Combining historical and theological analysis, Christopher Beeley offers a new contextualized reading of early church fathers - among them Origen of Alexandria, Gregory of Nazianzus, Augustine of Hippo, and Cyril of Alexandria - and reexamines their ultimate contribution to the development of Christianity. Focusing particularly on the question of how Christ can be both human and divine, he traces how different patristic theologians and church councils constructed the idea of an authoritative theological tradition. In doing so, he seeks to explain how during the "golden age" of early Christianity the seeds were sown for Christianity's fragmentation into rival churches, and ultimately for the Great Schism between Eastern and Western Christendom.

Christopher Beeley is Walter H. Gray Associate Professor of Anglican Studies and Patristics at Yale Divinity School. He is the author of Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God: In Your Light We Shall See Light, which won the 2010 John Templeton Award for Theological Promise.

'Beeley performs a signal service for the entire scholarly community – East and West – by tracing a clear line through the development of Patristic thinking on the relations of the members of the Trinity one to another, and subsequently the divine-human makeup in the person of Christ; in the event, he delivers a revisionary history, upsetting established, received, and ‘orthodox’ reputations and evaluations.' Patrick Madigan, Heythrop Journal