RTS Papers / Systematic Theology 3 / Fall 2018
THE ESSENCE OF THE CHURCH: A CAUSAL ANALYSIS
The church, Turretin said, is “the primary work of the holy Trinity.” The church must be viewed first as a divine work, whatever else it may be. Schwöbel ingeniously argues that the invisibility of the church as God’s power to create it is actually vital to be able to confess the church as an object of faith. Unless this is what we mean by “the church” in our creed, we are placing faith in something less than God.
Of course Barth said something similar in the words: “Credo in Spiritum sanctum, but not Credo in ecclesiam. I believe in the Holy Spirit, but not in the Church. Rather I believe in the Holy Spirit, and therefore also in the existence of the Church.”
However this is really a way of saying that how God redeems us into his church defines the marks. Bavinck placed his ecclesiology under the heading, “The Church’s Spiritual Essence.” For him, the body of Christ on earth was the ultimate organism, deriving its eschatological perfection from the essence of the triune God. He made this point by analogy: “Just as in Christ there is the union of a divine and a human nature, and in humans the union of soul and body, and in the sacraments the union of the sign with the thing signified, so in the church there is a visible and an invisible side. Christ is the efficient as well as the exemplary and the final cause of the church.”
What all of this really means, in the words of Clowney, is that we view the marks of the church in light of the “gospel.” While Christ is the ultimate cause as Builder (Mat. 16:18), renewed souls the material cause as “living stones” (1 Pet. 2:5), God’s glory in a worshiping sanctuary the end cause (Heb. 12:18-29), our main focus will be on the formal cause. Whether one analyzes the texts on the “assembly” (קָהָל) in the Old Testament or in the New (ἐκκλησία), we must focus on the immediate, formal cause. What is it that does the gathering of the people? We could discuss the role of the Spirit in bringing about faith, but here I only mean the most immediate cause. The answer is surely “the word of truth” (Jam. 1:18; cf. Rom 10:17). That the word creates the church has other consequences. As creatura verbi divini, “the way in which the church is constituted by divine action determines the character and scope of human action in the Church.”
This gospel cause of the church is also soli Deo gloria: God makes the church to speak about himself. Divine attributes are displayed by the way he creates the church. For instance, we may argue that because God is simple - all that is in God is God - so the marks of the church are also a unity. In other words, God has so ordered the church, as a display of his own glory, that its defining marks are all shared with each other. A few examples could be given. The church’s oneness is holy. The church’s discipline is catholic. The church’s apostolicity is in its word. And so on with the others.
THE CATHOLIC MARKS: FROM THE INVISIBLE TO THE VISIBLE
The oneness of the church refers to its unity. The first mark in the Creed has biblical warrant: “there is one body” (Eph. 4:4). The unity of the church is primarily spiritual. Bavinck remarks that though the universal church may not be historically prior to the local church, “it is logically so.” In fact, what he meant by historic priority is what my thesis means by visible priority. Rome perceives a division in the body to the extent that one has disagreed with Rome. The “eternal city” became the epicenter of the one church. But the Scriptures recognize the root of division to be splitting the roots of true doctrine: or, in a word, heresy (cf. Rom. 16:17, 1 Cor. 11:19, Ti. 3:10, Jd. 19).
“The unity of the church,” for Turretin, “supposes a preceding unity of faith in which believers are joined.” Whereas the basic error of Rome is to see the essence “only in externals and things striking the senses,” the relevant uses of the word for church in the New Testament demonstrate “a unity and conjunction of persons, not identity of place.” Berkhof quotes Moehler to make this point: “‘The Catholics teach: the visible Church is first,--then comes the invisible: the former gives birth to the latter.’ This means that the Church is a mater fidelium (mother of believers) before she is a communio fidelium (community of believers).”
Now if Rome gradually defined unity around the papacy, the modern ecumenicalist does so by diffusing orthodoxy. What is thought to cause division now is doctrinal precision and urgency. There is a false assumption behind this about our own role in unity. Richard Phillips cites the words of Jesus and Paul against this: “according to Paul the church is already united. He says, ‘There is one body and one Spirit’ (Eph. 4:4). Not that there ought to be one body, but that there is one body, one unified church. We are not exhorted to ‘create’ unity among Christians, but to maintain it, that is, to serve and promote the unity that is already a fact (Eph. 4:3). Likewise, Jesus prayed to the Father, not to us, for church unity, and we can be sure that his prayer was answered.”
Paradoxically, the catholic idea has an exclusive sense to it. Cyprian famously said that, “Outside the church, there is no salvation,” and Augustine added that, “I would not have known God as my Father unless I knew the church as my mother.”
It may surprise the nascent Reformed student that Calvin and Turretin both reaffirmed these sentiments. However, some qualification is in order. The church is a “mother” to us in its nursing capacity. At this point it is helpful to bring in the only cause we did not yet consider: the instrumental.
The ministries of the church are, collectively, doing this “mothering” or “nurturing” activity. But we must ask whether or not there is a hierarchy among the means of grace so ministered. First Peter gives us a clue in speaking of “the pure spiritual milk” of the word (2:2). Our chapter breakdown conceals that this comes on the heels of referring to the imperishable “seed” (1:23) of that same word that gives birth to us to begin with. Thus the church that is mother is but a channel for the real source of life: the invisible word.
The holiness of the church refers to its purity. Holiness too comes from the invisible word: “Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you” (Jn. 15:3). Holiness indeed is made visible, but its essence is the spirit and not the letter (2 Cor. 3:6), the heart and not the outward appearance (1 Sam. 16:7). Of course the first act and attribute of holiness is the divine act of carving us out of this common world and calling us holy. Such an action must be unilateral and free on the part of God. Given our pervasive sin nature, which continues after being initially regenerated, this initiating act of holiness makes a large part of the ordo salutis foundational for the holiness of the church. Justification must precede the holiness of the church: for it must precede sanctification in each believer. And this makes Rome’s conception of church holiness particularly dubious.
Webster points out that no matter what aspect of the Trinitarian economy of salvation we view things from, “God separates the Church. The Church does not separate itself, for it has neither mandate nor competence to do so.” Accordingly, this attribute of the church is “an alien sanctity.” If the ground of the church’s holiness were in the natural pedigree or the activities of its priesthood, then they would have grounds for boasting.
The catholicity of the church refers to its universality. This is the broadest conception of the church, transcending space and time. Therein lies the irony of the name “Roman Catholicism.” How can such a concept be pinned to a point on a temporal map? Romanism does not transcend space and time. Neither does Donatism, which pit visible holiness against catholicity. Calvin saw the Anabaptist recapitulating the same error. The Reformed definition of the essence of the church sailed between these space-time-bound extremes. The essence of the church belongs to true believers, and yet false professors fill her ranks.
We have reason to question the famous Warfield statement, in which Augustine’s ecclesiology and soteriology are placed at odds: the Reformers being the beneficiaries of the latter. There is a truth in it. On the other hand, it would seem as if Augustine was working with categories that distinguished between the “true church” and a “mixed body.”
In short, the Augustinian ecclesiology was not a catholicity that flowed from the visible to the invisible, nor one that held the two in a tension of metaphysical equals. To the contrary it was Augustine who gave such a deep, spiritual manner to the communio sanctorum.
The Reformed confessions are not shy to speak of catholicity; but when they do, they trace the roots back to the invisible work of the triune God. The Belgic, Helvetic, and Westminster all speak in this way: “one single catholic or universal church—a holy congregation and gathering of true Christian believers,” “namely, of those who truly know and rightly worship and serve the true God in Christ the Savior, by the Word and holy Spirit, and who by faith are partakers of all benefits which are freely offered through Christ,” The real problem with “Roman Catholicity” is not the presence of exclusivity but the absence of objectivity; to cite Bavinck, “in a real sense Rome has no marks or criteria by which the true church can be known. These, after all, presuppose a standard that is above the church and by which it may be judged by everyone.”
When Rome challenged the Reformers, “Where was your church before Luther?” the opinions of Luther and Bellarmine were weighed by Turretin. The former said that the essence of the church belongs to “faith and internal piety alone,” yet the latter answered that “No one can certainly know who are truly righteous.” This would indeed be a problem if we confused the essence of the church with all of our pastoral obligations to members. Turretin says that the twofold call of Word and Spirit issues forth into a twofold form, external and internal. Since the invisible and divine act precedes, its immediate effect is the more real and foundational essence.
The apostolicity of the church refers to its inheritance from the first church. We are instantly face to face with the Roman Catholic controversy. Where Rome claims “apostolic succession” in the sense of a lineage that extends from Peter to the present pope, the Reformed tradition would speak of a different line of succession. Is the teaching of the church the same as that of the apostles? That is the mark.
Vatican I had made “the church herself” self-attesting by various marks. It also rendered the argument circular.
If the Roman Church indeed originated the Scriptures, she would have done us all the greatest favor to have mentioned at least once the expectation of apostolic succession. She would have also served us well to have pointed to Rome as anything other than under the euphemism of Babylon (cf. 1 Pet. 5:13). In this light the argument from Matthew 16:18 cries out for other support. Apostolicity and catholicity come together in the Reformers’ historical self-consciousness. As Schwöbel remarks, they were neither progressives nor conservatives: aiming without rudder into the future or returning to some golden age. Their compass had a more timeless quality.
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