Jesus and the Church

The Foundation of the Church in the New Testament and Modern Theology

Paul Avis

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780567696205
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia

What is church's true foundation? Was the Christian church founded by Jesus, or does 'the Eucharist make the church'? Paul Avis sets out his own answer to these questions. Gathering a wide range of critical scholarship, he argues that there is something solid and dependable at the foundation of the church's life and mission. Avis argues that Jesus wanted a church in a sense, but not as we know it. Christ proclaimed the gospel of the Kingdom and his disciples proclaimed the gospel whose content was Jesus himself, the Kingdom in person. The church is battered and divided, but at its core is a treasure that is indestructible – the gospel of Christ, embodied in word and sacrament. A central theme of the book is the relationship between the church and Christ, the church and the gospel, the church and the Kingdom. Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, is the sole foundation of the church, but he cannot be without his people.

1

Rock of ages and living waters

‘The Church’s one foundation/Is Jesus Christ her Lord.’ S. J. Stone’s familiar hymn is a paraphrase of the Apostle Paul’s insistence in 1 Cor. 3:11 that God has laid the foundation of the church once for all in Jesus Christ: ‘Other foundation can no-one lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.’ This text is the guiding motto of this book (and of its proposed successors). Stone’s hymnal paraphrase is densely packed with good biblical theology. It begins: ‘The Church’s one foundation Is Jesus Christ her Lord; She is his new creation By water and the word. From heaven he came and sought her To be his holy bride, With his own blood he bought her, And for her life he died.’¹ Stone’s words, together with the tune ‘Aurelia’ which was written, two years before the composition of the hymn, by Samuel Sebastian Wesley, the grandson of Charles Wesley, make a powerful combination. Many of Stone’s hymns are marked by a robust faith and hope. The juxtaposition of ‘one’ and ‘foundation’ in this hymn, that is to say the powerful metaphors of unity and solidity, has a strong appeal; it stirs our emotions and evokes our commitment. This is what the church of Christ should be, we feel – united and standing firm against every onslaught!

This hymn is sung by many English-speaking Christians all the year round, but especially at festivals commemorating the original dedication of the parish church. The text and the hymn have a special relevance at times of change and transition, at moments of uncertainty and confusion in the life of the church. The third verse – ‘By schisms rent asunder, By heresies distrest [sic]’ – points to the fact that the hymn was intended as a counterblast to the what Stone regarded as the heretical views of John William Colenso (1814–83), Bishop of Natal. Colenso’s accommodating approach to African indigenous practices, including polygamy, and his radical (for those times) biblical criticism in his studies of Romans and the Pentateuch, provoked his excommunication by his metropolitan, Bishop Gray of Cape Town. First published in 1866, when Stone was the twenty-six-year-old assistant curate of New Windsor, ‘The Church’s one foundation’ was sung at all three main services of the 1888 Lambeth Conference. Archbishop Frederick Temple (father of Archbishop William Temple) became thoroughly fed up with it, complaining that he found it sung wherever he went!

The first verse of the hymn achieves this effect by piling up powerful biblical images, one upon another. It echoes the New Testament texts that speak of Christ’s Lordship and Headship over the Church (1 Cor. 12:3: ‘Jesus is Lord’; Eph. 1:22: ‘the head over all things for the Church’; Col. 1:18: ‘he is the head of the body, the Church’). It also weaves together the metaphors of new creation and new birth (2 Cor. 5:17: ‘there is a new creation, everything old has passed away’; Jn 3:3-8: ‘born from above . . . born of the Spirit’). Finally, the phrase ‘by water and the word’ is equally a biblical paraphrase and joins together the word and the sacraments. ‘By water and the word’ refers to baptism (Jn 3:5: ‘of water and Spirit’; Heb. 10:22: ‘our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water’) and the proclamation of the word of God in the gospel (1 Pet. 1:23: ‘born anew . . . of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring word of God’). The Epistle to the Ephesians (Eph. 5:26) links the ideas of water and the word together: ‘cleansing her [the Church] by the washing of water by the word’. In other words, this first verse of Stone’s hymn is a brilliant pastiche of biblical allusions.

Theological pluralism

‘No other foundation but Jesus Christ!’ All Christians can gather round this slogan. As ecumenical dialogue shows, all churches agree on it. Of course they do, though some Christians think that other Christians deny Christ and lack the ‘one foundation’. Some Christians assume that their way of being the church is closer to the will of Jesus Christ than the way of others. Our church is founded on Scripture, they insist, while yours is corrupted by tradition – as though all churches, as they have emerged through the historical process, were not the result of partial and contextual interpretations of Scripture, resulting in various distinctive forms of tradition. As an ecumenist on behalf of my church and my communion, as well as an ecclesiologist, I do not know of any church that does not intend to be faithful to Scripture. For us, but not for you, other Christians say, Christ is the only head of the church, and only he is the head of our church – as though all Christians and all churches did not recognize Christ as the church’s only head and therefore prayerfully seek, through their various structures of discernment, consultation and debate (i.e. conciliarity), his will for their church. I do not know of any church that has a head other than Christ, certainly not the Church of England: since the reign of Queen Elizabeth I in the second half of the sixteenth century, the monarch has been entitled the ‘Supreme Governor’. According to their lights, all churches seek to obey and follow Christ as head and build on the one foundation that God has laid in him.

Cardinal Walter Kasper, the president (until 2010) of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, in Harvesting the Fruits: Aspects of Christian Faith in Ecumenical Dialogue, quotes a statement from Lutheran–Roman Catholic dialogue: ‘“The one and only foundation of the church is the saving work of God in Jesus Christ which has taken place once for all.” E verything that is to be said on the origin, nature and purpose of the church must be understood as an explanation of this principle.’² Here Lutherans and Roman Catholics are of one mind. Cardinal Kasper himself endorses this affirmation: ‘The Gospel of Jesus Christ, preached by the apostles, is the source of all saving truth and the basis of all ecumenical dialogue.’³

However, to spell out what exactly it means, in today’s intellectual climate, to ground the Christian church on Jesus Christ alone is by no means straightforward. In fact it is shot through with paradox and tension. Above all, the pluralism of modern Christianity – a pluralism that is proliferating at breakneck speed, especially in the developing world and in the Far East – makes easy talk of unity in faith naive. Centrifugal forces within the church are stronger than ever. The existence of more than 30,000 separate Christian denominations, spread throughout the world, gives words like ‘unity’ and ‘schism’ an air of unreality. Can they all be facets of the one church, even when, in some cases, they deny that status to each other? Do we have to accept a diversity that amounts to an ultimate incompatibility, so that we have to ask, ‘Which Christianity are we talking about?’ Influential liberal thinkers like Isaiah Berlin have argued that we have to accept a radical incommensurability of fundamental values in the modern world: we cannot expect to see eye to eye with other cultures or communities about what is important, and even about what is right and good.⁴

Some of the greatest Christian theologians of the twentieth century believed that we have to come to terms with an incommensurability of understanding – a cognitive incommensurability – within the Church itself. In his hugely subversive essay ‘Pluralism in Theology and the Unity of the Creed in the Church’,⁵ Karl Rahner took an extremely pessimistic view of the possibility of meaningful communication even within the confines of his own Roman Catholic Church. Previously, Rahner observed, it was possible to assume that one could know the position of one’s opponents. One could understand their view and could explain to them why one could not share it. Both parties had in common a set of terms and a philosophical framework that made communication possible. Now, however, Rahner claimed, the situation is that ‘the representatives of the different schools cannot achieve, even indirectly, a position in which they can explain to one another consciously and unambiguously in what precisely the difference between their respective intellectual outlooks consists.’ Rahner was saying these things in the early 1960s and was describing the problem within the Roman Catholic Church. How much more must this be true half a century later and in a total global Christian community that is twice the size of that Church? A similar point was made by Edward Schillebeeckx, with regard to increasing specialization in theology.⁶ A theologian or even a group of theologians working together can have ‘no more than a limited and one-sided view of the totality of the reality of faith’. This should be a recipe for theological humility, Schillebeeckx proposes – ‘no theologian can say that what he does not see is theologically irrelevant or even less important than what he has himself discovered’ – but in practice it makes for a failure of communication. Each of us comes to the task of theological reflection from a very limited perspective; ours is a crampingly narrow angle on the faith.

One foundation?

The metaphor of foundations is unfashionable today. It is widely assumed in theology that nothing so redolent of solidity is available to us. When the critique of ‘foundationalism’ in philosophy (epistemology) is imported into theology, it is often used in a derisory sense, such that to look for ‘foundations’ in theology, as in philosophy, is derided as a pitiful delusion. The metaphor of ‘foundations’ is caricatured to mean a kind of methodological straitjacket, whereby a logical argument is supposedly built on unassailable premises. It is seen as the great epistemological faux pas of modernity. It is a problem mainly, I suspect, for conservative Roman Catholics and conservative evangelicals, both of whom hanker for a scholastic methodology, one that appeals to authoritative texts.⁷

Notwithstanding the prevailing scepticism about the idea of foundations, the imagery of the city of God, with foundations that cannot be shaken, has too much invested in it, in Scripture, the theological tradition and hymnody, for us to write it off to suit current ph ilosophical and theological scruples.⁸ Such fashionable scruples are often infected with an epistemological relativism that doubts whether we can know the truth or have a clue about the nature of ultimate reality. With regard to ‘the things of God’, the Christian tradition has a place for the via negativa, which holds that we can know only what God is not, and for apophatic theology, which emphasizes the darkness of divine mystery (especially in Pseudo-Dionysius, Thomas Aquinas and the English mystical work The Cloud of Unknowing).⁹ Borrowing insights from the philosophy of science, theology can follow the middle way between naive realism, which assumes that our knowledge corresponds veridically to reality, and non-realism, where we make no claim that our ideas correspond to how things really are and we cannot escape from our own inventions. The middle path of critical realism allows at the same time for both a meaningful grasp of the truth and a recognition of the limitations and distortions of our knowledge. What we have is simply sufficient to enable us to pursue the enquiry to the next stage. That should be enough for anyone, theologian or not.¹⁰

Given that what we think we know about reality is merely a pebble on the beach, profound intellectual humility well becomes the theologian as well as the philosopher. For the theologian, however, the question of divine revelation comes into play, augmenting and correcting our natural knowledge and insight. But I cannot embark on the difficult subject of revelation here: it is the subject of the next (i.e. the second) volume of this series, Theological Foundations of the Christian Church. I will simply say that when I talk about a possible or hypothetical ‘foundation’ of the church, I am not looking for any kind of dogmatic edifice of faith, nor am I promoting or advocating a systematic ecclesiology. The method that I follow throughout this book is one of critical enquiry, leading to provisional conclusions, both historically and theologically speaking.

The foundation God has laid

First, I want to home in closely on the Apostle Paul’s affirmation in 1 Cor. 3:11. The slightly awkward construction in the Greek, which Paul uses for emphasis (‘which [hos ] is Jesus Christ’), is difficult to translate felicitously. The King James Bible’s forceful rendering now seems ungrammatical to us: ‘Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.’¹¹ The New Revised Standard Version offers a cumbersome paraphrase that loses the impact: ‘No one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ.’ The Revised English Bible is a little free with the text: ‘There can be no other foundation than the one already laid; I mean Jesus Christ himself.’ C. K. Barrett renders the text: ‘No one can lay a different foundation from that whic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of abbreviations and references
• Preface
• 1 Rock of ages and living waters
• 2 Jesus and the church
• 3 Biblical speech about the church
• 4 Images of Christ and the church in the New Testament
• 5 From ‘founder’ to ‘foundation’
• 6 The foundation of the church in Protestant theology
• 7 The foundation of the church in Roman Catholic theology
• 8 The foundation of the church in Anglican theology
• 9 The Paschal Mystery the foundation of the church
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Copyright