Abstract
This deceptively slim volume – richly resourced by historical, dogmatic, and ethnographic sources – arises from the author being asked to teach a course in global Christianity and having felt distinctly unprepared for the task. Contesting the Body of Christ is the result of Werntz’s pilgrimage of discovery: ‘a book born out of a desire not to teach but to learn’ (p. 3). It is a work of ecclesiological testimony, pursuing stories of the Spirit’s work to form a body in particular times and places amid and despite the changes and chances of a tumultuous century.
The book’s organization is familiar, following the Creed’s marks: one, holy, catholic, apostolic. The approach is perhaps less commonplace. Werntz’s wager is that any churches confessing Christ as Lord, of whatever denominational heritage, are communities we may look to for signs of the Spirit’s life, discerned under the rubric of the four marks.
Contemplating the church’s oneness, we read parallel journeys of the Roman Catholic Church, to and beyond Vatican II, and the World Council of Churches. The former saw unity ‘not as an achievement but as a gift’; for the latter ‘unity might be discovered. . . in the midst of a fractured Christianity’ (p. 17, italics original). But we’re urged to reckon with other trends: towards ‘spiritual unity’ (Pentecostal movements), ‘unity of missions’, or ‘hermeneutical unity’ (Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism). The mark of holiness is both gift and task, and sought, in a century of populism, as ‘a property of the whole church’ (p. 57). To this end, Werntz tracks liturgical renewal and lay participation. So too, struggles for ‘national holiness’ in Orthodoxy (‘both . . . used by and using political life’, p. 73) and the Social Gospel (in which, as Black Social Gospel figures observed, ‘it became evident that not all of the social order was in view’ (p. 75).
The church’s catholicity can be understood through classical accounts emphasizing ‘original deposit’ or ‘ubiquity’, yet both impulses are now expressed with radical intensity. ‘Originalism’ is seen in various movements of restoration; comprehensiveness in concerns for contextualisation, including the need to address ‘material conditions affecting how the Christian faith is confessed’ (p. 116) animating both liberation theologies and prosperity gospel. Considering apostolicity, next, means turning not simply to questions of institutional continuity or missiology, but to moral questions and material culture (including the effect of mass communication).
A concluding ‘modest proposal’ is structured around pairings of the marks with virtues necessary for them to be sustained. Most of all, these virtues help us to live together as the body of Christ in time. Creatures of time, we cannot go back behind the complexity of the church as it actually exists, nor rush ahead. To quote that classic pilgrim’s tale, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt: ‘We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. . . We’ve got to go through it!’
Given the scope, no reader could possibly go along with every description nor evaluation. Nevertheless, we can be grateful that Werntz has managed somehow to write a book about the church in the twentieth century that is both sober about ecclesial failure and ecumenical frailty and persuasively hopeful, given the promised presence of the church’s Lord with his people. Attentive to the bewildering breadth of the church in our time, besides its manifold contradictions, Contesting the Body of Christ yet invites us to trace in and through it all the variegated expression of the singular work of the Spirit of God.