The Lord Jesus Christ taught that there is one Church --- “upon this rock I will build my Church”; his apostles taught that there is one Church and they identified this Church through the use of various metaphors or models – e.g., the Body of Christ, the Bride of Christ and the royal Priesthood; and the ecumenical Creed declares in summary of the biblical teaching that there is “one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.”
What the eyes see in the USA is not one Church, not even one Anglican, one Lutheran, one Presbyterian, one Baptist, and one Orthodox Church. They behold a vast array of denominations, which are distinguished from each other by name, by what they stand for, by their ecclesiastical polity and organization, and so on. Each of them claims either to be the whole of, or to be a part of, the Church of God and some but not all of them are in fellowship with others.
How can we maintain the belief in the One Church of Scripture and Creed, and at the same time live within the massive variety of competitive denominations and congregations in the West and in the world generally?
First of all, we need to realize that this is not in essence a new problem for sensitive souls. In other forms and manifestations, it has in principle been addressed by Christian philosophers and theologians in the past. From the patristic period, St Augustine is the obvious example (remember he had to address the Donatist schism] and at the Reformation of the 16th century, the reality of national churches, not always in communion with each other and not in communion with the Church of Rome and the Orthodox Churches of the East, raised serious questions for all the leaders about the unity of the Church.
Further, added to this problem of unity there always was the problem of the presence of those who deny the Faith by word and deed and who are members of parishes and national churches. Not all church members were of the elect of God, not even in apostolic times!
In England, these problems were addressed by the divines who met in Westminster Abbey, London, in the 1640s and who produced the Westminster Catechisms and Confession of Faith. In Chapter XXV of the Confession they wrote this “Of the Church”:
1.The catholic or universal Church, which is invisible, consists of the whole number of the elect, that have been or are, or shall be gathered into one, under Christ the Head thereof; and is the spouse, the body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all.
2. The visible Church, which is also catholic or universal under the Gospel (not confined to one nation, as before under the law), consists of all those throughout the world that profess the true religion; and of their children; and is the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ, the house and family of God, our of which three is no ordinary possibility of salvation.
3. Unto this catholic, visible Church, Christ hath given the ministry, oracles, and ordinances of God, for the gathering and perfecting of the saints, in this life to the end of the world: and doth by His own presence and Spirit, according to His promise, make them effectual thereunto.
4.This catholic Church hath been sometimes more, sometimes less, visible. And particular Churches, which are members thereof, are more or less pure, according as the doctrine of the Gospel is taught and embraced, ordinances administered, and public worship performed more or less purely in them.
5. The purest Churches under heaven are subject both to mixture and error; and some have so degenerated, as to become no Church of Christ, but synagogues of Satan. Nevertheless, there shall be always a Church on earth to worship God according to His will….
In making a distinction between (a) the One true Church of God, known only in its entirety to God and thus invisible to man who belongs to space and time, and (b) the variety of visible national Churches (or later of national Churches and denominations) together making up the One mixed and divided Church of God visible on earth, this Confession stated what was held in common by all Protestants. (Roman Catholics made the same essential distinction between the invisible and visible but stated the relation between the two in terms which effectively identified the visible with the R C Church only- or the R C and Orthodox Churches.)
So we return to the present day and the supermarket of Christian groups in the USA!
I cannot see any other way out of our dilemma today than that of also accepting this distinction between visible and invisible (it is presumed by the Articles of Religion and The Book of Common Prayer of the Anglican Way and so is already part of the faith of an Anglican).
How else can one make any sense of the complexity of the situation in the USA in terms of the massive variety of denominations, all claiming to be under Christ the Lord and based upon the revelation recorded in Holy Scripture? Of course, to accept it, does not mean that one uses it to justify the existence of thousands of denominations or to justify starting a new one when we feel that our interests are not being served! On the other hand, to accept it does mean that we shall see brothers and sister in Christ in groups and congregations other than our own, and we shall view them as future neighbors in the heavenly Jerusalem! And this will surely lead us to desire to dream of, to long for, to work for practical unity amongst the professing Christian people of the land, and especially so when they claim to belong to the same tradition (e.g., “Anglican”).
One major way in which the doctrine of the Church as invisible is wrongly used is to think and act as if, as a “born-again believer”, one has a kind of direct individualistic link as a human person to God the Father through Jesus Christ ( a kind of dial-up instant link). Note how the Confession states in (2) that ordinarily there is no salvation outside the belonging to and being a full member of the visible Church. In these days when individual autonomy is assumed as basic to living in the West, there is the real danger of linking this sense of autonomy to a doctrine of the Church as invisible and thereby getting the relation of the individual believer to Christ, to the members of Christ, to the local church and to God the Father, skewed! Salvation is as an individual person into the family of God so that one has brothers and sisters from the word go and on into eternity!
October 17, 2005 The Rev'd Dr. Peter Toon MA., D.Phil (Oxford)
No comments:
Post a Comment