The Church Unfinished: Ecclesiology through the Centuries

Vatican II's Constitution on the Church in the Modern World affirmed that God has endowed humans with a certain autonomy for shaping the world. The book asks whether that has implications for traditional presumptions about the order and structure of the Church. The tendency to presume that nothing new or unexpected could develop in the unfolding future of the Church might close us to the presence of the Spirit in our midst, and fail to recognize that our time, as much as any past time, is an opportunity for God's creative activity and grace.

The book thus proposes that the Church's leadership would do well to nurture a renewed eschatological attitude that embraces a genuine openness to the newness and surprise of the future, leaving room not only for continuity but also for the important elements of change and transformation. For, what the Church is, only the entirety of its history will fully reveal.

Audience
--undergraduate and graduate courses on the Church or on the development of Christianity
--readers who want to take the time and effort to learn more about the church