Book Review Robert M Grants Gods And The One God
Submitted by bugenhagen on 06/30/2008 05:21 PM
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Book Review Robert M Grants Gods And The One God
Robert M. Grant's Gods and the One God
Grant's 175 pages on the relation of early Christianity to its pagan philosophical and religious counterparts is heavier reading than its length suggests. Although it is only a survey of New Testament and Early Christian scholarship, the amount of lateral material, attempting to show potential pagan counterparts to New Testament documents and to early Christian theological development, makes reading laborious. The book contains no explicit argument, although the final pages seem to indicate that Christianity's opposition of the One God to the many gods of paganism resulted in a synthesis of the two emerging from the period following Nicaea. Instead of advancing a theory about the relationship of Christianity to pagan religion and philosophy, Grant tries, by and large, to show the early Christians in the philosophical and religious context in which they found themselves, and leave conclusions regarding the extent to which they were shaped or even infiltrated by paganism to the reader. Inasmuch as he does this, Grant is very enlightening to the stranger to early Christian history. Certain assumptions of Grant's, however, often slant his presentation of the facts, despite the general sense of even-handedness his writing exudes.
Grant's Presuppositions
Grant's approach to the New Testament, probably typical of most scholarship, more or less refuses to harmonize seeming inconsistencies in the theology of the various New Testament authors. When certain teachers at Antioch have a low christology, Grant explains that this is because they rely on Petrine sermons recorded by Luke (125). High christology is to be attributed to proponents' (Ignatius) reliance on Johannine texts (126). Attempts to harmonize Johannine and Petrine christologies, as would have characterized both parties in the dispute, are not even addressed as a live option by Grant. In this respect he is probably no more to...
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