Times of trial and testing can make us doubt a great many things. When they occur within the Church, they can very easily obscure reality, skew our perspective, and in the worst cases, push us to the point where we abandon faith.
A conflict arises among members of the parish that the priest can’t begin to deal with adequately, and the situation festers like an infected sore. A respected lay leader is arrested for selling child-pornography over the Internet, and the congregation goes into shock. On websites and through other media there circulate charges of financial mismanagement at the highest levels of church governance, and local communities become polarized over the entire messy issue.
Whether these things occur on a local or a national level, insofar as they impact us directly they represent powerful and sometimes overwhelming temptations. If things get bad enough, they can make us want to pack our bags and get out, to say “good riddance”—or something more expressive—to the whole matter, and give up altogether on “the Church.” For recent converts to Orthodoxy, it may be especially difficult. After all, many of them left their “former delusion” following a time of protracted and intense disappointment. Their first experiences in Orthodox worship gave them a sense of joy and hope at finding what they took to be “the true Church,” the place where salvation is offered in an atmosphere of beauty, faithfulness and love. Then comes Reality, or so it seems.
What indeed is “the true Church,” and just where do we find it?
The only possible way to answer the question is to go back to the sources of Orthodox faith, to Scripture and the whole of sacred Tradition. Those sources, though, need to be seen for what they are: the witness of people who have been there before us, who lived through times of trial and tribulation that make today’s disillusionments and frustrations seem less than momentous and hardly devastating. Recall, for example, the Church’s martyrs, from apostolic times to the present; or the internecine strife that left battle scars on bishops and lay theologians of the first ecumenical councils; or the tragic schism symbolized by the date 1054; or the fear and misery of so many Christian believers under the yokes of Islam, then communism, then Islam again. Then think, too, about the state of some other Christian confessions, where preachers and theologians are inveighing against everything from traditional belief in the divinity of Christ to the notion that a child in the womb might possess some inherent value.
This is not to make light of our own difficulties or to deny the need for appropriate action to clean house and redress wrongs. It is simply to say that the Church we long for, the Church that leads us to the threshold of the Kingdom of God, is already present; it is in our midst, even “within” us (Lk 17:21).
People have often resorted to a dualistic ecclesiology in an effort to find “the true Church.” They have imagined the “institutional church” as the weak, fragile and often corrupt reality made up of concrete human communities: parishes, monasteries, seminaries, and chanceries. The “true Church” they imagine as located beyond all that: an invisible, invincible, all-holy reality that encompasses angels and the blessed departed. Whether this dualistic view focuses on the “visible” and “invisible,” or on the “Church militant” and “Church triumphant,” it represents a widespread and regrettable distortion of what our “sources” know to be true.
According to those sources, those living witnesses, the Church is One: undivided in its faith and its inherent structure. It is characterized by a total and essential continuity: from Creation, through the Incarnation and Resurrection of Christ, to His Second Coming. This continuity extends vertically as well as horizontally. It embraces not only the temporal past, present and future, but also the things of earth and the things of heaven. The Church encompasses all of time and space, immanence and transcendence, ourselves and the communion of saints, earthly existence and heavenly glory. The Church is the Bride of Christ, His Beloved, for whom He offers the supreme sacrifice. Symbolized by Eve, drawn from Adam’s side, the Church flows forth in visible form from the wounded side of Christ.
“The Word was made flesh, and the Church is a member of Christ’s Body, she who was born of His side by water and received life by His blood. That flesh in which the Word was born, who exists from all eternity as Son of God, dwells among us sacramentally…. The Church is made up of publicans and sinners, of people from among the nations. Only the heavenly Second Adam is without sin. Nevertheless, the Church will be saved despite her sin, by bringing into the world offspring who will persevere in their faith.” (Hilary of Poitiers [+367], De Mysteriis 1.3)
In this perspective, the Church is the visible yet transcendent locus of our sacramental communion in Christ. Constantly filled with the Pentecostal outpouring of the Holy Spirit, she reveals, manifests, and makes present the Word of God to the world. The Church indeed is Christ, the living and life-giving Body of which He is the Head. Yet the Church is also us: simple, sinful people, called to persevere in our faith, to offer mutual forgiveness for our foibles and transgressions, and to witness to God’s love for each of us and for the world that considers itself to be beyond the Church’s borders. This is why our “sources” speak of the Church as a theandric or divine-human reality. She may often manifest herself as fragile and sinful, a very human institution. But in her essence, her innermost reality, she remains the transcendent Body and Bride of Christ, the Temple of the Holy Spirit, and the locus of true worship that unites our mundane lives and activities with the ceaseless celebration of the saints and the angelic host.
The Church of Christ is everywhere. It fills the cosmos, both visible and invisible. However bitter its struggles and frail its human institutions, it will pursue its mission until the end of time. And not even the gates of hell will prevail against it.