Devotional 133: The Universal Church: The Body of Christ Throughout the World

The Confession Read

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.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 25, Section 1

Introduction

Every Lord's Day the people of God assemble, and the eye beholds a church: a building, a congregation, a preacher, a table, a font. But the eye does not behold the Church. There is a church no sanctuary has ever contained, no steeple ever crowned, no register ever numbered, and no census ever completed. Its members are not written in a vestry book but in heaven; its assembly hall is not a meetinghouse but the immediate presence of God; its span is not a generation but the whole history of redemption from Eden to the New Jerusalem. The Westminster Divines, passing from the doctrine of marriage to the doctrine of the church, chose to begin not with the thing men can see but with the thing only faith can grasp, and they did so because they knew that every doctrine of the visible church will be misread until the invisible church is first believed. The opening section of Chapter 25 is one short sentence, but it is a sentence weighted with a century of controversy and a millennium of ecclesiology. It is, before anything else, a definition, and definitions are among the most consequential things a confession can contain. One cannot rightly ask what the church should do, or how she should be governed, or who belongs to her, until one has first asked what she is. The Divines answer with a definition so deliberately otherworldly that it has the power to unsettle every merely natural estimate of the church. The catholic church is invisible; she consists of the whole number of the elect; she is gathered under Christ alone as her Head; and she is the spouse, the body, the fullness of him that filleth all in all. Our age judges the church almost entirely by what it can see: by numbers and buildings, by influence and respectability, by the size of the crowd and the polish of the worship. It is a judgment the Confession quietly refuses. The Divines do not begin with statistics; they begin with election and union with Christ. They teach us to look at the church the way a man looks at a river that flows for miles beneath the earth before it breaks out in springs: what the eye catches on the surface is real, and precious, but it is not the whole river. There is a church beneath the visible church, older than it, larger than it, and more certain than it: the whole company of those whom the Father gave to the Son before the foundation of the world, whether they have already finished their course, are running it now, or have not yet been born. To confess the invisible church is to confess that the church's life is not something men produce but something God upholds, and that her true membership is known, not to any clerk or committee, but to the Lord alone. There is deep comfort here, and deep humbling. The comfort is for the discouraged believer who worships in a shrinking congregation, or who mourns that the church in some land seems all but extinguished, to know that the church of Christ has never been diminished by a single soul, because her members are elect and her Head is sovereign. The humbling is for the boastful, who must learn that the roll of the church is kept in heaven, and that many who are first in the visible assembly may be last in the invisible, and many last who are first. The section before us, then, is not a piece of dusty theology but a summons to see the church with the eyes of faith, to believe what God has declared about the company of his people, and to find in that belief the very foundation of our love for the church on earth.

Scripture Foundation

The doctrine of this section rests upon a chain of texts that run through the whole New Testament, and its foundation is the apostle Paul's vision of the church as the body and fullness of Christ. The fountainhead is Ephesians 1:22-23: "And hath put all things under his feet, and gave him to be the head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all." The Confession borrows its closing phrase almost word for word from this text, and it is worth lingering over what Paul asserts. Christ, risen and ascended, has been set far above all principality and power, and the Father has given him to be head over all things to the church. The church is here called his body, not a body, as though she were one organisation among many, but his body, the very organ of his presence and action in the world. And she is his fulness, plērōma, a word that startles the reader: how can the church, which is filled by Christ, be called the fulness of Christ? The answer lies in the mystery of union. The church is the fulness of Christ in the sense that a body is the fulness of its head, not that the head is incomplete without the body, but that the head's life, will, and glory are expressed and made visible through the body. Paul's phrase "that filleth all in all" circles back to the same truth: the same Christ who fills all things has chosen to manifest himself through the church, so that she is at once the object of his filling and the vessel of his fulness. This is the very heart of the Confession's definition, and it is as far as possible from a merely social account of the church. The second witness fixes our attention on the invisibility of this body, and it comes from the epistle to the Hebrews in Hebrews 12:22-24: "But ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant." Here the church is described, not as an earthly society but as a heavenly company already gathered around the throne. The writer tells trembling believers that in drawing near to God through Christ they have come to mount Sion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, to the church of the firstborn whose names are enrolled in heaven. The word ekklēsia, the called-out assembly, is here applied to a congregation that no man has ever beheld with the natural eye, an assembly of the elect, of the just men made perfect, whose citizenship is registered not in any city on earth but in the book of heaven. It is precisely this heavenly character that the Confession means by the word invisible. The church of the firstborn is not invisible because it is unreal, but because it is too real to be seen: it is the company of those who have been united to the risen Christ, and its true membership is written in a place no human eye can read. Our Lord himself speaks of this church in John 10:16, when he declares: "And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd." The words are a window into the catholic and universal scope of the church. Christ the Shepherd speaks of sheep who are his already: “other sheep I have,” though they are not yet in the fold, not yet gathered, in many cases not yet born. He speaks of them as possessed before they are gathered, because they are elect, given to him by the Father, and his sovereign purpose will not rest until every one of them has heard his voice. And the end he sets before us is a single, undivided company: "one fold, and one shepherd." Here is the catholicity of the church in its truest sense. The word catholic, from the Greek katholikos, "according to the whole," does not mean the church of Rome but the church of the whole, the church that is not confined to one nation or one age or one denomination, the whole number of the elect from every tongue and tribe and time gathered at last into one. Christ's sheep are scattered across the centuries and across the continents, and yet they are one, because they have one Shepherd, one voice, and one fold to which he is bringing them all. To these we may add the quiet seal of 2 Timothy 2:19: "Nevertheless the foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal, The Lord knoweth them that are his." The apostle had been describing a time of confusion in the church, when false teachers had overthrown the faith of some, and the question that rises in every such season is the question the Confession answers: how can the true church be known when the visible church is so mixed? Paul's answer is a word of deep repose. The foundation of God standeth sure, and its seal is not a human roll but the knowledge of God: the Lord knoweth them that are his. Membership in the invisible church is not finally determined by any profession, however orthodox, nor by any ceremony, however solemn; it is determined by God's own electing knowledge. This is the very ground of the distinction between the visible and the invisible church, and it is a ground of comfort to every believer who has ever looked at the condition of the church and asked, who then can be saved, and where is the true church of God? The Lord knoweth them that are his, and the church that matters most is the church he knows.

What the Divines Meant

To understand what the Divines meant, we must understand what they were opposing, and the seventeenth century supplied no shortage of errors to oppose. On the one hand stood the Roman claim that the church was essentially a visible and hierarchical institution, the body of believers subject to the bishop of Rome, outside which there was no salvation. On the other stood the enthusiasts and sectaries of the age, who so despaired of the visible church that they fled from it altogether, claiming a private spirituality that dispensed with ordinances, ministers, and assemblies. Between these two errors the Divines walked a narrow path, and the opening section of Chapter 25 is their careful marking of it. Against Rome they insisted that the church, in her essential and saving reality, is invisible, known to God rather than to any human officer; against the sectaries they insisted that the invisible church has a visible and necessary expression in the world, to which the later sections of the chapter will turn. The definition of the church as invisible was therefore not a retreat into abstraction but a polemical act of the first order, drawn to secure the biblical doctrine of the church on both its flanks. Consider first the phrase "catholic or universal." The Divines are at pains to reclaim a word that had been, in their day, all but annexed by Rome. The Apostles' Creed had confessed belief in "the holy catholic church" for centuries, and the Reformers did not surrender the word; they restored its meaning. Catholic, they taught, does not mean Roman; it means universal, the church spread through all ages and all nations, gathered out of every people under heaven. The Divines therefore gloss the word with its English equivalent, “catholic or universal,” so that no reader could mistake their meaning. The church of Christ is not bounded by any nation as Israel under the old covenant was bounded; under the gospel she is gathered from all the world, and her catholicity is a matter of her very essence, not of her outward extent at any given moment. The invisible church is catholic because the elect are drawn from every kindred and tongue, and because no one denomination, however pure, is the whole of her. The word "invisible" is the next weight to be lifted, and it is easily misunderstood. The Divines did not mean that the church is an ethereal fancy, or that the visible assemblies of God's people are unreal or unimportant. They meant something precise. The church is invisible with respect to her membership, because the elect of God cannot be infallibly discerned by the eye of man; the profession of faith may be genuine or feigned, and the Lord alone reads the heart. And the church is invisible with respect to her gathering, because the elect of all ages, past, present, and future, are one body in the purpose of God even now, though their full assembly has not yet met, and will not meet until the end of the age. The visible church is the church as men see it; the invisible church is the church as God sees it. The one is mixed, imperfect, and subject to change; the other is whole, holy, and certain, because she is the company of the elect united to Christ. To say the church is invisible is therefore not to despise the visible church but to refuse to identify the saving reality of the church with any outward society, however venerable. The heart of the definition is the phrase "the whole number of the elect." Here the Divines anchor the church in the decree of God, and in doing so they give the doctrine its Reformation character. The church is not, in the first place, the company of those who choose to join her; she is the company of those whom God has chosen. The elect “that have been, are, or shall be”: the phrase spans the whole reach of time, embracing the saints of the old covenant who looked forward to Christ, the saints of the present age who believe in him, and the saints yet unborn who will hear his voice. It is a definition that robs no human effort of its place but gives every human effort its true dignity, for the church exists because God has purposed her, and her gathering is the outworking of an eternal love. The Divines were not embarrassed by election; they made it the very definition of the church, because they saw that any other definition reduces the church to a human society that men may enlarge or shrink at will. But a church whose membership is written in the book of life before the foundation of the world is a church no man can destroy and no age can extinguish. Finally, the section gathers the whole doctrine into the three great images with which it closes: the church is the spouse, the body, and the fullness of Christ. The spouse is the image of his love; the body is the image of his life; the fullness is the image of his glory. And all three are rooted in the one reality of union with Christ, the Head. The Divines are careful to name Christ as "the Head thereof" before they name the church as spouse, body, and fullness, for it is union with him that makes the church what she is. Take away the Head and there is no body; take away the Bridegroom and there is no bride; take away Christ and the fullness is an empty vessel. The order of the sentence teaches the order of reality: Christ first, then the church; the Head first, then the body; the divine initiative first, then the human response. This is the church the Divines confessed, and it is the church we confess still.

Theological Depth

The doctrine of the invisible catholic church summoned the finest reflection of the Reformed tradition, and the great theologians of the tradition did not merely repeat the Confession; they unfolded its implications with a depth that rewards careful reading. Calvin's treatment of the church, in the fourth book of the Institutes, is the fountain from which so much that follows flows, and his opening distinction is the very distinction the Confession adopts. Calvin insists that we must believe the church, and that the church which is properly the object of faith is the church as she exists in the eternal counsel of God: the whole company of the elect, united to Christ by the secret working of the Spirit. It is this church, he teaches, that is truly invisible, known to God alone, and it is this church, not any earthly institution, that is the object of the creed's confession. Calvin does not for a moment despise the visible church; he calls her the mother of the faithful, and warns in the most solemn terms against those who would separate themselves from her fellowship. But he refuses to let the visible be confused with the invisible. The two are distinguished, not separated; and the mark of a right faith is that it holds to the one while it lives within the other. Calvin's great pastoral motive in all this is the comfort of the believer: because the church is finally invisible and elect, her survival does not depend upon the faithfulness of men, and the believer may rest in the certainty that not one of Christ's sheep will ever be lost. This is the consolation the doctrine was built to carry, and Calvin delivers it in full. Turretin takes up the doctrine in his customary scholastic precision and presses it to its logical end in his Institutes of Elenctic Theology. He asks whether the church is visible or invisible, and answers with the distinction the Confession preserves: the church may be considered either with respect to its internal and essential form, which is faith and the Spirit, and so it is invisible; or with respect to its external profession and its ministry, and so it is visible. He is careful to reject both the Roman error, which made visibility of the essence of the church, and the Anabaptist error, which denied the visible church any right to be called a church at all. Turretin's contribution is his relentless clarity: the invisibility of the church is not an imperfection in her but a perfection, for it means her essence consists in those things which cannot be seen (faith, regeneration, union with Christ) rather than in those outward things which may be counterfeited. He would have us see that the invisibility of the church is simply the corollary of her spirituality, and that every attempt to reduce the church to what the eye can measure is an attempt to un-church the church of God. Watson, whose gift was to turn doctrine into devotion, takes the definition of the church as the body and spouse of Christ and presses it toward the heart. In his Body of Divinity he delights in the titles the Scripture gives the church: the spouse of Christ, the body of Christ, the fulness of Christ, and he turns each into a ground of love and duty. If the church is Christ's spouse, then Christ loves her with an everlasting love, and she is bound to him in a covenant no sin of hers can finally break; if she is his body, then every member is united to him and to every other member, and the least believer shares in the life of the Head; if she is his fulness, then Christ counts his own glory as bound up with hers, and her shame is his dishonour, her honour his delight. Watson is the theologian of the tenderness of this doctrine. He would have the believer feel, not merely know, what it means to belong to the invisible church: to be loved by Christ, indwelt by Christ, and counted as the very fulness of Christ. It is a warmth the dry bones of controversy can never supply, and it is Watson's enduring gift to this section. Robert Shaw, in his Exposition of the Confession of Faith, supplies the briefest and most serviceable summary of the whole. The church, he writes, "is called catholic or universal, because it is not confined to one nation, or to one period of time, but consists of the whole number of the elect, that have been, are, or shall be gathered into one"; it is called invisible "because its members, in respect to their internal character, are known only to God, and its unity and glory are not discernible by the eye of sense." Shaw observes that the church is one under Christ her Head, however her members may be scattered in place and time, and that the titles of spouse, body, and fullness express the intimate and indissoluble union between Christ and his people. His exposition is valuable because it keeps the reader's eye on the single point the Confession is making: the church, in her saving reality, is one, holy, catholic, and invisible, and every error about the church begins by losing hold of one of these four words. To these voices we may add the later Princeton witness of B. B. Warfield, who saw with unusual clarity that the doctrine of the invisible church is the great bulwark of evangelical religion. Warfield insisted that the church, considered in her essence, is not an organisation but an organism, not a society men constitute but a body Christ indwells. He traced the distinction between the visible and invisible church back to Augustine and showed how the Reformers, in recovering it, recovered at the same time the freedom of the individual believer, who could be assured of his place in the church of God without first ascertaining the judgment of any ecclesiastical court. For Warfield the doctrine was not a piece of antiquarian theology but a living protection against every attempt to put the church in the place of her Lord. Where Christ is truly Head, the church is truly safe; where any man or institution claims the headship, the church is in chains. The whole Reformed doctrine of the church is, in the end, an elaborate defence of the headship of Christ, and Warfield stated it with a force that has not dimmed.

Puritan Application

First, let the invisibility of the church teach you to walk by faith and not by sight when you judge the state of the church. Our eyes are naturally drawn to what can be counted and seen: to the size of the congregation, the health of the denomination, the success of the latest mission. All these things have their place, and the Confession nowhere despises them. But the church of Christ is not measured by any of them. She is the whole number of the elect, known to God, and no season of outward decline can diminish her by one soul. When the visible church seems small, when orthodoxy seems in retreat, when the faithful are a remnant, remember that the foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal, the Lord knoweth them that are his. Judge nothing before the time. The church you can see may be discouraged; the church you cannot see is complete, and Christ is gathering her home with a hand that never fails. Second, let the catholicity of the church enlarge your love beyond your own congregation and your own tradition. The invisible church is universal, gathered from every nation, every age, every tribe, and the believer who belongs to her has more brethren than he has ever met. It is a sin of the narrow heart to love only those who worship as we worship and to regard the church of Christ as though it began and ended with our own assembly. The Confession's word "catholic" is a rebuke to every sectarian spirit. Love the whole church of God. Pray for believers in distant lands whose faces you will never see and whose tongues you could not speak. Rejoice in every true work of grace wherever it appears, and grieve over every wound to the body of Christ, wherever it bleeds. If the church is one under Christ her Head, then the believer who rejoices in one part of the body and despises another is despising, in that part, the very fulness of Christ. Third, let the headship of Christ be the rule by which you test every claim made over the church. The Confession crowns its definition with the words "under Christ the Head thereof," and the whole doctrine of the church rises or falls with that phrase. No pope, no bishop, no council, no magistrate, no committee, and no majority is the head of the church; Christ alone is her Head, and he has given no one leave to sit in his seat. This is a doctrine to be held with a jealous love, for wherever the headship of Christ is surrendered, the church begins to be governed by the wisdom of men and the church soon becomes the servant of the age. Test every proposal laid before the church by this touchstone: does it honour Christ as Head, or does it quietly transfer his authority to another? The church that keeps Christ as her only Head will keep her liberty; the church that forgets it will find herself in bondage to whatever lord the times supply. Fourth, let the images of the spouse and the body shape your daily conduct toward Christ and toward his people. You are, if you are a believer, part of the bride whom Christ loved and for whom he gave himself, and part of the body of which he is the Head. Let that be the ground of your purity, for a bride who belongs to Christ must keep herself for him alone, and must not give her affections to the idols of the world. Let it be the ground of your unity, for members of one body do not wage war against one another, but each serves the life of the whole. Let it be the ground of your joy, for you are not a mere adherent of a religious society but a member of Christ, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh in the spiritual and mystical sense. Carry that dignity with you through the week. The same Christ who fills all things has deigned to dwell in you and in the church, and no weekday is too low for the honour of belonging to him. Fifth, and finally, let the certainty of the invisible church steady your soul against every fear for your own standing. Many a believer is troubled by the question whether he truly belongs to the church of God, and the temptation is to read the visible church's mixed condition as though it settled his own estate. But the Confession lifts the matter out of the reach of men. The church to which salvation belongs is the church of the elect, and the seal of that church is not the judgment of any man but the knowledge of the Lord. Make your own calling and election sure, not by comparing yourself with the ungodly who share your pew, nor by despairing because your faith is weak, but by looking to Christ, in whom the elect are chosen and to whom they are joined. The Lord knoweth them that are his; and the surest way to know that you are his is to find yourself trusting his Son, loving his people, and longing for his appearing. Rest there. The church that cannot fail is the church that trusts a Head who cannot fail, and every trembling believer who clings to Christ belongs to her, now and for ever.

Prayer

Almighty and everlasting God, who hast loved Thine elect with an everlasting love, and hast gathered them into one body under Christ their Head, we bless Thee for the church that cannot be seen, for the company of the redeemed, written in heaven, of which no tongue can tell the number and no eye can trace the bounds. We thank Thee that Thou hast made us, in Christ, members of that blessed assembly, and that the gates of hell shall never prevail against it. Teach us, O Lord, to walk by faith and not by sight in all our judgments concerning Thy church. Keep us from trusting in numbers and outward show, and from despairing when the visible church is weak and small. Grant us the comfort of knowing that the foundation of God standeth sure, and that Thou knowest them that are Thine. Enlarge our hearts to love the whole church of God, in every land and every age, and deliver us from the narrowness that loves only our own assembly and our own tradition. O Lord Jesus Christ, Thou who art the only Head of the church, keep Thy people from bowing to any other head. Defend Thy church against every usurper, and preserve her liberty under Thy gracious rule. Make us, as members of Thy body and parts of Thy bride, pure and faithful, keeping ourselves for Thee alone, and serving one another in the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace. And for ourselves, we beseech Thee, grant us the assurance of our place in Thine elect church, not by our own merits, for we have none, but by faith in Thy Son, whom we trust, and whose voice we hear. Let us live this day as those who are the spouse, the body, and the fulness of Christ, and bring us at last, with the whole number of Thine elect, to that assembly of the firstborn where faith shall be turned to sight, and we shall see Thee as Thou art. We ask all this in the name of Jesus Christ, our only Head and our beloved Bridegroom. Amen.