Documents of the Christian Church / original editions selected and edited by Henry Bettenson ; third and fourth editions edited by Chris Maunder. [print]

The church and the world -- Creeds -- The earliest testimony to the Gospels -- The person and work of Christ -- The problem of the relation of the divinity and the humanity in Christ -- Pelagianism, human nature, sin, and grace -- The church, the ministry, and the sacraments -- The authority of the Holy See -- Doctrine and development : the Vincentian canon -- Christian inscriptions -- From Chalcedon to the breach between East and West -- The empire and the papacy -- Monasticism and the friars -- The church and heresy -- The conciliar movement -- Scholasticism -- The church in England until the Reformation -- The Reformation on the continent -- The Reformation in England -- The Roman Catholic Church from the Counter-Reformation to the Second Vatican Council -- The British churches in the seventeenth century -- The British churches in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries -- The Roman Catholic Church at the Second Vatican Council -- The twentieth-century world churches : justice, peace, and the environment -- The twentieth-century world churches and inter-faith dialogue -- The twentieth-century churches and Christian unity -- The twentieth-century churches : sexuality and procreation -- The churches and twenty-first-century issues.

This selection of writings vividly captures the most important moments in the history of Christianity, providing insights into 200 years of Christian theological and political debate. While retaining the original material selected by Henry Bettenson, Chris Maunder has added a substantial section of more recent writings. These illustrate the Second Vatican Council; the theologies of liberation; Church and State from 'Thatcher's Britain' to Communist Eastern Europe; Black, feminist, and ecological theology; ecumenism; and inter-faith dialogue. The emphasis on moral debate in the contemporary churches is reflected in selections discussing questions about homosexuality, divorce, AIDS, and in-vitro fertilization, amongst other issues. Much of the new material, in section XVIII, represents debate on issues with origins in the twentieth century but which, in the new century, has reached heightened levels of urgency and concern, mainly on the global growth of Christianity, global poaverty, the global economic debt, social justice, migration, disability, domestic violence and child abuse, addiction, climate change, tensions between the 'West' and the Middle East, mission in a multi-faith socaiety, mission in a secular society, genetic engineering, the Internet, progress on Christian unity, the unity of the Anglican communion.

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