Church Eternal
Liturgical Theology: The Church as Worshipping Community
by Simon Chan
IVP Academic, 2006
(208 pages, $22.00, paperback)
reviewed by L. P. Fairfield
“I would like to suggest that what evangelicals need is an adequate ecclesiology.” John Henry Newman writing in 1836? No, Chinese Pentecostal Simon Chan writing in 2006 , addressing the scandal of Western Evangelical capitulation to consumerist narcissism, with a particular view to the global undertow of this American McFaith. He points to a robust doctrine and practice of the Church as the way forward.
Together Utilitarian
Chan, Professor of Systematic Theology at Trinity Theological College in Singapore, accurately characterizes Evangelicalism’s anthropocentric ecclesiology. Ever since the prototypical Salem church covenant in early seventeenth-century Massachusetts, Evangelical congregations have understood themselves as aggregates of converted believers who voluntarily agree “in the presence of God to walk together in all his ways.”
In eighteenth and early nineteenth-century America, this “walking together” came to mean supporting revivalism and participating in voluntary societies for mission and for social reform. Evangelical churches have been functional and utilitarian. They are what they do.
Unfortunately, this pragmatism kept them from resisting a fascination with technique, or from eschewing the lure of “health and wealth” theologies. In late-capitalist and therapeutic postmodern America, the churches’ self-presentation has shifted from “We are good for society” to “We are good for you.”
Market-driven churches inevitably worship the market. But “Whatever works . . .” doesn’t work theologically. Chan applauds the critique of American Evangelicals like Mark Noll and David Wells, but argues that Evangelicals need to move beyond self-criticism to a solution.
Chan is a Chinese Pentecostal writing in Singapore, but there is nothing exclusively Asian about his response to Evangelicalism’s problems, which is solidly biblical and draws on the riches of the Western theological tradition, in particular the Fathers, the Reformers, and the Roman and Protestant giants of twentieth-century Trinitarian theology, as well as high-church Anabaptists like Stanley Hauerwas.
The Eternal Church
Chan proposes that we must view the Church not merely functionally but ontologically, that is, not primarily as sociological and humanitarian but as theological and biblical—and liturgical. Its chief end is not to improve society, but to worship God.
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