I. History
The notion of a history of theology is a product of the modern era, but the roots of a historical perspective can be traced back to the Early Church. One is the doxography of heresy (the earliest extant being Irenaeus’s Adversus haereses), which was a foundation for the history of dogma (Dogma, History of); another was literary history (Literature, History of: V, 2.a), beginning with Jerome’s De viris illustribus (392). But it was not until the age of Protestant or…