Can These Bones Live?: A Catholic Baptist Engagement with Ecclesiology, Hermeneutics, and Social Theory

by Barry Harvey

In this book, Barry Harvey offers a doctrine of the church that combines Baptist distinctives and origins with an unbending commitment to the visible church as the social body of Christ. Writing from a postliberal, post Constantinian perspective, Harvey outlines how the church, in its current Western setting, needs to recover and reinvigorate core ecclesial practices in order to "remember the scattered followers of Jesus into the earthy historical form of the crucified and risen Christ." These core practices include the theological interpretation of Scripture, the development of sound doctrine, the centrality of baptism and the Eucharist, the exercises of spiritual discipline, and the cultivation of the church as a distinctive social body. This book will serve as a useful text for students of ecclesiology, systematic theology, missiology, and ethics.

Genres: Theology

320 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2008

Reviews

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Somewhat difficult to get through, but this was the best, most well-balanced critique of individualized, consumerist American Christianity I have encountered. Harvey's prose is dense, but he tackles large social, political, and theological issues with both confidence and hope that we can overcome these distortions by returning to what it truly means to live as the body of Christ.

Strongly recommended.

[Noah Dellinger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent work from Harvey, who offers poignant, insightful critiques of various institutions (two swords of nation-state and global market) and thought-traditions (modern conceptions of religion, the individual, etc.), while also offering extensive positive visions in return. He is especially adept in narrating how foreign concepts infiltrated the Church and the consequences of such relationships, while simultaneously leading us onto “the better way.”

“Can These Bones Live” is best read in tandem with Harvey’s baptist conversation partners—James McClendon (“Systematic Theology”), Elizabeth Newman (“Untamed Hospitality”), Curtis Freeman (“Contesting Catholicity”), and others. Each of these works fleshes out in different shades and dimensions what it means to be a Baptist who also embraces their catholicity.

Harvey’s work here is dense and challenging, but primarily because of the ambition of a project which aims to fuse systematic theology, church history, and social commentary in a relevant way for Christians. “Baptists and the Catholic Tradition” is the second edition of the project, and is apparently more streamlined. I have not read that edition, but I assume it might be good to read it first as it is more recent and fifty pages shorter.

[M Christopher · Rating 1 out of 5]

Bagged it around pg 169. Books of theology about theological method are my least favorite and Harvey's style is nearly impenetrable. Unless you are a professional theologian or a student in need of a thesis, stay away.

[Spencer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is like William Cavanaugh, Rowan Williams, John Milbank, and James McClendon got together and had a very difficult to read but powerful and brilliant baby.

[Matt Crawford · Rating 3 out of 5]

The subtitle is awfully misleading. Unless by mistake Catholic should be catholic. Either way it is not overtly Baptist either. In fact there is no reference to the great Baptists like of church history like Spurgeon . Presently Mohler is absent Only one reference to John Bunyan. Actually there is a heavy reliance on a Lutheran, Bonhoeffer. Of the three topics mentioned, social theory seems to be the only concern. The title only really applies to the first chapter. He says he wants us to wake up but fails to mention what we should wake up to.