By Adriani Milli Rodrigues
Even though Protestant Reformers
did not begin the renewal of the church from a systematically developed
ecclesiology, they had to elaborate theological ideas concerning the church in
order to criticize the decadent condition of the late medieval church, and
afterwards to explain the nature of the churches that were arising from this
movement. In opposition to Roman Catholicism, which emphasized the importance
of the visible church, they supported that the church is, at the same time, a
visible and invisible community. According to that idea, the hidden aspect of
the church implies the totality of the elect who are known only to God, whereas
its visible aspect means the institutional body on earth.3 This paradoxical
concept engenders an intricate relationship between the notion of God’s people
and the institutional church.
This complex relationship is also
found in Seventh-day Adventist theology, particularly in the central idea of
its ecclesiological understanding: the remnant church.4 Actually, the Protestant
concept of visible and invisible church has been employed in diverse forms in
the Adventist study of the remnant.5 First, emphasizing visibility, Frank Hasel
argued that “over the years, Sabbatarian Adventists have considered themselves
God’s prophetic end-time remnant people.”6 This understanding is presented in
many official7 and representative8 Seventh-day Adventist publications. Second,
emphasizing both visible and invisible aspects, the significant work in the
history of Adventist theology, Questions on Doctrine, states that “God has a
precious remnant, a multitude of earnest, sincere believers, in every church,”9
which seems to stress the idea of invisibility, but this text also affirms a
visible remnant on the basis of Rev 12:17.10 Third, there is an emphasis on the
invisibility of the remnant. In this sense, regarding that God has “an
invisible church or kingdom whose members cannot be numbered,” S. Daily
recommends that Adventists should cease to think about themselves as the
remnant church and start to see themselves “as a part of God’s larger
remnant.”11 In another way, Jack Provonsha argued that the remnant of Rev
12:17, which is more than an institution, represents a prophecy that has not
yet been fulfilled. It implies that the visible remnant is not a present
reality.
The various interpretations regarding the
remnant church presented above indicate that there is no consensus about the
visibility and/or invisibility of the remnant. This situation may lead to some
questions. What is the relation between the concept of visible and invisible
church and the remnant? Should it be applied to the remnant church? Is the
remnant visible, visible and invisible, or invisible? What is the biblical
understanding of its visibility and/or invisibility? How does this
understanding impact the Adventist concept of the remnant church? Having these
questions in mind, the purpose of this study is to explore the concept of the
remnant in connection with the visible/invisible reality of the church.
In order to achieve this purpose,
I will take three basic steps. First, I will begin with a historical reflection
on the aspects of the visible and invisible church, especially covering the
period of the Protestant Reformation. Second, I will describe the concept of
remnant in the context of the Scriptures through a systematic approach,
verifying how the idea of visibility and invisibility is presented or implied
in the description of the remnant. Third, I will briefly summarize the
discussion and indicate the main implications of this study on the Adventist
understanding of the remnant church.
The Concept of Visible
and Invisible Church in Historical Theology
In this section, I will briefly present the
idea of visible/invisible church from the Patristic period until the Reformation.
Despite the fact that the term invisible church was probably “first used by
Luther,”13 this notion seems to be rooted in some patristic writings. In
addition, the Catholic emphasis on the visible church, and the subsequent
Protestant reaction, cannot be fully grasped without a knowledge of the
Patristic and Medieval periods.
The Patristic Period
Since the second century, “the
rise of heresies made it necessary to designate some external characteristics
by which the true Catholic Church could be known.”14 In this context, the
Church Fathers stressed ever increasingly the visible church. By the third
century, according to “his reputation for legalism and moralism,”15 Cyprian
“brought out, for the first time, with anything like clearness or distinctness,
the idea of a catholic church comprehending all the true branches of the church
of Christ, and bound together by a visible and external unity.”16 Strongly
emphasizing the importance of being part of the visible church, he wrote:
The spouse of Christ cannot be adulterous; she is uncorrupted and pure.
She knows one home; she guards with chaste modesty the sanctity of one couch.
She keeps us for God. She appoints the sons whom she has born for the kingdom.
Whoever is separated from the Church and is joined to an adulteress, is
separated from the promises of the Church; nor can he who forsakes the Church
of Christ attain to the rewards of Christ. He is a stranger; he is profane; he
is an enemy. He can no longer have God for his Father, who has not the Church
for his mother. If any one could escape who was outside the ark of Noah, then
he also may escape who shall be outside of the Church.
In short, his basic idea is that
true Christians “will always obey and remain in the Church, outside of which
there is no possibility of being saved.”18 Following this understanding, H.
Milman pointed out that “Cyprian entertained the loftiest notion of the
episcopal authority. The severe and inviolate unity of the outward and visible
Church appeared to him an integral part of Christianity, and the rigid
discipline enforced by the episcopal order the only means of maintaining that
unity.”19
However, “whereas for Cyprian the
boundary between those who are ‘outside’ and those who are ‘inside’ coincides
simply with the bounds of the visible church, Augustine distinguishes the
visible church from the ‘elect’ whose number and limits are known only to the
predestinating foreknowledge of God.”20 In his wrestling against the Donatists,
Augustine was “compelled . . . to reflect more deeply on the essence of the
Church.”21 In order to refute the Donatist argument that the true church is
constituted by pious and holy believers,22
Augustine argued that the Church was a mixed community . . . made up of
the truly pious, but also of the wicked and unfaithful. Its holiness did not
lie in the holiness of its members but in its participation in Christ.
Augustine conceived of the Church as both visible and invisible. The visible
Church is the empirical and sociological reality that we can see and this is a
mixed community. The invisible Church is known only to God and consists of
those who are truly elect.23
With the Parable of the Wheat and
the Tares (see Matt 13:24-30; 36-43) in mind, Augustine explained that, in this
“mixed church,” “hypocrites cannot even now be said to be in Him [i.e., in
Christ], although they seem to be in His Church.”24 Nevertheless, according to
his writings against the Donatists, the separation between the pious and the
wicked is not a human task:
Nor will you separate yourselves by an impious secession, because of
the mixture of the tares, from the society of that good wheat, whose source is
that grain that dies and is multiplied thereby, and that grows together
throughout the world until the harvest. For the field is the world, — not only
Africa; and the harvest is the end of the world, — not the era of Donatus.25
Through this explanation, Augustine attempted
to solve the contradiction between the traditional idea of visible church and
the presence of impiety inside this church. Evidently, his solution included
the idea of invisible church, which indicates that “the real unity of the
saints and therefore of the Church is an invisible one.”26 However, at the same
time that real and invisible unity “exists only within the catholic Church,”27
the visible church is characterized mainly by the episcopal succession and the
administration of the sacraments. Therefore, on the one hand, Augustine made
“no hard distinction between a visible and an invisible church,”28 since the
notion of invisible church was used for the sake of the visible church.
On the other hand, there is an
evident contradiction between the traditional emphasis on the visible church,
particularly in its understanding of the church as the ark of salvation with
its sacramental system, and the invisible church made up of those predestined
by God. That contradiction may be expressed by questions such as the following:
“Which is the true Church, the external communion of the baptized, or the
spiritual communion of the elect and the saints, or both, since there is no
salvation outside of either? . . . [and also,] what about the elect who never
join the Church?” In any case, it seems that “Augustine’s predestination views
kept him from going as far as some of his contemporaries did in the direction
of sacramentalism.”29
The Medieval Period and the Roman Catholic Position
The scholastic development of the concept of
the visible church can be basically depicted as the intensification of the
Cyprianic understanding of the necessity of the church for salvation and the
Augustinian notion of the church as the kingdom of God on earth.30 In this
sense, medieval theology ascribed an “undue significance . . . to the outward
ordinances of the church,” because “all the blessings of salvation were thought
of as coming to man through the ordinances of the church.”31 Moreover, there
was a total “identification of the visible and organized church with the
kingdom of God.”32
This ecclesiological
comprehension strongly emphasizes the visible nature of the church. Then,
through this idea of visibility, Roman Catholic theology was able to explain
its understanding of invisibility of the church, particularly in connection
with its notion of Christ’s incarnation and human soul. Assuming the church as
a continuation of Christ’s incarnation on earth, the church is described as
the
Mystical Body of Christ [which comprises] an external, visible, juridical
element (i.e., the legal organization), and an inner, invisible, mystical
element (i.e., the communication of grace), just as in Christ, the Head of the
Church, there is the visible human nature, and the invisible Divine nature, and
in the Sacraments, the outward signs and the inward grace.33
Likewise, employing the analogy of the
dichotomous conception of human soul and body, the Holy Ghost is compared to
the soul of the church, and this soul is considered the invisible aspect of the
church: “While the Holy Ghost is the soul of the Church, the lawfully organized
visible commonwealth of the faithful is the body of the Church. Both conjointly
form a coherent whole as do the soul and the body in man.”34 Thus, “he who
culpably persists in remaining outside the body of the Church cannot
participate in the Holy Ghost.” Exceptionally, those who do “not know the true
Church of Christ, can receive the supernatural life given by the Holy Ghost
outside the body of the Church. Such a person, however, must have at least an
implicit desire to belong to the Church of Christ.”35
As can be seen, the invisible
church is basically discussed within the boundaries of the visible church. This
means that “Catholics are willing to admit that there is an invisible side to
the church, but prefer to reserve the name ‘church’ for the visible communion of
believers,”36 since “the visible church is first, then comes the invisible; the
former gives birth to the latter.”37 Therefore, “the institute of the Church
logically precedes the organism, the visible Church precedes the invisible.”38
As a result, “the order in the work of salvation is, not that God by means of
His Word leads men to the Church, but just the reverse, that the Church leads
men to the Word and to Christ.”39
The Reformation Period
Even though von Harnack declared
that the Protestant “reflections on the visible and invisible church are
indefinite and unclear,”40 it seems evident that “the Reformation was a
reaction against the externalism of Rome in general, and in particular, also
against its external conception of the church. [In Protestantism,] . . . the
essence of the church is not found in the external organization of the
church.”41 Actually, “the church universal is spiritually united [which means
an invisible unity,] rather than institutionally united.”42 According to W.
Pauck, the chief difference between Luther and [medieval] scholasticism was
that, while scholasticism interpreted the corpus Christi in connection with the
sacraments and the hierarchical order, Luther emphasized the Word. Within this
new frame of reference, he declared the nature of the church spiritual and
apprehendable only by faith. In so far as Christ renders his spirit efficacious
through the preaching of the word and the administration of the sacraments,
this invisible church undergoes a process of materialisation (W. Koehler) in
becoming a visible cult congregation.
Hence, contrary to Catholic teaching, Luther
proposed that “from the invisible emerges the visible Church: and the former is
the groundwork of the latter.”44 Following this idea, “the church of Christ is
not a hidden reality in every sense of the word . . . [and] Luther does not
distinguish a visible church from an invisible church but teaches that the one
and the same church of Christendomis both invisible and visible, hidden and at
the same time revealed – in different dimensions.”45 In its invisible aspect,
the church is the “spiritual communion of those who believe in Christ.”
However, “this same church . . . becomes visible and can be known . . . by the
pure administration of the Word and the sacraments.” Therefore, “the really
important thing for man is that he belongs to the spiritual or invisible
church; but this is closely connected with membership in the visible church.”
Similarly, the Reformed tradition
believes that the “universal Church, which is invisible, consists of the whole
number of the elect, that have been, are, or shall be gathered into one, under
Christ the Head thereof.”47 In fact, this invisibility is understood “in more
than one sense: (1) as ecclesia universalis, because no one can ever see the
church of all places and all times; (2) as coetus electorum, which will not be
completed and visible until de parousia; and (3) as coetus electorum vocatorum,
because we are not able to distinguish absolutely the true believers from the false.”48
Although there is a direct
connection between the invisibility of the church with its visibility, the
Reformed tradition also admits that “in times of religious depression, as in
the days of Elijah and the late medieval period, the true church is driven
almost to invisibility.”49 In fact, this idea was radicalized by the
Anabaptists in their belief that “the true church was in heaven, and its
institutional parodies were on earth,” which means that the true church is
totally invisible. Such understanding denies that the church is a “mixed body”
and affirms, like the Donatists, that the church is a “holy and pure body.”
Hence, this invisible and pure church is depicted “as a faithful remnant in
conflict with the world.” Certainly, that notion is compatible “with the
Anabaptist experience of persecution.”
Against the accusation that some
scholars regard the Protestant concept of invisible and visible church as being
based on some kind of Platonism and its idea of two worlds,51 A. McGrath argued
that this concept is not primarily philosophical, but eschatological:
The former [invisible] consists only of the elect; the latter [visible]
includes both good and evil, elect and reprobate. The former is an object of
faith and hope, the latter of present experience. . . . The invisible church is
the church which will come into being at the end of time, as God ushers in the
final judgment of humanity.
In short, in this historical
section, I have provided a panoramic overview of the idea of visible/invisible
church in the Patristic Period, and in the Roman Catholic and Protestant
traditions. Concerning the ancient Fathers, Cyprian stressed that salvation is
only possible in the visible church, and Augustine admitted that there is an
invisible church made up of the elected by God. Further, Roman Catholicism
intensified the importance of the visible church through its sacramental and
hierarchical system and acknowledged the invisible church only within the
visible one. On the other hand, the Reformers underscored the invisible unity
of the church (the church as God sees it), which engenders a visible community
(the church as humans see it). However, the Protestant notion of invisible
church is based on the Augustinian concept of predestination. My second step is
to explore the visibility/invisibility of the remnant in Scripture.
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