Alexander Schmemann

3. The Age Of The Ecumenical Councils (50 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 20

Two Communities.

We know that in the minds of Christians from the beginning the Church had been a new community, a new people of God, created through the sacramental new birth by water and the Spirit. This birth had given Christian life a new dimension. It had introduced it into a Kingdom that was not of this world, and had brought it into communion with the life of the world to come, still concealed from sight, so that while remaining on this present earth the Christian became a citizen of another world as well, through the Church. “You have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” The Church, in other words, had been divided from the world not by persecution or rejection alone, but by the incompatibility of its most sacred essence with anything earthly.

As late as the fourth century the borderline between the Church and the world had been clear; by no means all believers accepted baptism, so strong was the awareness of the break connected with this sacrament. St. Basil the Great, for example, was baptized as an adult, and St.
John Chrysostom denounced those who put off baptism, thus postponing the time when they would part with their “pleasant” lives. By the fifth century, however, this external borderline gradually began to be effaced; the Christian community increasingly coincided with Byzantine society as a whole. Yet still in the doctrine and mind of the Church the principle remained inviolate that the Church is a community “not of this world,” as distinct from a “natural” community, and if we explore the text of the liturgy we see that it still remains a closed assembly of the faithful and not a public service which anyone who enters may attend.

The fact that the bounds of the sacramental community of believers coincided with the bounds of the natural community — an inevitable result of the acceptance of Christianity by the whole empire — does not in itself represent a departure from the original teaching of the Church about itself. Had it not been sent to all men? Its methods of preaching and action among men changed somewhat; its services developed and became more solemn; the Church embraced human life more widely; but essentially it remained what it had been and should be, an assembly of the people of God, summoned primarily to bear witness to the kingdom of God. The Eucharistic prayer still preserves this eschatological aspiration, and each liturgy proclaims the ultimate otherworldliness of the Church and its adherence to the age to come.

The coincidence between these two communities meant, however, that from the time of the Christianization of the empire the boundary between the Church and the world had gradually shifted from an external one dividing Christian from pagan to an inner one within the Christian mind itself. The Christian belongs both to the Church and to the world, but he must recognize the ontological distinction between them. Striving as a Christian to illuminate his whole life with the light of Christ’s teachings, he still knows that his final value and final treasure, “the one thing necessary,” is not of this world; it is the kingdom of God, the final union with God, the perfect joy of eternal life with Christ. He anticipates this joy in the Church, in its assembly, when in the breaking of bread it “heralds the death of the Lord and confesses His resurrection.” While joined to the world through each of its members and being itself a part of it, the Church as a whole is the mystery of the kingdom of God, the anticipation of its coming triumph, and therefore also, in the final analysis, free and distinct from the world.

 

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