Church

Radner

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781498297103
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Systematic Theology & Ethics

This is an introduction to thinking theologically about the Christian church--what is known as ecclesiology. The book covers background questions of conception, history, differences among separated Christian churches, and several modern approaches to the study of the church. It also introduces readers to a specific scriptural way of thinking about the church centered on mission, that takes into account problems associated with past approaches, and sensitive to contemporary concerns with the reality of Judaism and other national identities in a global context.

1

“The Wounds I Received in the House of My Friends,” Part I

The Complicated Theology of the Church

Histories of the Church’s self-understanding abound. The notion that one “breathes” the Church, or at least “assumes” it tacitly, most would agree, seems to apply to discussions from the earliest time of Christianity. When Matthew (16:18) records Jesus as a speaking about “my church,” no explication of the term is given, as if its meaning is well understood. Paul seems to vary his usage of “church,” but he doesn’t seem to think this is particularly problematic. Practical as well as conflictual demands provided moments of self-conscious reflection on the Church. Still, most theologians of the Church for the earliest centuries rely on indirect evidence for views of the time: liturgical forms (not very plentiful until the fourth century), polemic, and of course biblical exegesis. By the fourth century, canon law from councils adds to the mix, and the monastic movement’s rich practical and spiritual direction provides insights into the breathing set of assumptions. They are never systematized, however; and their import, just as with scriptural exegesis from these centuries more generally, has been debated with respect to its normative significance for Christians more broadly within this or that locale.

Augustine is often credited with providing the most focused set of theological tools or categories for talking about the Church, certainly in the West. Among his most potent contributions is his emphasis on the totus Christus, the “whole Christ” who includes “head” and “body” together. This underlines the way that Paul’s discussion of the Church as “body of Christ” (e.g., 1 Cor 12:27, or Col 1:18) is to be taken in a literal or ontological sense as pointing to the Church’s actual “being.” Historically, the totus Christus was extended to the eucharistic gifts, and the extended result of this vision was of a vast divine-human network of historical realities that caught up believers, both of the past and present, into the living form of Christ. Later Protestants (and some modern Catholics) have worried that this totus Christus notion of the Church overly divinized its structures, and thus accounted for the way that Roman Catholicism imbued its hierarchy and sacraments, indeed the very delimited communion of its members, with an identity of intrinsically indwelt Spirit or grace. Here arises the category of “infallible mystery” as applied to the Church. Protestants therefore tended to use the “body of Christ” language of Paul as a kind of linguistic metaphor, focusing instead on the way that the various aspects of the Church’s life and structures act more as “signs” of some other “external” truth regarding God’s work in Christ. The visible Church thus lives to “tell us things” about God, not “to be” these very things—something which, given the Church’s human fallibility, it could in any case never be. Modern Catholics, in response, have tried for some balance between the two, often to the point of dazing the mind with their elaboration of multiple categories for understanding the Church. As one Catholic critic put it,

[because the Church] is at once earthly and heavenly, temporal and eternal, present and eschatological, human and divine, active and contemplative, collective and individual, personal and supra-personal, united in love and ordered by laws, visible and invisible, proper reflection about her requires a system that balances all these aspects.5

But Catholic systematization had its challenges, as twentieth-century theologians admitted. Much of this had to do with the “apologetic” orientation that almost all thinking about the Church involved, for almost every Christian group. Defending this or that version of the Church has in fact defined our thinking about the Church almost exhaustively until relatively recently.

Defending the Church: The Apologetic Roots of Ecclesiology

The theological study of the Church is today referred to as “ecclesiology.” The use of the term in English dates only to the nineteenth century, although it was taken over as a transliteration from Latin [ecclesiologia]. Even in Latin, it was not a common term, deriving from the early modern period of the seventeenth century. It seems, in fact, that the notion of a “Church” as a distinctive topic of theological reflection does not itself arise until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and here mostly in reaction to growing conflict among Western European Christians.

The great French Dominican scholar Yves Congar laid this out most fully in his many historical studies of the Church’s self-understanding. His basic argument points to this crucial medieval period as the time when the Church was radically re-envisioned, at least in conceptual terms. For centuries, Christians had maintained a rather broad view of the Church as the congregatio fidelium, the “gathering of the faithful,” which embraced simply all those who had a true faith in Christ. Emphases could vary within this definition. Sometimes these fell in the direction of historical breadth—all believers from “Abel” (whose faith in Christ was implicit in his acceptance by God) to the present. Sometimes the focus was on more immediate affiliations—those in communion with certain bishops and councils. Still, it was not until the twelfth century, Congar suggested, that these aspects split into opposing conceptions of the Church. At this time, with reforming movements gaining traction and heretical groups like the Albigenses in southern France growing in numbers, more exclusive clarity was sought as to the Church’s true being. Some reformers, concerned with the visible failures and sins of ecclesial leaders and structures, began to identify the Church’s integrity only with its (often invisible) predestined faithful. This obviously relativized the visible forms of the Church’s life. Reactively, an alternative theology of the Church arose, finally triumphing in Western Catholicism, which identified the Church’s nature precisely with its visible forms, structures, and members. By the early seventeenth century, the Jesuit Robert Bellarmine could assert that the Church was “a popular assembly,” as “visible and palpable as the people of Rome, the Kingdom of France, or the Republic of Venice.”6

Congar’s historical argument has been generally accepted. It is true that treatises devoted to the Church—“De Ecclesia”—do not start appearing until the Middle Ages. We see them written on the one hand in conjunction with discussions of “heresy,” and on the other hand with reflections (often bitter) on political power and the relation of Church and civil authority. Some of the categories involved—who is in charge, who owns property, how to deal with the sin of church leaders, who determines the truly faithful—become increasingly compelling as the Western European church descends into schism (e.g., battles among Franciscans over faithful poverty, and the division of the papacy into rival popes in the fourteenth century). John Wycliffe wrote an important text De ecclesia, as did his Bohemian disciple John Hus. Tinged with a growing concern over biblical prophecy and apocalyptic worries and hopes, the topic “Of the Church” passes into the sixteenth century. It is now on the one hand ready-made for debate amidst the Reformation divisions, and on the other hand suited to parse and inform the revolutionary encounters of Europeans with non-Christians peoples—“the Nations”—around the globe. Finally, seeing how formal theological reflection on the Church came to be shaped in this context, it is possible to identify related dynamics much earlier. Cyprian’s famous third-century essay on “the unity of the Church” was forged within conflict and schism, just as Irenaeus’s earlier notion of Catholicism and Augustine’s later elaboration of its meaning grew out of hostilities with Gnostics and Donatists respectively. Jews, Gnostics, Manichaeans, Monophysites, Nestorians, Muslims: they were, from the beginning it seems, the shadow of the Church, and to know the Church was to grapple with its opposite. Hence in the late twelfth century, one of the first formal treatments on the Church by Hugh of Amiens could be called “Against Heresies, or On the Church” (Contra haereticos sive de Ecclesia): they amounted to the same thing.

Treatises De Ecclesia, “On the Church,” continued to be written with greater frequency and fury by both Catholics and Protestants from the sixteenth century on. Their form was driven by the disputes each group held with the other (and with Protestants among themselves). There are countless tracts and volumes of polemic here, often without systematic order, and there is no typical approach to talking about the Church. A massive tome like Juan de Torquemata’s Summa de Ecclesia, written in the fifteenth century’s struggle between Pope and Council, was revived a century later. It provided the basis for many post-Reformation Catholic treatments of the Church, unsurprisingly, given its interests in defending Roman supremacy and the pope’s role in church councils. De Torquemata’s fourth and final book of the treatise is devoted to schismatics and heretics, a focus particularly suited to Protestant defectors. Almost two centuries later, however, little has changed. Honoré Tournely’s two-volume De Ecclesia (1726) breathes a bit more freely, concerns itself with basic theological definitions, including the marks of the Church (the most important being catholic unity, rooted in the papacy). But even here, the weight falls on Roman apologetics almost immediately (despite Tournely’s personal commitment to the relative autonomy of the French Church), so that the marks of membership distinct from Protestant errors predominate, and questions of authoritative decision making end up enveloping all concerns.

Protestant treatises are not so different, although they obviously press their own distinguishing concerns. Richard Field, one of the calmer early Anglican theologians of the Church, orders his pioneering English work (Of the Church, 1606–10) around five themes that are worth enumerating in order to see the focus. First, he explains the nature of the Church mostly in terms of membership issues, but in a way that involves matters of election. Second, and most briefly, he examines the “notes” or marks of the Church. Here he mostly disputes catholic views regarding “succession,” “antiquity,” “universality,” “unity” and “catholicity,” and proposes instead common Protestant notes involving Word, sacrament, and discipline or governance. Third, and more diffusely, Field lays out the history of the Church, arguing for Protestant continuity and against various heresies present in Rome. He links all this to a supplemental discussion of Scripture as the basis for Christian teaching, arguing against a host of Catholic doctrines like purgatory and transubstantiation. Fourth is a book dealing with the ordering of the church’s authority (Scripture again, vs. the pope and tradition). In the final section of this tightly-printed 750 page book, Field addresses the governing ministries of the Church. This vast discussion covers Old and New Testaments, as well as the two natures of the mediating Son and his salvation as it relates to the Church’s ministry. With this in hand, Field can comparatively discuss priests, bishops, ministers, popes, councils, Lutherans, and Calvinists. Despite some considerable constructive insight—and Field’s is one of the most engaging of its Protestant kind—it is all very predictable in its antagonistic structure and content. Over the centuries little changes, and despite interest in the Scriptures or in holiness as the shape of the Christian life as a people, or even in fo...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: “The Wounds I Received in the House of My Friends,” Part I
• Chapter 2: “The Wounds I Received in the House of My Friends,” Part II
• Chapter 3: Talking about the Church
• Chapter 4: Talking About a People
• Chapter 5: Arguing about the Church
• Chapter 6: The Church as Israel
• Chapter 7: The Figure of the Church
• Conclusion
• Bibliography