Church Invisible: Insights for Today's Church From the Sixteenth Century Radicals

Church Invisible

Insights for Today’s Church

from the Sixteenth Century Radicals

Andrew Gamman

Copyright Page

Scripture quotations are from New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America.

Used by permission. All rights reserved.

‘Church Invisible’

 ‘Insights for Today’s Church from Sixteenth Century Radicals’

First published in New Zealand November 2013 by Kereru Publishing Ltd.

Text copyright © Andrew Gamman, 2013

The right of Andrew Gamman to be identified as the author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the New Zealand Copyright Act 1994

Except as provided by the New Zealand Copyright Act 1994 and Copyright Amendment Act 2011 no part of this publication may be reproduced or stored in a retrieval system in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the copyright owner

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the National Library of New Zealand (Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa)

ISBN 978-0-473-26318-8 (Kindle)

ISBN 978-0-473-26319-5 (PDF)

ISBN 978-0-473-26317-1 (EPUB)

ISBN 978-0-473-26320-1 (iBook)

Cover design © Tamar Hawkins,2013 – Hawkins Creative Ltd

Kereru Publishing Ltd

29 The Circle

Whangaparaoa 0930

New Zealand

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Contents

Copyright Page

Introduction

What is it that constitutes the church?

Chapter One - Weeds in the Wheat

Biblical material relating to the church visible and invisible

The use of the word ekklesia

Ekklesia and basileia

Parables

Other biblical images of the church

Chapter Two - The invisible union of love

Evidence from church leaders through the centuries

Augustine

Irenaeus

Origen

Wyclif

Luther

Zwingli

Calvin

Chapter Three - What it means to be radical

Defining the Radical Reformation

Background

Munster

Chapter Four - Colonies of Heaven

Jacob Hutter and the Hutterian Brethren start a new kind of church

Chapter Five - Confessors of the glory of Christ

Casper Schwenckfeld and the Schwenckfelders start a new kind of church

Chapter Six - What’s at issue?

The underlying theological issues

Where do we locate authority for doing theology?

Is the true church invisible?

Is there salvation outside of the visible church?

How is visibility manifest in the church?

Is the church in need of restitution?

Does the Christian faith have a physical – spiritual dichotomy?

Chapter Seven - The community of goods

Economic implications of the gospel

Chapter Eight - What to do now

A way forward for the church in the West

Strip away cumbersome institutional structures

Strip away clerical power

About the Author

Recommendation

Bibliography

Books

Articles

Electronic Media Accessed

Endnotes

Introduction

What is it that constitutes the church?

In our day, religious belief is deemed to be a matter of personal preference. By such an outlook having Christian faith is considered a private matter. As a result the sense of connectedness with other Christians and commitment to them diminishes. This mindset has repercussions in church life. To those who hunger after spirituality today, it seems that local churches and denominations offer a smorgasbord of ideas and experiences from which individuals may help themselves and mix and match their own unique blend of beliefs and ideals. So we have a mass of individuals, many of whom hold various Christian beliefs, but who have no belonging to any church community.

Some have spoken about this phenomenon in terms of having a churchless faith or believing without belonging. But, if we are referring to Christianity, isn’t a churchless faith an oxymoron? If Jesus said I will build my church can those who put their faith in him then choose to stand apart from it? This book asks the underlying question, What is the church? Is it that you can’t see the church’s membership, as it is in essence just a matter of individuals with an inward commitment and no external forms and structures are necessary? The question is vitally important because in the face of postmodernity, Western society is witnessing the erosion of support for many institutional structures, particularly those of a hierarchical nature and the church is not faring well in this re-alignment of values.

The church is not as popular as Jesus, especially among the young. More recently it has been suggested that we need to break away from traditional ideas of church and to think in more fluid terms. Perhaps rather than a regularly meeting, visible, gathered community of faith, any informal network of Christians may be called the church. A quick web search reveals that an increasing number of people are satisfying the desire for Christian community by means of on-line relationships in virtual churches. For some, the relationships which are developed on-line are as real, meaningful and permanent, or even more so, than what they have been able to achieve by physically meeting together with other Christians. The term virtual church again raises the question of exactly how the church is to be defined.

In the pages that follow we will examine some of the biblical and historical thinking that forms a background to these questions. In particular we will focus on that time of ferment in the sixteenth century that we call the European Reformation. Out to the left of the better known reformers like Luther, Calvin and Zwingli were a diverse group of radical reformers who were re-examining and redefining the church. It was the radical reformers who attempted to break the church free from the political powers of the day. In that they were seeking to define the church as a community apart from the existing institutions, they provide some answers that are relevant to our own time. These reformers believed that once the church was no longer anchored in the body politic they would be free to shape and redefine it according to God’s design. This in turn led to wide-ranging conjecture and speculation about what shape the church should be and what it should look like.

The questions that we examine are far from new. From the date of its birth on the Day of Pentecost, it has been difficult to precisely define what exactly is meant by the church, and where its boundaries lie. Augustine, who was grappling with the problem that within the fellowship of the followers of Christ there existed hypocrisy and behavior ill-befitting God’s people, was one of the first to talk about a church that you can’t see. He called it the invisible union of love. For him this was a helpful way of defining those who were truly God’s people.

The church that you can’t see, or invisible church, stands as distinct from the one that is visible. The term visible church is used to describe the church where the emphasis is on those things that are seen, tangible, empirical, sensate and concrete. This includes the institution and structures of the church as well as its orders and hierarchy. It also refers to the buildings, the physical gathering together of God’s people, and the use of images and icons, colors and sacraments, liturgy and the Bible. The visible church refers to the local fellowship of God’s people, as well being a group term for all the local fellowships of God’s people. The emphasis of the Catholic Church, with its institutional forms and apostolic succession, has been firmly toward the visible church.

By contrast the term invisible church is used of the church where the emphasis is on those things that are intangible, abstract and unseen. It is used to emphasize the importance of relationship, revelation, devotion and the work of the Holy Spirit. A way of dealing with the problem of those who join in with the visible church but appear to have no real commitment to Christ is to say that such people are not part of the true invisible church. Of course, no person is able to truly judge another’s sincerity or hypocrisy so, it is argued, that the true church is visible only to God.

While the Protestant reformers sought to give priority to justification by faith, which is an unseen concept, they also defined the church by externals. In their authoritative Augsberg Confession of 1530 the church was said to exist where the saints are congregated, the gospel is rightly taught and the sacraments are rightly administered.

Let it be said from the beginning that there are those who object to the very idea of an invisible church. Significantly last century Karl Barth and Lesslie Newbigin were among their number. Barth in his comprehensive Church Dogmatics wrote…

It is best not to apply the idea of invisibility to the Church; we are all inclined to slip away with that in the direction of civitas platonica or some sort of Cloud-cuckooland, in which Christians are united inwardly and invisibly, while the visible Church is devalued.¹

More recently Newbigin in similar vein expressed the thought that…

There is no invisible Church of souls perfectly united to Christ. It is not that some men are perfectly united with Christ and others not, and that these are mixed up together in the visibleChurch. It is that all Christians are both holy and sinful, both united with God by His gracious act in accepting them as righteous on the ground of faith in His redeeming work in Christ, and also at the same time liable to sin and guilty of sin.²

While Barth and Newbigin would want to argue against the existence of an invisible church, the concept is a timely one to ponder in an age when the visible institution is losing ground. When we look for biblical and historical support for the idea, we find it in the parables of Jesus, among the New Testament believers, and as a recurring theme throughout the history of the church.

As with other subjects, the church receives no systematic treatment in the Scriptures. We must glean passages here and there from the New Testament and put them together to get an understanding of the shape, progress and development of thinking about the church from its earliest adherents. Even within the record of the New Testament there is a growing sense of the development of church’s institutional form. Some passages refer to a local community of believers as the church, while in other places the church seems to be universal. Moreover, these earliest records include references that have been understood as the church visible and others as the church invisible.

After examining how the idea of an invisible church has recurred through history, we will visit two bold experiments in church life that were started in the sixteenth century and concentrate on the two poles within radical Reformation ecclesiology. We will first of all look at Jacob Hutter and the Hutterites with their exclusive and well-defined visible Christian communities. Then we will turn to Caspar Schwenckfeld and the evangelical spiritualists who viewed the church primarily as an invisible entity, the members of which had (inward) faith and were known only to God. After reflecting on some of the questions raised by these very different ecclesiological positions, the final segment will explore a number of the underlying theological issues, examining them in both their historical context as well as how they relate to the contemporary church in the West.

Chapter One - Weeds in the Wheat

Biblical material relating to the church visible and invisible

George and Helen have been Christians for many years. They both grew up with church-going parents. They attended church at Easter, at Christmas and on special occasions. It was only after they were married that they became involved with an evangelical church where, with their own children, they started attending weekly and quickly got roped in to the church leadership. For them there were many exciting days characterized by warm fellowship, large celebration events and bold outreach endeavors. However, there were difficult times too. After ten years George and Helen tired of the abrasiveness of church politics and the prevalence of power games among the leadership structures. They started to attend less frequently, and now they don’t attend at all. George and Helen are mature Christian people, devoted to Christ. Their supreme goal in life is to be obedient to their Lord. Once they sense a call, they would go to any lengths to help the needy or save the lost. Their names no longer appear on any formal church membership list. When it was suggested to them that a local church needs to keep a list of its active and committed members, they just laughed and asked, Do you think heaven is worried about whether or not our names are on a roll?

This leads us to ask, In the Bible do we find a view of the church that supports the idea of the church being institutional with a formal membership, or is its view of the church something more vague and unseen? Is the church just a collective noun for the group, unknown and invisible, consisting of those who have made some inner commitment to be followers of Jesus?

It may seem obvious to say that the Scriptures are the primary source of Christian thinking about the church. However, also of great importance in shaping our thinking is the way our interpretation of Scripture has worked out in the Christian community and the traditions that subsequently develop. Church history tells the story of the developing traditions being repeatedly challenged by a fresh look at Scripture.

This was no more so than in the European Reformation of the sixteenth century. The Reformation leaders were adamant that a correct interpretation of Scripture was only achieved as the individual reader was actively inspired by the Holy Spirit. Such a concept was a counter to the previous assumption that it was the church’s role to understand and judge the true meaning of Scripture. Classical ecclesiology, with its historical councils and creeds, was characterized by careful terminology and precise definitions of biblical terms. In seeking to define the church some of the radical reformers were drawn to biblical parables and metaphors where the meanings were more fluid, while others were prone to biblical literalism in their interpretations. Both streams are still well represented in our own day.

In examining the biblical record we need to acknowledge that we do so through the spectacles of our own cultural and religious background. It is to be expected that a marginalized and persecuted community will read these Scriptures quite differently to those who live within institutional church structures who often have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. So it is that at the root of South American Liberation Theology is the recognition that the context of a Christian community is what gives rise to its theology and interpretation of Scripture.³

With that qualification in place we begin by looking at the word church as it appears in the Bible. The English word church translates the Greek word ekklesia, which is used in several quite different ways with different