Re-membering the Body: The Lord’s Supper and Ecclesial Unity in the Free Church Traditions by Scott W. Bullard, and: Eucharist and Ecumenism: The Eucharist across the Ages and Traditions by Owen F. Cummings, and: God the Spirit: Introducing Pneumatology in Wesleyan and Ecumenical Perspective by Beth Felker Jones, and: A Service of Love: Papal Primacy, the Eucharist, and Church Unity

Abstract

Reviewed by: Re-membering the Body: The Lord’s Supper and Ecclesial Unity in the Free Church Traditions by Scott W. Bullard, and: Eucharist and Ecumenism: The Eucharist across the Ages and Traditions by Owen F. Cummings, and: God the Spirit: Introducing Pneumatology in Wesleyan and Ecumenical Perspective by Beth Felker Jones, and: A Service of Love: Papal Primacy, the Eucharist, and Church Unity by Paul McPartlan William P. McDonald Scott W. Bullard, Re-membering the Body: The Lord’s Supper and Ecclesial Unity in the Free Church Traditions. Free Church, Catholic Tradition 2. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books (Wipf & Stock), 2013. Pp. 175. $22.00, paper. Owen F. Cummings, Eucharist and Ecumenism: The Eucharist across the Ages and Traditions. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications (Wipf and Stock), 2013. Pp. 149. $19.00, paper. Beth Felker Jones, God the Spirit: Introducing Pneumatology in Wesleyan and Ecumenical Perspective. Wesleyan Doctrine Series. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books (Wipf & Stock), 2014. Pp. 132. $18.00, paper. Paul McPartlan, A Service of Love: Papal Primacy, the Eucharist, and Church Unity. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2013. Pp. 100. $16.95, paper. These four books offer models of different types of ecumenical engagement by theologians of Methodist, Catholic, and Baptist traditions. In the Felker Jones text, both ecumenical and Methodist sources combine to present a well-rounded approach to the Spirit useful for many Christian traditions. In the McPartlan volume, a Catholic offers a vision of papal authority that could inspire further thought on all sides about the papacy’s role in church unity. Cummings explores various underrepresented texts and thinkers to enrich eucharistic thought on the part of all Christians, and Bullard provides a look into how he and other Baptists are rethinking the Lord’s Supper by engaging Catholic and Protestant theologians at a quite detailed level. Felker Jones’s God the Spirit offers an ecumenical account of the Holy Spirit, with specific attention paid to her Wesleyan tradition. She proceeds from the notion that pneumatology is the most underdeveloped area of Christian theology, for which she offers correctives, not with new constructions but with historical perspectives, beginning with Gregory of Nyssa’s argument for the Spirit’s divinity against the Pneumatomachi. The book’s pastoral aim is to help readers “discern between the promptings of the Spirit and our (often sinful and selfish) wishes” (p. 119). The confusion between the two rests on a faulty understanding of the Spirit’s ministry in the church. The author points readers to a wealth of correctives offered across the Great Tradition and her Wesleyan ecclesial home. Along the way, she treats familiar questions in pneumatology with ecumenical import, such as the filioque, the role of the Spirit in soteriology, and glossolalia and other charismatic gifts. Two to nine discussion questions end each chapter and make it suitable for small-group use. [End Page 500] In three short chapters, McPartlan sums up the complicated ecclesiological problem of papal primacy and its relationship to the eucharist and church unity in A Service of Love. Papal primacy, the author explains, using the Ravenna Document (2007), should rest on the principal of headship in the Trinity patterned in the church’s hierarchy, where the one and many reflect “Christ among his brethren” (p. 4). Conciliarity, also part of the church’s deep structure, as such, is not limited to synods or councils, but it inheres in the church’s nature as a eucharistic community. A chapter on developments in the second millennium traces the juridical notions of papacy, especially as developed at Vatican I. Here, the pope is viewed as separable from all other bishops, and his authority could be conceived without connection to theirs. Naturally, such views make it difficult for Eastern Christians to see the pope collegially among the other ecumenical patriarchs. Reform and renewal of the papal office can come from attention to the first millennium, before the 1054 schism, in which understandings of the pope as chief minister of unity prevailed, rather than juridical models that exalted papal authority high above that of other bishops. In short, a return to communion from juridicism would go far in advancing the cause of unity between East and West...