Note (return) — Chapter II

The essential character of Christendom in its first period was a new holy life and a sure hope, both based on repentance towards God and faith in Jesus Christ and brought about by the Holy Spirit. Christ and the Church, that is, the Holy Spirit and the holy Church, were inseparably connected. The Church, or, in other words, the community of all believers, attains her unity through the Holy Spirit. This unity manifested itself in brotherly love and in the common relation to a common ideal and a common hope.140 The assembly of all Christians is realised in the Kingdom of God, viz., in heaven; on earth Christians and the Church are dispersed and in a foreign land. Hence, properly speaking, the Church herself is a heavenly community inseparable from the heavenly Christ. Christians believe that they belong to a real super-terrestrial commonwealth, which, from its very nature, cannot be realised on earth. The heavenly goal is not yet separated from the idea of the Church; there is a holy Church on earth in so far as heaven is her destination.141 Every individual congregation is to be an image of the heavenly Church.142 Reflections were no doubt made on the contrast between the empirical community and the heavenly Church whose earthly likeness it was to be (Hermas); but these did not affect the theory of the subject. Only the saints of God, whose salvation is certain, belong to her, for the essential thing is not to be called, but to be, a Christian. There was as yet no empirical universal Church possessing an outward legal title that could, so to speak, be detached from the personal Christianity of the individual Christian.143 All the lofty designations which Paul, the so-called Apostolic Fathers, and Justin gathered from the Old Testament and applied to the Church, relate to the holy community which originates in heaven and returns thither.144