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[Scholar's Corner]
A Sixth
Sola?
John R. Muether
Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus. There is no salvation
outside the Church. In the good old days of American religious
warfare these were perhaps fighting words for many Protestants, as
they smacked of the mysterious and repressive haughtiness of
Catholic sacerdotalism. Today, claims of the Church's exclusivity
seem quaint and inconceivable, not least among Roman Catholics
themselves, who are given to speak of even atheists being "anonymous
Christians," and Eastern Orthodox and Protestant communicants as
"separated brethren." Such incredulity testifies to Americans'
ignorance of church history, because the statement goes back to the
ancient Church. Nor are such claims the exclusive property of Rome,
because they were frequently invoked by the Reformers. Beyond
historical illiteracy, such claims' incoherence betrays the biases
of our anti-ecclesiastical age.
It was
Cyprian, the third century bishop, who is generally credited with
the formulation, "outside of the Church there is no salvation." He
compared the Church in the world to the ark in the flood. "If there
was any escape for one who was outside the ark of Noah, there will
be as much for one who is found to be outside the Church." Since
there was only one ark, so there is only one Church, and it was the
Christian's only hope. (The ark/Church relationship often survives
in church architecture even where it does not survive in churchmen's
memories.) For Cyprian, extra ecclesia nulla salus literally meant
that salvation was impossible outside of membership in the
institutional Church.
Sacerdotalism?
As the
doctrine of the church developed in medieval Catholicism, salvation
took on a sacerdotal character. Viewed as the perennial incarnation
of Christ, the church was the automatic dispenser of the gift of
salvation through its sacraments. By themselves, the sacraments
granted salvation to the partaker ex opere
operato.
The
Reformers were quick to reject sacerdotalism. God alone is the actor
in our salvation. He works salvation in his elect, through the
redemptive work of Jesus Christ, the one mediator between God and
man, and the efficacious power of the Spirit working directly upon
human souls. Contrary to medieval Catholic dogma, there was nothing
mechanical or magical about the instrumentality of the church. In
short, the sacerdotal confusion of the mediation of Christ with the
mediation of the church was a denial of solus
Christus.
Their
reform of the doctrine of the Church, however, did not prompt the
Reformers to jettison Cyprian's formula. Instead, they sought to
recover it, freeing it from the abuses of sacerdotal interpretation.
In his Large Catechism, Martin Luther wrote, "But outside the
Christian church (that is, where the Gospel is not) there is no
forgiveness, and hence no holinessŠ. Therefore they remain in
eternal wrath and damnationŠ. Outside of [the Christian church] no
one can come to the Lord Jesus." Cyprian's teaching was put in no
less striking terms by Calvin in his Catechism:
Minister: Why do you subjoin the forgiveness of sins
to the Church?
Child: Because no one obtains it, unless
he has previously been united with the people of God, cultivates
this unity with the body of Christ up to the end, and thus
testifies that he is a true member of the
Church.
Minister: You conclude from this that outside
the Church there is no salvation but only damnation and
ruin?
Child: Certainly. Those who disrupt from the body
of Christ and split its unity into schisms, are quite excluded
from the hope of salvation, so long as they remain in dissidence
of this kind.
While
rejecting the claim that the church functions as a subject of
salvation, the Reformers still upheld the instrumentality of the
Church. Christ has faithfully served the Father's purpose to call
out a people to himself, and the benefits of his redemption are
extended among the Church that the Father has called and the Spirit
has blessed. So Ursinus comments in his Commentary on the
Heidelberg Catechism: "outside the church there is no Saviour,
and hence no salvation." Similarly, in the Second Helvetic
Confession of 1562 we read: "we deny that those can live before God
who do not stand in fellowship with the true Church of God, but
separate themselves from it."
The Invisible Church?
Simply put,
there can be no Christian life apart from the Church, according to
the Reformers. No one can come to faith alone nor live by faith
alone. Our faith is not from the Church, it is a gift from
God (Eph. 2:8). But it comes through the Church, through whom
the wisdom of God is made known (Eph. 3:10).
But
what did the Reformers mean by the Church? It is rightly claimed by
low church Protestants that the Reformers developed the distinction
between the visible and invisible Church in part to refute the
sacerdotal claims of Catholics. The invisible (to us), universal
Church is "the whole number of the elect" from all ages (WCF 25.1),
the "church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven"
(Heb 12:23). The visible Church consists of confessing Christians
and their children (WCF 25.2). The latter, of course, contains
sinners and hypocrites, and is thus always, in this age, an
imperfect embodiment of that Church visible only to God.
This
distinction is often misunderstood, and contemporary interpreters in
evangelical circles make more of it than the Reformers intended. The
Reformers never suggested that the visible Church was of little or
no importance. As the manifestation of the invisible Church to the
world in time and place, the visible Church, though imperfect,
remains the true Church, because it displays the marks of the
Church. And it is the only Church that we can see and with which we
can have fellowship. We have no Gnostic recourse to any other church
than the visible Church.
Further, since the elect are in the invisible Church, to say
that outside the invisible Church there is no salvation, is simply
to say that outside of salvation there is no salvation. So to apply
Cyprian's formula to the invisible Church is to render the
expression a mere tautology. Lest we make that mistake, the tie to
the visible Church is made explicit in the Westminster Confession of
Faith:
"The
visible church, which is also catholic or universal under
the gospel (not confined to one nation, as before under the law),
consists of all those throughout the world that profess the true
religion; and of their children: and is the kingdom of the Lord
Jesus Christ, the house and family of God, out of which there
is no ordinary possibility of salvation" [emphasis
added].
The
Confession's clarification is accompanied by the qualification: "no
ordinary possibility of salvation." What does "ordinary"
mean? Does the Confession create a loophole in the Reformed teaching
on the Church's necessity through which one could drive busloads of
crusade-attending evangelicals? By no means. "Ordinary" must be
understood in a precise way, and light is shed on this from the
Westminster Shorter Catechism, Question 88:
Q.
What are the outward and ordinary means whereby Christ
communicateth to us the benefits of redemption?
A. The outward
and ordinary means whereby Christ communicateth to us the benefits
of redemption are, his ordinances, especially the Word,
sacraments, and prayer; all which are made effectual to the elect
for salvation.
The
Divines speak of the means of grace as "ordinary means" of
salvation. They are "ordinary" in the sense that this is how God is
pleased to work in his elect. They are the Christian's regular diet,
the diligent pursuit of which God has promised to bless. Thus,
"ordinary" is not a qualifier that expands options for the
Christian. We are not free to pursue other means of salvation.
Rather, it is to protect the freedom of the Spirit of God to operate
extraordinarily, when and where he chooses. It guards us from
assuming that his grace is on tap, to be released in a uniform and
predictable way at the command of the church, as the sacerdotalists
claim.
To be
sure, there are cases of individuals who are saved and yet are not
united to the visible Church (we need only think of the penitent
thief on the cross). But the Confession understands these situations
as exceptional, and no Christian ought to presume to be the
recipient of God's extraordinary operation. We have only the outward
and ordinary means, which he dispenses only through his Church. For
the Westminster divines, the Church remains as essential an
instrument for the salvation of God's people as the Word,
Sacraments, and prayer. A. A. Hodge comments: "God requires every
one who loves Christ to confess him in the regular way of joining
the community of his people and taking the sacramental badges of
discipleship."
The Church Our Mother
To explain
the centrality of the Church, Cyprian also employed the metaphor of
the motherhood of the Church. "You cannot have God for your Father,"
he wrote, "unless you have the Church for your Mother." This image
also was embraced by the Reformers, especially by Calvin:
"[L]et us learn even from the simple title "mother" how
useful, indeed how necessary, it is that we should know [the
church]. For there is no other way to enter life unless this
mother conceive us in her womb, give us birth, nourish us at her
breast, and lastly, unless she keep us under her care and guidance
until, putting off mortal flesh, we become like the angels. Our
weakness does not allow us to be dismissed from her school until
we have been pupils all our lives. Furthermore, away from her
bosom one cannot hope for any forgiveness of sins or any
salvation.1
Calvin's recognition of human weakness and frailty, nurtured
and attended by an enduring and all-embracing mother, carries
important implications for the Church today that are frequently
overlooked. Consider, for example, the current emphasis on the
doctrine of adoption in Christian counseling. The line of reasoning
goes much like this: "Yes, you have been abused, by your family, by
your friends, even perhaps by your church. And you may have reason
to conclude that no one is trustworthy. That is what God wants you
to learn. God is teaching you that no one is trustworthy. You must
distrust people in order that in your brokenness, when you learn
that everything else will fail you, you can understand that God
alone is to be trusted. And so, orphan, go home to Father, and live
like sons and daughters."
Is this
the biblical doctrine of adoption? What is dangerously
reductionistic in this logic is the implication that adoption is the
act of joining a single-parent family. Yet the very chapter of Paul
that includes the principle proof text for adoption (Gal 4:5-7)
argues also for the motherhood of the Church: "But the Jerusalem
that is above is free, and she is our mother" (v. 26). Calvin
comments on this verse: "The Church is the mother, and she has the
milk and the food that the Father has provided to nourish his
adopted children." He concludes: "This is why the Church is called
the mother of believers. And certainly, he who refuses to be a son
of the Church desires in vain to have God as his Father. For it is
only through the ministry of the Church that God begets sons for
Himself and brings them up until they pass through adolescence and
reach manhood."
Current
thinking on adoption, in short, is too often laced with the
individualistic and antinomian assumptions of our age. To choose
simply to live on your own (as an orphan) or to trust in God alone
(as a son) is to distort the biblical picture, because, as Calvin
put it, we are sons also of the Church. We are to trust in God
alone, but that trust is never alone. It is among the community of
believers, the Church of Christ, under whose discipline that trust
is cultivated and nurtured. In other words, just as sanctification
is a consequence of justification, so also is adoption by the Church
a consequence of our adoption by God. "Jerusalem is our mother," and
it is her duty to feed her children. God has entrusted to her the
spiritual growth of his people.
To be
sure, most American Christians will make some begrudging
acknowledgement of church membership, even submitting to the baptism
of the church. But increasingly they are drawn to lower common
denominator parachurch institutions that draw their loyalties away
from the Church. For example, one of the promises of a Promise
Keeper is "supporting the mission of the church." But that support
is undermined when one also promises to reach "beyond any racial or
denominational barriers to demonstrate the power of biblical
unity." In its implicit moral equivalence of the evils of racism and
denominationalism, Promise Keepers restricts the mission of the
Church by preventing the Church from cultivating spiritual maturity
through theological reflection.
This
inclusive, "big tent" ecclesiology finds fuller expression in
Westminster professor John Frame's recent book, Evangelical
Reunion. Because we live in post-denominational times, Frame
suggests that we must realign our priorities by establishing
"transdenominational loyalties." He writes: "Presbyterians ought to
be good Christians first and good Presbyterians second, without
neglecting either loyalty." This logic is to pit our Father against
our mother. We have no Church beside the visible Church. It is her
doctrine and worship we must uphold, and it is her peace and purity
that we must maintain. And so a Presbyterian can be a good Christian
only by being a good Presbyterian. In the same way, a
Lutheran can be a good Christian only by being a good
Lutheran. Good Christians are good churchmen.
Parachurch organizations have flourished in the fertile soil
of American individualism. In Thomas Luckmann's words, American
Protestantism is an "invisible religion," liberated from social
attachment and devoid of institutional expression.2 The depressing
polling data that confirms this is all too familiar to us. While 95%
of Americans believe in God, 44% of them are neither members nor
regular attendees of any church, and further, even those who attend
church have increasingly tenuous commitments, switching churches
like brands of laundry detergent. As the Gallup organization
concluded, "large majorities churched and unchurched agree that 'one
should arrive at their religious beliefs independent of any church
or synagogue.'"3 Church attendance becomes incidental to the
Christian life, resulting in what some have called "churchless
Christianity."
It is
often in the pursuit of an "Acts 2 Christianity," a spontaneous and
Spirit-filled Christian life, that contemporary Christians react
against the stifling "organizationalism" of today's churches. But
ironically, that is to miss the very message of the story of
Pentecost. Consider the masses that came to faith on that day. They
were baptized and added to the Church (Acts 2:41), and then they
immediately devoted themselves to the life of the Church, falling
into the rhythm of observing the outward and ordinary means of grace
(2:42). This is no Spirit-quenching institutionalization, but a
manifestation of the order and unity in the Church that only the
Spirit can provide.
Ecclesiastical Docetism
As we noted,
the Reformers embraced the centrality of the Church without the
sacerdotal errors of Rome. Still, we must concede that a high and
necessary view of the Church will inevitably be mistaken for
sacerdotalism in our low-church evangelical subculture. Indeed, if
we are taking the Church as seriously in our day as Calvin and the
Reformers did in theirs, we should expect that the false charge of
sacerdotalism will gain currency.
On the
other hand, those who level that charge ought to reflect on whether
they are docetics. Duke University theologian William Willimon has
observed that fundamentalists and liberals both share an
embarrassment over the visible Church, and he rightly labels this
impulse as docetic. In its ancient manifestation, Docetism claimed
that Christ did not take on a fully human nature, but he only
appeared human. In its modern form, docetics claim that the church
is not really the body of Christ. Modern docetics would claim to
love Christ all the while despising his body.
God's
gathering of his people--the Church--lies at the heart of our
identity as Christians. He has decreed to save a people for himself
for the revelation of his glory. And he has foreordained all the
means by which such is to be accomplished. It is to the Church that
Christ has entrusted this ministry for the gathering and perfecting
of the saints. It is the Church that God graciously endows with the
means of grace, and he is especially pleased to make the preaching
of the Word an effectual means of accomplishing that end.
And it
is the Church which has the structure and location where theological
reflection is to take place. As Richard Lints has argued, theology
belongs to the Church, and either will abandon the other only at
great peril. It is the Church, and only the Church, that is the
definer and defender of orthodoxy, through its creeds and
confessions--not Christian radio or television, not the academy, not
the Evangelical Theological Society or even the Alliance of
Confessing Evangelicals.
The
Christian life is the ecclesial life. The Bible lets us imagine no
other. Faith in Christ inevitably prompts life in the Church. As the
Belgic Confession puts it, the Church is "an assembly of those who
are saved, and outside of it there is no salvation" (Art. 28). Thus
"no person of whatsoever state or condition he may be ought to
withdraw from it, content to be by himself." If we refuse to submit
to its doctrine and discipline, we simply have no reason to think
that we are saved.
Christians who seek to recover the theology of the Reformers
in order to lead the Church into a modern Reformation are wise to
reappropriate the "five solas" of the sixteenth century. In our
anti-ecclesiastical context, we would do well also to consider a
sixth sola. For any effort to renew our doctrine of God our Father,
outside of whose love there is no salvation, will prove futile
unless it is accompanied by a renewal of our doctrine of the Church
our mother, outside of whose nurture there is no salvation. Sola
Ecclesia.
About the author:
John Muether is
the Director of the Library of Reformed Theological Seminary in
Orlando and the co-editor of the Nicotine Theological Journal.
Reprinted by permission of the Alliance of Confessing
Evangelicals, 1716 Spruce Street, Philadelphia PA 19103. ©1998, 1999
Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals
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