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A Model to Rediscover - by Canon John H. Heidt

A Model to Rediscover

Canon John H. Heidt

Back in the heyday of Anglo-Catholic triumphalism, most everyone accepted and taught the "branch" theory in which the Catholic Church was pictured as a great river flowing out from our Lord, going along quite smoothly until hitting a rock in 1054 and dividing in half between East and West.

Then within the West it hits a small snag and an English tributary goes off on its own in a parallel direction. Still one church, but now divided into three branches. In the West new rivers also spring up, rivers bearing similarities to the main stream but no longer part of it; separated brethren like Methodists and Presbyterians, Christian Scientists and, dare I say it, even Lutherans. The Anglican stream however, remains part of that original catholic river and not a new creation come up from a protestant spring because it has the apostolic succession and proclaims the common teaching of the undivided Church.

Here was a model of the Church that seemed great for evangelizing frustrated protestants and disillusioned Roman Catholics, but in the end it could not withstand the critical assault of scholars or the new wave of ecumenical sentiment. The image of the Church as a river with its various branches is too pat, too simple to fit the facts. Neither the Eastern Orthodox nor Roman Catholics have ever accepted it. The theory takes no account of schismatics who still have the succession, or of heretical teaching on the part of medieval popes or recent bishops. It fails to take our divisions seriously; and is most unkind toward our ecumenical partners.

We need a model of the Church which can preserve all the catholic doctrines and practices we once defended through the branch theory and restore our self-confidence as a legitimate province of the whole Catholic Church. We need to resurrect a truly biblical model which, though always a part of our Anglican tradition, has, I think, never been allowed to transform our thinking sufficiently to meet the demands of the present moment. We need to rediscover the Church as the mystical body of Christ.

In calling the Church the mystical body of Christ, "mystical" does not mean something weird or unearthly or even spiritual. In the 17th century it referred to something analogous or symbolic or sacramental. The Church is the body of Christ by analogy. It is a metaphor or epiphany, a shadow, an icon, an image of the resurrected body of Christ reigning in heaven. The Church is an effective sign of the resurrected Body of Christ, the locus where we come to know Jesus Christ in the everyday rough and tumble of the Church's life, tempered on the hard anvil of immutable scripture and transfigured on the sacrificial altar of sacramental rites where heaven and earth are joined. The Church is the extension of the incarnation - not just throughout time, but from eternity into time, from heaven into earth. The Church in every age is the indefectible sacrament of the risen Christ.

So where then are we to find this visible and mystical sacrament of Christ? Where is the true Church? If, as we have always acknowledged in our baptismal rites, all baptized people are members of Christ's mystical body, then the true church is wherever the baptized are gathered together claiming the name of Jesus: In Solemn High Mass and local study group, in village church and Gothic cathedral, on street corners and TV platforms - wherever two or three are gathered together in his name.

With the branch theory we could be divided from one another and still all be good catholics, because you can divide a river into separate streams and still keep the waters flowing. But you cannot divide a body into parts and still keep it alive. The body of Christ is not divided; rather, individual people, though baptized, are separated in various degrees from the Church and from one another. All are members of the Church but not all to the same degree or in the same way; some are limbs lopped off and others fail to function through disease or spiritual ignorance. No one member has the whole truth; we are all implicit heretics. It's only when we take our individual or denominational heresies as orthodoxies that we get into trouble. When Jesus prayed that we may all be one even as he and his Father are one, he, being the creative Word of God, created what he prayed for. The Church is already one, a common-unity, a holy community bound together by Holy Communion. It is not constituted by denominational constitutions nor canons but by a common adoration of the one Christ. All ecumenical attempts to merge denominational institutions have failed because the Church is not an institution, but a communion supported by a variety of institutions. Only a sanctity fed by repentance and grace will discover and manifest the unity of the body that already exists.

I am not suggesting that adherence to scripture, valid sacraments, or the apostolic succession are only additional options for those who like that sort of thing. Without them there would be no Church. But we need not worry. Look all around you. There are still people proclaiming the whole gospel of Christ, still sacrificing priests offering the Holy Sacrifice, still apostolic bishops. We cannot get rid of any of them even if we tried, but we need no longer limit their activity to any particular denomination nor even to any particular place or time. As members of an apostolic college, most of whose members are already in the Church triumphant or expectant, local bishops and their priests have the pastoral care of all who accept their ministry in whatever denomination or geographical area they happen to find themselves - diocesan boundaries not withstanding. In our world of the internet and the international corporation, geography has become history.

We Anglicans also need to face the fact that when the canon of scripture, the creeds, and holy orders were firmly established in the Church, so also was the primacy of the Bishop of Rome. You may not like it, you may even call him the anti-Christ, but like everything else in the catholic dispensation, you cannot get rid of him. John Paul II is our pope as much as anyone else's. He is the symbolic or mystical center of unity for all Christians no matter what their denominational allegiance, and someone we Anglicans, in our current state of anarchy, should listen to.

Though we dare not become Roman Catholic if it means denying our present catholicity, perhaps the day will come when we can remain Anglican and also be Roman Catholic and perhaps Eastern Orthodox and even Methodist, not by seeking our lowest common denominator but by embracing the highest. And when that day comes the world shall know that we are one even as the Father and the Son are one. ◘

–The Rev. Canon John H. Heidt is the canon theologian of the Diocese of Fort Worth. The preceding Reader's Viewpoint originally appeared in the January 16, 2005 issue of THE LIVING CHURCH magazine, an independent weekly serving Episcopalians. The Reader's Viewpoint does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or the board.

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