FREE CREDO: HISTORICAL AND THEOLOGICAL GUIDE TO CREEDS AND CONFESSIONS OF FAITH IN THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION PDF Jaroslav Pelikan | 672 pages | 12 Dec 2005 | Yale University Press | 9780300109740 | English | New Haven, United States Jaroslav Pelikan — The Need for Creeds - The On Being Project Report a problem. University of Toronto Libraries St. George St. Tell us about a web accessibility problem. About online privacy and data collection. All rights reserved. Terms and conditions. Our membership in ETAS has temporarily doubled our digital collections, adding 3 million additional items. ETAS items are listed as print-only in our catalogue. Still have questions? Toggle navigation. Jaroslav Pelikan. Back 0 Marked Mark Options. Get help. Holdings In. Knox College Caven. Trinity College John W Graham. Subjects subject. Creeds--Comparative Credo: Historical and Theological Guide to Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition. Creeds--History and criticism. More Details author. Pelikan, Jaroslav, author. Chapter 1: Definition of creed and confession -- Chapter 2: The genesis of creeds and confessions -- Chapter 3: The authority of creeds and confessions -- Chapter 4: The history of creeds and confessions -- Chapter 5: Bibliography -- Chapter 6: Indexes to creeds and confessions of faith in the Christian tradition -- Chapter 7: Indexes to Credo. Introductory volume to Creeds and confessions of faith in the Christian tradition. Appeared in Choice on Although it can be used independently, Credo serves as both the fourth volume and an introduction and companion to Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition 4v. A scholar and teacher of the creeds and their significance for nearly 50 years, Pelikan is devoted to the creedal tradition, as evidenced in this work's thoroughness and erudition. An expansive and fascinating array of topics is covered under four broad headings "Definition," "Genesis," "Authority," "History"and every conceivable perspective and line of discussion appears to be examined. The volume can be consulted as a comprehensive reference text or dived into at any number of points. Pelikan intends his work to Credo: Historical and Theological Guide to Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition Philip Schaff's Creeds of Christendom Extensive bibliographies and indexes cover both this volume and the entire set. The companion CD provides an electronic Macromedia Flash presentation of a selection of some of the original language texts contained in volumes of Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition. The publishers provide high-quality page images of documents in their original languages, and navigation through the tables of contents and the documents themselves is very easy. Advanced users will regret the lack of search ability, and since the text cannot be cut and pasted from the page images, the print volumes are certain to be used far more heavily than the CD. General readers; upper-division undergraduates and higher. Stewart Princeton Theological Seminary. This item was reviewed in:. To find out how to look for other reviews, please see our guides to finding book reviews in the Sciences or Social Sciences and Humanities. Bowker Data Service Summary. Addressing essential questions about the Christian tradition, Credo: Historical and Theological Guide to Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition stands as an independent reference work devoted to the subject of what creeds and confessions are and what their role in history has been. One of the world's leading theologians offers important insights into the history and significance of Christian creeds. An achievement unlikely to be surpassed. McKim, Theological Studies. 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 of creeds; their function; their political role; how they relate to Christian institutions, worship, and service; and how they help to explain the major divisions of the Christian church and of Christian history. Credo stands as an independent reference work devoted to the subject of what creeds and confessions are and what their role in history has been. It is also the first of the four volumes of Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, edited by Pelikan and Valerie Hotchkiss see below. This information is provided by a service that aggregates data from review sources and other sources that are often consulted by libraries, and readers. The University does not edit this information and merely includes it as a convenience for users. It does not warrant that reviews are accurate. As with any review users should approach reviews critically and where deemed necessary should consult multiple review sources. Contact University of Toronto Libraries St. Connect with us Twitter YouTube Instagram more social media. Your Name:. Include PDF. Record Title:. Record Author s :. Is there a problem with an e-resource? If so, please indicate which one: --select an eresource link Brief Description:. Your Name Optional :. Email Address Optional :. Email Address:. Credo Catalogue en ligne W hen Jaroslav Pelikan died at age 82 on May 13,the world of Christian scholarship lost its greatest living advocate and the best church historian America has ever produced. The achievements of his life are remarkable: He wrote nearly 40 books and over a dozen reference works on numerous aspects of Christian history. He presented the Gifford Lectures at University of Aberdeen and the Gilson Lectures at the University of Toronto and Credo: Historical and Theological Guide to Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition awarded honorary degrees from 42 universities around the world. Pelikan loved to quote this line from Goethe, his favorite poet: "What you have received as heritage, take now as task and thus you will make it your own. Both of his parents were born in Europe. Both his father and grandfather were Lutheran pastors. His mother was a schoolteacher who learned English by reading the essays of Emerson. They bequeathed to young Jary both a love for learning and a desire for God. When he was a little boy and couldn't quite reach the dinner table, his parents had him sit on stacked-up volumes of Migne's Patrologiaa collection of patristic writings in the original languages. He later quipped, "I thus absorbed the church fathers a posteriori! Pelikan's deep religious faith was nurtured on Luther's Small Catechismthe great chorales of J. Bach, and, above all, the Bible. Though he became an ordained Lutheran minister, Pelikan spent most of his life in the environs of the secular academy. But he never lost the rich faith he received as a small child. As he once confessed, "I was quite out of step with many in my generation, especially among theological scholars at universities, in never having had fundamental doubts Credo: Historical and Theological Guide to Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition the essential rightness of the Christian faith, but having retained a continuing, if often quite unsophisticated, Slavic piety. A precocious young Pelikan received both his seminary degree and a Ph. His first book, From Luther to Kierkegaardcame out a few years later Soon Pelikan established himself as one of the most prolific Luther scholars of his generation. He was general editor for the volume American edition of Luther's Works and wrote a separate volume on Luther's biblical exposition. Pelikan always had a great interest in ecumenical affairs. His book The Riddle of Roman Catholicismwritten on the eve of the Second Vatican Council, offered an irenic introduction to the world's largest Christian community. It is said that Karl Barth drew up a plan for his "collected works" at age 10! Just so, Pelikan had a clear, detailed plan of what he called his "big book" early in his career. He would write a comprehensive history of Christian doctrine, an account of what "the church of Jesus Christ has believed, taught, and confessed on the basis of the word of God. Only Adolf Harnack, the great scion of German liberal Protestantism, had attempted such a massive project with his three-volume History of Dogma. Harnack, however, for all his erudition, had little sympathy with the doctrinal content of his subject and presented a version of Christianity freed from the dogmatic shackles of the past. Pelikan, working with the same historical rigor, approached his subject with much more sympathy. As he put it, "I found, not in theological liberalism and historical relativism as so many of my predecessors, teachers, contemporaries did but in tradition and orthodoxy, the presupposition from which to interpret any portion or period. Pelikan's magnum opus eventually became five volumes that he called simply The Christian Tradition. Though Pelikan fully recognized the great diversity and varied expressions of Christian teaching across the ages, he also stressed the underlying unity and continuity of what the New Testament calls "the faith once delivered to the saints" Jude 3. Judaism has its shema and Islam its shahadahbut Christians, responding to Jesus' question "Who do you say that I am? Pelikan's collection includes several hundred of these, among them the Masai Creed from Nigeria. This creed Africanizes Christianity by declaring that Jesus "was always on safari doing good. He ascended unto the skies. He is the Lord. This creed was brought to Pelikan's attention by one of his students, a woman who had been a member of a religious order working in a hospital in East Nigeria. Pelikan dealt with many deep and difficult subjects in his scholarly work, but he wrote in a simple, elegant style with a clarity that is compelling. He had a way of capturing profound truths in short, unforgettable statements.