Where Is the Church?

Sooner or later, in every storm, the frightened heart asks with the Psalmist: If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do? Which is to say, it asks the oldest question: where is the Church? When hierarchs err and councils quarrel, when the buildings are held by one party and the truth seems to lodge with another, where shall I find her, to whom the promises were made?

The question is not new, and the Fathers answered it in days darker than ours. Their answer has two halves, and both must be held; for each, without the other, becomes an error.

THE FIRST HALF: WHERE THE TRUE FAITH IS

The Church is found where the true faith is. She is not located by grand buildings, by great numbers, by ancient addresses, or by the presence of important men. All of these she may have, and all of these have, at one hour or another, been in the hands of heretics. Saint Jerome, remembering the Arian noon within living memory, said it without softening:

And Saint Maximus the Confessor, standing almost alone against the thrones of his day, gave the same answer as a definition:

And behind them both stands one of the most ancient voices of the Church, Saint Irenaeus, the disciple of Polycarp, who was the disciple of John, binding the Church, the Spirit, and the truth into one knot that no age can untie:

But the Spirit is truth: that final clause carries all the weight. If the Spirit is truth, then a body departed from the truth has, in the departure itself, lost its claim upon the Spirit's presence, whatever buildings and titles it retains. The Fathers never separated the three things this sentence joins; neither may we.

THE SECOND HALF: THE VISIBLE BODY

The Church is a visible Body with visible marks, and the true faith does not float free of her order. She is found where the true faith is confessed, and the true Mysteries are celebrated, and the apostolic succession of ordination in the confession is kept: the pillar and the ground together, the hands and the faith together, as the first chapter taught.

Whoever seizes the first half alone concludes that the Church is wherever he and his opinions happen to be, and becomes his own pope in a congregation of one. Whoever seizes the second half alone concludes that the Church is wherever the certificates and the buildings are, whatever is preached in them, and follows the vestments into the pit. The saints held both. They sought the true confession, and they sought it embodied: in real bishops, real altars, real Mysteries, even when these were hidden in the wilderness. And God never left them without it, for He has promised that the Church shall endure to the end.

THE PROMISE RIGHTLY READ

That promise must now be weighed exactly, because it is misused in two opposite ways. The Lord said: upon this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

From this, some conclude that nothing need ever be done, since the outcome is guaranteed. The promise becomes a pillow. Others, seeing hierarchs fall, conclude that the promise has failed and the Church has perished from the earth. The promise becomes a tombstone. Both have misread what was promised.

The Lord promised that the Church as a whole shall never fail from the earth. He nowhere promised that any particular see, hierarch, majority, or generation cannot fall. History is the commentary. The world groaned to find itself Arian. The thrones served iconoclasm for a century. Every patriarch but one subscribed at Florence. And of the seven churches of Asia, to whom the Lord Himself wrote, He warned that the candlestick of any might be removed out of its place, and the traveller may see today where they stood.

The manner of the promise is as important as its scope. God kept the faith through the Arian noon not by suspending it in the air, but through Athanasius, through the confessors, through the faithful who would not commune with the lie. The promise is fulfilled precisely in such people, and by means of them. The certainty of the harvest has never excused the sower; the guarantee of the city has never discharged the watchman. The gates of hell shall not prevail: this is a charter for courage, not a licence for sleep, and still less a warrant for despair.²³

And beneath every shaken hour stands the Apostle's bedrock, on which the confessors of every age have set their feet:

TWO OBJECTIONS ANSWERED

Two objections must be answered before we go further, for they are heard everywhere.

The first says: if nearly the whole visible hierarchy can be captured by error for a generation, then Orthodoxy's claims collapse, for she staked everything on her bishops. But this refutes a claim the Orthodox Church never made. It is the Roman confession, not ours, that staked the faith on the guaranteed reliability of a living hierarch. Orthodoxy has never taught that any bishop, patriarch, majority, or assembly calling itself a council is immune from error. She teaches that the Church as a whole, across the ages, cannot fail; and that her final judgment is the council received by the whole Body. As the Eastern Patriarchs confessed in 1848, among us the guardian of religion is the very body of the Church, the people itself. Precisely because she never deified the hierarch, she has survived, again and again, the hour in which hierarchs fell. If the objection were sound, Orthodoxy was refuted by the year 360 and has not existed since. Instead, out of each collapse she rose, gathered her councils, condemned the error, and glorified the confessors through whom the promise had been kept.²⁴

The second objection is the whisper of despair, and it will meet us again in this book, for it is the special temptation of the zealous. It says: the apostasy has now become total; the grace has departed from all but a remnant; the Church survives only in this or that little party which alone has kept the faith. To this the whole of Church history answers with one voice: it has never once been true, and to believe it is to call the Lord's promise broken. In the darkest hours the Church was smaller than men thought, and greater than the remnant thought. She was in Athanasius, and also in millions of simple faithful whose names God alone knows. And every party that ever declared her perished outside itself ended, as we shall see in the chapter on the counterfeit wall, by withering into a sect. The confessor seeks the Church where the true faith is; he never pronounces her dead where his eyes cannot see her. Between those two sentences runs the whole difference between confession and despair.

THE TEST OF THE AGES

One test remains to be given, for the reader will need it when we come to the crisis of our own age: how does a Christian recognize that a teaching is false, without setting himself up as a judge over the Church? Saint Vincent of Lérins gave the golden rule:

Everywhere, always, and by all: the faith of the ages is the measure, and the individual believer's task is not to invent a judgment but to recognize one. When a new teaching contradicts what the Church has confessed in every land and every century, the believer who says so is not judging. He is remembering. The beloved disciple commands the very act: Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.

And Vincent himself pressed his rule into the darkest case, the case this book must also face. What if the novelty should infect not a corner of the Church but, to every visible eye, the whole? He answered without flinching:

Cleave to antiquity: the faith already delivered cannot be corrupted by tomorrow's fashion, for it is finished, and it is on record. Vincent wrote with the Arian noon in living memory, when the contagion had in fact reached nearly the whole visible body; and his counsel then is the Church's counsel now, not a new judgment, but a tighter grip on the old one.

This distinction, between the private opinion that condemns and the common memory that recognizes, is the key that will unlock the fifteenth canon two chapters from now. Carry it with you.