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Kinzig on the Creeds
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Faith in formulae. A collection of early Christian creeds and creed-related texts. Vol I, II, III, IV. Edited and translated by WolframKinzig. (Oxford Early Christian Texts.) Pp. xxiv + 552; vi + 420; vi + 464; vi + 509. New York–Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. £450. 978 0 19 060902 4; 978 0 19 960903 1; 978 0 19 875841 9; 978 0 19 875842 6
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 May 2018
Extract
In these four volumes Wolfram Kinzig has put together the largest compilation to date of texts which profess to set out the principal tenets of the Church between the second and the eighth centuries of the Christian era. In dimension it easily surpasses its German precursors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while in content it can aim to be more eclectic than the compendium which Philip Schaff addressed to the clergy and fellow-believers in 1877. Its only rival in the twenty-first century is the joint labour of Jaroslav Pelikan and Valerie Hotchkiss, broader in chronological range but therefore less exhaustive in its representation of this formative epoch. The first volume affords all necessary materials for the telling and untelling of the narrative which customarily ends with the promulgation of an amplified version of the Nicene Creed at Constantinople in 381; the second is an argosy of western specimens, a high proportion being prototypes or variants of the so-called Apostles Creed; the third is a miscellany of both personal and synodical confessions, some conventional, some idiosyncratic, many obscure in provenance and purpose; the contents of the fourth are drawn primarily from the Carolingian era, though the sources consulted in the first half are as various as the Pontifical of Donaueschingen (vol. iv. 99), the Irish Book of Dimma (iv. 119), the Dicta Leonis Episcopi (iv. 158–61) and the Sacramentary of Autun (iv. 283). The result is a monument of erudition, an invaluable resource for all future scholarship, and pleasurable reading for those who have hitherto been unable to approach the texts for want of an English rendering. The following remarks are therefore offered to the editor of these volumes as a stimulus to discussion, not to throw any aspersion on his judgement or on his many-times-proven competence as historian and critic.
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References
1 A Hahn, Bibliothek der Symbole und Glaubensregeln der apostolisch-katholischen Kirche, Breslau 1842, with new editions, amplified by G. Han (1877) and (1897); Heurtley, C. A., Harmonia symbolica, Oxford 1858Google Scholar; Schaff, P., The creeds of Christendom with a history and critical notes, New York 1877Google Scholar. See further Kinzig, Faith in formulae, i. 22–6.
2 Pelikan, J. and Hotchkiss, V., Creeds and confessions of faith in the Christian tradition, New Haven 2013Google Scholar. Kinzig discusses this at Faith in formulae, i. 27, but it is not to be found in the bibliography.
3 Kelly, J. N. D., Early Christian creeds, London 1972, 65–88Google Scholar.
4 The Oxford University Press, which has not always been a watchful patron of literacy in recent years, is to be congratulated on retaining, contra mundum, the spelling ‘credal’ rather than ‘creedal’ in these volumes.
5 On synods 63, at Kinzig, Faith in formulae, i. 11.
6 Sozemen, Church history 1.20–1; Kinzig, Faith in formulae, i. 287.
7 Wiles, M. F., ‘A textual variant in the creed of the Council of Nicaea’, Studia Patristica xxvi (1993), 428–33Google Scholar. This article is curiously absent from the otherwise copious bibliography. In The oecumenical documents of the faith, London 1906, T. H. Bindley is content to say that ‘Theodoret alone omits’ the term ktiston ‘from the Eusebian transcript’ (as though Socrates were not following Athanasius) and makes no reference to other witnesses.
8 Theodoret, Church history 1.12.8; cf. Basil, ep. cxxv.2; Cyril, Third letter to Nestorius 3; and Ambrose, On the faith 1.20.
9 Philostorgius, Kirchengeschichte, ed. J. Bidez, Leipzig 1913, 9–10. See further Edwards, M. J., ‘Alexander of Alexandria and the Homoousion’, Vigiliae Christianae lxvi (2012), 482–502CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which is cited in Kinzig's bibliography.
10 Price, R. and Gaddis, M., The acts of the Council of Chalcedon, ii, Liverpool 2005, 202Google Scholar.
11 Epiphanius, Ancoratus 119, 118 at Kinzig, Faith in formulae, i. 481–4, 516–17. Cyril of Jerusalem's creed is reconstructed from his catechetical sermons at i. 370–1.
12 F. Loofs, Nestoriana, Halle 1905, 167.
13 Leo, Tome to Flavian 2, in Bindley, Oecumenical documents, 196, 206–7.
14 Victorinus, Opera theologica, ed. A. Locher, Leipzig 1976, 29.
15 Kinzig, W. and Vinzent, M., ‘Recent research on the origin of the creed’, Journal of Theological Studies l (1999), 535–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 Eunomius, Apologia 5, in Vaggione, R., Eunomius: the extant works, Oxford 1987, 39Google Scholar.
17 Cf. Basil, On the Holy Spirit 7.6.
18 Nyssa, Gregory of, Opera omnia, iii/1, ed. Mueller, F., Leiden 1958, 50.15–17Google Scholar, cf. 48.1–2, where the works that commence with the Father are said to issue through the Son. On the same page, the Father wills, the Son prepares and the Spirit energises.
19 Heurtley, C. A. F., De fide et symbolo, Oxford 1869Google Scholar.