The Church in the Latin Fathers: Unity in Charity [Hardcover]

What is the church? What does it mean to be a member of the church? This book examines how the earliest Christian theologians in the Latin West understood the nature, ends, and boundaries of the church. By analyzing the thought and practices of figures such as Tertullian of Carthage, Cyprian of Carthage, Augustine of Hippo, and Pope Leo the Great, James K. Lee shows how early Latin theologians forged distinctive views of the church as one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.

Lee argues that according to the Latin fathers, the church was one complex reality with visible and invisible aspects that could be distinguished but not separated. God could work outside of the churchs visible bounds, yet all who were saved were joined to the churchs invisible bond of charity. The churchs unity was found in charity, and for the early Latin fathers, there was no salvation outside of the church. In addition, Lee demonstrates the trajectory from an exclusivist ecclesiology to a more inclusive understanding of church membership in the development of Latin ecclesiology over the course of the first five centuries of Christianity.

Ecclesiology has become one of the central doctrinal loci for systematic and moral theology. Its historical origins and development, however, have been neglected. James K. Lee remedies that neglect in this beautifully written presentation of the nature, ends, and boundaries of the church in the early Latin theologians. He makes a persuasive case that they had a discernible doctrine of the church and traces its development through Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine of Hippo, and Leo the Great. He situates ecclesiology within its historical and theological context, relating it to soteriology, pneumatology, sacraments, ethics, and more. Everyone interested in ecclesiology is in his debt for this masterful worlÓ7