Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Worshiping with the Church Fathers
    Unavailable
    Worshiping with the Church Fathers
    Unavailable
    Worshiping with the Church Fathers
    Ebook450 pages7 hours

    Worshiping with the Church Fathers

    By Christopher A. Hall

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Christopher Hall invites us to accompany the fathers as they enter the sanctuary for worship and the chapel for prayer. He also takes us to the wilderness, where we learn from the early monastics as they draw close to God in their solitary discipline. The focus of this book is not liturgy but more broadly worship in its corporate and individual dimensions. We enter into the patristic understanding of baptism and the Eucharist. And we come under the instruction and discipline of great spiritual teachers of prayer. In two previous books, Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers and Learning Theology with the Church Fathers, Christopher Hall has ushered us alongside the church fathers as they study the Scriptures and plumb the depths of theology. In this survey of the spiritual life of worship he informs and challenges Christians in faithful living today. Hall weaves his own experiences into his observations of the fathers' practices and teachings and so helps us close the gap of the centuries. Readers will enjoy a rich and rare schooling in developing their spiritual life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIVP Academic
    Release dateMar 18, 2010
    ISBN9780830867127
    Unavailable
    Worshiping with the Church Fathers
    Author

    Christopher A. Hall

    Christopher A. Hall (PhD, Drew University) is the president of Renovaré. He is associate editor of the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, and his books include Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers, Learning Theology with the Church Fathers, and Worshiping with the Church Fathers. Hall previously served at Eastern University for over twenty years in several roles, including chancellor, provost, dean of Palmer Seminary, dean of the Templeton Honors College, distinguished professor of theology, and director of academic spiritual formation.

    Related to Worshiping with the Church Fathers

    Related ebooks

    Christianity For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Keeping The Faith

      Oct 28, 2022

      Keeping The Faith
      3 min read

    • Article

      At Fellowship Church, Faith Knows No Creed Or Color

      Jul 19, 2021

      The Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, founded in 1944, transcends barriers of race, color, and creed, uniting instead in a shared humanity.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Sunday, April 26

      Feb 14, 2020

      I WAS RAISED IN A denomination that discouraged visiting other churches, so finding a faith community when I became a Christian eighteen years ago was a quandary. But once I overcame my inhibitions, exploring different denominations became interestin

      1 min read

    • Article

      Sunday, February 17

      Dec 14, 2018

      RECENTLY, A PASTOR REMINDED ME of something. Sunday morning at eleven o’clock is the most segregated hour of the week. I took some time to think about that. I didn’t grow up in the church and didn’t come to know Christ until my early adulthood. But w

      1 min read

    • Article

      Black Buddhists, Black Buddhisms

      Jun 28, 2022

      Black Buddhists, Black Buddhisms
      3 min read

    • Article

      Pray And Wash: Finding Church In Unexpected Places

      Mar 7, 2019

      When Julie Butcher goes to church, she looks forward to giving thanks to God, lending a supportive hand, breaking bread with friends – and helping people wash a tub of clothes.  “The laundromat is my church,” says Ms. Butcher, an Episcopal Church dea

      11 min read

    • Article

      Lukewarm Faith in the Church Today

      Nov 25, 2022

      Last month I led a biblical pilgrimage tour to Turkey with JOY! Travel. We visited the sites of the 7 Churches of Revelation. At each site we received relevant teachings from the group pastor about the letters written to the churches in the book of R

      1 min read

    • Article

      Letters To The Editor

      Dec 30, 2019

      Letters To The Editor
      6 min read

    • Article

      An Apex of Babble

      Mar 6, 2019

      An Apex of Babble
      13 min read

    • Article

      Keeping Christians Informed

      Mar 10, 2023

      Last month, tens of thousands of Christians gathered at a university campus in the USA to worship the Lord, share their testimonies, and praise His holy Name. This unplanned explosion started as part of a scheduled chapel service on the morning of Fe

      6 min read

    • Article

      My Two Religions

      Jan 18, 2022

      My Two Religions
      4 min read

    • Article

      Do You Practice Buddhism Together With Another Faith?

      Mar 19, 2019

      Buddhism dovetails beautifully with my Catholic upbringing, as the practice of meditation is akin to prayer. It’s a daily habit to find stillness in my heart and the peaceful place where I believe God and my basic goodness inhabit. The mala beads I h

      2 min read

    Reviews for Worshiping with the Church Fathers

    4/5

    45 ratings2 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      Substance: A brief introduction and overview of the eight "most important" church fathers (exegetes in the first few centuries after Christ), including biographical information and excerpts (very small) from their works. Includes an analysis of the importance of their views on scripture, and an explanation of how their thought applies today.Includes a nod to feminist critics on why there are no "church mothers" despite there being several prominent and esteemed female exegetes (they just didn't write much, or it wasn't preserved).Style: Lukewarm, but serviceable.Includes: Athanasius (and thus perforce Arian, albeit as a heretic not a father), Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil the Great, John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, Gregory the Great. Origen's work is also considered, although he is not ranked by Hall as a father because of his forays into now-heterodox thought.
    • 4/5
      Hall's book provides a neat counterpoint to Fitzmyer's. He explores how Church Fathers were both unified and at odds in how to read scripture, and how they run counter to the way biblical scholars work in the academy. His book is a description of the Antiochian and Alexandrian schools of exegesis in the first few centuries of Christianity, but also a defense of these exegetes and a call to reclaim them for today. This book is meant to serve as an overture to Hall's Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture series.The Fathers were not tenured professors writing books in private offices. They were bishops, ministers, men whose reading of the Bible was done with an eye to homiletics and to the immediate needs of the Church. Their criteria for sound exegesis did not just include critical reading skills, but also the spiritual health of the exegete: just as sin blinds one to God, it blinds one to God's Word. We should pay attention to their mode of reading scripture not just because many are saints and Church Doctors, but because of their hermeneutical and historical closeness to Christ, their ability to hear the music of scripture that falls dead on our modern ears.Hall goes on to describe eight of the major exegetes of the ancient Church, including Augustine, Basil, John Chrysostom, Athanasius, and Jerome. In really like how he describes their personal lives and the struggles they face: struggles between a call to ascetic contemplation and a need to serve the Church, between embracing the world or seeing its brokenness, between their scholarly sensibilities and the demands of the laity and leaders they served. These were men who fought heresies, such as Gnosticism and Arianism. At the end of describing these figures Hall points to good translations of their works for popular audiences, helping to bring ancient exegetes easily into the hands of modern readers.Hall then goes on to compare the Antiochian school of exegesis with the Alexandrian. The Alexandrian school, with such famous figures as Ireneus, Origen, and Augustine, looked to highly speculative allegorical readings of scripture. They could find the deepest symbolism in even the most prosaic Levitical laws; the cloven hoof of a goat could represent the Father and the Son, as could any binary in the Bible. To me this was reminiscent of Jungian dream interpretation: they assume that there is deep, deep meaning in every small detail of the dream, and of course find what they are searching for. Allegorical interpretation is useful for "explaining away" factual contradictions in the text or places where God seems less than Godlike. Alexandrian exegetes, responding to the Jewish skeptics of Christ's Messianship and the Gnostics' own allegorical reading, used allegory as an apologetic tool. Yet without hermeneutical constraints, allegory easily turned into a free-for-all more telling of the exegete's imagination than the text itself. Ironically, the same criticism is given to dream analystsAntiochian exegetes such as Theophilus of Antioch or John Chrysostom were more careful. While they were not above finding figurative meaning in scripture, they were clear that no figurative reading could contradict or take precedent over the literal meaning of a text. While there were surely viscious debates between these schools, Hall leads the reader through an examination of various exegetes' comments on Jesus' saying that a rich man's attainment of salvation is harder than putting a camel through the eye of a needle. The exegetes don't differ as much as one might think. While there were some wacky allegorists (Origen comes to mind), perhaps the polemics exaggerate the issue.Hall holds up ancient Biblical reading as a way out of two dilemmas faced in the academy. One is a modernist way of reading scripture: a rational, individual reader publishes research marked as their own corner. The other is the postmodern lapse into subjectivism. What criteria can we have for reading scripture if ultimately it's only our own solipsistic perspective? Hall's mode of returning to the Fathers, which he terms paleo-orthodoxy, provides an out by placing all scholarship in the community and needs of the Church. His readings are always theological. The Fathers unanimously read every verse of the Bible in light of Christ, whether allegorically or more literally.While I enjoyed Hall's book, his polemics at the end seemed unnecessary. I will keep in mind that this is published by InterVarsity Press, an Evangelical group, so perhaps his appeal to tradition needs to be defended more clearly. As a Catholic it seemed redundant. But perhaps this is my own failure to understand the mindset of his audience, a mindset that might disregard any Christian writer before Luther and Calvin. (Never mind that Luther was himself a Catholic monk nurtured on the Fathers!) Despite this annoyance, Hall's book is a solid user friendly introduction to how the Fathers read scripture.