Ecclesiology

Abstract This article contends that Hartmut Rosa's resonance theory can stimulate ecclesiological imagination regarding the relationship of churches to their contexts. After a brief explanation of Rosa’s central images, the argument turns to their ecclesiological relevance. Churches are called to generate an integrative transformative dynamic in which vertical resonance with God correlates with r…

Abstract As the Roman Catholic Church aspires ‘to embrace a synodal way’, some old questions about its ecclesial vision return. One such question is the equality of all the baptised within the church. This question is particularly fraught because of the church’s long history of viewing the itself as a society of unequals, its hierarchical structures, and its culture of top-down authority modelled…

Abstract Receptive Ecumenism ( re ) has been presented as a distinctive ecumenical approach for nearly fifteen years, and it is eight years since Paul Avis asked the critical question, ‘Are we Receiving Receptive Ecumenism?’ The main part of this essay addresses that question by surveying the different ways in which re has been received in the academy, in ecumenical bodies, and in the life of the…

This article discusses the significant roles of the innkeeper and the inn ( pandocheion ) in the parable of the Good Samaritan and how contemporary Christians can use the story to construct an open ecclesiology in the midst of global fear of others. The idea of open ecclesiology requires a rethinking of the classical marks of the church as one, holy, catholic, and apostolic in the light of the ne…

This paper traces the origins and subsequent use of the concepts of ‘organic union’ and ‘reconciled diversity’ as alternative descriptions of the visible unity of the Church and the method and goal of ecumenism, with special reference to the documents of the World Council of Churches and a select number of related texts emanating from theological dialogue at a world level. The paper argues: (1) t…

Abstract In the study of ecclesiology it is often said that the first treatises on the Church were written during the controversies around the bull Unam sanctam (1302) of Pope Boniface VIII. These works and their successors provide a political and institutional ecclesiology determined by the author's attitude to the papal claims. Before the bull, however, a friend of Boniface, William Durandus of…

Abstract The Episcopal Church has come to espouse a developed form of baptismal ecclesiology, in which all laypersons are believed to be ministers by virtue of their baptism and the ordained ministry is understood as a particular form of the ministry of all the baptized. The adoption of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer was significant for this. Also included in that book was a 'Baptismal Covenant' …

Book Reviews / Ecclesiology 5 (2009) 246–269 263 Mark S. Kinzer, Post-Missionary Messianic Judaism: Redefi ning Christian Engagement with the Jewish People (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2005), $30.00. 310 pp. ISBN 1-58743-152-1 (pbk). In the last fi fty years there have been many attempts to redefi ne the compel- ling but problematic relationship between Jews and Christians and it is now rare to …

258 Book Reviews / Ecclesiology 5 (2009) 246–269 William E. Phipps, Clerical Celibacy: Th e Heritage (New York and London: Continuum, 2004), x + 272 pp. $27.95. ISBN 0-8264-1617-9 (pbk). Th is is an author who certainly has the courage to display and reveal his posi- tion openly, from the very outset, and he continues to maintain it throughout the book, for the most part quoting only those who ag…

Abstract Pope John Paul II’s Encyclical Ut Unum Sint, published in 1995, was immediately recognized as a document of fundamental importance for ecumenism. John Paul II clearly and unequivocally renewed the Roman Catholic Church’s commitment to the ecumenical movement and invited leaders and theologians of other churches to engage with the Roman Catholic Church in patient and fraternal dialogue on…

Abstract In this essay, a Lutheran understanding of the development of doctrine is developed, in contrast with what George Lindbeck calls ‘historical situationalism’, the limitations of which are analysed. While the final authority of doctrine is a function of its evangelical content, a particular historical development of church teaching can possess a subordinate, distinct, formal authority as a…