Michael Bauman | Politics | The Chronicle of an Undeception

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“No one should be kept out of the Church by a modesty that supposes oneself unworthy or by a sincerity that scorns the hypocrisy of espousing a standard too high, for the Church is comprised not of those who claim perfection, but of those who know their need of help to a higher level of life.” Merrill Abbey, Creed of Our Hope	“The holy catholic church; the communion of saints;” “sanctam ecclesiam catholicam; sanctorum communionem;” “In the world of working people, if you want to find brotherliness, support, warmth, you go to neighbours, to workmates, to the pub -- but never to church. Among the middle-class, those who think of themselves as Christians move in two quite separate sets. They have a lively, bright, interesting world of friends whom they meet socially, at sporting or cultural events, or places of amusement. These are the people they invite to their homes, whose religion they never ask about, nor want to discuss. Then there is their other, Christian world, which has nothing sociable, or young, or pleasant, or smart about it. They meet these people through their good words, but never ask them to the house . . . Their children have no trouble in choosing between these two worlds. They cannot be said to be turning away from Christ, for they have never seen him. Christ is life, light, joy, and love. He can hardly be in those dismal assemblies where no one speaks to you or looks at you . . . They can hardly feel any obligation to attend when their absence could make no possible difference. No one looks pleased to be there; you only start to live again when you come out.” Louis Evely, Credo While Christ’s epiphany took place in Bethlehem in the days of Caesar Augustus, that of the Holy Spirit takes place in the Church. The Church is now the chief historical manifestation of God and his work. Part of its function is to show the Holy Spirit, to make Him visible by giving Him a body in space and time. Were God to withdraw from history, the true Church on earth would come immediately to nothing, though some churches and some denominations would doubtless remain completely unaffected. From God, the Church derives her sanctity, her mission and her life. Without the Spirit of Christ indwelling her, the Church would be only a headless corpse, devoid of guidance, even of existence. For that reason and for others, the creed follows its affirmation concerning the Holy Spirit with its affirmations concerning his work, especially his work in the Church, the center (though not the extent) of his great sphere of operation. The Church is the chief monument to the work of the Holy Spirit in our age. That Christ intended to build a Church is clear both from his words and his actions. On the one hand, He explicitly said so, placing his intention beyond dispute (Matt. 16: 18). On the other, He gave it a band of carefully selected and specially trained leaders, whom He then empowered with supernatural gifts. He gave it a mission and a message, as well as the twin powers of knowledge and utterance to carry them out. He gave it rituals of entrance and of remembrance, which He said were to endure until He returned. He gave it rules of discipline and the authority to enforce them. He even gave it an entire Testament full of written instructions for its future guidance. He bought it with his own blood. He intercedes for it. He sustains it. He will return to gather it to Himself. He declared that He would build his Church and promised that even the gates of Hell, which could not hold Him, would not hold it. Not to acknowledge the Church is to render Christ’s atonement pointless and ineffective, for the Church is the enduring fruit of his redemptive labors. In its earliest days, the Church Jesus founded was small, simple and passionate, perhaps even austere. It was a courageous fellowship in faith, dedicated to the resurrected Lord and to his gospel of mercy, which they intended to spread across the whole world. In many important ways, the early Church was more an organism than an organization, though not for long. Financial difficulties, administrative disputes, theological factionalism, political opposition and ethnic divisions -- the inevitable embarrassments of success -- soon arose (Acts 2: 43-47, 5: 12-16, 6: 1-7, 15: 1-29). To address these emerging problems effectively required a more elaborate theological and ecclesiastical superstructure than then existed. Thus, even by the early second-century, the Church Fathers advanced a very different idea of the Church than did their apostolic predecessors. The Church became more liturgically, administratively and theologically complex, as well as more geographically and culturally diverse. In short, the Church became a more highly organized institution. This process of ecclesiastical and theological elaboration has extended over centuries. In time, the Church became the churches. Its original unity and simplicity gave way to what theologians now call the constitutional theory of the Church, which defines the Church more by its structure and function than by its faithful members, its global purpose or its divine Head. In our day, that more formalized way of understanding the Church gives rise to much confusion. To be more specific, the Church of Christ is a spiritual community that exists by the express will and work of God. The Church is the universal assembly of believers, united in Spirit, faith and purpose. It stands upon Peter’s divinely inspired confession of faith in Jesus as both Messiah and divine Son (Matt. 16: 16). The Church is not defined or identified by its rituals, its buildings, its geographical location, its historical milieu, its wealth or its polity -- things which vary greatly -- but by its members and its Lord. Where He and they are, it is. Where even but two or three of them are gathered in his name, Christ said, He is there with them, in their very midst (Matt. 18: 20). That divine and human presence, plainly put, is the Church, or at least part of it. The Church must be conceived of in terms of its members and its Lord, that is, in terms of believers and the One in whom they believe, and not in terms of cathedrals, liturgies, denominations, hierarchies or rituals, things valuable and proper, things important for and conducive to theological and spiritual well-being, though not actually definitive. One sees these important instrumentalities without seeing the Church. Their presence does not make the Church, the Church makes them. Put differently, we must not identify the Church uncritically either with the churches in general or with any one of the churches in particular. We must not identify the empirical churches with the true Church. Membership in one does not necessarily entail membership in the other. To think otherwise is to advocate churchianity or ecclesiasticism, not Christianity. The Church is made up of all those believers, regardless of time or place, who exercise faith in Christ, not all those with membership in one or another of the various ecclesiastical communions now vying for our allegiance. Though most of these churches are divinely animated and sustained, they are fallible human organizations. They are the historical, empirical, tangible and imperfect manifestation of that immense body of faithful Christians who claim Christ as savior. The Church, in other words, has two dimensions, one visible and one invisible. Its invisible dimension is made up only of those who are true believers. Those without faith are not included. In that sense, the invisible Church is an unmixed assembly. Only the people of faith are included. Not so the visible churches, which do contain and shall contain both wheat and tares, both the friends of Christ and his enemies, until He returns. We can endorse the churches without blame only insofar as they realize in their worship, teaching, fellowship, and mission the intention God had for the Church (that is, for all believers) when He made it (them) his bride. We can call the churches the Church and render them our allegiance only to the extent they genuinely are set apart for God's own purposes and are true to his will, his work and his Word. The true Church, the invisible Church, is the society of the elect. The visible Church, by contrast, is the society of the professing. To identify any one of the various churches too closely with the Church is to fly the wrong flag -- and a great deal depends upon which flag we fly. We are Christians first and ecclesiastical or denominational advocates only second, or at least we ought to be. As Erasmus once explained, it is enough to be Christian, though some churchmen wish it were otherwise. Thus, while I am convinced that to be an evangelical Protestant is both good and right, I am further convinced that it is better still to be simply a Christian, one who looks first for the things that bind us together rather than for those that hold us apart. Toward that end, adherence to the Apostles' Creed is a more telling point than denominational affiliation. Perhaps an illustration will serve. I once interviewed for a faculty position in Systematic Theology at a prestigious American evangelical seminary. During the interview, I was asked to identify or describe myself. I said that I was Christian first, evangelical second and denominational third. My interviewer told me that my response was exactly backwards. He was denominational first, evangelical second, and Christian only third, he said. His denominational tribalism, though shocking, is by no means isolated. It helps to explain why, in America alone, we see more than 227 kinds of Baptist, not to mention the various sorts of Presbyterian, Methodist, Reformed, Orthodox and Catholic churches that surround us -- and this in the face of Christ's plea that we be one, even as He and his Father are one (John 17: 11). Too many of us are denominationalists and not real Churchmen. To be a good Churchman is to love and be part of the Church founded by Jesus. We must not transfer our primary churchly allegiance from the pure Church of Christ to one of its flawed historical manifestations. To be sure, the visible churches are indispensable and fundamentally important, but they are not infallible or indefectible, and they are not the Church. The Church that Christ promised would endure to the end, the Church He promised to build, cannot be identified too closely with any one of its ecclesiastical embodiments, or even with them all, at least not over the great distance in time, space and theology that now separates them from Jesus of Nazareth. Christians like the one who interviewed me seem not to understand that the churches are never an end in themselves. We are not Christians in order to make churches and denominations possible. We have churches and denominations in order that the Church can better fulfill its divine mandate in space and time. The churches and denominations are meant to aid our becoming Christians and to improve our serving and worshipping God in a fallen world. They are but an implementation or manifestation of the Church, and the manifestation of a thing is not the thing itself. One cannot have either the Church without the Christians and Christ or have the Christians and Christ without the Church. Normally, the Church is where at least two or three believers are gathered together in Christ's name and where He is present with them. The value of ecclesiastical structures and functions is not, as some say, that they define the Church, but that they help the Church -- those two or more believers and the Christ who accompanies them -- to fulfill its God-given mission, that of making disciples of every people and nation (Matt. 28: 16-20). What does not conduce to that end must either be fixed or forgotten. But I must not be understood here to diminish the churches in any way. To their great credit, the historical churches always seem to have been a veritable Noah's ark, holding at least two of every sort of spiritual, ecclesiastical and liturgical animal, thus enabling Christians of virtually any persuasion to find a church home and the nurture it best affords. The empirical churches are the historical incarnation of the Church, which itself is the body Christ. In that light, we see that the principle of historical embodiment begun in Jesus is carried out, however imperfectly, throughout history in the people and institutions that name his name. This means that the true Church cannot remain content to stay invisible, or to live only in the hearts of believers. Because it is the community of the incarnate God, the Christian Church must take upon itself in history a concrete shape. By its liturgy, its rituals, its message and its works of love (as these things are found in the churches), it mediates to its members and to the world the gospel of Jesus Christ in all its redemptive fullness. An unhistorical and unmediated religion is not Christianity. But we must be clear about the nature of that historical mediation. Some Christian communions mistakenly interpret Christ’s words in Matthew 16: 17-19 as a promise to build his Church upon Peter. But this is wrong. The word “rock,” which Christ employed in this passage, refers not to Peter himself but to Peter’s divinely originated declaration. Christ promised to build his Church upon the rock of Peter's confession, not upon the impetuous, erratic and fallen creature we call Peter, whose natural inclinations, even after conversion, were so often misguided and dangerous (Matt. 16: 21-24, 27: 69-75; Acts 10: 9-29; Gal. 2: 11-14). Much less does Christ promise in this passage to build his Church upon Peter’s alleged successors, or upon those who oppose them. If the Church consists of all those who are believers in Christ, who are part of his spiritual body, then membership in the Church comes by means of regeneration, not by means of some ritual or some membership class, things that make you a member of a church but not of the Church. In other words, Christianity, which is individually appropriated, is not individualistic. It is personal, but not private. Christianity has its inescapably corporate dimension, the Church. The churches, in turn, are the social and historical outworking of the Church and its Christian commitment. The churches are an important means by which we come to fullness in Christ, by which we serve a broken and fallen world with greatest effect. That is, the Christian is not an isolated individual. He does not stand alone, at least not by design, as if he were meant to be separate from his comrades in faith. The idea, then, which is expressed in the creed by the word “Church” is that of Christians regarded as a spiritual society, and not as a mere collection of unattached individuals. It follows, therefore, that the unattached or isolated Christian is impossible, is a contradiction in terms, not because he is by himself, which he is not, but because he is united indissolubly to Christ and to all Christians, whether or not he knows it or acknowledges it. The Church of Jesus Christ will never be done away. It shall survive all catastrophes and endure all setbacks, not because it is perfect or powerful in its own right, but because it stands upon Jesus Christ, Who is the same yesterday, today and forever (Heb. 13: 8). To speak of the Church, therefore, is to speak of its foundation. To believe in its eternal continuance is to believe in Him through whom and by whom it endures. The Church is a vast building, the Scriptures say, one that is alive. As such, the Church is a building founded upon Christ, her cornerstone. Without Him, the Church could not endure. Without Him, the Church is a house of cards, not a monument to the power and purpose of God, which cannot be diverted. By making his Son the Church’s immovable foundation, the Father demonstrates that He practices what He preaches: He does not build his house on shifting sand. The winds of time and the storms of life, the assaults of sin and the treachery of enemies, can never bring down the Church because it rests upon Jesus. As defined by the creed, the identifying marks of the Church are holiness and catholicity, both of which are widely misunderstood. The word "holy" means "set apart for God’s service," not "moral purity." The Church is not holy because its members are pure -- they are not -- but because they are set apart for God’s work by God's Word. To think of holiness as righteousness is to misconstrue righteousness. Christians are righteous not in fact, but in hope (non in re sed in spe). If "holy" meant “pure,” the Church would be empty, for no one is truly pure. The Church ought to have a noticeable purity, of that there should be no doubt. It ought to be characterized both by her innocence and her integrity. Its purity lies not in itself, however, but in its Lord, Who is her head, and Who gave the Church her task, her message, her rituals and her destiny. The Church is pure in her origin and in her animation, both of which arise from the Holy Spirit. As Bishop Westcott once observed, the mark of a saint and of the Church is not moral perfection but genuine dedication to God and his service. Saints are those who give themselves in faith to Jesus Christ, not those without fault. They are holy by virtue of their Lord and their calling, not their purity. The Church's glory and holiness, in other words, do not reside in her majestic cathedrals, in her venerable traditions, in her reverent liturgies, in her impressive and memorable assemblies, or in her supposed moral purity, but in her consecration to God and the redemptive task He has set before her. The word "catholic" is also widely misunderstood, especially by Protestants, who often mistakenly interpret it as "Roman Catholic," which it is not. The original meaning of this word was “universal,” a meaning that seems to have originated with Christians like St. Ignatius early in the second century and which became common very early in the Eastern churches. This word did not enjoy full creedal acceptance in the Western churches until the fourth century or in the African churches until perhaps the sixth. The Church is universal with respect to time, place, doctrine and mission. Its universal character reminds us that the Church is meant for all nations and all time, as well as to teach all necessary truth. Because she has endured and shall endure through all ages, the Church includes all those who were lost in the first Adam and redeemed by the Second. Thus, when we speak of the “catholic” Church, we speak of the Church taken as a whole, of the Church considered comprehensively, not of any of its branches, either new or old, large or small. No single ecclesiastical communion can now be identified as the “catholic” Church to the exclusion of all others. To claim otherwise for one’s churchly affiliation is not Churchmanship but one-up-manship. None of us today can belong to any visible church that is truly catholic, or genuinely all-inclusive. The holy catholic Church finally is, and has to be, the Church invisible. By saying that the Church is catholic we affirm that its message is valid and relevant to every age and every situation. It is not as if there is one Church with a message suited to the needs of the third century and another with a message suited to the needs of the eighteenth or the twentieth. God has given us one Church and one gospel for all time. Thus the same Church seeks to apply the same gospel to whatever situation it happens to find itself. In other words, the creed's affirmation that the Church is catholic is an affirmation of the universal validity and relevance of the gospel and of the Church that proclaims it. This implies that the proper or appropriate dimension of the catholic Church is the entire world and all history. The Christian Church has no bounds narrower than the human race. To be part of the Church is necessarily to be a world missionary, is to be like Christ, Who came not to save Himself but others. Those who follow Him have the same catholic task. Because a number of heresies arose early in the Church's history, and because those heresies tended to be both geographically limited and to teach doctrines noticeably at odds with what was taught by the churches as a whole, the word “catholic” also came to mean “orthodox.” Thus, though the heresies were scattered, partial, fragmentary and localized, the Church remained universal, comprehensive. In the words of H. C. Beeching, “As soon as heresy arose in the Church, it became necessary to distinguish the bodies which retained the old truth from any which adopted the new error; and as, at first at any rate, the error was restricted to a single teacher and his school, it was natural to oppose to his single teaching the teaching of the whole body of Christians, the faith of the universal or Catholic Church, which thus became distinguished as the the universal or Catholicfaith. Thus the word “Catholic,” meaning universal, came to mean orthodox or true.” (Beeching, The Apostles’ Creed 88-89). The word "catholic" must not be arbitrarily restricted to any sectarian reconstruction of theology or to any one form of ministry, liturgy or ecclesiastical government. While no church can function without a specific form of ministry, liturgy or government, none of those forms is essential to the Church, though by some Christians they are viewed in precisely that way. Consequently, to identify the constitutional church as the "catholic Church" is to be insufficiently catholic. This truth we must not forsake. While the members of the one Church ought ideally to be members of one of the churches, we must never confuse the latter with the former. The singularity of the Church does not exclude the plurality of the churches, though it does exclude identifying the whole with any of its empirical parts. To speak of the Church's catholicity is necessarily to speak of its unity. To be universal and fragmentary is a contradiction in terms. Its unity lies in its universality, its one Lord and its common faith, the faith of the creed, which we have been expounding all along. Thus, to add to the word “catholic” the word “one,” as does the Nicene creed, is redundant. The Church’s universal and unified character is true despite all appearances to the contrary. Those appearances divide the churches but not the Church. There never was an epoch since the Church spread beyond Jerusalem when the churches were one in visible uniformity or even in sympathy. Perhaps it is not so much the existence of many churches calling upon the same Lord which is the scandal as it is our slowness in recognizing one another as members of the only Church there is, the "holy, catholic Church" of Jesus Christ. All too slowly, Christians have come to realize that what they have in common is far more precious and important than what divides them. To proceed, the Latin words translated here in the creed as “communion of saints” are actually ambiguous. They can be read both as grammatically masculine or grammatically neuter. That is, these words can be read with equal facility both as “communion of saints" or as “communion of sacred things.” In fact, both readings have some historical precedent, though the first seems clearly to predominate. If we opt for it, we declare our allegiance to, and participation in, the fellowship of all believers, which has been brought into existence by the grace of God and by his Word. By the second reading we declare our participation in sacred things, like the ordinances, the preaching of the gospel and the Great Commission, outward indications of our inward connection. But of these two interpretive options, the first seems clearly the best. To it we shall confine our remarks. The words "communion of saints" indicate the enduring fellowship of the faithful, the comradeship of believers, which Paul called koinonia and which is so strong and durable that it cannot be severed by time, distance or even death. "Communion" here does not refer to the Lord’s Supper, even though that sacrament itself is one of the historic symbols of the word's larger meaning. “Communion” means simply “fellowship.” To be a Christian, to receive the Spirit of Jesus Christ, is to be part of a society of faith and commitment, is to be drawn out of one's isolation and planted foursquare into the unity and love of the body of Christ, the Church. To be a part of the communion of saints is to become one of God's people, the new Israel, which is a holy nation, chosen by God to serve Him, to know Him, and to enjoy Him forever. On earth, the Church is localized, but earth is not all there is. The Church exists elsewhere too. We must not confine the membership, fellowship, or ministry of the Church to this world. The community of Christian inspiration and aspiration is far wider. The privilege and intimate connection that binds Christians together cannot be severed, neither by birth nor by death, for we share it with those who lived before us and with those who are yet to come. We have fellow believers and co-workers beyond the veil in both directions, the veil both of death and of birth. The communion of saints is a bridge that spans even the deep canyons that separate life from non-life. We have friends in high places and friends in the future, friends in Heaven and friends to come. They are our family in the faith, both our spiritual ancestry and our posterity. However scattered and divided Christians now seem, they are knit together in a bond of allegiance, intention and destiny. They are united by the love of God, which inclines them to love one another, and which ultimately will prevail. Put differently, this phrase in the creed reminds us that the Church is an enduring fellowship and that it remains both sacred and dear to us for the sake of those who gave their lives and hearts to Christ and his gospel. We are indebted to those who counted no cost too high and who reckoned no prospect too daunting in their quest to glorify the God Who loved them and delivered them from sin and death. We thank God for their victory and for their example. We pray that our own example might be as instructive and inspiring for those who follow us as the example of our predecessors has been for those who followed them. They are our friends and benefactors, the people who taught us the language of prayer and of theology. They are the pioneers of faith who taught us how and where to walk. We share their very life. The self-same energy that flowed from God to them sustains us, thus ensuring that their victory will some day also be ours. That’s what the communion of saints is all about. It means we are part of something bigger than ourselves and that we can call upon it and draw strength from it. It means that we are all part of the love and plan of God, that we are not alone. By reciting this portion of the creed, we bring before our minds the highest deeds, the worthiest actions, the profoundest sufferings and the grandest loves of all who came before us. When we do so, we are heartened and strengthened. A single life circulates among all those who are incorporated into Christ, and his redemptive blood courses through all our veins. This union in Him makes us closer than brother and sister, parent and child. Christ’s will was not to unite us simply to Himself but to each other. Naturally, we pray for those we love, just as they pray for us. Death does not alter that fact at all. Though they have died, they do not neglect to pray for those of us still making our way through a fallen world, still walking carefully and fearfully through the valley of the shadow of death. Nor ought we to cease to pray for them. Though sin no longer besets them, they still face the joyous challenge of growth in knowledge and in grace. They enjoy the inestimable privilege of better knowing the God Who made them and redeemed them, a privilege they cannot fully pursue even with all eternity at their disposal, for God is too vast and too wonderful ever to know completely. But their privilege and their glorious challenge is to try. For them and for their blessed quest we pray. Prayer for the dead, you see, is really prayer for the living. As Hugh Burnaby once asked, “If our communion with those whom we love is not broken by death, how can we cease to pray for them as we did when alive?” (Burnaby, Thinking Through the Creed 79). But prayer for the dead is not prayer to the dead. Though we pray for our friends in Heaven, we pray only to our Father, only by means of the Son, and only at the prompting of the Holy Spirit. We pray to no one but God. The communion of the saints is not Christian spiritualism. We are not conjurers. This is no seance. Finally, as did the creed's earlier affirmation concerning Christ's resurrection, that concerning the communion of saints alters the way we view the dead and the dying. Too often death seems to us such a painful break, such an irrecoverable loss, that we shut ourselves up in a pagan grief and despair. We talk as if we had lost a loved one. This we must not do. Something is not lost if you know where it is. Those beyond the veil of death are not lost; they are with Christ. The day they died was the day their life truly began. On that day they became more alive, more effective, more active, more pure and more joyous than ever before. God, after all, is not God of the dead, but of the living (Matt. 22: 32). God is the God of all those who have lived and do live, including Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, whom Jesus specifically mentioned. Their life with God teaches us that the tombstones they left behind are really their business cards. Our friends in Christ are now involved in joy, prayer, love and service, what C. S. Lewis once called the serious business of Heaven. Someday that business shall be ours as well.	“God has not only given [the saints] existence, he has given them sanctity; and that is why we have fellowship with them, and are bound in one communion of saints. For the divine love which has triumphed in them will also conquer us. If we want to know what God is doing with us, we look at those splendid beings who share the spontaneity of the Creator’s mind, the delight of his heart and the breath of his love. Religion is not fundamentally a battle against sin, it is a drawing up together into glorification.” Austin Farrer, Words for Life
	Copyright © 2006. Michael Bauman. All rights reserved.	date modified: 5 July 2006 Website Hit Counters

“No one should be kept out of the Church by a modesty that supposes oneself unworthy or by a sincerity that scorns the hypocrisy of espousing a standard too high, for the Church is comprised not of those who claim perfection, but of those who know their need of help to a higher level of life.”
Merrill Abbey, Creed of Our Hope

“The holy catholic church; the communion of saints;”

“sanctam ecclesiam catholicam; sanctorum communionem;”

“In the world of working people, if you want to find brotherliness, support, warmth, you go to neighbours, to workmates, to the pub -- but never to church. Among the middle-class, those who think of themselves as Christians move in two quite separate sets. They have a lively, bright, interesting world of friends whom they meet socially, at sporting or cultural events, or places of amusement. These are the people they invite to their homes, whose religion they never ask about, nor want to discuss. Then there is their other, Christian world, which has nothing sociable, or young, or pleasant, or smart about it. They meet these people through their good words, but never ask them to the house . . . Their children have no trouble in choosing between these two worlds. They cannot be said to be turning away from Christ, for they have never seen him. Christ is life, light, joy, and love. He can hardly be in those dismal assemblies where no one speaks to you or looks at you . . . They can hardly feel any obligation to attend when their absence could make no possible difference. No one looks pleased to be there; you only start to live again when you come out.”
Louis Evely, Credo

         While Christ’s epiphany took place in Bethlehem in the days of Caesar Augustus, that of the Holy Spirit takes place in the Church. The Church is now the chief historical manifestation of God and his work. Part of its function is to show the Holy Spirit, to make Him visible by giving Him a body in space and time. Were God to withdraw from history, the true Church on earth would come immediately to nothing, though some churches and some denominations would doubtless remain completely unaffected. From God, the Church derives her sanctity, her mission and her life. Without the Spirit of Christ indwelling her, the Church would be only a headless corpse, devoid of guidance, even of existence. For that reason and for others, the creed follows its affirmation concerning the Holy Spirit with its affirmations concerning his work, especially his work in the Church, the center (though not the extent) of his great sphere of operation. The Church is the chief monument to the work of the Holy Spirit in our age.
         That Christ intended to build a Church is clear both from his words and his actions. On the one hand, He explicitly said so, placing his intention beyond dispute (Matt. 16: 18). On the other, He gave it a band of carefully selected and specially trained leaders, whom He then empowered with supernatural gifts. He gave it a mission and a message, as well as the twin powers of knowledge and utterance to carry them out. He gave it rituals of entrance and of remembrance, which He said were to endure until He returned. He gave it rules of discipline and the authority to enforce them. He even gave it an entire Testament full of written instructions for its future guidance. He bought it with his own blood. He intercedes for it. He sustains it. He will return to gather it to Himself. He declared that He would build his Church and promised that even the gates of Hell, which could not hold Him, would not hold it. Not to acknowledge the Church is to render Christ’s atonement pointless and ineffective, for the Church is the enduring fruit of his redemptive labors.
         In its earliest days, the Church Jesus founded was small, simple and passionate, perhaps even austere. It was a courageous fellowship in faith, dedicated to the resurrected Lord and to his gospel of mercy, which they intended to spread across the whole world. In many important ways, the early Church was more an organism than an organization, though not for long.   Financial difficulties, administrative disputes, theological factionalism, political opposition and ethnic divisions -- the inevitable embarrassments of success -- soon arose (Acts 2: 43-47, 5: 12-16, 6: 1-7, 15: 1-29). To address these emerging problems effectively required a more elaborate theological and ecclesiastical superstructure than then existed. Thus, even by the early second-century, the Church Fathers advanced a very different idea of the Church than did their apostolic predecessors. The Church became more liturgically, administratively and theologically complex, as well as more geographically and culturally diverse. In short, the Church became a more highly organized institution. This process of ecclesiastical and theological elaboration has extended over centuries. In time, the Church became the churches. Its original unity and simplicity gave way to what theologians now call the constitutional theory of the Church, which defines the Church more by its structure and function than by its faithful members, its global purpose or its divine Head. In our day, that more formalized way of understanding the Church gives rise to much confusion.
         To be more specific, the Church of Christ is a spiritual community that exists by the express will and work of God. The Church is the universal assembly of believers, united in Spirit, faith and purpose. It stands upon Peter’s divinely inspired confession of faith in Jesus as both Messiah and divine Son (Matt. 16: 16). The Church is not defined or identified by its rituals, its buildings, its geographical location, its historical milieu, its wealth or its polity -- things which vary greatly -- but by its members and its Lord. Where He and they are, it is. Where even but two or three of them are gathered in his name, Christ said, He is there with them, in their very midst (Matt. 18: 20). That divine and human presence, plainly put, is the Church, or at least part of it. The Church must be conceived of in terms of its members and its Lord, that is, in terms of believers and the One in whom they believe, and not in terms of cathedrals, liturgies, denominations, hierarchies or rituals, things valuable and proper, things important for and conducive to theological and spiritual well-being, though not actually definitive. One sees these important instrumentalities without seeing the Church. Their presence does not make the Church, the Church makes them.
         Put differently, we must not identify the Church uncritically either with the churches in general or with any one of the churches in particular. We must not identify the empirical churches with the true Church. Membership in one does not necessarily entail membership in the other. To think otherwise is to advocate churchianity or ecclesiasticism, not Christianity. The Church is made up of all those believers, regardless of time or place, who exercise faith in Christ, not all those with membership in one or another of the various ecclesiastical communions now vying for our allegiance. Though most of these churches are divinely animated and sustained, they are fallible human organizations. They are the historical, empirical, tangible and imperfect manifestation of that immense body of faithful Christians who claim Christ as savior.
         The Church, in other words, has two dimensions, one visible and one invisible. Its invisible dimension is made up only of those who are true believers. Those without faith are not included. In that sense, the invisible Church is an unmixed assembly. Only the people of faith are included. Not so the visible churches, which do contain and shall contain both wheat and tares, both the friends of Christ and his enemies, until He returns. We can endorse the churches without blame only insofar as they realize in their worship, teaching, fellowship, and mission the intention God had for the Church (that is, for all believers) when He made it (them) his bride. We can call the churches the Church and render them our allegiance only to the extent they genuinely are set apart for God's own purposes and are true to his will, his work and his Word. The true Church, the invisible Church, is the society of the elect. The visible Church, by contrast, is the society of the professing. To identify any one of the various churches too closely with the Church is to fly the wrong flag -- and a great deal depends upon which flag we fly. We are Christians first and ecclesiastical or denominational advocates only second, or at least we ought to be. As Erasmus once explained, it is enough to be Christian, though some churchmen wish it were otherwise. Thus, while I am convinced that to be an evangelical Protestant is both good and right, I am further convinced that it is better still to be simply a Christian, one who looks first for the things that bind us together rather than for those that hold us apart. Toward that end, adherence to the Apostles' Creed is a more telling point than denominational affiliation.
         Perhaps an illustration will serve. I once interviewed for a faculty position in Systematic Theology at a prestigious American evangelical seminary. During the interview, I was asked to identify or describe myself. I said that I was Christian first, evangelical second and denominational third. My interviewer told me that my response was exactly backwards. He was denominational first, evangelical second, and Christian only third, he said. His denominational tribalism, though shocking, is by no means isolated. It helps to explain why, in America alone, we see more than 227 kinds of Baptist, not to mention the various sorts of Presbyterian, Methodist, Reformed, Orthodox and Catholic churches that surround us -- and this in the face of Christ's plea that we be one, even as He and his Father are one (John 17: 11). Too many of us are denominationalists and not real Churchmen. To be a good Churchman is to love and be part of the Church founded by Jesus. We must not transfer our primary churchly allegiance from the pure Church of Christ to one of its flawed historical manifestations. To be sure, the visible churches are indispensable and fundamentally important, but they are not infallible or indefectible, and they are not the Church. The Church that Christ promised would endure to the end, the Church He promised to build, cannot be identified too closely with any one of its ecclesiastical embodiments, or even with them all, at least not over the great distance in time, space and theology that now separates them from Jesus of Nazareth. Christians like the one who interviewed me seem not to understand that the churches are never an end in themselves. We are not Christians in order to make churches and denominations possible.   We have churches and denominations in order that the Church can better fulfill its divine mandate in space and time. The churches and denominations are meant to aid our becoming Christians and to improve our serving and worshipping God in a fallen world. They are but an implementation or manifestation of the Church, and the manifestation of a thing is not the thing itself.
         One cannot have either the Church without the Christians and Christ or have the Christians and Christ without the Church. Normally, the Church is where at least two or three believers are gathered together in Christ's name and where He is present with them. The value of ecclesiastical structures and functions is not, as some say, that they define the Church, but that they help the Church -- those two or more believers and the Christ who accompanies them -- to fulfill its God-given mission, that of making disciples of every people and nation (Matt. 28: 16-20). What does not conduce to that end must either be fixed or forgotten.
         But I must not be understood here to diminish the churches in any way. To their great credit, the historical churches always seem to have been a veritable Noah's ark, holding at least two of every sort of spiritual, ecclesiastical and liturgical animal, thus enabling Christians of virtually any persuasion to find a church home and the nurture it best affords. The empirical churches are the historical incarnation of the Church, which itself is the body Christ. In that light, we see that the principle of historical embodiment begun in Jesus is carried out, however imperfectly, throughout history in the people and institutions that name his name. This means that the true Church cannot remain content to stay invisible, or to live only in the hearts of believers. Because it is the community of the incarnate God, the Christian Church must take upon itself in history a concrete shape. By its liturgy, its rituals, its message and its works of love (as these things are found in the churches), it mediates to its members and to the world the gospel of Jesus Christ in all its redemptive fullness. An unhistorical and unmediated religion is not Christianity.
         But we must be clear about the nature of that historical mediation. Some Christian communions mistakenly interpret Christ’s words in Matthew 16: 17-19 as a promise to build his Church upon Peter. But this is wrong. The word “rock,” which Christ employed in this passage, refers not to Peter himself but to Peter’s divinely originated declaration. Christ promised to build his Church upon the rock of Peter's confession, not upon the impetuous, erratic and fallen creature we call Peter, whose natural inclinations, even after conversion, were so often misguided and dangerous (Matt. 16: 21-24, 27: 69-75; Acts 10: 9-29; Gal. 2: 11-14). Much less does Christ promise in this passage to build his Church upon Peter’s alleged successors, or upon those who oppose them.
         If the Church consists of all those who are believers in Christ, who are part of his spiritual body, then membership in the Church comes by means of regeneration, not by means of some ritual or some membership class, things that make you a member of a church but not of the Church. In other words, Christianity, which is individually appropriated, is not individualistic. It is personal, but not private. Christianity has its inescapably corporate dimension, the Church. The churches, in turn, are the social and historical outworking of the Church and its Christian commitment. The churches are an important means by which we come to fullness in Christ, by which we serve a broken and fallen world with greatest effect. That is, the Christian is not an isolated individual. He does not stand alone, at least not by design, as if he were meant to be separate from his comrades in faith. The idea, then, which is expressed in the creed by the word “Church” is that of Christians regarded as a spiritual society, and not as a mere collection of unattached individuals. It follows, therefore, that the unattached or isolated Christian is impossible, is a contradiction in terms, not because he is by himself, which he is not, but because he is united indissolubly to Christ and to all Christians, whether or not he knows it or acknowledges it.
         The Church of Jesus Christ will never be done away. It shall survive all catastrophes and endure all setbacks, not because it is perfect or powerful in its own right, but because it stands upon Jesus Christ, Who is the same yesterday, today and forever (Heb. 13: 8). To speak of the Church, therefore, is to speak of its foundation. To believe in its eternal continuance is to believe in Him through whom and by whom it endures. The Church is a vast building, the Scriptures say, one that is alive. As such, the Church is a building founded upon Christ, her cornerstone. Without Him, the Church could not endure. Without Him, the Church is a house of cards, not a monument to the power and purpose of God, which cannot be diverted. By making his Son the Church’s immovable foundation, the Father demonstrates that He practices what He preaches: He does not build his house on shifting sand. The winds of time and the storms of life, the assaults of sin and the treachery of enemies, can never bring down the Church because it rests upon Jesus.
         As defined by the creed, the identifying marks of the Church are holiness and catholicity, both of which are widely misunderstood. The word "holy" means "set apart for God’s service," not "moral purity." The Church is not holy because its members are pure -- they are not -- but because they are set apart for God’s work by God's Word. To think of holiness as righteousness is to misconstrue righteousness. Christians are righteous not in fact, but in hope (non in re sed in spe). If "holy" meant “pure,” the Church would be empty, for no one is truly pure. The Church ought to have a noticeable purity, of that there should be no doubt. It ought to be characterized both by her innocence and her integrity. Its purity lies not in itself, however, but in its Lord, Who is her head, and Who gave the Church her task, her message, her rituals and her destiny. The Church is pure in her origin and in her animation, both of which arise from the Holy Spirit. As Bishop Westcott once observed, the mark of a saint and of the Church is not moral perfection but genuine dedication to God and his service. Saints are those who give themselves in faith to Jesus Christ, not those without fault. They are holy by virtue of their Lord and their calling, not their purity. The Church's glory and holiness, in other words, do not reside in her majestic cathedrals, in her venerable traditions, in her reverent liturgies, in her impressive and memorable assemblies, or in her supposed moral purity, but in her consecration to God and the redemptive task He has set before her.
         The word "catholic" is also widely misunderstood, especially by Protestants, who often mistakenly interpret it as "Roman Catholic," which it is not. The original meaning of this word was “universal,” a meaning that seems to have originated with Christians like St. Ignatius early in the second century and which became common very early in the Eastern churches. This word did not enjoy full creedal acceptance in the Western churches until the fourth century or in the African churches until perhaps the sixth.
         The Church is universal with respect to time, place, doctrine and mission. Its universal character reminds us that the Church is meant for all nations and all time, as well as to teach all necessary truth. Because she has endured and shall endure through all ages, the Church includes all those who were lost in the first Adam and redeemed by the Second. Thus, when we speak of the “catholic” Church, we speak of the Church taken as a whole, of the Church considered comprehensively, not of any of its branches, either new or old, large or small. No single ecclesiastical communion can now be identified as the “catholic” Church to the exclusion of all others. To claim otherwise for one’s churchly affiliation is not Churchmanship but one-up-manship. None of us today can belong to any visible church that is truly catholic, or genuinely all-inclusive. The holy catholic Church finally is, and has to be, the Church invisible.
         By saying that the Church is catholic we affirm that its message is valid and relevant to every age and every situation. It is not as if there is one Church with a message suited to the needs of the third century and another with a message suited to the needs of the eighteenth or the twentieth. God has given us one Church and one gospel for all time. Thus the same Church seeks to apply the same gospel to whatever situation it happens to find itself. In other words, the creed's affirmation that the Church is catholic is an affirmation of the universal validity and relevance of the gospel and of the Church that proclaims it. This implies that the proper or appropriate dimension of the catholic Church is the entire world and all history. The Christian Church has no bounds narrower than the human race. To be part of the Church is necessarily to be a world missionary, is to be like Christ, Who came not to save Himself but others. Those who follow Him have the same catholic task.
         Because a number of heresies arose early in the Church's history, and because those heresies tended to be both geographically limited and to teach doctrines noticeably at odds with what was taught by the churches as a whole, the word “catholic” also came to mean “orthodox.” Thus, though the heresies were scattered, partial, fragmentary and localized, the Church remained universal, comprehensive. In the words of H. C. Beeching,

                  “As soon as heresy arose in the Church, it became necessary to distinguish the bodies which retained the old truth from any which adopted the new error; and as, at first at any rate, the error was restricted to a single teacher and his school, it was natural to oppose to his single teaching the teaching of the whole body of Christians, the faith of the universal or Catholic Church, which thus became distinguished as the the universal or Catholicfaith. Thus the word “Catholic,” meaning universal, came to mean orthodox or true.” (Beeching, The Apostles’ Creed 88-89).

         The word "catholic" must not be arbitrarily restricted to any sectarian reconstruction of theology or to any one form of ministry, liturgy or ecclesiastical government. While no church can function without a specific form of ministry, liturgy or government, none of those forms is essential to the Church, though by some Christians they are viewed in precisely that way. Consequently, to identify the constitutional church as the "catholic Church" is to be insufficiently catholic. This truth we must not forsake. While the members of the one Church ought ideally to be members of one of the churches, we must never confuse the latter with the former. The singularity of the Church does not exclude the plurality of the churches, though it does exclude identifying the whole with any of its empirical parts.
         To speak of the Church's catholicity is necessarily to speak of its unity. To be universal and fragmentary is a contradiction in terms. Its unity lies in its universality, its one Lord and its common faith, the faith of the creed, which we have been expounding all along. Thus, to add to the word “catholic” the word “one,” as does the Nicene creed, is redundant. The Church’s universal and unified character is true despite all appearances to the contrary. Those appearances divide the churches but not the Church. There never was an epoch since the Church spread beyond Jerusalem when the churches were one in visible uniformity or even in sympathy. Perhaps it is not so much the existence of many churches calling upon the same Lord which is the scandal as it is our slowness in recognizing one another as members of the only Church there is, the "holy, catholic Church" of Jesus Christ. All too slowly, Christians have come to realize that what they have in common is far more precious and important than what divides them.
         To proceed, the Latin words translated here in the creed as “communion of saints” are actually ambiguous. They can be read both as grammatically masculine or grammatically neuter. That is, these words can be read with equal facility both as “communion of saints" or as “communion of sacred things.” In fact, both readings have some historical precedent, though the first seems clearly to predominate. If we opt for it, we declare our allegiance to, and participation in, the fellowship of all believers, which has been brought into existence by the grace of God and by his Word. By the second reading we declare our participation in sacred things, like the ordinances, the preaching of the gospel and the Great Commission, outward indications of our inward connection. But of these two interpretive options, the first seems clearly the best. To it we shall confine our remarks.
         The words "communion of saints" indicate the enduring fellowship of the faithful, the comradeship of believers, which Paul called koinonia and which is so strong and durable that it cannot be severed by time, distance or even death. "Communion" here does not refer to the Lord’s Supper, even though that sacrament itself is one of the historic symbols of the word's larger meaning. “Communion” means simply “fellowship.” To be a Christian, to receive the Spirit of Jesus Christ, is to be part of a society of faith and commitment, is to be drawn out of one's isolation and planted foursquare into the unity and love of the body of Christ, the Church. To be a part of the communion of saints is to become one of God's people, the new Israel, which is a holy nation, chosen by God to serve Him, to know Him, and to enjoy Him forever. On earth, the Church is localized, but earth is not all there is. The Church exists elsewhere too. We must not confine the membership, fellowship, or ministry of the Church to this world. The community of Christian inspiration and aspiration is far wider. The privilege and intimate connection that binds Christians together cannot be severed, neither by birth nor by death, for we share it with those who lived before us and with those who are yet to come. We have fellow believers and co-workers beyond the veil in both directions, the veil both of death and of birth. The communion of saints is a bridge that spans even the deep canyons that separate life from non-life. We have friends in high places and friends in the future, friends in Heaven and friends to come. They are our family in the faith, both our spiritual ancestry and our posterity. However scattered and divided Christians now seem, they are knit together in a bond of allegiance, intention and destiny. They are united by the love of God, which inclines them to love one another, and which ultimately will prevail.
         Put differently, this phrase in the creed reminds us that the Church is an enduring fellowship and that it remains both sacred and dear to us for the sake of those who gave their lives and hearts to Christ and his gospel. We are indebted to those who counted no cost too high and who reckoned no prospect too daunting in their quest to glorify the God Who loved them and delivered them from sin and death. We thank God for their victory and for their example. We pray that our own example might be as instructive and inspiring for those who follow us as the example of our predecessors has been for those who followed them. They are our friends and benefactors, the people who taught us the language of prayer and of theology. They are the pioneers of faith who taught us how and where to walk. We share their very life. The self-same energy that flowed from God to them sustains us, thus ensuring that their victory will some day also be ours. That’s what the communion of saints is all about. It means we are part of something bigger than ourselves and that we can call upon it and draw strength from it. It means that we are all part of the love and plan of God, that we are not alone. By reciting this portion of the creed, we bring before our minds the highest deeds, the worthiest actions, the profoundest sufferings and the grandest loves of all who came before us. When we do so, we are heartened and strengthened. A single life circulates among all those who are incorporated into Christ, and his redemptive blood courses through all our veins. This union in Him makes us closer than brother and sister, parent and child. Christ’s will was not to unite us simply to Himself but to each other.
         Naturally, we pray for those we love, just as they pray for us. Death does not alter that fact at all. Though they have died, they do not neglect to pray for those of us still making our way through a fallen world, still walking carefully and fearfully through the valley of the shadow of death. Nor ought we to cease to pray for them. Though sin no longer besets them, they still face the joyous challenge of growth in knowledge and in grace. They enjoy the inestimable privilege of better knowing the God Who made them and redeemed them, a privilege they cannot fully pursue even with all eternity at their disposal, for God is too vast and too wonderful ever to know completely. But their privilege and their glorious challenge is to try. For them and for their blessed quest we pray. Prayer for the dead, you see, is really prayer for the living. As Hugh Burnaby once asked, “If our communion with those whom we love is not broken by death, how can we cease to pray for them as we did when alive?” (Burnaby, Thinking Through the Creed 79). But prayer for the dead is not prayer to the dead. Though we pray for our friends in Heaven, we pray only to our Father, only by means of the Son, and only at the prompting of the Holy Spirit. We pray to no one but God. The communion of the saints is not Christian spiritualism. We are not conjurers. This is no seance.
         Finally, as did the creed's earlier affirmation concerning Christ's resurrection, that concerning the communion of saints alters the way we view the dead and the dying. Too often death seems to us such a painful break, such an irrecoverable loss, that we shut ourselves up in a pagan grief and despair. We talk as if we had lost a loved one. This we must not do. Something is not lost if you know where it is. Those beyond the veil of death are not lost; they are with Christ. The day they died was the day their life truly began. On that day they became more alive, more effective, more active, more pure and more joyous than ever before. God, after all, is not God of the dead, but of the living (Matt. 22: 32). God is the God of all those who have lived and do live, including Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, whom Jesus specifically mentioned. Their life with God teaches us that the tombstones they left behind are really their business cards. Our friends in Christ are now involved in joy, prayer, love and service, what C. S. Lewis once called the serious business of Heaven. Someday that business shall be ours as well.

“God has not only given [the saints] existence, he has given them sanctity; and that is why we have fellowship with them, and are bound in one communion of saints. For the divine love which has triumphed in them will also conquer us. If we want to know what God is doing with us, we look at those splendid beings who share the spontaneity of the Creator’s mind, the delight of his heart and the breath of his love. Religion is not fundamentally a battle against sin, it is a drawing up together into glorification.”
Austin Farrer, Words for Life

date modified:
5 July 2006

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