Editor’s Note: What follows is the conclusion of a two-part essay on the connections between the Church, the sacraments, and Christian ethical living. The first part may be found here. The discussion now moves to eschatology and life in a fragmented Church.
The Eschatological Horizon and Its Ethical Implications
The Creed’s closing affirmation (“I look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come”) situates all sacramental ontology and life within an eschatological frame. Baptism is death and resurrection enacted sacramentally (Rom. 6:3–4), while the Eucharist is a foretaste of the heavenly banquet (Rev. 19:9).
“The Christian hope is to live with confidence in newness and fulness of life, and to await the coming of Christ in glory, and the completion of God’s purpose for the world” (A Catechism 1989, 443). This is to live out the radical life initiated at Holy Baptism and sustained and perfected in the Holy Eucharist. Christian ethics, therefore, is not simply a moral code but a participation in the life of the kingdom already breaking into the present. As the radical orthodox theologian John Milbank insists in his Being Reconciled (2003), the Church’s social and moral life is a “liturgy extended,” in which sacramental Communion spills over into economic, political, and ecological responsibility. The implications of this are profound.
To confess credo in corpus is to affirm the indivisibility of the Creed, the Church, the sacraments, and the ethical life. The four marks are therefore sacramental realities; baptism is not a ritual of belonging alone but a commissioning into Christ’s mission; the Eucharist is not a private devotion but the Church’s very lifeblood.
In an age of ecclesial fragmentation and ethical confusion, the recovery of a credal-eucharistic imagination offers a path toward unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolic mission. To be credal is to be sacramental; to be sacramental is to be ethical; and to be ethical is to be deeply, visibly, and joyfully the Church.
Affirming a Credal Ethic in a Fragmented Communion
The current rupture in parts of the Anglican Communion, notably decisions by provinces in the Americas and Australasia to bless or permit same-sex marriages and increasing advocacy for similar recognition in the Church of England, is a challenge to the Church’s anthropology, sacramental grammar, and credal coherence. If the Creed is the Church’s ontological charter, divergences over sexual morality threaten the integrity of the Church’s confession and the coherence of sacramental identity.
A credal ethic must therefore show how the doctrine confessed in Nicaea and its account of the Spirit, sacrament, and eschaton bear on questions of sexuality and marriage. This requires recovery both of a robust incarnational anthropology and of a characteristically Anglican method of drawing on Scripture, reason, and tradition, alongside the resources of Latin and Eastern moral theology.
John Paul II’s Theology of the Body supplies a systematic, incarnational anthropology for sexual ethics. His insistence that “the body, in fact, and only the body, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine” (203) reframes the body as a sacramental sign. Theology of the Body reads the Genesis narrative as a revelation of the body’s nuptial meaning: man and woman are created for reciprocal gift and communion, the primordial human language that makes visible the Trinitarian communion.
John Paul II develops the argument that the conjugal act has an intrinsic nuptial and procreative meaning; it is a bodily language of gift. He emphasizes that sexual acts that close off the procreative dimension are contrary to the body’s cryptic language of self-gift: “In the conjugal act the human person gives himself to the other and at the same time receives the other in a mutually complementary acceptance” (332-34). In this great work, marriage is the “primordial sacrament”; to redefine marriage outside male/female complementarity is to disconnect the visible sign (the body) from the reality it represents (spousal covenant).
Applied to Anglican debates, Theology of the Body supplies three crucial convictions:
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- Sexuality bears meaning beyond subjective desire; it is constitutive of personhood and cannot be recast as merely a matter of preference.
- Marriage images Christ’s covenant with the Church; sexual acts that cannot and seek not to embody that sign cannot be placed in the covenantal context without inherent semantic contradiction.
- Theology of the Body seeks not to be punitive, but rather to be formative, inviting moral conversion by renewing an understanding of the body’s meaning—a call to return to the radix of gospel-centred living.
These convictions resist the claim that recognizing same-sex marriage is simply a pastoral accommodation. Rather, they underscore that to alter the definition of marriage is to alter the system of signs by which the Church reads God’s design for human communion and for the sacraments.
Richard Hooker’s method of drawing on Scripture, tradition, and reason remains a characteristically Anglican method for adjudicating moral controversies. Hooker’s formulation is precise: first place belongs to Scripture; next to reason; and then to the voice of the Church (Hooker, 1888, V.8.2). Hooker does not license private innovation. He requires reason to be disciplined by revelation and for tradition to serve as the corporate memory that constrains novelty.
Applying Hooker to today’s debates yields a procedural norm:
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- Scripture gives first principles: creation narratives, marriage texts (Gen. 1–2; Matt. 19; Eph. 5).
- Reason attends to human flourishing and biological realities, including the complementarity of the sexes and the teleology of sexual acts (Aquinas).
- Tradition presents an unbroken Christian witness; patristic, conciliar, medieval, and magisterial, to marital praxis. Both East and West have preserved a consistent marriage anthropology.
Hooker’s method enables an Anglican moral reasoning that is neither voluntarist nor legalistic; it is ordered, deliberative, and ecclesial. It therefore furnishes Anglicanism with a principled basis for resisting innovations that sever the Church from catholic moral consensus.
There is an important convergence between the Latin (Roman) and Eastern (Orthodox) traditions on the fundamental ends of marriage and sexual morality.
Aquinas (Latin) locates matrimony within natural law: matrimony is “instituted for the begetting of children” and is therefore of the natural law (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Suppl., Q.41). Aquinas further situates marriage within the economy of grace when he considers its sacramental elevation in the New Law (Aquinas, ST, Suppl. Q.42). The Thomistic posture emphasizes the teleological ordering of sexual acts to procreation and conjugal unity, which forms the basis of a public ethic and informs discerning public policy (Aquinas, ST).
Eastern Orthodox writers, from Gregory Palamas to Kallistos Ware and contemporary theologians such as Georges Florovsky (1893-1979) and Christos Yannaras (b. 1935), conceive marriage as a Mystery (sacrament) and as an ascetical vocation aiding theosis: the married life is a path of sanctification in which spouses assist each other toward union with God. Ware writes that marriage is an “ascetical vocation” and a means of theosis, and as such it cannot be reduced to a private matter of sexual fulfillment. Florovsky emphasizes patristic continuity and the formative role of liturgy and asceticism in shaping sexual virtue.
Both traditions therefore emphasize that sexual morality is ecclesial and soteriological: sexual acts are not moral atoms but are in fact embedded in a formation that includes liturgical life, ascetic discipline, and sacramental participation.
Taking these convergences seriously, the path for Anglicanism should be careful, ecclesial, and synodal. I propose a threefold practical program:
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- Synodal theological discernment: Provinces and dioceses should establish commissions mandated to read contested pastoral proposals through a credal grid, employing Hooker’s method and consulting Latin and Eastern patrimony (Nicaea → Patristic → Scholastic → Magisterial). Such commissions should be genuinely consultative, publishing theological reports, not merely political statements.
- Anthropological catechesis: Seminaries, formation programs and parishes should integrate Theology of the Body with patristic and sacramental theology. Catechesis must be patient, educational, and incarnational, teaching the nuptial meaning of the body rather than simply asserting prohibitions.
- Liturgical and disciplinary clarity: Because the Eucharist is the sacramental index of visible communion, in which divergence fundamentally contradicts the Church’s sacramental or doctrinal coherence, prudential measures should be considered. Such measures must be pastoral, time-bound, and aimed at restoration rather than exclusion. The objective is to protect a common credal space in which sound formation can take place.
Theological fidelity must be accompanied by pastoral charity. John Paul II’s corpus consistently stresses accompaniment: truth must be proclaimed with mercy. Pastoral measures must ensure care for persons, including those identifying as LGBTIQ+, offering prayerful support, spiritual counsel, and liturgical inclusion where appropriate, while reserving doctrinal changes for properly constituted ecclesial processes. This balance reflects the twofold fidelity of the Church: fidelity to the truth and fidelity to persons.
I Believe in the Church
To confess Credo in Corpus is to commit to an ecclesial life in which Creed, Sacrament, and ethics are inseparable. The four marks are not rhetorical ornaments but sacramental predicates constituted by the Spirit and realized in Baptism and the Eucharist. In a time of fragmentation, recovering a credal, Eucharistic imagination offers a way to renew unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolic mission. The program I have proposed—synodal discernment, integrated catechesis, and prudent sacramental discipline—constitutes one plausible road by which Anglicanism might remain faithful to its creedal inheritance while exercising pastoral care in a complex world.
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The Rev. Thapelo Masemola is Chaplain at St John's College, Johannesburg, South Africa.
