This article discusses David Tracy’s implicit and explicit reflection on the church as a community of Christian praxis. The church is both a social and a theological reality, just like its theological partner-reality ‘the world’. This means that no concrete expression of the Christian church may pronounce itself wholly or uniquely adequate to its theological field; neither can any boundary between ‘church’ and ‘world’ be rendered theologically determinate or fundamental. So Tracy’s thinking focuses on the centre of the church, not on its boundaries. As gift and sacrament, the church participates in God’s grace as disclosed in God’s self-manifestation in Jesus Christ. In bearing witness to this event, the church’s critical and self-critical praxis of love is borne upon mystical-prophetic discourses and dialogues with otherness without and within. Ecclesiology, therefore, emerges only in fragments and not as a closed system. Tracy’s ecclesiology is everywhere a function of an account of God and reality. A Christian church that learns a Tracyean route to naming God aspires actively, contemplatively, and fragmentarily to realise itself in answering fashion as an ‘institution of love’.

This chapter reflects on the theological virtue of hope in the Christian community and how it must be distinguished from mere optimism. Rather than seeing hope as a result of faith, the author proposes to consider both hope and faith from within the horizon of love. In paying particular attention to the transformative spirit of hope in the church, the chapter is written in dialogue with David Jasper’s ecclesiological reflections in his Trilogy.