Devotional 137: The Authority of the Church: To Administer the Keys of the Kingdom

The Confession Read

The purest churches under heaven are subject both to mixture and error; and some have so degenerated, as to become no churches of Christ, but synagogues of Satan. Nevertheless, there shall be always a church on earth, to worship God according to his will.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 25, Section 5

Introduction

There are two discoveries that have troubled the people of God in every age, and the second wounds more deeply than the first. The first is the discovery that the church is not nearly so pure as we had hoped. We enter her fellowship expecting a gathered company of the sanctified, and instead we find, alongside much genuine godliness, worldliness, coldness, quarrelling, and not a little concealed unbelief. The second discovery, harder still to bear, is that a church can fall away altogether: that a body which once preached the gospel with power and administered the sacraments with reverence can, across a generation or two, surrender the truth, corrupt the worship, and end as something that still bears the name of Christ while serving the purposes of His adversary. The first discovery breeds impatience; the second breeds despair. Both are answered in the single sentence of the Confession before us, which is at once one of the most sobering and one of the most comforting statements the Westminster divines ever framed. The sentence holds three truths in tension, and it is precisely the holding of them together that makes it wise. The first is realism: even the purest churches on earth are subject to mixture and error. The second is severity: some churches have so degenerated that they have ceased to be churches of Christ at all, and have become synagogues of Satan. The third is certainty: notwithstanding all this, there shall always be a church on earth to worship God according to His will. Take any one of these truths alone and you will be led astray. Realism without severity becomes the complacency that shrugs off apostasy as though it did not matter. Severity without realism becomes the separatism that abandons every imperfect church in the endless search for a spotless one. And both, without certainty, collapse into the despair that concludes the church's cause on earth is lost. The Confession refuses every one of these distortions. It will not let us be naive, it will not let us be proud, and it will not let us be afraid. The occasion of this section is, in part, the great sixteenth- and seventeenth-century controversy over the church of Rome. Could a church that had added so much to the gospel, and corrupted the worship of God so grievously, still be called a church of Christ? And on the other side stood the separatists and the perfectionists, who reasoned that because every church is imperfect, no church can be trusted, and the godly must withdraw and build afresh. The divines answer both errors with a careful distinction that we shall unfold. They insist, first, that imperfection does not un-church a body; and they insist, second, that apostasy does. The mark of a true church is not sinlessness, but the presence of the truth and ordinances of Christ; and where these are wholly cast off, the name "church" no longer applies, whatever the building may still say over its door. Yet beneath all the ebb and flow of particular churches there runs the unbroken promise of the Head: His church shall not fail from the earth. Let us set ourselves to understand this sentence, clause by clause, for it is a sentence that teaches us how to love a church that will always disappoint us, and how to hope in a church that will never be destroyed.

Scripture Foundation

The Confession's third clause rests upon a promise so direct that no honest reader can miss it. Our Lord said to Peter, "And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it" (Matthew 16:18). The Greek of the final phrase is worth pausing over, for the force of the promise lives in a single verb. Katischuō, "prevail," carries the sense of being strong against, of overpowering and bearing down upon a thing until it yields. The gates of Hades, the whole dread assembly of death and the powers that serve it, will set themselves against the church, and they will not be strong enough. This is not a promise that the church will never be diminished, never be driven into the wilderness, never be reduced in any place to a handful. It is a promise that she will never be overthrown. The church is built upon a rock, and a building founded on that rock may be stormed, battered, and scarred, but it cannot be torn down. Whatever particular congregations rise and fall, the church of Christ, as a living whole, shall stand until the Lord returns. This verse is the anchor of the third clause of our section, and we do well to read every other text about the church's frailty in the light of it. The phrase the Confession borrows for its second clause is drawn from the risen Christ's own lips in the letters to the seven churches. To the church at Smyrna He writes, "I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan" (Revelation 2:9); and to Philadelphia, "Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie; behold, I will make them to come and worship before thy feet, and to know that I have loved thee" (Revelation 3:9). Here the term refers, in its first application, to those who claimed to be God's covenant people by descent while opposing Christ and persecuting His flock. The Greek word is synagōgē, a "gathering together," from a root that means to lead or bring together. The irony is sharp and deliberate. The church is an ekklēsia, a company "called out" by the voice of God; a synagogue is simply a company "gathered together." A body that once was called out by Christ can, through apostasy, become a body that still gathers and still wears the old name, but is now gathered under another master altogether. The outward assembling remains; the inward identity has been inverted. This is the precise horror the Confession names: a church that has degenerated into a synagogue of Satan still assembles, still carries the signs and furnishings of religion, still says its prayers and keeps its forms, and yet, in the judgment of Christ Himself, it has become an instrument of the very enemy it was raised up to resist. For the doctrine of mixture, the presence of false alongside true even in the purest churches, the apostle Paul supplies an image that strikes at the root of our surprise. Writing to Timothy, he says, "But in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and of silver, but also of wood and of earth; and some to honour, and some to dishonour. If a man therefore purge himself from these, he shall be a vessel unto honour, sanctified, and meet for the master's use, and prepared unto every good work" (2 Timothy 2:20-21). The visible church in this world is a great house in which vessels of very different material stand side by side on the same shelf. Gold and silver serve the Master's table; wood and earth serve baser ends. Both are in the house; both are called by the household name; but only the one sort is meet for the Master's use. The point is not that we should be shocked to find the mixed vessels there, for the apostle assumes it as a matter of course, but that each of us should make sure of his own material. The presence of the wooden vessels does not make the house any less the Master's house; and the presence of the golden vessels does not prevent a wooden vessel from lying among them. Mixture is the standing condition of the visible church on earth, and it will be so until the Master Himself sorts the vessels at the last. Finally, the degeneration of a professing people is writ large across the Old Testament, and the divines read that history as a type of what can befall any church. When Israel forsook her God, the Lord commanded the prophet to take a name that was itself a verdict: "Then said God, Call his name Lo-ammi: for ye are not my people, and I will not be your God" (Hosea 1:9). The Hebrew lo'-ammi means "not my people," and it stands in grim symmetry with the earlier name Lo-ruhamah, "not having obtained mercy." These were the names God gave to the children of the prophet's broken marriage, and through them the Lord declared that a people who had borne His name could forfeit the reality of the covenant while still occupying the land and the temple. A church may keep the title "the people of God" long after God has withdrawn His covenant favour; the name on the door may outlive the presence within. Paul holds the same lesson up before the Gentile churches as a warning: "Because of unbelief they were broken off, and thou standest by faith. Be not highminded, but fear: For if God spared not the natural branches, take heed lest he also spare not thee" (Romans 11:20-21). The olive tree of the covenant is living, and branches that cease to draw life from the root are broken off, whether they be the natural branches of Israel or the wild branches grafted in from the nations. Degeneration is not a hypothetical danger but a repeated fact of sacred history, and no church, however pure today, is exempt from the possibility of being broken off tomorrow.

What the Divines Meant

The divines were not writing speculation; they were giving precision to a pastoral and polemical necessity. The sentence has three movements, and each movement corrects a distinct error. The first clause, "The purest churches under heaven are subject both to mixture and error," is aimed squarely at the perfectionist and the separatist. The divines concede as much as language can concede: the purest churches, not merely the average, not merely the worst, are subject to both mixture and error. Mark the two words, for they name two different defects. Mixture is a defect of the membership: into even the most faithful congregation there enter, and there remain, those who have never been truly converted, whose profession is outward only, and who sit among the saints while their hearts are far from God. Error is a defect of the understanding: the teaching and confession of even a sound church may be, and always has been, imperfect, partial, and in some matters mistaken, because the men who teach and confess are fallible. No church on this side of glory is sinless, and no church is infallible. To demand a church without mixture or without error is to demand something God has nowhere promised to give in this life. The divines are deliberately setting a boundary: the corruption of a church is a matter of degree, and only past a certain point does it touch the essence of the thing. That boundary is drawn by the second clause: "and some have so degenerated, as to become no churches of Christ, but synagogues of Satan." The key word is so: so degenerated, to such a degree, as to have crossed from corruption into apostasy. Not every error, not every mixture, un-churches a people; but a church that has cast off the foundation of the gospel, denied the essential truths of Christ, and corrupted the worship of God into idolatry has ceased to be a church of Christ. The divines had chiefly in view the church of Rome, which they judged to have overlaid the gospel with such additions, and the worship of God with such inventions, that it could no longer be called a church of Christ in any true sense. The phrase "synagogues of Satan" is their deliberate borrowing of the language of the risen Lord in Revelation, and it teaches a truth we shrink from stating plainly: an assembly may go on meeting, may go on preaching, may go on administering its rites, and yet be, in the sight of God, not a church at all but a gathering of the enemy. The sign may remain after the reality has fled. Israel kept the temple long after the glory had departed from it; and the divines warn us that the same thing may happen in the New Testament age. Then the third clause restores the balance: "Nevertheless, there shall be always a church on earth, to worship God according to his will." This is the doctrine of the church's indefectibility: her inability to fail utterly. However many particular churches fall away, however widely apostasy may spread in one land or one century, the church catholic shall never perish from the earth. There shall always be, somewhere, a company of men and women who worship God according to His will, in spirit and in truth, holding to the gospel and keeping the ordinances as Christ delivered them. The divines anchor this confidence, not in the faithfulness of men, but in the promise and power of the church's Head, who declared that the gates of hell should not prevail against His church. The ground of certainty is the same ground as that of humility: because the church's preservation depends on Christ and not on us, we may be certain she will never fail, and we may also be warned that our own congregation could fail while the church goes on without us. The genius of the sentence is the way it holds these three clauses in a single breath, so that no reader can take one without the others. It forbids the complacency that shrugs at apostasy, because a church can indeed cease to be a church. It forbids the despair that gives up on the church, because the church can never wholly fail. And it forbids the pride that would abandon an imperfect church, because imperfection is the appointed condition of every church under heaven. Realism, severity, and certainty are here bound together, and the soul that will learn to live within this threefold cord has learned the mature posture of a member of Christ's body in a fallen world.

Theological Depth

The divines stood in a long tradition of reflection on the church's corruption and her endurance, and the great teachers of the Reformed churches had already worked out the very distinctions this section compresses into a sentence. Calvin had faced the same two-sided question in the controversy with Rome and with the radical separatists of his own day, and his answer in the Institutes maps directly onto our text. He taught, on the one hand, that we must not abandon a true church for every imperfection. A church in which the gospel is still preached and the sacraments still administered, however many faults may cling to its life, is still a church of Christ; to depart from her because she is not pure is to sin against Christ, who has not disowned her. On the other hand, Calvin was equally insistent that the marks by which a church is known can be so extinguished that the body ceases to deserve the name. Where the Word of God is no longer truly preached, and the sacraments are either withheld or corrupted into something the Lord never appointed, there the outward shell may remain, but the reality of the church has vanished. What Calvin discerned, and what our Confession enshrines, is that the question "is this a church?" is never answered by asking whether the people are holy, but by asking whether the truth and ordinances of Christ are present. Holiness may be mixed with much unholiness and the church remains a church; the gospel and the sacraments, once wholly cast off, un-church a body altogether. Turretin pressed the same logic to its systematic conclusion by distinguishing two things we are prone to confuse. The church catholic is indefectible: it cannot fail. The particular church is fallible: it can. The promise of perpetuity, "there shall be always a church on earth," belongs to the church as a whole, to the one body of Christ throughout all ages and lands, and never to this or that congregation, denomination, or nation. When we read in Scripture that the gates of hell shall not prevail against the church, we must not transfer that promise to the church at Ephesus, or to the church at Rome, or to our own congregation, as though any one of them were guaranteed to endure. Ephesus was warned that her candlestick could be removed; Rome, having cast off the gospel, was judged to have removed it already; and the same possibility hangs over every particular church that will not hold fast. The indefectibility of the whole and the fallibility of the parts belong together: it is precisely because no particular church is guaranteed that the promise must rest upon the whole, which Christ Himself preserves by raising up new churches even as old ones fall. This distinction is the theological spine of our section, and it delivers us at once from the arrogance that thinks our church cannot die and from the despair that thinks, when one dies, that the cause of God has died with it. Watson, with his usual pastoral warmth, treats the same truth from the side of the believer's heart. He takes up the objection that the church's mixture of hypocrites discredits her, and answers it with the patience of a man who has long pastored real congregations. The chaff, he observes, lies mingled with the wheat until the winnowing; the presence of the counterfeit does not prove the whole coin false. There will be hypocrites in the church until the angels do the sorting, and their presence is no more an argument against the reality of the church than the weeds in a field are an argument against the field's being sown with good seed. And on the church's endurance, Watson's confidence is the confidence of our section's third clause: the church may be reduced, in any age, to a remnant, to those few who have not bowed the knee to Baal, but she can never be reduced to nothing. Her light may burn low, but it is never put out. The Lord has always kept, and will always keep, a seed to serve Him, so that the promise to Abraham stands sure and the praise of God never wholly ceases from the earth. Hodge, in his commentary on the Confession, supplies the analytic backbone, resolving the sentence into its three propositions and pressing each to its practical limit. The first proposition, mixture and error in the purest churches, he reads as a flat denial of perfectionism, and a warning against the two opposite extremes of expecting too much of the church and of expecting nothing at all. The second, degeneration into synagogues of Satan, he applies with unsparing clarity to Rome, while insisting that the test is doctrinal and objective, not moral and subjective: a church is judged by whether she retains the gospel, not by the conduct of her members. And the third, the perpetual church, he grounds in the promise of Christ and in the very nature of the covenant, so that the question of the church's survival is never left to human fidelity but is secured by the faithfulness of her Head. Warfield adds the deepest note of all, by pressing the distinction between the church as organism and the church as organisation. The organism, the living body of the elect, quickened by the Spirit, can never die, for it is bound to the life of the risen Christ Himself. The organisation, the outward institutional form that the organism takes in any age, can and does decay, apostatize, and perish. Our section, read in this light, is the application of that distinction to the course of history: the visible organisations rise and fall, but the organism lives on, and will always clothe itself afresh in some visible company of true worshippers, so that there is always a church on earth to worship God according to His will. What unites all these teachers is the refusal to let the church's corruption become either an excuse for leaving her or a reason for despairing of her. The corruption is real and must be named; the endurance is real and must be trusted. A mature faith holds both in a single hand, grieving over the one and resting in the other, and it is to that posture of soul that we now turn.

Puritan Application

First, do not abandon a true church over its imperfections. It is a mark of spiritual immaturity to be perpetually scandalized by the mixture and error you will find in the best congregation on earth. If you have discovered that your church has hypocrites in it, you have discovered what the apostle said would always be the case, and what the Lord Himself has chosen to tolerate until the harvest. If you have discovered that your church is imperfect in doctrine or practice, you have discovered that your church is composed of men. The question to ask is not whether the church is pure, but whether the gospel is preached and the sacraments administered, and whether Christ has manifestly not cast her off. Where those marks remain, your calling is to stay, to pray, and to labour for her reformation, not to flee to some imagined company of the spotless, which does not exist this side of glory. The man who leaves a true church because she is imperfect leaves Christ's body because it is not yet glorified, and he will search in vain for the church he seeks. Second, be clear-sighted about the other boundary: a church that has cast off the gospel is no church of Christ, and you must not remain where the foundation is denied. The same section that forbids separatism over minor faults commands separation when the gospel itself has been surrendered. If the word of God is no longer preached but another gospel substituted for it, if the worship of God has been corrupted into idolatry, if the sacraments are made into something Christ never appointed, then the body has degenerated past the point of recovery, and to remain in it under the pretence of charity is not faithfulness but complicity. The divines did not hesitate to call such a body a synagogue of Satan, and neither should we, whatever its history or its name. Discernment here is a matter of eternal consequence, and it requires us to know the difference between a church that is weak and a church that is dead, between a church that errs in some things and a church that denies the very things that make it a church. Third, turn the doctrine of mixture inward before you ever turn it outward. It is easy, and dreadfully natural, to read "vessels of wood and of earth" as a description of everyone else; the apostle, however, follows the image at once with a command that is personal: "If a man therefore purge himself from these, he shall be a vessel unto honour." The first question this section should provoke in you is not "who are the hypocrites in my church?" but "am I one of them?" Search yourself. Is your profession outward only? Is there a secret unbelief, a cherished sin, a coldness of heart toward Christ that you have learned to hide beneath the forms of religion? The mixture in the visible church is a warning addressed first to you. Do not comfort yourself that the church is full of false professors and thereby excuse the falseness of your own profession. Purge yourself, and make your calling and election sure, for the golden vessel and the earthen vessel sit on the same shelf, and only the Lord knows them that are His. Fourth, rest your hope, not in any particular church, but in the promise of the church's Head. There is a deep and practical comfort in the doctrine of indefectibility, and it is this: the cause of Christ on earth does not finally depend on any congregation, any denomination, or any nation. Your own church may decline; your own denomination may apostatize; the church in your land may be reduced to a remnant, and yet the church of Christ will stand, because it is built upon the rock, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. This certainty gives you both humility and courage. Humility, because you are delivered from the arrogance that mistakes the survival of your own institution for the survival of the kingdom. Courage, because you are delivered from the fear that the failure of any institution, however dear, is the failure of God's cause. Labour with all your might for the faithfulness of your own church, and at the same time lay hold of the promise that the church as a whole shall never fail. The one effort without the other is either presumption or panic. Fifth, fear and pray against the slow degeneration that has undone so many. Paul's warning stands over every church that reads it: "Be not highminded, but fear: for if God spared not the natural branches, take heed lest he also spare not thee." Apostasy rarely arrives as a single sudden fall; it arrives as a slow drift, a truth softened here, a practice relaxed there, a worship gradually conformed to the spirit of the age, an error tolerated first in one teacher and then in many, until at last the church has degenerated so far that it can no longer be called a church at all. The word of false teaching, Paul says elsewhere, eats as doth a canker, spreading silently and surely through the body. Therefore watch. Pray for your pastors, that they may hold fast the faithful word. Pray for your elders, that they may guard the doctrine. Pray that your own congregation would contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints, and that it would be found faithful when the Lord comes. And do not presume that because your church is pure today it will be pure tomorrow; the only sure preservative against degeneration is the continual grace of the Head, sought daily on your knees.

Prayer

O Lord Jesus Christ, Head and Husband of Thy church, we bless Thee that Thou hast built Thy church upon a rock, and that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. We thank Thee that though every congregation of men may fail, Thy church shall never fail from the earth, and that there shall always be a people to worship Thee according to Thy will. We confess with shame the mixture and the error that cleave even to the purest assemblies, and the darkness that yet abides in our own hearts. We have too often been impatient with Thy church because she is imperfect, and too often proud of ourselves while we sat among the false. Forgive us, we pray Thee, and grant us the mind that both grieves over corruption and rests in Thy promise. Keep us, we beseech Thee, from the blindness that shrugs at apostasy and from the despair that gives up when a church falls. Make us faithful in the church where Thou hast placed us, patient with her weaknesses, zealous for her purity, and jealous for the truth of Thy gospel. Suffer us not to be highminded, but make us to fear, lest we also be cut off. Preserve our pastors and elders in sound doctrine, that the word may be preached and the sacraments administered as Thou hast appointed, and that no synagogue of Satan may be raised where a church of Christ once stood. And when churches around us decline and fall, and the faithful in our land are brought low, grant us the courage that trusts in Thee alone, and the hope that knows Thy cause can never perish. Purge us, that we may be vessels unto honour, sanctified and meet for the Master's use. Raise up a faithful seed in every generation, and bring us at last to that church above, where there is no mixture, no error, and no more falling away, but the pure assembly of the firstborn, gathered before Thy throne for ever. We ask all in Thy name and for Thy glory. Amen.