literature in Eusebius and but briefly at one aspect of Lewis’s own (somewhat frightening) re-imagination of that pagan world in Till We Have Faces. Eusebius wanted to destroy the great poetry of the world’s pagan past (Homer and… Read More Healing the “Wound of Individuality”: Lewis on the Pagan Threat, Again (III)
by Joshua Shaw In the previous post we looked at the way in which Eusebius (and to varying degrees most of the early Christian apologists) considered the fractured humanity of paganism healed by the teaching of the true monarchy of God through Christ, which was reflected in the change of political order under Augustus and… Read More Re-Making the Books that Were Burned: C.S. Lewis’s Revival of the Pagan Threat (II)