BOOKS:

...Thomas used to speak...

...When Father Dulles characterizes the institutional model as teaching that "the Church is a kind of cable car or sacred chariot that takes men to their destination," in which "each individual [is] equipped with his own pair of opera glasses" and can ignore his fellows, he comes dangerously close to caricature, as he does when he blames the institutional preoccupation of seventeenth-century theology on "the baroque mentality...

...Doubleday, $5.95 JAROSLAV PELIKAN Just as books have their special destinies, so various Christian doctrines seem to have their special times -the Trinity in the fourth century, sin and grace in the fifth, justification in the sixteenth, and so on...

...For despite his thrice-repeated warning against the "aestheticism" that so easily besets the sacramental model, he has been arguing all along in a way that would seem to incline him toward making the Eucharist, rather than organization or fellowship or sermon or social service, define what the Church is and does...

...But meanwhile I am pleased to commend Models of the Church as a monograph that gives us, in remarkably brief compass, an introduction to a vast literature and to a complex set of issues, and does so with fairness, clarity, and grace.and grace...

...It is the only one of the five that "cannot properly be taken as primary...

...Despite his caution, however, he does sometimes seem to be polemicizing against the institutional model in just that way...

...The doctrine of the Church set forth in Aleksei Khomiakov's The Church Is One, or for that matter the one propounded by Vladimir Soloviev, would seem to have much to offer, since it does bring together many of the strands that have tended to be separated in Western theology...

...An ecclesiology that identifies the Church as herald "sees the Church as gathered and formed by the word of God" and regards it as the mission of the Church "to proclaim that which it has heard, believed, and been commissioned to proclaim...

...The Church is seen as sacrament when "the actions of the Church as such whereby men are bound together in grace by a visible expression" are taken to be constitutive of its nature...

...As a result there has been a welter of books on ec-clesiology during the past century and a half, with a quantum leap since the Second Vatican Council...

...In Models of the Church Avery Dulles has provided an analysis and a schema that seeks to sort out the principal options in the doctrine of the Church, evaluating each in relation to the others as well as in relation to Scripture and the Christian tradition...

...Therefore he does not want "to polemicize from a standpoint within his own preferred position...

...It also manages to avoid the snobbery into which several of the models described here seem to be in danger of leading...

...Finally, the Church as servant, in the formulation of the late Cardinal Cushing as quoted by Dulles, "announces the coming of the kingdom not only in word, through preaching and proclamation, but more particularly in work, in her ministry of reconciliation, of binding up wounds, of suffering service, of healing...

...The doctrine of the Church has come into its own during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries...

...As often happens to scholars who summarize the thoughts of many others, the author does "not feel compelled to choose" unambiguously from among the options, but prefers to be somewhat eclectic in his own stance...

...Believing strongly "that to immure oneself behind a fixed theological position is humanly and spiritually disastrous" and that "none of these approaches is invalid, none superfluous, and none by itself sufficient," he takes it as his assignment to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each position...

...For that very reason I find it strange that Father Dulles has given such scanty attention to Eastern Orthodox ecclesiology, to which he refers only en passant as he compares various Western theories, both Roman Catholic and Protestant...

...As one who deals primarily with doctrinal questions that have now become historical questions, I shall reserve for a personal conversation with Avery Dulles an exploration of what he means when he says, speaking of early Christian eschatology, that "this again is a historical question, and the answer to it tells us nothing about the doctrinal question...

...The five alternative models in Father Dulles' taxonomy are: the Church as institution, the Church as community, the Church as sacrament, the Church as herald, and the Church as servant...

...As a communion, according to Jerome Hamer as quoted by Dulles, the Church "is at once inward and external, an inner communion of spiritual life (of faith, hope, and charity) signified and engendered by an external communion in profession of the faith, discipline and the sacramental life...

...Foxhole conversions and deathbed theology certainly bear within themselves enormous possibilities for corruption, but any doctrine of the Church that does not include the ministry to the needs of individuals is not worth very much...

...nor, come to think of it, is it very "sacramental...

...On the other hand, when, near the end of the book, the author acknowledges that "for blending the values in the various models, the sacramental type of ecclesiology in my opinion has special merit," it should not come as a surprise to the reader...

...When, in the model of the Church as servant, those who march for justice "sometimes feel closer to one another" across confessional lines than to the uninvolved Christians in the pew, it is appropriate to ask, as the author does, "whether the Church would have a message of comfort for someone who, through no fault of his own, was dying poor and friendless" or for "the old woman in the garden" of whom St...

...In the first of these, "the Church tends to become a total institution-one that exists for its own sake and serves others only by aggrandizing itself...

...Let me begin my brief critical remarks by asserting that I share this preference for the model of the Church as sacrament...