ABSTRACT
On the contrary, from the very beginning, ecclesiastical history is marked by the struggle of the church to maintain unity in faith through diversity – diversity in worship, liturgical texts, rites, calendars, fasting periods, regulatory instruments. The outcome of this comparison is in full agreement with the perception of these church regulatory instruments as ‘expressions of the eternal in the temporal. The temporal is the “how”, the mode of application’, of the absolute truth about the order of church life that these regulatory instruments express. The names of other textual juridical categories could be used – which are more closely associated with the various regulatory instruments of the churches – such as ‘Code’, ‘Constitution’, ‘Charter’, ‘Statute’, ‘Book’, or ‘Manual’. Since church law/order/polity receives Christian theological truth about the nature and structure of the church, and it then particularises it in its various regulatory instruments, it is understood as ‘applied ecclesiology’.
