Why the Mission Needs the Marks of the Church
by R. Scott Clark |
(page 6 of 7)
When we adopted the three marks of true church, we were in a
situation very much like ours today. It was difficult for Christians
to know where they should worship and to which institution they
should give their allegiance. They needed clear, objective
indicators of where the true church could be found. That need has
never been greater than it is now. That is why we chose three
objective marks that can be tested by empirical evidence. Listen to
the sermons and ask, “Is the gospel preached?” That is not a trick
question. Either the gospel of justification through faith alone in
Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension is present or it
is not. Are the two sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper
administered? By our lights, if as often happens in our
hyper-spiritual age, they are absent or fundamentally corrupted in
favor of “new measures,” then the church is also absent. Finally, it
will become clear soon enough if a congregation is disciplined. If
the minister is unaccountable, or if there are no elders, or gross
sin and error are winked at, then there is no discipline.
It is often said that we should add a fourth mark. If we add to
these marks then we gain nothing and risk losing them all. To be
sure, there are subsidiary obligations in the church. For example,
we must love one another, but there are good reasons why “love” or
charity is not a mark of the true church. At first glace, the
evidence for making “love” a mark of the church seems overwhelming,
after all Paul is very clear that whatever else is true of us, if we
have not love, we are of little use to the kingdom (1 Cor 13:13).
The chief problem with adding love or any other virtue to the list
of marks is that the list becomes useless. If we make “charity” a
mark of the visible church so that one can look at a congregation
and determine whether it is a true church on the basis of whether it
has love, then who gets to say “how much”? Who gets to define what
counts as love and what does not? If we may add “love” as a mark of
the church, then why should we not add holiness, and if holiness
then why not other virtues? On what basis do we stop adding virtues
to the list of marks? We know the answer to that question as soon as
we answer another. Which congregation on the face of the earth has
all the necessary virtues or even one of them in sufficient quantity
to qualify as a true church?
As it happens, the Reformed churches already considered this
question. We assign the virtues to the marks of the Christian. Those
marks are also in Belgic Confession, Article 29.
As for those who can belong to the church, we can recognize
them by the distinguishing marks of Christians: namely by faith,
and by their fleeing from sin and pursuing righteousness, once
they have received the one and only Savior, Jesus Christ.
They love the true God and their neighbors without turning to
the right or left, and they crucify the flesh and its works.
In our theology, piety, and practice, there is no question
whether faith, hope, and love are necessary. We are not
Donatists. The lack of perfection in the saints or even in the
ministers does not disqualify the church. What matters most about
the church—between Reformed confessionalism and evangelical pietism
there is, on this question, fixed an unbridgeable gulf—is what the
church confesses, what it preaches, whether and how it administers
the holy sacraments, and whether it administers discipline. In our
view, however, the visible church, i.e. the congregation of the
saints in stated worship services where the Word is preached and the
sacraments and discipline are administered, are exactly “places
where things happens,” and those assemblies are ordinarily the
only such places where such things happen.
8. To say that the mission needs the marks is to say that the
mission needs the true church. One of the greatest faults of the EM
is that they seem bent on destroying or circumventing the visible
church. Perhaps this is because of their context? Perhaps they see
the visible church as disposable, or worse, as an obstacle, because
they are in mainline churches where dead heterodoxy seems to
flourish or they are in megachurches where the main “mission” seems
to be to fill the seats?
The Reformed understanding of the Scriptures is that mission is
impossible without Christ’s visible church, just as the
accomplishment of redemption was impossible without Christ’s human
nature. In Matthew 16:13–20 our Lord gave the keys of the kingdom to
his designated representatives, to the visible institutional church.
He did not give the keys to any other entity. In that sense, then,
the visible church is unique among all human institutions in that it
alone represents the authoritative, official proclamation of the
Gospel of the kingdom. To the visible, institutional church alone
Christ gave the power to remit and to bind. In Matthew 18:15–20 we
see the same pattern. When our Lord instructed his disciples to
“tell it to the church” (v.17), he did not have in mind the
“invisible church” of all times and places. He had in mind the
visible, local, congregation with officers. Indeed, the Apostles
were deeply concerned with the local church as the center of the
administration of the kingdom of God on the earth. The Apostle Paul
devoted about half or at least a generous portion of most of his
epistles to addressing the practical administration and life of
visible, true congregations of churches. He spent a considerable
amount of energy seeing to the preaching of the gospel, the
administration of the sacraments, and discipline. Those who denied
the humanity of Christ, in the churches of Asia Minor, “went out”
from actual congregations because they were never really,
spiritually “of” those congregations (1 John 2:19).
9. As the intellectual and spiritual children of pietists and
Anabaptists, the EM leaders seem to lack altogether a doctrine of
what our forefathers called “the means of grace.” The EM seems
entirely taken with the modern, pietist, autonomous, and
individualistic approach to spirituality and piety. The candles and
labyrinths of the EM piety are just medieval trappings over pietist
individualism. The piety and spirituality of the EM are still
Bonaventure’s journey of the mind into God or the piety of the
ascent of the soul to the divine.
Reformed piety is covenantal. It recognizes that God the Son
administers his grace through visible means, that we are baptized
into a community, that we are redeemed into communities, that we are
brought to faith by the public proclamation of the gospel (Rom
10:17), and that faith is strengthened and confirmed through our
baptism and the regular use of the Lord’s Supper. Confessional
Protestants confess that every day we repent and die to self and
live to Christ and, in that way, we daily renew our baptism. Lord
permitting, each week, after we hear the gospel in our ears, we
receive it again with our mouths confessing that, as certainly as I
receive the elements from the hand of the minister, so surely are
the promises of God true for those who believe.
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