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The Ministry—A Renewed Quest

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2009

William Nicholls
Affiliation:
Vancouver

Extract

The Fourth World Conference on Faith and Order, meeting at Montreal in July 1963, recommended the renewal of the study of the Ministry, within a new programme of theological study to be initiated by the Faith and Order Commission. As was noted at Montreal, the Ministry had not been the subject of Faith and Order study for twenty-five years. There were good reasons for this. While the Ministry continued to be the thorniest of the practical problems facing union negotiators, it was widely agreed that theologically it had failed and would continue to fail to yield to a head-on treatment. Only in the light of the doctrine of the Church, considered in its christological and eschatological dimensions, would the Ministry appear in a form that could draw Christians together in church union. So, without altogether losing sight of the hope that something helpful could be said about the Ministry, Faith and Order turned, first to the doctrine of the Church, and then, in the period after Lund, to a study of Christ and the Church. Now the time has come to return to the Ministry, in the light of the work done at these deeper levels of Christian doctrine.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1967

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References

page 297 note 1 Kerygma und Dogma, 7. Jahrgang, Heft 2, April 1961; cf. also Easton, B. S., The Pastoral Epistles, 1948.Google Scholar

page 301 note 1 We should prefer to translate ‘rulers and ministers’ in Phil. 1.1.

page 302 note 1 Daube, David, The New Testament and Rabbinic Judaism, p. 244f.Google Scholar

page 302 note 2 The Pastoral Epistles, p. 189.

page 303 note 1 The Apostolic Ministry, p. 41.