Book Review of “What Is The Church?”

       This is an excellent reference as to the church’s origins in the Jewish religion, and the fact that it is the Catholic religion that is the fulfillment of the Jewish religion, Jesus Christ being the prophesized messiah of the Jewish religion. No other great leader of a religion was predicted in the ancient scriptures as was Jesus Christ in Jewish scripture, particularly by the prophet Isaiah.  When He came, He claimed to be God Himself and proved it through showing his control over, sickness, the elements, death and even His own death by rising from the dead on Easter Sunday and Ascending to heaven in the Ascension.  This book goes into the Jewish foundations of the Catholic religion and with extensive biblical references to support its almost 2000 year history of being the fulfillment of the Jewish religion, the dogma of the mystical body of Christ and the Bride of Christ. It is volume 48 of the Twentieth Century Encyclopedia of Catholicism and carries a 1961 Imprimatur. The dust cover reads as follows:

       The Church is both a visible phenomena and an invisible and supernatural reality, and it must be considered in both these aspects.

       The Church visible has her own government structure, her own code of laws, her own courts. But those who see only the outward appearance of the Church never see her as she truly is.

       On the other hand those who see the Church only as a supernatural entity, ignoring her visible outward form, who consider that the church exists as an ideal, nor in history, are also making and error.

       “What then is the mystery of the Church? The author asks, defining mystery in its original sense as “an event produced by God’s power and revealed by God in the very act of bringing it about.

       “In this sense,” he answers, “the mystery of the Church consists in the interdependence within her walls, of history and the eternity of God, of man and of God, of the visible and invisible.”

       The Church is the Mystical Body of Christ, both in ists visible form and in its invisible reality. Christ constituted it visibly by giving it authority and powers, and a mission in history. By His Passion and Resurrection, He breathed his own Life and Spirit into it.

        The author, through treating of a difficult subject, has produced a clear, readily understood exposition of the theology of the Church. This is a book for the intelligent layman who wants a full understanding of the nature of the Christian Church.