Peter
John M. asked if my formulations in ecclesiology take account of WCF 25.4. I certainly don’t have any disagreement with it, and I don’t see any inconsistency with what I’ve said about the catholic church. Perhaps you could clarify how you see my positions to be inconsistent with the Confession here.
Here’s what I understand the Confession to be saying:
First, in saying the church is “sometimes more, sometimes less visible,” I take the Confession to be making an empirical statement (consistent with the way Calvin sometimes talks about the church’s visibility and invisibility). That is, in Soviet Russia or in contemporary China or in Ahab’s Israel, the church was less visible because it was forced into hiding. In Rome after Constantine’s conversion and in Dothan, Alabama, the church is more visible.
Second, and perhaps this was John’s point, the first statement implies that public, visible ecclesial institutions may be so corrupted that they no longer can be identified as the “catholick church,” which instead subsists in invisible communities of sons of the prophets. I think that’s possible, though what impresses me is God’s unbelievable patience with institutions we might want to treat as non-churches.
This is most striking in 2 Kings: Clearly, the sons of the prophets are the faithful in Omride Israel, but Elisha gives advice and help to the Omride kings. Even after a long period of official promotion of idolatry through several dynasties, Yahweh has compassion on Israel because of His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (2 Kings 13:22-25).
Third, the second sentence is claiming that particular churches (or denominational groups of churches) may be more or less faithful. But these are still considered “particular churches,” and therefore part of the “catholick church.”
Peter, many of the “pure evangelicals” in our denomination (PCA) want to affirm the more pure/less pure distinction without sacramental efficacy of any kind. On that score the FV and high church Calvinists are much closer to each other than to the evangelical party in our midst. But the question goes in the other direction as well. Does sacramental efficacy for you blur the more pure/less pure distinction? Might sacramental efficacy of baptism be analogous to what might be called “circumcision efficacy” of 2nd Kings? Not all Israel was true Israel in other words, though Yahweh remains faithful to his covenant with Israel. This is to be distinguished from the Roman intuition that “all of the Roman Catholic Church is the true Church”. If you can affirm the “more pure/less pure” distinction inside and alongside sacramental efficacy most of us high church Calvinists will gladly say, come join us!
Just a historical note. The “more or less visible” language in WCF 25.4 pertains to the visible church catholic. Yet, while it is to this catholic church that God gives the “ministry, oracles, and ordinances,” these are actually exercised on the local level and is where their purity is judged.
Thus “purity” pertains to the local congregation where the gospel is taught, the sacraments administered, and worship performed. Interestingly, following Calvin and some of the other Reformed confessions, the marks of doctrine and sacraments/worship are highlighted here without direct mention of “discipline.”
But this makes sense in historical context, particularly the singling out of worship in addition to ordinances. Part of the pressing issue was the desire of some Puritans to break entirely with the Church of England over purity of worship along with the appearance of a variety of new, putatively “pure” sects in the mid-17th century.
And so, WCF 25.5 follows with: “The purest churches under heaven are subject both to mixture and error; and some have so degenerated, as to become no churches of Christ, but synagogues of Satan.”
Again, context is likely important. By presenting purity as a matter of degrees in 25.4 and by affirming that even the purest churches are subject to mixture and error, the WCF was taking a stand against Independency and more extreme forms of sectarianism that were striving to create fully pure churches of visible saints.
Moreover, the WCF was warning that some of the new sects, in breaking with the established church, had gone so far astray as to devolve into something other than “churches of Christ,” perhaps aimed at some of the anti-trinitarian or other heretical sects cropping up at the time, especially in London.
If anything, then, WCF 25 pushes us to seek to maintain the visible catholicity of the church, even where matters are not as pure as we might prefer, at the least, unity in mutual prayer, exhortation, and sacramental fellowship between various bodies, local and national, as Rutherford suggests when he lists these as “Church-acts of externall communion with the reformed catholick visible Churches.”
So, what’s that imply with regard to sacramental theology? I’m not sure it implies anything directly, but at the very least it implies that, apart from the extreme case where a church has turned into a synagogue of Satan, we should exercise a generous judgment of charity with regard to even those brothers and sisters we deem less pure, while exhorting them in love towards greater purity.
Of course, the more general point stands that “not all Israel is Israel” and it is possible, as Augustine says against the Donatists, “But men put on Christ [in baptism], sometimes so far as to receive the sacrament, sometimes so much further as to receive holiness of life. And the first of these is common to good and bad alike; the second, peculiar to the good and pious.”
Yes, what Joel said.