Karl Barth's understanding of Luther and Calvin is not best illumined by an examination of his direct citation of their work, but by a consideration of his description of their vocation as church fathers as outlined in Church Dogmatics, I/2, a position held with remarkable consistency over the course of his career. Barth's discussion of Luther and Calvin there not only sets forth his understanding of the Reformers in a historical genealogy of revelation and its witnesses, but places them in an ordering of church authorities. Moreover, his description of their unique vocation sheds important light upon his understanding of the modern discipline of church history itself. His treatment of the Reformers thus both exemplifies and follows from his conviction that church history is not an independent theological discipline but can only accompany the central disciplines of exegetical, dogmatic and practical theology.

The origins of the term consensus fidelium lie in the rhetorical tropes of pagans who exhorted unity between friends and within cities – tropes supporting the hierarchy of imperial elites. The earliest Christians adapted this language for the same purpose within churches: to speak of unity and lay involvement in support of Church hierarchy. After the Reformation, Church of England writers used this rhetoric to enforce conformity to church polity and morality. The Tractarians and their successors employed a rhetorical ‘voice of the laity’ as a bolster for episcopal power. While the early twentieth century saw some in the Church of England and Anglican Communion use this same rhetoric to bring the laity into actual decision-making processes, the rhetoric of recent statements by the Communion has left power firmly with bishops.

John Henry Newman's study of the Church Fathers began during his years as a fellow of Oriel College and continued through his Anglican and Catholic periods almost to the end of his life. Among the various motives that attracted Newman to patristic theology, there are two that I consider especially important: scriptural hermeneutics and ecclesiology. He saw in the Fathers authentic interpreters of scripture, who read the Bible in and with the church in an exemplary way; he also found in them witnesses to the church's understanding of herself and of her offices. Through his ever more extensive reading on the doctrinal controversies in the patristic period, Newman formulated his theory of the development of doctrine, which is one of his major contributions to modern Catholic theology. Newman read the Fathers as contemporaries, as participants in the theological conversations and controversies of his own day. In the writings of the early bishops and theologians, he found a theological method that was congenial to his own.

The debate over the meaning of πίστις Χριστοῦ has been continuing for some time and shows no signs of abating, yet one conclusion has remained constant: the Church Fathers, generally, did not understand πίστις Χριστοῦ in the Pauline materials in the subjective sense as the ‘faithfulness of Christ’. Furthermore, there has heretofore been no text that correlates Jesus' faithfulness with his death on the cross in patristic writings. In light of that, the aim of this study is (1) to offer a critique of recent work on πίστις Χριστοῦ in the Church Fathers, and (2) to break the longstanding silence by presenting overlooked evidence from Hippolytus's De Christo et Antichristo that unambiguously relates Jesus' faithfulness to his death on the cross.

Ascribing inspiration to the composition and canonisation of the NT did not exempt it from the flux of history. Its contents were variously copied, quoted and interpreted. For example, early-church responses to Matthew's use of some of the OT prophets illustrate the freedom with which perhaps the most Jewish of the evangelists, having appropriated some of Judaism's greatest figures, was in turn appropriated by early Christianity, how also he was read by pagans and Jews, and how all, in good faith or not, sought to expose or defend or correct what readers thought to be its problems.