The Word Makes the Church, Part 2

When we view the church from the perspective of those people who comprise its membership and how they are built up into a spiritual house, the same principle applies. Everything moves from the invisible to the visible. It is not as though the church required a supernatural cause at first, but then has run by a purely natural principle ever since.

Here we will see that,

(i.) The Word Makes the Church’s Officers

(ii.) The Word Makes the Church’s Authority

(iii.) The Word Makes the Church’s Maturity

The Word Makes the Church’s Officers

Before we even speak of the qualifications and duties of the officers of the church, we must remember that these are called by God—just as the church as a whole has been called out of the world by God. Paul charges the Ephesian elders on the basis of the fact that “the Holy Spirit has made you overseers” (Acts 20:28). There is a call from a church. There is an ordination by the laying on of hands. But it is God who ultimately calls the man. Is this a mysterious call or an esoteric experience? Not at all. It is informed, over time, by the word. A strong impression and desire may seize a man all in a moment, in one defining season—but the man is made a shepherd by a more refined dose of that same sheep food for the whole flock.

Presbyterians will divide church officers into three: 1. ministers, 2. elders, and 3. deacons. A second division then ensues among elders between teaching elders and ruling elders. Both the general threefold division and the further division among elders make an appeal to a few passages.

Let the elders who rule well be considered worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in preaching and teaching (1 Tim. 5:17).

Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them … the one who teaches, in his teaching … the one who leads, with zeal (Rom. 12:6, 7, 8).

At best, such verses distinguish between gifts that one man might have more than another, but there is no other precedence for seeing these as boundaries between offices. The first passage gives rationale for why some men who labor ought to be set aside by means of income. Their special exercise of the gift demands the amount of time that would require it. However, it is a leap in logic to infer more than that. As it happens, other texts would show us that it is bad logic as well. For instance, Paul tells Timothy about any qualified elder, that he must be “able to teach” (1 Tim. 3:3). He goes further to Titus:

He must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it (Titus 1:9).

Three elements are present: loyal understanding, orthodox transmission, effective polemics. If any of these three are wholly absent from the man, he cannot be an elder. Notice the order. There is an immaterial object of truth. He must possess it before he can transmit it to others; then, because he is jealous to preserve this truth, he is ready and able to refute the wolves. But the life of the flock is the great cause and end for which the repelling of predators is merely the means.

The ruling of elders, including the administration of discipline in what amounts to church courts, follows from the doctrine. If discipline proceeds from the word as a mark of the church, from the invisible to the visible, then it follows that the duties (and gifts to match) of the elders corresponding to those marks would flow in the same direction. Problems resulting from the division between “ruling” and “teaching” as to kinds of elders may be legion. I would only list the dangers of pragmatism in church method and legalism in church discipline and counseling. When ruling and administrating are conceived as non-doctrinal things, the church’s life is no longer moving from the invisible to the visible, but attempting to produce life, or to channel life, by what are actually non-living principles.

The Word Makes the Church’s Authority

The most basic point of contention between the Reformers and Rome concerning church polity goes right to the top. Who is the head of the church? The question is not whether mere mortals will represent Christ in authority. The idea of a “vicar of Christ” means more than this for Rome. Calvin strikes the proper balance in saying,

For though it is right that he alone should rule and reign in the Church, that he should preside and be conspicuous in it, and that its government should be exercised and administered solely by his word; yet as he does not dwell among us in visible presence, so as to declare his will to us by his own lips, he in this (as we have said) uses the ministry of men, by making them, as it were, his substitutes, not by transferring his right and honour to them, but only doing his own work by their lips, just as an artificer uses a tool for any purpose.1

The second point of contention, equally fundamental, regards apostolic succession. Although this was already covered under the true marks of the church, it must be considered in terms of the nature of true authority as well.

Therefore, it is here necessary to remember, that whatever authority and dignity the Holy Spirit in Scripture confers on priests, or prophets, or apostles, or successors of Apostles, is wholly given not to men themselves, but to the ministry to which they are appointed; or, to speak more plainly, to the word, to the ministry of which they are appointed.2

Just as with the civil magistrate, so with the ecclesiastical polity, there is an office and there is a man who occupied that office. The office is closer to a universal, more like the archetype of authority. The man in the office—the man makes the office—either conform more toward that form of authority or deviate away from the form of authority. But nothing of his flesh and bones, nor any other temporal motions, are the form itself, but a visible instantiation.

In harmony with what Calvin had already said about the marks of the true church, how the church officers handle them also flows from the invisible to the visible. He that grace, working through means, “is dispensed to us by the ministers and pastors of the Church, either in the preaching of the Gospel or the administration of the Sacraments, and herein is especially manifested the power of the keys, which the Lord has bestowed on the company of the faithful.”3 In other words, discipline fundamentally flows out of the substance of the word first, the sacraments second, and then that same power operates the keys. The Reformed have used an expression for this: that the power or authority given to the church to bind and loose is declarative and ministerial. Both of these words are crucial to understand.

This authority is declarative in that it declares the gospel word and so makes a royal announcement. On the King’s own authority, full pardon for sins has been offered. It is as simple as that. Those who embrace this offer have the King’s clemency and those who reject it remain in a state of war, and, though they cannot see it with the eyes of their flesh, also remain in a state of chains. This authority is also ministerial as opposed to magisterial. Those two words were common in the early modern era as a contrast between a servant and a lord. So, for the same reason as the minister of Christ announces what only Christ accomplishes, he is Christ’s servant and as such serves either the medicine of mercy or the sentence of punishment. Hence these two words represent the manner of the activity and the rank of the actor. Calvin gives this summary:

This command concerning remitting and retaining sins, and that promise made to Peter concerning binding and loosing, ought to be referred to nothing but the ministry of the word. When the Lord committed it to the apostles, he, at the same time, provided them with this power of binding and loosing. For what is the sum of the gospel, but just that all being the slaves of sin and death, are loosed and set free by the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, while those who do not receive and acknowledge Christ as a deliverer and redeemer are condemned and doomed to eternal chains?4

Of course this raises the question of souls that undergo excommunication, for example, or even suspension from the Lord’s Table, as an extreme measure to ward off that final step. Is the session of a church making some final pronouncement on the state of their soul? No. Matthew 18:15-18 and 1 Corinthians 5 are the two central passages that make plain the goal of restoration. Church discipline is more than restoration, but it is never less. But for our purposes, we need to see how this too is a motion from the invisible to the visible. The Greek tense of Jesus’s two statements on binding and loosing is very particular. The NASB and LSB pick up on this by rendering it,

I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven (Mat. 16:19; cf. Mat. 18:18).

The significance of this tense is that when we move from the visible to the invisible—that is, from the earthly court to the heavenly court—we have a relationship of confirmation rather than causation. The causation flows the other way, from the invisible (shall have been bound / loosed) to the visible (whatever you bind / loose). Calvin adds statement after statement to the same effect.

We admit, that none can be bound or loosed but those who are worthy of being bound or loosed. But the preachers of the Gospel and the Church have the word by which they can measure this worthiness. By this word preachers of the Gospel can promise forgiveness of sins to all who are in Christ by faith, and can declare a sentence of condemnation against all, and upon all, who do not embrace Christ.5

We now understand that the power of the keys is simply the preaching of the gospel in those places, and in so far as men are concerned, it is not so much power as ministry. Properly speaking, Christ did not give this power to men but to his word, of which he made men the ministers.6

Or, again, in a longer statement,

In short, the jurisdiction of the ancient Church was nothing else than (if I may so speak) a practical declaration of what Paul teaches concerning the spiritual power of pastors. “The weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds; casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ; and having in a readiness to revenge all disobedience” (2 Cor. 10:4-6). As this is done by the preaching of doctrine, so in order that doctrine may not be held in derision, those who profess to be of the household of faith ought to be judged according to the doctrine which is taught.7

The magisterial Reformers brought blame to Rome specifically over what we might today call spiritual abuse. The priest who was said to be a minister, absolving sins, instead was an inquisitor exacting works of satisfaction.

Calvin wrote,

They say that no sins are remitted by the priest, but such sins as he is cognizant of; thus, according to them, remission depends on the judgment of the priest, and unless he accurately discriminate as to who are worthy of pardon, the whole procedure is null and void. In short, the power of which they speak is a jurisdiction annexed to examination, to which pardon and absolution are restricted.8

The extreme of this in the modern world is the religious cult. It is a common mistake to think that “cult” references a group that is obscure and fringe. We even speak of a “cult of personality” as if that is a radically different thing. The whole reason for a cult’s growth is precisely that a single person, or small group of persons, began to command the consciences of those who were too weak to question it. In fact, the leaders began to take the place of God. What Calvin’s criticisms of Rome teach us is that anyone who commands apart from the word, deflects attention from the voice of the Good Shepherd to a new master. It may be summarized in the brief maxim: He who makes the rules rules.

The Word Makes the Church’s Maturity

Much more can be said about maturity than I will say here, but I would focus on two areas of church life, namely, worship and counseling. Ordinarily I would not place worship under this section, but another rabbit trail for young people today is what I call the “trad-fad.” This goes beyond the retrieval of old thinkers who are obscure to revel in one’s novelty of the mind, but then there is the choice of Team “smells and bells” over Team “wooden shoes and wooden pews.” Here too Calvin is profound, but our help comes from Book I in which he makes his case against icons. The Institutes do not have a typical doctrine of God section, which has led some to misunderstanding. The key is that it is a polemic against Rome. He gives us this summary of his approach.

But although God, in order to keep us within the bounds of soberness, treats sparingly of his essence, still, by the two attributes which I have mentioned, he at once suppresses all gross imaginations, and checks the audacity of the human mind. His immensity surely ought to deter us from measuring him by our sense, while his spiritual nature forbids us to indulge in carnal or earthly speculation concerning him. With the same view he frequently represents heaven as his dwelling-place. It is true, indeed, that as he is incomprehensible, he fills the earth also, but knowing that our minds are heavy and grovel on the earth, he raises us above the worlds that he may shake off our sluggishness and inactivity.9

If anyone should ask why Calvin only treats as attributes God’s infinity and spirituality, the answer comes by a common sense question: What two divine attributes are most immediately lied about in the fashioning of an idol? They are the infinite and spirituality of God.

Here again, the invisible to visible order requires that the material cause be the written word. Why? Calvin says, “in Scripture the Lord represents himself.”10 On the other hand, a literal picture of God would thus be a contradiction in terms. It cannot do anything but lie about him, so much so, Calvin adds, “that every thing respecting God which is learned from images is futile and false … and all, therefore, who have recourse to them for knowledge are miserably deceived.”11 Nor is the heart of man passive in this deception. The natural bent of sinners is to prefer a deity that can be so crafted. Calvin explains this,

The mind, in this way, conceives the idol, and the hand gives it birth. That idolatry has its origin in the idea which men have, that God is not present with them unless his presence is carnally exhibited … After such a figment is formed, adoration forthwith ensues: for when once men imagine that they beheld God in images, they also worshiped him as being there … [and] as soon as a visible form is given to God, his power also is supposed to be annexed to it.12

There is both pseudo-doxology and psychology here. On the one hand, this is not so easily controlled. The mind subject to these stimuli by one’s church is easily captivated. On the other hand, it is motivated by a kind of control, as this “annexation” Calvin speaks of calls attention to how such a limited “god” is easier to rearrange and repurpose on the cutting board of one’s imagination. Man is the creator here, in the ultimate role reversal.

It is often argued that since the scope of the command regards public worship, so long as such is not being adored in itself, we are safe. No one is bowing down before these images, after all. J. I. Packer argued even about applying the second commandment to depictions of Jesus, of the triggering of false devotion that, “Since it is hard for us humans to avoid this pitfall, wisdom counsels once more that the better, safer way is to learn to do without them. Some risks are not worth taking.”13

Calvin’s analysis of Rome here easily applies to any such practice, and it is rather unflattering. There is an important sense in which such emphasis on the visible as the locus of spirituality and grace devolves the worshiper from something more like a rational mind to that of something more bestial.

Augustine wrote, “He is a slave to a sign who uses or worships a significant thing without knowing what it signifies.”14 Later on, when illustrating with 2 Corinthians 3:6 the first principle of ambiguous figurative signs (namely, do not take them literally), he adds, “Nor can anything more appropriately be called the death of the soul than that condition in which the thing which distinguishes us from beasts, which is the understanding, is subjected to the flesh in the pursuit of the letter. He who follows the letter takes figurative expressions as though they were literal and does not refer the things signified to anything else.”15

But he who uses or venerates a useful sign divinely instituted whose signifying force he understands does not venerate what he sees and what passes away but rather that to which all such things are to be referred. Such a man is spiritual and free, even during the time of servitude in which it is not yet opportune to reveal to carnal minds those signs under whose yoke they are to be tamed.16

Protestants had always projected the conviction that a people of the word would always be more intelligent for it—not in some elitist sense, but rather in a way fitting for disciples of Christ who want to make a difference in this world. This was not simply because of Tyndale’s idealized “ploughboy” who, with his Bible, would be more skilled in divine things than the scribes of old. The difference went all the way down to the very nature of the mind and its connection with ultimate reality. How we conceive of the church, as we peer inward, through the visible, will determine our maturity. The maxim Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi is often cited to say that the Christian faith is so much more than assent to doctrine—so much more than intellectualism—which is true, but potentially misleading.

In his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman made an interesting observation about the medium of ancient Israelite worship:

In studying the Bible as a young man, I found intimations of the idea that forms of media favor particular kinds of content and therefore are capable of taking command of a culture. I refer specifically to the Decalogue, the Second Commandment of which prohibits the Israelites from making concrete images of anything. “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water beneath the earth.” I wondered then, as many others have, as to why the God of these people would have included instructions on how they were to symbolize, or not symbolize, their experience. It is a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture. We may hazard a guess that a people who are being asked to embrace an abstract, universal deity would be rendered unfit to do so by the habit of drawing pictures or making statues or depicting their ideas in any concrete, iconographic forms. The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking.17

Evangelicalism has come to the same end of exalting visible stimulation to its already existing “theology” of immediate response inherited from the century of the Second Great Awakening. The essential difference between Roman Catholicism and American Evangelicalism on this point is only that the latter has displaced the institutional mediation and pageantry with the individual experience and pragmatics. Yet the locus of spiritual causation in the materials, in sensation, is the common thread.

It may be objected that what I am calling “maturity” here is nothing but a higher degree of intellectualism. However, what applies to the corporate worship structures of the church also applies to its life of discipleship. External means of commending maturity to others, or bringing blame in the case of sin, belong to the same class of mistakes. I have already cited Paul’s words to the Colossians about what he called “asceticism,” which is not something that belongs only to the monastery. There may be a suburban asceticism, a family-friendly list of rules to improve one’s marriage or children or whatever. We often hold out “character examples” out to those in need of mentoring, yet in ways that betray our ignorance of what character is. Paul said, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Cor. 11:1). True, one had to see Paul to get the lens on Christ, but that, again, is the order of knowing. In the order of being, Paul’s character was only as good as his own conformity to Christ. So, in the end, “be imitators of God” (Eph. 5:1).

This is what, Packer tells us, the Puritans understood as “the response of deliberate consent and intelligent obedience,”18 which we might consider to be a true spiritual obedience: that is, a seeing of the mind those realities and virtues that ought to which we aspire and which leads to genuine transformation. Likewise with rebuke, one reason why preaching does most of the workload in counseling is that it removes the stumbling blocks of one’s neighbor, and allows law and grace to perform the surgery of the Spirit, as Packer describes the Puritan approach as, “the ‘plain, pressing, downright’ preaching of sin and grace which would ‘rip up’ the conscience and then pour in gospel balm.”19 We know this from practical experience, that to have someone “see it for themselves” will be far more effective than to drag them along: as the saying goes, A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still. Thus, moral transformation—the whole of sanctification—moves from the invisible to the visible.

In all of these ways, and more that could be mentioned, the Reformed ecclesiology is a window into a truly more spiritual and rational conception of the Christian faith. Contrary to several different lines of criticism, it is not guilty of Gnosticism. It does not degrade aesthetics or community or hierarchy or sacraments. However, it does properly order these as fruit of the invisible word.

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1. Calvin, Institutes, IV.3.1.

2. Calvin, Institutes, IV.8.2.

3. Calvin, Institutes, IV.1.22.

4. Calvin, Institutes, IV.11.1.

5. Calvin, Institutes, IV.4.21.

6. Calvin, Institutes, IV.11.1.

7. Calvin, Institutes, IV.11.5.

8. Calvin, Institutes, III.4.22.

9. Calvin, Institutes, I.13.1.

10. Calvin, Institutes, I.10.1.

11. Calvin, Institutes, I.11.5.

12. Calvin. Institutes, I.11.8, 9.

13. J. I. Packer, Knowing God (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1973), 51.

14. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, III.9.13.

15. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, III.5.9.

16. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, III.9.13.

17. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness (New York: Penguin, 1986), 9.

18. Packer, A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1990), 281.

19. Packer, The Quest for Godliness, 48.