Some Protestants devoted their entire theological careers to exploring patristic and medieval texts, developing ever more nuanced accounts of the slow development of the church’s faith and practice throughout history. The Lutherans were particularly sophisticated in this effort. It was in relation to such attempts that the words patristics and patrology arose in their technical meanings from within the Lutheran tradition in the seventeenth century.28 It is unfortunate that this historical approach is less common among Protestants today, and part of the implicit goal of this book is to retrieve
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