§ 144. By reason of its coexistence with the world there exists in the Church a legislative and an administrative power, which is an essential effluence from the kingly office of Christ.
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If the Church were completely self-contained, so that in none of those who belonged to it there survived anything of the world, the soul of each Christian in the whole system of its powers rather being a perfect organ of the Holy Spirit, then always and everywhere all events in the Church would happen of themselves as the Spirit prompted. Owing to the identity of the Spirit in all, everything that happened would show a spontaneous consistency; there would exist no difference between the general will and that of individuals, and there would nowhere be any occasion for law. If general conceptions were applied to Church affairs, those so applying them would in reality only be formulating the ways in which men actually behaved. This ideal, however, has never been realized except in Christ Himself; hence the utterances and impulses of the Spirit, when resisted, take the form of law and are accepted as such. This being the case, the analogous activities of Spirit-filled men also take on a relation to law as well as to the resistance which law implies, and assume the form of executive power. Not in any external fashion, as with civil authority (for an external apart from an internal out of which it springs has not the slightest value for the Church), but owing simply to the natural predominance of the common Spirit over persons—a predominance such as every member of a community feels has won his free assent. Should there be someone who does not feel this, or who in his own person is consciously antagonistic to the challenge of the common Spirit, that fact denotes an anti-church element in his life, and the predominance of the common Spirit must be re-established inwardly before the person in whose case it was infringed can again be acknowledged as a true member of the Church. Now this power of producing without any external means a steady voluntary submission, is the very power exerted by Christ; and in every case where men were united to Him this power was manifested precisely in the fact that impulses coming from Him were recognized as law, and that His judgments regarding men were felt to be final pronouncements on what is in man—the new community thus becoming His Kingdom. In this respect, too, the Spirit actualizes in the Church what is to be received out of Christ’s fulness. Or to put it otherwise, when Christ breathed the Spirit on the community of His people, He thereby conveyed this power to it—a power which cannot be conceived apart from this original ruling influence of Christ, and without which the union of the Divine Essence with human nature exemplified in the Church must either be much more or much less than is involved in the conception of a guiding common Spirit.
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At first this explanation does not at all seem to lead up to what is generally understood by the Power of the Keys, for that spiritual power is ordinarily taken to refer to the expansion and maintenance of the Church, in the sense that it rests with the Church to decide who shall and who shall not be received into the Christian fellowship, and also who shall remain there or be expelled—a matter so far not even mentioned here, but left to be inferred by way of appendix to the foregoing. But the two things can easily be combined, and the path we are now taking is merely that which enables us better to subsume the whole of Church government, as is fitting, under one conception. If we start with the kind of resistance mentioned above, every case of permanent submission produced subsequently by the Church’s legislative authority is a new conquest for the common Spirit, which thereby wins a place for itself in an individual life which previously was, at best, a disputed possession hovering on the border between Church and world. By every such removal of hesitation through legislative action, the Church’s realm is extended. But it is also through such action that the first entrance of the individual into the Church is brought about, for regeneration is the effect of the same cause, for the first time presenting to men the preponderance of the God-consciousness as the law of spiritual life. The same is true of the power which applies this law in particular judgments and pronouncements; these define the place taken in the community by each individual as a consequence of his inward state, and determine whether much or little can be entrusted to him.
Another peculiarity seems to be that we formerly1 described the Power of the Keys as a prolongation of Christ’s kingly activity, whereas it is here taken more as an effluence thereof, mediated by the Spirit. But in this respect there is no more than a slight difference between the institutions treated of in this Division. The mediation of the Spirit comes in in every case, otherwise these institutions would not be actions of the Church; and the actions are all of them effluences of Christ, for it is always from Christ that the Spirit draws. It is less easy to describe this power as a prolongation of Christ’s activity, for the difference between legislative and administrative activities essentially relates to the organized community, while Christ’s own activity preceded it. If, then, the difference has no application to His case, the Power of the Keys as thus defined cannot in the strictest sense be called a prolongation of His activity, although it does develop the outline of the common life as Christ drew it, and that without absorbing alien accretions from without.