Friday 25 July 2014

The Kingdom and the Church in Roman Catholic Thought

Alfred Loisy (1857-1940), a French Roman Catholic priest and theologian who was later excommunicated, observed that "Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom, and what arrived was the Church" ("Jésus annonçait le Royaume et c'est l'Église qui est venue"). He seems to have made the remark with a tinge of sadness.

The statement is not altogether wrong, but it is defective in bracketing out Christ. The kingdom of God is embodied in Christ who established the church as the community in which His rule is acknowledged, celebrated and lived. It would be reductionist to identify the kingdom of God directly and solely with the church, and especially so if one were to overlook that the church is more than a human institution here on earth, but it would also be reductionist to think of the arrival of the church as merely subsequent to the proclamation of the kingdom rather than a direct and intended consequence of it. 

There is a close and intimate relationship between the kingdom of God and the church but this does not mean that whenever we read "kingdom of God" in the Gospels, we must see a reference to the church. This has become a contentious point especially with regard to some of the parables Jesus told which were traditionally interpreted as making direct reference to the church.

It is noteworthy that commenting on the parable of the weeds in Matthew 13 Daniel J. Harrington, S.J. claims that "there is no reason to identify the kingdom of the Son of Man with the Church" (Sacra Pagina, 206). Similarly, Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri write in The Gospel of Matthew (Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture): "the parable encourages patience with the presence of wickedness in the world (13:30a), it also provides assurance that the faithful children of the kingdom will be vindicated and the wicked will face severe judgment."

Patience is obviously  called for also within the church and it is certainly true that the church contains both the faithful who belong to the kingdom and the unfaithful who belong to the Evil one and will do so until the final judgement. But just like Reformed commentators today by and large no longer claim that the parable of the weeds or the parable of the net is about the inevitability of the church being a corpus mixtum, so these Roman Catholic commentators no longer make this claim. Are they out of line? It seems not.

This is what the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith says in Dominus Iesus
"The meaning of the expressions kingdom of heaven, kingdom of God, and kingdom of Christ in Sacred Scripture and the Fathers of the Church, as well as in the documents of the Magisterium, is not always exactly the same, nor is their relationship to the Church, which is a mystery that cannot be totally contained by a human concept. Therefore, there can be various theological explanations of these terms."
 And specifically
"To state the inseparable relationship between Christ and the kingdom is not to overlook the fact that the kingdom of God — even if considered in its historical phase — is not identified with the Church in her visible and social reality."
This seems to leave freedom for interpreters to explore the precise relationship between the kingdom and the church, as long as their inseparable relationship is acknowledged.

In his essay on “The Church and the Kingdom: A Study of their Relationship in Scripture, Tradition, and Evangelization,” Letter & Spirit 3 (2007): 23-38, Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J offers the following reasons for not equating God's kingdom and the church:
"Some competent scholars continue to maintain that the Church in the New Testament is identical with the kingdom of God. This opinion is, in my judgment, too narrow. The kingdom, as I have said, is sometimes identified with the work of Christ in his public ministry, even prior to the founding of the Church. At other times, the kingdom is treated as a future eschatological reality. Even after the Church is established, Christians still have to pray for the coming of the kingdom, as they do in the “Our Father.” Then again, Jesus indicates that the kingdom will be taken away from the Jews (Matt. 21:43), but the Jews never possessed the Church. Furthermore, metaphors such as the hidden treasure and the pearl of great price (Matt. 7:44-46), which are depicted as standing for the kingdom, are difficult to apply to the Church. One may conclude then, that while many kingdom sayings in the New Testament can be applied to the Church, the kingdom and the Church do not fully coincide."
He observes that "Augustine is often considered the author of the idea that the Church and the kingdom of God are identical" but notes that "Augustine sometimes points to differences between the Church and the kingdom.”

Cardinal Dulles further observes: “In the documents of the Catholic magisterium, the kingdom is frequently depicted as in some respects transcending the Church.” Dulles makes reference to two encyclicals by Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano (1922) and Quas Primas (1925). 
“In both these encyclicals he pointed out that Christ’s empire is all-encompassing; it includes the secular as well as the religious, the temporal as well as the spiritual, the natural as well as the supernatural. The Church, on the other hand, has a limited sphere of authority…According to Pius XI, therefore, the reign of Christ is not restricted to the Church.”
More recent popes have stressed the link between the kingdom of God and the church, arguing against secularist interpretations that have gained ground in modern times. Dulles sums up John Paul II as saying (in Redemptoris Missio): 
“The kingdom cannot be detached from the Church any more than it can be detached from Christ, for Christ has endowed the Church, his body, with the fullness of the blessings and means of salvation. The Church has a specific and necessary role in the process of salvation, for it is commissioned to announce and to inaugurate the kingdom among all peoples."
But even so "The same pope is willing to say, as did Paul VI, that the Church is at the service of the kingdom.”

In some sense, God's kingdom must be said to be bigger than the church because Christ has been given authority not only over the church but over heaven and earth. In another sense, the kingdom is present wherever Christ is present and this is especially so where two or three are gathered in his name and where Christians eat and drink the meal Jesus gives them.

In one sense, God's kingdom relates to the whole world because he rules over all.  In another sense, God's kingdom relates to the domain in which his will is accepted and this relates to the church, albeit imperfectly. In still another sense, God's kingdom has only truly come into its own where God's will is unswervingly done and in this sense we pray "your kingdom come!"

Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration (London: Bloomsbury, 2007):
"When Jesus speaks of the Kingdom of God, he is quite simply proclaiming God, and proclaiming him to be the living God, who is able to act concretely in the world and in history and is even now so acting." (page 55) 
The new and totally specific thing about his message is that he is telling us: God is acting now -- this is the hour when God is showing himself in history as its Lord, as the living God, in a way that goes anything seen before. "Kingdom of God" is therefore an inadequate translation. It would be better to speak of God's being-Lord, of his lordship." (page 56)
"The new proximity of the Kingdom of which Jesus speaks - the distinguishing feature of his message- is to be found in Jesus himself." (page 60)

[[ Another quote I wanted to have in my scrapbook.]] The German Franciscan Hilarin Felder wrote: “The dominion of God over the world, or the kingdom of God in the world, was in general the sum total of all hopes for the future. The whole Old Testament is filled with the idea, which Jesus summarized in the words: ‘Thy kingdom come.’” (Christ and the Critic, 2 vols., trans. John L. Stoddard; London: Burns Oates and Washbourne, 1924, 153; cited from Brant Pitre, “The Lord’s Prayer and the New Exodus,” Letter & Spirit 2 (2006): 69-96, p. 82)