Olga V. Solovieva's book is an exemplary interdisciplinary approach to the concept of “the body of Christ.” She investigates how “the body of Christ” functions culturally, religiously, and literarily in various historical contexts.Solovieva's thesis is clearly stated: “What the book offers is rather an investigation into the topos of Christ's body and the very specific rhetorical and epistemological functions that this religious notion has the potential to occupy when removed from the immediate context of ritual worship or theology and used in areas where it is least expected: in conceptualizations of the power of the state, or the materiality of a book, or the virtual space of a novel of consciousness, or in cinematic apparatus, or in a business corporation, to name just a few of its possible protean transformations” (p. 5). What then is implied by the book's title: “Christ's Subversive Body”? Solovieva concludes that the Apostle Paul's use of this concept in the New Testament as “an ideological operator” (p. 10). Moreover, “It means not the destruction but the substitution of one system of meaning by another within a shared cultural horizon” (p. 11). This concept then “relies on the Pauline positionality of the imitation of Christ in order to undertake what they define as a shift in an established system of values—to change social perceptions, or to influence constellations of power by reenacting the divine law's incarnation in the materiality proper to their own medium” (pp. 11–12). Here is where there may be some push back; namely, whether the Apostle Paul's uses of the concept of “Christ's body” as an ideological operator. Other prominent scholars,1 like Richard B. Hays interpret the concept “the body of Christ” as a metaphor used by Paul to illuminate the mystical union of both the church and the individual with Christ (see Hays, First Corinthians. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997).Solovieva's tome is an ambitiously historical adventure—covering the fourth to the twenty-first century. She does so judiciously and with keen precision.This initial chapter tackles an early fourth century bishop, Epiphanius of Salamis (Cyprus). The dilemma faced in the early monastic movement was: Are images of Jesus permissible in Christian worship? Or should these images be deemed idolatrous? Epiphanius argued vociferously that there is a difference between the concept of Christ's body (i.e., the Church universal) and the physical image of Christ—whether portrayed as an etching on a fresco or as an icon used in worship. Physical images of the body of Christ are to be avoided.Chapter 2 examines the fifteenth century Book of the Holy Trinity, which oddly served as an alchemist textbook. Solovieva makes the observation that through this book Corpus Christi shifted to Corpus libri, namely, the “body of Christ” to the “body of a book.” Thus, this book functions like a “sacred artifact,” something akin to what the New Testament scholar Larry Hurtado observes about the early Christian writings (namely, the physical texts themselves) in his The Earliest Christian Artifacts (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2006).Chapter 3 examines the life and works of Johann Caspar Lavater (d. 1801) a poet-pastor from Zurich. His notoriety is now the forgotten science of physiognomy—a mystical—scientific approach to religious experience. Accordingly, for Lavater, “the notion of the body of Christ allows for an inclusive relation between the physicality of an individual and the physical whole of the natural world, since the divine will of the invisible God-creator transverses both” (p. 92). His key work (contra Kant's Critique of Pure Reason) The Physiognomic Fragments, which contains a chapter on the images of Christ, attempts to “train human beings to observe each other and themselves so that they can estimate and influence their future position as members of Christ's transfigured body” (p. 111). People are then to see the divinity hidden in each human body.Chapter 4 explores the great Russian author Dostoevsky and his reaction to Hans Holbein's painting Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521–1522). Simply, an emphasis on the dead body of Christ (minus resurrection) deeply challenged Dostoevsky's faith. Thus, in his subsequent fiction Dostoevsky intentionally addressed the necessity of a crucified and resurrected Christ's body for Christian faith. This lead Dostoevsky on a literary quest, as Rowan Williams notes, wrestling with “faith and fiction.” “Faith and fiction are deeply related—not because faith is a variant of fiction in the trivial sense but because both are gratuitous linguistic practices standing over against a functional scheme of things” (p. 127).In Dostoevsky's later writings, he tackled the idea of Christ's body being more than just a theological concept, hence, a social concept—moving “into a ‘big dialogue’ on the ethics of social coexistence” (p. 132). This was an apologetic against the writings of Nietzsche, Hegel, and Schleiermacher.Chapter 4 delves into the controversial nineteenth century Italian cinematographer, Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose landmark movie The Gospel According to Matthew (1975) had a scandalous effect on how to portray Jesus (i.e., Christ's body) in the movies. Of course, this involved Pasolini's own complex and complicated sexualized interpretation of the body of Christ. Needless to say, Pasolini was excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church and died a tragic, self-inflicting death.One of the more interesting and salient chapters is the last one. Here Solovieva tackles the portrayal of Christ's body in the contemporary United States. She first addresses the impact of Richard John Neuhaus, a once Lutheran left-leaning pastor who turned right-leaning Roman Catholic founder and editor of the journal First Things. His book The Naked Public Square (1984) in many ways became the “Bible” for the neocons and Moral Majority in the 1980s. Solovieva also tackles the economist Michael Novak's theory of incarnate capitalism, the relationship of the church and state during the presidency of George W. Bush and finally the controversial Mel Gibson movie The Passion of the Christ (2004).Because this reviewer is a specialist in the field of New Testament studies, it does limit a broader critique of this book. The reviewer, however, has gained an appreciation for the breadth and depth of Solovieva's argumentation and the unwavering demonstration of the importance and impact of Christ's (subversive) body in the world.