Book Review

by Graeme Nicholas

God With Us: Synergy in the Church, by Ruth Page. SCM Press, 2000

Ruth Page has treated us to a very readable and evocative theology book. This book invites the reader to explore the implications of the ‘with’ in the title, especially for what it means to be church. Page studied and taught theology in New Zealand before moving to teach and later become principal at New College, Edinburgh. Her passion for finding the practical implications of theology for personal and church response to present situations has clearly shaped this book and provides the reader with stimulation and challenge on almost every page.

The author finds in the motif of God with us a strong and evocative guide to rethinking the church’s theology and practice in a postmodern situation. She introduces the book by pointing out that “if a relationship defined by ‘with’ obtains between God and the church, its characteristics become the model for all relationships in which the church is involved…” Later she says, “I am … concerned to consider … the implications of God being with us, such that ‘with’ is the term of relationship which defines what the church is like and what it does.”

In developing her theme Page pictures for us transcendence and immanence not as two competing ‘locations’ for God; transcendence, rather, speaks of God beyond the models and knowledge we lay claim to. “God is … transcendently immanent, God has been ‘with’ creation from the beginning, needing no outreach or intervention to be present always with every creature rather than occasionally present with some.”

The implications of this are then worked out. The church is critiqued as having become overly wedded to and shaped by modernity; it is called to engage in the postmodern context in a mode of dialogue and attraction rather than dominance and control.

Page skilfully and helpfully characterises some of the significant shifts that have taken place in the church in the last 50 years. In aspect after aspect of the church’s understanding and practice the shift can be portrayed as a movement toward understanding the implications of God with us. Themes worked through include church as community of communities; the shape of ministry, liturgy and mission expressive of God-with rather than being done for or to; mission and ministry as companionship; the postmodern thirst for spirituality and a creative relationship with ‘New Age’ spiritualities; peace and justice responses; ecumenism; and the church’s response to other faiths and to the environment.

Page draws from a wonderful range of material from diverse denominational, geographical and theological perspectives as well as some writing from quite outside the religious world. Each chapter is broken up with inserted boxes with practical illustrations or supporting quotes.

This is a book that could help us as we consider styles of leadership in the church, new ways of building ecumenical relationships, ways of engaging in mission, and ways of responding to the social justice and environmental crises of our time. I will return to it as I work with those reinventing the church for our time in our communities. I recommend it to all who sense that the shape and approach of the church has outlived its usefulness and yet hold on to some hope that there are other ways of being church. Ruth Page offers a vision which is expansive in its ecumenism and openness, challenging in its insistence on engagement beyond traditional comfort zones, and full of hope in its reclaiming of a central biblical them to guide the church of the future.