Note: From Glorification and the Life of Faith (Baker 2023). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
In many church traditions, at some point during a service of Christian worship, there likely comes a moment when those gathered will pause to say the creed together. After belief in the Father, Son and Spirit has been affirmed, the congregation turns to confess belief in the “one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.” These are the marks of the church. Anyone who has spent time in actual churches knows how far the church falls from these things. When we look at the fragmentations, divisions and wounds of the church, the prospect of the first mark (unity) seems especially inconceivable. However, if glory makes a doxology of the creed, and a richer doxological translation of pisteuomen is “we trust,” saying the creed as a doxology of trust is more than about believing in the church as it currently is. It is about trusting in God to gather together the church into what it is called to be: the glorified body of Christ, united in holiness, catholicity and apostolicity. The future orientation of the doctrine of glorification reminds Christians that life as it is, is not life as it could be. Alongside “trust,” then, another alternative to “belief” drawn from the repertoire of glory is “desire.” Shifting the mood from the imperative to the optative reveals a different tonality to these creedal marks. These marks of the church become cries of desire, the yearning and longing for what we do not yet see, seeing beyond the multiple divisions of the church to desire the holy unity that awaits all things.
It could be tempting to make glory the fifth mark of the church. Just as the order of salvation culminates in glory, so too the marks of the church. However, rather than adding to them, the four marks of the church – individually and together – are intensified by glory, just as the individual stages of the ordo salutis are integrated and intensified by glory. If you want to know the signs of the church made fully alive by the glory of God, these are the things you should look for. Where there is unity, there is glory. Where there is holiness, catholicity and apostolicity, there is more glory. Moreover, glory inspires the church to work toward deeper sorts of unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity. Glory encourages the church to enjoy that work. And glory intensifies each of the marks of the church by making them fully alive in relation to each other. The more the church is united, the holier it is. Once the church is fully these things, and loves to enjoy these things, the more the church is, in a word, glorified – vivens ecclesia.
The Primacy of Doxology
Each of the marks of the church is inseparably important. Holiness is especially important in that it shares with glory a deep concern for the Godness of God. If this were a full-scale ecclesiology, each of the marks would need to be worked through in relation to glory. What the present discussion requires is something more modest, and it follows others by focusing – in dialogue with the Letter to the Ephesians – on the unity of the church as the ultimate mark of the church fully alive. We have taken Ephesians to be the culmination of the Pauline tradition and the most glorious of epistles. Now, in this chapter, we take Ephesians to present the most vibrant ecclesiology of glory with a fundamental concern with what is ultimate for the church.
Ephesians takes epistolary form, but it begins in doxology and the overall dynamic is formational. The desire is for the building up of a mature church together, over the long haul, into fuller participation in the glory of God. The probable origins of the letter lie in doxological performance – in eucharistic or baptismal setting – and this, as we shall see, is important. Doxology sets the overall tone of the letter (“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” [1:3]; “I do not cease to give thanks for you” [1:16]) and emerges as the overriding practical wisdom for what makes a church fully alive in Christ, ending with the great imperative to “pray in the Spirit at all times in every prayer and supplication” (6:18). What is being asked of Christians is that they gather together, and when together they pray together.
Throughout, Paul encourages doxology as the most important thing a community can do by exemplifying it. In the opening doxology he prays,
With all wisdom and insight he has made known to us the mystery of his will [thelēmatos], according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness [plērōmatos] of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. (Ephesians 1:8-10)
This is a vast vision with inexhaustible dimensions that brings everything – including, but cosmically more than, the church – together. It suggests that the unity of the church as the body of Christ is not confined to the global; it is a catholicity that extends to everything. The most embracing idea in Ephesians, then, is the gathering up of everything in Christ to the “glorification of God’s glory,” to use Hans Urs von Balthasar’s translation of 1:6. This is God’s ultimate desire. The ultimate calling of the church is to be attracted into the desire of God, to let desires be shaped in line with it and to desire what God desires. The ultimate desire of the church is unity, for this is the ultimate mystery of God’s desire revealed in Jesus Christ.
The Syn Factor
The fundamental call to ecclesial “togetherness” is intensified in Ephesians 2:4-6 through the lavish piling up of the most energizing Greek verbs, each led by the dazzlingly glorious syn prefix.
God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together [synezōopoiēsen] with Christ….and raised us up [synēgeiren] with him and seated us [synekathisen] with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
Syn upon syn upon syn. The syn prefix features throughout Ephesians and is there too in the Nicene Creed. In the pneumatology article, we recall from chapter 1, the Nicene Creed affirms the divinity of the Spirit because the Spirit is glorified “with” (syndoxazomenon) the Father and the Son. As in the Nicene Creed, so too in Ephesians, the prefix suggests total togetherness. Something of the significance of the Greek can be felt in the English word synergy: the interaction that comes from when two or more are gathered produces a combined energy greater than the sum of their separate effects. The prefix brings verbs already full of life more fully to life. The desire of God is for us to be, not only made alive, but made alive together; not only raised up, but raised up together; not only seated with Christ in heavenly places, but seated together. Could anything be more compelling, challenging and imperative than the divine desire for the church to be made fully alive by being gathered together all in all, as a whole, in Christ?
The maturing into the fullness of God’s glory is a deepening into ever more intensified relations of “togetherness” in ways that surpass knowledge and understanding. Indeed, the utterly joint character of glorification means that divisions within the lives of individual churches cannot be healed until the separations between churches are overcome, and the dismantling of these might not be possible until the dividing walls between the church and other religions are brought down. The more we join in the flow of glory that moves within the divine life, the more our lives come to be shaped by the same sort of relationality. It rubs off on us. We are moved beyond relations of scarcity and competition generated by the conditions of sin, and we are drawn into the sorts of relations of equality and mutual intensification as summarized by the doxological “with” of the Nicene Creed.
Content taken from Glorification and the Life of Faith by Ashley Cocksworth and David F. Ford, ©2023. Used by permission of Baker Academic.
Ashley Cocksworth, senior lecturer in theology and practice, University of Roehampton; and David F. Ford, Regius Professor of Divinity Emeritus, University of Cambridge
