The Second Vatican Council on the Church
The Second Vatican Council on the Church
The Second Vatican Council introduced a new vitality into the discussion of the doctrine of the church, partly through its reappropriation of biblical imagery relating to the church. Prior to the Council, Catholic writers tended to think of the church in terms of a “perfect society.” This style of imagery dates from the later part of the sixteenth century, and emphasized the institutional credentials of the church, especially in the light of the increasing power of European nation-states. Part of the church's strategy for asserting its independence from the increasing power of the state was to affirm its own identity as a society.
This approach can be seen particularly clearly in the writings of Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621), one of the most important writers of the Catholic Reformation, who argued that the church was as visible and tangible a social reality as “the kingdom of France or the republic of Venice.” This institutional approach to the church dominated Catholic thinking for much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus, the standard edition of the theological textbook of Adolphe Tanquerey (1854–1932) spends some 64 pages demonstrating that the church is (1) an infallible society, (2) a perfect society, (3) a hierarchical society, and (4) a monarchic society. Inevitably, this strongly institutional approach to ecclesiology led to the church being defined primarily in terms of its visible aspects, and particularly its visible structures of government and its codes of belief and conduct. The church was, in effect, modeled on social institutions of the late sixteenth century.
Now we need to be clear that there has always been an institutional aspect to Christian doctrines of the church, whether Protestant or Catholic. Thus, both Luther and Calvin stressed the importance of proper church government. But neither of these reformers regarded the institutional element as being of defining importance. The critical thing was the gospel, not the institution. Similar insights are generally typical of patristic and medieval authors until the fourteenth century. At this point, increasing papal political power and a growing determination to fend off attacks on the institutions of the church (particularly the papacy and hierarchy) led to a growing tendency to defend these institutions by making them integral to a proper understanding of the church.
This tendency is generally thought to have reached its zenith during the nineteenth century. Responding to an increasingly dangerous political situation in Europe, where secularism and anti-Catholicism appeared to be on the increase, the First Vatican Council defined a strongly hierarchical conception of the church, perhaps seen most clearly in the rigid distinction between “the pastors and the flock.”
This general approach to ecclesiology dominated Catholic theology prior to the Second Vatican Council. On this view, the church of Christ is not a community of equals in which all the faithful have the same rights. It is a society of unequals, not only because among the faithful some are clergy and some are laity but also because God's power in the church enables only some to sanctify, teach, and govern and not others. This point was often expressed in terms of the distinction between ecclesia docens (“the teaching church,” referring to the hierarchy) and ecclesia discens (“the learning church,” referring to the laity, whose responsibilities were primarily to respect and obey their superiors).
Yet, by the middle of the twentieth century, Catholic scholars and theologians were expressing increasing misgivings concerning this model. In part, this reflects an awareness of the growing evidence which suggested that the early church did not have a coherent monolithic structure but had at least a degree of flexibility over its institutions and orders. The emergence of a strongly organized and institutional church increasingly came to be seen as dating from after the apostolic period and as being a response partly to political pressures, such as those resulting from the imperial recognition of Christianity under Constantine. The Belgian biblical scholar Lucien Cerfaux (1883–1968) and others paved the way for a recovery of biblical and patristic insights which had been overlooked on account of the trend toward institutionalization. Others, such as Yves Congar (1904–95), worked for the recovery of a theology of the laity, concerned over their marginalization in institutional models of the church. The result was that the Second Vatican Council was in a position to revitalize Catholic thinking on this vital area of theology, with all its implications for ecumenism and evangelism. The results may be seen in the document Lumen Gentium (“A Light to the Gentiles”).
We have already considered the Council's teaching on “the church as sacrament” (p. 364), and the manner in which it has been developed by theologians such as Karl Rahner. In what follows, we shall explore three further aspects of the teaching of the Council on the nature of the church.
The Church as Communion
In 1943, the German Catholic writer Ludwig von Hertling (1892–1980) published a study entitled Communio: Church and Papacy in Early Christianity, which dealt with the importance of the theme of “communion” (often referred to by the Greek term koinonia) for a proper understanding of the nature of the church. This work had a deep influence on the Council's reflections, and its distinctive themes can be found in the final statement on the church. Given the overtones which the term “communion” now possesses, it is perhaps useful to employ the older English word “fellowship” to bring out the point at issue. The basic biblical theme which is expressed by this term is that of sharing in a common life, whether this life is thought of as the life of the Trinity itself or the common life of believers within the church. The term possesses both vertical and horizontal aspects, the former referring to the relationship between the believer and God and the latter to the relationship between individual believers.
The recovery of this biblical idea proved to be a powerful corrective to the purely institutional conceptions of the church which had gained the ascendancy during the nineteenth century. The regulatory enforcement of fellowship was now seen to be one aspect of the more fundamental idea of the fellowship between the believer and God, established through the death and resurrection of Christ and lived out in the life of the church.
The Church as the People of God
Of the various models of the church set forth by the Second Vatican Council, the most important is that of the church as “the people of God.” This is a strongly biblical idea, with deep roots in both Old and New Testaments. The Second Vatican Council is careful to avoid the direct identification of “the people of God” with “the Catholic church,” or the suggestion that the church has somehow displaced Israel as the people of God. Indeed, the second chapter of the Council's text on the inner life of the church describes the church as the “new people of God,” continuous with Israel. The election of the church as the people of God does not entail the rejection of Israel but rather the extension of God's kingdom.
This point is made particularly clearly in the Council's “Declaration on Non-Christian Religions” (1965), which recognizes a special continuing place for Jews in God's purposes of salvation:
The Church of Christ acknowledges that in God's plan of salvation the beginning of her faith and election is to be found in the patriarchs, Moses, and the prophets. She professes that all Christ's faithful, who as men of faith are sons of Abraham (cf. Galatians 3: 7), are included in the same patriarch's call and that the salvation of the Church is mystically prefigured in the exodus of God's chosen people from the land of bondage. On this account the Church cannot forget that she received the revelation of the Old Testament by way of that people with whom God in his inexpressible mercy established the ancient covenant. Nor can she forget that she draws nourishment from that good olive tree onto which the wild olive branches of the Gentiles have been grafted (cf. Romans 11: 17–24). The Church believes that Christ who is our peace has through his cross reconciled Jews and Gentiles and made them one in himself (cf. Ephesians 2: 14–16).
The Church as a Charismatic Community
The Second Vatican Council took place at a time when there was widespread interest in the charismatic movement (see pp. 281, 290). The impact of this development was felt strongly within some quarters of the Catholic church. It led to the Belgian Cardinal Leo-Josef Suenens (1904–96) delivering a powerful appeal to the Council to include reference to this development in its reflections on the nature of the church. Lumen Gentium responded by explicitly recognizing the importance of charismatic gifts within the life of the church. The Council used the term “charism” (Greek: charisma, gift) to refer to such gifts or abilities bestowed upon individuals to fulfill some specific service. This term has a long history of use and does not necessarily imply the kind of “spiritual gifts” (such as speaking in tongues or the gift of healing) specifically associated with the charismatic movement. Nevertheless, the Pauline use of the Greek term charisma clearly includes such gifts, suggesting that the Council was allowing a significant degree of openness to this increasingly important aspect of the twentieth-century Christian experience.