Roger Owens’ efforts to describe what constitutes the church as God's life in the world is an ambitious project. His conviction that ‘the church's participation in God is none other than Christ's practicing himself as the embodied practices of the church’ (p. 183) requires a lot of unpacking: space is at a premium in this slim volume. He clarifies and develops this point by sticking closely to the questions that have led this discussion to arise: what makes the church different from any other voluntary association? How do the practices of the church relate to what God is doing in the world? The challenge that Owens has set himself is to answer these questions in ways that avoid the reductionism he sees in many contemporary ecclesiologies, which he believes to be commonly essentialist and thus taking insufficient account of our embodied, creaturely nature. In particular, he aims to demonstrate how Christ is meaningfully in this material world.
The modern ecclesiologies under inspection take one of two forms: overly abstract formal doctrines, that pay little attention to living communities and risk portraying the church as a rather static presence of God, or overly interiorized pietisms that sequester the centre of faith into a private personal realm where the importance of public communal action and embodied living is unclear at best. Neither of these takes creatureliness seriously enough for Owens. He is concerned to readdress this deficiency by calling the emphasis back to the Chalcedonian orthodoxy that is the church's touchstone for understanding human and divine inter-relation. This being the case, the church must be both human and divine in a way analogous to, though not identical with, Christ's hypostatic union: it must acknowledge its proper humanity as it acknowledges the humanity of Christ and it must acknowledge its divine nature as it acknowledges the divinity of Christ.
Owens’ chief argument against essentialist ecclesiologies is that they cannot give an account of the material and shape of the church. Bodies have particular and visible shapes and the body of Christ must therefore have a particular shape in this world. For Owens church practices, specifically the Eucharist and preaching, are God sharing his life, communicating with humanity. These practices constitute the church because God communicates through them in a form humanity can understand. In his discussion of the Eucharist, Owens employs McCabe's account of the sacrament as a new language that brings an end to exclusion. Sharing in the body and blood gives new tools of communication. These tools are the divine life given in a form humans can accept. Because God is not limited like us, this new divine language opens up space for all and overcomes human predispositions for exclusivity. Christ's body is present and unites all to him.
In preaching, what is proclaimed is not a transmitting of something that is absent. Rather it is the same Word made flesh present in words heard and enacted. Owens argues for preaching as a central church practice on the grounds that it is not an independent trade of the pastor but an activity of the whole church. The preaching of the pastor is not the beginning of proclamation because the church, which already exists, calls for this preaching. All members preach, but the pastor's preaching is a specialised division of this. That Owens felt the need to argue for preaching as legitimately a central practice demonstrates sensitivity to the status it holds in various traditions. Given Owens’ commitment to arguing for the material, visible, and concrete nature of the church it would have been beneficial to explore some specific examples of where these material, visible, and concrete communities disagree in practice. The discussions of Eucharist and preaching would have been fertile soil for this.
That being said, the breadth of engagement with a diverse range of interlocutors is a striking feature of this book. There are so many that the book cannot do justice to them all whilst maintaining the shape of its argument. In particular Schleiermacher suffers a somewhat summary treatment, which occludes many of the interesting questions that led him to make the moves he did. More recent interlocutors, Gustafson and Milbank particularly, receive fairer treatment. The attention paid to ancient writers however is very refreshing, particularly in a book on ecclesiology, which represents a challenge to the myopia of modern ecclesiologies.
Furthermore the book clings tenaciously to its roots in living worshiping congregation and community. Evidence from Owens’ own church, where he is co-pastor, and from the specific history of his Methodist tradition, informs and elucidates what participation in the life of God looks like with regard to the concrete practices of the church. This rooting in a real community will make this book revitalising for ministers and priests. Those with an interest in ecumenism will find less here than may be expected from a book on ecclesiology but may find other sources within that will broaden their horizons.
On the whole this is a constructive, instructive and well-developed piece of theology. The thought worlds that have dominated this area of theology have been successfully brought into question and the subject has been reconnected with roots in the ancient church and Chalcedonian thinking that is the benchmark of all Christian speech and practice. There is more work to do in this area, more than this text could attempt, particularly attention to the relationship between the church's participation in God and the rest of creation, but the debate has moved on considerably from where it was. Other theologians would do well to investigate the fields of enquiry opened up by this book because they impact on all areas of theology, given that it is concerned fundamentally with how God is in the world.
