Unbalancing the church

TO LIFE
Rediscovering Biblical Church
By Steve Maltz. Saffron Planet Publishing. 223 pages. £10.00
ISBN 978 0 956 229 625

This book concludes the train of thought begun in Steve Maltz’s How the Church lost the way…and How it can find it again and continued in How the Church lost the Truth…and How it can find it again. Born out of the author’s personal experiences of fragmentation and conflict in and between churches, the book tells us that ‘biblical church’ is to be found by rejecting the pagan and philosophical ‘Greek’ way of doing things, turning instead to the Hebraic model of lives, thoughts, and actions focused on God.

Much in this book is true, some good points are made, and the style is easy to follow. That said, I cannot write glowingly of all of it. In a book about ‘rediscovering biblical church’, one would expect to find the author’s definition of ‘church’. None is given — only a description of what the early church was (allegedly) like. Maltz is often given to over-simplification, which may account for his remarkable ability to write about ‘church’ without really addressing ecclesiology, his rose-coloured view of the early church, his failure to cite sources for the claims he makes concerning church history, and his dismissal of all cessationists, whatever their category, as ultimately deistic. I also felt uncomfortable with his use of ethnically based terms like ‘Hebraic’ and ‘Greek’, which readily bring to mind tensions in the early church, despite the author’s strong attempts to defend such terminology.