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The Church, the Councils, and Reform: The Legacy of the Fifteenth Century. Edited by Gerald Christianson, Thomas M. Izbicki, and Christopher M. Bellitto. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. 2008. Pp. xvi, 336. $79.95. ISBN 978-0-813-21527-3.)
The volume presents the papers of the Gettysburg Conference of the American Cusanus Society in 2004, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Brian Tierney's Foundations of the the Conciliar Theory (Cambridge, UK, 1955). Tierney contributes the afterword "Reflections on a Half Century of Conciliar Studies" (pp. 313-27) to the volume, emphasizing that canon law alone is not sufficient to explain the rise of conciliarism, but needs to be complemented by theological ideas and traditions. Consequently, the papers in this volume come from different disciplinary approaches, not just examining canonistic sources but also covering a broad array of reform debates from the fifteenth to the twentieth century.
The volume opens with Gerald Christianson's paper, "The Conciliar Tradition and Ecumenical Dialogue" (pp. 1-24), in which the author sheds some light on the practice of "synodality" in the early Protestant churches. Christianson's optimistic look on Protestantism as "a revival of cooperative conciliarism" (p. 22), however, underestimates Martin Luther's ecclesiology and his suspicion against the general council and its claim to infallibility. Nelson H. Minnich provides an excellent survey on recent research...