Devotional 134: The Visible Church: The Kingdom of Christ on Earth

The Confession Read

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.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 25, Section 2

Introduction

You can point to it on a map and find it in a street. It has a name on a board and a meetinghouse with walls, and on a certain morning of the week its people walk to a certain door and take their seats in a certain room. The church we confessed in our last study no map could show, for she is written in heaven and known to God alone; she is the company of the elect, the body and bride of Christ. But the church before us now is the church of the street and the doorway and the pew: the church a man may see, and count, and join, and grieve, and leave. The Westminster Divines do not permit us to rest long in the invisible church, and for a plain and kindly reason: a church that no man can see is of no direct use to a man who must be saved, and fed, and governed here upon the earth. So, having looked upward at the church that faith alone can grasp, we now look outward at the church that sight can examine, and the Divines give her a name that has grown strange to many ears: the visible church. And yet the very first thing they say of this visible church is that she, too, is "catholic or universal under the gospel." That is a claim worth pausing over, because it presses against the whole drift of our natural instinct. We are accustomed to think of the visible church as a scattering of denominations, each with its own name and its own customs and its own corner of the truth; and the catholicity of the church strikes us as a fine idea that has very little to do with the church we actually meet in. The Divines would have us think otherwise. The visible church is not a heap of rival societies but one society, one kingdom, one household, gathered out of every nation under heaven and bound together by one Head. When we confess the church, we confess something larger than any congregation and older than any denomination; we confess the whole company of those who, throughout the world, profess the true religion, together with their children. Everything in this section is designed to teach the believer to see that one great church standing behind, and within, every particular assembly he has ever loved. The matter is not merely academic, for how a man thinks of the visible church will govern how he treats her. If the visible church is a mere voluntary club of the like-minded, then he may join or leave her as his comfort dictates, and despise her when she disappoints him. But if she is the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ and the house and family of God, then to separate from her is no small thing, and to despise her is to despise, in some measure, her King and her Father. The section before us, then, is a summons to a right and high view of the church a man can see, and it closes with the most searching sentence in the chapter: that out of this visible church there is no ordinary possibility of salvation. Let us take the doctrine in hand and learn what the word of God teaches concerning the church that is seen.

Scripture Foundation

The first foundation of this section is the day the visible church was born, and Luke's account of it stands at the head of the Acts of the Apostles. Acts 2:41-47: "Then they that gladly received his word were baptized: and the same day there were added unto them about three thousand souls. And they continued stedfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers. ... And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved." Here, on the day of Pentecost, we see the visible church in her very constitution. Peter preached; those who received the word were baptized; and the baptized were added to the company of the disciples. The pattern is fixed, and it has not altered since. A man does not drift into the visible church, nor is he born into it by the mere accident of geography; he enters it by receiving the word that is preached and professing the faith that word calls for, and his entrance is sealed by baptism. The phrase "such as should be saved" has a tenderness about it, for it marks the company of professors as the company among whom the Lord is pleased ordinarily to work salvation. The second foundation carries us to the prophets, and to the promise that the church of the gospel would be gathered from all nations and not from one alone. Isaiah 2:2-3: "And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the LORD's house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it. And many people shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob." The old covenant church was a single nation, gathered around a single temple on a single mountain in a single land; a man became a member of her by being born an Israelite, or by being circumcised into that nation. But the prophet sees a day when the mountain of the Lord's house will be exalted, and the nations will flow to it as waters run downhill. That day dawned when Christ rose and sent his apostles to all the world, and our Lord's own word seals the change. Matthew 28:19: "Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." No longer one nation, but all nations; no longer one mountain, but every place where the gospel is preached and received. This is what the Divines mean when they say the visible church is catholic "under the gospel," and when they add the parenthesis, "not confined to one nation, as before under the law." The change from the old covenant to the new is not a change of churches but a widening of her, the coming of age of the people of God. The third foundation names the character in which this church stands before God, and it is drawn from Paul's word to the Ephesians. Ephesians 2:19: "Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God." The phrase "of the household of God" translates the Greek oikeioi tou theou, those who belong to the household, the family, of God; and it is this very phrase, lifted out of the apostle's letter, that the Confession echoes when it calls the visible church "the house and family of God." Paul is writing to Gentile converts, men and women who had once been aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise, and he tells them that in Christ they have been brought near: no longer foreigners but fellow-citizens, no longer outsiders but members of the divine household. The visible church is therefore not an institution men have invented for their own convenience, but the family God has constituted, the house in which his children are born and reared and fed. The image is domestic, and it is meant to be. The church is a home before she is anything else: a Father, a table, a family, a roof, and a hearth. The fourth foundation touches the tenderest clause of the section, the words "and of their children," and it reaches back to the covenant God made with Abraham. Genesis 17:7: "And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee." The covenant was never a private bargain between God and a solitary individual; it was a covenant with a man and his house, embracing the seed after him in their generations. And the New Testament does not narrow this but confirms it, for on that same day of Pentecost Peter declared, in Acts 2:39: "For the promise is unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call." The promise runs to the parents and to their children, and therefore the visible church, which is constituted by the covenant, receives into her membership not only those who profess the faith in their own persons but also the children whom God has given to his people. The Divines set down this clause with a quiet boldness, for it was contested in their day as it is in ours; and it leads, in the unfolding of the Confession, straight to the doctrine of baptism, where the place of the covenant child in the household of God is more fully expounded. For now it is enough to mark that the visible church is a family, and that in a family the children belong to the household from their birth. There remains the closing claim of the section, that out of the visible church there is no ordinary possibility of salvation, and its foundation is the exclusiveness of the gospel. Acts 4:12: "Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved." Salvation is in Christ alone, and Christ has appointed that it should ordinarily be dispensed through the ministry, the oracles, and the ordinances committed to his visible church. The section does not say God cannot save outside her, for he is not bound by his own means; it says there is no ordinary possibility of salvation without her, and that word "ordinary" carries the whole weight of the doctrine. These passages stand in a line and bear the weight of the section between them. Luke shows us the church constituted by profession and baptism; Isaiah and our Lord show her widened to all nations; Paul shows her standing as the household of God; Moses and Peter show the children received into her; and the apostle's word to the Jerusalem council shows why her fellowship is no small thing. Upon this foundation the Divines raised their sentence, and it has stood for four centuries because the foundation is the word of God.

What the Divines Meant

To understand what the Divines meant, we must first grasp the two errors they were steering between, for this section, like the one before it, was framed in the heat of a controversy. On the one hand stood the Roman claim, which so identified the church with a particular visible hierarchy that the very idea of a church not subject to the bishop of Rome seemed a contradiction; against this error the Divines had already insisted, in the opening section, that the church in her saving essence is invisible, known to God rather than to any human officer. But there was a second error, nearer at hand in the England of their day, and it is this second error that the present section is chiefly aimed at. The enthusiasts and sectaries of the age, having learned to despise Rome's false claims, went on to despise the visible church altogether. They fled from parishes and ordinances, abandoned the ministry and the sacraments, and claimed a private and inward religion that needed no congregation and no pastor. It was against these that the Divines now turned, and they turned with a sentence that binds the believer's conscience to the church he can see as firmly as the first sentence bound his hope to the church he cannot see. Consider, then, the careful architecture of the sentence. It opens with the word "visible," and everything that follows is an exposition of that word. The visible church is "also catholic or universal," for she shares in the catholicity of the invisible church, though in a different way: the invisible church is catholic in respect of her election, the visible in respect of her profession. She is catholic "under the gospel," a phrase that sets her in a particular epoch of the divine economy, and the parenthesis that follows explains it: she is "not confined to one nation, as before under the law." Here is a sentence loaded with a whole theology of the covenants. Under the law the church was a nation, Israel, and her bounds were the bounds of a land and a people; under the gospel the church is no longer a nation but a congregation gathered from all nations, and her bounds are the bounds of the world. The Divines were not teaching that the old covenant church was a different church from the new, for it was one church in two dispensations, one people of God under a growing revelation; but they were teaching that the outward form of that church has changed, and that the change is one of the glories of the gospel. The wall of partition has been broken down, and the visible church is now the one body of Jew and Gentile alike, spread through every land where the true religion is professed. The heart of the definition lies in the phrase "all those throughout the world that profess the true religion." Every word is weighed. The church consists of those who profess, not of those who are infallibly known to be regenerate; for the visible church is the church as men see it, and men can see and judge a profession where they cannot see and judge the heart. And they profess "the true religion," not merely a religion; the phrase is a quiet assertion that there is such a thing as true religion and false, and that the visible church is constituted not by any sincerity whatsoever but by a sincere profession of the faith once delivered to the saints. The word "profession" is the hinge on which the whole sentence turns. It is a public thing, a thing spoken before witnesses, a thing a man does with his mouth in the hearing of the church; and it corresponds to that word of the apostle, in Romans 10:9-10, "if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation." The Greek for "confess" is homologeō, to say the same thing, to speak in agreement with God concerning Christ; and it is this public agreement, this spoken profession, that constitutes a man a member of the visible church. Then comes the clause that has exercised the church ever since, "and of their children." The Divines were determined that the visible church should be seen as a family and not merely as a society of adult volunteers, and so they expressly receive into it the children of professing believers. This is not, as some have supposed, a claim that every child of believers is elect, for the Confession has already taught that election is the secret of God, and it nowhere confuses the visible with the invisible church. It is rather the recognition of the covenant: the children of believers are, by virtue of their birth into the household, members of the visible church from their infancy, and are to be brought up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord until the day when they make that profession their own. The clause is not a promise of the salvation of every such child, but a recognition of his standing, a standing that carries immense privilege and immense responsibility. He is in the church; he sits under her ministry; he is pledged in baptism to her Head; and he must one day answer for all these mercies either in faith or in unbelief. The sentence closes with three great titles and one great warning. The visible church "is the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ": a kingdom, not a democracy nor an oligarchy, for Christ is her King, and her laws are his laws, and her discipline is his authority exercised by his officers. She is "the house and family of God": a household, in which God is the Father, Christ the elder brother, the saints the children, and the whole company bound together by the tenderest ties of kindred. And out of her "there is no ordinary possibility of salvation." The Divines were careful to insert that word "ordinary," and it is the key that unlocks the whole doctrine. They did not say there is no possibility of salvation outside the visible church, for the thief on the cross was saved without ever entering a congregation, and God's grace is not bound to means. But they did say that in the ordinary course of God's dealings, the church is the appointed channel of salvation: the place where the word is preached, the sacraments administered, and the saints gathered and built up. The man who despises the visible church and absents himself from her is despising, in the ordinary way of things, the very means of his own salvation. It is a sober sentence, and it is meant to be, for it is the Divines' answer to every sectary who would have religion without a church, a Christ without a body, and a salvation without the means of grace.

Theological Depth

The doctrine of the visible church called forth some of the warmest and most searching reflection in the Reformed tradition, for the theologians who expounded it knew that here, more than almost anywhere else, the heart and the head must be kept together. To believe too little of the visible church is to starve the soul; to believe too much of her is to put her in the place of her Lord. Calvin's treatment of the visible church, in the fourth book of the Institutes, is the fountain from which so much that follows flows, and its keynote is a sentence that has never ceased to move the church: "For there is no other way to enter into life unless this mother conceive us in her womb, give us birth, nourish us at her breast, and lastly, unless she keep us under her care and guidance until, putting off mortal flesh, we become like the angels." He who has God for his Father, Calvin insists, must have the church for his mother. The visible church is the mother of all the godly, the nursery in which the children of God are born and nursed and reared, and to cut oneself off from her is to cut oneself off from the only ordinary means by which the life of Christ is conveyed to men. Calvin is no Romanist; he refuses, with the whole force of his mind, to identify the visible church with any particular see or hierarchy, and he will not pretend that she is without blemish. But neither will he hear of a piety that despises her, and his warnings against those who would separate from her for her imperfections are among the sternest things he wrote. A man is not to leave the church because she is imperfect, any more than a son leaves his mother because she is frail; he is to honour her, and bear with her, and labour for her healing, for she is the mother through whom God has willed that his children should be born. Watson takes the same doctrine and turns it, in his customary way, toward the affections. In his Body of Divinity he loves to speak of the visible church as the family of God and the suburbs of heaven, and he presses the domestic image to its warmest conclusions. If the church is a family, then God is our Father, and the saints are our brethren, and the ties that bind us to the humblest believer are ties of blood, spiritual blood, closer than the bonds of nature. If the church is the kingdom of Christ, then to be in her is to be under the scepter of a gracious King, and to obey her laws is not bondage but liberty. Watson would have the believer feel the privilege of visible membership: to sit at the table of the Lord, to hear the voice of the Shepherd in the preaching of the word, to be fed, warned, comforted, and corrected in the company of the redeemed. And he would have him feel, too, the obligation: he who is a member of the family must live as a member, honouring the Father, loving the brethren, adorning the house with a holy walk. It is Watson's gift to make us ashamed of despising what God has dignified, and glad to belong to the company the world calls poor and mean but God calls his household. Hodge, in his commentary on the Confession, supplies the analytic clarity the subject requires. He defines the visible church as "the whole body of those who profess the true religion, together with their children," and he distinguishes the two kinds of catholicity the Confession ascribes to her: the invisible church is catholic in respect of her membership in the counsel of God, while the visible church is catholic in respect of her extent and her unity in profession. Hodge dwells on the inclusion of children, showing that it rests not on any presumed regeneration but on the covenant, and that the child of a believer stands in a wholly different relation to the church than the child of an unbeliever, not because he is certainly saved but because he is certainly within the household, pledged to its Head and entitled to its nurture. And he is firm, with the Confession, on the final clause: the necessity of the visible church is a necessity of the ordinary means, not of the absolute decree, and the word "ordinary" must never be dropped, lest the doctrine be turned into the Roman error that no man can be saved who is not visibly in communion with the Roman see. It is a commentary that keeps the reader's feet on the ground, and it is the natural first resort for any who would understand the section precisely. Robert Shaw, in his Exposition of the Confession of Faith, compresses the whole into a paragraph that has worn well. The visible church, he writes, "is catholic or universal under the gospel, not confined to one nation, as before under the law; and it consists of all who, throughout the world, profess the true religion, together with their children." He observes that the visible church is called the kingdom of Christ because Christ is her only Head, and the house and family of God because God is her Father and all believers are his children; and he is at pains to explain the closing clause as a warning, not a sentence. The man who lives in the bosom of the visible church and yet neglects her ordinances is in peril, not because the church saves, but because she is the appointed means of that salvation which Christ alone bestows. Shaw's exposition is valuable because it keeps the reader's eye on the single point the section is making: the visible church is real, is one, is catholic, and is necessary, and every error about the church begins by losing hold of one of these four words. To these voices we may add the later witness of B. B. Warfield, who saw with unusual clarity how the doctrine of the visible church guards at once the honour of Christ and the comfort of the believer. Warfield insisted that the church is an organism before she is an organisation, a body Christ indwells before she is a society men administer; and he traced with learning the way the Reformers, in recovering the distinction between the visible and the invisible church, recovered at the same time the freedom of the believer and the liberty of the particular congregation. For Warfield the visible church is precious precisely because she is Christ's, and to despise her is to despise the work of his Spirit; yet she is precious in a derivative way, and the moment any man or council sets her above her Lord, she has ceased to be the church. It is a doctrine that keeps its balance under pressure, and it is the balance the Confession itself so carefully maintains.

Puritan Application

First, join the visible church, and count her fellowship no light thing. The Confession has just told you that out of the visible church there is no ordinary possibility of salvation, and it would be a strange and dangerous temper to hear that sentence and go on living as though the church were a convenience to be used when it suits and laid aside when it does not. If you have professed the faith, then profess it openly, and bind yourself to a particular congregation by the means God has appointed. The church is not a lecture hall where you may sit as a spectator and leave as a critic; she is your mother, and a child does not stand aloof from his mother while she feeds him. Make your membership real: attend her worship, sit under her ministry, receive her sacraments, submit to her discipline, and bear a part in her burdens. The man who says he loves Christ but will not join Christ's visible body is speaking a contradiction, for Christ is not divided, and the Head is not to be had without the members. Second, make your profession a true one, for the visible church is built upon profession, and a false profession is a breach in her wall. The church can see and judge only what a man says with his mouth; she cannot read his heart, and she is not required to. But you can read your own heart, and you are required to. Search yourself, then, whether the profession your lips make is the echo of a faith your soul holds. The word homologeō means to say the same thing, to agree with God concerning Christ; ask yourself whether you do in truth agree with God about your own sin, and about Christ's sufficiency, and about your need of him. A profession that is only an outward form will not save you, though it brings you into the church; it will only make you a hypocrite at a holier table, and the nearer the light, the sharper the shadow. Let there be no deceit between your mouth and your heart, for the church can receive what you profess, but God will judge what you are. Third, value the children of the church, and bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. The Confession has told you that the children of believers belong to the visible church, and it would be a great sin to treat that privilege as though it were nothing. Your children are in the household of God; they sit under his word, they bear his name in baptism, and they are pledged to his service before they can speak. Do not, then, raise them as though they were the children of strangers. Pray with them, and teach them, and bring them to the assemblies, and speak to them of Christ as one speaks to members of the family, for so they are. And let their standing in the church be a burden upon your own soul, for a covenant child who is lost is a double loss, a ship that went down within sight of the harbour, and a fire that burned in the very house of God. Bear them up in faith, and labour for their conversion with all the tenderness of a parent who knows that the promise is unto you and to your children. Fourth, let the catholicity of the visible church enlarge your heart beyond your own assembly and your own tradition. The church is catholic under the gospel, gathered from all nations, and she is one kingdom under one King, however her outward forms may differ. It is a sin of the narrow heart to love only those who worship exactly as we worship, and to speak of the visible church as though she began and ended with our own denomination. Love the whole visible 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. The church in China and the church in your own town are one church, one household, one family, and the child of God who despises a brother in a distant land despises a member of his own father's house. Fifth, and finally, live as a member of the family and a subject of the kingdom, for that is what you are. The visible church is the house and family of God and the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ, and these are not idle titles but the measure of your duty. As a member of the family, live in love: bear with the infirmities of your brethren, cover their faults with charity, and serve them in the works of mercy, for members of one household do not wage war against one another. As a subject of the kingdom, live in obedience: honour the officers Christ has set over you, heed the discipline of the church, and order your life by the laws of the King. And as one who has found salvation within these walls, do not despise the day of small things, nor the plainness of the means. The church you are tempted to think common is the church through which God has willed to save you; and the very plainness of her preaching and her sacraments is the mercy of a God who has not made salvation a rare and difficult thing, but has set it within reach of every soul that will enter and believe. Live, then, in her bosom with gratitude, and let your whole walk confess that you are glad to be in the house of God, with the people of God, under the King of grace.

Prayer

Almighty and everlasting God, who hast gathered a visible church out of every nation, and hast made her Thy house and family, and the kingdom of Thy dear Son, we bless Thee that Thou hast not left us to seek salvation in secret and in solitude, but hast set us in a congregation, and given us a ministry, and spread a table before us in the sight of our brethren. We thank Thee that, whereas we were strangers and foreigners, Thou hast made us fellow-citizens with the saints and of the household of God; and that the promise of the covenant is unto us and to our children. Teach us, O Lord, to prize the church we can see as we prize the church we cannot see. Forgive us our wanton despising of her fellowship, our neglect of her ordinances, our coldness toward her brethren, and our narrow love that embraces only our own assembly. Give us, we pray Thee, the heart of children in the household of God, who honour the Father, love the brethren, and sit with gladness at the family table. And make our profession a true one, that our lips and our hearts may agree, and that we may say the same thing concerning Christ which Thou Thyself hast said. O Lord Jesus Christ, Thou who art the only Head and King of the church, rule in her by Thy word and Spirit, and keep her in every land from error and from schism, from the pride that would exalt her above Thee, and from the despair that would count her nothing. Gather in the children whom Thou hast given to Thy people, and let not one of the little ones of the household perish. And for ourselves, we beseech Thee, bring us at last, with all who in every place call upon Thy name, from the church militant to the church triumphant, from the household of faith to the house of many mansions, where we shall be no more strangers, but shall dwell for ever in the family of God. We ask it in the name of Jesus Christ, our only Head, our elder Brother, and our King. Amen.