The French Dominican theologian Yves Congar (1904–1995) coined the term “total ecclesiology” in his groundbreaking outline for a theology of the laity,Lay People in the Church. “At bottom there can be only one sound and sufficient theology of laity,” he wrote, “and that is a ‘total ecclesiology.’”¹ In subsequent years, he used the term to describe the necessary context for a theology of the laity and to characterize the ecclesiology emerging from the Second Vatican Council’s debate on the church. Variants on the phrase appear throughout Congar’s published work, describing an ecclesiological synthesis that does justice to the...

When Yves Congar coined the phrase “total ecclesiology” in the introduction toLay People in the Church, he expressed the ecclesiological vision that had underpinned his theological reflection for more than twenty years.¹ An investigation of his previously published ecclesiological texts reveals that the notion of ecclesiological synthesis was fundamental to Congar’s theological method long before he coined the famous phrase. This chapter begins with a close examination of the phrase in its context inLay People in the Church, giving a preliminary understanding of Congar’s meaning. Next, it seeks the beginnings of Congar’s instinct for a total ecclesiology as...

Yves Congar is best known as a prolific author on a wide variety of ecclesiological issues. He began his career, however, as a teacher of theology at the French Dominican House of Studies, Le Saulchoir. His extensive lecture notes from ecclesiology courses taught in the first half of his career, as well as the thesis he wrote to gain the qualifications required to teach, reflect the same desire for an integral ecclesiological synthesis—a total ecclesiology—as is found in his published works. Congar himself saw a cohesiveness between his teaching and his writing. In early 1954, when he found...

Throughout the first half of his career, Congar repeatedly expressed his intention to construct his treatiseDe Ecclesiaaccording to a method of integration and synthesis in order to produce a truly theological treatise that would take as its object the full mystery of the church. His unpublished manuscripts show that, in developing this method of integration and synthesis, he strove over time to bring together speculative and biblical theological methods in a way that would provide a theological framework that could accommodate all the dimensions of that mystery. He found that his efforts to express his vision of the...

This study has argued that Congar’s published texts and unpublished work from the first half of his career demonstrate his consistent desire for a total ecclesiology. In his published texts, he repeatedly referred to an ecclesiology that would present the mystery of the church in all its dimensions. In his unpublished works, he used similar language to describe the integral ecclesiology that he attempted to construct in his courses and in the draft treatiseDe Ecclesia. Thus, both his published and unpublished texts reflect a single, unified aim: the pursuit of a total ecclesiology.

For full understanding of Congar’s pursuit...

This study has traced the development of Yves Congar’s notion of a total ecclesiology and his active attempts to construct such an ecclesiology from his earliest days as a theologian until his removal from the faculty of Le Saulchoir in 1954. At that time, with the suspension of his teaching activities, Congar also ceased drafting and revising the unfinished manuscript of his treatiseDe Ecclesia, although he continued to gather notes and references for the treatise until as late at 1971. In 1970, he gave a succinct account of his pursuit of a total ecclesiology:

In the introduction toJalons...