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Book Review: The Public Face of the Gospel

From the title one might expect a study of how the early Church was perceived by contemporary society, along well-travelled paths in recent scholarship, and the Introduction does nod in this direction, touching on the various possibilities: cult, club, school, synagogue, household and that peculiarly unilluminating and understated selfdesignation, ekklesia (the meeting?). A glance at Jesus comes next, comparing him with John the Baptist: both initiated apocalyptic movements, but with the difference that Jesus' survived its initial impetus and evolved into the Church. With these preliminaries out of the way, Leslie Houlden moves on to what he wants to discuss (and what he is so good at discussing), the New Testament authors' ideas (distinctive minds rather than a 'public face'?). He finds in Paul an unresolved tension between salvation-historical continuity (the Church as true Israel) and a Christocentric novelty (the Church as re-creation in the Last Adam). There are interesting comments on the eucharistic background to Paul's 'body of Christ' idiom, but too little perhaps on Pauline eschatology which is its deeper root and could have helped to explain the tension. The Gospels are undoubtedly products of the Church, by then largely settled and urban, but this rarely shows through explicitly. In the main, their ecclesiological ideas are implicitly superimposed on a quite different pattern, that of the itinerant, rural and noninstitutional movement around Jesus. Thus, avoiding the redactioncritical mistake of drawing a direct line from story to community, Houlden gives a fascinating, if tantalizingly brief, account of the Gospels, read ecclesiologically: discipleship in Mark, scriptural legitimation in Matthew, the fulfilment of Jewish legacy in Luke and the fusion of Christology and ecclesiology in John. In a final chapter, he asks if there is any kind of message here for us today, and answers in terms of Christian-Jewish dialogue and inner Christian ecumenism. He is positive about the former, but disappointingly negative about the latter: 'The insistence on organic unity, so difficult to attain and so uncertain of beneficial fruits, was misconceived' (p. 98). Nevertheless his own 'love-hate' relationship with the Church will be echoed by many readers of this stimulating essay: the Church is both the enemy of everything a free person stands for and yet also the necessary institution in which the possibilities of freedom are contained.