The Bride of Christ, Part 2

How the house don't fall when the bones are good

02/13/2024

Today we pick up again the subject of the nature of the true Church. Yesterday we began to see the Catholic Church more clearly when we held it up next to Protestant churches in general, sort of juxtaposing them side-by-side as people decided to leave one and enter the other. Today we must address another preliminary matter, namely, did Jesus want to establish a church in the first place? If we find that Jesus had no intention of founding a formal church with some specific structure and a stated purpose, we can end this study, close our Bibles, and go home. It is popular to ask: WWJD, meaning, What Would Jesus Do? in this or that specific situation. We too want to base our understanding of the Church on our Lord’s intentions regarding the Church. In other words, just like we want to do what Jesus would do today, so too we want to build on the foundation (if any) he laid 2,000 years ago. And so it is incumbent that we ask: did Jesus lay any foundation for a church at all?

One would think the matter was settled once and for all as soon as we read Mt 16:18, the famous dialogue at Caesarea Phillipi. There Jesus plainly declared his intention about his Church to his first pope: “And I tell you, you are Peter and on this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.” What could be more clear and unassailable than that Jesus’ intention was to create a Church so stalwart and enduring that not even Hades could defeat it? And yet this is precisely what people cast doubt on and some even deny. How do they question what seems Jesus’ manifest intention? Some Christians create a false dichotomy between a spiritual and invisible church (on the one hand) and a structural and visible church (on the other hand), and further insist Jesus came to establish the first but not the second. Sometimes you hear an echo of this thinking when people say: “What difference does it make what church you attend as long as you still believe in Jesus? After all, we are all worshiping the same God.” Have you heard people say that, or maybe expressed that opinion yourself?

I can sympathize with people who hold that view, especially Catholic parents who raised their children Catholic, but who now attend non-denominational churches. But notice what they are implicitly asserting about Jesus’ desire in Mt 16:18: Jesus did not come to establish a structural, visible, hierarchical, even juridical church, but rather a fellowship or spiritual community of believers whose primary source of unity is faith in Jesus. But this same fellowship of believers could be dramatically divergent – even contradictory – on other matters. In other words, just like we ask today WWJD, so we must ask retroactively, what did Jesus do in Mt 16:18? Did our Lord establish, as Cardinal Avery Dulles put it in his quickly-becoming classic Models of the Church: “a formally organized or structured society [or] an informal or interpersonal community (p. 39). This unhealthy bifurcation between society and community, at least in part, explains the exponential growth in so-called non-denominational churches like Community Bible, Fellowship Bible, and Life Church, etc. Please don’t misunderstand me. I have no doubt there are countless genuine and zealous Christians filling the seats in those churches. And in noteworthy ways their faith puts Roman Catholics to shame. Scott Hahn once said that Protestants do more with what little they have than most Catholics do with the fullness of faith that we possess. So, Catholics have no cause for boasting.

Nonetheless, are those spiritual, invisible, fellowships and community churches what Jesus intended to establish in Mt 16:18 when he said, “on this rock I will build my Church”? I believe the correct answer is “Yes” but with the caveat that Jesus intended more than that. That is, our Lord desired both a spiritual community but also a structural society, an invisible fellowship but one supported by a visible institution, people filled with the gifts of the Holy Spirit but also governed by canon laws, or again as Avery Dulles articulates it: “a community of men primarily interior but also expressed by external bonds of creed, worship, and ecclesiastical fellowship” (p. 48). Perhaps a comparison to the human body would be helpful. Just like you need a strong skeletal system (bones) to provide a rigid structure to support the muscles and organs so that a person can run and jump, dance and sing, so the spiritual side of the church needs the structural, formal side to support it. They work in tandem and in unison, not in opposition or competition. Indeed, they are symbiotic and cannot stand alone. As Maren Morris sang, “The house don’t fall when the bones are good.” She was talking about her loving relationship with her husband and comparing it to a house that stands strong because of a solid deep commitment that is the supporting structure, the bones. That combination of love and laws, of both the spiritual and the structural, is the Church that Jesus intended to establish in Mt 16:18.

May I just point out the four pillars or the structural bones of the house of the Church that Jesus constructed? This is how the four basic sections of the Catechism of the Catholic Church are often described. Are you familiar with how the Catechism is divided into four parts or pillars, or I would say bones? The first pillar or bone of the house of the Church is “The Profession of Faith,” the Creed we recite every Sunday. Jesus started outlining this Creed in Jn 14:1, where he asserted: “Believe in God; believe also in me.” The second pillar or bone is “The Celebration of the Christian Mystery,” which is essentially the seven sacraments. Jesus manifests his intention regarding celebrating the sacraments starkly in Jn 6:54 about the Eucharist, “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.” The third pillar or bone is called “Life in Christ,” which consists of the Ten Commandments and the Christian moral code. Jesus’ intention regarding Christian conduct is explicit in Mt 5:27-28, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” And the fourth pillar or bone is “Christian Prayer,” which entails the long tradition of prayer modeled by numerous saints and mystics but all pouring forth from the fountainhead of the Lord’s own prayer, the Our Father. Jesus intentions and teaching about the Lord’s Prayer can be found in Mt 6:5-15, and in particular verse 9: “This is how you are to pray.”

These are the four pillar or structural bones upon which Jesus first erected his Church. Again, this formal, structural, and visible church is in no way set in opposition to or competition with the informal, spiritual, and invisible fellowship and community of believers. Both are held in a healthy and holy tension, one as necessary as the other, and that is why Jesus included both of them in his Church from the beginning. “The house don’t fall when the bones are good.”

Praised be Jesus Christ!