[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on The Church
The Church (ecclesia) is much more than the association in which the disciples are grouped under an ordered authority. It is in the Church, and through the Church, by means of that authority, that the teaching is to be preserved safe from error, the life to find true guidance. The Church is, too, the means by which the disciple is related to God. Jesus Christ and the Church together constitute the mystical Christ of which, while Jesus Christ is the head the rest of the disciples are limbs, members.
The Church is a human community significantly constituted through the actions, intentions, and decisions of a multiplicity of human beings from Jesus through to Peter, Paul, James, John, and others during the apostolic era, through to the actions, intentions, and decisions of the present pope and all the faithful. This is, of course, not to deny the divine origins of the Church, since the actions, intentions and decisions of Jesus are those of the divine subject of the Word of God, incarnate as a human being living in obedience to the Father.
The Spirit of that selfsame Jesus is a principle of authenticity operating in the life of the Church, through its members. Nonetheless it remains that the Church as a historical community is significantly constituted by human actions, intentions, and decisions. What renders these intelligible is their proper orientation to the goal or purpose of the Church itself, the goal that Jesus identified and expressed heuristically in the symbol of the "kingdom of God.This element gives ecclesiology theological depth, ensuring that it is not reduced to being simply a critical history of the Church. It adds something new, for the introduction of an explicit teleology based on the kingdom of God provides us with norms for evaluating the life of the Church......
