The church is most typically referred to as the called-out assembly (Heb., qdhâl; Gk., ekklesia/synagöge)1 The passive concept of “called out” underscores the fact that this community is formed by the Word. It does not come together as an aggregate of individuals who have determined to form such a society, but is summoned, gathered, and called out by God’s electing, redeeming, justifying, and renewing grace. Ecclesiology is not a topic that exists alongside the gospel, which needs to be related somehow to it. Rather, the gospel itself, as God’s saving speech act (energies), generates a community called the church. The attributes, marks, and mission of the church therefore form the threads of a single bolt of fabric that is woven by the Spirit through the gospel as it is delivered through Christ’s appointed means.
We cannot help but think within certain frameworks or paradigms. In the last chapter I noted that one’s view of the sign-signified relationship with regard to the sacraments will show up also in one’s ecclesiology. In fact, different ecclesiological paradigms reflect different ontologies. Especially when we take up the attributes of the church identified in the Nicene Creed, there is a danger of two extremes between which we need to navigate.
At one extreme end there is the tendency simply to collapse Christology (and soteriology) into ecclesiology. The concept of the church and Christ together comprising “the whole Christ” (totus Christus) was developed by Augustine.2 However, over time it grew into a cosmic ecclesiology (and Christology) that fused the head with his members in one corporate personality. As the creatures of bread and wine are transubstantiated into Christ’s body and blood, the members of Christ’s body become fused into a single essence: the totus Christus. According to the broader ontological paradigm of Platonism/Neoplatonism, “the real” is one rather than plural, sameness rather than diversity. Everything that is real emanates from the One in ever-diminishing grades of being, from the bright glory of the soul to the dark prison house of the body. Even in its Christian forms, this ontology made it difficult to break with the idea that grace was a spiritual substance infused into nature (including persons) in order to elevate them to a supernatural plane of existence. (Monasticism became an institutionalized version of this paradigm.)
We have already challenged this outlook by observing that in Scripture the proper dualism is not between nature and grace but between sin and grace. The problem is not one of transforming natural creatures into something else, but of forgiving sinners and liberating creation from sin’s guilt and power so that everything that has breath may glorify and enjoy God forever. To the extent that an ecclesiology emerges from Platonic/Neoplatonic and Hegelian presuppositions, the tendency will be toward the one over the many, sameness over difference, and a hierarchy of being with grace flowing from the top of the ladder to its lower rungs. There is nothing questionable, ambiguous, or precarious about the church’s location or identity in this age, according to this perspective. The church is simply the kingdom of God—the historical replacement for the natural body of Jesus Christ. Therefore, “the whole constitution of the Church is completely aristocratic, and not democratic, her authority coming from above, from Christ, and not from below, from the community.”3
In Roman Catholic ecclesiologies. Platonism’s ladder of being is transformed into a hierarchical ladder of grace, flowing in diminishing grades from Christ and Mary to the pope and magisterium all the way down to all who do what lies within them. Through this hierarchy, writes Karl Adam, “the divine is objectivised, is incarnated in the community, and precisely and only in so far as it is a community…. So the Church possesses the Spirit of Christ, not as a many of single individuals, nor as a sum of spiritual personalities, but as the compact unity of the faithful, as a community that transcends the individual personalities …, the many as one.” Christ’s mission is “to reunite to God mankind as a unity, as a whole, and not this or that individual man ‘ (emphasis added).4 Not only unity (common fellowship in Christ) but unicity (numerical oneness in a hierarchy with a papal head) is Adam’s understanding of the church.5
In a somewhat chilling illustration of his time and place, Adam passionately asserts, “One God, one faith, one love, one single man: that is the stirring thought which inspires the Church’s pageantry and gives it artistic form.”6 Echoing Hegel even more explicitly, he declares, “For only in the whole can the divine realise itself, only in the totality of men and not in the individual.”7 As a consequence, “The structural organs of the Body of Christ, as that is realised in space and time, are pope and bishops.”8 This empirical polity—the observable structure of the ecclesiastical hierarchy—constitutes the visibility of the church in the world. Where is the true church? The answer is obvious and unambiguous: the historical institution that possesses the apostolic succession of bishops under the primacy of the bishop of Rome.
For all of these reasons, says Adam, “The Catholic Church as the Body of Christ, as the realisation in the world of the Kingdom of God, is the Church of Humanity.” So the church is simultaneously exclusive (there is no other ladder of grace) and inclusive (since God’s grace flows through her down to the lowest rungs).9 This grace operates “not only in the Christian communions, but also in the non-Christian world, in Jews and in Turks and in Japanese”—at least to “all those who hold themselves ready for it, who do what in them lies, who perform what their conscience bids them” (emphasis added).10
Although this ecclesiology was refined and balanced with other images, it has remained the dominant interpretation and has been reasserted by the current pope. Prior to becoming Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, in his book Called to Communion: Understanding the Church Today (1996), wrote, “The tem-poral and ontological priority lies with the universal Church; a Church that was not catholic would not even have ecclesial reality.”11 Apart from papal primacy, not even a valid succession of bishops is adequate.12
If Orthodoxy starts from the bishop and from the Eucharistic community over which he presides, the point on which the Reformed position is built is the Word: the Word of God gathers men and creates “community.” The proclamation of the Gospel produces—so they say—congregation, and this congregation is the “Church.” In other words, the Church as institution has in this view no properly theological status; only the community has theological significance, because what matters is the Word alone.13
Of course, this statement caricatures the Reformed position, but it does highlight the difference between a communion of saints generated by the Word and a hierarchical oneness generated by a single pastor.
The transubstantiation of the eucharistic body into the natural body of Jesus Christ is the basis for the transubstantiation of the ecclesial body into the totus Christus (in effect, replacing Jesus Christ and those united to him as persons). The marriage analogy often employed in Scripture suggests that the two become “one flesh,” yet in such a way that they remain two people. Yet for Rome, universal and numerical oneness is ontologically supreme.14 Accordingly, says Ratzinger, this leads to a “fusion of existences.”15
The sacrifice of the individual to the “corporate personality” in Ratzinger’s account is especially evident in his reiteration of the traditional Roman Catholic view that faith itself is “a gift of the church.” The belief of the individual subject (i.e., the personal act of faith) is entirely subsumed under the belief of the church as a whole.16 Noting the obvious influence of German idealism, Miroslav Volf comments, “Ratzinger even elucidates this notion of cobelief with the church with the expression ‘surrender one’s act [of faith] to it [the church].’”17 In the previous chapter we encountered similar language from Hans Urs von Balthasar, in his appeals to Schleiermacher and Hegel.
The eschatological dualism (or better, paradox) between the already and the not yet is replaced in this trajectory by the ontological dualism between visible and invisible. Plato rather than Paul dominates this ecclesiological horizon. As Volf judges,
Ratzinger has a tendency to search for something more profound or real behind the historical, and to view concrete reality merely as a sign for spiritual, transcendent content. Hence the earthly Jesus is portrayed less as a concrete human being than as “merely an exemplum of human beings"…. This is the result of Ratzinger’s Platonizing “commitment to the primacy of the invisible as that which is genuinely real (Ratzinger, Einführungin das Christentum, 48).”18
It is the pope who makes this invisible reality visible, as he is “placed in direct responsibility to the Lord … to embody and secure the unity of Christ’s word and work.”19 “Loss of this element of unity with the successors of Peter wounds the church ‘in the essence of its being as church.’”20
We have already encountered Graham Ward’s thesis that the “displacement” of Jesus-in-the-flesh is not a loss, but a transubstantiation of his personal existence in and as the church. So once again we return to the basic substance of the “ascent of mind” that can be traced from Origen to Schleiermacher: the disappearance of Jesus is not a problem because he did not really disappear after all, but is just as present—or rather, more fully present—today in and as the church. Despite his disclaimer that his “interpretation of the ascension is not in accord with Origen’s ‘ascension of the mind rather than of the body …,’”21 Ward’s arguments do little to allay the contrary judgment. According to this rather extreme version of the notion of Christ’s ubiquity, “We have no access to the body of the gendered Jew…. It is pointless because the Church is now the body of Christ, so to understand the body of Jesus we can only examine what the Church is and what it has to say concerning the nature of that body as scripture attests it” (emphasis added).22 Ward adds, “As Gregory of Nyssa points out, in his thirteenth sermon on Song of Songs, ‘he who sees the Church looks directly at Christ.’”23
Eastern Orthodoxy reflects a more eschatological (“already"/"not yet”) and pneumatological ecclesiology.24 Eschatology keeps ecclesiology from becoming a mere affirmation of a historical institution.25 Christ in-stitutes the church; the Spirit con-stitutes it.26 This leads to an emphasis on the common participation of all believers in the gifts of the Spirit and on the authority of the plurality of bishops in assembly rather than on papal supremacy.
Vladimir Lossky points out that catholicity and apostolicity are both dependent on the Truth.27 Thus, catholicity cannot simply mean universality: that which is widely held in many places. After all, Islam and Buddhism claim worldwide adherents.28 “A layman is even bound to resist a bishop who betrays the Truth and is not faithful to the Christian tradition,” Lossky insists.29 “At the same time, we must not fall into the contrary error which occurs when, in giving catholicity a charismatic character, we confuse it with holiness, seeing it in the personal inspiration of the saints, the sole witness of the Truth, the only true catholics. This would be to profess an error similar to Montanism and to transform the Church into a mystical sect.”30 Lossky adds,
To desire to base ecclesiology solely on the Incarnation, to see in the Church solely “an extension of the Incarnation,” a continuation of the work of Christ, as is so often stated, is to forget Pentecost and to reduce the work of the Holy Spirit to a subordinate role The Pneumatological element of the Church must not be underestimated, but fully accepted on an equal footing with the Christological, if the true foundation of the catholicity of the Church is to be found.31
The church is made “in the image of the Trinity,” and every ecclesiological error is ultimately an error concerning the Trinity and vice versa.32 The emphasis on the one essence over the person in Western trinitarian formulations carries over to ecclesiology. Lossky observes:
When, as often happens in the treatment of catholicity, the emphasis is placed on unity, when catholicity is above all other considerations based upon the dogma of the Body of Christ, the result is Christocentrism in ecclesiology…. On the other hand, when the emphasis is placed on diversity at the expense of unity, there is a tendency to base catholicity exclusively on Pentecost, forgetting that the Holy Spirit was communicated in the unity of the Body of Christ. The result is a disaggregation of the Church: the truth that is attributed to individual inspirations becomes multiple and therefore relative; catholicity is replaced by “ecumenism.”33
Lossky responds to both dangers once again by referring to the Trinity: “As in God each one of the three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is not a part of the Trinity but is fully God in virtue of His ineffable identity with the one nature, so the Church is not a federation of parts: she is catholic in each one of her parts, since each part in her is identified with the whole, expresses the whole, has the value which the whole has, does not exist outside the whole.” And this is expressed not only locally, but in wider assemblies and synods.34 Yet even such synods, in order to have validity, must conform to the catholicity of the Truth that makes the church catholic. Their authority cannot be determined simply by the power of a hierarchy any more than by the democratic consensus of the majority. Both would be parodies of catholicity. “There is no other criterion of truth than the Truth itself.”35 As is evident enough in Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer in John 17, the unity of Christ’s people is found in their union with him, which is also, through him, a fellowship with the Trinity. And this is a unity in the truth. The church is catholic when it is united in the truth of God’s Word in the Spirit.
There is a great deal of wisdom in Orthodox teaching concerning the nature of the church. Nevertheless, this tradition also reflects a tendency toward an overrealized eschatology of the totus Christus, identified this time not with a historical institution led by a single bishop, but with every celebration of the Eucharist, which can be valid only when officiated in communion with the Orthodox bishops. “The one Christ event takes the form of events (plural), which are as primary ontologically as the one Christ event itself.” On one hand, this is an improvement on Roman Catholic ecclesiologies: “The local Churches are as primary in ecclesiology as the universal Church.”36 No priority of the universal over the local Church is conceivable in such an ecclesiology. On the other hand, the totus Christus motif is still articulated in terms that can easily undermine the difference between Christ and the church. This is because the Eucharist is understood not as the meal that places us in the precarious intersection of this age and the age to come, but as the fully realized Wedding Supper of the Lamb.
Nowhere in Scripture do we read that the church together with Jesus of Nazareth constitutes “the whole Christ” (totus Christus). Rather, the historical Christ is the representative head of his ecclesial body. Even in the few passages that directly invoke the body of Christ analogy (Eph 4, Rom 12, 1Co 12), we are reminded that each member has its role in the body, not that each member is the whole body or that each member is assimilated to the whole.
This first paradigm (the one over the many) carries forward its assumptions consistently with respect not only to the unity and catholicity of the church, but also to its holiness. Augustine left a complex legacy to future generations for ecclesiological reflection. On one hand, he strove valiantly against Pelagianism and Donatism, underscoring the fact that the church’s existence is due to God’s grace alone. Yet he also tended to identify the church with the kingdom of God in a relatively non-eschatological manner, preparing the way unintentionally for an inflated ecclesial ego.37 However, the medieval developments that we have already considered added to this church-kingdom identity a notion that Augustine would never have accepted: namely, the sinlessness of the church as Christ’s bride. After all, Augustine’s argument against the Donatists was that the church was the kingdom even though it is a “mixed body” of elect and reprobate, and even the elect remain sinners.
Concerned that Augustine’s interpretation of predestination opened the door to an invisible-visible church distinction exploited by Protestantism, von Balthasar in the twentieth century reaffirmed the traditional Roman Catholic concept of the sinless body of Christ by appealing to Dionysian mysticism with its descending and ascending ladders.38 Like saving revelation, ecclesial identity is actually universal, with diminishing grades, and “sees in the Church all gradations of holiness from the highest, most unsullied sanctity of Mary to the very brink of damnation, in fact even beyond it, in the case of the gravely sinful who are not yet, in some way, members of the Church “39 In this conception, grace merely elevates nature. According to Vatican I, “the Church itself, with its marvelous extension, its eminent holiness, and its inexhaustible fruitfulness in every good thing, with its Catholic unity and its invincible stability, is a great and perpetual motive of credibility and an irrefutable witness of its own divine mission.”40 Thus, holiness and catholicity flow from the unicity of the totus Christus: the single subject that is Christ and his church. The church, in this view, is less a communion of persons with Christ as its head than a single person represented by a human head (the Pope)
At the other extreme is the view of the church as a purely spiritual reality brought into being by the will and effort of many individuals, with no definite relationship between the sign and reality signified. In this paradigm, Christ’s presence is located in the heart of individual believers. Like the first paradigm, this approach easily surrenders Christ’s transcendence over the whole church as its ascended head, only this time to the immanence of individual experience.
However different it is from the first paradigm, this approach can just as easily lose sight of the paradox of the real absence of Christ in the flesh and his real presence mediated by the Spirit through the means of grace. The Roman Catholic concept of the church as the ongoing incarnation of Jesus Christ, completing his saving work, has become a major emphasis in Protestant ecclesiologies (especially missiologies).41 In this case, the incarnation is said to be extended not by the church as an institution or by its official ministry of preaching, sacrament, and discipline, but by the church as a movement of disciples—and not principally by proclamation and sacrament, but by “living the gospel” among their neighbors. Especially in the Emergent Church movement, the notion of the church as the ongoing incarnation merges with an essentially Anabaptist ecclesiology. God “creates the church as a missional community to join him in his mission of saving the world.”42 One often encounters the counsel attributed to Francis of Assisi: “Always preach the gospel, and when necessary use words.”
Although “living the gospel” has long been a familiar refrain in evangelical piety, this approach is increasingly radicalized, by relocating the church’s identity and mission to its work in the world more than the means of grace in local churches.43 Often, “incarnational ministry” is simply a call to greater sensitivity to our ministry context. In more extreme versions, it is more literal in its understanding of the church (or community of disciples) as the extension of the incarnation.44
As in Roman Catholic versions, the principal problem with this approach is that it undermines the uniqueness of Christ’s person and work. “Christ” becomes a pattern or principle for our work rather than a unique person who redeemed us once and for all by his work. The gospel becomes an exhibition of our good works rather than the announcement of God’s work in Christ. The tendency of this way of thinking is to confuse the Creator and the creature, Christ and his body, his incarnation and completed work of redemption with our own, and the gospel with the law. Where the uniqueness of Christ’s historical incarnation is elided, Christology cannot help but capitulate to docetism with respect to his ascension (real absence) and return in the flesh. In the process, the work of the Spirit in mediating Christ’s presence here and now through preaching and sacrament is sacrificed to the work of the church as Christ’s presence here and now already.
The major difference between this radical Protestant paradigm and Roman Catholic versions of the idea of the church as an ongoing incarnation lies in the Anabaptist presuppositions of the former. Preaching and the sacraments are seen merely as human testimonies to God’s grace and the individual’s personal commitment, rather than chiefly as means through which God actually communicates his grace. From this it follows logically that the visible church and its public ministry bears no essential relationship to the invisible church and the relationship with God that each regenerate person enjoys. In philosophical terms, this view represents a radically voluntarist/nominalist ontology, while the first (“overcoming estrangement”) reflects a realist/idealist ontology.
The first paradigm has difficulty accounting for genuine plurality (the church as “many”) and the distinction between sign and reality. However, the second paradigm has difficulty accounting for genuine unity (the church as “one”) and the union of sign and reality. Consequently, the latter tends to exchange a covenantal interpretation of the church for a contractual view. To the extent that the relationship of the believer to Christ may be conceived as a contract in which God offers certain benefits in exchange for our making him Savior and Lord, our relationship to the church is simply a matter of personal decision based on the services we think it can provide for us.
If, according to Roman Catholic ecclesiology, the faith of the believer tends to be absorbed into the faith of the church, the obverse is evident in Free Church ecclesiologies. The personal decision of each person to believe in Christ and to join a church actually constitutes ecclesial existence. In evangelical contexts, the church is often regarded chiefly as a resource for fellowship and a platform for individuals to serve the body and the world in various ministries.45 Especially when wedded to an Arminian soteriology, such an ecclesiology gives rise to a voluntaristic emphasis, with human decision as the contractual basis for both conversion and ecclesial existence.46 From this perspective, the church has come increasingly to be regarded primarily as a service provider for a personal (unique and individual) relationship with Christ. Actual membership in the visible church can be left to private judgment, and in some cases formal membership does not even exist. Taken to a radical extreme, this perspective leads the argument now being made that the visible church and its public ministry are even impediments to personal growth and Christian mission.47
Not all tendencies to set Christ in sharp contrast with the church fit neatly in the preceding description. Especially in Bultmann and Brunner priority is given to an existential “I-Thou” encounter that often marginalizes the “We-Thou” emphasis of covenantal faith and practice.48 Yet we have also seen this tendency in Barth, treating the outward ministry of the church as providing not means of grace but rather means of testifying to grace. The sources of Barth’s ecclesiological reflections are far from contractual, individualistic, and synergistic.49 In fact, his sometimes sharp criticism of pietism is well known in this regard.50 However, his attraction to an independent ecclesiology, his rejection of the sacraments as means of grace, and his explicit rejection of infant baptism,51 point up what seems to me to be the dominant tendency of his thought that is already discernable in his first edition of his commentary on Romans.
Going beyond Zwingli (though, ironically, more closely echoing Luther), Barth says that the true church belongs to the “submarine island of the ‘Now’ of divine revelation” that lies beneath observable reality.52 In Romans, he speaks explicitly of “the contrast between the Gospel and the Church” (emphasis added).53 Christ is the only sacrament. In fact, not only is there a difference between the sign and its eschatological fullness; the “invisible church” is taken to extreme limits when Barth writes, “In the heavenly Jerusalem of Revelation nothing is more finally significant than the church’s complete absence: ‘And I saw no temple therein’” (emphasis added).54 Totalizing ecclesiologies may be faulted for an overrealized eschatology. However, Barth’s dualistic ecclesiology is not underrealized; he simply does not have any place for the church even in the consummation. Therefore, “the activity of the community is related to the Gospel only in so far as it is no more than a crater formed by the explosion of a shell and seeks to be no more than a void in which the Gospel reveals itself.”55
One of Barth’s great achievements was to turn attention back to Jesus. He is properly concerned to see that Christ’s reconciling work is in need of no further supplementation, no historical development, thus countering liberal historicism and synergism. The church is not an extension of Christ’s person and work.56 There is hardly a better statement of a covenantal ecclesiology than the following: “What constitutes the being of man in this [covenantal] sphere is not a oneness of being but a genuine togetherness of being with God” (emphasis added).57 However, the same logic (actualism) that keeps Barth from identifying God’s action directly with human words and deeds in his doctrine of revelation is also decisive for his ecclesiology.58 Barth offers important warnings about collapsing Jesus Christ into the church.59 However, in my view, it represents an overcorrection of the neo-Hegelian trajectory.
Superior to the contractual and existentialist-actualist versions we have considered is the revised Free Church ecclesiology proposed by Miroslav Volf in his remarkable work After Our Likeness. He affirms the Reformers’ view of the church as “mother” and distances himself from the counsel of Separatist leader John Smyth that those who are “born again … should no longer need means of grace,” since the persons of the Godhead “are better than all scriptures, or creatures whatsoever.”60 Furthermore, Volf emphasizes the priority of God’s gracious activity over human response in salvation. Interacting extensively with Ratzinger and Zizioulas, he recognizes their common debt to idealist metaphysics and critiques their reduction of the many to the totalizing unicity of a “corporate personality.” Constructively, he wrestles deeply with the tendency of Free Church ecclesiologies to become captive to modern individualism and consumerism and brings a richer eschatological and pneumatological perspective to bear.61
Nevertheless, Volf’s own ecclesiology remains rather subjective. A church exists, he says, wherever there is a faithful confession of Christ (1Co 15:11; 2Co 11:4; Ac 2:42).62 The “being of the church” is “constituted by the assembled people confessing Christ.”63 “That which the church is, namely, believing and confessing human beings, is precisely that which (as a rule) also constitutes it.”64 Not only the particular form of church government, but the very notion of ordained office is represented as belonging to the bene esse (well-being) rather than the esse (existence) of the church.65 Not even the sacraments are ultimately constitutive, but “are a public representation of such confession.”66 Therefore, the unity of the visible church is identified not with its organic unity, exhibited in a connectional government, but with “the openness of every church toward all other churches “67 While offering the most trenchant critique of the dominance of the one over the many, especially in the ecclesiologies of Ratzinger and Zizioulas, the Social Trinitarian model on which he draws is as unlikely to generate an adequate account of the church’s essential unity as of that of the Trinity itself.68
Baptist theologian Stanley Grenz observes, “The post-Reformation discussion of the vera ecclesia [true church] formed the historical context for the emergence of the covenant idea as the focal understanding of the nature of the church.”69 With their insistence on the marks of the church, “the Reformers shifted the focus to Word and Sacrament,” but the Anabaptists and Baptists “took yet a further step,” advocating a congregational ecclesiology. “This view asserts that the true church is essentially people standing in voluntary covenant with God.”70 The decision concerning baptism is decisive for this conception of the church.
Free Church traditions remind us that the church is not a department of religious affairs under an empire, nation-state, or city council and that belonging to a church formally cannot be a substitute for personal faith in Christ. Grenz properly reminds us that the church is “a spiritual people gathered out from the wider society,” even when that society is nominally “Christian.”71 The Reformers often spoke in similar terms, insisting that the Word alone and not secular power should be allowed to persuade people of the gospel. Nevertheless, in actual practice, the magisterial Reformation remained too attached to the patterns of “Christendom.”
However, the Lutheran and Reformed view that the visible church consists of believers together with their children violates the rule that is basic to an independent church polity: namely, a voluntary covenant, which entails not only the independence of local churches but the independence of individuals within them until they mutually agree on the terms of that relationship. “No longer did the corporate whole take precedence over the individual as in the medieval model,” notes Grenz. Rather, individuals formed the church rather than vice versa. “As a result, in the order of salvation the believer—and not the church—stands first in priority.”72 “Because the coming together of believers in mutual covenant constitutes the church, it is the covenant community of individuals,” although it has a history as well.73
Separating the visible sign from its consummated reality, radical Protestant ecclesiologies also tend to identify ecclesial holiness with the inherent sanctity of individual members. Whereas Rome teaches that the true church is to be found in communion with the papacy, this approach identifies the holy church exclusively with the sum total of regenerate believers. At least for Bultmann, Brunner, and Barth, the unambiguous identification of God’s saving presence with the institutional history of the visible church represented the domestication of God’s transcendence, placing revelation and reconciliation under human control. In this respect, especially Barth discerned similarities between Roman Catholicism and Protestant liberalism, in which “culture Protestantism” smothered any conception of God’s disrupting encounter in judgment and grace. For Roman Catholicism and Protestant liberalism, eschatology (God’s action) and history (human action) were not united but conflated. In reaction, these theologians argued that the event of personal encounter makes us contemporaneous with Christ. As a consequence, the Spirit’s mediation of ecclesial holiness within history and across the generations through the visible covenant community and its ordinary ministry is at the very least marginalized.
Free Church and Pentecostal traditions reflect a similar dualism, as we have seen, and therefore an underrealized eschatology when it comes to the relation between the sign (the visible church) and the reality signified (the invisible or consummated church). However, at least with respect to the individual believer and perhaps even the local assembly, they also often reflect an overrealized eschatology, with the notion of the church as a pure gathered church of the regenerate. Consequently, the church’s holiness lies not so much in the promise of Christ, which is proclaimed and ratified through its public ministry, but in the inherent experience and piety of each believer. In Pentecostal traditions especially, this holiness is identified with visible evidence of a “second blessing” of sanctification.74 Similar to the Roman Catholic conception of the church’s holiness as inherent and complete, this view nevertheless identifies holiness with individuals rather than the institution.conception of the church’s holiness as inherent and complete, this view nevertheless identifies holiness with individuals rather than the institution.
Negotiating our way between these two extremes is the goal of this chapter.75 Neither a conflation of Christ and his church (along with a fusion of believers) nor a contract, the church is founded on a covenant that originates in the counsels of the eternal Trinity.
As we embark on this journey through the attributes of the church, it is worth bearing in mind our coordinates thus far.
As Douglas Farrow has observed, the ascension of Jesus Christ in the flesh most radically challenges the Platonist/Neoplatonist ontology.76 Origen, the church father most enthralled by Greek philosophy, said that this event was “more an ascension of mind than of body.”77 Rather than an eschatology (“already"/"not yet”) wedded to history (past, present, and future), the Origenist trajectory prefers the allegory of the soul’s ascent from temporal appearances to eternal realities. Even Augustine said that the ascension was a benefit because it finally afforded the disciples (and us) the opportunity to concentrate on Christ’s deity rather than his humanity.78
This is in stark contrast to the reason Jesus gave for the benefit of his departure: namely, that he would send the Spirit to lead them to himself by his Word. Looking away from the concrete person, Jesus of Nazareth, and a departure that was as real as his incarnation and resurrection, thinkers such as Origen and Augustine made the church the surrogate for its absent Lord.79 A docetic ascension opened up the space for the church’s apotheosis in and as Christ, who keeps his deity for himself but surrenders his humanity (i.e., his visibility in the world) to his ecclesial body. The totus Christus (whole Christ) now referred primarily not to the historical Jesus as a whole and undivided person in two natures, but to the church as site of Christ’s body. His natural body was increasingly forgotten—and with it, the sense of dependence on the Spirit for mediating his presence here and now as well as a longing for Christ’s return. At the hands of Hegel and Schleiermacher, this notion became radicalized to the point that any distinction between Christ and the believer (or the believing community) vanishes. In fact, as we have seen from recent theologians such as John Milbank and Graham Ward, the particular person of Jesus Christ (“the gendered Jew”) vanishes as well.
In contrast to an ascension of mind, the ascension of Christ in the flesh does not allow us to entertain an overrealized eschatology or an overidentification of Christ (the head, in the unity of his person) with the church (his ecclesial body). There is no substitute for Jesus Christ in the flesh. His absence from us in the flesh is as real as will be his return in the flesh. Nevertheless, he reigns in heaven and on earth by the Spirit, whom he has sent to begin the renovation of all things. Christ is absent from us in time and space, but we are not absent from him in the Spirit. That is to say, Christ is present among us here and now, but not in the same way that he will be when he returns—as the host of the unending feast rather than the sacrificial meal. Through the Spirit’s work, there is a real union with Christ and, consequently, a real sacramental union of sign and signified with respect to the creaturely form of the church and its ministry on one hand and the consummated kingdom and its glory on the other.
Therefore, the signs and their reality are neither confused nor separated; the former participate in the latter through the energies of the triune God. Lodged by the Spirit between “this age” and “the age to come,” the church has an existence and visibility that are at present ambiguous: “already” and “not yet.” Christ has ascended and he will return, but he has poured out his Spirit in the meantime to gather a living community out of death and judgment. The church is different from Christ not only in terms of who he is but in terms of where he is in the economy of redemption. He has already experienced the exaltation and glorification that is our hope together in him, while we are still subject to decay, death, and sin. Yet because he is our head and we are his body, in Calvin’s words, Christ “reckons himself in a measure imperfect” until we all, with him, are glorified in the everlasting Sabbath.80 Until then, he breaks into this present age by his Spirit, sowing seeds of the new creation through Word and sacrament.
The same demand for immediacy that we have encountered in problematic views of revelation and redemption is evident in both “high church” and “low church” ecclesiologies. No formal ecclesiology will save a church from triumphalism (indeed, idolatry) when it embraces an overrealized eschatology. The oldest denominations and the newest sects often evidence this tendency to identify the full presence of Christ and his Spirit with their own organizations, movements, and uniquely gifted leader. Lording it over other churches, these bodies often claim even to be either a continuation or a restoration of Christ’s kingdom in its absolute form.
Whether it is the full identification of the kingdom of God with the church and its actions or with believers and their actions, jumping the eschatological gun always opens the door to dangerous parodies rather than signs of the age to come. Unwilling to wait for Moses to return with God’s Word—a Word that Israel did not want because it filled them with fear—the Israelites (led by Aaron) fashioned a golden calf through which they could attain a visible, immediate, and meaningful religious experience without having to wait for Christ, “the image [eikön, icon] of the invisible God” (Col 1:15). Similarly, when the church is weary—or perhaps bored—waiting for Christ to return in the flesh and is unsatisfied with its fragile, fallible, ambiguous, and precarious location between the two ages in dependence on the Word and the Spirit, it conjures substitutes for a direct and immediate encounter here and now.
This demand for immediacy is found in the claim that the visible church (even a particular denomination) is Jesus Christ. Although it would seem that there is mediation all the way down, through the sacraments, orders, images, and other creaturely forms, there is actually nothing to be mediated when the visible church is simply Jesus Christ in his visible form. In more “low-church” ecclesiologies such immediacy is sought in a personal relationship with Jesus that is direct, private, and unique. This view is expressed in a once-popular evangelical hymn by C. Austin Miles, “In the Garden": “I come to the garden alone And he walks with me and he talks with me and he tells me I am his own. And the joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known.” In both versions, the eschatological tension of the already and not yet is resolved before its time, as if Jesus Christ were just as present on earth today as he was in Jerusalem and will be when he returns in glory. If Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic ecclesiologies over emphasize the “already” of the eucharistic gathering, radical Protestants tend to under appreciate the reality (viz., the in-breaking of the age to come) here and now that the Spirit gives through the signs.
Originating in God’s choice and redeeming work, the church does not gather itself in this time between the times but is gathered by the triune God. Therefore, it is not defined by the personal faith and piety of its members or by the intrinsic holiness of its hierarchical graces but by the Word that creates and rules it. Accordingly, the church is not first of all the place where believing sinners are active. Nor is it the people who are active in works of service. All of this follows, but it is not the formative source and principle of ecclesial existence. Only hearers of God’s judging and saving speech can become doers of the Word. Before it is active in the world, the church is that part of the world that has been acted upon by the Father, in the Son, through the powerful agency of the Spirit. This priority of divine agency has already been defended in treating the doctrine of salvation and the means of grace (Word and sacrament).
Therefore, the visible church is not composed only of the regenerate; it is the covenant community where the Spirit brings to repentance and faith “those who are near” (i.e., “you and your children”) and “all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself” (Ac 2:39). We expect the baptized to grow up into Christ, coming to faith and maturing gradually in that faith, in the communion of saints.
In terms of polity, a covenantal ecclesiology also means that the church is constituted in neither a hierarchical-aristocratic nor egalitarian-democratic fashion, but as a representative body governed by a plurality of elders under Christ as its only head. Regardless of the church’s polity, the catholicity of the church depends on its being worded as “in Christ” rather than “in Adam.” There are legitimate voluntary associations and societies to which believers might belong together with nonChristians. However, the church is not this kind of a society. The world creates rival catholicities around gender, ethnicity, generational profiles, political persuasion, socio-economic class, and consumer preferences, but the unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity of the church derive from our being in Christ, who is the head of the body.
This means that the church cannot be reduced to a historical organization. After all, it is the result of a vertical disruption of the powers of this age by the powers of the age to come. It is an eschatological event: a kingdom that we are receiving rather than building (and that therefore cannot be shaken) (Heb 12:28), “the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband …” (Rev 21:2–3). However, as a covenant community, it is not merely a crater left by the impact of God’s eschatological event of revelation (see quotation from Barth above, under “The One as Many,” p. 838) but a partially realized form of the kingdom of God within history. The church does not therefore merely “happen” through vertical events that can never be recognized along a horizontal time line; it endures “from generation to generation.” In a covenantal perspective, the personal, corporate, and missional aspects of ecclesial identity converge: “From you comes my praise in the great congregation All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the LORD, and all the families of the nations shall worship before you Posterity shall serve him; it shall be told of the Lord to the coming generation; they shall come and proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn, that he has done it” (Ps 22:26, 27, 30–31, emphasis added). This conviction, if not this hymn itself, echoes in Peter’s Pentecost sermon: “For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself” (Ac 2:39).
Eastern Orthodox theologians are correct to point out that Western ecclesiologies tend to be either Christ-centered or Spirit-centered rather than Trinitarian. As a result (as Lossky observed; see above, pp. 833–34), the church easily mistakes itself for the ongoing incarnation of Christ or falls apart into private experiences and spiritual fanaticism.
To be sure, the church is a historical institution that has developed over time and in many different places, bearing all of the marks of any public institution. In a realist/idealist paradigm, the kingdom of Christ (the eschatological reality) is simply identified with the sign (the visible church). The Spirit’s intrusive work of disrupting and reorganizing human history and community is brought under the control of the ecclesiastical institution. In a voluntarist/nominalist paradigm, the kingdom is separated from the institutional church and the Spirit’s work becomes sharply distinguished from the visible church and its official ministry. A proper pneumatology, however, affirms simultaneously the sovereign freedom of the Spirit over and within the church as well as the orderly way in which the Spirit works through the church’s public offices and ministry. If the Roman Catholic view tends to make the Spirit’s work identical with the church and its ministry, radical Protestantism tends to separate the Spirit’s eschatological ministry from creaturely-historical means.
Christ is present and active in and through his visible church today because it is that part of the world that is being penetrated by the rays of the new age as the Spirit unites us to Christ, disturbing and reorganizing our fellowship around his person and work. The church is not merely an invisible entity based merely on a spiritual unity or experience, but it also cannot guarantee its existence simply by pointing to its history. The church is a covenant community extended through all times and places, but any particular church remains in communion with this true church only by constant dependence on the free mercies of the Spirit, who has bound himself to his Word.
Catholic means universal, but in its actual use it has a richer meaning, especially as a summary term for the communion of the redeemed as one body. Every racial barrier (beginning with the Jew/Gentile distinction), every socio-economic wall, every demographic profile and generational niche, and every political-ideological partition that defines this present age disintegrates as the rays of the age to come penetrate. Wherever the Word and Spirit—“one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Eph 4:5)—break up the givens of this age and reconstitute a new people, there is a piece of the catholic church. The unity and catholicity of the church are interdependent themes.
Although the Word and sacraments are the Spirit’s means of constituting the church, this catholicity is reflected in the reorganized sociality of the visible church. One striking example in the New Testament is the collection for the saints in Jerusalem initiated and executed under the leadership of the apostle Paul. After reiterating that his ministry is to present the Gentiles as an acceptable offering to God through the gospel (Ro 15:7–21), the Apostle exhorts the Roman Christians to contribute to the offering for the saints in Jerusalem who are suffering extreme hardship (vv. 22–33). Even the poverty-stricken Gentile believers in Macedonia and Achaia have given generously out of the recognition that God has given them every spiritual blessing in Christ. They realized that this was not an act of charity: “For if the Gentiles have come to share in their spiritual blessings, they ought also to be of service to them in material blessings” (v. 27). Their gift was a tangible response to the gospel that they have been given and to the heritage of the Jews to which they have been made co-heirs in Christ.
The same appeal is made to the Corinthians: each Lord’s Day an offering is to be taken for the general collection (1Co 16:1–4). Nevertheless, Paul, though an apostle, respects the integrity and authority of each local church to appoint and send its own deacons with Paul to Jerusalem (v. 4). A year later, the Corinthians—though citizens of a wealthier port city—had made only slight progress in contributing to the great collection (2Co 8–9). They needed to be reminded that Christ became poor so that we might become rich (2Co 8:9). The body of Christ is most visibly expressed locally, but each local church reaches out to the wider assembly of churches in catholic unity, love, and fellowship. In Christ’s body, the local church needs the other churches; Jews need Gentiles and Gentiles need Jews; the poor need the rich and the rich need the poor, so there will be no lack of spiritual and material benefits (2Co 8:13–15).
It was a turning point when the church officially, at the Jerusalem Council, embraced Gentile believers without requiring their acceptance of Jewish distinctives (Ac 15). It must have been an equally remarkable day when Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, arrived in Jerusalem attended by Gentile deacons to present a large treasury to their suffering Jewish brothers and sisters. Where the dividing wall of hostility had been broken down through the preaching of the gospel, one baptism, and one eucharistic meal, catholicity was also expressed in such concrete ways for the upbuilding of the church and a witness to the world.
I have defended the Reformation claim that the church is the creation of the Word. What constitutes the unity and catholicity of the church? As Paul Avis has observed, “Reformation theology is largely dominated by two questions: ‘How can I obtain a gracious God?’ and ‘Where can I find the true Church?’ The two questions are inseparably related “81 The Lutheran and Reformed confessions offer the same response to both questions: wherever God’s Word is truly preached and the sacraments are administered according to Christ’s command.82 The unity of the church arises from its origin, and since the canon (even prior to its formal inscripturation) created and still creates the church, this unity cannot be lodged either in a historical office or in personal experience.
First, the catholicity and unity of the church is found only in fellowship with the triune God. These attributes of the church do not arise from the individuals or a religious society, but from the Father, in the Son, by the Spirit. In Roman Catholic ecclesiology, Christology and ecclesiology become virtually indistinguishable. It is easy in such an approach to identify the catholicity and apostolicity of the church simply with the institution in its historical form. To be catholic is to belong to the Roman Catholic Church; to be apostolic is to be in communion with Peter’s successor. However, in some Free Church ecclesiologies (especially charismatic and Pentecostal), a one-sided focus on the Spirit often unhinges the vital connection between apostolicity and the visible means of grace.
Second, the catholicity and unity of the church is evident wherever God is at work through his ordained means of grace. The church cannot give birth to itself; it is born from above (Jn 3:3–5). As Jesus acknowledged in his prayer in John 17, the catholic church is united by orthodox faith in the triune God, with whom it enjoys fellowship in the Spirit and truth. And, as this great prayer teaches, this is the source also of its holiness and apostolicity. A church is present even where there is egregious disorder (as in Corinth) and even where there is a lack of spiritual earnestness and vitality (as in Laodicea), but if the Word really is being faithfully proclaimed and taught and baptism and Communion are living, formative, dynamic realities in the community, these weaknesses will be addressed.
For the alternative perspectives we have encountered, human action comes first: either in terms of a hierarchical order or in terms of personal experience and obedience. From a Reformation perspective, however, God speaks and ratifies this speech so that a community emerges as a platform for God’s ministry of bringing an evan-gelical order, experience, and obedience into being. Neither a particular government nor personal conversion, but the Word and the sacraments, identify the true church. We know that the Spirit is active wherever these marks are evident.
Nowhere in Scripture do we read of salvation coming by surrendering oneself to the church or even to Christ. In Christ, our personal identity is no more lost than his; rather, our personhood is redescribed, rescripted, redeemed, and renewed. Preaching, water, bread and wine remain ordinary creaturely elements, even when they are united by the Word and Spirit to their heavenly reality. Similarly, in the church the many remain, in all of their ethnic, social, and generational distinctiveness, yet now in a communion of life rather than in a state of perpetual war. In Christ, there is no scarcity to be overcome by an ecclesiastical rationing of grace; it is an economy of sheer abundance: the grace that exceeds the guilt and power of sin (Ro 5:20), “the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us” (Eph 1:7), and “the grace of our Lord [that] overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus” (1Ti 1:14). We are one because we have all received the same Gift and have been made sharers in “one Lord, one faith, [and] one baptism” (Eph 4:5). There is no mention in this seminal passage (or any others) of “one pastor” as essential to this unity; in fact, the following verses speak of Christ’s gifts being delivered to us through a variety of pastors and teachers.
Third, the reality of the ascension should keep us from substituting a pyramidal church for Jesus Christ. The ascension directs us to the work of the Spirit in uniting us to Christ so that there is real affinity despite real difference. We are one with Christ (and therefore with each other), but not one Christ. With such qualifications, we can affirm the truth in the totus Christus motif, as we find it, for example, in the following statement of Calvin’s:
This is the highest honour of the Church, that, until He is united to us, the Son of God reckons himself in some measure imperfect. What consolation is it for us to learn, that, not until we are along with him, does he possess all his parts, or wish to be regarded as complete! Hence, in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, when the apostle discusses largely the metaphor of a human body, he includes under the single name of Christ the whole Church.83
Nevertheless, for Calvin and his heirs, this version of totus Christus is eschatologically oriented: “the Son of God reckons himself in some measure imperfect” or incomplete only because he is the firstfruits of the harvest, the head of a body. What he possesses perfectly and completely in himself is at present only imperfectly and incompletely realized in his body. Even more than we, Christ longs for the day when we share in his glory, and he is not sitting idly by but working toward that final end.
Taken univocally, the theory of the church “as ‘the extension of the Incarnation,’” as Lesslie Newbigin observes, “springs from a confusion of sarx with soma” “Christ’s risen body”—that is, his ecclesial as distinguished from his natural body—“is not fleshly but spiritual.” “He did not come to incorporate us in His body according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” Hence, his promise that when he ascends he will send the Spirit.84 Newbigin’s point reminds us of the importance of both the ascension of Christ in the flesh and the descent of the Spirit. Our union with Christ does not occur at the level of fused natures, but as a common participation of different members in the same realities of the age to come by the same Spirit. Similarly, Volf argues, “A theological interpretation going beyond Paul himself is needed to transform the Pauline ‘one in Christ’ into Ratzinger’s ‘a single subject with Christ,’ or certainly into ‘a single … Jesus Christ.’”85 To be sure, Ratzinger says that “through the Holy Spirit, the Lord who ‘departed’ on the cross has ‘returned’ and is now engaged in affectionate dialogue with his ‘bride,’ the church.” “Yet even recourse to the representational work of the Holy Spirit,” says Volf, “cannot free the idea of dialogue within the one, single subject of the suspicion of being mere conversation with oneself. It does not seem possible to conceive the juxtaposition of church and Christ without giving up the notion of the one subject that includes both bridegroom and bride.”86
Furthermore, it is worth noting that in the few places where the church is identified as the body of Christ, the Pauline phrase is deployed to affirm plurality as much as unity, as in 1 Corinthians 12:12: “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.” Not only are the many and the one treated with the same ontological weight, but the formula itself expresses a simile: “just as … so it is with Christ.” Analogies are not rhetorical flourishes, but the communication of truth in a way that accommodates to our capacities. The counsel that we have heard from Dulles is wise: the various metaphors must be allowed to mutually interpret our ecclesiology, without selecting one (like “body of Christ”) and turning it into a literal concept.87
In a covenantal context, there is both affinity and difference. The vassal is so identified with the suzerain that a threat or injury to the one is a threat or injury to the other. As we have seen, the treaty-making ceremony in these secular treaties takes the form of a cutting of an animal that not only symbolizes but ratifies the participation of the whole community in its representative head. In the covenant of grace, Christ is both that representative head and mediator, on the one hand, and the divine suzerain who stands over against the covenant people, imposing the terms of the treaty, on the other. There is union without fusion, communion without absorption, with the covenant people (ecclesia) always in the position of receiving rather than of extending the personal existence and gracious reign of its ascended Lord. Because this covenant is constituted by the work of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, it is qualitatively different from all other forms of society and international politics. Yet, as Cardinal Dulles points out, the body-of-Christ metaphor is a subset of this covenantal analogy of suzerain and vassal.88
Fourth, the ultimate source of the church’s unity and catholicity is to be found in God’s electing grace. Hence, this unity is a gift, whose visible expression we are called to defend and preserve in peace and purity. Behind, above, and underneath all evidences of visible unity in the body of Christ lies the original, inviolable, and largely hidden unity of that body in God’s eternal election. According to the Heidelberg Catechism, to affirm “one holy catholic church” means, “I believe that the Son of God, through his Spirit and Word, out of the entire human race, from the beginning of the world to its end, gathers, protects, and preserves for himself a community chosen for eternal life and united in true faith. And of this community I am and always will be a living member.”89
Taking the catholicity of the church entirely out of our hands, election proscribes all overrealized eschatologies, whether they identify the pure church with a universal institution or with the sum total of the regenerate. Although proleptically we anticipate the catholic church, only in the eschaton will the visible church be identical with the catholic church. The union of Christ and his body—i.e., the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church—is the eschatological communion of the elect, chosen “in [Christ] before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him” (Eph 1:4).
With the Augustinian tradition more generally, Reformation theology lodges the church’s catholicity (i.e., unity and universality) in God’s electing grace. “Now this society is catholic, that is, universal, because there could not be two or three churches. But all God’s elect are so united and conjoined in Christ that, as they are dependent upon one Head, they also grow together into one body …,” Calvin argues. It is this church that is indefectible. It must always have its visible expression in every era, but this visibility is always ambiguous, both because the church is a mixed assembly and because even the elect are simultaneously justified and sinful.90
Thus, “invisible” and “visible” refer not to two different churches (much less do they correspond to true and false), but to the body of Christ as known to God in eternity and as known to us now as a mixed assembly. So, for example, the Westminster Confession first defines the catholic church as “invisible,” which “consists of the whole number of the elect, that have been, are, or shall be gathered into one, under Christ the Head thereof; and is the spouse, the body, the fullness of him that filleth all in all” (emphasis added). Yet in the next article, “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, out of which there is no ordinary possibility of salvation” (emphasis added).91 As such, it truly participates in the signified, but is not yet identical with it as one day it will be. “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God” (Ro 8:19), and despite the confusion, error, and dissension that have always plagued the church, “God’s firm foundation stands, bearing this seal: ‘The Lord knows those who are his …’” (2Ti 2:19).
Analogous to the sacraments, this visible church is neither identical with nor separate from the invisible church. Rather than see the relation in Platonic terms as spiritual and physical, we should see it in eschatological terms as “already” and “not yet.” The Spirit, working through the Word, ensures that Christ is present in the world as the Good Shepherd gathering his elect, but only when Christ returns in the flesh will the one, holy, and catholic church be revealed. Only then will the invisible church be fully visible.
In contrast both to totalizing models of the totus Christus and to social models of plurality that downplay an essential unity, a covenantal model affirms both unity and difference as essential to the being of the church, because it is rooted in election. We are not one Christ (methexis), but one in Christ (koinönia), and this is the result ultimately of God’s choice rather than our own. Just as my belonging to this church is ultimately grounded in God’s gracious choice rather than my own decision, these other people with whom I am gathered were given to me—chosen for me—as my brothers and sisters. Jesus reminds us, “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide” (Jn 15:16). Consequently, we are commanded to “love one another” (v. 17). A local church (or wider body of churches) is not free to develop its identity in continuity simply with the givens of racial, ethnic, socio-economic, or consumer affinities. Each particular expression of the church must seek to exhibit the catholicity that is grounded in God’s electing choice rather than in our own.
It is not only the church that has been elected, Bonhoeffer reminds us, but each member.92 “God therefore really sees the individual, and God’s election really applies to the individual.” Nevertheless, it is only part of the story. The communion that Christ creates by his Spirit is unique not because it overcomes ontological barriers in a miraculous fusion of persons, but because it justifies the ungodly and, consequently, liberates them for each other in Christ.
Far from legitimizing a spiritual elitism, the doctrine of election is meant to ensure that in spite of the failures of the visible church, God will preserve a remnant, and not only from one nation, but “from every tribe and language and people and nation” (Rev 5:9). And yet, this ransomed plurality constitutes a single “kingdom” (v. 10). Like its unity and holiness, the church’s catholicity is affirmed in faith, not by sight. Its security lies in God’s election, not in determinations that can be made by empirical inspection of its historical continuity and structure or of the piety and enthusiasm of its membership.
Also, in both Ephesians 4 and 1 Corinthians 8–14, the Supper (along with baptism and preaching) plays a critical role in the visibility of the church. It is not just common doctrine (“one faith”) that creates ecclesial unity, but “one baptism,” sharing “one loaf,” and drinking one cup. Notice again from these examples that in its most visible moments, the church is caught in the act of receiving Christ and his gifts. The church’s activity in the world is always ambiguous, riddled with inconsistency, hypocrisy, and pride. As we are shaped by the gospel through the means of grace and directed by the commands of the law, the church’s public activity will be transformed. Nevertheless, it is God’s action that creates and sustains the reality of his church in the world.
Nothing in these seminal passages suggests that this unity and catholicity is generated by a particular church order (much less a papal office) or the decision of individuals to belong to it. Neither the church nor the individual is creating this new reality in the world; it is the work of God. In Ephesians, the communion that each of the elect enjoys with Christ (chapter 1) simultaneously creates on the horizontal register (to which Christ also belongs as head) a communion of saints that defies the divisions of both Rome and Jerusalem. In the work of the Spirit through the event of Word and sacrament, the church is not simply reminded or brought to a new awareness of its unity, but becomes more and more the catholic church in truth (1Co 10:17).
A covenantal ecclesiology favors a connectional polity or form of government. If Orthodox and Roman Catholic ecclesiologies exaggerate the identity between the eschatological (“invisible”) church and the visible church in its present form, Free Church ecclesiologies fail sufficiently to appreciate the connection between the heavenly reality and its earthly-visible sign. If the heavenly Jerusalem coming down to earth as a bride adorned for her husband is one universal city, then this reality should come to some visible expression, however imperfect, in this age. The church is not simply a collection of individuals or even a collection of local churches. Rather, each local church is a particular expression of the catholic church.
The covenant of grace has its origin in the eternal covenant of redemption, which makes it unconditional in its gracious basis, yet it is administered in history, with elect and nonelect members related visibly to it. Churches are collectively addressed as “saints,” even though there are weeds among the wheat. Consequently, the covenant of grace is the site where the invisible church becomes partly visible even in this present evil age. Since we cannot identify the elect in this age, the church has no authority to separate the sheep from the goats. The visible church of professing believers and their children, not the invisible church of the elect, is available to us now.
The covenantal motif has tremendous potential to orient ecclesiology toward an integration of the one and many, local and broader assemblies, the invisibility of the church in election and the visibility of the church in the covenant community. To the extent that more recent Roman Catholic ecclesiologies have appealed to this motif, for example, there has been a deeper understanding of plurality in koinönia.93 On the Free Church side, Stanley Grenz notes that a covenantal perspective challenges the individualism to which congregationalism may be prone.94
If Reformed ecclesiology is designated “Church as Covenant,” it is not surprising that the form of its outward organization is connectional. This is to say that “the church” refers not only to particular (local) churches, nor to the clerical hierarchy, but to local congregations, broader assemblies (regional and ecumenical), and to the whole communion of professing believers and their children in all times and places. The New Testament refers to the church as wider than a local congregation (Ac 9:31; 1Co 12:28; Eph 4:4–16), and the churches addressed in the epistles (though in the singular) consisted of more than one local congregation (Ac 20:20; Ro 16:5; Phm 2). It is important to say at the outset that although I am discussing church government under the broader rubric of the essential attributes of the church, it is only because it is an implication of what I regard as a New Testament view of church unity, not because I regard a particular polity (presbyterian) as essential to the being of the church.
A covenantal ecclesiology suggests a concrete praxis, which is neither hierarchical nor democratic. “Presbyterian” comes from the word presbyteros (elder), with presbyterion (presbytery) being the New Testament term for a broader assembly of elders. We will examine specific passages, but first the main outlines of a presbyterian polity can be seen in the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15, where a local church dispute was taken to the broader assembly of the church. It is striking that several times the report refers to “the apostles and the elders” as the decision-making body. Commissioners (including Paul and Barnabas) were sent from the local church in Antioch to the wider assembly, convened at Jerusalem. In fact, it was James rather than Peter who said, for his part, “Therefore my judgment is that we should not trouble those of the Gentiles who turn to God …” (v. 19). Still, the final verdict awaited the assent of the full assembly. “Then it seemed good to the apostles and the elders, with the whole church, to choose men from among them and send them to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas,” to relate the written decision to that local church (vv. 22–29).
At the Jerusalem Council, the unity that the Spirit had established at Pentecost was preserved visibly not by the sacrifice of the one to the many or the many to the one, but by the consent of the many as one. The covenant community functioned covenantally in its outward and interpersonal government, in mutual submission rather than hierarchical unity or independent plurality. Already in the following chapter we see the salutary practical effects of this Council in the mission to the Gentiles, when Timothy joined Paul and Silas. “As they went on their way through the cities, they delivered to them for their observance the decisions [dogmata] that had been reached by the apostles and elders who were in Jerusalem. So the churches were strengthened in the faith, and they increased in numbers daily” (Ac 16:4–5). These emissaries were delivering not merely godly advice that churches could either accept or reject, but decisions to be observed by the whole body. At the same time, the decisions were not imposed hierarchically, but arrived at ecumenically by representatives of the broader church. The catholic church was present federally (covenantally) at the Jerusalem Council, whose decisions remain in effect for us.
A covenantal conception of apostolicity—seems to me at least to imply a connectional yet non-hierarchical polity (i.e., presbyterial government). Elders are to be “worthy of double honor,” although for this reason, “Do not ordain anyone hastily …” (1Ti 5:17, 22). Qualifications for ministers and elders are clearly laid out in 1 Timothy 3:1–7, distinct from the office of deacon (vv.8–13). It is not because of his charisma, personality, communicative skills, or any other characteristics of his person, but in virtue of his office that Timothy is told by Paul, “Command and teach these things,” in spite of his youth. “Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching. Do not neglect the gift you have, which was given you by prophecy when the council of elders [presbyterion] laid their hands on you” (1Ti 4:11, 13–14). So Paul can also remind Titus, “This is why I left you in Crete, so that you might put what remained into order, and appoint elders in every town as I directed you,” again listing the qualifications (Tit 1:5–9). It is significant that the most successful (and busiest) missionary in history did not consider a church to be planted adequately until elders were appointed in every local assembly.
Those who hold a special office in the church have greater responsibility to serve the saints, not greater standing before God. Even Peter can identify himself as an apostle in his salutation and yet immediately add, “To those who have obtained a faith of equal standing with ours by the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ” (2Pe 1:1). In his first letter, Peter says,
So I exhort the elders among you, as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as a partaker in the glory that is going to be revealed: shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight, not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you; not for shameful gain, but eagerly; not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock. And when the chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the unfading crown of glory. (1Pe 5:1–4)
Because the majority of the elders are not ministers of Word and sacrament, the distinction between those who exercise spiritual oversight and those who are served is not the same as that between clergy and laity in the usual sense. Just as the Jerusalem Council consisted of “the apostles and the elders,” broader and local assemblies are composed of ministers (teaching elders) and ruling elders together.95
As is evident in Peter’s example, all ministers are elders but not all elders are ministers. Together, they are “overseers” (episkopois), which is often translated “bishops.” This is evident from Acts 20, where the Ephesian elders are called episkopous (v. 28), as also in Philippians 1:1. In calling Titus to “appoint elders in every town,” Paul uses presbyterous and episkopous interchangeably (Tit 1:5–7). Significantly, it is Peter who says that Christ is “the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls” (1Pe 2:25). Together with other elders, the apostles oversaw the flock under Christ, its only Chief Shepherd, but they gradually widened this pastoral ministry to the ordinary ministers who were trained and ordained for the specific office of preaching, prayer, and teaching (Eph 4:7–16).
Whereas a hierarchical model directs the focus of unity and catholicity upward and inward from the lower rungs of the ecclesiastical ladder to a single earthly head or to a college of bishops, a presbyterian model directs the focus downward from the ascended Christ and outward in the power of his Spirit to the church and the ends of the earth. At the same time, individual believers and local churches are not left to themselves, nor merely open informally to other churches, but are gathered together as one flock under one shepherd. The responsibility for mutual encouragement, fellowship, and correction is not only local; instead, the churches are called to care for each other and to bring all of their resources to bear in common confession, discipline, evangelism, mission, and service.
The interchangeability of the terms episkopos (bishop) and presbyteros (elder) is also evidence in Clement of Rome’s Letter to the Corinthians (AD 95).96 Likewise, The Didache (AD 98) acknowledges “bishops [overseers] and deacons.”97 Even as late as the fourth century, theologians of such stature as Jerome could assume the presbyterian government of the early church and trace the gradual migration toward episcopacy. After adducing various passages in which the apostles “clearly teach that presbyters are the same as bishops,” Jerome observed that presbyters selected one of their number to moderate their meetings. Yet presbyters were “all alike of equal rank” in the apostolic era. In a letter, he repeated the point that “with the ancients, these names [bishops and presbyters] were synonymous,” and only grew into separate orders or offices by later custom rather than from “an arrangement by the Lord.”98 Writing in AD 376, Ambrose noted:
After churches were planted in all places, and officers ordained, matters were settled otherwise than they were in the beginning. And hence it was that the Apostles’ writing do not, in all things, agree with the present constitution of the Church; because they were written under the first rise of the Church; for he calls Timothy, who was created a Presbyter by him, a Bishop, for so, at first, the Presbyters were called.99
It is significant that ancient church leaders who themselves held the episcopal office recognized the gradual shift from presbyterian government. More recently, in his commentary on Philippians, the Anglican scholar J. B. Lightfoot observed the agreement of Chrysostom, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret, and others. “Thus in every one of the extant commentaries on the epistles containing the crucial pas-sages, whether Greek or Latin, before the close of the fifth century, this identity [of bishops and presbyters] is affirmed.”100
The Second Helvetic Confession repeats some of the patristic quotes often appealed to by the Reformers. Besides Cyprian, Jerome is cited: “Before attachment to persons in religion was begun at the instigation of the devil, the churches were governed by the common consultation of the elders.”101 The significance of Peter in the apostolic college was never denied by the evangelical confessions, yet it was pointed out that Christ gave the keys of the kingdom to all of the apostles equally, and it pertained to the confession of Christ as the Son of God (Mt 16:19 with 18:18–20). Especially given the recognition by Ratzinger and Zizioulas that it was the earliest working constitution of the apostolic community, I suggest that presbyterian polity (though often overlooked in recent evangelical and Pentecostal ecclesiologies) holds greater potential for transcending the choice between hierarchy and egalitarianism.102
Free churches properly remind us that “We are the church!”103 There is “one body” because the one Spirit has called us—Jew and Gentile—into one body: “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Eph 4:4–5). Nevertheless, this same passage includes pastors and teachers as the gifts dispensed by the ascended Christ to bring his body to maturity in him. Although constituted by its total membership, the church is instructed, governed, and served by different offices with different gifts (1Co 12:27–31; Ro 12:4–8).104
The manifold gifts that the ascended King has poured out on his church by his Spirit include not only offices pertaining to the sound instruction in the one faith and spiritual government but the ministry to the temporal needs of the saints. In order to give due diligence to this important work without distracting the apostles from their work of preaching and prayer, the diaconate was created (Ac 6; cf. Php 1:1; 1Ti 3:8–12). Just as the particular offices of minister and elder equip all of the saints as witnesses in their general office as prophets, priests, and kings, “works of service” are done officially in the name of the whole church by the deacons even though all believers are given gifts of hospitality, generosity, and mutual service in the body. The Spirit mediates Christ’s threefold office as prophet, priest, and king in this age through these three offices of pastor-teacher, deacon, and elder.105 Just as no believer is an island, no local church or denomination is the one catholic church; they are only one and catholic as they exist together in Christ through faithful preaching and sacrament. In this communion—expressed locally and universally—Christ cares for the temporal as well as eternal welfare of his commonwealth (see discussion of Paul’s collection, p. 847).
Pastors preach and teach, elders rule, and deacons serve. At the Jerusalem Council, not even the apostles acted without consulting the elders. Since elders are ordained members who are not called to the full-time ministry of prayer and preaching, the church—in both its local and its broader assemblies—resists the temptation of our fallen hearts toward domination. “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them,” Jesus told his disciples as they jockeyed for positions in his kingdom. “It shall not be so among you” (Mt 20:25–26). Knowing our frame, Jesus instituted checks and balances. Although this outward organization cannot save a church from apostasy and tyranny, such general declensions often coincide with a gradual loss of checks and balances.
At the same time, we are the church only with Christ as our head, from whom alone the church receives its unity and catholicity. The source of ecclesiastical authority is no more the members of the local congregation than it is the bishops or the pope. Rather, it is possessed magisterially by Christ alone (Mt 28:18; Jn 15:1–8; Eph 1:10–23; 2:20–22; 4:15; 5:30; Col 1:18; 2:19; 3:11; Phil 2:10–11; Rev 17:14; 19:16) and ministerially by delegated representatives (Mt 10:1, 40; 16:18–19; 28:19–20; Mk 16:15–16; Lk 22:17–20; Jn 20:21–23; 1Co 11:23–29; 2Co 13:3; Eph 4:11–12; 1Ti 3:1–7, 6–15; 2:14–4:3). Although the elders function representatively in the covenant community, they represent the Lord rather than the people.
In practical terms, a covenantal ecclesiology challenges the widespread tendency today to allow rival catholicities to determine ecclesial character. Of course, all of us see things from our location, but for Christians the most decisive location is “in Christ.” To be sure, we interpret reality within particular communities (ethnic, national, socio-economic, generational, etc.), but for Christians, again, the most decisive community is the church—and not only the local church, but the visible catholic church in all times and places. In our day, it is not so much confessional and denominational fragmentation that threatens our visible catholicity, but the worldly divisions of race, class, politics, and the consumer preferences that have been molded by the words and sacraments of a culture of demographic niche-marketing.
The Scriptures locate believers “in Christ,” which means in his church: “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:27—28). In 1970, Donald McGavran formalized a missiological theory: “People like to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic, or class barriers. This principle states an undeniable fact…. The world’s population is a mosaic, and each piece has a separate life of its own that seems strange and often unlovely to men and women of other pieces.”106 McGavran anticipates the objection that this simply capitulates to cultural narcissism: “It is better, they think, to have a slow growing or nongrowing church that is really brotherly, integrated, and hence ‘really Christian,’ than a rapidly growing one-people church.”107
Though clearly rejecting forced segregation on the basis of race, McGavran argues that before people can embrace true “brotherhood” they must become Christians and since people become Christians more rapidly in culturally homogeneous units, we should do whatever it takes to serve that missional end.108 South African theologians Allen Boesak and John de Gruchy argue that it was pietist missionaries who assumed this very principle when they planted “homogeneous” churches that inadvertently helped to bring apartheid into existence.109 I cannot see how we can reconcile the dissolution of Christ-centered catholicity with a proper concern for mission.
Yet this is not all that different from the situation that Paul faced in writing to the Corinthians. Where the problem in Galatia was especially the catholicity of Jew and Gentile in Christ, the problem in Corinth was that the Communion service and its following fellowship feast were divided by class, with the wealthiest enjoying the best food and wine in the central dining hall, free citizens in the outer hall, and slaves outside where they received whatever was left. So Paul writes,
When you come together, it is not the Lord’s supper that you eat. For in eating, each one goes ahead with his own meal. One goes hungry, another gets drunk. What! Do you not have houses to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I commend you in this? No, I will not. (1Co 11:20—22)
Today Paul might say, “Don’t you have your own homes, cars, workplaces, and circle of friends with whom you can listen to your favorite music, display your dis-tinctive styles, and enjoy the peculiarities of your own niche demographic?” However, the church of God is the place where the young, the old, and middle-aged, men and women of all races, the sick and the healthy, those with disabilities and without, the unemployed and the wealthy gather to become one in Christ. Our churches should exhibit the kind of community that is formed by God’s choice rather than our own. Christ is our most decisive location.
In addition to being “one” and “catholic,” the church is “holy.” Two important questions with respect to the church’s holiness present themselves: (1) What is its source? Is the church distinguished from the world by its own pious willing and activity or as that part of the world that is claimed by God as the field of his saving activity and mission to the world? (2) Is this holiness merely an eschatological event from above, a merely historical institution from below, or both?
As with the attributes of unity and catholicity, the crucial question with respect to the church’s holiness is not whether it arises from the community or the individual, although that is also an important question. The principal question is whether the church’s holiness arises from Christ or from us (whether considered corporately or individually). It is appropriate to bring our soteriological convictions to our consideration of ecclesiology. Both individually and corporately, we are holy in Christ; by God’s election, redemption, and calling, the church is holy.
The church is distinguished from the world by God’s act of claiming it for himself, and it is this indicative announcement of the gospel that both assures us of the church’s holiness in spite of its empirical condition and perpetually grounds the imperatives to realize this visible holiness more and more. After reviewing the moral and theological disarray of the Corinthian church, we might conclude that it was not even a church—and yet Paul addresses it as such and on that basis recalls it to its identity.
Nevertheless, that which God declares holy in Christ is also made holy in Christ. Sanctification is a gift that already belongs to the church, but it is also an ongoing process in which the church is being constantly provoked, challenged, renewed, and reformed by the Spirit, conformed to the image of Christ through God’s Word. Because the reality of the age to come is united to the sign of the visible church in this present age, the church is called to radical obedience, realizing more and more the implications of God’s holy claim on its existence and actions in the world. Yet it is always God’s sanctifying action that keeps the church from becoming assimilated again into the world out of which it has been called.
Are creaturely signs elevated ontologically and transubstantiated into the reality signified? Are they mere symbols or illustrations of that reality but not really conveyors of it? Or are creaturely signs means of grace, participating in the reality signified, while remaining in every respect natural? Defending this third view, I have argued that in sanctifying persons, places, and things, God claims creaturely reality in all of its essential goodness and historical fallenness and liberates it to serve his purposes.
It is God’s promise that makes ordinary water, bread, and wine holy elements. They do not lose the slightest degree of their created nature. God’s Word consecrates them for his saving service. Analogously, Jesus prays concerning his followers, not that they be taken out of the world, but that they may be sanctified in it: “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth” (Jn 17:17). Before sanctification is a process of inner renewal, it is a definitive claim made by the triune God: a declarative word that, like justification, initiates reverberations through every nook and cranny of personal and ecclesial existence. No longer lä-ümmi, “Not My People” (Hos 1:9–10), we are proclaimed to be the very people of God (1Pe 2:9–10, alluding to Hos 1:6, 9–10). Even while the church remains sullied both internally and externally, it calls on the name of the Lord in assurance, knowing that Christ “became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, ‘Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord’” (1Co 1:30).
Anticipated by the prophets, the day finally arrived when the “clean"/"unclean” distinction between Jews and Gentiles was rendered obsolete. The revelation of this promise’s fulfillment staggered and scandalized Peter, yet it resulted in the mission to the Gentiles (Ac 10:1–11:18). In Christ, even the “unclean” are holy; strangers to the covenants and promises can become children of Abraham (Lk 3:8; Jn 1:12; Gal 3:13–18; 4:21- 5:1; Eph 2:11–19; 1Pe 2:10) and their children can be holy to the Lord (1Co 7:14). The church’s holiness is attributed not only to the invisible church (i.e., those who are elect and regenerated), but to the visible church as a mixed company. Just as the visible catholicity of the church is threatened when we allow other lords to locate us under their dominion, the church’s visible holiness is threatened when its words and ways become assimilated to cultural traditions and fashions.
The tendency to conflate Christ and the church locates the church’s holiness in the visible form of the church itself. In the era of Christendom, the secular empire itself can become the body of Christ: the Holy Roman Empire, contrasted with the heathen nations under God’s judgment. Eschatology and history become one, with the church identified fully with the kingdom of God in its progressive unfolding. In this conception, eschatology loses its force in breaking up the givens of history. To be a Christian is simply to be a part of this history.
On the other hand, the rediscovery of eschatology, especially since Barth, can reduce history to a shadow, with the vertical irruptions of divine acts barely related to God’s faithfulness “from generation to generation.” Taken to an extreme, this view can lead us to think the work of the Spirit in the lives of individual believers bears no necessary connection to formal membership in the church. Even preaching and the sacraments can become optional resources for an entirely personal spiritual quest. The historical institution and its public ministry may even be treated as a humanly devised impediment to genuine spiritual growth.
In a covenantal conception, there is a history of redemption, but it unfolds not from its own immanent possibilities, either located in an institution or in the piety of individual believers. In fact, this history continues precisely because of God’s eschatological interruptions of its ordinary flow, judging, justifying, killing and making alive. The Spirit is always with his people, leading them from exodus to their homeland, but as a gift—never as a given. Israel and Judah learned this hard lesson when they witnessed the Spirit’s evacuation of the temple and were sent into exile.
It is into “this present age” (Tit 2:12; cf. Gal 1:4; Eph 1:21) that is “passing away” (1Jn 2:17; cf. 1Cor 7:31) that “the powers of the age to come” are penetrating by the work of the Spirit through Word and sacrament (Heb 6:5). The prophets refer to the arrival of the Messiah in “the latter days” (Jer 49:39), and the apostles indicate that the period in which we are now living between Christ’s two advents is “the last hour” (1Jn 2:18) and “these last days” (Heb 1:2). Familiar already in the eschatologies of Second Temple Judaism, the categories of “this age” and “the age to come” are directly invoked by Jesus (Mk 10:30; Lk 20:34). In the Pauline corpus, these categories are equivalent to “flesh” and “Spirit,” with the former representing the immanent powers and resources available to us under the conditions of sin and death and the latter indicating the new creation inaugurated by Christ’s resurrection and the indwelling of the Spirit, both of which he calls “the firstfruits” or down payment on our final glorification in the age to come (see esp. Ro 8:7–27).
Therefore, history itself has been claimed by God as the theater of his eschatological victory from heaven. In this history, Adam broke the covenant and brought death, and Christ fulfilled the covenant, bore its judgment, and inaugurated the new creation. This history is not transcended or elevated. Nor is it a secular history alongside God’s eternal history. Just as grace liberates rather than overwhelms nature, eschatology does not abolish history or turn it into something nonhistorical. Rather, God’s radical judgment and radical grace redefine the meaning of history as the nexus of these two ages where the church is born. The church is an institution in history, but it is a history that history could never have generated.
We have already seen that Roman Catholic ecclesiology sees the church’s holiness cascading down the one ladder of being, unified by its visible head, the pope. As a consequence, the church cannot be considered simultaneously justified and sinful. The holiness of the church is in no way compromised by the sins of its members, not because of an alien righteousness but because of an inherent righteousness that is infused into the church and flows from her. Rahner summarizes, “As the great theologians of the Middle Ages used to say (St. Thomas, Summa Theologica, I, IIae, q. 106, a.1), what principally constitutes the Church is the Holy Spirit in men’s hearts, all the rest (hierarchy, papacy, Eucharist, sacraments) are in the service of this inner transformation.”110
Dulles correctly perceives that from the viewpoint of Lutheran and Reformed ecclesiology, the Roman Catholic perspective can be seen only as a “theology of glory.”111 In spite of his salutary summons toward a more eschatologically sensitive ecclesiology, Dulles concludes, “The final coming of the Kingdom, I believe, will be the work of God, dependent on his initiative. But it seems likely that, as Rahner suggests, “the parousia will not occur until human effort ‘has gone to its very limits and so is burst open by salvation from above by developing its own powers.’”112 As a failure to appreciate the full impact of the ascension has contributed to the confusion of the church with an ongoing incarnation of Jesus Christ, so also it is unlikely that such a confusion could have developed apart from a synergistic soteriology. From a Reformation perspective, it is this synergistic view of the church’s holiness that unites Roman Catholic, Wesleyan, and Pentecostal traditions.113 However, from a covenantal perspective, all ways of locating holiness in someone or something other than Jesus Christ overlook the inseparable connection between Christology and pneumatology already highlighted.
A biblical view of the church’s holiness stands in sharp contrast with this conception. First, there is a distinction between Christ, who is our holiness (Jer 23:5–6; 33:16; 1Co 1:30; 2Co 5:21; Phil 3:9; Eph 1:7; Col 1:14), and the church, which is definitively and progressively holy only in him. The church is not the source of the holiness of its members, but the body that receives its holiness from outside of itself, in Christ. Second, this definitive holiness does not radiate in diminishing degrees, from the brightness of Mary and the saints to the clergy to the laity. Rather, all believers are saints, holy (hagios) in Christ.
From the perspective of Reformation theology, grace neither absorbs nature nor arrives independently of it; it is given through it. The claim of the triune God that makes the church holy in no way transubstantiates it into something divine. Yet the Spirit works through the ordinary means of grace in the church to bring about a communion of saints across all generations and ethnicities.
The church is holy—that is, the sphere of God’s saving, covenantal action—when it is “in Christ,” and it is the gospel that determines and audibly identifies this location. If a professing church no longer defines itself and its ministry—that is, its methods as well as its message—by that promise and command, it no longer has a valid ministry. It is no longer authorized to speak and act in Christ’s name to his people and to the world. Deprived of its holiness (which is given to it from outside of itself), it becomes just another secular institution.
We have seen that the idea of the church as the ongoing incarnation of Christ is increasingly prominent in Protestant (including evangelical) as well as Roman Catholic circles. There is, to be sure, an incarnational analogy in the New Testament, where we are called to have the same “mind” as Christ by imitating his humility (Php 2:5–8). However, to the extent that this is turned into a univocal concept, “incarnational ministry” can actually undermine the church’s holiness. Often, in an effort to incarnate itself in the world and redeem the culture, the church builds a Holy Roman Empire, Christendom, and, in our own day, produces a panoply of “Christian” things (music, exercise programs, politics, economics, entertainment, businesses, art, fiction, science, etc.) that are often poor imitations of their “secular” alternatives. Ironically, many voices in the churches today recognize that the church has capitulated to culture with respect to Christendom, empire, and Western (especially American) consumerism, militarism, and civil religion, while cheerfully accommodating the church’s message, identity, and mission to “our postmodern context.”
Christians are not distinguished from non-Christians—which is to say, are not holy—because they show love and kindness to their neighbors, defend justice, and care for the environment. These are obligations of the law of creation that Christians recognize in their conscience together with non-Christians. It is only the gospel that marks believers as holy, and it is only the preaching of that gospel and its ratification in baptism and Communion that generate a city of light in a dark world. Our holiness, then, will be expressed more and more in the world as a witness to our neighbors, but it will be the reverberating impact of the definitive holiness that makes the church something other than another charitable organization, spiritual community, political action committee or circle of like-minded friends.
In its holiness as well as its catholicity, the body is constituted “from above” by the always surprising and disruptive announcement of the gospel, and the covenant community receives its catholicity along with its entire being extra nos, outside of itself, in spite of its own history of unfaithfulness. As extended “from below” in history (“to a thousand generations”), catholicity and holiness are mediated through the faithful ministry of Word and sacrament, yielding a succession of faith from one generation to another across all times and places. The Spirit constantly disrupts the church, pulling it back from its tendency to become assimilated again to this passing age, but the same Spirit also constantly reorganizes the church so that it can maintain its historical continuity with past and future generations of the one covenant of grace.
Taking its bearings from both of these coordinates—the eschatological and the historical—a covenantal ecclesiology affirms that just as each believer must be joined to the visible body and each generation must be connected to those which precede and follow it, particular (local) churches must be “eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Eph 4:3) by ever wider and deeper solidarity that expresses itself in concrete, visible, and enduring structures.
Of course, God may meet strangers wherever he chooses, but he has promised to meet us in the covenant of grace, through the invocation of Christ’s name (Ac 4:12; Php 2:9–11). Persons, places, and things are holy because God has claimed these natural creatures for himself. The covenant of grace is the sphere of God’s sanctifying activity, where he has promised to unite believers and their children to Christ and his benefits. Lesslie Newbigin nicely expresses a perennial Reformed objection to the notion of the “anonymous Christian":
Nor can we attempt to preserve some remnants of consistency by the use of the conception of uncovenanted mercies, by suggesting that we can acknowledge fully the works of grace outside the visible Church and yet retain intact our conviction that the Church only exists where visible continuity has been preserved. This attempt lands us into an impossible situation. If God can and does bestow His redeeming grace with indiscriminate bounty within and without the confines of His Church, then the Church is no essential part of the whole scheme of salvation, and its order and sacraments, its preaching and ministering have no inherent and essential relation to God’s saving work in Christ, but are merely arbitrary constructions which God Himself ignores.114
While the visible church is indeed a “mixed assembly,” according to Reformation theologies, it is the exclusive site of God’s covenanted blessings in Christ. It is in fact this affirmation that fuels the missionary spirit that is intrinsic to Christian identity.
While Rome identifies this inherent holiness with the historical institution as such, independent ecclesiologies tend to identify it with the piety and actions of the individual, ranging from identifiable conversion experiences to speaking in tongues. To the extent that free churches treat as central the inner experience of conversion and renewal, there is substantial agreement with Rahner’s description of the Roman Catholic position cited above, namely, that “what principally constitutes the Church is the Holy Spirit in men’s hearts, all the rest … are in the service of this inner transformation.” Roman Catholic theology emphasizes the Mass as “the work of the people.”115 Protestant evangelicals typically regard the church primarily as the platform for their service to God and neighbor more than as the place where God serves them.
Reflecting a broad evangelical consensus in our day, Miroslav Volf suggests that “authentic Christian worship takes place in a rhythm of adoration and action.”116 However, adoration is action—and both are our actions. Of course, worship is the activity of worshipers, but this is precisely why it is important to see the weekly gathering of Christ’s people as broader than worship. Volf adds, “As Christians worship God in adoration and action they anticipate the conditions of this world as God’s new creation.”117 Lost in this exclusive emphasis on imperatives (adoration, action, and anticipation) are the grand indicatives of God’s actions in Christ by his Word and Spirit. We can only adore and act in anticipation of God’s new creation if in fact the powers of that new creation are already at work, penetrating this present evil age, uniting sinners to Jesus Christ. As we are gathered, the Spirit makes us share in the new creation. Only because God is at work is there any reason, much less any ability, for fallen creatures to participate in faith, hope, and love.
Covenant theology has taken a different route from either of these paradigms. Regardless of the personal holiness of its members, the church (understood in terms not only of its local but also of its broader assemblies) is holy simply because it is the field of divine activity in which the wheat is growing up into the likeness of its firstfruits, even though weeds are sown among the wheat. In this conception, the church admits people into her fellowship not because they are inherently holy but because the Lord has consecrated this space as the place of his holy action. Even if only one parent is a believer, the children are holy (1Co 7:14). This is due not to any inner transformation or infused grace, but simply to God’s promise. In covenantal thinking, the tree is holy even if some of its branches will finally fail to yield fruit and be broken off to make room for others (Ro 11:16–24). The tree is holy neither because it is collectively identical to Christ, nor because it is the sum total of the regenerate, but because of the eschatological connection of the covenant people to their living root (v. 16, 18–20). At any given moment, in any local expression, the church will be a “mixed assembly” and yet the field of God’s action where faith is created and sustained. The whole field is holy in this ecclesial sense even though there are weeds sown among the wheat.
The very people whom Paul “could not address … as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ,” are nevertheless infants in Christ (1Co 3:1). The letter is even addressed, “To the church of God that is Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” (1Co 1:2–3, emphasis added). The Westminster Confession reminds us, “The purest churches under heaven are subject both to mixture and error; and some have so degenerated, so as to become no churches of Christ, but synagogues of Satan. Nevertheless, there shall be always a church on earth, to worship God according to his will.”118
Like its individual members, the church remains simultaneously justified and sinful in this age. The calling of the church is not to witness to its own piety or to transform the world into Christ’s holy kingdom. In the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “The intention of the preacher is not to improve the world, but to summon it to belief in Jesus Christ and to bear witness to the reconciliation which has been accomplished through Him and His dominion.”119 It is the Word that “breaks up” the church into “the community-of-the cross,” to be “built up” into “the Easter community.”120 Although Christ works through the ministry of his church, the church can never regard its actions as identical with his.121 It is not the church but the Spirit who makes Christ present in the world for salvation and life. As we see in Paul’s address to the Corinthians, the church is holy because it consists of those who are “called to be saints,” chosen, redeemed, justified, and in the process of being sanctified by his Spirit. However imperfectly the church manifests this holiness in empirical terms, it is nevertheless called to become what it already is according to God’s recreating Word. Oswald Bayer reminds us, “Even the institutions sanctified by God can therefore never be the path to salvation, and even though they are and remain holy, in them we may either be lost or we may find deliverance—by faith alone.”122
Berkhof points out that whereas Rome locates the holiness of the church in its intrinsic character as the bearer of salvation, Lutheran and Reformed confessions “maintain that the Church is absolutely holy in an objective sense, that is, as she is considered in Jesus Christ. In virtue of the mediatorial righteousness of Christ, the Church is accounted holy before God.”123
Similarly, Lesslie Newbigin argues on the basis of Romans 9,
There is a covenant and a covenant people, and God is faithful to His covenant. But the substance of that covenant is all pure mercy and grace. If men presume to claim for themselves upon the basis of the covenant some relationship with God other than that of the sinner needing God’s grace, the covenant has been perverted. And where that has happened God, in the sovereign freedom of His grace, destroys these pretensions, calls “No people” to be the people, breaks off natural branches and grafts in wild slips, filling them with the life which is His own life imparted to men…. She who is essentially one is divided; she who is essentially holy is unclean; she who is essentially apostolic forgets her missionary task.124
The grace of God does not flow down a cosmic ladder by gradations and degrees; rather, every believer is a co-heir with Christ and each other. Everything that is in Christ is as holy as he is, because he is its sanctification (1Co 1:30–31). This being the case, the objective holiness of the whole body in its head is also at work throughout the body, so that each member will realize more and more the fruit of that definitive identity which can be neither improved nor diminished.
Even the church’s unregenerate members are in some sense beneficiaries of the Spirit’s activity in the covenant community, which, according to Hebrews (esp. chs. 4, 6, 10), makes them all the more responsible for embracing the promises signified and sealed to them in baptism. The church is never the effectual agent, but the recipient and field of God’s sanctifying work in the world: the theater in which the Spirit is casting and staging dress rehearsals of the age to come.
While the church (like each believer) is simultaneously justified and sinful, holy in Christ yet often unholy in its ambitions, affections, and actions, it is called to greater maturity in faith and practice. Just as the “invisible church” cannot be an excuse for neglecting the visible unity and catholicity of Christ’s bride, the empirical failures of the church keep us from triumphalism but should not keep us from responding faithfully to the imperative to reflect the righteousness as well as truth of our Living Head.
We need not—indeed, must not—choose between a view of the church as a purely passive recipient of grace and a view of it as an active bearer of grace. We are always passive recipients of grace from God and active agents of love to our neighbor. Grace activates works; love flows from faith. A forensic economy yields effective transformation: the word does what it declares; the believer and the church become what they already are in Christ. In this light, the church is always a recipient of grace in relation to God yet also active in witness, love, and service toward the neighbor.
The main point to be drawn from these arguments is that these attributes do not belong to the church as a result of its decision and activity, but God’s. The church’s unity and catholicity do not arise immanently within individual believers or a historical institution; they are gifts from the Father, in the Son, and by the Spirit. They are given because the triune God has elected, redeemed, and called us in Christ to belong to him and to each other. The church was chosen in Christ to be holy (Eph 1:4) and was sanctified by Christ’s life, death, and resurrection—applied by the Holy Spirit. The church’s apostolicity is grounded not in its orthodoxy or orthopraxy, but in the external Word, made fruitful in us by the Spirit. As long as the church hears, receives, and proclaims this Word that it has been given, it is something other than a club, neighborhood association, theological school, or political action committee.
A church that, weary of its ambiguous location between the two ages, preaches another gospel or corrupts the sacraments is no longer holy, but is assimilated into the world—the age that is passing away—despite its outward forms (Gal 1:6–9; 1Co 3:10–17). We cannot deny that there will be those finally who hear these chilling words of Jesus Christ: “I never knew you; depart from me,” although they protest that they performed wonders in his name (Mt 7:22—23). The candlestick of any particular church or group of churches can be removed when it ceases to bear illuminating witness to Christ in the world (Rev 2:5). This tragic end may come upon a church not only for abandoning the doctrine of the gospel itself, but for failing to bear witness to it. To deny that this eschatological judgment of one’s professing church is impossible by virtue of its inherent holiness and eminent history is itself a harbinger of apostasy, and it is a tendency to which all of our churches can easily succumb.
Yet we have Christ’s promise that he will build his church. Despite the church’s compromised, ambiguous, schismatic and sinful character, the covenant of redemption ensures that our unfaithfulness will not have the last word.
1.Discuss the importance of eschatology, covenant, and pneumatology for our ecclesiology.
2.Evaluate the idea of the totus Christus. Where did it originate, and how did it come to be interpreted by different theologians and traditions? What is the impact of this concept on the unity and catholicity of the church?
3. As with the sacraments, different ecclesiologies are engendered by different views of the relationship between sign and reality signified. Evaluate these different approaches across the ecclesial spectrum, especially in relation to the question of the “one” (unity) and the “many” (plurality).
4.What is the source of unity and catholicity according to the Scriptures?
5.What is the difference between the invisible and visible church? How are they related?
6.How do the churches relate to the one church in New Testament teaching?
7.In light of the holiness of the church, how do we understand the relationship between the church as a historical institution and the church as an eschatological event? What are some of the practical implications of our answer for church life?
1. As Louis Berkhof points out, the English noun church (similar to Kirk, Kerk, Kirche) is derived not from ekklesia but from kyriake, “belonging to the Lord” (Systematic Theology [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996], 557).
2. For example, he wrote, “Let us rejoice and give thanks that we are made not only Christians but Christ,” in Homilies on the Gospel of John, NPNF1, vol. 7, comment on Jn 21:8. Cf. Augustine’s “On the Epistle of John,” translated by H. Browne and Joseph Myers, in the same volume, 462: “The Word was made flesh and dwelled among us; to that flesh is joined the church, and there is the whole Christ, head and body.”
3. Karl Adam, The Spirit of Catholicism (trans. Dom Justin McCann, OSB; New York: Crossroad, 1924; repr., 1977), 21. See also the important work of Michael J. Himes, The Ongoing Incarnation: Johann Adam Möhler and the Beginnings of Modern Ecclesiology (London: Herder and Herder, 1997).
4. Adam, The Spirit of Catholicism, 31-32.
5. Ibid., 38.
6. Ibid., 41. Like many Catholic and Protestant theologians of his generation, Adam at first welcomed Hitler’s ascendancy, but later he criticized the regime.
7. Ibid., 53.
8. Ibid., 97.
9. Ibid., 159–65.
10. Ibid., 168. The italicized clause is from the nominalist maxim, “To those who do what lies within them, God will not deny his grace” (facientibus quod in se est deus non denigat gratiam), which the Reformation especially targeted in its criticisms.
11. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Called to Communion: Understanding the Church Today (trans. Adrian Walker; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996), 44.
12. Ibid., 79-80.
13. Ibid., 80-81.
14. Ibid., 82.
15. Ibid., 37.
16. Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Christian Morality (trans. Graham Harrison; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1968), 38.
17. Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 35, 37.
18. Ibid., 49.
19. Ratzinger, Das neue Volk, 169, quoted in Volf, After Our Likeness, 58.
20. Ratzinger, Gemeinschaft, 88, quoted in Volf, After Our Likeness, 59. On the same page, quoting Ratzinger’s “Kirche,” 178-79, Volf notes Ratzinger’s claim, albeit before Vatican II, “The sedes apostolica as such is Rome, so that one can say that communio catholica = communio Romana; only those who commune with Rome are standing in the true, that is, catholic communio; whoever Rome excommunicates is no longer in the communio catholica, that is, in the unity of the church.”
21. Ward, Cities of God, 115.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., 116.
24. John Zizioulas, Being as Communion (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), 132-33.
25. Ibid., 140.
26. Ibid.: “The fact that Orthodoxy has not experienced situationssimilar to those of the Western Churches, such as the problem of clericalism, anti-institutionalism, Pentecostalism, etc. may be taken as an indication that for the most part Pneumatology has saved the life of Orthodoxy up to now.”
27. Vladimir Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God (Oxford: Mowbray, 1967), 175. He refers to the expression of Maximus the Confessor, who replied to those who insisted that he accept communion with the Monothelites, “Even if the whole world should be in communion with you, I alone should not be.” In doing so, says Lossky, “he was opposing his catholicity to an ecumenicity which he regarded as heretical.”
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., 176.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., 177.
32. Ibid., 179.
33. Ibid., 179.
34. Ibid., 180.
35. Ibid., 181.
36. Ibid.
37. Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 559.
38. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Church and World (trans. A. V. Littledale with Alexander Dru; Montreal: Palm Publishers, 1967), 145-46.
39. Ibid., 152.
40. See Avery Dulles, SJ, Models of the Church (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974), 123.
41. Pioneers of a more explicitly “incarnational missiology” include Sherwood G. Lingenfelter and Marvin K. Mayer, Ministering Cross-Culturally: An Incarnational Model for Personal Relationships (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1986), and Charles van Engen and Jude Tiersma, God So Loves the City: Seeking a Theology for Urban Mission (Monrovia, Calif.: MARC, 1994). Latin American theologies of liberation have also shaped this emphasis, especially Orlando Costas, Christ Beyond the Gate (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1982). For a balanced theological analysis of the concept, see J. Todd Billings, “‘Incarnational Ministry’; A Christological Evaluation and Proposal,” Missiology: An International Review 32, no. 2 (April 2004): 187–201.
42. Brian McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004), 108. Drawing eclectically from ancient and medieval Christian mysticism, Anabaptism, Zen Buddhism, and liberation theology, McLaren even speaks of “The Great Chain of Being” (279-80). This is one of many instances that could be cited to indicate that the “overcoming estrangement” paradigm of Plato, Neoplatonism, Hegel, and New Age thought can find popular expression in evangelical “low church” traditions as well as in others.
43. See, for example, I. Mobsby, Emerging and Fresh Expressions of Church (London: Moot Community Publishing, 2007), 54-55; The Becoming of G-d (Oxford: YTC Press, 2008).
44. Controversial writers in the Pentecostal movement have argued that “the Church is Christ.” “The Second Coming of Christ, therefore, is through the Church, not Jesus returning in the flesh; we should not wait for Him to return in order to set the world in order, but we are to take His authority over the world and the spiritual realm now” (Earl Paulk, quoted in A. Dager, Vengeance Is Ours: The Church in Dominion [Redmond, Wash.: Sword, 1990], 148). Paulk writes, “Jesus Christ is the firstfruit, but without the ongoing harvest, the incarnation will never be complete” (Held in the Heavens Until [Atlanta: K Dimension Publishing, 1985], 60–61). “We are on the earth as extensions of God to finish the work He began. We are the essence of God, His ongoing incarnation in the world” (Thrust in the Sickle and Reap [Atlanta: K Dimension Publishing, 1986], 132). This “theology of dominion” may be traced from the Latter Rain Movement to successive movements (Vineyard and New Apostolic Reformation).
45. At least in the history of pietism, the individual or circle of believers who were thought to be more truly earnest about the Christian life remained members of the wider church. In many forms of nondenominational evangelicalism, especially since the “ Jesus movement” of the 1970s, church membership is optional or even eliminated. Seeking to replicate the worship of the first Christians (with dubious historical interpretations), the housechurch movement is one of many examples of the “triumph of the laity,” as it is sometimes called. In fact, as George Barna observes (and celebrates), the coming generation that he identifies as the “Revolutionaries” insists on finding forms of spiritual edification and community outside the organized church (Revolution [Carol Stream, Ill.: Tyndale, 2005]). Just how revolution-ary this is may be open to debate, since pietism and revivalism have a long history of such experimentation.
46. See, for example, Stanley Grenz, Theology for the Community of God (Nashville: Broadman & Holman 1997), 611.
47. The Willow Creek Association (led by Bill Hybels) concluded that as Christians mature their dependence on the church diminishes and they need to become “self-feeders” (Greg Hawkins and Cally Parkinson, Reveal: Where Are You? [South Barrington, Ill.: Willow Creek Association, 2007]). George Barna (in Revolution, cited above) argues that most believers will increasingly abandon local churches and receive their spiritual resources from the Internet).
48. Dulles observes, “Rudolph Sohm, for instance, taught that the essential nature of the Church stands in antithesis to all law. Emil Brunner, in The Misunderstanding of the Church, argued that the Church in the biblical sense (the Ecclesia) is not an institution but a brotherhood (Bruderschaft); it is ‘a pure communion of persons (Personengemeinschaft).’ On this ground Brunner rejected all law, sacrament, and priestly office as incompatible with the true being of the Church” (Models of the Church, 44).
49. Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 4, pt. 1, p. 150.
50. These differences are recounted and interpreted in fascinating detail in Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth and the Pietists (trans. Daniel W. Bloesch; Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2004).
51. Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 4, pt. 4.
52. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans (trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns from the 6th ed.; London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1933), 304; cf. 396 for the same analogy.
53. Ibid., 340.
54. Ibid. That this is the expression of 1920 should perhaps be taken into account here.
55. Ibid., 36.
56. Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 4, pt. 3, pp. 7, 327; vol. 4, pt. 2, p. 132.
57. Ibid., vol. 3, pt. 2, p. 141.
58. It is interesting that while Calvin rejects Erasmus’s translations of koinonia as societas and communio, in favor of stronger participationist language, Barth prefers Gemeinde (community, society, fellowship) to Kirche (church). To be sure, Barth affirms the New Testament motif of koinonia, founded on Trinitarian presuppositions: the persons (modes of being) in communion with each other; the communion between God and human beings; the communion of believers with each other, and indeed with all creatures. Each communion is a different kind of koinonia, but is ultimately grounded in this Trinitarian perichoresis (Church Dogmatics, vol. 3, pt. 2, pp. 256-60). There are more recent historical reasons, of course, for preferring Gemeinde to Kirche, such as the way these are distinguished in German Protestantism.
59. Even better than Barth, in my estimation, is John Webster’s treatment in Word and Church: Essays in Christian Dogmatics (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001), 227-32.
60. Volf, After Our Likeness, 161-62.
61. Volf (ibid., 16-17) points out that the privatization of faith that warps Free Church ecclesiologies threatens “the transmission of faith.” Yet he also judges that this adaptability to a culture of personal choice renders such ecclesiologies especially effective in our day (17). “Whether they want to or not, Free Churches often function as ‘homogeneous units’ specializing in the specific needs of specific social classes and cultural circles, and then in mutual competition try to sell their commodity at dumping prices to the religious consumer in the supermarket of life projects; the customer is king and the one best suited to evaluate his or her own religious needs and from whom nothing more is required than a bit of loyalty and as much money as possible. If the Free Churches want to contribute to the salvation of Christendom, they themselves must first be healed” (ibid., 18).
62. Ibid., 147-49.
63. Ibid., 150n93.
64. Ibid., 151.
65. Ibid., 152.
66. Ibid., 153.
67. Ibid., 156-58.
68. Ibid., 78-79, emphasis in original.
69. Grenz, Theology for the Community of God, 609.
70. Ibid., 610-611.
71. Ibid., 611.
72. Ibid.
73. Ibid., 614. For all of their differences, some of the modern versions of totus Christus we have encountered share with Protestant individualism a contractual rather than covenantal outlook. Reflecting his heritage in pietism, Schleiermacher wrote, “The Christian Church is formed through regenerate individuals coming together for mutual interaction and cooperation in an orderly way” (Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith [ed. and trans. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1928], 532). So, ironically, he could simultaneously view the church as a voluntary society among others (though of regenerate individuals) and speak of the sacrificing of the individual to the community. Ratzinger and Zizioulas also speak of the “sacrificing” of the individual to the community, while much of radical Protestantism today seems to assume a more autonomous individualism. However, the equal danger in contemporary mainline and evangelical Protestantism is to overreact against this individualism (marked especially in North America) by embracing a romantic notion of community.
74. Amos Yong, The Spirit Poured Out on All Flesh (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 84. Yong provides a helpful survey of the differences that emerged within the Wesleyan-Holiness/Pentecostal traditions, including debates over “whether there are one, two, or even three ‘works of grace’” (98–120). Throughout this discussion, Yong defends the importance of successive “crisis experiences” throughout the Christian life. This contrasts with a covenantal orientation, in which such experiences may or may not occur, yet life in the Spirit is seen as the common property of all believers.
75. I explore these issues more extensively in People and Place: A Covenant Ecclesiology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2008).
76. Douglas Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia: On the Significance of the Doctrine of the Ascension for Ecclesiology and Christian Cosmology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), chap. 4, pp. 87-164.
77. Ibid., 97, citing Origen’s First Principles 23.2.
78. Ibid., 119-20, citing Augustine’s Sermons 264; cf. The Trinity 1.18.
79. Ibid., esp. 150-60.
80. John Calvin, Commentaries on the Epistles of Paul to the Galatians and Ephesians (trans. William Pringle; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, repr. 1957), 218 (on Eph 1:23).
81. Paul D. L. Avis, The Church in the Theology of the Reformers (Atlanta: John Knox, 1981), 1.
82. The Reformed confessions added discipline, which I discuss below (pp. 896-97).
83. John Calvin on Eph 1:23, in Commentaries on the Epistles of Paul to the Galatians and Ephesians (trans. William Pringle; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1957), 218.
84. Lesslie Newbigin, The Household of God: Lectures on the Nature of the Church (London: SCM, 1953), 80.
85. Lesslie Newbigin, The Household of God: Lectures on the Nature of the Church (London: SCM, 1953), 80.
86. Ibid.
87. Dulles, Models of the Church, 17, 21-30. In fact, Paul Minear’s Images of the Church in the New Testament (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960) lists 96 images.
88. Dulles, Models of the Church, 46-47.
89. Heidelberg Catechism, q. 54, in The Psalter Hymnal: Doctrinal Standards and Liturgy of the Christian Reformed Church (Grand Rapids: Board of Publications of the CRC, 1976), 27.
90. Calvin, Institutes 4.1.2-3.
91. Westminster Confession, ch. 25, in Trinity Hymnal (rev. ed.; Philadelphia: Great Commission Publications, 1990), 863.
92. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 1, Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church (ed. Joachim von Soosten; English edition ed. Clifford J. Green; trans. Reinhard Krauss and Nancy Lukens; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), 162.
93. See, for example, Kilian McDonnell, SJ, “Vatican II (1962-1964), Puebla (1979), Synod (1985): Koinonia/Communio as an Integral Ecclesiology,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 25, no. 3 (Summer 1988): 414.
94. Grenz, Theology for the Community of God, 614.
95. Differing largely in nothing more than terminology, Presbyterian churches refer to the local session, a regional presbytery, and a national General Assembly, while for Reformed churches these bodies are referred to as consistory, classis, and synod, respectively.
96. Clement of Rome, 1 Co rin thi ans, in The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translation (2nd ed.; ed. Michael W. Holmes; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1989), 22-100.
97. The Didache, in ibid., 246-69.
98. Jerome, “Letter CXLVI to Evangelus” and “Letter LXIV to Oceanus,” in “Earliest Textual Documentaton,” Paradigms in Polity (ed. David W. Hall and Joseph H. Hall; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 57-58.
99. Quoted by Samuel Miller in “Presbyterianism: The Apostolic Constitution,” in Paradigms in Polity, 81.
100. J. B. Lightfoot, St. Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians (London: Macmillan, 1868; repr. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1974), 98-99.
101. Second Helvetic Confession, in The Book of Confessions (Louisville: PCUSA General Assembly, 1991), ch. 18, 5.160-62.
102. Interestingly, both Cardinal Ratzinger (Called to Communion, 122-23) and John Zizioulas (Being as Communion, 195) acknowledge that presbyteros and episcopos are used interchangeably in the New Testament and were synonymous offices in the earliest Christian communities.
103. Volf, After Our Likeness, 135.
104. For a helpful defense of office from a Free Church perspective, see Mark Dever, “The Priesthood of All Believers: Reconsidering Every-Member Ministry,” in The Compromised Church: The Present Evangelical Crisis (ed. John Armstrong; Westchester, Ill.: Crossway, 1998), 85-116.
105. Derke Bergsma, “Prophets, Priest, Kings: Biblical Offices,” in The Compromised Church, 117-32.
106. Donald McGavran, Understanding Church Growth (3rd ed.; rev. C. Peter Wagner; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 163.
107. Ibid., 174.
108. Ibid., 174-75. C. Peter Wagner defends McGavran’s approach in Our Kind of People: The Ethical Dimensions of Church Growth in America (Atlanta: John Knox, 1979).
109. Allan Boesak responds, “Manipulation of the word of God to suit culture, prejudices, or ideology is alien to the Reformed tradition” (Black and Reformed: Apartheid, Liberation and the Calvinist Tradition [ed. Leonard Sweetman; Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1984], 87). According to John de Gruchy, Reformed churches were not segregated until the “revivals in the mid-nineteenth century” by holiness preacher Andrew Murray and pietist missionaries. “It was under the dominance of such evangelicalism,” says de Gruchy, “rather than the strict Calvinism of Dort, that the Dutch Reformed Church agreed at its Synod of 1857 that congregations could be divided along racial lines.” He adds, “Despite the fact that this development went against earlier synodical decisions that segregation in the church was contrary to the Word of God, it was rationalized on grounds of missiology and practical necessity. Missiologically it was argued that people were best evangelized and best worshipped God in their own language and cultural setting, a position reinforced by German Lutheran missiology and somewhat akin to the church-growth philosophy of our own time” (Liberating Reformed Theology: A South African Contribution to an Ecumenical Debate [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991], 23-24).
110. Karl Rahner, “The Church,” in Sacramentum Mundi: An Encyclopedia of Theology (ed. K. Rahner SJ et al.; New York: Herder and Herder, 1968), 1:319.
111. Dulles, Models of the Church, 72-73.
112. Karl Rahner, “Christian ity and the ‘New Man,’” in Later Writings (Theological Investigations 5; trans. Karl-H. Kruger; (Baltimore: Helicon., 1966), 5:149, quoted in Dulles, Models of the Church, 114.
113. See, for example, Yong, The Spirit Poured Out on All Flesh, 130. Drawing on the doctrine of dispensations developed by John Fletcher (Wesley’s successor), Yong, a Pentecostal theologian, reaches the same goal, but by way of the immediacy of the Spirit apart from any necessary connection to the word of Christ or the church. This allows him also to affirm that “the mystical and universal body of Christ would include the entire spectrum from all those who explicitly confess his name to all who may not be knowledgeable about Jesus but are spiritually united with him by the power of the Holy Spirit.”
114. Newbigin, Household of God, 79.
115. From leitourgia, the term “liturgy” can refer to the service of the people or the ser vice to the people, rendered by the state. It was appropriated by the early church as the Divine service. Churches of the Reformation have interpreted the weekly gathering of the church as God’s ser vice to his people, provoking their response of faith in Christ and love for neighbor.
116. Miroslav Volf, “Worship as Adoration and Action: Reflections on a Christian Way of Being-in-the-World,” in Worship: Adoration and Action (ed. D. A. Carson; Carlisle, UK: Paternoster, 1993), 207.
117. Ibid., 208.
118. Westminster Confession, ch. 25.5, in Trinity Hymnal (rev. ed.; Philadelphia: Great Commission Publications, 1990), 863.
119. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 350.
120. Ibid., 212-13.
121. Ibid., 214.
122. Oswald Bayer, Living by Grace: Justification and Sanctification (trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley; Eerdmans, 2003), 62; cf. Martin Luther, Luther’s Works (ed. Helmut T. Lehmann; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1957; repr., 1971), 37:365.
123. Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 575.
124. Newbigin, The Household of God, 84.