§ 149. The antithesis between the Visible and the Invisible Church may be comprehended in these two propositions: the former is a divided church, while the latter is an undivided unity; and the former is always subject to error, while the latter is infallible.

1. If we merely recur to what was said above regarding the sphere and manner in which the sinless perfection of Christ is communicated,⁵ we are in a position to assert that what is innermost in every truly regenerate life is simply the whole truth of redemption; and it is solely as limited to this domain that we affirm the infallibility of the invisible Church. There is first of all the consciousness of divine sonship in living fellowship with Christ, a consciousness which each has for all and all for each; and to this is essentially attached the consciousness that in them and for their good there is being vouchsafed a leading into all truth.⁶ But when this innermost consciousness comes to be particularized in definite ideas, it no longer has the same full truth; for the individual’s ideas are the outcome of his previous life and are formed out of his previous thought and interests, and for this reason regeneration cannot be a sudden transformation of his whole style of thinking. Hence the outward expression of the inner truth becomes more or less distorted, and of its organized form the Spirit takes possession only gradually. The same holds true of the bent imparted to the will by the life of Christ within us; it is the pure bent of Christ Himself, against sin and for the dissemination of His life. But when this takes shape in particular acts, it comes to be mediated not only through the view taken of a specific situation, but also through the purpose in which the action is pre-formed. Both of these, again, are conditioned by ideas formed during the period when the will was still the slave of sense; hence they can no longer give pure expression to the new inward impulse. Thus, starting from the point to which the new life attaches itself, the pure and the impure very soon separate, and appear as the visible and the invisible; for that which passes over into the phenomenal consciousness is eo ipso no longer pure. Yet both belong to the Christian fellowship; for to say that redemption is being realized in anyone, and that he is beginning to form a part of the believing fellowship, are the same thing. Someone may say that he acknowledges the distinction between the pure and the impure as a distinction between the visible and the invisible, but that the invisible is not really a fellowship, because what is absolutely inward is absolutely isolated too, and a fellowship (which only becomes possible through means of self-expression) cannot from its very nature be the pure and the true. This objection certainly has to be admitted inasmuch as the invisible Church is not a fellowship by itself alone, entirely separate from the visible. But even in the ordinary usage of these terms, this is not the case; there as for us the invisible Church as a fellowship (and in our reading of these matters the conception of fellowship is given greater prominence than ever) is mediated through the visible. But in daily experience everyone will certainly make a distinction between the two. In the one case, reaching over and abstracting from the confused multiplicity of particular acts (our neighbour, too, contemplating us in exactly the same way), we each of us enter into a mutually strengthening and supporting union with the innermost impulses of the other, and thus constitute an element of the invisible Church; in the other, we enter into a fellowship of these very particular acts and forms of self-expression, so as uniformly to occupy a common area with those who have closest affinity with ourselves and to repel what is alien—and thus constitute an element of the visible Church.

It need not be explained that in the infallibility of the invisible Church we include also its purity, and in the fallibility of the visible also its sin. This is due partly to the fact that particular acts have underlying purposes that determine their range and are themselves subject to the imperfection of the ideas present in the mind, partly to the fact that the development of religious ideas also depends on activities of will, which are affected by the lack of purity in particular resolves.

2. Closely connected with this is the fact that the invisible Church is everywhere essentially one, while the visible is always involved in separation and division. The innermost consciousness and impulses of believers are nothing but the presence and living movements of the Spirit itself; their fellowship is nothing but the Spirit’s knowledge of itself. And this fellowship must extend wherever the Spirit is the same, i.e. over the whole of Christendom. Since it is only an invisible fellowship, it lacks everything that might give it a definite form, and everywhere and always it is simply the direct relationship to one another of all in whom the Spirit dwells and who, meeting and touching as they do in their innermost being, include in their fellowship all like souls. That is to say, it is the common striving of all to recognize everywhere the same Spirit through what is outward, and draw it to themselves. But particular forms of outward expression, ideas no less than acts, which are the channels through which this one fellowship is mediated, are also in themselves the divisive element in the visible fellowship. Not only because, by the laws of physics, attractive force radiating out from the chief controlling points must find its limit somewhere, so that the connexion is broken, but principally because the uniting consciousness of affinity, being bound up with what to our perception are sensible differences between men, takes the form of self-love, thus imposing limit and division.

And here it once more appears, as we have elsewhere shown, that the Christian fellowship as being one cannot possibly impose limits on itself, i.e. cannot actively will to have other fellowships alongside of it. That would mean either that the attractive power of Christ stopped at a certain point, His living fellowship thus narrowing itself to a certain circumference, in which case He would not have been inspired and endowed as Saviour of the whole human race. Or the impulse emanating from Him would of necessity be confined in self-love to the fellowship of believers, thus keeping others alongside of them who would not share the same advantages; and such love could not be identical with the love of Christ.

3. It can, however, be easily shown that in these paragraphs we have stated the whole difference between the visible and the invisible Church. Whether we start from the life of Christ within us or from the action of the Spirit within us, they both issue simply in the twofold fact that everything human in the individual is appropriated by the divine, and then as appropriated enters actively into the communal spiritual life. Now if the still worldly element in the individual has a disturbing influence on this activity, one of these activities must thereby be obstructed and diverted; indeed, it will be possible everywhere to trace what seems mere negation or omission to what is positively real, namely, an act. But all action within the fellowship is productive of fellowship, which can only continue to exist through actions bearing upon it; thus whatever disturbs such action must carry with it division. Similarly, if the Spirit present in each is one that leads into all truth, everything in the individual that works disturbingly must be a lapse into untruth. The fact that at this point our paragraph includes in untruth any aberration of the will in sin is justified by the consideration that when we speak of the Church, we have the actions of individuals in view only so far as they take place within the fellowship. And there they can only be disturbing in so far as they are perceived by others and constitute a process; which again can only be the case when they are adopted as guiding maxims, and maxims that contradict the basal forms of self-expression characteristic of the new life or are asserted as false subsumptions under maxims that are sound—in either case, therefore, in so far as they can be traced to error. On the other hand, isolated sins which spring from no purpose disappear in the life of the fellowship, without leaving a trace. There is no influence arising from the still worldly element within us able to disturb our relationships in the Church, other than those influences which confuse the Spirit—error affecting the Spirit as it leads into truth, and division as it binds and unites. Not only so, these two things are so closely connected that it is only through the presence of either that the other can be detected. Much may appear to be a disturbance of fellowship and yet not be so, unless it is also a defection from truth; so, too, nothing that seems to be error or sin really is so unless it at the same time disturbs fellowship.

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Footnotes

1. Rom. 7¹⁷· ²⁰, 1 John 1⁸⁻¹⁰. ↩

2. Cf. § 126, I. ↩

3. Cf. § 115, 2. ↩

4. Matt. 5¹⁴. ↩

5. Cf. § 88, 3. ↩

6. John 16¹³. ↩