[The Spirit of Catholicism] [Previous] [Next]
"I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill" (Mt. v, 17).
With the experience of Pentecost the new faith and the new fellowship of the faith entered history. Must we therefore regard the Church simply as the creation of the Spirit of Pentecost, the offspring of the faith, ultimately as the work of the glorified Christ manifesting Himself in the faithful, or does the Church go back to a positive and immediate foundation by the "historical" Jesus Himself?
The question is important not only for the more accurate definition of the aims and intentions of Jesus and therefore for the complete understanding of His historical figure, but also and more urgently for the authentication of the claims of the Church. The Pentecostal experience of the disciples would have been without roots, had it not been preceded by their historical association with Jesus, which prepared the way for their faith. And, similarly, the authority of the Church would be without a secure historical basis, if it were derived only from purely supernatural experiences. "Grace presupposes nature," which in this case means that the supernatural experiences presuppose historical facts. Experiences which rest in no way upon natural facts, cannot lay claim to any absolute validity, because they cannot be tested and controlled. The Catholic Church is therefore vitally interested in the establishment of the fact that she was not called into existence exclusively by the Pentecostal faith of the disciples, but that she is rooted in the thoughts and intentions of Jesus, which may be historically ascertained. She is the creation not only of the glorified, but of the "historical" Jesus.
The so-called "critical" theology positively denies any direct connection between Jesus and the Church. It regards it as scientifically proved that "Jesus of Nazareth did not found the universal Church of later centuries. There is no inward connection between Jesus and the Roman Church; they are separated by a profound gulf.[1] Yet it does not wish to deny that the deep gulf between Jesus and the Church is "exiguous and narrow," and that it even "seems in the end to close entirely." "The interval of time between Jesus and Catholicism is exceedingly small. The Christianity of the apostolic age is incipient Catholicism, and the catholicizing of Christianity begins immediately after the death of Jesus."[2]
Now that is a somewhat strange position. A mere historian might well be forgiven if he considered it odd that there should be a gulf between Jesus and the Church which is so narrow that it "seems in the end to close up entirely." It might well appear marvelous to him that the first disciples of the Lord, those who had seen and heard Him and must have known His mind, should "immediately after His death" set about catholicizing Christianity. And one might suspect, on "a priori" grounds, that there was some mistake in the "critical" argument. In order to get the matter clear, let us first examine our Lord's relations with Jewish worship and the Jewish Church, so that we may determine His attitude towards institutional religion. And, secondly, let us examine the fundamental ideas of His Gospel and see if they are really inconsistent with His foundation of a church. In this connection we propose to examine the scriptural texts themselves which testify to a direct foundation of the Church by Jesus.
No historian denies that Judaism in the time of our Lord possessed definite rites and an authoritative priesthood which performed and safeguarded those rites. Heiler is correct in asserting that the Jewish society in which Jesus lived and worked exhibited on its religious side "a striking similarity to Catholic ecclesiasticism."[3] What was our Lord's attitude toward this Jewish Church?
On one point there is surely agreement, namely, that Jesus should not be regarded—in the manner of many romances of the past and present—as an aggressive reformer, who raised the standard of spiritual religion and the love of God and attacked all external ordinances. On this point the evidence of the Gospels is too plain. So we are left to ask—and the question is in fact so formulated—whether Jesus did not by the novelty of His teaching, that is to say indirectly, undermine and uproot these external ordinances, and so annul and abolish them.
The attitude of Jesus towards the authoritative teaching of Judaism, as laid down in the Torah, is decisively indicated in His emphatic declaration (Mt. v, 17-18): "Do not think that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill. For amen I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall not pass of the law, till all be fulfilled." We have in this passage a genuine utterance of our Lord's, for St. Luke also, who has in his whole attitude some of St. Paul's independence towards the Law, gives this important saying, and puts it in the distinctive form: "It is easier for heaven and earth to pass, than one tittle of the law to fall" (xvi, 17).
Therefore our Lord's attitude towards the Mosaic Law, which comprehended both moral regulations and an abundance of liturgical ordinances, was by no means one of indifference, or one of unwilling tolerance. He is come for this purpose, and regards it as an essential part of His task, not to destroy the Law, but to fulfill it, down to its last iota. He explains in what sense He conceived this fulfillment in the verses which follow immediately, in which He presses for a fully spiritual interpretation of the commandments of the Law. "It was said to them of old: Thou shalt not kill. But I say to you that whosoever is angry with his brother shall be in danger of the judgment." So that He conceives the fulfillment of the Law as a moral and religious deepening of it, or, more precisely, as its permeation by love of God and of one's neighbor. Nothing whatsoever, He teaches, should be done in a merely external fashion, just because it is the Law. Everything should be done on interior principle, under the inspiration of the love of God and of one's neighbor. For on these two commandments "dependeth the whole law and the prophets" (Mk. xii, 29=Mt. xxii, 40). The six examples which Jesus gives all inculcate whole-hearted observance of these commandments. Indeed, such is His insistence on the law of love, that He is compelled four times to break the letter of the Mosaic Law. He sets Himself above even the authority of Moses; yet not in order to deny or destroy that law absolutely, but only to elucidate and fulfill it in its innermost meaning. The fulfillment of the Law means, in His eyes, that we should penetrate to the full depth of the divine intention and that we should bring out the truest and most profound meaning of the Law. Every legal ordinance is to be tested by this whole- hearted fulfillment of the two-fold law of love, and this is our Golden Rule.
Jesus subordinates the Mosaic law of the Sabbath to this rule. So long as the love of one's neighbor is not affected, this law remains obligatory; but if the two run counter to each other, and His hungry disciples are forbidden to pluck the ears of corn because it is the Sabbath, then the law must be subordinated to charity. "For the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath" (Mk. ii, 27).
And the same is the case with the Jewish sacrifices. Jesus twice cites the words of Osee (vi, 6): "I will have mercy and not sacrifice" (Mt. ix, 13; xii, 7). But both times His object is the same, namely, to spiritualize the current practice. God is a God of mercy. The man who offers God a sacrifice and yet is not merciful, does not offer a sacrifice which is acceptable in the sight of the all-merciful. The same idea is developed and illustrated in the Sermon on the Mount: "If therefore thou offer thy gift at the altar, and there thou remember that thy brother hath anything against thee, leave there thine offering before the altar, and go first to be reconciled to thy brother; and then coming thou shalt offer thy gift" (Mt. v, 23). Jesus does not wish to abolish sacrifice. He says expressly: "Come and offer thy gift." But it must be a sacrifice inspired by love and performed in love. When our Lord attacks the Pharisees and with prophetic zeal scourges them for their merely external observance, we should expect, if the views of the critical theologians are correct, that His words would breathe hostility to the Jewish ecclesiastical system and to its ritual law. We find, on the contrary, that His revolt against the pharisaical spirit is inspired by the profoundest respect for the temple and its worship. "The temple that sanctifieth the gold is greater than the gold, and the altar that sanctifieth the gift is greater than the gift. Whosoever shall swear by the temple, he sweareth by him that dwelleth in it" (Mt. xxiii, 17 ff.). Indeed, He regards the temple and its service as so holy, that when He sees it profaned by the money-changers and sellers of doves, He is roused to anger and takes up a scourge of cords (Mk. xi, 17; Jn. ii, 15). True, the temple was not the most sacred thing, nor was it to endure for ever. "There shall not be left a stone upon a stone." He Himself was the manifestation of something greater than the temple. When His work was complete, then the Father would be no longer adored in Sion only, but "everywhere in spirit and in truth."
His attitude towards the temple and its sacrifices is in fact distinguished, like His attitude towards the Mosaic Law, by a striving after interior, spiritual values. He destroys only in so far as the inner law makes destruction necessary. And in so far as the rabbinical dogma that the temple of Sion was eternal and the only legitimate place of worship, was at variance with His spiritual teaching, He resisted this Jewish attempt to give the temple such an absolute position; but He did not quarrel with the temple itself or its worship.
The same fundamental emphasis on spiritual religion dominates His attitude towards the Jewish authorities. It is true that He is kindled to a holy indignation by the hypocrites and blind guides among the Scribes and Pharisees, who tithed mint and cummin, but neglected what was more important in the Law: justice and mercy and faith (Mt. xxiii, 23). Yet the very preface to this vehement attack makes it plain that His protest is directed, not against the chair of Moses itself, but against the blind guides who sit in it. Here Jesus distinguishes expressly between the teaching and the teacher, or, as we should say, between the office and the person. "All things therefore, whatsoever they shall say to you, observe and do; but according to their works do ye not" (Mt. xxiii, 3). Therefore Jesus intends to preserve the principle of a teaching authority as such, and attacks only the perverse manner in which the Scribes and Pharisees realized this principle. To be sure, so far as this perversity was rooted in the nature of pharisaism, His attack on the blind guides becomes an attack on the institution itself, but it is not an attack on the principle of a teaching authority as such. On the contrary He expressly adopts and commends this principle in the same context: "Let one only be your Master, Christ" (Mt. xxiii, 10). And in so far as the disciples have to spread the teaching of Jesus, they, and St. Peter especially, are the appointed teachers of the kingdom of heaven.
The more we examine the matter the clearer it becomes that our Lord's attitude towards the Old Law is neither abrupt rejection, nor unwilling tolerance, nor entire acceptance. It is rather the attitude of one who wishes to complete and fulfill this Law, that is to say, a conditional acceptance. Because in the Judaism of the Pharisees the Law, the worship of the temple, and the official teaching had become externalized and divorced from spiritual and moral values, therefore Jesus could oppose only a decisive "No" to this rabbinical perversion of the Mosaic Church. "No man puts a new piece to an old garment, no man puts new wine into old bottles." To that extent Jesus is a conscious reformer. But in so far as the Judaism of His time rested on ordinances which were sanctified by the authority of Moses and aimed at the moral improvement of men, He acknowledges their inner value unequivocally. "These things you ought to have done, and not to have left the other undone" (Mt. xxiii, 23). That is the formula in which He Himself describes His fundamental attitude towards the Law of Moses.
Therefore it is not true to say that Jesus inwardly rejected all ritual, liturgical and hierarchical elements, and merely suffered that sort of thing as so much "background," without positively accepting it. In saying this the "critical" theologians fall all too readily into the error of defining our Lord's teaching exclusively in terms of its novel elements. But the truth is that the new rests on the old and is not to be separated from it. The teaching of Jesus is incomplete without both old and new. The basis of His teaching is no purely spiritual one, but it is the broad basis of the Old Testament religion handed down from Moses and the prophets, a basis which included both sensible and supra- sensible elements, both worship and morality, both a hierarchy and the individual conscience. It was upon this basis that He erected His new thing; or rather, He fulfilled the old and made it into the new. His teaching has a character of "unification, simplification and concentration"[4] in so far as He subordinated all external ordinances and regulations to the one thing necessary, the love of God and our neighbor. He restored to worship a guiding principle, gave it back its soul, its moral and religious significance. But, in doing that, He was restoring its original form and its true meaning as an expression and instrument of the supra-sensible. He did not destroy worship, but revived it. The old became new, and there was made one new thing.
We cannot, therefore, conclude from our Lord's attitude towards the Jewish Church, that He would have regarded the Catholic Church also as only so much background which had to be tolerated. For those very things which Jesus found lacking in rabbinical worship and teaching, namely, true spiritual religion and the love of God and of one's neighbor, these things are, as has been seen in the previous Chapters, of the essence of the Catholic Church. The dogma, morality and worship of the Church are Christo- centric, are spirit and life, and her organism is nothing else than applied love. There is in the Catholic Church nothing that is, or may be, purely external, without inner connection with the love of God and of one's neighbor. By visible things to the invisible: that is the fundamental principle of the whole system of the Church, and it is the principle also which inspired our Lord's attitude towards Judaism.
But though it be granted that His hostility to the Pharisees is not incompatible with His founding a Church, yet is not the rest of His teaching inspired by ideas which cannot be reconciled with such a design? Did not Jesus believe that the end of the world was at hand and that the Kingdom of God would come down from heaven in His own generation? The so-called "eschatological" school in particular lay great stress on this idea. It regards this "recognition of the eschatological character of the Gospel of Jesus" as the "Copernican fact of modern theology." "It overthrows the dogmatic structure of Catholicism with a single blow and unhinges the colossal fabric of the Roman Church."[5] If Jesus believed that the end was near, He cannot have regarded His group of disciples as a lasting community, and He cannot have committed to them more than a purely personal authority. If, then, we wish to secure the historical foundations of the Catholic Church, we must face this eschatological question squarely. The problem may be resolved, for precision's sake, into two particular questions. In the first place, we may ask, is the Kingdom of God which Jesus announced a purely celestial thing which descends miraculously from heaven at a definite point in time, or a Kingdom which has its commencement and its roots in our world and in our time, but which will reach its maturity and perfection only in the world to come? It is obvious that Jesus can have intended to found a Church, in the natural sense of those words, only in the latter case. The second question is intimately connected with this and is as follows: Did Jesus really share the error of certain apocalyptic circles of His time and surroundings, and believe that the Day of the Lord was very near at hand? If that be so, then again He cannot have founded a lasting Church. Let us now consider the first of these two questions.
Even the "critical" school must acknowledge that the theory that Jesus had in mind only a purely celestial Kingdom, which was to come down from heaven on to this earth—a theory first advocated by Reimar, then developed by Johannes Weiss and finally completed by Albert Schweitzer—cannot be supported by scientific theology. A glance at the Gospels is enough to convince any fair-minded person that Jesus was not an apocalyptic. Weinel is right in declaring that He belongs to the "main stream of Jewish moral and prophetic thought, and not to any eccentric movement or narrow coterie."[6] " He is interested in the accomplishment of the Kingdom of God in the living man of the present. His thought is for the "poor," for those outside the law, for sinners, the sick, children and for those who hunger for justice. He desired to sow the new seed of God's word in their hearts, the gospel of absolute trust in the Father, of love and humility even to the sacrifice of one's life, of inwardness even to the foundations of thought and desire. He regards the Kingdom of God as the incarnation on earth of purity, holiness and inwardness; as a thing thoroughly ethical in character. And so He tells the Pharisees expressly that the Kingdom of God cannot be observed and controlled like some astronomical phenomenon. "The Kingdom of God cometh not with observation. Neither shall they say: Behold here, or behold there." On the contrary, "the Kingdom of God is within you" (Lk. xvii, 20, 21). It is an inward spiritual force, it is a governance by God, which is already striking root all unheeded among the Jews, and which, in spite of its present smallness and in spite of all external obstacles, is asserting itself irresistibly like the mustard seed or the leaven (Mt. xiii, 31), or the grain which grows of itself (Mk. iv, 26 ff.). And Jesus is clearly conscious that the realization of this divine governance on the earth, this incipient incarnation of holiness and purity, is essentially connected with His Person. Men cannot be born again by means of mere ideas, but only by the profound power of the original, personal and divine life itself. Jesus knows that this fulfillment is achieved in Himself, that He is more than Jona and greater than Solomon (Mt. xii, 41, 42). The old era ends with John, the greatest of those born of women. The new era, the Kingdom of Heaven, has come. Therefore the least in this Kingdom of Heaven is greater than John (Mt. xi, 11). Jesus can testify: I saw Satan like lightning falling from heaven (Lk. x, 18). The strong man is bound and the Kingdom of Heaven has free passage (cf. Mt. xii, 29). To the doubters who asked for external proofs, He pointed to His deeds of power against the demons: "If I by the Spirit of God cast out devils, then is the Kingdom of God come upon you" (Mt. xii, 28). He Himself is the Kingdom. And this Kingdom is already beginning to send forth its first young shoots, men with trustful, childlike faith, the humble and loving souls of a Zacchaeus or a Mary Magdalen, and disciples who are ready to sell all to obtain the pearl of great price. And even the Scribe, who understands the law of love, is not far from this Kingdom (Mk. xii, 34). These and other Gospel texts place it beyond doubt that the Kingdom announced by Jesus is already present, not merely like "clouds that cast their shadows on the earth" (Johannes Weiss), but like a light that shines in the darkness (cf. Mt. iv, 16), which fights its way through to full day. The light must break through, and it is precisely in this process that the true character of the present Kingdom of God is manifested. For that Kingdom is not yet fulfilled. It has still to struggle with the evil forces of the world. It is like the field of wheat in which an enemy sowed cockle over night (Mt. xiii, 24). It is like the net in which good and bad fish are caught together. It is not yet finished and complete, but a compound of worthy and unworthy elements, which awaits the final selection, the harvest, the separation of spirits.
It is at this point that we meet that other aspect of our Lord's preaching of the Kingdom, its eschatological tendency and its preoccupation with the end of the world and the Judgment. The present Kingdom of God, because it is essentially unfinished, points beyond itself to that consummation, when all tares shall be removed and when the Kingdom of God shall appear in all purity as the newly perfected Kingdom of those loving souls who in the Name of Jesus have fed the hungry and given drink to the thirsty.
When Jesus employs the phrase "Kingdom of God" in its full meaning, He is thinking of this future Kingdom wherein God's rule is perfected. The beatitudes speak of this future Kingdom, and so does the prayer of the Paternoster, "Thy Kingdom come." In many of His parables and in explicit promises He directs the hearts and minds of His disciples to this great thing that is to come. Let your loins be girt, let your lamps be ready in your hands, the bridegroom cometh! This hope gives His message an immense power to enkindle and stir men's souls. It allows no easy acquiescence in the present, but requires us to be ever up and stirring, ready for the great hour. Now, that our Lord's teaching, on its eschatological side, culminated in this emphasis on the future Kingdom and the Judgment, cannot be seriously debated. But it is a far harder matter to determine from the Gospels His exact conception of the coming of the Last Day. Did he conceive it as an abrupt and catastrophic event, or as the gradual development of divine destructive forces which effected the Judgment in their process?
But one thing is certain, that Jesus taught plainly that the Kingdom which He had established in the immediate present was as yet embryonic, the least of all seeds, a tiny leaven, and that it was to pass from this embryonic state into full life and strength only after His death and because of His death, by a wondrous interposition of God. "And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to myself" (Jn. xii, 32). Not only St. Paul, but the Evangelists also know of our Lord's promise that after His death a great new thing was to happen, the visitation of the disciples by the Holy Ghost, "by the power from on high," as St. Luke says (xxiv, 49), by the "Consoler," as St. John calls Him. It is the plain conviction of early Christianity that this promise was fulfilled in the "mighty wind" of Pentecost, and that the small, embryonic Kingdom of God was then first awakened into full and fruitful life, into a life that was to fill the whole world.
From this we may conclude that our Lord's hope for the future was not concerned with the Last Day as an isolated event, but was concerned also with all those events which are essentially and actually connected with it and which lead up to the great separation of spirits: in particular, with His death and resurrection, with the outpouring of the Holy Ghost, with the founding of the universal Church, and—as necessarily belonging to this- -with the abolition of the Old Covenant and the downfall of Jerusalem. Precisely because Jesus knew that the Kingdom of God was already established in His own Person, because it was a central fact of His consciousness that the great separation of spirits, the judgment of the world, had already begun in His Person, He necessarily regarded all the events that depended upon His Person as particular moments of the General Judgment which was fundamentally and practically inaugurated with His Person. And so, proclaiming things in a prophetic manner, He made no distinction between today and tomorrow. He did not concern Himself primarily with the position of events in time and history; but in a single, powerful intuition comprehended their essential character, their real inner unity and their connection with His Person. The whole future, the destruction of Jerusalem as well as the establishment and expansion of His Church, was to Him the present, the present of His judgment. So His expectation of the Last Day embraced future generations along with His own, and He could threaten His own generation with the Coming of the Son of Man.
When is the exact day, the precise hour of His coming? If we formulate the question thus, we feel at once that it is an idle question, and we realize how impossible it is to believe that the Lord Jesus depicted in the Gospels, whose mind was so concentrated on the essential and real, not on the "when" but on the "what," ever expounded a chronology.
On the contrary it is to His disciples that we must attribute the attempt to fix dates. The age was inclined to apocalyptic speculation, and the disciples, influenced by its curious anticipations, were especially interested in the "when," that is to say, in the external and chronological aspect of our Lord's eschatology. And so, when they heard Jesus talking of the Last Day, they were disposed to conceive the main elements of His announcement, not according to the inner and essential connection in which He regarded them, but from a purely chronological standpoint, and so to weaken the whole force of His prophecy. And the evangelists manifest the simple fidelity of their record in nothing more plainly than in this, that in their manner of correlating our Lord's eschatological pronouncements with one another and with His other discourses, they represent the special interpretation, influenced as it was by traditional conceptions, which many of His disciples originally gave to the teaching of Jesus. Our Lord Himself expressly and finally refused to make any pronouncement regarding the day and hour of the Last Day. When the disciples asked Him when the sign of His coming and of the end of the world would appear (Mk. xiii, 4), Jesus declared without qualification: "Of that day or hour no man knoweth, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone" (Mk. xiii, 32). This is one of the most certain of all the sayings of our Lord and can come only from Him. For after His resurrection, when the glory of God had been manifested in His countenance, His disciples would scarcely have originated a statement so liable to misconstruction, as that even the Son did not know the day of the Judgment. We should therefore interpret all other sayings of Jesus in the light of this certain utterance. Jesus does not, as He might have done, answer His disciples with a pure distinction. He does not say that the Son of Man will assuredly come soon, but that the exact hour of His coming depends on the Father. His answer is rather an unqualified and plain "I know not." And therefore that statement of His which immediately precedes these words, that "this generation shall not pass until all these things be done," cannot refer to the definite day and hour of the General Judgment, but only to the events mentioned in His discourse, to those events introductory to the Judgment which were to occur in His own generation, and especially to the destruction of Jerusalem. Had Jesus contemplated an immediate coming of the Last Judgment, He would not have mentioned in the same discourse another series of signs which could not possibly be fulfilled in His own generation, such as fierce international wars, famines, earthquakes, universal hostility to Christians, the appearance of many false prophets, the preaching of the Gospel in the whole world (Mt. xxiv, 5 ff.). A very short time before His death, when the sinner of Bethania anointed Him, He returned to the last of these prophecies: "Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached in the whole world, that also which she hath done shall be told for a memory of her" (Mt. xxvi, 13). So Jesus contemplates a universal crisis which will last a very long time and include a very large number of events. As to when these shall reach their end, that is a matter which depends upon the Father alone.
Several of His parables point in the same direction. The wicked steward maltreats the servants and squanders the property entrusted to him under the pretext that "My lord is long a coming" (Mt. xxiv, 48). The bridegroom "tarries" so long, that the virgins awaiting him, the wise as well as the foolish, slumber and sleep (Mt. xxv, 5). The industrious servants were able to double the talents committed to them, before their lord returned "after a long time" (Mt. xxv, 19). It is not sane criticism to cancel all these significant indications simply because they conflict with our eschatological preconceptions. If we judge all the eschatological utterances of our Lord according to their true meaning, in the light of that central point with which Jesus was concerned, we shall find that they are nothing but a vivid and imperative summons to constant watchfulness and readiness for the Day of the Lord, come it when it may. "Ye know not when the lord of the house cometh: at even, or at midnight, or at cock-crow, or in the morning. Watch ye, therefore, lest coming on a sudden he find you sleeping. And what I say to you, I say to all: Watch!" (Mk. xiii, 35-7; Lk. xii, 37 ff.). The point that Jesus emphasizes is this, that His coming cannot be calculated beforehand, that it breaks in suddenly, as unexpected as a thief in the night (Lk. xii, 39), as instantaneous as a flash of lightning (Lk. xvii, 24), as quick as the snare that entraps an animal (Lk. xxi, 35). From a psychological standpoint we can readily understand how the disciples, haunted by the apocalyptic prepossessions of their time, and not so profoundly versed in the mind of their Master as were the twelve, interpreted the suddenness, speed and unexpectedness of the parousia to mean a proximate and imminent coming of the Lord, and how this misunderstanding long maintained itself among them, being supported by their personal desires and by the hopes of their time. Yet the apostles and evangelists were aware that our Lord Himself had not said that he would come soon, but that He would come suddenly. The Acts of the Apostles records the fact that the risen and glorified Christ also expressly declined to say whether He would restore the kingdom of Israel in that time (en to Chrono touto): "It is not for you to know the times or the moments, which the Father hath put in His own power" (Acts i, 7 ff.). It was this realization that the notion of a proximate coming of the Judgment did not rest on the clear promise of the Lord, but was derived only from their own opinions and desires, which spared the young Christian communities all those disappointments and troubles which they must else have suffered when the return of the Lord was delayed. The demolition of the old hopes was effected without friction. In the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians there is left but a faint echo of them, while in the Gospel of St. John they disappear completely. But there is one thing which did not disappear, and which abides even to the present day, namely, the true declaration and plain promise of our Lord, His great message: The bridegroom cometh, therefore be ye ready!
And so, to conclude, an estimate of the nature of the Church in the light of our Lord's eschatological teaching yields these two points: In the first place we see that the foundation of the Church is in the direct line of His thought. For the very reason that the Kingdom of Heaven is established in the immediate present and must by the Father's will wait a long time yet for the Coming of the Bridegroom, it is necessary that the pearl of great price should be provided with a protective shell, that the new spirit of God's governance should have a body, in order to pass unscathed through history. But since this present Kingdom is completed only in the future, therefore the life of the Church also is ordinated towards that future. The Church, founded on the one Peter, is a society awaiting the parousia, and her nature is fundamentally eschatological. And so her dogma is in its purpose a preparation for the future vision. "Now we see only a mirror.... but then face to face." Therefore her creed closes with the confession of belief in the life everlasting. Her liturgy seeks to adumbrate and anticipate by means of visible and transitory signs the glories of eternity. Her sacraments are anticipatory pledges of a future consummation. They convey that light of grace which is to pass one day into the light of glory. All her prayers and all her penance are inspired by the great hope: the Lord cometh. And so in her attitude she is not of this world, but of the next. Of course she recognizes and uses the things of this world, but she does so only so far as they relate to the other world and to the life eternal. Just as her Lord and Master saw and valued all contemporary events only in their inward connection with the great thing that was to come, so the Church also affirms in every present thing only its final and eternal value. She enlarges our life, and raises it from transitory values into eternity. She grasps the future in the present, and eternity in time. The Christian at prayer knows not time, as mere time. He does not allow himself to be governed by time and its movement. He is not the plaything of time, but lives in the eternal. His attitude is consciously supra-temporal. He "uses the world as though he used it not. For the fashion of this world passeth away" (1 Cor. vii, 31).
And, therefore, the Church has no use for any merely human and temporal civilization; her ideal is an eternal one, and consists in the establishment of God's Kingdom in the souls of men. Wherever a purely human ideal seeks to assert itself and men are taken captive by values less than the ultimate value, then the Church proves herself an irreconcilable opponent. This is the point in which she separates herself most profoundly from the world. She cannot rest in time. Whenever a purely worldly outlook shows itself, whether it be in the university, or in the busy marketplace, or even in the home, she will never cease to cry her "Be ye ready!" to all and sundry. This is the vital center of her being. Wherever the Church encounters the world, in philosophy and science, in politics and law, in art and literature, there the eternal impinges on the temporal, the divine on the human, and the Kingdom of Christ on the kingdom of this world.
That is the first point. And the second point is this, that the Church, in the light of our Lord's eschatological teaching, is seen to be necessarily incomplete and imperfect. The Church of the present is not as yet the whole and full Kingdom of God. It is a field of wheat in which there is still much cockle, a net that contains both good and bad fish. True, the spirit that dominates her is the Spirit of Jesus, and the forces that pulsate through her are the living forces of her risen Savior. But the men in whom this divine life is active are men confined within the bonds of their corrupt bodies, and therefore they are incomplete men and will remain so, until the Lord come. Moreover there will always be men in whom God's word does not take root, and who will be like the cockle and grow till the harvest. That is the tragedy of the Church and God's present Kingdom, that there should be this contrast between her temporal manifestation and her divine idea, between her actual state and that great and holy thing which liveth in her. But our hope is not illusory: this tragedy shall receive its happy solution on that day when Christ comes again. The Catholic turns his gaze away from all imperfection and wretchedness, from his own sins and the sins of his fellow Catholics, and looks forward with confident hope—exactly as did the first Christians of Corinth and Thessalonica—to the day when the Bridegroom shall come. Maranatha—come, Lord Jesus!
Endnotes
1. Heiler, op. cit., p. 43.
2. ibid.
3. ibid ., p. 25.
4. ibid., p 35
5. ibid ., p. 3.
6. H. Weinel, "Biblische Theologie des Neuen Testaments" 1918, p. 82.
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