The word “Church” means a lot of different things to different people. But what does the word mean in its biblical context? And what are the common ways that we misuse it today?
Speaker 1:
You are listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Hi, and welcome to Shameless Popery. This is Joe Heschmeyer. I wanted to talk today about the church. What does the Bible say The church is? This is a big issue that Christians often either don’t think about or disagree about pretty strongly.
Particularly I want to look at six biblical images of the church. And this is in no way exhaustive. I also want to address three common myths about the church. To begin with, let’s start the biblical images. The first biblical image, of course, is the church as the body of Christ. And we see this in first Corinthians 12, in which St. Paul says that, “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. For by one spirit we were all baptized into one body. Jews are Greeks, slaves are free and all were made to drink of one spirit.” Now, this is maybe an obvious point to some of you, but it’s really important point because this is actually a controversial one, that the way you enter the church in the Bible is baptism. That’s how you enter the body of Christ, which is how he’s describing the church.
And we see this in other places as well. For instance, in Acts 2 we see St. Peter on the famous homily on Pentecost. At the end of it, the people cry out, “Brethren, what shall we do?” And Peter says to them, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sin, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” Even goes on today with many words and exhortations, “Save yourselves from this crooked generation.” And so Acts 2:41, “Those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about 3,000 souls.” Well, added to what? Added to the church. We see the explosion of the church on Pentecost happens through baptism.
Now, we don’t want to separate that from all the other dimensions. Obviously the working of the Holy Spirit is through the spirit that you’re baptized. We don’t want to lose the charismatic dimension, we don’t want to lose the dimension of preaching of the word. All of those things are important, but the doorway to the church, according to scripture, is baptism.
Now, First Corinthians, let’s go back to First Corinthians 12 because we can see here St. Paul talking about this. He says, “You are the body of Christ and individually members of it. And God is appointed in the church, first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then workers of miracles, then healers, helpers, administrators, speakers in various kinds of tongues.” And he goes on to say, “Are all apostles? Are all prophets? No, but earnestly desire the higher gifts.” And that’s going to lead into his famous exhortation on love that you hear it a lot at weddings, First Corinthians 13.
But notice there that what he’s describing, when he says the body of Christ, there’s a couple ways we can think about a body. Sometimes we think about a body as just an undifferentiated mass. If you just say, “Well, the body of evidence,” you don’t mean that it’s arranged necessarily, you just mean, yeah, the mass of it, the group of it. But body in the original sense refers to something structured and organized. But here’s the other thing; it’s the body of Christ refers to something visible. It refers to the incarnation. We lose this 2,000 years on.
But the craziest part of Christianity in some ways is the idea that the invisible, infinite God who is spirit takes on humanity, takes on a body, that, “The word was made flesh,” John 1:14. And so the body of Christ is this shocking, visible sign of the invisible God, that Jesus’ humanity points to his invisible divinity. And so too, when Paul talks about the church as the body of Christ, he has all of that in view. And we’re going to see this from the other images. But that’s one of the chief images and I think the most important image to lead with.
The second one, the church as the bride of Christ and the fullness of Christ. Now, if you thought describing the church as the body of Christ with this incarnational message was shocking, wait till you hear the rest of what St. Paul has to say. Maybe the most shocking thing is in Ephesians chapter 1 and which he says in verse 22 to 23, “And He, the father, has put all things under his, the son’s, feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.”
Now, easy to catch the body part. Wait a second, the fullness of him, the fullness of Christ. What does it mean to say that the church is the fullness of Christ? Well, go back to Isaiah 61. In verse 10, there’s a line in which the inspired author says, “I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my spiritual exalt in my God.” And then goes on to talk about being clothed with the garments of salvation, covered with the robe of righteousness,” which these were often viewed as baptismal pre-configurations, “as a bride groom decks himself with a garland and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.”
Now, you might just think, well, this is just said Hebrew pattern of doing two different similar images; and maybe so, but the early Christian saw something deeper in it. Augustine and his track tapes… Or excuse me, homilies on first John talks about this and notices this thing. Well, there’s one speaker who is describing himself both as bridegroom and bride. What do we make of that? And he said, “Well, because it’s not two but one flesh, because the word was made flesh and dwelt in us. To that flesh, that church is joint and so there is made the whole Christ, head and body.” Now, that is a shocking statement, that the Christus totus, the whole Christ, is Jesus plus the church that if you have Jesus and say you don’t need the church, you have a decapitated Christ, you have an incomplete Christ, you have a bridegroom left at the altar, that you don’t have the fullness of Jesus Christ if you don’t have the church.
Now, some of you are saying, “Well, what kind of church?” Well, we’re going to get to that. But right now, let’s just get this idea right, that you absolutely need the church if you want to have all of Jesus. And if you don’t want to have all of Jesus, then we got to have a different video for that.
But you might be thinking, well, Augustine is just going way overboard. Obviously he’s a Catholic bishop, he’s going to have some crazy things to say about the church. Fair enough. But who else does St. Paul? St. Paul, in Ephesians 5, says, “As the church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands.” There is then that really long description about what husbands and wives owe to each other. And he keeps connecting it to what Christ does for the church and what the church does in response to Christ. But then in verse 29, he says, “For no man ever hates his own flesh but nourishes it and cherishes it as Christ does the church because we are members of His body.” Again, he’s connecting bridegroom and bride to his body, head and body.
And then he quotes Genesis, “For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” And then there’s this really striking part, because a lot of people read Ephesians 5 just as a thing about gender roles; gets super controversial for all of that. But that’s not actually the point that Paul is mostly going for here. All of that’s there, all that’s true, we can talk about all that, but if we miss the church part, we miss the thing that strikes Paul about it because the last line, he says, “This is a great mystery, and I mean in reference to Christ and the church.” It’s a great mystery to St. Paul how it can be that the bridegroom and the bride are one flesh, that Jesus and the church are one flesh union, such that the church is the completion or the fullness of Christ.
That is a striking claim. I’m going out on a limb here a little bit, but I think there’s a reason that St. Paul gets this, and I think that reason has to do with his own story. In Acts 9, we have the conversion of Saul who becomes Paul. Well, he’s breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord. For those of you who don’t remember Acts 9, this is well after Jesus is ascended in heaven. Though the church is a small community of believers who are then being hunted down by Paul, he goes and asks for letters so he can find any belonging to the way, men or women, and have them brought to Jerusalem so they can be killed. He already had collaborated in the killing of St. Stephen.
Along the way, on the road to Damascus, he has a, I guess you’d call it a road to Damascus moment. And he’s struck down to the ground. A lot of paintings depict this as like him being struck from a horse, more likely a camel, maybe even walking, but probably a camel. And he hears a voice that says to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” And he said, “Who are you, Lord?” And this voice says, “I am Jesus whom you are persecuting.”
Now, that point is not lost on him because obviously Saul is not trying to kill the risen and ascended Lord Jesus, he is trying to kill Christians; he’s trying to persecute the church. He is breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord. He is asking for letters to arrest and bring back to Jerusalem anyone belonging to the way. And so we see in this really radical identification of Christ with the church, that he identifies the persecuted church as a persecution of him, not of his people.
There’s another clue to this too, and I actually highlighted it, but I think it’s easy to miss, which is that the church is calling itself the way. Now, Jesus doesn’t give it that name. We don’t see any point in scripture where Jesus calls it the way. What he does instead, John 14:6, he says, “I am the way, the truth and the life.”
The church has so deeply recognized herself as the continuation, extension, completion of Jesus and his ministry and himself and his person that she presents herself as the way. Not as the second way, but as just this total unity with Christ. That’s the biblical depiction of the church. That’s what I say by the completion of Christ, the extension, the wholeness, the fullness of Christ; however you want to describe that. That’s the second thing to get right. And that is inseparable from the idea of the church as the bride of Christ, that we’re not just talking about some companion. Think about the biblical notion of a one flesh union. That’s what’s actually being described here.
Okay, so the third image to get right is the divine origins of the church. Now, maybe this is obvious given what I’ve just said, but this cannot be something that’s manmade. If you know who started your denomination, this is not the church we’re talking about. If you’re a Lutheran, you’re named after a guy from the 16th century, or if you’re a Calvinist or if you’re fill in the blank, this is not the church we’re talking about in scripture because the true church, the church is of divine origin. Now, I’m going to get into all that later on, but I want to just flag that and point to a very common, very popular phrase that I’m going… Or verse rather that I’m going to allied over.
I’m going to make this a very short point. In Matthew 16, verses 17 to 18, there’s this famous back and forth that says [inaudible 00:10:51]. And Saint Peter, after confessing that Jesus is the Christ, the son of living God, Jesus then says to him, “Blessed are you, Simon Barjona, her flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter and on this rock,” Peter’s name means rock, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell,” or the gates of Hades or the powers of death, “shall not prevail against it.”
Now, so often the Catholic Protestant conversation about this is about what does this mean about the role of Peter? Because then it goes on and talks about these special authorities that Peter has that are given to him individually, second person singular in the presence of the other apostles. And all that’s really important, all that’s really interesting. If we really want to get into understanding the church, I think that is a conversation that has to happen. That’s not going to be the conversation in this video just for time reasons, frankly. And it takes us too far down a rabbit trail. I want to focus in on one phrase, that Jesus says, “I will build my church.”
And I would encourage anyone launching this to consider what would be different about your experience of Christianity if Jesus hadn’t built a church? What I mean by that is this: Other religious movements, other philosophies, et cetera, have people who come along and say, “This is what we think this great thinker or this religious leader or whatever meant by these teachings.” And so they just autonomously, self-starting form themselves into communities.
Whatever else Jesus means, he means that’s not what we’re left to. That’s what would happen if Jesus did not build a church. The we’re looking for something else. We’re looking for a church that is actually built by Jesus Christ. When you say, “Who’s the founder of this church?” The response can credibly be, “Jesus of Nazareth.” And I would argue there’s a very short list of churches that can credibly make that claim, and none of them are Protestant. But again, we’ll get a little deeper into that as we go on because I anticipate some of the responses that are going to happen. If you’ve got responses, think about them, hold them. Hopefully I’ll address towards the end of this video.
But before we get there, I want to get to the fourth biblical image, that the church is the assembly of God. And this is a really important one because this is something that I think often gets misunderstood. For instance, here’s R.C. Sprout talking about the Ecclesial.
R.C. Sprout:
Talking about the etymological derivation of the word church. We know that the English word church translates the Greek word ekklesia, which means literally those who are called out of the world. In that meaning, for church in the New Testament, ekklesia means that the church is people. But-
Joe Heschmeyer:
That just is true. I don’t know another way to word say that more politely, but ekklesia or ekklesia does not mean the church is people, it does not mean the church are those called out of the world etymologically, literally. That’s not the literal meaning.
This is from Thayer’s Greek Lexicon. You can get other sources, I just like this one. It explains that it means called out or called forth. But this was not originally a churchy term. It was not originally a term that the church used to describe its separation from the world, it was originally a Greek word for the assembly of people who were convened in a public place or council for the purpose of deliberating. It was an organized body, or less organized body, as we’re going to see. It’s a gathering of citizens, it’s a gathering of people. It was not about separation from the world, but it was about not just being individual, that it has something to do with all actually being assembled together.
And we can see this word ecclesia or ekklesia used in Acts 19. This is after St. Paul purchased to the Ephesians. They’re really shocked because they really prided themselves on the tourist industry of the idolatry that they had there. And so the city has filled his confusion. They rushed together into the theater, they drag with them Gaius and Aristarchus, Macedonians who were St Paul’s travel companions. Paul tries to go, but he’s prevented from going into the theater. And we’re told in Acts 19 that, “Now some cried one thing some another, for the assembly was in confusion and most of them did not know why they had come together.” This crazy, disorganized mob, the word used there for the assembly there, ekklesia, it does not mean they’re called out of the world. This is a group of idolators and rioters and people just going nuts. That’s what we’re dealing with.
But there’s another use in Acts 19. The town clerk, he quiets the crown, and then he says, “Okay, look, if Demetrius and the craftsmen,” these are the people who are going to lose a lot of idol making business, “have a complaint against anyone, the courts are open and there are pro consoles. Let them bring charges against one another. But if you seek anything further, it shall be settled in the regular assembly.” There again ekklesia, only this time, it’s not a disorganized mob, it’s the organized convocation of people. And he warns, “We are in danger of being charged with rioting today, there being no cause that we can give to justify this commotion.” And then we’re told when he said this, he dismissed the assembly. We have in Act 19, the word ekklesia used to describe both this basically riotous mob and the legal proceedings of the citizens gathered together in something like a town hall.
Now, if you’ve ever been to a town hall, you maybe see why those two things are not as far apart as they might sound like they are. But it is this notion that it’s a gathering of the people. That’s the first. That’s the Greek meaning of ekklesia. There’s another meaning as well, that in the Septuagint, this is the word used to translate kajal or kajal, the assembly of the Israelites who were especially… The assembly there was for sacred purposes. This wasn’t citizens of the Greek Empire, the Roman Empire gathering together to discuss town business, this was the congregation of the Lord. That when they’re translating that Hebrew word into Greek in the Septuagint before the time of Christ, the word they used for it is ekklesia. In the first century, that word has these dual meanings. In a secular context, it means like this gathering together of the people for town purposes; it also refers to the bringing together of people for religious worship, for religious purposes.
And we see kajal, the word that’s getting translated into ekklesia, in several places. And Joshua 8:35, for instance, “There was not a word of all that Moses commanded which Joshua did not read before all the assembly of Israel and the women and the little ones and the sojourners who lived among them.” You can see it is not just the set of all believers, it’s the believers actually gathered together, it’s the believers actually united together.
There’s going to be a really critical difference between how Catholics understand this and how some, maybe many, Protestants understand this, because there’s often this reductive, oh, the church is just people. That’s not good enough because you could also say, “Well, an assembly is just people, but if you stay home, you’re not in the group.” And you can say the Michelangelo is just marble, but if you don’t know the difference between marble and the Michelangelo, there’s something deeply missing. It’s not just the matter, it’s the formed matter. And the form here is as an assembly, as a congregation.
We see other places as well. Numbers 10, actually God gives instructions to the trumpeters to tell them how to gather the assembly. This is important because it means it’s not just like the riotous mom that we saw in Acts 19, that the Jewish understanding is something a little more formalized; it’s something that actually has a convocation. Trumpeters are heralding people to come together.
Moreover, Deuteronomy 23 talks about people who, for whatever reason, can’t be part of the assembly because of castration or because they were illegitimate children. And so the assembly, the kajal, which in the Greek version of the Bible, again, the ekklesia, is not just anyone and everyone who believes, it has something a lot more structured in the meaning. When we talk about the assembly of God, we still need to have in mind something that’s visible, something that’s structured, something that’s, to some level, orderly. It can be a little bit like a mob, but we can still say, “Yeah, this person is in it, this person isn’t.”
In Acts 19, you’ll notice Paul wasn’t in the ekklesia, he wasn’t in the assembly, he was kept out of going into the theater. But there was a particular time and place in location and gathering and all of that. All that is included within the notion of the church in the way the Bible uses the word church.
Okay, images five and six here, the church as the household of God and the church is the pillar and foundation of the truth. Oh, I’ve got the wrong verse number there. That should be First Timothy, 3:15. St. Paul says, “I hope to come to you soon, but I’m writing these instructions to you so that if I’ve delayed, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and bullwork of the truth.”
He’s just given three descriptions of the church. The church is the household of God, the church as the church of the living God or the assembly of the living God, and the church as the pillar and bullwork of the truth, or the pillar and foundation of the truth. That is a critical role of the church. The church is not just you and me gathered together as we see fit, but there is this notion that in the absence of an apostle, if you want to know how one ought to live the Christian life, you look to the church. And that’s part of the role of the church, as household of God, as, even more obviously, the pillar and the bullwork of the truth; that if I want to know how to live the Christian life and I don’t have St. Paul to ask, which I don’t, I’m not left orphaned, I can look to the church, because this is part of the mission and role of the church. This gets both into who the church is but also what the church is for, if that makes sense, because these two ideas are really closely related.
I want to summarize all these things. And by the way, you can see that role of the church’s pillar and bullwork, or pillar and foundation of truth, in several places. For instance, in Acts 15, a theological crisis breaks out over what’s called the Judaizer controversy. The Judaizers went out without permission and were teaching heresy. And in response to that, the church leaders gather in Jerusalem. The apostles and the elders get together and they condemn this heresy. And they give instructions, and they say in those instructions in Acts 15:28, “It seemed good to us and the Holy Spirit,” or it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and us. They speak on behalf of God. And in the letter they write, they condemn the Judaizers for going out with that permission.
Now, this is something really important that we lose sight of in the modern world, where you just think, well, if I’ve got a message to share, I’m going to go share it. That there’s an actual role of sindy. Romans 10, St. Paul says, “How can they preach unless they are sent?” That this is all done in relationship to the church. If you’re a loan operator and you’re not doing this in connection with the church, if you’re doing it apart from the bishops – we’ll get into that more later – you’ve just broken from this Christian model of what the church looks like.
Let’s bring all that together now. The church is a visible, structured society established by Jesus Christ to be the pillar and foundation of truth in the house of the living God. The church is the bread of Christ, it is the body of Christ. In some sense, we can even say the church is Christ Himself in as much as the church is a continuation of His incarnation, that the church can apply to herself titles that Christ applies to Himself, and that we shouldn’t try to separate Christ in the church in a new radical way.
If those are the positive images of the church that we see in scripture, what are the myths? What are the things that I think we’re getting wrong? Well, the first one is this idea that really starts in full with the reformation, but before that, even with Jan Hus and John Wycliffe, which is that the church is the total number of the saved and only the saved.
I went on YouTube and I just wrote, what is the church? Because I wanted to see what are people saying? “Who do people say that I am?” as Jesus was saying, Matthew 16. What do people say about the church? And I think this was the very first video I saw. I went back, and it was actually like the fourth, but I think at the time, this was the first video that I saw is from Got Questions.
Speaker 4:
The body of Christ is comprised of two aspects, a universal church and a local church. Diving deeper, the universal church consists of all those who have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, for we were all baptized by one spirit into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free. And we were all given the one spirit to drink. In this verse-
Joe Heschmeyer:
That is a really fascinating description because he just said the universal church consists of all those who have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. But the text on the screen, which he then read, is First Corinthians 12, which we saw before, which doesn’t say anything like that. It says, “Just as the body is one has many members and all the members of the body, though many are one body, so it is with Christ, for by one spirit we were all baptized into one body, Jews or Greeks, slaves or free, and all were made to drink of one spirit.” Now, there’s no reference there to personal relationship with Jesus Christ. The reference there is to baptism.
Now, don’t get me wrong, personal relationship with Jesus Christ is great. Personal relationship with Jesus Christ is not how you become a Christian. It is not the defining feature of whether you are in the church or not. The defining feature of whether you’re in the church or not, according to scripture, is baptism. That’s night and day. Just compare what he says with what you’re reading, if you’re watching the video version, or what he then proceeds to read immediately after that. These are just two very different conceptions of the church. Now, there’s even more going on there, but you’ll notice that there’s just no verse in the Bible that says the church is all the saved and only the saved. That verse doesn’t exist. And so you get these really strange moments where the people defending that idea are using bible verses that just don’t say that at all.
Now, you’ll notice another thing too. He said there’s two aspects of the church: there’s the universal church and the local church. Now, he’s going to argue that the local church is visible, but the universal church is invisible. And I would suggest that doesn’t make any sense, that the local church, being visible. Universal is just all the local churches. To say that you can see one lion but you can’t see a pride of lions because a pride of lions is invisible is as far, as I can tell, nonsensical. Or take whatever example you want. If I said I can see humans, but I can’t see all humans, I can only see individual humans. Now, you may mean that there’s a category, that there’s like a platonic form, in which case you’ve just gone really far astray from the way the Bible talks about the church, but I can at least understand what you’re saying. But it doesn’t make sense at the obvious level. If I said, “The atoms of my body are visible but I’m invisible,” I’m not sure what that would mean. And so in the same way, I’m not sure what someone means when they claim that the universal church is invisible but the local particular church is visible, because they’re using universal and particular as analogous to invisible and visible, and those two things are not… Those are not the same distinction.
With that said, we should obviously turn in the second myth, which is about the invisibility of the church. But before I get there, sorry, I forgot to include this, Matthew 13, actually Jesus responds to this idea in verse 47. He says, “The kingdom of heaven is like a net which was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind.” Now, at the close of the age, we’re told the angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous. In other words, the kingdom’s a net containing good fish and bad fish, it’s containing the wheat in the weeds, it’s containing the saved and the damped. That’s how Jesus describes the kingdom of heaven on earth.
All that is to say, if you want a perfectly pure church of only the saved totally apart from sin, the two places you can find that are right now in heaven and at the end of the age in the Escaton. What what they mean by invisible church. There’s no question; we have no disagreement.
But that’s not what Protestants mean by the invisible church. They mean there is, in some sense, an invisible church here on earth. And that’s just totally contrary to what the Bible actually says. The Bible says that church on earth has saved and the damned. You may want to weed the garden, but when the people go and ask the master to weed the garden, they tell them no because in taking out the weeds, you may take out some of the wheat as well. A pure, perfect church here on earth without any measure of sin, without any measure of the damned, that doesn’t exist because Christ tells us that’s not going to be the model of the church.
Protestants preaching that church is really attractive, a totally pure, perfect church. Don’t have to worry about the scandals and sins of other Christians or my own scandals and sins, but it’s not the Christian message. And you won’t find a Bible verse that supports that, which is why you have these strange things of saying one thing and then having the Bible verse here quoting saying a totally different thing.
Now with that, let’s turn more fully to myth number two, that the true church is something invisible. Now, there are a lot of places to go for this. The Westminster Confession talks about this pretty explicitly. They really go into this myth. This is Ligon Duncan who is giving a talk, a 52 minute talk I think it was on the invisible church. And here’s how he explains it.
Ligon Duncan:
Church. Let me read to you again from the Westminster Confession as it speaks to this doctrine of the invisible and visible church. It says, “The Catholic or universal church, which is invisible, 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. 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.”
Joe Heschmeyer:
What’s striking there is that there’s two things. One, there’s this distinction between the visible church and the invisible church. Now, find me that distinction in scripture. Find me where Jesus distinguishes between those two or where there’s an obvious distinction being made between the visible church over here and the visible church over there. It’s not even clear amongst or between the reformers whether we’re talking about two churches or two parts of one church.
Now, Duncan is very clear. He says there’s only one church, there’s two aspects of the church. But he also argues that you can be a member of one church and not the other. You can be part of the invisible church and not part of the visible church, you can be part of the visible church and not part of the invisible church. Yu may be a baptized believer, in which case you’re part of both. You may be baptized but not a true believer, in which case you’re part of the visible church and not the invisible church. You may be a true believer who isn’t baptized, in which case you’re part of the invisible church and not the visible church. It’s a mess. It’s a mess because you really end up with a Venn diagram where you still have what seems like two churches despite the protests of many Protestants.
But moreover, they’re both called Catholic in the Westminster Confessions. You’ve got one invisible Catholic church and the other visible Catholic church. And the visible Catholic church has error and the invisible Catholic church doesn’t. And the invisible Catholic church, when we talk about the bride of Christ, we’re talking about the body of Christ, that only means the invisible Catholic church.
This is a very convenient way to avoid having to give any real authority to the Catholic church because you can just say, “Oh, well, that part’s just about the invisible church.” And it’s easy to pay lip service to your obedience to a church that no one can see, that no one can point to, that can’t discipline you, that can’t invoke any authority, that can’t make any demands on you because your pledging allegiance to an abstraction. Let me give a little more.
Ligon Duncan:
Today the topic of the invisible church and understanding the distinction between the visible and the invisible aspects of the church. This is a vitally important truth. It is a biblical truth. It is a truth that is expressed ubiquitously in scripture and it is a truth that is important practically in the Christian life, and so it is important for us to understand the terms, it is important for us to understand the basis of this doctrine in the Bible, and it’s important for us to understand the implications of this doctrine in the scripture.
For one thing, the doctrine of the invisibility of the church, the doctrine of the invisible aspect of the church protects the sovereignty of the spirit in our understanding of the church. One of the things that you will remember Dr. Sproll telling you last night is that over against the Roman Catholic teaching of the church wherein it was said, “Where there is a bishop, there is the church,” the reformer said, “Where the spirit is, there is the church.” And it is in large measure this doctrine of the invisibility of the church that protects that undeniable and essentially important scriptural truth about the church.
Joe Heschmeyer:
He just said two things. One, this is a really important biblical doctrine that is ubiquitous in scripture, meaning it’s found everywhere in scripture. All over the place you’re going to see references to the visible and invisible church. Great.
I will tell you, so you don’t have to watch the whole video, in a 52 minute video he gives one, count them, one biblical passage that he thinks makes a distinction between the visible and invisible church. We’re going to get to it because it doesn’t.
But more than that, he also just lays the cards on the table and says, “The reason we need to believe in the invisible church is because otherwise we’re faced with this Catholic objection, because otherwise we’re left with this Catholic idea that the church is somehow connected to the hierarchical church, that where the bishop is, there’s Jesus Christ.” Now, that’s a bad paraphrase of an actual Catholic teaching. And he’s going to say in response to that, “Where the spirit is, there’s the Catholic church.”
Now, this is really interesting because the actual claim, the original Catholic claim is that where Jesus is, there’s the Catholic church. Why? Because you can’t have the head without the body, you can’t have the bridegroom without the groom. The bridegroom of the bride, rather. And it’s just that notion of the church as a continuation of the incarnation by taking the emphasis off of the church as the body of Christ and connecting it to the spirit. And I mean here no denigration of the Holy Spirit at all, who is God, the Holy Spirit doesn’t have a body so’s very easy to talk about the church is invisible if you ignore all the biblical stuff connecting the church to Christ and instead say, “Well, wherever the spirit is, there’s a Catholic church.” And the answer to that is just no because to convert, to receive baptism, to enter the church, the Holy Spirit must first inspire you with the grace of conversion.
And so the Holy Spirit is constantly at work in people who are not yet believing Christians. To say that wherever the Spirit is, there is the church makes no distinction between the person who the Holy Spirit is still working on and the person who’s already incorporated into Christ. The Holy Spirit is, by all means, someone who brings you into the church, into Christ, but the church is not the body of the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit doesn’t have a body; Christ does.
What you see here hopefully is that this is a disincarnated church, that the reformers and these later, more modern Protestants are preaching; a church that isn’t a continuation of the incarnation but it’s just invisible. It’s like the Holy Spirit who blows wherever he wills and goes wherever he wants to go. And you end up at the church that’s an abstraction or impersonal force rather than an actual continuation of the incarnation, rather than an actual visible or structured society Christians.
And I’m really struck by the fact that they cite, both Sproll and then Duncan cite to this passage about where the bishop is, there is Christ. And again, it’s a misquotation. But it’s coming from Saint Ignatius of Antioch. Now, if you don’t know Ignatius, he is a student of the Apostle Johns. He’s on his way to be martyred, and he’s writing to the churches of Asia Minor. And amongst the things that he says to the church of Smyrna, he says, “See that you all follow the bishop, even as Jesus Christ does the Father and the presbyter is he would the apostles in reference to deacons as being the institution of God.”
Now, before I go any further, Ignatius is emphatic over and over and over again that you don’t have the church without that trifold structure of bishop, presbyters – we’ll later use the word priest for this – and deacons. That the church is, amongst other things, hierarchical. And then he says, “Let no man do anything connected with the church without the bishop. Let that be deemed a proper Eucharist,” which is either by the bishop or by one to whom he has entrusted it. “Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the multitude also be. Even as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic church.” Now, you’ll notice there that he’s not just saying, “Where the bishop is, there is the Catholic church,” he’s also saying that wherever Christ is, there is the Catholic church, and that because the bishop has this unique role to play in the church, we should stay with him because in being united with the bishop, we are being united with Christ.
Yeah, that’s still shocking, that’s still provocative, that’s still totally unlike what the reformers are teaching, but notice this is coming from a guy who knows what the Apostle John taught because he had John to consult, who knows what the apostles preach, who knows about the foundations of the apostolic church because he studied under an apostle while all of that stuff was going on. The idea that Sproll or Duncan or the reformers or anybody else understands Christianity better than a guy who got it from a living apostle strikes me as hard to believe, strikes me as a little bit arrogant, strikes me as just implausible.
In any case, this is the distinction they want. They say we don’t accept Ignatius’s model of the church, we accept this one that comes in the 16th century instead of in the 1st or 2nd century. And I would just say I think that makes it pretty clear. That shows us that this is not a good Christian model of the church because this is not a model of the church that any of the early Christians would’ve known, that the church is something invisible in its universal form.
Smyrna, by the way, I mentioned that Ignatius was preaching to the Smyrnians. In Revelation 2, Jesus praises them. He says to the church… Excuse me, to the angel of the church in Smyrna. Now, there’s a lot of question about who these seven angels of the seven churches are. There’s a really good argument that these seven angels are actually seven bishops of the seven local churches because they’re threatened with things like imprisonment that wouldn’t make sense to a literal angel. But I’m only going to mention, I’m not going to go into any real depth on that. But notice that Jesus in this message tells the church in Smyrna, “Be faithful into death and I will give you the crown of life.” In other words, he doesn’t treat them as a lukewarm or apostate church, he treats them as a church that’s faithful but going through tribulation and poverty. And he describes them as rich because of this; they’re rich in faith.
Now, these are the Christians to whom Ignatius is corresponding. And he’s talking about this structure of the church and this view of the church. Depending on when you place Revelation, some people say it’s dated to 80, 90, some people put it earlier, it’s not long before Ignatius is writing to this same church. To suggest that Ignatius, a student of John, and Smyrna, this church that when last we saw it was thriving, have both gone off the rails is a tall order. It’s hard to believe. But that’s what you have to believe to believe this. And Sproll and Duncan know more about what the church is than this actual literal church or a guy who got Christianity from the apostles and then became a bishop in a literal church, Antioch, the first place that the Christians are called Christians. With that said, here’s a little more from Duncan.
Ligon Duncan:
Self. Let me just take you to one passage to illustrate that. Turn with me to First John, First John, chapter 2, verse 18. “Children, it is the last hour, and just as you heard that antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have arisen. From this, we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they were not really of us, for if they had been of us, they would have remained with us, but they went out in order that it might be shown that they all are not of us.” Did you follow that? “They went out from us, but they were not really of us, for if they had been of us, they would have remained with us, but they went out in order that it might be shown that they all are not of us.” Now, there is the Apostle John articulating the visible, invisible distinction.
Joe Heschmeyer:
I find that really fascinating. I find that really fascinating because he just clearly is not doing that. He doesn’t say anything about the invisible versus the visible church there. You would have to read so much into that text. And again, I want to be really clear; in a 52 minute talk entitled The Invisible Church, this is literally the only passage that he claims includes this distinction between the visible and invisible church. He says this everywhere, it’s ubiquitous in scripture. He gives us one biblical passage that does not mention the word church, that does not mention the word visible, that does not mention the word invisible. Instead what it does is it talks about why particular Christians left.
Again, the passage for John 2, 18 to 19 says last hour. Many antichrist have come. They. Who? The antichrist. Not every apostate, not everyone has fallen away, but these particular antichrists went out from us but they were not of us, for if they’d been of us, they would’ve continued with us. But they went out that it might be plain that they all are not of us. Now, Protestants will take this to say two things. Number one, all true believers by definition will persevere, and that if you leave, therefore you must not have been a true believer. And number two, that because they weren’t of us, that meant they weren’t of the invisible church but they were of the visible church.
Now, I would just say I think in total charity and total fairness, you could believe those Protestant doctrines and think that that’s what this passage is saying. But nothing in the passage requires that reading. And if your entire doctrine is based on this thing that doesn’t say that, that’s a problem.
Here’s what I mean. If I say, “Duncan had that talk, I wanted to go but I had a dentist appointment. If I didn’t have a dentist appointment, I would’ve gone.” That’s the exact same setup as First John 2, 18 to 19, grammatically, logically, structurally. It would be obviously wrong to say, “Therefore, everyone who didn’t go to the talk was at a dentist appointment. Anyone who didn’t have a dentist appointment was at the talk, anyone who went to the talk didn’t have any dentist appointment.” You can’t logically draw any of that from that because you’re saying one person’s reason was X or one group of people’s reasons was X. And John in FIrst John is saying, “These people left because they weren’t really of us.” He’s not saying, “They were baptized members of the visible church and not the invisible church,” he’s treating them as spies who were spying on Christians and were actually antichrists. That’s clearly not a description of everyone who struggles with Christianity or everyone who leaves a particular denomination.
And it’s being used this way regularly by Protestants. And it’s just a logical fallacy. To say X left because of Y doesn’t mean the Z left because of Y. You just can’t draw that. I don’t know another way to say that other than just the passage does not say what he needs it to say. It does not say everyone who leaves was never a member of the true church. And not only does it not say that, but there are other passages that are really clear about people who are part of the church who then leave.
Now, before I get there, I want to give one more word about First John 2. Actually, two more words because Ignatius of Antioch, who he’s arguing against, learned Christianity from the guy who wrote First John. Maybe Ignatius understands this passage better.
The second he says, “But you,” his readers, “have been anointed by the Holy one. And you all know I write to you not because you do not know the truth, but because you know it and know that no lies of the truth. Who is a liar, but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ. This is the antichrist, he who denies the father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father. He who confesses the son has the Father also. Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, then you’ll abide in the Son and the Father.”
Now, notice he’s just said, “Those guys, those antichrist left because they weren’t really among us. I know you are. You’re anointed by the Holy one. You know the truth.” And he still says abide if what you heard from the beginning abides, and then you’ll abide in the Son and the Father.
In other words, he doesn’t take it for granted. He doesn’t say, “Well, obviously you’ll abide because I know you’re true Christians and all true Christians, by definition, abide. And if you don’t abide, then you’re not a true Christian; never were.” He doesn’t say any of that. These are literally the verses right after the verse that allegedly lays out his belief that all true Christians abide in all abiding people are true Christians. And if you don’t abide, then you weren’t a true Christian. None of that is there. He’s talking about one group of people and why they leave.
Okay, I mentioned there are other biblical passage that talk about true Christians leaving, and I’m going to give you two. Hebrew 6 says, “It’is impossible to restore again to repentance. Those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, have become partakers of the Holy Spirit and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come. If they then commit apostacy since they crucify the son of God on their own account and hold him up to contempt.” In other words, the other of Hebrews is saying if you’ve been baptized… Enlightenment is one of the original early Christian terms for baptism. If you’ve received the Eucharist that has tasted the heavenly gift, if you’ve been confirmed by being a partaker of the Holy Spirit, if you’ve tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, if you then apostatize, there’s no way we’re going to be able to bring you back; that you crucify the son of God again. He’s ransomed to you, and you’re rejecting your ransom.
Second Peter talks about this as well. This is just really clear in scripture. Second Peter 2, the whole chapter is about those who’ve been ransomed by Christ and they deny them and are like dogs returning to their vomit or pigs that get cleaned off and go to wallow in their own filth. But even more than that, we can talk about Simon Magus because Simon Magus is also mentioned in this talk. He doesn’t quote from Acts, but he talks about Simon Magus. Now, Simon sees the power of the proclamation of Christ. And he first, we’re told, believes and is baptized. Now, if you know Mark 16, you know this is a formula for getting saved. He believes and is baptized.
And then when he sees the laying on of hands, the imparting of the Holy Spirit, what appears to be the gift of confirmation given by the apostles, he tries to buy it with money. This is where the sin of Simony gets its name. And he is condemned and rejected for this. And Peter tells him to pray to God that he can be forgiven. He does not take it as a granted that either Simon was never a true Christian in the first place, there’s no hint of that, but nor is there a hint that Simon being a true Christian at one point is guaranteed to persevere. We’re very clearly told he believes in his baptized, point A, and then he falls into this terrible mortal sin in point B, that he’s told… He’s basically incurred condemnation. But then there’s this indeterminate point C that he can pray to God and hopefully be forgiven of his sin. There’s nothing of one saved, always saved. There’s nothing of a visible versus invisible church. None of that’s there. You just have to apply those reformation categories to the tax that say nothing of it. All that is to say we very clearly see believing baptized Christians then fall into sin; that deprives them seemingly of salvation. And so to say that they weren’t true Christians, et cetera, doesn’t work.
Now, I want to tie this back in. Remember in the Westminster Confession that it talks about the body of Christ as just being this invisible body. Now, that’s a terrible understanding of the body of Christ, which by definition is visible. But go back to First Corinthians 12. St. Paul talks about the body of Christ as having first apostles. And one of those apostles, if you remember, is the apostle Judas who is a great example of someone who has the Christian faith and then falls away. John 6, Jesus says, “Did I not call you 12 and one of you is a devil?”
We know two things. One, Judas is an apostle in the church, which is the body of Christ. And two, it would be better had Judas just not been born for him. It would be better if he’d not been born. It doesn’t bode well for his salvation. If there’s anyone presented as not saved in scripture, Judas seems like a pretty good candidate for that, and yet he was clearly a member of the church, not just the visible church in some carefully nuanced no true Scotsman kind of way, with the actual church, the apostolic church.
Okay, I want to give a couple more passages about this. In John 8, Jesus says, “I’m the light of the world,” and then in Matthew 5, he says to the church, “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid, nor do men light a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a stand and it gives light to all in the house. Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.
There’s two images there. We can add these for a list of biblical images. The church has the light of the world and the church is a city set upon a hill. Now, notice that it’s not just a city, but a city on a hill; that is a city in a place of peak visibility. And the light is not just a light under a bushel basket, but it’s a light set so it will shine before men. By definition, the church is visible because the church’s mission is to be visible.
Richard Gamble in his book, In Search of the City of God, talks about how the early Christians, the early church fathers, understood the church, the city’s visibility, the city of God’s visibility as expressing the same meaning as Jesus’ point in the following verse about a lamp’s on a stand and its power from that height to illuminate the whole house. That when these theologians turn to the picture of the city itself, they interpret it in a variety of ways, but always within a fairly narrow range and always in reference to the church, that the early Christian understanding based on scripture is the church is visible, it’s structured like a city, a city you can see set on a hill. This notion of an invisible church, what image is that? What invisible body of Christ are we talking about? Christ’s body isn’t invisible. That’s not the incarnation, that’s Gnosticism or something like it. That’s the difference there. Finally, let’s go to the third myth. This is a myth that the church is just you individually.
Speaker 6:
What is the church? Is the church a building? Is the church a pastor or the staff? Is the church the music, the tradition or the ministries? These are all good things, but they are not the church. Take them away and the church is still here. Why? Because you are still here. The church is you. The church is you with a purpose.
Joe Heschmeyer:
This is an extremely popular video. It has something like a half a million views. And I get it. I get that we want to avoid the idea of the church as just the priest or the pastor or the bishop or the committee or whoever doing stuff so I don’t have to. I get that there is a real role of every baptized Christian to go and live the faith. And in doing that, they’re making the church present in the world. All of that is true. Nevertheless, I can’t get over that description in that image. The church is you, and then there’s a picture of one stick figure, just you by yourself. To that I would say no, by definition you are not an assembly, you are not an assembly of God, you’re not a city, you’re one person. You’re part of the church, and that’s right, but you are not the church.
And in fact, First Corinthians says you’re not the church. Now you, this is you plural. Now, you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. Yeah, you’re a member of the church, but just like the liver isn’t the body, you’re part of something bigger than yourself. And that’s literally the point of the body of Christ’s imagery that St. Paul’s using in part, that you can’t say you don’t need the body. You’re part of something bigger than yourself.
Now, there’s another variation on this idea. Miroslav Volf in his book, After Our Likeness, “As where two or three are gathered in Christ’s name, not only is Christ present among them, but a Christian Church is there as well. Perhaps a bad church, church that may well transgress against love and truth, but a church nonetheless.” I find this really striking because this is the closest we’re going to get amongst these to anything like biblical support because Matthew 18 does say, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them.” Where two or three are gathered in Christ’s name, Christ is present among them. But he’s going to go beyond that and say, “Not only is Christ president among them, but a Christian churches is there as well.” And that part’s not true. That part’s not found there in Matthew 18.
On the contrary, Matthew 18, we find the exact opposite. “Here are the rules for what to do if your brother sins against you. First, go tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he doesn’t listen, take one or two others along with you that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses.” This was the old Mosaic law. “If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church.”
Okay, so there’s three steps: one-on-one, two or three gathered in the name of Christ. This is the same place that, “Two or three gathered in my name, I’m with them,” passage is coming from, Matthew 18. This is the verses immediately proceeding that. And then there’s the third step. If he refuses to listen to them. To whom? To the two or three. Tell to the church? Well, if the church is just two or three, there’s no difference between step two and three. It becomes redundant.
No, by definition, whatever the church is has to be bigger than what Volf claims. The church isn’t just me and it’s not just two or three people gathered in the name of Jesus. Instead, go back to the biblical model. The church is a visible, structured society. It’s the body of Christ, it’s established by Christ. It exists to be the pillar and foundation of truth, and it’s, again, a structured society. There’s apostles and prophets and teachers and evangelists and the like. As a body, it has different organs that do different things. It’s not an undifferentiated mass. That’s the idea.
In all of that, you’ll notice I didn’t really get into all of the particular issues even about how do we know Ignatius is right, that there’s a bishop, priests and deacons or bishop, presbyters and deacons? Haven’t gotten into the papacy, you haven’t gotten into any of those things. This is more about establishing, really, the foundational stuff, that what Protestants imagine by church is so far from what scripture means by church that unless we get those things right, it’s really hard to have the rest of the conversation.
I envision this as hopefully the beginning of a journey for many of you, that this is a way of just saying, “Oh, I’ve been carrying this baggage about the meaning of church with me. I’ve been thinking it meant one thing, and actually, as I look at this, maybe it doesn’t mean that.” Well, I’m hoping that’s where you come out. I hope you’ve enjoyed this video. Thank you, and God bless.
Speaker 1:
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