This volume of essays has its distant origins in the Third Annual Conference of the Pappas Patristic Institute, “Evil and Suffering in the Patristic Period,” held at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology, October 12–14, 2006. Owing to a variety of factors, its publication has been delayed, but this delay has enabled the editors to produce a collection that differs in many respects from the original conference presentations. All of the original six plenary lectures have been included (Anderson, Behr, Harrison, Hunter, Skedros, and Ware), although most in a considerably revised form. Of the original twenty-four shorter communications delivered at the 2006 conference, only six are present here (Finn, Gavrilyuk, Martens, Phillips, Quinn, and Walton). An effort was made to include chapters that addressed a range of patristic writers, Eastern and Western, and that would be accessible to a wide audience. Because this topic deserves a theologically nuanced treatment, the editors decided to solicit additional essays, including two that highlighted the christological contribution of patristic thought to the problem of evil and suffering (Daley, Smith).
The editors express their thanks to a number of people who have supported this project. First, thanks are owed to Dr. Bruce Beck, director of the Pappas Patristic Institute, for organizing the original conference and facilitating the participation of the contributors. We also acknowledge the assistance of the Editorial Board of the series Holy Cross Studies in Patristic Theology and History, which conducted an initial screening of the papers presented at the conference. We also thank Professor Brian Daley of the University of Notre Dame and Professor J. Warren Smith of Duke University Divinity School for agreeing to contribute their essays to the collection. Let me also thank Nonna Verna Harrison for her essay about John Chrysostom on the man born blind, written for this volume.
We appreciate Mr. James Kinney of Baker Academic, who saw the project through the final stages of production. Most of all we express our deep gratitude to Dr. James Ernest, who departed Baker Academic for William B. Eerdmans Publishing just as this volume was going to press. James has been a stalwart supporter of the Pappas Patristic Institute conferences and has enabled the Holy Cross Studies in Patristic Theology and History to prosper. We wish him the very best in his new position.
Finally, we acknowledge the publishers who have granted permission to reprint material that has been published elsewhere: Yale University Press, for allowing us to use material from Gary Anderson’s book Sin: A History (Yale University Press, 2009) in his chapter “Christus Victor in the Work of Ephrem, Narsai, and Jacob of Serug”; Eerdmans, for letting us reprint Brian Daley’s chapter, “The Word and His Flesh: Human Weakness and the Identity of Jesus in Patristic Christology,” which originally appeared in Seeking the Identity of Jesus, edited by Beverly Gaventa and Richard Hays (Eerdmans, 2008), 251–69; and Pro Ecclesia, which originally published J. Warren Smith’s essay, “Suffering Impassibly: Christ’s Passion in Cyril of Alexandria’s Soteriology,” Pro Ecclesia 11, no. 4 (Fall 2002): 463–83.