Dulles’ Models of the Church has proved an enduring text for introducing the study of ecclesiology, setting out a readily memorable typology of approaches that also provides guidance for their evaluation and a narrative of their development. Fifty years on from its original publication, Emerton cites it as ‘directly comparable’ to his own book, which attempts to fulfil a similar function in the light of the extensive work on ecclesiology that has been taking place during the intervening period (pp. 18–19).

Like the original version of Models of the Church, Types of Ecclesiology works with a fivefold typology. Yet there are some immediate differences. To begin with, Dulles was attempting a sketch of the broad sweep of ecclesiological developments in Western theology from the sixteenth century to the present. Although Emerton occasionally mentions earlier authors, the bulk of this study deals with figures written in the last fifty years. Moreover, while Dulles’ presentation of his first three models, institution, mystical body and sacrament, exhibited something of the character of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, Emerton’s typology is driven much more comprehensively by the search for balance on a critical ecclesiological question: how to give an adequate account of the church as both belonging to the work of God for the world’s salvation and constituting a site of human agency and interaction, while consistently maintaining ‘the asymmetrical relationship of divine and human togetherness in the church’s being’ (p. 11).

After the first, introductory chapter, there is a chapter for each of Emerton’s five types of ecclesiology. The first type, ‘empirical ecclesiology’, sits at one end of his spectrum, as preoccupied with the church as an entity whose identity can and must be captured through the disciplines of historical and social-scientific study, including, in influential recent examples, ethnography. The second, ‘performative ecclesiology’, by attending to the configuration of the church’s identity-conferring actions as responding to God’s work in Christ gives greater scope for divine agency, yet may struggle to uphold its primacy for the theological description of the church. Moving towards the other end of the spectrum, Emerton’s third type is identified as ‘communion ecclesiology’, where some form of social trinitarianism enables a strong claim about the relation between God’s being and the life of the church while still locating that life in the ordinary flows of human history. Continuing in the same direction, the fourth type, ‘ideal ecclesiology’, also insisting on the primacy of an account of divine action for understanding the church, stresses by contrast the discontinuity between divine and ecclesial life, thereby risking the eclipse of the latter. The final type, ‘ecclesiological ecclesiology’, is the one that Emerton advocates as most effectively addressing the priority of divine action for a properly theological account of the church’s being while also upholding the necessity of ‘thick’ description of the church in its concrete practices for completing that account.

The strength of the book lies in showing how questions about the relation between divine and human agency keep recurring in influential contributions to ecclesiology since the 1970s, highlighting the corresponding danger of failing to give due weight either to the church as divine work or as an element of human society. Emerton is able to use this central concern as a lens for analysing, comparing and evaluating many of the authors likely to figure on reading lists in British and North American universities and seminaries for courses on the doctrine of the church. As such, this volume fulfils his hope of providing ‘a constructive orientation to the field of contemporary ecclesiology’ (p. xvi). Emerton is an accessible and insightful guide, who will help students to gauge what is at stake in contrasting approaches.

What is more questionable is the attempt to make this investigation a basis for a comprehensive typology. Part of the issue here is the diversity of authors who appear under the same type: Hooker, Hauerwas and Hardy, for instance, as examples of performative ecclesiology, and Webster, Milbank, Ratzinger and Barth as examples of ideal ecclesiology. The divergences between them on other theological axes generate inevitable difficulties in trying to identify the common areas of weakness for all cases of the relevant type. In the final, evaluative section of each chapter, repeated appeals are made to what the reader might ‘worry’ about regarding the collective approach presented, in a way that at times appears equivocal regarding the extent to which an overt critique of individual theologians is being offered. Finally, the case for the superiority of the ecclesiological ecclesiology presented in the final chapter, via sustained expositions of Bonhoeffer and Tom Greggs, will not convince all. Can the balance that is sought be lost or found by decisions of methodological framework alone, or is it as much – or more – a matter of how the ecclesiological picture is then filled out?