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Myles Werntz. Contesting the Body of Christ: Ecclesiology’s Revolutionary Century. Baker Academic, 2025. $24.99. 200 pp.
“I believe in the church.”
This article of the Christian faith seems unusual compared to others in the church’s creeds. Our faith, like everything else about us, is fallible and marked by sin. Still, this is a confession of God’s divine action and preservation of Christ’s body. There is a church, and it is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. But what does this pronouncement look like in practice? The early twentieth century’s ecumenical movement had promising energy, but it has largely faded. Now, after a century marked by fragmentation, schism, and deepening denominational stratification, discussions of the church and its oneness seem exhausting and exhausted.
Yet Myles Werntz’s Contesting the Body of Christ: Ecclesiology’s Revolutionary Century is a refreshing and welcome contribution. The twentieth century, the “century of the church,” witnessed the rise of the modern ecumenical movement and global missions, and the dramatic growth of Christianity around the world. It also saw Vatican II and its reforms, the explosion of Pentecostalism, and widespread theological self-examination. The result was a strange combination of division and vitality, the church growing rapidly even as it reassessed its identity.
While Werntz reflects on twentieth-century history, this is not a work of history or sociology. Rather than evaluating the arguments and probabilities for an institutional merger or waving away genuine differences, Werntz invites readers to reflect on the essence of the church. He notes various lists of marks of the church, such as Martin Luther’s, but declines to ground his analysis in them as tests to determine whether a particular body counts as a “true church.”
Instead, Werntz frames his work around the Nicene marks of the church—one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. These marks describe what the church is, not what it lacks. Because they point to the church’s being rather than its borders, they create space for sincere ecumenical conversation. They also frame the past century’s conflicts and debates not as divisive battles but as explorations of what it means to practically and communally live out these four marks.
Werntz never directly addresses the Reformed–Anglican dialogue that culminated in a 2020 report identifying koinonia as a communion all churches share as parts of the one body of Christ. Communion is never “impaired,” the report asserts, but “variously received.” Still, Werntz’s approach substantially overlaps with that insight, especially in his treatment of the church’s oneness. The church is one because it is the body of Christ animated by His Spirit. Its unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity are not external additions; they arise from its very life. To be the church is to be these marks.
With this overall thesis in mind, Werntz traces the ways different twentieth-century Christian traditions “contested” or worked out what the church’s essence meant for their lives and practices. He frequently returns to the North American context, a geographical focus that reflects the availability of sources and the continuing influence of Western theology on global conversations. With far too many stories to list here, the book is worth reading if only for this panorama of Christ’s bride. This overview is especially relevant because the material issues that pressed the twentieth-century church (economics, race, the relationship between laity and clergy, the legacy of colonialism, etc.) have only intensified in the twenty-first.
The struggles, changes, sacrifices, sins, and reflections of the church are the working out of what it means to be one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. The marks of the church are gifts received, and therefore “will by their nature be contested, expanded, and reconfigured in different eras.” In other words, this contestation is how the church by the Spirit sorts out its marks as it comes into contact with the world and speaks to itself. So what does it mean to be one, holy, catholic, and apostolic in each particular place and time? Werntz devotes one section of the book to each mark.
One
Werntz begins his longest chapter with a sharp line from Cyprian, the mid-third century AD bishop of Carthage: “He cannot possess the garment of Christ who parts and divides the Church of Christ.” Few themes have preoccupied modern Christians more than church division and the elusive hope of unity. This mark deserves the extended attention he affords it, from formal moves within Roman Catholicism, the World Council of Churches, and Eastern Orthodoxy, and turns to approaches that emphasized spiritual unity—most notably within Pentecostalism—along with unity through mission, whether defined by evangelism or by the Social Gospel, and unity through hermeneutics, which Werntz associates most closely with the rise of evangelicalism.
Expressions of oneness by Christians across these traditions have included formal mergers, theological accounts of unity that persisted despite visible fractures, internal reckonings with non-denominational divisions like racism, cooperation in evangelistic and social efforts, common openness to the Spirit, and shared ways of reading Scripture. Werntz’s reporting highlights just how varied the attempts were and how differently each tradition understood what “unity” required.
His treatment of evangelicalism and the contestation for unity built upon hermeneutics is surprising and enlightening. Readers from other traditions may question aspects of his taxonomy, but I found his angle on evangelicalism refreshing. Werntz describes the movement as one that found church unity not primarily in institutions, mission, or the Spirit’s work, but in a shared hermeneutic. This is not to say evangelicals ignored institutions, mission, or the Spirit, or that traditions emphasizing those facets of the church’s life neglected Scripture. But for evangelicals, the center of contestation lay in how the Bible is read in ways that crossed institutional boundaries. The unity of the church was worked out through hermeneutical battles—internal debates, engagements with other Christian bodies, and efforts to embrace and partner with emerging majority-world churches whose readings began to differ sharply from their Western counterparts.
Experientially, this rings true and was even a little exposing to me as an evangelical reader and pastor. I am a Presbyterian who practices connectional polity and sacramental worship, yet contestation within my larger church still takes place on hermeneutical terrain. Doctrinal agreement matters deeply, but there must be a better way to express the oneness of Christ’s body than “We are united to the degree to which we agree.”
Holy
Werntz is keen to show that holiness is not simply an extension of oneness, even though the two are closely connected. Holiness is more than moral purity, although never less than that. It concerns the church’s life “by virtue of God having sanctified the church in Jesus Christ: before [holiness] is a task, it is an indelible gift of God’s own presence.”
So how did holiness belong to the whole church, and how did the church contest its holiness during a century marked by populist movements, lay empowerment, and complicity with social sins? Holiness, Werntz argues, is fundamentally about wholeness. Pentecostals emphasized this through the gifts and baptism of the Spirit. Pentecostals, mainline Protestants, Evangelicals, and Roman Catholics wrestled through the implications of the laity being wholly part of the church, because holiness presses outward: If the church is holy, the whole church must be engaged.
This becomes even more complicated when we consider social sins like colonialism and racism. Werntz shows how different models of polity shaped the ways churches reckoned with collective responsibility. The structures of the United Church of Canada produced one kind of response to questions of culpability regarding historic treatment of First Nations People; Southern Baptists in the Jim Crow South produced another. Werntz’s point is not to rank traditions but to reveal how holiness, understood as wholeness, inevitably draws the church into questions of common life, past failures, and present accountability.
Catholic
Catholicity for Werntz is a distinct mark, not just oneness under a different name. Catholicity is not just about unity, but shared confession in continuity with the apostolic message. Catholicity is not only what unites, but what is ubiquitous, believed universally across the centuries and across the planet. In other words, catholicity is about the movement of what unites Christians in different times and places; it is about how the church contextualizes and shares its unified witness in its pluriform contexts.
To show the limits of contextualization, Werntz turns to the German church of the 1930s and 1940s—a stark reminder that cath
