Creeds and confessions throughout Christian history provide a unique vantage point from which to study the Christian faith. To this end, Donald Fairbairn and Ryan Reeves construct a story that captures both the central importance of creeds and confessions over the centuries and their unrealized potential to introduce readers to the overall sweep of church history. The book features texts of classic creeds and confessions as well as informational sidebars.

How did the early Church understand the relation between grace, salvation, and the person of Christ? Donald Fairbairn's persuasive study shows that, despite intense theological controversy, there was in fact a very strong consensus in the fifth century about what salvation was and who Christ needed to be in order to save people. This consensus can serve as a standard by which to judge the varied pictures of Christ which coexist in the contemporary Church.

Was there a genuine theological consensus about Christ in the early Church? Donald Fairbairn's persuasive study uses the concept of grace to clarify this question. There were two sharply divergent understandings of grace and christology. One understanding, characteristic of Theodore and Nestorius, saw grace as God's gift of co-operation to Christians and Christ as the uniquely graced man. The other understanding, characteristic of Cyril of Alexandria and John Cassian, saw grace as God the Word's personal descent to the human sphere so as to give himself to humanity. Dealing with, among others, John Chrysostom, John of Antioch, and Leo the Great, Fairbairn suggests that these two understandings were by no means equally represented in the fifth century: Cyril's view was in fact the consensus of the early Church.

St. Fulgentius of Ruspe was perhaps the most brilliant North African theologian in the era after St. Augustine's death. He wrote widely on theological and moral issues. Between the years AD 519 and 523, Fulgentius engaged in correspondence with a group of Latin-speaking monks from Scythia, and that correspondence is translated into English-almost all of it for the first time-in this volume. The correspondence is significant because it stands at the intersection of two great theological discussions: the primarily Eastern Christological controversies between the Fourth Ecumenical Council in 451 and the Fifth in 553, and the largely Western Semi-Pelagian controversy, which ran from 427 to the Second Synod of Orange in 529. Contemporary Western scholars normally treat these controversies over Christ and grace separately, but there were noteworthy points of contact between the two discussions, and Fulgentius and the Scythian monks were the ones who drew the connections between Christology and grace most strongly. These connections suggest that we today may do well to treat Christology and grace more as two sides of the same coin than as separate theological issues. Both sets of issues deal fundamentally with the relation between God and humanity: Christological questions ask how the divine and human are related in the person of the Savior, and grace-related questions ask how the divine and human are linked in the conversion, Christian life, and final salvation of each Christian. Thus, Fulgentius's correspondence with the Scythian monks can do more than simply aid understanding of sixth-century Byzantine/Roman theology. It can also contribute to our contemporary thinking on the relation between two of the Christian faith's most central doctrines.

What can the early church contribute to theology today? Although introductions to Christian theology often refer to its biblical foundations, seldom is much attention paid to the key insights the early church had into the nature of Christian faith and life. Donald Fairbairn takes us back to those biblical roots and to the central convictions of the early church, showing us what we have tended to overlook, especially in our understanding of God as Trinity, the person of Christ and the nature of our salvation as sharing in the Son's relationship to the Father. This book will prove useful to beginning theology students as well as advanced theologians who want to get at the heart of the Christian gospel.