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52 Jurist 448 (1992)
The Local Church within Catholicity

handle is hein.journals/juristcu52 and id is 454 raw text is: THE JURIST 52 (1992) 448-454 THE LOCAL CHURCH WITHIN CATHOLICITY J.M.R. TILLARD, O.P. I will limit myself to some ecclesiological remarks on the problem of recognition that is at the heart of the ecumenical debate, particularly in Faith and Order. I will reflect on the theological mine-field that is the question of the relations between the Catholic Church in a particular place and Catholic koinonia. I deliberately am avoiding the expression universal Church because, as articulated in Western traditions, it is very ambiguous. It is especially clear that the way in which Ecclesia universalis and Ecclesia catholica are identified on the basis of a rap- idly and superficially assembled patristic dossier must be criticized and even rejected. 1. In the New Testament it goes without saying that the Church which is at Corinth--to use the example of a community that was far from ideal in its behavior-is a church which lacks nothing of what constitutes the Church of God. It is the Church of God in that part of the oikoumene (1 Cor.l: 2, 10: 32, 11: 22; 2 Cor. 1: 1). This means that in that quite concrete spot and among its inhabitants it is the community that belongs to God, the one which he acquired with the blood of his own Son, as the Paul of the Acts of the Apostles said of the Church which is at Ephesus (Acts 20: 28). God has made it in that place the community of the saints (1 Cor. 1: 2) in the koinonia of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord (1 Cor. 1: 9). To grasp the implications of these descriptions, one needs to refer to what the Acts say about the apostolic Church that arose at Jerusalem in the power of the Spirit of Pentecost. It emerges from the People of the Covenant on the day on which is celebrated the promulgation at Sinai of the Law that many Jewish circles knew to be destined for all peoples, in a theophany that recalls the tradition associated with that event, renewing divided humanity, as that event had done, in the koinonia of God. It accomplishes, then, in the strong sense of the word, what God had intended since the Qahal of the desert which Stephen would also evoke in his speech (Acts 7: 38; see Ex. 19: 7-15; Dt. 4: 10, 9: 10, 10: 4, 18: 16). If in the Pentecost-event, as Luke presents it, the

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