When you have finished reading Christian Ministry in the Divine Milieu you will have reviewed the historical evolution of the foundational doctrines of ecclesiology, become knowledgeable about how they fit together in the real life process we call church, and how each of us serves in co-creating this process throughout our life. You may also have to rethink your views of  sacred, secular, immanent and transcendent,  evolution, church, salvation, Holy Spirit, Catholic, and the Church as one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.

Maldari helps us rethink these categories in five chapters: The Immanent and Transcendent Aspects of the Church, Church and Ministry in Scripture, Ministry in the Church’s Tradition, A Critique of Ministry in the Church’s Tradition, and Catholic Ministry at the Service of the Church. What binds these chapters together isa recognition that evolution is a foundational law of the world we live in, as too is organic wholeness rather than amechanistic reductionism. Our cosmos is not two separate realms of reality: sacred and secular; immanent and transcendent. Our co-creation with God, our work, is our ministry toward its continual evolution.These are truths inherent in the way the world operates and thus part of God’s revelation to us.

His writing is clear, his proposals well thought out and researched; his book a cohesive argument by someone obviously accustomed to the challenges brought forward in the ministry of teaching. The book is a worthy addition to the Catholicity in an Evolving Universe series.

Joseph Bracken’s Church as Dynamic Life-System reads differently than Maldari’s book. He takes the work of authors he has dealt with over the years and reviews them in order to provide us with contexts fora central element of his theology: a “dynamic life-system.”  The cosmos is constituted by different kinds of life-systems in dynamic relation to each other.  Once this is clear it is an easy move to talk about the trinity, evolution, and the church as dynamic life-systems. According to Bracken, the church may then be seen as a historical process, a corporate life-system.   This application of his theory is especially possible if the parish becomes a center of environmental awareness.  The local church, parish, and the church at large are a collective reality: part of the dynamic life-system of the universe of which we all participate through our conscious thoughts and actions. 

In sequential chapters Bracken first reviews Teilhard’s theological vision, then Whitehead’s philosophical cosmology which leads us to, in chapter three, a systems-oriented approach to the God-World Relationship. Consequently, in chapter four, he applies his theory to the Catholic Church which, in the modern world, had gradually closed itself off from any type of conscious evolution. In other words he has to show how the static church of the modern world can become the church as dynamic life-system in the post-modern world; a church aware of its role as co-creator in the evolutionary process.  He reviews the documents of Vatican II, especially Lumen Gentium, Gaudium et Spes, and Pope Francis’ Laudatosi to show how the contemporary magisterium is slowly becoming open to a systems approach to understanding the present and formulating its tasks for the future.

Both books are worth reading. If you are familiar with a dynamic and evolutionary understanding of reality each, in its own way, provides both a review of current theories and a method for bringing these theories together to offer ways of re-engaging with church life and the necessary changes that have to come for its relevant survival in the future.  For those who see the dynamic and evolutionary ways of thinking as theological science fiction or even contrary to the Catholic tradition, a reading of either one of these books provides a clear exposition of another way of thinking – sort of like when Aquinas used Aristotle.  The event of Church has existed and does exist in many cultures. The people who make up these cultures change as too the church goers in each of these cultures. We need more theologies that think outside the 20th century culture box. Editors for Orbis Robert Ellsberg and Ilia Delio are owed a debt of gratitude for offering these authors thought to the world.