Church Faces Death: Ecclesiology in a Post-Modern Context, The

The Church Faces Death: Ecclesiology in a Post-Modern Context. By Michael Jinkins. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. x + 141 pp. $35.00 (cloth).

This brief but stimulating volume, written by Michael Jinkins, Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, challenges the churches of the West to make peace with their death. Too often, argues Jinkins, a church's anxiety about its institutional demise tempts it to compromise its identity and mission for the sake of survival. Such strategies to "save itself ' are doomed to failure, for it is only when the church is freed from the fear of death that it can "lose itself ' for the sake of Jesus Christ and the gospel and thereby stand ready to receive its resurrected life anew at the hand of God. As Jinkins asserts: "Ironically the church is most attractive when it pursues its vocation unconcerned with its own survival" (p. 32). For this reason, suggests Jinkins, churches should stop wringing their hands about the much-publicized decline in membership of Protestant mainline churches in North America and Western Europe; instead, churches should see this "gift of death" as a divine gift, for it may provide them a muchneeded opportunity to reconsider their very reason for existing.

Although churches facing the prospect of their imminent demise would do well to reflect on the issues that Jinkins explores in the five essays that comprise this book, this book is not simply for "dying" churches. Rather, these essays provide a forum for a number of interlocutors to ask difficult yet important questions of churches in the West. For example, in addition to engaging with Derrida's The Gift of Death in the title essay, Jinkins engages with the work of Vaclav Havel and John of Damascus in order to explore the ongoing challenge that the church faces in living between idolatry and iconoclasm, in living between image-making and image-breaking. The third essay explores the relative worth and shortcomings of ecclesial taxonomies, comparing the relative merit of those set forth by Avery Dulles, H. Richard Niebuhr and Loren Mead, and then concluding by using physicist Stephen Hawking's work to argue the paradoxical position that these taxonomies are most valuable precisely at those points at which they fail. The fourth essay explores the messy and unsystematic ways in which the language of "church" is used in everyday language. Such an exploration stands as a caution against lapsing into what Jinkins calls "ecclesiological essentialism," which is the view that there exists some other church than the ones we know and experience everyday that are the object of God's love and attention. The final essay employs the work of Bonhoeffer to begin formulating an answer to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s two haunting questions that he asked the churches in his famous "Letter from a Birmingham Jail": "Who worships here?" and "Who is their God?" Here, as elsewhere, Jinkins is not satisfied to retreat to some picture of the ideal Church that can be set in contrast to the real and actual Church; rather, Jinkins insists that we examine the concrete ways in which our common life reflects a great deal about our conception of God's character.

One of the powerful and consistent themes that runs throughout these essays is the need for the Church to internalize theologically in its own life the postmodern emphases on ambiguity, paradox, contradiction, particularity and plurality. Jinkins is at his best, for example, when he explores the way in which our understanding of the incarnation might press the Church towards affirming the particularity, openness, vulnerability, risk and failure inherent in any and all attempts to be the Body of Christ in any particular time and place. Perhaps appropriately, Jinkins is most unclear at those points where he is most suggestive. For example, throughout his reflections on the character of the Church as sign, Jinkins suggests that the Church functions as a sign even-and perhaps especially-in its weakness and failures. Yet Jinkins offers little help in discerning how to appropriate this important insight into the Church's self-understanding without falling prey to the notion that the shape of the Church's embodied witness before the world is unimportant. Yet Jinkins is the first to admit that his brief treatment of these matters can only be understood as a preface to a new ecclesiology, and so he is to be commended for undertaking the risky project of trying to articulate some of the crucial issues with which any postmodern ecclesiology will likely have to wrestle.

PHILIP D. KENNESON

Milligan College

Milligan College, Tennessee

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