The Incarnation and the Church
The Incarnation is not only the dogmatic center from which the spokes of the Trinity, union with God, and the Resurrection extend, but it is the doctrinal foundation of the Church as well. In fact, I do not think it too hyperbolic to state that ecclesiology is Christology. What we believe about the Church is, and ought to be, a reflection of our belief about Christ. And because the Incarnation is the foundation of our soteriology, what we believe about the Church will also reflect what we believe it means to be saved. That is to say, the doctrines about salvation and the Church are essentially linked to one another, in and through the dogma of the Incarnation.
The Church is Christ's Body. This is often thought of as a metaphor, a comparison between two different things. It is that. But the strength of such a comparison comes only from the reality it purports to limn. Or to say it another way, it only counts as a metaphor because it is true. But if the Church is Christ's Body it shares the same divine-human realities that Christ himself exhibits. If Christ is the theandros, the God-man, then the Church is similarly theandric, divine-human. If, in Christ's Person, the union of two natures was accomplished perfectly, so in the Church is the accomplishment of the union of the human and divine. If in the Person of Christ is the hypostasis which accomplishes the union of the human and divine, without separation, confusion, change or division, and if it is on this union that our salvation is predicated, then our incorporation into the Church is an experience of that hypostatic union, and it is only in the Church that we experience such a salvation.
This divine-human nature of the Church is often overlooked in our mostly Protestant and evangelical culture here in the U.S. Even the U.S. Roman Catholic Church, careful as is her theology, experiences the Protestant influence when her members feel free to hold their own contradictory opinions over the teaching of their church, or live lives in direct violation of her strictures, and still consider themselves members in good standing. (I'm too new to Orthodoxy to comment on Orthodox parish culture here in the U.S.) In many churches, then, on any given Sunday, the Church is not seen as a theandric entity, but rather as a fraternal organization: recite the pledge, pay your members' dues, vaguely own the organization's ethos, but pretty much do what you want, so long as you still get to call yourself "Brother So-and-so." And if ever the Church does or requires something you don't like, lobby to change it, or just leave and go elsewhere.
This is a focus on the human aspect of the Church, though a distorted one, but it completely misses, in an Arian-like heresy, that the Church is as divine as is her Head, the Lord Jesus. And in missing the divine nature it diminishes and distorts the human nature.
The reality is that the Church is a divine entity, while it is a human one. We human members of the Church do not contribute to it its divine element; we are incorporated into its divine life. It is true, that in God's unfathomable wisdom, we humans enter the Church still struggling with the sin and passions which continue to suffuse our persons. But our sinfulness does not diminish the divine reality of the Church. Rather the divine reality, if we freely struggle in concert with that reality, purges us of our sin. Indeed, the necessity of struggling against sin, as lived in our own specific particularities and under guidance of the Church, in the Church's priest or confessor, is part and parcel of being a member of the Church, for the characteristic facet of the life of the Church prior to the consummation is the struggle against sin and the enemies of God.
While the divine nature of the Church bestows upon her divine authority, and while that authority is worked out in the various institutional ways adapted to multiple times and cultures, the institution is not the primary structural form of the Church. If the Trinity is a relation of divine Persons, and if the incarnate Christ was the union of the divine and the human, then the primary structural form of the Church must be the family. God the Father is the heavenly patriarch of the Church, the Father who is iconized in the priest, for the priest (at the authorization of the bishop) is the human representation of Christ, and whoever has seen the Christ has seen the Father. The Churchly family then is one with authority, with hierarchy, but it is a divine-human one, one exercised in grace by faith. The Church is not a democracy, she has a Head, and that Head has given to his ministers authority to loose and to bind. But this authority is familial, so when the heads of the Church consult in council, their decisions are accepted by the faithful family. This is the manifestation of fatherly authority and is no autocracy, for the faithful family may say to her heads, "This is not of the apostles," and she has for not all councils are authoritative. But the Churchly family knows that authority nonetheless has been given and looks to her Bishops for the faithful transmission of the authentic mind and witness of the Church.
This familial, patriarchal mixing of the human and the divine then does not diminish that divinity, though the members of Christ's Body struggle always against their sins and passions, but rather, the divinity of the Church raises the human and deifies it. But this deification can only happen in the Church, for one becomes a Christian not as an orphan but as a newborn child into a large family. Only those certified as members of the family, through the apostolic authority and the grace of God in baptism and chrismation, can have confidence of their heritage. This does not eliminate the possibility, indeed the reality, that orphans have been, are, and will continue to be born to the Church, but these are known to God alone, and his dealings with them are subject to his discretion. One can say with certainty where the Church is, how far extends the familial boundaries. But one cannot so surely say where the Church is not, or what long-lost son or daughter will find their way home in the consummation.
So, the Church is life for us, because in the Incarnation the human is united to the divine, we are deified, and given a family with memories, heirlooms and names, all things which signify for us life. And if the Church is the locus of life and salvation through the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ, then the Mysteries (or Sacraments) that it is hers to safeguard and to freely give, are another manifestation of the energetic grace of God and a means of our salvation.
Posted by Clifton at October 10, 2004 12:11 AM | TrackBack