Christian Community

Text extracted from opening pages of book: CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY by J. V. LANGMEAD CASSERLEY D. Lit., Mary Crooke Hoffman Professor of Dogmatic Theology at The General Theological Seminary, New York LONGMANS CONTENTS PAGE PREFACE Vli Parti THE CHURCH OF GOD ITS GRANDEUR AND MISERY I 1. THE CHURCH IN THE BIBLE 3 Methods of Interpreting Holy Scripture God's Three Choices The Remnant The Church and the Person of Christ The Church and Human Destiny The Church and the Kingdom of God The Grandeur and the Misery of the Church The Singularity of the Church 2. THE STRUCTURE OF THE CHURCH MILITANT 32 The Distinction between Structure and Polity The Historic Episcopate The Episcopate and the Church Militant as an Order of Creation The Nature of Priesthood Some Contemporary Objections to this Doctrine The Episcopate and the Episcopal Office 3. THE FUNCTION OF THE CHURCH MILITANT 69 Worship Evangelism The Pastoral Ministry The Pro phetic Ministry 4. THE AUTHORITY OF THE CHURCH MILITANT Q2 The Authority of the Liturgy The Way of the Holy Spirit in the Church Scripture, Experience and Reason Infalli bility Part II THE CHURCH OF CANTERBURY ITS PROMISE AND PERPLEXITIES 109 5. THE NATURE OF ANGLICANISM III The Reformation Protest The Anglican Reformation 6. ANGLICANISM AS AN ECUMENICAL MOVEMENT 129 The Role of Anglicanism in the Ecumenical Strategy The Anglican Contribution to the Ecumenical Movement Angli canism and the Reunion Schemes Reunion and Ideology Need for Spirit of Realism VI CONTENTS PAGE 7. ANGLICANISM AS A LITURGICAL MOVEMENT 150 The Love of the Prayer Book and the Revising of the Prayer Book: ( a) The Maintenance of Literary Quality; ( b) The Nature of Revision; ( c) The Attitude of Reviserstowards Latin and Mediaeval Liturgy; ( d) The role of the Theologian in Liturgical Revision 8. THE FUTURE OF THE ANGLICAN COMMUNION 165 Suggestions towards fostering Anglican unity The Future of the Anglican Ideal PREFACE I HE traditional and hallowed way of defining man, as we find it in the ancient Christian writers, is to say that he consists of body, mind and spirit. This is indeed an excellent way of describing the wide and varied range of human existence, a prolonged spectrum moving from phenomena like digestion at one end to quite different processes like mystical prayer at the other. The trouble about this traditional formula is that by a very simple process of degeneration it becomes a statement that man is a composite being consisting of a body, a mind and a spirit, considered as three distinct entities. Because we are com pelled to distinguish between them in idea we are too easily led to suppose that they could conceivably be separated in fact, and we forget that it is one man who is body, mind and spirit at the same time. In order to guard against this error it is perhaps better to say in terms of twentieth-century thought, that man is a being who exists concurrently on the level or in the dimension of nature, on the level or in the dimension of history, and also and supremely for and before God. It is important to emphasise that the man who exists in nature or in history is the very same man as he who exists for and before God. We must not so state this doctrine, as even to seem to imply that these three modes of existence imply three distinct and separable parts of man's being. The whole man exists in nature, the whole man exists in history, and the whole man exists forand before God. The important conclusion to be drawn from this brief observa tion is that we must never commit the mistake of conceding human spirituality, or what is more often called * the spiritual life ', in terms of some theory of c pure' spirituality. The spiritual life of man means that form of spirituality which is appropriate to human nature. It must therefore include three things: ( a) a communal, social and historical element, which in theology is called The doctrine of the Church, for Christian existence is essentially existence in the Church; ( b)