8.      Quoted by Heiler and set in the forefront of his work. Archbishop Soderblom was the apostle of a reunion of Christendom on a Protestant basis. The nearest approach to his conception of a Protestant Catholicism is perhaps to be found in that “Free Catholicism” which has some advocates in this country.

9.      Op. cit., p. 5.

10.  “Aus Wissenschaft und Leben” (Giessen, 1911), Vol. I, p. 97.

Chapter II: Christ in the Church

“Behold, I am with you all days even unto the consummation of the world” (Mt. xxviii, 20).

If we ask the Catholic Church herself to tell us, according to her own notion of herself, what constitutes her essential nature and what is the substance of her self-consciousness, she answers us through the mouth of the greatest of her teachers, that the Church is the realization on earth of the Kingdom of God. “The Church of today, of the present, is the Kingdom of Christ and the Kingdom of Heaven”: such is the emphatic assertion of St. Augustine (De civ. Dei xx, 9, 1). The “Kingdom of Heaven” and “Kingdom of God,” taken up from the prophecy of Daniel (vii, 9-28) and proclaimed by Christ, that Kingdom which grows great like the mustard seed, and like leaven permeates the world, and which like a field of corn shelters both wheat and cockle until the harvest, this “Kingdom of Heaven” is, so the Church believes, implanted in her own being and there manifested. The Church believes that she is the manifestation of that newness and that supernature which come in with the Kingdom of God, the manifestation of holiness. She is the new supernatural reality brought by Christ into the world and arrayed in the garment of the transitory; she is the divine truth and grace presented under earthly veils.

And inasmuch as their fullness was creatively revealed in the Person of Christ, Paul, the Apostle of the Gentiles, expresses its deepest mystery when he borrows Hellenistic forms and calls the Church the Body of Christ (I Cor. xii, 27; Col. i, 18, 24; Eph. i, 22; iv, 12): “For in one Spirit were we all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Gentiles, whether bond or free; and in one Spirit we have all been made to drink” (I Cor. xii, 13).

Christ the Lord is the real self of the Church. The Church is the body permeated through and through by the redemptive might of Jesus. So intimate is this union of Christ with the Church, so inseparable, natural and essential, that St. Paul in his Epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians explicitly calls Christ the Head of the body. As the Head of the body Christ makes the organism of the Church whole and complete. And Christ and the Church can no more be regarded separately than can a head and its body (Col. i, 18; ii, 19; Eph. iv, 15 ff).