The two primary images that Metropolitan Hilarion has chosen to focus on in chapters 21 and 22 are the body and the bride of Christ. All Christians are called to deify the body through the Holy and Healing Body of Christ. All Christians are also called to enter the closeness of a marital kind of union with the Holy Trinity. The Church, then, is described often as a “pure virgin,” a term that is also used of the Theotokos. The Book of Acts describes members of the Church also as “holy ones” or the Latinate word, “saints.” They are the faithful members who are made one and holy through partaking of holy communion.
We yield to the Church as a bride who would be led by the groom into a new oneness of life. Faithfulness must be practiced in the Church daily as a newlywed must work at loyalty and love over the course of many years. Holiness is a mystery to be lived in the deepest part of the body – the noetic heart – where our body and soul meet the Divinity of Christ within our members in the Eucharist. Marriage is a fitting image because two people become one body. The recapitulation and reversal of humanity happens through the incarnation so that the incarnation can make us divine within ourselves through grace. Deification is the true marriage of Christians. The Church is given as a holy bride of Christ. The Holy Apostle Peter speaks of the holy ones as a royal priesthood. The whole people of ancient Israel were often called priests, or a “nation of priests” in the book of Exodus. So, we are called to be a holy nation, to become married mystically in our hearts, to be royal priests in the new kingdom. Christians all over the world are one people. Many indigenous and nations of the past called themselves in their own languages, “the first people,” “original men” and “the real humans” as opposed to foreigners. Likewise, we become fully human in the Church through deification, and the source of all life, light, holiness, purity, spotlessness, and infallibility in teaching everywhere flows from the Holy Trinity, St. Clement of Alexandria teaches.
The Church has been given the apostolic succession through holy hierarchs, and the Holy Spirit moves within it to preserve the doctrines, teachings and traditions of the Church intact. Holiness is pursued fully in the faithful practice of what was handed down to us through apostolic successive authority. There was no prerequisite of being holy, however, before entering the Church because sin is viewed primarily as an illness that can be cured, and Christ wants more than anyone to heal us all in His Church, often called a “hospital” by the eastern and western fathers. There were heretical and misguided views about the contradiction between individual holiness and the Church’s reputation of being “pure and spotless.” In the 3rd c. AD, the Roman episcopacy fought against such heretical groups as the Novatians and Donatists who wanted to create a pure church of their own. Novatian set up his own authority on the seat of the Roman episcopate and Donatus wanted to purge the Church of repeat sinners and apostates seeking forgiveness. Though there may be times when sacrifices are not offered rightly to God on the altar, the East and West early on agreed that the sacraments do not depend on the person doing the action but the faith of the person receiving the action, such as baptism, for instance. Holiness is not a numerical data point or added up individually; sacraments are given to make us holy from God Himself in a process of time. But the growth, experience, holiness and discipline of leaders in the Church are still important. The New Testament often exhorts churches to guide and order affairs according to the maturity and reputation of Christians and their calling. A “virtuous life” is the real rank of importance, as Metropolitan Hilarion reminds us because for every ecclesial rebirth, there is a downfall. The Roman way of governing and constructing city life was very systematic and defined in comparison to others outside of the empire. They marked the boundaries of the known world. This kind of “powerful institution” was a temptation for the Church to imitate. How then can the Church still claim to be Holy, One, Universal, if we see so much of secular dealings encroaching on the Church? St. Cyril of Alexandria asks that question in the next chapter, “Where is the Catholic Church?” The idea of conciliarity is part of the body and bride.