Chapter 4. THE CHURCH

Now we must turn our attention to the Church. There is no undisputed definition of the Church, and many of the definitions on offer could equally be applied to other institutions. Since the Church is an organised community, many of it characteristics are not very different from those of other organisations that have come and gone in the course of history. What is it that makes the Church distinct from any other institution?

In its Roman Catholic and Protestant forms, the Church was understood as an association (societas) with its own organisation. Although it has been dominant for centuries, this view of the Church is beginning to disappear, just as the idea that ‘society’ means a nation with a unified culture is also receding. This is not simply because the form taken by the Church varies from one country to another but also because national cultures are being dissolved by new social and economic forces.

For the Protestant Churches, the relationship of Church and society, which determines the public aspect of the Church, generally appears in terms that relate to the issue of secularisation. The relationship of the Church to society is not well defined, but it is not very different from the relationship that any other cultural organisation has with society as a whole. Protestant Churches have been profoundly affected by changing views of society, so we can identify communitarian and liberal forms of Church, each denomination with its own definition of the relationship of Church and society. Where the emphasis is on doctrine, as in the Lutheran and Calvinist Churches, it was formulated to create their own particular denominational identity. Protestant Churches in particular are exposed to prevailing secular trends, so their ethics are described in terms of rights and freedoms not very distinct from those held by the population as a whole.

The pressures determining Western ecclesiology have left their mark on Orthodoxy too. When Western denominations appeared in the seventeenth century, the Orthodox were asked which of them they recognised, so they described the teaching of the Orthodox Churches by reference to these denominations. In trying to distinguish themselves from these Western Churches, the Orthodox borrowed arguments from the Roman Catholics in order to reply to the Protestants and vice versa. However, to find a truly Orthodox account of the identity of the Church we have to examine its early history. The Church springs from the relationship of man and the world with God, experienced by the Christian community throughout the centuries.

The Orthodox take their account of the Church from two sources. The first of these is the divine Eucharist, the liturgical experience that all Christians share. The second is the experience of the Christian life and the ascetic tradition of the Church, Roman Catholic and Protestant ecclesiology seems to be informed primarily by the issue of mission. When an Orthodox Christian says that he is going to Church, he does not mean that he is going to hear the gospel of Christ being preached as though for the first time. He means that he is going to worship God in the community of the faithful and particularly to participate in the divine Eucharist. The Church is identified basically by its participation in the worship of God.

However, under the influence of those contemporary Christian movements and organisations that emphasise mission and preaching, a more individual piety has come to affect Orthodox understanding of the liturgy. Some of the clergy promote preaching over worship, to the neglect of the Eucharist, which fundamentally changes the orientation of the Church. Many clergy now read, rather than chant, the gospel in the divine liturgy, in the belief that this makes it more accessible to the laity. The enthusiasm for access and mission has undermined our understanding of the liturgy as participation in the mystery of communion with God.

In Orthodox theology, the Church is not constituted by the task of evangelisation or mission, that is, by its desire to make its faith comprehensible to outsiders. The divine liturgy does not attempt to explain the faith: though there are many accounts of the faith, none of them is central to the life of the Church. At the centre, is the eucharistic worship, and here the only explicit articulation of the faith is the creed, which we share with all other Churches and denominations. At the very beginning of the Church’s history, there was worship and the divine Eucharist. In the New Testament and early Fathers, such a Saint Ignatius of Antioch, Saint Irenaeus of Lyons and Justin Martyr, we see the origin of the Church in the celebration of the holy Eucharist. Therefore, it is primarily the divine liturgy that gives the Orthodox tradition its distinctive view of the Church. Monasticism represents another account of the Church. I will examine these two approaches to the identity of the Church, the eucharistic and liturgical on one hand, and the ascetic and monastic on the other, in order to pick out some theological principles.

Monasticism was deeply influenced by Origen, who along with Clement and other Alexandrian theologians of the period, was to some extent informed by the thought of Plato. For Plato the identity of every being is found in that being’s original idea and its material form was an incomplete if not an unfortunate embodiment of that idea. A thing is not what is it because of its present, material, corruptible and inconstant state, but only because of its relation to its idea that remains constant. We can only identify a thing to the extent it continues to reflect its unchanging archetype. In the view of the theologians of Alexandria, the identity of the Church is given by the same timeless realm of ideas, which is itself given by the Logos of God, which contains the rationality (logos) of all beings. The Church is true to its identity when its members are brought together by participation in this original universal Logos.

Alexandrian theologians responded to the question of the ‘being’ of the Church with an account of the union of the eternal souls with the eternal Logos. Although Origen’s concept of the immortality of souls, which was rejected by the Council of Constantinople (553), was not a decisive influence monasticism, the union of the soul with the Logos, another essential element of Alexandrian tradition, did play a significant role in asceticism. It was assumed that materiality obstructs the union of the soul with the Logos. The mind (nous) had to be cleansed of all that is worldly so it may return to the supreme Logos from which all souls come. The monastery was understood as a kind of rehabilitation centre, in which the souls were stripped of all passion and other impediments to this communion, so that they could return to their pristine state.

From the fourth century, this emphasis on purification began to impact on the Church. Holy communion came to be regarded as a means of carrying on this struggle with the passions. The spread of monasticism made sense within this Alexandrian, or ultimately Platonist, view of the world in which all that was material and tangible was believed to be a corruption of the superior intelligible world. As the influence of this theology of self-purification grew, the significance of the liturgy diminished.

But is the purification of the individual really the fundamental purpose of the Church? Is man being called out of this material world and into a world of beings without material bodies? Is the incarnate Logos simply a means of accessing the disembodied Logos? Is the Church a collection of minds purified of all bodiliness? The Fathers wrestled with these questions, and they continue to be asked today. However, the Church settled on quite a different view of the body and materiality. It decided that in the Church we are being brought together as the recapitulation of the world, body and spirit, in the incarnate, materially embodied Logos. Although Origen’s views were no longer dominant, they have never entirely disappeared. The individual charismatic holy man, purified of all passion and selfhood, is an important figure for the Church in our age as much as any other, and the hymns and devotional literature of the Church still suggest that individual purification is what the Church is essentially about.

However, when we look at the Eucharist, we see that it is Christ, the incarnate Word, who is the model of man. Christ has taken all material nature into his human nature, and this makes the event of the Eucharist, and is the source of the Church and of all who are made holy within it. It was the achievement of Saint Maximus the Confessor (580–662) to integrate the best insights of asceticism into the eucharistic theology of the Church.

As a monk, Maximus was well acquainted with the views of Origen and the Platonist traditions that underlay them. His use of Plato’s conceptuality in his theology made it easy for scholars to align Maximus with Origen and other platonising Fathers. In his ‘Cosmic Liturgy’ (translated by Brian E. Daley, S.J., San Francisco: Ignatius Press 2003) Hans Urs von Balthasar initially identified Origenist elements everywhere in Maximus’ thought, but he was corrected by Polycarp Sherwood, and von Balthasar subsequently rectified his own account. Sherwood showed that Maximus had gone through an ‘Origenist crisis’ after which Maximus had drastically revised Origen. Maximus had an extensive knowledge of Origen and neo-platonism, as did most of the Eastern monks, but because he conformed his theology to the lived experience of the Church, he came down on the side of a eucharistic ecclesiology.

An extraordinarily creative intellect allowed Maximus to achieve a truly majestic synthesis of these two approaches. He insisted that it is the Eucharist that most fundamentally expresses the identity of the Church. For him the truth of the ecclesiology of individual purification lies in the transformation and the presentation in Christ of the entire tangible and intelligible world, and of all human relationships. There must be a process of purification by which all negative or worldly elements are driven out, but the purification itself is not the ultimate purpose of the Church. By lifting it and offering it to God, the Eucharist transforms all creation. The Church is the place in which this purification takes place, but rather than producing incorporeal angels, it brings about the salvation of this material world by giving it eternal communion with God. The process of purification must be understood as part of the eucharistic transformation of the world, not as rejecting or devaluing the material and bodily creation. Though at one time or another each of these two aspects has been given greater emphasis, the Church has always held to Maximus’ synthesis.     Problems begin when theologians make one aspect bear too much weight. Unbalanced statements can be found in Saint Maximus himself, so some have seen him as a great exponent of the theology of self-purification. Among later Fathers, Saint Gregory Palamas in particular was promoted as a standard-bearer of Orthodoxy and representative of the theology of self-purification. Some scholars believe that there was a tension between those theologians who stressed individual spirituality, the ‘Hesychasts’, and other, eucharistic, theologians of the fourteenth century, such as Saint Nicholas Cabasilas of Thessaloniki (c.1323–c.1391). Saint Gregory Palamas has been commonly portrayed as representative of the ecclesiology in which the divine Eucharist is less important than individual spirituality. Nonetheless, I believe that, taken together, his treatises, doctrinal essays and sermons show that Palamas is agreement with Maximus in regarding the Eucharist as central. We are still waiting for studies that will show us where the other significant representatives of the Patristic tradition, in particular Saint Simeon the New Theologian, stand on this issue.

One area in which the tension between the theology of self-purification has vied with eucharistic ecclesiology has been in the relationship of the bishop and the monastic communities. It is the bishop, presiding at the divine Eucharist, who is the head of the Church, so the bishop represents this eucharistic ecclesiology of the entire gathered community. The monk, on the other hand, tends to represent the ascetic self-purification of the individual, even though we should see the monastic communities as essential to the holiness of the whole Church. Nevertheless, there is always a tension between the eucharistic and monastic ecclesiologies. In the ninth century, councils brought the monasteries under the authority of the local bishop and decided that monks should not exceed their office.

In our day, spiritual elitism and individualism are a very obvious problem for the Church. This spirituality comes in the form of monasticism for Orthodoxy, whilst in the West it takes the form of an amorphous interest in the Spirit and spirituality, which makes little reference to the Church or its teaching. Though it began as a departure from the world, the spirituality of the individual ascetic has now spread everywhere. Spiritual fathers from monasteries want to bring their ascetic spirituality to the lives of people who are married and bringing up families. The notion of obedience as an ascetic ideal that a monk undertakes from the moment of his tonsure, before God and people, promising to uphold it, has come out of the monastery to shape the Christian life. We see lay people struggling to become spiritual disciples without taking the vows of monks, while on the other hand, those who have vowed obedience and lifelong retreat in a monastery, are soon back out again and trying to turn ordinary Christians into followers of some particular spiritual path. Christians are puzzled about who they should obey and need guidance through a range of decisions that they never used to face. Therefore, it is important to cut through some of the confusion. This cannot be achieved by intellectual work alone, of course, but it does require that we find the proper balance between the Eucharist and the search for personal holiness, so that the holiness of individuals serves the whole gathered Church.

Christians have a relationship of direct and personal familiarity with the Church and the saints. The relationship is personal and involves our entire being, not merely our minds or feelings. Yet when someone lights a candle or makes an offering, you will often hear someone remark that such an action is meaningless if that person is not thinking the right set of thoughts or experiencing the tight set of feelings. However, we must be clear that it is not our thoughts or feelings that make anything what it is: what is significant is that we have left home and come to Church to be with the saints. The liturgy is simply the realisation of our relationship to God, the whole communion of his saints and the entire world. Its purpose is not simply to grasp something intellectually or emotionally or arrive at some particular state of mind. When the congregation signs themselves with the Cross each time a saint is mentioned, this shows that, even if they are not thinking the right thoughts or experiencing the right emotions, they enjoy a living relationship with that saint simply by being there together with the other members of the community.

The Church is the people of God assembled together, ‘being of the same mind, having the some love, being in full accord and of one mind’ (Philippians 2.2). The entire world is represented in this people, united in the person of Christ in the Holy Spirit. This is not only the truth of the Chruch, it is also the future of the world. In the meanwhile, the Church has to struggle to remain true, to keep itself distinct from all competing influences and identities, and then to allow the rest of the world to move towards this truth and future.

The origin of the Church is in God’s election of Abraham and the subsequent formation of the people of Israel as the people of God. Although Clement of Alexandria and Origen spoke of the pre-existence of the Church before the creation of the world, Scripture tells us that the call of Abraham is the origin of the people of God. Israel was created from the seed of Abraham for the specific purpose that ‘all nations shall be blessed in you’ (Genesis 12.3). This nation is the source of the Messiah and his eschatological community; the first Christians understood this call that created the nation of Israel as the origin of the Church, the ‘new Israel’. Then came the Incarnation. Yet the incarnation of the Son of God did not as yet include you, me or anyone else who would subsequently be brought into relationship with Christ, so the incarnation of Christ alone is not the final realisation of the Church. The Church is not simply the single body of Christ, as though Christ were an individual who extends into eternity. A body of Christ that consists of the incarnation of the Son without a subsequent Pentecost, and without our personal incarnation, would not be the Church.

Though the incarnation may at first sight present itself as an isolated event, the incarnation has to be understood as the incarnation of a community. The incarnate Christ takes the form of the community that is the Church. When the Apostle Paul discusses the Body of Christ in 1Corinthians 12, he says that the members of the Body of Christ are God’s people, and the body of Christ exists because the Holy Spirit calls these members together. The members of the Body of Christ are not merely the physical limbs that were crucified, or even the limbs that were resurrected. The members are the many joined together in the one to become a single whole, so the Body of Christ is the many actual members who make up the Church.

The Church lives in history, but its true identity is to be found in the future. The first Christian communities had a sense of expectation of the risen Christ. They looked forward to the climax of history, and in the expression ‘Come, Lord’ (maran atha) (1Corinthians 16.22), their anticipation became part of their liturgies. The Church preserved a strong eschatological sense through its hymns, vestments and the iconography of the saints, all of which served to make it clear that the kingdom is imminently present to us in the liturgy.

When the liturgy is allowed to keep this anticipation of the kingdom present to the world, this eschatological dimension has a public outworking. The Church is transcendent of secular institutions, so it does not compete with them. As a sign of the limits and transience of all institutions, the Church prevents every worldly claim from becoming totalitarian. Rather than involving itself in social work, and adopting the administrative systems of secular institutions of social welfare, the ancient Church encouraged unforced person-to-person charity. Love cannot be turned into an institution. This is not to say that the Church could ever be inactive in the world: when someone is hungry, you share food with him. The more of your eschatological identity you carry with you, the more you will love and come to the aid of whoever needs your help, whatever it costs you. Yet the Church can live in the world without becoming absorbed into organised social outreach or into politics, just as it can without retreating into quietism. Its action is personal, rather than institutional, and the same is true of missionary work and every other form of outreach. Today organised social work is the responsibility of the State and is usually performed better by it. If its charity becomes managed and administered, the Church will he driven by secular imperatives and cease to love, for love must always be free. For this reason, social action or activism cannot define the Church. So though the Church serves the mission for which it has been sent to every corner of the world, mission does not constitute the basis of the identity of the Church.

The Church is primarily a foretaste of the eschatological assembly of the Lord, made present in the world. The resurrection of Christ and Pentecost makes the Church and its worship the presence of the future. People go to Church because they want to grasp something of this elusive future, and this indefinable future element can be found in no other institution.

Christian ecclesiology evolved from the expectations of the people of Israel that the scattered people of God would be called together around the Messiah ‘on the last day’. This ‘Son of God’, who was also referred to as the ‘Son of Man’ in the Book of Daniel and other apocalyptic literature, would take all the sins of the world on himself and bring the kingdom of God in history. Christ confirmed these expectations in his teaching and ministry, using these two titles of the Messiah who would reunite the whole people of God. The Gospel of John tells us that the Son of Man would bring the many into himself, giving his own body for their sustenance and unite them in his eschatological assembly. The Apostle Paul says that all who believe in Christ and who through baptism and the divine Eucharist became incorporated in his Body would be members of the ‘people of God’.

From the resurrection of Christ, and even more after Pentecost, the Church declared that the ‘last days’ were making themselves felt in history, wherever the divine Eucharist assembled the scattered people of God together, incorporating the many into the one Christ. The Church is built on this historical experience of those who, from being scattered and opposed to one another, were brought together, reconciled and united in the person of Christ. For the Apostles John and Paul, and for Saint Ignatius of Antioch, this assembly of God’s people in one place and with one mind is the foundation of all ecclesiology.

At the time of the Apostle Paul, the community was loosely structured into those who led the divine Eucharist, and the people as a whole who received the Eucharist with their ‘Amen’. Saint Ignatius distinguished between the episkopos, one who heads the assembly, and the presbyters or priests who accompany him, and the deacons, who link the people to these ministers. As the officiating clergy assemble around the bishop they are an image of the eschatological assembly of God’s people, and this gives the Church its form and structure. The bishop is the centre around whom the people of God unite. In the words of Ignatius, ‘Where the bishop is, there let the people gather, just as wherever Christ is, there is the catholic (ie the whole) Church’ (Letter to the Smyrnaeans, 8). Just as all God’s people are brought together around Christ, the community of the Church gather around the bishop.

This bishop is surrounded by the ‘college’ of the presbyters who together represent the Apostles. In the eschatological assembly, the Apostles will be the judges of the tribes of Israel. ‘In the last days, you will be seated on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel’ (Matthew 19.28). At the completion of all time, Christ will return, accompanied by the twelve who represent this eschatological assembly which will judge first Israel and then the world. The Apostles are represented by the presbyters who stand on either side of the bishop. The bishop, surrounded by the presbyters, acts as judge of the Church and the world and so represents the Father to us, occupying, as Ignatius tells us, the ‘place of God’ (Letter to the Magnesians 6.1).

This typological ecclesiology gives us a foretaste of the eschatological reality. The reality of the Church comes to it from the eschaton, so the identity of the Church is not limited to its created history. The Church receives its identity from that which is to come, so that the Church is able to make the future present to the world now. This future makes itself present whenever the divine liturgy is performed. The Eucharist requires the physical presence of a figure who represents Christ, surrounded by his Apostles, to stand before its as we will finally stand before the Father. The people gathered by that Eucharist are an instalment of that final assembly. This is the account of the Church that had been established by the second century.

However, the clarity of this view of the Church did not last. With the ‘Christian Gnosticism’ that appeared at the beginning of the third century in Alexandria, this eschatological account of the Church began to give way to another ecclesiology. For Clement of Alexandria and Origen, its representatives, it is not the future fulfilment but the original existence of the Church that is significant. They regarded the original state of things as perfection, and everything subsequent to this as a falling away, which meant that the future had to be a return to that first state of perfection. In the ecclesiology of Origen and Clement, the gathering, the structure and offices of the Church in the liturgy are of secondary or even of no importance. For them the original perfection of the Church is demonstrated by the ‘logos’ of the world as a whole. The logoi of all separate beings will unite again within the one Logos of God that existed before the creation of the world. In this account the eucharistic gathering and unity of the Church makes no constitutive contribution to bringing all things together in the one eternal Logos.

The ‘logos’, rather than the liturgy and the offices of the gathered Church, became significant, and not in a merely judicial sense. The specific offices that gave the Church its public structure would have no role because only the union of the soul or the mind with the eternal and pre-eternal Logos is of any significance. Salvation no longer means the hope of a new world, with a new community and structure, for as we have seen, salvation in the Alexandrian account involves purifying the soul so that it may be re-united with the Logos who is before all society and before the created and material world. Consequently, purification means removing ourselves from society, cleansing ourselves of material things, and becoming united to the One who came before the creation of the material world. Perfection will take the form of a reversion. This account sees no significance in the Church as a gathered and ordered community imaging the future kingdom.

Under Cyprian and other Church Fathers, Ignatius’ ecclesiology continued to develop, so the two ecclesiologies progressed in parallel, and even interacted constructively. However, as often as they moved towards a degree of integration, tensions would re-merge and they would diverge again. Which is the right account of the Church? Where does the true identity of the Church become visible? Is it in the monastery, in the cell of the individual who removes himself from society in order to free himself of all passions by removing himself from the world and matter? Or is it in the community of all disparate persons gathered together by the Eucharist? This was the question that came up repeatedly through the history of the Church.

The Church has the resources to answer this question, but the readiness of any generation to receive these answers is another matter. The problem represented by this dichotomy is at heart a spiritual one. That the Church offers therapy for our passions is beyond any doubt, but there is no more difficult thing than to give up our passions and finally leave them behind. As soon as anyone begins to believe that he has had some success in this spiritual struggle, pride comes creeping back again, and then we are to to despise the Church and undermine its ministers.

If we truly have some control over our passions, our pride will be brought under control too, and we will not be tempted to sit in judgment on the gathered Church or its ministers. The person who has learned to control his passions will regard the bishop with respect, and gladly receive the teaching and instruction of their bishop. Those who have not achieved such self-control will of course ask what authority bishops and priests have. If we do not exercise the proper control over our passions, especially self-love and pride, we will come to believe that the spirituality of the bishop is no greater than our own, and thus undermine his authority over the Church. Those who go this way tend to make their own spiritual disciples and gather their own community, criticising the institutional Church and creating a contradiction between institution and charisma.

The religious individualism of such an ecclesiology constitutes a serious problem. It allows us to believe that we are not in need of the institutional community of the Church. This notion of salvation is without love, so rather than bringing us towards one another, it leads us away from one another. Though it talks about overcoming passions, it allows our passions to serve our own elitism.

In itself, this ecclesiology of personal spirituality or piety is not absent from the tradition of the Orthodox Church. But the main source of Orthodox ecclesiology is to be found in the eucharistic communion, headed by the bishop, who unites it in one body and lifts up its offerings to God, and with it the daily needs and hopes of mankind and all creation. All these are brought together as a foretaste and image of the eschatological kingdom of God.

The relations of the bishops and these other individualistic spiritual and charismatic leaders is a perennial problem. We must conclude that the true ecclesiology is the one that relates to the structure of the eucharistic community which portrays the eschatological assembly that is called into being by Christ. So it would be a mistake to look for the essence of the Church either in individual spirituality or through the cosmological approach that relates the Church to the beginning, rather than to the future recapitulation of human history. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Origen, and to a lesser extent Clement, finally diverged from the faith of the Church.

Saint Maximus the Confessor offers us the proper solution. Maximus succeeded in combining the two trends by integrating the cosmological approach, which refers creation to its origins, into the eschatological approach, which looks forward to the future kingdom of God. Maximus took the cosmology of Origen and made it eschatological, transferring its reference from the beginning to the end, so dethroning Plato. He turns us around from the past to the future so that the eschatological community became the centre of ecclesiology again. When cosmology is reconciled with eschatology, we get the eschatological community in the divine Eucharist and the body of the Church. This single eschatological community incorporates the logos of beings, the world, as realities that come to us from the future. The events of the end which the Church portrays are not about this people only, but about creation as a whole. Just as each Christian represents in his own body the gathering and redemption of material creation, so the whole Church is the assembling of all creation in Christ, who is himself the final truth of all things. This ecclesiology gives us an account of mankind in which the new Adam recapitulates all things, and so it overcomes the dichotomy of individual and eucharistic ecclesiologies.

We have seen how two accounts of ecclesiology sometimes competed and at other times combined to make a robust single ecclesiology. We have seen that Saint Maximus brought the two streams together to show that the divine Eucharist creates the Church as the foretaste of the eschaton. Though he is concerned with our spiritual life and purification, Saint Maximus is confident that the Logos has taken our flesh so he can enable us, with all our materiality, to take our place within him in the communion of God.

We must now turn from history to examine the issues this double approach creates for ecclesiology. Let us start by setting ecclesiology into its broader theological framework. Few will deny that the division of ecclesiology from theology and its relegation to a separate chapter of dogmatics has not been a helpful development. We cannot discuss ecclesiology in isolation from theology, because the Church is a reality that springs from God himself. The Church is the outcome of the Father’s will, a will he shares with the Son and the Holy Spirit, and which is realised through the economy in which each of the persons of God is engaged.

What is the distinct contribution of each member of the Trinity in the realisation of the Church? Every event of the economy begins from the Father and returns to the Father. The Father wills and brings everything to its beginning, and it was by his ‘good pleasure’ that the communion of God should extend into creation through the Church. The Father intended the world to come into eternal communion with God, the created with the uncreated, and so receive true life.

The Father initiated, and the Son and the Holy Spirit accepted and realised the Father’s ‘good will’. These distinct acts oblige us to distinguish between the divine persons, and to observe that a certain movement takes place in the Holy Trinity. The life of the Trinity is not static, but as the persons relate in love to one another so their will is ordered by reference to one another so that the Trinity has its own intrinsic order. The Father initiates, and the Son and the Spirit execute the initiative of the Father in the economy.

The particular role of the Son is to carry out freely the Father’s ‘good pleasure’ and become the person in whom this union of created and uncreated is realised. The salvation of creation will take place in the Son, and then be presented to the Father by the Son. The Holy Spirit has his own contribution to this plan. He makes the incorporation creation in the Son possible by enabling creation to open to its incorporation in the Son. Its natural limitations mean that, left to itself, creation cannot sustain any relationship with God, while the fall puts a further barrier to creation’s openness. However, through intervention of the Spirit this openness becomes possible and thus the incorporation of creation in the Son can be accomplished as the work of all three persons of the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

The Church is brought into being within this triune ‘economy’ in which the Father initiates, the Son undertakes to incorporate creation and bring it to the Father, and the Holy Spirit liberates the world from the limitations of its createdness. Through his incarnation the Son is the centre of this event, so the Church is described as the Body of Christ, rather than as the body of the Father or of the Holy Spirit. The distinction between the activities of the persons is crucial. It is the initiative of the Father that creation should be embodied and united in the Son that explains why this incorporation became reality. The Father created the world in order that it become the Church, and so made the plurality given in the Church the whole purpose of creation. However, in order that there could be this incorporation of creation in the Son and the arrival of the Church, mankind’s free consent had to be secured. Mankind is able to represent creation because he is the one free being within material creation who is able to give consent so that creation can be brought into relationship with God in freedom. For this reason Mary’s free ‘yes’ to the incarnation of the Son is crucial to the economy of our salvation.

We saw that, rather than representing creation and bringing it into this union with God, mankind freely decided to refer creation to itself and so make death part of its predicament. He deified himself and deified nature, and consequently he and nature fell into a closed relationship that condemned them both. God’s hope for the conversion of the world into the Church stumbled on man’s free denial, so God then had to find another way to bring the world into this relationship which would ensure its survival. This other way was the incarnation of the Son in the now fallen creation, something which required the Son, mankind, and all creation to pass through death and emerge from it in order to reach that union.

Although the Church and the whole economy now took a path that passed through the cross, the end of that path remained as it had been from the beginning, the union of the created with the uncreated God. The Church goes through the cross and travels on until all the discipline of the cross is transformed into the attributes of the eschaton, the resurrection.

This is where ecclesiological differences are crucial. For Western theologians, the passage through the cross gives the Church the wounds which evil and history deal out to the Body of Christ. Many stop at this point and assert that the Church is finally scarred by the cross and therefore by evil, thus Western theologians are inclined to begin with history and to end up with evil, thus even attributing it with some ultimate ontological status. Much of the music, art and literature informed by this theology is preoccupied by the cross and suffering, and never moves on to the kingdom of God.

The result is an ecclesiology that stops with Calvary and the crucifixion. It conceives of the Church as the body of the one sacrificed, and who ministers to the world through his suffering. Although this ecclesiology is often successful in eliciting an emotional response, it incarcerates the Church within the world, with the result that the Church’s activity in the world becomes important to the exclusion of all else. What can the Church be in the face of evil and human suffering? What consolation and recompense can it offer, and how much must it minister to mankind to ease this suffering? Thus the Church is motivated by the desire to relieve this endless pain and need, so it is driven by social and ethical concerns. By identifying itself exclusively with those who suffer it makes itself powerless to help them by offering them the truth of the redemption of creation that comes with an eschatological perspective.

The Son is crucified, and the event of the cross and its suffering is transferred into the eternal life of the triune God. This theology was advocated by some Lutherans, though the same sentimentality can be observed in those Russian theologians who also see the life of the eternal as bound to suffering and the cross. The sacraments and in particular the Eucharist are understood as the perpetual presence of Christ’s death. Even in many Orthodox Churches today, the crucifix is now set at the centre of the Eucharist, a trend which prevents us from receiving the truth of the Church’s liturgical experience. The truth of the Eucharist is that it does not take us to Calvary in order to leave us there, but brings us through it and beyond to the communion of the saints and the glory of the kingdom of God. This glory is made visible to us by, the icons, vestments, and the chanting of the psalms, all of which point to transcendence of the cross. Our understanding of the Church must start from Father’s good will, which has brought about the whole economy of God for man and the unity of the created with the uncreated which is the true purpose of creation.

The Church is the foretaste and realisation of the kingdom of God, so the spiritual and ascetic life by which we participate in suffering and the cross do not represent the ultimate purpose of the Church. The ascetic life is part of the Church, and the Christian who bears the marks of his participation in the cross of Christ on his person is assuredly a part of the life of the Church. However, when we put on the gold vestments of the eucharistic liturgy, we are looking forward to the kingdom of God. The Church is constituted by the resurrection and so has travelled past the cross and broken through into that new creation which is filled with the uncreated light of God.

The experience of the resurrection and new creation can be found in each individual who radiates sanctity, but this experience cannot simply be related to individuals. It is the Church that reflects the transformation of the entire material world and with it all human society and community. We have the Church only when we have a community. The Christian who hopes to radiate sanctity must become Church so he can participate in the community of the end of times.

We have come to the conclusion that it is the good will of the Father that the entire material world should become the Church, the body of the Son in the Holy Spirit. The Father does not desire mankind only, or only a certain number from among mankind, but all creation. However, because of man’s fall, the incorporation of the world in the Son must pass through the cross, and through the costly experience of the disciple and the ascetic, through a profound and consuming struggle against evil finally to gain the victory. The Christian goes through the narrow gate and along the narrow path set out by the Father’s good will, but his destination lies beyond that gate, at the end of that path, in the kingdom. The kingdom is being realised in the Church, and the Church is being fulfilled, by its progress along this narrow path. The Church that focuses on history and on Calvary will come to a halt before it reaches the end of that path. The overcoming of evil and defeat of the devil is not our final destination. A healthy ecclesiology will lead us on beyond the struggle with evil and into the light, to gain in the divine Eucharist our first experience of the kingdom of God. In this experience, a community of people portrays the future of the world, in which both society and all material creation overcome corruption. Such an ecclesiology will have profoundly positive consequences for the Christian life, the organisation of the Church, the sacraments, and for every aspect of the Church’s witness to the world.

The Church is rooted in the being and life of the Holy Trinity. God’s purpose in creating the world is that it attain communion with him and share his life. The Church is the future of the world in this communion, so we must look for the origins of ecclesiology and its destination in eternity.

We have said that the Holy Trinity is the communion in which the Church participates and that the Father loves and wills that creation come into communion with God. It is the Father who intends this and to whom we must attribute all that follows. The Son undertakes to carry out and personally substantiate this union of the created to the untreated. The Holy Spirit enables the transcendence of the limitations between the created and the untreated. He is the Spirit of communion, of power and of life, who tears down the barriers that separate beings; he enables creation to surmount the physical impossibility of communion of created and uncreated. The three persons act and are present in the Church, and so the Church is the product of their unity, but it is the Son who is the mediation of created and uncreated, and for this reason the Church is called the Body of Christ.

The Church is the image or ‘icon’ of the kingdom of God. In the Church all things are brought together, included and recapitulated so they will continue in life forever. The Church depicts the end time in history. I choose the term ‘depict’ in order to avoid some of the problems that the word ‘identify’ would cause us. The Church in history is clearly not identical with the kingdom of God. The trauma of history means that along with the rest of the world, Christians struggle with evil, and the way of the cross is this struggle. The Church is not the society of those who have overcome evil but of those who are struggling against evil. The holy Church is full of sinners, being made holy. Therefore, we must say that the kingdom of God is depicted the Church. This iconological ontology is key.

The Church is presently only a depiction of the end times, not the end times themselves. However, we need to clarify this distinction. The relation of a photograph and its object is dependent on the imagination of those who look at the photo: the resemblance they see comes from their ability to find likenesses. The photograph has no ontological continuity with that person: it is not a collage of items belonging to him, and if we disposed of this photograph this would not hurt the person portrayed in it.

However, an icon does have an ontological share in the original, so we honour the icon because we honour the saint whose image it is. There is an ontological continuity between the saint and their image, even though there is no continuity of material between them. The honour given on an icon ‘passes to the original’ in the words of Saint Basil the Great.

The distinction between image and truth that Maximus uses to express this iconological ontology comes from the distinction that the Letter to the Hebrews makes between shadow and reality (Hebrews 10.1). Maximus says that the ‘shadow’ refers to the Old Testament, while the New Testament gives us the ‘image’, but the reality itself, Christ and his kingdom, is still to come (Scholia on Dionysis’ Ecclesiastical Hierarchy 3.3.2). The reality, which is what the eschaton is, continually projects itself into our history to reveal itself to us.

The eschaton projects an image of itself backwards to create the experience of the Apostles which then constitutes the realities of the New Testament. The New Testament is the ‘image’ of the eschaton, the truth, and possesses something of it. The New Testament is the present image of future things. This distinction between image and the truth allows us to talk about the holiness of the Church, and even the holiness of Christians, even while Christians are still struggling with sin. Christians already participate in the truth, and this truth will become the whole truth about them. The Church is not simply what it is now but what it will be. Its identity is given to us in ‘earthen vessels’. The Church is mystery. The term ‘mystery’ indicates that the Church is ‘revealed’, and thus no complete definition of it is possible. Although the Church comes to us, it comes from the place that we cannot access, so we are unable to take final possession of it.

The Church can truly be known but, because it is sourced from Christ and his kingdom, it is inexhaustible, and cannot be known exhaustively and finally. The identity of the Church has to be set out by examining the mysteries and sacraments that make the Church present within our historical experience. The sacraments are images of the truth arriving from the end times so that they become the experienced reality of the Church. The sacraments transform sinners into saints so Church is not only revealed in them but constituted by them. A sacrament enables the Christian freely to take their place in the complete reality in which all creatures will share. The sacraments witness to the indivisible and inexhaustible mystery of Christ, and cannot therefore be regarded as an individual topic, but rather as the hermeneutic by which we can approach ecclesiology as a whole.

The divine Eucharist is the revelation of the kingdom of God and so quite simply the revelation of ultimate reality. The Eucharist reveals this reality which is future to us in the form of the present. The origins of this iconological ontology are found in the prophetic books of Scripture, in the apocalypses or revelations of heaven that we see in Isaiah, Daniel and the Book of Revelation. The prophet sees the completion of all time entering our still partial history and giving judgment on it before the whole assembly of heaven and earth.

In the form of the Eucharist all creatures are brought together and recapitulated in Christ. The Eucharist manifests and substantiates within time the identity of this assembly in the form of the Church. When we want to speak of the actual lived experience of the Church we have to start from the Eucharist, for this is where the Church appears. The Eucharist is the free coming together of all parts into their proper relationships and so into the good order of the whole in which each creature is liberated from the limits given by its own nature. This liberation is the eternal will of the Father which the Son has substantiated and which the Spirit now makes possible for us to share.

The sacraments that we regard as separate today all took place in the context of the Eucharist of the ancient Church, as is still clear from the liturgical structure in which these sacraments appear. This is the case for example with baptism.

As long as theology has been dominated by Scholasticism, it has tended to divide the indivisible mystery of the Church into separate sacraments which can be enumerated. Though the number seven was formalised in the twelfth century it had gone through a series of fluctuations: in one period the funeral service, and even the tonsure of a monk, were regarded as sacraments. In the scholastic understanding the Eucharist is just one particular sacrament, the one that perpetuates Christ’s passion through history. This division into separate sacraments should not prevent us from understanding all sacraments as aspects of the divine Eucharist. We must learn to see the Eucharist as the focus of all sacramental life in the Church.

If we want to see the unity and good order of the Church, we should look for it in the structure of the Eucharist. There we will find it exactly as it was shaped in the ancient Church, verified by the Church as a whole, and articulated by the canons given by the councils. The kingdom of God is well ordered, and the canonical structure of the Church is a manifestation of this good order, not simply an accommodation to those contingent organisational requirements by which the Church relates to the world. Therefore, we cannot say that some canons are essential and dogmatic while others are merely contingent and administrative. All the canons are ecclesiologically and ontologically significant.

The real danger of altering the image of the Church is that, rather than an image of the completion of history by the kingdom of God, it becomes a picture of hell. Those distortions of its teaching that the Church refers to as ‘heresy’ are not limited to dogmatic formulations, but also include liturgical and canonical matters: they are the result of introducing imagery that does not come front the eschaton. Those images that do not come from the kingdom of God, come from that other kingdom which loves disorder and hates and opposes the kingdom of God. For example, if we were to perform a eucharistic service for white people but not black people, or for men but not women, or for the educated but not the illiterate, or the rich but not the poor, or just for students, or just for lawyers or any other group, then that service would be the very opposite of the Eucharist. Every time we segregate ourselves from our neighbour through criteria of this kind, we receive a foretaste of hell. The Church can very easily be turned into the image of hell without even noticing that this has happened.

So far I have talked about the identity of the Church. Now we must say something about the form of the Church. The form of the Church relates directly to the Church’s very being, for there can be no gap between what the Church is and how the Church is. The way the Church is structured and arrayed is determined by what the Church is, for the Church must be truly itself even in its outward form.

Our first principle is that the Church is the mystery of God’s dealings with man. The Church is the purpose and culmination of the whole work of God for man and the recapitulation of all creation. It is the form in which the love of God is present to the world, and so manifests the world’s own origins to it. The Father initiates the whole economy of God for man and brings the Church into existence, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, provides the body that is the literal embodiment of the communion and love of God, while the Holy Spirit enables the communion of the created with the uncreated so this body can enable the communion of every being with every other.

The Church has its basis in the trinitarian life of God, that is to say, in ‘the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit’ (2Corinthians 13.14). Grace means that Jesus Christ is the gift of God, while the Holy Spirit enables us to exceed the limits of our creaturely being and enter that communion with God which is God’s love. Beings must have boundaries so that they can be acknowledged as distinct, but they must surmount these boundaries in order to come into communion with one another and so live as a society. Creatures must be able to distinguish themselves from God who is the source of their communion. The Holy Spirit enables both this demarcation and its transcendence and so makes all community possible. We have to bear in mind this trinitarian account of the Church as we consider its form and structure.

Our second basic ecclesiological principle is that the Church arises from the kingdom of God. The Church’s being does not come from within the history in which the Church presently exists, but from that which is to be revealed. The real identity of the Church is the community of the future, so the structure of the Church must reveal the eschaton out of which the Church comes. The third basic ecclesiological principle is that in history the Church is an image of the kingdom of God, created by the kingdom itself. It portrays the kingdom that prevails against all other kingdoms. Because it represents God’s judgment of history, the Church holds out against all secular, historical realities, and against the current of history itself. The Church fits no particular social forms, it cannot be represented by a political parts or be absorbed into the state. The Church remains a stranger in the world, always at odds with it, while it looks forward to the fulfilment of time. The Church cannot be content to be identified with the partial historical realities or partial and antagonistic communities of this world. Our final ecclesiological principle is that the Church substantiates the fulfilment of time through the divine Eucharist. With these basic ecclesiological premises, we can now see how the function of the Church is structured, assembled and organised.

First of all, let us take a look at the Church as a whole. The Lord founded one single Church which we identify as the Body of Christ. This one Church is expressed and realised in a single community which necessarily appears in the world as many communities or Churches. It is for the sake of the world that this eucharistic community exists in many places. Wherever the faithful assemble, the complete Body of Christ is present, and the whole work of God for man is made known and the kingdom revealed. The one Church therefore consists of many local Churches, each of which is the image of the eschatological community. From its very earliest times the Church was called ‘the catholic Church’, by which the Fathers meant that each local Church represents the whole eucharistic assembly and the recapitulation of all things, in each particular place.

The Church consists of many catholic Churches. In his attempts to defeat the Donatists, Augustine emphasised the universality of the Church against the particularisms of the Donatist communities, so that after him, the term ‘catholic’ began to refer to the one worldwide Church. The Church in the West was constituted as a single organisation, with a single head in the bishop of Rome. In the East by contrast, the Church was not regarded as a single organisation with a universal reach that required a single figurehead. It is chiefly this understanding of the Church as the image of the end times, realised in the divine Eucharist, that differentiates the East from the West. We regard every assembly that performs the divine Eucharist as the presence of the whole Church, for the presence of the whole Christ in the Eucharist takes precedence over all considerations of history or distance. Christ is not divided by geography, for he unites all places in himself. The Eucharist is celebrated in cities separated by distance, but this does not make them two Eucharists, so these two eucharistic assemblies do not need the extrinsic form of a unitary administration to bridge the distance between them. The Eucharist provides the Church with unity, for unity is what the Eucharist is. Each of the Churches that celebrate the Eucharist has the whole presence of Christ, indeed each of them is the whole presence of Christ, for that place. Each place in which the Eucharist is celebrated, participates in the future unity, of all time and place. We do not therefore see individual Churches as fractions of Christ, for every Church is the indivisible presence of Christ that unites and recapitulates all things.

We turn now to the account of the Church given by Western theology. We have seen that Western theology characteristically attributes priority to being, making particular realities less important than what is general and universal. The Church is one, but this indivisible Church is made up of many Churches. So which comes first, the particular Churches that gather in each particular place, or the universal Church? Western theology has taken the view that it is the one universal Church which comes first, and that each individual Church is consequent on it. It defines ‘catholic’ as worldwide, and attributes the worldwide Church with a structure that is independent of all local Churches. The one Church stands over all the many Churches, and the papacy over all other bishops. Just as this theology gives priority to the essence over the persons, Western ecclesiology gives precedence to the worldwide, ‘ecumenical’ Church over the many, actual Churches. Karl Rahner and Joseph Ratzinger used the standard distinction between essence and existence to assert this: Rahner subsequently pointed out that the one Church cannot exist without local Churches. Nonetheless the single worldwide Church was assumed to be prior to the local Churches. This was given expression by the First Vatican Council (1870) with the ruling that the Pope is infallible, and that all other bishops must be obedient to him. This is not simply a judicial matter, but a consequence of placing essence before existence, the one before the many.

The Second Vatican Council introduced a new ecclesiology, announcing that each local Church is the whole Church in each that place. Each local Church is ‘catholic’ and complete in itself, under its bishop. Orthodox theologians had clearly had some influence on Roman Catholic ecclesiology. However, the newly acknowledged catholicity of the local Church was in conflict with the older view that catholicity meant the unity of the whole Church (ecumene) above all particular Churches.     Vatican II did not formally overturn Vatican I but simply asserted that the new ecclesiology was fully in keeping with that of the previous council. However, far from being complementary, the decisions of these two councils seem to be contradictory, so Roman Catholic ecclesiology has to clarify this. Its concessions to the Orthodox Churches have opened new possibilities but they have also put Roman Catholic ecclesiology in a dilemma. It must either move towards conceding the catholicity of each local Church, or it can ignore other Churches and continue to insist that the authority of the Pope prevails over the local bishops, in which case Vatican I will continue to represent the real logic of Roman Catholic ecclesiology.

If we do not want to understand ‘catholic’ in the sense of a single worldwide Church united by a single organisation, what is the relationship between the particular Churches? How can we find the right balance between an ecclesiology that shows the fullness and catholicity of each local Church, and an ecclesiology that understands catholicity only as universality?

Each local Church is fundamentally related to every other. This unity consists in the councils of the Church which express the teaching of all the Churches that together constitute the one Church worldwide. The balance between the Churches and the councils is not easy to get right, for the council must not be allowed to become an autonomous institution suspended over all Churches together.

In the West the idea that councils express the supreme authority of the Church has been termed ‘conciliarism’. Both before and after papal infallibility was made an explicit doctrine by the First Vatican Council in 1870, Western Catholics argued for councils and hoped to establish limits to papal authority. It is a common assumption that the Orthodox have councils in the same way that Roman Catholics have the Pope, but the council does not stand above the local Churches in this way. No council is allowed to intervene in the internal issues of a local Church. In the third century Saint Cyprian set down the principle that every bishop is to lead his own diocese, ordain whomever he wishes, and be responsible directly to God. However, ignorance of ecclesiology has produced many anomalies, so we often hear demands for a council to intervene in issues of a local Church. Orthodox ecclesiology provides no justification for such intervention because this would create a single universal authority over all Churches.

However, many issues are common to more than one Church. A bishop can only make a decision for his Church if it will not affect another Church. If the issue within his own diocese has wider implications it requires a council which can then make the decision for all the Churches involved. Every bishop has to ordain, and this does not need the mediation of other Churches. However, what about the case of someone who is excommunicated from holy communion in one Church who then goes to another Church to receive communion? This was the issue that the Fifth Canon of the Council of Nicaea (325) ruled on. Having been denied communion by their own Churches, many people were going to other Churches to receive communion and complaining that the reasons for these excommunications were not being made clear. Bishops therefore took the decision to meet twice a year, in Lent and in the autumn, to examine cases of exclusion from communion. The right to exclude someone from communion was transferred from the local Church to a council. Whenever the issues are common, a council is required, the authority of which is limited to that issue. A council cannot impose anything on a Church, unless other Churches are affected by the consequences of its actions. This principle is basic to conciliarism.

The other basic rule that maintains the balance between any particular Church and the worldwide Church is that the councils that decide on issues in common, must be comprised of bishops, and all bishops must be allowed to take part in them. If bishops are excluded from a council, the council becomes an authority that is imposed on the Churches. If a bishop is excluded from a council, whatever decisions that council takes would simply be imposed on the Church led by the excluded bishop. When its bishop participates in that council, that Church shares in the decisions taken by that council, so they cannot be said to be imposed on it from outside. The Church maintained the balance between the local and the universal, by making the council the means of expressing the consensus of Churches, and not allowing it to become an authority above them. As Saint Ignatius says, bishops ‘throughout the world have the mind of Christ’ (Magnesians 7). They agree in Christ, and they come to agreement on each issue by means of a council which expresses their unity in Christ.

Any council that does not invite or include all bishops, is seriously at fault. Such is the pressure towards centralising authority that there have been, and indeed still are, many such failures in the proper exercise of conciliarity. If national governments prevent bishops from travelling, as the Ecumenical Patriarch has often been prevented from travelling to the Churches of his patriarchate, there is nothing that anyone can do. However, when all bishops are able to be present at a council, yet some of them stay away, or some are allowed to dominate the proceedings, creating anomalies, the foundations of the Church are threatened. Of course there is always the issue of whether all representatives of all Churches can be present, without the numbers making the council unwieldy, which is why the practice of alternating which bishop is to participate was established. The alternating participation of bishops in order of seniority of ordination ensures that all bishops participate in the council at some time.

Naturally, the ideal situation is that all bishops participate, which is why, as often as the Church was able and it was judged necessary, the Church would convene an ecumenical council, which for this reason acquired a prestige and authority greater than that of any local synod. However, the essence of a council, whether or not it is ecumenical, is to express the unity and consensus of the Churches.

To some it may seem as if the Church has two heads, the Pope for the Catholics and the Ecumenical Patriarch for the Orthodox. However, this is not how it is. The patriarchates and autocephalous Churches developed as expressions of the conciliarity of the Church, not as institutions positioned above the Church. The five patriarchates were the synods of their five respective territories, as are the autocephalous Churches, that do not belong to any of the patriarchates. Their status is governed by the Thirty-Fourth Apostolic Canon, according to which all bishops in one territory have to acknowledge a single head. It was the need to meet in councils that brought these primacies into being, because it requires a primatial bishop to convene a council and take the chair. The Canon goes on to say that the bishops must act with the primate, and he must act with them. This was the spirit in which the Patriarchates and the self-governing Churches developed, and the result is that we have a primate and a synod in every territory. if this pattern is abused, either because a primate or the bishops have excessive power, this is not a structural fault but a matter to be put right by those involved.

Each of these local Churches is lead by a primate. If a synod has to be called because joint action is required, someone has to preside. For the greater part of Christian history the Bishop of Constantinople has been acknowledged as this primate. If the Bishop of Constantinople acts within the spirit of this Canon, doing nothing without taking the others into account, and they do nothing without taking him into account, the institution remains healthy and we have no problem. The Pope has assumed the right to intervene in any local Church, without consultation of primates, and even when he does consult them, the Pope makes a final decision alone. Now if, out of courtesy or any other reason, the bishops make this concession to the Ecumenical Patriarch as their primate and allow him to officiate wherever he wants, this is their own decision, but there is no papal element to the institution of the Ecumenical Patriarch. This is what has to be said about the particularity and universality of the Church.

Let us now take a look at the local Church. How can a Church be organised on the basis that we have set out? The structure of each Church comes from the performance of the divine Eucharist, in which the good order of the Church depicts the good order of the eschatological communion that will he revealed at the end times. The offices cannot be altered without distorting the image of this eschatological communion. We have to distinguish between the offices that can be altered to respond to historical contingencies, and that essential form which cannot be changed.

Let us start with the elements which relate to the eschatological community, and which represent what is constant in the structure of the Church. The prayer of the preparation of gifts (proskomide) says that at the fulfilment of time, as the kingdom of God begins to break in, the scattered people of God will assemble together ‘with one mind’. A Church whose members do not come together with one mind but remain divided and disordered, cannot depict the fulfilment of time, and so cannot be the Church, for which the orderly and united assembly of God’s people is essential.

The second element, which also comes from the kingdom of God, which is to say, from the community made complete at the eschaton, is that the centre of this assembly is Christ. It is not enough for God’s people simply to assemble, but they must do so around the bishop.

The third element is that Christ is surrounded by the twelve Apostles. They must be present to identify the true Christ who is the fulfilment of history. The Gospels say that there will be great confusion about who the real Christ is; there will be many making claims that identify Christ here or there. Many Christians will be misled because they will not know which is truly the gathering point around which the scattered people of God are to assemble, But the twelve Apostles, as the ones who actually saw the risen Lord, will recognise Christ and be able to verify that this really is the one who rose from the dead, and that he really is the one appointed by God to be the ‘Son of Man’ who will judge the world. Because it relies on the Apostles to identify him, the Church is termed ‘apostolic’.

This why it is not enough to say that Christ is our focal point at the eschaton. We also need the Apostles to corroborate that this is indeed Jesus Christ, the genuine identity of Christ. Their presence around Christ is also essential for the image of the fulfilment of history. These are the elements of the eschatological community, without which there can be no Church or kingdom of God.

In the Eucharist the Church is becoming the image of the communion of God on Earth. In the Church this image is being realised here on earth in advance of the Lord’s return. In the divine Eucharist, all the scattered people of God assemble together, with one mind, who is Christ, the head of the body and the summation of all creation offered to the Father. The bishop depicts Christ for us in each place, so the bishop is head and focus of the Eucharist and we gather around him. The bishop lifts all creation to the throne of God, praying: ‘We offer to you these gifts from your own gifts in all and for all’. In the person of the bishop, Christ’s recapitulation of all things to the Father is brought within our hearing.

We said that Christ will not return alone, but surrounded by his apostles. Saint Ignatius saw the image of the twelve Apostles in the divine Eucharist of the local Church, in the persons of the presbyters who surround the bishop. The ancient Church had a set of thrones, a ‘synthronon’, at the centre of which sat the bishop, and around him sat his presbyters in a clearly eschatological image that recalls Christ’s promise to the twelve, that ‘you shall he seated on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.’ The Apostles point us towards Christ.

Gathered around the bishop the presbyters are the image of the Apostles, pointing us to Christ. The presbyters’ first task therefore was teaching, convening assemblies, preaching and catechizing. Saint John Chrysostom and Origen have left us the homilies they preached as presbyters. While bishops gave us our liturgies and in particular the anaphoras, the eucharistic prayers of offering, presbyters taught, preached and looked after the administration of the Church, and together with the bishop, were members of the synod of the Church in that place.

However, this arrangement did not last long. By the third century the Church was beginning to take a different course, particularly in the West, as evidenced by Cyprian. The notion of the bishops as the image of Christ changed in favour of the idea that they were the image of the Apostles. Nowadays a bishop is regarded as a successor to the Apostles, so his primary responsibility is to teach. However, Saint Ignatius says that it is not the bishop who does the teaching and that we should respect the silence, which according to his understanding, the bishop may maintain for everything, apart from the anaphora of the divine Eucharist, which is his responsibility solely.

The contemporary view that the primary role of the bishop is teaching and only secondarily the Eucharist, is a clear divergence from the early understanding of the Church. In the Middle Ages, teaching became the bishop’s chief role, while the celebrating the liturgy was handed over to the presbyters. Thus the priest performs the liturgy, while the bishop is primarily a manager, who exhausts himself in the administration of the Church. Here is a very significant divergence from the eschatological understanding of the bishop.

Quite early a fourth element was introduced into the Church. This is the role of the deacon as a link between those who preside at the Eucharist and the people as whole. Deacons are clergy, but they are not priests, so they cannot lead the liturgy or be seated. They go back and forth between people and their ministers, bringing the gifts from the people to the bishop who presides at the Eucharist, passing on to the priests the names of those who are to be prayed for in the liturgy; and giving the sanctified gifts to the people. The deacon receives the gifts that the people bring, and when they have been sanctified he distributes them to the people as the body and blood of Christ. He is the dynamic link between ministers and people that is crucial to the unity of the Church.

These offices must all be present in order to represent the eschatological image of the Church as the assembly of God’s people, gathered around the bishop, who is flanked by presbyters or priests, with the deacons forming the dynamic link between the people and the ministers. Saint Ignatius insisted that it is four offices, of people, deacons, presbyters and bishop, which makes this assembly the Church.

The Church has a variety of functions and relationships that are not provided by this structure of offices, such as teaching, missionary work, charity and spiritual direction. However, these will not pass over into the eschaton. There will be no evangelists at the fulfilment of time, because the need for evangelism and conversion will be over. Bishops and deacons will give way to the original, Christ with his apostles. These realities are essential components of the kingdom which is made up of Christ with his apostles and all the children of God gathered around him. Though there are other functions that are essential to us today they make no direct contribution in the public formation of the image of the kingdom of God.

Now we must turn to the relationship of Christ and the Holy Spirit in order to make clear the issue of the one and the many in the Church. We have to find an ecclesiology that is shaped by the right doctrine of God and so able to hold Christology and pneumatology in their proper relationship.

We have said that Western theology tends to emphasise Christology at the expense of pneumatology. Western theology is largely concerned with history, the incarnation and the life of Christ. The Holy Spirit however liberates the Son from history, because the incarnate Son took on himself the consequences of man’s refusal and fall. He became a man, taking on the constraints of time and space, along with all the consequences of our fallen history, being born at a specific moment of history, in Palestine under the rule of Caesar Augustus, and crucified under Pontius Pilate.

Our history carries death within it. To take the example of our own individual life-stories, the way in which we live in history and experience history relates to the fact that there was a time that we did not exist and there will come a time when we shall no longer exist. Our historical existence is interwoven with death: it is a thing of gaps and holes, and one of these gaps will turn out to be an end, after which life will be over for us.

This was the life that the Son entered in the incarnation. Since it was the Son rather than the Spirit who entered our life and became incarnate, it is he rather than the Spirit who bears the dissolution and death that are the outcome of our history. The Spirit stands by the Son and finally sustains him through all the trauma that comes with his involvement in fallen creation.

In taking on human flesh, the Son took on death and suffered the pain of the cross and death. However, death did not succeed in holding on to him so he was not finally overcome by it. He was raised from the dead by the Holy Spirit. The biblical witness is clear that it was the Father who raised the Son through the Holy Spirit. Whatever occurs in Christology is a matter of persons, not of natures, so the Spirit is crucial to all Christology. It is not enough to say that it was Christ’s divine nature that overcame death. The idea that it was by his divine nature that Christ overcame death was introduced by Pope Leo I in the council of Chalcedon, against Cyril’s insistence that agency can he attributed only to persons, not to natures.

Western theology tends to emphasise Christology at the expense of the Holy Spirit. When the Western Churches did eventually develop a pneumatology, it was not integrated into its ecclesiology, so the Church was regarded as primarily an historical reality, to which the Spirit brings an additional and almost cosmetic element. For Western theology, the Church was built solely from the material of history, so this community is given its form by the past, and then the Holy Spirit is allowed to animate it. However, the truth is that the Holy Spirit builds the Church together with the Son and is present at the foundations with the Son: the Spirit does not arrive when the Church is complete.

The Church is the indivisible act of the triune God in which all the persons of the Trinity are involved so we must allow no sense of competition between the persons of God to creep into our account of the Church. The ‘christo-monism’ of Western ecclesiology tends to assume that the Church began at creation, or perhaps with the incarnation, and that it will end with the coming of Christ, making the Church a kind of interim measure.

The East responded by over-emphasising the role of the Holy Spirit. In order to demonstrate his difference from the West, Alexis Khomiakov declared that the Church is the communion of the Holy Spirit, and so omitted its foundation in Christ entirely. Khomiakov declared that the Orthodox must regard the Church as the communion of the Holy Spirit, and not as the Body of the historical Christ. This immediately introduces an opposition between the Spirit and the Son, which represents an inadmissible division in God. Sadly we see this division often enough in the assertion that the Holy Spirit has nothing to do with the traditional institution of the Church, or that the gospel cannot be confined within institutional frameworks. We see it in the contrast between the supposed freedom of charismatic ecclesial communities, and the Churches with ‘institutional’ apostolic and episcopal ministry. This contrast is the disastrous outcome of emphasising pneumatology at the expense of Christology.

Whenever a new charismatic leader starts a new and more ‘spiritual’ community, they have divided the body of Christ into spiritual and non-spiritual, or charismatic and non-charismatic, and decided that they do not need half of the body of Christ. Such a distinction between the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘institutional’ Church means the abandonment of ordinary Christians, if we may call them that. Are not all Christians members of the body of Christ? Has the Spirit abandoned them? Charismatic leaders who separate themselves from the order and offices of the Church claim that baptism does not transmit the Spirit. But how can the Spirit not be given in baptism when it is the Spirit who baptises us, and who gives us all the sacraments by which we are to be made holy? It is the Spirit who gathers us all in Christ.

Some generations later George Florovsky very justifiably corrected Khomiakov, but he did so equally without nuance, by insisting that ecclesiology should be understood merely as a sub-section of Christology. The emphasis returned to the history of Jesus Christ, again conceived as confined by history as much as any other individual. Others like Lossky, Nissiotes and Bobrinskoy responded to Florovsky by placing all the emphasis back on the Spirit again. However, ecclesiology is not a matter of either Christ or the Spirit, but of all the persons of the Trinity in indivisible unity. When we emphasise the Spirit we must be clear that that we are speaking of the realisation of that recapitulation of all things in the Son. The choice is not between a christological ecclesiology on one hand and a pneumatological ecclesiology on the other, but between a christo-monist ecclesiology and a fully trinitarian ecclesiology in which all the persons of God are at work. The proper basis of ecclesiology is the trinitarian doctrine of God. The role of the Holy Spirit should never lead us into an ecclesiology not founded in Christ: ecclesiology cannot be Spirit-centred because the Church is the recapitulation of everything in Christ: Christ is the head that this recapitulation refers to. Christ redeems each being, and makes every creature present, both to the Father, and to every other creature.

Having established that all things are recapitulated and made present in Christ, we have to ask whether the Father alone accepts the offering, or whether the Son receives it too. The tradition tells us that the Son receives it too, which is why in the liturgy, the priest prays: ‘You are the one who offers and the one who is being offered; the one who accepts and the one who is being given’. Liturgists agree that the Liturgy of Saint Basil is older than that of Saint John Chrysostom. In the anaphora of the Liturgy of Saint Basil, the Eucharist is offered to the Father alone, and this comes straight front the earliest tradition. In the prayer, ‘Worthy and just it is, to offer songs to You, to offer praise to You, to exalt You, to thank You, to worship You, in every place of Your dominion’, we can see who ‘you’ refers to, from the words that follow. ‘For you are the inexpressible, the unimaginable, the invisible, the incomprehensible, the inapprehensible God; the one who always is, and thus is; you and your only-begotten Son, and your Holy Spirit.’ The ‘you’ refers to the Father.

In the Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom however, the anaphora is offered to the Father and to the Son and to the Spirit. Mention of the Son and Spirit was added to avoid any sense that the Father works without them and so to remove any suspicion of division in the persons of the Trinity. When the Father receives the offering, the Son is with him: ‘You, and your Son, and your Holy Spirit.’ Nonetheless we cannot say that it does not matter whether we are praying to the Son or to the Spirit. We always address specific persons, for the relationships in which we participate are personal and therefore non-transferable.

So, along with its over-accentuation of history, theology has often been tempted to state Christology at the expense of pneumatology, and allow the Spirit only a secondary and non-constitutive role. In Roman Catholic ecclesiology this takes the form of emphasising the historical succession and historical privileges of the clerical hierarchy. Such an ecclesiology gives the impression of only ever looking for the definitive demonstration of historical succession back to Saint Peter, as though proof of this would be decisive for all questions of the Church. Yet we must say that the Church is not simply an organisation that is created by its history, but that it is always constituted by the Spirit, so ‘spiritual’ and ‘charismatic’ elements are as fundamental as its history. The Holy Spirit was present from the very first to liberate beings from confinement within their own individuality and so create this communion that is the Church.

For Protestant Christians, the Church is chiefly the community that hears Christ’s word and follows his teaching. In coming after Christ in this way, the Christian body does not appear to be fully connected to its head. Only when pneumatology is allowed to be as foundational as Christology, can we see that Christ embraces all of us within him and that Christ is the community of which we are members. The identity of the Church springs from Christ, and we cannot refer to it without referring to him.

Thus the holiness of the church is fundamental. The Church draws its holiness from Christ much as it draws its being from him. Where does this holiness come from? The answer is given by the divine liturgy: ‘The holy things unto the holy. One only is holy, One only is the Lord, Jesus Christ, to the glory of God the Father’. The ‘holy’ are the ‘saints’ that is, the members of the community – to whom the sanctified gifts are given, and who are made holy by those gifts. Though the members of the community are sinful, they are addressed as ‘saints’ because this is what they will be in that kingdom. Because they are fully conscious that they are not yet holy, they respond by saying ‘One only is holy. One only is the Lord, Jesus Christ’.

If the identity of the Church is derived from the community itself, rather than from Christ, it would of course be scandalous to say that the Church is holy. This issue comes up regularly in ecumenical talks. The first thing that Protestants tend to say about the Church is that it is sinful, as though it were sin that most fundamentally constitutes the being of the Church.

Some Orthodox suggest that the identity of the Church comes from the saints, regarded as that tiny minority formally designated as such. They believe that when we say that the Church is holy, we are referring to these exceptionally spiritual disciples, marked out by unusual asceticism. However, this is not the answer that we find in the liturgy. There we say, ‘The holy things unto the holy’, because the gifts of the Spirit are given to the saints. They are not given to some saints, who set the standard for the rest of us: Christ is the one standard we have been given. We respond, ‘One is holy’, that is, Christ is holy and no one is holy beside him. All the saints put together before Christ are sinful, for nothing in all creation can sustain any comparison with him.

So when we are asked how, with so much sin, the Church can be regarded as holy, we must simply reply, with Saint John Chrysostom, that the head always lives to give life to the body. Christ is the head and the source of all that body’s life and holiness. The union of this head and body is utterly indissoluble. Any time we start to make a distinction between them it starts to turn into a separation, which is the beginning of the death of the body.

Everything depends on the correct relationship that we give to Christology and pneumatology. In the mediaeval era it was thought that the Holy Spirit just plucked a few saints from history, and concerned himself solely with these isolated cases, leaving the rest of us to Christ and to secular history. Pneumatology thus meant a preoccupation with saints, while Christology was about the main body of the Church in history. However, when we bring pneumatology into its proper relationship to Christology, we no longer have to see the saints as a small elite of Spirit-bearers. Linked to Christology, pneumatology does not refer merely to certain individuals but to the entire body.

The specific question for Western theology that derives from this separation between Christology and pneumatology, is whether the Church is the historical community primarily. Roman Catholics insisted on the historical continuity of this community, while Protestants have responded with the notion of the invisible Church, thereby suggesting that the actual historical community is not the true being of the Church.

For the Orthodox, the historical reality of the Church relates to the Eucharist and so to that reality which comes to us from the eschaton. This eschatological reality reveals itself to us by means of sacraments and icons, which must be described in terms of an eschatological and iconological ontology. These sacraments and images are created as the Holy Spirit draws us and all our history into relationship with the end time, the reconciliation of all partial kingdoms in the true history of the kingdom of God. To ask whether the true Church is the historical or the eschatological Church is to fail to grasp that the eschaton is the reconciliation and integration of all history and therefore the truth of history. The eschaton is the summation and truth of all time and all kingdoms, and thus the eschaton is the truth of the world, of which the Church is the foretaste.

For this reason we must not isolate history from eschatology. The liturgy shows that the divine Eucharist is both a historical and an eschatological event. Remembrance does not mean recalling an event that is simply past, an event borne away from us by the stream of time. It requires a conceptual revolution to grasp that the liturgy is both an eschatological and historical event, and that it is a historical event because it is first the eschatological event in which all histories are called into being and gathered up into one.

We have said that the liturgy is an eschatological and historical event. However, how can it be both at once? In the Western intellectual tradition we remember what is past, not what is still future to us.

    The Western tradition is constituted by its historical awareness, since it assumes that specific historical events are what is most fundamentally true, so all its scholarly efforts are directed to capturing or recovering the truth of historical events. This means for instance that when we ask about the authority of the councils, and want to identify where this authority begins and ends, we have to say that the authority of that council cannot be sourced merely in the event of that council, but also over the much longer event of the reception and acceptance of that council. Each conciliar decision is accepted in the fullness of the Church and so over time. Of course, it is not easy to accept such a degree of indeterminacy, for we want to identify an unchanging principle or institution or particular historical moment that we can date. This preoccupation with the givens of history is part of a larger yearning for security. Objective data takes the element of the unknown, and with it, the burden of responsibility away from us. It is important to seek the truth of events and to record them in the way that they occurred, but such scholarship is not only historical but also historicist, in that it claims such ‘historical’ knowledge precisely by divorcing events from their meanings.

The historical event is one apprehended by the mind and so constrained by the boundaries of the mind. When this is the case, what role is there for the Holy Spirit? We have a Christology at work here, because it is understood that we are in search of a series of past events, the cross, tomb, resurrection, ascension which fit into a timefrarne, ‘under Pontius Pilate’, ‘on the third day’ and so on.

Yet we also have to come to terms with the thought that the liturgy also remembers what has not yet taken place. In the prayer ‘We offer unto thee in all and for all’ of the Liturgy attributed to St. John Chrysostom we read the words:

Remembering, therefore, this commandment of salvation, and all those things which came to pass for our sakes: the cross, the tomb, the resurrection of the third day, the ascension inter heaven, the sitting on the right band, the coming again a second time in glory, Thine own, of thine own, we offer unto thee in all and for all.

This is the commandment of Jesus to his disciples to take and eat from his body and drink from his blood, in remembrance of him. However, it is perhaps not easy to see why we say that we are remembering his coming again in glory. How can we remember an event that has not yet taken place?

When we refer to remembering the future we part ways with the main Western intellectual tradition. The Church confesses that the Holy Spirit brings the future into history. Our kingdoms are founded on opposition to one another, each kingdom is in competition with every other. The peace of God, sustained by the rule of God, brings to an end this conflict between all partial kingdoms. The Holy Spirit invades the territory we hold against all others, and brings us into the rule and the peace of God, ‘In these last days, I shall pour forth from My Spirit, on all flesh’ (Acts 2.17). The Spirit brings all other rules and kingdoms, under the role of Christ, bringing about the peace of Christ by which all things are reconciled and made peaceful. Christ brings the rule and peace of God into history.

Pentecost is the fulfilment of all times. Though many Christians assume that Pentecost and the Holy Spirit illuminate them personally, enabling them to grasp the events of history and so to grow in the knowledge of Christ, this is only a partial understanding. The Holy Spirit frees us of all the various confinements that hold us within our individual histories or the histories of our nation or social group. The Spirit draws us into the vastly larger dimensions given by the future, in which we are free to he fully present to one another, each of us to all others without limit. The life the Holy Spirit gives us is not divided, but all at once, so for the first time we may live knowing that all Christians, past, present and future are present to us, in a communion not delimited by space or time.

What we experience in the divine Eucharist is the end times making itself present to us now. The Eucharist is not a repetition or continuation of the past, or just one event amongst others, but it is the penetration of the future into time. The Eucharist is entirely live, and utterly new; there is no element of the past about it. The Eucharist is the incarnation live, the crucifixion live, the resurrection live, the ascension live, the Lord’s coming again and the day of judgment, live. We cannot go to it casually or without repentance for it is the event in which all events are laid out and examined. ‘Now is the judgment of the world’ (John 12.31). This ‘now’ of the Fourth Gospel refers to the Eucharist, in which all these events represent themselves immediately to us, without any gaps of history between them.

The whole force of the Western intellectual tradition attempts to separate history and eschatology and fit Christian doctrine into its historicist and immanent mentality. Either the end times is a separate chapter that will take place ‘afterwards’, or it is the charismatic experience of a select few, set apart from the historical community. However, the eschaton means the end of all separate, disconnected times, the reconnection and reconciliation of our separate histories and the arrival of their future and fulfilment. All the continuity of our histories come from outside them, from the end times, so there cannot be any final reckoning of our history apart from the eschaton which gives it its coherence and future.

The Eucharist is the communion of all things penetrating into our presently mutually antagonistic ‘communions’. The fulfilled communion that is the Church is brought into being for us now by the entrance of the future reality of communion into our presently divided communities. Only a properly pneumatological Christology can give us the ecclesiology that understands the Church as the witness of the future. Next we must consider how neglect of the role of the Holy Spirit in theology has impoverished the Church.

When Christology provides the sole foundation of ecclesiology, the Holy Spirit has only a subsidiary role. For some it is important that Christ founded the institution of the Church, because it is the institutions which have allowed the Church to persist through history. For others the primary reality is the historical events of the incarnation, recorded in the bible. Both these views are based on a Christology without pneumatology: Christ constructs the body, which the Holy Spirit subsequently enters and brings to life as a soul animates a body. Protestants have not had much interest in the institution of the Church, some even doubting whether Christ intended to found the Church at all. The Holy Spirit is regarded as the inspirer, who assists every person individually, and the community generally, to receive the word of God. The Spirit is subordinate to Christ, who either founded the Church, as Roman Catholics have it, or provided the word which the Spirit reveals to as, as Protestants have it.

However, Christ does not form the Church without the Spirit, and the Spirit does not arrive later to till a Church that is already in existence. The Holy Spirit. ‘composes the entire institution’ of the Church, as one Vespers hymn puts it at Pentecost. The institution of the Church was not founded once and for all at one point in history, but is perpetually constituted and renewed through history by the Spirit. Every time that the Church congregates, it becomes the Church anew. The Spirit therefore makes the Church gather around the Son, giving it its basic structures and offices, the people through baptism and chrismation, and their ministers through ordination. The ordination of a bishop is a manifestation of the Spirit’s foundation of the Church, and a renewal of Pentecost, for the gathering of the Church will he renewed around him. The Spirit constitutes and re-constitutes the Church with the Son and thus it receives its continuity, historically, from the eschaton.

The Church is always the creation by the Spirit in one place in time of the coming events of the eschaton. The Church is the summation and recapitulation of the world, so it is only through its continued incorporation in the Church that the world survives. The being of the Church is the outcome of the present work of the Holy Spirit, who enacts the labour of Christ, rendering the whole body of Christ alive and present for this specific time and place. The particular Church that is here in this specific place is of primary importance. Each of the Churches that represent each geographical location is a faithful image because it points towards that single eschatological community. By enacting this image of the end times each time we gather at the Eucharist, we reveal the risen body of Christ, in whom the whole world is hidden.

The consequences of this go very deep. Ecclesiology requires more than finding the right balance between institution and charisma. The Roman Catholic inclination to make the Church the institution that Christ created imposes an institution above human freedom, while the Protestant insistence on fidelity towards the Word of God in the bible imposes the institution of the bible over human freedom. An ecclesiology constructed prior to the Spirit will always struggle because the institution of the Church and the Church’s history will appear as limits on freedom.

The Church is that congregation which is created by the Spirit as a portrayal of eschatological events, every time, in every place and whenever the divine Eucharist is performed. The Church is formed by the freely-willed gathering of Christians. We say, ‘I’m going to Church’. The structure, the institution of the Church is not something that is imposed by someone for we ourselves compose and constitute it. The Holy Spirit makes us all its founding members as he gathers us together as the Church, so the Church does not come into existence without us. In this way, we do not have problems of clericalism, or of the secularism which is a reaction against it. Clericalism results from the perception that the institution of the Church and its officiators, the clergy, exist independently of the event of the gathering of the Church.

This brings us to the role of the whole people (laos) in the Church. The people must be present in order that the clergy celebrate the Eucharist or even exist as clergy. It is the people who allow the clergy not merely to perform this as a ritual, but really to act with authority and be effective. The charismatic action and authority of the clergy depends on the presence of the whole people who lend them that authority and receive and acknowledge their action. Ordination is no separate ritual but takes place within the divine Eucharist, so it is the act of the whole Christian people, for we participate in the act by which the Holy Spirit makes these ministers our servants. There can he no ‘private’ or clerical liturgies for which the laity is not present. The Church is constituted by the people and presupposes their presence and willingness in order to exist. The people’s ‘Amen’ is required to validate the clergy’s words and acts, and make them the words and acts of the people of God. So when the priest says ‘Peace to all’, the response ‘And to your spirit also’ must come from someone who is not the priest: people and priest are in dialogue. The people must actively confirm with their ‘Amen’ that these prayers are their prayers.

The authority of the bible is always one of the most pressing concerns for Western theology. For Roman Catholics, the bible is interpreted authentically by the ministers appointed by the 'Magisterium’, that received its own authority from Christ and which as successor to the Apostles, continues to represent him. For Roman Catholics, the word of God is authentically interpreted by a priest, under the authority of a bishop, and finally the pope, in their own individual authority.

The Protestant approach is to interpret the Word of God by the Word of God, so Scripture is interpreted through Scripture. This makes the interpretation of Scripture an autonomous field of academic research. This is why, in order to become a minister, which essentially means someone who expounds the Word of God for Protestants, you must be trained in historical scholarship, for this is the means by which the authority of the bible is explained.

Protestants look to the historians to tell them what in any passage of Scripture is essential and what is merely contingent to the present expression of the Christian faith. Biblical scholarship has to identify which things are purely cultural and historical and no longer directly relevant to us today. When for example, Paul tells us that it is wrong for a man to grow his hair long, or that the world consists of sky, earth and the underworld, we have to recognise these as part of the cosmology of previous generations which is not binding on us. We then set out to establish a canon within the canon, and for criteria on the basis of which we can decide whether something in the bible is authentic or authoritative for the contemporary Church. The result is that historical critical studies tells the Church what it can and cannot find in the bible. The bible is re-interrogated with new categories and new charges laid against it as each generation discovers a new set of anxieties. However, this leads to a crisis in the authority of the bible. Those who decide not to accept the authority of Scripture are the intellectual heirs of those who proclaimed ‘sola scriptura’. By insisting on the bible only, they have ended up without the bible altogether.

These are the consequences of the desire to fit the truth, and the identity of the Church, into forms shaped solely by the past, forms which each generation then reacts against and struggles to escape. All the issues of authority, whether of the councils, bishops, the pope or the bible are related to the deep assumption that the past alone determines the forms and authority for the Church.

However, the Church that teaches a properly pneumatological Christology will not privilege the past over the future, with the result that it will not be so perplexed by these issues. It is for the Church to interpret her own Scriptures. However, even for Orthodox Churches there has been a trend towards reading in narrative or realist style instead of chanting the gospel. The gospel is often now read rather than chanted in the belief that this will make its meaning accessible for, it is believed, its historical meaning is what has to be grasped. The assumption is that the bible is like an educational textbook, which brings to the surface of the mind memories out of the past; so we are to read the Sermon on the Mount, for instance, as we imagine that Christ first gave it, so we may experience the events just as they took place then. However, this is a misapprehension for it is not just how things happened back then, but the way things will happen that is significant. The word of God shows us the future because it comes from the future and it brings the future to us.

It is within the framework of worship and the divine Eucharist that we find the reason and meaning of the gospel we chant. Saint John Chrysostom says that through chanting, the word of God ‘opens’ and incorporates us. We all experience the desire to grasp knowledge and land it in our net. The Word of God can never be grasped: all our concepts and conceptualising must wait for the Word of God to grasp us. It is our desire to take control of the truth of God which is driving the demand to replace chanting with reading in order to make the Scriptural readings instantly and universally comprehensible. However, even the word ‘comprehensible’ is telling: who believes that he can comprehend or apprehend these readings from the Word of God? The gospel cannot be laid open by any scholar, regardless of how great their grasp of these texts as documents of history. The chaining of the liturgy is not about some secret or exotic mystery, but simply the form of knowledge that is based in the communion of persons that is the Church, rather than simply in the intellectual achievement of the individual scholar or even of historical scholarship as a whole when they are not formed by the life and worship of the Church.

The Gospel is not just another book. If we study the bible outside the gathered congregation, in Western-style bible studies, we will only gain what Protestants have been gained by this method. We must move away from our preoccupation with hermeneutics and instead understand words as summonses, and as icons that open us up to reality. The bible speaks to us in quite a different manner when we hear it read in Church than when we read it at home. When the Gospel enters the Church we make the sign of the Cross and kiss it, welcoming it as Christ himself. The sermon should immediately follow the reading of the Gospel, and expound the text of the Gospel with reference to the liturgy as a whole. The preacher who suddenly appears with a sermon in the middle of holy communion upsets the logic of the liturgy. The sermon is as much a liturgical and sacramental event as the gospel itself, for together they are the Word addressing us from the end of time. We cannot introduce changes without risk to the image of the eschaton, which is what this gathering is. The very fact that you go to Church, and take your place in this assembly, means that you are part of this image of the end times, which the whole Church presents to the world.

The Eucharist realises and reveals the Church as a community. If the Christian people do not gather, or do not participate in the worship or do not affirm the decisions and teaching with their ‘Amen’, the identity of the Church is lost. Then we do indeed start to refer to the clergy as though they were the Church, as the media do every time they say that ‘the Church has announced’, with all the resulting division and confusion that we see around us. Without a theology of Christ and Spirit, and head and body, we are of course only able to pit clergy and people against one another, so every news story about the Church is about the individual opposing the hierarchy. But is by their being gathered together into one that the people of God are brought into being.

People often ask how we should prepare ourselves for the divine Eucharist. Should we avoid going if we are angry or tired? Let us not allow this deep assumption that everything is merely cognitive or a matter of psychology to affect our understanding of the Church. Does our resentment change the grace of God? All that counts is that we go. However, we must patiently insist that when the whole people freely gather around the bishop in the Eucharist, it demonstrates the indissoluble unity of the body of Christ.

When our bishops meet together in synods they are also part of a larger whole, the fellowship which is constituted by the Holy Spirit. Authority emerges finally from that complete event in which Spirit moves through all members of the Church. A decision or an interpretation by bishops can prove to be mistaken, just as we understand that academic historical scholarship can be mistaken. It is the whole Church expressed over the long term, through all its councils and through the worship of the whole Christian people, which gives us the truth of God.

The Church is the gathering of God’s people in a specific place and time, which portrays the complete assembly of all created things. It is summoned by the Holy Spirit who makes the Church new every time it gathers, and so sustains the constantly life-renewing body of Christ on earth. In this way, we are neither defined by history nor in denial about it. The Eucharist is the inaugural event of freedom and the moment in which eschatological reality becomes the actual presence of this assembly brought together by the Holy Spirit. This is the work of the Holy Spirit, which is why the invocation (epiclesis) of the Holy Spirit is fundamental. The gifts that bear the body and blood of Christ bring us into increasing participation in that body. This event of person-to-person relationship takes place in the Spirit, between each of us and Christ. These eschatological events are seen, felt and tasted in the gathering of the Church. This gathering is the event in which the Holy Spirit opens us to life together in freedom.

Finally, we must return to the issue of the many Churches and the one Church. The idea of reception is deeply rooted in the history and being of the Church. The Church was born out of a process of reception and has grown and existed through reception. First the Church receives: she receives from God through Christ in the Holy Spirit. However, the Church also receives from the world, its history, its culture, even its tragic and sinful experiences and failures, for it is the body of the Lord who takes upon himself the sins of the world. Second, the Church itself is received. The Church as a distinct community within the world exists in constant dialogue with whatever constitutes the ‘non-ecciesial’ realm, in an attempt to make herself acceptable to the world. What we used to call ‘missions’ is better rendered with the notion of reception, because the Church should be offering itself to the world rather than imposing itself on it. In the prologue of the Fourth Gospel the Son of God is spoken of as not having been received by the world: ‘his own did not receive him’. The other point in the Church’s being received is that each Church is received by another Church. The most important aspect of reception, stems from the basic ecclesiological fact that the Church, although one, exists as Churches, in the plural, and these Churches exist as one Church by constantly receiving one another as sister Churches. But what is it that is being received?

What is received is, as we have seen, the love of God the Father incarnate in his own beloved Son, who is given to us in the Holy Spirit. The Church exists in order to give what she has received as the love of God for the world. Because the content of reception is this love of God for the world incarnate in Christ, the Apostle Paul uses the terms parelabon and paralabete with reference to the person of Christ. He writes, ‘as you have received Christ’ (Colossians 2.6) and in Hebrews the verb ‘to receive’ is used in the sense of ‘receiving the kingdom’ (Hebrews 12.28).

The Church received the gospel which is the good news of God’s love to the world in Christ, and it is given in the concrete form of the teaching and of creed that give the historical facts of the coming of the communion of God to us. Thus, the Church receives also the historical facts, that Jesus Christ died and was raised from the dead , which are essential to the history of the people of God. The Church receives in this way a confession which it offers as a true statement of the acts of God in the history of mankind.

What is received is therefore the person of the Son. The fact that the Church receives a person, rather than simply information, underlies Paul’s use of ‘hand on’ (paralambanein) for the Eucharist, which the Apostle tells us (1Corinthians 11.23) is both received and handed on.

Attempts to maintain the truth of the facts of the gospel through which the love of God is received led the Church to develop a teaching authority which is responsible for protecting this gospel from distortions. The decisions and pronouncements of the councils are an essential part of the what of reception. The Church does not receive and perpetuate ideas or doctrines as such, but life and love, the very life and love of God for humanity. Dogmatic formulations which have no bearing on the life that the Church cannot claim to be part of the deposit of faith received by the Church.

The Church is itself also the object of reception, in two senses. The Church is received and accepted by the world. In addition, each Church receives and recognises each other Church in the communion of the one Church, which is the indivisible body of Christ that makes itself present to the world in each place. As long as the world rejects the Church, or the Churches reject one another, the need for reception continues. There is no full catholicity of the Church in such a state of division. How does this reception take places?

The form of reception is the most difficult thing to agree upon in our present ecumenical situation. However, with the help of some theological principles we can make the following points. God’s giving of his Son to us took and takes place, we all confess, in the Holy Spirit and thus in an event of communion. By giving his Son as his own very love, God does not impose the reception of this gift upon us. The Spirit is freedom, and reception of anything that is the content (the what) of reception cannot be imposed, on anyone by anyone. Truth is authoritative, but it is not authoritarian, because it comes to us through this event of communion.

Communion means community. Communion must come through the concrete communities of the Church. However, not any and every ecclesial community is a Church. No community can hold itself in isolation from the whole Church, for a Church is always structured in a particular way in an event of communion. No matter how widely something is received in the Churches, unless it is received by one Church from another, and this means that it must be received in the context of the Eucharist. All creedal and conciliar formulations meet their final purpose only when they become integral parts of the eucharistic community.

Reception is not just about individuals, but about communities, being in communication with each other. Because the Churches receive the gospel and the creeds as communities, we need a particular ministry that expresses and confirms the unity of the community. This ministry, of episcope is the function of the bishop. Each bishop ensures that what his Church receives is faithful to all previous communities going back to the first apostolic communities, and that what that Church receives sustains it in communion with all other Churches worldwide, which is achieved through conciliar gatherings and decisions. Therefore, the oversight of a bishop is essential to reception.

In the Holy Spirit everything takes place as an event of communion. Every decision taken by a bishop or by the bishops in council has to be received by the community. Therefore, there is an element of reciprocity: the community could do nothing without the bishop, who had to receive the ‘Amen’ of the community in all he did.

Reception cannot be limited to the local level, rather it also has to be universal. We need a ministry of universal reception that meets these requirements. This ministry should be episcopal, exercised by the head of a local Church, for this ensures that universal catholicity does not bypass or contradict the catholicity of the local Church. The consensus of the faithful should be obtained in every case of reception and this should go through the local bishops and not be delegated to individuals.

Since different people receive the gospel and Christ himself in different ways, reception involves the proper inculturation of the gospel. There should be room for freedom of expression and variety of cultural forms in reception, and this is why the reception of the gospel takes place in the local Church. Each local Church receives the gospel and re-receives it constantly, with the bishop supervising, in communion with the faithful and with other local Churches in conciliar decisions through a universal ministry. In the very act of responding to documents the Churches receive one another as Churches. All Churches constantly need to re-receive their own tradition and through such ecumenical encounters and re-orient themselves to the original apostolic community.

Two hopeful signs are emerging. The Churches which have always had bishops are beginning to realise that the office of bishop must be exercised as episcopal oversight in unity with the whole Christian community. Second, the Churches which have traditionally rejected episcopacy are beginning to see the need for such oversight as an essential part of ecclesial unity. With this issue of episcope, the thorny issue of the ministry of the Pope will have to be tackled sooner or later, but if it is put in its proper theological perspective, perhaps even this issue can be resolved.