Post a Comment On: Bruce Charlton's Notions

It has often been said that - for proper Christians - the real church is not the administrative bureaucracy but an entity termed the Mystical Church. But while many would agree in principle; the meaning of this is unclear. Perhaps most people would go no further than to say that it means Christians must be discerning and selective in their choice of obedience and support among the full range of organizational personnel, interpretations, assertions etc.A somewhat deeper idea would be that the Mystical Church lies behind or below the surface of what goes-on in the institutional church - perhaps along the lines that the real/ true/ eternal spiritual aspects; need to be seen through the transitory, corrupted, and often-false physical/ material manifestations of the organizational church. 
But it is possible, and probably necessary, to take this further. The spiritual Mystical Church could be understood and having no necessary relationship with any particular institutional church's actual, current manifestation. That is: the spiritual may in practice be detached from the physical. In other words, it is the spirit that is real and which we ought to believe and live-by; while the physical/ material church may be fully dissociable from the spirit. Any material church institution should therefore be regarded as secondary to the spiritual truth and validity - so that any physical manifestation might in practice be helpful... Or alternatively it might be useless, or indeed actively-harmful, to the spirit. 
What this further implies is that whatever we perceive - whether with our senses or by the inner-eye of our imagination - should be regarded as secondary and not-necessary as compared with what we know directly: know without intermediates, without word image or symbol. If "the church" is regarded in this intermediary and symbolic way; we can then regard the Mystical Church as that which we know of the truth and reality of that church - what we know despite whatever that church may say and do, here and now, or in the past. Another way to think about this is that the idea, or ideal, of a church may continue to be a valuable - or even vital - factor in our Christian life; even when that church was in practice never much good, and is by-now thoroughly corrupted and serves an evil agenda. 
If this is the case; we should not feel obliged to defend the Mystical Church against supposed facts and evidence - because facts and evidence are material, whereas the church we value is spiritual; and its real existence as an ideal may have no relationship with the contingencies and limitations of the material world.  Of course, we need to be consistent - and not thereafter try to smuggle-through expectations or assertions that the Mystical Church is to be valued because of its supposed effects (sooner or later) on this material world and our mortal lives. If the Mystical Church is to be sustained in its inspirational purity, it requires to be detached from the real world; and one who truly regards the spirit as primary will not object to this. 
The same principle can be extended from the church to any other human institution such as a nation, a city, or something like a school or a profession. There might be (and indeed is) a Mystical England (sometimes called Albion or Logres) - and also something similar for any other entity that we value. For this to work, and to be valuable in a world like ours - we need to refrain from our habit of making material assertion that are supposed to follow from spiritual ideals. If we are serious about Albion, for instance; then we should not derive it from the actual history of England, or from any particular things about current England - all of which are individually ambiguous and corruptible.
What we can legitimately say; is that some material thing - here and now, but not necessarily or always - helps inspire us to become aware of the ideal, the Mystical, the spiritual. Or; that the spiritual lies-behind that which is good in a material manifestation. After all: the material/ physical is always spiritual (is indeed a sub-set of the spiritual); but the spiritual is primary, and the spiritual does not require the physical.