It can be said that this volume is based on three great acts: the Christian act; the testimonial of that act in the New Testament; and the configuration of that act in history (primarily the history of the first centuries) through the service of ministry. Over the centuries, the crisis in ordained ministry has not been exclusively about the problem of celibacy, even though that is important, and this book certainly includes a reflection about it. The crisis is, above all, a crisis of identity due to the progressive disfiguring of the sense of the mission which Christ left to his apostles and which made of the early church as well as the later church an essentially missionary institution.
For this reason, J.I. Gonzalez Faus insists in these pages that all ministry, and specifically the ordained ministry, must express this same missionary spirit in order to avoid a relapse into pre-Christian religious beliefs, such as the belief in «sacred mediators» that threaten the exclusivity of Christ's mediation, as it is ascertained in the New Testament. The churches of the Gospels, Acts, and the Pauline Epistles, with their lessons in plurality, creativity, and enthusiasm, as well as their strong desire to be «communities of contrast» due to their evangelical style of exerting authority, have given today's Church the inheritance of an enormous freedom to reconfigure itself.
A careful review of the Church's history, however, shows a structuring of the ordained ministry influenced by a progressive privileging of the clergy within the Church, which, as the author explains, must be overcome today by substituting the binomy of lay-clergymen with the model of community-ministries. The second letter to the Corinthians offers us the gift of a «spirituality of surrender» ideally suited for this task. It is exceedingly possible that the Church might be reaching what has been called «the time of the laity», and yet it is also possible that we might pass through this time in a sterile way, not because of not having known of its arrival, or what it was about, but because of not having understood the specificity of the ordained ministry and that of other ministries within Christian communities.
The reader of this book will find a profound examination and revision of the missionary caritas as the fundamental spark of the ministry's Christology, of the ministry's biblical theology, and of the configuration of that same ministry through the whole of its history. González Faus, a Spanish Jesuit theologian, professor, researcher, and author of numerous books, is uncompromising as he engages us in this timely and necessary discussion of the identity and spirit of Christianity in the 21st century.
