Opening a book by Henri Blocher is like being invited to a wedding dinner. It is a theologically and culturally rich, tasty, and challenging experience. So, the release of his latest book La doctrine de l’Église e des sacrements, vol. 1 (Vaux-sur-Seine: Edifac, 2023), is a feast of theology.
The book consists of two parts. In the first, Blocher expounds on the Biblical data, while in the second, he analyses three types of church conceptions and models: the Catholic, the Reformed (paedobaptist), and the Confessing (credobaptist). Attention will be concentrated on the section regarding Roman Catholic ecclesiology.
Blocher acknowledges that the Roman Catholic view of the church has ‘great persuasive power’ (p.139) but is based on ‘insufficient’ Biblical foundations that have led to ‘ambiguities in its construction’ (p.113). He suggests four observations for critically evaluating Roman Catholic ecclesiology from a Biblical perspective. Let us briefly review them:
