Can These Bones Live? – Book Review
Barry Harvey brings together an enormous amount of scholarship and reading from a wide swath of Christian thought to reflect on the ‘dis-membered body of Christ’.
What kind of story is the Church in? Where are we in that story? What does it mean for us or for God’s purposes that the Church is divided (or dismembered)? Where, then, do we stand?
Harvey seeks to find an answer to these questions by tracing the Church’s journey: from early Christian apocalyptic to partnership with earthly powers (the ‘Constantinian shift’), through changes in eucharistic theology in the Middle Ages that led to the concept of the individual, to the modern and postmodern ages of where the nation-state (under the influence of democratic liberalism) mediates our public selves and where global capitalism fuels restless desire and consumption.
This book holds out a stubborn hope that transcends a very bleak world. Harvey doesn’t pull any punches about the desperate state of the pilgrim people of God (dry bones). Nevertheless his engagement with ecclesiology, hermeneutics and social theory help us to find ourselves ‘out of control’ in the true freedom that comes from holy vulnerability, and on our way to the eternal city of which we are true citizens.
I recommend this book very highly.
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