The Christian Tradition 3 by Jaroslav Pelikan

But by the time I was ready to publish volume 1, which appeared in 1971, the actions of the Second Vatican Council had made it clear that I ought to conclude my history of church doctrine in the modern period, and therefore the work as a whole, with that event. The Amsterdam assembly of the World Council of Churches in 1948 gave me a possible “terminus ad quern,” as did the promulgation of the assumption of the Virgin Mary by Pope Pius XII in 1950. I was quite sure all along that I wanted to begin the account in the first volume only after the New Testament, but I was much less sure just where to end the fifth volume, dealing with the modern period. I first began planning and outlining The Christian Tradition (though not yet under that title) in the 1940s, and my earliest drafts and sketches for it go back to the 1950s. Clebsch) had been warning me, both in person and in print, that it would be. There is reason to suppose that nothing quite like it will be tried again.Christian Doctrine and Modern Culture is the fifth and final volume of my history of the development of Christian doctrine, and it has in many ways turned out to be the “Sorgenkind,” as my friends (including Albert C. 'Pelikan's book marks not only the end of a dazzling scholarly effort but the end of an era as well. 'Professor Pelikan's series marks a significant departure, and in him we have at last a master teacher.'-Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle, Commonweal

McGrath, Times Higher Education Supplement 'This volume, like the series which it brings to a triumphant conclusion, may be unreservedly recommended as the best one-stop introduction currently available to its subject.'-Alister E. And there can hardly be a more lucid, readable and genial guide to it than this marvellous work.'- Economist 'Knowledge of the immense intellectual effort invested in the construction of the edifice of Christian doctrine by the best minds of each successive generation is worth having. The modern period in the history of Christian doctrine, Pelikan demonstrates, may be defined as the time when doctrines that had been assumed more than debated for most of Christian history were themselves called into question: the idea of revelation, the uniqueness of Christ, the authority of Scripture, the expectation of life after death, even the very transcendence of God.

Jaroslav Pelikan begins this volume with the crisis of orthodoxy that confronted all Christian denominations by the beginning of the eighteenth century and continues through the twentieth century in its particular concerns with ecumenism.

The Christian Tradition 3 by Jaroslav Pelikan