THE BREEZE OF THE CENTURIES
Introducing Great Theologians from the Apostolic Fathers to Aquinas
By Michael Reeves. IVP. 152 pages. £8.99
ISBN 978-1-84474-415-2
‘Totally scintillating’, declared the recommendation on the back cover of this book. I thought back to lectures I used to give, and doubted whether my students would have said the same about them.
In answer to the question, ‘Why study them?’, I used to say, ‘What would you feel if you met them in heaven and hadn’t a clue about what they had done?’ Michael Reeves gives a weightier reason. Drawing on C.S. Lewis, he describes how 21st-century people tend to think that ‘newer’ must be better, and that therefore there is nothing of benefit to be learned from thinkers in long-past centuries. He dubs this ‘chronological snobbery’ and shows that we are the poorer if we limit ourselves to the small island of our own century.
