I Love Best Of All That Church Mud-Splashed From History

For those that know, you know:

For those that don't: find out.

A Lenten Meditation

What prompts people to move from mediocrity (or worse) toward a radical reversal to the morally good and the best?

Supposing, of course, the illuminating grace of God (available to anyone who really and honestly wants it), evidence indicates that there are almost numberless reasons why. Christ surely is the most powerful of all the reasons. Despite the faults of individual members of the Church, who fail to live up to what they profess, thoughtful people recognize that the only fair way to judge any institution is according to its principles and the example of those who live in accord with them. That simple fact points to the sheer goodness and beauty of the saints, those who live heroically well what Catholicism is and teaches.

They are prime illustrations of the evidential power of beauty.

Church and State

I wonder whether this will finally sink in with folks: separation of church and state (rightly understood) is consequent to the influence of (Catholic) Christianity.

Catholic Inside Joke

The Church militant:

Two Cheers for Parochialism and Little Platoons

The phrase “mediating structures” was in recent decades popularized by Peter Berger and Richard John Neuhaus, but the concept has been fundamental to conservative thought since Edmund Burke. The term refers to the social groups and associations that lie between the individual and the state—the family, parish, guild, village, voluntary associations, and all other such local and parochial communities. At times, such groups are also referred to as “intermediate” or “secondary” groups, as in the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville. Whatever the precise language employed, the defense of mediating structures has been essential to modern conservatism, and, while certain liberals (such as J. S. Mill) and radicals (especially P. J. Proudhon and P. Kropotkin) have mounted at least tepid defenses of mediating structures, conservatism has been both more consistent and more vigorous than either liberalism or radicalism in efforts to preserve the corporate rights of social groups.

Burke first stated the conservative case for mediating structures in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Burke observed that the French revolutionaries subscribed to a version of modern natural law that refused to recognize the salutary influence of any traditional social institution. The Jacobins believed that rights reside within individuals and that there are no legitimate interests beyond the particular interests of individuals and the national interest. Accordingly, the revolutionaries abolished the guilds, attacked the monasteries, institutionalized divorce, bound the clergy to the Revolution by oaths, and eliminated primogeniture and other laws protecting family property. As Burke discussed in the Reflections, the revolutionaries also redrew districts according to population size and geometric symmetry in order that “the people would no longer be Gascons, Picards, Bretons, Normans but Frenchmen.” Burke says, however, that instead of being Frenchmen with one country and one heart, the people “will have no country. No man ever was attached by a sense of pride, partiality or real affection to a description of square measurement. We begin our public affections in our families . . . [,] we pass on to our neighborhoods, and our habitual connections. . . . The love of the whole is not extinguished by this subordinate partiality.” Indeed, Burke asserted that “to love the little platoon we belong to in society is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections."

To disband the little platoons is to foster individual “weakness, disconnection and confusion,” according to Burke. Mediating structures provide the individual guidance through custom, tradition, and habitual practices—“the coat of prejudice.” In a word, Burke believed that mediating structures militate against what Tocqueville in the next century called “individualism."

Tocqueville was preoccupied with the dangers of the loss of mediating structures, especially civil associations. In Democracy in America (1835), he describes “individualism” and the centralization of state power as rising in tandem, both rooted in the passion for equality. According to Tocqueville, the individual and the state are not opposed to one another. Rather, they are reinforcing poles, each opposed to the social groups and associations lying between them. The state secures individual rights and, without mediating structures to buffer the individual, the individual looks to the state to secure his needs—including the need for community. Tocqueville maintained that individualism fosters “democratic despotism” and that the centralized state vanquishes mediating structures, isolating individuals. Conversely, and more optimistically, Tocqueville argued that mediating structures simultaneously combat the chief evils of democratic egalitarianism—individualism and the overweening, tutelary state.

Much of modern thought has been hostile to mediating structures. For example, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Bentham each envisioned an ideal condition in which the state guards the rights and fulfills the needs of unencumbered, desocialized individuals. Nonetheless, recently in America the rhetoric of “community” has become commonplace, even fashionable. At times this rhetoric has certainly been abused, as in the widely noticed Habits of the Heart (1985), a book by Robert Bellah and several others that used the language of community to justify an egalitarian state dedicated to the redistribution of property. But such rhetoric is clearly not always disingenuous, and the recent concern with “community,” “civil society,” and “mediating structures” bespeaks a genuine and profound presence of conservatism in America today. Indeed, the strength of concern for mediating structures in any modern society is an excellent barometer for measuring the vigor of that society’s conservative philosophy.

Concerning Women's Ordination

A Letter to an Episcopal Friend

(as posted on an Episcopalian website)

Dear Friend:

When you asked me to outline the Orthodox reaction to the idea of women's ordination to the priesthood, I thought at first that to do so would not be too difficult. It is not difficult, indeed, simply to state that the Orthodox Church is against women's priesthood and to enumerate as fully as possible the dogmatical, canonical, and spiritual reasons for that opposition.

On second thought, however, I became convinced that such an answer would be not only useless, but even harmful. Useless, because all such "formal reasons" - scriptural, traditional, canonical - are well known to the advocates of women's ordination, as is also well known our general ecclesiological stand which, depending on their mood and current priorities, our Western Brothers either hail as Orthodoxy's "main" ecumenical contribution or dismiss as archaic, narrow-minded, and irrelevant. Harmful, because true formally, this answer would still vitiate the real Orthodox position by reducing it to a theological context and perspective, alien to the Orthodox mind. For the Orthodox Church has never faced this question, it is for us totally extrinsic, a casus irrealis for which we find no basis, no terms of reference in our Tradition, in the very experience of the Church, and for the discussion of which we are therefore simply not prepared.

Such is then my difficulty. I cannot discuss the problem itself because to do so would necessitate the elucidation of our approach - not to women and to priesthood only - but, above all to God in his Triune Life, to Creation, Fall and Redemption, to the Church and the mystery of her life, to the deification of man and the consummation of all things in Christ. Short of all this it would remain incomprehensible, I am sure, why the ordination of women to priesthood is tantamount for us to a radical and irreparable mutilation of the entire faith, the rejection of the whole Scripture, and, needless to say, the end of all "dialogues". Short of all this my answer will sound like another "conservative" and "traditional" defense of the status quo, of precisely that which many Christians today, having heard it too many times, reject as hypocrisy, lack of openness to God's will, blindness to the world, etc. Obviously enough those who reject Tradition would not listen once more to an argumentex traditione....

But to what will they listen? Our amazement - and the Orthodox reaction is above all that of amazement - is precisely about the change and, to us, incomprehensible hastiness with which the question of women's ordination was, first, accepted as an issue, then quickly reduced to the level of a disciplinary "matter" and finally identified as an issue of policy to be dealt with by a vote! In this strange situation all I can do is to try to convey to you this amazement by briefly enumerating its main "components" as I see and understand them.

The first dimension of our amazement can be termed "ecumenical." The debate on women's ordination reveals something which we have suspected for a long time but which now is confirmed beyond any doubt: the total truly built-in indifference of the Christian West to anything beyond the sphere of its own problematics, of its own experience. I can only repeat here what I have said before: even the so-called "ecumenical movement," notwithstanding its claims to the contrary, has always been, and still is, a purely Western phenomenon, based on Western presuppositions and determined by a specifically Western agenda. This is not "pride" or "arrogance." On the contrary, the Christian West is almost obsessed with a guilt complex and enjoys nothing better than self-criticism and self condemnation. It is rather a total inability to transcend itself, to accept the simple idea that its own experience, problems, thought forms and priorities may not be universal, that they themselves may need to be evaluated and judged in the light of a truly universal, truly "Catholic" experience. Western Christians would almost enthusiastically judge and condemn themselves, but on their own terms, within their own hopelessly "Western" perspective. Thus when they decide -- on the basis of their own possibly limited and fragmented, specifically Western, "cultural situation" -- that they must "repair" injustices made to women, they plan to do it immediately without even asking what the "others" may think about it, and are sincerely amazed and even saddened by lack, on the part of these "others" of ecumenical spirit, sympathy and comprehension.

Personally, I have often enough criticized the historical limitations of the Orthodox mentality not to have the right to say in all sincerity that to me the debate on women's ordination seems to be provincial, deeply marked, and even determined by Western self-centeredness and self-sufficiency, by a naive, almost childish, conviction that every "trend" in the Western culture justifies a radical rethinking of the entire Christian tradition. How many such "trends" we have witnessed during the last decades of our troubled century! How many corresponding "theologies"! The difference this time, however, is that one deals in this particular debate not with a passing intellectual and academic "fad" like "death of God," "secular city," "celebration of life" etc.-- which, after it has produced a couple of ephemeral best-sellers, simply disappears, but with the threat of an irreversible and irreparable act which, if it becomes reality, will produce a new, and this time, I am convinced, final division among Christians, and will signify, at least for the Orthodox, the end of all dialogues.

It is well known that the advocates of women's ordination explain the Scriptural and the traditional exclusion of women from ministry by "cultural conditioning." If Christ did not include women into the Twelve, if the Church for centuries did not include them into priesthood, it is because of "culture" which would have made it impossible and unthinkable then. It is not my purpose to discuss here the theological and exegetical implications of this view as well as its purely historical basis, which incidentally seems to me extremely weak and shaky; what is truly amazing is that while absolutely convinced that they understand past "cultures," the advocates of women's ordination seem to be totally unaware of their own cultural "conditioning" of their own surrender to culture.

How else can one explain their readiness to accept what may prove to be a passing phenomenon and what, at any rate, is a phenomenon barely at its beginning (not to speak of the women's liberation movement, which at present is nothing but search and experimentation) as a sufficient justification for a radical change in the very structure of the Church? How else, furthermore, are we to explain that this movement is accepted on its own terms, within the perspective of "rights", "justice," "equality," Etc. -- all categories whose ability adequately to express the Christian faith and to be applied as such within the Church is, to say the least, questionable?

The sad truth is that the very idea of women's ordination, as it is presented and discussed today, is the result of too many confusions and reductions. If its root is surrender to "culture", its pattern of development is shaped by a surrender to "clericalism." It is indeed almost entirely dominated by the old "clerical" view of the Church and the double "reduction" interest in it. The reduction on the one hand, of the Church to a "power structure," the reduction on the other hand, of that power structure to clergy. To the alleged "inferiority" of women within the secular power structure, corresponds their "inferiority," i.e., their exclusion from clergy, within the ecclesiastical power structure. To their "liberation" in the secular society must therefore correspond their "liberation" i.e., ordination, in the Church.

But the Church simply cannot be reduced to these categories. As long as we try to measure the ineffable mystery of her life by concepts and ideas a priori alien to her very essence, we entirely mutilate her, and her real power, her glory and beauty, and her transcendent truth simply escape us.

That is why in conclusion of this letter I can only confess, without explaining and justifying this confession by my "proofs." I can confess that the non-ordination of women to priesthood has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with whatever "inferiority" we can invent or imagine. In the essential reality which alone constitutes the content of our faith and shapes the entire life of the Church, in the reality of the Kingdom of God which is perfect communion, perfect knowledge, perfect love and ultimately the "deification" of man, there is truly "neither male nor female." More than that, in this reality, of which we are made partakers here and now, we all, men and women, without any distinction, are "Kings and priests," for it is the essential priesthood of the human nature and vocation that Christ has restored to us.

It is of this priestly life, it is of this ultimate reality, that the Church is both gift and acceptance. And that she may be this, that she may always and everywhere be the gift of the Spirit without any measure or limitations, the Son of God offered himself in a unique sacrifice, and made this unique sacrifice and this unique priesthood the very foundation, indeed the very "form" of the Church.

This priesthood is Christ's, not ours. None of us, man or woman, has any "right" to it; it is emphatically not one of human vocations, analogous, even if superior, to all others. The priest in the Church is not "another" priest, and the sacrifice he offers is not "another" sacrifice. It is forever and only Christ's priesthood and Christ's sacrifice -- for, in the words of our Prayers of Offertory, it is "Thou who offerest and Thou who art offered, it is Thou who receivest and Thou who distributest..." And thus the "institutional" priest in the Church has no "ontology" of his own. It exists only to make Christ himself present, to make this unique Priesthood and this unique Sacrifice the source of the Church's life and the "acquisition" by men of the Holy Spirit. And if the bearer, the icon and the fulfiller of that unique priesthood, is man and not woman, it is because Christ is man and not woman.....

Why? This of course is the only important, the only relevant question. The one precisely that no "culture," no "sociology," no "history" and even no "exegesis" can answer. For it can be answered only by theology in the primordial and essential meaning of that word in the Church; as the contemplation and vision of the Truth itself, as communion with the uncreated Divine Light. It is only here, in this purified and restored vision that we might begin to understand why the ineffable mystery of the relationship between God and His Creation, between God and His chosen people, between God and His Church, are "essentially" revealed to us as a nuptial mystery, as fulfillment of a mystical marriage. Why in other terms, Creation itself, the Church herself, man and the world themselves, when contemplated in their ultimate truth and destiny, are revealed to us as Bride, as Woman clothed in sun; why in the very depth of her love and knowledge, of her joy and communion, the Church identifies herself with one Woman, whom she exalts as "more honorable than the Cherubim, and beyond compare more glorious than the Seraphim."

Is it this mystery that has to be "understood" by means of our broken and fallen world, which knows and experiences itself only in its brokenness and fragmentation, its tensions and dichotomies and which, as such, is incapable of the ultimate vision? Or is it this vision and this unique experience that must again become to us the "means" of our understanding of the world, the starting point and the very possibility of a truly Divine victory over all that in this world is but human, historical and cultural?

---

About the Author: The late Rt. Rev. Dr. Schmemann, S.T.D., LL.D, D.D., was Dean of St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary in Crestweed, N.Y., where he also occupied the chair of Liturgical and Pastoral Theology.

Born in Estonia, he received his education in Paris. After completing his Baccalaureate in Philosophy, he graduated from the St. Sergius Theological Institute in 1945 and in the same year was appointed to the Institute's Faculty as Lecturer in Church History. In 1951 he joined St. Vladimir's Theological Seminary as Professor of Liturgical Theology. In 1962 he was appointed Dean of the Seminary. In 1959 he was granted the degree of Doctor of Theology. Since 1958 he has been Adjunct Professor at the Graduate Faculty of Columbia University and was Lecturer in Eastern Orthodoxy at Union Theological Seminary. He was a former member of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches and attended the assemblies of Amsterdam, Lune, Evanston, Oberlin and Montreal. He was a member of the Study and Planning Committee of the Standing Conference of the Orthodox Bishops in America, of the Metropolitan Council of the Orthodox Church in America, and of the American Theological Society. His publications in English included: The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy (1963), Sacraments and Orthodoxy (1965), The Ultimate Questions (1965), Introduction to Liturgical Theology (1966), and Great Lent (1969). He was also a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies and Worship.

To learn more about Fr. Schmemann,
watch this from the CBS of a different time.

Priests in Our Lives

Fr. Scalia

(How much fun is this picture?)
Celebrating the Latin Rite the right way:
Abouna:

Celebrating the Maronite Rite the right way:

Aletheia's First Blessings

I think the pics speak for themselves.

Thank you Abouna.At our Maronite Catholic parish:

Hymn to the Church

Your voice speaks:
In my arms I still carry flowers from the wilderness,
the dew on my hair is from the valleys of the dawn of mankind.
I have prayers that the meadows lend an ear to,
I know how storms are tempered, how water is blessed.
I carry in my womb the secrets of the desert,
on my head the noble web of ancient thought.
For I am mother to all earth’s children:why do you scorn me,
world, when my Heavenly Father makes me so great?
Behold, in me long-vanished generations still kneel,
and out of my soul many pagans shine towards the infinite.
I lay hidden in the temples of their gods,
I was darkly present in the sayings of their wise men.
I was on the towers with their star-gazers,
I was with the solitary women on whom the spirit descended.
I was the desire of all times, I was the light of all times,
I am the fullness of all times.
I am their great union, I am their eternal oneness.
I am the way of all their ways,
on me the millennia are drawn to God.

- Gertrude von Le Fort

The Church and the Jews in the Middle Ages

Before examining the Catholic Church's relationship with the Jews in the Middle Ages, it would be worthwhile to state an obvious yet often overlooked fact: The Middle Ages were, well, medieval. It is a fallacy (one that historians call presentism) to judge the past by the standards of the present. In a modern, post-Enlightenment world, religious belief is merely a personal preference, like a favorite color. But in most premodern civilizations, religion is a central, if not predominant, aspect of one's personal and collective identity. To seek to corrupt or defame a culture's religion would therefore be the equivalent of treason in the modern era. In both cases the crimes were thought to be severe enough to warrant the death penalty.

All of this is just to say that before the 18th century, religious tolerance was no virtue. No one doubted that heretics, blasphemers, pagans, and infidels had to be dealt with swiftly to prevent them from damaging the faith, leading others astray, and calling down divine wrath. This was the attitude of Jews in biblical times as well as Christians and Muslims in the Middle Ages — although the means and methods were different with each religion. It is not too surprising, then, that Christianity's main rivals vanished after it was declared the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century. What is surprising is that one of those rivals, Judaism, was singled out for toleration and protection by the Church. As a result, the once mighty cults of Isis, Mithra, and Diana disappeared without a trace, yet Judaism still survives.

To understand the medieval Church's attitude toward Jews, one must begin with St. Paul. As the apostle to the Gentiles, Paul insisted that observance of the Mosaic Law, which entailed things like dietary regulations and circumcision, was no longer necessary. A new covenant had supplanted the old. Indeed, St. Paul admonished the Christians of Galatia for their observance of the Law, since the observance itself suggested that they considered faith in Christ insufficient for salvation (Galatians 3:1-29).

It was in his letter to the Romans, however, that St. Paul laid the foundations for the medieval Church's attitude toward the Jews. There he wrote:

Let me put a further question then: is it possible that God has rejected his people? Of course not. I, an Israelite, descended from Abraham through the tribe of Benjamin, could never agree that God had rejected his people, the people he chose specially long ago. [Romans 11:1-2]

If they were not rejected, then:

. . . have the Jews fallen for ever, or have they just stumbled? Obviously they have not fallen forever: their fall, though, has saved the pagans in a way the Jews may now well emulate. Think of the extent to which the world, the pagan world, has benefited from their fall and defection — then think how much more it will benefit from the conversion of them all. [Romans 11:11-13].

In other words, by their refusal to accept Christ, the Jews had made it possible for the Gentiles to be saved. Paul is certain, though, that one day the Jews will see the truth (Romans 11:16-24). He concludes:

The Jews are enemies of God only with regard to the Good News, and enemies only for your sake; but as the chosen people, they are still loved by God, loved for the sake of their ancestors. God never takes back his gifts or revokes his choice. [Romans 11:28-29]

These words became the guiding principle of Christian attitudes toward Jews for many centuries, but they could be difficult to hear in the first three centuries of Christianity. Jews viewed Christianity as a blasphemy against God and a perversion of their faith. In third-century rabbinic texts, Jesus was described as a magician in league with Satan, Mary as a prostitute, and the apostles as criminals who deserved death. Daily Jewish prayers often included a plea for God to destroy the "sectaries," the term used to describe the Christians. Roman persecutions against the Jews ended in the third century, just as the persecutions against the Christians were starting to heat up. Although the Jews were not responsible for Roman persecutions, it was not unusual for some Jews to take part in them. As St. Jerome wrote, the Jews "in their synagogues blaspheme the Christian flock: and while they slay us, they will their own destruction in the eternal fire."

St. Jerome's response was not unusual. Most Christians were keenly aware of Jewish antipathy toward them, yet they held fast to St. Paul's words. Early Church Fathers, like Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Origen, Eusebius, and others, wrote tracts against Judaism, yet none of them called for persecution. Instead, they admonished fellow Christians who persisted in Jewish practices (like St. Paul's Galatians) and made the case that Christianity was not a new religion but the culmination of Judaism. The latter assertion was important, since potential Roman converts measured a religion's worth in terms of its antiquity.

The Roman persecutions of Christianity came to an abrupt end with the conversion of the Emperor Constantine (312-337). In a flash Christianity went from a struggling underground religion to the faith of the aristocracy. Constantine, who saw himself not only as Roman emperor but as the defender of the Church, issued several laws regarding Jews. He forbade the Jewish practice of stoning converts to Christianity and ordered Jews to stop circumcising their Christian slaves. He also made it unlawful for Christians to convert to Judaism. His son, Constans (337-350), outlawed intermarriage between Jews and Christians. In every other way, though, the emperors left the Jews alone. They retained full rights as citizens, including the right to worship freely.

During the remainder of the fourth century, matters remained fairly stable between Christians and Jews. That is not to say, however, that there were not tensions. Jewish communities were naturally alarmed at the extent at which these "sectaries" were growing in strength and numbers. By the end of the fourth century, the Roman Empire was overwhelmingly Christian. In 392 Emperor Theodosius I (379-395) closed the last of the pagan temples, making Christianity the official religion of the empire — a remarkable turnaround given that the same empire was vigorously persecuting Christians less than a century earlier. Nevertheless, Theodosius continued the policy of toleration toward the Jews. In 393 he declared attacks on synagogues to be a major offense.

The victory of Christianity, however, continued to be a sore point among Jews. In cities with sizable Jewish populations, there was a good deal of anger directed against the new Christian masters. At times this led to bloodshed. For example, in Alexandria in 414, decades of tension erupted when a Jewish mob launched a well-planned attack against Christian worshippers, killing a great many of them. The local authorities responded by expelling the Jews, uprooting a community that dated back to the foundation of the city.

At about the same time, at a town called Inmester in Syria, a Jewish celebration of Purim turned into an ugly anti-Christian rally. It was the practice to burn or hang an effigy of Haman, an enemy of the Jews, on Purim, yet the Jews at Inmester abducted instead a Christian boy, bound him to a cross, and flogged him to death. The Roman world was stunned by the crime. Emperor Theodosius II (402-450) responded by excluding Jews from certain government positions and forbidding the construction of new synagogues. In the Theodosian Code, strict regulations were placed on the celebration of Purim. Christians were also instructed not to have intimate or personal intercourse with Jews, which might lead to intermarriage. This law mirrored similar Jewish restrictions against fraternization with non-Jews. Nevertheless, the code did uphold the rights and citizenship of all Jews and protected existing synagogues.

It was St. Augustine who laid the second foundation of the medieval Church's attitude toward the Jews. Writing in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, Augustine rejected the claims of some Christians that the Jews were the servants of the devil. At the core of Augustine's philosophy on the Jews were the words of Psalm 59: "Slay them not, lest my people forget: scatter them by thy power; and bring them down, O Lord our shield." The Jews, Augustine wrote, were clearly wrong. The course of history had shown that their faith and rituals had been supplanted. But they served as a constant reminder of the antiquity of the Christian faith and the glorious gift of salvation that Christ had poured out on the Gentiles. Clinging to their scriptures, the Jews were a witness for the veracity of the Old Testament and its prophecies of Christ's coming. Augustine insisted that Jews should be treated with respect because they belonged to God, who would bring them one day to the fullness of salvation.

The fall of the Roman Empire in the late fifth century left chaos in its wake as barbarian tribes fought over the dismembered corpse of antiquity. The collapse of the Roman state forced the Catholic Church to step into the vacuum, feeding the poor, caring for the sick, organizing defenses, and trying to build some kind of order in so much mayhem. The popes in Rome soon took direct control over the city and region, becoming secular lords as well as spiritual leaders. The same was true with other bishops across western Europe. Thus began the Middle Ages.

Pope Gregory I (590-604) spelled out Church policy toward the Jews in his decree Sicut Iudaeis Non. As might be expected, it was a synthesis of Roman law and the philosophies of St. Paul and St. Augustine. Gregory wrote, "Just as the Jews should not in their synagogues be free to do anything not permitted by law, so also in those things granted them they should have no infringement of their rights." During his pontificate, he put these words into practice, intervening to protect Jews from violence and insisting that Jewish rituals be tolerated. Yet he had no power to force far-away barbarian lords, many of whom were not Catholic, to heed his commands. In his own domains, however, Gregory rigorously defended the Jews. Indeed, throughout the thousand years of the Middle Ages, Rome and the papal states were the only places in western Europe where the Jews were at all times free from attacks or expulsions. The medieval papacy's unfailing defense of the Jews was not lost on the Jews themselves, who frequently came to the throne of St. Peter for justice and support against their enemies.

Despite papal pronouncements to the contrary, secular rulers and local communities in Europe were at times quite willing to persecute Jews. Jewish merchants living in towns along the Mediterranean had effectively established themselves in commerce, particularly in the slave trade. This had a way of inflaming the righteous indignation of barbarians, especially those recent converts to Catholicism. In 612 Sisebut, the Visigothic ruler of Spain, ordered the Jews in his kingdom to release their slaves and accept baptism or be expelled. Similarly, King Dagobert of the Franks ordered the expulsion of the Jews in his lands in 629.

It was, of course, possible for Church leaders to accept the papal directives concerning the Jews while still remaining critical of Jewish practices. In the ninth century, St. Agobard, the archbishop of Lyons, wrote, "Since they dwell among us, we ought not to be malignant to them, nor should we threaten their lives, safety, or property. Let us observe the convention ordained by the Church, which is explicit in defining how we must be at once cautious but humane in our dealings with them." Nevertheless, St. Agobard strongly objected to the Jewish policies of Emperor Louis the Pious. He was particularly upset that the emperor had forbidden slaves owned by Jews to be baptized. Since baptism required the manumission of the slave, this had the effect of depriving the Jews of their property. St. Agobard argued that Louis's decree withheld salvation from souls, when the obvious answer was simply to pay the Jews for their losses. St. Agobard apparently had close contact with some Jews, for he knew all about the Toledot Yeshu, a collection of stories about Jesus and His disciples that was popular in medieval Jewish communities. In it, many of the old insults were repeated, but many new ones were included: for example, that Peter was called "Rock" because of his hardness and dullness of intelligence and that Christ's body was simply washed away when the Jerusalem aqueduct overflowed. But St. Agobard was particularly upset by the fact that Jews were changing Judaism. On the basis of certain rabbinical writings, they were adopting new beliefs and practices that he considered superstitious. He was one of the first Christians to notice the Talmud, something that would have powerful ramifications in later centuries. Nevertheless, despite his many criticisms, Agobard, like the popes, never supported persecution of the Jews.

The next few centuries were bad ones for the Church. Europe was hit by a new set of punishing invasions that tore apart what little order had been restored since the fall of the Roman Empire. It was only in the eleventh century that the Church could raise its head above the rubble and begin rebuilding. The reform movement of that century quickly picked up steam, restoring papal control over the Church and rooting out clerical abuses. The popes were particularly concerned about ending violence, not only against Jews but against all noncombatants. Initiatives like the Peace of God and Truce of God were devised by the Church to stop the killing, but such efforts met with limited success.

The resurgence of the Church in the eleventh century also allowed Christians in western Europe to take stock of Christianity's position in the wider world. It was not a happy picture. Core Christian lands like Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor had fallen to Muslim invaders. Even the birthplace of Christianity had been conquered. The Crusades began in 1095, when Pope Urban II called the knights of western Christendom to come to the aid of their eastern brothers and restore to them the lands that had been conquered by the Muslims. The Crusades are often cited as an early manifestation of European anti-Semitism. That is simply wrong. Anti-Semitism was alive and well long before the Crusades and would remain so long after the last crusader had hung up his sword. From the very beginning of the Crusades, the Church made a sharp distinction between Muslims and Jews. In a letter to the bishops of Spain, Pope Alexander II specifically forbade anyone from equating holy wars against Muslims with violence against Jews. He wrote, "The matter of the Jews is entirely different from that of the Muslims: the latter actively engage in war against Christians; the former are everywhere ready to remain peaceful."

Nevertheless, many Jews were killed in the Crusades. During the First, Second, and Third Crusades, there were misguided, misinformed, or cynical attacks on Jews. The Church actively opposed these attacks, and local clergy often came to the defense of Jews in their community. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, preaching the Second Crusade, told the soldiers of Christ, "The Jews are not to be persecuted, killed, or even put to flight." When a fellow Cistercian monk began exhorting Germans to destroy the Jews before waging war on the Muslims, St. Bernard went personally to put a stop to it. As Rabbi Efraim of Bonn wrote:

Bernard said to them [the Crusaders]: "It is good that you go against the Ishmaelites [Muslims]. But whosoever touches a Jew to take his life, is like one who harms Jesus himself . . ." When our enemies heard his words, many of them ceased plotting to kill us . . . Were it not for the mercy of our creator in sending the aforementioned abbot [Bernard] and his later letters, no remnant or vestige would have remained of Israel. Blessed be the redeemer and savior, blessed be his name.

The Crusades were bad for European Jews because the religious enthusiasm that they engendered often spilled over into popular attacks on the "infidels" at home. But the purpose of the Crusades was never to kill Jews.

The Fourth Lateran Council held in 1215 is often for its anti-Jewish decrees. It is true that the council excluded Jews from various public offices, yet this was merely a restatement of existing Roman law. More troubling from the modern point of view was the requirement that all Jews were identifying badges. This naturally conjures up images of German Jews forced to wear cloth badges by the Nazis. But the clergy of the 13th century were unfamiliar with the atrocities of the 20th. The medieval badges were part of a larger attempt to avoid sinful behavior in Christian society. The same council also required clergy to wear distinctive dress, so that they too could be immediately identified. This, they hoped, would head off lewd or sinful behavior toward, or on the part of, priests. By the same token, the Jewish badges were meant to warn Christians who might otherwise unknowingly become intimately familiar with a Jew — something also forbidden by Roman law.

The rise of universities in the 13th century led to an increasing familiarity with Hebrew among Europe's intellectuals. This naturally led Christian scholars to examine Jewish sacred scriptures. What they found there troubled them. Like St. Agobard several centuries earlier, they discovered that the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament, in which the covenant was established between God and his people) was dwarfed in size by the Talmud. The latter consisted of another body of law, believed by Jews to be of equal antiquity to the Torah, though not written down until the early centuries A.D. The Talmud, therefore, was the means by which rabbinical Judaism had grown, adapted, and changed.

Yet the existence of the Talmud posed a real problem for the Church. One of the reasons for toleration of the Jews was their witness to, and preservation of, the sacred scriptures of the Old Testament. The presence of the Talmud suggested that they were doing neither. Furthermore, if, as Christians believed, the only acceptable continuation of Judaism lay in the Gospel and the redemption of Christ, it stood to reason that these later writings must be false. Suddenly, Judaism looked less like a witness to the past and more like a present heresy.

The Talmud was brought most forcefully to the papacy's attention in 1239, when a former Jew, Nicholas Donin, informed Pope Gregory IX that it was filled with errors, blasphemies, and heresies. Gregory sent a letter ordering secular lords to confiscate Jewish literature and turn it over to the ecclesiastical authorities for study. The following year, St. Louis IX of France summoned to his court a council of rabbis to defend the Talmud. They failed to convince the Church's scholars, who concluded that the Talmud had supplanted the Torah, leading the Jewish people to abandon Mosaic Law. Louis ordered the confiscation of all copies of the Talmud in Paris. A few years later, Pope Innocent IV, acting in response to Jewish complaints, ordered a new investigation of the Talmud. But the new commission came to the same conclusion: The Talmud was filled with blasphemies against God and the Christian faith.

In response to these findings, Innocent IV enshrined in canon law the right of the pope to act to preserve Judaism from heresy. On the face of it, this may seem absurd. But it was entirely consistent with the Church's long-standing defense of the Jews. St. Paul and St. Augustine agreed that the Jews must be respected, not out of some anachronistic appreciation of religious diversity, but because they were both a witness to the truth of the Old Testament and the chosen people who would one day come to salvation through Christ. The Talmud struck at the heart of both of these rationales. Henceforth, for the popes, defending the Jews meant not only defending Jewish rights and persons but also the purity of the Jewish faith. In practice, though, Church-sponsored confiscations of the Talmud were rare.

The 13th century also brought the expansion of the Inquisition. The medieval Inquisition is a big topic, but very little of it is related to the Jews. Dominican inquisitors were generally careful not to tread on Jewish rights. When they did, Jews were quick to bring their grievances to Rome and the popes were just as quick to admonish the inquisitors.

The only point at which the medieval Inquisition and the Jews intersected was in the matter of apostasy. According to Roman law, and therefore canon law, a Christian was forbidden to convert to Judaism. The problem was that throughout the Middle Ages secular authorities or local populations frequently threatened to attack or expel Jews unless they accepted baptism. Most Jews moved on, if they could. But many others would go to the baptismal font rather than lose their lives or property. When the persecution was over, these baptized Jews would return to Judaism or, fearing the Inquisition, exist in a netherworld between the two faiths. The Church did not recognize a forced conversion as valid, so long as the person repudiated baptism within a reasonable amount of time. Yet if someone received baptism without objection, even if they were acting in response to an implied or spoken threat, that was considered valid. In other words, although the popes were opposed to anti-Jewish violence, if it led to a silent acceptance of coercive baptism, they were forced to recognize the validity of the sacrament. It was the job of the inquisitors, therefore, to make certain that these new Christians remained Christian.

Of all medieval institutions, the Church stood alone in Europe in its consistent condemnation of Jewish persecutions. Yet they happened anyway. England expelled all Jews in 1290; France in 1306; Spain in 1492. Europeans disliked the Jews for their affluence and for the closed nature of their society, which seemed to scorn Christians. Jews were commonly believed to use Christian blood in their rituals, to desecrate the host, and to engage in ritual murder. Kings increasingly saw Jews as nonsubjects and therefore detrimental to their kingdoms. When the Black Death arrived in the 14th century, the Jews were accused of polluting the wells or incurring divine disfavor through their rituals. Pope Clement VI issued bulls in 1348 repudiating these widely held beliefs, insisting that the Jews' lives and property be respected. But his words, and those of his successors in the 14th century, were ignored. By the beginning of the 15th century, the only safe place in Europe to be a Jew was in the lands of the pope.

We might well wish that the relationship between the medieval Catholic Church and the Jews had been better, friendlier, more modern. But it was not modern, nor should we expect it to be. It was, however, a relationship marked by mutual respect and a remarkable degree of tolerance in an age that knew little of either.

Thomas F. Madden is associate professor and chair of the Department of History at Saint Louis University.

Christian History of Ukraine

The following article has been compiled from texts written by Prof. Oleh Turiy of the Institute of Church History of Lviv, Ukraine; Bishop Michel Hrynchyshyn, C.SS.R., Apostolic Exarch for Byzantine-rite Ukrainian faithful in France and Apostolic Administrator for those residing in Germany; and Giampaolo Mattei of L'Osservatore Romano.

Ukraine has a long Christian tradition, dating from the 10th century. Today there are over 22,000 religious communities in Ukraine from about 80 different Christian denominations, as well as other religions. But the atheist policy of the Soviets has left its mark: many Ukrainians today are unchurched because of the great spiritual void, which the Bolshevik regime left in Eastern Europe.

The Conversion Of Ukraine And Tensions Between East And West

In 988 Prince Volodymyr the Great established Christianity in its Byzantine-Slavic rite as the national religion of his country, Kievan-Rus. This happened before the Great Church Schism of 1054 divided Christian East from West. The Kievan Church inherited the traditions of the Byzantine East and was part of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Yet this Church also remained in full communion with the Latin West and its patriarch, the Pope of Rome.

Though Constantinople and Rome had their disputes, the Kievan hierarchy tried to work for Christian unity. Representatives from Rus participated in the Western Councils of Lyon (1245) and Constance (1418). Isidore, the Metropolitan of Kiev, was himself one of the creators of the Union of Florence (1439).

While the Kievan metropolia was working towards reunion, a new metropolia arose north of Kiev, in Moscow. The Church of Moscow refused to accept the Union of Florence and separated from the ancient metropolia in Kiev, announcing its autocephaly (self-governing status) in 1448. In 1589, with Greek Orthodoxy and Constantinople subject to Turkish domination, the Church of Moscow became a patriarchate.

Union With Rome And East/West Divisions In Ukraine

The Kievan Church was challenged by the Protestant Reformation and the renewed Catholicism of that period and was also suffering a serious internal crisis. The Synod decided to pass under the jurisdiction of the see of Rome, re-establishing full communion of the Church in Ukraine with the Successor of Peter in 1595. The traditional Eastern rite of the Kievan Church was preserved and its ethnic, cultural and ecclesial existence was guaranteed. This was confirmed at the Council of Brest in 1596, which is the beginning of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church as an institution.

Some hierarchs and faithful of the Kievan Church, however, insisted on remaining under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Torn by internal division, the Central and Eastern sections of Ukraine passed under the control of the ruler of Moscow in 1654. Soon the Orthodox Kievan Metropolia was under the authority of the Moscow Patriarchate (1686). As the Tsarist Empire grew, it repressed the Greek Catholics and forced "conversions" to Russian Orthodoxy (1772, 1795, 1839, 1876). The Pratulin Martyrs died as a result of these repressions.

Orthodox clergy and laity in Ukraine were dissatisfied with the close connections of the Russian Orthodox Church with Russian national interests. "Ukrainophile" movements began and after the Russian Revolution in 1917 a movement began to gain autocephalous status for Ukrainian Orthodoxy. Attempts to proclaim autocephaly in the 1920s and 1940s were, however, repressed by the Soviet powers.

All of Ukraine had been part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the time of the Council of Brest, and western Ukraine remained so. The Church played a leading role in preserving the cultural and religious independence of the Ukrainian population there. As the Western Ukrainian lands later passed into Austrian control, the imperial government of the Hapsburgs supported and protected the Greek Catholic hierarchy.

Ukraine In The 20th Century

The 20th century was difficult and painful. After the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Western Ukraine was absorbed by Poland. This situation lasted until the outbreak of the Second World War, when there was a rapid succession of various undesirable regimes in the country.

The invasion by Russian forces at the beginning of the war was followed by the German occupation from 1941 to 1944. Towards the end of the war, Ukraine became definitively part of the Soviet Union.

Believers began to be cruelly persecuted. In 1946 the Greek Catholic Church was suppressed. Christians were declared illegal. God was banished; he no longer existed. The same was said of God's law and the moral order.

Three generations were raised in a climate of moral confusion devoid of the principles of divine law. This inevitably led to a morally sick society. "Free love" was proclaimed. The family was threatened. Divorce and the habit of contracting new marriages became the rule. The Soviet Union was the first State to legalize abortion.

During this difficult period, the Greek Catholic Church in Halychyna was graced by the exemplary leadership of Metropolitan Andriy Sheptytsky (1901-1944). He was the spiritual leader during two world wars and seven changes of political regime, including Nazi and Soviet. His tireless pastoral work, his defense of the rights of his people, his charitable and ecumenical efforts made the Church an influential social institution in Western Ukraine.

The Legacy Of Totalitarianism

It is the tragedy of the 20th Century, the epoch of terror and violence, which has most affected the development of religious life in contemporary Ukraine. Approximately 17 million people are estimated to have died a violent death in Ukraine in that century.

The war on religion was the ideology of the Communist regime and no effort was spared. Church buildings were ruined, burnt down, profaned; priests and faithful, Orthodox, Catholic and representatives of other religions were shot, arrested and deported to the Siberian gulag; church communities were persecuted, confined to underground activities or entirely destroyed. Both the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church at the beginning of the 1930s and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in 1946 in Halychyna and in 1949 in Transcarpathia were liquidated. The Roman Catholic Church and Protestant churches survived in only a handful of carefully monitored churches.

Even the activities of the Russian Orthodox Church (which functioned as a state church) were limited and it furthermore suffered from infiltration by Soviet security organs. There was a progressive spiritual vacuum and a deepening demoralization of society.

Moral Disintegration And Religious Pluralism

Nevertheless, in the 1980s, the suppression of Churches ceased. The formerly forbidden Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church emerged from the underground and communities of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church were created in 1989. The declaration of Ukrainian independence in 1991 created a new context for the activities of all the churches in this territory. Thus, official religious freedom in Ukraine opened the way for religious pluralism. However, in Ukrainian society today, there are still many social and moral evils.

The Church in Ukraine is only now rising from the ashes of the Soviet regime as efforts are being made to be morally reborn by the entire European continent and breathe with Christianity's two lungs. Having regained its freedom and independence at the beginning of the last decade of the 20th century, Ukraine is trying to become a democratic State with a new constitution, free elections and the indispensable instruments of government. The task is not an easy one, since at the time of the Soviet regime's collapse there were no ministries or governmental substructures in Ukraine, as compared with those in other satellite States of the Soviet Union.

Hope Is More Powerful Than Death

Like the grain of wheat that must die in order to bear much fruit, so the blood of martyrs that has soaked Ukrainian soil will be fruitful, giving a universal and ecumenical witness. Many lay people, priests and religious courageously persevered to the end, remaining always faithful to Christ and his Church and paying with their lives for this fidelity. The Catholic Church in Ukraine looks to the future with hope and with a new evangelization, working to heal the wounds of the past and deepening the spirituality of the people.

Between May and June 2000, many Ukrainian faithful were accompanied on pilgrimage to Rome by Archbishop Marian Jaworski of Lviv for Latins to pray at the tombs of the Apostles. Archbishop Jaworski explained, "Everything seemed to be leading to the death of this Church [after it was deprived of its Pastor, Metropolitan Eugeniusz Baziak, who was forced to leave the see in 1946], of the once numerous clergy (over 1,000), only 11 remained in 1990. And suddenly from that remnant, against all human hope, Jesus Christ, the Lord of History, makes the structures of this Church rise again through the Successor of Peter, John Paul II".

In 1991 a Pastor was appointed for the Archdiocese of Lviv in Ukraine, and since then the faithful have regained their former churches or rebuilt them, the Word of God is preached and the sacraments are celebrated. Everyone who could not publicly receive First Communion and Confirmation, especially children and young people, now solemnly approach the sacraments, civil unions are sacramentally validated, women religious devote themselves to catechesis, priestly vocations are on the rise and a major seminary has been opened for their formation. Ukrainians are now looking forward to embracing Pope John Paul II when he makes his long-awaited visit to Ukraine scheduled for 23-27 June.

On Recognizing the Church

by Thomas Howard

A Good Beginning

I was brought up in an Evangelical household. To say this is to say something good.

My father was a layman, not a preacher; but he was a devoted and assiduous daily student of the Bible. He and my mother exist to this day in my imagination as the very icons of the godly man and woman. It was a wonderful thing—that sage, earnest, transparent, Bible-centered faith. I owe the fact that I am a believer today, and that my whole pilgrimage, steep and tortuous as it has been sometimes, has been towards the center, not away from it, to the faith and prayers and example of my father and mother. I believe that I and my five brothers and sisters, all of whom, now, in our sixties, are Christians who want to follow the Lord wholly, would all testify to this godly influence of our parents. The household was a household suffused with the Bible. We sang hymns—daily—hundreds of them over the years, so that probably all six of us know scores of hymns by heart. We had family prayers twice a day, after breakfast and after supper. Our parents prayed with us at our bedside, the last thing at night. We all went to Sunday school and church regularly. There is only one agenda in a fundamentalist Sunday school: the Bible. The Bible day in and day out, year in and year out. Flannelgraph lessons, sword drills, Scripture memory: Everything was focused directly on the Bible itself. I am grateful for every minute of this, now, 50 years later. Because of this, the whole of Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, is ringing in my ears all the time. Hundreds of verses, in the language of the King James Version, are there, intact, in my memory. I hope that, if my memory fails and I lose my wits in my old age, perhaps these verses, from so long ago, will remain there and bring me solace.

The Christian believers among whom I grew up were very forthcoming about the faith. They spoke easily and informally about the Lord. When you were among them, you knew that you were among people of “like precious faith,” as St. Peter phrases it. Many of the guests in our household had been overseas missionaries, some of them interned in concentration camps by the Japanese during World War II. Our ears were full of stories of how God had been faithful in all sorts of human extremities. It would be hard to find a better ambiance, I think, than this good and trusty Evangelicalism of my youth.

The Pilgrimage Begins

But I speak as one whose pilgrimage has led him from the world of Protestant Evangelicalism to the Roman Catholic Church. One way or another, all of us whose nurture has been in one of the sectors of Protestantism where the Bible is honored, where the gospel is preached without dissimulation, and where Jesus Christ is worshipped as God and Savior—all of us desire to be faithful to the ancient faith that we profess, and to be found obedient to the will of God. Certainly such fidelity and obedience have motivated us so far, and we want to be able to give an accounting of ourselves when it comes to our turn at the Divine Tribunal, for we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ.

Why then, would anyone want to leave such a world? Was not that a rendering of the ancient faith almost without equal? Surely to leave it would be to go from great plenty out to famine and penury?

Of my own case, I would have to say that I did not want to leave it. Certainly I was restless as a young man, like all young men, and any grass across any fence tended to look very green. I did, out of mere curiosity, draw back from the little church of my parents and my childhood when I returned to my hometown after having graduated from college and put in my time in the army. I visited the local Presbyterian church, and the Methodist and the Lutheran and the Episcopalian. Only this last one held any great attraction for me—I think it was a matter of aesthetics more than any other single factor. The Episcopal liturgy is the most elegant thing in the world, and this is to be attributed to their Prayer Book, which has since been supplanted by a modern translation, but which in 1960 was still the old Book of Common Prayer, with its matchless Shakespearean prose. Episcopal churches tend to be gothic, with stained glass and cool, dark interiors. Episcopal hymnody is virtually the best in the world, if we are speaking of a rich treasury of hymns drawn from the era of Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley, as well as from ancient Christendom. I was attracted by all of this. There was also a strange note of nostalgia in it, since I knew that my mother had been “saved” out of Episcopalianism into fundamentalism in about 1915, but that she still retained an undying love for Episcopal hymns and liturgy. Somehow that nostalgia had communicated itself to me.

The next step in my pilgrimage was made easy. I found myself teaching at a boys’ school in England, so this put me in the neighborhood of the Church of England. There is a robust Evangelical wing in this old church, so I did not have to “leave” anything. I could have all this and heaven too, so to speak. I was received into the Church of England in 1962 and found myself among the best crowd of all, I thought: Evangelicals who took the liturgy, and the atmosphere of Anglicanism, for granted. I loved it.

When I returned to the United States and married, my wife, who was a wise and holy woman, was fairly quickly received into the Episcopal Church—or the Anglican Church, as many prefer to call it—and our two children were raised as Anglicans. Fortunately, we found ourselves, both in New York in the early years of our marriage and then in Massachusetts, in parishes where the Scriptures were honored and the gospel was preached and sturdy fellowship was central.

Liberalism & Worship

Two questions, I think, spring into the minds of people when they hear of someone opting into Anglicanism. First, what about the liberalism in these big Protestant denominations? And second, doesn’t one have to settle into worship that is dull and lifeless since it is all canned and rote, leaving behind the wonderful spontaneity and freshness that marks the worship in the Evangelical and Pentecostal churches?

On the first question, there is only one answer, and that is yes, one does have to learn to live in a denomination that has very largely given itself over to an extremely liberal interpretation of Scripture and now, alas, of sexual morality. The good and faithful souls in these Protestant denominations suffer over this, of course, and will tell you that they are trying to bear witness in the situation, and that the Church historically has been plagued always with heresy and sin, and that we can’t keep splitting and splitting, as we Evangelicals have done, in the interest of doctrinal or moral purity. You end up with an ecclesiastical flea market that way, such people might urge.

On the second question, about canned and rote worship, we come to an immense issue. What is at stake here is the rock-bottom question as to what worship is and how you do it. Put briefly, the question comes to this: Worship is the thing that we were created for—to know God and, knowing him, to bless him and adore him forever. This is what the seraphim and the cherubim and all the angelic hierarchy do ceaselessly. This is what the creation is doing: The Psalms call upon winds and mountains and seas and frost and hail and sun and stars to worship the Most High. We believe that in some very literal sense the entire creation does, each part of it after its own unique mode, “worship” him. But you and I belong to the species whose dignity entails leading the praises of our world.

To worship God is to ascribe worth to him. It is an activity distinct from teaching, and from fellowship, and from witnessing, and from sharing. It is an act, not an experience. We come to church primarily to do something, not to receive something, although of course in the ancient worship of the Church we do indeed receive God himself, under the sacramental species of Bread and Wine. But our task in worship is to offer the oblation of ourselves and our adoration at the Sapphire Throne.

Obviously this is a daunting and an august task. Fortunately we are not left to our own resources, nor to the whim of the moment, nor even to our own experience. The faithful have been worshipping God since the beginning, and there is help for us. All of us, even those of us who come from the so-called free churches where spontaneity is supposed to be the rule, are accustomed to borrowing secondhand, canned words to assist us in worship. I am speaking of hymns. When we sing “Amazing Grace” or “O, For a Thousand Tongues to Sing,” we are borrowing John Newton’s and Charles Wesley’s words. And we discover that, far from cramping or restricting our worship, these secondhand words bring us up to a level quite unattainable by our own spontaneous efforts. They take us away from ourselves. That is another crucial point in ritual worship: People who are fellowshipping with each other, and sharing, are, characteristically, facing each other. People who are worshipping are, all together, facing something else, namely the Sapphire Throne. The liturgy of the Church brings us into these precincts. Our Lord Jesus Christ was accustomed to this kind of worship—indeed, when he joined his parents and fellow Jews in weekly worship, he entered into the ritual. No one had ever heard of spontaneous public worship. The early Church, in great wisdom, realized that this is a principle that goes to the root of the mystery of our being. Spontaneity is a good and precious thing. The Lord loves any lisping, stammering, broken, and halting words we can offer to him, as he loves the buzzing of bumblebees and the braying of donkeys. But when we come together for the particular act of offering our corporate, regular, recurring adoration to him, then we need a form.

The Question of the Church

During my 23 years as an Anglican, I discovered, and gradually became at home in, the world of liturgy, and of sacrament, and of the church year. But also as I read in theology and church history and in the tradition of Christian spirituality, I found myself increasingly acutely conscious of a question: But what is the Church?

Every Sunday at the Anglican liturgy I found myself repeating, “I believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.” These are words from an era that all of us—Roman, Orthodox, Anglican, Protestant, and unaffiliated—must take seriously, since all of us, whether we are pleased to admit it or not, are the direct beneficiaries of the work of the men who hammered out those words. You and I may think, in some of our less reflective moments, that all we need is the Bible and our own wits. Sola Scriptura. Just me and my Bible. But that is an impertinent notion. Every Christian in every assembly of believers in this world is incalculably in the debt of the men who succeeded the apostles. For they are the ones who, during those early centuries when the Church was moving from the morning of Pentecost out into the long haul of history, fought and thought and worked and wrote and died, so that “the faith once for all delivered to the saints” might indeed be handed on. Heresiarchs popped up out of the weeds left, right, and center, and all of them believed in the “verbal inspiration” of Scripture. It was the Church, in her bishops and councils, that preserved the faith from the errors of the heresiarchs and other zealots, and that shepherded the faithful along in the Way, as it was called.

An Unrecognizable Church

You and I, insofar as we are familiar with modern Protestantism and, a fortiori, with Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism, are familiar with a state of affairs that would have been unimaginable to our Fathers in the faith in those early days. I am referring to the oddity that, even though we all say we believe in the final and fixed truth of divine revelation, we are nevertheless all at odds when it comes to deciding just what that truth is. Oh, to be sure, we all agree on the so-called fundamentals of the gospel—but of course those fundamentals have been articulated and distilled for us by the Church that wrote the creeds. The Mormons and the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the modernists all toil away at the pages of the Bible, but you and I would say they are not getting the right things out of that Bible. Why do we say that? Because, whether we acknowledge it or not, our “orthodox” understanding of the Bible has been articulated for us by the Church. All sorts of notions, for example, have cropped up about the Trinity, about the mystery of Our Lord’s divine and human natures, and so forth. The reason you and I are not Nestorians or Eutychians or Apollinarians or Docetists or Arians or Montanists is that the Church guarded and interpreted and taught the Bible, and we, the faithful, have had a reliable and apostolic voice in the Church that says, “This is what Holy Scripture is to be understood as teaching, and that which you hear Eutychius or Sabellius teaching from the Bible is not to be believed.”

But I was speaking of the question that began to force its way into my mind during those years: What is the Church? What may have appeared as a digression just now, when I referred to the men who worked so hard to preserve the faith, and the bishops and councils who settled upon the right understanding of revelation, was not a digression at all. When I heard myself repeating the words from the Nicene Creed at the liturgy, “I believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church,” I was, of course, saying words that are not directly from any one text in the Bible and yet that have been spoken in all of Christendom for a millennium and a half now and in some sense constitute a plumbline for us. The Creed is not Scripture; that is true. But then all of us, whether we come from groups that repeat the creed or not, would agree, “Oh yes, indeed; that is the faith which we all profess.” Some would add, “But of course, we get it straight out of the Bible. We don’t need any creed.” The great difficulty here is that Eutychius and Sabellius and Arius got their notions straight out of the Bible as well. Who will arbitrate these things for us? Who will speak with authority to us faithful, all of us rushing about flapping the pages of our well-thumbed New Testaments, locked in shrill contests over the two natures of Christ, or baptism, or the Lord’s Supper, or the mystery of predestination? This question formed itself in the following way for me, a twentieth-century Christian: Who will arbitrate for us between Luther and Calvin? Or between Luther and Zwingli, both appealing loudly to Scripture, and each with a view of the Lord’s Table that categorically excludes the other’s view? And who will arbitrate for us between John Wesley and George Whitefield—that is, between Arminius and Calvin? Or between J. N. Darby (he thought he had found the biblical pattern for Christian gathering, and the Plymouth Brethren to this day adhere to his teaching) and all the denominations? Or between the dispensationalists and the Calvinists on the question of eschatology?

A piquant version of this situation presented itself to us loosely affiliated Evangelicals, with all of our independent seminaries and Grace chapels and Moody churches, and so forth. When a crucial issue arises—say, what we should teach about sexuality—who will speak to us with a finally authoritative voice? The best we can do is to get Christianity Today to run a symposium, with one article by J. I. Packer plumping for traditional morality, and one article by one of our lesbian feminist Evangelicals (there are some) showing that we have all been wrong for the entire 3,500 years since Sinai, and that what the Bible really teaches is that indeed homosexuals may enjoy a fully expressed sexual life. The trouble here is that J. I. Packer has no more authority than our lesbian friend, so the message to the faithful is, “Take your pick.”

This is not, whatever else we wish to say about it, a picture of things that would be recognizable to the apostles, or to the generations that followed them. The faithful, in those early centuries, were certainly aware of a great babel of voices among the Christians, teaching this and teaching that, on every conceivable point of revelation. But the faithful were also aware that there was a body that could speak into the chaos, and declare, with serene and final authority, what the faith that had been taught by the apostles was. Clearly, we Evangelicals have been living in a scheme of things altogether unrecognizable to the apostles and the Fathers of the Church.

“I believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church,” I found myself saying in the creed. What Church? What is the Church? What was the Church in the minds of the men who framed that creed? Clearly it was not the donnybrook that the world sees nowadays, with literally thousands of groups, big and small, all clamoring, and all claiming to be, in some sense, the Church.

Five Recognizable Marks of the Church

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.

I.

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.

II.

Second, the Church in its authority confronts 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—if we 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.

III.

Third, the Church in its unity confronts 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 word unity. 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; or Sam 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 were not the Church. Likewise with the Donatists. God bless them for their fidelity and ardor and purity, but they were not 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—ours is 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.

IV.

Fourth, the liturgy of 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? The Book of Acts gives 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-called anaphora—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.

V.

Fifth and finally, the sacraments of the Church confront me. The word sacrament is the Latin word for the Greek mysterion, 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.

This article is adapted from a talk given in 1993 to The Fellowship of St. Barnabas, July 1993, in Oklahoma City.