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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
In his inquiries into the New Testament conception of the Church, Karl Ludwig Schmidt propounded the thesis: Ecclesiology is Christology—a thesis which is certainly not new, but which is by no means self-evident in the context of Protestant theology. At the outset I should like to say that I do not want my thesis to be understood in the sense of this equation, for the following reasons:
1. The terms in which the New Testament speaks of the Church are very manifold, and they are by no means merely Christological. Beside Christological designations of the Church—such as 
—there are also pneumatological designations such as ‘temple of the Holy Ghost’, and theological such as 
. Thus ecclesiology taken as a whole must be expounded and developed in a trinitarian way; and in this we should not forget that in the primitive Confessions the articles concerning the Church are directly connected with the articles on the Holy Ghost. This suggests that, within a trinitarian context, one should expound the doctrine of the Church as the opus proprium of the Holy Ghost.
1 These theses were propounded and discussed at a joint conference of Protestant and Roman Catholic ecumenical study groups on the 25th March 1953 at the Evangelical Academy, Tutzing. The translation is made by Miss Mary Lusk B.D., Edinburgh, from the German version, appearing in Kerygma und Dogma vol. 1, issue 3, 1955 (Verlag Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, Göttingen) and still available from booksellers and from the publishers.