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Review Summary: Required Reading |
Date: 2008-11-22 |
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Details: It would be hard to overestimate the depth of scholarship or importance of Jaroslav Pelikan's "The Christian Tradition" series. Written from the early 1970's through the late 1980's, this 5-volume series is the definitive standard on that elusive, and sometimes controversial, subject: the development of Christian doctrine.
For many Christians today, it is subconsciously assumed that the practices, doctrines and beliefs of today's church are simply identical to those of the first century. In fact, often it is the goal of founders of new churches and movements to restore the church to that pristine state. However, this assumption shows a lack of understanding both of the historical record as well as how the Holy Spirit works throughout the ages. Christian history shows us two sometimes conflicting trends. The first is a trend towards traditionalism, in which the powers that be in the church wish to keep the status quo, mostly to keep their own power base. On the other hand, there is the tradition of deeper understanding of the profound truths found in the teachings of Jesus and his apostles. The former trend is exactly what Jesus condemned in the Pharisees; the latter is part of the working of the Holy Spirit to lead the Church to all truth (cf. John 16:12-13). Skeptics tend to blend the two trends into one, and Christians often warn against the former trend but ignore (or even reject) the later. As Pelikan explains in the introduction:
"Tradition without history has homogenized all the stages of development into one statically defined truth; history without tradition has produced a historicism that relativized the development of Christian doctrine in such a way as to make it the distinction between authentic growth and cancerous aberration seem completely arbitrary...Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living."
Pelikan defines Christian belief as the way the Church "believes, teaches, and confesses." He is careful not to reduce history simply to the writings of the major figures of the times, or reduce Christian belief only to defined doctrines. One of the primary insights of this book is that Pelikan recognizes the important place the liturgy plays in the transmission and defense of Christian doctrine. For example, when discussing the Arian crisis of the fourth century, in which many bishops and faithful taught that Christ was a creature, not God made man, Pelikan points out that one of the primary tools the orthodox Christians used in their defense was the fact that Christians had worshiped Christ as God in the liturgy for 300 years. As all Christians recognized the central place of the liturgy in the life of the church, this argument was quite powerful against the Arians. This is just one case in which Pelikan digs deeper than most to discover the way in which Christian doctrine developed over the centuries.
I cannot recommend this book - and the whole series - highly enough. "The Christian Tradition" is required reading for any serious student of Christian history.
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Review Summary: Standard Reference |
Date: 2008-01-14 |
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Details: Pelikan's 5 volume series on Christian Tradition has become a fairly standard reference work that is accessible to newer students as well as those more familiar with Christianity. |
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Review Summary: Inventive, thorough and concise scholarship |
Date: 2007-10-17 |
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Details: Pelikan has written a very useful, accessible and noteworthy history of the beginnings of Chirstianity covering the major issues in a creative and lucid manner. Certainly, a book worthy of the library. |
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Review Summary: Every Christian needs to read this book |
Date: 2007-08-31 |
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Details: If you profess to be a Christian you need to read this book and understand how what you have accepted on faith. The Good News from Jesus was forced through a Hellenic sieve of of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy; on the Platonic side the essence of the unknowable is stressed, on the Aristotelian side the existential details are laid out in a highly logical fashion.
In this book you will learn why the Apostle's creed reads the way it does. You will learn the dissenting views that were pushed aside as anathema; 3 participants at the Nicene council refused to sign the Apostle creed revision and were excommunicated on the spot.
Why is it important that Jesus was born of a virgin? Exactly how was Jesus God and man at the same time? When and where did original sin and infant baptism come about. Jaroslav Pelikan is a brillant man who expounds upon all this and more in an eluminating fashion. If your Greek is not strong, I do recommend having wireless laptop with you to help out at those tricky points to understand words like homoousia and homoiousia. |
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Review Summary: A monument of scholarship |
Date: 2006-09-27 |
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Details: Volume 1 of Dr. Pelikan's 5 volume magnum opus is a breathtaking panorama of the development of Christian doctrine over the course of its first 6 centuries. Dr. Pelikan tells us what the infant Church taught, and the fascinating process by which it came to those conclusions, introducing us to the specific arguments of the various positions regarding issues like the relationship of the Old Covenant to the New, the Trinity, the nature of Christ, the question of Christian authority, predestination, grace, salvation, etc. This book is a sumptuous feast for the theologically-oriented mind and an intellectual achievement for the ages.
Two words in the book's subtitle should be emphasized to clarify the book's purpose; firstly, that this is a study of Christian_doctrine_, not a history of Christianity per se. The mention of dates and years is rare, and indeed, this book seems to operate in a world outside of time, where spiritual ideas are debated by disembodied theologians unmoored from any earthly context. As a history-buff, that lack of chronological perspective sometimes grates, but I came to accept that this is a historical study of ideas, not events, and the book is made stronger by its single-minded focus on that area. Secondly, the starting point of this book that has to be accepted is that the basics of Christian doctrine have come down to us by a_process_of revelation, development, evolution, and scholarly dialectics, not from the self-exegesis of Scripture Alone. Pelikan himself once sarcastically asked what human being could sit in a room with the New Testament and come up with the idea of the Trinity without the benefit of Tradition. That kind of thinking is no obstacle to those sectors of Christianity which believe that the Holy Spirit works through properly appointed authority (Eph 4:11-14) to ensure that Christ's one Church will never err in doctrine, but it might be a stumbling block to those Christians (particularly religiously anarchic Americans) who think that the whole of Christian doctrine, history and devotion is, and was intended to be, contained in and clearly spelled out in the pages of the New Testament, which fell from the sky on Good Friday 33 A.D. leather-bound, annotated and translated into the King James Version, ready-made to be individually interpreted anew by every generation of average Joe-Christians. As a previous reviewer said, this book is an antidote for ahistorical Christians.
Unlike his predecessor Harnack, Pelikan doesn't take the historical development of doctrine as a justification for religious relativism. Pelikan always approached his subject from the perspective of a believer, and even though he wrote this book as a Lutheran and later converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, I-as a Catholic- find no cause for any accusation of sectarian bias in his work. This is a work of impartial scholarship through and through, on a subject which is ripe for the insertion of denominational proclivities. My criticisms are minor: as far as I can recall, this book barely touched on the questions of Biblical canon and pre- 5th century Roman claims of primacy, two subjects I would describe as "doctrinal" but of which Dr. Pelikan apparently disagreed. In his section on infant baptism, he apparently neglected the testimony of St. Polycarp (died ca 155-167- a self-described "Christian for 86 years") as an additional buttress to the tradition. And there are stray sentences which could have been rendered with less theological opacity. But these are minor. This is the standard reference work for any serious student of Christianity, and will likely remain so for many decades to come. |
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out of 18 Reviews
