In her two-thousand-year-lifespan, the bride of Christ has endured across a wide swath of human eras, from pre-modern, modern, to (now, or soon) postmodern times. In all times, in all cultures, and in all places she gathers. Whether in a chapel, cathedral, catacomb, or abbey, the church remains the embodied people of God. Nevertheless, God’s people look, speak, work, and live in ways that differ not only according to place but also according to the times.

The church—which is one body, rich and vast, constituted of members past, present, and future—cannot be explained or contained in a few, finite words. This is why the Bible uses so many symbols to describe the church, and why the history of the church is expressed through so many symbols. The power of symbols is in how they communicate directly yet remain open to interpretation, expansive and suggestive beyond words. One symbol the Bible uses to portray the church is the bride of Christ. If the church is indeed a bride then she is as complicated, contradictory, deep, beautiful, spotted, enchanting, vexing, vexed, and uncontainable as any person. She contains multitudes. To see the church as a bride is to see her in all this complexity. And yet even this symbol cannot circumscribe all that the church is, does, has done, and will be. To see the church—a bride now of two thousand years—through her many layers, we might perhaps consider her through the layers of other symbols expressive of her nature and being.

The Cross

One of the first symbols associated with the church is the cross. From early on many churches were even built in the shape of a cross, and many still are. They were thus literally cruciform.

The cross was, of course, the literal site of Christ’s crucifixion. Thus it became a symbol of both his death and his victory over death through resurrection. Those who believed and professed Christ identified with him and with the symbol of his sacrifice for our salvation. Thus the cross symbolizes the Christian faith and the church.

Yet, even before his sacrifice on the cross, Jesus had pointed his followers to that instrument of death, telling those who wished to be his disciples that they must deny themselves and take up their cross in order to follow him (Matthew 16:24). Indeed, Jesus amassed many followers long before that dark day that would turn into eternal light. Those who followed him were fascinated by his riddling words, drawn to his miraculous healings, enraptured by his authoritative teaching.

But charismatic, enigmatic leaders are a dime a dozen. This fact was no less true in the ancient world than it is now. Even John the Baptist, despite his best efforts to point people to the true Messiah, drew his own cult following.

Then came the cross. With the cross came what most certainly appeared, at first, to be the death and defeat of this strange, otherworldly philosopher-teacher whose followers had expected him to turn the physical, political, temporal world upside down. 

Instead, he died. And gruesomely on a cross, between two thieves, degraded and tortured as a criminal.

But then he came back from the dead. There would be a new heaven and a new earth. Here and now. Through us. Through those of us who follow him. Follow him not only for that time during which he walked dusty roads, and preached on the flat places high up, and stopped the issue of blood, and caked unseeing eyes with mud, and told Peter to put down his sword. But follow him even when he was and is no longer here, in the flesh, on the ground, in the boat, on the mount, in the crowd, away from the crowd, under the sycamore tree, or in the garden, begging with his father, sweating blood, being betrayed.

One betrayal—the betrayal by Judas—brought his death. Another betrayal—the denial of Christ by Peter—was delivered by the one on whom Christ had said his church would be built.

For when Jesus early in his ministry asked his disciples, “Who do you say I am?” Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16). The foundation of the church is seeing who Jesus really is. Yet the church is from the beginning a paradox (like a cross). The one who recognized Jesus would later deny him. Peter’s response when Jesus looked at him after three times denying he knew him was to weep bitterly.

The bride of Christ was born in weeping but birthed for a union in Christ that would bring forth the fruit of love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22–23). Another paradox.

The earliest Christians were called followers of the Way. Jesus called himself the Way. When we talk about Jesus being “the way,” we most often mean “the way to salvation,” “the way to God,” “the way to heaven,” or “the way out of hell.” And Jesus is these things.

But that’s not all he is.

Jesus is also a way—or manner—of living here and now.

This way is often called cruciform—taking the form of the cross—because the way of Jesus reaches up, reaches down, and reaches across in both directions. It is cruciform because Jesus died—and conquered death—from the centre, the crux of the matter, the crux of it all. He lived this way too. If we are to follow him, we must do the same. What it means to reach up, to reach down, to reach across in both directions will look different for Christ followers living in different times, different cultures, different places. But it will always (or should always) look like the cross.

Significantly, no other means of death—not the sword, not the guillotine, not the bullet, not the injection, not the fiery chair—could represent in its very form the way of life we are to live because of the death of the Son of Man.

The form of the cross is its content. The medium, as Marshall McLuhan famously said, is the message. The wonder of the cross is that it conveys so much in so many ways and yet its core symbol is so simple: Christ bore the cross and defeated it. The church is built on the confession of who Christ is, what he did, and how he did it.

When Jesus told his disciples to take up their cross and follow him, they did not know what lay ahead for Jesus. They knew what a cross was, but they did not know that their teacher would be humiliated on it, bleed on it, give up the ghost on it. They did not know that what seemed but a metaphor would become for Jesus quite literal.

And yet, what the cross conveys about Christ and his followers—the church—has infinite layers. As outlaws, the early Christians clung to the cross but dared not display it openly as a symbol. But a few centuries later, after Constantine defeated his enemies carrying the cross on the face of his shield, the citizens of his empire could, likewise, openly display the token of a faith no longer secret and subversive. The cross was ubiquitous in art, on monuments, around necks, on robes, on gravestones. The history of the many shapes and depictions of these crosses is nearly as winding and intricate as the history of the church itself, with all its denominations, divisions, and doctrines.

From the means and the symbol of Christ crucified and the conqueror of death, the cross came over the centuries to be wielded as a weapon and a means of force and coercion into the faith, into the church, into the state, into the secular empire. Two simple pieces of wood were replaced by the machine.

The Machine

Perhaps nothing symbolizes the modern age more than machinery. The church, like all else that is human and of human time, is, too, interlocked into the machine that characterizes modernity. We might even say that modernity, along with the modern church, was made by the machine.

The particular machine was, of course, the printing press. That machine brought the Protestant Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, and these grew a church less uniform (but no less universal) and more multifarious than that one formed first by the cross alone. The printing press churned out Bibles, and the need (and desire) for each person to be able to read it, which brought widespread literacy, correction of some errors, the spread of others, and many, many more books. It brought the Puritans, The Pilgrim’s Progress, the novel, and the rise of the individual, the evangelical movement, revivalism, social mobility, and individual expressivism. No longer was one destined to worship in the church of one’s parish or neighbourhood. The church looked less like one continuous parchment scroll and more like a metal typewriter of many small, moving parts.

The modern age also gave birth to the modern subject, who lived not only in the world but in the church. When reason dethroned religion as the ruling authority, it also replaced the traditional sources of authority that were external and objective with an authority turned inward—the self. Rather than merely inheriting one’s source of external objective authority—whether Yahweh, Re, Zeus, Odin, Chaos, Shiva, Confucius, Muhammad, a monarch, or the pope—the modern subject was one expected to test, experience, admit, or reject authority. (“Question authority!” would become the mantra placed on the bumper of many modern mobile machines.) Even accepting the faith of one’s forebears meant rejecting the rejection of it. The process itself was king—and method, experiment, trial and error, and formula its courtiers.

With more machines—the locomotive, the automobile, the radio, the television, the airplane, and the computer—the global village made it possible for the church to go everywhere in almost every way. It also gave church members the option to attend and even belong to any church all the world over. More importantly, perhaps, it allowed brothers and sisters across the planet to share, learn, and bond with and from one another.

But as Marshall McLuhan (again) pointed out: technology does not only give but takes away too. Technology—what McLuhan described as “extensions of man”—not only amplifies but diminishes. So, too, is this true of the machine-manufactured church.

Global reach can bring local anonymity. Mega institutions might serve masses but crush single souls. Loudspeakers blast the message for all to hear but drown out an urgent whisper.

As a “people of the book,” we might remind ourselves that even writing is a technology, the dangers of which Plato warned about in Phaedrus. In this dialogue, the Egyptian king Thamus rebuts the boast of the god Theus, who invented writing. Thamus warns that this new technology of writing offers “no true wisdom . . . but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.”

To consider the ways in which the machine characterizes aspects of the modern church allows us to remember that technology and even machines are ancient as well as modern. For the church, this technology of writing goes back to the carving of the Ten Commandments by the hand of God on Mount Sinai, back to the first scrolls and the illuminated manuscripts of the medieval age.

Human agents play a large part in determining whether technology is put to good use or ill. The machine may define the modern age and overwhelm, in many ways, the church of that age. But it cannot define the church.

The Cloud

Paradoxically, the formulas of science, the methods of modernity, the binary digits of computing have brought the eclipse of the mechanical by the ethereal. The cloud has overshadowed the machine. Modernity is slipping into postmodernity.

If there is anything that most simply and comprehensively defines postmodernity, it is merely the rejection of modern certainty—along with modern skepticism. In place of the interlocking, intricate, connected parts of a machine—predictable, replicable, fixable—postmodernity might be symbolized by the cloud—malleable, shifting, floating, mysterious, ever ancient, ever new, always reforming. Like the church.

The church in the modern age grappled with the religious offspring of rationalism, from deism to agnosticism to atheism. The postmodern church still battles these today, though more often going by altered iterations and different names, such as deconstruction, dechurching, deconversion, and moralistic therapeutic deism.

Nevertheless, as in ancient and modern times, the church continues to be constituted by the faithful—the faithful of past, present, and future. The church continues to be surrounded, as the writer of Hebrews tells us, by “a great cloud of witnesses.”

This cloud of witnesses is identified earlier in the book of Hebrews as the believers of the Old Testament—including Abraham, Isaac, and Joseph—whose faith in the Messiah to come saved them. That faith includes them in the ark of the covenant, which foreshadows the church. Just as Noah and his family were baptized by the flood and preserved within the walls of the ark (another foreshadowing), we in the church body are saved for good works, works that include witnessing to the goodness and faithfulness of God, just like the great cloud of witnesses. There is such a thing as a time machine, after all. It is what connects us to that great cloud of witnesses.

There is yet another cloud that manifests the goodness of God. That is the one told of in the exodus, the pillar of cloud (which appeared at night as a pillar of fire) with which God guided the Israelites through the wilderness and with which he shielded them from the sight of their enemies.

Many of us in the church today have a sense of wandering in the wilderness too. We, too, feel pursued by enemies.

The cloud is an apt symbol for the darkness of spiritual warfare too. For the cloud we sense is not always the one that manifests God’s presence and protection. Never-ending revelations of scandal, abuse, corruption are a dark cloud looming over the church and many of its precious souls. These evils have always existed, of course, within the church and without. But for those of us living through a new wave of such doings, the feelings of pain and confusion are as fresh and raw as though carved into soft infant flesh.

But as an unknown medieval monk wrote long ago, the cloud is also a symbol of the limits of human knowledge. God’s ways are not our ways. (What human being would have come up with guidance by a pillar of cloud?) This “cloud of unknowing,” as the monk’s book is called, is one that can bring us into true communion with God. It is impossible for us to understand or know God or the ways of God, this mystic says. Sometimes the closest we can get to God on this earth is to wait for him in the darkness and the cloud.

The twentieth-century Jesuit priest Karl Rahner famously predicted that the Christians of the future will either be mystics or cease to be.

If that future is now, then the cloud is a fitting symbol for the church to remember and by which to be guided forward, just as the faithful among the ancient were. If “modern” means “of the time” or “of the moment,” the church will always be that on this side of eternity—but we must not be just that. We must be people who look back on what God has done, remembering the pillar of cloud, standing with the cloud of witnesses. We must be people who neither deny nor succumb to the clouds of darkness we face. We must be a people who understand that we cannot understand God fully or know him or his ways completely. We must have faith while existing in a cloud of unknowing, trusting that God will, again, lead us out of cultural captivity, resting in confidence in the one who knows and loves his bride, the church, still. As William Wordsworth reminds us in his poem “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” “Trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home.”