The Communion of Saints: The Church’s Crisis of Memory: Part III: Remembering Forward, Duane W.H. Arnold PhD

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

Part III: Remembering Forward

If the modern Church suffers from a crisis of memory, then its renewal will not begin with innovation but with remembrance. This is not a call to retreat into the past, nor an invitation to confuse tradition with traditionalism. Christianity has never survived or thrived by preserving relics. The Church has survived because every generation has learned anew how to receive what it did not create and to hand on what it never possessed exclusively as its own.

Tradition is one of the most misunderstood words in the Christian vocabulary. It is often imagined as little more than inherited custom, institutional habit, or resistance to change. Yet the classical understanding of traditio is far richer. The word itself means “that which has been handed over.” It describes a living movement rather than a static possession. The Church receives the apostolic faith, embodies it in worship, articulates it in doctrine, and entrusts it to those who follow. Tradition is, therefore, neither antiquarianism nor nostalgia. It is the living memory of the Body of Christ.

The Fathers understood this instinctively. Athanasius did not preserve the Nicene faith because he wished to defend the cultural superiority of fourth century Alexandria. Augustine did not preach in Hippo because he hoped future generations would admire his brilliance. Their concern was always the same: that the Gospel entrusted to the Church might remain recognizably the Gospel. Doctrine was never detached from worship, nor theology from holiness. One cannot read their works for long without discovering that the greatest theologians were first men of prayer.

That lesson has been confirmed repeatedly throughout my own life. Some of the finest scholars I have known possessed an intellectual humility that was as memorable as their learning. Pamela Bright demonstrated that rigorous historical scholarship could coexist with profound Christian charity. James Atkinson embodied a breadth of learning that never diminished his gentleness. Charles Kannengiesser reminded me that the Fathers remain inexhaustible precisely because they continue to point beyond themselves to Christ. Their scholarship was not an end in itself. It was an act of service to the Church.

The same could be said of Michael Ramsey. More than any Anglican theologian of the twentieth century, he understood that the Church exists only because she continually receives her life from Christ in the shadow of the Cross. Reading Ramsey, one is struck not by cleverness but by holiness. His theology emerged from prayer, from the liturgy, and from the patient contemplation of Scripture. He never separated doctrine from devotion because he understood that the deepest truths of Christianity cannot be mastered; they can only be inhabited.

Rowan Williams has continued that same conversation in our own time. He has shown, perhaps better than any contemporary theologian, that returning to the Fathers is not an exercise in historical curiosity but an encounter with living witnesses. His writings repeatedly remind us that theology begins in contemplation before it becomes analysis. We do not think our way into communion. We are drawn into communion, and only then do we begin to think faithfully about what we have received.

Robert Webber understood this in a different register. Long before many others recognized the growing spiritual exhaustion of modern evangelicalism, he perceived that the future of the Church would depend upon recovering her ancient memory. His call to rediscover the historic Church was never an appeal to romanticize the past. It was an invitation to recover the Church’s center. Worship, sacrament, catechesis, and the rhythm of the Christian year were not relics of another age but gifts by which the Church remembers who it is.

Looking back over the years, I realize that my own theological journey has been less a search for novelty than a gradual entrance into what I have referred to as the Great Conversation. At first I imagined theology to be a succession of books. Eventually I discovered that it was a communion of persons. Athanasius conversed with Augustine. Augustine illuminated Anselm. Ramsey read the Fathers. Rowan Williams entered the same stream. Bonner and Chadwick taught their students not simply what to think but how to listen. Across the centuries, the conversation continued, and by God’s grace I found myself occasionally invited to take a seat at the table.

This is why I have increasingly become convinced that the greatest threat facing the Church is not secularism, declining attendance, or even theological confusion. Those are real concerns, but they are secondary. Beneath them lies a more fundamental loss. We have forgotten that Christianity is something we receive before it is something we explain. We have mistaken independence for maturity, originality for faithfulness, and novelty for renewal.

The recovery of memory requires humility. It asks us to acknowledge that we are not the first generation to wrestle with Scripture, to celebrate the Eucharist, or to confess Jesus Christ as Lord. It reminds us that every genuine reform in the Church has arisen not from forgetting the past but from returning more deeply to it. The great reformers were first great listeners.

This is why the communion of saints matters. It is not a decorative phrase buried within the Creed. It is a confession about the nature of the Church itself. Christ has gathered one people across centuries and cultures, one Body whose members continue to bear witness to Him even as generations come and go. We are formed by those who preceded us, just as those who follow will in some measure be formed by us. The communion of saints is therefore not simply an object of belief. It is the context in which Christian faith is lived.

Every Sunday the Church quietly bears witness to this reality. We gather around one altar. We hear ancient Scriptures. We confess an ancient Creed. We offer ancient prayers that have been shaped and refined by countless generations of believers. Then, in the Eucharistic Prayer, we join “with Angels and Archangels and with all the company of heaven.” Those words are so familiar that we often fail to hear them. Yet they express one of the most extraordinary convictions in all of Christian theology. The Church at worship is never alone. The visible congregation is joined to the invisible communion. Time is gathered into eternity. Memory becomes praise.

Perhaps that is why I have come to believe that the communion of saints is ultimately grounded in the Church’s refusal to forget.

It refuses to forget the God who called Abraham.

It refuses to forget the prophets who proclaimed His word.

It refuses to forget the apostles who bore witness to the Resurrection.

The Church refuses to forget Athanasius standing almost alone for the faith of Nicaea, Augustine preaching to an anxious world, generations of unnamed monks preserving manuscripts through centuries of upheaval, scholars patiently recovering forgotten texts, missionaries carrying the Gospel across continents, parish priests faithfully celebrating the Eucharist in places history will never record, and ordinary Christians whose names are known only to God.

None of them belongs to the past alone.

They belong to the communion into which we ourselves have been baptized.

That confession is more than memory.

It is hope.

As I sit in my library writing these words, I am alone, yet surrounded by friends. Athanasius still defends the faith. Augustine still teaches me to think. Ramsey still reminds me that theology begins in holiness. Webber still calls the Church back to her ancient center. Bonner, Chadwick, Atkinson and so many others continue the  Great Conversation. Though they have departed this life, they remain remarkably present. Through their books they still speak. Through their lives they still instruct. In remembering them, I discover that I have never studied alone.

Yet the communion of saints is greater even than the companionship of books. Every Sunday I leave my library and come to an altar. There, once again, I confess a Creed I did not write, hear Scriptures I did not preserve, partake of a Eucharist I did not devise, and join my voice “with Angels and Archangels and with all the company of heaven.” At that moment the conversation becomes communion. Every Sunday, at every altar, the Church remembers. And in remembering, she discovers that she has never been alone. Perhaps that is what the Creed has been teaching us all along.

The communion of saints is not simply about those who have gone before us. It is God’s gracious reminder that no Christian ever believes alone, prays alone, worships alone, or serves alone. We have received a faith that has been handed to us by countless faithful hands. Our calling is simply to receive it with gratitude, live it with integrity, and hand it on with joy.

Duane W.H. Arnold, PhD