The Work
The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine is a five-volume work published by the University of Chicago Press between 1971 and 1989. The volumes are: (1) The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600), 1971; (2) The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600-1700), 1974; (3) The Growth of Medieval Theology (600-1300), 1978; (4) Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300-1700), 1984; (5) Christian Doctrine and Modern Culture (since 1700), 1989. Each volume runs to approximately 400-500 pages; the complete set exceeds 2,200 pages.
The work is the definitive English-language history of Christian doctrinal development - the most comprehensive and rigorous account of how the major Christian doctrines (Trinity, Christology, grace, sacraments, Scripture) have been articulated, debated, revised, and transmitted across twenty centuries of Christian thought. It draws on an extraordinary range of primary sources in Latin, Greek, Syriac, Slavonic, German, and other languages and has no serious competitor as a reference work in the field.
Jaroslav Pelikan converted from Lutheranism to Eastern Orthodox Christianity in 1998, at the age of 74. This conversion gave retrospective significance to his five-volume history, which can be read as a forty-year scholarly pilgrimage toward Orthodoxy.
Biblical Engagement
John 1:1 ('In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God') is the text whose interpretation the entire work traces from the second century through the twentieth. Volume 1 traces the controversies that led to the Nicene formulation of Christ's full divinity; Volume 2 traces the Iconoclast controversy and the Eastern development of trinitarian theology; Volume 3 traces the Western medieval development of Scholastic theology; Volume 4 traces the Reformation controversies about the authority of Scripture and the nature of grace; Volume 5 traces the modern encounter with historical criticism, evolutionary theory, and secular culture. Each stage of this development is an attempt to clarify and preserve - or, in the view of critics, to obscure and distort - the meaning of John 1:1.
Romans 5:12 ('Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned') is the biblical basis for the doctrine of original sin, one of the most contested doctrines in the history of Christian thought and one of the central subjects of Volume 1's account of the Pelagian controversy and Volume 3's account of the medieval debate about human freedom and divine grace. Pelikan traces the development from Paul's relatively undeveloped language through Augustine's systematization (drawing on a Latin mistranslation of the Greek 'because' as 'in whom,' which changed the theological import significantly) through the medieval inheritance and the Reformation controversy.
Hebrews 1:3 ('Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high') provides key vocabulary for the christological controversies of the early centuries. The term 'express image' (Greek character tes hypostaseos) contributed to the technical theological language of the Trinity debates, while the juxtaposition of Christ's divine status and his atoning work provided the framework for the later debates about whether God, strictly speaking, can suffer.
Genesis 1:1 ('In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth') is the background for Pelikan's account of the creation theology that runs through all five volumes: the debates about whether matter is good or evil (against Gnosticism in Volume 1), the Eastern apophatic theology of creation ex nihilo (Volume 2), the medieval account of the relationship between theology and natural science (Volume 3), the Reformation debates about Providence and natural order (Volume 4), and the modern encounter with evolutionary biology (Volume 5).
Pelikan's method is consistently to locate doctrinal development in its biblical roots and to show how each stage of development represents a genuine attempt - however culturally conditioned - to understand and transmit what the biblical text says. He is not a critic of the tradition but its historian; his stance is one of appreciative understanding rather than ideological evaluation.
Author & Context
Jaroslav Jan Pelikan Jr. (1923-2006) was born in Akron, Ohio, to a Slovak Lutheran family. His father was a Lutheran pastor, and the Lutheran tradition - with its combination of evangelical biblical theology and deep engagement with the Catholic and Orthodox patristic heritage - shaped his entire intellectual career. He was educated at Concordia Theological Seminary (St. Louis) and the University of Chicago (PhD, 1946, under Wilhelm Pauck). He taught at Valparaiso University, Concordia Seminary, the University of Chicago, and finally Yale University, where he was Sterling Professor of History from 1962 until his retirement.
Pelikan was a polymath: he read Latin, Greek, German, French, Russian, and Church Slavonic fluently, and his scholarship encompassed patristics, medieval theology, Reformation history, Russian Orthodoxy, and the history of biblical interpretation. He also wrote important works on Bach's theology, on the image of Jesus in Western culture (Jesus Through the Centuries, 1985), and on the development of the concept of tradition (The Vindication of Tradition, 1984).
His conversion to Orthodoxy in 1998, undertaken with his wife Sylvia, was the culmination of decades of engagement with Eastern Christianity. His account of the reasons for his conversion - primarily the Eastern Church's understanding of the relationship between Scripture and Tradition, and the theological depth of the liturgical life - illuminated the inner logic of all five volumes of The Christian Tradition, which consistently portrayed Eastern Christianity as the bearer of a theological wisdom not fully preserved in Western Christianity.
The work was written during the period of post-World War II ecumenical dialogue - the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), the Consultation on Church Union, the Lutheran-Catholic dialogue - and is shaped by ecumenical commitments. Pelikan believed that historical understanding of doctrinal development was essential for progress in ecumenical dialogue: you cannot discuss where the tradition has gone wrong, or where different traditions have diverged, without knowing where you came from and why you ended up where you are.
Structure and Argument
Volume 1 traces the emergence of the Catholic tradition from the New Testament through the Patristic period: the canon, the creed, and the institutional church as the three legs of the authoritative tradition; the Trinitarian and Christological debates culminating at Nicaea (325) and Chalcedon (451); and Augustine's theological synthesis as the theological foundation of Western Christianity.
Volume 2 traces the development of Eastern Christianity from the seventh century through the fall of Constantinople in 1453: Iconoclasm and the theology of the image; the Filioque controversy and the definitive East-West split; hesychasm and the theology of divine light; and the encounter with Islam.
Volume 3 traces the development of Western medieval theology: the Scholastic synthesis of Anselm and Aquinas; the development of sacramental theology (transubstantiation, penance, indulgences); and the late medieval reform movements that prepared for the Reformation.
Volume 4 traces the Reformation and its aftermath: Luther's theology of the Word, Calvin's sovereignty of God, the Council of Trent, the Radical Reformation, and the confessional orthodoxies that succeeded the first generation of reformers.
Volume 5 traces Christian theology's encounter with modernity: the Enlightenment critique of doctrinal authority; the development of liberal theology (Schleiermacher, Ritschl, Harnack); the fundamentalist-modernist controversy; and the neo-orthodox response (Barth, Brunner, Niebuhr).
Critical Reception
The work was uniformly praised by specialists in all five periods covered. No critic has challenged its scholarship; the disputes have been about emphasis and interpretation. Some critics have found Pelikan's stance - appreciatively historical rather than critically evaluative - too uncritical of the tradition's distortions. Some feminist theologians have noted that the tradition Pelikan traces is almost exclusively the work of men. Some Protestant theologians have questioned his treatment of the Reformation, finding it insufficiently sympathetic to the Protestant critique of Catholic tradition.
Theological Significance
The work's most lasting theological contribution is its demonstration that Christian doctrines are not timeless propositions but historically developing responses to specific challenges, questions, and cultural contexts. This does not (in Pelikan's view) relativize the doctrines - he is not a historicist - but it does require that they be understood in their full historical complexity rather than as abstract theological axioms.
His famous dictum, from The Vindication of Tradition: 'Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living' - encapsulates his approach. The tradition is alive precisely because it has been continuously reinterpreted, not despite that reinterpretation.
Legacy
The five volumes remain the standard reference work in the history of Christian doctrine and are used in theological education worldwide. They have been supplemented, in some areas, by more specialized scholarship, but they have not been superseded. Pelikan's Jesus Through the Centuries (1985), his study of Jesus in Western culture and art, brought similar historical scholarship to a broader audience and has been almost as influential.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Nicene Creed texts (John 1:1-18, Colossians 1:15-20, Hebrews 1:1-4 - the texts the Nicene formulation sought to interpret), Romans 5:12-21 (the Augustinian controversy over original sin), Matthew 16:13-20 (Peter's confession - the text around which the authority of the church was debated for centuries), John 6:48-58 (the Eucharistic discourse, background to the medieval controversy about the Lord's Supper), and 2 Timothy 3:16 (the authority of Scripture, the Reformation controversy).
Further Reading
- Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture (1985) - a companion to The Christian Tradition, tracing the image of Jesus in art, literature, and culture through eighteen centuries; more accessible and almost as illuminating. - Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition (1984) - his short but crucial reflection on the meaning of tradition and its relationship to Scripture; the best brief introduction to his theological method. - Phillip Cary, A Brief History of the Western Church (Yale lecture series) - a more accessible account of the Western theological tradition that covers much of the same ground as Volumes 1, 3, and 4 of The Christian Tradition for the non-specialist reader.