The historical investigations of H.-J. Sieben show that when early Christian authors such as Athanasius insist that church councils be “received,” they do not mean to introduce a democratic style of Church governance but to insist that Christ’s authority, transmitted through tradition, be acknowledged by hierarchy and laity alike.
I argue that both Tradition and liberation from social sin are rooted in the action of the Holy Spirit; I then offer some constructive thoughts about the implications that follow for a liberative understanding of Tradition.
While George Lindbeck and Kevin Vanhoozer provide helpful insights toward the recovery of what Lindbeck calls the “classic pattern of biblical interpretation” for the church, Robert Jenson’s proposal for joining together the biblical canon with the apostolic creed is the most fruitful way out of today’s methodological chaos.
The Book of Common Prayer formed the Church of England anew every day, but in a way that virtue theory (our dominant way of understanding Christian formation) is poorly equipped to understand.
Over the past several decades, theologians have turned to new methodologies to better understand how cultural situations shape lived faith and, in particular, the church. While these new methodologies have their origins in the social sciences, their adoption by theologians has both complicated and constructed new theological thinking for contemporary ecclesiology. This essay traces the […]
The way we usually talk about the “winners” and “losers” of church history influences our imagination and makes it harder to understand contemporary theological debates.
Christians in the millennial generation are turning toward tradition, but deep tensions exist that may ultimately undermine this embrace.
Intellectual traditions are dynamic entities. They grow and change over time. In fact, if Alasdair MacIntyre is correct that a tradition is “an historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition,” then this dynamism is perhaps the distinctive characteristic of tradition-as-such.[1] Thus, precisely because traditions […]
At the beginning of his essay “Contract and Birthright,” the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin revisits the story in Genesis where Esau sells his birthright to his brother Jacob for a bowl of stew. As Wolin sees it, Esau “bartered what was unique and irreplaceable for a material good for which there was a number of […]
