“Contesting the Body” Review at Mere Orthodoxy
I have a review of Myles Werntz’s Contesting the Body of Christ: Ecclesiology’s Revolutionary Century up at Mere Orthodoxy.
“I believe in the church.”
This article of the Christian faith seems unusual compared to others in the church’s creeds. Our faith, like everything else about us, is fallible and marked by sin. Still, this is a confession of God’s divine action and preservation of Christ’s body. There is a church, and it is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. But what does this pronouncement look like in practice? The early twentieth century’s ecumenical movement had promising energy, but it has largely faded. Now, after a century marked by fragmentation, schism, and deepening denominational stratification, discussions of the church and its oneness seem exhausting and exhausted…
The church is one because it is the body of Christ animated by His Spirit. Its unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity are not external additions; they arise from its very life. To be the church is to be these marks. With this overall thesis in mind, Werntz traces the ways different twentieth-century Christian traditions “contested” or worked out what the church’s essence meant for their lives and practices.
