Cheryl Peterson is a professor at Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Columbus, Ohio, an ordained pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and a past participant in the US Lutheran-Roman Catholic Dialogue, and this book is based in part on her doctoral research at Marquette University. These biographical details matter, in that one of the deep strengths of this book is its rootedness in context and its call for ecclesiology to speak from, with, and to particular contexts. Peterson's contexts—the family of Lutheran churches, mainline Protestantism in the United States, ecumenical dialogue, and North American Catholic and Protestant academia—shape the concerns and the audience of this book, and frame her own constructive project of a narrative, pneumatological ecclesiology.
Peterson's title question is rooted in a particular context of crisis, the current decline of mainline Protestant denominations in the United States. She argues against responding to declines in membership and influence with nostalgia for a particularly American form of Christendom, or with church growth strategies pursuing “relevance.” Rather, she names a crisis of ecclesial identity as the root cause of this decline. Her book outlines a particular flawed understanding of that identity that views the church as a voluntary association, draws upon three families of contemporary ecclesiological thought to provide resources for a different viewpoint, and then presents her own vision of a “third article,” narrative ecclesiology.
The book's initial chapter outlines a schematic history of Protestant ecclesiology in the United States, following the thread of the “voluntary principle” at the heart of American Protestantism up through the piecemeal disestablishment of the mainline churches in the last fifty years. Peterson then examines three families of contemporary ecclesiology that provide components for an alternate understanding. First is the church as “word-event,” rooted in the historic Reformation and in the thought of Karl Barth. She summarizes contemporary Lutheran and Reformed theologians Gerhard Forde and Michael Horton, and draws from this concept a crucial ecclesiological building block: “that ecclesiology should begin with who God is and what God is doing” (52). A second component comes from communion ecclesiology, in general and more specifically in the versions developed by theologians Robert W. Jenson and Philip Butin. With these thinkers’ Trinitarian and sacramental emphases, communion ecclesiology complements the word-event paradigm by keeping relationality and unity central to ecclesial identity. Peterson's third source, missional-church ecclesiology, counteracts a tendency in both word-event and communion ecclesiologies to focus ecclesial identity on the nature of the church rather than the mission of the church. Missional-church ecclesiology, as developed by Darrell Guder and Craig Van Gelder, focuses the church in the post-Christendom context of mainline decline more on its mission than on its nature as hearer of the Word or communion with the triune God.
Having critically appropriated the values and limitations of these three families of ecclesiological thought, Peterson concludes the work with two sections outlining her own proposal for a narrative ecclesiology of the “Spirit-breathed church.” Peterson's proposal is for an ecclesiology that does two things: first, it draws upon the centrality of God and God's initiative (word-event), the relationality and unity of the gathered church (communion), and the church defined by its mission; and second, it starts from pneumatological narrative, that is, the story of the church read “from the perspective of what God the Holy Spirit is doing” (99). These final chapters provide a suggestive taste of how a fuller narrative, pneumatological ecclesiology might be developed. My only critique regards how little room remained after such a thorough review of the relevant literature for the author to further develop an ecclesiology that “starts from the Spirit.” The quality of the constructive readings of the Acts of the Apostles and the historic creeds in the final two chapters already makes this a valuable resource for theologians and for those engaged in practical ministry in the churches in the United States, particularly Peterson's own ELCA. I end with great hope that she will continue to build upon this firm foundation to assist ecclesiology, in its many geographical, denominational, and cultural contexts, in developing a sense of identity adequate to the challenges the church of God now faces.
