Does God Need the Church?: Toward a Theology of the People of God

by Gerhard Lohfink, Gerhard Lohfink

Are not all religions equally close to and equally far from God? Why, then, the Church? Gerhard Lohfink poses these questions with scholarly reliability and on the basis of his own experience of community in Does God Need the Church?

In 1982 Father Lohfink wrote Wie hat Jesus Gemeinde gewollt? (translated into English asJesus and Community) to show, on the basis of the New Testament, that faith is founded in a community that distinguishes itself in clear contours from the rest of society. In that book he also described a sequence of events that moved directly from commonality to a community that was readily accessible to every group of people and was made legitimate by Jesus himself. Only later did Father Lohfink learn, within a new horizon of experience, that such a description is not the way to community. The story of the gathering of the people of God, from Abraham until today, never took place according to such a model.

Today Father Lohfink states that he would not write Wie hat Jesus Gemeinde gewollt? the same way. The situation of belief and believers has undergone a shift: the question of the Church has become much more urgent. Church life is declining and the religions are returning, often in new guises.

In light of these shifts and the change in his own view of community, Father Lohfink inquires in Does God Need the Church? of Israel's theology, Jesus' praxis, the experiences of the early Christian communities, and of what is appearing in the Church today. These inquiries lead to an amazing history involving God and the world - a history that God presses forward with the aid of a single people and that always turns out differently from what they think and plan.

Gerhard Lohfink, ThD, was professor of New Testament exegesis at the University of Tubingen until 1986 when he resigned from his professorship in order to live and work as a theologian in the Catholic Integrierte Gemeinde and its community of priests.

Genres: Theology, Church, Biblical Studies

252 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Rev. Father Gerhard Lohfink was professor of New Testament exegesis at the University of Tübingen. Since 1986, he has lived and worked as a theologian for the Catholic Integrated Community. His many books include Does God Need the Church? (Liturgical Press, 1999).

Reviews

[Jared · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been reading this book off-and-on for so long that it's difficult for me to coalesce my thoughts about it into a coherent review. There are two reasons for this. First of all, my reading of Lohfink's work faced the minor interruption of completing my doctoral thesis. That may have contributed a bit to my scattered recollections of Lohfink's most salient points. :-) Secondly, I decided to take notes as a I read; I ended up with 83 pages. A little overboard, I'll admit, but Lohfink's work well repaid the slow read.

On the whole, this is a VERY good book, filled with tremendous insight into both the fundamental theology of the Old and New Testament. The title of the book poses the fundamental question: Does God "need" the Church? The book is a resounding "Yes!" We know that God "needs" a special, chosen People simply because, from the beginning of Creation, God has always had a special, chosen People. It is the revealed nature of how God works in the world.

Though Lohfink is dealing with the broad sweep of Scripture, he very carefully anchors his insights in close readings of Old and New Testament texts. In reality, these specific readings, almost more than his generalized conclusions, are the great value of the book. Lohfink is a tremendous reader of Scripture, able to bring his expertise in the sociology of early Greco-Roman and Christian communities to bear in ways that genuinely insightful for contemporary understanding.

The book is closely argued but isn't dense or hard-to-follow. Lohfink is purposely writing a more "popular level" version that builds on his prior academic work (especially "Jesus and Community"). Here, Lohfink is quite "quotable," which is probably more of a credit to the translator than perhaps to Lohfink himself. (It's very rare that theological German phrases become quotable English sayings.)

I was also pleased how Lohfink kept the book from becoming an apologia for the Roman Catholic Church. To be honest, that was perhaps my only hesitation with this text. Only at the very end, when he attempts to make a case for papal authority does Lohfink's argument sound like special pleading. Other than that, this is a measured work of biblical theology, equally valuable to Protestant and Catholic traditions alike, and certainly a statement that must be reckoned with by all future analyses of biblical missiology/ecclesiology.

[Patrik Hagman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is written some years before the Jesus book, but it has the same ”bringing-it-all-together”-character to it. Again it is hard to avoid the comparison with Yoder, but whereas Yoder is an ethicist with very good knowledge of the Bible, Lohfink is a NT scholar with a very good grasp of political theology. And, as I said he is German and a Catholic. But they end up with an extremely similar understanding of Christianity and the church.

This book, then, traces the centrality of ”community” from the Old Testament, through Jesus, the Early Church and on to the church of today’s world. Obviously, the point is that Christianity just does not make sense without the community of Gods people, but Lohfink also tries to characterise this people. The best parts, understandably, is the chapters where he examines the role of the community in the teaching of Jesus and the apostles.

The book ends with a very beautiful auto-biographical chapter on ”The Church and I”, with tells of Lohfink's own experience from childhood up till now, through the ”critical” years up to his experiences in the Katoholishe Integrierte Gemeinde.

[Luke Eshleman · Rating 5 out of 5]

As others have said, Lohfink's narration of the biblical meta-narrative is similar to John Howard Yoder, except that Lohfink is a biblical scholar rather than an ethicist trained in systematic theology, which gives his work a different flavor and emphasis. Lohfink's project is a combination of biblical theology and exegesis and he avoids some of Yoder's subtle missteps in relation to Jewish-Christian dialogue and supersessionism (not to mention Yoder's personal and unrepentant sins). But together, one Catholic and the other Mennonite, they make a convincing case for the Church as those whom God has joined to biblical Israel and called to be set apart from the kingdoms of the world, who together embody the kingdom of God, initiated in Jesus and proclaimed to the nations. God needs the Church in order to spread the mission and reign of God to the ends of the earth, beginning in first century Jerusalem.

[Graham Gaines · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like this book could've been about 150 pages. There were some good parts, but this was a largely forgettable one for me.