Crux, 50 no 3 Fall 2014, p 2-10
Preaching Through Many Voices: Caesarius of Arles on Genesis 18
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I hate theology textbooks. They are utterly boring: typically, they present lifeless, meagre distillations of what once-upon-a-time were vibrant insights conveyed with conviction and passion. By contrast, it is nothing short of a dazzling experience to read Augustine's The Trinity. Likewise, following along with St. Anselm's prayerful exploration of Why God Became Man is enough to heal even the most prejudiced from their instinctive abhorrence of scholastic theology. And the bewitching rhetoric of Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics must be tempting even to ardent neo-Thomists of the so-called "strict observance." So, hoping not to turn off my students prematurely from their theological studies, I mostly have them read the "great texts of the history of the church--using textbooks only by way of emergency, when shortcuts seem unavoidable. Getting to know the work of a great theologian through another's voice--some secondary text--has always seemed to me an inferior way of learning the trade.
As I started reading Caesarius, I had an interesting experience. The bishop's Sermon 83 ("On the Three Men Who Appeared to Blessed Abraham") turned out to be, well...a meagre distillation of the vibrant insights once conveyed with conviction and passion by Origen: it was "another's voice." Caesarius turned out to have been a populariser of the theology of earlier brilliant thinkers, passing on their thoughts to his own contemporaries. He was a "textbook theologian."
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