The Idea of Church

The Idea of Church: Historical and Theological Perspectives was written by Frederick J. Parrella and remains unpublished at this time. If there is one missing piece in our understanding of the Church of Jesus Christ today, it may be our inadequate sense of history. Some of us like to see the church as timeless. The nineteenth century view of the church as "Christ in time" continues to appeal to the romantic in us. Yet, even the enduring presence of Christ takes place in a clear and distinctive temporal pattern. Without this pattern, without history, the whole mystery of the church as the "divine self gift" is unintelligible.

Christians must examine the Church in its historical context and, more important theologically, from its historical sense of itself. Whatever the Church is today, its present reality is the result of two millennia of growth and decline, of action and reaction to political, social, and economic forces within and without. Like our own lives, the church reflects the pattern of death and resurrection. Its meaning today is a sum of all those steps and missteps of the centuries.

We must enter into this continuum of the Church's self-awareness. In doing so, we will see an enormously varied pattern: a small community of Jews who proclaimed Jesus as the messiah; a leaven of truth and civility in an unraveling civilization; the most powerful institution of the Western world; a community fragmented and split by theological and political hostilities; and in our own time a plurality of communities wrestling with the problems of the modern and postmodern world.

Dr. Parrella was born in Queens County, New York. Trained in Catholic schools when Latin and Greek were required subjects, he chose Classical Languages as his undergraduate major at Fordham College. But it was the words that a Catholic nun wrote across the length of a chalkboard when he was 8 years old that would lead him to a career in theology. "God always was," she wrote, and since then Parrella has been exploring things of ultimate concern. He received an M.A. (1966) and a Ph.D. (1974) in Systematic Theology from Fordham University in New York. Long-known for excellence in teaching, Parrella's professional interests include the work of the great Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, Christian eschatology, and the theology of marriage.