Living Wisely with the Church Fathers

Hall (director, Renovaré Inst. of Christian Formation; Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers) has produced this work as a companion to the "Ancient Christian Commentary on the Scripture" series. The book's title refers to the way early church theologians formulated ethics and illustrates the major challenge that Hall asks his readers to confront. Although one can draw moral parallels between ancient Rome and the modern West, writers of that early period evaluated such questions quite differently. Without a nuanced and clear analysis of how questions of wealth, military service, sexuality, and the value of human life were approached, the conclusions of these thinkers would be dismissed out of hand. Hall approaches ethical reasoning as practices and characteristics that needed to be developed in order to know how to make wise choices and have the resources to carry them out. Such a concept of ethics required a mentor or example, and Hall brings out a dynamic synergism between the Hellenistic framework and radically different model of behavior as found in the Gospels.