The Sins of the Church

How deeply is the church involved in sin? This question has been climbing up the agenda of theological discussion the last few years. The old confession, Credo sanctam ecclesiam, has tempted many to underestimate the power of sin on the holy Church. The Church has, undoubtedly, been idealized. But in our time this temptation is increasingly being seen for the seduction that it is.

The insight that the mystery of the Church is its growth toward holiness has been seen more clearly. The Church, as the congregation of the Lord, called out of darkness into his wonderful light, exists under a profound responsibility for holiness. It was written of Israel, “I have known you alone, out of all the families of the earth; therefore shall I punish you” (Amos 3:1). It is something like this with the Church. We have, for instance, the picture of the church in Laodicea, which claimed to be rich and lacking in nothing but which in fact had nothing (Rev. 3:17). There is a warning here for the Church of every age.

So it is doubtless a good thing that theologians these days are thinking hard about the Church and its holiness. Are we expressing a remote ideal when we confess the “communion of the saints”? Does the Church hand over to the world, in this confession, a standard by which the world can too easily judge the Church? Christian people are often hard put to know how to respond to the sharp critique that the world lays on the Church. Has traditional Roman Catholic theology, with its high view of the Church as the Body of Christ, avoided embarrassment by distinguishing between the Church and the members of the Church? With this distinction, sin can be admitted in the lives of the members while the Church is still claimed to be God’s own holy masterpiece (cf. 1 Cor. 3:9). Is this perhaps the way out?

Greek Catholic theologians have said that the Church is a divine-human reality, and so elevated above criticism as the very work and, somehow, the reality of God. Here we surely have the Holy Catholic Church!

Pope Paul, at the opening of the second sitting of Vatican II, talked about the renewal of the Church. But he immediately added—“that is improvement in the weakness of its members.” When the council came to speak of the sin to which the people of God were exposed on their pilgrimage, the Pope intervened to make sure the council meant the people as members of and not as the Church.

This traditional distinction between Church and members of the Church is receiving less and less respect in recent years. Karl Rahner, back in 1947, wrote a remarkable article about the “church of Sinners.” In 1956, after a lot of criticism had been leveled against his earlier piece, he wrote another called “The Church of Saints.” But in it he kept sounding the same theme, that we must not create a mythical majesty out of the Church, a mythical thing that is free from sin and therefore above criticism. Is not the Church a church of living human beings? And must we not, on that account, admit that sin filters through the whole Church, including its high officials?

Not by happenstance, Paul’s word of First Corinthians 5:6 is being heard in Catholic circles these days: “Do you not know that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump?” In 1958, a book appeared in Germany about the image of the Church as the unspotted bride as it was stressed in medieval commentaries on the Song of Solomon. Was not the bride the unique, the perfect, the pure, with a beauty like the beauty of the pale moon and the shining sun? It was clear from the book that the time of medieval romanticism regarding the Church had gone. There is a more realistic, a more honest, and therefore less protective stance toward the sins of the Church, sins of commission as well as omission.

The confession made by the sixteenth-century pope Adrian VI is frequently recalled now. Adrian spoke about the tragedy of the split that had come to the Church, and said that perhaps God had, with this division, judged the sins of the people and, especially, the sins of the office-bearers of the Church. He talked about a misuse of religious authority that had led to a spiritual corruption carrying the sickness from the head to the members, from the popes to the lesser priests. This candid self-criticism is understood better in our day than it used to be. The distinction between the Church and its members is being openly criticized today as a flight from responsibility and an escape from judgment.

This greater modesty about the church signals not a rejection of the Church but rather a remembering of the fact that the Church is called out of the world, out of sin, by its own confession. Those Catholics—and Protestants too—who hold on to the old distinction do so because they fear a loss of respect for God’s work, the Church of Christ. But this is an odd anxiety, and very needless. The Church is, indeed, the Church of God, the Body of Christ, the Temple of the Holy Spirit; but this does not keep Peter from saying that the time has come for judgment to begin with the house of God (1 Pet. 4:17; cf. Ezek. 9:6). Just as Israel had no basis for supposing that its election excused it from judgment, the Church has no basis for supposing it can avoid the divine measuring. If the Church assumes it exists outside the possibility of divine critique, it has lost sight of its divine calling. The Gentile Christians, after all, were told by Paul that if they should boast and refuse to live by the grace and mercy of God, they could be pruned away (Rom. 11:22).

The biblical insight into the riches of the Church is very different from any romantic ecclesiology. When the Bible speaks of the gifts the Church enjoys, it speaks at the same time of the calling and responsibility the Church has; it always sends the Church into the world with humility. A confession of sin does not cause the Church to lose face in the world. Rather, it keeps the Church aware of its calling and God’s promise.

When the Church gives the impression that it is already “without spot or wrinkle” (Eph. 5:27), it violates its own character and reality. For the Church as well as for its members, the Word of God says, “If we say we have no sin, the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). It is just because the Church is called the light of the world, a city on a hill, the salt of the earth, and the like, that it is measured by such high standards. And, for this reason, when the Church makes its way in humility of confession, then alone, will the word of Zechariah come into its own: “In those days ten men from the nations of every tongue shall take hold of the robe of a Jew, saying, ‘Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you’ ” (Zech. 8:23).

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