404 - Jesus and Community: The Social Dimension of Christian Faith

Jesus and Community: The Social Dimension of Christian Faith
By Gerhard Lohfink
Philadelphia, Fortress, 1984. 223 pp. $9.95.

The global village is a mixed blessing in our age. While on the one hand, jet travel and satellite communication systems have shrunk the world and expanded human awareness of other inhabitants, the risk of misunderstanding other cultures (ethnocentrism) is quite high and too often realized. This book may have succumbed-even if unwittingly-to that risk.

Father Lohfink, Professor of New Testament at Tübingen, initially developed his ideas with adult Catholic laity and then shared them with the clergy of the dioceses of Limburg and Rottenberg-Stuttgart. His

405 - Jesus and Community: The Social Dimension of Christian Faith

basic concern is an erroneous understanding of church as a universal but invisible reality in individual souls. As has been fashionable in Germany since Kant and German idealism, Jesus' advice in the Scriptures is viewed as presenting proper, personal attitudes of heart, but hardly advice for a visible community. It is against this excessively narrow theological individualism that Lohfink correctly argues in this book.

Weaving together an impressive array of New Testament scholarship, Lohfink asserts that precisely in the concern for gathering, forming, and retaining an integral circle of disciples, Jesus and the early church up to Augustine were intent on establishing a visible community, a society that would stand in contrast to Israel and other peoples among whom these disciples lived. In four easy-to-read chapters having eight sections each, the theme is carefully developed. Special emphasis is placed on the "Contrast" nature of this visible community, the church.

For instance, while patriarchalism reigned in Israel, Jesus' community would strive for equality. Women played a very important role. Difficult to realize as this and other ideals might be, and despite occasional failures, the first and second century church fathers could paint a nearly perfect picture of this "contrast community" in their writings. And we have no rebuttals from those ages to discredit the written record. In this case, and in others, the author poses challenging questions to the modern church as to whether it has abandoned the pristine course of its founder and his early followers. Since that development is beyond the scope of this book, Lohfink notes at the end that a shift in the modern direction took place already with Augustine.

As interesting to read as parts of this book are, one still must wonder why it was translated and published in this form in the United States. The predominantly German language sources and the footnotes that refer to these sources will be of no value to the general reader and of little interest to scholars, teachers, or preachers. The author's legitimate concern about an invisible church of anonymous individuals being totally unsupported in the New Testament evidence does not present any helpful advice for the current American experience of staunchly faithful Christian groups striving to impose one or another theological interpretation as the only valid position for all citizens.

The word "social" in the subtitle is just a synonym for communal; there is no evidence of social scientific analysis of the New Testament or of contemporary German society anywhere in this book. For instance, relying upon psychosomatic explanations in discussing healing in antiquity betrays a lamentable and almost unpardonable failure to pay adequate attention to the insights of medical anthropology and other social sciences, which have much of value to offer to biblical scholarship on this topic.

In footnote 137, Lohfink unintentionally, but quite eloquently, demonstrates the risk of living in the global village. He observes that the efforts to unite liberation theology and religious renewal in Latin America and North America have hardly been noted in Germany. Were

406 - Jesus and Community: The Social Dimension of Christian Faith

it not for this English translation by John P. Gavin, Lohfink's analysis of a German life-setting and his proposed theological solution would probably go similarly unnoticed elsewhere. True, in the global village we need to be more aware of the problems of others and their attempts to work out (Christian) solutions. Yet the challenge to modern Christians is not to imitate the solutions of others, but rather to work out the most appropriate solution for a given culture, country, and time on the basis of the most critical analysis of the Scripture as possible. To meet this challenge, social science methodology is indispensable.

John J. Pilch
Milwaukee, Wisconsin