T&T Clark Handbook of Ecclesiology 9780567678102, 9780567678133, 9780567678126

Citation preview

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Forthcoming titles in this series include: T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Theology and the Modern Sciences, edited by John P. Slattery T&T Clark Handbook of Pneumatology, edited by Daniel Castelo and Kenneth M. Loyer T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Ethics, edited by Tobias Winright T&T Clark Handbook of Analytic Theology, edited by James M. Arcadi and James T. Turner, Jr T&T Clark Handbook of Colin Gunton, edited by Myk Habets, Andrew Picard, and Murray Rae T&T Clark Handbook of Theological Anthropology, edited by Mary Ann Hinsdale and Stephen Okey T&T Clark Handbook of Christology, edited by Darren O. Sumner and Chris Tilling T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Prayer, edited by Ashley Cocksworth and John C. McDowell

Titles already published include: T&T Clark Handbook of Thomas. F. Torrance, edited by Paul D. Molnar and Myk Habets T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Theology and Climate Change, edited by Ernst M. Conradie and Hilda P. Koster T&T Clark Handbook of Edward Schillebeeckx, edited by Stephan van Erp and Daniel Minch T&T Clark Handbook of Political Theology, edited by Rubén Rosario Rodríguez T&T Clark Companion to the Theology of Kierkegaard, edited by Aaron P. Edwards and David J. Gouwens T&T Clark Handbook of African American Theology, edited by Antonia Michelle Daymond, Frederick L. Ware, and Eric Lewis Williams T&T Clark Handbook of Asian American Biblical Hermeneutics, edited by Uriah Y. Kim and Seung Ai Yang T&T Clark Handbook to Early Christian Meals in the Greco-Roman World, edited by Soham Al-Suadi and Peter-Ben Smit

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Edited by Kimlyn J. Bender and D. Stephen Long

T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Kimlyn J. Bender, D. Stephen Long, and contributors, 2020 Kimlyn J. Bender and D. Stephen Long have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Terry Woodley Cover image © Andrew Moore / EyeEm via Getty All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Control Number: 2020938314. ISBN: HB: 978-0-5676-7810-2 ePDF: 978-0-5676-7812-6 eBook: 978-0-5676-7811-9 Series: T&T Clark Handbooks Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

Preface viii Acknowledgements ix 1 Introduction Kimlyn J. Bender and D. Stephen Long

1

Part I  Scriptural Foundations 2 The Old Testament John Nugent

11

3 The Synoptic Gospels and Acts C. Clifton Black

24

4 The Pauline Letters James W. Thompson

39

5 The Gospel of John, the General Epistles, and Revelation Paul Rainbow

54

Part II  Historical and Confessional Traditions 6 Patristic Ecclesiology in the Latin West James K. Lee

71

7 Patristic Ecclesiology in the Greek East George Kalantzis

81

8 Roman Catholic Ecclesiology: From the Medieval Period to Vatican I Trent Pomplun

96

9 Roman Catholic Ecclesiology: From Vatican II to Today Francesca Murphy

107

10 Eastern Orthodox Ecclesiology Will Cohen

128

11 Lutheran Ecclesiology Jonathan Mumme

145

vi

CONTENTS

12 Reformed Ecclesiology Paul T. Nimmo

163

13 Anabaptist Ecclesiology Gayle Gerber Koontz

181

14 Anglican Ecclesiology John Gibaut

196

15 Wesleyan and Methodist Ecclesiology Laceye Warner

211

16 Baptist Ecclesiology Paul Fiddes

225

17 Pentecostal Ecclesiology Cecil M. Robeck, Jr.

241

18 Evangelicalism and Restorationist Ecclesiologies John G. Stackhouse, Jr.

259

19 Ecclesiological Developments in the Majority World Joseph Ogbonnaya

274

Part III  Theological and Critical Explorations 20 Ecclesiology as a Dogmatic Discipline Kevin J. Vanhoozer

293

21 Ecclesiology and the Doctrine of the Trinity Fred Sanders

311

22 Ecclesiology and Christology Kimlyn J. Bender

323

23 Ecclesiology and Pneumatology Joseph L. Mangina

344

24 Liberation Ecclesiology in Latin America Edgardo Colón-Emeric

359

25 Gender and Ecclesiology Natalie Carnes

375

26 Ecclesiology, Ethnography, and the Social Sciences Nicholas M. Healy

391

CONTENTS



vii

27 Ecclesiology and Politics Jonathan Tran and Stanley Hauerwas

404

28 Ecclesiology and Ethics D. Stephen Long

419

29 Ecclesiology and Ecumenics Steven R. Harmon

433

30 Ecclesiology and Witness Darrell L. Guder

449

Notes on Contributors 463 Index of Names 469 Index of Subjects 480

PREFACE

The T&T Clark Handbook of Ecclesiology is a resource for the investigation of the Christian church and the scriptural, historical, theological, and ethical questions which surround its study. This handbook is structured into three primary divisions. The first is biblical and addresses scriptural foundations for ecclesiology. The second is historical and confessional, introducing the families of churches in all of their diversity. The third takes up dogmatic and other topical themes in contemporary ecclesiology. As a reference handbook aimed for a wide readership, the division and chapters have been selected to provide a broad and general overview of the discipline of ecclesiology that, while taking up prominent questions of the current discussion, attempts to avoid idiosyncratic or peripheral issues that might easily date the volume. Such a three-part division allows for traditional matters such as creedal attributes (i.e. “one, holy, catholic, apostolic”) and Reformation marks of the church, as well as questions of polity, liturgy, sacraments, ordination and orders of ministry, and other relevant topics to be addressed in the context of their development and importance in each stream of historic Christianity and the confessional traditions. It also allows that matters of thematic importance that transcend the traditions, as well as new areas of theological and ethical investigation, receive their own sustained treatment and attention. We the editors would like to thank all who have made our work in and for God’s church and in the theological academy possible—our family, friends, and colleagues, many more than we can name. We certainly must specifically express our gratitude to the scholars who have contributed the fine chapters comprising this volume. Our thanks are also extended to our respective institutions—George W. Truett Theological Seminary of Baylor University and Southern Methodist University. Finally, our very special thanks go to Justin Barringer who patiently, meticulously, and skillfully assisted in the compilation and formatting of this volume.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Material included in Laceye Warner’s chapter is used by permission. © 2014 Abingdon Press. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Unless indicated otherwise, all Scripture quotations are from New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

x

Chapter ONE

Introduction KIMLYN J. BENDER AND D. STEPHEN LONG

ECCLESIOLOGY WITHIN THE DISCIPLINE OF THEOLOGY: ITS TASK AND QUESTIONS Ecclesiology is a discipline that, broadly speaking, examines the church’s identity and activity, its theological definition(s) and temporal existence, and thus its divinely established reality as one people and the seemingly contingent reality of its various historical instantiations and diverse forms of doctrines, polities, ministries, liturgies, rituals, and practices. Ecclesiology in its most expansive undertaking engages all of the attendant questions that surround the church’s placement within God’s salvific economy and takes full account of all the paradoxes, peculiarities, and practices that accompany a people whose origin lies in eternity and who looks to a heavenly destiny, yet whose embodied life is firmly rooted on earth and whose ministry is carried out in the world across the span of centuries. Ecclesiology as a distinctive area of dogmatic investigation exists as a late arrival in the corpus of theological topics and disciplines, though its sources predate its appearance in the modern period and originate in Scripture and the very earliest traditions of the church. Ecclesiology is a derivative area of study following upon prior theological (trinitarian), christological, and pneumatological doctrines because the church exists as a people whose origin lies in the preceding work of God in Jesus Christ and through the Holy Spirit. The church thus stands in a unique position between the triune God and the world. On the one hand, the church resides on the side of God over against the world as the divinely constituted and appointed witness to the gospel of God’s salvation in Christ and the new life in the Spirit, and on the other hand, the church resides on the side of the world as a created and reconciled human fellowship, a people sharing in the full range of the experiences and indeed vagaries of earthly and mundane existence. This peculiar place of the church entails that its study will navigate a number of complex relationships, and developments and disagreements in ecclesiology are in no small way determined by the unfolding and understanding of these relations. These relationships cannot here be explicated in detail but they are either implicitly present or explicitly examined across the range of the following chapters. Now they are but briefly identified in a list that does not claim to be exhaustive. Ecclesiology examines the distinct place of the church in the economy of God’s reconciling and redemptive work. It thereby elucidates the relationship of the triune God to the church, and thus the relation of the Creator to the creature insofar as the church is both the product of a divine election, call, and event and simultaneously a created and continuing human society of persons that lives in response and obedience to this divine call and action. Of particular interest is the way that this relation of the triune God and the

2

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

church is contrastingly understood and construed in different ecclesiologies. In one type, the church is portrayed as a created product of God’s economic salvific activity which stands in unqualified distinction from God’s own eternal immanent divine perfection and life, even as it shares in covenantal fellowship with the triune God. In another type, the church is portrayed as a direct reflection of, and even participant in, God’s own inner divine life. This question of the relation of God and church set within the context of the inclusive question of the Creator’s relation to the creature remains a matter of continuing discussion and debate in modern ecclesiology and trinitarian reflection. The church’s relationship to Christ himself is a particularly rich area of ecclesiological deliberation yielding various interpretations among the ecclesial traditions. The church’s intimate relationship to Christ is set forth by some theologians and traditions in a manner that has so stressed the continuity and prolongation of the incarnation and ministry of Christ in the life of the church that others have believed it to undermine the very distinction of Christ and the church itself. Such differences of understanding are in no small way predicated upon diverging interpretative traditions surrounding the biblical image of the church as the body of Christ. This christological variance is also complicated by differing conceptions of the church’s ministry. One type understands this ministry to be a proclamation of the perfect work of Christ’s substitutionary and salvific work, while another sees it as the prolongation of Christ’s own exemplary and sanctifying ministry. Much sacramental and ministerial disagreement between the churches (including the precedence given to either gospel proclamation or eucharistic participation as constitutive of the church, as well as the opposition between the singular exclusivity of Christ’s vocation and the shared inclusivity of Christ’s threefold priestly, prophetic, and kingly office with the ministerial offices, with all the contentious attendant questions of valid ecclesial authority) thus lies in the range of questions surrounding this christological one. Similar issues accompany conceptions of the relation between the church and the Kingdom of God, a relation which follows the same orderly logic in expounding the apposition and distinction of Kingdom and church. Moreover, as not only the body of Christ but the new people of God, the church stands in both continuity with Israel and the original covenant of God with Abraham, as well as in discontinuity with Israel in the newness that comes with embodying the new covenant foretold by Jeremiah and inaugurated with the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The dialectical relation of continuity and discontinuity in the life and ministry of Jesus with all that came before him in the time of the patriarchs and prophets is reflected in the relation of the church with Israel. This relation is set over against that of the church with the world that reflects Israel’s own: the church lives within the world and among the peoples of the earth, but it also is set no less over against the world as a light to the nations and as a witness to the gospel which the world itself does not know. A further set of questions surrounds the relation of the Spirit and the church, the first the divine agent bringing forth the church’s very existence, edification, and empowerment for new life and witness, the second the embodied fellowship called forth by the Spirit as an earthly and historical agent (or collection of agents) existing as the Spirit’s own temple. Ecclesiological investigations therefore attempt to set forth the corresponding relation between the church as invisible and visible and between its spiritual reality and its social embodiment, expressed in the words of Jaroslav Pelikan as that tension between “Spirit versus structure,” the vital spiritual reality of the church set over against its institutional form. Such tension is reflected in the correlative debates surrounding the navigation between theological and sociological descriptions of the church’s nature and reality, and thus between dogmatic definition and ethnography. Finally, such tensions are

INTRODUCTION



3

also rooted in the twofold truth that we must speak of both the holiness of the church in its eternal election and call, and the very real sins that are witnessed in the history of the church’s concrete life throughout history (and this question of speaking of the church’s sinfulness, as well as of its infallibility, is itself an area of profound debate). Such paradoxes of theological identity and historical instantiation also mark how ecclesiology speaks of the Nicene marks of the church: the church is one (in the midst of its divisions); the church is holy (in the midst of its historical failures); the church is catholic (in the midst of its recurrent parochialism and insularity); and the church is apostolic (in the midst of ongoing disagreements among the churches regarding the very signification and denotation of this modifier and concerning what it means to stand in succession to the apostles). In sum, there remains an ongoing negotiation between stating what must be said of the church’s dogmatic esse and its historical vita. Other disputed relations are less about the church’s relation to God, Israel, or world, or about designating the church as a mystery pointing to both divine and creaturely action for its identity. They are nonetheless endemic and perennial in theological evaluations of the church over time. The first is the relation between the primitive ecclesiology of the New Testament and later developments of the church and its tradition (which entails the question of historical faithfulness and valid development in its creedal and confessional claims, as well as its later liturgical forms and ethical practices). The second is the relation between the unity of the church as one and the real diversity of various churches in their many ecclesial, confessional, and denominational instantiations, a particular concern for ecumenism as well as for considering the continual expansion of the church throughout the world. A third relation that in no small way undergirds the other two is the tension between understanding the primary referent for the church as the universal church of all believers across time and space, and understanding the church as the concrete gathered community of believers in a particular place and time. This tension is often found between episcopal and congregational forms of church order, but may be echoed within them, evident when one considers the famous debate in the twentieth century between then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and Cardinal Walter Kasper over the question of the temporal and ontological priority of the universal church over any particular local one (a question also present in the work of the Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas). Such fundamental theological and dialectical relations are accompanied by more fine-grained and specific material questions. A perennially disputed relation is that between understanding the church predominantly as a single agent or as an assembly of agents—that is, whether the church should be spoken of as a single subject or as a collection of subjects. Such reflects the ongoing negotiation of the relation between the church and the Christian, or in other terms, the community and the individual. Another disputed relation is that between the ordained ministry and the ministry of the laity. Here we may now be witnessing ecclesial ships passing in the night—chapters in this volume demonstrate an increasing focus upon the ministry of the laity in twentieth-century Roman Catholicism, even as Anglicans and Lutherans (of a particular persuasion) have argued, against simple notions of the priesthood of all believers, for a constitutive and definitive place for bishops and clergy and a correspondent “ministerial and episcopal authority” as necessary for the very esse of the church.1

All quotations in this introduction refer to chapters in the present volume.

1

4

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

The conceptualization, articulation, negotiation, and resolution of the questions surrounding these matters of the church’s placement within the divine economy of God’s works as well as of its fundamental relationships to the triune God and to the world are central to the overarching task of ecclesiology. Also important to this task is a consideration of the lesser questions surrounding the relation of the church to the individual Christian and of the form the church should take in its political structure, ordained ministry, and ethical stances and practices. The differing ways various churches and theologians have answered these questions and set forth their understandings of these relationships have impacted, and been influenced by, how they interpreted both the images and descriptions of the church in Holy Scripture and embodied these interpretations in the various forms of ecclesial and confessional life. This plurality of interpretation and ecclesiological reflection has in turn led to the great diversity of positions reflected in these chapters.

THE INTENTION AND GOALS OF THE HANDBOOK As editors, we have not understood our task as to adjudicate between or proscribe the diverse answers to such matters which exist in ecclesiology, but rather to allow for the full range of historic and contemporary reflection on the church to be included, represented, and given full voice in this handbook. Therefore this work, while at times prescriptive and rightfully partisan in the individual chapters, is descriptive and representative in the whole (though we make no claim for it being exhaustive by any stretch of the imagination). We are certain that the chapters taken together will evoke both hearty approval and disagreement from those who read them. As editors we simply serve the task of presenting ecclesiology in its bewildering range of interpretation, even while, as individual theologians, we take our own particular place within the range of answers given. With this in view, this handbook on ecclesiology contains a twofold purpose. The first aspect of this purpose is to provide an accessible overview to the scriptural, historical, confessional, doctrinal, and ethical sources that inform and comprise ecclesiology. The second aspect is to offer resources for theologians, ethicists, and historians to engage in the continuing work of ecclesial development and ecclesiological reflection. The first aspect is straightforward and direct. Each of the following chapters provides an overview of the biblical foundations for ecclesiology, or of the historic emergence and contemporary character of a particular ecclesial tradition, or of a dogmatic or ethical matter related to ecclesiology. To accomplish this objective, we invited leading biblical scholars, theologians, and ethicists to speak from their specialty. Our hope is that readers will find this handbook useful whether they are interested in the origins of ecclesiology in Scripture and tradition, in the differences between ecclesial confessions and families, or in the doctrinal and ethical issues that ecclesiology, with its diversity, raises. Here we offer a brief and incomplete overview of the work as a whole. The handbook is divided into three parts. The first attends to the scriptural foundations for ecclesiology. It begins with the Old Testament and a “four-stage narration” that shows how the question of ecclesiology is not alien to the Old Testament. The centrality of the church in the New Testament is unintelligible without first attending to Hebrew Scriptures. Although ecclesiology is central to the New Testament, neither the synoptic gospels nor the Acts of the Apostles present a readymade ecclesiology. They allude to ecclesiology by emphasizing the corporate character of Christian discipleship. Jesus’s ministry is the basis for that corporate character. It establishes a new “family” characterized by discipleship,

INTRODUCTION



5

following in the “footsteps” of the one who shows the way forward. One of the reasons ecclesiology has become significant in contemporary theology and ethics is because of the new perspectives on Paul that make the church “essential” to Christian “existence.” Paul’s epistles are foundational for an adequate understanding of the early developments of the church, and even more so for why ecclesiology continues to matter. As in all things doctrinal, the gospel of John has a pivotal place for understanding how to think about the dogmatic status of the church. The four Nicene marks of the church—unity, holiness, catholicity, apostolicity—readily find their biblical origins in John and the general epistles. Readers will note how these four marks appear throughout the following chapters in different forms and sometimes with conflicting interpretations. The first four chapters of the handbook on the Old Testament, the synoptic gospels and Acts, the Pauline letters, and the gospel of John and general epistles are foundational for everything that follows. From the focused origins on the scriptural foundations for ecclesiology, the second part branches out into the diverse, and often contending, traditions of ecclesiology. It begins with a broad examination of the church in the Latin West and the Greek East. We are reminded that no dogmatic definition of the church is available in the Eastern Church. Readers should take this reminder to heart. Unlike the two great mysteries of the church, the Trinity and the incarnation, the church does not receive a “dogmatic definition” on ecclesiology in the patristic era. The four marks of the church are generally affirmed, but those marks are not specified with great detail. While the doctrine of the church was a “distinctive feature” of the Latin West, it also did not develop a dogmatic definition in distinction from other crucial loci such as christology and pneumatology. A plethora of images, metaphors, and symbols were used in the patristic era to speak about the church. In the Middle Ages ecclesiology was a concern, primarily as a “treatise.” The ecclesiological reflections of this period are often neglected, and even disregarded as exclusively “juridical,” primarily as a contrast to the renewed emphasis on patristic ecclesiology arising from Vatican II. The role of Vatican II for reenergizing ecclesiology as a central doctrine cannot be overstated. Of course, as the first seven chapters of our handbook ably demonstrate, neither ecclesiology nor its centrality for Christian thought and practice originate in the twentieth century. Yet, ecclesiology was updated at Vatican II through a ressourcement from patristic sources. The importance of Johann Adam Möhler and the Tübingen school is another important theme in the history leading up to Vatican II that receives diverse interpretations in several of the chapters. While Catholics engaged in scholastic reflection on ecclesiology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Orthodox intentionally withheld offering “propositions and definitions” for the church. The church concerns worship, liturgy, and life. Roman Catholics would never, of course, deny these concerns as well. However, Catholics and the Orthodox have been disputing the nature of the church since the eleventh century, if not before. Despite the good ecumenical work and efforts at reconciliation during and since Vatican II, the disputes still divide them. Although Vatican II stated that the one, true church “subsists” in the Roman Catholic Church, Catholics consider the Orthodox Church to be a true church. The various Protestant communions did not garner such consideration. They were, and are, viewed as defective. According to Catholic teaching, they have “elements of sanctification and truth,” but they are not considered churches. If two Roman Catholic theologians rather than two Protestants edited this volume, the chapters that follow the three on Roman Catholic and Orthodox ecclesiology in the second part of the handbook might have had different titles. We understand Protestant traditions as legitimate churches. The Reformation did not

6

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

consider its reforms to break continuity with the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church but to retrieve those marks in faithful ways. Nonetheless, Protestant ecclesiologies can have significant differences between them, and not only with their Roman Catholic and Orthodox counterparts. Lutheran, Reformed, Anabaptist, Anglican, Methodist/Wesleyan, Baptist, Pentecostal, and Evangelical/Restorationist ecclesiologies find representation in this second part. Lutheran ecclesiology, true to its sixteenth-century confessions, views the church as “a creature of the gospel.” Most Protestant churches would readily agree. Interpreting the church as a “creature of the gospel” gives Lutheran and Protestant churches a distinct emphasis. The gospel makes the church. As with the Lutherans, so the “family” of churches that constitute the Reformed tradition look to Scripture and its various confessions to identify the true church. While the Reformed tradition views the church as ecclesia semper reformanda, “always in need of reform,” it does not interpret this need for reform as a rupture with the church prior to the Reformation. Each of the Protestant churches will have its version of affirming the church’s four marks. The left wing of the Reformation, represented by the Anabaptists and echoed in other Free Church traditions, brought distinctive features often neglected by other Protestants to ecclesiology: mutual aid, adult baptism, discipleship, the centrality of peace, and more. How these distinctive features work themselves out among the many churches now identified as Anabaptist differs, but the need for the church to follow in the new way of Jesus and live as an alternative community in the world unites them. The dominance of this exemplarist ecclesiology distinguishes Anabaptist ecclesiology from the other ecclesiologies in the handbook, even as their emphasis upon the centrality and supremacy of Scripture and task of witness unites them with most of the others. On another front, Anglican, Methodist, and Wesleyan ecclesiologies bear a strong family resemblance. Each traces its roots to the English Reformation in the sixteenth century and understands itself as something of a “middle way” between Catholic and Reformed ecclesiologies. Bishops are entrusted with preserving the unity of the church, but laity are given a significant role in leadership. Unlike their Catholic and Orthodox counterparts, this family of churches has affirmed women’s ordination at all levels including bishop. Anglican ecclesiology adheres to “provincial autonomy,” takes the diocese as its “basic ecclesial unit,” and exhibits well what has become known as “communion ecclesiology.” Methodist and Wesleyan churches take the conference as the basic ecclesial unit. Their ecclesiologies emerged more from mission than doctrine. Baptist ecclesiology begins at the level of the local church and its “covenant” relation with God and other believers. As the name itself signifies, baptism is the essential sacrament or ordinance by which one becomes a member of the church. Like the Anabaptists, Baptist churches usually understand baptism as properly administered to confessing believers rather than infants, though the relation of Anabaptists to Baptists remains a point of discussion and at times disagreement, with Baptists more often understood as proximate children of English Separatism than of Continental Anabaptism. Pentecostal ecclesiology can be as “elusive” as the Holy Spirit. Its origins are contested as is the question about which member churches and movements make up Pentecostalism. What unites Pentecostals into a family of churches is a distinct work of the Holy Spirit that can include movements such as speaking in tongues, ecstatic manifestation, entire sanctification, and more. Through the Charismatic movement, Pentecostalism influenced nearly all other churches. Evangelical and Restorationist churches may be the most difficult of all to identify as representing a well-defined ecclesiology. They are more defined by populism and pragmatism than by sacraments, orders, or any explicit discipline, though

INTRODUCTION



7

they do have an identifiable doctrinal center. Their ecclesiology is marked by “pluralism” and “personal piety.” Any discussion of ecclesiology would be incomplete without discussing the role of the majority world in rethinking ecclesiology. An entire handbook could have been produced on just this issue.2 Ecclesiologies in the majority world address issues often neglected in traditional discussions of ecclesiology such as how the church can be the church with authenticity and integrity, how it can maintain relations with the global church, and how it can resist colonialism and imperialism. The third part of the handbook explores doctrinal, political, and ethical issues. These are, of course, also present in the first two parts. In fact, the third part assumes the background knowledge the first two provide. It begins by discussing what was often neglected in the tradition. What is the dogmatic location of the church? It is not only a creature of the Word, but as such, it is a form of triune communication. It makes sense, then, to discuss ecclesiology in terms of the Trinity, christology, and pneumatology, each of which constitutes a chapter following upon the exploration of the church as a “dogmatic discipline.” Ecclesiology has been correlated to the Trinity by means of “communion, mission, and structural analogy.” The church has been correlated to christology by means of “building, bride, and body.” The Spirit gives life to the church, animating its liturgy and worship, prompting its prophets and priests. Once these dogmatic concerns are explored, the remainder of the third part looks at pressing issues such as liberation, gender, the place of ethnography, politics, and ethics in ecclesiology and the corresponding influence of ecclesiology on them. The final two chapters take up the current ecumenical task and the importance of the church as witness. The church in Latin America endured significant conflicts in the twentieth century, contributing to a distinctive understanding of ecclesiology and a refashioning of the four marks. No discussion of ecclesiology would be complete without attending to questions of gender and sexuality, including the topics of the church’s gender, the ordination of women, and the controversies around same-sex marriage. Likewise, the church’s relationship to other social formations must be explored in light of the claims for uniqueness that are often made for the church. Sociology and ethnography provide tools for doing so. Ecclesiology has taken on a significant role within political theology and ethics in recent theology. How and why it has done so helps explain the important role ecclesiology has had in theology since the early twentieth century. An overarching concern throughout the handbook is the contradiction between the church’s vocation to be a visible witness to holiness and the church’s many past and current divisions. Our handbook ends on a hopeful note. The decline in power and status that accompanies the church at the end of Christendom provides new occasions for witness and rethinking ecclesial unity, which leads us to the second aspect of the purpose for our handbook. Having provided a cursory review of what the reader can expect in the chapters that follow, we now turn to this second objective. It is not directly fulfilled by the leading scholars whose invaluable contributions make up this handbook, but by you, the reader. Unlike the authors who contributed to our handbook, you the reader have a distinct advantage. They were unable to read all the chapters and make comparisons and contrasts in order to think critically and constructively about ecclesiology. Our hope is that this handbook will be of service for such critical and constructive conceptual and practical work. To that end, we think that readers might benefit by thinking through a variety of

See Green, Pardue, and Yeo (2018) for such a volume.

2

8

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

questions as they read the following chapters and in light of the relations outlined above. The following are representative of such questions: Why has ecclesiology had such a prominent role in theology since the mid-twentieth century, and is this on the whole a positive or detrimental development? How should we think about the four marks of the church? What is the relationship between ecclesiology and other doctrinal loci, especially christology? Or to put this important question differently, in what sense is the church the body of Christ? Some traditions are comfortable affirming the church as the ongoing incarnation; others are not. The reasons for and against such affirmations are important and can be found in what follows. Relatedly, readers might consider this deceptively simple question, answered very differently by Henri de Lubac and by John Webster: does the church precede the gospel, or does the gospel precede the church? Moreover, how is the answer chosen to be understood and clarified in light of how both gospel and church are defined? And what are the entailments for ecclesiology as a whole based upon the answer given? Other kinds of questions can be asked as well: Do some of the most influential Christian movements today, especially evangelicalism and Pentecostalism, have a definable ecclesiology, and who has warrant definitively to decide this? If they do not, is their ecclesial form dependent on something outside of their movements? And if some of these ecclesiologies are on this account underdeveloped, are there ecclesiologies that might be seen as overdeveloped? Another way of considering this question is to ask it more broadly about all ecclesial divisions. How should those within and without Roman Catholicism think about the claim from Vatican II that the true church subsists in it? Although non-Roman Catholics will rightly bristle at such a claim, is it less problematic to settle for a pluralism of contending denominations? Should we continue to be concerned about, and work for, ecclesial unity? If politics and ethics are to have an ecclesiological dimension, how can they do so in a divided church? These are only a few of the questions that we hope you the reader will explore by means of this handbook. Of course, we also expect you to bring your own. Our hope is that you find the rich chapters that follow helpful and illuminating in thinking through such questions.

REFERENCE Green, G. L., S. T. Pardue, and K. K. Yeo (2018), The Church from Every Tribe and Tongue: Ecclesiology in the Majority World, Carlisle: Langham.

PART I

Scriptural Foundations

10



Chapter TWO

The Old Testament JOHN NUGENT

INTRODUCTION Neglecting the Old Testament in Ecclesiology The Old Testament (OT) has been grossly neglected in ecclesiological studies. Few books engage it at length, and those that do rarely focus exclusively on the OT. To be sure, ecclesiology is not unique in this regard. Together with OT scholars’ strong aversion to systematic theology, widespread ignorance about the OT has left multiple theological themes underinformed by the majority portion of Scripture. This problem is exacerbated by growing popular and academic aversion to the OT itself. One celebrity pastor recently urged the church to “unhitch” itself from the OT—seeing it as a hindrance to evangelism. Numerous scholars seem equally aghast at the OT’s alleged promotion of violence, sexism, and xenophobia. Against such negative momentum, it is all the more important that this volume affirm the OT’s vital contributions to ecclesiology. In practice, most ecclesiologies presume a certain flow to the Bible story that underwrites their particular approach, even though few scholars have reflected critically on what it might mean to engage the OT ecclesiologically. Whereas the OT does work for numerous ecclesiologies, few have subjected that work to full canonical scrutiny. Selectively appropriating it in this way belittles Scripture’s authority since it uses the OT merely to buttress one’s own views. Recognizing Scripture’s authority entails allowing it to cross-examine our ideas, histories, and traditions to determine whether or not we are being ecclesially faithful. This is what the early church meant in referring to Scripture as a canon—a measuring stick or a rule by which something is judged. Rather than conceding as indefensible certain strands of the OT, we must allow all of Scripture to contextualize itself and guide us in our interpretations.

Tending to the Old Testament in Ecclesiology Fortunately, neglect is not the only word to characterize academic engagement with the OT and ecclesiology. Scholars from diverse disciplines and traditions have pursued a variety of fruitful approaches. These approaches may be grouped into four categories. Some use the OT to provide background to NT ecclesiological themes (e.g., Ferguson 1996; Leeman 2016). Others use the OT as the backstory in narrative approaches to understanding the church’s mission (e.g., Wright 2006; Niringiye 2015). Still others regard the OT as a diverse repository of possible ecclesial approaches (e.g., Brueggemann 1991). A final

12

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

approach sees the OT as establishing a normative trajectory for ecclesiological reflection (e.g., Lohfink 1999; Lindbeck 2003; Yoder 2003a; Nugent 2011). This trajectory approach incorporates key elements of the other approaches while pushing beyond them. It sees the OT as providing necessary background to NT themes, while recognizing both the coherence of the biblical narrative from OT to NT and the plurality of postures that God’s people assume throughout the OT. In addition, it insists more strongly that God is proactively shaping Israel into the form that the church eventually assumes in the NT. The OT does not simply provide the background or backstory of the church because God is forming the church in the OT itself. In a very real way, then, the diversity we see in the OT is not a set of optional ecclesial postures from which we may pick and choose according to our current situation. Rather, it is evidence that the formation of God’s people was and still is neither straightforward nor linear. It is a winding journey with detours and recalibrations. Ecclesiology thus exemplifies how the division of Scripture into “Old” and “New” Testaments complicates matters. It puts the OT in the defensive position of having to justify its inclusion in the conversation. That stance plays into the widespread misconception that the church began in the book of Acts. If the church begins only in Acts, then the question must truly be asked, “What has the OT to do with ecclesiology?” From a methodological standpoint, this volume makes a significant statement by beginning with “Scriptural Foundations” and including four chapters that engage the full canonical witness—beginning with the OT. This chapter espouses a trajectory approach to the OT’s contributions to ecclesiology. The nature of such an approach is to tell the Bible story in sequential fashion. Thus we offer a four-stage narration of the OT, which allows us to see the trajectory set by the OT that is so crucial for grasping its ecclesiological significance. We will then be positioned to make several important observations about how the OT contributes to a biblically based ecclesiology.1

NARRATIVE TRAJECTORY FOR SITUATING THE CHURCH Assumptions Behind a Trajectory Approach To speak of the OT as providing a narrative trajectory for understanding the church assumes that the OT possesses a discernable narrative that flows into the NT and results in a coherent trajectory. It further assumes that this narrative is potent enough to cast a vision forward that future generations may draw upon to evaluate their own ecclesiological frameworks. Yet scholars have identified many disparate storylines in these books. That being the case, one might posit that every alleged trajectory is just the projection of some interpreter or interpretive community. While there is no way to refute such a claim definitively, several resources exist by which we may evaluate competing interpretations

Scholars are divided as to the church’s relationship to Israel (cf. Boys 2000). Supersessionist readings hold that the church replaced Israel as God’s chosen people and that Christians are exclusive heirs to OT Israel’s mission. That interpretation has been challenged and its implications for ecclesiology have been explored by numerous scholars (e.g., Bader-Saye 1999; Kaiser 1991; Küng 1967: 107–49; Yoder 2003a). 1

THE OLD TESTAMENT



13

and take seriously the possibility that Scripture does, in fact, provide a coherent narrative trajectory. The foremost resource for this task is the NT. If one confesses Jesus as the Messiah of Israel and NT authors as reliable receivers and interpreters of his assertions, then one possesses plenty of NT fodder by which to evaluate all claims of having identified the OT’s narrative trajectory. Another valuable resource is the biblical studies guild. Though few Bible scholars will venture a transtestamental trajectory, their insightful interpretation of individual books and more narrow pericopes can help us judge whether a given trajectory accounts for specific details that enjoy widespread support of Bible scholars. A final resource is internal consistency. A viable trajectory must be able to stand on its own two feet and handle the wide breadth of Scripture in a careful and coherent manner. And, when new objections are brought forward, it should exhibit strong explanatory power to overcome them without compromising its core claims. The four-stage narrative trajectory of the OT that follows has been subjected to these tests. First presented in The Politics of Yahweh (Nugent 2011), it has been examined and revised in light of theologians’ and Bible scholars’ ongoing findings, specific critical feedback, and a host of other new insights. Its explanatory power has proven to be remarkably resilient. This trajectory emerges from the OT, includes the NT, and has considerable implications for ecclesiology. While it is not the only way to tell the OT story, it aptly demonstrates the OT’s valuable contributions to ecclesiology. Stage One describes how God prepares to form a set-apart people as his answer to the fallenness of the world. Stage Two describes the actual formation of that people in Abraham. Stage Three covers the deformation of God’s people, as they fall into disobedience. Finally, Stage Four narrates God’s re-formation of his people. Each of these stages provides, in its own right, unique insights for ecclesiology. By taking them together as a narrative trajectory, we subject our hermeneutics to the insights of biblical scholars, we become embedded in the narrative of Scripture itself, and we follow Scripture as one story of God’s work that begins at creation and continues with Christ. Further, we see how God’s actions in making a people for himself drive the narrative forward. Ecclesiology is central to the entire biblical story, and tracing its narrative trajectory allows us to grasp many of the OT’s key contributions. Ecclesiology pulls together what other themes may separate and, in so doing, provides the kind of potent, coherent trajectory that we need to test our particular and contextualized applications today.

Pre-Formation (from Creation to Babel) Genesis 1–11 does not tell the story of God’s people, as such. Rather, it tells the story of the world prior to God’s people, so God’s people may learn from it. As we will see in Stage Two, the formation of God’s people begins with Abraham in Genesis 12. Nevertheless, the first eleven chapters shed important light on ecclesiological concerns. This is especially so when we interpret them sociopolitically as the original readers would have done and not apologetically as modern readers tend to do. Ancient Israelites would have read these chapters as shedding light on their status as a struggling nation being oppressed by the superpowers of their day and not as answering scientific questions about the fossil record, age of the universe, or historicity of Adam. When turning to these chapters it is tempting to isolate popular stories from one another—stories like creation and fall, Cain and Abel, flood and Babel. Read in this way, the narratives can teach valuable moral lessons about obeying God, resisting temptation,

14

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

seeking peace, renouncing violence, and shunning human pride. Again, while useful in some regards, the biblical canon is broken up into pieces that may distract from God’s forward motion. For this and other reasons, upon which my commentary on Genesis 1–11 elaborates (Nugent 2018), it is best to consider Genesis 1–11 as a unit that hangs together in its final canonical form as the preface to the calling of Abraham. A discernable thread weaves through all eleven chapters that makes an important statement about life in a fallen world and sets up God’s decision to form a set-apart people. Quickly recapitulating the content of Genesis 1–11 reveals the following: that humans were created for cooperative fellowship as they exercise creative stewardship of God’s good creation within the limits that God placed upon them and that humans quickly transcended God’s limitations, which resulted in estrangement between humans, God, and creation itself. The man who once joyfully celebrated the gift of a perfect counterpart now strives to rule over his wife (3:16). The creation which once generously bore fruit for humans now stands cursed and unable to yield its produce without considerable toil (3:17-19). These developments are merely symptomatic of a more fundamental problem. Human sinfulness has unhinged humanity from its proper place in God’s harmonious order. Before long, brother kills brother (4:8); men take multiple wives for themselves, continue to kill, and threaten potential rivals with godlike intensity (4:19-24); and the powerful prey upon the powerless until violence permeates all of creation (6:1-11). God answers with a flood, which does not fix the root problem; rather, it allows God to implement several countermeasures to rein in the unbridled violence (e.g., 9:1-6). Again, if we break up these chapters into separate stories, we miss the significance of God’s responsive actions. One of the most important and most neglected events for ecclesiology is the promise God makes following the flood: God vows never again to deal with human sinfulness by smiting all creation. Because humans remain bent toward wickedness (8:21), this promise poses a problem. If God will no longer flood away human wickedness, what will prevent creation from spinning out of control again? In promising not to flood the earth, God places the burden on himself to find another way to deal with human depravity. That other way has everything to do with the formation of a set-apart people that begins in chapter 12. At this point, it might appear logical to jump forward to Abraham. The narrative itself does not. Before we meet Abraham, we encounter Babel (Gen. 11:1-9). The Babel story is not an editorial afterthought. It is a deliberate narrative bridge that answers important questions raised by God’s ensuing formation of a set-apart people. The original readers of Genesis believed that God was going to somehow bless all nations through Abraham’s offspring (Gen. 12:3), but they also knew that this blessing had yet to materialize. In all likelihood, it appeared to them as if other nations played a bigger part in the direction of world history. After all, Egyptian rulers brought relative stability to the Nile River region, and the Assyrians and Babylonians were instrumental in stabilizing most of the fertile crescent. Meanwhile, God’s set-apart people struggled to eke out a livable existence in the rather small stretch of land between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River. Their existence seemed to have little to contribute to the forward motion of world history. The Babel account therefore instructs God’s people in a valuable lesson about their nature and mission. Before Abraham even appears on the scene, God places a check against the fallen world’s exercise of power. He scatters the residents of the mega-metropolis of Babel to create a plurality of diverse world powers, which God then uses to keep a basic

THE OLD TESTAMENT



15

level of order until he fulfills his purposes for his people and enfolds the entire created order into his harmonious reign. The primary lesson of the pre-formation period is simple: God’s people are latecomers on the world scene, and they are not even the main players. Many things need to be done in a fallen world, and God does much of this work through other peoples. Israel will have its place, for sure, but so will other nations. Negotiating the difference between the nations and themselves will be Israel and the church’s biggest challenge. Unfortunately, because this theme is most fully developed in the least read portions of Scripture—Israel’s history and prophets—God’s people have been slow in learning how to deal with it. Moreover, Western readers have been slow to learn this lesson from Genesis 11 because, as citizens of great empires who have benefited considerably from Christianity’s long-held cultural dominance, we tend to identify with the empire builders in the story rather than the Israelite readers who would have known that this story was mocking their pagan imperial overlords and that God’s people were more akin to slaughtered Abel in chapter 4, the victimized daughters of chapter 6, and Abram and Sarai who are called out from the Babylonian city of Ur in chapter 12.

Formation (from Abraham to Joshua) Most scholars agree that God began forming his people with childless Abram and Sarai. They usually emphasize the faith it required for them to pick up and leave to wherever God might send them and the fact that God promised that all nations would be blessed by their descendants (Gen. 12:1-3). Those themes are certainly important to ecclesiology, but equally important—especially on the heels of chapter 11—is the place that they had to leave. Ur of the Chaldeans was a Babylonian city (11:31). It was the center of cultural progress, political sophistication, and military might. The covenant of circumcision God gave Abraham (ch. 17) was not an arbitrary painful act intended to demonstrate radical loyalty. It was a deliberate departure from the familiar practice of Babylon, which they left behind, and an intentional identification with the customs of Canaan, to which they were heading. Babylonians didn’t practice circumcision, and most Canaanites did (cf. Martin 2007). The residents of Canaan were political pawns in the Ancient Near East. They were bounced around and trodden over by the Egyptians, Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians. By calling Abram and Sarai to leave for Canaan, God clarified and emphasized the character of his people: those who leave the somebodies of this world and settle among the nobodies. It was not for lack of effort that the Canaanites never achieved an impressive status; it was a lack of resources. Their land was famine-prone, so it was hard to settle down for long. Shortly after arriving in Canaan, Abraham and Sarah were themselves forced to relocate to Egypt to survive a drought. Stable civilizations do not emerge in places of such scarcity. If God’s people were to achieve stability there, God would have to provide it. This reality is re-emphasized later in the narrative when famine drives Abraham’s descendants from Canaan back to Egypt in Joseph’s day (Gen. 37-50). They are then trapped there for 400 years before God raises up Moses to deliver them. Deliverance could have come in many forms. One logical form, especially for a God capable of unleashing a slew of devastating plagues on Pharaoh’s house, is military coup. The Egyptians occupied the best natural lands for farming, thanks to predictable irrigation from the Nile River. Why not use his fearsome plagues to remove the pharaohs

16

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

from power and replace them with Israelite rulers? Once equipped with Torah, God’s people would be strategically positioned to establish it as the law of the land and create a powerful and just society perfectly positioned to take over Palestine, Northern Africa, and eventually the world. God does not take this route, however. Instead, he leads them back to Canaan, the land of the perpetual underdog. Even there in Canaan, with God’s support, Israel could become a mighty, dominant empire. But that is not how the story goes. On their way from Egypt to Palestine, God gives Moses and the crowds a set of laws that were intended to govern their new life together. These laws will not assist in the task of empire-building. Rather, God establishes his people as a loose federation of distinct tribes with no capital city, no king, and no standing army. Political alliances are also strictly off limits. Instead, God disperses governance among a plurality of scattered local leaders including judges, prophets, priests, and elders. Israel could have appointed a king had they wanted, but such a king must not become great like other ordinary kings (Deut. 17:14-20). He may only serve as a symbolic figurehead whose task was to learn and administrate Torah, in contrast to the ways in which other kings rule. What is more, God prevents the Israelites from overcoming the inhabitants of Canaan with an impressive show of military might. Instead, God makes them rely on him to fight their battles, and he places the priests, who are not even allowed to fight, in charge of declaring war. Again, God’s point was clear. He was not building a people like the nations of this world. Rather he was fashioning the Israelites into something altogether different, something that would become the church: a people with no territorial political center, a people with no sword or army, a migratory people who would not get too comfortable in one geographic location, a people organized with local leaders with little worldly power, a people who would have to rely upon God for their strength, and, above all, a people whose impact on the world would flow from their uniquely just and unassuming presence among cultures of pride and injustice. Had Israel followed Torah as instructed, they could have been economically prosperous because of how they care for one another and how God would have honored and rewarded such care. They could have become a nation of unparalleled justice, as well-off citizens voluntarily accepted caps on their prosperity rather than using it as leverage to increase their holdings at the expense of less fortunate neighbors. As a people, they would have shined among the nations, who would consequently have been impressed by and attracted to their righteous way of life (Deut. 4:5-6). Israel’s failure to follow Torah led to the next stage of the biblical narrative and thus the ecclesial trajectory.

Deformation (from Torah to Kingship) The Israelites weren’t content with Torah’s vision of significance. They were more impressed by the imperial formula for success. They forsook the covenant God made with them and began to live like their neighbors. God expresses his displeasure through withdrawal. If Israel wanted to thrive by their own strength according to the script of the nations, he would allow them to try. The inevitable resulted. Their weakness prevailed, and neighboring nations began claiming their land and subjugating their people. Sometimes the people would cry out to God and he would send them a deliverer who would subdue their enemies, liberate them, and guide them as long as he or she had breath. But after the judge died, everything fell apart again, and the nations resumed terrorizing them. When this pattern grew wearisome, the Israelites decided that they could only achieve stability by more fully embracing the ways of the nations. So they demanded a nation-like

THE OLD TESTAMENT



17

king. The wording is very particular, which demonstrates that this demand encompasses more than a mere change of title. A king like those of the nations lives in a capital city, keeps a standing army, empowers a wealthy upper class, creates foreign alliances, and concentrates power among the few. Their request therefore constitutes a fundamental abandonment of Torah, as well as a clear and direct return to the kind of peoplehood that God had rejected at Babel. When Samuel takes this request as a personal affront, God reminds him that it is merely the culmination of their rejection of his plans for his people which began long ago when they left Torah behind (1 Sam. 8:4-8). The prophet Hosea later captures God’s sentiments when he says on God’s behalf, “I gave you a king in my anger, and I took him away in my wrath” (Hos. 13:11). This negative assessment of Israel’s kingship, though clear in the text itself, has been difficult for Christians in the West to acknowledge. Nearly everyone agrees that it was wrong for Israel to want a king “like the nations,” but they fail to recognize the characteristics of such a king—a powerful monarch with a capital city and standing army. Often, such depictions emphasize that David was a man after God’s own heart and that Solomon was the wisest king of all time. Furthermore, God seems to have clearly blessed them and Israel through them. To be sure, such narrations confess that everything began to crumble when Solomon married foreign women and began to worship their gods. Prior to this, however, the texts describe impressive expansion, prosperity, and even international recognition. Jesus’s eventual acceptance of the moniker of “king” seems to endorse at least the best parts of Israel’s royal project. Here is where scholars routinely highlight the Bible’s supposed plurality of trajectories. Some view the reigns of David and Solomon as a high point, and others as a fundamental deformation of Israelite peoplehood. This point of divergence is deeply important. If David’s and Solomon’s reigns are a high point in the narrative, a time to which God’s people should aspire, then perhaps God’s people today might also seek political power in some fashion. If their reigns are, instead, characteristic of deformation, then other kinds of imperial Christianity must be denounced. Thus are battle lines drawn, and the OT becomes a pawn in a contemporary ideological battle. It is thus precisely at this point that the trajectory must be tested. Here also is where the resources mentioned above should be more rigorously employed. Is one of these positions more internally consistent than others? Does one share more support from the best biblical scholarship on the most pertinent passages? Does one cohere better with the way Jesus reveals God’s kingdom or even how sermons in Acts recount OT history? When Jesus comes as Israel’s king, what kind of kingship does he embrace? Is it more like the one established by David and expanded by Solomon? Or is it one that retools his people’s notions of power and peoplehood to be more like the pre-monarchial vision set forth in Torah? Does one look more like the kinds of kingdoms from which God removed Abraham, Moses, and the Israelites, and less like a peoplehood characterized by radical dependence upon God alone for security and prosperity? Seen as part of the narrative trajectory, the monarchy must be characterized as the culmination of unfaithfulness that goes back to the Israelites’ much earlier abandonment of Torah. It thus constitutes the decisive deformation of God’s people (cf. Lohfink 2012: 181). In doing so, this trajectory communicates to those who are ecclesiologically mindful that although God will allow unfaithfulness to go on among his people for long stretches of time, he will eventually correct it. Further, God’s people may enjoy the appearance of success and thriving even when they are being deeply unfaithful. In God’s good timing, as the narrative itself describes, God himself will judge.

18

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Re-Formation (from Exile to Eschaton) Israel’s prophets sounded a clear message. God will not indefinitely tolerate his people abandoning his design for their life together. He will remove their king as well as their military and national autonomy. He will woo them back to a more faithful covenant relationship. God fulfills these prophecies by raising up the Assyrians to dissolve the Northern Kingdom and the Babylonians to dismantle the Southern Kingdom. After 586, God’s people were scattered throughout the ancient world—some taking refuge in Egypt, others being exiled to Babylon or elsewhere, and still others remaining in Palestine as vassals to the Babylonian empire—exiles in their own land. It is common to interpret Israel’s downfall in strictly punitive terms. God set apart and blessed his people, they squandered that blessing, and so he punished them with exile. But that would be too narrow of an interpretation. Though God was certainly punishing Israel for abandoning Torah, the means by which he did so simultaneously stripped them of all national accoutrements that stood in tension with Torah. It is therefore worth noting that only after the exile did Israel become a people who were truly committed to Torah. Without a king like the nations, Israel became a people of the book. Moreover, in being scattered among the nations, the Israelites formed voluntary communities that shared common life together centered on faithfulness to Torah. This led to the formation of synagogues, which were central to the later church-planting strategy of the apostle Paul (Yoder 2003a: 43–66). It is thus not only possible, but most appropriate, to frame Israel’s demoted status as God’s intentional effort to re-form them into a people more conducive to his original calling for them. On a certain level, the narratives of Ezra, Nehemiah, and the post-exilic prophets— which celebrate Cyrus’s decree allowing the Israelites to return home from exile and rebuild their city and temple—appear to contradict such a reading. Here it is necessary to return to the text itself and to history, where we see that this rebuilding period neither fundamentally changed Israel’s status nor restored its stability. A very large number of the people remained scattered throughout the ancient world, and those who did return to the land remained vassals of a foreign empire (Persia). Ezra referred to their condition in terms of enslavement (Ezra 9:8-9). The returnees did not rebuild David’s fallen empire; they adapted life in Palestine to a Torah-centered ethos more akin to life in exile. Though the Israelites would gain temporary independence under the Maccabean dynasty in the second century, their self-rule was short lived and the Romans took full control of Palestine. This is certainly the situation when Jesus was born. Moreover, this richly fertilized soil of scattered, exilic, demilitarized, Torah-centered Judaism is the context in which the first-century church grew and grew rapidly. It is thus fitting that Peter refers to his Christian readers as aliens and exiles (1 Pet. 2:11), and James addresses his letter to the twelve tribes of the Diaspora (Jas 1:1). Jesus’s disciples repeatedly asked when he was going to restore Israel to its former Davidic glory (e.g., Acts 1:6), but he rejected this offer and embraced Israel’s demoted, servant status as the proper posture for his unique messianic mission and that of his followers (e.g., Lk. 22:25-26). Jesus did not pioneer a fundamentally new posture for his people; he validated God’s work of re-formation for mission. Moreover, in fully bearing the curses of Torah and then pouring out the Spirit, he unleashed the power to fulfill the OT’s vision of God’s people filling all the world with fruit (Isa. 27:6). The early church found plenty of scriptural evidence for this prior re-formation in the Servant Songs of Isaiah. The lowly, bruised, unimpressive posture of servant Israel in

THE OLD TESTAMENT



19

Isaiah 40–55 (situated amid the Babylonian exile) stood at the center of Jesus’s vision for his kind of kingship and kingdom (cf. Yoder 2003b: 149–67). Though Satan offered him precisely the kind of political power Solomon once wielded, Jesus decisively rejected it (Mt. 4:8-10). The coming of God’s kingdom through Jesus meant new things for the life of God’s people, especially the overt incorporation of Gentiles. Yet when read in light of Scripture’s overarching story, we see it as the natural culmination of Israel’s life and legacy. From an ecclesiological standpoint, the basic shape of the life of God’s people had long been in place. It is the presupposition of the biblical narrative itself, and not the innovation of Jesus or the apostles.

IMPLICATIONS FOR ECCLESIOLOGY With the above canonical trajectory in mind, we are poised to appreciate the OT’s contributions to ecclesiology. For the remainder of this essay, we will discuss three of them: criteria for evaluating ecclesial developments, clarity about the church’s fundamental task, and insight into possible ecclesial structures.

Criteria for Evaluating Ecclesial Developments A trajectory approach to ecclesiology requires us to reconsider the “when” of any ecclesiological “starting point.” Ecclesiologies frequently take either Jesus or Pentecost as their starting point, identify a later point in history that was formative for their own tradition—whether a specific thinker, document, or event—and then establish a clear trajectory that begins in the NT and culminates with them. Such a move, however faithful it appears, prevents us from evaluating our claims to faithfulness by means of God’s actual standards epitomized and most deeply revealed in Jesus, because it dislocates Jesus from the framing story of redemption required to recognize him as God’s Messiah. In affirming both the OT and NT’s relevance for ecclesiology, we disabuse ourselves of the notion that the starting point for ecclesiological reflection is punctiliar in nature. Rather than starting with Jesus and drawing a line in our preferred direction, we must recognize that Scripture already contains a line from Abraham to Jesus that extends forward in a particular direction—and not just any direction. The imagery of a line—rather than a point—may still be incomplete. In order for God’s people to walk upon it, the line must have breadth as well as length. God’s story provides this necessary breadth such that, however narrow the path, there is sufficient room for our feet. Envisioned in this way, the full canonical trajectory furnishes helpful criteria for evaluating ecclesial developments in church history and whatever new opportunities present themselves to us today. God’s path helps us discern which post-canonical developments stand in continuity with the canon’s direction as necessary evolutions and which ones constitute unwarranted devolutions or unfortunate detours. This is important from an ecclesiological perspective because church history is not particularly straight. It is a winding path that splits off into multiple trails that intertwine with one another and overlap at different points for varying lengths of time. Any given tradition may align with the canonical trajectory for a time and then depart from it at another time, during which another tradition might be more properly aligned. No tradition will find itself in perfect alignment with this trajectory at all times, a reality which beckons us all to embrace a posture of humility toward one another. Moreover, since the OT

20

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

is shared by Christians of all traditions, it constitutes common ecumenical ground that can be discussed and debated, and upon which varying traditions might agree (Lindbeck 2003: 145–65). Though it is inevitable that rival articulations of the OT narrative will emerge with differing assumptions about the canonical trajectory, ecclesiologies that take the full canon seriously in this way will have more in common than those that begin only with Jesus.

Clarity about the Church’s Fundamental Task If God is doing through the church what he began doing through Israel, then we are not only justified but required to examine the OT witness in order to gain our ecclesial bearings. Christians have envisioned the church’s role in this world in a wide variety of ways, which I summarize with the following terms: heaven-centered, human-centered, world-centered, and kingdom-centered (Nugent 2016). The lattermost term is meant to characterize what I believe is the church’s faithful posture and calling. Heaven-centered Christians believe that the church’s task is to recruit people to join them in leaving this world and going to heaven to be with Jesus after they die. Human-centered Christians believe that God has called the church to make this world a better place until we achieve the vision of Jesus. World-centered Christians believe we are called to fix this world as much as possible in anticipation of the new world God has begun to bring with Jesus and will bring in its fullness when he returns. Kingdom-centered Christians believe that God has not called the church to fix this world but to embrace and represent the new world God has inaugurated through Jesus which will eventually replace the old orders of this world when Jesus returns. All of these approaches lean heavily upon the NT witness to Jesus, but not all of them make equal sense in light of the narrative trajectory beginning in the OT. The heaven-centered approach falls short insofar as the OT nowhere associates Israel’s hope with leaving this world and going to heaven. By way of contrast, it anticipates a future day when God renews this world. The human-centered approach supposes that God’s people are somehow called and able to fix the brokenness of this world with a template provided by God. Yet the OT nowhere instructs God’s people to fix the wider world, and the prophets all envision that God will someday intervene in world history to set things right. In fact, just when humans were perfectly positioned to act in world-changing ways (e.g., the monarchy), God intervened to prevent them from doing so. The world-centered and kingdom-centered approaches are more compatible with the OT trajectory. They both envision salvation in terms of this world, recognize that divine intervention will be necessary to make it happen, and affirm that this intervention already began with Jesus. They disagree only about whether the church is responsible for doing its best now to fix the world in anticipation of its future divine restoration. Here, too, the OT testimony provides clear and consistent direction. Whereas humanity in general bears responsibility for exercising dominion over nonhuman creation, God places oversight of such matters into the hands of the nations. God’s people are never commanded in the OT (or NT) to take the lead. Rather they are called to order their own life together in such a way that God’s just order would be on display for the nations to see and learn from. Moreover, in the OT God separates his people from the nations, equips them to be fundamentally unlike the nations, and disciplines and redirects them when they manage to assume a world-fixing and world-governing posture like the nations. In the NT, Jesus and his followers endorse and maintain this same basic posture. The kingdom-centered

THE OLD TESTAMENT



21

approach is therefore most consistent with the full canonical trajectory. This big-picture understanding of the place of God’s people in the world should be foundational to all ecclesial reflection.

Insight into Possible Ecclesial Structures The big-picture contributions that the narrative trajectory makes to the church’s selfunderstanding bear also on the possible structures it might assume. If the church were tasked with fixing this world, then it ought seriously to ask which structures are most compatible with this sort of task. Sociologists would then provide valuable insights as to how the church might best position itself as a successful agent of worldwide change. Sociologist James Davison Hunter has observed that big change happens through the agency of powerful people who occupy high-profile positions in powerful institutions and are well-networked with others who fit the same profile (Hunter 2010: 1–47). He does not deny that grassroots movements make a difference; he simply insists that the change they envision is not implemented with lasting effect until it is embraced and advanced by powerful people in high-profile institutions. In other words, the Egypts, Babylons, and Persias of this world are best positioned to enact lasting change. This is exactly what we see happening in the OT. At the same time, at every turn we see God shaping his people to be notably unlike these nations. He takes them away from Babylon and Egypt when he could have usurped those nations’ power and accomplished immeasurable good with it (through people like Joseph and Daniel). He then fashions them into a people who are weak in the eyes of the world and strong only when their life together faithfully reflects God’s alternative world. On top of this, he forbids his people from making strategic alliances with world powers. Rather, he shapes, postures, and positions them in ways that are nearly incompatible with lasting world change. He structures them instead to be flexibly adaptive to minority life in just about any sort of nation. This claim is not contradicted by the handful of cases where certain Israelites—Moses, Joseph, Daniel, and Esther—providentially come to occupy noteworthy positions of political power in the OT. In each of these cases, the primary function of their elevated status is to safeguard the existence of God’s people who were on the brink of elimination. God used Joseph to save the Israelites from famine, Moses to lead his people out of Egypt where they were oppressively enslaved as their sons were being killed at birth, Daniel and his friends to counter royal edicts that threatened to execute all exiled Jews who would not compromise their faith, and Esther and Mordecai to stop empire-wide Jewish genocide. Though others may have benefited from their public service (as initially the case with Joseph), these stories emphasize how God was saving his people through extraordinary means and not using them to change the world or make their host nations a better place. For ecclesiology, this means that God’s people ought to embrace the lowly sort of posture and structures to which God began conforming his people in the OT and that Jesus incorporated and made central to his kingdom vision in the NT. As God originally created Israel to be a loose federation of unimpressive tribes spread throughout Palestine, so he has established the church as a loose federation of unimpressive communities scattered throughout the world as salt and light. The church ought to be careful not to rise above its divinely ordained posture by seeking to become powerful and impressive like the nations and corporations of our day. By contrast, the relative weakness of the

22

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

church mirrors the relative weakness of Israel’s tribes and highlights the incomparable power of our God and the liberating gospel message with which he has entrusted us. This will not impress the world on the world’s own terms, but it is best-suited to making the kind of impression that God seeks for us to make in this world on his behalf. The narrow path of which Jesus spoke was established and characterized long before his birth. It was established, so we are told, from the foundations of the world. Those who would follow Jesus and be known as his people must therefore look to his Lordship from its origins. To do so, they must thus look to the Old Testament. If George Lindbeck is right, such future work may just be the most ecumenically promising way forward for ecclesiology. His insightful words aptly capture the sentiments of this chapter: The Church thus identified sounds Catholic in its comprehensiveness, Calvinist in the unconditionality of its chosenness, and Lutheran in its possibilities of unfaithfulness while remaining genuinely the Church; but the total effect, not surprisingly, is more Jewish than anything else. (Lindbeck 2003: 157–8)

REFERENCES Bader-Saye, S. (1999), Church and Israel after Christendom: The Politics of Election, Radical Traditions, Boulder: Westview. Boys, M. (2000), Has God Only One Blessing? Judaism as a Source of Christian Understanding, New York: Paulist Press. Brueggemann, W. (1991), “Rethinking Church Models through Scripture,” Theology Today 48 (2): 128–38. Ferguson, E. (1996), The Church of Christ: A Biblical Ecclesiology for Today, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Hunter, J. (2010), To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kaiser, W. (1991), “Israel as the People of God,” in P. Basden and D. Dockery (eds.), The People of God: Essays on the Believers’ Church, 99–108, Nashville: Broadman Press. Küng, H. (1967), The Church, trans. R. and R. Ockenden, New York: Sheed and Ward. Leeman, J. (2016), Political Church: The Local Assembly as Embassy of Christ’s Rule, Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press. Lindbeck, G. (2003), “The Church as Israel: Ecclesiology and Ecumenism,” C. Braaten and R. Jenson (eds.), in Jews and Christians: People of God, 78–94, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Lohfink, G. (1999), Does God Need the Church? Toward a Theology of the People of God, trans. L. Maloney, Collegeville: Liturgical Press. Lohfink, G. (2012), Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was, trans. L. Maloney, Collegeville: Liturgical Press. Martin, T. (2007), “Circumcision in Galatia and the Holiness of God’s Ecclesiae,” in K. Brower and A. Johnson (eds.), Holiness and Ecclesiology in the New Testament, 219–36, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Niringiye, D. (2015), The Church: God's Pilgrim People, Downers Grove: IVP Academic. Nugent, J. (2011), Politics of Yahweh: John Howard Yoder, the Old Testament, and the People of God, Eugene: Cascade Books. Nugent, J. (2016), Endangered Gospel: How Fixing the World Is Killing the Church, Eugene: Cascade Books.

THE OLD TESTAMENT



23

Nugent, J. (2018), Genesis 1-11, Polis Bible Commentary, Vol. 1a. La Vista: Urban Loft Publishers. Wright, C. (2006), The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative, Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press. Yoder, J. (2003a), Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited, ed. M. Cartwright and P. Ochs, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Yoder, J. (2003b), Karl Barth and the Problem of War and Other Essays on Barth, ed. M. Nation, Eugene: Cascade Books.

Chapter THREE

The Synoptic Gospels and Acts C. CLIFTON BLACK

INTRODUCTION “Jesus announced the kingdom, and it was the church that came.” Although Alfred Loisy’s observation (1976: 166) has been remembered with rueful irony, he intended to state a sociological principle to which the church, like every institution, is subject: perpetual adaptation to conditions that are ever changing. Thus, Loisy continued (1976: 166): “[The church] came, enlarging the form of the gospel.” This chapter investigates the ways in which such inevitable acclimatization is documented in some of Christianity’s earliest, most influential writings. By the sixth century BC we can document the existence of associations comprising members with shared interests who had joined with others and had regularized their organization, leadership, and procedures. Such groups were made up of craftsmen, adherents of mystery religions, and students attached to such philosophers as Pythagoras or Epicurus (Van Nijf 1997; Burkert 1987; Culpepper 1975). Second-Temple Jews, who gathered in synagogues (Aramaic: kenisettah) throughout the Diaspora, constituted another fraternal organization; within their circle, subgroups such as trade guilds and burial societies were also formed (Cohen 1999; Levine 2000). For everyday Romans or Hellenistic Jews, the earliest churches of the first century AD would have resembled such voluntary associations. For information on how these groups were beginning to regard themselves, our best sources are the New Testament’s Pauline letters (see Chapter 4), the Johannine literature (Chapter 5), and the synoptic gospels and Acts: the focus of this chapter.

MARK (CA. AD 70) The briefest and probably earliest of the Synoptics, Mark offers a picture of Jesus’s followers, their conduct, and responsibilities only four decades removed from Jesus himself. That portrait is foundational for those of Matthew and Luke, both of which drew upon Mark as a primary source. As in all the gospels, abstract reflection on the church is absent from Mark, but its presentation of Jesus’s disciples and the character of discipleship stands near its front and center. Understanding Jesus Christ is this evangelist’s preoccupation; grasping what commitment to this Messiah entails is ancillary to and informative of Mark’s christology. As early as 1:16-20—instantly after Jesus’s baptism, temptation, and introductory

THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS AND ACTS



25

announcement of good news (1:9-15)—Jesus calls four fishermen (the brothers Simon and Andrew; the brothers James and John), who immediately drop their equipment and follow him (1:16-20). In 1:30 we learn that Simon has a mother-in-law; unless he was widowed— which Paul implicitly contradicts (1 Cor. 9:5)—Simon left behind both business and family to follow this unknown Galilean prophet. In 2:14 Levi, a toll-collector (a Jew employed by Roman overlords), answers the same summons—“Follow me” (cf. 1:17)—and joins the other five. In the following chapter (3:13-19a) Jesus rounds out his entourage to twelve, “summon[ing] those whom he wanted, [who] came to him . . . to be with him, and to be sent out to preach and have power to cast out demons” (vv. 13-14; au. trans., here and throughout). (Curiously, Levi is not mentioned among them; Matthew 9:9 and 10:3 refer to the tax collector as “Matthew.”) Apart from Andrew and Simon, nicknamed “Peter” (Greek: Petros; Aramaic: Cēphas; see Gal. 2:7-11), and the sons of Zebedee, the only other member of this dozen who reappears in Mark and about whom we learn anything is Judas Iscariot, “the one who betrayed him” (Mk 3:19a). Elsewhere in Mark “the Twelve” are mentioned only nine times (4:10; 6:7; 9:35; 10:32; 11:1; 14:10, 17, 20, 43), usually in the setup or recounting of the Passion Narrative. More often than not, Mark refers to them as [Jesus’s] “disciples” (mathētai)1: 2:15-16, 18, 23; 3:7; 4:34; 5:31; 6:1, 35, 41, 45; 7:2, 5, 17: 8:1, 4, 6, 10, 27, 33-34; 9:14, 18, 28, 31; 10:10, 13, 23, 46; 11:1, 14; 12:43; 13:1; 14:12-14, 16, 32; 16:7)—although, as we shall see, “the Twelve” and “his disciples” are overlapping though not coterminous companies. From these details one may tease out Mark’s fundamental attitude toward discipleship: 1. It is, primarily, a circuit of “calling” and “following,” both geographically and figuratively, a figure so commanding that addressees accept their vocation on the strength of Jesus’s sheer utterance. Unlike later rabbis, who accepted applicant pupils as apprentices (cf. m. ’Abot. 1), Jesus takes complete initiative in forming his followers, acting more like Elijah, who cast his mantle on Elisha (1 Kgs 19:19). Others in Mark who want to accompany Jesus or to inherit eternal life are either sent home to proclaim the Lord’s goodness to them (5:18-20) or are disqualified by their refusal of stringent discipleship (10:17-22). 2. Already in Mark’s earliest chapters we see that following Jesus carries significant social, financial, and political costs: Simon’s separation from his family, Levi’s relinquishment of imperial retainer, James and John’s quitting a small business organization. (Their father’s “hired hands” [tōn misthōtōn: 1:20] suggest that the brothers have resigned from The Zebedee & Sons Fishing Company.) 3. The basic responsibilities of Jesus’s adherents are “that they be with him,” serving as his emissaries in preaching repentance and in exorcism (3:14-15), to which is later added therapeutic anointing of the sick (6:12-13). In other words, Jesus’s disciples are expected to do just what their teacher does (cf. 1:21–2:12; 3:1-12; 5:1-43; 6:5), just as he did it: itinerantly, altogether dependent on others’ hospitality (6:7-11). Likewise, Jesus’s disciples are no more scrupulously observant of some religious conventions than he is (2:1–3:6).

Hellenistic influence on the Gospels is suggested by this familiar nomenclature. While some philosophers styled their adherents as “students” (Plato, Protag. 315a–316b, 349a; Xenophon, Mem. 1.6.3), the Hebrew equivalent, talmîd, is very rare in Hebrew Scripture (1 Chr. 25:8) and the Dead Sea Scrolls. After AD 200 (m. ’Abot. 1.1), talmîdim becomes a more common denotation for a rabbi’s pupils. 1

26

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

4. No reason is offered for Jesus’s selection of twelve as his closest cohort. To infer from a saying preserved in Matthew (19:28) and in Luke (22:30), it likely harks back to Israel’s original twelve tribes (Gen. 49:28; Exod. 24:4; 28:21; 39:14; Josh. 4:4; Ezek. 47:13). 5. The Twelve were a motley group. Although we know from Mark and the other Synoptics little or nothing about most of the Twelve, we do learn that, beyond Levi (in cahoots with the Roman Empire), Jesus also called “Simon the Canananaen” (3:18): a description possibly deriving from an Aramaic term for “zeal,” either religious (cf. Rom. 12:8, 11; Phil. 3:6) or revolutionary (cf. Lk. 6:15; Acts 1:15). Those associates of Jesus of whom we learn most in Mark are Peter, James, and John—who, though they appear to constitute Jesus’s inner circle (5:37; 9:2; 13:3; 14:33), repeatedly fumble (8:32; 10:3541; 14:29, 33, 37; 14:54, 66-72)—and Judas Iscariot, the traitor (3:19a; cf. 14:10, 43). These Twelve were not selected for their like-mindedness, capability, or heroism. Quite the opposite. A supreme irony in this extraordinarily ironic gospel is that Jesus’s closest companions are “cowards” (the most straightforward translation of deiloi in 4:40), lacking in insight, compassion (6:34-35; 8:2-4), or understanding (6:52; 7:18; 8:16-17, 21), incompetent because they fail to pray (9:17-18, 28-29), clannish (9:38), supercilious (10:13-14), fearful (4:38; 6:50), faithless (4:40; 9:19), shamelessly jockeying for power (9:33-34), stupidly self-aggrandizing (10:35-42), blustering (14:29) yet baffled (14:40). Were it not so serious, their ineptitude would be comical. Having been plainly instructed three times in cross-bearing service for others (8:31, 34–9:1; 9:30-31, 35-37; 10:33-34, 43-45), immediately the Twelve repudiate Jesus’s teachings (8:32-33; 9:3334; 10:35-41). Repeatedly he warns them to “stay awake” (13:33, 37; 14:34); within days, even minutes, of their master’s moment of crisis, they are snoring away (14:3741a). The only person in Mark whom Jesus addresses as “Satan” is Peter, because Simon tempts him away from the path he must take (dei: 8:31), luring the one he believes to be the Messiah away from God, toward humans’ disposition to save themselves (8:29, 33; cf. 10:45; 14:24). “Get behind me” (8:33) is a double entendre: Jesus disavows Peter’s reproach while reminding all disciples (8:33) of their proper place: following Jesus. At the very moment that Jesus, on trial for his life, owns his messianic identity and is sentenced to die (14:61-64), Peter, accosted by a servant-girl, forfeits his inmost self (psychē) by renouncing his discipleship: “I don’t know this fellow you’re talking about” (14:71); “I neither know nor understand what you’re saying” (14:68; cf. 8:35-37). That’s another double entendre. Peter simultaneously lies through his teeth while telling more truth than he realizes: throughout Mark neither he nor his confreres have understood Jesus. Judas triggers his teacher’s arrest (14:18b-21), but every one of them at table for their last supper falls away, just as Jesus predicted and Scripture ratified (14:27; cf. Zech. 13:7). While Peter rightly asserts that they have left everything and followed him (10:28), not once in this gospel does Jesus acclaim of them a faith they never express. Mark coats this irony with another layer: mostly nameless nobodies recognize in Jesus the power of God’s kingdom to relieve them and their loved ones of virtually hopeless affliction. These exhibit faith (hē pistis, which may also be translated as “belief,” even “trust”): a paralytic and his friends (2:5), a woman who for twelve years has suffered chronic menstruation (5:34), once-blind Bartimaeus (10:52; cf. 5:36; 7:29). The latter acts as a disciple should: ignoring others’ rebukes (10:48) and “throwing off his cloak, he sprang up, came to Jesus . . . [,] immediately regained sight, and followed him on the way” (10:50, 52b). After Jesus’s death, we learn that Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James the younger and Joses, Salome, and many other women had followed Jesus from

THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS AND ACTS



27

Galilee to Jerusalem and ministered to him en route (15:40-41). Like their unnamed “sister” in Bethany (14:3-9), the two Marys and Salome intend to anoint Jesus’s body for burial (16:1), honoring him as the disciples of John the Baptist did after his death but the Twelve did not (6:29; 14:50-51). Mark’s evident intent is not to snub the Twelve but to extend the circle of Jesus’s disciples to others (9:38-39) and to show just how hard it is to deny oneself, take up the cross, and follow him. This community’s boundaries are unusually fluid—“Whoever is not against us is for us” (9:40)—but the responsibilities of faith are terrifying: “I believe; help my unbelief!” (9:24; cf. 16:7-8). Both of these challenges converge in Jesus’s discourse to four of the Twelve on the Mount of Olives: the good news must be preached to all the nations (Gentiles) under circumstances of harassment for Jesus’s sake (13:9-13). As intimated by the repeated injunctions for the Son of Man’s suffering and his disciples’ self-sacrifice (8:31–9:1; 9:31-50; 10:32-45), Mark’s gospel was probably written for a community of Jesus’s followers undergoing persecution (see Black 2011: 36–8 et passim). Some may have held fast, paying the ultimate price (13:12b-13); others, exemplified by Peter, may have broken down under pressure (14:72). Hope for rescue is not futile (13:26-27); Jesus delivers on his promise of fidelity to Peter and others who have defected (14:28; 16:7). From beginning to end, Jesus came to call the sick and the sinners, not those healthy and righteous (2:17), and things that are humanly impossible are not beyond God’s ability (10:27). But the way of the cross, which ends in abundant life beyond imagining (10:29-30), is fraught with constant perils (cf. 4:13-20; 16:6). 6. Between Easter and the Son of Man’s return, this congregation is encouraged to do “the will of God” (3:35). What that entails Mark does not define, but indicates: do not hesitate to relieve those in need, even if it means bending the law and incurring pious wrath (3:1-6). Continue to undermine Satan’s depredations, even if others misconstrue your motives (3:21-27), dishonor you (6:1-6a), or drive you away (5:1-17). Feed the hungry with whatever resources you have (6:30-44; 8:1-10). Recognize and resist the evil that comes from within, instead of senselessly fearing contamination from without (7:1-23). Safeguard the vulnerable (9:42-50; 10:2-16). Uphold the Decalogue (10:18-19; cf. Exod. 20:12-16; Deut. 5:16-20). Beware temptations to trust in wealth (Mk 10:2325). Serve others; don’t lord it over them (10:42-45). Pray that what accords with faith in God is yours, and you will have it; forgive whatever you hold against another (11:2226). Respect Caesar, but not at God’s expense (12:13-17). Love the LORD your God with everything that is in you; love your neighbor as yourself (12:29-31; cf. Deut. 6:4-5; Lev. 19:18). Beware of frauds, withstand persecution, trust in God’s deliverance, and keep alert (Mk 13:3-37). In brief: follow the way of the crucified Messiah. Act as you remember Jesus acted. 7. For those who “have given up everything and followed him” (10:28), having suffered the rupture of their families (Mk 3:19b-20, 31-32; 6:4; 10:29)—even worse, having suffered by the hands of their own siblings, parents, or children (13:12-13a)—Jesus promises his followers their integration into a new, spiritually munificent home with brothers and sisters and mothers in faith (3:35; 10:29-30). This assurance is more than mere metaphor: the extended family was antiquity’s basic social unit (Osiek and Balch 1997). Amid his travels, Jesus is depicted “at home,” whether his or another’s (1:29; 2:1, 15; 3:19; 7:17, 24; 9:33; 14:3), making sure others find their way home (2:11; 5:19, 35-43; 6:10; 7:30; 8:26; 11:17). The house of the LORD, the Temple, will collapse as it

28

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

had before (13:1-2; cf. Jer. 52:12-13; Hos. 9:4; Joel 1:9), but Mark’s tormented audience is assured “a home for the homeless” (Elliott 1990).

MATTHEW (CA. AD 85) In Matthew’s gospel families are breaking apart for reasons both similar and different. Local households are coming unglued, violently so, because of Jesus; as in Mark, new families in faith are reconstituted around the traveling Teacher (Mt. 10:21-22; 12:46-50), typically gathering in homes (8:14; 9:10, 28; 10:12-14; 13:1, 36; 26:6, 18). On a broader scale, however, Jesus has now become a major point of division among Jews of the late first century. Exactly where, in Matthew, Jews and Gentiles stand in relation to each other is impossible to identify with confidence, because that gospel’s evidence is incoherent. On the one hand, Jesus defames Gentiles’ conduct (5:47; 6:7, 32; 10:18; 18:17; 20:19, 25; cf. Rom. 1:18-32; 1 Thess. 4:5; Tit. 1:12; 1 Pet. 4:3-4) and commissions the Twelve to avoid Gentiles and Samaritans, going “rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (10:1-6). On the other hand, Gentiles are named among Jesus’s lineage (1:3, 5, 6) and display a degree of reverence for and faith in Jesus exceeding that of Israel’s rulers (1:3, 5, 6; 2:1, 9-12; 8:5-13). The risen Jesus commissions his followers to proceed “discipling all the nations” (28:19; cf. 24:14). As suggested in Jesus’s exchange with the Canaanite woman (15:21-28; cf. Mk 7:24-30), Israel is offered the right of “first refusal”—or acceptance—of the good news Jesus proclaims, which is then extended to “many [who] will come from East and West to recline with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven” (Mt. 8:11). Woe betide any who reject that invitation (8:12; cf. 22:1-14). Equally obscure in this gospel is where its readers stand with respect to their Jewish coreligionists. Were Jesus’s followers in Matthew’s day still wrangling with their Jewish siblings within the walls of a common synagogue, or had an extramural split already erupted: two groups, both dedicated to Jewish tradition, each defining itself against the other over Jesus’s significance? This question remains controversial, since the gospel can be read to support either interpretation. “Upon Moses’s seat sit the scribes and Pharisees. Therefore, whatever they say to you, do and hold fast to it; but do not do as they do, for they do not ‘walk the talk’” (Mt. 23:2-3). Matthew tends to refer to “their [i.e., others’] synagogue[s]” (4:23; 9:35; 10:17; 12:9; 13:54); only in his version of the parable of the wicked tenants does Jesus conclude, “I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you [chief priests and Pharisees] and given to a nation [ethnei] producing its fruits” (21:43). Whether the evangelist believes that “nation” to be Gentile (cf. 24:14; Gen. 17:4-6; 1 Chron. 17:21; Pss. 78:55; 106:41; Isa. 2:4; Acts 7:45; Rom. 16:26) or a more faithful Israel (cf. Amos 9:9; Zeph. 2:9) remains an open question. Clearer, overall, is the impression that Matthew writes for a Jewish congregation that accepts Jesus as God’s Messiah (Mt. 1:1, 17-18; 2:4; 11:2; 16:16, 20), is in rancorous dispute with other Jews who deny that claim (23:4-32; 26:47-68; 27:41-43; 28:11-15), and has begun turning its evangelization toward a wider, more receptive Gentile audience (28:19-20). Using Mark’s framework, Matthew fleshes out in greater detail the responsibilities of Jesus’s disciples, fusing with Mark traditions distinctively his own (M) or shared with Luke (Q). Most of these additions are located in Matthew’s five great discourses: the Sermon on the Mount (5:1–7:28), a missionary address (10:5-42) to the newly formed Twelve (10:1-4), a collection of parables (13:1-52, expanding Mk 4:1-34), instructions on discipline within the community (Mt. 18:1-35), and warnings about the last days

THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS AND ACTS



29

(24:1–25:46, elaborating Mk 13:1-37). From these lectures by Christ, the sole Master (23:10), emerge recurrent motifs crucial for this Evangelist’s view of discipleship. 1. The cosmic context: the Kingdom of God. As in Mark (1:15; 4:26, 30; 9:1, 47; 10:14, 23; 12:34), so, too, in Matthew: the heart of Jesus’s preaching is “the kingdom of heaven,” God’s mysterious reign, now irrupting into human history (Mt. 3:2; 4:17; 10:7; 13:11, 33) and to be consummated at a time of the heavenly Father’s choosing (24:36). The express subject of most of Jesus’s parables (13:24, 31, 33, 44, 45, 47; 18:23; 19:12, 24; 20:1; 21:31, 43; 22:2; 25:1), the kingdom is the frame of reference in which Jesus’s exorcisms of demons—triumphant skirmishes with diabolical powers—are properly understood (12:28; see also Lk. 11:20). Disciples are called to free themselves from worldly encumbrances to the kingdom’s entry (Mt. 18:3; 19:23-24): in a word, to “repent” (3:2; 4:17; 21:32) or to turn one’s perception of reality Godward, and live as did Jesus: freely obedient to God’s will (7:21). Jesus’s ministry encounters devilish temptation (4:1-11), resistance from “an evil and adulterous generation” (12:39; 16:4). “An enemy” sows toxic weeds amid good wheat (13:25, 28). Shifting the metaphor, a dragnet lands fish of all kinds, good and bad (13:47-48). Only the householder (13:24, 27-30) and his slaves (13:27-28; alternatively, “messengers” or “angels”: 13:49-50; 24:31) are competent to distinguish the one to be taken, the other to be left (24:40-41). 2. The kingdom’s prime constituent: righteousness. No other term in Matthew carries a more positive or pervasive weight than dikaiosynē, which may be variously translated: “righteousness,” “uprightness,” “justice,” “putting right [what is wrong],” “being in right relationship,” or “integrity.” Among the Synoptics, apart from Luke 1:75, this term appears only in Matthew. In speaking of divine–human interactions, neither Jesus nor Matthew invented these ideas: they dipped from a deep well of Old Testament conviction. God’s righteousness comprises his holiness, majesty, honor, fidelity, compassion, and justice (Pss. 7:17; 9:8-9; 31:1; 71:2; 111:3; Isa. 1:27; 5:16; 42:21; Jer. 9:24). Israel’s election as God’s covenant people was based on divine mercy, not their inherent good conduct (Deut. 9:4-6; Isa. 59:14); however, by obeying the LORD’s commands, Israelites could learn to act justly (Deut. 6:25; Job 27:6; 29:14; Pss. 23:3; 106:3; Prov. 1:3; 2:9; 8:20; Hos. 2:19). Especially of Israel’s anointed kings (Ps. 2:2-7) is justice expected (1 Kgs 3:6; 10:9; 2 Chron. 9:8; Prov. 16:12; 20:28; Isa. 9:7; 32:1; Jer. 23:5). When injustice scorches Israel, the prophet prays, “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24). Nothing is more mandatory for Jesus’s disciples than dikaiosynē, as Matthew never tires of telling. Before Jesus was born, Joseph proved himself just (dikaios) toward innocent Mary (Mt. 1:19). On the eve of his ministry, Jesus fulfilled all righteousness by allowing John to baptize him (3:13-15). Before Pilate capitulated, his wife warned him that Jesus was so righteous that he had given her nightmares (27:19). As a whole, the Sermon on the Mount elucidates the righteousness in which Jesus’s followers are being trained: Avoid showboating piety; pray simply and modestly (6:1-18). Beware of idolizing wealth; entrust yourself entirely to God’s wise and merciful providence (6:19-34; 7:7-12). Don’t be gulled by the seemingly religious—including yourself: a hypocritical skin may cover rotten fruit (7:15-23). Even God’s commandments may be perverted; drive beneath the letter of Torah and live into the core of its intent (5:21-48). Rage and insults are as subject to judgment as murder (5:21-22); dehumanization of a woman is tantamount to adulterous abuse (5:2732); love, not merely your neighbor, but your enemies, “pray[ing] for your persecutors”

30

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

(5:43:44; cf. Exod. 20:13-14; Deut. 5:17-18). Matthew’s riposte to fellow Jews who have disclaimed Jesus as Christ is to present the Messiah’s maximum intensification of Jewish fidelity. Jesus’s constant complaint against “scribes and Pharisees,” recognized by their peers as among the most devout (Josephus Ant. 12–15), is that (at best) their righteousness falls short (Mt. 5:19-20) and (at worst) is hypocritical (23:5-36). Jesus has come not to drain but to fill to fullness the Torah and the prophets to the tiniest letter and curlicue (5:17-18). Only so can his followers attain such a teleiōsis—mature benevolence—as God enacts by bestowing sunshine and rainfall on just and unjust alike (5:45-48). 3. A countercultural mercy. To suppose that this gospel’s exhortations were nothing more than defensive maneuvers would be a mistake. Matthew is serious that such righteousness molds Jesus’s followers into greater conformity with their sole leader (23:10), who, as God’s uniquely beloved Son (3:16-17; 17:1-8), is privileged to reveal to his infant followers, “little ones” (10:42; 18:6, 10, 14), all that the Father has revealed to him but has concealed from the supposedly wise and discerning (11:25-27). Even now “the poor in spirit” and “those persecuted for the sake of righteousness” are recipients of the heavenly kingdom (5:3, 10). Those least esteemed by this world stand at the head of the kingdom’s queue (11:11; 18:14; 19:13; 21:21). Jesus is training his disciples as the kingdom’s “secretaries” (“scribes”: hoi grammateis), who draw the best of both old and new from Israel’s treasury (13:52). Those who recognize its inestimable value are overjoyed by their discovery, giving up for it everything they have (13:44-46). The yoke upon them is bearable (cf. m. ’Abot. 3.5), laid upon them by one as gentle and humble as they (5:5; 11:28-30). But a yoke it certainly is, and Matthew does not soften Mark’s warnings: wolves lurk among the lambs (Mt. 10:1623); a cross remains for all disciples to grasp (10:26-39). “A student is not above the teacher, nor a slave above his lord” (10:24; cf. Jn 15:20). Sawing against the grain of this world’s laws of tit-for-tat is Matthew’s persistent concern for forgiveness within the community (5:23-26, 38-42, 44-47; 6:12-15; 7:1-5; 9:1-6; 12:31-37; 18:15-35; 26:28). So ubiquitous is the subject that one wonders if this evangelist’s readers were susceptible to backbiting or grudge-holding. Two of Matthew’s unique and most vivid parables address the matter. The most obvious is that of the forgiven-yet-unforgiving servant: released by his merciful lord from repayment of an astronomical debt, the bastard instantly, mercilessly imprisons a peer who owes him a comparative pittance (18:23-25). The parable of the laborers in the vineyard (20:1-16) gets at a want of clemency from a different angle: even though they haven’t been cheated, eleven-hour laborers resent their employer’s paying the same wage to one-hour workers. Matthew prescribes an uncommonly detailed procedure for dealing with forgiveness within “the church” (hē ekklēsia: twice mentioned in 18:17, two of only three occurrences of the word in the Synoptics). Its overarching principles are safeguarding the offender while trying the offense (cf. Lev. 19:15-18; Deut. 19:15; cf. 1QS 5.24–6:1). Absent repentance, the wrongdoer is to be regarded “as a Gentile and a tax collector”: a curious decision, since both were avoided by scrupulous Jews yet receive Jesus’s mercy elsewhere in Matthew (9:10; 10:3; 11:19; 15:21-28; 21:31-32; 28:19). For all its rigor, this gospel leans toward reconciliation: defendants and plaintiffs should settle out of court (5:25-26); a fellow disciple should repair estrangement before offering anything at the altar of God, who demands mercy, not sacrifice (5:23-34; 9:13; 12:7; cf. Hos. 6:6); offenses should be forgiven infinitely (18:21-22). 4. The enduring presence of the hidden Christ. The church trial prescribed by Matthew 18:15-20 concludes with Jesus’s promise, “For where two or three have come together

THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS AND ACTS



31

in my name, there am I in their midst” (v. 20). This assurance strikes a complex chord. According to rabbinic teaching from the Mishnah’s Pirke Aboth (3.2): “If two sit together and the words of the law [are uttered] between them, the Divine Presence rests between them” (an aphorism recorded in the third century but probably much older). Jews who aspired to Torah-fidelity were regarded as wearing its yoke: another point of correspondence with Jesus’s teaching (Mt. 11:29-30). Moreover, at crucial points in Matthew, Jesus’s presence with a renewed Israel is underscored. Explaining to Joseph Mary’s virginal conception, an angel directs him to call the newborn “Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. Now all this happened in order to fulfill the thing said by the Lord through the prophet: ‘Behold, a virgin will conceive and will bear a son, and they will call his name “Emmanuel,” which is to be interpreted, “God is with us”’” (Mt. 1:21-23; cf. Isa. 7:14). This prenatal prophecy is echoed in the risen Jesus’s last words: “And behold I am with you every day until the consummation of the age” (28:20b). The post-Easter congregation, which may be in for a long wait until the Son of Man returns (24:36–25:30), is not abandoned. In Jesus, the Savior, God is with humankind, and that same Jesus abides with the church in its activity now and forever. In that affirmation lie confidence and caution. Both are captured in the uniquely Matthean tableau of the judgment of nations, which concludes Jesus’s final major discourse (25:31-46). This parable is redolent of the Jewish apocalypticism of Matthew’s day, envisioning a cleavage between the upright and the unrighteous, face-to-face vindication and condemnation, and consequences either blissful or hideous (cf. Wis. 4:20a, 5:1-2, 15; 1 En. 90.20a, 26-27; 1QS 4.6b-8, 11b-14). Between these texts and Matthew 25 lies a crucial difference. In the apocryphal and Qumran texts, those vindicated are on the side of the angels, and they know it. But in Matthew all are shocked by their judgment, sheep no less than goats, because neither group recognized their Lord in the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, or the prisoner (25:35-39, 42-43). Both herds ask the same question: “Lord, when was it that we saw you?” (Mt. 25:37-39, 44). The obvious implication: had they known it was Jesus in need, they would have been on their best behavior—but no one recognized their Lord in “the least of these” (v. 20, 45). The consummate integrity expected of Jesus’s disciples is revealed in just such uncalculating mercy, what later rabbis styled as gěmîlût hăsādîm, “the giving of loving-kindness” (cf. Isa. 58:7; Sir. 7:35; Midrash on Ps. 118:19) without expectation of reward (5:43-48). Jesus remains with the church. Stay hopeful. Pay attention. Act mercifully. 5. The disciples in Matthew are hardly paragons of righteousness (26:14-16, 25, 31, 3645, 51-52, 69-75; 27:3-10); neither, however, are they as pathetic as depicted by Mark. Matthew airbrushes out many of their blemishes. The storm-battered seamen do not scold their teacher (Mk 4:38) but beg their Lord to save them (Mt. 8:25). Unlike the disciples in Mark (8:18), those in Matthew are blessed with seeing eyes and hearing ears (13:16). In Matthew they understand Jesus’s parables (13:51; 16:12; 17:13); in Mark they understand nothing (4:12; 6:52; 8:17, 21; 9:32; 14:68). On the mount of transfiguration they do not speak from ignorance and fear (Mk 9:5-6) but prostrate themselves in reverence (Mt. 17:6-7; cf. 14:33). In Matthew, Zebedee’s sons do not request glorious thrones; their mother importunes on their behalf (20:20-21; cf. Mk 10:35-37). Mark’s curtain falls on speechless, terrified women (16:7-8); in Matthew the women depart the empty tomb with fear and great joy, worship the risen Jesus, and deliver the Easter message to the Eleven (28:8-10, 16). These disciples’ principal hindrance is not (as in Mark) a lack

32

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

of faith but a little faith (oligopistos: Mt. 6:30; 8:26; 16:8; 17:20), typified by Peter in Matthew 14:28-33: he bids Jesus to empower his walking on water, and does so until his fearful doubt overcomes his “little faith” (v. 31). Even at Matthew’s end, after following Jesus’s directions to reunite in Galilee, the Eleven worship him “though some doubted” (28:16-17). Such indecision cannot prevail. “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given” to Jesus (28:18). In turn, his disciples are given their marching orders: “Go, then, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” (28:19-20a). As regards the church, Matthew’s most difficult passage is 16:17-19. After Peter has acclaimed Jesus “the Christ, the Son of the living God” (v. 16), Jesus extols his confessor: Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for flesh and blood have not revealed this to you but, rather, my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you: you are Peter [Petros: cf. Isa. 51:1-2], and upon this rock I shall build my church and the gates of Hades shall not overpower it. I shall give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you release on earth will be released in heaven. Most New Testament scholars doubt that these words, recorded only in Matthew, are traceable to the Jesus of history. Were it otherwise, one would expect something like it to reappear elsewhere in the primitive tradition (especially in Q or L, Luke’s special source: as we shall see, Luke also highlights Peter’s prominence). Writing some three decades before Matthew, Paul acknowledges Peter’s (Cephas’s) leadership among early Christians (1 Cor. 1:12; 3:22; 9:5; Gal. 1:18; 2:9) but claims not to have been intimidated by his stature (Gal. 2:11-14). As in the Synoptics generally, Simon Peter is prominent in John’s gospel (1:42; 6:68; 13:6-8, 24, 26; 18:10, 15-25; 20:2; 21:2-11, 15-21) but overshadowed by the unnamed “disciple whom Jesus loved” (13:23, 25; 19:26-27; 20:1-10; 21:7, 20-24; possibly 18:15-16; 19:35). Although Peter is accorded extraordinary status in Matthew 16:17-19, elsewhere in this gospel, with few exceptions (14:28; 17:24-27), his conduct exactly matches that in Mark and in Luke (Mt. 4:18; 10:2; 17:1; 18:21; 19:7; 26:33-35; 26:58). Granting his notable role as spokesman for the Twelve (15:15; 16:16; 18:21; 19:27; 26:35), Matthew does not conceal Peter’s equally prominent deficiencies (16:2223; 26:36-46, 69-75). Perhaps for that reason Jesus forbids the community to ascribe to any member the traditional titles of rabbi, father, or teacher (23:8-12). Matthew himself provides the pertinent context for his view of Simon’s significance. Jesus does not compliment Peter’s human insight; instead, his confession of the Christ is a God-given gift of revelation (16:17b; cf. 11:27). Apocalyptic eschatology controls all that follows, with the church confronting the instruments of Hades. In the short term Peter does not demonstrate exceptional ability. After Easter Jesus shall build his community on this stubborn disciple and shall give him “the keys” by which future disciples may understand Jesus’s teaching and thereby enter the kingdom (cf. 23:13: scribes and Pharisees who lock the kingdom’s doors to would-be entrants). Peter shall faithfully adjudicate within the congregation what is admissible and prohibited (a derivative authority conferrable on other disciples: cf. 18:18-29). In effect Jesus elects Peter as the Messiah’s prime minister in the royal household to come (Meier 1979: 113), compatible with epistolary references to the laying of domiciliary foundations whose keystone is Christ (1 Cor. 3:10-14; Eph. 2:19b-21; cf. 2 Tim. 2:19). (On the complex interpretation of Petrine primacy in church history, see Luz 2001: 370–7.) The Greek term for “church” in Matthew 16:18

THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS AND ACTS



33

(tēn ekklēsian) is the same as that which appears twice in 18:17. In the latter verse it implies a local community, akin to a synagogue or kenesset. In 16:18 hē ekklēsia suggests a comprehensive, idealized institution comparable to the Hebrew qahal’ yisrael (Lev. 16:17; Deut. 9:10; 1 Kgs 12:3, 20; 1 Chron. 13:2; 2 Chron. 6:3, 12; cf. Zeph. 2:1) and hē ekklēsia in Ephesians (1:22; 3:10, 23; 5:27, 29, 32) and Colossians (1:18, 24). (The etymologies of both qahal’ and ekklēsia connote something that is “called out.”) Matthew 16:17-19 manifests a conceptual expansion of “the church” from a particular assembly with variable overseers to a universal entity subservient to God’s kingdom, governed by Christ with apostolic administration.

LUKE–ACTS (CA. AD 85–95) In many ways Mark and Matthew are centripetal documents, composed to hold together different groups of early Christians undergoing pressures of persecution, crises of identity, and germinal needs for organization. Both are beginning to make turns toward the gospel’s proclamation to the nations beyond Israel (Mk 11:17; 13:10; Mt. 24:14; 25:32; 28:19). (If, as some think, Mark was written for a largely Gentile audience, its turn had already been completed.) In Luke’s two-volume gospel and Acts, that change of direction is vibrantly executed, lending to both books greater centrifugal force. A centrifuge requires a fixed axis. In Luke–Acts that center is Jerusalem and the venerable tradition of Jewish piety it represents (see, e.g., 1 Kgs 3:15; 2 Chron. 30:13-27; Pss. 116:17-19; 122:3-9; 128:5; 135:21; 137:5-6; Isa. 2:1-4; Zech. 8:1-8). Unlike Mark and Matthew, Luke begins and ends in Jerusalem, specifically in its temple, where devout Jews like Zechariah (father of John the Baptist), Mary and Joseph, and Simeon and Anna bless “the Lord God of Israel” (2:68; cf. 1:8-23; 2:22-24, 27, 37-51), praying for Israel’s redemption (2:25, 38), for “knowledge of salvation to his people by forgiveness of their sins through the heartfelt mercy of our God” (1:77-78a). The third gospel concludes with the risen Jesus’s command that his disciples remain in Jerusalem (24:47) “until [they] are clothed with power from on high” (24:49b). So they do, “with great joy . . . continually in the temple, blessing God” (24:52-53). (In both his gospel [e.g., 11:1-13; 18:1-14] and Acts [e.g., 1:14; 2:42; 4:24-30; 10:1-16; 20:36], Luke emphasizes prayer more than any other evangelist.) At the beginning of Acts, the risen Lord dispatches his disciples from Jerusalem, throughout Judea and Samaria, to the end of the earth (1:4, 8b). In Luke the good news proceeds toward Jerusalem, to which Jesus sets his face as early as 9:51-53 (cf. 13:22, 33; 17:11; 18:31). In Acts the holy city (Neh. 11:1, 18; Isa. 52:1) is the theater of the apostles’ early ministry (Acts 2:1-42; 3:1–6:7) as well as the hub to and from which their expanded missions are conducted (8:14-27; 9:26-30; 11:2-22; 12:25; 13:13; 15:135; 16:1-5; 20:13-22; 21:15–23:11). In his sermon at Pisidian Antioch, Paul sums up the crux: “Brothers, sons of the descendants of Abraham and those [Gentiles] among you who fear God . . . God raised from the dead [Jesus], who for many days was seen by those who came up with him from Galilee to Jerusalem [and] are now his witnesses to the people” (13:26a, 30-31). Mark assumes Jesus’s Jewishness. Matthew intensifies its character. Luke constantly reminds Theophilus (1:1-4; Acts 1:1-5) and probably other Gentile readers that “the Way,” prepared by John (Lk. 1:76; 3:3; 7:27), promulgated by Jesus (13:33; 20), and extended by his followers (Acts 9:2; 19:9, 23), originated and remained connected with ancient Israel. Most commentators on Luke deem 4:16-30 a programmatic statement. I would go further: Jesus’s inaugural sermon in Nazareth, which Mark (6:1-6a) and Matthew (13:53-

34

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

58) situate later and only sketch, sets the agenda for much of Acts as well as the third gospel, revealing much of this Evangelist’s view of “the church” (hē ekklēsia): a term Luke uses to denote a local assembly (Acts 8:1b; 11:22, 26; 13:1; 14:23, 27; 15:3, 22; 18:22; 20:17, 28), a trans-geographical movement (9:31; 12:1), or both (5:11; 8:3; 12:5). “For the first time, in Antioch, the disciples were called ‘Christians’” (11:26c; cf. 26:28; 1 Pet. 4:16). 1. A contentious gospel, grounded in Jewish Scripture and observance. Luke introduces 4:16-30 by stressing that Nazareth is Jesus’s home, where he customarily attended synagogue on the Sabbath and now bases his proclamation in Scripture (4:16-20a). He is as devoutly Jewish as those figures Luke portrays (chs 1–2) before and just after Jesus’s birth. Throughout this gospel Jesus’s teaching and healing are associated with Sabbath (4:31; 6:1-9; 13:10-17; 14:1-5) and synagogue (4:33-38; 6:6; 7:5; 8:41; 13:10, 14; 23:54-56). So, too, in Acts: Paul and his colleagues customarily attend and preach in synagogues, often on the Sabbath (13:14, 44; 15:21; 16:13; 18:4). As in Jesus’s case, sometimes their message is received enthusiastically (Lk. 4:31, 36-37; Acts 13:42-43; 17:10; 18:19-20), sometimes vehemently rejected (Lk. 6:6-11; 13:10, 14; Acts 6:8-14; 18:5; 19:8-9). Simeon had warned Mary that her child was “destined for the rise and fall of many in Israel, as a controversial sign” (Lk. 2:34). Jesus’s beneficent ministry provokes breakup, particularly within families (12:49-53). After his resurrection, Israel remains internally divided over Jesus. In Beroea many Jews and not a few reputable Greeks receive Paul and Silas’s preaching with unqualified eagerness; but unbelieving Jewish interlopers from Thessalonica soon arrive, stirring up such trouble that Paul must vamoose (Acts 17:10-16; see also 14:1-7, 19-20; 23:6-10). Scripture cannot reconcile opposing factions (17:2-4, 11; 18:28). Back in Nazareth (Lk. 4:16-30), its interpretation ignites a riot. 2. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me” (Lk. 4:18a). For Luke’s understanding both of Christ and of the church, Jesus’s opening words from Isaiah 61:1 could not be more consequential. While present in Mark (1:8, 10, 12; 3:29; 12:36; 13:11; 14:38) and Matthew (1:18, 20; 3:11, 16; 4:1; 5:3; 10:20; 12:18, 28, 31-32; 22:43; 26:51; 28:19), the Holy Spirit is, indisputably, the prime mover in Luke–Acts. The same Spirit that authorized Elijah (Lk. 1:17) and bears witness to God through Scripture (Acts 1:16; 4:25; 28:25-27) creates Jesus’s very existence (Lk. 1:35), then empowers his preaching and healing (3:16-22; 4:14, 18; Acts 10:38). So also his envoys must receive the Spirit to perpetuate their Lord’s ministry after Easter (Acts 1:2, 5, 8). An outpouring of the Spirit fills righteous Jews (Lk. 1:15, 41, 67; 2:27; 4:1; Acts 2:17-18, 33; 4:8, 31; 6:3, 5; 7:55; 9:17; 11:24; 13:9, 52) and, at climactic moments in the church’s outreach, God-fearing Gentiles (Acts 2:1-11, 33; 8:14-17; 10:44-48; 11:11-17; 15:6-8; 19:1-7). Combating unclean or malicious spirits (Lk. 4:31-27; 8:26-33; 9:37-43a; 11:24-26; 13:10-17; Acts 16:16-18), the Holy Spirit may be resisted, but never without negative results (Lk. 12:10; Acts 5:1-9; 7:51–8:1; 19:11-20). For Luke, the Spirit’s communion with receptive human spirits (Acts 15:28; 19:21) is intimate yet universalizing: the Spirit reveals God’s will (Lk. 2:26), strengthens (1:80), consoles (2:25; Acts 9:31; 10:31), generates joy (Lk. 10:21; Acts 13:52) and boldness (Acts 4:31), leads (Lk. 4:1; Acts 8:29; 13:4) and binds (Acts 20:22), speaks (2:4; 10:19; 11:12; 13:2; 21:4, 11) and translates (2:8-11), preaches (2:18; 4:8; 19:6) and teaches (Lk. 12:12; Acts 18:25), bears witness (Acts 5:32; 20:23) and predicts (11:28), endows recipients with wisdom (6:10), faith (6:3, 5; 11:24), and oversight (20:28), even transports travelers (8:39) and bars their way (16:6). The Spirit can be neither wangled

THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS AND ACTS



35

nor bartered (8:9-24); for the repentant, it is God’s pure gift (Lk. 11:13; Acts 2:38). After Jesus’s heavenly exaltation (Acts 2:33; 5:31), the Spirit is Jesus’s proxy: “the Spirit of Jesus” (16:7) guards the church of God obtained by his own blood (20:28). 3. “Good news to the poor” (Lk. 4:18b) is another hallmark of Luke–Acts, expressed mainly in materials without Synoptic parallel (the exceptions: Lk. 7:22 = Mt. 11:5; Lk. 18:22 = Mk 10:21 = Mt. 19:21; Lk. 18:24-25 = Mt. 19:23-24 = Mk 10:23-25; Lk. 21:1-4 = Mk 12:41-44). Unique to Luke are Mary’s declaration in the Magnificat— “The hungry [God] has filled with good things, / and the rich he has sent away empty” (1:53)—a blessing of the indigent paired with the wretchedness of the rich (6:20, 24; cf. Mt. 5:3), a puzzling characterization of Pharisees as “money-lovers” (16:14), three mandates to invite the poor to banquets (14:12-13, 21), three parables about the heartless avaricious who receive their comeuppance (12:13-21; 16:1-9, 19-31), and the legend of rich Zacchaeus, who gives half his wages to the poor and restores fourfold all that he has swindled (19:1-8). The latter evokes Jesus’s cry, “Today salvation has come to this house, since even this one is a son of Abraham” (19:9). In a culture where, at best, about seventy percent scraped by day to day, at worst hobbled in grinding poverty, Luke’s message surely attracted notice (see Stegemann and Stegemann 2001: 88–95). While his vignettes of congregations sharing all things in common seem idealized (Acts 2:4447; 4:32-32), they may carry a grain of truth;2 certainly they express Luke’s vision of the faithful church in action (cf. Lk. 12:41-48; Acts 7:9-16; Moxnes 1988). Only Luke identifies various women who financially supported Jesus and the Twelve (8:1-3). Wealthy benefactors like Thyatira’s Lydia (Acts 16:14-15, 40) probably opened their homes to Christian missionaries (5:42; 8:3; 9:36-43; 10:24-48; 16:34-15; 18:7-10; 21:3-7; 28:7), as did Paul’s jailer in Philippi (16:25-34). Beyond sensitivity to economic inequities and the virtue of unreciprocated hospitality, Luke believes that God and wealth compete for human adoration. Between them disciples must choose (Lk. 14:33; 16:13). 4. Release for captives, the blind, and the oppressed (Lk. 4:18c). This paraphrase of Isaiah 61:1 summarizes Jesus’s ministry of the kingdom in Mark and Matthew; it is not for that reason to be devalued in Luke–Acts. In one episode after another, Jesus satisfies this promise (Lk. 4:31-41; 5:12-32; 6:6-11, 17-19, 20-23; 7:1-23, 36-50; 8:22-56; 9:10-17, 37-43; 11:14; 13:10-17; 14:1-6; 17:1-4; 18:15-30, 35-43; 22:49-51; 23:13-25). This is the year of jubilee (4:19; Lev. 25:8-12). Today God’s salvation breaks through (Lk. 4:21; cf. 2:11; 4:21; 5:6; 13:32-33; 19:5, 9; 23:24; Acts 13:33; 26:29). Jesus’s prodigious authority is conferred on the Twelve (Lk. 9:1-6, 10) and on seventy others (10:1-12, 1720). From them his delegates in Acts receive the baton, deploying the Spirit’s power for the healing and liberation of others (2:37-41; 3:1-10; 4:5-22, 29-31; 5:12-16; 6:8; 8:413; 9:10-19a, 32-43; 13:33-43; 14:3-4, 8-18; 15:10; 16:16-18; 19:11-20; 27:33-44; 28:8-9). Sometimes the Spirit releases the apostles themselves from their own captivity

Local gatherings’ “breaking of bread” (Acts 2:42, 46; 20:7; 27:35; cf. Lk. 5:27-29; 7:36-50 et al.) is reminiscent of 1 Corinthians 11:4-18. Like the Corinthians’ practice, that which Lk. describes was likely melded with observance of the Lord’s Supper (Lk. 22:7-27; 1 Cor. 11:23-26), “how [the risen Christ] was made known to them by the breaking of the bread” (Lk. 24:35). Apart from the Great Commission in Mt. 28:19, baptism for washing away the sins of Christian believers occurs only in Acts: 2:38-41; 8:12-16, 36-38; 9:18; 10:48; 16:15, 33; 18:8; 19:3; 22:16; cf. 1:5; 11:16. 2

36

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

(5:17-32; 12:4-17; 16:22-40). In no case does honor redound to the wonder-workers: praise of Jesus (Lk. 4:41b, 43; 5:25; 7:16; 8:39; 9:20; 9:43; 10:16; 11:20, 27-28; 17:15, 18; 18:43; 19:37) and of his apostles (Acts 2:47; 3:8-9, 11-16; 14:11-18; 17:16-31) is redirected to God’s glory, that the word of the Lord may mightily prevail (Acts 19:20). “We are unworthy slaves who have only done what we ought to do” (Lk. 17:10). 5. The outrage of universal salvation (Lk. 4:22-29). Nazarene plaudits sour when Jesus stresses the detestable: according to Scripture, the prophets Elijah and Elisha invoked judgment on Israel by extending God’s benevolence to Gentiles (a Sidonite widow [I Kgs 17:1-16]; a Syrian commander [2 Kgs 5:1-15]). This is precisely where Luke–Acts is headed (Lk. 24:27; Acts 1:8; 14:16). Without rejecting Israel (Lk. 1:16, 64, 68; Acts 2:22; 5:31; 10:36; 13:16, 23; 28:20), God’s mercy extends to Samaritans (half-breeds in pious Jewish eyes: 10:30-37; 17:11-19; Acts 1:8; 8:2-25; cf. Kgs 17:24-29). It embraces even those whom Israel once dispossessed (Acts 7:45; 13:19-20a), who had since taken Israel captive (Lk. 21:24; 22:25), and who had killed the Christ (Lk. 18:32; Acts 4:24-27) in collusion with Israel’s leaders (Lk. 9:22; 22:63–23:48; Acts 2:36; 4:10, 27; 7:52). By an unmistakable initiative (Acts 15:7), “God had opened a door of faith to the Gentiles” (14:27; cf. 11:1; 15:7), pouring out upon them as well the gift of the Spirit (10:45), signs and wonders (15:12), and “repentance unto life” (11:18; 15:19; 26:20). No longer has Israel alone been called by God as a people for his holy name (Num. 6:27; 1 Chron. 17:21); so also has he elected the Gentiles (Acts 15:14, 17; 26:23), just as Simeon prophesied at Jesus’s birth (Lk. 2:29-32). For this, some Jews and many Gentiles rejoice and glorify God (Acts 11:18; 13:48; 15:3; 21:18-20a; cf. Lk. 15:6-10). At a council in Jerusalem, Jewish Christians debate this turn of events at great length (Acts 15:1-7a) but ultimately are persuaded to address Gentile Christians as “brothers” (15:23): in Acts, the typical mode of address among Jews for one another (e.g., 1:15-16; 2:29; 7:2; 11:29; 13:15, 26, 38; 23:6). Other Jews, “zealous for the law” (21:20) and affronted by this boundary-breaking, stir up trouble (14:2), misrepresent Paul’s intent, and incite mobs (14:1-7; 17:1-9; 21:17-36). Paul decides that there is no convincing the implacable who thrust from themselves the Word of God first preached to them (13:46). Ultimately God sends Paul, “his chosen instrument . . . to carry his name before the Gentiles and kings and sons of Israel” (9:15), to more amenable Gentiles (22:21; 26:17). To the Roman imperium and its discerning officials, Luke repeatedly insists that the church is no threat (10:1-8, 30-33; 13:7; 18:12-17; 23:26-30; 25:13-18, 33-37; 26:30-32; 28:17-18). To the Jewish leaders in Rome, Paul absolves himself: “Let it then be known to you that this salvation of God was sent out to the Gentiles; they will listen” (28:28; cf. 13: 46; 18:6). Lest we leave Acts believing that obduracy is peculiar to unbelieving Jews, let us recall the conflicts in Acts 6:1-6 between Hellenists (probably Diaspora Jews with minimal Aramaic background) and Hebrews (Aramaic-speaking Jews), as well as the disputatious Jerusalem Council in Acts 15. Both ethnically volatile, either could have rent the church. 6. An unimpeachable testimony to God’s invincible will (Lk. 4:30). After bearing witness that threatens his life, Jesus escapes lynching because a prophet cannot perish away from Jerusalem (13:33-34; 18:31). The vacancy created by Judas’s death (Acts 1:15-20) can be filled only by one who accompanied Jesus throughout his ministry and, therefore, can testify to his resurrection (1:21-22; 10:31). (Only in Lk. [6:13] does Jesus “name” the Twelve “apostles.”) After their reconstitution, Jerusalem remains a place of peril for apostles (Acts 4:1-18; 5:17-42; 7:54–8:3; 9:2, 13, 21; 10:39; 13:27; 20:22; 21:11-12, 27-36; 22:5; 17-

THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS AND ACTS



37

20; 25:1-7, 24; 26:10). Paul’s rejoinder to Caesarean Christians frightened for his safety is, for Luke, spot on: “I am ready, not only to be jailed, but even to die in Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus” (21:13; cf. Jesus’s prayer for Simon’s fortification in Lk. 22:3132). God’s plan (hē boulē) has predestined salvation for all, in spite of obstructions (Acts 8:2, 4; 11:19-21; 12:20-24; 16:6-10; 27:13-44) and whatever the cost (4:25b-30; cf. 2:23-24; 5:38-39). God has borne witness (or “testified”: emartyrēsen) of his compassion for Gentiles (14:16-17; 15:8). All the prophets bear witness that “all who believe in [Jesus] receive forgiveness of sins through his name” (10:43). “The Lord bore witness to the word of his grace, granting signs and wonders to be done by their hands” (14:3). Jesus’s testimony was sufficient to seal his execution (Lk. 22:70-71). Stephen sacrificed himself for witness to “the Righteous One” (Acts 7:51-60; 22:20): the same testimony of a Roman centurion at Jesus’s death (Lk. 23:47; cf. Talbert 1974 for a plethora of structural parallels between and within Lk. and Acts). So it follows for all disciples: sinners though they be (Lk. 5:8; 7:37, 39), their commission is to offer testimony, whether accepted or not, to “what you have seen and heard” (Acts 22:15; cf. 4:33; 22:18; 23:11; 26:16; Lk. 9:5; 21:13). The church’s mission is to testify, to all, God’s ordination of Jesus as judge of the living and the dead (Acts 10:42). As Paul insists at Miletus, “I reckon my own life of no account or value unless I finish the course and the service that I received from the Lord Jesus: to testify fully to the gospel of God’s grace” (20:24).

BRAIDING THE STRANDS According to the Synoptics, God has called unto himself a people to do his will. The church does not supersede Israel; it extends that people to include all the nations. Merit remains out of the question (Deut. 7:7): the least, the ignorant, the vile, even murderers (Moses: Exod. 2:12) or their accessories (Saul: Acts 8:1, 22:20) are qualified if they accept the summons to turn Godward. In Jesus of Nazareth, the Son uniquely empowered by the Holy Spirit, the heavenly Father’s startling monarchy has begun its reclamation of the earth. While none of the evangelists formulates a trinitarian doctrine, their different descriptions of a “functional Trinity,” epitomized in the baptismal formula in Matthew 28:19, offer important bricks for the building of the Nicene-Chalcedonian Creed, which also affirms “one holy catholic and apostolic church.” The church’s basic responsibility is to follow Jesus and, by his commission, to do as he did: feed the hungry, cure disease, shelter the homeless, undermine cruelty with mercy, dignify the despicable, rescue the lost. These are not self-generated, humanitarian projects; they are the essence of the kingdom and expressive witnesses to its Messiah. For those in desperate need, that is good news. For those affronted by such indiscriminate compassion or fearful of the loss of this world’s comfort or prestige, it is received as bad news. To oppose a world under siege by diabolic forces, the gospel must have a cutting edge. That sword is not for the church to wield. But to remain faithful, it may be required to suffer amputation (Mk 9:32-48), even death itself (10:39). In one form or another, crucifixion awaits this Christ’s disciples. They do not suffer solitarily: they are supported by mothers, sisters, and brothers in faith who bear their own crosses. Of all the images of the church in the New Testament (Minear 2004: 165–72), the family or household of God is predominant. To some degree all of the Synoptics grapple with the relationship between the church and Israel. Mark skims the subject (12:9). Matthew and Luke virtually throw up their hands in frustration, confounded by the stubbornness of those who doubtless regarded

38

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

them as equally obtuse. None of the evangelists articulates a well-reasoned explanation, such as Paul attempts in Romans 9–11, for the acceptance of the Nazarene’s gospel by a Jewish minority and a Gentile majority. The critical point of division is Jesus himself: whether he is, in fact, the divinely endowed Messiah of Israel and Lord of all the nations. On both sides of the divide, it was a mystery then and so it remains. Man supposes; God disposes. Incomprehension, finally, is irrelevant. In Mark, Matthew, and Luke–Acts alike, the disciples’ duty is to follow, in faith, their only Lord. To borrow Eduard Schweizer’s apt analogy (1960: 11): after a heavy snowfall, children follow, step by faltering step, their parent’s footsteps until they safely make their way home. As well as any metaphor, that captures the depiction of the church in the synoptic gospels and Acts.

REFERENCES Black, C. C. (2011), Mark, Abingdon New Testament Commentaries, Nashville: Abingdon. Burkert, W. (1987), Ancient Mystery Cults, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cohen, S. J. D. (1999), The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties, Berkeley: University of California Press. Culpepper, R. A. (1975), The Johannine School: An Evaluation of the Johannine-School Hypothesis Based on an Investigation of the Nature of Ancient Schools, Society of Biblical Literature Dissertation Series 26, Missoula: Scholars Press. Elliott, J. H. (1990), A Home for the Homeless: A Social-Scientific Criticism of 1 Peter, Its Situation and Strategy, with a New Introduction, Minneapolis: Fortress. Levine, L. I. (2000), The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years, New Haven: Yale University Press. Loisy, A. (1976), The Gospel and the Church, Lives of Jesus Series, Philadelphia: Fortress. Luz, U. (2001), Matthew 8–20: A Commentary, Hermeneia, Minneapolis: Fortress. Meier, J. P. (1979), The Vision of Matthew: Christ, Church and Morality in the First Gospel, Theological Inquiries, New York: Paulist. Minear, P. S. (2004), Images of the Church in the New Testament, The New Testament Library, Louisville: Westminster John Knox. Moxnes, H. (1988), The Economy of the Kingdom: Social Conflict and Economic Relations in Lk.’s Gospel, Overtures to Biblical Theology, Philadelphia: Fortress. Osiek, C. and D. L. Balch (1997), Families in the New Testament World: Households and House Churches, Louisville: Westminster John Knox. Schweizer, E. (1960), Lordship and Discipleship, London: SCM. Stegemann, E. D. and W. Stegemann (2001), The Jesus Movement: A First Century of Its Social History, Minneapolis: Fortress. Talbert, C. H. (1974), Literary Patterns, Theological Themes, and the Genre of Luke–Acts, Society of Biblical Literature Monograph Series 20, Missoula: Scholars Press. Van Nijf, O. M. (1997), The Civic World of Professional Associations in the Roman East, Dutch Monographs on Ancient History and Archaeology 17, Amsterdam: Gieben.

Chapter FOUR

The Pauline Letters JAMES W. THOMPSON

INTRODUCTION The apostle Paul’s ambition to proclaim the good news where Christ has not been named (Rom. 15:20) was inseparable from his work of forming communities. While many rejected his message, others responded by placing their confidence in Christ and reorienting their lives. These converts did not live in isolation, but belonged to communities that shared the conviction that Jesus is Lord and Israel’s Messiah. As the apostle to the nations, Paul established communities throughout the Eastern Mediterranean—“from Jerusalem to Illyricum” (Rom. 15:19). His letters offer a window into his initial work of establishing a church, his continued task of community formation, and his responses to the challenges of communal identity. A major challenge of community formation was that new converts brought with them assumptions from their previous experience. Parallels to existing practices, including initiatory rituals, communal meals, and religious instruction, would have evoked associations with ancient communal practices (Thompson 2014: 18). Jewish converts would have recognized the parallels between the new community and the synagogue assembly, which included the reading of sacred texts, the call for holy living, and sharp boundaries from the rest of society. They were also familiar with the term ekklēsia, a common designation for the people of God in Scripture. Gentile readers were also familiar with the ekklēsia, the civic assembly. Numerous types of voluntary associations, often composed of people who shared the same craft or trade, also provided a background for the converts’ understanding of community. Paul’s churches were unprecedented. They were multi-ethnic communities that crossed the boundaries of social class, ethnicity, and gender. Indeed, communities that included even children were unprecedented in the ancient world. Members were brought together only by the confession that Jesus is Lord. Consequently, Paul’s major challenge in all of the letters is to provide communal identity and correct misunderstandings for converts who came from different backgrounds. Thus he writes to churches, expecting his letters to be read to the assembly, hoping to shape and maintain this new kind of community. Paul consistently speaks of his churches as the “ekklēsia of God” (cf. 1 Cor. 1:1; 2 Cor. 1:1; cf. 1 Cor. 10:32) in a specific place. He nowhere mentions institutions that coordinate or have authority over the local community. The body of Christ in Romans (12:3-8) and 1 Corinthians (12:12-27) is the local community that assembles. He refers to the church in a city (1 Cor. 1:1; 2 Cor. 1:1; Phil. 1:1), to the churches in a region (Rom. 16:4, 16; 1 Cor. 16:19; 2 Cor. 8:11; Gal. 1:2; Thess. 2:14), and to the church in someone’s house (Rom. 16:5; 1 Cor. 16:19). The term can be used for both the people

40

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

who assemble regularly as well as the assembly itself (cf. 11:18; 14:34). As the frequent references to the churches indicates (cf. 1 Cor. 11:16; 14:33-34; 2 Cor. 8:18), in most instances the term ekklēsia is used for the local community of believers. When he speaks of the “whole church,” he refers to the local church that assembles (1 Cor. 14:23). The reference to the church in a specific place indicates the universality of the church, for the local church is a manifestation of the whole church. Although these churches are not connected by a central authority, they participate in a network of mutual concern. He groups together the churches in geographic or Roman administrative regions, referring to the “churches of Galatia” (Gal. 1:2; cf. 1 Cor. 16:1), the “churches of Asia” (1 Cor. 16:19), the “churches of Macedonia” (2 Cor. 8:1) and, more generally, to the “churches of Christ” (Rom. 16:16). He consistently links the churches together. The Thessalonians have become an example (1 Thess. 1:8-9) to other churches of Macedonia. Paul addresses 1 Corinthians to “the church of God that is in Corinth . . . together with all those who in every place call on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 1:2), and he addresses 2 Corinthians not only to the local church, but to “the saints throughout Achaia” (2 Cor. 1:1). He encourages the Thessalonians to love “all of God’s family throughout Macedonia” (1 Thess. 4:10). In his letters, he sends greetings from one church to another (cf. 1 Cor. 16:19). In Romans 16:16, he even extends this to “all of the churches of Christ greet you.” The greetings have the rhetorical effect of connecting churches with each other. Paul’s churches are united by the instructions that he gives to all of the churches and his instruction for them to participate in a common mission. He indicates to the Corinthians that Timothy will explain what he teaches in all of the churches (1 Cor. 4:17), and he expects the Corinthians to adhere to the traditions for proper attire that he has passed on to all of the churches (1 Cor. 11:2, 16). His attempt to unite the churches is especially evident in the gathering of the collection for the church in Jerusalem. He commands the Galatians and the Corinthians (1 Cor. 16:1) to share in the collection, and he later tells the Corinthians that the Macedonian churches have shared in this project (2 Cor. 8:14). In Romans, he describes this collection as a sign of the unity of Jewish and Gentile churches (Rom. 15:22-29). Thus Paul’s churches do not exist in isolation from each other, but are local manifestations of the one ekklēsia (cf. 1 Cor. 15:9), a theme that will be developed at great length in the disputed letters of Ephesians and Colossians.

GENTILE CONVERTS AND A NEW COLLECTIVE IDENTITY The Israel of God Although Paul’s message was intended for “the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Rom. 1:16), the communities that he founded were composed primarily of Gentiles. As 1 Thessalonians, Paul’s first letter, indicates, Paul’s challenge is to establish collective identity for converts who were not united by the traditional bonds of family or ethnicity. After an initial period of community formation, Paul writes to reaffirm his earlier instruction. He addresses the “church (ekklēsia) of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” (1:1). Ekklēsia was a familiar term to these new converts, for it could refer to the civic assembly (cf. Acts 19:39) or even to an association. Indeed, “the church of the Thessalonians” would have been one of the numerous ekklēsiai in the city. Paul’s use of the terminology of “the church(es) of God” (ekklēsia[i] theou) distinguishes the community from other ekklēsiai. The phrase is an appropriate translation for the

THE PAULINE LETTERS



41

Hebrew qahal el (Deut. 23:2, 4; 1 Chron. 2:28:8; Neh. 13:1), a term for Israel in the Old Testament. Qahal, like ekklēsia, can refer either to an assembly that has been called together or to the congregation as an organized body. The LXX translators rendered qahal into the Greek ekklēsia 73 times out of 123 occurrences, while in other passages it is rendered as synagogē (Trebilco 2011: 446). In second-temple Judaism, qahal el was employed to describe the true Israel (Klaiber 1982: 126–7). Paul followed his predecessors in the Jerusalem church by designating the community as ekklēsia, distinguishing it from the synagogue, the term in common use in the Jewish community. That is, the predominantly Gentile church is the eschatological Israel. First Thessalonians offers a window into Paul’s consistent practice of identifying his communities with Israel. Just as ekklēsia is a term that places the Gentile community within the story of Israel, other terms also identify the community with Israel. When he describes their conversion as their election (eklogē, NRSV “[God] has chosen you,” 1 Thess. 1:4) or refers to their calling by God (cf. 1 Thess. 2:12; 4:4:7), he employs terms fundamental to Israel’s identity (Wright 1992: 259–68). The Deuteronomist repeatedly recalls that God chose Israel, “the fewest of all peoples” (Deut. 7:7). Indeed the refrain throughout Deuteronomy is the description of Israel as the people whom God chose (12:5, 11, 18, 21; 16:6-7, 11, 15-16). God is the one who calls the community in existence (1 Thess. 2:12; 5:24). Similarly, the identification of the community as “beloved of God” (1 Thess. 1:4) recalls the words of Moses in Deuteronomy: “Because [God] loved your ancestors, he chose their descendants after them” (Deut. 4:37). The church, like ancient Israel, was also called to holy living (1 Thess. 4:3, 7; cf. Lev. 19:2). Indeed, the sexual ethics of 1 Thess. 4:3-8 and the call for brotherly love (1 Thess. 4:9-12) are indebted to the holiness code in Leviticus (17-26). Paul even encourages this Gentile community not to behave “like the Gentiles who do not know God” (1 Thess. 4:5). Thus holy living (sanctification, Greek hagiasmos) establishes boundaries between the church and the world. Paul distinguishes between “believers” (1:7; 2:10) and the rest of society, whom Paul describes as “the others” (4:13) and the “outsiders” (4:12). The identification of the church with Israel is a feature in all of Paul’s letters. He consistently declares that the community owes its existence not to its own choice but to the calling of God (Rom. 1:6; 8:28; 1 Cor. 1:9, 26; 7:15; 8:28; Gal. 1:6; 5:13). He develops this theme especially in Romans, describing God’s calling “not only from the Jews but also to the Gentiles” (9:24-25). Indeed, the Gentile church is the wild olive branch that has been grafted on Israel, the olive tree (Rom. 11:16-21). Similarly, the identification of the members of the community as saints (hagioi, cf. Rom. 1:7; 1 Cor. 1:2; 2 Cor. 1:1; Phil. 1:1) and the theme of sanctification (hagiasmos, Rom. 6:19, 22; 1 Thess. 4:3-4, 7) identify the community with Israel. Paul consistently shapes a community consciousness as Israel, introducing a new vocabulary with roots in Israel’s Scripture to define Gentile converts. While they designate themselves with the categories from Scripture, they are not, like Israel, an ethnos but a community united only by their reception of the gospel that Paul preached. Faith that Jesus died and arose (4:14) unites them and separates them from the synagogue and from the rest of society (Thompson 2014: 47).

The New Family As the frequent references to the persecution of Paul’s converts suggest (cf. 2 Cor. 1:7; Phil. 1:28; 1 Thess. 1:6; 3:2-3), entrance into Paul’s communities resulted in alienation from

42

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

past relationships, including the family. It is not coincidental, therefore, that community formation for Paul involved establishing a collective identity for the community as a family. The household setting of early Christian assemblies undoubtedly contributed to the community’s self-understanding as brothers and sisters. While Paul never uses the term family (oikos) to describe the church in the undisputed letters, the family metaphors are pervasive. God is the Father (1 Thess. 1:1) and Jesus is his Son (1:10). The description of God as Father, whom believers address as “abba” (Rom. 8:15; Gal. 4:6), indicates that believers are not only Abraham’s children (cf. Gal. 3:6-9, 19), but also that they are God’s children. Paul also uses the language of the family to describe his relationship to them. When he was with them, he was gentle, “like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children” (1Thess. 2:7) and like a father instructing the children about proper behavior (2:12). When he was absent from them, he was “orphaned” (aporphanisthentes), longing to see their faces (2:17). As a parent, he regards them as his glory and joy (2:20). Paul consistently addresses his communities as “brothers” (adelphoi, NRSV “brothers and sisters”; cf. Rom. 1:13; 1 Cor. 1:10; Phil. 1:12). While this image is known in Greek and Jewish communities for those who are not physical relatives, its frequency is remarkable in the Pauline letters (Aasgaard 2002: 516). As a comprehensive term for the members of the community, adelphoi includes not only the men, but also the women and children (Pilhofer 2002: 216). The family image for a community composed of people from different ethnic groups and social strata was unparalleled in antiquity. The image of the family shapes the behavior of the community and determines its people’s relationships with each other. Paul’s instructions are largely about the treatment of siblings, the avoidance of familiar sibling quarrels, and the appropriation of family responsibilities. Within the intimacy of the house church, he instructs men not to wrong a brother by making advances toward his wife (1 Thess. 4:6). Thus his instructions commonly presuppose the family relationship. A brother should not stand in judgment against a brother (Rom. 14:10), despise him (Rom. 14:11), or place a stumbling block in his path (Rom. 15:13, 15; cf. 1 Cor. 8:11-13). Because family relationships establish boundaries from others, siblings should not take members of the family to court before unbelievers (1 Thess. 6:1-11). Siblings should not be guilty of jealousy, strife, and quarreling (cf. Gal. 5:19-21). Paul’s frequent use of “one another” (allēlōn) reflects the family relationship and the solidarity of the community. As siblings, they practice “brotherly love” (philadelphia), a word that was used in antiquity for love within a natural family (Rom. 12:10; 1 Thess. 4:9). He prays that the Thessalonians “will abound in love for one another and for all” (cf. Rom. 13:8) as well as for their siblings in Macedonia (1 Thess. 4:10). He also encourages the readers to prefer one another (Rom. 12:10), encourage one another (1 Thess. 4:18; 5:11), build each other up (Rom. 14:19; 1 Thess. 5:11), welcome one another into the respective house churches (Rom. 15:7), serve one another (Gal. 5:13), bear each other’s burdens (Gal. 6:2), seek the good of one another (1 Thess. 5:15), admonish one another (Rom. 15:14), and greet one another with a holy kiss (cf. Rom. 16:16; 2 Cor. 13:12). The reciprocal pronoun “one another” (allēlos) suggests two dimensions of communal identity that shape the moral conduct of the readers. In the first place, it suggests that believers care for one another without regard for social position. In the second place, the term indicates the equal status of all members within the group. The term indicates the community’s primary focus on the care of siblings in the new family rather than the care for others outside the group.

THE PAULINE LETTERS



43

Like the terminology of election and holiness, the sibling image distinguishes members of the family from unbelievers (1 Cor. 6:6; 7:12; 10:27; 14:22; 2 Cor. 4:4; 6:14), “outsiders” (1 Thess. 4:9-12), and “others” (4:13). While Paul does not limit loving action to insiders (cf. 3:12), his primary concern is the care for the siblings (Gal. 6:10).

CHRISTOLOGY AND ECCLESIOLOGY Paul’s churches lived not only in continuity with Israel, but also in discontinuity, as the separation from the synagogue suggests. The discontinuity is rooted in the christological confession. What united a multi-ethnic community was the conviction that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah of Jewish expectation and risen Lord. Believers received the gospel that “Christ died for our sins” (1 Cor. 15:3) and that those who call on Jesus as Lord will be saved (cf. 2 Cor. 4:5; Rom. 10:9). This christological dimension is expressed in the prepositions that link Christ and the church. Believers have been baptized “into Christ” (eis christon, Rom. 6:3; Gal. 3:27) and died “with Christ” (Rom. 6:8; cf. 6:6; 8:17; Gal. 2:19). Thus two major strands intersect in Pauline ecclesiology: one is the church as the people of God, the heir of ancient Israel; the other is the church as the body of Christ (Kraus 1999: 6–7). The image of the body of Christ appears in only two of the undisputed letters of Paul. However, the image belongs to a larger complex of Pauline themes. The body of Christ is an extension of “in Christ,” a phrase that Paul frequently employs to express his corporate christology. The phrase appears eighty-three times in the Pauline corpus (including the disputed letters). Paul also employs the equivalent phrase “in the Lord” (en kyriō) forty-seven times and “in him” six times (Thompson 2014: 52). Although these phrases can be used in a variety of ways, the dominant usage is local, referring to a sphere of being (cf. 1 Cor. 1:30; 15:18, 22; 2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 3:26-29). This local usage becomes a central feature of Paul’s ecclesiology, for it suggests the relationship of believers to Christ and to each other. Paul addresses communities that are “in Christ” (Phil. 1:1; 2:1; 1 Thess. 1:1; cf. 2:14) and challenges them to be of one mind “in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 2:5; cf. 4:2). Paul elaborates on this theme in Galatians as he resolves a dispute with the opponents’ competing ecclesiology. Whereas the opponents connected ecclesiology with traditional Jewish boundaries, including circumcision, Paul maintains that Abraham was saved by faith, and that his children are those who share Abraham’s faith (Gal. 3:6-9). Contrary to traditional interpretation, Paul argues that the promise to Abraham’s seed (Gal. 3:16) was not to ethnic Israel, but to Jesus Christ; that is, he insists that the seed is singular. Because the seed is Jesus Christ, the promise also extends to those who believe in him (Gal. 3:22, 26). Paul elaborates with the declaration in 3:27: “As many as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ” (Gal. 3:27). Christ is the inclusive person who incorporates believers, the “place” into which they have been baptized. Believers have put on Christ as a new garment and are enclosed by Christ (Umbauch 1999: 220). Paul concludes the answer to the argument over the identity of Abraham’s children by describing a community without distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, adding “you are one in Christ” (Gal. 3:28). Just as there is one seed, the Christ, there is only one new humanity in which ethnic, social, and gender identities are left behind (Thompson 2014: 63). Paul has redefined the people of God, maintaining that Christ is the inclusive person who takes away the common social distinctions. Incorporation into Christ by all who believe creates a new kind of community.

44

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Paul moves easily from the argument that believers are in Christ to the claim that Christ is among the believers. Employing maternal imagery as he expresses concern over their relapse, he says, “My little children, with whom I am in the pangs of childbirth until Christ is formed in you” (Gal. 4:19). Because English translations do not distinguish between the singular and plural of the second person, they obscure Paul’s statement. J. Louis Martyn has appropriately translated this “until Christ is formed among your congregations” (Martyn 1997: 64). Similarly, Paul maintains in Romans that both the Spirit (8:9-10) and Christ (8:10) dwell among believers. Therefore the Spirit (Rom. 8:9, 11) and Christ (8:10) dwell within the community. In 1 Corinthians, Paul confronts the partisan rivalries that threaten the ecclesial identity of the church. Extreme individualism, expressed in such slogans as “I am of Paul” and “I am of Apollos” (1 Cor. 1:12), suggest that many Corinthians envision the church according to the model of a political community (Mitchell 1991: 68–111). The loss of communal solidarity is evident in the Corinthians’ insistence on personal freedom (6:12; 10:23), the social division at the Lord’s Supper (1 Cor. 11:17-34), and the competition in the exercise of gifts in corporate worship (ch. 14). Paul employs two intersecting images—the building and the body—alongside the image of the cultivated field to establish communal solidarity. In parallel statements, he says, “You (plural) are God’s field, God’s building” (3:9), “you (plural) are God’s temple” (3:16), and “you (plural) are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (12:27). In each instance he responds to anti-communal forces by reminding believers of their collective identity. The images of the field and the building are drawn from Israel’s self-understanding (Kraus 1996: 172–4; cf. Jer. 1:10; 24:6). Paul transforms the images, indicating that he “planted” (1 Cor. 3:6) and “laid the foundation” of the building (3:10) when he preached Christ, establishing the community. The building becomes a dominant image in 1 Corinthians and in other letters. Paul employs both the noun oikodomē (1 Cor. 3:9; 14:3, 5, 26; 2 Cor. 12:19) and the verb oikodomeō (cf. 1 Cor. 8:1; 10:23; 14:4; 1 Thess. 5:11). In 1 Corinthians 3:10-15 he elaborates on the image, applying it to ministries that “build on” to the original foundation. This image plays a special role in 1 Corinthians. Paul responds to the Corinthians’ insistence on personal freedom, reminding the community that “knowledge puffs up, but love builds up” (oikodomei, 8:1). Similarly, he addresses the disorder in communal worship by insisting that all actions are for the sake of edification (oikodomē), the building of the community (cf. 14:3, 12, 26). Paul alters the building imagery in 1 Corinthians 3:16, declaring that “you (plural) are the temple of God” and that “the Holy Spirit dwells in you (plural).” Here the appropriate translation is, “The Holy Spirit dwells among you.” Whereas some considered the church a community of Spirit-filled individuals, Paul insists that the Spirit dwells in the whole church. The imagery is drawn from the Old Testament image of the temple as the dwelling place of God. God instructs Moses, “Make me a sanctuary, so that I may dwell among them” (Exod. 25:8), and promises “I will place my dwelling in your midst” (Lev. 26:11; Hogeterp 2006: 264). This image is the background for Paul’s affirmation that the Spirit dwells in the church, the temple of God (cf. 2 Cor. 6:16). The church is an organic whole, and the presence of the Spirit unifies the community. The images of the temple and the body intersect in 1 Corinthians 11–14, as Paul addresses the anti-communal forces in corporate worship. In an attempt to overcome the social division and competition among members, Paul describes the church as a unity with a diversity of gifts (1 Cor. 12:4-11) and then illustrates the principle with the description of the church as a body (12:12-27). This image has no direct antecedent in the

THE PAULINE LETTERS



45

Old Testament, but was widely used in the ancient world, especially in political contexts (Thompson 2014: 69). However, while the comparison of the church to a body parallels ancient discussions, Paul transforms the image. Ancient writers agreed with the premise, “Just as the body is one and has many members.” However, Paul offers the conclusion, “So it is with Christ” (1 Cor. 12:12). That is, Christ is one and has many members. After the lengthy description of the body and the indispensable role of all members, Paul concludes, “Now you are the body of Christ, and individually members of it” (12:27). The local church is not like other political bodies, for it is the body of Christ. Individual identity is derived from being a member of the body of Christ. Paul anticipates this description of the church as the body of Christ throughout 1 Corinthians. In response to Corinthian factionalism, he asks, “Is Christ divided?” (1 Cor. 1:13 KJV). Individual bodies are “members of Christ” (1 Cor. 6:15). He also anticipates the description of the church as the body of Christ in his interpretation of the eucharistic words (1 Cor. 10:16-17). In a discussion over the dangers of idolatry, Paul asks, “The bread which we break, is it not a participation (koinōnia) in the body of Christ?” He answers, “Because there is one bread, we the many are one body, because we partake of the one bread” (10:17). That is, believers become the one body when they share in the destiny of Christ. The church is not a collection of individuals, but a community that is one in Christ (Roloff 1993: 108). In the undisputed letters, Paul develops the theme of the body of Christ elsewhere only in Romans (12:3-8), once more using the image to describe the unity of the community and the diversity of its gifts. The image comes at the end of the lengthy argument in Romans, where Paul has established that God’s new humanity includes Jews and Gentiles (cf. 1:14-17; Rom. 9–11). Life in the new aeon is experienced in a community in which all are “members of one another” (12:5). Paul goes beyond the common Greco-Roman imagery of the body politic to describe the church specifically as the body of Christ. Thus Paul knows no existence apart from the body. All who place their allegiance in Christ are members of the body, bringing their own gifts to ensure its proper functioning.

THE BODY AND THE SACRAMENTS While Paul never uses the term sacrament, baptism and the eucharist—the practices later called sacraments—are vital to his ecclesiology. He mentions baptism rarely and discusses the eucharist only in 1 Corinthians, but he assumes that both play a critical role in his churches. The fact that he reminds the Corinthians of the eucharistic tradition that he had previously taught them suggests that he instructed all of his churches with Jesus’s words of institution (1 Cor. 11:23-26). When he writes to the believers in Rome, a church that he had not founded, he assumes that all have been baptized (Rom. 6:2-4). Both practices are visible manifestations of the nature of the church. In response to Corinthians who attend meals associated with idolatry, Paul asks, “The cup of blessing that we bless: is it not sharing (koinonia) in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break: Is it not a sharing (koinonia) in the body of Christ?” (1 Cor. 10:16). Knowing that pagan meals also provided koinōnia among the participants, Paul draws sharp boundaries, declaring that one may not share in the table of the Lord and the table of pagan deities, which he describes as demons (1 Cor. 1:18-20). This koinōnia with the Lord, however, is a participation in his death. Thus the eucharist is the manifestation of the solidarity of the community as the members share in the death of Christ.

46

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Paul’s additional teaching on the eucharist (1 Cor. 11:17-34) is a response to Corinthians who apparently equated the eucharist with common practices in ancient society. Because of the divisions between rich and poor at the meal, Paul declares that it “is not the Lord’s Supper” that they eat (11:20). While scholars debate what was taking place—whether the rich ate before the poor arrived or whether the rich and poor ate unequal portions at the meal—the issue remains the same. The eucharist had become the scene of divisions between the rich and the poor. Such a division was commonplace at ancient meals. The social division is evident in Paul’s questions (11:22), “Do you not have houses to eat and drink in? Or do you show contempt for the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing?” He addresses this issue in the concluding instructions: “If you are hungry, eat at home” (11:34). Paul first responds to the situation by citing the tradition of Jesus’s words of institution (11:23-26). The body and blood of Jesus signify the self-sacrifice of Jesus. “This is my body, which is for you” (11:24) recalls the early Christian creed that “Christ died for our sins” (1 Cor. 15:3) and the numerous instances indicating that Christ died “for our sins,” “for many” (Mk 14:24), or “for all” (2 Cor. 5:14). As Paul’s interpretation indicates in 11:27-34, the eucharist is a visible manifestation of the self-denial of Jesus. Consequently, true eucharistic practice involves the self-denial of the participants, for sharing in the bread and cup should shape the behavior of the participants. The example of Jesus teaches the community to act on behalf of others rather than indulge themselves in the supper. “For you” includes both rich and poor. In the eucharist, the community shares in the sacrifice of Christ, demonstrating that this meal is unlike any in the Corinthians’ past experience. It is the visible manifestation of the nature of the church. Just as Paul’s churches all participate in the eucharist, all members have been baptized. He does not discuss baptism at length, but introduces the topic on several occasions. In response to the rivalries in Corinth, Paul says, “By one Spirit you have all been baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit” (1 Cor. 12:13). The Holy Spirit is thus connected with baptism, for “each has received the Spirit” (12:7, 11), and all were baptized. The aorist passive recalls the earlier declaration of a singular event: “You were washed, you were justified, you were sanctified” (6:11). The fact that believers were “baptized into one body” indicates that baptism was a corporate event. When Paul describes Christ as the inclusive person in Galatians 3, he concludes, “You are all the children of God through faith” (3:26), adding “as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ” (3:27). The parallel between “all” (3:26) and “as many of you” (3:27) indicates the relationship between faith and baptism. Whereas in 1 Corinthians Paul says that believers were baptized “into one body” (12:13), in Galatians Paul indicates that believers were baptized “into Christ,” the inclusive person. In both 1 Corinthians and Galatians, baptism is not only a corporate event, but a reflection of abolishment of traditional boundaries. In 1 Corinthians 12:13, Paul indicates that baptism is a unifying event, introducing believers to a community where there are no longer “Jews and Gentiles, slave or free” (1 Cor. 12:13). Similarly, in Galatians 3:28, Paul declares that there is “no longer Jew or Greek,” “slave or free,” or “male and female.” Thus baptism, like the eucharist, is a visible manifestation of a church that does not recognize the traditional boundaries of ethnicity, social class, or gender. As in 1 Corinthians and Galatians, in Romans Paul mentions the occasion when the readers “were baptized” (Rom. 6:3; cf. 1 Cor. 12:13; Gal. 3:27). Here also he argues for a church in which Jew and Gentile are united in one body, as a community “for all

THE PAULINE LETTERS



47

who believe” 3:22; cf. 4:11, 16, 18, 24). Having argued in Rom. 5:12-21 that Adam is the inclusive person who brought sin into the world, he presents Christ as the inclusive person through whom all are made righteous through his grace (Rom. 5:19). He responds to the potential objections to his theology of grace with the rhetorical question, “Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?” with the reference to baptism, the common experience of those who have believed. Baptism is the irrevocable moment for believers, a death to sin and a newness of life. The phrase “all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death” (6:3) recalls the earlier statements that believers were baptized into one body (1 Cor. 12:13). To be “baptized into his death” is to share in the death and burial of Jesus, entering into the new humanity that includes Jews and Greeks. Both baptism and the Lord’s Supper offer important visible manifestations of Paul’s major theological themes. While he can speak of participation in the death of Christ without reference to either ritual (cf. 2 Cor. 5:14; Gal. 2:20), he appeals to both to describe the actualization of the death of Christ in concrete ways. Both the eucharist and the baptism are visible manifestations that the community participates in the death and resurrection of Christ. Both baptism and the Lord’s Supper constitute the unity of the body that no longer recognizes the traditional boundaries of social class or ethnicity (1 Cor. 10:16-17; 12:12-13; Gal. 3:27).

THE CHURCH AND CORPORATE FORMATION Writing to Gentile churches, Paul assumes that the readers share a common narrative. They not only adopt Israel’s narrative as their own, but they also have their own common narrative. He assumes that his readers began the journey in moral darkness. A common feature in Paul’s letters is the appeal to the community’s memory of its radical break with the past and its new beginning. His frequent distinction between “once” and “now” suggests a sudden transference or change of status (cf. Rom. 6:1-4, 17-19; 7:5-6; 1 Cor. 6:11; cf. 2 Cor. 5:17). The plural pronouns “you” and “we” (Rom. 5:1-11; 7:5-6; 8:3139) reflect the ecclesial identity and common narrative of the listeners. In keeping with Israel’s narrative distinction between the present age and the age to come, Paul insists that the believers were once enslaved to the passions (Rom. 7:5; cf. 1:1-18-3:20), but have been “delivered from the present evil age” (Gal. 1:4) and now belong to the new humanity. As a result of their baptism into Christ (5:12-6:11), they conduct themselves in “newness of life” (Rom. 6:4). They now belong to the new creation promised by the prophets (2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 6:15). Their narrative is not yet completed, for they live in hope for the final redemption (Rom. 8:23-24). Their ultimate destiny is to be “united with Christ in a resurrection like his” (Rom. 6:5) and to be conformed to the image of the Son (Rom. 8:29). Thus Paul not only plants churches, but he engages in continuing pastoral work to ensure that the community is ultimately transformed into the divine image. When he declares his pastoral ambition, he does not speak of saving individuals but speaks of communities that he will present to Christ (2 Cor. 11:2). Thus he speaks of a corporate narrative of a community that has a shared beginning (cf. 1 Cor. 1:18-2:5; 2 Cor. 3:1-6; Gal. 3:1-6; Phil. 1:1; 1 Thess. 1:6-10) and a common destiny. His images of himself as father (1 Thess. 2:11-12), mother (Gal. 4:19), and father of the bride (2 Cor. 11:2) all focus on the completion of the converts’ destiny. He describes his “anxiety for all the churches” (2 Cor. 11:28). His goal is that his churches become his “boast” at the day of the Lord Jesus (2 Cor. 1:14; Phil. 2:16; 1 Thess. 2:19), sanctified in the Holy Spirit (Rom. 15:16). Identifying with

48

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

the servant of Isaiah 49:4, Paul indicates that the failure to present a transformed people will mean that he has run in vain (Gal. 4:11; Phil. 2:16). Thus Paul envisions a communal destiny at the day of Christ. Living between the entrance into the new age and the final consummation, the task of the church is moral formation, as Paul’s prayers consistently indicate. He prays that the Corinthians and the Philippians will be “blameless at the day of Christ” (1 Cor. 1:8; Phil. 1:10) and that the Thessalonians will be “blameless in holiness” at the day of Christ (1 Thess. 3:13). In each instance, the term “blameless” is derived from the description of the righteous person in Israel’s Scripture (cf. Gen. 17:1; 2 Sam. 22:24-25; Ps. 28:23-24; Wis. 10:15; 18:21). Alluding to the community’s narrative in his opening prayer report in Philippians, he assures the community, “The God who began a good work in you (plural) will bring it to completion at the day of Christ” (1:6). Indeed, he affirms, “God is at work in you (plural), enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Phil. 2:13). Inasmuch as the community will ultimately be “conformed to the image of the Son” (Rom. 8:29; cf. Phil. 3:21), its challenge is transformation in the present. Indeed, Paul employs the stem morph- to describe this transformation. After lamenting the Galatians’ abandonment of Paul’s gospel, he speaks in maternal terms: “My little children, with whom I am in the pangs of childbirth until Christ is formed (morphōthē) in you” (Gal. 4:19). The plural “you” indicates that this phrase is more accurately translated “until Christ be formed among you.” Beverly Gaventa correctly indicated that “formation does not belong to individual believers, as a personal or private possession only. Instead, formation refers to the community of those who are called to faith, what Paul elsewhere refers to as the body of Christ” (Gaventa 1990: 196). Similarly, Paul concludes a contrast with contemporaries who cannot see the glory of the new covenant, affirming, “We all, with unveiled face, beholding the same image, are being transformed (metamorphousthe) into the same image” (2 Cor. 3:18). Whereas Paul affirms communal transformation in 2 Cor. 3:18, he instructs the readers in Rom. 12:2 to “be transformed (metamorphousthe) by the renewing of the mind.” Paul describes his own transformation as a model for his churches. He has come to know “the fellowship of his sufferings, being conformed (symmorphizomenos) to his death” (Phil. 3:10), and he has been “crucified with Christ” (Gal. 2:20). He assumes that his churches will also be conformed to the sufferings of Christ, experiencing the same sufferings that he experiences (2 Cor. 1:6; cf. Phil. 1:28). In the defense of his ministry in 2 Corinthians, he consistently points to his sufferings as the evidence of the legitimacy of his ministry (cf. 1:3-7; 4:7-15: 6:4-10; 11:23-33), but also indicates that transformation for the church involves sharing in the death of Jesus. When he says that “we all are being transformed from glory to glory” (2 Cor. 3:18), he includes himself with the whole church. In defense of his ministry, he refers to the creed, “one died for all” (2 Cor. 5:14), a variant of the tradition that “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3), to explain that his ministry is defined by participation in the death of Jesus. He adds, “Therefore all died” (2 Cor. 5:14), signifying that believers no longer live to themselves (2 Cor. 5:15). The church, therefore, is being transformed into the image of Christ (2 Cor. 3:18), for believers no longer live for themselves (cf. 1 Cor. 10:23-22:2; Phil. 2:1-4). As in Philippians 2:1-11, the foundational story creates a new kind of community that is based on the selflessness manifested in the cross of Christ. The transformation of the community involved not only its participation in the cross, but a new mindset (cf. Rom. 8:5-8; Phil. 2:1-5; 3:15) and a wider range of moral responsibilities. Paul’s expressed maternal anguish in Galatians 4:19 is followed by ethical

THE PAULINE LETTERS



49

exhortations in Gal. 5–6. The lists of “works of the flesh” (5:19-21) and “fruit of the Spirit” indicate practices to avoid and behavior to maintain. The works of the flesh are primarily anti-communal behaviors, and the fruit of the Spirit expresses the conduct of believers that builds the community. Thus Paul envisions a moral community. The appeal for the community to “be transformed (metamorphousthe) by the renewal of the mind” (Rom. 12:2) is the bridge between Paul’s extended argument that the righteousness of God is “for all who believe” and the ethical instructions in Rom. 12:3-15:13. Salvation for “all who believe” is the basis of a community that crosses the boundaries of ethnicity. The instructions in 12:3-15:13 focus on the primacy of love among members of the community in the multi-ethnic setting. While the topics vary among Paul’s letters, the consistent feature is ethical exhortation. The transformation of the community does not occur, however, under its own power. Indeed, Paul portrays humanity under sin (cf. Rom. 1:18-3:20), including even those who have the law (cf. Rom. 2:12-16). In contrast to both the Jewish and Greek philosophic traditions, Paul insisted that no one can do the good (cf. Rom. 7:7-25). The church, however, has been empowered to live the moral life. The ethical qualities that characterize believers are “the fruit of the Spirit” (Gal. 5:22). Paul elaborates on the divine empowerment most fully in Romans. After describing humanity as enslaved to sin, he declares, of the result of the incarnation, “the just requirement of the law may be fulfilled in us, who walk according to the Spirit” (Rom. 8:4). This announcement is evocative of the promises made by the exilic prophets. The church experiences the reversal of the situation of the old humanity that failed to keep the Torah. The portrayal recalls the prophetic expectation that God would put his Spirit within Israel (Ezek. 11:19; 36:27) and make the people follow his statutes and ordinances (Ezek. 36:27; Jer. 31:31-34). As the eschatological people of God, the church has received the Spirit promised by the prophets as the gift of the new age (Rom. 5:5; 7:6: 8:1-17), and thus it lives by the power of the Spirit. As Paul indicates in Rom 8:5-8, believers face the alternative between “the mind of the flesh” (8:7) and the “mind of the Spirit” (8:6). However, no one can please God without the Spirit that dwells (oikei) among them (8:8). The metaphor of the dwelling (8:9, 11) recalls the theme that God dwells in the temple. As the repeated “in you (plural)” indicates, the Spirit is a gift for the whole community. Not only does the Spirit equip the community for moral living; the indwelling Spirit will also raise the mortal bodies of believers (Rom. 8:11).

LEADERSHIP AND THE NEW FAMILY Inasmuch as each member (1 Cor. 12:7) has the gift of the Spirit, the church recognizes no hierarchy of priests or pastors. Paul is the undisputed authority who admonishes (1 Cor. 4:14) and commands (1 Cor. 7:17; 16:1) his churches to obey (cf. 2 Cor. 10:8). In his absence, he challenges the entire church to engage in pastoral care. The image of the body indicates the reciprocal nature of the functions within the community. While Paul mentions parts of the body, indicating that all are indispensable, he never mentions the head of the body in 1 Cor. 12:12–17. When he describes the church as God’s building, he insists that he laid the foundation, Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 13:10), but that others build on (1 Cor. 3:10-15). Indeed, as the “one another” passages indicate, he challenges the whole church to build each other up (1 Thess. 5:11) and encourage one another (1 Thess. 4:18). They “admonish the idlers, encourage the fainthearted, [and] help the

50

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

weak” (1 Thess. 5:14). These instructions correspond to the care that family members take for each other. Although Paul insists on the mutual ministry of members for each other, he also insists that members “know those who labor among [them], have charge of [them], and admonish [them],” and to “esteem them highly because of their work” (1 Thess. 5:1213). To “know” (5:12) and to “esteem” (hēgeisthai) them is to recognize the legitimate functions of a group of members who care for specific tasks within the community. That is, while they “admonish one another” (1 Thess. 5:14), one group has emerged who have this special task. The fact that Paul refers to them with a series of three participles indicates that they are recognized for their function rather than their title. Similarly, Paul instructs the church at Corinth to recognize the household of Stephanas, and to “be submissive to them” because of their work (1 Cor. 16:15-16). The basis of congregational recognition is “their work” (1 Thess. 5:13). Similarly, Paul expects the Corinthians to “know” those who “had devoted themselves to the service of the saints” (1 Cor. 16:15). Communal recognition, therefore, rests, not on titles, but on deeds of service for the community. Those who had emerged in Corinth were among the first converts in that city. The leaders in Thessalonica were also probably early converts whose work was exemplary for the whole community. The singular definite article (tous) in 1 Thess. 5:12 indicates that Paul has in mind one group with multiple tasks. The reference to “those who labor among you” (kopiōntas en hymin) recalls Paul’s description of his own evangelistic and pastoral work (cf. 1 Cor. 15:10; Gal. 4:11; Phil. 2:16) as well as the work of others (cf. Rom. 16:16, 12) who have provided various services on behalf of the community. With the second designation, “those who have charge of you” (proistamenoi), the NRSV emphasizes the authority of the group that has emerged within the local community. While proistēmi is used frequently to designate authority (1 Tim. 3:4; 5:17), it also involves care and concern for others. In the Pastoral Epistles, both authority and care are present in the use of the word for the paterfamilias (1 Tim. 3:4) and for elders (1 Tim. 5:17). In Rom. 12:8, the NRSV renders it as “leader,” while the RSV renders it as “one who gives aid.” Thus the word carries the connotation of “caring authority and authoritative care” (Von Campenhausen 1969: 65). The word may suggest that some have emerged who have the special means to care for the needs of the community. This task probably included both teaching and nurture of the community. Those who care for the community also “admonish” (noutheteountas) the members. Thus they assume the work of Paul, who had given the admonition expected of a father (cf. 1 Cor. 4:14; cf. Eph. 6:4) or sibling. Although admonition (nouthesia) can mean instruction, the term can also connote reprimand (cf. Wis. 16:6), rebuke (Tit. 3:10), and warning (cf. Acts 20:31). Those who have exhausted themselves for the community in Thessalonica thus have the authority to admonish members of the community. Their role is probably similar to that of the “bishops and deacons,” whom Paul includes in the address in Philippians 1:1, but does not mention in the rest of the letter. While their role is apparently self-evident to Paul and his readers, we ascertain their functions only by the terms episkopoi and diakonoi. As with those who receive special recognition in 1 Thessalonians, the use of the plural indicates that they consist of a plurality. Episkopos, used here for the first time in Christian literature, was a common word in antiquity for those who assume the responsibility that something is done, and which was then appropriated by the Christians. It does not have the sense in Philippians that it has in later ecclesiastical literature. Thus the word, like proistamenoi in 1 Thess. 5:12, probably refers to a group that is responsible for teaching and administration. Similarly, diakonoi does

THE PAULINE LETTERS



51

not have the later technical meaning, but refers to those who serve others. This word is used elsewhere for Phoebe, the diakonos of Cenchrea (Rom. 16:1), Apollos (1 Cor. 3:5), and Paul (1 Cor. 3:5; 2 Cor. 3:6; 6:4; 11:23). Together, the two words continue the dual focus on caring authority and authoritative care that is present in other Pauline letters. While Paul does not employ uniform terminology, he demonstrates the specific nature of ecclesiastical leadership in the close relationship of authority and service. Like Paul himself, the leaders receive recognition when they have distinguished themselves by their service to the community. Paul advocates a “dialectical leadership” of tasks that the whole church is involved in while recognizing a group who also engage in this ministry.

ECCLESIOLOGY IN THE DISPUTED LETTERS OF PAUL Colossians and Ephesians A new stage of ecclesiological reflection is evident in the disputed letters of Paul, as the communities face new challenges. In Colossians and Ephesians, much of the imagery remains the same, but it now takes on new meaning, as the communities face the challenge of recognizing their place in a world populated by threatening cosmic forces (Eph. 1:21; 3:10; 6:12; Col. 1:16; 2:10). Both epistles proclaim the exaltation of Christ above these powers (Eph. 1:21), and Colossians also declares that Christ defeated the powers at the cross. This cosmic victory determines the place of the church in the world, for both epistles portray a church that participates in this cosmic victory. Christ is not only the head over the universe, but also the head of the church (Eph. 1:22-23; Col. 1:18). Whereas the body of Christ is the local congregation in the undisputed letters (Rom. 12:3-8; 1 Cor. 12:12-27), in Colossians and Ephesians it is a universal and cosmic church, the place where the cosmic Lordship of Christ has become a reality for the readers (Roloff 1993: 227). While Paul’s portrayal of the members of the body in the undisputed letters makes no reference to the head, Christ is the head of the universal body in Colossians and Ephesians (Eph. 1:22-23; 4:15; 5:23; Col. 1:18). According to Colossians, the church has come “to fullness in him, who is the head of every ruler and authority” (2:10). Because of the place of the church in the universe, cosmic forces no longer threaten it. It is being filled from the head, which nourishes and holds together the joints and ligaments for growth (2:19). According to Ephesians, believers now sit with the exalted Christ in the heavenly places (2:6), and the mission of the church is to make known the wisdom of God to the principalities and powers (3:10). Like the church of the undisputed letters, the church in Colossians and Ephesians recognizes no boundaries among ethnic groups or social classes. According to Ephesians, Christ has abolished the dividing wall (2:14) and created a new humanity, reconciling Jew and Gentile in one body (2:16; cf. 4:4). According to Colossians, in this new community “there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free” (Col. 3:11).

The Pastoral Epistles Like Ephesians and Colossians, the Pastoral Epistles address problems that threaten the future of the church. All three epistles address issues relating to false teachers and their toxic impact on the church (cf. 1 Tim. 1:3-7 19; 4:1-6; 2 Tim. 2:17; Tit. 1:10-12). Although the ekklēsia is mentioned only three times (1 Tim. 3:5, 15; 5:16), the church plays the central role as the “pillar and bulwark of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15). The central

52

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

image for the church is the household (oikos, 1 Tim. 3:15), of which God is the owner (2 Tim. 2:21). The image corresponds to the ancient household with its established structures and rules for living. In a new stage in the ecclesiology of the Pauline churches, both 1 Timothy and Titus indicate that established offices emerge out of the household setting. According to 1 Tim. 3:4, among the qualifications for bishops and deacons is that they be married. Indeed, bishops must manage their household well, “for if anyone does not know how to manage his household, how can he take care of God’s church?” (1 Tim. 3:4-5). In Titus, bishops are God’s stewards—that is, household managers (1:7) who protect the church. Thus both letters envision a household in which the paterfamilias is the authoritative teacher.

CONCLUSION The consistent feature in the entire Pauline literature is that Christian existence is ecclesial. The church is the heir of Israel, but its christological confession distinguishes it from the Jewish synagogue. Christ is the inclusive person, and believers find their identity in him, living “in Christ” and “with Christ.” Paul envisions the corporate formation of his churches, anticipating that they will be morally blameless at the end. As the church is being transformed, it participates in the sufferings of Christ, and members exist in selfdenying love for each other. Moral behavior is thus ecclesial, for Paul’s ethical instructions are intended to establish a community that exists as a family, caring for the needs of all of the members. Like ancient Israel, it is a counterculture with distinct boundaries separating the community from the surrounding world.

REFERENCES Aasgaard, R. (2002), “‘Role Ethics in Paul’; The Significance of the Sibling Role for Paul’s Ethical Thinking,” New Testament Studies 48: 513–30. Campenhausen, H. Von (1969), Ecclesiastical Authority and Spiritual Power in the First Three Centuries, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gaventa, B. (1990), “The Maternity of Paul: An Exegetical Study of Galatians 4:19,” in Robert Fortna (ed.), The Conversation Continues, 189–201, Nashville: Abindon. Hogeterp, A. L. (2006), Paul and God’s Temple: A Historical Interpretation of Cultic Imagery in the Corinthian Correspondence, Biblical Tools and Studies 2, Leuven: Peeters. Klaiber, W. (1982), Rechtfertigung und Gemeinde: Eine Untersuchung zum paulinischen Kirchenverständnis, Göttingen: Vandenhhoeck & Ruprecht. Kraus, W. (1999), Das Volk Gottes: Zur Grundlegung des Ekklesiologie bei Paulus, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Martyn, J. L. (1997), Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Bible 33A, New York: Doubleday, 1997. Mitchell, Margaret M. (1991), Paul and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation: An Exegetical Investigation of the Language and Composition of 1 Corinthians, Hermeneutische UnterSuchungen zur Theologie 28, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Pilhofer, P. (2002), “Περι δε της φιλαδελπηιας . . . (1 Thess 4:9): Ekklesiologische Überlegungen zu einem Proprium früher christlicher Gemeinden,” in Die frühen Christen und ihre Welt. Greifswalder Aufsätze 1996-2001, WUNT 2/145, 139–53, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Roloff, J. (1993), Die Kirche im Neuen Testament, Grundrisse zum Neuen Testament. Das Neue Testament Deutsch Ergänzungsreihe 10, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

THE PAULINE LETTERS



53

Thompson, J. W. (2014), The Church according to Paul: Rediscovering the Community Conformed to Christ, Grand Rapids: Baker Academic. Trebilco, P. R. (2011), “Why Did the Early Christians Call Themselves ἡ ἐκκλησία?” New Testament Studies 57: 440–60. Umbauch, H. (1999), In Christus getauft, von der Sünde befreit: Die Gemeinde als Sündenfreier Raum bei Paulus, Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments 181, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Wright, N. T. (1992), The New Testament and the People of God, Minneapolis: Fortress.

Chapter FIVE

The Gospel of John, the General Epistles, and Revelation PAUL RAINBOW

INTRODUCTION This chapter takes up the remainders of the New Testament (NT), that is, documents belonging neither to the synoptic gospels (including Acts with Lk.) nor to the Pauline corpus, and inquires into their teaching about the church. There are ten pieces: the epistle to the Hebrews, the letters of James and of Jude, the pair of letters bearing Peter’s name, and the Johannine corpus, consisting of a gospel, three letters, and an apocalypse penned by a prophet named John.

EXEGETICAL SURVEY Before we delve into their ecclesiology it may be well to get an overview of each document in its rhetorical setting, highlighting passages about the church. James’s and Jude’s letters and the Petrine epistles, if authentic as for centuries they were taken to be, were all written within the lifespans of individuals who had been associated with Jesus, and so before the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 (Guthrie 1970). However, since shortly before the turn of the nineteenth century, critics who read the same data with different eyes have tended to place them after that date, even, in the case of 2 Peter, into the second century (Kümmel 1975). The reasons cited are plausible but inconclusive, chiefly (not entirely) linguistic. Could working-class Palestinian Jews have produced such literary Greek? Answer: certainly, by relying on secretaries—which clouds authorship (see Richards 2004). Probably Hebrews originated in the 60s as well, for it works harder to prove Christ as the fulfillment of the temple cultus than would have been necessary following the destruction of the temple. All five Johannine documents are usually and rightly dated in the closing decade(s) of the first century when, according to patristic memory, John left Palestine and moved to Asia. James, “the Lord’s brother” (Gal. 1:19), served the mother church in the first Jewish– Christian generation (Gal. 2:9), basing himself in Jerusalem from the mid-30s AD (Gal. 1:19) to his martyrdom in 62 (Josephus Ant. 20.9.1 [200]). Because he chaired synods of apostles and elders (Acts 15:13-21; 21:17), later church fathers regarded him as the first

THE GOSPEL OF JOHN, THE GENERAL EPISTLES, AND REVELATION



55

functional bishop of Jerusalem (Eusebius Hist. Eccles. 2.1.3, citing Clement of Alexandria who called James “bishop”; Hist. Eccles. 7.19, mentioning James’s physical “throne” still shown to pilgrims in the early 300s), though the NT nowhere calls him an episkopos. The epistle having his name testifies to his position and prestige among Jewish Christians not only in Palestine but also “in the dispersion” (Jas 1:1). The bulk of the letter consists of practical exhortation for those under trial to be patient and upright till the Lord should return, manifesting a number of parallels to Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. We catch a glimpse of believers disempowered socially and economically who need reassurance that they have been chosen by God (2:5); there is no further reflection on their status as God’s people. A celebrated paragraph arguing that final justification will be based on faith that performs works, not on bare faith (2:8-26), has proved challenging to some Protestant construals of Paul’s soteriology, but there is little of ecclesiological interest other than a fleeting picture of elders gathering in homes to hear confessions of the sick, pray for them, and anoint them with oil for healing (5:14-16). Jude’s letter was ostensibly written by a brother of James (v. 1), like him a half-brother of Jesus (Mt. 13:55). It seeks to confirm unspecified readers in the faith that Christ and his apostles delivered once for all (vv. 3, 17-18) and to fortify them against insidious doctrinal innovators who would pervert God’s grace into licentiousness (v. 4). The spoilers did not blanch to revile angels (vv. 8-10), to set themselves against authority (presumably of ecclesiastical leaders, vv. 8, 11), or to carouse carnally at meetings of the church (vv. 12-13). Perhaps the most striking ecclesiological notes are the mention in verse 12 of (probably) eucharistic gatherings as “love feasts,” and the ominous warning against “divisions” caused by false teaching (v. 19). What we call the epistle to the Hebrews is a homily (“word of exhortation,” 13:22) by an anonymous post-apostolic Christian leader (2:3; 13:7) addressed to unidentified Christians under pressure. It encourages them to hold fast to their confession of Jesus Christ at a time when some of them were suffering confiscation of their property and imprisonment by enemies of the gospel (Heb. 10:32-39; 13:3, 13-14). Because Judaism was a religio licita under Roman law (Josephus Ant. 14.8 [215-16]), unlike most near Eastern religions including Christianity which were proscribed, some church members may have been tempted to take refuge in the shelter of the synagogue. The discourse presents an exalted christology, showing how God’s divine/human Son is of a greater order altogether than former agents of revelation, especially God’s angels and Moses (1–3), and how his royal priesthood (4:14–5:14; 7), the new covenant he has founded (8), and his sacrificial ministry (9–10) brought corresponding aspects of the old covenant irreversibly to their eschatological culmination. Interspersed in this argument are several passages warning against the peril of falling away (3:7–4:12; 5:11–6:20; 10:19-39; 12:25-29) and bracing the readers to endure (11–13). While ecclesiology is not the main subject, the book adumbrates the concept of tradition (2:3; 13:7), touches on baptism (6:2; 10:22), underscores the vital importance of assembling together in spite of the risk (10:24-25), and outlines duties of Christians to one another (13). The Gentile Christians of Roman Asia who received Peter’s first letter (1:1, 18), like the recipients of the epistle of James, were spiritual exiles and aliens in their pagan surroundings (1:1, 17; 2:11). Indeed in some quarters they already suffered mocking (4:4), ostracization, or arrest and execution (4:12, 17; 5:8-9). Their situation fits the end of Nero’s reign or, in the opinion of some critics, the time of Domitian—in both periods anti-Christian sentiment waxed warm in some locales. As a whole the letter is a charge to believers to persist in living holy lives (1:15-16) and in maintaining exemplary civic

56

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

conduct so as to silence their detractors (2:11-12). No section is devoted to ecclesiology, but aspects that come up by-the-bye include the integration of Gentile believers into Israel’s covenantal privileges (2:4-10), the sharing of spiritual gifts with one another in local fellowships (4:10-11), and the nature of the office of elder (5:1-4). A second Petrine letter, conscious of the first (2 Pet. 3:1), must on stylistic grounds have been drafted by a different amanuensis from Silvanus (cf. 1 Pet. 5:12)—or conceivably had another author altogether—for a changed situation. Peter is represented as now having a premonition of his imminent martyrdom (1:14, which happened under Nero toward AD 68 [Eusebius Hist. Eccles. 3.1.2]) and as wishing before he dies to furnish the believers with a prophylactic against rising false prophets. The heresy in question is like that denounced by Jude: it distorts prophecies of Scripture (1:20-21), and especially a nascent collection of Paul’s epistles (3:15-16), so as to find license (2:2) to practice sexual immorality (2:10, 13b–22) and to derogate God’s angels (vv. 10-13a), scoffing at Jesus’s promise to return as judge (3:1-13). The harangue against heretics in the second chapter has an obvious literary relationship to the middle part of Jude. Although most commentators see 2 Peter as expanding, dependence could go the other way and Jude could be a condensation of 2 Peter. Be that as it may, to counteract this influence the author enjoins steady growth in virtue (1:3-11), holiness (3:11-13), and grace (3:18). A distinctive contribution of this epistle to ecclesiology is the role it implies for the church, that is the apostles (tacitly including the author) and their loyal followers, in interpreting Scripture aright and ruling out aberrations (1:16-21; 3:1-2, 15-17). According to the univocal and uncontested memory of the Asian churches from the late first and early second centuries, John left Jerusalem around the time of its fall to Titus’s forces and migrated to Asia. He settled near Ephesus where Paul’s missionary endeavors had preceded him and supervised churches into the reign of Trajan (Justin Dial. 81.4; Eusebius Hist. Eccles. 3.1.1; 3.39.1; 3.23.1-4; 3.32.3, 5-19; 4.14.6; 5.24.3, 16; citing Polycarp, Papias, many elders of Asia, Irenaeus, Polycrates, Clement Alex., and Origen; see Robinson 1985: 45–8). There, moved by fellow church leaders, he composed his gospel (Muratorian Canon, lines 10–16; Eusebius Hist. Eccles. 3.24.1-2, 8, 11; 5.8.4; 6.14.5-7; 7.25.7; citing “tradition,” Irenaeus, Clement Alex., and Dionysius Alex.) In the gospel he calls himself self-effacingly only a disciple “whom Jesus loved,” that is, whose identity is insignificant apart from the fact that Jesus loved him (13:23). But his reclining close to Jesus’s breast at the last supper across from Peter (13:23, 25) and his intimacy with Peter (18:15-16; 20:2; 21:20-24; cf. Lk. 22:8; Acts 3:1; 4:13) cohere with the patristic tradition about authorship. At Ephesus he also wrote at least the first of his epistles (Eusebius Hist. Eccles. 3.24.17-18; 7.25.7; citing general opinion and Dionysius Alex.), and the account of his visions on the isle of Patmos (Irenaeus, Haer. 5.30.1, 3). Some critics, impressed by the internal and patristic evidence, remain satisfied to confirm the traditional attribution of these works to John the apostle (R. Lightfoot 1956; Braun 1959–66; Guthrie 1970; Carson and Moo 2005); others, swayed by a tendency that has swept the field since the continental Enlightenment to doubt primary evidence, have proposed any number of alternative hypotheses, none of which commends itself to all (Brown 2003). In any case, for the sake of convenience mainline usage continues to denote the author as “John.” The fourth gospel nourishes and seeks to awaken faith in Jesus as the Christ within the presuppositional framework of the covenantal monotheism of the Hebrew Scriptures (Jn 1:1-5; 17:3; 20:28, 30-31). Meant for a readership familiar with the Synoptic account of Jesus, whether in oral or written form (Bauckham 1998a), it preserves the outline of the

THE GOSPEL OF JOHN, THE GENERAL EPISTLES, AND REVELATION



57

Synoptic narrative but substitutes a number of stories about Jesus recalled uniquely by the perceptive author, molded by his meditative powers into an uncompromising portrayal of Jesus as the Son of God and who is substantially everything his Father is, incarnate as the Messiah of Israel. To this end, after a prologue that lays down the book’s bold thesis (1:118), the first twelve chapters have Jesus present his case to the world, represented by a corrupt religious establishment in Jerusalem that rejects him out of rivalry and fear of his rapidly growing clientele (11:45-54; 12:19). Jesus then withdraws with the few who have received him, to prepare them for his impending departure (chs 13–17). His glorification ensues as he strides through crucifixion to rise again, appears to his disciples in a variety of settings, and breathes into them the Holy Spirit (chs 18–21). This gospel has abundant matter to inform ecclesiology, despite the fact that the word ἐκκλησία (ekklēsia, “church”) is lacking. (It is absent from the synoptic gospels too, apart from two instances in Matthew. After all, during his ministry Jesus put in place only rudiments of the church.) Much of John’s teaching about the church is concentrated in the Farewell Discourses (chs 13–17). These cover loving one another, the imminent coming of the Spirit-Aide in Jesus’s place to indwell his disciples, Jesus as the vine whose vitality makes fruitful the branches who abide in him, the world’s intensifying opposition, the Spirit’s task of convicting the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment, and God’s predestination and preservation of Jesus’s followers in a unity of love that radiates the divine glory to the world. Passages such as the key paragraph about mission (4:31-38), or the cryptic saying about living waters flowing from one’s heart (7:37-38), are also relevant for ecclesiology. Sayings of Jesus in 3:5 and 6:53-58 evoke theological truths that undergird the sacraments of baptism and the eucharist, respectively, even if their original settings were not sacramental. Documentary analysis has sometimes remanded these last two passages to a hypothetical “ecclesiastical redactor” (see, for example, the relevant sections of Bultmann 1971), but this method gained no lasting consensus and has all but faded away due to want of empirical support; therefore we include them. Homogeneous in style with the fourth gospel and with each other, the letters ascribed to John are addressed to churches at three descending levels of organization: an encyclical for a region (1 John), a letter from one local church (“lady”) to another (2 John), and a letter from the elder to an individual, Gaius (3 John). A group of progressives (2 Jn 9) went out from those who remained in communion with the author (1 Jn 2:18-19) denying that God’s Son came in flesh (1 Jn 2:21-25; 4:2-3; 2 Jn 7, 9-11) and apparently practicing a lifestyle at odds with the ethics of Jesus (1 Jn 1:6, 8, 10; 2:4; 5:16b). To neutralize their influence and solidify his communities the writer, who claims stoutly to have had sensory interaction with the incarnate Lord (1 Jn 1:1-2), weaves together the cardinal values of truth, righteousness, and love into a textured fabric. From the Johannine epistles we can construct a picture of late first-century house churches united in fellowship with the apostle (1 Jn 1:3-4), struggling for orthodoxy, sound morals, and mutual charity, and beleaguered in an uncomprehending world. Many aspects of ecclesiology lie below the surface of the text and come to light when we read between the lines. So well-known is the author that he need not identify himself by name, only as “the elder” (2 Jn 1:1; 3 Jn 1:1). He considers the readers “little children” and exercises fatherly care over churches in geographically outspread localities through traveling brethren (3 Jn 3, 5–8, 10). He expects to be heeded and will deal shortly with Diotrephes, who puts himself first, rejects the elder’s delegates, and undermines the elder (3 Jn 9–10). All of this bears out Clement’s picture of John behaving as a sort of informal metropolitan bishop. He “used to journey by request to the neighboring districts . . . in

58

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

some places to appoint bishops, in others to regulate whole churches, in others to set among the clergy one man” (Rich Man’s Salvation 42.1 [Clement 1919: 357]). Toward the end of the first century Christian missionaries had carried the faith to all parts of the Roman Empire, but much of Palestine lay devastated by the Jewish war, and the greatest concentrations of believers had swelled in the populous, prosperous urban centers of Roman Asia. Here Christians participated in the economy through trade guilds, many of which had tutelary pagan deities; they were exposed to the blandishments of Roman power and propaganda; and society bore down on them to honor political figures by doing their share in various expressions of the imperial cult (Rainbow 2008: 13–27). In this environment “John” wrote the book of Revelation (1:1, 4, 9; 22:8) to stir and strengthen the churches to persevere in faithfulness to Christ. He cast his prophetic summons (1:3; 22:7, 10, 18-19) in the form of a letter meant to circulate along the main trade route of Asia (1:4). It details oracles he received from an epiphany of the risen Lord Jesus (1:9–3:22) and visions he saw in heaven (4:1–22:9), bookended by a prologue (1:111) and an epilogue (22:6-21). The author, whose mind and writing were steeped in the Hebrew Scriptures and who stood consciously in the line of Israel’s prophets, interpreted his readers’ situation as the beginning of woes portending the very end of the cosmos. The rich ecclesiology of the Apocalypse is largely stamped by a christological twist on Israel’s charter as the people of God, and by Joel’s prophecy of an eschatological outpouring of God’s Spirit on all flesh. At Sinai God had set Israel apart (Exod. 19:6); John reworked this promise to include believers in Jesus (Rev. 1:6) from every nation and clan (5:9; 7:9; 11:9; 14:6), being careful to hold their royal and sacerdotal roles in tandem (3:12, 21; 5:10; 7:15; 20:4, 6), a duality that informs other passages (e.g., 7:4-8 with 7:9-12; 21:1-21 with 21:22–22:5). In keeping with OT promises, John views the church collectively as the mouth of the prophetic Spirit (11:3-13; 22:17). Thus even as Jesus fulfilled the three offices of Israel’s anointed leaders, so also those who bear his name (3:12; 14:1; 22:4) are prophets, priests, and kings. Over against and around God’s people lies a hostile world. At the climax of the Apocalypse is a multifaceted contrast between the final ruin of Babylon the great whore (17:1–19:10) and the everlasting glory of Jerusalem, the pure bride of the Lamb (21:10–22:5). In the group of documents with which we are dealing, then, we no longer see the efforts of Jesus and of his apostles to found messianic communities in Jewish Palestine, nor of Paul and his team to plant the gospel in the chief cities of the Gentile world. Rather, local house-churches have been successfully established in most towns of weight from Jerusalem around the Mediterranean Sea as far as Rome and now are beginning to face “toil, and tribulation, and tumult” from without; internally, the church is “sore opprest, by schisms rent asunder, by heresies distrest” (S.J. Stone, “The Church’s One Foundation”). From the ways the early Christians met these challenges we can glean a good many principles of ecclesiology.

DOGMATIC SOUNDINGS The foregoing sketch of historical and critical assumptions for exploring the teaching about the church found in these NT books frees us from the need to proceed further document by document. An approach to their ecclesiology along the lines of biblical theology might choose either to systematize the ideas of a select canonical author, or to trace themes through multiple authors over time. Given the shortness of the period that saw the production of the general epistles—a few decades—and the disparity of authors

THE GOSPEL OF JOHN, THE GENERAL EPISTLES, AND REVELATION



59

who contributed without sharing a literary tradition (even if the Johannine corpus does emanate from a single genius, or at least a school), such an approach will not be meaningful here. For the purpose of the present volume it is better to take loci from the dogmatics of the great church as our starting point and to work backwards, inquiring how those points are represented in the original sources. The result need involve neither proof-texting nor distortion. For, on the one hand, the dogmatic tradition took shape in the first place largely through scrupulous reading of the sacred texts; and, on the other, to the extent that the ancient setting in which a truth was embedded differed from its conceptual nexus in dogmatics, our hermeneutical tools enable us to pinpoint any variance.

Trinitarian Basis of the Church The NT general epistles and the Johannine literature contain the raw materials of the later Nicene and Cappadocian doctrine of the Trinity. Already triadic formulae bundle together God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Spirit (Jn 1:32-34; 14:16, 26; 15:26; 16:13-16; 1 Pet. 1:2; 1 Jn 3:21-24; Jude 20-21; Rev. 1:4-5; 5:1-7), while key passages strongly assert the ontological deity of God’s Son (Jn 1:1, 18; 20:28; Heb. 1:2-4; 2 Pet. 1:1; 1 Jn 1:1-2; 5:20; Rev. 5:8-14) and other statements maintain God’s unity indivisible (Jn 10:30; 17:3; Jas 2:19; 4:12; Jude 1:25; Rev. 15:3-4). The church is that body of persons on whom God has placed his own name, that is, over whom God claims special ownership (Jn 17:11-12; Jas 2:7; Rev. 3:12; 14:1; 22:4; cf. 1 Pet. 4:14, 16), and on whom he stamps his fatherhood (Heb. 12:9; Jas 1:17; 3:9; 1 Pet. 1:17; 1 Jn 2:13; 3:1; Jude 1). This implies selection, and indeed a sprinkling of passages point to God’s initiative in taking out of the world a people for himself. God brought forth believers “of his own will” (Jas 1:18), chose and destined them for obedience to Jesus Christ (1 Pet. 1:2), made them a “chosen race” (1 Pet. 2:9; cf. Jas 2:5), gave them to the Son that the Son might give them eternal life (Jn 17:2, 6, 9, 24), wrote their names in the book of life before the foundation of the world (Rev. 13:8; 17:8). Although the doctrines of election and predestination are especially clear in Paul, as witnessed by Augustine’s many quotations in his foundational treatises On the Spirit and the Letter and On the Predestination of the Saints, the latter work also makes heavy use of John 6. All that the Father gives Jesus will come to him (Jn 6:37), nothing will be lost (v. 39), no one can come unless the Father draws him (vv. 44, 65), and all whom the Father teaches do in fact come (v. 45). That God’s lot is what grants faith to believers (2 Pet. 1:1) need not, however, imply the converse—that God’s withholding of irresistible grace is likewise antecedent to the unfaith of the reprobate, as some have taken 1 Peter 2:8 and Jude 4 to say—for the Master bought even the very heretics who bring destruction on themselves (2 Pet. 2:1). Before creating the cosmos the Father destined Christ as a lamb to redeem God’s people by his blood (1 Pet. 1:19-20). Jesus formed the church by his historic proclamation, death, and resurrection. If James and Jude are curiously silent about the redemption and Hebrews has but a single reference to Jesus rising from the dead (13:20), that is because these short, occasional writings to already catechized believers contain only what was most apt for their immediate situations. Hebrews preserves a memory of Jesus as a preacher (2:3) and elaborates on Jesus’s cross-work (12:2) in terms of Israel’s annual ritual of atonement in Leviticus 16 (Heb. 9–10) but applies the effects to the depths of human conscience (9:14). Both Hebrews and 1 Peter see Jesus as Isaiah’s suffering servant of Yahweh who bore the sins of others (Isa. 52:13–53:12; Heb. 9:28; 1 Pet. 2:24-25), and the latter

60

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

adds a Pauline stress on Jesus’s resurrection as the birth of believers into a bright hope (1 Pet. 1:3-4). The narrative momentum of John’s gospel is toward Jesus’s passion, empty tomb, and post-resurrection appearances, and the Johannine correspondence recalls these saving events in terse confessional statements (1 Jn 4:9-10; Rev. 1:5, 18; 5:9). Although the gospel shows little interest in retelling Jesus’s preaching of the kingdom of God (Mk 1:14-15), calling of disciples (Mk 1:16-20), appointment of apostles (Mk 3:13-19), or commission to evangelize the nations (Mt. 28:18-20; Lk. 24:45-49)—probably because these elements were already fixed in the tradition—it nevertheless refers to the Twelve (Jn 6:13, 67, 70-71; 20:24) and alone informs us that Judas was the treasurer (12:6; 13:29), showing that Jesus organized his followers. That God’s Spirit works through the church as his organ in the world is reflected in the ancient creeds by the position of the article about the church. Our NT literature sees the Holy Spirit as the agent of divine self-revelation who inspired the Scriptures and, in the words of the Nicene Creed, “spoke by the prophets” (Heb. 3:7; 4:12-13; 9:8; 10:15-16; 1 Pet. 1:11-12; 2 Pet. 1:21). Indeed the Spirit continues to vouchsafe prophetic oracles through chosen vessels in the Christian community, whose messages are subject to evaluation for orthodoxy of content (1 Jn 4:1-6; Rev. 1:10; 2-3; 4:2; 14:13; 17:3; 19:10; 21:10; 22:6). But also the church as a whole, being heir to Moses’s wish that God would put his Spirit on all his people (Num. 11:29) and to God’s promise in Joel to let all classes of people prophesy and dream (Joel 2:28-29), serves as the Spirit’s mouthpiece (Jn 15:26-27; 16:7-11; Rev. 11:3-13; 22:17). This prophetic ministry is empowered by a comprehensive gift of the Spirit made over to the inchoate church in the days after Jesus’s redemptive work. First Jesus had to be glorified (Jn 7:39), then, on the evening of the original Easter, he bestowed the Spirit on his disciples in principle (Jn 20:22)—even if, according to Luke, the delayed impact entered their experience on Pentecost. Hence “the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you” (1 Pet. 4:14). “He has given us of his own Spirit” (1 Jn 4:13; cf. 3:24). The Spirit has come as a permanent, indwelling presence, another Aide in place of the Lord now ascended and absent (Jn 14:16-17, 25-26; 16:7). In these last days (Heb. 1:2; 2 Pet. 3:3; 1 Jn 2:18; Jude 1:18), then, the “place” on earth where God dwells is now his people, saved by the work of Christ and imbued with the Holy Spirit. As the incarnation made Jesus’s body the supreme instance of a temple, the terrestrial locale of God’s presence (Jn 2:19-22), so the insufflation of the “Spirit of Christ” (1 Pet. 1:11; cf. Jn 14:26 “in my name”; 15:26 “whom I shall send”) makes God available to the human race through his followers (1 Pet. 2:4; Rev. 11:1-2). Ezekiel’s vision of a stream flowing from the temple’s threshold to freshen the Salt Sea (Ezek. 47:112) finds a preliminary fulfillment in the life that brims from one who believes in Jesus (Jn 7:38), while the world awaits the removal of the distinction between heaven and earth, sacred and profane, that will mark the final order (Rev. 21:3, 22; 22:1-5).

Classic Notes of the Church In the course of historical experience the church has had to distinguish between herself and rogue claimants. According to the Nicene Creed the church has a peculiar set of qualities: she is “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.” These characteristics blend together to define one another. One  God, being one, gathers to himself a united people. That they form a unified whole was not tested in situations where the primary strain came from their external environment

THE GOSPEL OF JOHN, THE GENERAL EPISTLES, AND REVELATION



61

(Heb., Jas, 1 Pet., Rev.) Division threatened most where false teaching emerged within (2 Pet. 2:1; 1 Jn 2:19; 2 Jn 9; Jude 19) or where insubordination raised its head (3 Jn 9–10). For first-century Christians of Jewish extraction, as all our authors were, ecclesial unity meant first of all bridging the chief ethnotheological gap of the day by forging a union of Gentile converts with messianic Jews. Jesus’s inclusion of sheep from another fold to make “one flock, one shepherd” (Jn 10:16) took up the OT promise of a reunion of Israel’s divided kingdoms (Ezek. 37:15-28) and applied the language more broadly to incorporate Gentiles (Jn 12:20-24, 31-32). Thereafter the Jewish contingent among his followers had to recognize Gentile believers as co-inheritors of Israel’s blessings under the new covenant (1 Pet. 2:9-10; Rev. 1:6) and integrate them practically into communal life. This posed more of a challenge in the time of Paul at mid-century (Rom. chs 11, 14-15) than it did later, when Jewish Christians were an ever-shrinking minority. The author of 1 John regarded the departure of a heretical faction from the midst of his churches as the unmasking of an alien element that had harbored there temporarily (“they were not of us,” 1 Jn 2:19) rather than a tear within the true church. This concept informed the image of lopping off a rotten branch from a healthy tree in which the later church pictured its treatment of heresies. Its application became questionable when the West and the East (eleventh century) and then the West by itself (sixteenth century) saw tragic schisms open between vital parts of the church, divisions that persist to our day. The kind of unity for which Jesus prayed as he looked beyond his own ministry to that of his elect (Jn 17:11, 21-23) was, from the immediate context, their agreement in the truth of the gospel (vv. 6, 8, 14, 17, 20) and their harmony of love (vv. 23, 26) to make effective their mission in the world (vv. 18, 21, 23). Given the narrator’s lack of interest in formal ministries throughout the fourth gospel and the Johannine epistles, the valid corollary that profound unity should manifest itself in visible, institutional expressions is left for Christian ecumenists to draw and work out on their own. Holy  Because God is holy (Rev. 4:8), he makes his people holy (1 Pet. 1:15-16). Sanctification is both God’s objective setting apart of people to serve his purposes, and his working in them to purify them of sin and renew them in his ways. Because Jesus is God’s holy high priest (Heb. 7:26), those whom he has sanctified once for all (Heb. 2:11; 3:1; 10:10, 14, 29) carry out a priestly role among the nations, that is, they mediate God’s Word to people and represent people to God, functions that were once exclusive to Israel (1 Pet. 2:5, 9; Rev. 1:6). The divine agent who sets God’s people apart is the Spirit with which the Holy One has anointed them (1 Jn 2:20; 3:24; 4:13). A definitive washing takes place at the moment of baptism (Jn 13:10; Heb. 10:22); thereafter purification is progressive (1 Jn 3:3). God has set aside Jesus’s followers “in the truth” (Jn 17:17) and “for obedience” (2 Pet. 1:3). In a world of falsehood the church infallibly guards the truth of the gospel: the truth “abides in us and will be with us forever” (2 Jn 2; cf. 1 Jn 2:14). God is able to keep his church from falling (Jude 24). In keeping with Jesus’s dictum that it is the pure in heart who shall see God (Mt. 5:8), Hebrews points to the holiness “without which no one will see the Lord” (Heb. 12:14). To that end God has granted his people all things that pertain to life and godliness, to make them partakers of his own nature (2 Pet. 1:3-11), and he disciplines his people during this age (Heb. 12:10). The aim is that the church should no longer be conformed to the passions of her former ignorance, but holy in all her conduct (1 Pet. 1:14-18, 22; 2:11-12; 2 Pet. 3:11, 14, 18). Growth in practical righteousness is a criterion by which

62

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

it is possible to distinguish between the children of God and the children of the devil (1 Jn 3:3-10). Catholic  Catholicity characterizes the global web of churches forming a communion in doctrine, worship, and discipline. This reality was in formation during the first century. At the early stage covered by the gospels, the band of several hundred (or small thousands of) Palestinian disciples who clustered about Jesus from Galilee to Judaea (Mk 6:44; 8:9; 1 Cor. 15:6; Acts 1:15; 2:41; 4:5) formed the nucleus but scarcely qualified as catholic. So the fourth gospel, like the others, naturally has little on catholicity. Through the efforts of Paul and of other itinerant missionaries to maintain common standards with Jerusalem and mutual communication among the congregations they founded in ever more distant places there emerged a worldwide fellowship of local churches. The first description of the church as “catholic” came early in the second century (“Wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the catholic church,” Ignatius Smyrnaeans 8.2). Our literature contains intimations of that trajectory. None of our letters were sent to a specific place. Several authors explicitly intended them to circulate: James among Jewish Christians outside of Palestine (Jas 1:1); likewise 1 Peter among “exiles of the Dispersion” in five provinces of Roman Anatolia (1 Pet. 1:1); 1 John probably in greater Ephesus with its suburbs; and the Apocalypse among seven urban centers in Asia (Rev. 1:4, 11). Also several epistles have prominent leaders or whole churches greeting other churches, whether in opening matter (2 Jn 1) or in closing (Heb. 13:2324; 1 Pet. 5:12-13; 2 Jn 13; 3 Jn 15). These writers viewed the church as more than a local entity, extending to encompass at least a region. To combat doctrinal idiosyncrasy Jude could invite readers to hold to “our common salvation [koinē sōtēria]” (Jude 3), a concise argument that foreshadowed patristic appeals to what the unbreakable circle of churches believed as opposed to a heretical corner (Irenaeus Contra Haer. 3.3; Tertullian Praesc. 20–21; Vincent of Lerins Commonit. 2.3 [6]). John reveled in the multicultural constituency of the church comprising persons from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation (Rev. 5:9; 7:9). New Testament scholarship of the twentieth century saw a temporary near-consensus gel around the hypothesis of a “Johannine Christianity.” Articulated differently in various academic quarters, the basic idea was that of a quasi-sectarian movement that was loosely affiliated, or in tension, with the main streams of early Christian tradition that flowed together into the great church (Käsemann 1968: 27–78; Meeks 1972; Martyn 1979; Brown 1979; Smith 1984 [orig. NTS 21 (1976): 222–248]; Rensberger 1988). A maverick enclave of this ilk would not have been catholic. But the construct rested on a farrago of improbable assumptions (Bauckham 1998b; Klink 2007; Köstenberger 2009: 55–9). It depended squarely on critical rejection of the apostolic source of the Johannine corpus, for the NT presents John as standing in the highest echelon of ecclesiastical leadership at the very center of the Jerusalem church during the generation that followed Jesus (e.g., Acts 4:13-22; Gal. 2:9), a position from which he was instrumental in transplanting the doctrine and policies of Jerusalem to Asia (J. Lightfoot 1981 [orig. 6th ed. 1881]), making him a Catholic churchman of the first rank (Rainbow 2014: 352–8). Moreover, even though Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Eusebius, and other historians and heresiologists of the early church were fastidious in detailing all the sectarian movements of which they had information, we look in vain for any reference to a Johannine conventicle. An original genius lies at the back of the Johannine literature giving it unique accents, but at the ecclesial level there was no such proposed sect.

THE GOSPEL OF JOHN, THE GENERAL EPISTLES, AND REVELATION



63

Apostolic  If what Jesus’s apostles taught is the norm of a church’s doctrine, as documented by the apostolic Scriptures and attested by church leaders who derive their public authority by participating in a college of elders that traces its line of succession back to those apostles, that church is apostolic. According to the fourth gospel, Jesus promised that after his departure the Spirit of Truth would lead his followers into all the truth (Jn 16:12-15). At the time of speaking, his glorification (death, resurrection, and ascension) was imminent (“the things that are to come,” v. 13); these events would have to incubate in the reflection of the church before their full significance could unfold. The NT canon captures what is known of that process and its distilled content. In the first century, while the books of the NT were still coming to publication, the good news of Jesus was lodged in the memories of those who had been with him, and they spread it by word of mouth (Jn 15:27; Heb. 2:3-4; 13:7). Our literature contains notable specimens of eyewitness testimony (2 Pet. 1:16-18; Jn 1:14; 19:35; 20:8; 21:7; 21:24; 1 Jn 1:1-3). In this sense the apostles of the first generation were foundational for the church (Rev. 21:14). When false teachers later arose within Christian congregations (Jude 4; 2 Pet. 2:1-3; 1 Jn 2:22-23; 4:2-3; 2 Jn 7, 9), it became necessary to have recourse to a touchstone by which to judge their teaching; this was found in public recollections of the apostles, held to be an immutable deposit (Jude 3, 17; 2 Pet. 3:2; 1 Jn 2:21, 24, 26-27; 2 Jn 9–10), and in the apostles’ manner of interpreting the OT with reference to Christ (2 Pet. 1:18-21; 1 Jn 2:7-8). The lack of any concept of tradition in all the NT general epistles but Hebrews demonstrates their apostolic authenticity indirectly and eloquently. The author of Hebrews received the tradition from his forbears (Heb. 2:3; cf. 13:7), as did Timothy (Heb. 13:23) from Paul.

Ministry of Word and Sacrament Jesus and his apostles impressed on the church a model of ministry that included conveying God’s grace (1 Pet. 4:10) by the dual means of word and sacrament. During Jesus’s earthly ministry he was preoccupied with proclaiming the Word of God (a theme summed up at John 12:44-50; 17:4-8; 18:37). For him the OT Scriptures could not be broken (10:35), while his own words brought eternal life (6:63; 8:51), and even his enemies had to admit that no man ever spoke as he did (7:46). Peering ahead to the age of the church, he prayed for his chosen ones to be sanctified in the truth so that through their word others might believe (17:17-20). Baptized himself (1:29-34), Jesus took over water baptism from John the Baptist as the ritual for marking those who responded to become his disciples (3:22-23; 4:1), though he delegated it to assistants (4:2). According to the synoptic gospels Jesus instituted the eucharist at his last Passover meal on the eve of his crucifixion (Mk 14:12-24 and parallels); John’s gospel has the festal meal (“Passover,” 13:1; “during supper,” 13:2; “the feast,” 13:29; down to the detail of Jesus dipping bread with Judas, 13:26-27) but focuses instead on other events of that evening: Jesus’s washing of the disciples’ feet and giving them the love command. Word  From the liturgy of the synagogue, still fluid in the first century, early Christians adopted the practice at their meetings of having readings from Scripture for all to hear, followed by a homily (Lk. 4:16-21; Acts 13:15; see Martin 1974: 66–76). Just as Paul’s letters were read side by side with passages from the OT in these gatherings (1 Thess. 5:27; Phlm. 2; Col. 2:5; 4:16; cf. 2 Pet. 3:16), so we may assume that the general epistles

64

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

substituted for the presence of their authors giving oral addresses. They were convinced of the power of God’s Word to engender (Jas 1:18; 1 Pet. 1:23-25; Rev. 22:17), to nourish (Jas 1:19-21; 1 Pet. 2:2; Heb. 5:12-14), and to preserve faith by way of reminder (2 Pet. 1:12-13; 1 Jn 2:21; 5:13), as well as to penetrate the recesses of the heart (Heb. 4:12-13) with rebukes (Heb. 5:11-12; Rev. 2–3), to cleanse, sanctify, and bring about participation in the divine nature (Jn 15:3; 2 Pet. 1:4). Each believer has received a gift (charisma) to benefit one another in the church. These fall into two broad categories: speaking and service. A speaker is to utter oracles as from God. There is nothing to restrict these gifts to ordained officers (1 Pet. 4:10-11). The book of Hebrews is a particularly striking example of a hortatory sermon built largely of midrashic expositions of OT Scripture passages carefully selected to serve the writer’s argument (1:5-13; 2:6-8, 12-13; 3:7-11; 5:5-6; 6:13-14; 7:1-2, 17, 21; 8:5, 8-12; 9:20; 10:5-7, 16-17, 30, 37-38; 12:5-6, 26). Hebrews’ author assumes the Holy Spirit to be the ultimate speaker in each scriptural text (3:7; 9:8; 10:15), so that whenever, by whomever, and for whatever reason those texts were first written, his readers now hear the voice of God addressing them quite personally (Rascher 2007). Baptism  Christian baptism is a rite of initiation that involves drenching a person with water to symbolize and effect deep cleansing from sin in the eyes of God. The fourth gospel records the bare fact during Jesus’s ministry (Jn 3:22; 4:1) and says nothing about his final mandate to baptize converts (cf. Mt. 28:19), but at the end the resurrected Lord commissions his disciples to forgive or to retain people’s sins (20:23)—a function the apostles may have exercised at least in part toward those who repented by baptizing them for the forgiveness of sins (cf. Mk 1:4; Acts 2:38). Baptism is part of the basis of the Christian life laid at conversion (Heb. 6:1-2). Those who come to be baptized must repent from dead works and turn to God in faith (Heb. 6:1-2; 10:22). The name of the Lord Jesus Christ (cf. Acts 2:38; 8:16; 10:48; 19:5), or of the Trinity (cf. Mt. 28:19), was invoked (Jas 2:7) to stamp the baptizand as belonging to God; this distinguishes Christian baptism from ceremonial washings and baths of various religions in Greco-Roman antiquity (“baptisms” in Heb. 6:2). Application of water to the body corresponds to the sprinkling of an evil conscience (Heb. 10:22; 1 Pet. 3:21; Rev. 7:14[?]; 22:14[?]). The baptizand rises in union with the resurrected Christ (1 Pet. 3:21). Through the laying on of hands immediately afterwards (Heb. 6:2; cf. Acts 19:5-6) God grants an anointing with the Holy Spirit (1 Jn 2:20, 27). (In the first century Baptism and Confirmation were not yet separate sacraments.) Where such a faith-appeal is made, baptism, like Noah’s ark, “saves” from divine judgment (1 Pet. 3:21). John’s writings show little interest in the external rite as such, but dominical sayings recorded in the gospel indicate that regeneration is its essence. “Of water and Spirit” denotes a single means of birth into God’s kingdom, for one preposition governs both nouns (Jn 3:5). Nicodemus should have known God’s promise to sprinkle Israel with clean water and put his Spirit in them to make in them a new heart (Ezek. 36:25-27), fulfilled by Jesus’s baptizing with water and Spirit (Jn 1:26-27, 33; cf. Mk 1:8). Jesus’s cross-service provides a comprehensive bath. After baptism the believer continues to need cleansing for daily defilement (1 Jn 1:7, 9; 2:1-2), but the bath is not repeated (Jn 13:10). Eucharist  The importance accorded to the Lord’s Supper by the early Christians as an integral element of their weekly gatherings (Acts 20:7; 1 Cor. 11:18, 20, 33) stands in

THE GOSPEL OF JOHN, THE GENERAL EPISTLES, AND REVELATION



65

curious contrast to the paucity of references to it in the NT. In our literature, Hebrews, James, 1–2 Peter, 1–3 John, and the book of Revelation offer nothing on the topic. (Some maximalist liturgical readers have found an allusion in Hebrews 13:10. But juxtaposed to an emphasis on grace rather than on foods [v. 9], the “altar” reserved for Christ’s followers to eat from, like the “Holy Place” where he offered himself [9:12], is surely metaphorical. Likewise Jesus Christ’s “coming in flesh” [categorical present participle, 2 Jn 7] denotes his once-for-all incarnation [cf. 1 Jn 4:2], not an iterative coming in transubstantiation.) The want of mention of Holy Communion is nothing more than an accident of the targeted purposes of these letters. At first the eucharistic memorial was probably celebrated as part of a communal meal (Acts 2:42, 46; 20:7, 11; 1 Cor. 11:21-22) which, as an expression of mutual love, came to be called the love-feast (agapē, Jude 12). The absence of the institution of the eucharist from John 13 can be interpreted either as a polemical omission by an anti-sacramental sect, or, more credibly, as a matter of John’s presupposing a given that he had no need to belabor when supplementing the Synoptic tradition with his personal memoirs. Jesus’s words in John 6:53-58 have become in some circles a proof-text for the Real Presence. We must distinguish between what he meant and what the text means. The setting was a synagogue in Capernaum near the Passover season (vv. 24, 59), the hearers were unreceptive Jews (vv. 41-42, 52), and the Last Supper was nowhere on the horizon. Having fed the 5,000, Jesus invited them to see him not as a miraculous bringer of manna for their bellies but as God’s bread from heaven in whom they must believe (vv. 26-34). He spoke not of eating his “body” (sōma, found in all NT eucharistic texts) but of munching his “flesh” (sarx, vv. 53-56), a term that pointed to his mortality. In this context to eat his flesh and drink his blood was to believe in him as the crucified savior, a notion that gave offense to Jews looking for a triumphant Messiah (vv. 14-15, 60-61, 66). That said, for Christian readers Jesus’s language of eating and drinking inevitably evokes the eucharistic feast. The text, then, is not about the sacrament per se, but it points to the historic saving event and its effect of eternal life that the sacrament communicates to those who believe. Confession of Sin  A Christian who falls ill may summon the elders of the church to come, hear the sick person’s confession of any associated sin, and pray over the person for forgiveness and healing, anointing the sufferer with oil (Jas 5:14-16; 1 Jn 5:16). Aspects of this ancient practice, which went back at least to the time of Jesus (Mk 6:13), informed the patristic and medieval development of the sacraments of Penance and of the Last Rites.

Orders To fulfill her mission, the church must manifest to the world mutual love among her members (Jn 13:12-17, 34-35; Heb. 13:1; Jas 2:8; 1 Pet. 1:22; 4:8; 2 Pet. 1:7; 1 Jn 2:711; 3:11-18; 4:4:7–5:5; 2 Jn 5). Every believer is given a portion of God’s varied grace, a charism to be exercised for one another (1 Pet. 4:10): some to utter words of edification, others to serve (1 Pet. 4:10-11). A few believers have a special calling to shepherd and teach others (Heb. 13:7, 17; Jas 3:1; 1 Pet. 5:1-5). The early Christian custom of having recognized leaders lay hands on a man to authorize and empower him for this ministry (Acts 9:17; 13:3; 1 Tim. 4:14; 2 Tim. 1:6; Didache 15.1) happens to be unattested in either the Johannine literature or the general epistles. By the time of Ignatius, bishop

66

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

of Antioch into the first decade(s) of the second century, a threefold order of ministry consisted of the offices of bishop, presbyters (priests), and deacons (Letters, passim). In the period of the New Testament the nomenclature for these offices was still fluid, but some of the functions had clarified. Our slice of the NT canon has no occurrence of “deacon” (diakonos) for an office holder, nor are there instances of persons, whether men or women, who performed service specially in the name of the church (cf. the Pauline texts Rom. 16:1; Phil. 1:1; 1 Tim. 3:813). In John 12:26 the term refers to any disciple who follows Jesus to serve him. “Elders” (presbyteroi) in Mediterranean antiquity belonged to a respected ruling council whether at the local level (of the church: Jas 5:14; 1 Pet. 5:1, 5) or higher (of government: Egypt—Gen. 50:7; Judaea—Acts 4:5; Rome—the senatus, from senex). Eldership of the church entailed shepherding it by example (1 Pet. 5:2-3). Peter and John both called themselves elders (1 Pet. 5:1; 2 Jn 1; 3 Jn 1), though they had the status of pillar apostles (Gal. 2:6, 9). This modesty lends to the documents another badge of authenticity. For the office of bishop the NT has neither technical term nor formal criteria. (A NT episkopos [Phil. 1:1; 1 Tim. 3:2] is counted among elders [cf. Acts 20:17, 28; 1 Pet. 5:1-2; Tit. 1:5, 7]. The same man who oversaw a house church also sat on the local presbytery with overseers of other churches.) Apostles and their associates whose scope was regional or international anticipated some of the duties that bishops later assumed—appointing elders from place to place (Acts 14:23; 1 Tim. 5:22) and consolidating churches (1 Tim.; Tit.)—but were mainly on the road. The itinerant brethren of 3 John have been compared to the charismatic teachers and prophets of Didache 11–13. After James of Jerusalem, the next instance of permanent oversight was afforded by John residing in Ephesus, who probably bore the model of James with him. While it is left to patristic sources to document his geographical presence, already suggested by the Apocalypse (chs 1–3), the Johannine literature shows a fatherly caregiver conscious of his indispensability as a primary witness to Jesus (Jn 21:24; 1 Jn 1:1-4), who nevertheless wears his authority lightly (1 Jn 2:20-21, 27). Yet he will take to task Diotrephes, presumably a local elder, for trying to stake out his own cell church as a jurisdiction from which the author’s influence is excluded (3 Jn). This looks like the first clash between the apostolic–episcopal principle and the congregational principle in church government, and John was not about to let the church atomize into petty autonomies. If the episcopate became monarchic and the orders of ministry stratified only in the second century, nevertheless a flexible style of leadership that provided networking among churches had taken definite shape already in the first. Thus by the end of the first century, during the final third of which the last of Jesus's apostles completed their witness (Peter, James, Jude, John) and the next generation of ecclesiastical leaders stepped up (author of Hebrews), many roots of the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic” church of the patristic period and of its ordered ministry were firmly in place and already bearing fruit.

REFERENCES Bauckham, R. (1998a), “John for Readers of Mark,” in R. Bauckham (ed.), The Gospels for all Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences, 147–71, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Bauckham, R., ed. (1998b), The Gospels for all Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

THE GOSPEL OF JOHN, THE GENERAL EPISTLES, AND REVELATION



67

Braun, F.-M. (1959–1966), Jean le théologien, 3 vols., Paris: J. Gabalda. Brown, R. E. (1979), The Community of the Beloved Disciple: The Life, Loves, and Hates of an Individual Church in New Testament Times, New York: Paulist. Brown, R. E. (2003), An Introduction to the Gospel of John, edited, updated, introduced, and concluded by F. J. Moloney, Anchor Bible Reference Library, New York: Doubleday. Bultmann, R. K. (1971), The Gospel of John: A Commentary, Philadelphia: Westminster. Carson, D. and D. J. Moo (2005), An Introduction to the New Testament, 2nd ed., Grand Rapids: Zondervan. Clement. (1919), Clement of Alexandria, trans. G. Butterworth, Loeb Classical Library, London and New York: William Heinemann and G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Guthrie, D. (1970), New Testament Introduction, 3rd ed., Downers Grove: Inter-Varsity. Käsemann, E. (1968), The Testament of Jesus: A Study of the Gospel of John in the Light of Chapter 17, trans. G. Krodel, Philadelphia: Fortress. Klink, E. W. I. (2007), The Sheep of the Fold: The Audience and Origin of the Gospel of John, SNTSMS, Vol. 141, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Köstenberger, A. J. (2009), A Theology of John’s Gospel and Letters: The Word, the Christ, the Son of God, Biblical theology of the New Testament, Grand Rapids: Zondervan. Kümmel, W. G. (1975), Introduction to the New Testament, trans. H. C. Kee, rev. ed., London: SCM. Lightfoot, J. (1981 [orig. 6th ed. 1881]), “The Christian Ministry,” in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians, 181–269, Lynn: Hendrickson. Lightfoot, R. (1956), St. John’s Gospel, Oxford: Clarendon. Martin, R. P. (1974), Worship in the Early Church, rev. ed., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Martyn, J. L. (1979), History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel, 2nd ed., Nashville: Abingdon. Meeks, W. A. (1972), “The Man from Heaven in Johannine Sctarianism,” JBL 91: 44–72. Rainbow, P. A. (2008), The Pith of the Apocalypse: Essential Message and Principles for Interpretation, Eugene: Wipf and Stock. Rainbow, P. A. (2014), Johannine Theology: The Gospel, the Epistles and the Apocalypse, Downers Grove: InterVarsity. Rascher, A. (2007), Schiftauslegung und Christologie im Hebräerbrief, BZNW, Vol. 153, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Rensberger, D. (1988), Johannine Faith and Liberating Community, Philadelphia: Westminster. Richards, E. R. (2004), Paul and First-Century Letter Writing: Secretaries, Composition and Collection, Downers Grove: InterVarsity. Robinson, J. (1985), The Priority of John, ed. J. Coakley, London: SCM. Smith, D. M. (1984 [orig. NTS 21 (1976): 222–48]), “Johannine Christianity,” in Johannine Christianity: Essays on Its Setting, Sources, and Theology, 1–36, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

68

PART II

Historical and Confessional Traditions

70



Chapter SIX

Patristic Ecclesiology in the Latin West JAMES K. LEE

INTRODUCTION One of the distinctive features of early Christian theology in the Latin West is a preoccupation with the doctrine of the church (Evans 1972: 1). What is the nature of the church? What constitutes membership in the church? Early Latin theologians addressed such questions in distinct contexts and with particular concerns. None did so in isolated fashion—that is, none approached ecclesiology as a separate theological topic in contradistinction to christology, pneumatology, and other doctrines. The doctrine of the church was formed in the broader context of the development of Western theology as a whole. Perhaps for this reason, there are no treatises dedicated solely to the church in the Latin West (Hinson 1986: 1). In order to trace the development of early Western ecclesiology, it is necessary to explore the vast literary output of prominent Latin theologians and to examine the relationships between the church, Christ, and the Holy Spirit. For the defining marks of Latin patristic ecclesiology can be drawn in terms of the church’s mediation of Christ and the Spirit.

TERTULLIAN OF CARTHAGE Tertullian (ca. 160–225) is the first Latin-writing theologian whose works are extant. His writings touch on nearly every aspect of early Christian life and thought, and they supply much of the theological vocabulary of Western Christianity (Dunn 2004: 10–11). The details of Tertullian’s life are obscure. He reportedly grew up as a pagan in Carthage, North Africa, before converting to Christianity. By the second century, North Africa enjoyed prosperity as a Roman province, and Carthage had a population of at least 300,000, making it the second largest city in the Western half of the Roman Empire (Merdinger 2014: 229). Scholars now understand Africa to have retained its pre-Roman heritage in the midst of Roman colonization, such that African Christians could bear multiple identities and cultures (Wilhite 2017: 14–5). A number of religions were propagated in Africa, including indigenous and pagan cults that came from Egypt, Greece, and Rome (Decret 2009: 6). The first evidence of Christianity in North Africa emerges near the end of the second century, with the condemnation of twelve Christian converts who were beheaded for claiming Jesus as Lord (Dominus). Tertullian’s understanding of the church

72

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

developed in the context of persecution, although such persecution was sporadic during this period. For Tertullian, the church is the medium of salvation and holiness, and membership in the church requires adherence to dual baptismal oaths: 1) the rejection of traditional practices of Punic and Roman idolatry; and 2) a commitment to Christ by faithful observance of the church’s ritual, moral, and ascetic practices (Burns and Jensen 2014: 601). Anyone who violates these baptismal oaths by committing sin must be excluded from eucharistic fellowship. Some may return after performing penance, but those who commit grave sins such as idolatry, adultery, and murder could not be readmitted to eucharistic communion. This is necessary in order to preserve the church’s holiness, for the church is the body of Christ, whose members are one and holy. Tertullian uses many images from Scripture in order to depict the church’s holiness: the church is Noah’s ark, in which believers are kept free from impurity; the church is the camp of light at war with the army of pagan darkness; the church is the true body of Christ free from the stain of sin (Osborn 1997: 178). The church is also the bride of Christ, a virgin, and a mother, and Tertullian is the first to connect the church as mother with God as Father. Tertullian also closely associates the church with the one divinity of the Trinity. The church is apostolic in terms of episcopal succession and doctrinal continuity. The bishops are successors of the apostles, and the teaching received from the apostles comes from God through Christ. Apostolic churches display their unity in teaching, discipline, and the sacraments, while heretics forfeit unity. Tertullian makes a clear distinction between the clergy and the people by using the Roman civil terminology of ordo and plebs (Hall 2004: 51). While he upholds the authority of the offices of bishop, presbyter, and deacon, Tertullian sharply criticizes bishops who seek to pardon serious sinners and to readmit them to communion. In principle, the church has the power to remit grave sins, but a bishop who does so violates the virginal purity of the church and encourages further sin. Tertullian does not explicitly use the formula of the church as one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, but it is clear from his writings that the true church must bear these marks (Osborn 1997: 181). In the early third century, Tertullian committed himself to the New Prophecy, also known as Montanism, which claimed charismatic authority among its members. It is generally accepted that Tertullian’s Montanism was not an attempt to separate from the Catholic Church (Rankin 1995: 43–6). In any case, Tertullian’s works demonstrate an increasing emphasis upon the work of the Spirit, who is present and active in the church as revealed by the gifts of prophecy, healing, and ethical conduct. The sanctifying power of the Spirit need not be associated with an ecclesiastical office, for it could be manifested among laity and clergy alike. Only the spiritual, who demonstrate the power of the Spirit in unmistakable fashion, can be considered true members of the church. The presence of the Holy Spirit demarcates the spiritual ones; this is the meaning of the Paraclete passages from John 14–16. Tertullian is uncompromising in this regard, for he goes so far as to say that the church is the Spirit. Tertullian thus holds a perfectionist and exclusionist ecclesiology (Rankin 1995: 92–8), wherein the church on earth coincides with an eschatological ideal that excludes the presence of sinful members. In Tertullian’s view, the church’s purity and holiness depend upon preservation from the pollution of apostates. Tertullian is the herald of a kind of rigorism that refuses to reconcile serious sinners with the church. Further, Tertullian’s ecclesiology is marked by an elitist tendency, for the church consists solely

PATRISTIC ECCLESIOLOGY IN THE LATIN WEST



73

of the elite who can claim possession of the Spirit as present in demonstrable power. In Tertullian’s writings, there is an increasing tension between the members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the true body of spiritual believers. The church, represented by Noah’s ark, is an exclusive club without room for sinners, for the church must be free from the stain of sin as the bride and body of Christ, in whom the power of the Spirit resides.

CYPRIAN OF CARTHAGE Cyprian (ca. 200–58) was born of curial class, and prior to becoming a Christian enjoyed a successful career in Carthage as a master of rhetoric. In 246, he converted from polytheism to Christianity, having become disgusted with the corruption and immorality of the imperial society. Soon after his conversion, Cyprian was ordained a presbyter, and he would eventually be consecrated bishop of Carthage by the laying on of hands from Numidian bishops. After becoming a bishop, Cyprian was expected to avoid any entanglement in worldly affairs and to be committed to his ecclesial responsibilities. As in Tertullian’s day, the church at Carthage celebrated eucharistic worship daily at one altar as a sign of the church’s unity. According to Cyprian, the Lord’s passion is the sacrifice of the church offered at the altar (Chadwick 2001: 148). Cyprian the bishop was a man of the church whose thought was formed by principles of Roman law (Brent 2010: 24). Cyprian’s view of the church can be understood as an alternative society to that of the Roman Empire (Evans 1972: 47), for the church is a universal society constituted by the law of God and governed by the bishops in order to preserve the peace and concord of Christ. Cyprian inherited the see of Carthage during a time of plague and societal discord. Within two years of Cyprian’s consecration, the emperor Decius sought to restore the old religion of the empire, and thus instigated a sustained persecution of Christians. All citizens were required to sacrifice to the pagan gods under the threat of torture, imprisonment, and death. Everyone had to produce a signed certificate (libellus) attesting to the act of sacrifice. Many Christians renounced their allegiance to Christ and committed idolatry; some such as Cyprian went into hiding; others were martyred. After the death of Decius in 251, persecution subsided, and the church had to deal with the thorny issue of how to reconcile those who had lapsed in the midst of persecution. This required gathering bishops and calling councils in North Africa, Rome, and elsewhere. Initially, Cyprian and a group of clergy in Rome decided to exclude from eucharistic communion those who had sacrificed, as well as those who had cheated by obtaining a libellus without sacrifice (Hall 2004: 52). Genuine penitents could only be restored on their deathbed. This issue would be further complicated by the case of Novatian. Novatian was a presbyter in Rome who denied grave sinners the opportunity for reconciliation with the church. After the death of Fabian in 250, the synod elected Cornelius bishop of Rome. Cornelius was known to favor leniency toward the lapsed. Novatian found support from three rigorist bishops who chose to appoint him bishop of Rome. In addition, Novatian’s supporters attempted to take over the church in Carthage, but Cyprian returned in order to defend his episcopal see. In his writings, Cyprian argues that any attempt to divide the church by schism is evil. The church’s unity is found in the unity of the episcopacy as a sign of the Trinity. Using images found in Tertullian’s works, Cyprian speaks of the church as bride and mother by virtue of the sacraments. To divide the church is to be an adulterer, and no one can have

74

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

God as Father who does not have the church as mother. For Cyprian, Novatian was guilty of dividing the church, for Cornelius had been validly elected the bishop of Rome. The death of Cornelius in 254 led to the election of Pope Stephen I. By this time, bishops in Rome and North Africa had arrived at general agreement over the reconciliation of the lapsed after due penance. Many of Cyprian’s fellow bishops preferred a moderate position, wherein the lapsed could be forgiven after three years of penance (Wilhite 2017: 144). Cyprian’s rigorist position was not absolute, yet he maintained that those who committed serious sin after baptism were cut off from Christ, and anyone who separated from the bishop did not belong to the church. The Holy Spirit manifested power through the visible, institutional church, which dispensed the mercy of God through the sacraments. For Cyprian, there is no salvation outside of the visible church. In addition, there is no necessary tension between the hierarchy and the laity, for the church is united as one body around the bishop. It is the bishop’s duty to preserve the unity and peace of the church (Evans 1972: 135). The charismatic gifts of the Spirit are given to laity and clergy alike, for the authority given by Christ to the apostles in John 20 must arise from obedience to the commandment to love and serve one another in John 15. In contrast to Tertullian, Cyprian employs these Johannine passages in order to bring together the church’s charismatic and institutional aspects. The bishop exercises a unique kind of judicial authority, as handed on by the apostles. Charity is a mark of the episcopacy, and the church’s bond of charity is maintained by union with the bishop and the worldwide episcopacy. Despite this insistence upon unity with the universal episcopacy, Cyprian found himself at odds with Pope Stephen on the issue of the validity of baptism practiced by schismatic groups. Cyprian argued that only the one, true church could baptize, so all outsiders must be initiated by being baptized. Both Stephen and Cyprian affirmed one baptism, but Stephen was willing to recognize the baptism of those beyond the visible church. This issue remained unresolved when Cyprian was martyred under the persecution of Valerian in 258. Stephen was also martyred, and the controversy surrounding schismatic baptism continued over the course of the next two centuries. In the end, Stephen’s position prevailed, but Cyprian’s contributions to Latin ecclesiology are profound. Like Tertullian, Cyprian sought to maintain the church’s holiness by excluding serious sinners from eucharistic communion. However, Cyprian also worked to find conditions under which penitents could be readmitted. Moreover, in Cyprian’s ecclesiology, the church’s perfection does not depend solely upon the sinlessness of the members, but rather requires union around the bishop and the worldwide episcopacy. Unlike Tertullian, Cyprian does not collapse the eschatological church with the pilgrim church, for the church on earth is composed of both good and wicked, wheat and tares (Evans 1972: 56). God will separate the sheep from the goats at the final judgment, but the church remains holy as the spouse of Christ, led by the Spirit. Outside of the one church, there is no salvation. Cyprian resists the tendency to set the Spirit over against the marks of the visible church. Augustine, as pastor and bishop of Hippo in North Africa during the fifth century, builds upon and diverges from predecessors such as Tertullian and Cyprian in his emerging ecclesiology.

AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO Augustine of Hippo (354–430) is a pivotal figure in the development of Latin ecclesiology. Augustine attempted to mitigate the rigorism of Tertullian while maintaining Cyprian’s

PATRISTIC ECCLESIOLOGY IN THE LATIN WEST



75

insistence upon unity around the episcopacy. Augustine’s thought on the church developed from his early writings to his later works, particularly in the midst of his dispute with the Donatists. By Augustine’s time, North Africa was divided between Catholics and Donatists, a division that occurred following the double election of Majorinus and Caecilian to the see of Carthage sometime between 308 and 311. Caecilian was accused of being consecrated by a traditor, someone who “handed over” the Scriptures to be desecrated in the midst of persecution. Majorinus was elected by an opposing party, and he was soon succeeded by Donatus. Those who supported Donatus in the resulting schism became known as Donatists. The Donatists not only rejected episcopal consecration by apostates, but also insisted on re-baptism for those who entered their community from the outside. By the 390s, there were hundreds of Donatist bishops, and in parts of North Africa, Donatists formed the majority of Christians. Against the Donatists, Augustine argued that the church cannot be confined to a single community in North Africa, for the universal (catholica) church is spread throughout the world. Further, the sacraments have effects not because of the holiness of the minister, but because of the power of Christ. When baptism is administered, it is Christ who baptizes. There is only one baptism since there is only one Christ, and Augustine rejected the practice of re-baptism. The Donatists have a valid baptism, but they cut themselves off from the effects of the sacraments because they lack charity. For Augustine, the church’s unity is grounded in the Trinity, for the charity “poured into our hearts” (Rom. 5:5) is nothing less than the Holy Spirit, who binds the members of the church together as one body. The Holy Spirit is the soul of the body of Christ, and the church is holy because of the presence and activity of the Spirit. Moreover, the church’s holiness is not lost due to the presence of sinners in the fold. Following the influence of Cyprian, as well as the dissident Donatist theologian Tyconius, Augustine held that the church is a mixed body of good and wicked. The church is the city of God on pilgrimage to the heavenly homeland, but during this time, the church is composed of both good and bad citizens. In the end, there are two cities, heavenly and earthly, but they are intermingled at present. All of the members of the church are sinful. Every saint is also a sinner. Only at the eschaton will the elect be separated from the reprobate. Augustine uses images from Scripture in order to distinguish between the pilgrim church on earth and the heavenly, eschatological kingdom. The church is a mother who gives birth to her members through baptism, yet she is also the heavenly mother Jerusalem. The church is the bride of Christ, united to her bridegroom by the sacraments, for the sacraments mediate the life-giving work of Christ and the Spirit. She will be the spotless bride, perfectly free from sin, only at the end time. The church is the body of Christ, which is built up in history by means of the sacraments. Baptism incorporates new members into the body, and the eucharist unites the church on earth with the heavenly city of God as one sacrifice. The church is a sacrifice as the one body of Christ, offered under the form of a servant at the eucharistic altar. This is the daily sacrifice of Christians, the sacrifice of the “whole Christ” (totus Christus), head and members, which is pleasing and acceptable to God. As a mixed body, the church on earth must follow the head to heaven by enduring the trials and temptations of the journey, undergoing a process of purification and transformation. Christ the head enters into solidarity with the members such that they speak in one voice (una vox) as one body. Yet the church on earth remains in a mixed condition, as signified by Noah’s ark. The ark is filled with the good and

76

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

the wicked as it floats on the waves of this world. Despite the pilgrim church’s mixed constitution, the members of Christ’s body are united by the invisible bond of charity. Augustine’s distinction between the visible community and the invisible communion of charity does not undermine the significance of the empirical church. In this regard, Augustine claims to follow Cyprian, whom the Donatists also recognize as an authority. There is no salvation outside of the one church, for the church is the communion of charity, Christ, and the Spirit (Root 2013: 67). For Augustine, the Holy Spirit may work beyond the visible bounds of the church in order to bring others into the one communion of charity at some future time, for there are some outside of the church who will be inside, and there are some inside the church who will be outside. This does not mean that there is an invisible body of charity which subsists apart from the visible church. Rather, the Holy Spirit works to bring those outside of the church’s visible bonds into the very same communion of charity mediated by the sacraments. Participation in the sacraments is not a guarantee of participation in charity, as in the case of those schismatics who cut themselves off from the body, yet the sacraments remain essential, for they retain their mediatory role in the building up of the body of Christ until the eschaton, when the sacraments will no longer be necessary (Lee 2017: xxvi). Until then, the Spirit works through the visible sacraments, for the true church is the visible Catholic Church, which rises up and is seen by all. Augustine affirmed Cyprian’s view of the church’s unity around the episcopacy, but Augustine maintains that the church’s holiness does not depend upon the minister. The Paraclete passages of John 16 must be interpreted in light of the commissioning of the apostles, particularly Peter, who is a sign of the church’s unity. Peter represents the whole church in confessing Christ as the Son of God, yet the apostles also possess a particular mission as ministers of the sacraments. The entire human race must undergo a transformation from carnal to spiritual, a transformation that Augustine links to the sacraments. The sacraments mediate the transformative work of the Spirit, and so the spiritual are limited neither to the apostles, nor to the elite few who manifest certain charismatic gifts. Instead, the spiritual are those who participate in the sacraments celebrated by the church throughout the world. In addition, Augustine aimed to reconcile sinners with the church. When sinners repent of post-baptismal sin within the unity of the universal communion, the prayers of the saints win forgiveness, and the penitents receive the Holy Spirit through the ritual of reconciliation. Unlike Tertullian, Augustine argued that there was no sin that could not be forgiven by God and the church. Augustine’s identification of the Spirit as the source of the church’s unity and holiness provides a coherent theology of repentance and reconciliation (Burns and Jensen 2014: 351). Augustine thus laid the foundation for Western penitential practice based upon a rich ecclesiology that mitigated the rigorism of Tertullian while maintaining Cyprian’s adherence to the unity and holiness of the one church, outside of which there is no salvation. As such, Augustine’s approach to ecclesial membership is more inclusive than his North African predecessors. Augustine’s thought on the church left an indelible mark upon Western Christianity, and subsequent theologians relied heavily on his teaching.

POPE LEO THE GREAT Pope Leo the Great (ca. 400–61) became the bishop of Rome during the year 440 in the midst of uncertainty in the West and controversy in the East. Leo’s understanding of the church reflects the Augustinian distinction between the two cities, earthly and heavenly.

PATRISTIC ECCLESIOLOGY IN THE LATIN WEST



77

Like Augustine, Leo recognizes that the cities are intermingled during the church’s pilgrimage, yet the peace of the earthly city is a positive good to be pursued by the citizens of the heavenly Jerusalem. Leo further argues that the peace and temporal prosperity of the empire can be linked directly to the peace and unity of the church (Evans 1972: 130). While Leo distinguishes between the two realms (imperia) of church and empire, he sees them as partners whose interests go hand in hand. At the outbreak of the christological controversy in the East, the emperor Theodosius invited Leo to provide support for his position. Leo intervened in the controversy by commissioning a simple statement that affirmed the Western view of Christ as two natures in a single persona. Christ is both God and man, and therefore mediator. In June 449, Leo sent this statement, known as Leo’s Tome, to a synod of bishops as a sign of his Petrine authority. Leo was intent on expanding the authority of Rome in the midst of threats from invading peoples, including the Vandals and Attila’s Huns. According to Leo, the see of Peter enabled the church to become head of the world, and to reign over a vast empire. The church of Peter and Paul was predestined by God for leadership in the universal church, with jurisdiction not only over Rome but over every church. The Tome manifested Rome’s teaching authority over the churches of the East. After the council of Chalcedon in 451, which endorsed the teaching of the Tome, Leo claimed an important victory. The bishop of Rome rightly possesses magisterial authority over the church, and he serves as a visible sign of ecclesial unity. The emperor acts accordingly by rooting out and deposing heretics, and thus church and empire work together. Leo’s development of the papacy goes beyond the previous Latin tradition by positing the church not merely as a parallel society, but as a divinely instituted spiritual imperium, which must be respected and supported by any imperial administration. Leo draws heavily upon Roman imperial law, along with his reading of Scripture, in order to establish papal primacy. The apostle Peter, having been the first to confess Jesus as Christ, is entrusted with the governance of the church in terms of doctrine, discipline, and jurisdiction (Evans 1972: 136). Peter’s unique role is defined in relation to Christ and to the other apostles by Christ himself, who calls Peter “rock” and strengthens him. Whatever is done rightly by Peter is done by Christ. Peter is placed over the calling of all peoples, and Peter properly reigns over all whom Christ rules first of all (Neil 2009: 41). This Petrine authority is passed on to each successor. While church and empire contribute to the wellbeing of the other, the Roman see maintains spiritual authority as head of the entire world. Leo’s theology of the church follows from his christology and pneumatology. By virtue of the incarnation, Christ is present not only as the firstborn of creation, but also in all of his saints, who make up his body. Following Augustine, Leo declares that the head cannot be separated from the members, nor the members from the head. The church is the Temple of God, in whom the Spirit dwells in order to reconcile the world. Christ keeps the church holy and spotless, and the Spirit makes the church bear fruit as a mother. In baptism, she brings forth children of God, and in Christ, the whole world receives the adoption of sons. Christ told Peter to “feed my sheep” (Jn 21:17), and Christ guides all pastors while forming a single flock. The church celebrates the paschal sacrifice at the eucharistic altar, sharing in the body and blood of Christ in order to be changed into him. Christ lives in his church, and the church finds life in him. Leo adopts the main lines of Augustine’s thought on the church while further developing the authority of the bishop of Rome. Pope Leo the Great’s ecclesiology is predicated upon the mediatory role of the church as the presence of Christ on earth and the temple of the Holy Spirit. The bishop of Rome

78

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

is the sign and guarantee of unity, and he possesses doctrinal and juridical authority. Undoubtedly, Leo’s formulation of papal primacy is a crucial feature of Western patristic ecclesiology carried forward by Gregory the Great.

GREGORY THE GREAT Gregory (ca. 540–604) was the son of a Roman senator and grandson of Pope Felix III. Three of his aunts had become nuns, and Gregory chose to enter religious life, founding his own monastery of St. Andrew in Rome. Gregory followed a life of asceticism, selfdiscipline, and humility. He was ordained a deacon by Pope Pelagius II and became known for his preaching, which explored the literal, moral, and allegorical meanings of Scripture (Markus 1997: 46). In 590, Pope Pelagius died, and Gregory was elevated to the papacy. In his view, this was like “asking an ape to act like a lion” (Chadwick 2001: 659). Gregory became the bishop of Rome during a time of political and ecclesiastical turmoil, along with natural hardships such as drought, famine, and plague. Gregory inherited the teaching on papal primacy from Leo the Great, which he synthesized with his understanding of Augustine and the monastic tradition. Like Leo, Gregory conceived of the church as a unified imperium, with orders corresponding to civil society. The three traditional orders of senators, equestrians, and plebs in the empire correspond to the bishops, religious, and married in the church (Evans 1972: 142). The bishop is the Lord’s anointed, seated upon a throne of God, worthy of the respect paid to secular rulers. Gregory encouraged bishops to undertake civil responsibilities when necessary, but he also lamented the tendency among bishops to neglect the proper duties of preaching. Bishops must ask themselves how they will be judged according to their office, for some have become too secular. Gregory had to correct clerics who were guilty of crimes such as fraud, violence, and theft. Not only was he expected to protect the church, but Gregory was also responsible for the city of Rome, which had come under attack from the Lombards. From Augustine, Gregory learned that the church’s present enemies may become her future members, so his primary concern was to convert non-Christians. Gregory’s allegorical interpretation of Scripture reveals his thought on the church. In Gregory’s view, the figure of Job represents the suffering church in the sixth century undergoing crisis and trial. Job is a type of Christ and the church, while Job’s friends signify heretics such as Arians, Nestorians, and Donatists. Gregory’s Augustinianism is on display as he identifies the antithesis between the love of God and the love of self. The inordinate love of self is a mark of Satan’s work in the world and in the church. The intrusion of the lust for power among clerics is a sign of the imminent coming of the antichrist before the final struggle of good and evil. There is an urgent eschatological expectancy in Gregory’s writings, and he repeatedly draws an antithesis between the body of Christ and the members of the devil (Moorhead 2005: 36). Following Augustine, Gregory holds that the two bodies are comingled during this time on earth. Despite this mixed condition, Christ the redeemer is one with the holy church since together they form one body. The Holy Spirit joins Christians to this body by indwelling them and empowering them to participate in Christ’s heavenly life by growth in the virtues of faith, hope, and charity. United to Christ the head, the members offer themselves as a sacrifice, for just as Job’s friends are ordered to offer their sacrifices through Job, so Christians must offer their sacrifice through the Catholic Church. God accepts sacrifice only from the one church in which salvation is found and forgiveness is offered. Gregory asserts that the true sacrifice of the redeemer is immolated in the Catholic Church.

PATRISTIC ECCLESIOLOGY IN THE LATIN WEST



79

For Gregory, the church unites the elect and enables them to contemplate the heavenly mysteries. The monastic life of contemplation, which leads to the vision of God, can be realized in the church alone, for the truth shines forth from the church. Moreover, the church transmits the power of the Holy Spirit, who unites the members of the body in charity and compassion. The church stands against the anticommunion of the Leviathan, the devil, who draws some away by the things of this world. The devil sets himself up against the author of virtue in an attempt to take away from the perpetual sacrifice. The contemplative life of the church, however, enables one to let go of temporal things in order to share in the sacrifice of the one Christ. The church offers this sacrifice at the eucharistic altar, where heaven and earth are joined, and the visible and invisible merge as one. Gregory’s ecclesiology exhibits the traditional four marks of the church, yet his emphasis upon the monastic dimension of the church’s life is an important contribution to Western Christianity. Only in the church can one find the life of contemplation following conversion. This inspired Gregory to send his trusted monks on missions, a decision that would have a deep and lasting impact upon the church’s growth and resilience during the medieval period. For Gregory, the church mediates the charity and compassion of Christ and the Holy Spirit by means of the sacraments. Despite the difficulties and trials found within and outside of the church, Gregory understood the sufferings of the one body as a preparation for the joy to come.

CONCLUSION Ecclesiology in the Latin West developed over the course of several centuries in distinct sociopolitical and ecclesial contexts. According to the early Latin theologians, the church is the medium of holiness and salvation. The church mediates Christ and the Holy Spirit, though in different ways. For all of these early authors, the church can be distinguished according to four marks as one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. Likewise, all affirm that there is no salvation outside of the church. Yet there is a subtle but significant trajectory from an exclusive, rigoristic ecclesiology to a more inclusive view of church membership, due in large part to the work of Augustine of Hippo. As a representative of Western Christianity, Augustine’s voice continues to reverberate through history, even to the present day.

REFERENCES Brent, A. (2010), Cyprian and Roman Carthage, New York: Cambridge. Burns, J. P. and R. M. Jensen (2014), Christianity in Roman Africa: The Development of Its Practices and Beliefs, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Chadwick, H. (2001), The Church in Ancient Society, New York: Oxford. Decret, F. (2009), Early Christianity in North Africa, Eugene: Cascade. Dunn, Geoffrey D. (2004), Tertullian, The Early Church Fathers, New York: Routledge. Evans, R. F. (1972), One and Holy: The Church in Latin Patristic Thought, London: SPCK. Hall, S. G. (2004), “The Early Idea of the Church,” in Gillian R. Evans (ed.), The First Christian Theologians: An Introduction to Theology in the Early Church, 41–57, Malden: Blackwell. Hinson, E. G. (1986), Understandings of the Church, Sources of Early Christian Thought, Philadelphia: Fortress. Lee, J. K. (2017), Augustine and the Mystery of the Church, Minneapolis: Fortress.

80

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Markus, R. A. (1997), Gregory the Great and His world, New York: Cambridge. Merdinger, J. E. (2014), “Roman North Africa,” in W. Tabbernee (ed.), Early Christianity in Contexts: An Exploration across Cultures and Continents, 223–60, Grand Rapids: Baker Academic. Moorhead, J. (2005), Gregory the Great, The Early Church Fathers, New York: Routledge. Neil, B. (2009), Leo the Great, The Early Church Fathers, New York: Routledge. Osborn, E. F. (1997), Tertullian: First Theologian of the West, New York: Cambridge. Rankin, D. I. (1995), Tertullian and the Church, New York: Cambridge. Root, M. (2013), “Augustine on the Church,” in Chad C. Pecknold and Tarmo Toom (eds.), T&T Clark Companion to Augustine and Modern Theology, 54–74, New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark. Wilhite, D. E. (2017), Ancient African Christianity: An Introduction to a Unique Context and Tradition, New York: Routledge.

Chapter SEVEN

Patristic Ecclesiology in the Greek East GEORGE KALANTZIS

INTRODUCTION It is well known that there is no formal definition of ecclesiology in the patristic tradition that can claim doctrinal authority for the Eastern Church. It is also well known that none of the Eastern Fathers, nor any of the Ecumenical Councils, ever produced a dogmatic definition of what the church is. As Georges Florovsky put it, “The Fathers did not care so much for the doctrine of the church precisely because the glorious reality of the church was open to their spiritual vision. One does not define what is self-evident” (Florovsky 1976: 57). For the Greek East the theology of the church “is still im Werden, in the process of formation” (Florovsky 1976: 58) and the church itself is ultimately a μυστήριον κοσμικὸν, an earthly mystery, as the Didache proclaims it to be. That the church is resistant to dogmatic definition does not mean, however, that ecclesiological themes, discussions, and notions are not present throughout patristic corpora. Nor does this lack of a special chapter on ecclesiology in the Patrologia Graeca indicate a lack or confusion of ideas. On the contrary, just like the New Testament, Christian authors throughout the patristic period wrote extensively on ecclesiological themes in connection with temporary problems, especially within the context of apologetics or polemics. The first mention of the church in creedal form is found in the second-century Epistula Apostolorum (Hill 1999: 1–53) and the Symbolum Apostolorum. The church-order Traditio apostolica 8 placed the confession of the triune God inescapably within the church, the locus of eternal worship: “Glory to you Father and Son with the Holy Spirit in the holy church, now and forever through all ages” (Di Berardino 2010: xvii); and the fundamental ideas of the great theologians of the second century, especially Ignatius of Antioch and Irenaeus of Lyons, provided the framework for all subsequent development of ecclesiological thought for the Eastern Church. It is within this context, then, that some ecclesiological notions were developed in early Christianity, which became “universally accepted within the church, and which, in the aggregate, constitute patristic ecclesiology as such” (Alfeyev 2000: 191–2).

82

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

THEMES AND IMAGES It is precisely because the church is notoriously resistant to definition and ambiguous of referent that ancient Christian writers turned to a variety of images to express the thematic notions of unity, salvation, holiness, catholicity, apostolicity, and the two-dimensional character of the “pilgrim church” of this age and the “heavenly church” of the age to come. This language came to be affirmed in the creedal attestation of the church as “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.” The imagery developed to describe these notions is rich and diverse, and their expression and thematic development was guided by the language and imagery of both the Old and the New Testaments (Minear 1960; Ledegang 2001; Christo 2006; Ferguson 2013). John Chrysostom’s Homily on the Fall of Eutropius provides a potent illustration of this breadth: Nothing is more abiding than the church: she is your salvation; she is your refuge. She is more lofty than the heavens; she is more far-reaching than the earth. She never grows old; she always stays in bloom. And so, Scripture indicates her permanence and stability by calling her a virgin; her magnificence by calling her a queen; her closeness to God by calling her a daughter; her barrenness turned to fecundity by calling her “the mother of the seven.” A thousand names try to spell out her nobility. Just as the Lord is called by many names—Father, Way, Life, Light, Propitiation, Foundation, Gate, Sinless, One, Treasure, Lord, God Son, Only-Begotten, Form of God, Image of God, since one name could not hope to describe the Omnipotent, and many names give us some small insight into his nature, so the church goes by many names. (Halton 1985: 13) Emphasizing the spiritual rather than physical nature of these images, and the fact that they are complementary, not contradictory, Chrysostom continued: The church is many things: at one time a bride, at another a daughter, now a virgin, now a handmaid, now a queen; at one time barren, at another a garden; at one time fertile, at another a lily, at another a fountain. Therefore, when you hear these names beware of regarding them as physical. . . . A mountain is not a virgin, a virgin is not a bride, a queen is not a servant; yet the church is all these things. Why? Because these are spiritual, not physical, realities, and the spiritual is a vast ocean. (Halton 1985: 14)

ONE—BODY, BRIDE, MOTHER, EVE, MARY Body Paul’s language of the church as the body of Christ (Eph. 1:22f; 3:10, 21; 5:23-25, 27, 29, 32; Col. 1:18, 24) is one of the most popular and most enduring images throughout Christian history. Paul used the language of body to establish the continuity of the identity of the people of God. He also used the same language of body to address a variety of rifts and schisms over racial and ethnic differences, social traditions, gender, class, and economic distinctions, and so on. that distressed the congregations over which he had authority. In Rom. 12:4-8 and 1 Cor. 12:12-27 the argument is that Christ is the whole body and Christians are members of him; while in the later epistles (Col. 1:18, Eph. 1:2123) the emphasis is on Christ as the head of the body in the sense of origin or source of the whole church, having authority over the universal church. What is immediately evident in Paul’s language for the church is the emphasis on the communal aspect of Christian faith

PATRISTIC ECCLESIOLOGY IN THE GREEK EAST



83

and life. Paul used the language of the body to emphasize how a diversity of charisms and calls ought to coexist in one church based on the ontological multi-unity essential to the diversity in Christian communities. For the New Testament, “unity is not simply bene esse of the church, but its esse. Unity and church are synonyms” (Hovorun 2015: 83). It would be a mistake, however, to limit the language of body to a simple analogy or a convenient image. “One should not diminish the ontological significance of this unity (1 Cor. 10:17; Rom. 12:5; Col. 3:15; Eph. 2:16; 3:6; 4:4) by transforming it into merely a figure, a simile like a body or similar to a body,” as Bulgakov notes. “On the contrary, the apostle speaks precisely about one body (Eph. 4:4-6), in direct relation with the unity of God” (Bulgakov 2002: 258). For the Greek Fathers, “the church is not a conglomerate, but a body; and as such, it is not quasi-one, but genuinely one, although this unity is not empirical, but substantial, ontological. Empirically it as yet only ‘increaseth with the increase of God’ (Col. 2:19)” (Bulgakov 2002: 258). Clement of Rome (c. 96) uses the language of body—alluding to 1 Cor. 12:14-26—in an appeal for unity in the church at Corinth, which was once again troubled with division. Clement maintains that this unity of all the members is a sine qua non εἰς τὸ σώζεσθαι ὅλον τὸ σῶμα, “for the salvation of the whole body” (1 Clement 37.5). Most of the earliest writers found in Paul’s image of the church as the body of Christ an essential argument not only for the unity of the community but also for the nature of Christ and for the pre-existence of the church. Ignatius of Antioch (d. c. 110) quotes Paul almost verbatim, as he argues that “through his resurrection [Christ] might eternally lift up the standard for his holy and faithful ones, whether among Jews or Gentiles, in the one body of his church (ἐν ἑνὶ σώματι τῆς ἐκκλησίας αὐτοῦ)” (Smyrn.1.2). And in his letter to the church in Ephesus, Ignatius underscores its pre-existent character: “A church foreordained [προωρισμένῃ] from eternity past to obtain a constant glory which is enduring and unchanging, a church that has been unified and chosen in true suffering by the will of the Father and of Jesus Christ, our God” (Eph. inscr.). In his Visions, Hermas, a prophet in the first half of the second century in Rome, argues that since the church is the actual, physical body of Christ, she was created first of all things (Vision 2.4, Vision 2.8)— a theme that will be developed further by later Eastern theologians (Bulgakov 2002: 270). Likewise, arguing against a Docetic/Gnostic conception of materiality, 2 Clement (early to mid-second century) takes the language of body as the equivalent of the flesh of Christ. As Christ is pre-existent, so is his body (14.2-3, 4). Clement of Alexandria (d. c. 215) also uses the language of the church as the body of Christ to reason back to the very nature of Christ: “As a human being consisting of many members [1 Cor. 12:12] . . . is a combination of two—a body of faith and a soul of hope—so the Lord is of flesh and blood” (Paedagogus 1.6.42). And again, commenting on 1 Cor. 6:13 Clement says: “The church of the Lord is figuratively speaking a body (σῶμα δὲ ἀλληγορεῖται ἡ ἐκκλησία Κυρίου)” (Stromata 7.14.87.3). Origen (c. 184 – c. 253) understood the church not merely as a temporal or even an eschatological reality. Rather, he interpreted Paul’s language as indicating a pre-existing reality, since the creation of the world: “For you must please not think that she is called ‘the bride’ [Rev. 21:2] or ‘the church’ only from the time when the Saviour came in the flesh: she is so called from the beginning of the human race and from the foundation of the world—indeed, if I may look for the origin of this high mystery under Paul’s guidance, even before the foundation of the world [Eph. 1:4]” (Commentary on the Song of Songs 2.8). During the latter controversies of the patristic era, this very understanding of ontological unity prevailed because it gave impulse, inter alia, to the incarnational ecclesiology of the

84

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

fourth and fifth centuries, emphasizing the integrity of the entire church over and against schismatic and heretical groups. And this unity was defined both pneumatologically, in relation to the Holy Spirit who lives in the church, and christologically, in relation to Christ (Bulgakov 2002: 255). John Chrysostom spoke of the church as “the fulfillment of Christ in the same manner as the head completes the body and the body is completed by the head” (Homilies on Ephesians, 3.2). Just as the body is complete when all its members are present, so will “the head be complete, only when the body is perfect; when we all are most firmly united and strengthened” (Homilies on Ephesians, 3.2). In this way, the language of body functions as identity formation demarcating the boundaries between the initiated and those outside the community; it encourages one to consider that “the space of the church at some point suddenly ends and then the space without grace and salvation begins” (Hovorun 2015: 86).

Bride As in the New Testament, the language of body and the language of bride are inexorably connected in the idiom of patristic understandings of the church. Both body and bride are dependent and derivative—both “of Christ”—and ontologically indistinguishable in their diachronic form. Rooted in the Old Testament precedent of God as a husband to Israel (Jer. 2:2; Ezek. 16:8-14; Hos. 2:1–3:1), the New Testament writers employed the bridal imagery to stress the church’s purity as well as the continuity with the people of God. The seer John used bridal imagery to express the expectation of the eschatological consummation of the church’s union with Christ: “Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready; to her it has been granted to be clothed with fine linen, bright and pure—for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints” (Rev. 19:7-8). Because the church was seen as the bride of Christ, the bride of the Lamb, her purity became the focus of the earliest writers. For some, this purity manifested itself primarily in the realm of morality—often in an apologetic context against what was perceived to be the laxity of Greco-Roman practices. The lay-voice of the apocalyptic Shepherd of Hermas presented a highly elaborate image of the bride, focusing on the corporate purity and faithfulness of the church. The Shepherd represents the moral condition of the faithful in a series of visions. The church appears first as an aged woman, weak and helpless because of the sins of the faithful. In subsequent visions the church regresses in age, revealed first as younger (because the faithful are penitent) yet wrinkled and with white hair (due to lingering sin) and then younger still, until, finally, she reveals herself in true glory as the pure and spotless bride. Tertullian (c. 160–220) expressed similar concerns, stressing that, being a bride, the church comes to Christ as a virgin, pure from sin—including the sins of adultery and fornication (On Modesty 1.8; 18.11; On Monogamy 5.7; 11.2; Against Marcion 4.11.8; 5.12.6; 5.18.9). For others, like Clement of Alexandria, the purity of the church was the guarantor on issues of faith and doctrine to avoid heresies. Clement interpreted Romans 7.2, 4 to mean Christians belong to Christ as “bride and church, which must be pure both from inner thoughts contrary to the truth and from outward temptations,” which he identifies as heresies (Stromata 3.12.80). In one of the most brilliant, influential, and enduring hermeneutical moves, Origen connected the language of body with that of the bride in Song of Songs. Commenting on Paul’s words, “Our bodies are members of Christ,” Origen explained: “For when [Paul] says ‘our bodies,’ he shows that these bodies are the body of the bride; but when

PATRISTIC ECCLESIOLOGY IN THE GREEK EAST



85

he mentions the ‘members of Christ,’ he indicates that these same bodies are the body of the Bridegroom” (Commentary on the Song of Songs 3.2). Engaging in a thoroughly christocentric hermeneutic, Origen interpreted the words addressed by the bridegroom to the bride as “words spoken by Christ to the church. . . . [They] can be understood as spoken of this present age, for even now the church is fair when she is near to Christ and imitates Christ” (Commentary on the Song of Songs, 3.15). Persons do not establish individual bridal relationships apart from the church (Ferguson 2016).The soul becomes bride only as it enters into the church’s bridal relationship to Christ: “The blessed soul burns and is aflame and sings that marriage song through the Spirit by which the church is joined to her heavenly spouse, Christ” (Commentary on the Song of Songs, prologue 2). Origen’s enduring connection of the church as bride is developed further by Methodius of Olympus (d. c. 311). In his famous Symposium, or the Banquet of the Ten Virgins, Methodius comments on 2 Cor 11:2 that those who embrace the truth and are delivered from the evils of the flesh “become a church and ‘helper’ of Christ, purified and given in marriage to him, a ‘virgin’ according to the apostle” (Symposium 3.8.74). This virginity is not limited to mere bodily function—though the ascetic was indeed exalted—but had teleological significance in the pursuit of Christian virtue. As Christ is the Archiparthenos (ἀρχιπάρθενος), the completion and embodiment of all virtue, “the virginal life is a continual encounter—even beyond the seam of death—with the person of Virtue by participating in his completion of the human telos” (Hughes 2013: 170).

Mother Inexorably connected to the image of bride is the concept of the church also as mother, the one through whom the Word begets children. Though the language of mother is not so prominent in the New Testament, the concept is clearly anticipated. In his allegory of Hagar and Sarah, Paul insists that Sarah “corresponds to the Jerusalem above; . . . she is our mother” (Gal. 4:26). The woman who gave birth to the Messiah in Revelation 12 and who was persecuted by the dragon also gave birth to other children; she represents the people of God, including the church. As one is not the bride of Christ as an individual but corporately, so, too, this birth is not an individual endeavor to be pursued in isolation. This is a new birth through faith and baptism into a new family of God through Jesus (cf. Jn 3:5-7, Rom. 6:3ff). This family transgresses national identities and gender and societal constructs through the realigning effect of baptism (Gal. 3:28; Eph. 2:14) and brings all into a new kingdom (Rom. 6:1-3; Gal. 3:27-29). The image of the church as mother became one of the most popular in both Latin and Greek Christianity. God the Father, argued Origen, claims the church as his wife, and through her, the mother church, God produces children: A prudent son gives joy to his mother, the benevolence of God. She introduces us to the God and Father himself, as sons who have been weaned and allowed solid food. The result is that as his Son, Jesus Christ, who became a brother in likeness to us, so we also might live as free citizens in deed and word. Our mother is the church, whom the God and Father by the Holy Spirit betrothed to himself as a wife, for he always begets through her for himself sons and daughters. (On Proverbs 17.21) The language of motherhood was also used extensively in the efforts to protect the unity of the church. Irenaeus stressed that those “who do not partake of the Spirit [of God] are not nourished into life from the mother’s breasts” (Against Heresies 3.24.1). And

86

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Clement of Alexandria insisted that as a mother the church draws children to herself (Paedagogus 1.5.19), and as children seeking the church, the faithful “run to our good mother” (Paedagogus 3.12.99). Cyprian’s first principle that “one can no longer have God for his Father, who has not the Church for one’s mother” (De unitate 6) became axiomatic throughout the whole of patristic theology. Those who rejected mater ecclesia place their own salvation at risk, for salus extra ecclesiam non est, “there is no salvation outside the Church” (Epistle 73, 21.2). Chrysostom expressed similar views: salvation is only through Christ and his church. Though everyone is called and predetermined to it, whether to accept this call and follow Christ or not depends finally upon our free will (In Ep. ad Rom., Homily 15), for the purpose of the incarnation was neither to “destroy” nor to “restore” our nature but rather to “set our free choice aright” (In Ep. ad Rom., Homily 11) (Kalantzis 2013: 403–13). The interconnected images of virgin bride and mother help bring together the themes of the ontological oneness, holiness, and teleological completeness of the church, weaving both its katholikē as well as its theotic expression. In baptism the baptized becomes Christ (Gal. 2:19-20), and through this participation (μετοχήν) in Christ, one also participates in the incarnation of virtue. Each baptized person is the same personification of the genus homo, which passes away as sinful Adam passes away, but the baptized is recreated through the second incarnation of the Logos. For Methodius, the intimate involvement of the Holy Spirit reveals this process of generation to be the same as the act of creation. Each baptism is a repetition of the creation of the church by the Spirit of the Logos. The baptized person is a re-creation of that individual, filled with the Spirit so that divine perfections take up residence in life of the baptized who are now complete, each “a Christ” (Gal. 4:19). (Bracht 1999: 163–5) This new reality will be fully expressed in the eschaton. Until then, “Those who have been baptized into Christ by participation in the Spirit have become christs” (Methodius, Symposium 8.8.191), and the divine Logos is formed in them and dwells within them.

Eve In the Symposium, Methodius recounts the process of this birth through Thalia, one of the protagonists. Building upon Eph 5:26-31, Thalia ties directly the concept of catechetical pregnancy and birth (baptism) to the creation narrative—specifically, the creation of Eve from the flesh of Adam: The apostle accurately referred to Christ the things said to Adam. For it was for her sake that the Word left his heavenly Father and came down to earth in order to be joined to his wife, slept in the ecstasy of his passion, and died willingly for her sake so that “he might present her to himself a glorious church and without blemish, cleansing her by the washing of baptism” [(Eph. 5:26-27)] for the reception of that blessed spiritual seed which he sows and plants by internal inspiration in the depths of the mind; and as a woman the church conceives by this seed and forms it until the day she bears and nurtures it as virtue. (Symposium 3.8.70-74) The salvific implications of patristic understandings of creation and re-creation are profound. Following Paul in his “first Adam / second Adam” typology in 1 Cor 15:45, a number of the Greek Fathers saw the inescapable connection between God’s act of creation

PATRISTIC ECCLESIOLOGY IN THE GREEK EAST



87

in Genesis and God’s act of re-creation through the incarnation. As Christ is the second Adam, so the church is the second Eve. As the first Eve was brought forth “from the rib” of Adam while Adam slept, so the church was brought forth from the pierced side of Christ as he lay in the tomb. As Eve is the mother of all those born of flesh, so the church is the mother of all those born of the Spirit. The church is the mother in whose womb the faithful will mature and through whom they will be born in Christ, by means of their baptism. “This is why the Word of God was made a human, and he who was the Son of God became the son of man,” said Irenaeus of Lyons, “so that human beings, taken into the Word and receiving adoption, might become children of God” (Against Heresies, III.19.1). This is the patristic notion of theosis, a fundamental principle of Eastern Orthodox understanding of church and salvation: “In the Church our salvation is perfected; the sanctification and transfiguration, the theosis of the human race is accomplished” (Florovsky 1976: 37).

Mary As the book of the Revelation (Rev. 12) supplied another female image for the church, “Messiah’s Mother” (Minear 1960: 53f), rhetorically perceptive thinkers agreed early on the parallel paradoxes of the church as virgin bride and mother and of Mary as virgin and mother of Jesus. The mother of the physical body of Jesus was also seen as the mother of Christ’s mystical body, the church. “Indeed, this is she, our Mother, the great woman in heaven,” said Methodius; “this is the powerful heavenly archetype, greater than all her children. This is the Church; and her children, born through baptism in all parts of the world, die on the earth but rise and hasten to join their mother” (Methodius, Symposium 8.3). Hippolytus was among the first in the West to establish this connection between Mary and the church in his De Christo et Antichristo: The Church never ceases to give birth to the Logos. “And she brought forth a manchild to rule all nations,” says the text: the perfect man that is Christ, the child of God, both God and man. And the Church brings forth this Christ when she teaches all nations. Admittedly, he is thinking about the Church, but his words can also apply to Mary. (De antichr. 6) Augustine (354–430) expressed the same idea succinctly: “The church, imitating the Mother of God [Mary] . . . is both mother and virgin” (191.3), and she occupies a place in the church which is the highest after Christ and yet very close to us. The christological and therefore soteriological implications of the Theotokos were also the impetus for many of the pre-Chalcedonian debates on the natures of Jesus.

HOLY—NEW PEOPLE, NEW KINGDOM, NEW CREATION We have seen how the language and images of body and bride, virgin, and mother all included the concept of purity for the church. The moral and doctrinal purity of the church is yet another sine qua non throughout the patristic corpus. Yet, for early Christianity, the creedal attestation of the church of God as holy established the church also as “separate,” or rather, “set apart”; as such, it encompassed much more of a social dimension than modern conceptions of piety and virtue can contain. The theme of the people of God represents one of the many continuities between the Old Testament and New Testament. As holy, separate, and new, the church is also

88

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

understood as the visible manifestation of God’s presence, God’s kingdom, God’s temple, and God’s new creation here and now, as well as in the eschaton. Born of water and the Spirit, in baptism and regeneration, the church of Christ is also identified as “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people” (1 Pet. 2:9-10) a new people, a new ἒθνος (nation), a new γένος (genus, race); in every aspect (Buell 2005). The language of the Old Testament is taken over for the church. When God established his covenant with Israel at Mount Sinai, God said: “You shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples . . . [Y]ou shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation” (Exod. 19:56). The Exodus identification of the people of God and the language of the covenant formula was appropriated for the church from the earliest times. Commenting on 1 Cor. 29, Clement of Rome spoke of God as our “loving and gentle and kind-hearted Father, who made us [the church] his own chosen portion.” Clement made the contrast between “the old race [Israel who] was perverse and hard hearted” and “the new people [the church, who] are tender as a child” (Paedagogus 1.5.19.4). “Formerly the older people had an older covenant, and the law disciplined the people with fear, . . . but to the new and recent people a new covenant has been given, the Word has become flesh, and fear is turned into love” (Paedagogus 1.7.59.1). Out of the Greek and Jewish peoples “there are gathered into one race of the saved people those who come to faith” (Stromata 6.5.42). The children of God “become a new, holy people, by regeneration” (Paedagogus 1.6.32.4). In his Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, Justin used the language of people (λαὸς) and race (γένος) to identify the church as the succession and replacement of Israel: “After that Righteous One was put to death, we flourished as another people . . . We are not only ‘a people’ (οὐ μόνον λαός) but also a ‘holy people’ (λαὸς ἅγιος) . . . for God chose us (ἡμᾶς ἐξελέξατο ὁ Θεός)” (Dialogue 119.3-4). Justin continued his argument on the supersession of Israel by quoting Old Testament passages to show that the church of the Gentiles is a new Israel, “the true high priestly race (γένος) of God” (Dialogue 116.3). From the Jewish world, the nascent Christian community also borrowed the linguistic variant of qāhāl (assembly) to indicate the ἐκκλησία (ekklēsia) as a replacement for συναγωγή (synagōgē). At times, the term ἐκκλησία was used also to indicate the qāhāl YHWH, the “assembly of the Lord” (e.g., Deut. 23:2-4), which carried the Greek concept of the “assembly of the people,” where the people are gathered without distinction. Essential in the symbolism of coming together ἐπὶ τὸ αὐτό (epi to auto) for the same cause were the inescapable political implications of such a gathering (e.g., Acts 2:1; 1 Cor. 7:5; Cf. Baily 1958; Minear 1960). The language of the New Testament places the church, simultaneously, in direct continuity with Israel as the people of God and as something completely new. Clement of Alexandria quoted the Preaching of Peter as saying that Christians “do not worship as the Greeks,” “neither worship as the Jews,” but “worship in a new way by Christ” (Stromata 6.5; Ferguson 2016: Understandings of the Church, 15). Aristides presented Christians as a third race: “It is evident to us [Christians], O King, that there are three classes of people in this world: the worshipers of those called gods by you, the Jews, and the Christians.” The Epistle to Diognetus sets forth the socio-religious and political implications of the church’s identity and offers a succinct articulation of holiness as a new, separate people and ethnos. In their religion, Christians “neither acknowledge those considered to be gods by the Greeks nor observe the superstition of the Jews,” but are a “new race or way of life” (Diogn. 1). And in regard to their citizenship, this new race is not a seditious, hostile entity aiming to rebel. Rather, they offer the world an example of new relations, piety, and a divine politeia—including toward those who want to do them harm. Even though

PATRISTIC ECCLESIOLOGY IN THE GREEK EAST



89

Christians are not distinguished from other people by country, or language or custom, they demonstrate the remarkable and admittedly paradoxical character of their own citizenship. They live in their respective countries, but only as resident aliens [or, sojourners]; they participate in all things as citizens and they endure all things as foreigners. Every foreign country is their homeland, and every homeland is foreign. (Diogn. 5–6) But it is not only their political relationships that make Christians a new ethnos but also their way of life: in contrast to their pagan surroundings, Christians live exemplary moral lives; they care for the poor, share their possessions, care for the weak—including children— and even when persecuted they return love and blessing to the evildoers. As a result, even when “they are put to death, . . . they are brought to life” (Diogn. 5–6). This hope of the resurrection animated Christian communities from the earliest time, for it was a sure sign of God’s new creation. “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation (kainē ktisis / καινή κτίσις); what is old has passed away—look, what is new has come!” (2 Cor. 5:17). This radical language echoes Paul’s “universalist vision of the church” (Hovorun 2015: 85). The church is a separate, wholly new social order. The example of Christ, his response during trial and torture, even his physical posture of calm silence and assurance had given Christians a new vocabulary and a new identity. It transformed profoundly deeply rooted ideologies about human beings, power, the world, and history. To be humble was to be weak, poor, submissive, slavish, and womanish; contrary to the classical Greek concept of arēte, which was founded on the ideal of individual greatness. Humility was the physical position of shame, humiliation, degradation and, therefore, to be understood as morally bad. The New Testament revolutionized these values wholly by their total inversion. It presented Jesus who “endured the cross, disregarding the shame” (Heb. 12:2) as the one Christians ought to emulate (1 Pet. 2:19-20) and Paul’s boasting in his lowly status, tapeinos, and sufferings in imitation of Christ gave new meaning to humility, transforming it into a virtue. In this new paradigm ὑπομονή, patientia, endurance, replaced the ancient ideal of “glory,” and humility (ταπεινοφροσύνη), the voluntary abasement of the self and one’s body, “to be low, base, prone, and exposed, was now at the heart of the definition of being good” (Shaw 1996: 303–4). This new arēte found its full expression in the lives of the martyrs and later in the monastics (Kalantzis 2012: 33–4). Witnessing to the dyadic character of its existence, “heavenly and earthly, the Church is one in ground and limit, in entelechy, but she remains dual in the world process until the end of the world” (Bulgakov 2002: 264). The Didache followed closely the New Testament’s use of the image of the kingdom of God. On the one hand, the kingdom was described in sacramental terms, as a eucharist that happens here and now: As this broken bread was scattered upon the mountains and was gathered to become one, so may your church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into your kingdom. For the glory and the power are yours through Jesus Christ forever. But let no one eat or drink from your eucharist (εὐχαριστίας) unless they have been baptized in the name of the Lord. (Didache 9.4-5, slightly adapted) And on the other, as the kingdom that had been prepared for the church in the eschaton: “Remember your church, O Lord; save it from all evil, and perfect it in your love. And gather it from the four winds into your kingdom, which you prepared for it. For yours is the power and the glory forever” (Didache 9.5).

90

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

As Christians are the new people of God and the incarnation inaugurates God’s new kingdom and God’s new creation, so does the church replace the Temple in Jerusalem as God’s new dwelling place. Whether in reference to a local congregation (1 Cor. 3:16, et passim) or the universal Christian community (cf. Eph. 2:21) the New Testament stresses the pneumatological character of the church. Just as “the divine shekhinah that marked the particular presence of God in the Temple was not locked within its walls,” so also “the church presented as the Temple is more inclusive and reaches beyond its visible walls” (Hovorun 2015: 87). God’s presence cannot be confined and localized; nor can God’s church. Animated by the Holy Spirit, those who are in Christ are God’s temple: “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” Paul reminded the Corinthians (1 Cor. 6:19). And in Eph 2:19-22 Paul redefined the Christian community as a “holy temple in the Lord,” “a dwelling place for God,” “built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone.” The church, then, “is a temple as far as it hosts the Holy Spirit” (Hovorun 2015: 87). Irenaeus developed further the New Testament imagery of temple as he addressed the numerous heresies of his time; as a result, he also influenced all subsequent patristic thought. Linking closely the Holy Spirit and the church allowed Irenaeus to open the image of God’s temple far beyond the boundaries of any local community and establish the church as a vessel of the Spirit: We receive our faith from the Church and keep it safe; and it is a precious deposit stored in a fine vessel, ever renewing its vitality through the Spirit of God, and causing the renewal of the vessel in which it is stored. For the gift of God has been entrusted to the Church, as the breath of life to created man, that all members by receiving it should be made alive. And herein has been bestowed on us our means of communion with Christ, namely the Holy Spirit, the pledge of immortality, the strengthening of our faith, the ladder by which we ascend to God. For the Apostle says, “God has set up in the Church apostles, prophets, teachers” (1 Cor. 12:28) and all the other means of the Spirit’s workings. (Adv. haer. 1.24.1) Irenaeus’s move to identify the Spirit with truth and the church as the sole depositum and safeguard of that truth received dogmatic recognition during later Orthodox developments in ecclesiology and became an important criterion of belonging to the church. “Those who dissented from the Orthodoxy were regarded as stepping out of the church” (Hovorun 2015: 86–7).

CATHOLIC—FULFILLMENT, COMPLETION, WHOLENESS The confession that Christ’s church, body, bride, temple, nation, and the mother of those faithful is one, united through space and time, is both a dominical proclamation (Mt. 28:18-20) and the self-evident confession of Christians from that time to this: “There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all” (Eph. 4:4-6). The most common understanding of catholic has come to be equated with universal, in the topographical sense of worldwide. By confessing the church to be catholic in character, Greek patristic thought did not confess merely its spatial character, for that was empirically untrue. In the West, opposition to the geographical provincialism of the Donatists and

PATRISTIC ECCLESIOLOGY IN THE GREEK EAST



91

other schismatic groups led to a greater weight in the sense of “universality” for catholica. In the Greek East, there is a differentiation of the church as καθολική and as οἰκουμενική. The term καθολική is understood to be a linguistic derivative of καθ’ ὅλου (“according to the whole”), indicating primarily the inner wholeness and integrity of the church’s life, based on the church’s unchanging faith in the witness of the apostles. This wholeness “belongs not to the phenomenal and empirical, but to the noumenal and ontological plane; it describes the very essence, not the external manifestations,” as Bulgakov contends. Irenaeus had argued against the heretical groups that besieged his church by making a similar argument: “The truth preached by the church is firm, and that which has been fabricated by these other teachers is lying discourse. For the church, although dispersed throughout the whole world, as far as the ends of the earth, received from the apostles and their disciples the faith” (Adv. haer. 1.9.5c.–10.1). For Irenaeus, it was the firmness of that faith, the one received from the apostles, as contrasted with the spirit of sectarian separatism and particularism, that guaranteed the catholicity of the church both as the ontological unity of its members and as the diachronic wholeness of its character: As we have said before, the church has received this preaching and this faith. Although she is dispersed throughout the world, the church preserves this faith carefully as if living in one house. Similarly, she believes these points as if having one and the same soul and heart. She preaches, teaches, and delivers them harmoniously as if possessing one mouth. For even if the languages of the world are different, yet the force of the tradition is one and the same. (Adv. haer. 1.10.2; 3.3.2) The portrayal of the church as catholic expresses the idea of integrity and purity. In this sense, then, Ἐκκλησία Καθολική means that “the Church is fullness, τό πλήρωμα, fulfillment, completion” (Florovsky 1976: 38). Cyril of Jerusalem (d. 386) explained further the dual character of the church as catholic to those preparing for baptism: “[The church] is called catholic, therefore, because it is in all the inhabited world, from one end of the earth to the other. Also, because it teaches universally and without omission (καθολικώς καὶ ἀνελλειπῶς) all the doctrines which ought to come for human knowledge, concerning both things visible and invisible and things heavenly and earthly” (Catechetical Homilies 18.23). Cyril followed this with a practical warning: And if you sojourn in cities, do not inquire simply where the Lord’s house is, for other impious heresies undertake to call their dens a “house of the Lord.” Nor inquire simply “Where is the church?” Rather, ask, “Where is the catholic church?” For this is the proper name of this holy church and mother of us all. It is the bride of our Lord Jesus Christ, the one and only Son of God, . . . It is a type and copy of the Jerusalem above, which is free and mother of us all [(Gal. 4:26)]. Formerly she was barren but now has many children. (Catechetical Homilies 18.26) The catholicity of the church and the language of body go together. For the Greek East, it is at the mystery of gathering together (τὸ μυστήριον τῆς Συνάξεως) that the wholeness of the church is most vividly expressed. The gathering of the church is a mystery as it is based on the rejection of the self for the sake of the community. The person’s transfiguration into Christ is accomplished in the fullness of eucharistic communion. For the Greek tradition, the rejection and denial of our own self does not signify that personality must be extinguished, that it must be dissolved within the multitude. Catholicity is not

92

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

corporality or collectivism. On the contrary, self-denial widens the scope of our own personality; in self-denial we possess the multitude within our own self; we enclose the many within our own ego. Therein lies the similarity with the Divine Oneness of the Holy Trinity. In its catholicity the Church becomes the created similitude of Divine perfection. (Florovsky 1976: 43, emphasis original)

APOSTOLIC—“THE FAITH THAT WAS ONCE FOR ALL ENTRUSTED TO THE SAINTS” Florovsky speaks of the historic understanding of the church as the “similitude of Divine perfection” which was inaugurated and sealed by the Spirit of Truth uniquely in the apostles gathered at Pentecost (Acts 2:1-4). At that moment of the Spirit’s descent into the world, the Faith that has been entrusted to the apostles was also entrusted to “faithful people who [would] be able to teach others as well” (2 Tim. 2:2). All of patristic thought understood this apostolic succession to be a guarantor of the truth of the faith and a sign of the charismatic nature of the church over and against the pluriformity and confusion of schismatic and heretical groups. For historic Christianity, apostolic succession is the “living and mysterious thread” binding the whole historical fullness of the church’s life into one catholic whole. In both its Greek and its Latin expressions, historic Christianity recognizes two simultaneous claims in the principle of apostolic succession. In the first, as Irenaeus established early on, the claim to apostolic succession is also a claim of faithfulness to the regula fidei, the Tradition that sums up the whole of the Scriptural witness into the trinitarian, creedal formulation as the unalterable faith of the church (Irenaeus 1.3.6; 1.10.1ff). Secondly, since the Holy Spirit does not descend upon earth again and again in the manner of Pentecost, apostolic succession is a claim of the uninterrupted sacramental succession and continuity of hierarchy. For, “it is in the Church that [the Holy Spirit] breathes and sends forth His rays” (Florovsky 1976: 45). The claim to apostolic succession is, at its core, a truth claim. Clement of Rome also identified the succession as the logical outcome of the economy of salvation: “The apostles were given the gospel for us from the Lord Jesus Christ; Jesus the Christ was sent from God. Christ therefore is from God, and the apostles are from Christ. They both, therefore, came in good order from the will of God.” Having carried out their mandate to proclaim the good news (εὐαγγελιζόμενοι) to “every district and every city . . . appointed their first converts, after testing them by the Spirit, as bishops and deacons” (1 Clement 42.1-5; 44.1-6). Clement of Alexandria presented the expression of apostolic succession in the threefold ecclesiastical hierarchy of deacon, presbyter, and bishop to be modeled on and reflect the angelic hierarchy (Stromata 6.13.107). In his letter to the churches in Asia Minor, Ignatius of Antioch presented what came to be the founding principles of patristic ecclesiology, influencing the subsequent doctrines of church hierarchy for both Eastern and Western Christianity. In his effort to address the struggles that plagued the various congregations of Antioch vying for authority, Ignatius insisted: “Let the congregation be wherever the bishop is; just as wherever Jesus Christ is, there also is the universal church” (Smyrnaeans, 8.2). And in his letter to the Magnesians, Ignatius, too, made the claim that the threefold ecclesial hierarchy reflected the celestial order: I urge you to hasten to do all things in the harmony of God, with the bishop presiding in the place of God and the presbyters in the place of the council of the apostles, and

PATRISTIC ECCLESIOLOGY IN THE GREEK EAST



93

the deacons, who are especially dear to me, entrusted with the ministry of Jesus Christ, who was with the Father before the ages and has been manifest at the end. (Magnesians 6.1) This understanding of the close relationship between ecclesial hierarchy and the divine economy led Ignatius to yet another principle that became foundational for all subsequent patristic ecclesiology: because the faith Christ passed on to the apostles is the faith into which Christians are baptized and around which they live their lives, and because this faith remains secure through the time-conquering unity of the apostolic succession, the sacraments of the church are valid as means of that vivifying grace of God only under the oversight of the bishop: Let that Eucharist (εὐχαριστίαν) be considered valid that occurs under the bishop or the one to whom he entrusts it. Let the congregation be wherever the bishop is; just as wherever Jesus Christ is, there also is the katholikē (καθολικὴ) church. It is not permitted either to baptize or to hold a love feast without the bishop. But whatever he approves is acceptable to God, so that everything you do should be secure and valid. (Smyrnaeans, 8.2-2)

CONCLUSION Even though the ekklesia resists definition and overwhelms static attempts at circumscription, the images and themes used to describe the church of Christ as one, holy, catholic, and apostolic throughout the Greek patristic tradition still guide our sensibilities and challenge our imagination to think more clearly and, at the same time, more holistically about the church’s nature and expression. Reflecting the biblical language of Greek patristic tradition, Orthodox Christianity understands the church as “the living image of eternity within time” and tradition as reflecting the witness of the Spirit, the divine victory over time (Florovsky 1976: 45). This divine victory is at the core of Orthodox christology and soteriology as well, namely, the doctrine of theosis: the incarnation of the divine Logos restored created humanity to the living relationship with its Creator God had always intended. Rescued, redeemed, and restored, humanity is now able to move toward the ever-closer relationship with God that transforms us into the eschatological “likeness of God,” becoming partakers of that divine nature the primordial “image of God” held as its promise. The final word must to belong to Bulgakov: “Heavenly and earthly, the Church is one in ground and limit, in entelechy, but she remains dual in the world process until the end of the world” (Bulgakov 2002: 264).

REFERENCES Alfeyev, H. (2000), St. Symeon, the New Theologian, and Orthodox Tradition, Oxford Early Christian Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Aristides. (2003), Apologie, trans. Bernard Pouderon, Marie-Joseph Pierre, B. Outtier, and Guiorgadzé Marina, in Sources Chrétiennes, No 470, Paris: Cerf. Augustine (1992), Sermons (94a-147a) on the New Testament, trans. John E Rotelle, in The Works of Saint Augustine Pt. 3, Vol. 4, Brooklyn: New City Press. Baily, M. (1958), “The People of God in the Old Testament,” The Furrow 9 (1): 3–13.

94

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Bracht, K. (1999), Vollkommenheit und Vollendung: Zur Anthropologie des Methodius von Olympus, STAC 2, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Buell D. K. (2005), Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity, New York: Columbia University Press. Bulgakov, S. (2002), The Bride of the Lamb, Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans. Christo, G. G. (2006), The Church’s Identity Established through Images according to Saint John Chrysostom, Rolli, New Haven: Orthodox Research Institute. Chrysostom, J. (1988), Homilies on Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Thessalonians, Timothy, Titus, and Philemon, trans. P. Schaff, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 13, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Chrysostom, J. (2013), Homilies on Romans, trans. P. Papageorgiou, Brookline: Holy Cross Orthodox Press. Clement of Alexandria. (1991), Stromateis, trans. John Ferguson, in The Fathers of the Church, Vol. 85, Washington: Catholic University of America Press. Clement of Alexandria. (2002), Paedagogus, trans. M. Marcovich and J. C. M. van Winden, in Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae, Vol. 61, Leiden: Brill. Clement of Rome. (2003a), 1 Clement, in The Apostolic Fathers, Vol. I, ed. and trans. B. D. Ehrman, Loeb Classical Library 24, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Clement of Rome. (2003b), 2 Clement, in The Apostolic Fathers, Vol. I, ed. and trans. B. D. Ehrman, Loeb Classical Library 24, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cyprian. (1971), De Lapsis and De Ecclesiae Catholicae Unitate, trans. and ed. Maurice Bévenot, Oxford: At the Clarendon Press. Cyril of Jerusalem. (2013), Catechetical Homilies, trans. E. Ferguson, Understandings of the Church, Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Di Berardino, A., ed. (2010), We Believe in One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church: Ancient Christian Doctrine, Vol. 5, Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press. Didache. (2003), The Apostolic Fathers, Vol. I, ed. and trans. B. D. Ehrman, Loeb Classical Library 24, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Epistle to Diognetus. (2003), The Apostolic Fathers, Vol. II, ed. and trans. B. D. Ehrman, Loeb Classical Library 25, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ferguson, E. (2013), The Early Church at Work and Worship, Vol. 1, Ministry, Ordination, Covenant, and Canon, Eugene: Cascade. Ferguson, E. (2016), Understandings of the Church, Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Florovsky, G. (1976), Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View, The Collected Works of Georges Florovsky, Vol. I, Belmont: Nordland Press. Hill, C. E. (1999), “The Epistula Apostolorum: An Asian Tract from the Time of Polycarp,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 7 (1): 1–53. Hippolytus. (1985), De Christo et Antichristo, trans. T. P. Halton, in The Church. Message of the Fathers of the Church, Vol. 4, Wilmington: Michael Glazier. Hovorun, C. (2015), “Songs of Unity-Early Syriac Reflections on the Church,” in C. Rammelt, C. Schlarb, and E. Schlarb (eds.), Begegnungen in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, 83, Berlin: Lit. Hughes, A. K. (2013), “‘Chastely I Live for Thee’: Virginity as Bondage and Freedom in Origen of Alexandria, Methodius of Olympus, and Gregory of Nyssa,” PhD diss., Wheaton College. Ignatius. (2003a), To the Ephesians, in The Apostolic Fathers, Vol. I, ed. and trans. B. D. Ehrman, Loeb Classical Library 24, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ignatius. (2003b), To the Magnesians, in The Apostolic Fathers, Vol. I, ed. and trans. B. D. Ehrman, Loeb Classical Library 24, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

PATRISTIC ECCLESIOLOGY IN THE GREEK EAST



95

Ignatius. (2003c), To the Smyrnaeans, in The Apostolic Fathers, Vol. I, ed. and trans. B. D. Ehrman, Loeb Classical Library 24, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Irenaeus of Lyon. (1985), Against Heresies, trans. T. P. Halton, in The Church: Message of the Fathers of the Church, Vol. 4, Wilmington: Michael Glazier. Justin. (2003), Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, trans. M. Slusser, in Selections from the Fathers of the Church, Vol. 3, Washington: Catholic University of America Press. Kalantzis, G. (2012), Caesar and the Lamb: Early Christian Attitudes on War and Military Service, Eugene: Cascade. Kalantzis, G. (2013), “Creatio ex Terrae: Immortality and the Fall in Theodore, Chrysostom, and Theodoret,” Studia Patristica 67 (15): 403–13. Ledegang, F. (2001), Mysterium Ecclesiae: Images of the Church and Its Members in Origen, Leuven: Leuven University Press. Methodius. (1958), The Symposium: A Treatise on Chastity, trans. Herbert Musurillo, in Ancient Christian Writers, Vol. 27, Westminster: Newman Press. Minear, P. S. (1960), Images of the Church in the New Testament, Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox Press. Origen. (1957), The Song of Songs: Commentary and Homilies, trans. and ed. L. R. P., in Ancient Christian Writer, Vol. 26, Westminster: Newman Press. Origen. (2013), “On Proverbs,” trans. E. Ferguson, Understandings of the Church, Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Shaw, B. D. (1996), “Body/Power/Identity: Passions of the Martyrs,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 4 (3): 269–312. Shepherd of Hermas. (2003), in The Apostolic Fathers, Vol. I, ed. and trans. B. D. Ehrman, Loeb Classical Library 24, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Tertullian. (1989), trans. A. Roberts, J. Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vols. 3–4, Edinburgh: T&T Clark.

Chapter EIGHT

Roman Catholic Ecclesiology From the Medieval Period to Vatican I TRENT POMPLUN

INTRODUCTION Ecclesiology—considered as a “treatise” of scholastic theology—had its origins only in the nineteenth century. Most Catholic theologians locate its origins, however, in the late Middle Ages. Following the lead of Yves Congar—the man many believe to be the greatest ecclesiologist of the twentieth century—most Catholic theologians have little good to say about Roman Catholic ecclesiology before the nineteenth century (Congar 1960: 77–114; Congar 1961: 15–150). They seek the origins of treatises De ecclesia in fourteenth-century controversies about the pope’s spiritual and temporal jurisdiction, see it metastasize as the Church responded to Protestants during the Counter Reformation (so-called), and bemoan the eventual triumph of “Tridentinism” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Alberigo 2006: 19–38; Rush 2018: 263–92). On this model, Roman Catholic theologians from the Middle Ages to the First Vatican Council ignored the ecclesiological insights of the fathers and great scholastics like Thomas Aquinas and advanced a notion of the Church that was wholly juridical and hierarchical (Congar 1965: 73–4). Thankfully, all was not lost. In the nineteenth century—again, according to Congar’s genealogy—daring reformers like Johann Adam Möhler and John Henry Newman “discovered” the biblical and patristic notion of the Church as a living reality (Doyle 2000: 23–37). The followers of Möhler and Newman were opposed, however, by theologians who insisted upon the older ecclesiology of the Jesuit Robert Bellarmine, and these reactionary forces succeeded in imposing Bellarmine’s juridical and hierarchical ecclesiology on an unwilling Church at the First Vatican Council. Drawing on theological currents marginalized by the First Vatican Council, the great theologians of the nouvelle théologie—Henri de Lubac, Edward Schillebeeckx, Karl Rahner, and Yves Congar— rediscovered the biblical understanding of the Church as a pilgrim people of God and the mystical body of Christ, wrote the first modern masterpieces of Roman Catholic ecclesiology, and triumphed against scholastic conservatives at the Second Vatican Council (Dulles 1974; McBrien 1977). The juridico–hierarchical model of Bellarmine was thus banished, and the first “total ecclesiologies” were born (Beal 2014: 169–200).

ROMAN CATHOLIC ECCLESIOLOGY



97

There is much to commend in the “standard account” of Roman Catholic ecclesiology. It summarizes the most important theology developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It touches on the deepest problems of contemporary Catholic life and culture. Like most modern genealogies, however, the “standard account” of Roman Catholic ecclesiology evaluates late medieval and early modern theologians almost exclusively in terms of their utility in modern ecclesiastical politics. Not to put too fine a point on it: the conventions of the genre require one to highlight the juridical and hierarchical nature of late medieval and early modern ecclesiology in order to celebrate the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Rarely in such accounts are late medieval and early modern theologians read charitably. I hope to show in what follows that the theologians of the early modern age were not strangers to the great themes of twentieth-century ecclesiology. Far from being concerned merely with the pope’s power and jurisdiction, they pioneered almost every trend celebrated in the “standard account” of Roman Catholic ecclesiology.

LATE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN “ECCLESIOLOGIES” Most modern ecclesiologists identify James of Viterbo’s De regimine christiano (1301–02), Giles of Rome’s De ecclesiastica potestate (1302), and John of Paris’s De regia potestate et papali (1302) as the first treatises De ecclesia (Congar 1957: 32–7). They then trace the thread running through William of Ockham’s criticisms of Pope John XXII, Marsilius of Padua’s Defensor Pacis (1324), and the writings of other theologians who located infallibility in the universal Church rather than in the papacy. Finer studies add discussions of the conciliar theories of Pierre d’Ailly, Jean Gerson, and Francesco Zabarella (Tierney 1955: 157–237; Oakley 1969: 56–77). One may certainly construct an “ecclesiology” from treatises about the pope’s jurisdiction in temporal matters in the fourteenth century, subsequent controversies between those who supported pope or council as the ultimate authority in ecclesiastical affairs, and the repurposing of much of this material in the controversial theology of the Catholic Reformation, but it must be admitted that few of these writings were “ecclesiologies” in the modern sense. For example, the English Carmelite Thomas Netter’s Doctrinale antiquitatum fidei ecclesiae catholicae (1415–29), written to oppose John Wyclif, consists of one treatise De vera religione and two treatises De sacramentis. One finds a better fit for the standard narrative in Juan de Torquemada’s Summa de ecclesia (1456), which defended the prerogatives of the papacy against Conciliarists, Eastern bishops, and Hussites at the Council of Basel—or more properly at the Councils of Ferrara and Florence sponsored by Torquemada’s patron Eugenius IV. As a result, the latter half of the fifteenth century witnessed a genuine consolidation of papal power under the strong influence of three generations of Dominican theologians. As it turns out, many of these Dominicans were, like Torquemada, cardinals and theologians in the papal household. Cajetan, for example, supported the condemnation of Conciliarism at the Fifth Lateran Council and defended papal primacy at the behest of Leo X against Martin Luther in De divina institutione pontificatus Romani Pontificis (1521). Arguing that the papacy was characterized by petrinitas, perpetuitas, and romanitas, Cajetan based his arguments for papal primacy not on the regimen monarchicum (cf. Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles IV, 76), but on what he believed was biblical support for the divine institution of the papacy. Even so, important works of Conciliarism by Jacques Almain, John Mair, and Alonso Guerrero continued to be published in the sixteenth century and

98

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

took on new life in the seventeenth and eighteenth (Burns and Izbicki 1997: vii–xxiii; Tutino 2010: 185–210). In light of the general shift toward papal power during the preceding century, it bears noting that the Council of Trent did not include a dogmatic constitution on the Church, nor did it conceive the Church apart from the sacraments. The Council opened its twenty-second session by affirming that God left his spouse the Church a visible sacrifice as human nature requires and followed in its twenty-third session by teaching that the visible sacrifice of the eucharist required a visible priesthood. In fact, the canons of the twenty-third session pronounced solemn anathema against anyone who denied the visible and external priesthood, the existence of holy orders other than the priesthood, the sacramental nature and character of holy orders, and the divinely instituted hierarchy of bishops, priests, and ministers. Although early modern theologians did not talk explicitly about the Church as a sacrament, Trent’s emphasis on the visibility of the sacraments as constitutive of the Church was but a short step away from the more famous formulations in Lumen Gentium. Nor can one ignore the strong language of reform that permeated the council. If it spoke frequently of the obedience due to the hierarchy, its attacks on ecclesiastical careerism sound far stronger than similar Vatican statements in our era, especially after the most recent wave of scandals. That said, the major works of “ecclesiology” that followed were controversial in intent. Although Thomas Stapleton’s Principiorum fidei doctrinalium demonstratio (1578) and Robert Bellarmine’s three-volume Disputationes de controversiis Christianae fidei (1581–93) were not meant to be “total ecclesiologies,” they did form the template for later treatments De ecclesia apologetica and De ecclesia dogmatica in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Most of the more daring ideas of early modern ecclesiology were found not in treatises De ecclesia, but in the more established genres De Incarnatione, De fide, and De sacramentis. These treatises, of course, were rarely concerned with merely institutional or hierarchical aspects of the Church. Even Bellarmine’s infamous definition of the Church in De controversiis, tome 2, book 3, chapter 2—a body of men joined by the profession of the same Christian faith and by communion in the same sacraments, under the guidance of legitimate pastors, chiefly the Roman Pontiff, the sole vicar of Christ on earth (coetus hominum eiusdem christianae fidei professione, et eorumdem sacramentorum communione colligatus, sub regimine legitimorum pastrorum et praecipue unius Christi in Terris vicarii Romani Pontificis)—which is routinely cited as evidence of the emphasis of early modern treatises on hierarchy, stresses the unity of the faith and the sacraments. Critics of Bellarmine insinuate that his supposed emphasis on the external profession of faith excludes any interior consideration of the faith and thus underscores the institutional aspect of the Church (Dulles 1974: 14–15; Beal 2014: 112). These critics rarely note the context of Bellarmine’s definition, which was meant to explain how sinners could still be members of the Church against objections from Melchor Cano and John Calvin, nor do they address Bellarmine’s subsequent clarifications—to say nothing of the spiritual and mystical writings that belie this interpretation (Donnelly and Teske 1989). At any rate, other theologians—most notably Francisco Suárez in De fide, disp. 9—rejected “extrinisic” notions of faith even while agreeing with Bellarmine in substance about the relationship of faith and Church membership. Catholic theologians usually defined the Church to be all who had believed in the one true God and his providence from the very beginning of the world, sometimes figured as the Church before the Old Covenant, the Church of the Old Covenant, and the Church of the New Covenant (or the saints before the law, the saints under the law, and the

ROMAN CATHOLIC ECCLESIOLOGY



99

saints under grace). At other times, they divided the Church into the Church Militant, the Church Suffering, and the Church Triumphant (that is, the communion of saints of those alive on earth, those in purgatory, and those in heaven). In most cases (and in most treatises De ecclesia), theologians used the term ecclesia to mean the Church Militant of the New Covenant. So defined the Church was united in the profession of a common faith, participation in a common worship, and recognition of common authorities. This unity trumped all forms of identity traditionally considered, be they based on race, class, clan, or nation. Tridentine theologians, however, routinely emphasized the interior and mystical aspects of this unity against what they considered to be extrinisicist Protestant ecclesiologies. The unity promised by Christ to his Church was of theological necessity a visible manifestation of God’s love: the visible unity of the body of the Church signified its participation in the holiness and merits of Jesus Christ, who vivified and sanctified the Church with his Holy Spirit. Here the Catholic conception of ecclesiological unity and holiness ones finds in Suárez, De fide, disp. 9 draws upon the Aristotelian hylomorphism in which almost all of its theologians were educated. As in any living organism, one discerns—from the visible unity of its bodily actions and their various ends—the single principle, the soul or substantial form, that animates it. The unity of the Church and its “perfection” as a society was thus constituted by a most intimate union, namely the union of mystical graces flowing directly from Christ into the souls of those perfectly united to him. The gifts and graces bestowed upon every Catholic allowed him or her to grow together as one body with specific roles and functions, as each individual grew in greater likeness to Christ as unto a perfect man (Eph. 4:13) and the Church as a whole grew into the fullness of Christ (1 Cor. 12:12; Eph. 1:23). The other notes of the Church followed this broadly organic and Aristotelian conception. Catholic theologians assumed the holiness of the Church should be evident in its Head, manifest in the graces bestowed in its members, and so be proof of the Spirit who animates it. They thus understood the Church’s sanctity to consist in its imitation of Christ, especially in the exercise of the evangelical counsels of poverty, obedience, and chastity, but also in its corporal works of mercy. Such conceptions of holiness led naturally to similar conceptions of catholicity and apostolicity. Catholic controversialists like Clichtove, Eck, and Cochlaeus consistently emphasized these notes by appealing to the prophets, for whom the Messianic Kingdom was universal in extent (Ps. 2:7-12; Zech. 9:10) and united by a common faith and worship (Isa. 2:2; Mic. 4:1-2; Zech. 8:3). Nor did controversialists, especially those interested in eucharistic theology like Cajetan, Schatzgeyer, Canisius, and Gregory of Valencia, fail to point out passages that described the fulfillment of God’s covenantal promise with the continuous office of the priesthood and its sacrifices (Lev. 21:6; Num. 28:1-10; Ezek. 44:14-16; Dan. 8:13, 12:11-12; Mal. 1:11; Apoc. 5:10). Catholic theologians similarly derived the apostolicity of its mission as a necessary theological conclusion from its catholicity and indefectibility in doctrine. After the Council of Trent, then, few Catholic theologians interpreted the notes of the Church in juridical terms alone. In fact, the general drift of the times was to criticize the earlier notions of the pope’s plenitudo potestatis that one finds in Giles of Rome or Juan de Torquemada. Indeed, the very notion of the Church as a societas perfecta allowed for the gradual separation of church and state power. Following Aquinas’s discussion in Summa theologiae Ia-IIae, q. 90, a. 3, Bellarmine defined a society as perfect (a) if and only if its ends could not be subordinated to the ends of another society and (b) if and only if the means by which it achieved its ends were independent of other societies (Granfield 1979). In such a conception, the only two candidates for a “perfect society”

100

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

are the church and the state, the former determined by its supernatural ends and means, the latter by natural ends and means. If Bellarmine thought monarchy the best form of government in principle—Christ was King after all—he still believed “mixed” government preferable in practice owing to the corruption of human nature by sin. In fact, Bellarmine argued that secular rulers received their authority ex universo populo, and thus enjoyed a certain autonomy in their exercise of power. Rightly recognizing the implications of Bellarmine’s political claims, Pope Sixtus V submitted the Jesuit’s Controversiae to the Congregation of the Index in 1590 (Tutino 2010: 52–80). Over the next two decades, several Catholic theologians rejected the pope’s plenitudo potestatis and potestas indirecta and defended the absolute divine right of secular rulers. For an example, see the work of Bellarmine’s great rival, the Scotsman William Barclay’s De regno et regali potestate (1600), which upheld the absolute incommensurability of the temporal and spiritual power. Bellarmine, in short, was decidedly moderate by seventeenth-century standards, caught between the last supporters of the pope’s plenitudo potestatis and the first advocates for the absolute separation of church and state (Tutino 2010: 159–210). As a result, controversy and confusion followed Bellarmine well into the twentieth century, where he was simultaneously derided as a fascist and celebrated as a forerunner of modern democratic ideals.

THE VISIBILITY OF THE CHURCH IN EARLY MODERN THEOLOGY If there is a single guiding assumption in early modern Catholic ecclesiology, it is the visibility of the Church. Among Roman Catholics during the early modern era, the conviction that the Holy Spirit manifested himself visibly in the one, true Church was paramount. Theologians usually developed the notes of the Church in terms of their material and formal visibility. By material visibility, they meant only that the Church professed the faith and taught publicly. At no point could the unity of the Church be established by mere private profession in the manner of a secret society. By formal visibility, they meant that the Church was, of theological necessity, recognizable in all ages as the society established by Jesus Christ for the salvation of all men and women. Of course, the very notion of “formal visibility” extends the notion of visibility into the metaphysical and spiritual realms, but Catholic theologians maintained that one could secure the Church’s formal visibility by appealing to the supernatural salvific end for which Christ founded the Church and the supernatural sacramental means which he instituted to bring about the salvation of all men and women. Here, too, theologians underscored the exterior visibility of the interior, mystical aspects of unity, sanctity, catholicity, and apostolicity in their institutions. The Catholic Reformation witnessed the reform of older modes of social ministry (such as the hospitals in which so many late medieval mystics proved their mettle) and the explosion of new forms of social ministry (sodalities, confraternities, and colleges for example). Nonplussed by the idea that the Holy Spirit who manifested visibly in the New Testament would somehow hide himself in the modern era, Catholics pointed to the (very visible) ecstasies of mystics like Teresa of Avila, Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, and María de Ágreda to demonstrate the presence of the Spirit in the Catholic Church, and depictions of medieval and baroque mystics in ecstasy proliferated in baroque art and architecture. For Catholic theologians, then, both the individual mystic and the larger social institutions served to remind Europe that the Spirit resided in the Catholic Church

ROMAN CATHOLIC ECCLESIOLOGY

 101

in the same way he had manifested at Christ’s baptism and at Pentecost. The Church also renewed efforts to reunite with the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Churches, leading to the new creation of several so-called Uniate Churches. If Catholics pointed to their saints and social institutions as proof of the holiness of the Church, they pointed to the success of their missions to demonstrate its catholicity. The Catholic Church alone, they maintained, possessed missions in all nations. If the conversion of Central and South America, the western coast of India, and the Philippines were the first visible fruits of the Church’s catholicity, theologians dreamt of gaining the whole of India, China, Japan, and Tibet. It could be argued, in fact, that the most important developments of Catholic ecclesiology were brought about by the educational imperatives of the missions, especially those developments that concerned Church membership. Theologians of the Middle Ages, for example, acknowledged the possibility of invincible ignorance only in the most extreme circumstances, such as when infants had been abandoned in the woods or kidnapped by Muslim pirates. Early modern Catholic theologians such as Francisco Vitoria, Andreas de Vega, Domingo de Soto, Francisco Suárez, Juan Martínez de Ripalda, and Juan de Lugo, following the example of Bartolomé de las Casas, expanded these considerations to anyone wrongly educated, including the children of schismatics and heretics, and all non-Christians (Urdañoz 1940; Cardia 1941; Lombardi 1943; Cogoni 1946; Méndez Fernández 1993; Jericó Bermejo 2000; Morali 2006). Recall that for Aquinas and the great scholastics of the high Middle Ages, God granted implicit faith to uneducated people who faithfully believed what their religious leaders taught only before the coming of Christ. In Aquinas’s conception, uneducated persons who lived before the incarnation could be saved by believing what their religious authorities taught, provided that the authorities themselves explicitly believed in the coming of the Redeemer. After the incarnation and the promulgation of the gospel, however, every man and woman who had reached the age of reason (usually seven or eight years old) had to profess faith in Jesus Christ explicitly to be saved. With the discovery of the Americas and the vast extent of Asia, Catholic theologians abandoned this rigorous interpretation of implicit faith as unfitting with God’s mercy. Catholic theologians thus assumed that anyone who, believing in God and providence implicitly, made an act of perfect charity and contrition and persevered in the grace that made that act salutary, could be justified before God and thereby attain salvation. Theologians often added the caveat that such acts were not elicited in one who was aware of God’s desire for him or her to join the Church, but missionaries were quick to defend those who refused entry into the Church because Christians failed to live by its commandments. Indeed, if the missionary failed to present Christ visibly in his own actions—if the missionary failed in faith, hope, or charity—the virtuous non-Christian could not be blamed for remaining among the “invisible” faithful. Early modern Catholic theologians thus denied that the infamous phrase extra ecclesiam nulla salus meant that none could be saved except those in visible communion with the Roman Catholic Church. Indeed, Catholic arguments for an “invisible” Church of virtuous Jews, Muslims, pagans, and (even in rare circumstances) atheists curiously mirrored Protestant arguments for the “invisibility” of the true Church. Early modern theologians also developed novel interpretations of the mystical body. In interpreting the grace of headship in Summa theologiae III, q. 8, a. 2, Thomists such as Cajetan, Medina, Suárez, and Nazarius debated the degree to which Christ’s life flowed (influit) into the Church (Mersch 1938: 464–71). Scotists such as Bonaventura Belluti, Angelo Volpi, and Lorenzo Brancati expanded the doctrine of the mystical body to include and express their commitments to the absolute predestination of Christ

102

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

and the Blessed Virgin, returning to older patristic ideas of the predestination and pre-existence of the Church prior to Adam’s sin (Pomplun 2014: 525–51). Early modern biblical commentaries are also a rich source for ecclesiological ideas. Most early modern commentaries on the Song of Songs, for example, interpreted the text in terms of the intimate union of Christ and the Church. Prominent examples include Alonso Orozco’s Commentaria quaedam in Cantica Canticorum (1581) and Luis de Leon’s In Canticum Canticorum triplex explanatio (1589). One could hardly find an understanding of the Church more mystical than the one found in the Jesuit Ferdinand Quirinus de Salazar’s In Canticum Canticorum Salomonis (1642), which explained the marriage of Christ and the Church in an “allegorical, prophetic, mystical, and hyper-mystical” exposition.

THE MODERN ORIGINS OF “ECCLESIOLOGY” As a sub-discipline of theology that deals with the nature and mission of the Church, ecclesiology came into existence only in the nineteenth century. In fact, after treating Bellarmine to the usual capitulum culparum, the standard account of Roman Catholic ecclesiology skips two centuries to Johann Adam Möhler and the newly reconstituted Jesuits. From the Tübingen School of Möhler, Johann Sebastian von Drey, and Johann Michael Sailer, the standard narrative follows a trajectory to John Henry Newman, who brought German ecclesiological ideas into the mainstream of Anglo-American theology. The standard narrative treats the Roman theologians Giovanni Perrone, Carlo Passaglia, Clemens Schrader, and Johann Baptist Franzelin in parallel and sets these two schools on a course to collide at the First Vatican Council. On this model, the nineteenth century witnessed the Roman exaltation of papal prerogatives against Gallicanism, Febronianism, Josephinism, and similar movements that stressed the interests of national churches over and against Vatican claims. The theologians of the twentieth century, then, reaching back to the great insights of the Tübingen School, brought about the dialectical sublation of Papalism by Conciliarism by rejecting Roman claims. Although the Tübingen School did not “rediscover” the fathers—patristic scholarship had progressed for three full centuries after Erasmus, and early modern theologians rightly celebrated the vast historical–dogmatic syntheses of Denis Pétau and Louis Thomassin—German theologians certainly produced the most important ecclesiologies of the early nineteenth century. Möhler, Drey, and Sailer emphasized the organic unity of the Church, its living tradition, its historicity, and (what is most important) the development of its doctrine. In this, they placed themselves midway between what they imagined to be the static interpretations of the unity of the Church teaching that later came to be associated with neo-scholasticism (on the one hand) and the purely invisible conceptions of the Church they associated with Protestantism (on the other). Led by the Romantic tendencies of their time, however, the Tübingen theologians associated the internal and mystical elements of the Church wholly with antiquity and the Middle Ages. In their minds, the rise of nominalism and modern philosophy led to the complete loss of a bygone understanding of the Church that was interior and spiritual. To redress this (imaginary) loss, Möhler emphasized the constitutive role played by the Holy Spirit in the Church in Die Einheit in der Kirche oder das Princip des Katholicismus, dargestellt im Geiste der Kirchenväter der drei ersten Jahrhunderte (1825) and similarly stressed the role played by the Incarnate Word in Symbolik oder Darstellung der dogmatischen Gegensätze der Katholiken und Protestanten nach ihren Öffentlichen Bekenntnisschriften (1832).

ROMAN CATHOLIC ECCLESIOLOGY

 103

The climate in the Eternal City was more given to extremes. In 1796, Napoléon invaded Rome and occupied the Papal States. Pope Pius VI, who refused to cede sovereignty to Napoléon, was abducted by Napoléon’s general Alexandre Berthier in 1798 and taken into exile, where he soon died. The humiliation and death of Pius VI led to strong conservative support for the papacy, most notably in the publication of Mauro Cappellari’s Il trionfo della Santa Sede (1799), which defended papal infallibility and the temporal sovereignty of the pope. After relatively short reigns by Popes Leo XII and Pius VIII, Cappellari was elected to the papacy in 1831 and took the name Gregory XVI. The pope charged Antonio Rosmini-Serbati with revitalizing the Catholic philosophy of Augustine and Aquinas. As the political climate changed and Rosmini’s Republicanism came under suspicion, the newly reconstituted Society of Jesus consolidated power by securing the condemnations of rationalism, traditionalism, and ontologism (including several positions attributed to Rosmini himself). Upon closer inspection, however, we see that the newly empowered neo-scholastics also made compromises. In fact, with the idea of a genuine plenitudo potestatis placed beyond the pale by the events of the nineteenth century, they could not but revive Bellarmine’s understanding of the Church as a societas perfecta in order to argue that the Church’s independence was necessary for the spiritual good of Europe. It is difficult in this light not to interpret the definition of papal infallibility and necessity of a Petrine primacy of jurisdiction at the First Vatican Council as defensive in character, but it is important not to neglect other aspects of late nineteenth-century ecclesiology that found expression in the Council. The Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith emphasized the continued presence of Christ to his bride “assisting her when she teaches, blessing her in her labors, and bringing her help when she is in danger.” It recommended frequent reception of the sacraments for a closer union of the members with the head and an “increased vigor in the whole mystical body of Christ.” Even as the Council praised the submission of faith, it noted the need for the interior assistance, inspiration, and illumination of the Holy Spirit. When the Council spoke of the “clear notes” (notae manifestae) with which Christ endowed the Church, it presented them as credible, not incredible. What is more important, despite affirmations of worldwide authority and immediate jurisdictional power over the Church in matter of faith, morals, and discipline, the council fathers were forced to restrict the Church’s power to the faithful. It reaffirmed the Council of Florence’s teaching on papal primacy, but slyly refrained from asserting the plenitudo potestatis. In this light, even the Council father’s insistence on the inclusion of Bellarmine’s definition of the Church demonstrates a decided retreat from temporal affairs, and Leo XIII’s encyclical Immortale Dei (1885), which effectively elevated Bellarmine’s notion of the societas perfecta to papal teaching, sought less to assert the dependence of temporal powers on the Church as to secure the independence of the Church from temporal powers. In fact, most Catholic theologians of the late nineteenth century interpreted Bellarmine’s societas perfecta to imply that the state itself possessed ends and means that were independent of the Church, thereby setting the stage for the great debates about church and state that were to be resolved only at the Second Vatican Council.

CONCLUSION The historical process by which late medieval and early modern ecclesiology came to be vilified is embarrassingly simple. After the revolutions of the eighteenth and

104

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

nineteenth centuries, Catholic monasteries, libraries, and institutions of higher learning were unable to sustain the academic and theological cultures they had long nurtured. Most religious orders, quite unprepared for violent social change, were left in disarray. The first to return to prominence was the Society of Jesus, whose theologians quickly filled the void after the re-establishment of the order in 1814. But the scholasticism that revived during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a pale shadow of the earlier syntheses. Editions of many of the greatest scholastics and dogmatic theologians were published, but theologians, lacking the humanistic and scholastic culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, struggled to put the pieces together. In order to concentrate their forces on the defense of the Papal States, Jesuits and Dominicans reduced theology to scholasticism, and scholasticism to Thomism. In the early twentieth century, Jesuit and Dominican Thomists actively marginalized other scholastic traditions, compounding the neglect brought about by political upheaval with a willful know-nothing ignorance of other theologies. These trends found their culmination in the canonization of Bellarmine in 1930 and his elevation to the status of Doctor of the Church the following year. For conservatives, the canonization of Bellarmine served as a bulwark for the ecclesiology of the First Vatican Council. For progressives, the Jesuit “ecclesiologist” was the symbol for an increasingly authoritarian Church cut off from the society and actively hostile to modernity. For progressives, in other words, the entire development of ecclesiology as conservatives understood it was both a source and a symptom of the modernity the conservatives despised. If all theology after Duns Scotus had led to formalism, nominalism, skepticism, fatalism, pantheism, voluntarism, individualism, modernism, Spinozism, Kantianism, and radical Islamism as conservatives claimed, there was no reason to exempt Bellarmine from this narrative. Conservatives and progressives both failed to attend to the rich reflections on the Church found of early modern theology. Both adopted the periodization found in Lutheran histories of philosophy for their own political purposes, and both accepted the genealogies of the late medieval origins of modernity that we today associate with Étienne Gilson and his imitators (Pomplun 2016: 355–445). As a result, theologians of the twentieth century routinely claimed to “discover” biblical and patristic teachings that would have been common knowledge to early modern theologians. To give but one example: when Charles Journet opened his famous Théologie de l’Église (1958) by discussing the Church in its trinitarian relationship to Jesus Christ and the Blessed Virgin, the great Dominican unknowingly advanced a series of arguments that were commonplace in seventeenth-century Scotist treatments of the motive of the incarnation, the prerogatives of the Blessed Virgin, and theologies of the Church as mystical body. As the theological treatises of the late Middle Ages and early modern era remain unread, such false “discoveries” will only increase. It is a shame that twentieth-century Catholic theologians have reduced the history of ecclesiology before the nineteenth century to Bellarmine’s definition of the Church. The grand courses of scholastic theology and philosophy, the novel historical–dogmatic syntheses, and the mystical biblical commentaries and summae of the early modern age contain vibrant treatments of the relationship of the Church to Christ its founder, its head, and its spouse, as well as the mystical nature of their unity, and the relationship of these themes to the major loci theologici. All that remains is for theologians to put aside their old prejudices, pick up these works, and read them.

ROMAN CATHOLIC ECCLESIOLOGY

 105

REFERENCES Alberigo, G. (2006), “From the Council of Trent to Tridentism,” in Raymond F. Bulman and Frederick Parrella (eds.), From Trent to Vatican II: Historical and Theological Investigations, 19–38, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beal, R. (2014), Mystery of the Church, People of God. Yves Congar’s Total Ecclesiology as a Path to Vatican II, Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. Burns, J. H. and T. M. Izbicki (1997), Conciliarism and Papalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cardia, G. (1941), La posizione del de Lugo nella dottrina della universale necessità e possibilità della fede, Cagliari: F. Trois. Cogoni, G. (1946), La dottrina di Francesco Suarez nel problema della salvezza degli infedeli, Cagliari: Tipografia S. Giuseppe. Congar, Y. (1957), Lay People in the Church, Westminster: Newman Press. Congar, Y. (1960), “L’ecclésiologie, de la Révolution française au Concile du Vatican, sous le signe de l’affirmation de l’autorité,” in Maurice Nédoncelle (ed.), L’Ecclésiologie au XIXe siècle, 77–114, Paris: Editions du Cerf. Congar, Y. (1961), “Aspects ecclésiologiques de la querelle entre mendiants et séculiers,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 36: 15–150. Congar, Y. (1965). The Mystery of the Church, Baltimore: Helicon Press. (L’Ecclésiologie au XIXe siècle. Paris: Editions du Cerf.) Donnelly, J. P. and R. Teske (1989), Robert Bellarmine: Spiritual Writings, Mahwah: Paulist Press. Doyle, D. (2000), Communion Ecclesiology: Visions and Versions, Maryknoll: Orbis. Dulles, A. (1974), Models of the Church: A Critical Assessment of the Church in All Its Aspects, Garden City: Doubleday. Granfield, P. (1979), “The Church as Societas Perfecta in the Schemata of Vatican I,” Church History 48: 431–46. Jericó Bermejo, I. (2000), “Domingo Báñez: Teología de la infidelidad en los paganos y herejes (1584),” Revista Augustiniana 41: 7–479. Lombardi, R. (1943), La salvezza di chi non ha fede, Rome: Edizioni La Civiltà Cattolica. McBrien, R. P. (1977), The Remaking of the Church, New York: Harper & Row. Méndez Fernández, B. (1993), El problema de la salvación de “los infieles” en Francisco de Vitoria, Rome: Iglesia Nacional Española. Mersch, E., S. J. (1938), The Whole Christ: The Historical Development of the Doctrine of the Mystical Body in Scripture and Tradition, Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company. Morali, I. (2006). “Gratia et infidelitas: F. de Toledo SJ e F. Suarez SJ Maestri del Collegio Romano e la questione della salus infidelium al tempo delle grandi missioni gesuitiche,” Studia missionalia 55: 99–150. Oakley, F. (1969), Council over Pope? New York: Herder and Herder. Pomplun, T. (2014), “The Immaculate World: Predestination and Passibility in Modern Scotism,” Modern Theology 30: 525–51. Pomplun, T. (2016), “John Duns Scotus in the History of Medieval Philosophy from the Sixteenth Century to Étienne Gilson (†1978),” Bulletin de philosophie médiévale 58: 355–445. Rush, O. (2018), “Roman Catholic Ecclesiology from the Council of Trent to Vatican II and Beyond,” in Paul Avis (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Ecclesiology, 263–92, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

106

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Tierney, B. (1955), Foundations of Conciliar Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tutino, S. (2010), Empire of Souls: Robert Bellarmine and the Christian Commonwealth, New York: Oxford University Press. Urdañoz, T. (1940), “La necesidad de la fe explicita para salvarse según los teólogos de la Escuela Salmantina,” Ciencia Tomista 31: 529–37.

Chapter NINE

Roman Catholic Ecclesiology From Vatican II to Today FRANCESCA MURPHY

INTRODUCTION In 1922, Romano Guardini wrote, “the Church is awakening in men’s souls” ([1922] 1990: 19). There followed eight decades of loving and optimistic meditation on the Church. The Church was the subject of some of the best Catholic theology of the twentieth century; the most influential document of the Second Vatican Council (1962–5) is its Dogmatic Constitution on the Church: Lumen Gentium. The upbeat mood flowed into the mid1970s. Lumen Gentium’s laity-inclusive metaphor for the Church, “the people of God,” rose like incense from the lips of zealous parishioners. Projects for Church unity flourished in the 1970s and 1980s. By the 1990s the ecumenical committees were languishing: ecclesial climatologists had observed the onset of “ecumenical winter.” John Paul II’s 1995 encyclical Ut Unum Sint was a burst of sunlight, with its open-handed request of Protestant and Orthodox Christians to teach the Holy See how to reform the papacy (UUS 96). As the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Guardini’s book approaches, the hopeful outlook of twentieth-century ecclesiology looks like wishful thinking; its ecumenism seems as evanescent as moonshine. After twenty years of clerical sex abuse scandals, it is difficult to use the expression “people of God” without irony. When deployed in reference to “the scandal,” in the Letter of His Holiness Pope Francis to the People of God, it smacked more of desperation than of inclusivity (Pope Francis 2018). By contextualizing Petrine primacy within the Apostolic College of Bishops, Vatican II had merely burnished the glamour of the papacy. Paul VI’s mothballing of the triple tiara in 1964 had enabled subsequent popes to wear their authenticity well. Today, however, the papacy seems diminished by failure to redress “the scandal” in a manner condign and evocative. In the eyes of pre-Vatican II observers, be-cassocked, buttoned-up, Catholic priests were shorthand for the Roman Church; today, loathing not only of clericalism but of the clergy has helped to turn ancient Catholic countries like Ireland and Spain into secular strongholds targeted by Protestant missionaries. The twentieth century made the Church herself an outstanding, some would say egregious, feature of Catholic apologetics. What remains of this edifice? The Church is a mystery, and less readily visible than Catholics had been persuaded.

108

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

THE ANTECEDENTS OF VATICAN II ECCLESIOLOGY Johann Adam Möhler (1796–1838) and the Heritage of Vatican I (1870) The Church is the living authority on matters of faith for Catholics. Authority is largely distributed hierarchically, from the pope, down through the bishops, the clergy, and thence to laypeople. The ecclesiology of Vatican I is juridical. Juridical ecclesiology lays out the apportioning of authority in legal terms. Canonical and legal structures are a perfect object for sharply trained Thomists, who abounded in the Tridentine period. The most important concept which the Thomist-trained Vatican II bishops drew on is analogy (Guarino 2018: 25, 74–5). To a large extent, Vatican II replaces the legal exposition of the structure of the Church with analogical illustrations. The Council unfolds the existence and nature of the Church with analogies, such as “Light to the Nations,” “Mystical Body of Christ,” “People of God,” “Spouse/Mother.” The analogies it uses are fairly biblical. The roots of the analogical ecclesiology of Vatican II reach back beyond Vatican I to the nineteenth-century Tübingen School of Theology. The Tübingites were Platonizing Romantic Catholics who conceived of dogmas as proceeding organically from perfect forms. One of the original members of the Tübingen school, Sebastian Drey, described the theologian’s vocation as exhibiting the organic unity of Christian faith. This helped Adam Möhler to develop the notion of Catholicism as holistic and organic. Möhler conceived of the Church as an organic integration of divine and human elements. The Church is an organic unity of divine and human by analogy with Christ, in whom divine and human nature interlock. The Church perpetuates the incarnation: By the Church on earth, Catholics understand the visible community of believers, founded by Christ . . . established by him, and appointed to conduct all nations . . . back to God. . . . The . . . reason of the visibility of the Church is to be found in the incarnation of the Divine Word. Had that Word descended into the hearts of men . . . without appearing in a corporeal shape, then only an internal, invisible Church would have been established. But since the Word became flesh, it expressed itself in an outward, perceptible, and human manner. (Möhler [1832] 1997: 258) Romanticism brought with it both a taste for history and some glimmering of historical sense for the past as past, and, consequently, a recognition of the epistemological problem of understanding Christian origins. Möhler’s idea of the Church as an analogical “Continuity Incarnation” addresses the interest in and the problem of history. Through the Church Christ is not a distant figure in the past but present among us, and without his thereby losing his roots in his own time and in the traditions formed over the centuries. The Church is an eternity in time: “the visible Church . . . is the Son of God himself, everlastingly manifesting himself among men in a human form, perpetually renovated, and eternally young—the permanent incarnation of the same, as in Holy Writ, even the faithful are called ‘the body of Christ.’” Catholics think authority to interpret the Scriptures resides in the Church as an organic whole because, Möhler says, the Church has a divine–human structure parallel to that of Christ (Möhler [1832] 1997: 259). Möhler and his disciples acknowledged the paradoxical quality of the well-roundedness of the Church. Like nature itself the Church is an organic (we would say ecological) whole. But, unlike anything else in nature or in history, the Church’s unity encompasses extreme differences and holds opposites in tension. Church unity is a miracle. G. K.

ROMAN CATHOLIC ECCLESIOLOGY

 109

Chesterton’s Orthodoxy imagined the Church as a chariot, roaring from side to side in order to stay upright. Romantics from Möhler to Chesterton to Guardini, Henri de Lubac (1896–1991), and Erich Przywara (1889–1972) addressed Hegel’s “dialectical” philosophy of history with the argument that the only community sufficiently inclusive to hold contradictions together is the supernatural society of the Church. This idea reappears all the way down to Pope Francis’ “theology of the people” ecclesiology (Borghese [2017] 2018: 69). Between Vatican I and II, the most important ecclesial analogy is that of the Church as the “mystical body of Christ.” This analogy paved the way for others by inuring Catholic ecclesiologists to analogical thinking. Joseph Ratzinger noted that between Vatican I and the Great War, “papal primacy was so much in the foreground that the Church appeared . . . as a centrally directed institution . . . which only encountered one externally.” The revival of Möhler taught Ratzinger’s generation that it is “false theology” to maintain that “Christ in the beginning established the hierarchy and by doing so did enough to look after the Church until the end of time.” To the contrary: The Church is the mystical body . . . Christ is continually founding it: . . . he is never only the past but is always and above all the present and future. The Church is the presence of Christ, . . . he is contemporaneous with us. . . . Christ is present in people’s hearts: it is from there that he shapes the Church, and not the other way around. . . . Vatican II put this insight . . . at the head of its considerations when it began its fundamental text on the Church by saying: Lumen gentium cum sit Christus, “because Christ is the light of the nations” there exists the mirror of his glory, the Church, that reflects his radiance. (Ratzinger 1988: 4–5) Tübingen theology survived in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Catholic Church because it dispersed some of its seeds among the Thomists, who controlled Catholic education. The Vatican I cardinal, Johann Baptist Franzelin, was one of these. Möhler’s description of the Church as the “body of Christ” made its way into the Vatican I documents because of Franzelin’s dogged persistence. Even after Joseph Kleutgen erased it from the Pastor Aeternus, the Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church of Christ which Franzelin had originally drafted, the term reappears at the end of Dei Filius, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith. Vatican I explicates papal primacy in juridical language, which means it states legally where authority resides. The christological analogy pictures the Church as a body, that is, as an organic whole made up of constituent parts. After five decades underground, Möhler’s analogy will return to help unfold the picture of the Church as also containing agents such as bishops, clergy, religious, and even laity.

Matthias Scheeben (1835–88) Late Tübingen Romanticism discounted itself as an ecclesial–political force by tying its colors to opposition to papal infallibility. They were the losers at Vatican I, and Romantic ecclesiology would have disappeared altogether after 1870 if its emissaries had not been operative in the Thomist strongholds. Trained to argue by Roman Thomists, Matthias Scheeben contended for the mysterious quality of Catholicism. This is in line with Dei Filius, which states that Catholicism is reasonable up to a point, beyond which faith must take over. There is a gray area between faith and reason, where one can be guided, if not rationally by demonstration then at least by “motives of credibility.” There are, according to Scheeben, “motives of credibility,” that is, some reasonable evidence for belief, in the

110

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Catholic Church: the Church’s “visibility” is literally visible, not only the object of the eyes of faith. Scheeben writes, The Church is visible in the very way that its historical founder and head, the God-man Himself, was visible. . . . the Church is visible not only as it actually stands at present, but in its divine foundation and institution. The astonishing origin and the no less astonishing continuance . . . of this society, the numberless moral and physical miracles marking its course . . . prove that it is no mere work of man. They prove that it is a work of God . . . that He Himself has founded. (Scheeben [1946] 2006: 539) As an historical figure, Jesus was of course literally visible to his contemporaries, but Jesus was only seen as the Son of God by those illuminated by faith. The Church’s visibility transcends reasonable “motives for credibility” and becomes a matter of faith, according to Scheeben, when we take her claim to be not only that Jesus instituted its authority structure and handed it on to Peter and his successors, not only that God certifies the hierarchy by ever more remote causal institution, but that God is perpetually “incarnate” in the Church (Scheeben [1946] 2006: 541). Scheeben unfolds the mystical body of Christ analogy into a nuptial analogy: “As the mystical body of Christ, the Church is His true bride who, made fruitful by His divine power, has the destiny of bearing heavenly children to Him and His heavenly Father . . . and of conducting them beyond the whole range of created nature up to the very bosom of His heavenly Father” (Scheeben [1946] 2006: 541–2). Tridentine ecclesial thinking had commonly construed the Church as composed of two elements, “soul” (Holy Spirit) and “body.” The soul is the active and formative element, the body the passive material. Just as the Holy Spirit sired Christ in Mary, so, as the “Soul” of the Church, the Holy Spirit sires and begets offspring in her, that is, “Christ” or Christians as adopted sons of the Father. Scheeben says, [The Spirit] must be active in the members of Christ’s body as He is in the real body of Christ, namely, by filling them with the plenitude of His divinity. He must overshadow the bride of Christ as once He overshadowed Mary’s womb, so that in her the Son of God may be reborn in His divine holiness and majesty . . . she does not herself live, but God lives in her. He must make her so like her divine head and bridegroom that she seems to be Christ Himself. (Scheeben [1946] 2006: 544) Catholic theology did not begin its love-affair with “nuptial mysticism” in 1964 but in the 1870s. Scheeben restored Patristic nuptial mysticism to the heart of Catholic ecclesiology. Scheeben retained his relevance because he did not just use biblical metaphors as illustrations, but made them bear theological weight. If humanity is created in and for Christ, and if the Church is the body of Christ, then, at least vocationally, all humanity has an orientation to the Church (Scheeben [1946] 2006: 543). To be human is to be called and oriented toward the Church: this idea will be influential both in ecumenism, since “orientation” permits virtual membership in the Church, and in apologetics, since what binds global humanity together is humanity’s implicit christomorphism. “Catholic Romantics” from Möhler to John Henry Newman in England, and their French successors in the twentieth-century ressourcement movement, such as de Lubac and Yves Congar (1904–95), wanted to go head to head with secular Romanticism. Secular Romantics demonstrated a genuine historical sense, but they overestimated it, often envisaging all truths as historical, and historicity as the whole of the truth. A “Romantic” nose for history could help Catholics explain why Church tradition is inseparable from

ROMAN CATHOLIC ECCLESIOLOGY

 111

Scriptural revelation, but historicism has no place in Catholic ecclesiology. It was not until Vatican II that Catholics worked out how to say the Church has an eschatological completeness which simultaneously can be renovated, and grow to an ever-greater plenitude.

Ecclesiastical Internationalism Since the sixteenth century, Christian mission to the New World, India, Africa, and Asia had been interlaced with the projection of European military and mercantile dynamism. With the rise of nationalist consciousness in the politically subdued nations, the Church distanced itself from the colonial powers. It did not want its missionaries expelled along with the colonizers. As luck would have it, the need to distance itself from European territorial expansion began shortly after the Vatican lost all of its territorial redoubts. With the loss of the Papal States in 1870, the Church was, for the first time since the Middle Ages, a non-territorial power. It was from the seat of the world’s first non-territorial or virtual state that popes from Benedict XV to Pius XII issued encyclicals on the indigenous and simultaneously universal character of Catholicism. The recurrent theme of their social teaching is the unity of the human race under the one God (Murphy 2010). In proportion as trade and culture became more global, so the desire for national political representation increased. As a metaphor for the Church, Bellarmine’s Republic of Venice was ripe to be exchanged for the unity of the human race in Christ. Eugenio Pacelli wrote his dissertation on the canonical and legal consequences of the loss of territorial power and assisted in the revision of canon law which it entailed. As Pius XII, he would be one of the first authors to use the term “racism” not in a neutral sociological way, but as a derogatory term. Human brotherhood was a repeated feature of his encyclicals (SP 15, 17, 37, 49-50, 106). This theme was at the root of his insistence on the monogenetic origin of the human race (HG 37). The Vatican II bishops had lived through two World Wars, that is, through an era in which internecine conflict was more evident than international fellowship. If commerce and culture were more global while political feeling grew more nationalistic, what would make an increasingly contiguous human race a community? Alongside Pius XII, Henri de Lubac argued that the only force binding human beings together was the Church, to which all humanity was called to belong: “Humanity is one, organically one by its divine structure; it is the Church’s mission to reveal to men that pristine unity that they have lost, to restore and complete it” (de Lubac [1938] 1950: 16). The change in self-understanding had repercussions: in one generation American bishops went from promoting “national” parishes (with German and Irish churches just blocks apart) to being admonished by Pius XII to desegregate (McGreevy 1996: 91–2). Under Pius XII the Church had come to present itself as a transnational body which fostered localism. This is the origin of Lumen Gentium’s opening definition of the Church as “a light to the nations” (LG 1), the one unifying factor for globally warring humanity.

Mystici Corporis Christi (Pius XII: June 1943) The Vatican’s new “virtual” status as a political entity encouraged Catholics to consider how the visible Church has its birth “in men’s souls” (Guardini’s telling phrase). The answer is that Christ’s presence in human souls through grace is the source of the Church as the “visible” body of Christ. The “body of Christ” analogy for the Church which had been renewed by Möhler disappeared into Rome’s subterranean catacombs after Vatican I, but went mainstream when deployed by writers like Abbot Columba Marmion O.S.B.

112

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

(1858–1923), Emile Mersch (1890–1940), Cardinal Charles Journet O.P. (1891–1975), and Henri de Lubac with Catholicisme: les aspects sociaux du dogme (1938). Pius XII’s 1943 encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi authorized the new ecclesiology. This encyclical portrays Christ as causing and originating the Church by communicating his graces to his members through the sacraments. The mystical body of Christ analogy for the Church is a sacramental analogy. It claims, in Pius XII’s words, that Christ is the head of his mystical body, the Church, because as the nerves extend from the head to all parts of the human body and give them power to feel and to move, in like manner our Savior communicates strength and power to His Church so that the things of God are understood . . . and . . . desired by the faithful. From Him streams into the body of the Church . . . all the grace by which [believers] are made holy as He is holy. (MCC 49) The Mass is an “external rite,” performed by human beings, but the “effect” of participating in the sacrifice of the Mass is generated by Christ within human “souls” (MCC 51). This is a Christ-centered, sacramental conception of the Church. According to Pius XII here, the actual, living “subject” of the Church, the agent behind her actions, is Christ himself: “It is He who through the Church baptizes, teaches, rules, looses, binds, offers, sacrifices” (MCC 54). Here the encyclical integrates the Möhleresque, originally Pauline idea of the Church as the body of Christ with the old, baroque idea of the Church as human in her “body,” but divine in her soul: It is He who, through His heavenly grace, is the principle of every supernatural act in all parts of the Body. . . . while by His grace He provides for the continual growth of the Church, He yet refuses to dwell through sanctifying grace in those members that are wholly severed from the Body. This presence and activity of the Spirit of Jesus Christ is . . . described by . . . Leo XIII in his Encyclical Letter Divinum Illud . . . : “ . . . as Christ is the Head of the Church, so is the Holy Spirit her soul.” (MCC 57) When yoked in this way with judicial ecclesiologies, the “Mystici Corporis” idea is ecumenically disastrous. The young Joseph Ratzinger was not the only one to mention that Pius XII’s turn of phrase puts Protestants on a par with non-Christians in relation to the Catholic Church (Ratzinger [1960] 1993: 87). Others had preceded Ratzinger in adverting to this canonical blunder, observing that Protestant baptism is canonically valid and therefore must, in some sense, unite all Christians in a single body. No matter how strong the analogy, people still need to sort out what part of it is to be taken literally, and what part metaphorically. For Pius XII, “body” literally means “visible unity” (as in the Catholic Church): “Christ,” says the Apostle, “is the Head of the Body of the Church” (Col. 1.18). If the Church is a body, it must be an unbroken unity, according to those words of Paul: “Though many we are one body in Christ” (1 Cor. 12.12). But it is not enough that the Body of the Church should be an unbroken unity; it must also be something definite and perceptible to the senses.” (MCC 14) The Jesuit Henri de Lubac had been more judicious in his language: “The Church, without being exactly coextensive with the Mystical Body, is not adequately distinct from it. For this reason it is natural that between her and it—as within the Mystical Body itself between the head and the members—there should arise a kind of exchange of idioms: Corpus Christi quod est ecclesia” (de Lubac [1938] 1950: 26).

ROMAN CATHOLIC ECCLESIOLOGY

 113

Mystici Corporis Christi draws on the analogy to recollect that married laity are contributing members of the body (MCC 17). In Pius XII’s Thomistic usage, the analogy operates on the idea of cause. Christ our Savior, hiddenly present in the Mass as in all the sacraments, and their concealed agent, causes grace to flow through the sacraments, administered by priests and authorized by bishops. So in this conception the Church as “mystical body” is a kind of “sacramental machine,” and “that those who exercise sacred power in this Body [that is, the clergy] are its chief members must be maintained uncompromisingly”: “Bishops must be considered as the more illustrious members of the Universal Church” (MCC 17, 42). Those who are (secondary) causes must in this sense be the (secondary) movers of the Church. The driving philosophical idea here is Aristotle’s and (through him) Thomas’s conception of cause. Aristotle was simply pointing out the obvious. Human beings are inevitably interested in causes: causes are relevant to us because they make things happen. In Baroque Thomism, causes are often less conspicuous than “causation” as a process. In some respects, Mystici Corporis Christi conceives of the Church as a hierarchical process. Henri de Lubac offers a precision here in his Corpus Mysticum: Essai sur L’Eucharistie et l’Église au moyen âge, which describes how the term “mystical body” was reserved for the eucharist alone in the later Middle Ages. Before the controversies about the real presence, it was common to speak of the Church as the “translation” or continuation of Christ, as his body. De Lubac notes that the word mysterium denotes an action or an event, whereas the word “sacrament” refers to a thing (compare “the reservation of the Blessed Sacrament” and “the celebration of the mysteries”). As the “mystery-body” body of Christ, the Church is an event or action, brought about by the sacramental-body, the eucharist (de Lubac 1949: 55–65). De Lubac would influence not only Lumen Gentium but Ecclesia de Eucharistia (2003), John Paul II’s most important encyclical about eucharistic ecclesiology.

Charles Journet: The Church of the Word Incarnate (1941) Thomas Aquinas did not write an article about the Church, so all of modern Thomist ecclesiology, juridical or mystical, is an extrapolation. The Swiss Charles Journet has been described as Jacques Maritain’s theological cousin, and, like Maritain, Journet repurposed Thomas’s writings for modern readers. Journet deploys his knowledge of all of Thomas’s working parts to invent a Thomistic mystical body ecclesiology. Published in 1941, and leaving its mark both on Mystici Corporis Christi and on the Vatican II documents, Journet’s two-volume L’Église du Verbe incarné draws on themes to be found in Thomas himself, as also in the Alexandrian Church Fathers. One of these is the idea of Christ’s human nature as the “instrument” or “organ” of his divinity, that is, as the transmitter through which his graces are communicated to humanity (cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, Q. 2, a. 6; Q. 8, a. 1 Reply Obj. 1; Q. 13, a. 2, Reply; Q. 13, a. 3, Reply; Journet [1941] 1955: 6–7). As the instrument of Christ’s divine nature, Christ’s divinized humanity is the efficient cause of the grace which is handled by the clergy: God is the First Cause. The human nature of Christ is the organ of the Divinity, the instrumental cause substantially conjoined to the Person of the Word (as our hand is substantially conjoined to our own person). The hierarchy as a whole can be considered . . . as an instrument substantially separated from the Person of the Word (as a tool we pick up is separated from our own person). (Journet [1941] 1955: 44)

114

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Journet makes particular use of Thomas’s armory of technical terms relating to causality: virtue (special as in Christ’s humanity, separated as in his ministers), power, instrument, energy, and of course Aristotle’s four causes (material, efficient, formal, and final). Journet finds that it is best to “explain the Church in terms of the four causes on which she essentially depends” (Journet [1941] 1955: xxvi). The material cause of the Church is her canonical, legal structure; the “immediate efficient” cause is the bishop; the Church’s soul, the Holy Spirit, is her formal cause; and her final cause, the purpose which is driving all of this, is “divine sanctity,” the grace of Christ. Thus Mystici Corporis Christi restricted the body of Church to Catholics. Like Pius XII, Journet takes the corporate analogy of “body” and “soul” fairly literally: “the created soul and the body of the Church are, of themselves, coextensive—in other words, the created soul does not extend beyond its body” (Journet [1941] 1955: 31). Journet adds a grain of salt to Cyprian’s adage (“extra ecclesiam nulla salus”). Because their baptism and marriage rites are valid, Protestants are “oriented” to the true Church: “I do not say that there is no supernatural life at all outside the Church, but simply that there is none that does not look to her” (Journet [1941] 1955: 35). Something in Protestantism requires it to return to the mothership: When we say that the Church is in formation outside the Church, we are looking at things in a way which, from an ecclesiological standpoint, is accidental and secondary. We mean that those who broke with the Church took with them certain good things which by their very nature belong to her. In themselves, in virtue of their own internal exigencies, these scattered fragments demand to be reintegrated in the Church, and . . . the universal saving virtue of the God of mercy works mysteriously and incessantly for their reintegration. . . . Outside the Church the Church is in formation, but this comes about accidentally, by violence done to the course things have taken. Outside the Church, the Church, of itself, is in decomposition. (Journet [1941] 1955: 38) Journet was the most genial of pre-Vatican II Neo-Thomists. All of this play with Aristotelian terminology is ordered to the Mass, the axis of Journet’s ecclesiology. “By reason of the divine virtue that passed into it” Christ’s human nature has become “an inexhaustible source of grace for all the world,” and Catholics participate in that grace through the Mass. Journet pictures Christ as the “Priest of this liturgy.” “A liturgy,” that is, the historical crucifixion of Jesus Christ, “is at the root of the Christian religion”: “reconciliation” between God and fallen humanity “was accomplished in a ritual drama in which Jesus offered His life to God and communicated grace to men”: “the bloody sacrifice is brought to each one of us by the renewal of the bloodless rite instituted at the Last Supper; round which the Church is gathered and to which she clings” (Journet [1941] 1955: 56–62). This is a companion vision of the Church to that presented by the Jesuit Henri de Lubac in Corpus Mysticum and Catholicism. Journet’s vision is more concrete, calling up a picture of a mid-century Tridentine Mass, with its officiating priests silently gesticulating on the altar steps. Where de Lubac presents the eucharist, Journet displays officiating priests, immediate efficient causes of the production of grace. It is a hieratic vision of the Church as mystical body of Christ. Calling it a “clerical” ecclesiology would be question-begging in the context of the uncovering of “clerical” scandals. But it need not amaze us that post-Vatican II attempts to show the laity matter often appeared to transmute laypeople into imitation clerics.

ROMAN CATHOLIC ECCLESIOLOGY

 115

Vatican I’s Dei Filius had taught that “the church herself by reason of her astonishing propagation, her outstanding holiness and her inexhaustible fertility in every kind of goodness, by her Catholic unity and her unconquerable stability, is a kind of great and perpetual motive of credibility and an incontrovertible evidence of her own divine mission” (DF 3.12). Journet maintained this teaching (Journet [1941] 1955: 20). The “visibility” of the Church can be a difficulty, for Catholics, but it cannot be doubted. The question is whether the Church makes herself visible through her long-standing institutional components, such as the Holy Office, in its various avatars, and the papacy, whose occupants have been infallible but not impeccable, or through her charismatic element, her saints and martyrs.

Pre-Vatican II Rumblings of Discontent From 1927, with the Lausanne Faith and Order conference, Protestants began to discuss church reunion. In 1928, Pius XI in the encyclical Mortalium Animos forbade Catholics to attend such gabfests. In 1948, Protestants and Orthodox formed the World Council of Churches and began to hold ecumenical meetings. Some Catholics like Journet regarded their conception of “unity” as secular. Others, such as the Dominican Yves Congar were eager to discuss “unity,” with Möhler’s texts on hand. Congar’s pioneering ecumenical enthusiasm was discouraged by the Roman Curia. By the 1950s, Catholics were increasingly unwilling to conceive of the Church as a citadel behind clearly defined ramparts. Having been run together with the juridical ecclesiologies, the Church as “mystical body” felt stiflingly finished and sealed. Its demarcations better fit a nation-state, like the Republic of Venice, than the virtual, international body to which papal encyclicals recurred. In the hands of laypeople like Jacques Maritain and medieval historians like Marie-Dominique Chenu O.P., the new Thomism presented Thomas’s Aristotelianism as openness to secularity, indeed, as a reason for being open to modernity. In 1953, the Boston priest Leonard Feeney (1897–1978) was excommunicated for insisting on a literal interpretation of Cyprian’s extra Ecclesia nulla salus and denying that “baptism of desire” could orient non-Catholics to the Church. In 1952, Hans Urs von Balthasar had published his “programmatic little book,” Razing the Bastions. In the fifteen years before the Second Vatican Council, Catholics became dissatisfied with officially sanctioned versions of mystical body ecclesiology, especially those that walled out Jews and Protestants. Protesting against Mystici Corporis Christi’s apparent canonical blunder, Joseph Ratzinger asked, in 1960, “Is the non-Catholic Christian, for a Catholic, the ‘other’ brother only in the sense in which an unbaptized person is?” Ratzinger went on to claim that Protestantism has made an important contribution to the realization of Christian faith, fulfilling a positive function in the development of the Christian message and . . . given rise to a sincere and profound faith in the individual non-Catholic Christian . . . Perhaps we may here invert a saying of Saint Augustine’s: that an old schism becomes a heresy. The very passage of time alters the character of a division, so that an old division is something essentially different from a new one. (Ratzinger [1960] 1993: 87–8) In 1952, von Balthasar had argued that it was the interruption of Protestantism which enabled the retrieval of mystical body ecclesiology:

116

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

“No salvation outside the Church” means . . . that no salvation is mediated except through the Church. The Church is the instrument of the mediation of salvation to the world, for she is the mystical Body of Christ, into which the word of God descended for the sake of redemption. This transformation of awareness . . . would have been difficult to achieve without . . . the Reformation. We are far from wishing to give this terrible event of Christian guilt . . . the stamp of a . . . happy event . . .; nevertheless, in the power of redemptive grace, God can make use of what is for us an unforgivable sin to further his mysterious purpose. . . . Something of the innermost bowels of the Church had been torn out of the Church by the Reformers, . . . Not only are all the validly baptized outside the Catholic Church her children in truth . . . profound mysteries, things that often only her saints knew, were stolen from her by the Augustinian of Wittenberg. (paging Martin Luther; von Balthasar, [1952] 1993: 54–6) Ida Friederike Görres’s journals, published as Broken Lights, are a remarkable testimony to changing Catholic conceptions of Judaism after the Shoah. From the early 1950s, Görres was reading Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim and finding in them a postfiguration of Christ. She reads Gershom Scholem and conceives of the Hasidic idea of the Shekinah, the female presence of God on earth, as backhandedly inspired by the Church (Görres [1960] 1964: 10). Görres turns to a Pauline text, Rom. 9–11, to understand this: How was it possible that such a deep stream of genuine religious inspiration—the very Breath of the Holy Ghost—could spring up and flourish outside of Christianity? What loving searching for the ways of God, what passionate impulse towards holiness! And yet the answer is not really so hard to find. Even after the rise of Christianity Jewry remained—and still remains—the tree-stump of the Old Testament, lopped and stunted, yet in its faithful no less alive and authentic; the root from which Jesus himself stemmed, and Mary, Joseph, the Baptist, the Apostles. (Görres [1960] 1964: 6–7) From his reading of Karl Barth on Rom. 9–11, von Balthasar had by 1960 achieved a nonsupersessionist understanding of Judaism: The spiritual children are grafted into the root that they may share in the living sap of the holy olive tree, but not in such a manner as to by-pass the bodily Israel, since “God hath not cast away his people which he foreknew” (Rom. 11.2) . . . There can be no Christianity . . . which is not, a priori and inwardly, related in a deeply sympathetic manner to the “holy tree,” as the branch is related to the root. . . . Jews and Catholic may have only exchanged a few words in more than a thousand years and have turned their backs on one another. . . . But they are . . . tied back to back throughout the ages to form a sort of whipping post or pillory—for the “people of God,” old and new, together, is a single, indivisible scandal. (von Balthasar [1958] 1960: 18, 23, 72) In a series of pre-Conciliar essays, von Balthasar delved into the question of sin in the Church. “Casta Meretrix” (1961) (Latin for “Chaste Whore”) traces a thread from the Fathers to the Romanesque theologians comparing the Church to Rahab, the whore of the book of Judges, who dangles a red thread from her window in Jericho to assist the Israelites in taking the city from the Philistines. Rahab in the Old Covenant becomes Mary Magdalene in the New, von Balthasar says: he means that a basic type of the Church is the Church as Repentant Harlot, the Church who confesses her sins. In “Who is the Church?” (1961), he criticizes the regnant “mystical body” ecclesiology for misgendering and misidentifying the “Subject” or “who” of the Church. The personal “who” of

ROMAN CATHOLIC ECCLESIOLOGY

 117

the Church is Mary, in whose womb the faith of the Church is engendered. But the Church must be understood, as Augustine and his disciples sometimes recognized, as an eschatological notion. Too often theologians have resorted to the overhasty replacement of the spurned synagogue by the chosen Gentile Church . . . almost all theology . . . has given insufficient consideration to the truth that “salvation comes from the Jews” . . . . This deficiency . . . weakens the idea of metanoia as something relevant to the Church . . . : the turning from old to new as something with . . . permanent relevance . . . In the words of St. Gregory the Great: “Let the Church cry out, ‘I am black but beautiful,’ . . . black by merit, beautiful by grace . . . black from the past, beautiful through what I am made to be in the future” (Cant. I, 5 . . . ). As a concrete community of believers, the Church always exists in this tension . . . She is always both “spotless Church” and “disfigured Church,” always both “virgin” and “harlot.” (von Balthasar [1961] 1991: 227) By 1960, Catholics were tired of legalism and ready for what Pope John XXIII called “opening the windows” of the Church. Whether their exhaustion with legalism and tradition had readied them to be doused with holiness is another question: The ever-new gift of holiness to the Church is the mildest judgment God can send down upon his Bride. . . . It may be difficult to observe this point because the holiness that is canonized . . . has already . . . become history and tradition . . . Holiness is always the refutation of the idea that time plays an essential role in Christianity; . . . the reverse is true: our temporal distance allows us to come more directly to the source: namely, to the revelation of Christ. (von Balthasar [1952] 1993: 25–7) Lumen Gentium will define the Church in terms of holiness. The development of theology through a sequence of questions had been known to Catholics since the dawn of scholasticism. Typically, the questioner is a Catholic posing difficulties to which Catholics wanted answers, like Anselm’s Boso: the acceptable range of questions is defined from the inside, or as the children’s joke used to go, “Ve ask ze questions.” The novelty of Vatican II ecumenism in relation to non-Catholic Christians and to Jews is that non-Catholics are beginning to be permitted to raise questions from their own Orthodox, Protestant, or Jewish perspective. Positions that are taken in Vatican II documents respond to such “outside” questions seriously, and outside positions are permitted to shape the questions to which the documents respond. The ecclesiology of Vatican II attempts at points to take the positions of its Protestant guests into account. This makes for the difference between pre- and post-Vatican II ecclesial self-consciousness. In 1960, John XXIII set up a Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, the Curia’s first Office for ecumenical business. Its first job was to invite non-Catholics to the Council. It assigned dignitaries such as Lukas Vischer and Karl Barth to check on the committees drafting Unitatis Redintegratio, Nostra Aetate, Dignitatis Humanae, Gaudium et Spes, and Dei Verbum. For John XXIII, who opened Vatican II, and for Paul VI, who closed it out, a central aim of the Ecumenical Council was to achieve Church unity: John Paul II reiterates this interpretation of Vatican II in Ut Unum Sint (Morerod 2008: 312–14; UUS 17). One of the defining events of the Conciliar years was the 1964 meeting of Paul VI and Orthodox Patriarch in Jerusalem where both prayed together; one year later they both lifted the mutual Catholic/Orthodox anathemas of 1054. Catholics realized that if unity belongs to their vocation as Catholics, they must act as its agents, initiating change,

118

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

asking for forgiveness, and initiating the healing of memory which makes it possible to suture a thousand-year schism.

VATICAN II (1962–5): LUMEN GENTIUM: DOGMATIC CONSTITUTION ON THE CHURCH (1964) Lumen Gentium marks a radical revision of earlier Catholic ecclesiologies. Rather than changing the content of Catholic ecclesiology, this revision corrects the errors to which Catholic ecclesiology is susceptible. It recognizes that many of the biblical and traditional ways we have of conceiving the Church are “metaphors” and “images” (LG 6), thus indicating that we ought not to equate the Church with our analogies for it. The words we have for speaking of the Church are used not univocally but analogically. The operative concepts relating to the Church as Christ’s mystical body derive from the notion of theosis, that is, the idea that Christ deifies human beings. His divinity suffuses his human nature, and that divinized humanity communicates itself to those who sacramentally partake in it. Mystical body ecclesiology had tended erroneously to conceive of the Church here below, and especially in its clerical wing, as already the deified body of Christ. Even when correctives were nominally present, they tended to become subordinate to the majestic self-conception of the Church. The Church as mystical body is the spouse of Christ. Lumen Gentium says that spouse and bride are biblical images for the Church. So is “Mother” (LG 6; this passage works better in French than in English). Catholics had connected the maternal, bridal Church to Mary, equating the “Church” with Mary, the mother of God, the Theotokos, the God-bearer who is now assumed into heaven and deified. Lumen Gentium gently reminds us that the Church is merely on its way to being Marian. Altogether, it is not yet the bride: “While in the most holy Virgin the Church has already reached that perfection whereby she is without spot or wrinkle, the followers of Christ still strive to increase in holiness by conquering sin. And so they turn their eyes to Mary who shines forth to the whole community of the elect as the model of virtues” (LG 65). Catholics had distinguished the infallibility of the Church from moral indefectibility, but the theoretical distinction had not been taught as a core element of the doctrine of the Church. Chapter VII of Lumen Gentium is devoted to “the Eschatological Nature of the Pilgrim Church” and asserts that “the Church . . . will attain its full perfection only in the glory of heaven” (LG 48). Lumen Gentium states that the “one Church” founded by Christ “subsists in” the Catholic Church (LG 8). The Dutch theologian Edward Schillebeeckx was not alone in interpreting subsistit to mean “not exactly identical to” (Schillebeeckx [1989] 1990: 193–4). Schillebeeckx argued that “subsists in” was intended ecumenically, downplaying the identity between the Catholic Church and the one true Church. Paragraph 8 does conclude by observing that many features of the one Church are present outside her. Schillebeeckx must be on to something, since the drafts moved successively from claiming that the one Church “est” the Catholic Church, to “adest est,” and finally landed on the one Church “subsistit in” the Petrine, Catholic Church. If the authors had wanted to say “is” they could have done so. The term subsistit was proposed during the drafting by the conservative Thomist Sebastian Tromp, author of the as yet untranslated Corpus Christi Quod Est Ecclesia. He did not intend to imply that the one Church has a diffused

ROMAN CATHOLIC ECCLESIOLOGY

 119

presence in all Christian bodies and organizations. Rather, he understood subsistit to mean that the one Church exists fully in the Catholic Church, but that other bodies participate in this fullness. Subsistit is one of Vatican II’s greatest strategic deployments of an analogical concept, where the Catholic Church is the “prime analogue” of one Church, but, rather than “sucking all of the oxygen out of the term [one Church] others share in the attribute by participation” (Guarino 2018: 96). Lumen Gentium does teach, as the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith noted acerbically in 1992, that the “one Church” according to Lumen Gentium “exists” in its fullness in the Catholic Church (Ratzinger 1992), and the Vatican II decree does teach that the Catholic Church “is the per se and per essentiam realization of Christ’s Church.” But because subsistit in inhabits an analogical register, “Other Christian Churches formaliter and substantialiter participate in Christ’s Church with various levels of intensity” (Guarino 2018: 95–6). The refrain among theologians, that “subsists in” extended and diffused the meaning of the term “one Church,” sufficiently exacerbated the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that, in 2000, it issued a clarification, insisting that “subsists in” means “exists in” (CDF 2000/2001). The term “subsists in” seems to accentuate that the heart of the Church, her “Type,” subsists in heaven above, while the reality here below is only a shadowy, partial image of the real Thing, the eschatological Catholica (see again LG 6, where the Church is “that Jerusalem which is above,” and from which the Church here below is as if “in exile”). The Church here below it is not an empirically observable, sociological reality but an object of faith: “The mystery of the holy Church is manifest in its very foundation” (LG 5). As de Lubac, who participated in drafting Lumen Gentium, observed, Compare . . . Lumen Gentium . . . with the schema drawn up by the preparatory commission and the contrast is . . . astonishing. The result . . . has been an impression of novelty expressed . . . with an occasional exaggeration. The Church is first of all a mystery of faith. Lumen Gentium . . . and the Fathers are at one on this. She is a gift from above and human reason must acknowledge its limits in her regard. It is . . . superfluous to insist on such evidence as reason may offer: the fact has imposed itself on every believer in every century. (de Lubac [1967] 1969: 30, 34) Lumen Gentium affirms Vatican I’s teaching about the “sacred primacy of the Roman Pontiff ” (LG 18). Chapter III is called “On the Hierarchical Structure of the Church and in Particular on the Episcopate.” The Constitution completes the earlier Council’s teaching by defining the role of the bishops: they “sustain the roles of Christ Himself as Teacher, Shepherd and High Priest, and . . . they act in His Person” (LG 21). Just as the pope is the visible sign of the unity of the whole Church, so the bishop is the visible sign of unity in his particular diocese (LG 23). This rounds out Vatican I’s truncated torso. Lumen Gentium’s teaching on the laity is more novel, because it finds the “priestly, prophetical and kingly functions of Christ” in the “secular” and “temporal” world (LG 31). Clergy can happen to influence secular affairs: “But the laity, by their very vocation, seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs . . . They live in the world . . . in the secular professions . . . They are called there by God that by exercising their proper function . . . they may work for the sanctification of the world from within as a leaven” (LG 31). Chapter IV on “The Laity” is backed up by Chapter V on “The Universal Call

120

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

to Holiness in the Church.” This insists that the vocation to holiness is unrestricted: it addresses married couples, “widows and single people,” “those who engage in labor” (LG 41). Catholics had always believed this, as evidenced by a handful of married, non-clerical saints, such as Thomas More. But this is the first time Catholic ecclesiology specifies that the “call to holiness” applies to all “people who follow the poor Christ” (LG 41), and not only to those who perform the sacraments. It recalls that Christ the High Priest was a carpenter: laypeople “should imitate by their lively charity, in their joyous hope and by their voluntary sharing of each other’s burdens, the very Christ who plied His hands with carpenter's tools and Who in union with His Father, is continually working for the salvation of all men. In this . . . their daily work they should climb to the heights of holiness” (LG 41). Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church reiterates earlier Catholic ecclesiology. It mentions Petrine primacy at least twenty times. The Thomistically infused liturgical soteriology of the mystical body is unchanged: “In the human nature united to Himself the Son of God, . . . redeemed man and re-molded him into a new creation. By communicating His Spirit, Christ made His brothers, called together from all nations, mystically the components of His own Body” (LG 7). Following papal teaching from the previous half-century, it addresses the hope for the reunification of all humanity in the body of Christ. Because these well-worn elements are rearranged in a new mosaic, the face of the Church seems rejuvenated.

VATICAN II: “THE PEOPLE OF GOD” Pre-Reformation Christians knew that the Church needed rebuke and reform; even though Trent imposed multiple reforms on bad religious practices, post-Reformation Catholics often seemed to think of Church “reform” as a Protestant invention which they had no desire to emulate. The ecumenical idea that Protestantism is not simply the other against which we assert our singular grip on truth gave Catholics permission to conceive of the Church as reformable. One of the challenges of Vatican II was to name the Church with an analogy open to prophetic rebuke and reform. Chapter II of Lumen Gentium is named “The People of God.” In the Old Testament, God calls Israel. Exodus 6:7 is the first instance: “I will take you to me for a people, and I will be to you a God: and ye shall know that I am the Lord your God, which bringeth you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians” (KJV translation). Israel is named “the people of God,” and the New Testament refers to the baptized as the “people of God” (Exod. 6:7; Judg. 20:2; 2 Sam. 14:13; Heb. 4:9, 11:25; cf. also Rev. 21:3; 2 Cor. 6:16). Biblical Israel goes astray, is punished, and returns to God. “People of God” spontaneously connotes reformability. This was one reason for the term’s election by the Council Fathers. People had lost patience with the hierarchical “mystical body” ecclesiology: since many Catholics appeared to say that Christ is the “Subject” of the Church, its personal “who,” mystical body ecclesiology was felt by Protestants to be “an intolerable self-identification with Christ on the part of the Church.” By contrast “the concept of ‘the people of God,’” which had loomed large in the Protestant exegete Ernst Käsemann’s work on eschatology, “was introduced by the Council as an ecumenical bridge” (Ratzinger 1988: 16). The term fit the new spirit of episcopal collegiality: it seems to make more sense to call one particular diocese “the people of God” than to call one particular parish

ROMAN CATHOLIC ECCLESIOLOGY

 121

“the body of Christ.” “Localism” is a theme in post-Conciliar ecclesiology, and it has its roots in Lumen Gentium. Since the bishop consecrates priests, and priests confect the “church-making-Eucharist,” the eucharist–Church is present in every local bishopric. God calls together “the new People of God” through the bishops (LG 9 and 26). Some understandings of the expression “people of God” began to be contested. These expressions reversed the order in mystical body ecclesiology, where God causes Christ’s humanity instrumentally to disperse grace, and Lumen Gentium’s biblical ecclesiology, where God calls his people to him. The controversial ecclesiologies seemed to imagine grace as an emergent property of “the people” (CDF 2000/2001, Partial Interpretations). Nonetheless, the term “people of God” has abided, reappearing in the twenty-first-century “theology of the people.” Protestantism is the first step in the modern intellectual decline lamented by the Vatican I constitution Dei Filius (DF Preface): describing the Church as the “people of God” was Vatican II’s way of subsuming Protestant insights within its own ecclesiology. One of the influential Latin American writers of the post-Conciliar years, the Uruguayan Alberto Methol Ferré (1929–2009), wrote that “with the Council the church transcends both the Protestant Reformation and secular Enlightenment. It overcomes them, by taking into itself what is best in both of them. . . . it creates a new Reformation and a new Enlightenment.” With Vatican II, “they both finally recede into the past. They lost substance and their reason for being and realize the best of themselves in the Catholic intimacy of the church. The church, assimilating them, repeals them as adversaries and takes within itself their constructive power.” The Church’s response to Reformation and Enlightenment had been . . . somewhat insufficient, in the sense that they had refuted . . . the unacceptable elements of the Reformation and the Enlightenment, but they had not sufficiently distinguished their truth from their error. . . . the Second Vatican Council overcomes modernity . . . by understanding what was right about the Reformation and what was right about the Enlightenment: . . . In the case of the Reformation, this truth concerns the affirmation of the People of God and of the laity as a priestly people. . . . the Reformation was a great protest of the laity against clericalism. (Ferré, cited in Borghese [2017] 2018: 149–50)

VATICAN II: COMMUNIO ECCLESIOLOGY The 1985 Extraordinary Synod of Bishops had claimed that the essential notion of the Church at Vatican II had been that of “Communion.” The Church is created as a eucharistic communion, that is, the Church is generated by the sacrifice of the Mass. The idea of the Church as a “communio” became popular in the late 1980s, among Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants. Soon Catholics were arguing, again, about whether it is the eucharistic communion in the local church which creates “Church” then and there, or whether the Universal Communion of the whole Church subsidizes the communion of the particular churches. In the later 1990s, Walter Kasper and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had a vigorous exchange of opinions, with Kasper defending the rights of the locals against Ratzinger, speaking for the universal Church (McDonnell 2002; Murphy 2008). The question von Balthasar aired, “Who is the Church?,” is the underlying issue. To Whom do we refer when we say that “the Church” wills, prays, or intends? Are we referring to many people, in which case the church is a subjectless collective. Or is the Church one single subject?

122

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

VATICAN II AND BEYOND: ECUMENIC RECONFIGURATIONS OF THE CHURCH The ecumenical teaching of Vatican II reiterates the lesson of Mystici Corporis Christi that the Church is the means through which the grace of Christ is mediated to the world, and it accentuates that the grace of Christ really is so mediated to the world.

Unitatis Redintegratio: Decree on Ecumenism (November 1964) Unitatis Redintegratio opens with the statement that “the restoration of unity among all Christians is one of the principal concerns of the Second Vatican Council” (UR 1): “its importance reflects the fact that the purpose of the Church is to establish unity between the whole of humanity and God (cf. the programmatic first articles of the constitutions Lumen gentium, Dei verbum, Sacrosanctum concilium, and Gaudium et spes)” (Morerod 2008: 314–15). The decree notes that the heirs of the Orthodox schism and the Protestant Reformation are not morally responsible for it. Neither UR nor any subsequent Catholic teaching extends this absolution to Catholics. Catholics are under the exigency to confess to past faults and to tackle the problems these faults have caused. Our “primary duty” is renovating “the Catholic household itself ” (UR 3; cf. 7–8). The key idea of Unitatis Redintegratio is its distinction between “full communion” with the Catholic Church (i.e., membership of that Church) and degrees of imperfect communion with the one Church (UR 3; Morerod 2008: 316). Aside from “communion,” another preferred term is “brotherhood”: when they are baptized in Christ and believe in him, non-Catholics are brothers. The commonality which preserves an analogous communion is filiality. The document commends Orthodox liturgy and Protestant devotion to Scripture. Instead of seeing the Church as the exclusive repository of Christ’s truth, Catholics see it as the prime analogue for an embodied Communion in Christ which is shared with many who are more distant members of the same family (Guarino 2018: 109). Here again, the idea of analogical similarity allowed the Fathers at Vatican II to flex the meaning of Church membership but without diffusing or decentering it, since analogy does not exist without a prime, creative analogate. Unitatis Redintegratio articulates a notion of fullness or plenitude as being capable of ever-greater achievement: this ecclesiological reconsideration runs parallel to the notion of development of doctrine in Dei Verbum. How can the Church, which is already one, go further in achieving unity? What would reunion with the Orthodox and Protestants add to the unity of the Catholic Church, and if reunion cannot in fact swell Catholic fullness, what is the point of ecumenical suasion? As Charles Morerod explains, Plenitudo has a double meaning in the document. On the one hand, the “fullness of grace and truth” (plenitudo gratiae et veritatis) has been “entrusted to the Catholic Church,” where “it is possible to get every fullness of the means of salvation” (UR 3). On the other hand, “the divisions among Christians prevent the Church from realizing in practice the fullness of Catholicity [plenitude catholicitatis] proper to her, in those of her sons and daughters who, though attached to her by baptism, are yet separated from full communion with her” (UR 4). Therefore, the present fullness has to be constantly developed “to attain that fullness of unity [plenitude unitatis] which Jesus Christ desires” (UR 4) “until it shall happily arrive at the fullness of eternal glory . . . in the heavenly Jerusalem” (UR 3). Catholic ecumenism moves . . . from an existing

ROMAN CATHOLIC ECCLESIOLOGY

 123

fullness—nothing is missing in the means of salvation of apostolic faith—toward an increased fullness. (Morerod 2008: 332–3) With this development, Catholic teaching fully appropriated Catholic Romanticism.

Dignitatis Humanae: Decree on Religious Freedom (December 1965) Dignitatis Humanae is the Decree in which the Church walks back the nineteenth-century papal objurgation of religious liberty. Without denying the possibility of a state-established Church, the magisterium here roundly rejects the necessity of establishment for Catholic flourishing. Despite a century of papal imprecation of religious liberty, there is doctrinal continuity here, anchored in the ancient teaching that baptism cannot be coerced. Dignitatis Humanae was of immense significance as an ecumenical document and not only because it led to a schism among Catholics who refused to forgo faith in religious coercion. Non-Catholic Christians had with good reason viewed Catholics as believing that they had the right and the duty to establish their Church wherever it was possible so to do; ceasing to give non-Catholics cause to regard them as anonymous Inquisitors was the practical consequence of the ecumenism of Lumen Gentium and Unitatis Redintegratio. Dignitatis Humanae was belatedly prophetic. If Spain, Ireland, and the other remnants of modern integralism had in 1965 abandoned their Faustian concordats with conservative nationalism there is a sporting chance they might be Catholic still. Paragraph 3 of Dignitatis Humanae teaches, in effect, that error does have rights, because the only way in which to progress toward the truth for which our hearts long is through trial and error, that is, through a complex process of experiment, dialogue, and discovery. John Paul II adverts to this statement several times in Ut Unum Sint (UUS 32): it is only through respectful conversation that truth can be reached. Dignitatis Humanae’s idea of the human right to religious freedom is the basic insight on which post-Vatican II ecumenism is based. If today the media-icon popes are seen as model Christians by Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox, that results as much from Dignitatis Humanae as Unitatis Redintegratio.

Ut Unum Sint (May 1995) Unitatis Redintegratio reversed traditional practice by encouraging Catholics to pray with other Christians. In the subsequent decades, no pope went abroad without praying with non-Catholic leaders. The decree on ecumenism exhorted Catholics to take part in ecumenical gabfests; the immediate post-Vatican II years were a paradise for committeeoriented Catholics. Catholics signed a Joint Declaration on Justification with Lutherans in 1991. The 1999 Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) agreed that the papacy is “a gift to be received by all Churches.” Queen Victoria’s heirs attended the canonization of John Henry Newman in October 2019. Repeatedly and unmistakably insisting that the bishops speak infallibly only when operating in conjunction with the Bishop of Rome, Lumen Gentium recontextualized the papacy within the Apostolic College of Bishops as a whole. Hans Urs von Balthasar drew a parallel between this contextualization and the fact that we only know Christ within a “constellation” of other figures, such as Peter, James, and John. He noted that the communion of the Catholica cannot be characterized exclusively by the Petrine principle and thereby placed in opposition to other Christian communions and communities . . . Peter[’s] . . . figure is justifiable only within the structure. . . . the

124

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

relation of primacy and collegiality, so hard to explain juridically, is the best proof that in the Catholica the office of Peter ought not to be isolated. (von Balthasar [1974] 1986: 145–6, 159) In a variant on Möhler’s conception of the Church as a supernatural coincidence of opposites, von Balthasar describes the Church as operating within the dramatic tension between the charism of leadership (Peter), tradition (James), theological contemplation (John), and enthusiasm (Paul). The Office of Peter and the Structure of the Church is a defense of the Petrine ministry which depicts Peter’s threefold denial as just as perennial as Peter’s acknowledgement of Christ’s divine identity: Peter is a prototype of all the popes in his failures as in his vocation to leadership. Von Balthasar’s 1974 book captures the spirit of John Paul II’s landmark encyclical Ut Unum Sint, which asks forgiveness for the personal, moral weakness of the popes, and yet claims the popes’ weakness as an indication that their service is wholly a matter of grace (UUS 4, 11, 91). Ut Unum Sint celebrates the paradoxical status of the Church as enjoying since the “Pentecost Event” an “eschatological” “fullness” of unity, and yet constrained to recover those Christians still in “imperfect communion” (UUS 14, 11). The encyclical teaches that the—eschatologically full—Church “is effectively present” in separated Churches and communities to the extent that they have “the elements of sanctification and truth” (sacraments and Scripture). It pinpoints the martyrs of the past centuries as a common treasure of modern Christianity. Ut Unum Sint adds that “communion is already perfect in . . . the highest point of the life of grace, martyria unto death, the truest communion possible with Christ” (UUS 84). The post-Conciliar Church had acknowledged that unity is not Latinate or Western uniformity. Ut Unum Sint repeats one of the Slavic pope’s cherished exhortations: “the Church must breathe with her two lungs!” (UUS 54). A great deal of ecumenical dialogue had proceeded on the assumption that the papacy was an obstacle for ecumenism. Ut Unum Sint argues the reverse, that the pope’s particular charism is serving as a marker for and protector of Church unity (UUS 94). Given John Paul’s oft-stated conviction that truth is achieved through dialogue (he was one of the authors of Dignitatis Humanae), the encyclical proposes that the question of how the popes should perform their “office of unity” become the subject of “patient and fraternal dialogue . . . in which, leaving useless controversies behind, we could listen to one another, keeping before us only the will of Christ for his Church and allowing ourselves to be deeply moved by his plea ‘that they may all be one . . . so that the world may believe that you have sent me’ (Jn 17:21)” (UUS 96). This is a continuation of the Vatican II principle that the conversation about the reform of the Church is not to be conducted only by Catholics.

MARY GOES BEFORE PETER The Church would not need to be reformed if it were not, in some sense, sinful; it would be incapable of conversion and reform if it were not originally and eschatologically perfect. According to Charles Journet, the Church is formally and ontologically sinless: To the extent to which . . . [Catholics] harbour a region of shadows, a concession to venial sin, to that extent they are partially outside the Church. . . . the frontier of the Church passes through each one of those who call themselves her members, enclosing within her bounds all that is pure and holy, leaving outside all that is sin and stain. . . . So that even here below, in the days of her pilgrimage, the Church herself remains

ROMAN CATHOLIC ECCLESIOLOGY

 125

immaculate; and we can apply to her quite fully . . . Ephesians 9:25-28: “ . . . a glorious Church, not having spot or wrinkle.” (Journet [1941] 1955: xxvii) Hans Urs von Balthasar argues that in Mary the Church can look upon herself without risk of confusion, not only because she can never identify herself with Mary (for, in concrete it is always sinners who contemplate her) but also because what she sees in Mary is always the opposite of identification. Only at the end of time can she hope to reach the level of her most exalted member, when the stain of original sin has been washed away. (von Balthasar [1974] 1986: 23) In non-formal and material—“concrete”—terms the Church is Mary Magdalene confessing her sin, not the Immaculate One (von Balthasar [1961] 1991: 205–6). And yet, conversely, the faith of the Immaculate is the origin of the Church. The “formal” essence, or “subjective” core of the Church, is Mary’s faith, counting as, and spilling over into the faith of all Christians (von Balthasar [1961] 1991: 158–61, 165). She “is” the kenotic, self-abandoning origin of the Church. Her act of faith makes the objective, institutional “structure” possible. John Paul reiterates this theology in Mulieris Dignitatem: This Marian profile is also—even perhaps more so—fundamental and characteristic for the Church as is the apostolic and Petrine profile to which it is profoundly united. . . . The Marian dimension of the Church is antecedent to that of the Petrine, without being in any way divided from it or being less complementary. Mary Immaculate precedes all others, including . . . Peter himself and the Apostles. This is so, not only because Peter and the Apostles, being born of the human race under the burden of sin, form part of the Church which is “holy from out of sinners,” but also because their triple function has no other purpose except to form the Church in line with the ideal of sanctity already programmed and prefigured in Mary. A contemporary theologian has rightly stated that Mary is “Queen of the Apostles without any pretensions to apostolic powers: she has other and greater powers.” (von Balthasar, Neue Klarstellungen) (MD 27, footnote 55) The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that “Mary goes before us all in the holiness that is the Church’s mystery, as ‘the bride without spot or wrinkle.’ This is why the ‘Marian’ dimension of the Church precedes the ‘Petrine’” (CCC 773).

FROM THE PEOPLE OF GOD TO THE THEOLOGY OF THE PEOPLE: POPE FRANCIS AND METHOL FERRÉ From Lumen Gentium to Ut Unum Sint, the subjective act of faith has been central to ecclesiology. The theology of the people emerged in Latin America when, as a consequence of liberation theology and its option for the poor, theologians began to ask about the concrete faith of ordinary people. The act of faith of impoverished Latin American Catholics includes fervent devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe: “the faithful people” help to orient the belief of the Church (Buttiglione, forthcoming). Speaking to Argentinian Jesuits in 1974, Jorge Mario Bergoglio argued that we must acknowledge the reserve of religiosity that the faithful people possess . . . By faithful people I mean simply the people who make up the faithful . . . Denzinger says the faithful people

126

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

are infallible. . . . when you want to know what Mother Church believes, turn to the Magisterium, since it has the role of teaching it in an infallible way; but when you want to know how the church believes, turn to the faithful people. The Magisterium will teach you who Mary is, but our faithful people will teach you how to love Mary. (Cited in Borghese [2017] 2018: 52) Nearly forty years later in 2013, Pope Francis in Evangelii Gaudium utters a panegyric for the “theological life present in the piety of Christian peoples, especially among their poor” (EG 125–6). Like all Romantic Catholics, Pope Francis sees in the Church a miraculous paradox: The same Spirit creates diversity and unity, and in this way forms a new diverse and unified people: the universal Church. First, in a way both creative and unexpected, he generates diversity, for in every age he causes new and varied charisms to blossom. Then he brings about unity: he joins together, gathers, and restores harmony. . . . He does so in a way that effects true union, according to God’s will, a union that is not uniformity, but unity in difference. (Cited in Borghese [2017] 2018: xxv) Methol Ferré saw that the term “people” in “people of God” does not mean any “group of people”: it is only by the grace of God that a people exists at all, not a collection of warring individuals, and the Church is the only human community which amounts to a “People.” Only in the Church, Ferré claims, is the dialectic of history overcome: It would be superhuman to fully understand the coincidentia oppositorum that the church is. . . . The Church . . . is visible and invisible, in a single, indissoluble breath. Ecclesiologies tend to emphasize one or the other of the poles . . . The visible extremities, without Spirit, harden and freeze history. The invisible extremities move the church away from historical reality, become ahistorical idealisms. (Borghese [2017] 2018: 88–9)

REFERENCES Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission [ARCIC] (1999), “The Gift of Authority: Authority in the Church III.” Borghese, M. ([2017] 2018), The Mind of Pope Francis: Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s Intellectual Journey, trans. B. Huddock, Collegeville: Liturgical Academic. Buttiglione, R. (forthcoming), “Revelation and the Theology of the People,” in B. Mezei and F. Murphy (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Revelation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Catechism of the Catholic Church [CCC] (1993). Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith [CDF] (2000/2001), “The Ecclesiology of the Constitution on the Church, Vatican II, Lumen Gentium,” Dei Filius [DF] (1870). De Lubac, H. (1949), Corpus Mysticum: Essai sur L’Eucharistie et l’Église au moyen âge, Paris: Aubier. De Lubac, H. ([1938] 1950), Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man, trans. L. C. Shepherd, London: Burns & Oates. De Lubac, H. ([1967] 1969), The Church Paradox and Mystery [original French Paradoxe et Mystère de L’Eglise], trans. J. R. Dunne, Staten Island: Ecclesia Press. Görres, I. ([1960] 1964), Broken Lights: Diaries and Letters 1951–1959, trans. B. WaldsteinWartenberg, V. O. Walter, London: Burns and Oates.

ROMAN CATHOLIC ECCLESIOLOGY

 127

Guardini, R. ([1922] 1990), Vom Sinn der Kirche, Die Kirche des Herrn, Mainz: Matthias Grünvald Verlag. Guarino, T. G. (2018), The Disputed Teachings of Vatican II: Continuity and Reversal in Catholic Doctrine, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. John Paul II (1988), Mulieris Dignitatem [MD]. John Paul II (1995), Ut Unum Sint [UUS]. Journet, C. ([1941] 1955), The Church of the Word Incarnate: An Essay in Speculative Theology. Volume One: The Apostolic Hierarchy, trans. A. H. C. Downes, London and New York: Sheed & Ward. Lumen Gentium [LG] (1965). McDonnell, K. (2002), “The Ratzinger/Kasper Debate: the Universal Church and Local Churches,” Theological Studies 63 (2): 227–50. McGreevy, J. T. (1996), Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth Century Urban North, Chicago: University of Chicago. Möhler, J. A. (1997), Symbolism: Exposition of the Doctrinal Differences between Catholics and Protestants as Evidenced by their Symbolical Writings, trans. J. B. Robertson, New York: Crossroad. Morerod, C. (2008), “The Decree on Ecumenism: Unitatis Redintegratio,” in M. Lamb and M. Levering (eds.), Vatican II: Renewal Within Tradition, 311–42, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Murphy, F. A. (2008), “De Lubac, Ratzinger and von Balthasar: A Communal Adventure in Ecclesiology,” in F. Murphy and C. Asprey (eds.), Ecumenism Today: The Universal Church in the 21st Century, London: Ashgate. Murphy, F. A. (2010), “Globalization from Benedict XV to Benedict XVI: The ‘Astonishing Optimism’ of Gaudium et spes in Missionary Context,” Nova et Vetera 8 (2): 395–424. Pius XII (1939), Summi Pontificatus [SP]. Pius XII (1943), Mystici Corporis Christi [MCC]. Pius XII (1950), Humani Generis [HG]. Pope Francis (2013), Evangelii Gaudium [EG]. Pope Francis (August 20, 2018), “Letter of His Holiness Pope Francis to the People of God.” Ratzinger, J. (1988), Church, Ecumenism and Politics: New Essays in Ecclesiology, trans. R. Nowell and F. Sandeman, Slough: St Paul; New York: Crossroad. Ratzinger, J. (1992), “The Ecclesiology of The Constitution of The Church, Vatican II, ‘Lumen Gentium.’” Ratzinger, J. ([1960] 1993), The Meaning of Christian Brotherhood, San Francisco: Ignatius. Scheeben, M. J. ([1946] 2006), The Mysteries of Christianity, trans. C. Vollert, New York: Herder & Herder/Crossroad. Schillebeeckx, E. ([1989] 1990), Church: The Human Story of God, trans. John Bowden, New York: Crossroads. Unitatis Redintegratio [UR] (1964). Von Balthasar, H. U. ([1958] 1960), Martin Buber and Christianity, trans. A. Dru, London: Harvill. Von Balthasar, H. U. ([1974] 1986), The Office of Peter and the Structure of the Church [original German Der antirömische affect], trans. A. Emery, San Francisco: Ignatius. Von Balthasar, H. U. ([1961] 1991), Spouse of the Word: Explorations in Theology II, trans. A. V. Little, San Francisco: Ignatius. Von Balthasar, H. U. ([1952] 1993), Razing the Bastions: On the Church in This Age [original German Schleifung der Bastionen: Von der Kirche in dieser Zeit], trans. B. McNeil, San Francisco: Ignatius.

Chapter TEN

Eastern Orthodox Ecclesiology WILL COHEN

INTRODUCTION The Church as Mystery and as God’s Humanity—“Ecclesiology and Christology” Expository presentations of Orthodox ecclesiology often begin with a disclaimer: for the Orthodox the Church cannot be understood by way of propositions and definitions. A person inquiring about Orthodoxy is likely to be invited to come “taste and see” what the Church is by experiencing Orthodox worship—a Vespers or Matins service, perhaps a Divine Liturgy, although in the latter case actual eucharistic sharing is reserved for those already received into the Orthodox Church. Even so, enveloped by the iconography and hymnody of the Church and by incense and candles and the presence of Orthodox Christians joined together in prayer, an inquirer finds himself or herself palpably in touch with the mystery of the Church. Orthodox ecclesiology is primarily experiential in this sense. For the Church Fathers even at their most scholastic, as in An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith by St. John Damascene, the Church was not a direct object of their reflection. Why they “did not care for formulas” when it came to ecclesiology was, in the words of one of Orthodoxy’s foremost twentieth-century theologians, “simply because they had an existential knowledge of the Church, an intuition or vision of her mysterious reality. One does not define what is self-evident” (Florovsky 1989c: 29). This of course does not mean that the Fathers said nothing about the Church and her nature and life. The patristic sources bear consistent witness to the Church as the locus and matrix of God’s saving work of uniting humanity to himself. They draw and elaborate on the pattern found in the Bible in which every image of the Church—whether as body of Christ (1 Cor. 12:12-14; Eph. 4:1-16), bride of Christ (Eph. 5:22-23; 2 Cor. 11:2; Rev. 21:9), people of God (1 Pet. 2:9-10), living stones of a spiritual house (1 Pet. 2:5), or branches of the vine (Jn 15:5)—conveys the notion of an intimate belonging to God, a relationship of full dependency and unity. The fundamental attribute of the Church—without which the classical attributes or “marks” of the Church, namely her being one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, can have no real meaning—is that she is God’s. The Church is humanity claimed by and belonging to God. This is why salvation is in and through the Church and not apart from her, because humanity’s salvation lies in belonging to God. Of course it was in the incarnation that humanity came to belong to God definitively, finally became God’s humanity in a literal, irrevocable way in the

EASTERN ORTHODOX ECCLESIOLOGY

 129

person of Christ, fully human without ceasing to be fully divine. The Church has always understood her communion with God on this christological basis. So it is that Florovsky was moved to write elsewhere that “ecclesiology is nothing but a chapter of Christology” (Florovsky 1948: 12). And about the Church as the “body of Christ,” Florovsky stated that “this image of the Apostle Paul . . . is the most precise and fundamental definition of the Holy Church, making possible all other and later definitions” (Florovsky 1989a: 60).

The Holy Spirit and Ecclesiology The relationship between christology and pneumatology has been a topic of considerable modern theological discussion within and beyond Orthodoxy. Important Orthodox thinkers from Vladimir Lossky (1985: 177–81) and Nikos Nissiotis (1966: 195) to Dumitru Staniloae (1980: 47–8) have argued that Western theology has been prone to a certain “Christomonism” and has stood in need of Eastern Christianity’s emphasis on the role of the Spirit in ecclesiology. Florovsky, however, resisted the tendency he saw in Lossky to contrast a theology of the Spirit with a theology of Christ (1958: 208). Florovsky’s student John Zizioulas would somewhat reframe the debate, first, by noting that the New Testament witnesses both to the priority of Christ (who sends the Spirit) and to the priority of the Spirit (who constitutes Christ), and second, by emphasizing the coincidence of pneumatology and christology in the essential ecclesiological notion of the totus Christus, that is, of Christ as a corporate personality. This “corporate personality” is impossible to conceive without pneumatology. It is not insignificant that the Spirit has always, since the time of Paul, been associated with the notion of communion (κοινονία). Pneumatology contributes to Christology this dimension of communion. And it is because of this function of Pneumatology that it is possible to speak of Christ as having a “body,” i.e. to speak of ecclesiology, of the Church as the Body of Christ. (Zizioulas 1985: 127, 130–1)

THE CHURCH AS LOCUS OF DIVINE– HUMAN COMMUNION Orthodox ecclesiology is sometimes known for its “theandric realism”: its conviction that divine–human communion is no mere aspiration, let alone metaphor, of or about the Church but an actual reality she continually embodies and brings into being. As God in Christ became human without ceasing to be God, so we, in Christ, become more and more godlike without ceasing to be human. The body of Christ, the Church, is this space “in Christ” given by God where this deification of our humanity occurs. Although sometimes rendered in portentous and remote language, the concept of deification (or divinization) in the Christian life finds simple expression in the pertinent remark of Andrew Louth that “the Church is the community of those who, in Christ, have set out on the path to the restoration of fallen humanity” (2013: 90). This statement is in accord with the observation of St. Basil of Caesarea that “the Spirit is called the place of those who are being sanctified” (1997: 94). The idea that the “place” of the Spirit and the sphere of the Church are one and the same is expressed in the well-known words of St. Irenaeus, “For where the Church is, there is the Spirit of God; and where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church, and every kind of grace” (1999: 458). What Irenaeus goes on to say, less often quoted, is important: “[B]ut the Spirit is truth. Those, therefore, who

130

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

do not partake of Him, are neither nourished into life from the mother’s breasts, nor do they enjoy that most limpid fountain which issues from the body of Christ.” The images of the Church as mother and the Church as body of Christ are in no contradiction with each other here. According to both images, the nourishment we receive brings us “into life” which is ever deeper communion with God, and this for Irenaeus depends on the integrity of the apostolic teaching, the rule (κανών) of faith. In the mystical tradition of such theological inheritors of Origen as Methodius of Olympus, there is a remarkable sense in which the mother Church is nothing other than the individuals who have been conceived and nurtured and perfected by the faith which they then, as mothers, engender in other individuals. These perfected individuals are said to become the Church. And those who are still imperfect and only beginners are borne to the salvation of knowledge and formed as by mothers in travail, by those who are more perfect, until they are brought forth and regenerated unto the greatness and beauty of virtue; and when these by the progress of their growth in their turn have become the Church, they too cooperate in the birth and nurture of other children, bringing to fruition in the womb of the soul, as in the womb of a mother, the unblemished will of the Logos. (Methodius, Symposium, 3.8.74f: 37.9-15)

THE ECCLESIOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF MARY, THE THEOTOKOS Orthodox ecclesiology has been hesitant to discard an understanding of the Church as mother and bride, hesitant to replace “she” with “it.” From the Church identified as mother comes the insight that Christ’s birth in history is to be recapitulated within the life of each believer. Every person in being deified is giving birth to God’s Word anew within himself or herself. Cyprian famously stated that “[h]e cannot have God as his Father who does not have the Church as his Mother” (2006: 157). In the readings and hymnography for Mary’s Entrance into the Temple (celebrated November 21), one of the major feasts of the Orthodox liturgical year, the connection is drawn continually between Old Testament descriptions of the Lord’s glory filling the temple (Exod. 40:34; 1 Kgs 8:11; Ezek. 44:4) and the dazzling wonder of Mary as “God’s abode,” “the living ark who contained the uncontainable Word” (Vespers Prosómion, Tone 1). “Today the living temple, the temple of the great King, enters into the Temple” (Matins Sticheron Tone 2, following Psalm 50); “Today the God-containing temple, the Theotokos, shall be presented in the Temple of the Lord and be received by Zachariah” (Matins Idiomelon Tone 4). As the birth-giver of the Logos, Mary herself is not God incarnate. Yet as the Holy Spirit comes upon her and enters into her, Mary’s total receptivity makes her transparent to the Spirit. Sergius Bulgakov makes the point that, whereas for Christ, the single hypostasis of the Word Incarnate “is the unifying and governing center in the one harmonious life of the two natures,” divine and human, it is otherwise with Mary (and other Spirit-bearing saints). For her, the encounter with the Holy Spirit entails the ongoing presence of two hypostases (her own and the Holy Spirit’s). Bulgakov uses the term “divine inspiration” to describe this in contrast to the incarnation. Similar to the incarnation, divine inspiration— which he says may be seen “to the highest degree in the Virgin Mary”—does bring about “the union of the divine nature and the human nature” in some sense. It “affects the [human] hypostasis as well and brings it to a certain divine humanity.” However, the fact

EASTERN ORTHODOX ECCLESIOLOGY

 131

remains that here, “in the creaturely, human hypostasis there shines and is revealed the hypostasis of the Spirit, which does not intrinsically belong to the human hypostasis” (2004: 223). Bulgakov writes that Mary is “the hypostatic image of the Holy Spirit.” She is the paradigmatic example of those of whom it may be said that [d]ivine inspiration gives them a hypostatic illumination and suppresses the egotistical centers of their human hypostases, as it were, making them exist not for themselves, but only for the Holy Spirit. This is the gracious death of the personal I for a new life by the Holy Spirit. This also corresponds to the personal character of the Third hypostasis [of the Trinity], which does not exist for itself, as it were, and becomes transparent for the other hypostases. (2004: 223) Human existence fully receptive to and therefore inspired by and given over to God is what is meant by deification, and Mary consummately embodies this mode of humandivine communion. What bears emphasizing is that Mary as wholly self-giving in relation to God, and Mary as image of the Church, are inseparably connected. She stands therefore as a kind of “definition” of the Church. It is only when we respond to God’s self-gift to us by giving ourselves totally to him that we are able, with Mary, to proceed “on the path to the restoration of fallen humanity,” that is, the path of that real communion with God which is our life and joy, and which Orthodox theology calls deification. The centrality of Mary in Orthodox ecclesiology is expressed as follows by Fr. Alexander Schmemann: Ecclesiology, as it developed since the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, dealt almost exclusively with the institutional aspect of the Church, which is its “masculine” aspect: canonical and jurisdictional structures, hierarchy, ordos, etc. All this is necessary and essential for the Church; all this, however, is not the Church! The Church is new life in Christ, new joy, communion, love, ascension, deification, peace. The Church is an eternal “passage”—from the old into the new, from this world into the Kingdom of God. It is difficult to define this life, but those who live it, be it only imperfectly, know that its perfect expression, its very “movement,” is Mary. As life, the Church is a she, the Bride of Christ, the one who is called from eternity to be a “chaste virgin to Christ” (2 Cor. 11:2), to whom from all eternity her Bridegroom has said: “thou art all fair, my love, there is no spot in thee.” No synod, no ecclesiastical authority, has decreed all this; it is the direct and living experience of the Church herself that has discovered this identification of the Church with Mary, has expressed the life of the Church in reference to Mary and the veneration of Mary in reference to the Church. The piety of the Church is Mariological because Mary is the very embodiment of that piety, its image, its direction, its movement. She is the “oranta”— the one eternally alive in adoration and self-giving. (1995: 91–2) Iconographically, this deeply ecclesiological image of Mary appears in many Orthodox Churches on the apse which rises directly behind and above the altar, where she is shown with her hands in the orans position and her midsection dominated by a medallion representing Christ in her womb at the incarnation. Painted on a blue background often dotted with gold stars, this icon is traditionally known as Πλατυτέρα τῶν Ουρανῶν (more spacious than the heavens), an allusion to the astounding paradox that the one who created the universe was conceived in her womb. Also on the iconostasis of every Orthodox Church, next to the “royal doors” (through which only the priest or bishop emerges to read the gospel and to bring the consecrated eucharistic gifts at communion),

132

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

the first icon on the left side (as seen from the sanctuary) is always that of Mary, typically the Ὁδηγήτρια (“she who shows the way”) icon in which Mary is gesturing toward the Christ child in her arms.

“PRE-CHRISTIAN” MEMBERS OF THE CHURCH AND BELIEF IN UNIVERSAL SALVATION To the right of the royal doors after the icon of Christ Παντοκράτωρ (ruler of all) is usually an icon of John the Baptist, the “Forerunner,” as the Orthodox refer to him. The term alludes to Isaiah 40:3 as well as to John’s mystical continuity with Elijah (Mt. 17:12-13) and the other Old Testament prophets who anticipated or prefigured the coming Messiah. In Orthodox ecclesiology, which is sometimes fairly criticized as “supersessionist” vis-à-vis ancient Israel, since the Orthodox Church indeed understands herself to be the continuation of the chosen people of God (Gal. 6:16), it is nevertheless a notable feature that the Church is understood to be comprised not just of those who came after Christ, but also of those who (temporally speaking) came before. The Old Testament “cloud of witnesses” praised by Paul in Hebrews 11 may be considered in terms of the line of thought suggested in the earlier quotation from Bulgakov about divine inspiration with respect to Mary. The Orthodox Church is explicit in honoring these figures—Moses, Elijah, Samuel, King David, Jeremiah, Esther, and others—as saints of the Church. Their feast days are celebrated in the liturgical calendar, and icons of these saints are made and venerated. It is true that in Orthodoxy they are and can only be considered saints in Christ, for there is only one Savior, only one name to which “every knee should bend” (Phil. 2:10). Their lives of faith have their ultimate meaning in terms of the Word who, being from “the beginning,” was truly present to them but as yet had not “become flesh and lived among us” (Jn 1:1, 14), because of which “they did not receive what was promised” (Heb. 11:39). In the icon of the Resurrection which depicts Jesus’s emergence from his descent into Hades, all the figures in the background are Old Testament figures (with the exception of John the Baptist, to be understood as the last in their line), and in most versions their heads are surrounded by a halo or nimbus to signify their status as saints. It is Adam and Eve in the foreground whom Jesus pulls by the hand from the tombs. These two, although rarely portrayed with nimbuses as models of faith themselves, are the main focus of the Lord’s gracious descent. Such a portrayal of the resurrection reflects what Orthodox tradition regards as the breadth and depth of God’s tender compassion for his whole creation. [I]nasmuch as man is saved, it is fitting that he who was created the original man should be saved. For it is too absurd to maintain, that he who was so deeply injured by the enemy, and was the first to suffer captivity, was not rescued by Him who conquered the enemy, but that his children were,—those whom he had begotten in the same captivity. Neither would the enemy appear to be as yet conquered, if the old spoils remained with him. (Irenaeus 1999: 456) Apokatastasis, the teaching that by God’s love all will eventually be reconciled— including even the devil—is a theological opinion that many in the East held. Origen was posthumously condemned for it because of how interwoven it was with Platonist cosmology in his case. But Clement of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, Isaac the Syrian, and others who also espoused it were not condemned.

EASTERN ORTHODOX ECCLESIOLOGY

 133

It is significant that the same ecclesiological tradition that has strongly held the principle of extra ecclesiam nulla salus (Cyprian 1999: 384) could maintain even the possibility of universal salvation. But at the heart of the paradox is the belief that the day will come when all will belong to God, when all that is indeed his—everything and everyone—will make a self-offering to him freely, as already now occurs in the visible liturgical action of the Church. It is significant that the eucharistic offering of the Church is always said to be for the sake of all, rather than only of those presently belonging to the Church. This corresponds to the universality of the sacrifice of Christ who “gave Himself up for the life of the world,” according to the priest’s prayer in the Anaphora of the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. After repeating the words of the Lord from the Last Supper (“Take, eat. This is my body . . . Drink of it all of you, for this is my blood”), the celebrant lifts the chalice of wine and the discus holding the bread and intones, “Thine own of thine own, we offer unto Thee, on behalf of all, and for all.”

EUCHARISTIC ECCLESIOLOGY The Church as the body of Christ is made up, then, of those who participate in his oncefor-all self-offering: the Church is fundamentally eucharistic. Eucharistic ecclesiology was a phrase coined by the twentieth-century Russian émigré theologian Nicolas Afanasiev, who famously wrote, “Where there is a eucharistic assembly, there is Christ, and there is the Church of God in Christ” (2003: 18). The many who are gathered become one in the eucharist in the same way that the bread in the form of wheat that was at one time “scattered,” according to the oft-cited words of the Didache, “over the hills,” was then “brought together and made one” (Richardson 1996: 175). In addition to bringing about the concurrence of the many and the one, the eucharist brings together the temporal and the eternal. It is a participation on earth in the worship of God in heaven where, again according to the Anaphora of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, “there stand beside thee thousands of Archangels and ten thousands of Angels, the Cherubim and the Seraphim, six-winged, many-eyed, soaring aloft, borne on their pinions. Singing the Triumphal Hymn, shouting, proclaiming, and saying: Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord of Sabaoth; heaven and earth are full of thy glory.” This eschatological dimension of the eucharist is especially emphasized in the eucharistic ecclesiology of Zizioulas, who writes, “there is no room for the slightest distinction between the worshipping eucharistic community on earth and the actual worship in front of God’s throne” (Zizioulas 1985: 235). Zizioulas himself recognizes a need for a synthesis between the eschatological dimension so powerfully emphasized in Orthodox ecclesiology and the historical dimension, better maintained in the West (1985: 181–2). One of the difficulties in Zizioulas’s eucharistic ecclesiology concerns its notion that the Church is fully herself only in the actual eucharistic celebration. As Paul McPartlan writes, “Zizioulas referred to the ‘ontological grace’ of the eucharist as something ‘acquired only to be lost again until the last day when it will be acquired definitively’” (2006: 270, quoting Zizioulas 1967: 91). Although many Orthodox theologians do not agree with the idea of Zizioulas that the ontological grace imparted in the eucharist is continually lost in the intervals between eucharists and that therefore the Church is authentically herself only while the eucharist is actually being celebrated, it remains true that Orthodox eucharistic ecclesiology tends, generally, to view the eucharist less as a means to an end (viz., nourishment for the journey through history) and more as a reflection of and indeed participation in the eschatological kingdom.

134

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

THE FOUR “MARKS” OF THE CHURCH One It will be necessary to treat of this first “mark” of the Church, that is, the question of her unity, at considerably more length than the other marks because of the particular complexity and centrality of this question in Orthodox ecclesiology. The question of Church unity has long been a vexing one within the Orthodox Church, at times indeed even threatening to divide her. Just how the Church is one is a matter on which Orthodox Christians widely agree in one respect, but deeply differ in another. They largely agree that the Church in her unity is not to be understood as merely the sum of all the historically and still divided communities that call themselves Christian. In the early years of the World Council of Churches (WCC) when there was a need to clarify that the Council itself did not officially endorse or reflect this view, viz., that Church unity could somehow be achieved by merely bringing all the churches in their present divisions together (without first resolving those divisions), Orthodox participants were instrumental in helping to compose and promote the clarifying statements such as were produced at Amsterdam (1948) and Toronto (1950). Fr. Georges Florovsky, who served on the “Committee of Fourteen” (responsible for drafting the WCC constitution) as well as on the Central Committee and Executive Committee of the Council until 1961, wrote in his address to the WCC’s First Assembly in Amsterdam, “We know too well that the true unity of Christendom really has been broken. The whole can never be reconstructed simply by adding together the distorted particulars” (1989b: 25). Florovsky maintained that many of the participating traditions would need to be “reshaped and remoulded” in order to become “fit for reintegration” within a proper ecumenical synthesis. Along similar lines, he insisted that “parity of the divergent traditions or interpretations can hardly be admitted. Some definitive choice must be made. True synthesis presumes a discrimination” (1989b: 25). On these basic ecclesiological points, most Orthodox concur: not all “Christianities” are the same or equally proximate to the true faith. For this reason, the so-called Branch Theory, which holds, in a more limited way, that the one Church is comprised of at least the three main streams or branches of Christian tradition that understand themselves to have maintained apostolic succession—namely the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Anglican traditions—has always been unacceptable to the Orthodox. Orthodoxy is not content to conceive of a form of the unity of the Church that may remain indefinitely at an only invisible level, as if the historical fact of division between concrete communions can be presumed to have had no ontological impact. With only rare and anomalous exceptions, Orthodoxy has also opposed the practice of intercommunion with any non-Orthodox body, holding instead that agreement must be reached on whatever differences led to their division before there can be a sharing of the eucharist, which is a sign of full unity of faith. Beyond this basic level of agreement, however, there is deep disagreement within Orthodoxy about what is implied in the doctrine of the unity of the Church. Specifically, Orthodox sharply disagree with one another about what can be known and said about the ecclesial significance of other, non-Orthodox bodies. One perspective that has been consistently and adamantly expressed since at least the mid-eighteenth century, and which claims continuity with the ecclesiology of St. Cyprian and other Church Fathers, is that outside the visible and canonical unity

EASTERN ORTHODOX ECCLESIOLOGY

 135

of the Church there is not and can never be the presence of the Church at all, because there can be no division in the Church as the body of Christ. According to this hardline position there can be no authentic or “valid” sacraments outside the Orthodox Church. Although some who hold this view do leave room for the possibility of salvation for the non-Orthodox, they nevertheless believe that to affirm non-Orthodox bodies as actual churches, in any meaningful sense, for example with valid baptism, would contradict the nature of the Church as one. As the New Hieromartyr Hilarion Troitsky wrote in 1916, “If the grace-giving baptism of the Holy Spirit is permitted outside the Church, then it is completely impossible to preserve the unity of the Church” (1975: 39). Yet the contrary position has just as firm a foothold in Orthodoxy, too. This is the position that the canonical and charismatic boundaries of the Church do not necessarily always coincide. A common refrain among Orthodox that reflects this more uncertain, apophatic view is the saying, “We know where the Church is but we cannot be sure where it is not” (Ware 1980: 316). This apparently more humble agnosticism can itself, at times, be expressed in a spirit bordering on unconcern about what lies outside the Orthodox Church. At its best, however, it is combined with an urgent sense of responsibility expressed in a patient and attentive process of engagement to seek to identify where and how non-Orthodox Christian bodies really do reflect the beauty and truth of the Church in their faith and life. Florovsky was among those who could not view non-Orthodox Christianity as purely extrinsic to the one true Church that he believed the Orthodox Church to be. For him, the identification of the Orthodox Church with the one true Church did not solve or dispense with the agonizing paradox of the ecumenical problem. He certainly disagreed with the view of some of his WCC colleagues that the various separated Christian communions were so many fragments of the body of Christ which, in history, had come to be divided. However, he did speak often of “divided Christendom” (1989b: 24), and in terms of a more than merely sociological phenomenon. Indeed he went so far as to say that “Christian disunity is an open and bleeding wound on the glorious Body of Christ” (1989b: 25). When distinguishing Orthodox ecclesiology from that of Protestantism, modern Orthodox writers tend to emphasize the visible and structural aspects of the unity of the Church, as they have often felt compelled to do in the context of the World Council of Churches. “The Protestant conception of the unity and fullness of the Church as either something of an invisible nature or belonging to an eschatological future seems, to Orthodox Christians, to amount to a denial of the reality of salvation, as a repudiation of that which God himself has given us” (Meyendorff 1996: 203). When distinguishing Orthodox ecclesiology from that of Roman Catholicism, meanwhile, the same writers will emphasize the mystical dimension of the Church’s unity and criticize an overreliance on visible structures of authority. “[T]he Orthodox Church does not claim to possess any infallible and permanent criterion of Truth or any monolithic structure: it sees unity in a communion of faith, of which the Church itself—or rather the Holy Spirit always dwelling in the Church—is the unique judge” (Meyendorff 1996: 204). As another influential thinker of the interwar period expressed it: “To save the Christian world from the infinite subdivision to which Protestantism leads and from despotic uniformity as advocated by Rome—this is the vocation of Orthodoxy” (Bulgakov 1988: 94). Yet the notion that Orthodoxy is the golden mean equidistant from an atomizing Protestantism and a totalizing Catholicism is actually a misleading characterization of the Orthodox Church. Orthodoxy in fact shares much more with the Church of Rome historically, structurally, and theologically, than it does with any of the major Protestant

136

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

traditions. Such indeed was Florovsky’s view (Baker and Danckaert 2014: 212), and the most robust pan-Orthodox ecumenical dialogue of the past forty years, on which more theological reflection has been produced than on any other, has been the Orthodox– Catholic dialogue. Yet one other dialogue in which the Orthodox have participated since the mid-twentieth century has raised equal if not greater hopes of an actual restoration of unity, and that is the dialogue with the non-Chalcedonian, or Oriental Orthodox, Churches.1 First through an informal consultation in Aarhus, Denmark in 19642 and later through the channel of an official theological commission, the Eastern–Oriental Orthodox dialogue came to the conclusion—expressed in its Second Agreed Statement (1990)3—that the two communions were actually in agreement on the basic christological question that had initially divided them, for reasons now understood to have been largely terminological and cultural. In spite of this agreement on the level of ecumenical dialogue, the respective Churches themselves have yet to make any official or binding decision to restore communion, and issues of ecclesiology appear to be the main obstacle. It is unclear what authority, within each communion, would have the competence to reverse age-old anathemas leveled by each tradition against saints of the other and definitively to declare the long-separated communions united.4 As to the Orthodox–Catholic dialogue and the issues in need of resolution in order for the so-called Great Schism to be healed, this has been a matter of internal Orthodox debate. For such theologians as Vladimir Lossky and John Romanides, the question of unity or disunity with the Roman Catholic Church hinges very much on the filioqué, from which all other perceived distortions of the Catholic West are said to have followed. A greater number of Orthodox thinkers, however, from Florovsky and Kallistos Ware to Schmemann, Meyendorff, and Zizioulas, have not seen the filioqué as a real obstacle but have instead regarded the issue of papal primacy as the most important issue in need of resolution. To go by the number of books and articles written in recent years on primacy in its relation to conciliarity,5 a topic which has also been the subject of the most recent documents produced by the Joint International Commission for the Theological Dialogue between the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church at Ravenna (2007) and Chieti (2016), it is reasonable to suggest that primacy as it relates to the conciliar nature of the Church is one of the most important areas, if not the most important area, of exploration in Orthodox ecclesiology today. This becomes all the more evident in light of long-simmering intra-Orthodox tensions that came to a boil in the contentious atmosphere surrounding the Great and Holy Council on the island of Crete in June 2016, tensions that have subsequently boiled over in the dispute over the question of the

Long referred to pejoratively and misleadingly as “Monophysites” (mono=one, physis=nature) by Eastern Orthodox and other Chalcedonian traditions, the Oriental Orthodox are comprised of four ancient churches of Egypt (Coptic), Armenia, Ethiopia, and Syria (Jacobite), as well as the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Catholicosate founded in 1912 in India and the Eritrean Patriarchate (Ethiopia) which became independent in 1959. 2 Minutes of the discussions held and papers delivered at Aarhus are available in the Greek Orthodox Theological Review 10:2 (winter 1964–65). 3 https​:/​/or​​thodo​​xjoin​​tcomm​​issio​​n​.wor​​dpres​​s​.com​​/2013​​/12​/1​​4​/sec​​ond​-a​​greed​​​-stat​​ement​​-1990​/ 4 For the most thorough recent treatment of the variety of christological and ecclesiological issues at stake in the dialogue with the Oriental Orthodox, see Chaillot (2016). 5 Among recent monographs on the subject are DeVille (2011); Vgenopoulos (2013); and Siecienski (2017). Recent essays on the topic were gathered in two edited volumes in Chryssavgis (2016). 1

EASTERN ORTHODOX ECCLESIOLOGY

 137

autocephaly of the Church in Ukraine, formally granted by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in a Tomos issued in January 2019. At issue in both circumstances is the meaning and scope of the exercise of primacy on the part of the Ecumenical Patriarchate within the overall conciliar life of all the local autocephalous Orthodox Churches. The Moscow Patriarchate has opposed the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s understanding of primacy in the Church and has accused it of “papalist” tendencies and pretensions. A particular fault-line worthy of note in the Orthodox debate over primacy runs between those who hold that there is no legitimate need or place for visible primacy at the level of the Church as a whole, and those who hold that there is. The Ravenna statement declared, “Primacy at all levels is a practice firmly grounded in the canonical tradition of the Church.” By “all levels” was meant here not just the local and regional but also the universal level. In accord with this perspective were observations Alexander Schmemann made in an influential essay of 1963: Finally we come to the highest and ultimate form of primacy: universal primacy. An age-long anti-Roman prejudice has led some Orthodox canonists simply to deny the existence of such primacy in the past or the need for it in the present. But an objective study of the canonical tradition cannot fail to establish beyond any doubt that, along with local “centers of agreement” or primacies, the Church had also known a universal primacy. (Schmemann 1992: 163) Schmemann is critical of the idea popular in Orthodox apologetics that “the Church can have no visible head, because Christ is her invisible head” and describes this idea as “theological nonsense” (Schmemann 1992: 151). It was a stock Orthodox response to Vatican I, as exemplified in a letter of 1895 by Patriarch Anthimus of Constantinople who accepts visible headship at the local and regional levels but decidedly not at the universal, since “Our Lord Jesus Christ alone is the eternal Prince and immortal Head of the Church” (Vgenopoulos 2013: 48). Such a denial of visible headship at the universal level continues to be the default position of a great many Orthodox today, including as influential a figure as Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, head of the Department of External Church Relations in the Moscow Patriarchate. In the Eastern Church, Christ himself is considered to be the supreme authority, the only “Head of the Church” in the proper sense. Decisions binding for the whole Orthodox world are taken solely by an Ecumenical Council. The catholicity of the Church is considered primarily as conciliarity which is expressed in practice by the absence of a single visible head. (Alfeyev 2002: 101–2) In this popular strain of Orthodox ecclesiology that Metropolitan Hilarion expresses, the post-schism ecclesiological situation of Orthodoxy is portrayed as normative and permanent. Yet this approach overlooks key elements in Orthodox tradition itself since the schism, as well as before: not just the ecclesiologically important fact that the Orthodox Church has never appointed an Orthodox bishop of Rome, and that Orthodoxy in the context of the schism has never held a council it has called “ecumenical,” but also the closely related fact that the occurrence of the actual ecumenical councils of the first millennium depended, in important ways, on the role of the emperor. As Andreas Andreapoulos has pointed out, “The absence of an Emperor, the person who often demanded and enforced conciliar unity, sometimes using not very Christian methods, shows a gap in Orthodox ecclesiology—the system cannot work very effectively without an emperor” (2017: 6). The reality of the ecclesiological “gap” to which Andreapoulos refers is borne out by the

138

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

difficulties of the Orthodox Church in recent years to manage to speak and act as more than a confederation of local churches. The 2016 Council of Crete was an effort to make this unified action and expression possible but achieved at best mixed results.

Holy As the earlier discussion of theosis emphasized, the Orthodox believe in the reality of our participation in divine life in the communion of the Church. As already underscored, this ecclesial divine–human communion has a christological basis, which is also indicated at the point in the liturgy when the priest, in reference to the now consecrated gifts of bread and wine shortly to be shared by the gathered communicants, intones, “The holy things are for the holy.” The response of the choir is telling: “One is Holy, One is the Lord: Jesus Christ, to the glory of God the Father. Amen” (Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese 1971: 120). It would be a gross misinterpretation of these words to draw from them the meaning that there can be no holiness among the followers of Christ—as though his being the Holy One precluded our becoming holy. The idea instead is that no holiness for Christ’s disciples is possible apart from their union with him, which the eucharist they are about to receive effects and deepens. The presence of icons in the Church, of those who have gone before whose lives have radiated the holiness of the Holy One, to whom they conformed themselves in a conspicuous way, further attests to the possibility of the real union with Christ to which all are called in the communion of the saints. Indeed, the Orthodox perception that created reality has the potential and the calling to be Godbearing is reflected in a myriad of ways, not only in holy persons who dwell in the Church (paradigmatically represented by Mary, the Theotokos, that is “God-bearer”) and in their remains, or “relics,” which are venerated, but also in inanimate objects, from the wood of the Cross and the pages of the gospel to the wood and paint of icons, which in some cases miraculously stream the fragrant oil of myrrh, but which, in any case, are perceived as instances of the participation of matter in the holiness of Christ. All created reality is called to this participation, to be bearer and channel of God’s presence and grace. At Theophany, the commemoration of Christ’s baptism in the Jordan, the celebration of the liturgy is regularly brought or extended out into the natural world, to nearby lakes or rivers, as part of the “blessing of the waters,” and in the season of house blessings that typically follows, the priest visits and blesses people’s homes with “holy water”; other feasts entail the blessing of herb, seed, and flowers (Dormition) and of fruit and vegetables (Transfiguration). In all this the created order, in its essential sacramentality, damaged or obscured by our own sin, begins already now to be “set free” (Rom. 8:21) and restored to its right relationship with God through our role as “priests of creation,” understood in relation to the eucharist.

Catholic Orthodox writings on catholicity often emphasize the qualitative rather than quantitative or extensive sense of the term. According to Fr. John Meyendorff, the phrase “catholic church” was applied by Ignatius of Antioch and his contemporaries “to the local eucharistic community: each church is, indeed, έκκλησία ϴεοû in its fullness, because what gives that fullness is God’s presence, is the Body of Christ indivisibly manifested in each Eucharist” (1983: 55). This understanding of catholicity rooted in the local church is typically counterposed to what many Orthodox writers critically refer to as a universal, or “universalist,” ecclesiology, in which “[t]he Church is the sum of all local churches, which

EASTERN ORTHODOX ECCLESIOLOGY

 139

all together constitute the Body of Christ” (Schmemann 1992: 150). What the latter (more typically Western) view obscures is the important insight that, as John Zizioulas puts it, “the local churches are full circles which cannot be added to one another but coincide with one another and finally with the Body of Christ and the original apostolic Church” in “a unity in identity” (1985: 158, n. 66). While offering an important corrective to a view of catholicity that would focus only on geographical expansiveness, this Orthodox emphasis on qualitative catholicity can itself easily become one-sided by too readily discounting the association with geography altogether. According to St. Cyril of Jerusalem, “She [the Church] is called Catholic because of her existence throughout the inhabited world” (Didactic Sermons, 18, quoted by Nassar 1979: 1033). So too St. Athanasius: “The Church is called Catholic because she is spread throughout all the world” (Vol. II, p. 202, quoted by Nassar 1979: 1033). In light of these patristic texts, it would be necessary to say that Orthodox tradition understands by catholicity something qualitative and something quantitative or spatial. Further, catholicity connotes unity in the diversity of all types of people, male and female, of every culture and ethnicity. “The note of the Church, catholic or soborny, is manifest in its gathering together in unity humans of any kind” (Louth 2013: 93).

Apostolic From early on, as soon as the initial generation of Christian believers died, the question of the Church’s continuity and consistency with the community of apostles directly appointed by Jesus became critically important. In St. John the Theologian’s image of the “holy city of Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God” (Rev. 21:10), those “twelve,” themselves closely linked with the twelve tribes of Israel (Rev. 21:12), form the Church in her essential pattern and structure, though not of course in themselves but in their conformity to Christ. “And the wall of the city has twelve foundations, and on them are the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb” (Rev. 21:14). The same New Testament writer speaks of having heard, seen, and touched the “word of life,” the very one “that was with the Father,” in order that those he is addressing “also may have fellowship (κοινωνία) with us; and truly our fellowship (κοινωνία) is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ” (1 Jn 1:1-3). Both the content transmitted within the apostolic community and the direct and personal mode of its transmission constitute the identity of the Church through time. As St. Irenaeus of Lyons wrote in the second century about Clement of Rome as the successor of Linus (2 Tim. 4:21) and Anacletus: “This man, as he had seen the blessed apostles, and had been conversant with them, might be said to have the preaching of the apostles still echoing [in his ears], and their traditions before his eyes” (1999: 416). Irenaeus continues with the chronological list up to his own day and concludes: “this is most abundant proof that there is one and the same vivifying faith, which has been preserved in the Church from the apostles until now, and handed down in truth” (1999: 416). The profound personalism of Irenaeus’ sense of ecclesial continuity is reflected as well in his comments about Polycarp, who was not only instructed by apostles, and conversed with many who had seen Christ, but was also, by apostles in Asia, appointed bishop of the Church in Smyrna, whom I also saw in my early youth, for he tarried a very long time, and, when a very old man, gloriously and most nobly suffering martyrdom, departed this life, having always taught the things which he had learned from the apostles, and which the Church has handed down and which alone are true. (1999: 416)

140

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

The Orthodox Church claims to have always been and to continue being this same Church of the apostles, “having always taught the things . . . learned from the apostles” in an uninterrupted process of transmission. The notion of “apostolic succession” cannot be reduced to the apostles’ appointment of bishops who appointed others after themselves, generation by generation, in an unbroken line to the present day. For as the centuries unfolded, heretical and schismatic bishops and their communities could also trace their episcopal lineage back to the apostles. Nevertheless, the concept of “apostolic succession” cannot exclude this concrete dimension of sacramental continuity. Canon IV at the Council of Nicaea (325 AD) both ratifies the basic procedure by which each bishop is ordained by predecessors and further specifies that “a bishop should be appointed by all the bishops in the province,” or, if that is impractical, “three at least should meet together” (Schaff and Wace 1999: 11), with approval to be given in writing by those unable to attend and ratification “left to the Metropolitan” of the province. These requirements, together with the contemporaneous testimony of provincial and ecumenical synods as well as canons concerning the deposition of bishops for reasons either of heresy or disruption of ecclesiastical order, hint at the fact that the apostolicity of the Church could not be guaranteed by formally proper episcopal ordination alone. The content of the apostolic faith also had to be tested, where it was in question, by theological debate and spiritual discernment on the part of the Church as a whole. In addition to involving the modes of continuity and consistency with the apostolic Church discussed above, apostolicity also concerns the Church’s missionary nature. As the apostles were “sent” to proclaim the gospel to those who had not heard it, so the Church of every age, in order to be truly apostolic, acts on the ongoing call to witness throughout the world to the life-giving reality of God’s love for humankind in Jesus Christ. As stated by the bishops gathered on the island of Crete in June 2016, The apostolic work and the proclamation of the Gospel, also known as mission, belong at the core of the Church’s identity, as the keeping and observation of Christ’s commandment: “Go and make disciples of all nations” (Matt 28.19). This is the “breath of life” that the Church breathes into human society and makes the world into Church through the newly-established local Churches everywhere. In this spirit, the Orthodox faithful are and ought to be Christ’s apostles in the world. (Encyclical 2016: section 6)

MINISTRY Metropolitan John Zizioulas has written with regard to 1 Corinthians 12 that Paul there defines the Church as the body of Christ strictly in terms of ministry (1985: 212). Zizioiulas links this insight to two liturgical and canonical datum in Orthodox tradition. One is the early Church’s prohibition (e.g., Chalcedon canon 6) of ordinations “at large,” unrelated to any concrete community; and the other is the requirement that ordinations always take place “within the context of the eucharistic assembly” (1985: 212–13). Zizioulas sees in the latter point the possibility of resolving or transcending the sharp dilemma often posed between, on the one hand, a notion of ministerial power or grace transmitted through an historical line of succession and, on the other, the view that such power or grace is transmitted through the community which then “delegat(es) authority to the ordained person” (1985: 215). All this misses what, for Zizioulas, is the fundamental point that ordination entails “assignment to a particular ‘ordo’ in the community,” and that it is

EASTERN ORTHODOX ECCLESIOLOGY

 141

“not something that follows a pre-existing community but [is] an act constitutive of the community” (1985: 216). According to the ecclesiology of Nicholas Afanasiev, one of the orders in the Church is that of the laity, or, as he wished to call them, the “laics.” Consistent with what Zizioulas will later develop, Afanasiev wrote, “Ordained in the sacrament of baptism by water and the Spirit to be king and priest, the newly enlightened Christian is solemnly led into the eucharistic assembly” (2007: 33). He adds: “[O]nly one who is ordained for the ‘high calling’ of being a member of God’s people can participate in the Eucharist” (2007: 33). Zizioulas lays more explicit emphasis on the specificity of the order of the layperson, observing that the newly baptized would “take his particular ‘place’ in the eucharistic assembly” (1985: 216). Zizioulas goes to such lengths to make these clarifications because of his basic conviction that “the being of the Church does not precede her actions or ministries” (1985: 217, n. 20). Although what is usually referred to as the “threefold ministry” of bishops, presbyters, and deacons was widely established by the early second century and has continued to be in place in the Orthodox Church up to the present day, the canonical tradition attests also to the importance of subdeacons and readers, as well as deaconesses—whose precise liturgical and pastoral function has been a focus of renewed historical research and generated robust discussion in contemporary Orthodoxy. Canon 40 of the Council in Trullo (692 AD) includes the statement that “the sacred canons have decreed that a deaconess shall be ordained at forty” years of age (Schaff and Wace 1999: 384). Although the office of deaconess fell into obsolescence by the end of the Byzantine period, there have been calls for its restoration by some Orthodox liturgical scholars, and a tentative move in this direction was taken by the Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria in 2016 when a “deaconess of the Missions” of the Holy Metropolis of Katanga was consecrated, albeit with some ambiguity surrounding the nature of her office in relation to that of the ancient office of deaconess. Bishops in the Orthodox Church may not be married, while priests as well as deacons may be, but only prior to their ordination to the diaconate or priesthood. A deacon cannot consecrate the gifts of bread and wine in the eucharist or give formal blessings as the priest and bishop can. The priest, for his part, is always said to serve under the “omophorion” of a particular bishop—a literal reference to an episcopal vestment, but with the meaning of being subject to the bishop’s authority. Every altar is furnished with a rectangular linen or cloth “antimension,” on which are depicted the entombment of Christ surrounded by Scripture verses pertinent to the eucharist and, at each corner, one of the four Evangelists; the antimension, without which no liturgy can be celebrated, is always consecrated and signed by the bishop, concretizing the point that no priest can serve the liturgy on his own, but always only in relation to the bishop, who is the locus of unity of the entire community of that local church. In Orthodox parlance, “local church” can have at least two senses, in one of which it signifies an autocephalous church made up of many dioceses; but at the most rudimentary level, a “local church” is the church in her most basic form, namely that of the diocese itself. Why a diocese may be spoken of as a “complete” church is because of the existence in it of people of all orders, including, necessarily, that of the bishop as the visible head.

SACRAMENTS Many nineteenth- and twentieth-century Orthodox theological manuals, influenced by Catholic models, spoke of the seven sacraments of the Church—baptism, chrismation,

142

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

eucharist, confession, anointing, marriage, and ordination—but at least as many writings on the subject today will emphasize that Orthodox tradition was never especially committed to this way of numbering the sacraments and will point out that the Church in her very being is sacramental. The actual word “sacrament,” deriving from the Latin sacramentum, was not always in use in Orthodox tradition, which instead spoke of the holy “mysteries” of baptism, eucharist, and so on. As Fr. Andrew Louth points out, the word “mystery” for the sacraments helps to “make evident their association with the mystery of Christ” (2013: 98). The mystery of Christ, God’s long-hidden plan of salvation at last revealed in the life and teaching, death and resurrection of Christ, still contains, of course, hidden depths of meaning even once it has become known to human beings, yet something—indeed, Someone—has nevertheless been decisively disclosed. And the “mysteries” of the Church continually effect and realize this disclosure. “The mysteries are the ways in which the mystery of Christ is made manifest in the Church for the world” (2013: 98). The word “sacrament,” meanwhile, valuably emphasizes the idea that created things point beyond themselves, that, as Pseudo-Dyonisius wrote, “visible things are manifest images of things invisible” (Luibhéid 1987, ep. 10, quoted in Louth 2013: 100). Sacraments, or symbols, as Louth succinctly puts it, “invest the visible and material with a meaning that transcends them” (2013: 101). In the liturgical theology of Schmemann which had so significant an impact on twentieth-century Christian thought, greater stress is laid on the role of sacraments at the intersection of the temporal and the eternal. This of course is not at odds with the visible–invisible planes, but in Schmemann’s dynamic understanding of sacraments in the life of the Church, they are fundamentally a passage from this age to the next. At the heart of the idea of sacraments then is the mystery of passover, of what in the light of Christ is celebrated as Pascha. Schmemann indeed refers to Easter as the “sacrament of time” (1998: 58) and describes the sacrament of the eucharist as “the journey of the Church into the dimension of the Kingdom” (1998: 26). The invisible grace imparted in the eucharist is then in this perspective to be understood, certainly not as a supernatural substance or protection from life’s ills, but as “our sacramental entrance into the risen life of Christ,” an “entrance into a fourth dimension which allows us to see the ultimate reality of life. It is not an escape from the world, rather it is the arrival at a vantage point from which we can see more deeply into the reality of the world” (1998: 26, 27). He notes too about baptism and chrismation that each is followed liturgically by a procession—again the emphasis on a movement or passage—in which the newly baptized and chrismated participates. And penance or absolution, too, entails a movement, in this case that of a return, for although the forgiveness offered in baptism is not anything different from that which is received again in confession, and thus there is “no need for any ‘new’ absolution,” nonetheless, “there is indeed the need for us who constantly leave Christ and excommunicate ourselves from His life, to return to Him” (1998: 79).

REFERENCES Afanasiev, N. (2003), “Una sancta,” in Michael Plekon (ed.), Tradition Alive: On the Church and the Christian Life in Our Time—Readings from the Eastern Church, A Sheed and Ward Book, 3–30, Lanham and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Afanasiev, N. ([1971] 2007), The Church of the Holy Spirit, trans. V. Permiakov, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

EASTERN ORTHODOX ECCLESIOLOGY

 143

Alfayev, H. (2002), The Mystery of Faith: An Introduction to the Teaching and Spirituality of the Orthodox Church, ed. Jessica Rose, London: Darton, Longman and Todd. Andreapoulos, A. (2017), “In Conversation with Christos Yannaras: A Critical View of the Council of Crete,” Colloquium on Reflections after the Great Council of the Orthodox Church in Crete in 2016, Montreal Institute of Orthodox Theology & Faculté de théologie et de sciences religieuses (Université Laval), Quebec. https​:/​/ww​​w​.tri​​nityo​​rthod​​ox​.ca​​/site​​s​/def​​ ault/​​files​​/Andr​​eas​%2​​0Andr​​eopou​​los​-I​​n​%20C​​onver​​satio​​n​%20w​​ith​%2​​0Chri​​stos%​​20Yan​​naras​​ A​%20C​​ritic​​al​%20​​View%​​20of​%​​20he%​​20Cou​​ncil%​​20of%​​20Cre​​te​.pd​f Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America. (1971), Service Book of the Holy Eastern Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church according to the use of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America, Englewood: Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America. Baker, M. and S. Danckaert (2014), “Fr. Georges Florovsky,” in P. Kalaitsidis, T. Fitzgerald, C. Hovorun, Aik. Pekridou, N. Asproulis, G. Liagre, and D. Werner (eds.), Orthodox Handbook on Ecumenism: Resources for Christian Education, 209–13, Oxford: Volos Publications in partnership with Regnum. Basil the Great, Saint ([374] 1997), On the Holy Spirit, trans. David Anderson, Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Bulgakov, S. (1935] 1988), The Orthodox Church, trans. revised by Lydia Kesich, Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Bulgakov, S. ([1936] 2004), The Comforter, trans. Boris Jakim, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Chaillot, C., ed. (2016), The Dialogue between the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches, Volos: Volos Academy Publications. Chryssavgis, J., ed. (2016), Primacy in the Church, Vols. I and II. Yonkers: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Cyprian of Carthage, Saint ([256] 1999), Epistle LXXII, “To Jubaianus, Concerning the Baptism of Heretics,” in A. Roberts and J. Donaldson, Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 5, 379–86, Peabody: Hendrickson. Cyprian of Carthage, Saint ([251] 2006), The Unity of the Catholic Church, in idem, On the Church: Select Treatises, trans.  Allan Brent, Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. DeVille, A. (2011), Orthodoxy and the Roman Primacy, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Encyclical of the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church, Crete (June 2016). https​:/​/ww​​w​.hol​​ycoun​​cil​.o​​rg/-/​​encyc​​lical​​-hol​y​​-coun​​cil Florovsky, G. (1948), “Le Corps du Christ Vivant,” in G. V. Florovsky, F. J. Leenhardt, et al. (eds.), La Sainte Église Universelle: Confrontation OEcuménique, Switzerland: Neuchatel. Florovsky, G. (1958), “The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church by Vladimir Lossky,” The Journal of Religion 38 (3): 207–8. Florovsky, G. ([1925] 1989a), “The House of the Father,” in R. S. Haugh (ed.), The Collected Works of Georges Florovsky, Volume XIII: Ecumenism I, A Doctrinal Approach, 58–80, Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt. Florovsky, G. ([1948] 1989b), “Ecumenical Aims and Doubts,” in R. S. Haugh (ed.), The Collected Works of Georges Florovsky, Volume XIII: Ecumenism I, A Doctrinal Approach, 22–7, Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt. Florovsky, G. ([1963] 1989c), “The Historical Problem of a Definition of the Church,” in R. S. Haugh (ed.), The Collected Works of Georges Florovsky, Volume XIV: Ecumenism II, A Historical Approach, 29–37, Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt.

144

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Irenaeus, Saint ([circa 188] 1999), “Against Heresies,” in A. Roberts and J. Donaldson (eds.), Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1, 315–567, Peabody: Hendrickson. Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom ([4th–14th c.] 1971), Service Book of the Holy Eastern Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church, 10th ed., Englewood: Antiochian Christian Archdiocese of North America. Lossky, V. (1985), In the Image and Likeness of God, Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Louth, A. (2013), Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology, London: SPCK. McPartlan, P. ([1993] 2006), The Eucharist Makes the Church: Henri de Lubac and John Zizioulas in Dialogue, Fairfax: Eastern Christian Publications. Methodius of Olympus. ([1901] 1958), The Symposium: A Treatise on Chastity. Greek text in G. N. Bonwetsch, ed., Methodius, Vol. 27 of Die griechischen christlchen Schriftsteller der ersten drei Jahrhunderte, Leipzig; Berlin. Translation in St. Methodius: The Symposium, a Treatise on Chastity, translated and annotated by Herbert Musurillo, Ancient Christian Writers, Vol. 27, Westminster: The Newman Press. Meyendorff, J. (1983), Catholicity and the Church, Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Meyendorff, J. ([1960] 1996), The Orthodox Church: Its Past and Its Role in the World Today, 4th rev. ed., Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Nassar, S., ed. (1979), Divine Prayers and Services of the Catholic Orthodox Church of Christ, 3rd ed., Englewood: Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America. Nissiotis, N. (1966), “Report on the Second Vatican Council,” Ecumenical Review 18: 190–206. Richardson, C. (1996), Early Christian Fathers, New York: Touchstone. Schaff, P. and H. Wace (1999), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, Vol. 14, The Seven Ecumenical Councils, Peabody: Hendrickson. Schmemann, A. ([1963] 1992), “The Idea of Primacy in Orthodox Ecclesiology,” in J. Meyendorff (ed.), The Primacy of Peter, 145–71, Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Schmemann, A. ([1970-75] 1995), The Virgin Mary, Celebration of Faith, Vol. 3, trans. in part by J. Jillions, Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Schmemann, A. ([1963] 1998), For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy, Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Siecienski, A. Edward (2017), The Papacy and the Orthodox, New York: Oxford University Press. Staniloae, D. (1980), Theology and the Church, trans. Robert Barringer, Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Troitsky, H., Saint ([1917] 1975), The Unity of the Church and the World Conference of Christian Communities, Montreal: Monastery Press. Vgenopoulos, M. (2013), Primacy in the Church from Vatican I to Vatican II: An Orthodox Perspective, DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Ware, T. ([1963] 1980), The Orthodox Church, New York: Penguin. Zizioulas, J. (1967), “La vision eucharistiique du monde et l’homme contemporain,” Contacts 19: 83–92. Zizioulas, J. (1985), Being As Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church, Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

Chapter ELEVEN

Lutheran Ecclesiology JONATHAN MUMME

ARDUOUS CHILD’S PLAY: ECCLESIOLOGY IN THE LUTHERAN TRADITION “God be praised, a seven-year-old child knows what the church is,” claimed Martin Luther in 1537, “holy believers and ‘the little sheep who hear the voice of their shepherd’” (SA III, xii: 2).1 If this statement—iterated nearly two decades after the inadvertent beginnings of an ever-widening reform movement and in preparation for a council of the Western Church—was true in 1537, Luther’s historical heirs have found talking about the church a bit more difficult. Among them ecclesiology has transformed, been adapted, and even stood at the center of debates. Though articulating a doctrine of the church in the historical vortex of the Reformation was likely no child’s play even for Luther, he did enjoy a perspective that most Lutherans have not: Luther, a son of the latemedieval Western Church (Pesch 1985; Jedin 1968), knew and wrote about a church—a single ecclesial reality of life encountered in the world (Mumme 2015b: 301–7). Though he could speak of “churches,” thereby indicating locatable, regional manifestations of the church such as dioceses (Mumme 2019), subsequent Lutherans would be dealing with some different categories: particular churches of different confessions and distinct denominations. Before “Lutherans” and “Lutheran” churches accepted their now common appellation, they referred to their ecclesial communities as churches “of the Augsburg Confession.” The tension between the Reformation roots and the subsequent unfolding of this ecclesiological tradition can be observed by comparing the text of the Augsburg Confession (1530) to its later legacy. Some identify its seventh article “Concerning the Church,” “the first doctrinal statement ever made in Christendom about what the church is and wherein is her unity” (Sasse 1986: 42), as the magna charta (grand charter) of ecclesiology in the Lutheran tradition (Wenz 1999b: 1018). The Augustana’s seventh article is often read as a new sort of declaration. However, this selfsame confession goes on to claim that in what it has said about the ministry, the church, the sacraments, ordination, and bishops, “there is nothing here that departs from the Scriptures or the catholic church, or from the Roman church, insofar as we can tell from its writers” (Kolb and Wengert 2000: 59); the text of the Augsburg Confession claims to represent something old over against recent abuses.

All references to the following Lutheran confessions can be found in Kolb and Wengert 2000: Augsburg Confession (CA), Apology to the Augsburg Confession (Ap), the Smalcald Articles (SA), the Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope (Tr), as well as the Small Catechism (SC) and Large Catechism (LC). 1

146

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

This tension must be born in mind when doing ecclesiology in the Lutheran tradition. For on the one hand, Lutheran churches and Lutheran ecclesiology or ecclesiologies did become distinct entities and enterprises. On the other hand, the Lutheran tradition’s only unanimously authoritative texts (beyond the creeds) are confessions of the sixteenth century that have no concept of such entities or of ecclesiology as a denominationally distinct enterprise. What then constitutes “Lutheran” and “Lutheran ecclesiology”? Three points commend themselves. Firstly, Lutheran ecclesiology cannot be less than or at odds with the presentation of the church in the Lutheran confessions of the sixteenth century. Secondly, further unfoldings of ecclesiology in the Lutheran tradition are evidence of contextual dogmatics (Anselm 2000); Lutheran ecclesiology unfolds and expands as theologians of the Lutheran tradition take up sometimes rather standardized categories, modifying and developing them to address contexts marked by sociopolitical change. Thirdly, at its best Lutheran ecclesiology articulates a vision of the church as a creature of the gospel. This vision of the church, which fits neatly neither under the heading of “Protestant” nor under the umbrella of “Catholic” in the Roman sense, interacts with sociopolitical modes of governing communities, but must eventually assert a unique dominical authority unto the realization of communion as intended by Christ.

FROM LATENT LOCUS TO CONFESSION IN CONFLICT: ECCLESIOLOGY UP TO THE LUTHERAN CONFESSIONS As far as dogmatic theology goes, ecclesiology is relatively new (Pannenberg 1998: 21–7). Although topics related to the understanding of the church have been discussed and examined throughout Christian history, the church itself did not become a topic or locus of theology until the late Middle Ages when it emerged as a product of a waxing ecclesial crisis. The earliest treatises on the church stem from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and only gradually did theologians lay their hand to this topic that had been the purview of canonists (Kasper and Drumm 1993: 1461–2). The Western Church, still digesting the Gregorian Reforms, had recently faced the Western schism and toiled under wranglings of crown and curia and between curialists and conciliarists. Lacking an official ecclesiology, this increasingly brittle entity was being catapulted into an early modern era that was in part to be shaped by the absolutist ambitions of European heads of state. Luther rather stumbled into this new field. The controversy over indulgences that came to him was quickly shifted by Dominican opponents to a debate about ecclesiastical authority. In the snowballing controversy over the church and ecclesial authority Luther remained “within the framework of existing theological and canonical possibilities” (Pesch 1985: 121). Writings from the early 1520s evince Luther’s conviction that no single person (including the pope) or group of Christians (including the clergy and theologians loyal to the Roman Curia) could arrogate to himself or themselves and manipulatively manage gifts of Christ that belonged to the whole church (Stein 1974: 63–176). Though he never composed an ecclesiological treatise in the strict sense, the latter years of Luther’s career evidence a more conscientious deliberation of ecclesiological themes at a time when he, along with colleagues at the University of Wittenberg, were coming to bear some responsibility for ecclesial structures in lands and territories implementing the Reformation. On the highly embattled field of a dividing Christian West, Luther’s polemical treatises aimed to show how these evangelical Christian structures were “the true ancient church,” from which

LUTHERAN ECCLESIOLOGY

 147

the papists had fallen away and “set up a new church” (Luther [1541] 1966: 41:194), and how the church could be identified by certain holy things—subsequently referred to as notae ecclesiae (marks of the church)—that sanctified people, thereby making such people the church, “a Christian holy people” (Luther [1539] 1966: 41:143). Though his writings of the 1530s and 1540s had mainly Romanist opponents in view, interactions with both Swiss and radical factions of the Reformation in the 1520s make Luther’s emphasis on sacred institutions of Christ giving rise to, sustaining, and therefore characterizing the church rather distinct within the European reformations. The Word of God, baptism, absolution through the office of the keys, and the holy supper—as delivered by called and ordained ministers—hallowed a people; they established the holy church of God. This church lives and breathes in the liturgical assembly, where the faith is inculcated and transmitted and where prayer is learned. Here a holy and distinct people, the church, also suffers and knows Christ’s presence in suffering (Luther [1539] 1966: 41:143–78). In his mature sermons Luther highlighted the theophoric quality of the ministry and ministers; Christ is present in it and them, together. He presented ministers in historic and apostolic continuity with the prophets, apostles, and bishops of the church, and with Christ himself (Mumme 2015b: 93–188). Ministers were made by ordination, which traditionally fell to the bishops, whom Luther understood along with parsons as the “governors” of the church. Appealing to a long-standing tradition that the episcopacy did not constitute an essentially distinct ministerial order (Ott 1969), Luther and his Wittenberg colleagues recognized that priests/presbyters—most appropriately acting as parsons—could also ordain, and such ordinations began openly taking place in Wittenberg in 1535 (Krarup 2007). The first edition of Philip Melanchthon’s Loci communes (1521), which became the standard dogmatic textbook of the Wittenberg Reformation, did not contain a locus on the church, for ecclesiology was yet to become a common topic; the Reformation would lend it this status. The second edition of the Loci (1535) and subsequent editions offered a locus on the church. Against charges of opponents to the contrary, Melanchthon wrote of the church as the coetus vocatorum (the assembly of those called [to faith]) and presented it as a “visible” reality that could be encountered and perceived (Melanchthon [1555] 1982: 267), and which bore the institutional features of pure profession of the gospel, use of the sacraments in accord with their divine institution, and obedience to the ministry, which exists as instituted by Christ (Kühn 1989: 263–4, 1980: 39–57). “The true Christian Church is a marvelous government” (Melanchthon [1555] 1982: 257); “it is a gathered company” in which the “divine offices” of “preaching, administration of the sacraments, and punishment through the ban” take place (Melanchthon [1555] 1982: 266) as exercised by the ministers, to whom obedience is owed according to their various jurisdictions (Melanchthon [1555] 1982: 260). A theologically binding form of Luther’s and Melanchthon’s theology has been passed on to the Lutheran tradition in the aforementioned sixteenth-century confessions (Piepkorn 2006). The Latin text of the Seventh Article of the Augsburg Confession states: “One holy church will remain forever. The church is the assembly of saints (German: ‘assembly of all believers’) in which the gospel is taught purely and the sacraments are administered rightly” (CA VII:1). Speaking of the church in a creedal manner with congregatio sanctorum (assembly of saints) closely echoing communio sanctorum (communion of saints) from the Apostles’ Creed, the Augustana offers a short definition of the church that is both personal and institutional. The church is an assembly of persons, of people—believers or holy people. These people are holy solely by way of faith in Christ, which faith is reckoned to them as righteousness (CA IV). The personal, justifying faith of these holy people neither owes

148

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

to them nor begins with them; instead, this faith is effected “where and when it pleases God,” who “instituted the office of preaching” (Predigtamt) to give out the gospel and the sacraments (CA V:1-3). Through these tangible (leiblich) and external means (CA V:4) the Holy Spirit is given and works the justifying faith that is characteristic and constitutive of all those who constitute the church. In the logic of the confession the people or personal element does not lead but follows the institutional element, namely, the divine institution of the ministry. As Melanchthon states in a subsequently authored and received confession, the church is built on the ministry (Tr 25). The following articles of the Augsburg Confession expound this line of thought, treating the forgiving Word of God and the sacraments of baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and penance as divine realities to be used and enjoyed in faith and for the growth of faith (CA IX–XIII), while specifying that only those who are ordained publicly preach or administer the sacraments (CA XIV and Ap XIV). Although the tradition’s sixteenth-century confessions do not affirm seven sacraments, depending on how “sacrament” is defined, ordination can be understood as a sacrament (Ap XIII:7–13). Reflecting his understanding of the three estates (Drei-Stände-Lehre, i.e., the notion that all human society was organized through three hierarchies—ecclesia, oeconomia, and politia—that were rooted in and underwritten by God’s own authority), Luther’s Large Catechism speaks of the clergy as spiritual fathers, to whom obedience and material provision are due (LC Fourth Commandment: 158–64). The ecclesiastical ministry (ministerium ecclesiasticum) or preaching office (Predigtamt) (CA V) presented in the confessions is singular and unitary, and at the same time an understood hierarchy of ministers is also evident. To the bishops, who bear the church’s unique authority, both an authority of order (potestas ordinis) and an authority of jurisdiction (potestas iurisdictionis) are reckoned (Ap XXVIII: 13–14; Mumme 2015a). They are recognized as the regular ordinatores (persons ordaining) and visitatores (persons conducting visitations), but when they neglect or refuse such duties these responsibilities can and must be taken up by the secular clergy of the parishes, namely by parsons (Pfarrer) and the preachers working alongside them (Prediger) (SC Preface:1-6). Recognizing the essential unity of the ministry, it is affirmed that ordinations carried out by parsons in their parish churches are valid (Tr 65), which put in modern terms is an affirmation of presbyteral ordination. Ecclesiologically the Lutheran confessions of the sixteenth century indicate a movement calling for reforms from within the tradition of the Western Church. When the ecclesial rift over such reforms widened and solidified as opposed to healed, this reform movement within the Western Church gave rise to “churches,” thereby marking out new terrain for subsequent ecclesiological efforts.

LUTHERAN TO PROTESTANT TO ECUMENICAL: A SURVEY OF THE MODERN ERA The popular notion that the Reformation was about soteriology, that is, the doctrine of justification, has theological merit. Historically the issue was more mundane. “For the Reformation it was a question about salvation and not a question about ecclesiology that first occupied the foreground. However, the grounds for the rupture lay finally not in the doctrine of justification but in ecclesiology” (Kasper and Drumm 1993: 1462). How exactly the rupture or ruptures were to play out in lands implementing a Lutheran form of the Reformation would in large part have to do with institutional orders of the church being maintained, dissolved, or reconfigured.

LUTHERAN ECCLESIOLOGY

 149

Prior to the Lutheran Reformation the ecclesial structures overseen by the late-medieval Fürstbischöfe (prince–bishops) of the Empire’s northern lands were in a state of decay; simony, absenteeism, and pluralism were common (Methuen 2017). Initial reforms in the northern German territories, including visitations and ordinations, were carried out under the authority of the civil government (Wendebourg 2001). The Lutheran Reformation— which also spread to the Baltic countries, Moravia, Hungary, and Transylvania—came to Scandinavia as a magisterial reformation. There it played out with some variations along national lines. After conflict between the bishop of Uppsala and a Swedish regent contributed to the dissolution of the Kalmar Union, the now independent kingdom of Sweden retained the bishops of its domains and then consecrated an archbishop at the king’s behest (Jarlet 2004: 1055–6; Brodd 1993: 61). In Denmark King Christian III deposed the diocesan bishops and saw to the consecration of superintendents to replace them, who soon were being referred to as bishops (Lausten 1999: 550; Pedersen 1993: 85–7). In Norway, Hans Rev, the bishop of Oslo, was removed from office and subsequently (re)instated as a superintendent in Oslo (Lislerud 1993: 93–4). In Germany attempts at an evangelical bishop’s office were made, but failed mainly due to the reticence of civil authorities and territorial rulers to relinquish ecclesial powers they had in the meantime come to exercise (Wendebourg 1997). The Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555) dissolved the power of the bishops in lands of the Empire that subscribed to the Augsburg Confession. The “superintendents” (a Latinization of the Greek episkopoi) of these territories usually oversaw the churches in cooperation with consistories (Elert 1967). Even with a shared confession of the faith, Lutheran ecclesial reforms were rather patchwork. Their ecclesial institutions did not appeal to the pope for legitimacy, but everywhere the clergy now had to negotiate ecclesial powers with the civil authorities of their given lands (Press 1989: 381–4). The context for doing the “contextual dogmatics” of Lutheran ecclesiology (Anselm 2000) proved calmer and more stable in the lands of the Danish (Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Greenland) and Swedish (Sweden, Finland) crowns. In the German lands the context was more complex: Lutheran territories more closely neighbored those under Roman Catholic rule and also experienced the influence of the Calvinist or Swiss Reformation, sometimes with rulers pulling their dominion’s teaching and practice of the Christian faith toward an opposing confession. As the Reformation gave way to confessionalization in the German lands, ecclesiology unfolded in controversy. Differences between the confessions were underscored, and an apologetic interest sought to prove the veracity and validity of the particular church through the delegitimization of ecclesial others (Kehl 1995: 570–1; Tjørhom 2016: 327). The doctrine of the church was filtered through theological categories that distinguished one confession from another, and theologians often sought to keep pace with changed ecclesial circumstances then reflected in their dogmatic undertakings. The nascent ecclesiology of the Wittenberg reformers and of their received confessions underwent morphology (Elert 1958: 1:224–354 and 2:125–290). So whereas Luther simply recognized the bishops as the church’s governors (SA II, iv:9), Johann Gerhard, arguably Lutheran orthodoxy’s most significant and influential figure, retooled an understanding of the three estates that lent theological legitimacy to the Landesherrliche Kirchenregiment (church polity organized under the authority of the head of state). He presents these three estates as all being of the church and in the church, and to this amalgam the charge of the ecclesiastical ministry falls, though not to each estate in equal or like measure (Nüssel 2006: 153). According to Gerhard, for example, the head of state, as the foremost member of the church, bears the responsibility of caring for and overseeing the church, the cura

150

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

religionis. The ius episcopale (episcopal authority) that had fallen to the heads of state as an emergency measure during the Reformation was now seen as the norm and indeed as their right; the ruler was by divine ordering the sumus episcopus (the highest instance of ecclesial oversight, also known as the Summepiskopat) of his land (Dingel 2001: 1326). Although this theological revamping by Lutheran orthodoxy reinforced German rulers in powers they were already wielding and provided a basis for church law in a new era by appropriating episcopal categories that were already extant in imperial law, theologians such as Gerhard were also carving out and attempting to retain a real measure of influence and participation for the clergy and theologians in this changed form of church governance. “That total aggregate, which the hierarchical estates constitute, is called ‘church’” (König [1664] 2006: §999). If all three estates were in and made up the church and the governance of the church fell to this conglomerate, then the ever-growing ambitions of territorial states and absolute rulers could not simply circumvent or suppress the clergy in ecclesial affairs. Elevating Huldrych Zwingli’s distinction between (the) visible church and (the) invisible church to a structural principle (Anselm 1999: 1008) enabled Gerhard and other theologians of the Baroque period to affirm the clergy’s place and purview in the internal, sacred institutions that pertained to faith—the essence of the church—and were thus at the heart of the church’s life: preaching and teaching, and administration of the sacraments. To the rulers’ charge fell matters of the “external regiment” (König [1664] 2006: §982) such as the organization of visitations, the convocation of synods, prosecution of false teachers, as well as the legal ordering of the church (Anselm 2000: 211–31; de Wall 2001). As this mode of thinking about the church based on the three estates grew into an overarching theory of society and social ethic, and as territorialism (Territorialismus) came to shape the thinking of absolute states, these spheres of responsibility were referred to as ius in sacra (rights in sacred matters) and as ius circa sacra (rights in matters related to the sacred). As Orthodox theologians—who were an integral part of the so-called Lehrstand (teaching/doctrinal estate)—constructed monumental works of theology, they were also supporting a process of ecclesial consolidation increasingly focused on the catechesis and informed faith of individuals. Pietism, with its internalizing tendency, and Enlightenment thought, with its rationalizing tendency, took elements already latent in Lutheran orthodoxy’s rather scholastic exposition of faith and developed them in mutually opposing directions, except for their unifying element of individualism. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) is also significant for the theological and philosophical movements that would shape ecclesiology after Lutheran orthodoxy. In granting legal status to Calvinism, the end of the Thirty Years’ War made the confessional consolidations of the previous century something of a problem as different Protestant churches now “had to live side-by-side in the same territories” (Tjørhom 2016: 328). Ecclesiology per se was of little interest to Lutheran Pietists. If Lutheran orthodoxy attempted to shore up assurance of salvation and recognition of belonging to the true church by means of demonstrating the orthodoxy of the Lutheran church, Pietists located such assurance in the conversion of the heart, in true and personal faith as an inner disposition, and in a sanctified Christian life. In the tradition of Philip Jacob Spener, personal faith and a devout life were to be cultivated through collegia pietatis (schools of piety) that existed as small conventicles of true and earnest believers within the broader church (ecclesiolae in ecclesia). Spener helped shift the operative locus of salvation from the objective and external means of grace administered by the clergy to the internal and

LUTHERAN ECCLESIOLOGY

 151

personal faith of the believing individual (Baur 1980: 126–9). The invisible church was seen as the true church, and at least latently faith itself enjoyed systematic priority to institutional elements of the church. Along similar lines Spener’s implementation of the so-called universal priesthood of all believers “gave the laity a new status” (Tjørhom 2016: 328), mobilizing them for efforts of personal and mutual edification. If true belief and true Christianity could not simply be defined along doctrinal lines, then children of God also existed outside Lutheran orthodoxy. For this reason Spener, whom Emmanuel Hirsch could refer to as the “father of all unionist German theology and the originator of the gradual merging of the German Lutheran and the German Reformed churches” (Kühn 1989: 267), called attention to the faith and life shared in common with the Reformed. Invigorated by the conviction that the true church was a supra-confessional fellowship of the reborn, Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf ’s Brüdergemeinde (Congregation of the Brethren/Moravians) sought to carry out Christ’s work in a covenant of love unfettered by confessional differences; their work would shape the future of Lutheran missions. Indicative of German theology during the Enlightenment, Johann Salomo Semler distinguished between religion and theology. Sharing Pietist skepticism of orthodoxy’s dogmas, religion was aligned with the invisible church and theology with the visible. The weak may be in need of the church’s doctrines and ordinances, but lovers of Christian truth were not. For a morally reflective and religious person the church as an institution was of little value; the tangible and external means of grace were disregarded. Religion was a personal and rather intangible matter of one’s relationship with God. Immanuel Kant saw the utility of the church as passing, giving way to a higher republic of virtues that existed as a free fellowship of internal conviction whose members helped one another to a morally qualified and virtuous life that honored God (Kühn 1989: 267). The essence of religious faith is moral, and although the church could act as a vehicle to such faith the institution itself was only of temporary value for a philosophical program that sought binding and normative foundations for modern culture (Anselm 1999: 1009). In a “romantically inspired synthesis of Pietist and Enlightenment impulses” (Tjørhom 2016: 337), the work of F. D. E. Schleiermacher not only tied the diverging strands of modern intellectualism and religion together again but also attempted to re-coordinate individual piety with the institutional structure of the church. Inasmuch as the feeling or sense of God that constitutes religion for Schleiermacher is fully given by sharing in the power of Jesus of Nazareth’s God-consciousness, religion entails a sociality of the reborn and results in their coming together in an ordered way. The redemptive work of Christ binds believers together into a fellowship, and the church, which does exhibit institutional order, is the social form of religion. The church’s external, institutional form is organically ordered to its internal, essential fellowship and is therefore quite pliable. The invisible has precedence over the visible, and the church is a creatura fidei (a creation of faith). The internal, religious fellowship stipulates the Christians’ relationship to the external, ecclesial form. As a distinguishing matter of principle, Schleiermacher stated that Protestantism “makes the individual’s relation to the Church dependent on his relation to Christ, while [Catholicism] contrariwise makes the individual’s relation to Christ dependent on his relation to the Church” ([1830] 1989: §24). Ecclesial structure could thus be quite open, so long as it did not smack of a Roman-Catholic otherness. The spiritual fellowship that is the church is conceived as a sort of ideal society meant to leaven the whole of the culture and lead it to its Christian religious roots. Neo-Protestant proponents of Kulturprotestantismus (cultural Protestantism), such

152

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

as P. K. Marheineke, Albrecht Ritschl, and Ernst Troeltsch, would further develop this notion in nineteenth-century Germany. Although influences such as Pietism and the Enlightenment also shaped the ecclesial experience of Lutherans in the Scandinavian countries (Lausten 1999: 551–2), the Lutheran churches of this region did not have the same need to assert themselves over against or meld with other confessions as did those in Germany. From the sixteenth century on, the place of these Lutheran churches as folk churches (Volkskirchen) and/ or state churches (Staatskirchen) was, for their societies, a given and not subject to constant sociopolitical and theological negotiation. The Reformation in Scandinavia was conspicuous in that “the influence of Luther’s reformation was much stronger than the other currents of the Reformation . . . the resistance it met from Roman Catholicism was weak when compared with that of other European countries” (Molland 1965: 36). Within one or two generations Lutheranism enjoyed hegemonic status, and “from the end of the sixteenth century the Lutheran faith was the only religion which was allowed in the Scandinavian countries for about 250 years” (Molland 1965: 38). A close connection between the church, the state, and the universities was characteristic of Scandinavian life. Some of Denmark’s most influential theologians were simultaneously professors of theology and bishops of Zealand. In seventeenth-century Sweden religious unity was recognized—by the constitution—as the foundation for enduring political order and sovereignty, and the bishops, appointed by the crown, had to swear loyalty to the state and were ex officio members of parliament. In general, Calvinism was simply not allowed, conversion to Roman Catholicism was seen as akin to treason (as in the case of Queen Christina of Sweden, whose 1654 abdication of the throne coincided with conversion), and official Lutheran teaching set the accepted standard for catechesis and theological education. Something of a Lutheran “monoculture” (Bergmann 2004: 1373) obtained in the Scandinavian lands, which were marked by religious unanimity and solidarity. The somewhat dissimilar trajectories of Lutheranism in Scandinavia and Germany in the centuries after the Reformation would both come to be shaped by rapid political change, secularization, and waxing notions of religious freedom that surrounded and followed the French and the European Revolutions (Kerner 1989), albeit more slowly in Scandinavia than in Germany. Early nineteenth-century Germany saw multifaceted, regional awakenings come to compete with a late-rationalist spirituality then typical of the middle class. An offshoot of these awakenings was Neo-Lutheranism, which sought to reassert the place of the Bible and the confessions of the (Lutheran) church in theology. In so doing the church itself received fresh attention as a theological category. Though ecclesiological differences would appear in this movement, its initial and unifying catalyst was the 1817 decision by Frederick William III of Prussia to unite the Reformed and Lutheran churches of his domain into a single Protestant or Evangelische church, a development known as the Prussian Union. Neo-Lutheranism and its confessional theology resisted this merger. A further and somewhat divisive stage of Neo-Lutheran productivity occurred in a period up to and after the March Revolution of 1848, which indicated that a polity of church governance built around the authority of heads of state was of doubtful durability. Even if Neo-Lutherans could agree on an anti-rationalist approach to theology and on academic and theological assertion of their church’s confession, they could not necessarily find common ground on ecclesiology itself, or on a doctrine of the ministry (Fagerberg 1952). The ecclesiology of J. W. F. Höfling, who took crucial bearings from Schleiermacher’s principle regarding Christians’ relationships to God and to the church (Höfling 1851: 2),

LUTHERAN ECCLESIOLOGY

 153

sought “to exclude all catholicising tendencies” (Nüssel 2006: 186) from doctrines of the church and the ministry. Insisting on a distinction and separation between church order (Kirchenordnung) and the order of salvation (Heilsordnung), as well as between the governance of the church (Kirchenregiment) and its ministry (Kirchenamt), Höfling understood the church as a product of faith worked by the Holy Spirit and as an organism for the joint practice of this faith. The church’s ministry derived from the priesthood common to all believers; collectively for the sake of order believers delegated and conferred ministerial authority to those who acted as the church’s ministers in the narrow sense. According to Höfling, the church was primarily and essentially an internal and invisible fellowship, and the special ministry of the church derived from the responsibility and rights of all Christians, with ordination seen as a declarative action having mainly to do with ecclesial law and not as a divine action by which God puts someone into the ecclesial ministry. Other Lutherans, such as F. J. Stahl, Wilhelm Löhe, Theodor Kliefoth, and A. F. C. Vilmar, could, albeit with various accents, call attention to the church as an ongoing institution that owed its existence to being instituted by Christ. These theologians saw the church as an institution of salvation defined by the visible means of grace, which were distributed by the Gnadenmittelamt (means-of-grace-office); the congregation of believers resulted from these mediate operations of God. The office, instituted by Christ, was conferred by ordination—in which divine blessing was given the ordinand, with the ordained minister then representing Christ, speaking and acting on his behalf toward the congregation. Ministerial succession tracing back to the apostles and to Christ was affirmed. Institutions—such as the church and the ministry—had theological priority to individuals—such as believers. Not only did Höfling’s system struggle to integrate a doctrine of the means of grace as divine institutions through which faith was worked (Fagerberg 1952: 235–9), his articulation of the ministry as a delegated derivation of the common priesthood of believers aligned with collegialist sentiments already afoot in the previous century. Resonating with notions of social contract theory that had come to influence the political arena, the collegial system was “the ecclesial counterpart to the theories of constitutional law” that characterized the period (Fagerberg 1952: 17). Collegialists understood the church as a federation or voluntary fellowship of free persons and the church’s governance as issuing from decisions made by them; authority was delegated, which also meant it could be retracted. Stahl, an opponent of systems based on theories of popular sovereignty, was keen to point out that presbyterial forms of ecclesial polity and governance did not align with the intentions of the Lutheran reformers but did have a connection to the Reformed tradition (Stahl 1840: 239–62, 162–4). He and Löhe advocated instead an episcopal polity, according to which the governance of the church would be exercised by the ministry, and Kliefoth saw the attempt to derive the Gnadenmittelamt from the common priesthood of all believers as a characteristic of Reformed theology that had illegitimately been imported into the Lutheran church by collegialists (Fagerberg 1952: 104, 114). Awakenings, such as those in Denmark that drew on N. F. S. Grundtwig and on Søren Kierkegaard’s criticisms of the state church, also affected church life in the Scandinavian countries, though they did not experience the same upheavals as Germany. Significantly, in all of these Lutheran countries new forms of church governance and revised forms of polity were in the offing. The landesherrliches Kirchenregiment would last until the end of the German monarchy at the close of World War I. Increased privileges and powers were, however, being granted to or claimed by ecclesial organs and bodies much earlier. Systems of revised polity and governance were being constructed up and out from the

154

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

local congregations, and lay-participation in these gradually rose. The 1835 church order of Rhineland–Palatinate was the first instance of synodical polity—influenced by “Reformed presbyteral–synodical traditions”—to be adopted in Germany (de Wall 2001: 1293); others followed. Laws granting religious liberty were gradually being passed in the Scandinavian countries. A general synod was introduced in Sweden in 1863. Although Denmark never came to have a general synod or synodical constitution, the nation’s 1849 constitution recognizes the church to be separate from the state (though supported by it), and as of 1903 elected congregational councils came to have significant influence over local ecclesial affairs and also in the election of pastors and bishops. In their relationships to their given states, the general trend was toward greater independence of these churches in ecclesial decision-making and the management of church affairs. On the other hand the introduction of synods and synodical structures as well as some of their functions paralleled concurrent parliamentary and democratic developments in constitutional states, with which they were keeping step. Given the Lutheran mission work of the nineteenth century, Lutheranism was a global phenomenon by the twentieth century, albeit with ecclesiological engines still mostly housed in the older Lutheran lands of Northern Europe. The Lutheran Church of Sweden, especially under Archbishop Nathan Söderblom, became very active in the early ecumenical movement, forging connections with other churches of the north and jointly contributing to the formation of the World Council of Churches. There the so-called new understanding of the church was being shaped by theologians, according to which the Church of Sweden was coming to see itself as a part of the whole church (Jarlet 2004: 1059). In the vacuum left by the fall of the landesherrliches Kirchenregiment the Protestant churches of Germany’s states (Landeskirchen) overhauled, reconstituted, or outright constituted themselves along democratic lines of organization (Ohst 2001: 1331). The 1922 national federation of these churches, the Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchenbund, was replaced in 1933 by the Deutsche Evangelische Kirche (German Protestant Church) and a Reichsbischof (bishop of the realm/empire), which the German Christians tried to co-opt for the national–socialist state, thereby prompting the Kirchenkampf with the Confessing Church. Over against a form of episcopal governance shaped by the Führerprinzip, the Barmen Declaration (1934) declared the church to be “the congregation of the brethren in which Jesus Christ acts presently as the Lord” (Barmen Declaration II.3). Subsequent to World War II the Evangelical Church of the (old Prussian) Union (EKU), the United Evangelical Lutheran Church of Germany (VELKD), and the Evangelical Church of Germany (EKD) formed as federations of autonomous Landeskirchen. In 1947 the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) was founded, then representing some forty million Lutherans and today representing some seventy-five million, approximately 83–94 percent of Lutherans worldwide (Collver 2018: 5). This “century of the church” was ecclesiologically productive for Lutherans along at least two fronts. Firstly, implicit inner-Lutheran relationships sought explicit expression in bodies that extended beyond state and national lines. In places such as North America, where a state or folk church was not an option for Lutherans, various local synods had been seeking, forging, and sometimes breaking fellowship with one another in bodies such as the General Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in North America and the Evangelical Lutheran Synodical Conference of North America since the latter half of the nineteenth century. The standard approach to defining inner-Lutheran relationships was taken under the concept of “fellowship” (Gemeinschaft) or “church fellowship” (Kirchengemeinschaft) and involved aspects of both pulpit-fellowship (pertaining to teaching, preaching, confessions of the faith,

LUTHERAN ECCLESIOLOGY

 155

and doctrine) and altar fellowship (pertaining to eucharistic celebration and reception), with both having implications for ministerial fellowship and any sharing of ministers. Pushing beyond the questions of membership that monopolized the LWF’s attention in the 1950s and 1960s, Peter Brunner claimed that as a free association of churches the LWF itself was an “ecclesiological problem” (Brunner 1960/61), which sparked the so-called great debate that would eventually lead the LWF to revise its constitution and identify as a “communion of churches” (Root 1997). A body such as the International Lutheran Council (formed 1993), on the other hand, has understood itself as an association and not as a communion and has not tied mutual church fellowship to membership. Secondly, the unfolding of Lutheran ecclesiology and ecclesiologies took place around and through numerous ecumenical dialogues and conversations. Whether national, regional, or global, encounters with interlocutors of other Christian traditions provided opportunity for deep Lutheran reflection on the church, for clarification of theological principles, and for the crystallization of—sometimes opposing—Lutheran ecclesiological trajectories.

THE CONTEXTUAL DOGMATICS OF ECCLESIOLOGY IN A DEMOCRATIC AGE If Lutheran ecclesiology has been an exercise in contextual dogmatics, then contemporary constructive effort must, on the one hand, attend to the current sociopolitical and philosophical context, while on the other hand it must articulate a doctrine or vision of the church not simply confined to contemporary parameters but presenting the church as a present sign and manifestation of the coming kingdom of God, to which all the sociopolitical struggling and wisdom of fallen humankind will finally give way. Perhaps no factor of the contemporary sociopolitical context is so significant for ecclesiology as a democratic concept of authority. As a reality or an ideal it holds near hegemonic status in the modern Western world and in the Protestantism that has unfolded along with it. A Lutheran ecclesiology willing to admit that its sixteenth-century confessional standards have no concept of such authority faces thereby a serious but productive ecclesiological challenge. Doing ecclesiology in view of and—at least in part—out from the theology of the Lutheran Reformation as expressed in the Lutheran confessions means not only recognizing the extent of such ecclesiology, which was admittedly nascent, but also its ecclesiological utility. This can best be described as a noetic utility as opposed to an ontic utility (cf. Kinder 1956a). To put that another way, Lutheranism’s confessional tradition provides diagnostic and heuristic principles (Kinder 1956b) that aid in knowing, recognizing, and then speaking clearly about and living well as the church. This tradition does not, however, provide tools for constructing the church from the ground up and doing ecclesiology from a clean historical slate, such as happens when the church’s being or essence is postulated out from some principles newly (re)discovered in the Reformation era. In fact, it rejects the notion that such an undertaking is even legitimate, for it sees and treats the church as a divine institution and historically continuous reality that manifests itself in the brokenness of fallen human history, wherein competing ecclesiological claims need to be weighed and an uncontestedly true church can never simply be conjured up. Ironically then it is an ontic enterprise—at least in the modern, democratic era—that has often passed for the standard ecclesiology in the Lutheran tradition. Overtly or tacitly presuming that the Western Church by and large forgot or suppressed a fundamental

156

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

doctrine for centuries, the Reformation category of the common priesthood of the baptized (colloquially referred to as “the priesthood of all believers”) is then taken as the theological point of departure for ecclesiology. Believers assembled into a congregation (congregatio, cf. CA VII:1) are then identified as the essence of the church, and since faith understood as trust (fiducia) cannot be empirically tested or tangibly perceived by others the church is said to be essentially invisible, or at least hidden. Behind the hiddenness or invisibility of this essence nothing may theologically stand, including the rather distinctly tangible sacraments or means of grace. Even if there is a recognition that faith is created by the Word of God, any proclaimed word or so-called sacramental expression of that word is understood as a Lebensäußerung (something that issues from the life of) of the congregation, in which Christians jointly proclaim the word to one another and each have the fundamental right to administer the church’s sacraments. Because the unregulated exercise of each Christian’s rights to do this would result in disorder, believers must and do collectively delegate and transfer these rights to certain persons who exercise them on their behalf. This makes the ecclesiastical ministry a necessity. To it a person is capacitated by the saving grace possessed by all Christians and a theological education. Ordination is a liturgical expression of the delegation and conferral of this common Christian ministry that is celebrated chiefly to iterate the duties and responsibilities of this office (as an example of the foregoing, Härle 1989: 283–306). In addition to being an ontologically based ecclesiological operation, this system is ahistorical. It sets a nebulous group of believers that rather materializes out of nowhere as its starting point and then works all so-called external or institutional matters— including preaching—out from this collective. The New Testament’s presentation of the apostles as a distinct category of persons and questions of a historic succession of apostolic ministry might both get addressed in such a system, but they are axiomatically irrelevant. In the beginning are the believers. Further, such a system cannot point to a proclamation of the ostensibly faith-creating gospel that does not issue from the church itself—that is not a “human work” (Härle 1989: 292). Here the gospel is in no way a word external to the congregation (cf. CA V:4), and its being seen as a word that issues from and needing implementation by the congregation (Wenz 1999b: 1018) results in the soteriological contradiction of a church that is a self-perpetuating human creation. A noetic approach to ecclesiology guided by the confessional heritage of the Lutheran reformation yields a rather different sort of ecclesiology with some productive potential for the current juncture of the church’s history. On the one hand, the point of departure for ecclesiology is the creative and redemptive work of the Holy Trinity, which seeks to reconcile humankind to God. The absolute historical nexus of this work is the incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus the Christ, the Son of God the Father. Current share in this redemptive reality comes as the Holy Spirit creates and sustains trust in this God-Man as the key to right and renewed standing with God as Father (CA I–IV). In the creating of this faith the pneumatic and the tangible go together. The internality of faith as trust has its source in the externality of a word preached and sacraments administered by ordained servants, whose ministry owes to divine institution (CA V, XIV; Ap XIV). Thus the point of departure for doing ecclesiology today is the ordained ministry, which is functionally specified and—if it is not to be an abstraction—necessarily personal. In other words, an externality of divine and mediate action through preaching and the sacraments in the hands of particular human beings gives rise to the congregation or assembly of believers. The precedence of the external, tangible, and mediate to the internal, intangible, and immediate is utterly basic to Luther’s theology and was received into the Lutheran confessional tradition (SA III, viii: 3-13; Mumme 2019).

LUTHERAN ECCLESIOLOGY

 157

In this tradition the sacraments, understood along with the preached word as means of grace, integrate into ecclesiology not simply as markers or signposts of the church that issue from the church. Rather the means of grace (Gnadenmittel) mark the church as notae ecclesiae precisely because through them God makes the church (Wirkmittel der Kirche) (Kinder 1957: 64–8; 1960: 78–93; Kühn 1993: 1474). As divine means owing to divine institution, God savingly acts (Heilshandeln) through the preaching of the holy gospel, holy baptism, the loosing key of holy absolution, and the holy supper to bring together and sustain his assembly of salvation (Heilsgemeinde), or, as Luther put it, his “Christian holy people” (Yeago 1997). Inasmuch as the sacraments are to be administered “according to the gospel,” an orthodox doctrinal standard of the church’s confession based on the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments is implied and can also be understood as a mark of the church (Pannenberg 1998: 129–30; Wenz 1999b: 1018). With an operative priority of external, divine, sacramental, ministerial action to the internality of faith and the congregation of the believers, such Lutheran ecclesiology deftly incorporates the ancient insight lying in the ambiguity of the Apostolicum’s “communio sanctorum,” namely that the holy ones (sancti) are who they are by way of having a share in the holy things (sancta) (Elert 1966: 1–22). Here one is not setting up an entity, the group of believers, that then stands as an axiomatic and unquestionable first principle (Körtner 2006: 221) in the doctrine of the church. Instead one is dealing with a pneumatic, embodied reality that subsists through history, always living in an indissoluble Gegenüber (placement opposite one another) of the ministry and the congregation (Malta Report 1972: §50; Ministry in the Church 1981: §23). The church is the congregation of the saints and believers, and in this congregation the ministry is located, yet not as a ministry issuing from the congregation, but as that concrete and embodied reality entrusted with preaching that word and administering those sacraments that give rise to and sustain the church as saints and believers. With this being the case the Nicene attributes of “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic” coordinate with or are reflected in the marks just mentioned. The unity of faith and hope that the baptized share under the triune God (Eph. 4:4-6) is also the unity of a communion forged by and fed through the one ecclesiastical ministry. While recognizing a hierarchy of jurisdictional authority (CA XXVIII: 8) and thereby certain ranks and orders of clergy (CA XXVIII: 30; Ap XIV:1; SC Preface:1-6), Lutherans maintain that the ecclesiastical ministry is essentially singular and has irreducibly to do with preaching and teaching the gospel, the administration of the sacraments, and the exercise of the office of the keys. The gospel preached and taught with one accord and the sacraments administered according to it avail for the unity of the church (CA VII: 2). Though holiness is a goal of Christian life, holiness comes as a sure and certain gift on the receiving end of the holy things that are the means of grace. The multifaceted factor of catholicity is wedded to preaching and sacraments that are situated in the liturgy, the place where the service of the church’s ministers is most clearly and centrally expressed by their presiding or assisting in the liturgical assembly. There, as Wilhelm Löhe’s communion hymn expresses, the bounds of time and space are transcended as God “joins earth with heav’n beyond us / Time with eternity” ([1871] 2006: 639). Likewise, what the church has at all times and in all places believed is—along with reverent retention and observation of ancient rites and ceremonies—to be treasured and to be maintained (Kolb and Wengert 2000: 58–61) under episcopal oversight of teaching and worship practice (CA XXVIII: 21, 53), by visitations and by conscientious catechesis (SC Preface:1-6). The church is, finally, apostolic in view of an orthodox confession of the faith that truly exposits and clearly

158

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

exhibits the teachings of the prophetic and apostolic Scriptures. It is also apostolic by being served by the apostolic ministry and in being obedient to its ministers (CA XXVIII: 22, 55, 69; Ap XXVIII: 20), who represent Christ (Ap VII: 28). Thus the church, and any Lutheran iteration of it, is in its one Lord, Christ—the holy, sent one of the Father who now reigns over heaven and earth. In Christ Christians collectively and individually participate in the divine economy of creation, reconciliation, and consummation (Wenz 1999a: 1016–7) by common confession of the Christian faith and the joint witness of Christian life (Pannenberg 1998: 409, 423). These divergent trajectories of ontic and noetic approaches to ecclesiology in the Lutheran tradition give some indication of the rather contrary courses taken by Lutheran ecumenism. A more ontic approach is characteristic of a tradition influenced by the theological and ecclesial conflation of Lutheran and Reformed confessions in the Prussian Union and now echoes in the prevailing ecclesiology of the Leuenberg Church Fellowship (cf. Mannermaa 1981). This fellowship, now known as the Community of Protestant Churches in Europe, unites in pulpit and altar fellowship a number of Lutheran, Reformed, and Methodist churches under the Leuenberg Concord of 1973. The conclusions and convictions of the noetic approach, on the other hand, have tended to flower in Lutheran– Roman Catholic dialogue. Thus Risto Saarinen summarizes a pressing inner-Lutheran ecclesiological dilemma under the question of “Rome or Geneva?” and sees the more Scandinavian ecclesiology of the Porvoo Communion, begun in 1994 and 1995 by certain British Anglican churches with several Nordic and Baltic Lutheran churches, tipping toward the eternal city (2008: 182–3). Be it in Germany or Scandinavia, or the lands to which German, Scandinavian, and Eastern European Lutherans brought this confession and practice of the Christian faith, at least one facet of Lutheran ecclesiology clearly evident in its confessional tradition remains an unfinished project (cf. Kinder 1949: 50) and indeed a largely unexplored, dormant facet of its ecclesial life. For if practically explored, it would show itself at odds with the current era’s sanctioned form of imperium (civil authority or non-ecclesial political rule) (CA XXVIII: 20). This facet has to do with ecclesial authority being an episcopal authority to govern the churches by those very means that bring about and sustain the church, namely the gospel and the sacraments.

THE LOST KEY OF—OR TO—ECCLESIOLOGY IN THE LUTHERAN TRADITION? Lutheranism today does exhibit some important differences when it comes to the ministry. Most Lutherans agree that the ecclesiastical ministry of preaching the gospel and administering the sacraments is entered into by ordination. However, from the conservative Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod in the United States to the VELKD (United Evangelical Lutheran Church of Germany), this general recognition has at times been circumvented. In terms of office(s) of oversight, at least the use of the title “bishop” has been on the rise in recent decades, although some Lutheran churches still refer to their chief ecclesial officers by “president” or a similar title. The threefold office of bishop, priest/presbyter, and deacon is the ministerial reality in some churches, whereas others recognize all clergy as “pastors” or “parsons.” The diaconate exhibits little if any uniformity, except that almost all Lutheran churches directly undertake diaconal work with certain recognized persons being officially involved in it.

LUTHERAN ECCLESIOLOGY

 159

The understanding of the ministry may well be the key to the heretofore conflicted history of Lutheran ecclesiology. However, resolving important differences such as those listed in the paragraph above will likely not unlock further inner-Lutheran rapprochement or ecumenical progress. In fact, the key for that may well be lost, at least to most Lutherans today. This key is the binding key, that is the authority not only to forgive the sins of penitent sinners (the work of the loosing key, exercised in holy absolution) but “to bind . . . sins” (SA III, vii:1) and excommunicate unrepentant sinners from the sacramental fellowship of the church (SA III, ix). In the view of the Lutheran reformers and its confessions, the duty of forgiving and retaining sins, along with the authority to do so, was part and parcel of ordained ecclesiastical ministry. The loss of the regular practice of confession and absolution with one’s pastor, priest, or parson would be a sad development in their view (CA XI:1; SA III, viii:1). The general, though not total, loss of this practice among modern Lutherans, points, however, to something more—a matter of massive though largely unacknowledged significance for Lutheran ecclesiology today. This is the nearly total loss of a ministerial authority that would or even could effectively declare words and actions beyond the pale of the Christian communion and therefore outside of the church’s communing fellowship. A ministerial authority that can stand gegenüber any iteration of congregation—be it a group of Christians, a parish board or council, or a synod—and claim to say “No” to it with divine authority extending to the celebration of the eucharist is a rare or nearly absent phenomenon in modern Lutheranism. As Luther’s 1530 treatise On the Keys ([1530] 1958: 40:325–77) indicated, the apostolic authority to forgive and retain sins that comes as a gift to Christ’s church entails two keys—a two-sided, divinely monergistic authority to loose and bind. And if one key is ineffective, then the keys in question are not Christ’s keys and the authority operative is not Christ’s authority. Where an authority other than Christ’s authority is operative, someone or something else is lord. Here we are speaking about polity, but in a radically traditional fashion that is characteristic of the nascent and unfolding ecclesiology of the Lutheran confessions. For even where Lutheran churches today are overseen by bishops, their churches’ polities are most often of a mixed synodical–episcopal form, wherein an elected group of (lay and clerical) representatives take decisions also pertaining to the faith and liturgical life of the church by some type of majority vote. Call it what one will and backfill what theology one can, that is democracy, the modern, sanctioned form of imperium. Imperium—be it in its medieval, early modern, or current iteration—is not bad of itself, but it may not, according to the Augsburg Confession, be used to govern the church, for ecclesiastical authority is distinct from it. The eclipse of proper ecclesial authority can, however, be diagnosed by the silencing of that “basic evangelical truth” (Kasper 1982: 57) that there exists a Gegenüber of ministry and congregation in which the latter can also hear a divine “No” through the former. One might hope, along with Luther, that where the Law is, good news is on its heels (SA III, iii: 4). The ecclesiological and ecumenical flipside of this missing key’s rediscovery among Lutherans is the divinely authoritative “yes” of the gospel that not only marks the boundary of church fellowship and communion, but also makes such full, visible union possible. Embracing the ministerial and episcopal authority indicated by their confessions Lutherans are equipped (cf. Braaten 1998; Yeago 2004) to enjoy communion with all who gladly marvel that God has given such authority as this, now, on earth to men (Mt. 9:1-7; Mk 2:1-12) and through it raises human life to be a sign of his kingdom.

160

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

REFERENCES Anselm, R. (1999), “Kirche, V. Neuzeit,” RGG4 4: 1008–11. Anselm, R. (2000), Ekklesiologie als kontextuelle Dogmatik: Das lutherische Kirchenverständnis im Zeitalter des Konfessionalismus und seine Rezeption im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Baur, J. (1980), “Das kirchliche Amt im Protestantismus,” in Jörg Baur (ed.), Das Amt im ökumenischen Kontext: Eine Studienarbeit des Ökumensichen Ausschusses der Vereinigten Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche Deutschlands, 103–38, Stuttgart: Calwer. Bergmann, S. (2004), “Skandinavien, Theologie in, III. Norwegen,” RGG4 7: 1372–5. Braaten, C. E. (1998), “The Teaching Authority of the Church,” in Mother Church: Ecclesiology and Ecumenism, 82–97, Minneapolis: Fortress. Brodd, S.-E. (1993), “Sweden,” in Together in Mission and Ministry: The Porvoo Common Statement with Essays on Church and Ministry in Northern Europe, 59–69, London: Church House. Brunner, P. (1960/61), “The Lutheran World Federation as an Ecclesiological Problem,” Lutheran World 7: 237–56, 288–91. Collver, A. B., III (2018), “A Brief Status of Worldwide Lutheranism at the 500th Anniversary of the Reformation,” Logia 27 (3): 5–14. Dingel, I. (2001), “Kirchenverfassung II. Mittelalter – III. Reformation,” RGG4 4: 1315–27. Elert, W. (1958), Morphologie des Luthertums, 2 vols., München: Beck. Elert, W. (1966), Eucharist and Church Fellowship in the First Four Centuries, trans. N. E. Nagel, St. Louis: Concordia. Elert, W. (1967), “Der bischöfliche Charakter der Superintendentur-Verfassung,” in Max KellerHüschemenger (ed.), Ein Lehrer der Kirche: Kirchlich-Theologische Aufsätze und Vorträge von Werner Elert, 128–38, Berlin und Hamburg: Lutherisches Verlagshaus. Fagerberg, H. (1952), Bekenntnis, Kirche und Amt in der deutschen konfessionellen Theologie des 19. Jahrhunderts, Uppsala: Lundequistska; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Härle, W. (1989), “Kirche, VII. Dogmatisch,” TRE 18: 277–317. Höfling, J. W. F. (1851), Grundsätze evangelisch-lutherischer Kirchenverfassung, 2nd ed., Erlangen: Bläsing. Jarlet, A. (2004), “Schweden,” RGG4 7: 1054–9. Jedin, H. (1968), “Ekklesiologie um Luther,” Fuldaer Hefte: Schriften des theologischen Konvents augsburgischen Bekenntnisses 18: 9–29. Kasper, W. (1982), “Kirchenverständnis und Kircheneinheit nach der Confessio Augustana,” in K. Lehmann and E. Schlink (eds.), Evangelium – Sakramente – Amt und die Einheit der Kirche: Die ökumenische Tragweite der Confessio Augustana, 28–57, Freiburg in Breisgau: Herder / Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Kasper, W. and J. Drumm (1993), “Kirche II. Theologie- und Dogmengeschichtlich – III. Systematisch-Theologisch,” LThK3 5: 1458–74. Kehl, M. (1995), “Ekklesiologie,” LThK3 3: 568–73. Kerner, H. (1989), “Kirche und Staat, IV. Kirche und Staat im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert,” TRE 18: 386–97. Kinder, E. (1949), “Von Der Kirche: Confessio Augustana Artikel VII,” Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirchenzeitung 4: 50–4. Kinder, E. (1956a), “Kann nan von einem ‘lutherischen Kirchenbegriff ’ sprechen?” Theolgische Literaturzeitung 5: 363–8. Kinder, E. (1956b), “Zum reformatorisch-lutherischen Verständnis der Kirche,” Informationsblatt für die Gemeinden in den niederdeutschen lutherischen Landeskirchen 5: 305–8.

LUTHERAN ECCLESIOLOGY

 161

Kinder, E. (1957), “Basic Considerations with reference to Article VII of the Augsburg Confession,” in Lutheran World Federation Department of Theology (ed.), The Unity of the Church: A Symposium, Papers Presented to the Commissions on Theology and Liturgy of the Lutheran World Federation, 59–73, Rock Island: Augustana Press. Kinder, E. (1960), Der evangelische Glaube und die Kirche, Berlin: Lutherisches Verlagshaus. Kolb, R. and T. J. Wengert, eds. (2000), The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, Minneapolis: Fortress. König, J. F. ([1664] 2006), Theologia Positiva Acromatica (Rostock 1664), trans. A. Stegmann, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Körtner, U. H. J. (2006), “Kirchenleitung und Episkopé: Funktionen und Formen der Episkopé im Rahmen der presbyterial-synodalen Ordnung evangelischer Kirchen,” in D. Sattler and G. Wenz (eds.), Das kirchliche Amt in apostolischer Nachfolge II: Ursprünge und Wandlungen, 216–40, Freiburg in Breisgau: Herder; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Krarup, M. (2007), Ordination in Wittenberg: Die Einsetzung in das kirchliche Amt in Kursachsen zur Zeit der Reformation, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Kühn, U. (1980), Kirche, Gütersloh: Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn. Kühn, U. (1989), “Kirche, VI. Protestantische Kirchen,” TRE 18: 262–77. Kühn, U. (1993), “Kirche, IV. Im evangelischen Verständnis,” LThK3 5: 1474–6. Lausten, M. S. (1999), “Dänemark,” RGG4 2: 548–55. Lislerud, G. (1993), “Norway,” in Together in Mission and Ministry: The Porvoo Common Statement with Essays on Church and Ministry in Northern Europe, 93–9, London: Church House. Löhe, W. ([1871] 2006), “Wide Open Stand the Gates,” Lutheran Service Book, St. Louis: Concordia. Luther, M. (1955–2017), Luther’s Works, 77 vols., ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, Helmut T. Lehman, Christopher B. Brown, and Benjamin T. G. Mayes, Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press and Fortress Press; St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House. “‘Malta Report’ — ‘Report of the Joint Lutheran’ – Roman Catholic Study Commission on ‘The Gospel and the Church’” (1972), in Growth in Agreement: Reports and Agreed Statements of Ecumenical Conversations on a World Level, ed. H. Meyer and L. Vischer, 168–89, Ramsey: Paulist Press. Mannermaa, T. (1981), Von Preußen nach Leuenberg: Hintergrund und Entwicklung der theologischen Methode der Leuenberger Konkordie, Hamburg: Lutherisches Verlagshaus. Melanchthon, P. ([1555] 1982), Melanchthon on Christian Doctrine: Loci Communes 1555, trans. C. L. Manschreck, Grand Rapids: Baker Book House. Methuen, C. (2017), “The German Catholic Diocese on the Eve of the Reformation,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion (2017): 1–25, https​:/​/ox​​fordr​​e​.com​​/reli​​gion/​​view/​​10​.10​​ 93​/ac​​refor​​e​/978​​01993​​40378​​.001.​​0001/​​acref​​ore​-9​​​78019​​93403​​78​-e-​​275 (accessed April 20, 2020). “Ministry in the Church, The” (1981), in Growth in Agreement: Reports and Agreed Statements of Ecumenical Conversations on a World Level, ed. H. Meyer and L. Vischer, 248–75, Ramsey: Paulist Press. Molland, E. (1965), “The Historical Background,” in L. S. Hunter (ed.), Scandinavian Churches: A Picture of the Development and Life of the Churches of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, 34–43, London: Faber and Faber. Mumme, J. (2015a), “Being Church and the Potestas Iurisdictionis: Toward a Real-Pneumatic Authority From the Lutheran Confessions Out,” in A. B. Collver, J. B. Day, and J. Vieker (eds.), Dona Gratis Donata: Essays in Honor of Norman Nagel on the Occasion of His Ninetieth Birthday, 60–79, Manchester: The Nagel Festschrift Committee.

162

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Mumme, J. (2015b), Die Präsenz Christi im Amt: Am Beispiel Ausgewählter Predigten Martin Luthers, 1535–1546, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Mumme, J. (2019), “Luther’s Later Ecclesiology,” in M. Mattox, R. Serina, and J. Mumme (eds.), Luther At Leipzig: Martin Luther, the Leipzig Debate, and the Sixteenth Century Reformations, 265–87, Leiden: Brill. Nüssel, F. (2006), “Zum Verständnis des evangelischen Bischofsamt in der Neuzeit,” in D. Sattler and G. Wenz (eds.), Das kirchliche Amt in apostolischer Nachfolge II: Ursprünge und Wandlungen, 145–89, Freiburg in Breisgau: Herder; Göttingen:Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Ohst, M. (2001), “Kirchenverfassung, IV. Neuzeit, 2. Evangelische Kirche,” RGG4 5: 1329–32. Ott, L. (1969), Das Weihesakrament, Freiburg: Herder. Pannenberg, W. (1998), Systematic Theology, Vol. 3, trans. G. W. Bromiley, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Pedersen, G. (1993), “Denmark,” in Together in Mission and Ministry: The Porvoo Common Statement with Essays on Church and Ministry in Northern Europe, 85–91, London: Church House. Pesch, O. H. (1985), “Luther und die Kirche,” Lutherjahrbuch 52: 113–39. Piepkorn, A. C. (2006), “What the Symbols Have to Say about the Church,” in M. P. Plekon and W. S. Wiecher (eds.), The Church: Selected Writings of Arthur Carl Piepkorn, Volume 1, 19–58. Delhi: ALPB Books. Press, V. (1989), “Kirche und Staat, III. Kirche und Staat in der frühen Neuzeit,” TRE 18: 381–6. Root, M. (1997), “Affirming the Communion: Ecclesiological Reflection on the LWF,” in J. H. Schjørring, P. Kumari, and N. A. Hjelm (eds.), From Federation to Communion: The History of the Lutheran World Federation, 216–47, Minneapolis: Fortress. Saarinen, R. (2008), “Lutheran Ecclesiology,” in G. Mannion and L. S. Mudge (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Christian Church, 170–86, New York: Routledge. Sasse, H. (1986), “Article VII of the Augsburg Confession and the Present Crisis of Lutheranism,” in We Confess the Church, trans. N. Nagel, 40–68. St. Louis: Concordia. Schleiermacher, F. D. E. (1830), The Christian Faith, 2nd ed., ed. and trans. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989. Stahl, F. J. (1840), Die Kirchenverfassung nach Lehre und Recht der Protestanten, Erlangen: Verlag von Theodor Bläsing. Stein, W. (1974), Das kirchliche Amt bei Luther, Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag. Tjørhom, O. (2016), “Early Modern Lutheran Ecclesiology,” in U. L. Lehner, R. A. Muller, and A. G. Roeber (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theology, 1600–1800, New York: Oxford University Press. Wall, H. de (2001), “Kirchenregiment,” RGG4 4: 1292–4. Wendebourg, D. (1997), “The Reformation in Germany and the Episcopal Office,” in Visible Unity and the Ministry of Oversight, 49–78, London: Church House. Wendebourg, D. (2001), “The Ministry and Ministries,” Lutheran Quarterly 15: 159–94. Wenz, G. (1999a), “Kirche, VIII. Systematisch-Theologisch, 1. Fundamentaltheologisch,” RGG4 4: 1015–7. Wenz, G. (1999b), “Kirche, VIII. Systematisch-Theologisch, 2. Dogmatisch, a. Evangelisch,” RGG4 4: 1018–21. Yeago, D. S. (1997), “‘A Christian, Holy People’: Martin Luther on Salvation and the Church,” Modern Theology 13: 101–20. Yeago, D. S. (2004), “The Ecclesial Context of Ecumenical Reception: A Case Study,” in C. E. Braaten and R. W. Jenson (eds.), The Ecumenical Future: Background Papers for In One Body Through the Cross: The Princeton Proposal for Christian Unity, 29–44, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

Chapter TWELVE

Reformed Ecclesiology PAUL T. NIMMO

INTRODUCTION To speak of a “Reformed” ecclesiology is to speak of the understanding of the church which prevails in the life and doctrine of the Reformed churches—the family of churches which has its historical origins in the Swiss cities that followed a magisterial path of Reformation in the early sixteenth century and which saw later growth first across Europe and then around the world. The title “Reformed” signals the desire of these churches to be “Reformed according to the Word of God,” and thus the way in which these churches—for all their local distinctives and across all their temporal differences—have sought to have their life and doctrine governed by the Word of God made incarnate in Jesus Christ, revealed in the Holy Spirit, and attested in Holy Scripture. While other churches would certainly harbor a similar intention, the term “Reformed” has come in the course of history to designate this particular family of churches and the teaching which they advance, and thus to refer to one specific range of theological instincts and positions in the midst of others. As the name “Reformed” suggests, Reformed churches have never considered themselves to be starting a new church unrelated to what has gone before; rather, they have always sought to be engaged in the task of reforming the church that is already extant. Moreover, this task has always been recognized to be not a once-for-all enterprise, but rather an ongoing vocation of the church: in the famous dictum that the Reformed take as their own, ecclesia semper reformanda—the church is always in need of being reformed. This position of openness to the directing of the Spirit has led to various developments within the Reformed tradition of theology, as specific doctrines have over time been reviewed and revised in light of fresh understanding, insight, experience, or circumstance. It has also led the Reformed churches to a certain openness to the insights of other church traditions. For all this future-oriented openness, however, the Reformed churches remain recognizably and closely linked in their teaching, practice, and piety to their founding confessional documents, many of which go back to the sixteenth century. This confessional inheritance renders explicit the dependence of Reformed teaching upon the witness of Scripture, but it also indicates clearly its deep connectedness to, as well as demarcated departures from, the theological traditions it inherited. Further, this confessional legacy serves to identify a historically unifying center to the Reformed tradition in the first place, for all that tradition’s later doctrinal variations and sadly frequent schisms. And it is this confessional tradition that serves as the baseline for the account below of the Reformed

164

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

understanding of the church, even as that account seeks also to note areas of significant subsequent development. In a first section, this chapter explores the four Nicene attributes of the church as these have been construed within the Reformed tradition, outlining some of the particularities attending to the Reformed understanding of each attribute. It then moves in a second section to consider the different marks of the church which Reformed theology invokes to aid the discernment of where a true church may be present, illuminating something of the diversity within the Reformed tradition in understanding these marks. It proceeds in a third section to attend to two of the practicalities of the church in Reformed ecclesiology— the ministerial offices of the church, and the relationship of church and ruling political powers—and again sketches some particular contours of Reformed approaches to these issues. The chapter closes with a brief reflection upon some possible contributions of Reformed ecclesiology to ongoing theological reflection upon the church.

THE ATTRIBUTES OF THE CHURCH At the First Council of Constantinople in 381, drawing on generations of previous reflection, belief in the church as “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic” was made an article of Christian faith. In the sixteenth century, no magisterial Reformer, whether Reformed or Lutheran, was inclined to deny the church any of these predicates or “attributes.” However, at significant points, the way in which these attributes were understood shifted markedly, and the Reformed tradition gave its own particular slant to the interpretation of these attributes.

The Oneness of the Church For the Reformed tradition, the oneness of the church is simply a theological given that cannot be controverted: as Turretin writes, “its unity . . . flows from its nature” (Turretin 1997: 27). The Second Helvetic Confession explains: “since there is always but one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, Jesus the Messiah, and one Shepherd of the whole flock, one Head of this body, and, to conclude, one Spirit, one salvation, one faith, one Testament or covenant, it necessarily follows that there is only one Church” (Cochrane 1966: 262). The unity of the church is thus secured not by way of human foundation, whether earthly organization or clerical hierarchy, but simply by the contours of the economy of salvation in the work of Jesus Christ and the Spirit. The relation to Jesus Christ is highlighted in the Reformed tradition: as Huldrych Zwingli observes in his Sixty-seven Articles of 1523, Jesus Christ is “the Head of all believers, who are His body,” thus “all who live in the Head [Christ] are His members and children of God. And this is the Church or fellowship of the saints, the bride of Christ, ecclesia catholica” (Cochrane 1966: 36–7). In the Reformed way of thinking, the church is thus truly a singular creature of the Word. Three central, though not exclusive, emphases of Reformed ecclesiology with import for the understanding of the oneness of the church might be noted already at this point. First, the church is conceived as a concrete and identifiable gathering of members. In his Commentary on True and False Religion, Zwingli posits that “the Church is a congregation, an assemblage, the whole people, the whole multitude gathered together,” and notes that this usage is common to both Old and New Testaments (Zwingli 2015: 176 and 366). As Eberhard Busch observes, the early Reformed understood the church as “ekklesia, as

REFORMED ECCLESIOLOGY

 165

gathering,” and saw the primal form of the church “in the concretely gathered community” (Busch 2007: 151). The Second Helvetic Confession correspondingly observes that “the Church is an assembly of the faithful called or gathered out of the world,” an assembly “of those who truly know and rightly worship and serve the true God in Christ the Savior, by the Word and Holy Spirit” (Cochrane 1966: 261). The construal of the church as a “gathering” is the basic foundation of every Reformed ecclesiology. However, the church is no mere human gathering or members’ association, but a covenant community called for worship and for service. And, as the Leiden Synopsis identifies, it is God who is “the primary author of this calling, since He alone can bestow the grace to which He calls, and ordain the means whereby this calling is to be made” (Synopsis Purioris 2016: 559). Second, this concrete gathering of the community in time is firmly grounded in the divine act of election in eternity. The Westminster Confession similarly speaks of the church consisting “of the whole number of the elect” (Westminster Confession 2018: 137), and such language of being “elect” or “chosen” is often present in Reformed ecclesiological discourse. The Heidelberg Catechism, for example, posits that “from the beginning to the end of the world, and from among the whole human race, the Son of God, by his Spirit and his Word, gathers, protects, and preserves for himself, in the unity of the true faith, a congregation chosen for eternal life” (Cochrane 1966: 314). The implication that there is another community of people that is not chosen, and that may be passed over or, worse, reprobated, is a corollary of certain classical Reformed teachings on predestination. However, even where this binary presentation of divine election has been critiqued within the tradition, such as by Friedrich Schleiermacher and Karl Barth, the language of “election” and “covenant” remains prominent in works of Reformed theology (Schleiermacher 1928: §§117–120 at 536–60; Barth 1957: 3–506). Third, this divine act of election includes the election of the faithful of Israel. The Scots Confession, for example, posits that “from the beginning there has been, now is, and to the end of the world shall be, one Kirk, that is to say, one company and multitude of men chosen by God, who rightly worship and embrace Him” (Cochrane 1966: 175). Indeed, this Confession refers explicitly to the work of God in the time prior to the incarnation: “God preserved, instructed, multiplied, honoured, adorned, and called from death to life His Kirk in all ages since Adam until the coming of Christ Jesus in the flesh” (Cochrane 1966: 167). This desire to attest soteriological continuity across the different stages of the economy of salvation is clearly affirmed also in the Leiden Synopsis: “contrary to the papal teachers we must maintain that not only believers under the New Testament, after Christ’s ascension into heaven, but also believers who died in the faith under the Old Testament, reached this part of the triumphant Church in heaven” (Synopsis Purioris 2016: 563). In this position, there is an explicit inclusion within the community and its elect of the faithful of Old Testament Israel in the chosen, gathered, and saved community of God. For all the diversity of times and of signs, the Second Helvetic Confession notes, “from all these people there was and is one fellowship, one salvation in the one Messiah” (Cochrane 1966: 262). This theological reference to the unity of the covenant communities finds corollaries elsewhere in the Reformed tradition, in the ongoing emphasis upon the positive use of the Law and in the strong parallel developed between the sacraments of the old covenant and those of the new covenant. In conceiving the Christian church as this elected gathering of believers in history, the Reformed faced, with other confessions, the question of the relationship between the empirical community of the church and the elect communion of faithful believers, and from the outset offered a typically Protestant distinction between the visible church and

166

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

the invisible church. The former is described in the Leiden Synopsis as “the gathering of those who through the outward Word, the use of the sacraments, and church discipline, are formed together into one outward body and fellowship, which is called the visible Church” (Synopsis Purioris 2016: 577). The latter is, for Zwingli, “a second kind of church”—that church “for which Christ gave Himself up, to the end that He might sanctify it to Himself . . . [so] as to be a glorious and noble church, the spouse of Christ, without any spot or wrinkle” (Zwingli 2015: 368)—and the number and identity of the persons who comprise this church cannot be known definitively in this age, at least not by human beings. The Reformed thus make a clear distinction between these two “churches”; but there is no true separation. The Leiden Synopsis offers one carefully articulated account of this: “This visible Church is strictly speaking not different from the invisible Church, but it is only considered in a different way: the former as ‘coming about,’ the latter as ‘having come about,’” such that “the invisible Church is inherent in and contained by the visible one” (Synopsis Purioris 2016: 577). What is crucial to recognize is that the invisible church is not some abstract or imagined ideal. For all that, in speaking of the invisible church, reference is being made to an object of faith; yet that reference is not being made in abstraction from the visible church—the real community of concrete individuals. The First Helvetic Confession captures this dynamic well: “although this Church and congregation of Christ is open and known to God’s eyes alone,” it is not somehow removed from this world but “is not only known but also gathered and built up by visible signs, rites and ordinances” (Cochrane 1966: 105). The unmistakable emphasis is thus again on the visible gathering of the church. For John Calvin, correspondingly, it is the visible church that is accorded the title “mother” (Calvin 1960: 1016), while Karl Barth similarly insists that “a civitas platonica [Platonic society] can never represent the acting and responsible living congregation before its living Lord” (Barth 1964: 76). The Reformed thus occupy a middle ground between the denial and the prioritization of the idea of the invisible church, clearly recognizing its distinction from and relationship to the empirical visible church.

The Holiness of the Church In affirming the holiness of the church, the Reformed did not refer in the first instance to the holiness of the church as earthly institution, and therefore immediately resisted one of the core teachings of the medieval church. Instead, the holiness of the church consists, in the words of Marcus Wendelin, “partly in the holiness and righteousness of Christ acquired through faith” and “partly in the renewal and sanctification of hearts” (Wendelin in Heppe 2004: 663). The holiness of the church acquired through faith is the holiness of Jesus Christ imputed to it—this is the perduring and perfected holiness of the church. The renewal and sanctification of human hearts refers to the ongoing work of the Spirit in the communion of saints, a work incomplete in this life and therefore imperfect. In this regard, Heinrich Bullinger notes, “if thou wilt acknowledge no church upon earth but that which is altogether without blemish, thou shalt be forced to acknowledge none at all” (Bullinger 2010: 36). The corollary of this view is that the visible church is fallible, even in matters of faith. Francis Turretin observes that while the church “governed by Christ and the Holy Spirit only and always does not err,” the church militant—in other words, the church in time and space that is not yet consummated—“neither only nor always is so governed by the

REFORMED ECCLESIOLOGY

 167

Holy Spirit because it is not rarely governed also by the flesh” (Turretin 1997: 80–1). The result is that the church is permitted by God to fall into error that its faith might be tested. Correspondingly, as Bullinger observes, the church “doth err in doctrine and faith, as often as she, turning from Christ and his word, goeth after men and the councils and decrees of the flesh” (Bullinger 2010: 37). The limits of error are set out in the Leiden Synopsis: the invisible church can err “in matters that are circumstantial” but “can never fall away from the faith”; in relation to the visible church, however, “individual churches can fall away,” as Scripture and experience attest (Synopsis Purioris 2016: 583). The final word on this matter in Reformed ecclesiology, however, is one of consolation. Even as individual churches can and do err and fall away, the church as a whole shall not fail. The Belgic Confession correspondingly advises that “this holy Church is preserved or supported by God against the rage of the whole world; though she sometimes (for a while) appear very small, and, in the eyes of men, to be reduced to nothing” (Cochrane 1966: 209).

The Catholicity of the Church The catholicity of the church is described within Reformed ecclesiology in largely traditional terms, although the starting point is the theological definition of the church given above rather than any institutionalized iteration of the Christian community on earth. The Second Helvetic Confession describes the catholicity of the church as referring to the fact that the church “is universal, scattered throughout parts of the world, and extended unto all times, and is not limited to any times or places” (Cochrane 1966: 262). The scope of this catholicity in space embraces the church not only as the gathering of Christians struggling under heaven (the church militant) but also as the communion of the saints blessed in heaven (the church triumphant). And the ambit of this catholicity through time includes for the Reformed, again, the faithful of Israel, as the Scots Confession insists: “This Kirk is Catholic, that is, universal, because it contains the chosen of all ages, of all realms, nations, and tongues, be they of the Jews or be they of the Gentiles” (Cochrane 1966: 175). All Christians are to be part of this catholic fellowship, according to the French Confession: “no one ought to seclude himself and be contented to be alone; but . . . all jointly should keep and maintain the union of the Church” (Cochrane 1966: 153).

The Apostolicity of the Church The final attribute of the church, apostolicity, is a less common term in the ecclesiological works around the time of the Reformation, and is less often the direct focus of Reformed attention than it was an attendant issue in disputes concerning theological authority. Here, the Reformed once again resisted inherited medieval tradition, specifically that which identified the apostolicity of the church with the unbroken apostolic succession of ecclesiastical office-holders in the Catholic Church. Instead, in another typically Protestant move, the Reformed linked ecclesial apostolicity—and therefore authority—to the true substance of the church’s teaching, as it was formally and thus materially derived from the teaching of the apostles attested in Scripture. The Second Helvetic Confession renders this distinction clearly, declaring, “we reject human traditions . . . as though they were divine and apostolical, delivered to the Church by the living voice of the apostles, and, as it were, through the hands of apostolical men to succeeding bishops which, when compared with the Scriptures, disagree with them” (Cochrane 1966: 227). The effect was

168

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

to drive a clear wedge between the tradition of the church as transmitted via the officeholders of the church and the teaching of the apostles that was recorded in the pages of Scripture in a clear rejection of the position of the Council of Trent, which affirmed two sources of revelation. The Belgic Confession averts to this same distinction in the course of claiming the perfection and completeness of the teaching of Scripture: “Neither may we compare any writings of men, though ever so holy, with those divine Scriptures; nor ought we to compare custom, or the great multitude, or antiquity, or succession of times or person, or councils, decrees, or statutes, with the truth of God” (Cochrane 1966: 192). It is evident that the traditional Reformed understanding of apostolicity referred primarily to the material aspect of the attribute, in other words, the content of the Christian faith. It was only in subsequent years, beginning in the late eighteenth century, that the understanding of the meaning of the term “apostolic” within the Reformed tradition expanded to include a dynamic dimension, with the recognition that the churches, just as the apostles, were sent into the world with a message of good news and were thus to be involved in the work of mission. This led to significant Reformed missionary activity around the globe, at its best taking with it initiatives in education and healthcare, at its worst conspiring in devastating patterns of cultural blindness and oppressive colonization. Despite this complex history, the understanding of the church as in essence a missionary organization has been prominent in Reformed contributions to recent models and practices of ecumenical discourse (Flett 2010).

Summary The foregoing exploration demonstrates that the Reformed continue to subscribe to the traditional view of the church as one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. As in other traditions, these attributes of the church have come to be considered in a twofold light—both as gifts of God to the church and as tasks for the church from God. In the case of each attribute, however, the Reformed offered particular emphasis, clarification, or correction, at points following a typical Protestant position and at points offering innovative intervention. The result was an identifiable series of insights and doctrines that offered Reformed ecclesiology a rather particular profile and content compared to alternative construals. That profile and content was deepened in the Reformed enumeration of the marks of the church.

THE MARKS OF THE CHURCH The attributes of the church explored above were, for all their different interpretations, the shared property of all the churches. Yet in light of this, the Reformers sought additional ways to distinguish a true church from a false church—the “marks” of the church. Gerrit Berkouwer observes that at the time of the Reformation, “one had not yet said everything when one had referred only to the Church’s attributes,” and thus “the Reformation introduced a criterion by which the Church could be, and had to be, tested as to whether she were truly the Church” (Berkouwer 1976: 13). The Scots Confession deemed this further specification essential so that “the true Kirk be distinguished from the filthy synagogues by clear and perfect notes [marks] lest we, being deceived, receive and embrace, to our own condemnation, the one for the other” (Cochrane 1966: 176). The Belgic Confession offers a typically Reformed and comprehensive guide to discern where there exists a true church: “If the pure doctrine of the gospel is preached therein; if

REFORMED ECCLESIOLOGY

 169

she maintains the pure administration of the sacraments as instituted by Christ; if church discipline is exercised in punishing of sin” (Cochrane 1966: 210). The first two of these marks were shared with the Lutheran tradition; even within the Reformed tradition these identifying marks are sometimes reduced simply to the first two, and sometimes curtailed even to the first alone. As Herman Bavinck recounts, however, no material difference is thereby sought: instead, multiple marks simply refer to the same Word of God differently administered (Bavinck 2008: 312). At the same time, the Geneva Confession recognized the limitations involved in such an enterprise, noting that a true church may be present “even if there be some imperfections and faults, as there always will be among men” (Cochrane 1966: 125). And it was also recognized that even without these marks, as the French Confession stated, “some trace of the Church is left in the papacy, and the virtue and substance of baptism remain” (Cochrane 1966: 154). In what follows, the Reformed views of each of these three marks of the true church will be considered in turn.

The Preaching of the Word It is no coincidence that the preaching of the Word of God comes first in the list of Reformed marks of the church; each mark may indeed be necessary, but some marks are evidently more necessary than others. Turretin argues that “In the first degree of necessity is the pure preaching and profession of the word, since without it the church cannot exist . . . the administration of the sacraments does not have an equal degree of necessity” (Turretin 1997: 78). And similarly Calvin writes that the second mark, the sacraments, are an “appendix” to the promise: as Christ and the apostles attest, they “require . . . preaching to beget faith” (Calvin 1960: 1278–9). Thus whatever import they have, sacraments are second to the preaching of the Word. As Donald Macleod notes, in practical terms, “The concern to ensure appropriate preaching dominated all the arrangements of the Reformed churches” (Macleod 2009: 81). One can easily consider how Reformed church architecture and liturgy, for example, serve this priority. In theological terms, meanwhile, Brian Gerrish notes, “it was a fundamental principle of the Reformation that there is no people without the proclamation of the gospel; it follows that where the gospel is not proclaimed, even a packed sanctuary is not a church” (Gerrish 2015: 212). This principle remains broadly evident in the patterns of liturgy and practice in Reformed churches today. Then as now, preaching was considered to be far from the only way of proclaiming the gospel: each service of Reformed worship involves many liturgical acts beyond preaching, not to mention the wider engagement of the church in acts of mission and acts of love in the world. Through and in all of these activities, the gospel can be proclaimed. Yet it was the event of preaching the Word that served from the start as the focus of Reformed services of worship. Precisely this centrality, however, harbors implicit polemical dimensions, along with the seeds of intra-confessional variety and conflict. Formally, it is Scripture in its setting forth of the Word of God that forms the subject of Christian preaching, and this norm, as opposed to any church tradition, historical practice, or human agenda, is recognized as the final authority in a Reformed church. Bullinger provides a typical statement of Reformed belief in this regard when he writes, “the interpreters of God’s holy word, and faithful ministers of the church of Christ, must have a diligent regard to keep the Scriptures sound and perfect, and to teach the people of Christ the word of God sincerely” (Bullinger 2009: 75). The result in Reformed churches, as James Kay observes, is that “all preaching must be governed and, hence, tested, by the scriptural witness” (Kay 2007: 18). That witness is present not only in selected passages,

170

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

but across the entire corpus of Scripture; from this insistence follows the Reformed habit of expository preaching, working sequentially through the books of Scripture, trusting in the comprehensive inspiration of both Old and New Testaments. It is not, of course, that there is no wisdom in other sources; it is, however, to assert the primary normativity of the wisdom of Scripture. At times, this has led to deep controversy in the Reformed tradition between the view that the positive sanction of Scripture is required for any given church practice (the so-called regulative principle) and the view that the absence of prohibition in Scripture is sufficient to license it. Materially, the first and last recourse to Scripture in preaching has always been and continues to be shaped by the ever-developing tradition of the Reformed churches. Albeit provisional and imperfect documents, the founding confessions and catechisms of the tradition have historically served as particularly important—if penultimate and often implicit—norms for the interpretation of Scripture and thus for the guidance of preaching, and continue to do so in many Reformed churches to the present day. In a less clearly uniform or easily identifiable way, the major commentarial, homiletic, theological, and spiritual resources of the Reformed tradition have served the same function, often, though not always, in harmony with the founding documents. As different interpretations of Scripture and different emphases and moments have developed in Reformed discourse over time, points of disagreement have regularly emerged in respect of where the boundaries of Reformed churches and thus of the tradition itself should be located. Liturgically, to foreground the preaching of Scripture is at least implicitly to relativize the centrality of the sacraments in and to the church. This comports well with a number of other Reformation and Reformed concerns: to allow the witness of Scripture to serve as the decisive authority in respect of the belief and practice of the church; to present the clear teaching of Scripture in worship with a view to awakening and strengthening faith; and correspondingly to give congregations access to Scripture and its exposition in the native language of the community, resulting in the concomitant effort for wider education. After all, the necessity and centrality of preaching is no abstract or irrelevant matter for the Reformed: the salvation of human beings is at stake in their coming to true faith through the preaching of Christ’s gospel. In speaking of the “true preaching of the Word” as the principle mark of the church, then, the emphasis falls not so much upon the “preaching” as upon the “Word,” and upon the faith it can engender and the redemption it can bring. This last point is a reminder that in the Reformed tradition, the preaching of the Word is taken to include the hearing of the Word as well. Zwingli observes that “even if you hear the gospel of Jesus Christ from an apostle, you cannot act upon it unless the heavenly Father teach and draw you by the Spirit” (Zwingli 2006a: 82). In the same vein, the Second Helvetic Confession posits, the “preaching of the Gospel is . . . called by the apostle ‘the spirit’ and ‘the ministry of the spirit’ because by faith it becomes effectual and living in the ears, nay more, in the hearts of believers through the illumination of the Holy Spirit” (Cochrane 1966: 250). The efficacy of preaching thus depends wholly upon the Spirit working in the minds and hearts of the listeners. Calvin, recalling the apostle John’s declaration, concludes that “we are to expect nothing more from [God’s] Spirit than that he will illumine our minds to perceive the truth of his teaching” (Calvin 1960: 1162–3). The Word of God to be thus perceived is, of course, not exhausted by Scripture: as Bavinck makes clear, the two are not identical: “In Scripture . . . ‘Word of God’ is never identical with Scripture, even though we may undoubtedly call Scripture ‘the Word of God’” (Bavinck 2008: 449). The ultimate referent of all of Scripture, and thus of all

REFORMED ECCLESIOLOGY

 171

preaching, is Jesus Christ, the living Word of God. But precisely Scripture, in its testimony to this living Word of God, is to be attended in reverence and obedience. Both in Scripture and in the preaching of the church, to use a term much-loved by the Reformed, the Word of God accommodates itself to human capacity. By grace, the human words of Scripture and the human act of preaching become the occasion for God to reveal Godself, thus rendering possible something that is otherwise entirely impossible. It is in view of this event, and only within this carefully qualified context, that the Reformed on occasion boldly declare with the Second Helvetic Confession that “the preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God” (Cochrane 1966: 225).

The Administration of the Sacraments The second mark of the Reformed churches is the right administration of the sacraments, a mark which implicitly recognizes the need for a faithful conjunction of theology and practice. In common with their Reformation counterparts, the Reformed rejected many features of the medieval sacramental system of the Western Church. They recognized only two sacraments, baptism and eucharist, rather than seven. They denied that grace was automatically conferred to participants in the sacrament simply by virtue of the rite being performed, and they emphasized both the necessity of the Word preached and the presence of Christian faith for the valid and effective reception of the sacraments. From the very beginning, however, an array of views concerning the sacraments developed within the Protestant tradition at large and within the Reformed churches in particular, stemming from the rather underdetermined nature of scriptural texts on the matter. In an effort to capture certain prominent trajectories of thought amid this variety, Brian Gerrish has presented a helpful threefold typology of Reformed doctrines of the eucharist which can be extended to encompass the corresponding array of Reformed doctrines of baptism (Gerrish 1982). Gerrish distinguishes between “symbolic memorialism,” “symbolic instrumentalism,” and, occupying the ground between these positions, “symbolic parallelism.” The three descriptors broadly represent the positions of Zwingli, Calvin, and Bullinger, respectively, though Gerrish is careful not to tie the descriptors too closely to persons. The first category of “symbolic memorialism” refers to the position in which a sacrament is, in Zwingli’s words, “a sign of a sacred thing, i.e., of grace that has been given” (Zwingli 1999: 48). The sacraments are thus sacred and venerable, being instituted and received by Jesus Christ, and representing high things; they also augment faith and serve as an oath of allegiance. Yet their primary function is anamnetic, for “far from conferring grace . . . they do not even convey or dispense it” (Zwingli 2006b: 262–5). The church’s act of baptizing with water is thus distinct from being baptized with the Spirit. Instead, it is a sign primarily of God’s covenant of grace attesting the salvific divine act of election, and secondarily of the church’s obedient public response in faith to this covenant. Regarding the eucharist, Zwingli writes that spiritual participation in Jesus Christ is not tied to the sacrament, but is equivalent “to trusting with heart and soul upon the mercy and goodness of God through Christ” (Zwingli 2006b: 258). Sacramental participation, meanwhile, is to exercise faith while partaking of the bread and wine— symbolizing externally what happens internally. The second position, “symbolic instrumentalism,” is linked with Calvin, and bears a different accent. In this view, the sacraments have a clear mediatorial significance. Calvin posits both that a sacrament is “a testimony of divine grace toward us, confirmed by an

172

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

outward sign” (Calvin 1960: 1277), and that the sacraments are “means and instruments of [God’s] secret grace” (Calvin 2009: 227). For Calvin, baptism offers a token and proof of forgiveness of sins and knowledge and assurance of salvation; renders and demonstrates the recipient a participant in the death and resurrection of Christ; and testifies to the union of the believer with Christ. Meanwhile in the eucharist, Calvin writes, “Christ attests himself to be the life-giving bread, upon which our souls feed unto true and blessed immortality” (Calvin 1960: 1360). Spiritual communion with Christ takes place in and through the eucharist, as Christ “offers and sets forth the reality there signified to all who sit at that spiritual banquet” (Calvin 1960: 1370, rev.) The souls of the elect are lifted unto heaven by the Holy Spirit to feed on Christ, and so to become one with him. The third category of “symbolic parallelism,” associated with Bullinger, posits that the sacraments are given by God “to be witnesses and seals of the preaching of the gospel, to exercise and try faith, and . . . to represent and set before our eyes the deep mysteries of God” (Bullinger 2010: 234). Baptism, correspondingly, is considered by Bullinger to be a “holy action . . . whereby the Lord Himself doth represent and seal unto us our purifying or cleansing, gathereth us into one body, and putteth the baptized in mind of their duty” (Bullinger 2010: 352). In the eucharist, meanwhile, the faithful externally receive the bread and wine given to those participating in the sacrament; inwardly, meanwhile, by the work of Christ in the power of the Spirit, they receive the body and blood of Jesus Christ unto eternal life. In this way, for Bullinger, “the Lord . . . doth certify unto us his promise and communion, and sheweth unto us his gifts, . . . gathereth them into one body visibly, . . . and admonisheth us of our duty” (Bullinger 2010: 403). The eucharist thus serves as the seal and confirmation of the participant’s existing covenant membership, but—in contrast with Calvin’s view—is not recognized as a means or as an instrument of grace as such. This modest diversity of views on the sacraments is not merely represented in the work of individual magisterial Reformers. It is also reproduced in the various founding Reformed confessions (and their later counterparts), as well as in the history of Reformed churches and the work of Reformed theologians ever since (Nimmo 2016, 2018). There is simply no uniform Reformed view of the sacraments, either in confessional theology or in popular practice. Some in the tradition, following Calvin’s instincts, have subscribed to somewhat “higher” views of the sacraments and their efficacy, such as John Williamson Nevin (Nevin 2012); others, meanwhile, more in line with Zwingli and Bullinger, have proposed rather “lower” views of the sacraments and their power, including Barth (Barth 1969). At the same time, there is ground held in common by the various positions on the sacraments within the Reformed tradition. For the Reformed, the sacraments add nothing to the content of the Word, and hence there is no unique grace pertaining to their celebration. There is a correspondingly strong emphasis on the didactic aspect of the sacraments, seen as a divine accommodation to human weakness and insecurity. The sacraments serve as divinely instituted markers of the covenant of God, as signs and seals of the promises of God to the elect, and they both offer a public attestation of covenant membership, and serve as a strong exhortation to the covenant people to respond to God’s promise in ongoing faith and obedience. While there is diversity, therefore, that diversity is circumscribed. In respect of baptism, the Reformed thus generally embrace infant baptism as a sign of the covenant, drawing on the continuity of the old and the new covenants to recognize infants as members of the covenant. However, within this covenantal perspective,

REFORMED ECCLESIOLOGY

 173

emergency baptism is not seen as a theological necessity. In respect of the eucharist, the Reformed insist that the ascended body of Christ is in heaven and thus reject any corporeal presence of the body of Christ in the sacrament, affirming only a spiritual or sacramental, though no less real, presence. The Spirit thus plays a pivotal role in the Reformed understanding of this sacrament, uniting the covenant faithful with and in the body of Christ.

The Discipline of the Church The third mark of the Reformed churches, church discipline, is not enumerated in every single Reformed confession, but is seen by all as important to the life of Reformed churches. Turretin, for example, writes that as “the saving doctrine of Christ is the soul of the church, so discipline is as the nerves by which the members of the body mutually cohere, each in its own place” (Turretin 1997: 293). This view of the importance of ecclesiastical discipline is an ecclesial refraction of the insistence among the Reformed that there remains more generally a good and positive place—“the third use”—for the Law in the Christian life, for the conviction that the gospel brings both freedom and responsibility. The Reformed understanding of church discipline relates first to the church community and its life and teaching, which means a particular focus upon the church’s activity and leadership. This is not simply a matter of the personal morality of church leaders, although such remains significant. Bullinger, for instance, notes that “unto the holy ministry belongeth also discipline and correction of the ministers,” given that “churches and congregations are utterly destroyed through the negligence and ungodliness of wicked pastors” (Bullinger 2010: 504–5). It is also a matter of attending to the way in which the church effects faithfully the first two marks of its existence, to preaching and sacraments. The third mark of the church is thus irrevocably ordered to the true and right performance of these first two marks, rather than becoming itself the primary concern and criterion of the church, as in the case of more radical ecclesiologies. This Reformed ordering impacts upon the ways in which churches relate to each other. The Leiden Synopsis renders the consequence of this mark clearly: “with a church that properly speaking is heretical and schismatic, since its works belong to the flesh, we say that we must not maintain Christian communion, according to the command of Christ” (Synopsis Purioris 2016: 581). In other words, where the teaching and practice of a church departs from Scripture, communion cannot be maintained and separation must be enforced. At times, convicted adherence to this position has led to bewildering levels of schism in the Reformed tradition, at times almost to the point of dysfunction. At other times, however, it has led Reformed leaders and churches to courageous action in calling out the heretical teaching and unbiblical practice of other churches. One might think here of Reformed engagement in the Confessing Church in National Socialist Germany, opposing the teaching of the German Christians, or of the witness of many Reformed churches in South Africa, declaring the support of apartheid in other—including other Reformed—churches as heretical. The mark of church discipline also pertains, however, within the communal life of individual congregations. The theological reflex operative here builds on the first aspect of church discipline noted above: the gospel needs to be preached faithfully, but also to be heard attentively and enacted in the world; the sacraments need to be administered rightly, but also to be received appropriately. As Bullinger notes, then, “as the Lord

174

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

would have the transgressing ministers of the churches privately to be admonished and corrected, so doth he extend the commodity of the same admonition and correction to the whole church” (Bullinger 2010: 507). In historical terms, as well as in some quarters today, church discipline has been particularly visible in the ecclesiastical disciplining of individual church members who fall short in respect of their walk in Christian discipleship. For Calvin, this disciplining might progress in stages, depending on the severity of the error and the response of the miscreant: from “private admonition” through “the tribunal of the church” to “being removed from the believers’ fellowship” (Calvin 1960: 1230–1). In theory, such church discipline is designed to be a constructive and consolatory aspect of the life of the church: the Belgic Confession, for example, notes that “we admit only of that which tends to nourish and preserve concord and unity, and to keep all men in obedience to God” (Cochrane 1966: 212). Church discipline is thus to remind church members of their covenant responsibilities before God and each other, and to encourage and support them upon pathways of repentance, amendment of life, and reconciliation. At the level of the community, it is designed to maintain the holiness of the church and to avoid the corruption of the godly (Calvin 1960: 1232–3). In the course of history, however, it has at times been experienced as censorious, invasive, and oppressive, and has on occasion cultivated a counterproductive sentiment toward Christian discipleship.

Summary The presentation and explanation of these three marks of the church, combined with the reframing of the traditional attributes of the church explored in the first section, leads the Reformed tradition away from a reified understanding of the church defined by institution and office and toward a dynamic view emphasising teaching and practice. Berkouwer suggests that these new marks function “against every static ecclesiology . . . [which] no longer allows room for discussion about the ecclesiastical reality” (Berkouwer 1976: 14). And it is the ecclesiastical reality as living, the concrete gathered church community that is patterned in events of divine action and human response, that is brought front and center in the Reformed conception. This is true even where there is a range of views present in the tradition, as in the case of the sacraments. It is significant that the three marks by which the Reformed seek to discern the presence of a true church—preaching, sacraments, and discipline—are all profoundly human activities, for all that their faithful accomplishment is evoked, supported, and sustained by the grace of God. The consequence of this is that across the board the church can only be identified in the living, visible, and concrete obedience of its witness, in the events in which it gathers and seeks to respond to the grace which it has received. Here again, the focus of Reformed ecclesiology is upon the visible Christian community, called together and sustained for service by God.

THE PRACTICALITIES OF THE CHURCH This section turns its attention to the way in which the Reformed churches deal in their ecclesiology with two of the practical aspects of the church: the ministerial offices of the church, and the relationship of the church to the ruling political powers. Again, the diversity of positions on each matter available within the Reformed tradition will be identified.

REFORMED ECCLESIOLOGY

 175

The Ministry of the Church It is noteworthy that the issue of the ministry of the church does not appear thematically in the above considerations of the four attributes and the three marks of the church in the Reformed tradition. The description of the nature or essence of the church proceeds without any reference to particular orders of ministry or patterns of polity, and Zwingli well expresses Reformed hesitation on this score clearly in his Sixty-seven Articles of 1523: “we perceive that the so-called clerical traditions with their pomp, riches, hierarchy, titles and laws are a cause of all nonsense, because they are not in agreement with Christ, the Head” (Cochrane 1966: 37). At the same time, it is clear to writers in the Reformed tradition that the existence of orders of ministry is empirically of importance and even of necessity. Calvin therefore writes of “this human ministry which God uses to govern the church” as “the chief sinew by which believers are held together in one body” (Calvin 1960: 1055). The result is that there is in the Reformed tradition a variety—albeit a constrained variety—of polities present at different times and in different places, in different ways reflective of the largely unsystematized presentation of church offices in Scripture. Although united in their rejection of the pope and of religious orders, Reformed churches variously evidence congregationalist, presbyterian, and even episcopal polities. Across these various arrangements of polity, the Reformed churches have nonetheless shared a series of core instincts concerning the offices of the church. There is a firm view that all Christians are, in the words of the Second Helvetic Confession, “citizens of the one city, living under the same Lord, under the same laws, and in the same fellowship of all good things” (Cochrane 1966: 261). There should therefore be no hierarchy within the church, or division between clergy and laity, whether grounded in some ontological distinction conferred at ordination or in some perceived spiritual or practical charism. As the Second Helvetic Confession further states, in line with typical Protestant understandings but against the foregoing medieval tradition, “the priesthood is common to all Christians,” on the grounds of “all the faithful having been made kings and priests” (Cochrane 1966: 271). These offices are, of course, not to be understood in the absence of reference to Christ, and indeed of reference to human participation in these offices as accomplished by Christ. This inclusive understanding of the role of the people of God in the work of God does not, however, mean the absence of church offices or leadership: the priesthood of all believers does not abolish the particularity of church ministry. Ministers in the Reformed churches are ordained to the ministry of Word and sacrament, and thus explicitly to the curation of the first two marks of the church, for the sake of the good order of the church. Calvin ties his description of the tasks of ministry to the three marks of the church: ministers “have been set over the church . . . to instruct the people to true godliness, to administer the sacred mysteries and to keep and exercise upright discipline” (Calvin 1960: 1059). In fulfilling this vocation, ministers are described in the First Helvetic Confession as “God’s co-workers,” through whom God “imparts and offers . . . knowledge of Himself and the forgiveness of sins, converts, strengthens, and comforts men, but also threatens and judges them” (Cochrane 1966: 105). The consequence of this high calling is that ministers are expected, the same confession continues, “to be well instructed in the Holy Scriptures and in the knowledge of the will of God, blameless in piety and purity of life, and zealous and fervent in promoting the honor and name of Christ” (Cochrane 1966: 106). The question of whether there are further forms of ministry is answered variously. In some confessions, such as the Second Helvetic Confession, there is only one recognized

176

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

ministerial office in the church, covering a diversity of offices: “Therefore, the ministers of the churches may now be called bishops, elders, pastors, and teachers” (Cochrane 1966: 270). In other confessions, such as the Belgic Confession, a threefold distinction is made, dividing ministries according to function: “there must be Ministers or Pastors to preach the Word of God, and to administer the Sacraments; also elders and deacons, who, together with the pastors, form the council of the Church” (Cochrane 1966: 211). As the office of the deacon was particularly to administer the funds for and attend to the needs of the poor and the sick, so the office of the elder was particularly to take care of church discipline and, by extension, to oversee the preaching of the Word and the administration of the sacraments. In some Reformed churches, particularly Presbyterian churches, this latter position was described as “ruling elder,” in contrast to the position of the minister as “teaching elder.” What is common across this variety of articulations of church polity is the idea, as Busch notes, that all leadership “is in the community, not over it . . . is not the Head, but one of the many functions in the body of the one Head” (Busch 2007: 153). There is only one true office-bearer in the church, and that is Jesus Christ, its Head—the one Mediator between God and human beings, who cannot be substituted or replaced. Thus any distinct order of ministry can only be a matter of order and function, and not a matter of any divinely instituted hierarchy. It is thus a matter of the wellbeing (bene esse) rather than of the essence (esse) of the church. Ordination to positions of leadership is thus a public commissioning to a particular service of and in the church, rather than a divine endowing with ecclesiastical power that in some way ontologically differentiates the ordained from the laity.

The Church and Ruling Political Powers A further question concerning the practical aspects of ecclesiology arises in respect of the relationship between ecclesial authority and political authority in any given place. This question again has permitted of a range of answers in the lives of Reformed churches. The early Reformed tradition was united in the view, expressed clearly in the Second Helvetic Confession, that “Magistracy of every kind is instituted by God himself for the peace and tranquillity of the human race” (Cochrane 1966: 299). The Westminster Confession observes that this divine ordination is “for his own glory, and the public good” (Westminster Confession 2018: 127). This Reformed view contrasts with the desire of more radical voices at the Reformation to diminish or disregard the work of political authority, and to seek distance from its work. For the magisterial Reformed, by contrast, the civil magistrate was to be both respected and obeyed as an instrument of God. In the early Reformed teaching, the civil magistrate was responsible not only for the governance and defense of the state, but also had some measure of responsibility for the life and health of the church. After this fashion, the Belgic Confession advocates the office of the magistracy is “not only to have regard unto and watch for the welfare of the civil state, but also that they protect the sacred ministry, and thus may remove and prevent all idolatry and false worship” (Cochrane 1966: 217). However, the extent of the remit and power of the civil magistrate was viewed diversely among Reformed churches. In post-Reformation Zürich, for example, the city magistrates had ultimate authority over all matters of church and state. Bullinger writes of the magistrate that “the magistrate of duty ought to have a care of religion . . . and . . . to see that it proceed according to the rule of the word of God” (Bullinger 2009: 329). In Geneva, meanwhile, greater distinction

REFORMED ECCLESIOLOGY

 177

was sought, with Calvin emphasizing in just this connection “how great a difference and unlikeness there is between ecclesiastical and civil power” (Calvin 1960: 1215). Jan Rohls correspondingly observes that at times, in Calvinist churches, “ecclesiastical orders . . . are entrusted with the task of spiritual jurisdiction and are separated from the state”; nevertheless, he continues, even here there is a “co-operation between church and state” (Rohls 1997: 260). The church could excommunicate the heretic; but it was the state which deemed the heretic beyond the compass of the protection of the law, as prominent and sobering stories like those of Felix Manz and Michael Servetus demonstrated clearly to all. Given the obedience that Christians and churches are called to render to ruling political powers, the question arises as to how the former should behave in situations where the state either does not pursue Christian principles or actively opposes them. In respect of the former situation, where a state does not pursue a Christian agenda, churches are still to obey the ruling power. The Scots Confession observes that, as long as the “supreme powers . . . are acting in their own spheres,” then “those who resist . . . are resisting God’s ordinance” (Cochrane 1966: 183). The French Confession similarly counsels Christians to obedience, “provided that the sovereign empire of God remain intact” (Cochrane 1966: 158). Lack of advocacy for or interest in the church is thus not a sufficient ground for opposition to the state, and Christians are still to submit to such ruling powers. In respect of the latter situation, however, in which the ruling power is actively oppressing the church, the Reformed churches espouse a complex and diverse range of positions. First, the Second Helvetic Confession, even after having acknowledged that a magistrate can be opposed to the church, nonetheless concludes that “he who opposes the magistrate provokes the severe wrath of God against himself ” (Cochrane 1966: 301). Zwingli’s Sixty-seven Articles of 1523, however, implicitly hold out the prospect of civil disobedience on the part of Christians: “all Christians, without exception, owe [temporal rulers] obedience . . . in so far as they do not require anything contrary to God” (Cochrane 1966: 40–1). And finally, Zwingli himself opens up a further course involving more proactive resistance in writing that “When magistrates are unfaithful and do not act according to the rule of Christ, they may be deposed in the name of God” (Cochrane 1966: 41). This last suggestion, that there may be points at which it is not only possible but also commanded that the church resist the power of the ruling authorities, has been hugely important at various points in the history of the Reformed churches. Notable examples from Europe would include the Reformed resistance to Spanish oppression in the Low Countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the Reformed resistance to government oppression in seventeenth-century France. Such events of active opposition to ruling political powers stand in sharp contrast to the pacifist traditions of certain radical branches of the Reformation and evidence the theological permissibility within the Reformed tradition of direct action against a given ruling authority in those situations where the church faces persecution. In the contemporary era, a whole range of settlements exist between Reformed churches in various countries and the powers ruling in those lands. The baseline assumptions of the early Reformed theologies above—that the ruling magistrate, and indeed the whole society, would be broadly Christian—are no longer generally valid. It is therefore little wonder that the relationship between Reformed churches and ruling powers continues to be a matter of ongoing conversation in many places, particularly where Reformed churches formerly had close relationships with the state but have now broadly lost their influence upon society.

178

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Summary In respect of its approach to the orders of ministry and the relationship between church and ruling political powers, the Reformed tradition once again demonstrates a broadly consistent series of theological instincts. However, within these issues of practical ecclesiology there exist a number of issues over which there arises a variety of opinion— whether in respect of the precise identification of ecclesiastical offices or of the permitted response to tyrannical rule. Here, as in the matter of the sacraments, there thus exists within the tradition a constrained variety of theological position.

CONCLUSION This essay has sought to sketch out some of the most prominent contours of Reformed ecclesiology, drawing attention to its primary contours as well as to its variable features. Across its exploration of the attributes, marks, and practicalities of the Reformed churches, it has focused its attention particularly on the founding confessional texts of these churches. It has done so in the recognition that for all the subsequent historical changes and theological developments, these historical documents continue to exercise indubitable and inestimable influence over the life and teaching of Reformed churches, even where official subscription to their rule has waned or disappeared. It is the impulses deposited in these original texts that continue to guide the trajectories along which the Reformed tradition evolves. In light of this, and to conclude, three particular contributions of Reformed ecclesiology to the ongoing theological vocation of reflecting upon the church might be noted. First, the Reformed insistence upon the church as a gathering of people as a central trope of theological consideration might be foregrounded. Too often, the Reformed tradition has been caricatured by way of a supposed obsession with the eternally elect that are invisible to human eyes to the detriment of attention to the visible church. It is certainly true that the doctrine of election, however it be construed, tends to be an important doctrinal locus for the Reformed. However, as has been shown above, it is the visible and concrete gathering of the community that is truly and rightly the focus of attention in Reformed ecclesiology. And more than this, its focus is upon that Christian gathering as an ordered and worshipping community without ontological hierarchy. The church as one people of God, a universal priesthood by grace of God, without distinction or discrimination—such a vision of the church might yet have lessons for those outwith the Reformed. Second, and related to the first, the Reformed emphasis upon the church as a living and practicing community of believers might also be stressed. Certainly, the church is a creature of the Word that is empowered by the Spirit: without this, the church simply would not be. And yet the Reformed relentlessly drive attention to the ways in which the church and its members respond humanly to this grace and power—in their preaching, in their sacraments, in their discipleship. There is a dynamic impulse at the center of the Reformed understanding of the church, a recognition that there is no static essence or substance to the church that is not always and already in movement, engaged in action in the world and for the world in a pattern of discipleship seeking to conform to the grace of God. Rather than being a tribe of the elect resting on their laurels, then, Reformed churches have often been prominent in missionary work, in political activism, and in the work of the social gospel.

REFORMED ECCLESIOLOGY

 179

Third, and finally, the Reformed stress upon the need of the church to be continually reforming serves as a capstone to its accents upon the concrete and living reality of the church. There is an inbuilt provisionality to Reformed teaching that stands in marked contrast to the unalterable confessions of Lutheranism and the infallible dogmas of Catholicism. This has as a corollary a willingness on the part of the Reformed churches to recognize the limitations of all human formulations and confessions, and a seeking to be led forward by the Word and the Spirit along the path of faithful discipleship. Such openness need not serve to diminish the reverence or importance of the founding confessional documents in the life of Reformed churches. But it does serve to evidence the theological recognition within the Reformed tradition that the church is a pilgrim people, guided by the Word and the Spirit which not only come before it, but go ahead of it, and that the life and teaching of the church is not so much a fixed deposit as an evolving encounter.

REFERENCES Barth, K. (1957), Church Dogmatics, Vol. II, Part 2, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. G. W. Bromiley and others, Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Barth, K. (1964), God Here and Now, trans. Paul M. van Buren, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Barth, K. (1969), Church Dogmatics, Vol. IV, Part 4 (Fragment), ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. G. W. Bromiley, Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Bavinck, H. (2008), Reformed Dogmatics, Vol. IV, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend, Grand Rapids: BakerAcademic. Berkouwer, G. C. (1976), The Church, Studies in Dogmatics, trans. James E. Davison, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Bullinger, H. (2009), The Decades of Henry Bullinger: The First and Second Decades, ed. Thomas Harding, trans. H. I., Eugene: Wipf & Stock. Bullinger, H. (2010), The Decades of Henry Bullinger: The Fifth Decade, ed. Thomas Harding, trans. H. I., Eugene: Wipf & Stock. Busch, E. (2007), Reformiert: Profil einer Konfession, Zürich: TVZ. Calvin, J. (1960), Institutes of the Christian Religion, Vol. II, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, Library of Christian Classics, Philadelphia: Westminster Press. Calvin, J. (2009), Tracts and Letters, Vol. 2, ed. and trans. Henry Beveridge, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth. Cochrane, A. C., ed. (1966), Reformed Confessions of the 16th Century, Philadelphia: The Westminster Press. Flett, J. G. (2010), The Witness of God: The Trinity, Missio Dei, Karl Barth, and the Nature of the Christian Community, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Gerrish, B. A. (1982), “Sign and Reality: The Lord’s Supper in the Reformed Confessions,” in The Old Protestantism and the New: Essays on the Reformation Heritage, 118–30, Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Gerrish, B. A. (2015), Christian Faith: Dogmatics in Outline, Louisville: WJK. Heppe, H. (2004), Reformed Dogmatics, rev. and ed. Ernst Bizer, trans. G. T. Thomson, London: Wakeman Great Reprints. Kay, J. F. (2007), Preaching and Theology, St. Louis: Chalice Press. Macleod, D. (2009), “Word and Sacrament in Reformed Theologies of Worship: A Free Church Perspective,” in Duncan B. Forrester and Doug Gay (eds.), Worship and Liturgy in Context: Studies and Case Studies in Theology and Practice, London: SCM.

180

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Nevin, J. W. (2012), “The Mystical Presence,” in Linden J. DeBie (ed.), The Mystical Presence and The Doctrine of the Reformed Church on the Lord’s Supper, Mercersburg Theology Study Series, 1–221, Eugene: Wipf & Stock. Nimmo, P. T. (2016), “Sacraments,” in Paul T. Nimmo and David A. S. Fergusson (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Reformed Theology, 79–95, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nimmo, P. T. (2018), “The Eucharist in Post-reformation Scotland: A Theological Tale of Harmony and Diversity,” Scottish Journal of Theology 71: 460–80. Rohls, J. (1997), Reformed Confessions: Theology from Zurich to Barmen, trans. John Hoffmeyer, Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Schleiermacher, F. D. E. (1928), The Christian Faith, second edition (1830/1831), trans. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart, Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Synopsis Purioris Theologiae (Synopsis of a Purer Theology) (2016), Vol. 2, ed. Henk van den Belt, trans. Riemer A. Faber, Leiden/Boston: Brill. Turretin, F. (1997), Institutes of Elenctic Theology, Vol. III, ed. James T. Dennison, Jr., trans. George Musgrave Giger, Philippsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company. The Westminster Confession. With Associated Historical Documents (2018), Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust. Zwingli, H. (1999), “An Account of the Faith,” in William John Hinke (ed.), H. E. Jacobs (trans.), On Providence and Other Essays, 33–61, Eugene: Wipf & Stock. Zwingli, H. (2006a), “On the Clarity and Certainty of the Word of God,” in G. W. Bromiley (ed. and trans.), Zwingli and Bullinger, Library of Christian Classics, 59–95, Louisville and London: Westminster John Knox Press. Zwingli, H. (2006b), “An Exposition of the Faith,” in G. W. Bromiley (ed. and trans.), Zwingli and Bullinger, Library of Christian Classics, 245–79, Louisville and London: Westminster John Knox Press. Zwingli, U. (2015), Commentary on True and False Religion, ed. Samuel Macaulay Jackson and Clarence Nevin Heller, trans. Henry Preble, Eugene: Wipf & Stock.

Chapter THIRTEEN

Anabaptist Ecclesiology GAYLE GERBER KOONTZ

EARLY ANABAPTIST ECCLESIOLOGY Ecclesiology was central to both unity and significant diversity in the early Anabaptist movement that developed between 1525 and 1600. As part of the sixteenth-century Radical Reformation, Anabaptism emerged in three primary locations—Switzerland, South Germany/Austria, and North Germany/the Netherlands. Those who rejected infant baptism in these areas exhibited diverse emphases on issues related to the renewal of the church but also a few widely shared resemblances, which create a “family” that has been called Anabaptist. In common with other evangelical Protestants, Anabaptists strongly rejected Roman Catholic sacramentalism, insisted on Scripture as the final authority for all teaching, and held that salvation depends on God’s grace through faith. But they implemented renewal of the church in some new directions. Baptism upon confession of faith was a distinct difference. Although Anabaptists agreed that salvation is by God’s grace through faith, they believed that God gives people freedom to accept or reject that grace. Those who respond in faith through the power of the Holy Spirit bear visible fruit: “repentance, conversion, regeneration, obedience, and a new life dedicated to the love of God and the neighbor” (Snyder 1995: 88), as happened in the New Testament. Water baptism on confession of faith is an outward sign of the already lively work of the Holy Spirit in a person’s life. At the same time, it represents an inner dedication or pledge to follow Christ, and leads individuals immediately into the Gemeinde gathered by God through the Holy Spirit, a “community of yielded, regenerated, faithful, baptized, committed and obedient believers,” maintained by church discipline, the Lord’s Supper, communal worship, and expressions of love and mutual aid (Snyder 1995: 90). Baptism on confession of faith, representing an outward promise to the gathered church as well as to God, formed a significant visible ecclesiological boundary for all so-called Anabaptists (Snyder 1995: 91). Already, however, this summary begins to hide some of the diversity of emphasis within the early movement. While Anabaptists agreed widely on baptism following confession of faith as constituting a renewed church, leaders who were part of the three major streams within the movement differed on the role of the church in renewing God’s reign.

1. The Swiss Brethren, after some failed attempts to create Anabaptist territorial churches, generally emphasized the communal order and life of gathered congregations as a visible sign of God’s reign. In the earliest Anabaptist confession, the 1527 Schleitheim Confession, most of the Swiss Brethren leaders

182

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

agreed that church discipline would happen through implementation of the ban rather than use of violent coercion; that Christians should not bear the sword or serve as magistrates; and that there should be more radical separation from political, social, and economic society than would have been true for some in the other Anabaptist streams. Influential leaders included Conrad Grebel, Felix Manz, Georg Blaurock, Michael Sattler, Jakob Hutter, Peter Riedeman, and Balthasar Hubmaier who differed from the others on the use of the sword and who favored state church Anabaptism (Snyder 1995: 121).

2. The South German/Austrian stream was influenced more heavily by evangelical reformers Thomas Müntzer, Caspar Schwenkfeld, and Andreas Karlstadt and especially by the practical piety of late medieval mysticism (Packull 1977: 17–34). These Anabaptists focused on the regeneration of the inner life. They were less concerned with the visible church and its outward rituals, though they too baptized. In the thought of Hans Denck and Hans Hut, strong mystical roots combined with an emphasis on suffering as part of following Christ in life. There was increasing diversity in understandings of church renewal in South Germany after 1527, including syntheses of mysticism with an ecclesiology more like that of the Swiss Brethren. Pilgram Marpeck, a second generation Anabaptist leader, helped correct one-sided spiritualism by holding together a mystical sacramentalism and an ecclesiology drawn from the incarnation (Rempel 2011).



3. Although apocalypticism marked the thought of many Anabaptists (as was true for other Reformers in the sixteenth century), it preoccupied the first-generation baptizers in the North German/Dutch stream in a particularly memorable way. Drawing on Melchior Hoffman’s prophetic interpretation of Scripture, the more extreme Melchiorite leaders sought to gather the baptized “elect” in the city of Münster in 1534–5. They invited Anabaptists elsewhere to join them and eventually forced any in the city who were not baptized on confession of faith either to receive such baptism or to leave the city. The Münsterites believed that God was establishing the New Jerusalem there under his “second David,” and that the end times were at hand. Having gained control of the city, they began to implement their understanding of God’s kingdom, as outlined in their reading of Acts and the Old Testament, intending to defend the city by the sword if necessary. After the Catholic bishop instituted a military blockade of the city, with results disastrous for its residents, the final conquest of the city took place in June 1535. After this tragedy, as well as several smaller failed Anabaptist attempts at violent takeover of established church and city properties in the Netherlands, the Münsterite form of Melchiorite Anabaptism died out rather quickly (Snyder 1995: 143–51). Menno Simons (for whom Mennists or Mennonites were named) and Dirk and Obbe Philips were central leaders in the continuing North German/Dutch tradition in which taking up the sword was forbidden to Christians.

Baptist writer John E. Colwell has suggested that differing views among the early Anabaptists on the shape and timing of God’s coming reign are essential to understanding their ecclesial differences (1987: 124). Using Garrett’s church types, Colwell associates the “restored, gathered congregation of baptized believers under discipline and separated from the world and the state” and the Hutterite “apostolicity and necessity of community of goods” with mainstream Anabaptist eschatology (Garrett quoted in Colwell 1987: 121, 127). This type

ANABAPTIST ECCLESIOLOGY

 183

expects the gathered church to be “a true expression now of the presence of Christ and his kingdom but the fulfilment of that kingdom in judgement and glory lies in the future” (Colwell 1987: 128). The prophetic Münsterites were convinced that “the contemporary church now participated in the victorious reign of Christ”; it should take the shape of a theocracy and take up the sword of righteousness in God’s service. Spiritualist Anabaptists looked toward Christ’s visible rule in the future, also imminent, but believed that it is essentially an invisible, universal reality in the present (Colwell 1987: 124–5). Ultimately this meant a rejection of all ecclesial forms such as baptism and communion. The Swiss Brethren in the Zürich area were impatient about the slowness of the established church to accept reforms the Brethren were convinced were based on Jesus’s commands and the New Testament example. Their frustration finally erupted on January 21, 1525. On that day, as a sign of the Holy Spirit’s regenerating power and the promises of those gathered to follow Christ (nachfolge Christi) in life, Conrad Grebel baptized George Blaurock, and Blaurock baptized others present. At that time the Grebel group “made a mutual covenant to sever all existing attachments to the Zwinglian church” (Nienkirchen 1982: 233). These baptisms “marked the inauguration of a new separatist movement which was no longer either subservient to the civil authorities in matters of doctrine and practice or regarded as part of the established church” (Nienkirchen 1982: 233). This baptizing movement eventually came to be known in Europe as the “free church” tradition, in contrast to state church traditions, which continued to baptize infants and receive government support. Separation from established political and ecclesial control of the church meant, for example, freedom to appoint local ministers, interpret Scripture, and institute radical church reform undeterred by a need for compromise. In the context of the evolving Peasants War of 1525 and the unrest caused by Luther’s reforms, political and ecclesiastical authorities in the sixteenth century perceived all who baptized on confession of faith as a threat to the religious and political order. Officials labeled members of this renewal movement “Anabaptists” (re-baptizers), a term of reproach, and tortured and put to death many hundreds of them. To religious/political leaders, the baptizers’ refusal to use the sword in warfare—an act of obedience to Jesus’s teaching as they understood it—communicated insubordination. Baptizers also refused to swear oaths, because of Jesus’s counsel to let your “yes” be “yes” and your “no” be “no,” and thereby challenged widespread civil and feudal loyalty practice. Movement of Anabaptists from areas of severe persecution to more tolerant regions, such as Strasbourg and Moravia, resulted in an enriching interaction among refugees from the three streams of early Anabaptism noted above. This interaction complicates description of early Anabaptist ecclesiology. In addition, sustained reflection on ecclesiology was limited because many leaders were killed, survivors often had to do their theology on the run or in prison, and many of those attracted to the movement were peasants and tradespeople who lacked formal education. However, as Snyder points out, looking back “at the development of the Anabaptist movement from the point of the surviving groups we are able to identify internal patterns of tension and change that led from plural beginnings (albeit around a core consensus) to clearly defined ecclesial traditions by the end of the sixteenth century” (1995: 8). Those surviving traditions include the Amish, Hutterites, and Mennonites with both Swiss Brethren and Dutch ecclesiological influences. The emerging sixteenth-century core consensus included baptism on confession of faith; the church as the visible body of Christ—a community of yielded, regenerated,

184

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

faithful, committed, baptized believers; a community nurtured by the Lord’s Supper— understood both as a memorial to Christ’s love and sacrifice and as a pledge to God and the church in baptism; a community of worship and of visible expressions of love (mutual aid) among the members; a community maintained by loving admonition and the ban, if necessary; a community willing to suffer by yielding itself daily to God’s will, even to the point of death. Plurality and tension surrounded these core ideas, particularly in how the ban should be implemented and the extent to which economics should be communal. Sharper differences surrounded the question of the degree to which a faithful church should be separate from society and political responsibility. While the surviving groups agreed that Christians should not use the sword or the oath, they differed on the extent to which the faithful church should be separate from surrounding social, economic, and political life.

MARKS OF THE CHURCH IN THE ANABAPTIST TRADITION While the term “Anabaptist” technically refers to the sixteenth-century movement described above, it continues to be used in several additional ways.

1. It is used to refer to surviving descendants of sixteenth-century Anabaptist groups, including the Amish, Hutterites, and Mennonites, who have preserved some core Anabaptist understandings of the nature and purpose of the church. These groups range from more progressive Mennonite Church USA and Mennonite Church Canada to Old Order Amish and Mennonites. Also in this category are groups derived from these bodies by splintering or mission, if those groups continue to carry an Anabaptist identity. One hundred seven Mennonite and Brethren in Christ national churches from fifty-eight countries belong to the Mennonite World Conference (MWC global statistics website 2018).



2. It is used to refer to the “Anabaptist vision,” which inspired a church renewal movement among North American Mennonites in the 1940s–60s. New historiography at that time and rediscovery of the 1527 Schleitheim Confession led to calls for change in the church and to ongoing scholarly discussion and debate about Anabaptist origins and ecclesiology (Bender 1944).



3. It is used to refer to individuals, congregations, conferences, and associations worldwide who identify themselves as “Anabaptist” because they feel a connection to some of the emphases or ideals present in this ecclesial tradition. They may not be members of or historically connected to an explicitly Anabaptist denomination.

Given this broad definition and the significant diversity among Anabaptists globally today, it is difficult to describe Anabaptist ecclesiology in a simple way. Further, the widespread conviction in the early and the continuing tradition that God intends the gathered community of regenerated believers, filled with the Holy Spirit, to be the visible body of Christ on earth means that conversation about what being a faithful church entails is a broad one. It is not focused on rightly administering sacraments or on preaching. It is not primarily concerned with how Christ is present in communion or the mass. This tradition highlights the mystery of incarnation, God dwelling in Christ, and God’s desire that the

ANABAPTIST ECCLESIOLOGY

 185

whole church—both as it orders its life together and in the way it relates to those outside the church—mediate Christ’s presence. This understanding of the whole church as mediating Christ’s presence has implications for the types of questions that Anabaptist communities have struggled with throughout the tradition in relation to the four classical marks of the church: unity, apostolicity, holiness, and catholicity. Further, insofar as the church is called to continue the purposes of God in its being as well as its doing, an additional mark of a faithful church would be its faithful mediation of Christ to the world—its witness or mission. Menno Simons, for example, did not refer to the four classical marks but listed the following six marks of a true church: (1) unadulterated pure doctrine, (2) scriptural use of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, (3) obedience to the Word of God, (4) unfeigned brotherly love, (5) candid confession of God and Christ, and (6) persecution and tribulation for the sake of the word of the Lord (Wenger 1956: 743). Because for a variety of reasons both early and later Anabaptists gave priority to becoming a faithful church and less attention to theological reflection about the nature of the church, written sources are scattered and limited. The Amish, for example, do not have a formal theological tradition, though—as in all Anabaptist groups—theology of the church is taught and formed through preaching; hymnody; ceremonies such as baptism, the Lord’s Supper, marriages, and funerals; exposure to martyrologies (especially The Martyrs’ Mirror); catechisms; Bible reading; a wealth of faith stories; and other aspects of church life. Hutterite communities have a common confession and many documents that guide their tradition, but (as for the Amish) their ecclesiology has been largely implicit as they have focused energy on embodying faithful community life. Historians and theologians in the Anabaptist Mennonite stream have offered individual interpretations of ecclesiology. Gatherings of leaders and congregational representatives at various points have produced more widely shared confessional statements. These confessions do not have the kind of “operative authority in adjudicating theological matters” that creeds and confessions have in the major Protestant traditions. However, confessions do have some authority. They help provide “a theological construct anchored not only in the theological vision of sixteenth-century Anabaptist origins but also in the theological formulations reflected in the subsequent confessional developments” (Loewen 1985: 47–8). Mennonite theologian Howard John Loewen, who collected and studied many of the confessions of faith that have influenced the Mennonite traditions, concluded that “the theology of Anabaptism in its origins and the theology of Anabaptism in its confessional development are not fundamentally different” (1985: 46). Mennonite historian John Roth has also noted that the different confessions express views arising in different contexts, and their statements differ widely in terms of nuances in exegesis and emphasis, but “seen as a whole . . . a set of consistently recurring arguments and understandings do emerge out of this large body of material” (2000: 12). The confessions can therefore provide a valuable framework for Anabaptist Mennonite ecclesiological reflection, for at the very least they offer a sense of what questions are most central in this community of conversation. Because of the availability of such material, the following commentary will draw more heavily from Anabaptist Mennonite sources.

Apostolicity of the church In all three of the continuing groups—Amish, Hutterian Brethren, and Mennonites— apostolicity is understood primarily to refer to the whole congregation’s faith, spirit, and life, and the extent to which it reflects the faith of the apostles and the early church to

186

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

which Scripture witnesses. Menno Simons, for example—in his lengthy, sharp repudiation of Gellius Faber (a priest who joined the Reformed church and wrote a book attacking Menno and his followers)—repeatedly contrasted the magisterial church and its failures with a “truly penitent people, that is a true church, according to the example of the apostles” (Wenger 1956: 638). The truly apostolic church and its preachers live and act in the spirit of the apostles. Significant diversity among these groups regarding the nature of the church has characterized them since the early years. The Hutterian Brethren, guided first by Jakob Hutter and then by different versions of their Ordnung (church order), especially one written by Andreas Ehrenpreis in 1651, have for most of their history maintained a full community of goods, based on their reading of Acts and their understanding of human nature (Friedmann 1955a: 660–2, b: 856). The Amish have embedded many of the emphases of the 1527 Schleitheim confession in their community life, notably strict separation from “the world.” Mennonites in Europe, the United States, Canada, and elsewhere have adopted various understandings of what it means to be a faithful apostolic church, differing especially widely on what separation from the world involves. Nevertheless, the question of what it means to follow Christ and the spirit of the early apostles in restoring the church has remained a central focus of conversation among Anabaptist Mennonites. This understanding of apostolicity contrasts sharply with the idea of apostolic succession as espoused in Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions, in which the authority of priests or pastors is bound to continuity of ordination from apostolic times. Early Anabaptists took to heart Luther’s notion of the priesthood of all believers, believing that the faithful have direct access to God and an ability to interpret Scripture together by the power of the Holy Spirit. But they did not repudiate pastoral leadership. While they held that all the baptized are called to share ministry gifts and engage in evangelism, they saw that in the New Testament church the Holy Spirit called and congregations chose leaders. In the Anabaptist movement, shepherds were mentioned as early as the 1527 Schleitheim statement (Loewen 1985: 80). Minister meetings as far back as 1663 in Strasbourg devoted attention to orderly ways of recognizing distinct gifts in the congregation (Roth 2018). While a variety of practices and titles persisted in Anabaptist communities, the biblical threefold ministry of bishops, local pastors, and elders or deacons came to characterize church leadership in most of the continuing tradition (Krahn 1955b: 701–3). Ordained ministers were to serve the whole church in remaining faithful to its apostolic calling. Beginning with the early movement, a local congregation and representatives from the wider movement, as possible and desired, ordained pastors. Ordination included recognition of Spirit-led calling to ministry (by the congregation, and in some parts of the tradition, by lot), promises, prayer, and the laying on of hands. Congregations commonly selected plural ministers from among their members; in North America since the 1950s congregations have moved toward the professional pastor model (Krahn 1955b: 703). Mennonite Church USA and Mennonite Church Canada currently ordain pastors of congregations, chaplains, missionaries, and in some cases, those who teach and serve the wider church in seminary or major representative positions (Mennonite Board of Congregational Ministries 1996: 80–1). The calling and selection of pastors in these countries has been regularized and institutionalized for congregations associating with larger conferences. Overseers or conference ministers (bishops) have usually previously been ordained as pastors. On the basis of their interpretations of biblical texts such as 1 Corinthians 11 and 1 Timothy 2:11-15, as well as traditional practice, Amish, Conservative Conference

ANABAPTIST ECCLESIOLOGY

 187

Mennonites, and Hutterite Brethren do not ordain women. The first Mennonite women congregational pastors were ordained in the Netherlands and in the United States in 1911. However, the second ordination of a woman in the United States was not until 1973. By 2013, almost all Mennonite Church USA and Mennonite Church Canada area and provincial conferences had ordained women (Koontz 2013: 105–6; 109). This change was based on “God’s vision of reconciling all persons in Christ and breaking down all dividing walls of hostility (Eph. 2)” and the conviction that the Holy Spirit gives to women as well as to men the spiritual gifts the New Testament names (Mennonite Board of Congregational Ministries 1996: 15, 19, 49–51).

Unity of the Church In an ecclesial tradition in which authority lies with local congregations of baptized members and with conferences to which congregations freely give their loyalty, visible church unity is fragile and elusive. In the splintering characteristic of many Anabaptist groups, and in their separation from much of the larger Christian tradition through rejection or by choice, this tradition has not displayed the unity among his followers for which Jesus prayed to the Father, “so that the world may believe that you have sent me” (Jn 17). Given the Anabaptist movement’s origins in a hostile ecclesial climate, it is understandable that adherents focused first on unity in the Spirit in local congregations of the baptized. For three leaders who represent the mature early Anabaptist streams—Balthasar Hubmaier, Pilgram Marpeck, and Dirk Philips (who systematized Menno Simons writings)—unity with Christ and unity with those baptized on confession of faith were visibly expressed through the ceremony of the Lord’s Supper. Mennonite theologian John Rempel has noted that while these leaders emphasized different aspects of union with Christ in relation to the Lord’s Supper, their ecclesiology flowed from their christology. All insisted that the sacrament is an intersection of grace and faith, and all understood participation in the Lord’s Supper to reflect both an individual’s unity with Christ and unity with members of the congregation (Rempel 1993: 244–7; see also Krahn 1955a: 651–5). For this reason, this tradition has emphasized that the Supper is a remembrance of and thanksgiving for Christ’s love and sacrifice, and also, as Menno Simons put it, an “incitement to brotherly love” (Wenger 1955: 94). Marpeck wrote that “the Lord’s Supper cannot be eaten without love which is a requirement for communion. And this true love grows out of a true faith. Therefore, only believers in Christ, and no one else, can hold such a meeting or assembly so rich in love” (Klassen and Klaassen 1978: 266). Given this high bar, it follows that bodies of believers would be expected to give serious attention to self-examination and church discipline as outlined in Matthew 18 before partaking in communion. Hubmaier put this more gently than some others: “For without doubt there have also been many who have gone to the Supper of Christ who should have examined themselves beforehand and it did not happen so. Nevertheless, the Word in its power remains. The person should examine himself beforehand, 1 Cor. 11:28” (Pipkin and Yoder 1989: 263). Unity with Christ and unity with the body of Christ are linked by genuine love. The vision for unity extends beyond sharing bread and wine to sharing economic resources with brothers and sisters in need. This New Testament practice is expressed most radically in the Hutterite tradition but also by continuing Amish and Mennonite practices of mutual aid. More poignantly, given the persecution of the early Anabaptists, the Lord’s Supper is seen as a “public sign and testimonial” that participants are ready to

188

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

“sacrifice and shed their body and blood for one another” (Pipkin and Yoder 1989: 354– 5). When Anabaptist Christians find themselves in situations where their faith convictions are costly, they can draw on this dimension of unity—the Supper’s remembrance of Christ, who laid down his life for his friends. Another way to speak of unity within a diverse tradition is that of “unity in conversation.” Mennonite historian John Roth notes that even though the Swiss Brethren and Hutterites shared a number of principles for interpreting Scripture, they did not agree on ecclesiology, child nurture, mutual aid, or missions (1994: 54–5). Nevertheless, they agreed on the central questions the Anabaptist movement needed to debate. They were part of a distinct “community of conversation”—perhaps even engaged in a form of unity, if it is defined as “a series of arguments or debates into which participants were drawn precisely because they agreed on the importance of the issue being debated” (Roth 1994: 59). Such unity of conversation can be traced in each of the continuing Anabaptist traditions, even as congregational or conference splits occurred. Formal unity among all Anabaptist groups was not present at the outset, nor is it present today. While well-reasoned and carefully drawn boundaries for faith and life can preserve identity and unity, passion about such boundaries can also cause bitter controversies and destroy unity. The challenge for the Anabaptist tradition has been to embrace a strong theological vision for unity of Spirit and reconciling love, while at the same time learning to face conflict productively and without destroying relationships. This vision helped create the Mennonite World Conference in 1925, and this challenge stimulated Mennonite scholarly and practical work in conflict transformation in congregational and other settings (Eastern Mennonite University 2018; Lederach 2014; Lombard Mennonite Peace Center 2018). Anabaptist groups in the United States and Canada have also found unity in informal and practical connectional relationships, while agreeing to disagree on some aspects of the shape of the church or ethics. Some Hutterites and many Amish as well as Mennonite and related groups cooperate in responding to disasters, in supporting relief and sustainable development work, in fair trade initiatives to market handcrafted products made by disadvantaged artisans, in historical research projects, and in providing Anabaptist interpretive centers in several communities. Relationships of love are built and sustained through common commitments to follow Christ in service to others. While members of these groups might not celebrate the Lord’s Supper with members of the other groups, they are joined through Christ’s love and in care for one another. This, too, is visible unity, given an Anabaptist understanding of christology and ecclesiology.

Holiness of the Church Mennonite historian Harold S. Bender suggested that perhaps the most decisive mark of a true church for the early Anabaptists was its holiness (1955: 595). Howard John Loewen, in his examination of Anabaptist Mennonite confessions of faith from 1527 to 1980, found in virtually all confessions references to conversion and a believer’s new birth: repentance, regeneration, holy living, adoption, and sanctification (1985: 40–1; also see Mennonite Brethren Confession of Faith 1999). Given this, it is not surprising that there was an early emphasis on the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit and a continuing focus on discipleship and its corollary—church discipline. In the theology and practice of the continuing Anabaptist communities, the ethical life of the church has had extensive attention. In his examination of Anabaptist Mennonite confessions of faith, Loewen discovered that they tended to follow a classical model of theology but that there were “significant

ANABAPTIST ECCLESIOLOGY

 189

emphases” not found in those sources: “free will, conversion, footwashing, church discipline, Christian life and nonconformity, integrity and oaths, nonresistance and revenge, the Christian and the state” (1985: 36; Conservative Mennonite Conference 2018). From its origins, the Anabaptist movement took the biblical principle of church discipline seriously in order to preserve both the integrity of baptism and the moral character of the congregation professing to follow Christ, a church “without spot or wrinkle” (Eph. 5:27). Already in 1524, Conrad Grebel admonished Thomas Müntzer to “create a Christian church with the help of Christ and His rule as we find it instituted in Matthew 18 and practiced in the epistles” (Harder 1985: 289–90). Roth has noted that Anabaptist leaders in writing about church discipline made references to Matthew 18 but almost as frequently to “the Pauline texts of 1 Corinthians 12 (especially vv. 25-27, admonishing the body to unity) or 2 Corinthians 6 (vv. 14-18, which stress the separated nature of the faithful church from the fallen world).” He concluded that their defense of the importance of church discipline “was consistently rooted in Scripture” (2000: 13). Roth found that in the writings of Hubmaier, Marpeck, Menno, and Riedeman, as well as in later Anabaptist Mennonite confessions of faith, “discussions of discipline or the ban repeatedly begin with a clear statement that the intent of church discipline is to restore a wayward member to a fuller understanding of faith, discipleship, and relations within the fellowship of believers” (2000: 13). As Menno Simons put it, “We do not want to expel any, but rather to receive; not to amputate, but rather to heal; not to discard, but rather to win back; not to grieve, but rather to comfort; not to condemn, but rather to save” (Wenger 1956: 413). Since church members chose to join the baptizers knowing ahead of time what was expected of them, those who did not follow the doctrines or standards of the group needed to be admonished in order to maintain the character of the congregation. Motivated by love, discipline practiced according to Matthew 18 “was also a clear testimony to the nonviolent rule of Christ. In sharp contrast to the state churches, whose unity was preserved by the coercive practices of intimidation, torture, and executions, the Anabaptists insisted that the conscience could not be swayed by physical force” (Roth 2000: 14). For most of the nearly 500-year history of the Anabaptist tradition, the teaching and practice of church discipline has been central to the church as a visible, gathered body of believers. Roth noted that groups that rejected church discipline or allowed it to fall by the wayside “almost inevitably lost their distinctive identity, declined in numbers, and became assimilated into other denominations or into the broader culture.” At the same time, the teaching and practice of church discipline has been a “source of profound disagreements, intense conflicts, and numerous schisms within the Anabaptist Mennonite church,” usually focusing on ethical and cultural issues rather than on disagreements about doctrine (Roth 2000: 15–6). Already in the sixteenth century, one disagreement had to do with the use of the ban. Marpeck, for example, felt that the Swiss Brethren were too strict in church discipline. In a letter to Menno Simons in 1557, he wrote that preserving the purity of the church should be done with moderation according to the witness of Scripture, with aid, mercy, and helpfulness to them . . . We also fervently desire that the brothers in the Netherlands do not counsel husband and wife to separate in the ban. Damage and vice will follow from

190

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

it rather than God’s praise and the welfare of souls. The commandment regarding marriage outweighs the one regarding shunning. (Klaassen 1981: 231) By contrast, Jakob Amman argued that the Swiss Brethren were too lax in using the ban, and it became a major issue in the seventeenth-century split of the Amish from the other Swiss Brethren. The role of church discipline has eroded in many contemporary Anabaptist Mennonite congregations, particularly in settings where individual freedom is highly valued, where the authority of leadership has been weakened, where members have chosen to avoid the pain of conflict or have experienced badly implemented discipline, and where church discipline is seen to be a “human rather than a divine exercise” (Roth 2000: 21–3). Many congregations in the global South, Conservative Mennonite Conference, Amish, and Hutterite communities maintain much stronger discipline. As Roth concludes, “The boundaries of the gathered church—forged by our commitments of mutual love and vulnerability—offer a genuine alternative to a world defined by alienation, isolation, and loneliness” (2000: 25). The degree to which the Anabaptist Mennonite stream will be able to retain a strong ecclesial identity and practice of discipleship in various cultural settings remains to be seen. What is clear is that focus on the meaning of discipleship has continued to shape Anabaptist communities of conversation on questions such as the ways church members are expected to imitate Christ, what economic practices are consistent with Jesus’s teachings, how peacemaking is related to nonresistance or nonviolence, what separation from the world of sin means, how to carry out mission and evangelism, and what it means to be a disciplined church. The questions, if not all the practices surrounding church discipline, remain lively ones.

Catholicity of the Church Because the Anabaptist movement emerged in a time of religious upheaval and defined itself over against what the radical reformers considered failed attempts at church practice or renewal, the leaders were concerned more with reconstructing faithful congregations of baptized believers than with the concept or reality of a universal church. That said, historian Dennis Bollinger argues that while the “ecclesial Anabaptists” strongly emphasized the local congregation (Gemeinde), their writings indicate that many “recognized the universal or general church as well” (2008: 57–62). He holds that Hubmaier “became the most outspoken advocate” of the concept of the universal church among the Anabaptists, declaring that baptism includes entry into the universal church and that the person the congregation excludes from fellowship “also stands bound before God in heaven and excluded from the universal Christian church” (Pipkin and Yoder 1989: 239, 371). While their references to the universal church are clearly minor notes, Bollinger cites writings where Marpeck, Menno Simons, and Dirk Philips also acknowledge the universality of the church. The early Anabaptists were pulled into relationships beyond their local congregations because of persecution and migration to more tolerant areas. Roth refers to this intersection of relationships using the metaphor of a rhizome—a growing underground stem that puts out random roots and shoots (2018). The Amish have developed networks of communication across geographically separate communities, and Anabaptist Mennonites have built district, national, and international conferences that recognize the presence of Christ in and through the wider Anabaptist church; these entities can do better together what local congregations cannot do well on their own.

ANABAPTIST ECCLESIOLOGY

 191

Roth also identifies a “functional ecumenism” in the early movement. Swiss Anabaptists, for example, were in substantial conversation with evangelical reformers such as Karlstadt and Zwingli (Roth 2018). Anabaptists such as Michael Sattler and Menno Simons came into the movement as Catholic priests, bringing aspects of that formation with them. The continuing tradition, including that of the Amish, has connected to other Christians through economic relationships and in relief and service efforts. Anabaptist Mennonites especially have studied at other-than-Mennonite institutions, engaging in wider scholarly exchanges. They have participated in local ministerial associations and have contributed to theological discussions in national councils of churches, the World Council of Churches, and the World Evangelical Alliance. While the Amish and Hutterite Brethren have not been involved in such interchurch relationships, they are clear that they do not condemn or judge other followers of Christ in this respect (Roth 2018). Beginning with the latter half of the twentieth century, Anabaptist Mennonite theologians have joined in both informal and formal conversations with Baptist, Reformed, and Catholic representatives. Mennonites also have been heavily invested in eighteen Believers Church Conferences initiated in 1968, a modest theological venture drawing together a number of Anabaptist/Baptist groups. More recently, Lutherans and Mennonites at an international level examined reasons for the sixteenth-century division between Lutherans and Anabaptists, a process that resulted in services of reconciliation and new initiatives for closer relationships. From 2012 to 2017 the Vatican, Lutheran World Federation, and Mennonite World Conference engaged in a trilateral dialogue that recommended several steps to overcoming the historic impasse concerning the theology and practice of baptism. The most recent confession of faith for Anabaptist Mennonites in the United States and Canada, an extraordinary document for its broadly consultative character, cites Ephesians 2 and 4, Acts 1–2 and 11, Mark 3, John 20, 1 Corinthians 4, and Galatians 3, explicitly stating that “the church exists as a community of believers in the local congregation, as a community of congregations, and as the worldwide community of faith” (Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective 1995: 40). Given this theology of the church, Mennonites should find the resources needed to “consciously do their theology within the larger context of the body of Christ” more carefully than it has been done in the past (Blough 2004: 51; Ens 2010).

The Church as Missional Loewen in his work on Anabaptist Mennonite confessions concluded that the area that has received the strongest accent and been the most consistently uniform is that of the church and mission. Concern with mission appears as “care for the nature of the church’s communal life as a witness to Christ” (Loewen 1985: 41). The 1995 Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective picks up themes familiar from early Anabaptism. The church is called to witness to the reign of Christ by embodying Jesus’ way in its own life and patterning itself after the reign of God. Thus it shows the world a sample of life under the lordship of Christ. By its life, the church is to be a city on a hill, a light to the nations, testifying to the power of the resurrection by a way of life different from the societies around it. (Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective 1995: 42) Aspects of the life of the church that particularly affect those outside the church and that continue to mark the tradition include integrity and commitment to speak the truth (avoidance of oaths), renunciation of violent revenge and living by the law of love, keeping the Sabbath, and—because Anabaptist Christians “must remember our duty to

192

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

government, but . . . give priorty [sic] to the kingdom and its peace”—discouragement about holding civil office (Loewen 1985: 42–3). Proactive forms of peacemaking, understood as participating in God’s reconciling mission in the world, have been present in the tradition, but peace theology itself has been articulated and debated most clearly since the twentieth-century world wars. As Mennonite theologian Thomas Finger noted in relation to the early church, while new life in Christ brought healing and joy, suffering and persecution deepened the church’s worship and understanding of how it participates in God’s mission in the world. Anabaptist groups, too, in response to the call to the ministry of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:18-20) learned that “the Spirit is most fully present where it brings people into fellowship with Christ’s sufferings, and creates new life out of persecution, discouragement, and death” (1989: 254). Such experience deepens witness. Witness by example has characterized all the continuing Anabaptist groups. Some observers claim that this tradition tends quietly to hide whatever light it has under a bushel basket. Its missionary message, sometimes more and sometimes less explicit, continues to be a decisive call for repentance and toward new life. It promises God’s healing, hope, forgiveness, and the gift of the Spirit through Christ. But it also expects a turning from the practices and powers that bind individuals and the church to “the flesh” and “the world” of sin (Finger 1989: 293), as believers discern together in local communities of faith what the Spirit intends for specific times and places. Notably, the sixteenth-century Anabaptists were evangelistic, fervently inviting others to confess faith in Christ, to follow him, and to join congregations of baptizers. John H. Yoder in Theology of Mission: A Believers Church Perspective pointed out that the presupposition of such activity was making a clear distinction between church and world as the radical reformers did. “If there is a rejection of the visible distinctiveness of church and world, then there is less reason or capacity to conceive of a mission beyond the church because everybody baptized as an infant is already in it” (Yoder 2014: 159). While persecution and migration eventually muted evangelistic fervor, Anabaptist Mennonites were moved by the Protestant missionary zeal of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In many cases, Mennonite mission efforts looked much like those of other groups, but ecclesiology shaped through the Anabaptist tradition brought several distinctive elements to its mission work: (1) For Christendom churches, where membership in the church and society are coterminous, a strong link between empire and mission was normal. Mission followed conquest of new territories, and relationships between government and mission were characterized by close cooperation. While Anabaptist missionaries may also have benefited from colonial power, a dissenting church that baptizes on confession of faith and makes a clear distinction between church and world becomes uneasy when the Christian message becomes too closely identified with such power. (2) Related to this is the fact that the use of violence and participation in war has usually been justified theologically in the major Christian traditions; Anabaptist ecclesiology insists that the church mediate Christ’s nonviolent presence in the world. (3) In a Christendom church, it is proper that a Christian government “should support church structures emotionally, financially and even with police power to discourage dissent” (Yoder 2014: 151–2). A church formed by baptism on confession of faith has no such expectation and maintains its own structure. (4) Hierarchical churches require educated and officially ordained leadership; missionaries in a church formed by the Holy Spirit on believers’ confession of faith can develop and mentor leaders in a congregation that cannot afford expensive education. Yoder suggests, echoing Anabaptist practices over time, that minimum requirements for the church in mission settings include two or three people gathered together in the name

ANABAPTIST ECCLESIOLOGY

 193

of Christ; affirmation of the meaning of Christian faith; common worship, baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and reading the Bible together; recognition of leadership and discipline; and a link to church fellowship around the world (2014: 209). These basic characteristics mark the Anabaptist-related congregations that have grown from evangelistic efforts in North America and around the world. As of 2018 there are about 2.1 million Anabaptists worldwide. Two-thirds of the baptized are in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (Mennonite World Conference 2018). With rapid growth of the church, many members do not yet have a clear understanding of Anabaptist ecclesiology. However, intentional Anabaptist identity continues to grow as new members learn about this understanding of the church, including Jesus’s call to its ministry of reconciliation (Garcia 2014; Lapp and Snyder 2006). Mennonite missiologist Wilbert R. Shenk has been particularly influential in focusing the importance of ecclesiology for mission both in the global North and South. As director of the Missiology of Western Culture and the Christian Mission and Western Culture projects and professor of mission at Fuller Seminary, he has carried Anabaptist convictions about the church into ecumenical conversations about its mission (Shenk 2007).

A LIVING TRADITION Aspects of Anabaptist ecclesiology, emerging from passionate desire for renewal of the apostolic church, were both embodied and left behind (in Münsterite Anabaptism and its aftermath, for example), as the early Anabaptists followed what they believed to be the leading of the Holy Spirit. The movement shared convictions about the importance of baptism on confession of faith, discipleship, and church discipline; the observance of the Lord’s Supper as remembrance of Christ’s love, sacrifice, and example; and the expectation that church members would offer one another loving mutual aid. Some aspects of ecclesiology such as exactly what church discipline or mutual aid entailed continued to evolve, with differences arising in different groups. In the continuing tradition, communities of conversation argued, debated, forgave, or separated as they sought faithfully to follow Christ in life. Migration and changing cultural and political situations made it possible for some members to be recognized in society and given public responsibilities. This change in social status affected their attitudes toward separation of church and world, bringing more positive attitudes toward wider society and culture. Hutterites in Moravia in the seventeenth century and Mennonites who migrated to Russia in the eighteenth had freedom to administer their own wealthy farming communities, in which church and local government were not clearly separate—before violence sent these heirs of sixteenth-century Anabaptism to North and South America. Different understandings of and experiences with church discipline, such as how strong congregational discipline was in relation those who chose to participate in the military during the world wars, affected the speed of cultural assimilation and the mission of the church in the United States. Within this living tradition, Anabaptist groups have found the need to renew and revise aspects of their theology, seeking to reframe an ecclesiology that is both faithful and relevant. The strong traditional emphasis on discipleship and discipline has sometimes fostered undue shame and a sense of unworthiness and alienation among members who fail. In response, some have called for recovery of the gospel of grace and for practices of a forgiving community. Overemphasis on the need for repentance and turning away from sin neglects victims and those who need healing from harm from external powers. Emphasizing what followers should do to be faithful to Christ can lead to perfectionism,

194

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

pride, and judgment of others; recovery of a sense of the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit in the life of the baptized can address this weakness. Certainly, as God’s Spirit has moved globally to expand the Anabaptist community of conversation, questions of ecclesiology are also being renewed and revised: What does it mean to love Christ and one another in the midst of huge disparities of poverty and wealth? What does “washing each other’s feet” within the church require of the baptized—members and ministers alike? How can Anabaptists hold to an identity as one body of Christ in relation to hard tribal, national, or denominational boundaries? How should members respond to social media that can undermine embodied community life? Where is God’s Holy Spirit creating healing and hope in the world through the church, even in the face of violence, evil, and death? What finally does it mean for the church, like Christ, to give itself in love to the world?

REFERENCES Bender, H. S. (1944), “The Anabaptist Vision,” Church History 13 (1): 3–24. Bender, H. S. (1955), “Church,” in Harold S. Bender (ed.), The Mennonite Encyclopedia 1: 594–7. Blough, N. (2004), “The Church as Sign or Sacrament: Trinitarian Ecclesiology, Pilgram Marpeck, Vatican II and John Milbank,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 78 (1): 29–52. Bollinger, D. E. (2008), First Generation Anabaptist Ecclesiology, 1525–1561: A Study of Swiss, German and Dutch Sources, Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press. Colwell, J. E. (1987), “A Radical Church: A Reappraisal of Anabaptist Ecclesiology,” Tyndale Bulletin 38: 119–41. Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective (1995), Scottdale: Herald Press. “Conservative Mennonite Conference Statement of Practice” (1999), website accessed August 22, 2018. “Eastern Mennonite University Center for Justice and Peacemaking,” website accessed August 20, 2018. Ens, F. (2010), “Believers Church Ecclesiology: A Vital Alternative within the Ecumenical Family,” in Abe Dueck, Helmut Harder, and Karl Koop (eds.), New Perspectives in Believers Church Ecclesiology, 107–24, Winnipeg: Canadian Mennonite University Press. Finger, T. N. (1989), Christian Theology: An Eschatological Approach, Vol. 2, Scottdale: Herald Press. Friedmann, R. (1955a), “Community of Goods,” in Harold S. Bender (ed.), The Mennonite Encyclopedia 1: 658–62. Friedmann, R. (1955b), “Hutterian Brethren (Hutterische Brüder),” in Harold S. Bender (ed.), The Mennonite Encyclopedia 2: 854–65. Garcia, C. (2014), “The Relevance and Urgency of Anabaptism for Our Time: Several Proposals in Light of Contemporary Currents in Latin American Christianity,” trans. Elizabeth Miller and John D. Roth, Mennonite Quarterly Review 88 (4): 451–78. Harder, L., ed. (1985), The Sources of Swiss Anabaptism, Classics of the Radical Reformation, Vol. 4, Scottdale: Herald Press. Klaassen, W., ed. (1981), Anabaptism in Outline: Selected Primary Sources, Scottdale: Herald Press. Klassen, W. and W. Klaassen, eds. (1978), The Writings of Pilgram Marpeck, Scottdale: Herald Press. Koontz, G. G. (2013), “Divine Call, Reluctant Blessing: Ordination of Women in Mennonite Church USA,” in James E. Horsch, John D. Rempel, and Eldon D. Nafziger (eds.), According

ANABAPTIST ECCLESIOLOGY

 195

to the Grace Given to Her: The Ministry of Emma Sommers Richards, 103–21, Elkhart: Institute of Mennonite Studies. Krahn, C. (1955a), “Communion,” in Harold S. Bender (ed.), The Mennonite Encyclopedia 1: 651–5. Krahn, C. (1955b), “Ministry,” in Harold S. Bender (ed.), The Mennonite Encyclopedia 1: 701–3. Lapp, J. A. and C. A. Snyder, eds. (2006), Anabaptist Songs in African Hearts, Global Mennonite History Series: Africa, Intercourse: Good Books. Lederach, J. P. (2014), Reconcile: Conflict Transformation for Ordinary Christians, Harrisonburg: Herald Press. Loewen, H. J. (1985), One Lord, One Church, One Hope, and One God: Mennonite Confessions of Faith, Text Reader Series 2, Elkhart: Institute of Mennonite Studies. “Lombard Mennonite Peace Center” (Lombard), website accessed August 22, 2018. Mennonite Board of Congregational Ministries of the Mennonite Church, Ministerial Leadership Services, and the General Board of the General Conference Mennonite Church (1996), A Mennonite Polity for Ministerial Leadership, ed. Everett J. Thomas, Newton: Faith & Life Press. “Mennonite World Conference Global Statistics-World Directory” (2018), website accessed July 19, 2018. Nienkirchen, C. (1982), “Reviewing the Case for a Non-separatist Ecclesiology in Early Swiss Anabaptism,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 56 (3): 227–41. Packull, W. O. (1977), Mysticism and the Early South German-Austrian Anabaptist Movement, 1525–1531, Studies in Anabaptist and Mennonite History, No. 19, Scottdale: Herald Press. Pipkin, H. W. and J. H. Yoder, trans. and eds. (1989), Balthasar Hubmaier: Theologian of Anabaptism, Scottdale: Herald Press. Rempel, J. D. (1993), The Lord’s Supper in Anabaptism: A Study in the Christology of Balthasar Hubmaier, Pilgram Marpeck, and Dirk Philips, Scottdale: Herald Press. Rempel, J. D. (2011), “Critically Appropriating Tradition: Pilgram Marpeck’s Experiments in Corrective Theologizing,” The Mennonite Quarterly Review 85 (1): 59–75. Roth, J. D. (1994), “Community as Conversation: A New Model of Anabaptist Hermeneutics,” in H. Wayne Pipkin (ed.), Essays in Anabaptist Theology, Text Reader Series 5, 51–64, Elkhart: Institute of Mennonite Studies. Roth, J. D. (2000), “The Church ‘Without Spot or Wrinkle’ in Anabaptist Experience,” in Karl Koop and Mary H. Schertz (eds.), Without Spot or Wrinkle: Reflecting Theologically on the Nature of the Church, 7–25, Elkhart: Institute of Mennonite Studies. Roth, J. D. (2018), conversation with Gayle Gerber Koontz, June 15, 2018, Goshen. Shenk, W. R. and P. F. Penner, International Baptist Theological Seminary, and European Baptist Federation (2007), Anabaptism and Mission, Occasional Publications, Schwarzenfeld: Neufeld Verlag. Snyder, C. A. (1995), Anabaptist History and Theology: An Introduction, Kitchener: Pandora Press. The Mennonite Encyclopedia: A Comprehensive Reference Work on the Anabaptist-Mennonite Movement (1955), 4 vols., ed. Harold S. Bender, Hillsboro: Mennonite Brethren Publishing House. Volume 5 (1990), ed. Cornelius J. Dyck and Dennis D. Martin, Scottdale: Herald Press. All volumes can be accessed online: “Global Mennonite Encyclopedia.” “U.S. Mennonite Brethren Confession of Faith” (1999/2014), website accessed August 26, 2018. Wenger, J. C., ed. (1956), The Complete Writings of Menno Simons, trans. Leonard Verduin, Scottdale: Herald Press. Yoder, J. H. (2014), Theology of Mission: A Believers Church Perspective, ed. Gayle Gerber Koontz and Andy Alexis-Baker, Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press Academic.

Chapter FOURTEEN

Anglican Ecclesiology JOHN GIBAUT

INTRODUCTION The Anglican Communion is a family of churches that are found in 165 countries around the world, rooted in local cultures, contexts, and languages. As the word “Anglican” suggests (from the Latin anglicana meaning “English”), the roots of this communion of churches have been shaped by the history of the Church of England from the earliest centuries of Christianity, through the English Reformation of the sixteenth century, and beyond to the modern era. This particular experience of the life and faith of the Church was received first in other parts of the British Isles, represented today by the Church of Ireland, the Church in Wales, and the Scottish Episcopal Church. Through its often uncritical association with British colonization, Anglicanism spread around the world. As the new churches developed and matured, however, they gained local leadership and became dioceses and national or regional churches in their own right. The new churches around the world remained connected to one another and to the Church of England through common faith, common patterns of ministry (bishops, priests, and deacons), and common liturgical, spiritual, theological, and pastoral traditions. Practically, this meant mutual recognition of one another as belonging to the same family.

THE ROOTS OF A DISTINCTIVE ANGLICAN ECCLESIOLOGICAL TRADITION The cumulative experience of Anglican ecclesial life has given rise to a distinct tradition within global Christianity, and with it a unique understanding and practice of being the Church, that is, ecclesiology. Anglican ecclesiology has not been systematic, but has evolved in particular ways in response to various contextual challenges. Thus, Anglican ecclesiology does not fit neatly in systematic definitions; it is best described genetically, with reference to its origins and evolutions.

The Beginnings of Anglicanism Ecclesia anglicana: While the global Anglican Communion is not an extension of the Church of England, it is not possible to understand Anglicanism and Anglican ecclesiology apart from the English Church and its earliest beginnings. Christianity had spread to the Roman province of Britannia within the first centuries of the Common Era. As the Roman Empire withdrew in the fifth century, British Christianity was driven underground, or

ANGLICAN ECCLESIOLOGY

 197

pushed into the western regions of Britain during the Anglo-Saxon invasions. Christianity was reintroduced into the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms from two directions. In the early seventh century missionaries were sent from Rome to England. From their center in Canterbury in the south, the Roman missionaries began to expand toward the north. At the same time Irish missionaries led a second mission from Scotland and expanded toward the south. By the eighth century, a distinct Anglo-Saxon—or English—church had emerged. It was a church in unity and diversity, shaped by both Roman and Irish traditions, within the wider Western Catholic Church in communion with the See of Rome. Emerging from this period is an identifiable English Church, known in Latin simply as the ecclesia anglicana. Dioceses under the leadership of bishops, served locally by parish priests, were grouped together in two provinces. The Archbishop of York led the northern province, while the Archbishop of Canterbury, historically the senior of the two archbishops, led the southern province. By all accounts, the medieval English Church was a healthy, vibrant part of the Western Catholic Church. The Church of England: The sixteenth-century English Church initially resisted the Reformation instigated by Martin Luther. By 1533, however, the English Church had separated itself from the See of Rome, and shortly afterward committed itself to the Reformation. The medieval ecclesia anglicana became the reformed, particular, and autonomous Church of England. It was the Book of Common Prayer, the authorized liturgical text of the Church of England, which held the vision of the English Reformation, rather than the theology of any particular English or continental European reformer. The Prayer Book expressed a vision of the Church of England that was faithful to its catholic roots and yet shaped by the insights of the Reformation, as reflected in the celebration of Holy Communion (or the eucharist) on Sundays and holy days, its daily patterns of morning and evening prayer, along with the rites of baptism and confirmation, marriage, burial, and ordination. The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, the short summaries of Anglican positions on the contentious issues of the sixteenth century, are printed in the Book of Common Prayer. Ecclesiologically the reformed Church of England was traditional in comparison with the continental Reformation movements. While the rejection of the authority of the Bishop of Rome represents a major development in Anglican ecclesiology, in other ways the Reformation did little to alter the structures of church life. The inherited medieval diocesan and parish structures remained firmly in place, as well as the two ecclesiastical provinces, the north under the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of York, and the south under the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Primate of All England. The ecclesiological conservatism of the Church of England is reflected in its reformed rites of ordination, “The Form and Manner of Making, Ordaining, and Consecration of Bishops, Priests, and Deacons,” later appended to the Book of Common Prayer. The intention of the Church of England was to retain the threefold ministry from the time of the apostles, inherited by the patristic and medieval Church. In the context of the sixteenth century, the significant English reforms were to permit all clergy to marry, and to abolish the minor orders (subdeacons, acolytes, lectors, doorkeepers). As medieval sacrificial understandings of the eucharist were modified, so the ministries of bishops and priests described in the ordination rites were expanded to accent their roles in preaching, teaching, and pastoral care, as well as the celebration of the sacraments. The Reformation pattern of church life of the Church of England did not go unchallenged. Roman Catholics rejected it on the grounds that bishops who were not

198

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

nominated by the Bishop of Rome, thus out of communion with the See of Rome, and ordained without the rites of the Roman Catholic Church, were not considered ordained at all. For those English Christians who were influenced by the more sweeping Swiss Reformation—the Puritans—the very existence of bishops, priests, and deacons, together with the diocesan structures and the Book of Common Prayer, was evidence that the Church of England was far too un-reformed, and far too close to the structures of the medieval and post-Tridentine Catholic Church. Yet in spite of the challenges posed by Roman Catholics on the one hand, and by the Puritan reformers on the other, the reformed-yet-catholic ecclesiological pattern of the Church of England endured and became a distinctive ecclesiological pattern around the world. An Anglican communion of churches: As the British Empire began its colonial expansion, it brought with it the ecclesiological structure of the Church of England, with one significant exception. The Bishop of London became the diocesan bishop of every Anglican parish outside of England around the world. While a certain ecclesiological principle linked with Anglican self-identity as a national church was at play here, at a practical level the early global spread of Anglicanism was not episcopally led. A crisis to global Anglicanism occurred after the American Revolution of 1776 when its parishes and congregations in the United States of America ceased to be part of the legally established Church of England under the auspices of the Bishop of London. If they were to remain faithful to their ecclesiological self-identity, the new American church needed to have bishops of its own. While the first bishop of the new “Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America” was ordained by Scottish Episcopal bishops, the Church of England quickly decided that it was appropriate for the Archbishop of Canterbury to ordain bishops for the American church, as well as the emerging post-colonial churches in the rest of British North America (i.e., Canada), and later for the churches in Africa, Asia, Australasia and the Pacific region, Latin America, and the West Indies. As new Anglican dioceses were created within the British Empire it was the Archbishop of Canterbury who ordained the first bishops for these new dioceses. Thus, the See of Canterbury exercised a new global ecclesiological role. From these bishops, ordained for the colonial dioceses, all bishops of the Anglican Communion today trace their episcopal succession to the See of Canterbury, and from Canterbury back into antiquity. As the new Anglican churches developed and matured and became dioceses and national or regional churches in their own right, they remained bound to one another, and to the Church of England. A significant ecclesiological principle that was inherited from the English Reformation was that of being an autonomous independent national church. The emerging colonial and post-colonial churches were ecclesiologically, theologically, and liturgically very close, if not identical, to the Church of England. The sense of belonging to the same family of churches was strong. They were, however, autonomous and independent churches with no mechanisms for common decision-making. As the churches of the Anglican Communion became more contextual and inculturated, with different and even diverging responses to local circumstance, the question was whether common roots and self-identity were enough to sustain a growing global communion of churches.

Developments in the Anglican Communion from 1867 to the Present The Anglican Communion: The first international gathering of Anglican bishops took place in 1867. As the newer Anglican dioceses around the world became more inculturated

ANGLICAN ECCLESIOLOGY

 199

in different contexts and seemed to be drifting from one another in their responses to local circumstance, their bishops were convened by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and met at his London residence, Lambeth Palace. This global meeting of Anglicans took place in the context of other Christian World Communions also gathering its leaders across the world, recognizing the need to bring cohesion to their global families of churches.1 The first Lambeth Conference also had to deal with two divisive issues in particular which had led to a schism in South Africa, namely, questions over the interpretation of Scripture, and a question over human sexuality, that is, polygamy. The Lambeth Conference has met every ten years since. The first Resolution of the first Conference in 1867 identifies the family of Anglican churches as a “Communion” (Lambeth 1867: Res 1)2, a term that referred to something that was already recognizable as a family of churches. Hence, 1867 is a convenient date to mark the beginning of the Anglican Communion. The Archbishop of Canterbury has convened every meeting of the Lambeth Conference from 1867. Its purpose is to promote, protect, and deepen the unity of the Church and its mission, both internally within the Anglican Communion as well as with other families of Christians. The deliberations and reflections of the Lambeth bishops have contributed significantly to the ecclesiological self-understanding of the Anglican Communion, as well as its place within the wider Church. The following section traces the contribution of the Lambeth Conference to the development of the ecclesial self-understanding of the Anglican Communion. By the 1880s Anglicans around the world were beginning to explore relationships with other churches. They began to ask which conditions were necessary for Anglicans to be in communion with other churches; this is a classic question of ecclesiology. The 1888 Lambeth Conference’s answer to this question identified the “historic episcopate”— bishops ordained by other bishops who were ordained by bishops in a historical succession back to the apostolic Church—as an ecclesiological condition necessary for full communion with other churches (Lambeth 1888: Res 11). The scandal of Christian disunity associated with the First World War galvanized the churches to seek unity and reconciliation with one another in what became known as the ecumenical movement. At the 1920 Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Communion issued its visionary call for Christian unity. Its “Appeal to All Christian People” also deepened and enlarged an Anglican vision of Christian unity, which in turn marked a development of Anglican ecclesiology. It carefully articulated the understanding of the Church as communion and was able to recognize other global families of churches as “communions.” While insisting on the indispensability of the historic episcopate, the 1920 Lambeth Conference was equally insistent on recognizing the spiritual reality of the ministries of the churches that had not retained the historic episcopate (Lambeth 1920: Res 9). The fundamental ecclesiological principle at play at the 1920 Lambeth Conference was the mutual recognition of baptism. The 1930 Lambeth Conference contributed to the development of Anglican ecclesiology in the context of sharp disagreement over an issue of human sexuality, namely, artificial contraception. In their teaching on ecclesiology the bishops affirmed “that the true constitution of the Catholic Church involves the principle of the autonomy of particular churches based upon a common faith and order” (Lambeth 1930: Res 48).

For example, the First Vatican Council, 1869–70; Presbyterian/Reformed, 1875; Methodists, 1881 All references to resolutions of Lambeth Conferences cited are found in Coleman (1992) unless otherwise noted.

1 2

200

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

It also clearly identified the ecclesiological principle that the Anglican Communion is a fellowship of churches in communion with the See of Canterbury (Lambeth 1930: Res 49a). The experience of the leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and sacramental experience of communion not just with the person of the archbishop but also his local church, the Diocese of Canterbury, was formally recognized. The ecclesiological work of the 1968 Lambeth Conference echoes directions taken by the Second Vatican Council. In its 1964 “Decree on Ecumenism” the Roman Catholic Church stated that Christians “who believe in Christ and have been properly baptized are brought into a certain, though imperfect communion with the Catholic Church” (Decree on Ecumenism 3 in Abbott, Documents of Vatican II, 1964, p 345). Four years later, the 1968 Lambeth Conference affirmed that it is on the basis of mutually recognized baptism that Anglicans are permitted to welcome Christians from other churches to receive Holy Communion at Anglican celebrations of the eucharist. Like the Second Vatican Council’s Decree on Ecumenism, which admits a level of impaired or “imperfect communion,” the 1968 Lambeth Conference also acknowledged degrees or levels of communion from “full communion” and “reciprocal communion” to the more controlled “admission to communion.” (“Renewal in Ministry,” Lambeth Conference 1968: Resolutions and Reports, pp. 125–9) By the 1988 Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Communion had weathered its internal disagreements around the ordination of women to the priesthood. Between and within some provincial churches there was rejection of the ordination of women; in effect the Anglican Communion was in a situation of “impaired communion” with itself, since one of the marks of churches in communion is a mutually recognized and interchangeable ordained ministry. The disagreement on the ordination of women as priests, however, did not signal a threat to the overall integrity of the Anglican Communion, at least as long as all bishops were men. Given the role of bishops—and the communion of the bishops with one another—the ordination of women to the episcopate did signal a major threat to the integrity of the Anglican Communion. The 1988 Lambeth Conference did not respond to the controversy by reflecting on the ordination of women. Rather, the bishops responded by initiating a series of processes that reflected on the nature and mission of the Church, and with particular focus on the Church as communion. Through its engagement in multilateral and bilateral ecumenical dialogues, the Anglican Communion began to articulate an ecclesiology of communion in the sense of the New Testament understanding of koinonia. The intent of such a reflection on communion ecclesiology was not to resolve issues around the ordination of women as bishops. Rather, it set out the ecclesiological context in which the conversation would take place, given the Anglican Communion’s effective state of impaired communion. Moreover, the intent of the bishops in 1988 was to identify how Anglicans could “maintain the highest degree of communion with one another” despite disagreement in principle. Internal Anglican reflection was influenced by the insights of ecumenical koinonia that communion is a gift, not an achievement, and that while communion may be patently and painful impaired, it is theologically not possible to be completely “out of communion” with one another (Eames: s 40). From the 1988 Lambeth Conference, Anglican ecclesiology began to reflect in a more focused way on the character of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council, and the Primates’ Meeting as “structures of unity and communion” (Virginia: s 3.29). While disagreement on the ordination of women to the episcopate was still outstanding, the 1998 meeting of the Lambeth Conference was eclipsed by developments in some

ANGLICAN ECCLESIOLOGY

 201

provinces of the Anglican Communion around the place of homosexual persons in the life of the Church. The Lambeth Conference of 1998 is most remembered for its complex and much debated Resolution 1:10. The resolution affirmed the need for pastoral care of people of homosexual orientation and condemned homophobia. It also identified the marriage between two people of the same sex as incompatible with Scripture and advised against the legitimizing or blessing of same-sex unions and against the ordination of those in such unions (Lambeth 1998: Res 1:10). While successive Primates’ Meetings would identify Resolution 1:10 as normative, it was not necessarily received as such by all provinces of the Anglican Communion. Two actions by the two North American provinces disregarded Resolution 1:10. In 2002 the synod of the Diocese of New Westminster in the Anglican Church of Canada authorized the liturgical blessing of same-sex couples. In 2003, an openly gay priest in a same-sex relationship was elected and consecrated as a bishop in The Episcopal Church. The reactions that followed within the Anglican Communion were different in both kind and degree from the debates on the ordination of women. Significant schisms occurred over more positive attitudes to the place of gay and lesbian people in the life of the church, particularly in the United States. There were instances within the North American provinces where parishes sought alternative episcopal oversight from bishops in other Anglican provincial churches, without the consent of the local bishop. These violations of provincial autonomy created new strains on communion between the churches and disregarded fundamental issues of Anglican ecclesiology. There was deep anxiety across the Anglican Communion that disagreement on human sexuality would “tear the fabric of our Communion at its deepest level” (Windsor 2004: s 27). Anglican confidence in the capacity of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council, and the Primates’ Meeting to contain the effects of this disagreement was in jeopardy. A significant expression of Anglican unease was the large number of bishops who declined the invitation of the Archbishop of Canterbury to attend the Lambeth Conference of 2008. The response of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Primates’ Meeting in 2003 to the events in Canada and the United States was to establish the Lambeth Commission on Communion, with the mandate to reflect on how communion and mutual understanding could be enhanced where sharp disagreement threatened the future of the Anglican Communion. In the Lambeth Commission’s statement, The Windsor Report, an ecclesiology of communion is linked with missiology: when communion is weak, the witness and mission of the Church are weakened. The communion of the Church is not for its “own in-house business” but serves and signifies the mission of God in the world. As such, the communion of the Church is a sign and foretaste of God’s healing love (Windsor 2004: s 3). By reflecting on the historic Anglican tension between autonomy and mutual accountability, the Lambeth Commission proposed a radical solution: a binding covenant between the churches of the Anglican Communion. The ecclesiological virtue of a binding covenant according to the Lambeth Commission is “that it incarnates communion as a visible foundation around which Anglicans can gather to shape and protect their distinctive identity and mission” (Windsor 2004: s 119). The Anglican Communion, the Lambeth Commission submits, cannot afford the harmful effects of ongoing global intra-Anglican conflict: “It is our shared responsibility to have in place an agreed mechanism to enable and maintain life in communion, and to prevent and manage communion disputes” (Windsor 2004: s 119). Such a covenant was expected to provide safeguards in the future from what was experienced as deficiencies within the Anglican Communion that were exposed when The Episcopal Church and the Anglican

202

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Church of Canada took formal steps to include gay and lesbian people, and to change unilaterally recognizable Anglican norms around marriage. The majority of Anglican provincial churches could clearly not support or receive these developments. Completed in 2010, The Anglican Communion Covenant includes three distinct sections that identify the basic, practical characteristics of the communion between Anglican churches. A fourth section deals with the practical consequences of adopting the Covenant, and includes a subsection on dispute resolution, including “relational consequences arising from an action incompatible with the Covenant” (Covenant 2010: s 4.2.7). The Covenant has been a hotly debated text within the Anglican Communion. At the present time, however, of the potential forty provincial churches, only fourteen have formally made a decision at the provincial level. Of those, eleven have adopted the Covenant, while three have declined. The remaining twenty-six provincial churches have not made a formal decision. Some have made a decision not to make a decision, while others simply lack the capacity at this time to prepare a response, and yet other provinces have simply ignored the Covenant. The evidence suggests that the reason for the non-reception of the Covenant by so many of the provincial churches is a rejection of the fourth section, with its legalistic tone and mechanisms for both dispute resolution and the imposition of consequences. In short, The Anglican Communion Covenant project has failed. The adoption of the Covenant would have had profound practical consequences for the Anglican Communion and would signal a major ecclesiological development. As the majority of the churches of the Anglican Communion have signaled that the way forward has yet to be uncovered, the ecclesiological self-understanding of the Anglican Communion will continue to evolve.

THEMES IN ANGLICAN ECCLESIOLOGY Anglican ecclesiological reflection has developed contextually. Synthesizing the data from the Reformation and the life of the Anglican Communion into a systematic presentation would defy the genetic character of Anglican ecclesiology. However, a number of Anglican ecclesiological characteristics are identifiable.

Anglican Ecclesial Self-Understanding within the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church Anglicans from the Reformation onward have professed that they belong to the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, of which they claim to be a part, but not the whole; accordingly, they recognize that other churches likewise belong to the one Church. The bishops of the first Lambeth Conference described their dioceses and provinces to be “the Church of Christ in communion with the Anglican branch of the Church Catholic” (Lambeth 1867: Res 3). The 1930 meeting of the Conference gave a more precise definition: “The Anglican Communion is a fellowship, within the one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, of those duly constituted dioceses, provinces or regional Churches in communion with the See of Canterbury” (Lambeth 1930: Res 49). Or, as the current Preface to the Declaration of Assent and Canonical Obedience of the Church of England begins: The Church of England is part of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, worshipping the one true God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It professes the faith

ANGLICAN ECCLESIOLOGY

 203

uniquely revealed in the Holy Scriptures and set forth in the catholic creeds, which faith the Church is called upon to proclaim afresh in each generation. Led by the Holy Spirit, it has borne witness to Christian truth in its historic formularies, the ThirtyNine Articles of Religion, The Book of Common Prayer and the Ordering of Bishops, Priests and Deacons.3 The Church of England, with the later churches of the Anglican Communion, understood itself in continuity with the English Church prior to the Reformation. The inherited structures of the national church, with its two ecclesiastical provinces led by the metropolitical dioceses of Canterbury and York, did not change, nor did the diocesan and parish structures. The efforts that the Church of England took to ensure that the bishops who were appointed after the Reformation were consecrated by bishops who could trace their own consecrations prior to the Reformation are a clear indicator of the intent to retain this continuity. There are identifiable characteristics that contribute to the common identity of churches of the Anglican Communion: a common theological heritage grounded in an ongoing reading of the Bible, along with the historic Creeds of the Church. The Book of Common Prayer not only represents a common liturgical heritage but also expresses the faith of the Church as Anglicans have received it. And Anglicans have a common tradition of canon (or church) law. Since the Reformation Anglicans have lived together within these broad parameters in unity and difference in contrasting terms from low church to high church, from evangelical to Anglo-Catholic, from conservative to liberal, from charismatic to affirming-catholic, from an emphasis on mission as evangelism to an emphasis on mission as social justice, peace and reconciliation, and so on. What binds these different expressions of Anglican faith and life into a cohesive whole is a common ecclesiology with a common ordering of the churches of the Anglican Communion.

Polity, Structure of Ordained Ministry, and Ecclesiology While many Anglicans experience their parishes as the local church, the basic ecclesial unit of the local church in Anglican ecclesiology is the diocese. Within the diocese the bishop is the primary minister of word and sacrament, of pastoral care, teaching, mission, and evangelism. These episcopal tasks are delegated to priests (or presbyters) through ordination, but also by a license from the bishop to serve in specific parish settings. The parishes are in communion with each other sacramentally, as well as in witness and mission, because they are in communion with their bishop. The communion of the Church is firstly the communion of the local churches, that is, the dioceses under the leadership of their bishops. Thus, the primary instrument of Anglican unity is the bishop (Virginia 1997: s 3.51). Local bishops and their dioceses that are in communion with each other form an ecclesiastical province, led by an archbishop or metropolitan bishop. Anglicans use the term “province” in two different ways. The first meaning is a group of regional dioceses under the leadership of an archbishop, also known as a metropolitan. The second meaning is a national or transnational member church of the Anglican Communion; such a provincial church is under the leadership of a primate, who is sometimes called an

Declaration of Assent and Canonical Obedience of the Church of England, https​:/​/ww​​w​.chu​​rchof​​engla​​nd​.or​​g​/ pra​​yer​-a​​nd​-wo​​rship​​/wors​​hip​-t​​exts-​​and​-r​​esour​​ces​/c​​ommon​​-wors​​hip​/m​​in​ist​​ry​/de​​clara​​tion-​​assen​t 3

204

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

archbishop, or presiding bishop, or a primus. In the united churches, the primate is called a moderator. Each provincial (or member) church of the Anglican Communion, with its bishops in synod, orders and regulates its own worship, policy, ministry, and mission through its own system of governance regulated by its own church law. Thus, it is the province that is strictly speaking an “Anglican church.” The Anglican Communion is a communion of dioceses and provincial churches, rather than a single global Anglican Church. To date, there are forty provincial churches of the Anglican Communion.4 A significant ecclesiological principle is that of the independent and autonomous national church. Thus, Anglicans do not speak of a single global “Anglican Church,” but rather of a global “Anglican Communion” of autonomous churches. While many provinces use the word “Anglican,” such as the Anglican Church of Korea, the Iglesia Anglicana de la Region Central de America, or the Anglican Church of Aotearoa, New Zealand, and Polynesia, others use the term “Episcopal” often to differentiate themselves from the Church of England, such as The Episcopal Church in the United States, or the Scottish Episcopal Church. Other churches identify themselves with reference to the country in which they are found, such as the Church of the Province of Uganda, the Church in Wales, or the Church of Ceylon. Some member churches of the Anglican Communion are from united and uniting churches that brought together in an organic unity churches from different traditions, including former Anglican churches. These are the Church of South India, the Church of North India, the Church of Pakistan, and the Church of Bangladesh. In addition, there are six extra-provincial churches under the direct jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Canterbury. These provincial and extra-provincial churches formally constitute the churches of the Anglican Communion. Anglican dioceses and provinces across the world are in communion with one another because they are in communion with the Diocese—or See—of Canterbury, with its archbishop. Communion with the See of Canterbury is the “outward and visible test” of “Anglican identity and authenticity of belonging” (Virginia 1997: s 3.32) There are two fundamental features that identify a provincial church as being a member of the Anglican Communion: full communion with the Archbishop and See of Canterbury and formal recognition by the Anglican Consultative Council on its authorized schedule of churches.5 Anglican dioceses and provinces are governed by synods, sometimes called councils or conventions. Ecclesiastical authority within the communion of Anglican provincial churches is subsidiary, rather than centralized. Binding decisions are made at the level of the province and the diocese. The highest legislative body in the Anglican Communion is the general synod or convention at the provincial level where decisions are made about canon law, liturgy, doctrine, and ecumenical relationships. For example, decisions to authorize the ordination of women or the recognition of same-sex couples are made at the provincial level. In principle, such decisions are made after due consultation with the wider Anglican Communion. Anglicans recognize provincial autonomy and the right of Anglican provincial churches to order their own lives. And yet Anglicans are aware that autonomy is an insufficient

The most recent province of the Anglican Communion, the Anglican Church of Chile, was formally recognized in 2018. 5 For the authorized list of churches, see: www​.a​​co​.or​​g​/str​​uctur​​es​/me​​mber-​​churc​​hes​.a​​spx 4

ANGLICAN ECCLESIOLOGY

 205

category to understand the relationships of churches in communion to one another. An Anglican church is “autonomous” only in relation to other Anglican churches. The Anglican ideal is that the autonomy of each Anglican provincial church lives in relation to, and exercises its autonomy most fully in the context of, the Anglican Communion (Windsor 2004: s 76). The Lambeth Conference has described this as “interdependence.” This practical ecclesiology of communion is expressed in sharing and receiving, in equality, interdependence and mutual responsibility. In communion, each church acknowledges and respects the interdependence and autonomy of the other, putting the needs of the global fellowship before its own. Through such communion, each church is enabled to find completeness through its relations to the others, while fulfilling its own particular calling within its own cultural context (Windsor 2004: s 49).

The Church as Communion As noted above, the 1867 Lambeth Conference identified the Anglican family of churches as a “Communion” (Lambeth 1867: Res 1). While it would be over a century before the Anglican Communion would embrace a theology of communion as koinonia as explored in ecumenical theology, the term is significant in its nineteenth-century context. There is a sacramental quality implied in the use of the word “communion,” linked with Holy Communion or the eucharist. From its beginning, eucharistic communion with the See of Canterbury further defines the sacramental character of the communion of Anglican churches. Later Anglican reflection on the Church, shaped by ecumenical ecclesiology, emphasizes the trinitarian, christological, and soteriological dimensions of communion. Communion is a gift of the triune God, whose inner and relational nature is communion. The communion of love that the Son shares with the Father is shared with the community of the Church; the mutual love within the community of the Church is grounded in the love, unity, and communion of God. The death of Jesus reveals the depth of communion that God seeks to offer to his people (Eames 1998: s 18). The Resurrection is “God’s fundamental ‘yes’ to a communion of life with all people” (Eames 1998: s 20). It is the Holy Spirit that draws us into the divine communion of love and unity. Because the Church participates in the communion of the triune God, it has an eschatological reality and significance: “The mission of the Church is to be the icon of God’s life” (Virginia 1997: s 2.17). This communion determines theologically our relationship with one another. “Communion with God and with one another is both a gift and a divine expectation for the Church” (Eames 1998: s 22). This vision of the gift of communion is ultimately not about the Anglican Communion, or even the Church as a whole, but the communion of the whole human family with creation. The term “communion” has been so significant for Anglicans that it appears to be a synonym for the word “Church” itself. As such, it describes the life of the Anglican Communion beyond eucharistic communion, which remains the source as well as the goal of koinonia. As noted previously, an Anglican ecclesiology of communion has practical consequences, linked with the mission of the Church. As the report of the 1963 Congress, Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence in the Body of Christ, put it bluntly: “Full communion means either very little, if it be taken as a mere ceremonial symbol, or very much if it be understood as an expression of our common life and fortune. We all stand or fall

206

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

together, for we are one in Christ. Therefore we must seek to receive and to share.”6 If “mere ceremonial symbol” can be interpreted minimally as “sacramental communion,” then the highest degree of communion includes communion in life, mission, justice, and peace. And yet an inevitable feature of Anglican life of communion is the eucharist. It is eucharistic communion with the See of Canterbury that is the touchstone of Anglican identity. Whenever the Lambeth Conference, or the Anglican Consultative Council, or the Primates meet, its members celebrate the eucharist together, because there the Church is identified with that communion which God intends for all creation. Word and sacrament reveal God’s real and saving presence; they signify the Church’s essential participation in the life of God (Eames 1998: s 25). And yet Anglican disagreements around the ordination of women, or in protest against the admitting of same-sex couples in marriage, are most visibly and painfully expressed in rejection of eucharistic communion with one another. As seen in the previous section of this chapter, in Anglican experience ecclesial communion is fragile. When the communion of churches is strained by disagreement, even to the point of withdrawing eucharistic communion from one another, the Anglican recourse has not been to focus or resolve a particular church-dividing issue. Rather, the consistent Anglican response has been to reflect again on the call and challenges of life in communion/koinonia. Not unlike the Roman Catholic Church, which since the Second Vatican Council introduced the notion of a level of impaired or “imperfect communion” rather than “being in communion” or “being out of communion,” Anglican ecclesiology acknowledges different degrees or levels of “less than full communion” with the imprecise language of “impaired,” “fractured,” or “restricted” communion (Windsor 2004: s 50), as well as the imprecise call to “maintain the highest degree of communion with one another.” The trinitarian, christological, and soteriological natures of communion modify Anglican categories of impaired or broken communion. Communion that is impaired or strained is still true communion. This vital distinction affirms the theological principle that communion is the gift of God rather than the result of human achievement, and despite the failure of Christians, God’s gift of communion endures within the life of the Church.

Instruments of Communion Historically, the churches of Anglican Communion have lived with relatively few global structures beyond the provincial level. As long as there has been little conflict, the bonds of affection between the churches, the roles of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lambeth Conference, have been sufficient to sustain a communion of churches in unity and diversity. The experience of deep controversy over the ordination of women and questions over human sexuality, however, exposed the limitations of the current global structures to support the internal unity of the Anglican Communion. Again, the Anglican instinct in dealing with issues that strain communion has been to reflect on the nature of the Church, and in particular, the nature and mission of the Anglican Communion. A significant part of recent Anglican ecclesiological reflection has been on the experience of the global structures that historically have sustained the

§3, Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence in the Body of Christ. The Report of the Toronto Anglican Congress, 1963, http:​/​/ang​​lican​​histo​​ry​.or​​g​/can​​ada​/t​​oront​​o​_mut​​​ual19​​63​.ht​​ml 6

ANGLICAN ECCLESIOLOGY

 207

Anglican Communion: the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lambeth Conference—and those structures that emerged more recently—the Anglican Consultative Council and the Primates’ Meeting. Rather than treat these ecclesial structures historically or in terms of governance, an ecclesiological reflection has led the Anglican Communion to recognize the Archbishop of Canterbury and the three conciliar bodies as “Instruments of Communion.”7 The Archbishop of Canterbury: The See of Canterbury and its archbishop is the sacramental and pastoral focus of unity for Anglicans. From the Anglican Communion’s roots in the early medieval Anglo-Saxon church to the present, the Archbishop of Canterbury has been the pivotal focus of unity and leadership. The relationship of eucharistic communion between each Anglican diocese and the Diocese of Canterbury, and the relationship of each Anglican bishop with the Archbishop of Canterbury, is a touchstone of what it was to be Anglican (Windsor 2004: s 99). The Archbishop of Canterbury ordained the earliest bishops of the colonial dioceses. The Archbishop of Canterbury convenes the bishops of the Anglican Communion to the Lambeth Conference and is president of the Anglican Consultative Council. The Archbishop of Canterbury convenes the Primates’ Meeting and is the first among equals—primus inter pares—with the primates of the Anglican Communion. From these roles, Anglican ecclesiology identifies the central focus of the Archbishop of Canterbury in unity, mission and evangelism, and teaching (Windsor 2004: s 108-110). The Archbishop of Canterbury has no legal authority to compel, but rather a unique moral and spiritual authority to convene, to initiate consultation, to guide, and to express the mind of the Anglican Communion. The Lambeth Conference: The Lambeth Conference provides the opportunity for the bishops of the Anglican Communion to take common counsel together on the issues of the day. Like the role of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth bishops have no authority to legislate for the churches of the Anglican Communion, but exercise rather moral and spiritual authority. The Lambeth Conference expresses its mind to the churches through resolutions and pastoral letters. Any proposals that it makes must be received by the provincial synods of the Anglican Communion. While the Lambeth Conference has no legal power, its moral and spiritual authority has shaped and directed the Anglican Communion, as well as sustained its unity. It is important to emphasize that the Lambeth Conference is a single, ongoing conference which has convened in fourteen sessions from 1867 to 2008. The Anglican Consultative Council: The third Instrument of Communion is the Anglican Consultative Council, created in 1968, which meets every three years. It is the only Instrument that includes primates, bishops, priests, deacons, and, significantly, laypeople. As such, it is the most recognizably synodical body of the Anglican Communion. It is also the only Instrument with a legal constitution, supported financially by the churches of the Anglican Communion. The primary responsibility of the Council is to oversee the programmatic work of the Anglican Communion and to promote the unity and the purposes of the Churches of the Anglican Communion in mission, evangelism, ecumenical relations, communication, administration, and finance. As an Instrument of Communion, the Anglican Consultative Council is the most representative assembly of the provincial churches gathered for mutual consultation. Like

See, Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith and Order (2018).

7

208

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

the Lambeth Conference, the resolutions of the Anglican Consultative Council become authoritative only as the provincial churches receive them. In addition to eucharistic communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury, a church is deemed to be a province of the Anglican Communion by the formal recognition of the Anglican Consultative Council. The Anglican Consultative Council oversees the work of the secretariat at the Anglican Communion Office, led by the Secretary-General. It is through the Anglican Consultative Council and its secretariat that the Anglican Communion relates ecumenically to other Christian World Communions, the World Council of Churches, the United Nations, and other civil bodies. The Primates’ Meeting: Created by the 1978 Lambeth Conference, the collegial gathering of the primates of the provincial churches takes place when convened by the Archbishop of Canterbury for common counsel, consultation, and mutual support, and to confer on the implementation of proposals from the Anglican Consultative Council. The primates normally meet every two years, though in recent years it has met over both longer and shorter intervals. The role of the Primates’ Meeting has evolved in the course of the crisis over human sexuality, as it has offered pastoral advice, and has become the context in which the primates of those churches which have changed liturgies or canons around marriage to include same-sex couples are able to explain their churches’ actions. The 2016 Primates’ Meeting identified a series of consequences that provinces that depart from classic Anglican teaching are asked to undertake, namely, the removal of their members from ecumenical or doctrinal commissions and positions of elected leadership within the Communion. Anglican reflection in the Instruments of Communion goes beyond functionality to ecclesiology. These structures, which are expressions of the life of the Church, maintain and strengthen the visible communion of the Church (Eames 1998: s 26). They work together to serve and protect the inner mystery of the Church’s communion (Eames 1998: s 27), the trinitarian life of God in the Church, and to help all the baptized embrace and live out Christ's mission and ministry in the world (Virginia 1997: s 5.4, 6.36).

Ecumenism and Communion The Anglican sense of being part of, but not the whole of, the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church recognizes that other churches with which they are not in communion likewise belong to this one church. This recognition has led to an Anglican awareness of the abnormal state of Christian disunity. The Lambeth Conference has been the Instrument of Communion that consistently held before Anglicans an ecumenical vision of the Church. For example, as the 1930 Lambeth Conference said, The Conference makes this statement praying for and eagerly awaiting the time when the Churches of the present Anglican Communion will enter into communion with other parts of the Catholic Church not definable as Anglican in the above sense, as a step towards the ultimate reunion of all Christendom in one visibly united fellowship. (Lambeth 1930: Res 49) The quest for Christian unity and the questions around Anglican unity are one and the same. Ecumenical ecclesiology has enriched Anglican ecclesiology. Of particular significance are the agreed statements of the Anglican Communion’s bilateral dialogues,

ANGLICAN ECCLESIOLOGY

 209

such as the Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission’s agreed statements on The Church as Communion (1990) and Life in Christ, Communion, Morals and the Church (1993). The Anglican–Orthodox dialogue has contributed in a unique way to an Anglican appropriation of an ecclesiology of communion, especially The Church of the Triune God (2007). The 1998 Lambeth Conference gave a positive assessment of the World Council of Churches’ statement on unity at the 1991 Assembly, with its unequivocal ecclesiology of communion: The statement on visible unity adopted by the Seventh Assembly in Canberra, The Unity of the Church as Koinonia: Gift and Calling, was particularly important for Anglicans in deepening the vision of unity. Not only is it consistent with our Anglican understanding, but it challenges us to go on to taking bold steps in partnerships with others on the basis of explicit agreements in faith (“Called to be One: Section IV Report,” Lambeth Conference 1998: 225) . Currently the churches of the Anglican Communion, with other member churches of the World Council of Churches, are studying the convergence statement of the Commission on Faith and Order, The Church: Towards a Common Vision. At a time when internal Anglican unity is strained, a significant source of ecclesiological insight and vision that is available to Anglicans and their Instruments of Communion is its ecumenical agreements from both multilateral and bilateral dialogue commissions. The significance of ecumenical ecclesiologies of communion in the development of Anglican ecclesiology has already been noted.

Controversies and Communion As noted, the very first Lambeth Conference dealt with church-dividing issues of biblical interpretation and human sexuality, namely polygamy. Early twentieth century conflict was over the remarriage of divorced persons and artificial contraception. Anglican discourse in the past fifty years has similarly been consumed by debates around the ordination of women to the priesthood and the episcopate, and newer questions of human sexuality and marriage, including the sacramental marriages of same-sex couples. The consistent response of the Instruments of Communion when acute disagreement seems to have the power to divide the Anglican Communion has been to reflect ecclesiologically on the nature and mission of the Church as communion. Anglican understandings of the Church as communion or koinonia have developed and deepened in the contexts of controversy.

CONCLUSION Anglican ecclesiology, as viewed from the broadest historic perspective ranging from the early medieval period to the modern era, has contained differences of culture, spirituality, and liturgical and theological expression within unity and communion. From its roots in the medieval English Church, for instance, the ecclesia anglicana held together diverse roots in Roman and Celtic traditions. The sixteenth-century Church of England witnessed both an openness to the Reformation as well as continuity with its Western catholic inheritance. Anglican ecclesiology can be characterized as a communion of churches in unity and diversity.

210

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

As the Anglican tradition has spread around the world, the autonomous churches of the Anglican Communion have expressed their unity and diversity in more challenging ways as they have sought to proclaim the gospel in different historic and cultural contexts. To the experience of communion in unity and diversity, more recently Anglican ecclesiology acknowledges the painful witness of a communion of churches in unity, diversity, and deep disagreement. A significant discernment of recent Anglican reflection on ecclesiology is the recognition that churches can never be completely “out” of communion with each other; even “impaired communion” remains within the communion of the triune God.

REFERENCES Abbott, Walter M., ed. (1966), The Documents of Vatican II, New York: Guild Press. Book of Common Prayer 1662 (1969), Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coleman, R., ed. (1992), Resolutions of the Twelve Lambeth Conferences, 1867–1988, Toronto: Anglican Book Centre. Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith and Order (2018), Towards a Symphony of Instruments: A Historical and Theological Consideration of the Instruments of Communion of the Anglican Communion, Unity, Faith and Order Paper No 1, London: Anglican Consultative Council. Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence in the Body of Christ. The Report of the Toronto Anglican Congress (1963), http:​/​/ang​​lican​​histo​​ry​.or​​g​/can​​ada​/t​​oront​​o​_mut​​​ual19​​63​.ht​​ml The Anglican Communion Covenant, http:​/​/www​​.angl​​icanc​​ommun​​ion​.o​​rg​/me​​dia​/9​​9905/​​The​_A​​ nglic​​a​n​_Co​​venan​​t​.pdf​ The Lambeth Conference 1968: Resolutions and Reports (1968), London: SPCK. The Official Report of the Lambeth Conference 1998 (1999), Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Morehouse. The Virginia Report: The Report of the Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission (1997), London: Anglican Consultative Council. The Windsor Report (2004), London: Anglican Consultative Council. Women in the Anglican Episcopate: Theology, Guidelines and Practice. The Eames Commission and the Monitoring Group Reports (1998), Toronto: Anglican Book Centre.

Chapter FIFTEEN

Wesleyan and Methodist Ecclesiology LACEYE WARNER

In the meantime let all those who are real members of the church see that they walk holy and unblameable in all things. . . . Above all things, let your love abound. . . . By this let all men know whose disciples ye are, because you love one another. —John Wesley, “Of the Church” (1785)

INTRODUCTION Methodism’s missional and evangelistic heritage contributes significantly to its ecclesiology. John and Charles Wesley did not leave evidence of any intention on their parts for the early Methodist renewal movement within the eighteenth-century Church of England to become a separate ecclesial entity. Methodism developed from a missional imperative rather than from doctrinal disputes similar to the often polemical origins of most other Protestant denominations. While this is largely true, a brief mention of John Wesley’s rogue acts of ordination seems appropriate. Wesley ordained, a practice reserved for the episcopacy, three ministers prior to their departure for the United States, granting them sacramental authority in the midst of a shortage of Church of England priests at the dawn of the Revolutionary War (or War of Rebellion), implying a polity dispute. In spite of this unusual act, the Church of England did not discipline or excommunicate John Wesley. While both John and Charles Wesley remained Anglican priests until their deaths, ambiguity lingers in that Anglican and Episcopal churches do not recognize Methodist ordination as continuous with apostolic succession. In the following pages components of a Wesleyan and Methodist ecclesiology will be explored including doctrinal foundations, ordination, sacraments, and distinctive marks, including connectionalism, reflecting particularly on United Methodism in the midst of the broader Wesleyan tradition.

MISSIONAL MEANS OF GRACE The nature of the church throughout Methodism can at times seem elusive. Wesleyan and Methodist ecclesiology exhibits tensions between a mixed heritage from Catholic and Protestant roots—namely its roots as a renewal movement and the emphasis placed on doctrine (Jones 2002: 246). Albert Outler provocatively asked the potentially

212

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

unanswerable question, “Do Methodists have a doctrine of the Church?” In Outler’s essay of that name, he argued for Methodism’s character as an “evangelical order” pursuing renewal in a larger catholic context, finding itself “detraditioned” as a movement turned church (Outler 1991: 211–26). Despite United Methodism’s lack of ecclesiology per se, resulting in confusion as to its appropriate contribution to ecumenical conversations, it does not lack an awareness of the primary means through which Christians make sense of faith and discipleship, namely by living into God’s reign and gift of salvation. In one of his essays, Geoffrey Wainwright alluded to the closing words of Albert Outler’s essay, “Every denomination in a divided and broken Christendom is an ecclesiola in via [church in pilgrimage], but Methodists have a peculiar heritage that might make the transitive character of our ecclesiastical existence not only tolerable but positively proleptic” (Wainwright 1983: 220–1). Outler, in his concluding statement, went on to claim, “what we really have to contribute to any emergent Christian community is not our apparatus but our mission.” Outler, highlighting Methodism’s missional purpose and vocation as the primary characteristic of its identity, emphasizes, “this business of ‘being a church’ is really our chief business!” (Outler 1991: 226). Albert Outler’s question of “Do Methodists have a doctrine of the Church?” sometimes haunts conversations regarding Wesleyan and Methodist ecclesiology. Outler offers an accurate, but ambiguous, response: “The answer ‘yes’ says too much; ‘no’ says too little. ‘In a manner of speaking,’ which is more nearly accurate than the other two, seems nevertheless equivocal” (Outler 1991: 212). John Wesley’s passion and commitment for church renewal as well as his imperative to “spread scriptural holiness” offers a complementing refrain, if not a direct response, to questions like Outler’s. Richard Heitzenrater responds to Outler’s question by describing the church in Wesleyan and Methodist tradition as a means of grace in an effort to align the being of the church, or what it “is,” and the practices of the church, or what it “does” (Heitzenrater 2007: 119–28). The church is the primary location in which one lives out one’s faith as a participant in a community of faith and member of the body of Christ. The church is the place where through worship, prayer, and the sacraments—all considered means of grace by John Wesley—one’s understanding of Christian doctrine and its embodiment is formed and challenged (Jones 2003: 151). The church at its best functions as a, though not the only, means of God’s grace (Jones 2003: 151). Along with other denominations in the Wesleyan tradition, the United Methodist Church’s character as a means of grace includes much, if not all, of its organization and polity alongside worship, sacraments, and ordination. For example, the structure of annual conferences, the episcopacy, and the itineracy may be understood as prudential means of grace (Jones 2002: 255). While these may falter in specific circumstances, throughout its history the formation of the movement’s structure has kept its missional purpose at the center. The Wesleyan tradition emerged from a missional imperative (Logan 1994: 16). This is distinctive, since other denominational traditions often trace their roots to disagreements regarding confessional or doctrinal matters. John Wesley summarized his understanding of Methodism’s purpose: “What may we reasonably believe to be God’s design in raising up the Preachers called Methodists? A. To reform the nation and, in particular, the Church; to spread scriptural holiness over the land” (Davies 1984: 10:845). This means Methodism, and the Wesleyan tradition more broadly, affirms basic traditional Christian commitments proceeding from the Church of England of Wesley’s day, rather than pursuing a doctrinal distinctiveness from other Christian traditions. In addition to the importance of basic Christian doctrine, this commitment to foundational Christian

WESLEYAN AND METHODIST ECCLESIOLOGY

 213

beliefs deeply informed the practices of the early Methodist movement leading to its impact of renewal.

DOCTRINE John and Charles Wesley did not emphasize a sophisticated set of doctrines for the Methodist movement. Instead, John described a shared desire with his brother Charles in his “A Plain Account of the People Called Methodists” to preach and “to convince those who would hear what true Christianity was and to persuade them to embrace it” (Davies 1984: 9:254). John Wesley urged early Methodists to follow “only common sense and Scripture” but added that in “looking back, [there was generally] something in Christian antiquity” (Davies 1984: 9:254). This commitment to basic Christian doctrines rooted in Scripture and early Christian tradition, in their depth and focus, fed the vitality of the Methodist renewal movement. John and Charles Wesley insisted upon the following four points: First, that orthodoxy, or right opinions, is at best but a very slender part of religion, if it can be allowed to be any part of it at all; that neither does religion consist in negatives, in bare harmlessness of any kind; nor merely in externals, in doing good, or using the means of grace, in works of piety (so called) or of charity: that it is nothing short of or different from the “mind that was in Christ”; the image of God stamped upon the heart; inward righteousness, attended with the peace of God and “joy in the Holy Ghost.” Secondly, that the only way under heaven to this religion is to “repent and believe the gospel”; or (as the Apostle words it) “repentance towards God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.” Thirdly, that by this faith, “he that worketh not, but believeth on Him that justifieth the ungodly, is justified freely by His grace, through the redemption which is in Jesus Christ.” And, lastly, that “being justified by faith,” we taste of the heaven to which we are going, we are holy and happy, we tread down sin and fear, and “sit in heavenly places with Christ Jesus” (Davies 1984: 9:254–5). In this way, John Wesley, with Charles, emphasized basic Christian doctrinal foundations as mentioned above—all are made in the image of God and, if they choose to receive it, may have the mind of Christ, repentance, justification, and sanctification, respectively. These doctrines, as described by the Wesleys, resonated with a person’s spiritual journey. From this perspective, and with deep concern for the spiritual wellbeing of others, John Wesley drew from the standard doctrinal resources of the Church of England—the Book of Common Prayer, The Catechism, Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, and the Book of Homilies. These materials also informed those he compiled for the Methodists in North America. In Wesley’s concern to share and shape doctrinal materials for Methodists later to become the Methodist Episcopal Church, among others, the materials Wesley sent to America reflected, though with his revisions, the doctrinal materials of the Church of England. For example, Wesley sent the following with Thomas Coke in 1784: “The Sunday Service,” Hymnal, Articles of Religion (revised), The Catechism, General Rules, and a selection of John Wesley’s Sermons as well as his Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament. For United Methodists, a successor of the Methodist Episcopal Church, the Methodist Episcopal Church South, Methodist Protestant Church, and Evangelical United

214

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Brethren, there are a number of doctrinal materials that lend texture and depth to their understanding of the nature of the United Methodist Church. Among the United Methodist Church’s doctrinal standards are two historic documents in which the nature of the church is described—“The Articles of Religion” and “The Confession of Faith of the Evangelical United Brethren.” The Evangelical United Brethren represents the union of the Evangelical Association and United Brethren that occurred in 1946. The Evangelical United Brethren share German pietist roots. These documents are both among United Methodism’s constitutionally protected doctrinal standards. The specific descriptions of the church from these documents demonstrate the tension referred to earlier by Jones. “The first place where this tension shows up is in the different senses of the word ‘church’ used in the constitutional standards” (Jones 2002: 247). These references to the nature of the church provide a frame within which to consider biblical and practical theological components of Wesleyan and Methodists ecclesiology.

The Articles of Religion, The Methodist Church Article XIII—Of the Church  The visible church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men in which the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments duly administered according to Christ’s ordinance, in all those things that of necessity are requisite of the same. —“The Articles of Religion of The Methodist Church,” 2016 Discipline, para. 104 In addition to acknowledging the visible church as a means of grace, this description highlights three marks: (1) a body of faithful persons, (2) where the Word of God is preached and (3) the sacraments duly administered (Jones 2002: 245). As discussed earlier, these “marks” indicate ways in which the community of faith, or local church, functions as a means of grace through its gathering in worship to hear the Scriptures preached and to participate in the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. The Evangelical United Brethren “Confession of Faith” dates to the early nineteenth century with the leadership of Jacob Albright (1759–1808) of the Evangelical Association and Phillip Otterbein (1726–1813) of the United Brethren in Christ (Discipline 2016 para. 103: 62–3). In Confession V, “The Church,” similar themes occur to Article XIII above, but with additional components including the Nicene Creed’s reference to the four marks of the church and the role of the Holy Spirit. Article V—The Church  We believe the Christian Church is the community of all true believers under the Lordship of Christ. We believe it is one, holy, apostolic and catholic. It is the redemptive fellowship in which the Word of God is preached by men divinely called, and the sacraments are duly administered according to Christ’s own appointment. Under the Discipline of the Holy Spirit the Church exists for the maintenance of worship, the edification of believers and the redemption of the world. —“The Confession of Faith of the Evangelical United Brethren Church,” 2016 Discipline, para. 104 This article from “The Confession of Faith” does not mention the qualification of “visible” in relation to the church. However, it does echo the marks of a community of believers,

WESLEYAN AND METHODIST ECCLESIOLOGY

 215

the importance of the preaching of the Word of God, and the administration of the sacraments similar to Article XIII (Jones 2002: 247). The article from “The Confession of Faith” includes the four marks of the church from the Nicene Creed informed by the New Testament. “We believe it is one, holy, apostolic, and catholic” (Jones 2002: 248). This article also articulates the role of the Holy Spirit “for the maintenance of worship, the edification of believers and the redemption of the world.” Wesleyan and Methodist traditions share a number of “Basic Christian Affirmations” such as those described in the United Methodist Book of Discipline that link its identity as a church in communion with other Christians (Discipline 2016 para. 102: 49). These include belief in the triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—as well as the biblical witness to God’s activity and the church universal (Discipline 2016 para. 102, 49). The Discipline highlights the following affirmations: ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

We hold in common with all Christians a faith in the mystery of salvation in and through Jesus Christ. We share the Christian belief that God’s redemptive love is realized in human life by the activity of the Holy Spirit, both in personal experience and in the community of believers. We understand ourselves to be part of Christ’s universal church when by adoration, proclamation, and service we become conformed to Christ. With other Christians we recognize that the reign of God is both a present and future reality. We share with many Christian communions a recognition of the authority of Scripture in matters of faith, the confession that our justification as sinners is by grace through faith, and the sober realization that the church is in need of continual reformation and renewal (Discipline 2016 para. 102: 49–50).

SACRAMENTS In both Article XIII and Confession V the administration of the sacraments are mentioned as a constitutive part of the church’s identity. Among the means of grace, both sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper are outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace (Jones 2002: 256). Additionally, the liturgies of the sacraments give voice to the missional themes of the early Methodist renewal movement within the Church of England. From the United Methodist Hymnal, and consistent with Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry, the ecumenical Lima Document, baptized members of the community of faith are commissioned into this missional imperative in the baptismal liturgies: “With God’s help we will proclaim the good news and live according to the example of Jesus Christ” (UM Hymnal 1989: 35, 40). Likewise, the liturgy of the Lord’s Supper also concludes with a commission: “Grant that we may go into the world in the strength of your Spirit, to give ourselves for others, in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord” (UM Hymnal 1989: 11).

Baptism John Wesley’s views on baptism strongly echo Church of England understandings. Following in the footsteps of his father, who was also an Anglican parish priest and

216

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

scholar, John Wesley abridged his father’s appendix to The Pious Communicant (1700) on baptism in his “Treatise on Baptism” (1756) (Heitzenrater 1995: 200). In this work and throughout the Methodist renewal movement, John asserted that, through baptism, persons are not only incorporated into the body of Christ and made members of the Church, but also infused with grace and adopted as children of God (Heitzenrater 1995: 200). John Wesley argued for infant baptism rather than baptizing adults (also described as believer’s baptism), drawing comparisons between baptism and biblical mandates for circumcision of infants to make the point (Heitzenrater 1995: 200). Later, John Wesley provided an addendum to his thoughts on the New Birth, clarifying that the New Birth does not always accompany the sacrament of baptism (Heitzenrater 1995: 206). In baptism, one is born of water and the Spirit. Outward holiness, or doing good works, is not the same as inward holiness, or new birth in Christ (Heitzenrater 1995: 206). New birth and creation in Jesus Christ erase original sin allowing for new creation in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit (Heitzenrater 1995: 206). Wesley included a Sunday Service in his plans for resourcing a Methodist movement in the United States distinct from the Church of England. In these materials, revised from the Book of Common Prayer, Wesley described baptism by sprinkling as an alternative to the usual practice of immersion—the first known instance of such practice in a baptismal rite (Heitzenrater 1995: 289). Wesley included the Book of Common Prayer rubric of making a sign of the cross on infants’ foreheads in baptism. Wesley also softened the language related to regeneration from “that he being born again” to “that he may be born again” (Heitzenrater 1995: 289). For John Wesley spiritual rebirth was a twofold experience in the normal process of Christian development to be received through baptism in infancy and through commitment to Christ later in life (Felton 1996: 1). A Wesleyan view of salvation includes both God’s initiating activity of grace and a willing human response. In its development in the United States, much of Methodism was unable to maintain this Wesleyan balance of sacramental and evangelical emphases (Felton 1996: 1–2). Access to the sacraments was limited during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when the Methodist movement was largely under the leadership of laypersons who were not authorized to administer them (Felton 1996: 1–2). The creative Wesleyan synthesis of sacramentalism and evangelicalism weakened in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and both of these components became diluted among Methodist communities (Felton 1996: 1–2). In recent decades United Methodists, among other Wesleyan and Protestant Christians more broadly, have participated in liturgical renewal reflecting more deeply on the connection of beliefs and practices.

Lord’s Supper John Wesley described the Lord’s Supper in his “Sermon on the Mount” as “the grand channel whereby the grace of his [God’s] Spirit was conveyed to the souls of all the children of God” (Phillips 2004: 5). During the years in which Methodism was beginning and growing, Wesley himself communed an average every five days throughout his adult life, communing daily during the seasons of Easter and Christmas (Maddox 1994: 202). His sermon “The Duty of Constant Communion” (1787) emphasizes the role of the sacrament in the lives of Christians and explains his encouragement to Methodists in the United States in 1784 to celebrate the Lord’s Supper weekly (Maddox 1994: 202). While Wesley originally assumed Methodists would commune in local Anglican churches, this

WESLEYAN AND METHODIST ECCLESIOLOGY

 217

assumption shifted as the Methodist renewal movement within the Church of England attracted non-conformists as well. These participants did not have access to the Lord’s Supper with the same frequency and chose, for various reasons and pressures, not to commune with the Anglicans. Wesley maintained throughout his life and ministry the belief that the Lord’s Supper should be officiated by an ordained elder. As a result of these competing values and subsequent tensions, Wesley began resourcing the Methodist renewal movements in Britain and the United States through bolder means. These means led eventually to Wesley discerning ordination as a necessity for some ministering in the United States—hence Methodism’s development from a missional imperative. The Wesley brothers wrote and published a collection titled Hymns on the Lord’s Supper in 1745. Introducing hymns into the communion service was a novelty, though the hymns resonated with the theology and structure of the Anglican liturgy (Maddox 1994: 203). The Wesleys wrote about love, grace, sacrifice, forgiveness, the presence of Christ, mystery, healing, nourishment, holiness, and hope of heaven (“This Holy Mystery” 2004: 5). John Wesley wrote little original material on the theology of the eucharist, drawing from Daniel Brevint’s On the Christian Sacrament and Sacrifice as a preface to the collection of hymns (Maddox 1994: 203). Wesley followed Anglican teaching on the Lord’s Supper viewing the sacrament not as a repeated sacrifice for recurrent sin, but as a commemoration of Christ’s sacrifice that “re-presents” Christ’s once-for-all sacrifice demonstrating the gift of salvation. The Lord’s Supper for Wesley, consistent with Anglican teaching, conveys Christ’s grace not only for pardon but also empowerment for growth in Christian holiness (Maddox 1994: 203). The Wesleys appropriated Brevint’s language of Christ’s “real presence” in the sacrament emphasizing its relationship to the communicant more than the elements (Maddox 1994: 203–4). Following Richard Hooker, and his mother Susanna Wesley, John Wesley emphasized the agency of the Holy Spirit as the means by which Christ is present to communicants (Maddox 1994: 204). Wesley viewed receiving grace through the means of the Lord’s Supper as not the static presence of a “benefit” but as the pardoning and empowering presence of Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit (Maddox 1994: 204).

ORDINATION: MEMBERSHIP AS MINISTRY In the early Methodist movement, numerous roles filled by pastoral leaders, both lay and ordained, sustained ministries of renewal and participation in the reign of God. John Wesley did not ordain leaders for the Methodist renewal movement in Great Britain, though late in his life and ministry he eventually ordained Thomas Coke, Richard Whatcoat, and Thomas Vassey, sending them to encourage and lead the Methodist movement in the United States. In the United States, ordained ministers most often itinerated to bring the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper to the unfolding movement in an emerging nation. In Britain the ordained ministers within the Methodist movement were priests of the Church of England, ordained initially as deacons, similarly to provisional members in contemporary United Methodism, before becoming priests or elders in full connection. Also in Britain, John Wesley established a number of lay and other set-apart roles, such as class leaders, stewards, and visitors of the sick, to oversee and nurture the ministry of religious societies or bands and classes as well as local preachers to minister across the connection. In the United Methodist Church, drawing on Wesleyan traditions, ordination is a gift, affirmation, and continuation of the apostolic ministry “through persons empowered by

218

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

the Holy Spirit” (Discipline 2016 para. 303: 224). In ordination individuals are set apart for ministry, though an individual may be called to pastoral ministry but not called to ordination, for example, licensed local pastors. Since the earliest days of Methodism in the United States, traditional ordination has been marked by the election of candidates for ordination by the annual conference and ordination by the bishop laying hands upon the candidate. The 1787 Methodist Episcopal Book of Discipline describes these marks as the constitution of elders. They are “constituted” by “the Election of the Majority in the Conference, and by the laying on of Hands of Bishop, and the Elders present” (Discipline 1787 section V: 7). These practices continue today in the United Methodist Church and among other Wesleyan and Methodist communities of faith, though with support from additional bodies such as the Board of Ordained Ministry in relation to both elder and deacon. According to the United Methodist Discipline, “ordination is fulfilled in leadership of the people of God through ministries of Service, Word, Sacrament, Order, Compassion, and Justice” (Discipline 2016 para. 303.2: 224). Ordained ministers are often referred to as pastors—a term that seems initially to appear among Methodists in the United States in the 1892 Discipline (Discipline 1892: 104). A pastor is “an ordained elder, provisional deacon, or licensed person approved by vote of the clergy members in full connection and may be appointed by the bishop to be in charge of a station, circuit, cooperative parish, extension ministry, ecumenical shared ministry, or to a church of another denomination, or on the staff of one such appointment” (Discipline 2016 para. 339: 274–5). Though there are a number of pastoral roles, there are two orders of ordained ministry in United Methodism, and much of Methodism: the deacon and the elder. Those who respond to God’s call to lead in service, word, compassion, and justice and equip others for this ministry through teaching, proclamation, and worship and who assist elders in the administration of the sacraments are ordained as deacons. Those whose leadership in service includes preaching and teaching the Word of God, administration of the sacraments, ordering the Church for its mission and service and administration of the Discipline of the Church are ordained as elders. (Discipline 2016 para. 303.2: 224) The United Methodist Discipline goes on to point out that ordained ministers practice their ministry in covenant with all Christians, “especially with those whom they lead and serve in ministry” (Discipline 2016 para. 303.3: 224). It is important that all practice faithful and effective ministries together, participating and realizing God’s reign. Through such ministry it is hoped and expected that local churches will intentionally nurture candidates for ordained ministry (Discipline 2016 para. 303.4: 224–5). Alongside the roles assumed by those described above, there are additional categories of membership within which ministry is practiced in the United Methodist Church. As previously discussed, one may practice pastoral ministry in a formally recognized role, receiving the title of “Reverend,” without leading a local church, holding full membership in the annual conference, or ordination. The three main categories of membership for those ordained or practicing pastoral roles are associate, provisional, and full. Dating back to John Wesley’s leadership of the early Methodist movement, the roles and membership have represented more complexity than simplicity. Additionally, while requirements and processes are described in the Discipline, each annual conference possesses the authority to further modify requirements and processes for receiving annual conference membership.

WESLEYAN AND METHODIST ECCLESIOLOGY

 219

Associate membership is most often held by licensed local pastors or ordained pastoral members of other denominations. Associate members of an annual conference participate in the church’s itinerant ministry. They are permitted to vote on all matters except (a) constitutional amendments and (b) all matters of ordination, character, and conference relations of clergy (Discipline 2016 para. 321: 242). There is a fellowship of local pastors and associate members organized in each annual conference (Discipline 2016 para. 323: 244). Provisional membership is held by those preparing for full membership and ordination as deacon or elder. Candidates may be elected to provisional membership by vote of the clergy members in full connection upon recommendation of the Board of Ordained Ministry. Provisional members are commissioned to their ministry roles during a worship service of the annual conference at which the bishop commissions each candidate by name to the ministry of deacon or elder: Commissioning is the act of the church that publicly acknowledges God’s call and the response, talents, gifts and training of the candidate. The church invokes the Holy Spirit as the candidate is commissioned to be a faithful servant leader among the people, to lead the church in service, to proclaim the Word of God and to equip others for ministry. (Discipline 2016 para. 325: 242) Full membership or full connection is held by those ordained to the roles of deacon and elder. Provisional members may be elected to full membership following at least two years as provisional members of the annual conference and successful fulfillment of the disciplinary requirements for full membership. These requirements include the recommendation of the board of ordained ministry with at least two-thirds vote of support to the clergy session of the annual conference and two-thirds vote of the clergy members of the annual conference (Discipline 2016 para. 335: 248). During the clergy session at which full members are considered for election, the bishop may choose to examine candidates, drawing from the historic questions. These questions, as well as the duties of the preachers, date back to John Wesley and Frances Asbury in the early generations of Methodism in North America. Candidates elected to full membership at the clergy session of annual conference receive ordination from the laying on of hands by the presiding bishop during a service of ordination following the clergy session. Upon election to full membership and ordination, elders submit themselves to the bishop and participation in the itinerant system. The itinerant system continues to be the accepted method for appointment of ordained elders, provisional elders, and associate members in the United Methodist Church (Discpline 2016 para. 338: 272). “Bishops and cabinets shall commit to and support open itineracy and the protection of the prophetic pulpit and diversity” (Discipline 2016 para. 338: 272–4). Since the leadership of John Wesley in the early Methodist movement, the appointment of clergy and traveling preachers, historically the most authoritative roles within the Methodist and Wesleyan traditions, has occurred through an itinerant system.

The Elder in Full Connection Full-time ordained ministry in the United Methodist Church is most often carried out by elders in full connection or full membership: “Elders are ordained to a lifetime ministry of Word, Sacrament, Order, and Service” (Discipline 2016 para. 332: 264). Elders in

220

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

full connection may supervise deacons in full connection as well as other local pastors and lay-ministers. They most often serve as lead pastors in local churches. “By authority given in their ordination, they are authorized to preach and teach the Word of God, to provide pastoral care and counsel, to administer the sacraments of baptism and Holy Communion, and to order the life of the Church for service in mission and ministry” (Discipline 2016 para. 332: 264). Elders may also serve in appointments beyond the local church or extension ministries. In all settings the elder fulfills his or her calling “by leading the people of God in worship and prayer, by leading persons to faith in Jesus Christ, by exercising pastoral supervision, and by ordering the Church in mission to the world” (Discipline 2016 para. 332: 264). The elder in full connection is given the authority to vote on all matters pertaining to those in or seeking membership as full members. The elder shares with the deacon in full connection responsibility for discerning matters of ordination and conference relations of clergy (Discipline 2016 para. 332: 265). Elders, with deacons, may “vote on all matters in the annual conference except in election of lay delegates to the general and jurisdictional or central conferences (para. 601a)” (Discipline 2016 para. 332: 265). Like deacons, as well as associate members, the elders also share in covenant relationship through the order of elders formed in each annual conference (Discipline 2016 para. 332: 264). Responsibilities accompany the authority of ordination and full membership granted to elders in full connection. There are several paragraphs that offer descriptions and summaries of these responsibilities, but paras. 340 and 341 are the clearest in their descriptions of the responsibilities and duties of this very important role—both in terms of what to do and what not to do. According to para. 340, “Responsibilities and Duties of Elders and Licensed Pastors,” the fourfold ministry of the elder in all settings consists of: word, sacrament, order, and service. Licensed pastors share with the elders the responsibilities and duties of a pastor for this fourfold ministry within the context of their appointment.

The Deacon in Full Connection The United Methodist Church established the current (permanent) role of deacon at the General Conference in 1996. The person filling this role is ordained and holds full membership in the annual conference; she or he also shares, with elders, responsibility for all matters of ordination, character, and conference relations of clergy (Discipline 2016 para. 330: 254–6). The role of deacon, a role deeply rooted in Christian tradition, receives additional authority in comparison with preceding roles within Methodist traditions (Yrigoyen: 1999: 327). Deacons within United Methodism “are ordained by a bishop to a lifetime ministry of Word, Service, Compassion, and Justice, to both the community and the congregation in a ministry that connects the two” (Discipline 2016 para. 329: 254). Other diaconate roles preceded the current order of deacon within Methodist traditions. For example, the early Methodist renewal movement within Great Britain and the earliest embodiment of Methodism in America practiced a two-step ordination of deacon to elder—a pattern that was in place until 1996 (Rowe 1999: 344). Preceding the current role of deacon was that of diaconal minister, established among United Methodists in 1976 (Rowe 1999: 352). This role developed from influential forces emerging from the ecumenical movement among the World Council of Churches (Rowe 1999: 350–2). According to the 1976 Discipline, “a diaconal minister is a person whose decision to make

WESLEYAN AND METHODIST ECCLESIOLOGY

 221

a professional career in the employed status in the United Methodist Church or its related agencies is accompanied by the meeting of standards for the office of diaconal minister, who has been certified or commissioned in the chosen field of service, and who has been consecrated by a bishop” (Discipline 1976 para. 303: 162). According to Kenneth Rowe, “diaconal ministers were laypersons called of God; employed by the church or an outside agency, either part-time or full-time; and set apart through consecration for specialized ministries of love, justice, and service” (Rowe 1999: 353). While the service of the diaconal minister occurred primarily within the church, the current deacon serves primarily in the world. Deacons serve both local churches and communities, acting as a bridge between the two: “In the congregation, the ministry of the deacon is to teach and to form disciples, and to lead worship together with other ordained and laypersons” (Discipline 2016 para. 329.1: 254). Deacons also work for justice, “serving with compassion as they seek to serve those on the margins of society” (Discipline 2016 para. 329.1: 254). Bishops appoint deacons, like elders, to their places of ministry, and while they do not itinerate, they may work in a range of contexts including local churches, agencies, schools, colleges, and theological schools within the United Methodist connection (Discipline 2016 para. 331: 259–64). They may also be appointed to serve in educational, corporate, or other service industries beyond United Methodism (Discipline 2016 para. 331: 259–64). According to the Discipline, “the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry, Division of Ordained Ministry, in order to assist the Boards of Ordained Ministry and cabinets, will provide guidelines for validating the appropriateness of appointment settings beyond the local church and will be available for consultation with bishops, cabinets, and Boards of Ordained Ministry” (Discipline 2016 para. 331.4d: 260). Similar to elders in extension ministry, deacons are accountable to the bishop, district superintendent, and board of ordained ministry and affiliate with a local church in their home annual conference as well as with the connectional structure in the annual conference in which they serve, if other than their home (Discipline 2016 para. 331.5: 261). Deacons and provisional deacons appointed to a local church hold membership in that charge conference (technically, though in addition to their membership in the annual conference). Those appointed beyond the local church also hold membership within a charge conference in the annual conference in which they are appointed (Discipline 2016 para. 331.9b: 262).

A CONNECTIONAL CHURCH Methodism embodies characteristics of a connectional church in its polity and organization. For example, local churches have roots in the religious societies in Wesley’s Methodist renewal movement in both Britain and the United States that were connected with one another on a circuit within annual conference(s). Itinerating preachers appointed by an itinerating superintendency of district superintendents and bishops continue to serve local churches. Those annual conferences in United Methodism are now connected in jurisdictional and central conferences governed by the General Conference and supported by numerous general church bodies such as boards and agencies from the Council of Bishops, Connectional Table, and Judicial Council to the General Boards of Higher Education and Ministry, Discipleship, and Global Ministries, as well as the General Council on Finance and Administration and the United Methodist Publishing House,

222

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

among many others. The United Methodist Discipline defines the term connectionalism when describing the general agencies of the denomination: [Connectionalism] is a vital web of interactive relationships (para. 132) that includes the agencies of the Church, as defined in paras. 701.2 and 701.3, with the purpose of equipping local churches for ministry and by providing a connection for ministry throughout the world, all to the glory of God. It provides us with wonderful opportunities to carry out our mission in unity and strength. (Discipline 2016 para. 701: 521) According to the United Methodist Discipline, “connectionalism is an important part of our identity as United Methodists” (Discipline 2016 para. 701: 521). The language of connection—or “connexion”—dates to usage by John Wesley to describe the character of the early Methodist renewal movement. The early Methodist renewal movement seems to have relied on three convictions: “Christ died for all (so mission is the primary imperative), all are called to holy living (hence the Discipline and the need for oversight), and there is no such thing as solitary religion (hence the societies and all that is designed to sustain them)” (Beck 1998: 131). Wesley used the term connexion to refer to at least three layers of relationships within the movement for which he was the center as well as the authority—members, societies, and preachers—with a later addition of the conference (Beck 1998: 130). Several pragmatic attributes such as the development of band and class meetings, itineracy, rules, hymns, sermons, and Notes upon the New Testament as well as other publications in the Christian library supported this connexion. Eventually, particularly for Methodism in the United States, the trust clause was added, ensuring the ownership and use of facilities would remain held in trust for the annual conference, building upon what are now called doctrinal standards including the Articles of Religion (Beck 1998: 131). In the United States, Methodist connection represents multiple complex relationships. For Russell Richey, United Methodism institutionalizes three competing structures of connectionalism from Wesley’s time: superintendency and appointment-making, legislative decision-making authority of the conference, and organizational work in agencies (Richey 2009: 217). In this way, connectionalism lacks a simplicity and clarity to inform a consistent use of the term and facilitate understanding of the concept it represents. However, Methodists have continued to speak of themselves and their church as a connection even after a motion to expunge the language of connection from the Methodist Episcopal Discipline at the 1816 General Conference (the first following Frances Asbury’s death en route to the gathering). Richey argues this simple motion may “symbolize Methodists’ inability and/or lack of desire adequately to draw out the rich implications of their connectionalism either for themselves or for the larger Christian community” (Richey 2009: 215). At its best, Methodism embodies a connectionalism that is both organizational and functional as well as theological and eschatological—connecting the ministry and mission of the denomination to the unfolding reign of God.

MARKS OF A WESLEYAN CHURCH John Wesley often asked Methodists of his day, “What is the mark? Who is a Methodist . . .?” And, as he often did, Wesley supplied a response: “A Methodist is one who has

WESLEYAN AND METHODIST ECCLESIOLOGY

 223

‘the love of God shed abroad in [one’s] heart by the Holy Ghost given unto [them].’” This initial response was then followed by numerous marks identifying specific practices and values (Davies 1984: 9:30–46). In the fifth volume of the United Methodism in American Culture series, Russell Richey with Dennis Campbell and William Lawrence survey Methodist history for similar occasions of articulating the distinguishing marks of Methodism (Richey, Campbell, and Lawrence 2005: 2–6). Richey et al. discern four marks characterizing Methodist practices of church: connectional, disciplined, catholic, and itinerant (Richey, Campbell, and Lawrence 2005: 7). According to Richey et al.: [These] serve well to epitomize Methodism, particularly Methodist life together. And they link nicely and appropriately with what have been traditionally termed the “notes” or “marks” of the church, class affirmations Christians make about the nature and purpose of the church. The church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. Individually and collectively these traditional ecclesial affirmations parallel the four Methodist marks. (Richey, Campbell, and Lawrence 2005: 7) The process to discover deeper patterns in their research, ultimately leading to the distillation of these four marks with parallels to the traditional marks of the church echoed in the Nicene Creed (one, holy, catholic, and apostolic), began with a larger list, following the example of Methodists from over the centuries. According to Richey et al., “We and they have characterized Methodism not with a tight creedal or confessional affirmation but with an array of characteristics embracing belief, practice, ethos, commitment, lifestyle, and mission” (Richey, Campbell, and Lawrence 2005: 6). These distinctive marks represent a similar and shared trajectory from a common origin—John Wesley’s early Methodist renewal movement within the Church of England. Another formulation from John Wesley of his priority for the movement— specifically the importance of holding doctrine and practices together—is summarized in the following questions: “What to teach; How to teach; and What to do; that is, how to regulate our doctrine, discipline, and practice?” (quoted in Richey, Campbell, and Lawrence 2005: 11). From these questions Richey and his co-editors observe: “Surprisingly there seems to be little inclination among Methodists to go the other way, from the practices and polity of Methodist to their theological meaning” (Richey, Campbell, and Lawrence 2005: 11). The Wesleyan/Methodist movements over the centuries strive to hold together doctrines with participation in God’s mission to and with the world. While ambiguity will remain a thread of Wesleyan and Methodist ecclesiology, its missional imperative as a means of God’s grace to the world offers a unique ethos, part movement and part institution, through which to share and receive God’s love in Christ.

REFERENCES Beck, B. (1998), “Connexion and Koinonia: Wesley’s Legacy and the Ecumenical Ideal,” in Randy Maddox (ed.), Rethinking Wesley’s Theology for Contemporary Methodism, Nashville: Abingdon Press. Davies, R., ed. (1984–), The Bicentennial Edition of the Works of John Wesley, Nashville: Abingdon Press. Felton, G. (1996), By Water and the Spirit, Nashville: United Methodist Publishing House.

224

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Heitzenrater, R. (1995), Wesley and the People Called Methodists, Nashville: Abingdon Press. Heitzenrater, R. (2007), “Wesleyan Ecclesiology: Methodism as a Means of Grace,” in S. T. Kimbrough Jr. (ed.), Orthodox and Wesleyan Ecclesiology, 119–28, Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Jones, S. (2002), United Methodist Doctrine: The Extreme Center, Nashville: Abingdon Press. Jones, S. (2003), The Evangelistic Love of God and Neighbor, Nashville: Abingdon Press. Logan, J. (1994), “The Evangelical Imperative: A Wesleyan Perspective,” in James Logan (ed.), Theology and Evangelism in the Wesleyan Heritage, 15–33, Nashville: Kingswood Books . Maddox, R. (1994), Responsible Grace: John Wesley’s Practical Theology, Nashville: Kingswood Books. Outler, A. (1991), “Do Methodists Have a Doctrine of the Church?” in Thomas C. Oden and Leicester R. Longden (eds.), The Wesleyan Theological Heritage, 211–26, Grand Rapids: Zondervan. Phillips, E. (2004), This Holy Mystery, Nashville: United Methodist Publishing House. Richey, R. (2009), “Connection and Connectionalism,” in William J. Abraham and James E. Kirby (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Methodist Studies, 211–28, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Richey, R., D. Campbell, and W. Lawrence, eds. (2005), Marks of Methodism: Theology in Ecclesial Practice, Vol. 5, United Methodism and American Culture series, Nashville: Abingdon Press. Rowe, K. (Winter 1999), “The Ministry of Deacons in Methodism from Wesley to Today (1998),” Quarterly Review 19 (4): 343–56. The Book of Discipline for the United Methodist Church (1976), Nashville: The United Methodist Publishing House. The Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church (2016), Nashville: United Methodist Publishing House. The Doctrines and Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church (1892), New York: Hunt and Eaton. United Methodist Hymnal (1989), Nashville: The United Methodist Publishing House. Wesley, J. (1785), “Of the Church,” in Albert Outler (ed.), The Works of John Wesley; quoted in Bryan Stone, A Reader in Ecclesiology, Burlington: Ashgate Publishing. Wainwright, G. (1983), The Ecumenical Moment: Crisis and Opportunity for the Church, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Yrigoyen, C. (Winter 1999), “The Office of Deacon: A Historical Summary,” Quarterly Review 19 (4): 327–42.

Chapter SIXTEEN

Baptist Ecclesiology PAUL FIDDES

INTRODUCTION Baptist ecclesiology is a classic expression of what may be called “covenant ecclesiology.” Although groups exhibiting this way of being the Christian church are not uniform with each other, “covenant ecclesiology” should be identified as a fourth kind of ecclesiology that emerged from the Protestant Reformation, alongside Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican forms of the church (Fiddes 2018: 1–14). It was characteristic of both continental Anabaptists and English Separatists from the Church of England in the sixteenth century, together with ecclesial communities that emerged from the Separatist movement during the period of the long English Reformation, notably Baptists and Independents. These dissenting groups have often been dubbed “congregationalist” in polity by church historians, but—as will become clear in the following discussion—this term is misleading at least as far as Baptists are concerned, since it underplays the dynamic for congregations to associate together which is inherent within the covenant idea. Baptists worldwide are not a homogeneous grouping of Christian believers, despite the fact that many of them belong to the Baptist World Alliance which joins in fellowship some 170,000 local churches in 124 countries, and their diversity makes it difficult to construct a definitive list of marks of Baptist identity. However, their ecclesial life may be generally described as “covenantal,” in the distinct Baptist form of finding the covenant to be actualized in the baptism of believing disciples, whether or not the exact term “covenant” is employed today.

TWO DIMENSIONS OF COVENANT Covenant theology was pervasive in the thinking of the Reformers and their immediate successors, including English Puritans, where in the first place “covenant” referred to an eternal “covenant of grace” which God had made with created beings for their salvation in Jesus Christ. Calvin was influential in developing this idea, which for him included the restriction of the covenant to the elect (Institutes 2.6.1–4; 3.21.6–7; McNeill 1960: 340–8, 929–32). Further, the term “covenant” could refer to an agreement which God was believed to have graciously made in history with a national or transnational church, such as the Church of England or the Church of Rome (Peel and Carlson 1951: 51). This scheme of covenant was complicated by several issues. For example, many theologians after Calvin maintained that there was a “covenant of law” or “covenant of works” which preceded the actualization of the “covenant of grace” mediated by Jesus Christ. A disputed question was whether in the Old Testament dispensation the covenant

226

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

of grace was already present in a shadowy form, in ambiguous relation to the “covenant of works” which could not, however, in itself bring salvation (so Ames 1630: 102–13). Then there was the question as to whether God’s covenant of grace with created beings was unconditional as a gift or conditional upon obedience. For instance, a radical Puritan who remained in the established church, Thomas Cartwright, asserted that God’s covenant with the Church of England must be unconditional and so remained unbroken, despite disobedience over matters of church order: “the church, notwithstanding her spiritual adultery, is not unchurched” (Peel and Carlson 1951: 64–5). It was distinctive of groups such as Anabaptists and Separatists to maintain that God’s covenant was conditional; they were convinced that the existing Roman Catholic Church had violated its covenant with God, and that the newly reformed national or regional churches had either followed suit or were in danger of doing so. In a novel exegesis of Scripture, the step they took was thus to particularize the covenant as a relationship between God and distinct local congregations. Each local church, even if only two or three faithful people, was to be gathered by its own covenant. Characteristic of this covenant ecclesiology, as expressed by such Separatists as Robert Browne (Peel and Carlson 1953: 141–2) were two dimensions, which we might figuratively call “vertical” and “horizontal,” and these two vectors of relation are still discernible in Baptist ecclesiology today. On the vertical plane is the relation of the congregation to God, which takes the particular form of living under the rule of Christ alone, who is calling a church into covenant. Though it is essential that faith be voluntary, in response to the initiating grace of God, the local church is not to be regarded as a merely voluntary society, such as envisaged by the philosopher John Locke in his defense of religious freedom (Locke 1689: 10). Rather, the congregation gathers in obedience to Christ as the maker of the new covenant through his death and resurrection. Such congregations, including Baptists, have often been called “gathered churches,” but the model of covenant makes clear that its members do not regard themselves as gathering by their own choice, but consider themselves to be obedient to the Christ who is gathering them. Then, on the horizontal plane, members of the congregation relate to each other and agree to live together by a certain discipline of life, holding each other up to the high demands of discipleship. The members of a church instituted by covenant thus undertake a dual promise, to be faithful to God and to one another. In the words of one of the founders of the Baptist movement, John Smyth: “A visible communion of Saincts is of two, three or more Saincts joyned together by covenant with God & themselves” (Smyth 1607: 1.252). That he is envisaging a literal act of covenant-making is clear from his following assertion that “the outward part of the true forme of the true visible church is a vowe, promise, oath, or covenant betwixt God and the Saints . . . This covenant hath 2 parts. 1. Respecting God and the faithful. 2. Respecting the faithful mutually” (254). For some two hundred years it was common among Particular Baptist Churches—that is, those holding essentially to a Calvinistic view of election to salvation—to enshrine the covenant in a written document to which members would put their marks or names. There are many instances of such church covenants not only in England but America, where Baptist churches flourished among the colonists from about 1638 (Burrage 1904: 173–96). Among General Baptists— that is, those holding to an Arminian advocacy of human free will and to the universal efficacy of Christ’s sacrifice—the act of baptism itself was generally regarded as an entry into covenant relationship, without a formal document (e.g., Knollys 1645: 13–14), but there were other marks of a covenantal ecclesiology. We shall see shortly what these were

BAPTIST ECCLESIOLOGY

 227

(see next section), and how they still exist among Baptist churches today, regardless of whether the congregation possesses and uses a written covenant. One more historic example is apposite. Although Anabaptists on the continent held to a similar covenant ecclesiology, and therefore showed some common genes with Baptists, there is no evidence of direct influence on the emergence of Baptist congregations. Rather, Baptists developed out of English Separatist groups, or Christian congregations who first separated from the newly created Church of England during the reign of Elizabeth I, objecting to the authority of monarch and Parliament over the appointment of ministry and regulation of worship in the church, and aiming to live their own lives under their own church discipline (White 1971: 160–9). Especially significant in the history of Baptists then is the covenant made by a Separatist congregation at Gainsborough near Lincoln in 1606 or 1607. As one of their members, William Bradford (later to be Governor of the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts) recalled the event years later in America, the members “joyned them selves (by a covenant of the Lord) into a Church estate, in the fellowship of the gospell, to walke in all his wayes, made known, or to be made known unto them, according to their best endeavours, whatsoever it should cost them, the Lord assisting them” (Bradford 1912: 20–2). Within a year the part of the congregation that gathered in Gainsborough would be in exile in Amsterdam with their pastor, John Smyth, and within two years would have adopted the practice of believers’ baptism. Some members of that church would return to England in 1611 with Thomas Helwys as their pastor to found the first General Baptist church on English soil, in Spitalfields, London. The other part of the original covenanting group, who worshiped nearby in Scrooby, was to follow their fellow believers to Holland, but would retain the Separatist practice of baptizing infants. From their church in Leiden, served by John Robinson as its pastor, many of them would sail for America on the Mayflower and contribute to the story of Congregationalism in New England. Thus Separatism was to diverge into Baptist and Pedobaptist streams of covenant ecclesiology. In Bradford’s recollection we can discern the two dimensions of covenant, and the foreshadowing of a later covenant formulation much used among Baptists, namely to “walk together” and “watch over one another” (Burrage 1904: 153–66) Thus, to the two marks of the church they received from the magisterial Reformers—that a true church was where the Word of God was truly preached and the sacraments were properly administered—they added a third, that of church discipline, as the Reformer Martin Bucer had done earlier (Brachlow 1988: 28–9). Historically, discipline included admission to membership, pastoral care, rebuke of error, suspension from sharing in the Lord’s Table due to behavior unbecoming of a disciple, and excommunication in severe cases. Modern forms of spiritual discipline will be mutual pastoral care among members and the mutual encouragement of the highest standards as a disciple of Christ. Taking up the Reformation stress on Christ as “prophet, priest, and king,” and faced by the claims of a state-sanctioned ecclesiastical authority, Baptists followed the Separatists in claiming that the risen Christ, present in the midst of the congregation, shared the authority of his threefold office with the whole congregation. The office of prophet gave them authority to preach and elect their own ministers; the office of priest gave them the right to celebrate the Lord’s Supper; and the kingly office of Christ gave them the “power of the keys,” to exercise discipline (Declaration 1611: 119 [art 9]; Confession 1644: 159–60 [art. 10]; 166 [art. 13]; Confession 1677: 260 [ch. 8]). Underlying these three marks is, however, the presence of Christ who alone rules in the Church as covenant mediator. Appeal has often been made to the words of Christ:

228

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

“Where two or three are gathered together, there am I in the midst of them” (Mt. 18: 20). This also entails the belief, in the phrase of the Declaration of Principle of the Baptist Union of Great Britain of 1904, “That our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is the sole and absolute authority in all matters relating to faith and practice . . . and that each Church has liberty to interpret and administer his laws” (Kidd 1996: 21). For all their diversity, Baptists throughout the world share in common the government of the local congregation by a meeting of all its members, usually called “the church meeting.” This meeting makes decisions about the life and mission of the local church, preferably by finding a consensus but where necessary through a democratic vote. The aim is not to win a majority to a particular opinion but to find “the mind of Christ” for the congregation. At the end of the nineteenth century the language of the “autonomy” of the local church began to appear in statements of Baptist identity, first in America (e.g., Mullins [1912] 1925: 64), but the literal meaning of “self-rule” is theologically inconsistent with the covenant principle where Christ alone rules in the church. Earlier language was about the “liberty” of the local church to discern the “laws” or the purpose of Christ through reading Scripture and interpreting it corporately. The “liberty” rather than “independence” of the congregation is also consistent with an ecclesiology which is wider in scope than the local scene, as we shall see in the next section. While Separatists made the move of localizing the covenant, there was an innovative Baptist contribution when John Smyth perceived that the intersection of the horizontal and the vertical dimensions of covenant must mean that God’s eternal covenant of grace is actually identified with the covenant-making of a local congregation in instituting a church or expanding its membership through baptism: “We say the Church or two or three faithful people Seperated from the world and joyned together in a true covenant, have both Christ, the covenant, & promises” (Smyth 1609a: 2.403). Clearly, “the” covenant referred to here, in contrast to “a” covenant, is the eternal covenant of gracious salvation, containing all God’s promises. When people are joined in “a” covenant, they have the covenant itself. B. R. White thus comments that “it seems that for [Smyth], in the covenant promise of the local congregation the eternal covenant of grace became contemporary and man’s acceptance of it was actualized in history” (White 1971: 128). For another example of the conflation of eternal and local covenant we may consult the somewhat later practice of English Particular Baptists. When Benjamin Keach produced a covenant for his church at Horsley Down (1697), which became the model for many other covenants in Particular Baptist churches, he wrote an opening pledge which significantly appeals to the “everlasting covenant,” promising “to give up ourselves to the Lord, in a Church state . . . that he may be our God, and we may be his People, through the Everlasting Covenant of his Free grace, in which alone we hope to be accepted by him, through his blessed Son Jesus Christ” (Keach 1697: 71).

TWO TENSIONS OF THE COVENANT This covenant ecclesiology gives rise to two tensions of authority in the life of the church, and correspondingly the presence of these tensions is the evidence of covenant thinking, whether or not the term is actually used. The tensions are embodied in a Baptist confession of 1644, the so-called London Confession to which seven Particular Baptist churches in the city subscribed. The first is a tension between the pastoral oversight exercised by the whole church community and the oversight committed to its “officers” or spiritual leaders. As Article 44 expresses it:

BAPTIST ECCLESIOLOGY

 229

And as Christ for the keeping of this Church in holy and orderly Communion, placeth some special men over the Church, who by their office are to govern, oversee, visit, watch; so likewise for the better keeping thereof in all places, by all the members, he hath given authority, and laid duty upon all, to watch over one another. (Confession 1644: 168) This article describes a dynamic view of authority in the community, in which oversight flows to and fro between the personal and the communal; the responsibility of “watching over” the church belongs both to all the members gathered in a church meeting to find the mind or purpose of Christ, and to the spiritual leader(s). The London Confession expresses this duality without any apparent sense of strain: while all members agree to “watch over” (oversee) each other spiritually, they also recognize that Christ has called some to an office in which they have a special responsibility for oversight. But this tension is not resolved by any rule or formula defining the limits of oversight in each case. The two kinds of oversight are left fluid and open, requiring a relationship of trust. While “discipline” among Baptists of modern times has modulated into general pastoral care, the general tension in authority remains between ordained ministers and congregation and gives a Baptist congregation its recognizable tone. The second ecclesial tension discernible in the London Confession is between the local congregation and the associating of churches together. The seven churches, scattered throughout London, confess in Article 47 that although the particular Congregations be distinct and severall Bodies, every one a compact and knit Citie in it selfe; yet are they all to walk by one and the same Rule, and by all meanes convenient to have the counsell and help of one another in all needfull affaires of the Church, as members of one body in the common faith under Christ their onely head. (Confession 1644: 168–9) Each congregation makes decisions for its own faith and life, and yet together they are members of “one body,” observing “one and the same Rule.” The Rule is that of Christ, not an ecclesial rule or canon law defining areas of authority, and is discerned on the basis of Scripture when congregations assemble together. Like authority within the single local congregation, this tension can only be lived within by trust. Indeed, the record of the first general meeting of the Abingdon Association (Particular Baptist) in 1652 does not only affirm the practical advantages of cooperation, in mutual assistance, sharing of resources in mission, relieving poverty and giving advice; it also advances an interesting theological argument for the churches to hold “a firm communion with each other”: that is, there is the same relation between the particular churches as there is between the particular members of one church. The record adds, “For the churches of Christ doe all make up one body or church in generall under Christ their head” (White 1974: 126). By analogy, then, the association meeting is a kind of church meeting of church meetings. Because Christ rules in the local congregation, it has a liberty that cannot be infringed upon by any external ecclesial power. However, since Christ also rules in assemblies of churches when they gather, the local church meeting must give serious attention to the way that the association has discerned the mind of Christ. The historian B. R. White judges of the early Baptist churches that “they seem to have felt that they needed a very good reason for not falling in with the programme and advice of their association” (White 1976: 28). Of course, the church meeting would still be free to recognize, in exceptional circumstances, that there were good reasons not to confirm the wider decisions. From the modern period

230

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

comes the view of a document about associating accepted by the Baptist Union of Great Britain: “No local church is complete of itself and does well to seek for that of Christ which is expressed in the wider body. . . . To fulfil the mission of Christ, churches have to do it together that they may make up for each other’s lacks and set forth the whole Christ” (Baptist Union 1998: 4). Both tensions identified are in fact held within a framework of “covenant,” or an agreement made between members of the church, and between those members and God in Christ. The tensions arise naturally if the final authority in congregation and association is given to Christ as ruler and covenant-maker in the church without a hierarchical scheme to apply the rule in social terms. While the London Confession does not explicitly use the word “covenant” it applies the covenant language of “walking together” for the associating of the congregations in “one body” and “one rule.” The same two ecclesial tensions can be found in an influential Separatist confession of 1596. In fact, the compilers of the 1644 Baptist confession took the two passages in Articles 44 and 47 cited above verbatim from Articles 26 and 38 of the 1596 confession (True Confession 1596: 90, 94), as well as modeling their whole confession on the earlier one, demonstrating their heritage from English Separatism. The two characteristic tensions of authority, in congregation and association, could (and still can) issue in a lapsing toward one side of the polarity or the other—for example toward the autonomy of the local church, to the authoritarianism of leaders, or to the tyranny of the majority of the congregation. If, however, the tensions are held in bonds of trust, they can be truly creative, and they have been worked out in ways which are contextual for each age in which Baptists have lived.

COVENANT IN ASSOCIATING TOGETHER In England, Particular Baptists began meeting regularly in associations from the 1650s, formed according to geographical regions and holding some kind of correspondence with other associations. General Baptists appear to have formed their first association in Cambridgeshire in 1653, but—unlike Particular Baptists—they also held a regular “General Assembly” joining association assemblies together, the first meeting being in 1654. The Particular Baptists followed suit in 1689 and 1692 but then reverted to meetings only at the association level until the formation of a national Baptist Union in 1813. Outside England and Wales, a Scottish Baptist Association was not formed until 1835, but as early as 1707 five Calvinistic Baptist churches in America had formed the Philadelphia Association, and by 1814 there were more than 120 associations in the United States, both Arminian (“General”) and Calvinistic (“Regular” or “Particular”); their distribution tended to be theological rather than strictly geographical, gathering those of similar convictions (May 1977: 70). The geographical pattern tended to be repeated in the founding of multiple Baptist churches in the nineteenth century on the continent of Europe, largely by German Baptist immigrant traders and farmers, and worldwide in the British Empire and in spheres of American influence. A foundational local church would often create a network or association of churches around it, partly by church planting, and in time these networks would coalesce into a national unit. So, for example, the Nairobi Baptist Association in Kenya was formed in 1961, based on the Nairobi Church, and the Baptist Convention in Kenya was established in 1971 after the formation of other local associations similarly in Mombassa and Nyeri (Wardin 1995: 17–19). Names for these networks are not uniform: in Jamaica, local congregations are grouped in circuits sharing a pastor and grouped

BAPTIST ECCLESIOLOGY

 231

to form “area Councils,” and the Jamaica Baptist Union is composed of all ministers and church delegates. In England there are now thirteen “regional” associations, where there were historically some twenty-six associations based mainly on county boundaries. In countries where there are few Baptist churches, such as Syria, a national convention can offer support to congregations under pressure without the structure of associations. Theologically, however, the principle is consistent: there is an establishing of covenant relations and a recognition of the rule of Christ in different dimensions of social life wider than the local church (Baptist Union 1994b: 4–14). The existence of fellowship (koinonia) on different social levels calls for some kind of oversight (episkope), rather than a historic tradition of episkope being the origin of local instances of fellowship. The same principle of covenant also generally shapes the form of a national body. Often this consists of both an “assembly” of all churches and a “council” of elected representatives, but whatever the form, the aim is the same: to find the mind of Christ for the churches through various instruments of unity, the relation between which is often more contingent than dogmatic. Both Particular and General Baptist association meetings in England and Wales seem to have dealt in their early years with two main issues: questions from local churches about doctrinal disagreements they were facing, and the need to provide monetary support for poor and struggling congregations (White 1996: 49–55, 65–70). A similar pattern emerged in associations in America (May 1977, 71–2; Shurden 1975: 233–7). Particular Baptists were very clear that association meetings had no ecclesial authority over the local congregation; the representatives (“messengers”) sent from the churches met to “consider” disputed matters and they reported their advice to the churches concerned, but were not “entrusted with any church-power properly so called” (Confession 1677: 289 [art 26]). General Baptists, however, were inclined to tip the balance toward centralization; the General Assembly of 1696 resolved that it was an “irregular act” for a local church to reject an agreement made at Assembly (Baptist Historical Society 1909: 1.42), and the General Baptist “Orthodox Creed”—though accepted by only a limited group of churches, mainly in Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, and Oxfordshire—affirmed that General Assemblies “make but one church, and have lawful right, and suffrage . . . to act in the name of Christ” (Orthodox Creed 1679: 327 [art. 39]). However, this article refers to “Brethren” as well as “Bishops” and “Elders” present at the meeting, and the General Baptist minister and theologian Thomas Grantham makes clear that all Baptist church members were welcome to participate in the deliberations of the Assembly, not simply ordained ministers. He remarks that “this mutual Consultation . . . of many Churches together, shews not the Superiority of Churches one above another; but only the Brotherly interest which they have in the Strength of each other” (Grantham 1678: 2.2.142). While remnants of the second tension of covenant thus appear in General Baptist practice, it was the Particular Baptists who maintained the tension that came from fluidity (and so ambiguity) of authority between local congregation and assemblies of churches, accordingly laying more explicit stress on covenant than the General Baptists did (Fiddes 2018: 7–14). It was their approach that that won through to the modern age, when distinctions between “Particular” and “General” traditions have virtually disappeared. In England, with the demise of the largest part of the General Baptist cause in the eighteenth century, its successor in the “New Connexion of General Baptists” gradually became a non-geographical association of the Particular Baptist Union (formed in 1813), finally uniting formally with it in 1891 to form the Baptist Union of Great Britain. The Particular Baptists had abandoned an insistence on the five points of Calvinism for the sake of unity

232

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

and united mission (Kidd 1996: 17–21), but a Particular Baptist view of the authority of the new Union persisted. Elsewhere in the world today the same tension is readily observable, with adjustments for context. A central Baptist union or convention may hold the kind of powers over a local congregation that come from accrediting ministers, running a pension scheme or organizing an assistance fund for ministry in churches. In some former Eastern European countries, such as Romania, local congregations have no formal legal standing and thus the central body has inherited from communist days a mediatorial relationship between churches and government. Association also provides a focus for unity in faith and practice; for the first two hundred years of Baptist life Particular Baptist associations adopted a confession of faith, usually the so-called Second London Confession of 1669, and the General Baptist Assembly did likewise with its “Standard Confession” of 1660. Confessions were intended to explain Baptist convictions to those outside the community and to offer an educational tool for those inside, and despite disavowals, tended to take a creedal form and sometimes to commend the historic creeds (Harmon 2006: 71–88). In most Baptist unions and conventions in the world today—notable exceptions are the Baptist Unions of England, Scotland and Wales, and the American Baptist Churches in the United States—there is such a confession and a similar expectation that churches in fellowship with them will adopt it. But, despite all these qualifications, it is a Baptist instinct to preserve the “liberty” of the local congregation against encroachment by external ecclesial authority as far as possible, preserving the tension of covenant. Significantly, the confession of the German (Baptist) Bund Evangelisch-Freikirchlicher Gemeinden declares that “this confession of faith is an expression of and a witness to the churches’ agreement in belief. Thus it cannot itself be an object of faith or a compulsory law for faith” (Parker 1982: 57). Usually, the tension between local and supra-local is preserved by declining to call the association or union of churches “a church” in itself (one exception today is the Baptist Church of Georgia), and to restrict the term “church” to the local congregation. However, with increasing emphasis in recent years on covenantal ties, there is also increasing recognition that structures of fellowship beyond the local congregation are at least “ecclesial.” A covenant ecclesiology of association, and a general direction of historic development from local church to association and union, does not mean that in Baptist ecclesiology the church universal is theologically understood as an extension from the local congregation, or as a sum total of local congregations. The relation between the local covenant bond and the eternal covenant offered to all humankind will be analogous to the relation between a particular local congregation and the invisible company of all God’s elect. As Baptists have agreed in recent conversations with the Roman Catholic Church, the universal church cannot be merely a multiplication of many local communities (Word of God 2012: 37 [art. 12]). Rather, there is a universal reality which exists simultaneously with any local manifestation of it, just as God’s eternal covenant with humankind is simultaneous with the local covenant bond. From their earliest days Baptists have regarded the local congregation as a visible manifestation—the phrase used was often “visible saints”—of an “invisible church,” or the total company of all the redeemed, whether they were inside or outside the visible church, and whether they lived in the past, the present, or the future. This did not imply, however, that there was no visibility of the church beyond the local level. In the General Baptist Orthodox Creed of 1679, an article headed “Of the invisible catholick Church of Christ” is accompanied by an article entitled “Of the catholick Church as visible,”

BAPTIST ECCLESIOLOGY

 233

where the singular word “church” is glossed as “several distinct congregations” (plural). It is clear that the body of Christ becomes visible, not only in each congregation, but in the gathering of congregations together (Orthodox Creed 1679: 319 [art. 29]). As the eighteenth-century Particular Baptist Daniel Turner makes clear, as well as an “invisible Catholic Church” and a visible local church, there is a “visible Catholic Church” which he defines broadly as “the whole body of those that make any visible profession of a religious regard to the revealed will of God,” even though some may have only “the form of godliness” and not its “real power” (Turner 1778: 2–4). There is thus a dynamic within covenant theology toward engagement and even union with other Christian confessions. For a Baptist church, the way that it relates to other Baptist churches is exactly the same as the way it aims to relate to non-Baptist churches— that is, through making covenant—and such a relation entails the visibility of the body of Christ through itself and its partners (Pushing at the Boundaries 2005: 113–16). In accord with this, some twenty Baptist Conventions or Unions are members of the World Council of Churches. In recent ecumenical discussion, Koinonia has become the “sacred thread” (Fuchs 2008: 252) weaving together an ecumenical convergence on the nature of the church, partly because it allows for the flexibility of “degrees of communion” already manifest (Unitatis redintegratio 1977: 455–6) as well as hopes for a fuller visible unity. It was therefore a definite achievement of the recent conversations between the Roman Catholic Church and the Baptist World Alliance to align covenant with koinonia in the agreed statement that “the koinonia of the church may also be understood as a covenant community . . . ‘Covenant’ expresses at once both the initiative and prior activity of God in making relationship with his people through Christ, and the willing commitment of people to each other and to God” (Word of God 2012: 40).

SACRAMENTS ACCORDING TO A COVENANTAL PERSPECTIVE The majority of Baptists throughout the world prefer the term “ordinance” to “sacrament,” but it should not be assumed that this always implies a “memorialist” doctrine of the Lord’s Supper and the contraction of the meaning of baptism to a profession of faith. Some (by no means all) Baptists do take such a non-sacramental approach, but this is a phenomenon in Baptist life which largely dates from the nineteenth century, prompted by reaction to the Tractarian movement and encouraged by both an Enlightenment empiricism and an evangelical stress on personal experience of Christ (Bebbington 2010: 185–90). In the seventeenth century, the terms “sacrament” and “ordinance” were used interchangeably by Baptists (Orthodox Creed 1679: 317 [art. 27]; Lambe 1643: 35–9; Keach 1683: 425), the latter term emphasizing that the actions referred to were instituted by Christ himself. In those early days the sacraments—as I prefer to name them myself— were intimately connected with the ecclesiology of covenant, and they are increasingly so again in modern Baptist ecclesiology. Seventeenth-century Baptist thinkers were divided about whether the sacraments were “seals” of the covenant, a terminology common in Reformed theology. If they do “seal” or confirm the gift of the covenant to believers, as well as mark them out as recipients (so Collins 1680: 25), then they are evidently a means of grace. Those in the earlier years who denied that the sacraments were seals did not, however, thereby evacuate the sacraments of the gracious activity of God since they, like John Smyth himself (Smyth

234

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

1609b: 567, 582–7), preferred to identify the Holy Spirit with the “seal” and affirmed that this sealing of the Spirit was received through the sacraments. A modern “Baptist Manifesto” from the United States has taken up this language, affirming that the Spirit “makes the performance of these practices effectual so as to seal and nourish the faith and freedom of believers” (Broadway 1997: 307). The restriction of baptism to that of believing disciples defines the distinctive form of covenantal ecclesiology that Baptists espouse, in which such baptism normally marks the entry into the covenant community and through which the covenant of God with a particular church is reaffirmed and enlarged. Among many General Baptists, after John Smyth, baptism in fact replaced the signing of a covenant document rather than being complementary to it; Thomas Grantham, for example, called it “the Baptismal Covenant” (Grantham 1688: 23–7). While Reformed Christian churches retained infant baptism from the Catholic tradition, largely on the grounds that infants were to be included in the covenant by virtue of the faith of their parents (arguing from the rite of circumcision in the “old covenant”), Baptists insisted that a covenanted church required all its members to be able to make covenant promises on their own account. This should not be taken to mean that the profession of faith by a disciple exhausts the meaning of baptism. Baptists have envisaged the act of baptism—usually but not essentially by immersion in order to set forth the imagery of dying and rising with Christ—as a place where divine grace and human faith meet (Baptist Union 1996: 17–20); in the romantic language of George Beasley-Murray, baptismal water is a place in the material world that can become a “trysting-place” with the crucified and risen Christ who is the maker of the new covenant (Beasley-Murray 1963: 305). This modern Baptist scholar was echoing early Baptists who understood the presence of Christ in the baptismal waters to be salvific. The Particular Baptist Randall Roper finds baptism to be “the instrumental cause of remission of sin” while the blood of Christ is the efficient cause (Roper 1661: 19–20). The General Baptist Thomas Grantham refers to baptism as “the laver of regeneration” (Grantham 2.2.22) and insists that it is “a means wherein not only the remission of our sins shall be granted to us, but as a condition whereupon we shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost, Acts 2:38,” so that baptism “was Fore-ordained to signifie and Sacramentally to confer the grace of the pardon of sin, and the inward washing of the conscience by faith in the bloud of Jesus Christ” (Grantham 1671: 87–8). In various ways Baptists have held together the belief that there is a transforming grace of God in baptism with the requirement that someone must be regenerated through faith in Christ before baptism. In the past, the two convictions were often reconciled by affirming that in baptism the Spirit gave assurance of salvation, and enabled the beginning of life in a “visible state of grace” within the covenant (Lambe 1643: 36–7), baptism being “necessary to the incorporating or embodying Disciples of Christ in a Church capacity” (Grantham 1678: 162.2.20). Correspondingly, for Grantham the Spirit is given to a believer in Christ before baptism, but is also given in baptism, and the covenant is “sealed” by the Spirit in laying on of hands after baptism (2.1.91, 97), a rite insisted upon in the past by General Baptists as well as by many Particular Baptists. This is why it is more accurate to say that Baptists practice the baptism of “believing disciples,” and not simply of “believers”; baptism includes a commissioning to share, as a disciple, in the mission of God in the world, and so to receive appropriate gifts of the Spirit for this work. Among Baptists of more recent years, the work of God’s grace before, within, and after baptism noted by early Baptists has been integrated by stressing that baptism is only one

BAPTIST ECCLESIOLOGY

 235

moment in a whole “process” or “journey” of initiation into Christ (Fiddes 2003: 139– 55). This insight has also proved an essential part of Baptist ecumenical conversations with Christian confessions which practice infant baptism. From their early years, a sizeable number of Baptist churches (at first mainly in the Particular Baptist tradition, now regardless of church origin) have practiced “open communion,” welcoming to the holy table Christians baptized either as believing disciples or as infants, and many have extended this inclusiveness, regardless of the type of baptism, to “open membership” of the local congregation. One theological basis for this, advanced by Particular Baptist minister John Bunyan, was that baptism was a matter of personal obedience to Christ and not a “church ordinance” constituting the covenant community. The church was established simply by the faith of its members (Bunyan 1673: 32–5). This seemed inconsistent to other Baptists for whom baptism was essential for entrance into the covenant community. Some Particular Baptist ministers, like Daniel Turner, were able to practice inclusiveness because they found that the “essence” of baptism was in the obligation it laid upon those baptized to live a “holy life” (Turner 1772: 10). If persons baptized as an infant recognized that their baptism had given them a sense of this demand of Christ upon their life, then their own conscientious belief that they had been truly baptized should be accepted as sufficient for fellowship. Turner was reaching toward the heart of baptism as the rule of the Christ who makes covenant, also expressed in his affirmation, citing Rom. 12:3 and 14:7, that “as the Lord Jesus receives and owns them on both sides of the question, we think we ought to do so too” (Turner 1780: 21) A more recent argument for inclusiveness lies in the perception that initiation into Christ is a process in which baptism plays an essential but not sole part. In recent ecumenical dialogues, Baptists have been advancing, with range of conversation partners, the idea of “common initiation” instead of the more contested “common baptism” (e.g., Conversations Around the World 2005: 45–8; Pushing at the Boundaries 2005: 31–57; Leuenberg 2005: 19–22; Word of God 2012: 69–72). If initiation into the Christian life is a process with a number of stages, then there can be equivalent patterns: for example, the sequence of infan​t-bap​tism–​nurtu​re–co​nfess​ion-o​f-fai​th–co​nfirm​ation​ (including commissioning as a disciple) can be accepted as comparable with the Baptist pattern of infan​t-ble​ssing​–nurt​ure–c​onfes​sion-​of-fa​ith–b​aptis​m–com​missi​oning​. This proposal was, in fact, foreshadowed in an important convergence document of the World Council of Churches, but has been sadly neglected (Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry 1982: 5). It is typical of a Baptist understanding of the sacraments to locate God’s grace in the presence of Christ who uses the materials of water, bread, and wine to deepen a reception of his presence as covenant mediator in the community, transforming its participants and drawing them even further into the life of the triune God. This self-presencing of Christ is in accord with an understanding of “grace” as God’s gracious self-giving, rather than any kind of substance. Thus, a Baptist approach to the eucharist or Lord’s Supper (the more usual term among Baptists) affirms a “real presence” throughout the action and drama of the rite rather than affirming any change of substance in the bread and wine or even restricting presence to the elements themselves (Word of God 2012: 78–9). Baptists have been historically influenced by two traditions, those of Calvin and Zwingli, generally reflected among Particular and General Baptists respectively. Both groups have understood the Supper to confirm believers in their membership of the covenant community, often using the term “seal” to express this. While there are certainly Baptists in the world today who take a purely “memorialist” view of the Supper and reject any mention of “means of grace,” earlier Baptist practice in both traditions understood that

236

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

the self-presencing of Christ in the rite was a gracious gift that established believers in their spiritual life and assured them of their participation in the covenant. The language of the Calvinist stream was that of a “spiritual eating and drinking” of the body of Christ, an indispensable metaphor for being nourished by the life of Christ. Thus an English Particular Baptist of the late seventeenth century, Hercules Collins, affirms that “as the Bread and Wine sustain the Life of the Body, so also his crucified Body, and Blood shed, are indeed the Meat and drink of our souls” (Collins 1680: 41–2) so that “by the Holy Ghost . . . we are Flesh of his Flesh, and Bone of his Bones” (39). Such a testimony is well represented among Baptists to the present day, who in prose and hymn have found the substance of the elements to be—as C. H. Spurgeon put it in the nineteenth century—“an ordinance of grace” through which we pass, as through a veil, “into Christ’s own arms” (Spurgeon 1971: 251), so that he “feeds us with his body and blood . . . to enter into us for food” (69, 353). General Baptists also readily used this language of spiritual eating and drinking, but they also followed the Zwinglian insight that there is an overlap between the “body of Christ” as held forth in bread, and the “body of Christ” lived as the congregation. In some way, sharing in the Lord’s Supper deepens not only the relationship of Christ with the individual believer, but the presence of Christ in his gathered people. The real presence of Christ is manifested in the community of the church, as it becomes more truly the body of Christ broken for the life of the world. Thus the General Baptist Thomas Lambe emphasized the congregational aspect of communion as a “sacrament of our continuance and conservation in the visible body of Christ” (Lambe 1643: 37). The modern idea that a community is formed by the stories that it tells can be allied with this understanding of the presence of Christ. As the community shares together in recalling the narrative of the Lord’s Supper, it does not only rediscover its identity; it enters imaginatively into the saving events of the story of Jesus which have made it what it is. It is here that the Baptist way of celebrating the Lord’s Supper perhaps makes a fundamental contribution to the eucharistic liturgy of the worldwide church. Without a prayer book, and simply taking the account of the apostle Paul in 1 Cor. 11:23-6 as their liturgy, Baptists have always told the words of institution as a story which has been “handed on” to the community, rather than incorporating them into a prayer of consecration addressed to God the Father.

MINISTRY ACCORDING TO COVENANTAL PERSPECTIVE Finally, let us return to the first ecclesial “tension” of the covenant, and the place of ministry in the church. It has been characteristic of Baptist understanding of New Testament passages about church leadership to hold to a twofold rather than threefold ministry: the pattern has been pastor and deacons (diakonoi)—the pastor being sometimes named “bishop” (episkopos), “elder” (presbuteros), or “minister.” In the words of the Second London Confession: “A particular Church gathered, and completely Organized, according to the mind of Christ, consists of Officers, and Members; And the Officers appointed by Christ to be chosen and set apart by the Church . . . to be continued to the end of the World, are Bishops or Elders and Deacons” (Confession 1677: 287 [ch. 26]). The phrase “appointed by Christ to be chosen by the Church” is critical. In this view, Christ appoints spiritual leaders, and the church discerns this act through its meeting together to find the mind of Christ, in the light of which it makes its choice. The objection of early Baptists

BAPTIST ECCLESIOLOGY

 237

to bishops in the Church of England was not so much the office of bishop in itself, as in the appointment of pastors in the church by the monarch, later in collaboration with Parliament. According to the idea of covenant, Christ alone was to rule in the church and in all matters of religion inside or outside the church, and the same principle led to the rejection of a “Book of Common Prayer” imposed by the state. It also resulted, as early as 1612, in a radical assertion of religious liberty for all, whether Christians, Jews, Muslims, or “heretikes” (Helwys 1612: 69). People were responsible for their religious convictions and practice only to God as sovereign, a sovereignty committed to Christ and not to the state. Baptists have not generally held to a rigid separation of church and state, believing—for example—from their earliest years (unlike Anabaptists) that church members could serve as civil magistrates; but they have rejected any interference of the state in the church or in religious opinions, even with the best of intentions to “uphold sound religion,” and have consistently resisted any giving of privilege to the church by the state. In Baptist practice, a person who is to hold the office of diakonia is set aside by the local church acting on its own, and a person holding the office of episkope is usually only set aside in the context of fellowship with the wider church. If a minister is to represent the church as a whole, he or she must have the call from Christ to this ministry recognized by as wide a section of the church universal as is appropriate and possible, beyond the local scene. From early days of Baptist life there was a coming together of ministers from a wide area around the local church to share in the act of ordination. In accord with this, the General Baptist Assembly of 1702 held that “the ordination of Elders by Elders [is] of Divine Institution” (Whitley 1909: 1. 70; so Gill [1769]1839: 2. 265). In modern times this has been accompanied (and sometimes replaced) by the involvement of a representative figure from the national Baptist union or convention or from a regional association. We may see in this practice an expression of the link of the episkopos with the church beyond the local scene; as Daniel Turner put it in the eighteenth century, “a minister of a particular church . . . is a minister of the church in general” (Turner 1778: 60; so Baptist Union 1994a: 43–4). Just as Baptists have found associations of churches to be an expression of the covenant, so they have established trans-local ministries. In early years these were called “messengers” (i.e., “apostles” or “those sent”), and these could be sent by a local congregation to found congregations and represent the church in association meetings, or they could be sent by associations to establish or strengthen congregations. Among Particular Baptists, these had no authority over local congregations (Confession 1677: 289 [art. 26]), but among some General Baptists it seemed they had authority in the churches they had founded, or among congregations that had taken part in their election (Orthodox Creed 1679: 320 [art. 31]). For some, as evidenced in the Orthodox Creed, they were distinguished as “bishops” from the “elders” (presbyters) of the local churches in a threefold office (also Stanley 1667: 115–9). For the most part, however, they generally fitted into the twofold pattern of ministry as forms of the same pastoral episkope as the local bishop or elder, but with a wider scope of pastoral care than the local episkopos or bishop/elder. Today, these trans-local or interchurch ministries may be called—for example—“regional ministers” (in England), superintendents (in Scotland), executive ministers (in the United States), or “senior presbyters” (in the Ukraine and Russia). In some Baptist unions or conventions they are named “bishops,” for example in Georgia, Latvia, Moldova, and an increasing number of African American Baptist churches.

238

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

The covenant principle thus offers flexibility in the way that ministry, sacraments, and ecclesial structure are to be actualized. It was compatible with this principle for about half the Baptist churches in North India to enter a united Church of North India in 1970, with an episcopal structure where bishops are elected by the churches and need to win their consent for their policy, as the Baptist churches themselves explained (Church of North India 2001: 12–15). It has also more recently been consistent with the covenant idea for the Baptist Union of Sweden to enter a “uniting church” with Methodists and the Mission Covenant Church (coming from a Lutheran background). What remains essential is that the rule of Christ as discerned by the church takes precedence over human structures of authority, and is constantly allowed to relativize them.

REFERENCES Ames, W. (1630), The Marrow of Sacred Divinity, 2nd ed., London: Edward Griffin. Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (1982), Faith and Order Paper 111, Geneva: WCC. Baptist Union of Great Britain (1994a), Forms of Ministry among Baptists, A Discussion Document by the Doctrine and Worship Committee, London: Baptist Union Publications. Baptist Union of Great Britain (1994b), The Nature of the Assembly and the Council of the Baptist Union of Great Britain, Faith and Unity Executive Committee, London: Baptist Union Publications. Baptist Union of Great Britain (1996), Believing and Being Baptized, A Discussion Document by the Doctrine and Worship Committee, London: Baptist Union Publications. Baptist Union of Great Britain (1998), Relating and Resourcing: The Report of the Task Group on Associating, unpublished Council Paper. Beasley-Murray, G. (1963), Baptism in the New Testament, London: Macmillan. Bebbington, D. (2010), Baptists through the Centuries: A History of a Global People, Waco: Baylor University. Brachlow, S. (1988), The Communion of Saints: Radical Puritan and Separatist Ecclesiology 1570–1625, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bradford, W. (1912), History of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647, ed. W. C. Ford, 2 vols., Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society. Broadway, M., et al. (1997), “Re-Envisioning Baptist Identity: A Manifesto for Baptist Communities in North America,” Perspectives in Religious Studies 24 (3): 303–10. Bunyan, J. (1673), Differences in Judgment about Water-Baptism No Bar to Communion, London: John Wilkins. Burrage, C. (1904), The Church Covenant Idea: Its Origin and Its Development, Philadelphia: American Baptist Historical Society. Calvin, J. (1960), Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. McNeill, J. T., London: SCM Press. Church of North India (2001), The Constitution of the Church of North India and Bye-Laws, Delhi: ISPCK. Collins, H. (1680), An Orthodox Catechism, London: n.p. Confession of Faith Put Forth by the Elders and Brethren of Many Congregations (1677), repr. in Lumpkin 1959: 241–95. Confession of Faith, of those Churches Which Are Commonly (though falsely) Called Anabaptists, The (1644), repr. in Lumpkin 1959: 156–71. Conversations Around the World (2005), The Report of the International Conversations between the Anglican Communion and the Baptist World Alliance, London: Anglican Communion Office.

BAPTIST ECCLESIOLOGY

 239

Declaration of Faith of English People Remaining at Amsterdam in Holland (1611), repr. in Lumpkin 1959: 116–23. Fiddes, P. S. (2003), Tracks and Traces: Baptist Identity in Church and Theology, Carlisle: Paternoster. Fiddes, P. S., ed. (2018), The Fourth Strand of the Reformation, The Covenant Ecclesiology of Anabaptists, English Separatists, and Early General Baptists, Centre for Baptist History and Heritage Studies 17, Oxford: Regent’s Park College. Fuchs, L. F. (2008), Koinonia and the Quest for an Ecumenical Ecclesiology, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Gill, J. ([1769] 1839), Complete Body of Doctrinal and Practical Divinity: A New Edition in Two Volumes: London: Tegg & Co. Grantham, T. (1671), A Sigh for Peace, or, the Cause of Division Discovered, London. Grantham, T. (1678), Christianismus Primitivus: Or, The Ancient Christian Religion, London: Francis Smith. Grantham, T. (1688), Hear the Church, 2nd ed., London. Harmon, S. R. (2006), Towards Baptist Catholicity: Essays on Tradition and the Baptist Vision, Carlisle: Paternoster. Helwys, T. (1612), A Short Declaration of the Mistery of Iniquity, n. pl. Keach, B. (1683), Tropologia, A Key to Open Scripture-Metaphors, London: Enoch Prosser. Keach, B. (1697), The Glory of a True Church, and Its Discipline Display’d, London. Kidd, R., ed. (1996), Something to Declare: A Study of the Declaration of Principle, Oxford: Whitley Publications. Knollys, H. (1645), A Moderate Answer unto Dr. Bastwick’s Book, London. Lambe, T. (1643), A Confutation of Infants Baptisme, London. Leuenberg (2005), Dialogue between the Community of Protestant Churches in Europe and the European Baptist Federation, Leuenberg Documents 9, Frankfurt: Verlag Lembeck. Locke, J. (1689), A Letter Concerning Toleration, London. Lumpkin, W. L. (1959), Baptist Confessions of Faith, Philadelphia: Judson Press. May, L. E. (1977), “The Role of Associations in Baptist History,” Baptist History and Heritage 12 (2): 69–74. Mullins, E. Y. ([1912] 1925), Baptist Beliefs, Valley Forge: Judson Press. Orthodox Creed, An (1679), repr. in Lumpkin 1959: 297–334. Parker, K. (1982), Baptists in Europe: History and Confessions of Faith, Nashville: Broadman Press. Peel, A. and L. Carlson, eds. (1951), Cartwrightiana, London: Allen and Unwin. Peel, A. and L. Carlson, eds. (1953), The Writings of Robert Harrison and Robert Browne, London: Allen and Unwin. Pushing at the Boundaries of Unity (2005), Anglicans and Baptists in Conversation, Faith and Unity Committee of the Baptist Union of Great Britain, The Council for Christian Unity of the Church of England, London: Church House Publishing. Roper, R. (1661), Truth Vindicated, London. Shurden, W. B. (1975), “Baptist Associations: The Annual Meetings Prior to 1814,” Baptist History and Heritage 10 (4): 233–7. Smyth, J. (1607), Principles and Inferences Concerning the Visible Church, repr. in Whitley 1915: 1:249–68. Smyth, J. (1609a), Paralleles, Censures, Observations, repr. in Whitley 1915: 2:327–546. Smyth, J. (1609b), The Character of the Beast, repr. in Whitley 1915: 2:563–680. Spurgeon, C. H. ([1894] 1971), Till He Come, Pasadena: Pilgrim Publications.

240

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Stanley, F. (1667), Christianity Indeed, London. True Confession, A (1596), repr. in Lumpkin 1959: 82–97. Turner, D. (1772), A Modest Plea for Free Communion at the Lord’s Table, London: J. Johnson. Turner, D. (1778), A Compendium of Social Religion, 2nd ed., London: John Ward. Turner, D. (1780), Charity the Bond of Perfection, Oxford: n.p. Unitatis redintegratio (1977), in Austin Flannery, O.P. (ed.), Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, 452–563, Dublin: Dominican Publications. Wardin, A., ed. (1995), Baptists around the World: A Comprehensive Handbook, Nashville: Broadman and Holman. White, B. R. (1971), The English Separatist Tradition: From the Marian Martyrs to the Pilgrim Fathers, Oxford: Oxford University Press. White, B. R., ed. (1974), Association Records of the Particular Baptists of England, Wales and Ireland to 1660, 3 parts, Part 3, The Abingdon Association, London: Baptist Historical Society. White, B. R. (1976), Authority: A Baptist View, London: Baptist Publications. White, B. R. (1996), The English Baptists of the Seventeenth Century, London: Baptist Historical Society. Whitley, W. T., ed. (1909), Minutes of the General Assembly of the General Baptist Churches in England, 2 vols., London: Baptist Historical Society. Whitley, W. T., ed. (1915), The Works of John Smyth, 2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Word of God in the Life of the Church, The (2012), A Report of International Conversations Between the Catholic Church and the Baptist World Alliance 2006–2010, repr. in American Baptist Quarterly 31 (1): 28–122.

Chapter SEVENTEEN

Pentecostal Ecclesiology CECIL M. ROBECK, JR.

INTRODUCTION Pentecostal ecclesiology is a challenging subject. The term “Pentecostal” is complicated both by issues of definition, as well as self-definition. It is likely that when we think of Pentecostalism, we have one set of churches in mind. The largest single global organization of the oldest Pentecostal groups, Classical Pentecostals, is the Pentecostal World Fellowship (PWF). Yet many thousands of Pentecostal congregations and organizations around the world, classical or otherwise, do not belong to the PWF. Either they have chosen not to become members, or the PWF doctrinal commitments have excluded them. What is a Pentecostal? Who has the right to define the term “Pentecostal”? Who has the right to claim that they are Pentecostals? Answers to these questions are many, and they are not easily reconciled. Thus, a single meaning for the term “Pentecostal” and a single Pentecostal ecclesiology are highly elusive. The PWF does not admit such groups as La Iglesia Metodista Pentecostal (Santiago, Chile) and La Iglesia Pentecostal de Chile (Curicó, Chile), because it maintains that speaking in tongues is the evidence of baptism in the Holy Spirit, while these groups embrace a broader palette of evidences (Alvarez, et al. n.d.: 54). Early Classical Pentecostal leaders in the United States, who first applied the term “Pentecostal” to their churches, knew of these and other groups that took this broader position. While these groups embraced speaking in tongues as a charism, and many of their members spoke in tongues, some US leaders dismissed them as merely precursors (“History of Pentecost”: 1922: 5) to the real “latter rain” (more below). These groups did not accept the narrow definition given by various North Americans and they did not clearly identify themselves as Pentecostals until after the revival began at the Azusa Street Mission in 1906 (Tomlinson 1913: 211). Yet these groups fit the definition of Classical Pentecostal and understand themselves to be fully Pentecostal (McDonnell 1976). Groups such as the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World (Indianapolis, IN, USA), La Asamblea Apostolica de la Fe en Cristo Jesús (Rancho Cucamonga, CA, USA), La Iglesía Apostólica de la fé en Cristo Jesús (Mexico), and the United Pentecostal Church International (Weldon Spring, MO, USA) cannot join the Pentecostal World Fellowship even though they self-identify as Classical Pentecostals. Fr. Kilian McDonnell, OSB, was the first to define Classical Pentecostals as “those groups of Pentecostals which grew out of the Holiness Movement” at the beginning of the twentieth century. These Pentecostals fit that definition, but the PWF embraces the historic trinitarian position, while these Pentecostal groups, known as “Oneness Pentecostals,” do not.

242

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

While the PWF is not a juridical body, still other Pentecostal groups, especially independent ones (“Denominational and Independent Churches” 1949: 12; Human Organization” 1949: 4–5; “Is There National” 1949: 4–6), refuse to join, fearing anything that appears to be too institutional in nature. The PWF Statement of Faith says only that, “We believe in the church of Jesus Christ and in the unity of believers.”1 It gives no further definition to the “Church of Jesus Christ,” no reference to institution, no expansion of this phrase. From this brief introduction, it is evident that there are different types of Pentecostalisms, although most member churches would view the church as that body whose members only God knows. The question that remains is whether there is any distinctive Pentecostal ecclesiology. Yet again, the answer remains elusive.

THE ORIGINS AND HISTORY OF PENTECOSTALISMS The Pentecostal Movement began with the Classical groups that emerged from the nineteenth-century Holiness Movement, but there are many variations even on that theme. Their different polities cover a wide spectrum from episcopal, to presbyterian, to congregational, to radically independent free churches each of which is led by a single charismatic (in the Weberian sense) figure. The polity, and in some cases the doctrine adopted by each group, has typically reflected that of the prior denomination out of which most of their earliest members came (Althouse 2010: 227). Those with Methodist or Wesleyan Holiness backgrounds such as the Church of God (Cleveland, TN, USA) or the International Pentecostal Holiness Church, or even the Church of God in Christ, adopted variations on an episcopal polity. They also emphasize the doctrine of entire sanctification, carried over from their Holiness forebears. Others, like the Assemblies of God or the Congregação Cristã no Brasil, drew from a wider swath of denominations that included various Holiness churches, but they were more strongly influenced by Christian and Missionary Alliance, Presbyterian, and Waldensian churches. They ultimately adopted a type of presbyterian polity at the denominational level and while they hold to high holiness standards, they do not accept the doctrine of entire sanctification (Hoover 1970). Those influenced most strongly by Baptist backgrounds, such as the Filadelfia churches throughout Scandinavia and their mission churches throughout the world, took a congregational position (Carlsson 1974; Aronson 2012: 192–211). Still other churches, especially some megachurches, answer only to their apostolic leader. These differences demonstrate that there are various types of Pentecostalisms, and these variants point to divergent understandings of ecclesiology. Another difficulty resides in the issue of Pentecostal origins. When and where did this movement actually begin? North Americans have dominated the discussion to date, claiming to be the original center of this global movement. Yet, after more than a century, Pentecostal scholars from around the world are still engaged in debates on this point (Irvin 2005: 35–50; Van der Laan 2009: 141–59; Stewart 2014: 151–72; Robeck 2014: 13–30; Sepulveda 2015: 17–33). If we look at the first Pentecost described in Acts 2 as the origin of the church, one can argue that the entire church is Pentecostal or Charismatic (Bittlinger 1990). Most scholars acknowledge that Pentecost was the birthday of the church, and as such, the entire church has the right to declare itself Pentecostal. Yet an

Pentecostal World Fellowship, “Our Mission Statement,” February 20, 2020, https​:/​/ww​​w​.pen​​tecos​​talwo​​rldfe​​ llows​​hip​.o​​rg​/​ab​​out​-u​​s. 1

PENTECOSTAL ECCLESIOLOGY

 243

obvious movement of the Holy Spirit within the church of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries describes itself more narrowly as “Pentecostal,” “Pentecostal/Charismatic,” or “Charismatic,” as something discrete from, yet part of, the whole church. Beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, those who led the movement viewed the Pentecost event recorded in Acts 2 as applying uniquely to them. They admitted that the Holy Spirit indwells all who follow Christ (Rom. 8:9), but when they spoke in tongues, they claimed that they had experienced the Holy Spirit in a way “as definite and observable as . . . an attack of influenza” (Streeter 1929: 69) that was not shared by the rest of the church. The events recorded in Acts 2 functioned as a mirror. They believed that Peter’s appeal to Joel 2:28-29, when he preached his first Christian sermon (Acts 2:14-36), was critical for them. When Peter declared, “This is That,” interpreting the events of Acts 2 as a fulfillment of the promise in Joel 2, they understood that like the first group of Christians gathered in Jerusalem, the Spirit now fell upon them in a manifestation of power that set them apart from the rest of the church (McPherson 1919; Brumback 1942; Stibbe 1998: 181–93). They argued that the Holy Spirit now encountered them in a way that went beyond the experience of those Christians in whose ranks they had come to faith. Not only did they emphasize their spiritual encounter with the Holy Spirit as being the same “baptism in the Holy Spirit” that early Christian believers experienced, but they also emphasized the restoration of the full range of charisms or gifts listed in Scripture (1 Cor. 12:8-10, 28-30; 13:1-3; Rom. 12:6-8; Eph. 4:11-13), as well as actions described as signs, wonders, and exorcism in mission and ministry (Hocken 1976: 22). They quickly adopted another marker that they believed made them unique among all other Christians. It included a reading of the “early rain” and “latter rain” mentioned in Joel 2:23 as the hermeneutical key by which to understand the history of the church. If the apostles experienced the “early rain” of the Spirit, two millennia later they were experiencing the “latter rain.” In Joel’s prophecy, they read about the losses that Judah endured for its unfaithfulness to Yahweh (Joel 1:4) and they saw the historic church. They also noted the promise of renewal (Joel 2:25-27) conditioned upon Judah’s repentance, and they saw themselves (Barratt 1909; Myland 1910). From their perspective, the church had slowly lost her power through apathy, or apostasy, or compromise. Many believed that God began the church’s restoration when Martin Luther emphasized the doctrine of justification. It continued with John Wesley’s emphasis on sanctification. Others would follow with their contributions. Thus, the theme of “Loss and Restoration” would play out repeatedly in many subsequent self-descriptions of Pentecostals (McPherson 1919: 380–406). If the first Christian Pentecost described in Acts 2 was the beginning of the “Last Days” as Joel 2:28 seemed to suggest and Peter interpreted it to his audience (Acts 2:17), then in light of a “Lost and Restored” hermeneutic, they must be living at the end of the “Last Days.” Thus, they adopted a “Restorationist” understanding of church history with strong eschatological expectations (Carothers 1909: 62; Gaston 1922: 6; Blumhofer 1993: 145–60). Most Pentecostals, however, were ordinary laypeople who merely claimed that they had encountered God’s Spirit in a way that they had never encountered him before. This encounter with the Holy Spirit had transformed and empowered them. They wanted to share their experience with others with whom they traditionally worshiped. They believed that what had happened to them in this divine encounter, which they called baptism in the Holy Spirit, was also available to their peers. They wanted to encourage their families, friends, and fellow church members to seek God with the expectation that they, too,

244

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

could enjoy a similar, life-changing encounter with the Holy Spirit, and if they sought and received that experience, it would bring revival and renewal to the church. They also wanted to worship openly in such a way that all the charisms of the Holy Spirit could be manifested among them. Thus, their worship would typically not be programmed in advance, but left to the spontaneity of the Holy Spirit (Chan 2006). Sometimes their testimony was accepted. As a result, their family or friends, or even the majority of a congregation, joined them in seeking and receiving the encounter that proved to be as transformative to them as it had been to those who told them about it (McGowan 1956: 6; Davis 1983: 21). In many cases, however, the pastors and churches refused their testimony, labeling it “a disgusting amalgamation of African voudou superstition and Caucasian insanity” (“New Religions” 1906: 7; “Denounces” 1906: 5) or “dangerous” (“Young Girl” 1906: 1). Admittedly, some of the earliest Pentecostals brought rejection upon themselves from those that they had hoped to convince that what had been promised by the prophet Joel and proclaimed by the apostle Peter was now accessible to them (Acts 2:39) (Washburn 1913: 383–5). All too often, they made overly zealous appeals, or they made sharp judgments toward those who differed with them (“Tongue Priestess” 1907: 5). In a real sense, it was the rejection of these early Pentecostal believers as much as it was the transformation of a few small Holiness groups into Pentecostal ones that led to the formation of new and discreet Pentecostal congregations, denominations, and ultimately a definable movement. Yet, it was not the intention of these earliest Pentecostals to do so. Their intention was only “to turn people again to the apostolic faith,” what they read about in the New Testament, bringing revival and renewal to existing churches (“Divine Healer” 1905: 4). In some cases, such as the Church of God (Cleveland, TN, USA), that was exactly what happened. Often, the church where they held their membership invited them to leave (McGowan n.d.) or they soon withdrew because they felt no longer welcomed (Warrington 2008: 169). Most Holiness churches viewed them as heretical (Griffith 1906: 2 (706); Martin 1906: 2; “Delusions” 1907: 8 (328); Youngren 1908: 11; “The Tongues” 1908: 12–13; “Third Work” 1908: 3–4; “The Tongue” 1906: 6–7, 11). Pietists and Fundamentalists called them fanatical (Report of the 1928: 6), with demonic practices (Lange 1979: 288). Others viewed them as demented (“In Grip” 1907: 2). As a result, Pentecostal churches came into existence more as an “accident” of history than as a planned event or movement. They found one another through shared personal testimonies and shared publications. While many of them believed that the institutionalization of Christianity and its historic alignment with the State had contributed to the apostasy of the Church, the rise of higher criticism and charges of unbelief in contemporary Protestant churches also led Pentecostals to organize themselves into newer bodies that rejected these things. Even so, they organized in fear and trembling, often informally, since most of them considered official designations or ordination to be reasonably unimportant. As Edith Blumhofer has noted, “Ordination was not so much an acknowledging of authority within a specific group as fervent prayer for effectiveness in witness” (1989: I:357). Still they hoped to renew the Church through their “Pentecostal message,” or to manifest the “true” nature of the Church in their Pentecostal way.2

The groups that most embodied this position were those founded by A. J. Tomlinson—Church of God (Cleveland, TN, USA) and the Church of God of Prophecy. 2

PENTECOSTAL ECCLESIOLOGY

 245

Ordination, Ministry, and Liturgy While Pentecostals frequently appeal to the prophecy in Joel 2 and Acts 2 that tells of the Spirit being poured out on women as well as men, their record on women in ministry is, at best, uneven. Those with a Holiness background, such as the Church of God or the Church of God in Christ (Butler 2007), do not ordain women to senior pastor positions. On the other hand, the Assemblies of God offers ordination to women on an equal footing with men. While women have made substantial gains in the Assemblies in recent years, especially at top leadership levels such as its Executive Leadership team and the Executive Presbytery, the number of women in the General Presbytery and in senior pastoral positions is still quite low, and the number of single women missionaries has lost considerable ground (Cavaness and Gill 2004; Alexander and Yong 2009). It should come as no surprise that formal training for ministry often takes a back seat to personal experience. One can argue that ministers within Classical Pentecostal churches are primarily laymen and laywomen who often lack formal or accredited theological training. What is important is that they have an experience—salvation followed by baptism in the Spirit—a “blameless Christian life,” and evidence of a call to ministry. As the Assemblies of God has stated in its bylaws, “Any level of formal academic achievement (diploma or degree) shall not be a requirement for credentials” (Minutes, 2017: 156, Bylaws, Article VII Ministry, Section 2 h Basic Education Requirements). That said, through the years it has added, as criteria for examination, various correspondence courses on specific doctrines, a certain level of expertise obtained through self-study and demonstrated to decision makers, or a diploma from some theological institution ranging from a non-accredited Bible institute to a fully accredited theological seminary. While some even without high school have proven to be effective ministers, such limited requirements sometimes lead to limitations that appear in other forms. They include such things as personal insecurity when confronted by someone with better qualifications, suspicion of those who have a formal theological education, an unwillingness to be open to other church traditions due to ignorance and fear, and the inability to understand or cross various cultural boundaries due to a lack of tools that would enable them to do so. Many are proud of their pastoral success accomplished without formal theological education. If Pentecostals follow any of the sixteenth-century reformers when it comes to liturgical understanding, it would probably be Ulrich Zwingli, though it is doubtful that the majority of Pentecostals know who he was. Pentecostals typically lack a formal liturgy though they do have predictable liturgical patterns. They generally view baptism and the Lord’s Supper in symbolic terms with no developed theology that explains their meaning. Most Pentecostals consider these practices to be ordinances, typically rejecting sacramental language as bordering on magic. Some add the washing of feet to the list of ordinances though this is common mostly in the Holiness Pentecostal stream (Thomas 1991; Stephenson 2014). It may be because of their Methodist and Holiness background that in recent years several Church of God theologians have been exploring notions of sacrament and sacramentality, especially regarding baptism and the Lord’s Supper (Tomberlin 2015; Green 2012), but also including healing (K. Alexander 2012: 1–3, 14).

Pentecostal Identity and Charismatic Renewal There is little question that Classical Pentecostals stand at the beginning of a broad and energetic Pentecostal Movement. Yet the question remains: are they the only group that has rights to the self-designation, Pentecostal? At one level, their narrow claim seems to

246

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

have merit, just as there is merit to the broader claim that the entire Church is Pentecostal. Classical Pentecostals came some 400 years after the Protestant Reformation, but they existed for over fifty years before most others began to use the term “Pentecostal” as a self-designation. Today, Classical Pentecostals constitute only a small part of a much larger movement, while many newer groups have identified themselves as Pentecostals, too, making the task of definition much more difficult. Those who keep track of these older and newer groups describe them as constituting a single movement with few nuances (Johnson, et al. 2018: 24). When charismatic renewal began to enter mainstream Protestant churches in the 1950s, publications often focused on their Pentecostal features (Gunstone 1982: 192; Quanabush 1971; Bradfield 1979; Wietake and Hustad 1973). Their subsequent self-designation as Neo-Pentecostals or New Pentecostals continued for at least three decades, though along the way they frequently adopted the slightly broader designation of “Charismatic” (Kerr 1974; Omenyo 2002). They believed that this latter designation provided them with a bit of distance from what they deemed as the narrower dogmatic stance of some Classical Pentecostals. Ultimately, they did not keep the self-designation “Pentecostal” for several reasons. One was that they often came from a higher social class than did most Classical Pentecostals (Bradfield 1979: 1; Fichter 1975: 72–4). A second was that they were typically more open to ecumenism than Classical Pentecostals were (Bradfield 1979: 64; Hocken 1976: 18). Their primary concern, however, was that most Classical Pentecostals insisted on speaking in tongues as the evidence of baptism in the Spirit, while they were open to other evidences as well, thereby unknowingly adopting the position of certain early, Classical Pentecostal churches in Latin America and India. At the same time, many Pentecostal churches refer to themselves as Charismatic to make it clear that they are open to all the biblical charisms. Many Pentecostal members of historic Protestant and Anglican churches claimed they had received their baptism in the Spirit at the time of their conversion–initiation, but with no charismatic manifestation accompanying it (Dunn 1970). Others claimed that it came subsequent to their salvation and they accepted speaking in tongues or other manifestations as evidence of their baptism in the Spirit (Acts 2:4), while still others enjoyed this fresh encounter with the Holy Spirit but understood their speaking in tongues solely in terms of a charism or gift rather than an evidence (1 Cor. 12:8-10). These New Pentecostals joined the older Classical Pentecostals in recognizing both this fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit (often describing it as baptism in the Spirit or the fullness of the Spirit) and also the same charisms that now appeared among them. They differed only on the full meaning of speaking in tongues (Bittlinger 1968). The designation “Charismatic” did not deny their Pentecostal character, but it allowed Charismatics to encounter the Holy Spirit in a new Pentecostal way, yet remain where they were, integrating and explaining their encounter in ways that were consistent with the existing theological positions of their respective churches (Omenyo 2002: 240). Second, it embraced the broader spectrum of charisms that Classical Pentecostals embraced. These two points remain distinguishing characteristics that identify them as Pentecostals. During the Second Vatican Council (1962–5), the bishops of the Catholic Church declared: It is not only through the sacraments and the ministrations of the Church that the Holy Spirit makes holy the People, leads them and enriches them with his virtues. Allotting his gifts according as he wills (cf. 1 Cor. 12:11), he also distributes special

PENTECOSTAL ECCLESIOLOGY

 247

graces among the faithful of every rank. By these gifts he makes them fit and ready to undertake various tasks and offices for the renewal and building up of the Church, as it is written, “the manifestation of the Spirit is given to everyone for profit.” (1 Cor. 12:7). Whether these charisms be very remarkable or some simple and widely diffused, they are to be received with thanksgiving and consolation since they are fitting and useful for the needs of the Church. Extraordinary gifts are not to be rashly desired, nor is it from them that the fruits of apostolic labors are to be presumptuously expected. Those who have charge over the Church should judge the genuineness and proper use of these gifts, through their office not indeed to extinguish the Spirit, but to test all things and hold fast to what is good (cf. 1 Th. 5:12 and 19-21). (Lumen Gentium, 2:12) (Flannery 1976) Following the Council, Catholics also began to embrace the same experience of baptism in the Holy Spirit to which Classical Pentecostals had borne witness for over half a century. They embraced the self-designations “Catholic Pentecostals” or “Pentecostal Catholics” (Ranaghan and Ranaghan 1969; Byrne 1970; O’Connor 1971; Gelpi 1971; Heyer 1974; Ford 1976; Laurentin 1977). That may be because of the impact of David Wilkerson’s The Cross and the Switchblade, which told of Wilkerson’s Pentecostal ministry among New York City’s gangs (Wilkerson and Sherrill 1963), and John Sherrill’s subsequent work, They Speak in other Tongues, the first in-depth treatment of Pentecostalism in the United States. The first Catholics, mostly university students, who read these books, asked God to baptize them in the Spirit (Wilkerson and Sherrill 1963; Sherrill 1964). When they prayed, they began to speak in other tongues just like their Pentecostal forebears. Cardinal Suenens, who had actively provided leadership in the Second Vatican Council, and the Catholic sociologist Margaret Poloma of the University of Akron, both maintained that the Church was undergoing a new Pentecost (Suenens 1984; Poloma 1982). Pentecostal Catholics even claimed that Mary was the quintessential Pentecostal (Pfaller and Alberts 1973; Laurentin 1980: 28–43). Catholic teaching on charisms strongly paralleled Classical Pentecostal teaching on the subject (Martin 1998; “Do Not” 2016). Like Protestants, however, they interpreted their experience of baptism in the Spirit in Catholic terms, as residing in their “Christian initiation and . . . its reawakening in Christian experience” (Gelpi 1971; McDonnell and Montague 1991a: 89, 97, 1991b: 9; Chan 1999: 195–211). To do so, Cardinal Suenens, whom Pope Paul VI asked to oversee the renewal, asserted that Catholic theologians “had to disassociate it [baptism in the Spirit] from a vocabulary and theology which had their origins in classical Pentecostalism” (Suenens 1984: 223). This did not result in Catholics no longer being Pentecostal, but more pointedly, it helped them to become more theologically consistent Pentecostal Catholics. For over a decade, both bishops and theologians continued to wrestle with how best to name this renewal within the Catholic Church. Like their Protestant counterparts, they moved away from the designations “Catholic Pentecostals” and “Neo-Pentecostals” (Bradfield 1979) in an effort to distinguish the Pentecostal Movement in the Catholic Church from that of the narrower Classical Pentecostals. Catholic teaching re-explained baptism in the Spirit theologically in light of baptismal and confirmation teaching and in keeping with historic Catholic thought (“Theological and Pastoral Renewal Orientations on the Catholic Charismatic Renewal” 1974). The term “Charismatic” broadened the Pentecostal teaching reflected in the Catholic commitment to the grace of the Holy Spirit being shared by the whole Church, which included the recognition of all the charisms

248

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

given to the Church by the Holy Spirit (Sullivan 1982: 50–1). The Doctrinal Commission of the International Catholic Charismatic Renewal Services point to the fact that the roots of baptism in the Holy Spirit that they celebrate rests upon the foundation laid by early Classical Pentecostals, especially of William J. Seymour and the Azusa Street Mission (Robeck 2006; Baptism in the Holy Spirit [2012]: 9). The breadth of what I have so far described as Pentecostal did not end with Classical Pentecostals, nor would it end with the inclusion of mainline Protestants or even with Roman Catholics. Charismatic renewal touched Orthodox Christians as well, though it was not as widely accepted there (Ware 1973: 182–6; Emmert 1976: 28–42; Stephanou 1976). Much more open to the actions of the Holy Spirit were Evangelicals who had not been touched by any of the earlier movements. C. Peter Wagner would designate them as “Third Wave” churches (Wagner 1988), building upon the imagery of “First Wave” churches being Classical Pentecostals and the “Second Wave” being Charismatics. As he put it, “I see the Third Wave as distinct from, but at the same time very similar to the first and second waves . . . The major variation comes in the understanding of the meaning of baptism in the Holy Spirit and the role of tongues in authenticating this” (Wagner 1988: 18). While many “Third Wave” churches would remain independent, John Wimber successfully built a network of “Third Wave” churches into the Vineyard Christian Fellowship (Higgins 2012: 208–28; Jackson 1999; Miller 2003: 216–39). Scholars sometimes describe the Vineyard as a Pentecostal church (Versteeg 2011). The Vineyard states its understanding of baptism in the Holy Spirit and the validity of the charisms in the following terms: We believe that the Holy Spirit indwells every believer in Jesus Christ and that He is our abiding Helper, Teacher, and Guide. We believe in the filling or the empowering of the Holy Spirit, often a conscious experience, for ministry today. We believe in the present ministry of the Spirit and in the exercise of all of the biblical gifts of the Spirit. We practice the laying on of hands for the empowering of the Spirit, for healing, and for recognition and empowering of those whom God has ordained to lead and serve the Church.3 While the manifestation of speaking in tongues is not explicitly mentioned, tongues are often present even though baptism in the Spirit is explained as “the filling or empowering” of the Holy Spirit, as “a conscious experience, for ministry today.” The statement supports the presence and use of “all the biblical gifts of the Spirit,” which includes speaking in tongues. Thus, even without explicitly claiming its Pentecostal character, it is clear that, by definition, the Vineyard is Pentecostal. All the Vineyard has done is to distance itself from what it considers to be the “baggage” of the older Classical Pentecostal groups, the insistence that baptism in the Spirit is authenticated or evidenced solely by the ability to speak in tongues. In the case of the “Third Wave,” it is the insistence that they are Evangelicals who are experiencing the Holy Spirit in power that separates them from the “Second Wave” historic Protestant or Catholic Pentecostals. Yet like their predecessors, the Vineyard carries the primary markers that all Pentecostals carry.

“The Ministry of the Holy Spirit,” Core Values and Beliefs (no city: Vineyard Resources, 2016), 19, is available at: https​:/​/d1​​h8uvf​​6sd4t​​vp​.cl​​oudfr​​ont​.n​​et​/wp​​-cont​​ent​/u​​pload​​s​/201​​60527​​18494​​6​/Vin​​eyard​​-Core​​-Val​u​​es​-Be​​liefs​​ -RGB.​​pdf. Italics mine. 3

PENTECOSTAL ECCLESIOLOGY

 249

As “Third Wave” churches moved forward, Wagner was again responsible for naming another group of churches. He called them “New Apostolic” churches. This group of churches and pastors preach baptism in the Spirit and manifest all the charisms found in earlier Pentecostal groups. It has reached back into Classical Pentecostalism and adopted the Restorationist motif, promising even the restoration of the fivefold ministry mentioned in Eph. 4:11-13, including apostles and prophets (Wagner 1998). While most Classical Pentecostal groups reject the restoration of apostolic and prophetic offices, those groups impacted by a resurgent “latter rain” movement that dates from the late 1940s have championed this view (Riss 1982: 32–45; Faupel 2010: 239–63). This way of being Pentecostal has found considerable traction in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands among churches that belong to the World Assemblies of God Fellowship, though it has brought little that is new to the ecclesiological table (Kay 2007; Knowles 2014; Clifton 2009: 169–74). All language continues to change. Sociologists and historians now employ the term Neo-Pentecostal to differentiate the many Pentecostal churches that emphasize prosperity, found especially throughout the global South. Teaching on baptism in the Holy Spirit as well as the charisms in Neo-Pentecostal churches remain classically Pentecostal (Anderson 2011: 134). Neo-Pentecostalism include churches such as La Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus in Brazil (Macedo 1998: I:52–4), “Brother Mike” Velarde’s “El Shaddai” movement in the Philippines (Wiegele 2005, 2012: 171–88), that of the late apostle Benson Idahosa’s Church of God Mission International,4 as well as David Oyedepo’s Living Faith Church Worldwide, both of Nigeria, and Ray McCauley’s Rhema Bible Church in South Africa. They differ doctrinally from their predecessors, largely in their unique interpretations of Scripture passages that address the role of faith, trust in the promises of God, and various economic and stewardship questions. Many of these churches remain independent of one another, or they have developed their own networks of churches with the same or similar beliefs. Authoritarian figures, some calling themselves apostles, lead them. What is important about this group of churches is that their theology is classically Pentecostal, though they have added a variation on the interplay between God’s provisions and the faith of the believer. Some Pentecostal churches have criticized prosperity theology as being less about faith than about presumption (Fee 1979; Farah 1981: 3–21; Horn 1989; Romeiro 1993), but their core theology remains strongly Pentecostal. Finally, there are the many churches that have developed as indigenous, independent works, especially in Africa. The largest organization that represents these churches is the Organization of African Instituted Churches (OAIC), with its offices in Nairobi, Kenya. Sociologists often distinguish several types of African Instituted Churches (AICs) such as Ethiopian, Zionist, Apostolic/Pentecostal, and Messianic or Judaistic. Allan Anderson, who has spent much of his life studying African Christianity and Pentecostalism, notes that while not all “Spirit,” “Zionist,” or “Apostolic” churches call themselves Pentecostal, their history and theology mark them clearly as part of the historic Pentecostal family of churches (Anderson 2014: 112–16). The Zion Christian Church (Zimbabwe), Christ Apostolic Church (Nigeria), Church of the Twelve Apostles (Ghana), and the African Church of the Holy Spirit (Kenya) are but four of hundreds of Pentecostal AICs.

The Statement of Faith appears on the following website: www​.cgmglobal​.org​/belief​.htm. Point 8 reads: “We believe in the baptism in the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues and in the gifts of the Holy Spirit (Acts) and other gifts listed in 1 Cor. 12 and Rom. 12.” 4

250

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Importantly, while many of these churches self-identify as Pentecostal churches and their emphasis upon such Pentecostal markers as baptism in the Holy Spirit, the manifestation of biblical charisms, signs and wonders, and exorcism underscore this claim, many older Pentecostal churches, especially in Africa, refuse to recognize them as Pentecostal, or in some cases, even as Christian. Older Pentecostal groups generally link their rejection of the AICs to their alleged lack of discernment of spirits, and to various ritual practices that they view as involving unacceptable forms of syncretism. Admittedly, some AICs do not fit traditional standards of Christian orthodoxy, but many do, and it is important to recognize that many AICs also fit the historic theological patterns that mark them as Pentecostal (Kalu 2008: 68–83).

FINAL REFLECTIONS So, is there such a thing as a Pentecostal ecclesiology, and if so, what does it look like? What this survey should have made evident is the enormous varieties of Pentecostalisms. As a result, it should be equally apparent that there is currently no single Pentecostal ecclesiology but rather a range of ecclesiological models found in these Pentecostalisms. At the beginning of the modern Pentecostal Movement, there were no distinct Pentecostal theologies to guide them, only the Bible and their experience together, and Pentecostals have always held a high view of Scripture. As a result, they looked to the Bible for patterns of organization, worship, ministry, life, and mission, and in experimental gatherings they tried to stick closely to Scripture. They drew especially from the book of Acts and from 1 Corinthians as providing Pentecostal norms. Yet, Pentecostals are also notoriously pragmatic, so the way they organized themselves varied from place to place. The earliest models were generally makeovers of existing ecclesiologies. Since then, nearly every decade seems to have brought into being new types of Pentecostal churches with their own innovations. A few Pentecostals have tried to locate and articulate a Pentecostal ecclesiology, but no one has yet succeeded. The work of Melvin Hodges, a long-term missionary of the Assemblies of God, was the first such attempt (Hodges 1977). While Pentecostals are often confused with Evangelicals, these two groups are not the same. Both groups share a strong belief in the authority of Scripture. They acknowledge the reality of sin, the virgin birth, the atonement available only through the work of Jesus Christ, and justification by faith. They believe in the second coming of Christ, the resurrection of the body, and the final judgment. They contend that the people of God who make up the church are the means or instruments through whom the lost hear the message of the gospel. The most significant difference, however, lies in their understandings of pneumatology. Hodges recognized that there already existed a number of “good treatments” of ecclesiology, yet from his perspective, something was missing that separated Pentecostals from Evangelicals. It was the experience of the Holy Spirit in the power of Pentecost, the baptism in the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues (Hodges 1977: 30). In the end, the missionary concerns of Hodges motivated him more than his ecclesiology did. He tried to show that mission was the primary task of the church, since Jesus commanded his church to “[g]o . . . and make disciples.” He argued that it received power to go only when the people of God had received the Pentecostal baptism in the Spirit (Acts 1:8; 2:4). Russell Spittler has noted similarly that “Pentecostals have always been better at evangelism than at writing theology . . . known more for foreign missions than for writing theological

PENTECOSTAL ECCLESIOLOGY

 251

books” (Synan 1975: 243). This surely holds implications for whether or to what extent Pentecostals are even cognizant of a Pentecostal ecclesiology. A decade ago, Chris Thomas convened a consultation on Pentecostal ecclesiology and published an edited volume of the papers. Subsequently, Chris Green, who like Thomas serves on the faculty of the Church of God (Cleveland, TN) seminary, gathered various other articles and edited a volume on the same topic (Thomas 2010; Green 2016). These collections are worthy of further study, yet they fail to provide a comprehensive, cohesive, or compelling Pentecostal ecclesiology. The fact that these are edited volumes, rather than single author volumes, suggests that no single, coherent Pentecostal ecclesiology currently exists. Peter Althouse, a theologian from the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada, has observed, “Pentecostal churches eclectically borrow from other theological traditions and apply their practices in pragmatic and technical ways, but with little understanding of their philosophical and theological implications” (Althouse 2010: 227). Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, a Finnish Pentecostal theologian well known for his comparative theological studies, has concluded that early “Pentecostals did not . . . attempt to develop a distinctive ecclesiology . . . They were ‘doers’ rather than ‘thinkers’ and . . . they went on living and experimenting the New Testament type of enthusiastic church life” (Kärkkäinen 2002: 68–78; Kärkkäinen 2016: 4). Keith Warrington, a New Testament theologian of the Elim Pentecostal Church in England and Ireland, has firmly concluded, “Pentecostals do not own a distinctively Pentecostal theology of the church” (Warrington 2008: 131). Tommy H. Davidson, a Pentecostal scholar on the faculty of the Norwegian School of Leadership and Theology, has contended that any Pentecostal ecclesiology must be trans-denominational, but even now there are too few “concrete ecclesiological studies of the Pentecostal movement” to yield a viable Pentecostal ecclesiology (Davidson 2015: 226). And Simon Chan, an Assemblies of God theologian at Trinity College, Singapore, who until now has written more than any other scholar on the subject has concluded that “[w]hat Pentecostals need is . . . an ecclesiology to ensure effective traditioning and the faithful development of Pentecostal faith and experience” (Chan 2011: 125). Chan is the first Pentecostal to attempt a coherent Pentecostal ecclesiology. He has argued, and I think rightly, that “any attempt to develop a Pentecostal ecclesiology must seriously consider the nature of Pentecostal experience and be consistent with it” (Chan 2011: 93). In 1974, John Stevens Kerr, an American Lutheran, observed that Classical Pentecostals hold an “individual–spontaneous” understanding of how the Holy Spirit manifests itself within the church. Others, he maintained, including the Pentecostals found within the historic Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant churches, enjoy the same encounter with the Holy Spirit, but they take a “continuing–collective approach” to the subject (Kerr 1974: 6). Chan agrees with Kerr’s analysis that for the most part Pentecostals are individually focused rather than collectively oriented (Chan 2011: 6). Any Pentecostal ecclesiological understanding needs to address this penchant. Still, no distinctly Pentecostal ecclesiology seems to exist. In spite of the shared expectation that Pentecostals of all sorts contend for a definitive experience of the Holy Spirit as vital to the Christian life, their diversity suggests why so few Classical Pentecostals have even attempted to develop a theology of the church (Chan 2016: 23–46;. Augustine 2016: 65–87; Althouse 2016: 88–103; Robeck 2016: 221–43, 2018: 141–57, 2019: 66–8). When they do, they seem immediately to speak of the church in terms of spirituality or religious experience rather than in terms of ecclesiology. They typically view ecclesiology in terms of an active living out of what

252

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

they read in the New Testament. It may even be the case that without knowing it, they may find that the closest they come to an ecclesiological approach proposed by a major theologian is the work of Emil Brunner, who spoke of the church in terms of koinonia or fellowship (Brunner 1952: 47–54). A review of what Pentecostals have written on the subject of ecclesiology points most frequently to the practices found in the opening and closing verses of Acts 2, namely, Acts 2:1-4 and Acts 2:42-47. Pentecostal ecclesiology, then, begins with baptism in the Spirit as essential to Pentecostal belonging, but it quickly moves on to emphasize a return to apostolic teaching, fellowship (koinonia), breaking of bread, and the prayers. These would constitute the primary apostolic markers in any Pentecostal ecclesiology, perhaps superseding but not ignoring the other classic marks of unity, holiness, and catholicity. Yet, the subject of a Pentecostal ecclesiology remains largely unaddressed as such. The majority of Pentecostal scholars address only the elements of what Pentecostals call the message of the “Full Gospel,” whether fourfold or fivefold, that includes, salvation, sanctification or holiness, baptism in the Holy Spirit, divine healing (and other charisms), and eschatology. Given the dynamic, action-oriented, charismatic (in the biblical sense) character of the koinonia experienced by all who claim to be Pentecostal, how do we describe something that seems to be at home among Classical Pentecostals, Protestant Pentecostals, Catholic Pentecostals, Orthodox Pentecostals, AIC Pentecostals, Third Wave and New Apostolic Pentecostals, Neo-Pentecostals, and other newer Pentecostal groups? Given the spiritual activity in these groups, typically discerned and embraced as the work of the Holy Spirit among them, and their ability to recognize themselves and each other as Pentecostal, is the term “ecclesiology” even viable for Pentecostals to consider? Chan correctly notes, first, that any Pentecostal self-understanding must begin with what the earliest Pentecostals called “baptism in the Spirit” (Chan 2011: 94). When we study the various groups that have used or continue to use the term Pentecostal as a self-designation, it is clear that they all come back to this same experience as foundational to their self-understanding. They are still Pentecostal. There is no denying this individual or spontaneous element. The second element that all Pentecostals share is the ecumenical desire for koinonia or fellowship with other Christians with similar experiences of the Holy Spirit. This ecumenical quest for broader fellowship may point to the value of the “continuing– collective” approach outlined by Kerr. For the most part, they are much more comfortable in crossing lines or boundaries, in being ecumenical, and in sharing ministry than are their counterparts who have not encountered the Spirit in this existential baptism. The Charismatic Renewal that emerged in the late 1950s and continues today is an example of such boundary crossings (Synan 1992b; Quebedeaux 1983) as were the great ecumenical charismatic gatherings held in the late ’60s and early ’70s that seemed to bring thousands of people from every Christian tradition into a single venue for prayer and praise (Manuel 1977). These two points, namely that (1) any Pentecostal ecclesiology will begin with and take seriously the Pentecostal understanding of baptism in the Holy Spirit, and (2) it will be ecumenically open, seem to provide important contributions offered by a biblically consistent Pentecostal ecclesiology. Professor Frank Macchia has published, only this year, a dogmatic ecclesiological study that takes these two factors seriously. His perspective is to provide a glimpse of what a truly “Spirit-Baptized Church” might look like (Macchia 2020).

PENTECOSTAL ECCLESIOLOGY

 253

It seems that Pentecostals of all kinds hold the key to a unique way of understanding ecclesiology. They begin with a powerful form of spirituality, based in pneumatology, that is able to engage and transcend most other ecclesiological boundaries. In keeping with their Restorationism, they would argue that they have retrieved this form of spirituality, this understanding of the church, from the dark pages of Christian history or that God has restored it to the church through them. It is a form of spirituality, a pneumatological way of understanding the church, that they still seek to share with the entire church, believing that it will revitalize and restore the whole church to the place that Christ had first envisioned for it. Pentecostals of all kinds envision the church as the People of God that the Holy Spirit leads and empowers in predictable, official ways, but also in spontaneous and unofficial ways. As a result, the overwhelming majority of Pentecostals encourage all believers to have a direct encounter with the triune God, or the Holy Spirit of God that takes seriously his presence and power both at the institutional level and at the personal level. Pentecostalism recognizes that within this divine–human encounter, understood to be baptism in the Holy Spirit, regardless of the Christian tradition in which it finds expression, a profound transformation is available to the believer. This direct encounter with the Holy Spirit may extend from cleansing, to fruitfulness, to renewed confidence, and result in empowerment for witness (Acts 1:8) (Clark and Lederle 1989: 43–65). All are possible and more importantly expected through the Holy Spirit. No one should be surprised that various manifestations of the Holy Spirit will occur, nor should they be surprised when they occur throughout the entire church (Cartledge 2006: 19, 25–7; Warrington 2008: 1–16, 20–7; Chan 2006: 215–26). This divine encounter moves “life in the Spirit” from something theoretical to something experienced. Thus, life in the Spirit becomes a life lived with spiritual vitality in anticipation that the work of the Spirit moves from the pages of Scripture into the ongoing life of the whole church. It yields an ecclesiology that is compatible with the prophetic promise of Joel, “I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters will prophesy” (Joel 2:28; cf. Acts 2:17).

REFERENCES Alexander, E. and A. Yong, eds. (2009), Philip’s Daughters: Women in Pentecostal-Charismatic Leadership, Eugene: Pickwick. Alexander, K. (2012), “The Pentecostal Church: A Sacramental Healing Community,” Ecumenical Trends 4 (8): 1–3, 14. Althouse, P. (2010), “Ascension – Pentecost – Eschaton: A Theological Framework for Pentecostal Ecclesiology,” in J. Thomas, (ed.), Toward a Pentecostal Ecclesiology: The Church and the Fivefold Gospel 227, Cleveland: CPT Press. Althouse, P. (2016), “Towards a Pentecostal Ecclesiology: Participation in the Missional Life of the Triune God,” in C. Green (ed.), Pentecostal Ecclesiology: A Reader, 8, Leiden: Brill. Alvarez, C., P. Correa, M. Poblete, and P. Guell (n.d.), Historia de la Iglesia Pentecostal de Chile, Santiago: Ediciones Rehue. Anderson, A. (2011), “Globalization and Independent Pentecostals in Africa from a South African Perspective,” in A. Adogame (ed.), Who Is Afraid of the Holy Ghost? Pentecostalism and Globalization in Africa and Beyond, 134, Trenton: Africa World Press. Anderson, A. (2014), An Introduction to Pentecostalism, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

254

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Aronson, T. (2012), “Spirit and Church in the Ecclesiology of Lewi Pethrus,” PentecoStudies: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Research on the Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements 11 (2): 192–211. Augustine, D. (2016), “Pentecost Communal Economics and the Household of God,” in C. Green (ed.), Pentecostal Ecclesiology: A Reader, 65–87, Leiden: Brill. Barratt, T. B. (1909), In the Days of the Latter Rain, London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co. Bittlinger, A., (1968), Gifts and Graces: A Commentary on 1 Corinthians, 12–14, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Bittlinger, A. (1990), The Church Is Charismatic: The World Council of Churches and the Charismatic Renewal, Geneva: WCC. Blumhofer, E. (1989), The Assemblies of God: A Chapter in the Story of American Pentecostalism, Springfield: Gospel Publishing House. Blumhofer, E. (1993), “Restoration as Revival: Early American Pentecostalism,” in E. Blumhofer and R. Balmer (eds.), Modern Christian Revivals, 145–60, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Bradfield, C. (1979), Neo-Pentecostalism: A Sociological Assessment, Washington, DC: University Press of America. Brumback, C. (1942), What Meaneth This? A Pentecostal Answer to a Pentecostal Question, Springfield: Gospel Publishing House. Brunner, E. (1952), The Misunderstanding of the Church, London: Lutterworth Press. Butler, A. (2007), Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Byrne, J. (1970), Threshold of God’s Promise: An Introduction to the Catholic Pentecostal Movement, Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press. Carlsson, B. (1974), Organizations and Decision Procedures within the Swedish Pentecostal Movements, No City: Privately Published. Carothers, W. (1909), Church Government, Houston: J. V. Dealy Co. Cartledge, Mark J. (2006), Encountering the Spirit: The Charismatic Tradition, Traditions of Christian Spirituality Series, 19, 25–7. Maryknoll: Orbis Books. Cavaness, B. and D. Gill (2004), God’s Women: Then and Now, Springfield: Grace & Truth. Chan, S. (1999), “Evidential Glossolalia and the Doctrine of Subsequence,” Asian Journal of Pentecostal Theology 2: 195–211. Chan, S. (2006), Liturgical Theology: The Church as Worshiping Community, Downers Grove: IVP Academic. Chan, S. (2011), Pentecostal Ecclesiology: An Essay on the Development of Doctrine, Blandford Forum: Deo Publishing. Chan, S. (2016), “Mother Church: Toward a Pentecostal Ecclesiology,” in C. Green (ed.), Pentecostal Ecclesiology: A Reader, 23–46, Leiden: Brill. Clark, Mathew S. and Henry I. Lederle (1989), What Is Distinctive about Pentecostal Theology?, 184, Pretoria: University of South Africa. Clifton, S. (2009), Pentecostal Churches in Transition: Analyzing the Developing Ecclesiology of the Assemblies of God in Australia, Leiden: Brill. Davidson, T. (2015), Lewi Pethrus’ Ecclesiological Thought 1911–1974: A Transdenominational Pentecostal Ecclesiology, Leiden: Brill. Davis, Mrs. R. (1983), The Move of God: The Outpouring of the Holy Spirit from Azusa Street to Now, Tulsa: Albury Press. “Delusions of the Last Days” (May 21, 1907), The Free Methodist [Chicago], 8 (328).

PENTECOSTAL ECCLESIOLOGY

 255

“Denominationalism and Independent Churches” (December 1949), Herald of Faith 14 (2): 12. “Denounces New Denominations” (September 24, 1906), Los Angeles Express: 5. “Divine Healer” (July 6, 1905), Houston Daily Post: 4. “‘Do Not Quench the Spirit’: Charisms in the Life and Mission of the Church: Report of the Sixth Phase of the International Catholic-Pentecostal Dialogue (2011-2015),” Information Service N. 147 (2016/I), 47–62. Dunn, J. (1970), Baptism in the Holy Spirit, Naperville: Alec R. Allenson. Emmert, A. (1976), “Charismatic Developments in the Eastern Orthodox Church,” in R. Spittler (ed.), Perspectives on the New Pentecostalism, 28–42, Grand Rapids: Baker. Farah, C. (1981), “A Critical Analysis: The ‘Roots and Fruits’ of Faith-Formula Theology,” Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 3 (1): 3–21. Faupel, D. (2010), “The New Order of the Latter Rain: Restoration or Renewal?” in M. Wilkinson and P. Althouse (eds.), Winds from the North: Canadian Contributions to the Pentecostal Movement, 239–63, Leiden: Brill. Fee, Gordon D. (1979), The Disease of the Health and Wealth Gospels, Costa Mesa: The Word for Today. Fichter, J. (1975), The Catholic Cult of the Paraclete, New York: Sheed &Ward. Flannery, A. (1976, revised 1996), The Vatican Collection: Vatican II Council: The Conciliar and Post-Conciliar Documents, 363, Northport: Costello Publishing. Ford, J. (1976), Which Way for Catholic Pentecostals?. New York: Harper & Row. Gaston, W. T. (September 2, 1922), “The Latter Rain,” The Pentecostal Evangel, 6. Gelpi, D. (1971), Pentecostalism: A Theological Viewpoint, New York: Paulist. Green, C. (2012), Toward a Pentecostal Theology of the Lord’s Supper: Foretasting the Kingdom, Cleveland: CPT Press. Green, C., ed. (2016), Pentecostal Ecclesiology: A Reader, Leiden: Brill. Griffith, G. W. (November 6, 1906), “A Grievous Error,” The Free Methodist [Chicago], 2 (706). Gunstone, J. (1982), Pentecostal Anglicans, London: Hodder & Stoughton. Hawtin, G. and E. Hawtin (1949), Church Government, No City: Privately Published. Heyer, R. (1974), Pentecostal Catholics, New York: Paulist. Higgins, T. (2012), “Kenn Gullicksen, John Wimber, and the Founding of the Vineyard Movement,” Pneuma 34: 208–28. “History of Pentecost” (September 1922), The Faithful Standard 1 (6): 5. Hocken, P. (1976), “The Significance and Potential of Pentecostalism,” in S. Tugwell, G. Every, J. Mills, and P. Hocken, New Heaven? New Earth? An Encounter with Pentecostalism, 22, London: Darton, Longman & Todd. Hodges, M. (1977), A Theology of the Church and Its Mission, Springfield: Gospel Publishing House. Hoover, M. (1970), Origin and Structural Development of the Assemblies of God, No City: Mario G. Hoover. Horn, J. N. (1989), From Rags to Riches: An Analysis of the Faith Movement and Its Relation to the Classical Pentecostal Movement, Pretoria: University of South Africa. “Human Organization or Divine Administration” (1949), Herald of Faith 14 (2): 4–5. “In Grip of the Holy Rollers” (August 14, 1907), Los Angeles Daily Times: 2. “International Catholic Charismatic Renewal Services Doctrinal Commission” (2012), in Baptism in the Holy Spirit, Vatican City: International Catholic Charismatic Renewal Services, 9. Irvin, D. (Spring 2005), “Pentecostal Historiography and Global Christianity: Rethinking the Question of Origins,” Pneuma 27: 35–50.

256

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

“Is There a National or World Organization To Be Found in Acts 15?” (1949), Herald of Faith 14 (3): 4–6. Jackson, B. (1999), The Quest for the Radical Middle: A History of the Vineyard, Anaheim: Vineyard. Johnson, T., G. Zurlo, A. Hickman, and P. Crossing (2018),“Christianity 2018,” International Bulletin of Mission Research 42 (1): 24. Kalu, O. (2008), African Pentecostalism: An Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kärkkäinen, V. M. (2002), An Introduction to Ecclesiology: Ecumenical, Historical and Global Perspectives, Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press.

Kärkkäinen, V. M. (2016), “Church as Charismatic Fellowship: Ecclesiological Reflections from the Pentecostal-Roman Catholic Dialogue,” in C. Green (ed.), Pentecostal Ecclesiology: A Reader, 4. Leiden: Brill. Kay, W. (2007), Apostolic Networks in Britain: New Ways of Being Church, Milton Keynes: Paternoster. Kerr, J. (1974), The Fire Flares Anew: A Look at the New Pentecostalism, Philadelphia: Fortress. Knowles, B. (2014), Transforming Pentecostalism: The Changing Face of New Zealand Pentecostalism 1920–2010, Lexington: EMeth Press. Lange, D. (1979), Eine Bewegung bricht sich Bahn: Die deutschen Gemeinschaften im augebenden 19. und beginnenden 20. Jahrhundert und ihre Stellung zu Kirche, Theologie und Pfingstbewegung, Giessen: Brunnen Verlag; Dillenburg: Gnadauer Verlag. Laurentin, R. (1977), Catholic Pentecostalism, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell, Garden City: Doubleday. Laurentin, R. (1980), “Mary: Model of the Charismatic as Seen in Acts 1-2, Lk. 1-2, and John,” in Vincent P. Branick (ed.), Mary, the Spirit and the Church, 28–43, New York: Paulist. Macchia, F. D. (2020), The Spirit-Baptized Church: A Dogmatic Inquiry, London: T&T Clark. Macedo, B. (1998), Doutrinas da Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus, Rio de Janeiro: Universal. Manuel, D. (1977), Like a Mighty River, Orleans: Rock Harbor Press. Martin F., ed. (1998), Baptism in the Holy Spirit: Reflections on a Contemporary Grace in the Light of the Catholic Tradition, Petersham: St. Bede’s Publications. Martin, I. G. (December 12, 1906), “Los Angeles Letter,” The Pentecostal Herald 19 (10): 2. McDonnell, K. (1976), Charismatic Renewal and the Churches, New York: Seabury. McDonnell, K. and G. Montague (1991a), Christian Initiation and Baptism in the Holy Spirit: Evidence form the First Eight Centuries, Collegeville: The Liturgical Press. McDonnell, K. and G. Montague (1991b), Fanning the Flame: What Does Baptism in the Holy Spirit Have to Do with Christian Initiation?,, Collegeville: The Liturgical Press. McGowan, W. (n.d.), Another “Echo from Azusa,” Covina: Privately Published. McPherson, A. (1919), This Is That: Personal Experiences, Sermons and Writings, Los Angeles: The Bridal Call Publishing House. Miller, D. (2003), “Routinizing Charisma: The Vineyard Christian Fellowship in the PostWimber Era,” Pneuma 2: 216–39. Minutes of the 56th Session of the General Council of the Assemblies of God with Revised Constitution and Bylaws, 156, Springfield: General Secretary’s Office, 2017. Myland, D. (1910), The Latter Rain Covenant and Pentecostal Power, Chicago: Evangel Publishing House. “New Religions Come, Then Go” (September 24, 1906), Los Angeles Herald: 7. O’Connor, E. (1971), The Pentecostal Movement in the Catholic Church, Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press.

PENTECOSTAL ECCLESIOLOGY

 257

Omenyo, C. (2002), Pentecost outside Pentecostalism: A Study of the Development of Charismatic Renewal in the Mainline Churches in Ghana, Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum. Pfaller, L. and L. Alberts (1973), Mary Is Pentecostal, Pecos: Dove Publications. Poloma, M. (1982), The Charismatic Movement: Is There a New Pentecost? Boston: G. K. Hall & Company and Twayne Publishers. Quanabush, E. (1971), The Changing of the Guard: Neo-Pentecostalism, Burbank: Vision Enterprises. Quebedeaux, R. (1983), The New Charismatics II, 272, San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers. Ranaghan, K. and D. Ranaghan (1969), Catholic Pentecostals, Paramus: Paulist/Deus Books. “Report of the Tenth Annual Convention of the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association, Chicago, May 13–20, Resolutions and Reports” (June 1928), The Christian Fundamentalist 1 (12): 6. Riss, R. (Spring 1982), “The Latter Rain Movement of 1948,” Pneuma 4 (1): 32–45. Robeck, C. (2006), The Azusa Street Mission and Revival: The Birth of the Global Pentecostal Movement, Nashville: Thomas Nelson. Robeck, C. (2014), “The Origins of Modern Pentecostalism: Some Historiographical Issues,” in C. Robeck and A. Yong (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Pentecostalism, 13–30, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robeck, C. (2018), “The Church,” in C. Constantineanu and C. Scobie (eds.), Pentecostals in the 21st Century: Identity, Beliefs, Praxis, 141–57, Eugene: Cascade. Robeck, C. (2019), “Can We Imagine an Ecumenical Future Together? A Pentecostal Perspective,” Gregorianum 100 (1): 49–69. Robeck, Jr. Cecil M. (2016), “Ekleziologija,” in Corneliu Constantineanu and Christopher J. Scobie (eds.), Binkoštniki V.21 Stoletju Identiteta, Verovanje, Praksa, 221–43, Lublyana: Podvig. Romeiro, P. (1993), SuperCrentes: O Evangelho Segundo Kenneth Hagin, Valnice Milhomens e os Profetas da Prosperidade, São Paulo: Editora Mundo Cristão. Sepulveda, J. (2015), “The Power of the Spirit and the Indigenization of the Church: A Latin American Perspective,” in N. Medina and S. Alfaro (eds.), Pentecostals and Charismatics in Latin America and Latino Communities, 17–33, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sherrill, J. (1964), They Speak with Other Tongues, New York: McGraw-Hill. Spittler, R. (1975), “The Theological Opportunity Lying before the Pentecostal Movement,” in Vinson Synan (ed.), Aspects of Pentecostal Charismatic Origins, 243, Plainfield: Logos. Stephanou, E. (1976), Charismatic Renewal in the Orthodox Church, Fort Wayne: The Logos Ministry for Orthodox Renewal. Stephenson, L. (2014), “Getting Our Feet Wet: The Politics of Footwashing,” Journal of Pentecostal Theology 23 (2): 154–70. Stewart, A. (2014), “From Monogenesis to Polygenesis in Pentecostal Origins: A Survey of the Evidence from the Azusa Street, Hebden and Mukti Missions,” PentecoStudies: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Research on the Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements 13 (2): 151–72. Stibbe, M. (1998), “This Is That: Some Thoughts Concerning Charismatic Hermeneutics,” Anvil: An Anglican Evangelical Journal for Theology and Mission 15 (3): 181–93. Streeter, B. (1929), The Primitive Church: Studied with Special Reference to the Origins of the Christian Ministry, London: Macmillan. Suenens, L. (1984), A New Pentecost?. New York: Seabury.

258

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Sullivan, F. (1982), Charisms and Charismatic Renewal, Ann Arbor: Servant. Synan, V. (1992a), Under His Banner: History of Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International, 172, Costa Mesa: Gift Publications. Synan, V. (1992b), The Spirit Said “Grow”: The Astounding Worldwide Expansion of Pentecostal and Charismatic Churches, Innovations in Mission Series, 62, Monrovia: MARC. Theological and Pastoral Orientations on the Catholic Charismatic Renewal: Prepared at Malines Belgium, May 21–26, 1974, (1974), Notre Dame: Word of Life. “The Tongue Heresy” (December 19, 1906), Pillar of Fire 7 (51): 6–7, 11. “The Tongues Heresy” (July 23, 1908), The Burning Bush 7 (30): 12–13. “Third Work of Grace a Confusion of the Devil” (December 3, 1908), The Gospel Trumpet (3–4): 755–6. Thomas, J. (1991), Footwashing in John 13 and the Johannine Community, Sheffield: JSOT Press. Thomas, J., ed. (2010), Toward a Pentecostal Ecclesiology: The Church and the Fivefold Gospel, Cleveland: CPT Press. Tomberlin, D. (2015), Pentecostal Sacraments: Meeting God at the Altar, No City: Privately Published. Tomlinson, A. (1913), The Last Great Conflict, Cleveland: Walter D. Rodgers. “Tongue Priestess Denounces Clergy” (January 10, 1907), The Cleveland Leader: 5. Van der Laan, C. (2009), “What Good Can Come from Los Angeles? Changing Perceptions of the North American Pentecostal Origins in Early Western European Pentecostal Periodicals,” in Harold D. Hunter and Cecil M. Robeck, Jr. (eds.), The Azusa Street Revival and Its Legacy, 141–59, Eugene: Wipf & Stock. Versteeg, P. (2011), The Ethnography of a Dutch Pentecostal Church: Vineyard Utrecht and the International Charismatic Movement, Lewiston: Edwin Mellen. Wagner, C. (1988), The Third Wave of the Holy Spirit: Encountering the Power of Signs and Wonders Today, Ann Arbor: Servant. Wagner, C., ed. (1998), The New Apostolic Churches, Ventura: Regal. Ware, K., (1973), “Orthodoxy and the Charismatic Movement,” Eastern Churches Review 4: 182–6. Warrington, K. (2008), Pentecostal Theology: A Theology of Encounter, 1–16, 20–7, London: T&T Clark. Washburn, J. (1913), History and Reminiscences of the Holiness Church Work in Southern California and Arizona, South Pasadena: Record Press. Wiegele, K. (2005), Investing in Miracles: El Shaddai and the Transformation of Popular Catholicism in the Philippines, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Wiegele, K. (2012), “The Prosperity Gospel among Filipino Catholic Charismatics,” in Katy Attanasi and Amos Yong (eds.), Pentecostalism and Prosperity: The Socio-Economics of the Global Charismatic Movement, 171–88, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wietake, W. and J. Hustad (1973), Towards a Mutual Understanding of Neo-Pentecostalism, Minneapolis: Augsburg. Wilkerson, D. with J. and E. Sherrill (1963), The Cross and the Switchblade, New York: Bernard Geis Association/Random House. “Young Girl Given Gift of Tongues” (July 20, 1906), Los Angeles Express: 1. Youngren, A., “The Tongues Heresy” (June 16, 1908), The Free Methodist [Chicago], 11 (379).

Chapter EIGHTEEN

Evangelicalism and Restorationist Ecclesiologies JOHN G. STACKHOUSE, JR.

INTRODUCTION And now for something completely different. Unlike most, even all, of the other traditions and denominations in this volume, evangelicalism—including the intersecting movement known as restorationism or primitivism—does not have a distinctive and definitive ecclesiology. At least, it doesn’t in terms of the usual categories of “marks of the church,” clergy/ordination, polity, sacraments, and the like (Stackhouse 2003). As will become evident immediately upon defining what we mean by “evangelicalism,” evangelicalism comprises a number of ecclesiologies, since it comprises traditions with differing notae ecclesiae, groups that ordain clergy and those who do not, polities ranging from episcopal to congregationalist, and denominations whose regard for the sacraments run from a Reformed “spiritual presence in the eucharist” to at least one group (the Salvation Army) that has no sacraments at all. Evangelicalism nonetheless has a distinctive and definable ecclesiology after all, if also implicit: an ecclesiology that is both effect and cause of its distinctive identity and career. That identity now needs definition. And it is this definition, the discussion of which will take no small fraction of this chapter, that will ground our understanding of evangelical ecclesiology.

EVANGELICALISM DEFINED The word “evangelical” comes, of course, from the Greek word for “good news.” This evangel is a message about the life, work, and significance of Jesus Christ as “God reconciling the world to himself ” (2 Cor. 5:19) and how we can participate in that salvation. As a term denoting a particular group or movement of Christians, it goes back at least as far as the Reformation—and perhaps its antecedents, particularly John Wycliffe and the Lollards and Jan Hus and his followers. Since the sixteenth century, then, “evangelical” has meant “Protestant” (versus Roman Catholic), “Lutheran” versus Reformed in an earlier era of German history (thus the word Evangelical in the titles of various North American Lutheran denominations), and a particular party in the nineteenth-century Church of England (versus “High,” “Broad,” and other parties within that denomination). Historians generally agree, however, that it is the transatlantic revival movements of the eighteenth century, those that emerged out of Puritan and Pietist roots

260

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

to blossom into the “surprising works of God” (Jonathan Edwards) led by the likes of John and Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, and, yes, Edwards, that mark the arrival of evangelicalism as a new something in church history (Noll 2004). Ur-Evangelicalism, therefore, was an initiative of renewal and mission. It did not seek to be a separate kind of Christianity—on the same level as denominations or broader traditions such as “Reformed” or “Anabaptist.” Quite the contrary: it emerged as a desire to stir up the (Protestant) Christian church on the European continent, in Britain, and in the New World to fidelity in doctrine, fervency in piety, and faithfulness in mission—in short, to preach and promote the “New Birth” and its implications for Christian living. This basic concern for authentic Christianity has meant that evangelicals have reflexively been neither conservative nor innovative, but instead have been selectively both. They have promoted, that is, a devout and practical form of whatever tradition they have been in. Evangelicals therefore have defended certain traditional teachings while modifying or jettisoning others (such as emphasizing substitutionary atonement while being less particular about a theology of baptism); have cared deeply about some matters and scandalized other Christians by ignoring what their critics have held sacred (such as holding a much higher regard for the person of Jesus than has been true in some traditions while blithely accommodating various views of the eucharist); and have felt free to innovate in a wide range of practices (such as preaching in the open air instead of “properly” in a pulpit). Historians have worked hard to understand why some aspects of the Christian religion received more attention, passion, and action from evangelicals than others. Key to such explanation has been noticing where the church was lacking in a particular time and place. As a renewal movement, that is, evangelicalism would naturally seek to remedy what was deficient by a corresponding emphasis. Sometimes, therefore, evangelicals would emphasize social concerns (such as abolition, alcohol, or abortion) while in other circumstances their focus would be on more narrowly ecclesiastical matters (such as the historical criticism of the Bible, doctrinal innovations, or evangelistic campaigns). Given that historical situatedness, however, it is striking that over several centuries evangelicals have continued to emphasize a few characteristic teachings, concerns, and practices. “Evangelical” for most scholars nowadays denotes a type (quite literally, a type—a particular, distinct variety) of Christian ethos, of “Christian being.” This definition is what is indicated by British historian David Bebbington’s oft-cited criteria of crucicentrism, biblicism, conversionism, and activism:

1. Crucicentrism. Evangelicals focus on Jesus Christ, and particularly champion the doctrine of the atonement with a focus on the sacrificial, substitutionary death of Christ on the cross.



2. Biblicism. Evangelicals love the Bible as the Word of God written and place it in the center of their corporate worship (literally, in terms of church architecture, such as the central place accorded the pulpit, and liturgically, in terms of the order of service focusing on the sermon), spiritual exercises, theological method, and epistemological outlook.



3. Conversionism. Evangelicals believe that each person must be converted from sin to salvation (not necessarily in a dramatic “conversion experience”) and must press on toward full holiness of life—to be “fully converted.”

EVANGELICALISM AND RESTORATIONIST ECCLESIOLOGIES



 261

4. Activism. Evangelicals commit themselves to participating with God in God’s saving mission in and to the world, particularly in the proclamation of the gospel but also in charitable work and in caring for all of creation (Bebbington 1989).

Bebbington’s quadrilateral of criteria must be supplemented, however, with American historian George Marsden’s fifth element: trans-denominationalism, the willingness to recognize authentic Christianity in other denominations so as to warrant working together on projects of mutual concern. Such an attitude made possible the cooperation of evangelicals in the eighteenth-century revivals and the vast range of evangelical cooperation ever since (Marsden 1984). The criterion of trans-denominationalism also helps to mark off evangelicals from the more generic category of what we might call “observant Protestants,” a category that would include, for example, conservative Lutherans or conservative Anglicans, who generally have little to do with any other kind of Christian. Moreover, this trans-denominationalism is possible only because of the trait of evangelicals we noticed earlier, namely, the valuing of some beliefs, affections, and practices as more central than others—a distinction not observed in Christian organizations that insist on conformity all the way down. Indeed, evangelicals often have scandalized their brothers and sisters in this denomination or that movement precisely because they were willing to make distinctions among matters of primary, secondary, and tertiary importance and, when the primary concerns were met, would offer to cooperate with others who held quite different secondary and tertiary convictions. Bebbington and Marsden, to reiterate, are historians. Thus their fivefold definition of “evangelical” denotes an individual or a corporate entity that belongs to a historical movement known as “evangelicalism.” This definition is based on the eighteenth-century revivals but also on the history of evangelical movements to the present. Thus evangelicals today would be:

(a) those individuals and groups who descend from those revivals;



(b) AND who have not departed from the characteristic emphases of those revivals (that is, all five points of the definition);



(c) OR are individuals and groups who have since identified themselves with this evangelical tradition and thus have connected with other evangelicals beyond their own denominational lines.

North American examples of (a) and (b) would be most Baptists, some Presbyterians, and a minority of Anglicans/Episcopalians. Examples of (a) and not (b) would be most of the United Methodist Church in the United States and the United Church of Canada. Examples of (c) would be the Mennonite Brethren and the Christian Reformed Church (Stackhouse 1993). We might usefully pause to acknowledge that there have been several ulterior motives in defining evangelicals in particular ways. Some leaders of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) in the United States and of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (EFC), for example, have employed something like Bebbington’s quadrilateral without Marsden’s “trans-denominational” element and thus have presented their organizations as representing many groups that they did not, in fact, represent. Such groups included such large denominations as the Southern Baptist Convention and the Missouri Synod of Lutherans (the northern version of which is the Lutheran Church–Canada), which had no actual relationship with the NAE or EFC and generally stuck to themselves. Thus such

262

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

leaders passed themselves off as more important than they really were in their quest to present a “united evangelical front,” as the NAE used to put it (Stackhouse 1995). Others have wanted to marginalize evangelicals in public life. These critics have focused on matters such as creation science, biblical literalism, apocalyptic beliefs, or speaking in tongues in order to identify evangelicals as those with “strange” beliefs or practices, even though none of these is central to evangelicalism, nor is any of them held by all evangelicals. Still others would like to have claimed evangelical identity and credentials for themselves while departing from orthodoxy in doctrine or practice. (I have in mind here a wide range of examples, such as those who would combine evangelicalism with New Age spirituality at one extreme, or those who would like to maintain an evangelical identity while converting to Roman Catholicism at the other.) Definitions of evangelicalism that are too simple may well unintentionally or, in this case, intentionally include heterodoxy and heteronomy. This last group will prompt us to add a sixth element to our definition. But let’s pause to make a couple of key qualifications on what we have surveyed so far. First, these criteria describe what evangelicals centrally profess. In doing so, there is no implication that other Christians do not share some of these values. Of course they do. Precisely because these other Christians do share many values with evangelicals, in fact, they have been (erroneously) counted as evangelicals by many historians, sociologists, pollsters, and others. Observing carefully the six-point definition summarized below would (finally) yield study of evangelicals, and not just “conservative” or “orthodox” or “observant” or “enthusiastic” or “evangelistic” or “revivalistic” Christians. Thus, second, this set of criteria functions properly only as a set. There is nothing peculiarly evangelical about any of them singly. It is only this set as a set that helps scholars, pollsters, leaders, and interested others pick out evangelicals from Christians in general, or observant Christians in general, or observant Protestants in general, and so on. To be helpful, this definition must be employed as a set, without compromise, versus the common polling practice of counting as evangelicals those who score only “highly” but not absolutely on some scale derived from such criteria. Evangelicals themselves do not compromise on any of these values: they don’t think it’s okay to fudge on the doctrine of the atonement, or to neglect the Bible, or to avoid churchgoing, or to abstain from evangelism, or to avoid contact with anyone outside one’s denomination. To this five-point definition, therefore, I must add a sixth: evangelicals are orthodox, orthoprax, and “orthopath” (recognizing that there is currently no English word for “having the correct feelings/values”). This sixth criterion explicates what would have been assumed by evangelicals (and by Bebbington and Marsden) all along—namely, that evangelicals share the primary beliefs, affections, and practices of their particular traditions. George Whitefield or John Stott would never have expected to count as an evangelical someone who was truly “crucicentric” or christocentric but who denied the Trinity—as in “Jesus-only” Pentecostalism. They likewise would have assumed regular churchgoing as part of a life of growing spiritual maturity and caring for the poor as part of what it means to cooperate with God in his mission of redeeming the world. This hexagonal definition draws on the historical record: Bebbington, Marsden, and I contend that these traits mark out the essentials of the evangelical movement in modern Christianity. And yet a definitional problem remains: Who determines what counts as orthodoxy, orthopathy, and orthopraxy? Can one be an (authentic) evangelical and, say, hold that covenantal domestic and romantic partnerships between homosexuals should

EVANGELICALISM AND RESTORATIONIST ECCLESIOLOGIES

 263

be recognized by the church as sanctioned by God? Certainly there are people today who claim to fit all six criteria and yet hold to this opinion. Can one be an (authentic) evangelical and hold to the “prosperity” teaching that Jesus intends his disciples to enjoy health and wealth and success on all other fronts if they will only be faithful? Again, it is evident that there are such people who would claim to meet all six criteria—and conspicuously in places where evangelicals like to claim great success for their cause, such as sub-Saharan Africa, Korea, and Latin America. The customary answer from many evangelicals to the claims of such folk is to say, “Well, you might claim that you meet the six criteria, but you don’t.” You don’t, that is, believe or feel or live in accordance with what the Bible teaches, and thus are disqualified implicitly by the criterion of biblicism. But let’s recall that evangelicals disagree about what the Bible says—and on lots of issues. That’s why evangelicals are (criterion five) trans-denominational: they already disagree on a host of issues, many of which are important—indeed, many of which were so important in church history as to break the Christian fellowship that evangelicals now are saying is possible even in the face of such disagreements. Modes and meanings of baptism and communion; forms of church government; styles of preaching and evangelism; priorities in mission; countless points of dogma—all these and more have been grounds for Christians to excommunicate each other (in one sense or another of that word), and yet evangelicals as evangelicals say, “Yes, those things matter enough that we’re going to maintain denominational identities and distinctives, but we recognize you as an evangelical with whom we want to do Kingdom business, so let’s get going on that Bible school/rescue mission/evangelistic initiative/etc.” Therefore, since it is part of the very ethos of evangelicalism to recognize differences of opinion precisely about what the Bible does and doesn’t say about a host of issues, many of them quite consequential, then when it comes to the present discussion, it now appears that no evangelical can properly say, “Well, anyone who holds to X can’t be an evangelical, because the Bible clearly forbids X. And that’s that.” In short, evangelicalism cannot be sharply characterized in its beliefs, affections, and practices beyond understanding it to be something like this: Evangelicalism is obser vant (orthodox, orthoprax, and orthopath) Protestant Christianity devoted to the figure of Jesus Christ, centered on the Bible, and expressed in vital discipleship issuing in mission in cooperation with similarly concerned Christians of various denominations.

FROM PERSONAL PIETY AND PROMOTION TO PRAGMATISM, PLURALISM, AND POPULISM Evangelical ecclesiology unfurls as a set of interwoven, mutually reinforcing qualities that we can put thus: personal piety is to be promoted, thus evangelicals embrace pragmatism, which entails populism and results in pluralism. We begin, then, as the eighteenth-century revivals did: with piety. John Calvin famously defined piety as “that reverence joined with love of God which the knowledge of his benefits induces.” Indeed, Calvin says: For unless they recognize that they owe everything to God, that they are nourished by his fatherly care, that he is the Author of their every good, that they should seek nothing beyond him, they will never yield him willing service. Nay, unless they establish

264

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

their complete happiness in him, they will never give themselves truly and sincerely to him. (Institutes I, ii: 1) The eighteenth-century revivals certainly appealed to the emotions and, as Jonathan Edwards would most famously put it, the religious affections—whether through Whitefield’s theatrics, Charles Wesley’s hymns, or Edwards’s own vivid metaphors. Fundamentally, however, the preaching was informational, as befit a movement led by Yale and Oxford men. Behold what God in Christ has done for you and will do in you. Believe that message, that gospel, and respond accordingly. You will then be granted the New Birth and embark on a life of increasing holiness and fruitful service, assured as you do so (and this was a distinctive message in the eighteenth century) that you are among the saved. Hearing and receiving the good news of God’s “benefits,” one then gladly does one’s duty (= pius, the root of “piety”). This piety, furthermore, was deeply personal. The very image of being “born again” was “personal” both in the sense of individual and in the sense of involving the whole person. One’s ideas changed in conversion, yes, but so also did one’s values, one’s feelings, and one’s behavior: hence the evangelical appeal to the affections and the evangelical instruction in godly living. Upon conversion, one entered into a new relationship with God, a personal relationship with God, being adopted (to alter the “New Birth” metaphor slightly) into God’s own family. And evangelical sermons, songs, writings, and prayers depicted this relationship primarily in terms of Jesus, the incarnate image of God, giving rise to the distinctive evangelical familiarity (one might say, “familiality”) with the person of Jesus, rather than with “God-in-general” or with the Church. Thus the evangelical traditional call to “come to Jesus” and the conventional response: “I rose, went forth, and followed Thee” (Charles Wesley, “And Can It Be”; Hindmarsh 2005, 2018). The appropriate response to the great truths of the gospel was, of course, to surrender one’s whole life to God. One was now to devote every minute to the glory of God, whether in spiritual activities, such as prayer and churchgoing, or in family life, business, and recreation. Thus the early evangelicals fostered the Protestant Reformers’ emphasis upon the vocation of each Christian, not just clergy. Promoting this piety, furthermore, was incumbent upon everyone. Parents should instill it in children; friends should engage in uplifting conversation; pastors should foster it in their congregations; and some should undertake the spread of this message to others, by whatever means possible. Because these were matters literally of (new) life and death, evangelicals quickly disentangled themselves from anything that hindered the proclamation of the good news. If proper Anglican pulpits were closed to John Wesley, he would preach in marketplaces and crossroads. If conventional homiletical styles rendered jaded auditors listlessly inattentive, Whitefield would inspire a generation of preachers to dramatic vividness, even flamboyance. And if local clergy took umbrage at itinerants seeking to stir up the embers of piety, even as they tended to stir up other emotions as well, the itinerants would fire back with denunciation, thus often breaking up congregations into churches of those preferring the old ways versus those preferring the new. This pragmatism was seen by a staunch Calvinist such as Edwards in terms of sheer faithfulness to the Great Commission, which God sovereignly might deign to bless with immediate response. Edwards, after all, had preached “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” one week in his own church without noticeable revival, only to preach it soon afterward to a neighboring congregation and witness gospel fire breaking out. Who could say when and how inscrutable Providence would prompt hearts to faith?

EVANGELICALISM AND RESTORATIONIST ECCLESIOLOGIES

 265

Charles Finney, for one. Finney, a lawyer by training and a Presbyterian minister so indifferent to doctrine that he signed the Westminster Standards only later to disavow them when challenged to actually read them, was a great believer in what he called “gospel means” producing “gospel ends.” “A revival is not a miracle, or dependent on a miracle in any sense,” Finney characteristically averred. “It is a purely philosophic [that is, scientific or practical] result of the right use of the constituted means.” A century after Edwards and the Great Awakening, Finney’s “New Measures”—from extended meetings, to the designated seating of an “anxious bench” for those feeling “under conviction,” to extensive publicity, and more—extended evangelicalism’s confident pragmatism into the Second Great Awakening. But Finney is best seen as merely extending a tradition reaching back to Whitefield’s deliberate deployment of the techniques of the theater and John Wesley’s careful building of social networks to both light and keep lit the flames of renewal. This pragmatic tradition leads, then, from the eighteenth-century pioneers of evangelicalism through the camp meetings of the nineteenth-century frontier that became institutionalized as campgrounds and annual revival meetings among Methodists, Baptists, and others, through the nineteenth-century revivalists as varied as Finney and Yale University’s Timothy Dwight, to Dwight Moody and Billy Sunday’s extensively advertised urban campaigns into the twentieth. . . . . .all of which brings us to Billy Graham. Graham continued the Finney tradition as he came to national attention first while conducting extended meetings in a literal tent in Los Angeles in 1949. Whether media magnate William Randolph Hearst ever actually told his nationwide newspapers to “Puff Graham,” Graham’s media touch became golden, and he soon became nationally and internationally famous as an evangelist. Graham’s media machine was so effective, in fact, that officials of both major American political parties made pilgrimages to his headquarters in Minneapolis to learn about direct mail and other media in which Graham’s team were in the vanguard (Martin 1991; Wacker 2014). Graham pastored a church for only a short while in his youth and spent the rest of his career as an itinerant evangelist. But there is nonetheless a straight line from his ministry to the major developments in evangelical church life of the 1970s and beyond. Graham’s attention to statistics and techniques were of a piece with the Institute for Church Growth, founded by Donald McGavran and soon housed at Fuller Theological Seminary. This anthropological approach, born on the mission fields of India, promoted “people movements” for large-scale conversion, rather than focusing on individuals one by one, and recommended unapologetically that resources be diverted from unproductive missionary efforts to those that saw results. Consider also the roaring success of the Willow Creek Community Church, founded in Chicago’s suburbs by Bill Hybels on door-to-door surveying, and the tailoring of church to match the preferences of unchurched suburbanites, a pattern followed by dozens of churches in America and well beyond. Billy Graham was, as his biographer Grant Wacker called him, “America’s Pastor,” and evangelical pastors around the world learned much from how he conducted his work. Graham, that is, personified evangelical pragmatism, paying attention to every detail of networking, fundraising, local support, publicity, and both the training of volunteers and the following up of those who made “decisions” at his rallies. It wasn’t much of a leap from this business-inflected approach to mass evangelism to McGavran’s social-science-inflected approach to gospel proclamation, Hybels’s poll-based approach giving rise to “seeker-sensitive” Sunday mornings, and Rick Warren’s bestselling Purpose-Driven Church. Yes, Graham was the patron saint of savvy soul-saving. But he also stands for the populism at the heart of evangelical ecclesiology.

266

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

It is hard to think of someone who enjoyed a longer and more prominent career in the limelight of American popular culture. Bing Crosby—a giant of three media (recorded music, radio, and film) for decades—comes to mind as perhaps the only rival to Graham. And it was Graham’s popularity, and that alone, that gave him the leverage not only to conduct huge meetings all over the world but to convene international conferences of evangelicals (most notably, the Lausanne Conference of 1974 that issued the watershed call for evangelicals to recover social service alongside evangelism as central to their mission), open doors in the Iron Curtain (most notably, his controversial visit to the Soviet Union in 1982), and found key evangelical institutions (most notably, Christianity Today magazine). As historian Nathan Hatch detailed in his magisterial study of The Democratization of American Christianity (Hatch 1989), leadership in nineteenth-century American Christianity increasingly depended on one’s direct appeal to laypeople, rather than mediated authority one received via traditional organizational hierarchies. At the core of the legacy of the American Revolution (and, indeed, of the Enlightenment to which its ideology was so beholden) was the conviction that the common person was entirely capable of judging who should rule the country—the very basis of democracy. Likewise, it was increasingly thought in Jacksonian America and beyond, laypeople also possessed both the ability and the right to select their ecclesiastical leaders as well. Evangelicalism since then— not just in America, and not just among white evangelicals—has been directed mostly by pastors of huge churches, not by denominational executives or seminary presidents. Indeed, these latter roles are often filled by those selfsame preachers, whose success in building large followings ipso facto qualifies them to lead organizations and train the next generation of leaders. Since pragmatism and populism in the service of promoting personal piety so centrally shapes evangelical ecclesiology, it is no surprise, then, that evangelical ecclesiology is also characterized by pluralism. The Wesleys and Whitefield were Anglicans in an episcopal church; Edwards was a Congregationalist; and many have been the presbyterian/ elder-governed churches in between. The World Evangelical Alliance includes members across the spectrum of church polities, including groups (such as the Plymouth Brethren) who do not ordain clergy at all, and some, especially in the Pentecostal–charismatic movement, who recognize the offices of “apostle” and “prophet” on the modern scene (Callahan 1996; Grass 2006). Evangelical ecclesiology, therefore, has been perfectly matched to the “market-based” models of contemporary religious life theorized by the likes of Rodney Stark and Roger Finke (Stark and Finke 2000). Whether in the quietly radical work of Howard Snyder (Snyder 1975), who encouraged evangelicals to reconsider everything from meeting space (“Do you need to own a building?”) to congregational life (commending Wesleyan models of small groups as essential); or in the prosperity–gospel fulsomeness of TV preachers Creflo Dollar and Kenneth Copeland (Bowler 2013); or in the high-church formality encouraged by Robert Webber’s “ancient-future” model (Webber 1999); or in the hipster-rock events of Australia’s Hillsong franchises, evangelical churches could metamorphose (some would unkindly say, “metastasize”) to fill every niche in the spiritual marketplace.

PARACHURCH ORGANIZATIONS The evangelical themes of the promotion of personal piety fostering pragmatism, populism, and pluralism are nowhere better seen than outside the churches, in fact.

EVANGELICALISM AND RESTORATIONIST ECCLESIOLOGIES

 267

George Marsden has described what he calls “the evangelical denomination” as “essentially a trans-denominational assemblage of independent agencies and their supporters, plus some denominationally sponsored seminaries and colleges which support such parachurch institutions” (Marsden 1984). In his insightful study of The Restructuring of American Religion (1988), sociologist Robert Wuthnow indicates that the most important change he sees in evangelicalism in the last several generations, as in other religious communities, is the emerging dominance of parachurch and other “special purpose groups” at the same time that denominational identities and organizations are eroding. The term “parachurch,” or “alongside the church,” describes those organizations that have a clear Christian identity and purpose that yet are not tied to an individual congregation or denomination. In some accounts, they do what the “church” in its congregational or denominational form is not doing, or is not able to do, or is not doing well enough. This definition thus helps define a reality which Robert Wuthnow’s preferred term “special purpose groups” does not, since Wuthnow’s term includes all of the groups within congregations and denominations—from sewing circles to women’s fellowships to divorce recovery workshops to international missionary societies. Yet this term “parachurch” is seen by some as implicitly derogatory, and with good reason. It suggests that the “true” church is represented only in local congregations—and whatever political structures link those local congregations together into denominations. Every other Christian organization is somehow just “alongside” this true church, merely “parachurch.” Without intending this negative connotation, however, and with full recognition that parachurch organizations as a rule endorse the local churches and denominations in which their own members fellowship, “parachurch” can serve usefully to mark out this important category of Christian activity (Stackhouse 2002). Parachurch organizations have played an important part in the history of evangelicalism. The nineteenth century saw the rise of some long-lasting and influential groups that contended for the causes of the day, whether revival, abolition, women’s rights, temperance, education, or Lord’s Day observance. At least as important were the domestic and foreign missionary societies that fueled what K. S. Latourette called the “Great Century” of Christian missions. And to this day, some of the nineteenth-century organizations make a considerable mark, whether the American Bible Society, which distributes more than ten million Bibles or New Testaments annually, or the Salvation Army—itself a denomination that began as a parachurch inner-city mission. Historian Joel Carpenter has traced the importance of parachurch organizations in the life of American fundamentalism as it went culturally underground after the debacle of the Scopes “Monkey Trial” in 1925. Through the proliferation and expansion of Bible schools and liberal arts colleges, missionary societies, evangelistic agencies, publishing houses, periodicals, and so on, fundamentalists were able to construct entire institutional alternatives to the mainline denominations and mainstream culture over which they had lost influence (Carpenter 1987; cf. Marsden 1980). But the generations since the Second World War have seen such groups come to rival and even surpass congregational and denominational identities and institutions for the self-definition and support of many evangelicals. Sociologists in both the United States and Canada have detailed the phenomenon of “denominational switching” and have found it most prevalent among evangelicals. Many evangelicals feel free to leave one congregation, or even an entire denominational tradition, in order to find what to them is most important in a church: usually some combination of the right basic doctrines, fine

268

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

preaching, good programs for the kids, and so on. Indeed, only among evangelicals does one encounter the revealing cliché, “church shopping.” What loyalties evangelicals retain more readily, however, are those to organizations of particular types that match the concerns or interests of individuals. As one can read The Wall Street Journal everywhere, so one can take one’s subscriptions to Christian magazines everywhere and visit one’s favorite websites anywhere. As one can often find chapters of the Lions’ Club or Girl Scouts in a new town, so one can find chapters of favorite Christian organizations as one moves from place to place. And as one can support a charity, political party, or alma mater from anywhere, so one can send in support to Christian charities, interest groups, and schools from anywhere. Evangelicals certainly do support these groups. Relief and development organizations such as World Vision (founded in 1950) take in and distribute millions of dollars every year. Student ministries such as Campus Crusade for Christ (begun in 1951) staff thousands of college chapters with thousands of staff. Nondenominational seminaries such as Fuller (founded in 1947) and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (founded 1897) are among the largest in the world. Magazines such as Decision and Christianity Today (both arising out of the work of Billy Graham) have been numbered among the most popular religious periodicals in North America for decades. And evangelicals dominate the field of Christian contemporary music, a major industry since the 1970s. Why so many groups, and especially since the Second World War? Many groups have been formed to further traditional evangelical concerns such as missions and relief, from tiny local ministries to giants such as the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Feed the Hungry/Bread for the World. These ministries have been able to take advantage of the considerable increases in money and personnel available for such projects in the postwar boom. Some others have reflected a widening sense among evangelicals about what can properly be called “Christian.” No more narrowness for these folks about the “Christian life” consisting merely of piety and missions! This new perspective has coincided, it seems, with the general increase in time and money for leisure activities among the population at large. So affinity groups have formed for Christian motorcyclists, Christian drag racers, and Christian magicians. (Indeed, some of these groups stay true to their evangelical roots as they explicitly seek to evangelize others with the same interest.) And, especially in America but elsewhere as well, resources can be found to start a new organization if none is available that is sufficiently evangelical. Periodicals such as Christianity Today (founded as an alternative to the liberal Christian Century); ecumenical organizations such as the National Association of Evangelicals (founded as an alternative to the Federal—later, National—Council of Churches); professional associations such as the Evangelical Theological Society (founded as an alternative to what would become the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature); and even broadcasting options such as the Trinity Broadcasting Network and The Family Channel (founded as an alternative to the standard TV fare)—all of these reflect evangelicalism's tradition of starting something else if what is available will not do. As the government has increased its involvement in spheres formerly seen as “private” and therefore at least in part under the purview of the church, so Christians have mobilized to encourage, resist, guide, or circumvent such involvement. Racial integration; free choice of abortion; the threat of taxation of clergy, churches, or other religious institutions; restraint of public displays of religious symbols; civil rights and other public recognition of homosexuals; the teaching of evolution in the schools: all of these and more have compelled many evangelicals to form organizations to respond.

EVANGELICALISM AND RESTORATIONIST ECCLESIOLOGIES

 269

One of the results of this expansion has been ironic. The founding and successes of many of these groups have prompted the formation of still other groups on other sides of an issue. The various Creation Science groups helped to inspire the development of the American Scientific Affiliation of evangelicals who, for their part, agree with some form of evolutionary theory. The rise of the New Religious Right in politics provoked responses in groups such as the Sojourners Fellowship and Evangelicals for Social Action. The formation of the Evangelical Women's Caucus and then of Christians for Biblical Equality on the egalitarian side of the gender question stirred others to establish the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood in opposition. Parachurch groups, then, clearly make up an important part—and an increasing part—of the evangelical experience. Thus, as they take a portion of interest and resources away from local churches while maintaining a constant appeal to their constituents, they divide the loyalty of evangelicals ecclesiastically and ecclesiologically. “The Church” for evangelicals has become a multiplying and bewildering array of pick-your-own options, reinforcing the individualism at the heart of evangelicalism’s understanding of piety and therefore of everything else.

PRIMITIVISM What, then, about primitivism—Restorationism, the Plymouth Brethren, and Anabaptism as well? In considering these formally similar movements (while leaving for others discussion of Pentecostalism and other groups that have primitivist traits as well), we encounter a tension between the primitivist impulse and evangelicalism that keeps the two distinct, and often separate. “Restorationism” is the common American term for groups that emerged out of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century frontier revivalism, most vividly the Cane Ridge, Kentucky, camp meetings of 1801 (Hughes 2008). Chafing at various constraints laid upon them by denominations (particularly the Presbyterian and Methodist)—notably the expectation of a certain amount of seminary education for preachers and cooperation in a hierarchical order for clergy and congregations—a variety of groups led by charismatic individuals such as Barton Stone and the father-and-son team of Thomas and Alexander Campbell proceeded to found churches and then formed intentionally loose fellowships of the like-minded, preserving the autonomy of the local church against any inclination to denomination-building. Indeed, these movements, for all their focus on the New Testament, also took careful note of the churches they saw around them—that is to say, the false churches they saw around them: insufficiently reformed at best (their fellow revivalist Protestants) and positively devilish at worst (the unreformed and irredeemable Catholic Church). Unlike the typical evangelical trans-denominationalism that presumed an adequate level of “basic Christianity” among a range of faithful traditions, Restorationists believed there had been a great and general “falling away” over the “Dark Ages” since the apostolic period. So “back to the Bible” faithful Christians needed to go to restart a faithful version of Christianity. “I have endeavored to read the Scriptures as though no one had read them before me,” claimed the younger Campbell (Campbell 1826). Known generally as “Disciples” or “Christians,” these groups multiplied to become a significant presence on the religious landscape particularly of the American Midwest and South, as well as Texas, in some places rivaled numerically only by the Baptists and Methodists. Cooperating in missions and education (their best-known institution

270

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

being Pepperdine University in California), they characteristically resisted any other organizational linkage. Clergy were ordained by local churches, and those churches were governed by groups of lay-elders. No authority was recognized beyond the local level. Periodicals filled the resulting gaps, with certain popular magazines and newspapers becoming rallying points for disagreement and disunion. (This outsized role of mass media, of course, typifies the populism of evangelicalism as well.) Meanwhile, in both Ireland and southwest England, Christians weary of denominational isolation “gathered to the name of the Lord only” on Sunday mornings in rented halls to take communion, sing, pray, and exhort each other from the Bible. (Indeed, weekly communion characterized both the Brethren and the Disciples.) They soon withdrew from the other denominations into fellowships of independent congregations, however, while maintaining a special service for communion each Sunday morning. Their refusal to ordain clergy meant that anyone (who was male: Brethren, like virtually all other churches at the time, did not accept female leadership as a biblical principle) could take a turn leading in the service by standing up and giving out a hymn number for congregational singing, or praying, or reading a passage of Scripture, or even preaching. And, like the early Restorationist movements across the Atlantic, they governed themselves through councils of elders in local churches. A. N. Groves, George Müller, and J. N. Darby were notable early leaders, and Dublin, Bristol, and Plymouth were early centers, the last giving its name to the movement known as “Plymouth Brethren,” although they are also known widely as “Christian Brethren.” From these ecumenical and evangelical roots came a denomination that since has figured prominently, out of all proportion to its small numbers, in the leadership and staffing of interdenominational and trans-denominational evangelical organizations, from student ministries (such as the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, known globally as the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students) to Bible societies, to educational institutions (such as Wheaton College and Regent College), to the Lausanne Committee and the World Evangelical Alliance. It was this radical impulse—literally, going back to “the root” of Christianity to principles, practices, and patterns seen in the New Testament—that guided these groups and also provided grounds for their distancing, in some respects, from evangelicalism and its characteristic ecclesiological patterns. In the starkest cases, some Restorationist and Brethren groups became hard-shelled sects (e.g., the “Exclusive Brethren”), having nothing to do with anyone else. In less extreme instances, the commitment to what they saw as straightforward biblical teaching kept them at some remove from other evangelicals, whether the Churches of Christ’s distinctive insistence on baptism “for the remission of sins” (while refusing to endorse any ex opere operato sacramentalism) or the Brethren’s characteristic anti-hierarchical refusal to ordain clergy and to be suspicious of all formal structures. Indeed, it was a similar insistence on congregational autonomy that caused the final split between the Churches of Christ and the Disciples of Christ in 1968 when the latter grasped the nettle and opted for a national denominational structure—a split that only widened as the Disciples became more and more theologically liberal while the Churches of Christ did not. Similarly, some Anabaptist groups also kept to themselves, and not only the extreme instances of Amish and Hutterite colonies. Wary of the homogenization of doctrine, polity, and worship they saw in the broader evangelical world, they feared the erosion of historic traditional distinctives, such as commitment to nonviolence and justice advocacy. Indeed, like the Disciples who had likewise recoiled from creedalism and instead

EVANGELICALISM AND RESTORATIONIST ECCLESIOLOGIES

 271

emphasized liberty in doctrine, some Mennonite groups became more comfortable with liberal movements, connecting more with the National Council of Churches than with the NAE—with parallel affiliations in Canada. The Disciples, in fact, were responsible for the founding of the leading liberal Christian periodical in America, The Christian Century, and strongly influenced one of the bastions of liberal theology, the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, while one small group of Restorationists helped constitute the United Church of Christ in 1955. Thus primitivism, whether American, British, or Continental in flavor, never escaped the tension between its ecumenical “generically Christian” aspirations and the boundary-forming entailed by the maintenance of its particular convictions. Thus it constituted a Venn circle intersecting, but by no means being enclosed by, the circle of trans-denominational evangelicalism. Indeed, the Churches of Christ’s countercultural eschewing of musical instruments in worship because none were described in New Testament worship is a key example of Restorationists preferring primitivism to promotion and pragmatism. The cause of the initial division with the Disciples in 1906, this practice could be guaranteed to perplex, if not alienate, the world the Christians were trying to convert. Yet the New Testament pattern had to be followed above all.

THE PARADIGM For every bestselling pastor like Californian Francis Chan, therefore, who renounces pop-pastordom for a more group-oriented approach to church; for every large congregation led by a small group of keen founders, as is common in evangelical megachurches in Canada, Britain, and Australia (most notably, the massive Hillsong franchise); and for every group earnestly wrestling with issues of indigenization—there are dozens of up-and-coming preachers who perpetuate the reinforcing combination of pragmatism and populism. Populism is, after all, the politics of pragmatism. What works is what is best, and leadership is validated by results: who most successfully promotes piety? The dominant paradigm thus remains that of the entrepreneurial pastor atop the megachurch. Whether we mean the “prosperity” pastors (Joel Osteen, Paula White—the rare woman in this predominantly patriarchal world), the “bro” pastors (Mark Driscoll, Matt Chandler), the “funky” pastors (Nicky Gumbel, Carl Lentz), the “correct” pastors (John MacArthur, John Piper), the “friendly” pastors (Andy Stanley, Tony Evans), and even the “smart” pastors (Tim Keller, Greg Boyd), the ecclesial shape looks remarkably the same. Take a quick look beyond America, and one encounters Matthew Ashimolowo of the Kingsway International Christian Centre in London, Brian Houston of Hillsong in Sydney, Young Hoon Lee of Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul, and Sunday Adelaja of Embassy of the Blessed Kingdom of God for All Nations in Kiev, pastors of large churches in what until recently seemed unpromising locales. These churches might have denominational connections, but their success and thus their power comes from what they do locally, and thus they remain functionally autonomous, just as their immediate polity is populist: a charismatic leader riding a tide of personal support. Likewise, the liturgies of evangelical churches globally, from Hong Kong to Houston, from Brisbane to Bangalore, and from Lagos to Liverpool increasingly look and sound the same: a quick welcome from a friendly emcee, then a bloc (five, six, seven songs) of band-led congregational pop music, then some announcements and an offering, then a sermon (replete with projected images and texts), and a final song. No “confession and absolution,” no extended passages of

272

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Scripture, no to-and-fro responsive readings. And certainly no silence. It’s now a highly amplified, carefully choreographed, rather relentless, and very basic Whitefield-and(Charles)-Wesley-type show. The sign on the door or the website might say “Anglican” or “Presbyterian” or “Baptist” or “Pentecostal.” The congregations might be white or Asian or African or Latinx or First Nations. But the more evangelicalism spreads around the world, the more it takes on the shape of global popular culture, and the more its pragmatic and populist drive to promote personal piety ends up, paradoxically, with less and less ecclesiological pluralism after all.

REFERENCES Bebbington, D. W. (1989), Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s, London: Unwin Hyman. Bowler, K. (2013), Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Callahan, J. (1996), Primitivist Piety: The Ecclesiology of the Early Plymouth Brethren, Lanham: Scarecrow. Campbell, A. (1826), Christian Baptist, 229. Carpenter, J. A. (1987), Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ferguson, E. (1997), The Church of Christ: A Biblical Ecclesiology for Today, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Grass, T. (2006), Gathering to His Name: The Story of the Open Brethren in Britain and Ireland, Milton Keynes: Paternoster. Hatch, N. O. (1989), The Democratization of American Christianity, New Haven: Yale University Press. Hindmarsh, D. B. (2005), The Evangelical Conversion Narrative, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hindmarsh, D. B. (2018), The Spirit of Early Evangelicalism: True Religion in a Modern World, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hughes, R. T. (2008), Reviving the Ancient Faith: The Story of Churches of Christ in America, 2nd ed., Abilene: Abilene Christian University Press. Marsden, G. M. (1980), Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of TwentiethCentury Evangelicalism 1870–1925, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marsden, G. M., ed. (1984), Evangelicalism and Modern America, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Martin, W. (1991), A Prophet with Honor: The Billy Graham Story, New York: William Morrow. Noll, M. A. (2004), The Rise of Evangelicalism, Leicester: InterVarsity Press. Snyder, H. A. (1975), The Problem of Wineskins: Church Structure in a Technological Age, Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press. Stackhouse, J. G., Jr. (1993), Canadian Evangelicalism in the Twentieth Century: An Introduction to Its Character, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Stackhouse, J. G., Jr. (1995), “The National Association of Evangelicals, the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, and the Limits of Evangelical Cooperation,” Christian Scholar’s Review 25 (December): 157–79. Stackhouse, J. G., Jr. (2002), “The ‘Parachurch,’: Promise and Peril” in J. G. Stackhouse, Jr., Evangelical Landscapes: Facing Critical Issues of the Day, 25–36, Grand Rapids: Baker Academic..

EVANGELICALISM AND RESTORATIONIST ECCLESIOLOGIES

 273

Stackhouse, J. G., Jr., ed. (2003), Evangelical Ecclesiology: Reality or Illusion?, Grand Rapids: Baker Academic. Stark, R. and R. Finke (2000), Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion, Berkeley: University of California Press. Wacker, G. (2014), America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation, Cambridge: Belknap Press. Webber, R. E. (1999), Ancient-Future Faith: Rethinking Evangelicalism for a Postmodern World, Grand Rapids: Baker. Wuthnow, R. (1988), The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith since World War II, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Chapter NINETEEN

Ecclesiological Developments in the Majority World JOSEPH OGBONNAYA

INTRODUCTION The emergence of distinct theologies informs the ecclesiological developments formulated to guide various ways of being church as the community of the Christian faithful. This is particularly so for the emerging world churches which boast of massive conversions and commitment to and practice of the Christian faith. Andrew F. Walls recognized this phenomenon as “a demographic shift in the center of the Christian world, which means that more than half of the world’s Christians live in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Pacific” (Walls 2002: 85). Because of differences in culture and history, the appropriation of divine revelation and the articulation of meanings constitutive of the gospel will invariably be context-related and determined by situations. The reality of these differences bordering on plurality could raise questions about the unity of faith, theology, and church akin to the difficulties encountered earlier in theology amid the transition from classicism to historical mindedness, from classical to empirical culture, from one way of being church to multiple ways of being church, and from the one universal theology to the contextuality of all theologizing. Developments in ecclesiology are often tied to christological developments as people conceive of the church in the light of their understanding of the person, mission, and ministry of Christ and their role in the continuity of this ministry. Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orobator reminds us: “Any particular view of the nature and vocation of the church is always grounded on the understanding of Christ” (Orobator 1996: 272). Vatican II’s teaching of the church as the sacrament, the sign and instrument, of Christ’s reconciling salvation (Lumen Gentium 1) makes perfect sense in light of the connection between ecclesiological developments and Christ. As aptly expressed in the clear words of Joseph Komonchak, “there are few areas in theology in which theory and practice more directly intersect than in ecclesiology” (Komonchak 1995: 3). This is more so in the majority world where the church is often one of the most strongly reliable institutions that serve as the voice of the voiceless, advocating for justice and providing social and other infrastructural amenities including education and health care for improved wellbeing of the people. I will argue that ecclesiological developments in the majority world are tied to their christological developments drawing on the importance attached to the relevance of

ECCLESIOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS IN THE MAJORITY WORLD

 275

Christianity to the social, political, religious, and personal development of the people, to the Christian faithful’s experience, and to the inherited ecclesiological institutional model from the European missionaries. The church as a historical reality cannot be understood outside the varieties of contexts and the experiences of the faithful in the church and the relevance of the church in their lives. My approach will include a consideration of the theological treatment of the church and the relevance of the church in the common experience of the majority world. In my African context of the majority world, African theology heavily influences the ecclesiological development. Specifically, my context will further be limited to sub-Saharan Africa with emphasis on the Catholic Church. The chapter will be divided into four parts. First, we consider the major characteristics of the majority world. Second, we introduce our context by examining the focus of African theology out of which a systematic study of the church is formulated. Third, we review and critically evaluate emergent ecclesiologies in Africa noting their challenges. Finally, we conclude by suggesting ways forward for the advancement of African ecclesiology.

FEATURES OF THE MAJORITY WORLD CHURCH Since its adoption at the 2004 Lausanne Forum for World Evangelization in Pattaya, Thailand (Claydon 2004: 118), the term “majority world” has been used to describe the three continents of Africa, Asia, and Latin America as the places where the majority of the world’s Christians are now located. Christianity in these continents has also been described in the light of Western Christianity as Christianity in the “non-Western world” (Pachuau 2018: 4). Economically and developmentally, the majority world is described as “the third world” or “the developing world.” Even though there is numerical growth of Christianity, these continents experience varying degrees of poverty, oppression, and misrule. The theologies arising from the majority world aim at rooting out “their painful experience of poverty and oppression and their longing for dignity and liberation based on the victory already won by Jesus Christ” (Ogbonnaya 2017: 38). These theologies seek to solve the identity crises resulting from colonial rule and the ways they are continued in the authoritarianism of their own elected leaders. The majority world’s theologies grow out of their various churches. In no way does this mean the majority world is monolithic. One other feature of the majority world is its openness to plurality in the expression of the Christian faith and its varied understandings in theologies. And so, while Africa emphasizes inculturation and liberation perspectives, Latin America is strong in the liberation motif. Asia’s great diversity combines inculturation, liberation, native spiritualities, and interreligious dialogue. But theologians of the majority world jointly reject the dominant Eurocentric classicist universal theology and way of being church which stunts the autochthonic nature of cultures, religion, and spiritualities. The majority world theologians, therefore, emphasize the contextuality of all theologies and the uniqueness of the ways of being church. According to Ngindu Mushete: It should be noted that for a long time Westerners have not noticed that there is not one world that exists, but worlds; there is not one history, but histories; not one culture, but cultures; not one theology but theologies. Every people, every human community, conceives and organizes its historical existence not according to a universal, immutable model, but according to its own particular situation in space and time. (Mushete 1994: 24)

276

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

THE FOCUS OF AFRICAN THEOLOGY African theology is the fruit of the critical stance against foreign theologies and leadership of African churches in the decolonization period. The mission theology of saving souls and the colonial theology of church plantation were rejected because they neglected African contexts and maintained through the missionaries the European way of being Christian understood as civilization. “In other words, African theologies developed at the same time African peoples were emancipating themselves from foreign domination and colonialism” (Ogbonnaya 2015: 28). As reflection on the Christian faith aimed at understanding and fostering committed relationship with Christ, African theology evaluates the African ways of being church. Because it is borne out of the liberative context of freedom from foreign rule and leadership, African theology continues to be liberative theology and envisions the church as institution whose goal of salvation includes promoting community life, mutual coexistence, progress, freedom, justice, and peace. Its various forms—African theology of inculturation, African theology of liberation, Black theology of South Africa, theology of reconciliation and reconstruction, and African women’s theology—address the issues of African identity (Lowery 2017: 7) while emphasizing the contextuality of all theologizing and the urgent need of integral liberation of Africa from the forms of oppression including the “anthropological poverty” (Mveng 1994: 154) that wounds the African psyche and subjects them to an inferiority complex and other forms of economic, political, material, religious, and social injustice. Even though there had been tension between the inculturation and liberation motif theologians (Martey 2009), African liberative theologians emphasize “contextualization.” By this is meant taking seriously the gender, sociopolitical, economic, cultural, religious, historical experiences of people in shaping the form of Christianity and ways of being church. Categories drawn from African religious culture will therefore be useful in constructing African ecclesiologies. African inculturation theologians emphasize being church in the light of the culture of the people. They adopt inculturation related ecclesiologies using such metaphors like the church as the family of God, the African clan, the ancestor, African sense of community, spirituality, and so on. They want the church to resolve the identity crises of Africans by returning to the root of African culture and modernizing them in the light of the Christian faith. African women theology reminds inculturation theologians of the need for a critical appropriation of African culture especially as some elements of such culture marginalize women. They want a church cognizant of the patriarchal readings of Scripture which cause various forms of subjugation of women in church and society. They point to texts that affirm the dignity of women and their equality with men in the church by the one baptism in Christ. The church in Africa must engage in catechesis to move beyond their inherited cultural biases against women (Ngalula 2015: 181). Thus, “although African women theologians draw on African culture in their reflections, they reframe the inculturation debate using gender as a tool of analysis. In this way, they embark on a reconstruction of ecclesiology captured in feminist ecclesial portraiture and call for new visions of partnership among men and women in the sense of koinonia” (Sakupapa 2018: 6). Liberation theologies including Black theologies of South Africa and theologies of reconstruction argue that the church should be a liberating agent working toward the integral development of the people. This implies the church performing its prophetic function of standing as the voice of the people against agents of misrule, including economic policies against the people’s wellbeing. It means the church being

ECCLESIOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS IN THE MAJORITY WORLD

 277

of service in the reinvention of Africa. Emmanuel Katangole sums this up well: “Living fully in this incarnational reality requires the Church to keep its feet firmly grounded on African soil but its eyes looking towards heaven. It must not resign itself to the way things are in Africa but must constantly invite Africa to higher ideals and into a new history and a new experience of society” (Katangole 2015: 199).

EMERGENT ECCLESIOLOGIES Since its inception from the missionary activities carried out from the nineteenth century by the Europeans, African Christianity has struggled to establish itself as a unique, authentic, independent church in the universal church of Jesus Christ. African Christianity, which is the African way of being church, has faced identity crises. What, one may ask, is the African church, or what is African Christianity? Is it different from expressions of Christianity in other continents especially the dominant European, North American Christianity? What organizational structure did it inherit and how has this structure been reconstituted to suit the patterns of African thought and values? Emergent ecclesiologies began with the church European Christian missionaries established in various African missions.

MISSIONARY ECCLESIOLOGY Opinions are divided among scholars, historians, and theologians about the Christian missionary activities in Africa, with some praising the pioneering role of the missionaries in the evangelization and civilization of Africans, and others blaming them for the crisis of identity including the anthropological poverty suffered by Africans which manifests itself in the ongoing inferiority complex experienced by Africans in the global scene. Emmanuel Ayandele paints the image clearly thus: Missionaries’ activity was a disruptive force, rocking traditional society to its very foundation, producing disrespectful presumptions and detribalized children through mission schools, destroying the high principles and orderliness of indigenous society through denunciation of traditional religion without adequate substitute and transforming the mental outlook of Nigerians in a way that made them imitate European values slavishly whilst holding irrational features of traditional religion. (Ayandele 1966: 326) Whatever side one takes, Africa would not be part of the majority world with burgeoning Christian expansion were it not for the missionaries. Their disregard of traditional institutions and religions owes a lot to their miseducation. According to Louis Mbaefo: “the original missionaries were educated in post-Reformation polemic which tended to see all pagan cultures as the work of the devil and therefore to be overthrown and rejected by the gospel messenger” (Mbaefo 1994: 31). The exaltation of the European Christian culture over traditional cultures, languages, and institutions, through the schools which became centers for European cultural assimilation, predisposed African Christians to European values which they consider superior to their own traditional cultural values. Such a mindset predisposed the African Christians to accepting the ecclesiology formulated by the European missionaries, which became the dominant form of ecclesiology even as African theologians and church leaders formulated alternative ecclesiologies. The

278

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

centerpiece of African ecclesiology will be the Africanization of the Christian message and the inculturation of the liturgy in such a way that they are meaningful to Africans who come to Christianity from various African religious cultures. Traditional Catholic ecclesiology, according to the Apostles’ Creed, defines the church as one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. Catholic missionaries in Africa operated within the pre-Vatican II institutional and hierarchical structure of the church which emphasizes not only the difference between the clergy and the laity, but also the centralization of ecclesiastical authority in the pope as the vicar of Christ. “The church, in official documents and approved textbooks of the time, saw itself as a ‘perfect society,’ essentially monarchical and hierarchical” (Bevans 2004: 185). The missionaries influenced by the superiority complex engendered by their Eurocentric worldview and disdain for local cultures considered church administration and its leadership such serious business that the natives could not be entrusted with it. The Catholic missionaries thus were reluctant to admit indigenous Africans into the clerical state despite Gregory XVI’s 1845 encyclical Neminem Profecto “calling for the establishment and formation of a local clergy” (Uzukwu 2014a: 223). The reluctance to establish indigenous clergy was because of the unwillingness to share ecclesiastical power and privileges with Africans. “Admitting indigenous vocations into the clerical state were unavoidably granting them equality to European missionaries, and thereby endowing them with equal powers and privileges, which the missionaries hitherto monopolized” (Njoku 2007: 207). When eventually a few Africans were admitted into the clerical state, the hierarchical structure of the church was emphasized which demands blind obedience to the European clergy and strict adherence to the statements of the universal church. African bishops have done little to change this clerical structure they inherited from the missionaries. Thus, Benzet Bujo, a Zairian theologian, defines clericalism in Africa as “a kind of cancerous growth which poses a dangerous threat to the life of the church in Africa” (Bujo 1992: 98). The implication of the reluctance of the Catholic missionaries to establish native clergy will be clearer when compared with the eagerness of the Protestant missionaries to institute independent local churches under the leadership of the indigenous clergy. “The central characteristics of the Protestant churches are their focus on correct doctrine, the right ministry of sacraments and the right application of discipline” (Mwambazambi 2011: 2). Unlike the Catholic missionaries, Protestant missionaries bent on establishing self-sufficient indigenous churches quickly raised indigenous clergy and saw promotion of local languages as important tools of mission. This was in line with the view shared by the Protestant missionary movement in the nineteenth century, namely, “to establish in each district and especially where there are separate languages, a self-supporting, self-governing, self-extending native Church” (Venn 1865: 4–5). Hence, most biblical translations into local African languages were championed by Protestant missionaries. However, the case of the insubordination of some European clergy under Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther and his eventual dethronement casts a dark shadow to the Protestant inclusion of native clergy (Sanneh 2008: 183). Intense rivalry between the Catholic and the Protestant missions in the struggle for territories of influence equally shaped this institutional hierarchical ecclesiology. The triumphalism of each of these Christian denominations as the repository of the truth of Christian faith accounts for the gnawing gap in ecumenism in Africa today. However, it is important to note that the beginning of African theology (of the sub-Sahara) in the twentieth century was the work of the All African Conference of Churches, an ecumenical body, formed in 1963. The World Council of Churches is also active in Africa. “Both of

ECCLESIOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS IN THE MAJORITY WORLD

 279

these Assemblies have produced very encouraging support to the ecumenical work of the Church in Africa as a whole” (Mbiti 1978–9: 391). Christian missionary activity in Africa would have been different had it taken place in the period after Vatican Council II when communion ecclesiology and the church as mystery in the light of the trinitarian communion and of the mystery of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit was the official model of ecclesiology. Would that the missionaries had done their marvelous works in Africa without having to contend with the reactionary ecclesiology meant to combat the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. Would that they had not been burdened with implementing the Counter Reformation of the Council of Trent and its attendant clericalization formed in the church’s battle and reaction against modernism. But they served as faithful servants of the church entrusted with working for the Reign of God. As the 1995 African synodal document Ecclesia in Africa (EIA) stated: “The splendid growth and achievements of the Church in Africa are due largely to the heroic and selfless dedication of generations of missionaries. This is acknowledged by everyone. The hallowed soil of Africa is sown with the tombs of courageous heralds of the Gospel” (EIA 1995: #35). Even though African ecclesiology is still finding it difficult to shake off the hierarchical model of ecclesiology of the missionary era, emergent ecclesiologies, particularly those post-Vatican II, are emphasizing the church as the people of God, reiterating the church as the community of the faithful and calling for the practical living out of the love and communion of the Trinity. Various symbols are used in formulating these ecclesiologies by theologians majorly influenced by the two important African synodal documents: Ecclesia in Africa and Africae Munus.

ECCLESIOLOGY OF ECCLESIA IN AFRICA At the 1994 Special Assembly for Africa of the Synod of Bishops in Rome, on the theme “The Church in Africa and her evangelizing mission towards the Year 2000: ‘You shall be my witnesses’” (Acts 1:8); the leaders of African Catholic church, bishops, priests, religious men and women as well as the laity adopted the symbol of the church as the family of God in the service of society. The symbol of the church as family of God draws from the images of the church in the Dogmatic Constitution of the Church, Lumen Gentium as the House of God (cf. 1 Tim. 3:15), and as the Household of God in the Spirit (cf. Eph. 2:1922). This family symbol is a practice of inculturation since it is based on the deep respect of the family as communal institution in Africa emphasizing “care for others, solidarity, warmth in human relationships, acceptance, dialogue and trust” (EIA: #63). Ecclesia in Africa mentions as one of the challenges facing the African church “the various forms of division which need to be healed through honest dialogue” (EIA: #55). The source of these divisions it traced to external and internal factors: “the borders left behind by the colonial powers, the coexistence of ethnic groups with different traditions, languages” (EIA: #55), as well as “tribalism, nepotism, racism, religious intolerance and the thirst for power taken to extremes by totalitarian regimes which trample with impunity the rights and dignity of the person” (EIA: #117). The hope is that if Africans see each other as brothers and sisters, they will not go to war against each other. “Since the same Blood of Christ circulates in each of us, and since we are all members of the Church-Family of God in the Body and Blood of Christ, it stands to reason that to shed a brother’s or sister’s blood, the Blood of Christ, this is killing his life in us” (Lineamenta: #39). EIA urged African theologians to develop this

280

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

inculturated image of the church in Africa as family in the light of the images of the church in Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium: “It is earnestly to be hoped that theologians in Africa will work out the theology of the church as family with all the riches contained in this concept, showing its complementarity with other images of the Church” (EIA: #63). Since the convocation of this synod dates to the request by the leaders of the church in Africa for an African synod between 1977–83 (EIA: #5) and its preparation championed by the Ecumenical Association of African Theologians (EAAT) which organized its first consultation on the theme of an African council of bishops (Mveng 1996: 20), African theologians were already experimenting on African ecclesiology. In the clear words of Laurenti Magesa and J. N. K Mugambi: If the mission of Christ was to establish the rule of God through the preaching of the Gospel, and if the Church is the witness of that rule through its total ministry, then it cannot but be that the Church flows from Christ just as logically (in theology) as ecclesiology flows from Christology. . . . To be an effective witness of the preaching and life of Christ in Africa, the Church must likewise take root in African culture. Not only must it have an African skin—so to speak, but its whole body-soul, the entire organism called Church must acquire an African character. The external structures and internal content of doctrine of the African church must be rooted in and reflect the African religious heritage. (Magesa and Mugambi 1990: 1–2) Thus, African theologians quickly heeded EIA’s request and worked out ecclesiologies based on the Church in Africa as family.

ECCLESIA IN AFRICA ORIENTED ECCLESIOLOGIES Orobator’s Family of God Ecclesiology Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orobator S. J. is one of the leading theologians in Africa who responded to the call of the EIA. He recognizes that the African idea of church draws from three basic elements of authentic African values: community, family, and ancestors (Orobator 1996: 269). African culture is communitarian, and the individual’s sense of self is drawn from the community where daily life is lived, children are raised communally, and challenges are faced together as members of the community. Also, ancestors equally belong to their various communities where they are believed to continue to serve as guides from the land of the dead. Christians by conversion become members of communities of faith in Christ. Christian community is meaningful to the African because the community is vital for survival. “Community creates the context in which African belief systems are formulated and lived as communion by all its members. As a fundamental structure of African spirituality, it facilitates participation, fellowship, and personal and interpersonal relationship from which no one is excluded” (Orobator 1996: 269). However, in various writings Orobator has made the image of the church as the family of God the centerpiece of his ecclesiology. He has interpreted it from the perspective of dialogue (Orobator 1995: 33–50), and also sociologically (Orobator 1996) and from the viewpoint of church leadership and ministry (Orobator 2000: 295–313), including from the context of formation (Orobator 2004: 23–34). Ordinarily church as family is easily understood in the context of the broad-based nature of African family. Within this context the church is expected to be inclusive of everyone enabling Africans to overcome ethnic conflicts. Orobator argues such interpretation is limited. Instead

ECCLESIOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS IN THE MAJORITY WORLD

 281

he prefers a hermeneutical view of the family in EIA as a principle of formation instead of the often-presumed understanding of it as a model. This is because as principle the family is inclusive, supportive of solidarity, and fosters communion, but as model, family could become divisive excluding members of other families, clans, ethnic groups. Family exhibits certain divisive tendencies which thrive on tribal, ethnic and clannish sentiments. A church or congregation uncritically modelled on this expression of family will naturally assume that only one class of people, one tribal or ethnic group is fit to assume leadership and exercise authority. It will find it hard to accommodate divergent opinions and legitimate dissent; it will undermine the practice of dialogue, consensus and palaver found in the pattern of leadership in certain African contexts. (Orobator 2004: 27) Orobator is right. The events in Africa, especially the genocide in Rwanda, a predominantly Catholic country, while the African synod was going on, shows that the symbol ought to be taken not as a model because of the challenges that could lead to division and violence in the family. The concept of the church as family of God can help in bringing about reconciliation if the African peoples accept the intended image of themselves as brothers and sisters by their priesthood in Christ. But as Archbishop Obiefuna rightly remarked during the first Special Assembly for Africa, the blood of tribes is thicker than the blood of the waters of baptism. Even among the church hierarchy, priests and bishops, ethnic alliances have continued to be obstacles to church administration. The church as family of God understood as a principle fosters the wellbeing of every member of the church, clergy, religious, and laity, especially women: consecrated, married or single. It will equally change the way of being church in Africa, especially modifying intra-ecclesial relationships: between bishops and priests, priests and the laity, religious men and women, the youth, and so on, as equal members of the same family. Orobator highlighted the important role of women in the family equally emphasized by the synod and called on the African church to involve women “in decision-making at all levels of the family-of-God” (Orobator 1995: 41), including possibly also in the ministerial priesthood. “In this line of thought, the notion of the so-called spiritual motherhood that has been used to exclude women from the sacramental, ministerial and structural life of the church loses its validity. The woman is not mother in the idealized and spiritualized sense, but more importantly in her active role and participation in nurturing the life of the church-as-family” (Orobator 1995: 42). This will transform and free the African church from the institutional, hierarchical model it inherited from the missionaries which manifests itself in the clericalism of the church (Orobator 2000: 297–9). Another ideal of the symbol of the church as a family of God is its fostering of dialogue since the family welcomes people despite differences in creed, code, and cult. “Family life facilitates dialogue by the very fact that it is open to and offers welcome to all co-members who are not necessarily adherents of the same religion or faith” (Orobator 1995: 45). The African church should attend to voices within itself and the divisions in Christianity and work toward ecumenical understanding with other Christian denominations and ecclesial bodies. The same need for dialogue equally holds for dialogue with members of other religions including Islam and African Traditional Religion in order to promote mutual coexistence, peace, and love. One of the extremely important insights of the synod is that it situates dialogue on two interrelated levels. The first can be termed dialogue within the church, and the second,

282

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

dialogue with other Christians, other religions and all people of good will. One way of looking at these two levels is to say that the latter presupposes the former. The churchas-family cannot dialogue credibly with others, if all the co-members are not seen to be living a life of dialogue. (Orobator 1995: 47)

Communio Ecclesiology: Elochukwu Uzukwu Elochukwu Uzukwu’s ecclesiology, drawn from the ecclesia in Africa’s metaphor of church in Africa as family of God, is based on his analysis of community as central to African cultural values. By extension, the African way of being church should be cognizant of such communal fellowship and exemplify authentic community through shared love for one another. African community is often a home for all, welcoming, loving, sharing, correcting, and forgiving. People are free and express themselves as members of their various communities with no one lording it over them. Such a model of community is for Uzukwu what Christian communities should look like. Uzukwu thinks the institutional model of church the missionaries used in church administration in Africa should now be replaced. He worries that the African church leaders are reluctant to embrace communio ecclesiology by their maintenance of clericalism that impedes the emergence of authentic Christian communities (Uzukwu 1996: 120–1). He is convinced “the exercise of authority, as caring and warmth in the church-family on the local level, mobilizes all gifts of the members of the community for the upbuilding of the community” (Uzukwu 1996: 143). Uzukwu’s position agrees with the communio ecclesiology of Vatican II which defines the church as the people of God. Most recently, Gerald Azike joins Uzukwu to argue for the symbol of church as the people of God as complementing the symbol of church as family of God adopted by Ecclesia in Africa. The image of the people of God . . . was a more prominent conciliar image than that of “family” and provided language to overcome some of the deficiencies of pre-conciliar ecclesiology, some of which still characterize the local churches . . . The image of the people of God . . . will not be in opposition to the image of the family of God as expressed by the eminent bishops of Africa, but rather complementary. (Azike 2016: 9–10) Uzukwu’s ecclesiology of communion equally emphasizes the need to improve the social order to bring about social transformation for the optimum wellbeing of the members of the community through recovery and reorientation of African cultural values. In A Listening Church, he argues the thesis that “the retrieval and modernization of our African cultural matrix is the necessary route toward healing the political, economic, social and religious misery of Africa” (Uzukwu 1996: 5). The future of the African church lies in its ability to inculturate Christian faith to the culture of her peoples. And so, the totality of African culture, ancient and modern, should be the context of theology. First, inculturation theology is a reaffirmation of African culture and identity, denied by Western colonialism and Christian missionary evangelism. Second, it acknowledges that the message of Jesus Christ which must be carried and communicated culturally dwells among us. Third, it holds that the Jesus living among us is the church. And fourth, the church responds to this message through her liturgy, spirituality, discipline, ethics, and theology. Uzukwu faced the brute fact of the life of misery in Africa where wars prevent people from farming their land thus making them unable to feed themselves. People are afflicted

ECCLESIOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS IN THE MAJORITY WORLD

 283

with diseases such as malaria, typhoid fever, and tuberculosis, and towns and villages are plagued by HIV and AIDS. These conditions are exacerbated by bad governance that neglects the majority of the African people, leaving them to their fate. These deplorable conditions result from the distortion of Africa’s social order and communities through various forms of imperialism: religious and political. The African church’s role should be the restoration of community-bonding and solidarity through the recovery of Africa’s religious culture and through inculturation, the emergence of strong Christian communities characterized by love, peace, and solidarity. An appreciation of Africa’s tradition is necessary for the work of inculturation and building an African church that promotes Christian community. Uzukwu asserts: Igbo and West African religions are Spirit-driven and spirit-embedding. The religions are organized around a highly complex relational anthropology intimately connected to God’s providential gift of a personal guardian spirit for the integral flourishing of each human. This providential gift extends into the practice of Christianity. Consequently, in the reception and practice of Christianity, the therapeutic intentionality of ATR [African Traditional Religion], enables Christian converts to imaginatively embrace the innumerable virtues, energies and gifts of the Holy Spirit that was previously experienced as coming from the ATR deities. (Uzukwu 2014b: 86) Uzukwu suggests tapping from the African Traditional Religion which is West Africa’s religious culture, “as steps toward the creation or emergence of Christianity that is local and catholic” (Uzukwu 2014b: 90). “One does not abandon one’s Christian faith to practice ancestral religion; but one enriches the Christian faith” (Uzukwu 2014b: 99).

CHRISTOLOGY-INSPIRED ECCLESIOLOGIES “If any single area of theology is especially poised to raise questions about the nature and practice of inculturation, it is surely Christology” (Schreiter 2001: xi). African christological ideas evolved from J. S. Mbiti’s position that “there are no African ideas about Christology,” (Mbiti 1972: 51) to its gradual development with Joseph Danquah calling God the great ancestor (Danquah 1969) to Charles Nyamiti’s bold statement “there is no doubt that Christology is the subject which has been most developed in today’s African theology” (Nyamiti 1992: 3). Ancestors as “the living dead” (Mbiti 1991: 79) participate actively in the life of their communities, serve as guides to their families, role models, intercessors, and protectors. They also preserve the morality of their societies and thus promote human relationship with God and hence enhance their spirituality. “The category of ancestor is of particular interest because it focuses not just on one aspect of Christ’s work but on the being of the person of Christ” (Moloney 1987: 509). Jesus is rightly called the ancestor because of the universal salvation of humankind in Jesus, the Christian community that flows from his mission and ministry, his role as mediator between humans and God, his advancement of the decalogue and his moral teaching. “Since our Saviour is prophet, king, priest and eschatological Messiah, his ancestorship must also be prophetic, royal, sacerdotal and eschatological” (Nyamiti 1990: 131). According to Volker Küster, Jesus is the ancestor because he mediates life, is present among the living, is simultaneously the eldest. Jesus Christ is the ancestor because he is the mediator between God and humans and within human community (Kuster 2001: 63–4).

284

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

From the ancestor christology there emerged ancestor ecclesiologies of Charles Nyamiti (1984), Benezet Bujo (1990), John S. Pobee (1979), with support from Kwame Bediako (2000), Jean Marc Ela (1989), and others. Nyamiti argues that “African ecclesiology presupposes African Christology, for the obvious reason that the church is the prolongation of the mysteries of the Incarnation and Redemption in human communities” (Nyamiti 1990: 129). He developed a communio ecclesiology of the church as koinonia “and perceives the church as the extension of Christ’s ancestorship in human societies” (Sakupapa 2018: 5) inclusive of humanity irrespective of differences in race, gender, ethnicity, living, or dead. The Church is the perpetuation or extension of Christ’s ancestorship in human communities. This being so, the Church must be determined or characterized by the qualities of Christ’s own ancestorship. The ultimate principle of Christ’s ancestral condition and all his salvific activities has his pneumatic descendancy as their ultimate basis and animating principle. Without such basis Christ’s ancestorship and his salvific work are unthinkable. Accordingly, just as the ancestorship of our savior and all his redemptive activities are rooted in the Trinity, so also the Church’s being and activity are, or should be, ultimately grounded in the mystery of the triune God. This means that an ecclesiology which is not rooted in the mystery of the Trinity . . . is a shallow and false ecclesiology. (Nyamiti 1990: 137) In a similar way, Bujo (1992) developed an ancestral ecclesiology based on Christ (the proto-ancestor) who as the founder of the community of faith nurtures members through the proto-ancestral meal of the eucharist, and thus communicates the vital force of life. “Inasmuch as inculturation is gradually being taken more seriously . . . we could, for example, start with the importance of our forefathers, to the proposal to conceive Jesus Christ as Proto-Ancestor, founder of a new family and clan which is the Christian church” (Bujo 1990:109). What is to be noted here is the important place African belief in the ancestors must play in African ecclesiology. Closely related to the ancestor ecclesiology is the ecclesiology modeled after the African close unit of the clan. Using the clan system in Buganda, Uganda, as a case study, John Mary Waliggo thinks the African clan ecclesiology has important consequences: It would modify the manner in which Church leaders are chosen. It would influence the administration and organization of the local Church. It would put emphasis on ecumenism, seeing all as God’s people and true relatives. It would not simply encourage but seriously undertake inculturation in all aspects. It would promote the active role of the laity, of women and children in an effort to realize a clear division of work. At the centrality of the Church there would be communion, and everything done would be to strengthen it. (Waliggo 1990: 125) Ancestor ecclesiology connects with the church as family, as clan, as a community or social group related to a common ancestor. Communion with ancestors is integral to the African sense of community.

CHALLENGES The major challenge to the emergence of an authentic African ecclesiology in the Catholic Church is that these emerging ecclesiologies impact very little of the lived realities of African Christians. Despite the African synod’s symbol of the church as the family of God,

ECCLESIOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS IN THE MAJORITY WORLD

 285

ethnicity and group bias is still rampant in much of Africa and is responsible for the cult of mediocrity and nepotism destroying the social fabric of most African countries. Also, proto-ancestral ecclesiology has hardly any influence in the actual belief and practice of the church. Besides the few theologians who expound it, African Christians do not view the church in the light of the ancestors or in the light of their roles in families or as leaders of clans. However, face to face with the riddles of life, especially of various forms of suffering including ill health, misfortune, and repeated setbacks in business, or when they suspect they have incurred the wrath of the gods from the spirit world, Africans have recourse to their ancestors. In such situations, they go to priests of the African Traditional Religion or to prayer/healing centers, particularly those of the African Initiated Churches, not to the mainline churches like the Catholic or the Protestant churches. In other words, ancestral christology will be appreciated if more African Christians are made aware of it and if it is expounded in the common-sense language of everyday African. Even though communio ecclesiology is proposed and servant leadership emphasized with its attendant inclusion of the laity as equal members of this body of Christ, in practice the institutional model is dominant in ecclesial administration and relation to the laity. Perhaps because of the effect of the patriarchal culture highly structured around respect for authority and reverence of elders who are repository of wisdom, the African church is so clericalized that creative ideas could be impeded by fear. Also, because of this, some African bishops and local churches as mission churches become too deferential to Roman (Vatican) leadership, too timid to inculturate the gospel in their churches. “Doing the will of Rome—whatever that means—or ‘according to the Holy Father’ has become an art and sometimes a veneer laid over glaring pastoral failures on the part of many Catholic bishops in Africa to become true shepherds of the local church where the Catholic Church is fully present according to the teaching of Lumen Gentium” (Ilo 2015: 32). Another area of challenge is in the prophetic mission of the church in Africa face to face with the endemic poverty, misrule, and corruption in the polity and even in the church administration. The fear of possible collusion with the state and the ambivalent stand of the universal Catholic Church on politics sends mixed messages which dampens the spirit of church leaders who would like to bring about effective change in the society. In many countries of Africa, even where the church has significant membership, its prophetic role has been muted, relegated to mere communiques which hardly have any bite or impact on the much-needed social transformation. In the light of this, Mercy Amba Oduyoye of the Concerned Circle of African Women Theologians urged that “public theology or political theology needs to be vigorously pursued because church and society issues are matters of faith for many. . . Matters pertaining to justice, peace, ecology, poverty, and wealth creation that damages the environment all need the input of theology for their resolution” (Oduyoye 2015: 330).

AREAS FOR FURTHER DEVELOPMENT Building the Church as Family After the genocide of Rwanda, the ecclesiology of church as family has become the building block of reconciliation, justice, and peace. Communio ecclesiology, despite its challenges, agrees with African culture. The problem has always been in not implementing it in full. According to bishop Antoine Kambanda, who is implementing communion ecclesiology through the establishment of small Christian communities:

286

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

In the pastoral work of basic Christian communities, we can get close to the people . . . In Rwanda, after the genocide, there were so many orphans and children without any family reference. Basic Christian communities made new families in which new family relations were created. This also helped in the integration of foreigners and others who were far from their families to feel at home in the new communities of faith. (Kambanda 2015: 54)

Moving Away from Missionary Ecclesiology So far it has been difficult if not impossible to develop an alternative ecclesiology that will guide church administration in most of Africa. The institutional model has been very attractive because it allows the full range of exercising power of the clergy over the laity. But it is no longer fashionable because even when the laity appear not to be complaining, they are moving to other ecclesial bodies; hence, the Catholic Church is losing thousands of members. Clericalism has also been deconstructed in the haze of confusion of multiplication of clerics in the wave of the multiplicity of Christian denominations. The church is better served if communion ecclesiology is adopted in humility and in recognition of the common priesthood Christians share in the one priesthood of Christ. The example of Pope Francis is a model of such change. “Francis’ style directly challenges a model of leadership that is antiquated and trapped in a warped, authoritative exercise of power . . . The church in the inspiration of Francis lives by the virtues of humble service, compassion for the poor, and mercy for the weak and vulnerable and it forms an inclusive community of missionary disciples” (Orobator 2015: 10).

CONCLUSION African ecclesiologies developed in tandem with the development of African theology and social and political changes in the wake of the decolonization of sub-Saharan Africa. The nineteenth-century missionary activities of Africa, which engendered massive conversion, left behind the Tridentine and Vatican I ecclesiology with its institutional hierarchical model of church with emphasis on the distinction between the clergy and the lay-members of the church. The major catalyst of the contemporary ecclesiological development was the 1994 Special Assembly for Africa which adopted the metaphor of the church as the family of God in Africa after the Trinity. Various theologians developed this metaphor which agrees with the African sense of community and proposed communio ecclesiologies. Other ecclesiological developments like the proto-ancestor ecclesiology draw from different christological formulations in Africa of Jesus as the brother ancestor in the light of the important role of the ancestors in African families, clans, and communities. Despite obvious challenges facing these ecclesiological developments, they exemplify the giant strides of African Christianity as part of the majority world. However, the church in Africa must be involved in the quest for human promotion. It should sensitize its flock through education on their civic responsibilities and the importance of their involvement in politics and economic development of their nations. Unless poverty is eradicated, the poor will always turn against each other in the quest for scarce resources. Unless the healthcare system is improved, people will always accuse each other of witchcraft, and other crimes and violence and conflict will always remain inevitable. The church in Africa must take up and put into practice its prophetic image of itself in the first Special Assembly for Africa as “the voice of the voiceless” (EIA: # 70).

ECCLESIOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS IN THE MAJORITY WORLD

 287

REFERENCES Ayandele, E. A. (1966), The Missionary Impact on Modern Nigeria 1824–1914, London: Longmans. Cited in K. Johnson (2011), “Aladura: The Search for Authenticity an Impetus for African Christianity,” Asian Journal of Pentecostal Studies 14 (1): 149–65. Azike, G. (2016), The People of God in Lumen Gentium: A Theological Renewal of Institutional Ecclesiology and Its Implications, Rome: Gregorian and Biblical Press. Bediako, K. (2000), Jesus in Africa: The Christian Gospel in African History and Experience, Akropong-Akuapem: Regnum. Bevans, S. SVD (2014), “Mission as the Nature of the Church: Developments in Catholic Ecclesiology,” Australian eJournal of Theology 21 (3): 184–96. Bujo, B. (1990), African Christian Morality at the Age of Inculturation, Nairobi: St Paul Publications. Bujo, B. (1992), African Theology in Its Social Context, Maryknoll: Orbis. Claydon, D., ed. (2004), A New Vision, A New Heart, A New Call, vol. 2, Pasadena: William Carey Library. Danquah, J. B. (1969), The Akan Doctrine of God, London: Frank Cass. Ela, J.-M. (1989), My Faith as an African, trans. J. P. Brown and S. Perry, Maryknoll and London: Orbis and Chapman. Ilo, S. C. (2015), “The Church of Pope Francis: An Ecclesiology of Accountability, Accompaniment, and Action,” in A. E. Orabator, S.J. (ed.), The Church We Want: Foundations, Theology and Mission of the Church in Africa, 27–45, Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa. John Paul II. (1995), Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Ecclesia in Africa, Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana. Kambanda, A. (2015), “‘He Who Wants Cows Must Sleep Like a Cow’: The Bishop in the Church of Pope Francis,” in A. E. Orabator, S.J. (ed.), The Church We Want: Foundations, Theology and Mission of the Church in Africa, 46–57, Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa. Katangole, E. (2015), “Of Coffins and Churches: Seven Marks of an Emerging African Ecclesiology,” in A. E. Orobator, S.J. (ed.), The Church We Want: Foundations, Theology and Mission of the Church in Africa, 190–202, Nairobi: Paulines Publication Africa. Komonchak, J. A. (1995), Foundations in Ecclesiology, Boston: Boston College, Supplementary Issue of the Lonergan Workshop Journal Volume 11. Lowery, S. A. (2017), Identity and Ecclesiology: Their Relationship among Select African Theologians, Eugene: Wipf and Stock. Magesa, L. and J. N. K. Mugambi (1990), “Introduction,” in J. N. K. Mugambi and L. Magesa (eds.), The Church in African Christianity: Innovative Essays in Ecclesiology, 1–4, Nairobi: Initiatives Publishers. Martey E. (2009), African Theology: Inculturation and Liberation, Maryknoll: Orbis Books. Mbaefo, L. (1994), “The Church Bishop Shanahan Left Behind,” The Nigerian Journal of Theology 8 (1): 30–42. Mbiti, J. (1972), “Some African Concepts of Christology,” in G. Vicedom (ed.), Christ and the Younger Churches, 51–62, London: S.P.C.K. Cited in Volker Kuster (2001), The Many Faces of Jesus Christ, trans. John Bowden, London: SCM Press. Mbiti, J. (1978–9), “The Future of Christianity in Africa,” CrossCurrents 28 (4): 387–94. Mbiti, J. (1991), Introduction to African Religion, Long Grove: Waveland Press, Inc. Moloney, R., S.J. (1987), “African Christology,” Theological Studies 48: 505–15. Mushete, N. A. (1994), “An Overview of African Theology,” in R. Gibellini (ed.), Paths of African Theology, 9–24, Maryknoll: Orbis Books.

288

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Mveng, E. (1994), “Impoverishment and Liberation: A Theological Approach for Africa and the Third World,” in R. Gibellini (ed.), Paths of African Theology, 154–65, Maryknoll: Orbis Books. Mveng, E. (1996), “The Historical Background of the African Synod,” in African Faith and Justice Network (ed.), African Synod: Documents, Reflections, Perspectives, 20–31, Maryknoll: Orbis Books. Mwambazambi, K. (2011), “A Missiological Reflection on African Ecclesiology,” Verbum et Ecclesia 32 (1): 1–8. Ngalula, J. (2015), “Milestones in Achieving a More Inclusive Feminine Presence in the Church of Pope Francis,” in A. E. Orobator, S.J. (ed.), The Church We Want: Foundations, Theology and Mission of the Church in Africa, 179–89, Nairobi: Paulines Publication Africa. Njoku, Chukwudi A. (2007), “The Missionary Factor in African Christianity, 1884–1914,” in O. U. Kalu (ed.), African Christianity: An African Story, 191–223, Trenton: Africa World Press, Inc. Nyamiti, C. (1984), Christ as Our Ancestor: Christology from an African Perspective, Gweru, Zimbabwe: Mambo. Nyamiti, C. (1990), “The Church as Christ’s Ancestral Mediation: An Essay on African Ecclesiology,” in J. N. K. Mugabi and L. Magesa (eds.), The Church in African Christianity: Innovative Essays in Ecclesiology, 129–77, Nairobi: Initiatives Publishers. Nyamiti, C. (1992), “African Christologies Today,” in R. J. Schreiter (ed.), Faces of Jesus in Africa, 3–23, London Oduyoye, M. A. (2015), “Conclusion: Theology at the Service of Ecclesia in Africa: A Voice from the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians,” in A. E. Orobator, S.J. (ed.), The Church We Want: Foundations, Theology and Mission of the Church in Africa, 322–35, Nairobi: Paulines Publication Africa. Ogbonnaya, J. (2015), “African Liberative Theologies,” in M. De La Torre (ed.), Introducing Liberative Theologies, 26–46, Maryknoll: Orbis Books. Ogbonnaya, J. (2017), African Perspectives on Culture and World Christianity, New Castle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Orobator, A. E. (1995), “A Church in Dialogue as the Family of God,” in C. McGarry (ed.) What Happened at the African Synod? 33–50, Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa. Orobator, A. E. (1996), “Perspectives and Trends in Contemporary African Ecclesiology,” Studia Missionalia 45: 267–81. Orobator, A. E. (2000), “Leadership and Ministry in the Church-as-Family,” Studia Missionalia 49: 295–313. Orobator, A. E. (2004), “Spotting the Chick: An Essay on Formation in the Context of Church as Family,” Afrika Yetu: SJ Perspectives: Bi-annual Journal of the African Assistancy of the Society of Jesus 7: 23–34. Orobator, A. E. (2015), “Introduction: On the Church We Want,” in A. E. Orobator, S.J. (ed.), The Church We Want: Foundations, Theology and Mission of the Church in Africa, 9–24, Nairobi: Paulines Publication Africa. Pachuau, L. (2018), World Christianity: A Historical and Theological Introduction, Nashville: Abingdon Press. Pobee, J. (1979), Towards an African Theology, Nashville: Abingdon Press. Sakupapa, T. C. (2018), “Ecumenical Ecclesiology in the African Context: Towards a View of the Church as Ubuntu,” Scriptura 117 (1): 1–15. Sanneh, L. (2008), Disciples of All Nations, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

ECCLESIOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS IN THE MAJORITY WORLD

 289

Schreiter, R. J. (2001), “Foreword,” in Volker Kuster (ed.), The Many Faces of Jesus Christ: Intercultural Christology, xi–xiii, Maryknoll: Orbis Books. Uzukwu, E. (1994), The Listening Church, New York: Orbis Books. Uzukwu, E. (1996), A Listening Church: Autonomy and Communion in African Churches, Maryknoll: Orbis Books. Uzukwu, E. (2014a), “Distance-Nearness, Absence-Presence: Reevaluating the Relational Triune God Through the Lens of Igbo (and West African) Health-Focused Religion,” in U. E. Elochukwu and A.-K. Njoku (eds.), Interface between Igbo Theology and Christianity, 86–106, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Uzukwu, E. (2014b), “Church Family of God: Icon of the Triune God, as Listening Church and Africa’s Treasure, Reinventing Christianity and the World,” in A. E. Orobator, S.J. (ed.), Theological Imagination: Conversations on Church, Religion, and Society, 211–29, Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa. Venn, H. (1865), Retrospect and Prospect of the Operations of the Church Missionary Society, London: Church Missionary House. Waliggo, J. M. (1990), “The African Clan as the True Model of the African Church,” in J. N. K. Mugabi and L. Magesa (eds.), The Church in African Christianity: Innovative Essays in Ecclesiology, 111–27, Nairobi: Initiatives Publishers. Walls, A. F. (2002), The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History, Maryknoll: Orbis Books.

290

PART III

Theological and Critical Explorations

292



Chapter TWENTY

Ecclesiology as a Dogmatic Discipline KEVIN J. VANHOOZER

INTRODUCTION: CREDO IN ECCLESIAM “I believe in . . . the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints.” This may be the most difficult line in the Apostles’ Creed to confess, for the simple reason that it refers to something to which everyone has empirical access. We struggle to believe in “Church” precisely because of what we have seen with our eyes. We see the denominational divisions, moral corruption, politics, hypocrisy, petty jealousies—the sheer banality of it all. How, then, can we believe in it? Of disheartening accounts of the church there appear to be no end. American coins proclaim “In God we trust,” but a 2018 Gallup poll indicated that only 38 percent of adults living in the United States trusted the church or organized religion. That is more than those who trusted Congress (11 percent), but significantly fewer than those who trusted the military (74 percent). There is indeed ample evidence that the institutional church is flawed. Dogmatic theology nevertheless insists that these facts comprise only half the story and, taken by themselves, yield only thin descriptions that fail to do justice to the church’s true nature and ultimate reality. How does the church differ from other social entities? A church is neither simply the place where people congregate to worship God nor the institution that oversees the ministry of word and sacrament. In addition to being earthly–historical, the church is also eschatological–heavenly (Eph. 2:6), “a society which, though visible and distinguishable among many others, is not as those others are” (MacKinnon 1940: 21). That the church belongs to the realm of faith alerts us that phenomenological descriptions alone will fail to do it justice. To do justice to both visible and invisible aspects of the church, to the church as a human society and “society of God,” (Calvin 1960: 1015), requires theologically thick descriptions, qualifiers like “holy” and “catholic,” and reference to the Son and Spirit: “The concept of church is conceivable only in the sphere of reality established by God” (Bonhoeffer 2009: 127). This chapter specifies what it means to give a dogmatic description of the church. The first section briefly examines the place of ecclesiology in what has been called “the century of the Church” (Dibelius 1927)—the pro-ecumenical twentieth century. Contemporary ecclesiology is vulnerable to two pathologies: first, the reductionist temptation to identify the church with one’s own particular tradition only; second, the equally reductionist temptation to describe the church as merely human, all too human via non-theological,

294

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

ethnographic methodologies only. The second section guards against both errors by introducing dogmatic theology as a distinct theological project with its own aims, norms, and method for describing the church. The third and central section sets forth the essential principles of ecclesiology as a dogmatic discipline. What comes into focus is not a particular confessional tradition but the being and works of the triune God. The main claim is that the church is a creature of the Word and essential ingredient in the economy of the gospel. Ecclesiology as a dogmatic discipline situates the church in the Father’s electing, the Son’s reconciling, and the Spirit’s enlivening work that makes the church what it is. There follows a dogmatic account of Augustine’s totus Christus, a notion that obliges us to examine more deeply the sense in which the church is the body of Christ, and hence the relation of ecclesiology to christology. While the greater part of the present essay deals with issues pertaining to the beginnings and nature of the church, the conclusion makes a brief foray into the end and vocation of the church: “The church is. The church does what it is” (Van Gelder 2000: 37).

PARSING “PEOPLE OF GOD”: ECCLESIOLOGY AS FIRST THEOLOGY Despite its inclusion in the Apostles’ Creed, serious theological reflection on the church took many centuries to emerge, and “belongs entirely to the era of modernity” (Avis 2018: 1). Ecclesiology became a distinct theological topic only at the time of the Reformation (see Haight 2004). The twentieth century has been widely recognized as “the century of the church” (Dibelius 1927) primarily because of two global developments: the ecumenical movement and Vatican II. The stimulus for the former was the 1910 Edinburgh World Missionary Conference, a largely Protestant affair that sought a way to resolve tensions between missionary agencies whose competition worked against Jesus’s prayer “that they may be one” (Jn 17:11). Church unity was also a leading concern of Vatican II, as evidenced by the opening statement of the 1964 Decree on Ecumenism: “The restoration of unity among all Christians is one of the principal concerns of the Second Vatican Council.” The twentieth century was also the century of sociology, the “science of institutions, their genesis and their functioning” (Durkheim 1982: 15). The social practices, politics, and relationships that comprise the institutional church have proven ripe for sociological analysis (see, for example, Troeltsch 1931). To be sure, the church is less an institution, building, or set of beliefs than a people: “What our Lord left behind Him was not a book, not a creed, not a system of thought, nor a rule of life, but a visible community” (Newbigin 1953: 20). The challenge of ecclesiology, however, is to say how the people of God truly are “of God.” What exacerbates this challenge is that, while God is one, his people appear to be divided. The differences that, since 1054, separated Eastern and Western Christendom and, since 1517, have generated a plethora of Protestant denominations have prompted many Christians to look down on other confessing Christians and declare, “not my people” (cf. Hos 1:9). Ecclesiology attempts to understand and describe the church as the people of God: “The church is simultaneously a human, historical, social reality . . . and a theological reality” (Haight 2004: 38–9). The church is a single reality that can be described in two irreducible languages: theology and sociology. This section examines three leading

ECCLESIOLOGY AS A DOGMATIC DISCIPLINE

 295

contemporary approaches to the church that, for different reasons and in different ways, tend to focus on the empirical community—its visible unity (ecumenism), participation in trinitarian koinonia (communio ecclesiology), and life together (corporate practices)— and, in so doing, have made ecclesiology of first importance.

Ecumenism The ecumenical movement, as much as any other single factor, put ecclesiology onto the map of modern theology: “No other movement in the history of the Christian church, perhaps with the exception of the Reformation, has shaped the thinking and practice of Christendom as much as the modern movement for Christian unity” (Kärkkäinen 2002: 7–8). Emphasizing the unity of the visible church may give the impression that the most important Christian doctrine is the doctrine of the church itself. Whereas traditional confessional theologies magnified doctrinal disagreements, setting various churches against one another, ecumenical theology urged churches toward mutual recognition of one another’s ministry and ministers. The most successful of these endeavors is the World Council of Churches’ Faith and Order Commission report, Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry (1982). The net result of ecumenical efforts has been a determination to find concrete ways of visibly displaying the oneness of the church, hence the concomitant focus on the social–historical reality of the various institutions that make up present-day world Christianity. Ecumenism is typically less concerned with dogma than with shared praxis (Bosch 1991: 359–62).

Communio According to Cardinal Bellarmine’s classic definition, the church is a society of human beings “who profess the same faith and law of Christ under obedience to the Roman Pontiff ” (Bellarmine 2016: 47). The communio ecclesiology characteristic of Vatican II also affirms the idea of church unity, though Lumen Gentium (1964), the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, develops it in a less juridical and more organic direction, defining the church as the whole people of God, not simply the hierarchy of bishops, and insisting that the deepest meaning and expression of unity is community. The church is a human society that enjoys communion (koinonia) with the triune God and with one another (Lubac 1988). Communio ecclesiology, widely adopted in ecumenism, defines the church by its center (the mystic union with the Father in Christ through the Spirit) rather than circumference (the faith and order maintained and monitored by the clergy), enabling it, despite its denominational diversity, to affirm the unity of the church precisely as a “communion of communions” (Tillard 1992: 29). It also tends to lean on a social doctrine of the Trinity, namely, the idea that the triune God is himself a “society” of persons-in-communion in which the church participates.

The Grammar of Church Practices While Christians may not always agree on doctrine, they nevertheless share a tacit understanding of their communal identity by engaging in the community’s most important practices. Church tradition is a socializing force that forms a people whose characteristic speech and action constitute “cultural-linguistic” theology (Lindbeck 1984). Practice-oriented theologians view the church as a particular kind of social–historical reality, namely, a storied community that receives its peculiar and particular identity from

296

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

a foundation narrative (i.e., Scripture) that orients its life together (Hauerwas 1989). Members of the society learn to speak and act Christian as participation in community life helps them learn the grammar of faith. It is not so much Scripture’s final form (canonical semantics) but the church’s form of life (community pragmatics) that shapes ecclesiology, thus raising a concern here that church practices displace the Word of God as the de facto authority (see Vanhoozer 2005: 165–76).

Two Pathological Extremes The recent interest in the visible unity and communal practices that shape and socialize the people of God is to be welcomed to the extent that it enables thicker descriptions of the church. At the same time, there is a danger of pathological exaggeration, and this in two directions: either elevating the agency and reality of the church beyond its creaturely status, according it a role that is Christ’s alone (i.e. sacralization), or reducing the agency and reality of the church to something wholly susceptible to sociopolitical analysis (i.e., secularization). A dogmatic account of the church avoids both extremes, as we shall see. The first temptation is to exaggerate the church’s likeness to and participation in God’s triune relationality. Many communio ecclesiologies give too thin an account both of what it means to participate in the Trinity and of the Trinity itself. John Webster wonders whether making communio into a master concept is an attempt “to subsume God and creatures under a single reality of ‘communion’” (Webster 2005: 163). Communio is a convenient category precisely because it can mean different things to different people (Doyle: 2000). Classical trinitarian theology resists speaking in vague terms about relationality, however, preferring instead to spell out the concrete relations between the divine persons (e.g., begetting; proceeding). Mention of “mission” and “procession” are conspicuously absent in communio ecclesiologies: “As a consequence the contours of the church’s mission seem to have less to do with the concrete mission of Jesus’ inaugurating the kingdom of God and more to do with general notions of building a (nonhierarchical) community of love” (Omerod 2015: 455). This observation highlights a chronic weakness of the approach, namely, to make communio into an idealized Platonic form that both abstracts from the actual history of the church and distracts from the church’s present conflicts and ongoing mission. As concerns the second temptation (i.e., giving pride of place to ethnographic descriptions of the church), field work is fine, as long as it does not reduce the church to its earthly–historical form, resulting in a naturalized ecclesiology. Sociology and ethnography excel in providing “horizontal” accounts of the people of God, often at the expense of the vertical (Godward) dimension. Given the all-too-human nature of the society we call church, it is easy to understand how an ecclesiology dominated by ethnographic categories has become first theology. Yet it is also regrettable: “The churches in their separation and divisions are a countersign to the one church that the economy of salvation portends as a witness to the truth of the gospel (Jn 17:20-1)” (Del Colle 2007: 250). The way forward is to view the church “as being simultaneously theological and social/cultural” (Ward 2012: 2–3). We risk forfeiting a proper dogmatic framework for ecclesiology through preoccupation with either the church’s participation in the social Trinity or the church’s cultural practices. What exactly is the relation of the church as an imperfect human communion to the perfect communion that is the life of Father, Son, and Spirit? It is not enough merely to say “both/and”: the way forward lies in rightly relating divine and human agency and reality. It is to this task that we now turn.

ECCLESIOLOGY AS A DOGMATIC DISCIPLINE

 297

ON DOGMATIC THEOLOGY Ecclesiology is “the discipline that is concerned with comparative, critical, and constructive reflection on the dominant paradigms of the identity of the church” (Avis 2018: 3). The task of the present essay, however, is to consider ecclesiology as a dogmatic discipline. What, then, is dogmatics, and what kind of descriptions do dogmatic statements make? In the first place, dogmatic statements contrast with descriptions of the church as a merely this-worldly phenomenon, limited to the horizontal plane or “immanent frame” (Taylor 2007: 542–3) of social–historical reality only. Dogmatics deals with God and all things in relation to God. On the other hand, we do well not to limit dogmatics to this or that set of official theological statements authorized by competing confessional traditions. We may distinguish this latter, “special” dogmatic theology from a more “general” dogmatic theology, understood either as that which expresses the faith of the whole (Catholic) Church or, alternately, as that which preserves and unfolds the logic of the gospel. As such, it belongs to no single church or confession, for it is beholden to its evangelical subject matter alone: “The [saving] knowledge that God has revealed in his Word to the church concerning himself and all creatures as they stand in relation to him” (Bavinck 2003: 38). Dogmatic theology therefore involves not free speculation but bound discourse, a response to a prior divine communicative initiative. God is both subject (active agent) and object (subject matter) of dogmatics (Vanhoozer 2017: 27). There are, of course, many ways to speak about God. Philosophical theology is a form of bound discourse too, though what tethers it are concepts like “perfect being” or “a being than which nothing greater can be conceived.” Systematic theologies, similarly, sometimes frame talk of God with conceptual schemes (e.g., existentialism; feminism; liberationism) drawn from elsewhere than Scripture or the church. Dogmatics proper draws upon theology’s own resources, the aforementioned communicative presence and agency of God, which is expressed in the divine economy—the historical missions of Son and Spirit—that constitutes “the domain of the Word” (Webster 2012b: 3–30). Assessing how far church proclamation and practice corresponds with the Word of God is arguably the chief task of dogmatics: “Dogmatics is the critical question . . . about the agreement of the Church proclamation . . . with the revelation attested in Holy Scripture” (Barth 1975: 248). God’s self-revelation as the one who is with us and for us appears in history but is not identical with history: “Revelation beckons theological intelligence to consider the cause of revelation, and to receive it as an embassy of that which cannot be resolved into or exhausted by historical manifestation” (Webster 2016: 6). The cause of revelation—the Revealer—belongs to a different ontological order. The one who is with us is essentially different from us. It follows that dogmatics must consider God absolutely, in his self-existent internal perfection, as well as relatively, that is, in relation to all other things and his external works. Stated differently: the economy (what God does with his two hands, Son and Spirit) derives from who God is in himself (one God in three persons). Dogmatics begins by contemplating God’s external works in the history of redemption, yet never forgets that they are the works of the one who transcends space and time and is eternally all that he is. Dogmatics is a thoroughly trinitarian affair, tracing all God’s acts back to their origin in God’s own perfect life: “The Christian mind remains unsatisfied until all of existence is referred back to the triune God” (Bavinck 2004: 330). To give a dogmatic account of anything is to locate its origin, nature, and end in relation to the triune God. The church is

298

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

not an essential part of the triune God, yet it is one of his works and, arguably, part of his eternal purpose (Eph. 1:9-10). Everything thus depends on rightly locating the church in the economy of redemption, that is, the actual way in which God communicates his light and life to creatures. That God has communicated his light and life to sinful creatures in Christ through the Spirit is the good news that lies at the heart of Christianity: “Dogmatics is the schematic and analytic presentation of the matter of the gospel” (Webster 2012b: 131). Ecclesiology as a dogmatic discipline thus aims rightly to locate the church vis-à-vis the God of the gospel and the gospel of God.

THE DOGMATIC LOCATION OF THE CHURCH: CREATURA EVANGELII The chapters in part two of this handbook present ecclesiology from a number of different confessional perspectives. Despite the terminological similarity, what we are here calling dogmatics is not simply a repetition of ecclesiology in one of these confessional modes (e.g., “Lutheran” ecclesiology). There is a place for such reflection, even though some believe that it encourages each tradition to define itself over against the others, thus belying the creedal affirmation that the church is one. In the context of ecumenism, identifying the church with one’s own denominational self-understanding is a non-bridge too far: “Confessional theology is defunct” (Avis 2018: 14). From the vantage point of “general” Christian dogmatics, the most important things to say about the church are, first, that it owes its existence to the triune God and, second, that it is a creature of the gospel. We can adapt Calvin’s famous maxim for ecclesiological purposes: without knowledge of the triune God there is no knowledge of the church; without knowledge of the church there is no knowledge of the triune God. The latter claim may initially appear implausible, but if so it is because we have forgotten to think dogmatically. There can be no biblical doctrine of God without a doctrine of the church for the simple reason that “God is the one who manifests who he is in the economy of his saving work in which he assembles a people for himself ” (Webster 2001: 195). At the same time, “We cannot properly understand the purpose of God, nor the method of grace, nor the kingdom of Christ, nor the work of the Holy Spirit, nor the meaning of world history, without studying the doctrine of the church” (Packer 1962: 241). In contrast to ethnographic approaches for which the church’s own self-understanding is the point of departure and norm, ecclesiology in dogmatic perspective is a function of the doctrine of the Trinity and the gospel: “the church is ingredient within the divine economy of salvation, which is the mystery of God made manifest in Jesus Christ and now operative in the power of his Spirit” (Webster 2001: 195).

Ecclesiology and the Creator–Creature Distinction The church did not emerge from God’s head like Minerva from Jove’s. The church may be a society of God, but the “of ” signals creation, not emanation. Dogmatic theology begins by distinguishing the triune Creator from everything else, including the church. The most serious dogmatic distortion is that which confuses or conflates Creator and creature. That way gross confusion, and idolatry, lies. Ecclesiology therefore begins by acknowledging the church’s creatureliness. The church is neither self-existent nor self-constituting: “we need to draw a fundamental distinction between the being and act of God and the being and act of the church” (Webster 2001:

ECCLESIOLOGY AS A DOGMATIC DISCIPLINE

 299

195). There is an asymmetry of divine and human being as well as divine and human action that is important to acknowledge and appreciate. The Reformers highlight this by speaking of the church as “creature of the Word” or “creature of the gospel.” To affirm the church as creatura verbi domini is to confess the church to be constituted by God’s action alone: “The fundamental lesson to be learnt from the ecclesiology of the Reformers is the art of distinguishing and relating opus Dei and opus hominum” (Schwöbel 1989: 149). The church is a creature of the Word because it is begotten of a divine speech act: “The Church is created by the divine Word insofar as it evokes the human response of faith” (Schwöbel 1989: 122). The church, as a community of faith, is a derivative rather than self-constituting community, for “faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ” (Rom. 10:17): “To this solo verbo there corresponds sola fide” (Webster 2003a: 44). Indeed, as a creature of the divine Word, hearing is the church’s definitive act: “Insofar as the Church is a creature, it is the creature of the preached gospel of God’s grace . . . The Church is the social and practical response to that grace” (Forsyth 1917: 31). Dogmatic theology insists on the Creator–creature distinction, then, for the sake of preserving a proper understanding of the relation between what the church is and does and what God is and does. There is a place for ethnography, yet faith alone, itself a gift of the Spirit, grasps the church’s spiritual reality, which is to say its creaturely status and location in the economy of redemption: “the concept of the invisibility of the church is a standing denial of any easy identification of divine and human work” (Webster 2001: 197). The church is simultaneously at Corinth (or Chicago, etc.) and in Christ. In speaking of the reality of the church, we must not forget, even for a moment, that it is first and foremost not merely a human society but a society of God: a creature of the divine word and an implication of the gospel.

Creature of the Triune God of the Gospel The church’s creatureliness can be set out in three movements, each a moment in the triune economy of the gospel. The Father’s Electing: Adoption  The church did not have to be. There was a time when it was not. Everything the church is and has, it owes to the gracious initiative of God, who out of loving freedom brought into being a creaturely counterpart to his own society, with which to share his own light and life. Ethnography is helpful, but it takes us only so far, for the origin of the church predates its historical existence. From an earthly perspective, then, the church’s existence was entirely contingent: “Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom, and what arrived was the Church” (Loisy 1902: 111). This may suggest the church was something unplanned, an unfortunate accident. Philosophers have stumbled over the mystery of the cosmos—why is there something rather than nothing? Ecclesiology asks: why is there church rather than nothing, or something else? These are twin questions to which the dogmatic theologian has a ready reply: there is something rather than nothing, and church rather than something else, because God chose to form a people to be his own treasured possession (Exod. 19:5). There is something in general—a cosmos—rather than nothing, in order for there to be a very particular something: a covenant people. Dogmatic theology discovers the ultimate origin of the church in the Father’s eternal electing purpose. Everything that happens in the history of Israel and the church (the

300

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

twin forms of God’s elect people) has its beginning “before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4) and its source in “the good pleasure of his will” (Eph. 1:5): “The Father wills that—ex nihilo—there should come into being a creaturely counterpart to the fellowship of love which is the inner life of the Holy Trinity” (Webster 2005: 153). That God has chosen what is not God to share in his own life is good news, which is why election is “the sum of the gospel” (Barth 1957: 3). What is the church? It is the historical realization of God’s eternal electing purpose to create a people for the sake of covenant fellowship. A covenant is “an elected, as opposed to natural relationship of obligation under oath” (Hugenberger 1993: 11). The church is heir to God’s promise to Abraham to make his children a great nation (Gen. 12:1-3). God makes good his eternal electing purpose through a variety of covenants, each a means of integrating aliens into a familial structure: “covenant establishes kinship” (Hahn 2009: 28). The church has come into being because of the eternal will of God the Father who “destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ” (Eph. 1:5). The church is thus the result of the free and sovereign determination of the Father, who already had a beloved Son, to expand his family. The Son is a willing participant, for it is his mission that accomplishes the Father’s electing purpose: “For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, in order that he might be the firstborn within a large family” (Rom. 8:29). The Son’s Reconciling: Restoration  The good news of adoption into the family of God is a consequence of the Son’s saving work. The Son’s work was necessary because of the people’s covenant unfaithfulness. God had appointed Israel to be “a priestly kingdom and a holy nation” (Exod. 19:6), but as a result of the people’s unfaithfulness the Lord appeared to consider their covenant privileges forfeit, dismissing them as “not my people” (Hos. 1:9). However, because God cannot deny himself, or his promise, he proved faithful even when his designated people were faithless. He therefore sent his Son, the covenant Lord, to be the incarnate Suffering Servant of Israel, to accomplish a work that would change the status of “not my people” to “children of the living God” (Rom. 9:26). Through the work of Christ, the righteous God has found a way to fellowship with those who were unrighteous. The church is a gathered assembly, but not every gathering is a church. The church is the Society of Jesus, an assembly that gathers in his name (Mt. 18:20) in response to the proclamation of salvation he has wrought. Though this salvation was purposed in eternity, it was accomplished in history, through the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus that together make up the Christ-event that inaugurated a new covenant (Jer. 31:31; Lk 22:20; Heb. 9:15). In Christ, there is “a new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17), “one new humanity in place of the two” (Eph. 2:15). The church owes its existence to the person and work of the incarnate Son. The Spirit’s Enlivening: Incorporation  The external works of the Trinity are indivisible (opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt); hence the church is equally the creation of the Holy Spirit. What makes the church one is not some vague community spirit but the Spirit of God, the third person of the Trinity. The Son is the resurrection and the life (Jn 11:25), yet the Spirit is the giver of life insofar as it is he who unites people, through faith, to the Son. The Father initiates, the Son effects, and the Spirit perfects: “the Spirit . . . is the divine agent who consummates Christ’s objective work of reconciliation and realizes in a final way God’s purpose for creaturely being in fellowship with himself ” (Webster 2012a: 213).

ECCLESIOLOGY AS A DOGMATIC DISCIPLINE

 301

The Spirit gathers the Society of Jesus by quickening hearts and minds to the gospel, prompting faith and incorporating the faithful into a “body” with Christ as its head. Thanks to the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost—the Big Bang of the church, as it were— Jesus is not simply a memory but a living presence. The church is a fellowship of the Spirit because the Spirit effects union with Christ and communion with all those who are members of his body. As perfecter of God’s plan to create a people for himself, “the Spirit animates and preserves a human social world in which the old order of sin and death has been set aside and the life of the children of God is unleashed” (Webster 2012a: 213). In the power of the Spirit, local assemblies gather in Jesus’s name to live out the life of Christ in them, thus becoming corporate parables of the kingdom of God, social– historical anticipations of a shalom that has yet fully to come.

Marks of the Church: A Dogmatic Account To this point we have traced the church’s being back to the being and activity of the God of the gospel. The church, we said, was not an accident but the realization of God’s eternal purpose to form a people to be his treasured possession. The point is worth underlining: the church does not merely proclaim the gospel, but is itself a central theme and result of the gospel. The church, it should now be clear, is both a theological and a social–historical community, both a creature of the gospel whose life is hidden “in Christ” and a flesh-and-blood community with an earthly address, be it ancient Corinth, Calvin’s Geneva, or present-day Jakarta. Which church are we describing when we confess the historic attributes of the church: the visible (historically situated) or the invisible (theologically constituted)? It is in response to such questions that the aforementioned Creator–creature distinction comes into its own. The “invisible” and “visible” churches are not wholly distinct entities but pertain to the difference between the being and activity of God and that of human creatures. God is spirit (Jn 4:24), and invisible (Heb. 11:27), hence there will always be something invisible about the people of God: “The ‘invisibility’ of the Church refers to God’s act in constituting the Church which, as the power to create a visible community of witness, is itself invisible” (Schwöbel 1989: 130). It takes faith to see the church as a creature of the gospel: “spiritual visibility is visibility to prayerful reason illuminated by the Holy Spirit to see and trust the work of God in creaturely occurrence” (Webster 2012a: 215). To speak of the spiritual visibility of the church is to view the social practices that comprise the visible community as evidence of, and testimony to, the invisible empowerment of the Holy Spirit, the first fruits of the new creation (Rom. 8:23). To be sure, the church that is visible in the eyes of the world, and of sociologists, often fails to bear faithful witness to the gospel. The visible church on earth, an ongoing social project, does not perfectly correspond to the church seated in the heavenly places (Eph. 2:6). To confess with the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed (381) the four traditional marks or attributes of the church obliges us to acknowledge the church as an eschatological reality: the earthly people of the gospel of God are both already (invisibly) and not yet (visibly) one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. The church is indeed visible, yet from a dogmatic perspective even its visible reality is rightly seen only with the eyes of faith. For the four marks of the church are actually marks of the presence and activity of the triune God, hallmarks of the church as a creature of the gospel, in whose economy it lives and moves and has its being.

302

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

One  The church, a creature of the gospel, is one because there is one God (Deut. 6:4) and no other gospel of God (Rom. 1:1; Gal. 1:6-7). There is no other gospel because there is no other Jesus than the one the apostles proclaimed (2 Cor. 11:4), and because Jesus “offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins” (Heb. 10:12). The good news is that, in Christ, there is no more class warfare or racial conflict: “There is one body and one Spirit . . . one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Eph. 4:3-4)—one cup, one bread (1 Cor. 10:1617). Church unity is nevertheless both gift and task. The earthly community must strive to manifest visibly what is already the case in Christ, for the sake of the integrity of its gospel witness. Empirical ecclesial actuality lags behind eschatological ecclesial reality; this lag is the groaning of creation (Rom. 8:22-23), the burden of our earthly tent (2 Cor. 5:2-4). Holy  The church is holy because it is a people set apart by the Holy Spirit for covenant fellowship with God and other saints and for bearing witness to the gospel. The work of the Spirit is the perfection of the Father’s determination before the creation of the world to choose a people in Christ “to be holy and blameless before him” (Eph. 1:4): “The Church is what it is in the ceaseless gift of its being through the risen Christ and the Holy Spirit who accomplish the will of the Father in gathering a holy people to himself ” (Webster 2003b: 56). As the community of the reconciled, founded on Christ, the church has become a holy nation (1 Pet. 2:9) and holy temple (1 Cor. 3:17), comprised of citizens of the gospel and members of the household of God (Eph. 2:19). Catholic  The church is catholic because the scope of the gospel, which is to say the wideness of God’s love and mercy, knows no bounds (Rev. 7:9). Yet it was the Lord’s intent from the beginning to bless all the families of the earth (Gen. 12:3). The catholicity of the church is thus a predicate of the covenant of grace, not the result of some diversity committee’s work. What the church is, it is by grace, so that no one may boast (Eph. 2:9). The catholicity of the church is implied by the gospel itself, for the message of reconciliation in Christ is good news for people in all times, places, and situations (2 Cor. 5:18-19). Apostolic  The church is apostolic because it is the creature of a gospel word of which it is not author but recipient. The apostles were commissioned and sent by the risen Christ. To call the church apostolic is to say both that it exists because of this prior commissioning, and that it has been commissioned—sent on a mission to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8)—to hand on to others the original testimony to “what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes . . . concerning the word of life” (1 Jn 1:1): “Properly understood, however, apostolicity is a matter of being accosted by a mandate from outside. It is a christological–pneumatological concept, and only by derivation is it ecclesiological” (Webster 2003a: 51). The church is apostolic when its corporate speech and action (i.e., tradition) exemplify neither innovations nor additions to the gospel but only a fresh hearing of the prophets and apostles (i.e., Scripture). The church is apostolic when it hearkens to the authoritative Scriptures “as the instrument through which the Spirit breaks and reforms the community” (Webster 2003a: 52).

ECCLESIOLOGY AND CHRISTOLOGY: THE TOTUS CHRISTUS AS A CASE STUDY IN DOGMATICS In light of what we have said about the church as a creature of the gospel of the triune God, what shall we make of the Pauline expression “body of Christ,” a phrase that

ECCLESIOLOGY AS A DOGMATIC DISCIPLINE

 303

many see as “the deepest description of the mystery of the Church” (Berkouwer 1976: 78), more specific and substantial than the other leading biblical images: “people of God” and “fellowship of the Spirit”? Is Paul comparing the church to the human body in general, with its various limbs and members (see Rom. 12:4-5; 1 Cor. 12:14-27), or to the singular union of the Logos made flesh, taking on the form of a servant (Jn 1:14; Phil. 2:7)? Is this merely a manner of speaking or is it to be taken literally? Should a dogmatic account of the church understand “body of Christ” metaphorically or ontologically?

The “Body of Christ”: A Pauline Metaphor Consider Paul’s statement to the church at Corinth: “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (1 Cor. 12:27). On one end of the spectrum of interpretive possibilities is a purely metaphorical meaning: the church is the body of Christ because, despite its diversity (Jew and Greek, slave and free), it displays an organic and inclusive unity, and because all the parts, lay and clerical, with their diverse giftings, are necessary for the health of the whole. At the other end of the spectrum is the ontological claim that “the church is the body of Christ in a realistic sense, as a ‘prolongation’ or ‘extension’ of the incarnation” (Badcock 2009: 66). The nature of the identification of Christ with his church is an unsolved dogmatic problem (Berkouwer 1976: 83; cf. Bonhoeffer 2009: 140). Thinking through the church as the body of Christ is thus an appropriate case study for ecclesiology in dogmatic perspective, and an excellent exercise for young dogmaticians. The challenge is to specify Christ’s relationship to the church—and to remember his own incarnate humanity. Christ incorporates individuals into his body through baptism. Being born of water and the Spirit (Jn 3:5) is the port of entry into the church. Through baptism, the Holy Spirit unites us to Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection (Rom. 6:3-4)—the key events of his public ministry and saving work—thereby creating a new humanity: “Through the Holy Spirit, the crucified and risen Christ exists as the church-community, as the ‘new human being’” (Bonhoeffer 2001: 220). Whereas baptism is a one-time event, the Lord’s Supper is a constant reminder that the many saints—all who partake of the one bread—have been incorporated into the one body, the new reconciled humanity in Christ (Eph. 2:14-16), and so enjoy communion with Christ and one another (1 Cor. 10:17): “Baptism incorporates us as members into the unity of the Body of Christ. The Lord’s Supper keeps us in this community with Christ’s body” (Bonhoeffer 2001: 216). Yet the question remains: what kind of body is the church? To what is Paul referring and how does it relate to Jesus Christ? Metaphors are reality-depicting (Campbell 2014), yet this particular Pauline metaphor is complex, for Paul deploys it in different contexts for different purposes: “This variety of usage should warn us against seeking to produce a single inclusive definition of the image” (Minear 1960: 174). At times the emphasis is on the diversity of members (i.e., ministries) in the one body (Rom. 12:4-8; 1 Cor. 12:14-27); at other times the emphasis is on the unity of the many members (1 Cor. 10:16-17). Paul uses other corporate metaphors as well (e.g., temple; building) to speak of the union believers have in Christ. Among the most suggestive is the nuptial metaphor: Paul applies Jesus’s teaching that husband and wife “are no longer two, but one flesh” (Mt. 19:6) to the mystical union of Christ and the church (Eph. 5:31-32). Significantly, this is a union between others who remain in some senses distinct. Finally, Paul contrasts (e.g., 1 Cor. 15:22) being “in Adam” (belonging to the old sinful humanity) with being “in Christ” (belonging to the

304

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

reconciled new humanity). The Holy Spirit is the principle of incorporation, the agent who brings about a person’s union with Christ and the communion of the saints: “For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body” (1 Cor. 12:12). Paul can therefore speak both of the church as Christ’s body (1 Cor. 12:27) and of Christ’s distinction, as “head,” from the body (Eph. 5:23; Col. 1:18; 2:19): “It would not have occurred to any New Testament writer to suppose that a man might be ‘in Christ’ yet not ‘in the Church’” (MacGregor 1958: 4). What does Paul mean? To what reality does “body of Christ” refer? Is it dogmatically correct to identify the flesh-and-blood Christian community as Jesus’s literal body? J. A. T. Robinson thought so, arguing that the voice Saul heard on the road to Damascus (“Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” [Acts 9:2]) indicated his realization that the post-resurrection body of Christ was in fact the Christian community he was trying to exterminate (Robinson 1952: 58). Robert Jenson agrees: “[Paul] means that the risen Christ as a complete living human person has a body and that the church is this body” (Jenson 1997: 209). Yet again, we see the intimate connection of ecclesiology and christology: Christ has only one Body . . . but that Body exists under various modes. As a natural Body it was seen on earth, hung on the Cross, rose in glory on the first Easter Day and was taken into heaven in the Ascension; as a mystical Body it appeared on earth on the first Whitsunday and we know it was the Holy Catholic Church. (Mascall 1946: 161)

Totus Christus: An Augustinian Proposal Robinson and Jenson are well downstream of Augustine’s notion of the totus Christus— the “whole” or “fullness” of Christ (Eph. 4:13). In Sermon 341 Augustine sets out three ways we can speak of Christ: as God, according to his eternal deity (i.e., as one of the Trinity); as man, who is at the same time God (i.e., as incarnate Jesus); and finally, as the “whole Christ” (totus Christus), which is to say, the fullness of the church, head and body. Augustine does not say that Christ would be incomplete without the church, yet he insists that Christ did not wish or choose to be complete without the church. As the Word assumed flesh and became man (Jn 1:14), so the Word assumes a body and became church. It is a mysterious union, like marriage (Eph. 5:32), and, again as in marriage, Christ is the head of his body, the church (Eph. 5:23). The church really is Christ’s body, though Augustine can no more explain the nature of this union than he can the incarnation. Augustine’s totus Christus was far from being a mere one-time sermon illustration. In another sermon, Augustine views the whole of Psalm 79 as a meditation on the mystery of Christ and the church: “This passage reveals an interpretive key for Augustine’s exegesis of Scripture. The ‘total mystery’ (totum mysterium) of Scripture is the ‘whole Christ’ (totus Christus). Head and members remain distinct, yet Christ and the church form one mystery, and all of Scripture is concerned with this mystery” (Lee 2017: 1-2). The “whole Christ” refers to the entire incorporation, as it were, though Christ remains the singular head. Some scholars hold that the totus Christus is the hermeneutical key to Augustine’s “Christo-ecclesiological” exegesis of the Psalms or, at the limit, the center of his whole theology (Cameron 2015: 206), yet another reason to make it a case study of the relationship of christology and ecclesiology. The apostle Paul clearly refers to Christ as the head of his body, the church. Augustine goes further when he hears this composite spiritual entity speaking in the Psalms: “Christ and church are thus a single entity whom Augustine hears talking in the psalm’s

ECCLESIOLOGY AS A DOGMATIC DISCIPLINE

 305

speaking ego” (Cameron 2015: 213; see also McCarthy 2015: 234–5). To understand this union, “we must understand the whole of Christian doctrine” (Mersch 1938: 10). Is it dogmatically correct, however, to explain this union as “the prolongation of the mystery of the Incarnation in the whole Church” (Mersch 1938: 438)? How exactly is the church the continuation of Christ? Orthodox theologians agree that the persona of Jesus Christ is the eternal Word, the Logos made flesh. The idea that the Word takes on the role of a human speaker is central to Augustine’s reading of the Psalms, and to his suggestion that the Word is also the persona of the church community’s life: “Augustine is the first to use the expression totus Christus, ‘the complete Christ,’ to denote the complex unity that is not only the Word and Jesus but Jesus and the members of his Body, understood as making up together a single persona, a single acting and speaking subject” (Williams 2018: 74). Is it dogmatically correct to speak of Christ and the church as one person, or does doing so mistakenly blur the distinction between Christ and the church? Two twentieth-century theologians have wrestled with precisely this question.

The Totus Christus in Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer How does Barth work out the celebrated christological concentration that characterizes his Church Dogmatics in his doctrine of the church? Interestingly, he invokes Augustine’s totus Christus in describing the church as Christ’s own earthly–historical form of existence. Jesus’s relationship to his body the church is “indirectly identical to the relationship between Himself as the eternal Son of God and His being as man” (Barth 1958: 59). The believing community is for Barth a second form of Jesus’s body, united to him by the Holy Spirit: “Where this community lives by the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ Himself lives on earth” (Barth 1956: 353). The church has no autonomous existence, however, for a body without a head is just a corpse. The church is “only as it is gathered and lets itself be gathered and gathers itself by the living Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit” (Barth 1956: 650). The church is an event, never a static institution. Ecclesiology as a dogmatic discipline must therefore “learn to recognize the act of God in the earthly–historical life of the church, and not to identify the act of God with it” (Badcock 2009: 90). Barth therefore resists the Roman Catholic predilection to identify the church with the earthly institution. One must not mistake the “body” of Christ (the community) with the “fleshly” institution (the magisterium), for the Word was made flesh once only: “We cannot speak, then, of a repetition or extension of the incarnation taking place in it [the church]” (Barth 1958: 60). The idea that the church is a continuation of the incarnation “springs from a confusion of sarx with soma. Christ’s risen body is not fleshly but spiritual” (Newbigin 1953: 86). Barth nevertheless understands this community christologically, that is, in Chalcedonian terms: “The Chalcedonian pattern is comprised of a unity, a differentiation, and an asymmetrical relation between the divine and human natures in Christ” (Bender 2013: 4). Mistaken ecclesiological positions may thus be described in terms of christological heresies. To identify the true church with the invisible reality behind the earthly community is to fall prey to ecclesiological docetism, for example (Bender 2013: 7). The Chalcedonian way forward is to acknowledge the asymmetrical relation of body (earthly–historical form of Christ’s existence) to head (heavenly form of Christ’s existence). The body does not exist independently of its head: “Because He is, it is; it is, because He is. That is its secret . . . which is visible only to faith” (Barth 1956: 661). The

306

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

church whose existence Christians confess is first and foremost not an institution but a new humanity constituted in and by Christ, the earthly gathering in which “He Himself is the Subject present and active and operative in His community. ‘Christ liveth in me’” (Barth 1958: 60). Barth resists collapsing christology into ecclesiology by insisting on the priority of Christ’s agency: “The being of the community is a predicate of his being . . . He does not live because and as it lives. But it lives . . . only because and as He lives . . . The sequence and order are all important” (Barth 1957: 655). Christ is the active subject who gives existence to his body, while the body “lives in obedient correspondence or analogy to Christ as a true and free partner, yet never taking the place of Christ or his work” (Bender 2013: 203n.12). Bonhoeffer, similarly, invokes the totus Christus in describing the church as “Christ existing as community” [Christus als Gemeinde existierend]: “‘To be in Christ’ is synonymous with ‘to be in the church-community’” (Bonhoeffer 2009: 140). Some critics worry that such language risks collapsing christology into ecclesiology. However, though Bonhoeffer undertakes a sociological analysis of the church, he is careful to insist that the community is a reality of revelation, established in Christ and actualized by the Holy Spirit. Christ alone is the agent who breaks down the dividing wall of hostility in order to create a new humanity in himself (Eph. 2:14-15): “The church is God’s new will and purpose for humanity” (Bonhoeffer 2009: 141). Stated differently: the church is the visible, earthly–historical community that attests the invisible, eschatological–heavenly community of the reconciled, a creature of the reconciling Word: “Life in the community is a ‘being-there’ on behalf of humankind, history and nature, declaring in its existence and practice that Christ is the centre of all human reality” (Williams 2018: 191). Bonhoeffer tries to do justice to both the sociological and dogmatic aspects of the church community. Like Barth, he acknowledges the priority of Christ’s agency: “For Bonhoeffer, it is Christ who constitutes the church, not the reverse” (Mawson 2018: 127). Moreover, though Christ is present in the church, a complete identification between head and body cannot be made “since Christ has ascended into heaven and is now with God” (Bonhoeffer 2009: 140). The church cannot be the continuation of the incarnation of Jesus because Jesus’s incarnation is not the end of his story. The New Testament identifies him not only as the one who was born, buried, and raised, but as the one who ascended into heaven, where he is now seated at the right hand of the Father (Eph. 1:22). The ascension is the safeguard that prevents us from simply identifying Christ’s person with the earthly–historical form of the church, the bridegroom with the bride: “it is ecclesiologically elemental that the Son of God is in heaven . . . the Son’s relation to the church is external, but not in such a way as to contradict the union with Christ that is proper to the church as one of the fruits of redemption” (Webster 2012a: 210–11). Hence the mystical union of head and body does not erase the fundamental Creator–creature distinction: Where the Church is itself, finite action is conformed to and woven into the eternal initiative of the Word through union with Jesus Christ in the Spirit; but since the Church is not united with Jesus Christ in precisely the same sense as Jesus is united with the Word, the transparency of finite action to divine in the body of believers is irregular and episodic. (Williams 2018: 78) Metaphors are reality-depicting. To what reality does “body of Christ” then refer? The dogmatically correct answer is to say that the church is really the body of Christ when, coordinated by the Spirit, the various members act in concert with their head. Jesus

ECCLESIOLOGY AS A DOGMATIC DISCIPLINE

 307

is present not in institutions but in the evangelical activity of the gathered assembly: the proclamation, celebration, and instantiation of the gospel in concrete forms of life together. The church is the body of Christ when, in the power of the Spirit, it speaks and acts in ways that communicate the mind of Christ.

CONCLUSION: “DOING CHURCH” IN DOGMATIC PERSPECTIVE Ecclesiology is “the systematic reflection on the shape which this dwelling of God takes in the community of Christ that journeys between Pentecost and parousia” (Vandervelde 2003: 10). “I believe in the church”—for now. It has been said that the church is the only earthly institution that will continue into heaven. We can appropriate for ecclesiological purposes the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism: what is the chief end, and the destiny, of the church? The answer remains the same: “To glorify God and enjoy him forever.” Glorifying and enjoying fellowship with God in the community of the reconciled is indeed the telos of the church, and its present mission. The church’s mission (what it does) follows from the church’s nature (what it is). The church in dogmatic perspective is a creature of the gospel of the triune God. The church’s mission is to bear witness to what, in Christ, it is, through the Spirit: The church is what it is because of the gospel. The church is assembly around the gospel, a spiritual event and not only a structure of human society. As assembly around the gospel, the church’s most characteristic activities are praise, prayer, hearing the Word of God, celebrating the sacraments, proclamation and service. The church’s vocation is to hear, and then live and proclaim, this good news. (Webster 1998: 109) When people typically speak of “doing church” they refer to what people do in going to, ministering, and worshiping in church. Yet ecclesiology as a dogmatic discipline insists that it is the triune God who “does” (i.e., establishes and actualizes) church—the new humanity in Christ: “What primarily takes place in the witness of the church, Barth argues, is Jesus’ own confession of the church as his body” (Badcock 2009: 89). Church members share the privilege and responsibility of bearing witness to the new reality in Christ, for Jesus has commissioned and constituted them his witnesses through the Spirit’s empowerment (Acts 1:8): “It is through the Spirit’s work alone that the church becomes visible, and its visibility is therefore a ‘special’ or ‘spiritual visibility,’ created by the Spirit and revealed by the Spirit” (Webster 2005: 181). The church is “God’s workshop for a new humanity,” an eschatological outpost of God’s will for humanity on earth, as it is in heaven, where the saints are seated with Christ (Eph. 2:6): “When the church is being the church, it forms us to reflect the humanity of the ascended Jesus” (Ganski 2013: 26–7). When the church in the power of the Spirit corresponds to the new humanity that is in Christ, it is indeed the visible body of Christ: “The church becomes what it is as the Spirit animates the forms so that they indicate the presence of God. . . . The church is and is visible because God the Holy Spirit is and acts” (Webster 2005: 102, 104). The church is the harbinger of the new humanity created in Christ. To do church is to bear witness to what the church is—a creature of the gospel ordained by the Father, incorporated in Christ, and enlivened by the Spirit. The church is a standing reminder in the world of what is real: the recreated order that is in Christ, and that is already

308

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

though not-yet fully in the world. When the people of God respond in faith to the gospel of God, the human (earthly) church community corresponds to the heavenly (spiritual) reality. Ecclesiology as a dogmatic discipline is all about getting real, with others, by acknowledging, celebrating, and corresponding to the coming cosmic lordship of Jesus Christ. Until then, the church, the visible reality perceived by faith, is a reality of revelation and a foretaste of heaven on earth.

REFERENCES Avis, P. (2018), “Introduction to Ecclesiology,” in P. Avid (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Ecclesiology, 1–30, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Badcock, G. (2009), The House Where God Lives: Renewing the Doctrine of the Church for Today, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Barth, K. (1956), Church Dogmatics IV.1, Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Barth, K. (1957), Church Dogmatics II.2, Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Barth, K. (1958), Church Dogmatics IV.2, Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Barth, K. (1975), Church Dogmatics I.1, Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Bavinck, H. (2003) Reformed Dogmatics vol. 1: Prolegomena, Grand Rapids: Baker Academic. Bavinck, H. (2004) Reformed Dogmatics vol. 2: God and Creation, Grand Rapids: Baker Academic. Bellarmine, R. (2016), Doctrina Christiana: The Timeless Catechism of St. Robert Bellarmine, trans.  Ryan Grant, Post Falls: Mediatrix Press. Bender, K. (2013), Karl Barth’s Christological Ecclesiology, Eugene: Cascade. Berkouwer, G. C. (1976), The Church (Studies in Dogmatics), Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Bonhoeffer, D. (2001), Discipleship, ed. Geffrey B. Kelly and John D. Godsey, Minneapolis: Fortress. Bonhoeffer, D. (2009), Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church, trans. Reinhard Krauss and Nancy Lukens, Minneapolis: Fortress. Bosch, D. (1991), Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission, Maryknoll: Orbis Book. Calvin, J. (1960), Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 vols., trans. Ford Lewis Battles, Philadelphia: Westminster. Cameron, M. (2015), “The Emergence of Totus Christus as Hermeneutical Center in Augustine’s Enarrationes in Psalmos,” in B. Daley and P. R. Kolbet (eds.), The Harp of Prophecy: Early Christian Interpretation of the Psalms, 205–26, Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press. Campbell, C. R. (2014), “Metaphor, Reality, and Union with Christ,” in M. J. Thate, K. J. Vanhoozer, and C. R. Campbell (eds.), “In Christ” in Paul: Explorations in Paul’s Theology of Union and Participation, 61–86, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Del Colle, R. (2007), “The Church,” in J. Webster, K. Tanner, and I. Torrance (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology, 249–66, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dibelius, O. (1927), Das Jahrhundert der Kirche, Berlin: Furche. Doyle, D. M. (2000), Communion Ecclesiology: Vision and Versions, Maryknoll: Orbis. Durkheim, E. (1982), The Rules of Sociological Method, New York: Free Press. Faith and Order Commission (1982), Baptist, Eucharist and Ministry, Geneva: World Council of Churches. Forsyth, P. T. (1917), The Church and the Sacraments, London: Independent Press.

ECCLESIOLOGY AS A DOGMATIC DISCIPLINE

 309

Ganski, C. (2013), “The Church Upward and Outward: Implications of the Ascension,” Comment Magazine (Fall 2013): 21–7. Hahn, S. (2009), Kinship through Covenant: A Canonical Approach to the Fulfillment of God’s Saving Promises, New Haven: Yale University Press. Haight, R. (2004), Christian Community in History, Vol. 1, New York: Continuum. Hauerwas, S. and W. H. Willimon (1989), Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, Nashville: Abingdon Press. Hugenberger, G. (1993), Marriage as a Covenant: A Study of Biblical Law and Ethics Governing Marriage Developed from the Perspective of Malachi, Leiden: E. J. Brill. Jenson, R. W. (1997), “The Church and the Sacraments,” in Colin Gunton (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine, 207–25, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kärkkäinen, V.-M. (2002), An Introduction to Ecclesiology: Ecumenical, Historical & Global Perspectives, Downers Grove: InterVarsity. Lee, J. K. (2017), Augustine and the Mystery of the Church, Minneapolis: Fortress. Lindbeck, G. (1984), The Nature of Doctrine: The Church in a Postliberal Age, Louisville: Westminster John Knox. Loisy, A. (1902), Evangile et l’Eglise, Paris: Picard. Lubac, H. (1988), Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man, San Francisco: Ignatius. MacGregor, G. (1958), Corpus Christi: The Nature of the Church According to the Reformed Tradition, Philadelphia: Westminster. MacKinnon, D. M. (1940), The Church of God, London: Dacre. Mascall, E. L. (1946), Christ, the Christian, and the Church, London: Longmans, Green and Co. Mawson, M. (2018), Christ Existing as Community: Bonhoeffer’s Ecclesiology, Oxford: Oxford University Press. McCarthy, M. C. (2015), “An Ecclesiology of Groaning: Augustine, the Psalms, and the Making of Church,” in B. Daley and P. R. Kolbet (eds.), The Harp of Prophecy: Early Christian Interpretation of the Psalms, 227–56, Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press. Mersch, E. (1938), The Whole Christ: The Historical Development of the Doctrine of the Mystical Body in Scripture and Tradition, Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing. Minear, P. (1960), Images of the Church in the New Testament, Louisville: Westminster Press. Newbigin, L. (1953), The Household of God, London: SCM Press. Omerod, N. (2015), “A (Non-Communio) Trinitarian Ecclesiology: Grounded in Grace, Lived in Faith, Hope, and Charity,” Theological Studies 76 (3): 448–67. Packer, J. I. (1962), “The Nature of the Church,” in C. F. H. Henry (ed.), Basic Christian Doctrines, 241–7, Grand Rapids: Baker. Robinson, J. A. T. (1952), The Body: A Study in Pauline Theology, London: SCM Press. Schwöbel, C. (1989), “The Creature of the Word: Recovering the Ecclesiology of the Reformers,” in C. Gunton and D. Hardy (eds.), Being the Church: Essays on the Christian Community, 110–55, Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Taylor, C. (2007), A Secular Age, Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Tillard, J.-M. R. (1992), Church of Churches: The Ecclesiology of Communion, Collegeville: Liturgical Press. Troeltsch, E. (1931), The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, London: Allen and Unwin. Vandervelde, G. (2003), “The Challenge of Evangelical Ecclesiology,” Evangelical Review of Theology 27: 4–26.

310

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Van Gelder, C. (2000), The Essence of the Church: A Community Created by the Spirit, Grand Rapids: Baker. Vanhoozer, K. J. (2005), The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology, Louisville: Westminster John Knox. Vanhoozer, K. J. (2017), “Analytics, Poetics, and the Mission of Dogmatic Discourse,” in O. Crisp and F. Sanders (eds.), The Task of Dogmatics: Explorations in Theological Method, 23–48, Grand Rapids: Zondervan. Ward, P. (2012), “Introduction,” in Pete Ward (ed.), Perspectives on Ecclesiology and Ethnography, 1–12, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Webster, J. (1998), “What Is the Gospel?” in T. Bradshaw (ed.), Grace and Truth in the Secular Age, 109–18, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Webster, J. (2001), Word and Church, Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Webster, J. (2003a), Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Webster, J. (2003b), Holiness, London: SCM Press. Webster, J. (2005), Confessing God: Essays in Christian Dogmatics II, London and New York: T&T Clark International. Webster, J. (2012a), “‘In the Society of God’: Some Principles in Ecclesiology,” in Pete Ward (ed.), Perspectives on Ecclesiology and Ethnography, 200–22, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Webster, J. (2012b), The Domain of the Word: Scripture and Theological Reason, London: T&T Clark International. Webster, J. (2016), God without Measure vol. 1 God and the Works of God, London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark. Williams, R. (2018), Christ the Heart of Creation, London and New York: Bloomsbury Continuum.

Chapter TWENTY-ONE

Ecclesiology and the Doctrine of the Trinity FRED SANDERS

INTRODUCTION Formally speaking, the three most influential approaches to explicating the relation between ecclesiology and the doctrine of the Trinity can be identified as communion, mission, and structural analogy. The communion approach emphasizes the overlap between trinitarian perichoresis and churchly koinonia; it locates the church in eucharistcentered ecumenicity, and thrives in the context of communio ecclesiologies. The mission approach connects the Father’s sending of the Son and Spirit with the church’s sending to the world; it locates the church’s being in the work of mission, and thrives in the context of missio Dei ecclesiologies. The structural analogy approach identifies patterns of correspondence between the immanent order of the trinitarian persons and the ordered polity of church leadership; it tends to accompany or illustrate the other two approaches and rarely stands on its own. But while these three approaches serve to articulate a connection between the doctrines of church and Trinity, attention should be given first of all to the underlying impulse to make that connection at all. There is a trinitarian itch that these diverse ecclesiological impulses all seek to scratch. That itch or impulse runs deep, and has much to do with the way the doctrine of the triune God is related to the history of salvation. When Robert W. Jenson published his Systematic Theology in two volumes, he structured it according to a distinction between “God himself on the one hand and on the other hand everything else” (Jenson 1997: x). The distinction is a time-honored, scholastic one, and in its classic form in theologians like Thomas Aquinas, it dictates a strict limitation of the doctrine of God followed by a wide expanse for the works of God ad extra. But Jenson modified the distinction considerably to make it serviceable for his own project: in his systematics, “Christology and pneumatology, together with discussions of the historical Jesus, of the doctrine of atonement, and of the resurrection, are drawn back into the doctrine of God, swelling that doctrine to make half the total work” (Jenson 1997: x). Jenson’s distinctive theological commitments, including his revisionist metaphysic based on a narrative construal of divine identity, dictated that the work of the Son and the Spirit, especially in their incarnation and outpouring, were part of the subject matter constituting the doctrine of the Trinity even ad intra. Moving the historical Jesus and the atonement into the doctrine of God proper is a drastic way to make a point about God’s involvement with history. It raises the question of whether

312

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

anything at all counts as a work ad extra. In the Preface of volume two, Jenson conceded that “organizing the work on the plausible principle that finally all Christian teaching in one way or another tells God’s own story would of course have obliterated the point” (Jenson 1999: v). And so Jenson moved creation, the church, and eschatology to a spacious second volume. But in doing so, he worried aloud that perhaps the doctrine of the church in particular actually belonged in the first volume after all. There is something about ecclesiology that aligns it more with the identity of the triune God than is the case with creation and eschatology. “The church,” after all, “is not in the same way an opus ad extra as is the creation, even when it is perfected in God” (Jenson 1999: 167). Some of the connections are obvious: the church can scarcely remain a straightforward opus ad extra after the incarnation and Pentecost have come to be in some way opera ad intra. For all the idiosyncrasies of his theological project, there is something in Jenson’s treatment of ecclesiology and the Trinity that is not just peculiar to him, or to the decisions he made in structuring his Systematic Theology’s table of contents. His deliberations make especially clear one aspect of the relation between these two doctrines. So intimate is the link between God and church that the impulse to articulate their connection is perennial in Christian theology. And when the trinitarian dynamic of the Christian doctrine of God is made explicit, numerous links to ecclesiology emerge: as the people of God, the body of Christ, and the temple of the Holy Spirit, the church is the point at which the triune God touches creation. There seems to be specifically trinitarian warrant for giving ecclesiology a greater depth of ingression into the divine life than any other created reality. The locus on the church, in Jenson’s terms, seems readily drawn back into the doctrine of God under the pressure of a consummated trinitarian soteriology. Though the tendency is perennial, including the church within the Trinity has been particularly attractive to modern theologians. In theological regimes that prefer to leave the Creator–creature boundary unpoliced, the church is in danger of being simply deified. But even theologians who articulately confess the boundary between Creator and creature when attending to the doctrine of creation sometimes find it difficult to maintain the distinction with equal clarity when they turn to the doctrine of the church. Something about ecclesiology seems to invite, if not actual transgression of that boundary, at least bold approaches to it. The scriptural rhetoric of intimacy and fulfillment gathers special intensity in what the Bible says about the church, God’s particular treasure and “peculiar people” (1 Pet. 2:9). Francis Turretin confessed as much in beginning his locus on the church by calling the church “the primary work of the Holy Trinity (primarium S.S. Trinitatis opus), the object of Christ’s mediation and the subject of the application of his benefits” (Turretin 1997: V. 3:1). Turretin’s brief expression encapsulates a crucial tension in rightly relating the doctrine of the Trinity to the doctrine of the church: confessing it as on the one hand primarium and on the other hand as opus; as the recipient of Christ’s mediation and the Spirit’s application, but after all a work and a creature. Before we turn our attention to the three influential modern approaches to relating ecclesiology and Trinity (that is, by way of communion, mission, and structural analogy), we should secure good order on this frontier between the Creator and the redeemed creature that is the church.

TRINITARIAN DEDUCTION OF ECCLESIOLOGY For an especially clear set of guidelines on how to navigate these issues, we can turn to the theology of John Webster, who cultivated a special methodological awareness of

ECCLESIOLOGY AND THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY

 313

what was at stake in relating theology proper and ecclesiology. Webster certainly wanted to recognize the close link between them. He recommended that ecclesiology should be developed by way of a kind of “trinitarian deduction” in which the reality of the church was traced back into the prior reality of the Trinity. “A doctrine of the church,” he said, “is a function of the doctrine of the Trinity” (Webster 2016: 177). Broadly, the trinitarian deduction of ecclesiology requires an account of divine action that begins with the divine life itself and then moves outward to God’s free actions by way of a processions–missions structure: Intellectual apprehension of the being of the church requires us to explicate it as an element in the covenantal economy of God’s goodness towards creatures; this, in turn, requires a theology of the divine missions, which is itself rooted in a theology of the inner-divine processions. Like all Christian doctrines, the doctrine of the church is to be traced back to the immanent perfections of God’s life and his free self-communication in the opera Dei exeuntia. (Webster 2016: 177) The relevant line can be traced in either direction: in the order of being, it runs from the inner life of God out into creation via the divine missions; in the order of knowing it begins with the reality of the church and runs back through the missions into the processions. The result is that the doctrine of the church is “an extension of the Christian doctrine of God” (Webster 2016: 178). To put it this way is to make a high claim for the nature of the church, but it is even more obviously to cede decisive priority to the doctrine of God. The church is, in this account, the manifestly derivative reality, receiving its dignity from its relation to its source. To claim that “dogmatics arrives at the doctrine of the church by trinitarian deduction” is to identify ecclesiology as a “derivative doctrine” in which the absolutely prior “doctrine of God is directly at work” (Webster 2016: 181). One benefit of setting ecclesiology in this relation to the doctrine of God is that it enables Webster to do justice to the social and historical particularity of the church, without relegating the church to the status of merely a human society with no divine background or basis. The church is certainly a social–historical entity, and Webster even speaks of this in a metaphysical register by saying that the being of the church is “a form of human society characterized by a certain estrangement from other such forms.” But this is only one side of the church’s being. “Ecclesiology has a proximate and a principal res,” and its principal res is not the empirically observable social–historical phenomenon; that is only the proximate res. The church’s principal res is “the temporal processions of God and the eternal processions from which they are suspended” (Webster 2016: 177–8). To state the relation this way is obviously not to promote the church to divine status, but to recognize that the being of the church cannot be accounted for without reference to something decidedly beyond and above it. That something beyond is the triune God in his free actions of salvation and in the infinite divine life from which those actions arise. “The temporal economy, including the social reality of the church in time, has its being not in se but by virtue of God who alone is in se” (Webster 2016: 179). In this way, Webster recognizes “the human assembly as what it is,” precisely by referring it to “certain antecedent divine works” which are “the exemplary cause of the church’s temporal assembly” (Webster, 2016: 190). The wisdom of including within the definition of the church such an entirely transcendent reference is that it anchors ecclesiology in an order of being that is higher than a merely historicized ontology allows for. Webster identified one of the most troublesome and besetting problems of modern theology to be this philosophical bias in

314

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

favor of historicism in ontology; he characterized it as “a conviction, part metaphysical and part theological, and often only half-articulated, that the real is the social–historical.” It is a conviction with far-reaching doctrinal consequences. In ecclesiology, Webster noted that one consequence of this conviction is that it “commonly promotes the metamorphosis of what I have called the proximate res of ecclesiology into principal res” (Webster 2016: 178). That is, if what is fundamentally, metaphysically real is that which is social–historical, then the observable, social–historical reality of the church is all that makes it what it is. With the eclipse of the reference to any reality that transcends the church, ecclesiology becomes nothing but a series of indicators pointing to the social and the historical in itself. Thereon follow consequences for any of the standard approaches to relating ecclesiology and trinitarianism. Social reality taken in isolation is a poor imitation of the communio at the heart of communio ecclesiology, but it is easy to see how the thinner notion could be substituted nearly undetectably for the richer notion. Likewise, historical process taken in isolation is a poor imitation of the missional movement at the heart of missio Dei ecclesiology, but with the alteration of background metaphysical assumptions about God’s reality above and beyond historical process, missio Dei ecclesiology could easily be transformed into a mere affirmation of historical development or church expansion. As for the strategy of identifying structural analogies between the immanent Trinity and ecclesial polity, Webster cautions that “the relation of theology proper and ecclesiology is best explicated not by setting out two terms of an analogy but by describing a sequence of divine acts both in terms of their ground in the immanent divine being and in terms of their creaturely fruit” (Webster 2016: 182). Webster’s trinitarian deduction of ecclesiology shows the way to safeguard the reality of both communio and missio Dei ecclesiology, and, to a much lesser extent, even the appeal to putative structural analogies. “To speak of the church’s being, dogmatics is required to speak of God who alone has being in se; to speak of the church’s acts, dogmatics is required to speak of the opera Dei interna et externa” (Webster 2016: 180). It secures an anchoring of ecclesiology in the doctrine of the Trinity without which these other two strategies would be exposed to the risk of losing their own best insights. “Because Christian dogmatics does not concede the self-evidence and primacy of the social-historical . . . its account of the church is an extension of the doctrine of God, and so of teaching about God’s immanent perfection and goodness” (Webster 2016: 180). The trinitarian deduction of ecclesiology is, in other words, Webster’s characteristic “theological theology” extended to the task of keeping ecclesiology properly theological. So far we have appealed to Webster mainly for his insights into the formal dynamics of how to relate Trinity and ecclesiology. But we have not yet stated the actual content of his trinitarian deduction of ecclesiology. That content is bracingly traditional and can be stated in terms drawn largely from the Bible itself and from some Reformed confessional expansions of scriptural motifs. Webster’s trinitarian deduction of ecclesiology is a matter of “tracing how particular external works of God with respect to the church may be appropriated to particular persons of the godhead” while bearing in mind that the external works of the Trinity are undivided (Webster 2016: 183). The Father’s appropriation in ecclesiology is centered in “the primal reality of the inner-divine life” in which “the Father is properly and personally autotheos” (Webster 2016: 183). Because of this primacy, election is appropriated to the Father as the one who chooses, and adoption as the paternal ground responsible for “the bestowing of status, a status which fulfils natural sociality but only by way of redemptive grace” (Webster 2016: 183).

ECCLESIOLOGY AND THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY

 315

There is more to say about the Son’s relation to ecclesiology, but Webster limits himself mostly to the task of “ensuring that the full compass of Christology is brought to bear on the matter” (Webster 2016: 184). Vigilant to keep christology from being misconstrued as an endorsement of historicist ontology, Webster warns that attention must be given not only to the incarnation but also to the eternity of the divine Logos as well as to his ascension and enthronement. “When too narrow a selection of christological material is deemed pertinent, ecclesiology suffers disfigurement” in this regard: “The person and work of the Son can be so identified with his incarnate presence that his eternal pre-existent deity recedes from view; or the post-existence of the Son in his state of exaltation can come to be retracted” (Webster 2016: 184). When the Son’s pre-existence and post-existence are eclipsed by his incarnate presence and “temporal career” narrated in the gospels, the result for ecclesiology is a loss of interest in any question but “what kind of continuity” obtains “between the incarnate and the ecclesial body” (Webster 2016: 184). The result is a reduction of the full scope of biblical category of the church as the body of Christ, and the danger of relativizing christology to ecclesiology rather than vice versa. Webster calls this “the ecclesiological functionalization of christological doctrine” (Webster 2016: 184). It is to be resisted by identifying Christ as the lord of the church in the full scope of his eternal deity, his work as reconciler, and his rule as the ascended one. Webster completes the material content of his trinitarian deduction of ecclesiology by indicating the Holy Spirit’s appropriation in the church: “There is a stream of life which flows from heaven towards creatures, whose source is God the Father and whose power is God the Son; this is the Holy Spirit, by whom God’s covenant with his rational creatures takes social-historical shape” (Webster 2016: 188). Thus the work of God is traced from the “primal reality of the inner-divine life” in the Father all the way through the actual “social–historical shape” of the reconciled community taking its creaturely place among other social–historical communities. By doing this descriptive work of showing ecclesiology to be deduced from the doctrine of the Trinity, Webster establishes a doctrinal context in which ecclesiologies of communion and mission can succeed in rising above the social–historical and making contact with the doctrine of the Trinity. To these we now turn.

COMMUNION AND MISSION The ecclesiological motifs of communio and missio Dei can easily claim ancient roots and biblical warrant, but both received their classic formulations in the twentieth century. In fact, they emerged from official twentieth-century ecumenical discussions and are in their own ways marked by these ecumenical origins. Both communio and missio Dei ecclesiologies have a certain breadth and inclusiveness that evince how they were designed not only to be congenial to a diversity of confessional traditions, but also to serve as explanations of this diversity. In both cases, this ecumenical origin has advantages. It lends itself to large and comprehensive patterns of thought, to schemas which take in a maximum amount of claims and information, and thus are more easily connected to a doctrine as comprehensive as the doctrine of the Trinity. Not just any ecclesiology is expansive enough to be convincing in its appeal to trinitarian theology; communio and missio Dei ecclesiologies both are, mainly because they arise from ecumenical ambitions. The communio ecclesiology, as classically stated by J.-M. R. Tillard on the basis of an analysis of the documents of Vatican II, had dialogue with the Eastern Orthodox Churches

316

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

especially in mind. The title of his book, Church of Churches, captured the intention to include multiple ecclesial fellowships within the one overall ecclesial reality of a church already constituted by fellowship. “We have recognized in communion the profound being of the Church of God. Church of Churches, it is a communion of communions, linked to God who is revealed as the eternal communion of three Persons” (Tillard 1992: 169). Already here in Tillard’s formulation, it is evident that the view of overlapping ecclesial communions has a certain priority. The appeal to the Trinity is, if not quite an afterthought and not merely a rhetorical ploy, at least a kind of final extension of the ecclesial motif. The center of gravity for communio ecclesiology is the church’s koinonia, especially as it is constituted by eucharistic fellowship. How much weight to give the underlying sacramental theology is a major decision in evaluating communio ecclesiology. The eucharistic fellowship can be understood as a participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, a mediatorial encounter through which believers have fellowship with God. Or it can be understood in a less traditional way, as a more direct participation in the fellowship of the Trinity. In this way of construing sacrament, what is being participated in is divine perichoretic unity. Communion in the sense of eucharist comes to be viewed as a participation in communion in the sense of perichoresis. When this more expansive use of the communion motif takes hold, it risks over-determining the kind of things that can be said about the Trinity. That is, as Webster warned, it can functionalize the doctrine of the Trinity by pressing it into the shape demanded by the notion of communion already worked out at the churchly level. What kind of construal of the Trinity is required to underwrite communio ecclesiology? All things being equal, a certain type of strong social trinitarianism seems most congenial to serve as the transcendent ground of ecclesial fellowship. In some influential authors like Jürgen Moltmann and Leonardo Boff, this becomes fairly explicit. But communio ecclesiology and social trinitarianism are not linked by necessity; they do not logically entail each other. And a certain late twentieth-century enthusiasm for communio ecclesiology has perhaps given way to a more critical phase of cautious appeal to the motif, especially at those places where it is most in danger of introducing distortion into trinitarian theology. Brian Doyle points out that after all “the vocabulary of communio is not sufficiently represented in the tradition of Christian reflection on the Trinity to be the primary analogy employed in contemporary trinitarian theology.” He admits that “no one denies that communio plays a role within historical trinitarian theology. However, its relatively minor role and its absence from the ecumenical creeds have caused some to ask whether this concept can carry the weight of an orthodox Christian theology of God” (Doyle 2006: 247). Doyle also makes the biblical case that “although koinonia/ communio is a biblical concept, it is rarely used in the Scriptures in reference to God” (Doyle 2006: 247). Communio ecclesiology, it seems, provides a rich source of resonances and connections between the doctrine of the church and the doctrine of the Trinity. But in the final analysis, it requires tremendous discipline to make proper use of it, and that discipline comes from sources rather far afield from merely ecclesiological concerns. A fully formed doctrine of the Trinity, worked out according to its own proper sources and norms, must already be in place if communio ecclesiology is to make limited but meaningful connections to it. Missio Dei ecclesiology likewise arose in the setting of twentieth-century ecumenical discussions, although those discussions were first of all about the nature of Christian witness and mission rather than about the nature of the church. Where communio ecclesiology coalesced in Vatican II’s intentional discussions of ecclesiology, the conversation about

ECCLESIOLOGY AND THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY

 317

missio Dei started almost as an alternative to, or attempted relativization of, the church. That is, in world missionary conferences where it was widely perceived that Christian mission was being in some ways held captive to the constraints of the established churches and their programs, the note of God’s own mission was introduced as an expansion of the Christian message beyond the sphere of the church. As David Bosch traces the spread of the missio Dei motif, it entered the discussion through the influence of Karl Barth, and made its first major impact on a mission conference at Willigen in 1952: “it was here that the idea (not the exact term) missio Dei first surfaced clearly. Mission was understood as being derived from the very nature of God. It was thus put in the context of the doctrine of the Trinity” (Bosch 2011: 399). While it would be too much to say that the emphasis on God’s own mission started as an anti-ecclesiology, the idea was definitely used to relativize the church by bringing in something larger, more theocentric, more theological: “In the new image mission is not primarily an activity of the church, but an attribute of God. God is a missionary God” (Bosch 2011: 400). The idea has nevertheless made its way into the self-understanding of the churches, and has in the process become a key element in actual ecclesiologies. Ecclesiologies of this kind tend to be actualistic, and to locate the being of the church in the very witness of the church toward the outer world. As a movement, the missional movement of the twentieth century insisted that rather than simply explaining how churches could add an emphasis on mission to their current ecclesiologies, the goal should be to think of church as altogether mission. An ecclesiology that locates the church within the missio Dei has the advantage of tracing the trajectory from God’s action through to the church’s own actions. We might say that such an ecclesiology is closely engaged with the economic Trinity, because it confesses itself to be brought into existence by the sending of the Son and Spirit. Bosch explains the advantages thus: It cannot be denied that the missio Dei notion has helped to articulate the conviction that neither the church nor any other human agenda can ever be considered the author or bearer of mission. Mission is, primarily and ultimately, the work of the Triune God, Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, for the sake of the world, a ministry in which the church is privileged to participate. Mission has its origin in the heart of God. God is a fountain of sending love. This is the deepest source of mission. (Bosch 2011: 402) At its best, missio Dei ecclesiology can carry out something like Webster’s trinitarian deduction of ecclesiology, and it can certainly make good on the confession that the church is a creature. At its worst, missio Dei ecclesiology can be ontologically thin, simply refusing to make statements about the being of the church, preferring verbs to nouns. But in most cases the refusal to engage in metaphysical reflection simply leaves one at the mercy of an age’s background metaphysical assumptions, and if Webster is right, these are likely to be biased toward historicized ontologies and a metaphysical privileging of the social–historical. This outcome would be ironic in several ways. Colin Gunton once argued that the main advantage of bringing Trinity and ecclesiology into conversation is that ecclesiology can then benefit from the highest-level metaphysical reflection in Christian doctrine, which is contained in the trinitarian dogma. “The development of the doctrine of the Trinity was the creation, true to the gospel, of a distinctively Christian ontology; but . . . its insights were for the most part not extended into ecclesiology. What happened was that the vacuum was readily filled by rival ontologies” (Gunton 1991: 62). John Flett has argued that a proper understanding of God’s mission would not treat it as something subsequent to, or incidental to, his being. Flett interprets Karl Barth’s

318

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

trinitarian theology as requiring that God’s mission belongs properly within his own eternal self-determination (Flett 2010: 214–15). That is certainly a metaphysical claim, though it runs close to what we have called a historicized ontology. At any rate, missio Dei ecclesiology must be vigilant on the ontological front, and must invoke theologically informed metaphysical commitments if it is to be true to its own interests. These two broad approaches to relating ecclesiology and the doctrine of the Trinity stand in an interesting tension with each other. We might say that communio is more Catholic and missio Dei more Protestant; that is certainly true to their origin stories and to the bulk of the literature devoted to them. Communio tends to be ontically thick, trading on notions of participation and assuming profound continuity between what it means to say that both God and the church are constituted by communion. Missio Dei tends to be ontologically thin or underdeveloped, and stands in danger of inheriting an unexamined set of metaphysical commitments. Communio tends to focus on the immanent Trinity; missio Dei on the economic. In face of the danger of treating ecclesiology sub-theologically as an indicator of a merely social–historical entity, communio is at risk of reduction to the social, missio Dei in danger of reduction to the historical. In terms of the desired deduction of ecclesiology from the doctrine of the Trinity, communio ecclesiology clearly intends to strike home in the heart of God’s eternal being, while missio Dei clearly intends to trace God’s actions out into history. Both approaches are broad in scope and capable of accommodating many different elements and emphases, and this is an advantage. Large ecclesiological categories have the best chance of aligning with large claims like the doctrine of the Trinity. All of this is to be expected, as one observer noted of the benefits of linking Trinity and ecclesiology: If the ecumenical movement is looking for a basis for a common understanding of church and of mission, an obvious choice is the trinitarian understanding of God. Both the new trinitarian-based koinonia concept in World Council of Churches (WCC) Faith and Order’s thinking on church unity, and the increasingly trinitarian understanding of missio Dei in recent church thinking on the theology of mission, are based on a return to the common trinitarian understanding of God. (Haudel 2001: 401)

STRUCTURAL ANALOGIES Compared to the previous two approaches for relating Trinity and ecclesiology, our third approach, the quest for structural analogies, has a peculiar status. On the one hand, it is a recurring favorite on the popular level with considerable influence. For some people, it simply seems axiomatic that church structures ought to correspond to the structure of the Trinity. On the other hand, unlike communio and missio Dei, the structural analogy approach has not attracted many scholarly advocates, and has rarely been given extensive conceptual articulation. We will take up one case study in order to clarify what is and is not at stake in this approach, but we should bear in mind that none of the theologians involved in this case study treated the production of structural analogies to be some kind of sufficient basis for their entire ecclesiologies. They operated with other ecclesiological models for most of their work, but supplemented them with structural analogies in certain limited areas. The case study is a three-way conversation enacted by Miroslav Volf in his book After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity. Volf engages, from a Free Church perspective, with Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox ecclesiologies respectively in

ECCLESIOLOGY AND THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY

 319

the works of Joseph Ratzinger and John Zizioulas. As the title of his book signals, Volf proceeds as if “the thesis that ecclesial communion should correspond to trinitarian communion enjoys the status of an almost self-evident proposition” (Volf 1997: 191). The interesting thing is that in this discussion, three different ecclesiologies correspond to three different accounts of the Trinity. In Volf ’s presentation, Ratzinger’s ecclesiology represents an overriding interest in catholicity, which grounds all the internal relations in a constant reference to the whole: The one Christ acting as subject in the church is represented by the one visible head of the church, namely, by the pope as head of the universal church, and by the bishop as head of the local church. Thus only the one pope and the one bishop, and not the college of bishops, can be grounded as structural elements through the doctrine of God. (Volf, 1997: 71–2) As a result, Volf argues, for Ratzinger relations between Pope and bishops as well as between the individual bishops and congregation members (or priests) must necessarily be structured hierarchically. Just as the one substance of God (or the Father) is over Christ, so also must the one who is to vouch for the totality of the church, namely the Pope as vicarius Christi, be over the bishops, and the bishops over congregation members (or priests). (Volf 1997: 72) Volf ’s critique of Ratzinger centers on the way he conceives the relation of person to community: persons, divine and human, appear as pure relations who never stand on their own. “Whereas it initially seemed as if pure relationality would relativize the hierarchical structure of relationships, in reality it merely gives free hand to the power of the hierarchs” (Volf 1997: 72). Everything must be related to the whole, and what that concretely means in ecclesial structures is necessary subordination of each person to the one bearing the office of catholic unity. Just as Ratzinger’s trinitarianism prioritizes the one substance of God, his ecclesiology prioritizes the office of Pope. In Volf ’s account of John Zizioulas, the Orthodox voice in the conversation, it is the monarchy of the Father as the source of the Son and Spirit that comes to the fore. “Just as in the Trinity the one (the Father) constitutes the many (the Son and the Spirit) and at the same time is conditioned by them, so also does the one (Christ and bishop as alter Christus) constitute the many (the church) and at the same time is conditioned by them” (Volf 1997: 123). Volf summarizes: “Whereas in Zizioulas we encounter a mutual (albeit assymetrical) relation between the one and the many, in Ratzinger we encounter an (almost completely) one-sided relation of the whole and the one to its concrete realizations” (Volf 1997: 123). Volf is careful and evenhanded in his reporting, but his treatments of his interlocutors is necessarily compressed, and the final point of comparison emerges clearly: in his own way, each of these two authors ground a necessary hierarchy and subordination of the laity in the analogate communion of the Trinity. For his part, Volf appeals to a more thoroughly social model of the Trinity, in which the relations among the trinitarian persons are complementary and the persons themselves are perichoretic subjects. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of the book is that Volf ’s main constructive moves in the doctrine of the Trinity itself occur in the span of a few pages that rely on a series of footnotes invoking Jürgen Moltmann’s trinitarian theology. Central to his account is a refusal to conflate divine processions with trinitarian relations as such. As a result, Volf argues that “one must distinguish between the constitution of the persons and their relations” (Volf 1997: 216). Son and Spirit receive their divinity as persons from the

320

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

hypostasis of the Father by way of the relations of origin, but for Volf this is not all there is to say about the trinitarian relations. In addition to these person-constituting unilateral relations of origin (which would put Volf in very close agreement with Zizioulas), there are also mutual relations among the three which are more complex, diverse, multilateral, and polycentric. Volf, following Moltmann, insists on a distinction between constitutional and relational levels of the triune life, which “are, of course, not to be conceived as two temporally sequential steps, but rather as two dimensions of the eternal life of the triune God” (Volf 1997: 217). These pluriform, perichoretic relations have equal ontological status with the relations of origin. Much of Volf ’s own proposal relies on this distinction being valid. It is a distinction which Moltmann first drew in the course of ecumenical dialogue about the filioque, and in that context it enabled Moltmann to recognize the elements of truth in both Eastern and Western views. At the level of procession, Moltmann rejects the filioque completely: the Father is the sole source of divinity, and to obscure this fact is to subordinate the Spirit to the Son one-sidedly. But at the level of relational form, Moltmann admits that “the filioque has its proper place.” He goes on to offer a paraphrase of the creed: we believe in “the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father of the Son, and who receives his form from the Father and from the Son” (Moltmann 1980: 171). If the constitutional/ relational distinction is correct, it not only resolves the filioque problem (as Moltmann argues), it opens up a whole sphere of immanent trinitarian activities where polycentric and reciprocal relations among the three persons can be recognized. It is in this new territory that Volf finds warrant for his ecclesiological vision. If this distinction . . . is persuasive, then the unilinear hierarchical relations can disappear from the trinitarian communion, since maintaining that the Father constitutes the Son and Spirit says nothing yet about how the relations between them are structured. In any case, within salvation history they do appear as persons standing in reciprocal relationships to one another. With regard to the immanent Trinity, salvation history thus allows us to infer the fundamental equality of the divine persons in their mutual determination and their mutual interpenetration; even if the Father is the source of the deity and accordingly sends the Son and the Spirit, he also gives everything to the Son and glorifies him, just as the Son also glorifies the Father. Moreover, within a community of perfect love between persons who share all the divine attributes, a notion of hierarchy and subordination is inconceivable. Within relations between the divine persons, the Father is for that reason not the one over against the others, nor “the First,” but rather the one among the others. (Volf 1997: 217) Having established this distinction, Volf summarizes his position over against the Catholic and Orthodox interlocutors: “The structure of trinitarian relations is characterized neither by a pyramidal dominance of the one (so Ratzinger) nor by a hierarchical bipolarity between the one and the many (so Zizioulas), but rather by a polycentric and symmetrical reciprocity of the many” (Volf 1997: 217). Stated prescriptively, “The more a church is characterized by symmetrical and decentralized distribution of power and freely affirmed interaction, the more it will correspond to the trinitarian communion” (Volf 1997: 236). In arguing that the church is or should be the image of the Trinity, Volf is not insensitive to the dangers of unwarranted assimilation of divine and human realities. In fact, one of the first tasks he undertakes in the constructive part of his book is to put in place definite limits to the correspondences and analogies that are permissible. Without these limits of correspondence in place, Volf admits that “reconstructions of these correspondences

ECCLESIOLOGY AND THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY

 321

often say nothing more than the platitude that unity cannot exist without multiplicity nor multiplicity without unity” (Volf 1997: 191) or, on the other hand, they seem to be exhortations for us to act like God. These options are too little and too much, respectively. Volf therefore takes pains to clarify the limits. Because “the mystery of the triunity can be found only in the deity itself, not in the creature,” every attempt to conceive correspondences to the Trinity is chastened. Mediations are necessary, and Volf provides three. On the one hand, he clarifies that at the conceptual level we are dealing at all times with constructed models and not with God himself, “who always remains hidden in the light of his own being” (Volf 1997: 198). Secondly, Volf argues for a wide gap between the use of terms like “person” and “communion” in the two contexts of Trinity and ecclesiology. Thirdly and most substantively, Volf employs a far-reaching eschatological proviso, reminding us that there is a wide difference between “the historical and the eschatological being of Christians,” and that “for a sojourning church, only a dynamic understanding of its correspondence to the Trinity is meaningful” (Volf 1997: 199). Volf ’s proposal repays study because it is as good as the structural analogy approach gets. But after he has been fair to Ratzinger and Zizioulas, and after he has put his careful limitations and methodological provisos in place, he still has to make a case that his Free Church ecclesiology corresponds in some meaningful way to the structure of the immanent Trinity. And in order to do this, he introduces new levels of conceptual complexity into his account of the Trinity. It is a lot of work for a limited payoff, especially when we consider the awkward spectacle of a Roman Catholic theologian finding in the Trinity structures corresponding to the papacy, an Eastern Orthodox theologian finding structures corresponding to world Orthodoxy, and a Free Church theologian finding structures that correspond to free association. In less capable hands, the structural analogy approach fares even worse. There is little to be said in its favor.

CONCLUSION The goal of articulating the connection between ecclesiology and the doctrine of the Trinity is to let the doctrines mutually illuminate each other, but with a decided priority given to letting the doctrine of the triune God illuminate the doctrine of the church. Confessing the connection properly will probably entail, as we saw with Jenson, running right up to the boundary of what can be said about God’s intimacy with his redeemed creatures. But we do not want to transgress the boundary between Creator and creature; we want to be able to confess, as in Turretin’s formula, the church as “the primary work of the Holy Trinity (primarium S.S. Trinitatis opus)”; both primary and a work; both exalted to fellowship with God and yet a creature. In order to maintain good dogmatic order that lets the doctrine of God retain its commanding role within the structure of theology, something like Webster’s trinitarian deduction of ecclesiology is necessary. With these guidelines in place, ecclesiology can make limited use of communio and missio Dei motifs, and at most a strictly chastened use of structural analogies. Webster’s decisions and warnings were guided not just by the architectonics of how the doctrines in a dogmatic system hung together, but also by a commitment to approach the task of theology in a way that gave definite priority to Scripture. He described theology as a work that is at the service of the Word of God when it modestly indicates “the worlds of meaning in Scripture.” Theological texts succeed “when they attain a certain transparency to the Bible, when concepts and patterns of argument are sufficiently light that they can be seen not as an improvement upon Scripture, but as a means whereby it can, as it were,

322

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

be repeated” (Webster 1997: 57). These words stand as an apt warning in the territory of trinitarian ecclesiology. At their worst, some attempts to articulate the connection between church and Trinity run afoul of this charge to stay transparent to Scripture’s own terms and indications. It is very easy for trinitarian ecclesiology to take on a kind of baroque hyper-development that leaves the main lines of Scripture far behind. A more appropriate goal would be not to turn heads with clever new ways of arguing, but to repeat, in the context of describing the church and the triune God, what Scripture says.

REFERENCES Bosch, D. (2011), Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission, 20th Anniversary Edition, Maryknoll: Orbis Books. Doyle, B. M. (2006), “Social Doctrine of the Trinity and Communion Ecclesiology in Leonardo Boff and Gisbert Greshake,” Horizons 33 (2): 239–55. Flett, J. G. (2010), The Witness of God: The Trinity, Missio Dei, Karl Barth, and the Nature of Christian Community, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Gunton, C. (1991), “The Community: The Trinity and the Being of the Church,” in C. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 58–85, Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Haudel, M. (2001), “The Relation between Trinity and Ecclesiology as an Ecumenical Challenge and Its Consequences for the Understanding of Mission,” International Review of Mission 90: 401–8. Jenson, R. W. (1997 and 1999), Systematic Theology Volume 1, The Triune God, and Volume 2, The Works of God, New York: Oxford University Press. Moltmann, J. (1980), The Trinity and the Kingdom, trans. Margaret Kohl, Minneapolis: Fortress. Tillard, J. M. R., O.P. (1992), Church of Churches: The Ecclesiology of Communion, Collegeville: The Liturgical Press. (French original 1987) Turretin, F. (1997), Institutes of Elenctic Theology, Volume 3, Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing. (Latin original, 1690) Volf, M. (1997), After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Webster, J. (1997), “Reading Theology,” Toronto Journal of Theology 13 (1): 53–63. Webster, J. (2016), “‘In the Society of God’: Some Principles of Ecclesiology,” in God Without Measure: Working Papers in Christian Theology, Vol I: God and the Works of God, 177–94, London: T&T Clark.

Chapter TWENTY-TWO

Ecclesiology and Christology KIMLYN J. BENDER

INTRODUCTION Christology and ecclesiology stand in a close dogmatic relation if for no other reason than that the church exists as founded by, for, and upon Jesus Christ. The church is “the church of Christ” (Rom. 16:16), and Christians are identified as those who call upon his name (1 Cor. 1:2; cf. Rom. 10:13) and who are his servants (Rev. 1:1; cf. 22:6). They are those who share not only in his sufferings but in hope look to share in his resurrection (1 Cor. 15:20-23). The relation between Christ and church as understood in ecclesial history is rooted in this scriptural witness and is the common inheritance of all confessional traditions. The nature of this relation is more than a historical one in which the appearance of Jesus of Nazareth precedes the appearance of the church at Pentecost, for it is rooted in the economy of God’s works of revelation and salvation, and, while the relation itself is confessed, the nature and entailments of this relation have been understood differently among the churches. Differences in christological understanding are mirrored in ecclesiological divergences.

THE RELATION OF CHRIST AND THE CHURCH: A BRIEF HISTORICAL SKETCH The NT Images of Christ and His Church: Building, Bride, and Body All conceptions of the relation between Christ and the church—that is, between his person and work and the church’s own identity and ministry—are informed by the imagery and descriptions of this relation within the biblical canon. Three overarching images provided by the Pauline letters (and that of 1 Peter) are of particular importance in shaping the understanding of Christ and church in the history of theological reflection (though there are, in truth, numerous other images in the NT itself for the church and its relation to Christ—see Minear 2004). The first of these three dominant images is that of the church as the building or temple of God, of which Jesus Christ is the foundation and cornerstone (1 Cor. 3:9-17; 1 Pet. 2:4-8; also Eph. 2:19-21). Christ is the foundation of the church not only in his atoning work and resurrection, but also in the proclamation of the cross and resurrection of Christ by Paul himself. There is here reference to a singular supremacy of Christ (i.e., Christ alone is the

324

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

foundation of the church) but also to a correspondent human participation in the ministry of the gospel (i.e., Paul’s proclamation of the word of the cross, building upon the foundation of Christ). For this image as for all those here considered it must be remembered that the direction flows from Christ to the community which is built upon him: “Ecclesiological statements are not separable from their Christological foundation” (Strecker 2000: 180). Yet ecclesiological statements cannot simply be collapsed into christology straightforwardly. Because the church is founded on Christ, it “does not derive its existence out of itself,” even as “its holiness does not derive from itself but from God” (Strecker 2000: 181; cf. Best 1955: 23). Not in spite of, but because of, the unparalleled precedence and singularity of the Lord Jesus, the members of the Christian community discover their distinctive identities, callings, gifts, and obligations “in Christ,” for it is they who “rejoice, stand fast, and labour” in him (Best 1955: 23). The unique identity of the Christian (and also of the church) is therefore not lost, but found, in Christ. For this reason, the unity between Christ and the church (and the Christian) is not simply a figure of speech for Paul, but neither does it signify an undifferentiated union as in some versions of religious mysticism (see Best 1955: 23). Correspondingly, the defining mark of the church is not so much co-activity with Christ but receptivity to the gifts Christ brings and bestows (Best 1955: 24). In this, Christ truly is the foundation and cornerstone upon which all else is built. The second image is that of the church as the bride of Christ. This image finds its implicit source in the references of Jesus to himself as a bridegroom (Mk 2:19-20, Mt. 9:15, and Lk. 5:34-35; cf. Mt. 25:1-13; Jn 3:29). The image is found explicitly in Paul, who writes to the Corinthians that he has promised them “in marriage to one husband, to present you as a chaste virgin to Christ” (2 Cor. 11:2 NRSV—all references hereafter to this translation). Most important is the reference to this image in the later Pauline book of Ephesians, where Paul compares the mystery of marriage between man and woman to the mystery of Christ and the church. Paul here instructs husbands to love wives with the care with which they show their own bodies, “just as Christ does for the church, for we are members of his body” (Eph. 5:29-30). Then after directly quoting Genesis 2:24 in which the man and the woman are said to be joined so that “the two will become one flesh” (Eph. 5:31), he concludes: “This is a great mystery, and I am applying it to Christ and the church. Each of you, however, should love his wife as himself, and a wife should respect her husband” (Eph. 5:32-33). This image of Christ and the church as one of bridegroom and bride appears also in Revelation (Rev. 19:7; cf. 21:2; 21:9; 22:17). It is an image that indicates both the intimacy of the union of Christ with his church while also preserving the distinction between them. The third image and that of greatest importance (and one often joined to the prior one in later church reflection) is that of the church as the body of Christ. Our concern here is not to trace the history of the concept of a corporate person in the ancient world, including the notion of the many in the one upon which Paul may have drawn (such investigation has produced at best inconclusive results—see Strecker 2000: 184; also Käsemann 1971: 102–21; Nelson 1951/1963: 67–84). Rather, Paul’s unique usage is at issue. Paul introduces this image in 1 Corinthians, where his initial purpose is focused on emphasizing the intimate union of the Corinthians with Christ such that their behavior implicates Christ himself in their (nefarious) actions. Specifically, Paul’s point in taking up this discussion of Corinthian Christians joined with Christ is to highlight and warn that sexual immorality of such members has not only ethical, but christological, implications, as Paul asks: “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Should I therefore take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never!” (1 Cor. 6:15; see 6:12-20).

ECCLESIOLOGY AND CHRISTOLOGY

 325

Paul develops the image of Christ’s body further to speak of a eucharistic sharing in Christ’s body (and blood) and the implications this has for participating in pagan feasts (1 Cor. 10:14-22). In so doing he draws a parallel between the one loaf that is shared among them in the Lord’s Supper and the one body which the church comprises: “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor. 10:17). Again, Paul’s concern pertains to matters of participation in problematic practices, now pertaining to idolatry, as the former example pertained to sexual immorality: “You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons. Or are we provoking the Lord to jealousy? Are we stronger than he?” (1 Cor. 10: 21-22). In each of these early employments of the body imagery (both similarly framed and ending with rhetorical questions), Paul’s ecclesiological and eucharistic references to the participation of believers in the “body of Christ” are tied to specific ethical and practical challenges facing the church itself (i.e., prostitution and partaking in pagan temple meals). This is consistent with his use of the terminology of being and acting “in Christ” in general, so that it is rightly said that “Paul’s mysticism is consequently essentially ethical” (see Best 1955: 16). This image of the body in fact occurs not in the context of passages that are intentionally dedicated to christology or soteriology, or even in ones setting forth a developed ecclesiology for its own sake, but rather in the context of ethical admonition (Küng 1967: 227–8). The image of the body of Christ as the church in 1 Corinthians is elaborated in chapter 12, where the emphasis is upon the body of Christ as composed of individual believers who are its members. The unity of the body is displayed in, and not in spite of, the diversity of these members and the diversity of their (spiritual) gifts, even as this diversity finds its meaning only in the unity of Christ, who here stands not only for Jesus Christ himself but for the church with him in intimate unity: “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ,” for the church itself is the “body of Christ” and Christians individually members of it (1 Cor. 12:12, 27; see 12:12-31). All members are needed, and none can dismiss the place or importance of the others, for while there are many members, all are gifted participants in the one body. While this passage is the most developed use of the image in 1 Corinthians, here too it cannot be separated from the larger context in which Paul is dealing with the practical problem of dissension and disunity over the possession and proper exercise of spiritual gifts. In this sense, the image itself is serving Paul’s other theme and purpose in the letter, namely, that rightful diversity should not lead to dissension, and that diversity of members and gifts serves the larger unity that is the church, which is the one “body of Christ.” Therefore, in 1 Corinthians, the soma Christou is an evocative and exhortatory image rather than a systematically developed one. It is not part of an ontological discussion of the “body of Christ” as an elaborate ecclesiological category for its own sake, but it rather serves other circumscribed paraenetic purposes. Paul has a similar pragmatic use of the image of the body of Christ in Romans as well, again linking membership in the body of Christ to the diversity and unity of its members and their respective gifts (Rom. 12:3-8). Paul’s imagery points to the church’s intimate participation in the life of Christ but does so without eliminating the distinction between Jesus as the historical and ascended Christ and his earthly body, the church. The imagery of the body in Paul’s letters of 1 Corinthians and Romans serves the question of unity amid diversity of members and gifts rather than a developed metaphysics of a corporate person. It exhibits a conviction of the unity of Christ with his church, yet equally emphasizes the importance of a unity of the members of Christ’s body with one another in light of their existence in Christ. There is

326

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

no collapse in Paul between the ascended Christ and the church as his earthly body, and the perfection of the first is set over against the imperfection of the latter. This is evident in the fact that Paul consistently distinguishes between Christ and the Christian (and the church itself) in noting that while the believer dies with Christ, it is Christ who has died for the believer (Rom. 5:6; 1 Cor. 15:3; Gal. 3:13; see also Best 1955: 57). Even as Paul can state that he has been “crucified with Christ,” so also he concludes with extolling not himself but the Son of God “who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20). As Paul states succinctly in making this point of Christ’s perfect work of atonement for the sake of others that points to their own incorporation in that death: “one has died for all; therefore all have died” (2 Cor. 5:14). Accordingly, Paul attests that “we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake” (2 Cor. 4:5). While Paul can speak of the intimate union of Christ and his church (and with the believer), this corporate unity retains also an inviolable distinction. There is thus a true unity of the church and its members with Christ, but the unity is not founded on any confusion of Christ with his church: “There is for Paul no extension of the earthly Jesus in the Church as the earthly deputy of the exalted one. It is just where he speaks of the body of Christ that Christology and ecclesiology are not interchangeable” (Käsemann 1969: 245). None of these observations, however, imply that this image of the church as the body of Christ is a mere figure of speech, for Paul ties inclusion in the body to the incorporation into it by baptism (1 Cor. 12:13) and to the participation in Christ’s body shared in the cup of blessing and the bread broken, the church being one because of the one loaf of which all members partake (1 Cor. 10:16-17). While Paul’s understanding of the body is not best understood as undifferentiated mysticism, as noted earlier, neither is it best understood as a simple metaphor (see Käsemann 1971: 104; cf. Nelson 1951/1963: 83). It points to a real and intimate union of Christ with his church, but one in which the distinctiveness of each and their irreversible and asymmetrical relation is never sacrificed: Christ remains the ascended Lord, and the church remains his servant, even as it is also his earthly body (see Käsemann 1971: 117). In the later Pauline letters, the image of the church as Christ’s body becomes more robust and refers to the church universal and its relation to the exalted Lord. While there can be references in Colossians to the church as a local congregation (Col. 4:15, 16), the other references are to the church universal as the body of Christ. In Ephesians, every reference to the church seemingly refers to the entire church and not to local congregations, even though what is said of the whole could be said of any individual local instantiation (Marshall 2004: 391). Moreover, in Ephesians it is not Christ alone who is said to be the foundation of the church as in 1 Corinthians (1 Cor. 3:11; cf. Acts 4:11), but the “prophets and apostles” themselves who are the foundation with Christ Jesus the cornerstone [or capstone—ἀκρογωνιαῖος]—a shift in the image from Christ alone to Christ with his witnesses (Eph. 2:20). What is particularly new in the later Pauline letters is the image of Christ as the head of the church as his body, an image not found in Paul’s earlier letters, and one employed with more direct ecclesiological prominence than the earlier exhortatory and paraenetic use, though such ethical themes are not absent in these later epistles (Eph. 1:22-23; 4:15-16; 5:23; also Col. 1:18; 2:19; cf. 2:10; see Arnold 1994: 358–66). Whereas in the Corinthian letter Christ is identified with his body, though not subsumed into it, here in Ephesians and Colossians Christ is the head in contrast to his body the church, such that seeming identification (1 Cor. 12:12) has become demarcation between head and body, Christ and church (Eph. 1:22-23; Col. 1:18). Moreover, while in 1 Corinthians the image is one of

ECCLESIOLOGY AND CHRISTOLOGY

 327

the church as comprised of many members constituting a single (human) body (1 Cor. 12:12, 27), and this is indeed echoed in Ephesians (4:16), now Christ and church are also depicted in cosmic terms, Christ portrayed as the pre-existent, exalted, and cosmic Lord and head, and the church as his body that not only exists but grows (Col. 2:19; cf. Eph. 4:16), though whether the imagery of head and body itself is primarily physiological or cosmological is disputed (see Arnold 1994). Perhaps most striking, the church is portrayed not only as a historical reality, but as grounded in the eternal decision of God (Eph. 1:4). Finally, even in the later Pauline letters, the distinction between the Lord and the apostle, as that between Christ and the church (and the Christian), is not set aside or abrogated. It is the cross of Christ alone, and not the sufferings of Paul or the church, that has brought the reconciliation of believers to God and also to one another, the cross alone which has freed them from their legal debt, and the cross alone that has disarmed the evil powers holding them and the world captive (Col. 1:20-23; 2:13-15; Eph. 2:15-16). This is true even as Paul can speak of his own suffering as completing Christ’s own: “I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Col. 1:24). Seen in light of the previous references, it is evident that Paul does not consider his suffering and affliction as on the same salvific plane and of the same cosmic efficacy as the Lord he served, or that the work of Christ required an apostolic supplement to bring about its perfection. Nevertheless, these striking words point to a real and divinely appointed contribution of such apostolic sufferings to the ongoing benefit of the church in the time of Christ’s ascension. This suffering is in service to the pronouncement of the gospel of Christ in correspondence to the afflictions of Christ himself, all for the sake of the church and in fulfillment of God’s divine purpose.

Augustine Of these three images of the building, the bride, and the body, it is the latter two, and especially the third, which were to play the greatest part in the development of ecclesial thought and the understanding of the relation of christology to ecclesiology. While the image of the body of Christ for the church can be found in early patristic authors such as Tertullian and Origen (Contra Celsus 6:48—see Verbrugge 1988: 293–4), and some like Justin (1 Apol. 66.2) and Irenaeus (Adv. Haer. IV.18.5) use it with reference not to the church but to the eucharistic elements (de Lubac 2006), the most important figure for the development of a christological ecclesiology (i.e., a christological framework and pattern for understanding the church) in the patristic era is unquestionably Augustine. No single figure was as indebted to, and so widely made use of, the Pauline imagery of the body of Christ as an ecclesiological description, a practice widely attested in his corpus, such as in the City of God (Works of St. Augustine [hereafter WSA] I/7: 527–8). Save for Paul himself, no one was as significant for shaping how discussions and descriptions of the church, particularly in the West, were to develop on this score. With Augustine this designation of the church as Christ’s body served not only as an ecclesiological description but as a test of ecclesial veracity, evident in his debate with the Donatists, where, in what was his common practice, the image of the body is combined with the nuptial imagery of the church as Christ’s bride: “The whole Christ is head and body. The head is the only-begotten Son of God and his body is the Church— bridegroom and bride, two in one flesh. Those who disagree with the Sacred Scriptures about that head, even if they are found in all the places where the Church is represented,

328

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

are not in the Church” (“Letter to Catholics on the Sect of the Donatists” in WSA I/21: 613). Separation from the body through schism is therefore for Augustine separation from salvation itself. Correspondingly, entrance into the body is procured in baptism (which removes original sin) and participation in it is realized in sacramental sharing in the eucharistic body of Christ as found within the Catholic Church. Augustine develops this NT image of the church as the body of Christ in the most significant way with his conception of the totus Christus, the whole Christ, head and body, a phrase extent throughout his works such as his Expositions on the Psalms and Homilies on the Gospel of John (see WSA III/15: 81; also 198; 275; 350–1; and WSA III/12: 379; 477; cf. 181; WSA III/14: 22; see also Van Bavel 1998). In Augustine’s writings the distinction of Christ from his church displayed in his supremacy over the church, resonant throughout the NT, can be witnessed, but the emphasis tilts toward intimate union verging on identification, as Augustine can speak of Christ and church together as the unus Christus, a “single grammatical subject” of predication (Ployd 2015: 71–2, 83–4; see 56–99). The irreversibility of the relation due to the supremacy and provenience of Christ is readily witnessed when he writes: For indeed head and body form one Christ. Not that he isn’t complete without the body, but that he was prepared to be complete and entire together with us too, though even without us he is always complete and entire, not only insofar as he is the Word, the only-begotten Son equal to the Father, but also in the very man whom he took on, and with whom he is both God and man together. (Sermon 341.11 in WSA III/10: 26; see also Sermon 341.19 in WSA III/11: 299) In this regard, the body is entirely dependent upon the head, but the head is not dependent upon the body (see Exposition 2 of Ps. 30.4 in WSA III/15: 324–5). Yet, this distinction of head and body points to a greater unity, expressed in the language of identification: “Without him, we are nothing, but in him we too are Christ. Why? Because the whole Christ consists of Head and body. The Head is he who is the savior of his body, he who has already ascended into heaven; but the body is the Church, toiling on earth” (Exposition 2 of Ps. 30.3, WSA III/15: 323). Augustine thereby puts forth a truly mystical communion of Christ and the church. While passages that emphasize the supremacy and lordship of the historical and ascended Christ over his church are numerous, they are matched by others in Augustine’s work that demonstrate a prominent emphasis upon the church and its own dignity due to an identification of the church with Christ himself. In such accounts, the distinction of head and body in the later Pauline literature gives way to imagery that maximizes the identification of Christ as his body the church, and the church as Christ himself, predicated upon a particular reading of the earlier imagery of Paul in 1 Corinthians (see Van Bavel 1998: 84–93). It is impossible to overestimate the importance for Augustine of a select number of NT passages which he takes to entail this strong identity, and he quotes and references Act 9:4 (“Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”) and 1 Cor. 12:12 and 12:27 (along with Mt. 25:31-46) repeatedly on this score, verses which signify for him an identity of existence, and verses upon which he places great ecclesiological and in turn metaphysical weight. So while Augustine highlights the distinction between Christ and the church in numerous passages, what also comes increasingly to the fore in his writings is their identification under the concept of the “whole Christ,” Christ with his body, and these in such intimate nuptial union as to count as a single subject, the totus Christus, the two joined in unity as “one flesh” akin to the marital union of man and woman, which

ECCLESIOLOGY AND CHRISTOLOGY

 329

Augustine takes not to foreground the duality of the partners, but the singularity of the result of this merger (see Sermon 129.4 in WSA III/4: 304–5). It is this idea of Christ and church as single person in Augustine which expands beyond the delimited descriptions of the NT, and it is this description of the church not only as Christ’s body but of Christ with the church as a single metaphysical subject and agent of action which is Augustine’s own development of Paul’s use of the imagery in a new creative ecclesiological dimension (Van Bavel 1998: 89–92). In Augustine the image of the body of Christ as the church, united with the head, which is Christ, is therefore spoken of as constituting a single person: “Christi et Ecclesiae, unam personam nobis intimari” (WSA I/11: 189; Latin quoted in de Lubac 1963: 303nt.45). As Augustine elsewhere states: “The whole Christ, head and body together, constitute a perfect man” (WSA III/20: 257). With Augustine the imagery of the body is also combined with the imagery of the bride of Christ as to signify the unity of Christ and church as a single corporate person comprised of two constitutive members who, as one, mutually share experience and suffering: “Accordingly, when we hear his voice, we must hearken to it as coming from both head and body; for whatever he suffered, we too suffered in him, and whatever we suffer, he too suffers in us” (Exposition of Ps. 62.2 in WSA III/17: 230). The suffering of Christ and that of the church are thus not clearly demarcated but at times meld together in Augustine’s thought, particularly in his frequent references and discussions of Col. 1:24 (see Exposition of Ps. 61.4 in WSA III/17: 204–5; Exposition of Ps. 62.2 in WSA III/17: 230–1; and “On the Gospel of John,” Tractate 108.5 in Augustine 1995: 405). The distinction of Christ and church and their corresponding agencies and activities set forth in the NT are at times softened, as when Augustine states that not only is the church Christ’s body, but “he is also us” (Sermon 133.8 in WSA III/4: 338). The dominant emphasis predominantly falls not upon distinction but identity, as the church is identified with Christ himself when Augustine reminds his readers, “we too have risen again with Christ, and with our head we are Christ” (Sermon 144.6 in WSA III/4: 433). Christ thus makes the church to be “one single man with himself, head and body” (Exposition of Ps. 85.1 in WSA III/18: 221; see 220–3; see also Exposition 2 of Ps. 30.4 in WSA III/15: 324; and Exposition of Ps. 39.28 in WSA III/16: 221). The irreversibility of the union of Christ with his church witnessed earlier is set beside a reversibility of relation and attribution in other passages such that Christ’s voice and the church’s voice become indistinguishable, so that when Christ speaks the church speaks, and when the church speaks Christ speaks (see Exposition 2 of Ps. 30.3, WSA III/15: 322–5). This move toward describing the union of Christ and the church as one that results in a single subject, such that the relation between them is reversible and their predicates mutually shared, is a move that itself is dependent upon a relatively straightforward comparison between the hypostatic union of Word and flesh and two natures in Christ on one side and the union achieved by Christ’s joining himself to the church on the other. There is, in Augustine, a seemingly direct parallel, though not identity, between the Word which takes flesh in the person of the hypostatic union, and Christ who takes the church to himself in the union of the totus Christus (see Exposition of Ps. 44.3, WSA III/16: 282). This concept of a direct parallel between the hypostatic union and the union of the totus Christus lies at the source of the later ecclesiological idea of the extension of the incarnation in the church, the church itself an incarnate reality of the Word and of God’s revelation in history (Lee 2017: 125; also 54nt.229). Nevertheless, it must be reaffirmed

330

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

that while such trajectories of identification of Christ and church would be developed in much more triumphalist ways in later ecclesiologies, Augustine himself vacillated between such conceptions of unity and demarcation, of single and dual descriptions of agency and activity, and never sacrificed either side, readily witnessed when he states: Let us hear them [Christ and the church] as one single organism, but let us listen to the Head as Head, and the body as body. Their persons are not separated, but in dignity they are distinct, for the Head saves and the body is saved. May the Head dispense mercy, and the body bemoan its misery. The role of the Head is to purge away sins, the body’s to confess them. (Exposition of Ps. 37, WSA III/16: 151) Therefore, despite his passages that emphasize identity of Christ and church, Augustine does not collapse Christ into the church or equate the church with Christ without qualification. Augustine thus stands at the headstream of both later triumphalist ecclesiologies and of those who criticize them. In sum, Augustine effortlessly moves between this distinction of Christ and the church as two subjects and the identification of them as the unus Christus, a single corporate person and agent comprising the totus Christus. These conceptions are strikingly fluid in Augustine’s writings, pressing the biblical images of bride and body in numerous directions, including in ways that heighten tension between competing understandings of them. Such conceptions for Augustine are not given diligent systematic expression but serve his pastoral and exhortatory purposes, and he can use seemingly conflicting images in single passages, such as designating the church as both the bride of Christ and the mother of Christ (see Sermon 72A.8 in WSA III/3: 287–9). With this paradoxical witness of fecund ecclesiological ideas that drew upon but also extended the Pauline imagery, Augustine bequeathed to the later church not only a rich and imaginative treasury of concepts but also the ambiguity of their interpretation and the imprecision that comes from rhetorical flourish. These realities would frame and in no small way foster later ecclesiological debates.

THE ENSUING PATHS OF CHRISTOLOGY AND ECCLESIOLOGY The biblical images and Augustine’s development of them are foundational for all later ecclesiological reflection with relation to christology, particularly in the West. In the NT, the order of the relation of Christ and his church (as that of Jesus and his apostles) was one of irrevocable distinction in an intimacy always grounded in Christ’s own decision and divine election. Even passages displaying unity of identity (i.e., Acts 9:4; 1 Cor. 12:12, 27; and Col. 1:24) were framed and set within consistent patterns of the unique singularity of Christ in self-chosen solidarity with the apostles and the church. In Augustine, such strict irreversibility of relation is relaxed though not abandoned, so that while the distinction between Christ and his church is maintained, there is also an emphasis on their identification as a single subject of salvific activity and passive suffering. From this complex legacy, two differing historical types, or trajectories, of understanding the relation of Christ and the church can be traced in later ecclesiological thought. These two types can here be but cursorily outlined and illustrated, though they are readily attested in the work of prominent theological figures and foundational for large swaths of literature.

ECCLESIOLOGY AND CHRISTOLOGY

 331

Christ and the Church: Distinction in Overarching Unity The first type is comprised of a determinative emphasis upon the intimacy of the mystical union of Christ and the church, an intimacy often construed with direct analogies to the hypostatic union such that the church itself is seen as an extension of that union and at times described as an incarnatus prolongatus, that is, a prolongation of the incarnation. While a separate and distinct doctrine of ecclesiology did not appear until the modern period, its emergence was closely linked with an embrace of this christological understanding of the church as Christ’s mystical body. Such conceptions are not limited to the Western Church or solely due to a dependence upon Augustine. Drawing on the tradition stemming from Second Clement, Origin, and other patristic writers, Eastern Orthodox theologians also speak of the church in rich christological terms and often explicitly describe it as an extension of the incarnation, stressing the assumption of the human by the divine for the divinization of human life in the church. The church is thus Christ’s bodily presence which participates in the life of God. This theological conviction is articulated by the Orthodox theologian Kallistos (Timothy) Ware: “The Church is the extension of the Incarnation, the place where the Incarnation perpetuates itself,” and in turn the protraction of Christ’s office as prophet, priest, and king (Ware 1993: 241; see also Bulgakov 1988: 1–2). Drawing upon Ignatius, the relation of Christ and the church is mirrored in the relation of the bishop to the local church so that the “function of the bishop is to fulfill in assembly the ministry of the Head, to sit where Christ sat among His disciples, to teach what He taught, to be the shepherd and the high priest” (Meyendorff 1983: 117). The presence of Christ is concretely located in the church not only in the teaching office of the bishop but preeminently in the eucharist which constitutes the church and effects the unity of Christ with it: “The Eucharist is where Christ dwells in the fullness of His Body” (Afanassieff 1992: 110; cf. Ware 1993: 241–2). Constituted by the eucharist, the body of Christ is fully present in every local congregation gathered around its bishop, such that the local churches are not themselves “members” of a universal body of Christ but each fully incarnate Christ even as they are also joined to one another: “The Church of God is the one and indivisible Body of Christ, wholly and indivisibly present in each church, i.e., in the visible unity of the people of God, the bishop and the eucharist,” each church itself and all of them together the whole body of Christ in a way that transcends the antithesis of local and universal (Schmemann 1992: 155; Zizioulas 1985: 153–4). This ecclesiology hinges upon a particular christology and theological ontology, one in which the hypostatic union is mystically extended in the life of the church and where the union of Word and flesh are directly paralleled and prolonged in the union of Christ and his ecclesial body, as expressed by Sergius Bulgakov: “The Church is the work of the Incarnation of Christ, it is the Incarnation itself. God takes unto Himself human nature, and human nature assumes divinity: it is the deification of human nature, result of the union of the two natures in Christ” (Bulgakov 1988: 2). Strict demarcations between Christ’s person and his ecclesial body thus give way to the identification of Christ and his body insofar as the Spirit calls both simultaneously into existence: “Christ does not exist first as truth and then as communion; He is both at once. All separation between Christology and ecclesiology vanishes in the Spirit” (Zizioulas 1985: 111; cf. 114; 130–1). This does not entail, however, that Christ’s “distinct personal particularity” and his “capacity as the body of the Church” cannot be spoken of in separate terms (Zizioulas 1985: 111). Yet the focus is upon the unity and identification of Christ as the unity of head and body in

332

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

a single mystical person. This unity of the body of Christ is realized in the eucharist and effected in history by the Holy Spirit upon whom both christology and ecclesiology are dependent (Zizioulas 1985: 161–2; see also 139). The unity of Christ and the church is reflected in an identification of their ministry, for, as John Zizioulas states, “there is no ministry which can be conceived as existing parallel to that of Christ but only as identical with it. In her being the Body of Christ, the Church exists as a manifestation of Christ’s own ministry and as a reflection of this very ministry in the world” (Zizioulas 1985: 163). How Christ and the church are distinguished in this portrayal of their identity is less clear. Both Eastern and Western ecclesiologists have noted that the early patristic christological conceptions of the church gave way in time, in both East and the West, to more juridical understandings with an emphasis upon the church’s visibility and ecclesiastical structures (see Schmemann 1992: 149–51; Himes 1997: 324–6). These observations can in fact be presented in an oversimplified manner, one that misrepresents the complexity and christological imagination of medieval and early modern ecclesiological positions (see Pomplun in this volume; cf. alternatively Himes 1997: 324–6). Nevertheless, it is true that it is in the modern era that the rich christological imagery of the church came to the fore in an ecclesiological revival touching both East and West (Schmemann 1992: 149). Whereas in much of Catholic neo-scholasticism the relation of Christ and the church was conceived primarily in terms of Christ as the founder of an institution and society, the modern period saw a rich retrieval of the biblical and patristic materials pertaining to the church as the body of Christ (Himes 2000: 64). What modern Orthodox and Roman Catholic conceptions of the church largely share amid disagreements over papal primacy and other significant matters is a conviction that the church is made to be the mystical body of Christ by the eucharist which stands at its center and which is not only enacted by the church but effects its very being, for the eucharistic body of Christ itself constitutes the church as Christ’s body (Zizioulas 1985: 21; cf. de Lubac 1963: 78; Congar 1960: 73–4; 75–8). The first type of christological–ecclesiological thought thus emphasizes a strong identity and prolongation of God’s presence, revelation, and salvation from Christ through the existence and sacramental reality of the church. While Orthodox ecclesiology bears all of the markings of this first type, it appears in the West in the modern period with particular fecundity. As noted above, while christological conceptions of the church were not absent in the late medieval and early modern periods, and ecclesiological construals were richer than simple repetitions of Bellarmine’s definition of the church, much of this earlier ecclesiological reflection in Tridentine Catholicism was focused upon the juridical aspects of the church and dominated by apologetic and polemical concerns (Himes 1997: 323–7; see also Murphy in this volume). It was in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that an intensive focus upon the mystical body of Christ as the church appeared as an intentional christological ecclesiology, even as it was during this period that ecclesiology as a doctrine in its own right came into existence. In significant Catholic schools of thought, there was a turn from descriptions of the church primarily in terms of institution and organization (Gesellschaft) to depictions of it as a communion and organism (Gemeinshaft), all purposefully avoiding a sacrifice of its true visibility and structure in this process (see Beal 2014: 35–6). This christological trajectory in ecclesiology was given its greatest theological impetus by the Tübingen school and its most influential member, Johann Adam Möhler, whom some consider to be the most important founder of ecclesiology as a separate field within systematic theology (Himes 1997: 1–2; Riga 1961: 564). It was Möhler who brought a christologically grounded ecclesiology to the fore of Roman Catholic thought in the nineteenth century, turning from a predominance of institutional conceptions to the

ECCLESIOLOGY AND CHRISTOLOGY

 333

centrality of organic imagery for understanding the church. In his mature ecclesiology, this conception of the church found its most innovative nineteenth-century advocate, and Augustine’s pastoral reflections on the body of Christ now became dogmatically and metaphysically developed to the point of seemingly eliding any distinction of church and incarnation. As Möhler wrote in 1832: “Thus, the visible Church . . . is the Son of God himself, everlastingly manifesting himself among men in a human form . . . the permanent incarnation of the same, as in Holy Writ, even the faithful are called ‘the body of Christ’” (Möhler 1997: 259; see also Himes 1997: 259). It may appear ironic that Möhler, who had at first gleaned from but later distanced himself from the pneumatology of Friedrich Schleiermacher because he believed Schleiermacher had collapsed the Holy Spirit into the spirit of the Christian community, now subsumed the church into Christ, and Christ’s agency into the church, even as he collapsed Scripture into tradition (see Himes 1997: 118; also 114–21; 210; 259–60; and Möhler 1996: 117). Nevertheless, with Möhler the relation of the hypostatic union of Christ as divine and human and the mystical union of Christ with his body the church became functionally and even ontologically indistinguishable—as Christ is both divine and human, so the church itself is divine and human as the “permanent manifestation” of Christ, a prolongation of his very hypostatic existence (Möhler 1997: 259; cf. 265; see also Himes 1997: 201; 256; 259; 257–74; Riga 1961: 576–9). The church is absorbed into Christ and thus divinized as an extension of the incarnation itself and the agency of each, if not their natures, merged. Correspondingly, in Möhler there is an intensification of Augustine’s notion of an exchange of predicates between these ecclesial natures, divine and human—if the divine, comprised of the “living Christ and his Spirit,” is infallible and “eternally inerrable” in its instantiation in the church, so also is the human church “infallible and inerrable in the same way,” though only because of its union with the divine (and not in its individual members) (Möhler 1997: 259; Himes 1997: 302–3; cf. 309–11). Consistent in Möhler’s thought, from his early (pneumatological) to his late (christological) ecclesiology is the novel application of the ancient christological principle of the communicatio idiomatum to the church, such that the communication of attributes between the natures of Christ in the hypostatic union is now directly extended to apply to the relation between Christ and the church, so that the holiness, authority, infallibility, and other exalted perfections of Christ are directly attributed to the church itself (Himes 1997: 120; 260–1; 316; cf. 281). Moreover, there is a reversibility not only of attributes but also activities, for the activities of the church are those of Christ, and those of Christ are also those of the church—“prophetic, high priestly, and royal” (Himes 1997: 277). This conception of the church as an extension of Christ in history accompanied by a reversible communication of attributes and activities is at the heart of Möhler’s ecclesiology. His organic doctrine of the church—seeing it as an extension of the incarnation, a prolongation of the hypostatic union, a christological–ecclesiological reality where christology and ecclesiology become reversible and in the end indistinguishable—would not find much traction among many neo-scholastics of the period, but it did find a welcome reception in the ecclesiology of the German theologians Joseph Scheeben and Karl Adam, the latter who asserted in 1923 that the church is “the incarnation of Christ in the faithful,” and “the realization in history of His divine and human Being” (Adam 1997: 20). Scheeben’s own affinity to Möhler is evident in his declaration of the mid-nineteenth century: To the eyes of faith the Church is not merely a society founded and approved by God or a divine legate; but it is built upon the God-man, it is made an organic part of Him,

334

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

it is raised to His level, it is upheld by His divine power and is filled with His divine excellence. The Church is the body of the God-man; and all who enter it become members of the God-man so that, linked together in Him and through Him, they may share in the divine life and the divine glory of their head. (Scheeben 1946/1958: 541) It was Scheeben who developed the idea that not only is the church an extension of the incarnation, but that Christ and the church fall under the more general category of sacrament as a union of the supernatural (invisible) and the natural (visible), a fundamental ontological category of the divine will and purpose to combine spirit and matter. The consequences of placing both Christ and church and eucharist under the more general category of sacrament was, in effect, to subject the incarnation itself to a more fundamental (philosophically or anthropologically derived) mystery, of which it served as an instance, however preeminent, of a larger more general class of encounters between God and world (see Scheeben 1946/1958: 560–1; 560–6; 591; Himes 1997: 328). Ecclesiology was taken up into christology, even as christology was taken up into a sacramental ontology. Möhler’s organic christological ecclesiology, along with Scheeben’s understanding of the church as sacrament, would in time shape much of Roman Catholic ecclesiology in which Christ’s salvific and revelatory action as the great sacrament are ecclesially prolonged through history, even as the church itself is constituted by the central sacrament of the eucharist (Dulles 2002: 56–60; 173–4; see also Mersch 1951/1962: 546; 548–9; 591). A christological ecclesiology of this type is evident in the Catholic encyclical tradition, running from the 1896 papal encyclical Satis Cognitum of Pope Leo XIII through the especially influential 1943 encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi of Pope Pius XI to the 1964 encyclical Ecclesiam Suam of Pope Paul VI. It is carried into the documents of Vatican II such as Lumen Gentium, even though by that council the focus had shifted from overarching christological imagery for the church to more plural trinitarian and pneumatological ones that accompanied it. What is true regardless is that the encyclicals are framed, before and beyond, by theological thinkers who take the notion of the close identification of Christ and the church from Augustine but extend it in ever more developed metaphysical directions. As Émile Mersch, an important writer on Catholic ecclesiology of the early twentieth century, stated: “What St. Augustine teaches better than anyone else is the living, interior, and . . . psychological unity that brings Christians and Christ together in a single organism, a single man, a single Christ . . . a single Son” (Mersch 1962: 350; see also 197; 228; 369; 479; 483; 523–5). Such sentiments were witnessed well into the twentieth century. They were voiced directly by Henri de Lubac in a passage that echoes both Möhler and Scheeben: If Christ is the sacrament of God, the Church is for us the sacrament of Christ; she represents him, in the full and ancient meaning of the term, she really makes him present. She not only carries on his work, but she is his very continuation, in a sense far more real than that in which it can be said that any human institution is its founder’s continuation. (de Lubac 1988: 76; cf. 226; see also de Lubac 1963: 120; 124–5; 127; 142; cf. 84; 92) Echoing Augustine’s intermingling of imagery of the body and of marital union, de Lubac stated that the head and body thus form “one single body, one single Christ; the Bridegroom and the Bride are one flesh” (de Lubac 1963: 124; cf., however, 71–2; 91).

ECCLESIOLOGY AND CHRISTOLOGY

 335

Such intimate union has practical implications: “Practically speaking, for each one of us, Christ is thus His Church” (de Lubac 1963: 125). Such notions were common in early and mid-twentieth-century Catholic theology despite differences between theological figures. However much Karl Rahner differed from de Lubac, he too expressed remarkably similar thoughts on the church: “As the people of God socially and juridically organized, the Church is not a mere eternal welfare institute, but the continuation, the perpetual presence of the task and function of Christ in the economy of redemption, his contemporaneous presence in history, his life, the Church in the full and proper sense” (Rahner 1967: 13; cf. 18–19; 23–4; see also Rahner 1968: 29; 31; 34; cf., however, 45). While some like Yves Congar, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger grew wary of such direct identifications of Christ with the church and of the dangers of absorbing ecclesiology into christology witnessed in such mystical body ecclesiologies (Congar 1957: 55; 66; Congar 1960: 35–6; Ratzinger 2008: 24–5; von Balthasar & Ratzinger 2005: 26; cf. 28; see also Murphy in this volume), such conceptions, grounded in a particular Augustinian hermeneutical and interpretative tradition focused upon a select number of key biblical texts, remained a staple of Catholic ecclesiology up to and during the period of Vatican II. The strength of this ecclesiology was the emphasis it placed upon the unity of Christ with his church, as well as the seriousness with which it took such biblical texts for understanding this unity. The overarching understanding of the church and its general characteristics in this first type of ecclesiology are readily discerned: the church is characterized as a prolongation of the incarnation, marked by an ontological, fluid, and reversible relation between Christ and the church; this reversibility is demonstrated by a full communication of divine and human attributes in the incarnation now applied to the relation of Christ and his church, such that Christ and the church directly share perfections such as holiness; the church cooperatively participates in and perpetuates Christ’s salvific and sanctifying ministry and teaching authority; in turn, the church’s sacraments and dogma flow organically, and thus naturally and historically, from the incarnation of Christ and his appearance in time, and are seen as intrinsically contained therein; and finally, Scripture and tradition exist on a chronological spectrum of continuity, with Scripture the first in time, but in truth ontologically subsumed under the larger category of tradition itself. In sum, Christ and the church stand on an extended continuum of divine revelatory, salvific, and governing authority and activity. While contemporary christological ecclesiology of unity and identification is chastened and more modest than its forebears (particularly in Roman Catholicism, and any particular advocate of it may insist on qualifying one or all of these general characteristics here outlined), the theme of overarching identification of Christ and church remains a central thread of this first type of ecclesiology, and one poignantly expressed and summarized in the celebrated line of Joan of Arc included and endorsed in the current Catechism of the Catholic Church [CCC]: “About Jesus Christ and the Church, I simply know they’re just one thing, and we shouldn’t complicate the matter” (CCC 1995: 229). As de Lubac insisted in relation to this expressed conviction of the young saint, “we should always keep a firm hold on that equivalence” (de Lubac 1963: 125).

Christ and the Church: Unity in Overarching Distinction In contrast to the first type of ecclesiology outlined above which emphasizes the continuity and close identification of Christ and the church in the midst of their distinction, there is

336

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

another type that emphasizes an inviolable and stringent distinction in the midst of real unity, one that, in fact, sees the matter of Christ and the church not as “one thing” but as irreducibly two, and where christology and ecclesiology are not organically related but held in an irreversible relation where the first has inviolable precedence over the second. Such positions are typical among the ecclesial traditions stemming from the Reformation traditions (Bender 2014a: 138–40). While Luther’s reform is most often associated with themes of soteriology and justification, it was in no small part a challenge to current understandings of the relation of Christ and the church. For Luther, it was not the structure of the church nor its mysticism that preserve its relation to Christ, nor could its authority be portrayed as a direct investiture of Christ into a magisterial teaching office. The church is, rather, under the single and singular lordship of Christ who does not hand over his authority to vicars in his absence (Luther, Luther’s Works [hereafter LW] 31: 342). Rather than thinking of the church and its teaching, priestly, and governing offices and ministries as inheriting and possessing the direct authority and efficacy of Christ, Luther understands Christ as continuing to exercise his kingly rule, as well as his prophetic revelatory address and priestly salvific agency, through his Word. In this way, God’s revelatory and salvific action are effectively enacted by Christ alone (sola Christus) by the grace of God alone (sola gratia) and can simply be received by faith alone (sola fidei). Moreover, the critical agency of Christ not only within but over against his church is expressed in Scripture alone (sola Scriptura), for it is Scripture which retains the freedom and lordship of Christ’s voice over against the church and its tradition such that they cannot be simply equated nor identified. Luther’s ecclesial vision, and one largely shared by all major strands of the Reformation traditions (Lutheran, Reformed, and Anabaptist), was one that was in no small part founded on the irreversible relation and distinction of Christ and the church. This relation was itself the particular and definitive relation that exemplified the general inviolable distinction between opus Dei and opus hominum, God’s action and human action (Schwöbel 1989: 118–19). In this view, Christ’s own agency and voice were not understood to be invested in the church’s vicarious offices of teaching, sanctification, and governance but remained distinct from them and were tied to the Word written and proclaimed, by which this teaching authority, salvific agency, and effective rule were exercised by Christ in the present (Bender 2014b; Schwöbel 1989: 124). This understanding of Christ’s lordship over his church, and the corresponding rejection of a vicarious magisterium or ministry that could be directly identified with his authority and agency, were related to how the church itself was understood. As Luther and his Reformation colleagues and heirs taught, the church is where the Word of God is rightly proclaimed and the sacraments rightly administered. Despite sacramental debates among the Reformers, the centrality of the Reformation vision was to think of Christ’s relation to the church not primarily in terms of physical presence and eucharistic substance, but as effected by the Spirit through the Word of God written and proclaimed. The Word of God was, for Luther, that upon which the church was founded, and the Word proclaimed and written the locus whereby Christ himself was present to the church in revelatory and salvific power. Scripture for this reason stood above and was not incorporated into the interpretive action of a magisterial teaching office or council, which, for Luther, themselves stood under the authority, rule, and even correction of Scripture. If, for the ecclesiology of the first type discussed earlier, it is the eucharist which makes the church and is constitutive of it, for Luther it is the Word which does this (a Word present first in the preaching of the gospel and the accompanying sacrament), so that preaching is placed

ECCLESIOLOGY AND CHRISTOLOGY

 337

at the center of worship. This is clearly stated in Luther’s 1523 work Concerning the Ministry, where he wrote: “For since the church owes its birth to the Word, is nourished, aided and strengthened by it, it is obvious that it cannot be without the Word. If it is without the Word it ceases to be a church” (Luther LW 40: 37; see also Luther LW 41: 150). For Luther, the church is a creation of the divine Word (creatura verbi divini), a creature of the gospel (creatura Evangelii). For this reason, the Word and the church cannot be conflated, for the Word comes to the church extra nos, from outside of the church and its members, establishing the church itself. This was also true for Calvin, who stated in his debate with Sadoleto that Christ rules the church by his Word, which is the scepter by which the heavenly king rules his people. For the Reformers, the Word preceded the church, rather than the church preceding the gospel (cf. de Lubac 1982: 8). This demarcation of Word and church is predicated on the prior conviction that Christ, the ascended Lord, is graciously joined to the church as his earthly body but is not identified with it. Indeed, Luther was not as dependent upon the singular image of the church as the body of Christ joined to its head (though he could speak of this) but employed it along with other favored images, and particularly that of the church as the flock of Christ under one Shepherd, witnessed in his Large Catechism of 1529: I believe that there is on earth a holy little flock and community of pure saints under one head, Christ. It is called together by the Holy Spirit in one faith, mind, and understanding . . . I was brought into it by the Holy Spirit and incorporated into it through the fact that I have heard and still hear God’s Word, which is the beginning point for entering it. (Luther 2000: 437–8) Such an image displays intimacy, but its stress is upon the overarching distinction between the Shepherd and his sheep. This is just as true of Luther’s use of the imagery of Christ as head and the church as his body—what is emphasized is not their identity, but their difference and the superiority of the Lord to his servants (see Luther LW 39: 72–6). This emphasis upon the lordship of Christ over his church, expressed through his Word, would be a common theme in the traditions stemming from the Reformation, traditions that would, however, betray a certain reticence of taking up ecclesiology as a dogmatic topic in its own right, in no small part due to a wariness of perceived Roman Catholic excess. Nevertheless, as the nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought a new emphasis upon a christological ecclesiology among Catholic theologians and the Roman Catholic Church itself, some Protestant theologians followed suit. The most ambitious attempt to provide a rich dogmatic description of a christological ecclesiology among evangelical theologians in the twentieth century was Karl Barth. Barth recognized that the relation of Christ and the church was an area of contested understanding in which very different conceptions were, under the surface, quite similar, a discovery that Möhler also realized in his affinity for Friedrich Schleiermacher, even amid his own disagreements with him. In short, Barth opposed the conflation of Christ and the church that he perceived in both the Protestant liberalism and Roman Catholicism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while nonetheless selectively embracing language that many Protestants had abandoned, and specifically, the language of the totus Christus of Augustine that had been revived with such energy in the late modern period by Roman Catholic theologians. While Barth developed a rich christological ecclesiology of the body of Christ and even made use of the term totus Christus for the church (see especially Barth Church Dogmatics [hereafter CD] IV/2: 59–60; CD IV/1: 661–8; CD IV/3.1: 207; 278–9;

338

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

CD IV/3.2: 754–5), he did this in a distinctively evangelical way, conceiving and depicting the relation of Christ with his church not as an ontological unity but a covenantal one, the church not a natural and organic implicate of the incarnation, but an accompanying witness to the incarnation’s incomparable reality, a witness itself grounded in an eternal election and effected through the call of Christ and the Spirit (Bender 2013). It was a relation Barth understood to be strictly governed and irreversibly ordered, Christ taking up the church as his body, but the church also inviolably distinct from Christ, “who has the Church within Himself but whom the Church does not have within itself, between whom and it there is no reversible or alternating relation, just as the relation between master and servant is not reversible. He is immanent in it only as He is transcendent to it” (Barth CD I/1: 100–1). This is, if nothing else, both an embrace of the rich christological ecclesiology of the period in its broad intentions, but also at the same time a rejection of its naturalized, historicized, and organic conceptions of the relation of Christ and the church as well as of any straightforwardly immanent and mystical understandings of their relation. With this in view, it is clear that in contrast to the Catholic organic ecclesiology of the period Barth retained and exhibited a number of firm evangelical and Protestant commitments that are representative of this broad second type of ecclesiology and constitute its central convictions: the relation of Christ and the church is marked by unity but is never the identification of a single corporate subject, so that though the church is “the second form of His [Christ’s] one existence” it is not a divine one, for divinity belongs not to the church but properly to Christ alone (Barth CD IV/2: 59); the relation between Christ and the church is irreversible and asymmetrical in terms of both agency and predication (i.e., Christ’s activity and that of the church cannot be directly identified, and there is no ecclesiological communicatio idiomatum); correspondingly, the exclusivity and uniqueness of the hypostatic union entails that no direct application of its reality or patterns can be applied to the mystical or covenantal union between Christ and the church, though there may be indirect and highly qualified forms of predication; furthermore, the singular and perfect revelatory and salvific activity of Christ are not extended, even as his person is not extended, in the life and ministry of the church, a ministry which is better thought of as witness rather than mediation, and this is true even if the suffering of the church and the Christian is in a real sense a participation in Christ’s cross, though not in its salvific effect (see Barth CD IV/2: 604; cf. CD IV/3.1: 206–7); and finally, the ongoing ministry of the ascended Christ is exercised through his Word, so that the written Word of Scripture stands not as the first and earliest form of tradition but as the voice of Christ over all later tradition itself. In brief, the relation of Christ and the church is strictly and irreversibly ordered and Christ and church strictly demarcated such that the church cannot be thought of as a prolongation or extension of the incarnation, either in terms of being or activity (see Barth CD I/2: 118; cf. 543; CD IV/1: 317–18; CD IV/2: 55). While Barth does apply christological patterns to ecclesiological thought, he does so in a distinctly evangelical (and specifically Reformed) way, and one marked by indirectness and stringent qualification (Bender 2013, 2014a: 22–37). In this, his christological ecclesiology is put forth as a conscious alternative to the rich organic ones of Möhler and Scheeben (both of whom were well known to Barth). This evangelical sensibility of the inviolable distinction between Christ and church, as well as the irreversibility of predicates, attributes, agencies, and activities here witnessed, is displayed in numerous Protestant writers of the modern period. What can be said in short is that Protestant theologians remained critical of the organic christological

ECCLESIOLOGY AND CHRISTOLOGY

 339

ecclesiologies that grew out of Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, often judging such understandings of the mystical body as an extension of the incarnation to be a betrayal of the inviolable distinction between the Creator and the creature as well as a failure to uphold the perfection of Christ’s work. For some, this conviction of the uniqueness of Christ’s person and the perfection of his work entailed a rejection of the language of the Augustinian conception of the totus Christus altogether (though this was not true for Barth). At the very least, this second type of ecclesiological understanding was predicated upon and demanded a very different way of interpreting and extrapolating from the biblical texts (i.e., Acts 9:4; 1 Cor. 12:12, 27; Col. 1:24) that were so central to Augustine’s understanding of the church and which proved foundational for those who appealed to him in setting forth an ecclesiology of the corpus Christi mysticum. Space precludes further examples of this second type of ecclesiology, but it has perhaps been most incisively summarized in recent years by John Webster, who, like Luther with whom we began, emphasized that the proper order of christology and ecclesiology is rightly understood when the order follows that of gospel first and church second: The Christian faith is thus ecclesial because it is evangelical. But it is no less true that it is only because the Christian faith is evangelical that it is ecclesial; that is to say, its ecclesial character derives solely from and is wholly dependent upon the gospel’s manifestation of God’s sovereign purpose for his creatures. The church is, because God is and acts thus. Consequently, an especial concern for evangelical ecclesiology is to demonstrate not only that the church is a necessary implicate of the gospel, but also that gospel and church exist in a strict and irreversible order, one in which the gospel precedes and the church follows. Much of particular character of evangelical ecclesiology turns upon articulating in the right way the relation-in-distinction between the gospel and the church. (Webster 2005: 154; cf. to de Lubac 1982: 8) This relation-in-distinction of gospel and church is, at its heart, the relation of Christ and the church. In short, Webster highlights that for this second type of christological ecclesiology (what he terms “evangelical ecclesiology”), the church is not extrinsic to the gospel as if its existence were indifferent to the ways and means of God, but neither is it intrinsic to the gospel if this means intrinsic to God’s own being or “intrinsic to the christological mystery of the union between God and humanity,” such that “Christology and ecclesiology are mutually implicating” (Webster 2005: 160). Such is at the heart of Webster’s criticisms of the ecclesiologies of the first type, which he discusses under the rubric not of christological but communion ecclesiologies: “Because communion ecclesiology is heavily invested in a theology of the ontological union between Christ and the body of the church it is characteristically insecure (even casual) about identifying Christological boundaries: it is not possible to determine the point at which Jesus stops and the church begins” (Webster 2005: 163). The strength of evangelical ecclesiology lies in preserving this inviolable distinction.

CONCLUSION In light of the investigation of these two ways of thinking of the relation of Christ and the church presented above, we might reasonably designate the first type of ecclesiology as “ontological ecclesiology,” just as we might designate the second as “covenantal ecclesiology.” That these might be labeled “catholic ecclesiology” and “evangelical ecclesiology” respectively could lead us reasonably to conclude that these two trajectories

340

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

could simply be divided between Roman Catholic and Orthodox (and perhaps AngloCatholic) conceptions on one side, and Protestant and evangelical conceptions on the other, but this would in fact be an oversimplification. Certainly it is generally true, as Yves Congar perceptively noted, that despite a mutual acceptance of the “dogmatic formula defining the mystery of the Incarnation” at Chalcedon, what separates Protestants and Anglicans on one side and Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox on the other is a difference in the sense in which the Chalcedonian Definition is interpreted (Congar 1957: 23; see also 65–6). Yet regardless of this general truth, there are Roman Catholic figures who emphasize the distinction between Christ and the church and the irreversible relation between them as adamantly as some evangelical theologians, and there are Protestant figures who intentionally or unintentionally collapse Christ into the church in ways that even most Roman Catholic and Orthodox theologians would find problematic. Prominent among the first group is the Catholic theologian Hans Küng (see Küng 1967: 234–41; also 32–4; 94–6; 173–9). Prominent among the second group are theologians such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, for whom Christ’s God-consciousness is taken up into, and mediated by, the consciousness of the Christian community (see Schleiermacher 1989/1994: 361–5; Himes 1997: 87). Also representative of this second group are Rudolf Bultmann, for whom Christ is raised into the kerygma of the church (Bultmann 1967: 468nt.80; 468–9; cf. Käsemann 1969: 57–60), and Robert Jenson, for whom Christ is raised into the body of the church and specifically into the eucharistic elements (Jenson 1999: 211–20). It is difficult to see in what manner Christ’s transcendence, perfection, and distinctive agency are maintained and safeguarded in such ecclesiologies, and it appears that in them Christ has, in Webster’s phrase, “no substantial subjectivity proper to him” (Webster 2005: 164). Contemporary christology and ecclesiology remain occupied with questions of the relation of Christ and his church understood along the lines of the two broad types of reading given above. These questions include the following, and how they are answered has theological and ecumenical import: (1) In what way is the distinct lordship of Christ exercised not only within but over his church? (2) In what way is this lordship enacted in the present, in this time of Christ’s ascension? (3) In what way is the agency of Christ united with, yet distinct from, the teaching, sanctifying, and governing acts of the church? and (4) What elements of Christ’s ministry are complete and perfect in himself, and what elements are properly understood as continued in the life of the church? Such questions are best answered in view of a robust doctrine of the personal and bodily resurrection of Christ as well as of the ascension and eschatological return. The NT witnesses to the risen, ascended, and reigning Christ, who lives and speaks within the church through his Spirit, even as the church itself longs for his promised coming. A retrieval of the doctrine of the ascension will rightly raise the question as to the appropriateness of speaking of Christ and the church as a single “person,” for such can lead to a confusion of their distinct agencies and realities. Adolf von Harnack may have with polemical intent oversimplified matters when he stated that “Augustine created the Catholic doctrine of the Catholic Church on earth” (von Harnack 1898: 143), but what is nevertheless true is that Augustine introduced a conception of the body of Christ in which the relation of Christ and church was portrayed as a unity resulting in a single subject. While Harnack suspected that the doctrine of salvation was undermined in Catholicism by the “subsidiary doctrine” of the church (von Harnack 1898: 143), what can be more calmly and modestly concluded is that understandings of the relation of christology and ecclesiology take two primary if diverging paths from Augustine. The difference between

ECCLESIOLOGY AND CHRISTOLOGY

 341

these paths may be illustrated by how representatives of each understand and qualify the dictum of T. A. Lacey: “To say that the Church is the body of Christ is not the same as to say that the Church is Christ” (quoted in Nelson 1951/1963: 91).

REFERENCES Adam, K. (1997), The Spirit of Catholicism, trans. Dom Justin McCann, New York: Crossroad. Afanassieff, N. (1992), “The Church Which Presides In Love,” in John Meyendorff (ed.), The Primacy of Peter: Essays in Ecclesiology and the Early Church, 91–143, Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Arnold, C. E. (1994), “Jesus Christ: ‘Head’ of the Church (Colossians and Ephesians),” in Joel B. Green and Max Turner (eds.), Jesus of Nazareth: Lord and Christ – Essays on the Historical Jesus and New Testament Christology, 346–66, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Augustine. (1990–2019), The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, Brooklyn and Hyde Park: New City Press. Cited as WSA. Augustine. (1995), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Augustine: Homilies on the Gospel of John, Homilies on the First Epistle of John, Soliloquies, First Series Vol. 7, Peabody: Hendrickson. Barth, K. (1936–1977), Church Dogmatics, Four Volumes in 13 Parts, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. G. W. Bromiley, G. T. Thomson, et al. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Cited as CD. Beal, R. M. (2014), Mystery of the Church, People of God: Yves Congar’s Total Ecclesiology as a Path to Vatican II,Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. Bender, K. (2013), Karl Barth’s Christological Ecclesiology, Eugene: Cascade. Originally published Ashgate, 2005. Bender, K. (2014a), Confessing Christ for Church and World: Studies in Modern Theology, Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press. Bender, K. (2014b), “Martin Luther and the Birth of the Protestant Ecclesial Vision,” Perspectives in Religious Studies 3: 257–75. Best, E. (1955), One Body In Christ: A Study in the Relationship of the Church to Christ in the Epistles of the Apostle Paul, London: SPCK. Bulgakov, S. (1988), The Orthodox Church, trans. Lydia Kesich, Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Bultmann, R. (1967), Exegetica: Aufsätze zur Erforschung des Neuen Testaments, ed. Erich Dinkler, Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr – Paul Siebeck. Catechism of the Catholic Church (2005), New York: Doubleday. Cited as CCC. Congar, Y. (1957), Christ, Our Lady and the Church: A Study in Eirenic Theology, trans. Henry St. John, London, New York and Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co. Congar, Y. (1960), The Mystery of the Church, trans. A. V. Littledale, Baltimore: Helicon Press. De Lubac, H. (1963), The Splendour of the Church, trans. Michael Mason, Glen Rock: Deus Books and Paulist Press. De Lubac, H. (1982), The Motherhood of the Church, trans. Sergia Englund, San Francisco: Ignatius Press. De Lubac, H, (1988), Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man, trans. Lancelot C. Sheppard and Elizabeth Englund, San Francisco: Ignatius Press. De Lubac, H. (2006), Corpus Mysticum: The Eucharist and the Church in the Middle Ages – historical survey, ed. Laurence P. Hemming and Susan F. Parsons, trans. Gemma Simmonds, et al., Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

342

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Dulles, A. (2002), Models of the Church, expanded ed., New York: Image Books and Doubleday. Himes, M. J. (1997), Ongoing Incarnation: Johann Adam Möhler and the Beginnings of Modern Ecclesiology, New York: Crossroad Publishing Company. Himes, M. J. (2000), “The Development of Ecclesiology: Modernity to the Twentieth Century,” in Peter C. Phan (ed.), The Gift of the Church: A Textbook on Ecclesiology in Honor of Patrick Granfield, O.S.B, 45–67, Collegeville: Liturgical Press. Jenson, R. (1999), Systematic Theology: Volume II The Works of God, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Käsemann, E. (1969), New Testament Questions for Today, trans. W. J. Montague, Philadelphia: Fortress. Käsemann, E. (1971), Perspectives on Paul, trans. M. Kohl, Philadelphia: Fortress. Küng, H. (1967), The Church, trans. R. and R. Ockenden, New York: Sheed and Ward. Lee, J. K. (2017), Augustine and the Mystery of the Church, Minneapolis: Fortress. Luther, M. (1955–1986), Luther’s Works, 55 vols., ed. J. Pelikan and H. T. Lehman, Philadelphia: Fortress. Cited as LW. Luther, M. (2000), “Large Catechism” (1529), in R. Kolb and T. J. Wengert (eds.), C. Arand, et al. (trans.), The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, 377–480, Minneapolis: Fortress Press.. Marshall, I. H. (2004), New Testament Theology, Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press. Mersch, E. (1951/1962), The Theology of the Mystical Body, trans. C. Vollert, St. Louis: B. Herder Book Co. Meyendorff, J. (1983), Catholicity and the Church, Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Minear, P. S. (2004), Images of the Church in the New Testament, Louisville: Westminster John Knox. Möhler, J. A. (1996), Unity in the Church or The Principle of Catholicism: Presented in the Spirit of the Church Fathers of the First Three Centuries, ed. and trans. P. C. Erb, Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. Möhler, J. A. (1997), Symbolism: Exposition of the Doctrinal Differences Between Catholics and Protestants as Evidenced by Their Symbolical Writings, trans. J. B. Robertson, New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company. Nelson, J. R. (1951/1963), The Realm of Redemption: Studies in the Doctrine of the Nature of the Church in Contemporary Protestant Theology, London: Epworth Press. Ployd, A. (2015), Augustine, the Trinity, and the Church: A Reading of the Anti-Donatist Sermons, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rahner, K. (1967), The Church and the Sacraments, trans. W. J. O’Hara, New York: Herder and Herder. Rahner, K. (1968), Theology of Pastoral Action, trans. W. J. O’Hara, Freiburg and Montreal: Herder and Palm Publishers. Ratzinger, Joseph (2008), Church, Ecumenism, and Politics: New Endeavors in Ecclesiology, trans. Michael J. Miller, et al., San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Riga, P. (1961), “The Ecclesiology of Johann Adam Möhler,” Theological Studies 22: 563–87. Scheeben, M. J., (1946/1958), The Mysteries of Christianity, trans. C. Vollert, St. Louis and London: B. Herder Book Co. Schleiermacher, F. (1989/1994), The Christian Faith, ed. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart, trans. S. Mackintosh, et al., Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Schmemann, A. (1992), “The Idea of Primacy in Orthodox Ecclesiology,” in J. Meyendorff (ed.), The Primacy of Peter: Essays in Ecclesiology and the Early Church, 145–71, Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

ECCLESIOLOGY AND CHRISTOLOGY

 343

Schwöbel, C. (1989), “The Creature of the Word: Recovering the Ecclesiology of the Reformers,” in C. E. Gunton and D. W. Hardy (eds.), On Being the Church: Essays on the Christian Community, 155, Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Strecker, G. (2000), Theology of the New Testament, trans. M. E. Boring, New York: Walter De Gruyter & Louisville: Westminster John Knox. Van Bavel, T. (1998), “The ‘Christus Totus’ Idea: A Forgotten Aspect of Augustine’s Spirituality,” in T. Finan and V. Twomey (ed.), Studies in Patristic Theology, 84–94, Dublin and Portland: Four Courts Press. Verbrugge, V. D. (1988), “Origen’s Ecclesiology and the Biblical Metaphor of the Church as the Body of Christ,” in Charles Kannengeisser and William Petersen (eds.), Origen of Alexandria: His World and His Legacy, 277–94, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Von Balthasar, H. U. and J. Ratzinger (2005), Mary: The Church at the Source, trans. Adrian Walker, San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Von Harnack, A. (1898), History of Dogma, Vol. 5, trans. James Millar, London, Edinburgh, Oxford, et al.: Williams & Norgate. Ware, T. (1993), The Orthodox Church, new ed., London: Penguin Books. Webster, J. (2005), Confessing God: Essays in Christian Dogmatics II, London and New York: T&T Clark International. Zizioulas, J. D. (1985), Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church, Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

Chapter TWENTY-THREE

Ecclesiology and Pneumatology JOSEPH L. MANGINA

INTRODUCTION The connection between the Holy Spirit and the church runs deep in Christian tradition. In a famous passage from his treatise Against Heresies, Irenaeus of Lyon writes that “where the Church is, there is the Spirit of God; and where the Spirit of God is, there is the church, and every kind of grace.” As a consequence, “those who do not partake of him [the Spirit], are neither nourished into life from the mother’s breasts, nor do they enjoy that most limpid fountain which issues from the body of Christ” (Against Heresies, 3.24.1, ANF Vol. 1). The relation of pneumatology and ecclesiology is also reflected in the creedal tradition, most notably the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381, the most widely accepted of all Christian confessions of faith. Of the third person of the Trinity this creed affirms: “We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father. With the Father and the Son together he is worshiped and glorified. He spoke by the prophets.” There follows immediately the assertion of faith in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. Granted that the church is in some sense creatura spiritus, a creation or creature of the Holy Spirit, how exactly does that work? How does the Spirit bring forth and shape the church as a body of witness to the Lord in time? In attempting to answer this question, the present article will be guided by the affirmations of the Nicene Creed. Pneumatology— which is, after all, a body of discourse about God—is logically prior to ecclesiology. Hence each of the creedal claims about the Spirit will be used to illuminate some aspect of the nature of the church:

1. To confess the Spirit as Lord raises fundamental questions concerning God’s identity as YHWH, the God of the Burning Bush and the Exodus, and hence the church’s primordial relation to the people Israel.



2. The Spirit’s role as giver of life will serve as an occasion for inquiry into the church’s role in the economy of grace; this includes questions about the sacraments and the ecclesial mediation of salvation.



3. The manner of the Spirit’s procession—in effect, the centuries-long debate over the filioque—raises the question of whether Western theology suffers from a “pneumatological deficit,” and therefore whether the West has a similarly deficient understanding of the church.

ECCLESIOLOGY AND PNEUMATOLOGY

 345



4. The fact that the Spirit is worshiped and glorified invites inquiry into the church’s character as a doxological community: ecclesiology as liturgy.



5. Finally, the confession that the Spirit spoke by the (Old Testament) prophets poses fundamental questions about the role played by Holy Scripture in fashioning and sustaining the church. More specifically, this will provide an opportunity to reflect on the important role of figural exegesis as a practice that defines the life of the ekklesia.

This agenda of issues is meant to be illustrative rather than exhaustive. The Spirit, famously, “blows where it will, and [we] know neither whence it comes nor whither it is going” (Jn 3:8).1 The manner of the Spirit’s presence and activity in the church is mysterious. My hope, however, is that the Creed will provide a reliable guide for illuminating this mystery, helping us to think better about the relation of pneumatology to ecclesiology.

THE SPIRIT AS LORD OF ISRAEL AND THE EKKLESIA When the bishops gathered at Constantinople declared the Spirit to be “Lord,” they were attempting to say something biblical, obvious, and uncontroversial. The church had just been through several decades of agonizing controversy over the divinity of the Son, and no one wished to reopen that particular debate with respect to the Spirit. The name “Lord,” however, is an unimpeachable scriptural designation for the Spirit. No less than Paul makes the straightforward identification: “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:17). In the Pauline context, the word “Lord” has a strong christological inflection: the apostle here comes close to identifying the Spirit with the risen Jesus as source of the Christian’s transformation. But Paul’s usage also clearly echoes the rich Old Testament discourse concerning the Spirit of YHWH (in English Bibles, the divine name is usually rendered in capital letters as “LORD”). In Scripture, the LORD’s Spirit is the mysterious wind or breath (ruach) that animates all living things, and whose withdrawal causes them to “return to their dust” (Ps. 104:29). More specifically, however, the Spirit in the Old Testament is depicted as playing various specific roles in the life of the people Israel. The Spirit raises up political leaders, first the judges—themselves depicted as charismatics—and later the kings; tellingly, David’s reception of the Spirit coincides with the latter’s departure from Saul. On the other hand, the Spirit is the divine power that raises up prophets in Israel. In the early period of Israel’s history the Spirit would “fall upon” figures like Elijah and Elisha, empowering them with authority to speak and act in the LORD’s Name. Centuries later, the great prophets of the exile would describe possession of, or by, the Spirit as an essential mark of their calling (e.g., Isa. 61; Ezek. 2.1-2 and throughout the book). Eventually the presence or absence of the Spirit would come to be seen as the determining factor in Israel’s existence as a whole. Ezekiel’s great vision of the valley of dry bones describes a situation where the people’s history has reached a literal dead end, until the LORD raises up the bones, covers them with sinews and flesh, and finally breathes upon them the life-giving Spirit

All biblical citations are from the English Standard Version of the Bible.

1

346

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

(Ezek. 37:10). In like fashion, the prophet Joel foresees a day when the Spirit will be poured out on all members of the people without distinction of age, sex, or social class. The political and prophetic dimensions of the Spirit come together in Israel’s messianic hope, a category that is no less important for ecclesiology than it is for the person and work of Christ. A representative text in this regard is Zechariah 4, concerned with the prospects for rebuilding the Temple—a symbol of Israel’s national restoration. Here the prophet relates a mysterious vision of a golden lampstand bearing seven lamps and flanked by two olive trees. An angel glosses the lamps as the “seven eyes of the LORD, which range through the whole earth,” and identifies the olives as two mysterious “anointed ones.” The entire passage is rich with messianic and pneumatic overtones. Zechariah is told that the rebuilding of the Temple will come about exclusively through the agency of the LORD’s ruach: “This is the word of the LORD to Zerubbabel: Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the LORD of hosts” (Zech. 4:6). An early Christian prophet named John will later identify Zechariah’s “seven eyes of the LORD” with the seven eyes of the slaughtered Lamb, an emblem of the crucified and risen Jesus, and describe these eyes in turn as the “the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth” (Rev. 5:6). Seven is the number of fullness. Hence Jesus just is the Israelite who perfectly possesses the Spirit of God, allowing him to embody and enact God’s final Kingdom. Jewish Messianism, then, is at the heart of the early Christian understanding of the church. If Jesus is the Messiah, hence the final Spirit-bearer, he is also the one who shares his Spirit with his followers; in this way he brings into being the prophetic community described by Joel. Two of the four gospels make this communication of the Spirit explicit. In Luke we are given the story of Pentecost, in fulfillment of Jesus’s promise to the disciples at the close of the gospel (Lk. 24:49; Acts 2). In the farewell discourse of the fourth gospel Jesus comforts the disciples with the promise of “another Advocate,” and on the evening of Easter day actually breathes the Holy Spirit upon them; in this case, reception of the Spirit is directly related to the authority to “bind and loose”—the exercise of discipline for the sake of the community (Jn 14:16; Jn 20:19-23). In both these gospels the Spirit ’s coming succeeds the direct, palpable presence of Christ in the flesh. We may then speak of the “time of the church” as a specific period between the Lord’s ascension and final coming, analogous to the forty days of resurrection appearances as narrated by Luke; Karl Barth makes much of this idea in his treatment of the resurrection as “the verdict of the Father” (Barth 1956: §59.3). Yet this succession is in the service of simultaneity, for it is truly Christ who is rendered present and available by the witness of the Holy Spirit. This togetherness-in-difference of Christ and the Spirit is a mark of specifically Pauline ecclesiology. Thus when the apostle looks for evidence to counter the Galatians’ misplaced hankering after Torah-observance, he points to the activity of the Spirit in their midst: “Does he [God] who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law, or by hearing with faith?” Hearing the gospel with faith creates a community in which the Spirit is active in powerful and demonstrative ways. That such manifestations of the Spirit could, at times, become too demonstrative is evidenced in 1 Corinthians, where Paul seeks to make peace in a community torn apart by rival claims to spiritual gifts. Love, not ecstatic experience, is the central mark of life in the ekklesia (1 Cor. 12–13). Nevertheless, Paul takes for granted that the Spirit is central to the being of both the church and the individual Christian life. On the one hand, the Spirit— understood specifically as the Lord’s holy Spirit, echoing Scripture—sets the church apart as a community that ought to look different from communities of the present age. Thus:

ECCLESIOLOGY AND PNEUMATOLOGY

 347

“Do you not know that you [plural] are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple” (1 Cor. 3:16). The Spirit, in fact, bears a profound relationship to the world of bodies; the opposite of Spirit/spirit in the NT is not body but flesh (sarx). The Spirit-body nexus sets up a remarkable set of dialectics concerning the church’s existence. On the one hand, the Christian body is the body destined for resurrection, as Paul makes clear in the eschatologically charged Romans 8: “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you” (Rom. 8:11). This passage can be read as a compressed statement of the whole trinitarian economy of salvation. On the other hand, the resurrection is not yet, and so the Spirit’s engagement with the world of bodies and of flesh inevitably takes the form of a struggle. As the total context of Romans 8 makes clear, the Spirit is associated with the birth-pangs of the new creation, a laboring in which the church, too, is inevitably caught up. The theological tradition has often enough spoken of the historical community of Christ’s followers as the “church militant.” The metaphor is useful, though “the church in travail” might be truer to the cruciform ecclesiology that we encounter in Paul’s letters. It is no accident that in the very passage in Galatians where Paul enumerates the various fruits of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, kindness, and so on, he immediately reminds his readers that these fruits cannot coexist with the works of the flesh: for “those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Gal. 5:22-23). The church is the community of those who are “in Christ,” and whose life in the body is just so subject to constant disciplining by the Holy Spirit. Finally, mention should be made of the Spirit’s important function as Teacher and Truth-Teller in relation to the church. One context for the discernment of truth is prophecy: according to 1 John, false spirits—the ones that speak through false prophets—are known by their failure to acknowledge Christ’s coming in the flesh. Christian prophecy is also the assumed setting in the Apocalypse, where “what the Spirit is saying to the churches” is nothing less than Christ’s own word of consolation and judgment to his people as mediated by the Seer. In the fourth gospel Jesus promises to the disciples the coming of the Spirit-Paraclete, who will “teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you”; essential here is that the Spirit introduces no novel teaching, but confirms and interprets for the community only the words of Jesus who is the Word itself (Jn 14:26, cf. 16:13). The Spirit is thus the chief agent of the church’s memory across time, the guarantor of faithful speech and witness.

THE SPIRIT, GIVER OF LIFE TO THE CHURCH The Nicene Creed names the Spirit as kyrion kai zōopoion, not only the Lord, but the Lord who is life-giver. The Spirit’s connection with life is a pervasive theme in the Scriptures of Israel (Gen. 2:7; Ps. 103:29-30; Ezek. 37:5) as well as in the New Testament (Jn 3:5, 6:63; 1 Pet. 3:18). But how exactly does the Spirit give life, and what has the church to do with it? In modern theology, one widely shared answer to this question is that the Spirit bestows the gift of koinonia, communion, and that the church is the human society where that gift is most fully realized: thus Paul wishes for his readers the “koinonia of the Holy Spirit” (2 Cor. 13:14). The term koinonia has, of course, played a central role in the movement

348

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

known as communion ecclesiology. This school views the church in terms of Christians’ communion with Christ and with one another, especially as realized in the eucharist: “The bread that we break, is it not a participation [koinonia] in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor. 10:16-17). Moreover, although theological discussions of koinonia often focus on the Trinity, there is good reason to see the Spirit as being in a special way the agent who realizes the gift of communion. The church’s koinonia is with the Father and the Son (1 Jn 1:3), but effected by the Holy Spirit, in an action that is as mysterious and elusive as it is powerful. The Spirit is rightly spoken of as the “mediator of communion” (Hunsinger 2000: 148–85). In reflecting on the relation of the Spirit to ecclesial koinonia, there are two major pitfalls to be avoided. First, it is important not to elevate some immanent creaturely principle into a de facto replacement for the Spirit: this could be faith, church practices, formation in the virtues, or even simply the church itself, understood as a kind of incarnation of the Spirit in time and history. (Any talk of the Spirit’s being incarnate in the church is a major category error.) What John Webster once called “industrial strength ecclesiology” is to be avoided at all costs (Webster 2001: 214). Conversely, however, the fact of the church’s human frailty and fallibility should not be used as an excuse to minimize the crucial role of the church in the divine economy. As the grace of God is not an idea or principle, but a new life lived in communion with the Father and the Son, so the Spirit’s effecting of this communion takes visible and tangible form in the ekklesia. The church certainly does not control or channel divine grace—on the contrary, by the workings of the Spirit the church is rendered ecstatic to herself!—but in myriad ways she enfolds us in that grace. In Augustinian terms, the church functions as an efficacious sign: thus Reformed missiologist Lesslie Newbigin characterizes the local congregation as a “sign, instrument, and foretaste of the reign of God,” while in the words of the Second Vatican Council the church “is in Christ like a sacrament or as a sign and instrument both of a very closely knit union with God and of the unity of the whole human race” (Newbigin 1995: 110; Lumen Gentium ch. I, 1). If the church as a whole is “like a sacrament,” this analogy is only possible on account of the sacraments themselves: powerful sign–acts of the Spirit, by which the truth of God in Christ is rendered visible and tangible in the world of bodies. Baptism, for instance, has traditionally been associated with reception of the Holy Spirit—if not the first such encounter in a person’s experience, then the one that is publicly and ecclesially decisive. The model here is Jesus’s own baptism, a trinitarian icon marked by the descent of the Spirit in the form of a dove. The eucharist, too, is a pneumatically charged happening. While this is true for the sacrament as a whole, historically the petition for the coming of the Spirit has been associated with the ancient prayer of epiclesis, or “calling upon,” in which the Spirit is asked to come and transform the elements into the body and blood of Christ. As it appears in one representative modern rite: And we offer our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving to you, Lord of All, presenting to you, from your creation, this bread and this wine. We pray you, gracious God, to send your Holy Spirit upon these gifts that they may be the Sacrament of the Body of Christ and his Blood of the new Covenant. Unite us to your Son in his sacrifice, that we may be acceptable through him, being sanctified by the Holy Spirit. (Book of Common Prayer USA, 1979)

ECCLESIOLOGY AND PNEUMATOLOGY

 349

“Real presence,” then, is not just a christological but a pneumatic reality: the Spirit elevates creaturely realities so that they may be the bearers of heavenly things. In the eucharist as in the other sacraments, it is the Spirit who unites the sign with its signifier, making of the bare sign a potent testimony to the lordship of the Crucified. The church’s gospel has Christ as its content, but the Spirit as the ultimate and powerful witness to his embodied gift (Hinlicky 2015: 328). Baptism and eucharist do not stand alone, but take their place within a larger web of practices that define the Christian community. One of the classic lists of such practices may be found in Martin Luther’s 1537 treatise On the Councils and the Church (Luther 1966). In the portion of the text devoted to the marks or indicators of the true church, Luther proposes that church is always a function of seven “wonder-working holy possessions” (the German word is Heiligthümer, a deliberate echo of the medieval cult of relics) by which the Holy Spirit sanctifies the holy people of God. Though the context is polemical, as Luther seeks to assert the claims of the Reformation against perceived Roman errors, the list itself is remarkably catholic in its scope and tenor. The seven marks are:

1. The Word of God



2. Baptism



3. The Lord’s Supper



4. The power of the keys, or absolution



5. The ordained ministry



6. Public prayer and worship of God



7. Suffering under the cross

It is no surprise that, for the Christ-intoxicated Luther, christological themes predominate. Thus the first item on the list is the proclamation of the Word, ultimately identical with Christ himself, while the final item describes Christians’ participation in his cross: the true church is revealed as such in persecution and martyrdom. Equally striking, however, is Luther’s insistence on the church’s holiness and on the Spirit as the agent of her sanctification. All seven of the Heiligthümer are signs and means of the Spirit’s sanctifying activity. Luther’s ecclesiology reflects the basic grammar of his theology of the cross, with the Spirit as the One who renders the church cruciform. In the theological tradition, the Spirit not only fashions the church as such but bestows gifts on her individual members. Two key biblical texts have played a decisive role in this regard. The first, Isaiah 11, describes the Spirit’s resting on the Messiah and endowing him with certain attributes of leadership: in the enumeration given in the Latin Vulgate, these are wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, fear of the Lord, and piety. It is this list that medieval theologians had in mind when they spoke of “gifts of the Spirit.” Distinguishing these gifts from the virtues, Thomas Aquinas saw them as the perfections granted to all Christians, enabling them to be more open to the Spirit’s promptings (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia IIae, q. 68). But it is the second text that is the more directly pertinent to ecclesiology. In 1 Corinthians, Paul finds himself confronted with a community that prides itself on spectacular manifestations of the Spirit, but where the Spirit has also become a source of division. Against the Corinthians’ tendency toward factionalism Paul sets the unity of the Spirit, the Lord Jesus, and ultimately God Himself (1 Cor. 12:4-6). The Spirit is given not for puffing up religious egos but for the common good (pros to sympheron, 12:7). In this

350

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

context Paul cites the specific gifts of wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, miracle-working, prophecy, the capacity for discernment among spirits, speaking in tongues, and the interpretation of tongues (1 Cor. 12: 8-11). This catalogue is surely not meant to be exhaustive; elsewhere, Paul names an entirely different set of spiritual endowments (e.g., Rom. 12). The Spirit’s work is mysterious, powerful, and resistant to neat categorization. But however we may understand it, the gifts of the Spirit to individuals are intended for the upbuilding of the ekklesia. It is no accident that the apostle’s discussion of spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12 moves naturally into the great image of the church as the body of Christ, each of whose members is radically dependent upon the others. Paul’s word for “gift” is charisma, often rendered in English as “charism.” Twentieth-century ecclesiology saw a flowering of interest in charismatic leadership viewed as a sociological category, building on the pioneering work of Rudolf Söhm and Max Weber. Popular reception of their work often suggests that charismatic leadership is fundamentally at odds with institutions: either the church is guided by Spirit-filled prophets, or she is an institution with offices and routinized practices, such as the sacraments. This contrast can easily be married to a narrative of decline, in which the pneumatic church of the New Testament period suffered a fall into ecclesiasticism and mere “religion.” Few theologians today, however, would see charism and institution as being mutually exclusive (Gaybba 1987: 167–71). Rather, charismatic and institutional elements have been intrinsic to Christianity from its origins: “the Holy Spirit always lives in the Church as objective as well as subjective Spirit: as institution, or rule, or disciplina, and as inspiration and loving obedience to the Father” (Balthasar 1995: 239). The eucharist, for instance, is both a predictable ritual performance—hence we speak of Jesus as “instituting” the sacrament—and a surprising advent of the Spirit. Which aspect we focus on will depend upon our particular interests of the moment. Sociological categories can at times sharpen theological insight, but must not be allowed to eclipse properly theological concerns.

WHO PROCEEDS FROM THE FATHER AND THE SON: THE NAMES OF THE SPIRIT IN THE LIFE OF THE CHURCH All Christian confessions agree that Christ, the incarnate Word, has a role in the eschatological sending of the Holy Spirit: thus the Johannine picture of Jesus conferring the Spirit on his disciples after his resurrection (Jn 20:22). But does this event in time reflect the relation between Son and Spirit in God’s eternal being? This question has been a subject of profound disagreement between the churches of the East and West. Western Christians have argued that the Spirit proceeds ex patre filioque, “from the Father and the Son.” Eastern Christians have emphatically rejected this idea as an unwarranted rewriting of the creed of 381. For Orthodoxy, the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone. The question to be taken up in this section is whether and how much difference this makes for ecclesiology. Behind the filioque stands the towering figure of Augustine, who taught Western theology its trinitarian ABCs. Drawing on scriptural texts such as Jn 15:26 and Rom. 5:5, Augustine argued that the Spirit is most appropriately named as Gift and Love. To be sure, the affirmation “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8) applies to the Trinity as a whole. But the Spirit instantiates that love in a singular way. The Father’s generation of the Son is an act

ECCLESIOLOGY AND PNEUMATOLOGY

 351

of love, answered by the Son’s love for the Father, and that shared love is itself personal, a divine hypostasis—the Holy Spirit. The Spirit comes forth from Father and Son to be a genuine “other” to both, yet sharing in the same eternal divine life. Moreover, just as the Spirit unites the persons of the Trinity in love, so also he enkindles in the faithful a love of Jesus and of his body, the church: “Therefore, we also receive the Holy Spirit if we love the Church, if we are joined together by love, if we rejoice in the Catholic name and faith. Let us believe, brothers, that as much as each one loves Christ’s Church, so much does that one have the Holy Spirit” (Augustine 1993: 47). The converse of such claims, of course, is that schism is precisely a sin against charity and hence against the Spirit. For Orthodox theology, the Augustinian naming of the Spirit as Love and Gift has always seemed to say too much—an unwarranted attempt to explain the Spirit’s procession through an analysis of the relations of origin. By contrast, modern Western theologians are inclined to fault Augustine for saying too little. Hans Urs von Balthasar, for example, argues that the economy of salvation is marked by a complexity and richness that goes beyond the names Love and Gift. He points out that in the Johannine literature, the Spirit is as much connected with truth and judgment as it is with love. While not rejecting the Augustinian names, Balthasar proposes that we need to supplement them in order to do full justice to the Spirit’s work (Balthasar 1993). In similar fashion, thinkers associated with the modern eschatological turn including Jürgen Moltmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Robert Jenson have sought to recover a robust sense of the Spirit’s role in inaugurating God’s future, beginning with the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. If these authors were to assign the Spirit a special name, it might well be that of Promise. Yet another possibility would be a naming of the Spirit as Blessing. Throughout the Old Testament the LORD is not only present to the people Israel but bestows blessings on them, while the righteous, in turn, are summoned to “bless the LORD.” The theme of blessing is prominent in Kendall Soulen’s trinitarian theology of divine names, with Blessing being the special identity of the Holy Spirit, just as the Father is bearer of the divine Singularity and the Son of the divine Presence (Soulen 2011). The three persons are co-equally God, and yet their manners of being and of coming to us are irreducibly distinctive—an ancient principle of trinitarian thinking. As a general principle, we may observe that a particular theologian’s doctrine of the Spirit reflects his or her convictions about reform and renewal in the church. We can see this already in Augustine’s imaginative, scripturally shaped naming of the Spirit as Love and Gift. Writing in the politically and theologically charged context of the Donatist controversy, the bishop of Hippo wants his communities in North Africa to be joined in charity with the Catholic Church, and to understand that salvation is exclusively attributable to God’s grace and not their own doing. His emphasis on Love is a hedge against Donatism, and his insistence on Gift an argument against Pelagianism. Are Love and Gift, then, scriptural categories or contextual ones? In a sense, they are both. The Spirit attested in the Scriptures is the same Spirit that moves through the North African assemblies, drawing them—with all the inexorability of grace—into the life of the divine Giver. But what of the filioque? Regarding the doctrine itself, there exists a widespread consensus that it should never have become a church-dividing issue. In affirming the filioque, Western Christians do not intend to deny either the real distinctions among the persons or the Father’s unique role as fons divinitatis, the “source of divinity.” Conversely, Eastern Christians have their own ways of affirming the eternal relation between the Son and the Spirit. The Father from whom the Spirit proceeds is, after all, the Father of the

352

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Son. Already in the sixth century Maximus Confessor saw the two doctrines as being complementary rather than contradictory, and modern ecumenical theologians across the confessions have happily followed his lead (Siecinski 2010: 84, 193–215). The remaining obstacles seem more cultural and church-political than strictly doctrinal in nature. Even if the controversy over the filioque can be resolved, however, there remains a nagging sense in some quarters that modern Western theology is marked by a Spirit-deficit, and that the church suffers as a consequence. The concerns can take various forms. Apart from a robust doctrine of the Spirit, it is said, the church succumbs to a lifeless institutionalism, becoming identified with its structures and office-holders. Though charismatic movements arise to protest this development, they fail to resolve the underlying theological issues at stake (Nissiotis 1968, followed by Jenson 1993). Theologians also express the worry that the pneuma is easily reduced to the status of an epistemic principle, whose main function is to fill believers’ heads with doctrinal content rather than incorporating them into the new life in Christ (Williams 2000). Or the blame may be assigned to a deficient theology of justification. If justification is viewed as imputation, a mere change in the legal status of the sinner before God, then the Spirit is sidelined and the church thereby made redundant. Only a robust doctrine of justification as theosis or union with Christ by the Spirit can secure the church’s identity as God’s elect, beloved community (Hinlicky 2015). What these various proposals have in common is the conviction that the church should be more like the church, and not a pale reflection of the world—of course this is a concern of all ecclesiology—and that this can only happen if the Spirit is accorded its proper scope and dignity. This is most certainly true! It is only true, however, to the extent that the Spirit is understood as the midwife of the church’s and the believer’s new birth in Jesus Christ. The Spirit of the Lord is not himself pneumatocentric, much less ecclesiocentric, but theo- and christocentric. Hence Bruce Marshall rightly cautions that “the Spirit is self-effacing, even elusive. It is the Holy Spirit who works directly upon us to unite us with Jesus Christ and his Father, but the Spirit does this by teaching us to know who Jesus is, not to know who he is” (Marshall 2011: 400). This seems wise counsel for ecclesiology as for other domains of Christian doctrine. By the power of the Holy Spirit, the church is the sphere given for communion with Jesus and the Father. It is only appropriate, then, that the Spirit undergo a kind of self-willed eclipse, so that human beings might be drawn into life-giving fellowship with the Father and Son.

WHO IS WORSHIPED AND GLORIFIED: THE SPIRIT IN THE LITURGY Christian worship is a pneumatic event. Nowhere is devotion to the Holy Spirit more manifest than in the worshiping assembly, when the church offers up “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs” to God in the power and energy of the Spirit (Eph. 5:19). It seems clear, however, that the way the church honors the Spirit differs from its praise of the other two persons. The heavenly liturgy described in Revelation 4–5 may be taken as paradigmatic in this regard. As the scene unfolds, the adoring gaze of literally every creature is drawn equally to God the Creator and to the slaughtered, risen Lamb. The Spirit is mentioned only obliquely, in the mysterious image of the seven spirits who stand before God’s throne. Nevertheless, the entire episode is shot through with the Spirit’s powerful energy and presence. Not only is the Seer “in the Spirit” when he sees these

ECCLESIOLOGY AND PNEUMATOLOGY

 353

things, but the voices, singing, and movement of the heavenly beings must be understood as being animated and orchestrated by the Spirit. It is the Spirit who loosens creaturely tongues to cry out “Blessing and honor and glory and power be unto him that sits upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever” (Rev. 5:13). Basil of Caesarea’s famous treatise On the Holy Spirit is devoted in part to working out the “grammar” of the Spirit in Christian worship (Basil 2011). Curiously enough, the motivation behind this treatise was defense of a liturgical innovation. It had long been customary for Christians to offer up praise to the Father “through” the Son and “in” the Spirit. Basil, however, employed a form of the doxology that linked the three divine persons horizontally: now the Father is glorified “with” (meta) the Son and “together with” (syn) the Holy Spirit. Basil’s Arian critics were outraged by this bald assertion of the Spirit’s divinity, which they saw as going beyond the evidence of Scripture. Basil, however, vigorously defended the legitimacy of both forms of prayer. He argued that the older form speaks of the divine economy, the shape of the Spirit’s work and gifts among the faithful, while the newer form speaks of theology in the proper sense, meaning God’s own immanent being. In the Godhead itself, we affirm the three persons of the Trinity as being fully eternal and co-equal. Basil’s preferred language is reflected in the Creed of 381, which affirms of the Spirit that “with the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified.” Both these ways of thinking about the Spirit are to be found in classic texts of Christian liturgy. We hear echoes of Basil’s formula whenever the triune persons are spoken of in coordinated fashion. Thus, in the Orthodox liturgy aptly named for St. Basil himself, the opening invocation runs: “Blessed be the kingdom of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit”; this usage is echoed in the service of Holy Eucharist in the Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church USA (1979). This trinitarian parallelism also marks the ancient hymn Gloria in excelsis deo, one of the ordinary or unchanging parts of the Latin Mass. Although largely devoted to praise of the Father and of Christ, the hymn concludes with the words: “you alone are the Most High, Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit, in the glory of God the Father. Amen.” Numerous other prayers and collects close with a trinitarian doxology. Equally prominent, however, are allusions to the mediating or instrumental role of the Spirit. A particularly beautiful example is Thomas Cranmer’s Collect for Purity, adapted from the medieval Sarum Rite. In its classic form: “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secretes are hid: cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnify thy holy name: through Christ our Lord. Amen” (The Book of Common Prayer, 1662). The church’s worship also unfolds “in” the Spirit in the sense that the Spirit sets the collective tone and mood of the Christian assembly. This aspect is extremely difficult to quantify. Both as fixed rite and as improvised performance, worship itself can only be attributed to the Spirit’s enlivening presence. The diverse elements of the liturgy, including the reading of Scripture, proclamation, and music, and culminating in the eucharist, can be viewed as the Spirit’s provision for the exchange of blessing between heaven and earth. At the same time, the church is constantly at risk of mistaking the Spirit’s gift of liturgical form for magic—the possession of a technology sufficient for controlling the divine. In a much-cited passage from her metaphysical prose poem Holy the Firm, Annie Dillard notes the “unwarranted air of professionalism” that marks the more sacramental Christian churches (the traditions, it should be noted, to which Dillard herself belongs). Such churches, she writes, act “as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of creatures to have dealings with God. I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed.”

354

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Dillard goes on to say that if “God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it any minute. This is the beginning of wisdom” (Dillard 1977: 59). In truth, of course, no style of Christian worship is immune to the temptation to domesticate deity. Self-conscious informality and spontaneity can function this way, no less than liturgical formalism. The problem is best addressed not by endless tinkering with the liturgy, in hopes that we might at last “get it right,” but by offering up a heartfelt prayer of veni Creator Spiritus—“Come, Creator Spirit!”—in an attitude of repentance and hope. Although Christian worship as a whole is the Spirit’s work, there are also particular moments in the liturgy that bear his special imprint. The public reading and exposition of Holy Scripture is one of these. Because Scripture is not dead letter but living Word, the church reads Scripture trusting that the Spirit will apply this Word to this people in this unique moment of its life before God. (For a more expansive discussion of the Spirit’s relation to Holy Scripture, see the discussion below.) Likewise the eucharist or Lord’s Supper is superintended by the Spirit, not only in the epiclesis but in the overall movement of the action from confession, to thanksgiving, to remembrance, to offering, to communing in Christ’s body and blood. Here as elsewhere, the relation of Word to Spirit is not competitive but complementary. Finally, but most elusively, the Spirit makes himself felt in the ecstatic character of worship itself. Christian worship is but an extended display of the Pauline paradox: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). In worship, we temporarily forget ourselves, and rediscover our true selves in Christ. This is why all good liturgy is unselfconscious: in a certain sense, the less we think about it, the more authentic it is. The Spirit effects this decentering of the self and the community in multiple ways. The use of heightened and intensified speech is one of these—already in the New Testament, we see Christian worship being punctuated with cries of Amen, Hallelujah, and Maranatha, as a reminder that the present age is passing away, and that the new creation requires a new language. (The fact that Gentile churches continued to use such Hebrew and Aramaic expressions testifies to the abiding hunger for mystery in religion; not everything can or needs to be translated). Speaking in tongues, a pneumatic experience that continues to play an important role in Pentecostal Christianity, is an extreme version of this phenomenon. Bodily movement and gesture also plays an important role: kneeling for confession or Communion, raising one’s arms in praise, the laying on of hands, all may serve as Spirit-given signs that “it is no longer we who live, but Christ who lives in us.” But if one had to name a single, well-nigh universal language of the Spirit in the life of the church, it would have to be that of music. From monastic choirs to Reformation hymnody, and from Bach chorales to folk Masses, music has almost always played a crucial role in the life of the church. There is something about the gospel that demands not only to be said, but sung. While this is much too large a theme to explore here, no account of the church’s doxological life in the Spirit would be complete without it.

WHO SPOKE BY THE PROPHETS: THE SPIRIT, SCRIPTURE, AND THE CHURCH’S LIFE IN HISTORY One of the criticisms often leveled at the Nicene Creed is its lack of explicit reference to Israel. The text opens with confession of God as the Creator—to be sure, an essential

ECCLESIOLOGY AND PNEUMATOLOGY

 355

part of Israel’s faith—and then moves directly to the person and history of Jesus Christ. Nothing is said about Israel as such. Curiously enough, the one exception to this rule occurs in the Creed’s third article, which confesses the Spirit to be the One “who spoke by the prophets” (to lalēsan dia tōn prophētōn). If, at one level, this assertion says something important about the Spirit, at another level it says something about the scriptural canon and so about the church. What is the church, if not the community that reads the Scripture as testimony to God’s work of salvation in Jesus Messiah? The task of reading the two parts of the canon as a unity sets the agenda for all Christian theology. Following the rejection of Marcionism—arguably the first and most important dogmatic decision on the part of the early church—Christians were confronted with the double task of making sense of Scripture and of allowing Scripture to interpret the things concerning Jesus. If Scripture is the Word of God, this must be the same Word that became incarnate in the saving economy. Jesus, then, is no stranger to the Old Testament. Indeed he pervades the ancient writings, although discovering him there demands attentiveness to the text and the exercise of interpretive imagination (cynics would say, ingenuity). The process begins as early as Paul’s letters. In 1 Corinthians, for instance, the apostle develops a remarkable figural reading of Israel in the wilderness, arguing that the ancient Israelites were “baptized” at the Exodus, and that they participated in the same “spiritual food and drink” as the Corinthians themselves—presumably the Lord’s Supper. “For they drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ.” God’s gifts, however, do not exempt his people from judgment. Thus Paul concludes: “Now these things took place as examples [typoi] for us, that we might not desire evil as they did” (1 Cor. 10:1-6). This passage is the charter text for what would eventually become known as the figural interpretation of Scripture, sometimes called typology, allegory, or spiritual exegesis. All these terms refer to a habit of reading that (at its best) extends Scripture’s literal sense, showing how the latter “opens up” to refer to events and persons beyond its plain or common-sense meaning. The correlation in question may be intra-canonical (e.g., the binding of Isaac as a type of Jesus’s sacrifice), or it may reach out to include the reader’s own world of experience. Far from being an esoteric or arcane practice, figural exegesis was well into the early modern period the natural—one might almost say inevitable— form of Christian engagement with the Scriptures. It may seem odd to raise the issue of figuralism in a discussion of the Holy Spirit and ecclesiology. In fact, figuralism takes us to the very heart of the matter. To read Scripture figurally is to apprehend the shape of the Spirit’s direction of the church in a particular time and place, with a view to the salvation made present in Messiah Jesus. Figural reading is on the one hand spiritual reading, aiming at the readers’ own faithfulness and transformation. It is on the other hand messianic reading, given the peculiar time in which the church finds itself. Thus Paul reiterates, toward the end of 1 Corinthians 10, that “these things happened to them [the Israelites] as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come” (1 Cor. 10:11). If the ability to read the church typologically came naturally for the first Christians, the conditions that made this possible were lost fairly early on. Among the complex reasons for this is the simple fact of Christianity’s becoming an overwhelmingly Gentile faith. While confirming the Old Testament’s status as Scripture, Christians believed that the Jews’ status as God’s beloved people had been revoked, and that this title had now passed on to the church—the outlook we now refer to as supersessionism. Moreover, the changes wrought by modernity only served to sharpen Christians’ sense of having left Israel and

356

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

the Jews far behind. Moderns instinctively construe the relation between the two parts of the canon in historical terms. At best they are viewed as successive moments in a salvation history, or Heilsgeschichte, while at worst the elder testament is demoted to the status of so much “historical background” for the gospel, the latter being the only truly interesting part of the Christian “thing.” Either way, the old is devalued at the expense of the new. Historicism in fact accentuates supersessionism. Finally, we might note the role played by modern pneumatologies, which consistently describe the Spirit as an agent of novelty and startling change. The Spirit is God coming from the future, casting the ekklesia in the role of a kind of avant-garde for the human race. Notwithstanding these changes, there have been important modern theologians who have swum against the tide and sought to recover a kind of figural understanding of the church. Foremost in this regard is Henri de Lubac, whose massive work on medieval exegesis was as much a contribution to ecclesiology as it was to the history of interpretation (Wood 1998). To be sure, de Lubac was more a theorizer than a practitioner of spiritual exegesis. This stands in contrast to his friend Hans Urs von Balthasar, whose engagements with the Old Testament in his Theodrama are vigorous and imaginative, if not always persuasive. On the Protestant side, Karl Barth in his Church Dogmatics produced some powerful examples of figural exegesis of Scripture, most notably in his doctrine of election (Church Dogmatics 2.2). God’s election of Israel—and therefore, the Jews—is irrevocable, while Israel’s Scripture is irreplaceable as a source of Christian self-understanding.14 Finally, mention must be made of George Lindbeck, who developed his colleague Hans Frei’s work on biblical narrative to address questions of ecclesiology and ecumenism. By retrieving a view of the church as the “messianic pilgrim people of God typologically shaped by Israel’s story,” Lindbeck hoped to overcome what he saw as the built-in idealism as well as supersessionism of much contemporary ecclesiology (Lindbeck 2003: 146). In this vision, Catholic and Protestant disagreements about the church are overcome through a shared return to an understanding of the church as Israel, a title Christians share in critical solidarity with the Jews. The retrieval of the figural vision in our era faces two potent criticisms. First, it is often suggested that because figural reading tends to be idealistic and ahistorical, it fails to grapple with the “real church.” On this view it is not enough to read Scripture to discover the church; one must also engage in ethnographic description, which show us how Christian communities actually function at the empirical level. Second, the charge is made that figuralism is unscientific and imports meanings into the text that are simply not there. Ephraim Radner quotes one trenchant critic of the figural enterprise as saying that it “isn’t theology, let alone history; it is prophecy!” (Radner 2016: 206). In other words, figural reading is subjective and arbitrary, and an ecclesiology oriented toward it would lack all foundations. It would thus have no place in a university setting. Interestingly, both these objections bear a direct relation to the Holy Spirit: the first claims that figuralism ignores the lived experience of Christians, thereby eclipsing the Spirit, while the second worries that it turns the theologian into a seer, an adept of the Spirit who denies the claims of public reason. There are answers available to both sets of concerns. To the first, there is no reason in principle why a figural ecclesiology must ignore the empirical church; indeed, one could argue that there is an inherent “pull” of the figural toward history. The church figured in Scripture is not some ideal community but precisely the one church (or rather, alas, the divided church!) in all its messy human reality. Attention to the empirical is in fact a natural extension of the figural vision, which refers both the biblical story and the

ECCLESIOLOGY AND PNEUMATOLOGY

 357

world of common experience to God’s creative power and providential rule. So, for example, Lindbeck drew eclectically on disciplines like biblical studies, history, sociology, and ethnography in developing his ecclesiology of the church as Israel. Figuralism is in fact the friend of ecclesial visibility. While the church is surely more than its empirical and social manifestations, it is also not less than these. To the second objection, we can say that while ecclesiology is not, of course, prophecy in any direct sense, it is a task of the Christian imagination. Theological accounts of the church do not come readymade. They are descriptions, sketches that inevitably contain elements of both the church as we know it and the church as we learn about it in Scripture, read in companionship with the faithful dead (a better term, perhaps, than the abstract “tradition”). Our present location in the story or stories of the Bible is not obvious; this is the limitation of all salvation–historical schemes, which make it all too easy for us to locate ourselves on history’s cutting edge. But to read Scripture with the use of the faithful imagination, Christian communities may be able to understand better the Lord’s gifts to his people and what the Lord is asking of them in their particular time and place. The Spirit is active at both the objective and subjective poles of such reading. The Spirit enlightens the reader, enabling her to discern the Spirit’s testimony to the Word in the words of the sacred text. The Spirit who spoke once to the church by the prophets and apostles speaks by them still.

CONCLUSION The preceding forays into the Spirit’s relation to the church are meant to be illustrative rather than exhaustive. Clearly there is much more that could be said—for instance, about the charisms or gifts of the Spirit as these pertain to the church’s common life, a major theme in both Catholic and ecumenical theology in the period following the Second Vatican Council (Pedlar 2015). One might also mention the role of the Spirit in God’s sending of the church into the world, as seen in contemporary theologies of mission. Finally, it is worth reflecting on the ways in which theologies of divine perfection and aseity tend to set limits on appeals to the Spirit in ecclesiology, precisely by way of emphasizing the Spirit’s full divinity. The Spirit of God is not to be identified with the church’s Gemeingeist, or common spirit, but rather sets the latter free. This is a good reminder of the church’s creaturely character, her identity as the fully human bride of the Lamb. But perhaps enough has been said to indicate some general lines of thought. The Spirit that creates the church is none other than the Spirit of the LORD God of Israel. The Spirit gives life to the community in a dizzying variety of ways, but above all in the provision of Word and Sacrament for God’s people. As the Love that proceeds from and unites the Father and the Son, the Spirit draws the church into a deeper communion with both these divine persons, as well as binding the members of the church in love for one another. The Spirit is the divine person/presence enlivening Christian worship. The Spirit arranges the words of Scripture in such a way that they are a faithful representation of God’s Word, a mirror in which the community discovers itself and its destiny across time. The question is sometimes posed: “will there be the church in heaven?” If we mean the institutional church, with its structures and sacraments, the answer to this question is obviously no: in the kingdom, the Spirit’s historical work of creating and sustaining the church will be completed. But if we mean the company that gathers around the Throne for the heavenly liturgy, the church in that sense is unending. That eternal assembly will

358

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

be even more a community of the Holy Spirit than the pilgrim church on earth. Rendered perfectly ecstatic by the Spirit, the church will join with all creation in the praise of God and the Lamb.

REFERENCES Augustine. (1993), Tractates on the Gospel of John, 28–54, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Barth, K. (1956), Church Dogmatics 4.1, Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Dillard, A. (1977), Holy the Firm, New York: Harper Colophon. Gaybba, B. (1987), The Spirit of Love, London: Geoffrey Chapman. Hinlicky, P. (2015), Beloved Community: Critical Dogmatics After Christendom, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Hunsinger, G. (2000), “The Mediator of Communion,” in Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Jenson, R. (1993), Unbaptized God: The Basic Problem with Ecumenical Dialogue, Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Lindbeck, G. (2003), “The Church,” in Lindbeck, The Church in a Postliberal Age, ed. J. J. Buckley, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Luther, M. (1966), “On the Councils and the Church,” in Luther’s Works, Vol. 41, Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Marshall, B. (2011), “The Deep Things of God: A Trinitarian Pneumatology,” in Gilles Emery and Matthew Levering (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity, 400–13, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Newbigin, L. (1995), The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission, rev. ed., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Nissiotis, N. (1968), Die Theologie der Ostkirche im Ökumenischen Dialog: Kirche und Welt in Orthodoxer Sicht, Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk. Pedlar, J. (2015), Division, Diversity, and Unity: A Theology of Ecclesial Charisms, New York: Peter Lang. Radner, E. (2016), Time and the Word: Figural Reading of the Christian Scriptures, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Siecienski, A. Edward (2010), The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy, New York: Oxford University Press. Soulen, K. (2011), The Divine Names and the Holy Trinity: Distinguishing the Voices, Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. St. Basil the Great (2011), On the Holy Spirit, trans. and ed. Stephen Hildebrand, New York: St. Vladimir’s Press. Von Balthasar, H. U. (1993), Creator Spirit: Explorations in Theology III, San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Von Balthasar, H. U. (1995), Spirit and Institution: Explorations in Theology IV, San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Webster, J. (2001), Word and Church: Essays in Christian Dogmatics, London: T&T Clark. Williams, R. (2000), “Word and Spirit,” in Williams, On Christian Theology, London: Basil Blackwell. Wood, S. K. (1998), Spiritual Exegesis and the Church in the Theology of Henri de Lubac, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

Chapter TWENTY-FOUR

Liberation Ecclesiology in Latin America EDGARDO COLÓN-EMERIC

INTRODUCTION Ecclesiology blooms in seasons of conflict. The European reformations of the sixteenth century renewed attention on the nature and mission of the church. In the struggles between Catholics and Protestants, the marks of the church served as signposts for distinguishing the true church from its counterfeits. Robert Bellarmine expanded the list of marks by which the true church is recognized to fifteen. He included in this list the creedal four (one, holy, catholic, and apostolic) plus historical markers like the antiquity of the Roman Catholic Church (Bellarmine 2015: 19ff). John Calvin concentrated the markers for recognition around core church practices: the preaching of the word and the administration of the sacraments (Calvin [1559] 1960: 1023). In both cases, the marks of the church served a polemical, rather than catechetical, purpose. Latin America was a spectator to these theological debates. Outside a few conspicuous exceptions, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, theologians in the Americas were little more than translators. Whatever was decided in Europe was transplanted for the “New World.” Things changed in the twentieth century. The Second Vatican Council, the ecumenical movement, the Cold War, and the struggles for liberation from colonialism contributed to the upheaval of the Latin American theological landscape and gave rise to churches that no longer mimicked their northern counterparts. This chapter explores how thinking about the church in Latin America flourished during the conflicts of the twentieth century. First, I begin by offering a brief account of the history of theological reflection in the lands and peoples encountered by Columbus. In this section, I trace the development of the theology from European transplant to ever more authentically Latin American expressions. In this story, the emergence of liberation theology plays a pivotal role. Second, I consider how biblical images of the church were reflected and refracted in Latin American thought. Finally, I suggest that the revolutionary situation of the twentieth century led to a reframing of the marks of the church that polemically presented poverty as the chief mark of the church.

AN ARDUOUS PILGRIMAGE Enrique Dussel narrates the history of theology in Latin America as a coming of age story (Dussel 1981: 306–33). The narrative arc of this tale bends from conquest to liberation.

360

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

The first chapter in the story of Latin American theology was prophetic theology and it began in the early sixteenth century. In popular imagination, the story of Christianity’s crossing of the Atlantic is synonymous with genocide; the typical Christian is cast in the role of a cross-bearing, sword-wielding conquistador. The story is not so simple. The theology of holy war practiced by these transplanted crusaders was resisted by the prophetic theology of Dominican missionaries like Antón de Montesinos and Bartolomé de las Casas. Their preaching, teaching, and advocacy introduced an alternative way of imagining the church in the Americas. In their vision, the gospel could only be proclaimed nonviolently and the indigenous people were to be respected as brothers and sisters for whom Christ died. Prophetic theology in this stage was not simply a European endeavor. The contribution of indigenous voices like that of Guaman Poma de Ayala to a vision of a church that was Christian, but not Spanish, must not be neglected (Guaman [1615] 2006; Adorno 2000). In Dussel’s account, the era of prophetic theology is followed by the era of colonial theology (1553–1808). The theology produced in Latin America during these centuries took its cues from European theology and in particular from the theology of the Council of Trent (1545–63) (Larkin 2016: 107–32). The teachings of this council cast a long shadow that reached across the Atlantic and outlined a colonial theology. A few traits of this form of Christian thought, spirituality, and practice are worth noting. First, colonial Christianity emphasized the transparency of the material to the supernatural. Sacred objects like relics were understood to be imbued with divine power. Since there were no officially recognized saints in the Americas until the seventeenth century, all relics were imported from Europe. Images took the place of relics in Tridentine piety in the Americas. Statues and paintings could be shipped across the Atlantic but they could also be manufactured locally. Second, colonial Christianity was sustained by public rituals. The faithful conducted pilgrimages to far-off shrines; they brought gifts of flowers to sacred images; they clothed statues with fine dresses and jewelry. Chief among these rituals was the one centered on the material locus of sacred immanence par excellence, namely the eucharist. The eucharist contributed to the edification of beautiful and ornate worship spaces. Lavish altar screens and the proliferation of frescoes contributed to people’s piety by visually representing the sacredness of the space and the nearness of God. The eucharist also solidified colonial social hierarchies. So, for instance, in Cuzco, the feast of Corpus Christi required the participation of the indigenous in the processions as a sign of the triumph of orthodoxy over heresy but they were strictly prohibited from partaking in the host before the Second Council of Lima (1567) (Dean 2012: 1). Third, colonial Christianity strongly promoted the cult of the saints. Naming a city after a saint placed it under the protection of a powerful patron. The saints contributed to the formation of a new social identity that bridged the Old World and the New. Their veneration, managed by lay-groups called cofradías, served as one of the binding ties of colonial societies. It is worth noting that colonial Christianity had many points of contact with the piety of indigenous peoples and Africans whose own worldview emphasized ancestors, public rituals, and the immanence and commingling of the natural and the supernatural. The independence movements of the nineteenth century eroded the pillars of colonial theology. In Dussel’s account, the collapse of this way of Christianity, at least among the elites, clears the way for political theology (since 1808), neo-colonial theology (until 1930), theology of the “new Christendom” (since 1930), and finally theology of liberation (since 1959). In other words, for Dussel, the story of theology in Latin America is the story of the coming of age of liberation theology and the vindication of the prophetic theology of the sixteenth century.

LIBERATION ECCLESIOLOGY IN LATIN AMERICA

 361

Liberation theology is not a homogeneous school of thought. It is a movement that has diverse intellectual currents and distinct historical moments. Dussel distinguishes four stages in the history of liberation theology. The first of these begins with the preparations for Vatican II until the meeting in Medellín, 1959–69. This period was characterized by an incremental approach to social change. However, the yearning for social transformation that was prevalent in the 1960s was not satisfied by development theories. Gustavo Gutiérrez observes, “development, in its strictly economic, modernizing sense, was advanced by international agencies backed by the groups that control the world economy” (Gutiérrez 1970: 246). The result was that development models did not address the root causes of the Latin American situation and fostered more dependency, misery, and oppression. The real problem was not underdevelopment; the real problem was marginalization and oppression and the remedy was liberation, which brings us to Dussel’s second period from 1968 to 1972, the birth of liberation theology. One of the watershed moments for the emergence of this theology is the second Conference of Latin American Catholic bishops that met in Medellín, Colombia in 1968. Ostensibly, the bishops gathered in order to apply the teachings of Vatican II to the Latin American situation. What ended up happening at Medellín was something like a Latin American Pentecost. The wind which blew through the windows opened by John XXIII in the Vatican shook off the lethargic complacency of many church leaders in Latin America. Confronted with a continent groaning from poverty, the Latin American bishops could not remain silent; they had to respond, and one of the ways in which they responded was liberation theology (Medellín 1968: 14, 1–2). Liberation theology offered a way for Christian intellectuals to contribute to the transformation of the social matrix in which they lived. Gutiérrez observes that liberation theology “seems to express better both the hopes of oppressed peoples and the fullness of a view in which man is seen not as a passive element, but as agent of history” (Gutiérrez 1970: 247). For liberation theology, reflection follows a prior act of commitment. In the words of an ancient motto much appreciated by Gutiérrez: primum vivere, deinde philosophari (first live, then philosophize). This does not mean to say that theological reflection is a pastime for a leisure class. Rather, the point is that action precedes reflection. Gutiérrez states: “We understand theology, then, as an intellectual understanding of the faith. But faith is above all a commitment to God and the neighbor. Although it implies the affirmation of truths, Christian truth nevertheless has the particular character of being a truth that is thought but that first of all is done” (Gutiérrez 1996: 26). The third period of liberation theology from 1972 to 1976 was a time of maturation. Dussel points to works of christology by Leonardo Boff and Jon Sobrino as examples of the growing depth of liberation theology (Boff 1972; Sobrino 1974). This period of theological reflection reaches a climax with the announcement of a third Conference of Catholic Bishops that met in Puebla (1979). The teachings from this gathering helped solidify the work of liberation theologians and energized the opposition. Dussel leaves his story at this point but it is generally agreed that a new period in liberation theology begins with the collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989 and the end of the Cold War. The arduous pilgrimage of Christian theology in Latin America that we have been rehearsing here is a story of liberation. It is a tale from captivity to European Christianity to liberation for being authentically Latin American. It is usually told as a story of Catholic theology. There are good reasons for this given the impact of Roman Catholicism on the continent. However, it is worth considering the fact that the term “liberation theology” itself appears to have been first used by the Brazilian Presbyterian theologian Rubem Alves

362

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

in a doctoral dissertation titled “Towards a Theology of Liberation” that he defended at Princeton in 1968 before Gutiérrez’s similarly named work (Kerber 2013: 1820). It is also interesting to note that before Jon Sobrino released his work on christology in Latin America, the Argentine Methodist José Míguez Bonino published Doing Theology in a Revolutionary Situation (1975). The book is aptly named, for it describes the social context in which all these theologians (Catholic and Protestants) were working. Even if they were not supportive of armed insurrections against the state, they were doing theology and ecclesiology in a revolutionary situation. The urgency and energy of this context shapes their ecclesial reflection in distinctive ways, which we now turn to consider.

IMAGES OF THE CHURCH IN LATIN AMERICA The manner in which Dussel tells the story of theology in Latin America has been challenged, but the influence of his schema is undeniable (Saranyana 2002: 268). As we have seen, it is a story from colonization to liberation, or in the terms of Alberto MetholFerré, it is the story of the emergence of an iglesia fuente (source church) from an iglesia reflejo (reflection church) (Methol-Ferré 2006: 53, 79; cf. Rubio 2007: 9–42).1 It is the story of a church that went from being readers of theology to being producers of theology. By extension, for the purposes of this chapter, it is the story of the development of Latin American ecclesiologies from echoes of Tridentine ecclesiologies. The ecclesiological frameworks which came as potted plants in the colonial period became liberated from their vases in the contemporary era and allowed to grow roots in Latin American soil. In this section, we consider the indigenization of some of the central biblical images for the church—people of God, communion, body of Christ.

The Church as the People of God The Second Vatican Council placed the image of the people of God at the center of its ecclesiological reflections. God does not save human beings as individuals. Instead, God gathers humankind “as one people, a people which acknowledges Him in truth and serves Him in holiness” (Lumen Gentium 9). Both clergy and laity are led by the Holy Spirit to answer the call to holiness and grow into the full stature of Christ, the head of this messianic people of God. The episcopal conference that gathered in Medellín followed in the footsteps of Vatican II when it emphasized that the entire people of God has been entrusted with a mission in Latin America. “The commitment does not end with the bishops. It is the people of God who, in the providential time in our continent, experience the call of the Spirit” (Medellín 1968: Presentación). From the deliberations in Medellín, two streams of ecclesiological thought on the people of God sprang which need to be considered—the Argentine teología del pueblo and the Salvadoran pueblo crucificado. The Teología del Pueblo The teología del pueblo or “theology of the people” emerges in Argentina from the confluence of the teachings of Vatican II and the political struggles churning within the Peronist movement. At the core of this theology, as its name suggests, is the concept of pueblo or peoplehood. Juan Carlos Scannone, a leading exponent of

The distinction appears to have been coined by Henrique de Lima Vaz (1968: 17–22).

1

LIBERATION ECCLESIOLOGY IN LATIN AMERICA

 363

this theology, explains it in the following terms: “The category ‘people’ is ambiguous, not for its vacuity but for its wealth of meaning. On the one hand, it can designate the entire people as a nation; on the other hand, it can designate the lower classes and popular social sectors that comprise a nation” (Scannone 2016: 121). It is from the first sense of the term, the people as nation, that teología del pueblo begins. The ecclesial reflection of the Argentine theologians was guided by the manner in which the Latin American bishops concretized the universal language of humanity used at Vatican II with the particularity of pueblo. To the notion of pueblo, these theologians added that of culture, “the particular mode in which human beings cultivate their relationship with nature, with each other and with God, within a pueblo,” (Puebla 1979: 386). In the ecclesiology that developed from the combined attention on peoplehood and culture, notions of “class” and “dependency” faded into the background. More precisely, we can say that the significance of class conflict is retained within a larger anthropological framework. A similar reframing occurs with the category of the poor. The ecclesiology of the pueblo underscores the importance of the poor within the pueblo while at the same time changing the conversation from economic to cultural considerations. Scannone explains “the simple and poor, at least de facto in Latin America and probably also de jure, are the ones who best preserve a common culture, its values and symbols” (Scannone 2016: 122). The reason that the poor play such a pivotal role in the culture of the pueblo is that “they alone have their human dignity and common culture without the privileges of power, possession, and knowledge” (Scannone 2016: 122). The poor belong to what Pope Francis calls the pueblo fiel (the faithful people); they bear a “popular wisdom,” a “mysticism of the pueblo” that is rich in evangelizing and humanizing potential (Scannone 2016: 123). The contemporary ecclesiological implications of this vision are amply displayed in Pope Francis’s Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium. The echoes of Puebla, the teología del pueblo, and even Aquinas are unmistakable. The People of God is incarnate in the peoples of the earth, each of which has its own culture. The concept of culture is valuable for grasping the various expressions of the Christian life present in God’s people. It has to do with the lifestyle of a given society, the specific way in which its members relate to one another, to other creatures and to God . . . Grace supposes culture, and God’s gift becomes flesh in the culture of those who receive it. (Evangelii Gaudium 2013: 115) The privileging of popular wisdom over Marxist analysis and of history over sociology rankled the feathers of fellow Latin American theologians. Indeed the term teología del pueblo seems to have been introduced by the Uruguayan Jesuit, Juan Luis Segundo as a term of opprobrium (Scannone 1997: 690ff). Fellow Jesuits working in El Salvador also focus their ecclesiological attention on peoplehood but in a very different way from the Argentine theologians. For Ignacio Ellacuría, the martyred rector of the Central American University in San Salvador, the people of God is more than the pueblo fiel, it is the pueblo crucificado. The Pueblo Crucificado  Ignacio Ellacuría insists that in order to understand the church as the people of God we must start our inquiry from a stubborn fact: “the existence of a great portion of humanity that is literally and historically crucified by natural, and above all, personal and historical oppressions” (1990: 189). That a particular group of people has carried the weight of the sins of the world throughout most of history should pose soteriological and ecclesiological questions for every Christian. The pueblo crucificado

364

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

(crucified People) are not simply a collection of suffering individuals. They are people who are “crucified to a social order promoted and sustained by a minority who exercise dominion on the basis of a number of factors which given their historically concrete efficacy must be considered as sin” (Ellacuría 1990: 201). Ellacuría begins his ecclesiological exploration by considering the death of Jesus. He rejects the dialectical and naturalistic explanations that present death as necessary for life, even though Jesus speaks of himself as a seed that must die in order to rise again to newness of life and fruitfulness (cf. Jn 12:24). Interpreting the death of Jesus as a quasi-biological circle of death and rebirth misses the historical reasons for his death. Jesus was killed because of the challenges that his manner of living presented to the religious, economic, and political establishments of his day. The death of Jesus receives its meaning not from abstract atonement theories but from his life. Ellacuría’s historical soteriology has ecclesiological implications. First, the unity of Jesus to the church has a historical dimension. Mystical and sacramental principles are not enough to guarantee the continuity of Jesus’s presence with the community. Instead, “a historic continuity is necessary that continues accomplishing what he did and how he did it” (Ellacuría 1990: 201). Second, the crucified people are a principle of universal salvation. The conformity of the crucified people to the crucified Jesus is a sign of their acceptance by God and of the ongoing validity of their historical mission. As in the case of Jesus, the suffering death of the crucified people is no accident. In fact, “the oppression of the crucified people comes from a historic necessity: the necessity that many suffer so that a few may enjoy themselves” (Ellacuría 1990: 203). Third, the crucified people are not simply equivalent to the church. Ellacuría’s ecclesiological investigation of the passion of Jesus leads him to the suffering servant in Isaiah. This mysterious figure serves as a character sketch that illumines the reality of suffering and oppression today. Ellacuría states that “the suffering servant of Yahweh will be all those crucified unjustly for the sins of humanity because all the crucified form a single unity, a single reality, even if this reality has a head and has members with different functions in the unitary work of atonement” (Ellacuría 1990: 210). The elusiveness of the suffering servant is a characteristic of the crucified people. The crucified people cannot be precisely identified with any group, not even with the church. The ecclesiology of the pueblo crucificado is built into the architecture of the University of Central America Simeón Cañas, where Ellacuría was rector. For the chapel of Jesus the Liberator, Ellacuría commissioned a collection of black and white drawings of tortured corpses as the Stations of the Crucified People. As the priest preaches and presides, his eyes are on the congregation and on the drawings. The identification of the crucified Christ with the crucified pueblo is not fatalistic but empowering. Indeed, Ellacuría proposes that the “crucified people” of the world have sacramental and saving significance. This significance has its origin in “the unity of the figure of Jesus with that of oppressed humanity” (Ellacuría 1990: 190). Their respective passion narratives need to be read together in order to understand rightly how salvation is actualized in history. Differently stated, the scandal of the crucifixion of Jesus and the scandal of the ongoing oppression of the poor illumine each other. Seen together they help expose the idealized and ideological interpretations of Christianity that have hindered the proclamation of good news to the poor.

The Church as Communion Scripture speaks of the church as a koinonia, a fellowship or communion. The first Christians, anointed by the Spirit at Pentecost, “devoted themselves to the apostle’s

LIBERATION ECCLESIOLOGY IN LATIN AMERICA

 365

teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42). Paul writes to the Corinthians of how God in his faithfulness has called them “into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord” (1 Cor. 1:9). An ecclesiology centered on communion played a powerful role in ecumenical theology and in the Latin American situation. I will examine two expressions of this ecclesiology as lived in the Latin American context: the base ecclesial communities and the communion of the poor.

The Base Ecclesial Communities The term “base ecclesial communities” appears in the charter texts of the Latin American Catholic Church. Medellín speaks of the phenomenon of “comunidades cristianas de base” (base Christian communities) as the nucleus of the church, “the initial cell of ecclesial restructuring, the focus of evangelization, and the chief advocate of human progress and development” (Medellín 1968: 15, 10). The communities are described as small and relatively homogeneous so that people can care for each other in a fraternal manner; clergy, religious, or laity can lead them. The formation of leaders who are “spiritually and morally mature” is crucial for the efficacy of these communities (Medellín 1968: 15, 11). Puebla speaks of how these communities have helped the church to “discover the evangelizing potential of the poor” (Puebla 1979: 1147). The “base ecclesial communities,” as Puebla refers to them, are signs of hope and joy for the church as a whole. Indeed, “in many segments of the people of God, the base ecclesial communities have produced a greater closeness to the gospel and a quest for the perennially new face of Christ who fulfills their legitimate longing for an integral liberation” (Puebla 1979: 173). At the same time, Puebla laments that these communities “in some places are being manipulated by clearly political interests that seek to draw them away from genuine communion with their bishops” (Puebla 97). The proposed solution to this problem is more intentional formation and better leadership. The name “base ecclesial communities” itself carries theological weight and designates important aspects of this new way of being church. First, these are communities. In these gatherings, relation is more important than structure and hierarchy. Second, these communities are ecclesial. In other words, they are not a club or some other generic social affinity group; they are communities of disciples seeking to follow Christ in communion with the church. Finally, these are base communities. That is to say, they grow from the base of society (the poor) and the base of the church (the laity). The growth of base ecclesial communities represents a new experience of church. The Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff termed this new birth of the church in Latin America an “ecclesiogenesis” (Boff [1977] 1986: 2).2 The first base ecclesial communities probably began in Brazil, but the best-known one was found in Nicaragua. Ernesto Cardenal’s Gospel in Solentimane (2010) opens a window to a base community of Solentiname, a remote archipelago on Lake Cocibolca. The transcripts of the conversations that the members of this community had on Scripture are illuminating. Reflecting on Peter’s confession and Jesus’s promise that he would build his church on that rock, one of the members of the community states: “A church without faith can’t be a church. It’s not a community. And without that faith, we really live without life; we live without any hope” (Cardenal 2010: 268).

The term is not original to Boff. It arose in the 1970s to speak of a church that is born of the people by the Spirit.

2

366

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

The ecclesiology of the base ecclesial communities cannot be limited to the writing of the theologians and the reflections of the base. It is important to consider also the music sung in the base communities. An important source for this music is found in the Misa Campesina Nicaragüense of Carlos Godoy. Consider, for instance, the Kyrie in this mass. It is not so much a plea for mercy as an invocation of the merciful one. The people pray not “Christ have mercy on us” but “Christ, identify yourself with us.” Christ, Christ Jesus, do not extend solidarity to the oppressive class that squeezes and devours the community but with the oppressed with my people thirsting for peace. (Vigil and Torredas 1988: 12)3 Christ in solidarity with people who are fighting for their liberation: this is the base ecclesial community par excellence. In this community, the eucharist is “not a transcendent banal myth,” it is rather “communing with the collective struggle” (Vigil and Torredas 1988: 12). It is an offering from “the working class looking for work since dawn” (Vigil and Torredas 1988: 12). All are invited to the banquet “to the table of creation, where each person with his stool has a post and a mission” (Vigil and Torredas 1988: 23). The change of the elements into the body and blood of Christ is affirmed but it is the beauty and empowerment of the community that is emphasized. The people sing of the “tasty bread,” “the delicious wine,” the “gorgeous table” (Vigil and Torredas 1988: 25). At the same time the aesthetics of the banquet highlight the commitment of communion: “Whoever accepts the bread and the wine, accepts communion with the struggle and the way of Jesus in his passion.” The commitment involves risk because the people witness to liberation in a world full of wolves (lobos). The eucharist in these liberationist liturgies constitutes the church as the church of the poor. When the mass is ended, the assembly is sent to make of the world a table where there is equality, working and struggling together, and sharing property. (Vigil and Torredas 1988: 23)4 Communion of, with, and for the poor The lex orandi and lex vivendi of base communities like the ones in Nicaragua provided the praxis that fueled the lex credendi of theologians like Jon Sobrino. His ecclesiology underscores the importance of solidarity with the poor to the integrity of the church’s life and witness (Sobrino 2008). In Latin America, Luke’s story of the rich man and Lazarus (Lk. 16:19-31) reads less like a parable and more like an economic report on the state of the hemisphere. The consequences of iniquitous disparity are dehumanizing for both characters. The

All translations of Vigil and Torredas 1988 are my own. Interestingly, in the version of this song published in the Spanish edition of the United Methodist Hymnbook, the verses were toned down in their prophetic pitch. The final phrase “compartiendo la propiedad” (and sharing property) now reads “por el bien de la humanidad” (for the good of humanity) (Martinez 1996: 292). 3 4

LIBERATION ECCLESIOLOGY IN LATIN AMERICA

 367

conspicuous excess of the lifestyles of the elites and their collective silence in the face of the misery that surrounds them wounds their common humanity. Even as there is growing awareness among the privileged that poverty must be ameliorated, the attempts to do so frequently end up as dehumanizing. The war against poverty becomes a war against the poor. The elimination of poverty becomes their further exclusion from social life. Furthermore, the correlation of prosperity with blessedness makes it impossible to look at the world of the poor as anything other than the antechamber of Gehenna. In this situation of historic and systemic injustice, the church is called to embrace a new logic of salvation. Cyprian of Carthage, in the context of the Novatian schism, stated that extra ecclesiam nulla salus, outside the church there is no salvation. In the context of Latin America, Sobrino believes that the saying needs to be reformulated as extra pauperes nulla salus, outside the poor no salvation (Sobrino 2008: 35). In Sobrino’s ecclesiological vision, the church is the communion of those who are forced to be poor with the one who chose to become poor, Jesus Christ. Poverty is not univocal. Sobrino understands poverty as a journey of solidarity with Christ. This journey begins with the “materially” poor as those who are hungry, sick, and destitute. When this lack of food, health, and home is the result of oppression, Sobrino refers to them as the “dialectically” poor. When the poor reflect critically on these experiences, they become “consciously” poor. When they organize themselves to fight for liberation from the causes of poverty, they become “liberatively” poor. As this awareness and activity is animated by gratitude, joy, perseverance, and hope, they become “spiritually” poor. Finally, when these persons live in awareness of God’s predilection for them and all the poor and perceive Christ’s presence in the poor, Sobrino speaks of them as “theologally” poor. Salvation takes place in the flesh, particularly in the flesh of the poor. The way of poverty traced by Sobrino must not be glamorized. Poverty is an evil that is suffered and it can be the cause of sin. Poor people can be as greedy and egotistical as their rich neighbors. Even so, outside the poor, no salvation. Sobrino insists, “The formula should not be discredited simply because the mysterium iniquitatis is present also among the poor. Even the church fathers of antiquity called the Church casta meretrix, the chaste prostitute” (2008: 71). The poor are God’s chosen bearers of salvation not because they are strong, but because they are weak and rejected. By virtue of whose they are, they denounce a world of selfish abundance and call it to repent, turn, and be saved by siding with the poor in transforming society. The poor serve as a mirror to the church in the first world, which “on seeing itself disfigured, comes to know itself in its truth, which it otherwise seeks to hide by every means possible” (Sobrino 2008: 60). In sum, for Sobrino, the poor are heralds of conversion, bearers of truth, teachers of hope, and sacraments of Christ; they are the church as communion. The church as the communion of the poor as seen by Sobrino is christocentric. Ivonne Gebara and Maria Bingemer call attention to the central role played by Mary in the base ecclesial communities: “If, as the Council says, Mary is a figure of the church, we can say that here in Latin America she is increasingly the figure of this church of the poor, of which the base communities are a new and outstanding embodiment” (Gebara and Bingemer1989: 163). Like the vast majority of people belonging to these communities, Mary is not identified with the elites but with the base and the working classes. She is the “mother of the oppressed” and the “mother of the forgotten” who accompanies her children as they struggle for liberation. Mary helps the marginalized find their voice so that they can say “yes” to the mercy of the Most High without hesitation and to say “no” to the riches of the world’s mightiest without reservation. She leads them in singing of

368

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

how God “has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly” (Lk. 1:52). Authentically Marian piety, as practiced in the base ecclesial communities, does not lull people to passivity but energizes “their prophetic cry to denounce injustice and announce the liberation that has already taken place, and is now taking place for those who hope in Yahweh” (Gebara and Bingemer 1989: 161).

The Church as the Body of Christ Paul writes to the Corinthians that they are “the body of Christ and individually members of it” (1 Cor. 12:27). The members of this diverse body are united by a common principle (the Holy Spirit) and end (eternal life with God). The church is a body sui generis; it is a mystical body. In Latin American ecclesiology, this imagery fell on hard times. Its associations with Tridentine Catholicism tinged this image with colonial hues and the invisibility of its unifying principle rendered it impotent against political oppression. William Cavanaugh faults the ecclesiology of the mystical body of Christ with the equivocating response of the church in Chile to the Pinochet dictatorship (Cavanaugh 1998: 16).5 By contrast, Óscar Romero’s ecclesiological reflections do not dismiss the image of the church as mystical body. Instead, he gives this image density by considering the church as the body of Christ in history. In a pastoral letter titled “The Church: the Body of Christ in History” Romero writes: “The Church is the flesh in which Christ makes concrete his own life and his personal mission through the centuries” (Romero 2005a: 76).6 The historicity of the body that is the church has human and divine dimensions. As human, the church is subject to the vulnerabilities and ambiguities of life in a fallen world. It grows weary; it is tempted by power and prestige; it forgets; it even hates. However, as divine, the church is holy; its human dimension is sanctified by the Spirit; it is without sin; it is indefectible. As human and divine, the Church “prolongs with respect to humanity the flesh of Christ in history” (Romero 2005c: 150). In Romero’s theological vision, ecclesiology cannot be separated from spirituality. At his episcopal ordination, Óscar Romero adopted the Ignatian motto “Sentir con la Iglesia.” In Romero’s ecclesial vision, Christians identify themselves fully with the body of Christ in its historical concreteness. Sentir con la iglesia means a number of things. First, it means being one with the Roman Church. Even as his life was threatened and his orthodoxy questioned, Romero declared, “I shall die, God willing (primero Dios), faithful to the successor of Peter” (Romero 2006: 60; See also Romero 2007: 426, 319; and Romero 2008: 381, 259). The flesh of the people cannot be separated from the bones of hierarchy. Both receive their life from the head that is Christ. Even if these bones dry up, the Holy Spirit can make them live again (cf. Ezek. 37:1-14). Romero himself is a prime example of the Spirit’s power to vivify the hierarchy. Second, being one with the body of Christ in history means being one with the militant church. Christians bear responsibility for the body’s passage through history; they are committed to the church, as it exists here

He states: “The church construed itself not as a real body but as a ‘mystical body,’ hovering over the ‘temporal plane,’ uniting all in soul, if not in body. The church was therefore ill-equipped to counter the military regime’s strategy of disappearance and isolation, since the church had effectively already ‘disappeared’ itself through its own ecclesial practice” (Cavanaugh 1989: 16). 6 This section of the argument draws on my work Óscar Romero’s Theological Vision: Liberation and the Transfiguration of the Poor (Colon-Emeric 2018: 189–216). 5

LIBERATION ECCLESIOLOGY IN LATIN AMERICA

 369

and now with all its ambiguities. The true church is not found in a past golden age, in a future utopia, or in a gnostic present. The true church is the body of Christ in a history that is conflicted. This body is in constant need of redemption. Romero’s language is strong: “We are rotten flesh; we are fragile flesh; we are the flesh of Christ in history” (Romero 2007: 71). Third, being one with the body of Christ in history means being one with the church of the poor. The church of the poor is not a party meeting; it is more than a gathering of poor people. The Church of the poor is the Church of the beatitudes. It is the Church of “the poor who hunger for God, of those who feel that without God all things are empty and impure” (Romero 2007: 29). Fourth, being one with the body of Christ in history means being one with Mary. The body of Christ is always born of the Virgin Mary. Romero states: “Mary becomes Salvadoran and incarnates Christ in the history of El Salvador, and Mary takes on your last name and my last name to incarnate the story of your family, my family, in the eternal life of the gospel” (Romero 2007: 96). For Romero, the church as the body of Christ in history is a pilgrim. It cannot settle down and build its home in a particular historical period. There is no Christendom here below. The church, like humanity, is always on the move. The Church is commissioned to be “Christ in this time and in this country. It must speak as Christ would speak here, today” (Romero 2005b: 286). The incarnation is in sense an ongoing event. The Word becomes flesh in new languages, peoples, and cultures in order to incarnate these into the body of Christ.

COUNTERPOINTS The ecclesiological reflections on the theological images that we have been examining so far are largely Catholic and liberationist. The attention devoted to these is reasonable given the depth and strength of these theological currents. However, theological reflection on the church was not limited to Catholic liberation theology. Catholic countercurrents and Protestant streams also coursed through Latin America. Here I consider three of these.

The Church in the People By way of counterpoint to the theological voices we have already studied, it is important to consider the work of Alfonso López Trujillo. In anticipation of the conference of Catholic bishops that met in Puebla in 1979, López Trujillo surveyed the directions of ecclesiological reflection present in the Latin American scene (López Trujillo 1980: 137– 213). He conducted this survey out of a sense of responsibility for his role as secretarygeneral of CELAM (Conference of Latin American Bishops) and from concern about what he saw as the dangerous ecclesiological interpretations that followed from a flawed reading of Medellín. López Trujillo sets forth two guiding principles for Latin American ecclesiology. First, those who would theologize on the church must love the church. True knowledge is only made possible by love, but not just any love, a Christ-like love for his bride. Church reformers are first and foremost church lovers not church demolition experts. They are moved by beauty not by defeatist readings of church history and of the present ecclesial moment. In brief, ecclesiology requires a faith informed by love. “Approaching the church without faith, without the implications of the mystery which she is . . . would mean capturing only its façade and playing the role of one afflicted with colorblindness in front of a colorful fan” (López Trujillo 1980: 142). The second principle that López Trujillo proposes is the

370

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

inseparability of christology from ecclesiology. “Christ is given to us through the church and in the church. We have access to Jesus Christ by the mediation of the church. We believe in Christ uniting ourselves to the church’s confession of faith” (López Trujillo 1980: 145). The historical and even biblical pluralism of christologies and ecclesiologies is beyond doubt. However, this diversity must not be mistaken for incoherence or as license for divorcing Christ from the church in order to wed him to the kingdom. López Trujillo distinguishes between two opposing forms of ecclesiology. There are those that speak of a church of the people and those that speak of a church in the people. The church in the people points to the “incarnation of the Church.” The church takes root in the culture and history of the peoples. The soil of these cultures is ready to nurture these roots thanks to the seeds of the Word already present. One of the marks that the church has become incarnate in the people is the phenomenon of popular religiosity. “The Church in the People, we repeat, carries a strong sense of incarnation without loss of identity. It assumes the cultural expressions of the people, its customs, its folklore, its wisdom, sowing them with evangelical ferment; it discovers seeds of the Word in the people and in a vital dialogue listens to it” (López Trujillo 1980: 171). By contrast, the Church of the People is not the result of the incarnation of the Word in the people but of its absorption. In seeking to serve the people, the church becomes completely identified to the point of losing its specific character.

The Church as Herald of the Kingdom Another strand of ecclesial thought is focused on the image of the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is central to Jesus’s life and ministry. The kingdom is the subject of his preaching (cf. Lk. 4:43), his parables (cf. Mk 4:30), his miracles like the transfiguration (cf. Lk. 9:27), his exorcisms (cf. Mt. 12:28), and even simple things like how he treats children (Mk 10:14). Jesus speaks of the kingdom as near to us (cf. Mk 1:15), indeed among us (Lk. 17:21). The kingdom is also future and awaiting to be revealed (cf. Lk. 21:31). So central is the theme of the kingdom in the gospels that Alfred Loisy provocatively asserts: “Christ preached the Kingdom of God, and the Church appeared instead” (Boff [1977] 1986: 50). Latin American theologians acknowledge the difference between the church and the kingdom and the theological challenge that this represents. In the words of Leonardo Boff, “The existence of the church testifies to a human freedom that can oppose God” (Boff [1977] 1986: 59). In somewhat less agonistic terms, Emilio Castro refers to the present and future reality of the kingdom as the cantus firmus of the whole Bible (Castro 1985: 53). The kingdom is a utopia that fulfills the dreams of a people caught up in suffering and it is a liberating reality that comes in the midst of the oppression and resistance of the anti-kingdom. The vision of the kingdom sustains the church in its struggle against everything that seeks to deny its presence and refuse its coming. In the words of Julia Esquivel, “He who believes that on the throne of God the Lamb reigns who was slain for love does not dare kneel down before any god made of gold or stone. He dares to oppose any political project that produces injustice or death for the people” (Castro 1985: 79ff). Centuries of transmission and reception have washed out the rich biblical image of the church as herald of the kingdom. On the one hand, as Mortimer Arias states: “The gospel of the kingdom had to be translated into the context of Greek culture and Roman society, and later to medieval and modern societies” (Arias 1980: 37). On the other hand, the translation changed the message. Under the banner of contextualization, the theological vision of

LIBERATION ECCLESIOLOGY IN LATIN AMERICA

 371

the kingdom of God has been constricted in apocalyptic circles to a cataclysmic event, in evangelical circles to an interior state, in liberal circles to a new social order, and in charismatic circles to an ecstatic experience (Arias 1980: 37–53). In one reductive vision after another, a part has been confused for the whole. An ecclesiology centered on the kingdom of God must overcome these flattened, fragmented visions of the community proclaimed by Christ.

The Church as Misión Integral One last ecclesiological current bears mentioning, that which goes under the name of misión integral. This current emerged in dialogue and contrast with the Catholic and ecumenical streams running through Latin America. The representatives of these currents, Catholics like Leonardo Boff and Protestants like Julio de Santa Ana, asked the right questions but gave questionable answers. Of particular concern was the perceived syncretism of Marxism and Christianity in Latin American theology. In the words of René Padilla, the theological vision cast by these intellectual leaders was woven out of the equation of “ideology (Marxism) and faith (Christianity), the erasing of the boundary between the church and the world, the sanctification of the revolution, the rejection of biblical authority” (Padilla 1971: 100). Misión integral, as the name suggests, attempts to offer a holistic view of the gospel, the church, and the mission against reductive alternatives. In particular, it is attempting to overcome the tendency in evangelical theology to reduce the scope of the church’s mission to the salvation of the individual. Mauricio Solís defines it as “God’s call to the church asking it to fulfill the scriptural mandate of restoring all of creation in Christ and for Christ” (Solís 2001: 1–12). The ecclesiology of misión integral does not shy away from speaking of the church as sacrament but it does not emphasize the role of the sacraments of the church in this mission. Instead the sacramentality of the church is understood within a wide set of ecclesial practices that include the ministries of discipleship, service, preaching, and reconciliation. Through these practices, the church announces and prepares each sociocultural and historical context for new creation in Christ.

THE MARKS OF THE CHURCH IN LATIN AMERICA Ecclesiology in Latin America was born from a revolutionary situation. Against the backdrop of social upheavals and Cold War realignments, some parts of the church served as bastions of the status quo; others sided with the revolutionaries; others resisted the first while avoiding the second. In both cases, the ecclesiologies advanced in Latin America sought to engage the context in which they emerged. The images of the church that we considered above are evidence of the struggle of the church to remain faithful to the biblical witness for the Latin American context. The collage of images presented here is kaleidoscopic. On first impression, some of the images clash against each other (e.g., the pueblo fiel and the pueblo crucificado). Whether the juxtaposition of image is jarring or ultimately harmonious is a matter of continuing debate. The collection of images and the narration of the story of Latin American ecclesiology presented in this chapter is limited. Perhaps the most glaring omission is the pneumatological deficit of these ecclesial visions. It is not that Latin American theologians have not reflected on the Holy Spirit but that the ecclesiologies of Catholics and Protestants alike have been more christocentric than trinitarian. In spite of these limitations, it is possible to offer a provisional affirmation of the marks of the church in Latin America.

372

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

The Latin American church is one, holy, catholic, apostolic, and persecuted. Persecution is one of the marks of the church. This should not be a surprise since Jesus said as much: “If they persecuted me, they will persecute you” (Jn 15:20). Persecution is listed among the beatitudes (cf. Mt. 5:11-12). Romero says, “The church is the salt of the world and obviously, where there are wounds that salt will burn. For this reason the church has persecution as one of its essential notes and there are times when that persecution increases.”7 Persecution is a mark of the church because while it remains true to its mission, the body of Christ of Christ will be rejected. A church that does not ruffle feathers or trouble the waters has either entered the kingdom of God or made its peace with the kingdoms of this world. In the Latin American setting, the true church is poor. Poverty is a mark of Latin American society. However, the material poverty of most people in the continent is not what makes poverty a mark of the church leading to persecution. It is when the church made a preferential option for the poor that poverty became a mark of the church. In Romero’s ecclesial vision: “Only the Church which converts and commits itself with the poor, suffering people can be the true Church” (Romero 2007: 276). Poverty, then, does not name simply a social reality but an ecclesial vocation. It is both a sign of the solidarity of the church with the majority of people in the continent and a pledge of hope because Christ is united with the poor. There are two ways of interpreting poverty as a mark of the church in Latin America. On the one hand, one can consider poverty as the mark of the church. The problem with this interpretation is that it shifts the identity of the church from God to the poor. When this Copernican revolution occurs, the church is relegated to the role of a spiritual NGO, one more special interest or advocacy group. On the other hand, one can consider poverty as a mark of the church or as a criterion for interpreting the marks of the Latin American church. The history and images of the church considered in this chapter contain this fundamental ambiguity. For some liberation theologians, one starts from the poor and discovers Christ. For others, one starts from the poor Christ and discovers the poor of Christ. The ecclesiologies explored in this chapter are most surefooted when they follow the second path. Following Christ necessarily includes commitment to the poor but the reverse is not true. One can be committed to the poor without following Christ. When this christological path is followed, the ecclesiologies studied here can be understood as both Latin American and catholic; they contribute their unique voice within a larger symphony. The church is one, holy, catholic, apostolic, and poor in union with the one who became poor and preached good news to the poor. Interpreted in this way, the mark of poverty is an articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae in Latin America and beyond.

REFERENCES Adorno, R. (2000), Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru, Austin: University of Texas. Arias, M. (1980), Venga tu reino: La memoria subversiva de Jesús, México: Casa Unida de Publicaciones. Bellarmine, R. (2015), On the Marks of the Church, Post Falls: Mediatrix.

Romero recalls Leo XIII saying as much. When asked about the marks of the church, he replied, “There are the four known ones: One, holy, catholic, and apostolic. Let us add another one: persecuted” (2005b: 117). 7

LIBERATION ECCLESIOLOGY IN LATIN AMERICA

 373

Boff, L. (1972), Jesus Christo Libertador: Ensaio de Cristologia Crítica para nosos Tempo, Petrópolis: Editora Voces Ltda. Boff, L. ([1977] 1986), Ecclesiogenesis: The Base Communities Reinvent the Church, trans. R. R. Barr, Maryknoll: Orbis. Calvin, J. ([1559] 1960), Institutes of the Christian Religion, Vol. 2, ed. J. T. McNeill, trans. F. L. Battles, Louisville: Westminster John Knox. Cardenal, E. (2010), The Gospel in Solentiname, Maryknoll: Orbis. Casas, B. (1990), Obras Completas 2. De unico vocationis modo, Madrid: Alianza Editorial. Castro, E. (1985), Sent Free: Mission and Unity in the Perspective of the Kingdom for Mission, Geneva: World Council of Churches. Catholic Council of Latin American Bishops. (2014), Las Cinco Conferencias Generales del Episcopado Latinoamericano, Bógota: CELAM. Cavanaugh, W. (1998), Torture and Eucharist, Oxford: Blackwell. Colón-Emeric, E. (2018), Óscar Romero’s Theological Vision: Liberation and the Transfiguration of the Poor, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame. Dean, C. J. (2012), Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ: Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco, Peru, Durham: Duke University. Dussel, E. (1981), A History of the Church in Latin America: Colonialism to Liberation, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Ellacuría, I. (1990), “El pueblo de crucificado,” in I. Ellacuría and J. Sobrino (eds.), Mysterium Liberationis: Conceptos fundamentales de la teología de la liberación, Vol. 2, 189–216, Madrid: Editorial Trotta. Francis, Evangelii Gaudium: Apostolic Exhortation on the Proclamation of the Gospel in the Today’s World, November 24, 2013, http://w2​.vatican​.va​/content​/francesco​/en​/apost​ _exhortations​/documents​/papa​-francesco​_esortazione​-ap​_20131124​_evangelii​-gaudium​.html García Rubio, A. (2007), “Em direção à V Conferência Geral do Episcopado da AL e do Caribe: fidelidade ao legado de Medellín?,” Atualidade Teológica 11 (25): 9–42. Gebara, I. and M. Bingemer (1989), Mary, Mother of God, Mother of the Poor, Maryknoll: Orbis. Guaman Poma de Ayala, F. ([1615] 2006), The First New Chronicle and Good Government, trans. D. Frye, Indianapolis: Hackett. Gutierrez, G. (1970), “Notes for a Theology of Liberation,” Theological Studies 31 (22): 243–61. Gutierrez, G. (1996), Gustavo Gutierrez: Essential Writings, ed. J. B. Nickoloff, Maryknoll: Orbis. Kerber, G. (2013), “Teología de la liberación y movimiento ecuménico: breve reflexión desde una práctica,” Horizonte 11 (32): 1813–26, 1820. Larkin, B. (2016), “Tridentine Catholicism in the New World,” in V. Garrard-Burnett, P. Freston, and S. C. Dove (eds.), Cambridge History of Religions in Latin America, 107–32, New York: Cambridge University. LimaVaz, H. (1968), “Igreja-reflexo vs. Igreja-fonte,” Cadernos brasileiros (46): 17–22. López Trujillo, A. (1980), “Tendencias eclesiológicas en América Latina,” in De Medellín a Puebla, 137–213, Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos. Martinez, R., ed. (1996), Mil voces para celabrar, Nashville: United Methodist Publishing House. Methol Ferré, A. and A. Metalli (2006), La América Latina del siglo XXI, Buenos Aires: Ehasa. Míguez Bonino, J. (1975), Doing Theology in a Revolutionary Situation, Minneapolis: Augsburg.

374

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Padilla, C. R. (1971), “A Steep Climb Ahead for Theology in Latin America,” Evangelical Missions Quarterly 2 (7): 99–106, 100. Romero, O. (2005a), La voz de los sin voz: La palabra viva de Monseñor Romero, San Salvador: UCA Editores. Romero, O. (2005b), Homilías: Monseñor Óscar A. Romero, Vol. 1, ed. M. Cavada Diez, San Salvador: UCA Editores. Romero, O. (2005c), Homilías: Monseñor Óscar A. Romero, Vol. 2, M. ed. Cavada Diez, San Salvador: UCA Editores. Romero, O. (2006), Homilías: Monseñor Óscar A. Romero, Vol. 3, M. ed. Cavada Diez, San Salvador: UCA Editores. Romero, O. (2007), Homilías: Monseñor Óscar A. Romero, Vol. 4, ed. M. Cavada Diez, San Salvador: UCA Editores. Romero, O. (2008), Homilías: Monseñor Óscar A. Romero, Vol. 5, ed. M. Cavada Diez, San Salvador: UCA Editores. Saranyana, J. I., ed. (2002), Teología en América Latina, Vol. III: El siglo de las teologías latinamericanistas (1899–2001), Vervuert: Iberoamericana. Scannone, J. C. (1997), “Perspectivas eclesiológicas de la ‘teología del pueblo’ en la Argentina,” in Fernando Chica Arellano, S. Panizzolo and Harald Wagner (eds.), Ecclesia tertii millenii advenientis, Omaggio a P. Angel Antón, professore di ecclesiologia alla Pontificia Università Gregoriana nel suo 70º cumpleanno, 686–704, Casale Monferrato: PIEME. Scannone, J. C. (2016), “Pope Francis and the Theology of the People,” Theological Studies 77 (1): 118–35. Second Vatican Council. Lumen Gentium, November 21, 1964. http://www​.vatican​.va​/archive​/ hist​_councils​/ii​_vatican​_council​/documents​/vat​-ii​_const​_19641121​_lumen​-gentium​_en​.html Sobrino, J. (1974), Cristología desde América Latina, Río Hondo: Centro de Reflexión. Sobrino, J. (2008), No Salvation Outside the Poor: Prophetic-Utopic Essays, Maryknoll: Orbis. Solís Paz, M. (2001), “El Impacto de la Teología de la Misión Integral en la Iglesia Evangélica Latinoamericana,” Revista Iglesia y Misión (78): 1–12. Vigil, J. M. and Ángel Torredas (1988), Misas centroamericanas: Transcripción y Comentario Teológico, Managua: Centro Ecuménico Antonio Valdivieso.

Chapter TWENTY-FIVE

Gender and Ecclesiology NATALIE CARNES

INTRODUCTION The conjunction of gender with ecclesiology does not generate a single, neatly contained problematic. It spawns a tangle of questions, concerns, and histories regarding how Christians have related to the church. It spans issues of how Christians have described, organized, and practiced church, and how they have reflected on those activities. In short, the topic of gender and ecclesiology is large; it contains multitudes. In what follows, I thread a path through the multitudes by following three central thematics: construing the gender of the church; negotiating gender in the church; and strategies of feminist ecclesiology. What emerges is a picture of how gender has always been central to the conceptualization and performance of church, and a set of questions about how to move forward given the ways that history has been laced with damage, particularly for women and LGBTQ individuals.

THE GENDER OF THE CHURCH The church given to the faithful in Scripture is already gendered. “Husbands, love your wives,” the author of the epistle to the Ephesians enjoins his readers, “as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25 NRSV). The extended analogy moves from the command that wives submit to their husbands to the nuptial mystery of two becoming one flesh. Weaving between the relation of husband and wife and that of Christ and the church, the passage has a complex, often troubling legacy. On the one hand, it has been used to cement oppressive political arrangements both within the church and in sociopolitical life more broadly. On the other, it advances one of the most enduring metaphors in Christianity: the church as the bride of Christ. In doing so, it reinterprets for the New Testament the Old Testament’s descriptions of Israel as God’s beloved, and it authorizes a reading of the Song of Songs in which the bridegroom is Christ and the bride is the church—and Mary. The association of Mary with the church was forged early in Christian history, even apart from interpretations of the Song of Songs. It is expressed at least as early as Clement of Alexandria (d. 215), and some argue that it is implicitly present in the Eve– Mary juxtapositions of Justin, Irenaeus, and Tertullian in the second and third centuries (Semmelroth 1963: 39–42). After those early figures, the tradition lived on in some of the most momentous theologians of the fourth and fifth centuries: Epiphanius of Salamis, Ambrose of Milan, Augustine of Hippo, Jerome, and Cyril of Alexandria. Expounding a particularly influential approach to Mary’s relation to the church, Ambrose called

376

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Mary an image (figura) and type of the church, while Jerome solidified the Mary–church connection through his interpretation of the Song of Songs. Shortly after their deaths, the church acquired Mary’s title, affirmed in the Council of Ephesus (431), of Theotokos, Mother of God. Still later, the church and Mary shared the titles of the Our Lady litanies (Jelly 2000: 437). As Mary was imagined as a figura of the church, her titles elucidating its character, so the church was thought to clarify the significance of Mary. Figures like eighth-century Ambrose Autpertus drew the two still more closely together through the woman of Apocalypse, who crushes the head of a serpent with her heel. In this female character, Mary and the church shared an eschatological horizon. By the Middle Ages, the identification of Mary with the church had become a pronounced theological motif. Commentaries on the Song of Songs proliferated, extending and ramifying the tradition of linking Mary and church, at the same time that Marian devotion grew. Exemplifying the theological strands tying Mary to the church, medieval theologian Honorious of Augustodunum wrote that Mary is a type of the church “which exists as virgin and mother, for she is proclaimed as mother because she, fertile through the Holy Spirit, daily brings forth children through baptism. But she is said to be virgin because, serving inviolate the purity of faith, she is not corrupted by vicious heresy” (Augustodunensis 1991: 52; quoted in Griffiths 2011: xl). As she shares her titles, so Mary shares with the church her paradoxical virgin motherhood; both are fertile and yet chaste. Though Protestantism did not continue the association of Mary with the church—nor the gendering of the church as feminine more broadly—the Mary–church connection remained important into modernity for Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. The Catholic Church, for its part, explicated both the Marian dogmas and the ecclesiologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by drawing on patristic and medieval theologies correlating Mary and the church. For example, Lumen Gentium, the dogmatic constitution of the Second Vatican Council, describes Mary as “pre-eminent and as a wholly unique member of the  Church” and as the church’s “type and outstanding model in faith and charity” (Pope Paul VI 1964: 53). Drawing on traditions from Hugo Rahner and Ambrose of Milan, Pope Paul VI also named Mary Mater Ecclesiae to honor the way her body held Christ’s own, rendering her the caretaker and prefigurement of the church to come. Pope John Paul II reaffirmed the Mary–church typology in his encyclical Redemptoris Mater (RM), where he underscores the intricate Mary–church connections in Pope Paul VI (Pope John Paul II 1987: 47). In RM, Mary is the mother of Christ who becomes the mother of all humanity and the mother of the church, and her multifaceted motherhood also speaks to the church’s own motherhood. Drawing the nuptial metaphor into his account of motherhood, Pope John Paul II claims that Mary’s yes to God and intimacy with Christ “prefigures the Church’s condition as spouse and mother” (Pope John Paul II 1987: 1). Elsewhere, Pope John Paul II quotes Ambrose’s affirmation of Mary’s likeness to the church in terms of her status as betrothed, virginal, immaculate, bridal, fertile, and generative (Pope John Paul II 1987: 11). These gendered descriptions of Mary passed on to the church, imagining the church through a particular vision of the feminine. In Eastern Orthodoxy, the bonds between ecclesiology and Mariology have been no less powerful. Not only do the Orthodox faithful continue the tradition of referring to the church by the Marian title of Theotokos, but they also give Mary the ecclesial title of “All-Holy” (Panagia). One of the twentieth century’s most prominent Eastern Orthodox theologians, Alexander Schmemann, even describes Mary as an icon of the church. In his ecclesiology, Schmemann sees himself as recovering what he calls the “feminine” or “Mariological” dimensions of the church—including joy, beauty, and ultimate reality—

GENDER AND ECCLESIOLOGY

 377

which for him surpass the “masculine” elements of forms, structures, and leadership. “Mary,” he insists, “is the secret joy of all that the Church does in this world. It is she who can and will purify the world, not priest’s unions and masses of protest” (Schmemann 1970: 32). Schmemann’s discussion of Mary and the feminine occurs, like the Mary–church theology of twentieth-century Catholic documents, at a high level of abstraction, and his essay displays the precariousness of interpreting what this valuation of an abstracted feminine might mean for the lives of actual women. Discussing the feminine dimensions of the church, he writes, “We men are, to be sure, co-workers with God. We are the heads of families, churches, institutions, etc. We become bishops, priests, superintendants [sic]. Unfortunately, some women today think that they should also become priests and bishops. They are wrong” (Schmemann 1970: 32). Even though positional leadership is devalued relative to the Marian dimension of the church, such leadership is also nevertheless restricted to men. Just after Schmemann’s claim that women seeking ordination are wrong, he offers his own meditation on the abstract feminine in relation to concrete women, writing, “It is symbolic indeed that on Mount Athos, the great monastic center of the Orthodox East, no woman is admitted. Yet, the whole mountain is considered to be the particular possession of the Mother of God” (Schmemann 1970: 32). It is symbolic for many feminist theologians, no less than for Schmemann, that realms so insistently gendered feminine as Mount Athos and church leadership welcome no actual women. Schmemann’s argument illustrates two aspects of the Mary–church theology that feminist theologians often criticize. First, because the femininity of the church is abstract, it lacks a woman’s body with all the aspects of women’s bodies that have historically perturbed readers and interpreters of Scripture (Watson 2008: 465). The relation between “the feminine” and “women” is thus remote, troubled even. Second, and related, even as the church is described through femininity, it is still a male body that is deemed the site of salvation (Watson 2008: 467; Edgardh 2015: 198–9). Then there is a third argument, implicit in Schmemann and many of the twentieth-century Catholic documents, that feminist theologians critique regarding the ecclesial–Mariological feminine: the femininity elevated is narrow—confined to wifehood, motherhood, and virginity, which are all roles defined in relation to maleness (a husband, a son, abstinence from men) (Edgardh 2015: 198–9). This valuation of the feminine endues women with value only by way of men. Is this where conversations about the gender of the church must leave us? Can valuing “the feminine” ever upend rigid hierarchies? Or, must it simply secure them, displacing flesh-and-blood women with abstractions filled out by men? What room does the narrow and abstracted femininity of the church leave women and LGBTQ individuals for negotiating their gender within the church?

GENDER IN THE CHURCH While feminist theology has a relatively short history in the 2,000-year life of the church, the negotiation of gender does not. In one of the earliest Christian stories of martyrs, firstcentury woman Thecla converts to Christianity and loses interest in her fiancé, and so her mother—who wants women to learn from what happens to her daughter—demands that she be punished, even executed. Thrown into a pool of water teeming with hungry seals, Thecla is not defeated, the story goes, but survives, using the occasion to baptize herself and ultimately convert her mother. Triumphing over those who would control her and,

378

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

through her example, control other women, Thecla turns a position of weakness into a position of strength. There are other strong, female figures who find their voice even within patriarchal structures. Restricted from offering commentaries on Scripture, women like twelfth-century Hildegard of Bingen claimed direct revelations of God that interpreted God’s work in the world. Denied the possibility of clerical office, Catherine of Siena in the fourteenth century gained such a reputation from her fasting, miracles, and visions that she gained the ear of the pope. Unable to travel freely in the way that a man might, Julian of Norwich of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries became an anchoress whose words circulated widely even while she remained cloistered. In the eighteenth century, Jemima Wilkinson was barred from preaching because she was a woman—until an episode of typhoid, which she narrated as the death of her old identity. Reborn as Public Universal Friend, neither male nor female, Wilkinson began her preaching career. The list of how women turned attempts to circumscribe their power into new opportunities to realize it could go on. What is different about feminist movements in the church is not that they name women’s attempts to negotiate gender ecclesially in a way that gives them greater voice, respect, or authority. That work has always gone on. But with the advent of feminist theology, these negotiations are no longer limited to individuals. They happen at the level of a collective, for women as women—and lately, for some, with a view to the LGBTQ community. Feminist theologians negotiate gender in an attempt to legitimate the voices of others, especially other women. The first and signature effort by feminist theologians in ecclesiology has been on the issue of female ordination, followed by subsequent high-profile efforts of some feminist theologians regarding same-sex marriage. Focusing on these two efforts—particularly the arguments around the first and their recapitulation, extension, and transformation in the second—offers a window into some of the most fraught negotiations of gender in the church over the last several decades.

The Major Arguments against Female Ordination The debate over women in ministry has touched almost every church in the twentieth and twenty-first century. The churches that have admitted women into ministerial positions have had to give some account of their decision to do so since the assumed default position has been an all-male priesthood and pastorate. But the churches that have heretofore decided not to ordain women have also had to give an account of their own reasoning, for if an all-male priesthood is historically the default position, it is an increasingly contested one. A central document in the debate over female ordination has been Inter Insigniores: Declaration on the Question of the Admission of Women to the Ministerial Priesthood (II), issued in 1976 by the Catholic Church’s Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) and reaffirmed in Pope John Paul II’s 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis. Not only did II defend the Catholic Church’s reason for continuing with an all-male priesthood, it also became a touchstone for many Protestant and Anglican feminist theologians who made their case for women ministers against II’s arguments. It has played a pivotal role in the debate about gender and ecclesiology, articulating the three major streams of arguments against women’s ordination. The first major stream of arguments for an all-male priesthood is a simple invocation of precedent: the priesthood has always been male and should therefore continue in that mode as a way of honoring tradition. The more Catholic version of this argument

GENDER AND ECCLESIOLOGY

 379

includes Scripture by seeing it as inaugurating the all-male tradition, particularly in Jesus’s calling of twelve male disciples and the disciples’ decision to replace Judas with another man, Mattias, rather than with Mary Magdalene, Mary or Martha of Bethany, or any of the other witnesses at the tomb. II quotes Pope Innocent III of the thirteenth century to point out that not even Mary, most blessed among women, was given an apostolic office, so why, it implicitly asks, would the church break with tradition for any other woman (CDF 1976: 2)? History, so this argument goes, has honored these precedents of Jesus and the Apostles by continuing the tradition of an all-male priesthood. To ordain a woman is to break with the entire history of the Catholic Church. A demonstration of long-standing, perhaps even unbroken, tradition does not clinch an argument for authoritative precedent in Protestant theology the way it can in the Catholic Church. Many of the debates in Protestant churches focus exclusively on Scripture, and they reflect a different reading of Scripture than the Catholic documents do. Unlike II’s invocation of the examples of Jesus and the disciples, Protestant arguments against ordination give more weight to individual epistolary injunctions against women speaking in the church or teaching men, citing passages like 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2. Instructions regarding church structures and women’s roles in the letters of the New Testament are read by some Protestants as providing context-independent rules for all churches across time and place, and so Scripture, in this line of interpretation, establishes a binding precedent for an all-male ministry. This case from precedent, in both its more Catholic and more Protestant versions, is buoyed by an interpretation of gender in which maleness and masculinity are conceptualized as more suited to the priestly role than femaleness and femininity are. The Catholic version of this second argument turns to the nuptial metaphor. Evoking the Ephesians passage, II claims that the nuptial symbolism of ecclesial language discloses deep and enduring realities about gender. The document continues, “That is why we can never ignore the fact that Christ is a man” (CDF 1976: 5). Always in the metaphor, God’s people are feminine while God is masculine, and as the masculine stands in for God metaphorically, so men stand in for God ecclesially. II treads a fine line here in claiming that men are more suited to standing in the role or persona of Christ “at the level of functions and service,” but not because of any “personal superiority . . . in the order of values” (CDF 1976: 5). It claims greater fittingness of men for the priesthood—and, like many in Eastern Orthodoxy, even suggests the priesthood is more natural to men than women—but it stops short of naming any quality that would render men so fit (Hopko 1999). In this way, it parts ways with another traditional argument for the priesthood: that women are naturally inferior to men. Drawing on an Aristotelian anthropology describing women as misbegotten males, Thomas Aquinas among others makes this argument, but even while Thomas remains a major source for II, his account of female inferiority is abandoned in favor of this more ambiguous invocation of fittingness. The Protestant version of the argument from gender roles is often championed under the banner of complementarianism. In the late 1980s, popular evangelical theologians John Piper and Wayne Grudem (along with several others) founded the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW) to defend precisely this complementary view of gender. In 1988, the CBMW issued the Danvers Statement, which asserted that the distinction between “masculine and feminine roles” is “ordained by God as part of the created order” and that even a “heartfelt sense of call to ministry” should not overrun “Biblical criteria for particular ministries” (CBMW 1988: 2, 8). In other words, for the

380

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

CBMW, Scripture makes clear that women cannot have a call to be pastor. Yet they claim this does not suggest women’s inferiority. Protestant complementarians, no less than Catholic ones, want to claim gender equality is not threatened by affirming gender difference. The 2000 Baptist Faith and Message (BFM 2000) displays this approach as it provides is own gloss on Ephesians 5, which it interprets as commanding the husband to love, provide for, and protect his wife, who must love and graciously submit to the husband, as the church submits to Christ. Continuing to assert both the woman’s equality and domesticity, it claims of the wife, “She, being in the image of God as is her husband and thus equal to him, has the God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation” (SBC 2000: 18). In its division of husband and wife into separate but equal roles, the BFM 2000 delineates a version of modern gender complementarity still prevalent in some strains of Protestantism. A third stream of arguments against women’s ordination turns on the maleness of Christ. While Protestants look to Christ to establish a headship pattern that mirrors the headship of men over women, Catholics, Orthodox, and Anglicans have an additional reason to look to Christ. In the eucharist, the priest stands in persona Christi, and because Christ came as a man, some argue, men are suited for that role in a way that women are not. The argument given in II and elsewhere in Catholic theology (and specifically in Thomas Aquinas) is that all sacraments must bear a natural resemblance to what they signify, and by virtue of their sex, women do not bear the natural resemblance to Christ that men do. Imagining a woman priest, II claims, “It would be difficult to see in the minister the image of Christ.” The point here is subtle, for turning to Galatians 3:28, II acknowledges there are no distinctions between male and female in Christ, but it claims that the maleness of Christ is a fact that “cannot be disassociated from the economy of salvation” (CDF 1976: 5). As in the argument about gender norms, II here again navigates tricky waters, affirming scriptural declarations that unity, not distinction, between male and female is primary in Christ, while also claiming ongoing relevance of Jesus’s manhood for sacramental ministry.

Feminist Ripostes to the Arguments against Female Ordination How have feminist theologians engaged these arguments? One way they have challenged the first argument for all-male priesthood—the one from precedent—is to point to the disappearance of the argument for women’s natural inferiority from church conversation. The absence of this argument in modern debates suggests the way traditions live, grow, and change over time. All precedents, then, are not unalterable. But feminist theologians also challenge these arguments from precedent by pointing to places where the all-male paradigm for ordination does not hold, as in Phoebe, who is called a deacon in Scripture (Rom. 16:1); Junia, who may have been an apostle (Rom. 16:7); Mary Magdalene, who is a first witness to the resurrection and prominent among Jesus’s circle of friends; or early Christian examples of inscriptions and allusions to women as bearing important offices in the church, even the title episcopa (usually referring to the wife of a bishop but also connoting a set of responsibilities that go with that role) (Macy 2008: 49–58). Feminist theologians also frequently call for opening more roles to women in light of other scriptural stories and passages: the Galatians 3:28 declaration that there is neither male nor female in Christ, for example, the Parable of the Talents, or the story of the Spirit coming on all flesh at Pentecost.

GENDER AND ECCLESIOLOGY

 381

Alongside this strategy of offering counterexamples and lifting out different scriptural trajectories, some scholars advocate for female ordination by reinterpreting or contextualizing the Pauline prohibitions. New Testament scholar Charles Talbert digs deep into the historical and rhetorical context of I Corinthians 14 to suggest not only that Paul did not forbid women from speaking in church, but that he was horrified by the Corinthians doing so (Talbert 1987: 62–71). His argument is that I Corinthians 14 has been interpreted by those opposed to women’s ordination in a manner precisely contrary to Paul’s meaning. Other scholars insist that these passages be read as epistles to certain churches in specific times and places, rather than as universal rules prescriptive to all. Another way scholars and theologians have addressed these arguments from tradition is to invoke traditional theology against them. Elizabeth Johnson does this, for example, in her retrieval of Gregory of Nazianzus. In response to Apollinaris’s view of the incarnation as a union of God with a human body (and not also a human spirit), Gregory of Nazianzus claims that such an incarnation could not be salvific. It would not result in the salvation of the human, who is body and spirit, for, “What Christ has not assumed, Christ has not saved.” Johnson leverages Nazianzus’s point to press against the third stream of male-only-ordination argument, which invokes Christly resemblance as an argument against female ordination. “If maleness is essential for the Christic role, then women are cut out of the loop of salvation, for female sexuality is not taken on by the Word made flesh. If maleness is constitutive for the incarnation and redemption, female humanity is not assumed and therefore not saved” (Johnson 1992: 153). The converse, she wants to suggest, is also true: if Christ assumed all humanity, not just men, then maleness cannot be essential to standing in persona Christi. Sometimes feminist theologians extend this argument by pointing to baptism, in which women as well as men are united to Christ (Butler 2000: 421–2). To claim Christ renders gender ultimately insignificant is a strategy of de-gendering ecclesiology; that is, it frames gender as irrelevant to ecclesiology and the priesthood. Another, sometimes complementary strategy, is to queer it, which is a literary–theological tactic of making strange and untenable certain deployments of gender. Many feminist theologians have pointed out that gender does not work as neatly as defenders of an all-male priesthood want to claim, either in life or theology. II itself both acknowledges and then dismisses the queerness of ecclesial gender symbolism, as when it claims [I]t will perhaps be further objected that the priest, especially when he presides at the liturgical and sacramental functions, equally represents the church: he acts in her name with “the intention of doing what she does.” In this sense, the theologians of the Middle Ages said that the minister also acts in persona Ecclesiae, that is to say, in the name of the whole Church and in order to represent her. (CDF 1976: 5) The priest, in celebrating the eucharist, acts in the place of a “she” as well as a “he,” but this does not mean, II is quick to qualify, that women can inhabit the role of celebrant, for the priest represents the church (the body of Christ) only because he first represents Christ (the head). The she-ness of the priest’s role is supposed to disappear into the heness. Sarah Coakley wants to pause over this moment in which II acknowledges that the priest stands both in persona Christi and in persona ecclesiae. Here, she points out, II names a destabilization of gender fixity, though only to males does it attribute an “infinite capacity for reversal and internal reciprocity” of standing in for both the masculine Christ and feminine church (Coakley 2004: 87). Though the asymmetry of the reversals vexes

382

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Coakley, she underscores that the inherent gender fluidity in the priest’s role ought not simply be suppressed with quick talk of male headship, for the destabilization of the fixity of male and female gestures toward a “divine ‘order’ of union and communion beyond any tidy human attempts at gender characterization and binary division” (Coakley 2015: 97). Teresa Berger also discusses gender ambiguity, which she sees not just in the context of the priest’s role as celebrant, but in the center of traditional Christian theology. Gender roles everywhere are upended. She writes about how Christ was a male whose body was made from and by a woman’s body; the masculinity of the priest is expressed through sexual abstinence that enables the priest to signify beyond earthly maleness; and the church that is the virgin bride is a “chaste whore” (castra metrix) as well as a mother. Berger claims that Mary, that other mother, is “both the daughter of the Father as well as the mother and sometimes the bride of the Son.” What would it mean, Berger wonders, to represent and acknowledge such gender ambiguity? “What if we rendered visible our ecclesial and liturgical tradition as distinctly gender fluid space?” (Berger 2015: 214). Perhaps God the Father, who begets, can give birth; perhaps the Father might have breasts. Perhaps Jesus’s eucharistic body is not simply biologically male but also nursing, laboring, bleeding, and groaning, bearing us to life like a pregnant woman. This gender ambiguity, in fact, goes all the way down through the church’s traditions, into the Bible itself. Elizabeth Groppe draws on the work of Caroll Stuhlmueller to recover the gender ambiguities in Scripture, where the husband of Israel is associated with a maternal womb and Israel is sometimes masculine, other times feminine (Groppe 2009: 166–7). Seeking to honor such fluidity, Kathryn Kleinhans invokes ambiguity to reclaim the nuptial metaphor with a bridegroom figure who can be figured as male or female (Kleinhans 2010: 123–4). Many feminist theologians have pressed the ambiguity of gender in the priest’s role to draw out its abiding queerness—its resistance to a fixed gender—in a way that unsettles strict association of maleness with priesthood, Christ, or divinity. But the ambiguity of gender, for some feminist theologians, is not just in the fluidity of the masculine and the feminine but in the diversity of men’s and women’s lives. Feminist theologian Natalie Knödel Watson wants to insist on the plurality of women’s experiences and ways of being in the world in a way that destabilizes the notion that “the feminine” is associated with femaleness, or that womanhood means a singular thing. “What we talk about,” she writes, “is in fact the sex that is not one” (Knödel 1997: 118). The identification of “the feminine” with females, in other words, overinterprets womanhood, which encompasses a much more diverse set of relations to self and world than “the feminine” suggests. Nurturing may be identified with “the feminine” and yet not all women experience themselves as nurturers. A theologian like Rosemary Carbine displays one possible constructive direction this deconstruction of rigid conceptions of gender might take for thinking about ordination. What if gender were not considered determinative for resembling Christ? What if the church lauded a different type of resemblance, a “performative imitation of the ministry of Christ for the kingdom, rather than an ontological signification or biological replication of the historical human nature of Jesus Christ?” (Carbine 2009: 191). What if women could stand in persona Christi by virtue of a weightier and more expansive resemblance than gender identification? Not all feminist theologians are unequivocally committed to female ordination as a response to patriarchy within the church. Certainly, many insist, it cannot be the sole

GENDER AND ECCLESIOLOGY

 383

response. Watson, for one, worries that it could simply entrench clericalism. Could the problem, Watson wonders, reside less in the fact that women are excluded from church hierarchy and more in the hierarchy itself (Knödel 1997: 67)? Might a revaluation of the laity and congregations be just as important as a focus on ordination? The question of women’s ordination is also the question, as Karen and Garth Kasimu Baker-Fletcher put it, of what ordination means for a distinct ecclesial community (Baker-Fletcher and Baker-Fletcher 1997: 239). And different communities have gone in different directions. The first Protestant churches began ordaining women in the late nineteenth century; many more churches ordained women in the middle to late twentieth century; and many still do not ordain women. The Catholic Church ordains women neither to the priesthood nor the diaconate, but in 2016, Pope Francis appointed the Study Commission on the Women’s Diaconate in the Catholic Church. The next year, the Orthodox Church in Alexandria revived its tradition of a female diaconate (Frost 2017). The debate over women’s roles is contextual, embedded in the commitments and histories of particular churches.

The Debate over Same-Sex Marriage As the debate about women’s ordination is embedded in particular churches and their understanding of ordination, so the question of same-sex marriage turns on particular churches’ understanding of what marriage means. In this way and others, the debates about same-sex marriage resemble those about female ordination. Against same-sex marriage, there is an argument from precedent—in its traditioned and scriptural forms. There is, likewise, the riposte of scriptural and historical precedents otherwise (David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi), coupled with the insistence, from defenders of same-sex marriage, that historical continuity is insufficient reason (Rogers 1999: 19–21; Boswell 1980: 92–7; Tanner 1998: 161–8). As in the second stream of arguments about women’s ordination, there is also an appeal to two complementary genders throughout scriptural and traditional metaphor. There are then the rebuttals that de-gender and queer those examples—arguing, that is, that gender is irrelevant to the metaphors and arguments about marriage or that it works otherwise and more ambiguously than claimed. There are the same invocations of individual spiritual injunctions and prohibitions, and some of the same strategies for suggesting counterexamples and contextualizing passages. But there is one major difference in the categories of arguments against same-sex marriage: the prominence of natural law argument. The natural law argument remains somewhat buried in defenses of an all-male priesthood. In Catholic arguments, it diminished as the argument for the natural inferiority of women faded. In Protestantism, it surfaced in gender complementarianism, but in a lightly articulated form, since scriptural passages more than any thick account of natural law fill out the content of those arguments. In the case of same-sex marriage, however, natural law has been much more forcefully deployed. In one version of the natural law argument about same-sex marriage, both defenders and detractors of same-sex marriage look to modern science to legitimate their understanding of same-sex desire as natural or unnatural. They argue about whether individuals are born LGBTQ, using nature’s apparent plans to signify what is moral and immoral. Another version does not appeal to science exactly but instead looks to the procreative differences in males and females to argue for the normativity of heterosexual marriage. Robert Song offers a variation on this approach, but it leads him to mark the distinction between

384

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

legitimate and illegitimate marriage not as falling along the lines of straight and queer marriages but along those of procreative and non-procreative marriages (Song 2014). Defenders of same-sex marriage respond with arguments about the difficulty of reading a person’s purpose off of her body, and decidedly so under the conditions of injustice toward the LGBTQ community. In Sexuality of the Christian Body, Eugene Rogers gives an excellent treatment of various natural law deployments by both sides (Rogers 1999: 91–126), and much of the debate circles around the question of how determinative and interpretable human bodies are. Then there are other, more complex treatments of natural law found in theologians like Jean Porter, Lisa Sowle Cahill, Margaret Farley, Cynthia S.W. Crysdale, and Cristina Traina, who argue for a retrieval of a natural law tradition that takes seriously the cultural forms in which “nature” always comes to us. They argue that the natural law tradition at its best operates through an inductive reflection on experience that can generate thick yet open descriptions of humans and their flourishing (Porter 1990). This interpretation of the natural law tradition asks: “What are the characteristics and requirements of individual flourishing?” Traina points out that this argument means reflecting seriously on the experiences of individuals—including members of the LGBTQ community and those who feel constrained by traditional gender roles— and deeply considering their flourishing (Traina 1999: 12). This type of natural law thinking opens new types of reflection on same-sex marriage in relationship to human flourishing and the practices and virtues intrinsic to such flourishing. The implications of the new natural law thinking for same-sex marriage are just beginning to be theologically unfolded.

FEMINIST ECCLESIOLOGY As debates about the negotiations of gender in the church wear on, they generate new ways of thinking about ecclesiology. In arguing that women and LGBTQ individuals should be given a greater voice in the church, feminist theologians have found themselves examining the structure, boundaries, and markers of the church—and seeking new modes of discourse about the church as they do. In these ways, the victories, vicissitudes, and even the disappointments in the debates about women’s ordination and same-sex marriage have helped birth and nurture the field of feminist ecclesiology. As in many births, feminist ecclesiology’s arrival in the world was attended by pain. In the wake of the Second Vatican Council, feminist thinkers like Mary Daly and Daphne Hampson became so disillusioned with the church that they despaired of it as hopelessly patriarchal. Daly, for example, called female solidarity the “cosmic antichurch” (Daly 1973: 172). Yet other feminist theologians insisted on fighting for the church, which they claimed as too important to leave to patriarchy. A first wave of feminist ecclesiological theologians that included Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Letty Russell, Natalie K. Watson, and Mary Grey began to shift away from arguing for why women ought to be included in and accepted by the church and toward claiming the insight, “Women are the church and have always been the church” (Schüssler Fiorenza 1982). After all, women were the first witnesses to the resurrection; they are baptized as full members into the church; and they are the majority of contemporary churchgoers. Why, these feminist theologians argued, should they have to ask to be heard by it? To begin with the claim that women always were and are the church is to insist that the church is not something other than the women who want to be heard.

GENDER AND ECCLESIOLOGY

 385

Energized by this insight, feminist theologians like Schüssler Fiorenza, Ruether, and Russell focused on underscoring the salience of women to ecclesial life and strengthening sisterly bonds. Schüssler Fiorenza and Ruether, both Catholic theologians, did so by using the base community model from liberation theology to create what Ruether calls, in her book by the same name, “women-church” (1985) and what Schüssler Fiorenza describes as an “ekklesia of women” and a “radical democracy” in which women fully and equally engage in church life (Ruether 1985; Watson 2008: 469, drawing on Schüssler Fiorenza 1993). For these feminist theologians, women-church or the ekklesia of women is a manifestation of the universal church, which can be transformed by these female communities as dough by leaven. Early Protestant feminists, many of whom spoke from denominations that did ordain women, adopted other strategies. Letty Russell reflected on the church from her own experience as a Presbyterian minister in Harlem. She connects the ideal of women as church with a church revitalized by radical hospitality to become a safe haven for the oppressed of the world (Russell 1993). She calls this way of thinking about church “hot-house ecclesiology” and identifies it with the vision women have for the church (Russell 2001: 48). Writing about violence, harassment, and oppression of women, Russell claims, This, and many other forms of dehumanization of women in the life of the church, are the reason for the development of a feminist ecclesiology which can help us think about the church from the perspective of advocacy for the full humanity of all women together with all men, and in harmony with all the creation . . . It seeks to transform church traditions so that women can experience that tradition, and its practices, as welcoming. (Russell 2001: 52) Identifying four keys to hot-house ecclesiology—the Spirit is poured out on women, the good news is preached by women, hospitality is offered women, and justice is shared by women—Russell describes the importance of feminist ecclesiology in terms of its flourishing of all humans, especially all the marginalized. In her work of finding new ways of identifying the true church, Letty Russell’s work is kindred to Susan Abraham’s. Abraham writes that the church is connected with Christ, its founder and head, most profoundly when it manifests the justice that Jesus did (Abraham 2012: 207). For Abraham, justice is not just one more marker to add on to the others. It is integral to them. Abraham argues that the traditional markers of the church—one, holy, catholic, and apostolic—can only be attained where there is justice (Abraham 2012: 213). Anne Arabome also makes justice central to the church, a move that she hopes will mean that church hierarchy will dissolve as a true communion and dialogue come to take its place (Arabome 2012: 116). Operating in a similar spirit, Natalie Knödel Watson is one of the few feminist theologians to make ecclesiology her central point of reflection. She interprets the mantra “women are the church” to name a shift from the question of what is the church to the question of who is the church. The church, she argues, is a storied and embodied community that can cultivate the flourishing of women in its sacramental celebration of the story of God (Watson 2008: 472). By putting questions of flourishing, story, and sacrament together at the heart of ecclesial reflection, Watson in her 1997 dissertation “Introducing Feminist Ecclesiology” (published as a book in 2002) continually raises the question of where boundaries are placed and why, even as she affirms the incarnational, sacramental presence of Christ in multiple rites and people of the church (Watson 2002:

386

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

119). She argues for examining liturgical rites and opening them up, offering the example of “churching” whereby women who have just given birth are admitted back into full church life. Though this rite has been, Watson argues, too narrowly focused on women’s purity, it can be reinterpreted and reframed to recover more life-affirming layers of meaning (Watson 2002: 78–100). As Watson wants to open up church rites, she also wants to open up ecclesiology, moving it away from roles of policing who is in and who is out of the church. In this move, she enacts the type of work she believes feminist ecclesiology should do: not just argue for female ordination but also “enable us to discern that the reality of being woman makes a difference as to how ecclesial sacramentality is experienced, but that gender is far too dependent on socio-cultural and linguistic constructions to be a fundamental tenet for priestly or ecclesial authority” (Watson 2002: 119). Voicing her worry at the uncritical way some feminist theologians invoke gender at the core of their arguments about ecclesiology, Watson continues, “The aim of a feminist ecclesiology must therefore be not to create a ‘church of women,’ but to critique and re-write ecclesiology in a way that women are not abandoned into the position of responding objects, but represented as sexual subjects without which the church can in fact not be the church” (Watson 2002: 119). For Watson, then, the claim that women are the church ought to lead, not to base communities creating a women-church, but to a re-envisioning of ecclesiology that honors women’s full agency and selfhood. Around the same time that Watson issued her call for a fresh re-evaluation of the use of gender in ecclesiology, Ninna Edgardh wrote her doctoral thesis “Feminism and Liturgy— An Ecclesiological Study” (2001), in which she theologically analyzed empirical data to demonstrate the gender-blindness in ecclesiology and church practices. Echoing Audre Lorde, Edgardh claims “It is hard to dismantle the house of patriarchy with gendered tools produced in that very house” (207). For Edgardh, that means reevaluating symbol, liturgy, language, and other tools of meaning-making for the gendered assumptions they embed and reiterate. Calling for churches to become “spaces for transcendence and transformation,” Edgardh wants to explore the ecclesiological “cracks” that suggest the possibility for imagining a world beyond oppressive norms regarding gender, race, and class. Continuing this focus on oppression, Marcella Althaus-Reid worked on some feminist ecclesiological themes—de-policing the boundaries of the church, making justice central, and the flourishing of those in the margins—within a framework she called “Indecent Theology” or “Queer Theology.” While she did not write ecclesiology as traditionally understood, she did reflect on the church’s practices, symbols, and images. As she advocated for a radical break with the history of the church, she also saw this break as reclaiming, rather than repudiating, the church. She writes, “Queer theologies do not disregard church tradition.” Instead, queer theologies render traditions strange by highlighting and recovering what was excluded or suppressed (Althaus-Reid 2003: 8). At the same time, the gathering of forgotten struggles for justice and sites of love that queering theological sources entails also means disruption. Ironically, it is this disruption of the church’s current identity that makes space to recover the true traditions and true identity of the church. Althaus-Reid thus claims, “Queer holiness”—that site of “decolonisation and ideological unmasking”—is “a privileged space for the envisioning of a new ecclesiology” (Althaus-Reid 2003: 5). Althaus-Reid’s approach of coupling queer theory with Christian theology has influenced Linn Tonstad’s approach to ecclesiology. Tonstad expounds an “ecclesiology of nonreproduction” or, more provocatively, an “abortive ecclesiology” that resists any

GENDER AND ECCLESIOLOGY

 387

claim of possessing the body of Christ and disavows any attempt at reproducing itself. In conversation with queer critical theory, Tonstad contrasts her vision for the church— as “a sign of judgment, transformation, and the nonpossessible body of God”—against the ecclesiological imaginings prevalent in much contemporary theology, for which the church is “God’s living body and a sign–symbol of fidelity to God’s order” (Tonstad 2016: 257). Tonstad critiques this latter mode of ecclesiology for failing to attend sufficiently to the ascension, which names the absence of Christ’s resurrected body. The fantasy of possessing Christ’s resurrected body, she asserts, then funds attempts to secure the ongoing presence through modes of reproduction that exclude difference and loss, like virginity and heterosexual marriage. But Tonstad wants an apocalyptic ecclesiology in which the church comes to terms with the loss of Christ’s body and so is shaped not by a fantasy of possession but by the hope of Christ’s return. She calls this “abortive ecclesiology,” for it names “the end of history’s reproduction of sameness” and the end of exclusive claims to goodness and finality (Tonstad 2016: 273). Tonstad’s work runs from the more directly political side of feminist ecclesiology—engaging the arguments about female ordination—to the more conceptual side of critiquing certain ecclesiological commitments, thus showing in her own work the deep connection between the two.

CONCLUSION In the end, the three different areas of reflection on gender and ecclesiology—the gender of the church, gender in the church, and feminist ecclesiology—are more integrated than may initially appear. Gendering the church as female has been used in arguments against female ordination and same-sex marriage, and in responding to those arguments, feminist theologians have reflected on what the church is, what it ought to be, and how best to conceive of it—questions that generated the field of feminist ecclesiology. The questions these histories raise are various and span all three areas of gender and ecclesiology. They include: What possibilities, if any, are there for continuing to speak about the church as female or as identified with Mary in a way that does not participate in the suppression of women’s voices? If there are none, what are the faithful to do with the nuptial metaphor, and what way of speaking about the church should replace it? Are strategies of degendering or queering ecclesial language preferable? Is there another option? What do commitments to the flourishing of women and, indeed, all marginalized individuals mean for how to think about the practices, sacraments, and rituals of the church? And how can ecclesiology move forward with less anxiety about policing boundaries and erecting hierarchies? The questions raised by the conjunction of gender and ecclesiology continue to multiply, raising difficult questions about how to bear a damaged legacy faithfully into a new era. Where do we go from here?

REFERENCES Abraham, S. (2012), “Justice as the Mark of Catholic Feminist Ecclesiology,” in S. Abraham and E. Procario-Foley (eds.), Frontiers in Catholic Feminist Theology: Shoulder to Shoulder, 193–213, Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Althaus-Reid, M. (2003), The Queer God, London: Routledge. Arabome, A. (2012), “Gender and Ecclesiology: Authorities, Structure, Ministry,” in L. S. Cahill, D. Irarrázaval, and E. M. Wainwright (eds.), Gender in Theology, Spirituality, and Practice, 110–17, London: SCM Press.

388

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Augustodunensis, H. (1991), Seal of Blessed Mary, trans. A. Carr, Toronto: Peregrina. Baker-Fletcher, K. and Baker-Fletcher, G. Kasimu (1997), My Sister, My Brother: Womanist and Xodus God-talk, Maryknoll: Orbis Books. Berger, T. (2015), “Reflection on the Church at Worship and the ‘Lieutenant Nun,’” in S. Fahlgren and J. Ideström (eds.), Ecclesiology in the Trenches: Theory and Method Under Construction, 208–19, Cambridge: James Clarke & Co. Boswell, J. (1980), Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century, Chicago: University of Chicago. Butler, S. (2000), “Women and the Church,” in P. C. Phan (ed.), The Gift of the Church: A Textbook Ecclesiology in Honor of Patrick Granfield, O.S.B., 415–33, Collegeville: Liturgical Press. Carbine, R. (2009), “Artisans of a New Humanity: Re-Visioning the Public Church in a Feminist Perspective,” in S. Abraham and E. Procario-Foley (eds.), Frontiers in Catholic Feminist Theology: Shoulder to Shoulder, 173–92, Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Coakley, S. (2004), “The Woman at the Altar: Cosmological Disturbance or Gender Subversion?” Anglican Theological Review 86 (1) Winter: 75–93. Coakley, S. (2015), “In Persona Christi: Who, or Where, is Christ at the Altar?” in Eugene E. Lemcio (ed.), A Man of Many Parts: Essays in Honour of John Bowker on the Occasion of His Eightieth Birthday, 95–112, Cambridge: James Clarke & Co. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF). (1976), Inter Insigniores: On the Question of the Admission of Women to the Ministerial Priesthood, http:​/​/www​​.vati​​can​.v​​a​/rom​​an​_cu​​ ria​/c​​ongre​​gatio​​ns​/cf​​aith/​​docum​​ents/​​rc​_co​​n​_cfa​​ith​_d​​oc​_19​​76101​​5​_i​nt​​er​-in​​signi​​ores_​​en​.ht​​ml (accessed May 1, 2018). Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CMBW). (1988), “Danvers Statement,” https​:/​ /cb​​mw​.or​​g​/unc​​atego​​rized​​/the-​​danve​​rs​-​st​​ateme​​nt/ (accessed May 1, 2018). Daly, M. (1973), Beyond God the Father, Boston: Beacon Press. Edgardh, B. N. (2001), Feminism och liturgi: en ecklesiologisk studie, Doctoral Dissertation, Uppsala University. Edgardh, N. (2015), “(De)gendering Ecclesiology: Reflections on the Church as a Gendered Body,” in S. Fahlgren and J. Ideström (eds.), Ecclesiology in the Trenches: Theory and Method Under Construction, 193–207, Cambridge: James Clarke & Co. Frost, C. F. (2017), “Not a Novelty: The Eastern Orthodox Case for Deaconnesses,” Commonweal, May 18, 2017, https​:/​/ww​​w​.com​​monwe​​almag​​azine​​.org/​​not​​-n​​ovelt​y (accessed May 1, 2018). Griffiths, P. (2011), Commentary on the Song of Songs, Grand Rapids: Brazos Press. Groppe, E. (2009), “Women and the Pesona of Christ: Ordination in the Roman Catholic Church,” in S. Abraham and E. Procario-Foley (eds.), Frontiers in Catholic Feminist Theology: Shoulder to Shoulder, 153–71, Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Hopko, T., ed. (1999), Women and the Priesthood, rev. ed., Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Jelly, F. M. (2000), “Mary and the Church,” in Peter C. Phan (ed.), The Gift of the Church: A Textbook Ecclesiology in Honor of Patrick Granfield, O.S.B., 435–68, Collegeville: Liturgical Press. John Paul II, Pope. (1987), Redemptoris Mater: On the Blessed Virgin Mary in the life of the Pilgrim Church, http:​/​/w2.​​vatic​​an​.va​​/cont​​ent​/j​​ohn​-p​​aul​-i​​i​/en/​​encyc​​lical​​s​/doc​​ument​​s​/hf_​​jp​-ii​​ _enc_​​25031​​987​_​r​​edemp​​toris​​-mate​​r​.htm​l (accessed May 1, 2018).

GENDER AND ECCLESIOLOGY

 389

John Paul II, Pope. (1994), Ordinatio Sacerdotalis: Apostolic Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church On Reserving Priestly Ordination to Men Alone, https​:/​/w2​​.vati​​can​.v​​a​/con​​ tent/​​john-​​paul-​​ii​/en​​/apos​​t​_let​​ters/​​1994/​​docum​​ents/​​hf​_jp​​-ii​_a​​pl​_19​​94052​​2​_ord​​​inati​​o​-sac​​ erdot​​alis.​​html (accessed May 1, 2018). Johnson, E. (1992), She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse, New York: Crossroad. Kleinhans, K. A. (2010), “Christ as Bride/Groom: A Lutheran Relational Christology,” in M. J. Streufert (ed.), Transformative Lutheran Theologies: Feminist, Womanist, and Mujerista Perspectives, 123–34, Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Knödel, N. (1997), “The Church as a Woman or Women Being Church? Ecclesiology and Theological Anthropology in Feminist Dialogue,” Theology and Sexuality 7: 103–19. Macy, G. (2008), The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West, New York: Oxford University Press. Paul VI, Pope. (1964), Lumen Gentium: Dogmatic Constitution of the Church, http:​/​/www​​.vati​​ can​.v​​a​/arc​​hive/​​hist_​​counc​​ils​/i​​i​_vat​​ican_​​counc​​il​/do​​cumen​​ts​/va​​t​-ii_​​const​​_1964​​1121_​​​lumen​​ -gent​​ium​_e​​n​.htm​l (accessed May 1, 2018). Porter, J. (1990), Recovery of Virtue: The Relevance of Aquinas for Christian Ethics, Louisville: Westminster John Knox. Rogers, Jr., E. F. (1999), Sexuality and the Christian Body: Their Way into the Triune God, Malden: Blackwell Publishers. Ruether, R. R. (1985), Women-Church: Theology and Practice of Feminist Liturgical Communities, New York: Harper and Row. Russell, L. M. (1993), Church in the Round: Feminist Interpretation of the Church, Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press. Russell, L. M. (2001), “Hot-House Ecclesiology: A Feminist Interpretation of the Church,” The Ecumenical Review 53 (1) January: 48–56. Schmemann, A. (1970), “On Mariology in Orthodoxy,” Marian Library Studies 2 (4): 25–32, http:​/​/eco​​mmons​​.uday​​ton​.e​​du​/ml​​_stud​​ies​/v​​​ol2​/i​​ss1/4​ (accessed May 1, 2018). Schüssler Fiorenza, E. (1982), “Gather Together in My Name. . .Toward a Christian Feminist Spirituality,” in D. Neu and M. Riley (eds.), Women Moving Church, 11 and 25, Washington, DC: Center of Concern. Reprinted in Benedictines 38 (1): 46–51. Schüssler Fiorenza, E. (1993), Discipleship of Equals: A Critical Feminist Ekklesia-ology of Liberation, New York: Crossroad. Semmelroth, O. (1963), Mary, Archetype of the Church, trans. M. von Eroes and J. Devlin. Intro. J. Pelikan, New York: Sheed and Ward. Song, R. (2014), Covenant and Calling: Toward a Theology of Same-Sex Relationships, London: SCM Press. Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). (2000), “Baptist Faith and Message, 2000,” http://www​.sbc​.net​/bfm2000​/bfm2000​.asp (accessed May 1, 2018). Talbert, C. H. (1987), “Biblical Criticism’s Role: The Pauline View of Women as a Case in Point,” in Robert B. James (ed.), The Unfettered Word: Southern Baptists Confront the Authority-Inerrancy Question, 62–71, Waco: Word Books. Tanner, K. (1998), “Response to Max Stackhouse and Eugene Rogers,” in S. M. Olyan and M. C. Nussbaum (eds.), Sexual Orientation and Human Rights in American Religious Discourse, 161–8, New York: Oxford University. Tonstad, L. M. (2016), God and Difference: The Trinity, Sexuality, and the Transformation of Finitude, New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

390

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Traina, C. (1999), Feminist Ethics and Natural Law: The End of the Anathemas, Washington, DC: Georgetown. Watson, N. K. (2002), Introducing Feminist Ecclesiology, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Watson, N. K. (2008), “Feminist Ecclesiology,” in G. Mannion and L. Mudgem (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Christian Church, 461–75, New York: Routledge.

Chapter TWENTY-SIX

Ecclesiology, Ethnography, and the Social Sciences NICHOLAS M. HEALY

INTRODUCTION The church teaches that it is different from all other social groups. The difference lies not merely in its having its own particular set of beliefs and practices, and its own normative texts. Other religions have their own, yet somewhat similar, beliefs and practices, and their authoritative texts may function in much the same way for them as the Bible does for Christianity. But according to the Creed, the church is a unique social group, because the Spirit of Christ is graciously present and active within it alone to constitute it as one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. One of the functions of ecclesiology is, therefore, to draw upon Scripture and doctrine to construct a description of those aspects of the church that constitute what we can call its “unique identity.” The church usually acknowledges that its unique identity is not always easy to discern within its concrete social structures and activities. There are two main reasons why. First, as most of its members are aware, the church is divided, sometimes sinful, and often confused. The church is imperfect, then, and as such is just like any other social group. Second, the church is similar to other groups because throughout its history it has appropriated and adapted all kinds of beliefs, practices, authoritative structures, social forms, and much else from its diverse social, cultural, and political contexts. These two ways in which the church is similar to other social bodies—imperfect, and sharing much—constitute what we can call the church’s “concrete identity” at any given time and place. Or rather, we should say its “plural identities,” since the churches are significantly different, as are their respective congregations, and each member of each congregation, too. The concrete and the unique identities of the church are never separate, however. They can be distinguished only theologically, and even then only in a limited way. For although its concrete identities are partly constituted by its sins and imperfections, and by a long history of appropriation from elsewhere, it is only within its concrete forms that the Holy Spirit makes the church’s unique identity a reality that can be known and experienced by its membership. In order to present a well-rounded view of the church, ecclesiology attempts to bring together the church’s unique identity and the two aspects of its concrete identity into a single, “binocular” perspective. The primary reason for doing so is that ecclesiology’s function is not simply to get our thinking about the church correct, but to get it correct enough that we can help the church’s unique reality be more present, effective, and experienced in and through its concrete structures and practices.

392

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

ECCLESIOLOGY: THE CONCRETE AND THE UNIQUE For the most part, modern ecclesiology has tended to begin with, and focus upon, describing and supporting the church’s doctrine of its unique identity—its radical, grace-enabled difference from all other social groups. Theologians do this with good reason, for it can deepen our awareness of the unique qualities of the church and prompt church reforms. They sometimes organize their descriptions of the church by means of a traditional name, such as “body of Christ,” “Sacrament,” “Temple of the Spirit.” Or they may use a perfection term, such as “communion,” or a primary function, such as “herald” (for “models,” see Dulles 1987; for an example, Brunner 1952). The same concern for the uniqueness of the church is evident in ecclesiological sections within most large-scale systematic theologies. Because the church’s uniqueness can be present and manifest only in practices and structures that are found in more or less similar forms elsewhere, any ecclesiology must decide how to construe the relation between the unique identity of the church and the various forms of its concrete identity, and whether they are sinful, imperfect, or appropriate. Not infrequently, that construal must take the form of a struggle to free the church from something sinful or erroneous that has found a way into its concrete identity that obscures or is contrary to its unique identity. A classic example would be the Barmen Declaration of 1934, which courageously rejected the German Christian Movement’s promotion of its sinful ideology. A very early example of the church struggling successfully to discern the concrete implications of its unique identity is the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15). Barmen’s judgment was obviously correct. But many judgments have been made that at one time might have seemed reasonable, but which now may seem to confuse imperfect elements of the church’s concrete identity as compatible with, and perhaps even part of, its unique identity. This confusion may be seen in some of the papal responses to modernity. For example, in his Syllabus of Errors (Pius IX 1864), Pius IX writes as if it is a given that, when his teaching is incompatible with modern sociocultural developments, those developments are necessarily wrong. He further assumes that, because he is the pope, he has absolute authority to decide political and social matters that affect the church, and may rightfully expect all Catholics to accept his judgments without hesitation. A somewhat similar example is the Ultramontanism of Pope Pius X’s Vehementer Nos (Pius X 1906). Pius sought to rid his church of what he considered to be anti-Christian cultural influences on the laity. He did so by teaching that it is the role of the laity to be completely obedient to the authoritative teaching of the magisterium (Pius X 1906: par. 8). Both popes were highly intelligent and very well intentioned. But due to their formation within the concrete church of their time, it can be argued that they treated what was originally a non-Christian absolutism as if it were a necessary element of the church’s concrete identity, and quite possibly of its unique identity. These examples could easily be multiplied because the church cannot exist as a concrete social entity without appropriating some products of non-Christian societies and cultures for its own use. Nor does it have much control over this activity, since few of its members live solely within the church, and most Christians, including the church’s leadership, may be formed as much or more by their lives outside their church. Accordingly, an important function of theological controversy is to help the church sort out which among non-Christian products are compatible with the gospel, which need modification and how much, and which among those that already constitute its concrete identity should be

ECCLESIOLOGY, ETHNOGRAPHY, AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

 393

rejected—and to do this in terms of the church’s unique identity as one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. In their attempts to fulfill this function, theologians will benefit—or so this chapter will argue—if they acquire some of the critical insights of social science, particularly those developed in recent years. It was social–scientific work that, for example, made it possible for theologians to help the church come to acknowledge and address some of the cultural vices it has not only encouraged, but at times has confused, with what makes it one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, such as absolutism, classism, racism, and sexism. There is much to be learned, too, from ethnographic descriptions of congregations, not least because they can point to questionable sociological and theological assumptions about how the church and its members actually live, and how they should live.

CRITIQUES OF RELIGION The perspectives and agendas of non-theological accounts of social groups have changed significantly over the past two centuries. By and large, there has been a broad movement away from describing religious bodies according to some non-theological theory, and toward describing religious groups rather more in terms of their members’ selfunderstanding and experience. Initially, non-theological treatments of religion arose within the broad-scale social theories of modernity that in different ways ruled out any notion that the church could have a unique identity. Theologians who accepted Kant’s arguments against the possibility of any knowledge of God found it difficult to describe the church as anything more than a particular version of a generic moral–religious community. Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud developed competing theories to show that religion could not possibly be what religious people think it is, and they explained in anti-religious terms why religious people are so mistaken in their self-understanding. Considered in light of such thorough-going attacks, the responses of Pius IX and Pius X noted above appear quite reasonable, given the options then available to them and to those they cared for. The rise of Protestant Fundamentalism can also be construed as a similarly appropriate response, given the lack of alternatives. More recently it has become possible to argue that the overarching scope of each of these nineteenth- and early twentieth-century critiques undermines the others, and that religious belief is left relatively unscathed by all of them. Yet some elements of these grand theories have been helpful, mostly because they offer critical tools for gaining fresh insight into the church’s concrete identity, particularly in regards to its historical development, internal dynamics, and structures of power.

SOCIOLOGIES OF RELIGION Unlike such large-scale critiques, recent sociology generally seeks to describe and to understand religion and religious social groups rather than to explain them in terms that undermine their own self-understanding. But it has taken some time to get to that position. Sociology has been concerned with religion and the church since its inception. Its two pioneers, Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) and Max Weber (1864–1920), understood sociology of religion to be a science. Because they held the traditional (Aristotelian) belief that every science must have a clear definition of what it studies, they sought to define

394

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

what “religion” is. Each looked to the forms of religion he found around him for his definition. According to Durkheim, religion is “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them” (Durkheim 1965: 62). From this he concluded that “the idea of religion is inseparable from that of the Church . . . [which] makes it clear that religion should be an eminently collective thing” (Durkheim 1965: 63). For Durkheim, then, religion is defined in terms of its function: “what religion does and how it affects the society of which it is a part” (Davie 2013: 19). Weber defined religion somewhat differently, as primarily concerned with meaning, and so having to do with our attempts—individual as well as collective—at making sense of reality in order to live well. Weber is thus relatively more concerned “with what religion is,” its “substance,” than with its social function (Davie 2013: 19). For Weber, beliefs are logically prior to Durkheim’s “sacred things,” since such things require belief. If a religious community worships a supernatural power, it follows that its members must believe in that power, and believe in its self-communication, and therefore believe, too, in the distinction between the natural and the supernatural (Christiano 2008: 5). Some later sociologists have criticized these approaches because they seem to require the reality, or at least the real possibility, of the supernatural. They rightly insist that the supernatural, however described, cannot be definitive of a properly social–scientific approach to religion. However, as the sociologist Grace Davie points out, rejection of believers’ references to the supernatural would “likely . . . exclude a whole range of activities or behaviour which—to the participants at least—take on the character of ‘sacred’ even if the supernatural as such is not involved” (Davie 2007: 20). For example, some people may consider their country, or the “democratic process,” or a national art collection, or the earth itself, as “sacred,” but without the word having any supernatural connotation. We will see below how this issue is resolved in contemporary sociology of religion. A more troubling issue, perhaps, is the obvious correlation between the two sociologists’ definitions of religion and their respective social–political contexts. Durkheim’s definition and his sharp distinction between the sacred and profane clearly reflects the way the Roman Catholic Church functioned in France at that time. It does not apply so well to other churches there nor to the church in other countries. It is doubtful whether the church functions in France like that now, especially with its government’s secularity agenda (Laicité). Weber’s focus on meaning was especially fitting for the Protestantism he was familiar with, and arguably still applies to a good number of contemporary religious people. His influence can be seen in the work of the sociologist Peter Berger, who argued that, in order for our lives to be meaningful, individuals and communities must engage in “world-construction” by developing beliefs about themselves and their reality (Berger 1967: 5). Although Berger’s discussion is nuanced, the idea that we construct our world in order to make life meaningful does not seem to leave open the possibility that, through a religion like Christianity, the meaning of life may be revealed to us. Weber and Berger’s “religion” appears to be little or nothing more than a human construction. Churches come in a variety of forms that reflect the needs and backgrounds of significantly different kinds of people. Ernst Troeltsch, a contemporary of Weber and Durkheim, proposed a typology of religious bodies from a social–historical perspective influenced by a non-doctrinaire use of “the ‘Marxist’ method” (Troetsch 1911/1960:

ECCLESIOLOGY, ETHNOGRAPHY, AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

 395

1002). He rejected the reductionist Marxist view that the churches are merely the products of class and other social distinctions, and sought instead to show how the churches reflect those distinctions, concluding that the shape of “the whole Christian world of thought and dogma [depends] on the fundamental social conditions . . . at any given time” (Troetsch 1911/1960: 994). From those conditions, he distinguished three types of Christianity. The “Church” type can be found in the Roman Catholic Church and “mainline” Protestant churches. The “Sect” type is a “voluntary society” which “belongs essentially to the lower classes” (Troetsch 1911/1960: 996). The third type is “Mysticism,” which privileges individual experience and finds it difficult “to establish satisfactory relations with the churches” (Troetsch 1911/1960: 997). Troeltsch’s three broad types show how sociocultural differences are reflected in some of the concrete forms of the church. Working in somewhat the same line, the social ethicist H. Richard Niebuhr argued that the variations among the denominations are predominantly the product of social–historical differences, which give rise in turn to theological differences (Niebuhr 1929). In a later book, Christ and Culture, Niebuhr nuanced this relation by adopting a more theological perspective that would “correct” Troeltsch’s social–historical approach (Niebuhr 1951: xii). He describes five ways Christian theology has responded to different sociocultural contexts. For those interested in ecclesiology, the book can be read as a discussion of “Church and Culture.” For it is the church and its members who interpret “Christ” in the various complex ways that relate to their sociocultural contexts as Christians and, as they do so, develop their ecclesiology. The typology can then be read, in Niebuhr’s categories, as an account of how the church can be: against culture; of culture; above culture; in paradoxical relation to culture; and transformer of culture. Niebuhr’s conclusion is that there are always too many variables for us to be able to argue for a single normative relation between the church and its social–cultural environments. Niebuhr’s approach remains illuminating, but the church–culture relations he describes are those of mid-twentieth-century United States. His work cannot give—nor was it intended to give—any particular guidance as to how to go about constructing an ecclesiology for the contemporary church. Furthermore, a social–historical approach tends to treat the individual person somewhat reductively, as largely a product of her social group, and having little agency of her own. This may in turn exacerbate ecclesiology’s own tendency to describe the complex relation between the church and the Christian person largely from the perspective of ecclesiology. Later we will see how ethnographic descriptions of congregations into ecclesiology can help counter this by their focus on the local and particular.

“Religion” in Social Science Contemporary sociology has been moving away from describing religion in terms that reflect “Christian and modernist emphases on belief, transcendence, spirituality, interiority and related themes” (Harvey 2015: 19). The Weberian stress on belief was not inappropriate in light of the intense controversies of the Reformation over doctrine. But as Weber himself was well aware, disagreements between rival churches in the sixteenth century had as much to do with social, economic, and political issues as religious (e.g., Weber 1958). The subsequent theologies of the modern period, especially Protestant scholasticism and Catholic neo-scholasticism, together with the large dogmatic systems of the twentieth century, also fostered the assumption that beliefs are the fundamental element of religion.

396

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Two developments in recent sociology of religion are especially significant for ecclesiology. The first is to construe “religion” as a much broader and more complex category than hitherto. Contemporary studies of how ordinary Christians live religiously—a field of study sometimes called “lived religion” (McGuire 2008)—indicate that members of the church do all kinds of things that are “religion.” People “marry, protest, own homes in particular places,” and suchlike, and “these activities are religion, not just religiously informed acts” (Harvey 2015: 5). “Religion” is thus far too diverse, complex, and fluid to be pinned down in a definition that fits all its forms. This development constitutes a constructive response to a rejection of sociology of religion by the ethnographer Timothy Jenkins: “the category of religion . . . is not a good one for sociological purposes, for there is no homogeneous bounded phenomenon that can be so labelled a priori and thus isolated for analysis. . . . To claim that there is . . . is unconsciously to take up a position within the field under consideration, to adopt certain tactics and stakes” (Jenkins 1999: 70). From this newer sociological perspective, a religion such as Christianity cannot be defined in terms of what it has in common with other religions. “Religion” is more like a family resemblance term than a generic concept. It is recognizable when one comes across it, but it cannot be defined in advance. If it is predefined, it is very likely to be misunderstood and large parts of it will overlooked or overemphasized.

Truth and Religion A second development in the sociology of religion pertinent here has to do with the truth status of religion. Christians of various kinds may “experience” the “transcendent”— though few would use those terms. Within recent sociology of religion, such an experience can be accepted as genuine without having to accept transcendence as a reality. It is sufficient that the experience is real for the person experiencing it. It is not necessary, nor is it possible, to rule out the very possibility of experiencing transcendence, for that would be to make a claim—whether negative or positive—about transcendent reality, which is not something social science can do if it is to be properly scientific. As a textbook of sociology of religion puts it: “as long as a person is not lying, whatever a person claims to be his or her religious experience is his or her religious experience” (Christiano 2008: 11). Accordingly, sociology of religion’s working position is in effect that “all religions are true” (Christiano 2008: 11). The question of the “objective” truth of doctrines and whether or not there is “in fact” a transcendent deity to be experienced thus becomes methodologically irrelevant, as Robert Orsi confirms from a religious studies perspective (Orsi 2012). With regard to the church, then, it is outside the remit of contemporary sociology of religion to decide whether or not it has a unique identity, or whether such a claim has any truth value, or even whether it makes any sense in non-Christian terms. Instead, sociology can acknowledge that most Christian religious experience is made possible by life within the church’s concrete identity, and that at least some Christians have experiences of the church’s unique identity. (For Roman Catholics and some Anglicans, this might be in the experience of sacramental presence; for Lutherans, in their reliance upon sola fide; for Baptists, during and subsequent to their [adult] baptism.) The experiences are real and are made possible by the religion of those who experience them, for language is constitutive of our experience. Members of other religions also have experiences that can be described only by using their theological language. Any attempt to explain such an experience by re-describing it in other terms would be unscientific and uninteresting. All this the

ECCLESIOLOGY, ETHNOGRAPHY, AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

 397

sociologist can acknowledge and describe without having in any way to accept Christian doctrine, or Christian experience, as a possibility for herself. With these developments, and to the extent they are accepted within the discipline of sociology, theological concerns about sociology are arguably unwarranted. To summarize: recent developments in sociology of religion include the following: (1) a broader understanding of religion as informing much or all of a religious person’s life; (2) “religion” is a family resemblance that cannot be reduced to a definition; and (3) religious experience is real for the person experiencing it and is therefore truly a religious experience, and must be described accordingly. These developments indicate that social science has become much more useful for ecclesiology in that it can: (1) help ecclesiology analyze and describe the church’s complex concrete identity in more sophisticated ways, and (2) accept the possibility that at least some Christians’ experience includes experience of the church’s uniqueness. As a consequence, (3) social science (of this kind) can and should be used by ecclesiology to help describe and assess the church’s concrete social forms, and, (4) the theologian can use it without worrying that, as a non-theological “science,” sociology necessarily distorts descriptions of Christian doctrine, social forms, and experience by imposing its own beliefs or assumptions about what religion is.

Sociological Challenges to Theological Assumptions A sociological perspective on the church of this kind is neither for nor against any particular theological perspective. As a neutral view it is likely to be able more accurately to discern the sociological weaknesses of theologians’ descriptions of the church’s concrete identity. We can illustrate this point by taking as an example the popularity of communal notions of social formation within the church that began about 1980. Alasdair MacIntyre wrote a well-received book on “virtue theory” (MacIntyre 1984), and another setting out why and how the church should engage agonistically with other “traditions of inquiry,” especially liberalism and postmodernism (MacIntyre 1990). Stanley Hauerwas argued that one’s personal Christian identity should be formed within one’s church community in such a way that one rejects the dominant liberal culture in the United States (e.g., Hauerwas 1991). In the background of these and similar proposals was the work of social commentators who decried what they understood to be the serious decline in traditional American communitarian culture, which reflected the increasing individualism, even narcissism, in contemporary Western societies (e.g., Lasch 1979). The common sociological assumption of these and similar works was that churches are able to socialize their members sufficiently that the churches and their members will become ever more distinctively Christian. This in turn would enable the church community to socialize its members yet more effectively. The reaction from some leading sociologists was not at all positive. David Martin dismissed the very idea that the church can form its members well enough for a congregation or local church to become truly a “community.” He argued that the “forms of communitarian ideology propagated by mainstream religions are based on delusions,” and “do not ‘correspond’ to any reality.” On the contrary, “the emphasis on ‘community’ corresponds to a shrinkage in the constituency of persons influenced by the Church” and “owe[s] a great deal to a middle-class nostalgia about lost community” (Martin 1997: 131, 132). One might note that the word “community” can have a range of meanings, not all of which are communitarian. But when we come to discuss ethnographic descriptions of congregations, we will find indications that Martin

398

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

is probably correct that the church is unlikely to be able to form the majority of its congregations into “communities” in any robust communitarian sense of the word. Another sociologist, Robin Gill, similarly questioned the usefulness of the communitarian emphasis upon virtue ethics and socialization. He pointed out that “virtue ethics, the very discipline which has challenged moral philosophy to take history, traditions and local communities seriously . . . has been curiously bashful about putting forward actual moral communities that can be analysed and measured. . . . Instead Christian communities have become far too idealized” (Gill 1999: 1). Christian community (in the communitarian sense) is an “ideal” that is rarely realized in congregations to any significant degree, which suggests that ecclesiological efforts to privilege it over other aspects of the church may well distort the church’s concrete identity. Perhaps we must be content to think of the concrete church and its congregations—as distinct from its unique identity—as societies or organization within which community can occasionally be experienced.

THE ETHNOGRAPHIC TURN Interest in the particular identities of congregations and other smaller religious groups was stimulated by the work of the cultural anthropologist, Clifford Geertz (Geertz 1973). Anthropologists used to go to exotic places to study “native” cultures. There they looked for “religion,” but often had difficulty in finding or understanding it, because they thought of it according to European and North American models. Geertz, by contrast, sought to understand a culture as a whole and on its own terms. By acquiring such “local knowledge” (Geertz 1983), he could work up “thick descriptions” (Geertz 1973: 6–10; the phrase is Gibert Ryle’s) of what the members of the culture under study understood themselves to be doing, which included “religion.” In the early 1980s, some elements of this approach were adopted by the Lutheran theologian, George Lindbeck, whose interests at that time were in ecclesiology and ecumenism. He had realized that ecumenical dialogue requires something like “local knowledge” of the other denomination’s “cultural–linguistic” system (Lindbeck 1984). The words used and the practices enacted within a specific denomination may have quite subtle connotations that are difficult for a member of another denomination to grasp, not least because they may assume their own particular understanding is universal. Obvious examples might be: “justification,” “grace,” “worship,” “Bible,” and “church,” all of which can have denomination-specific meanings, especially when combined. Beyond denominations, each religion is a cultural–linguistic system, too, as perhaps are some secular systems, such as liberalism, class, and gender. From Lindbeck’s sociocultural theory of religion and religious dialogue it was only a small step to suggest that ecclesiology could benefit if it made use of ethnographic-like descriptions of particular congregations in order to enrich and refine its descriptions of the church’s unique and concrete identities, and the relations between them (Healy 2000). Ethnographic descriptions of local churches can help ecclesiology become more aware not only of the inadequacies of the church’s concrete forms, but also of their unexpected potential. Rather than describe a particular congregation in terms of its denomination’s ecclesiology and authoritative teaching, ethnographic field studies engage directly with the congregation’s culture, its particular way of organizing itself, its way of teaching and what it teaches, its complexities and contradictions, and, not least, its relation to its various local environments.

ECCLESIOLOGY, ETHNOGRAPHY, AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

 399

Congregational Studies The best way to show the value of ethnography for ecclesiology would, of course, be to discuss various examples in detail. But congregational ethnographies usually require a complex narrative that cannot be summarized well, and their focus is so local, particular, and detailed that they cannot easily be generalized. (For diverse examples, see Jenkins 1999; Byrne 2016; Marina 2013; Thorsen 2015.) For our purposes here we can begin by looking at Jerome Baggett’s sociological study of six Roman Catholic parishes in the San Francisco Bay area, which describes each of their distinctive identities. They include a gay congregation, one favoring the Latin Mass, another oriented toward suburban families, another mostly Latino, and so on (Baggett 2009). Each congregation’s “identity” reflects its own set of people and the beliefs and practices that, over time, they have developed into a particular form of Christian living. Baggett did extensive interviews with almost all members of all six parishes. He found that although the congregations had distinct identities, there were significant counter-differences within each congregation, too. Individual members of each congregation shared fewer commonalities with other members than one might expect, given each congregation’s relative distinctiveness. Baggett displays data tables showing the particular set of beliefs held by the members of each congregation, which gives some indication of that congregation’s particular identity. But other tables show that every congregation has a few members who hold beliefs incompatible with the majority. For example, even within a Catholic congregation identifying itself as very traditional, 8 percent of its members thought one can be a good Catholic without believing that Jesus physically rose from the dead, or without believing in the Real Presence in the eucharist; 13 percent believed it is not necessary to follow the Roman Catholic Church’s teaching on birth control (Baggett 2009: 105). These outliers within each congregation were significant enough to suggest that the notion of a clear and distinct “congregational identity” can by no means be presumed, as ethnographers are careful to acknowledge (Ward 2004). Quiet dissent from congregational identity can be found in forms other than belief and practice. Ole Riis and Linda Woodhead argue that religious emotions are important factors in congregational identity, though often overlooked. Emotions are not merely private feelings, they “are active, embodied forces central to relational life—the relation of self both to itself and to others” (Riis and Woodhead 2010: 22). As such they “unceasingly communicate, monitor, and adjust our stance in the world” (Riis and Woodhead 2010: 27). In any given congregation, certain emotions are privileged and others are less welcome. In one congregation, a primary emotion expected of its members might be awe and humility before the sacramental presence; in another we should have warm feelings of family and community; in yet another empathy for those undergoing hardship and oppression; and so on. A congregation’s set of privileged emotions constitute what Riis and Woodhead call its “emotional regime.” The regime fosters the congregation’s distinctive identity and is usually a factor in its members’ decisions to choose that particular congregation rather than another. The effects of a congregation’s emotional regime upon its members is by no means consistent, however, because it “can provoke very different feelings, or none at all, in different participants” (Riis and Woodhead 2010: 98). Like the outliers in the congregations Baggett studied, individual members may have emotional reactions that do not conform to the regime. They may be left unmoved by some forms of communal emotion, or be moved

400

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

in the wrong way. If only a few members are unmoved or reject only a few parts of the regime, it can be sustained. But if too many of its members become emotionally “passive and uncommitted,” they indicate the congregation has developed a “dysfunctional” emotional regime and is likely to suffer a significant decline in membership. Within larger sections of the church, a broader decline in the popularity of an established emotional regime may contribute “to a major re-formation or split” (Riis and Woodhead 2010: 115).

Ethnographic “Testing”: An Example In this section we look at an example of how the “ethnographic turn allows for a ‘soft’ test of theological assertion” (Ward 2012: 5)—in other words, how ethnography and related studies can sometimes challenge sociological and theological assumptions. Prompted by the combination in the 1980s of the emphasis on formation and the communitarian ideology discussed above, some more conservative Roman Catholics began calling those who disagreed with church teaching “cafeteria catholics,” implying they pick and choose among the offerings of the church to find those things they find easy and enjoyable and reject the rest. Those who saw themselves as belonging within the sociological category of “spiritual but not religious”—concerned for their spiritual growth but unwilling to be affiliated with a church—were portrayed as self-indulgent and superficial (Lash 2004: 92– 3). For conservatives, such diversity and dissent within the church’s concrete identity was thought to be incompatible with its unique identity. On the contrary, it was taken to be an intrusion from the contemporary culture “outside” the church that inhibited the church’s attempts to be united, sanctified, and governed by the apostolic witness of Scripture. Congregational ethnographies and historical studies of lived religion challenge the idea that individual dissent is entirely or largely the product of our modern, individualistic, Western culture. Nor do such studies support the view that a more thorough socialization of the members of the church will necessarily produce a more distinct Christian alternative to that culture. It may do so, of course. But it does not seem obvious that those who have undergone extensive and careful formation within the church are on that account better Christians, nor are their moral or religious judgments always better than those who are less well formed. Good socialization can do only so much against sin and human confusion. Socialization is not always good socialization; indeed, it may be harmful and even sinful. Formation practices developed for church leaders have arguably prevented some of them from understanding and admitting their failure to adhere to very basic moral norms. This has recently become evident with regard to the leadership of the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches, and within some of its most thoroughly socialized religious orders. So, as perhaps many Christians are aware, there is no direct correlation between the amount of formation and the spiritual health of a Christian or the church. The kind and quality of formation is key, and in that regard, perhaps some critical ethnographic studies of socialization practices within the various kinds of church communities would be useful. Moving on to the problem—that individualism and dissent is new, or much increased—we find a tendency to idealize or overstate past communitarianism and conformity. Historical studies indicate church members have always practiced the kind of individual decision-making described in sociological studies like Baggett’s and in many ethnographies. They may have new forms now, and may be more openly expressed because Christians in most secular societies no longer need fear any significant consequences from the church authorities. But what the polemic against individualism seems to have overlooked is that there has always been

ECCLESIOLOGY, ETHNOGRAPHY, AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

 401

a great deal of individual creativity in ordinary Christian living (Bynum 2015). The notion that contemporary dissent is a new kind of dissent is perhaps in part the product of earlier historical and sociological studies of Christianity that were distorted by a misguided tendency “to view popular religious practices—especially those of peasants, uneducated immigrants, and premodern times—as highly tradition-bound, passively replicated and transmitted, and not at all autonomously chosen” (McGuire 2008: 64). More recent studies indicate that the religion of premoderns, much like the religion of contemporary Christians, “was much more central to their everyday lives than was the church part alone.” Although “virtually all persons [in any given area] were members of a single church,” since there was usually no real alternative, their “membership was a minor part of their religion-as-lived. Individuals’ actual lived religions were highly diverse” (McGuire 2008: 25). Robert Orsi describes how more recent traditional lay-Catholics— those who are neither cafeteria catholics nor spiritual-but-not-religious—also develop their own particular ways of living as a Christian. They pick out what they find helps them in their Christian life, and they reject what they find wrong or useless, in a kind of ongoing bricolage. Their religion also prompts them to question as well as to accept the church’s guidance. “What the Virgin Mary or the saints have had to say to ordinary people has often challenged the authority, behavior, and, less often, the teachings of the Church” (Orsi 2016: 29). Both premodern and contemporary forms of Christian religion, as lived by ordinary Christians (i.e., neither leaders nor trained theologians), are not all that dissimilar to other religions. Their “performance, embodiment, materiality” is “fluid, accommodative and permeable.” And although “it might be the definitive role of some religious leaders, and of some structuring systems . . . to construct and then to police borders . . . it is the necessary permeability of boundaries, the everyday fact of their transgression, that is more truly definitive of lived religion than any elite imagination of fixed and secure boundaries” (Harvey 2013: 146–7). The view of what Christianity is, and how it should be lived, is thus rather different, depending largely upon whether one is elite or ordinary. The socialization of the church’s leadership, and the usually quite different but equally intensive socialization of theologians, may sometimes prevent them from understanding how reasonable and vital it is that ordinary Christians continue to think and act Christianly for themselves, especially about things that are most important to them. In their efforts to do so, they are not rejecting the gospel nor are they in thrall to secular culture, or no more than theologians sometimes are to new theories or the leadership sometimes are to bygone cultural or social forms. Their primary concern is not to lead or to teach, but to maintain themselves, as individuals and families, in a loving and saving fellowship with our gracious God. Socialization within the church is always necessary. Well-respected descriptions of historical and contemporary church life indicate that the effect will continue to be limited. The leadership and some theologians will continue to be concerned over the parlous state of the ordinary believer, who will continue to take liberties with standard Christianity. But perhaps that is the way the church has always done things, and how it has survived.

CONCLUSION What has changed, though, is that we now know so much more about the social dynamics and structures of the church and about the rich complexities of congregations. Past theologians did not have the benefit of contemporary social science and ethnography.

402

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

And yet, by careful reading of Scripture and Christian traditions, and by an intuitive grasp of the signs of their times within and outside the church, they have constructed ecclesiologies of great consequence. Almost all of them were clergy, and perhaps their pastoral work enabled them to learn much of the lived religion of their congregations. By contrast, those who advance ecclesiological proposals today are perhaps mostly laity, who are much less likely, one suspects, to acquire such close knowledge of their own congregation. Ecclesiology is one of the more complex areas of theology. Yet contemporary academic theological training in ecclesiology has tended until recently not to focus much attention on sociological treatments of the church, nor on ethnographic descriptions of congregational life, nor on the lived religion of the church’s individual members. The immense variety of concrete forms of the church and its members’ ways of living as Christians are constantly shifting as they respond to, and are changed by, the church’s diverse and ever-evolving social, cultural, and material contexts, and by the shifts in the thinking, practice, and experience of its individual members. The sociological and ethnographic perspectives on the church discussed here can help to support or improve theological descriptions of the church’s unique identity, as well as decisions about how that identity should or should not be reflected in its concrete identities. Such perspectives must not be allowed to undermine the primacy of the theological perspective within ecclesiology. But used appropriately, they can help theologians to discern, locate, and describe what is actually happening in the church. This chapter has argued that greater use of descriptions of congregations and their members made by social science, ethnography, lived religion, religious studies, and other non-theological approaches can help theologians better understand the concrete identities of the church, its diverse congregational forms, and their individual members. Understanding church life in all its complexities and tension is surely a basic necessity if ecclesiology is to describe and help promote appropriate kinds of reforms and renewal.

REFERENCES Baggett, J. (2009), Sense of the Faithful: How American Catholics Live Their Faith, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berger, P. L. (1967), The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion, Garden City: Doubleday. Brunner, E. (1952), The Misunderstanding of the Church, London: Lutterworth Press. Byrne, J. (2016), The Other Catholics: Remaking America’s Largest Religion, New York: Columbia University Press. Christiano, K. J., W. H. Jr. Swatos and P. Kivisto, eds. (2008), Sociology of Religion: Contemporary Developments, 2nd ed., Landham: Rowan & Littlefield. Davie, G. (2007), The Sociology of Religion: A Critical Agenda, Los Angeles: Sage. Davie, G. (2013), The Sociology of Religion: A Critical Agenda, London: Sage. Dulles, A. (1974/1987), Models of the Church, Garden City: Doubleday and Image Books. Durkheim, E. (1915/1965), The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, New York: George Allen & Unwin and The Free Press. Geertz, C. (1973), The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books. Geertz, C. (1983), Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, New York: Basic Books.

ECCLESIOLOGY, ETHNOGRAPHY, AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

 403

Gill R. (1999), Churchgoing and Christian Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harvey, G. (2013), Food, Sex and Strangers: Understanding Religion as Everyday Life, Durham: Acumen. Healy, N. (2000), Church, World and the Christian Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jenkins, T. (1999), Religion in English Everyday Life: An Ethnographic Approach, New York: Berghahn Books. Lasch, C. (1979), The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, New York: Norton. Lash, N. (2004), Holiness, Speech and Silence, Aldershot: Ashgate. Lindbeck, G. L. (1984), The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age, Philadelphia: The Westminster Press. MacIntyre, A. (1984), After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press. MacIntyre, A. (1990), Three Rival Traditions of Moral Inquiry, Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press. Marina, P. (2013), Getting the Holy Ghost: Urban Ethnography in a Brooklyn Pentecostal Tongue-Speaking Church, Lanham: Lexington Books. Martin, D. (1997), Reflections on Sociology and Theology, Oxford: Clarendon Press. McGuire, M. B. (2008), Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Niebuhr, H. R. (1929), The Social Sources of Denominationalism, New York: Henry Holt. Niebuhr, H. R. (1951), Christ and Culture, New York: Harper. Orsi, R. A. (2012), “The Problem of the Holy,” in R. A. Orsi (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, 84–105, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Orsi, R. A. (2016), History and Presence, Cambridge: Belknap and Harvard University Press. Pius IX (1864), The Syllabus of Errors, http:​/​/www​​.papa​​lency​​clica​​ls​.ne​​t​/piu​​s09​/p​​​9syll​​.htm (accessed October 10, 2018). Pius X (1906), Vehementer Nos, http:​/​/w2.​​vatic​​an​.va​​/cont​​ent​/p​​iusx/​​en​/en​​cycli​​cals/​​docum​​ents/​​hf​ _p-​​x​_enc​​_1102​​1906_​​​vehem​​enter​​-nos.​​html (accessed October 10, 2018). Riis, O. and L. Woodhead (2010), A Sociology of Religious Emotion, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thorsen, J. E. (2015), Charistmatic Practice and Catholic Parish Life: The Incipient Pentecostalsim of the Church in Guatelema and Latin America, Leiden: Brill. Troeltsch, E. (1960), trans. Olive Wyon, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, New York: Harper Torch Books. Ward, F. (2004), “The Messiness of Studying Congregations Using Ethnographic Methods,” in M. Guest, K. Tusting, and L. Woodhead (eds.), Congregational Studies in the UK, 125–37, Aldershot: Ashgate. Ward, P., ed. (2012), Perspectives on Ecclesiology and Ethnography, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Weber, M. (1958), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Chapter TWENTY-SEVEN

Ecclesiology and Politics JONATHAN TRAN AND STANLEY HAUERWAS

INTRODUCTION: ON SEEING THE WORLD The Spirit of God is at work reconciling the world to God. Just as God’s blessing of all the nations begins with God’s covenant with Israel, so the Spirit’s redemption of the world begins with the church. The redeemed life of the church reveals and anticipates the redemption of the world. Two basic beliefs then govern the life of the church: that the world has been redeemed in Christ, and that the church, by the specific indwelling of the Spirit, images for the world its redemption in Christ. The matter of church and politics in turn rests on two sets of questions. The first concerns how the church’s life, its political constitution, reveals and anticipates that redemption. The second concerns the church’s political relationship to the world when the world, unlike the church, has yet to claim this redemption. At the heart of both is the critical matter of vision. How does the church see itself as politically constituted, and how, thus constituted, does it see the world? Granting priority status to the church accordingly has the effect of saying that God—narrated in terms of God’s activity in and through the church—matters for how one thinks about politics. Invoking “church” issues as a claim that God, at least in this place and in this way, exists and loves the world. The church prefigures the world’s redemption by showing the world what it looks like for the world to be redeemed. The church can be thought of as a special piece of the whole redeemed world, that piece where redemption is already and especially underway. The first set of questions regarding church and politics has to do with this specialness. We will call this specialness “the church as politics” (Hauerwas 2010). Before describing how the church as politics is an answer to our first set of questions we need to clarify something about the world as we are describing it, a clarification that will get us to that second set of questions regarding the church’s political relationship to the world. To claim that the church’s specialness relative to the world is a function of the Spirit’s indwelling—that it is “a special piece of the whole redeemed world,” as we say—is not to claim that the Spirit does not also dwell in and with the world. It is only to say that the Spirit operates by means other than those by which the Spirit operates in the church— traditionally construed as word and sacrament. Both means flow from the redemptive work of Christ, and, as we shall see in regards to the perceptual power of concepts, the latter is only intelligible in light of the former. The world might be thought of, with respect to the church, as that domain where the Spirit operates through means different than the Spirit does in the church, most basically through the world’s natural ordering as creation, wherein the world is special insofar as it is a work of creation.

ECCLESIOLOGY AND POLITICS

 405

Indeed, God’s natural ordering of the world, an ordering that reflects creation’s abundance insofar as it exists at all, is itself a mode of anticipation and the condition for the possibility of the church’s being made a site of redemption. If we are to avoid an infelicitous dualism between nature and grace we need to emphasize that the church’s being made a site of God’s redemptive work in Christ requires that God’s redemption unfold continuously with God’s originating and sustaining presence in creation.1 Rather than compensating for some fundamental lack or filling an unnatural vacuum, the grace of Christ elevates nature by extending God’s originating and sustaining abundance already present in and as creation. While grace arrives alien in the world of sin it does not arrive alien in the world as such. Discerning the Spirit’s extra-ecclesial operations in the world is the concern of the second set of questions regarding church and politics. The chief task of the church in its political relationship with the world is to acknowledge the Spirit’s operations beyond the church, which in part entails differentiating that work from the Spirit’s operations in the church.2 Christians viewing the Spirit at work both in the church and beyond the church requires of them regular negotiation, between themselves and with others, of what they mean when they talk about “politics” since that word, like any word, addresses and responds to regularly changing conditions. Such negotiation, and the habits of negotiation, are a part of what it means for the church to be church, to follow the work that is the life of God. The primary resource the church possesses for discerning the Spirit’s operations in the world is its experience of the Spirit’s operations in the church. God’s work in the church is the lens through which the church discovers God’s work in the world. Such a hermeneutic, circular as it is, may appear to limit what the church is able to see in the world, but such limitation is simply the nature of perception (Merleau-Ponty 2013; Baz 2018). Much about politics and church relates to this hermeneutical frame and hence much more about it will be said. For now it is enough to anticipate an objection to our opening claim that “just as God’s blessing of the nations begins with God’s covenant with Israel, so the Spirit’s redemption of the world begins with the church.” Some will object that our claim prioritizes the church to the world. And so it does. But it does so on account of a hermeneutical principle about the formation of perception (Kovesi 1967). In this case, we think that perceptual formation, the ability to see God and God’s redemption, must begin in the place where God has clearly manifested Godself to God’s people—namely in word and sacrament. Accordingly, perceptual formation begins with the imaginative capacities the church as politics enables. To those who would object, “But surely God must be at work in the world!” we would reply, “By what criteria would such work be recognized as God’s?” The cultivation of perceptual concepts through which Christians see begins with a scripturally centered story about the church, a story the telling of which comprises a great deal of the church’s life. Our sense is that many of the controversies related to the theological matter of the church and politics fail to understand the basic hermeneutical principle that observing God’s operations in the world, and judging how the church is to relate to those operations, requires first an account of how God operates at all (Stout 2015). To delineate the church–world relationship in this way—that is, in hermeneutical terms regarding the formation of perception—is thus to challenge two common, but

The current essay largely makes the argument that a distinction between church and world better conceptualizes Christianity’s relationship to political affairs than does a distinction between grace and nature (Hauerwas 2013: 3–21; 41–64, 1998). 2 We see this claim as an extension of Hauerwas’ oft made claim, “The first task of the church is to make the world the world” (Hauerwas 2015: 122–46). 1

406

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

unsatisfactory, approaches to this relationship. On the one hand, those who operate in terms of a sharp church–world dualism fail to appreciate the ways the church consistently reproduces and replicates patterns of the world. On the other hand, those who, reacting against such a dualism, attempt to dissolve any real difference between church and world relinquish the capacities to distinguish the work of the Spirit from the affairs of the world. Detailing the church–world relationship in terms of concepts and perceptual judgments, as we do below, advances a more nuanced account of this relationship, one wherein Christian concepts and speech are not self-contained, stable, or pure, nor is the political identity of the church constituted in a manner undetermined and undefined by entities beyond its own life. The church–world distinction is, in this sense, not strictly speaking a dualism but rather a duality, where duality as a deeply historicist rhetorical device requires its articulation amid the exigencies of human intercourse for its meaning to be discovered. As Williams James put it, “The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. . . . Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its verification” (1975: 97). Neither components of the church–world duality nor the pairing itself are defined ahead of time, as if “church” or “world” were primitive notions, but arise in the place where the concepts are applied and negotiated. Accordingly, the specificity, particularity, and integrity of the church’s political existence is established precisely in and through its relationship with the world, a relationship consisting of both sharing and commonality, as well as conflict and difference. Much of the drama of the church’s relationship with the world has to do with whether in its comportment it makes known the two basic beliefs that we suggested govern its life, that is, that the world has been redeemed in Christ and that the church, by the specific indwelling of the Spirit, images for the world its redemption in Christ. Our view is that the church has, by setting up political arrangements that make the world safe for Christians, too often succumbed to the temptation to dissolve the force of the duality’s critical distinction. At those moments, the church–world duality is made to come to nothing as the church nullifies the crucial difference that issues as Christian witness. One way of describing the loss of the necessary duality between church and world is what we have sometimes referenced as “Constantinianism” (Hauerwas 2000: 163–72; Hauerwas 2011a: 156–7; Tran 2010: 1–10). Constantinianism expresses an ongoing temptation for Christians to have the world be the church, to dissolve the very distinction that requires of the church faithful witness. Like many scriptural instances of impatience, Constantinianism begins with a proper attempt to live out the demands of love, hope, and faith. Somewhere along the way, however, Constantinianism displaces the promise of redemption from the promise’s necessary covenantal structure. The Constantinian temptation implicates a confused eschatology that mistakes the church’s vocation for something other than one lived between times, practically unfolding in a series of misguided gestures angling to preempt the world’s redemption. Interestingly, the oft made appeal to Romans 13 in order to justify Constantinian arrangements only works by isolating Romans 13 from the rest of the epistle, including the immediate context of the admonition that begins Romans 12: I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect. (12:1-2 NRSV).

ECCLESIOLOGY AND POLITICS

 407

Romans 13, read in light of this admonition, in light of the church–world duality, would require that in the unlikely event of a Christian coming into political rule, a possibility one should not in principle preclude, certain eventualities follow—for example, not repaying evil with evil, refusing to seek vengeance, feeding one’s enemies, so on and so forth.

THE CHURCH AS POLITICS In Scripture the church is synonymous with the work of the Spirit. This, again, is not to say that the Spirit only works in the church (much less that the church is synonymous with the Spirit) but rather that the church’s existence is entirely dependent on the work of the Spirit. What does it mean for the Spirit to work? Jesus offers just such a picture when he, standing up in a first-century synagogue, reads from the prophet Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Lk. 4:18-19 NRSV). Notice that Jesus’s account of the Spirit involves a distinctly political set of realities. We see distinct aspects of Jesus’s ministry brought forward by the Spirit’s anointing: good news to the poor, release to captives, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and proclamation of God’s favor. Each of these turn out to characterize Jesus’s political career, fulfilling in a surprising manner Isaiah’s prophetic expectation for the Messiah’s political redemption of Israel. God’s Spirit makes legible the politics of Jesus. Luke defines the New Testament church as that body gathered by the Spirit in discipleship and then joined as a body by the Spirit to Christ’s own body. As the Spirit was in Jesus, so the Spirit of Jesus is with the church, enabling what Luke–Acts describes as “many wonders and signs” which describe not only what the gathered church accomplishes but the gathering of the church itself. The miraculous effects of the church on political bodies cannot be separated from the miracle of the church as a body. The church’s effects—say, on the world—are not primarily effects of individual Christians but corporate effects of the church gathered. Incorporation of the church begins with its continuity between the covenant people of Israel and the church’s claimed fulfillment of covenantal peoplehood—no Israel, no Jesus; no Jesus, no church—a continuity enabled and embodied in Jesus’s body which gathers first Jews and then Gentiles: So those who welcomed [the apostle Peter’s] message were baptized, and that day about three thousand persons were added. They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. (Acts 2:42-45 NRSV) One should pause to consider the sheer fact of the church’s corporality, its constitution as a body—again, even before considering anything the church does or says. The noted political theorist Sheldon Wolin in his magisterial treatise on radical democracy, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, acknowledges as much in his estimation of Christianity’s contribution to political theorizing: The significance of Christian thought for the Western political tradition lies not so much in what it had to say about the political order, but primarily in what it had to say about the religious order. The attempt of Christians to understand their own group

408

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

life provided a new and sorely needed source of ideas for Western political thought. Christianity succeeded where the Hellenistic and late classical philosophies had failed, because it put forward a new and powerful ideal of community which recalled men to a life of meaningful participation. Although the nature of this community contrasted sharply with classical ideals, although its ultimate purpose lay beyond historical time and space, it contained, nevertheless, ideals of solidarity and membership that were to leave a lasting imprint, and not always for good, on the Western tradition of political thought. (Wolin 2016: 86) It would be left to theologians like Augustine of Hippo to spell out the church’s innovative temporal spatiality, which he would cast in terms of pilgrimage from the temporal city to the eternal city (Tran 2018). Wolin sees the church as a political entity that introduced a new picture of politics to the world, one that inaugurated a novel way of being together and an innovative vision for human sociality. To take Wolin seriously here is to recognize the genuine contribution of this political arrangement, both how original it was and how much it availed new political possibilities going forward. It is also to recognize that because modern political theory sees the world through a lens that begins by discounting religious community as genuinely political, moderns have been largely unable to appreciate this innovation (Rawls 1999; Cavell 1991). Any political theorizing that narrows its field of vision to statecraft alone will preclude recognizing the church as political, missing what we are describing through “the church as politics” as a Spirit-enabled political innovation. Modern political theory has tended to privilege the nation-state as the primary institution of political life. It would take the efforts of radical democratic theorists like Wolin to open up new fields of vision (Coles and Hauerwas 2008). Taking the Spirit’s work in the church as the criteria for recognizing the Spirit’s redemptive work in the world entails both assessing the career of the church, its relative successes and failures, and discovering the work of God beyond the church. That the church offers a glimpse of the world’s redemption relativizes both what is to be expected of the church and what can be expected of the world. We do not wish to suggest in any sense that the church has or is a fully realized community of redemption, nor that the church can consistently be distinguished from the world by means of its moral superiority. Rather, we maintain that the church’s constitution as a political body is a work of the Holy Spirit, a sign of the world’s redemption to come, and a lens through which to see this redemption in se. The distinction between church and world, then, should be understood primarily in terms of vision, of seeing the Spirit at work. The particularity of the Christian narrative of redemption grants one the critical purview by which to see the world as being redeemed by the Spirit of Christ, or resisting this redemption.

JUDGMENT AND POLITICAL THEOLOGY As briefly mentioned and filled out here, when we speak of the church as politics we have in mind the conceptual lenses by which it sees itself, first, as a political body and, second, in its relationship to other political bodies. The former tends to get lost when attention is only given to the latter. But the latter cannot occur except by the former. The church can only understand how to relate politically to others by first understanding what it means for it to be political at all. In other words, the critical political work of the church with respect to the world is one of seeing as seeing is taught and learned in the church. The church is political itself in the way its corporate life actualizes a vision by which it makes

ECCLESIOLOGY AND POLITICS

 409

certain kinds of political judgments. To ascertain the relevance of seeing for politics, let us turn for a moment to the question of political theology. “Political theology” sometimes means Christian theology applied to political concerns, ranging from the theoretical (e.g., the relationship between contemporary human rights language and early modern conceptions of property ownership) to the practical (e.g., government policies that do or do not reflect Jesus’s love ethic). Other times, “political theology” intends something narrower, technically derived from the academic field of moral philosophy. In this case, political theology deals less with politics per se than with moral reasoning and the use of theological claims for the justification of political actions and arrangements (Schmitt 2006; Kotsko 2018). One might answer the question, “Why did you vote that way?” by claiming some theological warrant (e.g., “Because the Holy Spirit prompted me to do so”). The idea here is that in accounting for our political actions and beliefs, both to ourselves and to others, we appeal to God, or some proxy of God, as the material reason for our judgments. We might do so when such appeals are seen to be pertinent and persuasive, in order to secure them under certain justificatory conditions. Obviously, such appeals only work with certain constituencies, but for those constituencies they possess significant explanatory power. Political theology serves a mode of political rationalization which situates God as its logical starting point—a manner of thought that is politically theological. It can be thought of as a species of political theory insofar as political theory is expressly invested in questions of authorization, especially when authorization is related to the use of power and coercion. Political theology becomes one way, perhaps the ultimate way, of authorizing uses of power and coercion. (Notice that this second kind of political theology can be used to serve judgments of the first kind.) Modern political theory, especially of those theorists influenced by and trained in modern moral philosophy, was for some time hamstrung by overly rationalistic conceptions of judgment which tended to bar political theology of the kind we just described. Haunted by the specter of, ostensibly, politically theological justifications of religious war, political theorists, most eloquently exemplified by the great theorist John Rawls, developed liberal conceptions of politics that could take conflict out of politics and reduce political life to largely procedural matters. These conceptions presumed qualitative distinctions between facts and values, pressing both toward moral evaluations based on facts as empirically verifiable phenomena and away from assessments based on values stemming from subjective dispositions like religious commitments, or what Rawls called “comprehensive moral doctrines” (Rawls 1993). Inasmuch as God was understood as transcending empirical verifiability, political theology was ruled out of the justificatory apparatus necessary for political judgment. Motivating the disbarring of political theology was a picture of moral agents choosing between a host of options they could allegedly see prior to and devoid of values (Crary 2009). Missed is the determinative role moral commitment plays in perception, and that facts and values are coinciding realities. Also missed is an account of normative judgment where value-laden facts are observed as empirical features insofar as agents have been trained to see, even value, them (Crary 2016). In this case normativity is more basically concerned with perception than with choosing, or more succinctly, choosing is determined by seeing. One acts and chooses to act in a world one sees, and one sees only having been trained to see (Hauerwas 2009: 147). Vision, construed here as value-laden perception, is a condition for politics, as the case of Wolin’s radical democratic theorizing has shown, insofar as politics rests on creative judgment and not simply autonomous observation of reality (Wolin 2016: 17–20).

410

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Our account of politics and church presumes the second, more technical, notion of political theology, the one about justification and authorization, and argues that political justification for Christians has everything to do with perceiving morally relevant reality enabled and encoded by concepts that lead to action (Pfau 2017; Pinches 2002). Political theology comes down to the question of political authorization determined by communally trained forms of seeing God. The church supplies the communally formed concepts Christians use to make those judgments. Concepts are the lenses by which people perceive morally pertinent data and act on that data. The data which informs the church’s politically theological judgments has to do with God’s redemption of the world. Christians pick up this data not only in church, but, critically for our notion of the church as politics, as church. Moral action presumes an ability to perceive features of the world that some stretch of concepts determines to be morally relevant. Without moral concepts, there can be no moral perception, and without moral perception there can be no moral action. One’s moral judgments go as far as one’s moral concepts. As Wittgenstein noted, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (2001: 68). This line of thought is what we have in mind when we assert that the matter of church and politics comes down to the question of vision. To speak of church this way is to claim God’s active presence in the world and the church as the means God gives for seeing that presence.

THE WORK OF CONCEPTS Christians are those whose moral deliberations are informed more or less by concepts informed more or less by the church’s historical reflection around Scripture. Submitting to the church entails submitting to the authority of the church’s vision, to see with its concepts, to see as the church sees. The concepts work purposefully toward enabling Christians to see the world as redeemed in Christ. It is the sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit that enables Christians to see the world through these concepts. The concepts themselves become the site of God’s enlivening such that those who possess the concepts are likewise possessed by them. Christians act in a world the Spirit enables them to see by gifting the church with these concepts. When we say that the Spirit first acts on the church we mean that the Spirit introduces through the church the possibility of seeing the world as redeemed in Christ. Christians, as those indwelt by this Spirit, claim to see the world rightly by claiming to possess and be possessed by this sanctified vision. It is no doubt circular for Christians to believe that the world is redeemed and that they uniquely see it. There is something deeply illiberal about the idea that some have been given to see the world rightly and some have not. But Christians cannot help believing this about themselves, nor can they avoid claiming that the Spirit grants them the special dispensation of seeing the world as it really is. They, it must be said, can only see the world as they have been given to see it. To be sanctified in truth is to be given eyes to see the world and speak truthfully about it. It is also important to say, however, that the content of what Christians see requires that they see themselves as continuously in need of correction. They see, but dimly. Their seeing anything at all begins with seeing the deficiency of their vision, the ways finitude on the one hand and sin on the other obscure what Christians are able to see. The first thing that dawns upon Christians upon seeing God is how much more they need God to help them see. This lends a provisional air to their perceptual judgments. Not only do they realize these judgments cannot be secured in certainty, they also recognize certainty as not something to be sought. They learn to be weary of those moments when certainty is claimed, including and especially

ECCLESIOLOGY AND POLITICS

 411

by themselves, for certainty can only obtain for divine judgment. They then proceed cautiously with the actions to which their perceptions commit them. Christian judgment is fraught in this way, hence the strong caution against self-righteousness as a distinct feature of Jesus’s political career. Christian judgments about the world are equally fraught. Christians believe they are possessed of concepts through which God enables them to see the world rightly. Yet the very nature of being possessed of God means that they take great care in how they morally reason. They at once believe they have been enabled to see and that their seeing needs continuous correction. And while they believe they see better than others not so enabled, they believe that the correction of their seeing can come from anywhere, that God uses the world similarly to how God uses the church to help Christians see better. Christians are rightly jealous for their concepts. They, like any, naturally believe that their concepts enable them to see the world as it is, and they will not easily lay down those concepts, unless when, as just described, it is part of the substance of those concepts that they do so. Concepts are employed inasmuch as they work, and so become trusted over time. To possess concepts is to belong to a form of life, and one would no more easily exchange one’s concepts than one would exchange one’s form of life. Honed over time, concepts are trusted precisely because of their specificity, their ability to help their users pragmatically navigate the world. This is a philosophical point. Its correlative political entailment is that people are and should be hesitant to trust other concepts (Cavell 2015; Hauerwas 2011b; Tran 2017). Yet an important complexity arises as part of the political implications of the philosophical point. Difference between political communities arises principally as a matter of conceptual perception. Difference is a function of communally formed perception and communally formed perception is irreducible. Coming to terms with political difference entails coming to terms with this irreducibility. Theologically understood, the irreducibility of the grammar of Christian speech is a christological claim. God is in the world revealing Godself through Christ. In Christ’s career, described earlier in reference to Luke–Acts, God reveals Godself. In so revealing Godself, God shows Godself to the world. Critically, by “God” Christians do not refer to some thing in the world. Christians do not think there are other concepts that substitute for the Christian concept of God. Any thing as a thing (e.g., this present book) can be reduced to something else (e.g., a purchased product). But God is not a thing among other things; rather, God is the Creator and sustainer of all things. Every thing can be reduced to the genus of another thing. Not so with God, who is no thing. As uncreated, God cannot be reduced to any genus. Hence, there are not analogues for God; God as a concept, to put it technically (or grammatically), is explanatorily simple. In giving the world Jesus, God does not give the world an especially effective analogy. In giving the world Jesus, God gives the world God. Hence, no other concept can stand in for God. A brief example will clarify. While Christians say God is just and justly should be worshiped, they do not mean that God can be reduced to justice. By “God” Christians do not mean “justice” but the one who is the source and end of justice. By God Christians assess claims of justice, not the other way around (McCabe 2003). To look for God in the world then is to apply churchly criteria for what is and is not God. Because God is not reducible to some other concept—for example, justice— then God as described by the church determines the course of Christian life. Again, this controversial political point sits on top of an uncontroversial philosophical point about the use and application of concepts. Both points are gathered christologically in the previously delineated idea that there is and can be nothing more basic than the God

412

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

whom Christ makes known. To look for God is to look for Christ and to look for Christ is to look for the one offered in Scripture as shared by the church. As we have already said, the claim that God is in the church is not the claim that God is not also in the world. Nevertheless, the discovery of God in the world operationally depends on the only criteria Christians have for making those discoveries, which is the same criteria that governs Christian speech about God—or about justice. One could object and say that no such governance of speech should be permitted, and that one should not require criteria for the right use of speech; but that would be to confuse the political and the philosophical and tempt incoherence. Put simply, there can be no speech without shared criteria by which any set of speakers governs its speech. Moreover, there can be no discovery of God except by shared concepts of God. Christians derive their shared concepts in and from the church in pragmatic intercourse with the world, and these concepts are the only ones they have for the discovery of God in the world. Indeed, we should say that “the only ones we have” can be made to sound limiting; in fact, conceptual criteria are the condition for discovery and perception itself.

POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT The political implications of this account of concepts, perception, and judgment should be coming into view. The church’s political relationship with the world begins with its insistence that God in Christ is reconciling the world to God. The church’s primary task in naming this reality is to proclaim it to others. But this primary evangelistic task also entails discovering features of the world that convey God’s redemption. The church initially discovers this task in its own life of word and sacrament, its ritual celebration and enactment of Jesus’s distinct political career. Political engagement begins here because it is the church’s life around word and sacrament that grants the concepts used to see God. Seeing God both sharpens the church’s vision and grows its desire to see more of God. And insofar as the church’s claim about redemption is universal in scope, it will look to see God beyond the church in the world, both for signs of its redemption and for signs of God’s activity. Indeed, the discernment of God’s activity in the world is essential also to the church’s self-understanding and its understanding of God’s redemptive activity in the church. Just as the church’s internal life around Scripture and sacrament prepare the church to properly discern God in the world, so the church’s engagement with the world prepares the church to return to its ecclesial life to receive God anew. The church as politics and the church’s political relationship to the world are mutually dependent in this way. On the one hand, the church’s ability to have a distinct political relationship to the world is predicated on its prior constitution as a discrete political body, made available by the evangelion upon which it is constituted. On the other hand, the church comes to better understand itself politically precisely in its encountering other political forms, in its engagement with difference, which entails both proclamation and critical reconfiguration. Theologically, this is to say that by its missionary endeavors does the church come to better understand the redemption it proclaims exactly because it must proclaim it to another. Politically, mission names the church’s relationship with the world wherein it comes to better self-knowledge of its own political constitution. Accordingly, engagement with the world also grants the church opportunities to refine and correct its concepts. Human concepts are answerable to the facts of human life and constantly evolve and adapt with respect to those facts. Human experience, including human experience of God, permits of conceptual growth, as humans project concepts

ECCLESIOLOGY AND POLITICS

 413

into new contexts, stretching those concepts into new possibilities. When those concepts no longer make sense of the world, no longer successfully negotiate human life, becoming obsolete, we leave them behind (Diamond 1988). While human life unfolds in concepts, there is nothing sacred about any specific concept; or more precisely, what is sacred about a concept is what the concept allows us to see. We trust our concepts because they enable us to successfully live in the world, and living in the world through our concepts is more important than the concepts themselves. Concepts are disposable whereas living in the world is not. Christian concepts are those the church has decided are indispensable for living in the world as Christian. If the church were to decide at some point in time to rid itself of certain trusted concepts, it would need to rewrite its history, indicating those past uses of those concepts as confusions of some sort or other. The disposability, or not, that one feels toward a relative swath of concepts indicates one’s participation, or not, in a determinate form of life. Again, our concepts may inform us about what living in the world amounts to, but they are as answerable to the world as they are descriptive of it. Theology includes all those concepts the church has used to describe God, tried and tested over time through the history of its development. Likewise, one can think about the church’s political relationship to the world as a relationship between one stretch of concepts and another. As answerable to the world, concepts are always in direct conversation with other concepts, other ways of imagining and living in the world. In this sense strong distinctions between church and world, present in much thinking about the church and politics, break down inasmuch as they imagine concepts abstracted from the endless interpenetration of human exchange. Christian concepts are always entangled with other concepts, and the vast majority of concepts that determine the life of the church likewise determine the life of the non-Christian world. Importantly, shared concepts become the site where critical difference enters in. It is precisely this sharing—which arises from a shared history of words—that creates the most interesting, and often most difficult, differences. Oftentimes the differences can be worked out or are simply tolerated. Other times the differences arise to the level of genuine political conflict and what follows amounts to nothing less than a contest of competing descriptions of the world, not only different ways of seeing and acting in the world but different ways of adjudicating those differences (MacIntyre 1988, 2017). Though we might like to imagine the difference of Christian political existence to the world in terms of a fundamental opposition between incommensurable forms of life, in reality difference emerges most sharply not between incommensurate traditions but between those with shared concepts and histories.

NEOLIBERALISM’S ENERVATION OF CONCEPTS The account of church and politics we have been developing consists of two considerations: first, the church as a distinct political entity, and second, the church’s political relationship to the world. Both considerations come down to the critical question of vision, and so we have tried to examine both in terms of conceptual perception and parse the relationship between the two. We believe that consideration of either requires consideration of both and that contemporary Christian theology has consistently struggled to keep both in view, sometimes focusing on the latter to the exclusion of the former, and other times the former at the cost of the latter. When contemporary Christianity has taken the second consideration to frame the entirety of its political considerations, failing to consider the church’s own political life, it results, ironically, in an impoverished way of thinking about

414

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

the church’s political relationship to the world. One can attribute this failure to any number of political theories that have incapacitated Christians from keeping in sight both considerations, but at the end of the day, we think the blame falls on the familiar stuff of unfaithfulness which has swayed Christians from the whole range of political obligations. On the other hand, consideration of the church as politics to the exclusion of consideration of the church’s political relationship to the world, wherein that relationship entails discoveries of commonness as well as difference, leads only to gated, enclave politics. If one imagines instead, as we do, that the church’s political identity and the church’s political relation to the world are deeply intertwined, insofar as the Spirit of God is operative in both, then privileging one consideration to the neglect of the other amounts to closing oneself off to broad range of divine activity. What will be needed going forward is a more capacious understanding of Christianity’s political obligations and opportunities. Unfortunately, once one has abandoned consideration of the church as itself a political body, one has not only surrendered Christianity’s political vision but also the processes by which one can retrieve that vision. Conversely, when one considers the church’s own political constitution alone, neglecting its political relationship to the world, one’s political vision is similarly narrowed, resulting in a failure to see the manner in which the church as a political entity is always inextricably determined and defined by entities beyond its own life, especially beyond its own purview, without which it can hardly begin to understand its existence as a political entity. This limitation also pertains to issues of theory and method, but of a different kind than previously noted. At stake here is how one imagines notions of identity, ecclesial identity in particular, and the range of that identity’s social constitution. Beyond question is the idea that identity is socially constituted; what remains in question is the number of influences that shape a community’s respective identity and their relative weights in identity formation. Too often theologians imagine the social constitution of identity as a largely self-contained affair, and specific communities would of course like to think this about themselves because it allows them the impression of stability and purity. Yet, we highly doubt that communities and their social identities work this way. The best way we know to think about this question comes from the fluid conception of political community we have learned from ordinary language philosophers—what we described above as conceptual formation—wherein the constitutions of political communities are understood to constantly shift and refashion under the pressures of internal and external realities.3 Depending on where one sits, one may or may not see how a community is changing. What one can be sure of is that the moment a community stops changing, it has already expired, for to be a community is to be a tradition of discourse that undergoes the revolutions that is the discursivity of the human form of life. Concluding, we will try to show how Christian conceptual formation gets undermined and the resources that remain for its restitution become depleted. A significant present danger to the church as politics is the enervating power of neoliberalism. It is our view that Christians and theologians have not yet come to terms with this threat. We began this essay on church and politics by describing creation theologically. We said that the church is a special piece of God’s redemption of the world, one that allows the world to anticipate

We have in mind here those who have advanced Wittgenstein and Austin (Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, James Conant, Hilary Putnam, Sandra Laguier, Alice Crary, and Stephen Mulhall) toward conceptions of mutuality where companionship and estrangement determine one another. 3

ECCLESIOLOGY AND POLITICS

 415

its redemption. We said that it is critical to see this redemption in continuity with God’s originating and sustaining abundance in and as creation. In light of this, neoliberalism must be understood as a set of threats to the church’s political vision, which is rooted in these theological claims about God and the world (Hauerwas 1970, 2000; Tran 2011). Neoliberalism is a political economy that would undermine this vision by diminishing the church’s capacity to see the world as God’s, threatening from the ground up the entire constellation of its beliefs and practices. Described succinctly by Wendy Brown as “a peculiar form of reason that configures all aspects of existence in economic terms,” neoliberalism aggressively works to commodify creation and extract value from it, over time inverting the theological claim about created abundance/abundant creation to a mythos of scarcity driven to surplus value (2015: 17). Internal to neoliberalism are a host of social forces that justify its operations by the production of subject identities available to commodification and control. Here we have in mind capitalism’s persistent relationship to imperialism, racism, misogyny, and other forms of oppression (Cox 2018). As an advanced form of capitalism, neoliberalism inundates the administrative state in order to press into service its organs and citizens. No wonder neoliberalism has proven death-dealing to democratic culture and institutions. When theorists speak of the end of the nation-state, they have in mind the rise of a political economy that submerges the entirety of political life to economic concern, reducing political mutuality to economic necessity (Bobbitt 2002; Wood 1995). Our sense is that the rise of the neoliberal political economy has outpaced the church’s ability to understand it, especially at those points at which the church itself has been commodified and controlled, itself complicit in the operations of neoliberalism. Beyond these practical appropriations, it has also meant that the church’s concepts of the political lags behind these developments. For instance, when Christian theologians talk about the relationship between Christianity and politics, they remain committed to an image of the state that no longer exists—namely, an apparatus which operates independently of the market and which is not subject to the power of capital. The most fundamental threat neoliberalism exacts on the integrity of Christian political concepts is directed at its basic notions of creation. To come to terms with the question of politics and Christianity today is to wake up to the neoliberal age and its fundamental dangers to Christian concepts of created abundance/abundant creation, that is, Christian ways of seeing the world as redeemed in Christ. Taking the Spirit’s work in the church as criteria for assessing the politics of neoliberal capitalism and the church’s complicity within it helps Christians see the significant dangers the church faces. Remember that we characterized the distinct aspects of Jesus’s ministry as his having been anointed by the Spirit to bring good news to the poor, release to captives, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and the proclamation of God’s favor. This picture of Jesus as liberating, a picture consistently passed on through subsequent generations of ecclesial life, contrasts sharply with neoliberalism’s aggressive transformation of everything to commodity and its reduction of forms of gratuitous exchange rooted in abundance to transactions rooted in debt and exploitation (Polanyi 2001). In Luke–Acts, we see Christ living into a created abundance that had been suppressed by the strictures of imperial Roman life and its reduction of human life to necessity as poverty, captivity, blindness, enslavement, and oppression (Jennings 2017). Jesus’s good news does not so much introduce alien grace within this matrix as much as activate resident possibilities always already present in creation as creation, but subjugated by death-dealing forces. The ability to see the world as such does not arrive as fantasy, but rather by being enlivened to what has been obscured by sin.

416

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

To follow Jesus is to come and see the world differently, a difference we are blind to but to which the Spirit awakens us. Through the enlivening power of the Holy Spirit’s anointing, we see through Jesus’s political vision precisely good news for the poor, release for captives, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and God’s favor. Inasmuch as the church continues Jesus’s emancipatory politics within its own life, it forms amid bodies gathered around Jesus’s body conceptual lenses through which to see the world in terms of the good news of the Spirit’s freedom. Over against enervating ways of seeing the world, the Spirit provides Jesus’s gathered body concepts for seeing the world as redeemed. It challenges discourses that paint the world as bad news, recognizing that in order to do so it will need also to appropriate concepts it shares with the world and rework them from the inside. The incarnational ministry of Christ and the church takes up this work which necessarily entails blurring distinctions that make for difference. Because it holds its judgments confidently but provisionally, it assumes a posture of humility even while aware of those concepts that might render it myopic or blind it altogether. With its stretch of concepts and political vision the church is positioned, and required, to confront neoliberalism. It will be at the site of its shared conceptual agreements that the divine economy of God makes its presence known and its differences from neoliberalism felt. It too speaks of the world, but it means by its terms importantly different things. When its people are able to show this difference in the ways they live, Christ’s good news is proclaimed. When they are not able to do so, the church becomes complicit in neoliberalism’s claim to totality, in its insistence that it alone achieves the world’s catholicity. However, whenever enabled by the Spirit, the church heralds good news, working against idolatries that would imprison, blind, oppress, and speak lies. One might think of localized financial systems that begin with the scriptural claim of abundance over against neoliberal conceptions of scarcity. In the same way that neoliberalism relies on political arrangements that deplete democratic sensibilities, the church, always already involved with government in one way or another, will bring to bear upon the political imaginary what Wolin described as a new and powerful ideal of community which recalls people to a life of meaningful participation. The danger of neoliberalism, theologically speaking, is the way in which it challenges a critical Christian claim about creation’s goodness. It is yet another way we are tempted to see the world awry. In its contrastive political vision, the church reveals neoliberalism’s distorted desires and presses toward a true catholicity, the integration of all things in the gathering redemption of God.4

REFERENCES Baz, A. (2018), The Crisis of Method in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy, New York: Oxford University Press. Bobbitt, P. (2002), The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History, New York: Random House. Brown, W. (2015), Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, Cambridge: MIT Press.

The construction of this essay substantially benefited from the assistance of Nicholas Krause. For Krause and Tran’s further engagement with Christian political theology, see their essay, “The Third City: Radical Orthodoxy’s (Emphatically) Complex Political Theology” in the forthcoming T&T Clark Companion to Political Theology, ed. Ruben Rosario-Rodriguez (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019). 4

ECCLESIOLOGY AND POLITICS

 417

Cavell, S. (1991), Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cavell, S. (2015), Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coles, R. and S. Hauerwas (2008), Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary: Conversations between a Radical Democrat and a Christian, Eugene: Wipf & Stock. Cox, O. C. (2018), Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics, London: Forgotten Books. Crary, A. (2009), Beyond Moral Judgment, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Crary, A. (2016), Inside Ethics: On the Demands of Moral Thought, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Diamond, C. (1988), “Losing Your Concepts,” Ethics 98 (2): 255–77. Hauerwas, S. (1970), “Politics, Vision, and the Common Good: The Contemporary Situation and the Theological Response,” CrossCurrents 20 (4): 399–414. Hauerwas, S. (1998), Sanctify Them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified, Nashville: Abingdon. Hauerwas, S. (2000), A Better Hope: Resources for the Church Confronting Capitalism, Democracy, and Postmodernity, Grand Rapids: Brazos. Hauerwas, S. (2009), A Cross-Shattered Church: Reclaiming the Theological Heart of Preaching, Grand Rapids: Brazos. Hauerwas, S. (2010), In Good Company: The Church as Polis, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Hauerwas, S. (2011a), War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity, Grand Rapids: Baker. Hauerwas, S. (2011b), Working with Words: On Learning to Speak Christian, Eugene: Wipf & Stock. Hauerwas, S. (2013), Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics, and Life, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Hauerwas, S. (2015), The Work of Theology, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. James, W. (1975), Pragmatism, ed. Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Jennings, W. J. (2017), Acts: A Theological Commentary of the Bible, Louisville: Westminster John Knox. Kotsko, A. (2018), Neoliberalism’s Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capital, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kovesi, J. (1967), Moral Notions, London: Routledge and Kegan. MacIntyre, A. (1988), Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. MacIntyre, A. (2017), Ethics and the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative, Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. McCabe, H. (2003), Law, Love & Language, London: Continuum. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2013), Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald Landes, New York: Routledge. Pfau, T. (2017), “Varieties of Nonpropositional Knowledge: Image—Attention—Action,” in Vivasvan Soni and Thomas Pfau (eds.), Judgment and Action: Fragments toward a History, 269–302, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Pinches, C. R. (2002), Theology and Action: After Theory in Christian Ethics, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

418

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Polanyi, K. (2001), The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Times, Boston: Beacon. Rawls, J. (1993), Political Liberalism, New York: Columbia University Press. Rawls, J. (1999), The Law of Peoples: With “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Schmitt, C. (2006), Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stout, J. (2005), Democracy and Tradition, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tran, J. (2010), The Vietnam War and Theologies of Memory: Time and Eternity in the Far Country, Oxford: Wiley. Tran, J. (2011), Foucault and Theology, London: T&T Clark. Tran, J. (2017), “Linguistic Theology: Completed Postliberalism’s Linguistic Task,” Modern Theology 33 (1): 47–68. Tran, J. (2018), “Assessing the Augustinian Democrats,” Journal of Religious Ethics 46 (3): 521–47. Wittgenstein, L. (2001), Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. Pears and B. McGuinness, New York: Routledge. Wolin, S. (2016), Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wood, E. M. (1995), Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chapter TWENTY-EIGHT

Ecclesiology and Ethics D. STEPHEN LONG

INTRODUCTION Ecclesiology and ethics are unlikely allies from two opposing viewpoints. First, much of modern post-Humean philosophical ethics refuses to ground ethics in the nature or being of anything, let alone that of the church. Second, post-Reimarian methods of biblical scholarship, such as the principle of dissimilarity, often find the creation of the church as a mistaken later development of “early catholicism” that replaced Jesus’s original, and purer, ethical teaching on the kingdom of God. Ethicists committed to the principle that no “ought” can come from “is” would find ecclesial ethics nonsensical. Theologians and biblical scholars committed to post-Reimarian critical interpretation would find that, far from being the basis for ethics, the church usurped Jesus’s ethical teaching. Before any defense or explanation of ecclesial ethics can be set forth, these two objections must be met. Ecclesial ethics intentionally distances itself from both criticisms.

THE OBJECTION FROM PHILOSOPHICAL ETHICS Hume famously challenged the ethical transition that takes place in any theological or philosophical ethics that first “established the being of God” or any “observations concerning human affairs” and then derives ethical obligations from the nature of God or humanity. He wrote: In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with an ought or ought not. This change is imperceptible, but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought or ought not expresses some new relation or affirmation, tis necessary that it shou’d be observed and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others. (Hume 1888: 469) A common philosophical interpretation of Hume’s argument is that no “ought” can be derived from “is,” whether that “is” be the nature of God, the church, creation, the human person, or so on. This problem has been exacerbated because of a number of modern philosophical convictions such as G. E. Moore’s “naturalistic fallacy” and the modern fact/value split. Moore viewed the “good” as a “non-natural property” that cannot be derived from nature. After Moore, moral judgments become understood as

420

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

expressions of sentiment or emotion, which is a theory of the meaning of moral terms known as “emotivism” or “expressivism.” Each of these related distinctions poses problems moving from the truth of what is to the moral judgment of what should be. While most scholastic theologians thought the “true” and the “good” were transcendental perfections of being that formed a unity, modern philosophy renders them asunder. Questions of truth and questions of goodness bear little relation to each other. In fact, questions of goodness have largely been replaced by questions of rightness. In his influential work, The Right and the Good, W. D. Ross put the relationship between goodness and rightness this way: “Moral goodness is quite distinct from and independent of rightness, which (as we have seen) belongs to acts not in virtue of the motives they proceed from, but in virtue of the nature of what is done” (Ross 1988: 156). The “right” identifies the state of affairs that is brought about in the world. The “good” refers to the motive by which the act is done. The focus of modern ethics is on the state of affairs brought about more so than on the character of the agents who bring about those states. If Hume, Moore, and the modern tradition that distinguishes fact from value is correct, then moving from the nature of the church to an ethics would be a priori ruled out. Yet, as other philosophers have pointed out, this interpretation is not exactly what Hume stated (MacIntyre 1959; Sayre-McCord 1994). Hume expresses surprise that moral philosophy or theology moves from the nature of something (God, church, creation, the human person) to moral claims without giving reasons for the transition. Whether or not Hume thought such reasons could be given remains an open question. Suffice it to say that much of modern philosophical and theological ethics divides on this issue. Some side with G. E. Moore and nearly the entire tradition of modern economics, finding it impossible to move from the nature of something to moral judgments. Take for instance William Frankena’s “moral point of view.” He argued that it was necessary for justifying moral concepts. He agreed with Hume that “ought” cannot be derived from “is” so what we need is a method that abstracts from nature and adopts the viewpoint of an ideal observer. Ethical judgments are justified when they arise from a consensus by agents who are “free, impartial, willing to universalize, conceptually clear, and informed about all possible facts.” This consensus is, he notes, “ideal” and not “actual.” It also assumes that morality is independent of any religious or philosophical tradition (Frankena 1973: 112). Others find moving from “is” to “ought” not only reasonable but necessary if moral judgments are to be something other than expressivist statements or utterances of subjective preferences (Foot 2003; MacIntyre 2016). Foot’s philosophical naturalism, like MacIntyre’s neo-Aristotelianism, assumes with Aristotle that the human being has a natural function and that identifying this function is necessary for a virtue ethics. The purpose of a good knife is to cut well; that is its function. We know what it ought to do by what it is, which is why we naturally sharpen it when it is dull. Similarly, the purpose of the human being is human flourishing. We identify the virtues by acknowledging the natural states that make for human flourishing. MacIntyre’s neo-Aristotelianism is not the same as Foot’s philosophical naturalism. Unlike Foot, MacIntyre finds the question of human flourishing to be “inescapably theological.” The person of practical reasoning, he argues, assumes a final end that exists “beyond the finite.” Otherwise, “there is no final end, no ultimate good, to be achieved” (MacIntyre 2016: 56). For MacIntyre, Aristotle’s eudaimonism leads to Aquinas’s beatitude. The above objection from philosophical ethics has a theological correlate. Since the Council of Trent (1545–63) the discipline of theology has been divided into two: moral

ECCLESIOLOGY AND ETHICS

 421

and dogmatic or speculative (Grisez 1983; Mahoney 1990: vii). Dogmatic or speculative theology is a species of theoretical reasoning primarily concerned with true belief or true judgments. It addresses a question, such as, “What is it?” Dogmatic theology uses theoretical reasoning to make truthful judgments such as that God is simple. God’s essence is God’s existence, God has no parts; distinctions such as form/matter, actuality/ potentiality, substance/accidents, or genus/difference do not apply to God. Judgments about the latter are not so much good or bad as they are true or false. If they are true, then they cannot be other than what they are if they identify what is meant by “God.” Justice, however, is not simply one thing that is true or false. It is a virtue whose exercise requires attention to place, person, time, social context, and so on. Practical reasoning concerns actions that can be good, bad or evil. It addresses a question such as, “How should one live?” Practical reasoning is reasoning that can be other. While the truth of a matter may have a singular answer, acting well has several possibilities. While practical reasoning is not theoretical reasoning, if too sharp a distinction is made between them, then bringing doctrine and ethics together will appear to be mistaken, especially when “unity of the transcendentals” is abandoned. The specialization of academic disciplines tends to divide them. In modern theology, ecclesiology is undertaken as one of the loci in systematic or dogmatic theology. This location for ecclesiology is unsurprising. After all, the church is identified in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds as an object of faith. As a theological discipline, ecclesiology asks the question, “What is the church?” and receives answers such as the four marks (one, holy, catholic, apostolic) or one of the threefold forms of the body of Christ. The creedal confession is an answer to a question that specifies the object of belief. It is usually placed under the third article of the Creed: “Do you believe in the Holy Spirit?” The proper answer is: “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy, catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, and the resurrection of the body.” Another proper answer is, “I believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.” These answers are seldom rejected by theologians. They are differently configured based on ecclesial traditions, but few would deny that the answers are true, or that this exercise in theoretical reasoning about the nature of the church is misguided. As a species of practical reasoning, moral theology or Christian ethics can become mistakenly divided from doctrine. At its most extreme, this distinction resembles the so-called two-tiered version of Thomism where ethics is grounded in the bottom tier of what is natural and known through reason alone by anyone, and doctrine is set in the upper tier, known by faith, and is the province of the church. Karl Barth famously challenged this distinction (as did others such as Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar) by claiming “dogmatics is ethics.” His Church Dogmatics refused to separate ethics from doctrine but interspersed it throughout dogmatics. Ecclesial ethics owes many debts to Barth. However, Aquinas had already done something similar by bracketing ethics within the doctrinal sections of the Summa Theologiae. His secunda pars dealing with ethics is not best read in isolation from the prima and tertia pars, which are concerned with doctrine. The Anglican moral theologian Oliver O’Donovan has raised some important cautions against what he refers to as “the bracing Barthian ‘war cry.’” He fears that Protestantism fails to distinguish dogmatics from ethics. Both are forms of theology, but they are distinct. He opposes two tendencies in relating them. One is a perennial Protestant temptation that either reduces ethics to dogmatics or dogmatics to ethics. Reducing dogmatics to ethics abandons the truth of Christian teaching. Reducing ethics to dogmatics leads to

422

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

ethics as “a purely descriptive discipline,” incapable of making the move from reflection to deliberation and decision (O’Donovan 2013: 81, 86). The temptation is to imagine that by describing the church’s life we have described a social ethics that has no further need for deliberation and decision. Practical reasoning always requires the latter and it is more than mere description. The other temptation is to distinguish them too decisively— something Catholicism did from the Council of Trent to Vatican II. It founded ethics upon a doctrine of pure nature that had little to no need of doctrine, including ecclesiology, for ethics. O’Donovan writes, “Moral thinking is the vocation of Adam, an aspect of human nature. But Adam’s vocation is never ‘pure’ nature, conceivable in isolation and on its own, but is conceived only in the light of the Second Adam, who is Christ” (O’Donovan 2013: 75). O’Donovan’s cautions should be heeded, but they do not call into question an ecclesial ethics; they strengthen it. Doctrine and ethics are not the same activity. The former arises from theoretical reasoning and is primarily concerned with what is true. The latter arises from practical reasoning and is primarily concerned with what is good. Goodness is not truth. Goodness is the truth of being under appetitive desire. Truth is not goodness. Truth is the adequation of the mind to what is. The first principle of the speculative intellect is truth. The first principle of the practical intellect is goodness. These two principles are always related because the subject who thinks and acts is one. The Christian doctrine of creation assumes the true and good are fundamentally united so that any distinction between them cannot be equivalent to Hume’s no “ought” from “is,” G. E. Moore’s naturalistic fallacy, or the economist’s fact/value distinction. In that sense, ecclesial ethics is best understood as a species of philosophical and theological “naturalism” where nature is indistinguishable from the theological category of creation. Drawing on the work of Aristotle and Aquinas, it teaches that God creates human beings with a function that when attained leads to flourishing. This function as creature is both natural and supernatural. It is natural in that creaturely existence is good. Everything that makes it up—desire, passion, emotion, reason, movement, action—is a condition for flourishing. Nature alone, however, never suffices to attain humanity’s true end, which is friendship with God. Something more is needed; the more is grace and the infused virtues of faith, hope, and love. They are primarily, although never exclusively, mediated through the sacraments or means of grace by the Holy Spirit in the church. Grace does not evacuate nature; it corrects our broken nature and perfects its creaturely goodness. It does this through participation in Christ which takes place in one of the forms of his body—the church. True humanity is found in Christ and his mission. Because he is the one for whom, through whom, and in whom all creation exists, what is present in the church resonates with creation properly understood. Ecclesial ethics assumes the church is essential to Jesus’s apocalyptic mission. It is neither an accident nor a mistake.

THE OBJECTION FROM BIBLICAL STUDIES AND THEOLOGY If ethics privileges the right over the good, ideal observers over concrete communities, expressivism over neo-Aristotelianism, then ecclesial ethics makes no sense. Ecclesial ethics has means by which it can answer Hume’s surprise; it can give reasons as to how we move from what is to what ought to be, but those reasons will be theological. If theology is a priori excluded from reasonable discourse by philosophical ethics, then ecclesial

ECCLESIOLOGY AND ETHICS

 423

ethics cannot gain a hearing from the philosophical side. It can also have difficulty gaining a hearing from the theological side. Some biblical scholars and theologians not only find the church to be irrelevant for ethics, they go further and view the church as usurping the role of ethics in Jesus’s message. Alfred Loisy (1857–1940), the Roman Catholic priest and modernist theologian, encapsulated much of twentieth-century scholarship when he wrote, “Jesus announced the Kingdom and what came was the church” (Loisy 1976: 166). Loisy was summarizing the biblical scholarship and theology of previous generations, especially Harnack, who taught that the formation of the church was a later accomplishment of “early Catholicism.” Jesus presented an ethical message of the “Kingdom of God,” a new and inclusive form of community. His early followers, however, distorted this message by establishing the church. An extreme form of this interpretation was found in Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768). Reimarus was a deist and biblical critic who wrote some fragments about Jesus’s life that were published, after his death, in 1774–8 by the philosopher G. E. Lessing. Reimarus distinguished between Jesus’s and the apostles’ teaching. Jesus taught the coming of the kingdom or realm of God. It was neither a mysterious nor supernatural reality, but an allegory by which Jesus sought to change the social and political institutions of his day. His apostles changed his simple moral and political message for the sake of their own political gain. Reimarus read Scripture suspiciously, noticing how the disciples misunderstood what Jesus was about in hopes that they would be granted authority in the new realm that he proclaimed. When he was crucified, their hopes were dashed. Unwilling to give up their aspiration for power, they invented the resurrection, established the church, and set themselves up as authorities. Ecclesiology replaced ethics. For Reimarus, retrieval of the historical Jesus and his ethical message would also retrieve the priority of ethics against the church. Few nineteenth century scholars were as suspicious as Reimarus, but his critical scholarship raised the fundamental question: could we really trust the apostles and the biblical witness to present Jesus, or should we get “behind” it to the original witness himself? The apostles and those who wrote the Scriptures had a stake in the story ending in a particular way. Was it not in their interest to see the church as the conclusion to the story? The principle of dissimilarity suggests that if we can find a political interest in the unfolding of the story, we should not consider it authentic. Adolf von Harnack (1873–1912) similarly interpreted the church as alien to the “essence of Christianity.” For Harnack, its essence consists in ethical ideals, “the kingdom of God and its coming. God the Father and the infinite value of the human soul. The higher righteousness and the commandment of love.” Harnack recognized that the creation of the institutional church was necessary for Christianity’s survival once it separated from the “Jewish national communion.” However, the church was not formed from the ethical ideals of Jesus’s message. It arises more from the “Hellenic cults in the age of Neoplatonism.” Harnack asks, “What are the characteristic of this Church?” He answers, “It takes the form, not of a Christian product in Greek dress, but of a Greek product in Christian dress” (Harnack 1978: 51, 182, 220–1). While Harnack interpreted Jesus as an ethical teacher and the church as a Hellenistic import, Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923) interpreted him as a religious teacher whose teachings needed ethical supplementation. In his monumental Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, he argued that Jesus’s message was purely religious. It bore no political significance in itself, so it had to adopt one from the surrounding cultures to

424

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

convey its purely religious message. Adopting Max Weber’s ideal types, he set forth three types by which Jesus’s apolitical message took on a social teaching: the church, sect, and mystic types. The church type adopts and accommodates ethics from the surrounding culture. It takes on political responsibility. The sect type withdraws from the surrounding culture and eschews political responsibility. They mystic type focuses on individual spirituality. Troeltsch preferred the mystic type but he acknowledged that the church type was necessary for Christianity to address social and political issues. Only two church types accomplished this successfully: medieval Catholicism and Calvinism (Dorrien 2019: 428). Their accounts of the church were borrowed cultural material relative to time and place. They were not intrinsic to Christianity. The church could not be a social ethic in itself because Jesus’s message was not about social ethics. Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) offered a different interpretation altogether. He critiqued the schools of thought that emphasized Jesus as an ethical teacher. It overlooked his radical apocalypticism. Harnack too easily discovered contemporary relevance for Jesus by ignoring his eschatology. Schweitzer wrote, “Harnack, in his What is Christianity? almost entirely ignores the contemporary limitations of Jesus’s teaching and starts out with a Gospel which carries him down without difficulty to year 1889.” Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet, not an ethical teacher. The kingdom of God that he proclaimed was not an ethical or political ideal; Jesus imagined that it would catastrophically break into human history during his lifetime. When it did not, Jesus “threw himself upon the wheel of history” to force God’s hand. But the wheel did not stop, and Jesus failed. He was a failed apocalyptic visionary. Jesus as the Messiah who “preached the ethics of the kingdom of God” is “a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in a historical garb.” Although Schweitzer did not interpret Jesus as an ethical teacher, like Harnack and Troeltsch, the formation of the church was inessential to his message. For Schweitzer, the “historically known” Jesus has no contemporary significance. Only the “Jesus as spiritually arisen within [us]” has any relevance, and each person “must learn in their own experience Who He is” (Schweitzer 1998: 253, 371, 398, 401–3). Despite their differences, these influential Protestant theologians all gave support to Loisy’s critique: rather than the kingdom of God, we got the church. In one sense, they all pitted ethics against ecclesiology. If the church is to be ethical, it must find an ethics. The discipline of Christian ethics has been influenced by this opposition between ecclesiology and ethics. Through H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture, Troeltsch’s ideal types gained a considerable hold over the discipline. The result was that the church’s social ethics was found not in the church itself but in the relationship between Jesus’s message, understood primarily as religious, and the culture to which ethicists attempted to make it relevant. Eschatology was even less influential in Christian ethics. It is not too much of an overstatement to suggest that the discipline of Christian ethics arose in order to replace ecclesiology and eschatology with ethics. Take as an example the influential early work of Paul Ramsey (1913–88) in his 1950 Basic Christian Ethics. He identified agape or disinterested love as the heart of Jesus’s ethics. Agreeing with the American theologian Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918), Ramsey argued that Jesus’s apocalyptic context is untenable for moderns. We cannot “translate” his love commands from that context into ours. Jesus’s “strenuous” sayings such as his command to love our enemy, give everything to the poor, or resist calling someone a fool only make sense in that context. What we can do is recognize that the “genesis” of those commands does not determine their “validity.” Agape remains ethically valid without Jesus’s eschatology or his ecclesiology (Ramsey

ECCLESIOLOGY AND ETHICS

 425

1993: 36, 41). Ramsey’s later work changed directions. He remained an “agapist” in his ethics, but he did not understand ethics as replacing ecclesiology or eschatology. When ecclesiology and eschatology are jettisoned for ethics, then the theological reasons that would provide Christian ethicists with an answer to Hume’s surprise are likewise abandoned. To go from “is” to “ought” requires something more than a few moral principles. It requires a narrative construal of who God is and what God has done, including his works of creation, providence, and redemption. Jesus’s life, mission, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension are necessary for such a narrative construal. He is the embodiment of what Irenaeus called “the glory of God,” which is “the human person fully alive.” (For one of the best accounts of Irenaeus’s teaching applied to a theological ethic through Oscar Romero’s commitment to the poor and their liberation, see Colón-Emeric 2018.)

ECCLESIAL ETHICS: ECCLESIOLOGY, ESCHATOLOGY, AND INFUSING VIRTUE Ecclesial ethics assumes that it is possible to go from what is to what ought to be, but the transition requires accepting a theological rendering of what it means to be a human being. The person is to be a reflection of the glory of God and this brings beatitude. Beatitude is a form of happiness that begins in this life and is fulfilled in life with God. It is a gift; we do not earn it but receive it. Reception is, however, activity. We move toward it even as it comes to us. Two forms of movement can explain this receptive activity. The first is the bodily movement toward God that persons make when receiving the eucharist. People move to the bread and wine that is the body and blood of Christ with open hands and a receptive disposition. No one is compelled to move toward the reception of God as if it would be some kind of passive possession beyond our control. Yet what is received is more than our human actions alone could achieve. We enter into communion with God and one another, a communion that is only possible from God’s gracious actions. The second is the bodily movement involved in hearing the Word read and proclaimed. To hear the word of another is also not a passive activity. It requires attentiveness, openness, a willingness to be affected by something outside of us. Like music that moves us to dance and sing, the Word proclaimed moves the receptive hearer to see and act by a vision that is more than empirical sight alone. The perfect, simple, triune God cannot be seen, comprehended, or mastered by finite means. As Saint Augustine put it, “if you comprehend it, it is not God.” We use our reason to know God. Our desire moves us toward God. But neither human reason alone nor human desire attains God because God is not an object in the world that can be pointed to and attained. God always exceeds human grasping. And yet God gives Godself to be received, a reception that is, as the Jesuits put it, always “more.” These two patterns provide insight into the nature of ethics not only in the church, but also in all creatures, for creatureliness itself is a grace. Our very existence is a gift given to us by others. Before we learned to speak, language was there for us to receive. Food, shelter, education, kindness, friendship, love, and much more is essential for human flourishing. No one is solely responsible for attaining all these creaturely goods. They come as gifts. To learn to receive them well is to learn what it means to be human, and that requires sharing them, for everything that is not God is a creature intended to be used for the good ends God intends. Christian ethics refers to the receptive activity at

426

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

the heart of the Christian life as the “infused virtues.” They are called “infused” because they are external principles given by the Holy Spirit that cause virtuous, human action. Most virtues depend on principles internal to the human person; they are internal. These external principles differ from acquired virtues because they require receiving something more than principles intrinsic to human nature. In that sense, they are receptive. But they must also be actively exercised by human agents. Because the relationship between the Spirit’s agency and human agency is non-competitive, it is possible for human agents to receive external principles and act upon them by means of their own agency without the Spirit evacuating human agency. There are three infused virtues—faith, hope, and love. These three recalibrate all the other virtues. They are not destroyed but perfected. More will be said below on the infused or theological virtues. Ecclesial ethics also assumes that the church was not an accident; it is intrinsic to Jesus’s mission. Schweitzer was both right and wrong. He was right, against Harnack, that Jesus was not a mere ethical teacher. He was an apocalyptic Jewish thinker whose life broke into ours bringing something otherwise unavailable. Jesus’s mission is unintelligible without his apocalypticism. Schweitzer was wrong that Jesus’s apocalypticism has no contemporary relevance. For an ecclesial ethic, the formation of the church was intrinsic to Jesus’s eschatological mission. Ecclesiology and eschatology are indissolubly linked. Gathering twelve disciples and heading toward the Temple in Jerusalem was a sign of restoration and the return of divine glory. Jesus’s transfiguration revealed that glory. His provocative summons to destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days set forth his body as a temple substitute. Christianity, like post second-temple Judaism, no longer needs the Jerusalem temple for the viability of the divine mission. That mission was given to Abraham and Sarah. They were charged with being a great nation unlike the other nations for the sake of the nations. By observing Torah, God’s name is made holy. By cultic ritual, God and creation dwelling together remains possible. Christianity shares this Jewish mission. It was a retrieval of the Jewish character of Jesus’s mission that brought ecclesiology and eschatology together. One origin for the ecclesial approach to ethics is found in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics when he writes, “The Word did not simply become any ‘flesh,’ any man humbled and suffering. It became Jewish flesh” (Barth 1988: 166). Much of the earlier scholarship treated Jesus’s Jewish context as insignificant. In fact, the principle of dissimilarity was sometimes doubled so that it separated Jesus not only from the community established in his name (the church) but also the community within which he lived (Judaism). Barth was by no means without error in relating Christianity and Judaism, but he set Christian theology on a fruitful path by reminding us of the necessary Jewish context for Jesus mission. Barth, however, had little time for an Aristotelian ethics. Ecclesial ethics links Barth’s church dogmatics with neo-Aristotelian virtue theory creating tensions. Barthians have little time for Aristotelian ethics or its influence on Catholic moral theology. Neo-Aristotelians have little time for Barthians. Some find the tensions too unstable, creating an anti-modern reactionary ethic via a traditionalism that takes refuge in the church (Stout 2004). Yet the tension between a Barthian church dogmatics and a philosophical virtue theory can be a source for fruitful engagement between the messiness of the church and its engagement with modernity (Long 2018: 116–28). Virtue theory helps make sense of ecclesial ethics. Liturgy, discipleship, preaching, and mission form persons to act in the world. Church dogmatics offers the vision within which action is possible. It also makes sense of moral failure through the open-ended necessity of repentance. Aristotle concluded the Nicomachean Ethics by pointing to the importance of the political contexts within which virtue could flourish. Ethics too often proceeds as if

ECCLESIOLOGY AND ETHICS

 427

human agency occurs in contextless situations. One of the important advances made by a feminist ethics of care is to return ethics to the political contexts that render it intelligible. Virginia Held argues persuasively that “the dominant moral theories” of deontology and utilitarianism are “modeled on the experience of men in public life and in the marketplace” (Held 2006: 24). Deontology fits well within the context of a modern nation-state that emphasizes rights and individual dignity. Utilitarianism fits well within the global, capitalist market in which individuals maximize their utility. Of course, the boundaries between the nation-state and market are always blurred, but much of contemporary ethics tacitly or explicitly assumes that the proper context for ethics is the nation-state or the market. Ecclesial ethics assumes that ethics depends on social contexts for its intelligibility. The question is not if there is a social context, but which one, and is it one that can attain human flourishing?

ECCLESIAL ETHICS AS FAILURE To argue that the church is the social context that renders ethics intelligible easily lends itself to the false impression that an ecclesial ethics overlooks actual, existing churches, propagates ecclesial purity, and abandons creaturely goods by denying truth, goodness, and beauty outside the church. The church does not have impermeable cultural membranes that seal it off from other creaturely goods, nor should it seek them. It is also a creature, and like all creatures it struggles with sin and moral failure. Simultaneously, the church is more than a creature because unlike any other creaturely institution it participates in the risen and ascended Christ. Ecclesial ethics assumes neither a pure church nor that we can find the “right church” (Hauerwas and Wells 2018: 23–34). It does assume that the church is one of the forms of Christ’s body. The church’s failures, as well as its faithfulness, constitute its social ethics. Jesus takes upon himself the sins of the world. As one of the forms of his body, the church’s brokenness and failures make this sinfulness visible for all to see, but the point is never to be fascinated with, or satisfied by, sin and moral failure. Only in the light of redemption can sin and moral failure be gazed upon faithfully. When the members of the church reject or deny their brokenness, the church cannot function as a social ethics, for one of its main components is the continual announcement, “In the name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven.” The church has often been a source of conflict, and no church can protest its innocence against the charge that it too has participated in it. The Anabaptists, Catholics, Orthodox, and the multitudinous versions of Protestantism all have blood on their hands at some point in their histories. How can an ethics be generated from a church divided and even at war with itself? The divisions between the Eastern and Western Church in 1054 and then the multiple, and violent, divisions in the sixteenth century, a century in which persecution returned to Christianity but with Christians persecuting other Christians, lend little support to the concept of ecclesial ethics if that concept sets forth purity. An influential narrative emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that the treaties of Westphalia in 1648 created a new form of social ethics, modern nation-states that were necessary to create peace through well-defined borders with sovereign authorities that were not beholden to sectarian, religious, partisans. Religious persons were prone to irrational violence.1 Modern nation-states at least rationalized the violence by generating

Without denying religious people have been violent, William Cavanaugh complicates this narrative. See Cavanaugh 2009. 1

428

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

peaceful bonds through self-interest and fear. By the eighteenth century, a new hope for peace emerged from the discipline of political economy. A global market in which each person maximized their interest was heralded as a way to create social peace. Where the church failed, the modern nation-state and/or a global economy would succeed. They could bring about perpetual peace or a harmonious wealth of nations. Perpetual peace and the wealth of nations are forms of eschatological hope first present in Judaism and Christianity that “migrated” to the state and the market. Much modern ethics looks to the state or market as the social context for a future hope. Their failure to achieve this hope has done some, but perhaps not yet enough, to chasten the hope placed within them. Perhaps the inability to recognize their shortcomings is due to the fact that neither of these social contexts has any means of forgiveness. They can acquit and refuse to carry out punishment, but they make no such claim as that found in the church, “In the name of God, you are forgiven.” Nor should they. They lack the peculiarity found in the church that it is one of the threefold forms of the body of Christ. Only the church sets forth a transcendent end that is something more than what can be immanently attained through our own resources. Because of this transcendent end, which is its final beatitude, it can face its failures without fear or denial (not that it always does). As Saint Augustine put it in the second book of his Confessions, “For love of your love, I shall retrace my wicked ways” (Augustine 1961: 43). Nation-states, like global markets, tend to lose the ability to retrace their wicked ways or acknowledge their moral failures. If your only ethical goal is what you can achieve through your own innate principles, then the constant failure to do so is devastating. It becomes difficult, if not impossible, to face the truth. We have not attained perpetual peace but perpetual warfare (See Davies 2019). We have not attained the wealth of nations nor the three-day workweek promised nearly a century ago, but massive global inequality. I make these comments not to deny that some good resides in modern nation-states and global markets, but only that they lack the means fully to confront moral failure and seek repentance, reform, or renewal that is foundational for hope. I am not placing these various social contexts on a scale in which the church emerges more just because the latter two are depicted as so unjust. The church has not curtailed its own failures in the modern era. In fact, the three social contexts— church, state, and market—as well as a variety of others that are the conditions for moral formation, are never disentangled from each other. The church does not win because other social contexts are just as bad if not worse. It should not “win” at all. Victory is not the point. What makes the church a social ethics is that it holds forth a final, transcendent end that shows what it means to be a human being truly alive and what the means are to attain it. Those means include the ongoing necessity for repentance.

ECCLESIAL ETHICS Ironically, or perhaps providentially, the church’s marginalization since the seventeenth century and the rising dominance of the secular nation-state and global market are the conditions for the construction of an ecclesial ethics. When the church rules through force and domination, it does not need to be a social ethic because it already wields an alien social power and becomes comfortable within it. Only when secular power loosed its bonds with the church could the latter see itself in a new light. The church has found it necessary to be intentional about its life together. The ecumenical impetus of the twentieth century that Dibelius called “the century of the Church” (see Vanhoozer, this volume) contributes to this newfound intentionality. Christians found that they needed each other

ECCLESIOLOGY AND ETHICS

 429

across old ecclesial divisions. An ecclesial ethic, then, cannot seek to generate the “right” church or encourage a quest to identify one of the existing divisions within the ecclesial fractures as the only true church. The church is, as the Nicene Creed states, an object of faith and thus also of hope. Anyone who claims to have seen the one, true church in its fulness has no more seen it than anyone who claims to have comprehended God has seen God. As an object of faith, the church is first and foremost one of the threefold forms of the body of Christ. First is Christ’s historical body, truly God and truly human as one acting subject who in his birth, life, teachings, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension was the perfect performance of the unity of heaven and earth, God’s dwelling place among creatures. The risen and ascended crucified Christ sits at the right hand of the Father; he is the true ruler of the universe whose rule is unlike any we have known because it does not exercise power over others but serves them as friends. His body and rule, no longer limited by space and time, is mediated through Word and sacrament through the Holy Spirit, another form of Christ’s body. When we are attentive to worship, we hear and receive this mediation through Scripture and proclamation. After Scripture is read, many churches hear the words, “This is the Word of the Lord.” Seldom do skeptical persons arise who respond to the person reading, “Wait one minute. That was your voice we heard. Are you equating your voice with the Word of God?” Instead, the church responds, “Thanks be to God.” This response is marvelous because it acknowledges that human language can express God’s Word in human words without competition between divinity and humanity. The divine inhabits the human without evacuating it. Sacraments are a response to the Word read and proclaimed. In the eucharist, persons come forward to receive the fullness of the body of Christ. Each wafer or piece of bread is proclaimed to be “the body of Christ.” Christ’s body is not divided up as if each recipient receives some small part. No one says, “the right toe of Christ” when distributing the elements. That would be to misunderstand how Christ’s body is mediated. Each recipient receives the fullness of Christ without detracting from another. The whole church, both local and universal, also receives the fullness of Christ making a third form of Christ’s body—the church. Through the Holy Spirit, the church’s mission is to continue Christ’s mission in the time of witness, the time between his first and second coming. It does so by overlapping repetitions. There is the repetition of the fourfold act of worship: the church gathers, hears the Word read and proclaimed, responds, and is sent out in mission only to gather again, hear, respond, be sent. . . . This fourfold act is repeated throughout the church year that repeats the life of Christ from the expectation of his coming to the fulfillment of his mission and the sending of the Spirit. We repeat Christ’s life year after year participating in his body and mission and waiting in expectation. Then there is the repetition of the threefold movement of the Christian life done each Sunday, throughout the church year, and in each Christian’s life. The first movement is repentance and baptism. It is the initiation into Christ’s mission by leaving behind what would bind us to slavery and moving into Christ’s faithful performance of the unity of divinity and humanity. His performance is both imputed and imparted to the baptized. While baptism is done once, repentance is repeated. For some inscrutable reason, sin remains after baptism such that vigilance against what enslaves us continues post baptism. We learn to confess sins and moral failure better after baptism than we could before; they should become clearer. This confession is necessary to move toward reconciliation with God and neighbor which is present in the repeatable feast known as the eucharist. In it, we continue the tradition of meeting, eating, and drinking with God (Exod. 24:9-11). Unlike baptism, we are never finished with the eucharist. Like manna,

430

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

it sustains us for an ever-greater journey into God, a journey that cannot come to an end because God is infinite and eternal. God is like an intriguing old city that always has something more to delight and surprise us. If we are not delighted or surprised, then our journey has become misdirected. These overlapping repetitions make the theological virtues available for us, the virtues of faith, hope, and charity. They are not the only virtues. Acquired, natural virtues are also necessary, and they must be, as their name suggests, acquired. The Christian life is not a passive life by which gifts are received without intentional, voluntary, human action. The theological virtues are principles external to the human agent that at the same time can become internal. They are both imputed and imparted. Faith is intellectual assent to what has been revealed by God about God. It is both individual and communal. Persons with rational capacity are able to assent to the church’s teachings about God and God’s operations, but assent is never comprehensive. It is always at the beginning or in the middle of an ongoing story where new forms of assent present themselves. Those incapable of rationality, which is all of us at some time, are not excluded from faith because faith is a communion in the lives of others. Faith is found in the person who can receive baptism, confess sin, and move toward eucharistic reconciliation. The infused virtue of faith has as its end love for, and hope in, God. Faith is also a virtue necessary in creaturely life. It is present in the refugee who flees violence and oppression to find peace for herself or her family. Faith is present in the aid worker who leaves water in the desert in hope that he will diminish others’ suffering and death. The movement of these three examples bears familial resemblance even if the infused virtue of faith cannot be reduced to its ordinary role in creation. Something wicked is left behind. Something hopeful pulls one forward. Faith is the intellectual and practical activity that makes the movement from the one to the other possible. Hope is the faithful desire that the goal can be obtained. The ultimate goal is beatitude or friendship with God in which God and creatures dwell together in unity. Friendship with God is the theological virtue of charity. The penultimate goals are the myriad ways that the ultimate goal can be partially inhabited in the time between the times. Charity is when our relationships are not defined by fear or self-interest but by friendship. The infused virtue of charity is friendship with God. God seeks friendship with us and we in turn seek to be friends with each other. Only friends can finally exercise true charity. We are also commanded to love our enemies and not only our friends, but not because we value them as enemies. We love them in faith and hope that they too can become friends.

CONCLUSION What kind of ethics is ecclesial ethics? Julia Annas interprets modern ethics as the attempt to provide specific action-guiding principles that bring about a state of affairs from a “hierarchical and complete method.” She notes that most ancient ethics would find these concepts foreign (Annas 1993: 7–9). It asked different questions, especially “How ought I to live?” or “What should my life look like?” If Annas is correct, then ecclesial ethics resembles ancient ethics more so than modern. It does not provide a hierarchical method where one principle such as respect, utility maximization, or agape orders all subordinate principles. Nor does it offer a complete method by which an agent’s actions can be strictly guided. I find this to be a strength of both ancient and ecclesial ethics. If an ethics has to provide strict guidance, then it mistakenly takes on theoretical or speculative rationality rather than practical reasoning. Ethics can never be an algorithm or a pill that one can

ECCLESIOLOGY AND ETHICS

 431

observe or take with a guaranteed outcome. Ancient and ecclesial ethics ask different questions than modern ethics. They also provide more space for the diversity of peoples’ roles and formations and the free exercise of their practical reasoning. They are less reductive than many modern ethics on offer. It would be a mistake, then, to ask ecclesial ethics to do what modern ethics attempts, even modern virtue ethics, and reduce ethics to specific action-guidance. Ecclesial ethics recognizes the importance of the distinction between speculative and practical rationality. It provides a vision within which humans can act without stipulating precisely what must be done. It rules out certain possibilities. For instance, how can people share the peace in church and then kill each other in the world? Perhaps it is possible, but the onus will be on those whose actions violate the virtue of peaceableness. Indiscriminately killing the innocent can gain no hearing within an ecclesial ethics. How can Christians gather in a sanctuary that cannot be defined by national boundaries because it is defined by baptism and then reject comfort and aid to the refugee at their door? How can they receive the eucharist and then accept an economic system that permits global inequality, even lauding it for allowing “only” 60 percent of humanity to live in poverty and being content with the eight richest people owning as much wealth as the bottom 3.6 million (Hickel 2017: 16). How is it possible to receive the eucharist and then turn away from this reality? More examples could be provided. Ecclesial ethics does not provide specific guidance for action. It offers a context for practical reasoning by which agents can deliberate and decide how they should live to attain their purpose—to be a human being fully alive that reflects the glory of God. Although it has a primary audience for those who are baptized, it does not set up rigid boundaries around the church and argue that everyone is on one side or the other. It is an inscrutable mystery but unavoidable fact that sometimes the virtues are better exhibited by those who for good and honorable reasons find themselves incapable of entering the church doors. All human creatures are made in the image of God and called to reflect divine glory. Nonetheless, the importance of the church should not be discounted out of some misplaced, false humility. It has means unavailable to any other social context or institution including the family, the nation-state, the global market, the university, or any gathered body in civil society. In none of those places would it be appropriate to pronounce, “The Word of the Lord,” or “The Body of Christ given for you.” As long as people gather who are willing to hear, receive, and respond to that announcement, an ecclesial ethics will witness to the divine glory that alone can be the hope for justice in a broken world incapable of righting itself.

REFERENCES Annas, J. (1993), The Morality of Happiness, New York: Oxford University Press. Augustine. (1961), Confessions, London: Penguin Classics. Barth, K. (1988), Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Reconciliation IV.1, trans. G. W. Bromily, Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Catholic Church. (2012), Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed., Vatican: Libreria Editrice Vaticana. http:​/​/www​​.vati​​can​.v​​a​/arc​​hive/​​ENG00​​15/​_​I​​NDEX.​​HTM Cavanaugh, W. (2009), The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Colón-Emeric, E. (2018), Oscar Romero’s Theological Vision: Liberation and the Transfiguration of the Poor, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

432

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Davies, W. (2019), Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason, New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Dorrien, G. (2019), Social Democracy In The Making: Political & Religious Roots of European Socialism, New Haven: Yale University Press. Foot, P. (2003), Natural Goodness, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Frankena, W. K. (1973), Ethics, 2nd ed., Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall Inc. Grisez, G. (1983), The Way of the Lord Jesus Christ, vol. 1, Christian Moral Principles, Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press. Harnack, A. (1978), What Is Christianity? trans. Thomas Bailey Saunders, Gloucester: Peter Smith. Hauerwas, S. and S. Wells (2011), Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, London: WileyBlackwell. Held, V. (2006), The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hickel, J. (2017), The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets. New York: Norton Co. Hume, D. (1888), A Treatise of Human Nature vol. III Of Morals, Oxford. Clarendon. Loisy, A. (1976), The Gospel and the Church, Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Long, D. S. (2018), Augustinian and Ecclesial Christian Ethics: On Loving Enemies, Lanham: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic. MacIntyre, A. (1959), “Hume on ‘Is’ and ‘Ought,’” The Philosophical Review 68 (4): 451–68. MacIntyre, A. (2016), Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mahoney, J. (1990), The Making of moral Theology: A Study of the Roman Catholic Tradition, Oxford: Clarendon Paperbacks. O’Donovan, O. (2013), Self, World, and Time: Ethics as Theology vol. 1, Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co. Ramsey, P. (1993), Basic Christian Ethics, Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press. Ross, W. D. (1988), The Right and the Good, Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co. Sayre-McCord, G. (1994), “On Why Hume’s ‘General Point of View’ Isn’t Ideal – And Shouldn’t Be,” Social Philosophy and Policy 11 (1): 202–28. Schweitzer, A. (1998), The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Stout, J. (2004), Democracy & Tradition, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Chapter TWENTY-NINE

Ecclesiology and Ecumenics STEVEN R. HARMON

INTRODUCTION The relationship between ecclesiology and ecumenics is implicit in the sole affirmation regarding the church’s identity in the only truly ecumenical creed bequeathed to the whole church by patristic Christianity. While the Apostles’ Creed with roots in the Old Roman Symbol and antecedent expressions of the regula fidei (“rule of faith”) became the baptismal confession of Western Christianity, the Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan Creed came to serve both as the baptismal and eucharistic creed of the Eastern Church and as the eucharistic creed of the Western Churches for which such creeds have official ecclesial status. When the creed affirmed by the Council of Constantinople in AD 381 included in its expansion of the third article of the Creed of the Council of Nicaea (AD 325) the declaration that the church is “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic,” its historical context was an ecclesial reality in which those notae ecclesiae (“marks of the church”) already called for eschatological qualification. The church, though called to be “one” in making visibly manifest the unifying realities of “one body and one Spirit . . . one hope . . . one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all” (Eph. 4:4-6), had not fully manifested this visible oneness since its apostolic beginnings, if even then (cf. 1 Cor.) Its call to visible holiness as a community whose character proceeds from participation in the holiness of God was belied by the tragic reality of ecclesial sin (cf. Rahner 1969). Its call to be a church marked by a catholicity both quantitative in including all who belong to Christ and qualitative in manifesting wholeness of faith and practice was long compromised by divisions that were not merely theological but ethical in their development and maintenance. And its call to be a church that maintains continuity with the community first called into being by Christ was contradicted by competing claims to apostolicity and practices at odds with the way the apostles learned from Jesus. Ecumenics is really one of the sub-loci of ecclesiology, for it is the branch of ecclesiology that seeks both to reckon seriously with the distance of the church from its eschatological identity as “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church” and to discern where and how the church is already manifesting this identity through the work of the Spirit. The discipline of ecumenics works to identify the theological roots of this distance of the church from its eschatological identity and to reflect theologically on the concrete manifestations of the Spirit’s work by which the church already embodies its eschatological identity. It also endeavors to envision means by which the church may live ever more fully into this work of the Spirit by making visibly discernible progress in history toward the realization of its eschatological identity.

434

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

DEFINITIONS Before this chapter explores further the ecumenical dimensions of ecclesiology, some definitions are in order. The term “ecumenical” derives from the ancient Greek word oikoumenē, which in pre-Christian usage referred to the whole inhabited world (Liddell and Scott 1968: s.v. “oikoumenē”). It came to be applied to the church in its expansion throughout the oikoumenē and to the interrelationships of the increasingly far-flung multiplicity of multiple local expressions of church that constituted one body of Christ (Lampe 1961: s.v. “oikoumenē”). Thus, the early councils such as the Council of Nicaea in 325 were ecumenical in the sense that they involved representatives of the churches throughout the world that Christians inhabited, and also in the sense that these councils sought to maintain the one body of Christ’s unity in the faith. The term acquired a more precise usage in its application to the modern ecumenical movement that seeks visible unity in the midst of the church’s ongoing divisions. “Ecumenism” properly refers to this intra-Christian endeavor, while interreligious dialogue is the correct designation for the constructive engagement of Christianity with non-Christian religions. (Judaism, the religion from which Christianity emerged and with which Christianity shares much in common in comparison with other religious traditions, is a special case that falls somewhere between ecumenical relations and interreligious relations, a circumstance reflected in placement of the Commission of the Holy See for Religious Relations with the Jews in the structure of the Roman Curia—not under the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, but rather as a sub-commission of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. The relationship of Christianity to Judaism therefore may also be considered one of the sub-loci of ecclesiology.) Despite this qualification, some Christian proponents of interreligious dialogue have described this enterprise as a “broader ecumenism.” “Ecumenical theology” is the second-order discipline that reflects critically on first-order practices of ecumenical engagement and makes constructive proposals of new possibilities for ecumenical convergence, which may be understood as expressions of constructive systematic theology (Harmon 2009: 134–7, 143). “Ecumenics” is the designation sometimes given to the academic theological discipline concerned with both ecumenical theology and practices of ecumenical engagement. This chapter relates the concerns of ecumenics to the broader concerns of ecclesiology as one of the major loci of systematic theology.

BIBLICAL BASES FOR ECUMENICAL ECCLESIOLOGY While the New Testament is the primary source for historical reconstruction of the earliest self-understandings of the church of Jesus Christ, the Hebrew Scriptures were authoritative for the writers of the New Testament documents and the Christian communities to which they belonged. The New Testament employs a complex of interrelated images that identify the church with the people of God whose story is narrated by the Hebrew Scriptures: Israel, holy nation, twelve tribes, fathers (and mothers) and descendants, children of Abraham, exodus pilgrims, house of David, remnant, and the elect (Minear 1960: 67–84). These intertestamental connections make possible a figural ecclesiological reading of the story of the people of God in the Old Testament in which the division of Israel becomes a type of Christian division (Leithart 2006: 24–8; cf. Radner 2012: 155–7). Thus, any account of the biblical bases for ecumenical ecclesiology must include not only the New Testament’s attention to both the unity of the church and the scandal of

ECCLESIOLOGY AND ECUMENICS

 435

its division, but also the insistence of the Old Testament that it is “very good and pleasant . . . when kindred live together in unity” (Ps. 133:1 NRSV) along with its recognition that it is a tragic corruption of God’s intentions for the people of God when they do not. The earliest documents of the New Testament are the genuine Pauline letters, and among them 1 Corinthians attests both to manifestations of ecclesial division in the period of Christian origins and to the early Christian conviction that such division contradicts God’s intentions for the community brought into being by Christ (Murphy-O’Connor 2011: 9–14). Reports of divisions in the Christian community in Corinth occasioned Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 1:10-17, 3:1-23). Throughout 1 Corinthians Paul exhorts members of the church in Corinth to embody the unity symbolized in the one cup and one bread by means of which they share in the one blood and body of Christ (1 Cor. 10:16-17). When Paul offers instructions for celebrating the Lord’s Supper in chapter 11, he targets the divisions they have been bringing to their eucharistic observances (1 Cor. 11:17-34). In the following chapter he encourages the Corinthian believers to understand themselves as diverse members of a singular body of Christ (1 Cor. 12:12-31), an ecclesiological image rich in ecumenical implications. The text most commonly cited as the biblical warrant for the modern ecumenical enterprise is John 17:1-26 (on the use of this text in ecumenical theology, see Randall 1965: 373–94; Mardaga 2005: 148–52; and Malan 2011). The fourth gospel reflects a context marked by increasing division—not only the parting of the ways between church and synagogue, but also the beginnings of the christological theological divisions that would sharpen early in the next century. In John 17, which the gospel of John presents as a prayer of Jesus that concludes his “Farewell Discourse” on the night preceding his crucifixion, Jesus prays four times that his disciples and all who through their witness later believe might have unity (vv. 11, 21, 22, 23) and that they might be protected from the “evil one” who is the source of division (v. 15). In a connection anticipating not only the church’s subsequently developed trinitarian theology but also the trinitarian koinonia ecclesiology that has in recent years borne much fruit for the Faith and Order stream of the ecumenical movement that will receive attention later in this chapter, the Johannine Jesus grounds this unity in the interpenetrating oneness he shares with the Father (vv. 11, 21-23; cf. John of Damascus, De Fide Orthodoxa 1.8, where this Johannine text is key to the eighth-century development of the concept of trinitarian perichōrēsis, the “mutual indwelling” or “interpenetration” of the three persons in the being and work of one another). Jesus also prays in vv. 21 and 23 that this unity among his followers will be not merely spiritual but visible—a unity that the world can see. The concern for ecclesial unity likewise marks the literature attributed to Paul from a later period that reflects a similar historical context to that of the gospel of John, one in which the phenomenon of division has intensified. This is notably the case in the letter to the Ephesians. It is significant that in what was possibly originally either a general epistle or one specifically addressed to more than one church and may have been intended to function as an epitome of Pauline teaching for these churches, the unity of the people of God in Christ and in the Spirit is the overarching theme (Lincoln 1990: xlvii–lxxxvii, 1–4; on the function of the theme of unity in Ephesians, see Hanson 1946; and Heil 2007). In the first chapter of the letter, the church as the body of Christ plays a crucial role in God’s plan to unify all things (Eph. 1:10, 22-23), and in chapter 2 the purpose of the work of Christ is to create “one new humanity . . . in one body through the cross” (Eph. 2:15-16 NRSV). The epistle’s central passage at the beginning of chapter 4 highlights the

436

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

unifying realities of the faith as the rationale for the admonition to “maintain the unity of the Spirit” (Eph. 4:3): “There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all” (Eph. 4:4-6). This interest in the unity of the church in the face of worsening divisions anticipates the emphasis on Christian unity in the context of heightened christological divisions in the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, written not long after the canonical Ephesians in the first decade of the second century CE. These letters echo Ephesians and have conceptual parallels with the Johannine literature (Maurer 1949; Rathke 1967; Harmon 2011: 35–9, 42–3).

THE HISTORICAL REALITY OF ECCLESIAL DIVISION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF ECUMENICAL ECCLESIOLOGY Ecclesiology must attend to its ecumenical dimension because of the historical reality of ecclesial division. While Christianity has experienced division from the primitive church reflected in the New Testament documents onward, each subsequent period of the history of the church has included specific forms of division that persist as factors in the contemporary divisions of the church.

Patristic Ecclesial Division The patristic period—so designated for the “fathers” (as well as “mothers”) of the church who provided theological as well as administrative leadership during this formative period of Christian history that followed the New Testament and continued until the beginning of the Middle Ages—birthed divisions rooted in conflict over how best to explain the church’s conviction that “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (Col. 1:19) in a human being, Jesus the Christ. In what sense was the person of the incarnation divine? Was the divinity present in Jesus Christ, God’s Son, identical with, similar to, or different from the divinity of God the Father? In what manner are Father and Son, along with the Spirit, related to one another while yet being and acting as one God? How do the humanity and divinity present in Jesus Christ relate to one another in his person and work? All parties in these trinitarian and christological controversies were devoted to Jesus Christ as the revealer of God and the savior of humanity, yet in the fourth and fifth centuries their differing perspectives sometimes led to ecclesial fissures that continue to this day. The intent of the ecumenical councils convened to address these theological divisions was indeed ecumenical, for they sought to find unity in the faith rather than to harden divisions by defining orthodoxy and anathematizing heresy—yet division was their tragic outcome. In recent decades, however, ecumenical dialogue with the non-Chalcedonian churches of the East has led to rapprochement between these churches and those committed to Chalcedonian orthodoxy (Gros, Meyer, and Rusch 2000: 108–12, 187–99, 291–4, 688–711, 709–12; Gros, Best, and Fuchs 2007: 2–11, 33–8, 39–57, 190–6, 197–205), recognizing along with the Vatican II Decree on Ecumenism Unitatis Redintegratio that these second-order doctrinal constructions may be “mutually complementary rather than conflicting,” or, in the words of John Paul II’s encyclical “On Commitment to Ecumenism” Ut Unum Sint, “different ways of looking at the same reality” (Vatican II 1964: 917 [§ 17]; John Paul II 1995: § 38).

ECCLESIOLOGY AND ECUMENICS

 437

Medieval Ecclesial Division When long-developing differences in theology, liturgy, politics, language, and culture led to the Great Schism of 1054, the division of the church between East and West also occasioned efforts to overcome this division. Reunion councils in Lyons in 1274 and Florence in 1439 resulted in representatives of the Western and Eastern churches reaching agreement on many of the contested issues, though they subsequently fell apart for reasons that were largely political, and in retrospect it seems clear that the agreements were reached largely on terms insisted upon by the Roman Church. Since the Second Vatican Council, however, relations between the Catholic and Orthodox churches have improved dramatically, beginning with a joint declaration in 1965 between Pope Paul VI and Patriarch of Constantinople Athenagoras I that withdrew the mutual excommunications and condemnations of 1054 (Paul VI and Athenagoras I 1965). Today the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Churches are closer to full visible unity with each other than they are with any other Christian churches, with the matter of Petrine primacy being the primary obstacle to full communion remaining. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “With the Orthodox Churches, this communion is so profound that it lacks little to attain the fullness that would permit a common celebration of the Lord’s Eucharist” (Catholic Church 1994: 222 [§ 838]).

Sixteenth-Century Ecclesial Division Even the early Protestant Reformers did not intend their separation from communion with Rome to be permanent, for they understood themselves to be leading a reforming movement within the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. While Martin Luther was unsparing in his critique of the Roman Church, believing that certain developments within it jeopardized the integrity of the gospel, he regarded the resulting divisions as necessary temporarily but ultimately inconsistent with Christ’s will for his church. Thus, this first division of the sixteenth century was not deliberate separation with the goal of founding or restoring a true church but rather an unintended tragedy occasioned by a complex set of social, political, and ecclesiastical historical circumstances (Yeago 1996). It can be argued that John Calvin functioned as the nascent Protestant movement’s first noteworthy ecumenist (McNeill 1963). Calvin attended theological dialogues between Catholics and Lutherans, and he longed for a general council of the evangelical churches that might unify the rapidly multiplying divisions in the churches of the Protestant Reformation. While his hoped-for council did not come to fruition, Calvin’s ecumenical commitments were evident in his correspondence with Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer and Catholic Cardinal James Sadoleto; to the latter, Calvin expressed his desire that their current divisions might not forever thwart the work of Christ to “gather us out of our present dispersion into the fellowship of his body, that so, through his one Word and Spirit, we may join together with one heart and one soul” (Bonnet 1858: 2:347–8; Reid 1954: 256). Like Luther, Calvin did not hesitate to name the serious disagreements that precluded an easy reconciliation with other churches, yet he did not abandon the hope that the triune God might yet overcome these divisions and bring about visible unity. The early Reformation confessions likewise were ecumenical in their intent. They were drafted primarily to explain the Reformers’ positions so that they might be able to engage in the Protestant–Catholic doctrinal contestation prerequisite for any movement toward unity with the Roman Church, and secondarily to seek unity among the churches of the Reformation.

438

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

THE MODERN ECUMENICAL MOVEMENT AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF ECUMENICAL ECCLESIOLOGY The varied engagements of the churches with modernity—and with what has followed in its wake—have engendered new expressions of ecclesial division over differing responses to the challenges posed by new scientific perspectives and new historical and literary approaches to the study of the Scriptures, new conceptions of gender roles and a new consciousness of racial injustice and economic inequity, and most recently new understandings of human sexuality. At the same time, the modern period also saw the ecumenical impulse that has persisted in the church throughout its history of division come to fuller flower in the form of the modern ecumenical movement. The modern missions movement that began in the nineteenth century birthed the modern ecumenical movement. The missionaries quickly concluded that taking a denominationally divided Christianity to the mission field was a scandal to the gospel, and some of them began to press their sending denominations to work toward cooperation with one another in mission. One such missionary advocate for ecumenical cooperation was William Carey, a Baptist missionary to India who in 1806 proposed that “a general association of all denominations of Christians from the four quarters of the earth” meet each decade at the Cape of Good Hope (George 1991: 163). What Carey envisioned was realized over a century later by the 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland and, beginning in 1921, the ongoing International Missionary Conference. These gatherings were initially limited to Protestants, but they served as the nucleus for what became the primary institutional expression of the worldwide ecumenical movement. The quest for unity in mission was soon joined by attention to the theological causes of division and possibilities for theological convergence. Bishop Charles Brent, an Episcopal missionary to the Philippines from the United States who was one of the speakers at the Edinburgh World Missionary Conference, urged participants not to be content with merely seeking greater cooperation in missions, for visible unity would not be possible apart from addressing divisive issues of doctrine and church order. Brent called for the creation of an international commission devoted to the study of the matters of faith and order that presently divided the churches and proposed this to representatives of the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Churches, and various Protestant communions (Zabriskie 1948). Brent’s proposal led in 1927 to a World Conference on Faith and Order in Lausanne, Switzerland, at which all major Christian communions (with the exception of the Roman Catholic Church but including the Orthodox churches) were represented. By the time of the Lausanne Conference there were three major streams of the modern ecumenical movement, for two years earlier, a Conference on Life and Work had its inaugural meeting in Stockholm, Sweden for the purpose of seeking ecumenical cooperation in addressing social issues. A young Dietrich Bonhoeffer was one of the early participants in the Life and Work movement, serving as its youth secretary and rooting the whole of his theological and ethical work in his ecumenical convictions regarding the indispensability of the church’s bonds of communion for the church’s participation in God’s work of justice in the world (Bethge 1970: 146–53; Clements 2015). In their emergence, these three complementary expressions of the worldwide ecumenical movement—unity in mission, joint work on divisive doctrinal and ecclesiological issue, and solidarity in social action—were regarded as coinherent, and they eventually coalesced in a unified institutional embodiment of the ecumenical quest. The Life and Work movement and the Faith and Order movements joined to form the World Council

ECCLESIOLOGY AND ECUMENICS

 439

of Churches (WCC) in 1948 at the inaugural WCC assembly in Amsterdam; in 1961 the International Missionary Conference also joined the WCC. The ecumenical movement has been its healthiest when the coinherence of these three streams of the modern ecumenical movement with their distinctive emphases on mission, doctrine, and social justice has been prized, and it has suffered whenever any one of those emphases has been prioritized in relation to the others. The classic definition of the visible unity sought by the ecumenical movement is a statement included in a report issued by the Third Assembly of the World Council of Churches in New Delhi, India in 1961: We believe that the unity which is both God’s will and [God’s] gift to [God’s] Church is being made visible as all in each place who are baptized into Jesus Christ and confess him as Lord and Savior are brought by the Holy Spirit into one fully-committed fellowship, holding the one apostolic faith, preaching the one Gospel, breaking the one bread, joining in common prayer, and having a corporate life reaching out in witness and service to all and who at the same time are united with the whole Christian fellowship in all places and all ages, in such wise that ministry and members are accepted by all, and that all can act and speak together as occasion requires for the tasks to which God calls [God’s] people. (World Council of Churches 1962: 116) According to the New Delhi definition, the goal of the ecumenical movement is not a super-denomination created by the structural merger of the currently divided churches, but a full communion of the churches with each other in which all baptized Christians fully belong to one another in a covenanted community that is both local and worldwide, marked by common confession of the broad contours of the historic faith of the church, common celebration of the eucharist in which table fellowship is fully extended to all members of all churches, joint engagement in mission and service, mutual recognition of the baptisms and ordinations performed by one another’s churches, and a unified prophetic voice. The visible unity envisioned by the New Delhi statement became a much more realistic hope when the Roman Catholic Church officially embraced the worldwide ecumenical movement at the Second Vatican Council (1962–5). In advance of the Council, the Vatican established a Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity and invited other Christian communions to send official observers. One of the most significant ecumenical developments of Vatican II was the promulgation of the Decree on Ecumenism Unitatis Redintegratio (“The Repair of Unity”) on November 21, 1964 (Vatican II 1964). This decree was the major twentieth-century turning point in the progress of the modern ecumenical movement. It acknowledged that “division openly contradicts the will of Christ, scandalizes the world, and damages the holy cause of preaching the Gospel to every creature” and recognized the modern ecumenical movement that began beyond the Catholic Church as the work of the Holy Spirit. It acknowledged that all churches, including the Roman Catholic Church, share responsibility for their contributions to the present divisions. Unitatis Redintegratio explicitly affirmed that non-Catholic Christians experience the grace of God through the presence of Christ and the work of the Spirit in Christian communities that are outside the Catholic Church. The decree called for all Catholics, laity as well as clergy, to learn about and learn from the distinctive gifts that the other denominational traditions contribute to the body of Christ. It explicitly committed the Catholic Church to participation in the various forms of the worldwide ecumenical movement. This made the modern ecumenical movement truly ecumenical in the sense of

440

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

involving all Christian communions, with the numerically largest expression of the body of Christ among the divided churches of Christ now among them. The Catholic Church followed through on the ecumenical commitments made in the Second Vatican Council by forming a Joint Working Group with the World Council of Churches in 1965 and officially joining the World Council of Churches Commission on Faith and Order in 1968 (though not becoming a member church of the World Council of Churches, which would not have been consistent with intra-Catholic ecclesiology). This meant that the primary international forum for multilateral ecumenical dialogue was now more fully representative of the whole church in its constructive contestation of church-dividing ecclesiological issues and proposals for convergence, some of the most significant of which will receive attention in the next section of this chapter. The Catholic Church also initiated bilateral dialogues with other Christian world communions, beginning with those most closely connected to the major historical divisions of the church to which the Catholic Church was party—the Eastern Orthodox Churches, the Lutheran World Federation, and the Anglican Communion, communions that in various ways also represented fewer barriers to possibilities for full ecclesiological communion with the Catholic Church. The beginnings of these bilateral dialogues were soon followed by dialogues between the Catholic Church and additional Christian world communions and by the entry of non-Catholic communions into bilateral dialogue with one another. The fruit of a half-century of these international bilateral dialogues in the form of their reports and agreed statements, along with some of the key documents of multilateral ecumenical convergence, is published in the Growth in Agreement series sponsored by the World Council of Churches (Meyer and Vischer 1984; Gros, Meyer, and Rusch 2000; Gros, Best, and Fuchs 2007; Best, et al. 2017).

KEY DOCUMENTS OF ECUMENICAL ECCLESIOLOGY Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (1999) The modern ecumenical movement has had two major success stories related to the first two of the four key documents of ecumenical ecclesiology treated in this section. One was the outcome of the bilateral dialogue initiated by the Catholic Church, immediately following the Second Vatican Council, with the Lutheran World Federation—the two Christian world communions whose forebears were involved in the original sixteenthcentury division of the church in the West. The joint commissions to the ongoing dialogue produced several agreed statements that addressed issues that were more directly ecclesiological as well as other theological issues that were ecclesiological in the sense that the differences of the two communions on those matters had historically been regarded as church-dividing (Lutheran World Federation and Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity 2013: 93). Phase I (1967–72) issued an agreed statement on The Gospel and the Church (1972). During Phase II (1973–84), the dialogue produced reports of their efforts toward convergence on themes reflected in their titles: The Eucharist (1978), All Under One Christ (1980), Ways to Community (1980), The Ministry in the Church (1981), Martin Luther—Witness to Christ (1983), and Facing Unity—Models, Forms and Phases of Catholic-Lutheran Church Fellowship (1984). The first two phases paved the way for concentrated work in Phase III (1986–93) on the theological issue at the root of the divisions between Catholics and Lutherans in the sixteenth century—the doctrine of justification—detailed in the report Church and Justification (1993). Much of the heavy

ECCLESIOLOGY AND ECUMENICS

 441

lifting in terms of shared biblical, historical, and theological work on justification had been done by the joint commission to the American national dialogue between representatives of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and American Lutherans that began meeting in 1965 and in 1983 produced the report Justification by Faith (United States Lutheran–Roman Catholic Dialogue 1983). On October 31, 1999, the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation officially approved and issued the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (JDDJ) (Lutheran World Federation and Catholic Church 1999). Following the lead of the US Lutheran–Catholic dialogue, the JDDJ articulated what has been termed a “differentiated consensus” on justification. The two communions arrived at a fundamental consensus on justification that understands justification to be God’s gracious initiative that both declares humanity to be righteous and is at work to make humanity actually righteous in character and conduct. This consensus is differentiated in terms of differences that remain regarding the ecclesiological and sacramental outworkings of justification, but the remaining differences are regarded as matters that do not imperil the fundamental consensus and are not church-dividing, though they warrant ongoing dialogue. Thus, almost 500 years after their initial division, the great achievement of the international Lutheran–Catholic dialogue was an authoritative agreement that, while there remain important church-dividing disagreements between the two communions, the central doctrine at stake in the debates of the sixteenth century is no longer considered to be among church-dividing differences. What began as the most significant outcome of all the international bilateral dialogues of the past half-century later became a five-party multilateral convergence on justification. In 2006 the World Methodist Council officially joined the JDDJ, followed by the World Communion of Reformed Churches in 2017, and on October 31, 2017, the Anglican Communion also became official signatories to the JDDJ in a service in Westminster Abbey with representatives of the Catholic Church, the Lutheran World Federation, the World Methodist Council, and the World Communion of Reformed Churches participating.

Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry (1982) Another major success story of the modern ecumenical movement proposed to the divided churches some possible convergences regarding significant ecclesiological differences between them. In 1982 the World Council of Churches Commission on Faith and Order issued a “convergence” statement on Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry, often conveniently referenced as BEM (World Council of Churches 1982). BEM was the fruit of fifty years of multilateral work on Faith and Order, and it received input from representatives of multiple Protestant denominations, including the Free Church or Believer’s Church traditions, along with the Eastern Orthodox Churches and the Roman Catholic Church. Its most significant achievement was in its section on baptism. On the one hand, partly because of the constructive contributions of consultations with representatives of the Free Church/Believer’s Church traditions and building on much twentieth-century New Testament and patristic historical scholarship, BEM definitively articulated what is now the current ecumenical consensus that “baptism upon personal profession of faith is the most clearly attested pattern in the New Testament documents” and that believer’s baptism by immersion is the normative biblical practice from which the later practice of infant baptism derives its significance. On the other hand, BEM commended two legitimate patterns for uniting baptism, personal faith, and Christian formation in the churches’ work of making disciples in a way that has encouraged much progress toward mutual

442

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

baptismal recognition, between churches that baptize only those who have embraced the faith of their own volition and churches that also baptize infants whom the church nurtures in faith. BEM likewise treated the eucharist and the ministry of the church in ways that invited mutual recognition of the essential features of eucharistic practice and the exercise of ministry in one another’s churches in the midst of significant remaining differences regarding eucharist and ministry, though the convergences proposed regarding these latter two aspects of ecclesiology have not been as influential in their reception as the section on baptism. The World Council of Churches has published six volumes of official ecclesial responses to BEM (Thurian 1986–88).

One Baptism: Towards Mutual Recognition (2011) Building on the achievements of BEM regarding baptism and taking into account the responses of the churches to the convergences it proposed, in 2011 the WCC Commission on Faith and Order issued One Baptism: Towards Mutual Recognition as a “study text” (World Council of Churches 2011). Rooted in a rich engagement of Scripture and a thick account of the diversity of baptismal practices and theologies in the Christian tradition, One Baptism helpfully shifted the emphasis of ecumenical discussions of baptism from chronological orderings of faith, baptism, and formation in faith to the whole journey of Christian initiation in the company of the church, gesturing toward ways in which both believer-baptizing and infant-baptizing churches might discern in one another’s baptismal practices common journeys of Christian experience which they could mutually recognize as the basis for church membership.

The Church: Towards Mutual Recognition (2013) Two years after the publication of One Baptism, the WCC Commission on Faith and Order issued The Church: Towards a Common Vision (TCTCV), which joined BEM as one of only two documents to be designated as a “convergence text” among the approximately 300 documents produced by the WCC Faith and Order Commission across its history (World Council of Churches 2013). The 186 responses to BEM from member communions of the WCC (Thurian 1986–8) had surfaced some ecclesiological themes that needed further study: first, the role the church plays in God’s salvific goals; second, the implications for ecclesiology of the concept of trinitarian koinonia; third, the manner in which the church is created by the Word of God; fourth, the nature of the church as a sacrament by which the world comes to experience God’s love; fifth, the church’s identity as a pilgrim community; and sixth, the church as prophetic sign and servant of the coming reign of God. A new project to address these broader issues of ecclesial vision evolved in several stages, beginning with a draft text titled The Nature and Purpose of the Church: A Stage on the Way to a Common Statement (World Council of Churches 1998). As with BEM, again the churches offered responses to this draft document that were taken into account in the next phase of the Commission’s work. At the 2006 WCC Assembly in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the Commission presented a new draft, The Nature and Mission of the Church, again subtitled A Stage on the Way to a Common Statement, and again the Commission submitted the text to the churches for response. Further input came from the Plenary Commission on Faith and Order meeting in Crete in October 2009, during which several plenary addresses offered global perspectives on the ecclesial vision of The Nature and Mission of the Church. One by Syrian Orthodox Metropolitan Geevarghese Mar Coorilos

ECCLESIOLOGY AND ECUMENICS

 443

of India critiqued the way the draft text on The Nature and Mission of the Church treated biblical images of the church in purely doctrinal terms without sufficient attention to their sociological dimensions and implications for the liberation of the dispossessed and the disempowered, which Metropolitan Coorilos called “the actual church amongst communities of people in their struggle for the fullness of life.” He said: In India, for the [“untouchable” members of the Dalit caste] who form the majority of the Indian church, the body of Christ is a Dalit body, a “broken body” (the word Dalit literally means “broken” and “torn asunder”). Jesus Christ became a Dalit because he was torn-asunder and mutilated on the cross. The Church as “body of Christ,” in the Indian context, therefore, has profound theological and sociological implications for a Dalit ecclesiology. . . . [The Nature and Mission of the Church], however, fails to strike chords and resonate with such contextual theological challenges. . . . In other words, the text fails to encounter the real ecclesia among communities of people in pain and suffering. (Coorilos 2012: 190–1) In addition to feedback offered in such addresses, in smaller working groups, and in general discussions, the Plenary Commission recommended that those responsible for drafting “shorten the text and . . . make it more contextual, more reflective of the lives of the churches throughout the world, and more accessible to a wider readership” (World Council of Churches 2013: 45). The drafting committee took this feedback into account along with a 2011 inter-Orthodox consultation on the text and the churches’ earlier responses to The Nature and Mission of the Church. It underwent three more drafts that made improvements in light of continued feedback, and in September 2012 the WCC Central Committee officially received the new convergence statement, now titled The Church: Towards a Common Vision. It was published in 2013, presented at the Tenth Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Busan, South Korea that October, and commended to the churches for study and response. One feature of TCTCV that seems most obviously an advance beyond BEM is the way it re-engages the roots of the modern ecumenical movement in the modern missions movement. It frames the quest for Christian unity as a participation in God’s mission in the world in its opening chapter, “God’s Mission and the Unity of the Church.” The opening paragraph ends with these two sentences: The Church, as the body of Christ, acts by the power of the Holy Spirit to continue his life-giving mission in prophetic and compassionate ministry and so participates in God’s work of healing a broken world. Communion, whose source is the very life of the Holy Trinity, is both the gift by which the Church lives and, at the same time, the gift that God calls the Church to offer to a wounded and divided humanity in hope of reconciliation and healing. (World Council of Churches 2013: 5 [§ 1] [emphasis added]) This first chapter sees the missio Dei as carried out in the sending of the Son, defined by the earthly ministry of Jesus, extended in the church as the body of Christ that continues his mission, and empowered by the Holy Spirit sent upon the church and into the world. In the next chapter on “The Church of the Triune God,” the church “is by its very nature missionary, called and sent to witness in its own life to that communion which God intends for all humanity and for all creation in the kingdom.” Whereas the title of an earlier text on “The Nature and Mission of the Church” suggested that one could somehow differentiate the church’s nature and the church’s mission, the new text now conceived

444

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

of mission as essential to the nature of the church—a strengthening of a long-developing trajectory in ecclesiology and ecumenical theology that appropriates the missiological concept of the missio Dei in which the church participates and becomes more fully the church whenever it does so. A second notable advance beyond BEM of TCTCV is the way it roots the unity of the church in the unity of the triune God: “Communion, whose source is the very life of the Holy Trinity, is both the gift by which the Church lives and, at the same time, the gift that God calls the Church to offer to a wounded and divided humanity in hope of reconciliation and healing” (World Council of Churches 2013: § 1). The text advances this trinitarian rationale and framework for conceiving of the church and its unity not only in its first chapter, titled “The Church of the Triune God,” but throughout the document. It does so especially in terms of the biblical concept of koinonia, which the subsequent Christian theological tradition has developed both as a trinitarian concept and as an ecclesiological concept, and it is influenced in particular by recent constructive retrievals of these developments (e.g., Fuchs 2008). TCTCV reaps the harvest of this trinitarian ecclesiological ferment as a deepening of a theme long present in ecumenical theology (cf. Vatican II 1964: § 2). A third strand in this ecumenical vision that TCTCV brings into sharper focus is its development more strongly than BEM of the church’s ecumenical imperative in eschatological terms, which TCTCV sees as inseparable from the mission of the triune God, who is the source of ecclesial unity. The three strands come together in the opening paragraph, which concludes with the insistence that “Communion, whose source is the very life of the Holy Trinity, is both the gift by which the Church lives and, at the same time, the gift that God calls the Church to offer to a wounded and divided humanity in hope of reconciliation and healing” (World Council of Churches 2013: § 1[emphasis added]). TCTCV portrays the church that has this eschatological hope as “an eschatological reality, already anticipating the kingdom, but not yet its full realization.” Therefore, it is also “a pilgrim community” on a “journey towards the full realization of God’s gift of communion” (World Council of Churches 2013: §§ 33, 35, 37). This thoroughly eschatological pilgrim church motif had already been expressed in the Vatican II Decree on Ecumenism, which said that the church “makes its pilgrim way in hope toward the goal of the fatherland above,” with that goal defined in the next sentence as “the sacred mystery of the unity of the Church” (Vatican II 1964: § 2). This pilgrim church conception of ecclesial identity, however, belongs broadly to the modern ecumenical movement and all churches that participate in it. The concept was clearly expressed in reports and documents issued in connection with assemblies of the World Council of Churches that preceded and followed the Second Vatican Council— Evanston in 1954 and New Delhi in 1961, as well as Uppsala in 1968. The New Delhi assembly issued a Report on Witness that urged “a reappraisal of the patterns of church organization and institutions inherited by the younger churches” so that “outdated forms . . . may be replaced by strong and relevant ways of evangelism.” It offered this as an example of “how the Church may become the Pilgrim Church, which goes forth boldly as Abraham did into the unknown future, not afraid to leave behind the securities of its conventional structure, glad to dwell in the tent of perpetual adaptation, looking to the city whose builder and maker is God” (quoting Heb. 11:10). The New Delhi assembly also proposed a vision of the ecumenical future toward which the pilgrim church journeys in its definition of the unity sought by the modern ecumenical movement quoted earlier in this chapter (World Council of Churches 1962: 116).

ECCLESIOLOGY AND ECUMENICS

 445

A PROMISING NEWER PARADIGM FOR ECUMENICAL CONVERGENCE: RECEPTIVE ECUMENISM Despite the remarkable convergences toward unity achieved by the modern ecumenical movement as represented by the documents introduced in the preceding section, many observers of and participants in this movement have characterized its current status as an “ecumenical winter.” Attention to divisions between denominations has been greatly complicated by divisions within them, especially in relation to bitterly contested differences over responses to the challenges of new understandings of human sexuality. In turn, worsening intra-denominational divisions within the communions that have historically been key participants in the modern ecumenical movement have siphoned resources and energy away from the instruments of ecumenical engagement, and the necessarily urgent task of attending to interreligious understanding has attracted the attention of many of the church’s thinkers who might otherwise have been leaders of the intra-Christian quest for unity. Nevertheless, today there is much ecumenical excitement about a promising path beyond the current retrenchment termed “receptive ecumenism.” Receptive ecumenism is an approach to ecumenical dialogue in which the communions in conversation with one another seek to identify the distinctive gifts that each tradition has to offer the other and which each could receive from the other with integrity (Murray 2008). It was anticipated in Pope John Paul II’s Encyclical on Ecumenism: “Dialogue is not simply an exchange of ideas. In some ways it is always an ‘exchange of gifts’” (John Paul II 1995). Some ecumenical dialogues, like the one between the Roman Catholic Church and the World Methodist Council, have worked toward concrete proposals for the exchange of ecclesial gifts (Catholic Church and World Methodist Council 2006). Yet, as an international conference on receptive ecumenism held in 2006 defined this approach, “the primary emphasis is on learning rather than teaching . . . each tradition takes responsibility for its own potential learning from others and is, in turn, willing to facilitate the learning of others as requested but without dictating terms and without making others’ learning a precondition to attending to ones’ own” (Murray 2008: vii). Receptive ecumenism is in many respects a more user-friendly approach to ecumenism for churches that have not heretofore been active participants in the ecumenical movement. Receptive ecumenism assumes that because each tradition has been entrusted with a unique historical journey as a people of God, it possesses distinctive gifts to be offered to the rest of the body of Christ. It also suggests the possibility that any tradition can incorporate the gifts of others into its own distinctive pattern of faith and practice without abandoning or distorting the gifts that already define its identity. Receptive ecumenism may also reveal many traditions that have not been self-consciously ecumenical as being much more receptive ecumenically than one might assume, for throughout the histories of the separated traditions and in their contemporary ecclesial life, all churches have received from other churches much that forms the core of their Christian identity while also enriching their distinctive denominational identities. Throughout the history of the church and its efforts to repair its fissures, ecumenics has not been an optional ecclesiological side project. It is central to ecclesiology, for our ordered thinking about the church is about the divided body of Christ, who prayed that its members might be one. Indeed, it is central to theology: the quest for unity is rooted in the unity of the triune God who has created humanity for unity with God and unity with one another, whose response to sin’s sundering of unity is to bring into being a community called to communion and to join in God’s work of remaking the world into the unity of God’s creative vision.

446

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

REFERENCES Best, T., L. Fuchs, J. Gibaut, J. Gros, and D. Prassas, eds. (2017), Growth in Agreement IV: International Dialogue Texts and Agreed Statements, 2004–2014, Books 1 and 2, Faith and Order Paper 219, Geneva: World Council of Churches Publications. Bethge, E. (1970), Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Man of Vision, Man of Courage, trans. Eric Mosbacher and others, New York: Harper & Row. Bonnet, J., ed. and trans. (1858), Letters of John Calvin, 2 vols., New York: Burt Franklin. Catholic Church. (1994), Catechism of the Catholic Church, Liguori: Liguori Publications. Catholic Church and World Methodist Council. (2006), The Grace Given You in Christ: Catholics and Methodists Reflect Further on the Church. Report of the International Commission for Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the World Methodist Council, Lake Junaluska: World Methodist Council. Clements, K. (2015), Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ecumenical Quest, Geneva: WCC Publications. Coorilos, G. (2012), “The Nature and Mission of the Church: An Indian Perspective,” in John Gibaut (ed.), Called to Be the One Church: Faith and Order at Crete, 188–92, Faith and Order Paper no. 212, Geneva: World Council of Churches Publications. Fuchs, L. (2008), Koinonia and the Quest for an Ecumenical Ecclesiology: From Foundations through Dialogue to Symbolic Competence for Communionality, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans. George, T. (1991), Faithful Witness: The Life and Mission of William Carey, Birmingham: New Hope. Gros, J., H. Meyer, and W. Rusch, eds. (2000), Growth in Agreement II: Reports and Agreed Statements of Ecumenical Conversations on a World Level, 1982–1998, Faith and Order Paper no. 187, Geneva: WCC Publications and Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans. Gros, J., T. Best, and L. Fuchs, eds. (2007), Growth in Agreement III: International Dialogue Texts and Agreed Statements, 1998–2005, Faith and Order Paper no. 204, Geneva: WCC Publications and Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans. Hanson, S. (1946), The Unity of the Church in the New Testament: Colossians and Ephesians, Acta Seminarii Neotestamentici Upsaliensis, no. 14, Uppsala: Almquist & Wiksells. Harmon, S. (2009), “Ecumenical Theology and/as Systematic Theology,” Ecumenical Trends 38 (9): 6/134–9/137, 15/143. Harmon, S. (2011), “Qualitative Catholicity in Ignatius of Antioch—and the New Testament: The Fallacies of a Restorationist Hermeneutic,” Perspectives in Religious Studies 38 (1): 33–45. Heil, J. (2007), Ephesians: Empowerment to Walk in Love for the Unity of All in Christ, Society of Biblical Literature Studies in Biblical Literature, no. 13, Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature. John of Damascus De Fide Orthodoxa. ([1899] 1994), English translation, “Exposition of the Orthodox Faith,” trans. S. D. F. Salmond, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 9, Peabody: Hendrickson. John Paul II. (1995), On Commitment to Ecumenism (Ut Unum Sint), May 25, 1995, online: http:​/​/www​​.vati​​can​.v​​a​/hol​​y​_fat​​her​/j​​ohn​_p​​aul​_i​​i​/enc​​yclic​​als​/d​​ocume​​nts​/h​​f​_jp-​​ii​_en​​c​_250​​5​ 1995​​_ut​-u​​num​-s​​int​_e​​n​.htm​l Lampe, G. (1961), A Patristic Greek Lexicon, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Leithart, P. (2006), 1 & 2 Kings, Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible, Grand Rapids: Brazos Press. Liddell, H. and R. Scott (1968), Greek-English Lexicon, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

ECCLESIOLOGY AND ECUMENICS

 447

Lincoln, A. (1990), Ephesians, Word Biblical Commentary, Vol. 42, Dallas: Word Books. Lutheran World Federation and Catholic Church. (1999), Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans. Lutheran World Federation and Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. (2013), From Conflict to Communion: Lutheran-Catholic Common Commemoration of the Reformation in 2017. Report of the Lutheran-Roman Catholic Commission on Unity, Leipzig: Evangelische Verlangsanstalt. Malan, G. (2011), “Does John 17:11b, 21−23 Refer to Church Unity?” HTS Teologiese Studies/ Theological Studies 67 (1): 10. doi: 10.4102/hts.v67i1.857. Available online: http:​/​/hts​​.org.​​ za​/in​​dex​.p​​hp​/HT​​S​/art​​icl​e/​​view/​​857 (accessed August 14, 2018). Mardaga, H. (2005), “Reflection on the Meaning of John 17:21 for Ecumenical Dialogue,” Ecumenical Trends 34 (10): 148–52. Maurer, C. (1949), Ignatius von Antiochien und das Johannesevangelium, Abhandlungen zur Theologie des Alten und Neuen Testaments, no. 18, Zürich: Zwingli-Verlag. McNeill, J. (1963), “Calvin as an Ecumenical Churchman,” Church History 32: 379–91. Meyer, H. and L. Vischer, eds. (1984), Growth in Agreement: Reports and Agreed Statements of Ecumenical Conversations on a World Level, New York: Paulist Press and Geneva: World Council of Churches. Minear, P. (1960), Images of the Church in the New Testament, Philadelphia: Westminster Press. Murphy-O’Connor, J. (2011), “Divisions are Necessary (1 Corinthians 11:19),” in P. Spitaler (ed), Celebrating Paul: Festschrift in Honor of Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, O.P., and Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J., 9–14, Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series, Vol. 48, Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America. Murray, P., ed. (2008), Receptive Ecumenism and the Call to Catholic Learning: Exploring a Way for Contemporary Ecumenism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Paul VI and Athenagoras I. (1965), “Joint Catholic-Orthodox Declaration of His Holiness Pope Paul VI and the Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I,” December 7, 1965, online: www​.v​​ atica​​n​.va/​​holy_​​fathe​​r​/pau​​l​_vi/​​speec​​hes​/1​​965​/d​​ocume​​nts​/h​​f​_p​-v​​i​_spe​​_1965​​1207_​​commo​​n​ -dec​​larat​​ion​_e​​n​.htm​l Radner, E. (2012), A Brutal Unity: The Spiritual Politics of the Christian Church, Waco: Baylor University Press. Rahner, K. (1969), “The Sinful Church in the Decrees of Vatican II,” in Theological Investigations, Vol. 6, Concerning Vatican Council II, trans. Karl-H. and Boniface Kruger, 270–94. Baltimore: Helicon Press. Randall, J. (1965), “The Theme of Unity in John 17:20-23,” Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 41 (3): 373–94. Rathke, H. (1967), Ignatius von Antiochien und die Paulusbriefe, Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur, no. 99, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag. Reid, J. (1954), Calvin: Theological Treatises, Library of Christian Classics, Vol. 23, Philadelphia: Westminster Press. Thurian, M., ed. (1986–88), Churches Respond to Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, 6 vols., Geneva: World Council of Churches. United States Lutheran-Roman Catholic Dialogue. (1983), Justification by Faith: U. S. Lutheran-Roman Catholic Dialogue, Origins: NC Documentary Service, Vol. 13, no. 17, Washington, DC: National Catholic News Service. Vatican II. (1964), Decree on Ecumenism (Unitatis Redintegratio), November 21, 1964, in N. Tanner (ed.), Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, Vol. 2, Trent to Vatican II, 908–20, London: Sheed & Ward and Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

448

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

World Council of Churches. (1962), The New Delhi Report: The Third Assembly of the World Council of Churches, 1961, New York: Association Press. World Council of Churches. (1982), Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, Faith and Order Paper no. 111, Geneva: World Council of Churches Publications. World Council of Churches. (1998), The Nature and Purpose of the Church: A Stage on the Way to a Common Statement, Faith and Order Paper no. 181, Geneva: World Council of Churches Publications. World Council of Churches. (2011), One Baptism: Towards Mutual Recognition. A Study Text, Faith and Order Paper no. 210, Geneva: World Council of Churches Publications. World Council of Churches. (2013), The Church: Towards a Common Vision, Faith and Order Paper no. 214, Geneva: World Council of Churches Publications. Yeago, D. (1996), “The Catholic Luther,” in Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (eds.), The Catholicity of the Reformation, 13–34, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans. Zabriskie, A. (1948), Bishop Brent, Crusader for Christian Unity, Philadelphia: Westminster Press.

Chapter THIRTY

Ecclesiology and Witness DARRELL L. GUDER

INTRODUCTION Martus/marturia/marturion/martureo The language of witness is widely spread throughout the biblical record. Kittel’s Dictionary lists fifteen different Greek terms based on the root martus (witness). A glance at a concordance reveals that there are easily more than 300 scriptural usages of some term related to “witness” or “testimony.” The term may refer to a particular person whose speech or actions define him or her as a “witness”; there is a great diversity of ways in which persons who are witnesses function as such in Scripture. The impact of such persons can be spoken of as their witness or their testimony. The personal distinctiveness of witnesses, their actions and their speaking, may also be experienced by others as testimony or witness, sometimes in legal settings. There are verbal forms of “witness,” “witnessing,” and “testifying” which are used for the many ways in which witness or testimony can be communicated, received, and engaged. In many instances where witness is happening, there is a focus upon the bearing of the witness’s testimony on matters calling for decision. “Witness” is often a secondary act, coming after something has happened and has been observed and perhaps interpreted. The subsequent testimony of the witness can be of importance for decisions like those of a judge making a legal determination. The witness is not so much an initiator as an observer, a respondent, a participant who has been drawn into a situation. The witness’s testimony is made known, and others act as a result of it. The crucial issue with many biblical witnesses is their integrity, their believability, their trustworthiness, or, to use the fundamental biblical concept, their faithfulness. In the development of the Christian vocabulary over time, the Greek root of “witness” gradually became the term for the person who testified with his or her life, the martyr.

WITNESS, MISSION, AND THE MISSIO DEI Witness, in its many biblical usages, frequently relates to the people of God and to their attestation of God’s self-disclosing Word. Testimony to who God is and what God has done is basic to the biblical message. Witnesses can testify to God’s grace in action for the healing of the nations. Witness and testimony can be events that relate directly to the biblical language of proclamation and good news. In this understanding, witness is not merely one of the essential aspects of the apostolic community. It defines the overarching purpose of that community as the agent and instrument of God’s mission. Beginning with

450

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

the call of Abraham and the promised blessing of his seed so that all nations are to be blessed (Gen. 12:1-3), God’s healing purposes have been served by his called and chosen people: his witnesses. It is the purpose and promise of the missio Dei to bring about the healing of the nations, and it is God’s called and equipped people who are to serve that mission by rendering their witness, making known their testimony. Thus “witness” lies at the heart of biblical faith and is or should be especially formative of a missionally focused ecclesiology. Indeed, the introduction of the term “missional” in the last decades should be understood as an ecclesiological approach that centers on the mission of God and its implementation through God’s called, set-apart, equipped, and sent-out people: God’s witnesses. Thus “witness” serves the ecclesiology shaped by Luke–Acts as its dominant theme (Guder et al. 1998: passim). It is crucial to the faithfulness of mission that its proclamation of good news take place with biblical and ecclesiological integrity. Based on his extensive research on evangelism in the early church, Michael Green describes the martus/martyria word group as a “great cluster of words used in the New Testament to describe the evangelistic work of the early Church” (Green 2003: 106). He groups it with “proclamation” and “good news” as the vocabulary that defines the church’s public purpose and action. When the actions and impact of witnesses are considered together with “proclamation” and “good news,” what emerges is the overarching action of “mission” as the vocation that defines God’s chosen people. Understanding “witness” within the context of “mission” raises ecclesiological issues that go to the very heart of our doctrine of the church, both its purpose and its action. Linking “witness” and “mission” reflects important theological moves in the twentieth century in which the theological significance of “mission” shifted away from a reference to one of the possible activities of the institutional church and began to be used as a reference to the missionary nature of God. The emerging language of the missio Dei emphasized that mission was to be understood as God’s mission (Bosch 2011: 398–402). David Bosch articulated the thrust of this conceptual shift in a much-cited passage: “Mission is not primarily an activity of the church, but an attribute of God. God is a missionary God . . . Mission is therefore seen as a movement from God to the world; the church is viewed as an instrument for that mission” (Bosch 2011: 400). “It is not the church that has a mission of salvation to fulfill in the world; it is the mission of the Son and the Spirit through the Father that includes the church” (Bosch 2011: 400, citing Moltmann 1977: 64). Approaching ecclesiology through the rubric of the missio Dei can helpfully expand the discussion represented by this volume, since “mission” is not otherwise listed as a theme to be explored in its relationship to ecclesiology. This omission presents an opportunity to work both critically and constructively with the crucial character of the church as the instrument of God’s mission, and to interpret her witness as the way in which that calling is carried out.

THE DOCTRINAL SILENCE OF MISSION AND WITNESS In the course of the twentieth century, the theological exploration of mission and witness emerged as a major undertaking. The complexity of this discussion is indicated by the way in which David Bosch discusses the [thirteen!] “Elements of an Emerging Ecumenical Missionary Paradigm” in the final third of his magisterial Transforming Mission (Bosch 2011: 377–532). There were many factors that worked together to encourage this process: the challenges arising from the outcomes of the Western missionary movement, especially the Ecumenical Movement; the rapid expansion of the Christian movement resulting

ECCLESIOLOGY AND WITNESS

 451

in globalized Christianity; the international expansion of missiology as a multifaceted discipline addressing the outcomes of the modern missionary movement; growing critiques of Western mission; and the decline of Western Christendom contrasting with the expansion of global Christianity beyond the borders of the West (Guder 2003). As the discussion and exploration of mission and witness expanded, it became clear that the doctrinal process of Western Christendom itself presented a challenge. It was difficult to address “mission” and “witness” theologically because they were largely untreated themes in Western ecclesiologies. That is not how the apostolic mission movement began. Bosch points to the classical claim made by the theologian Martin Kähler at the beginning of the twentieth century, speaking of the early church: “Mission is the mother of theology” (Bosch 2011: 16). The apostolic mission generated the processes of theological reflection within expanding Christianity as the adventure of mission generated questions and themes that required the church’s thoughtful engagement. One could point to the New Testament Scriptures as the first phase of Christian theological reflection. But as Western culture was “Christianized” and the church “established,” the focus upon God’s mission shifted. Its task was alleged to be completed with the “establishment” of Roman Christianity and its church: the majority of the population in the world as it was then known was by definition Christian! The church focused more and more upon its members and their salvation, with a gradually diminishing sense of the apostolic mandate which triggered the mission in the first century. John Flett, surveying this long history, describes this challenge as “the omission of mission from the dogmatic horizon” (Flett 2010: 31).

Grappling with the Christendom Legacy So there is a case to be made that, while both “mission” and “witness” are dominant themes expounding the church’s purpose and action in Scripture, the theological processes of Western Christendom have neglected to address them and to explore their ecclesiological significance. “Mission” and “witness” are not significantly represented in the doctrinal working vocabulary that we inherit from the centuries of Western Christendom. “If Europe became Christianized and Christianity became the established religion in the Roman Empire and beyond, theology lost its missionary dimension” (Bosch 2011: 501). The ecclesiological challenge presented by that legacy of Christendom can be aptly illustrated with an example from the Reformed/Presbyterian theological process in the United States. From its founding by Scottish and English settlers onward, the sole doctrinal standard of the colonial Presbyterians was the Westminster Confession of Faith—lasting until 1967 when the denomination adopted its Book of Confessions. Westminster can be read as a summarizing of major strands of Western doctrinal theology, ranging from patristic theology to the theological initiatives of the Reformation. How, then do “mission” and “witness” figure in Westminster? When we consult Westminster’s chapter XXV/XXVII, “Of the Church,” looking for some kind of theological definition of the church as a witness or an instrument of God’s mission, we find first of all a definition of the membership of the church which “consists of the whole number of the elect, that have been, are, or shall be gathered into one, under Christ, the head thereof.” The “visible Church” “consists of all those throughout the world that profess the true religion, together with their children, and is the Kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ; the house and family of God, through which men are ordinarily saved and union with which is essential to their best growth and service.”

452

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

When we search a little further, we find a certain broadening of the doctrinal definition provided by “Of the Church” in paragraph three: “Unto this catholic visible Church, Christ has given the ministry, the oracles, and ordinances of God, for the gathering and perfecting of the saints, in this life, to the end of the world: and doth by his own presence and Spirit, according to his promise, make them effectual thereunto” (Book of Confessions 1999: 6.142). It appears that the mission and witness of the church can be summarized as the “gathering and perfecting of the saints.” When reading Westminster, we need to pay attention to the way in which the text evolved in two denominations: the Presbyterian Church in the United States (the “southern” church) and The United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (the “northern” church). The paragraph on “the church” is chapter XXVII of the southern version, while it is chapter XXV of the northern version—although it is the same text for both. This exposition of the shared chapter “Of the Church” does not cross-reference the language of chapter X, “Of the Gospel,” which is only in the southern version! In chapter X of the southern version we find promising evidences of an emerging missional theology with the emphasis on the universality of the gospel and the missionary mandate which proclaims it: Chapter X Of the Gospel

1. God in infinite and perfect love, having provided in the covenant of grace, through the mediation and sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ, a way of life and salvation, sufficient for and adapted to the whole lost race of man, doth freely offer this salvation to all men in the gospel.



2. In the gospel God declares his love for the world and his desire that all men should be saved, reveals fully and clearly the only way of salvation; promises eternal life to all who truly repent and believe in Christ; invites and commands all to embrace the offered mercy, and by his Spirit accompanying the Word pleads with men to accept his gracious invitation.



3. It is the duty and privilege of everyone who hears the gospel immediately to accept its merciful provision; and they who continue in impenitence and unbelief incur aggravated guilt and perish by their own fault.



4. Since there is no other way of salvation than that revealed in the gospel, and since in the divinely established and ordinary method of grace faith cometh by hearing the Word of God, Christ hath commissioned his Church to go into all the world and to make disciples of all nations. All believers are, therefore, under obligation to sustain the ordinances of the Christian religion where they are already established, and to contribute by their prayers, gifts and personal efforts to the extension of the Kingdom of Christ throughout the whole earth. (Book of Confessions 1999: 6055–8)

We observe here that Matthew’s “Great Commission” is an essential part of the Presbyterian understanding of the gospel itself. Mission is certainly addressed here. The church is commissioned to go out into all the world. The church is to “invite . . . and command . . . all to embrace the offered mercy.” But the action of witness which implements that gospel vision is summarized in largely institutional terms as

ECCLESIOLOGY AND WITNESS

 453

“sustain[ing] the ordinances of the Christian religion where they are already established, and [contributing] by their prayers, gifts and personal efforts to the extension of the Kingdom of Christ.” American Presbyterians, like virtually all Protestant denominations at the time, caught the vision of “going into all the world and making disciples of all nations.” In the course of the nineteenth century, the American Presbyterian engagement in global mission developed rapidly, with missionary churches planted on every continent. It became the dominant passion of American Presbyterians, evoking great generosity and enlisting growing numbers of responses to the call to foreign mission. With time, the silence of Presbyterianism’s sole doctrinal standard with regard to foreign mission became a great enough concern that the old “northern stream” Presbyterians amended the Westminster Confession with an interesting editorial move. In 1903, they inserted paragraph XXXV, under the title “Of the Gospel of the Love of God and Missions”—the text they used was already chapter X of the southern stream’s version of the Confession, entitled “Of the Gospel,” as discussed above. Thus, the northerners used as the content of this paragraph on missions the entire southern stream paragraph on “the Gospel” (cited above as chapter X). The effect is that the southern version has the content but not the title, “Of the Gospel of the Love of God and Missions.” The content of the chapter, shared by both streams in different sequence, implies that the church is by its very nature missionary. But the lack of any cross-reference to the discussion of “the church” indicates the absence of ecclesiological reflection on the central themes of mission and witness. The southerners affirmed the gospel mandate: “Christ has commissioned his Church to go into all the world and to make disciples of all nations.” But that mandate does not have any concrete doctrinal bearing upon wording defining the Church, including its characteristics and its actions, in terms of Christ’s mission. Of equal importance with that missional calling is the expectation that Presbyterians will “sustain the ordinances of the Christian religion, where they are already established, and to contribute by their prayers, gifts, and personal efforts to the extension of the Kingdom of Christ throughout the whole earth.” This stipulation aptly summarizes how mission actually functioned in the Presbyterian Church. And it fulfilled this expectation impressively as the global missionary movement steadily grew through the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century. But the ecclesiology summarized in Westminster has no direct link with God’s mission carried out by the witnessing community. There is very little room for the idea that Luke’s “You shall be my witnesses” is to shape and form the Presbyterian mission process in modernity. In fact, none of the documents in the Presbyterian Book of Confessions before the twentieth century mentions “mission” or “witness” in any doctrinally relevant sense. The ecclesiologies that shape all the Reformation traditions neglect these basic themes. Neither in the Westminster Confession nor in the two catechisms based on it is there any exposition of the universal vocation of witness, nor of mission as the essential definition of the purpose and action of the gathered church. The institutional maintenance of the missionary enterprise and the churches it planted is the dominant theme, which reflects the reality of most Protestant mission efforts in the West in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For the modern missionary movement, “mission” is one of the very worthwhile activities of the church. It merits financial support and institutional development, along with the other major purposes and activities of the church (e.g., worship, fellowship, sacraments, ordered ministry, cure of souls). Commonly, “mission” refers to those endeavors where Christian communities spend money on someone else

454

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

rather than on themselves. It is also subject to profound shaping if not distortion by the historical context within which it unfolds. In another context I have sought to interpret the Christendom legacy with its silence of mission by suggesting that a profound doctrinal “reductionism” developed in Western doctrine and practice (Guder 1985, 2015: 67–70). If “mission was the mother of theology” for early Christianity, its establishment and expansion to embrace all of Western culture brought with it a movement from theology for mission to theology for maintenance. The gospel was, over centuries, reduced to a focus upon individual savedness—a soteriological reductionism. The driving issues had to do with the spiritual state of one’s soul, and where one would ultimately spend eternity. The impact upon the church’s doctrinal reflection and practice was massive: the church became, over a long period, the institutional means by which individual salvation was managed. This was the ecclesiological reductionism that generated the absence of mission in the church’s process of self-reflection and interpretation. The effect was to hallow a false dichotomy between the mission or purpose of the gospel, and the benefits one received from being a believer. This “mission/benefits dichotomy” negatively influenced virtually every dimension of the church’s life and thought. It has had an especially problematic impact on the theology and practice of evangelism. But it is a reduction of the gospel, not a renunciation of it. The gospel is not absent; the message does get proclaimed and responded to, and the apostolic mission is passed along from generation to generation, as problematic as its doctrinal and cultural compromises might be. In fact, Christendom never stopped doing mission, especially along its cultural boundaries with pagan or unevangelized peoples. But it did not theologize about mission. The theme was foreign to its ecclesiological labors. Much of the history of revivalism in Western Christianity can be understood as a response to this reductionism and to its neglect or distortion of mission.

RECLAIMING THE APOSTOLIC MISSION The reclamation of the apostolic mission is a process that accompanies the reformation of Western Christianity from the sixteenth century onward. It is a complex and manysided movement whose outcome can be interpreted as the replacement of the doctrinal silence of mission and witness with robust theological interrogation and exploration of the church’s missional vocation and practice. We shall survey the process in broad strokes, beginning with the central role of Luke–Acts for the initiation and ongoing formation of the apostolic mission movement. The ecclesiological significance of witness is defined by its central role in the Acts of the Apostles. “You shall be my witnesses” (Acts 1:8) establishes both the purpose and the action of the first-century apostolic church. What this dominical claim means is then demonstrated by the entire plot of Acts: the unfolding of the apostolic mission carried out by the planting of witnessing communities. From Pentecost onward the apostolic mission is the Spirit’s empowering process of gospel proclamation resulting in the planting of communities of believers who have heard and are responding to the good news. They hear this message as God’s call, they respond to it, and as enabled respondents they receive, appropriate, and pass on the healing gospel of grace. Crucial to their response is their incorporation into the emerging community of apostolic witness. Wherever the gospel is proclaimed by the apostolic missionaries, there is empowered response and thus the formation and continuation of the witness that God uses to bless all creation. These communities are called together, formed, and sent out to continue that mission.

ECCLESIOLOGY AND WITNESS

 455

The biblical canon that emerged in the first three centuries of the church’s history can be understood as the written testimonies used by God’s Spirit to continue the formation of gathered communities for faithful witness. The apostolicity of the emerging church is thus best understood in terms of its faithfulness to the apostolic mission which called it into being. “You shall be my witnesses” continues to define the sense of purpose and action of the expanding Christian movement. The gathered community understood itself as equipped, commissioned, and sent. From the early twentieth century onward, this ancient missional focus emerged as the reclaimed consensus of the global missiological conversation. Mission was not just a strategy or a tactic: it was a theology, a way of doing ecclesiology. Bosch summarizes: “mission belongs to the essence of the church” (Bosch 2011: 504).

Ecclesiological Implications of Luke–Acts: You shall Be My Witnesses We have emphasized that the vocation and action of witness constitute the overarching theme of Luke–Acts, and thus define its ecclesiology. The theology and practice of the apostolic mission are the major thrust of Luke–Acts, initiated on the Mount of the Ascension. But the story actually starts with the four gospels, with the calling of the disciples and their disciplined formation under the personal and intensive tutelage of Jesus. The outcome of their discipleship will be the apostolate that awaits them. Seen in missional terms, discipleship is not an end in itself but is rather an essential passage of spiritual and martyriological formation for the life of witness which will be initiated at Pentecost. Jesus emphasizes this intentional formation in his final earthly encounter with the disciples before his Ascension. Looking ahead toward their apostolic vocation, he assures them, “You are witnesses of these things” (Lk. 24:48). And within days they hear him again lay out their commission: “But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8). This is not a command but a description of what God is doing and will do. When Jesus tells the disciples gathered after Easter, “You shall be my witnesses” (Acts 1:8), he is unleashing the Spirit’s empowered missio (sending) for which the disciples have been prepared in their years of discipling with their master. He defines their purpose and practice by announcing that they are now his witnesses. Reflecting the complex and diverse world of meaning in this cluster of biblical terms, “witness” is a comprehensive descriptor. It addresses who God’s called and commissioned people are, what they do, and what they say. They are witnesses, they do witness, and they say witness. The central task of such witnesses, as they follow the Spirit into the world into which they are sent, is to found witnessing communities. It is the task of ecclesiological reflection to explore how this mandate is to be translated into the life and practice of the gathered community. We have proposed that the concept and practice of witness dominates the ecclesiological thrust of the Book of Acts. From the outset, the term’s multiple meanings are significant. In Acts 1 the gathered disciples are addressed in the plural: together they are witnesses, but each one is a distinctive witnessing person. Their impact upon the world in which they testify is both corporate and individual. Each one demonstrates in the world his or her witness, but as a gathered community, they convey to the world a shared and corporate message. That to which they testify is the report, the good news, of God’s completed work of salvation in Christ. Their testimony is rooted in their response to that message and their obedience to the call to become its witness. For that purpose, God’s

456

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

Spirit gathers the communities that are to continue the witness that initiated them. As witnesses of God’s work of salvation in Jesus Christ, they are now empowered to serve God’s healing purposes as apostolic (sent-out) messengers. Their testimony to salvation is possible because of their experience of salvation.

WITNESS AS A MAJOR THEOLOGICAL CONCERN In the course of the twentieth century, the situation with regard to the theology and practice of mission developed in remarkable ways. The theological silence of mission ended. For many, “witness” became the comprehensive biblical definition of the Christian vocation. In a relatively short period of time, the centuries of theological neglect of mission and witness was replaced by a vibrant and rapidly expanding theological engagement with mission as the defining purpose and action of the church. That mission however was not a mere expansion of an institution through church planting in every culture. “Mission was understood as being derived from the very nature of God . . . The classical doctrine on the missio Dei as God the Father sending the Son, and God the Father and the Son sending the Spirit was expanded to include yet another ‘movement’: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit sending the church into the world” (Bosch 2011: 399). This dynamic and ecumenically diverse engagement with the centrality of mission reached a certain climax in the statement of the Second Vatican Council that the church is “missionary by its very nature” (Bosch 2011: 381–2). The missional witness of American Presbyterianism was profoundly enriched by the inclusion in its Book of Confessions of the Theological Declaration of Barmen and the Confession of 1967 with a fully developed theology of the mission of the church in the service of the ministry of reconciliation (Book of Confessions 1999: 8.01–8.28; 9.01–9.56). With the mention of the Barmen Declaration, we encounter Karl Barth and the significance of his work for “ecclesiology and witness.” Barth drafted the text of Barmen in 1933 and placed at its core this succinct ecclesiological formulation: The Christian Church is the community of brothers and sisters in which, in Word and sacrament, through the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ acts in the present as Lord. With both its faith and its obedience, with both its message and order, it has to testify in the midst of the sinful world, as the Church of pardoned sinners, that it belongs to him alone and lives and may live by his comfort and under his direction alone, in expectation of his appearing. (Busch 1990: 88) The convictions expressed in this confessional statement constitute the core of Barth’s theological project, anticipating what will become the central emphases of his Church Dogmatics. The gathered community is called to overcome the false divisions of sinful humanity: it is a gathering of brothers and sisters. It results from the initiative and action of its Lord and King, Jesus Christ, who is present and at work though the church’s Spiritempowered faith, obedience, message, and order—all of which are the response of the church to Christ’s calling, healing, formation, and sending. The operative verb in this one paragraph ecclesiology is “has to testify.” It can be rendered “must necessarily bear witness” in this sinful world and as forgiven sinners to the all-embracing lordship of Christ. Thus, in this terse ecclesiology, the centrality of witness as the church’s defining mission is unambiguously articulated. Barth’s dogmatic project is, from Barmen onward, basic for the contemporary reclamation of mission and witness at the heart of ecclesiology. There are theologians

ECCLESIOLOGY AND WITNESS

 457

who have claimed that Barth had minimal interest in mission and left us little to work on with regard to witness as a central theologian concern. John Flett has effectively discredited such claims (Flett 2010: 11–16). Barth’s interest in and commitment to mission is liberally documented throughout his life. As an enthusiastic young theologian attending von Harnack’s history seminar in Berlin, Barth wrote a book-length seminar essay on the theme, “Paul’s Missionary Activity According to the Acts of the Apostles” (1907). Here he argued his conviction that Paul must be understood as missionary preacher, whose commitment to gospel proclamation undergirds and illumines his entire biography (Barth 1992: 148–243). The theological revolution Barth ignited with the Romans commentary was moving toward his exposition of the fundamentally missionary nature of the church, centered on the witness to the gospel. As we shall see, the outcome of his theological exploration was the firm anchoring of witness as a basic concept within the ecclesiological vocabulary of the church. The missiocentricity of Barth’s doctrinal project is documented with particular clarity in his address to the Brandenburg Mission Conference in Berlin, April 11, 1932, under the title, “Theology and Mission in the Present Situation.” He unpacks the argument by asking, “What is mission?” That Jesus Christ is in truth and reality this Lord is the actual content of the Word of God, that Word that God speaks to humanity and which the church wants to serve with its activity. This too is what mission seeks, both in the church and with the church. The certain form in which the mission seeks to serve the word of God consists of the fact that its proclamation of the message of Jesus Christ is directed to those people who are not yet located within the church, that is, to those who have not yet made their confession of God’s self-revelation in Jesus, who have not yet heard his voice and thus do not yet belong to him. They do not yet belong to him in the sense that, lacking that confession, the certainty that they do in fact belong to him has not yet become visible through the proclamatory ministry of the church exercised towards them, not yet become visible through their own acknowledgement of it, and not yet become visible through the sign of baptism that confirms the will of the Lord directed towards them . . . To that extent all activity of the church is mission, even if it is not expressly called that. (Barth 1932: 190). Barth then defines “theology” engaging the understanding of “mission” laid out here: What, then, is theology? To be sure, it also wants to be an activity of the church, a form of confession of Jesus Christ, an attempt to do his will by communicating the message about him. But this is true of theology in a different sense from that of mission. Theology is distinguished from mission, and from all the other proclamation of the church that is not missionary in the narrow sense, in that it does not seek so much to be the communication of that message as the reflection on that activity, reflection on the rightness of that communicative process . . . The task of theology emerged and emerges out of the complete inadequacy of the church’s proclamation as it is placed in human hands. Theology is a corrective. (Barth 1932: 191–2) One outcome of Barth’s exposition of this self-critical theological discipline is not only the reclamation of the theological centrality of mission. It is the enlistment of “witness” as the theological definition and formation of church praxis in the service of gospel proclamation. He arrives there through the ecclesiology which concludes and draws together the theological argument of volume IV of the Church Dogmatics, “the gospel

458

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

of reconciliation.” Bosch summarizes what he describes as “Barth’s magnificent and consistent missionary ecclesiology”: Under the overarching rubric of soteriology, Barth develops his ecclesiology in three phases. His reflections on soteriology as justification . . . are followed by a section on “The Holy Spirit and the Gathering of the Christian Community . . . His exposition on soteriology as sanctification . . . leads to a discourse on “The Holy Spirit and the Upbuilding of the Christian Community . . .” And his discussion of soteriology as vocation . . . is followed by a treatise on “The Holy Spirit and the Sending of the Christian Community.” From three perspectives, then, the entire field of ecclesiology is surveyed; each of these perspectives evokes, presupposes, and illuminates the other two. (Bosch 2011: 382) The event and process of reconciliation moves dynamically and even dialectically between and among justification, sanctification, and vocation. It takes on concrete form as gathering, upbuilding, and sending. It focuses on Jesus Christ, who is at work in all of these dimensions of the reconciling gospel. Its impact on sinful humanity is to bring about forgiveness, newness of life, and hope, which flows into human service of God’s divine purposes for all of creation and the Spirit’s formation for that service. The human role is always understood as empowered and enabled response. The central focus is always upon Jesus Christ as the initiator, enabler, and completer. What is revolutionary is Barth’s insistence that the fullness of the gospel requires that the process result in vocation, God’s action drawing humans to himself and into action for his rule. This insistence upon vocation guards the church and the individual Christian against the reductionism of the gospel to one’s individual savedness. The reality of salvation as concrete event is the presupposition of one’s living one’s life shaped by God’s calling. Doing so worthily and faithfully is the response of the witness. The import of vocation is summarized by the thematic introduction to “The Vocation of Man” in volume IV.3.2 of the Church Dogmatics: “The Word of the living Jesus Christ is the creative call by which He awakens man to an active knowledge of the truth and thus receives him into the new standing of the Christian, namely into a particular fellowship with Himself, thrusting him as His afflicted by well-equipped witness into the service of His prophetic work” (Barth 1962: 481). Barth expounds the reality and action of the called person as he adds more and more layers of exposition: “we have now to show and develop in detail what the goal of vocation is in detail, namely, what it means practically and concretely to become and to be a Christian” (Barth 1962: 554). Given all the diversity of humanity, there must still be a common vocabulary of the called witnesses, informed by Scripture as it serves as God’s instrument for the formation of the witnessing community: “there must be lineaments, outlines and contours of the Christian which more clearly and accurately in some cases, and with greater distortion and inaccuracy in others, impress themselves upon all and are visibly the same in every case” (Barth 1962: 555). When they are faithfully perceived and articulated, then we can “understand by the Christian a [person] whom Jesus Christ has called to [a stance of belonging] to Himself, to his discipleship and to living fellowship with Himself, and whom, as we finally say, he has bound and indeed conjoined with Himself ” (Barth 1962: 555). Never far from the flow of the argument is the need to examine again the traditions and the inherited formulations with a view to confronting their distortions and dilutions and correcting them. There is a particular need to do this in our reception of theological definitions of the Christian person. What I have critiqued as “Gospel

ECCLESIOLOGY AND WITNESS

 459

reductionisms” are masterfully described and analyzed by Barth in his discussion of what he calls “the classic view of what it means to be a Christian” (Barth 1962: 561–71): “there can surely be nothing more obvious than to define the Christian as the man who is distinguished from others by the address, reception, possession, use and enjoyment of the salvation of God, given and revealed to the world by God in Jesus Christ. Christians, we are told, are those who are the recipients of grace” (Barth 1962: 561). This reduction of vocation to savedness requires thorough investigation because of its broad domination of Christian thought and practice. It makes known an inwardly focused gospel that has largely lost its orientation to the world into which the witnessing community is sent. That which concerns and affects and reaches me, my gracious visitation and salvation, the saving of my soul, and to that extent my reception, possession, use and enjoyment of the beneficia Christi, is the only thing which is relevant, essential and important in the goal of vocation, that this goal and therefore my standing at the side of God, consists absolutely and exclusively in my Christian being, possession and capacity. (Barth 1962: 563–4) This trenchant insight continues to set the agenda for our ongoing critique of Christendom: “If it is really the case that the true and ultimate goal of my vocation is that I as a Christian may exist so well and gloriously for Christ’s sake, then in practice everything depends upon my strong or feeble awareness of this with invincible definiteness. Everything depends upon my personal assurance of salvation” (Barth 1962: 565). The reductionism of the classic definition of the Christian then generates, as we have stressed, a problematic ecclesology: “Can the community of Jesus Christ . . . really be only, or at any rate essentially and decisively, a kind of institute of salvation, the foremost and comprehensive medium salutis, as Calvin self-evidently assumed and said?” (Barth 1962: 567). The crux of Barth’s missional interpretation of vocation is his insistence that Christian identity is defined by the commission which we are given: “It is common to all the biblical accounts of calling that to be called means being given a [commission]. And for those who are called . . . vocation thus means existence in the execution of this [commission]” (Barth 1962: 573–4). As the argument moves toward its climax in the summary of “the vocation of the Christian as witness” (Barth 1962: 554–614), Barth lays out the core sense of witness: And [this commission] consists in the fact that with their whole being, action, inaction and conduct, and then by word and speech, they have to make a definite declaration to other men. The essence of their vocation is that God makes them His witnesses . . . He makes them witnesses of His being in His past, present and future action in the world and in history, of His being in His acts among and upon men. They are witnesses of the God who was who He was, is who He is, and will be who He will be in these acts of His. (Barth 1962: 575) What it means, then, to serve Christ as his witness, is explored in the Church Dogmatics in the remainder of §71 and in the content of §72 (Barth 1962: 681–901). The argument presents rich resources for the development of a missional ecclesiology, and is unflinching in its critique of the distortions and reductionisms that characterize the Christian tradition after centuries of Christendom. The way that the critique proceeds is, however, a constant reminder of the meaning of missional vocation. To be Christ’s witness (Acts 1:8) means to live, to act, and to speak in response to God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. Christ’s

460

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

witnesses point away from themselves to Christ (we are reminded of Grünewald’s famous painting of the crucifixion in which John the Baptist points to Christ on the cross [the Isenheimer Altar]). To be Christ’s witness is to be incorporated into his community, the church, to serve as evidence in the world that mission of God’s rule in Christ is true, certain, and coming. Eberhard Busch reminds us that “a legitimate criticism of the church can, therefore, never be made except from a position of true solidarity with it, with an ultimate respect for its holiness, which the church is incapable of destroying even by its deepest failures” (Busch 1990: 88). But there is certainly need for that “legitimate criticism.” Busch summarizes a frequent but much neglected emphasis of Barth when he stresses that “in God’s orientation to the world there is no room for a church that is an end in itself. God’s ways do not seek to establish churches but to illumine the world” (Busch 1990: 96). For the purposes of a missional ecclesiology, Barth’s definition of the vocation of the Christian as witness redefines the discussion in a very comprehensive way. In the remainder of volume IV, especially in paragraph 72 (“The Sending of the Community of the Holy Spirit”), Barth models concrete guidance for the ecclesial discipline of biblical and theological reflection that shapes obedient and faithful witness, both individually and corporately. His argument can be understood as “strategies for the vocation of ecclesial witness.” Such strategies often look like Christian practices originating in the apostolic movement and constantly re-emerging in the history of the Christian movement. But if the action appears familiar, the motivation, purpose, and sense of identity are transformed by the missional commission that defines the who, the what, the how, and the why of faithful ecclesial practice. The discussion of the “forms of the community’s service” (not “ministry!”) in numbered sub-sections (Barth 1962: 830–901) is an example of the merger of doctrinal and practical theology in discourse that centers on the formation of the faithfully witnessing community. There are complementary ecclesiological strategies that flesh out the theme of vocation as witness which can enrich the conversation and unpack criticism of Christendom in ways that may stimulate important insights for the contemporary challenges. There is, for example, the emphasis upon “doing mission in Jesus Christ’s way,” that emerged in the ecumenical discussion of mission in the postwar period. It addresses the valid criticisms of the modern missionary movement. Brief mention of that critique has been made: it is a growing refrain through the entire twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. David Bosch entitled his discussion of the modern missionary paradigm “mission in the wake of the Enlightenment” (Bosch 2011: 268–353). The phrase aptly captures the multivalent motivations and agenda of the modern missionary movement: Western cultural supremacy combined with revivalist commitment to sharing the gospel with all; political and economic exploitation alongside emancipatory activism and self-sacrificial service; social classism and racism side by side with radical engagement for liberation and indigenous rights. Secular scholarship often reveals its own prejudices with sweeping dismissals and generalizations about the negative impact of world mission. The Hocking Report of the 1930s documented the negative stance toward mission, which was engaged by passionate advocates of mission in a debate that still goes on (Fitzmier and Balmer 1991). The ecumenical missiological discussion candidly engaged the challenges. It was a mandate of the World Council of Churches that generated the document Mission and Evangelism: An Ecumenical Affirmation in 1983 (Mission and Evangelism 1983). It proved to be an important stimulus of the global movement toward constructive strategies for faithfulness to the vocation of witness. The biblical text that guided the emerging discussion was John’s great mission mandate: “As my Father has sent me, so I send you” (Jn 20:21). There was

ECCLESIOLOGY AND WITNESS

 461

much discussion of the text’s relevance for the church’s understanding and practice of its mission. In particular, the focus upon “Jesus Christ’s way” has proven to be a mobilizing ecclesiological strategy for the articulation of faithful witness to the vocation of Christ. It was the guiding theme of the 1989 World Conference on Mission and Evangelism (San Antonio), for which Lesslie Newbigin contributed the preparatory Bible studies (Mission in Christ’s Way 1988). The core conviction of the emphasis upon “mission in Christ’s way” was that “our obedience in mission should be patterned on the ministry and teaching of Jesus” (Mission and Evangelism 1983, no. 28). The Presbyterian Church USA adopted the World Council document as reliable guidance for the church in its search for integrity as a community of missional witness. That denomination built on the global ecumenical process and adopted its own white paper on evangelism in Jesus Christ’s way in 1991 (Turn to the Living God: A Call to Evangelism in Jesus Christ’s Way, 1991). It is instructive to compare this denomination’s theological consensus on the theme of mission reflected in the Westminster Confession of Faith, as formally articulated in 1903, with the stance adopted in Turn to the Living God in 1991. The contrast becomes even richer if we include the Barmen Declaration and the Confession of 1967 in the survey. The “vocation of the Christian as witness” has become the working basis of the church’s ecclesiological labors, and continues to prod the church toward greater faithfulness. The christological focus of the ecclesiological discourse we are surveying takes a more radical step with the exploration of the missional significance of the incarnation. This strategy is characterized by the use of the neologism “incarnational,” as in “incarnational witness,” and its major proponent was the ecumenical scholar and leader, John Mackay. In his classic study Ecumenics: The Science of the Church Universal, MacKay defined mission as “the church’s mediation of the love of God in evangelical witness” (Mackay 1964: 162). The crucial concern is how this is to be done—which was very much the question that led to “doing mission in Jesus Christ’s way.” Mackay engages this question with the introduction of “the incarnational principle”: “The evangelical word must become indigenous flesh” (Mackay 1964: 173). If the central salvific event of the gospel is the “word becoming flesh” in Jesus Christ, then its witness thereafter must in a comparably radical way also “become flesh.” “By being truly man, and being intimately identified with human life, Christ obtained a unique understanding of the nature and dimension of man’s problem.” The “as” in John’s mission mandate—“as the Father has sent me, so I send you”—is interpreted to mean that Jesus’s laying down of his life for humanity is both the once-and-for-all event of salvation and the event which defines how it is to be communicated. I have often expounded this “incarnational principle” by saying that it is impossible to proclaim a gospel of love and be hateful, a gospel of peace and be hostile, a gospel of forgiveness and be vindictive, a gospel of generosity and be miserly. It is the task of the ecclesiology of witness to engage such a challenge in its ongoing formation of the community mandated to be Christ’s witness. Karl Barth was dubious about the interpretation of the incarnation in this fashion, and he rightfully identified some real risks involved (Guder 2004: 15). But it is still the case that Karl Barth unfolds his theology of Christian vocation, which decisively shapes his ecclesiology, in terms of Jesus Christ’s prophetic vocation. To be a disciple of Jesus is to live in “analogy to what [Jesus Christ] is” (Barth 1962: 532; Guder 2004: 15–16). If we are committed to doing ecclesiology in ways “worthy of the Gospel of Christ” (Phil. 1:27), then we shall carry out that vocation faithful to our Lord’s promise that, empowered by the Holy Spirit, we shall be Christ’s witnesses wherever we are sent out in this world (Acts 1:8).

462

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF ECCLESIOLOGY

REFERENCES Barth, K. (1907), “Die Missionsthätigkeit des Paulus nach der Darstellung der Apostelgeschichte,” in H. A. Drewes and H. Stoevesandt (eds.), Karl Barth: Vorträge und kleinere Arbeiten, 1905–1909, Zürich: Theologischer Verlag TVZ, 1992. Barth, K. (1932), “Die Theologie und die Mission in der Gegenwart,” Zwischen den Zeiten 10 (3): 189–215 (My translation: D. Guder). Barth, K. (1962), Church Dogmatics: IV. The Doctrine of Reconciliation, part three, second half, Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Bosch, D. J. (2011), Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission, Maryknoll: Orbis Books. Busch, E. (1990), “Karl Barth’s Understanding of the Church as Witness,” St. Lk.’s Journal of Theology XXXIII (2): 87–101. Fitzmier, J. and R. Balmer (1991), “A Poultice for the Bite of the Cobra: The Hocking Report and Presbyterian Missions in the Middle Decades of the Twentieth Century,” in M. J. Coalter, J. M. Mulder, and L. B. Weeks (eds.), The Diversity of Discipleship: Presbyterians and Twentieth Century Christian Witness, 105–25, Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Flett, J. (2010), The Witness of God: The Trinity, Missio Dei, Karl Barth, and the Nature of Christian Community, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans. Green, M. (2003), Evangelism in the Early Church, rev. ed., Grand Rapids: William. B. Eerdmans. Guder, D. (1985), Be My Witnesses: The Church’s Mission, Message and Messengers, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans. Guder, D. (1998), Missional Church: A Vision of the Sending of the Church in North America, ed. D. Guder et al., Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans. Guder, D. (2003). “From Mission and Theology to Missional Theology,” The Princeton Seminary Bulletin xxiv (1), new series: 16–54. Guder, D. (2004), The Incarnation and the Church’s Witness, Eugene: Wipf & Stock. Guder, D. (2015), “The Missio Dei; A Mission Theology for After Christendom,” in D. Guder, Called to Witness: Doing Missional Theology, 20–43, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans. Mackay, J. (1964), Ecumenics: The Science of the Church Universal, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. Moltmann, J. (1977), The Church in the Power of the Spirit: A Contribution to Messianic Ecclesiology, London: SCM Press. Newbigin, L. (1988), Mission in Christ’s Way, New York: Friendship Press. Office of the General Assembly (Presbyterian Church USA). (1999), Book of Confessions, Louisville: Office of the General Assembly. Turn to the Living God: A Call to Evangelism in Jesus Christ’s Way. (1991), Louisville: Office of the General Assembly. World Council of Churches. (1983), Mission and Evangelism: An Ecumenical Affirmation, Geneva: WCC Mission Series.

CONTRIBUTORS

Kimlyn J. Bender teaches in the areas of historical and constructive theology at Truett Theological Seminary. He received the PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary and was ordained as a pastor in the American Baptist Churches USA. He is the author of Karl Barth’s Christological Ecclesiology (2005; 2013; 2016), Confessing Christ for Church and World: Studies in Modern Theology (2014), and Reading Karl Barth for the Church: A Guide and Companion (2019), and is co-editor of Theology as Conversation: The Significance of Dialogue in Historical and Contemporary Theology (2009). His work has appeared in numerous journals and collections. C. Clifton Black (MA, Bristol; MDiv, Emory; PhD, Duke) is Otto A. Piper Professor of Biblical Theology, Princeton Theological Seminary, USA, and has taught biblical studies and their theological interpretation for thirty-five years at Duke, the University of Rochester, Southern Methodist University, and Princeton Theological Seminary. He has authored or edited numerous books, articles, essays, and reviews. An ordained elder of the United Methodist Church, Black is a member of the Society of Biblical Literature, the Catholic Biblical Association, Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas, the Center of Theological Inquiry, and has served eight years as secretary of the American Theological Society. Natalie Carnes is Associate Professor of Theology, Baylor University, USA, who teaches constructive theology, feminist theology, and related topics. She has published multiple articles and three books, including Image and Presence: A Christological Reflection on Iconoclasm and Iconophilia (2018) and Motherhood: A Confession (2020). Will Cohen is Associate Professor of Theology, University of Scranton, USA. He is a graduate of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary (2002) and the Catholic University of America (PhD, 2010). He is the author of The Concept of “Sister Churches” in Catholic-Orthodox Relations since Vatican II (2016; 2017), as well as numerous articles on ecclesiology, ecumenism, and issues of hermeneutics and tradition in Orthodoxy. Since 2009 he has taught in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Scranton. He is book reviews editor of the Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies and a subdeacon in the Orthodox Church in America. Edgardo Colón-Emeric is Irene and William McCutchen Associate Professor of Reconciliation and Theology, Duke University, USA. He is the author of Wesley, Aquinas, and Christian Perfection: An Ecumenical Dialogue (2009), which received the 2008 “Aquinas Dissertation Prize Winner” from the Aquinas Center for Theological Renewal at Ave Maria University, Óscar Romero’s Theological Vision: Liberation and the Transfiguration of the Poor (2018), and The Saving Mysteries of Jesus Christ: Christology in the Wesleyan Tradition (2019) with Mark Gorman. Colón-Emeric is an ordained elder in the North Carolina Annual Conference. In addition to directing the Center for Reconciliation at Duke Divinity, he directs the Central American Methodist Course of

464

CONTRIBUTORS

Study and the Peru Theological Initiative. He serves in the United Methodist Committee on Faith and Order and on both national and international Methodist–Catholic dialogues. Paul Fiddes is Professor of Systematic Theology, Oxford University, UK, Principal Emeritus of Regent’s Park College, Oxford, and Honorary Fellow of St. Peter’s College, Oxford. He is Canon Emeritus of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, and Ecumenical Prebendary of St Endellion, Cornwall. Among his many publications are The Creative Suffering of God (1988), Past Event and Present Salvation: the Christian Idea of Atonement (1989), Freedom and Limit: A Dialogue between Literature and Christian Doctrine (1991), The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature (2000), Participating in God: A Pastoral Doctrine of the Trinity (2000), Tracks and Traces: Baptist Identity in Church and Theology (2003), and Seeing the World and Knowing God: Hebrew Wisdom and Christian Doctrine in a Late-Modern Context (2013). John Gibaut is President, Provost, and Vice-Chancellor of Thorneloe University, Sudbury, Canada. He has served as Director of the Commission on Faith and Order of the World Council of Churches, and as the Director for Unity, Faith, and Order for the Anglican Communion. While he taught in the Faculty of Theology at Saint Paul University, Ottawa, he was a member of national and international ecumenical dialogues with a focus on ecclesiology. He has a doctorate in theology awarded conjointly by Trinity College and the University of Toronto. John is a priest of the Anglican Church of Canada, and canon theologian of the Diocese of Ottawa. Darrell L. Guder is Emeritus Professor of Missional and Ecumenical Theology, Princeton Theological Seminary, USA. His work on the theology and practice of mission has been influenced by his doctoral work in Germany, his work in evangelistic youth ministry in Germany and the United States, and his service as missiologist on three seminary faculties (Louisville Presbyterian, Columbia, and Princeton). He coordinated the research process in the Gospel and our Culture Network which resulted in the publication of Missional Church; A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America (1998), which he edited. He authored Be My Witnesses, The Continuing Conversion of the Church (2000), The Incarnation and the Church’s Witness (Trinity, 1999), and Called to Witness: Doing Missional Theology (2015). He has translated German theology into English (Otto Weber, Eberhard Jüngel, Karl Barth), serving most recently as English editor of the three volumes of Karl Barth in Conversation (Westminster John Knox). Steven R. Harmon is Associate Professor of Historical Theology, Gardner-Webb University, USA. He is the author of four books, including Baptist Identity and the Ecumenical Future: Story, Tradition, and the Recovery of Community (2016). He is a Cooperative Baptist Fellowship–affiliated ordained Baptist minister and past president of the National Association of Baptist Professors of Religion. He serves as Co-Secretary for the joint commission to Phase III of the international dialogue between the Baptist World Alliance and the Catholic Church (2017–21). Stanley Hauerwas is Gilbert T. Rowe Professor Emeritus of Divinity and Law, Duke Divinity School, Duke University, USA. His book A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (1981) was selected as one of the 100 most important books on religion of the twentieth century. Dr. Hauerwas recently authored Matthew in the Brazos Theological Commentary series (2015), Hannah’s Child: A Theological Memoir, 2nd Ed. (2012), and War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity (2011).

CONTRIBUTORS

 465

Nicholas M. Healy, PhD, is Professor of Theology and Religious Studies, St. John’s University New York, USA. He has published numerous essays, most of which are at least indirectly concerned with ecclesiological issues. His books include Church, World and the Christian Life (2000), Thomas Aquinas: Theologian of the Christian Life (2003), and Hauerwas: A (Very) Critical Introduction (2014). George Kalantzis (PhD, FRHistS) is Professor of Theology, Wheaton College, USA, and Director of the Wheaton Center for Early Christian Studies, Wheaton College. His research and writing focuses on the development of doctrine (especially Christological and Trinitarian thought), as well as the interplay of classical Greco-Roman society and early Christianity. He is author and editor of a number of works, including Caesar and the Lamb: Early Christian Attitudes on War and Military Service (2012), Theodore of Mopsuestia: Commentary on the Gospel of John (2004), Evangelicals and the Early Church: Recovery, Reform, Renewal (2012), Life in the Spirit: Spiritual Formation in Theological Perspective (2010), Christian Political Witness (2014), and Christian Dying: Witnesses from the Tradition (2018). Gayle Gerber Koontz is Professor of Theology and Ethics Emerita, Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, USA). In addition to teaching at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary for over thirty years, Gayle Koontz served as a faculty member at Silliman University Divinity School in the Philippines (1989–90) and taught students in Burundi, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Guatemala. She edited John H. Yoder’s Theology of Mission: A Believers Church Perspective (2014) and is the author of numerous articles from a Mennonite feminist point of view. James K. Lee is Associate Professor of the History of Early Christianity, Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, USA. He works in the areas of Latin and Greek patristics, ecclesiology, and biblical exegesis. He is the author of Augustine and the Mystery of the Church (2017) and The Church in the Latin Fathers (2019). D. Stephen Long is Cary M. Maguire University Professor of Ethics, Southern Methodist University, USA. He received the PhD from Duke University and is an ordained United Methodist Minister. He works in the intersection between theology and ethics and has published over fifty essays and sixteen books on theology and ethics including Divine Economy: Theology and the Market; Christian Ethics (2000), Christian Ethics: A Very Short Introduction (2010), Augustinian and Ecclesial Christian Ethics: On Loving Enemies (2018), and Truth-Telling in a Post-Truth World (2019). Joseph L. Mangina is Professor of Theology, Wycliffe College, University of Toronto, CAN. He teaches at Wycliffe College, a member institution of the Toronto School of Theology. He was born and educated in the United States, receiving both his MDiv and PhD from Yale University. His publications include Karl Barth: Theologian of Christian Witness (2004), Revelation in the Brazos Theological Commentary series (2010), and The Temple of His Body: A Johannine Ecclesiology (forthcoming). From 2008 to 2017 he edited the journal Pro Ecclesia: A Journal of Catholic and Evangelical Theology. Jonathan Mumme is Associate Professor of Theology, Concordia University, Wisconsin, USA. He published his dissertation, written under Oswald Bayer, as Die Präsenz Christi im Amt: Am Beispiel ausgewählter Predigten Martin Luthers, 1535–1546 (2015). He serves as an editor for Lutherische Beiträge and is co-editor of Feasting in a Famine of the Word:

466

CONTRIBUTORS

Lutheran Preaching in the Twenty-First Century (2016), Luther at Leipzig: Martin Luther, the Leipzig Debate, and the Sixteenth-Century Reformations (2019), and Church as Fullness in All Things: Recasting Lutheran Ecclesiology in an Ecumenical Context (2019). Francesca Murphy is Professor of Systematic Theology, University of Notre Dame and was formerly Professor of Christian Philosophy in the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, where she taught from 1995 until 2010. Her major interest is theological aesthetics. She has written books such as Christ the Form of Beauty, The Comedy of Revelation (1995), Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Etienne Gilson (2004), and God Is Not a Story: Realism Revisited (2007). Her most recent book is Gnosis and the Theocrats from Mars (2020). She has also edited several volumes, including The Providence of God: Deus Habet Consilium (2009), The Oxford University Press Handbook to Christology (2015), and The Oxford University Press Handbook to Revelation (2020). Professor Murphy has translated four books. Paul T. Nimmo holds the King’s (1620) Chair of Systematic Theology at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of Being in Action: The Theological Shape of Barth’s Ethical Vision (2007) and Barth: A Guide for the Perplexed (2017), as well as co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Reformed Theology (2016) and The Oxford Handbook of Karl Barth (2019). He is Senior Editor of International Journal of Systematic Theology and Co-Director of the Aberdeen Centre for Protestant Theology. John Nugent is Professor of Bible and Theology, Great Lakes Christian College, USA. He works in the area of Old Testament studies and is the author of Politics of Yahweh (2011), Endangered Gospel (2016), and Genesis 1–11 (2018). He serves as co-host of the weekly After Class Podcast. Joseph Ogbonnaya is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology, Marquette University, USA. His research intersects theology’s engagement with culture, world Christianity, globalization, African theology, and Lonergan studies. His books include African Perspectives on Culture and World Christianity (2017), African Catholicism and Hermeneutics of Culture (2014), and Lonergan, Social Transformation and Sustainable Human Development (2013). He coedited (with Lucas Briola) Everything Is Interconnected: Towards A Globalization with a Human Face and an Integral Ecology (2019) and (with Cyril Orji) Christianity and Culture Collision (2016). Trent Pomplun is Associate Professor of Theology, Loyola University Maryland, USA. His interests extend from late medieval to modern thought, with special emphasis on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He has published on the history of scholastic theology, Catholic missions in Asia, and Indo-Tibetan religion and culture. He is the author of Jesuit on the Roof of the World: Ippolito Desideri’s Mission to Eighteenth-Century Tibet (2010) and is co-editor of The Blackwell Companion to Catholicism (2011). Paul Rainbow is Professor of Bible, Sioux Falls Seminary, USA, who teaches in the area of New Testament studies. His degrees include the BA in Classics (Greek) from the University of Minnesota, 1977; MDiv from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 1980; ThM from Harvard Divinity School, 1980; and DPhil, University of Oxford (UK), 1988. He formerly taught at Canadian Bible College (Regina, SK) and was a visiting scholar at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies from 1994 to 1995. He is the author of a number of books, including Johannine Theology: The Gospel, the Epistles, and the Apocalypse (2014) and The Pith of the Apocalypse (2008).

CONTRIBUTORS

 467

Cecil M. Robeck, Jr. is an ordained minister of the Assemblies of God. He currently serves as Senior Professor of Church History and Ecumenics, Fuller Theological Seminary, USA, and Special Assistant to the President for Ecumenical Relations at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. For over thirty-five years, he has been involved in ecumenical work with a broad range of churches. He is a member of the Commission on Faith and Order of the World Council of Churches, where he has long worked on issues related to ecclesiology. He is the co-chair of the International Catholic–Pentecostal Dialogue, and for the past twenty-eight years, he has represented Pentecostals at the annual meeting of the Secretaries of Christian World Communions. He is the author of Prophecy in Carthage (1992) and The Azusa Street Mission and Revival (2006), and coeditor with Amos Yong of the Cambridge Companion to Pentecostalism (2014) and a host of articles on Pentecostalism and on ecumenical topics. Fred Sanders is a systematic theologian who teaches in the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University. He is the author of The Deep Things of God (2010) and The Triune God (2016), as well as numerous articles. John G. Stackhouse Jr., PhD, is Samuel J. Mikolaski Professor of Religious Studies, Crandall University, CAN. He was raised in a restorationist tradition and has published extensively on evangelical history and theology, including Evangelical Futures: A Conversation on Theological Method (2000), Evangelical Ecclesiology (2003), and other books with the University of Toronto Press, Baker Academic, and Oxford University Press. He currently is researching and writing the volume on evangelicalism for the Very Short Introduction series published by Oxford. James W. Thompson is Scholar in Residence and Professor of New Testament at Abilene Christian University. Since 1993 he has been the editor of Restoration Quarterly. His research focus has been in the philosophical background of the Epistle to the Hebrews and in Pauline theology. He is the author of numerous books, including The Beginnings of Christian Philosophy: The Letter to the Hebrews (1982), Preaching like Paul (2001), Pastoral Ministry according to Paul (2005), Hebrews: A Commentary (2008), Moral Formation according to Paul (2011), The Church according to Paul (2014), and Apostle of Persuasion (2020). He is also the translator of Udo Schnelle’s The First Hundred Years of Christianity (2020). Jonathan Tran is Associate Professor of Religion, Baylor University, USA. He specializes in theology and ethics and holds the George W. Baines Chair in Religion at Baylor University. He is the author of The Vietnam War and Theologies of Memory (2010) and Foucault and Theology (2011) and has published numerous articles in academic journals. He and Stanley Hauerwas are currently writing the book Christianity and the Promise of Politics. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, PhD, is Research Professor of Systematic Theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, USA. Previously, he served as Blanchard Professor of Theology at the Wheaton College Graduate School (2009–12) and Senior Lecturer in Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland (1990–8). He is the author of ten books, including The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (2005), Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship (2010), and Biblical Authority after Babel: Retrieving the Solas in the Spirit of Mere Protestant Christianity (2016). His most recent publication is Hearers and Doers: A Pastor’s Guide to Making Disciples through Scripture and Doctrine (2019).

468

CONTRIBUTORS

Laceye Warner, PhD, serves as Royce and Jane Reynolds Associate Professor of the Practice of Evangelism and Methodist Studies and as Associate Dean for Wesleyan Engagement at Duke University Divinity School. She is an ordained elder in the Texas Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church. Before coming to Duke, she taught at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary at Northwestern University as the E. Stanley Jones Assistant Professor of Evangelism. Her books include The Method of Our Mission: United Methodist Polity and Organization (2014), Saving Women: Retrieving Evangelistic Theology and Practice (2007), and Grace to Lead: Practicing Leadership in the Wesleyan Tradition (2016), co-authored with Carder Kenneth.

INDEX OF NAMES

Aasgaard, R.  42, 52 Abel  13, 15 Abraham  2, 13–15, 17, 19, 28, 33, 35, 42–3, 300, 426, 434, 444, 450 Abraham, S.  385, 387–8 Abraham, W. J.  224 Adam  13, 47, 86–7, 102, 132, 165, 303, 422 Adam, K.  333, 341 Adelaja, S.  271 Adorno, T.  360, 372 Afanasiev, N.  133, 141–2 Afanassieff, N.  331, 341 Alberigo, G.  96, 105 Alberts, L.  247, 257 Albright, J.  214 Alexander, E.  245, 253 Alexander, K.  245, 253 Alfeyev, H.  81, 93, 137 Almain, J.  97 Althaus-Reid, M.  386–7 Althouse, P.  242, 251, 253, 255 Alvarez, C.  241, 253 Alves, R.  361 Ambrose of Milan  375–6 Ames, W.  226, 238 Amman, J.  190 Anacletus  139 Anderson, A.  249, 253 Andreapoulos, A.  137, 143 Andrew, St.  25, 78 Anselm, R.  146, 149–51, 160 Anselm of Canterbury  117 Apollinaris  381 Apollos  44, 51 Apostle Paul  5, 18, 25, 32–56, 58–63, 67, 77, 82–6, 89–90, 112, 124, 129, 132, 140, 236, 303–4, 308, 323–30, 341–2, 345–7, 349–50, 355, 365, 368, 381, 435–6, 457 Aquinas, T.  96–7, 99, 101, 103, 113, 311, 349, 363, 379–80, 389, 420–2 Arabome, A.  385, 387

Arias, M.  370–2 Aristides  88, 93 Arnold, C. E.  326–7, 341 Aronson, T.  242, 254 Asbury, F.  219, 222 Ashimolowo, M.  271 Athanasius  139 Augustine of Hippo  59, 74–80, 93, 103, 115, 117, 294, 304–5, 308–9, 327–34, 337, 339–43, 350–1, 358, 375, 425, 428, 431 Augustodunensis, H.  376, 388 Autpertus, A.  376 Avis, P.  294, 297–8, 308 Ayandele, E. A.  277, 287 Azike, G.  282, 287 Badcock, G.  303, 305, 307–8 Bader-Saye, S.  12, 22 Baggett, J.  399–400, 402 Baily, M.  88, 93 Baker, M.  136, 143 Baker-Fletcher, G.  383, 388 Baker-Fletcher, K.  383, 388 Balch, D. L.  27, 38 Balmer, R.  254, 460 Barclay, W.  100 Barratt, T. B.  243, 254 Barth, K.  23, 116–17, 165–6, 172, 179, 297, 300, 305–8, 317, 322, 337–9, 341, 346, 356, 421, 426, 431, 456–62 Basil of Caesarea  129, 143, 353, 358 Bauckham, R.  56, 62, 66 Bavinck, H.  169–70, 179, 297, 308 Baz, A.  405, 416 Beal, R.  96, 98, 105, 332, 341 Beasley-Murray, G.  234, 238 Bebbington, D.  233, 238, 260–2, 272 Beck, B.  222–3 Bediako, K.  284, 287 Bellarmine, R.  96, 98–100, 102–6, 111, 295, 308, 332, 359, 372 Belluti, B.  101

470

Bender, H. S.  184, 188, 194–5 Bender, K.  305–6, 308, 336, 338, 341 Benedict XV  111, 127 Berger, P.  394, 402 Berger, T.  382, 388 Bergoglio, J. M.  125 Berkouwer, G.  168, 174, 179, 303, 308 Bermejo, J.  101, 105 Berthier, A.  103 Best, E.  324–6, 341 Best, T.  436, 440, 446 Bethge, E.  438, 446 Bevans, S.  278, 287 Bingemer, M.  367–8, 373 Bittlinger, A.  242, 246, 254 Black, C. C.  27, 38 Blaurock, G.  182–3 Blumhofer, E.  243–4, 254 Bobbitt, P.  415–16 Boff, L.  316, 322, 361, 365, 370–1, 373 Bollinger, D.  190, 194 Bonhoeffer, D.  293, 303, 305–6, 308–9, 438, 446 Bonino, J. M.  362, 373 Bonnet, J.  437, 446 Borghese, M.  109, 121, 126 Bosch, D.  295, 308, 317, 322, 450–1, 455–6, 458, 460 Boso  117 Boswell, J.  383, 388 Bowler, K.  266, 272 Boyd, G.  271 Brachlow, S.  227, 238 Bradfield, C.  246–7, 254 Bradford, W.  227, 238 Brancati, L.  101 Braun, F. M.  56, 67 Brent, A.  73, 79, 143 Brent, C.  438 Brevint, D.  217 Broadway, M.  234, 238 Brodd, S. E.  149, 160 Brown, R. E.  56, 62, 67 Brown, W.  415–16 Browne, R.  226 Brueggemann, W.  11, 22 Brumback, C.  243, 254 Brunner, E.  252, 254, 392, 402 Brunner, P.  155, 160 Buber, M.  116, 127 Bucer, M.  227 Buell, D. K.  88, 94

INDEX OF NAMES

Bujo, B.  278, 284, 287 Bulgakov, S.  83–4, 89, 91, 93–4, 130–2, 135, 143, 331, 341 Bullinger, H.  166–7, 169, 171–4, 176, 179 Bultmann, R.  57, 67, 340–1 Bunyan, J.  235, 238 Burkert, W.  24, 38 Burns, J. P.  72, 76, 79, 98, 105 Burrage, C.  226–7, 238 Busch, E.  164–5, 176, 179, 456, 460 Butler, A.  245, 254 Butler, S.  381, 388 Bynum, C. W.  401 Byrne, J.  247, 254, 399, 402 Caecilian  75 Cahill, L. S.  384 Cain  13 Cajetan, T.  97, 99, 101 Callahan, J.  266, 272 Calvin, J.  98, 149–50, 152, 166, 169–72, 174–5, 177, 179, 225–6, 230–1, 235–6, 239, 263–4, 293, 298, 301, 308, 337, 359, 373, 424, 437, 446, 459 Cameron, M.  304–5, 308 Campbell, A.  269, 272 Campbell, C. R.  303, 308 Campbell, D.  223–4 Canisius  99 Cano, M.  98 Cappellari, M.  103 Carbine, R.  382, 388 Cardenal, E.  365, 373 Cardia, G.  101, 105 Carey, W.  438 Carlson, H.  225–6, 239 Carlsson, B.  242, 254 Carothers, W.  243, 254 Carpenter, J.  267, 272 Carson, D.  56, 67 Cartledge, M. J.  253–4 Cartwright, T.  226, 239 Castro, E.  370, 373 Catherine of Siena  378 Cavanaugh, W.  368, 373, 427, 431 Cavaness, B.  245, 254 Cavell, S.  408, 411, 414, 417 Chan, F.  271 Chan, S.  244, 247, 251–4 Chandler, M.  271 Charles W.  211, 213, 260, 264, 272 Chenu, M.  115

INDEX OF NAMES

Cho, D. Y.  271 Christiano, K. J.  394, 396, 402 Christina of Sweden  152 Christo, G. G.  82, 94 Clark, M. S.  253–4 Claydon, D.  275, 287 Clement of Alexandria  55, 67, 83–4, 86, 88, 92, 94, 132, 375 Clement of Rome  83, 88, 92, 94, 139 Clements, K.  438, 446 Clichtove, J.  99 Clifton, S.  249, 254 Coakley, S.  381–2, 388 Cochlaeus, J.  99 Cochrane, A. C.  164–71, 174–7, 179 Cohen, S. J. D.  24, 38 Coke, T.  213, 217 Coles, R.  408, 417 Colón-Emeric, E.  368, 373, 425, 431 Colwell, J. E.  182–3, 194 Conant, J.  414 Congar, Y.  96–7, 105, 110, 115, 332, 335, 340–1 Coorilos, G. M.  442–3, 446 Copeland, K.  266 Cox, O. C.  415, 417 Cranmer, T.  353, 437 Crary, A.  409, 414, 417 Crosby, B.  266 Crowther, A.  278 Crysdale, C. S. W.  384 Culpepper, R. A.  24, 38 Cyril of Alexandria  375 Cyril of Jerusalem  91, 94, 139 d’Ailly, P.  97 Daly, M.  384, 388 Danckaert, S.  136, 143 Danquah, J.  283, 287 Darby, J. N.  270 Davidson, T. H.  251, 254 Davie, G.  394, 402 Davies, R.  212–13, 223 Davies, W.  428, 432 Davis, R.  244, 254 de Ágreda, M.  100 de Ayala, G. P.  360, 373 de las Casas, B.  101, 360, 373 de Leon, L.  102 de Lubac, H.  8, 96, 109–12, 114, 119, 144, 327, 329, 332, 334–5, 337, 339, 356, 358, 421

 471

de Lugo, J.  101, 105 de Montesinos, A.  360 de’ Pazzi, M. M.  100 de Ripalda, J. M.  101 de Salazar, F. Q.  102 de Santa Ana, J.  371 de Soto, D.  101 de Torquemada, J.  97, 99 de Vega, A.  101 de Wall, H.  150, 154 Decius  73 Del Colle, R.  296, 308 Denck, H.  182 Denzinger  125 Diamond, C.  413–14, 417 Dibelius, O.  293–4, 308, 428 Dillard, A.  353–4, 358 Dingel, I.  150, 160 Diotrephes  57, 66 Dollar, C.  266 Domitian  55 Donnelly, J. P.  98, 105 Dorrien, G.  424, 432 Doyle, B.  316, 322 Doyle, D.  96, 105, 296, 308 Driscoll, M.  271 Drumm, J.  146, 148, 160 Dulles, A.  96, 98, 105, 334, 342, 392, 402 Dunn, J.  71, 79, 126, 246, 255 Durkheim, É.  294, 308, 393–4, 402 Dussel, E.  359–62, 373 Dwight, T.  265 Eck, J.  99 Edgardh, N.  377, 386, 388 Edwards, J.  260, 264–6 Ehrenpreis, A.  186 Ela, J. M.  284, 287 Elert, W.  149, 157, 160 Elijah  25, 34, 36, 132, 345 Elisha  25, 36, 345 Ellacuría, I.  363–4, 373 Elliott, J. H.  28, 38 Emmert, A.  248, 255 Epicurus  24 Epiphanius of Salamis  375 Esquivel, J.  370 Esther  21, 132 Eugenius IV  97 Eusebius  62 Evans, R. F.  71, 73–4, 77–9

472

Evans, T.  271 Eve  86–7, 132, 375 Faber, G.  186 Fabian  73 Fagerberg, H.  152–3, 160 Farah, C.  249, 255 Farley, M.  384 Faupel, D.  249, 255 Fee, G. D.  249, 255 Feeney, L.  115 Ferguson, E.  11, 22, 82, 88, 94–5, 272 Fernández, M.  101, 105 Ferré, A. M.  121, 125–6, 362, 373 Fichter, J.  246, 255 Fiddes, P.  225, 231, 235, 239 Finger, T.  192, 194 Finke, R.  266, 273 Finney, C.  265 Fitzmier, J.  460 Flett, J.  168, 179, 317–18, 322, 451, 457 Florovsky, G.  81, 87, 91–4, 128–9, 134–6, 143 Foot, P.  420, 432 Ford, J.  247, 255 Forsyth, P. T.  299, 308 Frankena, W. K.  420, 432 Franzelin, J. B.  102, 109 Frederick William III  152 Frei, H.  356 Freud, S.  393 Frost, C. F.  383, 388 Fuchs, L.  233, 239, 436, 440, 444 Gaius  57 Ganski, C.  307, 309 Garcia, C.  193–4 Gaston, W. T.  243, 255 Gaventa, B.  48, 52 Gaybba, B.  350, 358 Gebara, I.  367–8, 373 Geertz, C.  398, 402 Gelpi, D.  247, 255 Gerhard, J.  149–50 Gerrish, B.  169, 171, 179 Gerson, J.  97 Giles of Rome  97, 99 Gill, D.  245, 254 Gill, J.  237, 239 Gill, R.  237, 239, 245, 254, 398, 403 Gilson, É.  104–5 Godoy, C.  366

INDEX OF NAMES

Görres, I. F.  116, 126 Graham, B.  265–6, 268, 272–3 Granfield, P.  99, 105, 342, 388 Grantham, T.  231, 234, 239 Grass, T.  266, 272 Grebel, C.  182–3, 189 Green, C.  245, 251, 253–6 Green, G. L.  7–8 Green, M.  450 Gregory of Nazianzus  132, 381 Gregory of Nyssa  132 Gregory of Valencia  99 Gregory XVI  103, 278 Grey, M.  384 Griffith, G. W.  244, 255 Griffiths, P.  376, 388 Grisez, G.  421, 432 Groppe, E.  282, 288 Gros, J.  436, 440, 446 Groves, A. N.  270 Grudem, W.  379 Grundtwig, N. F. S.  153 Guardini, R.  107, 109, 111, 127 Guarino, T. G.  108, 119, 122, 127 Guder, D.  450–1, 454, 461 Guerrero, A.  97 Gumbel, N.  271 Gunstone, J.  246, 255 Gunton, C.  317, 322 Guthrie, D.  54, 56, 67 Gutiérrez, G.  361–2, 373 Hagar  85 Hahn, S.  300, 309 Haight, R.  294, 309 Hall, S. G.  72–3, 79 Hampson, D.  384 Harder, L.  189, 194 Härle, W.  156, 160 Harmon, R.  232, 239, 434, 436, 446 Harvey, G.  395–6, 401, 403 Hatch, N.  266, 272 Haudel, M.  318, 322 Hauerwas, S.  296, 309, 397, 404–6, 409, 411, 415, 417, 432 Healy, N.  398, 403 Hearst, W. R.  265 Hegel, G. W. F.  393 Heitzenrater, R.  212, 216, 224 Held, V.  427, 432 Helwys, T.  227, 237, 239 Heppe, H.  166, 179

INDEX OF NAMES

Heyer, R.  247, 255 Hickel, J.  431–2 Higgins, T.  248, 255 Hildegard of Bingen  378 Hill, C. E.  81, 94 Himes, M. J.  332–4, 340, 342 Hinlicky, P.  349, 352, 358 Hinson, E. G.  71, 79 Hippolytus  62, 87, 94 Hirsch, E.  151 Hocken, P.  243, 246, 255 Hodges, M.  250, 255 Hoffman, M.  182 Höfling, J. W. F.  152–3, 160 Hogeterp, A. L.  44, 52 Honorious of Augustodunum  376 Hooker, R.  217 Hoover, M.  242, 255 Hopko, T.  379, 388 Horn, J. N.  249, 255 Houston, B.  271 Hovorun, C.  83–4, 89–90, 94 Hubmaier, B.  182, 187, 189–90, 195 Hugenberger, G.  300, 309 Hughes, A. K.  85, 94 Hughes, R. T.  269, 272 Hume, D.  419–20 Hunsinger, G.  348, 358 Hunter, J. D.  21–2 Hus, J.  259 Hustad, J.  246, 258 Hut, H.  182 Hutter, J.  182, 186 Hybels, B.  265 Idahosa, B.  249 Ignatius of Antioch  81, 83, 92, 138, 436, 446 Irenaeus of Lyons  56, 62, 81, 87, 90–2, 95, 129–30, 132, 139, 144, 327, 344, 375, 425 Irvin, D.  242, 256 Isaac the Syrian  132 Izbicki, M.  98, 105 Jackson, B.  248, 256 James, W.  406, 417 James of Viterbo  97 Jarlet, A.  149, 154, 160 Jedin, H.  145, 160 Jenkins, T.  396, 399, 403 Jennings, W. J.  415, 417

 473

Jensen, R. M.  72, 76, 79 Jenson, R. W.  304, 309, 311–12, 321–2, 340, 342, 351–2, 358 Jerome  375–6 Joan of Arc  335 John Chrysostom  82, 84, 133, 144 John of Damascus (John Damascene)  128, 438, 446 John of Paris  97 John the Baptist  27, 33, 63, 132, 460 John the Theologian  139 John XXIII  117, 361 John Paul II  107, 113, 117, 123–4, 127, 287, 376, 378, 388–9, 436, 445–6 Johnson, E.  381, 389 Johnson, T. G.  246, 256 Jones, S.  211–12, 214–15, 224 Joseph  21, 29, 31, 33 Josephus  30, 54–5 Journet, C.  104, 112–15, 124–5, 127 Julian of Norwich  378 Junia  380 Justin Martyr  56, 88, 95, 327 Kähler, M.  451 Kaiser, W.  12, 22 Kalantzis, G.  86, 89, 95 Kalu, O.  250, 256 Kambanda, A.  285–7 Kärkkäinen, V. M.  251, 256, 295, 309 Karlstadt, A.  182, 191 Käsemann, E.  62, 67, 120, 324, 326, 340, 342 Kasper, W.  3, 121, 127, 146, 148, 159–60 Katangole, E.  277, 287 Kay, J.  169, 179 Keach, B.  228, 233, 239 Kehl, M.  149, 160 Keller, T.  271 Kerber, G.  362, 373 Kerner, H.  152, 160 Kerr, J. S.  246, 251–2, 256 Kidd, R.  228, 232, 239 Kierkegaard, S.  153 Kinder, E.  155, 157–8, 160–1 Klaiber, W.  41, 52 Klassen, W.  187, 194 Kleinhans, K.  382, 389 Kliefoth, T.  153 Klink, E. W.  62, 67 Knollys, H.  226, 239 Knowles, B.  249, 256

474

Kolb, R.  145, 157, 161, 308–9 Komonchak, J.  274, 287 Koontz, G.  187, 194 Körtner, U. H. J.  157, 161 Köstenberger, A. J.  62, 67 Kotsko, A.  409, 417 Kovesi, J.  405, 417 Krahn, C.  186–7, 195 Kraus, W.  43–4, 52 Krause, N.  416 Kühn, U.  147, 151, 157, 161 Kümmel, W. G.  54, 67 Küng, H.  12, 22, 325, 340, 342 Küster, V.  283, 287 Lacey, T. A.  341 Laguier, S.  414 Lambe, T.  233–4, 236, 239 Lampe, G.  434, 446 Lange, D.  244, 256 Lapp, J. A.  193, 195 Larkin, B.  360, 373 Lasch, C.  397, 403 Latourette, K. S.  267 Laurentin, R.  247, 256 Lausten, M. S.  149, 152, 161 Lawrence, W.  223–4 Lazarus  366 Ledegang, F.  82, 95 Lederach, J. P.  188, 195 Lederle, H.  253–4 Lee, J. K.  76, 79, 304, 309, 329, 342 Leeman, J.  11, 22 Leithart, P.  434, 446 Lentz, C.  271 Leo X  97 Leo XIII  103, 112, 334, 372 Levine, L. I.  24, 38 Liddell, H.  434, 446 Lightfoot, J.  62, 67 Lightfoot, R.  56, 67 Lincoln, A.  435, 447 Lindbeck, G.  12, 20, 22, 295, 309, 356–8, 398, 403 Linus  139 Lislerud, G.  149, 161 Locke, J.  226, 239 Loewen, H. J.  185–6, 188, 191–2, 195 Logan, J.  212, 224 Löhe, W.  153, 157, 161 Lohfink, G.  12, 17, 22 Loisy, A.  24, 38, 299, 309, 370, 423–4, 432

INDEX OF NAMES

Long, D. S.  426, 432 Lorde, A.  386 Lossky, V.  129, 136, 143–4 Louth, A.  129, 139, 142, 144 Lowery, S. A.  276, 287 Luther, M.  97, 116, 145–7, 149, 157, 159, 161, 197, 243, 336–7, 339, 341–2, 349, 358, 437, 440 Luz, U.  32, 38 Lydia  35 MacArthur, J.  271 McBrien, R. P.  96, 105 McCabe, H.  411, 417 McCarthy, M. C.  305, 309 McCauley, R.  249 Macchia, F.  252 McDonnell, K.  121, 127, 241, 247, 256 Macedo, B.  249, 256 McGavran, D.  265 McGowan, W.  244, 256 McGreevy, J. T.  111, 127 McGuire, M. B.  396, 401, 403 MacIntyre, A.  397, 403, 413, 417, 420, 432 Mackay, J.  461 MacKinnon, D. M.  293, 309 Macleod, D.  169, 179 McNeill, J.  225, 239, 437, 447 McPartlan, P.  133, 144 McPherson, A.  243, 256 Macy, G.  380, 389 Maddox, R.  216–17, 223–4 Magesa, L.  280, 287–9 Mahoney, J.  421, 432 Mair, J.  97 Majorinus  75 Malan, G.  435, 447 Manuel, D.  252, 256 Manz, F.  177, 182 Mardaga, H.  435, 447 Marheineke, P. K.  152 Marina, P.  399, 403 Maritain, J.  113, 115 Markus, R. A.  78, 80 Marpeck, P.  182, 187, 189–90, 194 Marsden, G.  261–2, 267, 272 Marshall, B.  352, 358 Marshall, I. H.  326, 342 Marsilius of Padua  97 Martey, E.  276, 287 Martin, D.  397, 403 Martin, F.  244, 247, 256

INDEX OF NAMES

Martin, R. P.  63, 67 Martin, T.  15, 22 Martin, W.  265, 272 Martyn, J. L.  44, 53, 62, 67 Marx, K.  393 Mary Magdalene  26–7, 379–80 Mary, the mother of Jesus  29, 31, 33, 34, 35, 87. 110, 116–18, 122, 124–32, 138, 247, 367–9, 375–80, 387, 401 Mascall, E. L.  304, 309 Mattias  379 Maurer, C.  436, 447 Mawson, M.  306, 309 Maximus Confessor  352 May, L. E.  123, 230–1, 239 Mbaefo, L.  277, 287 Mbiti, J. S.  279, 283, 287 Medina, N.  101 Meeks, W. A.  62, 67 Meier, J. P.  32, 38 Melanchthon, P.  147–8, 161 Merdinger, J. E.  71, 80 Merleau-Ponty, M.  405, 417 Mersch, E.  101, 105, 112, 305, 309, 334, 342 Methodius of Olympus  85–7, 94–5, 130, 144 Methuen, C.  149, 161 Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk  137 Meyendorff, J.  135–6, 138, 144, 331, 341–2 Meyer, H.  436, 440, 446–7 Minear, P.  37–8, 82, 87–8, 95, 303, 309, 323, 342, 434, 447 Mitchell, M.  44, 53 Möhler, J. A.  5, 96, 102, 108–12, 115, 124, 127, 332–4, 337–8, 342 Molland, E.  152, 161 Moloney, R.  283, 287 Moltmann, J.  316, 319–20, 322, 351, 450 Montague, G.  247, 256 Moo, J.  56, 67 Moody, D.  265 Moore, G. E.  419–20, 422 Morali, I.  101, 105 More, T.  120 Morerod, C.  117, 122–3, 127 Moxnes, H.  35, 38 Mugambi, J. N. K.  280, 287 Mulhall, S.  414 Müller, G.  270 Mullins, E. Y.  228, 239 Mumme, J.  145, 147–8, 156, 161–2

 475

Müntzer, T.  182, 189 Murphy, F. A.  111, 121, 127 Murphy-O’Connor, J.  435, 447 Murray, P.  445, 447 Mushete, N.  275, 287 Mveng, E.  276, 280, 288 Mwambazambi, K.  278, 288 Myland, D.  243, 256 Naomi  383 Napoléon, B.  103 Nassar, S.  139, 144 Nazarius  101 Nelson, J. R.  324, 326, 341–2 Nero  55–6 Netter, T.  97 Nevin, J. W.  172, 180 Newbigin, L.  294, 305, 309, 348, 358, 461 Newman, J. H.  96, 102, 110, 123 Ngalula, J.  276, 288 Niebuhr, H. R.  395, 403, 424 Nienkirchen, C.  183, 195 Nietzsche, F.  393 Nimmo, P. T.  172, 180 Niringiye, D.  11, 22 Nissiotis, N.  129, 144, 352, 358 Njoku, K.  278, 288–9 Noll, M. A.  260, 272 Novatian  73–4, 367 Nugent, J.  12–14, 20, 22 Nüssel, F.  149, 153, 162 Nyamiti, C.  283–4, 288 Oakley, F.  97, 105 Obiefuna, A. K.  281 O’Connor, E.  247, 256 O’Donovan, O.  421–2, 432 Oduyoye, M. A.  285, 288 Ogbonnaya, J.  275–6, 288 Omenyo, C.  246, 257 Omerod, N.  296, 309 Origen of Alexandria  56, 83–5, 94–5, 130, 132, 327, 343 Orobator, A. E.  274, 280–2, 286–9 Orozco, A.  102 Orsi, R.  396, 401, 403 Osborn, E. F.  72, 80 Osiek, C.  27, 38 Osteen, J.  271 Otterbein, P.  214 Outler, A.  211–12, 224 Oyedepo, D.  249

476

Pacelli, E.  111 Pachuau, L.  275, 288 Packer, J. I.  298, 309 Packull, W. O.  182, 195 Padilla, R.  371, 374 Pannenberg, W.  146, 157–8, 162, 351 Papias  56 Parker, K.  232, 239 Passaglia, C.  102 Patriarch Anthimus of Constantinople  137 Paul VI  107, 117, 247, 288, 334, 376, 389, 437, 447 Pedersen, G.  149, 162 Pedlar, J.  357–8 Peel, A.  225–6, 239 Pelikan, J.  2, 161 Perrone, G.  102 Pesch, O. H.  145–6, 162 Pétau, D.  102 Pfaller, L.  247, 257 Pfau, T.  410, 417 Philips, D.  182, 190, 195 Philips, O.  182 Phoebe  51, 380 Pilate  29 Pilhofer, P.  42, 52 Pinches, C. R.  410, 417 Piper, J.  271, 279 Pipkin, H. W.  187–8, 190, 195 Pius VIII  103 Pius IX  392–3, 403 Pius X  392–3, 403 Pius XII  111–14, 127 Ployd, A.  328, 342 Pobee, J. S.  284, 288 Polanyi, K.  415, 418 Poloma, M.  247, 257 Polycarp  56, 94, 139 Polycrates  56 Pomplun, T.  102, 104–5, 332 Pope Felix III  78 Pope Francis  107, 109, 126–7, 286–8, 363, 374, 383 Pope Innocent III  379 Pope John XXII  97 Pope John XXIII  117 Pope John Paul II  376, 378, 445 Pope Leo XIII  334 Pope Paul VI  247, 288, 334, 376, 437, 447 Pope Pelagius II  78 Pope Pius VI  103 Pope Pius XI  100, 334

INDEX OF NAMES

Pope Sixtus V  100 Pope Stephen I  74 Porter, J.  384, 389 Przywara, E.  109 Pseudo-Dyonisius  142 Putnam, H.  414 Pythagoras  24 Quanabush, E.  246, 257 Quebedeaux, R.  252, 257 Radner, E.  356, 358, 434, 447 Rahner, K.  96, 335, 342, 376, 433, 447 Rainbow, P.  58, 62, 67 Ramsey, P.  424–5, 432 Ranaghan, D.  247, 257 Ranaghan, K.  247, 257 Randall, J.  234, 435, 447 Rankin, D. I.  72, 80 Rascher, A.  64, 67 Rathke, H.  436, 447 Ratzinger, J.  3, 109, 112, 115, 119–21, 127, 319, 321, 335, 342–3 Rauschenbusch, W.  424 Rawls, J.  408–9, 418 Reid, J.  437, 447 Reimarus, H. S.  423, 432 Rempel, J.  182, 187, 194–5 Rensberger, D.  62, 67 Rev, H.  149 Richards, E. R.  54, 67 Richardson, C.  133, 144 Richey, R.  222–4 Riedeman, P.  182, 189 Riga, P.  332–3, 342 Riis, O.  399–400, 403 Riss, R.  249, 257 Ritschl, A.  152 Robeck, C.  242, 248, 251, 257 Robinson, A. T.  304, 309 Robinson, J.  227 Rogers, E.  383–4, 389 Rohls, J.  177, 180 Roloff, J.  45, 51–2 Romanides, J.  136 Romeiro, P.  249, 257 Romero, Ó.  368–9, 372–4, 425, 431 Roper, R.  234, 239 Rosmini-Serbati, A.  103 Ross, W. D.  420, 432 Roth, J.  185–6, 188–1, 194–5 Rowe, K.  220–1, 224

INDEX OF NAMES

Rubio, G.  362, 373 Ruether, R. R.  384–5, 389 Rusch, W.  436, 440, 446 Rush, O.  96, 105 Russell, L.  384–5, 389 Ruth  383 Ryle, G.  398 Saarinen, R.  158, 162 Sadoleto, J.  337, 437 Sailer, M.  102 Sakupapa, T. C.  276, 284, 289 Salome  26–7 Samuel  17, 132 Sanneh, L.  278, 289 Sarah  15, 85, 426 Sarai  15 Sasse, H.  145, 162 Sattler, M.  182, 191 Sayre-McCord, G.  420, 432 Scannone, J. C.  362–3, 374 Schaff, P.  99, 140–1, 144 Schatzgeyer, C.  99 Scheeben, J.  333–4, 338, 342 Scheeben, M.  109–10, 127 Schillebeeckx, E.  96, 118, 127 Schleiermacher, F. D. E.  151–2, 162, 165, 180, 333, 337, 340, 342 Schmemann, A.  131, 136–7, 139, 142, 144, 331–2, 342, 376–7, 389 Schmitt, C.  409, 418 Scholem, G.  116 Schrader, C.  102 Schreiter, R. J.  283, 288–9 Schüssler Fiorenza, E.  384–5, 389 Schweitzer, A.  424, 426, 432 Schweizer, E.  38 Schwenkfeld, C.  182 Schwöbel, C.  299, 301, 309, 336, 343 Scott, R.  434, 446 Segundo, J. L.  263 Semler, J. S.  151 Sepulveda, J.  242, 257 Servetus, M.  177 Seymour, W. J.  248 Shaw, B. D.  89, 95 Shenk, W. R.  193, 195 Shepherd of Hermas  83 Sherrill, J.  247, 257–8 Shurden, W. B.  231, 239 Siecinski, E.  352 Silas  34

 477

Silvanus  56 Simeon and Anna  33–4, 36 Simon  25–6, 32, 37 Simon the Canananaen  26 Simons, M.  182, 185, 187, 189–90, 195 Smith, D. M.  62, 67 Smyth, J.  226–8, 233–4, 239–40 Snyder, C. A.  181–3, 193, 195 Snyder, H.  266, 272 Sobrino, J.  361–2, 366–7, 373–4 Solís, M.  371, 374 Solomon  17, 19 Song, R.  383–4, 389 Soulen, K.  351, 358 Spener, P. J.  150–1 Spittler, R.  250, 255, 257 Spurgeon, C. H.  236, 240 Stackhouse, J. G. Jr.  259, 261–2, 267, 272–3 Stahl, F. J.  153 Staniloae, D.  129, 144 Stanley, A.  271 Stapleton, T.  98 Stark, R.  266, 273 Stegemann, E. D.  35, 38 Stegemann, W.  35, 38 Stephanas  50 Stephanou, E.  248, 257 Stephenson, L.  245, 257 Stewart, A.  242, 257 Stibbe, M.  243, 257 Stone, B.  269 Stone, S. J.  58 Stott, J.  262 Stout, J.  405, 418, 426, 432 Strecker, G.  324, 343 Streeter, B.  243, 257 Stuhlmueller, C.  382 Suárez, F.  98–9, 101, 105 Suenens, L.  247, 257 Sullivan, F.  248, 257 Sunday, B.  265 Talbert, C. H.  37–8, 381, 389 Tanner, K.  383, 389 Taylor, C.  297, 309 Teresa of Avila  100 Tertullian  62, 71–4, 76, 79–80, 84, 95, 327, 375 Teske, R.  98, 105 Thecla  377–8 Theodosius  77

478

Theophilus  33 Thomas, C.  251 Thomas, J.  251, 258 Thomassin, L.  102 Thompson, J. W.  39, 41, 43, 45, 52 Thorsen, J. E.  399 Thurian, M.  442, 447 Tierney, B.  97, 106 Tillard, J. M. R.  295, 309, 315–16, 322 Tjørhom, O.  149–51, 162 Tomberlin, D.  245, 258 Tomlinson, A. J.  241, 244, 258 Tonstad, L.  386–7, 389 Torredas, Á.  366, 374 Traina, C.  384, 390 Tran, J.  406, 408, 411, 415, 418 Trebilco, P. R.  41, 52 Troeltsch, E.  152, 294, 309, 394–5, 403, 423–4 Troitsky, H.  135, 144 Tromp, S.  118 Trujillo, A. L.  369–70, 373 Turner, D.  233, 235, 237, 240 Turretin, F.  164, 166–7, 169, 173, 180, 312, 321–2 Tutino, S.  98, 100, 106 Tyconius  75 Umbauch, H.  43, 53 Urdañoz, T.  101, 106 Uzukwu, E.  278, 282–3, 289 Valerian  74 Van Bavel, T.  328–9, 343 Van der Laan, C.  242, 258 Van Gelder, C.  294, 310 Van Nijf, O. M.  24, 38 Vandervelde, G.  307, 309 Vanhoozer, K. J.  296–7, 308, 310, 428 Vassey, T.  217 Velarde, Brother “Mike”  249 Venn, H.  278, 289 Verbrugge, V. D.  327, 343 Vgenopoulos, M.  136–7, 144 Vigil, J. M.  366, 374 Vilmar, A. F. C.  153 Vincent of Lerins  62 Vischer, L.  117, 440, 447 Vitoria, F.  101, 105 Volf, M.  318–22 Volpi, A.  101

INDEX OF NAMES

von Balthasar, H. U.  115–17, 121, 123–5, 127, 335, 343, 350–1, 356, 358, 421 Von Campenhausen, H.  50, 52 von Drey, J. S.  102 von Harnack, A.  340, 343, 360, 372, 423–4, 426, 432, 457 von Zinzendorf, N. L.  151 Wace, H.  140–1, 144 Wacker, G.  265, 273 Wagner, C. P.  248–9, 258 Wainwright, G.  212, 224 Waliggo, J. M.  284, 289 Walls, A. F.  274, 289 Ward, F.  399–400, 403 Ward, P.  296, 310 Wardin, A.  230, 240 Ware, K. (Timothy)  135-6, 144, 248, 258, 331, 343 Warrington, K.  244, 251, 253, 258 Watson, N. K.  377, 382–6, 390 Webber, R.  266, 273 Weber, M.  350, 393–5, 403, 423 Webster, J.  8, 296–302, 306–8, 310, 312–17, 321–2, 339–40, 343, 348, 358 Wendebourg, D.  149, 162 Wendelin, M.  166 Wenger, J. C.  185–7, 189, 195 Wengert, T. J.  145, 157, 161 Wenz, G.  145, 156–8, 161–2 Wesley, C.  211, 213, 260, 264, 272 Wesley, J.  211–13, 216–17, 219, 222–4, 260, 264 Wesley, S.  217 Whatcoat, R.  217 White, B. R.  227–9, 231, 240 White, P.  271 Whitefield, G.  260, 262, 264–6, 272 Wiegele, K.  249, 258 Wietake, W.  246, 258 Wilhite, D. E.  71, 74, 80 Wilkerson, D.  247, 258 Wilkinson, J.  378 Williams, R.  305–6, 310, 352, 358 Williamson, J.  172 Wimber, J.  248, 255 Wittgenstein. L.  410, 414, 418 Wolin, S.  407–9, 416, 418 Wood, E. M.  415, 418 Wood, S. K.  356, 358 Woodhead, L.  399–400, 403 Wright, N. T.  11, 23, 41, 53

INDEX OF NAMES

Wuthnow, R.  267, 273 Wyclif, J. (Wycliffe)  97, 259 Yeago, D. S.  157, 159, 162, 437, 448 Yoder, H.  12, 18–19, 22–3, 187–8, 190, 192, 195 Yong, A.  245, 253, 257–8 Youngren, A.  244, 258

 479

Zabarella, F.  97 Zachariah  130 Zebedee  25, 31 Zerubbabel  346 Zizioulas, J.  3, 129, 133, 136, 139–41, 144, 319–21, 331–2, 343 Zwingli, H.  164, 166, 170–2, 175, 177, 180, 191, 235, 245

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

activism  178, 260, 460 admonition  50, 174, 184, 325, 406–7, 436 adoption  77, 87, 110, 188, 216, 300, 314 African-American Baptist  237 African Christianity African Christians  71, 277, 284–5 African church  249, 276–7, 279–83, 285 African theology  275–6, 278, 283, 286 African Traditional Religion  281, 283, 285 African women’s theology  276 agape (agapē)  65, 424, 430 agent  2–3, 21, 55, 60–1, 109, 112–13, 117, 276, 297, 300, 304, 306, 329–30, 347–9, 356, 361, 409, 420, 426, 430–1, 449 divine agent  2, 61, 300 age to come  47, 82 agnosticism  135 aliens  18, 55, 89, 300 allegory  85, 355, 423 altar  30, 65, 73, 75, 77, 79, 114, 131, 141, 155, 158, 360 alter Christus  319 alternative community  6 Amish  183–8, 190–1, 270 Anabaptist  6, 181–95, 225–7, 237, 260, 270, 336, 427 analogical  108–9, 118–9, 122 anathema  98, 117, 136, 436 anchoress  378 ancient church  136, 146 Ancient Near East  15 angels  29, 31, 55–6, 133 Anglican church  201, 204, 210, 400 Anglican Communion  196, 198–210, 440–1 antichrist  78 antichurch  384 apocalypticism  31, 182, 424, 426 apocryphal  31 apokatastasis  132

apophatic  135 apostles  3, 19, 33, 35–6, 54–6, 58, 60, 63–4, 66, 72, 74, 76–7, 90–2, 139–40, 147, 153, 156, 167–9, 185–6, 197, 237, 249, 302, 326, 330, 357, 407, 423, 433 Apostles Creed  147, 278, 293–4, 433 apostolic succession  3, 63–4, 92–3, 134, 140, 153, 156, 167–8, 186, 198–9, 211 apostolic teaching  130, 252 Archbishop of Canterbury  197–201, 204, 206–8, 437 aretē  89 Arian  353 Aristotelianism  115, 420, 426 Arminian  226, 230 Articles of Religion  197, 203, 213–14, 222 artificial contraception  199, 209 ascension  253, 304, 455 asceticism  72, 78, 85 Assemblies of God  242, 245, 249–51 assembly of saints  147 Augsburg Confession  145, 147–9, 159, 161 Augustinianism  78 autocephalous  137, 141 autocephaly  137 autonomy  6, 18, 100, 199, 201, 204–5, 228, 230, 269–70 Babel  13–14, 17 Babylonian exile  19 the ban  147, 182, 184, 189–90 baptism adult baptism  6, 396 baptismal formula  37 baptismal oath  72 baptismal rite  216 baptized “into Christ”  43 believer’s baptism  216, 441 infant baptism  172, 181, 216, 234–5, 441 Jesus’s baptism  24 re-baptism  75

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry (BEM)  215, 235, 238, 441–4 Baptist “Orthodox Creed”  231 Baptist World Alliance  225, 233, 238, 240 Barmen Declaration  154 Baroque period  113, 150 base ecclesial communities  6, 165, 203 beatitude  420, 425, 428, 430 beatitudes, The  369, 372 Belgic Confession  167–8, 174, 176 Bible societies  270 Bible story  11–12 biblical foundations  4 biblical images  118, 303, 330, 359, 362, 443 biblical narrative  12, 16, 19, 356 biblical scholarship  4, 13, 17, 419, 423 biblicism  260, 263 birth control  399 bishop of Rome  73–4, 76–8, 136 Black theology  276 Book of Common Prayer  197–8, 203, 210, 213, 216, 237, 348, 353 born again  216, 264 Branch Theory  134 breath of life (ruach)  90, 140, 345 bridal imagery  84 bridegroom  85, 131, 334 bride of Christ  72, 75, 84, 110, 128, 164, 324, 329–30, 375 brotherly love (philadelphia)  41–2, 185, 187 Calvinist  22, 149, 150, 152, 177, 226, 230–1, 236, 264 five points  231 camp meeting  265, 269 canonical tradition  137, 141 canonical trajectory  19–21 canonization  104, 123 capitalist market  427 capstone (ἀκρογωνιαῖος)  90, 323–4, 326 casta meretrix  116, 367 catechism  125, 145, 148, 165, 170, 185, 213, 238, 307–8, 335, 337, 341, 437, 453 Catholic Pentecostals  247–8, 252 celebrity pastor  11 charism  65, 124, 175, 241, 246, 350 charismatic gifts  74, 76 charismatic movement  6, 266

 481

charismatic renewal  245–8, 252 Christendom  7, 22, 124, 135, 145, 192, 208, 212, 294–5, 360, 369, 451, 454, 459–60 Christian discipleship  4, 174 Christian missionaries  35, 58, 62, 101, 107, 111, 186, 192, 197, 245, 275–9, 281–2, 360, 438, 454 Christian origins  108, 435 christological analogy  109 christological confession  43, 52 christological controversy  77 Christomonism  129 christomorphism  110 church as body of Christ  2, 43, 45, 82–3, 112, 129, 133, 135, 140, 303, 315, 324, 326, 328, 332, 337, 350, 368–9, 435, 443 church discipline  166, 169, 173–4, 176, 181–2, 187–90, 193, 227 church militant  99, 166–7, 347 Church of England  196–8, 202–4, 209, 211–13, 215–17, 223, 225–6, 237, 259 church order  3, 81, 153–4, 186, 226, 438 church planting  18, 230, 256 church’s gender  7 church suffering  99 church’s vocation  7, 307, 406 church triumphant  99, 167 church unity  5, 107–8, 117, 124, 134, 185, 187, 294–5, 302, 318, 335 church-world dualism  405–7 circumcision  15, 43, 216, 234 citizens  15–16, 73, 75, 77, 85, 88–9, 175, 302, 415 civic assembly  39–40 civil magistrates  237 civil rights  268 Classical Pentecostals  241, 245–8, 251–2 clergy  3, 58, 72–4, 107–9, 113, 119, 146, 148–50, 157–8, 175, 197, 218–20, 259, 264, 266, 268–70, 278, 281, 286, 295, 362, 365, 389, 402, 439 clericalism  107, 121, 278, 281–2, 286, 383 cloud of witnesses  107, 121, 278, 281–2, 286, 383 cofradías  360 collegialists  153 colonialism  7, 276, 282, 359 commemoration  138, 217

482

common salvation (koinē sōtēria)  62 communication idiomatum  333 communion of saints (communio sanctorum/congregatio sanctorum/ hagioi)  41, 99, 147, 157, 166, 238, 293, 421 community formation  39–40, 42 Conciliarism  97, 102 conduct, moral and spiritual  24, 28–9, 32, 42, 47, 49, 56, 61, 72, 441, 459 confessing  6, 76, 90, 125, 294, 312, 321 Confessing Church  154, 173 confessional statements  60, 185, 456 confession of faith  181–3, 187–8, 191–3, 214–15, 232, 238, 270, 451, 461 confession of sin  65 Congregationalism  227 congregationalist  175, 225, 259, 266 Constantinianism  406 continuity with Israel  2, 43, 88 conversionism  260 corporate christology  43 corpus Christi mysticum  339 cosmic  29, 51, 308, 327, 384 Council of Basel  97 Council of Chalcedon  37, 77, 87, 136, 140, 305, 340, 436 Council of Constantinople  164, 433 Council of Crete  138 Council of Ephesus  376 Council of Florence  103 Council of Jerusalem  392 countercultural  30, 271 Counter Reformation  96, 131, 279 covenant people  29, 172, 299, 407 creation narrative  86 creation science  262, 269 Creator/creature  298–9, 301, 306, 312, 321 creatura fidei  151 creatura verbi divini  337 creedal  3, 81–2, 87, 92, 147, 223, 232, 270, 298, 344, 359, 421 creedalism  270 cross  26–7, 30, 48, 51, 59, 64, 89, 138, 216, 245, 260, 304, 323–4, 327, 338, 349, 360, 435, 443, 452, 460 crucicentrism  260 crucified Messiah  27 crucified people  364 crucified with Christ  48, 326

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

day of Christ  48 deacon  66, 72, 78, 92, 141, 158, 176, 218–21, 380 deaconess  141 death of Jesus  48, 205, 364 decalogue  27, 283 decolonization  276, 286 deconstruction  382 deification, see divinization deist  423 democracy  159, 266, 385, 407 demographic shift  274 denomination  184, 212, 218, 222, 242, 259, 261–2, 267, 269–70, 398, 439, 451, 461 deontology  427 deposit  63, 90 depositum  178–9 diaconate  141, 158, 220, 383 diakonia  50, 236–7 dialectic  2–3, 51, 102, 109, 126, 347, 364, 367, 458 Diaspora  18, 24, 36 diocese  6, 119–20, 141, 145, 196–8, 200–4, 207 disciples  18, 24–38, 57, 60, 62–4, 108, 117, 138, 140, 211, 221, 225, 234–5, 250, 263, 269–71, 286, 331, 346–7, 350, 365, 379, 423, 426, 435, 441, 452–3, 455 discipleship  4, 6, 24–6, 29, 38, 174, 178–9, 188–90, 193, 212, 221, 226, 263, 371, 407, 426, 455, 458 divided church  3, 7–8, 38, 44, 46, 55, 61, 75, 82, 115, 122, 134–5, 191, 279, 281, 284, 293, 296, 349, 356, 427, 429, 433–41, 445, 456 divine economy  4, 93, 158, 297–8, 348, 353, 416 divine election  1, 165, 330 divine image  47 Divine Liturgy  128, 133 divinization  113, 118, 129, 331 deification  129, 131 theosis  87, 93, 118, 138, 352 Docetic/Gnostic  83, 369 Dominican  97, 104, 115, 146, 360 Donatists  75–6, 78, 91, 327–8 doxological community  345 Eastern Fathers  81 ecclesial ethics  419, 421–2, 425–8, 430–1

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

ecclesial form  8, 151 ecclesial life  158, 196, 225, 385, 412, 415, 445 ecclesial structure  151, 238 ecclesial trajectory  16 ecclesial unity  7–8, 61, 77, 435, 444 ecclesia semper reformanda  6, 163 ecclesiastical authority  131, 146, 159, 204, 227, 278 ecclesiola in via  212 ecclesiology African  276, 284, 286 Anabaptist  6, 181, 183–4, 192–3 Anglican ecclesiology  6, 196–7, 199–203, 205–10 Baptist  6, 225–6, 232–3 Baptist ecclesiology  6, 225–6, 232–3 christological  327, 332–5, 337–9 communio  6, 121, 200, 279, 282, 284–6, 295, 314–16, 318, 339, 348 covenant  225–8, 232 Eastern Orthodox  5, 128–37 Evangelical  259, 263, 265–6, 339 exemplarist  6 feminist  375, 384–7 incarnational  83 Lutheran  6, 145–6, 149, 155, 157–9, 298 Methodist  211–12, 223 missio Dei  311, 314–18, 321, 443–4, 449–50, 456 modern  2, 97–8, 103, 392 patristic  5, 71, 78, 81, 92–3 Pentecostal  6, 241–3, 245, 250–3 primitive  3 Reformed  163–4, 167–8, 174, 178 Roman Catholic  96–7, 102, 107, 334 Wesley and Methodist  211–12, 223 economy of salvation/salvific economy  1–2, 92, 164–5, 296, 298, 347, 351, 380 Ecumenical Councils  81, 117, 137, 436 ecumenical movement  154, 199, 220, 294–5, 318, 359, 434–5, 438–41, 443–5, 450 Ecumenical Patriarchate  137 ecumenism  3, 107, 110, 117, 122–4, 158, 191, 200, 208, 246, 278, 284, 294–5, 298, 356, 398, 434, 436, 439, 444–5 ecumenists  61, 437 ekklēsia  30, 33–4, 39–41, 51, 57, 88, 93, 164, 345–6, 348, 350, 356, 385 ἐκκλησία  52, 57, 83, 88, 91, 138

 483

elder  56–7, 66, 176, 217–20, 236–7, 266, 356 elect, God’s elect  61, 75, 79, 118, 165, 172, 178, 182, 225, 227, 232, 300, 352, 434, 451 election, doctrine of  1, 3, 29, 41, 43, 59, 75, 120, 165, 171, 226, 300, 314, 330, 338, 356 embodied  1–2, 4, 122, 157, 193–4, 228, 244, 249, 285, 399, 407 emotivism  420 empire  15–16, 18, 21, 26, 58, 71, 73, 77–8, 149, 154, 177, 192, 196, 198, 230, 451 encyclical  57, 103, 107, 111–13, 115, 124, 140, 278, 334, 376, 436, 445 English Reformation  6, 196–8, 225 English Separatism  6, 230 Enlightenment  56, 121, 150–2, 233, 266, 460 entire sanctification  6, 242 epiclesis  348, 354 episcopal  3, 66, 72–3, 75, 120, 140–1, 150, 153–4, 157–9, 175, 196, 198, 201, 203–4, 211, 213, 218, 222, 238, 242, 259, 266, 353, 362, 368, 438 polity  153, 242 The Episcopal Church  196, 198, 201, 204, 211, 213, 266, 353 episcopate  66, 119, 199–200, 209 episcopa  380 episkope  237 episkopos/episkopoi  50, 55, 66, 149, 236–7 equality  205, 269, 276, 278, 320, 366, 380 eschatological kingdom  75, 133 eschatological people of God  49 eschatology  32, 120, 182, 252, 312, 406, 424–6 esse  3, 83, 176 eternal election  3, 338 eternal life  25, 59, 63, 65, 165, 172, 320, 368–9, 452 eternity  1, 83, 93, 108, 131, 157, 165, 300, 315, 454 ethical instruction  49, 52 ethicists  4, 419, 424–5 ethics of Jesus  57 ethnicity  39–40, 46–7, 49, 139, 284–5 ethnography  2, 7, 296, 299, 357, 391, 399–402

484

eucharist bread  35, 45–6, 63, 65, 89, 133, 138, 141, 171–2, 187, 235–6, 252, 268, 302–3, 325–6, 348, 365–6, 407, 425, 429, 435, 439 communion  72–4, 91, 121, 205–8 cup of blessing  45, 326 gatherings  55 Lord’s Supper  35, 44, 46–7, 64, 148, 181, 184–5, 187–8, 193, 214–17, 227, 233, 235–6, 245, 303, 325, 349, 354–5, 435 memorial  65, 171 real presence  65, 113, 173, 217, 235–6, 349, 399 wine  133, 138, 141, 171–2, 187, 235–6, 348, 366, 425 words of institution  45–6, 236 eudaimonism  420 Eurocentric  275, 278 evangelicalism  8, 216, 259–63, 265–72 evangelion  412 exalted Christology  55 exclusionist  72, 367, 413–14 excommunication  115, 142, 159, 177, 211, 227, 263, 437 exemplary moral lives  89 exiles  18, 55, 62 exilic prophets  18, 49 exorcism  25, 29, 243, 250, 370 explanatory power  13, 409 expressivism  420, 422 extra ecclesiam nulla salus  101, 114, 133, 179, 367 fact/value  419, 422 fallen humanity  114, 129, 131 fallen world  14–15, 189, 368 fall of Jerusalem  54 false church  168, 269 false prophets  56, 347 false teacher  51, 63, 150 false teaching  55, 61 family resemblance  6, 396–7 Febronianism  102 federation  16, 21, 138, 153–4, 191, 440–1 female ordination  378, 380–3, 386–7 feminist  276, 375, 377–8, 380–2, 384–7 feminist ethics of care  427 Fifth Lateran Council  97 filioqué  136, 320, 344, 350–1 first-century church  18

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

First Vatican Council (Vatican I)  96, 102–4, 199 flood  13–14 forgiveness  30, 33, 37, 64–5, 76, 78, 118, 124, 142, 172, 175, 192, 217, 221, 228, 458, 461 formalism  104, 354 fourfold act of worship  429 four-stage narration  4, 12 functional Trinity  37 fundamentalist  244, 267 Fürstbischöfe (prince-bishops)  149 Gallicanism  102 gay priest  201 gender  7, 39, 43, 46, 82, 85, 269, 276, 284, 375, 377–8, 398, 438 genealogy  96–7, 104 General Baptist  227, 231–2, 234, 236–7 general epistles  5, 54–5, 58–9, 63, 65 genocide  21, 281, 285–6, 360 Gentile Christians  36, 55 Gentiles  19, 27–8, 30, 33–4, 36–41, 45–7, 51, 55–6, 58, 61, 83, 88, 97, 117, 167, 354–5, 407 global church  7 global South  190, 249 glorification  57, 63 God-consciousness  151, 340 God’s people  12–21, 55, 58–9, 61, 141, 284, 357, 363, 379, 405 God’s reign  181, 212, 218 good news  25, 27–8, 33, 35, 37, 39, 63, 92, 159, 168, 215, 259, 264, 298, 300, 302, 307, 364, 372, 385, 407, 415–16, 449–50, 454–5 Great Awakening  265 Great Commission  35, 264, 452 Great Schism  136, 437 Greek East  5, 81, 91 Gregorian Reforms  146 happiness  264, 425, 431 head of the body  49, 82, 112 head of the church  51, 112, 137, 319, 326 heaven  20, 28–9, 32, 58, 60, 65, 75, 79, 87, 99, 118–19, 133, 139, 158, 165, 167, 172–3, 190, 213, 217, 277, 304, 306–8, 315, 328, 353, 357, 429 heaven-centered  20 heavenly church  82 heavenly destiny  1

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Hebrew Scriptures  4, 56, 58, 434 heir of ancient Israel  43 Hellenistic Jews  24 Helvetic Confession  164–7, 170–1, 175–7 heresiologists  62 heresy  56, 115, 140, 360, 376, 436 hermeneutics  13, 59, 84–5, 243, 281, 304, 335, 405 hidden Christ  30 hierarchy  49, 73–4, 92–3, 98, 109–10, 113, 131, 148, 157, 164, 175–6, 178, 281, 295, 319–20, 365, 368, 383, 385 historicism  111, 314, 356 Holiness Movement  241–2 holy city  33, 139 homily  55, 63, 82 homosexual  201, 262, 268 house-churches  28, 38, 42, 55, 57–8, 66 human construction  394 human nature  98, 100, 108, 113–14, 118, 120, 130, 186, 296, 305, 331, 382, 422, 426 human sexuality  199, 201, 206, 208–9, 438, 445 human society  1, 140, 148, 293, 295, 299, 307, 313, 347 Hutterite  182–5, 187–8, 190–1, 193, 270 hylomorphism  99 hymnody  128, 130, 133, 157, 185, 213, 215, 217, 222, 236, 264, 270, 352–4, 366 hypostasis  130–1, 320, 351 hypostatic image  131 hypostatic union  329, 331, 333, 338 icon iconography  128, 132, 138, 205, 348, 376 iconostasis  131 idolatry  45, 72–3, 176, 298, 325 iglesia fuente (source church)  362 image of God  82, 90, 93, 213, 264, 380, 431 image of the Church  2, 83, 85, 128, 131, 280, 326, 328, 337, 350, 368, 370 image of the Son  47–8 imagination  4, 93, 355, 357, 360, 401 imitate  85, 89, 99, 114, 120, 190, 277, 314, 382 immaculate  125, 376 imparted  133, 142, 429–30 imperfect communion  122, 124, 200, 206

 485

imperial cult  58 imperialism  7, 283, 415 imputed  166, 429–30 in persona Christi  380–2 in persona ecclesiae  381 incarnate  57, 102, 110, 113, 130, 163, 264, 300, 303–4, 315, 329, 331, 348, 350, 355, 363, 369–70 incarnatus prolongatus  331 inclusion  12, 61, 165, 248, 278, 285, 294, 326, 456 incorporation  19, 43, 300, 304, 326, 407, 454 inculturation  275–6, 278–9, 282–4 individualism  44, 104, 150, 269, 397, 400 indulgences  146 infallibility  3, 97, 103, 109, 118, 333 infused virtues  422, 426 inner-city mission  267 instrumentalism  171 intercommunion  134 international conference  190, 266, 445 internationalism  111 interpretative traditions  2 interpretive community  12 interreligious dialogue  275, 434 invincible ignorance  101 invisible  2, 76, 79, 91, 101–2, 108, 126, 134–5, 137, 142, 150–1, 153, 156, 166–7, 178, 183, 232–3, 293, 301, 305–6, 334 irresistible grace  59 Islam  104, 281 Israel’s election  29 Israel’s Scripture  41, 48, 356 itinerant system  219 ius episcopale (episcopal authority)  3, 150, 158–9 Jerusalem  27, 33, 36–7, 39, 41, 54–8, 62, 66, 75, 77, 85, 90–1, 117, 119, 122, 139, 182, 243, 392, 426, 455 Jesuits, Society of Jesus  96, 100, 102, 103–4, 112, 114, 125, 300–1, 363, 425 Jesus’s inner circle  26 Jesus’s lordship  22, 39, 51, 191, 214, 308, 328, 336–7, 340, 349, 456 Jesus’s ministry  4, 29, 35, 64, 407, 415 Jesus’s words of institution  45–6 Jewish Messianism  346 Johannine corpus  54, 59, 62 Johannine epistles  57, 61

486

Johannine literature  5, 24, 59, 62, 65–6, 351, 436 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification  440–1 Josephinism  102 judgment (juridical)  29, 31, 36, 42, 57, 64, 74, 117, 194, 238, 244, 250, 347, 351, 355, 387, 400, 406, 409–12, 416, 419–21 juridical  5, 78, 96–7, 99, 108–9, 113, 115, 124, 242, 295, 332, 335 justification  55, 123, 148, 213, 215, 243, 250, 336, 352, 398, 409–10, 440–1, 458 justifying faith  147–8 Kantianism  104 katholikē  86, 93, 102 keeping the Sabbath  191 king  16–18, 88, 100, 130, 132, 141 kingdom-centered  20 Kingdom of Christ  298, 452–3 kingdom of God  2, 28–9, 60, 89, 119, 131, 155, 271, 296, 301, 370–2, 419, 423–4 koinōnia  45, 200, 205–6, 209, 223, 231, 233, 252, 276, 284, 295, 311, 316, 318, 347–8, 364, 435, 442, 444 Kulturprotestantismus (cultural Protestantism)  149, 227, 283, 331, 337, 456 Kyrie  366 laity  3, 6, 72, 74, 107, 109, 113–14, 119, 121, 141, 151, 175–6, 278–9, 281, 284–6, 319, 362, 365, 383, 392, 402, 439 Last Days  28, 60, 243 Last Supper  26, 56, 65, 114, 133 Latin America  7, 125, 193, 198, 246, 263, 274–5, 359–63, 365–7, 369, 371–2 Latin American theology  360, 371 Latin West  5, 71, 79 law  16, 27, 31, 36, 49, 55, 73, 77, 88, 98, 111, 150, 153, 159, 165, 173, 177, 191, 203–4, 225, 229, 232, 295, 346 layperson  141, 216, 221 leadership  6, 24, 32, 51, 62, 66, 77, 124, 173, 175–6, 186, 190, 192–3, 196–7, 200, 203, 207–8, 214, 216, 218–19, 236, 245, 247, 251, 266, 270–1, 276, 278, 280–1, 285–6, 311, 349–50, 365, 377, 392, 400–1, 436

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

legalism  117 lex credendi/lex orandi/lex vivendi  366 LGBTQ  375, 377–8, 383–4 liberating gospel  22 liberation  2, 7, 35, 146, 199, 231, 275–6, 297, 312, 359, 361–2, 365–8, 425, 443, 460 liberation theology  125, 276, 359–62, 369, 372, 385 life together  16, 18, 20–1, 185, 223, 295–6, 307, 428 liturgical  3, 65, 120, 130, 132–3, 140–2, 147, 156–7, 159, 169–70, 196–8, 201, 203, 209, 216, 245, 260, 353–4, 381–2, 386 liturgy  5, 7, 63, 114, 122, 128, 133, 138, 141, 157, 169, 204, 215, 217, 236, 245, 278, 282, 345, 352–4, 357, 386, 426, 437 local church  6, 40, 45, 57, 62, 121, 138–41, 200, 203, 214, 218, 220–1, 225–6, 228–33, 237, 267, 269, 278, 282, 284–5, 319, 331, 397–8 localism  111, 120 Lollards  259 Lord’s Day  267 love feasts  55, 65, 93 Lutheran confessions  146–8, 155–7, 159 Lutheran ecumenism  158 lynching  36 magisterial  77, 149, 163–4, 172, 176, 186, 227, 266, 336, 407, 450 magna charta  145 Magnificat  35 majority world  7, 274–5, 277, 286 manna  65, 429 Maranatha  354 Marcionism  355 marginalization  361, 428 Marian  118, 125, 368, 376–7 marks of the church apostolicity (add apostolic succession from above)  5, 82, 99–100, 140, 167–8, 182, 185–6, 302, 433, 455 catholicity  5, 62, 82, 91–2, 99–101, 122, 137–9, 157, 167, 185, 190, 252, 302, 319, 416, 433 holiness  3, 5, 7, 29, 41, 43, 48, 56, 61, 72, 74–6, 79, 86, 88, 99, 101, 110, 115–18, 120, 125, 138, 157, 166, 174, 185, 188, 212, 216–17, 241–2, 244–5, 252, 260, 264, 324, 333, 335, 349, 362, 386, 433, 460

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Nicene marks  3, 5 notae ecclesiae  3, 5–8, 71–2, 74, 79, 118, 129, 134, 147, 157, 159, 164, 168–9, 173–5, 178, 184–5, 200, 211, 214–15, 218, 222–3, 225, 227, 234, 252, 259, 301, 349, 359, 370–2, 421, 433, 435 oneness/unity  86, 92, 164, 295, 433 marriage  7, 84–5, 102, 114, 142, 185, 197, 201–2, 206, 208–9, 304, 324, 378, 383–4, 387 heterosexual marriage  383, 387 married laity  113 same-sex marriage  7, 378, 383–4, 387 martus (witness)  449–50 martyr, martyrdom  54, 56, 73–4, 89, 115, 124, 135, 139, 185, 349, 363, 377, 449–50, 455 Marxism  371 mass  112–14, 121, 184, 353, 366, 399 mater ecclesia  86, 376 means of grace  150–1, 153, 156–7, 212–15, 233, 235, 422 mediaeval  115, 166–7, 171, 175 medium salutis  459 Melchiorite  182 membership  71–2, 76, 79, 98, 101, 110, 122, 155, 172, 192, 217–21, 227–8, 235, 244, 285, 325, 391, 400–1, 408, 442, 451 Mennonites  182–7, 190–3 mercy  29–31, 33, 36–7, 74, 99, 101, 114, 171, 189, 286, 302, 317, 330, 366–7, 452 Messiah  13, 19, 24, 26–8, 30, 32, 37–9, 43, 57, 65, 85, 87, 132, 164–5, 283, 346, 349, 355, 407, 424 messianic  18, 26, 58, 99, 149, 346, 355–6, 362 metanoia  117 metaphor  5, 27, 29, 38, 42, 49, 65, 107, 110–12, 118, 129, 190, 236, 264, 276, 282, 286, 303, 306, 326, 347, 375–6, 379, 382–3, 387 metaphysic  100, 311, 313–14, 317–18, 325, 328–9, 333–4, 353 Methodism  211–12, 214, 216–23 Methodist/Wesleyan  6 metropolitan bishop  57, 203 Middle Ages  5, 96, 101–2, 104, 111, 113, 146, 376, 381, 436 middle way  6

 487

Midrash  31, 64 militant church  99, 166–7, 347, 368 mind of Christ  213, 228–9, 231, 236, 307 mind of the Spirit  49 ministerial office  2, 164, 174, 176 ministry of the laity  3 misión integral  371 modern era (period)  1, 100, 104, 146, 148, 196, 209, 229, 331–2, 337–8, 355, 395, 428, 438 modernism  104, 279 Montanism  72 moral community  49, 394 moral formation  48, 428 morally reason  409, 411 mother  25–6, 31, 54, 72–5, 77, 82, 85–7, 90–1, 108, 126, 130, 166, 217, 281, 330, 367, 376–7, 382, 451, 454 motherhood  85, 281, 376–7 mother of Christ  87, 330, 376 Mother of God (Theotokos)  87, 118, 130, 138, 376–7 Mount of Olives  27 multi-ethnic communities  39 Münsterites  182–3 Muratorian Canon  56 mystery  3, 5, 24, 29, 38, 79, 81, 83, 91–2, 107, 109, 113–14, 116, 119, 125, 128, 142, 172, 175, 184, 208, 215, 217, 279, 284, 298–9, 303–5, 321, 324, 334, 339–40, 345–6, 348, 350, 352, 354, 364, 367, 369, 375, 423, 431, 444 mystical body  87, 96, 101, 103–4, 108–10, 112–16, 118, 120–21, 304, 331–2, 335, 339, 368 Mystici Corporis Christi  111–15, 122, 334 mysticism  110, 182, 324–6, 336, 363, 395 mystics  100 narrative approaches  11 narrative trajectory  12–13, 17, 20–1 nation ethnei (nation)  28 ethnos  41, 88–9 holy nation  88, 300, 302, 434 nation-state  427–8 natural function  420 naturalistic fallacy  419, 422 natural law  383–4 natural ordering  404–5 natural virtues  430

488

neighbors  27, 29, 181, 361, 429 neo-colonial theology  360 neoliberalism  414–16 Neo-Lutheranism  152 Neo-Pentecostal  246–7, 249, 252 Neoplatonism  423 Neo-Protestant  151 Nestorians  78 new age  48–9 New Age spirituality  262 new covenant  2, 48, 55, 61, 88, 98–9, 165, 172, 226, 234, 300, 348 new creation  47, 87–90, 101, 120, 216, 300–1, 347, 354, 371 New Delhi statement  439 new family  41–2, 49, 85, 284, 286 new humanity  43, 45, 47, 51, 300, 303–4, 306–7, 435 new identity  89 New Jerusalem  182 new kingdom  85, 87, 90 new life  1–2, 16, 98, 131, 181, 192, 264, 348, 352 new perspectives on Paul  5 New Testament  3–4, 22, 32, 37, 54, 62, 66, 81, 83–5, 87–90, 93, 100, 120, 129, 139, 165, 181, 183, 186–7, 200, 213, 215, 222, 236, 244, 251–2, 269–71, 306, 347, 350, 354, 375, 379, 381, 407, 434–6, 441, 450–1 Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan Creed  301, 443 Nicene-Chalcedonian Creed  37 Nicene Creed  60, 214–15, 223, 344, 347, 354, 421, 429 Noah’s ark  64, 72–3, 75 noetic  155–6, 158 nominalism  102, 104 normative trajectory  12 notae manifestae  103 nouvelle théologie  96 nuptial analogy  110, 303, 327–8, 375–6, 379, 382, 387 nuptial mysticism  110 obedience  1, 59, 61, 74, 98–9, 147–8, 171–2, 174, 177, 181, 183, 185, 202–3, 226, 235, 278, 295, 350, 455–6, 461 object of faith  119, 166, 232, 421, 429 office  2, 56, 66, 72, 78, 99, 115, 117, 124, 141, 147–9, 153, 156–8, 167, 174, 176, 192, 208, 221, 227, 229, 237, 247, 319, 331, 336, 352, 378–9

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

oikodomē/oikodomeō  44 oikoumenē  434 Old Covenant  55, 98, 116, 165, 234 Old Testament  4–5, 11, 22, 29, 41, 44–5, 84, 87–8, 116, 120, 130, 132, 165, 182, 225, 345, 351, 355–6, 375, 434–5 Oneness Pentecostals  241 ontic  155, 158, 318 ontological  3, 59, 83–4, 86, 91, 124, 133–4, 156, 175–6, 178, 297, 303, 317–18, 320, 325, 333–5, 338–9, 382 ontologism  103 opera Dei  313–14 oppressed  13, 35, 361, 364, 366–7, 385, 407, 415–16 oppression  177, 275–6, 361, 363–4, 367–8, 370, 385–6, 399, 415, 430 opus Dei  299, 336 opus hominum  299, 336 ordained ministry  3–4, 156, 200, 203, 218–19, 221, 349 ordinance  6, 49, 151, 166, 177, 214, 233, 235–6, 245, 452–3 ordinary language philosophers  414 ordination of women  7, 200–1, 204, 206, 209 ordo  72, 131, 140 organism (Gemeinshaft)  332, 334 original covenant  2, 227 original sin  125, 216, 328 Orthodox Church Eastern Church  5, 81, 137, 142, 433, 437 Oriental Orthodox  101, 136 Orthodox Patriarch  117, 141 orthodoxy  57, 60, 90, 109, 128–9, 132, 134–5, 137, 141, 149–51, 213, 250, 262, 321, 339, 350, 360, 368, 376, 379, 416, 436 outward sign  172, 181 Παντοκράτωρ  132 pantheism  104 papacy papal infallibility  103, 109 Papalism  102 papal primacy  77–8, 97, 103, 109, 136, 145, 332 Petrine authority  77 Petrine primacy  32, 103, 107, 120, 437 parables  28–31, 35, 301, 370

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

parachurch  266–7, 269 Paraclete  72, 76, 347 parochialism  3 parousia  307 Particular Baptist  226, 228–35, 237 Pascha  77, 142 passions  47, 61, 347 pastor  11, 74, 109, 159, 186, 218, 220, 227, 231, 236, 245, 265, 271, 380 pastoral care  49, 197, 201, 203, 220, 227, 229, 237 Pastoral Epistles  50–1 paterfamilias  50, 52 patriarchal  271, 276, 285, 378, 384 patriarchs  2 patriarchy  382, 384, 386 patristic era  5, 66, 81, 83, 327, 436 Pauline corpus  43, 54 Pauline epistles  5, 56 Pauline letters  5, 24, 39, 42, 51 peace  6, 14, 73–4, 77, 131, 149–50, 176, 188, 190, 192, 203, 206, 213, 276, 281, 283, 285, 346–7, 366, 372, 416, 427–8, 430–1, 461 peculiar people  312 Pedobaptist  227 Pelagianism  351 penance  65, 72, 74, 142, 148 Pentecost  1, 19, 60, 92, 101, 124, 241–3, 247, 250, 253, 301, 307, 312, 323, 346, 361, 364, 380, 454–5 Pentecostal Catholics  247 Pentecostalism  6, 8, 241–2, 247, 249–50, 253, 262, 269 Pentecostal Movement  242, 245, 247, 251 early rain  243 First Wave  248, 384 latter rain  241, 243, 249 Pentecostal–charismatic movement  266 Second Wave  248 Third Wave  248–9, 252 perceptual judgment  406, 410 perfection  2, 72, 74, 86, 92, 99, 118, 168–9, 193, 297, 302, 313–14, 326–7, 333, 335, 339–40, 349, 357, 391–2, 420 perichōrēsis  311, 316, 319–20, 435 persecution  27, 33, 41, 72–5, 177, 183, 185, 187, 190, 192, 349, 372, 427 personal freedom  44 philosophical ethics  419–20, 422 philosophical naturalism  420

 489

Pietism  150–2, 214, 244, 259 pietist  150–1, 214, 244, 259 piety  7, 29, 33, 87–8, 126, 131, 150–1, 163, 175, 182, 213, 260, 263–4, 266, 268–9, 271–2, 349, 360, 368 pilgrimage  75, 77, 124, 212, 265, 359–61, 408 pilgrim church  74–5, 82, 118, 358, 444 pilgrims  55, 434 Platonic form  296 Platonizing  108 plenitudo potestatis  99–100, 103 plural identities  391 pluralism  7–8, 149, 263, 266, 272, 370 plurality  4, 12, 14, 16–17, 50, 184, 274–5, 382 pneumatology  1, 5, 7, 71, 77, 84, 90, 129, 250, 253, 302, 311, 333–4, 344–5, 371 politics politeia  88 political body  408, 412, 414 political economy  415, 428 political engagement  412 political theology  7, 285, 360, 408–10, 416 political vision  414–16 populism  6, 263, 265–6, 270–1 post-exilic prophets  18 postmodernism  397 post-Reformation  120, 176, 277 post-Reimarian  419 potentiality  421 poverty  35, 99, 194, 229, 275–7, 285–6, 359, 361, 367, 372, 415, 431 practical reasoning  420–2, 430–1 pragmatism  6, 263–6, 271 praxis  295, 366, 457 prayer  33, 37, 48, 76, 128, 133, 147, 186, 197–8, 203, 212–13, 216, 220, 236–7, 244, 252, 264, 285, 294, 301, 307, 348–9, 353–4, 365, 407, 435, 439, 452–3 preaching office  148 preaching of the Word  169–71, 176, 215, 359 predestination  57, 59, 101–2, 165 Pre-Reformation  120 Presbyterian  175–6, 199, 242, 261, 265–6, 269, 272, 361, 385, 451–3, 456, 461 presbyteroi  66, 72–3, 92, 158

490

presence of Christ  77, 103, 109, 171, 183, 190, 217, 227, 234–6, 331, 346, 385, 439 present age  47, 85, 346, 354 presiding bishop  204, 219 priesthood (office)  2, 55, 61, 88, 98–9, 119, 121, 141, 200, 209, 281, 300, 333, 336, 378–83, 386 priesthood of all believers  3, 151, 153, 156, 175, 178, 186, 286 primate  197, 200–1, 203–4, 206–8 primitive tradition  32, 436 primitivism  259, 269, 271 primus inter pares  204, 207 processions–missions  313 proclamation  2, 33–4, 59, 90, 140, 156, 169, 215, 218, 261, 264–5, 297, 300, 307, 323–4, 349, 353, 364, 407, 412, 415, 429, 449–50, 454, 457 prophetic (mission, office)  2, 49, 58, 60, 102, 119–20, 123, 158, 182–3, 219, 249, 253, 276, 283, 285–6, 333, 336, 346, 360, 366, 368, 407, 439, 442–3, 458, 461 Protestant churches  6, 150, 154, 158, 244, 246, 251, 278, 285, 379, 383, 395 Protestant Reformation  121–2, 225, 246, 279, 437 Protestant tradition  5, 171, 185 pueblo crucificado  362–4, 371 pueblo fiel  363, 371 pure nature  422 purgatory  99

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

qahal/qāhāl  33, 41, 88 quadrilateral  261 queer/queerness  381–4, 386–7

Reichsbischof (bishop of the realm/empire)  154 reign  15, 29, 55–6, 77, 181–3, 191, 212, 215, 217–18, 222, 227, 279, 348, 442 renewal movement  183–4, 211, 213, 215–17, 220–3, 260 repentance  25, 29–30, 35–6, 64, 76, 116, 159, 174, 181, 188, 192–3, 213, 243, 354, 367, 426, 428–9, 452 Repentant Harlot  116 reprobate  59, 75, 165 ressourcement  5, 110 restoration  20, 122, 129, 131, 136, 141, 243, 249, 283, 294, 300, 346, 426 Restorationism  253, 259, 269 Restorationist  6, 243, 249, 259, 269–71 resurrection  2, 34, 36, 47, 59–60, 63, 83, 89, 132, 142, 156, 172, 191, 205, 226, 250, 300, 303–4, 311, 316, 323, 340, 346–7, 350–1, 380, 384, 421, 423, 425, 429 revivalism  269, 454 righteousness (dikaiosynē)  29–31, 49, 57, 61, 147, 166, 183, 213, 411, 423 risen Lord  33, 43, 58 Roman Catholicism  3, 8, 135, 152, 262, 335, 337, 339, 361, 376 Roman Curia  115, 146, 434 Roman Empire  26, 58, 71, 73, 196, 451 Roman Pontiff  98, 119, 295 Romanticism  108–10, 123 royal priesthood  55, 88 rule  11, 14, 16, 18, 22, 87, 130, 149, 158, 176–8, 183, 189, 226, 228–31, 235, 237–8, 266–7, 275–6, 280, 294, 315, 336, 350, 355, 357, 396, 407, 429, 433, 458, 460

Radical Reformation  181 redemption  1, 19, 33, 47, 59–60, 116, 151, 156, 170, 213–15, 284, 297–9, 306, 314, 335, 369, 381, 404–8, 410, 412, 414–16, 425, 427 the Reformation  5–6, 116, 121, 131, 145–50, 152, 155–6, 167–9, 176–7, 197, 202–3, 209, 227, 259, 294–5, 336–7, 349, 395, 451, 453–4 reforms  6, 97, 120, 146, 148–9, 183, 197, 302, 392, 402 regula fidei  92, 433 regulative principle  170

sacerdotal  58, 283, 378 sacralization  296 sacraments administration  147, 150, 157, 169, 171, 176, 215, 218, 359 seven  141, 148 two  171 saints  40–1, 50, 59, 76–7, 84, 92, 98–9, 101, 115–16, 120, 130, 132, 136, 138, 147, 157, 164, 166–7, 226, 232, 293, 302–4, 307, 337, 360, 401, 421, 452 salus extra ecclesiam non est  86, 101, 114, 133, 367

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Salvation Army  259, 267 same-sex desire  383 same-sex relationship  201 sanctification (hagiasmos)  5–6, 41, 61, 87, 119, 124, 166, 188, 213, 242–3, 252, 336, 349, 371, 458 sanctifying  2, 72, 112, 335, 340, 349, 410 sanctuary  44, 132, 169, 431 sarx  65, 305, 347 Satan  19, 26–7, 78 saved  43, 60, 88, 101, 132, 165, 264, 330, 367, 381, 451–2, 454, 458–9 scarcity  15, 415–16 scattered  16, 18, 21, 89, 114, 133, 167, 185, 229 schism  58, 61, 73–6, 82, 84, 91–2, 101, 115, 118, 122–3, 136–7, 140, 146, 163, 173, 189, 199, 201, 328, 351, 367, 437 Schleitheim Confession  181, 184, 186 scholastic theology  96, 104 scholasticism  102, 104, 117, 332, 395 scriptural foundation  4–5, 12 Scripture as a canon  11 Scripture’s authority  11 second Adam  86–7, 422 second Eve  87 second-temple Judaism  24, 426 Second Vatican Council  5, 8, 96–7, 103, 107–9, 111, 113–15, 118–24, 200, 206, 246–7, 274, 278–80, 282, 294–5, 315–16, 334–5, 348, 357, 359, 361–3, 376, 384, 422, 436–7, 439–40, 444, 456 secularization  152, 296 seeker-sensitive  265 See of Canterbury  198, 200, 202, 204–7 See of Rome  197–8 self-revelation  60, 297, 457, 459 separatists  183, 225–8, 230 Sermon on the Mount  28–9, 55, 216 sexism  11, 393 sexual immorality  56, 324–5 sexuality  7, 199, 201, 206, 208–9, 381, 384, 438, 445 shalom  301 shekhinah  90 Shoah  116 sin  47, 49, 61, 64–5, 72–6, 84, 100, 102, 116, 118, 124–5, 138, 169, 190, 192–3, 213, 216–17, 234, 250, 260, 301, 328, 351, 364, 367–8, 400, 405, 410, 415, 427, 429–30, 433

 491

sinfulness  3, 14, 427 skepticism  104, 151 slaves  29, 36, 46, 326, 429 Smalcald Articles  145 social class  39, 46–7, 51, 246, 346, 460 social embodiment  2 social formations  7, 397 social–historical  295, 297, 301, 313–15, 317–18, 394–5 socialization  398, 400–1 social transformation  282, 285, 361 societas perfecta  99, 103 sociological principle  24 sola Christus  336 sola fide  299, 336, 396 sola gratia  336 sola Scriptura  336 soma  65, 305, 325 soma Christou  325 Son of Man  27, 31, 87 soteriology  55, 87, 93, 120, 148, 156, 165, 205–6, 312, 325, 336, 363–4, 454, 458 speaking in tongues  6, 241, 246, 248–50, 262, 350, 354 Spinozism  104 Spirit-filled  44, 350 Spirit’s procession  344, 351 spiritual exiles  55 spouse of Christ  74, 118, 166 stewardship  14, 52, 217, 249 structural analogy  7, 311–12, 318, 321 subsist  5, 8, 76, 118–19, 157 substance  98, 121, 142, 167, 169, 178, 235–6, 319, 336, 394, 411, 421 substance/accidents  421 substitutionary  2, 260 suffering servant  59, 300, 364 sufferings of Christ  48, 52 sui generis  368 sumus episcopus  150 superintendency  221–2 supersessionism  12, 88, 116, 132, 355–6 Swiss Reformation  149, 198 Syllabus of Errors  392 symbols  5, 16, 64, 81, 88, 102, 104, 142, 171–2, 205–6, 222, 245, 268, 279, 281–2, 284, 346, 363, 377, 379, 381, 386–7, 433, 435 synagōgē/συναγωγή  41, 88 synagogue  18, 24, 28, 33–4, 39, 41, 43, 52, 55, 63, 65, 117, 168, 407, 435

492

synoptic gospels  4–5, 24, 38, 54, 57, 63 synthesis  133–4, 151, 216 systematic theology  11, 311–12, 332, 334, 434 telos  85, 307 temple  2, 18, 24, 27, 33, 41, 44, 49, 54, 60, 88, 90, 130, 302–3, 325, 346–7, 426 temple of God  44, 77, 323 temple of the Spirit  77, 130, 312, 392 temporal  1, 3, 77, 79, 83, 96–7, 100, 103, 117, 119, 132–3, 142, 163, 177, 313, 315, 320, 368, 408 temptation  13, 24, 27, 29, 75, 84, 293, 296, 354, 406, 421–2 theandric realism  129 Theodrama  356 theological loci  5, 8, 59, 104, 147, 421, 433–4 theophoric  147 theoretical reasoning  421–2 theosis, see divinization Theotokos  87, 118, 130, 138, 376 thick descriptions  293, 398 time and space  3, 90, 157, 166, 275, 297, 408, 429 Torah  16–18, 29–31, 49, 346, 426 trajectory approach  12, 19 transcendent  313, 316, 338, 366, 396, 420–1, 428 trans-denominationalism  261, 269 transfiguration  31, 87, 91, 138, 368, 370, 426, 431 transformation  48–9, 75–6, 116, 188, 244, 253, 282, 285, 345, 355, 361, 378, 386–7, 415 transtestamental  13 transubstantiation  65 triadic formulae  59 tribes  16, 18, 21–2, 26, 139, 281, 434 Tridentine  96, 99, 108, 110, 114, 198, 286, 332, 360, 362, 368 trinitarian  1–2, 37, 59, 92, 104, 205–6, 208, 241, 279, 295–7, 311–21, 334, 347–8, 351, 353, 371, 435–6, 442, 444 triune communication  7 triune God  1–2, 4, 81, 157, 205, 209–10, 215, 235, 253, 284, 294–5, 297–9, 301–2, 307, 311–13, 317, 320–2, 425, 437, 443–5

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

true church  5–6, 8, 61, 72, 74, 76, 100–1, 114, 118, 135, 150–1, 155, 164, 168–9, 174, 185–6, 188, 227, 267, 305, 349, 359, 369, 372, 385, 429, 437 truth claim  92 Tübingen school  5, 102, 108, 332 twelve tribes  18, 26, 139, 434 two cities  75–6 Ultramontanism  392 universal church  2, 77, 82, 92, 97, 113, 121, 126, 190, 215, 232, 277–8, 319, 385 universalist  89, 138 universal primacy  137 universal salvation  36, 132–3, 283, 364 universal society  73 unus Christus  328, 330 utilitarianism  427 Vatican I, see First Vatican Council Vatican II, see Second Vatican Council vicar of Christ (vicarius Christi)  98, 278, 319 vine and branch  41, 57, 61, 116, 128, 134 violence  11, 14, 78, 114, 190, 192–4, 270, 281, 286, 385, 427, 430 virgin bride  86–7, 382 Virgin Mary/Blessed Virgin  102, 104, 130, 369, 401 virtue  35, 56, 79, 85–7, 89, 114, 130, 169, 201, 397–8, 420–1, 425–6, 430–1 visible church  74, 76, 108, 111, 150, 165–7, 178, 182, 187, 214, 226, 232, 295, 301, 333, 451–2 visible witness  7 voluntarism  104 voluntary associations  24, 39 warrant  8, 19, 261, 312, 315, 320, 350–1, 353, 397, 409, 435, 441 weakness  16, 21–2, 124, 172, 194, 296, 378, 397 wealth  17, 27, 29, 35, 185, 193–4, 263, 285, 363, 428, 431 Weberian  242, 395 Wesleyan Holiness  242 Western Christians  350–1 Western schism  146 whole Christ (totus Christus)  75, 129, 230, 294, 302, 304–6, 327–30, 337, 339, 395, 439 womb  87, 110, 117, 130–1, 382 women’s ordination  6, 378, 380–1, 383–4

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Word of God  36, 63, 87, 116, 147–8, 156, 163, 169–71, 176, 185, 214–15, 218–20, 227, 232–3, 235, 260, 296–7, 307, 321, 336, 349, 355, 429, 442, 452, 457 Work movement  438 World Council of Churches  115, 134–5, 154, 191, 208–9, 220, 235, 278, 295, 318, 439–44, 460

 493

World Evangelical Alliance  191, 266, 270 World Methodist Council  441, 445 World War I  153–4 World War II  154, 267–8 xenophobia  11 Yahweh  13, 59, 243, 364, 368

494