He Came Down from Heaven: The Preexistence of Christ and the Christian Faith by Douglas McCready

Author:Douglas McCready [McCready, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2009-12-09T05:00:00+00:00

THE PATRISTIC WITNESS

The earliest noncanonical church documents we have date from about the time of the last New Testament books.25 They show the postapostolic church no less accepting of Christ’s preexistence than its predecessors. According to J. N. D. Kelly, the apostolic fathers generally took for granted Christ’s preexistence and his role in creation and redemption.26

These writings of early church pastors and theologians are an important link between the New Testament documents and twenty-first-century Christians. The authors are overwhelmingly Gentile, whereas probably all but one of the New Testament authors (Luke) were Jews. These postapostolic writings document the movement of Christian faith into the Hellenistic Gentile environment of the Mediterranean basin. Some of the documents are difficult because of the language and philosophy involved, but they show early Christians attempting to communicate to their contemporaries using concepts the audience can understand. At the same time, many of these concepts underwent a significant transformation at their hands to make them more adequate vehicles of communication. Today, we call this contextualization. It was during this period that the writings of the Bible began to be organized into Christian doctrine. This was a necessary process that drew connections between subjects, probed implications and established boundaries for what constituted legitimate interpretation. During this time, Christians debated a number of subjects whose conclusions many now take for granted. The first series of these debates dealt with who Jesus Christ is.

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