Published a little over three hundred years ago, The History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches remains not only the greatest book of Bossuet (1627-1704), the famed French bishop and preacher, but also a classic in its field. Such works retain an instructiveness even in times that do not wish to be instructed about some basic, unalterable facts. Thus in this era of ecumenical good feeling, nother may seem more out of place than a vast reminder, such as this book, about some salient features of the Reformation
Yet there remains a stark disparity between ecumenical hopes and actual progress towards a reunion between the Catholic Church and the Protestant Churchs. If one wants to understand this fact, one has to probe into the fact of the great variety of Protestant Churches and into the logic that inexorably generates their doctrinal variations.
In presenting this logic and illustrating it with a wealth of statements from the works of the Reformers, Bossuet shifted the interconfessional debate from particular topics to general principles. Herein lies his genius, which is especially relevant for present-day ecumenical theology.
Stanley L. Jaki, the author of the Introduction, is the winner of the Templeton Prize for 1987. Although most of his now almost forty books are on the history and philosophy of science, he originally mad a name for himself by his Les tendance nouvelles de l'ecclésiogie, first published in 1957 and republished during Vatican II.
(678pp. 1997.) 28.00 USD + S+H