Theology Today - Vol 41, No. 4 - January 1985 - BOOK REVIEW - The Churches the Apostles Left Behind

484 - The Churches the Apostles Left Behind

The Churches the Apostles Left Behind
By Raymond E. Brown, S.S.
Ramsey, N.J., Paulist, 1984. 160 pp. $8.95, $4.95 paper.

"How will it be when none more saith, 'I saw'?" So Robert Browning depicted the Apostle John, as the last living witness to "the Word made flesh," musing upon the prospect of his own death. With diction less poetic but with historical imagination no less vivid, Raymond Brown, America's foremost Roman Catholic New Testament scholar, offers sketches of the various ways in which the "sub-apostolic" writings (Brown's characterization of New Testament texts written during the last third of the first century) confronted the problem of the church's continued existence in the world after the death of the first generation of .apostolic witnesses. For Brown, "the question of survival after the death of the first great generation of apostolic guides or heroes" (p. 30) provides a lens through which he views the distinctive understandings of the church operative in various early Christian communities, as represented by the Pastoral Epistles, Colossians/Ephesians, Luke/Acts, I Peter, the Fourth Gospel, the Johannine Epistles, and the Gospel of Matthew. A chapter is devoted to- each of these witnesses.

Originally delivered as the Sprunt Lectures at Union Theological Seminary (Virginia) in 1980, the contents of Brown's book reflect a concern for "practical application of scholarship to pastoral interests" (p. 7). He concludes each chapter with a summary of the strengths and weaknesses of the ecclesiology manifest in the writing(s) under consideration, pointing out analogies in more recent church history and framing lessons for Christians divided by theological or denominational differences. For example, the great strength of John's Gospel is located in its insistence that "church members receive life from Jesus and must be in a loving relationship to him" (p. 98); its crucial weakness lies in its tendency to foster an individualistic "born-again" faith which divorces itself from the structures necessary to insure responsible continuity in the church. Or again, Brown compares the sharp polemic of the Johannine Epistles against the "secessionists" to Luther's attack on the Schwärmer who had carried his program of reform far beyond what Luther himself bad envisioned. The message throughout is strongly ecumenical-"for every theological insight one pays a price" (p. 1l7) and consequently no single understanding of the church can be definitive. (Appropriately, the book is dedicated to a roster of fifteen non-Catholic biblical scholars.) The diverse witnesses within the New Testament canon must correct and balance one another. (As an illustration Brown notes Vatican II's adoption of the "people of God" ecclesiology from Acts as a counterweight to the previously dominant "body of Christ" ecclesiology of Colossians/Ephesians.) An honest examination of the evidence "should convince every Christian community that it is neglecting part of the New Testament witness" (p. 149).

485 - The Churches the Apostles Left Behind

Since he is writing for a general readership, Brown documents his portrayals of the early Christian communities only sparingly. Those who are not persuaded will have to refer to his massive Anchor Bible commentaries on the Gospel and Epistles of John and to his other writings, especially The Community of the Beloved Disciple and Antioch and Rome, his recent collaborative effort with John Meier. Some readers (this reviewer among them) will find Brown overly optimistic about our ability to reconstruct the history of the communities that produced the writings. (See, for example, pp. 129-35 on "the Matthean church situation" or pp. 78-79, where Brown buys into J. H. Elliott's theories about the social setting of I Peter.) Do we actually know any more about the Johannine and Matthean communities than about "the Markan community," about whose situation Brown declines to speculate (pp. 28-29)?

Of course, any book as ambitious and as brief as The Churches the Apostles Left Behind invites numerous possible criticisms. Should Luke/Acts really be treated, along with Colossians/ Ephesians and the Pastorals, as a development of "the Pauline heritage"? Does Brown's heuristic question (how did the church survive the death of the apostles?) produce a skewed reading of a text like Acts, which--as Brown notes on p. 69--does not even bother to mention the deaths of its chief protagonists? (The question, after all, originates from Brown's study of the Johannine writings, where the death of the Beloved Disciple does appear to constitute a major theological crisis.) Does I Peter really provide sufficient data for Brown's purposes? (Many of his comments about I Peter's strengths and weaknesses would apply with equal aptness to almost any other New Testament text.) Does Matthew really offer an ecclesiology as perfectly balanced as Brown suggests, or is his vision finally an unstable compromise between law and grace? Most puzzling, why does Brown omit any extended discussion of Hebrews and Revelation, two distinctive major writings from the period with which he is concerned? For that matter, why not also give equal time to a roughly contemporaneous non-canonical text like I Clement?

The last question reveals something important about the focus of Brown's work: he is ultimately concerned less with historical questions than with theological ones. He concentrates on the ecclesiology manifest in selected canonical texts, rather than on the concrete social history of communities. Thus, in some ways, his work has more in common with Paul Minear's Images of the Church in the New Testament and Avery Dulles' Models of the Church than with Wayne Meeks' The First Urban Christians.

The barrage of questions that I raise about Brown's work, however, should be construed not as an indictment but as a testimony to its stimulating effect. This book deserves warm applause, and I will certainly commend it to students who are disposed to doubt the pastoral worth of historical-critical studies of the New Testament. Brown has given us a clear, non-technical overview of certain major concerns of the

486 - The Churches the Apostles Left Behind

communities that produced the bulk of our New Testament writings, as these communities are envisioned by one of our most distinguished scholars. His reflections on the pastoral implications of his historical reconstructions are consistently wise, judicious, and "catholic," in the best sense of the word. Not surprisingly, Brown is most penetrating in his treatment of the Johannine material, but everywhere the book offers a mature distillation and synthesis of insights gained through a career of painstaking scholarship. The Churches the Apostles Left Behind would be an excellent resource for extended study and discussion by groups of pastors or laypeople. We can be grateful to Brown for offering up the fruits of his scholarly labors in a form so lucid and accessible, and we may hope that this book will receive the wide reading that it deserves.

Richard B. Hays
Yale Divinity School
New Haven, Connecticut