Sir,
Hugh Rayment-Pickard’s criticism of John Milbank’s ecclesiology is insightful. A belief that the Church is the site of the ideal society because it is a group which models the ideal teaching can lead some to think of it a moralistic exclusive club, if the Church is viewed simply as a human construct.
Nevertheless, I wonder whether Dr Rayment-Pickard’s counter-argument does not rely on a false dichotomy between the Kingdom and the Church. It is true that Jesus said a great deal about the Kingdom and not much about the Church. He also did not write any books, or tell anyone else to. But all we know of his teaching comes from the books that were, in fact, written; and all of them were written in, and for, church communities. The New Testament texts, including the Gospels, are unavoidably ecclesial; the teaching of the Kingdom cannot be separated from the Church.
Jesus founded a community of disciples to be both the bearer of the Kingdom message and the place where it starts to manifest in concrete human society. And although Jesus himself did not say much about the Church, the Pauline and pseudo-Pauline epistles have a great deal to say. The imagery of the Body of Christ, a living organism in which Christ recapitulates a renewed humanity, is repeated too often to be ignored. Indeed the Kingdom is God’s initiative in Christ; and the Church is the movement of human society into that Kingdom. Not perhaps the “site” of the ideal society, as Professor Milbank would have it, but at least where that society is beginning to become real. And not only human society. Salvation, as texts such as Colossians 1:15-20 make clear, is both ecclesial and cosmic. The Orthodox Theologian Vladimir Lossky once said, ““the entire universe is called to enter within the Church… that it may be transformed into the eternal Kingdom of God”[1].
None of this requires that the Church be seen as an exclusive club. Indeed, quite the reverse: an orthodox ecclesiology must be inclusive and generous. The redemption wrought by Christ is, in God’s will, universal, limited only by the extent to which creatures may refuse to participate. We may and should say that the movement into the Kingdom is happening in the visible community of the Church, but we cannot say where it is not happening. The ultimate boundary of the Church, “outside of which there is no salvation”, is stretched as far as the love and generosity of God revealed in Jesus will go. And I believe that is a very long way indeed.
Yours sincerely,
The Revd Matthew Duckett
[1] V Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, (Fellowship of Ss Alban & Sergius, translators), James Clarke & Co Ltd., 1957, p 113
No comments:
Post a Comment