The Visible Church or Visible Churches?

OK, this will be the last post in which I mercilessly pick apart C.S. Lewis's church-as-house metaphor, I promise. Poor Clive Staples, I can just imagine him up in heaven yelling down at me, saying "Blimey, it was just an illustration for crying out loud! Lighten up."

That said, off we go....

On the one hand Lewis's house can't be the invisible church since the invisible church is one and therefore not divided into rooms (it's to this church that we traditionally have applied all those "unity" verses like Eph. 4:3-5 and I Cor. 12:12).

But on the other hand it can't be the visible church, either. Technically, we don't really believe in a visible church, do we? Sure, we believe in visible churches (self-governing bodies, whether independent congregations or denominations), but if that is what we're trying to illustrate then we should use the metaphor of a neighborhood comprised of individual homes, some bigger and some smaller. But in order for Lewis's house to illustrate "the visible church" then all the individual churches throughout the world would have to be visibly united in some way, just like the individual rooms in the house are visibly connected by a single roof (which, after all, is what a house is in the first place).

So if the point of the visible is to make apparent the invisible (as much as possible given the necessary qualifications), and if the invisible church is one, then wouldn't it follow that the visible church must be one as well? And to press it further, if what unites the invisible body is its Head, then wouldn't the visible body need a visible head in order to make its unity, well, visible?

Now if we deny this by saying that the visible church only needs an invisible Head and not a visible one, then doesn't that prove too much? Why do visible churches need a visible shepherd if the visible church doesn't?

So when all is said and done, it seems more Protestant to speak of "the invisible church" on the one hand, and "visible churches" on the other.

The Bare Necessities

I plan to begin an extended consideration of Matthew 16:13-19 soon, but before I do I want to continue to explore C.S. Lewis's analogy a bit (for those just tuning in, Lewis likens the church to a house with many rooms, each of which represents a particular denominational tradition. The rooms open up to a common hallway, which represents what he calls "mere Christianity").

Now, in a real house there is rarely any ambiguity about where the hallway actually is. I mean, it's pretty obvious, right? That long narrow thing with doors on either side? That's the hallway.

But is it that simple in Lewis's "house"? What exactly constitutes "mere Christianity" anyway? I know that D.L. Moody claimed he could write the gospel on a dime, but that just causes one to wonder if the message that can fit on it is worth more than the coin it's written on.

Is Reformed covenant theology a part of "mere Christianity"? What about the substitutionary atonement? Infant baptism? The real presence of Christ in the Supper? The ever-virginity of Mary?

My guess is that Clive Staples would tell us that "mere Christianity" is what you find in the creeds of the early church. The question immediately arises, "Which ones?" Do we accept the declarations of the first four councils (Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon)? The first seven? All twenty-one?

And if our answer is that we only accept the decrees of those councils that were faithful to Scripture, then does that not just put us back in the position of not agreeing about where the hallway is?

I guess what I'm asking is this: Ought our faith to be reduced to its lowest common denominator? And if not, how much unity are we willing to sacrifice for the luxury of expressing our faith more robustly?

Little Boxes Made of Ticky-Tacky

Continuing our discussion of C.S. Lewis's analogy of the Christian church being like a house with many rooms (denominational traditions) with a common hallway connecting them ("mere Christ-ianity"), I would like to highlight a few qualms I have. Now I realize that all illustrations break down at some point or another, but it seems like this one starts to fall apart pretty quickly upon an initial examination.

Now on a purely architectural level it is certainly true that the thing underneath a roof and between four outside walls is a house, that the things behind the inside doors are rooms, and that the thing to which the inside doors open is a hallway. But is it legitimate to then say that, on an ecclesiastical level, the existence of multiple church groups and denominations equals one church?

It depends. If the "church" being described by Lewis's house is invisible, then sure, it is possible to say that the full number of elect souls who eventually wind up in heaven will have worshiped in varying local churches throughout history. No real controversy there.

But if Lewis's house is one of those houses that you can actually see from the street (i.e., the visible kind), then that changes things a bit. Sure, most Christians claim to accept other Christians as fellow housemates, but according to Paul, true unity is not only verbal, it is sacramental. If it is true that there is "one God," "one Lord," and "one Spirit," it is also true that there is "one body," "one faith," and "one baptism" (Eph. 4:4-5). This means that the claim on the part of an evangelical that he is "one" with a newly-converted cradle-Presbyterian is an empty claim if he insists that the Presbyterian be re-baptized upon his conversion. To give another example, if a Lutheran minister refuses to offer the bread and cup to a Reformed minister, or if a Reformed minister refuses to commune a Baptist, then any claim of unity rings rather hollow.

It seems to me that the number of visible churches directly corresponds to the number of binding-and-loosing authorities over those churches. So the pastor-led independent Bible congregation is one church, Calvary Chapel as a whole is another, and so is the PCA. NAPARC is not a visible church, but an affiliation of visible churches (for it has no ecclesiastical authority). The same can be said for evangelicalism in general. And the Catholic Church, of course, is a visible church because of its authority rooted in the Petrine See.

The question, then, is whether Jesus intended to build a single church with a visible head whose keys allow him to bind and loose, or whether many visible-yet-divided churches are permissible. And if the answer is the former, then what is it that unifies this one church's many congregations?

Our House. In the Middle of our Street.

Well, I was hoping to take a little siesta from all things controversial and do a five-part review of Kreeft’s Love Is Stronger Than Death, but alas! it appears that you all have no appetite for smooth waters (excuse the mixed metaphor, it’s late). So anyway, once the comments turned from Kreeft’s treatment of death as a stranger to the grammatical issue of whether quotation marks belong inside or outside the comma—well, needless to say the writing was on the wall.

I hope to interact with Horton’s People and Place once I’ve got some of it read, but in the meantime I’ll bait the hook by shamelessly piggybacking on my pal Mike Brown’s discussion of C.S. Lewis’s description of the church as a big house with many rooms, all connected by a hallway. The rooms, Lewis says, are our denominations and confessional traditions (there’s a Baptist room [with no beer], a non-denominational room [whose walls everyone refuses to acknowledge], and a Presbyterian room [stocked with Arturo Fuentes and single malt]). The hallway, on the other hand, is what Lewis calls “mere Christianity” (you know, those “essentials” that we all supposedly recognize and agree upon). So although we spend lots of time in our respective rooms, we also venture out into the hallway to chat with our various housemates.

Some questions that we may want to tackle include: (1) Does the illustration even make sense? Does “many rooms = one house” even correlate to “many denominations = one church”? (2) Who gets to determine where exactly the hallway is? Does “mere Christianity” include infant baptism? How narrow is this thing anyway? (3) If the hallway is defined by the ecumenical creeds, does that include all of them, or just the ones we like? (4) Can we see this house from the street, or is it one of those “invisible” houses?

And we would be remiss, of course, if we failed to ask whether this house has a “Roman Room” in it, or if Rome’s is a different kind of structure altogether.

And if so, which was built first?