We believe in one… Catholic Church.
The word “catholic” comes into English via the Latin cognate “catholicus” which in turn comes from the Greek cognate “katholikos”. This Greek word comes from the elision of two Greek words: the preposition “kata” and the noun “holos”. “Kata holos” means according to, or in accord with, the whole. In what follows I will give some remarks about my intuition that CATHOLICISM, as such, is the immanent manifestation of the life of God. To be catholic is to participate in the oneness of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, to share in each of the divine persons being mysteriously in “accord with the whole” of the Godhead.
The origins of catholicity are to be sought in the final chapters of the Gospel of Saint John – that portion which Father Raymond Brown called “The Book of Glory” – chapters 13-21. The center of this section of John is our Lord’s “high priestly prayer” which he prayed the night before he suffered, at the Last Supper.
The first thing to notice about our Lord’s high priestly prayer is that he was praying in the presence of the Apostles (see Mat. 26.20) – the eleven disciples (Judas having left) whom he had chosen “to be with him and to be sent out to preach and have authority to cast out demons” (Mark 3.14f), from among the many who followed him. In the Lord’s high priestly prayer, we see the interpenetration of the Church’s unity and its apostilicity: the Lord is praying for the Apostles specifically, saying “And now I am no more in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to thee. Holy Father, keep them in thy name, which thou hast given me, that they may be one, even as we are one.”
So we may see that the unity of the Church is not something that is crated by the Church’s members. Rather it is a fact granted to the Apostles by our Lord’s prayer for them – and this unity is constituted by the unity of God himself. We are one (IF we are one) because we have been given the life of God, who is a Trinity of persons in unity of substance. The Church is one because God is one, and because God has poured out his life to and for the Church: “The glory which thou hast given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and thou in me, that they may become perfectly one” (Jn. 17.22).
Note our Lord’s reference to the gift of glory. The glory which he gives to the Apostles is nothing less than the glory he has received from the Father: “I glorified thee on earth, having accomplished the work which thou gavest me to do; and now, Father, glorify thou me in thy own presence with the glory which I had with thee before the world was made” (Jn. 17.4f).
We should notice that the gift of unity is an outgrowth, a consequence, of our Lord’s gift of HIMSELF to and for the Church. In John 6 he says: “I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh." Therefore the Church is constituted at once as ONE, as Apostolic, and as Eucharistic. It should be no surprise then that the Lord prays this prayer within the context of the Last Supper – at the institution of the Eucharist: the night when he took bread and wine, blessed God, and gave it to his disciple saying “This is my Body / This is my Blood… DO THIS…”
So likewise we can see what Saint Paul means when he chastises the Church at Corinth, when he writes to them: “What! Do you not have houses to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I commend you in this? No, I will not. For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, "This is my body which is for you. Do this…” (1 Cor. 11.22f). So Saint Paul also says: “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” To share in the Eucharist is to announce one’s participation in the Body of Christ, which is the Church (Col. 1.18). Hence we can see the multiplicity of related meanings of the word “communion” – as in “Anglican Communion” on the one hand, and “Holy Communion” on the other.
….
In 1948 the Archbishop of Canterbury received the report of a commission on Catholicity subtitled: A Study in the Conflict of Christian Traditions in the West”. Members of the panel which produced the report included such Anglican Catholics as the poet TS Eliot, the great liturgical scholar and Benedictine monk Dom Gregory Dix, and Michael Ramsey, who would himself go on to become Archbishop of Canterbury. In the opening of their report, they wrote: “It is often remembered that in the seventeenth chapter of St. John our Lord prayed for the unity of His disciples: it is sometimes forgotten, however, in our modern discussions that this prayer for their unity was linked with His prayer for their sanctification in the truth: 'Sanctify them in Thy truth; Thy word is truth'. The unity of Christians, coming as it does from the unity of the Father and the Son, is interwoven with their sanctification in the truth which our Lord delivers.”
So returning to the Book of Glory, our Lord prays not only for the Apostles, but for “those who believe in me through their word” (Jn. 17.20). He prays that those who believe in him THROUGH THE TEACHING OF THE APOSTLES might be one with the Apostles, and thereby one with himself, and thereby one with the Father. But this is all through the ministry of the WORD, through the Apostles’ teaching, because the Apostles are given authority to teach what the Lord himself taught and to do the works that he himself did. In the closing verses of the Gospel of Saint Matthew, the Lord says: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, TEACHING THEM TO OBSERVE ALL THAT I COMMANDED YOU; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age." And Christ’s teaching, his commandments, his “word,” comes from the Father: “…I do nothing on my own authority but speak thus as the Father taught me” (Jn. 8.28). And the Lord says of the Apostles: “I have given them the words which thou gavest me, and they have received them…” (Jn. 17.8), and “they have kept thy word” (Jn. 17.6). The Lord says clearly that to hear those whom he sends is to hear him; and likewise to reject those whom he sends is to reject him: “He who hears you hears me, and he who rejects you rejects me, and he who rejects me rejects him who sent me” (Lk. 10.16). The unity of the Church is the unity of the Lord with the Apostles – “I in them and thou in me” (Jn. 17.23) – and it is therefore not to be taken for granted; it is a gift, and it is given not just to anyone, but expressly to “those who believe in me through their word” (Jn. 17.20).
The Church’s unity – its oneness – therefore comes through its share in and its reception of the words of God (the theou logoi or, loosely speaking, a unity of theology), which the Father has given to the Son, and which the Son has given to the Apostles, and which the Apostles have preached to “all nations”. The Father’s gift of his Word to the Son is constitutive of the Father’s having eternally begotten the Son. That is, the Father’s gift of the Word to the Son is an eternal gift, and a gift so tightly given and so closely received, that it constitutes the very essence of God as Son. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (Jn. 1.1). This, again, can be seen in the Nicene Creed: the Word of God is “begotten of his Father before all worlds,” “of one substance with the Father,” and “very God of very God.”
Christ’s gift of the Word of God to the Apostles is shown to be the essence of the oneness of the Church as the Body of Christ. As I have mentioned, this discourse in John is presented in the context of the institution of the Eucharist, where the incarnate Word gives HIMSELF to the Apostles: “This is my body which is given for you” (Lk. 22.19). And therefore the Church rightly recognizes the yoking of preaching the Word and ministering the sacraments: “Give grace, O heavenly Father, to all bishops and other ministers, that they may… set forth thy true and lively Word, and rightly and duly administer thy holy Sacraments” (BCP p. 329). In full expressions of the Church, therefore, we recognize that to proclaim the Word of God is to imitate Christ in his offering himself to the Father, because the Word of God is not just the abstract teaching of the Apostles, and not just the Bible, but rather as John 1.14 says “the Word became flesh.” If to preach the Gospel is to proclaim the Word of God (and it is), then it is not merely to proclaim a teaching (it is that; but its not JUST that), but it is even more fundamentally to offer the flesh of Jesus Christ. The whole reason for preaching, for proclaiming the Word, is because it is the enterprise of holding up the unique, which is to say the one flesh of Jesus Christ who is the Word of God: “‘and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself.’ He said this to show by what death he was to die” (Jn. 12.32). When Jesus speaks of his being "lifted up" he is speaking, in essence, of his proclamation of himself as the Word of God.
The unity and apostilicity and catholicity of the Church are therefore all part and parcel of baptized believers in Jesus being “consecrated in the Truth.” The Lord prays: “Sanctify them in the truth; thy word is truth. As thou didst send me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sake I consecrate myself, that they also may be consecrated in truth. I do not pray for these only, but also for those who believe in me through their word, that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me” (Jn. 17.17ff).
And this unity is the essence of the Eucharistt. It is a perpetuation of the Apostolic power of lifting up the Word of God, which has become unique flesh. To offer the Word is therefore to offer a spotless and immaculate victim, the flesh of the man Jesus of Nazareth, who is of one substance with God the Father. Preaching the gospel and offering the Eucharistic sacrifice are forever and inextricably linked precisely because God’s perfect offering of his own life to humankind is forever and inextricably linked to the offering of perfect human nature to the Father in Christ’s “one oblation of himself, once offered” on the cross. In the crucified flesh of Jesus Christ there is at last perfect intercourse between God and man – a perfect, loving, simultaneous, and mutual outpouring of natures – because it is the ONE Christ who is crucified, and “although he be God and man, yet he is not two, but one Christ” (Athanasian Creed). Christ’s sacrifice is the loving and simultaneous self-offering of God to man, and of man to God.
But it is realized immanently only by those whose faith in Christ is circumscribed by the teaching of the Apostles, viz. "those who believe in me through their word.”
A final note: the realization of the Church as One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic, is both the reality which the Lord has bestowed on the fellowship of those who believe in him and who have been baptized into his Body, and it is also an eschatological vision, something that will not be fully manifest until the end, when he returns in glory to judge the living and the dead, at the vindication of the Lamb of God as conqueror and judge. In a sense then, we like the Jews are “waiting for Messiah” – whose age is marked by peace and well-being, an abundance of wine on the lees, and fat things full of marrow, the curing of disease, and the resurrection of the dead. As the visionary of Revelation says: “Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, every one who pierced him; and all tribes of the earth will wail on account of him. Even so. Amen.”
So we are now waiting for him to come again in glory and to manifest what he has already in himself and within his followers: namely, conquer death. Then, and perhaps only then, will it be evident just how it is that we are one as he and the father are one, how it is that our faith and devotion are KATA HOLOS – in accord with the whole Body of Christ, and therefore in accord with the essential and eternal fellowship that belongs to God alone – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The word “catholic” comes into English via the Latin cognate “catholicus” which in turn comes from the Greek cognate “katholikos”. This Greek word comes from the elision of two Greek words: the preposition “kata” and the noun “holos”. “Kata holos” means according to, or in accord with, the whole. In what follows I will give some remarks about my intuition that CATHOLICISM, as such, is the immanent manifestation of the life of God. To be catholic is to participate in the oneness of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, to share in each of the divine persons being mysteriously in “accord with the whole” of the Godhead.
The origins of catholicity are to be sought in the final chapters of the Gospel of Saint John – that portion which Father Raymond Brown called “The Book of Glory” – chapters 13-21. The center of this section of John is our Lord’s “high priestly prayer” which he prayed the night before he suffered, at the Last Supper.
The first thing to notice about our Lord’s high priestly prayer is that he was praying in the presence of the Apostles (see Mat. 26.20) – the eleven disciples (Judas having left) whom he had chosen “to be with him and to be sent out to preach and have authority to cast out demons” (Mark 3.14f), from among the many who followed him. In the Lord’s high priestly prayer, we see the interpenetration of the Church’s unity and its apostilicity: the Lord is praying for the Apostles specifically, saying “And now I am no more in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to thee. Holy Father, keep them in thy name, which thou hast given me, that they may be one, even as we are one.”
So we may see that the unity of the Church is not something that is crated by the Church’s members. Rather it is a fact granted to the Apostles by our Lord’s prayer for them – and this unity is constituted by the unity of God himself. We are one (IF we are one) because we have been given the life of God, who is a Trinity of persons in unity of substance. The Church is one because God is one, and because God has poured out his life to and for the Church: “The glory which thou hast given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and thou in me, that they may become perfectly one” (Jn. 17.22).
Note our Lord’s reference to the gift of glory. The glory which he gives to the Apostles is nothing less than the glory he has received from the Father: “I glorified thee on earth, having accomplished the work which thou gavest me to do; and now, Father, glorify thou me in thy own presence with the glory which I had with thee before the world was made” (Jn. 17.4f).
We should notice that the gift of unity is an outgrowth, a consequence, of our Lord’s gift of HIMSELF to and for the Church. In John 6 he says: “I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh." Therefore the Church is constituted at once as ONE, as Apostolic, and as Eucharistic. It should be no surprise then that the Lord prays this prayer within the context of the Last Supper – at the institution of the Eucharist: the night when he took bread and wine, blessed God, and gave it to his disciple saying “This is my Body / This is my Blood… DO THIS…”
So likewise we can see what Saint Paul means when he chastises the Church at Corinth, when he writes to them: “What! Do you not have houses to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I commend you in this? No, I will not. For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, "This is my body which is for you. Do this…” (1 Cor. 11.22f). So Saint Paul also says: “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” To share in the Eucharist is to announce one’s participation in the Body of Christ, which is the Church (Col. 1.18). Hence we can see the multiplicity of related meanings of the word “communion” – as in “Anglican Communion” on the one hand, and “Holy Communion” on the other.
….
In 1948 the Archbishop of Canterbury received the report of a commission on Catholicity subtitled: A Study in the Conflict of Christian Traditions in the West”. Members of the panel which produced the report included such Anglican Catholics as the poet TS Eliot, the great liturgical scholar and Benedictine monk Dom Gregory Dix, and Michael Ramsey, who would himself go on to become Archbishop of Canterbury. In the opening of their report, they wrote: “It is often remembered that in the seventeenth chapter of St. John our Lord prayed for the unity of His disciples: it is sometimes forgotten, however, in our modern discussions that this prayer for their unity was linked with His prayer for their sanctification in the truth: 'Sanctify them in Thy truth; Thy word is truth'. The unity of Christians, coming as it does from the unity of the Father and the Son, is interwoven with their sanctification in the truth which our Lord delivers.”
So returning to the Book of Glory, our Lord prays not only for the Apostles, but for “those who believe in me through their word” (Jn. 17.20). He prays that those who believe in him THROUGH THE TEACHING OF THE APOSTLES might be one with the Apostles, and thereby one with himself, and thereby one with the Father. But this is all through the ministry of the WORD, through the Apostles’ teaching, because the Apostles are given authority to teach what the Lord himself taught and to do the works that he himself did. In the closing verses of the Gospel of Saint Matthew, the Lord says: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, TEACHING THEM TO OBSERVE ALL THAT I COMMANDED YOU; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age." And Christ’s teaching, his commandments, his “word,” comes from the Father: “…I do nothing on my own authority but speak thus as the Father taught me” (Jn. 8.28). And the Lord says of the Apostles: “I have given them the words which thou gavest me, and they have received them…” (Jn. 17.8), and “they have kept thy word” (Jn. 17.6). The Lord says clearly that to hear those whom he sends is to hear him; and likewise to reject those whom he sends is to reject him: “He who hears you hears me, and he who rejects you rejects me, and he who rejects me rejects him who sent me” (Lk. 10.16). The unity of the Church is the unity of the Lord with the Apostles – “I in them and thou in me” (Jn. 17.23) – and it is therefore not to be taken for granted; it is a gift, and it is given not just to anyone, but expressly to “those who believe in me through their word” (Jn. 17.20).
The Church’s unity – its oneness – therefore comes through its share in and its reception of the words of God (the theou logoi or, loosely speaking, a unity of theology), which the Father has given to the Son, and which the Son has given to the Apostles, and which the Apostles have preached to “all nations”. The Father’s gift of his Word to the Son is constitutive of the Father’s having eternally begotten the Son. That is, the Father’s gift of the Word to the Son is an eternal gift, and a gift so tightly given and so closely received, that it constitutes the very essence of God as Son. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (Jn. 1.1). This, again, can be seen in the Nicene Creed: the Word of God is “begotten of his Father before all worlds,” “of one substance with the Father,” and “very God of very God.”
Christ’s gift of the Word of God to the Apostles is shown to be the essence of the oneness of the Church as the Body of Christ. As I have mentioned, this discourse in John is presented in the context of the institution of the Eucharist, where the incarnate Word gives HIMSELF to the Apostles: “This is my body which is given for you” (Lk. 22.19). And therefore the Church rightly recognizes the yoking of preaching the Word and ministering the sacraments: “Give grace, O heavenly Father, to all bishops and other ministers, that they may… set forth thy true and lively Word, and rightly and duly administer thy holy Sacraments” (BCP p. 329). In full expressions of the Church, therefore, we recognize that to proclaim the Word of God is to imitate Christ in his offering himself to the Father, because the Word of God is not just the abstract teaching of the Apostles, and not just the Bible, but rather as John 1.14 says “the Word became flesh.” If to preach the Gospel is to proclaim the Word of God (and it is), then it is not merely to proclaim a teaching (it is that; but its not JUST that), but it is even more fundamentally to offer the flesh of Jesus Christ. The whole reason for preaching, for proclaiming the Word, is because it is the enterprise of holding up the unique, which is to say the one flesh of Jesus Christ who is the Word of God: “‘and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself.’ He said this to show by what death he was to die” (Jn. 12.32). When Jesus speaks of his being "lifted up" he is speaking, in essence, of his proclamation of himself as the Word of God.
The unity and apostilicity and catholicity of the Church are therefore all part and parcel of baptized believers in Jesus being “consecrated in the Truth.” The Lord prays: “Sanctify them in the truth; thy word is truth. As thou didst send me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sake I consecrate myself, that they also may be consecrated in truth. I do not pray for these only, but also for those who believe in me through their word, that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me” (Jn. 17.17ff).
And this unity is the essence of the Eucharistt. It is a perpetuation of the Apostolic power of lifting up the Word of God, which has become unique flesh. To offer the Word is therefore to offer a spotless and immaculate victim, the flesh of the man Jesus of Nazareth, who is of one substance with God the Father. Preaching the gospel and offering the Eucharistic sacrifice are forever and inextricably linked precisely because God’s perfect offering of his own life to humankind is forever and inextricably linked to the offering of perfect human nature to the Father in Christ’s “one oblation of himself, once offered” on the cross. In the crucified flesh of Jesus Christ there is at last perfect intercourse between God and man – a perfect, loving, simultaneous, and mutual outpouring of natures – because it is the ONE Christ who is crucified, and “although he be God and man, yet he is not two, but one Christ” (Athanasian Creed). Christ’s sacrifice is the loving and simultaneous self-offering of God to man, and of man to God.
But it is realized immanently only by those whose faith in Christ is circumscribed by the teaching of the Apostles, viz. "those who believe in me through their word.”
A final note: the realization of the Church as One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic, is both the reality which the Lord has bestowed on the fellowship of those who believe in him and who have been baptized into his Body, and it is also an eschatological vision, something that will not be fully manifest until the end, when he returns in glory to judge the living and the dead, at the vindication of the Lamb of God as conqueror and judge. In a sense then, we like the Jews are “waiting for Messiah” – whose age is marked by peace and well-being, an abundance of wine on the lees, and fat things full of marrow, the curing of disease, and the resurrection of the dead. As the visionary of Revelation says: “Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, every one who pierced him; and all tribes of the earth will wail on account of him. Even so. Amen.”
So we are now waiting for him to come again in glory and to manifest what he has already in himself and within his followers: namely, conquer death. Then, and perhaps only then, will it be evident just how it is that we are one as he and the father are one, how it is that our faith and devotion are KATA HOLOS – in accord with the whole Body of Christ, and therefore in accord with the essential and eternal fellowship that belongs to God alone – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
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