Category: Church

The Christian people is a vast assembly made up of all the members of Christ, both those who for us are in the past and the future. All the members of that assembly, the whole Christ, intend that we join them. Our full identity is there with them. They intend to make us present there with them, and the pass on to us the means by which we may fully take on our identity and take up our place in that assembly.

This future and final assembly makes itself present to the present world in two modes. It passes on the manyness and diversity of the whole Christ to each eucharistic congregation present in each location in the world. And it makes present to the world the unity of the whole Christ in the one indivisible Church in which each of these congregations participate. The Church participates in the unity and plurality of the whole Christ. It witnesses to the manyness and oneness of Christ, and it passes on to the world the manyness and unity it receives from Christ. The Church supplies the world simultaneously with both unity and plurality, identity and difference. The world receives its own unity and diversity, and with them its very existence, from the whole assembly of Christ. This act of witness shows that, in itself, apart from Christ, the world is not yet either one or many. Without the present assembly of the Church, present in every part of the world, both the unity and diversity of the world are in doubt.

The assembly of Christ’s people makes itself present in the eucharistic community in each locality. In its petitions it makes each locality present to God, and so that locality receives its existence. Each congregation that confesses Christ-with-his-whole-people, receives the discipline and shaping of the whole Church. The eucharistic community that receives the shaping of the whole Christ makes the whole future cosmic community present there in that locality. To participate in the whole it must seek Christ in every corner of his worldwide Church and beg each part of the body to give it that gift of Christ that it has not yet received. Thus each particular part of the world, represented and made present in the assembly called before God, seeks and receives the discipline of Christ learned and exercised worldwide and through all generations. Next we have to link this universality to the authority and discipline of Christ, that the Lord exercises through his entire Church.

So far I have said that in the eucharist we receive our place in the one loaf of Christ glorified together with his people. In the eucharist all are called and gathered together in Christ, and through him we will be connected to, and so become alive to, all other people. When we are at last connected to one another, we will no longer be isolated entities, are our life be be supplied to us without limit.

It is not only that we are being fitted together in a vast living company of people, but that this company is being fitted to the cosmos. Humanity and nature are in process of reconciliation and integration. The church and the cosmos, like two halves of a single piece of engineering, are being brought together to form one vast entity. We are learning how to get into time with the cosmos, and the cosmos is being brought into synch with us. When humanity and nature are fitted together, and move in step, they will make a single beautiful working whole, called ‘creation’. But in giving the loaf to you, he is making it complete. It is not complete without you, but as you take hold of it and it is so joined to you, it is made complete. You are the completion of the cosmos. So the eucharistic loaf is a world-loaf – all creation united with Christ. We will be complete, and live with, rather than against, the order of creation. When Christ is all in all, we will all be in all.

This bread, which we now understand is the loaf, shows the world the present and the future of the church, which is linked to the future of the cosmos. The loaf we see held up in the eucharist is the cosmos. It is shown to us so we can acknowledge that it is not yet complete, but still fragmented. It is waiting for us, and for many others. (The verb ‘shows’ is scarcely adequate to the case, but I’ll come back to it when I talk about participation and our Amen).

The Lord wants us to acknowledge that it is not yet whole loaf, and that we are all waiting for the rest of God’s creation to come in and join this loaf. This incomplete loaf represents his commission, ‘Go into all the world’: the mass is commission and mission. We have to go out and get these many others and bring them back with us and present them to God here at this point. That loaf is one half of a tally stick: the point is to come up with the other half. So this bread is work. This work of bringing these many in is what is going on in the lifting them up (anaphora) or offering them. This means that we present them to the Lord for his inspection. This work is Christ’s work. It is not our work apart from Christ. It is an invitation to participate in Christ, and so also in his work, to take it for ourselves, and to enjoy with him this labour of his along with its outcome.

Only within this assembly, that recognises and gives the proper name to all things as creatures of God, does this by participating (publicly for the benefit of world) in Christ’s office of lifting up (anaphora) the world to God. Only the assembly-member (represented by the bishop) in the assembly can carry out this priestly office. Thus only the bishop is the priest, and only when all those around him, all the people of God, accompany him in this act, so it is their act because his, his because theirs, their joint act because the act of Christ. In the next post I will talk about the significance of the bishop.

Jesus does not come to the individual believer alone, but to his whole community. And he is not merely present to us, but brings us into this community and incorporates us in this body. It is Jesus Christ who comes to me, anointed (christed) with his whole people. As members of that people, we are part of that christ-ing.

We exist, you and I, purely because Christ holds us in his regard. He never loses concentration, and his regard is our whole life-supply. Though we may be hidden from all other people, dead to them, yet we are sustained in life by Christ. He will bring us to them, and them to us, so that as we are increasingly united to one another we become alive with the complete life of our Lord. We will live, and flourish, and enable one another to flourish without limit and gloriously, as his regard brings us into connection with one another. In his regard we will participate in one another, and live to and from one another.

Now Christ calls us to receive from him all whom he calls together in his eucharist. Like Jacob sending his flocks ahead to Esau, Christ sends us all these people ahead of him to us. To receive him we have to receive them, all of them, refusing none. They are all of them part of the loaf he intends for us. As we take them from him, as his members, they become part of us and we become part of them. We will receive our name and identity from them, and cannot attempt to be ourselves without them. We may not define ourselves by any more exclusive definition or smaller group. The identity that we will receive from this vast company will make us universal beings, for Christâ??s is the true and universal eucharist.

In the eucharist we pray and ask God for the whole of future body of Christ. We look forward to all those who are to come, and who will make that body complete, and we wait, and mourn, for those who are not yet present. Their absence means that we are not yet present as we want to be. The whole Christ, and our own very being, is waiting for them.

For us now the eucharist is exclusive, partial and anticipatory, for this kingdom has not yet come. Our way into this communion is through the exclusive path of the cross of Christ, in which the many exclusive groups and false universals (â??catholicitiesâ??) are stripped off us.

My caricature continues:

Catholic and Protestant deliberations on the eucharist tend to focus on the encounter of two individuals, Jesus Christ and the believer. In this encounter Christ makes himself present in the form of the wafer consecrated before us. In the eucharist Jesus comes to me in an event of transformation in which ordinary bread is made extraordinary. But it is not the bread which is being transformed here, but the Christian. The Christian is being made holy, transformed from one degree of Christlikeness to another, from partial to whole and perfect.

The loaf does not represent Christ individualised and therefore without us. The loaf represents Christ – and us with him. That loaf is him and us together. It represents us in part as we are (broken) and in part as we shall be (whole). Thus the loaf represents all humanity recapitulated in Christ, who together make the one. It is the Christ-and-his-people loaf, the Christ-in-his-kingdom loaf.

The resurrection does not just mean that one day my little body will be made to stand upright again. It is that I will be raised to you, and you will be raised to me, so that the relationship we once had will be restored, and the relationship that we never had will now begin. I will be alive because you will supply me with this life: you will be my source of life and I will be your source of life. This will be so because we will both be connected to Christ, who is the source for all of us, and he will give and receive us back from one another again, authenticating our reception of one another.

I have been running away from people my whole life long. But in the event of the resurrection I am turned around so that I run slap into those very people I have been fleeing. Our collision and sudden encounter is what the resurrection is, for me and for them. In this encounter we are brought into relationship with all others, and so transformed.

We are being brought into relationship with those who are (presently) living and with those who are (to us) dead. They are dead to us and to each other, but they are not dead to Christ. Even separated by death from all other persons, they are alive, because Christ does not end the relationship he has with them; as long as Christ does not let them go, they are sustained and cannot finally die. Christ does not believe in death; he does not give it an inch, and he will not allow its individualizing and isolating to prevail over us.

It is not that I am being transformed as a merely individual entity. Rather I am being turned outwards so that I can no longer be thought of as someone cut off and isolated from others. I am being adapted to fit each other living person. We are all of us being fitted to one another. Resurrection means that I am brought into living relationship with, and so made alive to, every other person, and they to me. The (future) body of Christ will be made of every living person. We are being broken out of our present partial and sectarian community and brought into a much bigger one, indeed into the universal community. Our small local sectarian loaf is being re-dissolved and baked into a much bigger loaf – one that is made of all.

[cont.]

Chris keeps nudging me towards saying something reckless about catholicity and ‘full communion with Rome’. His gambit is ‘Catholicism with a small “c” is incoherent without Catholicism with a big “C.”.’ I have resisted for months, for surely a real friend would not ask me to do anything so foolish. But now for your entertainment (ready with that outrage?) I am going to take a couple of posts to caricature and contrast two different ways of thinking about the church. Here goes:

The Western church begins its ecclesiology with consideration of the priest, the people and either the eucharistic host (or bible, depending on which is your side of the Reformation divide). It sees the eucharistic bread as one single wafer, broken for each individual communicant (or, the bible immediately open and comprehensible to the individual believer). Its ecclesiology begins with the church hierarchy, with the individual priest at the local level, and the pope at the worldwide level. The priest consecrates the bread and the people are formed by its reception. The pope holds the church together, making all these people and congregations one church. The logic here is that, though the authority of the priest is given by the pope and validated by him, priest and pope are individuals, but the pope is more so, his greater universal individuality sourcing and validating the individuality of each church in each locality (Yes, it is caricature, but I am trying not to take too long a run-up to what I want to say – this is only a blog).

On this logic the people are the church because the priest, or the pope, ministers to them. His ministry makes them who they are: he is not only the source of their unity but of their existence as church. The Western church makes this basic assumption of the singleness of the priest, and of the pope, and assumes that the manyness of the Christian people derive from it. Unity occurs at the expense of diversity.

The Protestant Reformers insisted that the people are made the people of God by baptism, the direct action of God, not by the ministry of the hierarchy. The laity do not depend on the hierarchy for their existence as the people of God. But despite its proper stress on the people of God, there was some part of the gospel that the Reformers did not adequately recover. They did not manage to show that the people of God are not only the recipients of the gospel, but also the form of the gospel. The manyness of the people of God is caused by the gospel because the gospel is Christ united with his people. He is never without them and they are never without him. They are never known without him, and he is never known without them. The gospel is the manyness of Christ’s people.

In the Western half of the church we have this basic and very deep assumption of a oneness or unity that occurs at the expense of diversity. Although the diversity is expressed, Western theology does not make clear that the diversity is not subordinate to the unity. It does not tell us clearly enough that plurality and unity are equally fundamental. To put it at its very bluntest, the Western church fails to tell us that the people, and included with them the leadership of the church (and not the leadership of the church without the people) who make the unity of the church. This is to say that Christ-united-with-his-people, never one without the other, who are the church. Instead we are left with the impression that the pope makes the church but the church does not make the pope, and the Reformers did not succeed in getting rid of this assumption from the deepest level of the logic of ecclesiology. This is implicit assumption, an aspect of the logic of the Western church – for no part of the Western church teaches this explicitly. But this logic holds good not only for the pope but it is also the logic of the position of every minister and pastor before every congregation. As such it is denial of the gospel embedded in the form and structure of the church.

So next I have to show that the Eastern Orthodox are the guardians of some part of the gospel, and of the logic, of the gospel, embodied in the public form of the church, that we Westerners have yet to learn. I will call this ‘catholicity’. [cont.]

Father Thomas Hopko has produced a very significant statement of what is outstanding between the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches. I have plucked four paragraphs from a nine-page document.

The pope would also make it clear that Christ’s crucifixion was not a payment of the debt of punishment that humans allegedly owe to God for their sins. He would rather teach that Christ’s self-offering to his Father was the saving, atoning and redeeming payment of the perfect love, trust, obedience, gratitude and glory that humans owe to God, which is all that God desires of them for their salvation.

WOW

â??The pope would also assure all Christians that the bishop of Rome will never do or teach anything on his own authority, “from himself and not from the consensus of the church (ex sese et non ex consensu ecclesiae).” He would promise to serve in his presidency solely as the spokesperson for all the bishops in apostolic succession who govern communities of believers who have chosen them to serve, and whose validity and legitimacy as bishops depend solely on their fidelity to the Gospel in communion with their predecessors in the episcopal office, and with each other.â??

RIGHT

â??The bishop of Rome would be chosen by the church of Rome. His election, because of his church’s unique position among the churches, and his position in the world, may have to be affirmed in some way by the patriarchs and the primates of autocephalous (i.e. self-governing) archbishoprics and metropolias throughout the world. But like the election of all Christian bishops, the pope’s selection and installation would be the canonical action of the community that he oversees. A “college of cardinals” appointed by the pope and having nominal ministries in Rome would no longer exist.â??

TOUGH, BUT RIGHT

â??The pope would not select and appoint bishops in any churches. He would, however, affirm them in their ministries, and may even do so in some formal manner, as every bishop is called to affirm his brothers with whom he holds the one episcopate in solidumâ?¦â??

RIGHT AGAIN, THOUGH STILL TOUGH

This new and more modest Rome might change everything for the Protestant mainline denominations. If so many historic Protestant objections to Rome are removed perhaps we would see an ecumenical avalanche. Perhaps the Protestant churches would be unable to stay away from the ongoing ecumenical council that would be the new (or restored) form of the worldwide church. Or, perhaps, without a Catholic Church centralized on a strong Rome we will see anarchy â?? but that would be a faithless fear.

Enormous goodwill, energy and time would be necessary to refashion the papacy so that the Pope of Rome might be Christianity’s world leader as the bishop whose church “presides in love” among all the churches of orthodox faith and catholic tradition. And, as recent popes have insisted, radical repentance would be also be required, beginning with the Roman church itself whose calling, as first among Christian churches, is to show the way to all others.

The Orthodox churches would surely have to undergo many humbling changes in attitude, structure and behavior to be in sacramental communion with the Roman church and to recognize its presidency among the churches in the person of its pope. The Orthodox would certainly have to overcome their own inner struggles over ecclesiastical power and privilege. They would have to candidly admit their sinful contributions to Christian division and disunity, and to repent of them sincerely. They would also have to forego all desires or demands for other churches to repent publicly of their past errors and sins, being willing to allow God to consign everything of the past to oblivion for the sake of bringing about the reconciliation and reunion of Christians at the present time.

In a word, the Orthodox would have to sacrifice everything, excepting only the faith itself, for the sake of building a common future together with Christians who are willing and able to do so with them. Like Roman Catholics and Protestants, they would have to be willing to die with Christ to themselves and their personal, cultural and ecclesiastical interests for the sake of being in full unity with all who desire to be saved by the crucified Lord in the one holy church “which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all” (Eph 1.23), that is “the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth.” (1Tim 3.15)

Fr. Thomas Hopko Roman Presidency and Christian Unity in our Time

With thanks, as ever, to Pontifications

It is an odd thing not to ordain women, but it is precisely this sort of odd decision that is intrinsic to the Christian form of life. But it is not unfair. It is not unfair because the whole Church is given by an act of love, and makes possible love, which is to say, subordinating ourselves and deferring to others. Since the whole community of God is premised on an act of love, we cannot say that any particular station in it is unfair – it is all for free in the first place. The whole Church is made up of beggars who are surprised and relieved to find themselves in it at all. No one has to be in the Church, and if you really want to get on in the world, dont hang around in the Church, get out there in the world.

It is no more unfair on women that they are not ordained than it is unfair that, in the UK at least, women make up the majority in many congregations. If the Christians all wore a ribbon in their hair or stood on one leg, that would be just another of those odd things, like meeting on Sunday morning or eating fish on Fridays, that marks Christians out and makes them identifiable to the rest of the world. The Christian faith and life is full of things that seem odd at first. It takes long Christian life to discover the reason behind some of them, but that reason usually becomes plain when the Christian community really comes under pressure.

What is the reason for this odd ruling about who is ordained? The church has understood that Christ is our husband and we are his bride, and that this is played out publicly in every church service. Each gathering is a microcosm of the relationship of Christ and his Church, the groom at the head the bride before him. We are that bride. He is the male in this analogy, we the female. If you put a female at the front of the congregation that analogy and microcosm is lost, and with it a large part of the Christian teaching that the Lord is groom to our bride – which you can find summarized in Ephesians 5.

A great part of the Christian gospel is communicated tacitly by the arrangement in which the Christian people stand when they are in church together. In every church service the very form in which each congregation assembles is a big corporate analogy, a microcosm. The arrangement of the congregation of one standing before the many is the public playing out of a microcosm of the relationship of God to his creation, and to his people.

Jesus Christ is the husband of this crowd, the provider and protector of this people. The congregation plays the provided for and the protected – his bride. This analogy works if you have a male at the front and regard the rest of the congregation as his bride. Putting a male at the front says that this particular person, Jesus Christ, who became one of the two sexes for us, is our provider and protector. We are those he protects and provides for. This microcosm played out by the whole congregation is an act of anticipation (prolepsis). It is not yet the reality, but it is the beginning and in-breaking of the reality. If you put a female at the head of the congregation this long-running analogy disappears. Of course all this depends on the news that Christ is our husband is actually being preached and taught, and that the congregation is converted and baptised into this event, that Jesus Christ is the husband of the Church.

But it is not simply an equation of husband with male (for lots of males never become husbands), but of husband with an act of unlooked for love. Being a husband is an act of love, even of compassion. It is entirely God’s act of compassion, and all our acts of being husbands, parents, neighbours… are extensions of God’s act of love. It is an extension of being a generous neighbour to anyone who is without a neighbour, and who needs you to be generous to them. Your ability to be that neighbour is given to you, just so you have something to give to others, by God. God is their neighbour, and he makes you participate in this office, so you become their neighbour, and in this act, become God-like to them and for them. In the same way somebody, one person, in the congregation, is required to play out publicly the role of Christ as groom so the whole congregation can more easily understand itself as God’ s bride. It is neither unfair nor fair, but it is God’s love, unlooked for, but given anyway.

Well, I am not utterly convinced by all this myself, but at least I have had a go at putting it in writing.

Collegiality was not understood simply in terms of an ultimately non-binding collegial frame of mind; collegiality is rather a reality ontologically grounded in the sacrament of episcopal consecration, the shared participation in the one episcopal office… This collegiality is of course not limited to the horizontal and synchronic relationship with contemporary episcopal colleagues; since the Church is one and the same in all centuries, the present-day church must also maintain diachronic consensus with the episcopate of the centuries before us, and above all with the testimony of the apostles. This is the more profound significance of the apostolic succession in episcopal office.

The episcopal office is thus an office of unity in a two-fold sense. Bishops are the sign and the instrument of unity within the individual local church, just as they are between both the contemporary local churches and those of all times within the universal Church.

Should we not therefore also be in a position to say together: the decision for the ordination of women to the episcopal office can only be made with an overwhelming consensus, and must not in any way involve a conflict between the majority and the minority. It would be desirable that this decision would be made with the consensus of the ancient churches of the East and West. If on the contrary the consecration of a bishop becomes the cause of a schism or blocks the way to full unity, then what occurs is something intrinsically contradictory. It should then not take place, or should be postponed until a broader consensus can be reached.

‘ Grex unus, qui unianima consensione pascitur’, that is the aim of ecumenical dialogue; it can only succeed if the unianima consensio of every single one of the separated churches is preserved and is then constituted step by step between those separated ecclesial bodies. May this, in spite of all the difficulties and resistance, be granted to us one day by the grace of God.

Cardinal Walter Kasper An address given to the Church of England Bishops’ Meeting (5 June 2006)

If we Westerners are the ‘strong’, and the South are the ‘weak’, we ought to ‘bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves.’ That we bear with them is the only possible sign that we are indeed the mature and the strong.

Even if we sophisticated modern Protestant Westerners are more mature in the faith than all the poor backwards Christians of the Third World, with their patriarchal views of gender and sexuality, they are the gift of God to us (and we to them). God has generously bound them to us. We are, as it were, married – the ‘sophisticated’ to the ‘backward’, the liberal to the fundamentalist.

We cannot decide to make changes in our corner of the Church, because our corner does not belong to us only, but to the whole Church. Unilateral decisions show not only indifference, but antagonism to them. Our salvation consists in our being joined to them in Christ, so separation from them tugs against our salvation.

Do those who want to ‘go forward’ into new, ostensibly more inclusive, forms of church life, really don’t mind if they leave others, traditionalists, Africans and Asians, behind? They want to go a little more quickly, but do they want to leave others behind? But in the wilderness if we do not go at the pace of the very slowest, we will be abandoning the slowest and weakest, so the body will break up and never arrive. The whole point of our time in the wilderness is not to arrive anywhere in particular, but to learn to serve and hold on to one another, the strong serving the weak and waiting for them. Fast finishers don’t get earlier admission, for admission to the land promised to us is only for the whole Church, the strong bound to the weak.

Of course if these other churches are wrong about who may be ordained, we have to tell them so, and if there are churches who belive we are wrong about this, we have to listen to them and examine ourselves. We have to talk to them, and either be corrected by them and return to them, or to correct them and beg them to come back to us. We have to serve them in this way, or be served by them. Our readiness to do is the proper demonstration of our maturity. Any division in the Church makes it hard to pray, but our present acts that widened our separation from the rest of the Church, mean that we must pray and lament.

Catholicity, sometimes also called ecumenism, is not an extra. It is the centre of the gospel. It is an evangelical imperative. Without reconciliation with the rest of the Church, there is no salvation for us. If the Church of England, and its Synod, does not feel the absolute priority of ecumenical reconciliation with all other churches, this is not merely negligence, it is culpable, it is sin. But we may not forget that we are sinners forgiven, and so in humility we must consider these others better than ourselves. We are the bloody-minded, schismatic, divisive ones, now brought by baptism into the Body of Christ and so calmed and reconciled. Our reconciliation, and our reception of our reconciliation, is our being reconciled to all others. But if we are still holding out against other Christian churches, through ignorance or indolence or because we don’t care, we are pushing that the reconciliation and forgiveness away. We are pushing our Lord away, and with him our salvation