The Church and the World

Extract

The Church exists among men, men of flesh and blood who are, for the most part, in what we shall call ‘the world’. It is not a simple thing. While men are free to change the world they live in, this same world exercises, now as in the past, a great influence on men, including those who make up the community of believers that is the Church. It is true that the Gospel must be numbered among the forces at work in the world, since the men who respond to the Gospel are also in the world. There is an interplay, a complex relation between the world and the Gospel, a relation that varies from time to time, and which cannot be solved by a simple affirmation of a common divine origin of both societies. St Paul, having commented rather sharply on aspects of the world in his time, says later on: ‘Be not conformed to this world, but be reformed in the newness of your mind, that you may prove what is the good and the acceptable, and the perfect will of God’.

Nevertheless, history has seen a considerable assimilation of elements from the world within the structures of the Christian community, even before Constantine. In the Eastern Churches, the conciliar procedure followed that of the Roman senate, and the division of ecclesiastical dioceses followed that of the civil dioceses. Byzantium was a place of little importance in the Church until Constantine established his capital there. Even in the realm of faith, the influence of Hellenism is undeniable. Contact with the Greek intellectual world raised questions, while at the same time it provided tools, for a theological reflection which is a permanent part of our Christian heritage. To admit a certain assimilation of elements from the world, a certain ‘conforming’ to structures which do not have their origin in the Gospel is not to say that these elements are always corrupting influences.