Ecclesiology — The Church

To speak of the Church is to speak of the Body into which every believer is baptized and from which every servant serves. Ecclesiology is therefore not an abstract chapter of dogmatics but the very air in which the Christian life breathes.In this lesson, we trace the doctrine of the Church as received by the Fathers and the apostles by examining the following topics:

The Kingdom of God: Its three expressions.

• Elements of the Church: The constitutive components of a true Church.
• Scriptural Mystery: The images and symbols Scripture uses to unveil the mystery of the
• Church. History and Purpose: The Church's story from Eden to Pentecost, and up to the Second
• Coming. Visibility and Invisibility: The Church's dual nature.
• The Four Marks: Those confessed by the Creed.
• The Four Orders: The structures the Holy Spirit has built into the life of the Church.

Along the way we speak frankly about what has harmed the unity of the Church — the heresies and schisms of history — not to exult in division but to teach the pre-servant to guard the flock from the errors that still walk abroad in our own generation.

What Is the Kingdom of God?

The Kingdom of God was the main subject of our Lord's ministry in Israel. It is the work of the Holy Trinity exercised over all creation. The Father sent His Son and His Spirit to establish that Kingdom on earth, fulfilling the long preparation of the prophets and the promises of the Old Covenant. The New Testament sets the Kingdom before us in three distinct but interconnected expressions.

The first is the Kingdom within. It is the reign of God in the heart of the baptized, accomplished by the work of the Son and the Holy Spirit.

“For the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” Romans 14:17

This Kingdom is established in us by Baptism and maintained in us by the Eucharist. Once a person is baptized, each of us becomes a temple of the Holy Spirit, and is grafted into the sweet olive tree which is the One, Holy, Universal, Apostolic Church of God.

The second is the Kingdom on earth, which is the Church herself. Our Lord established her as His Bride and His Body. He built her as a house, the Temple of God, with the apostles as her foundation. He ratified His covenant with her in His own Blood. And her life depends upon the presence of the Holy Spirit, who gives her being and guidance. That is why in the Creed the confession of faith in the Church is placed immediately after the confession of faith in the Holy Spirit: the Church does not exist apart from the Spirit whose temple she is.

The third is the Kingdom to come. It begins on the day of Christ's second coming and the resurrection of the dead, when Christ will take His Church to His Father in glory, and every tear will be wiped away. This is the eschatological horizon that gives the whole present life of the Church its meaning — she is not merely a society in the world, but a pilgrim community moving toward the City whose builder and maker is God.

What Makes a Church?

The apostolic and patristic definition of a Church is triadic and exact. A Church is the community of baptized believers led by a canonical bishop — one who stands in apostolic succession — gathered around the Holy Eucharist. Three elements together: baptized believers, canonical bishop, and the Eucharist. Any one of them missing, and what remains may be a religious gathering, a devotional society, or a well-intentioned assembly, but it is not what the apostles called a Church.

This definition was not invented by later generations. It is the self-understanding of the Church from her earliest hour, and St. Ignatius of Antioch, a disciple of St. John, sets it down for us with unmistakable clarity at the turn of the second century.

“Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the multitude also be; even as, wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church. It is not lawful without the bishop either to baptize, or to celebrate a love-feast; but whatsoever he shall approve of, that is also pleasing to God.” — St. Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Smyrnaeans 8

The Orthodox Church defines the bishop's identity through his essential participation in the apostolic college as a whole, a unity expressed 'conciliarly'—through the synodal gathering of bishops—rather than through submission to the Bishop of Rome alone. While the Roman Catholic Church asserts that communion with the See of Rome is the necessary prerequisite for the 'fullness' that allows for a common celebration of the Eucharist, the Orthodox Church rejects this as an uncanonical addition. For the Orthodox, the Eucharist is the fundamental manifestation of the Church’s life and is not a seal of administrative compliance with the Pope. Therefore, the Orthodox Church maintains that the constitutive bond of unity already exists within the collective episcopacy and the Eucharist itself; the assertion that this unity is deficient due to the absence of papal submission is viewed not as a lack, but as a preservation of the ancient, synodal structure that defines the Church's life.

On the other hand, most of the Protestant denominations define a Church simply as a group of believers, without requiring a bishop in apostolic succession and without receiving the Eucharist as the sacramental Body and Blood of the Lord. The Anglican and Episcopalian bodies retain bishops and a Eucharistic assembly in form, but these do not hold the same sacramental weight they hold in the apostolic Churches, and their own orders have been judged irregular by both Rome and Orthodoxy. We do not speak of this to disparage other believers; we speak of it because a pre-servant must know what the Church has always meant by the word Church, so that terms do not drift under him when the hard questions come.

The Names and Three Senses of the Word 'Church'

The word itself is instructive. The Latin ecclesia is drawn from the Greek ek-ka-lein, meaning to call out of. The Church is an assembly of those called out — called out of the world, called out of darkness, called out of their own scattered lives into the one family of God. The same word was first used of the assembly of God's people at Mount Sinai; the first Christian community in Jerusalem took it up as the heir and continuation of the Church of the Old Covenant.

In the liturgy and in the Fathers the word is used in three overlapping senses, and a well-formed servant must hold them together without confusion.

• The Universal Church — the one, holy, universal, and apostolic Church of God across every land and every age. The deacon prays in the litanies, "pray for the peace of the one, holy, universal, and apostolic Church of God."
• The Local Community — the particular diocese or parish in a given place. The deacon prays, "pray for this holy Church."
• The Eucharistic Assembly — the concrete gathering of the faithful around the altar for the Divine Liturgy. The deacon prays, "and our assemblies."

The Church is at once the great Body spanning every tribe and tongue, the specific community in Houston or in Alexandria, and the particular assembly kneeling tonight before the altar. Each sense is real. Each sense depends on the other two. To collapse them — to speak as though only the invisible universal Church is real and the local parish is merely its expression, or as though only the parish is real and the universal is an abstraction — is to lose the full scriptural reality of the Body of Christ.

The Images and Symbols of the Church

Scripture does not define the Church by a single formula; it unveils her through a wealth of images, each of which teaches something the others cannot say alone. The Fathers gathered these images and arranged them as a kind of icon of the mystery. Seven of them stand out.

The first is the People of God. In the Old Testament the images of election gathered around this people — chosen, covenanted, set apart to fear God and do good. In the New Testament Christ becomes the head of the New Church, and the plan of salvation unfolded from the beginning is fulfilled: God willed to save not isolated individuals but a people, clothed with the dignity of His own children, sent as salt of the earth and light of the world, commanded to love one another, destined for the Kingdom of Heaven. At Chrismation each baptized person is anointed with the anointing of Christ and made a partaker of His priestly, prophetic, and royal offices — offering prayers and sacrifices on behalf of all creation, living in service to the poor and sick, witnessing to the faith in word and deed.

The second is the Body of Christ. This image holds unity and diversity together. Christ is the head; the faithful are the members; the one Body has many members with many functions, yet is one living organism knit together by the Holy Spirit.

“Christ is head of the church; and He is the Savior of the body.” Ephesians 5:23

“And He is the head of the body, the church.” Colossians 1:18

“So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and individually members of one another.” Romans 12:5

“Now you are the body of Christ, and members individually.” 1 Corinthians 12:27

So intimate is this image that St. Paul in places uses 'Christ' and 'Church' almost interchangeably — "so also is Christ," he says in 1 Corinthians 12:12, speaking of the Body. And from this unity he draws the indignant question, "Is Christ divided?" (1 Corinthians 1:13) Because there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus (1 Timothy 2:5), there is only one Church, and outside her bounds salvation is not a thing the apostles dared to promise.

“He cannot have God for his Father who has not the Church for his mother… outside the Church there is no salvation.” — St. Cyprian of Carthage, On the Unity of the Church 6

The third is the Bride of Christ, for whom the Bridegroom handed Himself over and whom He washed with His own Blood. "I have betrothed you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ," says St. Paul in 2 Corinthians 11:2. "Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her" (Ephesians 5:25). And at the end of the Revelation of John, the marriage of the Lamb has come, and His wife has made herself ready, arrayed in fine linen, clean and bright — which is the righteous acts of the saints (Revelation 19:7-8).

The fourth is the Sheepfold. Christ is the Gate, by whom all must enter. He is the Good Shepherd who lays down His life for the sheep. He is the Chief Shepherd who gathers His flock and knows each one by name.

The fifth is the Temple of God, the Temple of the Holy Spirit. Each person is a living stone, built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, with Christ Himself as the chief cornerstone. As the body is the house of the human soul, so the Holy Spirit is the soul of the Body of Christ — the Church. Without that indwelling Spirit, the stones remain stones; with Him, they are a living Temple.

The sixth is the Cultivated Field — the olive tree whose root is the people of the Old Covenant and whose new branches are the grafted Gentiles, and the vineyard in which Christ is the Vine, the faithful are the branches, and the Father is the Vinedresser. The image teaches both growth and dependence: no branch bears fruit of itself; every fruit is borne in communion with the Vine.

The seventh is the Heavenly Jerusalem — our mother who is from above (Galatians 4:26), the Bride of Christ whom He nourishes and cherishes (Ephesians 5:29). This final image carries the whole doctrine forward into eschatology: the Church is not only now; she is the city descending from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

The Beginning and the Purpose of the Church

The Church is not a later addition to the plan of salvation — she is its instrument and its goal. Her story runs through four great stages.

The first is the Old Testament preparation. The Church was, in a real sense, created in the paradise of Eden, where God's family lived with Him as His people. She was in the mind of God from the beginning, for the Church is simply the human family as God willed it to be. After the fall, God's plan of salvation was set quietly at work. He preserved a seed from corruption in the Ark of Noah. He called Abraham and his descendants out of the world and consecrated them, so that through them the whole world would be called. Through the Tabernacle and the Temple He sanctified them for their mission; through a succession of prophets He purged them of idolatry. Every step was preparing the ground on which the Church of the New Covenant would stand.

The second is the institution of the Church by Christ Himself. In the fullness of time He came and announced the Kingdom of God. Wherever the King was, there the Kingdom was present. He gathered the Twelve; He chose the Seventy; He established the Church on them. The Fathers read in the piercing of His side on the Cross a figure of her birth.

“As Eve was formed from the sleeping Adam's side, so the Church is formed from the side of Christ as He slept upon the Cross: for from His side came blood and water — blood for the Eucharist, water for Baptism — and from these the Church was formed.” — St. John Chrysostom, Catechetical Homily 3

Thus the Church is born of Christ's total self-giving. And He did not leave her without form; He gave to His apostles the structure and order of her life.

The third is the revelation of the Church by the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost. What had been instituted in the Upper Room and sealed at Calvary was now manifested to the world with power and with signs. The Holy Spirit constituted the hierarchy, distributed the gifts of service, and bestowed the spiritual gifts for the edification of every member. The Spirit remains the guide of the Church until the return of Christ; without Him she is nothing.

The fourth is the final glorification of the Church at the Second Coming. She will be taken to be with her Lord in His Father's house, and in that day she will be perfected — without spot or wrinkle or any such thing (Ephesians 5:27), conformed fully to the image of her Bridegroom, reflecting His holiness, righteousness, and love in their entirety. The journey from Eden to the heavenly Jerusalem will be complete.

The Church Visible and Invisible

The Church, like her Lord, is at once divine and human. She is the union of heaven and earth, the visible community and the heavenly company, the pilgrim on the way and the city at the end of the way. To deny either side of this mystery is to wound the Church.

In her visibility she is a community of believers united in faith and worship, with real buildings, real clergy, real parishes, real councils, and real sacraments. Those who speak as though the Church were purely invisible — a spiritual fellowship of all those anywhere who believe, with no visible structure or sacramental life required — have cut the Church away from the apostolic reality. The apostles baptized, ordained, laid on hands, broke bread. There was always a visible assembly.

In her invisibility she is the communion of saints, living and departed, united in Christ by the Holy Spirit and partaking even now in the eternal life of God. Those who speak as though the Church were only the visible institution — as though the Body ended at what the eye can see — have forgotten the great cloud of witnesses, the choirs of angels, the saints before the throne. The Liturgy celebrated in our parish tonight is celebrated jointly with heaven; the Cherubic Hymn is not poetry but participation.

Christ gives Himself completely to His Church in the mysteries He instituted and entrusted to her. Through the mysteries we receive Christ and the Spirit; through Christ and the Spirit we come to the Father. The Church is the mystery of salvation — not one instrument among several for finding God, but the very Body of Christ in which the Father's saving will is enacted. This is the sober meaning of the saying of St. Cyprian that outside the Church there is no salvation. The saying is not a boast; it is a definition. To be saved is to be joined to Christ; to be joined to Christ is to be a living member of His Body; and His Body is the one Church.

The Four Marks: One, Holy, Universal, Apostolic

The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed confesses four characteristics of the true Church. Every generation must ponder them, because every generation meets counterfeits that lack one or more of them.

The Church is One. She is one in faith, in doctrine, and in spiritual life.

“There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.” Ephesians 4:4-6

Our Lord Himself prayed for this oneness on the night before His Passion — that they all may be one, as the Father is in Him and He in the Father, that the world may believe (John 17:20-21). And He foretold it to His disciples: "Other sheep I have which are not of this fold; them also I must bring, and they will hear My voice; and there will be one flock and one shepherd" (John 10:16). He came that He would gather together in one the children of God who were scattered abroad (John 11:52).

The unity of the Church is constituted by seven bonds which St. Paul sets out in a single breath:

• One Body — realized in the Eucharist: "For we, though many, are one bread and one body; for we all partake of that one bread." (1 Corinthians 10:17) •One Spirit — the Holy Spirit dwelling in all the faithful •One Hope — the hope of eternal life in Christ •One Lord — Jesus Christ, the one Mediator •One Faith — the Creed confessed by the undivided Church •One Baptism — the single baptism for the remission of sins
• One God and Father — the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, above all and through all and in us

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The Church is Holy. She is holy because she is the Body of Christ, who is Holy. She is set apart for God, and she is called to live a life of holiness. Her holiness is not the sum of the personal merits of her members but the sanctifying presence of Christ within her, mediated through the mysteries and through the work of the Holy Spirit. And yet she is also called to make that holiness visible. Her members, cleansed in the mysteries, are sanctified progressively so that they may be filled more and more with the Holy Spirit. Like the Israelites at Sinai they must be clean in body, soul, and heart as they come to Communion; like the apostles in the Upper Room they must hear the words of Christ and examine their own hearts before receiving His Body and Blood. Holiness is never a matter of private preference — it affects the whole Church. Where the holiness of the members is lacking, the power of prayer is lacking and the manifestation of miracles is lacking. Every member bears a real weight in the sanctity of the whole.

The Church is Universal — in Greek katholikē, whence the word catholic. Here a pastoral note must be sounded, because the word has been much abused. In modern English, especially in non-religious circles, the adjective "catholic" has been so tightly fused with the proper noun "Roman Catholic" that the two are heard as synonyms. They are not. The word katholikē is drawn from the Greek phrase kath' holon, referring to the whole; it passed into Latin as catholicus, meaning universal. The Church is catholic because she is sent to the whole of the human race — to every nation, every language, every color, every age. The Coptic Orthodox Church is as fully catholic as any other apostolic Church — she is the one, holy, katholikē, apostolic Church confessed in the Creed.

The Church is Apostolic. She was founded upon the apostles and maintains apostolic succession — the unbroken ordination by which every canonical bishop today stands in a line of hands traceable to the Twelve. The apostolic fathers, who are the generation immediately after the apostles, are the first witnesses that this succession was preserved and taken with the utmost seriousness.

“Having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone.” Ephesians 2:20

And apostolicity is not only genealogical; it is doctrinal. The teaching of the Church must remain the teaching of the apostles, and any departure from it is condemned by the apostles themselves in the strongest possible terms.

“But even if we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel to you than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone preaches any other gospel to you than what you have received, let him be accursed.” Galatians 1:8-9

What Has Hurt the Unity of the Church

Because the Church is the Body of Christ, nothing in history has been more tragic than the wounds inflicted upon her unity. Two kinds of wounds must be named.

The first is heresy — the corruption of apostolic doctrine. The history of the first centuries is a history of the Church, gathered in councils, naming heresies and confessing the faith against them.

We note carefully, with the precision the Orthodox tradition has always insisted upon, that the Oriental Orthodox Churches — the Coptic, the Syriac, the Armenian, the Ethiopian, the Eritrean, and the Indian — have never embraced the Eutychian heresy sometimes called Monophysitism. Our faith, confessed with St. Cyril, is the one incarnate nature of God the Word — a union without confusion, without change, without division, without separation. The caricature painted by adversaries in the fifth century does not describe us and never has.

The second wound is schism — the breaking of communion where doctrine might or might not be at stake. The Great Schism of 1054 divided the Latin West from the Byzantine East over a complex set of theological, political, and cultural differences, culminating in the filioque and the claim of papal supremacy. The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century separated vast portions of Western Christendom from Rome, over disagreements about doctrine, authority, and the sacraments. Beneath these great ruptures a continual stream of lesser schisms has run, each with its own immediate cause and its lasting bitterness.

One clarification is essential, because it is often misstated. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 was not itself a schism; it was an ecumenical council that addressed the Christological question. The schism which the Oriental Orthodox Churches sustained at that council was not, on our side, a rejection of the right understanding of Christ — it was a rejection of the Tome of Leo's formulations and of the political and ecclesial pressures that were felt to be imposing them. Modern theological dialogues between the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox have repeatedly confessed that both families understand the same Christological faith in different languages. A pre-servant must be able to speak carefully about this, because the easy account that makes the Copts heretics of Chalcedon is neither historically fair nor theologically true.

Beyond heresy and schism, lesser forces still chip at unity: cultural and ethnic pride, political and social partisanship, personal ambition, failure to love and to forgive. The doctrine of the Church is also an examination of conscience. Every member is either healing her unity or helping to wound it.

The Orders of the Church

The Holy Spirit has structured the life of the Church in orders, each with its own dignity and service.

The Laity are the People of God — the saints, the faithful, the brethren. The word itself comes from the Greek laos, the people of God, and from this body the other three orders emerge. The laity hold the general priesthood of all believers; they are not a passive audience for the clergy but the living Body from which and for which the clergy serve. In a real sense, technically, the clergy are themselves laity — members of the people of God called to a particular service.

The Deacons — literally, servants — are ordained for two inseparable labors. First, they serve the altar, assisting the priest in the liturgy. Second, they serve the material needs of the people, especially widows, orphans, and the poor. Their origin is narrated in Acts 6, where the apostles laid hands on Stephen, Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicolaus. The Church has never permitted the diaconal order to drift entirely into the sanctuary; a deacon with no care for the poor is a deacon who has forgotten the first page of his own history.

The Presbyters — the elders, whose Greek word presbyteros became the Latin presbyter, the Old English preost, and finally our modern priest — are ordained to rule and to labor in the word and to teach the true doctrine of the local congregation. They administer the sacraments under the bishop, preach the Gospel, and shepherd the parish.

The Bishop is the overseer of the congregation. Sometimes in the New Testament the words episkopos (overseer) and presbyteros (elder) are used interchangeably, and the full separation of the two offices into distinct ranks was a development of the late apostolic and sub-apostolic age. But the office of bishop as a distinct rank is already in the New Testament — the Twelve themselves held it, and Acts 1:20 speaks of the office from which Judas had fallen, a word that can literally be translated as bishopric. The apostles in turn consecrated others to succeed them — Timothy, Titus, and many more. Outside the New Testament, the letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch, at the beginning of the second century, already speak of Christians as laity at one with the bishop, the presbyters, and the deacons — the four orders fully in place.

In the Orthodox Church authority resides in all orders, with the bishop providing the center of unity. His authority is not over the Church but within the Church. He is, as the Liturgy calls him, an icon of Christ, the Shepherd and Overseer of our souls. In the larger matters that concern more than a single diocese, the Holy Synod — a council of bishops — exercises authority together, in the pattern of the Council of the Apostles at Jerusalem in Acts 15. No bishop is a sovereign; no diocese is a congregation unto itself; no order of the Church can dispense with the others.

The Family as a Church

There is one last dimension of ecclesiology which must not be omitted, because it touches every home a pre-servant will ever enter. The Christian family itself is a Church — a little Church, a domestic Church, the Church in miniature — where the faith is first received, first lived, and first handed on.

St. Paul takes this for granted in the most casual way in his letters.

“Likewise greet the church that is in their house.” Romans 16:5 (of Priscilla and Aquila)

“Aquila and Priscilla greet you heartily in the Lord, with the church that is in their house.” 1 Corinthians 16:19

The home of this blessed couple was considered a Church because our Lord had promised, "For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them" (Matthew 18:20). The family of St. Timothy was also a Church, for the faith that dwelt in him had dwelt first in his grandmother Lois and in his mother Eunice (2 Timothy 1:5) — three generations of the same domestic liturgy of faith.

The family as Church is not a sentimental metaphor. It is a dogmatic reality. The parents exercise a priesthood over their household. The table becomes a lesser altar. The evening prayers are a lesser liturgy. The faith of the grandmother is a true apostolic succession, conveyed by catechesis and example to the mother, and by the mother to the child. Every Coptic household that prays the hours together, that reads the Gospel in the evening, that teaches its children to fast and to give, is an ecclesia within the Ecclesia. The servant's work in the larger Church rests on what is happening, or failing to happen, in these thousands of little Churches under thousands of roofs. Any ecclesiology that forgets the home has forgotten where the flock is actually fed.