Ecclesial Mediation of Grace and Truth

1 An earlier version of this essay was presented on 30 April 2011, at the Spring 2011 “Thomistic Circles” Conference on “Theo-Centric Ecclesiology” at the Dominican House of Studies, Washington, D.C. 2 See the ancient witnesses to this appreciation of the Church adduced in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 760. See also Henri de Lubac, The Splendor of the Church (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986 [French 1953]), 61-65. Olivier Messiaen’s “Apparation de l’Église éternelle” evokes this sense of the Church. 3 Charles Journet, The Church of the Word Incarnate, vol. 1, The Apostolic Hierarchy, trans. A. Downes (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1955 [French, 1941]), 2-5. Journet repeats this in his The Theology of the Church, trans. Victor Szczurek (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2004 [French, 1958]), 14-15. 4 For the lex divinitatis, see Serge-Thomas Bonino, O.P., “The Role of the Apostles in the Communication of Revelation according to the Lectura super Ioannem,” in Reading John with St. Thomas Aquinas: Theological Exegesis and Speculative Theology, ed. Michael Dauphinais and Matthew Levering (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 318-46, at 318-20. This difference between supra- and post-lapsarian order seems to imply that the Law does not in fact have the necessary and universal force neo-Platonism ascribes to it. 555 The Thomist 75 (2011): 555-83 ECCLESIAL MEDIATION OF GRACE AND TRUTH1 GUY MANSINI, O.S.B. Saint Meinrad Seminary Saint Meinrad, Indiana T HE CHURCH IS AN END, the end of all things. Envisaged by God before the foundation of the world, she is that for the sake of which all things have been made.2 The Church is also a means, the mediatrix of the charity of Holy Spirit and the grace of adoption, and the ambassador who represents the mind of Christ, his teaching. Charles Journet said that before the Fall there was no mediation of the grace and truth of God to men.3 But now there is mediation, and the lex divinitatis, the law of mediation, is verified in the Church as in the natural order.4 The claim of the Church is as follows. If we want to listen to Christ and to be certain that it is him to whom we are listening, GUY MANSINI, O.S.B. 556 5 The truth and grace of Christ can be found outside the Church, but cannot there be recognized with certainty. Cardinal Newman makes this point in An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909), part 1, chap. 2, sect. 2: “An Infallible Developing Authority to Be Expected.” we must listen to the Church. Likewise, if we want to receive the salvation he brings, and to be sure it is he who touches us to wash, heal, and feed us, then we must let the Church touch us through the sacraments.5 This twofold mediation of the Church is contested. The Reformation challenged especially the Church’s mediation of grace, reducing sacraments to words that announce a grace to be apprehended by faith alone. The Enlightenment challenged especially the Church’s historical mediation of revelation on the ground that critical historical studies do not show continuity but rather discontinuity between Jesus and the New Testament, and between the New Testament and the early Church. Since the Reformation and the Enlightenment, therefore, our confidence and trust in the Church may no longer be spontaneous. In what follows, historical questions are bracketed, and the more theoretical questions about mediation are addressed. Arguably, the theoretical questions are the important ones. When Enlightenment thinkers began to raise questions about the continuity of the Christian message from the preaching of Jesus to the first witnesses to the New Testament and beyond, they did so in an already established context of unbelief. H. S. Reimarus, for instance, was not driven to rationalism by the historical difficulties for orthodox faith he found in the Bible. Rather, he approached the Bible forearmed with the conviction that there could be no divine revelation meant for all humanity universally, and under Deist presuppositions produced the readings of the Bible that G. E. Lessing subsequently published...