Getting the Gospel Right

The Tie That Binds Evangelicals Together

R. C. Sproul

• Publisher: Baker Books
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9781441231512
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Études bibliques

Unity in the gospel is essential to the witness of the church. Yet that unity was tested by the release of two documents, Evangelicals and Catholics Together and The Gift of Salvation, which appeared to surrender the historic doctrine of sola fide (faith alone). In response, Christian leaders released a statement called The Gospel of Jesus Christ: An Evangelical Celebration.Getting the Gospel Right, a companion to Sproul's popular Faith Alone, contains the complete text of that statement along with thorough, point-by-point discussion and exposition, to make a strong declaration of the abiding unity of evangelicals regarding the gospel and justification by faith alone.

Part 1: Controversy Concerning the Gospel

1
Unity and the Gospel

I BELIEVE IN THE COMMUNION of the saints. . . .” This affirmation is declared weekly by myriads of Christians assembled for worship in congregations around the world. It is a crucial affirmation of the Apostles’ Creed. That the communio sanctorum is an article of catholic Christianity, a universal article of historic Christian faith, underlines the gravity of its importance to the people of God.

This confession has several important aspects to it. Among these is the recognition that Christians from every tribe and tongue and nation, from varied and diverse ecclesiastical communities, enjoy a unity of fellowship that is supernatural in its cause and in the reality of its very essence. A communion is a union with something. In this case it is a union with people. The specific people in view in the creedal affirmation are called “the saints.” The reference to “saints” is not restricted to those few extraordinary Christians who have been canonized by a specific institution or who have the title “saint” before their names, such as St. Paul, St. Peter, St. Augustine, St. Francis, and St. Thomas Aquinas. Here the term saint is applied to all believers, following the nomenclature of the New Testament, in which rank-and-file Christians are addressed as “saints” or “the holy ones” (hagioi).

Those who are called saints in the New Testament are not so-named because they have achieved a singularly high level of righteousness or a unique degree of sanctification. They are called saints because they have been “set apart” or consecrated to a holy mission and belong to a holy fellowship by virtue of their inclusion in the body of Christ. They are the people who have been regenerated and indwelt by the Holy Spirit. In a word, they are the elect of God from every nation.

The Visible and Invisible Church

The distinction between the visible and invisible church of Christ owes much of its definition to the thinking of St. Augustine, bishop of Hippo in North Africa, who is generally regarded as the greatest theologian of the first millennium of Christian history, if not of all time. Augustine sought to expound the teaching of Christ and His apostles regarding the biblical metaphor of tares and wheat who coexist in the visible or outward congregations of Christian churches. The Bible clearly indicates that it is possible for people to make a profession of faith and unite themselves to a congregation while not actually possessing the faith they profess. Christ spoke of the facility by which people can honor Him with their lips while their hearts are far removed from Him (Mark 7:6). He warned in the Sermon on the Mount that on the last day people will say, “Lord, Lord” whom He will dismiss from His presence with the dreadful words, “I never knew you; depart from Me” (Matt. 7:23). In like manner James expounded the problem of those who declare they have faith but whose faith is moribund, yielding no fruit and displaying no works consistent with genuine saving faith (James 2:20).

Augustine’s concept of the invisible church was not an ancient paradigm for an underground church or for a few loose groups of people who do not join or participate in the life of an organized church or community of believers. For Augustine the term invisible church refers substantially to people who are inside the visible church. It refers to those within the visible church who are the wheat rather than the tares. It incorporates all who are in Christ Jesus. There are not two separate bodies, one inside the visible institution we call the organized church, and the other outside the parameters of the institutional church. Again, the invisible church is to be found within the visible church. We note, however, that Augustine spoke of the invisible church’s being found substantially within the visible church. This differs from saying that the invisible church is contained exclusively within the visible church. Augustine recognized that for various reasons at various times, some members of the invisible church may not be within the visible church.

How is it possible for a person to be in the invisible church but not at the same time in the visible church? In the first instance we can point to individuals who have the desire to unite with a visible church but who are providentially hindered from doing so. Suppose, for example, a person is converted to Christ. On the way to join a local church, he is hit by a car or suffers a fatal heart attack and dies before he has the opportunity to do so. We think immediately of the thief on the cross who embraced Christ in his dying moments (assuming he was not a believer before that time) and received the comforting assurance from Jesus that he would soon join Jesus in paradise (Luke 23:43).

A second category includes people who in their spiritual infancy mistakenly believe it is not their duty to unite with a visible church. They may remain in error for a season, even though they are truly converted.

A third category includes those for whom there is no available visible church to join. This may involve prisoners in solitary confinement, those held in concentration camps, or people who live in isolated wilderness spots remote from any body of believers.

A fourth category includes believers who have been excommunicated from the visible church. It might surprise some that this category is even included. But it must be for the following reasons. First, the person may be the victim of an unjust excommunication. That is, the church may have erred in her judgment of excommunication and cast out a member who is wheat, mistaking him for a tare. Second, the person may have justly and properly been excommunicated while in a protracted period of impenitence, even though he is truly converted. Excommunication, among other things, is a final step of discipline for church members, but it carries the hope that it will lead the person to repentance, with him being restored to full fellowship. The classic case is the incestuous man of the Corinthian church (1 Cor. 5:1). While in the state of excommunication, the person is to be regarded as an unbeliever, yet with the understanding that the church can only look at the outward appearance while God alone can read his heart.

A fifth category includes those who are in the invisible church but are united with false or apostate visible institutions that claim to be churches. This category has posed a serious problem for the church of all ages. In antiquity heretical movements arose such as Montanism, Arianism, and Monophysitism, the leaders of which were declared heretics and banished from the visible church. Not all of these heretics went away quietly. Often they continued their false teaching and organized followers into “churches.” Some of these heretical bodies captured true believers in their fold, at least for a season. This category recognizes that a member of the invisible church may for one reason or another be enrolled in a false visible church, which in reality is not a church.

Probably at no time in church history was the question more acute than during the catastrophic upheaval of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. This resulted in the most severe fragmentation of the visible church in the history of Christendom. When Martin Luther was excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church, was he therefore outside the invisible church? When Protestants organized into various groups such as Baptists, Lutherans, Reformed, and Episcopalians, were these groups valid churches or false churches? And what of Rome? Many of those who left the Roman Catholic Church in the sixteenth century did not hesitate to declare Rome apostate and therefore no longer a true church.

The issue became for Protestants not so much the question, what is the true church? Instead it was, what is a true church? Rome continued to assert that she was not only a true church, but the true church. That assertion was strongly challenged by Protestants. Again the challenge was not simply that Rome was not the true church, but that she was no longer a genuine visible church at all.

When Is a Church Not a Church?

In the ensuing years following the outbreak of the Reformation, various communions and sects arose that went in widely different directions. The question of what is a sect, a cult, or a bona fide church became critical to many people who earnestly desired to be faithful to Christ but found it difficult to discern the marks of a true visible church. Out of this conflict and the reflection it provoked came the historic Protestant view of the marks of a true church: (1) the preaching of the gospel, (2) the due administration of the sacraments, and (3) the presence of church discipline (which included some form of ecclesiastical government necessary to that end).

The first mark was conceived in terms of not only the practice of preaching but also its content. In this regard the criterion was intensely theological. The concept of the “gospel” included the content of truth that is essential to biblical Christianity. For example, the content included the major tenets of historic Christian orthodoxy such as the Trinity, the deity of Christ, the atonement, and the resurrection. These affirmations were embodied in the classical creeds and confessions of the ancient ecumenical councils such as Nicea and Chalcedon. If an organization that rejected essential elements of historic, catholic Christianity claimed to be a church, this claim was rejected. In modern terms we ask the question, Is the Church of the Latter Day Saints a true church? Is the organization called Jehovah’s Witnesses a true church? Certainly Mormons claim to be a church. Not only that, but they claim to be a Christian church. Jesus has a prominent role in their religion. He is venerated and elevated to a position of honor. Mormons even speak of having a “personal relationship” with Christ. Yet both Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses categorically deny Christ’s deity. Likewise the Trinity is denied by some groups organized as churches, such as the Unitarians.

Those who adhere to the marks of the church as formulated by the Protestant Reformers do not accept the bodies mentioned above because, not only are they infected by theological error or heresy, but their errors and heresies involve the rejection of truths or doctrines essential to biblical Christianity. These institutions, though claiming to be churches, are regarded as false churches, sects, or cults by orthodox Christianity.

Is it then possible for a true Christian to be a member of any of these institutions? The answer must be yes. Not every member of an institution affirms everything the institution formally affirms, or denies everything the institution denies. It is possible for a person to be a member of a Mormon community and still believe in the deity of Christ, just as it is possible for a person to be a member of a visible church that affirms the deity of Christ while privately rejecting this doctrine.

As late as the nineteenth century at Vatican Council I (1870), Rome referred to Protestants as schismatics and heretics. The tone of Rome changed dramatically in our own day at Vatican II (1965), where Protestants were referred to as “separated brethren.” This was not a tacit recognition that Protestant churches are valid, but a clear affirmation that true believers can be found in institutions that have separated from Holy Mother Church.

When the Reformers declared Rome apostate and no longer a true church, they did so not because Rome denied the Trinity, the deity of Christ, His atonement, and His resurrection, all of which were deemed of the esse or essence of Christian truth, but because Rome condemned the doctrine of justification by faith alone or sola fide. The Reformers believed that sola fide is an essential truth of biblical Christiani...