The Church of the Holy Spirit

Books of comparative religion such as I used to read way back in university (such as Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions) gave the reader the impression that all religions, if not the same, were at least similar and that Christianity was one of the world’s religions. 

The notion was an old one:  G. K. Chesterton (d. 1936) wrote in his The Everlasting Man about how different faiths were grouped together as if each were a different species of the same genus:  “We are accustomed to see a table or catalogue of the world’s great religions in parallel columns until we fancy they are really parallel.  We are accustomed to see the names of the great religious founders all in a row: Christ; Mahomet; Buddha, Confucius. But in truth this is only a trick; another of these optical illusions by which any objects may be put into a particular relation by shifting to a particular point of sight.”  For Chesterton the Christian Faith was not at all like the other faiths: “The Church,” he wrote, “is too unique to prove herself unique.”

       I agree.  And we can see the uniqueness of the Christian faith (i.e. the Church) when we compare it to the religious world in the first centuries of the Church’s existence.  We are accustomed to talk now about that religious world by using the term “paganism” as if paganism was one thing.  But it was not.  Paganism was a thousand and one things.  It was the offering of dead animals (i.e. sacrifice) to Zeus and Apollo; it was the cerebral machinations of the high-minded philosophers gassing away (sorry:  “philosophizing”) on their porches among their disciples; it was desperate people resorting to spells, amulets, and dark witchcraft to get what they wanted; it was the orgiastic rites of people working themselves into a frenzy; it was the earnest and wistful quests of those seeking immortality through the Mystery Religions.  It was all that we find today in the Indian subcontinent and the regions of Africa. 

It was, in fact, the natural faith of mankind, frightened and groping toward the light in the midst of their self-created darkness.  The Hebrew religion was, of course, the sole exception, and the Hebrews knew this only too well.  That is why they had such disdain for the Gentiles and why they knew that Israel was different from the nations in kind as well as degree.

       What all these faiths had in common was that they all felt that the world as they knew it was the eternal stage on which the human drama had always been and would always be played out, and that the gods were up there and separated from us, and that we could strive to favourably reach the gods by doing things.  Exactly which things, of course, differed according to group, but all felt that religion was the instrument by which the gap between mankind and the gods might be overcome.

Most pagans felt that the cyclic was fundamental to existence and that the ceaseless alternation of the seasons gave the clue to the ceaseless cycle of all existence.  Each season returned again and again and history was not heading anywhere except for where it had already been. 

Put differently, history had no real telos, no goal—or at least no goal that was different in kind from what had already been.  Nationalisms aside (and the Romans were nationalists par excellence) history had no ultimate meaning—at least not for the average peasant or worker trying to make a living and get by.  Roman rhetoricians might praise the Roman empire as the key to history’s meaning, but that didn’t mean that much to the guy at the bottom rung of the empire, taxed to death and struggling to live. For them survival was more important than meaning and history wasn’t leading anywhere except to the grave.

Then came the Christian Faith, building upon and claiming to embody and fulfil the hopes and visions and desires of the Hebrew prophets before them.  That faith proclaimed that history was indeed heading somewhere, that it had a purpose and goal.  That goal was the resurrection of all the dead and a totally transfigured world, a world in which weakness, disease, and death no longer ruled or had a place.  In other words, this age, suffused with suffering and cursed with mortality, was going to have a definitive End and then a new Beginning. 

More astonishingly, the Christians proclaimed that this transition from our own age of suffering and death to the coming age of immortality and joy had already begun.  The passage from one age to the other, the hinge on which everything in the world swung, was the resurrection of the dead and the Christians shockingly insisted that the resurrection had begun to take place.  The resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth whom the Christians confessed as God in the flesh, crucified as a rebel against Roman rule under Pontius Pilate and raised from the dead on the third day, marked the beginning of the final resurrection.  St. Paul said it clearly enough: “Each in his own order:  Christ the first fruits, after that those who are Christ’s at His coming.  Then comes the end when He delivers up the Kingdom to the God and Father” (1 Corinthians 15:23-24).  In other words, the final resurrection was already under way. No wonder St. John said, “Children, it is the last hour” (1 John 2:18).  Religion, universally understood as the instrument for favourably reaching the gods, was now no longer necessary, for the true God had Himself come down to earth in Jesus of Nazareth and sent the Holy Spirit to give life.

Crucial to our understanding of the nature of the Church is how the final resurrection and the age to come will come about.  That is, the power which will raise the dead and transform the world is the Holy Spirit, confessed in the Creed as “the Life-giver”.  It is through the Holy Spirit that the cosmos will be regenerated, brought to new and immortal life, and born again.  That is why the Lord referred to the age to come as “the regeneration” in Matthew 19:28. The Holy Spirit is the power of the age to come; here in this age, the Spirit is the presence of the future.

The Church is the home of the Holy Spirit, the epicenter of His activity, the sphere where the Spirit is poured out and actively works.  Absolutely everything that savingly happens in the Church is the work of the Holy Spirit.  Sinners are regenerated in the waters of baptism by the Holy Spirit, receiving in their own souls and bodies a foretaste of the power which will one day regenerate the cosmos.  Christians receive bread and wine as the Body and Blood of Christ by the transforming power of the Holy Spirit, invoked upon the Church and its offering in the Eucharist.  Men are set apart for their calling as leaders and servants in the Church in ordination by the power of the Holy Spirit.  The sick anointed with oil are healed by the power of the Holy Spirit in the sacrament of unction.  Physical things such as icons, the cross, the relics of the saints, all have power to heal and banish darkness by the power of the Holy Spirit.  Miracles of prophetic clairvoyance and healing are done by the power of the Holy Spirit.  Every single baptized Christian becomes a temple of the Holy Spirit and begins a life of righteousness and victory over sin by the power of the Holy Spirit.  It is by this internal anointing of the Spirit that the Church is ultimately led into all truth (see John 16:13, 1 John 2:27).  No wonder that one theologian (Nicholas Afansiev) referred to the Church as “the Church of the Holy Spirit”.

All of this makes the Church (as Chesterton said) “too unique to prove herself unique.”  In none of the other religions of the world do we find this reality.  In the Church alone (i.e. in Christ alone) do we find the presence of the future savingly active in our midst, creating a renewed and transfigured human nature.  Ancient paganism is so far in the past or is so far away geographically and we have become so familiar with the pneumatic vocabulary of the Church that we cannot easily discern the difference between the Church and the religions.  The ancient pagans and the ancient Christians discerned the difference all too well—which is why the Church experienced growth even when it was under persecution.

The ancient pagans experienced the Church as something brand new—startlingly and dangerously new.  To quote Chesterton once again, “It was as if a new meteoric metal had fallen on the earth.”  Some were attracted to it.  Some, then as now, were not.  All realized it was different in kind from anything that had gone before.

This is what is meant by saying that the Church and its faith are eschatological.  The Church came into being and continues to exist by the presence of the Holy Spirit in her midst.  The Holy Spirit, being the power of the age to come, gives the Church her eschatological character, for the Church lives by the power of the age to come and is already planted in that age.  In this age she is and must be a stranger and a sojourner.  Religions are native to this age and are characteristic of this age.  Religion will always be at home here and (to the chagrin of people like Richard Dawkins) will always be welcome here. 

Not so the Church.  The presence of the Holy Spirit in our midst means that we will never be at home here and will often be not welcome here either.  That is why one of the first prayers of the Church, dating from the time when its native tongue was Aramaic, was “Maranatha!”, “our Lord, come!”  We love our neighbours, of course, and the countries where we now live.  But we long to go home.  We are an eschatological people and don’t really belong here.  As the people of the Holy Spirit, we belong in the age to come.