Faces of the Church: Meditations on a Mystery and Its Images by Geoffrey Preston, O.P., and: After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity by Miroslav Volf (review)

326 BOOK REVIEWS innovatory and varied imagistic cataphaticism: "perhaps just as apophatic in the long run as the great game of constructing structures of negative predications employed by other mystics" (230). The notes and bibliographies are a mine of information, though it would have been preferable, in what will be for many years a standard work of reference, to have extracted the primary sources for listing in their own right. Blackfriars, Cambridge Cambridge, Great Britain AIDAN NICHOLS, 0.P. Faces of the Church: Meditations on a Mystery and Its Images. By GEOFFREY PRESTON, O.P. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1997. Pp. x + 310. $35.00 (paper). ISBN 0-8028-4353-0. After OurLikeness: The Church as the Image ofthe Trinity. By MIROSLAvVOLF. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998. Pp. 314. $28.00 (paper). ISBN 0-8028-4440-5. These two recent works of ecclesiology, though both published by the same company, represent two quite different theological perspectives. Geoffrey Preston writes as an English Catholic and a Dominican Friar, a retreat master and a novice master. Miroslav Volf, though now a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, comes from Yugoslavia where he grew up in a parsonage as son of the pastor who represented what Volf calls the "free Church" tradition but what we in the United States might recognize more readily as the English Baptist tradition emanating from the sixteenthcentury ReformerJohnSmyth. That a publishing house more traditionally identified with Calvinist thought would publish both of these authors demonstrates considerable ecumenismas well as a significantservice to Christian scholarship. Friar Preston's Faces of the Church is a collection of thirty-two essays organized into four thematic parts. Part 1 consists of ten essays, each treating a New Testament image of the Church. In Preston's terminology these are: Ekklesia, People of God, Brotherhood, Temple, Flock, Kingdom, Poor of the Lord, Bride of Christ, Body of Christ, New Creation. Part 2 comprises nine essays under the thematic heading, "Focusing the Church: The Sacraments," wherein after the question "What is a Sacrament?" all seven are treated. In part 3, entitled "Living the Church: Some Privileged Moments," Preston treats in nine chapters various manifestations of Church, individual and collective. BOOK REVIEWS 327 Included are: places and forms of assembly (Church as sacred space, councils, and synods), groups (pilgrims, saints, and martyrs) and individuals Gohn the Baptist, Joseph, and Mary). Part 4, entitled, "The Mystery of the Church," begins with an essay on koinonia and then presents us with three separate chapters on Trinitarian themes: the Church of the Spirit, the Church of the Father, the Church of the Son. The book concludes with three indexes: names, subjects, and references. The first thing to be noted about Faces of the Church is that it is a posthumous publication assembled and edited by an admiring religious confrere , Aidan Nichols, a work perhaps never intended for publication. This fact makes for two difficulties. For one thing, there is at times a paucity of references which, no doubt, had Preston lived to see this work into print, he would have supplied. For example, when on page 158 he says, "Of the Hebrew functionary who stands behind the New Testament apostle it was said that 'a man's shaliach ['apostle'] is as the man himself,"' one would like to know precisely who said that and where, but unfortunately there is no footnote reference. Similarly, when on page 160 Preston quotes Saint Thomas Aquinas on the mission of the Church, one might assume (correctly) that it was St. Thomas's Commentary on Ephesians and not a reference in the Summa Theologiae or some other work, but one is not quite certain because there is no precise documentation for the quotation. The other problem created by this work's posthumous publication is the fact that at times Preston's comments appear rather dated. Preston died in 1977, and at times the concerns and issues that he treats here are more distinctive of the 1960s and 1970s than of today. For example, when on page 18 he says, "The existence of the Christian people as a unity does not depend on its having...