John Zizioulas on The Meaning of Being Human

In Eastern Christian studies, a new work by John Zizioulas has to count as a major event. He has commanded wide respect and authority across Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox traditions for decades now. Some years back, I did an informal survey of university and seminary classes in ecclesiology where his first and still most famous book Being as Communion was assigned. It was an impressively high number in schools of all three aforementioned traditions. His ecumenical reach is very impressive and very much to the good. 

He has recently released a new book: The Meaning of Being Human (Sebastian Press, 2021), 100pp. About this book the publisher tells us this:

In this book Metropolitan of Pergamon is dealing with the most contemporary, the most urgent, the most existential issues facing the Church today. The core of author’s argument is that personhood as an ekstatic and hypostatic mode of existence is not subject to any predetermination or necessity. The book provides a perfect opportunity to look retrospectively at Metropolitan John Zizioulas’ profound theological vision. It serves both as a significant illustration of his vitality in preserving the continuance of his thought, and of his enduring faithfulness to the constants which permeate his entire theological legacy. The restoration of personhood in Christ leads inevitably to the community of the Church which, in its turn, offers impersonal nature the possibility of being “referred” to God in its integrity through the personhood of man. This makes the Church eucharistic in its very nature, and man God by participation in God. The Church’s eucharistic identity has led Zizioulas to rethink theology as a whole on the basis of ecclesial experience as a reflection of Trinitarian life.

To Be a Priest of Creation

Neither John Chryssavgis nor John Zizioulas need any special introduction to those with any passing familiarity with contemporary Orthodox thought, especially its "green" turn. But the former has nonetheless edited a new book about the latter's recent sacerdotal-ecological writings: Priests of Creation: John Zizioulas on Discerning an Ecological Ethos (T&T Clark, July 2021), 248pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Based on a constructive reading of Scripture, the apostolic and patristic traditions and deeply rooted in the sacramental experience and spiritual ethos of the Orthodox Church, John Zizioulas offers a timely anthropological and cosmological perspective of human beings as “priests of creation” in addressing the current ecological crisis.

Given the critical and urgent character of the global crisis and by adopting a clear line of argumentation, Zizioulas describes a vision based on a compassionate and incarnational conception of the human beings as liturgical beings, offering creation to God for the life of the world. He encourages the need for deeper interaction with modern science, from which theology stands to gain an appreciation of the interconnection of every aspect of materiality and life with humankind. The result is an articulate and promising vision that inspires a new ethos, or way of life, to overcome our alienation from the rest of creation.

On Liturgical Dogmatics: David Fagerberg Interviewed

If you read past entries on here, you will know that I am an undisguised admirer of the work of David Fagerberg, whom I have interviewed previously about his many excellent books, all of which are worth your time. I have used his first book, Theologia Prima, in courses for some fifteen years now. 

More recently I have been recommending his On Liturgical Asceticism to students.

Now there is a new must-read book from him, and it really does belong on every RCIA reading list, and on the syllabus of introductory courses in Christianity, whether in a parish or undergraduate classroom. For Liturgical Dogmatics is, quite simply, that good. It has achieved the rare feat of being a book written by a top-drawer academic who eschews complicated jargon and an academic apparatus to write an accessible, cogent book that is not at all dumbed down but remains meaty and substantial from your first bite to the last morsel. 

As is my custom, I sent David some questions about his background, the book, and future plans. Here are his thoughts. 

AD: Tell us a bit about your background

DF: I am nearing retirement (another year) so I find myself retrospecting quite a lot. In 1988 I submitted a dissertation proposal titled “What Is Liturgical Theology” and I have been adding to my answer since, as though the dissertation was a small sculpture and I’ve been adding clay to the bust. The pathway to Liturgical Dogmatics was direct thematically, even if meandering biographically.

AD: What led to the writing of Liturgical Dogmatics?

DF: The books on the wall in front of me are about liturgy and Byzantine theology. The books on the wall behind me are about philosophy and systematic theology. They are from two different phases of my life, and perhaps this volume is their reconnection. I began with systematics, and was drawn into liturgical studies. It is nice to think that instead of those initial years being wasted, they have hung around to be put to use now.

I also answer this question with a short and true anecdote. I wrote the book in a second and a half in my mind; putting it on paper naturally took longer. 

I was asked once if I could teach the course in liturgical history one summer. I thought, “Yes I could. I would start with Adam and Eve as cosmic priests, talk about their forfeiture of a liturgical career, cover salvation history from Abraham to Moses to the prophets, arrive at Jesus as the High Liturgist, and consider the baptized Christian as his liturgical apprentice.” 

Then I realized I was only being asked to teach a course on the history of the liturgy. All that got me thinking that we might also do a liturgical triadology, liturgical cosmology, liturgical anthropology, liturgical hamartiology (sin), liturgical soteriology, liturgical Christology/Pneumatology, liturgical ecclesiology, and liturgical eschatology. These are the sections of the book.

AD: Your first book, Theologia Prima, has been out for many years now, and I've used it for over a decade in classes before also using On Liturgical Asceticism  and Liturgical Mysticism. How does Liturgical Dogmatics stand in relation to those other three? What is its unique contribution?

DF: There was no grand plan. I marvel at authors who have some multi volume project in mind from the start, but such was not the case for me. I was carried along the current of liturgical theology. The first task was to understand what Kavanagh and Schmemann meant when they said, respectively, that liturgy is primary theology and the ontological condition for theology. The first book was linking liturgy + theology as two words naming one reality. 

But I found that students and colleagues misunderstood, and I concluded it must be due to operating with a different grammar, so I wanted to thicken both terms: treat liturgy as leitourgia, theology as theologia. The Orthodox theologians of asceticism helped me with that. 

The ascetical dimension opens another door. Not only is it what capacitates us for committing liturgy, it also is a connection between the sacred and the profane. Robert Taft wrote, “the purpose of all Christian liturgy is to express in a ritual moment that which should be the basic stance of every moment of our lives.” So my previous two books (Consecrating the World and Liturgical Mysticism) looked at daily life through the lens of liturgy. And since dogma concerns the whole of Christian thought and life, it was time to look at dogma through the lens of liturgy.

Kavanagh referred to his fictitious Mrs. Murphy as someone who does primary theology. If I may say so, then, my books have been describing Mrs. Murphy as a liturgical theologian (though not of the academic variety), a liturgical ascetic (though not of the monastic variety), a liturgical mystic (though not of the extraordinary variety), and now I am considering her as a liturgical dogmatician. The dogmas that scholars talk about, she experiences.

AD:Already in your introduction you unapologetically introduce a term that, in the Latin Catholic world at least, is still being "recovered" as it were: theosis. Tell us a bit about the connection between liturgy and theosis.

It is like flower and fruit, pathway and home, tasting and seeing, work and beatitude, dawn and noontime, tabernacle tent and Solomon’s Temple. There is a foretaste of theosis in liturgy, but the discipline and rhythm of liturgy leads to the throne of God. That we drink from the river of liturgy (the reference to Jean Corbon is intentional) means we acquire a taste for deification. It brings us home. One of the sentences that fell off my keyboard said what I mean: “the liturgy is not the performance of a human religion; liturgy is the religion of Christ perpetuated in Christians.” Theosis is Christ taking up his occupancy in us. 

AD: The great liturgical historian Robert Taft of blessed memory often analogized liturgy to what happens between the outstretched fingers of Adam and God in Michelangelo's famous Sistine fresco. Is that analogy useful in illustrating your opening emphasis on liturgy as synergistic co-operation with God?

I found Lev Gillet’s definition of synergy to be perfect: “two unequal, but equally necessary, forces.” Both fingers must stretch out, but God’s power of grace is stronger than man’s power of ritual. So it is in sacraments: the human minister applies water and grace regenerates. So it is in liturgy: liturgy is a work of God, though it is an activity of man. (This is also expressed in scholastic categories of causation. Garrigou-Lagrange wrote, “one part does not come from us in the other from God. The act is entirely from God as from its first cause, and it is entirely from us as from its neck and cause. The first cause does not render secondary causes superfluous.”)

AD: I'm wondering if the use of "dogma" and cognates in your work won't stick in a few throats given common misconceptions of dogma as stifling, cramped, restrictive. Here is where I'm wondering if your work on Chesterton might be helpful. I often paraphrase him (accurately, I hope, for it's been a while since I went back and read him!) that we should see "dogma" as a bounded playground, as a free space where we can play at leisure within certain boundaries beyond which the Church simply says "Here be mines!" or "There be dragons!" Is that apt?

You have helped me fulfill my vow to quote Chesterton to somebody, somewhere, once a week. That is exactly his point, yes. “Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes. The Catholic Church has for one of her chief duties that of preventing people from making these old mistakes.” So he calls doctrine or dogma a sort of map of the mind; a guide to the maze; the key that fits the lock. Dogmatic teaching takes “the responsibility of marking certain roads as leading nowhere or leading to destruction, to a blank wall, or a sheer precipice.” It allows for freedom.

AD: Perhaps more seriously, tell us a bit about the relationship between dogma and liturgy. The old tags about "lex orandi" and "lex credendi" have sometimes carelessly been used to suggest a monocausal and unidirectional relationship between the two, but it's more complicated than that, surely?

DF: I do propose a unidirectional relationship, but that’s because it’s a category mistake to treat them on the same level. Kavanagh thought we are misled by having ignored the verb statuat. “So long, I think, as the verb stays in the sentence it is not possible to reverse subject and predicate any more than one can reverse the members of the statement: the foundation supports the house.” Of course the house exerts weight upon the foundation, but the unidirectionality is expressed by Schmemann calling liturgy the ontological condition for theology.

AD: I'm struck by the care you pay to the great Orthodox Met. John Zizioulas in your book (as well as Florensky and others), and this, together with your long interest in and writing about Schmemann and others from the East, makes me think that while our liturgical practices differ very considerably, our liturgical theology, as Catholics and Orthodox, is very closely intertwined indeed. Is that a fair assessment?

DF: I would like to think so – agreed. I sometimes say that I can catch the scent of something in Eastern liturgy, Eastern spirituality, Eastern theology that I might not otherwise single out, but once I am aware of it I can detect it also in the West. 

Bowing down in docility to both the letter and spirit of the Second Vatican Council (from docilis, meaning “easily taught”), I have sought to obey the magisterium’s command in paragraph 15 of Unitatis Redintegratio:

Catholics therefore are earnestly recommended to avail themselves of the spiritual riches of the Eastern Fathers which lift up the whole man to the contemplation of the divine. The very rich liturgical and spiritual heritage of the Eastern Churches should be known, venerated, preserved and cherished by all. They must recognize that this is of supreme importance for the faithful preservation of the fullness of Christian tradition, and for bringing about reconciliation between Eastern and Western Christians. 

I want to avail myself of spiritual riches. I want to be lifted to the contemplation of the divine. I want to know, venerate, preserve, and cherish the heritage of liturgy and spirituality as it appears in the fullness of Christian tradition, and therefore I will look over the fence to pastures of the East. (I borrowed that from the opening of an essay I wrote for a forthcoming collection titled Mapping the Una Sancta, ed. Sotiris Mitralexis and Andrew Kaethler.)

AD: I'm struck by the creedal structure of your book: you start by reflecting on the conditions necessary for the "I believe" or "I know," move next to God, the fall and redemption, the Holy Spirit, the Church, and then eschatology. In addition, we get sections on angels and demons, on seven deadly sins, and much else, making the book seem in some ways ideally suited for, say, an RCIA program? Was that structure deliberate?

I looked at the table of contents of some manuals on dogmatics on the shelves behind me and noticed that’s the way they divide things up. If I’m going to look at traditional dogmatics through a liturgical eye, I might as well use their organizational scheme. It would please me very much to think I have made things more intelligible to someone in RCIA. They will have to send an email to Ignatius Press. 

AD: Naturally, while enjoying the whole book, I paid special attention to your section on ecclesiology, an area I have written about in my own books. Oddly enough I confess to relief at what is not here: any notion that offices and structures are worth your time! You say nothing about them and I'm assuming--correct me if I'm wrong--that this reflects the truth that offices and structures will pass away and exist no more in heaven, but that there we will always and forever liturgize?

Though I cannot find the quote in all the Schmemann material at my fingertips, I swear he is the one who said: “the Church is not an institution with sacraments, she is a sacrament with institutions.” That seems to speak to your point. I did not intentionally skip offices and structures: they simply were not the main characteristics of the Church to parade before my eyes.

AD: You open by explicitly eschewing footnotes, leading me to assume you are hoping for a readership beyond the AAR or the Society of Oriental Liturgy. Then your very clear style, and concrete metaphors and illustrations, make this an accessible book for a lot of people I suspect. Who was your imagined audience, and who especially would benefit from reading the book?

DF: What do academics do with dogmas? Talk about them, organize them, prioritize them, footnote them, write about them, systematize them, shelve them and take them back down again. But I suppose the thesis of the book is that Mrs. Murphy can experience dogmas. I’m not expecting Mrs. Murphy to read this book, then, but I do hope it defends her to the academic guild. 

AD: Having finished this book, what are you at work on next?

A couple times I have quipped that it would be possible to write a second volume of Liturgical Asceticism by using only Western authors this time. I’m going to give it a try under the title Liturgical Abnegation. There are Catholic spiritual authors that use terms troubling to our modern ears, terms like “abnegation, annihilation, indifference, resignation, mortification, nothingness, self-denial,” etc. The terminology sounds harsh because we hear it within a limited horizon, but it might be better understood if we could place the language against a more transcendent horizon. 

That transcendent horizon, I hypothesize, is the act of liturgizing God. Liturgical asceticism is a capacitation for liturgy; liturgical abnegation is a consequence of liturgy. Asceticism and abnegation are akin, but I look forward through the former at liturgy and am now looking backward through liturgy upon the latter. I do not gather my authors under any hard and fast temporal or geographical line grouping the authors, they are simply ones who have spoken about abnegation in a way revealing and provocative to me: Olier, Grou, Boudon, Rodriguez, de Caussade, Fenelon, de Sales, Libermann, Saint-Jure, Eudes, Scaramelli, de Granada, Ravignan, for example. 

Theology as Doxology

I'm very glad to see this collection published this year. In my years of involvement with the World Council of Churches, and then in writing my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy, I always found the writings of Nikos Nissiotis helpful and challenging.

Those who have not read him will now be able easily to do so thanks to this impressive collection with some impressive editors: Theology as Doxology and Dialogue: The Essential Writings of Nikos Nissiotis by Nikolaos Asproulis, eds. John Chryssavgis and John Zizioulas (Fortress Academic, 2019), 348pp.

About this book we are told this by the publisher:

Nikos Nissiotis (1924-1986) was one of the foremost and formative intellectuals of the ecumenical movement in the twentieth century. As professor of philosophy and psychology of religion at the University of Athens, director of the Bossey Institute, and Chairman of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches, he interpreted the Orthodox spiritual tradition for a Western audience and highlighted the role of Christian thought in the modern world.

This collection of his most fundamental and significant articles--some of which have been largely inaccessible until now--includes an introduction by the editors to the ecumenical and theological legacy of this exceptional thinker.

The Essential Writings of Nikos Nissiotis

As someone who, involved in the global ecumenical movement since 1990, has benefited from some of the works of Nikos Nissiotis, I am glad to see them brought together in this newly edited collection, Theology as Doxology and Dialogue: The Essential Writings of Nikos Nissiotis, eds. Nikolaos Asproulis and John Chryssavgis  with a foreword from John Zizioulas (Fortress Press, 2019), 348pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Nikos Nissiotis (1924-1986) was one of the foremost and formative intellectuals of the ecumenical movement in the twentieth century. As professor of philosophy and psychology of religion at the University of Athens, director of the Bossey Institute, and Chairman of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches, he interpreted the Orthodox spiritual tradition for a Western audience and highlighted the role of Christian thought in the modern world.

This collection of his most fundamental and significant articles – some of which have been largely inaccessible until now – includes an introduction by the editors to the ecumenical and theological legacy of this exceptional thinker.

Two Books by Sotiris Mitralexis

I had the pleasure of meeting the author briefly in Iasi in January at the inaugural conference of the International Orthodox Theological Association. I look forward to seeing him again at a conference in Syros in June. In the meantime, herewith two notices about his newest books:

Sotiris Mitralexis, ed., Polis, Ontology, Ecclesial Event: Engaging with Christos Yannaras' Thought (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 2018), 277pp.

About this book the publisher tells us the following:

Christos Yannaras (born 1935 in Athens, Greece) has been proclaimed ‘without doubt the most important living Greek Orthodox theologian’ (Andrew Louth), ‘contemporary Greece’s greatest thinker’ (Olivier Clément), ‘one of the most significant Christian philosophers in Europe’ (Rowan Williams). However, until recently the English-speaking scholar did not have first-hand access to the main bulk of his work: in spite of the relatively early English translation of his The Freedom of Morality (1984), most of his books appeared in English fairly recently – such as Person and Eros (2007), Orthodoxy and the West (2006), Relational Ontology (2011) or The Schism in Philosophy (2015). In this volume, chapters shall examine numerous aspects of Yannaras’ contributions to Orthodox theology, philosophy and political thought, based on his relational ontology of the person, later popularised in the Anglophone sphere by John Zizioulas. From political theology to Heidegger and the philosophy of language, from Yannaras’ critique of religion to the patristic grounding of the theology of the person and from Orthodoxy to the West, this volume comprises a panorama of Christos Yannaras’ transdisciplinary contributions.

The second work by Mitralexis is his Ever-Moving Repose: A Contemporary Reading of Maximus the Confessor's Theory of Time (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 2018), 256 pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Sotiris Mitralexis offers a contemporary look at Maximus the Confessor's (580-662 CE) understanding of temporality, logoi, and deification, through the perspective of contemporary philosopher and theologian Christos Yannaras, as well as John Zizioulas and Nicholas Loudovikos. Mitralexis argues that Maximus possesses both a unique theological ontology and a unique threefold theory of temporality: time, the Aeon, and the radical transformation of temporality and motion in an ever-moving repose. With these three distinct modes of temporality, a Maximian theory of time can be reconstructed, which can be approached via his teaching on the logoi and deification. In this theory, time is not merely measuring ontological motion, but is more particularly measuring a relationship, the consummation of which effects the transformation of time into a dimensionless present devoid of temporal, spatial, and generally ontological distance--thereby manifesting a perfect communion-in-otherness. In examining Maximian temporality, the book is not focusing on only one aspect of Maximus' comprehensive Weltanschauung, but looks at the Maximian vision as a whole through the lens of temporality and motion.

Hurry Up Already: Eschatological Ecclesiology and its Problems

If you've been at this ecclesiology and ecumenism business as long as I have (thirty years this spring, since I was a high-school student involved in Anglican-Catholic dialogue, and then in the Canadian Council of Churches and World Council of Churches for many years), you realize how long even little things take, and how far off into the future unity looks. One of the first lessons I learned in the late 1980s was that by then everyone who had been at it since the 1960s saw a significant cooling off; and a little later still, the hopes for full-on Christian unity everywhere by the turn of the millennium were scaled waaaaaay back. (Already in 1991 in Canberra, everyone was using the phrase "ecumenical winter.") By the new millennium we had some people (e.g., Aidan Nichols in his otherwise useful Rome and the Eastern Churches) speaking of unity as an eschatological prospect, which I found very depressing.

Along comes an affordable paperback edition of a recent book to cheer and buck us up by arguing that all this talk of eschatology can be a dodge for doing more things better right now: Scott MacDougall, More Than Communion: Imagining an Eschatological Ecclesiology (Bloomsbury, 2018), 302pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

The dominant contemporary model for ecclesiology (theological views of the church itself) is the ecclesiology of communion. MacDougall argues that communion ecclesiologies are often marked by a problematic theological imagination of the future (eschatology). He argues further that, as a result, our ways of practising and being the church are not as robust as they might otherwise be. Re-imagining the church in the light of God's promised future, then, becomes a critical conceptual and practical task.

MacDougall presents a detailed exploration of what communion ecclesiologies are and some of the problems they raise. He offers two case studies of such theologies by examining how distinguished theologians John Zizioulas and John Milbank understand the church and the future, how these combine in their work, and the conceptual and practical implications of their perspectives. He then offers an alternative theological view and demonstrates the effects that such a shift would have. In doing so, MacDougall offers a proposal for recovering the 'more' to communion and to ecclesiology to help us imagine a church that is not beyond the world (as in Zizioulas) or over against the world (as in Milbank), but in and for the world in love and service. This concept is worked out in conversation with systematic theologians such as Jürgen Moltmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Johannes Baptist Metz, and by engaging with a theology of Christian practices currently being developed by practical theologians such as Dorothy C. Bass, Craig Dykstra, and those associated with their ongoing project.

The potential for the church to become an agent of discipleship, love, and service can best be realised when the church anticipates God's promised perfection in the full communion between God and humanity, among human beings, within human persons, and between humanity and the rest of creation.

Ecclesiology

Having written for several of them now, I always pay attention when Oxford University Press tells me of a forthcoming new volume in its various series of handbooks. In August of this year we shall be treated to one such that I'm greatly looking forward to reading: The Oxford Handbook of Ecclesiology, ed. Paul Avis (OUP, 2018), 712pp.

About this hefty collection, in which, as you'll see below, there are significant Orthodox contributions, the publisher tells us:

The Oxford Handbook of Ecclesiology is a unique scholarly resource for the study of the Christian Church as we find it in the Bible, in history and today. As the scholarly study of how we understand the Christian Church's identity and mission, ecclesiology is at the centre of today's theological research, reflection, and debate. Ecclesiology is the theological driver of the ecumenical movement. The main focus of the intense ecumenical engagement and dialogue of the past half-century has been ecclesiological and this is the area where the most intractable differences remain to be tackled Ecclesiology investigates the Church's manifold self-understanding in relation to a number of areas: the origins, structures, authority, doctrine, ministry, sacraments, unity, diversity, and mission of the Church, including its relation to the state and to society and culture. The sources of ecclesiological reflection are the Bible (interpreted in the light of scholarly research), Church history and the wealth of the Christian theological tradition, together with the information and insights that emerge from other relevant academic disciplines. This Handbook considers the biblical resources, historical development, and contemporary initiatives in ecclesiology. It offers invaluable and comprehensive guide to understanding the Church.

The table of contents:

1. Introduction to Ecclesiology, Paul Avis
Part I: Biblical Foundations
2. The Ecclesiology of Israel's Scriptures, R. W. L. Moberly
3. The Church in the Synoptic Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, Loveday Alexander
4. The Johannine vision of the Church, Andrew T. Lincoln
5. The Shape of the Pauline Churches, Edward Adams
6. The Church in the General Epistles, Gerald O'Collins, SJ
Part II: Resources from the Tradition
7. Early Ecclesiology in the West, Mark Edwards
8. The Eastern Orthodox Tradition, Andrew Louth
9. Medieval Ecclesiology and the Conciliar Movement, Norman Tanner, SJ
10. The Church in the Magisterial Reformers, Dorothea Wendebourg
11. Anglican Ecclesiology, Paul Avis
12. Roman Catholic Ecclesiology from the Council of Trent to Vatican II and Beyond, Ormond Rush
13. Baptist Concepts of the Church and their Antecedents, Paul S. Fiddes
14. Methodism and the Church, David M. Chapman
15. Pentecostal Ecclesiologies, Amos Yong
Part III: Major Modern Ecclesiologists
16. Karl Barth, Kimlyn J. Bender
17. Yves Congar, Gabriel Flynn
18. Henri de Lubac, Gabriel Flynn
19. Karl Rahner, Richard Lennan
20. Joseph Ratzinger, Theodor Dieter
21. John Zizioulas, Paul McPartlan
22. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Friedericke Nussel
23. Rowan Williams, Mike Higton
Part IV: Contemporary Movements in Ecclesiology
24. Feminist Critiques, Visions, and Models of the Church, Elaine Graham
5. Social Science and Ideological Critiques of Ecclesiology, Neil Ormerod
26. Liberationist Ecclesiologies with Special Reference to Latin America, Michelle A. Gonzalez
27. Asian Ecclesiologies, Simon Chan
27. African Ecclesiologies, Stan Chu Ilo

Primacy in the Church, vol. II

In the very early days of 2015, I was honoured and humbled to get a call from the Archdeacon to the Ecumenical Throne John Chryssavgis, inviting my participation in an international collection on the themes of primacy and authority in the Church. I noted here the details of the first volume, and hope to return to commenting in more detail on some of its riches.

The second volume, Primacy in the Church: The Office of Primate and the Authority of Councils (Volume 2), released this summer, features another distinguished cast of scholars including, mirabile dictu, an essay from me. I have myself only read about a third of the essays, which are very rich, and look forward to reading the rest of them soon and having more to say about them in the coming days.

In the meantime, the description from the publisher, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, gives you a good overview, along with the table of contents:

Primacy in the Church is a careful and critical selection of historical and theological essays, canonical and liturgical articles, as well as contemporary and contextual reflections on what is arguably the most significant and sensitive issue in both inter-Orthodox debate and inter-Christian dialogue—namely, the authority of the primate and the role of councils in the thought and tradition of the Church.

Volume One examines the development and application of a theology of primacy and synodality through the centuries. Volume Two explores how such a theology can inform contemporary ecclesiology and reconcile current practices. Chryssavgis draws together original contributions from prominent scholars today, complemented by formative selections from theologians in the recent past, as well as relevant ecumenical documents.

Contents:

• Foreword , John [Zizioulas], Senior Metropolitan of Pergamon
• Introduction: Reflecting on the Future, John Chryssavgis
• The Principles of Accommodation and Forgetting in the Twenty-first Century,
   Adam A.J. DeVille
• Primacy and Apostolic Legend: The Challenge to Christian Unity,
  George E. Demacopoulos
• Does Primacy Belong to the Nature of the Church?, Cyril Hovorun
• Reflections on Authority and Synodality: A Eucharistic, Relational,
  and Eschatological Perspective, Bishop Maxim [Vasiljević]
• The Canonical Tradition: Universal Primacy in the Orthodox Church,
   Alexander Rentel
• The Ministry of the Bishop of Rome: From Doctrine to Modes of Exercise
   Bishop Dimitrios [Salachas] of Gratianopolis
• The Ravenna Document and Canon 34 of the Apostles: The Position of the Patriarchate     of Moscow on Primacy
   Bishop Kyrillos [Katerelos] of Abydos
• Vatican I: Papal Primacy within a Juridical Model of Church
   Bernard P. Prusak
• Collegiality and Primacy in John Henry Newman,
   Mark Reasoner
• Sentinel of Unity: Jean-Marie Tillard on Primacy and Collegiality
   Brian P. Flanagan
• Primacy and Synodality: An Essay Review of Official Statements,
   with Special Focus on the Ravenna Document, Nikolaos Asproulis
• The Synodal Institution: Reduction and Compromise,
   Stylianos [Harkianakis], Archbishop of Australia
• The Place of the Papacy in a Historically Conscious Ecclesiology
   Neil Ormerod
• Sister Churches and Problematic Structures, Robert F. Taft, SJ
• A Tale of Two Speeches: Secularism and Primacy
   in Contemporary Roman Catholicism and Russian Orthodoxy
   Brandon Gallaher
• Recent Trends and Tensions: Intra-Orthodox and Intra-Catholic Thinking
   on Primacy and Synodality, Will Cohen
• The Orthodox Church and the Primacy of Peter: Are We Any Closer to a Solution?              Metropolitan Kallistos [Ware] of Diokleia
• Reflections on the Catholic-Orthodox Dialogue Concerning Primacy,
  Walter Cardinal Kasper
• Afterword - Contemporary Ecclesiology and Kenotic Leadership:
  The Orthodox Church and the Great Council,
  John Behr and John Chryssavgis
• Index of Names and Subjects

What's More Than Communion?

As I've mentioned before, I'm going at month's end to Baylor University in Texas to give a lecture at the Wilken Colloquium, this year devoted to the theme of eschatology. Later this summer a new book will emerge that also treats this theme in the context of the work of two major theologians, Western and Eastern, of our time, viz., John Milbank and John Zizioulas: Scott MacDougall, More Than Communion: Imagining an Eschatological Ecclesiology (Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015), 288pp.

About this book we are told:

Scott MacDougall offers a proposal for recovering the 'more' to communion and ecclesiology to aid in imagining a church not beyond the world (as in Zizioulas) or over against the world (as in Milbank), but in and for the world in love and service. This concept is worked out in conversation with systematic theologians such as Jürgen Moltmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Johannes Baptist Metz, and by engaging with a theology of Christian practices currently being developed by such as Dorothy C. Bass and Craig Dykstra. The potential for the church to become a vehicle for love and service can be realised when it anticipate God's promised perfection in the communions between God, humanity, and the rest of creation.
Zizioulas' and Milbank's theologies of the church are both marked by an overly realised sense of the impending end of the world (eschatology). As a result, their theology fails to acknowledge the potential for good the time-frame a theology of eschatology can have on influencing how people act. This focus on the impact of the ending of the world is further connected to both theologians' devaluation of material creation and history, privileging of institutions, the restrictive and closed concept of the church, and reduction of ecclesial practice essential to eucharist. 

Christianity and Ecological Responsibility

With rumors flying that the next papal utterance to which we are to be treated in encyclical form will cover the controverted and tiresome topic of global warming, it is interesting to note that Eastern Christianity has been addressing ecological concerns for quite some time now. Indeed, the Ecumenical Patriarch has sometimes been nick-named the "green patriarch" for his frequent discussions of ecological issues. At the same time, however, Orthodox theology has not developed as far as Catholic theology has when it comes to other social and economic issues. Catholic social teaching goes back well over a century while comparable Orthodox teaching is somewhat more recent on some questions. 

A new collection looks like it will go some way towards helping Orthodox theology further engage with some of the socio-economic and ecological questions of our time: John Chryssavgis and Michele Goldsmith, eds., Sacred Commerce: A Conversation on Environment, Ethics, and Innovation (Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2014), 152pp.

About this collection we are told:

In Sacred Commerce distinguished religious leaders, environmentalists, and businessmen share together their respective understandings and assessments concerning the present and future conditions of our planet. Well-known anthropologist Jane Goodall discusses biodiversity. Bill McKibben offers sobering statistics and a call for restraint. James Hansen addresses the present and future effects of climate change. Gary Hirshberg relates by example how a business can be successful and environmentally responsible. Amory Lovins reveals how the energy demand that fuels our businesses can be environmentally responsible. Richard Chartres discusses how we must exchange our economic calling, grow first and clean up later, for a new religious calling, one human race and one whole world. Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon offers insight on where we must go in the future. Sacred Commerce presents the creativity of business, the evidence of science, and the understanding of religion in a united effort for the welfare of not only industrialized countries, but for all human communities and living things now present on earth.

Next Year in Jerusalem!

Early this year, Our Sunday Visitor, the largest Catholic newspaper in the United States, commissioned me to write a long essay on Orthodox-Catholic relations on the eve of the papal and patriarchal visit to Jerusalem. Francis and Bartholomew were both going to the holy city in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of their predecessors, Paul VI and Athenagoras, meeting there in 1964. In my essay I reviewed centuries of Orthodox-Catholic relations and then looked at where we are today, what outstanding issues remain to be resolved, and what prospects for the future look like.

Several short essays, covering much the same territory, were published this spring around the time of my essay in a very small little book by Fordham University Press: John Chryssavgis, ed., Dialogue of Love: Breaking the Silence of Centuries (Fordham UP, 2014), xv+75pp.

This wee book, which I read in a couple of hours yesterday, contains a preface by Chryssavgis (an archdeacon of the Ecumenical Throne and well-known Orthodox theologian) and is published in Fordham University Press's welcome Orthodox Christianity and Contemporary Thought imprint. The very brief introduction is written by the metropolitan of Pergamon and very well-known Greek theologian John Zizioulas who uses a phrase of his mentor Georges Florovsky to describe the East and West as two conjoined sisters who actually cannot be separated from one another without very serious damage.

After these short preliminaries, Chryssavgis gives us a very helpful chronology of the events and personalities leading up to the 1964 meeting, and details of that meeting also. This essay is nicely done, with just enough detail to set the scene without overwhelming the reader with the tedious trivia ("and then, at 10:17am, the pope went to the bathroom and had to ask the patriarch the way...") one sometimes finds in accounts like this.

The second chapter is by the Jesuit patrologist and historical theologian Brian Daley of Notre Dame. It is a first-rate survey of what has happened since 1964--the so-called dialogue of love. Daley begins by noting that the groundwork for much of this was laid by Yves Congar in his hugely important and influential 1954 book After Nine Hundred Years: The Background of the Schism Between the Eastern and Western Churches.

Daley deftly reviews the details of the development of the international dialogue, but also, justly, spends a good bit of time on its coterminous North American counterpart, of which he has been a member since 1981 and, more recently, the executive secretary for the Catholic side. As he notes, the North American dialogue "has been at times, if only by default, the world's main forum for constructive Orthodox-Catholic conversation" (31). He reveals one detail of which I was not aware: the very first Catholic members proposed for the North American dialogue in March 1965 included "three Eastern-rite Catholic priests (two of them Jesuits from Fordham)" (33) and this caused no small alarm on the Orthodox side. Thus one sees that the "Uniate" issue was neuralgic long before the international dialogue tried to address it in the infamous Balamand statement of 1993.

I met the members of the North American dialogue in the autumn of 2002 when they met in Ottawa at Saint Paul University, where I was a doctoral student. (Several of us grad students volunteered to serve wine and various amuse-bouches to the dialogue at a reception--a way not only for free food and wine but, to my mind, the even more important access to long and profitable conversations with the Orthodox and Catholic hierarchs and theologians there assembled.) It was very clear to me then that they got along well and worked profitably in large part, as Daley confirms here, because of the shared cultural background of the participants as well as the fact that many people have been involved for more than a quarter-century and over that time have come to "deeply cherish each other's friendship" (44).

Daley ends with a few commonplace suggestions on changes needed in Catholicism--a decentralized papacy and greater level of synodal governance (where have we heard that before? Oh, right: Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity)--and in Orthodoxy: mechanisms to overcome fractious ethnic divides and speak with one mind on important issue.

The final chapter consists of an introduction by Matthew Baker, a newly ordained Greek Orthodox priest and outstanding doctoral student at Fordham who is already a very accomplished young scholar from whom we can expect further important work. Baker very intelligently introduces us to an essay by Georges Florovsky that he unearthed, one that was published in Paris in 1964 but never translated or given wider dissemination which, Baker rightly notes, is odd given the huge influence Florovsky had in twentieth-century Orthodoxy and given, moreover, his widespread involvement in the ecumenical movement. Baker translates the essay here from the Russian original and annotates it with a few useful footnotes.  There is nothing terribly new here, but we would do well to continue to adhere to Florovsky's counsel to always seek out "sober historical memory [as] the indispensable guarantee of responsible action" (61), something with which the impudent sectarians frothing at the mouth about the "pan-heresy of ecumenism" and the "errors of the Latins" seem to have so little intimate congress, then as now.

In sum, Dialogue of Love: Breaking the Silence of Centuries is indeed, as we say in French, a souvenir. That verb is a reflexive one in French: Je me souviens (Quebec's official motto, as it happens), usually "I remember" but equally "I remind myself." And we all need to remind ourselves gratefully of the courage and foresight of our forbears fifty years ago to seek each other out and to begin the dialogue and work for unity, which has not ended. We need, indeed, to remember, as I said elsewhere about the 2014 Jerusalem visit, that the search for unity is not an optional extra but a dominical imperative: the Lord expects us to be one. Please God we will not have to wait another fifty years for that to happen.

Taking the Fathers Back

Whenever I heard self-appointed Orthodox apologists bashing people over the head with references to "the Fathers" or "the Holy Fathers said....X" I long for someone to write a bracing polemic subjecting such claims to the same treatment as Stanley Hauerwas did more than twenty years ago now in challenging people who make the same claims, substituting only "the Bible" or "the Holy Bible says....X." In his Unleashing the Scripture: Freeing the Bible from Captivity to America, Hauerwas begins by arguing thus:

Most North American Christians assume they have a right, if not an obligation, to read the Bible. I challenge that assumption. No task is more important for the church to take the Bible out of the hands of individual Christians in North America. Let us no longer give the Bible to every child when they enter the third grade or whenever their assumed rise to Christian maturity is marked….Let us rather tell them and their parents that they are possessed by habits far too corrupt for them to be encouraged to read the Bible on their own.

.....North American Christians are trained to believe that they are capable of reading the Bible without spiritual and moral transformation. They read the Bible not as Christians, not as a people set apart, but as democratic citizens who think their ‘common sense’ is sufficient for ‘understanding’ the Scripture. They feel no need to stand under the authority of a truthful community to be told how to read. Instead, they assume they have all the ‘religious experience’ necessary to know what the Bible is about. As a result the Bible inherently becomes the ideology for a politics quite different from the politics of the Church.

Could not every word of that be applied to self-styled "traditionalists" quoting from Maximus the Confessor here, Gregory Palamas there, and Athonite elders everywhere? These types fail to realize that not anybody can pick up and read patristic literature, and read it intelligently and profitably. Their readings almost always do hermeneutic violence to the texts, and fail to realize that their own readings reflect not these ancient texts so much as their own late-modern "democratic" belief in their abilities to read and understand, seemingly above ideology and politics when, of course, they are steeped in it. (Come to think of it, someone has written an attack on these abuses--Christos Yannaras.)

Over the past half-century, intelligent people have offered some wise reflections on how to read the Fathers, and how to avoid the pitfalls in doing so. Georges Florovsky, in an article over fifty years old but still very much worth paying attention to, offered such wisdom.  So did Alexander Schmemann. Hans Urs von Balthasar, in the lovely and elegant introduction to his Presence and Thought: Essay on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa also offered perceptive reflections on what we can, and cannot, take from the Fathers, and how they can, and cannot, be used today--something he also wrote about in an important article from 1939, "Patristik, Scholastik und wir."

Now Augustine Casiday has come along to help us with these issues in his splendid new book, Remember the Days of Old: Orthodox Thinking on the Patristic Heritage. This is a very accessible, wonderfully useful book for those who want to learn more about the nature of reading and interpreting, about Christian historiography, and the place of the Fathers in the Church and in Christian history generally. It is cogently written and its crisp, clear prose makes difficult issues accessible, so this would be an ideal book for a parish study or for use in an undergraduate classroom. It should also be on reading lists for catecheumens coming in to the Orthodox Church so that they do not fall into the traps, and commit the errors, of too many zealots and apologists one finds online.

Casiday, whom I interviewed earlier this week about his book on Evagrius, has here written a short book of four chapters, beginning with the question "What is the Patristic Heritage?" Almost immediately he offers important cautions about what could be called the problem of "genre" in patristic literature. We have to watch out for certain aspects--e.g., technical vocabulary, say, or caustic personal attacks or vindictive rhetoric--that  mark certain texts, and we have to be aware, moreover, of the context in which these texts were written. Perhaps their disputatious context is too far removed from our own day to be entirely profitable for contemporary readers. It is not enough to blindly yank a fourth-century Cappadocian father into 21st-century North America and expect that everything will "fit" and the meaning and application will become clear. Here Casiday rightly avers to one of the classic treatments of hermeneutics, H.G. Gadamer's Truth and Method. Here I would also note an apt comment by another landmark work in hermeneutics, Bernard Lonergan's Insight: A Study of Human Understanding,where Lonergan pours scorn on the idea that knowing and understanding consist simply in "taking a good look." It involves time and effort, and the patience for both. Merely picking up a collection of patristic sayings, or a volume of The Philokalia and flinging a paragraph around in a Facebook debate does very little, and may in fact be little more than obscurantism in a high-tech medium and thus totally counter-productive. As Casiday nicely puts it:

the reputation that we as Orthodox enjoy (and sometimes cultivate) [is] for unrivalled continuity with the Christian past. On the basis of that reputation, one could assert that being Orthodox leads to a privileged understanding of the ancient church and that this understanding is preferable to the results of academic study. This option has the satisfying outcome of securing the theological study of patristic sources. But it does so at a cost. The security it provides is the security of a ghetto. It also increases the likelihood of confusing prejudices with insights. Above all, it betrays our responsibility to bear witness to Christ (35).

Much of the rest of this chapter is spent dealing with the not entirely satisfactory ways others in the past century tried to deal with the patristic heritage. Casiday singles out Florovsky and Paul Valliere for extended discussion. He ends the chapter with a reminder of the limitations of human knowing, and the importance of being mindful of those limitations.

Chapter 2 asks the question "How is it Transmitted?" How do we transmit the heritage of the Fathers of the Church? How is it received? Again, those who have attended to the processes of hermeneutics will recognize that these are deceptively simple questions hiding a rather involved process of transmission and reception, of translation, interpretation, and application. This chapter makes use of a tried and true scholarly method, which I often profitably use with undergraduates, namely case-studies. He begins with Vincent of Lerins and his treatment of Origen and Augustine, showing how one father grappled with other fathers before moving on to St. Maximus the Confessor, particularly his Ambigua. 

Casiday's final case study concerns the filioque,which is treated with great sensitivity and intelligence as the author notes, rightly, that "it is a fact of history that the theological literature of antiquity provides evidence which can be taken to support either the dual procession of the Holy Spirit (called 'filioquism') or the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father alone (called 'patrimonism'). The origins of this difference are obscure" (81). In the debates, within East and West and between them, over this issue, there was sometimes the tendency to regard "the Fathers" as having infallible authority here as elsewhere. But as Casiday repeatedly notes, one can be held up and respected as a father while having made errors and been wrong about one or more matters. This is an important point to underscore to some who seem to act as though the Fathers were immune to error and we must unquestioningly accept everything they wrote.

His next chapter focuses on symbols and creeds, and later in the chapter Casiday returns to the filioque again, asking why it is some focus on this as a sign of apparently insurmountable East-West difference while we ignore other discrepancies in other versions of the creeds. Drawing on the classical and pioneering anthropology of Mary Douglas in her Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, he notes that "something odd is going on in this particular case" because "there survive not only the Latin and Greek received texts, but also Armenian and Syriac texts. No two are completely identical, even allowing for the exigencies of translation. The Syriac and Armenian versions are not without interest--we have already noted that a Syriac version of the creed says that the Spirit is 'from the Father and the Son'" (129).

Casiday sharpens the point by referring to Tia Kolbaba's recent and important historical works Inventing Latin Heretics: Byzantines and the Filioque in the Ninth Century and The Byzantine Lists: Errors of the Latins. Why is it, both ask, that of all the controversies the Byzantines generated and of all the charges they threw at the West, the filioque is about the only one anybody still talks about today? (Can we not, as I asked yesterday, finally declare this discussion over and move on?)

The last chapter is appropriately titled "Forward with the Fathers," and spends no little time on the work of John Zizioulas, particularly his landmark work Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Zizioulas claims that book is based on patristic, and especially Cappadocian, theology, and it is, but it is also in dialogue with modern philosophy and theology. Sharp critical responses (notably from Lucian Turcescu) have suggested that Zizioulas tends to read back into his patristic sources distinctions and conceptions that are not found there, but only found in modern philosophy. And yet, this in itself is not objectionable if one is clear about it. (The problem is that Zizioulas rather flatly and not very convincingly asserts he is merely allowing the Fathers to speak through his work, without adding anything to that process.) It is, indeed, the same method the Fathers themselves used, as Casiday demonstrated earlier in the book. Casiday does not adjudicate these disputes, but once again uses them as a sort of case-study on the process of reading and reception of the Fathers, arguing that they--and we--have "the Christian freedom...in the business of articulating their good news in the idiom of their contemporaries" (149). Thus we must resist those who would insist that the Fathers and only the Fathers are entirely and absolutely normative for Eastern theology and nothing and nobody can challenge or go beyond them--something that Aristotle Papanikolaou has called "patristic fundamentalism."

How then to proceed? Clearly Orthodox theology cannot jettison the Fathers, but neither must it treat them as adamantine objects to be imposed on an unruly and wicked age. Instead, turning once again to the Fathers themselves--especially Origen and Augustine--Casiday uses their own tried and true method of "despoiling the Egyptians." We take what is good and useful for the glory of God, and use that, regardless of its provenance--a form, to use another old expression, of "baptizing paganism" if you will. This is precisely what the Fathers themselves did, and would tell us to do today. So scorning all of modern "Western" culture, philosophy, literature, and, yes, theology, is a deeply un-patristic thing to do. We cannot all sit around snorting incense and endlessly quoting from John of Damascus or Augustine of Hippo as though that would--as von Balthasar put it--absolve us of our responsibilities to and for our own age. As Casiday nicely puts it, "If we want to join the early fathers in 'despoiling the Egyptians' and imitate them in making the best of the world in which we find ourselves as Christians, we will find fairly quickly that there is more to living patristically than carefully articulating theological doctrines to rejoice the angels and refute the heretics" (172). Casiday then concludes by offering several suggestions for what the Fathers would say to us today, not least in challenging us to a greater service of the poor as seen, e.g., in St. Basil the Great.

In sum, Remember the Days of Old: Orthodox Thinking on the Patristic Heritage is an extremely useful and deeply compelling book, written with great clarity, insight, and restraint, and it very much deserves a wide audience, not merely among other academics, but especially in parish study groups, catechetical classes, and similar venues. The Fathers would applaud.

Thomas Torrance and Orthodoxy

Matthew Baker at Fordham e-mailed me in late December about a new volume he has worked on, dealing with Orthodoxy and Thomas Torrance. The table of contents features an impressively diverse set of interlocutors--St. Athanasius the Great, St. Ephraim the Syrian, George Dion Dragas, Dumitru Staniloae, John Zizioulas, the Cappadocians, Georges Florovsky, and others. In his e-mail to me he tells me the following about this collection, which you may read here: 

The issue brings together scholars -- mostly Orthodox, but a couple Protestants and one RC too -- from 7 countries (Bulgaria, Denmark, England, Greece, Russia, Serbia, US) to explore and extend further different aspects of Torrance's engagement with the Fathers, science-theology dialogue, and modern Orthodox systematics. Among other things, the issue should gain attention for the essay we have included from Fr Nicholas Loudovikos, responding to Zizioulas' important paper on Maximus last fall in Belgrade.

Rethinking Trinitarian Theology

As I have had several occasions to note before, perhaps most clearly in my interview with Gilles Emery and Matthew Levering, we have been seeing a revival of interest in Trinitarian theology (as well as the history of its development) for the last couple of decades.

In the Orthodox world, one of the most prominent voices, in Trinitarian theology and much else, has been John Zizioulas, who remains one of the biggest names in Eastern Christian theology today, and has for some time. He began to make his mark in the anglophone world with the 1985 publication of his landmark work Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. This is a work that has been regularly and widely cited in the literature across traditions--one often notices it in Protestant and Catholic, as well as Orthodox, works. Many of the themes in this book were continued in the 2007 book Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church, ed. Paul McPartlan (T&T Clark).

A sense of the breadth of engagement of Zizioulas (who is not without his critics in Orthodoxy, including perhaps especially Lucian Turcescu) may be seen in such studies as Paul Collins, Trinitarian Theology West and East: Karl Barth, the Cappadocian Fathers, and John Zizioulas from 2001 as well as the collection edited by Douglas Knight, The Theology of John Zizioulas, and Paul McPartlan's own early work, The Eucharist Makes the Church: Henri De Lubac and John Zizioulas in Dialogue.

Zizioulas is not always easy to read both for the profundity of the matters he discusses as well as for the style of his writing, especially in Being as Communion. For that reason, I always recommend starting with his very lovely, and generally accessible, collection, Lectures in Christian Dogmatics, which I have used with great profit in several different classes.

Zizioulas authors a chapter on the Trinity in the recently published collection, Giulio Maspero and Robert Wozniak, ed., Rethinking Trinitarian Theology: Disputed Questions And Contemporary Issues in Trinitarian Theology (Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 2012), 512pp. There are other chapters in this book of interest to Eastern Christians, including on the Fathers as well as two chapters about the Holy Spirit and the filioque. About this book we are told: 

The book aims at showing the most important topics and paradigms in modern Trinitarian theology. It is supposed to be a comprehensive guide to the many traces of development of Trinitarian faith. As such it is thought to systematize the variety of contemporary approaches to the field of Trinitarian theology in the present philosophical-cultural context. The main goal of the publication is not only a description of what happened to Trinitarian theology in the modern age. It is rather to indicate the typically modern specificity of the Trinitarian debate and - first of all - to encourage development in the main areas and issues of this subject.

The Lord the Giver of Life

Coming out in June of this year is a collection from Eerdmans treating that one Person of the Trinity sometimes overlooked in some traditions, and sometimes thought to be at issue in East-West Trinitiarian disputes. I speak, of course, of The Holy Spirit: In Biblical Teaching, through the Centuries, and Today. Authored by Anthony Thiselton, this book, the publisher tells us, is a

wide-ranging, thoroughly researched volume [that] approaches questions concerning the Holy Spirit with an up-to-date account of biblical teaching on the topic, including exposition of passages and hermeneutics; a comprehensive historical survey; and current writers and issues, with assessment and mutual dialogue with Pentecostals and the Renewal Movement.

The Holy Spirit, prophecy, tongues, the miraculous, the range and nature of the Spirit's gifts, the Holy Spirit in relation to the Trinity -- all of these topics are of ongoing interest today. This learned volume from Anthony Thiselton offers scholarly work on specific themes along with practical consequences for worship and life.

Part II treats the Fathers, including the ante- and post-Nicene Fathers in both East and West. Part III has a chapter looking at both Lossky and Zizioulas.

A Reader in Ecclesiology

When last year I taught ecclesiology to graduate students--all of whom were positively enraptured by reading  Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity, an experience you will surely not want to miss--I made use of several books, including of course John Zizioulas' justly famous Being As Communion. Along with that, I used parts of the very useful collection amassed by Routledge: The Routledge Companion to the Christian Church. But this latter anthology may have found a worthy competitor in a book set to be released next month: Bryan P. Stone, ed., A Reader in Ecclesiology (Ashgate, 2012), 271pp.).

About this book the publisher tells us:

This Reader presents a diverse and ecumenical cross-section of ecclesiological statements from across the twenty centuries of the church's existence. It builds on the foundations of early Christian writings, illustrates significant medieval, reformation, and modern developments, and provides a representative look at the robust attention to ecclesiology that characterizes the contemporary period. This collection of readings offers an impressive overview of the multiple ways Christians have understood the church to be both the 'body of Christ' and, at the same time, an imperfect, social and historical institution, constantly subject to change, and reflective of the cultures in which it is found.

This comprehensive survey of historical ecclesiologies is helpful in pointing readers to the remarkable number of images and metaphors that Christians have relied upon in describing the church and to the various tensions that have characterized reflection on the church as both united and diverse, community and institution, visible and invisible, triumphant and militant, global and local, one and many. Students, clergy and all interested in Christianity and the church will find this collection an invaluable resource.

Contents: Introduction; Part 1 The Early Church: The New Testament; Clement of Rome (d.101); Ignatius of Antioch (c.35–110); The Didache (c.110); 'Father, we thank you' (based on the Didache, c.110); Epistle to Diognetus (c. 150–225); Justin Martyr (c. 110–165); Shepherd of Hermas (c.140); Irenaeus of Lyons (c.140–202); Clement of Alexandria (c.150–215); Tertullian of Carthage (c.160–220); Hippolytus (c.170–236); Didascalia Apostolorum (c.200–250); Cyprian of Carthage (c.200–58); Origen of Alexandria (c.185–254); Cyril of Jerusalem (c.315–386); The Apostolic Constitutions (c.375); Petilian of Citra (born c.365); Augustine of Hippo (354–430); Pope Gelasius (d.496). Part 2 The Middle Ages and Reformation: Urbs beata Jerusalem (8th century); Gregory VII (c.1020–1085); Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153); Isaac of Stella (c.1100–1169); Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179); Innocent III (1160–1216); Fourth Lateran Council (1215); Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274); Unam Sanctam (1302); Marsilius of Padua (1324); William of Ockham (1285–1347); John Wyclif (1328–1384); Jan Hus (1369–1415); Council of Constance (1414–1418); Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464); Execrabilis (1460); Martin Luther (1483–1546); The Schleitheim Confession (1527); The Augsberg Confession (1530); Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531); John Calvin (1509–1564); Heinrich Bullinger (1504–1575); Menno Simons (1496–1561); John Knox (1510–1572); Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621); Richard Hooker (1554–1600); The second Helvetic Confession (1566). Part 3 The Modern Period: John Smyth (c.1570–1612); The Westminster Confession of Faith (1643); John Owen (1616–1683); Charles Wesley (1707–1788); John Fawcett (1740–1817); John Wesley (1703–1791); John Newton (1725–1807); Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834); F.D. Maurice (1805–1872); 'The Church's one foundation' (1866). Part 4 The 20th Century: Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918); Kanzo Uchimura (1861–1930); Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923); Karl Barth (1886–1968); The Barmen Theological Declaration (1934); Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945); William Temple (1881–1944); Henri de Lubac (1896–1991); 'Here, O Lord, your servants gather' (1958); Lesslie Newbigin (1909–1998); Vatican Council II (1962–65); Basil Christopher Butler (1902–1986); Martin Luther King Jr (1929–1968); M.M. Thomas (1916–1996); John Howard Yoder (1927–1997); World Council of Churches (1967); Hans Küng (1928–); Alexander Schmemann (1921–1983); Juan Luis Segundo(1925–1996); James Cone (1938–); Gustavo Gutíerrez (1928–); Jürgen Moltmann (1926–); Oscar Romero (1917–1980); Leonardo Boff (1938–); Stanley Hauerwas (1940–); John Zizioulas (1931–); Rosemary Radford Ruether (1936–); George A. Lindbeck (1923–); Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (1938–); Bénézet Bujo (1940–); Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928–); Letty M. Russell (1929–2007); Delores S. Williams (1934–); Miroslav Volf (1941–); Elizabeth A. Johnson (1941–); Amos Young (1965–); For further reading; Index.