caa a22 4500 388111860 CHVBK 20180307125355.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e199901 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0956618X00003446 doi S0956618X00003446 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0956618X00003446 Norman Edward Canon of York Minster Authority in the Anglican Communion [Elektronische Daten] [Edward Norman] The Church was not founded at Pentecost, as is sometimes said, but by Christ during the course of his ministry in Galilee and Judea. It was he who appointed the twelve to become what today, perhaps, would be called teaching officers, and who commissioned the seventy as a corps of evangelistic missioners. In the ancient world religious knowledge was sometimes committed to sacred writings, sometimes to a school of ideas, sometimes to a priestly caste or an assemblage of cultic observances, and sometimes it emerged episodically through the translations of oracles. Christ, in contrast, revealed his truth to a living company of people—‘the People of God—who, after his corporeal departure, became his body on earth. Precisely because the message was thus conveyed organically it remained permanently new: able to adapt to changing intellectual modes and social filtration, capable of bringing forward fresh insights in the successive cultural shifts of a progressive humanity. Written texts do not transmit truth of themselves: they require re-interpretation, over long periods of time, if they are to achieve durable meaning. Priestly castes have the disadvantage of imploding into small coteries of exclusivity; they frequently become a mere adjunct of ruling elites. Philosophical systems tend to die when the surrounding culture to which they originally related transforms itself or disintegrates. But a living body of people, at the centre of whose religious insights is not a set of ideas but a person, has the verifiable capability of enduring through the centuries, forever changing yet forever the same. Copyright © Ecclesiastical Law Society 1999 Ecclesiastical Law Journal Cambridge University Press 5/24(1999-01), 172-187 0956-618X 5:24<172 1999 5 ELJ https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956618X00003446 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956618X00003446 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Norman Edward Canon of York Minster NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Ecclesiastical Law Journal Cambridge University Press 5/24(1999-01), 172-187 0956-618X 5:24<172 1999 5 ELJ CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge