Who is a person of the Church?

The writings of St. Clement of Alexandria reveal how the early Church viewed the person of the Church who views the Church as a place of teaching and the place where God shepherds His people. He says, “Feed us, the children, as sheep. Yea, Master, fill us with righteousness, Your own pasture; yea, O Instructor, feed us on Your holy mountain the Church, which towers aloft, which is above the clouds, which touches heaven.”¹¹⁵⁴ St. Clement truly loved the Church and was very much loyal to her traditions and canons. He says, “We are bound in no way to transgress the canon of the Church.”¹¹⁵⁵

Origen was a churchman, in the fullest sense of the term; his proudest boast was to be a man of the Church. It may even be said that scripture and the Church were the most important and essential things about him.¹¹⁵⁶ Jean Daniélou says, “We have seen from his life that he had been catechist, lector, priest, doctor and martyr by turns: the whole of his life was spent in the discharge of ecclesiastical functions.”¹¹⁵⁷

He was careful to preserve the deposit of Christian teaching and the authority of the Church. Origen says, “I, myself a man of the Church, living under the faith of Christ and placed in the midst of the Church, am compelled by the authority of the divine precept to sacrifice calves and lambs and to offer fine wheat flour with incense and oil (in the spiritual sense).”¹¹⁵⁸ Again he says, “If I am in the Church, no matter how very little I am, my angel enjoys the liberty and the trust always to see ‘the face of the Father, who is in heaven.’ But, if I am an outsider, and not a member of that Church ‘that has neither spot nor wrinkle, nor anything of that sort’ (Eph. 5:27), and the facts prove that I am not a member of such a congregation, then my angel does not enjoy the trust of beholding ‘the face of the Father, who is in heaven.’”¹¹⁵⁹

1154 St. Clement of Alexandria, The Instructor or Christ the Educator (Paedagogus) 1.9 (ANF 2:231).

1155 St. Clement of Alexandria, The Stromata, or Miscellanies 7.15 (ANF 2:549).

1156 Thomas Halton, The Church (Message of the Fathers of the Church, vol. 4) (Wilmington, Del.: M. Glazier, 1985): p. 21.

1157 Jean Daniélou and Walter Mitchell, Origen (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1955): p. 27.

1158 Origen, Homilies on Leviticus 1:1:2 (FOTC 83:30).

1159 Origen, Homilies on Luke 35:3–4 (FOTC 94:144).