Rites of Ordination: Their History and Theology

Description

Review

“We have come to expect from Paul Bradshaw the very best in critical historical studies of Christian liturgical practice and the most accurate and balanced accounts of the diversities of current Christian liturgical meaning. Both gifts are brilliantly present in this book. No future consideration of the history or the meaning of the appointment to leadership in Christian communities will be able responsibly to ignore this important book. Even more, the excellent questions that Bradshaw puts to every period of this history—including our own—will be able to form the basis for a lively conversation between the churches, a conversation that may move toward both mutual recognition of ministries and mutual admonition about their potential misuses. This is a fair, honest, important, and genuinely ecumenical book.”Gordon W. LathropProfessor of Liturgy EmeritusLutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia

One of the great gifts which Bradshaw has brought to liturgical scholarship is recent decades is his sharp eye regarding what we know and what we do not know. . . . [This book] is an extraordinarily rich study of a major focus of development in the life of the church as a whole. Rites of Ordination is a valuable addition to the extensive bibliography of ordination studies which have been published in recent decades.

Louis Well, Anglican Theological Review

Product Description

Paul Bradshaw, one of the world's foremost scholars on the history of Christian liturgy, has shared this expertise in several works that have become standard texts for students of liturgy. In Rites of Ordination , Bradshaw turns his attention to the ways that Christians through the ages have understood what it means to ordain someone as a minister and how that has been expressed in liturgical practice.

Bradshaw considers the typological background to ordained ministry some have drawn from the Old Testament and what ministry meant to the earliest Christian communities. He explores the ordination rites and theology of the early church, the Christian East, the medieval West, the churches of the Reformation, and the post-Tridentine Roman Catholic Church. Rites of Ordination promises to serve as an enriching resource for seminary students, students of liturgy and church history, and anyone fascinated by the history and theology of Christian liturgy and ministry.

About the Author

Paul F. Bradshaw is emeritus professor of liturgy at the University of Notre Dame and an Anglican/Episcopal priest. The author or editor of over thirty books and of more than 120 articles and essays, he is also a past president both of the North American Academy of Liturgy and of the international Societas Liturgica. From 1987 to 2005 he was editor-in-chief of the scholarly journal Studia Liturgica.