According to the New Testament, the church is God’s holy covenant people. It is the family of God. It is the community of Jesus’s disciples. It is the body of Christ. It is the redeemed and renewed humanity, the firstfruits of God’s new creation.
When we look at the church as it exists today and has existed in history, though, much of this becomes hard to believe. Very often, we see in the church unholiness, division, sin, corruption, hypocrisy, and a refusal to actually follow Jesus. To say the least, the church does not always look like the body of Christ.
For this reason, some Christian theologians have distinguished between the “visible church” and the “invisible church.” The invisible church is composed of all genuine Christians. These are Christians who have genuine, saving faith, who are truly following Jesus as His disciples, and have union with Christ by the Holy Spirit who is in them. The visible church is composed of all who make a Christian confession of faith, are baptized, and partake of the Lord’s Supper. Not all of these are genuine Christians. As John Calvin explains, in the visible “Church there is a very large mixture of hypocrites, who have nothing of Christ but the name and outward appearance: of ambitious, avaricious, envious, evil-speaking men, some also of impurer lives, who are tolerated for a time, either because their guilt cannot be legally established, or because due strictness of discipline is not always observed. Hence, as it is necessary to believe the invisible Church, which is manifest to the eye of God only, so we are also enjoined to regard this Church which is so called with reference to man, and to cultivate its communion.”[1]John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 4, Chapter 1, Paragraph 7.
This concept of the distinction between the visible church and the invisible church is legitimate and important. Just because someone claims to have faith in Christ and outwardly participates in the sacramental life of the church, this does not necessarily mean that they are truly a child of God. There can be hypocritical “false believers” within the church (Gal 2:4). In some times and places, such nominal Christians may make up a large portion or even a majority of the visible church. It is important to make it clear that not everyone who goes through the motions of being part of the visible church is truly saved.
The idea of the invisible church, though, can easily be taken in a problematic direction, leading people to a distorted understanding of what the church is and what it means to be a Christian. One serious error is thinking that one can be part of the invisible church without being part of the visible church. Some Christians think that, if the invisible church is the “real” church, then one can be part of the church just by having faith in Jesus and dispense with being part of the visible church altogether. Such an idea is radically contrary to everything the New Testament says about what it means to be a Christian. According to the New Testament, Christian salvation is not a matter of an individualistic personal relationship with Jesus, but is inextricably tied to being a member of the visible church community. The invisible church is a subset of the visible church. One can be a member of the visible church without being a true Christian, but one cannot be a true Christian without being a member of the visible church.
Another serious error is thinking that, because the “real” church is the invisible church, then Christians do not need to be concerned about whether the visible church is actually visibly being the body of Christ. On this account, one does need to be part of the visible church in order to be saved. But, Christians must resign themselves to the fact that the visible church will always remain a religious institution that will never appear visibly distinct from the world.
The problem with this is that Christianity is not a religion or a theory; it is a body, the body of Christ. A body must be visible. This is where the language of “invisible church” becomes problematic. A church is by definition an “assembly,” a visible gathering of people. The distinction between the “visible church” and the “invisible church” allows us to recognize the unfortunate fact that there are some false Christians within the church. But Christians should not resign themselves to this unfortunate fact. As the quote cited earlier from John Calvin states, it is only because of our lack of knowledge of others’ true spiritual state and our failure to practice biblical church discipline that nominal “Christians” remain within the church. There will always be some nominal Christians within the church. But the church should make every effort to keep this number as small as possible. True revival for the church comes not just by getting more people into the church, but also getting people who do not actually love Jesus out of the church.
Christian ethics is not an individualistic affair, but a communal affair, centered in the church community. In order for Christians to truly follow Jesus, the church community as a whole, and not just individuals within it, must follow a way of life that is visibly distinct from the world. The church is not a religious entity, but a political community, called to visibly embody the politics of God’s Kingdom. But if many, or most, members of the visible church are not genuine participants in God’s Kingdom, then the church will be unable to actually function as such a political community.
In the modern period, the end of Christendom and the decline of biblical church discipline have led the church to become disembodied. There is no sharp or clear visible distinction between the church and the world. Rather than visibly embodying a radically different way of life from the world, the church has become a merely religious institution . For the most part, modern “Christianity” is a mile wide and an inch deep.
Why is this so problematic? As theologian Stanley Hauerwas puts it, “From a Christian point of view, the world needs the church, not to help the world run more smoothly or to make the world a better and safer place for Christians to live. Rather, the world needs the church because, without the church, the world does not know who it is. The only way for the world to know it is being redeemed is for the church to point to the Redeemer by being a redeemed people. The only way for the world to know that it needs redeeming, that it is broken and fallen, is for the church to enable the world to strike hard against something which is an alternative to what the world offers.”[2]Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2014), Page 94. The church’s evangelistic efforts to proclaim the Gospel will ring hollow if the church is not visibly living out a radically different way of life that can show the world what God’s Kingdom looks like.
Christians must not be content with an “invisible church.” They must not be content with providing individuals opportunities for religious rituals and hoping that some of them will be saved. Rather, Christians must work to build up the body of Christ into a disciplined political community that can visibly show the world who Jesus is.
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