The first chapter of Lumen Gentium, “On the Mystery of the Church,” is not a chapter presenting basics or preliminaries that we can leave behind once stated. It is about the “mystery of the Church” not only in the sense of what that mystery is, but in the assertion that the Church is a mystery. This is presented as fundamental and constitutive. Any further specification of what the Church is, and what life flows from it, is within this conceptual “container” of the Church as mystery.
What is meant by “mystery” here? “Mystery” in the theological sense refers to a truth of the faith that is strictly speaking revealed, one to which reason could not have attained on its own. It is thus “above” reason, even though, once revealed and received in faith, it is hospitable to reason as reason “seeks to understand” what it believes.
By “above reason” we do not mean something just extra hard, more difficult by degree, such as the difference between algebra and differential equations, or in this case, something AI could find out, whereas human reason is just too limited. We mean something intrinsically unattainable to reason, such as the truth of someone else’s free will and anything in which the will is involved, such as love.
To see, specifically, how the Church is a mystery we have to read further. The primary and ultimate mystery is the mystery of the eternal Father’s will, or as LG puts it, the “free and mysterious design of his wisdom and goodness” (LG §2). In mentioning this will, we also find the first mention of “life” that will be important to keep track of: “The eternal Father, in accordance with the utterly free and mysterious design of his wisdom and goodness, created the entire universe. He chose to raise up human beings to share in his own divine life” (ibid.).
“Father” is used here in its Trinitarian sense, presupposed in the text, that is, the first Person of the Trinity, who eternally begets his divine Son. Further in LG §2 we read: “All those chosen, the Father ‘foreknew’ before time began ‘and also predestined to become conformed to the image of his Son that he should be the firstborn of many brethren’” (Rom 8:29). And, a little later, in LG §3: “The Son, accordingly, came, sent by the Father, who before the foundation of the world chose us and predestined us in him [in the Son] to be his adopted sons [and daughters].”
So the Father chose to raise up human beings to share in his own divine life as he shares it from all eternity with his Son, willing that we would be so intimately united with and in his Son that, though we are not eternal, we would nevertheless become sharers in his eternal Sonship, in his eternal relationship to the Father, “adopted” into that relationship, as the text says, in virtue of our intimate union with the Son.
This life is Church life, essentially speaking. The life of the Church, life in the Church, as a member of the Church, is this sharing in Christ’s eternal relationship to the Father, that is, in the divine life.
We can see this as we read along, because the Church is not an afterthought as presented here, but part of the plan, eternally willed “before the foundation of the world,” as the aim or goal of the foundation of the world and the creation of free human agents and thus already prefigured at “the beginning of the world,” referring here, though it is implicit but nevertheless traditional, to the gendered bodies of Adam and Eve as prefiguration of Christ the Bridegroom and the Church as Bride (cf. Eph 5:32).
The “convocation” of the Church, eternally willed by the Father, prefigured at the beginning of time, is “prepared in marvelous fashion in the history of the people of Israel and in the ancient covenant; established in this last age of the world; made manifest in the outpouring of the Spirit; to be brought to glorious completion at the end of time,” when “all the just” from all time “will be gathered together with the Father in the universal Church” (LG §2).
Far from being an accident of history, a contingency of our plans and projects, the Church is eternally willed by God as the aim of his creation of human beings and it will persist in an eternal life of relationship with the Father, “in,” as we have seen, the Son, “for,” moving on to LG §3, it is “in him that it pleased the Father to restore all things.” Eternal life is Church life, not erased but “brought to its glorious completion.” We have in the life of the Church no less than a participation already, though not in its perfection, in eternal life.
More specifically, reading a little further, “To carry out the will of the Father, Christ inaugurated the kingdom of heaven on earth and revealed his mystery to us; by his obedience he brought about the redemption” (LG §3)—Christ’s obedience reveals the mystery of his eternal relationship to the Father. That obedience and the mystery it reveals takes form, we could even say, takes life, “grows visibly,” in and as “the Church, that is, the kingdom of Christ already present in mystery . . . in the world.”
The “origin and growth” of the mystery of Christ’s life with the Father made present in the world, the “origin and growth of the Church,” are very intimately signified to us (not just “symbolized” as some translations have it), revealed to us, “by the blood and water which issued from the open side of the crucified Jesus (see John 19:34), and were foretold in the words of the Lord referring to his death on the Cross: And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself (John 12:32)” (LG §3). The origin of the Church is in the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross; she comes forth from that self-gift or sacrifice as the life of Christ poured out in love. It is his life that is hers, even now. The image says more than words can say. From the love revealed on the Cross comes the life of the Church, the life made present on earth of the loving obedience of the Son to the Father. The growth of the Church is in the continued fruitfulness of that sacrifice, always at work drawing all people, as he says, to himself, uniting them to himself in his self-gift and thus in his relationship to the Father, in his divine life.
LG §3, as it continues, shows us very clearly where his work drawing all people into union with himself is continually, even now, made efficaciously present: “As often as the sacrifice of the Cross by which Christ our Pasch is sacrificed (1 Cor 5:7) is celebrated on the altar, the work of our redemption is carried out. At the same time, in the sacrament of the Eucharistic bread, the unity of the faithful, who form one Body in Christ (see 1 Cor 10:17), is both represented and effected” (LG §3).
This is the mystery of the Church. It is the mystery of a “convocation” of human beings, the goal and aim of creation, as a communion in the divine life of the Father that he shares from all eternity with the Son. It is the height of this mystery that it is in the communion we have with each other, not as lone agents, that we are sharers in the divine life. That is because this communion is not a communion we created or gave ourselves, but a communion in the obedience of Christ, his relationship to the Father, as it was revealed and enacted on the Cross through the self-giving love he poured out for us there. It is this love that, made available to us in the Eucharist, binds us together so intimately that we are but one Body and so in our communion we have our participation in the divine life.
This life in Christ is life in the Spirit, as we read in LG §4. The Spirit is the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of the shared life of Father and Son, their mutual love, which animated the sacrifice of Christ itself and which is imaged as fully released or “sent on the day of Pentecost to sanctify the Church continually and so that believers might have access to the Father through Christ in the one Spirit.” The Spirit of Christ’s sacrifice “dwells in the Church and in the hearts of the faithful, as in a temple (see 1 Cor 3:16, 6:19), prays and bears witness in them that they are his adopted sons (see Gal 4:6; Rom 8:15-16, 26), guides the church in the way of all truth (see John 16:13) and . . . bestows upon it different hierarchic and charismatic gifts.” The life of the Church is life in the Spirit. “Hence,” section 4 concludes, “the universal Church is seen to be ’a people made one by the unity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’ (quotation from Cyprian).” The life of the Church—Church life—is thus essentially a participation in the Trinitarian life, as, we could say, a communion of and in Trinitarian life.
This is all returned to and expanded upon more fully in LG §7, which we can read as an exact theological description and characterization of Church Life as we might find anywhere. It bears careful contemplation and close reading.
Thus, we get to the passage which I identified as a kind of synecdoche of LG’s description of the mystery of Church life.
Christ, the one Mediator, established and continually sustains here on earth his holy Church, the community of faith, hope, and charity, as an entity with visible delineation through which he communicated truth and grace to all. But, the society structured with hierarchical organs and the Mystical Body of Christ, are not to be considered as two realities, nor are the visible assembly and the spiritual community, nor the earthly Church and the Church enriched with heavenly things; rather they form one complex reality which coalesces from a divine and a human element. For this reason, by no weak analogy, it is compared to the mystery of the incarnate Word. As the assumed nature, inseparably united to him, serves the divine Word as a living organ of salvation, so, in a similar way, does the visible social structure of the Church serve the Spirit of Christ, who vivifies it, in the building up of the body (LG §8).
The mystery of the Church is that it is a “visible assembly,” a society or fellowship like others we could think of, fraternal clubs, countries and kingdoms, even Bible study groups, just as much in the world as they are and composed as they are, on earth anyway, of fallen human beings. And yet this very visible assembly is a “spiritual community” in that it is the “Mystical Body of Christ” which is formed and held together by the love poured out on the Cross by Christ, drawing all to union with himself in every age through the Eucharist, a Body “vivified,” given life, by the Holy Spirit, who is, you could say, the Love poured out on the Cross. It is not the same as, but it is analogous to, the Incarnation, which is wholly God’s initiative and a work of grace, assuming the human being Jesus into Personal union with the divine Son, who is thereby a “living organ of salvation,”—except in the case of the Church, the humanity that is taken up into union with the Son, as his mystical Body, is fallen. The miracle is that he still takes us up, nevertheless, into this life of his, which even now, despite our fallenness, is a participation, as his members, in the divine life, in his relationship to the Father.
This is what it means to say that the Church is genuinely but in mystery, in seed form, yet to be fully perfected, the Kingdom of God on earth. That certainly cannot be said of any other human association, club, country, corporation, and reading group on earth. It helps us to understand two things about “church life” as we experience it now on earth and as mentioned in LG chapter 1.
Unlike any other human association, the Church is immaculate and holy, because the love that makes the Church and gives it life, Christ’s love poured out in the Spirit, is immaculate and holy. Unlike Amtrak and other humanly formed associations. However, since this love binds together sinners all, the Church is always in need of purification: “The Church is at once holy and always in need of purification” (LG §8). Church life is a participation in the holy and divine life that binds us together as a purifying life, ongoing and completed only eschatologically at the end of the world.
Thus the image of the Church as a “pilgrim”: “The Church, ‘like a stranger in a strange land, presses forward amid the persecutions of the world and the consolations of God’ (citing Augustine, City of God 18.51), announcing the Cross and the death of the Lord until he comes (see 1 Cor 11:26). But by the power of the risen Lord she is given strength to overcome, in patience and in love, her sorrows and difficulties, both those that are from within and those that are from without” (LG §8).
This life of holiness being purified is also expressed in the same imagery earlier in the text. Individually, it means that “all the members must be formed in his likeness until Christ is formed in them (see Gal 4:19),” a work of formation carried out in the first instance by the life of the Lord vivifying the Church. “For this reason, we who have been made like to him, who have died with him and risen with him, are taken up into the mysteries of his life; until we reign together with him (see Phil 3:21, 2 Tim 2:11, Eph 2:6, Col 2:12, etc.). On earth, still as pilgrims in a strange land, following in trial and in oppression the paths he trod, we are associated with his sufferings as the Body with its Head, suffering with him, that with him we may be glorified (see Rom 8.17)” (LG §7).
The image of pilgrimage expresses the way in which the Church’s life, the Church’s communion, the Church as Mystical Body, is formed by the same love that was expressed in the Incarnation: “Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God . . . emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave (Phil 2:6-7), and being rich, became poor for our sake (2 Cor 8:9)” (LG §8). This self-emptying love is always a “stranger” in a fallen world, fallen precisely because it is addicted to power, prestige, rank, privilege, grasping, and self-centeredness. The Church’s life, by its very nature, is thus identified with, “emptied into,” “all those who are afflicted by human infirmity and it recognizes in those who are poor and who suffer, the likeness of its poor and suffering Founder . . . holy, innocent and undefiled who knew nothing of sin” (LG §8, alluding to Heb 7:26, 2 Cor 5:21).
That means (the second point) that the Church, even before any works of its members (though certainly hopefully leading to works congruent with its identity) is the seed of a new human community, the kingdom of God, the convocation envisioned by the Father from all eternity, springing up and growing secretly, in the midst of all of the various fallen and distorted versions of human communion we see all around us. This is the meaning of the most famous passage in LG, from its opening lines: “the Church, in Christ, is a sacrament—a sign and instrument—that is, of communion with God and of the unity of the entire human race” (LG §1).
There is no principle of human communion coming from this world that is unfallen, no principle of communion that could truly unite all human beings with each other, because every one of them has a vested interest of some kind, an angle, a point of exclusion. The only one is the holy, undefiled, innocent, and sinless love of Christ, self-emptied of any claim for itself or vested interest, a love not of this world but emptied into it by the Father’s eternal will in order to bear witness against all the kingdoms of this world with their claims, and to purify and transform all human association into itself by reforging them in itself. The Church is the visible presence in this world—the efficacious sacrament—of the Kingdom of God, the new community, whose divine life is experienced in our lives as a continual purification, a continual refusal to settle into pathologized human associations as though they had any finality, a dynamism of self-emptying that, “recognizing in those who are poor and who suffer [in any way], the likeness of its poor and suffering founder, and does all in its power to relieve their need and in them it endeavors to serve Christ, who, holy, innocent and undefiled knew nothing of sin” (LG §8).
In closing, two more points just to mention. First, the mystery of the Church and her life is carried principally by images, not by concepts. These are especially mentioned in LG §6, which I did not cover specifically here, but really throughout Chapter 1. The images are biblical, that is, revealed, proposed by the Holy Spirit, and Church life is learning to use and to re-propose and to live into these images. These images tell the “story” of the Church and are to be used in telling our own stories of life in the Church, our own witness to and love of the Church. This is how we can teach love of the Church, by refusing to reduce the mystery of the Church to concepts (without eschewing them in their place, of course) and allowing her mystery to “take hold” through the Spirit-authorized images. Though I have left it to the end, this point cannot be emphasized enough.
Second, the point that the true Church of Christ is “unique,” that there is and can be only one because Christ has and can have only one Body that is truly his own and formed by his one sacrifice, and that “this church, constituted and organized as a [visible] society in the present world, subsists in the Catholic Church, governed by the successor of Peter and by the bishops in communion with him” (LG §8). The document uses “subsists in” rather than simply “is” because if the mystery of the Church is truly that it is a visible communion bound together by a love and life it did not give itself, then it has to be locatable in this world. It is locatable, and is the Catholic Church. But there are Christians who are not in full communion with the Catholic Church and yet, as Christians, they are still members of the only Church there is, the Body of Christ. “Subsists” allows the one true Church to include them, even if in imperfect communion. This, humanly speaking, prohibits triumphalism by Catholics, as though only Catholics had or could have any holiness—while in fact “many elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside its [the Catholic Church’s] visible confines.” But it also prohibits triumphalism by those Christians separated to some degree from the Catholic Church, as though true holiness and reformed purity were a function of their separation—when in fact all these “elements of sanctification and of truth . . . are gifts belonging to the Church of Christ and so are forces impelling towards Catholic unity” (LG §8). This leads naturally to the idea of the new “People of God,” the subject of Chapter 2.
