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1. The term “Benedictine” applies in a general sense to all monks who live communally according to the rule of Benedict of Nursia (ca. 480-ca. 547). More narrowly Benedictines are members of a Benedictine confederation set up in 1893 by Pope Leo XIII (1878–1903). To this group belong 21 autonomous congregations with some 9,000 male members and 18,500 female members under an abbot primate in Rome ( Catalogus monasteriorum OSB 17 [1990]). 2. Benedict composed the rule that would decisively shape Western monasticism originally for ¶ his own monastery at Monte Cassino (after 529). …

1. The Benedictine monastery of Cluny, northwest of Mâcon in Burgundy, was founded in 910 by Duke William III of Aquitaine. In the 10th and 11th centuries it became the center of a reforming movement that began as a return to the original goals of monasticism (i.e., renunciation of the world in anticipation of the life of paradise in adoration and praise). In the course of time, it radically changed the Christian world in the West. 2. The basis of the reform was the demand for a stricter following of the Benedictine Rule in the tradition of Benedict of Aniane (d. 821). This demand was made i…

1. Term Patristic theology came into use among Lutherans in the later 17th century (Orthodoxy 1) in an effort to provide evidence from early Christian tradition that the teaching of the Reformers was in agreement with that of the church fathers. Patristics, which was distinguished from both biblical theology and systematic theology, served to stress continuity between the Reformation and the early church. The term “patrology” occurs for the first time in the title of a work by the Lutheran theologian Johann Gerhard (1582–1637): Patrologia, sive de primitivae ecclesiae Christian…