The Christian Tradition 5: Christian Doctrine & Modern Culture since 1700

The Christian Tradition #5

by Jaroslav Pelikan

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 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 the idea of revelation, the uniqueness of Christ, the authority of Scripture, the expectation of life after death, even the very transcendence of God. "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. And there can hardly be a more lucid, readable and genial guide to it than this marvellous work."€”Economist "This volume, like the series which it brings to a triumphant co

Genres: History, Theology, Church History, Religion, Christianity, Nonfiction, Christian

414 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Jaroslav Jan Pelikan was born in Akron, Ohio, to a Slovak father and mother, Jaroslav Jan Pelikan Sr. and Anna Buzekova Pelikan. His father was pastor of Trinity Slovak Lutheran Church in Chicago, Illinois, and his paternal grandfather a bishop of the Synod of Evangelical Lutheran Churches then known as the Slovak Lutheran Church in America.

According to family members, Pelikan's mother taught him how to use a typewriter when he was three years old, as he could not yet hold a pen properly but wanted to write. A polyglot, Pelikan's facility with languages may be traced to his multilingual childhood and early training. That linguistic facility was to serve him in the career he ultimately chose (after contemplating becoming a concert pianist)--as a historian of Christian doctrine. He did not confine his studies to Roman Catholic and Protestant theological history, but also embraced that of the Christian East.

In 1946 when he was 22, he earned both a seminary degree from Concordia Seminary in Saint Louis, Missouri and a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago.

Pelikan wrote more than 30 books, including the five-volume The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (1971–1989). Some of his later works attained crossover appeal, reaching beyond the scholarly sphere into the general reading public (notably, Mary Through the Centuries, Jesus Through the Centuries and Whose Bible Is It?).

His 1984 book The Vindication of Tradition gave rise to an often quoted one liner. In an interview in U.S. News & World Report (June 26, 1989), he said: "Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide.

"Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition."

Reviews

[Matt Pitts · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this series and can’t get enough of it (I’ve finished volumes 1, 3, and 5 so far and volumes 2 and 4 are waiting on my bedside table). Pelikan is unsurpassed.

[Jackson Brooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pelikan's Christian Tradition was my project for the year. It was a good one. It challenged my knowledge of Church History in general, filled in blind spots, and gave me directions for later research. Comprehensive, satisfying, and rich. I am filled with hope for God's Church in the future.

[RAD · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Essence of Exposition

Jaroslav Pelikan concludes volume 5 of The Christian Tradition with the same words with which he begins volume 1: Credo unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam. Covering the period in church history from 1700 to roughly the middle of the 20th century, Pelikan highlights the familiar faces (Harnack, Newman, Schleiermacher, et al.) and the somewhat less familiar (Rauschenbusch, Reimarus, and Zinzendorf, among many others). As I've stated in other reviews of previous volumes, I reiterate: now after 1500+ pages and five volumes, the biggest surprise is perhaps how much remains unsaid! For that, Pelikan provides an unparalleled bibliography for further research.

The breadth of Pelikan's learning is extraordinary. Chapter 6 it titled "The Sobornost of the Body of Christ." One may think of chapter titles as metaphors or generalizations devoted to common themes, but I admit that there was nothing about "sobornost" that resonated with any of my education to date, Christian or otherwise. Shame on me, it would seem. The following is typical Pelikan:

"A sign of [Eastern Orthodoxy's] increasing influence was the adoption, as almost a technical term, of the Russian word "sobornost" by Western theologians of many linguistic and denominational traditions. The term "sobornaja" had been -- if not, as Aleksej Chomjakov claimed, already in the usage of Cyril and Methodius, "the apostles to the Slavs," then at least as early as the eleventh century -- the Old Church Slavonic rendering of "catholic" in the Nicene Creed; use of the word "sobor" for the church councils to which Eastern Orthodoxy assigned authority in the church helped to make the term a way of distinguishing Eastern ecclesiology from both the "papal monarchy" of Roman Catholicism and the "sola Scriptura" of Protestantism. "Sobornost" in this sense entered the vocabulary and the thought world of the West just as, for reasons that lay in the political and cultural upheavals of the modern era, Western Christianity, whether Roman Catholic or Anglican or Protestant, was, throughout the twentieth century, rediscovering the Christian East, whether Slavic or Greek or Near Eastern, within much of which the nineteenth century had been a period of such intense ecclesiological renewal" (287-288).

Now you know.

If there is a criticism of Pelikan, it is this simultaneous density and long-windedness that is characteristic of much of his writing. It does not make for easy reading. But it is rewarding. Maugham said "to write simply is as difficult as to be good": while that may be true, it must also then be true that there is more than one measure of goodness.

Credo unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam eccelsiam: "I believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church." These words from the Nicene creed, echoed in the Apostle's Creed, are appropriate bookends for Pelikan's thoughts in his 5-volume history of Christian thought. But after 1500+ pages, he's not done: the prolix Pelikan has since written Credo, which is an enormous academic exposition of those seven words.

For anyone interested in the foundations and continuation of Christian thought from an intellectual-history point of view, Pelikan is required reading.

[Jacob Aitken · Rating 4 out of 5]

With this volume Pelikan--the master of Church History--finishes his supreme project. By reading these volumes--and meditating on the causes of the controversies found therein-- the reader will have a knowledge of church history far surpassing that of the average seminary student. This present volume, though, is not Pelikan's best work. That distinction belongs to either the third or fourth volume in this series.

Here Pelikan details the problems that all forms of Orthodoxy--Easter, Catholic, or Protestant--faced in the crisis of modernity (circa 1700 onward). Most of the discussion isn't all that different from what one would find in a decent manual on worldview. It is in the last two chapters, though, that Pelikan's genius really shines. Pelikan notes that the challenge of historical criticism, especially the parts that couldn't simply be ignored, forced church traditions, particularly that of Roman Catholicism, to create something akin to "dogmatic development." The Vincentian Canon, while claiming to be that faith which was believed everywhere by all, more likely means believed by "most people in most places."

Pelikan is equally fair and brutal to all traditions. Contra Catholicism, the immaculate conception and papal infalliblity are not only not found in the earlier fathers, but are openly contradicted by the facts of history. This led Newman--who did not dispute the challenge--to say that they were "secretly believed" or that the "truth was there somehow." This is special pleading with a vengeance.

Eastern Orthodoxy, too, has its own development. This is seen in the problem of divine images. While the theology behind it might be correct, the fact remains that there isn't all that much earlier reference in the Fathers to it.

Likewise, Protestantism must account for the fact that justification by faith alone is not found in the fathers.

The book ends with an observation concerning ecuemnicism. While much of ecumenicism is wrong-headed, the fact remains that the different traditions are working together (Eastern theologians are using critical editions of the Schaff Fathers Series). Who knows what the Lord's Spirit might work in the future.

[Andrew Fendrich · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm honestly wondering if this book has so many positive reviews because people are worried if they say they didn't like it, it will communicate that they're not cultured and educated on church history.

Pelikan is a highly academic writer, and, while I admit I'm the least academically-inclined seminary student in the world, it bears noting that good writers can communicate academic thoughts in palatable prose. Pelikan seems incapable of writing a simple sentence.

But there's a deeper problem with his writing style: while he does a fine job of quoting hundreds of primary sources (the only reason I'm giving this 2 stars instead of 1), his confuddling paragraph-long sentences and duck-and-weave source-quoting style reveal his aversion to historical Protestantism. He bounces from one primary source to the next, often multiple times in one sentence, and in so doing he can almost make it look like he's using those sources as an accurate representation of their time. But too often, I noticed him quoting one theologian as representative of a whole movement (e.g., Coleridge), while not giving fair consideration of orthodox, Reformed Protestantism.

Overall a miserable read. Glad to be done with it.

[w gall · Rating 3 out of 5]

I reached my goal of reading this 5 volume set on the progress of theology. It became wearisome. I realize this is a scholarly work, but why could he not bring these concepts down to earth? The sentences were extremely long and the lack of concrete situations made them hard to process. He dealt with specific issues, but he would go back and forth citing scholars who landed on both sides of these issues. I became dizzy, but I didn't faint. Also the trajectory of these volumes led seemingly to come to the conclusion, exemplified in his description of Vatican Two, "Why can't we all just get along?" The history ended there in the 1960s. I remember those times, all that bubbly optimism that the real world (including the Churches) crushed. It seems as though he subtly, perhaps unconsciously, interjected his hopes. I supposed it is better to hope for the best than expect the worst, as it says 1 Corinthians 13, "love hopes all things." Objectivity is a goal none of us quite reach.

[M Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

This final volume of Jaroslav Pelikan's 5 volume review of the history of Christian doctrine probably engaged me the least of any of the set. The same high quality workmanship is there in writing and research. The problem for me is that the issues of the 1700s and 1800s seem dusty in a way that the problems of the Early Church, Middle Ages and Reformation do not, as those issues continue to inform the doctrinal questions of today, while the doctrinal development of the Eastern Church was interesting because it was unknown to me. In this volume, Pelikan must delve into such movements as Jansenism & Pietism, both of which have had their day and left their trace but do not remain important strains in the thought of the Church.

The chapters that deal with the 19th and 20th centuries, on the other hand, were of more interest because those controversies are still playing out. Like the wheels of justice and the mills of God, the problem-solving of the Church grinds slow and exceeding fine. Inspiration and infallibility (the name of one of the sections of Pelikan's chapter on the 19th century) are still at the root of many disagreements in the church in 2014. Nor have we seen the final outcome of the Ecumenical Movement and of Vatican II, which dominate the chapter on the 20th century, still 11 years from its close at the publication of this volume.

On the whole, I'm very glad I made the effort to work through this important and exhaustive series. I am quite sure that I will find it a valuable resource for future study, thought and writing.

[Cherry · Rating 4 out of 5]

此書是作者Pelikan教會教義史歷史著作系列（A History of the Development of Doctrine）的最後一卷，以1700年後的教義發展為時限，講述傳統基督教教義與現代文化間的互動過程。

本人只閱讀了此書的第二至五章。作者從18世紀啟蒙運動對傳統教義的衝擊開始，先描述教義的支柱如何一步一步的被理性主義拆毀，然後講述教會以強調教義的主觀內容和宗教情感作為反擊。其後，論述十九世紀後教會神學家致力運用現代的思維邏輯來解釋和證明信仰的真確性的現象。最終教會還是發現教義無法以人的理性和歷史思為解釋，這些論證也無助挽回行將崩潰的教理權威。因而有學者提出「默示 (inspiration)」觀念，以此確立聖經和教會（天主教）的絕對觀威。不過，也有學者認為真理是通過歷史演進而來，所以教義的轉變是自然不過的事，唯有教義中的核心價值和內容，才是歷久常新的。作者在文末小結，指出普世教會同有一個共識，就是教會與神學在任何時代都有其需要解決不特殊議題，而在教會觀嚴重多元的二十世紀，在神學上將會是個「教會的時代（the age of the church）」。

不少人認為此書文字不太容易閱讀，本人卻未有此等感覺。其實 Pelikan 以其獨到的歷史觸覺，抽取了近代教會史發展的精粹：教義發展為整套著作的主線，層層遞進的剖釋今日教會（尤其新教）不再重視傳統教義的原因。全書未有冗長註腳，閱讀時常見教會、神學家與現代文化思潮爭鋒相對，讓讀者有更多深層的神學思想，也對現今教會所面對的神學問題有進深的理解。

[Wyatt Houtz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Helpful but lacking. Author has personal criticisms of dogmas that prevent a full treatment of issues.