The Church: A City Set on a Hill
For seven years I worked at a Catholic parish in Texas, bringing people to Christ. One of my main roles was to help people work through their Protestant objections to Catholicism by studying Scripture, Tradition, and Church history. After hearing these objections for a while, and after watching people hesitate as they accepted some of the Church's teachings but not others, I saw that a deeper story was at work than the interpretation of this or that verse, doctrine, or practice.
That deeper story revolved around one question: what is the Church?
Answering it requires us to face our unconscious assumptions. These presuppositions are like lenses that color what we see and how we engage the world. Every human being wears lenses built up from teachings, experiences, worldviews, and ideologies. The atheist cannot see biblical truth and instead hunts for absurdities. The critical scholar cannot accept miracles, so he busies himself with theories that unmask the supposed politics of the author. Even the apologist can miss the forest for the trees, gathering verses to use as stones or arrows in an argument while missing the deeper point of a passage.
Contrast these attitudes with that of a faithful disciple reading Scripture. He reads the miracle stories as demonstrations of Christ's divinity or as signs that confirm the Apostles' teaching. He finds nourishment even in the most difficult and perplexing parts of the Bible, because he presupposes that every word is "inspired by God" (2 Tim. 3:16) for his salvation. He is willing to wrestle with the text because he sees Christ in the Law and the Prophets, and even the dark passages of the Bible can nourish the faithful when Christ is the key to both Testaments. This is the difference between doubt and suspicion on the one hand and faith and trust on the other. The faithful reader is not gullible. He can draw immense help from scholarship and biblical criticism, but his faith is not shaken, because he attends to the text with trust. Skepticism, doubt, and criticism can even strengthen faith, because they make the Christian dig deeper, wrestle with new accusations, and perhaps see an old passage with new eyes.
One goal of reading the Bible faithfully is to become conscious of our lenses, so that we can see them for what they are and limit the distortions they bring to our reading. Scholars distinguish exegesis from eisegesis, that is, drawing the author's meaning out of the text as opposed to reading our own views into it. We all know how twisted the facts can become in a news story or a political speech. How much more damage is done when we read our views into the biblical text instead of drawing God's meaning out of it? This is why biblical scholars remind their students that "a text without a context is a pretext for a proof text."
What Is the Church?
When we think of "church," a thousand images may pass through our minds: a humble country chapel, a splendid cathedral, the congregation, families at a wedding, the hierarchy, prayer, the Body of Christ, an institution, a movement, something visible, something invisible, sacraments, worship, service, preaching, teaching, discipleship, and on and on.
These images shape our understanding of the Church, and we bring that understanding to the Bible when we read the passages about the Church's nature, mission, or order. As a result, we ignore or misread passages that run contrary to our presuppositions and exaggerate the ones that favor our views. Honestly, we do not want to do the hard work of scrutinizing our own views and asking, "Is the image in my head the same one the Bible communicates?" Our pride resists the question, and so does the affection and joy we have from belonging to churches, schools, and communities that share our definition of church, even when that definition is not wholly correct.
So where do we start? How can we examine our own lenses so that we read the Bible without simply imposing my lenses on you or yours on me? We examine ourselves. We ask foundational questions that bring our presuppositions into the light:
What are my primary images of the Church? Are they biblical images or someone else's interpretation?
Is the Church a visible reality or an invisible one?
Is the Church ordered or structured in a particular way?
What is the relationship between the universal Church and the local church?
What is the Church's relationship with ancient Israel?
What is the Church's relationship with the surrounding cultures?
What is the Church's relationship with the Bible?
As we explore Scripture together, these questions will keep prodding us toward newer and deeper answers, because the Catholic Church's answers are often, though not always, at odds with those of other Christian communities. Encountering a different biblical and theological tradition makes demands on us, usually through questions that challenge our assumptions or answers our own tradition could not give. These are Catholic answers, of course, but since we all draw on the same Bible in the hope of receiving its God-breathed truth, even where the Catholic view does not convince you, it can still widen your own.
The Assembly of God's People
The New Testament gives us many images of the great mystery of Christ and his Church. Jesus uses the word "church" only in Matthew's Gospel, in chapters 16 and 18. That seems odd at first, but his preferred phrase was "the kingdom of heaven" or "the kingdom of God," which he uses dozens of times, especially in the parables. In the Acts of the Apostles and the letters of St. Paul, the language shifts, and "church" becomes the word for the people of God who follow Christ. St. Paul not only uses the word often but complements it with two principal images, the Body of Christ and the Bride of Christ. Peter never uses the word in his letters. James uses it once, John uses it three times in his third letter, and the Book of Revelation uses it twenty times.
Christ is calling together a new people to himself, just as God once gathered Israel at the foot of Mount Sinai. The Old Testament calls Israel the qahal, the congregation or assembly of the Lord, and the gathering at Sinai, where Israel received the Law, is remembered as "the day of the assembly" (Deut. 9:10). There Israel received the Law and the Book of the Covenant, which made them a holy nation, a royal priesthood, and a people chosen by God. When the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek, qahal was often rendered ekklesia, from ek-kaleo, "to call out." The twelve tribes of Israel were called out of Egypt, out from among the nations, and assembled as God's holy people.
Again and again the Old Testament calls Israel God's people, especially as Moses confronts Pharaoh: "Let my people go" (Exod. 10:3). God claims the Hebrew slaves as his people and his possession. In setting himself over the Israelites, Pharaoh sets himself against the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Hosea expresses the Lord's heart toward Israel at this time: "When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son" (Hos. 11:1). The ten plagues are God's judgment on the house of Pharaoh, above all the tenth plague, in which Pharaoh's first-born son and heir dies. At the assembly at Sinai, Israel entered fully into covenant with the Lord, receiving the Law at the feast that Jewish tradition remembers as Pentecost. And like Adam and Eve, Israel broke the covenant almost at once.
A Divided People
Through the prophets God promised to gather his people again after centuries of sin, but it would be no easy task, because Israel was now divided. The ten northern tribes broke faith with the house of David and set up their own kingdom, the Kingdom of Israel. It was dominated by idolatry and lasted about two hundred years, until the Assyrian Empire destroyed it and carried its people off to other lands, which is why they are known as the lost tribes of Israel. The two southern tribes, Judah and Benjamin, became the Kingdom of Judah, and they endured in this fractured state for about three and a half centuries, until Babylon invaded, burned Jerusalem, destroyed the first Temple, and seemingly ended the house of David as well.
Yet the prophets spoke of a time when North and South would be restored and gathered together under one king from the house of David. Ezekiel 37 contains two great prophecies, the valley of dry bones (vv. 1-14) and the two sticks (vv. 15-28). First Ezekiel prophesies over the valley of dry bones that Israel will be restored, gathered, and filled with the Spirit: "Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel" (Ezek. 37:11). Then God commands the prophet to write "For Judah" on one stick and "For Joseph" on another, symbolizing the divided kingdoms, and to join them together in his hand, a sign that God will one day gather them. The promise reads:
"Behold, I will take the people of Israel from the nations among which they have gone, and will gather them from all around, and bring them to their own land. And I will make them one nation in the land, on the mountains of Israel. And one king shall be king over them all, and they shall be no longer two nations, and no longer divided into two kingdoms. They shall not defile themselves anymore with their idols and their detestable things, or with any of their transgressions. But I will save them from all the backslidings in which they have sinned, and will cleanse them; and they shall be my people, and I will be their God. My servant David shall be king over them, and they shall all have one shepherd. They shall walk in my rules and be careful to obey my statutes." (Ezek. 37:21-24, ESV)
Jeremiah carries this hope forward. In chapter 30 the Lord says, "For behold, days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will restore the fortunes of my people, Israel and Judah, says the LORD, and I will bring them back to the land that I gave to their fathers, and they shall take possession of it" (Jer. 30:3, ESV). In chapter 31 he speaks of the new covenant God will make with Israel:
"Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the LORD. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people ... For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more." (Jer. 31:31-34, ESV)
Israel in the Time of Christ
By the first century, the house of David had been reduced to a "stump" (Isa. 11:1) with no reigning heir. The Second Temple had been rebuilt under Zerubbabel after the return from exile in Babylon, and Ezra and Nehemiah later restored the Law and the walls of Jerusalem. One empire after another dominated Israel, sacking her cities and carrying off her people. After the empire of Alexander the Great broke apart and his Hellenizing successors warred against one another, Antiochus IV profaned the Temple and martyred many Jews. Israel fought back in the Maccabean revolt, led by the priestly family of Judas and Simon Maccabeus, and won a limited freedom, cleansing and rededicating the Temple. Their dynasty, the Hasmoneans, descended neither from King David nor from the established high-priestly line, yet they ruled as both kings and high priests, which produced further political division and religious scandal. Finally Rome took control and installed Herod, an Idumean, as king of the Jews.
These political and religious divisions hardened into factions: Pharisees, Essenes, Sadducees, and Zealots. In Jerusalem and the other large cities there were aristocrats who lived more like Greeks or Romans than Jews. The religious elite who followed the traditions of the Pharisees looked down on ordinary people who could not keep the Law in all its detail: "this crowd, who do not know the law, are accursed" (John 7:49).
During Christ's public ministry, the sons of Herod ruled various parts of the land. The territory of the old northern tribes was now "Galilee of the Gentiles" (Matt. 4:15), slowly being resettled by Jews from the south in towns such as Nazareth. Roman rule hung over the Promised Land with an iron fist, and Pontius Pilate, the governor of Judea, exercised his authority with notorious brutality.
This is the divided and waiting people into whom Christ came, to gather a new Israel around himself. The Catechism sums up how Scripture describes what he gathered:
"In Scripture, we find a host of interrelated images and figures through which Revelation speaks of the inexhaustible mystery of the Church. The images taken from the Old Testament are variations on a profound theme: the People of God. In the New Testament, all these images find a new center because Christ has become the head of this people, which henceforth is his Body." (CCC 753)