Ecclesiology and Postmodernity: Questions for the Church in Our Time

Ecclesiology and Postmodernity: Questions for the Church in Our Time. By Gerard Mannion. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2007. 249 pp. $29.95 (paper).

This book that will be especially helpful and informative to those who want to keep abreast or read the history of Roman Catholic ecclesiological debates in the last several decades. For those who want to understand some of the questions that ecclesiologists as well as ecumenists are grappling with in our time, this book also provides a very good overview and is written in a commendable way, at once critical but respectful, pointed but never polemical.

Mannion describes the arguments of major protagonists-Walter Kasper, Joseph Ratzinger, Karl Rahner, Gregory Baum, Roger Haight, Francis Sullivan, and others-in great detail. He is also briefly attentive to a handful of non-Catholic theologians, including the Anglicans associated with the Radical Orthodoxy movement (chiefly John Milbank and Graham Ward) and the Methodist Stanley Hauerwas; and to recent ecumenical dialogues (ARCIC especially) in the aftermath of Dominus Iesus in 2000.

Mannion's approach to treating these debates is comparative. He argues repeatedly in favor of a "comparative ecclesiology" and his book is a good manifestation of that approach, comparing not merely various ecclesiologists but also various claims made by ecclesial bodies and officials, and how and whether those claims are theologically justified and justifiable. He is rightly critical that too much official ecclesiology is far too abstract, far too inattentive to context and practice, and often practiced by those far too insufficiently schooled in the practice of humility. Additionally, he notes that too many authoritative statements from the Roman Catholic Church over the years have been obsessed with the question "who decides" rather than "what is to be decided"-the question, that is, of authority rather than truth per se.

Mannion claims that the real burden of his book is not just to describe these various debates and their protagonists, but to advance the debate beyond what he calls "neo-exclusivism" on the one hand and a vacuous pluralism on the other. He contends that a greater alliance between ecclesiology and virtue ethics (as practiced by Alasdair MacIntyre and Jean Porter) will allow the church to overcome the danger of being either too exclusivist and "sectarian" on the one hand, or too relativistic and empty of all distinctiveness on the other. Mannion takes this approach because he argues that "the ecclesiological dilemma of the church, local and universal, mirrors the dilemma in modern moral philosophy to which recent virtue ethicists refer" (p. 192). Mannion's continued approach to the church in bipartite terms ("universal vs. local") is not surprising-but it is disappointing. This is a perpetual blind spot on the part of Western ecclesiologists and ecclesiastics, who simply and regularly fail to understand in any substantial way the necessity of genuinely regional bodies (for example, patriarchates) in the church to transcend local particularities but not be swallowed up by the often hollow universalism of Rome.

Mannion spends the last section of his book describing, far too briefly, the debates in virtue ethics over the last three decades, and then, even more briefly and inadequately, the application of this moral tradition to ecclesiology. In sum, he suggests that a "virtuous ecclesiology" moves us away from the dangers of abstraction, institutionalization, and organizational self-preoccupation. Instead, Christians and the churches of which they are a part can simply embrace "the notions of the church as mystery, sacrament, and community" committed to living out the truth in love (p. 227).

This book's attentiveness to the debates of ecclesiologists and ethicists is also its greatest weakness. Mannion spends so much time on the positions of others that his own contributions are inadequately developed, coming very late in the book and being rendered in such a way as to suggest that the author simply ran out of steam-or interest. Mannion has been very careful in unfolding the positions of others he reviews, but when it comes time for him to offer his own ideas, which merit extended discussion, he seems timid and is often reduced to sloganeering, such as: "ecclesiology should and must be empowering" (p. 172); "the church's task is to . . . discern the signs of the times" (p. 204); and "our task is to build a community where character truly matters, in both an individual and social sense" (p. 222).

The key to understanding this book, then, lies in its subtitle: it is focused almost entirely on the questions of our time. To that extent, it is very helpful indeed. But for those looking for substantial answers to some of these debates, the search continues.

ADAM DEVILLE

University of Saint Francis

Fort Wayne, Indiana

Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Spring 2008
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