Church of the Spirit: From Clement of Rome to John Wycliff

The present work, Church of the Spirit: From Clement of Rome to John Wycliff, corresponds to the first section of the book The Church in Exile, which concentrates on Christian history in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, so it is a glimpse of the evolutionary process from the New Testament church, which many call the “church of the spirit”, to the church of the popes and emperors, “the worldly church”.

The present work belongs to the collection entitled Independent Ecclesiology, composed of books dedicated to the theological and historical study of the doctrine of the church, among which are the following works:

Protestant theology has the quality of starting from the Sola Scriptura in its theological work, with exegesis, (which is the extraction, breakdown and analysis of the different literary units of the sacred text) to proceed to its subsequent synthesis and then decant into dogmatics, or systematic theology in which the ecclesiologies that concern the subject of this book are found. And as an additional science, we find historical theology in which we try to describe how the people of God became aware of the biblical doctrine, where we study the studies made by the Fathers of the Church, the reformers and other theologians. The study is completed with the pastoral application, which the present set is concerned with a “code of canon law” of congregationalism, while it is hoped that it will serve as a manual and aid for the pastorate and ecclesiastical administration.

This whole must be seen not as separate, self-contained departments, but as parts of a single theological tree, in which the roots are immersed in the sacred text, its branches are dogmatics and its fruits are the results of practical work.