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The Teaching of Church History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2009

Extract

What does the Church expect of her historians? What kind of person does one imagine when one speaks of a teacher of Church History? Is it too much of a caricature to say that one expects him to be a venerable scholar, steeped in learning, meticulous and perhaps a trifle pedantic, inclined to be sceptical about the motives of men in the ecclesiastical crises of the past, and above all characterised by an academic detachment which can clearly do more good in a library writing books than in a parish in the cure of souls?

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1960

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References

page 60 note 1 Any resemblance to any Church Historian known to the author is purely coincidental.

page 62 note 1 Rust, E. C., The Christian Understanding of History (Lutterworth Press, 1947), p. 76.Google Scholar

page 63 note 1 Butterfield, Christianity and History, p. 25.

page 63 note 2 Smith, R. Gregor, The New Man (S.C.M. Press, 1956), pp. 4748.Google Scholar

page 63 note 3 The Misunderstanding of the Church, p. 41.

page 64 note 1 André de Robert, at a Protestant-Orthodox-Catholic conference at Villemetrie, December 1955. The point was made somewhat earlier by the author of the Book of Jonah.

page 64 note 2 Wright, G. Ernest, God Who Acts (S.C.M. Press, 1952), p. 42.Google Scholar

page 64 note 3 Cullmann, , Christ and Time, p. 167.Google Scholar

page 65 note 1 Wendland, H. D., in The Kingdom of God and History, ed. Wood, H. G., pp. 5253.Google Scholar Quoted by E. C. Rust, op. cit., p. 266. See also Cullmann, op. cit., pp. 151ff.

page 65 note 2 Christ, the Christian, and the Church, p. 144.

page 66 note 1 I Pet. 2.9 (Moffatt).

page 66 note 2 God Who Acts, p. 25.

page 67 note 1 Newbigin, Lesslie, The Household of God (S.C.M. Press, 1953), pp. 138139.Google Scholar

page 67 note 2 See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, and Torrance, T. F., Royal Priesthood (Scot. Jour, of Theol. Occasional Papers, No. 3, 1955), pp. 82, 83.Google Scholar

page 67 note 3 Powicke, F. M., History, Freedom and Religion (Riddell Memorial Lectures for 1937, O.U.P.), p. 14.Google Scholar

page 68 note 1 Filson, Floyd V., The New Testament Against its Environment (S.C.M. Press, 1950 etc.), p. 46.Google Scholar

page 68 note 2 Professor Butterfield recollects ‘taking part in a viva voce examination in Oxford … when we were left completely and permanently baffled by a candidate who ascribed everything to the direct interposition of the Almighty and therefore felt himself excused from the discussion of any intermediate agencies’ (Christianity and History, p. 20).

page 68 note 3 A History of the Expansion of Christianity, I, p. xvii. Cf. esp. E. C. Rust, op. cit., pp. 69–70.

page 69 note 1 See Brunner's defence of the idea of legitimate development in tradition, The Misunderstanding of the Church, pp. 37–39; and note that no amount of merely scientific historical criticism can enable anyone to draw his distinction between ‘development’ and ‘distortion’ on p. 39.