In August, Sammy Allen attended at the 19th International Oxford Patristics Conference, where they presented a paper entitled “Providential Computation: Reconstructing Theodoret’s Theology of History.” This paper argues that the fifth-century Christian author Theodoret of Cyrus holds a self-consistent but under-articulated view of divine providence across his theological and historical works, which scholars have tended to read in isolation because of their disparate genres. Allen contends that Theodoret’s God must ‘calculate’ what interventions in human history will save the greatest number of souls.
The College of Arts