Dear Theophilus, 

I received your letter recently and was interested in your comments. You raise the question of the Church and maybe it is time that we looked at what the Church is because there are very many wrong ideas as to what the Church is and what the Church's role is.

Any consideration of the basis for the Church must consider the person of Christ, its founder. The Church in this case does not refer to the stone or wood building where worship is carried out, but refers to the body of believing worshippers united in their fellowship through Jesus Christ. In the New Testament, this is always seen in the light of the Church being a growing, thriving, developing organism and thus St. Paul refers to it as the Body of Christ. This is a very mysterious saying but it is important for us to try to understand at least some of what it means..

In some sense, the Church is divine and the Church is human. What are the factors which point to it being divine? First, the Church was founded by God in the person of Christ who at the Last Supper said: do this in remembrance of me. There is a command to perform an action and this implies continuity and a creation of an institution to carry out this action. At the same time, we can clearly see the human response of the Apostles and those who followed them listening and obeying Christ's command. Here we have the human component - the human response to the divine initiative.

The Church also witnesses to her divine basis in the sacraments which are offered and enacted within her. Here, the materials of the world are used as vehicles for spiritual blessings. To take one example, the sacrament of baptism uses water for regenerating and redeeming a human being. The actual baptism begins with the sanctification of water, water which signifies judgement (you can drown in it) and cleansing (you wash with it). Matter is not evil in itself but, cut off from God, it takes part in the rebellion against God. Through sanctification matter is now seen as not existing autonomously from God but as existing as a path toward God.

Probably the most powerful expression of the divinity within the Church is the fact that she is called the Body of Christ. This can be understood in a variety of ways. The Church is the Body of Christ in that she is a Eucharistic community, a group of people who participate in the Last Supper. They come to Church and they join in the prayers whereby the bread and wine are transformed into the Body and Blood of Christ. Here, we do not see ourselves as repeating the Last Supper, or multiplying it into millions of copies over all these centuries; what we are doing is continuing the Last Supper which is present there and then, while we are worshipping. In effect the Church is an eschatologically oriented body which transcends linear time. (Eschatology is the study of end times.) What this means is that the Church is not bound by passing time as we understand and experience it - the Church also participates in eternity, in God's time. We often hear of the fall corrupting matter and the world but, we more rarely, hear of time being also disfigured, but, the effects of the fall are so widespread that time that we experience becomes mainly a destroyer, a bringer of death. This is clearly shown in our understanding of memory versus the understanding expressed in the New Testament and in Judaism. For us, memory is a bitter sweet remembrance of things as they were, never to be repeated or enjoyed - it is over, done with, finished. For the Church, memory does not imply the past, but the present, for the whole world exists because it is upheld in the "memory" of God. Memory for the Church is thus not a passive, helpless faculty but an active, life-giving one and the reason why we don't experience it in this way is due to the distortion caused by the fall. With God, time is expressed as eternity, a constant present, without decomposition or decay. When we celebrate the Liturgy, what we are doing is stepping out of disfigured time into God's time. In this time we can be present and are, at the Last Supper and at the Second Coming. This, of course, is very difficult for us to comprehend because we are so involved in passing time - in chronos as it is called in Greek - but, we should realize that our time is not as absolute as it first may appear. In the physical sciences, it has been proposed that time is relative depending on the speed being experienced by a body. Permit me to give you an example as it is related to medicine so that you may see that what we are considering isn't simply some abstract and meaningless intellectual exercise. There are certain radioactive particles which could be used to kill cancerous cells but the problem is that they themselves, the particles, exist for such a very short time and then decompose that they are useless as such. However, if we accelerate these particles, we find that we can extend their lifetime showing that time is not absolute. In this manner, they can be used to kill malignant cells and are so used in therapy. From this we can see that the time that we experience is not absolute. Therefore, the Church's statement that at the Liturgy we are experiencing eternity - time different from passing time - is not contrary to clues given within creation itself. We see here a duality within the Church - she is within time and outside of it.

The Church is the Body of Christ at an even more fundamental level. The early Christians were faced with a dilemma of trying to explain why Christ had come. This question, of course, is the crux of Christianity and since it is so important, no single answer was found to be totally and completely satisfactory. Some attempted to see in Christ an example of how a human life is to be lived in face of adversity: it should be lived in total trust in God. True as this is, it falls short of explaining how Christ actually changed the relationship between God and man. Another view, continuing ideas originating in the Old Testament, saw Christ as ransoming us through his sacrificial death. He laid down his life so that we might be freed from sin and from bondage to the Devil. There is much truth in this view, but there remain serious questions - to whom was the ransom paid and why?

Probably the most widespread view of Christ's work was that of victory. But, victory over what or whom? And the near unanimous reply would be - victory over death. Salvation means freedom from death. The reason why Christ had come and had died is so that death would be changed from a "dead end" into a "passover", a passage to something else and that something else is life with and in God. Note the words used here: life in God. Christ says that those who believe in him have already passed through death into life. In other words, Christ's redemptive work lies in the fact that he accepts us into Himself in some mysterious but actual way, and by living in him here and now, we will live in him after our biological death. Now, you may say to yourself: what does all this have to do with the Church? Well, if Christ is in me and he is in my neighbor, and Christ cannot be divided, then I and my neighbor and all believers are one and this very union we call the Church. Salvation is never an individual matter carried out in isolation and it is in this light that the early Church viewed the fact that Christ's Resurrection does not only concern Christ but involves the whole of the Church. In the classic Byzantine icons depicting the Resurrection, Christ was shown with those who were resurrected with him. Salvation is a personal matter in that it involves personality and the essence of personhood is relationship with other people. Thus, the statement that we are saved in and through the Church is theologically true. What is contradictory and false is to say that one is a follower of Christ and at the same time, not a member of the Church.

The Church may therefore be called an Incarnational Arena. It is incarnational in the sense that the believers in the Church permit God to be present in this world in a very real and evident manner. The Church can be likened to God's limbs through which He shapes the world. But this is not a one-sided relationship for through the Church, man is given the opportunity to be "incarnated", that is, to exist in a genuinely personal manner in the world to come, the world subsequent to biological death.

What significance does all this have with our daily lives? This is a very important question in light of the experience that most of us have had coming to Church and seeing it virtually empty, or coming for a service where the main concern of those attending is to exchange social news, and so on. What this points out to us and teaches us is that not we, but God who initiates, guides and gives power to the Church. This is done through our conversion. So the first and most crucial step is to be converted or else, everything that I have written to you will appear, if not nonsense, then idealistic expressions of nice sentiments with no relationship to reality. On being converted, we become clothed in the Body of Christ in a real and experiential manner, and since we are in the Body of Christ, then we will see everything through his eyes. This means seeing in each person at the given Church service a word of God and by communion with these people, we will recognize sentences that God directs to us. It is through these people, who are as fallen as we are, that God is speaking to us and we should pray for ears to hear what He is saying to us. Our relationship to others in the Church is the acid test of our spiritual state. If we condemn others, or if we go to Church and get nothing out of this exercise, then this is an indication of spiritual malaise not within the Church, but within ourselves.

I know what you are going to object to and I will address it right now. A lot of the language used is poetic and really has no connection with reality. I know you will say this because a lot of people feel the way you are feeling. This is a pity and an impoverishment because we can talk about the world only in a scientific and objective manner as if this leads to truth whereas all other languages are false. But just think what would happen if tomorrow science were to be removed, how would you talk about the world? The world would still be there and the language of poetry, of metaphor, of symbol is just as valid as any other language and should not be dismissed out of hand just because it does not have the clarity or simpleness of mathematical descriptions of the universe. Don't let the precision of scientific language fool you into thinking that this is the only way to approach reality.

Yours, as always,

Bar-Abbas

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