The Oxford Handbook of Ecclesiology

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Part I: Biblical Foundations; Part II: Resources from the Tradition; Part III: Major Modern Ecclesiologists; Part IV: Contemporary Movements in Ecclesiology. This review will not attempt any comment on Part III; will note some observations drawn from Part II; but will focus primarily on Part IV, and then on Part I, for reasons which hopefully will become apparent.

² Pages 11–12 include a list of other relevant resources, including The International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church, now completing its eighteenth year of publication. As he notes, IJSCC has a wider remit than the journal he edits, ‘but does include strictly ecclesiological material’. It does indeed! It has published a wide range of articles and special issues on the theology of the Church, claiming the future from the past by its focus on contemporary life and history, exploring new and traditional approaches to ecclesiology from multiple perspectives, as a means of ‘shaping understanding and knowledge of the Christian Church’. Not least among its interests have been the Churches of Central and Eastern Europe and the ‘Oriental Orthodox’ world, absent from the Handbook under review, but essential for comprehending the full scope of ecclesiology.

³ The Editor in effect indicates that attention needs to be given to these areas (3 and 246), and readers might attend to e.g. Atwell, Celebrating the Saints and Cottingham, ‘Saints and Saintliness’; and in respect of the Editor’s own communion of Anglicanism, Nichols, ‘From Common Prayer to Common Ancestor’. Other resources: Esler,New Testament Theology; Johnson, Friends of God and Prophets.

⁴ Examples from the ‘Reform’ tradition include Cranfield, ‘Divine and Human Action’ and Wolterstorff, The God We Worship.

⁵ See e.g. Abram, Gallagher, and Kirwan (Philosophy, Theology and the Jesuit Tradition) on the Jesuit tradition.

⁶ Fiddes, ‘Baptist Concepts of the Church’, 312;Wendebourg, ‘Magisterial Reformers’, 236; and Yong, 352–3.

⁷ See also the observations in Graham, ‘Feminist Critiques’, 546–7; and the dearth of reflection on the lives of children, in Regan, ‘Barely Visible’.

⁸ Chapman on ‘Methodism and the Church’ does not comment on the plight of African-Americans in the USA in the past, if not in the present, not excepting Episcopalianism, as elsewhere.

⁹ Only Zizioulas (469–73) and Pannenberg (490–1) are credited in the essays with an ecclesiology with a Trinitarian focus, and neither with the Editor’s specific connection of the Holy Spirit with the Scriptures.

¹⁰ See also insights from Esler, The First Christians; Gnuse, Trajectories of Justice; and, in the Handbook itself, O’Collins’ essay on the General Epistles’ in which he proposes five elements to mark the Church: wise; priestly; worshipping; faithful; and Petrine and Pauline (159).

¹¹ See Porter, Sydney Anglicanism.

¹² See e.g. Tanner, ‘Gender’ and the recent Church of Scotland Theological Forum Report, 2017.

¹³ E.g. Newsom, Ringe, and Lapsley, eds., The Women’s Bible Commentary; Meyers and Kraemer, eds., Women in Scripture; Joynes and Rowland, eds., From the Margins 2.

¹⁴ ARCIC, Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ.

¹⁵ Louth, ‘Mary the Mother of God and Ecclesiology’.

¹⁶ Gonzalez, ‘Liberation Ecclesiologies’, 576–8. Mary was named by John Paul II in 1999 as ‘Patron of the Americas’.

¹⁷ See the Church of Scotland, The Church Hymnary Trust, Church Hymnary fourth edition, which begins with a major section on the Psalms for singing, incorporates some of the ‘paraphrases’ of the Psalms into the hymnody, drawn from across the globe, the whole arranged explicitly in a Trinitarian, credal pattern, and has a concluding section on the Holy Spirit both ‘in the church’, and in its celebrations, in a final part on ‘Doxologies and Amens’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ann Loades

Ann Loades is an Honorary Professorial Fellow, St Chad’s College, Durham; Professor Emerita of Divinity, Durham; Honorary Professor in the School of Divinity, St Andrews, all UK. She was the first woman to be awarded a ‘personal’ chair in Durham (1995) and a CBE ‘for services to Theology’ (2001).