| Abstract: | Abstract The Church of Alexandria was a highly centralized institution, reflecting Alexandria's civil status rather than an ecclesiology comparable to that of Rome. Cyril's thinking on the Church was not ideologically driven but the product of his biblical exegesis. Of the many symbolic images of the Church he finds in the Scriptures, the most important are the tabernacle, the temple, the city of Sion, and the body of Christ. In discussing these images, he presents the Church as a community of faith in which humanity is recreated in Christ through the Holy Spirit, a community in which believers reproduce on the moral level the essential unity of the Trinity itself. With a strong sense of the Church as a society in the world, Cyril is anxious to protect this community from competitors who would thwart its purpose through wrong belief. |
