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Book Review: MIROSLAV VOLF, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity.
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan/ Cambridge, UK, 1998.
ISBN 0-8028-4440-5 (pbk). Pp. xii + 314.
The name of Miroslav Volf is becoming increasingly well known in the theological world. He comes from Eastern Europe (Croatia), has lived and studied in Western Europe (Germany), and has lived and worked on both sides of the USA (Fuller Seminary and Yale Divinity School). In August 2008 he will visit Melbourne; those who know his work will not want to miss him.
Other publications by Volf, notably Exclusion and Embrace (1996) and the recent The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World (2006), have been very well received. He writes not only on topics of systematic theology but also on issues of conflict resolution and peace-making, in which he has had first-hand experience.
After Our Likeness won the Christianity Today book award. It is one of the key works on the doctrine of the church published in the last ten years. It is also an important book in the area of trinitarian theology. The claim he makes is that there is a correspondence between the triune being of God and the differentiated unity of the church. This book is exactly what Colin Gunton called for some years ago when he lamented that our understanding of the church had suffered from an insufficient grounding in the being of God as triune. Gunton himself had argued for a strongly ontological view of the church as a finite or temporal echo of the trinitarian life of God. This is a large claim to make about this imperfect, broken community that we know as the church.
To think about the church in this way is not merely to say that the Holy Trinity is a model or example for the church to try to emulate. For Volf, the Trinity is a source of this emulation. The church does not, after all, actualise its proper being simply by human effort but by what God constitutes it to be and by grace enables it to become, albeit imperfectly, in its empirical life. This book is about the ecclesiality of the church: what makes the church the church.
Christian life, ecclesial life, is not only about what God demands but what God gives, indeed who God is. As Volf writes in a more recent work [God’s Life in Trinity, co-edited with Michael Welker, Fortress, 2006], the beginning of our Christian journey in baptism is our entry into communion with God and its end is the beginning of perfect communion with God. Communion is the key theological term; it has three aspects: the communion between the Persons of the Holy Trinity, the communion which God grants us in our ecclesial life, and the communion in which the churches live despite their separateness and which they are called to make more visible.
The first part of the book is an exploration of the church as a communion, which Volf undertakes in a highly instructive critical engagement with two of the most able representatives of this way of understanding the church: John Zizioulas (Greek Orthodox) and Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI). His critical view of their under standing of the church stems from their respective understanding of the Trinity. In Ratzinger’s case it leads to a monistic view of the church, in which the relations between the Persons of the Trinity have no structural consequences for the church (71). In Zizioulas’s case, the trinitarian relations are understood too asymmetrically, resulting in a view of the church in which the laity are one-sidedly constituted as an ecclesial communion by the bishop (106).
In the second part of the book Volf discusses a range of specific questions about the church: the church as God’s eschatological new creation, the relation between the local church and the whole church of God, the relation between persons and the church, the structures of the church, and the catholicity of the church, among others. One of the chapters in this part of the book is entitled ‘Trinity and Church’. The presupposition here is that, despite the difference between God and creaturely reality, in this created world there must still be ‘broken creaturely correspondences’ to the triune being of God (192). God is the ground of both the unity and the multiplicity of the church, indeed of the world.
Volf argues that the churches find their identity in their relation to the one eschatological people of God, the church, that is in their relation to their future as the one people of God. This has implications for their relations to each other in the present. It follows that a church that is not ecumenical is a contradiction in terms. Churches can no more live in isolation than human persons can. Ecclesially speaking, only a communion can correspond to the Trinity (207). There must be an openness of churches to each other that echoes the openness of the trinitarian Persons to each other and the reciprocity that marks their mutual relations.
This book is rich fare; but so is the substance of the faith. Early in the book Volf argues that the faith should be lived and passed on, neither loaded with oppressive baggage nor emptied of its proper content (5). This book is a very impressive demonstration of the ‘proper content’ of our doctrine of the church.
Christiaan Mostert
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Looks very interesting!