One hot day a eunuch of great authority under Candace, Queen of the Ethiopians, was riding home in his chariot. He had just been to the temple in Jerusalem, yet he was not content to have his faith nourished by the priestly exposition of Scripture alone, but was also studiously reading Scripture for himself, specifically the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. He found enough clarity in the prophet to strengthen his faith; but then he came across a passage that seemed to block his access to the meaning of the prophet, for it spoke of one who in a contradictory way was humiliated beyond all others, and yet exalted above the earth. As he was puzzling over the meaning of this passage, a man appeared and asked him, ‘Do you understand what you are reading?’ The eunuch could have dismissed this question with proud disdain. Instead, he responded with modesty and humility, ‘How can I, unless someone guide me?’ Philip answered the eunuch's most pressing question, ‘Of whom does the prophet speak?’ by pointing him to Jesus Christ. The eunuch responded to Philip's help in interpreting Scripture with such faith that he asked to be baptized then and there, and then returned home with much joy, for he now knew the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom he has sent.

The concept of the covenant is crucial to understanding the development of Reformed theology in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The origin of this aspect of theology during the initial decades of the Reformation, however, has received little attention. Kenneth Hagen's groundbreaking article on the advent of covenant theology and its distinctiveness from testamental theology was a pioneering outline, yet was not built upon by the succeeding generation of scholars. Attempts to explain the Reformed covenant as an outgrowth of late Medieval theology, in particular the Nominalist pactum concept, remain tentative and inconclusive. Efforts in the field of Anglo-American Puritanism have likewise yielded little in the way of detailed analysis.

Nowhere in the literary remains of antiquity is there another document quite comparable to Gregory of Nyssa's fourth homily on the book of Ecclesiastes: certainly no other ancient text still known to us—Christian, Jewish, or Pagan—contains so fierce, unequivocal, and indignant a condemnation of the institution of slavery. Not that it constitutes a particularly lengthy treatise: it is only a part of the sermon itself, a brief exegedeal excursus on Ecclesiastes 2:7 (‘I got me male and female slaves, and had my home-born slaves as well’), but it is a passage of remarkable rhetorical intensity. In it Gregory treats slavery not as a luxury that should be indulged in only temperately (as might an Epicurean), nor as a necessary domestic economy too often abused by arrogant or brutal slave-owners (as might a Stoic like Seneca or a Christian like John Chrysostom), but as intrinsically sinful, opposed to God's actions in creation, salvation, and the church, and essentially incompatible with the Gospel. Of course, in an age when an economy sustained otherwise than by chattel slavery was all but unimaginable, the question of abolition was simply never raised, and so the apparent uniqueness of Gregory's sermon is, in one sense, entirely unsurprising. Gregory lived at a time, after all, when the response of Christian theologians to slavery ranged from—at best—resigned acceptance to—at worst—vigorous advocacy. But, then, this makes all the more perplexing the question of how one is to account for Gregory's eccentricity. Various influences on his thinking could of course be cited— most notably, perhaps, that of his revered teacher and sister Macrina, who had prevailed upon Gregory's mother to live a common life with her servants—but this could at best help to explain only Gregory's general distaste for the institution; it would still not account for the sheer uncompromising vehemence of his denunciations.

The 318 Fathers at the First Council of Nicaea (325) began their profession of faith in the second article of the creed as follows:

Confessing that: We believe in one God … And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father as only begotten, that is, from the essence of the Father, [ek tes ousias tou patros].