The Churches the Apostles Left Behind

Let me first clarify I am a practicing Catholic. Let me also confess I love Raymond Brown. I am always awed by his wisdom, erudition, and authority in everything he wrote. So don't expect this review to be objective. Yet this book is not so much a detailed scholarly study of the early Christian communities. What Fr. Brown does here is identify the specific Christian communities discernible strictly from the NT, and clarify the issues which troubled every one of these communities. He then expounds the lessons and pitfalls pertinent to each community which can be gleaned from specific NT documents, and applies them to the modern Catholic Church. The reader can develop here a greater appreciation of why each of those documents was added to the NT canon and of why the NT must be taken as a whole: each individual Epistle or Gospel by itself cannot be the foundation of a church. Moreover, the book is an affirmation of II Vatican Council as bringing the Catholic Church closer to the spirit expressed in those Epistles and Gospels. Implicitly and overtly, this book also expresses that it's the Catholic Church which best preserves the balance between all these lessons contained in the NT. And all of this is fine with me.

The title in itself is already a message. It tells us that from the very beginning, the disciples of Jesus gathered in various communities or churches, with distinctive understandings of his message and of his personality. There was no monolithic orthodoxy. The book is a very useful and savory medicine against the temptation of searching for absolute truth through an unqualified literal reading of the material in the New Testament. The way the author puts into perspective some of the texts is quite convincing of the fact that their meaning for us, can only be perceived through a preliminary and careful study of the times and circumstances in which they came about. Raymond Brown does this work here for us, concerning a variety of texts. For each one he shows what the emphasis is, and tries to explain why, by describing the context. When the text is written in the framework of a given polemic, it may become a stumbling block for future generations who are not aware of the presuppositions. Therefore, each time Raymond Brown points out the strengths of the particular point of view stressed by the author. He also signals the inherent weaknesses of that particular vision, namely when you tend to center your attention on it and therefore neglect or even forget the rest, resulting in a loss of heritage. He concludes by saying that there are many ways of being faithful, and invites us to read the Bible, not in order to make our point, but in order to discover what we have not yet been listening to.

Raymond Brown's investigation into the Apostolic communities of the early Church provides a solid biblical foundation for studies of the Church. It offers a mature view of the scripture which attests to these communities. While remaining orthodox, Brown does not appeal to less-informed views of the Bible. Instead, he views the testimony of the New Testament writers within their realistic historical contexts. It is from his view of these contexts that his work derives most of its strength. Brown looks at each book (or set of books) that he investigates as an example which addresses the strengths and weaknesses of the community which caused the writing to come into effect. He realizes that the work of the New Testament is one which is an organic whole, no one work being a microcosm of the message of the New Covenant. By starting from this perspective, Brown is able to explain the strengths and weaknesses of each community and how each is addressed in the works associated with them. This gives a mature view of how scripture informs us, as a whole, not as isolated parts. In the study of ecclesiology, it can become very tempting to approach the views of the Church from a solely historical perspective, without taking reflection to scripture. Brown's book gives a good starting background to investigating ecclesiology as a whole, scriptural and traditional.

In the manner of a great scholar, Raymond E. Brown normally multiplies arguments built upward from his unusual command of a great array of facts. A hint of that tendency emerges in The Churches the Apostles Left Behind. Fr. Brown, a Roman Catholic priest, asks how the churches of the late first century survived the trauma of the deaths of the originary apostles. Using paradigms that emerge from reading the Pauline pastoral epistles, Colossians/Ephesians, Luke/Acts, First Peter, the Gospel of John, the Johannine epistles, and the Gospel of Matthew, Brown presents models of church laitant in the communities of the New Testament documents. Though his book traces an emergent ecclesiology in the Christian canon, it intends to provide an ecumenical church of the present age lessons in just how we might be church in the present age. Rather than a teacher of dusty history, Fr. Brown here serves as a pastor for the church of flesh and blood. The Churches the Apostles Left Behind presents a different kind of read for Fr. Brown's students.

Raymond Brown uses his wide and deep knowledge of the New Testament to give us valuable pastoral insights for all Christian communities and churches. But he has some especially valuable insights for his fellow Catholics when he notes that the aftermath of Vatican II has brought some very tragic losses in Catholic belief and practice. He sees the effort to "recoup" these losses by emphasizing traditional and distinctive Catholic practices as "eminent good sense" (pp. 117-18). That effort has been central to the papacy of John Paul II, and it certainly makes eminent good sense. These and other insights into church life make reading this book a thought-provoking experience.