This volume by Avis, eminent ecclesiologist and long-term ecumenist, marks the start of a projected multi-volume series in a ‘quest for the true foundation of the Christian church’ (p x). Intended as an ecumenical, practical and missional theology contributing to the repentance and reform of the current Church, it is the fruit of more than three decades of reflection.
Future works promise discussion of revelation, ministry, sacraments, liturgy and authority. This volume deals with just two questions. First, did Jesus intend to found the Church and, if so, in what form? Second, how did New Testament writers and Western theologians in the last two centuries understand the relationship between Jesus and the Church? While exploring these questions, Avis makes bold pledges to extricate the gospel from a superseded eschatological world-view; promises to bridge the gaps between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith, between Judaism and Christianity, and between institutional authority, tradition and academic critique; and to offer advice on how Christians should respond to the often-painful question of change and development within the Church. Most of these topics are indeed touched upon, some in detail. Though there is a recurrent attempt to avoid portraying the Church as superseding God's covenant with Israel, the question of how Christianity should now relate to Judaism is not discussed.
Chapter 1 introduces the first half of the book, which explores the relationship between Jesus and the Church as found in the New Testament. Avis accepts Paul's description of Jesus as the Church's foundation stone (1 Corinthians 3:11) but urges that the pluralism of modern Christianity and the advent of the historical-critical method necessitate humility in the writing of ecclesiology. Avis endorses Rudolph Bultmann's scepticism about being able to identify the historical Jesus and his intentions: the Church is built on the faith-fuelled proclamation of the risen Christ (and the instantiation of this proclamation in the sacramental and pastoral ministry of the Christian community) rather than on the results of historical enquiry alone. Instead of a dogmatic or historical approach, Avis promises a critical realist ecclesiology that puts forward only ‘provisional conclusions’ (p 5).
Chapter 2 takes a brisk trot through nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship concerning the unquestionably eschatological, kingdom-focused content of Jesus’ teaching. This leads Avis to answer the question of whether Jesus intended the institution of the Church with a bold ‘no’. Ecclesial polities seeking to root themselves in a putative dominical command are ruled out. Instead, a chastened ecclesiology emerges. Avis favours the World Council of Churches’ Lima statement, which speaks of certain ‘permanent characteristics’ that show continuity with the life and ministry of Jesus. These including baptism, the Eucharist, care of the sick, and preaching. Even though we cannot find a blueprint for the Church in the teaching of Jesus, we can identify a trajectory, a ‘minimal ecclesial purpose for his followers’ (p 28). Further, Avis is keen that we recognise that such a Church emerges within an inaugurated eschatology that is the fruition of God's longer-term history of covenantal interaction with Israel.
Chapter 3 turns to a discussion of three major New Testament terms used to describe this eschatological community: ecclesia, koinonia and ‘kingdom’. Avis also dwells on the corporate implications of the prepositional phrases ‘in’, ‘with’ and ‘into Christ’. He emphasises that ecclesia designates those ‘called together’ and that the term is in continuity with what the Septuagint means when it describes the Jewish people as a gathered people. Ecclesia does not therefore mean those called out of the world, but rather those called together in service of God in the world. In passing, Avis dismisses the significance of Matthew 16:18 (‘You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church’) as a post-Easter invention, arguing that ‘rock’ must be understand as the act of Peter's confession, rather than his person.
Chapter 4 broadens to a study of a select number of mutually enriching images or symbols, found in Paul and the wider New Testament, concerning the relationship between Christ and the Church. The most important of these is the ‘body of Christ’, Paul's vision of the eschatological Christian community as Christ's corporeal presence on earth. Avis suggests that this concept emerged from a combination of Paul's absorption of the language of the Last Supper, Stoic thought and personal reflection on his road to Damascus encounter (where the risen Christ identified himself with those whom Paul was persecuting). Also discussed is the image, continuous with the Old Testament, of the Church as the ‘people of God’, a ‘royal priesthood’, the ‘family/household of God’ (which Avis cautions against equating with the modern nuclear family), ‘friends’, ‘temple’, ‘bride’ and ‘new humanity’.
The second half of the book shifts to a study of twentieth-century protestant, Catholic and Anglican ecclesiologies. Chapter 6 reviews protestant theology from Schleiermacher to Pannenberg, largely showing that, though its thinking tends to be congenial to historical-critical scepticism by shifting the focus towards inner, emotional or existential notions of faith, this leaves protestant thinkers at a loss when it comes to the role of sacraments, questions of institutional continuity or even divine agency. The resulting protestant concept of church often seems to resemble a mere fellowship of individuals moved by the example or (at best for Avis) the ‘character’ of Christ. Harnack, Troeltsch, Brunner and Moltmann are given short shrift. Barth's rediscovery of the role of the Holy Spirit as vivifying the Christian community in part outweighs his anti-historicism; Tillich and Pannenberg are said to offer promising insights.
In Chapter 7, Avis turns his gaze towards Roman Catholicism, which is painted, at an official level, as a dismal failure to recognise the last two centuries of historical research (the author expresses no warmth for the writings of the recent Pope Benedict). Besides the official line, he parses the work of Catholic theologians who attempted to engage with historical research, many of whom were censured for ‘Modernism’. In theologians of the latter part of the twentieth century (Schillebeeckx and Küng), a minimalist ecclesiology emerges that accepts that the Church as it now exists cannot be said to have been intended by Jesus, but that it is emergent from and congruent with his teaching and praxis. In the liberation theologian Boff, the Church is revealed as a necessary but morally ambiguous institution that must ever be subject to critique. Avis concludes with Walter Kasper, with whom he clearly has most affinity. Kasper allows that the ministry of the pre-Easter Jesus was solely to the lost sheep of Israel, but that building upon the gathering at the Last Supper there emerged a post-Easter community that is ‘the sign, instrument and foretaste of the eschatological gathering of God's people’ (p 175).
In a briefer chapter, Avis treats Anglican theologians of the last century. As one would expect, modernist, catholic and reformed sensibilities tug in different directions. In large part, though, Anglican scholarship has made its peace with the eschatological colouring of the New Testament. Anglican thinkers have generally accepted that Jesus did not intend to found the Church as we know it, but have instead proposed a variety of organic models which saw the Church as emergent from Jesus’ earthly life and ministry.
Though these three chapters provide obvious intellectual foundations for Avis's project, the centre of gravity is firmly in the work of mid- to late twentieth-century European white men. Will the voices of twenty-first-century Pentecostal, African, Asian or women theologians be heard in future volumes, as Avis promises for orthodoxy?
Avis concludes with a somewhat breathless sketch of his own ecclesiology, much of which has already been hinted at in previous chapters. He takes Bultmann's observation, on the shift in the Gospels from Jesus-as-proclaimer to Jesus-as-proclamation, as the scaffold of a dynamic ecclesiology. In the life and ministry of Jesus, God's covenant with Israel is renewed. Jesus embodies the perfect reception of, and response to, divine love; he himself manifests God's kingdom. His early followers are the remnant of faithful Israel responding to God's reign. They are incorporated into Jesus’ body through the Last Supper. After Easter, the Eucharist and baptism continue to unite believers to one another and with Christ. Believers constitute a new spiritual temple in which the messianic hopes of the Old Testament, for Israel and the world, are being fulfilled. To belong to the Church means to participate in an extended paschal mystery that stretches back into the pre-Easter life of Jesus and continues into the future as an institution that is ever developing and ever in need of reform. Avis offers a compelling, critical and strongly corporate vision of a Church contiguous with the earthly life of Jesus, which it is to be hoped that future volumes will expand upon.
