ECCLESIOLOGY – the logos (‘-ology’) of what the Church is is a largely post-Reformation subject. From the time of Constantine until the late Middle Ages Europe was synonymous with ‘Christendom’; its culture, politics and social life were all totally entwined with the Church. In the sixteenth century the consequent need for reform was very real, since many of these structures, including the papacy, were liable to decay and corruption, and new areas of knowledge and culture associated with the Renaissance, such as art, geography or science, were not easily integrated into the Church’s sphere of control.

The various reform movements often took the form of new ‘churches’ though all claimed continuity with the early Church of the scriptures and the apostles. Many produced ‘Confessions’ or ‘Articles of Religion’, such as the Lutheran Augsburg Confession, the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles, the Presbyterian Westminster Confession or the Roman Catholic Decrees of The Council of Trent, specifying what each saw to be the central or fundamental points of Christian faith. As these became distinguishing marks of identity they in fact further helped to divide the churches. Ecclesiology has again become a prominent subject in the twentieth century, since the Ecumenical Movement’s attempt to re-unite these churches again throws into relief the question: What is the Church, which in the Creed, we all profess to be one, holy, catholic and apostolic?

The present answer is based on two principal texts: Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church – Lumen Gentium, and the booklet produced in 1998 by the World Council of Churches’ Faith and Order commission, The Nature and Purpose of the Church. The ecclesiology of Vatican II, contained mainly in Lumen Gentium, but also partly in the document on The Church in the Modern World, is the fullest and most profoundly theological official statement produced in this century, and has consequently been the stimulus to, and often the basis of, many other ecclesiological statements which develop or react to it. The Faith and Order Commission booklet was a response to the fifth world conference of the WCC, at Santiago in 1993, intended to draw together the fruits of various dialogues and other theological work, as well as the growing experience of Christians around the world living together in varying degrees of fellowship. Lumen Gentium is an objective theological statement of what the Roman Catholic Church understands the Church to be, of considerable length and depth. A comprehensive treatment worked out through five drafts by 3000 bishops, it is not only a piece of theoretical theology but is also intended to reflect, and reflect on, Catholics’ lived experience of the Church. The Faith and Order booklet has a more immediately practical purpose: it addresses to all the churches concerned this invitation: “If you can recognize in this text an emerging convergence on the nature and purpose of the Church, what implications has this for your relations with other churches who may also recognize that convergence ? What steps might your church take even now, towards mutual recognition ?”

The present study selects five themes, as treated in these two texts, and fills them out with material concerning other churches in these islands, mainly those churches which are members of the ecumenical instrument Churches Together in England, since these have considered the ecclesiological question explicitly in the past few years.
 

This is the title of Lumen Gentium chapter one, and the starting point for all the rest of the theologising in the document:

The main part of this chapter is then structured on the central, mysterious Christian truth of the Trinity, as Article 2 goes on to state our belief in how this design of God was put into practice:

Article 3 brings in the work of the Son more fully:

Article 4 introduces the work of the Holy Spirit:

This perception of the Church as patterned on, and flowing from the Trinity is succinctly repeated in Vatican II’s Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio 2 when it speaks of ‘the unity of the Church in Christ and through Christ, with the Holy Spirit energising its various functions. The highest exemplar and source of this mystery is the unity, in the Trinity of persons, of one God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’ and Lumen Gentium 4 further quotes the third century writer St Cyprian: ‘The universal Church is seen to be a people brought into unity from the unity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit’ (De Orat. Domini 23).

After this trinitarian section Lumen Gentium 5 goes on to point out that ‘the Mystery of the Church is brought to light’ in the manner of its foundation by Christ in his earthly mission, and further remarks that ‘just as the revelation of the Kingdom in the Old Testament was made known under the form of symbols, so too is the inner nature of the Church made known in various images.’ This concept of the revelation of a mystery by symbols and images takes us back to a sentence in the first article of Lumen Gentium: ‘The Church in Christ is in the nature of a sacrament, that is, a sign and instrument of communion with God and unity among all people.’

The Latin word sacramentum was used to translate the Greek (mysterion); mystery/ mysterion was not at first commonly used by the early Christians because of its association with pagan mystery religions such as Mithraism. Sacramentum moreover had other useful overtones in the Roman world since it could also refer to a legal contract, a soldier’s oath of loyalty or the mark of ownership branded on a slave.

In the pagan context mysterion meant a secret, specialist knowledge for which ritual initiation was necessary; however, by the middle of the fourth century the dominance of Christianity was sufficiently assured for St Ambrose to pick up this implication, when he told his newly baptised converts that now they had been ‘initiated’ he could tell them about the ‘mysteries’, i.e. the sacraments, especially the Eucharist. Another interesting use of the word occurs in the Greek text of St Matthew 13:10-11: where the twelve ask Christ ‘Why do you speak to the people in parables ? ‘ and he replies, ‘To you it is given to know the secrets (mysteria) of the Kingdom of Heaven, but to those outside it is not given.’ In the Greek of the New Testament period mysterion could also mean a secret plan or strategy that a king or military leader would only reveal to his inner cabinet or intimate advisers – the initiates – suggesting that those baptised into the ‘sacrament’ which is the Church are thus brought into a particularly intimate relationship with God.

So Lumen Gentium has implied very considerable depth of meaning in describing the Church, firstly as a ‘Mystery’; how far is this approach shared by other Christian churches ? The Faith and Order booklet on The Nature and Purpose of the Church does not present anything like the same depth since its aim and purpose are different, but it does not exclude this perception. It asserts that:

It talks of the Church as the Body of Christ and the Temple of the Holy Spirit, and goes on to say that ‘It is God’s design to gather all creation under the Lordship of Christ, and to bring humanity and all creation into communion. As a reflection of the communion in the Triune God the Church is called by God to be the instrument in fulfilling this goal.’ (Art. 26)

Echoes of this approach can be found in some Anglican statements. The Virginia Report commissioned by the 1988 Lambeth Conference, under the heading ‘Being Anglican’, says among other things:

A similar theme can be found in a recent Methodist statement on ecclesiology, Called to Love and Praise:

The transcendent yet visible quality of the Church is also expressed in ways that certainly harmonise with what we have already seen of the ‘mystery’ of the Church:

The Orthodox Churches, those who have rejected the primacy of the pope since the eleventh century, share this recognition of the ‘mysterious’ quality of the Church, and discern it chiefly in the local, specific manifestation of the universal Church:

Lutheran ecclesiology as expressed in the 1530 Confession of Augsburg, associates the mysterious quality of the Church with what is not seen but adhered to by faith:

Lutherans see this invisible but indefectible unity as inseparable from the key tenet of Lutheranism – justification by grace through faith: ‘Justification and Church necessarily go together. Justification is bound up with our being “in Christ” – I share in the righteousness of Christ and so am justified, because I am in Christ and Christ is in me by faith and baptism. But to be “in Christ” is to be in his body, the Church – justification and the reality of the Church are inseparable (Cf. Fackre & Root).

In 1531 Philip Melancthon’s Apologia expanded Art.4 of the Augsburg Confession to say:

The other great Protestant theologian of the sixteenth century Reformation, John Calvin, asserted in his great work The Institutes of the Christian Religion that the real Church is invisible, consisting of the elect who are saved, and whose number and identity are known only to God (Bk.4.1.2). This Protestant heritage is also found in the 1646 Westminster Confession accepted by the Presbyterian and Congregational Churches, when it speaks of ‘Effectual Calling’ and of ‘The Church’:

So for these churches the ‘mysterious’ aspect of the Church considered as ‘the communion of saints’ is highlighted by the invisible, or only imperfectly visible, quality of a reality which is known only to God.

A consequence of such ecclesiology is that such churches, which would include the Baptists, the Independent Methodists and many of the Black Majority Churches in this country, do not see the Church to be universal, though they believe it to be so. For them the local gathered, worshipping community, and more especially the explicitly committed membership, is a particular manifestation and exemplar, an outcrop so to speak, of that mysterious, invisible reality, the catholic or universal Church.

This variety of ecclesiologies became very apparent when, in 1996 Churches-Together-in-England published a synthesis, under the title Called To Be One, of the answers received to its questionnaire which ran: How does your church understand the word ‘church’, the word ‘unity’ and the word ‘visible’ ?

It is significant that in the Creed we say we ‘believe in’ the Church, not that we ‘know’ it, or ‘acknowledge’ it or ‘recognise’ it. The Church, as ‘mystery’ is an object of faith, and as a mystery we shall never fully comprehend it; but the appropriate attitude to mystery is not to try to understand it, or explain it away, but to ponder it, to explore its depths as far as we are able, though – by definition, we shall never plumb them to the full this side of the grave.
 

What makes the mystery of the Church visible is not primarily buildings or structures, but people. This was very evident in the Augsburg Confession and the Westminster Confession, where the Church was referred to as the ‘whole number of the elect’. To be ‘elect’ or ‘called’ is the root meaning of our word ‘ecclesiastical’: the Greek and Latin words /ecclesia translate the Hebrew word (qahal) used in scripture to refer to the ‘called’ or ‘Chosen’ People, a word which comes from the verb meaning to invite or convoke. So the Church is not just people in general, any people, an arbitrary crowd such as gathers round some unusual sight; it is those people who have been invited or convoked by God to form a community.

As can be seen in the New Testament, in the Acts of the Apostles or the Pauline Epistles, the early Church elaborated its ecclesiology in terms of the ‘New Israel’, the new ‘People of God’ who had replaced the Chosen People of the Old Testament, and it certainly exhibited a strongly anti-semitic attitude. Now we consciously try to avoid such an attitude, which was indeed condemned by Vatican II in its Declaration on Non-Christian Religions, Nostra Aetate: ‘The Jews should not be spoken of as rejected or accursed as if this followed from Holy Scripture.’ (Art. 4) The same point is also made in Lumen Gentium: ‘The People to whom the covenants and promises were first made, in view of that divine choice are a People most dear to God for the sake of their Fathers, for the gifts of God are without repentance.’ (LG, Art. 16)

In its earliest phase the Church in Jerusalem did indeed remain well within the ambit of Judaism. In the decade or so after Pentecost Jerusalem was its organizational centre; after the Gospel triumvirate of Peter, James and John had been broken up by Herod’s execution of James in AD 44, the other James (’the Lord’s brother’) took his place. He became chairman of the Apostle in Jerusalem and imposed a distinctly Judaic outlook. St Paul felt it necessary to square his preaching with this Jerusalem leadership (Gal 2:1-10), and James saw to it that their rulings were enforced (Gal 2:11-14) sending emissaries to Antioch, Galatia and Corinth, a situation reluctantly accepted by St Paul. However after the death of SS Peter and Paul in c. AD 68 and the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, a different outlook developed and theology came to be understood in terms of a new ‘People of God’ replacing the old. In the context this is not surprising since it must have seemed to be the only way to make sense of the belief that Christ was indeed the Messiah (), in the face of actual historical developments – the destruction of the Jewish temple and the rapid spread of Christianity among the pagans.

Lumen Gentium explicitly accepts the ‘new People of God’ ecclesiology, and develops the concept of ‘People’ as a coherent, organic community with four significant qualities or characteristics which identify it:

The shape and structure of this people is further developed in connection with the threefold messianic role of Christ as prophet, priest and king:

These ideas, taken from Lumen Gentium’s chapter two which is entitled ‘The People of God’, are more fully developed in chapter four entitled ‘The Laity’, and taken up again in a separate document on the Apostolate of the Laity.

This concept, of the Church as the People of God, is widely taken for granted among the Christian churches and was frequently used, without comment or explanation, by the answers included in Called to Be One. The Faith and Order booklet adopts this approach: its section specifically on the nature and purpose of the Church has three paragraphs under this heading which portray the Church as the fulfilment of the call of Abraham and of Israel’s journey – fulfilment for both Jew and pagan (Art. 17-18). Such an approach to the visibility of the Church as People of God implies and includes three other familiar concepts: the Church as the Body of Christ, as (koin“nia)/communion, and as the Kingdom of God on earth, and four paragraphs on the Church as the Body of Christ immediately follow those on ‘the People of God’ in that booklet (19-22). The coherence, or communion, of the People of God is implied in the use of images such as ‘temple’ and ‘spiritual house’ (23-4), while a whole section is devoted to the subject of ‘communion’, finally recapitulated in article 51:

The notion of the Church as the Body of Christ originates of course in the Pauline writings where two different uses can be distinguished. In Rom 12:4-5 and I Cor 12:12-31 the image is used to exhort Christians to preserve unity in the body of Christ, despite the manifest diversity of their gifts which shoud be seen as complementary rather than competitive. In Rom 6:12-20, Col 1:17-8 and Eph 1:22-3 and 4:15, the concept is being used to expound and emphasise the close and intimate relationship between Christ the head and the members of the body. The theme was taken up extensively by many Fathers of the Church in both East and West, such as St Gregory Nazianzen and St Augustine of Hippo: ‘My brothers, do you understand the grace of Christ our Head ? Rejoice ! We have become Christ. For if he is the head we are the members. He and we are the complete man. What is the Head and members ? Christ and the Church.’ (Augustine On John’s Gospel, 21:8).

By about the ninth century the concept and terminology of ‘body of Christ’ was increasingly focussed on the Eucharist and became more familiar in that context of theology and devotion. In the sixteenth century, disputes about eucharistic presence and the rejection of some more extreme views on this led the Reformers, especially Calvin, to retrieve the phrase and concept for application to the Church. As a consequnece it was not, at that time, commonly so used by the Roman Catholic Church. In 1944 however Pope Pius XII decided the time had come to re-adopt this rich, traditional ecclesiology, and he developed it at length in his encyclical on The Mystical Body of Christ. His extremely detailed, even laboured, deployment of the analogy resulted however in stylistic, psychological and even theological snags; so in 1964 Lumen Gentium 7 again took up the theme, handling it with great care and sophistication:

Most of the Reformed Churches strongly emphasise the headship of Christ over against human authority, and so warm to the concept of the Church as the Body of Christ, but the association of ‘embodiment’ with human structures and organization – which can become corrupt, tends to mean that they do not always talk of the Church in this way, since in general they do not consider structures and organization to be of such divine mandate that they cannot be changed by human decision. The theme is however very apparent in Charles Wesley’s great hymn:

Christ from whom all blessings flow
Perfecting the saints below,
Hear us, who thy nature share,
Who thy mystic body are.

Join us, in one spirit join,
Let us still receive of thine;
Still for more on thee we call,
Thou who fillest all in all !

Closer knit to thee, our Head;
nourish us, O Christ, and feed;
Let us daily growth receive,
More and more in Jesus live.

and in Called to Love and Praise, which links the Church with the Old Testament People of God in its section on ‘God’s Reign and Mission’. The whole idea of ‘Covenant’ is of course a characteristic feature of Methodism, and constitutes a major theme in this ecclesiological statement. This Methodist treatment also points out how St Paul claims to be in continuity with the Old Covenant precisely in his mission to the pagans (Rom 3:31), thus implying a ‘reconstuction’ of Israel. It recognises a ‘replacement’ ecclesiology in some parts of the New Testament, e.g. in Hebrews, but re-emphasises Paul’s own assertion of the irrevocability of God’s call to Israel (Rom 9:11) and suggests that is why he uses ‘body-of-Christ’ language, precisely to counter divisiveness in the one People of God (2.2:4-6.) Methodists profess themselves reluctant to draw sharp boundaries or to define too tightly who is, or is not, part of the Church, so Called to Love and Praise offers merely an approximate definition of ‘church’ in terms of people: ‘Wherever people join together to respond to Christ as Lord, there is the Church’; however it also asserts that ‘the Methodist Church claims and cherishes its place in the holy, catholic Church which is the Body of Christ.’ (2.4:9-11)

It also finds in the passages about the Body of Christ in Eph 4:12 and I Cor 12:12-27 a theological undergirding for the Methodist system of ‘conexionalism’ – its organization of the ministers of the Church in circuits and districts all ultimately subject to the authority of the Central Methodist Conference.
 

The Lutheran Augsburg Confession speaks of the Church as the Body of Christ, and in the context of recent discussions with Protestant, Episcopal and Roman Catholic Churches in the U.S.A, one Lutheran theologian has ephasised the point that ‘Local congregations or groups within the Church, even where these are juridically autonomous, must not be mistaken for the “Body of Christ” as such, but seen as cells, healthy or otherwise, within that body.’ (Fackre & Root) However unlikely it may appear to our more ecumenically conscious age, the unity of that Body was of vital importance to the sixteenth century Reformers: Melancthon’s Apologia, for the Augsburg Confession interpreted Col 3:14, about ‘love which binds everything together’ not in terms of personal virtue or perfection, but as referring to the perfection of fellowship – the koinonia or communion of the Church.

The concept of koinonia/communion, as the apt description of the sort of unity appropriate to the Church as the Body of Christ, has become the main theme of modern ecumenical efforts to reunite the fractured Christian Church, epitomised by the report of the World Council of Churches Assembly at Canberra in 1991: ‘The purpose of God, according to Holy Scripture, is to gather the whole of creation under the Lordship of Jesus Christ, in whom, by the power of the Holy Spirit, all are brought into communion with God. The Church is the foretaste of this communion with God and with one another.’

This concept of koinonia originates in I John 1:3: ‘What we have seen with our eyes and touched with our hands – the Word of life – this is our theme. That life which was with the Father was made manifest to ... what we have seen and heard we declare to you, so that you may have fellowship (koinonia ) with us; and our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. These things we declare to you that your joy may be full.’ It was aptly defined in the Introduction to the Final Report of the First Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission as ‘that relationship which is brought about between people by their common participation in the same sacred reality.’ The notion is obviously implicit in the Pauline Epistles, which use various forms of the Greek verb (koinoun), and was reiterated by the Fathers of the Church.

As time went by the need to verify the bonds of communion between different local churches or groups of Christians gave this concept an external and even legal character. In the fifth century the custom developed of exchanging (or refusing) letters of communion between bishops, so it came to be alsmost equated with the legal or canonical bonds by which it was manifested, a juridical approach which has persisted even to our own day. Renewed exploration of the more spiritual and theological dimensions of communion goes back some decades in the twentieth century: Lumen Gentium 9 described the Church as ‘established by Christ as a communion of life, love and truth’, and notable studies of the notion appeared in both Europe and the U.S.A.in the 1970s. Perhaps the most striking was that by Bishop Walter Kasper of Stuttgart in 1986; this looked at the notion of the Church as a ‘communion of life, love and truth’ not in the ecumenical context of divided churches, but against the background of the various totalitarian versions of soulless political and social community which had oppressed so much of Europe in the twentieth century, and aroused in many a yearning for true community which they could not fulfil.

It has been however in the ecumenical context that that the idea has been most fully exploited. A study in 1988 by Bishop Pierre Duprey of the Council in Rome for the Promotion of Christian Unity, distinguished three levels of communion among the divided Christian churches: the spiritual or ontological level on which, because of the free gift of the Holy Spirit, as Christians we are brothers and sisters ‘whether we like it or not’ in the fourth-century words of St Augustine; the visible level where partial communion at least is manifested by, e.g. profession of a common faith, sharing in sacramental life and the acceptance of a common ministry; and the canonical or juridical level on which specific norms or rules which can be verified testify to the existence of communion, whether full, or partial. The theme has been taken up extensively by the World Council of Churches, whose Canberra Assembly in 1991 developed a document entitled The Church as Koinonia – Gift and Calling and the Faith and Order Commission has been engaged in an intensive study of that material since 1994, of which the booklet mentioned earlier, The Nature and Purpose of the Church is an interim report. A good half of that text is devoted to the subject of the Church as Koinonia.

The most careful and detailed exposition of this theme so far however was worked out by the Second Anglican-RC International Commission, and its reason for producing The Church as Communion is significant. Anglicans and Roman Catholics had achieved theoretical agreement on some major doctrinal points previously controverted between them, viz: the Eucharist, Ministry and some aspects of Church Authority, so the Commission came to the conclusion that the way foward for that particular dialogue would be to articulate an agreed statement on what the Church is – what the two churches actually believe it to be – as a kind of map or groundplan on which to situate the remaining points of conflict or serious difference. Publication of this statement provoked a brief reaction from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome in 1992, when A Letter on the Church as Communion sought to re-affirm that the universal Church is a visible reality in its worldwide structure led, as Catholics believe by the Pope, and not just a spiritual union or communion of local churches. Lumen Gentium 23 states with reference to local churches, or dioceses led by their bishops: ‘It is in these, and formed out of them, that the one and unique Catholic Church exists.’ The CDF Letter, emphasised that the corollary is also true and necessary: ‘These churches are also in, and formed out of, the one universal Church of God.’

Thus the notion of koinonia sooner or later raises the question of visible structures, and the concept of ‘the Kingdom of God on earth’ can form the link between these two dimensions. The Pauline Letters freely use this notion: ‘The Kingdom of God is not a matter of eating or drinking’ (Rom 14:7); again: ‘He has transferred us from the Kingdom of Darkness into the Kingdom of his beloved Son.’ (Col.1:13) Such expressions seem to suggest that the Kingdom of God has already come,though others – ‘When he will hand over the Kingdom to his God and Father’ indicate that it is not yet fully realised.

All Christians do agree that the Kingdom, or rather the reign ( - mal ^ekuth) of God can and should, to some degree, be tangibly experienced here and now on earth, as it was in Christ’s own time with the forgiveness of sins, the healing of disease, the righting of wrongs, growth in virtue and moral conduct both individually and communally. The Church is called to mirror, and in a limited, finite way exhibit, the characteristics of God’s Kingdom now. Some scriptural passages however, e.g. ‘He has made us a kingdom and priests to serve our God and Father’ (Rev 1:6) or ‘You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation’ (I Pet 2:9) made it possible to identify the concept of the kingdom rather too closely with the visible Church on earth.

Lumen Gentium expresses the link in a carefully nuanced fashion:

In relation to the sharing of the People of God in Christ’s messianic kingship Lumen Gentium 13 says: ‘Since the Kingdom of Christ is not of this world, the Church, or People of God, which establishes that Kingdom does not take away anything from the temporal welfare of any people.’

The theory is fine, but over the course of history the reality has too often been different, leading the Church – or at least its authorities, to an unsuitable and oppressive triumphalism, and the wielding of all too real earthly and political power. This has caused many, especially members of the Reformed Churches, to reject altogether any perception of the Church on earth as the Kingdom of God. Others limit and qualify that perception, admitting only that the Church is merely the incipient or incohate Kingdom, simply the means and instrument to the reign of God. This instrumental connection was well expressed in Vatican II’s Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes 39:

To conceiveve of the Church itself as a sacrament necessarily implies a serious evaluation of its visible structures. The statement of the Second Anglican-RC International Commission, Salvation and the Church, said: ‘The Church is therefore called to be, and by the power of the Spirit actually is, a sign, steward and instrument of God’s design. For this reason it can be described as a sacrament of God’s saving work.’ (Art. 29) This langauge of ‘sacrament’ as ‘sign, steward and instrument’ or ‘sign, instrument and foretaste of the first fruits of the Kingdom’ is now used by many Christian churches, especially in ecumenical dialogues. ARCIC II’s statement develops the notion further: ‘In its life the Church signifies God’s gracious purpose for his creation, and his power to realise this purpose for sinful humanity... In the service of this mystery the Church is entrusted with a responsibility of stewardship, which it is called to fulfil by proclaiming the Gospel, and by its sacramental and pastoral life.’ (Art. 26-7) This concept has an important place in the ecclesiology of Lumen Gentium, as was apparent in discussion of the concept of the Church as the Body of Christ.

However there is a variety of views among the Christian churches about which visible structures are necessary or appropriate in the Church and their precise function and value. A major divide centres on whether such visible structures are ‘iconic’ or ‘functional’, i.e. whether they are merely representational illustrations of the religious truths we believe, or whether they are indeed effective signs bringing about what they signify. Calvin in the sixteenth century was explicit that they are the former; Roman Catholics believe the latter. A further divide occurs over which, if any, are of divine origin and mandate in such a way that they cannot be altered, adapted or abandoned by the competent human authorities in the Church on earth.

Lumen Gentium devotes its third chapter to the principal visible structures of the Church, pointing out that:

The role of bishops and their assistant ministers is in some way to represent Jesus Christ still present among the members of his Church, and so to preach, to administer the sacraments, to incorporate new members into the body of Christ, to direct, lead and pastor the People of God. St Ambrose, explaining ‘The Mysteries’’ to his newly baptised converts in the mid-fourth century, admonished them to recognize in the priest they saw when they entered the baptistry, ‘the angel of the Most High; do not have regard to his person, but to his office, and the greatness of the salvation of which he is the minister.’

Individual bishops exercise their pastoral office in their own ‘particular churches’ or dioceses, but as members of the College of Bishops they have a common responsibility for the welfare of the whole Church and its mission – for upholding unity of faith, common discipline, pastoral care and the proclamation pf the Gospel (Cf. LG 23). Since bishops and priests are so constituted by sacramental ordination this hierarchical structure of the Church has a sacramental quality which distinguishes it from merely human political or social arrangements. It is in this sense that these offices are said to be iure divino – ‘set up by Christ the Lord himself’. Such is the basis of the Roman Catholic belief that the Church itself is in the nature of a sacrament, that is to say: this visibly organised, active community of the People of God actually makes present and accessible the mystery of divine salvation – salvation which is communion with the Blessed Trinity.

Apart from the claims made by Roman Catholics for the papacy, the Orthodox Churches would share, by and large, in this sacramental concept of the Church, heightened and emphasised for them by the supreme stress they place on the celebration of the liturgy.

The Anglican Church in general claims to inherit and maintain the same ancient tradition. The statement of the second Anglican-RC International Commission, The Church as Communion, said that the Church is both the sign and the instrument of salvation in Christ, and consequently is in the nature of a sacrament (Cf. Arts; 19,22,24). Speaking of the episcopate that same document goes on:

Anglican understanding of episcopal collegiality has also been recently further explored and expressed in the document Bishops in Communion: Collegiality in the Service of the Koinonia of the Church, published by the Faith and Order Advisory Group of the Church of England.

In some recent Anglican dialogues, however, especially with Lutherans and with Methodists, a different evaluation of the structure of episcopate seems detectible. There is apparently a greater willingness to admit that the threefold, sacramentally ordained hierarchy of bishop, priest and deacon, though traditional, is not of divine right in the sense that it can, for a good reason, be modified, or even abandoned without the community in question ceasing to be part of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. In response to the Churches-Together-in-England questionnaire, Called to be One, the Church of England asserted: ‘The Church’s unity must be visible, audible and credible to those around, but it cannot be neatly summed up in a single phrase.’ A Report of the Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission in 1986, For the Sake of the Kingdom: God’s Church and the New Creation, admitted that Anglican comprehensiveness had sometimes been maintained at the cost of ‘vagueness, lack of rigour and seriousness, a refusal to face fundamental theological issues.’ (Art. 93). It defended ‘pluriformity’ on the grounds of real inculturation: ‘The Church belongs to all its many times and places’ and so found the unity of the Church in a fellowship and visibility based on common institutions – ‘scriptures, ecumenical creeds, sacraments, the historic threefold ministry’ and in ‘practical institutions for mutual consultation, admonition and criticism.’

Luther originally remained implicitly close to a sacramental view of the Church: ‘The Church cannot be better governed and maintained than by having all of us live under one head – Christ; and by having all the bishops equal in office (however they may differ in gifts) and diligently joined together in unity of doctrine, faith, sacraments, prayer, works of love etc.’ (1537 Smalkald Articles 8 ); a modern Lutheran exposition is adamant about the visibility of the Church, finding this chiefly in the network of relationships which constitute koinonia :

For the most part however the Reformation Churches largely dismantled the universal mediaeval hierarchical structures, and found their visibility rather in the ‘marks’ that should characterise each local congregation. For Luther there were seven such marks:

                The Word of God in scripture and preaching
                baptism
                eucharist
                the office of the keys or absolution
                ministries duly called and constituted
                public prayer and praise
                the cross, i.e. patient endurance of suffering and misfortune

(cf. On the Councils and the Church); but for most of the Reformed Churches the two essential marks by which the Church could be seen and recognised were: the preaching of God’s word according to the scriptures, and the celebration of the two Gospel sacraments of baptism and the eucharist. Calvin added to these the church order he believed was to be found in the New testament, consisting of the four offices of pastor, doctor or teacher, presbyter or elder and deacon – an order generally maintained by those churches which inherit his teaching, notably the Presbyterians and Congregationalists.

While there is now a considerable degree of difference among the churches on this subject of church order or organization, there is still fundamental agreement on the fact that it is precisely the congregation the people gathered to worship, which makes the Church visible. St Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, commenting on that article of the Creed defined the Church as ‘The Congregation of those who believe’ and expanded this somewhat in another work by paraphrasing the Creed as ‘I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, the Sanctifier and Unifier of the Church’. (Contra Gentes 20:22) This stress on the significance of the congregation is further emphasised in another modern Lutheran work: ‘What the Church is all about is that one old story of God’s dealings with us – the story that spans the Exodus and Easter morning. The Christian community consists of those people who keep on telling this story to each other’. (P. Berger, The Noise of Solemn Assemblies, N.Y. 1961)

A 1998 Report of the Council of the Baptist Union of Great Britain characterised the congregation slightly differently by enunciating five ‘Core Values’ which for them determine the nature and purpose of the Church. These spring from the expressed belief that: ‘We do not follow Jesus simply as individuals. As Baptists we emphasise the significance of the gathered Church. Our understanding of Church is not as a hierarchy or organization, but essentially as community in Christ. So, Baptists are called to be: a prophetic community; an inclusive community; a sacrificial community; a missionary community; a worshipping community.’

Methodism stresses that each congregation lives in interdependence with all other churches, and the system of connexionalism has implications which do resemble a hierarchical organization, since considerable authority is entrusted to District Chairmen and women, and to Circuit preachers. A supreme authority is recognised as necessary and is exercised, corporately, by the Methodist Conference – a situation which leads the document Called to Love and Praise to raise even the question of papal primacy, admitting that, if such an office could be shown to be essential for the unity of the Church, then it would have to be admitted that it was part of God’s plan for his Church. (Art. 4,6:11) It is the Conference which ordains Methodist ministers, and Methodists hold that such real, though corporately exercised forms of authority are mandated by the New Testament. (Art. 2,3:14-16) They are in general very committed to the ecumenical movement and the attempts to reunite the visible Church, in obedience to the prayer of Christ ‘That they all may be one’, and they fully recognise the consequences: ‘This implies the closest possible communion; it would be unrealistic to imagine that this would not involve visible, structural union... If the incarnation of Christ is taken seriously, it has to be related to institutions as well as to beliefs, faith, relations and prayers.’ (Art. 3,1:1,15)

Focus on the congregation brings up the subject of membership: who belongs and who does not ? Consideration of this question has distinguished two main ways in which membership is recognised: ‘ecclesial belonging’ and ‘positive covenanting’. The first description refers to the belief and practice of churches such as the Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican, who incorporate new members by the sacramental rite of baptism; those baptised are thereafter members for life, unless they freely and deliberately cut themselves off from membership. There are some qualifications of this situation: these churches also use the sacrament or rite of confirmation or chrismation which in some way completes or perfects membership, though the theology of this is extremely confused. The Church of England also has a system of legal or canonical membership which can include people, even those not professedly Anglican, on the parochial role, and confer on them some right to participation in the affairs of the church.

In general the Congregational type of Reformed Churches follow a practice of ‘positive covenanting’. The phrase ‘Covenant’ is principally associated with the Methodist Church, which operates a fairly rigorous scrutiny of those who seek membership of the local community; these have to be approved and accepted by the Church council, and their names are entered on the Church role when they make the covenant to accept and live by the doctrine and practice of the Church. While Methodists do not attempt to define the boundaries of the universal Church, they do hold that it is important for each local church to define who is a member and who is not, because of the essential visibility of this church.

In other gathered churches the membership is similarly known and recorded, though membership is more commonly initiated not by a written covenant but by a solemn public declaration of faith. For Baptists this is always a personal act made when an age of at least discretion has been reached, so that the candidate is eligible for baptism. For other churches, where the infants of Christian parents may have been baptised already and so, in some sense, admitted to the Church, a later ceremony normally accompanies the declaration of adult faith. Methodists will describe this as confirmation which thus carries some sense of ‘full’ membership.

Not surprisingly the Faith and Order booklet The Nature and purpose of the Church has some difficulty in summarising and synthesising such a variety of visible structures. It adopts the phrase: ‘The Church is the sign and instrument of God’s design for the world’ (Art. 42) and relates this to the concept of ‘mystery’’: ‘To speak of the Church as ‘sign’ also entails the dimension of ‘mysterion’, indicating the transcendence of its God-given reality – as the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church, which can never be clearly and unequivocally grasped in its visible appearance.’ (Art. 44) It indicates the purpose of the visible, historic Church: ‘As instrument of God’s design the Church is... called by God... to proclaim the Good News in word and deed, that the world may believe. Thus it makes present throughout history the mercifulness of God.’ (Art. 46) It then gives a summary description of the various signs and structures of communion without evaluating any of them, and adds descriptive sections on baptism, eucharist, ministry, episcopé/oversight, conciliarity and primacy. It is perhaps significant that the longest description, in seventeen articles, concerns episcopé (), i.e. structures of authority.
 

All Christians confess, in the Creed, their belief in the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church, but there is a spectrum of understanding in how these ‘marks’ are conceived and recognised. The various views of the oneness or unity of the Church have already been indicated in previous sections, but how is apostolicity to be interpreted ?

To see the Church as ‘apostolic’ is to look both backward and forward – backward to its origins, and forward to its continuing mission. The 1982 Faith and Order publication, Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry summed this up saying: ‘Apostolic tradition in the Church means continuity in the permanent characteristics of the Church of the Apostles, i.e. witness to the apostolic faith; proclamation and fresh interpretation of the Gospel; celebration of baptism and the eucharist; the transmission of ministerial responsibilities; communion in prayer, love, joy and suffering; service to the sick and needy; unity among local churches, and the sharing of the gifts that the Lord has given to each. (Art. 4)

So ‘apostolic’ means both origin in the college of the Apostles, and a continuing ‘apostolate’ or ‘mission’ to the contemporary world until the final establishment of the Kingdom of God. The ARCIC II statement, Church as Communion puts it thus: ‘Because the Church is built up by the Spirit upon the foundation of the life, death and resurrection of Christ, as these have been witnessed and transmitted by the Apostles, the Church is called “apostolic”. It is also “apostolic” because it is equipped for its mission by sharing in the Apostolic mandate.’ (Art. 25) All churches could agree on the BEM statement, but would make various distinctions among the elements listed: there is general agreement that apostolicity concerns faith, ministry and sacraments, and that the other characteristics mentioned, including communion, are in some sense the consequences of this. There is agreement, too, that the Apostolic faith is contained in the New Testament and the classic creeds, i.e. the Apostles’ Creed dating from c. AD 215, and the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed formulated at the General Councils of AD 325 and 381. The location and interpretation of ‘ministry’ and ‘sacraments’ is a more vexed question; as might be expected it is the Roman Catholic Church which has elaborated its theology in this area most fully and precisely.

Vatican II’s Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum chapter two is illuminating:

In Catholic understanding therefore, the three elements are not equal and distinct; apostolicity in faith and sacraments is, to a large extent, dependent on apostolicity of ministry. As Lumen Gentium teach ‘Christ set up the Church by entrusting the Apostles with their mission, a divine mission destined to last until the end of the world.’ (Art. 18)

For Catholics apostolic succession in ministry is vital to the reality of the Church, but this succession needs to be correctly understood. When St Irenaeus wrote at the end of the second century, it was obviously possible to trace an unbroken linear succession back to the time of the Apostles in some four or five principal sees; in the twenty-first century it is clearly not possible, though the illusion of such a ‘pipeline’ concept of succession remained in many minds for a long time. This was one of the pieces of outmoded theology corrected by Vatican II in Lumen Gentium’s specific definition that the bishops of the Church are united in a ‘college’ or organic communion into which newly ordained bishops are integrated. It is this corporate body or ‘college’ which succeeds to the ‘college’ of the Apostles.

The manner and moment when Christ actually ‘appointed’ the Apostles to their mission has also been the subject of some confused popular theology. The Gospel text, ‘Go and teach all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’ (Mt 28:19), is commonly quoted as the divine mandate, but modern critical scholarship has cast some doubt on whether these are literally the words of Christ himself, or the legitimately inspired interpretation of his intention articulated by the Gospel writer. It was also common for Catholics to claim that Christ ‘ordained the apostles priests at the Last Supper’ with his words ‘Do this in memory of me’. It is now more widely realised that such an over-literal use of proof texts is not very helpful for the support and exposition of our faith. When the Final Report of the first Anglican-RC International Commission was published in 1982, the Bishops of England and Wales produced a notable Response which touched on this point: ‘That there has been ordained ministry in the Church, from the beginning, as the result of a commission given by Christ to the Apostles, is as far as a Catholic needs to go in claiming the divine origin of the hierarchy.’ (Art. 22)

Roman Catholics would not of course claim that local congregations deprived of bishops or priests through no fault of their own (e.g. in situations of persecution) thereby cease to be ‘church’; they may well preserve the apostolic faith with astounding fidelity and accuracy, but for normal maintainence of the apostolic life of sacraments and faith the apostolic ministry, present in the Church as a whole, is the essential guarantee – a sign which is effective, sacramental.

Nor do Catholics claim that the proclamation of that faith in practice or the stimulus and encouragement of that life is limited to the ordained ministers of the Church. Well before the Second Vatican Council the Church had a good deal to say about the ‘Lay Apostolate’, pointing out that all members of the Church are sent by God in Christ, and so have their part to play in the spreading of the Gospel and the celebration of the means of salvation. Lumen Gentium repeated this forcefully in a number of places e.g. ‘Through baptism and confirmation all are appointed to this apostolate by the Lord himself... an apostolate that belongs to absolutely every Christian.’ (Art. 33) and Vatican II devoted another lengthy document, Apostolicam Actuositam, to just this subject of the Apostolate of the Lay members of the Church. Nor is the responsibility for preserving the purity of the apostolic faith confined wholly to the ordained. Discussing the share of all members of the Church in Christ’s prophetic role, LG 12 points out that the whole body of the faithful, as an organic unit ‘has an anointing which comes from the Holy Spirit (Cf. I Jn 2:20) and so cannot err in matters of belief... This supernatural appreciation of the faith (sensus fidei) appears when the whole people... bishops and laity... manifest universal consent in matters of faith or morals... Aroused and sustained by the Spirit of truth... this sensus fidei receives not the mere word of man, but truly the word of God, “the faith once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3).’ The ARCIC II Statement, Church as Communion found a happy expression for the apostolic tradition: ‘Central to the mission of the Holy Spirit in the Church is the safeguarding and quickening of the memory of the teaching and work of Christ, of which the apostolic community was the first witness... To keep alive the memory of Christ means to remain faithful to all that we know of him through the apostolic community.’ (Art. 25-6)

Such a concept of an apostolic life in faith and sacraments, sustained by an ordained ministry truly in apostolic succession, would be shared by the Orthodox churches, and to some extent by Anglicans. The latter however are not willing to assert that ordination into the apostolic succession is indeed an effective guarantee of fidelity to the apostolic faith, since bishops can err, and over the ages many have ! Nor are they willing to base the validity and effectiveness of the sacraments so exclusively on the validity of apostolic ministry. Dialogues with non-episcopal churches (such as the Nordic and Baltic Lutheran churches) have led Anglicans to place more stress on the apostolicity of the whole Church, where sacraments, faith and life can all manifest and transmit the quality of apostolicity – of which ordained ministry is a paramount and historic, but not necessarily effectual sign. Thus it has been possible for the Church of England to enter into a significant level of relationship with, for instance, the Lutheran Church of Denmark, where historic succession in the episcopate was broken at the sixteenth century Reformation. As the relevant Porvoo Declaration puts it: ‘The continuity signified by the consecration of a bishop to episcopal ministry cannot be divorced from the continuity of life and witness in the diocese to which he is called... the act of ordination is a sign of God’s faithfulness to his Church, especially in relation to the oversight of its mission... the sign of historical episcopal succession does not, by itself, guarantee the fidelity of a church to every aspect of the apostolic faith, life and mission... nor does it guarantee the personal faithfulness of the bishop.’ (Art. 49-50) Anglican thought on this subject is in process of development, an interim stage of which is summed up in the 1994 Faith and Order Advisory Group paper, Apostolicity and Succession.

For Lutheran churches apostolicity is firmly located in the Church as a whole, and manifested by the maintaining of Word and Sacrament – that is the true preaching of the Gospel and the due celebration of the two Gospel sacraments: ‘Wherever you hear this Word preached, believed, professed and lived, do not doubt that there is the true ecclesia sancta catholica. Likewise, wherever baptism and the Sacrament are, there God’s people must be, and vice-versa.’ (Luther, Marks of the Church.)

The Methodist statement, Called to Love and Praise, firmly and explicitly rejects ministerial succession as a guarantee of apostolicity (as do other non-episcopal churches):

Called to Love and Praise does however admit that ‘continuity in ministry can be a valuable sign; the Methodist Church acknowledges this in its own practice, and in response to the earlier Faith and Order document, Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry stated ‘we await the occasion when it would be appropriate to recover the sign of episcopal succession’. This is in fact a vital and difficult theme in the current conversations between the Methodists and the Church of England.

The Faith and Order booklet attempts to synthesise this spectrum of views:

Six articles (69-74) deal explicitly with the apostolic faith ‘once delivered to the saints’: This faith, ‘uniquely revealed, is set forth in the ecumenical creeds, to be proclaimed, freshly and relevantly in every place for each generation... Interpreted in the context of changing times and places, it must be in continuity with the original witness of the apostolic community and with the faithful explication of that witness throughout the ages.’ However, ‘Apostolic faith’ does not refer to one fixed formula or specific phase in Christian history: ‘it is confessed in worship, life and service the living tradition of the Church.’ (Art. 72)  

The equally essential mark of the oneness of the church cannot be separated from that of catholicity. The term comes from two Greek words, (kath’ holon) – ‘according to’ (or ‘in the light of’) ‘the whole’st;, so its basic implication is ‘wholeness’ with the obvious connection with the mark of unity. That is why in early centuries, for instance in the time of St Augustine of Hippo, it was synonymous with orthodoxy: the ‘catholic’ faith was the faith of the whole Church, in contrast to the beliefs of sects, splinter groups, schismatics or heretics, such as the fourth-century Donatists or Manichaeans. The Roman Catholic Church still uses the word in the same sense, claiming to be the chief embodiment of the one, universal Church of Christ, and so the guardian and confessor of ‘Catholic’ faith.

However such catholicity – in the sense of wholeness – when combined with the necessary embodiment of the Church in visible structures, inevitably implies variety, a pluriformity of visible structures in different times and places. As the Methodist statement, Called to Love and Praise said, the incarnation must be taken seriously – if God became flesh, so must his Church. A contemporary expression for this is ‘inculturation’: the Church must really take root in, and express itself through all legitimate human cultures, since we believe that God wishes all to be saved, and the the Church is his instrument for proclaiming and offering that salvation. It cannot just be a matter of the Church, in some already existing embodiment, being brought into a new culture from outside; the mission of the Church frequently starts that way, but must not stop there. The Body of Christ must really take flesh, become truly embodied within each culture, age or situation.

There will therefore be a vast variety of legitimate embodiments, and thus of human expressions and visible structures – but it must still be the one Church. Catholicity is that mark or quality which not merely holds together physically or legally, but actually welds into real communion, this variety of expressions of the Church, demonstrating that it is precisely such communion among many different embodiments that actually makes up the whole, the Catholic Church.
 

All the Christian churches profess their belief in this mark of the Church, and all associate it in some way with people rather than with structures or organization – ‘God’s holy people’, but it is also one of the ways in which the Church can be considered as the Kingdom of God.

The Catechism produced by The Catholic Church in the wake of the sixteenth-century Council of Trent taught that the Church is holy because it teaches a holy doctrine, offers the means of holiness to all, and is distinguished by the eminent holiness of many thousands of its members. The somewhat naive arrogance of this statement still reflects Reformation polemics, but does contain some germs of truth more comprehensively and felicitously deployed in Lumen Gentium: ‘The Church, whose mystery is set forth by this Council, is held, as a matter of faith, to be unfailingly holy. This is because Christ, the Son of God, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit is hailed as “alone holy” loved the Church as his bride, giving himself up for her to sanctify her (Eph 5:25), joined her to himself as his body, and endowed her with the gift of the Holy Spirit for the glory of God.’ (Art. 39) ‘Christ – holy, innocent and undefiled, knew nothing of sin but came to expiate the sins of the people. The Church however, since it embraces sinners, is at once holy and always in need of purification, and so constantly follows the path of repentance and renewal.’ (Art. 8)

The opening sentences of Lumen Gentium 2, quoted above at the beginning of Chapter I, are further developed in Lumen Gentium 5 which is entitled ‘The Universal Call to Holiness in the Church’. This sets out a definitive description of holiness of life:

The final sentence of this passage is a very careful expression of the Catholic doctrine of salvation and grace, worked out in the Middle Ages by theologians like Aquinas, and defined precisely at the Council of Trent in reaction to the teachings of Luther. This doctrine recognises that salvation and grace are the free gift of God’s initiative, which can in no way be earned or even influenced by prior human efforts. However, once that saving grace has been given (normally through baptism), the human person is really changed interiorly – remade, recreated in a condition of friendship with God, so the redeemed human will can now cooperate freely and deliberately with God’s saving plan.

Lumen Gentium accordingly sketches a succinct programme for such co-operation:

It is recognised however that ‘the Church to which we are all called in Jesus Christ, and in which – by the grace of God – we acquire holiness, will receive its perfection only in the glory of heaven, when the time comes for the renewal of all things. Until that time the pilgrim Church, in its sacraments and institutions which belong to the present age, carries the mark of this world which will pass away.’ (Art. 48)

The Orthodox churches would share this general understanding of holiness and salvation but they do not share the western Catholic Church’s detailed articulation of the doctrine of grace. They are characterised by their even greater stress on the sanctifying effect of the celebration of the liturgy to the extent that, where the normal activity of the Church is constricted under an oppressive or persecuting regime, they may tend to sacrifice other activities – even catechetical or pastoral work – if that is the price of being permitted to continue to celebrate the liturgy.

When discussing The Marks of the Church – God’s Holy People Luther retained a good deal of the mediaeval approach to the sanctifying influence and activity of the Church, albeit with a reformed tone and attitude:

The doctrine of grace, and the belief in justification by grace through faith alone, became of course the central point of conflict between the Roman Catholic Church and Luther, together with those other Reformed Churches which have espoused his position on this; and it remained so for four hundred years. However, on ‘Reformation Sunday’ in October 1999 official Lutheran and Roman Catholic representatives solemnly signed a Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, which affirmed that this need no longer be a church-dividing issue. The Declaration outlined the biblical and historical background of the doctrine and the ecumenical implications of the question, and then set out in detail a careful exposition of the common understanding of the points of faith at issue in this question. The crucial paragraphs of this common understanding concern ‘Justification as the Forgiveness of Sins and Making Righteous’:

This careful statement of an agreed faith which admits of differing theological developments is a remarkable ecumenical achievement, and offers a model for other dialogue.

In the sixteenth century the Church of England tended to adopt the Reformation position on grace and justification but has firmly refused to be wholly ‘protestant’ in this respect, and does prize the sacraments and ministrations of the Church as actual means to real holiness now, in this life:

In the Statement of ARCIC II, Church and Salvation, Anglicans and Roman Catholics were able to say together:

It is the Methodist Church of course which has developed its understanding of the mark of ‘holiness’ most fully. Methodism started as a ‘holiness movement’, and exhortation to holiness of life was the outstanding theme of John Wesley’s preaching as he urged people to renew their covenant with God. The distinctive Methodist emphasis is still on God’s grace, on holiness and on covenanted obedience, and members of the early societies were committed to a rule of life not unlike that of a religious order. (Cf. Called to Love and Praise 2,2:9 & 4,2:2)

The quest for holiness is moreover not seen merely as as solitary quest, but one which draws people closely together in discipleship. Wesley’s concept of holiness was derived from earlier Christian saints and writers as well as from contemporary experience, and so was rooted in the Church’s traditional concept of grace. During his own lifetime it was sometimes misunderstood as though he taught that the attainment of absolute perfection was possible in this life, which in fact he did not.

Methodists share their basic concept of grace, holiness and salvation with other churches of the ‘catholic’ tradition, as well as with some of the newer Pentecostal and Black-led Churches, but are perhaps its exponents par excellence. They see holiness as an experience given to, rather than achieved by, ordinary Christians in the context of ordinary life, expressed in the striving after perfect love, and nurtured in an ecclesiological context. (Cf. CLP 4,3:8-9)

In the Honolulu Report of the RC-Methodist Dialogue in 1981 the two churches agreed that:

As contemporary American Wesleyan revivalist preachers have pointed out: ‘grace is always responsible grace, demanding, enabling and empowering response from us. Koinonia is not true koinonia if it is not active – the constant giving and receiving which is characteristic of the life of the Church at every level’ – a theme extensively developed in Called to Love and Praise. Because Christians saw in the death and resurrection of Christ the completion of God’s mission and the decisive evidence that God reigns, a new community was created which already experienced a foretaste of the divine life intended by God for all humankind; so, deriving its very existence and purpose from God’s reign and mission, the Church is necessarily holy. Moreover, without an adequate Trinitarian doctrine we cannot have an adequate ecclesiology, since the Church is called to mirror on the finite level, the reality which God is in eternity. Yet ‘holiness’ is not an ‘other-worldly’ characteristic, but a ‘Christian’ one deriving from the God whose very being was imprinted on Jesus (Heb.1:3). (CLP '152)

The Church is called to be holy – and one and catholic and apostolic – both in and for the world, and at the same time, over against the world; and it often fails, for this is not just a matter of doctrine, but of lived experience and tradition which passes on more than just doctrine. Sanctity and spirituality are also transmitted by all holy men and women throughout the ages. The quality of the Christian’s, and the Church’s life, depends on the extent to which they share God’s life, and their witness will make it easier, or tragically harder, for others to believe in the God of whom they speak. (CLP '153)

The Faith and Order booklet, The Nature and Purpose of the Church can do little more than repeat many of the salient points found in these writings on the subject of holiness; it is this, perhaps most transcendent, characteristic of the Church, which seems to give it most difficulty, and gets the most restricted treatment, not even meriting a section to itself.

It repeats that the Gospel is the offer of the free gift of being born into the new life of communion with God and so with one another; communion is the gift of God whereby all humanity is drawn into the orbit of the divine self-giving love which flows between the persons of the Trinity. By faith and baptism people are united with Christ through the Holy Spirit; thus joined with all who are ‘in Christ’ they belong to the new koinonia of the risen Lord. The final destiny of the Church is to be caught up into the intimate relation of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. (Cf. Art. 54-9)

Christian discipleship is obeying the living word of God rather than human beings, repenting sinful actions, forgiving others, living sacrificial lives of service. Christians believe that God, who is absolute love, mercy and justice,is working through them by the Holy Spirit; the Christian community always lives within the sphere of divine forgiveness and grace.

Such grace calls forth faith and shapes the moral lives of believers. Members of the Church rely on God’s forgiving grace in their faithfulness and in their infidelity, their virtue and their sin, but the Church does not rest on moral achievement, but on justification by grace through faith; it is on this basis that moral engagement, common action and reflection can be affirmed as intrinsic to the life of the Church. (Cf. Art. 113-4).

Through humanity the world is meant to be drawn to the goal of restoration and salvation; as a reflection of the communion of the triune God the Church is called to be the instrument of fulfilling this goal. Embodying in its own life the mystery of salvation and the transfiguration of humanity, the Church participates in, and points to, the Kingdom of God, and so is truly holy. (Cf. Art. 26, 28, 34)

However, until the second coming of Christ and the final consummation of God’s creation, the Church will always have to apply to itself the quotation from the Song of Songs applied to it by St Ambrose in his fourth century treatise On the Mysteries: ‘I am black but beautiful, my Beloved; black because of the frailty of human nature, but beautiful through grace; black because of sinners, but beautiful through baptism – the sacrament of faith.’