Church

The church, the subject of the doctrine of ecclesiology, is the assembly of God’s people gathered in Christ. The word translates the Greek ekklesia, itself a rendering of the Hebrew qahal, “the assembly or congregation of Yahweh.”¹ Scripture uses the word in two related senses: the whole company of the elect in every place and age, and the visible, particular congregations in which that company gathers, worships, and is governed under Christ, its only head.²

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession devotes a full chapter to the church, and states first what the wider Reformed confessional family agrees on. The “catholic or universal church,” it says, “may be called invisible” and “consists of the whole number of the elect, that have been, are, or shall be gathered into one, under Christ, the head thereof.”² Christ alone holds “all power for the calling, institution, order or government of the church”; the confession denies that the pope can in any sense be its head.³ The Westminster Confession states the same two points in nearly identical language: the invisible church “consists of the whole number of the elect,” and “there is no other Head of the Church but the Lord Jesus Christ.”⁴

Where the two confessions part company is membership in the visible church. Westminster extends it to “all those, throughout the world, that profess the true religion, and of their children.”⁵ The 1689 confession instead ties visible-church membership to credible profession alone: “visible saints,” those “professing the faith of the gospel, and obedience unto God by Christ according unto it,” are who “particular congregations” are to be constituted of.⁶ From that premise the confession builds a congregational polity distinctive to the Baptist tradition: each gathered church holds, in itself, whatever “power and authority… is needful for their carrying on that order in worship and discipline” that Christ has instituted for it.⁷ Its officers, bishops (elders) and deacons, are “chosen thereunto by the common suffrage of the church itself,” not appointed from outside it.⁸ Churches may send messengers to confer with one another “in cases of difficulties or differences,” but such gatherings hold no “jurisdiction over the churches themselves.”⁹

The wider Reformed family states the church’s identifying marks in similar terms even where a given confession does not use the word “marks” itself. The Belgic Confession gives the classic formulation: “if the pure doctrine of the gospel is preached therein; if she maintains the pure administration of the sacraments as instituted by Christ; if church discipline is exercised in punishing of sin.”¹⁰ The 1689 confession’s own chapter does not use this three-part formula, but its content, pure doctrine, rightly administered ordinances, and church discipline, runs through its treatment of gathered congregations and their government.

Biblical Basis

Ekklesia denotes, at root, a gathering of people called together for a purpose. In the Old Testament, Israel as a worshiping people is the qahal YHWH, “the assembly of Yahweh.” After Christ applies the word to the community he gathers around himself (Matt. 16:18; 18:17), the church becomes, after Pentecost, “an independent religious assembly acting in the place of Israel as the new people of God.”¹ The New Testament uses the word both for a specific local congregation, as when Paul addresses “the church of God in Corinth” (1 Cor. 1:2), and for the whole body of the redeemed, as when he writes of the one body united to Christ (Eph. 4:4). Bavinck describes the church as “an organism in which the whole exists prior to the parts,” its unity resting in Christ as head rather than assembled after the fact out of individual believers who join it by choice.¹¹

Scripture describes this one church through a cluster of images, each naming a different aspect of its relation to Christ: the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12:27; Eph. 5:23; Col. 1:18), the bride of Christ (2 Cor. 11:2; Eph. 5:32; Rev. 19:7; 21:2), the sheepfold of the Shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep (John 10), and the building, temple, or house of God (Matt. 16:18; Eph. 2:20; 1 Pet. 2:5), raised on Christ as the cornerstone and the apostles and prophets as its foundation. It is also called the people, possession, and Israel of God (Rom. 9:25; 2 Cor. 6:16; Heb. 8:10; 1 Pet. 2:9-10).¹²

The church is not to be collapsed into the kingdom of God, though the two are inseparable. “‘Church,’ as the people of God, must not be confused or identified with the eschatological notion of the kingdom of God,” Bavinck writes; the kingdom is the internal, spiritual possession of “the poor in spirit,” while the church is the visible, organized company through which that kingdom’s gifts, above all the Holy Spirit, are given to the world.¹³ Christ is head of the church, on this account, precisely so that in the end God may “publicly appear as king of his people and be all things in all people.”¹³

Historical Development

The early church’s controversies with schismatic groups pressed it toward a doctrine of catholicity: one church, marked by unity with the whole rather than a sect’s private claim to the Spirit. Irenaeus wrote, “where the church is, there is the Spirit of God, and where the Spirit of God is, there is the church and every kind of grace.”¹⁴ Cyprian, arguing against schism in the third century, went further: “there is also but one church, one flock, one mother out of which all believers are born and outside of which there is no salvation.”¹⁴ Augustine, writing against the Donatists (AD 393-411), held the church together with the reality of hypocrites within it: “there is chaff among the wheat; there are bad fish among the good; there are many sheep outside and many wolves inside,” yet he still called the church “mother,” insisting “those who do not have the church as their mother do not have God as their Father.”¹⁵

By the medieval period this catholicity doctrine had hardened into an institutional claim. Rome distinguished the hierarchical “teaching church” (ecclesia docens) from the “listening church” (ecclesia audiens) subject to it, holding that “where the pope is, there is the church” (ubi papa, ibi ecclesia) and that external participation in its sacraments was necessary for salvation.¹⁶ Wycliffe, Huss, and the Waldensians resisted this institutional identification before the Reformation, locating the true church in holy living rather than in submission to the hierarchy, though their reform impulses did not carry over into a lasting alternative.¹⁶

The Reformation supplied that alternative. Luther, finding peace not in sacraments performed ex opere operato but in the forgiveness of sins by faith alone, distinguished the visible church from the invisible, the latter “an object of faith” rather than sight.¹⁷ The true visible church, on this account, is marked by the pure administration of the Word and sacraments: “where the Word is preached and sacraments administered according to the Word, one can be certain a church is present.”¹⁷ Reformed theology carried this distinction further, identifying the invisible church with the elect, “known only to God,” and adding holy living and church discipline alongside Word and sacrament as marks of a true visible church.¹⁸ The Belgic Confession’s three-part formula and the 1689 confession’s own emphasis on credible profession and discipline both belong to this stream.

Within the multiformity that followed the Reformation, Baptist congregationalism took shape alongside other movements that likewise insisted the visible church be composed of visibly gathered, professing believers rather than an entire baptized population: the “gentler Anabaptism of Menno Simons” and the “English Independentists” among them.¹⁹ The 1689 confession’s insistence on “visible saints” and congregationally chosen officers reflects this same conviction, worked out within a Reformed confessional framework rather than a separatist one. A different post-Reformation trajectory ran the opposite direction: John Nelson Darby, the founder of dispensational premillennialism, “proceeded, openly and decisively, to reject every church and all ecclesiastical forms,” regarding them as corrupt and calling believers only to withdraw and await Christ’s return.²⁰

Opposing Views

Roman Catholicism locates the church’s essential identity in its visible, hierarchical institution under the pope, continuing the medieval position that Bavinck traces to the patristic catholicity doctrine’s institutional hardening: “the church is as ‘visible and palpable as the assembly of the people of Rome,’ a gathering of humans bound together by profession of the same faith and participation in the same sacraments under the control of legitimate pastors and particularly of Christ’s vicar on earth, the pope of Rome.”¹⁶ Both the 1689 and Westminster confessions reject this identification directly, naming the pope “antichrist, that man of sin, and son of perdition.”³

Dispensationalism, in its classic Darbyite form, holds the church to be a distinct, parenthetical entity within redemptive history, sharply separated from Israel and even from the visible institutional forms Christianity has taken.²⁰ The Reformed confessional witness, by contrast, applies Old Testament language for Israel, “the people, the possession, the Israel of God,” directly to the church (Rom. 9:25; 2 Cor. 6:16; Heb. 8:10; 1 Pet. 2:9-10), understanding it as standing in continuity with, rather than merely alongside, God’s covenant people under the old covenant.¹²

Within confessional Protestantism itself, churches disagree over polity, whether officers and discipline belong properly to the gathered local congregation, as the 1689 confession holds, or to a wider body of elders or bishops beyond it. That disagreement, and its Presbyterian and episcopal alternatives, is treated at length in Church government.

Objections and Responses

Objection: if there is no salvation outside the church, as Cyprian and Rome have held, then the church itself, not Christ, becomes the ground of salvation. Reformed theology affirms the church’s ordinary necessity while rejecting Rome’s absolute institutional claim. God “ordinarily grants the benefits of Christ by means of Word and sacraments,” administered within the visible church, “but he is not bound to this method” and “very rarely also grants salvation outside the institution of the church.”¹⁸ The claim is about God’s normal way of working through means he has appointed, not about the church itself dispensing salvation apart from Christ.

Related Doctrines

References

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality”: “After the ascension, the community of Christ believers became the church, an independent religious assembly acting in the place of Israel as the new people of God.” ↩ ↩²
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 26, “Of the Church,” para. 1. ↩ ↩²
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 26, “Of the Church,” para. 4. ↩ ↩²
Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 25, “Of the Church,” para. 1, 6. ↩
Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 25, “Of the Church,” para. 2. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 26, “Of the Church,” para. 2. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 26, “Of the Church,” para. 7. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 26, “Of the Church,” para. 8-9. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 26, “Of the Church,” para. 14-15. ↩
The Belgic Confession (1561), art. 29, “Of the Marks of the True Church, and Wherein She Differs from the False Church.” ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality”: “The church is an organism in which the whole exists prior to the parts.” ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality”: “the church is the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12:27; Eph. 5:23; Col. 1:18), the bride of Christ (2 Cor. 11:2; Eph. 5:32; Rev. 19:7; 21:2), the sheepfold of Christ… the building, the temple, the house of God… the people, the possession, the Israel of God (Rom. 9:25; 2 Cor. 6:16; Heb. 8:10; 1 Pet. 2:9-10).” ↩ ↩²
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality”: “‘Church,’ as the people of God, must not be confused or identified with the eschatological notion of the kingdom of God.” ↩ ↩²
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality.” ↩ ↩²
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality.” ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality”: on Wycliffe, Huss, and the Waldensians, “the criterion for identifying the true church was not found in the objective ministry of Word and sacrament but in holy living… attempts at reformation could not carry over into other areas or they ended in disappointment.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality.” ↩ ↩²
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality”: “In addition, the Reformed churches also placed holy living and church discipline as a key mark.” ↩ ↩²
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality.” ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality”: “John Darby, the founder of modern dispensational premillennialism, proceeded, openly and decisively, to reject every church and all ecclesiastical forms.” ↩ ↩²