1.
The True Church
There
is a Christian community only when the Holy Spirit is at work. A Christian
community is visibly the true Church only when, in the power of the Holy
Spirit, it shines and so is distinguished from the darkness of both the world
and its own sinful tendency to proclaim itself. But the being and visibility of
a Christian community as the true Church are seen only with the eyes of a faith
graciously awakened by that same Spirit.
The
Christian community exists visibly as the true Church only in a history in
which its own very human actions are initiated, sustained, and ruled by the
Holy Spirit. This history is a movement toward a goal: the provisional
representation of the sanctification of all people already accomplished fully
in the exaltation of the Son of Man. The Christian community actively serves
its Lord as this provisional representation insofar as Jesus Christ himself
builds it up and it in turn participates in that edification. The activity of
Jesus Christ is the source, center, and goal of its own activity, but the
Church also has this activity to do.
To
build up or edify means to integrate. The Christian community is not simply a
collection of individuals. It is a group of individuals gathered in faith by
Jesus Christ and then united in freedom for the sake of witnessing to his
lordship. This unity in freedom is one which both affirms the uniqueness of
each individual and binds them together in common cause. Edification, then, is
not a matter of conforming to an abstract moral code. It is a matter of that
active love and those loving acts by which the community is integrated and so
enabled to be the provisional representation of man’s sanctification.
2.
The Growth of the Community
The
Christian community actively integrates itself as a community based on and
moving toward its Lord by the power of the Holy Spirit. One characteristic of
this active integration is growth. By the sovereign power of the Holy Spirit,
the Church demonstrates its freedom to increase the number of people
participating in it. But this outward, horizontal, numerical growth—while
important—is never an end in itself. It is always subordinate to inner growth.
Always the quantity of those participating in the Church is subordinate to the
quality of that participation. Growth which truly upbuilds is vertical and
spiritual. The constant movement of the Christian community along this way is
its only alternative to the fatal sleep of sloth.
3.
The Upholding of the Community
The
Christian community is always threatened with danger from both without and
within. The question is how to maintain its existence and edification, its life
and growth, despite these threats.
In
the context of the world, the Christian community calls attention to itself by
following a very different Lord, by proclaiming a very different message, and
by increasing the number of people called out of the world and into its
fellowship. The world will regard all this as bothersome if not dangerously
revolutionary. In response, the world may persecute the community with more or
less severity. Perhaps the world will simply pressure the community to take a
more positive attitude toward it and accept a few reasonable compromises.
Perhaps pressure will be applied more heavily to a few of the community’s more
visible members. Perhaps the pressure on the community will become sufficiently
intense that many Christians will question whether the cost of discipleship is
too great.
But
the world attacks the Church with more subtlety and seriousness simply by
ignoring it. Sometimes, in a tolerance of the quaint or traditional, the world
will indulge the Church by asking it to participate in weddings, funerals, and
graduations.
The
Christian community also faces threats from within. The world not only exists
outside the community. It also exists inside the community because Christians
themselves remain sinners. So there is
no form of sin confronting the community from without that cannot also be
welcomed from within. For this to happen, the community need not openly
repudiate the lordship of Jesus Christ. All it needs to do is relax just a bit
the tension that Christ’s critical and instructive lordship causes between the
community and the world.
Danger
from within comes in the form of either secularization or sacralization.
Secularization occurs when the community listens to a voice from the world
alongside or instead of the Word of God, when it allows that voice to interpret
the Word rather than following the Word’s interpretation of that voice. The
community may follow this alien voice in an attempt to avoid persecution or it
may do it to grow into a force to be reckoned with. Either way the Church as
the salt of the earth loses its savor (Matthew 5:13).
If
secularization is preservation or power through acculturation, sacralization is
the grab for power through self-assertion. Through it the community exchanges
humility for influence, faithfulness for success, and proclamation of its Lord
for proclamation of itself. In doing so, it become just like the world even as
it seeks to keep the world at bay. When suffering from sacralization, the
community separates itself from the losers, sinners, and sufferers of the world
in order to exercise the influence of winners.
Every
Christian community constantly faces these four dangers. One or more of these
may actually destroy it. This is not only because Christians themselves are
weak and sinful. It is also because these dangers represent a concerted attack
on the community by the power of death. This power was decisively defeated by
Jesus Christ at the cross. It can in no way hurt him. But in its death throes
it tries to annihilate the Christian community witnessing to the victory of
Jesus Christ. Nothing in the world is as threatened as the Church and nothing
consequently stands so desperately in need of someone to uphold it.
The
Christian community, however, has been upheld always by Scriptures as these
continually become the living Word of God communicating the very power of God.
And Scriptures become this voice and exercise this power because Jesus Christ
the living Lord speaks and acts through them as they are read and heard in his
community. And as death cannot defeat him, so he will not permit it to destroy
the community in whose midst he stands.
4.
The Order of the Community
The
edification of the Christian community takes the form of order in opposition to
the disorder of chaos. It follows a law in opposition to lawlessness. Its
growth takes place in this form according to this law. Its preservation in the
world despite mortal danger vindicates both its form and law.
If
the Christian community is going to be a provisional representation of man’s
sanctification in Christ, and can only be this in a definite form according to
a definite law, we must begin by acknowledging that Jesus Christ as Lord is the
primary acting subject and his community is always secondary, that Jesus Christ
is the Head of his body the Church. So the Christian community provisionally
represents sanctified humanity only because and as the Holy One rules it and it
obeys. This irreversible relationship between Jesus Christ as Lord and the
Church and Christians as his servants is the primary source of order and basic
law of the Church.
Because
Jesus Christ is Lord and the community is his obedient servant, the whole
structure of its life must be formed by his Word rather than by rules created
abstractly or adopted from other groups. Church law is always law in obedience
to Christ and therefore, in opposition to both legalism and lawlessness, is
always law developed by the Church in obedience to the voice of Christ it hears
attested in Scripture by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Church
law developed in obedience to the living voice of Jesus Christ our Lord is
always a law of service. Jesus Christ serves his Father and therefore all
people. He calls Christians to his service and in it to mutual service.
Ministry is the true order of the Christian community. There is not a law of
rule and privilege for some alongside the law of obedience and service for the
rest. The law of service to Christ, and in Christ to one another, is the only
law, it applies to every aspect of community life, and it applies equally to
every Christian as well.
Second,
Church law developed in active obedience is always liturgical. Jesus Christ is
the center of the Christian community. His community is truly edified in
worshiping him. Church law grows out of the community’s service of worship to
order the community’s life as a whole. It is in worship that the Christian
community, the body of Christ on earth, stands out by representing in its
history the particular history of Jesus Christ between his conception and
ascension. It is in worship that the sabbath stands out from the six days of
work preceding and following it. It is in worship that Christians abandon the
scattered, anonymous, and private character of their daily existence and to
stand together at a specific time and place and give definite form to the
communion of saints provisionally representing the sanctification of all
people.
Third,
true Church law is always alive. This is because Jesus Christ is the living
Lord to whom the community listens continually for direction. This daily
commitment to listening and obeying expresses itself in a canon law capable of
developing new answers to various issues of community life and of expressing
these answers with the greatest possible clarity in the form of legal
propositions. However, for all its confidence and clarity, canon law is only
human law and also subject to the one law having absolute authority over the
community: Jesus Christ. Only in constant submission to its living Lord can
canon law remain alive. It is also in this obedience that canon law may even perhaps
improve as it moves from the best laws of yesterday to those of tomorrow.
Finally,
true Church law is always exemplary. The Christian community may contribute to
the upbuilding of the civil community by witnessing to the law it has developed
in obedience to Christ. In doing so Christians may demonstrate to
non-Christians the true relativity of existing civil law. The Church cannot
speak definitively on civil law, but it may speak on what it has done
provisionally in obedience to Christ and in that same obedience point to
something better. In doing so the Church witnesses to the active lordship of
Christ in the world as he himself guides lawmakers.
Copyright © 2019
by Steven Farsaci.
All rights
reserved. Fair use encouraged.