Does God Need the Church?

Gerhard Lohfink

The Liturgical Press 1999

Reviewed by Andy Baker

Are you a fundamentalist when it comes to reading Scripture? Well, this book will hopefully give you a new appreciation for the historical critical methods and viewing Scripture not as a static book of answers, but a theological process. At least that is the effect it has had on me.

Reportedly, Michael Cartwright, editor of John Howard Yoder’s A Royal Priesthood, and a long-time disciple of Yoder’s has said this book is better than anything Yoder ever wrote. Those are strong words that make ones eyebrows raise in a moment of skeptical curiosity. After reading this book closely, I have to say that this book rivals that of the Politics of Jesus and is much more in depth.

The description of the book on the back cover will do adequately to give the reader a sense of the over all project of this book: Gerhard Lohfink examines Israel's theology, Jesus' praxis, the experience of the early Christian communities, and the current situation in the churches. What emerges is an amazing history involving God and the world, a history God presses ever forward with the aid of a single people, and that always turns out differently from what we think or plan.

To this I would add that Lohfink shows how the church as a visible alternative social project is a social force in this world. It is not some element that is subsumed in a larger history of nation-states. The community God has gathered is a radical exodus from the world, living in it but not of it. Lohfink adequately counters the view that the people of God are the soul of society, or that the church is merely concerned with preaching some gnostic Gospel with no concern for the here and now, the disgustingly material world and everydayness of our lives. No rather the church is a concrete visible body of people who do justice and love mercy, who live together without violence, and who act as a social body, a force in this world.

He also counters a Niehburian view that the Anabaptists are relegated to the irrelevant and have nothing to say to society...they merely provide a moral conscience for the realistic killing that has to go on. Lohfink shows as Yoder does in his works that such a view is inadequate, such a view makes the church synomomous with the rest of the world. Rather the church in and of itself is a polis, it the only gathered people capable of living in community in step with how the world really is.

Two high points that I want to mention are Lohfink’s interpretation of the pre-exodus narrative and his account of the resurrection.

Lohfink points out that the exodus narratives tell more about what precedes the actual exodus than the exodus itself. One reason is that the “narrative tries out various possibilities, exploring ways in which the Israelites could act in confrontation with an over-powerful state.” The first way of acting toward the State is Passive Resistance. (Exodus 1:15-22. Here the Hebrew midwives resisted Pharaoh’s demand that they kill the males when they were born. At first they were successful, but Pharaoh eventually saw through their strategy and took charge of the infanticide himself (1:22). And then all the newborn Israelite boys were drowned in the Nile. So in the long run passive resistance fails.

The next way of acting toward the State that is explored in the narratives is counter violence. (Exodus 2:11-14) Moses is saved from drowning by cunning and divine guidance and is reared in Pharaoh’s court. Then one day he kills an Egyptian oppressing a Hebrew (counter-violence). However the Israelites are not rally behind him but are divided amongst themselves, therefore the system of Pharaoh is even stronger and Moses is forced to flee. Counter violence also fails.

The next option explored by the narrative according to Lohfink’s analysis is what he calls finding “free space.” (Exodus 5:1-4) This occurs in the form of a festival. Free space is a form of accommodation in which the people of God cannot accept the structures of society, but do not want to escape them either. The narrative rejects this option. It is not presented as a serious option but only as a pure pretext for the Exodus (only a deception of the authorities). It is this last option that the church today in the USA finds itself tempted with. The narrative of the Exodus rejects this option though.

All three options have one thing in common: they “do nothing to oppose it [the State], they simply want to soften it.” “They adapt themselves and attempt to avoid its worst consequences through deception, counterforce, or the creation of free spaces, but they remain within the system.” But God has an utterly different solution: exodus. The goal of the Exodus is a new social project, a new pattern of society. The Torah is at the center of this new social project.

It is here that Lohfink excels. He goes on to describe the Torah as God’s new social project and interprets the Torah with such stunning clarity and insight that the reader is compelled to see the continuity between Jesus and his Jewishness, the Church and Israel, rather than discontinuity.

The next highpoint I would like to highlight in order to give the reader a taste of what this book has to offer is Lohfink’s account of the resurrection. Lohfink demonstrates that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is intimately intertwined with the resurrection of the community he gathered. At Jesus’ death the disciples scattered, went back to where they were from and denied Jesus. Then suddenly they gathered again, in the most dangerous of places, claiming that God had raised this Jesus from the dead so that the gathering of the believers is in itself a de facto witness to the resurrection of Christ. The community was scattered to the wind at the crucifixion, it was dead, killed with Jesus; and then with the bodily resurrection of Jesus, with the flesh and blood appearances the visible, concrete localized community of gathered believers is also resurrected. They gather in the most dangerous place they could, Jerusalem and by their very witness as the eschatological kingdom of God witness to the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

I will spare the readers of this review the details of Lohfink's use of the historical critical methods’ fruit in Biblical studies. All I will say is that he offers very compelling and to my ears new interpretations of Scripture that will likely have an effect on the way I view Scripture for the rest of my life. He takes what Biblical “scholars” have done and uses it for theology. This is something that is hardly ever done it seems. Biblical scholars never seem to want to pass the baton in the race and theologians never seem to get around to using the fruit of Biblical studies to do their theology. Lohfink uses these studies to not only uphold the integrity of the people of God and their writings, but to up build the church as well.

This book has only a few flaws. One is that the first chapter is terrible (I do not think I am over stating it to use that word but let the reader decide). He leaves himself open to much misinterpretation and does not sufficiently ground his account of Creation in the Triune God. But the first chapter is expendable. One could quite conceivably begin reading at the second chapter and not miss a thing.