Given how much I’ve enjoyed his Freedom for Ministry, I thought it wise to read a little more about Rev. Neuhaus. The son of a Lutheran minister, Neuhaus served with both the Missouri-Synod and the ELCA for roughly three decades before being received into the Catholic church in 1990. In “How I Became the Catholic I Was,” Neuhaus eloquently recounts his ecclesial pilgrimage, spelling out how his earliest intuitions about the Church—nurtured in St. John’s Lutheran Church in the Ottawa Valley of Canada—set him on a path that ultimately led to his embracing the Catholic faith. I find very intriguing his notion of becoming, even at a young age, an “ecclesial Christian.” Here’s how he puts it,

To be brought up a Lutheran, at least a Missouri Synod Lutheran, at least there and at least then, was to know oneself as an ecclesial Christian. Of course I did not put it that way as a young boy, nor was it put that way to me, but I would later see what had happened. An ecclesial Christian is one who understands with mind and heart, and even feels with his fingertips, that Christ and his Church, head and body, are inseparable. For the ecclesial Christian, the act of faith in Christ and the act of faith in the Church are not two acts of faith but one. In the words of the third century St. Cyprian, martyr bishop of Carthage, “He who would have God as his Father must have the Church as his mother.” In an important sense, every Christian, even the most individualistic, is an ecclesial Christian, since no one knows the gospel except from the Church. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus—no salvation outside the Church—applies to all. For some, that truth is incidental; for the ecclesial Christian it is constitutive, it is at the very core, of faith and life.

A little further on, Neuhaus summarizes his experience this way,

I simply underscore the ways in which being brought up a Missouri Lutheran—at least then and at least there—produced an ecclesial Christian. One might also speak of a sacramental Christian or an incarnational Christian, but, whatever the terminology, the deepest-down conviction, the most irrepressible sensibility, is that of the touchability, the visibility, the palpability of what we might call “the Christian thing.” To use the language of old eucharistic controversies, finitum capax infiniti—the finite is capable of the infinite. Put differently, there is no access to the infinite except through the finite. Or yet again, God’s investment in the finite can be trusted infinitely. Although Lutheran theology discarded the phrase, it is the ex opere operato conviction evident in Luther’s ultimate defiance of Satan’s every temptation by playing the trump card, “I am baptized!” Ex opere operato is the sacramental enactment of sola gratia. It is uncompromisingly objective. By it morbid introspection, the delusions of religious enthusiasm, and the endlessly clever postulations of the theological imagination are called to order by truth that is answerable to no higher truth; for it is Christ, who is the Truth, who speaks in the voice of his Church—“I baptize you . . . ,” “I forgive you your sins . . . ,” “This is my body . . . ”

Much could be said in response to all this. I simply want to register how salutary it is to conceive of oneself as “an ecclesial Christian.” This seems to track with Brad East’s distinction between “biblicist” and “catholic” Christians. Give me catholic over biblicist any day. The question, however, that this raises for me: Is it possible to be an “ecclesial Christian”—a ‘catholic’ Christian—and a committed Protestant? Does Protestantism allow for this kind of vision? I believe it does, but it’s uncomfortable to know that many ecclesially-inclined Christians see conversion to Rome as the only viable option.