§ 126. The fellowship of believers, animated by the Holy Spirit, remains ever self-identical in its attitude to Christ and to this Spirit, but in its relation to the world it is subject to change and variation.
- If the fellowship of believers, as an historical body within the human race, is to exist and persist in continuous activity, it must unite in itself two things—a self-identical element, whereby it remains the same amid change, and a mutable element, in which the identity finds expression. If we consider it merely in its co-existence with the rest of contemporary human life, summarily described in Scripture as ‘the world,’ we might apparently say that the Church can just as well be known by its difference from the world as the world can by its difference from the Church. And certainly amongst believers there are not wanting those who think that they and their like are recognizable chiefly from the fact that they are not what the world is. This, however, is a view inclining equally to separatism and to legalistic righteousness. For the sinful common life, with the exception of the feeling of need surviving in the mass of men (a feeling which constitutes the Church’s elemental claim upon the world and strictly is characteristic of the Church itself), is really nullity and a purely negative thing; as has been made sufficiently clear by our whole account of sin.1 Hence it is quite true that the world, as being formless and confused, can be recognized by believers from the fact that it is excluded from a share in the being of the Church. But the converse does not hold. The usage of Scripture in entitling ‘world’ that part of the human race which is not yet Church is very natural, for the whole human race had been so described, and this particular part only remained what the whole had always been; unfortunately, however, it may easily give rise to the impression that the world in this sense is as much a whole as the Church is. Whereas, in fact, it is only an aggregate of individual elements which in many respects are antagonistic to each other, and which unite only in accidental and temporary ways. This erroneous impression is only heightened when the Church, as it confronts the world, is constantly described as a ‘little flock’—that is, as also being on its side an aggregate, and one of no importance. It would therefore be best that this use of the term ‘world’ should disappear from the devotional field and be kept for the field of Dogmatics, where its true significance can be more easily defined and conserved.
The self-identity of the Christian Church, however, can cover no more than the fact that the mode in which the divine exists in the human ever remains the same, and that the goal also remains the same to which the Church throughout all its movements is seeking to approximate. In Christ also the union of the divine with the human was ever the same; and, since in His case there can be no question of approximation, the adaptation of what in Him underwent human development to the divine impulse in Him was the same too; but all else was determined in accordance with the laws of the temporal by His position in the world. Similarly, the relation of the Holy Spirit to the Church as its common spirit remains the same, and the Church is ever self-identical as the locus of the Spirit in the human race, as also in this further respect that it is always to the same likeness of Christ that the Church is striving to be conformed.
Turning to the mutable, however, we note that even in Christ, though strife and conflict were absent, this element was not as such determined by the divine in Him—the divine being incapable of any temporal determination—but by the human nature conjoined to it. So, too, in the case of the Church, the mutable as such is not determined by the Holy Spirit but by human nature, on which and through which the Spirit works. Now if we apply the term ‘world’ to human nature in the whole extent in which it is not determined by the Holy Spirit, we may also say that everything mutable in the Church is as such determined by the world, but not uniformly. For whatever has been or is gradually being realized in man through the Holy Spirit is as it is because the world, operated on by the Holy Spirit, was as it was. In all gifts of the Spirit there is recognizable a definite basis in human nature, causing it inevitably to take the form it does, and throughout the entire development of the new man the kind and the degree of progress depends on the development of nature in the person concerned and on the character of his environment. Similarly, the form which the Christian fellowship takes in a particular nation depends on that nation’s peculiar characteristics, for otherwise no reason could be found in the Holy Spirit why it should impress on the Christian fellowship different forms in different places. All this has its ground of determination in the world owing to the law that Christianity must develop as a force in history, and the world as it appears in Christianity is the world as it has been seized upon and permeated by the Holy Spirit. On the other hand, everything that exists within the Church because it is found in those through whom the Holy Spirit works, yet is not due to the Spirit’s action, is determined by the world as opposed to the Spirit, and represents the encroachment of the world upon the Church’s sphere. This includes not merely what may in a stricter sense be called the sins of the regenerate, but also every hampering and distorting influence which their sinfulness opposes to the Holy Spirit’s action, as well as all mistaken and perverse elements that may find their way into the religious consciousness. Now it is true that all such things are in process of disappearing, but they constantly revive as often as the Holy Spirit takes possession of a new field; just as both things, the signs of having been apprehended by the Spirit and of resistance thereto, are equally found in the sphere of the preparatory operations of grace. The same is true of such differences in the Christian fellowship as are due to the diversities of human nature. Not only is what arises thence, in consequence of the sinfulness persisting in the Church, destined to disappear, but the closer the fellowship is the more will each seek what is his neighbour’s and take it up into his own life, with the natural result that differences are correspondingly lessened. But while this happens more or less in each generation, the next is none the less confronted by an undiminished task.
- If the self-identical element in the Christian Church be considered simply by itself, as something which in a way may be regarded as a manifold, it forms the subject of the disciplines of Christian Dogmatics and Christian Ethics. For if we wish to exhibit that likeness of Christ to which we are ever more striving to approximate, we find it in the outlines of the Christian life laid down in the latter discipline, including as one of its integral parts the development of the Christian consciousness. And if we wish to exhibit the self-identity of the Christian Church as the locus of the Holy Spirit, we must present it as inclusive of the truth into which the Holy Spirit alone can lead. Both, however, can only be presented with differences of time and space; so that all we can say is that in these disciplines and their adjuncts what we are really trying to express is this self-identical element, yet for this purpose we have only these variable means of expression. The same, however, holds true of all aspects of Christian life, in so far as they are based on the truth taught by the Spirit and contain features of Christ’s likeness. But the totality of these aspects is just the historical reality of the Christian Church throughout its whole career, and to this we should have to resort for material if we wished to exhibit the changing and mutable element; and this we cannot do without at the same time bringing in what is unchanging and self-identical. This is the more evident because the efforts which give rise to these varying forms of Dogmatics and Ethics are all themselves a minor part of the Church’s history. Thus neither element can be exhibited apart from the other. If the attempt were made to set forth the self-identical and invariable element in Christianity in complete abstraction from the historical, it would scarcely be distinguishable from the undertaking of people who imagine that they are expounding Christianity when in point of fact what they offer is pure speculation. And if anyone tried to present solely the variable in Christian history in complete abstraction from the self-identical, his aim would apparently be the same as that of people who, penetrating no further than the outer husk of things, permit us to see in the history of the Church nothing but the complex and pernicious play of blinded passion.
The two aspects or elements, then, cannot be exhibited apart from each other without making the real nature of the Church unrecognizable; on the other hand, we cannot here treat of both together in the way just indicated. Consequently, in the doctrine of the Church in its coexistence with the world, we can only state first those chief activities through the continuous exercise of which the temporal development of this whole really becomes the development of the Christian Church, and which thus form its essential and invariable features. Thereafter we shall treat of those characteristics of the fellowship whereby during its coexistence with the world it is distinguishable from that which it can only become even in appearance after this hampering antithesis between Church and world has passed away, but which—as being the same under both forms—inwardly viewed it already is. The former invariable element is due to the fact that the Church can only persist and reach its perfection through that to which it owes its very existence; the latter variable element, however, being conditioned by the world, is chiefly traceable to the material which the world offers to the instreaming influence of the principle by which the Church is constituted. This division of the subject, therefore, falls into two halves—one of which comprises the essential and (in spite of its coexistence with the world) immutable features of the Church, while the other sets forth the mutable element which belongs to the Church in virtue of its coexistence with the world.
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Footnotes
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65 ff. ↩