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Chapter Thirteen: Theology of Church
- University of Notre Dame Press
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Thirteen Theology of Church . ’, .. Until the twentieth century the theme of the church in the thought of Thomas Aquinas was not much discussed. Then, in the century just ended, the ecclesiologies of medieval theologians began to be studied. The theology of the church—which was related to such topics as ecumenism , episcopal collegiality, an emphasis upon the local church, and the expansion of ministry—became prominent, and the twentieth century was called by some the time of the church. Scholars of a historical and creative bent researched the theology of Aquinas as it touched on the church. Curiously, while in the first half of the twentieth century a neo-scholastic revival and a papal centrism flourished, neither of them in fact drew much from medieval theologies of the church. It was the creative theologians whose thought was preparing for Vatican II who unfolded the ecclesiology of Aquinas, men who were at times personally and intellectually at odds with the exaggerated Pian claims to power for the church, that is, for the papacy. Aquinas did not compose an ecclesiology: that is, there is no section of the Summa Theologiae on church forms. Why? Some answer that society in the thirteenth century saw the church to be mainly the universal church rather than parish or diocese. Others argue that in Aquinas’ view the central topics of theology were the great themes of Christian revelation, and ecclesiastical structures are hardly on the same level with the Trinity or Incarnation. Perhaps Aquinas presumed that faith and theology, life and liturgy, are lived against the backdrop of the church, Thomas F. O’Meara, O.P. within a context of the church. Like the great cathedrals, the church was important but secondary: it offered the physical place, the structures of laws and administrators , the architecture and art, the array of human forms realizing grace and voicing its special presence.1 M.-D. Chenu noted: “It is significant that this theology (of the church) is not formed into a separate treatise . . . , but develops totally—both as institution and sacrament—within a theology of Christ and the Incarnation. The church is the very body of Christ animated by the Spirit whose organic realities come from its apostolic foundation now under the guidance of the pope. The church is at the same time a body (a corporation in the sociological sense of the word) and a mystery of Christ living on mystically and sacramentally.”2 Chenu and a few others found in Aquinas not a treatise but brief treatments of ecclesial motifs, insights seminal for a theology of the church. These the following essay pursues. But first, can we find echoes or traces of a personal ecclesiology in Thomas Aquinas’ life and career? As a young man he left the institutions of the feudal past: the monastery under the Benedictine rule with its monastic school and patristic and Neoplatonic meditative theology of symbols. Early on he avoided possible ecclesiastical positions like abbot or bishop and resolutely embraced the new movements of university and friar. He lived amid the medieval city and world and became the advocate of emerging new forms of ministry in the church seeking to restore the work of Jesus, and his theology clearly stated that some legal and political forms of the church have human origins and are not of the institution of the twelve apostles. He had intimations that history and biblical origins modify church offices. Aquinas, however, is not so clear about the identity and limits of what comes from medieval society and ancient philosophy and what came from the age of Jesus; a number of ecclesiological aspects are colored by his medieval focus upon the priesthood of the Eucharist as central and special and by his regard for Pseudo-Dionysius. Regardless, he chose to live his life amid institutions being born or in flux, and, as we will see, his theology of the church is one of Spirit rather than of feudal form. Discovering an Ecclesiology When he was thirty-five, in , Yves Congar published a remarkable article on the place of Thomas Aquinas in medieval ecclesiology and in the history of explicit ecclesiologies composed during the following centuries. “It is true that on the church St. Thomas wrote no separate treatise, characterized by a study of the distinctive marks of the church, of its organization in the form of a king- [23.20.220.59] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 06:30 GMT) dom, or of the authority which rules...