AP reports that The Rev. Henry Chadwick died last week at 87 years old.
The Rev. Henry Chadwick, a Church of England priest and renowned scholar of the early centuries of Christianity, has died at age 87.
Chadwick died Tuesday at a hospital in Oxford, his family said. The cause of death was not announced.
Much of Professor Chadwick’s work involved controversies in the early church, which he sought to explain with sympathy for the individuals involved; the same attitude was evident in his work in Anglican ecumenical dialogues with Roman Catholics and the Orthodox church.
Born June 23, 1920 in Bromley, England, Chadwick won a music scholarship to Magdalene College, Cambridge, but his interest turned to church history. He was ordained priest in 1943.
His teaching career began as fellow and chaplain at Queens’ College, Cambridge, where he served as dean for five years; he was appointed Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University in 1959, and in 1969 was appointed dean of the college of Christ Church, Oxford.
He moved to Cambridge in 1979 as Regius Professor of Divinity, and served as master of Peterhouse college, Cambridge from 1987 to 1993. He edited the Journal of Theological Studies from 1954 to 1985.
“The story of the Christian Church is a fascinating narrative, and I have tried to write a true account especially (but not only) of the career of this society with its faith (and sometimes its follies) in the centuries of antiquity, during which Christianity enforced the transition from ancient to medieval, and on to modern,” Chadwick told Contemporary Authors, a biographical resource.
“I have tried to write about the people involved in this story with human sympathy and understanding for their problems.”
The first of his many books was a translation of “Contra Celsum” by Origen of Alexandria, the third century church father, published in 1953.
His later works included studies of St. Ambrose, Priscillian of Avila, Boethius, and St. Augustine, capped in 2002 with the publication of “The Church in Ancient Society.”
He was knighted in 1989.
Chadwick is survived by his wife of 63 years, Margaret; their three daughters and his elder brother, the Rev. Professor Owen Chadwick, also a distinguished church historian.
The funeral is planned at Christ Church, Oxford on Wednesday.
Archbishop Rowan Williams wrote a remembrance in the Guardian.
‘The Anglican church,” it was said, “may not have a Pope, but it does have Henry Chadwick.” Nothing could better illustrate the unique position held for many years by this aristocrat among Anglican scholars, who has died aged 87. His erudition was legendary, in practically all areas of the study of late antiquity, but it was also deployed to memorable effect in the work of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission.
Many sensed that the more recent history of Anglican-Roman Catholic relations was a source of some sadness to him. He had little love either for radical fashions in theology or for the fierce neoconservatism characteristic of some parts of the Roman Catholic church in recent decades. He represented that earlier and more hopeful phase, begun and aborted in the 1920s at the Malines conversations (named after the French spelling of the Belgian city of Mechelen where they were held), where Anglicans and Roman Catholics discovered unexpected common ground in the study of the fathers of the church and in a deep but unobtrusive liturgical piety….
He once proclaimed ecumenism “a good cause to die for”, and was certainly deeply committed to finding consensus – not by coining a conveniently vague formula, but by a real excavation of common first principles.
Read the AP Story here.
Here is Rowan Williams tribute.