Topical Search in Church Fathers

Milkman

Is there anyway to do a topical search or what the Apostolic Fathers thoughts were on a particular subject? For example, if I wanted to know what they thought/taught/believed about the resurrection how would I go about this? Or is it as simple as making the CF collection a Collection?

Mark Smith

Is there anyway to do a topical search or what the Apostolic Fathers thoughts were on a particular subject? For example, if I wanted to know what they thought/taught/believed about the resurrection how would I go about this? Or is it as simple as making the CF collection a Collection?

Unfortunately there really is no such thing as a topical search in Logos 4. The only thing you can do is search all the text in a collection of the CF for the word resurrection which will give you hundreds and hundreds of hits, many of which you might not want.

You can search the CF for a Bible reference if you feel that would narrow your results. For instance put <1 Cor 15> in the search for box. Unfortunately you will still get more references than you are likely to want and many not on the resurrection. Narrow it down to a verse or two and you might make some progress.

Another way to go at this in Logos 4 is to use something like Thomas Oden's Systematic Theology. He refers to and tries to incorporate the ECF in his expositions and there are links to the ECF in his work. Volume 2 has a section of the resurrection of Christ and you'd find some relevant material there.

Unless Logos implements topical tagging and topical searching in Logos 4 you will be handicapped in extracting this information from the ECF.

If you install Libronix software you are in better shape for a task like this. Using the Topic Browser you can at least find a number of sections within the ECF dealing specifically with the resurrection. It isn't perfect as Logos will point out but is better and faster than anything you can do in Logos 4.