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106 pages

English

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In this compelling new work, Father David Meconi tells the exciting story of, as the subtitle says, the first 500 years of Christ's life. How can that be, readers may ask, if Christ lived only 33 years on earth. Therein lies the uniqueness of Meconi's approach to this history. In these pages, he shows how the early Christians understood the Church not as a set of teachings or even as one more religion among many, but as the extension of Christ himself. The Church is ultimately the deifying union between Christ the Head and his sanctified members. Just as the Lord unfurls himself into the Eucharist, Jesus Christ also extends his divinely human presence into his Mystical Body, the Church. By focusing on the development of the early Church and the first 4 ecumenical councils in particular, these pages trace that development over the first 500 years of Jesus' life on earth.

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Philosophie et théologie

Catholic Church

Christian Church

History of religions

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Publié par	TAN Books
Date de parution	30 mars 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781505110333
Langue	English

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CHRIST UNFURLED
CHRIST UNFURLED
The First 500 Years of Jesus’s Life
FR. DAVID VINCENT MECONI, SJ
TAN Books Gastonia, North Carolina
Christ Unfurled: The First 500 Years of Jesus’s Life © 2021 David Vincent Meconi
All rights reserved. With the exception of short excerpts used in critical review, no part of this work may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in any form whatsoever, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible—Second Catholic Edition (Ignatius Edition), copyright © 2006 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Cover design by Caroline Green
Cover image: St. Augustine and St. John the Evangelist, 1320-1325, by unknown artist, fresco, Chapel of St Nicholas, Basilica of Saint Nicolas of Tolentino, Tolentino. Italy, 14th century. Bridgeman Images.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020950368
ISBN: 978-1-5051-1032-6 Kindle ISBN: 978-1-5051-1034-0 ePUB ISBN: 978-1-5051-1033-3
Published in the United States by TAN Books PO Box 269 Gastonia, NC 28053 www.TANBooks.com
Printed in the United States of America
To Fr. Donald J. Keefe, SJ (d. 2018), who taught me to love the Church, and Fr. Leo Sweeney, SJ (d. 2001), who taught me Christ and the Church are One
“Modern Catholicism is nothing else but simply the legitimate growth and complement, that is, the natural and necessary development, of the doctrine of the early Church.”
—St. John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine
CONTENTS
Greater Ones Than These
C HURCH H ISTORY AND C HRISTIAN S PIRITUALITY
They Will Also Persecute You
P RELUDES AND P ERSECUTIONS (100-313)
The Father and I Are One
A POLOGY , A CCEPTANCE, AND THE C OUNCIL OF N ICAEA (325)
He Will Guide You to All Truth
T HE G REEK F ATHERS AND THE F IRST C OUNCIL OF C ONSTANTINOPLE (381)
Hail, Full of Grace
M ARY , M OTHER OF THE C HURCH AND E PHESUS (431)
Who Do You Say that I Am?
P ETER S PEAKS T HROUGH L EO AT THE C OUNCIL OF C HALCEDON (451)
Greater Ones Than These
CHURCH HISTORY AND CHRISTIAN SPIRITUALITY
“Have I been with you so long, and yet you do not know me, Philip? He who has seen me has seen the Father; how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority; but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father in me; or else believe me for the sake of the works themselves. Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I go to the Father” (Jn 14:9–12).
P HILIP CAPTURED THE human heart when he cried out his desire to see and to know God. From the depths of his being, he wanted to behold the fullness of all that is. He instinctually knew that if he could have that, there would really be nothing lacking in his life, and so he begs Jesus: “Lord, show us the Father, and we shall be satisfied” (Jn 14:8). In his response, Jesus assures his followers that faith in him will not only lead to eternal life but will result in even greater works than they see him doing.
How can we do greater things than Jesus? What could Jesus mean here, promising that whoever believes in him will perform greater works than the ones he does? How can Jesus’s followers do greater things than the Lord himself?
To ask this question is to open the door to Christ’s unfurling himself into and as his Church. It is to enter into the history of the Church not as a building or even a religion but as an extension of Jesus Christ himself. To pick up a book of Church history, then, is to trace the stories of Christ’s disciples as they travel and evangelize, as they gather in worship, and as they set out to defend and clarify the life-giving message Jesus imparted while he walked among them. The first followers of Jesus understood the Church not as an edifice, or as some set of instructions, or even some ceremony, however pious, but as the unfolding of Christ into the lives and lands of those who lived outside first-century Jerusalem. To flip rightly through the pages of the first five hundred years of the Church, then, is to assume a posture of faith that the Church and Christ really are one. In fact, this is precisely how most of the people who feature in the pages to follow understood the body to which they freely belonged. Today, the Catechism of the Catholic Church captures such a theology beautifully, officially teaching:
Christ and his Church thus together make up the “whole Christ” ( Christus totus ). The Church is one with Christ. The saints are acutely aware of this unity: “Let us rejoice then and give thanks that we have become not only Christians, but Christ himself. Do you understand and grasp, brethren, God’s grace toward us? Marvel and rejoice: we have become Christ. For if he is the head, we are the members; he and we together are the whole man.… The fullness of Christ then is the head and the members. But what does ‘head and members’ mean? Christ and the Church” (St. Augustine, Homilies on the Gospel of John 21.8). “Our redeemer has shown himself to be one person with the holy Church whom he has taken to himself” (St. Gregory the Great, Moralia on Job , Preface §14). “Head and members form as it were one and the same mystical person” (St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III.48.2). A reply of St. Joan of Arc to her judges sums up the faith of the holy doctors and the good sense of the believer: “About Jesus Christ and the Church, I simply know they’re just one thing, and we shouldn’t complicate the matter” (From the Acts of the Trial of Joan of Arc ). 1
As such, the Church teaches us today that “the good sense of the believer” never separates Christ from his Church, the Head from his Body. This reality then helps us better understand that the apostles and their immediate successors had no greater access to our Lord than we do today. To the truly Christian mind, every baptism is an unfolding of Bethlehem, every sacrifice is the Passion continued, each consecrated “yes” continues Mary’s “let it be done to me according to your word,” every feeding of the hungry is to minister to Christ, every pope is an echo of Peter’s confession, every woman whose dignity is restored in Christ is another Mary Magdalen, every chalice really is the Holy Grail.
Whereas Christ could meet a few hundred people at any one gathering, his Church today gathers billions and continues to grow. Whereas Christ preached in his native tongue, his Gospel is today proclaimed in thousands of languages. Whereas our divine Healer cured the ill and comforted the mourning throughout only a tiny part of the Middle East, how many are today healed in his hospitals and nourished in his shelters around the entire world? Since Truth can never err, perhaps this is how Jesus meant that we would do “greater things” than if he had remained on this earth’s surface. Whereas Christ founded his Church on the primacy of Peter (Mt 16:18), the Pentecostal out-pouring vivified that Church and equipped her with the languages and growing cultural awareness (Acts 2) of how to succeed in bringing the Gospel into every land of this world. So perhaps this is how we are to understand that bittersweet moment of Christ’s revealing his ascension as being “better” for those he seemingly leaves behind: “Nevertheless I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Counselor will not come to you” (Jn 16:7). In ascending, the Son raises all of humanity into heavenly glory by sending the Holy Spirit, who in turn makes all his disciples sons and daughters of the same heavenly Father. Christ’s departure from us may be mysterious, it may be confusing, but the virtue of hope knows that in the end it is better, infinitely better.
In the book of Acts, St. Luke starts a custom of writing down the story of how God’s new presence in Christ changed lives forever. The book of Acts is thus the first narration of the Church’s history but was never intended to be a mere history. It is also a theology, a story based in faith that the movement of the first disciples in and out of Jerusalem was something divinely inspired and sustained. This was no mere human endeavor: this was the power of God sweeping through souls and uniting the entire world around the New Adam who has opened the gates of heaven for all. Church history is thus an echo of what Christ began and what Luke and the other apostles continued and extends to the present life of the Church today. Accordingly, these pages approach the genesis and the growth of the Church as the personal entry of the Son of God into the human condition, and then his extending his divine presence throughout the world as his Church. As such, my approach to the first five hundred years of Church history is ultimately the story of Jesus Christ alive and active in his faithful throughout the globe and across the centuries. While some see the history of the Church as the simple chronicling of events or the reporting of dates and deeds, this book understands Church history as the story of how Christ brings cultures and civilizations to a fuller understanding of the Truth that alone sets us free. The Church is neither a building nor a book, but she is instead Jesus Christ’s dwelling in and deifying the human soul.
In the following chapters, the Church Fathers will be allowed to speak for themselves on this identity between Christ and Christian. This is a work of both Church history and Catholic ecclesiology, as my overall thesis and consequent methodology maintain that the two cannot be separated. Anything else is just sociology, superficially accurate, perhaps, but nowhere near approaching the depths of Christ at work. This type of study