Five Recognizable Marks of the Church
-a Lecture by Thomas Howard - who is a renowned Christian writer and scholar, known for his works on C.S. Lewis and another Inkling, Charles Williams.
As an Anglican I became aware that I, as an individual believer, stood in a very long and august lineage of the faithful, stretching back to the apostles and fathers. The picture had changed for me: It was no longer primarily me, my Bible, and Jesus (although heaven knows that is not altogether a bad picture: the only question is, is it the whole picture?). Looming for me, as an Anglican, was “the faith,” ancient, serene, undimmed, true. And that faith somehow could not be split apart from “the Church.” But then, what was the Church?
I realized that, one way or another, I had to come to terms with the Church in all of its antiquity, its authority, its unity, its liturgy, and its sacraments. Those five marks, or aspects, of the Church are matters that all of us, I think, would find to be eluding us in the free churches. I speak as a Roman Catholic, for that is where my own pilgrimage has brought me in my quest for this Church in all of its antiquity, authority, unity, liturgy, and sacraments. Let me touch on each of these briefly.
Antiquity
First, the antiquity of the Church confronts me. As an Evangelical, I discovered while I was in college that it was possible to dismiss the entire Church as having gone off the rails by about a.d. 95. That is, we, with our open Bibles, knew better than old Ignatius or Polycarp or Clement, who had been taught by the apostles themselves—we knew better than they just what the Church is and what it should look like. Never mind that our worship services would have been unrecognizable to them, or that our church government would have been equally unrecognizable, or that the vocabulary in which we spoke of the Christian life would have been equally unrecognizable. We were right, and the Fathers were wrong. That settled the matter.
The trouble here was that what these wrong-headed men wrote—about God, about our Lord Jesus Christ, about his Church, about the Christian’s walk and warfare—was so titanic, and so rich, and so luminous, that their error seemed infinitely truer and more glorious than my truth. I gradually felt that it was I, not they, who was under surveillance. The “glorious company of the apostles, the noble army of martyrs, and the holy Church throughout all the world” (to quote the ancient hymn, the Te Deum) judge me, not I them. Ignatius, Polycarp, Clement, Justin, Irenaeus, Cyprian, Cyril, Basil, the Gregorys, Augustine, Ambrose, Hilary, Benedict—it is under the gaze of this senate that I find myself standing. Alas. How tawdry, how otiose, how flimsy, how embarrassing, seem the arguments that I had been prepared, so gaily, to put forward against the crushing radiance of their confession. The Church is here, in all of its antiquity, judging me.
Authority
Second, the Church in itsauthorityconfronts me. That strange authority to bind and to loose that our Lord bestowed on his disciples has not evaporated from the Church—or so the Church has believed from the beginning. If you will read the story of those decades that followed Pentecost, and especially that followed upon the death of the apostles, you will discover that the unction to teach and to preside in the Church that passed from the apostles to the bishops was understood to be an apostolic unction. I, for example, could not start up out of the bulrushes and say, “Hi, everybody! The Lord has led me to be a bishop! I’m starting me a church over here.” The whole Christian community—bishops, presbyters, deacons, and laity—would have looked solemnly at me and gone about their business.
The Holy Spirit, in those days, did not carry on private transactions with isolated souls, and then announce to the Church that so-and-so had been anointed for this or that ministry. The unction of the Holy Spirit, and the authority of the Church to ordain for ministry, were not two random enterprises. The Holy Spirit worked in, and through, the Church’s ministry and voice. To be sure, he could do what he wanted to do, as he had always done, being God. Under the Old Covenant, we could say that he worked in and through Israel; but of course you find these extra characters like Job and Jethro and the Magi, coming across the stage from outside the Covenant, yet nonetheless undeniably having been in touch with God. God can do what he wants, of course.
But the Church understands herself to be the appointed vessel for God’s working, just as the Incarnation was. Her authority is not her own. She arrogates nothing to herself. Her bishops and patriarchs are the merest custodians, the merest passers-on, we might say, of the deposit of faith. As a Roman Catholic, I am, of course, acutely conscious of this. When someone objects to me, “But who does the Catholic Church think she is, taking this high and mighty line” (about abortion or about sexual morality or about who may or may not come to the Lord’s Table), the answer is, “She doesn’t think she’s anything particular, if you mean that she has set herself up among the wares in the flea market as somehow the best. She has her given task to do—to pass on the teaching given by the apostles, and she has no warrant to change that. She is not taking her cues from the Nielsen ratings, or from a poll, or even from a sociological survey as to what people feel comfortable with nowadays. She didn’t start the Church, and it’s not her Church.”
As a free-church Christian, one can, of course, make up one’s mind about lots of things. Shall I fast or not? Well, that’s for me to decide. Shall I give alms? Again— a matter for my own judgment. Must I go to church? That, certainly, is my own affair. Need I observe this or that feast day in the church year? I’ll make up my own mind. Piety and devotion are matters of one’s own tailoring: No one may peer over my shoulder and tell me what to do.
Indeed, no one may do anything of the sort—ifwe are speaking of ourselves as Americans who have constitutional rights. But if we are speaking of ourselves as Christian believers, then there is a touchstone other than the Constitution by which our choices must be tested.
Our Christian ancestors knew nothing of this sprightly individualism when it came to the disciplines of the spiritual life. They fasted on Fridays, and they went to church on Sundays. Some Roman pope did not make these things up. They took shape in the Church very early, and nobody dreamed of cobbling up a private spirituality. And likewise with all sorts of questions. Shall women be ordained as priests? It is, eventually, not a matter of job description, or of politics, or even of common sense or public justice. The question is settled by what the Church understands the priesthood to be—with cogent reasoning given, to be sure. It is not a question to be left interminably open to the public forum for decade after decade of hot debate.
The Church is here, in all of its authority, judging us.
Unity
Third, the Church in itsunityconfronts me. This is the most difficult and daunting matter. But one thing eventually became clear: My happy Evangelical view of the church’s unity as being nothing more than the worldwide clutter that we had under our general umbrella was, for good or ill, not what the ancient Church had understood by the wordunity. As an Evangelical, I could pick which source of things appealed most to me: Dallas Seminary; Fuller Seminary;John Wimber; Azusa Street; the Peninsula Bible Church;Hudson Taylor; the deeper life as taught at Keswick;Virginia Mollenkott;John Stott; orSam Shoemaker. And in one sense, variety is doubtless a sign of vigorous life in the Church. But in another sense, of course, it is a disaster. It is disastrous if I invest any of the above with the authority that belongs alone to the Church. But then who shall guide my choices?
Once again, we come back to the picture that we have in the ancient Church. Whatever varieties of expression there may have been—in Alexandria as over against Lyons or in Antioch as over against Rome—nevertheless, when it came to the faith itself, and also to order and discipline and piety in the Church, no one was left groping or mulling over the choices in the flea market.
Where we Protestants were pleased to live with a muddle—even with stark contradiction (as in the case of Luther versus Zwingli, for example)—the Church of antiquity was united. No one needed to remain in doubt for long as to what the Christian Church might be, or where it might be found. The Montanists were certainly zealous and earnest, and had much to commend them; the difficulty, finally, was that they werenot the Church. Likewise with the Donatists. God bless them for their fidelity and ardor and purity, but they werenot the Church. As protracted and difficult as the Arian controversy was, no one needed to remain forever in doubt as to what the Church had settled upon: Athanasius was fighting for the apostolic faith,against heresy. It did not remain an open question forever.
There was one Church and the Church was one. And this was a discernible, visible, embodied unity, not a loose aggregate of vaguely like-minded believers with their various task forces all across the globe. The bishop of Antioch was not analogous to the general secretary of the World Evangelical Fellowship or the head of the National Association of Evangelicals. He could speak with the full authority of the Church behind him; these latter gentlemen can only speak for their own organization. He was not even analogous to the stated clerk of the Presbyterian Church or the presiding bishop of the Episcopalians, neither of whom is understood by his clientele to be speaking in matters of doctrine and morality with an undoubted apostolic authority.
This line of thought could bring us quickly to the point at which various voices today might start bidding for our attention, each one of them with “Hey—oursis the apostolic voice—over here!” That is not my task here. I only would want to urge you to test your own understanding of the Church against the Church’s ancient understanding of itself as united, as one. What is that unity? It is a matter that has perhaps been answered too superficially and frivolously for the last two hundred years in American Protestantism. The Church in its unity is here, judging us.
Liturgy
Fourth, theliturgyof the Church confronts and judges me. That seems like an odd way of putting it: In what sense can anyone say that the liturgy “judges” me? Certainly it does not condemn me or pass any sort of explicit judgment on me. But if only by virtue of its extreme antiquity and universality, it constitutes some sort of touchstone for the whole topic of Christian worship.
Often the topic is approached as though it were a matter of taste: John likes fancy worship—smells and bells—and Bill likes simplicity and spontaneity and informality. There’s the end of the discussion. And certainly, as I mentioned before, God receives any efforts, however halting and homespun, which anyone offers as worship, just as any father or mother will receive the offering of a limp fistful of dandelions as a bouquet from a tiny child. On the other hand, two considerations might be put forward at this point.
First, what did the Church, from the beginning, understand by worship— that is, by its corporate, regular act of worship? TheBook of Actsgives us little light on the precise shape or content of the Christians’ gatherings: The apostles’ doctrine, fellowship, the breaking of bread, and the prayers are mentioned. St. Paul’s Epistles do not spell out what is to be done. We have to look to other early writings if we are curious about the apostolic church’s worship. And what we find when we do so is the Eucharistic liturgy. This, apparently, was what they did as worship. If we think we have improved on that pattern, we may wish to submit our innovations for scrutiny to the early Church in order to discover whether our innovations have in fact been improvements.
Which brings us to the second consideration: the content of the Eucharistic liturgy. From the beginning, the Church seems to have followed a given sequence: readings from Scripture (including the letters from Paul and Peter and John), then prayers, and then the so-calledanaphora—the “offering,” or, as it was also called, the Great Thanksgiving. This was the great Eucharistic Prayer, which took on a fairly exact shape at the outset, and which you may still hear if you listen to the liturgy in any of the ancient churches. Psalmody, canticles, and hymns also came to be included, and certain acclamations like the “Kyrie, eleison!” The whole presents a shape of such rich perfection that one wonders what exactly is the task of the “coordinators of worship” on the staff of various churches. The worship of the ancient Church is far from being a matter of endless tinkering, experimenting, and innovating. The entire mystery of revelation and redemption is unfurled for us in the church’s liturgy. That liturgy is here in all of its plentitude, majesty, and magnificence, judging us.
Sacraments
Fifth and finally, thesacramentsof the Church confront me. The wordsacramentis the Latin word for the Greekmysterion,mystery. Indeed, we are in the presence of mystery here, for the sacraments, like the Incarnation itself, constitute physical points at which the eternal touches time, or the unseen touches the seen, or grace touches nature. It is the Gnostics and Manichaeans who want a purely disembodied religion.
Judaism, and its fulfillment, Christianity, are heavy with matter. First, at creation itself, where solid matter was spoken into existence by the Word of God. Then redemption, beginning not with the wave of a spiritual wand, nor with mere edicts pronounced from the sky, but rather with skins and blood—the pelts of animals slaughtered by the Lord God to cover our guilty nakedness. Stone altars, blood, fat, scapegoats, incense, gold, acacia wood—the Old Covenant is heavily physical.
Then the New Covenant: We now escape into the purely spiritual and leave the physical behind, right? Wrong. First a pregnancy, then a birth. Obstetrics and gynecology, right at the center of redemption. Fasting in the wilderness, water to wine, a crown of thorns, splinters and nails and blood—our eternal salvation carried out in grotesquely physical terms. Then pure spirituality, right? Wrong. A corpse resuscitated. And not only that—a human body taken up into the midmost mysteries of the eternal Trinity. And Bread and Wine, Body and Blood, pledged and given to the Church, for as long as history lasts. Who has relegated this great gift to the margins of Christian worship and consciousness? By what warrant did men, 1,500 years after the Lord’s gift of his Body and Blood, decide that this was a mere detail, somewhat embarrassing, and certainly nothing central or crucial—a show-and-tell device at best? O tragedy! O sacrilege! What impoverishment for the faithful!
May God grant, in these latter days, a gigantic ingathering, as it were, when Christians who have loved and served him according to patterns and disciplines and notions quite remote from those of the ancient Church find themselves taking their places once again in the great Eucharistic mystery of his one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.
---Adapted from a lecture given in 1993 to the Fellowship of St. Barnabas in Oklahoma City.
To Read the whole article, please see Touchstone Magazine article, "Recognizing the Church: A Personal Pilgrimage & the Discovery of Five Marks of the Church,"
by Thomas Howard:
http://touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=06-03-005-f#ixzz1brsfI0fX
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