In this five-volume opus-now available in its entirety in paperback-Pelikan traces the development of Christian doctrine from the first century to the twentieth.

"Pelikan's The Christian Tradition is] a series for which they must have coined words like 'magisterial'."-Martin Marty, Commonweal

The line that separated Eastern Christendom from Western on the medieval map is similar to the "iron curtain" of recent times. Linguistic barriers, political divisions, and liturgical differences combined to isolate the two cultures from each other. Except for such episodes as the schism between East and West or the Crusades, the development of non-Western Christendom has been largely ignored by church historians. In The Spirit of Eastern Christendom, Jaroslav Pelikan explains the divisions between Eastern and Western Christendom, and identifies and describes the development of the...

"A magnificent history of doctrine." "New York Review of Books"
"In this volume Jaroslav Pelikan continues the splendid work he has done thus far in his projected five-volume history of the development of Christian doctrine, defined as 'what the Church believes, teaches, and confesses on the basis of the word of God.' The entire work will become an indispensable resource not only for the history of doctrine but also for its reformulation today. Copious documentation in the margins and careful indexing add to its immense usefulness." E. Glenn Hinson, "Christian Century"
"This book is...

This penultimate volume in Pelikan's acclaimed history of Christian doctrine winner with Volume 3 of the Medieval Academy's prestigious Haskins Medal encompasses the Reformation and the developments that led to it.
"Only in America, and in this case from a Lutheran scholar, could we expect an examination so lacking in parti pris, a survey so perceptive, so free and, one must say, the result of so much immense labor, so rewardingly presented." John M. Todd, "New York Times Book Review"
"Never wasting a word or losing a plot line, Pelikan builds on an array of sources that few in our...

Jaroslav Pelikan begins this volume with the crisis of orthodoxy that confronted all Christian denominations by the beginning of the eighteenth century and continues through the twentieth century in its particular concerns with ecumenism. The modern period in the history of Christian doctrine, Pelikan demonstrates, may be defined as the time when doctrines that had been assumed more than debated for most of Christian history were themselves called into question: the idea of revelation, the uniqueness of Christ, the authority of Scripture, the expectation of life after death, even the very...