The Father’s Apostle of Life and His Apostolic Church

The Lord Jesus Christ is the Apostle of the Father, sent from heaven to give His life for a world fallen from Paradise and fractured by sin. Christ’s life-giving sacrifice is not merely an historical act which serves juridically to balance the cosmic scales of God’s justice—through a sort of legal fiction—so as to allow Him to refrain from pouring out His wrath upon the world while maintaining unblemished the quality of His character as perfectly just. Rather, Christ poured out His eternal life upon all of time and space so that real, concrete persons might receive that life and come to live it by faith along with and in Him, becoming by grace, progressively through repentance, perfect and holy according to the archetype of the divine image in which they were created.

One is the life lived by all who would become immortal in Christ, by all who would become adopted sons of the Father and brothers of the ascended Son. In Christ, as the second Person of the Triune God, is found true life: infinite, perfect, and eternal. In departing therefrom, one can find only death, decay, and isolation in outer darkness, apart from the light, for Christ is life, and this life was the light of men.¹ “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive”.² For those who instead turn inward to approach the throne of the heart within, and find not Christ seated, there remains only a kingdom of oblivion. All who seek the glory of eternal life should refrain from seizing this throne for themselves alone; we were made not for self-isolation—to be the lonely rulers over ourselves as ones in fact enslaved by pride—but for communion as kings with the King. And with great love, Christ opens a place on His throne to all who love Him and follow His commandments. Let us choose this royal path! The Apostle Paul assures His son in the faith, Timothy, of this truth:

For if we died with Him,
We shall also live with Him.
If we endure,
We shall also reign with Him.³

Speaking to the Father, the Son says: “And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent”.⁴ To see and to know the Son is to see and to know the Father; and so the Son, full of grace and truth, in love entered the created order and came, as man, to man made in His image so that all might see, know, and love Him—that all might die to sin and live His very own eternal life, coming to share in the glory and communion which He had with the Father before the world was, in which humans were created to live. The divine archetype came in Christ to fulfill the image in man, who bears it, giving those who dwell in time a foretaste of and partial access, in this age, to the perfection of the age to come.

This boundless, divine life is the inexhaustible boon of the human soul; but what is the tangible means by which one might receive this life and continue endlessly to grow therein? The means, which Christ became incarnate to establish, is the Church, His very own mystical body, of which we become members and into which our souls are grafted, receiving infusions of immortality through the food and drink of His body and blood and divine grace through all the sacraments. The Church being His body, there indwells His Spirit, who conveys the fullness of His presence both among its members and even beyond its boundaries in the form of a call to those who are yet wandering in the desert of the world, perhaps seeking, unaware, the water Christ gives, whose drinkers will never thirst again.⁵ Christ Himself is the Head and Cornerstone of this Temple-Body; and the prophets along with the apostles, but especially the latter in a tangible way, are the foundation of the Church in its more fully realized state in the age of the New Testament.

Only through Jesus Christ, as One sent by the Father, can we know the Father as supreme Person and Bishop of providence over all things—as the One Who, in His ineffable and boundless love, gave His only begotten Son over to death for the salvation of the world, waiting with open arms and utmost longsuffering to receive all who return to Him through His Son. In an analogous way, Christ, as the Apostle of the Father and His express image, commissioned His own apostles to establish the New Testament Church after His ascension—in the wake of His spilled blood, which cleanses the world as God’s cosmic Temple—thereupon sending them out to call the lost sheep back into the fold of the true Shepherd of their souls. The apostles were among those selected by Christ to live with Him full-time as His disciples during the public phase of His ministry on earth, inaugurated by His baptism in the Jordan by St. John the Forerunner. Because of the considerable time spent with Him, the apostles were able to come genuinely to know Him and to appropriate His teaching in its fullness, witness His merciful and miraculous dealings with all who came to Him, and experience firsthand His personal fulfillment of vast swaths of Old Testament prophecy, leaving the promise of complete fulfillment at His second coming. In short, they were given the opportunity to develop a unique spiritual connection with Him as His dear friends. Because the apostles were so shepherded, taught directly, and loved by Christ for three full years during His earthly ministry, they became stewards of an invaluable treasure, assuming the responsibility to hand it down as an unchanging foundation for the Church. St. Dumitru says:

The apostolic presentation of Christ’s Person and work—that is, the apostolic formulation of His teaching and the teaching about Him—remains the permanent and unchanging basis of the Church’s faith and teaching, because it is the most faithful rendition of this teaching. As true instruments of the revelation in Christ, the apostles give, through presenting this revelation and through its forms of expression, their direct insight into the divine infinity of Christ’s Person and unique humanity.⁶

Having been witnesses of Christ's human life, death, resurrection, and ascension, all of which were perfect expressions of His divine life in the Father, the apostles were formed and shaped in an intimate way to be the perfect beacons of their Master. Developing this idea further, St. Dumitru describes the apostles’ unique position in this regard vis-à-vis the rest of the faithful, as those who become members of His apostolic Church:

Through the apostles, we know Christ as He was; we know His teaching, through which He explained Himself and indicated the path for the human person’s salvation and perfection. On one hand His teaching is not separated from their faith but rather forms the content or the basis of their faith. On the other hand their faith, which received its ultimate strengthening through the Resurrection, gave them the vision to understand Christ’s Person and work, as well as the entire content of His teaching. That is why after the Resurrection, they were able to see Jesus’ Person, teaching, and work implied in the Scriptures before Him, and therefore they could see His Person, teaching, and work illuminating the entire Scripture and Christ Himself. They were able to see Christ and His work as the fulfillment of God’s plan for salvation.⁷

The apostles, as Christ’s unique inner-circle of firsthand witnesses, eventually reposed and ceased to be present in the same constant, visible manner to the Church, as they had been from the time of Pentecost—but not without teaching and appointing bishops as their successors to continue the apostolic ministry they received from Christ, so that the Church might always live “spiritually by the same apostolic grace, and by the same teaching and sacramental and evangelical practice of the apostles”.⁸ Along these lines, St. Dumitru describes the Church “in her expansion throughout time and space”⁹, with the “interior factor of this succession”¹⁰ ultimately being “Christ Himself and His Holy Spirit”¹¹, as a tree:

The bishops are the branches that, growing out from the same apostolic trunk, extend the grace and content of the apostolic life into all the smaller branches, represented by the priests and into all the leaves and fruits, represented by the faithful. Better said, the same sap—that is, Christ—spreads through the bishops and priests into the whole tree of the Church and is found directly in each of her members. Without the grace of the apostolic succession of the hierarchy and without the apostolic teaching transmitted together with it, there would be no baptized Christians; there would be no communion with Christ in His activity in Christians, of how He has been present and exercised His activity in the whole of the past.¹²

It is important to note that this apostolic ministry does not consist only in proclaiming to the world the truth about Christ; rather, it is the fullness of Christ as a Person living and present, in all His aspects, which is transmitted by the Church to her members, opening to them the possibility of living His very own eternal life. St. Dumitru says:

The doctrine about Christ does not constitute the only content of the apostolic succession or of the tradition; in that case it would become a theoretical doctrine that could come to seem antiquated after a time. Nor does the grace of the mysteries, as the activity of Christ communicated to us, form the only content of tradition. In order for the activity of Christ to have its full effect within us, we must know in a broader way who He is and what it is that He asks of us.¹³

It is the whole of “Christ’s grace and teaching and the teaching about Christ...His living and effective fullness”¹⁴ which the apostles received from Christ and gave to the Church as a living Body and uncreated organism, within and through which the Lord’s very own eternal life may be entered into and lived in all places and times by anyone who would deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Him.¹⁵ The life of the Church is the eternal life of God in Jesus Christ; as the custodian of this life, She is the treasury of salvation for all who would enter through the narrow gate of baptism and walk in newness of repentant, self-denying life by the grace and power of the Spirit imparted through Her mysteries.

1. John 1:4

2. 1 Corinthians 15:22

3. 2 Timothy 2:11-12

4. John 17:3

5. John 4:14

6. St. Dumitru Stăniloae, The Experience of God, Vol. 4, p. 91.

7. Ibid, p. 89.

8. St. Dumitru Stăniloae, The Experience of God, Vol. 5, p. 154.

9. Ibid, p. 154.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid, p. 156.

14. Ibid.

15. Matthew 16:24