Mystery of the church in the world

Blair Laird

I am having a hard time finding resources that will help me understand the meaning of Didache 11:11. I have tried to search my library for "mystery of the church in the world" but do not come up with results that are beneficial. 

MJ. Smith

Do you have this?

■ 10–11 Then follows19 a second characteristic for distinguishing true from false prophets. The one who teaches the truth (ἡ ἀλήθεια), but does not do it, is a false prophet.20 Now (v. 11)21 the text addresses a special case, one that we again can no longer fully understand. To begin with, whatever it concerns applies only to the προφήτης δεδοκιμασμένος,22 ἀληθινός, that is, the “true and tested” prophets.23 Then the crucial clause reads: (προφήτης) ποιῶν εἰς μυστήριον κοσμικὸν ἐκκλησίας, μὴ διδάσκων δὲ ποιεῖν, ὅσα αὐτὸς ποιεῖ. This text constitutes a classic crux interpretum in the Didache. Its formulation is probably cryptic by design,24 although the original audience certainly understood what it was about. In contrast it appears that even the Coptic and Ethiopic translators no longer understood the text.25


    Excursus: The Crux of 11.11

    The Coptic version (in the German translation by Carl Schmidt)26 reads: “who teaches and attests a worldly (κοσμικός) tradition (παράδοσις) in the church (ἐκκλησία).” The question is whether there ever was a Greek form of the text corresponding to this or whether the Coptic form does not represent, instead, an ad hoc alteration by the translator, who no longer understood the Greek text before him. Something analogous may be said of the Ethiopic version, which reads at this point (in the English translation by George Horner):27 “who acts in the assembly of men and acts unlawfully.” Attempts to work with the Coptic28 or Ethiopic text as a basis do not take us any farther. It is the text of H that must be explained. It is obscure, but at least it has integrity.29
    (1) Some interpreters30 have attempted to arrive at an understanding of this passage by recourse to the expression following in v. 11c, ὡσαύτως γὰρ ἐποίησαν καὶ οἱ ἀρχαῖοι προφῆται, with reference to the familiar symbolic actions of the Old Testament prophets.31 They then attribute something similar or analogous to the Christian prophets of the Didache as well. In that case one could understand the text to say that the Didache prophets sometimes clarify or illustrate their prophetic witness through symbolic actions.32 This opinion can be given concrete shape by reference to the analogy, implicit in the concept of μυστήριον κοσμικόν, between the heavenly and earthly realms. The text could then be understood to mean that the Christian prophets (following their OT models), by means of certain actions, present heavenly mysteries in an earthly manner33—most probably the union between Christ and the church.34 In the first place, however, it is clear that in fact only the Old Testament prophets could be meant by ἀρχαῖοι προφῆται (and not, e.g., the prophets of the earliest Christian period).35
    (2) Moreover, the text (as Harnack first rightly realized, in principle, despite his false interpretation of the term ἀρχαῖοι προφῆται)36 can be understood still more concretely if one thinks not of a symbolic action, but of the whole of the prophet’s way of life, namely, a matrimonium spirituale, a spiritual marriage in which the prophet lives with his companion.37 This marriage (as the key phrase μυστήριον κοσμικὸν ἐκκλησίας would suggest) is ecclesiologically motivated; that is, it represents the union of the Kyrios with his bride, the church.38 The advantage of this interpretation is that it achieves a focused meaning for an otherwise baffling text; the disadvantage is that it requires us to locate the beginnings of the institution of spiritual marriage relatively early. It may be, however, that the community at Corinth was already acquainted with spiritual marriage in Paul’s time (cf. 1 Cor 7:36–38*).39
    

If these suggestions are correct, the passage should be interpreted as follows: it may happen that the prophet will not arrive alone but accompanied by a Christian woman with whom he lives in a spiritual marriage. This may have been somewhat alienating for many Christians (and in fact it is only permitted for genuine prophets). In such a case the local Christians should recall that this spiritual marriage has (as we would now say) the character of a “real symbol.” In it the heavenly syzygy between Christ and the church is made visible through an earthly illustration; it is present in the ascetic union of the two Christians. What the prophet does is thus done as an earthly reflection of the heavenly mystery of the church (namely, its syzygy with the Kyrios).40 Spiritual marriages are here (in the Didache) explicitly approved—although with certain provisos—and they are defended against the objections that may have been expressed by individual fellow Christians,41 on the condition that the prophet in question does not say that his way of life is not the one and only way that is obligatory for all Christians (i.e., διδάσκων δὲ ποιεῖν, ὅσα αὐτὸς ποιεῖ).42 If the prophet lives in his spiritual marriage without trying to impose that way of life on others, then: οὐ κριθήσεται ἐφʼ ὑμῶν· μετὰ θεοῦ γὰρ ἔχει τὴν κρίσιν (“he shall not be judged by you, for his judgment is with God,” v. 11b). Finally, the text introduces one last argument to make the institution of spiritual marriage more comprehensible. The prophets who live in this way thus correspond typologically only to the Old Testament prophets who behaved in the same way (as is said totum pro parte in v. 11c). We therefore have a double typology before us. On the one hand, spiritual marriage corresponds to its heavenly model, namely, the union of the Kyrios with his bride, the church; on the other hand, however, the prophet living in a spiritual marriage repeats, in typological fashion, the model (understood in a salvation-historical sense) of the Old Testament prophets. One can see that in this (isolated) passage some of the “theological” convictions of the Didache tradition, or of the Didachist, peek through, and yet it is characteristic of the unique quality of this book (and its sources) that the didactic implications are not expounded nor given full scope but remain merely as hints, and that they appear unsystematically, in a way that seems almost accidental, as if evoked by particular situations.


Kurt Niederwimmer and Harold W. Attridge, The Didache: a Commentary, Hermeneia—a Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1998), 179–182.