Christ and the Church: Some Twentieth-Century Themes
Christ and the Church: Some Twentieth-Century Themes
The twentieth century has seen renewed interest in the area of ecclesiology, partly on account of the rise of the ecumenical movement (concerned with the promotion of Christian unity) and partly through the enormous stimulus given to this area of theology through the process of renewal and reform initiated by the Second Vatican Council (1962–5), especially the constitution Lumen Gentium (“A Light to the Gentiles” – note that authoritative Catholic conciliar and papal statements are generally referred to by their opening words in Latin). We shall consider the teaching of this Council presently.
A convenient means of grouping together some themes in twentieth-century ecclesiology is to consider the maxim of the first-century writer Ignatius of Antioch (c.35–c.110), who declared that “Where Christ is, there is also the Catholic church.” This memorable aphorism has had a deep impact on ecclesiological reflection – whether Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox – throughout Christian history. In what follows, we shall explore three different twentieth-century ways of approaching this aphorism.
Christ is Present Sacramentally
One of the most distinctive contributions of the Second Vatican Council to the development of ecclesiology is its assertion of the sacramental character of the church. As Lumen Gentium puts it, “the church, in Christ, is a kind of sacrament – a sign and instrument, that is, of communion with God and of unity among all human beings.” The Council did not suggest that the church is a sacrament; the traditional sevenfold understanding of the sacraments (see pp. 384–5) is retained. Rather, the church is “like a sacrament.” In making this statement, the Council seems to have been attempting to bring together the idea of the church as constituted by the Word of God, on the one hand, and as being a visible entity, on the other. This idea is certainly present in Augustine's concept of sacraments as “visible words.”
The idea of the church as sacrament has had a major impact on Catholic ecclesiology in the twentieth century. Even before the Second Vatican Council, such ideas were gaining momentum within the church. In part, this reflects the rise of a “theology of retrieval,” which sought to reappropriate a series of seminal themes from earlier periods in Christian history (most notably the patristic period) which had adopted understandings of the nature of the church which contrasted sharply with the more institutional conceptions which had gained the ascendancy since the sixteenth century.
This view can be seen clearly in the writings of Henri de Lubac (1896–1991), a pre-Second Vatican Council theologian noted for his magisterial grasp of the patristic heritage. In his important work Catholicism (1950), he wrote:
If Christ is the sacrament of God, the church is for us the sacrament of Christ; she represents him, in the full and ancient sense 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 in which it can be said that any human institution is its founder's continuation.
Although retaining an institutional understanding of the church, de Lubac gave a new sense of identity and purpose to Catholic conceptions of the church: the church is there to make Jesus Christ present to the world. Ignatius's aphorism is therefore given new significance through this sacramental understanding of the role of the church.
The idea caught on. In 1953, the German Jesuit theologian Otto Semmelroth (1912–79) published a highly influential study entitled The Church as Primordial Sacrament, in which he argued for the church as the “primordial sacrament” (Ursakrament), which demonstrates God's ability to use the material order to bear witness to the spiritual. The Dominican theologian Edward Schillebeeckx (1914–2009) developed related ideas in his Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God (1963). The overall effect of this approach is to integrate the fields of Christology, ecclesiology, and sacramentology into a coherent whole. Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–88) adopted a strongly incarnational approach to his understanding of the church, arguing that the church is the elongetur Christi – the prolongation of Christ in time and space. The Jesuit writer Karl Rahner (1904–84) continued this sacramental understanding of the church, declaring that the church is there to make Christ present in the world in an historical, visible, and embodied form.
Rahner's approach has attracted considerable interest. For Rahner, the church “is the continuance, the contemporary presence of that real, eschatologically triumphant and irrevocably established presence in Christ in the world of God's saving will.” The church is thus a “concrete manifestation of God's salvation of humanity,” the enduring presence of God in the world (an idea anticipated in the sixteenth century in the writings of the Spanish mystic Teresa of Avilà, 1515–82). And, on account of its real historical presence in the world, it follows that it requires structures.
For this reason, Rahner held that it is possible to justify a continuing institutional element in any Catholic understanding of the nature of the church, but he also insisted that these particular structures are not necessarily of defining importance. Furthermore, Rahner was prepared to concede a degree of flexibility in relation to those structures. What may have been appropriate to the definite historical circumstances of the past may not be appropriate today. The church must be free to achieve its sacramental mission in new historical structures.
Schillebeeckx differs from Rahner at some points of importance, most notably in his rejection of Rahner's argument that the church is the “primal sacrament” (an idea, as we noted above, which can be traced back to Otto Semmelroth). For Schillebeeckx, Christ must be regarded as that primal sacrament; whatever sacramental character the church possesses must be understood to arise through its relationship with Christ.
Protestant critics of this approach have expressed anxiety about the approach's relative lack of a biblical foundation and its relative lack of a place for a theology of preaching. In view of the importance of this point, we may move on to consider further Protestant interpretations of Ignatius's axiom which focus on the presence of Christ resulting from the preaching of the Word of God.
Christ is Present through the Word
A central theme of Protestant understanding of the nature of the church focuses on the presence of Christ resulting from the proclamation of his Word, in preaching and the sacraments. For example, we have already noted Calvin's view (pp. 361–3) that the preaching of the word and right administration of the sacraments are linked with the presence of Christ – and wherever Christ is, there his church is to be found as well.
This kerygmatic (Greek kerygma, “herald”) theme has continued to be of major importance in the twentieth century, particularly in the writings of Karl Barth (1886–1968). For Barth, the church is the community which comes into being in response to the proclamation of the Word of God. The church is seen as a kerygmatic community which proclaims the good news of what God has done for humanity in Christ, and which comes into being wherever the Word of God is faithfully proclaimed and accepted. As Barth put it in his 1948 address to the World Council of Churches, the church consists of “the gathering together [congregatio] of those men and women [fidelium] whom the living Lord Jesus Christ chooses and calls to be witnesses of the victory he has already won, and heralds of its future manifestation.” Barth's ecclesiology is thoroughly trinitarian at this point, involving Father, Son, and Spirit in a dynamic understanding of the nature of the church. For Barth, the church is not an extension of Christ but is united with Christ, and called and commissioned by him to serve the world. Christ is present within his church, through the Holy Spirit.
The role of the Holy Spirit is particularly important. Although it would not be correct to say that Barth has a “charismatic” understanding of the church, his Christological approach to the identity of the church allocates a definite and distinctive role to the Holy Spirit, which Barth summarized as follows in his Dogmatics in Outline (1947):
Credo ecclesiam [“I believe in the church”] means that I believe that here, at this place, in this assembly, the work of the Holy Spirit takes place. By that is not intended a deification of the creature; the church is not the object of faith, we do not believe in the church; but we do believe that in this congregation the work of the Holy Spirit becomes an event.
The church is thus seen as an event, not an institution. Barth does not identify the Holy Spirit with the church, nor limit the operation of the Spirit to the bounds of the institution of the church. He argues that the Spirit empowers and renews the church, unites it with Christ's redemptive work on the cross, and is the means by which the risen Christ is made present to the people of God. In this way, the Spirit safeguards the church from lapsing into purely secular ways of understanding its identity and mission.
Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) also adopted a strongly kerygmatic approach to the nature of the church, linking Barth's emphasis on the foundational role of “proclamation” with the notion of “church as event”:
The word of God and the church are inseparable. The church is constituted by the word of God as the congregation of the elect, and the word of God is not a statement of abstract truths, but a proclamation which is duly authorized and therefore needs bearers with proper credentials (2 Corinthians 5: 18–19). Just as the word of God becomes his word only in event, so the church is really the church only when it too becomes an event.
Christ is Present through the Spirit
A third major theme in twentieth-century ecclesiology has focused on the role of the Holy Spirit as constitutive of the church. Here, Ignatius's aphorism is interpreted in such a way as to emphasize the necessity of the Spirit in actualizing the presence of Christ. We have already seen the importance of this point in relation to Barth's ecclesiology; however, it is present in more developed forms in writers such as the Brazilian Catholic theologian Leonardo Boff (born 1938) and the Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas (born 1931). These two writers interpret their pneumatological (Greek: pneuma, “spirit”) understanding of the church in different ways. Boff remains Christ-centered, despite his emphasis on the Spirit, on account of his strongly western understanding of the Trinity; Zizioulas develops a much more Orthodox approach, based on a Cappadocian understanding of the role of the Spirit within the Godhead.
For Leonardo Boff, one of the leading representatives of liberation theology, the constitutive role of the Holy Spirit in an understanding of the church rests on the fact that it is the Spirit of Jesus Christ. Whereas writers such as Rahner and Balthasar had defended the view that the church was the physical embodiment or “re-presentation” of Christ in the world, Boff defends the view that the church is primarily the spiritual body of Christ and is therefore not confined to any specific existing structures. In this respect, Boff can be seen as mounting a criticism of institutionalized understandings of the church, particularly those that flourished before the Second Vatican Council.
In his Ecclesiogenesis: The Base Communities Reinvent the Church (1986), Boff provides a definition of the church which shows some parallels with kerygmatic understandings of the church:
The church comes into being as church when people become aware of the call to salvation in Jesus Christ, come together in community, profess the same faith, celebrate the same eschatological liberation, and seek to live the discipleship of Jesus Christ. We can speak of church in the proper sense only when there is question of this ecclesial consciousness.
For Boff, this “ecclesial consciousness” is the result of the work of the Holy Spirit, whose person and work are inseparable from the risen Christ. Boff interprets the creedal doctrine of the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son as an affirmation of this point.
In the case of Zizioulas, however, the Holy Spirit is allocated a quite distinct role. Zizioulas points out how, especially in 1 Corinthians 12, Paul appears to allocate a constitutive role within the church to the Holy Spirit. Pneumatology is therefore not about “the well-being of the church [...] it is the very essence of the church.” Zizioulas's distinctive approach could be summarized as follows: the church may have been instituted by Jesus Christ, but it is constituted by the Holy Spirit.