Frederick J. CWIEKOWSKI. The Church: Theology in History. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2018, xi + 412 pp., ISBN: 978-0-8146-4468-3, $39.95, paperback. Reviewed by Patrick J. HAYES, Redemptorist Archives, Philadelphia.

            Cwiekowski, Sulpician and long-serving seminary professor, leaves no stone unturned in this lengthy survey of the Catholic Church’s understanding of itself and the theology surrounding it.  With its roots in the Hebrew scriptures, the entity that became the Ekklesiatou Theou in the salvific action of Jesus Christ, crosses the centuries to our own day.  The author presents large swaths of Christian thought on ecclesiology, mostly by well-known churchmen.  Women (Mary of Magdala, Hildegard of Bingen, Catherine of Siena, Angela Merici) make sporadic appearances, though the Blessed Virgin Mary is encoded into the larger narrative of the Church, either as archetype or mother. 

Eleven chapters chart the chronology of Catholic ecclesiology.  The first four chapters are strongly anchored in the biblical material arising from the first century Christian experience.  The apostolic period is well established as formative and shows how creative the early Christians were in the face of rather daunting obstacles.  The first four chapters are at their best in conveying key ideas that brought together a nascent community, such as disciple (mathētēs), ritual action, prayer, mission, priesthood, and incorporation into Christ’s body.  The initial call and response of those early followers of Jesus recall what Henri de Lubac, SJ, once noted: “The church is a convocation before it is a congregation” (52).  These were graced moments, launched by the experience of Pentecost, and from which was gained the power to evangelize the good news.  Even in its earliest stages, the church had an authoritative and perpetuating structure in the form of the college of the twelve apostles and the significance of Peter as its head.  There was exclusivity in the movement’s ranks.  Followers became part of an “in group” and Jews (and some Gentiles) became part of the “out group.”

With later periods, coming rapidly in subsequent chapters, the history of theology itself is outlined.  This is more or less an intellectual history of how the basic touchstones of the gospels, acts, and letters of St. Paul cohere and supply data on the Triune God, sacramental life, ethics, and so forth.  The message is not muddled: in one’s reading on the church over time, one gets a sense of the whole of theology.  In the eleventh century especially, when division between the churches of the East and that of the West were fueled by imperial politics and the temperament of individual personalities, an opening toward reform also entered ecclesial discourse.  The centralization of power became an almost viperous phenomenon and the “apostolic life,” whose purity was now threatened, began to recede in the fog of history.  The trappings of papal Rome, the later development of a court curia, and the split between church and state showed how the Church was less interested in the spiritual welfare of its people.  It set the stage for abuse of office and the Reformation, a host of novelties in liturgical practice and theology, and tensions with Enlightenment thought.  Cwiekowski spares no punches in the battles for papal primacy in the nineteenth century and shows how the ultramontanists influenced European culture and the Church’s notion of tradition.  In the twentieth century, the long road to Vatican Council II and its exigencies is summarized well, with a stress laid upon the Council’s apostolic constitutions.

What we miss in a survey of this kind is the social element of how the Church actuated or enacted itself.  How is the Church perceived by the people in the pews (or even those outside of the Church)?  The centrality of Jesus’ story must be coupled with the pneumatological force of God’s grace.  In the chapter on Vatican II, there is only the briefest mention of synodality.  The current papacy has seen this as a crucial driver in the post-conciliar era and so the concept could be further elucidated.  And we need a forthright integration of the Church’s sinfulness into the larger picture of the Church’s history.This would have extended Cwiekowski’s treatise considerably, but it would have given a more grounded and relatable understanding of God’s people.

This text will be useful in general church history courses in seminaries and will likely become standard there.  Faculty who teach courses in religious history at the undergraduate level will also find this a solid offering, particularly with select chapters.