[Continuing my Apologia de CREC. Previous parts: I, II, III, IV, V, VI]
In this final entry into my series on being a Reformed scholaticism guy within the CREC, I turn to foundations of ecclesiology. Here the differences between the Reformed Orthodox approach and the Federal Vision streams often present in or connected to the CREC are most visible, and here I intend to explain my own sort of asymmetrical synthesis. To start with, I will introduce the radical (in the old sense of from the root) distinctive of FV dark ecclesiology and highlight wherein it differs from the ecclesiology of the Reformed Orthodox.
Also, if you are interested in this series but are not a paid subscriber, I decided to offer a discount for a time to accommodate you. It’s pretty cheap, though perhaps you get what you pay for.
When it comes to ecclesiology and soteriology, almost everything I think needs to be said about the Federal Vision touches on this quote from Leithart’s The Baptized Body, which is probably the most concise and potent FV dark manifesto:
Without qualification or hedging, the church is the body of Christ. Everything the Federal Vision says about baptism, about soteriology, about apostasy flows from that affirmation.
This may sound like an obvious point, but the FV distinctives begin with how “the church” is being discussed here. Leithart begins to unpack this a bit later in the book as he discusses the common Reformed claim that baptism admits one to the visible Church:
What does a baptized person become a member of when he becomes a member of the church? What kind of bond to Christ, and through Him to the Father and Spirit, is forged when one enters the visible church by baptism? Can we say that a member of the church is, necessarily, a member of Christ? Answers to these questions depend on ecclesiological assumptions, on the answer to our question, Is the visible church the body of Christ? If the visible church is the body of Christ, and if the body of Christ is the community united to the humanity of the Son of God by the Spirit, then baptism joins the baptized to Christ the Son.
Note that here, to be a member of the “visible Church” is to be a member of Christ, i.e. united to Christ. Given the ordinary sense of “union with Christ” in Reformed theology as that saving way of being connected to Christ by the Spirit out of which all spiritual blessings flow, the point of this construction is to say, absolutely speaking, that baptism puts one into a state of saving union with Christ, that is, that baptism transfers a person from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light, bringing justification, sanctification, regeneration, etc.
After the above passage, Leithart proceeds to explain how the simple path from baptism to being savingly united to Christ via the visible Church simply doesn’t match any traditional Reformed understanding of the Church. He concludes his survey of such views by noting the most they can give you is this:
Baptism admits the baptized to the visible church.
The visible church involves an external, conditional, and legal covenant relationship with God.
Therefore, baptism admits the baptized into an external, conditional, legal relationship with God.
Leithart identifies this conclusion as in no way similar to the language of the New Testament. This brings him to a proposed solution: salvation as sociology. Thus recounts the history of the biblical story in terms of God’s purpose to form a worshiping race that would obediently fill and rule the earth. Sin interfered with this, God worked through the patriarchs, Moses, the kings, and the rest to prepare Jesus to fix this, and now in Christ a new race has been formed and filled with the Spirit to rightly worship and obey God.
The emphasis on a race, a renewed Israel, is critical to his point. Leithart highlights the role of relationships to human life:
We are created as social beings, entangled with the lives of others and with the things of the world in such profound ways that it’s often difficult to know where one ends and another begins. A woman loses her husband of fifty years and feels that she's lost part of herself.…
Because of the way human beings are made, sin damages our relations with each other and the world as much as it damages our relationship with God. Like Adam, we blame other people to assuage our guilt…
Having drawn attention to how deeply human life and indeed human sin are affected by our relationships, Leithart proceeds:
Given the way God created us, salvation for the human race must take a social form… If He delivered us from individual sins without delivering us from the sinful ways we treat one another and the world, He would not be saving us from sin at all. If God is going to restore the human race to right order, He must form a society of the saved. If God were to delay the formation of this race until the end of time, then salvation would be delayed until the end of time. If there is no society of the saved in history, then there simply is no salvation in history. Salvation is still a distant, longed-for possibility. If salvation doesn’t take form in history, a social form in history, the gospel is untrue. If there is no community of the saved, salvation has not actually occurred at all.
From this as a turning point, Leithart makes extended argument that the vast majority of the New Testament’s language about the Church and the Body of Christ—including the many statements about being holy, united to Christ, full of the Spirit, elect, and more—clearly refers to the actual, flesh-and-blood community of Christ on earth, the visible Church with all its righteous, all its godly, all its hypocrites, and all its short-lived members who flee back to the world. If you are part of the earthly community, you are part of Christ.
Moreover, Leithart works to extend our usual array of benefits attributed to salvation. Many of the benefits are social and even political: we receive a shared mission, a new family to enjoy and rely on, gifts with which to edify each other, promises for a glorious future that include the Church’s influence over the nations. These are gifts, graces, from a loving God for His people in Christ.
Thus Leithart turns back to elements of the traditional ordo salutis to frame them sociologically as well. Justification means to be part of the community God counts as just for Christ’s sake. Sanctification is being part of the communion of the saints. Adoption is being part of the actual community of God, all the real flesh-and-blood people in the Church. Even regeneration is simply coming to share in the new life God has given this community. We are social beings, so, Leithart argues, “If our being is communion, then extraction from one communion and insertion into another is a change in our being. It is a new birth.”
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