Essentials of Christian Community: Essays for Daniel W. Hardy

Essentials of Christian Community: Essays for Daniel W Hardy. Edited by David F. Ford and Dennis L. Stamps. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996. 380 pp. $59.95 (cloth).

Essentials of Christian Community is not an easy book to review for the simple reason that it tries to accomplish a number of things under one cover. On one level, it is indeed a collection of essays that, as the title suggests seeks to highlight the essentials of Christian community. On another, it presents to the general public the life and thought of a theologian who has made an enormous contribution to the life of the churches in England and America but who has made this contribution as much through his "behind the scenes" encouragement of the theological enterprise as through his writings. Finally, it provides Prof. Hardy an opportunity to display his own theological commitments in dialogue with the students and colleagues who have contributed to this volume.

The editors display what they hold to be "the essentials of Christian community" by means of the various subdivisions of the volume. Thus, they organize the collected essays under the following headings: "Worship," "Faith and Love," "Scripture," "The Church as Institution," "Christian Formation," and "Hope." The essays in a collection of this sort are apt to vary widely in quality, but in this case, the quality of the essays is uniformly high. Some stand out. Jeremy Begbie's essay in the worship section on the relation between theology and music is both original and important. Stephen Pickard's on the significance of the doctrine of the Trinity in the section entitled "Faith and Love" is remarkably suggestive for the importance of the doctrine in the life of the church. Peter Sedgwick's article on Anglican polity provides a superb apologia for the relation between the Church of England and the society of which it is so much a part. Francis Young's article on Christian formation in the first four centuries charts a way ahead for the contemporary church as it seeks to form a new generation of believers in circumstances where its more recent methods seem remarkably ineffective.

The essays that Ford and Stamps have collected in this volume cover an extraordinary range of topics. Stanley Hauerwas offers a fine treatment of the relation between worship and the teaching of Christian ethics, Stephen Sykes presents a timely discussion of the relation between "Orthodoxy" and "Liberalism," and James Dunn provides a helpful treatment of the various ways in which the Bible functions in the life of the church. These are but a few of the topics covered under the headings listed above. What the reader misses, however, is a discussion by the editors of the particular ordering they have chosen for the essays they present. Why are these the essentials of Christian community and why are they presented in this particular order? There are theological convictions at work in this ordering, and it would be helpful to be told more about what they are. Because these connections are missing, the reader has to work to find the ties that bind these essays together.

Dan Hardy, himself, seeks to trace their inner connections in an afterword in which he responds to each of the essays in the collection. These comments provide a review of the book that is far better than can be presented in the review section of a theological journal. Indeed, I would suggest that readers begin with the comments with which the book concludes and after reading them return to the beginning for a first reading of the book as a whole. These comments suggest a unity of theme and purpose which the ordinary reader will at first probably miss. Even more, they reveal the complex and luminous mind of the man in whose honor these essays have been collected. In reading his responses to those who sought to honor him by means of these essays, I was afforded a glimpse of a remarkable and important theological project-one that sees the interplay between the life of the church and life of the world it inhabits in a positive, complex and reciprocal manner. Hardy refers often to both the church and its theologians as "standing in the cross light" between the tradition and common life of the church and the larger world which is both governed by God and inhabited by the church. As a consequence of this stance, he sees the sources of theological knowledge as multiple but he does so without any of the trendy capitulation to culture that so characterizes the present theological scene.

Indeed, Hardy's comments on these essays supplement nicely the biographical sketch which David Ford provides at the beginning of the book. One sees in his words and the words written about him a man who, throughout his life, has given himself to being a theologian of the church. He has done so as a member of a department of religious studies, as a participant in numerous commissions of the Church of England and as Director of the Center for Theological Inquiry at the Princeton Theological Seminary. In all these efforts, he has shown himself a consistent advocate of a theological method that brings together a thorough grasp of the history of Christian thought and practice and the events and movements of one's own times. There is little doubt that questions about the nature and mission of the church provide the central theological issues of our time. This collection makes an important contribution to this ongoing and necessary investigation and is essential reading for anyone who wants to keep abreast of this very important debate.