The final chapter explores the problems of agency and conformity among the enslaved at both individual and communal levels. I situate the Shepherd among ancient Mediterranean writers who understood enslaved persons to function as extensions of their own personae, as well as in conversation with Africana, feminist, postcolonial, and slavery studies on the agency of enslaved and possessed individuals. I suggest that God’s enslaved persons, as possessed instrumental agents of God, are imagined to be empowered by the enslaver to take particular actions and acquire particular virtues that contribute both to their enslaved obedience and their salvation. I then turn to the construction of a tower, the most lengthy visionary account in the Shepherd. Placed alongside Vitruvius’s On Architecture and Sara Ahmed’s scholarship, I argue that the Shepherd portrays the bodies of the enslaved as (ideally) uniformly shaped pieces of a monolithic ecclesiastical whole. Being “useful for the construction of the tower” is made manifest by how the various stones are shaped, reshaped, or rejected from being used to build a tower that is said to represent both God’s house and the Christian assembly itself.

Samuel Goyvaerts explores the notion of liturgical pastoral, the roots of which are to be found in the Liturgical Movement. It is an umbrella term that makes one understand how liturgy is intrinsically connected to the Church’s diakonia, kerygma, and koinonia. Liturgy is essential for building up the Church, for faith formation, and for the faithful’s service to the world.

On the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy is part of a corpus of Greek works by an unknown author in the late fifth or early sixth century. The author wrote under the pseudonym of Dionysius the Areopagite, who according to Acts 17:34 converted after hearing Paul’s preaching. The corpus was highly influential in the Byzantine tradition, its ideas influencing authors from Maximus the Confessor to Gregory Palamas. Through various translators, the most famous being John Scotus Eriugena, it also informed many medieval Latin theologians. It was cited in papal documents and excerpted in collections of sententiae, and no less a thinker than Thomas Aquinas wrote a commentary on the Dionysian text On the Divine Names. In 1457, the humanist Lorenzo Valla demonstrated that the corpus could not have been written by the Athenian convert Dionysius, and his views were disseminated by Erasmus. Still, the corpus contains a classic statement of mystical theology and continues to be read widely today.

Augustine’s liturgical preaching is integral to his conception of the liturgical celebration as rendering present the unrepeatable saving acts of Christ. During the liturgical season from Lent to Easter, the north African bishop is consistently preoccupied with the present effectiveness of the mysteries of Christ’s death and Resurrection. During Lent, he invites his congregation to fashion a cross for themselves – through prayer, fasting, and alms – for the sake of communion in Christ’s crucifixion. On Good Friday, he invites his listeners to contemplate the suffering of the impassible God and to safeguard the integrity of the Church that is the fruit of his suffering. In the Easter celebrations, he instructs his flock to be strengthened in their Easter faith through participation in the Eucharist and through performance of works of mercy, and to hold fast to the objective content of their faith in the genuine corporeality of the Risen Lord. He guides them into an experience of Easter joy as a proleptic participation in the eternal joy of the Church’s communion in the body of the Risen Lord, which can only be attained through a sharing in his Crucifixion.

Local, provincial, or ecumenical councils offered rare opportunities for bishops and other clergy members to weigh in on normative practice and establish precedents for ecclesiastical polity. While it remains debatable whether councils were effective in prescribing (or proscribing) Christian conduct and beliefs – be they among the heady echelons of clergy members or among the vast majority of laypeople – they nevertheless offer precious windows into which matters Christian leaders considered most urgent and immediate. Conciliar canons from late antiquity, and any historical period, resound with the bias and agenda of the dominant majority, and so treating them as windows through which modern readers can see what religious life was like “on the ground” for everyday Christians is problematic at best. By design, the canons convey the voice of the victors, so figuring out objections to them can be a challenge – and we can be sure that alternatives to the conciliar decisions existed. What conciliar canons do provide, then, is an indication of debates that raged among Christian groups in particular localities – debates about theology, clerical authority, communal organization and identity, ritual performance, and ascetic behavior.

This chapter explores Augustine’s preaching on the Old Testament in three primary collections: 1) Sermons to the People, 2) Explanations of the Psalms, and 3) the Dolbeau sermons. It begins by considering Augustine’s Christo-ecclesial hermeneutic for the interpretation of Scripture, which Augustine employs while preaching in the context of liturgical worship. Then it provides an overview of Augustine’s developing figurative exegesis of the Old Testament, especially during his debates with the Manicheans. Next, it examines how Augustine engages the different kinds of literature in the Old Testament, such as the Pentateuch, Psalms, and wisdom literature, in the aforementioned collections. The chapter concludes by arguing that Augustine’s sermons on the Old Testament demonstrate the unity of Scripture and the underlying Christo-ecclesial meaning of the Old Testament in Augustine’s thought.

Augustine was plunged into the Donatist controversy upon becoming bishop of Hippo in 395. In the wake of the Diocletianic persecutions in the early fourth century, the Donatists had split from the group whom Augustine called and considered “catholics” (i.e., “worldwide Christians”), creating a schism in the North African church that lasted for well over a century. The very nature of the church was in dispute: Donatists believed that the church must retain its purity and holiness, separating itself from sinners, whereas catholics maintained that the church could tolerate the presence of sinners as long as consent was not given to their sin. Donatists believed that catholics were implicated in the sin of those who lapsed in the Diocletianic persecutions by handing over the scriptures to imperial authorities; they believed that only by retaining its purity in this way could the church guard against catholic contagion. Furthermore, they regarded any sacrament administered by a cleric in a state of sin as invalid, and accordingly former catholics entering their communion had to be baptized (for the first time, in their view).

Among his many duties as bishop of Hippo in North Africa, Augustine (354–430) oversaw the reception of converts into the church. When newcomers to Christianity were ready to prepare for baptism, they were designated as catechumens. The catechumenate was a period of training, often lasting several years, in which newcomers learned how to live as Christians. At the beginning of each Lent, those catechumens who wished to be baptized at the upcoming Easter would submit their names and thereby formally become “petitioners” (competentes). During Lent the petitioners engaged in a number of ascetical and ritual practices designed to complete their initiation into the Christian way of life. These included fasting, undergoing periodic exorcisms, and receiving special instruction from the bishop by listening to sermons that covered a broad range of Christian doctrine and practice. Two weeks before Easter, petitioners participated in a ceremony known as the traditio symboli, the “handing over” of the creed. At this ceremony the bishop formally recited the creed, with the expectation that afterward the petitioners would memorize it. There was a similar ceremony that “handed over” the Lord’s prayer (traditio orationis). At the Easter Vigil, the petitioners would “hand back” the creed (redditio symboli) and the Lord’s prayer (redditio orationis) by reciting them before the congregation and fully participate in the Eucharistic liturgy for the first time, in the course of which they received the sacraments of initiation: baptism, chrismation, and Eucharist. During the Easter octave – the eight days from Easter Sunday to the following Sunday, counting inclusively – the newly baptized, whom Augustine called “newborns,” would attend sermons that unpacked the meaning of the sacraments they had just experienced and received at the Easter Vigil.

Thascius Caecilianus Cyprianus – better known to history as Cyprian – converted to Christianity around 246 after a successful secular career as a rhetorician. Soon he was ordained to the priesthood and in 248 or 249 was consecrated as the bishop of Carthage. Not long after this, in late 249, the persecution of Emperor Decius broke out and Cyprian fled Carthage out of a concern that his church not be deprived of its bishop, as had recently happened in Rome and elsewhere. When the persecution ended in 251, in its wake there arose in Carthage and Rome several theological and pastoral problems, particularly over the readmission into the church of those who had lapsed in the persecution. Cyprian adopted a measured policy of readmitting the lapsed after a period of suitable repentance, and this policy was adopted also by Cornelius, the new bishop of Rome. He lays out this approach in On the Lapsed (De lapsis), written in 251. But laxists in Carthage, who supported the lenient readmission of the lapsed, and rigorists in Rome, who denied that readmission was even permissible, opposed the official policy, leading to schisms in both places.

I propose to situate my contribution in a long chronological sequence that goes from the pontificate of Pius IX to the “Vatican II moment” (including the pontificate of Paul VI). The chapter is structured around three axes. The first takes into account the doctrinal and dogmatic developments that sanction papal primacy without detaching them from the socio-political context. The second evaluates the refusals and acceptance of the model thus developed by questioning the concept of “romanity,” the practices that result from it and the institutional and doctrinal impasses, sensitive under the pontificate of Pius XII. The third axis analyzes the development of the idea of collegiality before the Council and evaluates the conciliar debates before understanding how the pontificate of Paul VI assumes and renews the pontifical heritage of the previous century in the context of the crisis of the 1960s and 1970s.

This article discusses David Tracy’s implicit and explicit reflection on the church as a community of Christian praxis. The church is both a social and a theological reality, just like its theological partner-reality ‘the world’. This means that no concrete expression of the Christian church may pronounce itself wholly or uniquely adequate to its theological field; neither can any boundary between ‘church’ and ‘world’ be rendered theologically determinate or fundamental. So Tracy’s thinking focuses on the centre of the church, not on its boundaries. As gift and sacrament, the church participates in God’s grace as disclosed in God’s self-manifestation in Jesus Christ. In bearing witness to this event, the church’s critical and self-critical praxis of love is borne upon mystical-prophetic discourses and dialogues with otherness without and within. Ecclesiology, therefore, emerges only in fragments and not as a closed system. Tracy’s ecclesiology is everywhere a function of an account of God and reality. A Christian church that learns a Tracyean route to naming God aspires actively, contemplatively, and fragmentarily to realise itself in answering fashion as an ‘institution of love’.