NOTES for Ti1 3:14-16

Paul says of the Church that it is the "pillar and foundation of the truth." How should his words be understood? And what does he mean by the Church? In Christian history these words of the apostle were often used to assert the authority of one or another religion that grew up on Christian soil, and of many different church structures and institutions that claimed to be the final expressers and bearers of Christian truth.

Paul quite obviously does not have in mind any religions or any church institutions: for him Christianity was never a religion, and church institutions in their medieval form simply did not exist in his time. For the apostle, the Church is something completely different. This is not surprising, for Paul never perceived Christianity as a new religion either; for him it was always not religion, but life, life with Christ in His Kingdom.

It is in Him, in Christ, that Paul sees the living truth. And not Paul alone: the first two, or even three, generations of Christians looked at Christ as the living Torah, and therefore as the living truth. The Savior Himself also said of Himself that He is the way, the truth, and the life. But such truth can exist only as the person of the Messiah, who revealed the living Torah to the world. A person can know Christian truth only by becoming a living Torah in Christ. There can be no abstract, formulated Christian truth: no words and no formulas can contain it by definition.

There are, of course, church creeds, but they have never claimed to be a complete expression of Christian truth. They only mark out the space of opinions possible for a Christian on fundamental questions; by leaving that space, a person effectively ceases to be a Christian in the sense in which the first Christians were Christians. But for a person to become a living Torah is possible only on the condition of personal relationships both with God and with the Messiah sent by Him. More precisely, it is possible within these relationships, the relationships of the Father and the Son, in the spiritual space that they form.

All who find themselves in this space and participate in the process of spiritual formation are also bound to one another, forming that spiritual whole which in another letter the apostle calls the body of Christ. This is precisely the Church, the "pillar and foundation of the truth." Of course, such unity always has some outward dimension connected with the life of its age, but it is never fully identical with any of the forms in which it exists. The Church as the body of Christ is always greater not only than any church structure and any institution, but also than any particular church community. And only she, in her spiritual dynamic, is the "pillar and foundation of the truth." This is the Church of which Paul speaks in his letter to Timothy.