4 The Church: The Communion of Saints
The Church: the communion of saints
All of us have memories of meetings that have left a deep impression on us. I remember visiting an old lady while I was a curate in Nottingham in the early 1980s. She was unwell and thought she had not much longer to live. ‘I’m looking forward to going home,’ she told me. I was new in my job and didn’t quite catch the significance of what she was saying. Happily, she realized this and explained what she meant. ‘I look forward to being in heaven. That’s the hope that keeps me going.’ It was a powerful statement, and I wove it into my sermon at her funeral a year later.
But that was only part of what the elderly lady said to me that cold and wet afternoon, as we drank strong tea together in her snug kitchen. She lived on her own; her husband had died ten years earlier. ‘The church is my family,’ she told me. It was where she felt she belonged. Then she used another phrase that stuck in my mind. ‘It’s like an outpost of heaven.’ Her church seemed to her to be a foretaste, no matter how inadequate, of what heaven would be like. She felt it was a threshold from which she could dimly see what lay beyond.
Many of us think about the Church as a community, which offers us support and encouragement and helps us follow Christ. This old lady realized it was also a pointer, a signpost, to something greater. In the next two chapters, we shall look at this theme and some others and see how they fit into the life of faith. But let’s stay for now with the clear insight we find in the New Testament, played out over two thousand years of Christian history: ours is not a solitary faith but one lived out in the company of others.
The Spirit of grace inhabits a community, not simply a collection of individuals. By the one Spirit, Christians throughout the world are all baptized into the body of Christ – the Church (1 Corinthians 12.13), through which the life-giving and life-changing Spirit of God can flow. But why does community matter?
Let’s begin with a very simple point. I learned to play chess when I was about 6. At the start, I wasn’t much good at it. I had no idea about making strategic moves and tended to rely on my opponents having even less experience of the game than I did. At 13 I moved to a new school, which had a well-established chess club. I suppose it was inevitable that I would join it. For the next four years I was an active member, and over time I noticed two things happening.
First of all, I got much better at playing chess. It wasn’t just practice; it was because I could talk to older students who took chess seriously and had devoured books by grand masters. As they spoke about their strategies, I found myself beginning to grasp the game at a deeper level than before. Previously, I had just moved pieces around according to the rules; now, I played tactically, in a classic demonstration of the young learning from the older and wiser. But I wouldn’t have improved if I had not joined the chess club.
The second thing that happened grew out of this. My school had a very strong sporting tradition and an outstanding reputation in rugby, cricket and rowing. Chess was seen by most of my peers as an intellectual game, played by socially backward students who were incapable of doing anything more interesting or worthwhile. So we chess enthusiasts huddled together for comfort. Within the club there was a sense of shared values and friendship, which helped us cope with the gently critical attitude of others. It’s much easier to handle marginalization in company than on your own.
I gave up playing chess when I went to university at Oxford, partly because my academic work was so interesting that it displaced the game. But after I discovered Christianity, I found the same pattern repeating itself. Going to church in Oxford helped me in two ways. First, it introduced me to people who knew a lot more about their faith that I did. Personal friendships opened the way to a deeper understanding of what the Christian faith was all about and how best to live it out. Every now and then, a sermon might prove especially exciting and help me to grasp something that had hitherto eluded me. The church was a community that stimulated my growth in faith.
But there was more to it than that. In the 1970s, Oxford students were fascinated by Marxism and tended to see any kind of religious belief or involvement as outmoded and reactionary. Why read about Jesus of Nazareth when you could read Mao Tsetung’s Little Red Book? Churches were essential to resisting such transient cultural trends. They acted as communities of support and encouragement in the face of hostility, indifference and cynicism. They provided fellowship, mutual support and encouragement. They were like spiritual oases in the midst of a wilderness or desert, offering refreshment and revitalization. Of course, we all know that churches can go wrong and become inward-looking, suspicious and oppressive. But when they work, they’re great.
How can we understand more of what the Church is all about? One of the best ways is to look at a series of analogies or images for the Church that we find in the New Testament, and to explore the tradition of Christian reflection on this text. Let’s begin with the idea of the Church as a people who have been called together by God.
Being called out of the world
I often find myself being struck by certain biblical verses, lingering over them and taking delight in their ideas and images. One that regularly slows me down is a short statement in John’s Gospel, in which Jesus speaks of his coming death. ‘I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself ’ (John 12.32). There is much to reflect on here, including the subtle reworking of a theme associated with the ‘Suffering Servant’: ‘he shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high’ (Isaiah 52.13). Where some might take this ‘exaltation’ to refer to preferment or promotion, here it is reinterpreted as being raised up on the cross. That’s interesting, but it’s not the main thing that causes me to slow down.
The fact is there’s a deep understanding of the Church packed into that verse: it presents the Church as the community that gathers around the crucified Christ. We can see the beginnings of this community in those who assembled around the cross at Calvary, and its extension in Paul’s equation of the gospel with the ‘message of the cross’. The compelling image of Jesus of Nazareth suffering on the cross invokes in us something that cannot really be put into words. The Church is those who gather together around Christ, believing that they have been called to follow him.
The Greek word ekkle-sia, traditionally translated as ‘church’, refers to an assembly of people, convened for a purpose. During the Golden Age of ancient Athens, an assembly of citizens was convened in times of need – for example, at moments of political crisis, when a decision had to be made about whether to go to war, or to elect representatives.
The New Testament sees the Church as such an assembly of Christians, called by God ‘out of darkness into his marvellous light’ (1 Peter 2.9). It is not an accidental construct that Christians blunder into, but a centre of support, encouragement and teaching; it is not primarily a human invention, but a community that is saturated by grace and inhabited by the Holy Spirit. All Christian writers – whether Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox – consider the Church to be an integral part of the Christian life. Initially, Christians seem to have used the word ‘church’ to refer simply to a gathering of believers, likely to meet in a private house for prayer and worship. When the New Testament speaks of the church at Corinth or Philippi, it means a ‘house church’, a relatively small group of people.
Once Christianity became a legal religion (with the conversion of Constantine in 313), a subtle change began to take place. As they were no longer forced to meet in secret, Christians could begin to construct their own buildings for public worship. Gradually, the word ‘church’ came to refer to the buildings in which Christians assembled, not the assembly of believers itself. In our own day, it is used to refer to a Christian organization – for example, the Church of England or the Methodist Church. This emphasis on the institutional or organizational aspects of Christianity, rather than the ideas and values that lie at the heart of the Christian faith, is quite natural. Christians need to meet somewhere, and they need to organize themselves if they are to survive.
Let’s continue our thinking about the nature of the Church by exploring the strengths and weaknesses of some traditional models.1 Some of these have associations with particular Christian denominations, while others emphasize certain aspects of the role of the Church. Taken together, they can help us begin to put into words some of the core ideas that underlie our Christian understanding.
The Church: a secure base for the Christian life
A few years ago, I researched and wrote a biography of C. S. Lewis. One of the things I discovered was how unhappy Lewis was at school. Following his mother’s death in 1908, shortly before Lewis’s tenth birthday, his father sent him away from home to study at English boarding schools. Although it was probably a well-meant decision, it turned out to be disastrous for Lewis’s personal development. He was separated from most of his family and closest friends.
Others knew the same experience. In 1951, the British psychologist John Bowlby (1907– 90) produced a study for the World Health Organization that looked at the mental health problems of children who had been displaced by the Second World War. His main conclusion was that children needed a ‘secure base’ from which they could learn to cope with challenges, develop independence and mature emotionally.2
This idea of a ‘secure base’ is helpful as we think about the creeds. One of the great themes of the Old Testament is that God is a place of safety and refuge. Christians can find refuge in the shadow of God’s wings (Psalm 36.7). God is like a strong tower, a fortress or a place of safety. It’s an idea that is familiar to many through Augustus M. Toplady’s famous hymn ‘Rock of Ages, cleft for me’. God is portrayed as a secure base, a rock on which we may stand, even when the storms of life rage around us.
Yet this idea is also helpful in thinking about the nature of the Church. The Church is a community that enfolds us, protects us and encourages us as we grow in our faith. It is like a nursery that helps us set down roots and grow. One day, we can look after ourselves. Yet we need a place in which we can explore our faith and test its limits, make mistakes, and learn from them. It’s no accident that many Christians find it helpful to talk about the Church as a ‘mother’. It’s an image that can be traced back to Cyprian of Carthage in the third century. ‘You can’t have God as your father,’ he remarked, ‘unless you have the Church as your mother.’3 John Calvin made much the same point in the sixteenth century:
I shall start, then, with the church, into whose bosom God is pleased to gather his sons, not only that they may be nourished by her help and ministry as long as they are infants and children, but also that they may be guided by her motherly care until they mature and at last reach the goal of faith.4
Now we all know that churches can go wrong. It’s a sad fact of life that churches can be places of bullying and abuse. But they’re not meant to be like this, and they don’t have to be like this. They can be places of security, hospitality and care.
Traditional models of the Church
One of the most familiar ways of thinking about the Church is to see it as an institution, and for many in the secular world this has become the default option. When Constantine was converted and believers were given the opportunity to meet openly for the first time, the strength of Christianity on the ground became increasingly obvious. Christianity began to play a greater role in imperial politics, eventually becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire. When, in the fifth century, the Roman Empire began to collapse in Western Europe, the Christian Church emerged as the only institution to survive the chaos that followed the breakdown of imperial rule. There are obviously limits to the comparison, but the Western Church began to see itself as the successor to the Roman Empire, with the pope as the new emperor and the bishops as the new governors of provinces.
The benefits of this model were obvious. By the Middle Ages, the Church was the most stable and influential institution in Western Europe. But it had its weaknesses. Some felt that it had lost touch with its historical and spiritual roots in the New Testament and had become preoccupied with issues of power and money. Many such issues were debated in the sixteenth century, which was an age of Reformation for the churches in Western Europe.
But perhaps not addressed as thoroughly as they might have been were (a) the danger of attaching too much importance to preserving the institution of the Church at the expense of other legitimate concerns, and (b) the way in which renewal movements can be suppressed and charismatic voices marginalized if they appear to challenge traditional, institutional ways of thinking.
Another way of regarding the Church is to see it as a community of faith. This idea is often expressed in terms of Paul’s powerful image of the ‘body of Christ’ (see especially 1 Corinthians 12), which suggests an interconnected body of people, each of whom has a role to play in sustaining the ministry of the Church. To speak of the Church as the ‘God’s people’ (1 Peter 2.10) is not to deny the importance of individuals or human individuality; it is to recognize that individuals are enabled to grow in wisdom and to overcome their limitations through belonging to a community. As the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906 – 45) realized, other people are good for us – no matter how irksome and difficult we may at times find them. They help us identify and face up to our pride, weaknesses and vanities. And as others accept us, so we come to accept others.
A Christian fellowship lives and exists by the intercession of its members for one another, or it collapses. I can no longer condemn or hate a brother for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble he causes me. His face, that hitherto may have been strange and intolerable to me, is transformed in intercession into the countenance of a brother for whom Christ died, the face of a forgiven sinner.5
I was speaking at a conference of ministers in Chicago. Having an hour spare, I slipped into a session dealing with clergy burnout. Several clergy were speaking about the causes of burnout and the impact it had on their lives. More importantly, they also talked about what they found helpful in dealing with it. One of the clergy found that the biggest cause of stress was his bad relationships with other people – including other ministers and members of his own congregation. He shared what he found helpful in dealing with this problem.
He told us how he thought about people he disliked or found difficult. These are people for whom Christ died! Therefore he had to force himself to see them in that light. Instead of seeing them as people who annoyed him and made his life difficult, he would try to see them from God’s perspective. God loved them – and so must he. Yet he then found something utterly transformative taking place – something unexpected, which he put down to the grace of God. He began to see people in a new way, actively seeking out their good points. And when he started looking for their good points, he found them.
Now I don’t know whether that pastor had read Bonhoeffer. But he had certainly read his New Testament, especially Paul’s plea that we should try to see others as being better than ourselves (Philippians 2.3). The Church is meant to be a community in which we delight in one another’s strengths and help one another cope with our weaknesses. It’s a community which helps us to grow in faith by providing us with support as we try, by God’s grace, to become better people.
There’s another point we need to make here. Faith is a great social leveller, precisely because the Christian gospel makes it clear that social status is not of any great importance in God’s sight. Paul’s image of the ‘body of Christ’ may be seen as a subtle and understated criticism of the hierarchical model of society that was prevalent throughout the Roman Empire, in which someone’s social status was largely the result of that person’s circumstances. Accidents of birth were not to be carried over into the Church! The one who some in society would consider an ‘inferior member’ is to be given ‘greater honour’ within the Church (1 Corinthians 12.24). A similar point is made in the letter of James, which criticizes church leaders who prioritize rich church members over poor ones (James 2.1– 4).
Yet another way of understanding the Church is to consider it as a school of discipleship. The later letters of the New Testament emphasize the importance of teaching, both for the transmission of faith to later generations and as a means of helping present-day Christians to develop maturity in their faith. In the early church, the bishop was often seen as having a significant role. Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 315 – 87) is widely regarded as one of the finest teachers of this period: his ‘catechetical lectures’ were delivered at Jerusalem in about the year 350 to those preparing for baptism. The early church took this sacrament very seriously and used the period of Lent to teach people who wished to publicly acknowledge their faith through baptism. The ceremony itself took place on Easter Day in order to celebrate the new life it brought.
Instruction is an important aspect of the Church’s identity and mission. As we have stressed throughout this series of books, Christianity is not an uninformed trust in God or a blind faith in certain doctrines. It is a coherent set of ideas linked together to enable believers to make sense of life and live it to the full. As the recent rise of the New Atheism has made clear, Christians need to know what they believe and why they believe it. Although many of today’s most influential Christian teachers have leadership roles in churches, some do not – perhaps the most famous of these being C. S. Lewis, who took great pleasure in emphasizing that he was simply a ‘layman of the Church of England’.
This teaching role of the Church does not simply concern what Christians believe; it’s about inculcating values and exploring how these can be put into practice in life. At its best, the Church is a community of wisdom, in which guidance can be given about how best to live out the Christian faith in an increasingly complex world where many of the old certainties don’t seem to work well any more.
A final way of thinking about the Church is to see it as a herald – a community that tries to explain and commend its ideas and values to those outside its confines. The early church grew out of the apostolic proclamation of the gospel and saw this act as a core aspect of its identity. Those within the Church were to be helped to grow in their faith; those outside were to be enabled to understand what Christianity was all about and the difference it could make to their lives.
The use of the term ‘herald’ is important. A herald announces the coming of a person. The Church is the community that gathers in worship and prayer around the risen Jesus of Nazareth. Although Christianity does have certain beliefs, it is more fundamentally about a relationship with Christ. The great Baptist preacher C. H. Spurgeon (1834– 92) made this point well.
The theme of a minister should be Christ Jesus in opposition to mere doctrine. Some of my good brethren are always preaching doctrine. Well, they are right in so doing, but I would not care myself to have as the characteristic of my preaching, doctrine only. I would rather have it said, ‘He dwelt much upon the person of Christ.’6
Let’s explore this point further.
The Church and the world: images and insights
What is the Church? Ignatius of Antioch, who was martyred for his faith in Rome in about the year 108, had a neat answer: ‘Wherever Christ is, there is the Church.’ It’s a nice piece of theology, and it makes a lot of sense of the New Testament’s statements about the Church as the community that gathers around Jesus of Nazareth. Just as the teaching of Jesus drew crowds in Palestine, so the Church’s proclamation of Jesus of Nazareth draws followers down the ages. ‘Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them’ (Matthew 18.20). In his 1948 address to the World Council of Churches, the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth declared that the Church consists of ‘the gathering together of those men and women 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’.
Although Ignatius was a bishop, with a strong sense of the value of church structures and discipline, he was clear what was of decisive importance. The centre of the life, thought and worship of the Church was Jesus of Nazareth. The institution of the Church was secondary to the person of Jesus Christ, who was its true foundation and focus. The preaching, sacraments and ministry of the Church were intended to sustain and nourish the presence of Christ within the community of faith, so that he in turn might sustain and nourish believers.
This rich idea opens up lots of interesting questions. How are we to think about believers being sustained in this way by Jesus of Nazareth? How can we think of them as growing? It is interesting to note how many Christian writers have picked up on the biblical imagery that suggests that the Church is like a vineyard, which is to be tended so that it may bear fruit. Caring for a vineyard is an excellent image for ministry (Matthew 20.1–16). In Palestine, a vineyard needed to be shielded from wild animals and the elements. It was all too easy for a vineyard to die and revert to barren soil. It needed protection and irrigation.
This led some theologians to compare the Church to a walled garden, similar to the Garden of Eden. Isaac Watts (1674 –1748), best known for ‘When I survey the wondrous cross’, penned a hymn that expressed this idea, based on some themes from the Song of Songs:
We are a garden walled around,
Chosen and made peculiar ground;
A little spot enclosed by grace
Out of the world’s wide wilderness.
It is helpful to think of the Church as an oasis within a desert, where plants can flourish, grow and bear fruit. This suggestive image weaves together the core themes of community, grace and the Holy Spirit.
Another image of the Church makes a similar point. Just as Noah’s ark bore people (and animals!) through the floods to safety, so the Church, like a boat voyaging on the high seas – the sea, you will recall, is often regarded as an image of chaos and destruction in the Old Testament – represents a place of security in the face of chaos and a mode of transport to a safe haven. This idea is reflected in the architecture of many churches. The ‘nave’, the central part of the church, in which the congregation sits, takes its name from the Latin word for ship, navis, and the vaulted roof of the nave looks rather like an inverted ship’s keel.
The Christian Church will always exist in tension with what we sometimes call ‘the world’. As I touched on earlier, many theologians believe that Christianity lost something of its original vitality when it became entangled with power politics as part of the Roman cultural establishment. There were unquestionably positive aspects to this development, in that Christian moral values – especially concerning the care of widows and orphans – were afforded greater cultural influence. But it led to Christianity losing at least something of its prophetic role, as bishops increasingly became political rather than spiritual figureheads.
The rise of the monastic movement partly reflected concern about the direction the Church had been taking, and indicated a longing to escape the complexities and compromises of power. Many monasteries were founded in the deserts of Egypt and often took the form of walled compounds. The walls did more than provide physical security against wild animals and marauders: they were symbols of the community of faith’s determination to concentrate on prayer, worship and service, and not to be swamped by the concerns and prevailing ideologies of the world.
For the monks of those orders, withdrawing from the world was the best way of preserving the life of faith. Whether we agree with them or not on this point, we have to concede that the world can easily draw us into its ways of thinking and being. The Church, understood as the ‘community of faith’ or the ‘communion of saints’, is about safeguarding the integrity of our faith. It is a place for building our spiritual fitness so we have the energy to work and witness in the world.
There is something of a dilemma for Christians to face here. To serve the world we need to withdraw from it from time to time. If we are to be the ‘salt of the earth’ and the ‘light of the world’, we need to preserve our saltiness and keep our batteries charged. Both these helpful images are found in the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus says:
You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled underfoot. You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.
(Matthew 5.13 –16)
Note that these images emphasize the importance of being noticed, whether through taste or sight. But they also express the need to maintain our distinctiveness. Salt can lose its taste; lamps can run out of olive oil. Or, picking up on the image of the Church as a boat, ‘the place for the ship is the sea, but God help the ship if the sea gets into it’ (D. L. Moody).7 One of the roles of the Church is to sustain and support us in the life of faith.
In the first volume in this series, Faith and the Creeds, we noted how Christianity gives us a distinct way of seeing things. Let’s now look at how the Church helps us to develop and sustain this.
The Church as a community of vision
Austin Farrer, an Oxford colleague of C. S. Lewis, once remarked that we ‘see through the Church of Christ as a man sees through the telescope to the stars’.8 It’s an interesting idea, especially for a former amateur astronomer like myself ! I used to love the cold and crisp winter nights when the night sky could be seen clearly. I knew the names of the constellations, and took great pleasure in following the movement of the planets against the background of the stars.
When I made my first telescope, I discovered that it opened up new riches. I was looking at the same night sky, but now I could make out far more stars than before. I could see the surface of the moon in great detail and the moons of the planet Jupiter. Through the telescope’s greater light-gathering power, things that had always been there, but were invisible to the unaided eye, suddenly sprang to sight.
This is one of the points that Farrer is making. A telescope helps us see the stars. The Church – as a community of believers – helps us see ourselves and the world more effectively than would otherwise be the case. Why? Because we pool our spiritual wisdom. We view the Christian faith through other people’s eyes, and realize that our own understanding needs to be expanded. We share ways of thinking about core Christian ideas. We listen to other people describing how their faith helps them cope with life’s traumas and triumphs, and learn from them. Or we hear people talk about the writers they have read who enabled them to grasp a difficult point or inspired them to serve God in new ways. The Christian Church is a community of learning, which helps us to go deeper and further into our faith.
C. S. Lewis emphasizes this in Mere Christianity, as he draws on his own experience of spiritual growth and theological reflection. ‘The one really adequate instrument for learning about God is the Christian community, waiting for Him together.’9 It is within such a community of people ‘united together in a body, loving one another, helping one another, showing [God] to one another’ that the life of faith takes root and develops. Although Lewis found his faith stimulated and enriched in other ways – most notably, through the group of colleagues that we know as ‘the Inklings’ – there is no doubting the importance he attached to the local church as a means of grace.
But Farrer was making another point as well. The Church helps us develop habits of thinking and acting that are grounded in the Christian faith – what we might call ‘a discipleship of the mind’. The local church enables us to grasp the Christian story, and learn to inhabit it, not simply to understand it. The church provides a community that is nourished by this way of thinking – for instance, through preaching that illuminates our minds, transforms our hearts and inspires us to take action. Preaching is theology on fire! It enables us to make connections between the horizontal and vertical dimensions of life.
We shall have more to say about the life of faith in the final volume of this series, The Christian Life and Hope. In the meantime, let’s consider briefly the Church as a community that sustains the Christian faith. The sociologist Peter Berger coined the phrase ‘plausibility structures’ to refer to an environment that reinforces a faith. In the seventeenth century, Western culture was shaped by the presuppositions of Christian belief, and thus it often promoted some of its core themes. In the intensely secular culture of the twenty-first century, the assumptions of faith are challenged if not actually ridiculed. Christians can easily feel demoralized and intimidated, tempted to ‘go with the flow’. But the Christian community offers an environment that allows the growth rather than the withering of faith. This should not in any way deter us from exploring Christian ideas, or reflecting on how they may be challenged by a secular culture.
Finally, the Church is a community of moral vision – a group of people who find that their faith leads them to see the world in a new way and act in accordance with that way of seeing. For example, the Christian doctrine of creation reminds us that the world is God’s, not ours. We are its stewards, not its owners; it has been entrusted to us, who bear God’s image. The new (and welcome) awareness of environmental concerns on the part of so many Christians is grounded in such fundamental theological beliefs. We are to see nature not as something that exists for our convenience but as God’s precious possession, entrusted to us for safe-keeping. And once we see nature in that light and in that manner, our behaviour towards it changes.
The word ‘church’ has been used extensively throughout this chapter, and as there are so many different Christian churches in the world today, some readers may perhaps have been wondering which church we are talking about. Surely we need to clarify what is meant by this word?
Denominations and divisions: which church?
The Christian faith spread rapidly in the Mediterranean area in the first century, with congregations being established in many parts of Asia Minor and Europe, including Rome, the capital city of the Empire. Although these congregations were probably quite small, meeting in houses for fear of the authorities, they appear to have seen themselves as part of a greater community of Christian believers, dispersed throughout the civilized world of the time.
Tensions always existed within the early church – for example, over which bishops took priority within the global Christian community. As the Roman Empire started to fall apart in the fifth century, two quite distinct forms of Christianity began to solidify: the Latin-speaking church of the West, and the Greek-speaking church of the East. Relations between them were bad and eventually became so strained that they ceased seeing themselves as parts of a single church. In 1054, the Great Schism led to the separation of these two bodies, each of which saw itself as the ‘true Church’.
Further division took place in the sixteenth century in Western Europe, when the Protestant Reformation led to the fragmentation of the medieval church. Territorial churches – such as the Church of England – emerged, followed by independent groups such as the Baptists. Today, there are tens of thousands of Christian denominations, each regarding itself as either the ‘true’ Church or, at the very least, as a valid form of the Church. What are we to make of this?
Like many before me, I regard C. S. Lewis’s notion of ‘mere Christianity’ to be helpful in framing our reflections on this question. We touched on this idea in Faith and the Creeds, and it’s worth exploring further at this point. After his conversion, Lewis felt the need to make a public demonstration of his faith. He wanted to ‘show the flag’. As he was an Oxford don at Magdalen College, he decided to start going to college chapel. And he also began attending Holy Trinity Church in Headington, the village just outside Oxford where he lived.10 He was quite happy (as we saw earlier in this chapter) to describe himself as a ‘layman of the Church of England’.
Yet Lewis never saw his identity as a member of the Church of England as implying the supremacy of this denomination. It was his personal choice and, as his later writings make clear, he saw no reason either to regret it or to impose this choice on – or even to recommend it to – anyone else. Why? Because of his idea of ‘mere Christianity’.
Lewis borrowed this term from the writings of the Anglican clergyman Richard Baxter (1615 – 91), who used it to refer to ‘Christian basics’. Lewis, like Baxter, disliked denominational politics and wanted to focus on the themes of a basic consensual Christianity, shorn of the specific denominational ideas and practices that so often became the cause of bad-tempered controversy or arrogant assertions of superiority. ‘You will not learn from me whether you ought to become an Anglican, a Methodist, a Presbyterian, or a Roman Catholic.’11 Yet Lewis was clear that being a Christian meant being associated with the community of faith. Christianity was not a solitary religion: it entailed being involved with a church that would provide a wellspring for the development of faith.
Lewis’s analogy for explaining the place of denominations in the Christian life has become well known and remains helpful. It enables us to grasp that Lewis is not advocating the abolition of individual Christian denominations or suggesting that these cannot play an important role in living out the Christian faith. What he is proposing is that each denomination should be seen as a distinct version of something more fundamental – ‘mere Christianity’.
[Mere Christianity is] like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted. But it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in.12
Let’s explore this analogy in more depth.
By using the image of a hall, Lewis prompts us to imagine a large, open space to which all Christians have access. The form of Christianity he has in mind is based on the Bible and the creeds, which focus on the essentials of faith and are generous about how these may be put into practice. Lewis recognizes that Christians do have different views on various things – for example, whether churches should be governed by bishops or congregations, or whether infants should be baptized – and he is aware that some Christians regard these matters as important. However, Lewis suggests we try to see these divergences in their proper perspective, and one way of doing so is to imagine that the large hall leads into smaller rooms. It’s important to appreciate that you can reach these smaller rooms in no other way than through the hall, which is a ‘common area’ for all Christians, while the rooms are where specific kinds of Christians meet.
Lewis is not advocating a ‘denominationless Christianity’. He’s not saying that Christians should live apart from a community of faith – after all, he himself attended his local church every Sunday with his brother Warren. The essential thing is for Christians to see their commitment to the Christian faith as primary, and their allegiance to a specific denomination as secondary. That does not mean that denominations are unimportant! It is simply to put them in context so that we realize that they are not of ultimate importance.
What then might be the value of different denominations? The answer lies in Lewis’s emphasis that the rooms have something that you don’t find in the hall – namely, ‘fires and chairs and meals’. In 1940s England – when Lewis first delivered the talks eventually published as Mere Christianity – these three items turned a house into a home. A cold and lifeless building became a warm and welcoming place in which to live. Denominations offer us a place where we feel we belong. My local church provides our congregation with spiritual warmth, comfort and sustenance.
Which denomination, you might be wondering, is to be preferred? I can’t answer that question for you, but I can set it in context. In the next chapter, we shall look at the four ‘marks’ or ‘notes’ of the Church. This may be helpful in reflecting on the nature of the Church and its mission, as well as our own denominational identity.