This book represents a truly remarkable effort, not only in size, but also in the scope of its investigation, the profundity of much of its exposition, its range of reference and its organisational power. A synopsis of the argument of each chapter is helpfully provided at the beginning of the book and again, in expanded form, at the start of each chapter. The fruit of ten years’ labour, the volume is designed as the first of a projected three-volume ecclesiology. Professor Greggs’ ambition is most praiseworthy and his intellectual energy, grasp and grip are very impressive.
The title, The Priestly Catholicity of the Church, is arresting. True, the priestly character – in Christ the great high priest – of the whole body of the church runs right through the book, being unfolded through all the sub-themes, including baptism, Holy Communion, the communion of saints, intercessory prayer, thanksgiving and praise, sanctification, and love. But by the end of the book I remained unclear why catholicity was designated priestly, rather than being attached to one or both of the other two messianic offices of Jesus Christ (namely, the prophetic or royal), or indeed to all three. The conjunction seems a bit arbitrary, though certainly not misplaced. By the same token, priesthood could equally validly be conjoined with the other three credal notes of the church – unity, holiness and apostolicity – though these areas will apparently be addressed in the forthcoming two volumes (Greggs briefly defends his scheme on p. xxi, n. 3). Nevertheless, the exposition of Christ's priesthood (especially in chapter 2) is rich and helpful. ‘Catholicity’ seems to be used here in the sense of ‘authenticity’ (though not in those exact terms). Authenticity – the church as true to its vocation and mission from God – is a necessary but not sufficient condition of catholicity. The complementary dimensions of catholicity – universality and inclusiveness – are not developed. Whether this partial interpretation of catholicity is favoured because Greggs is intentionally writing a ‘Protestant’ ecclesiology, rather than an ecclesiology for the universal church, I am not sure.
Nevertheless, in the exposition of the chosen sub-themes there is much to warm the Christian heart and to stimulate the theological mind. The strengths of the substantive account of this ecclesiology include the following points:
(i) The commanding methodological placement of the Holy Spirit, whereby ecclesiology is derived from pneumatology, and the church is defined as ‘the event of the act of the Holy Spirit’, mediating Christ to the world. So, while Greggs proposes a dynamic, actualistic ecclesiology, it differs from the kerygmatic ecclesiology of Luther, where the church is creatura verbi divini, and from the eucharistic ecclesiology expounded by Afanasieff, de Lubac, Zizioulas and others. So in Greggs’ formulation, it is neither primarily the word nor the eucharist that creates the church, but the Holy Spirit. However, this stance seems to be in tension with the next point.
(ii) Greggs’ proper insistence that there is no unmediated presence, action or experience of God in the world (pp. 28–30), and that the church as a priesthood mediates Christ through the Holy Spirit to the world (p. 113). It is then puzzling to read of the ‘salvific work not of the church as an institution but of … the Holy Spirit’ (p. 38, n. 121). What are word and sacrament but divinely appointed means or media through which the Holy Spirit works, as Luther, de Lubac et al. would readily affirm? Word and sacrament cannot be ministered without an institutional framework, or chaos would ensue.
(iii) A determination to speak of the empirical church in time and space – the church ‘as we know it’ – rather than to embroider idealised notions of the church, ‘blueprint ecclesiologies’. But then Greggs does not identify the empirical church with the ‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic church’ of the creed, which he holds to be ‘hidden or invisible’ and ‘not institutional’. Thus he can speak of two churches which should never be mentioned separately and have to be related to each other (pp. l, liii, liv). However, he is spot on in insisting that a particular form or polity of the empirical church cannot be a condition of being recognised as a ‘true’ church (pp. 123, n. 39; 124).
(iv) The pervasive theme, powerfully articulated, of participation and communion, through the Holy Spirit, with God the Holy Trinity and with all members of the body of Christ.
(v) The emphasis on the priestly character of the whole Spirit-bearing body of the church, the laos, as opposed to priesthood being identified, in an exclusive way, with a clerical order. Personally, I think the more biblical formula ‘the royal, prophetic priesthood of the baptised’, drawn from 1 Peter 2, is preferable to the post-Reformation slogan ‘the priesthood of all believers’ (p. 28, n. 90) and more in tune with Greggs’ proper emphasis on the corporate nature of the church's priesthood.
(vi) The strong orientation of the church's priestly ministry and mission towards the world, rather than being turned inward upon itself and merely servicing its internal life. This is coupled with the refrain that appears throughout, taken from Martin Luther, depicting the unredeemed human condition as incurvatus in se, so that sanctification is the correction and reversal of this, to give a primary orientation to the needs and well-being of the other.
(vii) The stress on love as the culmination of priesthood, its highest expression and perfect work.
It is also pleasing that Greggs completely avoids gendered pronouns for God; and it seems appropriate that he consistently uses feminine pronouns for the individual human person as a corrective to past and still prevailing androcentrism (p. xxxii, n 19).
Greggs is obviously steeped in the theology of Karl Barth and, although he certainly does not follow him slavishly or uncritically, Barth is the most quoted non-biblical writer. Unfortunately, Barth also seems to have left his mark on the style, which sometimes involves long sentences, multiple sub-clauses and complex terminology in a Germanic mode. There is a sprinkling of inelegant expressions, such as ‘systematicity’ (pp. xxxvi, n. 32; xlii, n. 39), ‘livingness’ (p. xxxvii), ‘multivocity’ (p. xli), ‘primality’ (p. 33) and examples of frankly barbaric jargon, such as ‘creaturely media in the quotidian ontic reality of spatiotemporal existence’ (p. 132) and ‘internal abductive socio-poiesitic reality’ (p. 146). In addition to Barth, other oft-quoted twentieth-century writers are P. T. Forsyth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Thomas F. Torrance, though the range of other sources quoted or mentioned is huge, including modern Roman Catholic and Anglican writers.
What Greggs means by ‘Protestant’ and therefore by ‘Protestant ecclesiology’ is not fully explained, though there are some cryptic allusions. He demarcates his project from Roman Catholic and Orthodox ecclesiology, but then immediately asks, ‘[W]hat does it mean for those of us who believe that we receive justification only by grace through faith in accordance with the teaching of Scripture to continue to believe in “the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church”?’ (p. xix). Who are ‘those of us’ who so believe? Does he mean the worldwide Lutheran, Roman Catholic, Reformed, Methodist and Anglican Communions, all of whom have either signed or formally associated themselves with the 1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, with its explicit affirmation of justification only by grace through faith in accordance with scripture? How does Greggs understand the descriptor ‘Protestant’ against that background? He also identifies in passing with ‘evangelical’, ‘charismatic’ and ‘Holiness tradition’ groups. He is ambivalent about the ‘magisterial Reformation’, wanting to make common cause with it, but to distance himself over certain matters that we will come to shortly. I think he misunderstands (pp. xlvii–xlviii, n. 46) the term ‘magisterial’, seeming to take it as meaning authoritative teaching (‘magisterial’ in the modern sense), rather than referring to the connection of the Lutheran, Reformed and proto-Anglican churches with the civil power (‘the magistrate’).
There is quite a lot of setting up ‘straw men’ in order to have the satisfaction of knocking them down, including pejorative dismissals of respectable alternative avenues. The ‘essence of Christianity’ project is dismissed as ‘reductive’, ‘deductive’ and ‘speculative’ (pp. xxiv, 438), though its main proponents, notably Schleiermacher and Troeltsch, believed that it was in part empirical, and more recently the essence quest was given serious consideration by Stephen Sykes (Sykes, the leading Anglican ecclesiologist of the second half of the twentieth century, is not indexed). Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican ecclesiologies are the main targets, though their exponents are quoted approvingly in other contexts. ‘Standard’ or ‘traditional’ accounts of the church tend to be rejected, without being specified, for allegedly erecting their ecclesiologies on a foundation of claims about the structure of ordained ministry. Thus any ecclesiology ‘which (as is most usually the case) is orientated first on forms of church governance, institution, or even patterns of worship and behaviour, rather than speaking first of the gracious economy of God's salvation in the event of the church as an act of the Holy Spirit’ and any ecclesiology with a ‘primary orientation on polity and form’ are attacked here (p. 7; emphasis added). I know of no ecclesiology (as opposed to limited studies of specific issues) that does not take its rise from the gracious act of God in Jesus Christ for the salvation of the world. The rest of the Christian church has not gone as far wrong as Greggs likes to make out. ‘Institution’ is frequently a word of disparagement, and there is an animus against all churches that are wedded to a particular polity, whether presbyterian, episcopal or congregational, whatever their rationale for that may be. I entirely agree with Greggs that polity comes quite a long way down the ecclesiological line and should be seen as at best an inference from fundamental ecclesiology, and I also endorse his protest that polity should never be used to unchurch other Christian communities. However, I think it is a mistake to claim (echoing P. T. Forsyth and the late John Webster) that the gospel has a ‘self-organising’ power (e.g. p. 153). The Holy Spirit preaches the gospel through existing created means, and so the organisation of the gospel cannot but follow the contours of social reality, which means institutions of various and diverse kinds. There is no human social existence that is not institutional to some degree.
Greggs notes that Protestants have found it difficult to give a purely Protestant account of the church without drawing on Roman Catholic or Orthodox sources, as though this were a shortcoming (p. xxvi, n. 2). But ecclesiology has been done ecumenically for many decades now, and ecumenical theology can be seen as a subset of such ecclesiology. Of course, it is still possible and probably necessary to examine what is meant by a Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed or Methodist ecclesiology, in the sense of what particular emphases and what unique insights they can bring, in the spirit of receptive ecumenism, to the common enterprise. But I am afraid I cannot see how the Christian church is helped by elaborating at enormous length a self-consciously and intentionally ‘Protestant’ ecclesiology that is demarcated from and positioned over against the other main traditions of Christian theology. For example, much is made – perfectly properly – in this book of the munus triplex Christi as Prophet, Priest and King. This conceptuality is a striking example of ecumenical convergence extending over many centuries. The model of the threefold messianic office of Jesus Christ is latent in scripture and was adumbrated in patristic theology, elaborated by Calvin, applied to the church as Christ's body by Newman as a Roman Catholic, adopted by the Second Vatican Council nearly a century later and is now a received trope in ecumenical ecclesiological reflection. The concept of the munus triplex does not belong to any one strand of Christianity. We should strive to do justice to all the major traditions of the church, by personal engagement and close empathetic study and dialogue, but we should not be overprotective of any of them. Labels are invidious and increasingly meaningless. An over-against stance is not constructive and often rests on misunderstandings.
Finally, I must come to the most difficult part: Professor Greggs’ account of the sacraments and of the principle of sacramentality itself. There is much that is rich and rewarding in these two chapters (5 and 6), especially the account of communion with the triune God and with one another in the Holy Communion. Greggs rejects ‘sacrament’ as a genus, preferring to align baptism and the supper with other means of edification (he is ambivalent about the expression ‘means of grace’), especially prayer and worship; and he asks why, following the Lord's example, footwashing should not be put on the same level as the ‘sacraments’. At this point I would probably be looking for attention to the combination of dominical promise and dominical command in order to identify a sacrament among various ordinances (‘This is my body … Do this in remembrance of me’). One reason for Greggs’ diffidence about the word ‘sacrament’ is that he believes that it is ‘ambiguous and unbiblical’ (pp. 149, 154) – though he must know that sacramentum is how the Greek mysterion in Ephesians 5:32 was translated in the Vulgate.
He offers ‘a non-efficacious account of baptism’ (p. 196) and suggests that ‘[I]t might be wise to avoid, therefore, all speech of the sacraments as instrumental means of divine grace’, on the grounds that the Holy Spirit is the means by which grace is given to the believer (p. 160). The Thirty-nine Articles (1571) of the Church of England, an expression of Protestant theology, state that baptism is ‘a sign of Regeneration or new Birth, whereby, as by an instrument, they that receive Baptism rightly are grafted into the Church’, etc. (Article XXVII, emphasis added). Nevertheless, Greggs strongly promotes the semiotic and symbolic function of baptism; it is much more than an outward profession or an initiation rite. By baptism ‘we symbolize our active participation in Christ's humanity, our sharing in the body of Christ, and our entry into the priesthood of God's people’ (p. 174). Greggs rightly highlights prevenient grace, and it seems that for him the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit in the believer precedes baptism which then serves as its outward, symbolic expression: ‘the baptizand seeks to symbolize the already present power of the grace of the gospel in her life’ (p. 178; cf. p. 179: ‘In baptism, we symbolize …’). It symbolises the baptism of the Spirit that has already taken place (p. 195). I sense that the strong emphasis on prevenience, combined with the rejection of sacramental instrumentality, comes dangerously close to making baptism basically something that we do, a human work, rather than primarily a gift of God. However, Greggs helpfully underlines the significance of baptism for the community and not only for the candidate. He insists that baptism cannot be repeated and does not reject infant baptism.
In his exposition of the theology of Holy Communion, Greggs draws particularly on Zwingli. He wants to offer a ‘high memorialist’ and receptionist interpretation. Aspects of his exposition are indeed edifying and practically helpful, but the words ‘symbol’ and ‘symbolize’ dominate. The notion that a symbol ‘participates’ in what it symbolises is rejected. One risk, Greggs feels, in making the eucharist central in the church is that it immediately leads to questions of polity: who can preside? There is a constant refrain that Christ is not ‘in’ or especially ‘present to’ the bread and wine, and repeated warnings against any ‘repetition’ of the once-for-all sacrifice on the cross. But I doubt whether any current sacramental theology holds that Christ's body and blood are ‘materially’ (p. 218) ‘in’ the elements, or that the eucharistic sacrifice is meant as a repetition or re-enactment of Calvary. There are too many negatives, too much refighting the battles of long ago. The lurid language of feeding on Christ's flesh and blood in John 6 and in the eucharistic liturgies of the churches (including the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which Greggs quotes with approval: p. 227) refers to our true sacramental participation, through the Holy Spirit, but not without the created elements, in the sacrificial and victorious humanity of Jesus. In divine wisdom, the command and the promise are attached to created elements. To affirm the incarnation is to affirm the principle of sacramentality. The real communication of grace in conjunction with embodied means follows. And we may even take the next step of affirming – in fear and trembling – that the church as Christ's body is also sacramental. Professor Greggs offers his work to the Protestant world in faith, hope and charity (p. 455). I offer this critical appreciation in the very same spirit. This has been the most difficult review that I have ever had to write in forty years of reviewing theology. I hope there are some thoughts here that the gifted author will feel able to ponder as he grapples with the challenge of the succeeding volumes.
