by Sara Parvis

Readers of Open House would like to hear more about the Church Fathers, Mary Cullen wrote to me recently. Could I write a piece for the journal on the Church Fathers on women and sex? With reference to St Monica and St Augustine? Yes, I said, I think I probably could – this comes into the category of things I have thought rather a lot about over the years, one way and another. First of all, though, I need to unpack the expression ‘Church Fathers’. It tends to be used above all by High Church Episcopalians and Eastern Orthodox theologians, and implies figures who have a special authority because they are close to the Early Church: they come from a period before the break-up of Christianity into Latin, Greek, Coptic and East and West Syrian traditions in the fifth and sixth centuries, and so represent a period which should be doctrinally privileged above later centuries.

Dr Sara Parvis is a senior lecturer in Patristics at the University of Edinburgh.