Jaroslav Pelikan

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

One of the world’s leading scholars offers unique insights into the history and significance of Christian creeds. Eminent theologian Jaroslav Pelikan has been translating, editing, and studying the Christian creeds and confessions of faith for sixty years. This book is the historical and theological distillation of that work. In Credo, Pelikan addresses essential questions about the Christian tradition: the origins...

In 726, the Byzantine emperor, Leo III, issued an edict that all religious images in the empire were to be destroyed, a directive later endorsed by a synod of the Church in 753 under his son, Constantine V. If the policy of Iconoclasm had succeeded, the entire history of Christian art—and of the Christian church, at least in the East—would...

The momentous encounter between Christian thought and Greek philosophy reached a high point in fourth-century Byzantium, and the principal actors were four Greek-speaking Christian thinkers whose collective influence on the Eastern Church was comparable to that of Augustine on Western Latin Christendom. In this erudite and informative book, a distinguished scholar provides the first coherent account of the lives and...

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...

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...

“A rich and expansive description of Jesus’ impact on the general history of culture. . . . Believers and sceptics alike will find it a sweeping visual and conceptual panorama.”—John Koenig, front page, New York Times Book Review Called "a book of uncommon brilliance" by Commonweal, Jesus Through the Centuries is an original and compelling study of the impact of...