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Authority in the Anglican Communion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 July 2008
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The Church was not founded at Pentecost, as is sometimes said, but by Christ during the course of his ministry in Galilee and Judea. It was he who appointed the twelve to become what today, perhaps, would be called teaching officers, and who commissioned the seventy as a corps of evangelistic missioners. In the ancient world religious knowledge was sometimes committed to sacred writings, sometimes to a school of ideas, sometimes to a priestly caste or an assemblage of cultic observances, and sometimes it emerged episodically through the translations of oracles. Christ, in contrast, revealed his truth to a living company of people—‘the People of God—who, after his corporeal departure, became his body on earth. Precisely because the message was thus conveyed organically it remained permanently new: able to adapt to changing intellectual modes and social filtration, capable of bringing forward fresh insights in the successive cultural shifts of a progressive humanity. Written texts do not transmit truth of themselves: they require re-interpretation, over long periods of time, if they are to achieve durable meaning. Priestly castes have the disadvantage of imploding into small coteries of exclusivity; they frequently become a mere adjunct of ruling elites. Philosophical systems tend to die when the surrounding culture to which they originally related transforms itself or disintegrates. But a living body of people, at the centre of whose religious insights is not a set of ideas but a person, has the verifiable capability of enduring through the centuries, forever changing yet forever the same.
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