Figuring out the Church: Her Marks, and Her Masters by Nichols O.P. Aidan

Author:Nichols O.P., Aidan [Aidan, Nichols O.P.,]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781586177829
Published: 2013-12-11T05:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

Though de Lubac wrote on the topic of ecclesiology over a period of more than half a century, there is no noticeable change in his views. What alters is the context and the mood. In his early writings, he is painfully aware that many Protestant Christians consider Catholics to be ecclesiolaters, worshippers of the Church, who confound the visible institution with the whole work of Christ and give her hierarchs an homage due only to the Redeemer. Over against such misunderstandings, he insists that we do not believe in the Church in the same sense in which we believe in God.

At the end of his life, by contrast, de Lubac had to confront a minimalistic ecclesiology among Catholics themselves, a scholarship for which it was fashionable to present an anarchic view of Christian origins, and an attitude for which it was perfectly acceptable to proceed by treating the Church as something we can make up as we go along. In his last ecclesiological essay, the entirety of an eighteen-page introduction is devoted to this problem.38 His solution to the problem of postconciliar ecclesiological minimalism can be found in his study of the Apostles’ Creed. His advice is this: explain to people that, while we do not believe in the Church as we believe in the triune God, nevertheless, the Church is the corporate subject—the individual-transcending subject—of all Christian believing. When as Catholic Christians we believe, we do so from start to finish by participating in the faith of the Church.39 That comes to us first by hearing, in the apostolic preaching,40 but then by a process of interiorisation,41 as the voice of our ecclesial Mother gives her accent more and more to our own.42

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