Archishop Lazar Puhalo on the Visible and Invisible Church

QUESTION: In Western church tradition, there is a concept of the visible and invisible church, however we define that. Is there such a concept in Eastern Christianity?

RESPONSE: There is, but there is not such a sharp dichotomy in the East since the visible and invisible church are intimately connected. What the West would call the invisible church, the East “the noetic altar in the heavens” with a noetic projection on earth. So, the invisible permeates the visible.

QUESTION: And what constitutes the visible church?

RESPONSE: Sometimes we make the mistaken of trying to look for a physical definition rather than a spiritual definition. And sometimes we carry ‘spiritual’ a little too far and make it meaningless.

But the church on earth—“the catholic church”—is where catholic means “gathered together,” where everyone gathers or is gathered. I would call the church “the harvester of the earth,” because you make the church present and call everyone into it.

The minute you are baptized and chrismated, you become part of the royal priesthood, and you become part of THE Church—not the visible church but THE Church, visible and invisible, all united together.

It’s very important to remember that if one listens to the divine liturgy carefully, you can see this osmosis, this penetration of the heavenly into the earthly. The moment we enter the temple—we gather as a kind of visible kingdom of God. When we have what we call “the entrance,” most people miss it, but we say, “Blessed is the entrance of thy holy ones—the angels—because in the priest’s prayers, the angels are entering with us. And in the great anthem of the people of God, as I call it, “the Cherubic Hymn,” we sing,

“Let us who mystically represent the Cherubim and sing the thrice-holy hymn to the life-giving Trinity, lay aside all worldly cares, that we may receive the King of all, invisibly upborne [escorted] by angelic hosts. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.”

In other words, the angelic hosts are celebrating together with us—so the unseen is totally penetrating the seen and what is unseen is now seen.

And to make it more definitive, we see it in types and symbols. The types and symbols are very powerful. In the liturgy itself, inside “the gates of paradise,” when the priests start to cense the gifts, they pray,

“Having received them upon Thy holy, most heavenly, and noetic altar as an odor of spiritual fragrance, send down upon us in return the divine grace and the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

We must always see the penetration of the Holy Spirit as the union of the visible and invisible church, because they are not two distinct entities. The visible is for the sake of our weakness, but the invisible is always present—as long as we understand there is no dichotomy, we can say that the church here on earth is the visible aspect of the heavenly church.

But again, as a farmer, I often think of the church as the harvester of the crop, as long as there’s a harvest to be had,… so “lift up your eyes, the fields are ripe for the harvest.”