Auswahl der wissenschaftlichen Literatur zum Thema „Celtic church – history“

Irenaeus flourished toward the end of the second century as a bishop in Lugdunum (modern Lyons, France). He is important for several reasons, but scholarly interests in Irenaeus have focused chiefly on his place in the history of Christian thought and his churchmanship. Although his mission/evangelistic work is routinely mentioned by church historians, little effort has been made to extract from his apologetical-catechetical writings something of his missiology. As a native of Asia Minor, he engaged in cross-cultural work among the pagan Celtic peoples of southern Gaul. Two aspects of his missiology are probed: cultural adjustment in linguistics and his motivation for the task. Missiologically, he stands as a thoughtful combination of missionary-theologian-churchman.

In recent historiography a rather unlikely alliance has emerged which is concerned to normalize Early Irish Christianity by emphasizing its links with the religious culture of Western Europe. One wing of the alliance represents a historiographical tradition that originated in the debates of the Reformation with the introduction of a formidable Aunt Sally by the erudite ecclesiastical historian Archbishop Ussher, who purported to discover in the Early Irish Church a form of Christianity in conformity with the Pure Word of God, uncorrupted by papal accretions. Ussher’s A Discourse of the Religion anciently professed by the Scottish and Irish initiated a debate that has reverberated down the centuries around the issue of which of the two major post-Reformation Christian traditions may claim Early Irish Christianity for its heritage. The debate continues to echo, even in these ecumenical times, in a Roman Catholic tradition of writing about the history of the Early Irish Church which emphasizes its links with Roman Orthodoxy—which were, in reality, tenuous and tension-ridden—and glosses over its highly characteristic idiosyncrasies. More recently that tradition has received unlikely and, indeed, unwitting support in consequence of the development of a revisionist trend in Celtic historical studies against a perception of Celtic Ireland that originated in the romantic movement of the nineteenth century and that was taken over holus-bolus by the cultural nationalists. This romantic-nationalist interpretation pivots upon an ethnographic antithesis between the Celt and the other races of Western Europe which endows the former with singular qualities of spirit and of heart and interprets Early Irish Christianity accordingly. By way of antidote modern scholarship has taken to emphasizing external influences and the European context as the key to an understanding of the historical development of Christianity in Ireland, playing up its debt to the Latin West and playing down the claims made on its behalf as the light of Dark Age Europe.

Throughout Christianity, its activities are in one way or another connected to the historical reality of its time. Usually, for different epochs, the strength of these bonds was different, but during the Middle Ages, they were significantly stronger than before and after. It is here that perhaps the most important moment was the rise of Christianity, which spread over a relatively short period of time almost throughout Europe. It was then - and never again in all its history - that the Church was able to participate in the formation of all aspects of its contemporary life (including the social), in accordance with its spirit. When solving this task, it inevitably came in close contact with the "world" and the various forms in which it was represented (ie with culture, state, etc.).