Reference: Christianity
Reference: The World’s Religions by Huston Smith
[NOTE: In color are Vinaire’s comments.]
If Christ was the head of this body and the Holy Spirit its soul, individual Christians were its cells, few at first but increasing as the body came of age.
The first Christians who spread the Good News throughout the Mediterranean world did not feel themselves to be alone. They were not even alone together, for they believed that Jesus was in their midst as a concrete, energizing power. They remembered that he had said, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” (Matthew 18:20). So, while their contemporaries were nicknaming them Christians (literally the Messiah-folk, because they believed Jesus to be the Redeemer the prophets foretold), they began to call themselves an ekklesia, a Greek word that means literally “called out,” or “called apart.” The choice of this name points up how unlike a self-help society the early Christian community thought it was. It was no human association in which people of goodwill banded together to encourage one another in good works and lift themselves by their collective bootstraps. Human members constituted it, but it was powered by Christ’s—which is to say God’s—presence within it, though that presence was now spiritual and no longer visible.
The first Christians, who spread the Good News throughout the Mediterranean world, believed that Jesus was in their midst as a concrete, energizing power.
Completely convinced of this, the disciples went out to possess a world they believed God had already possessed for them. Images came to mind to characterize the intense corporate identity they felt. One of these came from Christ himself: “I am the vine, you are the branches.” This is obviously a metaphor, but we shall miss its force unless we see the exact sense in which the early Church read it. Just as a physical substance flows through the vine, entering its branches, leaves, and fruit to bring life to them, so a spiritual substance, the Holy Spirit, was flowing from the resurrected Christ into his followers, empowering them with the love that bore good works as its fruit. (The earliest Christians regarded the Holy Spirit as Christ/God’s empowering presence in the world. By the fourth century that presence had assumed a spiritual identity of its own and was identified as the third person of the triune God and was judged to be consubstantial and co-eternal with God the Father and God the Son, Christ.) This was the way Jesus’ followers read his own statement of the matter: “I am the true vine…. Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me” (John 15:1, 4).
It was believed that a spiritual substance, the Holy Spirit, was flowing from the resurrected Christ into his followers, empowering them with the love that bore good works as its fruit.
Saint Paul adapted Christ’s image by using the human body instead of a vine to symbolize the Church. This preserved the vine’s image of a central life-substance that animated its parts, while allowing for greater diversity than branches and leaves suggest. Though the offices and talents of individual Christians might differ as much as eyes and feet, Paul argued, all are animated by a single source. “For as in one body we have many members, so we who are many, are one body in Christ”–Christ and Church being synonymous here (Romans 12:4–5).
Christ’s image was adapted to symbolize the whole body of Christian believers, the Church.
This seemed to the early Christians to be the completely apposite image for their corporate life. The Church was the Mystical Body of Christ. Mystical here meant supernatural and mysterious, but not unreal. The human form of Christ had left the earth, but he was continuing his uncompleted mission through a new physical body, his Church, of which he remained the head. This Mystical Body came to life in the “upper room” in Jerusalem at Pentecost through the animating power of the Holy Spirit. For “what the soul is to the body of man,” Saint Augustine was to write, “that the Holy Spirit is to the Body of Christ, which is the Church.”
For “what the soul is to the body of man,” Saint Augustine was to write, “that the Holy Spirit is to the Body of Christ, which is the Church.”
If Christ was the head of this body and the Holy Spirit its soul, individual Christians were its cells, few at first but increasing as the body came of age. The cells of an organism are not isolates; they draw their life from the enveloping vitality of their hosts, while at the same time contributing to that vitality. The analogy is exact. The aim of Christian worship was to say those words and do those things that kept the Mystical Body alive, while at the same time opening individual cells, souls, to its inflowing vitality. The transaction literally “incorporated” Christians into Christ’s person, for in an important sense Christ now was the Church. In any given Christian the divine life might be flowing fully, partially, or not at all according to whether his or her faith was vital, perfunctory, or apostate, the latter condition being comparable to paralysis. Some cells might even turn cancerous and turn on their host—these are the Christians Paul speaks of as bringing disrepute upon the Church by falling into scandal. But to the degree that members were in Christian health, the pulse of the Holy Spirit coursed through them. This bound Christians to one another and at the same time placed them in the closest conceivable relation to Christ himself. “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?” (1 Corinthians 6:15). “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20).
The aim of Christian worship was to say those words and do those things that kept the Mystical Body alive, while at the same time opening individual cells, souls, to its inflowing vitality.
Building upon this early conception of the Church, Christians came to think of it as having a double aspect. Insofar as it consists of Christ and the Holy Spirit dwelling in people and suffusing them with grace and love, it is perfect. Insofar as it consists of fallible human members, it always falls short of perfection. The worldly face of the Church is always open to criticism. But its mistakes, Christians hold, have been due to the human material through which it works.
The worldly face of the Church is always open to criticism. But its mistakes, Christians hold, have been due to the human material through which it works.
In what sense there is salvation apart from the Body of Christ is a question on which Christians differ. Some Protestant liberals reject completely Christianity’s historic claim that “there is no salvation outside the Church” as indicative of religious imperialism. At the other extreme are fundamentalists who insist that no one but those who are knowingly and formally Christians will be saved. Other Christians, however, answer the question by drawing a distinction between the Church Visible and the Church Invisible. The Church Visible is composed of those who are formally members of the Church as an earthly institution. Pope Pius IX spoke the views of the majority of Christians when he rejected membership in the Church Visible as indispensable to salvation. “Those who are hampered by invincible ignorance about our Holy Religion,” he said,
and, keeping the natural law, with its commands that are written by God in every human heart, and being ready to obey him, live honorably and uprightly, can, with the power of Divine light and grace helping them, attain eternal life. For God, who clearly sees, searches out, and knows the minds, hearts, thoughts, and dispositions of all, in his great goodness and mercy does not by any means suffer a man to be punished with eternal torments, who is not guilty of voluntary faults.
Pope Pius IX spoke the views of the majority of Christians when he rejected membership in the Church Visible as indispensable to salvation.
This statement clearly allows for those who are not members of the Church Visible to be saved. Beyond the Church Visible stands the Church Invisible, composed of all who, whatever their formal persuasion, follow as best they are able the lights they have. Most Christians continue to affirm that in this second meaning of the Church there is no salvation apart from it. Most of them would add to this their belief that the divine life pulses more strongly through the Church Visible than through any alternative institution. For they concur with the thought John Donne put poetically in his sonnet on the Resurrection, where he says of Christ,
He was all gold when He lay down, but rose All tincture….
Beyond the Church Visible stands the Church Invisible, composed of all who, whatever their formal persuasion, follow as best they are able the lights they have.
Donne was referring to the alchemists, whose ultimate hope was to discover not a way of making gold but a tincture that would transmute into gold all the baser metals it touched. A Christian is someone who has found no tincture equal to Christ.
A Christian is someone who has found no tincture equal to Christ.
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