The Royal Commission is required to make ‘recommendations that will provide a just response for people who have been sexually abused and ensure institutions achieve best practice in protecting children in the future.’ To that end, the Interim Report of the Commission released mid last year discloses that the Commission is considering, as examples of its work, recommendations on programs that teach children how to recognise and report abuse, on institutional accreditation schemes and on the elimination of obstacles to institutional responses to reported abuse. By mid-2014 the Commission had heard complaints against more than 1000 institutions, including government agencies, private companies, churches and faith-based and community organisations.

One of the pivotal roles of the Church, on the injunction of Christ, is its call to be salt to the world, a purifying and preserving influence. In certain periods within the history of the West it has acquitted this role with vigour, to the extent that at times I wonder if the State has come to rely on the smell of salt emanating from the Cathedrals. In the drama between Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar, Oxford Professor Oliver O’Donovan reads the following truth: ‘Empire cannot articulate to itself its suppressed knowledge of its own fragility; the king as dreamer knows something that the king as ruler cannot repeat.’ Here is the Church playing its role in speaking a truth to the State that is too fearful for the State to admit.

The uncovering of sexual abuse by persons with authority in the Church has cut many of the faithful with a deep dismay. If the Church senses its own nightmare in this, it is the question as to whether it has failed at an existential level to be itself. To illustrate why, let me draw an allusion from ancient Greek philosophy.

The extent to which early Church theologians were influenced by Greek philosophy in their theories of the Church has at times been hotly contested by theologians. Saint Augustine was so taken with seeming parallels between Platonic insight and Christianity that he theorised that the teaching of the Israelite prophets may have reached Plato. Plato reasoned that all beings have an ideal form in a pre-existing world, that their existence here is but an opaque reflection of that form, and that their reason for existing is to perfect the expression of that form. It has been argued that controversial third century theologian Origen drew upon Platonic thought in formulating his teaching on how the Church of this world would be made perfect and complete on the return of Christ.

The Bible conceives of the Church as a creation of God. Both its telos and its nature originates in His edict. The purifying power of repentance is a defining attribute of its nature. Repentance is foundational, it is the very precursor to the birth of the Church. Repentance is also necessary to the Church’s ongoing existence, through it the Church continually recalibrates its focus back upon its telos through repentance at a communal level.

To the extent that the Church has failed to protect the innocent in her care, she has failed to uphold her God-given role as purifying and preserving salt. To draw a strained Platonic allusion, she has failed to live according to her perfect form, her God-given nature. By not living out its raison d’etre, its reason for existence, it has not been itself, if we say ‘itself’ is as God has described its ideal form, as his bride, that will be revealed in purity on the return of Christ. Here is the heart of our dismay, in these matters the Church has fallen monstrously short of what we know she should be.

The claim that the Church has failed to acquit its heavenly calling is not new to our generation. As far back as 1066, William of Normandy justified the Norman invasion of Britain by a purported need to purify a corrupt British church. Henry VIII’s nationalisation of the assets of the Church after the Pope refused to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon was, at least publicly, justified in part by a growing critique by humanists and reformers of many of the practices of the medieval Catholic Church, both on account of its corruption in places, and also on account of a belief that religion should confer more obvious public benefits.

So how does the Church fulfil its telos and its nature in response to the work of the Royal Commission? In the interests of justice, and to protect children in institutional care today, the Church must assist in the bringing of perpetrators to justice. The Commission, through its investigatory role, holds a central means to seeing this justice done. The Church, as preserver and savourer of truth must approach the Commission’s work in a genuine attempt to understand and fight for the innocent aggrieved. It can also see in that work opportunity to receive learned wisdom on how to prevent any such evil into the future.

The Church should, as in all things, approach the work with a concern to ensure its true nature is lived out. It must face reality with the absolute certainty that its nature is to stand for the innocent and for justice. It does this in the interests of justice for those harmed and to protect those in its care now. It does this to be itself.

Here Paul’s analogy of the old ‘self’ warring with the new takes on some institutional relevance. The Bible teaches that the believer is fashioned anew in the image of Christ. The believer has been given a new nature, which the Holy Spirit will reveal through the effluxion of time. The old character wars with the new, but the terrifying but powerful process of honesty and repentance forges a new eternal character. This process is terrifying, because forgiveness first requires the conviction that can only flow from admission of the full depth of our depravity. It’s powerful, because the depth of that depravity cannot exhaust the far greater depths of God’s forgiveness. The power of the Cross exhausts heaven’s just judgement on evil.

This leads us to conclude that if the Church fails to approach the findings with honesty, it risks finding forgiveness. It also fails to live out the most fundamental of Christian convictions, the universality of heavenly forgiveness for the truly repentant, and it fails to play its role as a witness to the nations. In failing to hold to the means to its own hope of eternity, it fails to model for society the eternal hope of which it is charged of being the preserve.

Mark Fowler is a practising lawyer and a doctoral candidate in law at the University of Queensland.

Image: Andy Bullock on Flickr, used under CC License.