What Church Unity Is (Part 2 of 2)
In a previous post, I wrote that Church unity is not an aggregate of like-minded individuals. That is to say, individuals and their opinions neither render the Church one nor do they render it many. This conception of unity might apply to the self-ascribed ethos of liberal states, since the tradition of classical liberalism privileges individuals, but for understanding the Church it is a wrongheaded conception. Given my post about what ecclesiological unity is not, it is fitting to say something about what ecclesiological unity is.
Unity is part of the Church’s very nature. In the language of the Apostles’ Creed, oneness is the opening concept in the phrase “one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic.” This point needs unpacking.
1. The Church’s unity is grounded in, and defined by, the divine source of the Church’s existence
The Church’s unity is a consequence of, and analogous to, God’s own unity that endows being upon the Church (see CC §813). God’s oneness is what grounds the Church’s oneness; the perfect unity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit makes the Church one. Notwithstanding individuals’ ability to damage the Church’s witness in the world, the Church’s oneness is not something that individuals can constitute or enable. It is something to which they can submit. This point has an important corollary.
There can, as a matter of principle, be only one Church [see Note 1]. Singularity is in its very nature (CC §813: “Unity is of the essence of the Church”; see also the Apostles’ Creed; the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed; etc.). Oneness is in the nature of the Church in the way that foursided-ness is in the nature of a square. In the same way that, without foursided-ness, we will have ceased speaking of a square, so too without oneness we will have ceased speaking of the Church. Furthermore, the one Church is at once intrinsically visible (i.e., tangible, human, earthly) and intrinsically invisible (i.e., intangible, divine, heavenly). There is no picking and choosing in this area, nor is it legitimate to prioritize one of these dimensions over the other, as some modern movements have attempted (e.g., Reformed Protestant ecclesiology, which emphasizes an invisible entity as “the true church,” whose purported purity warrants separation from visible, corruption-prone institutions and clerics; e.g., Westminster Confession of 1646, XXV.1).
In a biography of John Calvin (1519–1564), Reformed Protestant historian Bruce Gordon describes early Reformed ecclesiology as open to the idea that sometimes the “true church” appears to have no historical manifestation, only a heavenly one (see Gordon, Calvin, p. 59). The precedent for this idea was Martin Luther from the prior generation (see Richard Rex’s The Making of Martin Luther). How do tangible human beings know whether they belong to such an intangible entity? Individual religious experience and personal intentions in line with “the” Protestant cause became key bases for identifying who is and is not a member. According to Gordon, what mattered was not “differences of theology and method” so much as “commitment…to the Word of God. This was [Calvin’s] application of the concept of friendship to church unity” (Gordon, Calvin, 105; but cf. Calvin’s 1552 letter to Philip Melanchton, where Calvin expressed serious concern about Protestant divisions stemming from Protestant principles). There is conceptual commonality between Calvin’s friendship-based conception of unity and the idea that a given individual has unity with others whose thoughts and intentions match their own, so that there are divergent, plural Protestant “churches” where people can self-select into unity (i.e., the aggregate conception). Individuals’ own interior life is the gauge. Anglican theologian Simeon Zahl writes candidly that Protestant theology involves “a foundational prioritization of psychological and affective considerations” (see his “Revisiting ‘the Nature of Protestantism’: Justification by Faith Five Hundred Years On,” p. 129). Such individualistic ecclesiologies of invisibility were revisionist; their roots began in modern Europe, with individual experience and individual judgment at the center. Prioritizing individual judgment has fueled Protestants’ history of fracture.
What the Catholic Catechism (§815) calls “visible bonds of communion” are (1) the one faith received from the apostles; (2) common celebration of worship, particularly of the seven sacraments; and (3) apostolic succession through the sacrament of Holy Orders. To reject the visible bonds is to engage in distinct activities of heresy, apostasy, schism, or some combination thereof—none of which occurs without sin (CC §817). Such activities are scandalous toward the body of the Church.
2. “The body of Christ” as an ecclesiological analogy
Why can there be only one Church? As hinted above, the Church, by virtue of what it is, is inseparable from its divine source and specifically from the incarnate Son, who only spoke of building one Church. In Matt 16:18, Jesus renames Simon as “Petros” amid a wordplay, which is reflected in the Aramaic designation Cephas (lit. “the Rock”) that Paul used in his letters for referencing Simon (see Gal 1:18; 2:9, 11, 14; also 1 Cor 1:12; 3:22; 9:5; 15:5). Κηφᾶς is simply the Aramaic term כיפא written in Greek characters. Neither Greek “Petros” nor Aramaic “Cephas” are attested as personal names prior to the New Testament. Matthew’s Gospel narrates the origins of the odd personal name “Rock,” when Jesus says to “Simon son of Jonah”:
“I tell you (sing.), you (sing.) are Petros;
on this Petra (sing.) I will build my Church (μου τὴν ἐκκλησίαν);
the gates of Hades will not overcome it.”
Since the Church is Jesus’s own, he chose to establish a form of ongoing, visible leadership that he himself presented as monarchical (Matt 19:27–29; also Luke 22:28–30) and that was clearly understood as such in the 1st–2nd centuries. This leadership became known as the episcopacy. Note that, in line with the “construction” or “building” metaphor of Matt 16:18, the term ἐκκλησία (“meeting, gathering, assembly”) on a linguistic level suggests nothing about invisibility or otherworldliness or divine election (there is no theophoric element in the word at all; see, e.g., Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek) [see Note 2]. From earliest times, the Christian ἐκκλησία was understood as a divinely established, hierarchical, visible polity. As the apostles’ successors, the episcopacy marked and preserved the polity that Jesus established through the apostles’ ministry (e.g., some of the 1st century documentation on the episcopacy’s indispensability is Ignatius of Antioch, “To the Magnesians”; also “To the Trallians,” where he flatly says “Without these it cannot be called ἐκκλησία”; also 1 Clement 44). The Church’s inseparability from the Son and its oneness are built into a core ecclesiological analogy within the New Testament: the Church as “Christ’s body.”
There is one Church because there is one Christ. Christology and ecclesiology are overlapping issues; the latter is not a kind of DIY add-on to doctrine, but is itself part of the deposit of faith. The incarnate Son’s physical body is a unity of both the visible (tangible, human, earthly) and the invisible (intangible, divine, heavenly). To emphasize just one of these aspects, or to suggest that just one aspect identifies the true Christ, would be heretical Christology (i.e., either a quasi Gnosticism where ultimately the invisible is what matters, or a subordination of Christ’s divinity to his humanity where ultimately the visible is what matters). By the same token, to emphasize the Church’s invisibility over its visibility or vice versa is doctrinally erroneous. The Son was incarnate as one body. Likewise, the Church was established as one: an indivisible unity of visible and invisible analogized within scripture to the body of the incarnate Son himself (see Rom 7:4 [cf. 12:5]; 1 Cor 12:12, 27 [cf. 6:15 and 10:16]; Eph 4:12 [cf. 5:23]; Col 1:18, 24 [cf. 3:15]). In short, the Church is analogized to the incarnation.
Paul in Colossians makes a major statement about the Church as an institution greater than the sum of its parts. He writes in cosmic terms of the Church as a singular, visible “body,” with Christ as its head (1:18, καὶ αὐτός ἐστιν ἡ κεφαλὴ τοῦ σώματος τῆς ἐκκλησίας). Upon stating that God has endowed “all things” (τὰ πάντα) in heaven and earth with existence “through” and “for” Christ (vv. 16), Paul speaks of the Church in this context of divine creation. Furthermore, what is invisible in Col 1:15–20 is neither the Church nor the Son, but rather the creator himself (τοῦ θεοῦ τοῦ ἀοράτου, v. 15). By comparison, the Son is the creator’s εἰκὼν, “image, icon”—i.e., one who makes the invisible visible (εἰκὼν is about visibility and tangibility, with a lexical meaning of “picture, statue”; it is related to the term “iconography”). In fact, nowhere in scripture is the Church defined in terms of invisibility, which is not to say it lacks heavenly or invisible aspects (definition ≠ aspect; see Heb 12:22–24, where ἐκκλησία in v. 23 indicates approachable [προσέρχομαι] saints in heaven, perfected in justice). The Church has invisible dimensions. Yet Paul’s focus in Col 1:15–20 accentuates other dimensions: the visibility of the one Church as Christ’s body. Because of the Christological elements of ecclesiology, visibility is of vital, theological import as it pertains to the Son and his “body the church,” where both invisible and visible are unified.
Historically speaking, prior to modern Europe, Christian conceptions of the Church’s oneness were not about individuals agreeing in their own interpretations of scripture or feelings of assurance or the like. Oneness was about a divinely created body, a polity with forms of leadership stemming from the apostles (see already 1 Clement), a polity whose oneness is not something individuals constitute as an aggregate. Rather, it is a oneness to which individuals submit in faithfulness to Jesus himself.
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[Note 1] Here, someone might ask: But what about all those different Protestant groups claiming to be the one Church? Their claims are, like most core aspects of Protestant thought, a distorted repackaging of historically Catholic teaching (in this case, the Catholic Church as the Church). Pointing out that some Protestant groups have and do claim this standing undermines Catholic teaching no more than pointing out how, for the most part, Protestants affirm that Jesus is divine; that baptism is important; or that there is such a thing as a canon of scripture. Generally speaking, Protestantism is to Catholicism what a parasite is to its host. A Protestant who affirms some account of the Church’s oneness depends on, while protesting, teachings that he otherwise claims to jettison. In fact, schism and heresy typically are motivated by aspects of what is true (e.g., Marcion affirmed that Jesus’ teachings were important; Arius affirmed Jesus was the Son of God; Gnostics affirmed salvation to be crucial; Donatists and Pelagius affirmed that ethics were important; Martin Luther affirmed scripture’s importance; etc.).
[Note 2] There is an urban legend definition that travels among certain lines of preachers, who attribute a quasi-otherworldly definition to the term ἐκκλησία. Influential preacher R. C. Sproul tried linking the word’s etymology to the Reformed ecclesiology of invisibility by claiming it conveys something about election into an invisible church. He wrote, “Thus, ekklesia means ‘those who are the called-out ones.’ Simply put, the invisible church, the true church, is composed of those who are called by God not only outwardly but inwardly by the Holy Spirit” (link here). He is even more explicit elsewhere about otherworldly connotations, asserting that “we know” the word “literally” means “those [people] who are called out of the world” (see here, ca. the 6:50 mark). Linguistically, his claims are baseless. Not only is there no “God” element in the term, there is no “world” or “invisibility” element either. Moreover, etymological arguments are among the least reliable ways to judge the meaning of a given word. Due to (1) their abstraction of words from actual contexts and usages in particular texts; and (2) their faulty supposition that a word’s “root” is a carrier of stable meaning, etymological arguments are routinely rejected among linguists and philologists. I would also point out that, aside from this kind of ungrounded linguistic claim, the conceptual shift in the Lutheran and Reformed redefinition of “church” as a chiefly invisible phenomenon is at least as radical as, e.g., redefinitions of “marriage” or “man” or “woman” that stem from poststructuralist philosophy.
