Browsing by Author "Dunn, Geoffrey David"

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    'For it is improper to be addicted to the tedium of affliction': Christian Responses to Pandemic in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages
    (Wydawnictwo KUL, 2021) Dunn, Geoffrey David
    The current COVID-19 pandemic has seen some turn to the past to see if the historical evidence provides any assistance to forecasting the probable duration and intensity of the disease and the length of time until a vaccine or cure is found. In this paper, on the contrary, the aim is to look to the present situation to help understand the past. The current pandemic, which seems impossible to halt even as vaccines start to roll out, and threatens to destroy the way people interact with one another and provide for their families has undermined confidence in the progress of medical science and the human mastery over the natural world. The fear and helplessness that has come in its wake is much the way people in previous centuries felt in the face of rampant and uncontrollable disease. In this paper several episodes of the first bubonic plague, known as the plague of Justinian, that lasted from the sixth to eighth centuries, as reported by Gregory I, bishop of Rome, and Gregory, bishop of Tours, both active at the end of the sixth century, will be explored. In light of our own experience of vulnerability because of the impotence of modern medicine so far to offer protection, we are better able to appreciate the reaction of people who lived in Lombard Italy and Merovingian France to intractable natural disaster.
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    Tertullian, Apostolicity, and the Apostles
    (Wydawnictwo KUL, 2024) Dunn, Geoffrey David
    How did Tertullian regard the apostles? This article investigates the references to them scattered through his writings both as individuals and as a collective. It reveals that individually the apostles were remote figures who appear in the pages of the New Testament simply as interlocutors of Jesus. Even Peter, significant as he was, was someone whose role was personal to himself and not a pattern for future leadership. Yet collectively the apostles performed an important function in Tertullian’s ecclesiology; they were the first receivers and transmitters of the regula fidei, and their fidelity to that responsibility distinguished authentic Christian communities from heretical associations. The regula fidei was important to Tertullian. As a synthesis of the essentials of faith as preached and lived by Jesus, it provided the measure against which passages of Scripture and Christian belief and practice were to be interpreted. The regula relied upon the accurate and complete transmission of the message of Jesus via the apostles to the church and its leaders. The apostolicity of the church is at the heart of why Tradition is central to Christian theology.