(Photo stained glass, Canterbury Cathedral).
The Rev. Henry Chadwick, a Church of England priest and renowned scholar of the early centuries of Christianity, has died at age 87.
Rev. Chadwick died Tuesday at a hospital in Oxford, his family said. The cause of death was not announced.
Much of Rev. Chadwick’s work involved controversies in the early church, which he sought to explain with sympathy for the individuals involved; the same attitude was evident in his work in Anglican ecumenical dialogues with Roman Catholics and the Orthodox church.
“He once proclaimed ecumenism ‘a good cause to die for,’ and was certainly deeply committed to finding consensus — not by coining a conveniently vague formula, but by a real excavation of common first principles,” Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said in an obituary written for The Guardian newspaper.
Early church controversies (theological, social, and political) was one of the core studies of my undergraduate degree. I spent many a night in college reading Henry Chadwick. He was a great, deep, humane, thoughtful. A man of great faith as well. God speed.
My favorite work of his is probably Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition.
