A FEW years back, I attended a theological workshop organised by a department of the Church of England. The theme was mission, Church, and Kingdom. In the usual way, we spent portions of the day in small groups, gathered round a large piece of paper. Later, the assembly as a whole discussed the fruits of those smaller deliberations. With “mission” and “Kingdom”, all went well, but when we got to “Church”, one group came back with a blank piece of paper.
That blankness — whether absence of knowledge or of enthusiasm — would have perplexed St Paul. He wrote about the Church often, and with gusto. It would also have surprised the writers of the creeds, who gave the Church an honoured place in their summary of the faith: as the “holy catholic church” in the Apostles’ Creed, and as the “one, holy, catholic and apostolic church” in the Nicene.
DISCONNECTION from the doctrine of the Church is not new. A 1938 Church of England doctrine report, faced with its own equivalent of a blank piece of paper, felt it necessary to point out that “The Church is part of its own creed.” So it is. But let me ruffle feathers further by pointing out that the Church is also part of the gospel. The Church is in the creeds, and the creeds present what they do because it belongs to the good news. Indeed, the Church is part of the gospel five times over: as the beginning, means, and end of the gospel, and as its sign and herald.
That the Church is the herald of the gospel is obvious enough. Her great calling is to announce the good news. That is only one part of the story, however, and the part that receives the most attention today. I will therefore move on, since the Church does not only speak this message, she embodies it.
CHRISTIANS today tend to be suspicious of claims about the glory of the Church. At worst, we have been poisoned by the cynicism of the age. At best, we are circumspect because we have a penitential awareness of the Church’s failings, and we want to behave sensitively towards people whose experience of the Church has been far from glorious.
Approached carefully, however, a sense of the high vocation of the Church need not blunt either our penitence or our concern. Remembering that corruptio optimi pessima (”the corruption of the best is the worst of all”), rather than giving up on all the Church can be, we should heed Paul’s words: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (Romans 12.21).
THE Church embodies the gospel in many ways. One is by being universal. We may have grown used to that — to being in a family that spans the globe — but it is a remarkable thing to be gathered in brotherly and sisterly love with people of every nation and background. Consider here Paul’s famous passages about how old divisions are set aside in Christ: that there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female (Galatians 3.28, cf Colossians 3.11).
Although we might quickly pass over the “Jew or Greek” distinction there, it is particularly revolutionary, since it brings Gentiles into the promises to Israel. Ephesians offers a marvellous treatment of this (e.g. Ephesians 2.11-22). That letter also gives us a concentrated announcement of this good news of inclusion within the Church by means of three words that chime more in Greek than they do in English (Eph. 3.6): that we are synkleronoma (“fellow-heirs”), syssoma (“members of the same body”), and symmetocha (“fellow-partakers” in the promise).
DOES this make the Church a sign of the gospel? Yes, but more than just a sign, since the Church is also the beginning of what that gospel is out to realise. She is the first fruits of the new community, reconciled with God and with one another. Thus, when the brilliant John Webster wrote that the Church is “the interim realisation of the goal of rational creatures, namely, fellowship with the creator”, even he did not quite go far enough. An “interim” stands in for something else; the Church is the beginning of the thing itself.
That brings us to a yet bolder relation between the Church and the gospel: that the Church is the gospel’s goal and fulfilment. As the early medieval Irishman John Scotus Eriugena put it, Christ came for the sake of the Church. In response to John the Baptist’s words “He who has the bride is the bridegroom” (John 3.29), he wrote: “He who came for the sake of the Church came that he might have a bride.”
LET us turn back to Ephesians (this time, chapter 1). What is God’s plan: the “mystery of his will”? his “good pleasure . . . set forth in Christ” (verse 9)? It is adoption within the family of the Church (verse 5). It is a “glorious inheritance among the saints” — i.e. the Church (verse 18). It is for Christ to be “made the head over all things”. Why? For “the Church, which is his body” (verse 22).
I can never understand why people think that they can diminish the significance of the Church in the new creation. Then, more than ever, the Church will be “the fullness of him who fills all things” (verse 23).
THE Church is herald and sign of the gospel; its beginning, and even its end. It is also the means of the gospel, since being joined to Christ is inseparable from being joined to the Church. As Augustine put it, while natural birth comes about by “a mixing of blood . . . from a mingling of the flesh of male and female”, the second birth of salvation — by which we are born anew — is not “from male and female” but “from God and the Church”.
Two of my favourite Anglican theologians put this well. Eric Mascall described the Church as “in its essence simply the human nature of Christ made appropriable” by us. And Francis Hall offered the pithy phrase that Christ the Word joins us to himself in the Church so as to make it the “Word Incorporate”.
Of course, sobriety is needed alongside all this exuberance. An analogy from Ambrose is useful, to situate the Church in relation to Christ. “Deservedly is the moon compared to the Church, who has shone over the entire world. . . Not from her own light does the Church gleam, but from the light of Christ.” The Church is Christ’s bride and herald; she is not Christ himself.
BACK to that blank piece of paper, held up in embarrassed silence. It assumed that the clause about “the holy catholic church” in the creeds must be among the least interesting or important: a piece of institutional housekeeping, wedged between the forgiveness of sins and the life everlasting.
That phrase, however, turns out to be among the warmest and most appealing things that the creeds proclaim, and full of the gospel. The Church is not the envelope; it is part of the letter. It is herald and sign of the gospel: its beginning, its means, and even its end, since “he who came for the sake of the Church came that he might have a bride.”
The Revd Dr Andrew Davison is Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford and a Canon Residentiary of Christ Church.
QUOTATIONS
“We believe in the brotherhood of man and the Fatherhood of God. This teaching, the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ, involves today the issue of unions (where men call each other brothers); it involves the racial question; it involves cooperatives, credit unions, crafts; it involves Houses of Hospitality and Farming Communes. It is with all these means that we can live as though we believed indeed that we are all members one of another, knowing that when ‘the health of one member suffers, the health of the whole body is lowered’.” Dorothy Day, “Aims and Purposes” of the Catholic Worker Movement, 1940, alluding at the end to Ephesians 4.25 and 1 Corinthians 12.26
“I think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed.” Flannery O’Connor, Letter, 20 July 1955
“Union with Christ is also union with all those to whom he gives himself. I cannot possess Christ just for myself; I can belong to him only in union with all those who have become, or who will become, his own.” Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, §14
BIBLICAL PASSAGES
Psalm 133
“HOW very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity!. . . For there the Lord ordained his blessing, life for evermore” (verse 1).
This psalm points to an important communal good for which there is no singular form: no one can dwell together in unity alone. This good, promised to the people of Israel, is found again in the Church. In the Church, we are invited by the gospel into something profoundly good — something of the good news — that does not just happen to be found there as a community: it can only be found in the Church because it is a community. Contrast this to Kant’s unfortunately influential understanding of Christianity, in which each person is related to God individually, one by one. The Church is then reduced to a gathering for those who need that kind of thing: for the supposedly weaker, more communally minded sort of person. But no! We are inherently saved together, even if Kant could not see it.
Mark 10.29–30
IN ONE of the most remarkable passages about the Church as good news, Jesus replies to Peter’s protestation that “we [the apostles] have left everything and followed you”: ”There is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age — houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions — and in the age to come eternal life.”
We might have imagined that their present loss would be balanced by future joys, in the world to come. There is indeed eternal life in “the age to come”, but also that hundredfold recompense “now in this age”. That is not the multiplication of property; it is the community of the Church. The needs of this life are not overlooked: the Church has long provided materially in time of need. But the greatest gift is community — brothers and sisters, mothers and children — within the household of the Church. This “hundredfold” is no incidental part of how the Church, proclaimed in the creeds, is part of the gospel.