Picture three scenes: First, an Israelite living around 1450 BC looks aghast at a priest who stands with a bloody spear and a furious look in his eye after executing a man and a woman for the sin of idolatry (Num. 25:8–13). Second, a first-century young man named Eutychus begins to doze as he sits on a high windowsill while a long-winded apostle preaches after midnight (Acts 20:7–12). Third, in 2024, a 9-year-old sings to Jesus at an international church gathering in Abu Dhabi.
What do these three characters have in common? It’s not obvious they share anything noticeable in common—they live in vastly different times, cultures, and situations. They hail from different worlds. But according to Brad East, in his beautiful little book The Church: A Guide to the People of God, these three characters are all part of a single, cosmic people. They’re part of the point of human history: they’re part of the church—the Bride of Christ, the spouse for whom he made and redeemed the entire cosmos. The Church is a far-reaching book that presents the story of God’s people as told by Holy Scripture.
Ecclesiology with a Twist
East, associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University, warns that he isn’t writing a typical ecclesiology. “You may be surprised,” he tells us, “by the sparsity of major topics in ecclesiology, which is the name for the doctrine of the Church” (14). If it isn’t a dogmatic consideration of the doctrine, what then is East’s book? It’s a romance.
East tells the story of the one true God and his spouse—created in the election and deliverance of Israel and come to her own in the church of Jesus Christ. As he summarizes, “God’s plan from the beginning in electing Abraham was to unite all things to Himself through Jesus, the seed of Abraham; to bless all the families of the earth through the family of Abraham; and this to bring to fulfillment the divine desire from all eternity: to set apart a people for Himself” (129).
This is the story all the saints are swept up into—Phinehas, Eutychus, Paul, and my 9-year-old are all part of the same people graced with the unspeakable privilege of saying to Christ, “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine” (Song 6:3).
Deep Roots and Lovely Fruit
The church’s story doesn’t begin at Pentecost but rather all the way back in Genesis. The church’s family history boasts Abraham as one of her patriarchs. In other words, the story of the church and the story of Israel in the Old Testament aren’t two separate stories; they’re one and the same.
While it isn’t uncommon for ecclesiologies to acknowledge this, few do so in East’s thorough manner. Rather than asserting the church is the natural telos of Israel’s story in the Old Testament, East shows the reader this connection by tracing out Israel’s story and drawing attention to how the church lives out her identity in Christ—the true Israel.
The story of the church and the story of Israel in the Old Testament aren’t two separate stories; they’re one and the same.
East doesn’t propose that Old Testament Israel is directly replaced by the church today. Nor does he defend the idea that “Israel is a sort of way station” on the journey to the church (26). He manages to do something that seems fresh without being theologically novel. He maintains the crucial affirmation that God’s elect people are Israel, and this people includes all nations, who are adopted to Abraham’s family through Christ.
Gentiles don’t become Jews, but they can become the true seed of Abraham through adoption (see Gal. 3:16). This deep awareness of the church’s Old Testament connections is a welcome emphasis. All the more so because of the undeniably beautiful prose in which East develops this idea. Indeed, The Church can just as easily be labeled a work of art as a work of theology. For example, his reflections on the typological resonances between Eve, Mary, Israel, and the church are nothing less than riveting.
Too Much of a Good Thing (and Not Enough of Others)
Occasionally, the beautiful writing obscures East’s point. In the lovely discussion of Mary (chapter 2), East draws attention to the convincing typological parallels between Mary and the church. Both are, East explains, “temples” of Christ—he dwelled in Mary, the “God bearer,” and by his Spirit, he dwells in the church today. But then East lets this parallel run wild, reversing referents without compelling warrant.
He suggests that since the church is Christ’s Bride, and Mary prefigures the church in a kind of typological way such that we’re warranted to call the church our mother, we can also conclude that “in a sense [Mary] is his bride” (12). He goes on to say that she, like the church, “is the bride of Christ, and thus the new Eve to his new Adam” (13).
No biblical justification for this conclusion is given apart from the observation that “no human being ever knew Christ with greater intimacy than Mary” (13). Further, little is made of this parallel between Mary and the church as the Christ’s Bride from a theological point of view. The aesthetic symmetry is clear, but what does it mean that “Mary is a kind of bride of Christ”—an “Eve to his Adam”? This seems like an example of sacrificing clarity for the sake of beautiful language.
Gentiles don’t become Jews, but they’re adopted into Abraham’s family through Christ—the true seed of Abraham.
Additionally, for all the book’s merits in developing the New Testament’s Old Testament context, it turns out to be less of a book about the church and more of a biblical-theological reflection on the relationship between Christianity and Old Testament Israel. A crucial part of the church’s identity has thereby overwhelmed and consumed every other part. The book is lean on considerations of topics such as the local church, church membership, polity, ecclesial offices, the nature of the sacraments, and church discipline. Readers looking for an introduction to the church should reach elsewhere on the bookshelf for a more straightforward ecclesiology.
This is a beautiful book. Taken in such a way, The Church should receive a wide and appreciative readership. Even so, readers would be better served by approaching it not as a work about ecclesiology but rather as a kind of extended essay: a theological reflection on the church’s relationship to the Old Testament in general and Israel’s story in particular.