Myles Werntz’s bold intervention into the field of ecclesiology has its genesis in his experience of ‘coming up short’, when brought to recognise a lacuna in his knowledge of global Christianity by an assignment to teach a course on it (p. 2). Faced with this realisation, he endeavoured to range far more widely in his engagement with varieties and expressions of Christianity and of the Christian community. In this regard, the project bears the mark of all the best scholarship: an outgrowth of the scholar’s curiosity aiming to learn something not already known. The result is a wide-ranging, but focused study on how the Christian churches have endeavoured (and still endeavour) to make sense of themselves and their identity, even amid realities that would seem to belie that self-understanding. It is wide-ranging in that Werntz draws from an impressive array of geographic and denominational perspectives, particularly Catholic, Orthodox, and Pentecostal Christianities. It is focused in that it takes as its organising framework the four classical notae ecclesiae of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed: unity, sanctity, catholicity, and apostolicity.
Each chapter takes one of these notes and considers how it has been variously understood among the Christian churches. The consideration of unity traces trajectories in Catholicism (beginning with an ecumenism of return to the ‘one true church’ to the embrace of other communities as composed of separated siblings), in the ecumenical movement and especially the World Council of Churches, to the commitments of the Eastern Orthodox, to a pneumatologically-conceived unity among Pentecostal Churches, to the hermeneutical unity proposed by early fundamentalism. Along the way, considerations of challenges to unity, such as racism and Christian nationalism, receive attention.
The church’s holiness is traced in its liturgical and political contours especially, along with considerations of how the Pentecostal traditions add physical healing to the mix of assessing sanctity, and how various churches (specifically, the Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, and the United Church of Canada) have struggled to reckon with the failures of holiness that trouble their pasts.
Catholicity is considered under the rubric of an openness to the whole, which opens up space for engagements with globalisation, the economic analysis brought into focus by traditions of Latin American liberation theology, and questions of inculturation and mission. I was left wondering why mission was considered here rather than as a dimension of apostolicity, though this also serves to show just how mutually implicating these notes are – a refrain to which Werntz frequently returns.
The discussion of apostolicity involves such expected questions as that of apostolic succession, while also ranging into such topics as the affirmation of LGBTQ Christians (though the latter is raised only to receive a non-committal answer), and is principally concerned with the relationship of the church of the present to both its foundational past and its anticipated future.
Werntz’s concluding reflection, ‘A Modest Proposal for the Twenty-First-Century Church’, evinces genuine creativity, weaving its way through an extended metaphor of the church as ‘living sacrifice’, while considering the notes of the church in the context of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, and the practical virtues of temperance (unity), prudence (sanctity), fortitude (catholicity), and justice (apostolicity).
Two features of this book deserve particular praise. The first is its ambition to break out of the constraints of geographic and denominational parochialisms. While this is directly related to what I consider the book’s principal shortcoming (see below), it still merits praise for its motivating impulse. The second is a commitment to methodological empiricism. Werntz is explicit in his assumption that a community that claims to be a church of Jesus Christ is ‘guilty until proven innocent’ (p. 6). In other words, he avoids ‘offering evaluative statements about whether or not a church counts as exercising unity, holiness, catholicity, or apostolicity’, and instead ‘presume[s] that if they confess Christ in the flesh (a work made possible only by the work of the Holy Spirit), they are frail members of Christ’s body and, by the Spirit’s work, do exhibit these things in some fashion’ (p. 158). This opens the space for questions about the marks of the church that are now ‘born out of curiosity [rather than suspicion], asking how this is so rather than presuming it is not so’ (p. 8).
For all these commendable features, the book still falls short in its execution. In particular, and somewhat endemically, nearly every discussion of Catholic theology evinced misunderstandings both of the material content of Catholic teaching and of the formal dynamics of how the Catholic Church understands its magisterium to function. Examples include the distinction between ordained ministers and the lay faithful in liturgical assemblies, the status of Thomas Aquinas within Catholic theology, the relative authority of different sorts of ecclesiastical documents, the relationship between Vatican II and the meetings of the Latin American and Caribbean Episcopal Conference, the question of to whom apostolic succession applies, along with a forgetfulness of the witness of women religious, and the contents of such conciliar documents as Sacrosanctum Concilium and Unitatis Redintegratio. Recognising this raised the question for me of how accurate the presentations of other traditions with which I was less familiar (namely Pentecostalism) were. Perhaps, and hopefully, these discussions were perfectly accurate, but I was left wondering.
As I noted above, these shortcomings are perhaps related to the book’s great strength. It is commendable to reach beyond the confines of one’s own tradition and engage widely. But significant misunderstandings remain a hazard for anyone who is self-taught in a tradition in which they have not received significant formation. For all that, to remain enclosed in one’s parochial horizons is no better as an alternative. Werntz’s title speaks of contestation. It is only through putting ideas out there that such contestation and correction can occur. For all its shortcomings, this book at least beckons this needful conversation.
