How Did the Church Fathers Interpret the Fall | Paul Blowers
Channel: Henry Center
Date: 22/07/2019

Lecture Title - Patristic Interpretations of the Fall: Prophecy, Apocalypse, and Tragedy

Christian interpreters from very early on presumed that the Adamic fall was a primordial cataclysm with ramifications for the whole human posterity; but they did not all concur on the precise nature of its causes and consequences. Blowers’ lecture will track three major trajectories of patristic interpretation. First is a tradition viewing the fall as an adumbration of the perduring patterns of human sin, a preview of the continuing reinvention of moral evil, generation after generation, beginning with Adam and Eve. Second is a tradition that understood the fall as an apocalypse of sorts, insofar as it provided a catalyst for revealing the fullness of the Creator’s sacrificial love
for his creation and his resourcefulness in sustaining it. Third is a trajectory that acknowledged the fall as a fateful tragedy, one that called into question the very stability of human nature, its penchant to relapse into nothingness, and the fact that human beings were haunted by the very freedom that was supposed to be a gift.

Paul M. Blowers (PhD University of Notre Dame) is Dean E. Walker Professor of Church History at Emmanuel Christian Seminary. His publications include Drama of the Divine Economy: Creator and Creation in Early Christian Theology and Piety (Oxford University Press, 2012), Maximus the Confessor: Jesus Christ and the Transfiguration of the World (Oxford University Press, 2016), and Visions and Faces of the Tragic: The Mimesis of Tragedy and the Folly of Salvation in Early Christian Literature (Oxford University Press, 2020).

The Henry Center for Theological Understanding provides theological resources that help bridge the gap between the academy and the church. It houses a cluster of initiatives, each of which is aimed at applying practical Christian wisdom to important kingdom issues—for the good of the church, for the soul of the theological academy, for the sake of the world, and ultimately for the glory of God. The HCTU seeks to ground each of these initiatives in Scripture, and it pursues these goals collaboratively, in order to train a new generation of wise interpreters of the Word—lay persons and scholars alike—for the sake of tomorrow’s church, academy, and world.

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