§ 148. The fact that the Church cannot form itself out of the midst of the world without the world exercising some influence on the Church, establishes for the Church itself the antithesis between the Visible and the Invisible Church.
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If every person in the world who has been laid hold of by the Spirit of Christianity were instantly so to become a possession of the Spirit that every element in his life was solely determined by his reception of the Spirit’s influence, and he became entirely free from vestigial traces of his former life, it would certainly mean that the world might persist alongside of the Church, opposing the Church’s further advance. And in this way the world might modify the Church’s action and throw it back upon itself. But yet the Church, as actually existing, would none the less be without any worldly admixture; the two would be entirely separate and mutually exclusive societies. In point of fact, however, regeneration is not a sudden transformation; even though delight in God’s will has become the man’s proper self,1 there remains in him everywhere an activity of the flesh striving against the Spirit; and thus even in those who taken together compose the Church, there is always something that belongs to the world.2 Hence Church and world are not spatially or externally separate; at each point of human life as we see it, wherever there is Church, because there faith and fellowship in faith are to be found, there is world as well, because there exist also sin and fellowship in universal sinfulness. Each visible part of the Church, accordingly, when more closely examined, is a mixture of Church and world; and only if we could isolate and collect the effects of the divine Spirit in men, should we have the Church in its purity. Now not merely are these effects certainly present, inasmuch as the Holy Spirit is only given in this active union with human nature; they also form a connected and co-operative whole. Yet they cannot be exhibited in isolation; it is only invisibly that they are contained within the whole complex as the element in it which opposes the world and separates it from the world. Thus the invisible Church is the totality of the effects of the Spirit as a connected whole; but these effects, as connected with those lingering influences of the collective life of universal sinfulness which are never absent from any life that has been taken possession of by the divine Spirit, constitute the visible Church.
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By the Invisible Church is commonly understood the whole body of those who are regenerate and really have a place within the state of sanctification; by the Visible Church, all those besides who have heard the gospel and therefore are called, and who confess themselves outwardly members of the Church, or who (as we should prefer to express it) form the outer circle of the Church, inasmuch as they receive preparatory gracious influences through the medium of an externally constituted relationship.3 But if this externally constituted relationship be taken as consisting in the fact that they have received baptism and call themselves Christians, it must be pointed out that according to Christ’s original intention there was not to be any such visible Church, since only those were to be baptized who had repented and were mature enough to receive, in and with baptism, the forgiveness of sins and the bestowal of the Spirit. Thus the called too were to remain outside the Church until both the community and they themselves were at one in the conviction that a living fellowship had been established between Christ and them; and the outer circle aforesaid was to be composed, not of members of the Church, but of candidates for the Church. It may be urged that this original arrangement cannot now be restored, not merely because of infant baptism, but much more because the nations have been Christianized en masse and Christianity has been given civil privileges, and that therefore the arrangement may in a way be regarded as having been altered by Christ Himself. Yet this would not make it any more fitting to describe the fellowship of the regenerate as invisible. Even though the moment of regeneration cannot be fixed, and many Christians may feel uncertainty regarding many other Christians, questioning whether they really are in the state of sanctification; still, this uncertainty regarding some cannot make the whole invisible. On the contrary, the fellowship or community of those who, just because most firmly settled in the state of sanctification, are most strenuously opposed to the world, cannot but in this sense be the most visible of all.4 The body, then, which in ordinary usage is known as the invisible Church is for the most part not invisible, and what is known as the visible is for the most part not Church. On the other hand, as we have explained it, the antithesis affirms something true and necessary. Even if it were possible to keep all the non-regenerate outside the Church, the whole body of the regenerate would only constitute the visible Church in our sense of the term, and, because visible, would for that very reason not be pure from alien admixture. The pure Church cannot everywhere be made visible; but it is necessary to treat of it separately as the peculiarly active element in the other. The institutions dealt with in the doctrines of the First Half are the principal organs of the invisible Church, and most of all represent its forces at work within the visible. Here we treat of those general conditions of the visible Church which, as perpetually self-renewing consequences of the persistence of the world within the Church, do most to bring to clear consciousness the antithesis between the visible Church and the invisible.