These two separate, almost mutually exclusive, ideas of what the Church of Christ was, lived side by side during the Middle Ages in the same unconnected fashion. The former, the spiritual Church with its real but unseen fellowship with Christ, was the pre-eminently religious thought. It was the ground on which the most conspicuous mediæval piety rested. It was the garden in which bloomed the flowers of mediæval mystical devotion. The latter was built up by the juristic dialectic of Roman canonists into the conception that the Church was a visible hierarchical State having a strictly monarchical constitution—its king being the Bishop of Rome, who was the visible representative of Christ. This conception became [pg 482] almost purely political. It was the active force in all ecclesiastical struggles with princes and peoples, with Reformers, and with so-called heretics and schismatics. It reduced the Church to the level of the State, and contained little to stimulate to piety or to holy living.
The labours of the great Schoolmen of the thirteenth century did try to transform this political Church into what might represent the double fellowship with Christ and with fellow-believers which is so prominent a thought in the New Testament. They did so by attempting to show that the great political Church was an enclosure containing certain indefinite mysterious powers of redemption which saved men who willingly placed themselves within the sphere of their operation. They maintained that the core of the hierarchical constitution of the Church was the priesthood, and that this priesthood was a species of plastic medium through which, and through which alone, God worked in dispensing, by means of the sacraments entrusted to the priesthood, His saving grace. It may be questioned whether the thought of the Church as an institution, possessing within itself certain mysterious redemptive powers which are to be found nowhere else, was ever thoroughly harmonised with that which regarded it as a mass of legal statutes embodied in canon law and dominated by papal absolutism. The two conceptions remained distinct, mutually aiding each other, but never exactly coalescing. Thus in the sixteenth century no less than three separate ideas of the Church of Christ were present to fill the minds and imaginations of men; but the dominant idea for the practical religious life was certainly that which represented the Church as an institution which, because it possessed the priesthood, was the society within which salvation was to be found.
Luther had enjoyed to the full the benefits of this society, and had with ardour and earnestness sought to make use of all its redemptive powers. He had felt, simply because he was so honest with himself, that it had [pg 483] not made him a real Christian, and that its mysterious powers had worked on him in vain. His living Christian experience made him know and feel that whatever the Church of Christ was, it was not a society within which priests exercised their secret science of redemption. It was and must be a fellowship of holy and Christlike people; but he felt it very difficult to express his experience in phrases that could satisfy him. It was hard to get rid of thoughts which he had cherished from childhood, and none of these inherited beliefs had more power over him than the idea that the Church, however described, was the Pope's House in which the Bishop of Rome ruled, and ought to rule, as house-father. It is interesting to study by what devious paths he arrived at a clear view of what the Church of Christ really is;[435] to notice how shreds of the old opinions which had lain dormant in his mind every now and then start afresh into life; and how, while he had learnt to know the uselessness of many institutions of the mediæval Church, he could not easily divest his mind of the thought that they naturally belonged to a Church Visible. Monastic vows, the celibacy of the clergy, fasting, the hierarchy, the supremacy of the Pope, the power of excommunication with all its dreaded consequences, were all the natural accompaniments of a Visible Church according to mediæval ideas, and Luther relinquished them with difficulty. From the first, Augustine's thought of the Church, which consists of the elect, helped him; he found that Huss held the same idea, and he wrote to a friend that “we have been all Hussites without knowing it.”[436] But while Luther and all the Reformers held strongly by this conception of Augustine, it was not of very much service in determining the conception of the Visible Church which was the more important practically; and although the definition of the Catholic Church Invisible has found its way into most [pg 484] Protestant Confessions, and has been used by Protestants polemically, it has always remained something of a background, making clearer the conception of the Church in general, but has been of little service in giving clear views of what the Church Visible is. From the very first, however, Luther saw in a certain indefinite way that there was a real connection between the conception of the Visible Church and the proclamation of the Word of God—a thought which was destined to grow more and more definite till it completely possessed him. As early as October 1518, he could inform Cajetan that the Pope must be under the rule of the Word of God and not superior to it.[437] His discovery that the communion of the saints (communio sanctorum) was not necessarily a hierarchy (ecclesia prælatorum),[438] was made soon afterwards. After the Leipzig Disputation his views became clearer, and by 1520 they stood revealed in the three great Reformation treatises.
Luther's doctrine of the Church is extremely simple. The Church is, as the Creed defines it to be, the Communion of the Saints, which has come into existence through the proclamation of the Word of God heard and received by faith. He simplified this fundamental Christian conception in a wonderful way. The Church rests on the sure and stable foundation of the Word of God; and this Word of God is not a weary round of statutes issued blasphemously by the Bishops of Rome in God's name. It is not the invitations of a priesthood to come and share mysterious and indefinite powers of salvation given to them in their command over the sacraments. It is not a lengthy doctrinal system constructed out of detached texts of Holy Scripture by the application of a fourfold sense used under the guidance of a dogmatic tradition or a rule of faith. It is the substance of the Scriptures. It is the “gospel according to a pure understanding.” It is the “promises of God”; “the testimony of Jesus, Who is the Saviour of souls”; it is the “consolations offered in Christ.” It is, as Calvin said, [pg 485] “the spiritual gate whereby we enter into God's heavenly kingdom”; the “mirror in which faith beholds God.” It is, according to the Westminster Confession, the sum of God's commands, threatenings, promises, and, above all, the offer of Christ Jesus. All these things are apprehended by faith. The Church comes into existence by faith responding to the proclamation of the Word of God. This is the sure and stable thing upon which the Church of Christ is founded.
The Church of Christ, therefore, is a body of which the Spirit of Jesus is the soul. It is a company of Christlike men and women, whom the Holy Spirit has called, enlightened, and sanctified through the preaching of the word; who are encouraged to look forward to a glorious future prepared for the people of God; and who, meanwhile, manifest their faith in all manner of loving services done to their fellow-believers.
The Church is therefore in some sense invisible. Its secret is its hidden fellowship with Jesus. Its roots penetrate the unseen, and draw from thence the nourishment needed to sustain its life. But it is a visible society, and can be seen wherever the Word of God is faithfully proclaimed, and wherever faith is manifested in testimony and in bringing forth the fruits of the Spirit.
This is the essential mode of describing the Church which has found place in the Reformation creeds. Some vary in the ways in which they express the thought; some do not sufficiently distinguish, in words at least, between what the Church is and what it has, between what makes its being and what is included in its well-being. But in all there are the two thoughts that the Church is made visible by the two fundamental things—the proclamation of the word and the manifestation of faith.
This mode of describing the Church of Christ defines it by that element which separates it from all other forms of human association—its special relation to the divine; and it is shown to be visible at the place where that divine element can and does manifest itself. It defines the [pg 486] Church by its most essential element, and sets aside all that is accidental. It concerns itself with what the Church is, and does not include what the Church has. It therefore provides room for all things which belong to the well-being of the Church—only it relegates them to their proper place.[439]
If the proclamation of the Word of God, and the manifestation of the faith which answers, be the essence of the Church, all that tends to aid both is to be included in the thought. There must be a ministry of some sort in word and sacrament instituted within the Church of Christ in order to lead the individual to faith. God has created this ministry, and all the Reformed Churches were careful to declare that no one should seek entrance into office unless he was assured that he had been called of God thereto; and as his function is to be a minister of the Church and a servant of the faithful, no one “should publicly teach or administer the sacraments unless he be duly called (nisi rite vocatus).” Such a ministry has its field simply in ministering the means of grace. “The Church of Christ,” says Luther, “requires an honest ministry diligently and loyally instructed in the holy Word of God after a pure Christian understanding, and without the addition of any false traditions. In and through such a ministry it will be made plain what are Christ and His Evangel, how to attain to the forgiveness of sins, and the properties and power of the keys in the Church.”
All this is matter of administration. Some societies of believers may have different ideas about the precise form that this ministry ought to take; but such differences, while they may lead to separate administrations, do not imply any separation from the one Catholic Church of Christ to which they all belong. However outwardly they differ, all retain the essential things—the preaching and teaching of the Word of God and the due administration of the sacraments. Some may prefer to set forth a creed of one kind and others may prefer another. The French, [pg 487] the Scottish, and the Dutch Churches had all their own creeds, and all believed each other to be parts of the same One Catholic Church of Christ.