A DAVENANT TRUST PUBLICATION ISSUE 1.7 • MARCH 2017 ADFONTES A JOURNAL OF PROTESTANT RESOURCEMENT SIMUL JUSTUS ET PECCATOR: THE GENIUS AND TENSIONS OF REFORMATION ECCLESIOLOGY W. BRADFORD LITTLEJOHN THE GENIUS OF LUTHER’S ECCLESIOLOGY It is often remarked that Martin Luther did not set out to make a new church, just to reform the old one. This is true enough, but if it is meant to imply (as it sometimes is) that Luther was not up to anything terribly radical, that the Reformation was just a big misunderstanding, then it is gravely misleading. For Luther did mean to offer a new understanding of what the church was—not wholly new, of course, but radically new from the standpoint of the later Middle Ages. He writes in his Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation: All Christians are truly of the spiritual estate, and there is no difference among them except that of office. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12 that we are all one body, yet every member has its own work by which it serves the others. This is because we have one baptism, one Gospel, one faith, and are all Christians alike; for baptism, Gospel, and faith make us spiritual and a Christian people. 1 1. In Three Treatises, from the American Edition of Luther’s Works (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1966), 12. The church, in short, is all of us, everyone who calls on the name of the Lord. Indeed, so far from the clergy constituting the church, the church constitutes the clergy. This was a profound shift from the irreducibly institutional understanding of the church in medieval Catholicism, for which “the Church” meant above all an authority structure, with the Pope squarely at its head. From one standpoint, Luther’s redefinition appeared to offer a straightforward and empirical account of what the church was: an assembly of people—or rather, the whole sum of assemblies throughout the world of people—who call on the name of Christ. But properly speaking, this was not so much an account of what the church was but of where you found it. The Church itself, wrote Luther, “is a high, deep, hidden thing which one may neither perceive nor see but must grasp only by faith through baptism, sacrament, and word.” 2 It was not so much an empirical assembly of bodies as “a spiritual assembly of souls in one faith . . . The natural, real, and essential Christendom exists in 2. WA 51:507, quoted in Paul D.L. Avis, The Church in the Theology of the Reformers (London: Marshall, Morgan, and Scott, 1981), 14. THE CHURCH, IN SHORT, IS ALL OF US, EVERYONE WHO CALLS ON THE NAME OF THE LORD. INDEED, SO FAR FROM THE CLERGY CONSTITUTING THE CHURCH, THE CHURCH CONSTITUTES THE CLERGY.
2 the Spirit and not in any external thing.” 3 After all, if the Church was nothing but the body of Christ, and none could be united to Christ except by faith, and faith was itself a “high, deep, hidden thing,” then how could the true Church not be likewise? But lest this notion of the Church suggest something static and abstract, a mere logical sum of individual believers, we should note that Luther describes the Church in far more dynamic terms than that. The Church is the creature of the living and active Word of God, and particularly the Word as preached. “The Church is nothing without the word and everything in it exists by virtue of the word alone.” 4 Indeed, “The Church of God is present wherever the word of God is spoken, whether it be in the middle of the Turks’ land or in the pope’s land or in hell itself. For it is the word of God which builds the Church which is lord over all other spaces.” 5 The Church, thus, is in itself invisible, but it becomes visible when that which gives it life, the Word, is preached, heard, acknowledged, and obeyed in the world. We may, however—indeed must for practical purposes—speak of the regular organized assembly of professing believers who worship in word and sacrament as the “visible church,” with appropriate caveats. Luther’s concept of the justified sinner, simul justus et peccator, sometimes provided him a framework for ecclesiology. The church was perfectly righteous by virtue of its union with Christ, but this union, and this righteous identity, were hidden; as manifest in the world, in history, it was still sinful and failing, a corpus permixtum composed of wheat and tares, gradually being sanctified. And yet there remained certain “notes” or “marks” by which the true church could be visibly recognized in history. The Augsburg Confession of 1530 established two marks: “The Church is the congregation of saints, in which the Gospel is rightly taught and the Sacraments are rightly administered.” 6 But some over the next couple decades sought to emphasize that just as true Christians must be characterized by godly life, so must the true church. Accordingly, they added a third mark, “discipline,” which initially had quite a broad sense, rather than simply designating excommunication and its precursors. 7 3. LW 39:69, quoted in Avis 14. 4. LW 40.11, quoted in Avis 20. 5. WA 43.596, quoted in Avis 20. 6. Art. VII (http://bookofconcord.org/augsburgconfession.php [accessed May 27, 2014]). 7. See Jordan J. Ballor and W. Bradford Littlejohn, “European Calvinism: Church Discipline,” in Irene Dingel and Johannes Paulmann, eds., European History Online (EGO) (Mainz: Institute of European History (IEG), 2013): http://www.ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/ crossroads/religious-and-denominational-spaces/jordan-ballor-w-bradford-littlejohneuropean-calvinism-church-discipline. Some of the material in the “Attempted Solutions” section below is adapted from that article. THE TENSIONS OF LUTHER’S ECCLESIOLOGY Such marks were all fairly useful in giving you a decent idea of roughly where the church was (although they obviously could not stand alone; they presupposed a Protestant understanding of what the Gospel and sacraments were): if you saw a minister faithfully expounding the text of Scripture, and administering baptism and the Lord’s Supper, then you could assume that there was a manifestation of Christ’s body; imperfect, perhaps, but in communion with the Head. But they weren’t so good at telling you where the church wasn’t. 8 How false did a church’s preaching have to be before it could no longer count as part of the body of Christ? How distorted or rationalistic or superstitious did its sacramental practice have to be? How lax did its discipline have to be? Luther’s theology offered no clear answers to such questions. It also opened itself to other dangers. The clarion call of the Letter to the Christian Nobility was, after all, a double-edged sword. So long as the Church was dominated by corrupt clergy, it made good sense to remind the Christian laity that they too were called to be kings and priests to God. They too had responsibility for the welfare of the Church, and they must do all in their power to see it reformed—especially those whom God had placed in positions of authority. But what about once a faithful ministry of godly clergy had been established? Should lay rulers continue to exercise control over the affairs of the Church? Luther and his colleague Melanchthon hesitated, but ultimately acknowledged a substantial ongoing role for civil magistrates in church affairs. Indeed, it was their very emphasis on the hiddenness of the true church that determined this conclusion: since we must be very wary of trying to draw precise boundaries around the truly faithful Christians, they had to accept for practical purposes that all those who professed Christianity belonged to the Church, and this meant nearly the whole body of citizens. In its temporal profile, then, the Church overlapped almost wholly with the body politic, and hence decisions about its temporal well-being were fit subjects for the civil magistrate’s concern. The same basic assumption, with slight differences of emphasis, was to inform Zwingli’s reform in Zurich, Bucer’s reform in Strasbourg, and the various phases of the English Reformation. 8. Paul D.L. Avis, “The True Church in Reformation Theology,” Scottish Journal of Theology 30.4 (1977): 334: “The notae ecclesiae is a qualitative concept; theoretically one can say whether a certain ecclesial body possesses the marks or not. But in practice it was found to need supplementing by a quantitative one, such as Calvin’s concept that Rome contained the vestigia of the church.” STILL, WHILE COHERENT ENOUGH IN PRINCIPLE, THE NEW PROTESTANT ECCLESIOLOGY WAS SHOT THROUGH WITH TENSIONS IN PRACTICE, AND A RANGE OF RIVAL MODELS FOR RESOLVING THESE TENSIONS SOON EMERGED.
3 Still, while coherent enough in principle, the new Protestant ecclesiology was shot through with tensions in practice, and a range of rival models for resolving these tensions soon emerged. ATTEMPTED SOLUTIONS TO THE TENSIONS OF PROTESTANT ECCLESIOLOGY The Anabaptist Model The first model, one with which Luther himself had briefly sympathized, but which was before long rejected by all the leading Reformers, was the Anabaptist option. Although there were several independent and rather different strands of the Anabaptist movement, the most important was probably that which arose in Zurich and its environs under the leadership of Conrad Grebel and Balthasar Hubmaier in the mid-1520s. Zurich had embraced a particularly thoroughgoing model of the partnership between magistracy and ministry, and although the Reformation there was real and resulted in the conversion of many, Grebel and Hubmaier were appalled by the slow pace of reform and the nominalism of so much of the populace. The Church in Zurich was self-evidently not identical with the city’s whole population, and leaders like Grebel and Hubmaier did not think that such an ambiguous state of affairs should be tolerated. Anabaptism is best known for its insistence on re-baptism and its critique of civil authority, but both of these positions must be understood against the larger background of the Anabaptist aim to establish a visible congregation of saints that truly was the Church and nothing but the Church. Writes Kenneth Davis, Contrary to most Magisterial reformers’ exegesis, most Anabaptists upheld that while society at large could correspond to the parable of the tares (Matt. 13) and openly include believers and unbelievers, the church could not. Rather, each church, as a corporate entity, was to be visibly and voluntarily (without any civil constraints) holy, an approximation of the heavenly, spiritual kingdom on earthly collective display. 9 This entailed not only limiting church membership to those who voluntarily committed themselves by baptism, but also carefully policing church membership by rigorous discipline (“the ban”) to remove false Christians from the fellowship. Despite the complexity and variety of 9. Kenneth R. Davis, “No Discipline, No Church: An Anabaptist Contribution to the Reformed Tradition,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 13.4 (1982): 44. the Anabaptist movements, this emphasis on discipline was a consistent theme. The Strasbourg Model It was also a theme that found a sympathetic hearing among several of the Reformers, including Martin Bucer at Strasbourg and his protegé, John Calvin. Of course, the word “discipline” could mean many different things. Although the word easily carries a negative connotation, for Bucer, it primarily meant something like “corporate sanctification.” “Discipline” meant a Christian community’s determination that its members would live out Christian love toward one another. 10 Of course, this did not happen spontaneously. It required structures, rules, and, where necessary, discipline in the more precise sense of corrective imposition of these rules. As an outward action, discipline in this sense could never guarantee inward renewal (hence there was, for Bucer and Calvin, no question of the Anabaptist notion that the visible church might be brought to match the invisible), but the Strasbourg reformer believed that if administered rightly by ministers, church discipline could have a much better chance of prompting real repentance than the merely civil discipline practiced at Zwingli’s and Bullinger’s Zurich (where even excommunication functioned as a civil penalty prescribed by magistrates). Bucer’s interest in a church discipline which could at least reduce the gap between the church visible and invisible proved broadly appealing and inspiring for other reformers, with at least two different models emerging. One, associated with John Calvin, proved best suited to city-states or small polities with relatively sympathetic magistrates. It had considerably less in common with modern Presbyterianism than we generally imagine: Calvin’s “deacons” were civil officers charged with overseeing welfare distributions, and the “elders” functioned not merely alongside the ministers on the Consistory, but as leading city councilors of Geneva. Magistrates even had an important role in matters of worship and church order. 11 Indeed, Calvin accepted no less than did the Zurich reformers a Christendom model, in which the church of Geneva and the citizenry of Geneva made up one and the same society. However, there were some points of ambiguity and ten10. See Jake Meador, “‘That No One Should Live for Himself, but for Others’: Love and the Third Mark of the Church in the Theology of Martin Bucer,” in W. Bradford Littlejohn and Jonathan Tomes, ed., Beyond Calvin: Essays on the Diversity of the Reformed Tradition (Moscow, ID: The Davenant Press, forthcoming 2017). 11. Matthew Tuininga, “Christ’s Two Kingdoms: Calvin’s Political Theology and the Public Engagement of the Church,” unpublished PhD dissertation (Emory University, 2014), 346-47. (Forthcoming from Cambridge University Press as Calvin’s Political Theology and the Public Engagement of the Church: Christ’s Two Kingdoms.)
4 sion. First was the role of the ministers, who for Calvin had a direct divine calling as well as a human ordination. While not denying Luther’s notion of the universal priesthood, Calvin did put more emphasis on the distinctiveness of the clerical calling, and wanted to avoid any implication that ministers might be mere officers of state (though he did allow to magistrates an important role in confirming their appointment). 12 Second was the power of excommunication, which for Calvin was a spiritual exercise of discipline necessary to guard the purity of the Lord’s Table, not a mere civil penalty for wicked behavior, and, as such, wholly under the authority of ministers and of the elders acting in their ecclesiastical capacity as members of the Consistory. Given the dual role of most of Geneva’s elders, it is easy to see why the City Council struggled to see the importance of the neat distinction, but for Calvin, it was essential. 13 As a contribution to Protestant ecclesiology, Calvin’s institutionalization of church discipline at Geneva was both blessing and curse. At its best, it testified to the essential Protestant insight that the only authority in the Church was the authority of the Word: only the internally convicting power of the Word, not any external punishments, was the means to bring repentance and restoration to the Christian and to build up the community of the Church. But it was easy for the emphasis to be displaced from the minister’s declaration to the minister’s office. This effectively erected another parallel juridical authority within the Christian society with the capacity to administer what amounted—in such a society—to a civil as well as spiritual punishment, and with much greater strictness than any civil court would. The Consistory at Geneva, and its many imitators elsewhere, were certainly not always that bad; but the system was certainly ripe for abuses. It is important to note, however, that despite his fame, John Calvin was perhaps not the most important contributor to Reformed ecclesiology. After all, Calvin’s model of the church assumed close cooperation between magistracy and ministry, and thus required not only a sympathetic magistrate, but a relatively small or decentralized polity. It thus proved influential in the Swiss city-states and in the quasi-autonomous cities of the Netherlands, and was even adopted (though with profound tensions) in the small kingdom of Scotland, but it required extensive adaptation in other settings. A better model for a more-or-less autonomous church in the midst of an unfriendly society was pioneered by the Polish Reformer Jan Łaski, who spent most of his ministry in the Netherlands and Eng12. Institutes of the Christian Religion IV.4.13. 13. For a good survey, see Gillian Lewis, “Calvinism in Geneva in the Time of Calvin and Beza (1541-1605),” in Menna Prestwich, ed., International Calvinism, 1541–1715 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 39–70. land. Like Bucer, with whom had worked closely, he felt the need to respond to Anabaptist pressures, and during his tenure as superintendent of the church at Emden (1542-48) adopted a stricter discipline administered by lay-elders within the congregation. But he first had a free hand to develop his ideas fully as pastor of the London Strangers’ Church, a collection of congregations composed of Dutch and French Protestant refugees which Łaski administered from 1548 to 1553. There Łaski, together with French pastor Valérand Poullain (1509?-1557), pioneered the creation of a form of church discipline (described in his Forma ac ratio) that, although retaining the emphasis on discipline as a means of edification and redemption of recalcitrant sinners, was particularly severe even by the standards of the day. 14 Moreover, since the English authorities gave the exiles freedom to govern their own affairs more or less autonomously, Łaski was able to create a church structure remarkably reminiscent of the Anabaptist ideal—a gathered, self-governing community of believers who agreed to commit themselves to the biblicallymodeled system of discipline, which helped purify the body of the faithful from the “tares” of worldly Christians. 15 By its very presence at the heart of London, Łaski’s church exerted a radicalizing influence on many in England, and perhaps even on the Scottish reformer John Knox (c. 1514-1572), who was preaching in London at this time. 16 When Mary I (1516-1558) took the throne in 1553, the members of the Stranger churches, their ranks swelled by fleeing English Protestants, scattered to several continental havens, bringing the model of Łaski’s Forma ac ratio with them—back to Emden, to Frankfurt, and even to Geneva. Łaski scholar Michael Springer has convincingly argued that the English exile churches in Frankfurt and even Geneva itself (which John Knox pastored) mod14. As Michael Springer relates in Restoring Christ’s Church: John á Lasco and the Forma Ac Ratio (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), one striking example of Łaski’s disciplinary zeal was his directive in the Forma ac ratio for ministers to visit anyone who fell ill in their congregation, in order to “warn the afflicted that God uses illness as a warning and evidence of his divine justice, and that the stricken should endure it with patience and gratitude…. [And] because the illness had been sent as a punishment, the preacher or elder should encourage the parishioner to reconcile with anyone they had offended” (92). 15. Particularly remarkable in this regard was the insistence in the Forma ac ratio that the sacraments could be only be administered to individuals who had pledged to abide fully by the discipline of the community. See Springer, Restoring Christ’s Church, 84, 87. If we define the Anabaptist or “radical” ecclesiology according to the four themes identified by Paul Avis in his Church in the Theology of the Reformers (pp. 55-61)—voluntarism, primitivism, exclusivism, and obsession with discipline—it is hard not to see the influence of this model on Łaski’s (and to a lesser extent, Bucer’s) ecclesiology. A distinctive element in Łaski’s system, however, which certainly ran contrary to Anabaptist congregationalism, was the office of superintendent, a quasi-bishop or permanent moderator of sorts for a small group of congregations, who helped oversee their administration and guide their teaching. Unlike Lutheran superintendents or English bishops, however, Łaski’s superintendents were chosen by congregants, not magistrates. See Springer, Restoring Christ’s Church, 62-67. 16. See Springer, Restoring Christ’s Church, 86-89.
5 eled themselves chiefly after Łaski’s Strangers’ Church, and not, as usually assumed, after Calvin’s Geneva. 17 The influence of Łaski’s model was also to be felt in the Netherlands and in the French Reformed Church, which, although deeply influenced by Calvin and Beza at Geneva, had to adapt their model for use in a setting where churches could not rely on the support of magistrates. Łaski’s model, more than any, seems to lend itself to the use of a disestablished Protestant church, such as those in America and indeed in most of the world today. However, by its zeal to identify and police the boundaries of that church, it runs the sectarian risk of Anabaptism, and of trying to erase too much the gap between the visible and invisible churches. This danger was to become particularly clear in Elizabethan Puritanism, which seems to have drawn as much inspiration from the London Strangers’ Church as it did from Geneva. But to understand this movement, we must briefly touch on one other model for Protestant churchpolity. The Nation-State Model If Bullinger, Bucer, and Calvin had all sketched ways of organizing a church within a small polity governed by sympathetic magistrates, and Łaski had provided a model that could work without the support of any magistrates, what about a Protestant church in a very large polity, and a monarchical one at that, like England? Here the centralization of authority in the monarch and the basically hierarchical structure of society worked against any notion of a democratic, bottom-up church. A totally independent church hierarchy deriving its authority from Christ above, on the other hand, would have perpetuated the intolerable church-state conflicts of the late Middle Ages, and would have tended to reinscribe the clericalism that Luther had fought so hard to overcome.
Accordingly, the most natural solution was to maintain two distinct hierarchies, the bishops and the nobility, which joined at the top— working together in Parliament, under the sole sovereignty of the monarch. Of course, after the early hubris of King Henry VIII, there was no question of the monarch actually exercising or being the source of spiritual authority—the bishops and the presbyters exercised their spiritual calling of Word and Sacrament on behalf of Christ, but their particular appointments, and their position in the hierarchy, were determined by human authority, with the monarch as its locus. And Luther’s principle of the universal priesthood was operative enough in England for most of its bishops to recognize that laymen in Parliament, and the monarch as the praecipuum membrum ecclesia (“foremost member of the church,” a phrase of Melanchthon’s), had a legitimate role in making decisions about what Scripture and prudence required for matters of church order. 17. See Springer, Restoring Christ’s Church, 126-32. The fact that a rather similar episcopal structure prevailed in Lutheran Denmark and Sweden suggests that the distinctive shape of the Church of England is less the result of a particular “genius of Anglicanism,” and more the natural fruit of Protestant ecclesiology adapting itself to a monarchical nation-state. Of course, the adaptation was not without profound tensions, any more than the other models we have seen. In England, at least, three distinct sources of tension may be noted. The first concerned the relation of Crown and Parliament, and the distinct elements of Parliament to one another. In particular, did the bishops report directly to the monarch, or did the laymen in Parliament also have a role in overseeing them—or did the bishops together with the lay Lords and Commons make up Parliament together, and relate to the monarch in that capacity? The second concerned the difficulty, within such a large hierarchical church structure, of bishops being sufficiently responsive to the bottom and top simultaneously—to the practical on-the-ground needs of pastors and churchgoers, and to the wishes and demands of the monarch and of national political realities. Some bishops were indeed worldly time-servers, as many of their critics charged, but most were earnest and godly men torn between numerous often-conflicting obligations. 18 The third concerned the same basic tension that bedevilled Protestant ecclesiology from the beginning: how to live with the obvious disconnect between a body calling itself “the Church,” the bride of Christ, and a Church made up of men and women who, for the most part, seemed to understand little of the faith they professed on Sundays and to practice even less of it on weekdays. The first of these issues, being largely one of political theory, will not detain us here, but the latter two proved to be generative of more than a century of profound conflict within the Protestant Church of England, and bequeathed to us in America (whose forefathers were often refugees from these conflicts) much of our distinctive approach to ecclesiology. THE PURITAN MOVEMENT The Puritan movement was birthed out of profound dissatisfaction with how the bishops had handled the so-called Second Vestiarian Controversy in the 1560s. In her restoration of Protestant worship to England in 1559, Elizabeth had taken a relatively conservative line to 18. For a sympathetic portrait, see Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), and Kenneth Fincham, Prelate as Pastor: The Episcopate of James I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).
6 ease the transition for those of her subjects less than thrilled about the new state of affairs. In particular, she required clergy to wear many of the same vestments that their Catholic predecessors had while leading worship. Many ministers felt that, rather than making it easier for them to win more Catholic-minded parishioners, these vestments simply offended the sensibilities of the godly, who could not overcome their popish associations. Many of the bishops sympathized with this concern, but when the Queen proved emphatic, they reasoned that discretion was the better part of valor and enforced conformity, deeming that there was nothing intrinsically ungodly about the vestments.
Feeling betrayed, many young leaders in the church began to question the authority of bishops altogether, as well as the multitude of outward ceremonies and orders in the Church of England that were retained from its pre-Reformation days. Indeed, by appealing to the senses rather than the soul, these outward ornaments helped lull the nominal Christians (who made up the vast majority in England, they charged) into complacency. While for the most part not rejecting the notion of a comprehensive national church, the emerging Puritan party hoped to purify it somehow by learned preaching, strippeddown ceremonies, and rigorous discipline, so that it consisted as much as possible only of those who were truly godly. For many of them, a key part of this process was abolishing bishops and replacing them with a presbyterian or quasi-congregational system in which pastors and elders oversaw a largely autonomous church structure. Such autonomy either implied a parallel hierarchy and jurisdiction alongside the civil one, which seemed a recipe for civil war, or else a separatist sect dedicated to maintaining a pure fellowship of the godly within its bounds, while the majority of the national church was consigned to perdition. 19 Although Elizabethan authorities understandably feared the former most of all, seeing it as a new popery, it was not until the 1640s that these fears came to partial fruition, and that was the perhaps predictable result of episcopal tyranny in the 1630s. The latter threat, however, that of separatism, was to gain traction in the 1590s and early 1600s, eventually spawning many of the first immigrants to America. Of course, from our standpoint we would be quick to point out that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a disestablished, self-governing church; such was the Church before Constantine and such 19. For a good survey, see Stephen Brachlow, The Communion of Saints: Radical Puritan and Separatist Ecclesiology, 1570–1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). are all our churches in America today. However, problems do arise when such a church organizes itself within a broader church or society which considers itself genuinely Christian. In such a setting, it is easy for the separating church to think that the reason for its separation is that the broader church isn’t really Christian after all, and then to suppose that it, the separated church, really is. Sometimes, the separating church is right about this; but this move can represent an attempt to carve out a visible church made up only of members of the invisible church, rather than accepting that the church that we see is a mixed multitude of saints and sinners, and its structures more human than divine. Having made this move intellectually, the separated church then tries to reinforce it culturally by fostering an implacable opposition to and withdrawal from the culture and practices of the broader society. All of this characterized the separatist wing of the Puritan movement in the Church of England, and because they brought to the New World this need to define themselves against a nominal broader church, the Puritans in New England soon found themselves squabbling over purity, drawing boundaries, and separating from one another in a process that was to play out interminably in the centuries that followed. 20 CONCLUSION The genius of Protestant ecclesiology is same as that of Protestant soteriology—as the individual lives by faith alone, so does the Church. The Christian cannot seek his identity in anything that he brings or does, but only by throwing himself on Christ by faith in the Word proclaimed, and trusting that his life is hidden with Christ in God. Likewise, the Christian Church cannot seek its identity in its outward form or practices, but only by receiving its being from Christ by the Word proclaimed in its midst, and trusting that its true life too is hidden with Christ in God. But the tension and struggle of Protestant ecclesiology is the same as that of Protestant soteriology—how is faith attested, manifested, and recognized by its works of obedience? How does the unseen church of faith make itself visible by rendering corporate obedience to Christ, governing and ordering itself in accordance with his Word and the 20. The early New England phases of this divisiveness are well chronicled in Michael P . Winship, Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); the later 19th-century phases in John Williamson Nevin, “The Sect System, Article 1,” Mercersburg Review 1:5 (1849): 482–507. THE GENIUS OF PROTESTANT ECCLESIOLOGY IS SAME AS THAT OF PROTESTANT SOTERIOLOGY—AS THE INDIVIDUAL LIVES BY FAITH ALONE, SO DOES THE CHURCH. THE CHRISTIAN CANNOT SEEK HIS IDENTITY IN ANYTHING THAT HE BRINGS OR DOES, BUT ONLY BY THROWING HIMSELF ON CHRIST BY FAITH IN THE WORD PROCLAIMED, AND TRUSTING THAT HIS LIFE IS HIDDEN WITH CHRIST IN GOD.
7 demands of discipleship? If Luther was sometimes too content to leave the sanctification of the church in merely human hands, the Anabaptists, and occasionally some of the Reformed, were too quick to seek for the Spirit’s fingerprints in the outward life of the body. The same polarity appeared in the conflicts of the Church of England, and it continues today, for instance in the battle between evangelical megachurches that ask only a minimalist profession of faith and stern Reformed churches that impose strict discipline on their faithful few. It is a tension that defies any conclusive, once-for-all resolution, but the approach of English theologian Richard Hooker in the 1590s may still offer us some valuable light. “Signs must resemble the things they signify,” he declares, and we might legitimately speak of the visible church, in his theology, as a sign which signifies the presence of the invisible. Accordingly, it must strive to manifest outwardly the qualities which it has antecedently in Christ: That which inwardly each man should be, the Church outwardly ought to testify. And therefore the duties of our religion which are seen must be such as that affection which is unseen ought to be. Signs must resemble the things they signify. If religion bear the greatest sway in our hearts, our outward religious duties must show it, as far as the Church hath outward ability. . . . Yea then are the public duties of religion best ordered, when the militant Church doth resemble by sensible means, as it may in such cases, the hidden dignity and glory wherewith the Church triumphant in heaven is beautified. 21 21. Richard Hooker, Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity, V.6.1-2. This hidden glory includes both unity and purity. But like all outward manifestations, such unity and purity are to be treated under the heading of the doctrine of sanctification. But just because sanctification must be distinguished from justification does not mean it should be separated: the sanctification of the church is the process of it becoming more conformed to its hidden reality, as righteous in Christ. Hooker, accordingly, is well-prepared to argue at length for the importance of historical structures of authority, visible forms of unity, liturgical aids to holiness, diligent observance of the sacraments, and submission to creedal and confessional norms as the signs and seals of the church’s hidden life, crucial to its sanctification and well-being. 22 But these things do not constitute the church’s being, the basis of its recognition before God. That is hidden with Christ in God, and our first task is ensure that we, and those in our own churches, are sharing in this life, not to obsess over the criteria for other churches to share in it. Meanwhile, we extend them whatever fellowship we can, and exhort them to grow in truth, unity, and holiness. Dr. Bradford Littlejohn is the President of the Davenant Trust and teaches philosophy at Moody Bible Institute. He is the author of two books on Richard Hooker as well as numerous articles and book chapters on Reformation theology and Christian ethics. 22. For more on these elements in Hooker’s ecclesiology, and their relationship to his key distinctions of the visible and invisible church, see my Richard Hooker: A Companion to His Life and Work (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2015), chs. 10–11.
8 The Anglican Communion is a fellowship of thirty-eight autonomous provinces in communion with the see of Canterbury. 1 The Archbishop of Canterbury is the Primate of all England and, while his ecclesiastical jurisdiction is restricted to the Church of England, he does hold a position of spiritual leadership as a focus of unity across the Communion. How Anglicanism arrived at this state of autocephaly and decentralized authority is a complicated story. The decentralized nature of Anglicanism is currently under attack and seen as a weakness of its polity, especially with respect to the current conflicts facing Anglicanism and the attempts to discern whether any degree of theological uniformity might be achieved, and, perhaps, even enforced. At the time of the Reformation, the Church of England declared its independence from Rome through a series of statutes that forbade any appeal to foreign power (i.e. the papacy) in matters both temporal and spiritual, and consequently asserted the spiritual as well as temporal supremacy of the Crown. 2 Thus, at the time of the Reformation, what would later become known as the Anglican Church charted an independent national identity, firmly rooted in Reformed principles. What was not anticipated at the time was the rise of what we now call global Anglicanism in the form of independent ecclesiastical provinces that emerged as the result of colonial expansion and, ultimately, from colonial independence. Just as the first independence of the English Church from Rome was defined by statute and legal wrangling, so too the ensuing history of Anglican provincial autonomy is equally one of legal wrangling. Diarmaid MacCulloch has suggested that while Archbishop Thomas Cranmer was highly wary of papal jurisdiction (as the pope was 1. A thorough description of the Anglican Communion with short history of each province can be found in Kevin Ward, A History of Global Anglicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 2. See especially The Act in Restraint of Appeals, 1533 (24 Henr. VIII, c.12), Act for the Submission of the Clergy, 1534 (25 Henr. VIII, c.19), and The Act of Supremacy, 1534 (26 Henr. VIII, c.1). deemed to be Antichrist), he was at least an ideological conciliarist. He held the belief (at least aspirationally) that a General Council was the ultimate decision-maker in the Catholic Church, and harbored a hope for a General Council to rival Trent that would deal with doctrinal matters. 3 Of course, there is an obvious tension here with Cranmer’s commitment to the supremacy of the Crown, and this tension constitutes an interesting historical “what if ” had his plans for an international Reformed General Council had come to fruition. 4 This tension between international catholicity and local autonomy has been a struggle that has characterized Anglican identity since the Reformation. Anglicanism’s attachment to autonomy has persisted. Perhaps overstating the case slightly (and ignoring Cranmer’s initial conciliar longing), Mark Chapman has suggested that the idea of an international conciliarism is essentially a foreign one to Anglicanism. 5 There was no room in the national church, as established at the Reformation, for international appeal (although significant interplay with the Reformed churches of the Continent existed). Indeed, he reminds us that Laud claimed (invoking that great conciliarist, Gerson!) “that…the church may be reformed in parts; and that this is necessary, and that to effect it, Provincial Councils may suffice; and in some things, Diocesan.” 6 Presciently, this is how the Anglican Communion would come to be organized. Chapman notes, “…it would be fair to characterize the development of Anglicanism as the planting of this national church ideal in the many varied parts of the world where the 3. For Cranmer’s desired hopes for such a General Council, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer (New Haven: Yale, 1996), 394, and also 586 for his own plan to appeal his own case to a General Council. 4. One might look to the outcome of the Synod of Dort for a tangible example. See W. Brown Patterson, “The Synod of Dordt,” chap. 8 in James VI and I and the reunion of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 260-292. 5. Mark D. Chapman, “The Dull Bits of History: Cautionary Tales for Anglicanism,” in The Anglican Covenant: Unity and Diversity in the Anglican Communion, ed. Mark D. Chapman (London: Mowbray, 2008), 92. 6. Chapman, “Dull Bits,” 93. THE ANGLICAN COMMUNION: A COMPLICATED STORY OF PROVINCIAL ECCLESIASTICAL AUTONOMY DANIEL F. GRAVES John Strachan (1778-1867), firS t biShop of toronto (1839-1867), courte Sy of the archive S of the a nglican Dioce Se of toronto. uSeD with permiSSion.
