The Open Body emerges from a conference held at Harvard Divinity School in April 2011. The essays in this book reflect on ecclesiology in the Anglican tradition, that is, they debate whether and how humans should gather as a «church» in the name of Christ. While the prompt for this collection of essays is the contemporary crisis in the Anglican Communion regarding homosexuality and church governance, this book provides a capacious re-interpretation and re-imagination of the central metaphor of Christian community, namely «the Body of Christ». By suggesting that the Body of Christ is «open», the authors are insisting that while the recent controversy within the Anglican Communion should prompt and even influence theological reflection on Christian community, it should not define or determine it. In other words, the controversy is regarded as an «opening» or an opportunity to imagine and to examine the past, present, and future of the Church, both of the Anglican Communion and of the entire Body of Christ. Some of the essays begin their reappraisal by looking backward and offering creative theological retrievals from the early Church; some essays offer fresh perspectives on the recent Anglican past and present; others examine the present ecclesiology from a comparative, interreligious perspective; and still others are keen to anticipate and influence the possible future(s) of the Body of Christ.
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«Against the background of a denomination that seems to lurch from one crisis to the next, these essays offer penetrating and rigorous discussions of what it means to be 'open' in theology and in the church. Coming from a wide variety of theological perspectives and disciplines, the authors seek to raise the tone of the debate: instead of the panic and paucity of theology that have characterized so many of the responses to current issues (such as human sexuality), these essays offer a far more considered and theological appraisal of the situation facing the Anglican Communion in its wider social and political context. In short, this collection offers some of the most creative theological thinking in Anglicanism in recent years.» (Mark Chapman, Vice-Principal, Ripon College Cuddesdon, and Reader in Modern Theology, University of Oxford)