WHC Frend, RIP
A bit of sadness to report on this otherwise wonderful day. I learned that the great William Frend passed on to be with our Lord on 1 July. He was an awesome historian of the early church. His work Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church is an absolute must for studying martyrdom and is a blessing of information and analysis for a general study of the first centuries of the Church. Below is an article in the UK's Daily Telegraph.
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The Rev Prof William Frend
(Filed: 11/08/2005)
The Rev Prof William Frend, who has died aged 89, combined the roles of Early Christian historian, archaeologist and theologian in a career of such startling optimism and diversity that some were inclined to dismiss him as 'a holy fool'.
Encouraged by his Low Church inclinations and experience of digs in North Africa, he genially denied papal claims to primacy in the first centuries AD, and retained strong sympathies with those who had fallen out with Rome. Before his pre-war Oxford thesis was published as The Donatist Church in 1952, patristic scholars had generally viewed Donatism, which appeared at Carthage early in the fourth century, as a heresy which prompted St Augustine to formulate aspects of Catholic sacramental theology.
But Frend saw it as a valid theological stance which allied itself with the rural poor against their largely Catholic landlords, and he gloried in the resistance of the early Christian martyrs to Roman persecution. He further suggested that Donatism, rather than St Augustine's Catholicism, was the inheritor of the traditions of pre-Constantinian African Christianity. While such ideas about the social basis of Donatism have been qualified by subsequent scholarship, Frend's interpretation is still respected.
His Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church (1965) dealt with a wide canvas of sources from pre-Christian Jewish texts until the fourth century, though it attracted criticism from specialists. The Rise of the Monophysite Movement (1972) was a study of the opposition to the Council of Chalcedon, which defined the doctrine of the Incarnation in 451; and The Rise of Christianity (1984), covering the first six centuries of the Church, remains the most substantial work of its kind written by a British scholar for more than half a century.
For more of the article, click here: Telegraph | News | The Rev Prof William Frend
__________
The Rev Prof William Frend
(Filed: 11/08/2005)
The Rev Prof William Frend, who has died aged 89, combined the roles of Early Christian historian, archaeologist and theologian in a career of such startling optimism and diversity that some were inclined to dismiss him as 'a holy fool'.
Encouraged by his Low Church inclinations and experience of digs in North Africa, he genially denied papal claims to primacy in the first centuries AD, and retained strong sympathies with those who had fallen out with Rome. Before his pre-war Oxford thesis was published as The Donatist Church in 1952, patristic scholars had generally viewed Donatism, which appeared at Carthage early in the fourth century, as a heresy which prompted St Augustine to formulate aspects of Catholic sacramental theology.
But Frend saw it as a valid theological stance which allied itself with the rural poor against their largely Catholic landlords, and he gloried in the resistance of the early Christian martyrs to Roman persecution. He further suggested that Donatism, rather than St Augustine's Catholicism, was the inheritor of the traditions of pre-Constantinian African Christianity. While such ideas about the social basis of Donatism have been qualified by subsequent scholarship, Frend's interpretation is still respected.
His Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church (1965) dealt with a wide canvas of sources from pre-Christian Jewish texts until the fourth century, though it attracted criticism from specialists. The Rise of the Monophysite Movement (1972) was a study of the opposition to the Council of Chalcedon, which defined the doctrine of the Incarnation in 451; and The Rise of Christianity (1984), covering the first six centuries of the Church, remains the most substantial work of its kind written by a British scholar for more than half a century.
For more of the article, click here: Telegraph | News | The Rev Prof William Frend
posted by Eddie at
4:09 PM
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