Devotional 138: The Catholic Church: Fellowship in Christ, Not Uniformity Under Rome

The Confession Read

There is no other head of the church but the Lord Jesus Christ. Nor can the pope of Rome, in any sense, be head thereof.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 25, Section 6

Introduction

A body with two heads is a monster. A ship with two pilots steering in contrary directions is a wreck in the making. A flock that heeds two voices scatters and is lost. These are not idle pictures. They are the deep logic of the one sentence before us, for the Confession has come at last to the crown of its doctrine of the church. We have considered what the church is: the spouse, the body, the fulness of Christ. We have considered her visible and invisible dimensions, her purity and her mixture, her endurance and her possible degeneration. Now we come to the question that governs every other. Who is her Head? Every blessing we have traced through this chapter hangs upon the answer, and every error the divines were fencing against flows from getting that answer wrong. A body lives only because it is joined to a head. Join it to the wrong head, and it dies, however loudly it still calls itself the church. The occasion that drew this sentence from the divines was the long and bitter controversy over the papacy, which had rent Christendom and driven the Reformers to the stake. Rome claimed a visible head on earth, a vicar of Christ in whom the church's unity was supposed to reside. The Reformers answered that her unity resides in her one Head in heaven, and that setting a man in His place denies both His presence and His sufficiency. What we have here is the settled verdict of that controversy, written not in the heat of battle but in the calm of a confession meant to teach the church for generations. The sentence is short, but it carries the whole weight of the Reformation. It states a positive and a negative, and the church needs both. The positive: the Lord Jesus Christ, and He alone, is the head of the church. The negative: the pope of Rome cannot, in any sense whatever, be that head. The divines were not being harsh when they named Rome. They were being precise, for the great contest of their age, and of every age since the Reformation, was this: is the church on earth governed by a man enthroned in one city, or by the risen Christ enthroned in heaven, present among His people by His Word and Spirit? Two heads could not both be true. One had to be false. And on knowing which was which depended the purity of the gospel, the freedom of the Christian conscience, and the salvation of souls. Before we descend into the particulars, we should see how much is at stake. The head is the source of the body's life and the seat of its government. What the head is to a man, Christ is to His church. Put some other in His place, and we have not merely rearranged the furniture of church government; we have cut the body off from its life and handed it over to an authority that cannot save it. This doctrine is not ecclesiastical housekeeping, a quarrel over titles and precedence. It is the difference between a church that lives by the Spirit of Christ and a church that lives by the commands of men, between a flock that follows the voice of its Shepherd and a flock that has been taught to follow the voice of a stranger. So let us hear the Scripture, then the divines, and then what this truth must do in our own souls.

Scripture Foundation

The apostle Paul sets the doctrine down in a single luminous verse, and it is well that we begin there, for it is the fountain from which all the rest flows. Writing to the Colossians, he says of Christ, "And he is the head of the body, the church: who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he might have the preeminence" (Colossians 1:18). Every word of that verse is laden. The Greek term rendered "head" is kephalē, and in Paul's usage it gathers up two ideas that belong together if we are to follow him. The head is the source of the body's life, the part from which the whole frame draws its animation. It is also the seat of the body's direction, the part from which the whole frame takes its orders. One word carries both, and Christ holds both. He is the source, for the church lives because He died and rose; He is the ruler, for the church is governed because He is Lord. Then Paul adds a word so strong that our translation can hardly contain it: proteuōn, "that he might have the preeminence." It means to hold the first place, to be first in everything. Paul is not describing one head among several, first among equals. He is saying that Christ is the head, and that in all things, without rival and without remainder, He holds the first place. Any other claimant to the headship, whoever he may be, is by that very claim reaching for what God has given to His Son alone, and the verse itself is the refutation of him. The same truth Paul presses home by turning the headship into a doctrine of the body's growth, and the image repays slow reading. "But speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ: from whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love" (Ephesians 4:15-16). Here the head is no distant governor issuing decrees from afar. He is the very principle of the body's cohesion. The joints and bands, the members and the measure of every part, all draw their nourishment from the head, and it is from Christ, and from Christ alone, that the body is "fitly joined together and compacted." A body whose members take their life from some other source is not Christ's body at all. Notice how the growth is described: the body increases, not by attaching itself to an earthly head, but by growing up "into him in all things." The church's life runs upward, toward her Head in heaven, never outward toward a man on a throne. This is the Pauline anatomy of the church, and it leaves no room for a second head, any more than a living man leaves room for a second head upon his shoulders. But the Confession's negative clause is not arbitrary, and the divines did not invent the figure of the rival head out of thin air. They found him already described in Scripture, and in terms so terrible that no honest reader can mistake them. The apostle warns the Thessalonians of a day that cannot come "except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition; who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God" (2 Thessalonians 2:3-4). The Greek of this passage has an almost dreadful precision. The figure is called ho anthrōpos tēs anomias, the man of lawlessness, whom the received text names the man of sin; and huios tēs apōleias, the son of perdition, the son whose end is destruction. His defining act is set down in a single verb, antikeimenos, "who opposeth," the one who sets himself over against. He does not merely disobey; he opposes. He is the anti-head, the adversary, and his aim is nothing less than to take the place of God, to seat himself in the temple, to shew himself that he is God. This is the biblical portrait of the usurper, and it stands behind the Confession's rejection of Rome's claim. Wherever a man or an office sets itself up in the church as though it were the head, the shadow of the man of sin falls across the sanctuary; and the church's first duty toward any such claimant is to say plainly that he is not her head, and cannot be. One further word of our Lord completes the foundation, for He Himself forbade His disciples to assign to any man the place that belongs to Him alone. "But be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren. And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven. Neither be ye called masters: for one is your Master, even Christ" (Matthew 23:8-10). The force of the passage is not that we may never honour teachers, or that the word "father" is forbidden to the lips of a child. The force is that certain relations belong to God alone and may never be transferred to a man. One is your Master; one is your Father; one is your Head. The moment a man lets another man stand in the place of Christ toward his soul, to bind his conscience, to mediate his access to God, to be called by a name that belongs to God, he has surrendered the very thing Christ died to secure for him. Our Lord's words are a standing warning against an instinct that is ever alive in the fallen heart: the wish to trade the invisible Head for a visible one, to prefer a man we can see to the Christ we must trust. Read in the light of these texts, the Confession's two clauses are simply the church's solemn refusal to make that trade.

What the Divines Meant

The divines were not composing a new doctrine here. They were compressing into one sentence a truth the whole New Testament teaches and the Reformation had been forced, at great cost, to recover. The sentence has two clauses, and each does its own necessary work. The first clause is the positive foundation: "There is no other head of the church but the Lord Jesus Christ." The divines use the singular deliberately. The church does not have several heads, one in heaven and one on earth, one invisible and one visible, one for the soul and one for the outward order. She has one Head, the Lord Jesus Christ, and His headship is total. What did the divines mean by "head"? Everything the word can bear. The head of the body is, first, the fountain of its life: the body does not quicken the head, but the head the body. The head is, second, the seat of its government: the body does not command the head, but the head the body. Christ is the church's head in both senses. He is the fountain of her life, for she is quickened by His Spirit, fed by His Word, and kept alive by His intercession. He is the seat of her government, for He rules her by His law, gathers her by His grace, and will judge her at His coming. To the divines the headship of Christ was no figure of speech but a living reality, the very bond by which the church is joined to her Saviour and ordered by her Lord. The second clause draws the negative consequence: "Nor can the pope of Rome, in any sense, be head thereof." The phrase "in any sense" is the key, and it is there to close every door that sophistry might try to leave open. The divines knew that Rome had learned to make room for Christ's headship in word while denying it in fact, by pleading that the pope is only a visible head, or a ministerial head, or the head of the church's external government, while Christ remains the head of her inward life. No such distinction can be made, the divines answer, for the head of a body is one thing and cannot be divided. Christ needs no vicar, because He is not absent; He promised to be with His church to the end of the world, and He is present by His Spirit and His Word. He needs no substitute, because He has not withdrawn; He lives and reigns, and the government is upon His shoulder. A visible head, a ministerial head, a vicar of Christ on earth, is no help to Christ's headship but a denial of it, for by its very existence it declares that Christ's own presence and rule are not sufficient for His church. The divines would have no such declaration, and so they wrote "in any sense," closing the matter with the finality it deserves. One thing more deserves mention here: the words the original Assembly attached to this sentence. In the text first framed at Westminster, the sentence did not end at "be head thereof." It went on to identify the papal office with "that Antichrist, that man of sin, and son of perdition, that exalteth himself in the church against Christ and all that is called God." The divines were quoting, almost verbatim, the apostle's description of the man of sin from the second chapter of the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, which we have already read. They judged that the claim to be head of the church in Christ's place, and the claim to sit in the temple of God shewing himself that he is God, were one and the same thing; that the office which declares a man the vicar of Christ on earth is the very office the apostle describes as exalting itself against Christ. Whatever form of words a later church has chosen for this doctrine, its substance is unchanged. The claim to stand in the place of Christ over His church is the mark of the antichrist; and the church that would be faithful to her Head must say of every such claim, however ancient, however adorned, however plausible: this is not my Head, and I will not follow him. The Confession has said exactly that in one short sentence, and said it in terms that cannot be mistaken.

Theological Depth

The great teachers of the Reformed churches did not leave this doctrine undeveloped. Each pressed the headship of Christ to its consequences, and in their hands the sentence before us opens into a whole theology of the church's life and liberty. Calvin, in the Institutes, made the headship of Christ the hinge on which the whole controversy with Rome turned, and he argued it so plainly that no accumulation of papal titles could answer him. His point was practical and devastating at once. The church is a body, and a body is joined to its head by living bonds. A man sitting in one city of Italy cannot be joined by living bonds to a church scattered through every nation under heaven. Only Christ, present everywhere by His Spirit, can quicken and govern a body so vast. To appoint a head on earth, then, is not to supply something the church lacks but to confess, in the very act, that Christ is absent; and this the church may never do, for her Lord has promised, "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." Calvin pressed further. To transfer the honour of the Head to a creature is to despoil Christ of His glory, and a church that strips her Head of His crown has begun to die at the very point where her life is given. The papacy, in his judgment, was no mere defect in church government but an injury done to Christ Himself, a rival enthroned in the place of the only Head. Turretin, with the precision of the schoolmen, sorted the question into its parts and answered each in turn. He distinguished first between a head of influence and a head of government. The head of influence is the source from which the body draws its life and vigour; the head of government is the authority by which the body is directed and ruled. Christ, Turretin argued, is head in both senses, and in both senses the claim of any man is impossible. No pope gives life to the church, for life comes only from the Spirit of Christ. No pope governs the church universal, for a mortal man in one place cannot exercise authority over the whole body of the redeemed. He distinguished second between a head that is primary and a head that is ministerial. He conceded that in the outward order of a congregation a minister may be said to bear a kind of subordinate rule; but this is the rule of a servant under the Head, not the headship of a second sovereign. The Roman claim was of an altogether different kind, and Turretin denied it outright: the Roman pontiff is not, and cannot be, the head of the church, because the headship of Christ is incommunicable, a prerogative of the God-man that no creature can share. Hodge, in his commentary on the Confession, takes the section apart into its two propositions and gives each its sharp edge. The first, that there is no other head of the church but Christ, he reads as the ground of the church's unity. A body has one head, and it is one body precisely because it has one head; multiply the heads and you have multiplied the bodies, torn the seamless garment, and divided what Christ bought to be one. The second, that the pope cannot be head in any sense, he applies with unsparing clarity to the Roman claim in all its modern refinements, insisting that the test is not whether the claimant calls himself head in some modest, limited way, but whether he claims the headship at all. For Hodge the matter was simple and final. The church has a Head already, one who cannot die and cannot err and cannot be replaced; and any office that lays claim to His place, by whatever name, is an anti-Christian office, whatever else it may be. Shaw, in his Exposition, gives the compressed summary, and it is worth quoting for its brevity. The sole headship of Christ, he observes, is a fundamental article of the Christian faith, one of those truths upon which the church stands or falls; and the claim of the bishop of Rome to be the church's head is not an error of degree but a usurpation of the crown rights of the Redeemer. The church of Christ is a monarchy, and her monarch is in heaven. To set up an earthly monarch over her is to change the very constitution of the kingdom. Shaw, like all the divines, saw that this was not a matter of taste in church polity but of loyalty to the Lord who purchased the church with His own blood. Watson, with his characteristic warmth, turns the same doctrine toward the believer's comfort. He sees in the headship of Christ not a bare fact of government but a pledge of sympathy. The head, he observes, must be of the same nature as the body; a head of gold set upon a body of clay would be no head at all, but a burden. Therefore Christ took our nature, that He might be a suitable Head to His church, one touched with the feeling of our infirmities. And because the head is the seat of sense and feeling, Christ the Head feels every pain of every member. In all our affliction He is afflicted, and no sorrow in the least believer passes through the heart without first passing through the Head. The headship that excludes every rival is the very headship that assures us of a Saviour who knows our frame, and who, because He is our Head, will never cast off His own members. What unites these teachers, and what gives this section its gravity, is the conviction that the church's life and the church's loyalty are one thing. A church that has the true Head has life, whatever her outward weakness; a church that has a false head has death, whatever her outward splendour. The headship of Christ is not one doctrine among many, to be affirmed when convenient and set aside when it offends. It is the load-bearing wall of the whole edifice, and if it is removed, the house falls. The divines knew this, and they wrote the sentence before us as a stake driven into the ground: here the church takes her stand, and here she will not move.

Puritan Application

First, trust Christ alone for your spiritual life, and seek it from no other quarter. The head is the fountain of the body's life, and if you would live, you must draw your life from the Head. Every one of us carries a religious instinct that is also a wayward one: we crave a mediator we can see, a man, a priest, a pastor, a system that will stand between us and God and do the living for us. The Confession forbids us to gratify that instinct, and the forbidding is mercy. Christ is your life, and He is closer to you than any man could ever be, for He dwells in you by His Spirit. Do not go looking for another head, another mediator, another source of grace, as though Christ were far off and could not reach you. Abide in Him and let Him quicken you. The branch that will not draw from the vine but roots itself in other soil will wither and be cast away. Your safety and your peace lie in being joined to the one Head who can keep you alive to the end. Second, learn to know the Shepherd's voice, and be slow to follow whatever claims authority over your soul. Our Lord said that His sheep know His voice, and that a stranger they will not follow but will flee from him, for they know not the voice of strangers. The world is full of voices claiming the place of the Head: some speak in His name while denying His gospel, some offer themselves as necessary mediators between you and God, some bind your conscience where Christ has made you free. The apostle's command is your defence: "Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God" (1 John 4:1). Test every voice against the Word of Christ. If it agrees with the Shepherd, it is His. If it speaks contrary to Him, however sweetly, it is the voice of a stranger, and you must flee it. The church that knows her Head well is not deceived by a false one; sheep that have learned the true voice detect the counterfeit at once. Third, rest in the completeness you have in Christ, and let no man persuade you that you lack something only his office can supply. Paul's word to the Colossians speaks to every believer who has ever been told he is somehow incomplete without some human addition: "And ye are complete in him, which is the head of all principality and power" (Colossians 2:10). You are complete in Christ. You need no other mediator, no other sacrifice, no treasury of merit, no earthly head to make you whole before God. The Head in whom you are complete is the head of all principality and power, higher than every throne and authority, and in Him you already possess all that God requires and all that your soul needs. Received into the heart, this doctrine kills anxiety and superstition together, for it teaches you that between you and God there stands one, and only one, and He is enough. Fourth, receive the office-bearers of the church as servants under the Head, and give the headship to no man, however gifted or godly. The Lord has appointed pastors and teachers for the perfecting of the saints, and they are to be honoured and obeyed in the Lord. But they are ministers, and the word means servants. The Head alone is Lord of the conscience, and no elder, no presbytery, no council may claim His place. When the disciples disputed which of them should be greatest, Christ answered with a principle that still governs His church: "Whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister" (Matthew 20:26). Let your ministers be great among you by serving you, and never great over you by lording it over your faith. And let every minister remember the same truth: he stands before the flock as an under-shepherd who must give account to the chief Shepherd, and the flock is not his but Christ's, bought with His own blood. Fifth, take comfort in this: your Head is in heaven, and where the Head is, the body must one day be. The church's life is hid with Christ in God, and because the Head is risen and glorified, the body cannot perish. Here is the ground of our confidence in the church's future and of our comfort in our own. The headship of Christ means the church is not left to the mercy of men, the wisdom of councils, or the fortunes of nations. She is joined to a Head who is above all, who has promised to be with His people alway, and who will present the church to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle. When you are tempted to despair over the state of the church, or over the state of your own soul, look up to the Head. He is not far off. He is not absent. He is risen, and He reigns, and He is the head of the body, the church. What He has begun He will finish, and the member that abides in the Head shall be glorified with the Head, world without end.

Prayer

O Lord Jesus Christ, Thou who art the only Head of Thy church, we bow before Thee and confess that Thou alone art Lord. Thou hast purchased the church with Thy blood, Thou quickenest her by Thy Spirit, and Thou rulest her by Thy Word; and there is no other head but Thee. We thank Thee that we need no other, for Thou art near us, and in Thee we are complete. Forgive us the unbelief that has so often looked for a visible mediator, a man we could see, a hand we could touch, and has so slighted the sufficiency of Thyself, our risen and ascended Head. Keep us, we beseech Thee, from every false head, and from every voice that would claim the place that belongs to Thee alone. Give us ears to know Thy voice, and hearts to flee the stranger. Suffer no man to stand between us and Thee, no office to bind our conscience where Thou hast made us free, no authority to be called by a name that is Thine. Make us to honour those whom Thou hast set over us as servants of Thy flock, while we give the headship to none but Thee. Be Thou to Thy whole church, O Christ, the fountain of her life and the seat of her government, in every land and in every age. Gather Thine elect, feed Thy flock, and rule over us in righteousness until the day when Thou shalt present the church to Thyself, glorious, without spot or wrinkle. And bring us, the members of Thy body, home to be with the Head for ever. We ask it in Thine own name, and for Thine own glory. Amen.