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Catholicism at the Crossroads: How the Laity

Can Save the Church. By Paul Lakeland. New
York: Continuum, 2007. 164 pages. \$19.95
(paper).

Rodger Van Allen

Horizons / Volume 34 / Issue 02 / September 2007, pp 368 - 369

DOI: 10.1017/S0360966900004655, Published online: 18 March 2013

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0360966900004655

How to cite this article:

Rodger Van Allen (2007). Horizons, 34, pp 368-369 doi:10.1017/
S0360966900004655

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368 HORIZONS

unbiblical direction. The usual territory is covered (e.g., Kähler, Bultmann,

Barth, Käsemann, Cullmann, Pannenberg, Frei).
One might think that some of his conversation partners, such as Pannen-
berg, who is the “most prominent representative in recent years of the quest to
think theology and history together” (36), and especially N. T. Wright, would
be judged satisfactory. However, Rae approaches the question of history and
theology in a quite different way from Wright, for example, whose program is
rooted in an optimistic assessment of the competence of historical enquiry. Rae
constructs a theology of history by starting with the self-revelation of God in the
Bible; his reflections are guided by the rubrics of creation and divine promise,
whereby God generates history and then directs it toward the goal.
In his attempt to promote the importance of history by placing it in a
biblical and theological frame, Rae occasionally paints himself into a corner.
For example, he understands the resurrection to have taken place within the
created order and he works to instill trust in biblical accounts. In a chapter on
“Testimony and Tradition,” drawing on work like C. A. J. Coady (Testimony: A
Philosophical Study), Rae argues on critical grounds for the essential historical
reliability of the Bible. However, guided by his biblical orientation, he asserts
that the resurrection “is not apprehensible just like any other event in history”
and “bursts the bounds of the present order” (72). His attempt to think history
and theology together is both the strength of this book and its weakness.
Although the book does not break substantial new ground, it is worthy of
theological collections that want to track ongoing discussions of the relation-
ship between history and Christian theology.
East Carolina University CALVIN MERCER

Catholicism at the Crossroads: How the Laity Can Save the Church. By Paul
Lakeland. New York: Continuum, 2007. 164 pages. $19.95 (paper).

Paul Lakeland holds the Aloysius P. Kelley, S. J. Chair in Catholic Studies

at Fairfield University. His previous book, The Liberation of the Laity: In
Search of an Accountable Church, won first place for Theology in the Catholic
Press Association’s 2005 Awards. The present book covers much the same
territory as the former, but is deliberately written in language that requires no
special expertise in theology. It is, however, an intelligently written, substan-
tive, and highly engaging book about how to be church in the spirit of Vatican
II. It is written “for adult Catholics who want an adult church that can sustain
their adult faith.”
The heart of Lakeland’s book is found in his extended analysis and dis-
cussion of the role of the laity. A veteran undergraduate theology professor, the
author recalls that it is always instructive to challenge students on the first day
of class to propose a definition of a layperson that does not use the word ‘not’!
This is difficult for students who are more readily inclined to say that laypeople
are not priests, are not in positions of leadership in the church, cannot say
mass, cannot preach, are not obliged to celibacy. These, however, are not defi-
Book Reviews 369

nitions that must always have positive content. Lakeland points out that laity
“are baptized Christians called to ministry,” a definition wholly in the spirit of
both the early church and of Vatican II. Their ministry is largely constituted by
its secular expression, witnessing to the gospel in word and action in the world.
But the Council did not articulate a rigid church/world and clergy/ laity divide.
Laity had a right and a duty to speak out when the inner life of the church
required it, and clergy were not to shun the world as though they had no
conscientious responsibilities within their general lives. All the baptized are
ministers in different ways.
Lakeland sees the ceremony of ordination as reserved for certain ministries
and not for others, but critiques the understanding of the sacrament of orders as
conferring an ontological change, finding this untenably a kind of transfer into
another or higher order of being. “It really is not possible to be more a Christian
than any other baptized person. Baptism makes you a Christian. God may call
you to certain ways of service in the church, but it does not make you more
something. It simply gives you a particular role in the church, always in rela-
tion to the whole faithful people” (37).
Lakeland argues that real accountability in the church should be a neces-
sary corollary of the renewed ecclesiology of Vatican II, but the appropriate
two-way openness of a healthy institution is still lacking in great measure.
Laity and clergy who claim adulthood and call for accountability are frequently
viewed as strident if not actually subversive, but “to want an adult church,
stridently or not, is to want the good of the church” (10).
Lakeland describes his book as a work “that sets out to reassure liberal
Catholics that their position on issues is perfectly justifiable and that their
vision of the church as an open progressive community is at least as orthodox
as the more conservative models that seem currently to be in the ascendancy”
(ix). He does this, however, in a way that is irenic, humble, and well-deserving
of a reading by those of varying perspectives.
Villanova University RODGER VAN ALLEN

Women Deacons in the Early Church: Historical Texts and Contemporary De-
bates. By John Wijngaards. New York: Herder & Herder/Crossroad, 2006. ix +
226 pages. $24.95 paper.

John Wijngaards is a former priest member of the Mill Hill Missionary

Society who left his institute and the active priesthood in 1998 over the ques-
tion of the ordination of women, which cause he then took up. This book is a
republication of his 2002 study, published in England, which contends that
women were sacramentally ordained to the diaconate and therefore can be
ordained as priests. While he presents ample support for his premise that
women were ordained deacons, his conclusion follows only indirectly, and in
the long run can possibly harm the valid and legitimate restoration of the
ordained female diaconate in the Catholic Church. That is, Wijngaards is not
interested in the ordination of women as permanent deacons in service to the