The Great Tradition - A Great Labour

Essays exploring the challenge for modern churches, especially in the Anglican tradition, of living authentically within the historic legacy of Christianity.Christianity’s Great Tradition, as editor D.H. Williams describes it, is ‘the foundational legacy of apostolic and patristic faith, most accurately enshrined in Scripture and secondarily in the great confessions and creeds of the early church.’ Anglicanism offers a test case of how the modern Church has developed in relation to this legacy. Of particular interest is the highly dynamic process by which a recognizable ‘Anglican Way’ has been preserved and transmitted over the centuries, a process has been enlivened through constant negotiation and exchange with surprising convergences that have brought new life and direction.Inspired by a conference entitled ‘Ancient-Wisdom-Anglican Features’, the essayists in this volume discuss the issue of what it means to inhabit the Great Tradition ‘authentically’. This dialogue inspires reflection on how one participates in a Church rooted in the canonicity and catholicity of Christian faith, and brings Anglicans into a resurgent ressourcement of the Great Tradition, alongside an increased interest in early Christian worship.The Great Tradition – A Great Labour further expands upon these ideas by considering what it means to receive and pass on the inheritance of historic Christianity for the sake of transformative worship and community in a post-modern world. Representing different perspectives and denominations, they show how ‘profitable and commodious’ (as Richard Hooker has said) the Great Tradition can be in nurturing the worship, communal life, and mission of the Church. But at the same time they demonstrate how hard it can be to uphold the varied integrities of historic faith in the contemporary marketplace of religion, and especially among evangelicals who continue to follow the Canterbury Trail.