foundations of systematic theology lesson

Transcript - ST408 Foundations of Systematic Theology© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 18 of 24ST408

Ecclesiology: The Nature of the Church

Foundations of Systematic Theology

In the last few lessons, we have studied the ordo salutis—that is, the list of doctrines showing us what God does in each individual life as we are united to Christ. In those lessons, we considered mainly the salvation of individuals—calling, election, regeneration, and so on—are events that happen to each individual. But in the Bible, salvation is more than that. In Acts 20:28, Paul tells the Ephesian elders, “Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which He obtained with his own blood.” Hear that? The church which Jesus obtained with His own blood. Jesus did not just die for individuals. He died for a people, a body, a bride, a church consisting of many people united in the bonds of a larger whole. So throughout the Bible, we read of God bringing to Himself not only individuals but also families—the families of Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Eventually that family becomes a nation, and God calls that nation to be His—to be His holy people. In the New Testament, that nation is the church of Jesus Christ.

Let’s look first at the Old Testament background of the church. As a community of people worshiping God, the church certainly goes back to the Garden of Eden. After the fall, Cain and Abel brought sacrifices to the Lord, so again there was the existence of a worshiping community. Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve, had a son named Enosh, and Scripture tells us that at that time—that is, the time of Seth and Enosh—“people began to call upon the name of the Lord” (Genesis 4:26). So there has always been a community of people on the earth worshiping the true God. But something special happened when God led Israel out of Egypt to meet with Him on Mount Sinai. As the people camped around the mountain, they did not see the form of the Lord, but the mountain was full of His presence. There were thunders and lightnings and trumpet blasts, thick clouds, smoke, the mountain itself trembled. The people had to wash themselves to be ceremonially clean in God’s presence.

John M. Frame, D.D.Experience: Professor of systematic theology

at Reformed Theological Seminary

Transcript - ST408 Foundations of Systematic Theology © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.


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Then God spoke words to them. This was the only time in history that the whole people of God had been assembled in one place to hear words directly from God’s own mouth. These words were the covenant that I described in lesson five. In that covenant, God gives His name, Yahweh—the Lord—then declares His previous mercies to Israel. He brought them out of the land of Egypt—the house of slavery. Then God set forth the Ten Commandments, the fundamental Law of the covenant. When the people heard these words, they were terribly afraid. They did not want to hear God speak to them anymore. They asked Moses and said, “You go up the mountain and talk with God and then tell us what He said. But we cannot bear to hear God’s voice anymore.”

In Deuteronomy—written sometime afterward—the wonderful and terrible meeting between God and Israel at that mountain is called “the day of the assembly.” The word “assembly” is qahal in Hebrew, sometimes translated “congregation.” In an important sense, this meeting is the beginning of the church. It was on this day that the nation of Israel became, by covenant, God’s holy nation distinguished from all the other nations of the world. God has redeemed them from Egypt. They are His treasured possession among all peoples (Exodus 19:4-5). They are a kingdom of priests and a holy nation (Exodus 19:6). Their constitution is the treaty called the Ten Commandments.

We hear these titles of Israel—kingdom of priests, holy nation—again in the New Testament. In I Peter 2:9, where the apostle says, “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for His own possession,” so the New Testament church, like Old Testament Israel, is God’s own special people. It’s the continuation of Israel. Significantly the Greek translation of Deuteronomy uses the term [ekklesia] church to represent the gathering of the people into God’s presence. Israel was the church of the old covenant. The New Testament church is the Israel of the new covenant, what Paul calls “the Israel of God” in Galatians 6:16.

Now there are some Christians called dispensationalists who believe that Israel and the church are two distinct peoples of God given different sets of promises. I believe Scripture teaches on the contrary that God’s people are one body the same in the Old and New Testaments. There is only one set of promises all of which are fulfilled in Jesus Christ. We can see this by the fact that the New Testament church bears the same titles that God gave to Israel in Exodus 19:5-6. We’ve seen those titles in I Peter 2:9. In Romans



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11:11-24, Paul speaks of the people of God as one olive tree. Some branches, unbelieving Jews, are broken off and believing Gentiles are grafted in, but there is one tree; not two.

Paul also teaches that there is to be no dividing wall in the church between Jews and Gentiles. Gentiles do not need to become Jews in order to be saved. This is the message of Galatians. They do not need circumcision. Rather they are Abraham’s children by faith, the Israel of God, part of one body in Christ. There is one family. So the Old Testament then belongs to the Christian church. Jesus is the theme of the Old Testament. Old Testament saints like Abraham are examples of the same faith that the New Testament speaks of (Romans 4, Hebrews 11), and they stand as witnesses to the life of faith. It’s even the case that Old Testament prophesies about Israel are fulfilled in the church. In Joel 2:28-32, the prophet says that God will pour out His Spirit on Israel. In Acts 2:17-21, Peter says that God has fulfilled this prophecy by sending His Spirit to bring first a large number of converts into the Christian church. Similarly, look at the other passages on your outline that apply Old Testament promises to the New Testament church.

I would like now to look systematically at the nature of the church, then discuss briefly the government of the church. Next lesson, we shall consider the church’s task, and in lessons 20 and 21, we’ll consider the means of grace and the sacraments. What is the church? Essentially the church is the people of God in all ages. Notice that the church is people, not buildings. I think it’s right that people have buildings in which to meet in which to worship, but the church is not the building. The church is the people. In one church I have attended, the worship leader typically welcomes the people at the beginning of the service and he thanks them for bringing the church into this room. That greeting epitomizes the biblical emphasis. The church is the people who come into the room; it’s not the room itself.

The church is not, however, just any people. It is the people in covenant with God through Jesus Christ. In one sense, the church is the elect—those joined to Christ in eternity past and through eternity future. In another sense, the church is the people who sincerely or insincerely have identified themselves with God’s people by profession and baptism. Don’t forget our earlier discussion that the visible church contains both elect and non-elect. The non-elect are covenant breakers not covenant keepers but they too are in the covenant. They are branches in the vine of Christ that will one day be broken off.



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This leads us to the distinction between the visible and the invisible church. This language is from tradition; not the Bible. But it does give us language to express the presence of both believers and unbelievers in the church. We should not take this to mean that there are two churches—visible and invisible. Rather these two terms are just different ways of looking at the same church—two perspectives. The invisible church is—to use Wayne Grudem’s definition—the church as God sees it. God knows who is truly joined to Christ by faith, for He can see people’s hearts. We cannot see this, for the heart of human beings is invisible to us. The visible church is the church as man sees it, though of course God sees the visible as well as the invisible. The visible church consists of all those who credibly profess faith in Christ with their children (more on the children later on).

When someone applies for church membership usually some elders examine the person to see if he understands the gospel and trusts Jesus as Lord and Savior. If the person is living in some sin that flagrantly contradicts the gospel, like worshiping idols in his home or living in a homosexual relationship, the elders should decline to admit that person to church membership. But, as we know, there are many sins that are hard for us to evaluate—greed, resentment, bitterness, and so on. People with sins like those usually find it easy to hide from human scrutiny. The elders can’t see all of those sins when someone applies for church membership, but they should do the best they can to determine not if the person is sinlessly perfect, for none of us is, but whether the person has made a sincere commitment to Christ. They cannot see a person’s heart, so visible churches do include some unbelievers. In fact, visible churches may include even some non-elect.

Are those unbelievers in the church? In one sense no, for they are not united to Christ in a saving way. So we say they are not part of the invisible church, but in another sense yes, because they have taken vows. They have become part of the covenant relation with God. God will hold them accountable, even those who take the vows fraudulently. They are members of the covenant, but they are covenant breakers; not covenant keepers.

Another important distinction concerns the geographic extent of the church. The word “church” in the New Testament refers sometimes to local, sometimes to regional, and sometimes to universal bodies. Locally the early Christians met mostly in homes, in house-churches. Regionally there was the city-church like the Church of Rome, of Corinth, of Antioch, and so on. We know



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that the church of Jerusalem, for example, had 3,000 members following the events of Acts 2, and later even more thousands were added. But it’s unlikely that those thousands worshiped together in the same place, so the city church is divided into house-churches. Yet there is a unity in the city-church. It is one church, and possibly the city church had a common government. Then there is the universal church, which is the whole body of believers throughout the world. On at least one occasion in Acts 15, the leaders met in Jerusalem to make decisions that were binding upon the entire church throughout the world.

Still another way to get an idea of the nature of the church is to look at the images that Scripture uses to describe the church. We’ve already looked at the idea of covenant from which we learn that the church is the covenant people of God. In the covenant, God is Lord and the church is His servant. Another important image we have already looked at is the family of God. This figure stresses the intimacy of life in the church. We saw in our study of the doctrine of adoption that God is our Father and the members of the church are brothers and sisters. Jesus is our older brother in Hebrews 2:11-12.

But there is an even greater intimacy in the metaphor of the church as the bride of Christ—a wonderful picture which we see in both testaments. In the Old Testament, Israel is the unfaithful wife of Yahweh. In the New Testament, the church is the bride who will be presented spotless to Jesus at the marriage supper of the lamb. And there is also the figure of the body of Christ. This metaphor stresses the unity of the church with Christ and the unity of each Christian with all the others. One part of our physical body is depended on the others, so every member of the body of Christ—each believer—depends on the others and the others depend on him. So we should work together as the arms and the legs and the head work together in a rightly functioning physical body. We are one body in Christ, the body of Christ, and therefore all the gifts that God gives to each of these, He wants us to use for the benefit of the whole body. In a somewhat different use of the image, Christ is the head distinguished from the rest of the body. This image encourages us to be subject to Him, to accept His direction.

Then there’s the temple metaphor. We are corporately the temple of the living God. Each of us is a living stone held together by Jesus the chief cornerstone. Scripture also speaks of each individual Christian as a temple of the Holy Spirit. We should not allow that



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temple to be defiled by sin. In a related figure, believers are priests serving under Jesus the High Priest. This is the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. The church is also the branches of the vine which is Christ. It is the olive tree from which some branches have been broken off and others grafted in. It is God’s field and it is the harvest brought forth from that field.

We should also look at the traditional attributes of the church. In the Nicene Creed, we confess to believing in one holy Catholic and Apostolic church. One holy Catholic and Apostolic—those are the four attributes of the church. The Roman Catholic Church interprets these adjectives in a somewhat self-serving way emphasizing its oneness against the many churches of Protestantism.; it’s holiness as seen in its masses and ceremonies; it’s catholicity, for it is the Roman Catholic Church; and it’s apostolicity, for it claims to have a priesthood in direct succession from the apostles by the laying on of hands from generation to generation. But the Nicene Creed was written centuries before the Catholic/Protestant division, so we should not assume that these adjectives were written with future Roman polemics in mind. We should rather ask what these words mean in the context of a biblical doctrine of the church.

First, the church is one. Paul teaches that it is one body in Christ with one Lord, one faith, one baptism. But Jesus prayed for the unity of the church in John 17. Both Paul and Jesus indeed anticipated disunity as a problem in the church. They knew that disunity was something we should pray about and try to eliminate. So, as some other concepts we’ve discussed in this course, the unity of the church is both a fact and a norm. God has made it one. The unity of the church is a fact, but He commands us to seek oneness, so the unity of the church is a norm, or a command.

The unity of the church is spiritual, but not only spiritual. It’s also, I believe, organizational. Jesus and Paul do not distinguish between spiritual and organizational as many do today. Rather they call us to seek unity in all these respects, to agree with one another, to love one another, to serve one another, to glorify one another as Jesus says in John 17, that He glorified the Father. The unity of the church is also organizational, for Jesus founded one church; not many denominations. He founded a church to be ruled by apostles, elders, and deacons and His word tells us to obey your leaders (Hebrews 13:17).



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When there are disputes within the church, Jesus gives us in Matthew 18 directions for resolving those disputes. We’ll talk about those later, but He never gives us the option of leaving one church and starting another, and that is what has happened, of course, in the history of denominationalism. I believe that denominationalism is an offense against God and that it has weakened the church’s witness. The rise of denominations is caused by sin, either sin of those who left the original church or sin of those who forced them to leave or most likely both. And if you want to hear more about that, look at my book called Evangelical Reunion, which is mentioned in your bibliography.

Second, after oneness, the church is holy. As I indicated in lesson 16 on sanctification, we are God’s saints, His holy ones. Paul regularly addresses the church as the saints. This does not imply that every member of the visible church is elect or even that any of them are sinlessly perfect, but we are God’s people. He has bought us to be His, to be associated with Him as His servants, sons, and daughters. Since God is holy, anyone associated with Him in these ways is also holy. We are the temple of His Spirit, and those who persecute Christians persecute the Lord.

Third the church is Catholic. That word simply means “universal,” although the Roman Church has tried to steal it away from the rest of us. This word means that the church does not belong only to one nation or race. In the Old Testament period, the church was closely associated with one nation—Israel—but in the New Testament, the church is scattered throughout the nations fulfilling God’s promise to Abraham that in him all the nations of the earth would be blessed.

Finally, the church is apostolic. This does not mean, as Roman Catholics think, that every elder must be in a historical succession going back to the apostles. The New Testament knows of no such succession nor does it suggest that the office of the apostle continues in the church today. It does tell us, however, that the early Christians “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship and to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42). The church must always be in fellowship with the apostles, believing the apostles’ teaching, and following the apostles’ example too as Paul says, “be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (I Corinthians 11:1).

Now let’s look at the nature of the church from another angle. Another tradition seeks to describe the church by certain marks. A



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mark of the church distinguishes the true church from everything else that is not the church. Especially it distinguishes the true church from false churches—churches that only pretend to be churches of Jesus Christ. This discussion arose especially during the Reformation Period where the church became very divided and questions arose as to which churches were true churches and which were not.

The Protestant Reformers generally acknowledged three marks: the true preaching of the Word, the right administration of the sacraments, and church discipline. We will look more carefully at these in later lessons. The first two of these marks come from Acts 2:42 which I quoted earlier. Now Acts 2:42 does not say that these are marks of the church, but certainly as we look at the New Testament teaching as a whole, it would be hard to conceive of any genuine church without these—the preaching of the Word and the right administration of the sacraments. The third mark was discipline, for it seemed that the first two marks were in jeopardy unless there were significant discipline to guard the true preaching of the Word and the right administration of the sacraments.

I think these marks are important, but it’s not always easy to apply them. Protestants differ, for example, as to whether baptism should be given to covenant children. Should Baptists therefore judge that Presbyterians do not rightly administer the sacraments and that therefore their churches are not true churches, or vice versa? Most Protestant denominations have not taken the principle this far, but how far should it be taken? As for the true preaching of the Word, how much preaching must I disagree with in a church before I consider it to be a false church? We should not pretend that these three criteria solve the problem of distinguishing true churches from false. And we should also ask, “Are these the only marks of the church?” Scripture does not say that any of the previous three are marks, but it does say that love is a mark. Jesus said, “By this all people will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35). Strange that love has been ignored in the discussion of marks. Perhaps if love and not only true doctrine had been recognized as a mark, the church would have been less characterized by theological battling.

A good case could also be made for worship as a mark. The church gets its very name from the worshiping community gathered around Mount Sinai. If it is not a body that gathers to praise the true God, it certainly is not the church, and worship is certainly



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more than the sacraments as we shall see.

And what of the Great Commission? This is the central task of the church to evangelize and nurture as we’ll see in the next lesson. How can the church possibly be the church if it is not doing this? And who else does this except the church? So I think a good biblical case can be made for worship, love, and the Great Commission as marks of the church, and if you tie those in with my threefold labels, worship would be the normative perspective; love, the existential perspective; and the Great Commission as the situational perspective. The Great Commission, of course, includes the preaching of the Word, and worship includes the sacraments. Discipline is a form of love, so my triad of marks is broader than the older triad and it includes them and it seems to be important that we recognize these marks in their broader form.

Finally, I would like to present a summary discussion of church government. Jesus gave certain powers to the church. He did not give any church the right to use physical force to accomplish its tasks. As theologians say, He did not give the church the power of the sword; only the civil government has that power. But He did give to the church the sword of the Spirit—the Word of God. No matter how much people despise the Word of God, it is the most powerful force on the face of the earth (Romans 1:16). Jesus also gave to the church what He called the “keys of the kingdom of heaven.” That is, the church has the authority to say who belongs to the covenant and who does not. It has the power to admit people to the fellowship and to cast them out.

We usually refer to the power of the keys as the power of church discipline. Scripture takes discipline in the church very seriously. In I Corinthians 5, the apostle Paul says five times that a church member guilty of serious sin—incest in this case—should be cast out of the church—excommunicated. We rarely hear of excommunication today except in the Roman Catholic Church. People usually think that excommunication is an ancient and outmoded practice and very cruel. If the church represents the love of Christ, people ask, how can they ever throw anyone out? But discipline is biblical. It can be more or less serious from excommunication at one extreme to admonition or rebuke for lesser sins, but every church ought to practice it.

There are at least three purposes of discipline. The first is to restore a sinning believer. That is discipline aims not merely to punish but to turn the offender away from his sins, to turn him



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to repentance. Discipline is for his good for his sake. So church discipline is not a cruel thing but a loving thing. Secondly discipline exists to deter such sins by others, to instruct the congregation as to what is and is not acceptable. Third, discipline exists to protect the honor of Christ and His church. When churches ignore sin, the world despises them and the reputation of Jesus Christ Himself is dragged through the mud. Instructing, honoring Christ, and helping the offender, normative, situational, existential.

The first form of discipline is teaching. The church must make clear what behavior is acceptable to God, and it must present the gospel in such a way as to motive obedience. Remember that people aren’t motivated by denunciations and scolding nearly as well as they are motivated by the love of Jesus for them and the joy of living a godly life. Matthew 18 lists the steps of discipline in cases where the teaching of the church has not had its desired affect. If someone sins against you, says Jesus, sometimes you should ignore it, of course, for love covers a multitude of sins. But sometimes you just can’t, so Matthew 18 tells us to go to the person who has sinned against you. Don’t gossip about him but go to him. If that doesn’t lead to reconciliation, then go again and take a witness with you. If that doesn’t work, go to the church—that is, the ruling body. They are authorized to make a decision whether the person is guilty or innocent. And if the person is guilty, whether the person should be admonished, rebuked, removed from office, or excommunicated, that’s also the decision of the ruling body of the church.

Not all sins should be the subject of formal discipline. Indeed we sin so often that most of them cannot be. Romans 14 talks about some disagreements in the church such as disagreements over vegetarianism and over the observance of special days that are not to be resolved by formal discipline but rather by Christians of different views living together in love. The sins to be disciplined formally are sins against individual brothers in the church, as in Matthew 18, and the outward scandalous sins like the man who was sleeping with his father’s wife in I Corinthians 5.

Now a bit about the formal structure of church government. There were three kinds of officers in the New Testament church. The highest office was the apostle. The apostles were those who had seen the risen Christ and were appointed by Him to be the official witnesses to His resurrection. Scripture doesn’t suggest that that office continues past the original generation of apostles. Certainly as time passes, it would eventually have been impossible



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to find people who had seen the risen Christ and who had been appointed as official witnesses.

The next office has various names in the New Testament. I believe that the words “elder,” “pastor,” and “bishop” are interchangeable titles of the same office. This is the ruling office. It is the elder who is charged with setting and administering the rules of the church subject to the Word of God. Among the elders, some are official teachers—those who labor in preaching and teaching as Paul puts it in I Timothy 5:17.

Then there are the deacons. Little is said about their role in the church, but traditionally they have been associated with the seven men in Acts 6 who were appointed to the ministry of mercy. They are not called deacons in Acts 6, and some people think that the seven people of Acts 6 were ruling elders in effect. But nevertheless, there was an office called “deacon” that’s described later on in the New Testament, particularly in I Timothy 3:8-13 where Paul sets forth the qualifications of deacons. The qualifications of deacons are largely spiritual and moral and they’re identical to the qualifications of elders with the exception that elders are required to be apt to teach and deacons are not. These three offices fit in with our threefold analysis that we’ve discussed in previous lessons.

The apostle is normative, for his teaching governs all the teaching the church for all generations. The elder is situational, the one who applies the apostles’ teaching to all the situations and problems in each church. The deacon is existential, the one who ministers Jesus’ love to people in need; the one who makes the temple—the house of God—into a home, into a family, into a community of love.

Now there have been three main theories of how these offices are to function. We call them historically Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and Congregational. In the Episcopal system—found in the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of England, the Worldwide Anglican Communion, and various other churches called Episcopal—churches in a region are under the authority of one man called a bishop. The word “Episcopal” comes from the Greek word for bishop. The bishop has the power to consecrate and to appoint other officers following the model of the apostles in Acts 14:23 and Titus in Titus 1:5.

In the Presbyterian system—common in churches that are called

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Ecclesiology: The Nature of the ChurchLesson 18 of 24

Reformed as well as Presbyterian—there is a plurality of elders for every church. Presbyterian comes from the Greek word for elder. These are elected by the people. The elders meet as the ruling body in each particular church, and the elders of a region meet together as a broader court dealing with the ministry of the whole area. Usually once a year all the elders in the denomination, or a representative group of them, meets as a general assembly, or synod, to resolve questions of importance to the whole church as the apostles and the other leaders of the church did in Acts 15.

In the Congregational or independent system—often found in Baptist churches as well as Congregational churches and independent churches—there is no church government beyond the individual congregation. The local governing body may be called elders or deacons or there may be both elders and deacons. There may be voluntary organizations of churches involving meetings of elders similar to a presbytery. Those organizations may give advice and mutual assistance, but they have no authority to compel a local congregation to do as they wish.

In my judgment, Scripture doesn’t teach us clearly that one of these is right or what other alternatives there may be. I personally believe that the Presbyterian system offers the best balance of authority and freedom. Episcopal churches face the dangers implicit in one-man rule, and Congregational churches give the local church no court of appeal when things go wrong locally. The Presbyterian system avoids these dangers, but the well-being of the church has more to do with the work of the Spirit than with the form of government. That should seem obvious, but that is a point we need to keep making. No form of government has shown itself adequate in itself to keep churches on track doctrinally and practically, so we need to be much in prayer for our churches and much in prayer for the churches leaders that these leaders will have a double portion of the Spirit—the Spirit’s wisdom and grace and peace.

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