01 — What the Church Is

Before the Church can be described as an institution with bishops, canons, and territories, she must be described as what she is: the Body of Christ, the Israel of God into which the nations have been grafted, the dwelling of the Holy Spirit. This section sets out the biblical images and their patristic reading, and then makes the prior methodological point — that the Church is a mystery before she is an institution, that no Ecumenical Council ever issued a definition of her, and that this last fact explains why ecclesiology is the least settled of the dogmatic loci.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Contents

File Description
the-body-of-christ-and-the-new-israel.md The Pauline images — body, temple, bride, household, vine — and why “Body of Christ” is read as ontology rather than metaphor; ekklesia and the LXX qahal; the Church as the Israel of God (Galatians 6:16) into which the nations are grafted (Romans 11), with St Paul’s insistence that the gifts and call of God are irrevocable; and the patristic reading in Chrysostom, Irenaeus, and Cabasilas
mystery-before-institution.md Ephesians 5:32 and the Church as mysterion; the absence of any conciliar horos on the Church and what follows from it; Cabasilas on the Church signified in the mysteries; Florovsky’s judgment that ecclesiology remains theologically underdeveloped; and the countervailing warning — that “mystery before institution” is a statement of priority, not a licence to treat canons, bishops, and structures as a fall from grace

What This Section Establishes

The Church is not an aggregate of believers. She is a divine-human reality in which the baptized are incorporated into the risen Christ, so that her unity is not agreement among the like-minded. Sections 02 and 03 build on this.

The Church is continuous with Israel, not a replacement of her. She takes her very name from the LXX’s word for Israel’s assembly, and Romans 11 explicitly rules out the crude supersessionism that a careless reading of “new Israel” produces.

The Church has no conciliar definition of herself. The councils that defined the Trinity and the Person of Christ addressed the Church’s order in canons rather than her nature in a horos. Hence disputes over primacy, autocephaly, and the boundaries of the Church cannot be settled by citing a definition, and sections 04, 06, and 07 must report open questions as open.

See Also