Issue 23.5: Tradition and Traditions

Aaron Pidel

Conciliar Reception in the Early Church as Traditio and its Contemporary Implications

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.

Patrick Gardner

Spirit, Tradition, and the Pneumatology of Liberation

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.

Paul W. Gleason

A New Creation: Performing the Book of Common Prayer

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.

Timothy K. Snyder

Theological Ethnography: Embodied

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 […]

Travis Pickell

Choosing My Tradition

Christians in the millennial generation are turning toward tradition, but deep tensions exist that may ultimately undermine this embrace.

Matt Jantzen

Eric Gregory, John Milbank, and the Future of Augustinian Engagements with Liberalism

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 […]

TOJ Editors

Issue 23.5: Tradition and 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 […]