The future church of 140 BCE

by Bernard J. Lee

A century and a half before the time of Jesus, a movement of educated Jewish laity initiated a profound transformation of Judaism. Bernard Lee uses this as a metaphor for a hidden revolution in the U.S. Catholic Church today: the development of a lay interpretation of Catholic Christian identity. He proposes an ecclesiology that believes that the Spirit is God's gift to the entire people of God without privilege or prejudice. Accordingly, some form of dialogic community is ecclesiologically appropriate to give the lay experience of faith a legitimated voice in the telling of the Catholic story, i.e., a place in the interpretive structure of Catholic community.