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J. I. Packer has observed that Christians do not have license to ignore theology; insofar as we are Christians, we must think theologically, however good or bad, informed or misinformed that thinking may be. The same is true, he would add, of biblical study. What is striking and disturbing today is the gap—the gulf—between the formal academic disciplines of theology and biblical studies and the practice of those disciplines in the life of the church. Rather than attempting an account of how we got in this fix, I would like to point to some Exit doors. I am writing not as a scholar but rather as an interested reader. The books under review deserve extended scholarly engagement; what I am offering instead is an incitement, a provocation challenging others more qualified for the task to recognize the enormous opportunity represented by such books.
Where three are gatheredMiroslav Volf has been until recently professor of systematic theology at Fuller Theological Seminary and has now accepted a position at Yale Divinity School. He is familiar to readers of Books & Culture as the author of Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation. His new book, After Our Likeness: The Church As the Image of the Trinity, is a translation from the original German edition, which was in turn based on Volf's Habilitationsschrift (the so-called second doctoral dissertation in the German system) at the University of Tubingen, supervised by Jurgen Moltmann. Volf's book is the first volume in Eerdmans's series Sacra Doctrina: Christian Theology for a Postmodern Age, under the general editorship of Alan G. Padgett.
After Our Likeness makes a case for a particular understanding of the nature of the church, as exemplified in the free church tradition. But Volf makes that case in a most unusual way: in an ecumenical dialogue with Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger and the Orthodox Metropolitan John D. Zizioulas. Volf's own "point of departure" in this conversation, he explains, "is the thought of the first Baptist, John Smyth, and the notion of church as 'gathered community' that he shared with the Radical Reformers." And throughout, Volf grounds his exposition in Scripture.
As its subtitle suggests, After Our Likeness is particularly concerned with the way in which contending ecclesiologies are related to differing understandings of the Trinity. Conceived one way, Trinitarian persons and relations underwrite a church structure characterized by "a pyramidal dominance of the one (so Ratzinger)"; seen from another angle, "a hierarchical bipolarity between the one and the many (so Zizioulas)." Against these perspectives Volf poses a view of Trinitarian relations—and thus of the ecclesial community—as "a polycentric and symmetrical reciprocity of the many. It should be clear from this summary why Volf's academic peers will be reading his book—and indeed, in November of 1997, when the book was just off the press, a session at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature was devoted to After Our Likeness. (See also the fine review by John W. Stewart of Princeton Theological Seminary in the Christian Century, May 20-27, 1998, p. 541.)
But what about the rest of us? Why should a pastor or a professor of political science, a high school vice principal or a student on her way to becoming a medical missionary, a historian or a religion writer for the local paper—why should anyone, in short, who is not on a theological faculty bother to open this book? Who else would have any interest in following abstruse arguments about the Trinity? Who else has time for lengthy analysis of Catholic, Orthodox, and free church ecclesiologies?
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