Transcript
O God, holy and just, who exalt us to all nations, who follow in the way of the righteousness disclosed in Jesus Christ, we pray for all lands and all peoples. Deliver us from greed of gain, from race and class prejudice, from all those causes of oppression and strife, and while thou inspire in us, we beseech thee such love of our neighbor and concern for one another's welfare, that we shall work together with one heart and will
to secure equal opportunity and do reward for all. O God, for as much as without thee we are not able to please thee, mercifully grant thy holy spirit that in all things we may be directed and ruled through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. Let me welcome you again to the Warfield Lectures. This is the last of those lectures and the topic for this afternoon, which Professor Torrance will be delivering to us, is The One Church. Professor
Torrance. I wonder if I may say, in a word or two, how happy I've been in these two weeks here in Princeton and how much I've enjoyed not only giving a few lectures but also the many discussions I've had with members of faculty and students. You've all been very kind to me. In one holy catholic and apostolic church, we acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead and the
life of the ages to come. It's significant that the Nicene Consent and Neapolitan Creed does not at this point repeat the words we believe, but following on the article on the Holy Spirit simply says in one holy catholic and apostolic church. The significance of this would appear to be twofold. First, the clauses on the church do not constitute an independent set of beliefs, but follow from belief in the Holy Spirit. If we believe in the Holy
Spirit, we also believe in the existence of the one church in the one spirit, so that belief in the church is a function of belief in the spirit or rather belief in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And secondly, the clauses on the church are to be reckoned as belonging integrally to saving faith. They are integral to faith in the Holy Trinity and cannot be treated as affirmations having significance in themselves apart from the inner substance
of saving faith. This relation of the clauses on the church to the main substance of the faith, as affirmed in the Creed, sets the context and tone of what we have to say about the church and the way in which it is understood from that perspective. It might also be remarked that there were no monographs on the church as such in the early centuries, apart from the tractate by Cyprian on the unity of the church. And
many theologians of the greatest calibre, for example Athanasius or Nazianzen, scarcely mention the church except in certain predictive ways or secondary contexts, although what they say and clearly presuppose in that way is highly significant. The fact, however, that there are no monographs specifically devoted to the nature and function of the church reflects the primary fact that it is Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit who occupy the central focus of faith practically as well as illogically. This
seems to me to be evident from the very earliest creedal formulas where the church is mentioned. For example, in Irenaeus, the Apodaxis Chirigmaton, where he speaks of the order and rule of our faith which follows the Trinitarian form, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and then where the community of union between God and man is mentioned, but not the church as such. The church doesn't need to be mentioned, it's the corporate complement within space and time of
the oneness of our communion with God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And we have a similar connection of ideas in the Epistola Apostolorum which dates from about the middle of the second century. Now this seems to indicate that it is within the church, within the corporate communion, corporate life of the church, that the faith in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is held and not least faith in the Holy Spirit. That comes to concretion, I'm
sorry, within the life of the church, faith in Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and not least that of the Holy Spirit, comes to concretion within our human existence in life. But it also indicates that the church is the effect of the Holy Spirit, so to speak the complement of the Holy Spirit's presence and activity in our midst, as in and through the Spirit we are made to share in Christ, the incarnate Son, and through him have
access to the Father. Take such a statement as we get in Irenaeus again to refer to another of his works, Forewear of the Churches there is the Spirit of God, and where the Spirit of God is there is the Church and every kind of grace, but the Spirit is truth. Those therefore who do not partake of him are neither nourished into life from the mother's breasts nor do they enjoy that most limpid fountain which issues from
the body of Christ. Now this language is used again and again, but it's often used in such a way as to miss out the fact that the relation of the Spirit to the church here is really a participation in the reality of Christ, the Aletheia of course is truth, but also here I think the downright reality of Christ in the midst. The church then is spoken of in these early texts as the living body of Christ
insofar as it participates in him through his life-giving Spirit and is organically constituted and made to cohere in him so that the church throughout history is a dynamic, charismatic magnitude and shining an altogether new, indeed divine dimension in the world. That is what is meant by the church, living in this quite new way and quite new perspective under the sheer impact of God's Spirit. All members of the church are united to Christ and become one
body in him. So Irenail stresses again and again, Enosus, Caeconia, union and communion with Christ in the most real sense, for there is a profoundly ontological unification of the people in the Spirit in Christ in the midst of whom God dwells through the immediate presence and power of his Spirit. But this body is what it is through the redeeming and recreative and recapitulative operation of Christ in his incarnation and through the staggering event of Pentecost in
which God's own immediate presence and life are poured out upon the church to become its own continuing life and power in the world. All this is, of course, an extension of the Pauline and Johannine teaching of the New Testament, blended together in a Christological and Pneumatological way. But at this stage, the doctrine of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church begins to be formed within the evangelical and worshipping context of the life of the church and
its And the stress is undoubtedly upon the kerugma, in Irenail's sense, upon the gospel, upon the truth, upon faith, rather than upon ecclesiology. For all that is said of the church in an institutional way is a byproduct or a function of the living reality of the truth, or rather the Spirit of truth, who dwells in the church and gives it its inner substance and intelligible form, and without which the church would not be at all what
it is. It is then that primacy of the truth mediated to the Spirit and of faith in Christ that lies behind the Nicene Creed and its formulations. But the Nicene formulations are geared into and are functions of the Trinitarian formulations of faith in God as they devolve from the baptismal formula. Now in the development of the church from its apostolic foundation, constituted through the event of Pentecost, it was held that the church continues to be constituted
and given life and is brought into being through baptism into the triune name and through the creative activity of the Holy Spirit. The church is thus tied up with a tradition, the handing on of the apostolic message or gospel, which is communicated with baptism, instruction in the faith and baptism are inseparable. Thus in the language of St. Paul there is one Lord, one faith and one baptism, resulting from or bound up with the one body and
one Spirit and the one hope of our calling, in which we are summoned to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. And there is one God, one Father of all, who is above all, through all and in all. The primary constitutive facts then are the one faith and the one baptism coordinated to the activity of the one Spirit and the one Lord and the one Father. The one church is to be understood
strictly in that milieu of doctrine so that throughout the centuries one faith and one baptism are given a focal and central significance in the foundation of all that is said of the doctrine of the church. Before we go further, it ought to be noted that in this basic concept of the church there is nothing confessed or affirmed about the structure or organization of the church. The church is strictly a de fide matter and is to be
understood from its theological roots in the Trinity and that takes precedence over everything else, such precedence that in this context mention is not made of constitutional organizational affairs. But it should also be noted that the episcopate is everywhere assumed as having a primary place in and from the apostolic foundation of the church and as such the episcopate is subordinate not only to the apostolic foundation but to Christ himself. I believe it is important to consider the
problem that faced the Christian church in the early centuries as it spread out into the Mediterranean world. The question it had to answer was this, how is the church to take root and develop within human society which has already been stamped with basic patterns of culture and behavior? Kind of question we still have to ask. Now this must be considered parallel to the problem of how the gospel was to take root and develop within the Greco
-Roman culture and thought when the answer had to be given only by transforming its very foundations. As we have seen the early church had to tackle and overcome the basic dualisms that undermined the gospel and gave rise to Gnosticism outside the church and Arian and other disintegrating heresies within the church and it was precisely in overcoming that dualism that the classical theology of the church came to its clear and structured articulation. But what of the Christian
church itself in all this process? Was the church able to transform society and overcome the dualist paradigms that affected its structure? In this early stage preceding and following the Nicene and Constantinople Councils the answer must be given largely in the affirmative but dualist notions of the church which we find in Clement and Origen affected by the platonic slant of their thought and the body dualism and contemporary anthropology and law together laid the basis for more serious
problems. Although it is only when the church had to relate itself to law and its dualist structures that the problems developed which built into later centuries a dualist understanding of the church as corpus juridicum on the one hand and juridical institution on the other hand. One thinks here of the Augustinian answer to the Donatius revolt and the Leonine answer to the problem of law in the corpus juris canonica. And may I say that it is precisely
today that this problem in the history of the Roman Catholic Church is particularly acute because following upon the Vatican Council, Second Vatican Council which is largely Christological and soteriological, the Vatican Councils had to face the fact that the foundations in canon law are still radically dualist and the foundations in the epistemology are still largely dualist. And we have rejection in the Vatican Council of the old concept of the corpus pepetitum Calvin castigated it and a double
notion of the church, a mystical body on the one hand and institutional body on the other hand, something that came to expression in the humani generis. We have a rejection of that in the Lumen Gentium and at the same time, and I think this is of staggering significance, a real rejection of the body-soul dualism in the church. So that here we have a doctrine of the church which is closer to that, for example, taught by
Calvin and the institutes than we have ever had in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. Although one must say that the only other semi-constitutional document produced by Rome and the church which comes in the ninth chapter of the Tridentine Catechism is itself very heavily influenced by Calvin. Well I mentioned that simply to show that these problems that the early church faced in those centuries are still very profound problems in our modern culture and they
require a great deal more thinking than we've been able to give to it. Now in the early period during the rise and formulation of classical concilia theology, the church was all together centered in the lordship of Christ and his reign as the enthroned and kyrgios Christos and it was the kingdom of Christ that was predominant for all power in heaven and earth had been given to him and things visible and invisible earthly and heavenly were subject
to him. They had in any case been created by him as the word of God. What gave concrete shape and structure to this faith was the incarnation, the economic condescension of God, his saving activity within the structures of space and time. Was then the incarnation merely a temporary episode in the divine providential purpose or was it permanent? That was the question at stake in the heretical notions of Marcellus of Cyra to which I've alluded twice in
earlier lectures who held at the kingdom would eventually be handed over to the father and the whole economic activity of the son and the spirit that his incarnation would come to an end which would inevitably affect the very root of the church as the body of the incarnate and risen Jesus Christ. Now the Nicene Constantinopolitan creed came down decidedly against that idea and asserted into the creed the clause whose kingdom shall have no end. It is
then the finality and thus the essential nature of the incarnate economy that affected the basic understanding, the basis of the church's understanding of itself as a dwelling place of the spirit of God, the place where God in his immediate majesty and power and his sheer godness is present, the church which is what it is through sharing in Christ and being united to him through the power of his spirit. That is the primary fact that predominated and
was given precedence over all questions of external form, organization and structure. The real structure of the church is through its union and communion with the risen and exalted Christ in the spirit which he has bestowed upon it and thereby shared with the church the very life of God himself, hence the other eschatological clauses of the creed. Now let me return to the parallel problems in theology and in ecclesiology. We find that the clauses on the church
like those on the spirit are closely correlated to those on the son. That is they are parallel to the essential statements of faith in opposition to Arianism. So that we can state the situation like this. Arianism held that the relation between the son and the father was an external relation of will only. Nicene theology held that the relation between the son and the father was one internal to the being or the usir of God and was
one not of will but of nature. Again Arianism held that our salvation is by way of an external moral relation between us and Christ and a merely moral union is involved. Nicene theology on the other held that salvation takes place through the incarnation and with the son of God has penetrated into the depths of human being which he united to himself so that redemption and reconciliation take place within his incarnate person as mediator between God and
man who is God and man and is one reality. And again Arianism held that the church is formed through external association of like minded people. Nicene theology on the other hand insisted that the church arises out of the ontological activity of redemption affected by the son in which we are given to participate to the spirit. Incarnation and atonement in their inseparable relation to one another thus provide the doctrinal basis, the doctrinal structure for the doctrine of
the church. The church in the spirit is given koinonia in all that Christ has done on our behalf hence here the blessed exchange between Christ and us is actualized in the spirit and the result is the church or rather the holy church through the holy spirit the very body of Christ. Here the moral and the ontological relations are one they are inseparable they interpenetrate one another for redemptive and recreative work of Christ in here in one
another. It is in that interpenetration that we are to see the relation of the church to the holy spirit who is the actualizing and perfecting source the teleosis of the church's sanctification and renewal in Christ. Now as I've indicated the actualization of the church in this sense took place through holy baptism in which takes place through holy baptism in which people are initiated into the sphere of the spirit and are united to Christ as members of
him and in him as members of one another. The church is thus the church of the triune god partaking of the communion of the father the son and the holy spirit and the oneness of the holy trinity. Now in order to clarify this view of the church let us think of it in three aspects or respects. First the Christological center of the church. The church is the body of Christ for it arises out of his incarnational
and atoning work. That is to say it is the intimate relation between Christ and those whom he has redeemed which constitutes the heart and core of the church. It is Christ then the ontological ground and controlling center of the church who occupies the whole focus of attention. He is in the most intense sense the personal and personalizing center of the whole community life of the people. In that sense the church is body of Christ and not
the body of the spirit for it was not the spirit of course but the son who became incarnate. Second it is through or in the spirit that the church is given koinonia in Christ in this way. Through sharing in the one spirit the church is made one body of the one Christ. Thus while the center of unity is Christ himself through the power and operation of the spirit that unity is progressively actualized in the life of
the people of God. The church thus regarded is the temple where God dwells by his spirit and where Christ himself in his incarnate and risen reality is present as Lord and Savior and who is mediated to us through the who receives from the son. It is in and through the spirit then that the reciprocity between God and man established in Jesus Christ himself is opened or widened or if you like catholicized to include all men so
that it is through and in the spirit that the church comes into being as a community of reciprocity with God. We may put this question in another way and here I'm thinking of the teaching of Hillary who spoke of a three-fold communion. There is the consubstantial the homoousial union or communion in the holy trinity between the father the son and the holy spirit. There is secondly the actualization of communion between the father and the son
in the incarnation of the son through whom the holy spirit is mediated to us which we think of classically as a hypostatic union and then there is the communion of the holy spirit who is actualized in the church through its union and communion with Christ and in the spirit and the ironian language is here taken over by Hillary to express this. And thirdly we must think of this as actualized in our existence on earth and space
and time as I've said to holy baptism. Now baptism was spoken of in this period as Tomega Musterion the great mystery and this I believe is one of the great differences between the modern church and the later church and the early church whereas baptism was the great mystery today baptism is a little mystery. See the font is even not seen here so to speak but at any rate what I'm saying is that I do not believe
we really understand the early church or understand their theology or the development church unless we realize that baptism was indeed Tomega Musterion the great mystery. Baptism and the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit brings the church into being as a sphere in which the divine blessings of forgiveness of sins resurrection and eternal life are bestowed and become effective. Hence the creeds tend always to concentrate upon the one baptism or the one
faith or one baptism for the remission of sins but notice the Nicene constant Neapolitan creed says one baptism but it does not say one Eucharist. Now why was it as I think is the case was it because the baptismal Eucharist was in mind and the Eucharist is here properly celebrated within the one body and therefore within the great mystery of baptism which included the Eucharist at any rate it is significant that it is baptism that is
mentioned here in connection with the unity of the church recalling the one Lord the one faith and the baptism of the Ephesian epistle and it's particularly important to note what baptism really means in relation to the gift of the spirit. There is here a different emphasis in Cyril of Jerusalem from Athanasius of Alexandria the former stressing the subjective aspect of baptism the spirit in us but with Athanasius it is the objective work of the spirit that
is stressed which arises from the closest connection between the spirit and Christ Christ mediating the spirit and the spirit mediating Christ. Now the important point Athanasius makes is that Christ in his incarnate reality received the spirit upon himself and that he did that not for his own sake but for for he was eternally one with the spirit in God thus when Jesus was baptized in the Jordan and the Holy Spirit was sent upon him by the
father it was our humanity in him that was baptized sanctified sealed and anointed so that when he was baptized for us we were baptized in him and our baptism in the name of the Holy Trinity has to be understood as our participation in that one baptism of Christ on our behalf or as the actualization of in us of that one baptism Christ sanctified himself for us that we might be sanctified in him and that is the
objective ground and significance of baptism. Now I think it's important at this point to indicate a difficulty that very many people have in the very terminology and this is a difficulty I think that is goes back to the distinction I've just shown between the emphasis of Cyril of Jerusalem which is more subjective and the emphasis of Athanasius which is more objective in this sense when the New Testament speaks about baptism it uses the term baptism it
does not use once the term baptismos now the term baptismos refers to the right and the New Testament never speaks once of it the term baptisma is quite parallel to the term kirugma and kirugma refers to the reality preach rather than to the preaching of it so in preaching and proclamation it is the objective reality of Christ who proclaims himself that is the primary fact and the same thing is of baptism but the interesting thing is
that while Josephus can speak about John's baptism as baptismos the New Testament right from the start speaks of it as baptism and the reason for that is as we can see this in Hippolytus because Christ submitted to John's baptism he transformed so that John's baptism from the start relates baptize and kerosene baptisma and kirugma in that sense so that when we look at baptism when we for example rethink of roman six roman six was not speaking
of what happens in a right it is speaking of what took place in Jesus Christ objectively he was baptized on our behalf when he died we died when he rose again we rose again and that is the very heart and center of baptism so that if we understand baptism in this sense which directs us immediately to what took Christ in our behalf the ontological objective reality in Christ then we understand baptism but if we understand it
as baptismos then everything begins to go wrong then you find the meaning of the right either in what I do or expression of my of what I do or you find it in simply in the performance of the right itself some kind of ex operate operato performance of it now as I understand the whole of the nysene theology is here definitely athanasian and epiphanian it is concerned with baptism in this objective sense even though cyril of
Jerusalem has already given a slant of baptism in the direction of understanding in terms of baptismos that is not reflected here in the creed and as far as I can see not reflected in the theology that led up to it now it's in this life that we have to understand also the problem about second baptism in the church or rebaptism in the church because when the problem arose in rest there came this significant document today re
-baptismate and if you look at baptism in this sense that baptism is what Christ took undertook on our behalf once and for all in the Jordan and on the cross and the resurrection has a counterpart in in Pentecost then to re-baptize is equivalent to having Christ crucified all over again and that's to put him to no pen shame that then is immense seriousness of the hen baptisma the one baptism that is asserted against repeated baptism
and against any subjective understanding of it in the history of the church I emphasize that because I do not believe that the modern church has really the Roman Catholic church or the Protestant churches have really adequately grasped this I tried at one stage God bless him to show this to Karl Barth he was at that stage beyond looking at this and I said to him dear Karl Barth how could you possibly distinguish between Geist-Taufer and
Wasser-Taufer, water baptism and spirit baptism the very thing that Irenaeus rejected as Gnostic because there's only one baptism and you cannot look at in that dualistic light. Now let me offer in the rest of the lecture some comments upon the seen content of the appellate clauses on the church with a view to throwing further light on some of the points or that I've made or rather throwing them into sharper relief and I won't have time
I'm afraid to do all that I intend to do but perhaps I can select certain points that may be relevant. One church as we have seen this is certainly bound up with the one Lord and one faith and the one baptism of St Paul's teaching. Nicene theology insisted on the intimate connection between the one faith and the one baptism of Christ and of course the one God. The oneness and integrity of baptism cannot be separated from
the oneness and integrity of the faith and behind that lies the one holy trinity and the one spirit in whom the one faith is grounded in the one triune God. And so the only time when the Nicene theologians or the constant appellate theologians will in any sense brook what looks like a second baptism is when the first baptism so called has not been baptism in the name of God the father the son the holy spirit but
the name of God one God and two creatures Christ and the spirit that is not baptism and therefore second baptism in this event is not second baptism it is baptism for the first time in the one name of the holy trinity. I mentioned that to show that here the the Nicene creed the baptism the one baptism and the one objective faith in the trinity are so indelibly bound together. Now there's another aspect of the oneness of
the church in relation to the oneness of the holy spirit that must be noted. And this is apparent from the statement which speaks of the spirit which I noted yesterday as he who spoke by the prophets. Now the significance of this is that the spirit is the one spirit the eternal spirit of the one God and is therefore identical with the spirit who spoke the word of God in the old testament as well as the new
testament the spirit who was active in the church of the old testament the ecclesia of the old covenant and the ecclesia the church of the new covenant. Now this also significantly was stressed by Cyril of Jerusalem and also by Epiphanius who has connections with Jerusalem as well and it's in the holy land tend to take this line. This is stressed for example by Cyril of Jerusalem who speaks of the first church as he calls it which
he relates to the institution of the Aaronic priesthood and the second holy church which we call the catholic church the church of Christians which owes its increase throughout the world to the fact that the one church in Judea is cast off. Now here he is referenced to the Pauline term namely the the the gentile churches are are grafted into the trunk of Israel and Paul warns the Jewish believers that they might be cast off. He goes
too far here I mean Cyril but care is nevertheless taken to maintain the continuity in the one spirit between the church and divine revelation in the old testament church and in the new testament church. Now in Alexandrian theology it is the Irenaean doctrine of the one church stretching back to Adam in which the whole race has been recapitulated in Christ which underlines the doctrine of the unity of the church across all differences between old and new
covenants. Athanasius has quite clearly here an old testament or a Hebraic cast of mind and is certainly even more Hebraic than that of Cyril of Jerusalem but it is especially I think in Epiphanius that this doctrine of the church with its oneness with the old testament church comes out. The fact that the one church is coordinated with the one spirit who spoke in the old testament prophets is certainly emphasized but the difference in the church of
the one spirit is made precisely by the incarnation and referring to the incarnation that the holy catholic church owes its distinctive marks vis-a-vis the church of the old testament fathers. Even so Epiphanius can speak of Jerusalem as the mother of faith and of the holy catholic as the mother of the one catholic and orthodox faith and when he uses this expression you don't quite know whether he's speaking of Jerusalem in the sense of the
old testament people of God or whether he's speaking of Jerusalem in another sense relating to the church but they are I think they are conflated together. Now let us turn to the clause the holy church. The holiness of the church derives from the sanctification of the spirit or rather from the self-sanctification of Christ in the spirit on behalf of the church in which the church shares to the spirit. Now here we have the old testament
concept and this is particularly clear I think in Athanasius the old testament concept that God hallows or sanctifies himself in the midst of his people and as God hallows and sanctifies himself in the midst of his people he gives his people to share in his own holiness. This however is translated into the into the terms of the incarnation and in the incarnation we are concerned with the self-hallowing of the self-sanctifying of Christ in the
midst of those whom he calls his brothers and whom he redeems and for whom he lays down himself and sacrifice so that they are given to share in the same holiness which he has in himself. The holiness of the church is thus objectively grounded in the holiness of the triune God and therefore it is naturally correlated in the hymns and praise of the church with the Trishagion of the divine worship. The holiness of the church then
is not to be understood from the holiness of the members of the church a moral holiness aggregated in the church subjectively based it is none other than the holiness of God who in old testament language that I just said sanctifies or makes himself holy in the midst of his people. That is the holiness of the church in the sense of the Naricene creed. Here the stress then upon the holiness is stress upon the immediate presence of
the one triune God in the midst of the church. It's an objective holiness. Holy church has thus a profound slant to it. It attracts all and reverence and respect for it is the holiness of God in the midst of the church which the church shares in its corporate life as the body of Christ. Now of course this could go too far because we can put the church in the place of Christ and the holiness the sancta
ecclesia the una sancta and the place of Christ but this is not done in the Naricene theology. As I said before the sheer focus of attention the overwhelming focus of attention is upon Christ himself and it's precisely because he sanctifies himself for us and sanctifies us in him that we have to speak of the church as holy and as such it calls forth from us reverence and awe and respect that are profound. Now catholic church it
is in this context that the catholicity of the church is to be understood the holy catholic church. To be catholic the church must be holy the holy church of the one God. To be holy the church must be the catholic church embracing all dimensions of people of the people of God in old and new testaments and their existence in space and time. While the universality of the church throughout the world is stressed by Cyril of Jerusalem
I'm leaving out there were passages from him I'd intended to quote while the universality of the church is is throughout the world the oikoumene is stressed in patristic writers of the Nicene period that is not the primary aspect of catholicity. As far as we can see the term catholic came into being as the gnostic nickname for those they dubbed apostolicoi ecclesiasticoi the apostolics and ecclesiastics who believed in the universal range of redemption in and through Christ
as opposed to the gnostics themselves who believed in the redemption only of the people they called the spirituals and not the huliks or the blockheads. Only some people are saved because they are the only people worth saving let's say the gnostics held a sectarian concept of redemption and here we have the root of limited atonement. Now it's precisely because those who followed the apostles in the church the apostolicoi ecclesiasticoi rejected that limited atonement and rejected the
sectarian church bound up with it that they were nicknamed the catholics. Let's say those who believed that Christ Jesus the incarnate son of God died for all men. The gnostic idea then of redemption was in line with the radical distinction between the sensible and the spiritual and carried with it the disjunction between water baptism and spirit baptism which I mentioned a little earlier. So that rejection of that radical dualism rejection of any double concept of the
church carried with it a unity of the church which is essentially catholic in the one universal Christ. Thus the catholicity of the church is grounded in the inseparable unity between the incarnation and atonement through the one son of God and in the one spirit. But for that very reason the catholicity of the church is nothing else but the wholeness and integrity of the church's oneness in Christ and in the spirit. Hence a number of years ago
George Forosky here wrote a paper and which insisted that we have to stand catholic to the church not in terms of catapuntos but in terms of catholou and he was dead right because it is this sense of catholicity that I think is primary and that's what I've been trying to expand. The church then is catholic because it is the one body of Christ who is the one head of all things visible and invisible and who gathers
up through his atoning life and work all things in and through his cross into himself. Catholicity refers to the intensive wholeness and fullness of the church in Christ, the coordination of the church everywhere and every place throughout all space and time to the wholeness and fullness of Christ himself. For the catholic church does not live out of itself but out of Christ, not out of its own or spirit but out of the one spirit of the
triune God but throughout all its life this intensive wholeness or oneness necessarily expands through the spirit of Pentecost and manifests itself in extensive ways in human creaturely existence and life and thought for the inner wholeness and perfection of the one catholic church cannot but become manifest as it bears witness to and serves the one Christ in the one spirit as it is a product of the one energy, the one activity of the father through the son
and in the spirit. And now finally the apostolic church. The apostolicity of the church refers to its rooting and grounding in Christ as he founded the church upon the apostles to whom he gave authority over the church and through whom the word of Christ is transmitted to the church for all time. The apostolicity of the church then has to do with its original constitution in the apostles by Christ and to the unity and continuity of that
constitution throughout the life and of the church in all times and places. It is bound up with the fact that the one holy catholic church today and everywhere is one and identical with the church in its foundations by Christ on the apostles. It is semper ae adem as the latin formula runs. Just as the holy trinity is ever identical with itself as the nature says and as Christ is the same yesterday today and forever and that
there is only one and the same spirit in God and in us in the old testament new testament church in the apostolic foundation new testament and in the church today so we have to think of the church as ever identical with what it is in Christ and the spirit of God. The apostles here constitute so to speak the great hinge the cardinals the great hinge of the relation between the catholic church in history and the once
and for all foundation to the apostles of the church in Christ and because they constitute that great hinge they are unrepeatable. You cannot repeat you cannot go back and repeat the folding out of the vertical horizontal that place between Christ and his apostles. Now practically of course this means that the grounding of the faith of the church in the faith of the apostles in Christ the ground this means the grounding of the faith of the church
in the faith of the apostles in Christ and the subjection of the catholic church in all times and places to that apostolic foundation and authority and through the apostles the subjection of the church to the sole lordship of Christ and his spirit. At no time and no place therefore as Carl Baer expresses it is the church an authority which upholds itself out of itself. Here Jesus Christ rules alone and any ruling of man can only represent
this government of his. It must not let itself be measured by that government it must let itself be measured by that government but Jesus Christ rules in his word and by the Holy Spirit. Church government then is in a sense identical with holy scripture fought witnesses to him so the church must continuously be occupied with exposition and application of the holy scriptures and that is precisely what we find in the run-up to the Nicene council
and in the half century between the Nicene the Constantinopolitan council. What the Nicene fathers thought and did about the church was precisely this thorough going exegetical activity in which they sought to bring to expression the internal connections of the faith and thus to provide the ongoing church with a structural framework within which they could worship and interpret the scriptures and preach the gospel and proclaim the forgiveness of the cross. Now of course the Nicene fathers thought
of the relation between scripture and church in a somewhat different way than Carl Baer within the living witness of the church and the fact that the apostolic foundation of the church continued to be alive and directive of the under the power of the Holy Spirit. This is the Iranian concept of the depositum nevertheless the Nicene and Constantinopolitan councils and the Nicene fathers and theologians certainly devoted themselves to establishing and maintaining the life and the thought of
the church at every point possible in tune with the once and for all apostolic foundation and in accordance with the witness of the apostles theological and exegetical work was quite basic for the church had constantly to renew its its mind in the apostolic mind which was the one mind of Christ under which under the inspiration of the spirit of Christ had come to expression in them. Thus at every crucial point the Nicene theology and the Nicene
formulations were checked and established strictly in accordance with the holy scriptures even though the points of connection had sometimes to be expressed through the coining of new terms to clarify and preserve the genuine faithfulness to the new testament. Now this is not to say that the Nicene and Constantinopolitan fathers were engaged in any kind of biblicist doctrine of the faith or any kind of biblicist account of the gospel what they were concerned with in wrestling with
the holy scriptures was to say what they were compelled to say within the context of the apostolic tradition under the revelation of God and the spirit in Christ to say what they were compelled to say on that basis about the father the son and the holy spirit and then in that way to provide children young people new people the church throughout history with a continuing framework within which continuous exegesis and teaching could be conducted. Now we
come to the end and I simply want to say that when we examine the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed in this way and look at it and find that here something as I said in I think the first lecture something quite irreversible took place in the history of Christian thought an understanding from by the church of the holy scriptures and of the gospel upon which it is quite impossible for us to go back. Looked at in that light
the Nicene creed constitutes what the fathers justly called the canon of truth and this year when we celebrate the 16th centenary of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed I would hope that the churches throughout all Christendom could think again about the fact that this is the one ecumenical creed of all Christendom it is far greater ecumenical reign than the apostles creed in the early church and today it is the one ecumenical creed of the church and it
is upon this creed upon this basis that the churches must come together and therefore I would hope that in all renewing and restoring activities and all ecumenical activities we will learn from this year to put the Nicene creed in the centre of all our creedal formularies and especially in our relations with one another determined to work toward union and reconciliation as the structure of our thought takes shape under the guidance of this ancient canon of truth.