The Communio Sanctorum and Diversity in Education-- Part 1

In his work, Models of the Church, Avery Dulles draws our attention to seven ecclesiological possibilities:

1) institution;
2) mystical communion;
3) sacrament;
4) herald;
5) servant;
6) eschatology;
7) community of disciples.

Each of these, as an aspect of the Church's identity, also speaks to the nature of Christian education. As Dulles notes, a model of the Church as simply an institution can lead to passivity, legalism, and obstruction of the people's relationship with God, as well as of growth in theology and of charismata (43-44), yet it also expresses the nature of something being instituted, having legitimacy, regularity, and staying power. The institutions of the Church, such as its schools, carry both the dangers and strengths of this reality.

To speak of the Church as the herald of the gospel is to see how the preached Word calls us to account and gives us a message for others, while to note that the Church is a servant is to reinforce the call to social justice, sacrifice, and hospitality. Both of these aspects remind us that the end of Christian education is not just removing ignorance, it is also overcoming idolatry. It is conversion, transformation, metanoia. We pursue a cross-shaped pursuit of education without pneumatological power. The Christian university should also, then, see itself as an eschatological sign of what God intends for the cosmos. We can never be satisfied with business as usual. Our (perhaps inevitable) failures should grieve us.

I will address the notion of education as sacramental and as discipleship in later posts, for the moment I would like to address the Christian university as communion. Dulles point out that theologically the imagery of the Body of Christ tends to draw attention to the mystical divine life present in the Church, while the imagery of the people of God tends to be more sociological and earth-centered. Both are out of balance without the other.

As the Apostles Creed confesses, " Credo in . . .sanctorum communionem." ("I believe in the communion of saints.") A true evangelical--and Baptist, for that matter--catholicity embraces an evangelical recovery of the communio sanctorum, the communion of saints, and this calls for a sense both of our mystical connection to all the saints and an identity as God's people set aside for his purposes in this world. We should remind ourselves that the communio sanctorum is marked by koinonia fellowship and by covenant faithfulness. As the Epistle to the Hebrews cautions us,

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us . . . you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. (Heb 11:1, 18-24)

We need in our particular branch of Baptist education a recovery of divine authority that resides in all Christian traditions and their peoples. We need to see its holiness. Such authority should extend beyond, but not be untethered from the ecumenical councils and creeds. Instead, it should grow as a tradition is meant to grow, pursuing the same telos as the sources, the well springs, of the Apostolic Faith.

This is not a denial that our "rule of faith" (the regula fidei) needs to arise primarily and originally from the scriptures, but it is an acceptance of the Spirit's presence in Church history. A Christian academic culture covenants with the larger, historic Body of Christ in all our manifestations. Certainly Anabaptist challenges to Christendom were in part about a recovery of the primitive church (i.e. the true church, the unspoiled church). This is a pursuit that in some of its forms many would suggest is not only impossible, but finally unbiblical. Instead, as I argued last month, thick ecumenism is not a denial of our differences; it requires the teaching of them. So not only should we study the texts of various Christian traditions past and present, we should invite their representatives to lecture and teach on campus.