Barry Harvey provides a doctrine of the church that combines Baptist distinctives and origins with an unbending commitment to the visible church as the social body of Christ. Speaking to the broader Christian community, Harvey updates, streamlines, and recontextualizes the arguments he made in an earlier edition of this book (Can These Bones Live?). This new edition offers a style of ecclesial witness that can help Christian churches engage culture. The author suggests new ways Baptists can engage ecumenically with Catholics and other Protestants, offers insights for Christian worship and practice, and shows how the fragmented body of Christ can be re-membered after Christendom.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes in one of his last prison letters that he had "come to know and understand more and more the profound this-worldliness of Christianity". In Taking Hold of the Real, Barry Harvey engages in constructive conversation with Bonhoeffer, contending that the "shallow and banal this-worldliness" of modern society is ordered to a significant degree around the social technologies of religion, culture, and race. These mechanisms displace human beings from their traditional connections with particular locales, and relocate them in their "proper places" as determined by the nation-state and capitalist markets. Christians are called to participate in the profound this-worldliness that breaks into the world in the apocalyptic action of Jesus Christ, a form of life that requires discipline and an understanding of death and resurrection. The church is a sacrament of this new humanity, performing for all to hear the polyphony of life that was prefigured in the Old Testament and now is realised in Christ. Unable to find a faithful form of this-worldliness in wartime Germany, Bonhoeffer joined the conspiracy against Hitler, a decision aptly contrasted with a small French church that, prepared by its life together over many generations, saved thousands of Jewish lives.

Additional Authors Include Thomas Shrewsbury, Jean Wellington, And Beverly Wolf.

What is the church, and what is essential to it particularly in a post-Christian age? In contrast to "the City," that is, the world (including the hedonism and narcissism of popular culture) that virtually all human beings now inhabit, the author calls upon the church to remember that it is "Another City" that does not compromise itself by giving allegiance to any political entity that belongs to this world. He points out how the hedonism and narcissism of "the City" or popular culture have been embraced also by those who make up Christ's body, the church, without seeing that this contradicts biblical faith. In contrast, the early Christians represented a subversive presence or "Another City" within the wider Roman society. In time, however, the church succumbed to "the City, became aligned with the empire, gained power, and began to render to Caesar what belonged to God." Today what was once called "Christendom" is rapidly eroding. Christianity no longer dominates as in the past. In such a situation, Harvey says, it is time for the church to remember that it is "Another City" and that it does not compromise itself by giving allegiance to any political entity that belongs to this world. Instead, the church has the courage to live, like Israel of old, in the diaspora as a distinct minority, remaining an uncompromising and faithful servant of God's final (though still future) triumph in the risen Christ. Barry A. Harvey teaches systematic theology at Baylor University.