The mission of the Church

Front matter

■ I

Shelf .iEk~U S :

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

Contents

LECTURE I

PAGE

LECTURE II Unity within the Church of England ... 29

II

Now the point which, at this stage, I wish to emphasize is that Christ has thus enshrined in a visible body, a visible Church, those gifts of truth and grace with which He has enriched mankind.

Another method might have been adopted. It is conceivable that our Lord might have proclaimed a certain body of truth, and then left it to make its own way, to advance by its own weight among mankind. He might have scattered truth at random, like "bread upon the waters," over the area of human need. But in fact He did something different, He enshrined the truth deliberately in an organized society; and it is, we believe, in accordance with the mind of Christ that the Church has in fact gone out into the world as a society based upon a distinctive creed, a creed gradually enshrined in formulas and appealing to a fixed canon of sacred scriptures, representing the original teaching of Christ's Apostles.

Once more, the gifts of grace are made part of a visible system through the ministry of sacraments. What are sacraments ? They are outward, visible and also social, ceremonies intended for the conveyance of spiritual gifts. There is the gift of regeneration, the gift of the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, the gift of the bread of life, the flesh and blood of Christ. Now these are spiritual gifts, and we can conceive of their having been given through purely invisible channels ; in fact, they are given by channels which, as I say, are not only visible, but also social. Baptism, through which is conveyed the Spirit's gift of regeneration or incorporation into Christ, is an outward ceremony, and an outward ceremony which, at the same time, is social. It is a ceremony of admission into a visible society. Confirmation, by which is bestowed the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, is an act of benediction, the laying on of the hands of the chief ruler of a society upon one of its members. The Eucharist again, in which is given and taken the body and blood of Christ, is an outward ceremony, and a ceremony which, in its material basis, involves a fraternal meal. Each of the sacraments is not only a visible but also a social institution; such as involves that men are to be admitted into, and kept in relation to, a visible societj^.

Once again this society is not only to be a visible reality at any particular moment. It is also to be continuous down the ages. It is in view of this need that the meaning of the apostolic succession of the ministry becomes apparent. For the Church is a catholic society, that is, a society belonging to all nations and ages. As a catholic society it lacks the bonds of the life of a city or a nation — local contiguity, common language, common customs. We cannot, then, very well conceive how its corporate continuity could have been maintained otherwise than through some suecession of persons such as, bearing the apostolic commission for ministry, should be in each generation the necessary centres of the Church's life. Granted this apostolic succession, there is guaranteed in the Church as a whole, and in each local church, a perpetual stewardship of the grace and truth which came by Jesus Christ, a perpetual stewardship which, at the same time, acts as the link of continuity, binding the churches of all ages and of all nations into visible unity with the apostolic college.

Thus by her creeds and her canon of scriptures, by her sacraments and her apostolic succession, the Church is rendered necessarily a visible body. It is spiritual in its aim. It exists for no other purpose than to minister to the spiritual union of man with God. It is spiritual in its aim and essence, but it is visible in fact on earth. The invisible gift is conveyed through visible channels: the invisible essence is enshrined in a visible body.

Of this doctrine of the visible Church we may say that it is first natural and second historical. Its intimate correspondence with the principle of the Incarnation we shall have the opportunity of noticing in the next lecture.

First it is natural: it corresponds to a law of our nature. Aristotle said long ago that man is a "social animal." The meaning of this is that though society is made up of individuals, and indeed the aim of society is the development of the faculties of the individual, yet man realizes his individuality only by relations to a society. It is the society that makes him man, it is the social life of the nation or the city that enables the individual to become truly human.

The moral philosophy of the last, and of the early part of the present century was characterized by individualistic theories, according to which men were regarded as primarily individuals and only secondarily as members of society. But it is noticeable that modern ethical writers, even of a non-theistic school, such as Mr. Leslie Stephen and Mr. Alexander, exhibit a return to the Aristotelian principle. "We must take society and the individual as we find them in fact," says Mr. Alexander, "the latter with ties that bind him to others, the former as something which we have never known to be formed by the mere coalescence of separate and independent individuals." 1 It is, then, in correspondence with a fundamental law of man's social nature that the religion of the Son of Man should not deal with us first as isolated individuals; that it should present itself as a society incorporating individuals and developing the individual life by first absorbing it. It is because man is social that "the perfect man " 2 is to be realized, not by the single Christian, but by the whole Church.

Secondly, this theory of the Church is historical

1 Alexander, Moral Order and Progress (Trtibner, 1889), p. 96. *Eph. iv. 13 [R.V.].

— the title-deeds of Christianity establish it. Historical proof is a long matter. It cannot be given fully in a single lecture, but I may refer to one or two chief elements in it.

1. The method of Christ. We can conceive, as I have said, easily enough how our Lord might have cast the truth which He came to teach mankind broadcast over society, and left it to make its own way. But the more you examine the gospels, the more you will note that His method was not in fact this, but the opposite. More and more He concentrates all His efforts upon that little band beside Him, whom by steady discipline He was preparing to be the nucleus of His new and distinctive society. On this vigil of St. Peter's Day, we naturally notice this more particularly: He turned away from our human nature as He found it, unsatisfactory and inadequate, when He wished to lay His new foundation. " He did not commit himself to men . . . for he knew what was in man." Those faults in our human nature, which in every generation have turned philanthropists into cynics, and driven the wisest wellnigh mad — that unsatisfactoriness of our fallen manhood — Jesus knew from the first. Therefore He waited, He laboured, He prayed in our true manhood till He had prepared the soil which should be adequate for the seed He meant to sow in it ; till He had found a foundation, not like the shifting sand of ordinary fallen manhood, but strong and rock-like, on which He could build;

and this rock-like character our human nature was to gain only through faith in Himself complete and entire. Thus, when He had gained from the lips of St. Peter an adequate confession of His name, a confession different altogether from the vague and shifting ideas about Himself which were current among the people generally, then it was that He could make a beginning with his new spiritual structure. He turned to Peter, the representative of the new r confession, and said, "Blessed art thou, Simon Bar- Jonah; for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. And I also say unto thee, that thou art Peter — Rockman — and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of death shall not prevail against it." 1 We know the subsequent history. The faith of Peter was shared by the apostolic college, and the promise to Peter w r as, as the Christian fathers perceived, fulfilled to the whole apostolic company in their common commission: "As my Father hath sent me, even so send I you." And the meaning of this whole history is, that Jesus did, with all deliberation, establish a distinct society to represent the kingdom of God on earth, a society distinct from humanity at large, based upon the explicit confession of His name. Consider further the method of Christ, the institution of social sacraments, baptism and the eucharist, and you will find that

1 St. Matt. xvi. 17, 18. Cf. Holland's Creed and Character, Serm. III. "The Rock of the Church" (Longmans).

it becomes to your mind a more and more luminous truth, that our Lord was constituting, to last till He should "come again," one visible fraternity, the company of His " elect" in which to enshrine the spiritual life which was to have its source in Himself.

2. Now let us read, from this point of view, the apostolic writing; and we shall notice with what clearness the religion of Jesus Christ appears in history as a visible society, and nothing else than a visible society. Its story is told simply enough in the Acts of the Apostles. In that book being a Christian means nothing else than membership in the visible body, the Church. The Church advances from place to place, but the local bodies, "the churches," are the expansions of "the Church" 1 — based upon the "apostles' doctrine," continuing in the "apostles' fellowship," and governed by the common apostolic authority. 2 The same truth is apparent in St. Paul's epistles — not only in the Epistle to the Ephesians, or in the Pastoral Epistles in which he is specially making provision for the Church's future in view of his own death, but also in an epistle of an earlier period. Observe in the First Epistle to Corinth, where St. Paul is dealing with the lamentable case of incest in the young church there, how instinctively clear to his mind is the distinction between "those within" and "those without." 3

Christianity is not a set of opinions which people may hold, as in fact people in India to-day do hold, more or less, the truth about Christ over a wide area of Hindoo society. To be a Christian means to be within that apostolic society, which was made up of good and evil mingled together, as this incestuous man, and those aiding and abetting him, were as tares among the wheat, in the young community at Corinth.

3. Let us pass to the sub-apostolic Church. We should all of us make ourselves familiar with those very short writings, the Epistle of Clement and the Epistles of Ignatius. The Epistle of Clement was written about the same time as St. John's Gospel, in the West, at Rome. It comes, then, from under the immediate shadow of apostolic influence and teaching; yet notice how unquestionably this doctrine of the visible Church is its characteristic mark. There is no conception of Christianity there discoverable, except this conception of an actual society, with its divinely established order and its officers commissioned by apostolic authority. 1

You turn from the West, from Clement, from the influence of St. Peter and St. Paul, to Ignatius, in the East, to the sphere of the influence of St. John, and still you find the same thing. Read the letters of Ignatius the martyr, written about a.d. 110, on his way to death. He is hard pressed to deliver his message to the churches before he is 1 See appended note 1.

taken away. And the central interest of his message is twofold. It lies first in the paramount necessity which he discovers in the truth of the Incarnation, that Christ, the very Son of God, did really take our human nature ; and secondly in his insistence upon the truth that God's message to man is enshrined in those visible societies which have for their ministers bishops, priests, and deacons, " without which three orders no Church has a title to the name." 1

4. As w r e move down the record of history we find the Church in different parts of the world assuming different characteristics. In the West, where the Roman genius prevails, the special characteristic is that of order and discipline. In Alexandria Christianity is regarded primarily as the truth, which is to attract, to satisfy, to educate, the intellect and life of man. But this variety in the local characteristics of churches only throws into higher relief the common underlying creed and conception of the visible Church. In regard to the Church, its sacraments, its ministry, there is no hesitation. The idea of a number of individuals combining to form a church of their own with an organization developed out of themselves is one which, if heard of at all, as among the Montanists, is heard of only to be repudiated. Of the common doctrine of the Church I will quote only one specimen, and it shall be from Tertullian — a passage in which he 1 Ign. ad Trail. 3, Lightfoot's trans.

declares that, whatever doctrine may be matter of dispute, this at least cannot be. "Christ Jesus, our Lord," he says, 1 "so long as He was living on earth, spoke Himself either openly to the people, or apart to His disciples. From amongst these He had attached to His person twelve especially, who were destined to be the teachers of the nations. Accordingly, when one of these had fallen away, the remaining eleven received His command, as He was departing to the Father, after His resurrection, to go and teach the nations, who were to be baptized into the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. At once, then, the Apostles, whose mission this title indicates, after adding Matthias to their number, as the twelfth, in the place of Judas, on the authority of the prophecy in David's Psalm, and after receiving the promised strength of the Holy Ghost to enable them to work miracles and preach, first of all bore witness to the faith in Judaea and established churches, and afterwards, going out into the world, proclaimed the same teaching of the same faith to the nations, and forthwith founded churches in every city, from which all other churches in their turn have received the tradition of the faith and the seeds of doctrine ; yes, and are daily receiving, that they may become churches; and it is on this account that they too will be reckoned apostolic, as being the offspring of apostolic churches. Every kind of thing must be 1 Tertull. depraescr. 20.

referred to its origin. Accordingly, many and great as are the churches, yet all is that one first Church which is from the Apostles, that one whence all are derived. So all are the first, and all are apostolic, while all together prove their unity; while the fellowship of peace, and the title of brotherhood, and the interchange of hospitality remain amongst them — rites which are based on no other principle than the one handing down of the same faith."

Ill

"I believe in one Holy Catholic Church." This act of faith puts us in opposition to current "undenominationalism," and, as we hold it in the Anglican Church, to the exclusive claim of the Roman communion. Both oppositions must be briefly considered.

Undenominationalism. By this name I refer to the theory which represents men as first becoming Christians by an act of individual faith, and, after that, combining into Christian societies, greater or smaller, as suits their predilections. 1 This, you observe, is the opposite of the theory that men become Christians, in the first instance, by incorporation into the one Christian society, and then, after that, are bound to realize individually their Christian privileges. This second theory, if what I have been saying is true, is the 1 See app. note 2.

one which alone is sanctioned in the original documents of Christianity. Whether it seems therefore at any particular moment advantageous or disadvantageous — in any case we are not responsible for it. It is part of that which comes to us from Jesus Christ our Master; but yet the objections to it on the undenominational side are sufficiently clear to demand that we should consider what they mean.

" This doctrine of the Church seems reasonable enough, as you state it," people say, "and we recognize the strength of its appeal to the New Testament and primitive Christian traditions. But if it comes seriously to believing it, one must ask, Is it not in too manifest conflict with facts ? This suggestion of exclusive channels of grace, does it square with facts, with the wide and promiscuous diffusion of spiritual excellence as the record of history and the experience of life present it? Nay! I must have a freer theory. Verily, 'the wind bloweth where it listeth ' — so is the movement of the free Spirit."

Ah, yes ! who could deny it? The Spirit breatheth where He listeth. All life is His in nature and in man. There is no being which lies outside the action of the eternal Word or His Spirit. Every movement of good in man anywhere is of His breathing. Everywhere, under His inspiration, men are seeking after God, " if haply they may feel after Him and find Him," and "in every nation he that feareth God and worketh righteousness," feareth and worketh with the help of the Holy Spirit, and in Him is accepted of God. Thus, though in Hooker's words, 1 "It is not ordinarily God's will to bestow the grace of sacraments on any, but by the sacraments"; yet God is not tied to any special channels. There are no such things as exclusive means of grace, means of grace as to which one can say, "God worketh here, not elsewhere." But this, after all, is no novel concession. "Deus non alligatur sacramentis suis," it was said of old. " His ordinances are laws for us, not for Him." 2 In all ages thoughtful theologians of almost all schools have seen that this truth is involved in the recognition of the fatherhood of God, and His all-rectifying and impartial justice. But then, the rejoinder comes, what is it you claim for the sacraments? Just what is involved in the idea of "covenant," and in the idea of "the household" of God. The state of covenant carries us into a region beyond that of dim and anxious seeking. It involves a clear disclosure of Himself by God, and, corresponding with this, clear and distinct bestowals and promises of grace. A household is a place where food and nurture is definitely and systematically provided. The joy of Christians is the joy of sons in their father's household, children of the covenant. This is what we claim for sacraments : not that they are exclusive channels of grace, so that God cannot give except through them the gifts of

1 E. P. v. 57. 4. 2 See app. note 3.

His love; but that through them only, as elements in His unique covenant, are definite graces pledged and guaranteed by the Divine fidelity; so that the faithful Christian transcends the conditions of anxious enquiry and passes into the region where he faithfully welcomes the assured gift, and fearlessly uses it as indeed given.

And if you press the question further, and ask, "Does not your theory of the security of the covenant involve the conception of 'valid sacraments ' — sacraments, that is, that are only valid when they are celebrated by persons properly ordained in the due transmission of apostolical authority? and does not this theory leave out of account what is, at least in Anglo-Saxon Christianity, an immense and solid part of the working force of Christianity?" — I answer, We must hold to this doctrine of apostolic succession as bound up with the validity of some at least of the sacraments. The idea of an ordained stewardship of divine gifts is inseparably associated both in idea and in history with the sacramental system. But what is meant by valid sacraments? The Greek word fteftcuos, and the Latin word "validus," have a definite meaning. The opposite of secure or valid is not non-existent but precarious. The fact that God promises to give in one waj^ does not destroy His power to give in another. It were blasphemy, then, to deny the Spirit's action where we see the Spirit's fruits. It is impossible for one who thinks seriously to ignore or underrate the vast debt which English Christianity owes to nonconformist bodies, to bodies which have fallen quite outside the action of the apostolic ministry. But was there not a cause? If we consider the sins, the scandalous neglect and sluggishness of the Church, is it so very wonderful that God should have worked largely and freely outside the appointed and authorized ministries? We should think it blasphemy, then, to deny the spiritual experience of the past or of the present as to the freedom of the divine action, even when the spiritual experience is only viewed from outside. Still less could we dream of asking any one who is not himself a Churchman to be false to his own experience. But we may ask men to be completely true to the whole of experience.

Now one part of experience is surely the disastrous present effect of our divisions. No serious Christian can fail to desire most earnestly restored fellowship among Christians. Something is so very wrong at present that we must ask over again, and more and more as circumstances throw back each man upon first principles, What is the divinely intended basis or form of the Christian religion? And the answer is "by one Spirit were we all baptized into one body." The one body — you view it in history, you trace it back to apostolic days — certainly its main lineaments are throughout unmistakeable. There have been many partial developments and causes of division, and local beliefs and changing customs and laws.

But there is the one tradition of the faith in its central features constant and original: there are the apostolic scriptures, the canon of which gradually takes the place of the living authority of apostolic teachers, as the ultimate court of Christian appeal : there is the system of the sacraments : there is the apostolically commissioned ministry, with its stewardship of the gifts of truth and grace. 1 These, as parts of the organism of the Spirit, constitute for the whole of the first fifteen centuries the fabric of Christianity. Since the Reformation it is not too much to say that historical enquiry in general, and in our own days, biblical criticism, have rendered it increasingly difficult to tear the Bible out of the structure of the Church, out of the organism of which it forms a part. Nor is it possible to find in original Christianity a " liberty of prophesying " which left men independent of the visible Church: not in apostolic days, if the Acts of the Apostles and the Pastoral Epistles and the Epistle to the Corinthians are true witnesses : not in later days, unless we do violence to the existing evidence and make of Montanism the truly conservative movement. 2

In regard to the doctrine of apostolic succession, I must say one other word. It has been, in history, too much identified with the threefold form of the ministry. 3 I believe myself that the evi-

2 See The Church and the Ministry, pp. 207-213, and app. notes H and I.

3 See further, The Church and the Ministry, pp. 72 ff.

dence, as we have it at present, points cogently to this conclusion : that since apostolic days there have been always three orders of the ministry; not only deacons and presbyters (or bishops according to the earliest use of the term), but also ministers of the apostolic order, superior to the presbyters, such as Timothy and Titus, or those "prophets" of whom we hear in the earliest Christian literature. I believe that what occurred was the gradual localization in particular churches of this apostolic order of ministers which previously had not usually been so localized, and that there was no time when presbyters or presbyter bishops had either the supreme authority of government or the power to ordain; the change which took place consisting only in the localization of an order of men previously exercising a more general supervision, and the reservation of the name "bishop" to these localized apostolic officers.

But there are certain facts which have led some good authorities to suppose that, at one time, all the presbyters in some churches held together the chief authority in government and the power to ordain, the "episcopate" being as it were "in commission " among them. Now this theory has, I think, from the point of view of ecclesiastical principle, been too much discussed. It does not affect the principle of apostolic succession in the least. The principle is that no man in the Church can validly exercise any ministry, except such as he has received from a source running back ultimately to the apostles, so that any ministry which a person takes upon himself to exercise, which is not covered by an apostolically received commission, is invalid.

Now, if the order of presbyters at any time held the right to ordain, that was because it had been entrusted to them by apostolic men. It no more disturbs the principle of apostolic succession than if your lordship ordained all the presbyters in this diocese to-day to episcopal functions. There would ensue a great deal of inconvenience and confusion, but nothing that would violate the principle of apostolical succession. On the other hand, the departure from this principle is manifest when presbyters in the sixteenth or subsequent century took upon themselves to ordain other presbyters. They were taking on themselves an office which, beyond all question, they had not received — which was not imparted to them in their ordination. There had been a perfectly clear understanding for many centuries what did and what did not belong to the presbyter's office. This is the principle which it is essential to maintain, and its title-deeds lie in the continuous record of Church history.

IV

We stand, then, repudiating the undenominational conception of Christianity. On the other hand, we Anglican Churchmen stand repudiating the claim of Rome. When you state the doctrine of the visible Church, sacraments and ministry, people sometimes tell you that the Roman Church is the only logical expression of that theory. Now, historically, the Roman Church is not the development of the whole of the Church, but only of a part of it; and this historical fact would not matter so much if spiritually the Roman Church represented the whole of Christianity — the whole of Christianity as it finds expression in the first Christian age, or in the New Testament. But the more accurately any one studies the subject, the more clearly he must, I think, come to see that the Roman Church, whatever be its graces, powers, and excellences, is a one-sided development of Christianity: a development of certain qualities in Christianity with which the Latin genius had special affinity, its disciplinary and governmental powers, but a development which ignored other qualities at least as certainly belonging to Christianity, such as the strengthening of individuality which it is intended to promote, the responsibility which it inculcates for personal enquiry, the love of the bare truth, the considerateness, the fairness which it ought to foster. The Roman Church does not represent the whole of Christianity, nor the whole spirit of Scripture or of the early Church. To some of us this will seem understating the truth ; but a statement of the truth as far as it goes it certainly is.

Now it is not only the case that the Roman

Church does not in fact represent the whole of the Christian spirit, but it is compelled by its principles to exorcise part of it, and cast it out as evil. It has committed itself to unhistorical doctrines, e.g. that the pope not only is, but has always been, infallible, that Mary was immaculately conceived, and that these doctrines have alivays been recognized elements in the Catholic faith. These dogmatic positions it puts outside the region of free enquiry and criticism. Thus it is compelled by these unhistorical dogmas to condemn the free appeal to history on matter defined by the Church, and to repudiate the responsibility of a private, i.e. personal, judgment on matters of faith. And this repudiation is bound up with a deficient appreciation of the claim of truth, intellectually and morally, for its own sake no less than for its results.

For some minds Rome is, so to speak, put out of court by positive abuses, e.g. the withdrawal of the chalice from the laity, exaggerated devotion to St. Mary and other saints, obligatory confession to the priest, compulsory celibacy of the clergy. To other minds it appears a more convincing consideration that Rome is not, and cannot be, the whole of Christianity. For it is certainly true that Christianity was not meant to be narrowed as it came down the ages, or to become less and less applicable for the freeing of the whole of our manhood.