8. The Church: One, Holy, Apostolic
8 THE CHURCH: ONE, HOLY, APOSTOLIC
In the I referred to one of the ways in which St Paul spoke about what was done on the cross when he used the Greek word which translates the Old Testament Hebrew word for the ‘mercy seat’. In the New Testament the word is translated as ‘propitiation’. One of the most helpful ways to comprehend what Christ did for us on the cross lies in the knowledge and understanding that he has created a place where sinful men and women, despite their sins, may be accepted by God and enabled to live and rejoice in his presence. It is, if you like, the continuation of the ministry of Jesus who received sinners and ate and drank with them. The church is the place where this still happens.
The church is obviously an integral part of the gospel. Nobody becomes a Christian by first of all studying the doctrines of atonement and justification by faith, and so forth, and then at the end of the ‘course’ looking around for some place to make contact. On the contrary, we become Christians because in one way or another the work of the Holy Spirit has drawn us into some kind of existing Christian fellowship. The church precedes our faith, and as always, the gospel is not a set of disembodied ideas or a set of words. It is always a concrete reality in history: a reality which we call the church.
The New Testament word for the church is the Greek word ekklesia, which also means ‘assembly’, and from which words such as ecclesiastical and so forth are derived. And it is worth looking at the background of that word. The Bible of the early church was the Greek of what we call the Old Testament. In it they would have read of the congregation, the whole assembly, of the people of Israel. These Old Testament meanings were rendered in the Greek by two words – synagogos and ekklesia. They might have taken either synagogos or ekklesia because they understood themselves to be the congregation which had its origin in God’s calling of Abraham. They did not see themselves as a new society. They were the congregation of the people of Israel which was enlarged to include the Gentiles, as God had promised to both the patriarchs and prophets.
They could, as I have said, chosen either of those two words. There is one place in the New Testament where the word synagogue, synagogos, is used, but otherwise they always used the other word ekklesia, which the Greek Old Testament uses. And perhaps there were two reasons for that. One might be that the word synagogue was already used by the Jews for their congregations. The other was that the word ekklesia was a secular word which described the assembly of all the people.
In the Greek city states the affairs of the city were settled in the assembly, as we see in the latter chapters of Acts, and that assembly was called the ekklesia, the calling out of the people. That is its literal meaning. In Acts the assembly was called by what we would now refer to as the town clerk and all the citizens were expected to attend. But this is the assembly called, not by the town clerk, but by God. And so the church is constantly referred to in the Greek as ekklesia tou Theou, the assembly of God, the assembly which God called. That was the phrase the first Christians used to describe their togetherness as the continuation of the congregation of the people of Israel.
This explains an important little point in the New Testament – that the same name is used both for an individual local church and for the church as a whole. We ourselves tend to use two words. We use the term ‘congregation’ when we speak of a local gathering and we are inclined to use the word ‘church’ for the universal body. But the early church had no such distinction. You will notice this in the Acts and in Paul’s letters. He speaks of the churches of Asia, or the church of Asia. It is not that the individual churches are branches of the church. The church is that act of God gathering his people in each place, and in all places. So it is necessary to have this dynamic picture, which is the real inner meaning of this biblical language.
Everywhere God is gathering his people through Jesus Christ into this place of atonement where it is possible for sinful men and women to have fellowship with God. But that action is happening both locally and universally. And that is also why the church is never designated by any other adjectives except the name of the place and the name of the one who calls it.
It is the assembly of God in Corinth, the assembly of God in Ephesus, the congregation of God in Colossae. That is how the church is defined. It is defined by the one who calls it and by where this calling takes place.
When it was proposed to call the church by any name other than the name of God and the name of the place – as, for example, in Corinth (1 Corinthians 3), where people said we are of Peter’s party, of Apollos’ or Paul’s party – Paul was scandalised. He effectively said, ‘You are carnal. You have dismembered the body of Christ.’ Paul was affronted by the thought that anyone should attach any name except that of Christ and the place.
So the church in each place is the catholic church, the universal church, and not a branch. It is the catholic church because God is here calling it. And where God is, you cannot say that it is a branch of a church; it is the church. This means that by its very nature, the church is one. There is one God and one Lord Jesus Christ, and there is one place of atonement, not many, and therefore the church is one. But here, of course, we come to the sad story of disunity. We know that the church throughout its history has become divided.
It is worthwhile running over the main divisions. The first great partition happened in the fourth and fifth centuries when the churches outside the Roman Empire, which could not take part in the theological discussions that defined the nature of Christ, became separated. I am thinking, for example, of the Armenians, Assyrians, Syrians, Copts and Ethiopians, many of whom would probably never have become separated but for that tremendous political divide.
You can well understand that when the Roman and Persian empires were either at war or in a state of political hostility, Christians in Persia, Armenia or India might well have been suspected of being stooges of the ruling empire. If you lived in the Roman empire these people were regarded as foreigners. So although there were doctrinal differences, this was principally a politically motivated division, which has left us with what we call the ‘lesser eastern churches’.
The second great division came in the eleventh century with the mutual excommunications of Byzantium and Rome. The two halves of the Empire had been drifting apart for a long time, but it is important to remember that from the point of view of the eastern churches the Roman Catholic Church was, for two reasons, a schismatic body.
First the Roman church made an addition to the Nicene creed without consulting the whole body of the church. They added the so-called ‘Filioque clause’: the words, ‘and from the Son’. This related to whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father (which both churches agreed upon) as well as the Son. This still remains a deeply resented schismatic act in the minds of eastern Christians. The second reason was the action of Pope Leo III in crowning Charlemagne in St Peter’s Church on Christmas Day in AD 800 as emperor when there was already an emperor on the throne in Constantinople. These two theological and political acts were seen as schismatic. To this day in the Eastern part of Christendom – in the Russian, Greek, Serbian and other major orthodox churches – there remains a deep sense of resentment against the Church of Rome. In some ways this division goes much deeper than that within the Western church – between the Roman Catholics and the churches of the Reformation.
In the sixteenth century the third division occurred, with which we are all so familiar: the Reformation which separated Northern and Southern Europe from each other. And then in the nineteenth century, especially in the United States, the idea of a denomination developed, as though Christians could quite contentedly live in separate bodies, regarding themselves all as different branches of the same church. That was the fourth major point of schism to further divide the church.
How are we to understand the issues that divided the church? I suppose it is helpful to draw attention to three great emphases that are not mutually contradictory – which are all properly part of the reality of the church – but have become separated and put against one another. I am speaking of what one might roughly call the Catholic, the Protestant and the Pentecostal emphases.
Look first at the Catholic emphasis. Jesus said to his disciples, ‘You did not choose me, but I chose you …’ (John 15:16). The church is not a body of people who have decided that they are going to follow Jesus. The church is that body created by Jesus. He called them apostles, consecrating them and sending them out into the world to make disciples of all nations. It was a specific and particular body historically created, formed and sent forth by Jesus Christ. He gave them the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and they went out and preached. Subsequently they appointed their successors from those among the believers they found to be fit for that office.
The emphasis here is that the church exists not as a body which we have created or constituted. It is there as the body which Jesus Christ himself sent into the world. But some people set themselves up and say, ‘We will have our own leadership. We have consecrated our own bishops and we will do our own thing.’ Is that the church? Surely the church is something that is given, with its objective reality, which we must clearly embrace if we are to find salvation. That is the Catholic emphasis.
One of the most vivid expressions of this emphasis is to be found in the autobiography of John Henry Newman, the great Anglican leader, who in 1845 became a Roman Catholic and led many others to follow him. If you read the autobiography of this writer, poet and historian you will see that this man was passionately concerned with the overriding question: ‘Which is the true church?’ He reasoned that if one was not part of the true church then one was not saved. As a result of his agonised and reasoned arguments he concluded that the Roman Catholic Church was the true church and that all the others, however excellent, were not the authentic church. So the church is defined, at least in part, by its valid historical succession. It can show that it is the same body which Jesus sent out into the world, not something that has been shaped by any kind of innovation.
Against this you have the tremendous issues that arose so strongly at the time of the Reformation: that the church may well have a valid apostolic succession, but it could lose its way. Its bishops may have been consecrated by bishops who in turn were consecrated by bishops, and so on, until you reach those who were consecrated by the original apostles, and yet it still might fall into error and sin. Episcopal consecration could not guarantee the reality of the church. In the robust language that people used at the time of the Reformation, the Scots reformer John Knox (1505–72) declared, ‘Lineal descent is no mark by which the true church may be distinguished from the kirk malignant, that horrible harlot!’ Well, theological discussions were conducted in a lively manner in those days, but that was the essential emphasis.
The point the Reformers made was that the church was something created by the action of the living Christ. Its existence did not simply depend upon historic succession but was created by the living power of the gospel, mediated through the word and the sacraments of the gospel. This dynamic conception of the church had enormous power. It brought about a tremendous renewal, but also, of course, a tremendous division in the life of the church. The danger is that it seems to neglect that which the Catholic emphasis affirms. It is in danger of making the church something which, as it were, happens moment by moment, or fails to happen, but not something which is a given historical reality continuing through history.
Next there is what I call the Pentecostal emphasis. You may have correct apostolic succession and correct doctrine as well as properly administered sacraments, and yet the living power of the Spirit may be absent. Are you then the true church? There is a grim little story in the Acts of a man who was claiming to cast out evil spirits in the name of Jesus and Paul, and several demoniacs attacked him, exclaiming, ‘Jesus I know and I know about Paul, but who are you?’ (Acts 19:15). Do you have the authentic presence of the living Spirit or not?
Each of those three emphases is valid. They have their authentication in the gospel. Yet each, taken alone, can lead to a vital loss of substance. The Catholic emphasis, by itself, can produce something which has no life in it, which is formal and dead. The Protestant emphasis can produce something very lively but which has no sense of unity. It can break apart, especially when the whole thing depends upon correct doctrine. The history of the Protestant church is one of continual division over the detail of doctrine so that the unity of the church disappears from view.
In the Pentecostal tradition the danger is that one emphasises experience, individual personal experience, without paying sufficient attention to these questions: ‘What is it we are experiencing? What is the reality with which we are dealing?’ In our kind of society, especially with its tendency to subjectivism and relativism, there is a real danger that this emphasis, taken by itself, can lead to the church dissolving into ‘what I feel’.
With great respect to our good friends in the Methodist church I think one has to recognise that this dissolving has sometimes happened. John Wesley’s great revival saw a tremendous outpouring of the power of the Spirit, manifested in the transformation of lives and in the manifold gifts of the Spirit. But Christianity has often dissolved into something defined as ‘what I feel good about’ – merely a kind of personal subjective experience. This is because at times insufficient attention has been given both to doctrine – to what we believe, the truth to which we have committed ourselves – and to the given continuity and reality of the universal church. These three elements, integral to the fullness of the gospel, can nevertheless lead us to division and mutual suspicion when they are separated. The result is that we profoundly suspect one another of not being true to the reality of the church.
How can we overcome these divisions? We cannot escape the force of the words our Lord used on the night of his passion, ‘… that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe…’ (John 17:21). We cannot deny that it is the intention of our Lord that the church should be in such ways a visible unity, that the world may recognise that this is the place of atonement where sin is forgiven and where we can be reconciled to one another. This is the place of which Jesus spoke: ‘I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself’ (John 12:32). We cannot escape the vital importance of unity, no matter how much we may be disappointed in the face of difficulty.
But let us not forget that we are now living in the first age of Christian reunion. The entire history of the church over the past centuries has been one long story of continual division. We are the privileged ones who live in an age where for the first time people are beginning to come together, though perhaps slowly and hesitantly, and to recognise one another in Christ despite our many differences.
How does God enable us to restore the unity of the church? The problem is that each of us is bound to confess that a church to which he or she belongs is the church of God. This is because that specific church was the one that drew that particular person to Christ. I cannot deny that. And the temptation for us is that we look at one another and perhaps say, ‘In this respect you lack something. You lack one of the essential marks of the church.’ It might be in regard to doctrine or apostolic succession or in relation to the place of the Spirit in the life of one’s church, but we tend to say to each other, ‘If you can correct yourself at this point, then we can unite.’
But there is an important difference between asserting that something is a proper mark of the church and maintaining that something is essential to the church. Something can be a proper mark of the church – and these three things I have mentioned are proper marks of the church, they properly belong to the nature of the church – but if you say they are essential, then you are suggesting that without them there is no church. And none of us has been willing to draw the logical conclusion of that.
From the Roman Catholic point of view, in the report of the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission it is said, for example, that recognition of the Papacy or recognition of a certain doctrine of the Eucharist is ‘essential’ as a pre-requisite of union. You are really saying that without these there is no church. ‘Essential’ means exactly that, fundamental or absolutely necessary. The logic of this kind of thinking would be to conclude that those churches which lack these things ought to have disappeared – as a branch cut from the vine perishes – and if a church lacks something essential to its life then it ought not to exist. And all our excommunications of one another, such as the excommunications exchanged between the patriarch of Constantinople and the Pope of Rome in 1054, if God had ‘validated’ them, would have meant that these churches would have disappeared and thus no longer existed as part of the church. But they have not disappeared.
Surely we must accept the fact that the church exists only by the mercy of God, only by his grace to sinners and not by its fulfilment of any of the conditions for the fullness of the church. It is, as I have suggested, the basic picture of the place of atonement: where God receives sinners into his fellowship. Does that not mean, therefore, that the way for us to restore the unity of the church is that we accept one another as God seems to have accepted us? Let us accordingly accept one another as we are, acknowledging the many ways in which we fall short of God’s purpose for the church and then, having accepted one another as we are, seek to correct, reform and build up one another in the faith.
There is a kind of relaxed and tolerant easy-going way, which I fear is becoming all too popular, which finds expression when we simply say, ‘Yes, let us all accept one another, because God has accepted us.’ And we leave it at that. It is the equivalent of our saying, ‘Shall we go on sinning, so that grace may increase?’ (Romans 6:1). If God has given grace to churches which are sinful, which lack something that belongs properly to the church, let us just carry on and God will continue to give us his grace. This notion is unthinkable: ‘Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?’ St Paul’s reply is vehement, ‘God forbid’ (v.2). It is unthinkable. The mercy of God towards churches which lack that which belongs properly to the church, should not lead us to contentment. Rather it should lead us to repentance and to a willingness not merely to accept one another, but to correct one another. We should therefore hold one another up to the reality of the gospel itself so that God may make of us what he intends us to be.
Looking at the present situation, some general points can be made about the church in Europe. If we look at the church in parts of the world such as Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islands where it continues to grow rapidly, the situation is different. But in considering the situation in Europe I think we have to agree that the Roman Catholic Church, with a kind of stubborn intransigence, is still a tremendous power but is nevertheless facing severe internal contradictions and crises.
I think undoubtedly the mainline Protestant churches in Europe are in decline and that the main growing parts of the church in Europe are the evangelical and charismatic bodies, both within the churches and in the various ‘parachurch’ organisations, fellowships and associations, which are springing up so luxuriantly around us.
At this point it is important to say one word about the importance of the Catholic tradition. When I was a student it was the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England which was strong and vigorous, producing the best scholars, many of the best priests and generally setting the pace. Evangelicals were a relatively small and rather frightened minority. The position today is almost exactly the opposite.
The evangelical wing of the church is strong, growing and confident, and the Catholic wing of the church, especially following the crisis over the admission of women to the priesthood, is on the defensive. And I think that exactly at this point, we recognise the importance of the Catholic tradition, the objective reality of the church and its sacraments as something which is given, and not just a matter of my personal experience.
I have often been a bit turned off when some of my friends have spoken of a Eucharistic service as if the important thing about it was whether or not it had personal meaning, as though essentially it was a kind of subjective experience. If you compare that with what St Paul says in 1 Corinthians about participation in the Eucharist, where he says that if you take part in it without discerning the body, it is not merely that nothing happens, it is that you are under judgment. Whatever happens when you take part in the Eucharist it is not that nothing happens; something happens! (1 Corinthians 11:27–29)
Either you are built up in your life in Christ, or you are judged, but an objective reality exists there. I think it is important that we recover our sense of this in the face of the subjectivism and relativism of so much of our culture. I say this because currently it is the evangelical and charismatic parts of the church which are, thank God, so strong and confident and bearing so much fruit.
I think we are all uncertain about how to proceed in the matter of Christian unity. This is because the movements towards organic unity, so promising around fifty years ago, seem in large measure to have petered out. We have to discover new ways and means to express our unity across the board, from the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, to the evangelical and charismatic churches where so much of the main growth is now going on. Perhaps at first these new ways can be very informal. But undoubtedly we are faced with one of the greatest challenges of the present time.
The real issue that divides Christians in the United Kingdom today is not between Catholics and evangelicals or Protestants and charismatics, but the difference between those who believe that there is a gospel and those who have ceased to believe that. On the one hand there are those who believe unequivocally in a God-given reality: ‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only Son’ (John 3:16), and that here is the place of atonement. I think that Catholics, evangelicals and charismatics have that in common. On the other hand, there are sadly a great many Christians in the United Kingdom who have lost the sense of there being a real God, and have allowed their faith to dissolve away into opinions and subjective experiences, with no real gospel.
Let me finish with five affirmations that sum up what I want to say. The first is the one with which I began: the historic reality of the Christian church. It is important to stress this point because when you listen to the radio, watch television or read the newspapers, you soon realise the church is often regarded as a fairly marginal phenomenon interested only in gaining popularity. The inevitable, and almost only, question the media asks is whether or not certain activities are going to make churches more popular. It is as though they are looked upon as a passing phenomenon and if they are not popular enough they will disappear. How absurd, especially when you remember that the church has outlived mighty empires, infamous totalitarian structures and great philosophical systems. Within twenty years the things that today seem to occupy the whole horizon of public thinking will become half-remembered phantoms, mere ephemera, of a past age. But the church will still be there.
The church is historic reality, beginning with God’s call to Abraham and continuing through the ministry of prophets and apostles right down the ages until now. And whether or not the church is popular, big or small, is relatively unimportant. The fact of this great rock, this anvil upon which so many hammers have been worn out, this given reality, needs to be at the centre of our thinking as Christians.
Secondly, the church is a body of sinful men and women. It is a body of sinners whom God calls saints. St Paul usually starts his letters by saying something like this: ‘Paul, called to be an apostle to the church in Corinth, called to be saints.’ The Greek actually says, ‘Called apostle, called saints.’ It is not in the Greek, ‘Called to be saints’ it is ‘called saints’ – kletos apostolos, kletois hagiois. In other words, God calls them saints.
They may not look like it but God calls them saints and it is what God calls them that matters. They are sinners! Yes we are! But God calls us saints because God has made us his own – that is the whole meaning of atonement. Of course, the church is always going to be a bunch of sinners. It has never been anything else. And it is very easy to become completely pessimistic about the church. We have to be realistic and not pretend that the church is anything other than it is. But we also have to be faithful, knowing that it is what God says that goes. If God has called us saints, made us his own, given us his gift of atonement in Jesus Christ, then that defines who and what we are.
Above all, let us not escape with this idea of an invisible church. The invisible church is an attractive idea because the visible church is the people God has chosen, and as we know, he has chosen some pretty funny characters. The invisible church has the great advantage that ‘I’ choose who belongs to it. It is the church of the people that I think are the real Christians and that, of course, is very comforting, but that is not the church. The church is that body of sinners, whom God has called and chosen to be saints, to belong to him.
Thirdly, the church is defined by its centre, not by its boundaries. When you begin to define the church by its boundaries, you get into all kinds of legalistic difficulties: ‘Was that person baptised? Was the one who baptised that person ordained by a bishop? Was that bishop consecrated in the apostolic succession? Was the right statement of faith signed? Did the person concerned have the right kind of spiritual experience?’ These are all relevant questions but the ultimate questions are: ‘Is he or she absolutely committed to Christ? Is Christ absolutely fundamental for him or her?’ By that I mean Christ as he is known to us in the Scriptures, not a Christ that we imagine.
I am afraid there are many people who talk about Christ, but not about the Christ we meet in the Gospels. They talk of an ideal figure they have manufactured for themselves. I am talking about the Christ who is known to us in the Gospels. We know what he said and did and we know what he calls us to do.
Essentially I believe the church is constituted by its relationship to Jesus Christ. If a person tells me that for him or her, Jesus is final and decisive, then I must regard that person as a brother or sister in Christ. From that point, I can begin to ask, ‘Then how do you reconcile what you do with Jesus? How can you reconcile what you say with Jesus?’ There is a basis on which we can correct one another and build one another up, but it is the centre that defines the whole thing.
The fourth point is that the church is a sign and an instrument – a foretaste of the kingdom of God. The church is not itself the kingdom of God, nor is the kingdom something completely separate from the church. When we separate the kingdom of God from the church, then the church becomes some kind of ideology, a sort of programme or a social or political utopia. The church is both the sign and the instrument, and therefore the foretaste. It is a sign, and a sign always points away from itself. If you are in Manchester you will not see a sign pointing to Manchester. It is when you are elsewhere that you have a sign. So the church is a sign in that it points to something which is not itself but is a foretaste of the reality of God’s reign. It is a guiding light or it may be an instrument in the hands of God for doing his will in the world, an instrument of the kingdom. It is both of those because it is a foretaste. The church is that fellowship within which we enjoy a foretaste of the freedom, the joy, the holiness of God’s kingdom. And because it is a taste or experience of something to be enjoyed in advance, it can be looked upon as both a sign and an instrument.
My fifth and final point is that the church – and this is the proper sense of the invisible church – is in communion with the saints who have gone before. This is an element that we are in danger of losing in the reformed Protestant churches. We must not lose this most precious thing, that the churches remain in communion with those who have gone before us on the way of faith, who wait with us for the final victory of Christ, for the resurrection of the body and the coming of the new heavens and new earth.
It ought to be a living part of our life in Christ, that we share in the communion of the saints, in the fellowship of those who have gone before us and who inspire us as they, and we, look to Jesus and to his final victory, of which we have the foretaste, right now, in the gift of the Holy Spirit.