Each Sunday, around the world, Christians gather to profess their faith and to witness to the reality of God’s action in their midst. And each Sunday, many of them do a curious thing: affirm faith in their own existence: “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints…” Why must we affirm that we believe in the church? If it could simply be seen or observed like any other earthly reality, why should it be in the creed? Every other article of the Apostle’s Creed names a reality that is either intrinsically invisible to us, or invisible to us now because it happened in the past or is yet to be revealed in the future. Our belief “in the holy catholic church” fits plausibly within the last class— realities which we can dimly perceive now, but which in their full and proper sense are yet to be revealed to our senses. The church, too, is an object of faith.[1]
In his stirring essay, “The One City of God,” Peter Leithart acknowledges the importance of this “gesture toward invisibility” (as John Webster puts it), but seems decidedly uncomfortable with it. In large part, his worry seems to be rhetorical—that “If we think the church is an invisible community of true believers, then we might be tempted to avoid the mess of membership in a real community.” This is a real danger and I do not wish to minimize it. I would heartily echo Leithart’s exhortations to earnestly pursue visible unity amidst our visible churches, with all their highly visible divisions.
But if this is all there is to his warning, the essay need give us little pause. After all, similar warnings have been raised about the doctrines of election or justification by faith alone; indeed, whenever we proclaim the absolute primacy of God’s gracious action over our own human response, we can run the rhetorical risk of encouraging complacency. But we cannot avoid this risk by ignoring these essential truths. That will simply open us up to the opposite danger: imagining that our works determine the success or failure of God’s purposes, or that the visible contours of the Christian life determine the invisible realities. Theology is a dangerous business, and one must constantly attend to the perils on every side. Leithart warns, “the church … has invisible dimensions and depths, deep as the depths of God Himself. But these invisible dimensions don’t overwhelm or cancel the real-world character of the church.” But in my view we must equally say that the church’s visible dimensions should not overwhelm or cancel the invisible character of the church. Is Leithart willing to say this?
In places, he appears not to, pushing the bolder thesis that it is not merely risky, but strictly speaking false and grammatically improper to speak of “the invisible church,” or to describe the hidden body of true believers as the church. But it is here that we must press the definitional question: what, fundamentallyand irreducibly, is the church? What is it about the church that makes it the church? I might be able to agree with Leithart that the church is “a human society, but it’s an utterly unique human society,” depending on what it is that makes it utterly unique. Is it unique simply because it’s a human society formed for unique purposes and ends, characterized by unique practices? Is the church, like the local bowling league, a human society, but unique inasmuch as it is formed for the purpose of worshipping the triune God? This, in my view, is a woefully inadequate account. The church is a human society only in the sense that it is a society of human beings; but is not a society formed by human beings.
The church lives not of herself, or by the actions of her human members, but by the power of the Word of God and the action of the Spirit. Otherwise, the church would not be the church, but merely another religious association or social club. As Christoph Schwöbel puts it, “The Church is creatura verbi divini: the creature of the divine Word. The church is constituted by God’s action and not by any human action. It is not an association of people who have a shared taste for religion or the creation of some kind of human community spirit.”[2]Of course the church thereby created does take shape as a visible community of worship and witness—but it can only become visible as the church because of its prior (and continuing) invisibility. This is why Bavinck and the tradition insist that the church’s essence derives from its true members, whose identity remains partially hidden.
Leithart is rightly concerned that we speak biblically about the church; but this is precisely why we cannot rightly define the word “church,” as Leithart does, as a historical or sociological reality. On his definition, we could not say that the church is “blessed in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places” or “chosen to be holy and blameless before him,” or “predestined for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed the church in the Beloved.” We could not say that the church “has redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of its trespasses, according to the riches of his grace.” We could only say that the church is a group of people, some of whom have these things. But of course, we could also say the same thing about the local bowling league, so long as there are some Christians within it. We could not say that the church is the body of which Christ is head (1 Cor. 12), or the branches of which Christ is the vine (Jn. 15), or the flock of those who hear Christ’s voice (Jn. 10); only that the church is a human society among whom are people who are sheep, branches, or members of Christ.
In short, to speak coherently and biblically about the church, we must acknowledge that the church’s invisibility is not incidental or merely adverbial, but is actually constitutive of the church. The church is made up of visible members, but the thread that knits them together as the church is an invisible one.
And if this is the case, then we must insist, with the Augustinian and Protestant tradition, that properly speaking, those who are not members of Christ are not members of the church. Of course, Scripture does not hesitate to describe as “church” bodies of believers that were surely mixed with hypocrites, just as we might not hesitate to say “we invited a group of college students over for lunch,” even if there were a couple of alumni in their midst—especially if the alumni tagged along uninvited. If Leithart really wishes to insist, contra the tradition, that the unregenerate are indeed true members of the church, then he will have to concede that “the church” is defined by something other than the divine life within it and the divine purpose for it. This, in my view, would make a complete muddle of the New Testament’s teaching, so I hope to see Dr. Leithart clarify his position on this point.
Let me close, however, by addressing the imperative for which his reformulation of the indicative is meant to prepare us: the imperative of visible unity.
Perhaps surprisingly, given Leithart’s hesitations regarding the church’s invisibility, he acknowledges that the task of visible unity begins in the reality of invisible unity: “The church’s visible unity arises from the invisible reality of the members union with Christ, and our participation with one another, by the Spirit.”
But what is this visible unity, and in what ways is it lacking today? Leithart highlights failures to proclaim one faith, and failures to share in one baptism and one eucharist, and these should undoubtedly concern us. But he also here, as in his recent book The End of Protestantism, cannot resist fingering “denominationalism” as a grievous failure of visible unity. Indeed, in The End of Protestantism, he insists on institutional unity as a key desideratum for our ecumenical efforts:
“Guided by Scripture above all and by the Christian tradition, the [reunited future] church will issue binding judgments about which deviations are tolerable and which are intolerable. Some opinions and teachers will be judged a threat to the gospel itself, and impenitent teachers will be expelled from the church. … [T]he reunited church will have one advantage over the churches of today: expulsion from the reunited church will be plausibly seen as expulsion from the church.”[3]
The problem, of course, is that anyone can draw boundaries—different churches are attempting to do so in their own ways all the time—but it’s quite another thing to enforce those boundaries in a way that makes them meaningful. The only way to do this in a unified way that prevents the excluded Christians from forming their own church is to have (a) an infallible magisterium, which can “issue binding judgments about which deviations are tolerable” and (b) a universal Christian magistrate, who can enforce those judgments and suppress separating sects. Somehow I doubt this is what Leithart is really calling for.
Even short of this extreme, though, confusing visible unity and institutional unity can have grievous consequences. Many over-hasty efforts to dissolve denominational boundaries have resulted in fresh schisms or deep wounds of mutual suspicion within Christian churches. When Jesus exhorts his disciples to unity at the Last Supper, it is a unity of loving one another that he is chiefly concerned with (Jn. 13:34-35), and Paul shows the same concern in his critique of the divisions at Corinth. There is certainly no shortage of failures to love one another in the American church today, but many of the worst failures are within, not across, denominational boundaries. Indeed, most American Christians today are far less likely to hate their brother for being a Methodist, not an Anglican, than for being a Democrat, not a Republican.
In short, I applaud Dr. Leithart’s call for Christians today to urgently pursue the goal of visible unity. I am less convinced, however, that his essay gives us the most useful set of categories or benchmarks to aid us in that pursuit.
Bradford Littlejohn (Ph.D, University of Edinburgh; M.A., New Saint Andrews College) is the President of the Davenant Institute and Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Theory at Patrick Henry College. He has authored or edited many books in the field of historical theology, including The Peril and Promise of Christian Liberty (Eerdmans, 2017), and Reformation Theology: A Reader of Primary Sources with Introductions (Davenant, 2017).
[1]As providence would have it, I received the invitation to participate in this series the day before I published a lengthy article on this precise question in the journal Religions. I have borrowed bits and pieces from that essay here; as the journal is open-access, you can read the full text here.
[2]Christoph Schwöbel, “The Creature of the Word: Recovering the Ecclesiology of the Reformers,” in Colin E. Gunton and Daniel W. Hardy, eds.,On Being the Church: Essays on the Christian Community(Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989, 122.
[3]Peter Leithart, The End of Protestantism: Pursuing Unity in a Fragmented Church (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2016), 29-30.
Each Sunday, around the world, Christians gather to profess their faith and to witness to the reality of God’s action in their midst. And each Sunday, many of them do a curious thing: affirm faith in their own existence: “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints…” Why must we affirm that we believe in the church? If it could simply be seen or observed like any other earthly reality, why should it be in the creed? Every other article of the Apostle’s Creed names a reality that is either intrinsically invisible to us, or invisible to us now because it happened in the past or is yet to be revealed in the future. Our belief “in the holy catholic church” fits plausibly within the last class— realities which we can dimly perceive now, but which in their full and proper sense are yet to be revealed to our senses. The church, too, is an object of faith.[1]
In his stirring essay, “The One City of God,” Peter Leithart acknowledges the importance of this “gesture toward invisibility” (as John Webster puts it), but seems decidedly uncomfortable with it. In large part, his worry seems to be rhetorical—that “If we think the church is an invisible community of true believers, then we might be tempted to avoid the mess of membership in a real community.” This is a real danger and I do not wish to minimize it. I would heartily echo Leithart’s exhortations to earnestly pursue visible unity amidst our visible churches, with all their highly visible divisions.
But if this is all there is to his warning, the essay need give us little pause. After all, similar warnings have been raised about the doctrines of election or justification by faith alone; indeed, whenever we proclaim the absolute primacy of God’s gracious action over our own human response, we can run the rhetorical risk of encouraging complacency. But we cannot avoid this risk by ignoring these essential truths. That will simply open us up to the opposite danger: imagining that our works determine the success or failure of God’s purposes, or that the visible contours of the Christian life determine the invisible realities. Theology is a dangerous business, and one must constantly attend to the perils on every side. Leithart warns, “the church … has invisible dimensions and depths, deep as the depths of God Himself. But these invisible dimensions don’t overwhelm or cancel the real-world character of the church.” But in my view we must equally say that the church’s visible dimensions should not overwhelm or cancel the invisible character of the church. Is Leithart willing to say this?
In places, he appears not to, pushing the bolder thesis that it is not merely risky, but strictly speaking false and grammatically improper to speak of “the invisible church,” or to describe the hidden body of true believers as the church. But it is here that we must press the definitional question: what, fundamentallyand irreducibly, is the church? What is it about the church that makes it the church? I might be able to agree with Leithart that the church is “a human society, but it’s an utterly unique human society,” depending on what it is that makes it utterly unique. Is it unique simply because it’s a human society formed for unique purposes and ends, characterized by unique practices? Is the church, like the local bowling league, a human society, but unique inasmuch as it is formed for the purpose of worshipping the triune God? This, in my view, is a woefully inadequate account. The church is a human society only in the sense that it is a society of human beings; but is not a society formed by human beings.
The church lives not of herself, or by the actions of her human members, but by the power of the Word of God and the action of the Spirit. Otherwise, the church would not be the church, but merely another religious association or social club. As Christoph Schwöbel puts it, “The Church is creatura verbi divini: the creature of the divine Word. The church is constituted by God’s action and not by any human action. It is not an association of people who have a shared taste for religion or the creation of some kind of human community spirit.”[2]Of course the church thereby created does take shape as a visible community of worship and witness—but it can only become visible as the church because of its prior (and continuing) invisibility. This is why Bavinck and the tradition insist that the church’s essence derives from its true members, whose identity remains partially hidden.
Leithart is rightly concerned that we speak biblically about the church; but this is precisely why we cannot rightly define the word “church,” as Leithart does, as a historical or sociological reality. On his definition, we could not say that the church is “blessed in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places” or “chosen to be holy and blameless before him,” or “predestined for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed the church in the Beloved.” We could not say that the church “has redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of its trespasses, according to the riches of his grace.” We could only say that the church is a group of people, some of whom have these things. But of course, we could also say the same thing about the local bowling league, so long as there are some Christians within it. We could not say that the church is the body of which Christ is head (1 Cor. 12), or the branches of which Christ is the vine (Jn. 15), or the flock of those who hear Christ’s voice (Jn. 10); only that the church is a human society among whom are people who are sheep, branches, or members of Christ.
In short, to speak coherently and biblically about the church, we must acknowledge that the church’s invisibility is not incidental or merely adverbial, but is actually constitutive of the church. The church is made up of visible members, but the thread that knits them together as the church is an invisible one.
And if this is the case, then we must insist, with the Augustinian and Protestant tradition, that properly speaking, those who are not members of Christ are not members of the church. Of course, Scripture does not hesitate to describe as “church” bodies of believers that were surely mixed with hypocrites, just as we might not hesitate to say “we invited a group of college students over for lunch,” even if there were a couple of alumni in their midst—especially if the alumni tagged along uninvited. If Leithart really wishes to insist, contra the tradition, that the unregenerate are indeed true members of the church, then he will have to concede that “the church” is defined by something other than the divine life within it and the divine purpose for it. This, in my view, would make a complete muddle of the New Testament’s teaching, so I hope to see Dr. Leithart clarify his position on this point.
Let me close, however, by addressing the imperative for which his reformulation of the indicative is meant to prepare us: the imperative of visible unity.
Perhaps surprisingly, given Leithart’s hesitations regarding the church’s invisibility, he acknowledges that the task of visible unity begins in the reality of invisible unity: “The church’s visible unity arises from the invisible reality of the members union with Christ, and our participation with one another, by the Spirit.”
But what is this visible unity, and in what ways is it lacking today? Leithart highlights failures to proclaim one faith, and failures to share in one baptism and one eucharist, and these should undoubtedly concern us. But he also here, as in his recent book The End of Protestantism, cannot resist fingering “denominationalism” as a grievous failure of visible unity. Indeed, in The End of Protestantism, he insists on institutional unity as a key desideratum for our ecumenical efforts:
“Guided by Scripture above all and by the Christian tradition, the [reunited future] church will issue binding judgments about which deviations are tolerable and which are intolerable. Some opinions and teachers will be judged a threat to the gospel itself, and impenitent teachers will be expelled from the church. … [T]he reunited church will have one advantage over the churches of today: expulsion from the reunited church will be plausibly seen as expulsion from the church.”[3]
The problem, of course, is that anyone can draw boundaries—different churches are attempting to do so in their own ways all the time—but it’s quite another thing to enforce those boundaries in a way that makes them meaningful. The only way to do this in a unified way that prevents the excluded Christians from forming their own church is to have (a) an infallible magisterium, which can “issue binding judgments about which deviations are tolerable” and (b) a universal Christian magistrate, who can enforce those judgments and suppress separating sects. Somehow I doubt this is what Leithart is really calling for.
Even short of this extreme, though, confusing visible unity and institutional unity can have grievous consequences. Many over-hasty efforts to dissolve denominational boundaries have resulted in fresh schisms or deep wounds of mutual suspicion within Christian churches. When Jesus exhorts his disciples to unity at the Last Supper, it is a unity of loving one another that he is chiefly concerned with (Jn. 13:34-35), and Paul shows the same concern in his critique of the divisions at Corinth. There is certainly no shortage of failures to love one another in the American church today, but many of the worst failures are within, not across, denominational boundaries. Indeed, most American Christians today are far less likely to hate their brother for being a Methodist, not an Anglican, than for being a Democrat, not a Republican.
In short, I applaud Dr. Leithart’s call for Christians today to urgently pursue the goal of visible unity. I am less convinced, however, that his essay gives us the most useful set of categories or benchmarks to aid us in that pursuit.
Bradford Littlejohn (Ph.D, University of Edinburgh; M.A., New Saint Andrews College) is the President of the Davenant Institute and Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Theory at Patrick Henry College. He has authored or edited many books in the field of historical theology, including The Peril and Promise of Christian Liberty (Eerdmans, 2017), and Reformation Theology: A Reader of Primary Sources with Introductions (Davenant, 2017).
[1]As providence would have it, I received the invitation to participate in this series the day before I published a lengthy article on this precise question in the journal Religions. I have borrowed bits and pieces from that essay here; as the journal is open-access, you can read the full text here.
[2]Christoph Schwöbel, “The Creature of the Word: Recovering the Ecclesiology of the Reformers,” in Colin E. Gunton and Daniel W. Hardy, eds.,On Being the Church: Essays on the Christian Community(Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989, 122.
[3]Peter Leithart, The End of Protestantism: Pursuing Unity in a Fragmented Church (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2016), 29-30.
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