306 - The Sense of a People: Toward a Church for the Human Future

The Sense of a People:
Toward a Church for the Human Future
By Lewis S. Mudge
Philadelphia, Trinity Press International, 1992. 258 pp. $17.95.

We live at the time of the emergence of a vast interlocking, changing, and deeply troubled global civilization. In this public sphere,

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there is a dearth of symbolic language and imagination to deal, on the one hand, with life's paradoxes, tragedies and evil and, on the other, with human aspirations, possibilities, and hopes.

An enormous opportunity and responsibility, therefore, awaits religious communities, which traditionally have been communities of "symbolizing the human condition in depth." Historically, the Christian church has been such a community, asserts the author, who is Dean of the Seminary at San Francisco and Professor of Theology in the Graduate Theological Union. To begin to serve the needs of the new global civilization, the churches would need to turn again to their biblical and historical roots. Mudge thinks they can, and he finds in the ancient biblical image of "the people of God" a metaphor he deems powerful enough to help the church "organize its thinking" ecclesiologically to the point that its "thinkers and seers" could begin more consciously to contribute to the larger human dialogue on the future of humanity and the world.

Why this particular metaphor? It is, he avers, deeply imbedded in Christian tradition; it carries with it historical and social realism, conveying a "this-worldly, concrete (and) present reality"; and it is "resistant to monarchical, imperial or patriarchal overtones":

My argument has lifted up the people metaphor because it does things the mystery and kingdom terminologies do not. The tradition has always needed words to show that God's reconciling activity transcends visible churches, but the terminology chosen has tended to make that transcending activity mysterious and inaccessible. The people metaphor, by contrast, portrays God's active worldly presence in a form neither located out of sight in a "mystical body" nor relegated to an unfathomable future.

Since 1963 in the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches, world-level dialogues centering on the effort to understand what "Christian faith is as a global community in the contemporary world" have been going on and have resulted in a new ecumenical consciousness. Add to this the testimonies of the issue-focused communities of interpretation, and it is obvious that a whole new, non-parochial notion of catholicity has been emerging in our midst-a catholicity consisting of principles to be upheld "everywhere ... and by all." For Mudge, these principles would have to include "the rejection of slavery in all its forms, the duty to resist tyranny, the 'preferential option for the poor,' the rejection of all kinds of racism and sexism, the conviction that we must care for the earth."

To "receive" such products of the work of the ecumenical movement and the countless "communities of interpretation" that have contributed to their production, the churches would need "to have accepted the regulative idea behind that work"; they would have to "embody the sense of a larger people of God in their ecclesiological reasoning" and see the church as "a sign or sacrament of God's gathering of the human race."

This is a close-textured book. In the foreword, Mudge warns us that

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he comes to the question of the church's role in the human community from involvement in three specific areas of discourse: the professional theological educator, the participant in ecumenical dialogue, and current debate in the field of philosophical hermeneutics. One could wish that, for purposes of sustained argument and focus of vision, the author had chosen this time to work within one of these areas, or to have arranged his material with greater inner coherence. Nonetheless, all of us who are currently engaged in a critical theological rethinking of ecclesiology within the North American context are greatly in his debt.

Douglas John Hall
Rhoda Palfrey Hall
McGill University
Montreal, Quebec