Abstract
This article argues that ‘Reformed catholics’ should accept Augustine’s totus Christus Christological-ecclesiology. It states what Augustine said about the doctrine. Then it responds to five Protestant objections to Augustine’s doctrine, examining similar iterations in the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Karl Barth. Finally, it describes what totus Christus entails and does not entail, and concludes that Protestants should accept it because it is based in Scripture and does not entail all the deleterious things the objections claim it does.
Keywords
Introduction
Reformed theologians can be catholic today, or so say proponents of “Reformed catholicity,” a burgeoning movement in contemporary Reformed theology. In the movement’s eponymously titled manifesto, Michael Allen and Scott Swain claim that “Reformed catholicity” is not a theological system, but a “theological sensibility” rooted in Reformed Protestant theological principles. Its purpose is to retrieve the Church’s ancient teaching for “theological and spiritual renewal” of Reformed churches and theology within Reformed confessional boundaries. 1 One important recent contribution to it is Christian Dogmatics: Reformed Theology for the Church Catholic, a single volume in which “Reformed catholic” theologians address major dogmatic loci “within the context of the catholic church of the Reformed confessions.” 2 Allen and Swain, its editors, admit that the volume parallels Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson’s edited volume of the same title, which was designed to address the “catholic church” from the standpoint of the Lutheran confessions. 3 In these discussions, to be “catholic” means to engage the entirety of the catholic, or universal and historical, Christian tradition from a Lutheran or Reformed theological perspective, assenting to what is true and dissenting from what is false based on the perspective’s theological axiology. “Reformed catholics” desire continuity with ancient catholic tradition where it is possible, especially with its early conciliar teaching on God and Christ. 4
However, Reformed catholics typically reject an ancient teaching on the identity of the Church, which has expressed the Catholic Church’s self-understanding for hundreds of years: the teaching that Christ has formed a mystical union with his Church so that they are now one spiritual entity, the totus Christus (“the whole Christ”), Head and members. Augustine (354-430) is responsible for developing this teaching, though it is not original with him. 5 Reformed catholics are indebted to Augustine’s teaching on the Incarnation, sin, nature, and grace, as Luther and Calvin were. Augustine has been so influential on both Protestant and Catholic theology that we might think that agreement with him is part of what it means to be catholic or universal. But his ecclesiology of the totus Christus has not enjoyed favor among Reformed catholics. One reason for this may be the fact that it is explicitly encoded in Catholic ecclesiology but does not appear in any Protestant confession of faith. 6 Thus, the reason for this absence may be historical.
However, the main reason totus Christus is unpopular with Reformed catholics is theological. Michael Horton, Kevin Vanhoozer, and John Webster, all of whom have either identified as Reformed catholics directly or been associated with the title indirectly, have rejected it. In this essay, I will address their objections to the doctrine. I will argue that Reformed catholics, and Protestants in general, should accept the language of totus Christus as a true description of the Church. My argument proceeds in four parts. First, I present what Augustine said about totus Christus, particularly his exegesis of Scripture supporting it, and draw out four features of the doctrine from Augustine’s theology that I will defend. Second, I list five Reformed objections to totus Christus. Third, I argue that none of these objections are compelling, because totus Christus does not have the deleterious consequences these objections claim that it has. The strongest responses to these objections come indirectly from the works of Augustine and Hans Urs von Balthasar, two of the greatest theologians in the Catholic tradition, and the Protestant luminary Karl Barth. All three theologians held that Christ and the Church are totus Christus, and they drew this conclusion based on Scripture. None of them think that totus Christus has the unsavory consequences the Reformed objections say it has. And the Reformed objections fail to undermine the Catholic account of totus Christus as it appears in Augustine and von Balthasar. Fourth, drawing on the analysis in the third part, I will discuss what totus Christus entails and does not entail in an attempt to advance the conversation on this ecclesiological motif.
Augustine on Christ and the Church as Totus Christus
The Church is the one body of Jesus Christ, according to Paul. 7 Jesus Christ, one and the same as the divine Logos, did not need to take on flesh, nor did he need to make the Church his body. But in God’s great love, the Logos became incarnate for our salvation. He drove out sin and death on the cross and in the resurrection through his infinite divine power working efficaciously in his human acts. Precisely because of this power, what Christ accomplishes in his flesh—most of all in his death and resurrection—is saving. 8 And by this same divine power working in his bodily death and resurrection (Rom. 7:4), Christ has made us his body so that “we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members of one another” (Rom. 12:5, NRSV).
For Augustine, this scriptural teaching reveals a crucial claim about the Church’s identity: Christ is united with his Church so that one new spiritual entity—the totus Christus—comes to be.
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Before we proceed, we need to define what this entity is as precisely as possible to avoid misunderstanding. Augustine helpfully does this for us in an anti-Arian sermon preached in 419. There he argued that Christ can be understood and named in three ways in Scripture. The first way is according to his divine nature, in which he is coequal with the Father and the Holy Spirit. The second way is post-Incarnation, according to which he is both God and a human being. The third way is insofar as he is the Head of the Church, to whom he is united; in this third way, Christ is understood “in some way as the whole Christ (totus Christus) in the fullness of the Church, that is, Head and Body, according to the completeness of a certain perfect man, the man in whom we are each members.”
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On Augustine’s view, we must take this third way as seriously as the first and the second in our Christology if we are going to be faithful to Scripture. But we must also be clear about the distinction of this third way from the first and second. In Scripture, Christ and the Church, Head and members, form the totus Christus, one “perfect man” (vir perfecti). But Christ and the Church are not united as one Christ in the same way that Christ’s two natures are united in his person. Christ’s union with the Church is not the same kind of union as the hypostatic union. Christ is complete, or perfect, as the whole Christ without the church. Yet Christ willed to unite us to himself in the economy of salvation in another way:
Indeed head and body are one Christ, not because he is not complete without the body, but because he deigned to be complete (integer) with us, he who without us is always complete, not only in that he is the Word, the only-begotten Son equal to the Father, but also in the man himself that he took on, and with which he is God and man together.
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Christ is ontologically complete without us. He does not need us to exist; he is perfect without us. Yet out of sheer love, he has united himself to us, the Church, so that we are the totus Christus with him.
Augustine thinks Scripture teaches totus Christus in a rather straightforward way. In his study of totus Christus in Augustine’s thought, Tarsicius van Bavel argued that Augustine got the idea for the motif directly from the words of Paul.
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To take one central example, in a sermon, Augustine expounds a central Pauline text that identifies the totus Christus, 1 Cor. 12:12-13, which reads,
For just as the body is one and has many members, and yet all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.
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He meditates on the kind of union that Christ maintains with his members, commenting,
He [Paul] does not say: so it is with both Christ and his body; but he says, “the one body has many members, so it is with Christ.” Therefore the whole thing (totum) is Christ; and because the whole thing is Christ, therefore the Head shouted from heaven, “Saul,” he says, “Saul, why do you persecute me?”
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Augustine thinks we should understand Paul’s statement here in the following way: “Christ is Head and Members together, and not: the relationship between Christ and us bears a resemblance to the relationship between the head and members of a body.” 15 In other words, the precise natural sense of the biblical language, especially its predicative force (the is of identity), should lead us to think that Christ and the Church, Head and members, are one spiritual entity, totus Christus. This is why Augustine thinks that the statement “the Church is Christ’s body” cannot be a weak or empty metaphor. If it were, the Church’s relation to Christ would be utterly dissimilar to how a natural body relates to its head. But this is exactly the opposite of what Paul flatly says: the Church is Christ’s body in some real way. As Kimberly Baker observes, “[T]o say that Christians are incorporated into the one body of Christ is much more than a symbol or metaphor; it describes the reality of a transformed relationship between Christians and God.” 16 This transformed relationship must be a real, spiritual union than which a greater cannot be conceived.
For Augustine, Christ unites himself to the Church by the Holy Spirit. 17 The Holy Spirit’s distinctive task, though not apart from the Father and the Son, is to cause human beings to dwell in God by transforming them inwardly. Augustine thinks this is based on a straightforward biblical notion: The Holy Spirit makes us dwell in God by giving himself to us (1 John 4:13). This gift is a work of the whole Trinity. Although the persons of the Trinity are love commonly, because God is love, “love” is appropriated to the Holy Spirit who conforms us to the love of Christ. 18 Augustine says of the Spirit, “So it is God the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from God, who inflames man to the love of God and neighbor when he has been given to him, and he himself is love.” 19 The great work of the Spirit, as Love, is to give us love for God, or charity, which comes from Christ’s love. In this love, the Spirit binds the individuals in the Church together as one Body with Christ (Eph. 4:13). However, this union is not perfect. Though we are united to Christ now, we are not united to him in full, since perfect union with him will only come in the eschaton. Augustine draws this distinction carefully: “We are with him in heaven through hope, and he is with us on earth through charity.” 20 Charity unites us to Christ in the present, but hope directs us to desire to be united with him in the future when we see him as he is (1 John 3:2).
Here we should summarize some basic features of totus Christus ecclesiology as Augustine presents it. First, totus Christus denotes a spiritual union between Christ and the Church so that, out of the two, one spiritual entity, Head and members, comes to be. The union is spiritual because the Holy Spirit brings it about. Second, totus Christus is a metaphysical union between Christ and the Church. Third, the metaphysical union in the totus Christus is qualitatively distinct from the hypostatic union and from the unity of the three divine persons. The Logos is hypostatically united to his flesh so that his flesh truly is his own, that is, it belongs to his person. But his union with his Church, though metaphysical, is decidedly different and non-hypostatic. Fourth, totus Christus denotes a kind of metaphysical identity between Christ and the Church, such that the “whole thing” (totum) is Christ. But this spiritual entity is not composed of two distinct entities that become numerically identical, or one and the same thing. Christ and the Church are distinct in one way and united in another: distinct in their being, we might say, since God and creatures are distinct, but united by the Holy Spirit. As I will show, these four features overlap with what the Reformed and Catholic traditions have called Christ’s “mystical body.” “Mystical body” and totus Christus have a common lineage with overlapping meanings.
Protestant Objections to Totus Christus
Even though totus Christus was a fundamental component of Augustine’s biblical ecclesiology, several “Reformed catholic” theologians have recently rejected it. As far as I can tell, they have leveled five main objections to it. Some of these objections originate in long-standing disagreements between Rome and Protestant communions over the nature of the Church. Other objections articulate worries with contemporary versions of totus Christus. I will list these objections, focusing in greatest detail on the fifth, which I take to be the most basic and the most serious against any account of totus Christus.
Kevin J. Vanhoozer sums up four of these objections succinctly in his recent Biblical Authority after Babel: Retrieving the Solas in the Spirit of Mere Protestant Christianity. 21 First, he recognizes that totus Christus calls for some kind of ontological union between Christ and the Church. But he argues that Christ and the Church are not ontologically united because Christ in his divine nature is only ontologically united to the Father and the Holy Spirit. He writes, “In the first place, the church is not constitutive of the Son’s identity as are the Father and the Spirit; its relation to the Son is not substantival but covenantal, a matter of fellowship, not ontology.” 22 Vanhoozer seems to suggest here that totus Christus implies that Christ is united with the Church in the same way that Christ is united to the Father and the Holy Spirit, whether the doctrine’s proponents realize it or not. One reason for this may be that totus Christus identifies Christ and the Church as one “person,” Head and members; identifying Christ and the Church in this way would seem to collapse Christ into the Church, eliding the distinction between God and creatures. If this consequence follows, totus Christus raises yet another problem: if Christ and the Church are one person, then the Church is identical to Christ himself. Reformed theologians must protest, Vanhoozer argues: “the church is not a continuation of the incarnation.” 23 Second, Vanhoozer claims that “Jesus was impeccable; and the Church is fallible.” 24 But the Catholic Church has claimed that it is identified with Christ as the totus Christus, and this underwrites the infallibility of its teaching in matters of faith and morals. Thus, Vanhoozer seems to think that totus Christus supports the claim that everything the Catholic Church teaches is divinely authorized. Third, Vanhoozer holds that totus Christus seems to entail that the Catholic Church’s sacraments are necessary for grace, and thus that Christ alone is not the only source of grace. For this reason, Protestants cannot hold the totus Christus, since they maintain that Christ alone gives grace to the Church (solus Christus). 25 Motivated by the same worries, Reformed theologian Michael Horton has argued that recent Catholic theologians, primarily of the communio persuasion, have used totus Christus to legitimize the institutional and hierarchical Roman Catholic Church as the sole source of true doctrine and sacramental grace: Rome alone is Christ alone. 26 Fourth, Christ has ascended into heaven and is no longer present on earth with the Church. Thus, he cannot be united with the Church ontologically.
The fifth objection is not one Vanhoozer makes explicitly, but it underlies some of his objections, especially the first. This objection is the most serious, for it claims that totus Christus contradicts a basic principle of theology: God’s distinction from creatures. The Reformed theologian John Webster of blessed memory develops this objection in detail. He argues that totus Christus elides the metaphysical distinction between God and creatures. 27 That is to say, totus Christus collapses Christ, truly God, into the church, truly creature. He thinks Protestant ecclesiology preserves this distinction better. For Protestants, God and creatures exist, as Christoph Schwöbel has argued, in a “fundamental asymmetry.” 28 Protestant ecclesiology takes this fundamental distinction to be basic, “following through the logic of the distinction between uncreated and created being in thinking about the church and its existence in time.” 29 Because God is distinct from creatures, so this argument goes, Christ must be distinct from the Church. Similarly, the Church must “add nothing to the identity of the exalted Son.” 30 To summarize, Webster thinks the distinction of God and creatures is logically prior to the distinction of Christ and the Church: “The distinction between uncreated and created, expressed in the Son’s transcendence of the flesh even in its assumption, is crucial to a theologically intelligent grasp of the historical forms and acts of the church.” 31 That is to say, we cannot adequately understand the relationship of Christ and the Church if we do not grasp the distinction of God and creatures first.
Webster is concerned that several recent works in ecclesiology “ordered around a particular construal of the ‘body of Christ’ metaphor” err, especially theologies of the totus Christus, because they do not adequately attend to the distinction between God and creatures. 32 He worries that the communio ecclesiology of Henri de Lubac and the Protestant ecclesiologies of John Milbank and Robert Jenson go awry because they do not give full weight to the “perfection” of Christ. 33 On Webster’s view, Christ the Logos exists as Lord over the Church because of his divine perfection, which is his “metaphysical rather than his moral greatness.” 34 God’s perfection is his metaphysical greatness. God’s metaphysical greatness is his ability to create ex nihilo. If God alone is perfect and creates ex nihilo, his creatures, imperfect and unable to create ex nihilo, cannot be ontologically united with him. Totus Christus collapses God into creatures and brings about what Calvin accused Osiander of creating with his doctrine of “essential righteousness”: a crassa mixtura between God and human beings. 35
However, Webster thinks that if we take God’s distinction from creatures seriously in ecclesiology, we will understand that Christ did not create the Church to be an extension of himself, but to be a distinct subject that enters into “fellowship” with him. Webster suggests that the relation of Christ and the Church is best characterized as covenantal fellowship rather than mystical or spiritual union. 36 “Covenantal fellowship,” a term that implies at least two distinct subjects, is the best way to maintain the ontological distinction between Christ and the Church; ontological participation in God is not. 37
Augustine, von Balthasar, and Barth on Totus Christus: Union and Distinction
The fifth objection is the most serious because if it is correct, totus Christus violates a fundamental principle of Christian theology. Webster’s objection may apply to the ecclesiologies of Jenson, Milbank, and some versions of communio ecclesiology. But I do not want to defend those ecclesiologies here. Instead I will argue that totus Christus does not violate the distinction between God and creatures; rather, it maintains it. We can find strong arguments for this claim in the work of Augustine, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Karl Barth. They maintained both totus Christus and the ontological distinction between God and creatures. However, they did so in different ways and with different concerns. But they illuminated the doctrine from their respective vantage points while substantially agreeing on its truth.
Augustine and the Totus Christus in Enarrationes in Psalmos
Augustine consistently held both that Christ and the Church are totus Christus and that God is distinct from creatures. We can see this in how he understands Christ’s suffering with the Church. In his exegesis of Scripture, he learned that Christ is intimately joined to the Church so that he suffers with its members when they are persecuted, even after his ascension. But Christ does not suffer with the Church in the same way that the Church suffers, because the two are not numerically identical. Augustine expounds this idea in detail in his second exposition of Psalm 30. He characterizes Christ’s suffering with his Church as the “wonderful exchange” (admirabile commercium), where Christ suffers for the Church both in his body on the cross and in the present with the Church.
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He thinks the Psalms reveal this teaching. And he developed that notion from his study of Paul’s use of the Old Testament, where he learned that Christ and his sacrifice form the interpretive center of Scripture, including the Psalms.
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That is to say, Scripture itself warrants his Christological readings of the Psalms.
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Moreover, Augustine adopted a “prosopological” form of exegesis, a rhetorical strategy that discerns different speakers in one and the same text. In this way, Augustine regularly discerned Christ as the speaking subject of the Psalms who can speak in the place of the psalmist.
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In his second exposition of Psalm 30, Augustine asks whether Christ is able to experience fear. His solution is striking. Christ indeed speaks in this psalm as one who fears, but it is not he himself who fears. Rather, he fears in us, the Church:
But nevertheless, he who deigned to assume the form of a servant, and in that form to clothe us with himself, who did not disdain to assume us into himself, did not disdain to transfigure us into himself and to speak in our words, so that we could speak in his. For this is the wonderful exchange, the completed divine “trade,” the celebrated alteration of things in this world by the heavenly trader. He comes to receive insults and to give honors; he comes to drain the cup of suffering and to give salvation; he comes to endure death, and to give life. Therefore, since he intends to die because of what he had from us, he was fearful in us, but not in himself.
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Christ gives the Church life in exchange for our death. However, Christ’s gift goes beyond his historical sacrifice on the cross; he has taken on the Church’s sufferings even now. Christ and the Church have become one, and Christ wills that this should be so. Thus, Christ has united himself to the Church so that when Christ speaks words of fear, he can speak them not in his own person but in us. This means that
[B]ecause he said this, that his soul was sorrowful even to the point of death, certainly we all said it with him. For without him, we are nothing. In him, we are Christ himself. Why? Because the whole Christ (totus Christus) is the head and the members.
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Christ suffers with the Church so that when Christ our Head cries out in suffering here in the Psalm, we do so with him as his Body. Christ is not distant or absent from the Church’s sufferings, but is intimately present in them.
Augustine finds one pillar of totus Christus ecclesiology in Acts 9:4, where we are told that Christ suffers with the Church and the martyrs.
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In this text, the ascended Christ addresses Saul on the road to Damascus and asks why Saul persecutes him. As Augustine points out, Christ’s famous cry to Saul calls for a theological explanation:
Yet because of our union with him, whatever the Lord says in virtue of the fleshly nature he assumed can be taken as said both by the head who has now ascended into heaven and by the members who still struggle along on their earthly pilgrimage. When Saul was persecuting Christ’s earthly members, Christ cried out from heaven in the person of those suffering members, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”
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Because Christ is united to us, we can understand his question to Saul in two ways. First, we can apply it to Christ as an individual human being, and, second, we can apply it to us, the members of his body. Christ’s words in Acts 9:4 fall under both categories: they refer to the sufferings of Christ and the sufferings of his members. Christ speaks to Saul for himself and for us: when we suffer, he suffers. Why? The Church is inseparably joined to him. Thus, totus Christus explains what Christ says to Saul. Augustine might say that if Christ were not totus Christus with us, then the Christ’s words on the road to Damascus would not make sense.
However, Christ does not suffer with us in the same way that we suffer, or in an unqualified sense of numerical identity. This is true because Augustine’s totus Christus ecclesiology is tempered by a heavily eschatological dimension: Christ’s union with the church is real and metaphysical, but not fully realized as it will be in glory. By contrast, Jürgen Moltmann posits that totus Christus ecclesiology, especially its modern variants, is an “‘over-realized’ eschatology.” The reason, he argues, is that the Church is now only Christ’s Bride, awaiting her eschatological marriage to the Bridegroom. 46 But Augustine’s ecclesiology is not overrealized. For him, Christ’s sufferings are not unqualifiedly identical with the Church’s sufferings for two reasons. First, Christ as a human being is in heaven, and this fact distinguishes him from his members on earth. Second, the Church remains on pilgrimage through this world, aiming for the eschatological goal for which she hopes: fully realized union with Christ.
Two representative texts bear out these judgments. First, in his exposition of Psalm 142, Augustine claims that Christ, having willed to die for us, also wills to speak in us, his members.
And so sometimes he [Christ] says things from the person of his members, sometimes from his own person, as he is our head. He has something which he says without us; we cannot say anything without him. The apostle says: “So that I may fill up what is lacking of the sufferings of Christ in my own flesh” (Col. 1:24). “So that I may fill up,” he says, “what is lacking of the sufferings,” not of mine, but “of Christ”; “in the flesh,” not of Christ, but “of my flesh.” He says that Christ is suffering now, but not in his own flesh, in which he ascended to heaven, but in my flesh, which labors now on earth. Christ, he says, is suffering in my flesh: “For now I live my own life no longer; truly it is Christ who lives in me.” (Gal. 2:20)
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Paul can “fill up what is lacking” in Christ’s sufferings by his own suffering, in the sense that Christ suffers with him. Similarly, his members can fill up what is lacking in Christ’s sufferings when they suffer together as one body. However, the man Jesus in heaven does not physically suffer when Paul or the Church suffers. Christ suffers with his members in their suffering on earth as the Head of the Body, since suffering will be part of the Body’s life in its pilgrimage on earth. As Augustine argues in exposition of Psalm 87, “[t]hese tribulations are never lacking to the Church while it makes its pilgrim way through this world; now they afflict some members, now others, for the calamities strike from every direction.” 48 Christ suffers with the Church now, but not in his human nature as he did on the cross.
One could still object, however, that Augustine’s totus Christus doctrine improperly elides the distinction between Christ and the Church: Christology has become ecclesiology. Augustine would likely counter this objection by pointing to the biblical distinction between Christ and the Church as Bridegroom and Bride. If the Head and Body motif leads the mind to think of one person, the nuptial motif draws it to think of distinct persons. In the second exposition of Psalm 30, Augustine expounds Eph. 5:31-32, which contains nuptial language signifying the relation of Christ and the Church. Paul calls this “a great mystery” (τὸ μυστήριον τοῦτο μέγα). Augustine argues that this mystery, unfolded now at the end of the age, is that we have two distinct entities out of which one single entity, the totus Christus, comes to be: the Bridegroom and the Bride are also the totus Christus, Head and Body.
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This new creation is the “unity of person” (unitatem personae). This united person forms one body, but one body that has distinct members, namely, two subjects. Christ and the Church are not ontologically equal or identical so that one collapses into the other; the Church neither becomes another person of the Trinity nor a part of the hypostatic union. Rather, as Augustine says, the Church depends on Christ, but Christ exists perfectly, even without the Church. Commenting again on 1 Cor. 12:12, Augustine writes,
A body is a single unit, with many members, but all the members of the body, numerous as they are, constitute one body; and it is the same with Christ. Many members, one body: Christ. All of us together with our Head are Christ, and without our Head we are helpless. Why? Because united with our Head we are the vine, but if cut off from our Head (God forbid!) we are only loppings, of no use to the vine-tenders and fit only for the bonfire . . . If we can achieve nothing without you, Lord, we can do everything in you. Yes, because whatever work he does through us seems to be our work. He can do plenty, or rather everything, without us, but we can do nothing without him.
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Christ surely exists without the Church, but the Church will cease to exist apart from Christ. Christ has united us to him as his Body so that the Church is wholly dependent on him, but Christ does not depend on the Church for his being or his works.
Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Totus Christus as Sponsa Verbi (Spouse of the Word)
In Scripture, Christ is distinct from the Church because the Bridegroom is a distinct person from the Bride. Hans Urs von Balthasar carefully attended to this nuptial motif and its signal importance for totus Christus ecclesiology. He believed this distinguishing motif balanced the unity evoked by the Head and Body motif. I introduce von Balthasar here not because he offers a corrective to Augustine’s account of totus Christus, but because he used personalistic categories to explain totus Christus in a creative way that shows how the distinction between Christ and the Church must observe the limits set by the distinction between God and creatures.
Von Balthasar believed that the biblical motif of the Church as the Bride of Christ distinguishes the Church as a collective person or agent from Christ. 51 But the Church’s collective “personhood” evinces the Church’s mysterious identity, since Christ and the Church are also one Body, Head and members. Von Balthasar sought to understand this mystery in his essay “Wer ist die Kirche?” (Who is the Church?), which contains his main account of the totus Christus. 52 He argues that totus Christus does not eliminate the ontological distinction between Christ and the Church, precisely because it does not elide the qualitative distinction between God and creatures. For him, this distinction, formalized as the (in)famous “analogy of being” (analogia entis), is a condition all Christian theology must meet.
In the essay, von Balthasar inquires about the nature of the Church, since it seems to be a single subject or a person even though it lacks consciousness.
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And the Church in Scripture is also the body of Christ, an extension of another subject or person. If we are going to be faithful to Scripture, then, we must develop an ecclesiology that links both motifs together conceptually:
this means, if we allow its full range of meaning, that the Church, in regard to her Head, is not a person on her own, a new and second one. The “body” in the sense of the simile, forms, together with the “Head,” one being; that is, she is a person only “by grace” of the Head.
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For von Balthasar, as for Augustine, Christ the Head can exist without the Body, but the Body is dependent on the Head. By grace, the Head allows the Body to “participate in His personality.” 55 Therefore, the Church must be Christ’s Body by grace in order to be a person at all.
Von Balthasar thinks it is striking that Paul uses personalistic categories when he describes the Church as the Body and Bride of Christ in Ephesians 5. Scripture requires that we say that two seemingly contradictory motifs about the Church are true at the same time:
[T]he personal, in virtue of which the Church is a “someone” whom the Lord loved and for whom he delivered himself up, “a someone,” therefore, who in a certain way already existed; and the somatic, in virtue of which the Church is what she is, namely, the glorious one without spot or wrinkle yet owing her origin wholly to this event of the Cross.
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For von Balthasar, we need both the personal or nuptial and the somatic or bodily motifs of the Church for an adequate account of the Church’s nature. These motifs present a picture where the Church is a “someone” distinct from both Christ and Christ’s Body. Von Balthasar calls this a “paradox, not to say contradiction.” 57 He thinks ecclesiology falters if it draws attention to the body of Christ motif and overlooks or ignores the nuptial motif, as theology had been doing in his day. 58 To correct this overemphasis of the somatic or bodily motif, von Balthasar foregrounds the personal or nuptial motif in his account of the totus Christus: thus his question, “Who is the Church?” As John O’Donnell, S.J. comments on Balthasar’s theological motivations, “If we ask who is the Church, a question which supposes that the Church is a subject and not a thing, the bridal image can help us to find an adequate response.” 59
Because the nuptial motif involves distinct persons, “contradistinction” must be utterly basic to Christ and the Church. 60 Moreover, the Church is a subject in the sense that its subjectivity comprises the individuals who constitute it. 61 The role of the hierarchy of the Church is to communicate grace to the individuals who constitute the Church: “the structure and the graces they impart are what raise the created subjects up to what they should be in God’s design: a humanity formed as a bride to the Son, become the Church.” 62 Von Balthasar’s account of the ecclesiastical hierarchy understandably causes Protestants to worry, but as we will see further on, it is not necessary to follow von Balthasar on this point to hold totus Christus.
For von Balthasar, the nuptial motif in Scripture presupposes three things. The first is the union of two persons. The second is the Eucharist, the physical sacrament that generates new spiritual life in the Church.
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The third is the mystery of how the two persons resolve into one, the totus Christus. In the totus Christus, Christ and the Church are not numerically identical because the Church is not Christ “purely and simply.”
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The Church does not directly participate in the hypostatic union. Yet Christ gives his “seal of identity” to the Church so that the opposition between them is overcome. Von Balthasar explains,
It is comprehensible that the seal of identity should be imprinted from above on the oppositions that arise in salvation history: thus, too, the opposition between Christ as Bridegroom and the Church as bride is subsumed in the identity of the one Christ, Head and Body, who, as Christus totus, is for Augustine “one person,” and for Paul the “one” (see Gal. 3:28). This seal of identity imprints itself right through the unity Christ-Church until it reaches that most fundamental opposition that rejects identity, because in it the dissimilarity is ever greater than the similarity—the opposition, that is, of God and creature. In the hypostatic union (and its imperfect participation in the Church), even this irreducible abyss, without being eliminated, is bridged and tunneled by the power of God’s love.
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Christ gives his seal of identity to his Bride and overcomes the opposition between them, giving rise to the totus Christus. However, this union of the totus Christus must obey the metaphysical strictures of the analogy of being. For von Balthasar, these strictures are regulative, conceptual boundaries that condition how we understand Christian doctrines, and they derive from the fact that God is qualitatively distinct from creatures in the order of being. If we apply these strictures to Christian doctrine, every doctrine is understood to maintain “a dissimilarity greater than any similarity” between God and creatures. 66 On this view, then, any union between God and creatures must not be understood strictly in a creaturely way. For example, Christ and the Church cannot be united in the totus Christus so that the two become numerically identical as would be the case in some kinds of union between creatures, such as the mixture of water and salt in saltwater, or the unity of one’s own bodily integrity. Christ and the Church are one spiritual entity, but also two distinct subjects—their union neither collapses their subjectivities into one nor separates them.
Karl Barth on the Totus Christus in Church Dogmatics IV
Von Balthasar’s close relationship with Karl Barth is well known. They shared a rich theological friendship and had many similar aims. Both were concerned with identifying the relationship between Christ and the Church; their ecclesial moment, the years prior to Vatican II, made the issue a pressing concern. 67 In the 1950s, Barth moved away from his earlier theology that moderately emphasized the importance of sacramental mediation in the Church while other Protestants warmed to the idea of totus Christus. 68 He developed an “ethics of testimony” in the fourth volume of the Church Dogmatics that explains how Christ is distinct from the Church. On his view, Christ calls the Church and the Church responds to him in obedience and witness. 69 Yet for Barth, Jesus Christ and the Church are tightly united as the totus Christus.
Barth’s account of the totus Christus is partly based on an account of double agency in his Christology, which George Hunsinger has dubbed “Chalcedonian”: “a relationship of asymmetry, intimacy, and integrity between God and the human being.” 70 Barth then applied this Chalcedonian logic to Christ’s relation with his community, the Church. 71 For Barth, Jesus Christ has two forms of existence: in the incarnation itself, and in his union with the “community” or the Church. 72 In the incarnation itself, the Word takes flesh and joins it to himself, generating the asymmetrical relation between the Word and human nature. The two natures are hypostatically united in the Person of the Word while they remain irreducibly distinct. In his union with the community, the same Chalcedonian logic orders the union, though it does this in a way merely analogous to the incarnation. Christ and the community are united, but unlike the union of two natures in the Word, they remain irreducibly distinct subjects. 73 Within this schema, Barth calls the Christian community the totus Christus with Christ. For Barth, like Augustine and von Balthasar, Christ is intimately one with his Body, the Church, but they also remain distinct.
Christ’s election is the foundation of the Church’s election, and therefore is the basis for the totus Christus. The Church exists because of Christ, who reconciled humanity to himself and offers the Church the possibility of its existence. 74 Because the Church is elected in Christ, the Church becomes Christ’s “earthly-historical form of existence.” 75 The doctrine of reconciliation is therefore the crucial foundation for the Church. Because of this reconciliation, Jesus Christ now “lives in a special element of this history created and controlled by Him . . . This particular element of human history, this earthly-historical form of existence of Jesus Christ, is the Christian community.” 76 Christ reconciles the Church to himself and becomes its Head, a biblical motif that Barth attends to closely in his ecclesiology: “He is the Head of this body, the community. And it is the body which has its Head in Him. It belongs to him, and He belongs to it.” 77
Christ the Head is asymmetrical and distinct from the community, the body, but they are also deeply united so that they are one. Barth has a distinct way of parsing these matters. And Kimlyn Bender points to a central passage where Barth does this.
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Barth writes,
When we say Jesus Christ, and therefore speak of the existence of the Son of God in human nature as it was actualized in Him, we certainly speak of the One who exists as this man and in this way, but we do not speak of One who is alone as such, who became this man and existed in this way for Himself. When we say Jesus Christ, we say Jesus Christ and His own—those who are co-elected by Him as the Son of God and in Him as the Son of Man. We say Jesus Christ and His community, Jesus Christ as the Head of the body, Jesus Christ in both His heavenly and also His earthly historical form of existence. His existence takes both the one form and the other.
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In assuming human nature, Christ elects all humanity implicitly. However, wherever this election is known in faith, hope, and love, human beings are caught up in Christ as his earthly-historical form of existence. 80 Christ’s relationship to the Church is “indirectly identical” to the relation of divinity and humanity in the hypostatic union. But the “indirectly” is important here; Christ and the Church are not numerically identical. Like Augustine, Barth thinks Christ does not need the Church to exist, but the Church is utterly dependent on Christ, particularly on his election. Thus, he argues that there cannot be an analogy or “repetition or extension of the incarnation” in the community. The community is the earthly-historical form of Christ’s existence that corresponds to Christ’s heavenly form of existence, but they are not the same.
As Head and members, Christ and the community are the totus Christus, but like Augustine, Barth argues the totus Christus has an eschatological dimension. That is to say, although Christ and the community form a “differentiated, but inseparable unity,” 81 Christ will fulfill his imperfect union with the community in the eschatological renewal of all things: “In God’s eternal counsel, in His epiphany, and finally in His revelation at the end of the age, He was and is and will be this totus Christus—Christ and Christians.” 82 Barth affirmed this eschatological dimension because of his study of Scripture. He thought Paul’s phrase “attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ” (εἰς μέτρον ἡλικίας τοῦ πληρώματος τοῦ Χριστοῦ, 4:13) was fundamental; the fulfillment of the pleroma will not occur until Christ is all in all. 83 The church does not experience this fulfillment yet. For the present, Christ prepares the community as a “provisional representation” to the world of Christ himself. 84
Barth thinks the Church is the totus Christus because of Paul’s phrase “in Christ” (ἐν Χριστῷ), which he attributes to the Church. The significance of this prepositional phrase cannot be overstated:
Jesus Christ is, and in His being the apostles and communities are. For this reason, directly or indirectly, everything that is said about the being of Jesus Christ can be only an explication of the being of Jesus Christ, and everything that is said about the being of Jesus Christ applies directly or indirectly to the being of Christians.
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Because Jesus Christ lives, the New Testament apostles and all Christian communities live in him “as the totus Christus.” 86 Christ thus lives not only in heaven but also on earth in the community. He does not live only in the faith, prayers, or confessions of the community, but “as the place in which all this can and may and must and will happen”; Christ makes all that the Church is, possible. 87 Joined to Christ, the Church is the “fullness” (πλήρωμα) of which Paul speaks in Ephesians 4. It is destined for union with Christ, the “perfect man” (ἀνήρ τέλειος), but it does not see this fulfillment yet; it can only expect it to arrive in the eschaton. Nevertheless, Christ and the community, the totus Christus, will be the ἀνήρ τέλειος in the end. Christ does not need the Church to constitute his identity, but the Church as part of the totus Christus is inextricably tied to Christ’s election. 88 Salvation history will end with Christ as victorious along with his body: “Salvation history is the history of the totus Christus, of the Head with the body and all the members. This totus Christus is Christus Victor.” 89
For Barth, the Holy Spirit is the principle of the unity of the totus Christus. The community is the “predicate” of Christ’s existence; it lives as he lives.
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However, the Holy Spirit’s action “as the work of the free grace of God in Jesus Christ is the basis and secret of the existence of the Christian community.”
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The Holy Spirit does not work apart from Jesus Christ; both have the same will and power to create the community. Barth writes, “The Holy Spirit is the power of God proper to the being of Jesus Christ in the exercise and operation of which He causes His community to become what it is.”
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The Holy Spirit is the “bond of peace” of the Father and the Son, and so he is the one who brings peace and reconciliation to the community in history.
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The Spirit does this precisely by constituting the unity of the totus Christus,
i.e., Jesus Christ in the heights and in the depths, in His transcendence and in His immanence. He is the One who constitutes and guarantees the unity of the first and the second predicates, of the primary and secondary dimensions and forms of existence of His being.
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Thus, the Holy Spirit upholds both the heavenly and earthly-historical forms of Christ’s existence.
One might say that the Holy Spirit is the efficient cause of the unity of Christ and the Church for Barth. The Spirit joins Christ and the community while keeping them distinct in their forms of action, divine and human. The Spirit’s work is
to bring and hold them together, not to identify, intermingle nor confound them, not to change the one into the other nor to merge the one into the other, but to coordinate them, to make them parallel, to bring them into harmony and therefore to bind them to a true unity.
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That is to say, the Holy Spirit coordinates the action of Christ on the community, on the one hand, and human freedom and obedience to Christ, on the other. In this way, the community is not identical to Christ even though it “corresponds” to him. As Barth writes elsewhere,
Between [the community’s] invisible being and that of Jesus Christ, between its distinction from the world and His, there is indeed correspondence but no parity, let alone identity. Even in its invisible essence it is not Christ, nor a second Christ, nor an extension of the one Christ.
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Barth does not deny here that the community is Christ’s body; he only denies that the community is identical to the person of the Word. As we have seen, Augustine and von Balthasar deny this as well. Christ is not numerically identical with the community, but he is one with it by grace. In fact, for Barth, Christ is so intimate with his community that the community can represent him in its suffering. Barth thinks this is the best way to read the account of Saul’s vision of Christ on the road to Damascus, the text that was so important to Augustine’s totus Christus. 97 In that account, Christ is the subject of the community’s suffering, that is, the community does not “point to” Christ in its suffering, but Christ himself is present in that suffering. 98 Much like Augustine in his reading of Psalm 30, Barth thinks Christ is so intimately united with his community that Christ suffers with them. Barth’s theology of the totus Christus represents a striking level of unity between Christ and the church, actualized by the Holy Spirit.
Totus Christus and the God–Creature Distinction Objection
Augustine, von Balthasar, and Barth hold totus Christus but reject versions of it that destroy the distinction between God and creatures. To summarize my analysis: (1) For these theologians, God and creatures are distinct ontologically, even in the totus Christus. Yet Christ and the Church are united ontologically in some way. Therefore, Christ and the Church are both united and distinct, a reality that surely discloses the mysterious character of the Church (Eph. 5:32). For von Balthasar, this means that the nuptial motif in Scripture must balance the Head and Body (somatic) motif in our account of the totus Christus. (2) Eschatology should shape how we should understand the doctrine. Christ is one with the Church now, but not in full. (3) The Holy Spirit unites Christ with the Church while Christ physically remains in heaven, that is, according to his human nature. Based on these arguments, we have good reason to think that totus Christus does not elide the distinction between God and creatures. In what follows, I will respond to Prof. Vanhoozer’s four objections listed in part III of this article. Then I will discuss what totus Christus entails and does not entail.
Responses to Objections—What Totus Christus Entails and Does Not Entail
The first objection stated that totus Christus is false because it entails that Christ as God is united to the Church in the same way that he is united to the Father and the Holy Spirit. However, totus Christus, as I have tried to represent it, teaches that the Holy Spirit unites us to Christ, not in a hypostatic unity or the unity of the Trinity, but in a mystical or spiritual union. Vanhoozer, Horton, and Webster seem to think the totus Christus must be the same kind of union as the unity of the Trinity or the hypostatic union. And they do not seem to think there are other ways of conceiving this union, or they do not say so explicitly. But this seems to be mistaken. Scripture teaches that Christ is really, or ontologically, united to the Church. Among the Pauline texts that teach Christ’s union with the Church as his Body and Bride that we have already mentioned, we can see this in Peter’s claim that human beings participate in the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). How should we describe the kind of union of the totus Christus to avoid any “crass mixture” between God and creatures? Thomas Aquinas provides a helpful theological taxonomy that accounts for this mode of union and distinguishes it from other kinds. 99 According to him, God is present to creatures in three modes. First, he is present to all creatures according to his essence, presence, and power as their first cause. 100 Second, he is present to the Christian by the grace of the indwelling Holy Spirit which flows from Christ’s humanity as the Head of the Church. 101 Third, he is present to a creature in the closest possible mode by the grace of hypostatic union. 102 In the totus Christus, Christ is present to a creature in the second mode, not in the third. This conceptual move furnishes us with a set of theological rules for how we should talk of the totus Christus. For example, since totus Christus is not the hypostatic union, things that are true of Christ are not necessarily true of the Church. For example, we cannot argue that the Church is sinless because Christ is sinless. This would only be true if Christ and the Church are numerically identical, which would surely be a “crass mixture” between God and creatures. However, some things that are true of Christ as man can be attributed to the Church. For example, Christ as man is holy and therefore the Church is holy, since grace flows to us from his holy humanity by the Holy Spirit. The difference here is that Scripture invites us to attribute holiness to the Church because of Christ’s holiness; Christ himself gives the grace of adoption to the Church (Eph. 1:4-6, Rom. 8:15). But Scripture does not say that the Church is identical to Christ. The totus Christus, then, is not the hypostatic union. Thus, the Church is not the ongoing Incarnation, if we suppose that “ongoing Incarnation” here means that the Church directly participates in or becomes a part of the hypostatic union.
However, in Barth’s effort to deny that the Church is the ongoing Incarnation, he also denied that the Church is the mystical body of Christ, a term that overlaps in meaning with totus Christus. He denied it because he found no basis for it in Scripture. 103 Thus, Barth affirmed totus Christus, but denied the mystical body of Christ. This raises a question: Can we affirm totus Christus and deny the mystical body of Christ if the two bear a similar meaning? Interestingly, Barth is out of step with a good deal of the Reformed theological tradition in this denial. For example, the Westminster Confession explicitly affirms that Christians are members of Christ’s “mystical body” (§29.1), a spiritual union between Christ the Head and the members, his Body. Moreover, the English Reformed divine John Owen and the Italian Reformed scholastic Girolamo Zanchi, both students of Thomas Aquinas’ theology, held that the Church is Christ’s mystical body, and they thought this doctrine is based on Scripture. 104 Probably more than any other Reformed divine, Owen argued, similarly to Barth, that the Holy Spirit is the principle of our union with Christ. But unlike Barth, Owen affirmed that we are members of Christ’s mystical body by faith. Owen writes, “Faith in Christ is that grace whereby the church is united unto him—incorporated into one mystical body with him. It is thereby that he dwells in them, and they in him.” 105 Christ sends the Holy Spirit, who makes Christ present to them and joins them together into one body. 106 It seems clear, then, that Reformed catholics do not need to reject Christ’s mystical body because it fuses Christ and the Church into the same thing; many Reformed divines did not think so, and they held that the Holy Spirit is the principle of Christ’s mystical union with his body.
Furthermore, and importantly, recent Catholic teaching affirms this judgment. Pius XII’s encyclical Mystici Corporis attests that to the Holy Spirit
as to an invisible principle, is to be ascribed the fact that all the parts of the Body are joined one with the other and with their exalted Head; for he is entire in the Head, entire in the Body, and entire in each of the members.
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Protestants can agree with Catholics that the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the Son (Gal. 4:6), is the principle of Christ’s union with the Church.
The second objection stated that totus Christus underwrites the Church’s infallibility; our analysis shows that this claim is not warranted. Not everything the Church teaches is divinely authorized, precisely because its union with Christ is not yet consummated. The Church is united to him as his Body, but it is not fully realized as his body as it will be when Christ is all in all. This means that totus Christus does not underwrite the Church’s teaching as viva vox Dei, neither does it make it necessary to assent to all conciliar or papal decrees. Catholics and Protestants disagree on whether the Catholic Church mediates divine revelation, but totus Christus should not be the reason why.
The third objection claimed that totus Christus entails that the Catholic Church’s sacraments are necessary for grace, and thus that Christ alone is not the only source of grace. However, the sacraments of the Catholic Church are not logically necessary for grace in the economy God has willed. This contention seems to be the standard position of the Catholic Church after Vatican II. In Lumen Gentium, the Council Fathers teach that the Church subsists in a visible society in the Catholic Church, although many elements of sanctification are found beyond this visible structure. These elements, the document argues, belong to the Church of Christ and “are forces impelling to catholic unity.” 108 These elements outside the visible Catholic Church introduce a distinction: the mystical body of Christ is not the same thing as the Catholic Church’s visible structure, even though the mystical body and the institutional hierarchy are not “two realities” (duae res). The Holy Spirit joins Christians beyond the hierarchical and sacramental boundaries of the Catholic Church to Catholics “in some real way” (imo vera quaedam). 109 It seems clear, then, that the grace of Christ exists beyond the Catholic Church and its sacraments. If Christ’s grace extends beyond the Catholic Church, totus Christus also extends beyond it, though it also includes it.
Against the fourth objection, which argues that Christ’s ascension into heaven precludes his presence with us on earth, there are a number of ways to respond. First, Augustine argued that Christ’s physical absence was deeply significant for the Church’s pilgrim journey in this world. For Augustine, “we are with him [Christ] in heaven through hope, and he is with us on earth through charity.” 110 Charity is poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit given to us (Rom. 5:5). In this action, the Holy Spirit unites us with Christ despite Christ’s physical absence. And the theological virtue of hope instills in us a longing to be physically present with Christ when he returns. John Calvin argued, quite similarly, that the Holy Spirit unites us with Christ, particularly in the Lord’s Supper, and that in this action the Spirit overcomes the distance between Christ in heaven and his Church on earth. 111 Another way to solve this problem is to argue that Christ’s humanity is the instrumental cause of our salvation. This means that the human actions of Christ are saving for us because of the divine power of the Logos working in them. By this divine power, Christ can also “touch” us through the faith that he imparts and in the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist, even though he is physically absent from us. 112 We do not need to affirm baptismal regeneration or transubstantiation to hold this doctrine. By the Holy Spirit, Christ works through faith, the sacraments of the faith, and the preaching of the Word to minister to us now.
What does totus Christus entail? First, as Augustine might say, Christ is more present to the Church than the Church is to itself; the union between Christ and the Church is a real, metaphysical union. For this reason, as the Church suffers in this world and hopes for her eternal home, Christ bears her sufferings with her. Second, this metaphysical union is not the same as the hypostatic union or the unity of the Trinity: Christ is present to the Church in the mode of grace, not hypostatic union. Third, Christ is not numerically identical with the Church, even though by the Holy Spirit he is united to it and makes up one spiritual entity with it. Fourth, the Church is not yet fully united to Christ, which will only be accomplished at the end of time, the Parousia, and the resurrection of the dead. Fifth, Scripture describes an analogous relation between our bodies and Christ and his mystical Body, the totus Christus. That is to say, Scripture uses the analogy of our bodies, Head and members, to signify by analogy the real, metaphysical union of Christ and the Church. It derives this analogy from the meaning or ratio of heads and bodies as we know them. 113 Following Scripture, we apply this ratio to the terms “Head” and “Body” as Scripture uses them of Christ and the Church, since this reference shares a common ratio with how the terms refer to our heads and bodies. But God infinitely exceeds creatures in the order of being. This means that our terms about bodies cannot adequately name the fullness of Christ’s union with the Church in his Body, the totus Christus. The union of his mystical Body far exceeds the union even within our own bodies and is a unity than which a greater cannot be conceived.
Why hold totus Christus to be true? First, totus Christus follows the precise sense of Scripture’s teaching about Christ’s relationship to the Church. Second, it does not entail any of the negative consequences that the Reformed objections say it does, and the objections fail to apply to what Augustine, von Balthasar, and Barth say about it. Third, if we want to be Reformed catholics by seeking to revive ancient catholic teaching for renewal of our churches and theology, we must carefully examine every ancient “catholic” doctrine, including ecclesiological doctrines. And we must look past faulty recent permutations of those doctrines that may not be the same as the ancient, venerable ones. If a version of totus Christus is biblically and theologically sound, Reformed (and Protestant) theologians should accept it. We should do this not because it is the most ecumenical decision, but because the doctrine is true.
