Audio only:
Joe Heschmeyer explores the unique mystery of the Church revealed by Judas, the apostle who betrayed Christ.
Transcription:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer and today I want to talk about the church because I can’t tell you the number of times Protestants have told me some variation of the idea that when scripture speaks of the church, they don’t mean anything visible, but instead that they mean an invisible collection of the saved or those who have a living relationship with Jesus Christ or the predestined or the elect. Depending on the theology, you might get different flavors of this basic theology, but it’s the idea that the true church is an invisible church. Not all Protestants believe this, but enough do that. I wanted to address it beginning by letting those who believe it give a nice 22nd version of what it is that they believe.
CLIP:
Whereas the visible church includes everyone who is part of God’s covenant community. The invisible church is composed only of those who have been united to Christ and salvation. For this reason, it’s sometimes called the true church. Generally speaking, we treat most people in the visible church as if they were truly saved, giving them the benefit of the doubt.
Joe:
There are a lot of things you could say in response to this. For instance, when St. Paul talks about how the church is a pillar in bulwark of the truth and that it gives us a model for how we should act, how do we do that if we can’t even find it because only God can find it. When St. Paul goes to persecute the church and Jesus says, Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me identifying himself so radically with the church that he calls it himself? Was he talking about an invisible church that Paul couldn’t even see or was he talking about the visible church? That’s another important question, but I’m going to leave all those aside and instead focus on a dimension I don’t hear people talk about that I think is an interesting kind of way to explore, and that’s the role of the apostle Judas.
Yes, Judas is scar it that one and the question I would suggest asking to anyone who believes in this idea of the invisible church is, was Judas part of the true church? And the reason I would ask this is because number one, scripture certainly seems to present Judas as part of the true church, and I put it like this in its syllogism, the major premise apostles or members of the body of Christ, the minor premise Judas was an apostle, the conclusion therefore Judas was a member of the body of Christ. Now we can see each of those three things I think pretty clearly from scripture. First that apostles are members of the body of Christ. That certainly is how Saint Paul seems to think of them. In one Corinthians 12, he says, you are the body of Christ and individually members of it and God has appointed in the church first apostles. Notice that in the church this is an appointment within the church. That is how the concept of apostleship even makes sense and not the visible, not really the true church, church, the true church, the body of Christ.
Second, Judas was definitely an apostle. That’s very clear from scripture over and over again in Luke six, Jesus calls his disciples chooses from them 12 whom he names apostles, they’re then listed. The last one listed is Judas Ariat. Why does this matter? First it shows Judas is an apostle second, it shows all apostles are disciples. He doesn’t say he called 11 of his disciples in one rotten scoundrel, he calls his disciples. So Judas by the biblical evidence, is a disciple of Christ and an apostle of Christ. Jesus also calls him part of the 12th. He says, did I not choose you? The 12 and one of you is the devil in John six verse 70. In the next verse, John makes it very clear, he means Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, who’s one of the 12. In fact, the evangelists love to remind us that he’s one of the 12 in Matthew 26 and in Mark 14 we’re told that he’s one of the 12 when he goes to betray Jesus to the hive priest, when he goes to betray him in the garden of Gethsemane.
We’re again reminded by Matthew and Mark that he’s one of the 12, Luke 22 also tells us that there, it also tells us at the last supper when Satan enters him that he enters Judas called Theriot, who is one of the number of the 12. Now it’d be easy to say, sure on paper he’s one of the 12, but do we see him doing apostle kind of things? Not very much. Obviously he’s not in the acts of the apostles. He’s not alive by that point. But we do see places like Matthew chapter 10 where Jesus calls to himself his 12 disciples and gives him authority over unclean spirits to cast them out and to heal every disease in every infirmity, and it lists which 12 people he gave this authority to. And the last one is Judas Iscariot. So Judas wasn’t just like an apostle on paper, Judas was given spiritual authority to do things like exorcisms and perform miracles.
Likewise, in Acts chapter one when they go to replace Judas, St. Peter reminds them that he was numbered among us and was allotted his share in this ministry. So you should be asking, well, what is this ministry? It’s whatever the other apostles have. It isn’t that 11 of them got one thing and Judas gets something else he’s sharing in their ministry. And then Peter quotes the Psalms, including the line, his office let another take some translations. I believe the KJV say his bishop Rick let another take. They then pray together over the two men they’re selecting from to replace Judas and they pray to choose the right man to take the place in this ministry in apostle ship from which Judas turned aside to go to his own place. That is pretty clear that Judas had possessed the same ministry and apostleship as everyone else and that he then turned them aside.
He abandoned them. So if it’s true that the apostles are members of the body of Christ and that Judas was an apostle, it follows that Judas was a member of the body of Christ, hopefully straightforward. Why is that even controversial? Well, because there are people who believe in the idea of what’s called the invisible church. That the true church as the Westminster Confession says the true church, 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 that had thereof and is the spouse, the body, the fullness of him that filleth all in all. So that’s the idea that when Ephesians talks about the body of Christ or the bride of Christ or the church a fullness of Christ, it doesn’t mean the visible church, it means the invisible church.
Why is that a problem? Well, if you hold that view, then you have to say, Judas isn’t part of the church. Now why might you hold that view? The syllogism, I think, works something like this. The first premise is that everyone in the church, church is saved. The second premise that well, not everyone in the visible church is saved and therefore concludes therefore the visible church is not the true church. Now we agree on the minor premise premise too. Not everyone in the visible church is saved. Catholics and Protestants, Orthodox, everybody seems to agree on that point. The mere fact that someone is an enrolled member of the church is no guarantee that they will end up in heaven. We disagree on everything else, though we disagree on the first premise. It doesn’t seem obvious at all that everyone in the true church is saved.
I don’t see a verse that says that, and therefore the conclusion doesn’t follow as well that the visible church is not the true church. It seems just as easily shown that there is a true church on earth that right now includes some measure of the dam, but will in time be purified as Ephesians five tells us, and as Matthew 13 tells us, that the garden with wheat and weeds will someday be purified, that the net with good and bad fish will someday have the bad fish thrown out. But we are not there yet. And so it is not a difference of two different churches or visible versus invisible. It’s just the church now compared to its final purification which we have not arrived at. So Judas was a member of the church and then ceases to be.
But instead, if you buy into these premises that everyone in the true church has saved, you then come to the conclusion that therefore the visible church is not the true church. So as I say, this argument doesn’t appear to be coming from scripture. There’s no obvious place in scripture to find it. I watched an hour long video by Ligon Duncan on the Invisible Church and I could not find a place where he pointed to anything that said there’s a and an invisible church instead like the Westminster confession, it just seems to be coming from the reformation tradition. Now, I would suggest it goes actually even a little deeper than that, namely to two sometimes called proto reformers, JHAs and John Wycliffe. So Caleb Kosi says, if you’re going to call Luther the father of the Reformation, you can call John Huss or John Huss, the grandfather of the Reformation and John Wycliffe the great-grandfather of the Reformation.
But there’s this intellectual path that goes from Y cliff to Huss to Luther that gives us Protestantism and that matters for a few important reasons. Number one, Wycliffe is the first one to really clearly advance this idea that there is a true church that’s not really the same as the visible church. Hutto Gonzalez whose Methodist theologian says for Wycliffe, the invisible church is the body of the elect. While the visible church includes some who are elect and some who are reprobate, meaning unsaved. So you’ve got the invisible church over here, true church all saved. Then you have the visible church, maybe good, maybe bad, and he explains. You can’t perfectly distinguish which one is which. Indeed, you can’t even know which category you fall into. Nevertheless, there are certain indications that permit you to make a relatively accurate guess, and that includes things like having a life of piety and obedience to the will of God.
Now you may notice in that first video I played, there was a strange part where it talks about how we can’t always tell exactly, but it’s like why are you trying to tell? Where in the New Testament are you told? Try to figure out if your neighbor is a real believer. Try to figure out if your neighbor is really the real deal. That’s not usually the kind of thing we talk about as Christians, but if you believe in this theology of the invisible, invisible church, you want to be a part of the invisible church and you don’t know from your membership in the visible church if you are or if your bishop is or your pastor or your pope. I’m getting ahead of myself, but that’s where this theology goes. So in Wycliffe’s case, he concludes that the Pope is not only a reprobate, but even the antichrist and therefore has lost all rightful claim to any sort of dominion over the faithful.
There’s a whole backstory here. Wycliffe has a falling out with the church, and so he gets these ever increasingly radical ideas in which he’s able to say pretty conveniently that he’s not amatic, even though he helped start the schism of lardy, that he’s not really amatic because he and his friends are the true Christians so holy in their own estimation, while the people they disagree with are bad Christians and therefore they don’t have to listen to or obey them. Do you see how easy it is to fall into that trap? Do you see how much that is just human pride as a theology? You’re not careful. This whole idea of yeah, I don’t have to listen to you because I don’t regard you as a true Christian is tempting. It’s attractive, but for all the wrong reasons and it spreads from here into all this stuff into a Jan Huss and into the Reformation, but it includes the denial of Judas membership in the church.
This is where we started, right? Wycliffe says as Judas was a thief and no member of Christ, no part of holy church, though he ministered the order of Bishop. Think about that idea. He’s a bishop but not a bishop of the church. Once you introduce that chasm and say he was instead a devil of hell, so he can conclude that there are worldly clarris in his own day that he says will be damned for cursed sins like coveting, hypocrisy, simony, and despair as Judas was. So imagine that he’s saying you’re not a real priest and a real bishop, a real pope because you’re guilty of the sin of coveting or the sin of hypocrisy.
That’s the moral standard you’re going to use. If someone is a legitimate moral authority, you have to follow or not, it becomes totally impossible. So he concludes from this that they like Judas, are not members of Christ and therefore not part of holy church. That makes rebellion so easy to do and it doesn’t take long for it to spread from there. So Jan Huss is introduced to the ideas of Wycliffe and brings him to Czechoslovakia, and he argues very similarly that Christ’s true church is his mystical body that is his hidden body, that it’s only those who are predestined.
Huss ends up going on trial before the Council of Constance and before the Holy Roman emperor. While there, he’s defending this theology of Wycliffe that if a Pope bishop or pate’s Im mortal sin, then he’s not a Pope bishop or pate. So if the pope has a bad day, loses his temper and says something evil and is mortally sinful, he ceases and tell his next confession to be the pope. That’s the argument. But you don’t know. You don’t know if he had a bad day today. So therefore you can never really know who is and isn’t a bishop or a pate or the Pope. You see the chaos, an anarchy of this vision of theology then in saying Judas doesn’t count. You have to end up saying, anybody who falls into mortal sin doesn’t count for the time they’re in mortal sin. But then he goes a step further and says, yeah, that also applies to kings.
A king inm mortal sin is not really a king in the sight of God. Now, this is directly, directly contrary to the New Testament. We’re told to honor the emperor Jesus before punches. Pilate says he would have no power unless it was given to you from on high. They don’t say, you know what? You were sinful pagans and therefore you can’t have legitimate authority. You can’t have dominion, you can’t have political authority, none of that. But Jan Huss takes this view and this inspires the Holy Roman emperor to say that in all christened him, that’s not a greater heretic than Huss because he sees immediately this is total anarchy. If you can totally throw off the king if you think he’s sinning, can you imagine if you applied this to modern politicians or politicians in any day, the number of times you’re going to say, I don’t have to listen to the other guy of a different party. I think he’s a sinner. I’m just going to ignore him. He’s not a legitimate authority. It undermines the whole notion of authority in the church or in the state. It’s total anarchy, total chaos, and when taken seriously led to horribly bloody warfare. And so it’s not surprising that the Holy Roman emperor has him burnt at the stake
That then leads to Martin Luther. So you’ve got this trial going from Wycliffe to Huss, and then in 1519 a friend of Martin Luther, well, followers of Jan Huss after hearing Martin Luther sort of defend Jan Huss when faith with Johann X challenge points out Luther’s vision of the church was the already condemned version of Huck and Huss and Iff and Luther’s like, yeah, sure. So in 1519, friend brings Luther copy of De Ecclesia Jan Hu’s book on the church. Luther the next year writes to a friend of his and says, up until now I have held and espoused all of the teachings of Jan Hass. Without knowing it, Johann von Staus has unwittingly done the same. In short, we are all hussite without realizing it, then he claims, I would say falsely here, even Paul and Augustine are literally Hussites that doesn’t follow because I think you can see very clearly from scripture that Paul, and obviously not from scripture, but from his own writings, Augustine don’t take the same view that Huss and Wycliffe and Luther do. This is a mistake. This is an error not found in scripture, but found in medieval theology from the period right before Luther, and it creeps in from Wycliffe to Huss to Luther, always with these guys who are in rebellion from the church for other reasons coming to this conclusion that their rebellion’s, okay, because they’re the true Christians and the people they’re opposing don’t count and don’t have the authority that they appear to have at the outward level.
In the end, this always ends up in the same place. You have to deny that bad bishops and priests are really bishops and priests, and you have to deny that the apostle Judas is really an apostle of the church, even though the scripture depicts him as one. So we laid out in one final syllogism, if John Calvin, the confession, Martin Luther, John Huss and John Wycliffe were right about the church, then Judas wasn’t a member of the church, right? If their theology of the church is correct, Judas isn’t a member of the church. Second premise, Judas was a member of the church. Therefore, we can conclude that the theology of the church presented from sources as diverse of John Calvin and the Westminster confession to Martin Luther, to John Hus, John Wycliffe. They’re getting the church wrong. Now, I realize I haven’t laid out a particularly positive vision.
I’ve just highlighted a danger that this idea of a pure church of just elect is not the reality of what Jesus creates when he comes to earth. He gathers his disciples from that group. He gathers 12 apostles in that group. There’s a fellow by the name of Judas Escar. Jesus does not intend to create a perfect, pure church here on Earth, doesn’t promise he’ll do so there will come a day where the church is purified. In Matthew 13, the church is compared to a field with wheat and weeds, and we’re told that one day at the end of time the weeds will be removed, but they’re not gone yet. So if you are presenting as having a pure wheat field, that’s not the true church. The true church we’re told the kingdom of heaven we’re told is wheat and weeds and that it’s like a net containing good and bad fish and the bad fish are going to be there until the close of the age when the angels separate the wicked from the righteous.
So what can we take from the apostle Judas? I’d say this. Number one, it’s a reminder that church scandals are nothing new and will continue on until the great day in which the righteous and the wicked are separated. One of the greatest arguments against Catholicism and frankly against Christianity in general is bad Catholics, bad Christians. People look at that and say, why would you expect me to believe that when you don’t live like it? That is a compelling emotional argument. But as Jesus shows us, it’s not a good enough argument because the church he says he’s going to create is a church that at the level of apostle has a wicked member. Second, I would suggest this actually gives us a great deal of hope. We don’t have to try to guess where the true church is because there’s a visible church, and this is the point of the church.
One of the major reasons Jesus has a body is so we know where God is. One of the major reasons the church is the body of Christ is so we know where the church founded by Jesus Christ is the body is visible. Jesus compares it to a city on a hill that he says cannot be hit. The true church is not some hidden thing. It’s not some invisible thing. It’s a thing known to the whole world like a mustard seed that is so big you can’t miss it when it grows into a mustard tree. That’s the church and there’s something incredibly relieving about the fact that you don’t have to go hunting. It’s right there. You can’t miss it. Third and finally, Jesus doesn’t just call the perfect the sinless. He calls broken people including some wicked ones. This should give us cause for pause and cause for hope, pause because we don’t want to be like those who die in the wilderness.
In one Corinthians 10, St. Paul reminds us of Israel on his journey in the Exodus that these are the people of God explicitly. These are the people of God and yet many of them die in rebellion in the wilderness. Being a member of the people of God doesn’t guarantee that you will persevere to the end. That doesn’t mean there’s two separate peoples of God. That just means you could fail to live up to what you’re told to do. That’s the cause for pause for alarm, but the cause for hope is that God wants to do something with poor, broken sinners like us. The fact that he uses everyone from Peter to Judas and the fact that everyone from Peter to Judas fails him should be great hope to those of us who struggle at times, those of us who fall short at times, that you don’t have to end up like Judas.
A church of just the perfect has no place for you and me, but the church that Jesus founds, while we may be scandalized by the sins of our neighbor also has enough room for our own fight against sin, with God’s help, we can get to heaven. Even if you have sin in your life right now, that doesn’t have to be the final story. The purification is coming, but don’t buy into the promise that there already is some pure invisible church of the elector right now because that is not the biblical vision for Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.