Harvey's Baptists and the Catholic Tradition is an updated edition of his earlier Can These Bones Live? (Brazos Press, 2008). Chapters on scriptural reasoning and imagination and the function of doctrine have been removed. Harvey has surgically revised portions of his engagement with social theory, politics, and economic analysis without sacrificing the force of his interdisciplinary arguments. This second edition preserves the impressive scholarly breadth and the dynamic biblical and theological learning of the original edition.
In a new introduction, Harvey recontextualizes his original argument. Concerned that the earlier edition did not explicitly urge Baptists toward full communion with other ecclesial traditions, he does so in this book. He commends that Baptists (and others) adopt and embrace an “ecumenical posture” (6). Epicletically vivified, such a posture requires that the ways the penitent faithful move forward toward the unity that Christ mandates reside “not in the sameness of … performance, but in timely” and fitting improvisations of the life, love, mercy, forgiveness, and peace enacted in the life and passion of Jesus (142). Catholicity is not idealized but grounded in concrete manifestations of witness.
The book bears the influence of two principal interlocutors that have shaped Harvey's theological career: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and James Wm. McClendon. Harvey's unyielding commitment to the church as the visible body politic of Christ bears the influence of Bonhoeffer's Christology, ecclesiology, ethics, and theology of discipleship. Critically reconstructing McClendon's “baptist vision” in light of analogical reasoning, Harvey apocalyptically imagines the contemporary church as a nonidentical repetition of the primitive and eschatological community of Jesus. Although there are points of contact between them, Harvey arrives at his understanding of the apocalypse by a different route than recent scholarship on the Apostle Paul's apocalyptic thinking.
The book narrates the dismembering and re-membering of the church as the body of Christ. Eschewing any notion of a Constantinian “fall,” Harvey claims that “over the centuries the outlines of the body of Christ become less distinct, and the day-to-day existence of Christians becomes coextensive with, and thus indistinguishable from, that of any citizen” (35). He concentrates his narrative of dismembering on how the disciplinary regimes of the modern nation-state and the global neoliberal market have “effectively domesticated, marginalized, and exploited” the church's “life, language, and witness” (8).
How might the pilgrim people of God be re-membered by the power of the Holy Spirit as the body of Christ? In the book's two most interesting chapters, Harvey answers this question by addressing the concrete manifestations of catholicity. One chapter discusses how the “sacramental sinews” of baptism and the Eucharist are material actions that “produce martyrs—that is, witnesses to the apocalyptic activity of God in Christ” (156). The other chapter explores the “holy vulnerability” generated and nurtured by practices of spiritual formation (prayer, confession, fasting, hospitality, the works of mercy). Being pneumatically inducted into the art of vulnerability enables the people of God to discern and reject the false “spirits” of modernity, which entice with claims of security and unencumbered freedom, as well as equip the church to hear, receive, and participate in what Christ is speaking, doing, and suffering in the present.
In the end, this marvelous ecclesiology compellingly presents an aesthetic of witness. In the symphony of creaturely life, the cantus firmus is the life, Passion, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Inspired and empowered by the Spirit, the “artisans of the age to come” faithfully enact, before the world, an anamnetic improvisation of the cantus firmus (10). As they practice the art of pilgrimage, such improvisations by the company of sojourners may not only be a faithful remembering of God's apocalypse in Christ but also an unveiling of God's messianic reign in fleshy, local ways.
Baptists and the Catholic Tradition makes an important contribution to ecumenical theology. This excellent, demanding book moves witness to the center of the search for unity, nudging us beyond conversion or renewal to the beauty of truth embodied in the distinctive performances of life and language of the pilgrim church.
