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Christ in Practice: A Christology of Everyday Life

Author:	Clive Marsh
Published By:	Darton, Longman and Todd (London)
Pages:	168
Price:	£12.95
ISBN:	0 232 52541 2

Reviewed by Alun Brookfield.

Clive Marsh, Secretary of the Faith and Order Committee of the Methodist Church, has written an interesting little book, attempting to answer the question posed by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1944: “Who is Christ for us today?”

His answer, broadly speaking, is that we need to discover the art of living within Christ, and not being dominated by churchy agendas. For Marsh, Christ is not located solely in the church, but is to be found in a wide range of contemporary situations beyond the walls of the church building and management structure.

Fine so far, and few, if any, within the denominational structures would disagree with him. So how does he go about helping the church to be Christ in the wider world as well as in church?

He begins by describing and refining Bonhoeffer’s challenge. This reviewer was impressed, not only by how well he knows Bonhoeffer’s writings, but how successfully he manages to bring them alive for a new generation of readers. This first chapter makes illuminating reading as the author presents scholarly theological notions in a lively and clear way.

In Chapter Two, Marsh lists a number of circumstances where the refining reality of the presence of Christ can be identified. These include, for example: wherever people suffer innocently for a just cause; wherever forgiveness occurs; whenever truth is told, no matter how painful; and so on. This is very close to Rowan Williams’ idea that, even if people reject the presence of Christ, the fact that Christ has lived in the way that he did means that he has set a benchmark against which all human existence must now be measured.

Chapter Three is odd, not because it seeks to take seriously the fact that a person’s religious, racial and cultural background will inevitably affect that person’s understanding of Christ, but because it talks only about ethnicity. It fails, for example, to address the issue of personality type, or of past traumas, or the myriad of other things which can affect the lens through which we encounter the risen Christ.

The next three chapters, however, redeem the weakness of Chapter Three. In these chapters, Marsh gets down to the hard work of identifying how the church can be “Christ as a community of practice” at work, in education, among family and friends and at church.

Finally he reflects helpfully on the whole process of discerning the mind of Christ.

This is a scholarly piece of work, which was hard going at times. But if I have a major criticism to make, it is that I sensed always that this author does not believe in the actual presence of the risen Lord in our culture. Rather he seems to speak of Christ throughout as a concept or construct, a set of ideas on which to base a better world, rather than as a person to be known within personal relationship.

Perhaps a book for a week’s study leave, rather than a practical manual for engaging with the person of Jesus in pastoral practice.