The Communion of Saints: The Church’s Crisis of Memory: Part II: When the Church Forgets

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

Part II: When the Church Forgets

In the first part of this essay, I have argued that Christianity is, at its heart, a religion of memory. The Church exists because it remembers. It remembers Israel’s story, Christ’s saving work, the apostolic witness, and the faith once delivered to the saints. That memory is not preserved merely in books, but in liturgy, sacrament, doctrine, and in the life of the Church itself. Yet if memory is essential to Christian identity, then forgetfulness is among the gravest dangers the Church faces.

Memory is rarely lost in a single generation. It erodes quietly until an entire people mistakes forgetfulness for freedom. Civilizations disappear this way. Families disappear this way. Churches disappear this way.

Our own age has not abolished history. Indeed, it often appears fascinated by it. We produce documentaries, commemorate anniversaries, digitize archives, and debate the past with remarkable intensity. Yet fascination with history is not the same thing as historical consciousness. The latter requires humility. It recognizes that we ourselves are products of a past we neither created nor fully understand. Historical consciousness teaches us to ask not simply what happened, but how what happened continues to shape us.

Modern Christianity has too often exchanged historical consciousness for the cult of the contemporary. We instinctively evaluate the past according to the assumptions of the present, forgetting that we ourselves will one day be judged by generations yet unborn. The result is a Church increasingly tempted to imagine that authentic Christianity is whatever our generation discovers for itself. The past becomes a warehouse from which we selectively retrieve quotations rather than the living inheritance within which we have been formed.

Moreover, this temptation is not confined to one theological tradition. Conservatives often imagine that fidelity consists in preserving a particular moment in history. Progressives frequently assume that faithfulness requires liberation from history. Both instincts misunderstand tradition. The Church has never existed by preserving a museum, nor by beginning anew every generation. It lives by receiving, discerning, and faithfully transmitting the apostolic inheritance under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

This, however, raises a deeper question. Who has the authority to narrate the Christian story?

Every community lives by a narrative. Families tell stories about themselves. Nations tell stories about themselves. Churches do the same. Those narratives shape identity far more deeply than constitutions or mission statements. But, if the story is distorted, the identity becomes distorted as well.

Much of the contemporary Church suffers from precisely this disorder. We have become adept at creating mythologies. We imagine golden ages (whether in the 1950s or the Middle Ages) that never existed or primitive Christianities conveniently resembling our own theological preferences. We speak confidently of ‘returning to the New Testament Church,’ as though two thousand years of theological reflection, liturgical development, missionary expansion, and spiritual experience were unfortunate detours rather than the providential history of Christ’s Body.

The irony is striking. Architecture, medicine, law and so much more in the arts and sciences rest on centuries of accumulated knowledge and practice.  Yet many Christians who accept this as a truth in other fields, often feel entirely comfortable dismissing centuries of theological reflection as irrelevant. We have accepted the authority of accumulated wisdom in nearly every discipline except the one that concerns the knowledge of God.

The Fathers understood this differently. They never imagined themselves as religious entrepreneurs. Athanasius did not defend the divinity of Christ because he wished to construct a novel theological synthesis. Augustine did not write to establish a personal school of thought. Their concern was the depositum fidei, interpreted within the regula fidei and received in the worshipping life of the Christian community. Development occurred, certainly, but development was understood as faithful reception rather than creative reinvention.

I did not always appreciate this.

Like many students, I initially approached theology as the acquisition of information. I wanted answers. The bookcases began to fill. I wanted mastery of texts, historical periods, and doctrinal controversies. Theology seemed to consist primarily in learning enough to defend one’s conclusions.

That illusion gradually dissolved.

My years in higher education in the United States and in England fundamentally altered the way I understood both theology and history. Attending the Oxford Patristic Conferences introduced me to an intellectual world whose roots extended far deeper than I had imagined. Studying in Durham for three years confirmed that discovery in ways I could never have anticipated. There I came to understand that scholarship is less about possessing knowledge than entering a conversation that was already underway.

Libraries became more than repositories of books. They became witnesses. Every shelf testified that generations of Christians had wrestled with the same Scriptures, prayed the same Psalms, celebrated the same Eucharist, and confronted many of the same questions that confront us today.

What changed me most was not simply reading the Fathers. It was discovering that they were neither relics nor monuments. They became teachers, guides and friends.

Athanasius ceased to be merely the subject of academic investigation. Augustine became more than a towering intellectual figure. Their writings revealed minds disciplined by prayer, formed by the liturgy, and devoted to the life of the Church.

The same was true of the scholars from whom I was privileged to learn. Gerald Bonner possessed an extraordinary command of Augustine, yet what impressed me most was not the breadth of his learning but the generosity with which he shared it. Henry Chadwick demonstrated that immense scholarship need not produce arrogance. Conversations with colleagues often continued long after lectures had ended. Disagreement was expected. Intellectual rigor was assumed. Charity was indispensable.

Those years taught me something that has remained with me ever since. Theology is not a debate to be won but a conversation into which one is invited. There is a seat at the table for those who want it and who are willing to engage.

That realization transformed my understanding of authority. I no longer imagined the task of theology to be originality. Originality is rarely a Christian virtue. Fidelity is. I learned that the best theologians listen before they speak because they know they are not the first to read the Scriptures or to ponder the mystery of the Incarnation. Their confidence rests not in novelty but in communion.

Looking back, I recognize that those years also reshaped my understanding of the Church itself. The communion of saints ceased to be merely an article recited in the Creed. It became an intellectual and spiritual reality. I found myself increasingly aware that every serious theological conversation included voices that transcended centuries. Athanasius was present. Augustine was there. The Cappadocians had their voices heard. Anselm, Hooker, Taylor, Temple, Ramsey, Packer, Stephen Sykes, Rowan Williams, Bob Webber—all were present and belonged to the same conversation, each of them illuminating the Gospel from within his own place and historical moment while remaining accountable to those who had come before.

This was not antiquarianism. Nor was it nostalgia. It was participation.

Much has been written in recent years about “deconstruction.” The term is often used to describe the painful dismantling of inherited beliefs. Some forms of that process are necessary. Every generation must distinguish authentic tradition from mere custom, apostolic faith from cultural accommodation. Yet deconstruction without reconstruction produces only fragmentation. The Church does not flourish by severing herself from her memory. She flourishes by returning to the sources—ressourcement in its richest sense—not to escape history but to inhabit it more faithfully.

Perhaps that is what I have missed most in recent years. It is not simply theological discussion, but theological friendship. There was a time when conversations ranged naturally from Athanasius to Augustine, from Brunner to Barth, from liturgy to exegesis, from ecclesiology to prayer. The purpose was not victory but understanding. We assumed that truth was something to be sought together rather than possessed individually.

That assumption now feels increasingly rare.

The speed of contemporary discourse has left little room for patient reflection. Social media rewards certainty more than wisdom. Polemics travel faster than careful argument. Theological identity is too often reduced to slogans, while the patient work of historical theology is dismissed as irrelevant. Yet the Church has always depended upon precisely that patient work. Doctrine matures through prayer, controversy, worship, and generations of faithful reception. Theological amnesia is never overcome by louder voices. It is overcome by deeper roots.

I left England with degrees, books, and friendships that have enriched my life beyond measure. More importantly, after years of study, I left with a different understanding of what it means to be the Church. I had entered what I have often come to think of as the Christian version of the Great Conversation. It took me years to realize that it began long before I arrived and will continue long after I am gone. My task was not to dominate that conversation. It was to enter it with humility, to learn, to contribute what I could, and then to hand it on to those who would come after me, knowing full well that I’ll still have a seat at the table.

That, I have come to believe, is what the communion of saints looks like in the life of the mind. It is not merely the remembrance of holy men and women who have gone before us. It is the joyful recognition that we never think, pray, preach, or worship alone.

If the Church is to recover its voice in the modern world, it must first recover its memory. It must once again learn to listen before it speaks. Only then will the Church discover that the conversation it feared had ended has, by the grace of God, been continuing all along.

To be continued…

Duane W.H. Arnold PhD