The review #5, from those that are gradually being posted on our website, is devoted to the article by Prof. Paul Gavrilyuk, “Harnack’s Hellenized Christianity or Florovsky’s ‘Sacred Hellenism’: Questioning Two Metanarratives of Early Christian Engagement with Late Antique Culture.” In this 2010 study, which appeared in St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, Paul Gavrilyuk, a Kyiv native and well-known modern expert in many areas of theology, had analyzed two totally contrasting interpretations of the idea of “Christian Hellenism”: its complete rejection by Adolf von Harnack, and its unquestioning idealization by Fr. Georges Florovsky.
In this article, P. Gavrilyuk draws attention to the need to move beyond the two stereotypical receptions of the Greek Fathers’ heritage, as well as to abandon radical Hellenocentricity, which is the shortest route to locking oneself in the captivity of the past. The researcher calls on Orthodox theologians to avoid any attempts to interpret the Gospel and the Church’s kerygma in any particular, static cultural form. Moreover, in the context of reviewing the ambivalent approach to philosophy in the Church Fathers’ era, Prof. Gavrilyuk provides exciting information about the unfortunately lost texts of Apollinaris of Laodicea: (1) his paraphrase of Old Testament events in the style of Greek classics, as well as (2) Apollinaris’ creative arrangement of Gospel texts into the literary form of Plato’s dialogues.
A review of Paul Gavrilyuk’s article is available at this link:
