Why I’m Not Reformed Post 3:

I’m continuing to explore the thesis, put forth originally HERE on ‘Fitch’s provocations,’ that the theology of the Reformation has not aged well as a theology that could shape the North American church for mission. The theology of the Reformation (in which I include both Luther and Calvin) emphasized certain truths (such as ‘justification by faith’) to the de-emphasis of other truths, and then expanded on them for the crisis of European Catholicism at the time. This theology proved powerful as an expression of the gospel and theology for the church of Europe 15^th century. It was contextual theology at its best. But, when transported across the ocean, uprooted from its Christendom context, this theology does not translate well into the North American multi-cultural post-Christianized world we live in today. I argue it actually works in many ways against the church in mission.

In the previous post, I talked about the way the Reformation’s theology of Scripture – the doctrine of Sola Scriptura, did not transfer well for the times of mission we’re living in. In this post I close in on the Reformation distinction of the visible/invisible church, and the way it works against mission today.

The Emergence of the Visible/Invisible Church Distinction:

The Reformation articulated a new understanding of the church – ‘the visible versus invisible church’ as part of their emphasis on salvation through Christ Alone – Sola Christus.

The Reformation of course came into being as a reaction to the corruption of the Medieval Catholic church. Luther was declared a heretic and excommunicated from the “one true church.” And so Luther, and his many followers, were left churchless. And the Reformation was forced to answer the question: what is the true church? And can one be saved apart from it? It all led to the Reformation’s distinction between the visible/invisible church.

Faced with a corrupt institutional church, that claimed salvation could only be attained from within its institutional practice, the Reformers claimed that the one true church is invisible. The true church was the faithful spiritual body of believers across time known only to God. Meanwhile the institutional church must surely carry on the organized practice of the sacraments, ministry and mission of the church. But this institutional church inevitably contains true believers alongside those who practice the faith in rote only. The visible church is inevitably compromised containing both the faithful and the apostate. It is the conundrum of the visible/invisible church.

This doctrine of the visible/invisible distinction solved a few problems for the Reformation. It countered the Roman church’s claim to be the one true church apart from which no one can be saved. It set the medieval person at ease fearful they were condemned to hell if they had challenged the Catholic church. Furthermore, it emphasized the true saving faith of the Christian over the authority of the church to grant salvation. Reformers could now be saved outside the Roman church. But 500 years later, now transported overseas, this distinction creates new problems because it presents the conditions for a lack of a visible social witness amidst a post-Christianized culture. In other words, this distinction works against mission.

The History of the Doctrine

The Reformation cannot be blamed entirely for the origin of the visible/invisible church distinction. Augustine in City of God, famously said, “there are many sheep without and many wolves within.” He makes a distinction between the true body of Christ, which consists of the elect children of God from the beginning, and the mixed body of Christ, which includes all the baptized.[i] Augustine however never actually used the “visible-invisible church” distinction. It was the Reformation that did that and pushed the issue to the forefront. In particular, Luther, Zwingli, Wycliffe, and even Calvin put forth this distinction as a necessary understanding in response to the Roman Catholic church doctrine.[ii]

One hundred years after the Reformation, the influential Westminster Confession of Faith stated: “The Church, which is invisible, consists of the whole number of the elect. . . . The visible Church, (which is . . . not confined to one nation, as before under the law), consists of all those throughout the world that profess the true religion and of their children.” In this confession, the visible church of Christ has been given the ministry, oracles, and ordinances of God, for the gathering and perfecting of the saints. Then it provides the additional qualifier: “The purest Churches under heaven are subject both to mixture and error; and some have so degenerated, as to become no Churches of Christ, but synagogues of Satan.”[iii]

In early versions of Westminster, the Pope was called the Antichrist and identified as an example of a false Christian in the visible church.[iv] Westminster also identified the Protestants excommunicated by Rome during the Reformation as “true Christians” that were not part of the only visible Church at that time and place. In this way again, the push for visible/invisible church distinction served the Reformers as a corrective to the Roman doctrine of the Middle Ages (from Cyprian): “Extra ecclesiam nulla salus” (No salvation outside the church).

Instead of the church as the only way to salvation, Luther asserted Sola Christus, salvation is through Jesus only. In Luther’s words “What I am telling you is that it is easier for us humans to believe and trust in everything else other than in the name of Christ, who alone is all in all, and more difficult for us to rely on him in whom and through whom we possess all things.”[v] According to Luther, the Roman Catholic Church had clouded the gospel by adding assistants and helpers into the mix of a person’s salvation. Rome preached a gospel of “Jesus and . . . ”: Jesus and Mary, Jesus and purgatory, Jesus and the saints, Jesus and works of charity. For Luther, the Reformers needed to clear the fog by ridding the church of these helpers of salvation. Sola Christus!

What Happens When This Doctrine Moves to North America

But, hearkening to Bonhoeffer, the invisible/visible church distinction is fine when the backdrop of the Reformation is one monolithic Christianized culture out of which the church is established. Here the Reformed distinction of the visible/invisible church makes it possible to call people who have become comfortable in their status as a member of the monolithic church/culture to a more faithful discipleship. But separated from this Christianized culture, it has the reverse effect. It now makes it possible to be a Christian without the church. Five hundred years later in the multi-plural and the divided world of the secularized West of the twenty-first century, this malforms the church for witness in at least two ways.

First, we no longer have a visible way of life by which our witness to the world can be located and seen in a way of life by a watching world. By de-emphasizing the participation in the body politic of the church as the shaper of being a Christian, we lose the social reality of the church as witness. In a post-Christianized, secular and a pluralized world, we cannot argue our way to witness, because there is no single monolithic rationality.[vi] The gospel therefore must be displayed in a compelling way of life through visible social bodies in order for there to be witness. In Stanley Hauerwas’ words, “The gospel is . . . a seeing of a communion between people the world cannot otherwise know.”[vii] The malformation of the invisible/visible church distinction therefore leaves us without this kind of essential witness in a post-Christianized society.

Second, without the church as a visible social body we no longer have a way of life in which our language can make sense in the pluralist post-Christianized parts of North America. Truth, in a non-hegemonous world, with no dominant culture, where meanings and language can no longer be assumed, must have a community within which the words are used, and can be made sense of. Whereas the capacity to be freed from church institution and social embodiment was a positive in the Euro-Christendom Reformation, it is now a hardship in post-Christian society, because we increasingly find ourselves in a world that no longer understands our words like “sin,” “salvation,” “justice,” and “Jesus as Lord.” And we have no social world called church in which to use these words and from which they can make sense to an onlooking world.

Perhaps I exaggerate a bit? Nonetheless, I contend that the invisible/visible church distinction in this day injures our ability to display what words mean via a practiced way of life in a pluralist world. In the words of Hauerwas, “Protestant churches in America lost the ability to maintain the disciplines necessary to sustain a people capable of being an alternative to the world.”[viii] In a post-Christianized world, where we can no longer assume cultural habits sufficient to shape Christians, where the church’s practices have become diminished and consumerized, we by default are now individuals being formed by the practices of a post-Christianized culture. The loss of such a set of practices we call church has left us without a formation for witness. We just blend in. This I suggest is an unintended consequence of the Reformation’s emphasis on the invisible/visible church distinction some 500 years later.

The Neo-Anabaptist Corrective to the Visible/Invisible Distinction

The Neo-Anabaptist trajectory counters this lack. It starts with the assumption that Christians are a minority in a post Christendom world. The alignment with nation-state and/or cultural power is an anathema. It is not the way God works to redeem the world.[ix] Therefore, Christians must locate their own cultural identity and way of life in a political alternative: the church. It is church, as a visible way of life, that makes possible witness in the world to the way God works. The first task of the church, therefore, is to be the church, a contrast visible community as witness to the world.[x]

Thus, Neo-Anabaptists have traditionally focused ecclesiology on practices.[xi] Practices, not separated from beliefs but in conjunction with beliefs, become the starting point for shaping a community that is formed around and in mutual submission to the presence of Christ. Contra the Reformation, which so often founded their churches on Confessions and written catechisms, the Anabaptist stream starts with practices into which we live what we believe and shape how we articulate it anew. More than a confession or belief statement, these practices form a way of life by which we reconcile conflict, read the Bible together, disciple one another, and exercise leadership within the gifted community. These include thick practices of life together such as the way we eat, share economics, discern life together, recognize leaders, and engage the world through resistance and cooperation. All of this generates a way of life that enables a neighborhood to actually Jesus as Lord at work among a people, and His victory over sin, death, and evil. This kind of ecclesiology can be a resource for reinvigorating the visible church as the foundation for mission in the new post-Christendoms of North America.

In North America, in the face of cultural upheaval, in the face of a consumerized church discredited by its abusive pastors and its compromised alignment with a decadent president, it seems to me this Neo-Anabaptist practice of being witnessing communities of the Kingdom, is the way forward. It is the way of mission that overcomes the individualized Christianity spawned by the Reformation’s visible/invisible church distinction landing in North American evangelicalism.

If this is the first post you’ve read in this series, I urge you to go back and read the prior posts HEREand HERE. And I have one more post coming in this series. If you’re interested in being notified, make sure to subscribe to my substack below. It’s free. And as always, comments are much appreciated and I’ll respond as best I am able.

[i] As cited by Schaff, History of the Christian Church, 7:457. Available online:https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/hcc8.iv.xiii.iii.html

[ii] Wycliffe used the distinction in order to critique the hierarchy. With Wycliffe, “visible” carried the connotations of “ostentatious” and “fleshly.” The earliest use of the terminology itself is in Zwingli around 1530. See Peter Leithart on this in his “Augustine on ‘Visible-Invisible Church.’” Brad Gregory states Luther originated this idea apart from Wycliffe, Zwingli, etc. See Gregory, Rebel in the Ranks, ch. 1 footnote 67.

[iii] Westminster Confession of Faith, XXV.VI.I–II.

[iv] Westminster Confession of Faith, XXV.VI.

[v] Luther, The Complete Sermons of Martin Luther, 79.

[vi] MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

[vii] Hauerwas, “Beyond the Boundaries,” 68. In the same vein, Anaan Baan argues that Hauerwas correlates what Wittgenstein means by “showing” to witness. The Necessity of Witness, 85-86.

[viii] Stanley Hauerwas, “The End of American Protestantism,” ABC Religion and Ethics, July 2, 2013.

[ix] I build out this case in David Fitch, ‘Reckoning with Power, Brazos 2024.

[x] Hauerwas’ famous line in this regard is “The first task of the Church is not to make the world more just but to make the world more the world.” It can be found in numerous places. See his discussion of it in Hauerwas, The Work of Theology, 26.

[xi] I build out this case in David Fitch, What is the Church?, Herald Press 2021, and David Fitch, Faithful Presence, IVP 2016.