The discipline of ecclesiology has always been implicit in the wider theological enterprise but in the twentieth century, not least through the influence of the ecumenical movement, it has come to prominence and become central to theology as a whole. Communitarian strands in contemporary theology have also helped to raise its profile. So the time is ripe for a major survey to see where we have got to, and this volume is it.

The book has 650 pages, 28 chapters, 26 contributors from the USA, Germany, Rome, Australia, UK, Ireland, France and Singapore. There are five substantial essays on the biblical foundations, nine essays on the Christian tradition beginning with the early church, Orthodoxy, medieval Catholicism, and reaching through the Reformation period to Anglican, Roman Catholic, Baptist, Methodist and Pentecostal ecclesiologies. The chapter on Anglican ecclesiology by Avis will be of especial interest to readers of this journal, in which he weighs up how far it should be described as Protestant and how far as Catholic, with a depth of referencing to Reformation and Caroline theologians. The issue of how far the Anglican Communion makes ecclesiological sense is briefly considered, but contemporary Evangelical perspectives do not receive much attention.

Major modern ecclesiologists have their own chapters, including Barth, Congar, de Lubac, Rahner, Ratzinger, Zizioulos, Pannenberg and Rowan Williams (but no Moltmann). Contemporary movements in ecclesiology including feminist critiques, social science perspectives, liberation theology and Asian and African perspectives (though none from theologians currently working in Africa or the Indian sub-continent). There are no dedicated chapters on Radical Orthodoxy or ecumenical theology or recent missiology (despite the latter being highlighted in the introduction), which means the coverage of the volume is not quite comprehensive. The chapter on African ecclesiology is restricted to Roman Catholicism.

As a whole the book is a considerable achievement. The editor Paul Avis has commissioned and compiled a rich and varied collection. He describes the production of the book as ‘a long haul’ and it is not hard to imagine why this was so. It is a volume of broad yet detailed scope which will become a standard reference book for this field of theology. He is very well qualified for the task, having produced a string of clearly written and informative ecclesiological publications based on his experience as General Secretary of the Council for Christian Unity of the Church of England and on his expertise in historical theology (with published studies of Charles Gore, Anglican authority in the Reformation period, the pre-Reformation Conciliar movement, amongst much else), and as editor of the journal Ecclesiology.

The introduction is lively and engaging and opens up some key issues. Ecclesiology is ‘comparative, critical and constructive reflection on the dominant paradigms of the identity of the church’ (p. 3). In many ways it is the flip side of missiology because mission is ‘the essential work of the church’ (p. 3). The church finds itself through mission and worship (p. 4). But contingency also shapes the church (p. 9), hence many chapters devoted to historical presentation. This points to one of the major divides within the discipline, between the historicists and theoreticians, as it were, seen within the biblical chapters where a choice has to be made between historical and sociological analysis on the one hand and literary approaches on the other. The chapter on the Johannine literature, for example, is firmly of the latter, which brings out the centrality of the Church in the fourth gospel despite the fact that it does not use the term ‘ecclesia’. Is this divide a weakness or a strength within ecclesiology? We will return to this question below.

As always in a review of this kind of book it is possible to describe only a few of its highlights. One is the way Edward Adams on the Pauline literature interestingly pushes back on the dominant view of his ecclesiology being of the household or ‘house church’ model. Instead Adams argues for a more diversified picture, with some churches meeting in shops or workshops of small traders and craftsmen, as well as in inns, storehouses, stables and meeting halls (p. 139). Gerald O’Collins also describes how the general epistles reveal a diversity of church life: the epistle of James sees the church as a Jewish Christian synagogue rooted in the Wisdom tradition (p. 148); I Peter surprisingly omits images of the church as the body of Christ or temple of the Holy Spirit. All the epistles, though, share a concern for the unity of this diverse church. Mark Edwards reminds us that we know a lot less about the earliest churches than we thought and provides a very positive assessment of the contribution of Pope Gregory the Great (p. 178). Andrew Louth describes how Orthodox ecclesiology has been dominated by the idea of a ‘symphonia’ between church and empire and then church and state in later centuries (p. 183).

Many of the chapters remark on how little explicit ecclesiology there was in the first millennium and how it is a recent innovation as a distinct discipline. This raises a number of questions: why now? Is it legitimate? If so, how is it to be authoritative? One answer to the first question would be that the loosening of links between church and state in many parts of the world has required the church to develop a greater sense of its distinct nature and identity apart from that of the host society. This helps to answer the second question, which is also answered by the book’s uncovering of implicit ecclesiology within so much of Christian tradition. As for the third question there are, as already hinted, two broad types of approach within the discipline, one based on the historical study of the contingencies of history and the way it has produced untidy forms of church life that no one would design if starting from scratch (Anglicanism being a good example of this). The other school of thought trained in the discipline of abstract philosophical thinking takes a theoretical approach, marshalling ideal concepts of church life and assembling them in systematic theologies. Ecumenical theology often demonstrates the latter, whereas pastoral and practical theology is based on the former. The two schools are often in tension with each other, as shown by Neil Ormerod’s essay on the contrasts between social scientific and theological approaches to ecclesiology.

Is this a fundamental weakness of ecclesiology, that it is trying to combine the ying with the yang of theology in general? Not necessarily. Many areas of theology are now multi-disciplinary and some of the most interesting and creative work comes out of the interchange between those disciplines. Ecclesiology should be able to benefit from this kind of approach, if the historians and the systematicians can be persuaded to engage closely with each other in a sustained and open-ended way. This book reveals the existence of these different schools (and some others) and so makes plain what otherwise might remain hidden. It shows that ecclesiology is deeply interdisciplinary and therefore needs to embrace and work with this. If it does so its future role in the church could be immensely creative and constructive.