The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification (continued)
Ecclesial Reception of the Divine Life 185 but only one body of Christ, "and not the Church of our own day alone, but that which began with Abel and extends to all who will be born and will believe in Christ. . . . There the angels are our fellow citizens; but while we are still toiling along on our pilgrimage, they, at home in the city, look forward to our arrival."12 From the angels who anticipate our union with them in God, we now turn to the stumbling, persecuted church of the pilgrim.
The Church of the Patriarchs
and Prophets
After the caelum caeli comes the historical pilgrim church. If the church is how creation properly praises God and if the church is where all created persons experience union with God, it is fitting that God would make that church available to all humankind. Just as there was never a time without a celestial church, there never was a history without an earthly ecclesial dwelling. Many of the church fathers saw how a preparatory church ran throughout all of history and therefore had to explain how this pilgrim church's genesis could predate its head's incarnation.13 The solution was to inquire into the holiness and the sanctity of the Old Testament patriarchs and prophets. Since all grace is Christ's through his church, wherever there are graced individuals they somehow belong to Christ's church.
But how can we attribute sanctification and holiness to those who predate Christ? Augustine's answer is to point to the Old Testament figures who are indispensable in the build-
12. en. Ps. 90, exp. 2.1; Boulding, Expositions (III/18), 330. 13. The Christian argument for the church's primordial roots hinges on the activity of the eternal Logos: all rational creatures share in reason and therefore in Reason himself. An idea which originally arose in Stoic circles, Justin was the first to give this idea Christian expression, cf., 1 Apol. §46; cf. Heinrich Dörrie, "Das Gebäude spätantiker Bildung mit seinen religiösen Zügen," Kirchengeschichte als Missionsgeschichte, edited by H. Frohnes and U. Knoor (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1974), 247–61.