L'Ancien Testament dans l'ecclesiologie des Peres: Une lecture des Constitutions apostoliques. By JOSEPH G. MUELLER.

Abstract

Historians employ the Constitutiones apostolorum knowing that they use it at their peril, and aware that, like other church orders, it is a redactional product produced with agenda, whilst yet uncertain as to the nature of these agenda. Fr Mueller has done the inestimable service of producing a redaction-critical study of CA complementary to that of Synek. For this reason alone the work is to be commended. That Mueller ties the production of CA to the redactor's ecclesial vision makes his argument all the more interesting. Rather like the work which he discusses, Mueller's work is very complex. The essence of his argument is that the CA represent a rereading of Old Testament Scripture in a mode of exegesis which Mueller terms ecclesial, and that this reading is undertaken in order to form the Church and her institutions on a scriptural foundation. The redactor in part sees the earlier documents which are taken up into CA as part of this foundation, but principally the redactor's insight is a perception of the Church as the end of a salvation history which runs unbroken from the period of Israel under the old covenant. In visioning the Church in this manner the redactor is responding to the imperial promulgation of canons under Theodosius and issuing from the Council of Constantinople, and so establishing an anti-imperial church order based on scriptural authority.