The Early Church at Work and Worship - Volume 1

Ministry, Ordination, Covenant, and Canon

Ferguson

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781630871680
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This is the first volume of Ferguson's collected essays, and includes some of his most memorable work, especially on laying on of hands.

1

Images of the Church in Early Christian Literature1

The study of ecclesiology often deals with the institutional, external aspects of the church. Less attention has been given to the nature or essence of the church. One approach many have found helpful in studying the essential nature of the church is by way of the images employed in reference to it.

The value of this approach in regard to the New Testament was demonstrated by Paul Minear’s impressive and influential compilation of Images of the Church in the New Testament (1960). I covered the images used for the church in the New Testament in my book The Church of Christ: A Biblical Ecclesiology for Today (1996). Herwi Rikhof, The Concept of the Church: A Methodological Inquiry into the Use of Metaphor in Ecclesiology (1981), and Avery Dulles, Models of the Church (1987), examined imagery in contemporary theological discussion of the church. Less attention, however, has been given to the use of images for the church in Christian writers of the early centuries after the New Testament. Thomas Halton’s collection of sources, The Church (1985), for the series Message of the Fathers of the Church (volume 4) gives only 10 out of 234 pages to “The Images of the Church,” noting the church as sheepfold, as edifice, as mother, as bride of Christ, and as the sheet let down from heaven in Peter’s vision (Acts 10:9–16). E. Glenn Hinson’s nearly contemporary collection of sources, Understandings of the Church (1986), for the series Sources of Early Christian Thought gives no explicit treatment of images for the church.

This situation changed somewhat with the massive, nearly 700 page, work of F. Ledegang, Mysterium ecclesiae: Images of the Church and Its Members in Origen (2001).2 Ledegang’s comprehensive study groups the scores of images and related terminology in the writings of Origen into six categories: body of Christ, bride of Christ, family, house and sanctuary, people of God, and “the earth and all that is in it.” For this paper I will take Ledegang’s six categories and give a passage from Origen and then some passages from Origen’s chronological predecessors and contemporaries.

What is immediately evident in these images for the church is that they all emphasize the communal aspect of Christian faith and life. This communal emphasis stands in contrast to the individualistic approach of so many of the expressions of Christianity in the modern Western world. Most of these images are rooted in Biblical usage. They, furthermore, testify not only to the importance of the church in Christian thought, but also to the relation of the church to key theological concepts.

Body

My approach is to give a passage from Origen and then some passages from his predecessors and contemporaries. Of Origen’s extensive use of the body imagery I select one passage not from a commentary or homily that explicitly refers to its scriptural basis.

We say that the divine Scriptures declare the body of Christ, animated by the Son of God, to be the whole church of God, and the members of this body—considered as a whole—to consist of those who are believers. Since, as a soul vivifies and moves the body . . . , so the Word, arousing and moving the whole body, the church, to the things that need to be done, moves also each individual member belonging to the church, so that they do nothing apart from the Word.3

Origen in the context uses the analogy of the church to a body, animated by a soul, to support the union of the soul of Jesus, perfect man, with the eternal Word, Son of God; but he is drawing on 1 Cor 12:12 and 27 and Rom 12:4–5.

Origen’s predecessor, Clement of Alexandria, made use of the body imagery for the church. In commenting on Ps 19:4–6, he quotes some who say that the “Lord’s tabernacle is his body,” but others say, “it is the church of the faithful.”4 Clement of Alexandria, like Origen, uses this imagery of the church as the body of Christ to reason back to the nature of Christ. He alludes to 1 Cor 12:12 with the words, “As a human being consisting of many members . . . is a combination of two—a body of faith and a soul of hope—so the Lord is of flesh and blood.”5 In an extended commentary on ...