THIS book deserves a wider readership than its subtitle is likely to attract. Indeed, the author acknowledges that “negative work” is not an obvious conversation-starter as far as a prescription for the Church is concerned. Nevertheless, the elaboration in the final pages of the word “negative” as intended to be understood “in the photographic sense” more precisely captures the author’s primary concern to promote the Church as “a radical counter-project . . . standing in contrast to an institution built on positive authority, miracles and power”.
With such a prospectus progressive, liberal and liberationist Christians will surely find themselves in sympathy — and more traditionally conservative Christians find themselves appropriately challenged.
Edda Wolff is an Episcopal priest who served as a lay chaplain at the University of Reading, and later in the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe., most recently as interim Vicar of St Nino’s Episcopal Mission in Georgia — a remote and somewhat marginalised mission where “institutional structures are distant, leadership is fluid, and resources are minimal.”
It has proved to be something of a Petri dish for the inspiration and testing of their distinctive apophatic ecclesiology, which offers serious challenges and transformative theological, pastoral, and liturgical proposals for churches that are perhaps less existentially fragile but may, for that reason, be most in need of her impassioned prospectus.
The key question is posed as follows: “Can the church justify its place in a world where the damage it has caused — through patterns of abuse, unchecked power, exclusion, and complicity in oppression — looms in the minds of those both within and outside its walls?”
But Dr Wolff is not a prophet of doom as “the church is at its best precisely when it is thrown off balance.” This provides an opportunity for the Church to be “re-imagined and rediscovered in the lives of those who inhabit it”. How? By moving beyond the security of institutional power “into the radical openness of grace and creativity”.
The seven chapters develop the argument with intermittent references to Jesus’s temptations in the wilderness (hence the title), Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov, and illustrative examples of how the basic principles of the Church as “negative work” have been applied in practice. While the examples can tend to be somewhat idiosyncratic, the linking of the respective themes to the scriptural temptation texts is intriguing, while the “Grand Inquisitor” cross-references are spot on and truly memorable.
Chapter one plots the challenge to the ecclesiastical status quo by defining and deploying the concept of negative work. Here, following Miroslav Volf, the meaning of “work” in relation to the Church goes beyond toil and drudgery, and gainful employment, to engage with the fundamental impetus and motivation informing the Church’s institutionalised order and practice. This negates prevailing assumptions, structures, and practices to the extent of being legitimately described as “negative work”.
The implications are fleshed out in chapter two as “(un-)becoming church”, situating both “negativity” and “work” as key terms historically, theologically, and philosophically. Wolff succinctly summarises the remaining chapters as “building on this theoretical foundation. Chapters three to six apply this to the Church’s functions — diakonia, leiturgia, martyria — exploring how these functions can become “temptations to certainty”. Here, the theory and practice of their thesis are skilfully articulated, with an eye trained on what is practically possible as well as existentially imperative.
Notwithstanding the apparent negativity of their project, and their critique of prevailing “fixed borders and traditions”, this is essentially a love letter to the Church born out of a passion for its potential to become a much better and more Christ-like version of itself.
The Rt Revd Dr John Saxbee is a former Bishop of Lincoln.
Tell these Stones to Become Bread: Church as negative work
Edda Wolff
SCM Press £50
(978-0-334-06724-5)
Church Times Bookshop £40