The Origins of the Church
From whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love.
Ephesians 4: 16
In Sunday school this week, the path of going through the Old and New Testaments has reached the Epistles of which 13 letters were from Paul to the new churches he founded. So, I was thinking about the founding of the Church which begins in the New Testament with Matthew 16:18. Then is more formalized in Acts with the spread of the Gospel from Jerusalem to whole world i.e., the Roman empire by means of small congregations. (Acts 2: 1 - 4; Acts 2: 41 – 47)
And then Paul writes letters to either encourage or chastise the small congregations as they are growing. Examples of this are in Ephesians 4: 1-16 and 1 Corinthians 12: 12-31.
The Eastern Church associates itself strongly with the Apostolic tradition from the above-mentioned verses. We, westerners, forget that the Church began on the east coast of the Mediterranean in Jerusalem and then expanded to Damascus where Paul met Ananias, Tarsus, Philippi, Thessaloniki, and Corinth among other small congregations. The Epistles are letters to these churches from Paul along his 4 missionary journeys.[i]
The Church was one Church until the schism of 1054 between the Latin and Greek elements. The eastern Greek Church has continued much as it started in Apostolic times unknown to the western world due to what I hope is mostly a language difficulty but with some obvious cultural differences as well.
While the Eastern Church has beautiful buildings, it’s concept of the Church is not centered on an earthly foundation. The Church is founded on 2 fundamentals found in scripture: 1) the Body of Christ (Christology) and 2) pneumatology or the fullness of the Holy Spirit.
What does this mean? The Body of Christ is described in 1 Corinthians 12: 12- 26 where all parts of the body have importance and are necessary to for the body to live where Christ is the head. We are both the body of Christ and members individually.
The 2nd part is more difficult to visualize about the “fullness of the Holy Spirit” or that the Church is the icon of the Holy Trinity. What does this mean? Vladimir Lossky writes that this is the unfathomable mystery of the Church, the work of Christ and the Holy Spirit, one in Christ, multiple through the Spirit, a single human nature in the hypostasis of Christ and many human hypostases in the grace of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit communicates Himself to each person and opens to each member the body of Christ with the fullness of the divine inheritance.[ii]
Lossky says the Eastern Church thought is not about impersonal mysticism or divine nothingness but as an ascent towards the infinite. This ascent is not to a nature, an essence, nor a person, it is something that transcends all notion of nature and persons, it is the Trinity. Τριας or three is perfection and goes beyond dualism of the Platonists. The Trinity, St Gregory Nazianzen says it is a “name which unites things united by nature and never allows those which are inseparable to be scattered by a number which separates.” Further St Gregory says, two is the number which separates, three the number which transcends all separation: the one and the many find themselves gathered and circumscribed in the Trinity. St Basil says this Trinity is not a quantity which can be used for calculation but a symbol which realizes itself with ceaseless flow where one passes into one and into the other reciprocally reflecting each other.
I can think of 2 examples. One the beautiful painting by Andrei Rublev, The Icon of the Trinity[iii] and a more modern but much less eloquent example of a Venn diagram of 3 circles standing all on top of each other but sometimes depicted as a classic Venn diagram.
Rublev’s depiction is more beautiful unless you prefer the architectural simplicity of the Venn diagram. The Rublev painting depicts the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit sitting at a table each looking at each other in a circular fashion but you should also notice is there is an open seat in the front from the perspective of the on looker inviting our participation.
[i] Litsa I Hadjifoti, St Paul, His Journeys through Greece, Cyprus, Asia Minor, and Rome, M. Tourbis Editions S.A., 1993, http: //www.toubis.gr
[ii] Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, Ch. Two Aspects of the Church, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, New York, 1976
[iii] https://orthodoxwiki.org/Andrew_Rublev