The Communion of Saints: The Church’s Crisis of Memory: Duane W..H. Arnold PhD

Part I: The Church Remembers

The Communion of Saints: The Church’s Crisis of Memory

Every Sunday Christians around the world stand and confess words older than themselves. They recite a creed they did not write, celebrate a Eucharist they did not devise, read Scriptures preserved by generations they never knew, and gather among the living and the dead in what the Creed calls “the communion of saints.” Yet many Christians have forgotten what that phrase actually means. You see, we have reduced it to a comforting sentiment about heaven when, in reality, it is a profound declaration about memory and the Church. The communion of saints is the Church’s refusal to believe that Christianity began with us. It is the conviction that faith is received before it is proclaimed.

That claim may seem surprising. We have become accustomed to describing Christianity in terms of belief, morality, mission, or personal experience. Each, of course, is essential. Yet beneath them all lies something which I think more fundamental. Christianity is, before anything else, a religion of memory.

The Scriptures repeatedly remind us that the greatest danger facing the people of God is not persecution, intellectual doubt, or even moral failure. It is forgetfulness.

Israel’s history is punctuated by the recurring command, “Remember.” Remember that you were slaves in Egypt. Remember the covenant at Sinai. Remember the mighty acts of the Lord. The biblical imperative is not nostalgia for a vanished past but covenantal fidelity in the present. To forget is to sever oneself from the acts by which God has constituted His people. Memory is therefore neither sentimental nor optional; it is an act of obedience.

This pattern reaches its fulfillment in the Upper Room. Our Lord did not instruct His disciples merely to think about Him after His departure. He commanded them, “Do this in remembrance of me.” The Greek term, anamnesis, cannot be reduced to mere psychological recollection. Within the liturgical and covenantal vocabulary of Scripture, it signifies a remembrance that participates in the reality of what is remembered. The Eucharist is therefore not simply an exercise in historical reflection but the Church’s perpetual participation in the once-for-all saving work of Christ. All this is to  say, Christian memory is sacramental before it is intellectual.

The same principle governs the life of the Church in every age. Baptism is memory enacted. The Creed is memory confessed. The liturgical year is memory ordered in time. Even the canonical Scriptures are themselves the written memory of God’s dealings with His people, received, preserved, and proclaimed within the worshipping community long before they became objects of scholarly investigation. The Church does not merely possess memories; the Church exists because it remembers.

This understanding stands in marked contrast to the assumptions of contemporary Western culture. Ours is an age captivated by innovation. We instinctively equate what is new with what is better, what is recent with what is relevant. We celebrate originality while quietly assuming that dependence upon the past is a weakness to be overcome. Historical consciousness has given way to chronological snobbery. All too often, tradition is frequently caricatured as intellectual inertia, while novelty is mistaken for vitality.

The Church has not escaped these assumptions. Indeed, the Church has all too often baptized them. Every generation is tempted to imagine that, somehow, it stands at the beginning of Christian history, uniquely capable of recovering an authentic Gospel that  is somehow obscured by two millennia of theological reflection, liturgical development, and ecclesial life. Such confidence is neither reformational nor evangelical. It is simply ahistorical in that it mistakes amnesia for renewal.

This temptation is hardly new. The Fathers confronted it repeatedly. Whether opposing Gnosticism in the second century or Arianism in the fourth, they did not appeal first to originality but to continuity. Their concern was the regula fidei—the rule of faith received from the apostles and confessed throughout the churches. Orthodoxy was never understood as the invention of new doctrine. Rather, it was the faithful reception, preservation, and articulation of the apostolic inheritance. As St. Vincent of Lérins would later argue, authentic catholicity is discerned in that which has been believed ‘everywhere, always, and by all’—not as a mathematical formula but as a recognition that the Holy Spirit has not abandoned the Church to perpetual theological reinvention.

This is precisely what the Creed means by the communion of saints.

Modern Christians often hear the phrase and imagine only those believers who have died and now rest in Christ. That is certainly included, but it is hardly exhausted by it. The communion of saints is the Church’s confession that Christ has created one Body that  extends across all generations, languages, cultures, and centuries. Those who have gone before us are not simply historical curiosities to be viewed from a distance. They remain members of the same Body into which we ourselves have been baptized. Their witness continues to instruct us, their prayers accompany the worship of heaven, and their theological labors continue to nourish the Church they served in their own generation.

This understanding has profound implications for how we read Scripture, how we worship, and even how we think. Christians do not approach the Gospel as isolated individuals armed only with private judgment. We read within a communion, just as we worship within a communion. It is a communion of the ages. Now, the Fathers are not infallible, nor are the great medieval theologians, nor the Reformers, nor, indeed, scholars of our own age. Yet neither are they disposable. They are our elder brothers and sisters in Christ, fellow pilgrims, no matter the age in which they lived, whose lives bear witness to the inexhaustible riches of divine revelation.

Years ago, during my own theological formation, I began to realize that scholarship was not primarily the acquisition of information but entrance into a conversation… a conversation that was already in progress. Surrounded by the accumulated wisdom of centuries, I slowly discovered that the finest theologians did not seek originality for its own sake. They sought fidelity. They listened before they spoke. They received before they critiqued. Their confidence arose not from intellectual independence but from their willingness to inhabit the Great Tradition with humility. It was then that I began to understand that the communion of saints is not merely an article of the Creed. It is the very environment in which Christian theology lives and breathes.

Every Christian, whether consciously or not, inherits a history. The question is not whether we possess a tradition. We all do. The question is whether we have the humility to recognize the one that has already formed us, and is forming us still.

That recognition is desperately needed today. Before we can address the Church’s divisions, recover theological seriousness, or speak credibly to an increasingly fragmented culture, we must first recover our memory. For the Church cannot proclaim faithfully what it no longer remembers. You see, the communion of saints is not merely an ornament of Christian doctrine. It is the Church remembering itself.

To be continued…

Duane W..H. Arnold PhD