Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1963
The 2nd and 3rd editions are not completely the same.
In the selection of these documents, the aim has been to provide illustrations of the development of the Church and of her doctrines for the benefit of the general reader and the general student. There are, as there must be, many large and obvious gaps. Perhaps the most glaring is the entire omission of any reference to Eastern Christendom between the Great Schism and the year 1922.
This book is divided into two unequal portions. The first part deals with the early Church, to the time when the Fourth Oecumenical Council issued the last of the series of definitions and decrees to which all the historic churches refer as the expressions of the consent of the Church Universal in antiquity. The remaining sections, save the last, deal with the doctrinal developments of this period, the gradual shaping of the instruments of Christian faith and worship.
In the second and larger part, such an arrangement under doctrinal topics did not seem possible, and the selections are given generally in chronological order, with the exception that those relating to the English church are given in separate sections. This book is compiled from an Anglican standpoint, and the Church of England receives a portion of illustrations, which is only in perspective from that point of view. Even if this be taken into account, it might be argued that too many legal documents, of considerable length, belonging to the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth, have been included at the expanse of things of wider importance. But the position and character of the Church of England cannot be understood without reference to the documents which display the way in which her independence of the Roman See was asserted, and her relationship to the state explicitly or implicitly defined, or left without a rigid definition.
Part I: The Early Church (to the Council of Chalcedon, 451)
Section I: The Church and the World
Section II: Creeds (Apostle’s Creed; The Old Roman Creed; A Gallican Creed of the Sixth Century; The Creed of Caesarea; The Creed of Nicaea; The Nicene Creed)
Section III: The Earliest Testimony to the Gospels
Section IV: The Person and Work of Christ
Section V: The Problem of the Relation of the Divinity and the Humanity in Christ
Section VI: Pelagianism. The Nature of Man, Sin, and Grace
Section VII: The Church, The Ministry, and The Sacraments
Section VIII: The Authority of the Holy See
Section IX: Doctrine and Development. The Vincentian Canon
Section X: Christian Inscriptions
Part II: From the Council of Chalcedon to the Present
Section I: From Chalcedon to the Breach Between East and West
Section II: The Empire and the Papacy
Section III: Monasticism and the Friars
Section IV: The Church and Heresy
Section V: The Conciliar Movement
Section VI: Scholasticism
Section VII: The Church of England Until the Reformation
Section VIII: The Reformation on the Continent
Section IX: The Reformation in England
Section X: Dissent in England
Section XI: The Roman Church from the Counter-Reformation to the Present
Section XII: The English Church from the Reformation to the Present
Section XIII: The Church of Scotland
Section XIV: Christian Unity
