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Telling the Churches Stories: Ecumenical Perspectives on Writing Christian History
Timothy J. Wengert and Charles W. Brockwell, Jr., Editors (1995)
NCR410, $12.95
Division among Christian communions have sometimes arisen from and are often sustained by vastly different accounts of the origins and development of important historical events. Telling the Churches' Stories takes a critical look at the practice of writing church history and challenges historians of Christianity to be self-consciously ecumenical in the practice of their craft.
The result of a study done by the Faith and Order Working Group of the National Council of Churches from 1988 to 1991, which studies the interaction between views of the history of Christianity and problems in ecumenical relations, the essays in this volume evaluate and employ fourteen principles for writing Christian history from an ecumenical perspective.
Editors Timothy J. Wengert and Charles W. Brockwell, Jr. begin by placing these principles of historiography more fully within current trends in ecumenism and church history. In response, Richard A. Norris critiques these principles, their moral basis, and the difficulties with their implementation, and Gunther Gassmann places these principles squarely within the global context of ecumenical history.
Three noted historians, contributing articles from their own fields, apply these principles to specific case studies: Frederick W. Norris examines the Arian controversy of the fourth century; Elsie Anne McKee looks at Katharina Schutz Zell, an influential sixteenth-century Protestant Reformer; and James Hennesey investigates the role of history in the nineteenth-century Roman Catholic Church in the United States.
A forward by Justo L. Gonzalez, a conclusion by Thomas Finger, and a bibliographic essay by Douglas A. Foster also provide ample indication of the importance these principles will have for organizing meaningful discussion of the profound ways in which ecumenical perspectives and history writing interact with each other.