Before
delving into the theological meat of the ninth Article of the Christian Creed
allow me to point out that the spelling of “Catholick” in the title of this
essay is not a typo. The declinable
suffix –icus in Latin and its Greek counterpart - ῐκός
were added to other words, usually nouns, to turn them into adjectives. These suffixes survive in both English and
French where they have dropped the declinable case endings but retained the
function and meaning in the French –ique and the English –ic. The English suffix had a number of different
spellings before it was standardized as –ic in the nineteenth century. In the sixteenth century editions of the Book of Common Prayer we find the Nicene
Creed talking about the “Catholike” and “Apostolike” Church. This is obviously an Anglicized version of
the French spelling. More common was
the Middle English –ick, which we find in the 1662 Restoration edition of the Book of Common Prayer. This version continued to be used well into
the Modern English period but the k was dropped from standard spelling by the
end of the Victorian era. Today, when
the older spelling of adjectives that in standard spelling end in –ic is used,
it is for the purpose of being deliberately archaic. This
is why I have used it in the title. I
will not force you, my readers, to endure it every time this word appears in
this essay, however. I will use it when
citing the Restoration BCP, but otherwise will use the standard spelling.
In the
Apostles’ Creed the ninth Article and all the Articles that follow it are part
of the same sentence that began in the eighth Article with Credo or “I believe”. This verb has multiple objects and the
remainder of the sentence lists them, separating them with commas, in Spiritum Sanctum or “in the Holy
Ghost” being the first in the sequence.
The tenth, eleventh, and twelfth Articles, like the eighth, each contain
one item in the list. The ninth Article
contains two items, which tells us that these two items have an even closer
connection than that which exists between all the items in the list, one so
close that they are treated as being in some sense the same thing. The ninth Article in the original Latin
reads: sanctam Ecclesiam catholicam, sanctorum communionem. In the Restoration Book of Common Prayer this is rendered as “The holy Catholick
Church; The Communion of Saints”. In
addition to the spelling update discussed in the first paragraph, later
editions of the BCP revert to the commas of the Latin original in place of the
semi-colon.
In the
Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed there is only one item in this Article. This part of the conciliar Creed does not
use the same grammatical structure as the Apostles’ Creed. The eighth Article is its own sentence as is
the ninth and the tenth Article begins with a completely different first person
verb. The Greek original is Εἰς μίαν, ἁγίαν, καθολικὴν καὶ ἀποστολικὴν Ἐκκλησίαν. Here the Restoration Book of Common Prayer, like the earlier English Reformation
editions of 1549 and 1559, interestingly departs from both the Greek and Latin
texts of the Creed by rendering it “And I believe one Catholick and Apostolick
Church”. The “And” renders “Et” in the
Latin text, which does not have an equivalent in the Greek original, but the “I
believe” is entirely an interpolation, having no original in either the Greek
or Latin texts. Whereas one would expect
to find an “in” after the “I believe” – and in actual practice, when this part
of the Creed is recited it is often inserted by those doing the reciting – it
is absent from the English text, although it can be found without the “And I
believe” in the Greek original. A more
important omission is the word “holy” after “one” and before “Catholick”. This is the ἁγίαν in the Greek text and it is
present in the Latin as sanctam in
the Latin text. The reason for
Cranmer’s omission of it is unclear. It
couldn’t have been a theological objection to it because he retained it in the
Apostles’ Creed. The oft offered
explanation that it was due to what we would call textual criticism today –
that he found a regional Latin variation that omitted the sanctam and became
convinced that this rather than the text in use everywhere else was the
original – is not very satisfactory. It
is unlikely that he would have left it out for this reason without leaving a
written explanation justifying the decision and it would be very strange and
inconsistent for him to have omitted the universally testified to “holy” for
this reason while a) adding “I believe” to the text and b) retaining the
unoriginal filioque in the preceding
Article. Recent editions of the Book of Common Prayer, like the Canadian
1962 edition, have restored the “holy” which should have been done much
sooner. Everywhere else, Cranmer’s
English rendition of the Creed is impeccably faithful to the original and
impossible to improve on in English style, making the way in which he treated
this Article all the more conspicuous for departing from that norm.
In the ninth Article as it appears in the conciliar Creed we
find four adjectives and a noun. The
four adjectives – one, holy, Catholic and Apostolic – are called the marks or
notes of the Church. Church, of course,
is the noun, and we shall consider it first before looking at the words that
modify it.
In English the word Church represents the Greek word Ἐκκλησία. The Latin Ecclesia is the Greek word
borrowed and transliterated into Latin characters. At the root of the Greek word is the
combination of the preposition ἐκ which is used to denote movement of some
sort, literal or metaphorical, from a source and is most often translated “of”
“from” or “out of” in English, with the verb κᾰλέω which means “call” or
“summon” (our English word “call” is derived from this verb’s cognate in the
Germanic family of languages). The
compound form of the verb is a more intense way of saying “summon” and the noun
we are looking at was formed from the passive perfect form of the verb
indicating those who have been summoned, i.e., to a meeting or “assembly” as it
is regularly translated when it is not being used as the name of the sacred
society affirmed in the Creed. In
pre-New Testament ancient Greek literature it was used of formal military and
political assemblies. It was used, for
example, for the citizen-assemblies of the Greek city-states, of which the most
famous was that of Athens. Aristophanes’
comedy in which the women of Athens put on fake beards and their husbands
clothes and invade the assembly where they vote themselves supreme power over
the city-state is entitled Ἐκκλησιάζουσαι which,
when it is not just Latinized as Ecclesiazusae
is usually translated Assemblywomen. When the writers of the New Testament chose
this word for the spiritual society founded by Jesus Christ through His
Apostles it was not for these political associations, but for the word’s more
basic meaning of people gathered or assembled together. In the LXX, the Greek translation of the
Hebrew Scriptures made at the request of Ptolemy II Philadelphus of Egypt from
which the New Testament writers frequently quote and which in practical usage
became the Christian Old Testament, this word is used on numerous occasions
when all of national Israel was assembled together. The most relevant of these to our discussion
of the Christian Ἐκκλησία is how the word is used in the translation of the
Books of Moses. Here it is the word used
of the sacred assembly when the LORD commanded that Israel assemble before Him,
that His Law be read to them, and made His Covenant with them. In the Book of Deuteronomy commandments are
given that make it clear that this assembly was not just a historical gathering
but something that was to be ongoing for the duration of the Covenant. In this sense, it basically means Israel,
viewed not through the ethnic/political lens as a nation, but through the religious/spiritual
lens as the “congregation of the LORD’.
This is the usage of the word that would have been first and foremost in
the minds of the New Testament writers when they used this word of the society
that was formed when the Holy Ghost descended upon the Apostles. In the Ἐκκλησία of which they wrote and
which we affirm here in the Creed this Old Testament concept of the
“Congregation of the LORD” is updated and adapted for the New Covenant.
The English word “Church” that we use for the Ἐκκλησία, like
the German “Kirche”, the Scottish “kirk” and other such cognates in the Germanic
family of languages is ultimately derived from the Greek word meaning “of the
Lord” through a Gothic intermediary word that has been lost to time. This etymology suggests that this word
originally denoted the place where the Ἐκκλησία assembled and eventually came
to also be the word for the Ἐκκλησία itself, although the original usage has
been retained as well since we often speak of the buildings where the Church meets
as “churches”. When this word appears
in the English translation of the Creed and when it translates Ἐκκλησία in the
New Testament it is not with the meaning of the building, however, but of the
society of worshippers that gathers there.
In the Gospels, the Church is seldom mentioned by name. St. Matthew is the only the Evangelist to
use the word Ἐκκλησία and he uses it only three times. All of these are in the future tense. The first is when Jesus, following St.
Peter’s confession of Him as “the Christ, the Son of the Living God” declares
that “upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not
prevail against it.” (Matt. 16:18). The
other two occur in a single verse two chapters later when Jesus is giving His
disciples instructions as to what to do when their brothers sin against them. The Gospel accounts record other things that
are important to ecclesiology – the commissioning of the Apostles, the institution
of the Lord’s Supper in each of the Synoptic Gospels, and the extended
pre-institution teaching concerning its significance in the sixth chapter of
St. John’s Gospel to give three examples – but from the uses of Ἐκκλησία in St.
Matthew and Jesus’ post-Last Supper pre-arrest dialogue recoded in St. John, we
see that the Church was still in the future at the time of the events recorded
in the Gospels, awaiting Christ’s Ascension and the coming of the Holy Ghost.
It is St. Luke who provides us with the account of the birth
of the Church. He does not use the word
Ἐκκλησία in his Gospel but he uses it frequently throughout the Acts of the
Apostles in which it occurs for the first time in the last verse of the second
chapter. St. Luke records, both at the
end of his Gospel and the beginning of Acts, Jesus’ instructions to His
Apostles to wait in Jerusalem until they are empowered from Heaven to carry out
the Commission He had given them. This
occurred, a little over a week after His Ascension, on Pentecost. Pentecost, meaning “fifty”, was the Greek
name for the Jewish Feast of Weeks, Shavuot, so called because it fell a “week
of weeks”, i.e., seven weeks, after Passover.
This was one of the three pilgrimage festivals prescribed to Israel in
the Law of Moses in which the Israelites were commanded to annually assemble,
first at the Tabernacle, then later at the Temple in Jerusalem. On the Pentecost after the Ascension, as
devout Jews from all over the Roman Empire were gathering in Jerusalem for the
festival, St. Luke records that the Apostles were gathered together in one
place when the sound of a mighty wind from Heaven filled the house, cloven
tongues of fire appeared over them, and the Holy Ghost filled them and they
began to proclaim Christ in the languages of the Diaspora Jews gathered for the
festival. This astonished the multitude
and St. Peter addressed them with a sermon in which he proclaimed Jesus, Whom
they had so recently crucified, to have risen from the dead and to be the long
awaited Christ. The repentant crowd
asked what they must do and he told them to repent and be baptized in the name
of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins and the Holy Ghost would come upon
them as well. About three thousand were
so converted that day and “they continued steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine
and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers.” (Acts 2:42).
This was the birth of the Christian Church. Had St. Peter gone on to preach a second
sermon in which he told them that they, each of them as individuals, were the
Church, and that they as individuals were the Church as they went out and lived
their individual lives and conducted their individual everyday business in the
world around them, the sort of sermon that is heard from time to time from
certain Protestant pulpits, they would have looked at him as if the reverse of
the miracle of Pentecost had taken place, for this sort of language would have
been completely foreign to them. The
Church was not who they were as individuals
but who they were as a community. It
was right here in the very name of their society – the Ἐκκλησία – those
assembled or gathered together.
Together, they were, for St. Luke goes on to tell us that they were
together, both in the Temple and from home to home, on a daily basis, not just
once a week. Indeed, at first the Church
was not just a community but what we would call a commune, holding all things
in common. At the end of this
description of this sacred community in its fledgling days, St. Luke names it
by telling us “the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved”.
(Acts. 2:47).
Since she is rarely mentioned in the Gospels, and it is her
earliest history with which St. Luke is concerned in the book of Acts, it is
the epistles of the New Testament that we must turn to find doctrine concerning
the Church. In the epistles, three
metaphorical images are prominently used to depict the Church and these
correspond with the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity. With regards to the Father, the Church is
called the people of God. While there
are a few verses in St. Paul’s epistles that refer to the Church this way, such
as Titus 2:14, it is St. Peter who makes the most out of this image in the
second chapter of his First Epistle where he writes:
But ye are a chosen
generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye
should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into
his marvellous light; Which in time past were not a people, but are now the
people of God: which had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy.
(1 Pet. 2:9-10)
Here St. Peter, the Apostle of the Circumcision (Gal. 2:7),
writing to churches whose members were largely of Jewish origins, borrows the
Old Testament’s language with regards to Israel and applies it to the
Church. We shall defer discussion of
the relationship between the Church and Old Testament Israel to later when we
address the note of unity. Note that
this is also the proof text for the Protestant doctrine of the “universal
priesthood of believers”. Clearly the
universal priesthood of the Church is here affirmed, just as the universal
priesthood of Israel was affirmed in Deuteronomy. We shall address the erroneous conclusion
that many Protestants infer from “universal priesthood” when we come to the
note of Apostolicity.
With regards to the Son, the Church is said to be the Body
of Christ. This is the primary image
that St. Paul uses of the Church and he uses throughout his epistles. In this image, the Church is likened to a
physical body, Jesus Christ is identified as the Head, and the individuals
Christians who are members of the Church are likened to the other parts of a
body. When this imagery is used, the
emphasis is on the unity of the Church.
In the twelfth chapters of both Romans and 1 Corinthians the unity of
the Body is urged against those who either looked with envy at other Christians
spiritual gifts and ministries or conversely thought theirs were more important
than those of others. One implication of
this imagery is that in this period of time, after the Ascension His Presence
on earth that began with His Incarnation is continued in His Body, the Church
until He returns in Judgement and receives His Church to Himself as His Bride. (1) St. Paul also teaches that this unity of
Christians, with each other and with Christ, is established and maintained by
means of the Sacraments of the Church. In
baptism, which as we saw in Acts 2 is the rite of entry to the Church, St. Paul
says in Romans 6, Galatians 3, and Colossians 2 we are united with Christ. In 1 Corinthians 10, speaking of the
Sacrament of Holy Communion – the “breaking of bread” that the first Church
partook of daily in Acts 2 – he writes “The cup of blessing which we bless, is
it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it
not the communion of the body of Christ? For we being many are one bread, and
one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread.” (2 Cor. 10:16-17).
With regards to the Holy Ghost, the Church is the Temple of
the Holy Ghost. This exact expression is found in 1
Corinthians 6:19 which is often mistakenly taken to be talking about the
physical body of the individual Christian.
The verse reads “What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the
Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?” The mistake is excusable in that it occurs
in a passage in which fornication is being discussed and in which the physical
body is mentioned in the previous verse.
In this verse, however, the body is modified with the plural possessive
“your” by contrast with “the” and “his own” in the preceding verse, and this
point back to three chapters earlier where the Apostle tells the Church to
which he is writing that they collectively are the “temple of God”, and that
the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?” (1
Cor. 3:16) shortly after having described them as “God’s building” erected on
the foundation of Jesus Christ. 1
Corinthians 6:19 is referring back to this.
The contrast between its metaphorical use of the word body and the
literal use in the preceding verse is wordplay.
If you look at the argument in the passage as a whole, noting the
contrast drawn in verses 16-17, it becomes evident that the body in verse 19 is
the Church. Further examples of the
Temple image can be found in 1 Peter 2, in the verses just prior to the ones
about the Church as the people of God, where the Church is described as a
“spiritual house” built up with the “lively stones” of the believers with
Christ Himself as the “chief corner stone”, and in Ephesians 2:22 where Jesus
Christ is again identified as the “chief corner stone” of a temple built on the
foundation of “the apostles and prophets”.
Among evangelical Protestants it is widely thought that when
the New Testament speaks of the Church as the People of God, the Body of
Christ, and the Temple of the Holy Ghost, “the Church” does not denote a
visible society but is used as an aggregate term for all individual believers
in Jesus Christ. Theologically, this
concept is described as “the invisible Church”.
Something like the invisible
Church concept can be inferred from St. Paul’s remarks concerning national
Israel that they are not all Israel who are called Israel, but that only the
believing and obedient are the true Jews, the inference being that the same can
be said of the Church. The closest that
the New Testament comes to explicitly expressing this concept, however, is the
expression “the elect”. The word Ἐκκλησία is never used with this meaning in
the New Testament, however. Apart from
instances where it is used for assemblies of other sorts, it always refers to
the visible society that was established on the Pentecost after the
Ascension. It is this visible society
that is the People of God, Body of Christ, and Temple of the Holy Ghost.
We turn now to the notes or marks of the Church, those four
adjectives that modify the word Church in the conciliar Creed. We shall not examine them in the order in
which they appear in the Creed, but will start with the most controversial and
most misunderstood, Catholic, and then we shall look at Apostolic, which
follows Catholic in the Creed, before turning to the first two notes in the
order in which they appear, One and Holy.
This word Catholic is widely misunderstood today, both by
those who think it means the Communion over which the Bishop of Rome presides
supreme, and by those who do not. To
understand what it really means, we need to go back to the book of Acts and see
what happened to that society, the Church, after Pentecost. In the third through sixth chapters of Acts,
the Church has not yet expanded beyond Jerusalem, although it is rapidly
growing. In the sixth chapter the
Church has grown so much, that the Apostles establish the order of Deacons to
take care of the distribution of goods, and one of these, St. Stephen, is
brought before the Sanhedrin by false accusers. The seventh chapter is mostly an account of
the sermon he gave on that occasion and ends with his martyrdom by
stoning. Saul of Tarsus, who would
become St. Paul the Apostle, appears for the first time in the account of St.
Stephen’s martyrdom, and at the beginning of the eighth chapter we read “And at
that time there was a great persecution against the church which was at
Jerusalem; and they were all scattered abroad throughout the regions of Judaea
and Samaria, except the apostles”. From
this point on the Church is no longer just in Jerusalem, but is found
throughout the Holy Land wherever the scattered members go. The persecution fails in its intent for the
Church only grows the more because her scattered members “went everywhere
preaching the word” (Acts. 8:4). The
example is provided of St. Philip the Evangelist – one of the seven deacons
ordained earlier in the sixth chapter and not the Apostle of the same name –
who brings the Gospel to the Samaritans. In the ninth chapter the account
returns to Saul of Tarsus, who with letters of authority from the High Priest
sets out to Damascus to take the Christians there prisoner and bring them back
to Jerusalem only to encounter the Risen Christ on the way. Converted and commissioned by the Lord, he
goes blinded to Damascus where he is taken in by the Church, healed and
baptized, and straightway begins preaching Christ until he is forced to flee
the city. After this St. Luke records “Then
had the churches rest throughout all Judaea and Galilee and Samaria, and were
edified; and walking in the fear of the Lord, and in the comfort of the Holy
Ghost, were multiplied.” In the
Received Text of the New Testament this is the first plural use of the word
Church. (2) The plural can be found in
the New Testament when the writer wishes to speak of the Church in several
different locations at the same time, but it is far more common for the
singular to be used, because the New Testament writers stress the unity of the
Church. Wherever the Church is found,
it is the one Church established in Jerusalem on Pentecost. In New Testament usage, the Church in a
particular location is spoken of as the Church, not as the local part of the
Church. It is the same Church wherever
it is and if a distinction needs to be made between the Church in a particular
location and the Church everywhere the New Testament writers make the
distinction by identifying the location of the particular Church – the Church
in Corinth, the Church in Galatia, etc.
Obviously, they could have done this the other way around by using a
modifier for “the Church” when the Church everywhere was intended, and very
early on Christians realized the advantage to having such a word and settled on
καθολικὴ. The first recorded use of this word, which
is a compound form of the Greek word for “whole” in which the prepositional
prefix which usually means “down”, “against” or “according to” is just an
intensifier, is in St. Ignatius’ epistle to the Church at Smyrna. St. Ignatius was the bishop of Antioch and
like St. Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna, was a direct disciple of the Apostle
John. The epistle in question was
written shortly before the martyrdom of St. Ignatius which according to
Eusebius of Caesarea occurred in the reign of Trajan (98 to 117 AD). There is no reason to think that St.
Ignatius coined the word for this epistle and so his early second century use
of it is a good indicator that it may have been in use already before the end
of the first century.
The word “Catholic” then speaks of the Church, the society
of Christian believers established in Jerusalem on Pentecost and spread
throughout the world, as a whole wherever she can be found, as distinct from
her presence in one particular location, or from her presence in multiple specific
locations that are not all-inclusive of every location in which she is present
which is when the New Testament uses the plural. Therefore, contrary to widespread
contemporary usage, it is not communion with the Church of one particular
location, Rome, that makes a Church Catholic.
“Roman” is not one of the notes of the Church in the Creed and
Scripturally it is the Church in Jerusalem that is the Mother Church and not
the Church in Rome. The Roman Church
errs, therefore, in identifying herself as the Mother Church, and those in
communion with her as the Catholic Church.
Hyper-Protestants, who similarly identify the Catholic Church with the
Roman Church but who condemn her for being Catholic and who do not hesitate to
condemn traditions that are held not just by the Roman Church but shared by all
the ancient Churches, err worse than the Roman Church in this regards. The reverse error to this, is that of those
Protestants who define Catholic as “universal” and think that by doing so they
have identified the Catholic Church with the “invisible Church”. Catholic does mean “universal”, of course,
but “universal” in the sense of the visible society founded in Jerusalem
extended universally, not in the sense of an aggregate of unorganized
individual believers. Organic
continuity with the Mother Church in Jerusalem is essential to the Catholicity
of a Church, present communion with the Church in Rome and her Bishop is not.
Further insight into the Catholicity of the Church may be
gleaned by examining her Apostolicity.
The Church is Apostolic in several different ways. First the Church is Apostolic in her
foundation. The Apostles were the
intermediaries through which Jesus Christ founded and built His Church, as we
see from His future tense references to the Church in St. Matthew’s Gospel, His
commissioning the Apostles, and the historical account of the Church’s founding
in Acts. Second the Church is Apostolic
in that she has Apostolic authority. The Apostles were the governors that
Christ set in authority over her from the beginning. This is evident in the mission He gave them,
in His instructions to them in the Gospels as to how they were to follow His
example and lead as servant-leaders and not like temporal rulers, and in the
history of the early Church in Acts. Third,
the Church is Apostolic in her priesthood.
The Church in her entirety is described as a priesthood in the New
Testament, just as all of national Israel was called a priesthood in
Deuteronomy. Just as Israel, the nation
of priests, was given a specific priesthood, the Levites, under the Aaronic
High Priesthood, so the Church, the priesthood of believers, was given a
specific priesthood, the Apostles, under their High Priest, Jesus Christ, a
Priest after the Order of Melchizedek.
Fourthly, the Church is Apostolic in her doctrine. This pertains to matters both of faith –
that there are twelve Articles in the Creed is because there are twelve
Apostles, the traditional account of its origins which although discounted by
critical historians today is very early is that the Creed was written by the
Twelve, each contributing an Article – and of practice, i.e., moral teaching.
The Protestant Reformers emphasized the fourth of these ways
in which the Church is Apostolic over all the others and, indeed, for most
forms of Protestantism, this is the only kind of Apostolicity that
matters. Hyper-Protestantism takes this
a step further and actively opposes and condemns the second and third types of
Apostolicity. They do so out of zeal
without knowledge. Let us take a
further look at Apostolic authority and priesthood in the Church.
In the New Testament, the Apostles are the governors of the
Church. At first they are all together
in the Church in Jerusalem. There they
establish the order of Deacons to assist in the distribution of goods in the
sixth chapter of Acts. Later, when the
Church is scattered, with the Apostles themselves still initially centred in
Jerusalem, we find that the Church in each of its various particular locations
had local leaders who were subordinate to the Apostles. The New Testament uses two terms for
these. One of these is πρεσβύτεροι
(presybyteroi) which means “elders”.
This term the early Church borrowed from the Jewish synagogue although
the Church clearly used it in a less literal sense (1 Tim. 4:12). The other term was ἐπίσκοπος (episkopos)
which means “overseer”. While these two
terms seem to have been mostly used interchangeably in the New Testament, the
word for “elders” is usually plural and the word for “overseers” is usually
singular, which might suggest that the Church in each location was led by a
group of “elders” themselves led by a single “overseer”. Either way, the elders/overseers answered to
the Apostles and thus constituted a second order of ministry under the Apostles. The ministry of the Church in the New
Testament, therefore, was a hierarchy of three orders, with the Apostles
themselves as the highest order, who governed the Church as a whole – the
Catholic Church – and who ordained the members of the other orders. That the Apostles had the higher authority
was early illustrated in the eighth chapter of Acts. After the scattering of the Jerusalem
Church, St. Philip, again the deacon not the Apostle, went to Samaria, and many
were converted by his preaching and baptized, but it was not until SS Peter and
John came down from Jerusalem and laid their hands on the baptized converts –
the New Testament does not use the word but this is what in later times would
be called confirmation – that they received the Holy Ghost. The laying on of the Apostles’ hands was
also, as we saw in the account of the establishment of the Deacons, the method
of ordination. The question becomes
what happened the authority of the Apostles?
The New Testament answers that question and for 1500 years
every Church – not just the Church of Rome, but the Eastern Orthodox Church,
the Assyrian Church of the East, the Oriental Orthodox Churches (Coptic,
Armenian, etc.) – all the ancient Churches – could give the New Testament
answer. The Apostles, before they died,
admitted certain of the elder-overseers into their own order, conferring on
them their authority and governorship of the Church. This happened before the New Testament was
complete. The Pastoral epistles of St.
Paul, the epistles to SS Timothy and Titus, are written to two elder-overseers
who had been given the Apostolic authority to ordain others. The Apostolic authority has been passed on
in the same way ever since. Depending
upon whether elder and overseer were completely interchangeable at first, or
whether overseer denoted the person in charge assisted by the elders, either
the overseers were the ones admitted to the Apostolic order or, at some point
late in the first century, it was decided to reserve the term overseer for the
new members of the Apostolic order.
Either way, those who exercise the Apostolic government of the Church
have ever since been called bishops which is the Anglicization of the Greek
word for overseer just as priest, an Anglicization of the Greek word for elder,
has been the term for the ministers of the second order.
That ministers of the second order are called priests
because this term is derived from their original Greek name of πρεσβύτεροι
meaning elders is not what is meant by the Apostolic priesthood of the
Church. In 1 Peter, the word used to
describe the Church as a royal “priesthood” is ἱεράτευμα (hierateuma) which has
no relation to the word for elder. It
refers to the state of being a ἱερεύς (hiereus). This is the basic Greek word for someone who
ministers in a temple, offering prayers and sacrifices to God, if it was a
Levitical Jewish priest, or to a god, if it was a pagan priest. That it is consistently translated in
English, not merely in the Bible but in other literature as well, by a word
that ultimately comes from the Greek word for elder, testifies to the ancient
association between the Christian ministry and temple service. We have already explained why the use of the
term priesthood for the entire Church does not preclude the Apostolic
ministry’s being a more specific priesthood.
The entire nation of Israel was described as a nation of priests in book
of Deuteronomy and yet a more specific priesthood was established for that
nation. Therefore the Church’s being a
universal priesthood cannot preclude her ministers being priests in a more
specific manner. Indeed, the Old
Testament allusions in the passage in 1 Peter make it even less logical to
argue against the priesthood of the Apostolic ministry on the basis of the
universal priesthood because the passage emphasizes continuity between Israel
in the Old Testament and the Church in the New.
Hyper-Protestants maintain that a Christian priesthood
offends against the teaching of the New Testament, particularly that of St.
Paul in the epistle to the Hebrews, that Jesus Christ offered Himself as the
One Sacrifice that effectively takes away sin and does away with the need for
any other propitiatory blood sacrifices.
There is no need for priests, their argument goes, if there are no more
sacrifices, an argument that could just as well be used against the universal
priesthood of believers. Or, they will
argue, Jesus Christ is our Priest, therefore we need no other, another argument
that works as well against the universal priesthood of believers. Their position is, in part, a retaliation
against the unwise language the Roman Church was using just before the
Reformation, and which she dug her heels in to defend in the Council of Trent,
about Christ’s Sacrifice being reoffered in the Eucharist in a propitiatory
manner effective for the living and the dead.
The Hyper-Protestants, however, pushed the pendulum too far in the
opposite direction.
In the Old Testament, God appointed the Levites as the
specific priests of His nation of priests Israel. He appointed various sacrifices to be
offered for different reasons and at different times. Not
all of these had to do with sin. As to
what was to be offered, there were basically three types. There were animal sacrifices, of course,
which with the death of the animal and the blood sprinkled on the altar – and
on the Day of Atonement on the Mercy Seat – prefigured Christ’s One
Sacrifice. There were also meal
offerings – meat offerings in the Authorized Bible – of grain or flour, and
drink offerings or libations, of wine. Whether or not the offerings were associated
with the sins of the people, the animals, the grain or flour, and the wine were
brought by the people to the Tabernacle/Temple as if the people were offering
the tribute of a meal to God. What was
not burned was reserved in accordance with the Mosaic Law as the food of the
priests.
In the New Testament, Jesus’ death on the Cross did what
none of the sacrifices for sin which had to be repeated could ever do. His
shed blood sprinkled in the Holy of Holies of the Heavenly Tabernacle after
which the earthly was patterned, did what the blood of bulls and goats could
never do. As the Agnes Dei, the Lamb of
God as John the Baptist called Him, He took away the sins of the world once and
for all. By fulfilling what they
prefigured, His death did away with animal sacrifices, blood sacrifices,
sacrifices for sin, once and for all.
Again, it was sacrifices for sin that were ended by Christ’s One
Sacrifice. It was not the entire
sacrificial system. The rest of the
sacrificial system was radically transformed and streamlined for the Church by
Christ’s One Sacrifice. Remember the
meal and drink offerings. Jesus told the
multitude that came to Him in Capernaum after the feeding of the five thousand that
He was the true Bread from Heaven, referencing the Manna of the Old Testament,
the Bread of Life and that they would need to eat His flesh and drink His
blood. How could they do that, though,
without violating all sorts of prohibitions, including the Noahic prohibition
against drinking blood? At the Last
Supper on the night of His betrayal, Jesus revealed the answer to His Apostles
as, at that Passover meal, He took the mazot, blessed it and broke it, and
distributed it to them saying that it was His broken body, and similarly
blessed the cup of wine before passing it around telling them that it was His
blood of the New Covenant shed for many for the remission of sins. The
other elements of the Levitical sacrificial system, the grain offerings and the
libations, were thus transformed into the bread and wine which would be the
means by which the Church would be fed from the life-giving food of Christ’s
Body and Blood, broken and shed for us, in the One True Sacrifice.
Jesus’ instructions to the Apostles at the Last Supper
therefore established them as the priesthood that would lead His Church which
would be a priesthood in a more general sense. Holy Communion in the Church under the New
Covenant took the place of the Levitical sacrifices in Israel under the Old
Covenant. Consider one of the few
passages in which Holy Communion is discussed at length if you doubt that this
is the role of Holy Communion in the Church.
In 1 Corinthians 10 St. Paul, warning the Corinthians to flee idolatry,
explains how the bread and cup of the Eucharist are the Body and Blood of
Christ which make those who partake, the Church, one body. (1 Cor. 10:16-17). He then immediately points to national
Israel and how they which eat of the sacrifices, i.e., the Levites, are
partakers of the altar (v. 18). He then
talks about how the pagan Gentiles sacrifice to idols and those who partake of
these sacrifices have fellowship with devils (vv. 19-20). His point, spelled out in verse 21, is that
partaking in the Lord’s cup and table is incompatible with partaking in the cup
and table of devils. What the form of
his argument shows is that Holy Communion is in the Church what the Levitical
sacrifices were in Israel and what sacrifices to idols were in the pagan
religion(s). This makes those whom
Christ commissioned to administer the Sacrament, the Apostles, and those they subsequently
ordained to partake in their ministry, priests.
It is not that in the Eucharist Jesus’ Sacrifice is again be
repeatedly offered up to God as a propitiation to take away sins. That was done once and for all at the Cross. It is rather that in the Eucharist that One
True Sacrifice becomes the food of God’s people. Jesus, by His death on the Cross, reversed
the direction of the sacrificial system.
In His One Sacrifice, He was both the Priest Who offered the Sacrifice
and the Victim Who was offered, but He was also God, the One Who received the
offering. This means that the One
Sacrifice that actually took sin away was not something offered by sinful man
to the God he had offended to appease Him, but an offering made on behalf of
sinful man by the very One they had offended and so was a gift from God to sinful man to reconcile
him to Himself. This effected a
reversal in direction in the New Testament Sacramental system from the Old
Testament sacrificial. In the old
system, the people brought the offerings to God through the priests. In the new system, God gives to the people
through the priests. Christ’s
Sacrifice, as the Sacrifice that propitiates God, i.e., satisfies the demands
of His justice against sin, can never and need never, be repeated. As the food that sustains believers, we are
in constant need of it for we are frail as long as we are in the flesh in this
world, and so God provides that we are fed by it repeatedly through the means
of the Sacrament. If the sacrificial system of the Old Covenant
required priests, all the more does the Sacrament of the New Covenant for the
substance is always greater than the shadow. (3)
Should a Hyper-Protestant object that the New Testament does
not explicitly designate the Apostolic ministry a priesthood I will answer that
this is not true. In the penultimate
chapter of the epistle to the Romans, St. Paul, in justifying the boldness with
which he had written to them, speaks of the grace of God given to him that:
I should be the
minister of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles, ministering the gospel of God, that
the offering up of the Gentiles might be acceptable, being sanctified by the
Holy Ghost. (Rom. 15:16)
The word rendered “minister” in our Authorized Bible is the
accusative form of λειτουργός. This
word, in which the origins of our word “liturgy” can be seen, means “one who
performs a λειτουργία, which word, compounded from the word for “people” and the
word for “work” means “public service”.
A λειτουργός was a public servant, which could mean various things,
among them civil servant and priest.
Obviously civil servant is not the intent here. That priest is what is intended is spelled
out by the verb translated “ministering” in our Authorized Bible, which word is
a participle form of ἱερουργέω a verb meaning “to do the work of a priest” that
is compounded from the word for priest and the word for work. That the final clause further adds to St. Paul’s
depiction of his ministry as a priestly one in this verse should be obvious
even without reference to the Greek.
That this kind of language is not used more widely of the
Apostolic ministry in the New Testament is most likely due to the fact that the
bulk of the New Testament was composed prior to the destruction of Jerusalem in
AD 70. Up until that time the Temple
was standing and the Old Testament sacrifices were being offered on its altar. The New Testament writers, not wanting to
confuse the Apostolic ministry with that of the Levites, avoided using terms
like ἱερεύς for the Apostolic ministry for the most part while the Levitical
priesthood was still operating. In the
verse in which St. Paul describes his ministry this way, it is emphasized that
his mission is to the Gentiles, eliminating the potential for such confusion.
Whatever disagreements led to the breaking of fellowship in
the fifth and eleventh centuries between the ancient Churches they all agree
that the Church is a visible society of believers, governed by the Apostles and
their successors the bishops, who with the order of presbyters under them,
comprise a priesthood whose chief priestly duty is to feed the flock of God’s
Church with the Body and Blood of Christ through the Sacrament of the Lord’s
Table, a consensus shared by the Church Fathers and, as we have just seen,
supported by the New Testament.
Turning back now to the fourth form of Apostolicity, the one
emphasized by all Protestants and the only form of Apostolicity accepted by the
Hyper-Protestants, this is Apostolicity of doctrine. To the first and second generations of
Church Fathers the idea that this could be separated from the Apostolic
government of the Church would have been an alien idea. The Apostles had guarded the Church against
false doctrine, those who rebelled against the Apostolic teachings and
government and broke away and formed their own groups were guilty of
soul-damning schism and heresy, and those whom the Apostles admitted to their
government as their successors were entrusted with continuing this ministry of
guarding the flock against the wolves of heresy. The formulation of the conciliar Creed in
the first and second Ecumenical Councils of the fourth century was the outcome
of the faithfulness of the bishops of the early centuries to this charge. The Creed contains everything that we, faced
with the challenge of liberalism in the last couple of centuries, have come to
call the “fundamentals” or the “essentials” of the Faith. The Hyper-Protestant attempt to fall back on
Apostolicity of doctrine after rejecting everything else that has been regarded
as essential to Apostolicity for 1500 years was doomed to fail, therefore, in
that it required condemning as unfaithful to Apostolic doctrine a Church that
confesses the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed confessed by all the ancient
Churches. The truths over which the mainstream continental
Reformation was fought – that the Scriptures as the written Word of God possess
an infallible authority to which the Church is accountable, that salvation is a
free gift given to us in Jesus Christ that we receive by faith rather than a
reward that we must earn, and that as such we can be confident in our salvation
rather than kept perpetually on a treadmill of good works running after a hope
that is always just out of our reach like the grapes of Tantalus – are, of
course, vitally important. It was
further necessary that they be re-emphasized when they were in the sixteenth
century because by that time the Bishop of Rome had stooped to sending
hucksters around to raise funds for his building project by literally selling
salvation. Hyper-Protestantism,
however, goes beyond the Reformers’ legitimate outrage over the Bishop of
Rome’s antics and how they were compromising the freedom of salvation by the
grace of God and condemns what is
genuinely Catholic, in this case the Sacramental ministry of the Church’s
Apostolic priesthood, shared by all the ancient pre-1500 Churches not just
Rome. There is no conflict between the Church’s
Apostolic priesthood administering the grace of God through the Sacraments and
the Gospel of salvation as a free gift given to us in Jesus Christ and received
by faith provided it is understood that the Sacraments do the same thing as
preaching the Word does, that is, brings the grace of God in the Gospel to us
to be received by faith and are not “works” that we do to earn our salvation. (4) Meanwhile, the Hyper Protestants who accuse
Catholics – not just Romanists – of “works salvation”, generally teach either
decisionism or Bezite theology.
Decisionism is when the Gospel is preached as a precursor to inviting
people to be converted by making a decision of some sort, an act of their will,
usually described in every possible way other than with the New Testament
language of believing or faith. Bezite
theology (5) is the idea that God gave Jesus as a Saviour only for certain
people whom He had pre-selected, that Jesus died only for those people, and
that people can only know – with something less than the certainty that came
with the Gospel in the doctrine of St. John (1 Jn. 5:13) and the Reformers – that
they are part of the lucky few by seeing the evidence of their election in the
fruit of grace in their lives, i.e., their works. Both of these doctrines, are more serious
offenses against the Gospel of God’s freely given grace in Jesus Christ and
more worthy of being labelled “works salvation” than the Sacramental ministry
of the Apostolic priesthood of the Catholic Church. Hyper-Protestants, therefore, are like those
hurling stones in a glass house, when they accuse Churches that confess the
ancient Creeds of infidelity to Apostolic truth for teaching that God has
ordained the Church, her Apostolic priesthood, and her Sacraments as means of
bringing the grace of the Gospel to the faithful.
We turn now to the note of Unity. We have already said much about this under
the notes of Catholicity and Apostolicity.
We have seen that in the New Testament the Church was founded as a
united visible society in Jerusalem, that when she was scattered in the
persecution that followed after the martyrdom of St. Stephen she was still
thought of as One Church. Her members
that fled to Damascus continued to meet there as the Church and the Church they
met as was not thought of as a new Church distinct from that back in Jerusalem
nor as being a part of the Church but as being the Church, the whole unified
society, even though most of her members were elsewhere and her governors, the
Apostles, were back in Jerusalem. This
way of looking at her persists throughout the New Testament. The word Church is pluralized only when the
intent is to indicate the Church in more than one location but not necessarily
the whole Church in all locations.
Otherwise the Church in each location is the Church. St. Paul never writes to “the part of the
Church” that is in Galatia, Rome, etc.
He writes to the Church in each of these places as the whole society. This will be important to remember when we
come to consider what has happened to the Unity of the Church through history.
First, however, let us consider a few things that St. Paul
has to say about the Unity of the Church.
In his epistle to the Ephesians one of the Apostle’s key themes is the
“mystery” whereby in the Church, Gentiles and Jews are united into one body,
and he has already discussed this at length by the time we get to the fourth
chapter. In that chapter he urges them
to endeavour “to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (v. 3). The
Holy Ghost here is shown to be the source of the unity of the Church, something
that Jesus Himself had alluded to in His prayer on the night of His betrayal,
and which St. Paul would immediately go on to reiterate in saying “There is one
body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling” (v.
4). The image here is of how a body and
the spirit that animates a body together make up a whole person. The Holy Ghost is the Spirit that dwells in
the Body that is the Church and makes her One Body. At this point we might recall that the ninth
Article belongs to the section of the Creed that pertains to the Holy Ghost in
which the Church is the first thing confessed after the direct confession of
the Holy Ghost Himself. The most
important part of the ministry of the Holy Ghost is the effecting of the union
of believers with Christ in His Body, the Church.
St. Paul proceeds to list other unities of the Church – “One
Lord, one faith, one baptism, One God and Father of all, who is above all,
and through all, and in you all.” (vv. 5-6).
The Holy Ghost Who indwells the Church, making her One Body, unites her
with her One Lord, Jesus Christ through the one faith she confesses and the one
baptism that is the visible sign of union with Christ and His Church being to
the New Covenant what Circumcision was to the Old (Col. 2:11-12), and to
complete the Trinitarian Unity, she is also united to her God, the Father, Who
is above, through, and in her. To
complete the picture we can add to this what we have already seen how elsewhere
in writing to the Corinthians Saint Paul speaks of how we are One Body because
we all share in the one bread of Holy Communion. Clearly St. Paul’s idea of the Church as the
One Body of Christ is world’s removed from any notion of an invisible
connection between believers as individuals whose Christianity is a “personal
relationship”, i.e., one-on-one between the individual believer and Jesus
Christ and is rather the Catholic view held by all the ancient pre-Reformation
Churches.
Speaking of the ancient pre-Reformation Churches in the
plural, however, brings us around to a sticky question concerning the Unity of
the Church. What are we to make of the
fact that there are a plurality of Churches, each of which has organic
continuity with the original Church in Jerusalem (6), each of which confesses
the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, in each of which the Gospel Sacraments are
administered by a priesthood ordained and governed by bishops whose governing
and priestly authority goes back to the Apostles, each of which, however,
regards herself as the One Church, not in the New Testament sense that the
Church in Ephesus and the Church in Colossae were each herself the One Church
but not to the exclusion of the other, but in the sense of being the Catholic
Church, outside of which there are no other?
To answer this we must consider what the New Testament has
to say about schism. Σχίσμα, to which
our English word “scissors” is etymologically related, means “a cleft, rent, or
division”. It occurs in the New
Testament where it is usually translated by words like “rent”, “tear” or “division”
in our Authorized Bible although it is transliterated in 1 Corinthians 12:25
which speaks of ecclesiastical schism.
Ecclesiastical schism is treated very seriously in the New Testament. It is a sin against the Unity of the Body of
Christ. There are two types of
ecclesiastical schism. These are schism
within the Church, and schism from the Church. The first is the type of schism St. Paul
rebukes as having formed within the Church in Corinth. Factions or parties had developed, each
claiming to adhere to a different teacher – teachers who would have joined St.
Paul in rebuking this factionalism – but it had not reached the point where
anybody had left the Church.
It is St. John who writes about schism from the Church in his first epistle. He does not use the word, but he describes
the thing very well:
Little children, it is
the last time: and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are
there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time. They went out from us, but they were not of
us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but
they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us.
(1 Jn. 2:18-19)
Obviously, this type of schism is a far more serious offense
against the Unity of the Church than schism within the Church. St. John does not write to the schismatics calling on them to repent. He writes about
the schismatics in the harshest of terms to the Church which these schismatics
are no longer part of, warning the Church against them. These schismatics were guilty, not just of
schism, but of heresy – in this case the denial that Jesus is the Christ (v.
22).
In the earliest centuries the Church had to deal with both
types of schism. Indeed, in what is
probably the earliest extra-Scriptural Christian document extent, one that was
considered for a time for inclusion in the canon, St. Paul’s companion St.
Clement, who was Bishop of Rome around the time St. John was finishing the New
Testament canon with the Book of Revelation, wrote to the Corinthian Church to rebuke
them for having taken the schism against which St. Paul had written to the extreme
of deposing their ordained leaders, which St. Clement likened to the rebellion
of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram against Moses in the wilderness. Slightly over a decade later, St. Ignatius
of Antioch in his epistles stressed the need for each of the Churches to which he
wrote to adhere firmly and loyally to their bishop and his presbyters in order
to remain true to the Apostolic faith, making the same connection between
departure from the Apostolic leadership of the Church and departure from the faith
that his own teacher, St. John the Apostle, had made. A second generation disciple of St. John,
St. Irenaeus of Lyon who had sat under St. Polycarp’s ministry in the Church of
Smyrna, is most remembered today for his Adversus
Haereses which discusses several of the heretical sects that had departed
from the Church in schism in the first century and a half of Christianity. He follows St. Justin Martyr in tracing the
origins of these back to the Simon Magus who had been baptized by St. Philip in
the Samaritan Church in the eighth chapter of Acts before being rebuked by St.
Peter for trying to purchase the Apostolic authority. He spells out the doctrine of Apostolic
succession and closely connects it with the episcopate’s role in safeguarding
the orthodoxy of the faith.
When the Church of Rome and the Eastern Orthodox Church
excommunicated each other in the middle of the eleventh century it has ever
since been called the Great Schism. Each side regarded it as a schism from the Church rather than a schism within the Church and took the position
that they were the Church and the other side was guilty of schism and now
outside the Church. An examination of
the history of the Schism and the issues at stake points to the conclusion that
both sides are mistaken on this, that neither side was guilty of the sort of
thing St. John wrote about, both were and still are guilty of the other kind of
schism, and that thus neither are the One Church in Catholic sense, both are
the One Church in the non-exclusionary sense that the Church in Philippi and
the Church in Thessalonica were each the One Church in the New Testament, and
that their mutual excommunications of each other were on both sides an abuse of
the Keys neither of which were therefore respected in Heaven. A
similar conclusion, I think can be drawn about the earlier schism between the
Churches that would not agree to the Definition of Chalcedon and the
Chalcedonian Churches, especially since recent dialogue has shown that the
non-Chalcedonian Churches do not teach the Monophysite heresy condemned by the
fouth Ecumenical Council as the Chalecedonian Churches had until recently
thought they did. With regards to the
Protestant Reformation, the English Church to which I belong made every effort
in her Reformation to retain the Apostolic government and priesthood and the
Gospel Sacraments and not to start a secession movement from the Catholic
Church but merely to no longer acknowledge the universal jurisdiction that the
Bishop of Rome, contrary to the canons of the Ecumenical Councils, and the practice
of the early centuries of Christianity, had usurped. The Church of Rome’s excommunication of the
English Church was, therefore, another abuse of the Keys that is not respected
in Heaven and, indeed, the Roman Church was so corrupt and abusive of the Keys
in the sixteenth century that all of her excommunications of the Protestants can
be similarly disregarded, even though with a few exceptions, such as in the
Kingdom of Sweden, the Magisterial Reformation was not conducted with such care
to maintain continuity and the Apostolic order as in England, and the fanatics
who declared that the Magisterial Reformation had not gone far enough and started
their own sects in secessionist movements can hardly avoid the charge that they
committed schism from the Church rather than within it. The Roman Church has made arguments against
the validity of the English Church’s Apostolic orders and Sacraments that have
repeatedly and soundly been rebutted, although sadly, in the last century,
Anglican leaders in the UK and North America have gone out of their way to
undermine us as a Church by breaking from Catholic – not Roman, Catholic by St.
Vincent of Lerins’ description of that which is held by the Church “everywhere,
at all time, and by all” – teaching and practice in adopting liberal positions
on a number of matters which all have to do with sex in one way or another –
contraception, ordaining women to the priesthood and episcopate, promoting the increasingly
absurd demands of the alphabet soup gang, etc.
Triumphant as the liberals seem to be in the English Church in the UK,
Canada, and United States right now, as the Arians seemed to be in much of the
period between the first two Ecumenical Councils in the fourth century, orthodoxy
prevails in the worldwide Anglican Communion which inspires hope that it will
overcome here too.
The English Church never claimed to be the One Church in the
sense of being the Catholic Church to the exclusion of all others, merely to be
what she was, the One Church in her jurisdiction in the same way the Galatian,
Corinthian, Thessalonian, Churches were the One Church in theirs. In the nineteenth century, the Reverend
William Palmer explained the claims of the English Church with regards to herself
and to other Churches that had the Apostolic ministry and confessed the
orthodox faith in the Creed in terms of branches on a single tree. While his Treatise on the Church of Christ (1838) was overall helpful and
needed, the metaphor created the potential for confusion in that it is very
similar to a metaphor used in the New Testament in regards to a different
sticky aspect of the Unity of the Church.
This is the question of the relationship between Old Testament Israel and
the New Testament Church.
This is a difficult question for a number of reasons. Israel and the Church are described in the
Bible in ways that are at times the polar opposite of each other. Israel was a nation in the ethnic sense of
the word – a people with a common bloodline, common language, common religion,
etc. – that was told by God to be separate and distinct from the nations around
them, to the point of wearing distinct attire and eating a distinct diet. The Church, by contrast, is a society in
which people from every tribe and nation are joined in One with no distinction
between them. These are hardly descriptions
of the same thing, yet both are called the People of God, and St. Peter in his
account of the Church as the People of God, written to Churches that were
largely Jewish in their membership, uses the language of Old Testament Israel
in a way that indicates continuity between Israel and the Church. St. Paul also speaks of continuity between
Israel and the Church when he speaks of Israel as an olive tree, from which
branches – the Jews who did not believe in Jesus - were cut off and to which
other branches – the Gentiles who believed in Jesus – were added, thus making
the Church the continuation of Israel.
The Church therefore has to be the continuation of Israel in some sense. She
is neither something completely new, created to replace Israel after God cast
her off forever in judgement for rejecting Christ, as has sometimes been taught
based on the Parable of the Vineyard, nor is she one of two distinct peoples of
God co-existing with the other Israel at the same time as dispensationalists
teach. Both of these extremes are
precluded by St. Paul’s metaphor.
If the Church is somehow a continuation of Israel, how then
do we explain the fact that Jesus spoke of her in the future tense as something
He would build and the New Testament seems quite clear that she began on
Pentecost when the Holy Ghost came down and united the disciples with the
Ascended Christ in One Body?
There are two aspects to the continuity of Israel and the
Church. When the Church was founded on
Pentecost all of her members were Jews who believe in Jesus. The Church’s membership consisted strictly of
believing Jews until the Church in Jerusalem was scattered after St. Stephen’s
martyrdom. After this, Samaritans were
added to the Church under the ministry of St. Philip, then, after the Holy
Ghost sent St. Peter to preach to Cornelius the centurion, the Gentiles were
added, having also received the Holy Ghost after believing and being
baptized. In this early history of the
Church we can see what St. Paul was talking about with his metaphor. The Church was formed from the believing
remnant of Israel to which others were later added. St. Paul used the metaphor to warn Gentile
believers who had become the majority in the Church not to be arrogant towards
the Jews. This warning was for Gentile
believers qua Gentiles, not to the
Church qua Church. This needs to be understood because all
metaphors can be stretched too far.
Every time something in the Old Testament corresponds to something in
the New, that which is in the Old Testament is a type and shadow of that which
is in the New, which is the reality and substance. Israel is the type and shadow, the Church is
the reality and the substance. The
danger in stretching the olive tree metaphor is of reversing this.
The other aspect of the continuity of Israel and the Church
has to do with the fact that when the Church was founded at Pentecost by the
Holy Ghost uniting the disciples on earth in One Body with their head the
Ascended Christ in Heaven the believers in the Old Testament, who had been
retroactively redeemed by Christ in the Atonement and taken to Heaven with Him
after the Harrowing of Hell (Hades), were similarly joined by the Holy Ghost to
the same Church. In the epistle to the
Hebrews, St. Paul – yes, he wrote Hebrews – provides numerous examples, in the
eleventh chapter, of Old Testament figures living out their faith, whom he
describes at the beginning of the twelfth chapter as “so great a cloud of
witnesses” to us who are running the race of faith in the present. Later in the chapter he describes the
destination of this race, the heavenly Jerusalem where the “general assembly
and church of the firstborn” await “the spirits of just men made perfect” (Heb.
12:22-23). While this might seem like
an exception to what I said earlier about Ἐκκλησία never being used with the
meaning of “the invisible Church” in the New Testament what we see here is not
the “invisible Church” concept of theology, an aggregate of individual
believers as opposed to an organized society, but the idea denoted by the
expression “The Communion of Saints” in the Apostles’ Creed. This is the ultimate meaning of Unity as it
pertains to the Church. The society
Jesus Christ founded, His Church, is a visible and organized society, but is
present not just on the earth visible to us, but in Heaven which is not. (7)
The final note of the Church is Holiness. This is a word that is often confused with “righteousness”
and “purity”. These words denote qualities
associated with Holiness rather than Holiness itself. The words in Greek and Latin that we
translate as Holy denote being separate and apart. To be separate and apart means that there
has to be something from which you are separate and apart. We might identify that something as sin or,
if we want to be more general, that which is bad or evil, and we would not be
entirely wrong but this is not the entire picture. God is Holy.
In the hymn of the Seraphim in the sixth chapter of Isaiah, God is
thrice proclaimed to be Holy. God was
Holy, however, before any part of His Creation fell into sin. Holiness, therefore, is more than just
separation from sin. We might say that
it is separation from the common and mundane.
In the case of that which is created, the separation from that is Holiness is the result of a
separation unto, namely separation unto
God. God commanded the Israelites to
keep the Sabbath, the seventh day, Holy.
This did not mean “don’t sin on Saturday”. They weren’t supposed to sin any day. It meant that they were to reserve that day
for God and rest on it from that which was not sinful but appropriate to every
other day, particularly work. It is the
Lord’s Day, the first day of the week, that we keep as Holy in the Church
because it is the day of the Resurrection.
We keep it Holy by reserving it for meeting in the Church to worship
God, hear the Word preached, and partake of the Lord’s Table. In the Tabernacle of Israel, God ordained
that various items be made and placed that were to be consecrated as Holy,
which meant that they were to be used only in His service and not put to
ordinary use. In the Church we
consecrate spaces, such as the buildings in which we meet, for God’s use. When we confess that the Church is Holy in
the Creed we mean that she is the society which God founded and established as
His Own. The Church, which remember
means assembly or congregation, is not called to meet together for political,
economic, social, or cultural reasons, although her meeting together may end up
having impact in these areas, but is called together to worship God, to offer
up our prayers, to hear God’s Word taught and proclaimed, and to partake of the
Sacrament of the Lord’s Table. Purity
and righteousness, may, and we trust, pray, and hope will, ensue, but it is
this being set apart from worldly – even in the non-morally negative sense of
the word – ends, and being set apart unto God, and of course in her being
indwelt by the Holy Ghost in which the Church’s Holiness lies.
(1) This
alternate image of the Church as the future Bride of Christ is found in
prophetic passages and parables in St. Matthew’s Gospel and the book of
Revelation. The passages in St. Paul
that use similar marriage imagery speak of the present relationship between
Christ and His Church.
(2) There
is a textual discrepancy here with some manuscripts containing the singular.
(3) That
it is to the New Testament, where the substantial is to be found, rather than
the shadowy types of the Old Testament, that we must look to understand the
true nature of priesthood is a point stressed by R. C. Moberly in Ministerial Priesthood: Chapters
(Preliminary to a Study of the Ordinal) On the Rationale of Ministry and the
Meaning of Christian Priesthood, 1910.
(4) For
a good explanation of how the Sacraments do this see Francis Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, Volume III, 1953,
in particular the section entitled “The Means of Grace”, pp. 101-219, and the follow
up sections on “Law and Gospel”, pp. 220-252, “Holy Baptism”, pp. 253-289, and
“The Lord’s Supper”, pp. 290-393. Or
if you prefer a shorter version you can check out John Theodore Mueller’s work
of the same title, published as a one volume epitome of Pieper’s in 1936 almost
two decades before the English version of Pieper’s was available (the original
German had been published from 1917-1924).
Franz Pieper had been professor of theology and president of Concordia
Theological Seminary and a past president of the Missouri Synod of the
Lutherans. This work’s influence in the
Missouri Synod may help explain their unusual success in combatting liberalism
in the last century. Being German
Lutheran rather than Scandanavian Lutheran it is very deficient in its
ecclesiology, but is excellent in its soteriology.
(5) What
I have here called Bezite theology is more commonly known as “Calvinism”. Those who teach this sort of theology are
more properly the disciples of Theodore Beza, however, than of John
Calvin. While Calvin had a strong view
of election and predestination is predicated on God’s choice rather than
anything in us he taught that God worked His purposes in election through the
means of a Gospel which proclaimed to everybody that God had given them a
Saviour in Jesus and that Jesus had died for them. He warned that that it was dangerous to
consider election except by looking at Christ and that looking for proof of
election in ourselves was the road to perdition. He told people worried about
whether they were part of God’s elect to look to Christ and they would see
their election reflected back in Him as a mirror. (Institutes
of the Christian Religion, III.24.v)
(6) The
Church was founded as a community in Jerusalem.
When her members were scattered, wherever they found themselves they
continued to meet as the Church, and thus those meetings in other places were
the Church in organic continuity with the Church in Jerusalem, the same society
now meeting elsewhere whether other members were joined to her in the same way
as they originally had been in Jerusalem.
This is what is meant by organic continuity. It means that the society is organically the
same as the original. This is a distinct
concept from Apostolic succession although the two are related. Apostolic succession is the admission of
others to the governing authority originally held by the Apostles by those to
whom it had already been passed on from the Apostles. Apostolic succession is organic continuity
as it pertains to the governing order of the Church rather than as it pertains
to the society as a whole. Apostolic succession has generally stood for both
meanings throughout Church history because there cannot be Apostolic succession
where organic continuity of the Church is absent and so Apostolic succession
guarantees organic continuity.
(7) “No
such antithetic contrast between the visible Church and an invisible one made
up of the elect can be found in the New Testament. The elect are there repeatedly identified
with the baptized members of the visible Church (Eph. 1:4-6; Col. 3:12; 1 Thess. 1:4,; 1 Pet. 1:2; 2:9; 5:13), and
the application of the term “Church” to those who attain to the heavenly
Jerusalem (Heb. 12:22-23) plainly
does not denote another Church, separable from the visible Church, but (like
the local applications above mentioned) is a relative and analogical
designation of an assembly yonder that is a true part and embodiment of the
universal Church. That not all those who
now belong to the visible Church will enter the heavenly Jerusalem is plainly
set forth in Scripture (Heb. 6:4-6; cf.
Matt. 13:24-30, 41-42; John 15:6; 1 Cor. 9:27; Phil. 2:12; 1 Pet. 4:17-18),
but the explanation lies in their being cut off from the Church because of
their incurable wickedness, not in there being a separate ekklesia, with other than baptismal conditions of admission. In later parlance, the Church “militant,”, “expectant,”
and “triumphant” is one ekklesia,
into which entrance is obtained by Baptism, from which obstinate sinners will
be finally cut off, and the perfection of which is realized in its triumphant
part and stage in Heaven (Eph. 5:25-23;
Rev. 19:7-9). Francis J. Hall, Anglican Dogmatics, Vol. II, 2021, p.
316. This is a condensed 2 volume
edition of what was originally published in ten volumes as Dogmatic Theology from 1907-1922, the condensing being done by John
A. Porter. It was published by Nashotah
House Press. This is an unusual work in
that in the Anglican tradition works that cover multiple doctrines tend to take
the form of commentaries on either the Creed or the Articles of Religion and when
they do take this format are seldom called Dogmatics or Dogmatic Theology for which Dogmatics is
short. Dogmatic Theology is the term
preferred in continental Europe and the languages spoken there – Pieper’s Christian Dogmatics referenced in footnote 3, vide supra, was originally
written in German - for what is usually called Systematic Theology in English,
although there has been a recent tendency to avoid using either “Systematic” or
“Dogmatic”, presumably with “Theology” being the next word to be dropped. Hall's Anglican Dogmatics is a good complement to Pieper's Lutheran one, being very strong in the area where Pieper is weak.
