[A number of years ago, I wrote an article in which I tried to briefly state the essence of what I learned concerning authority in the Church from the writings of the French Dominican, Fr. Yves Congar, while doing my doctoral dissertation on that topic.I never did much with it.What follows, in parts, is that article.]
Authority as sign of the Gospel
It was Congar’s contention, as I have said, that the way the Catholic Church throughout this history came to speak of its authority does not adequately express the full Tradition of the true nature of that authority.As Congar says,
[T]he Church must, in following Christ, seek an incarnation which would make her message transparent.Today we must energetically seek for modes of existence in the Church—including the area of the exercise of authority—so that she may be seen as clearly as possible and to the highest degree as a sign of the Gospel…In my opinion, the essential point to remember is that biblical and evangelical revelation is not, in its essential intention, a theoretical system, but an affirmation, simple and at the same time very rich, concerning what is the true religious relationship, that of man made in the image of God with the living God himself (Yves Congar, “The Council in the Age of Dialogue,” trans.Barry N. Rigney.Cross Currents: Spring, 1962, 149-150).
To speak of the Church’s authority as transparently evangelical demands, Congar would insist, that beyond her structure—but not excluding that structure—one recognizes the reality of Christ’s authority active in the very life of the whole Church and in its members.To raise the question of authority as transparently evangelical is to ask:Where does one in fact—existentially, practically and concretely—encounter the reality of Christ acting to build up the Church?
The methodology of structure and life
Here it is important to give brief articulation to Congar’s essential methodology regarding the ‘way’ or the hermeneutical lens through which he reads the sources of the Church regarding her nature.
In the measure that I advanced in the knowledge of this reality that is the Church, I better realized that one could hardly study its structure and not also speak of its life.This very distinction between life and structure appeared to me to permit the better posing of, and therefore clarification of, a large number of problems.The Church has its structure, from which it receives its constitutive elements; but, structured, it lives, and the faithful live in it, in unity.The Church is not solely a framework, a system, an institution; it is a communion (Yves Congar, Vraie et fausse reforme dans l’Église, Unam Sanctum 72, 2nd Ed, Paris: Cerf, 1968, 7-8).
Clearly, for Congar, in order to comprehend the full reality of the Church one has to look, in addition to her essential structure—that is its rule of faith, the sacraments of faith, and the apostolic ministry—to the actual life of faith lived by the People of God; to the charisms and initiatives possessed by its individual members and the variety of charisms and initiatives found within local Churches.Why this is of such significance, according to Congar, is that when one looks seriously at the historical journey of the Church one simply must acknowledge that the Church as the Body of Christ is built up not simply by its established structures from outside and above it, but from within it by the very life of faith lived by the People of God and the actual charisms and initiatives that God raises up from within this people.Again, the gospel question is posed here:Where is the actual authority of God encountered acting to construct his people into the Body of Christ?
God as the living God
This fundamental conviction of Congar, that to speak authentically of the Church and her authority requires one to speak both of her structure and her life, drew him into a yet more profound conviction.“[I]t is not only our idea and our presentation of the Church which must be renewed in its source, it is our idea of God as a living God, and in light of this, our idea of Faith” (Congar, “The Council in the Age of Dialogue,” 148).In other words, to speak of the true nature of the Church demands an authentic understanding of the nature of God as encountered within Christian revelation.For Congar, what flows from the Christian understanding of the living God is a profoundly Trinitarian conception of God and of the nature of the Church as a participation in the Trinitarian communion.
Authority as essentially Trinitarian
In relation to its authority, this means precisely that it is God the Father who builds-up the Church by means of his “two hands,” the Son and the Spirit (Cf. Yves Congar, The Word and the Spirit, 34).This serves to underscore the essentially theological nature of authority by clearly showing God the Father as the chief architect, who constructs the Church through his ‘two hands’, the Word and the Spirit.For Congar, then, the whole of the Church’s life is grounded in the very reality of God, specifically in the Church being “from end to end …built on the image of the Three-in-One” (Yves Congar, A Gospel Priesthood, trans. P.J. Hepburne-Scott, New York: Herder and Herder, 1967, 165).
Congar highlights the significant implications this has for the proper understanding of the reality of authority in the life of the Church.Here again is found Congar’s insistence on the united action of the Son and the Spirit in building up the Church.
The gospels show Jesus as having authority over his Church…but they also show him as the life of his Church, dwelling in her by his Spirit…The one Christ is both transcendent to his body the Church by his power and immanent by his life; the one body is both fellowship in the reconciled life of sonship and means, ministry or sacrament of that life (Yves Congar, Lay People in the Church, trans. Donald Attwater, rev. ed., Westminster, Maryland: Newman Press, 1957, reprint Westminster, Maryland: Christian Classics, Inc., 1985, 167).
What this implies, for Congar, is that within the Church there is what might be described as “two authorities,”the one hierarchical and possessing power from above to structure the community, the other of life and unity flowing from the interior action of the Spirit in the life of God’s people (Ibid.See also 234, 246-47, 279-285, 290, 327-328). This highlights the “living organic reality of the total Church” in which authority is concretely expressed.“In life as it is lived, the hierarchical principle (determinant for structure) combines with the communal principle (which calls for all to be associated together according to their order) for a work which is the work not of the hierarchs but of the Church” (Ibid., 282).Essential to Congar in this vision of authority is that in the Church is found
an earthly order that follows the pattern that exists in God himself, in whom the Father is Principle, but he is not alone.The witness that God has raised up on the earth, the Church, is also many and one, a concord, literally a symphony.The fatherly and fertilizing voice of apostolic authority is echoed by the voice of the faithful people, in such a way that the second voice, while in exact agreement with the first, does not repeat it mechanically: it amplifies it, carries it further, enriches it and corroborates it (Ibid., 294).
Congar’s fundamental ecclesiological dialectic of structure and life becomes, in relationship to the question of authority, the dialectic of hierarchy and community or life. While the hierarchical principle of this dialectic, an essentially Christological principle, allows Congar to clearly articulate the nature of the Church as a given reality, the life principle, essentially pneumatological, enables Congar to give clear and consistent articulation to the dynamic, organic reality of the Church.Importantly, Congar’s methodological approach enabled him to give expression to the complex theological Tradition, allowing the various distinct aspects of this Tradition to interact in a dynamic whole, all in light of the rich, deeply profound reality of the mystery of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who is the very essence of the Tradition.
It is important, here, to offer a note of clarification concerning the use of terms in regard to authority when speaking of ‘two authorities’ in the Church.“Auctoritas designates moral superiority, power founded in right, potestas, the public power of execution” (Congar, L’Église : de saint Augustin à l’époque moderne, 32-33).Authority is, then, the larger reality which, in the case of the Church, designates a spiritual authority possessed by ‘right’ by the individual within the community.This ‘right’ may be based in the office one holds (ex officio), such being the case for the hierarchical authority, or in the charisms or holiness of a person (ex spiritu), such being the case in the community or life principle of authority, though the two cannot always be precisely separated (Congar, Power and Poverty in the Church, 87. Congar, Vraie et fausse réforme dans l’Église, 190).Power in the Church, as such, designates the public authority to pronounce laws, define dogma, carry forth discipline.In this sense, power refers solely to the hierarchical principle of authority.There is no such public power of execution in the community principle of authority.This is well summarized by the biblical scholar Francis Martin.He says that while both the life principle and hierarchical principle
are endowed with authority in that they can affect the life and the direction of the church, the authority of office [hierarchical authority] adds to this the dimension of objectivity—office is transmitted through some form of human historical activity (Francis Martin, The Feminist Question:Feminist Theology in the Light of Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI:Eerdmans, 1994) 92).
Within the Church, then, there is present these two principles or aspects of authority which both flow from the auctoritas of God who is the ultimate auctor in the building up of the Church (Congar, Tradition and Traditions, 312).