Beeson podcast, Episode 340
https://www.beesondivinity.com/podcast/2017/he-will-be-with-them
John Webster
May 16, 2017

Announcer:	Welcome to the Beeson Podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George.
Timothy George:	Welcome to today's Beeson Podcast. Today, we have the privilege of hearing a lecture by the late Dr. John Webster. Dr. Webster was Professor of Divinity at the University of St. Andrews. He had taught at St. John's College in Durham. He had held professorships at Toronto, at Oxford, at Aberdeen. A remarkable scholar, a great theologian of our time. This lecture he gives we're going hear was originally presented at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School as a part of a series of lectures honoring the late Dr. Ken Kantzer, the Kantzer Lectures in Revealed Theology.
	It's a lecture that deals with ... It's called "He Will Be with Them." He's dealing here in this lecture with some of the deep issues of ecclesiology. What is the Church? In particular, how does the Church relate as a focus of theology with the other great doctrines of the faith? It's a tremendous insight into the Church and the role of the Church in systematic theology and in the life of the Church today.
	So, we're going to hear Dr. Webster present this lecture from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. We want to thank our friends there for giving us permission to use it. If you want to learn more about the Henry Center or the Kantzer lectures that are given there on an ongoing basis, visit henrycenter.tiu.edu. You can find a lot of more wonderful resources from our friends at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. We go now to Deerfield, Illinois, and listen to the late Dr. John Webster.
John Webster:	Let's pray.
	Almighty God, who hast built Thy church upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the head cornerstone, grant us so to be joined together in unity of spirit by Thy doctrine, that we may be made a holy temple, acceptable unto Thee, through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
	Here we are at the last lecture. My gratitude for you all for coming and listening to me rambling through this material, to Professor Vanhoozer for asking me to bend for being such an organizer, and to the institution for putting up with me is very real. I'm grateful to have been here. These will appear in print at some point, so I'm told, although quite when I'm going to get an opportunity to expand them, I'm not quite sure, maybe at four o'clock another morning.
	We're going to end with some material on ecclesiology. At the hands of some recent theologians, ecclesiology has acquired the status of first theology - that is, no longer a derivative or corollary topic. It has expanded to become a substrate for all Christian doctrine, a kind of condition for and component in all material Christian teaching.
	So rather than putting in a relatively late appearance near the conclusion of the dogmatic corpus, it's come, for some at least, to be a pervasive theme to which all other loci are to be related. If we were to ask how this expansion of ecclesiology has come about, then at least a couple of factors, I think, would need to be borne in mind.
	The first is the remarkable prestige enjoyed by communion ecclesiology in some dominant strands of theological and ecumenical work. The language of koinonia is widely judged to have a special potency in demonstrating the integrity of teaching about God, salvation, and Church and thereby moving beyond the externalism thought to be so ecumenically ruinous.
	Jean-Marie Tillard, for instance, offers a summary statement, a compact account, really, of communion ecclesiology. Communion with God (himself Trinitarian communion), and the benefits of Salvation acquired by Christ (whose incarnation is a realistic communion between God and humanity) and given by his Spirit, the fraternal communion of the baptized, all of it made possible by communion in the once-and-for-all (irreversible) Event of Jesus Christ which communion in the apostolic witness guarantees throughout the centuries and which the Eucharist celebrates (sacrament of communion).  There is the Church in its substance. 
	Well, there are at least three interlocking themes of communion ecclesiology to be identified there. First of all, obviously, a good deal is made of the life of the Holy Trinity as a communion of divine persons in relation. Second, God's saving work is directed to the restoration of the communion of creator and creatures. A communion breached by sin, but restored by the Son's assumption of humanity and its out working in the saving history of the Incarnate One. Third, the incarnational union of God and creatures is saving the extended in the church, which is; therefore, integral to the mystery of salvation and not simply its annex. For it is in and as the church and its visible practices, that the saving purpose of God for communion is realized. 
	The church, in fact, is salvation in social form. Thinking of the church and its relation to God through the idiom of koinonia, is in effect an ecclesiological critique, and a rather strong one, of the straight demarcation between uncreated and created, to which these lectures have often returned. 
	But to think these dogmatic considerations is a second factor behind the expansion of ecclesiology, namely a set of metaphysical convictions about the relation of nature and super-nature. These convictions nowadays, of course, commonly encountered through the work of Henri de Lubac. Most of all, in his untranslated works Surnaturel, but also in more ecclesiological traits: Catholicism, Corpus Mysticum for the splendor of the church is forceful if at times, I think somewhat impressionistic genealogy of the philosophical and genealogical routes of modern ecclesiological disorder exercises some sway. 
	De Lubac, you probably know, lamented what he called the separated philosophy, which began to arise in the late 12th century, in which nature and super-nature began to drift apart in such a way that nature came to have an imminent finality disintegrated from supernatural ends, and so became something graspable without any reference to its ordering to participation in God.  
	The results of dualisms between temporal and eternal, between material form and inner-substance for de Lubac ontologically calamitous. They segregate creatures from the creator.  But they also infect ecclesiology and sacramental theology. This of course, is the thesis of that strange book, Corpus Mysticum. Above all, they infect sacramental theology and ecclesiology by turning the relation of Christ and the church into something wholly extrinsic. As a result, the Church becomes a natural and diuretically defined polity, described through a naturalized ecclesiology, which can actually make little sense of the rich theology of partaking in Christ, which for de Lubac pervades the patristic and early and medieval tradition. 
	Of this kind of dualism, Protestant ecclesiology, with its characteristic nervousness about the Church as Christ's Body, and its fondness for a sharp distinction between divine and churchly agency is only the most fully realized example. 
	De Lubac's explorations on the matters have of late been radicalized and rather drastically reduced by John Milbank. Now, I say reduced because in Milbank's account, they become detached to some degree from the historical complexity and the generous dogmatic and spiritual instincts, which de Lubac brought to bear upon the material. 
	Milbank's programmatic essay from some years ago on the name of Jesus argues for what he calls "the priority of ecclesiology." That is, in his words, Christological and atonement doctrines are secondary to definitions of the character of the new universal community or church. Milbank, Christ and his work, can't be dealt with as some kind of extrinsic datum. For that to be understood in the terms of their function within the process of the emergent of account a polity. Last, he says, the gospels can be read not as the story of Jesus, but as the story of the refoundation of a new city, a new kind of human community: Israel become the church. 
	Jesus figures in this story simply as the founder, the beginning, the first of many. Jesus, of course the absence of language about his deity is not without significance, Jesus is to be thought of as what Milbank calls primarily a new Moses. Not so much a substantial subject who is the Church's source, as one who he says comes to be simultaneously with the Church.  Hence the primary affirmation, there can be an ecclesiological deduction of the incarnation and likewise of the atonement.
	The only thing, which will really remove us from extrinsicism, he goes on to say, is the primacy of ecclesiology.  The most concrete element in the gospels is the injunctions and examples regarding Christian practice. Only here, do we identify God incarnate. 
	Well, there is certainly a lack of restraint there. Even the kind of recklessness or defiance in reconfiguring with a single stroke the entire corpus of Christian dogma to make the theology of the church into its center. 
	The nucleus of the difficulty, I think, is the process of ecclesiological deduction. That is, arranging Christian teaching in such a way that what's said about the Savior and about salvation is presented as an implicate of what has already been said about the new polity, which is the Christian society. 
	Such deduction, I think, simply reverses the evangelical logic of ecclesiology. That logical can be discerned for example, in the opening of the first of the Johannine Epistles. That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the Word of life. The life was made manifest, and we saw it and testified to it, and proclaimed to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us. That which we have seen and heard, we proclaim also to you, so that you may have fellowship with us, and our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.
	But what kind of orientation for ecclesiology might we find there? Well, first, first obviously, the beginning is not the Church, but God. Look closely, the beginning is for 1 John, the eternal life and fellowship of father and son, who together share in eternal life. If there is deduction, therefore, it's from theology proper to ecclesiology not the reverse because it's the divine ____, which is prevenient.
	Second, this eternal life, which was from the beginning that is utterly uncaused, doesn't rest within itself. It was made manifest in the Son. In his audible, visible, tangible presence in his substantial and distinct identity, the unoriginated life of God is in some manner present. And he is this and does this in himself. That is, he's not simply a founder or the first of a series. He's not the initiator whose ranked with and perhaps passes over into that to which he gives rise. No, he is the divine self-manifestation from which all else unfolds, but, which is completed by none because it requires no completion. 
	Third, the history which succeeds upon this manifestation is not a repetition or continuation of the manifestation. It's not therefore a history, which in some way fleshes out or animates an indistinct or inchoate origin. Now what follows from the manifestation from 1 John is of different order, namely, what's called here, testimony and proclamation. 
	Testimony and proclamation are ostensive or transitive acts. That is to say the acts which indicate what they are not gesturing away from themselves to that which is other than themselves to what has been seen and heard and touched as the Word of life extends itself towards creatures. 
	And fourth, therefore, there is fellowship.  Fellowship with Father and Son, and fellowship with other creatures who also exist from this witness and proclamation. There really is koinonia.  Of course the admonition of the epistle as a whole is directed to a community with what sounds like an intensely segregated common life.  But this fellowship can only be conceived as what it is by keeping in mind the flow of the economy as it stems from God's eternal life: the beginning, the manifestation, the witness, the fellowship. Ecclesiology will suggest has its place in this sequence, and so it cannot be first theology. 
	Well, at 4:00 this morning, that sounded really good, but let me now try to explain what I'm talking about. Okay. Let me try and expand these things.
	The rest of the Christian gospel, I think, a way with God, which answers to God with us. Because this holy unexpected act to divine condescension as taken place, that is because the Son has fulfilled the Father's will and redeemed Adam's race, and because together Father and Son have poured out the Holy Spirit, then Adam’s sin, and now a continuation in it, have not overwhelmed God's purpose. Indeed, the ____ of sin has been exposed by God's undeviating determination to be our God, and thereby to evoke a people for himself despite themselves. The term of estrangement from God has been interrupted by the missions of Word and Spirit, an end has been set to it. 
	On the created sign of this end, is the existence in time of a form of common human life, which is the fulfillment of God's purpose before all time. A form of common human life, which Ephesians calls a citizenry of saints, a household of God, a holy temple, a dwelling place of God in the Spirit. What kind of account might Christian dogmatics give of this extraordinary reality? 
	Well, a doctor of the Church is only as good as the doctrine of God upon which it is built. Because of this, dogmatics, I think, will only have slender investment in depicting the life and activities of the fellowship through, for example, social phenomenology or the symbolics of religious association. The being of the community of the saints and the acts by which that community realizes itself in time, are sui generis. They're explicable only, as it seems to me, in a very preliminary way as instances of human sociality and its practices. We only properly begin to approximate their being when we refer to God's act of turning human polity back to himself. 
	So terms like God's household, the temple, the dwelling place of God are not as it were merely surface or secondary designations—designations, which can be resolved back into more basic accounts of the church as a social, historical phenomenon. No, they go all the way down. The church is and is not merely fancifully described as such a reality. 
	Christian dogmatics, therefore, has, I think, to exercise some vigilance against the kind of nominalism which reduces the ecclesial to the social reduction, which is close to hand when, for example, the Christian communities of the Apostolic era are made into objects of social anthropological inquiry. Church cannot be comprehensively grasped as a magnitude in the social history of religion. 
	But, vigilance in another direction, is also, I think, required. It's relatively easy to fall into the metaphysical trap, which de Lubac and others have sought to unearth. And you on earth are trapped and you can’t unearth a trap, can you? Well, anyway. Identify. Namely, the kind of super naturalism in which the Church's pure form must remain untainted by time. So, dogmatics also has to avoid rendering the Church as something less than a historical creature of reality. Its aim, rather, is to try to sort out what kind of history the Church is. What kind of creaturely acts are performed in the ____ life of the saints? More closely again, invoking language about God, talking about the Church as God's citizenry, and temple, and all the rest. Invoking language about God isn't a second layer of description super imposed upon a set of social phenomenon, which could equally well be described, perhaps even better described, as a social history. 
	No, it's simply saying what this social history is. It is of course a social history. It's the passage of a people through time, and all the attendant forms of collective organization, but it is that because, and only because of the realities, which the gospel announces. The realities, that is, of election, incarnation, exultation, the bestowing of the Spirit. The church is indeed visible, natural, social history, but to explicate it, more is needed than simply recourse to the principle of analogy from all other forms of common human life. 
	The anthology of the Church can only be grasped if its social, historical reality is seeing as manifesting a particular depth, and it's this depth, which Ephesians indicates by speaking of the fact that the saints and members of God's household are built upon the foundation of the prophets and apostles, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone in whom the whole structure is joined together and grows. Reference to the Church is prophetic and Apostolic foundation and to Christ as it's integrating and animating element is of the essence. This is what takes place in the creative history of the Church--an access, which eludes reduction. 
	With that's the case, then ecclesiology has its place in the basic movement of Christian doctrine from teaching about God to teaching about everything else in God. It's a derivative doctrine concerned with the economy of God's creatures and in its explication. The doctrine of God is to have operative, not merely background status.  But of course if the principle of derivation is to be observed here, so too is the principle of inclusion. 
	The life of the people of God is a necessary theme in Christian dogmatics because dogmatics concerns not only theology, but also economy, or a bit more accurately, dogmatics is concerned with economy precisely because it's concerned with theology. 
	Because in theology proper, dogmatics attends to this one, the one whose perfect life includes the movement of bestowing and maintaining the life of creatures.  Then there is a necessary ecclesial component to Christian teaching without which, the doctrine of God would be imperfectly apprehended. 
	Well, deduction of teaching about the nature of the Church from teaching about the Trinity is of course a familiar move in contemporary theology. Especially on the part of advocates of the kind of social Trinitarianism in which the relations of the persons of the Godhead are echoed in the Christian communion.
	There are evident benefits here. In terms of the doctrine of God, it means getting beyond ideas of God as an undifferentiated principle or cause of the Church. In the terms of the doctrine of the Church, it means resistance to ecclesial logical naturalism. But difficulties remain, I think. Most of all, that of deploying a notion of relationality as a—I don't know why people say relationality rather than just relation, but they do, don't they?—a notion of relationality as a bridge term between God and creatures. Put too simply, appeal to this notion can mean that the passage of the doctrine of God to the doctrine of the Church is effected too swiftly without securing an adequate sense of the unqualified gratuity of the Church in existence and of its difference from God, who is the creative power of its life. 
	Theology and ecclesiology come to correspond rather too neatly. The shock, which ought to be registered by the existence of a people of God is to some degree muffled. The relation of theology proper and ecclesiology is best expanded, therefore, not as it were by setting out two terms of an analogy, but by describing a sequence of divine acts. That sequence as it thrives in the inner divine council or decree, that then finds temporal execution in the missions of sullen spirit through which the purpose of the Father bears created fruit.
	And that kind of agential idiom, using the language of agency, retains both the perfection and the absolute creativity of God in relation to the Church, enabling theology to retain something basic to its account of the communion of the saints. Namely, the communion of the saints is creaturely--that is has been brought into existence in the course of the administration of God's gracious purpose, and so therefore, the fact of its proper distinction—of the proper distinction in God as creator and the Church as creature even in their fellowship is kept in mind.
	 This is a little tag from Calvin on the church. He says, "All those who, by the kindness of God the Father, through the work of the Holy Spirit have entered into fellowship with Christ are set apart as God's property and personal possession. In both its origin and its life, now therefore, the Church looks to divine election. The Church is possessed, and therefore, alive in God." Well, once again how can we set the tab in a little bit more detail? 
	Well, first of all, if there is this way with God, which corresponds to God with us, it is so because of what Calvin here calls "the kindness of God the Father." 1 John 3: "See what love the Father has given us that we should be called children of God, and so we are." The existence of the Church in time as a form of human fellowship is by virtue of a declarative act of divine naming. The agent of this naming is God the Father. His naming is an act of creative love through which the Church comes to be. Dogmatic reflection on this naming begins from the inner Trinitarian of God the Father. That is, God the Father is Father of the Son and Father as the one from whom with the Son, the Spirit proceeds. 
	That is to say, Father primarily denotes God as the principle of the life of the Holy Trinity. The infinite, uncaused depth of God's triune life. And it's here, with Father as uncreated origin, that ecclesiology has to begin rather than with for example, the inner divine relations as in some way imaged in the life of a human community. Moreover, the Father's act of loving creatures and naming them his children is rooted not only in the eternal relation of Father and Son, but also in the Son's mission, which he enacts the bidding of the Father. The Son consents with alongside his holy unique relation to the Father, there should also be other children that he will be the first born, that he will graciously place himself at the head of Adam's lost race and reestablish its fellowship with the Father. And all this, is done in fulfillment of the Father's love for what he has not got. His resolve that creatures should be and that their lives should not be quenched even by their self-destructive abandonment of himself as the life giver. 
	Now, just at that one point, stand back for a moment and we can see that in reflecting on this biblical statement from 1 John 3, dogmatics is trying to build up an account of the identity of the divine agent and the modes of that agent's action. It's asking: who is the Father, and how does the Father execute his work? The answers, offered by dogmatics, are built up out of the canonical materials with a close eye upon the exegetical traditions which have grown up around those principles.  In other words, we're working with two principles. 
	First, that Scripture constitutes a unified witness to the gospel in such a way that its constituent texts are mutually illuminating. And second, that the Spirit superintends the Church's reading of Scripture. In this case therefore, dogmatics makes a construal of Father, and of the Father's act of giving, which can then serve to characterize the human fellowship, which that act brings into being. In formal terms, therefore, ecclesiology follows theology, or in material terms, because there is this Father, there are these children of God, there is the Church. 
	When you notice here that for the apostle, the existence of the Church is a matter of some astonishment. Behold the love of the Father, and so we are. The Church's existence is not a factor of nature, but of grace. Its dynamic, being that of adoption and the bestowing of status. Calvin comments this on that verse from 1 John 3:1. "It was not common honor that the heavenly Father bestowed on us when he adopted us as his children. For, when the apostle says that, 'love has been bestowed,' he means that is from mere bounty and benevolence that God makes us his children. For why are we sons even because God began to love us freely when we deserved hatred rather than love?" 
	Now, Calvin, there, is touching, I think, on something fundamental to the Church's being. Namely, that it exists in grace. In particular, in the act of the Father, whereby, he names us as children of God, and so we are. Name means that identify, status, nature, and, therefore, tasks, are received by creatures when God speaks as their author. 
	This of course is why, or further reason why, they cannot be that ecclesial deduction of Christology or soteriology or of any other lock of Christian teaching. The inner content of ecclesiology is such that it can only be deduced. It can no more act as a foundation for teaching about God than creature can be that from which the creator is deduced. Teaching about the Church is retrospective. It draws its substance from that which was from the beginning. And that beginning, includes the love of the eternal Father, who adopts creatures into fellowship through the person and saving acts of the eternal Son. 
	So we move, therefore, to the second element in this Trinitarian deduction of the Church which is the person in work, or the Son of God. Well, in relating ecclesiology to Christology, a lots going to hang on insuring that the full compass of Christology is kept in mind and that all the relevant material is allowed to be operative. When this doesn't happen, because too narrow a selection of Christological material is deemed pertinent, ecclesiology can suffer disfigurement. So, on the one hand, the person in work of the Son can be so holy identified with his incarnate presence that his eternal preexistence deity recedes from view.  Or, on the other hand, the post-existence of the Son in his state of exultation can recede from view exercising little or no regulative role in ecclesiology. 
	In both cases, Christology is constricted by allowing its central episode, the temporal career of the Son, as it were to expand and fill the hole. An immediate result of this is that the metaphysics of the Church tends to be expanded with a view to one question, namely, what kind of continuity is there between the incarnate body and the ecclesial body?  This in turn, I think, is connected to the way, in which, a constricted ecclesiology both is produced by and reinforces selectivity in treating the canonical witness.
	The most obvious case in point in this, I think, is concentration on the image of the Church as the body of Christ, requiring that image to bear a good deal more weight in dogmatic ecclesiology than in fact does in Scripture, and allowing it to shape all the major lines of argument in a doctrine of the Church. Not only do I think, does this load the metaphor with expectations which it can't fulfill, but it also leads to some ecclesiological malformation. As the reality of the Church is in some measure detached from the Son's perfection.
	Well, what would happen if dogmatic ecclesiology took a rather different tract, and begin somewhere else? Well, at least two possibilities suggest themselves or did so at about a quarter-till-five this morning. The doctrine of election or the doctrine of Christ’s exultation, because a full ecclesiology would treat both tracts of material. Both ensure the right sort of externality of Christ relation to the Church. Both enable dogmatics to keep in mind the miraculous or gratuitous nature of the Church's existence in time. Both give proper weight to the fact that the Church is creature. And precisely so, both are able to indict the full force of “we with God”, that is, they're able to generate a theology of God's communion with creatures without falling into what Calvin called that ______, that gross mixture of God and creatures, which Calvin appalls _____ and variance of which continue to rattle around in some strands of contemporary ecclesiology. 
	Well, in continuation of the argument to my previous lecture, let me just say a few things on the exultation of Christ and its ecclesial significance, and leave election for the finished version. It doesn't think for the New Testament ecclesiologically elemental that the Son of God is in heaven. He who descended is he who ascended far above all the heavens. We have a great high priest who has passed into the heavens, Jesus the Son of God. We have such a high priest, one who is seated at the right hand of the throne and majesty in heaven. That's all.
	The ecclesiological importance of this is that the Son's relation to the Church is in a deep sense external. Now, to read that claim isn't to contradict the union with Christ, which is proper to the Church as one of the fruits of redemption. The Church is indeed made alive together with Christ. It is raised up with him. It sits with him in the heavenly places. This being with the Church ... Sorry, this being with Christ has ontological weight, that is the Church has its being with him. But, what's the force of this with? 
	Well, for my money, it indicates an intimacy of relation between Christ and those who we exalt to share his location, but nevertheless, a relation in which he retains his free, sovereign, incommunicable identity. His co-location with the Church is not such that his identity as the exalted Son becomes porous, or that he is no longer gracious towards the community. The Church adds nothing to the identity to the exalted Son. By grace, twice there in Ephesians 2, by grace is not merely a way of talking of the means of the Churches entry into union with Christ, it's the permanent characteristic of that union, and therefore, a signifier that the Church's relation to its Lord is characterized by ever greater dissimilarity. And it's this element of distinction between the Church and its Lord, which I think is routinely muted in ecclesiology's ordered around the body metaphor. 
	Robert Jenson's account on the matter is striking but a rather drastic example. Embodiment on his account, this is his account within the systematic theology, although he's tells whereas as well. Embodiment on Jenson's account is what he calls "a person's availability to other persons and there upon to her or himself." Notice, that the account begins from observations about embodiment rather than from the identity of the agent of who the metaphor's predicated, but nevertheless, let's not worry about that at the moment. Embodiment is a person's availability to other persons and there upon to her or himself. The ecclesiological extension of this principle of embodied availability runs like this, "That the church is a body of Christ means that she is the object in the world, as which the risen Christ is an object for the world. An available something as which Christ is there to be addressed and grasped. Where am I to aim my intention, to intend the risen Christ?" 
	Well, the first answer, Jenson says, must be to the assembled Church, and if I'm in the assembly, to the gathering that surrounds me. And so, the Church with her sacraments is truly Christ's availability to us just because Christ takes her as his availability to himself. "Where does the risen Christ turn to find himself?” Jenson asks. To the sacramental gathering of believers. 
That's a bit odd isn't it? It's surely odd to ask where the risen One turns to find himself. Who could hardly ask that question of God unless the attribute to perfection had ceased to bear any real weight, and to ask it of the risen Christ assumes that his identity is in the process of construction rather than eternally replete. This means Jenson developed, I think, a rather strange account of the otherness of Christ to the Church focused on the eucharistic elements. The object that is the Church assembly is the body of Christ. That is Christ available to the world and to her members. Just in that the Church gathers around objects distinct from herself: the bread and the cup, which are the availability to her of the same Christ. Within the gathering, we can intend Christ as the community we are without self-deification because we jointly intend the identical Christ in the sacramental elements in our midst, which are other than us.
	But this sounds to me like an emergency measure which can scarcely compensate for the absent of a sense of Christ singular, self-constituting subjectivity as the end-throne Son. Wouldn't it be better therefore to say something like this, "That the Church is the body of Christ because its being is a predicate of his lordly and complete identity and activity. He is the head of the body the Church, he is the beginning, the first born from the dead that in everything he might be preeminent. And this string of metaphors there in Colossians 1-- headship, origination, primogeniture, preeminence -- they're all of course terms of relation. The exalted One is separate from the Church. Fellowship flows from his work, for he is the Reconciler, but the fellowship, which he brings about is not such that the identity of the exalted one is extended, completed, enacted, intended in the community over which he presides. The eternal Son creates the Church by exalting it to his side, but it is not there by create or intend himself for his identity is anteceded the replete as himself or to theos, his identity as Son is given him by the Father in full measure. As this One, he is far above all the heavens. 
	Well, on that train of thought, simply repeats basic dogmatic rules that we with God do rise from God with us and that God with us doesn't mean the diffusion of God's life, but its self-originating generativity. Because this is so, there really is fellowship with God. There really are brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ. The risen One doesn't cast about him to find his identify or intend himself. He declares himself in that lovely phrase from Hebrews 2, "Here am I and the children God has given me." 
	The third element in the Trinitarian deduction of the Church is of course pneumatology. The Church is and acts by virtue of the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life. That is an order, isn't there, to that confession about the Spirit. The Spirit gives life because he is Lord. Whatever is said about the economic activity of the Spirit is therefore, predicated upon his consubstantiality with Father and Son. His quickening is the work of the eternal majesty says Ambrose. It's effectiveness rests upon the fact that the Spirit has no imminent created power that he is not amongst, but above all things. 
	Now, Ambrose's point is that the Spirit isn't to be numbered amongst creatures, but it's precisely as this one, that is one who shares in the eternal lordship of God that the Spirit is active in the created realm as life-giver. 
	It's common in Christian theology to speak of the Holy Spirit as the divine agent of creaturely perfection. That is, the one in whom the works of God towards creatures are completed, so that creatures attain their end. Creatures don't have life in themselves, and so cannot maintain their own life, but they are maintained by the Spirit through whose presence and activity creatures do indeed live. Acts in spontaneity move through time deliberates and relates and all the rest. 
	Above all, the Spirit gives new life since he is the divine agent who consummates Christ's objective work of reconciliation, realizing in a final way, God's purpose to creaturely being in fellowship with himself.  In fulfillment of the Father's decree, in consequence of the Son's perfect work of reconciliation, the Spirit creates a human reality in which the old order of sin and death has been set aside, and the life of the children of God is unleashed. Through the Spirit, it comes about that there exist a temporal, social, bodily reality in fulfillment of the divine appointment, “you should be my people.”
	All this takes place as the accomplishment of the Spirit's mission. That is, the Spirit's being sent by Father and Son in order to effect in time the full realization of the economy of redemption. There is a stream of life, which flows through heaven towards creatures. The source is God the Father, and whose power is God the Son, and this is the Holy Spirit by whom heaven and earth, eternity and time are joined. "The Spirit," writes Calvin, "truly unites things separated in space." 
	Now to press this point further, by virtue of the Spirit sending presence and activity, there is a human society, which began in Calvin's phrase, "keeps us in the society of God." By the Spirit, a form of human fellowship or common human life is brought into being of which it can be said that those who participate in it thereby, in some way, participate in fellowship with the Holy Trinity. To be in this society is therefore, to be on the way to the fulfillment of created nature in heaven. Behold the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them. They shall be his people, and God himself will be with them.
	Now again, in speaking in those kinds of terms, we're speaking about a visible human society, which takes form in certain human activities. The Church is a visible, human fellowship. It's an association with communicative, symbolic institutional shape.  However, these visible forms are not as it were self-enclosed bits of nature, painted description without implication of language about God. They creaturely forms animated by the coming of the Spirit to serve as an order of signs. That is, as created accessories used by God to give profile, social extension, and endurance to life in fellowship with himself. 
	God's presence and action is neither holy within these forms, nor holy without them. Instead, the Spirit quickens these forms, so that by his use of them, the human society of the Church is kept in God's presence, and so we can speak of the visible form of the Church as the sphere of "the secret power, the ___ of the Holy Spirit as Calvin called it. 
	This power is a divine movement. God is not immobile, nor does he so inhabit the Church as to find his identity therein. No, as Spirit, God is in movement towards creatures, turning towards them after the unlimited abundance of his own life, giving life to the Church's acts, dwelling with them but is the Lord who has his own place. 
	Two signs of the society of the Church especial feels of the Spirit's activity in the outbuilding of the fellowship: Scripture and sacrament. There is a third of course, which is office in the Church, but that would mean I've missed my plane, so ... 
	Life in the society of the Church takes place under the sign of Holy Scripture set up by the Spirit as that by which God keeps the Church in the truth of the gospel. Holy Scripture is the canon of prophetic and apostolic writings whose authorship and reception are the Spirit's work. The human authors are moved by the Holy Spirit, which is to say that what's encountered in these texts isn't appeal to human impulse, but speech, which is from God. And those who read and hear these words are able to read and hear them as divine communication, as revelation, because they themselves are caught up in a further movement of the Spirit, in which he bestows upon such readers and hearers the capacity to attend to the divine Word. 
	To speak of Scripture, we need therefore, to speak of the Spirit’s acts of inspiration and illumination through, which the text and its reception are sanctified. This reference to the Spirit is profoundly significant for understanding what happens when the Church articulates the gospel when through itself, or to others. In the Spirit of the Church, a particular kind of communicative activity takes place. A given set of text is read and spoken about, but in these practices, the Church acknowledges the texts to be divine oracles that through which divine communication takes place. To its core therefore, the Church is a hearing Church, living in the communicative presence of God. This in part is what’s meant by speaking of the Church as the reformers did, as the creature of the Word.
	Ecclesial existence is existence in the domain of divine revelation. That means that there is by consequence a passive or a derivative character to the Church's representation of itself in speech. If the Church instructs, exhorts, and proclaims, its only because it has itself already received and continues to receive instruction, exaltation, and proclamation from the Word through the Spirit. The communicative course of the Church is therefore, as in 1 John: “This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you.”
	Life in the society of the Church is also life in which the Spirit builds up the community by the sacraments of the gospel. God, the Holy Spirit, gives and maintains life through baptism and the Lord's Supper through ... well, not in the sense that human acts are signifying considered in them of themselves effect states of affairs, which can only be effected by God, of course not. But, the Church's acts of signifying are not to be considered in and of themselves any more than the writing or reading of Scripture are purely natural acts. They are the Church's acts. That is, acts in which, by his gifts, the Spirit is at work; acts, which therefore, have a special kind of spiritual visibility and effectiveness.
	The Churches acts are undertakings to which a divine promise is attached. Namely, that through the agency of the Spirit, God will take these acts into his service, and through them make his grace, not himself, present and operative to bless his people. Sacramental activity, like scriptural activity, is a field of divine benefit because of the lordly movement of the Spirit. Well, this for example, may prompt you to think of the presence of Christ and the Lord's Supper in the following way: Classical Reform tradition struggled to articulate an account of the Lord's Supper, which severed the connection between the local and the effectual, and did so on the basis of two principles. 
	First of all, the perfection of the exalted Christ, whose humanity is now in heaven, and second, his presence through the operation of the Spirit. Christ isn't here. His body is located at the right hand of God. It's not dispersed through space of launched in the sacramental elements, but local presence of that kind isn't necessary to ensure fellowship in Christ. That fellowship is secured by the action of the Spirit of God who overcome spatial distance making effectual what is not present in bodily form. 
	This is Calvin again, "The Lord bestows his benefit upon us through his Spirit so that we made one in body, Spirit, and soul with him." The bond of this connection is, therefore, the Spirit of Christ with whom we are joined in unity and is like a channel through, which all that Christ is and has, is conveyed to us. 
	Christ sacramental presence, that is, his life changing relation to believe that through this action of the Church, is a function, not of the ubiquity of his body, but of the omnipotence of his rule exercised through the Spirit. “Though he has taken his flesh away from us,” Calvin writes, "and in the body has ascended into heaven, yet he sits at the right hand of the Father." That is, he reigns in his Father's power, and majesty, and glory. This kingdom is neither bounded by location in space, nor circumscribe by any limits, thus Christ is not prevented from exerting his power wherever he pleases in heaven and on earth. He shows his presence in power and strength. He's always among his people, breathes his life upon them, lives in them, sustaining them, strengthening, quickening, keeping them unharmed, as if he were present in the body. In short, he feeds his own people with his own body, the communion in which, he bestows upon them by the power of the Spirit. 
	What does that mean? Well, a churchly act takes place an assembly, words, prayers, gestures, material objects and in all this, the divine Spirit is at work as life-giver in such a way that Christ comes to be present to the fellowship to nourish, reassure, and so nurture life in communion with him. Well if that kind of sketch with word and sacrament has any substance to it, of course it's only a sketch, then two conclusions may be identified. 
	First, the visible acts of the Church are testimonies to the presence of Christ through the Spirit. The Church can't effect that presence. He himself, gives himself freely. The acts of the Church are, therefore, ostensive or indicative, not practices which embody him, but acts pointing beyond themselves to where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. That is why in one of the great movements of the Church is the Sursum Corda: lift up your hearts.
	Second therefore, the Church is most itself as it prays, above all, as it prays for the coming of the Holy Spirit with which we may fit in the drawer our thoughts to a close. 
	And this is good, old Bishop Cousin's translation of that ancient hymn, "Veni Creator Spiritus." "Come Holy Ghost our souls inspire and lighten with celestial fire. Thou, thee anointing Spirit art who dust thy sevenfold gifts in part, thy blessed unction from above is comfort, life, and fire of love, enable with perpetual light, the dullness of our blinded sight, anoint and share our solid face with the abundance of thy grace, keep far from foes, give peace at home where there art guide no ill can come, teach us to know the Father, Son, and Thee of both to be but one, that through the ages all along, this may be our endless song, praise to thy eternal merit, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen."
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