§ 114. In a comprehensive summary of what our Christian self-consciousness has to say about the fellowship of believers, we must first treat of the origin of the Church, the way in which it takes shape and disengages itself from the world; then the way in which the Church maintains itself in antithesis to the world; and finally the abrogation of this antithesis, or the prospect of the Church’s consummation. 1. These three points certainly do not seem to have the same relation to our Christian self-consciousness. The second is the sphere of everyday experience; our spiritual life proceeds within the limits of this antithesis. In proportion as we know how to distinguish within ourselves between what appertains to the fellowship of believers and what still appertains to the world, our Christian common feeling will rightly separate, in what happens around us, what belongs to the Church and to the world. This all contributes to our propositions concerning the maintenance of the Church co-existently with the world. Propositions even with the same content would be inadmissible if drawn from other quarters. As in individuals the distinction between what belongs to sin and to grace is drawn, not from the outward aspect of the act open to perception, but from the constitution of the inward motives, so affirmations concerning the Christian Church can be rightly made only by those who know its inner life through personal participation in it. The affirmations of our self-consciousness, however, about the consummation of the Church, if indeed there are any, are certainly only most unreliable ones; and as to the origin of the Church only historical evidence can be accepted, with which we cannot deal here. To begin then with this last point: the Christian fellowship gradually expands as individuals and masses are incorporated into association with Christ. The general fact has been established that the new life of the individual arises out of the common life within the outer circle of which it lies. And this holds good also of the new life of the first disciples, when as yet the power of the inner circle was entirely confined to Christ. The origin of the Christian Church is thus the same thing as happens daily before our eyes. On the principle that the redeeming activity must lay hold of everything gradually, it is of no consequence that we should establish a technical rule for the exact how and why of this expansion. Rather, since at any one moment the redeeming activity is reaching out from the community to cover a far larger number than are at that time actually led to conversion, our starting-point must be a right grasp of the distinction between the converted and all the rest; to have this is to understand the beginnings of the Church. Here certainly we have a self-consciousness which has to be grasped in thought, namely, the antithesis which is established in our fellow-feeling and sympathy between the previous inclusion of all in the common state of sinfulness, and the new differentiation between those under grace and others. As regards the consummation of the Church: if we go by personal experience, all that is given in our self-consciousness is, we must grant, just growth in sanctification, without any presentiment that an entire harmony of all our faculties, and the consummation of the individual life as an instrument of Christ’s life in us, will, after the old man has been completely eradicated, finally emerge. In the same way, if we go by corporate feeling, the Church only confronts us as something growing out of the world and gradually, of itself, expelling the world—the presentiment of the consummation being always held up by the indestructible element of sympathy due to the fact that the old man is always born again with each new individual. Thus the consummation of the Church, even as a presentiment, requires as a condition that the propagation of the race should cease: it therefore founders on the rock of our racial consciousness; and it looks as if everything put forward as Christian doctrine on this point must derive from some other source than the Christian self-consciousness. In that case it would have no right to a definite place in our exposition, but, resting as it must on an objective consciousness, could, in view of its source, come in only in subordinate wise.5 Yet two points may still be noted in this reference. For one thing, we are far from being in a position fully to realize as a presentiment the alternative conception of an advance asymptotically approaching the consummation in infinite time, an advance always limited by the appearance of new generations; nor does this conception supply what is lacking in the presentiment of the imperfect sanctification of our own self at the end of life. And in the second place, even if this presentiment cannot in itself furnish any doctrine in our sense, because it is not an isolable moment of self-consciousness, still the admission of it can yield a proof, as the other form of infinite approximation cannot, that we have rightly appreciated what underlies it and the doctrine of the maintenance of the Church, namely, the essential nature of the Kingdom of God. The proof is that the truth of the exposition holds good even in an attempt to consider the Church in itself apart from its antithesis to the world; to this extent this attempt is necessary and natural.
- Between these three main divisions of the subject there is an analogous dissimilarity, not to be overlooked, which may be put thus. In discussing the second we find ourselves entirely, and all but exclusively, within the sphere of the redeeming activity of Christ, for this is the actual boundary of the Kingdom of Christ.6 Yet if we were to conceive the absolute consummation extensively as well as intensively, the dissimilarity between Him and us would be entirely abrogated, and His lordship would cease.7 This is an additional confirmation of the view that this is not matter for Christian doctrine in the strictest sense of the word. Especially as in the consummation itself no sense of need can be supposed to persist in self-consciousness, so that the consummation can be regarded as specifically Christian only in so far as it remains the consummation of a common life dependent on Christ. And while presumably in this consummation natural changes would be involved which lie outside the sphere of the kingly dominion of Christ and belong to the divine government of the world, yet about this bodily side of the matter—which would be the point at issue—we have here nothing to say. Hence, take it how we will, we find ourselves here at the limit of Christian doctrine, and can say nothing definite without overstepping it. So too with regard to the emergence of the Christian Church, alike at its beginning and all the way along. For while the power of the Divine Word and of the Love that seeks the salvation of men remains always the same in the great inward act of preaching, the difference in its efficacy rests on different conditions of susceptibility; and this again depends on the circumstances in which the divine government of the world places different persons. This cannot but seem very natural; for in the passing of either individuals or masses from the world into the Church the divine government of the world plays a part and necessarily in the form of activity. Hence our sympathetic appreciation of the matter would be very incomplete if it did not accept the difference that arises as resulting from the divine government of the world. At this point, however, we must bring in another element, to supplement a defect in our previous exposition. We formerly considered the activity of the Redeemer and its operation in the soul of the individual apart from the life of the community; and thus later, in the doctrine of sanctification, it was still possible for us to consider the individual merely as a separate being, acting independently in living fellowship with Christ. Now of course it is by the very same act that the individual is regenerated and that he becomes a spontaneously active member of the Christian Church. But this second aspect of the matter we previously ignored: hence we must now discuss that act anew and independently of our earlier exposition, in view of the fact that it forms the basis of the relation of the individual to the larger whole. And here our attention is at once focused on the most definite thing in our whole self-consciousness, where we always distinguish and combine both things—our independent personality in living fellowship with Christ, and our life as an integral constituent of a whole.
From both points of view the doctrine of the Church, in its continuous existence alongside of the world, is the essential kernel of this whole section. Hence it is appropriate to establish this doctrine first, and then to treat the other two subjects more by the way of appendix. In adopting the order natural to an historical review, we shall attain greater vividness and simplify many problems.
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