John Chrysostom's doctrine of conversion
James Bennett Ayers, Boston College
Date: 2001
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Abstract
John Chrysostom, the "golden-mouthed" preacher of late-fourth-century Antioch and Constantinople, proclaimed the Christian faith in many hundreds of homilies that have come down to us. These were not theological treatises, but expositions of scripture and exhortations to the ordinary church member to live the Christian life. Across this corpus a solid underlying theology can be discerned: in particular, a complex and evocative doctrine of conversion. Chrysostom preached that conversion happens to us because of God's gracious gift of salvation in Christ: yet it must be lived in the life of the particular believer. What God has initiated in grace must now be established in works of righteousness. Individual Christians, then, becomes witnesses in word and deed, working for the salvation of their neighbors, and seeing their own salvation established in that same process. Thus a person is simultaneously evangelizer and evangelizee, converted and being converted.
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