The Community Life of God: A Book Review/Plug

Rodriguez, Milt. The Community Life of God: Seeing the Godhead As the Model for All Relationships. The Rebuilders, Gainsville, FL. Ppg 198

Community, community, community. Community is the church buzz word right? Wherever you go there is this talk about community. Community groups, living in community, community outreach, blah, blah, blah, right? Actually community is not only a good thing, you were saved, sanctified and filled with God’s Spirit for this purpose.

Theologians love to talk about all of the cross centered theology. Propitiation, Justification, Adoption, Atonement, Regeneration and every other “tion” and “ology”. This is actually my cup of tea. As we search over the horizon of what is known as the bible, the typology under the Old Covenant and the antitype under the New Covenant are wrapped up in these words as the true seed of Abraham, comes and crushes the head of the serpent, thus restoring the image of God in man and reconciling us to God. But here is the question is this for “salvation” only? Well insert Brother Milt’s book….

Community talk is good, healthy, and even Godly, but we have to first ask, “what is community” and “what does it look like”. Well Brother Milt has rebuked us for such questions and called those questions a category mistake. See we should be asking “who is community” and “who does it look like”. And this is where “The Community Life of God” has done the body of Christ a great service. See God is a community. This is why trinitarian doctrine is important friends. It isn’t some abstract theology left for seminaries, it is as practical to us as believers as any other doctrine. The Triune God is a community and Milt points out that this truth is found on the first strokes of the book of Genesis “let us make man in our image” (pg 11;14)

Milt points out that even the way the church evangelizes and communicates and meets is all about “salvation” saving souls from hell. This is true that the saving of souls is very important, but Milt points out that it wasn’t to get a clean slate (pg 134) so that we can fill it up the way we want (even if those things are so called biblical things). We are now to be filled with the Spirit and this purpose is that of community.

Something else this book really helped me grasp is that if we want to see God’s purpose of creation we need to look at Genesis 1-2 and then Revelation 22-24. We see here what God’s “eternal purpose” really was in creating men. He also points out that God was not deficient in His creation of men, He didn’t need men to feel desired, or to want someone to worship Him. God was fully complete in eternity!!! Our modern church “outreach” and evangelism and even the way we gather and alter calls (this is me speaking not Milt) can learn much about this. God is not a hopeless romantic, waiting for a prom date. He is the one above all and contains no blemish or needs! Milt does a great job of explaining this early on in this book (Introduction thru chapter 4).

Milt goes on to point out that individualism is a result of the fall, the running and hiding, the nakedness that embarrassed the first couple and even our pursuit of our own way today. This is all a result of sin (I must write about this). Milt goes on to explain that God is the foundation the epitome the springboard of community and if we want to know what community is (don’t forget that God is community just like God is love) we need to look no further than Heaven but even more recently the incarnation of Jesus (chapter 12).

Finally the recommendation. I recommend this book to both the more traditional churches and those who are planting and establishing organic fellowships. Some of the stuff a more traditional fellowship would disagree with especially chapter 14. None the less, it is a marvelous work. It starts off a bit abstract and necessarily so. Unless we understand God is a community and that we were created in His image and with His eternal purpose in mind, community will just become another buzz word that fizzles out when something else more attractive comes along that Christians can pounce on to help “grow” (width not depth) the church. God has created us for community and Milt has done a great job of expressing it both philosophically and then instructing us how to live it out practically.