Paul Valliere’s Conciliarism

This past Thursday I had the privilege of attending a book launch dinner for my colleague Paul Valliere’s new book, Conciliarism: A History of Decision-Making in the Church, published by Cambridge University Press. I had the privilege of reading the New Testament section prior to publication, and am looking forward to reading the rest of the book.

The focus is on exploring the church council not as a simple fail-proof solution to church decision making (far from it), but as nonetheless a preferable model as providing a middle way between the extremes of either authoritarian hierarchicalism on the one hand, or the individualism in which every disagreement precipitates the division of what was previously one denomination or congregation into two on the other.