RTS Papers / Systematic Theology 3 / Fall 2018
The Nicene Creed is among the most famous statements of the Christian faith in the world. In it we find this confession: “We believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.” Here we have four attributes which we might call “catholic” in the sense that all Christian churches in the following centuries believed the same in principle. It is true that the Donatist error and the division between East and West severely challenged this belief. On the other hand the real controversy was only ever about who gets to lay a claim to such a church, not primarily over whether the words were true.
When the Protestant Reformation developed its own three marks of the true church, its greatest theologians would never have positioned the Word, sacraments, and discipline against those older catholic marks. Rather these were offered precisely to distinguish between true and false meanings of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. Consequently, where the Reformers protested, they sought a true catholicity, not less of a catholicity. The question of authenticating marks for them was exceedingly practical. After all they were being charged with innovation and schism.
This essay will put forth the following thesis:
The “catholic” and “Reformed” marks of the true church belong together, and are each best understood from the invisible to the visible. That is, we know their essence from the perspective of the invisible acts of God.
By this distinguishing order, from the invisible to the visible, I will mean something rooted in the ordo salutis, since it is by the whole Trinitarian work of salvation that we find ourselves in this entity called the church. This will not be meant in any atomistic sense. That is, we will have no room for the idea that the church is nothing but a gathering of those who have come through the ordo salutis, as isolated individuals, only to then grace the church with their incidental presence. Rather we are saved immediately into and even as the church. Nevertheless, salvation is logically prior to the church in that only those whom Christ redeems are members of his body. This essay will move from a conceptual analysis of this essence of the church, to a causal analysis of the same, to a reading of the four catholic marks and three Reformed marks in that light.
THE ESSENCE OF THE CHURCH: A CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS
By conceptual analysis I only mean to focus our minds on the very definition. As Anselm reasoned for God’s existence by the very definition of “greatest conceivable being,” so here I would argue for the “invisible-to-visible” essence of the church by its very definition. In doing so, we will assume the historic distinction between the invisible and visible church. Of course these are not two different “churches,” but rather one church in two dimensions.
The simple terminology of the invisible church testifies to its status as the esse of the church. Turretin goes as far to say that the definition of church per se is enough to show this: that all of the most basic imagery used of the church draws attention to the invisible workings of grace. Interestingly the last of his eleven such arguments is that the fathers confess the same. He then gives a more concise, plain list, that “whatever things constitute the church properly so called are internal and invisible: election and effectual calling, union with Christ, the Spirit, faith, regeneration and the writing of the law on the heart, the reasonable (logikos) and spiritual worship.”
When Paul says, “the Lord knows those who are his” (2 Tim. 2:19), one of the implications comes by way of contrast. Consider how we do not see as the Lord sees. What else does this mean but that we do not see the reality or the true condition of one’s inclusion into the eternal church? Paul speaks with even greater clarity to the church in Rome about one who is “a Jew … inwardly” (2:29) and that “not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel” (9:6). In the former he speaks of circumcision and obedience to the commandments, whereas in the latter his topic is election as the reason why the promises of God had not failed.
Both passages demand not only that there is a distinction between the invisible and visible, but that the invisible is, in a sense, the truer foundation.
Even of all the very earthy images used of the church, we can see the essence being an invisible substance. The church is called an assembly, a family, a bride, a building, a city, and a plant for harvest. These are all very tangible at first glance. However a closer look reveals a call, a blueprint, a seed and sower, and a covenant of love: all grounded, according to Bavinck, in “an object of faith, for what one believes is not visible.” As to other imagery, we are not quite a whole kingdom, but a colony of one. Even of our King it is said, “you do not now see him” (1 Pet. 1:8). So he who is most real and essential about the church reigns and rules from heaven. All that we have, we have by union with him: the whole body flowing from him as its source (Eph. 1:22-23, 4:15-16, Col. 1:17-18).
Neither the common nor the diverse senses of ἐκκλησία detract from the point that a gathering of souls is an intelligent and volitional phenomenon. Both the local and the universal, or for that matter the regional or the ecclesiastical, are all expressions of the hearing with faith that visibly assembles. The invisible makes the visible at every level.
An objection should be met at this point. The priority of the invisible over the visible is not Platonism, nor any other kind of dualism. As the Westminster Confession says about the divine decree establishing (rather than violating) human agency, so we may say that the divine work on the church is that which lasts and is manifest in its human and visible form.
Indeed the invisible and visible dimensions of the church are subsets of the divine decree and human responsibility: for we are responsible, as the church, to be one, holy, catholic, and apostolic; to preach the word, and to administrate and participate in the sacraments and discipline.
Consequently the primacy of the invisible essence of the church does no violence to the visible marks, but rather it is precisely this invisible essence which establishes and gives shape to what we mean by the visible marks.
(#ecclesiology #apostolic #sacraments #church #catholic #creed #Reformed)
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