[Note: A member of my heritage churches and I have struck up an email conversation in the last few days. In the most recent exchange I was asked, "Briefly, how do you 'see' the New Testament church in Orthodoxy?" My reply follows.]
I'm not sure that the way I understand the Church in Orthodoxy is any different than what the New Testament itself says of the Church. In fact, it has been my consideration of several verses I either innocently ignored or whose implications I never fully traced when I was formally a member of the Restoration Movement churches, that has led me to the following, very brief, very incomplete set of essential characteristics of the Church.
First, in the Church is the fullness of Christ, which means, in the Church is the fullness of the divinity. The Church, then, is not merely a human institution, it is a divine one. Consider the following verses:
“For in Him dwelleth all the fullness of the divinity bodily, and ye are made full in Him, Who is the head of all principality and authority . . .” (Colossians 2:9-10).*“And He put in subjection all things under His feet, and gave Him to be head over all things to the Church, which is His body, the fullness of Him Who filleth all things in all” (Ephesians 1:22-23).
Note that the fullness of God, which we experience in Christ, is found in the Church. In the Colossians reference above, the “ye” indicates the second person plural in the Greek. Paul is speaking of the Church at Colossae as being made full in Him (Christ), in Whom Himself the fullness of the divinity dwelt bodily. The Ephesians reference is even more explicit.
Christ cannot be separated from his Body, nor His Body from him. They are one. Thus:
“There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye also were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, Who is over all, and through all, and in you all” (Ephesians 4:4-6).
This oneness of the Church, the Church's unity, is necessarily indivisible. It is inconceivable that the Body in which the fullness of God dwells could be divided, that the unity which obtains eternally in the Head could fail to obtain in the Body which is eternally connected to the Head. If there were ever to be a separation of Head from Body, the Church would cease to exist. And Christ's words would come to naught:
“And I say also to thee that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of hades shall not prevail against her” (Matthew 16:18).
Consider also Jesus' own prayer:
“And I do not make request for these only, but also for those who shall believe in Me through their word: in order that all may be one, even as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in Us, that the world might believe that Thou didst send Me forth” (John 17:20-21).
This is a radical unity that is rooted fully and essentially in the unity of the Holy Trinity. It is a unity not of dogma (though dogma is fundamentally necessary), but is rather a unity of Person, a unity accomplished first and foremost in Christ. If the Holy Trinity can be divided, then I suppose the Church can be divided. But since the former could never be true, the latter cannot be true as well. (So, of the divisions that exist, they are fallings away from the Body, and thus are not divisions in the Body. I'm admittedly utilizing here a terminology that is not so clearly defined in the New Testament; cf. St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 11.)
Thus, the Church of the New Testament cannot be divided, nor can it ever cease to exist. The Church after all, is “God's house”:
“So then ye are no longer strangers and sojourners but fellow citizens of the saints and of the household of God, who were built up on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the cornerstone, in Whom every building, being joined together, increaseth to a holy temple in the Lord, in Whom ye also are being built up together for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit” (Ephesians 2:19-22).
The foundation of this house is the apostles and prophets (perhaps the OT prophets and the apostles, or at least the apostles and prophets of the New Testament). On this foundation, God is building his home in which he dwells. God's home is the Church. God's life and immortality is imparted in Christ to the Church, since He dwells there. If you want to seek and find God, look for Him in the Church, which is in Christ.
And since the Church has the fullness of God, since the Church is essentially one in and with God (though is not herself God), since the Church is God's home, it is not surprising that the Church has God's wisdom and declares it:
“. . . the house of God, which is the Church of the living God, pillar and stay of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:15).
and:
“. . . in order that the much-variegated wisdom of God might be made known to the principalities and to the authorities in the heavenlies through the Church, according to the purpose of the ages which He made in Christ Jesus our Lord . . .” (Ephesians 3:10-11).
In other words, the entity that “holds down the fort” on truth is the Church. If you want the truth, seek the Church, in whom is the Truth. It is in and through the Church that God declares his surprising and “much-variegated” wisdom. If you want wisdom, seek the Church which is in Christ.
You can well understand that I was not exactly taught these things as a Restoration Movement Christian, or, perhaps more accurately, these things were not put together in their full implications for me. It was in the process of study and reflection in which I was engaged through the summer and autumn of 2002 that these considerations came more fully to light. So having “discovered” these things, as it were, in my own studies, when I read and heard in Orthodoxy these same things, and when Orthodoxy spoke of the Church and of itself, I had a strong inkling that the New Testament Church I had been trained all my life to seek and to labor for was right there.
Of course, the whole connection between the Church of the New Testament and Orthodoxy is easily traced from the New Testament and the much-neglected-by-the-Restoration-brotherhood history of the Church.
*All New Testament citations are from The Orthodox New Testament, © 2004 Holy Apostles Convent.
Posted by Clifton at February 17, 2005 03:30 PM | TrackBack