The Church of Christ is not an institution; it is a new life with Christ and in Christ, guided by the Holy Spirit. The light of Christ’s Resurrection shines on the Church, and fills it with the joy of this Resurrection, the joy of victory over death. The Risen Lord lives with us, and our life in the Church is a secret life in Christ. “Christians” bear this name because they belong to Christ: they live in Christ and Christ lives in them. The Incarnation is not an idea or a theory; it is, above all, an event that took place once in history, but which contains all the power and permanence of eternity. This permanent Incarnation, as a perfect and indissoluble union, despite the non-mingling of the two natures—the divine and the human—this Incarnation, constitutes the Church. The Church is the Body of Christ, being a unity of life with Him. We express the same idea when we call the Church the Spouse of Christ or the Bride of the Word: the relations between the betrothed or the bridegroom, if we consider them in their eternal fullness, are based on a complete unity of life, which does not negate the fact of their difference; It is a union of two in one, a union that is not dissolved by duality and not absorbed by unity. The Church, being the Body of Christ, is not Christ, the God-man, for she is only his humanity, but she is life with Christ and in Christ, and the life of Christ in us: “It is not I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). But Christ is not only a divine person, he is “one of the persons” of the Holy Trinity, and his life is shared in the essence of the Father and the Holy Spirit. Therefore, the Church, as life in Christ, is also life in the Holy Trinity. The Body of Christ lives in Christ, and for this reason lives in the Holy Trinity. Christ is the Son, and in him we learn to know the Father, and we become adopted. We are adopted by God, to whom we cry: “Father.”

The love of God, the love of the Father for the Son, and of the Son for the Father, is not a mere attribute or relation: it, in itself, has a personal life, it is hypostatic, that is, it has a separate and independent action. The love of God is the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father to the Son and dwells in him. The Son does not exist in relation to the Father except in the Holy Spirit who dwells in him. Likewise, the Father shows his love for the Son in the Holy Spirit, who is the unity of the life of the Father and the Son. This is the place of the Holy Spirit in the Holy Trinity. (1).

The Church, as the Body of Christ living by the life of Christ, is for this very reason the field in which the Holy Spirit works and the place where He is present. Let us say more: the Church is life through the Holy Spirit. We can therefore define the Church as a life blessed in the Holy Spirit and we can also say, at times, that it is the Holy Spirit living in man. And this doctrine is also demonstrated by history: the Church is the product of the Incarnation of Christ, indeed it is this Incarnation: God takes up human nature, and human nature assumes divine life. The Church is the theosis of human nature, a deification that comes about as a result of the union of the two natures in Christ. But the work of the Spirit of the Church entering the world was not accomplished by the Incarnation alone, nor by the Resurrection alone. “It is to your advantage that I go (to the Father)” (John 16:7). This act requires the sending of the Holy Spirit, and Pentecost, which was the realization of the Church. The Holy Spirit descended into the world in the form of tongues of fire and descended upon the apostles. And the unity of these, the unity of the twelve, and those tongues of fire remained in the world, and they constitute the treasure of the gifts of the Holy Spirit present in the Church. The apostles, in the early Church, transmitted the gifts of the Spirit after baptism, in a way that was visible to everyone: and what corresponds to this, now, is: “the seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit” granted in the sacrament of chrismation.

The Church, then, is the Body of Christ, and through the Church we participate in the divine life of the Holy Trinity. It is life in Christ, that life which is inseparably united to the Holy Trinity, and it is life in the Holy Spirit, through whom we become children of the Father, and who cries in our souls: “Father,” and who reveals to us that Christ living in us. For this reason, before we study the definition of the idea of the Church and its appearance in history, we must understand the Church as one of the divine “gifts,” existing by itself, identical with itself, and as an expression of God’s will realized in the world.

The Church exists and is “given.” If we understand this expression from a certain point of view, independently of her historical formation, she is formed because she was a divine, suprahuman purpose. She exists in us, not as an institution or a society, but especially as a “spiritual axiom” (evidence spirituelle), as a particular choice, as a life.

The proclamation of primitive Christianity brought good and victorious news of this new life. Life cannot be defined, but we can describe it and live it. There can be no satisfactory and complete “definition” of the Church. “Come and see”: one can only conceive of the idea of the Church through experience and grace, participating in its life. For this reason, before defining the Church externally, one must conceive of her in her mystical essence, the basis of all these definitions: if we consider the Church only in her historical becoming, if we conceive of her as a worldly community only, we will not perceive her true nature, which is the expression of the eternal in the temporal, the manifestation of the uncreated in the created.

The essence of the Church is the divine life, manifest in the life of creatures; it is the deification of creation by the power of the Incarnation and Pentecost. This life is a supreme reality, it is clear and certain to all who participate in it, but it is a spiritual life hidden in the “secret man,” in the “closet” of his inner heart: in this sense it is a sacred mystery. It is above nature, or in other words: it existed before the world came into being, but it is adaptable to the life of this world. These two properties are equal in their own nature. If we consider its first property (this life being above nature), we say that the Church is “hidden,” unlike everything that is “visible” in the world and that falls under the senses among the things of this universe. It can be said that it does not exist in this world. And if we follow the path of experimentation in the sense understood by Kant, we will not come across an “accident” corresponding to the Church, which makes the hypothesis of the Church superfluous to empirical cosmology as much as the hypothesis of God is superfluous to the system of the creation of the universe (Cosmogonie) of the scientist Laplace. It would be right, then, at least, to speak of the invisible in the Church, if it were not incorrect to speak of the invisible Church.

But this “invisible” is not unknown, for man possesses, apart from his senses, “spiritual eyes” by means of which he sees, perceives, and knows. This organ is faith, which, according to the Apostle, is “the evidence of things we do not see” (Heb. 2:1). Faith raises us, on its wings, to the spiritual world, and makes us citizens of the heavenly world. The life of the Church is the life of faith, by which the things of this world become transparent. Naturally, these spiritual eyes can see the “invisible” Church. If the Church were truly invisible, or completely incomprehensible, this would mean that there is no Church. The Church cannot be content to exist by itself, separate from people. She does not enter completely into the realm of human experience. The life of the Church is a divine life that is inexhaustible. However, something of the quality of this life, a kind of experience of life in the Church, is given to those who have not approached it, and in this sense everything in the Church is invisible and mysterious, everything in it goes beyond the limits of the visible world, but everything that we do not see may become visible. The issue of seeing the invisible is a necessary condition for the existence of the Church.

The very existence of the Church is an object of faith, for it is known by faith: “I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.” By faith one perceives the Church not only qualitatively or as an experience, but also quantitatively, as the unity of all, as one and complete life and as “sobornost” (community) in the image of the union of the three divine persons. The only thing that reaches our eyes is an infinite fragmentation. We see each individual living an isolated, selfish life. The children of the one Adam do not see or perceive their unity, although they are social beings, although they are attached to their brothers. But this unity is revealed in love and through love, and it exists thanks to participation in the life of the one divine Church. “Let us love one another, so that with one mind we may confess and acknowledge…” – this is what the Church proclaims during the Divine Liturgy. This unity of the Church appears to the eyes of love not as an external union – like the unions that are found in every human society – but as the first, mystical principle of life.

Humanity is one in Christ, men are clusters of one vine, members of one body. The life of each man expands infinitely to become the life of others: the communion of saints. Each man in the Church lives the life of all humanity, which has become a Church. Each man is humanity: (Homo sum et nihil humani me alienum esse puto) “I am human, and nothing human is alien to me.” But the universal Church is not limited to the human race. The angelic host is also part of it. The very existence of the angelic world is inaccessible to the human race, it can only be proven by spiritual experience, and can only be perceived with the eyes of faith. Our union in the Church, through the Son of God, is all the greater in proportion as he has restored all earthly things to heavenly things, and has broken down the wall of separation between the world of angels and the world of men. The whole of creation, the whole of nature, is united to the human race and to the whole host, the whole of nature, is united to the human race and to the host of angels. It is entrusted to the guardianship of angels, and given to man to rule over. It shares man’s destiny: “The creation groans and sighs until now… as though it were working… waiting for the adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (Rom 8:22-23) and awaiting its manifestation as a “new creation,” a manifestation that will take place at the same time as our resurrection. Man becomes a “cosmic” being. His life in God unites him to the life of all creation through the bonds of universal love. These are the limits of the Church. This Church, which unites not only the living but also the dead, the angelic orders, and all creation, this Church, is invisible but not unknown. The life of the Church precedes the creation of the world and of man; it reaches its climax in eternity.

It can be said that the Church was, before the beginning of time, the goal and foundation of creation. In this sense, she was “created before all things, and for her the world was made.” The Lord created man in his own image, which makes possible the incarnation of the spirit of the Church into man and the incarnation of God: God can only assume the nature of a being who is identical with him, who possesses his own image. In the perfect unity of the human race, there is, as a nucleus, the unity of the Church in the image of the Holy Trinity. It is therefore difficult to define a time when the Church did not exist in humanity, at least in a prior state of thought: according to the belief of the Fathers, a primitive Church existed even in Paradise, before sin, when the Lord spoke to man and was in contact with him. After sin, the Lord laid the foundation of what is called the Church of the Old Testament, that Church in which man learned to unite himself to a God in common with him. Even in the deepest darkness of paganism, where the human soul naturally sought a God, there existed a “barren pagan Church,” as some hymns of the Church call it. The Church, of course, did not reach the fullness of its being until after the Incarnation, and in this sense we say: The Church was founded, founded by the Lord Jesus Christ and realized by Pentecost. With these events is the foundation of the militant Church, and it must become the triumphant Church, where “God is all in all.” (2).

The Church cannot, therefore, be limited in space, in time, or in her capacity for action: her depths are unfathomable. But this does not make the Church invisible, in the sense that she does not exist on earth in a form that can be perceived by experience, or in the sense that her existence is entirely “transcendent,” since this, in practice, amounts to nonexistence. No, although the Church’s mystical being is hidden from us, she can be seen on earth, our experience can reveal her to us, she has limits in space and time. The invisible life of the Church, the life of faith, is indissolubly bound up with the material forms of earthly life. The “invisible” is present in the visible, this includes it, and together they form a symbol. The word “symbol” designates something that belongs to this world, is intimately linked to it, but has a content that preceded all generations. In this there is a unity of the transcendent and the immanent, a bridge between heaven and earth, a union of God and man, God and creation. The life of the Church is symbolic from this point of view, it is a hidden life hidden under visible features. The opposition between the “invisible Church” and a visible human society constitutes the inner purpose of the Church, but it is alien to her. The opposition destroys the symbol, indeed it eliminates the Church herself, as the union of divine life and the life of creatures. Such an opposition reduces the Church to a mere “transcendental” one and transfers her to the realm of the noumenal, and in this very way the value of the phenomenological world is diminished.

The earthly Church contains within it the Church as life, but this earthly Church, like every earthly reality, has limits in time and space. It is not only a society, it is something much broader than that society, but it exists just as a society with its own characteristics, with its own laws and limits. The Church has a history for us and in us, during our temporal existence. Like everything in the world, it remains in history. Thus the eternal, divine, immutable existence of the Church appears in the life of this century as a historical manifestation. It has, therefore, a beginning in history. The Church was founded by our Lord Jesus Christ on the rock of Peter’s confession made in the name of all the apostles. After the resurrection, he sent the disciples to preach the Church, which came into being as the Church of the New Testament at the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Then the first apostolic call resounded from the mouth of Peter, inviting people to enter the Church: “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ… and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38). “And about three thousand were added that day” (Acts 2:41). Thus began the Church of the New Testament.

Father Serge Bulgakov

This article is the first chapter of the book “Orthodoxy” written by Father Bulgakov in 1932. It is an Arabic translation by A. J. from the first French translation of the book (Paris, Alkan, 1932), and was first published in Al-Nour magazine, issues 3, 4 and 5, in 1956.

As for Father Serge Bulgakov (3) (1871-1944), he was a professor of political economy at the universities of Kiev and Moscow and was an atheist. Then he converted to the faith and was ordained a priest after the Russian Revolution, then he was exiled by the Soviet authorities and became dean of the Saint Sergius Theological Institute in Paris. Father Serge wrote many theological books in the Russian language, the most important of which are “Orthodoxy” which was translated into several languages, “On the Incarnate Word”, “The Comforter” (translated into French), “The Bride of the Lamb”, “The Light That Never Shines”, etc.

(1) See: “A Look at the Teaching of the Catholic ChurchTo Father Dr. George Attia... (Al-Shabaka)

(2) See “Chapter Three: The Church of God“To Metropolitan Callistus, from the book”Orthodox Church: Faith and Doctrine“….(network)

(3) We would like to point out here that Father Sergei Bulgakov was accused of heresy by “Seraphim Sobolev, Archbishop of Sofia“Metropolitan Seraphim received his Master of Theology degree in response to what he called the heresy of Father Sergius. A synodal decision was issued by the Moscow Patriarchate (August 24, 1935, No. 93), and the Synod of the Russian Church Outside Russia, formerly held between October 17-30, 1935, that what Father Sergius Bulgakov says about the Mother of God is heresy.

In 1937, a council was held in Paris (November 9-26) to put an end to this issue. This council concluded that what Father Serge taught was not heresy but a false theological opinion with serious defects that needed to be corrected. (Ref. Sergius Bulgakov & Sophianism)….(network)