"No one can have God as Father who does not have the Church as Mother"

- St. Cyprian Evangelical Catholics?

Provocative, eh? Let me quote John Calvin for you just in case you think this is a "Roman" thing:

“But as it is now our purpose to discourse of the visible Church, let us learn, from her single title of Mother, how useful, nay, how necessary the knowledge of her is, since there is no other means of entering into life unless she conceive us in the womb and give us birth, unless she nourish us at her breasts, and, in short, keep us under her charge and government, until, divested of mortal flesh, we become like the angels,(Matth. 22: 30.) For our weakness does not permit us to leave the school until we have spent our whole lives as scholars. Moreover, beyond the pale of the Church no forgiveness of sins, no salvation, can be hoped for, as Isaiah and Joel testify, (Isa. 37: 32; Joel 2: 32.) By these words the paternal favour of God and the special evidence of spiritual life are confined to his peculiar people, and hence the abandonment of the Church is always fatal.”

In fact Calvin has a ridiculously high theology of the Church in his Institutes, going so far as titling the fourth book "Means of Grace: Holy Catholic Church." So here's the deal - if you want to be an orthodox and traditional Christian, you have to have a high view of the Church as the "body of Christ." That's it. No way around it.

Continuing on then with my Evangelical Catholicism I think the issue of the Church is one of the most important notions that needs to change if we evangelicals want to serve Jesus. I was recently doing a study on Church discipline and was shocked to find out how low a view of the Church there was amongst my fellow ordinands. Let it not be true! I think we have been fed lies about what the Church is for the last two hundred years in evangelical circles and it is about time we found out what the Church is really about. First a discussion of the 'popular' conception of Church I find someplaces among evangelical Christendom and why I find there faulty, then a more positive view of the Church from an evangelical perspective. Important: I am not putting forth a uniquely Roman Catholic position here, I am defending the historic view of the Church as Mother which finds itself even in John Calvin, who was as Biblical as a theologian gets.

Evangelical conceptions of Church

I hesitate to even capitalize Church when using it in evangelical terms because most of us were taught to view Church in the same way as we view the sacraments: something we kind of do but we know nothing really happens. Are you serious? When asked what the Church is most evangelicals will probably have no idea what the question means. More appropriate is "who is the Church", not what. That's because they don't think it actually exists. I think this is a product of the incredible Enlightenment focus on the individual and loss of the sacramental union and presence of God on earth. So the Church is really just the name for a group of people who cognitively assent to certain ideas and who may (or may not) show up together to sing songs and listen to someone talk for an hour. The question of why you do this from an individualist evangelical perspective still needs to be asked, but I imagine it is the same as the aforementioned sacraments: "It's always been this way." But if you don't think there is a metaphysical presence and participation that is more than just a bunch of individuals, why bother? Some groups in America I think are realizing this and have decided to ditch the whole Sunday service thing ('service' way to make it meaningless) in favour of 'actually' doing something. Why sing hymns and listen to the Word when we could be doing something useful like feeding the poor or building houses? That question has to be asked by evangelicals who have lost the sense of a high theology of Church.

More to the point, I think this makes practical matters in the Church community impossible to deal with. The Church is seen not as an elect people of God trying to redeem the world through its own community that is centred on the presence of Jesus Christ, it is a bunch of likeminded people who are glad to have people show up and leave whenever they like. "Whatever gets them saved" is the cry of the day, but what does salvation mean if it is not an ingrafting into the body of Christ? And isn't that body defined totally by some cognitive facts laid out by Rick Warren in the evangelical framework? The idea of Church discipline (one of the traditional marks of the Church along with the Word and Sacraments) is nonsense because there is no such thing as 'the Church'. There is just an everchanging and never confident collection of people who assent to roughly the same things but don't know what to do about them. I'm I being unfair? I really don't think so.

Positive Aspects of the Church

So the question is then "What is the Church?" Well that is a insanely difficult question and a perfect definition is probably impossible to give in a fallen world, but something we could get our teeth on would be the same thing Calvin and St. Cyprian have been saying throughout Christian history: the Church is themystical union of Christ, the space where humanity participates with God through the mediation of the Holy Spirit, the community of God's faithful which is ever increasing and has the final goal of conquering the entire earth in the name of Jesus - through martyrdom and evangelism with the Holy Spirit. Working this out a bit, the Church is:

1. An actual reality which is more than just individual believers who assent to things; it is the presence of Christ on earth. When God set about restoring order after Gen 11 he didn't just go to individuals, he found Abram and started a nation, one which had a particular identity and physical embodiment. It is a lie of modernity that when Jesus came he gave up on Israel and decided to seek individual souls. He actually finally opened Israel to the rest of the world – the Church becoming the wider expansion of the nation of Israel. There is an organic unity here which says that the whole is more than just the sum of the individual parts. I think this is true of marriage as well - when two are united together it is more than two people - they are made one flesh, but it is a different flesh, with the creational participation in the goodness of God.

2. The Church is sacramental. We need as evangelicals to get back to the Church as sacrament (mysterious presence of Christ) and as the mystical body of Christ. Paul says this all the time - why don't we believe him! The Church is united not (just) by the cognitive assent to Creedal beliefs, but also in the union that comes about through baptism and the Lord's Supper. These are high mysteries where the Holy Spirit brings us into communion with the Lord Jesus and thus makes us one as he and the Father are one. I am tempted to say that if a 'Christian group' does not have the sacraments then they do not have Christ - this is the view of all Christian history up until the radical reformation, which somehow became the evangelical position! We are done with modernity's emasculating desire to render everything as cognitive truth, we can speak once again about participation and revelation, lets get back the physical and spiritual dimension to the Church, as opposed to the mental which we have been force fed for so long (you can try and argue that there was a spiritual dimension but it really came down to the Spirit giving you truth, not actually indwelling in you like Jesus says in John 14).

3. The Church is evangelical. That needs to be said. The Church is formed around the canon of Scripture and the Holy Spirit's witness in and through it. He makes us known to the Father through the Church but the Church is exactly what we find in the NT and the continuation of the nation Israel in the OT. You don't need to get rid of the Bible to be 'high Church.' In fact, you need it more than ever. The Church is supposed to transform the entire world, it is a community that is to draw the world into it by the Holy Spirit so that all may be one through the participation with Christ in worship of the Father. As I have said before, the personal relationship with Jesus is wonderful, but there is more to being a Christian than me and my Bible. I can never figure out why evangelicals are so scared of the high Church position. Have you read the Church Fathers? Do you know how highly they view Scripture? We got our committment to Scripture from them, not the other way around.

The Church is what Jesus initiated through his ministry and his death and resurrection. I am worried that we are turning our backs on him by denying his kingdom on earth in the form of the Church. The historic teaching has always been that there is no salvation outside of the Church - and they weren't talking about a social club that met on Wednesday evenings; they were talking about the physical and spiritual presence of Jesus Christ with his people in the prayers, the Word, and the breaking of bread. It definitely didn’t have Matt Redman.