The church-idea; an essay toward unity

Front matter

Oass Book

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Prefatory Note

The following papers contain some things which in a purely theological treatise would be superfluous. But clergymen are not the only public the writer has had in mind. There is, in America, a constantly widening circle of educated and thoughtful people who take a keen interest in such subjects as are here discussed, but whom it would be unreasonable to credit with any extended knowledge either of Church History or of Systematic Divinity. The book is chiefly meant for readers of this class. Care has therefore been taken to free the argument, in its main drift, alike from technicalities of language and obscurities of allusion. Everything of an exclusively professional interest has been thrown into the foot-notes, and can be readily avoided.

Contents

I. The Gospel of the Kingdom .... 9 II. The Thought and its Clothing ... 29

III. Romanism: the Idea Exaggerated . . 50

IV. Puritanism: the Idea Diminished . . 75 V. Liberalism: the Idea Distorted . . .95

II. The Thought And Its Clothing

Life, of whatever sort it is, looks for a lodgment in organization. Perhaps the remark ought to be limited to life as we know it upon this planet. What the vital conditions may be elsewhere, we cannot tell. Here, certainly, life is forever taking on shapes that are at once its clothing and its expression.

Vegetable life finds its organization in roots and stalks, leaves and branches, plants and trees. Animal life breathes itself into flesh and bones, and seeks a dwelling in the bodies of all moving creatures, in birds, beasts, and men. There is yet a higher kind of life than either the vegetable or the animal. We call it spiritual life, the life that differences man from the brute.

Now where and how does this spiritual life find organization ? In a partial and meagre way the question is answered whenever spirit and flesh are welded together in one living man. But this embodiment is of necessity incomplete. It is the incarnation of a spirit, rather than of spirit. We must look for an ampler tabernacle than the human frame, and we find it in that large and complicated body, society. This is the law that binds men together in communities, girding the earth with a chain armor of families, each link nearly or distantly connected with every other link. The individual is conscious of incompleteness, and seeks instinctively, by joining himself to others of his kind, to realize that " fulness " which really can be gathered up in no one person save the Word made flesh. This, then, is the rationale of the Gospel of the Kingdom. This is the marrow of the Church-Idea. Because there has always been spiritual life in the world, therefore there has always been society. Because it is possible for the spirit of man to live either with God or apart from Him, therefore there has always been an inner or elect society, — the Church. Because Jesus Christ brought into the world a vast access of spiritual life, therefore the new society of the elect in which this life has found embodiment is called, in distinction from the national election it displaced, the Catholic or Universal Church.

Now it is one thing to admit the truth of abstract statements like these, and quite another to discern their true bearing on the history of the past, and the needs of the present. We have undertaken to study the Divine idea of the Church, but the attempt is hopeless without the aid of some sort of illustration.

Moreover, we want an illustration that shall carry with it the weight of authority. A man is at liberty' to pick and choose illustrations when he is setting forth his own thoughts ; but when he undertakes to interpret a revealed thought of God, we demand that he employ similitudes stamped with the sanction of the Revealer.

Our Lord provided for this necessity very fully when He promulgated His Gospel of the Kingdom. He knew well that men would never catch His idea unless He put it into pictures, and wrote His own Fecit on the canvas. Both He and His Apostles after Him took pains, therefore, to employ very striking comparisons as a means of expounding the nature of the new society. Some of these comparisons illustrate one aspect of the Divine idea, others another aspect.

Thus the Church is likened in the New

Testament to a field of wheat, to a fisher's net, to a vineyard, to a kingdom, to a ship, to a sheep-fold, to a family, to a bride, to a tree springing from a seed, to the human body. Of all these various similitudes, the last is richest in suggestion. Nothing in Nature is so marvelously wrought as the house that man inhabits, and it is no wonder we find it the best symbol of that Divine society whose Head is Christ, and whose many members are destined to constitute at last w; the perfect man."

Besides, this illustration of the body falls in admirably with our present purpose, which is to ascertain in what way the Divine thought as it came from the mind of Christ took on, at the hands of His immediate successors, the clothing of actual fact. The Apostle with whose activity in missionary labor we are best acquainted, was the same whose eye seems to have caught most readily the resemblance between the body and the Church. We are likely to find, therefore, that the analogy is as rich in practical suggestions as it is useful in the interpretation of ideal truth. Let us see.

The first and most obvious attribute of a body is visibility. Undoubtedly there are bodies that we cannot see, — microscopic bodies, for example, and ethereal bodies too subtile for our vision ; but when we speak of such bodies as invisible, we really only mean that we have not the eyes to see them. Letting alone such fine-spun distinctions as this, the remark is perfectly true that the most obvious attribute of a body is visibility. It is, indeed, this very visibility that, in the common judgment of men, distinguishes body from spirit. Spirit is something that cannot be seen ; body is something that can be seen. When the disciples after the resurrection were frightened because they thought they had seen a spirit, Jesus, while He reassured them, gently reproved their error of judgment. " Why are ye troubled ? Behold my hands and my feet that it is I myself. Handle me and see, for a spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye see me have." 1 Here sight is made, by the highest authority, the criterion of the body's reality. " Handle me and see." It is a true body, because it is a visible one.

If, then, the Church is a body, in any real and satisfactory sense, the Church must be a society that is visible, open to the eye. And

1 Luke xxiv. 39. 3 what is a visible society ? It is any union of men that confesses itself a union by having terms of admission and symbols of membership. The societies called u secret " are just as visible as any others, so far as the evidence of their existence goes. The nearest approach to an invisible society, if the very coupling of the two words does not involve a contradiction, is in the case of men banding together for the attainment of some object, and agreeing solemnly that their relation to each other shall not be indicated by any outward sign or token whatsoever. But we have a distinct name for such a union as this. We call it a conspiracy, or mingling of breaths. Yet even a breath upon a cold day takes form and shape such as the eye can see. So hard is it to disconnect the idea of visibility from the idea of a society.

Why, then, do we hear so much in these days about " the Church Invisible ? " There certainly is no warrant for the phrase in Holy Scripture. Nowhere in the Word of God, from the first page of it to the last, is there any mention of a Church Invisible, save of that which is only invisible because it is in heaven, not on earth. We must remember that there is a difference between " things not seen " and things that cannot be seen. The heavenly Church is among the things not seen as yet, but this is not because it is a Church Invisible by nature. It can be seen, and will be seen, even as in vision it has been seen. Here is the picture of it. " After this I beheld, and lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands ; and cried with a loud voice, saying, Salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb." x This is indeed a Church to us invisible, and it is the onlv " Church Invisible4" of which the Scriptures speak.

In the previous paper the argument against the theory of invisibility was rested upon the words of Christ Himself, and the question of His intention was made the central point. A glance at the actual practice of the men who were commissioned by Christ to carry out His plan, will show whether the inference there drawn from the language of the King finds warrant in the acts of His lieutenants.

Let us see what was St. Paul's notion of

i Rev. vii. 9.

36 THE CHUKCH-IDEA.

edifying or building up that Body of Christ of which he said so much.

The Apostle goes into a certain city of Asia Minor, or Macedonia, or the Greek Peninsula, and he preaches there the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The soil is an outworn and unpromising one, but into it he bravely casts the seed. What follows ? Some of the inhabitants of that city repent and believe. What follows next ? The Apostle satisfies himself of the genuineness of their repentance and faith, and he then receives those persons and their households into the circle of the Kingdom, the Fold of the Church, the Body of Christ. How does he do this ? He does it by that sacrament of Holy Baptism which the Lord Himself ordained as the door of entrance to the new society. They become regenerate, or new-born into the family of God.

The Apostle goes away. His missionary errand carries him to some far-off city of the Mediterranean. Presently he learns, either by some chance comer or by a special messenger, that all is not going on well in that city wThere he planted the Kingdom, and left it to be cared for at the hands of others. There has been a falling away from the

THE THOUGHT AND ITS OLOTHING. 37

faith, or dissensions have sprung up, or gross sins have crept in and defiled the flock, so that purity of life, as well as of faith, is put in peril. What does the Apostle now ? He takes his pen, or he bids some fellow-missionary take the pen for him, and he writes a letter of counsel to those far-off* Christians, telling them how sadly grieved he is to learn that anything has gone wrong, and pointing out in what way all may be set right again. But how does he address this letter ? Pause a moment. How should we expect him to address it, according to the " invisible Church " theory? Should we not look to find him drawing a sharp line of distinction at the very outset between those in the Church who had come up to his expectations, and those who had not ? Should we not expect him to state explicitly that he regards those who have been in fault as no Christians at all? Ought he not to tell these last that their baptism was a nullity, that events have proved the sacrament to have been in their case an empty form, and bid them reflect that their membership of the " mere visible Church " avails them nothing ?

This is what we might very naturally expect. But do we, in point of fact, find the

Apostle taking this line ? We know that the Christians of Corinth were, at one time, fallen into much such a state as has been pictured. St. Paul wrote to them. What was his address ? " Paul, called to be an Apostle of Jesus Christ, through the will of God, and Sosthenes our brother, unto the Church of God which is at Corinth, to them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, .... grace be unto you and peace." 1 The whole spirit of the letter is in harmony with this beginning. The Corinthian Christians, one and all, are dealt with throughout as those who had been sanctified, set apart to be holy, made members of the Body of Christ. The appeal to those of them who have gone astray, is made to rest upon this very fact that they do belong, in virtue of their baptism, to the sacred Body of the Lord, and that they ought to be deeply penitent for having defiled that Body. " As many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ ; " this is the promise that underlies all his reasoning, the solemn reminder that gives weight to his every rebuke. Even when he is expostulating with the offenders themselves, his argu-

i 1 Cor. i. 1.

ment is that they are defiling the temple of God, " which temple," he significantly adds, "ye are." Does this look as if St. Paul had always in mind two Churches, an outer and an inner, a visible and an invisible, a husk and a kernel ? Does it not rather look as if he regarded the whole body of the baptized as being the one Church of Christ on earth, a Church not without its unworthy and sickly members, even as the Lord had said should be, but still one Church, to be addressed as brethren, to be taught, to be guided, to be built up, to be ministered unto, to be led on in holy living, and, at last, to be judged, not by him, Paul, but by that One who is ordained to judge both them and him ?

The mention just now made of the temple suggests a second point in the analogy between the Church and the living human body. What is it that gives honor to this complicated organism of flesh, and blood, and bones, and nerves, and muscles we call " the body ? " It is the solemn fact that the body is the appointed dwelling-place of a spirit. So longas it can claim this august tenant as its own, the body has dignity ; but no sooner is the spirit fled from out it than the body begins to return into the crude and worthless elements of which it is built up. Beauty and power alike forsake it. Only dust remains.

Now what is it that makes the new society whose nature we are exploring worthy of the high and glorious titles given to it in Scripture ? Doubtless it is the indwelling in this Body also of a Spirit. And what Spirit ? God the Holy Ghost. Here lies the distinction between the Church and any other society whatsoever. The Church has the promise of its Divine Founder that He will be in it always.

And only consider what the presence of a spirit in a body involves. It is a most marvelous thing, this connection between ourselves and the temporary home in which we think and feel. The wit of man can formulate the law that keeps the stars in their courses, but of the law that links body to soul, it tells us almost absolutely nothing. We can philosophize upon that mysterious union, and invent all manner of hard names to describe it, but we get no nearer to understanding it by doing so. All that we really know about it is that it exists, and that it answers the purpose of making the body the servant and instrument of the soul. Thus, for example, you wish to express a thought in writing. Your will determines that your hand shall take the pen, dip it in ink, put it on the paper, form the words. But how did the mandate, which \vas a spiritual thing, find its way to the muscles of your hand ? And when it had reached them, how did it compel obedience ? You answer, " By the power of volition." Yes, but are you any nearer to understanding the thing, because you have the phrase that describes it at your tongue's end? Not one whit.

And if we cannot understand how the spirit impels the body to action, neither do we know any better why it is that an injury done to the body brings grief and anguish to the spirit. By what strange electricity the nerves of feeling are empowered to carry to the soul their nimble messages of warning, and, as it were, bring down the spirit to the suffering part, who can comprehend ? We only know that thus it is. The ancients used to say, The soul is all in every part. We moderns have not got beyond the paradox.

It is impossible to appreciate the wealth of St. Paul's illustration unless we take into account this omnipresence of the spirit in the body. Let the reader summon up to his mind the image of a vast society of living men, all animated, actuated, and controlled by one central spirit. Let him imagine that spirit sending out commands to every remotest point of the complex organism, just as a human will telegraphs its orders to hand or foot, to eye or lip. Let him imagine again that spirit receiving intelligence from all these various members, learning of their necessities, knowing when they suffer, sorrowing, as it were, with their sorrow, rejoicing in their joy. " Now the Lord is that Spirit : " His body is the Church. His going forth upon the nerves of motion we call " grace.' ' Our coming to Him upon the return nerves of feeling we call " prayer." What a marvelous similitude it is ! How can we enough adore the wisdom that has thus made the seen things the mirror of the unseen ; our perishable and earthly frame the type of that Body Mystical which is the dwelling-place of Christ !

A third important point in this analogy is that which bears upon the question of the Church's unity. That the Church ought to be visibly, as well as spiritually one, is a direct corollarv from the two truths alreadv brought out. It is wonderful that even the usages of common speech do not teach people to see more clearly the connection between life and unity. Thus, for instance, while a man is living, we say that he is one person, but after he is dead, we speak of his " remains. '" Why this change of number from the singular to the plural ? It is because a body, taken by itself, suggests manifoldness of parts ; and when the tenant whose presence brought all things into unity has. fled, the characteristic which was before subordinate, becomes conspicuous. Similarly we make " dissolution " a synonym of death ; and what is dissolution but a sundering into parts of that which before was whole ? Are those who maintain that the competition of sects makes the life of the Church, aware that what they advocate is really nothing less than the dissolution of the Body of Christ ? Indeed, is it not something worse than dissolution ? The demoniac who had Legion for his guest would probably have chosen death as a relief; and yet the only way by which sectarianism can escape the charge of crucifying the Lord afresh, is by taking refuge in the idea of a Body multitudinously possessed. An alternative more awful it would be hard to name.

We are assured that there must be " diversities of operation,'1 and hence sects. By all means let us admit the first proposition. By no means let us consent to the inference. Diversity is perfectly consistent with oneness ; sectarianism not at all. Nature is running over with variety, but it is a variety in unity, a diversity that is absolutely obedient to law. That the modern interpretation of the phrase just quoted would have been wholly alien to the mind of its author, is evident from the peremptory way in which we find him dealing with the sectarian principle in his own times. He does not seem to have regarded the Cephas party and the Ap olios party as harmless " diversities of operation," in which the Corinthian Church might safely be indulged. On the contrary he did not hesitate to say that such divisions savored more of worldliness than of godliness. No, this theory that the eye of the Almighty discerns in sectarian Christianity a harmony hidden from man's weaker vision is but a poor make-shift at best. The definition of unity that it implies is such a definition as would not be admitted for a moment in connection with any of those forms of community-life most familiar to us. Who, for instance, would dream of organizing a commonwealth, an university, an army, or a navy, upon this principle that outward and visible unity need not be considered as particularly important ? And if, the higher we rise in the development of social life, the more we feel the need of a perfect order, why should we imagine that in the structure of the ideal community, the Church, this point may be safely disregarded ?

But these are questions that properly belong to a later stage of our inquiry. At present they are only noted in their connection with the argument from analogy. If the Church be a living body, unity belongs to it of right.

One more resemblance. In every human body that lives and breathes there goes forward a process of ceaseless change. The vital energies are constantly engaged in discarding old material, and assimilating new. The atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, that have done their work, go on their way to build up other bodies, and fresh atoms come in to take their place. Physiologists have not decided what precise period of time is required for an entire change of fleshly clothing ; but that such a change does take place many times over in the course of an ordinary life, they are agreed. The identity of a man's body is, therefore, something quite different from that of a marble statue,1 for it

1 Much confusion of thought with regard to the Christian is an identity that must, somehow, be consistent with perpetual change. Now and then there come crises 1 in the history of a body. We call them diseases. They may leave the man in a better condition than they found him, or they may leave him in a worse. They may alter his outward appearance for the remainder of his life, or, again, they may alter it only temporarily. In either case, and in any case, a man's body, so long as he inhabits it, remains his body still.

The bearing of these facts upon the phenomena of Church life is important. We talk about Reformations of the Church, and argue whether they are desirable or not. Reformations ! Why, the whole life of the Church ought to be- a continual Reformation, a constant taking out of the way that which is effete, and re-forming the tissue with new material. Those who fancy that in order to demonstrate the identity of the Church they must import into the nineteenth century the cultus of the thirteenth are under a delusion. As well refuse to own your friend because his

doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body would be avoided, if this distinction between two sorts of identity, — identity of material and identity of growth, — were always kept in mind. 1 M. Comte was fond of speaking of his attacks of fever under this name.

countenance at forty is not what it was at twenty-five, as turn suspicious of the Church of your fathers because it does not look to you precisely as it looked to them. Provided the historical continuity of the Church be kept, and the original deposit of faith preserved intact, it matters not how many reformations are experienced. An unintermitting reformation would be the best of all.

Thus we gather from this analogy of the Body no less than four notes, or characteristics of the perfect Church : —

1st. Visibility.

2d. The indwelling Spirit of the Lord.

3d. Unity.

4th. Capability of perpetual renewal.

But how has it fared with this Divine idea in the actual history of the world ? This is a question upon which we have yet to enter. We must approach it prepared for some measure of disappointment, and even of mortification.

Every one is familiar writh the distinction between an idea and its realization. A man conceives some grand and noble thought, and he attempts to give expression to it, but he invariably fails. What we call works of art are but the forms or shapes into which men

48 THE CHUKCH-IDEA.

have cast their various thoughts and imaginings. The one word written upon them all is Imperfection.

No matter what the work is, be it a picture, a poem, a statue, a building, a machine, an oratorio, — the maker of it will be the first to acknowledge, if he be an artist indeed, that that which seems so perfect in the eyes of others, does, in his own, fall short of what he can imagine. Between a high idea and man's embodiment of it there is always a great gulf fixed.

It is told of the famous Danish sculptor, that in later life he was once found in his studio laboring under deep dejection. He gave it as the cause of his melancholy that he had just completed a work that satisfied him. " My powers must be on the decline," he added, " when I find that I am contented with anything that I accomplish." This must always be the confession of honest human endeavor. Our best achievements lag behind our visions of what might be.

The history of the Church of Christ is but the record of a long and painful effort to clothe in actual fact the Divine idea of a heavenly kingdom upon earth. But in this, as in all else with which man has to do, the result has been lamentably imperfect.

Is it objected that such an admission is inconsistent with what has been said about the Divine origin of the Church-Idea ? Not at all. The Divine thought, it is true, must be perfect for the very reason that it is Divine. But the working out of the thought has been left to a great degree, in the hands of men. Part of the purpose was that in this building of the Temple we should be " laborers together with God." God's share in the work has indeed been perfect ; ours very far from perfect. This is why it was said that we should find cause for mortification ; for is anything more mortifying, when we have the picture of what might be, and of what was meant to be, before our eyes, than to observe in what a sad and terrible way human willfulness, and human pride, and human enmity, have marred and disfigured in the fulfilment the fair beauty of the promise ?

And yet, along with our mortification, we shall feel gratitude and joy, if we discover that, after all, the lines of the original painting are still traceable upon the stained and torn canvas, and that underneath the incrustations of long ages there lies the pure and perfect outline of the Mystical Body of the Lord. 4

III

In one of his latest addresses to the pilgrim Israelites, Moses made a point of warning them against the temptation to tamper with the Law they had received. " Ye shall not add," he said, u unto the word that I command you, neither shall ye diminish aught from it." The people understood that their Leader claimed this perfectness for his Law solely on the ground of its having come from God. Their acquiescence was but a confession of the general truth that God's handiwork cannot be bettered by man's skill. Thus the precept covered a principle, and a principle which is as true now as it was then. A Revelation once given is susceptible of improvement at no hand save the Revealer's. We may use our ingenuity in interpreting and applying its contents ; but until it has been superseded by a new revelation of par-

l The issues of the Council of the Vatican are so uncertain that it is folly to attempt to forecast them. In the present paper, therefore, the writer confines himself to the past, not wishing to rest any portion of his argument upon conjectural ground. Whatever Rome may now assert, there are some things she cannot retract. It is with these irreversible steps of hers, already taken, that the critical student is principally concerned.

amount authority, our simple duty is to guard it alike from increment and loss.

In the course of our inquiry into the true nature of the Church of Christ, we have reached a point where the application of this principle is of the utmost importance. The adherents of the religious system known as Romanism claim for themselves that they, and they alone of living men, are in communion with the true Body Mystical of our Lord Jesus Christ. In their view, the Papal Church is the Catholic Church ; and if the Catholic Church, then the Church of the Apostles ; and if the Church of the Apostles, then the Church of Christ ; and if the Church of Christ, then the City of God, the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, the Mother of us all.