What is the Great Hall? It is not the New Jerusalem nor an invisible “type” or (Platonic) “form” of the perfect church. The Great Hall isn’t the invisible grouping of all born-again Christians in the world or in time. Nor is it the invisible array of all church entities spread across denomination and space. It is a metaphor, and thus amorphous, both more and less than each and all of these. Yet physical churches are offshoots and instantiations of the Great Hall.
To use early Christian categories, the Great Hall is “Mother Church”–the one Church of Eph. 4 and of the Nicene Creed. The imagery of motherhood, it turns out, is a good one. It is also a very ancient one, probably stemming from the NT itself (cf. Gal. 4:26, 2 John 1; and possibly Rev. 12:17), but definitely and explicitly with Irenaeus, Cyprian, and Tertullian. These guys are very early, and their geographic separation, attesting to the same metaphor, suggests that the archetype is earlier. To scorn the metaphor is to reject the earliest Christian experiences, categories, and descriptions of the Church.
The Great Hall includes the heritage and sum experience, rich and growing richer all the time, of all true churches. It is genuinely and fully connected to all times and places, but it is not equally accessible to all churches. Why not?
The Greek word we render as “church” (ekklesia) literally means “those called out” and it refers to a (singular) collective entity. God is the caller, and He calls one entity. That is, rather than viewing the ekklesia as a bunch of called individuals who voluntarily affiliate with one another, it refers to a divinely-called community to which individuals may be attached. Do you see the difference?
There is a perspectival issue in play between Catholic and Protestant conceptions of the Church. We must understand that a communal view of terms and passages is closer than one based in Enlightenment and early American ideals–both of which emphasize the individual and the individual’s personal choices. That simply isn’t the cultural starting point for first-century people.
And this leads to what I say next, which comes only from a place of linguistic conviction and theological necessity: the Great Hall is and can only be “Catholicism”.
Not Roman Catholicism per se, although Ι believe she most fully incorporates it–numerically, historically, and theologically. That is, Roman Catholicism understands this identity and the unity that it is and orients herself around it, and in this way is different from all other groups who make exclusive claims. But the Great Hall isn’t coterminous with Roman Catholicism. As Vatican II’s Unitatis redintegratio (“Decree on Ecumenism”) makes clear in section 3, “the separated Churches and Communities as such, though we believe them to be deficient in some respects, have been by no means deprived of significance and importance in the mystery of salvation.” And yet, if a church is not invited in by those inside, if it is not willing to permanently open its own doors to that Great Hall, it is not attached to the Great Hall in the intended way.
The Great Hall is the “place” where churches connect, affiliate, and become one with each other and the unbreakable, original Church of the past, the one that has been here since Acts 2, the one that the apostles authorized and led, and the only one that can make any claim to originality. “Catholicism” is, in its very terminological roots, the assertion that the Church must be connected wherever and whenever it is, and this is integral to what it is. “Catholic” is the statement that the Church that God has called and promised to protect (Matt. 16.18, “and the gates of Hades will not prevail”), this Church has a real, tangible, explorable, and sometimes gritty history as deep as the New Testament because it has planted itself all over the world in a network of churches which exist in an intentional union, common doctrine, common sacraments, common leadership, and common heritage. It is the same Church through which God gave us the Scriptures and which holds the interpretive keys to those Scriptures. In sum, we should all desire “catholicity”, for unity is its basic assertion.
Moreover, the Great Hall is essentially part of every church that is explicitly and consciously and intentionally and visibly and demonstrably connected to it–to that common identity, structure, belief system, and history. And when that connection is as it ought to be, it is like the doors between the peripheral, individual church and the Great Hall are permanently propped open (only schism can close them), and that church becomes part of the heritage and experience that belongs to the Great Hall, and people can move from one offshoot into the Great Hall and peer at their sister churches. Because, after all, the doors are all permanently propped open. It becomes, in a real sense, one very large, open building where people can freely roam about in community with one another. But only if the doors are permanently propped open.
With respect to any given Protestant church, I can roam freely from my church, through the propped open door into the Great Hall, over to her door. But her door, like most Protestant doors, is not propped open, let alone permanently propped open.
You see, the door isn’t open by default. An open door doesn’t represent an attitude that values unity or an affiliation with a multiplicity of churches (although such things are good). Neither is the door opened by desire. It is not opened by commonality of doctrine. It may only be opened through a visible and intentional connection with a specific network of churches–those with doors propped open to both one another and to the one Church of history. These latter points (i.e., a church must be connected to the one Church of history and that one Church of history must authorize that connection) help us to understand why just any church affiliation does not and cannot fulfill the ideal unless they are attached to and affiliated with the one Church of history. And the door can only be opened from the inside.
Unfortunately, Protestant churches have very discrete and specific inception points very late in history. In addition, arguably all but inarguably most were born in contradistinction to what existed at that time; that is, born in contention to what was before. This means that these ecclesiological collections have explicit starting points in discontinuity–not conscious continuity with the existing Church of history. Do we see the problem? They were never authorized by the only authorizer–the true Church of history.
A church cannot declare itself into continuity with the One Church. It is incumbent upon every church to join that existing One Church of Scripture. But that is not what most churches do nor how they think.
Another way to say this might be: if all churches claim to best know and practice the Christian truth, as they at least surreptitiously must in order to justify their existence apart from others, there follows only two legitimate perspectives. Either one church, amidst them all, truly does have the fullest embodiment of the truth, in which case it isn’t arrogant to claim so, or none of them have any fuller embodiment of the truth than any other. For a long time I held the latter, but I always had reservations about it because of what it implies about God’s protection of his truth and reliable ways to find it. And it felt disintegrating.
After a reasonable number of years of concerted study of Scripture and church history, I would commend the following principle to all with ears to hear: If Roman Catholicism seems like every other option in the church marketplace, it can only be because one has too little knowledge of the meaning and experiences of the One Church of history.
Unlike today’s Christians, the Reformers knew that the Roman Catholic Church was not just one option among any. They could not but help to know that there was something very unique about her. She was their mother, and there could be no soft feelings about her. She loomed as the only option. And so their perspective could not but be cosmic in scope: the Antichrist had led her into a renewed Babylonian captivity. Their assessment was not all wrong. Those who represent Christ but nevertheless act in willfully sinful or egregious ways represent the Antichrist in a special way.
However, the magisterial Reformers were wrong to throw the baby out with the bathwater. They didn’t even want to. George Lindbeck argues in “A Protestant View of the Ecclesiological Status of the Roman Catholic Church” that the magisterial Reformers predominantly believed their solution (i.e., schism) to the problem of corruption was only an emergency and temporary measure. Churches in schism were never meant to extend into the future indefinitely.
Now, in light of this, I don’t think it takes much historical intuition to recognize, given that the rapprochement between Protestants and Catholics was not forthcoming and the emergency measure drew on and on with fading potential for reconciliation, that Protestants needed to start re-conceptualizing the Church in ways that didn’t contradict their existence and position in the world. In light of social forces and splintering movements, they hadn’t much time. This is a major reason why there is such poor reflection about ecclesiology in the Protestant world by and large–it is a practical artifact of a concrete historical situation. Ecclesiology is, for historical and existential reasons, the ugly stepchild of Protestant priorities–especially evangelical priorities.
When I say this, I do not mean that Protestant or specifically evangelical pastors give no attention to the Church. On the contrary, they often give miraculous energies and thought to the administration of their churches. But when it comes to the theological identity, meaning, and uniqueness of the historical church, they tend to give it very few energies. I believe it has been said by more than one of my educated evangelical teachers (in valid self-criticism): “Evangelicals do not have an ecclesiology.” What they mean is that its ecclesiology is so undeveloped so as to be nearly non-existent. And as I observed evangelicalism over time, I found that they were right. In the minds of many evangelicals, the church is often an unnecessary superfluity, tossed away whenever the next consumer option offers something that looks better. Deriving theological corroboration, in a paradigm of sola fide, the church simply is not essential. Such a perspective enables and bolsters this consumer mentality on the American scene.
A church may only be fully connected when the apostolic community recognizes her. God’s church cannot be taken by storm. Nobody can just decide to start a church and expect to be fully connected. No church or leader can self-authenticate. Similarly, unauthorized leaders cannot authorize others, and no leader can get authorized except by those previously authorized. The mantle cannot be passed on except by a person who carries that mantle. Thus, with every schism comes a mandate to identify the original, apostolic community. This is a hard assertion for Protestants to swallow. It was for me.
To get at this another way, many Protestants take issue with the Nicene clause, “I believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.” They tend to struggle with the word “catholic” until they hear that an acceptable gloss is “universal”, but the real problem is the word “apostolic”. “Apostolic” does not merely refer to a church who claims to teach what the apostles taught. It is a characteristic of the Church. The apostolic community is not any community who “thinks” or “feels” that their community best represents the first century community of the apostles or most closely believes what they think the apostles taught. The apostolic community cannot be created. Its only starting point was Pentecost, and a real, organic connection must exist to that church, not one manufactured by perceived similarities in interpretation or practice. In other words, the true apostolic community is that specific community the apostles began and which their successors, with Jesus’ protection, have continued.
To help illustrate what I’m saying here, imagine you wrote down all your core beliefs in a book and passed that book on to your children. Now, imagine that The Good Book of You (hereafter, TGBY) was also read by other groups, and after your passing, one group, the “Bozos”, began to claim your last name and a share of your inheritance because they practiced the TGBY better than anyone else. Now, in such a situation, we can clearly see that your appellation and inheritance do not belong to the Bozos simply because they want it. To your descendants, whatever interpretation of TGBY they may have, belong your last name and inheritance. Nobody can lay claim to such things unless they are born or adopted in. Only you can give people a share in your identity and inheritance.
We can see clearly that these Bozos have no right to your identity and inheritance, despite their devotion and fidelity to TGBY. But when it comes to Protestant claims, we suddenly cannot see so clearly, even though what is happening is very similar. Protestants justify the legitimacy of their churches in the same ways as the Bozos do. They believe they understand the Good Book better and so, by virtue of good interpretation and better ethics, they claim to be legitimate churches and fellow partakers in the divine inheritance. Yet while they succeed in gaining a following, they deny God’s true community. They call themselves churches, but the Church has not made them churches.
The basic problem is: they have offered unauthorized fire (Lev. 10:1), and this problem has been around since the beginning. It happened with Cain, and it certainly happens within American evangelicalism because we no longer understand continuity and succession. This has awful consequences for unity. The only way to overcome this short-sightedness is to recognize that there is a community that goes back to the true apostles and that guards apostolic succession to this very day. And then to recognize which community that is. And that community is not sectarian, for it desires and has processes to bring everyone into its fold.
One might object to the above conception with, “The church’s situation is different. Membership is not determined by blood (or legal) succession.” While it’s true that one cannot be born into the Church, succession does happen by blood. Christ purchased the Church with his own blood (Acts 20.28; Rev. 5.9), and the identity and inheritance belong to whichever Church he purchased. Are we certain Christ has indiscriminately purchased every group who claims to be a church? If some are to be excluded, who gets to decide on the criteria?
When we consider the motif of adoption, how readily does evangelicalism assume that adoption happens invisibly and apart from the Church? Instead, why not by a Father (God) and Mother (Church) into a family? The Church, as the (i.e., authorized) possessor of the identity and inheritance, physically adopts us. All other arrangements are temporary and to be superseded.
In sum, the Great Hall is the point of connection that binds and connects all physical, concrete churches within history to a single identity wherein each is part of each other’s experience and history. As such, it has existed from the beginning and itself has a history. And its future inheritance is greatly desirable.