What is the Church?

Many answers have been given to this, answers that seek to give an overall definition of the essential nature of the Church. All revolve in some way or other around the central theme of the Church being a community of the redeemed. Some definitions may concentrate on the institutional side of the Church and define it along the lines of an institution founded by Christ for the salvation of souls. Other definitions may concentrate more on the relationship between the members of the Church, stressing that they all share a common faith and profess their sharing in a common salvation or unity in Christ. Moreover, some definitions focus on the visible aspect of the Church, while others may wish to stress the invisible bonds created by the Spirit's action, the Spirit's grace that is the life-blood of the Church. The former will define the Church mainly in visible terms, the latter will define it mainly in terms of the elect, unknown to humanity but only to God. Then there are those who stress the invisible aspect of the Church so much that they virtually exclude the visible Church from their definition, while others will attempt to bring both visible and invisible aspects into their definition. But all the definitions revolve around what the Creed calls ‘the communion of saints’, which is the unity and spiritual sharing existing between all those justified and sanctified in and through their unity with Christ.

All the definitions imply that in the Church we see the divine-human community (the linkidea in this book) taking shape. We saw that God is a community and created humanity as a community, the purpose being that the two communities would become one. The unity between the two communities was forged by the incarnation of the Son and the outpouring and indwelling of the Spirit of love binding Father and Son to each other. The Church, then, is the place where we see this divine-human community taking shape. This is the basic idea behind the statement of Catholicism's Second Vatican Council that the Church is ‘a kind of sacrament or sign of intimate union with God, and of the unity of all mankind’ (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, I,1).