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THE PROBLEM OF THE MIXED COMMUNITY We have been arguing that as a member of a believing community the Christian holds his faith in fellowship with all the faithful, saying not only ‘I believe’ (credo) but ‘we believe’ (credimus). The conception that it is faith which is central to the Church's apostolicity was not new among the reformers. It was already well developed in the Carolingian period. Christianus of Stavelot, a contemporary of Hincmar of Rheims, says that everyone who believes and confesses the faith with Peter deserves to be called an apostle as much as he. So important is the collective confession of faith by believers that Luther argues that it is this which makes the Church identifiable as a visible community. But it was also apparent to the reformers that the machinery for the collective expression of the faith has not always worked smoothly, either in Councils, or through the offices of those with a responsibility for oversight. Why has there frequently been imperfect consensus, periods of learning from mistakes, and so slow and patchy a growth in understanding? A reason for this to which Augustine could subscribe as readily as a modern commentator is that in the deep structures of decision-making human needs and failings are accepted and allowed for, and the mode of our learning together is in tune with the enabling of our growth in holiness through living together in the faith. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Underlying both the debates about practice and the doctrinal debates on matters of authority lay questions of another order about the authority on which the authoritativeness of any statement about authority is to be judged. These were of particularly acute concern in the sixteenth-century debates, as reformers pressed for reliance upon ‘Scripture alone’. Inseparable from the question of the primacy of Scripture was a complex of difficulties at this level to which sixteenth-century scholars gave a great deal of attention as they struggled to define the way in which Christ is to be made in practice the ground of all truth in Christian believing, and to understand the manner in which that truth might be expressed in the words and experience of the community of his people first and supremely in Scripture, and also in the continuing life of the Church. Problems of authority at this level lie behind all that was said in our opening chapters about the status of the written and intellectual resources on which the sixteenth-century combatants drew in their debates. We have seen how there grew up a tendency to think in terms of a ‘power-struggle’ between the divine gift of Scripture and the rival authorities of human scholarship, human fancy, human reasoning, human opinion, human tradition, and above all a ‘human’ Church authority. Contemporary work on the text of the Bible in Greek and Hebrew challenged such simplifications at innumerable points, and a good many individuals found themselves at times exasperated (Erasmus), or unable to reconcile a scholarly with a partisan position (Eck). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We do not seek unity because we can approve of one another. We seek it because, when we refuse to do so, we treat with contempt the immeasurable kindness of our Lord who has accepted us as we are in order that he may make us what he would have us be. (A–R, 123b) In the last analysis, perhaps we must say that the sixteenth-century debates failed in the attempt to convince and persuade opposing parties that there was a common truth upon which they could continue to build a common ecclesial life, because the urge to unity was simply not strong enough. The doctrine of the Church which Augustine held made schism the worst of heresies. The sixteenth century did not share that priority. The adversarial character of the debates made for polarisation, and the opposition of elements which we should now see as complementary in the balanced ecclesiology of a united Church. Classic principles of formal ‘order’ were reinforced in the Roman Catholic community to the point where rigid rules were imposed as a condition of membership. The reformers tended to place the emphasis on the individual's relationship with Christ, with a correspondingly undeveloped theology of community; and with the strengthening of notions of Scriptural primacy and rights of private judgement in interpretation, over against the community's consensus expressed through time. There was a danger of imbalance on one side in favour of what can be called ‘descending’ authorising and on the other in favour of an ‘ascending’ authorising; on one side a preference for a central and on the other a prejudice in favour of a ‘diffused’ authorising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Melanchthon proposed a compromise in the matter of the powerlessness of the human will to do good, which was later adopted by the framers of the Lutheran Formula of Concord of 1577. He says that although man's will cannot choose the good in spiritual things (because without the help of the Holy Spirit it cannot even understand what is good), it is possible for human beings to identify what is reasonable in ‘external, temporal and civil affairs’. This anomalous and imperfectly accounted for exception reflects a more pervasive difficulty experienced by the reformers in accommodating secular rule and civil affairs within the religious sphere, and balancing the authority of Church and state. Luther and Melanchthon were among a number of reformers who decried the habit of thinking about the Church's authority in a political way. The Pope is not a magistrate, says Luther, seeking to separate spiritual and temporal jurisdiction as being of different sorts, and to get away from the political analogy. ‘Human polities are bound to a certain succession; they have their laws and power to interpret their laws; they have degrees of persons, kings, dukes; they also have their glory … the Church is not such a polity.’ The particular difficulties involved were in part a matter of contemporary vocabulary. As nineteenth-century debates might emphasise ‘duty’ and today's language might be of ‘responsibility’ and ‘service’, as a democratic model replaces a paternalistic or imperial one; so for the sixteenth century the key concern was with notions of princeliness and magistracy, and their application to the government of the Church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

FORGIVENESS SEALED AND RENEWED The doctrine of justification by faith (with its insistence upon the freedom and completeness of the transformation of the individual's position before God) was not intended by Luther to conflict with the theology of baptism. But he did intend it to show that an elaborate penitential system was unnecessary, and its ‘imposition’ on the faithful dangerously likely to distract them from the great simple truth of their redemption. The new emphasis brought into clear view once more an anomaly which had in fact existed for many centuries. As a rule, the first generations of Christians were baptised as believing adults, able to declare their faith for themselves and to make a deliberate choice in committing themselves to Christ. The response of faith and the rite of baptism went together without strain. There was an emphasis in the first Christian centuries on the power of baptism to wash away sin and also its consequences; and a concomitant discipline which expected those who were baptised not to fall into serious sin again, for it would make a mockery of baptism to suggest that it could be repeated. Not every community was willing to restore to fellowship those who did lapse, and where penitents were readmitted they usually had to demonstrate the sincerity of their repentance to the community so that there could be no doubt about it. Penitents were marked by the wearing of special garments, and they performed various penitential acts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

OVERSIGHT AND DISCIPLINE: OFFICE OR POWER? Although Luther's recommendations to the Bohemians were offered as an emergency solution, he took the underlying theology to have more than interim force. The local focus prominent in Luther's attempts to solve the Bohemian problem, and in the ‘gathered churches’ of some branches of the reforming movement, rests on the best authority. The local church as a territorial entity under the leadership of one presbyteros or episcopos was the fundamental unit of Church organisation in the early Church. The territorial principle of ‘one priest one church’ is insisted upon throughout the Middle Ages. No priest is to abandon the church ‘to which he has been blessed and married’. To give a church two rectors would be ‘spiritual bigamy’. No-one may preside in two bishoprics and no-one may receive in his diocese any priest who does not belong there. But such strictures in the mediaeval period were always understood within the context of the wider Church, a community extending through time and throughout the world. Difficulties about ‘order’ in its wider structural sense quickly became apparent in Lutheran and other reforming communities, as they began to discover that in escaping from the ‘tyranny of clerical dominion’ they were in danger of losing something of that order which had from very early times been inherent in the visible structure of the Church. The new worshipping communities which gathered round the reformers soon found a practical need for a ministerial office which included a power of governing in a larger sphere than that of the local congregation and which could exercise discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE PRIESTHOOD OF ALL BELIEVERS One of the most far-reaching of the perspectives of the Second Vatican Council was to view the Church ‘from the starting-point of baptism’, so that the ordained ministry is seen not as possessing a ‘higher power’ but as ‘a service at the centre of the Church community’. To say that ‘the greatest day in the life of a Pope is not that of his election or coronation, but the day on which he receives that which the Greek Fathers call the holy and unbreakable seal of baptismal regeneration’, is to reverse the assumption which was causing difficulty in the late Middle Ages and the sixteenth century: that that which is common to all is of less value than that which is committed only to some. For that carries with it its concomitant problems of resentment, and a sense of alienation among those who are not ordained. That had been and remained the nub of the problem about the authority of the ordained ministry in the Church. Waldensians in the twelfth century, Franciscan factions upholding the virtues of poverty from the thirteenth, a growing number of critics both within and outside the ranks of the clergy, contrasted the simplicity of Jesus' life with the pomp and display and wealth of the higher clergy. While the Church was the only alternative to a military career for the well born, and the higher offices in the Church were filled with scions of the nobility, there were bound to be many who entered the Church from worldly motives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In The City of God Augustine develops two related ideas. The Church includes all the elect, those who have already died, those still living and those yet to be born, in a bond of unity which transcends the ties of this life. It is therefore a community whose invisible reality is only imperfectly and partly embodied in its visible presence on earth. Secondly, because the human community on earth includes members of both ‘cities’, and because (as Augustine held) only God knows who are his elect, the ostensible Church membership here and now is in fact a mixed community. Wheat and tares grow together until harvest. The principle is echoed in Thomas Becon, Anglican reformer and Homilist, in his Catechism; he points out that ‘This word “Church” in the Holy Scripture is taken not only for the fellowship or company of the good and faithful, but also of the wicked and unfaithful.’ Augustine saw it as essential that the earthly community should preserve its unity as one body, saints and sinners together; no-one should presume to have special knowledge which enabled him to say who were God's people and who were not. There was thus a built-in tension in Augustine's ecclesiology. Visible and invisible Churches have different constitutions. The difficulty Augustine threw into relief arises in part from a doctrine of election which denies that anyone but God can know who are the elect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]