A New Critique of Theoretical Thought. Deel 3. The Structures of Individuality of Temporal Reality

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Chapter IV
The structural principle of the temporal church-institution

§ 1 - Introduction. the basic problem of the relation between the ‘ecclesia invisibilis’ and the ‘ecclesia visibilis’¹ in Roman-Catholicism and in the reformers.

From the outset Christian thought related the idea of the Christian State to the idea of the ‘una sancta ecclesia’. So long as the Church was conceived in its supra-temporal religious fulness of meaning as the body of Christ, this conception was the only one possible.

1 I adopt the traditional indication of the transcendent corpus Christi and its immanent temporal manifestation as ecclesia invisibilis and ecclesia visibilis respectively, because I want to restrict my deviations from the prevailing terminology to what is strictly necessary. But I cannot say that I think this terminology particularly felicitous. It has been derived from the metaphysical antithesis between noumenon and phenomenon (even Dr A. Kuyper, Encycl. der H. Godgeleerdheid III, p. 191 uses these terms). However, we need not at all interpret these terms in a speculative sense. Calvin did not do so, nor does Kuyper use the terms noumenon and phenomenon in this connection in a speculative sense. In any case the terms ‘ecclesia visibilis’ and ‘invisibilis’ are to be preferred to the new terminology proposed by Kattenbusch in his work Doppelschichtigkeit in Luthers Kirchenbegriff and by Brunner in Das Gebot und die Ordnungen, viz. ‘Kirche des Glaubens’ (Kirche im Grundsinn) and ‘Kultgemeinde’. The conception implied by this terminology unambiguously absolutizes the temporal community of faith to the transcendent root of the Church. The ‘cult community’ as an ‘empirical community’ is not conceived of in its only possible sense of a temporal community of faith in its common cult but is opposed to the community of faith as the empirical versus the transcendent, hidden Church (cf. Brunner, op. cit., p. 521). This fideistic standpoint falsifies the structure of the temporal Church-institution. Its consequences are apparent in the entire view these writers take of the conception that the Reformers had concerning the relation between the ecclesia visibilis and the ecclesia invisibilis.

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There should not remain any doubt about this in the mind of those who place themselves on the Biblical standpoint¹.

St. Augustine was not wrong when he held the State which had been separated from the body of Christ, to be part of the civitas terrena. Neither was he wrong when he considered the body politic as a divine institution and not sinful as such, although human apostasy is apparent in the historical realization of its structural principle.

The reason is that this sinful human formative activity cannot affect the inner nature of the State as a divine institution. In line with Reuter and Gierke, St. Augustine's basic thought has often been fundamentally misrepresented, because the internal structural principle of the State, and human positivation and actualization of this structural principle, as a subjective activity, were not properly distinguished. Moreover, Augustine himself has given occasion to misunderstanding since he did not properly distinguish the Church, as the kingdom of Christ in the hearts of men, from the temporal Church institution. This was why he held to the erroneous opinion that the State can only become Christian by subjecting itself to the guidance of the institutional Catholic Church. In this respect his famous work De Civitate Dei laid the foundation for the medieval view of the Holy Roman Empire, with its secular and spiritual sword, under the supremacy of the latter.

1 It was also Calvin's view; this has been elaborately demonstrated by Bohatec in his Die organische Idee in der Gedankenwelt Calvins, translated under my supervision and published in the periodical A.R. Staatkunde, 2e jrg. 1926, pp. 362 ff.

The deviation from the Christian view of the State and the Church starts with the universalistic absolutizing of the temporal Church-institution. The Roman-Catholic conception of the Church.

In this medieval view the ‘ecclesia visibilis’, as the temporal manifestation of the ‘ecclesia invisibilis’ (i.e. the supra-temporal body of Christ), was already identified with the temporal Church institution. The latter was assumed to have the transcendent fulness of power and the all-embracing scope of the ‘ecclesia invisibilis’. This was at the same time the beginning of a deviation from the Christian conception of the State.

This universalistic conception of the Church institution was the erroneous starting-point of the scholastic theory of human so-

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cietal structures. In an earlier context we have shown that it involved a compromise with the classical Greco-Roman view of the State as the perfect whole of human society inclusive of the public religion¹. Fundamentally it was a manifestation of the ‘carnal desire’ to deify the temporal Church-institution, to give the temporal authority of the Church dominion over the souls of the believers, and to guarantee the temporal Church the supremacy over the whole of societal life, including the secular government. Of course the universalistic conception of the Roman Catholic Church developed since Gregorius VII recognised that the hierarchical ecclesiastical institution is only the temporal manifestation of the ‘ecclesia invisibilis’. But the ‘ecclesia visibilis’, viewed as the hierarchy of a sacramental institution of grace, with its monarchical culmination in the papacy, was as such supposed to transcend all the ‘secular’ societal relationships, and to embrace the whole of Christian life. In this universalistic conception the Church-institution is absolutized to the perfect Christian society.

Thomas Aquinas only gave this medieval view a new foundation in the scholastic basic motive of nature and grace and adapted the former to the Aristotelian metaphysics and politics. The dogma of papal infallibility, promulgated in 1870 (by the Vatican Council), transfers Christ's absolute authority to the temporal institution as a hierarchical official organization. The conception of the seven sacraments, as the supra-natural means of grace of the Church-institution, is essentially connected with the Roman-Catholic view of the supra-natural power of the hierarchically organized clergy. The indispensable requirement for carrying through this conception was the assignment of a real sovereign governmental character (not derived from the State) to the official hierarchy.

At the same time the ecclesiastical juridical community had to be modelled on the public juridical organization of the State², an imitation strongly favoured by the medieval conception of the Holy Roman Empire. And finally it was necessary to subordinate all secular authority to that of the pope. The universalistic curial conception of the institutional Church obtained its sharpest

1 Cf. Vol. III, pp. 150 ff.

2 Accordingly the pope has legislative authority, the highest judicial authority, the supreme administrative authority, the competence to impose taxes and to appoint ambassadors to foreign secular courts.

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formulation in the famous bull Unam Sanctam (1302) of Boniface VIII, which summarized the theory of the two swords as follows: ‘The one Church has only one head. One flock, one shepherd. This shepherd has two swords, the spiritual and the secular sword (Luke 22:38). The secular sword must be maintained for the benefit of the Church; the spiritual sword must be maintained by the Church; the spiritual sword by the priesthood, the secular sword by kings and soldiers, but in accordance with the will of the priest and as long as he allows it. The secular authority is subject to the spiritual. For Divine Truth teaches us that the spiritual power must institute the secular and pass judgment on it, if it is not right...’¹.

1 Hefele, Conciliengeschichte VI, 346.

The relation between the ecclesia visibilis and ecclesia invisibilis according to Luther. The influence of the nominalist-dualistic separation between ‘nature’ and ‘grace’.

Against this absolutization of the Church-institution, the Reformation engaged in a fundamental struggle. But the relation between the ‘una sancta ecclesia’ and the internal individuality-structure of the temporal institutional Church remained a problem which could not be solved in a really Biblical sense so long as the scholastical basic motive of nature and grace was not abandoned in principle. Luther's view of the Church started from the supra-temporal ‘invisible’ Church, whose only Head is Christ. This was the Biblical conception of the Reformers generally. The ‘invisible Church’ is the true body of Christ but, as such, it has no temporal organization. Therefore it can never coalesce with the temporal institution. The important question was: what is the true relation and connection between the ‘ecclesia invisibilis’, and the institutional ‘ecclesia visibilis’ as an organized community? The point at issue was the temporal organization of the institutional Church and its individuality structure. Luther held that the Church is at once visible and invisible. He thus related the ‘ecclesia visibilis’ to the ‘ecclesia invisibilis’. The Augsburg Confession says that the Church is ‘the congregation of saints and true believers, in which the Gospel is rightly taught and the sacraments are rightly administered’².

In its ‘essence’ the Church is invisible. In its temporal manifestation as a ‘congregation’, it has its ‘visible marks’ as the true

2 Conf. Aug. VII, R. 11.

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Church in the pure preaching of the Word, in the just and Scriptural administration of the Sacraments, and in the fruits of faith. But only the faith aspect of the temporal Church has been considered here. The historically founded internal organization of the institution has not yet had due attention, so that the structural principle of the Church-institution remains unexplained. From the outset Luther was caught in a dualistic scheme when he had to conceive the relation between the Church, in its qualifying aspect of a community of faith, and its internal institutional organization.

His difficulty originated from the nominalistic dualistic separation between ‘nature’ and ‘grace’. The temporal Christian community of faith is unexpectedly lifted out of the temporal world-order and hypostatized to the ‘supra-natural’, which has no internal connection with the ‘natural’ order. The ‘essence’ of the Church as a Christian community of faith, with its visible signs of a right administration of the Word and the Sacraments, is contrasted with its internal institutional organization. The latter is said to belong to the merely natural earthly forms of life. On the other hand the hypostatizing of the faith aspect of the institutional Church as ‘congregatio fidelium’ threatened to weaken the organized institution by favouring the formation of sectarian conventicles. These consequences can be clearly demonstrated in the evolution of Luther's views on this subject. But we cannot enter here into a detailed analysis of the latter¹.

The great Reformer remained fully aware of the fact that the institutional Church embraces both true believers and hypocrites, who cannot be distinguished by means of external criteria. Yet after his breach with Rome he inclined to favour the formation of conventicles, to constitute an ‘ecclesiola in ecclesia’ that was to contain ‘true Christians’ only. The idea of the ‘congregatio fidelium’, originating from the nominalistic trend in the Conciliar Movement of the XVth century, assumed an unmistakable individualistic character here. The institutional communal

1 Cf. the summary of this development in Dr. H. Bouwman, Ger. Kerkrecht (1928) I, p. 199. Recent investigations in the domain of Church history, instituted by Holl and others, have brought to light so many facts about Luther's development that Troeltsch's exposition, of Luther's standpoint in his famous work Die Soziallehren der Christl. Kirchen und Gruppen, must be considered obsolete. This does not mean that we agree with recent attempts to accommodate the opinions of Luther and Calvin by eradicating their differences.

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operation of the Word and the Sacraments recedes into the background for the sake of group-formation based on personal rebirth and conversion¹.

These ideas really tended to sectarianism, and very soon Luther had to give them up. His experiences in the peasant revolt made it clear to him that it was necessary for the ‘ecclesia visibilis’ to have a strong order and organization. But now it appeared that his dualistic starting-point did not enable him to conceive the internal structure of the organized Church institution in its unbreakable coherence with the Church in its central religious sense. He looked upon the temporal arrangement of the Church, the ‘äusserliche Gemeinde’, as a merely external juridical organization. In his opinion this temporal order is not internally connected with the spiritual essence of the Church, and Holy Scripture gives no binding norms for it².

Therefore he could provisionally leave the church organization to the sovereign without any fundamental objection. The secular government, the Protestant lord of the country, was appealed to - though from necessity³ - to give the Church its organization.

The secular authorities had to establish and to maintain the legal order; this was their task and office. The lord of the country, as ‘praecipuum membrum ecclesiae’, had thus to supplement the purely internal spiritual order of the Church with a compulsory secular legal order. This ‘external’ authority was, however, to be exercised in accordance with the ministry of the Church⁴.

1 His attitude is characteristically revealed in his motivation why he could not yet realize his plan: ‘Aber ich kann und mag noch nicht eine solche Gemeinde oder Versammlung ordnen oder ausrichten. Denn ich habe noch nicht Leute und Personen dazu; so sehe ich auch nicht viele, die dazu dringen.’ [But I cannot and must not yet order or establish such a congregation or assembly. For I do not yet have the people for it; nor do I see many who urge me to do so.]. (Luthers Werke, Braunschweig, 1892, VII, p. 168).

2 Luther explicitly declared this in his Vom Papstum zu Rom wider den hochgerühmten Romanisten zu Leipzig (June 1520).

3 Cf. Bouwman, op. cit. I (1928) p. 205; compare also the view of Karl Holl, Ges. Aufsätze I, 349. A different opinion is held by Kattenbusch, Die Doppelschichtigkeit in Luther Kirchenbegriff, pp. 94 & 101.

4 Luther turned to the Elector of Saxony with the request to institute visitation. The Elector then established a ‘kurfürstliche Visitation’ and composed an instruction. The visitors became his officers and were only responsible to him. Thus the territorial Church government was introduced, although it was certainly not in line with Luther that the Elector exercised this government as a sovereign chief of the Church.

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In the Lutheran territorial Churches consistories were introduced, which were ecclesiastic organs instituted by the lord of the country. They had the power of imposing secular public juridical penalties, which was no doubt contrary to Luther's own views¹. But the difference was not fundamental when considered from the standpoint of the juridical organization of the Church². Luther looked upon ecclesiastical law as the external work of man that was unconnected with the internal essence of the Church³. His only concern was that the legal rules and the form of government should not affect the pure doctrine and the right administration of the sacraments. But he did not see that there is an internal sphere of ecclesiastical law in which the inner nature of the Church institution itself finds a typical expression. In this way it was of course impossible to conceive the internal structural principle of this institution.

1 Cf. Sohm, Kirchenrecht I, pp. 542-633 and K. Müller, Ueber die Anfänge der Konsistorialverfassung, Hist. Zeitschr. B. 102, pp. 1 ff.

2 Cf. Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der Christl. Kirchen und Gruppen (1919), p. 517/8 note 235.

3 Therefore Luther's ideas about the possibility of giving the congregation the right to elect the Church officers and the task of maintaining doctrinal discipline are not of fundamental importance. (Cf. Luther's Werke, Braunschw. VII, 139).

The episcopal system.

Meanwhile the older Lutheran conception of Church government, prevailing until the end of the seventeenth century, was still based on a sharp distinction between jurisdictio ecclesiastica and jurisdictio saecularis. The former chiefly consisted in maintaining the purity of the ecclesiastic doctrine and should be executed by the protestant lord of the country only in accordance with the wishes of the ministers as the real office bearers (the ministerium). Theologically the external authority of the secular sovereign within the Church was justified by an appeal to the position of the Christian sovereign as the guardian of the two tables of the decalogue. In this capacity the magistrate was the ‘praecipuum membrum ecclesiae’⁴.
The first jurists who specialized in the scientific study of Protestant ecclesiastical law were the brothers Joachim⁵ and Matthaeus Stephani⁶. They ignored the theological arguments for the secular Church government and tried to find a positive juridical justification. In a modified form this construction was connected with the older

4 Cf. Melanchton, Loci (Corpus doctrinae Lips., 1561), p. 640.

5 Institutiones juris canonici (1604).

6 Tractatus de jurisdictione (1611).

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theological view since Reingkink. Owing to the peace of Augsburg (1555), episcopal Church government in Protestant countries had been delayed until the religious struggle had been settled. According to the brothers Stephani this Church government ad interim had devolved upon the Protestant sovereigns as an extension of the jus advocatiae, introduced at the time of the Frankish monarchy. Already before the brothers Stephani, jurists had followed this construction¹. The Stephani's, however, drew certain conclusions from this: they distinguished two different persons in the sovereign, viz. the sovereign qua talis, and the sovereign as the representative of the bishops ad interim. The sovereign has secular authority jure proprio, but he has episcopal or ecclesiastical authority only on account of a special imperial concession (concessione imperatoris), as a merely provisional authority lodged with him only instar depositi until the settlement of the religious differences.
This juridical construction is at present called the ‘episcopal system’² and in line with Theodorus Reingkink it was henceforth connected with the older dogmatic theological construction of the sovereign as ‘praecipuum membrum ecclesiae’ and ‘custos utriusque tabulae’. This view was then justified by an appeal to the ‘nature’ of the matter and to Holy Scripture. As a result the juridical construction of the Stephani's was considerably changed.
The episcopal authority was now considered to be an illegal usurpation. The arrangement of the religious peace was not thought to be a provisional concession (devolution), but a final restitution to the sovereign of his natural rights within the Church.
This theologically and juridically founded episcopal theory was elaborated by Gerhard, Carpzovius, and others, to the famous doctrine of the three ‘estates’, clearly oriented to a universalistic conception of the temporal Church relationship. The Church consists of the civil magistrate (the ‘status politicus’ or governing class), the class of the fathers of a family (‘status oeconomicus’) and the ministry (‘status ecclesiasticus’). Only the last of these three possess internal Church authority proper, because they only have to judge of questions of doctrine according to the Scriptures. The secular government only possesses a potestas externa in the Church. This external power consists of the maintenance of public worship, the institution of the ministry, the convocation of synods, the suppression of idolatry and heresy, the punishment of unchristian conduct and the enforcement of decisions concerning doctrine and liturgy. The class of the family fathers have potestas communis and are to form their own opinion by means of independent study of the Scriptures. Without their consent the government or the ministers could not impose any iudicium on the family fathers³.

1 Sf. Stahl, Die Kirchenverfassung nach Lehre und Recht der Protestanten (2e Aufl. 1862), p. 5 note 4.

2 Stahl, too, is in favour of this system in his book cited above.

3 This theory has been elaborated in the clearest and completest way by Carpzovius in his Diss. de jure decid. theol. controv. (1695).

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The attempt made in this theory to distinguish the internal Church authority from the secular, and to bind the former to Holy Scripture was doubtless praiseworthy. Nevertheless, the juridical aspect of the Church as an institutional community continued to be viewed as external political. And the doctrine about the three ‘estates’ clearly betrays its origin from the late medieval nationalist view of the Church.
The distinction between internal and external jurisdiction lacked a sharp juridical signification, at least insofar as this theory did not recognize that the internal church authority has an original legal competence independent of the secular government.

The territorial system.

This was the vitium originis of the Lutheran episcopal theory which made it an easy prey to the Humanistic natural law theories of the territorial system and the collegial system.
The territorial system ousted the episcopal system chiefly under the influence of Thomasius, and was inspired by the desire to guarantee ecclesiastical tolerance to pietists by the sovereign power of the State¹. Thus the contrast between internal and external official authority in the temporal institution of the Church was radically abolished. All organizational authority in the latter was merged into that of the territorial sovereign and the ministry were denied any influence on Church government. The secular government has this power in its own right, and according to Thomasius' natural law conception, the secular authority in ecclesiastic affairs has the exclusive task to maintain the external peace in the Church. The maintenance of doctrinal discipline in the latter was in principle made impossible. It is true, J.H. Böhmer, the most important defender of this system, made room in the government of the Church for the settlement of controversial doctrinal questions. But, entirely in accordance with Thomasius, this establishment of the doctrina publica was only intended as a means to safeguard the external peace within the Church in the interest of the State. This was the reason why that task was solely entrusted to the secular governors ‘sine concursu necessario Theologorum².

1 Cf. Stahl's elaborate discussion, op. cit., pp. 15 ff. Thomasius' Humanistic idea of tolerance was in no way in accordance with the views of Spener c.s.

2 Jus ecclesiast. prot. lib. I. lit. 1 § 32 sqq; quoted by Stahl, op. cit., p. 21.

The collegial system.

Finally the collegial theory destroyed the last remnants of the insight into the specific structural character of the Church-institution. This theory had been founded by Christoph Matthaeus Pfaff, and was carried through in the German territorial Churches in the second half of the eighteenth century. It seemed to favour the liberty

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of the Church, but conceived of this institution as a mere ‘societas’, a ‘social contract’ in accordance with the individualistic natural law scheme. The Church was construed as a free private association or society composed of individuals having the same religious faith. In this association every norm and authority was founded in an agreement made by the members. The relation between the Church and the State was defined in the same way as that between the State and all other free private associations. The State has the sovereign authority over the Church, the jura majestatica including the competence of reformation, the supreme control and the protection of the ecclesiastical community. The Church possesses the jura collegialia including the contractual establishment of dogma, the regulation of the liturgy, the ordaining of the ministry, the contractual enactment of ecclesiastic regulations, and the maintenance of discipline.
The majority has the power to decide upon everything. There is no longer any question of the believers as such having any authority, let alone of Christ's kingship in the institution.

Zwingli's conception of the institutional Church. Bullinger and Erastus.

The Lutheran view of the Church could not do justice to the internal structure of the latter as an institution. Zwingli¹ finally also delivered the organization of the ecclesiastical institution to the State, because he had an insufficient insight into the internal structural principle of the temporal organization. In line with Luther, the Zürich Reformer started from the ecclesia invisibilis, and later on characterized it as the community of the elect. This conception, however, became blurred through the influence of a Humanist ‘universal theism’. Only the ‘visible Church’ has an organization. This organization was considered as an essential characteristic of the ‘ecclesia visibilis’. Here Zwingli differed from Luther and opposed the sects. The visible Church consists of the assemblies of local congregations (the ‘Kilchhören’)².

Only the institutionally organized local Church is to be viewed as a Church assembly invested with authority. But the actual organization and the whole of the internal ecclesiastic government were left to the reformed lord of the country to be exercised in

1 Cf. Schulthess-Rechberg: Luther, Zwingli und Calvin in ihren Ansichten über das Verhältnis von Staat und Kirche (1909); and Gottschick: Zeitschr. f. Kirchengeschichte, Bd. VIII, pp. 590 ff.

2 In a great many places the ‘Kilchhören’ are called members of the universal ecclesia invisibilis because they take the Word of God as the standard of their ecclesiastical actions. Cf. Gottschick, op. cit.

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accordance with the congregation, not ‘jure suo’, but ‘in Namen der Kirche’ (in the name of the Church). This is why Zwingli and the adherents of his ecclesiastic juridical views like Bullinger and Thomas Erastus, were sharply opposed to the Calvinistic conception of church discipline.

According to the latter, ecclesiastic discipline is the peculiar competence of the Church as an institution. According to the Zwinglian view the ministers have no other duty than that of exhortation and admonition, but the power of the keys of the Church lacks any internal juridical sense.

Calvin's conception of the Church institution.

Calvin was indeed the first to conceive the ecclesia invisibilis (as the ‘mystic body of Christ’, the assembly of the elect) in close connection with the internal structure of the Church institution as a temporal societal relationship. It is true that the Genevan reformer could not struggle free from the traditional conception of the Christian State in which only the ‘organic’ bond with the Church could give the political community its Christian character. But in his conception of the Church this view does not play a part. He was the first to infer the nature of the temporal Church institution, as a real organized community, from its internal structural law, revealed in the New Testament. He does not only distinguish the institution from the ‘ecclesia invisibilis’ but conceives it as essentially connected with the invisible Church. On the one hand his conception of the institutional Church is purified from the Roman Catholic idea of hierarchy, which concentrated all ecclesiastic power in the clergy. This is done by the principle of Christ's absolute authority, exercized through Christ's Word and Spirit, a principle already clearly explained by Luther. On the other hand Calvin lays full emphasis on the essential importance of the internal Church organization, in its unbreakable relation to Holy Scripture and the confession of faith.

Precisely because Calvin had in principle broken with the dualistic basic motive of ‘nature’ and ‘grace’, he could no longer leave the internal organization of the institution to the secular power as an indifferent, worldly concern. He is keenly alive to the fact that the internal communal law of the Church is essentially dependent on the exceptional structure of this institution. From the basic thought of Christocracy in its application to the structural principle it necessarily follows that the

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Church also has sovereignty within its own sphere in a juridical sense. As the institution is a real organized community, its internal structure must express itself in all the aspects of its actual existence. The structure of authority in this societal institution cannot be conceived exclusively in its qualifying aspect of faith, with the abstraction of all its other modalities, as Luther did. This authority also has its juridical, moral, economic, aesthetic, historical, psychical aspects, etc.

As Calvin takes full account of the structural principle of the Church institution, as a real organized community, his view is not one-sidedly spiritualistic. This is the reason why, unlike Luther, he does not look upon the Church institution exclusively as a ‘Heilsanstalt’ (an institution of salvation), but recognizes its functions belonging to its specific communal structure in all the spheres of human societal life¹. It also explains why Calvin, like Johannes à Lasco, could justify his plea for the necessity of the internal organization of the Church by an appeal to every other organized community². But with respect to the disposition of the four offices as well as to the manner in which he wanted to let the congregation share in the election of Church officers, he was exclusively guided by the structural law of the Church institution, as he found it described in the New Testament. This is the fundamental difference between Calvin's view and that of the secularizing nominalistic trends in the period of the Renaissance.

Needless to say that authors like Kampschulte, Marcks, Dilthey, Sohm and Thompson have fundamentally misunderstood Calvin's view by interpreting it as a theory of people's sovereignty, a political democracy and a modern system of representation³. This is perfectly clear from a study of the basic

1 This peculiarity has been emphasized by Hundeshagen (Zeitschr. f. Kirchenrecht, Bnd. 1, p. 455) and K. Rieker, Grundsätze reformierter Kirchenverfassung (1899), p. 68.

2 Cf. Institutio religionis Chr. IV, 11, 1: ‘Quemadmodum nulla urbs nullusve pagus sine magistratu et politia stare potest: sic ecclesia Dei... sua quadam spirituali politia indiget.’ In the same spirit Johannes à Lasco expresses himself in the first part of his Forma ac ratio tota ecclesiastici ministerii (ed. Kuyper II, p. 45).

3 Kampschulte, Joh. Calvin I, p. 269/270: ‘Das vornehmste Recht der kirchlichen Gewalt, die Excommunication, dürfen die Geistlichen nicht ausüben ohne Hinzuziehung der Vertreter der Gemeinde: noch viel weniger darf diese Strafe von einem Einzelnen verhängt werden. Es war nur consequent, dass die Souveränität der Gemeinde in der Ausübung dieses wichtigsten kirchlichen Rechtes auch in besonderer Weise äusserlich zum Ausdruck gelangte.’ [The clergy are not allowed to exercise the principal right of ecclesiastical authority, viz. excommunication, without consulting the representatives of the congregation. Still less may this punishment be inflicted by one single individual. It is only consistent that the sovereignty of the congregation should find special external expression in the exercise of this most important ecclesiastical right.] The view of this Roman Catholic writer that Calvin seeks the sovereignty over the Church in the collective will of the Church members is shared by Erich Marcks, Gaspard von Coligny I, 1, p. 296 ff; also by Dilthey in the essay Die Glaubenslehren der Reformatoren (Preuss. Jahrbücher, Bnd. LXXV, p. 79) and by Sohm, Kirchenrecht I, p. 649 Anm. and pp. 653 ff.; Stahl is also inclined to this view when he says that in Calvin the general priesthood of the believers is the constitutive element of the church ordinance, in contrast with Luther's conception. Rieker rightly contradicts this, op. cit., p. 141.
R.E. Thompson, A History of the Presbyterian Churches in the United States, p. 286 and Sohm, op. cit., pp. 653 ff. assert that in the presbyterial organization of the Church the elders are the representatives of the congregation, in the modern sense of the political representative system in the State. But Rieker, op. cit., pp. 141 ff. has conclusively refuted these views.

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principles of Calvin's conception of ecclesiastic organization explained in the fourth book of his Institutio.

§ 2 - The transcendental limiting character of the individuality structure of the church institution. the church as an instrumental institution of regenerating grace, and the problem of church and sect.

The radical type of the temporal Church institution.

Already in its radical type the internal structure of the Church institution assigns a unique and exceptional position to this community. There is no doubt that it has its qualifying function in the aspect of faith (i.e. it can only find its leading function in a temporal community of belief subject to the Divine revelational norms), and that it must display a typical historical foundation. But this merely radical typical qualification is not a sufficient definition of the essential Christian character of the Church institution¹. Every differentiated religious community necessa-

1 This theoretical definition of the radical type of the institutional Church is not meant by us as an attempt to subsume this relationship under a higher logical genus as a pseudo-general concept. In his Enc. der H. Godgel. III, p. 191 Kuyper makes some excellent remarks against such an attempt, which are entirely in agreement with our own conception. But that the temporal Church-institution must have a radical type founded in the temporal order of creation cannot be doubted from the Biblical standpoint. It is only the scholastic basic motive of nature and supra-natural grace which led to the denial of this truth.

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rily has it qualifying radical function in the modal law sphere of faith. But even the merely modal circumscription of this leading function suffices to show that the domain of the structures embraced by this radical type, occupies a unique position in temporal human society.

In the general theory of the modal law-spheres the function of faith has been proved to possess a transcendental limiting character. Even in its apostate closed condition, this function necessarily refers to a revelation of the divine Origin of the creation. And we have seen that even in its modal meaning-kernel it points to the central religious sphere of human existence, which transcends the temporal order. Therefore, every societal structure qualified by the modal aspect of belief must display this transcendental limiting character, which does not belong to any other type of organized community. It is true that other types of societal relationship also function in the second limiting aspect of the temporal order, but none of them is qualified by the function of faith. Also in the modal sphere of belief their own structural principle is maintained, and in this principle their typical leading function as such lacks the transcendental limiting character.

The individuality-structure of the Church-type is thus found within the radical type of historically founded societal structures with a pisteutic qualification. When we examine this Church-type, we at once understand why it is only possible as a temporal manifestation of the ecclesia invisibilis. Every attempt to approach the structure of the ecclesiastic institution theoretically has, therefore, to start from the Christian confession of the una sancta ecclesia in Jesu Christo. The transcendental Christian limiting character of this institution dominates its structure.

It is impossible to speak of a real Church if it lacks the temporal institutional (though defective) manifestation of the supra-temporal body of Christ¹.

1 Emil Brunner has an excellent remark on this point, op. cit., p. 521: ‘Sie’ (i.e. the institutional Church-community) ‘muss sich der Welt gegenüber wenigstens als Erscheinungsform der Kirche dokumentieren...’ [The organized institution must at least document itself before the world as manifestation of the Church...].

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A non-Christian State, a non-Christian marriage and family community, etc. may retain their original character as a State, a marriage and family community, etc., although they do not manifest any Christian faith. A non-Christian Church, however, is a contradictio in terminis, as surely as a non-Christian Christian community of faith is self-contradictory. We do not mean a merely logical self-contradiction, but one that is precluded by the internal structural principle. The temporal Church institution may degenerate and fall a victim to all kinds of sin and error. But the structural principle of a Church makes it impossible for us any longer to recognize as a Church any so called ‘religious’¹ community that has really completely fallen away from the Divine Word-revelation in Christ. For this structural principle characterizes the temporal Church institution as a manifestation of the supra-temporal corpus Christi. If this internal vital law is set aside, the internal unifying bond of this institution cannot be realized. Then the term ‘Church’, if it is maintained, does not correspond in any way to the inner nature of the community to which it is applied. A State, a family relationship, etc. remain within the boundaries of their structural principle, in spite of their subjective apostasy from the Christian root of life. But the individuality-structure of the temporal Church has a transcendental limiting character which does not allow of an apostate isolation from its Head, Jesus Christ.

According to its internal structural law, the Church institution is an institutional manifestation of the ‘gratia particularis’.

1 The term ‘religious’ is here meant in the sense of ‘qualified by the modal function of faith’.

The relation between ‘particular’ and ‘common grace’ reconsidered.

Again we are confronted with the problem concerning the relation between ‘particular grace’ and ‘common grace’.

In an earlier context we have defined this relation as follows: particular grace directly concerns the supra-temporal root of mankind, whereas common grace remains restricted to temporal life. But we stressed the Christo-centric standpoint that common grace has its root and centre only in Christ as the incarnate Word. We opposed any kind of dualistic theory of specific ‘spheres of grace’, which is essentially nothing but an after effect of the dualistic basic motive of ‘nature’ and ‘grace’. But

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now it might be asked: ‘If the Church, as a temporal organized community, is recognized as an institution of particular grace, do not we then run the risk of identifying this temporal institution with the supra-temporal ‘corpus Christi’? And on the other hand, is there not a risk of eradicating the difference between common grace and particular grace, if, in line with Dr. A. Kuyper, we make a sharp distinction between the ‘Church as an institution’ and the non-institutional manifestations of the corpus Christi in temporal life, which Kuyper, in a really confusing terminological way, styled ‘the Church as an organism’?¹

These questions are of a fundamental character and may not be considered as merely theological problems. For the Biblical basic motive of Christian philosophy is at issue here. The terms ‘special’ and ‘common’ grace have been introduced into Reformed theology. But this terminology is a little scholastic and must lead us astray as soon as it is interpreted in the sense of the scholastic basic motive of nature and grace, which has retained a great influence in protestant theology. It may easily induce us to think of ‘gratia specialis’ as concerned with a ‘special supra-natural sphere’ of an inner spiritual life of grace, and of ‘gratia communis’ as embracing the ‘general sphere’ of ‘natural human life’ qua talis. But such a view would contradict the radical and integral meaning of the Biblical basic motive of creation, fall into sin, and redemption.

‘Gratia specialis’ or ‘gratia particularis’ really refer to the radical change brought about by Christ Jesus in the apostate root of the whole temporal cosmos, which is concentrated in mankind; therefore this ‘particular’ grace bears a radical-universal character. Already in the present dispensation this radical change of direction in the root of life must necessarily reveal itself in temporal reality, in its conserving effect as well as in its regenerative operation. Its conserving effect is primarily manifest in the preservation of the temporal world-order by God in Christ Jesus, as the Head of the Covenant², so that the disintegrating effect of the fall into sin in temporal life is checked.

God does not renounce His creation, not even in its subjective apostasy. He maintains the temporal structures, which cannot find their creaturely root, their religious centre, in the spirit of

1 Cf. A. Kuyper, Enc. der H. Godgeleerdheid (2e druk 1909) III, p. 204.

2 Christ is the Head of the Covenant also before the Incarnation, viz. as the promised Mediator.

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darkness, the spirit of apostasy¹. It is true that the temporal world-order with all its diversity of structures belongs as such only to the law-side of creation, and is related to the central commandment of love as its religious radical unity. But this divine order both in its temporal diversity and radical religious unity would be meaningless if it were not realized. Therefore it necessarily refers to Jesus Christ, who has come to fulfil it in its religious fulness of meaning. In the full Scriptural sense of the word Christ Jesus is the ‘second Adam’, in Whom nothing of God's creation can be lost. Only in Him all the nations of the earth are blessed according to the testimony of the Scriptures. Only in Him is God willing to have mercy on his fallen creation, and only in Him can the conserving effect of common grace have its creaturely root. Outside of Him there is no Divine grace, no ‘common grace’ either, but only the manifestation of God's wrath on account of sin. This conserving common grace also embraces the apostate, dead members of mankind for the sake of the full and true human race, included in the ‘corpus Christi’, in the ‘ecclesia invisibilis’².

‘Special grace’, which we had better call ‘renewing’ or ‘regenerating grace’, only embraces the ‘ecclesia invisibilis’, i.e. reborn mankind. This renewing of meaning of God's creation in Christ, cannot remain hidden in time, but necessarily reveals itself as the root of the temporal conserving grace as well. The temporal manifestation of the ‘ecclesia invisibilis’ pervades temporal society in all its structures. It is found wherever the Christian attitude to life expresses itself in a temporal form. Thus the deeper unity between conserving and regenerating grace finds expression in every sphere of human society, insofar as it reveals the influence of the Christian spirit, and not merely in the Church institution. This is what Dr. Kuyper meant by his view of the ‘Church as an organism’, in which he clearly and fundamentally opposed the dualistic separation between ‘special’ and ‘common grace’. The term ‘Church as an organism’ had better be replaced by the expression ‘temporal manifesta-

1 Therefore, it is not sufficient to relate ‘common grace’ only to the Triune God as its Origin. For then the question about the creaturely religious centre of this grace remains unanswered.

2 Cf. Jesus' parable of the tares and the wheat which must grow up together till Judgment Day, that the wheat may not be pulled out together with the tares.

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tion of the body of Christ in all societal relationships’, but in this broad sense it also embraces the temporal institution.

It is evident that the ‘ecclesia visibilis’ in this universal sense cannot be identical with the temporal Church institution. This institution remains bound to its specific structural principle and could only make its appearance after Christ's coming into the flesh. The temporal revelation of the ‘corpus Christi’, in its broadest sense, on the other hand, embraces all the societal structures of our temporal human existence, and made its entry into the world at the first manifestation of the antithesis between the civitas Dei and the civitas terrena.

The temporal Church institution as the instrument of renewing or regenerating grace.

We shall now try to answer the question how we can recognize the temporal Church institution as the institution of ‘gratia regenerativa’ without identifying it with the supra-temporal body of Christ. The institutional Church, as a temporal organization, has been instituted by Christ within the modal and radical typical structures of temporal reality given already at the creation¹.

By conserving temporal grace (the so called ‘common grace’), these structures are preserved from the disintegrating operation of sin. But unlike the State, the institutional Church is not a special institution of conserving grace, because by virtue of its leading function, as the institutional community of believers in Christ, it has not been ordained to embrace believers and unbelievers alike in one temporal community. Naturally, every institutional Church community can have many members who only formally belong to it and do not belong to the ecclesia invisibilis. It is beyond human power to establish which of the members of a Church are really Christians and which are so only in name. Nevertheless, as to its inner nature the Church institution embraces only those who have been included in the New Testament Covenant by baptism and (when they are adults) by their confession of faith. And in comparison with the other temporal societal relationships revealing the ecclesia invisibilis, the institutional Church insofar occupies an exceptional position as it is qualified as a Christian community of faith.

1 Cf. also Dr. Kuyper's excellent exposition in his Enc. der H. Godgel. III, p. 211.

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In this sense the Church institution is really a particular institution of renewing or regenerating grace. The offices and functions instituted in this Church are typically qualified according to their internal structure as instruments of the working of the Word of God and that of the sacraments in the community of the Christian believers. But regenerating grace also reveals itself in the institutional Church as the true root of temporal conserving common grace. For in this institution the structure of the function of faith, implanted in the human race already at the creation, is again opened to the Divine Word-revelation in Christ Jesus, disclosing the true meaning of the belief-aspect, as the second terminal aspect of human experience. This function of faith belongs to temporal human existence as such, and its structure remains intact through conserving grace, notwithstanding apostasy.

The institutional Church-type and the sect-type. Troeltsch's view of both.

Meanwhile, the very fact that the Church institution can only exist as a temporal community of Christian believers raises a new fundamental problem.

This problem may be formulated as that of the relation between a Church and a sect. Already at an early date this problem disturbed the Christian Church in its institutional manifestation. In the modern ‘religions-soziologische’ studies of Max Weber¹ and Ernst Troeltsch² this question has again been discussed from a viewpoint which was supposed to be dogmatically unprejudiced. Troeltsch explicitly declares that his theoretical inquiry into the structure of churches and sects is oriented to the ‘formal tendency’ in sociology introduced by Simmel³.

Weber's special standpoint and his own methodology cannot be discussed here in more detail since it would demand an ample critical treatise. In the present context I shall restrict myself to Troeltsch's view of the relation between church- and sect-types, as it is explained in his book Die Soziallehren der Christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen. Here he calls Church and sect two independent sociological types, implied in what he styles the ‘reli-

1 Cf. especially Max Weber's treatise: Kirchen und Sekten in Nord-Amerika (Christl. Welt, 1906, pp. 558 ff. and 577 ff.), which had a great influence on Troeltsch's view.

2 Die Sociallehren der Chr. Kirchen und Gruppen (1919), pp. 358 ff.

3 Op. cit., p. 364 note 164.

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gious sociological basic scheme of Christianity’, with its radical tension between individualism and universalism. In this way the ‘sect’ loses all trace of being inferior to the Church and becomes a sociological type perfectly equivalent to the church type. Important moments of the oldest stage of Christianity, pushed in the background within the church-type, find renewed expression in the sect-type, albeit in a one-sided way.

As an organized community the Church is a supra-individual institution (‘Anstalt’), an organized permanent institution of saving grace. One becomes a member of this community at birth, and is immediately included in its ‘Wunderkreis’ (supra-natural circle) at baptism. The official organization remains the bearer of the treasure of grace, independently of accidental personal unworthiness on the part of the office-bearers. These institutional traits make it possible to compromise with the existing ‘worldly ordinances’; for notwithstanding all the faults and defects of the persons, the sacred character and the divine nature of the institution remain unaltered. Through its inherent miracle-working power the Church will conquer the world according to the divine promise.

The Roman Catholic hierarchical institution is the purest embodiment of this type, which naturally implies the universalistic ideal to subject all existing secular temporal societal relationships to its own authority. These relationships are incorporated into the Church as a lower, previous stage of the Christian community of grace.

But now it is necessary to relativize the absolute evangelical standards. For this purpose the latter are combined with the Stoic and Aristotelian conceptions of the lex naturalis. So Troeltsch's theoretical church-type is the incarnation of the universalistic synthesis between the ‘supra-natural Christian religion of grace’ and the ‘natural’ societal order. Such a compromise can only be philosophically justified by means of a synthesis-philosophy like that of Thomas Aquinas. Sociologically the church-type in some form or other always aims at an ‘ecclesiastical-civil organization of human society, and at an ‘ecclesiastical cultural unity’. In this culture the institutional Church takes charge of the whole of ‘natural’ society, both in its political and non-political structures. This sociological type is considered to be the necessary consequence of the universalistic factor in the sociological basic scheme of Christianity, which aims at conquering and renewing the world.

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The sect-type explicitly relinquishes the idea of the Church as an institution of saving grace independent of the personal qualities of its officers; consequently it also abandons the universalistic social ideal of world government by the spiritual authority of a hierarchically organized clergy.

A sect prefers a voluntary community to an institution, because it is a condition of a real communion of believers that the latter join deliberately of their own free will. Such is compatible only with an associational form of organization. This implies that everything depends on the personal dignity of the cooperating individuals. The sect community does not incorporate any one at his birth but exclusively on account of his personal conversion. This community is not Christian or sacred because of the objective guarantee of an institution, with its sacraments of grace, but because of the personal Christian attitude of life of the individual members. Consequently the sect-type can only form small groups. Such a small community wants to derive its social ideal exclusively and purely from the Gospel and Christ's commandment of love, without stooping to any compromise with existing secular ordinances. Those secular societal ordinances that are incompatible with the evangelical societal ideal are not recognized, but either avoided in Christian patience, or openly opposed in an enthusiastic eschatological attack, launched to replace them by a purely Christian order¹.

Troeltsch considers this sect-type as the sociological consequence of the second or individualistic factor in the religious sociological basic scheme of Christianity.

One aspect of Jesus' teaching is this radical individualism which emphasizes the eternal and infinite value of the individual personality as a child of God.

All differences in social position lose their meaning in comparison with this value of the individual person, who has direct communion with God without the intermediary of any institution.

1 Die Soziallehren der Chr. Kirchen und Gruppen (1919), p. 362, 372 ff; pp. 427 ff.

Critique of Troeltsch' conception of the church- and sect-types.

Troeltsch' conception of the relation between the church- and sect-types briefly summarized above stands and falls with his

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view concerning the ‘religious sociological basic schema of Christianity’, which itself is dependent on the starting-point of his ‘Religionssoziologie’. The latter is rooted in the historicistic immanence standpoint, according to which theoretic thought has to view the Christian religion, and all the temporal manifestations of the ‘corpus Christi’ in societal life, merely as historical sociological phenomena. Their subjective meaning-content has to be approached according to a supposedly dogmatically unbiassed scientific method¹. This method uses such ‘formal sociological ideal types’ as ‘church’ and ‘sect’, which are mere subjective schemes of thought and have not been based on the internal individuality-structures of the communities concerned. These schemes are supposed to be deducible from the subjective historical phenomena, whose rational tendencies are purposely overstrained and idealized in order to understand their subjective meaning-content ‘zweck- und wertrational’².

Thus the inner nature of the temporal Church-institution is replaced by a schematic subjective ‘ideal type’. Such a type is thought to be derivable from a particular moment of the ‘religious-sociological basic scheme’ of the historical phenomenon ‘Christianity’, and its rational subjective effects in historical development. The ‘ideal type’ is then imposed on the phenomena as the church-type and used to interpret all real church-formations as historically determined nuances of one and the same basic sociological schema.

It stands to reason that in such a scientific attitude a truly normative structural idea of the institutional Church, ruled by the Biblical basic motive itself, cannot play any rôle. Instead, the kingdom of Jesus Christ in the hearts of men is interpreted in the sense of a universalistic sociological conception of the temporal Church-institution, inspired by the dialectical scholastic basic motive of nature and supra-natural grace.

In this way Troeltsch' ideal type church is completely oriented to the medieval Roman Catholic view of the Holy Roman Empire under the papal supremacy. The primordial question as to whether this conception of the ecclesiastic institution is compatible with the Biblical meaning of the religious kingdom of Christ is not seriously taken into consideration. Nor is the

1 Cf. also E. Brunner's criticism in Das Gebot und die Ordnungen, p. 673/4.

2 According to the rational consequences of their purpose and value.

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fundamental question raised as to whether the structural principles of the temporal societal order really contradict the central commandment of love, so that from the evangelical point of view they can only be accepted by means of a compromise, philosophically justified by the Thomistic system.

The result is that Troeltsch's church-type is nothing but a scientifically untenable generalization of a typical Roman Catholic social form in which the structural principle of the institutional Church has been realized. It is impossible that such an ideal type can do justice to the different Church-formations issued from the Reformation, let alone that it should be able to account for all facets of the modern Roman Catholic view of the Church. Rather it prevents the investigator from gaining an insight into the inner nature of the Church-institution as such, guaranteed by its normative structural principle.

And without this insight the different social forms in which this structure has been realized cannot be related to one and the same structural type.

Troeltsch starts with assuming a polar tension in the ‘religious basic idea’ of the Gospel between religious individualism and religious universalism. He has wrenched the Gospel from its context in the whole of the Divine Word-revelation¹. Consequently the relation between the Christian religion and the temporal-worldly ordinances must be described in terms of a dilemma, viz. that of ascetic avoidance, versus a compromise and synthesis with an inferior ‘nature’. The ‘church-type’ must necessarily have ‘universalistic tendencies’, and strive after ‘ecclesiastical unity of culture’ under the leadership of the institution of grace. The idea of a ‘free Church’ must necessarily belong to the sectarian type. Even such an eminent scholar as Ernst Troeltsch could not help going astray, when he tried to interpret the phenomena of Church and sect from these a priori basic tenets.

He forced Calvin's conception of the Church into his own scheme of ‘church- and sect-type’, but gave a fundamentally wrong interpretation of the Reformer's views. This has been convincingly proved by Dr Severijn in his essay: Ernst Troeltsch over de Betekenis van het Calvinisme voor de Cultuurgeschiede-

1 Cf. Dr A. Kuyper, Enc. d. H. Godgel. III, p. 186 - against isolating the ‘doctrine of Jesus’.

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nis.¹ and in a broader context bij Bohatec in his great work Calvin's Lehre vom Staat und Kirche (Breslau 1937).

We have shown in the first section of this chapter that the universalistic conception of the institutional Church is to be considered as an apostasy from the Biblical Christian standpoint. In its classical form it embodied the medieval synthesis with the pagan Greek view of the ‘perfect society’. If we are called upon to interpret the social facts, we are forced to a religious commitment with respect to this fundamental point. There is no possibility here of a truly scientific neutrality because it is not possible to conceive the temporal Church institution apart from the true religious sense of the Kingdom of Christ. Troeltsch, too, could not help committing himself to a religious standpoint. In fact he approached the structure of the Church from a Humanistic religious point of view, with its dilemma: the motive of domination or that of personal freedom.

1 Cf. Antirevol. Staatk. (driem. org., 1e jrg., 1927) pp. 1-72.

Troeltsch's church- and sect-types are both in conflict with the Christian transcendence-standpoint, on which a sect cannot be equal to the Church institution.

Church- and sect-types, as conceived by Troeltsch, are both in conflict with the Christian transcendence-standpoint. The sect-type is of an individualistic-nominalistic origin and serves to construe the temporal Church-community from the ‘converted individuals’. Insofar as its starts from the dialectical basic motive of nature and grace, it holds to the dualistic nominalist conception of the latter. Therefore it cannot be equivalent to the idea of the institutional Church when viewed from the Biblical standpoint. But we must immediately admit without any reserve that the rise of sects is often an indication of a process of decay in the Church institution².

As soon as the temporal Church-community is based on the personal qualities of converted individuals, it ceases to be a Church. According to the Biblical view of the latter the foundation of our salvation is solely to be sought in Christ Jesus and not in ourselves. He is the firm ground on Whom the temporal Church relationship is built. Apart from the fact that it is beyond

2 Dr A. Kuyper in his ‘Tractaat van de Reformatie der Kerken’ (1884) p. 110, says: ‘Sects nearly always arise through the fault of the Church...’ The same view is found in E. Brunner, op. cit., p. 527.

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human power to judge the hearts of our fellow men, the qualities of the individual Christians are a treacherous kind of quicksand for a church-formation. This is why the concept ‘association’ does not suit the institutional Church. The true Christian Church, in its institutional manifestation, is not built by men. Christ builds His Church by His Word and His Spirit, and not out of ‘converted individuals’ but in the line of the Covenant. The Church members are members of one body sanctified in Christ alone¹.

If we believe Christ is to rule the temporal Church-institution, we must acknowledge that He alone is the judge of the regeneration of the individual members. Such judgment cannot be entrusted to men. Any attempt to base the temporal Church community on personal regeneration is an act of interference with the authority of the King of the Church, a fundamentally revolutionary thought, inverting the relation between the ecclesia visibilis and the ecclesia invisibilis.

The temporal Church community can only be an instrument of the Divine grace in Christ Jesus through the administration of the Divine Word and the sacraments. In virtue of its internal structural law this community must have an institutional character, which should express itself in the form of its organization². The institutional administration of the Word and the sacraments is the constitutive centre of the Church-institution, in its corporative structure as a temporal congregatio fidelium. But this corporative structure should be conceived in accordance with the norm of faith, i.e. the divine Word-revelation. This ‘congregatio’ is an outcome of the divine Covenant and not an assembly of mere individual believers. The Covenant embraces the believers with their children³, although the latter may later on prove to be unbelievers who do not wish to belong to the ecclesia visibilis in its institutional sense. If we break with the thought of the Covenant in the temporal organization of the Church, we open the door to the individualistic sect-type.

1 Cf. Matth. 13:18, 19.

2 Cf. Calvin, Inst. IV, 8, 2: ‘id dotum non proprie hominibus ipsis, sed ministerio, cui praefecti sunt, dari; vel (ut expeditius loquamur) verbo cuius ministerium illis est commissum.’ [This authority has not been given these men themselves but to the office of which they are the bearers; or (to say it more clearly) it has been given to the Word whose ministry has been entrusted to them.]

3 Cf. Gen. 17:7; Matth. 19:14; Luc. 22:11; Acts 2:39; and 10:47; Col. 2:11, 12, 13 and other passages of Scripture.

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The sect considers the visible Church, in the sense of congregatio fidelium, as a group of converted individuals and thereby misinterprets the divine structural law of the institutional Church¹. Although this institution cannot be built on the personal regeneration of its members, it remains qualified as a Christian faith-community in the organized administration of the Word and the sacraments, and as such it is necessarily an institutional manifestation of the ecclesia invisibilis electorum². The spiritually dead members are not really included in the invisible Church, although outwardly they behave like believers. They cannot be outwardly distinguished from the true believers by us, but they are left to the judgment of the King of the Church.

Troeltsch says that these facts prove the unavoidable compromise embodied in the Church as an institution. But in the sect-type we find in fact the same state of affairs, which is based on man's absolute incompetence to judge the heart of his fellow-men³. The subjective intention to build the Church community from regenerated individuals alone cannot alter this fact.

1 Cf. Calvin, Instit. IV, c. 1, §§ 13, 14, 18, 19, 24.

2 Calvin, op. cit., expecially stresses St. Paul's attitude to the Corinthian Church into which so many horrible sins had crept. The apostle keeps recognizing this congregation as a Church.

3 In this connection E. Brunner (op. cit., p. 527) makes a striking remark: ‘In der Regel aber wird in der zweiten oder dritten Generation die Sekte sich innerlich mehr und mehr der Kirche’ (i.e. as an institution) ‘annähern...’. [As a rule the sect will internally approach the Church-institution more and more in the second or the third generation...].

Does the temporal Church-institution have a higher value than the other societal structures?

Our remarks on the only possible guarantee of the Christian character of the temporal Church-institution holds indeed for the whole of the ecclesia visibilis, within its institutional manifestation as well as outside of the latter.

This guarantee can nowhere be found in ‘converted individuals’ but only in the authority and power of the Word of God in the different spheres of life, each according to its own structure. This raises the question whether from the religious point of view the special institution of regenerating grace is superior to all the other societal relationships. The answer must be negative, for it should always be remembered that the ecclesia visibilis is not limited to the institutional Church, but in principle

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embraces all the structures of human society. The only Christian starting-point remains the supra-temporal ‘ecclesia invisibilis’. In this religious radical community in Christ all temporal societal structures are equivalent to one another, just as all the different law-spheres are irreplaceable refractions of the fulness of meaning in Christ, each in its own modal structure.

Naturally, this does not mean that from the viewpoint of temporal life all societal structures are of the same importance. It is quite evident that in this respect the institutional structures are much more fundamental than the structures of free associations. But an axiological arrangement of the structures of human society assigning the ‘highest religious value’ to the Church-institution takes its origin in a universalistic scholastic view of the temporal societal relationships and is incompatible with the Christian transcendence-standpoint. Insofar as the other societal relationships, in their actual reality, are subjectively withdrawn from the ‘Corpus Christi’, they fall outside of the ‘ecclesia visibilis’. Only in this respect do they remain enclosed within the civitas terrena, viz. in a subjective sense. But the conserving grace in Christ preserves and maintains the structural offices of the institutional organizations and communities, and liberates them, at least in principle, from the civitas terrena. And the typical structures of the inter-individual and the non-institutional communal relationships can no more belong to the civitas terrena than those of the institutional communities. The relation between the civitas Dei and the civitas terrena cannot be conceived as an ‘axiological hierarchy’, but only as an irreconcilable antithesis.

Consequently, the radically Christian idea of societal relationship can only consider the temporal societal structures as equal in rank in their common root: the ecclesia invisibilis. But at the same time we must recognize the fundamental internal diversity in these structures and their mutual irreplaceableness in their own temporal value. And this implies the acknowledgment of the completely exceptional position of the institutional Church, as a particular institute of regenerating grace.

In perfect agreement with this view both Calvin and Kuyper laid full emphasis on the thought that in its institutional manifestation the Church is the mother of our faith in Christ Jesus¹.

1 Calvin, Instit. IV, 1, 1. Kuyper, Encycl. d. H. Godgel. III, 193; Tractaat, p. 178.

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In truth: The light of eternity will always glow in the sanctuary of this particular Christian community.

§ 3 - A further inquiry into the structural principle of the church-institution in its two radical functions.

In the preceding section it appeared that the institutional Church, though only possible as a temporal manifestation of the ecclesia invisibilis, is nevertheless integrated into the temporal world-order, as a societal relationship with an individuality structure of its own. There could be no doubt about the two radical functions of this structure. The typical leading function has been found in the sphere of faith and the typical foundational function lies in the historical law-sphere. All historically founded communities possess a typical organization which can only be understood from their structural principle. We will thus try to gain a more detailed insight into the structural principle of the Church-institution to acquire from this a deeper insight into its typical form of organization.

The typical foundational function of the temporal Church institution.

According to its institutional manifestation the Church is founded in an organization of historical power. This statement only determines the typical foundational function in a modal sense. We can say the same thing about the State and the undifferentiated societal relationships. And yet the concept ‘organization of historical power’ is not a multivocal ‘general concept’, because in its theoretically analysed modal sense it is perfectly defined.

We must, however, give an account of the individuality-type of this organization of power. Then it appears that the Church and the State display a radical difference because each of these two societal structures possesses an absolutely different radical type. The foundational function of the State has been described as the monopolistic organization of military power over a territorially limited cultural area. We have shown that the State's organization of historical power can only be grasped as an opened meaning-structure, anticipating the typical leading function of the body politic as a public juridical coercive community. Nevertheless, this qualifying function itself appeared to offer to

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theoretical thought at least a provisional resting-point since the juridical aspect in which it presents itself lacks as such the transcendental limiting character inherent in the faith aspect.

However, the organization of historical power on which the Church-institution is based, directly expresses the transcendental limiting character of this societal relationship. This character does not even offer a provisional resting-point to thought but directly points beyond time to the transcendent root of the ecclesia visibilis, i.e. to Christ's Kingdom in the hearts of men. The whole temporal Church-institution is founded in the historical power of Christ as the incarnate Word. It is the historical power of ‘the sword of the Divine Word’ which by faith is directly grasped as the revelation of Christ's transcendent fulness of power, of His kingship over the whole world. Christ himself gave this historical power its first provisional organization in the institution of the apostolic office and the sacraments: ‘Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost’. By his Word through the mouth of his apostles He has ordained the basic structure of the institutional Church-organization.

According to its transcendental limiting character, the ecclesiastical organization of power does not allow of territorial boundaries like that of the State. Its historical task, revealed by Christ himself, is to gain the spiritual dominion over all nations and peoples. As will appear later on, this does not exclude the formation of local churches. But through its limiting position between time and eternity the Church's historical world-dominion is radically distinguished from any other meta-historically qualified organization of power. Its sole qualification is the unshakeable power of Christ's Word and Spirit.

In its non-institutional manifestations the ecclesia visibilis also has real historical faith-power, operating in all societal structures, and in each of them according to their specific nature. This power of faith reveals renewing grace hidden in the ‘ecclesia invisibilis’, as the true root of conserving grace. But it is only the institutional organization which enables this historical power to be the typical foundational function of the temporal Church-community, as a societal structure with a character of its own. In this organizational form the institutional ecclesiastical power, as the typical foundation of a real communal whole functioning in all the law-spheres, possesses a certain all-sidedness, just like the State's power organization. Other forms of power are united

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in it, e.g. economic, juridical, moral power, etc. But the power of Christian faith is the typical internally qualifying form of organized power of the Church according to the ecclesiastical structural principle. The organization at once reveals the imperfect human factor of this institution as a temporal instrument for the effects of the power of Christ's Word and Spirit. According to its structural principle, the institutional Church is a typical temporal societal relationship whose internal organization can only be actualized by sinful human action.

The institutional offices are holy, and the Word and the sacraments, administered by the office bearers as instruments, are holy. But the Christians who hold these offices are sinful human beings, who are only sanctified in the hidden ecclesia invisibilis in Christ Jesus.

According to Calvin's view, which has broken with the Lutheran dualism between faith-community and organization, the basic rules of the internal Church organization have been ordained in God's Word-revelation. All the communicant members have been invested with the general office (διαϰονία) to cooperate in the work of formation and reformation of the Church-institution, in the election of the special office-bearers, etc. By the side of this general office Christ has ordained the special offices of the administration of the Word and the sacraments, of eldership and diaconate. The Church-institution can only function according to its Biblical structure when there is active cooperation between the general office of the believers and the special institutional offices within the congregation. Thus the internal historical power of the institutional Church becomes an institutionally organized power qualified by the Christian community of faith. As such this power is entirely derived from Christ, as the true and the only King of the Church¹. In this organization of faith-power the institutional and the corporative factors have been harmoniously combined, but the power of the institutional administration of the Word and the sacraments is the centre of ecclesiastic organization. In these characteristic traits of its typical organization the structure of the Church-institution re-

1 Therefore, the undefined general concept ‘order’ (Ordnung) employed by Brunner, op. cit., pp. 517 ff. to approach the internal organization of the congregation is wholly inadequate and unserviceable. Cf. pp. 406 ff. in the present volume.

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veals its uniqueness, which can only be understood from its Biblical basic principle¹.

As soon as alien political elements are introduced into this internal organization of power, the institution will be denatured and its sovereignty within its own sphere affected. Such deformations are only possible within the normative basic structure of the organized Church. The organization of power in which this institution is founded, is incompatible with political dominion resting on the power of the sword, and also with the vassalage of the secular sword.

The typical historical foundation of the institutional ecclesia visibilis explains why it is not of all times. Its structural principle is indeed constant and based on the temporal world-order, but as an actual formation the Church-institution could only appear after Christ's incarnation, death and resurrection. In the Old Testament there was a people of the Covenant, isolated from the other nations. In this people of the Covenant, kingship, priesthood and the prophet's office were sharply distinguished from each other and foreshadowed Christ's kingship, priesthood and prophetic office. There was already an ‘ecclesia visibilis’ as the temporal manifestation of the ‘ecclesia invisibilis electorum’, but there was no institutional Church as a typical societal institution of regenerating grace in the community of Christian faith².

1 But it can never be understood apart from the transcendent root of the Church. Therefore Tillich's view in his Kirche und Kultur, and Dibelius' conception in his Das Jahrhundert der Kirche, are fundamentally wrong. They hold that the Church, as a ‘sociologically approachable’ societal relationship can be explained by means of general sociological concepts. Cf. E. Brunner, Das Gebot und die Ordnungen, p. 517.

2 Cf. Dr A. Kuyper, Tractaat van de Reformatie der Kerken (1884), p. 11/12.

The leading function of the temporal Church-institution. Community of confession is required by the structural principle. The idea of a national Church (above any division of faith) and the confessional Church.

The internal organization of the ecclesiastical institution in its transcendental limiting character is qualified by its leading function as an institutionally organized community of Christian believers in the administration of the Word and the sacraments. According to this structural principle its internal unity is exclusi-

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vely possible in a real community of confession. Therefore the institutional Church can only be a confessional Church. The idea of a national Church uniting the whole nation, irrespective of fundamental differences in confession, into one and the same ecclesiastical institution, is only a deformation, or even a disintegrating thought¹.

This is not a matter of an entirely subjective insight on the part of particular ‘sectarian ecclesiastical groups’, but it concerns the essential character of the institutional ecclesia visibilis. It is the internal structural principle of the institutional Church itself which does not allow of any other bond of unity than that from within, and not from a political organization alien to its true nature. The institutional faith-community in the Church-institution is radically different from a political community of faith like that of a Christian State. In such a State the whole nation, insofar as it displays a Christian basic character, should reveal its political unity also in a general political bond of Christian belief, in spite of the differences in confessions of the various Churches².

The internal unity of the Church-institution is qualified by the bond of faith and not by a public-legal function. The community of faith in it cannot be truly realized without the unity of confession about the Word and the sacraments. For the internal institutional Church-community is only possible in the administration of the Word and the sacraments.

Among the drawbacks of a confessional Church E. Brunner³ mentions the danger of its becoming a ‘sect’ through misunderstanding the central teaching of the Gospel, viz. justification by faith alone. The national Church may show other serious disadvantages, but by recognizing infant baptism as the basis of Church membership it has the advantage of influencing the nation as a whole, especially youth. But this pronouncement shows the writer's lack of insight into the true nature of a confessional Church. We have seen in an earlier context that a true

1 Cf. A. Kuyper, Enc. d.H. Godgel. III, p. 191 and Tractaat van de Reformatie der Kerken, p. 12.

2 A national Church which denies any binding force to its confessional documents, need not be an established Church; but it seeks its temporal universality in the ecclesiastical union of the nation, as such, without considering that a Church can only maintain its real Church-character as a Christian community of faith.

3 Das Gebot und die Ordnungen, p. 535/6.

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confessional Church is distinguished from the sect-type precisely by recognizing infant-baptism, and accepting the children of the believers as baptismal members. This acceptance is based on the idea of the Covenant. Brunner overlooks that infant-baptism must lose any meaning as an institutional sacrament, if it is detached from the confession of the Church as a community of Christian faith. Then baptism is degraded into a cultic ceremony about which everybody is free to confess what he likes.

By virtue of the internal structural law of the Church-institution, fundamentally different confessional tendencies will assert themselves within the ‘national Church’ making the essential internal ecclesiastical unity illusory¹. A confessional Church does not imply a mechanical uniformity in the conception of the confession. It should leave room for differences insofar as they do not affect the fundamentals of the Church doctrine. As to the latter, however, a unity of conception is indispensible, provided that this conception is always subject to the spiritual moving power of the divine Word and does not interpret the Holy Scripture from an unbiblical basic motive. Brunner's standpoint with regard to a confessional Church is dependent on his misconception of the essential relation between the internal Church organization and the character of the institution as a temporal Christian community of faith ruled by the living Word of God². We shall return to this point presently. The confession postulated by the internal structural principle of the institutional Church is the confession of a community giving the norm of faith for the congregation a positive form. Like every positivization this confession is the work of man, and can have no other authority than that founded in the divine Word by which it should always be tested. For this very reason the Church confession should not be

1 The question about political parties in the State is a quite different matter, because these parties have another structural principle than the body politic, as will be shown in a later context.

2 Cf. op. cit., p. 536: ‘The way in which the Church has been organized is not decisive. There is only one thing decisive: the living Word of God’. [‘Wie die Kirche organisiert ist, kann nie etwas Entscheidendes sein. Entscheidend in ihr ist nur eins: das lebendige Wort Gottes’.] Compare with this Kuyper's sober-minded pronouncement in his Tractaat van de Reformatie der Kerken, p. 110: ‘You will not save your Church by means of a good Church government if the Spirit of God leaves it; but if your Church government is bad, you cannot prevent your Church from deteriorating, even if you could equip your Church government with a strictly orthodox personnel’.

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rigid and static. It requires actual adaptation to the historical development of pisteutical insight into the Word-revelation, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and to the development of the way of expressing the essential contents of Christian belief.

The Church confession should not degenerate into theological dogmatics. According to its internal structure it should never be elevated to an infallible authoritative document stifling the Christian freedom of believers¹.

Fundamental differences in confession such as those between Roman Catholics, Lutherans, the Reformed Churches, etc. which occasioned different church organizations opposing one another more or less sharply, are to be deplored as a disruption of the institutional ecclesia visibilis. To my mind they are to a high degree caused by the influence of the dialectical motive of nature and grace. This regrettable state of things should urge all true Christians to confess their guilt and to repent, because every guilt of the Church is our own guilt. An appeal to the ‘pluriformity’ of the Church cannot heal this deep wound. This pluriformity has doubtless a good sense, but it should not be misinterpreted to mask the fundamental raggedness of the ecclesiastical institution, or to justify fundamental deviations from the integral and radical basic motive of the divine Word-revelation. But every human endeavour to arrive at ecclesiastical unity by obscuring the real basic differences in confession, is in conflict with the inner nature of the institutional Church².

1 Compare also what Calvin remarks in his Instit. IV, 1, 12. The confusion between a confession of faith and a theological dogmatics disregards the inner nature of the Church community and must lead to a deformation of the latter. The ecclesiastic confession is no theology, and the ecclesiastical institute has no authority in theoretical theological questions.

2 E. Brunner also recognizes this, op. cit., p. 529. But he goes further, and lapses into relativism with regard to the Church institution. He even unexpectedly eradicates the boundaries between the institutional Church, the sect and the non-institutional manifestations of the Church, which he formerly took into account. He writes: ‘also the Quakers and even the individualists who purposely reject any ecclesiastic community have some truth of the Gospel lacking in any of the present-day institutional Churches. Christ's inheritance is divided, who shall investigate who has retained or acquired the biggest part!’ [‘dass auch die Quäker und selbst die bewusst unkirchlichen Einzelgänger Wahrheit des Evangeliums fûr sich haben, die jeder der heutigen “verfassten” Kirchen fehlt. Die Erbe Christi ist zerteilt, wer will untersuchen, wer das grösste Stück behalten oder bekommen hat!’] This procouncement can no longer be understood as a ‘cri de coeur’ deserving our sympathy, but it has a deeper background in Brunner's conception of the Church. Cf. p. 509, note 1, of this volume.

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A quite different question is whether it is not an urgent necessity that the divided Churches seek for an ecumenical basis for cooperation where this is possible. In the face of the increasing dechristianization and spiritual uprooting of modern mankind this necessity is so evident that any further argument is superfluous. The only reserve to be made is that the ecumenical cooperation should be aware of the inner boundaries of the ecclesiastical task and that its starting point should be the pure basic motive of Holy Scripture. For apart from this latter every possibility of an ecumenical basis of cooperation between the Churches is illusory because of the inner nature of the Church-institution.

§ 4 - The expression of the structural principle of the temporal institutional church in the internal authoritative organization of its offices and in its different modal aspects.

After our detailed structural analysis of the other institutional communities it is not necessary to investigate the expression of the structural principle of the Church in all its modal aspects. We shall make a suitable selection and start with an inquiry into the typical structure of authority in the ecclesiastical institution, which radically differs from that in other organized communities.

The typical structure of authority in the temporal Church-institution.

The structure of ecclesiastical authority cannot be restricted to the aspect of faith, but it is doubtless qualified by the latter. And so it shows the transcendental limiting character peculiar to the structural principle of the institutional Church. This explains why on the Scriptural standpoint the Church makes confession of its faith in the sole sovereignty of Christ in the ecclesiastical community, and at the same time recognizes that this authority is exercised by means of the offices ordained by the King of the Church. The ecclesiastic offices are qualified and destined as the instruments of faith for effectuating the absolute authority of the Divine Word and Spirit. They are founded in

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the organized formative power of the latter in historical development. This view should not be considered as a merely subjective reformed conception of the ecclesiastical offices, because it is concerned with a state of affairs implied in the structural principle of the institutional Church as such. If this state of affairs is ignored, we shall form an erroneous subjective idea of the authority of a Church office, assigning alien characteristics to the internal structure of the Church-institution. An ecclesiastical office is qualified as service in the community of faith in Christ. This qualification is grounded in the internal structure of the Church-institution, and retains its pregnant sense in the juridical aspect of ecclesiastical authority¹. Therefore, the structure of ecclesiastical authority is radically different from that of the State's authority. No doubt, from the Christian point of view the office of the secular government is also a ministerium, a service, under the sovereign authority of God, which finds its religious expression in Christ's kingship. It was the Carolingian monarchy in which this Christian conception found its first recognition.

But, according to its structural principle, authority in the State is not typically qualified as service, but as public legal authority of the government, founded in the power of the sword. The government's office can only be seen as service from the point of view of the moral and pisteutical² aspect of the body politic. Under the leading of Christian legal principles the juridical organization of secular governmental authority will be influenced by the Christian conception of office. But this fact does not alter the governmental structure of the State's coercive authority.

Ecclesiastic official authority is entirely different. It is qualified as a ministerium in the community of faith, and therefore it is to be understood as service also in its juridical structural aspect, and not as governmental dominion. A Church that really displays a legitimate Scriptural constitution, cannot recognize any public legal governmental authority in its internal legal

1 Karl Rieker observes in his Grundsätze reformierter Kirchenverfassung, p. 114, note 2, that the conception of ‘governmental power’ in the Church as service, and not as dominion, is of Reformed origin. We had better say that this conception is of Biblical origin, because, if the Scriptural structure of this authority is recognized, no other conception is possible.

2 ‘Pisteutical’ means: ‘in the meaning-modality of faith’.

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order¹. Therefore, the organizational forms of the secular government's political authority cannot be transferred to the internal ecclesiastical order without violating the structure of the latter. The typical political forms of authority, such as monarchy, democracy and aristocracy, in their different historically founded varieties, e.g., constitutional monarchy, parliamentary democracy, etc., are absolutely incompatible with the structural principle of official ecclesiastic authority.

1 Rieker, op cit. refers to Kliefoth, Acht Bücher von der Kirche I (1854), pp. 435 ff. when he observes: ‘According to the Lutheran conception Church government is a service in the same sense as the government of the State, i.e. in a moral sense; in a juridical sense, however, it is dominion, a government in the proper sense of the word, as well as the exercise of the State power.’ This remark does not do full justice to the original Lutheran view. In the preface to Melanchton's ‘Unterricht der Visitatoren’ (1528), Luther explicitly states that the various Evangelical princes were not to have dominion in the Church but to render a service of love. But Luther did not properly understand the juridical aspect of this ‘ministerium’, and practice in the Lutheran territorial Churches very soon showed the tendency described by H. Liermann in his Deutsches Evangelisches Kirchenrecht (1933) p. 152: ‘But also with the sovereigns... office became right, service turned into dominion.’ [‘Aber auch bei den Landsherren wurde... aus Amt Recht, aus Dienst Herrschaft.’]

The supposed ‘democratic’ character of the Reformed principles of ecclesiastic government.

We have seen in an earlier context that Calvin recognized the indissoluble internal coherence of a legitimate ecclesiastical organization with the basic principle of Christocracy. He was deeply convinced of the fundamental difference between Church government and the government of the State. He did not at all favour the idea of any sovereignty on the part of the congregation in the Church, and made no attempt to introduce a kind of representative system of ecclesiastical government. By interpreting the Reformer's conception in terms of such democratic political ideas its real meaning is completely misunderstood. Sohm summarizes all these misconceptions in his Kirchenrecht (I, p. 649, Anm. 37) when making the following remark with respect to Calvin's conception of the organization of the Church: ‘Everywhere there is evidence of the thought that the Church of Christ is organized in a worldly fashion; the constitution of the Church has been conceived in exactly the same manner as that of a town. It is well known that this is the general opinion prevailing at present’².

2 ‘Überall schlägt der Gedanke durch, dasz die Kirche Christi nach weltlicher Art verfaszt ist: wie eine Stadtverfassung gerade so ist die Kirchenverfassung beschaffen. Es ist das bekantlich die heute allgemein herrschende Auffassung’.

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The passages quoted from Calvin's Institution by Kampschulte in his Joh. Calvin I (pp. 269 ff.) to prove his view that the Reformer started from the principle of the sovereignty of the congregation, have nothing to do with this question, or they prove the very contrary. The first quotation is from Inst. IV 3, 13 and 14. But here Calvin only remarks that the extraordinary way in which the apostles were elected is not a rule for the election of the ‘ministers of the Word’. In Inst. IV, 3, 15, he says indeed that in accordance with the Word of God the call of a minister is lawful ‘ubi ex populi consensu et approbatione creantur qui visi fuerint idonei’¹. But a moment before it has been made clear what importance. Calvin attaches to this election by the whole congregation: ‘Bene ergo Cyprianus, dum contendit, ex divina autoritate descendere, ut sacerdos plebe praesente sub omnium oculis deligatur, et dignus atque idoneus publico iudicio ac testimonio comprobetur’. (Italics are mine)².
So Calvin does not at all derive the election of office-bearers by the congregation from a kind of ‘people's sovereignty’ in the Church, but from the authority of God's Word; in the latter this manner of election has been ordained that it might be accomplished as purely and as honestly as possible.
This is why Calvin concludes this 15th paragraph as follows: ‘Praeesse autem electioni debere alios pastores, ne quid per levitatem, vel per mala studia, vel per tumultum a multitudine peccetur’³.
In this light we must also view Calvin's demand (Instit. IV, 11, 6 and 12, 7) that no excommunication shall be carried out by the ministers without the cooperation of the representatives of the congregation.
This, too, is not a consequence of some sovereignty of the congregation (which is incompatible with Calvin's Christocratical thought) but a guarantee ordained by the Word of God against any arbitrary excercise of the ‘power of the key’. The elders in the Reformed Church constitution are not the ‘representatives’ of the congregation in the sense of the modern political system of representation, as is supposed by Thompson and Sohm. It is true that Calvin uses the term ‘representatives’ to qualify the office of the elders. For example he calls the elders and the members of the consistory in general those ‘qui totum corpus ecclesiae repraesentant’. But Rieker correctly observes that the modern concept of representation

1 ‘When those who are found suitable are elected with the consent and approval of the people’.

2 ‘Therefore Cyprianus rightly says that it was from the Divine authority when a priest was elected in the people's presence and the sight of them all, and considered to be worthy and capable by public opinion and testimony’.

3 ‘The other pastors should preside over this election so that no wrong may be done either through levity, or through partiality, or through the riotous spirit of the multitude’.

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was foreign to his days. The elders are called representatives of the congregation insofar as they are ministering organs of the congregation according to their office. Rieker says: ‘Calvin is far from looking upon the ecclesiastical office-bearers as representatives of the congregation in the modern sense of “mandataries of a popular will above them”. He chooses his position not below but above the congregation when he grasps the idea of Church government’¹. How averse Calvin was to a ‘popular will’ in the Church of the Lord is completely clear from the initial paragraph of the third chapter of the fourth book of his Institution, where he writes: ‘We have now to speak of the manner in which the Lord has wanted his Church to be governed. For He Himself rules and governs His Church and must preside over it and have the highest authority. And although this government and rule must be accomplished by His Word alone, since He does not dwell among us by a visible presence to inform each of us of His will by word of mouth, we have already said that He employs the service of men and appoints them as a kind of vicars. He does not transfer His own right and honour to them but only does His own work through their mouths, just as a workman uses a tool to carry out his work’².
These words concisely express the Scriptural view of the authority of an ecclesiastical office.
Rieker's remark is very much to the point when he says: ‘The individual member has the right to examine if their (i.e. the Church officers') orders and arrangements are in accordance with the Word of God, and only if, and insofar as this proves to be the case, he is in duty bound to obey. For there is no other authority for a Christian than that of Christ and His Word: only to this authority is the Christian subject’³. The exclusive sovereignty of Christ in His Church

1 ‘Calvin ist weit entfernt davon, in den kirchlichen Amtsträgern Vertreter der Gemeinde im modernen Sinne, Mandatare eines über ihnen stehenden Volkswillens zu erblicken. Er nimmt, indem er die Idee eines Kirchenregiments fasst, seinen Standort nicht unten, in der Gemeinde, sondern oben über der Gemeinde’.

2 ‘Iam de ordine dicendum est quo ecclesiam suam gubernari voluit Dominus. Tametsi enim solum ipsum regere ac regnare in ecclesia, in ea quoque praeesse vel eminere, et imperium hoc solo eius verbo exerceri atque administrari oportet, quia tarnen visibili praesentia inter nos non habitat, ut voluntatem nobis suam ore coram declaret, hominum ministerium in hoc adhibere diximus, et quasi vicariam operam, non ad eos ius suum honoremque transferendo, sed tantum ut per os ipsum suum ipse opus agat, qualiter ad opus quoque faciendum instrumento utitur artifex’.

3 Op. cit., p. 114: ‘der Einzelne hat das Recht der Prüfung, ob die Anordnungen jener (i.e. der kirchlichen Amtsträger) dem Worte Gottes gemäsz seien, und nur wenn und soweit dies zutrifft, ist er ihnen Gehorsam schuldig. Denn es gibt für den Christen keine andere Autorität als die Christi und seines Wortes: nur ihr ist er Unterthan’. In a note Rieker points out that ‘the right of private judgment’ is explicitly acknowledged in the ecclesiastic order and government of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland.

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is also the foundation of the Calvinistic principle of collegial Church government and of the collegial organization of the exercise of ecclesiastical discipline. All important ecclesiastical decisions should not be made by one single office-bearer but collegially: no ‘individual’ shall rule in the Church in the name of Christ. Calvin formulates this principle sharply and concisely in his pronouncement: ‘He (i.e. Christ) attributes nothing but a common ministry to men and to each of them a particular part’¹.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century the German evangelical territorial Churches introduced synodal forms and a system of congregational representation into the ecclesiastical organization. This change was the beginning of the ‘Synodal-Konsistorialsystem’, which at first sight displays some connection with the old Reformed tradition. But this connection was only formal in character. Liermann emphatically states that the material origin of these new forms of organization is much rather to be found in modern political constitutional thought asserting itself also in Church government since 1848². The typical character of the ecclesiastic offices as service was more and more ignored. The ‘synod’ was organized like a real ‘parliament’ and a formal kind of ‘parliamentarism’ made its way into the German territorial Churches. Thus the process of deviating from the internal structural principle of ecclesiastical organization continued when it had once started with imposing political forms of organization on the Church. The constitution of the Church fell a victim to the political spirit of the age, and every change in the political regime was bound to reflect itself in the internal Church-organization.

Such forms of organization lack any internal ecclesiastical structure and must be qualified as alien, political forms. It is impossible to ‘let the facts speak for themselves’, if we have no insight into the true nature of this deviation from the structural principle of Church organization. The facts will only speak the language of the positivist after an injection with the positivist's

1 Inst. IV, 6, 10: ‘Hominibus nihil tribuit’ (viz. Christ) ‘nisi commune ministerium, et unicuique modum particularem’. Compare with this the pronouncements of the Confessio Helvetica XVIII, 16 and those of Johannes à Lasco quoted by Rieker, op. cit., p. 122/3.

2 Deutsches Evangelisches Kirchenrecht (1933) p. 172/3.

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theory. Then the facts will indeed re-echo the positivist's own prejudice.

The internal structural principle expresses itself in the moral aspect of the Church-institution as a community of love among fellow-believers in Christ.

In the foundational direction of the temporal order the qualifying or leading function of the temporal institutional Church immediately refers back to its moral structural function. According to the latter the Church is a typical community of love among fellow-believers in Christ Jesus, bound together by their common confession of faith.

This community of love cannot be understood in the merely modal moral sense of a general love of one's neighbour, but is rather the typical expression of the entire internal structure of the temporal Church-institution. It shares the transcendental limiting character of this structure by which it is qualified as a community of love guided by the bond of a common Christian faith and confession. Therefore all differences of nationality, family, social class or position, fall away in the internal Church-structure. This internal community of love in the faith in Christ Jesus does not tolerate competition on the part of any love relations of a different internal structure. No love among comrades, or ‘class’ mates, no love of country, not even paternal or filial love, as such, may cause any separation in the internal community of love of the institutional Church, because all these are of an entirely different internal structure. The internal community of love which, according to the ecclesiastical structural principle, should interlace ‘those who are of the household of faith’ in ‘brotherly’ and ‘sisterly’ bonds, can be realized only under the leading of a living community of faith. But in this life such a realization will always be imperfect and defective, especially in the modern conditions of large towns. It is nevertheless, even in this defective form, one of the ‘fruits of faith’ and displays its limiting character in being only possible as a temporal manifestation of the bond of love in Christ Jesus¹. There is no true community of faith without the bond of love in Christ Jesus.

This internal transcendental structure also explains the character of the particular Church office of diaconate. In cooperation with the general priesthood of all the Christian believers the organized office of charity towards the poor members of the

1 Cf. 1 John 3, esp. verse 17.

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congregation has been entrusted to the deacons. According to the Scriptural structural principle of the temporal Church-institution, this office is an essential part of the internal ecclesiastical organization¹. The very structure of the institutional Church demands this special office. In the non-institutional manifestations of the Church of Christ on earth charity to one's fellow-man belongs to the general office of the believers.

In its ecclesiastical organizational structure the diaconate is qualified as a Christian institution of faith, an instrument for the working of Christ's Word and Spirit in the first place among the members of the congregation. Christ's divine priestly office of charity finds its institutional official expression in the diaconate. This characteristic fundamentally distinguishes the diaconal from the civil care of the poor on the part of the State government, as well as from private charity.

In Lutheran countries this church-office could not develop according to its own internal nature. The State interfered with the government of the Church and as a result ecclesiastical and civil charity were mixed. This was doubtless not in accordance with Luther's own standpoint. He pointed out the necessity of an ecclesiastical diaconate, though he was not so emphatic and energetic in this respect as Calvin was.

Civil relief remains qualified by the juridical principle of public interest, and as governmental care of the poor it can never have the character of free Christian charity. Private charity, manifesting itself in a particular, non-ecclesiastical form of a philanthropic organization, remains qualified by the typical moral leading function of this organization. This moral qualification also appears in Christian charitable societies. Only in the diaconal care of the poor is the typical societal organization of charity qualified by the community of Christian faith. As soon as this typical dependence on its leading function is ignored, diaconal charity is denaturalized.

1 Brunner (op. cit., p. 542) has a striking remark on this point: ‘A Church that does not produce a living congregational diaconate must be seriously suspected of being mortally ill’. But Brunner only recognizes the essential character of the ecclesiastical function of charity, he denies the necessity of an institutional office of charity. This viewpoint is connected with his dualistic separaton between the ‘ordinances’ and the ‘commandment of love’, and especially with his identification of the ‘Glaubenskirche’ with the ‘ecclesia invisibilis’, discussed in an earlier context.

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The expression of the internal structural principle in the juridical aspect of the Church-institution. Sohm's denial of a true internal ecclesiastic law.

The moral structural function of the temporal Church-institution necessarily refers back to the juridical societal aspect. At this point we are confronted by the question if there is a real internal antinomy, and a dialectical tension, between a Christian faith community and a juridical order. This problem has played a very important part in the history of ecclesiastic law since the Reformation.

Sohm argued that the legal order and the essential nature of the Church are mutually exclusive. And with particular emphasis the question has been discussed ever since in every modern textbook on Protestant Church-law. This is quite understandable. For the issue of the debate is the question whether the Reformation has or has not remained faithful to its basic principles in the development of a Church-law of its own. This debate will always be useless if the problem is posited in a fundamentally wrong way, which so often happens. If the Christian philosophic theory of the modal and the individuality structures of human society is to explain anything, it must shed light on the way this problem should be formulated.

Sohm's thesis is: ‘Church-law is contradictory to the essential nature of the Church’. This thesis is rooted in the Lutheran antithesis between the Gospel and the Law, in which we have discovered an after-effect of the dualistic-nominalistic scheme of ‘grace’ and ‘nature’. ‘The essence of the Church is spiritual, the essence of law is secular’. This is Sohm's basic tenet. It is the same dualism expressed in E. Brunner's antithesis between ‘the commandment of love’ and the ‘secular ordinances’ in recent times. ‘Law’ was not really conceived in its true modal sense, but in the formalistic and positivistic sense of a formal order of communal life (thought of in terms of the coercive State law). The binding force of this legal order was derived from the will of the secular legislator.

In his work Das Gebot und die Ordnungen E. Brunner does not even recognnize any other law than State law, and proclaims this positivistic juridical view to be the original typical conception of the Reformers. He contrasts it, as the Protestant view of law, to the Roman conception of natural law¹. If such a positivistic

1 Op. cit. p. 653 note 17 (435). Brunner only rejects naturalistic positivism and thinks he has thereby finished with juridical positivism as such. His ‘critical’ positivism, however, is no better than the naturalist kind, since it replaces the modal structure of the juridical aspect by formal categories of thought which may assume any arbitrary content.

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dogma is accepted, the question as to whether a typical internal Church-law with sovereignty in its own sphere can exist, is of course implicitly answered in the negative. Sohm's elaborate investigations of the organization of the Church in early Christianity, Roman Catholicism, and the Reformation, could not really contribute anything to prove the correctness of the negative answer to the above-mentioned question. These investigations started from his petitio principii¹. In his antithesis between the nature of the Church and that of law, Sohm commits a second error by conceiving the ‘essence of the institutional Church’ in the transcendent religious sense of the perfect ‘Kingdom of God’. Thereby the problem of the relation between Church and law has been wrongly posited from the outset.

1 K. Kahl correctly remarks in his Lehrsystem des Kirchenrechts und der Kirchenpolitik (1e Hälfte p. 73) that Sohm is wrong in principle when he represents his thesis concerning the incompatibility of Church and law as the result of historical research: ‘Der Lehrsatz selbst bleibt... falsch. Was zu bekämpfen ist, sind nicht in erster Linie Geschichtsthatsachen, sondern Geschichtsreflexionen, die aus den Thatsachen gezogenen Schlüsse. In der Thesis redet nicht die Sprache der Geschichte, sondern Sohm's Sprache über die Geschichte’. [‘The thesis itself... is false. What we have to combat are not in the first place historical facts but historical reflections, conclusions drawn from the facts. In the thesis we do not hear the language of history, but we hear Sohm speak about history’].

The antithesis between form and content in Church law in E. Brunner's dualistic conception.

Brunner posits the problem a little differently from Sohm. He realizes that, as a temporal institutional organization, the Church cannot exist without a legal order. Just like Kattenbusch he conceives of the Church as a ‘Kultgemeinde’ (cult community) and opposes this to the ‘Kirche des Glaubens’ (the Church of faith), which stands for the ‘ecclesia invisibilis’ in his view. In the Church as a cult community he admits the necessity of a material Church-order. Such an order is subservient to the ‘commandment of the moment’ (‘Gebot des Augenblicks’) of the ‘Word of God’, and its peculiar legal character is precisely broken through and cancelled by its direct relatedness to this irrationalist view of the central commandement.

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As an order it retains its secular character and, in this sense, it should keep at a proper distance from the authority of the Word of God. But in matters of faith, in establishing the confession as the norm of ‘pure doctrine’ for instance, the Church-order is closely related to the ‘Kirche des Glaubens’, which only lives by God's Word. Although the ‘cult-community’ is merely a ‘human form’ of the divine, in such matters of faith it has some share in the divine authority. Such Church-orders owe their legal character exclusively to the State. On this point Brunner explicitly agrees with Sohm. Consequently the question about the real nature of Church-law is answered as follows: ‘In a material sense, according to the nature of its content, protestant Church-law is ecclesiastical; in a formal sense, however, according to its juridical nature, it is purely secular-political...’¹. The famous form-matter scheme, in its neo-Kantian sense, is thus called in here to elucidate the problem concerning the essential character of Church-law. This scheme is, however, anything but appropriate to do so². It owes its origin to a misconception and disruption of the divine world-order, and must always end in an internally contradictory dualism. In Brunner's solution this dualism is obvious at the first glance: The juridical order proper is a perfectly alien political element in the Church-relationship. But according to its content this order is supposed to be essentially related to the Church-institution. The consequence is that the juridical form is perfectly alien to the content embraced by it! Practically speaking, Brunner's unreal and forced construction is as obscure as that of the Lutheran ‘episcopal’ system, and displays the same vitium originis.

The background of Brunner's dualism between form and content of Church-law is the deeper dualism between ‘nature’ and ‘grace’, Law and Gospel. So long as this dualism keeps ruling thought, it is impossible to gain an insight into the individuality-structure of the temporal Church-institution. The contrast Brunner makes between ‘Kirche des Glaubens’ and ‘Kultgemeinde’, replacing the distinction between ‘ecclesia invisibilis’ and ‘ecclesia visibilis’ (the institution), testifies to a lack of insight into the internal structure of the institutional Church.

1 Op. cit., p. 533: ‘Materiell also, seiner inhaltlichen Eigenart nach, ist das protestantische Kirchenrecht kirchlich, formal aber, seiner Rechtsnatur nach, ist es rein weltlich-staatlich...’.

2 Cf. our critical analysis of this neo-Kantian scheme in Vol. II, pp. 12 ff. and pp. 208 ff.

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If the modal meaning of law is not from the outset theoretically misinterpreted by including in it the typical political moment of governmental coercion, there is nothing in the juridical aspect as such which is incompatible with the internal structure of the temporal ecclesiastical institution. We must put it even more strongly: we cannot have grasped the individuality-structure of this organized community correctly, if we start denying that it necessarily possesses an internal-juridical structural aspect.

The criterion of the internal Church law. Why its formal legal source is no criterion.

This internal juridical structural aspect, however, cannot be grasped in a positivistic (pseudo-) concept of law, oriented exclusively to the State's apparatus of coercion. Nor is it determined by the formal juridical source of Church law. As such, this genetic juridical form of binding legal norms is no more than a human legal declaration of will, made by an organ invested with competence to law formation. The various individuality-structures of law cannot be founded in such formal juridical sources; on the contrary they lie at the foundation of all human law making.

We shall see later on that it is precisely these genetic juridical forms that function as real nodal points of enkaptic structural interlacements within the juridical law-sphere. That is to say, not everything contained in the genetic juridical form of a Church regulation displays the individuality-structure of internal Church-law. Neither are all rules contained in the constitutional form of statute law thereby characterized as internal constitutional law of the State. This observation holds with even greater force when alien legal structures have penetrated an ecclesiastical organization because the Church has become unfaithful to its own nature.

Recall an official church-rate imposed also on the baptismal members¹, and collected after the manner of the State; recall also alien political forms of ecclesiastical organization. Legal rules concerning such points may be Church rules in a formal sense, i.e. they may have been formed and positivized by ecclesiastical organs. But they have nothing to do with the internal structure of the Church-institution; according to their material sense, they are much rather in open conflict with this structure.

1 I.e. members who have not yet been confirmed.

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True internal Church-law can only be such law that displays the individuality-structure of the ecclesiastical community. Its material meaning is indissolubly connected with the leading function of the Church as a community of faith and confession in the administration of the Word and the sacraments.

We refer to the legal rules concerning the inner constitution of the ecclesiastical community, the competence of the different offices and the conditions to be satisfied with respect to the investiture with these offices, ecclesiastical discipline, the establishment and alteration of the confession, etc. All such regulations belong to the internal legal sphere of the Church insofar as they are indissolubly connected with questions of Christion belief and confession, and do not encroach on the public order and the civil law of the State, both conceived according to their own structural principles.

If Church-law is really conceived in this internal sense, it can never be in conflict with the nature of the ecclesiastical institution, and it cannot be involved in any rivalry with the internal public legal order of the State, or with the civil legal order of the latter.

Such rivalry can only arise when either the State or the Church-institution in their law formation exceed the inner boundaries of their competence. A striking example of such a rivalry is to be found in the Roman Catholic conception that the legal regulation of marriage, except that of the purely financial relations, belongs to the exclusive competence of the Church. Even from the Roman Catholic viewpoint that the matrimonial bond has a supra-natural side, as a sacrament, this conception ignores the inner boundaries of ecclesiastical law. For, this viewpoint implies that marriage also has a natural substructure whose legal aspect is as such not of an ecclesiastical character. In its internal sphere the Roman Catholic Church is doubtless competent to establish ecclesiastical legal rules concerning the matrimonial bond, insofar as the latter is viewed as a sacrament. But this can never imply an exclusive competence to regulate this bond as a natural institution, which has so many enkaptic interlacements with the State and other ‘natural’ societal relationships (in the scholastical sense of the term ‘natural’). The very fact of these interlacements implies the competence of the State to regulate marriage as to its civil legal side, which as such is independent of the Roman Catholic viewpoint of faith that marriage is a sacrament. It is only due to a universalist view of the Church-

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institution, and to the pretention of the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical authority to give a binding interpretation of the so-called natural ethical law, that this truth has been lost to sight. This is why the traditional Roman Catholic view concerning the relation between Church and State lacked a sharp criterion for the distinction between the spheres of competence of these two institutions.

The internal ecclesiastical legal rules display the general modal meaning of a retributive harmonization of interests, inherent in every juridical norm, irrespective of its typical structure of individuality.

It is consequently not merely a question of terminology, as Brunner thinks, when in this modal sense we call the inner Church-order a legal order. For the juridical sphere-sovereignty of the Church depends on this real juridical character of the ecclesiastic order in its contradistinction to the legal spheres of the State. According to its individuality-structure as Church law, it is qualified as an instrument of faith for the effectualization of the sole authorithy of Christ Jesus by His Word and Spirit. As such, it does not permit any coercive sanction on the part of the State. The unique and incomparable principles of Church-law in this individuality-structure are implied in the Scriptural structural principle of this institution itself.

No ius divinum positivum.

But there can be no question of a ius divinum positivum in the internal sphere of the Church. The forming, the positivization of the legal principles for the internal structure of the ecclesiastical institution is a human activity, and has been entrusted by Christ to the lawful organs of His Church. As this juridical forming always remains bound to the substratum of historical development, positive Church law cannot have an unchangeable character. Owing to its transcendental limiting character as an instrument of faith, ecclesiastic law does not permit any formalism in its application, whereby the abstract legal rule would dominate the activity of faith¹.

1 That the internal juridical principles in the institutional Church have a different character from the civil juridical, or from public legal principles, has been demonstrated in my treatise: De Structuur der Rechtsbeginselen en de Methode der Rechtswetenschap in het Licht der Wetsidee (Wetensch. Bijdragen door Hoogleraren der V.U. aangeboden ter gelegenheid van haar 50-jarig bestaan, Amsterdam, 1930).

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The internal Church-law is a very sensitive instrument for the working of God's Word and Spirit in the community of Christian believers. Of course, the moment of legal ordering remains typical of the organizational norms of this legal sphere. This juridical moment of ordering cannot be dispensed with, because the Church cannot do without an official organization.

But this organization possesses an ecclesiastical individuality-structure, which should be positivized in accordance with the Scriptural indications. Therefore the ordering moment in the internal Church-law does not remain alien to the Church as a temporal community of faith in the administration of the Word and the sacraments. It is entirely qualified by this ecclesiastical leading function so long as the order is conceived in the Scriptural sense. It is characterized as service, and it is never qualifying.

So we may conclude that the view according to which the institutional Church has no internal juridical sphere, originates from a lack of insight into the individuality-structure of this community, and from an erroneous view of law, which identifies the latter with a formalistically conceived State-law. Especially in Lutheran circles the relation between Church and law has been conceived in an unscriptural way, as an antithesis between Gospel and Law, ‘grace’ and ‘nature’. This was partly the result of a justifiable opposition to the Romanist deformation of Church-law to a supposed ius divinum positivum. This latter was modelled after the juridical organization of the State and dominated the community of faith, since it was supposed to contain true public juridical governmental regulations. On this point too, Calvin showed the Reformation the true Biblical way.

The expression of the internal structural principle in the other aspects of the temporal Church-institution.

After the detailed analysis of the three last structural functions of the temporal Church-institution only a few remarks will be made on the expression of the structural principle in the other aspects of this community. It is not necessary to prove separately that in the institutional Church there is an internal aesthetical, an internal economic, an internal social¹, an internal linguistic

1 ‘Social’ has here the modal sense of the aspect of human intercourse.

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structure¹, etc. Our previous investigations have clearly shown that all the modal aspects in the internal structure of a societal relationship are indissolubly interwoven.

Internal Church-law cannot function without the substratum of internal-ecclesiastical harmony, internal ecclesiastical economy, etc. In all these structural functions the internal structural subject-object relation presents itself.

In this relation objective thing-structures function enkaptically in the subjective ecclesiastical community, and, as such, are subservient to the subjective leading function of the Church institute. In this light internal ecclesiastical art should be viewed in its objective structures as a structurally bound art². According to its internal structural principle it should be permeated by the Christian Spirit to be an instrument of the community of faith in the service of the Word and the sacraments. The structural subject-object relation in which ecclesiastical art functions, is not aesthetically qualified. Therefore, the aesthetical function should not obtrude at the expense of the transcendental leading function of the institutional Church-community. Such an obtrusion disturbs the internal aesthetical harmony in the objective structure of the church-building. And the internal aesthetical harmony is also disturbed when objects of an explicit political structure are placed in the church-building where they do not belong, e.g., coats of arms, flags, standards, etc.

The ‘Garnisonskirche’ in Potsdam is one of the most horrible examples of disharmony in this respect. Another example is Westminster Abbey in London, which partly functions as a national museum.

When investigating the typical structural functions of the temporal Church institute in the modal law-spheres of social intercourse, language, the historical development of culture, logical thought, feeling, etc., the internal structure of this institution should be sharply distinguished from the external structural interlacements in which it functions enkaptically.

Nationality, the State's order, local customs and manners, etc. can only give the positive form of the Church-institution an external variability type, but they should never affect the real internal structure of the different Church formations. As soon as

1 Recall ecclesiastical symbolism, the ecclesiastical way of linguistic expression, etc.

2 Cf. Vol. III, pp. 139 ff.

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such external factors dominate the factual internal relations within the ecclesiastical community, the Church-institution is radically deformed.

The ‘pluriformity of the Church’ can only be justified in the sense of external variability types of ecclesiastic forms, but never on the ground of their internal structure.

The spatial structural function of the institutional Church, and the internal sense of local Church formation.

From the point of view of the internal structural principle it is obvious that the connection between the spatial boundaries of a Church formation and those of a State (and its component parts) can only have an external, variable, but never an internal, fundamental character.

The view of the Church-institution prevailing in the Reformation correctly emphasized that the local congregation is the primary institutional manifestation of the Church of Jesus Christ. In opposition to the Roman Catholic conception, the starting-point for more comprehensive ecclesiastical bonds is to be found in the local congregation. It was pointed out that the apostles recognized every local Church formation as an ἐϰϰλήσια and always spoke of ἐϰϰλήσιαι or Churches, but never of a Church in the sense of the fusion of all local congregations into a more comprehensive organization¹. This primary local character of the institutional Church must be explained from the internal structural principle, and not from the external interlacement with the spatial boundaries of the municipal parts of the State-organization. According to its leading function, as a confessional community of faith in the administration of the Word and the sacraments, the institutional Church can only find its spatial centre in local congregations. For the service of the Word and the sacraments can only be performed regularly in a local Church. The spatial boundaries of the local Churches are determined from within by the possibility of a real temporal community in the regular divine services. That these boundaries should coalesce with those of the civil municipality² is untenable, if the

1 Cf. A. Kuyper, Tractaat, p. 35/6.

2 I do not subscribe to Kuyper's argument on this point, op. cit., p. 16. This does not mean that the congregational thought of the Independents was more consonant with the structural principle of the Church-institution. For in this congregational thought there is a strongly individualistic tendency, which is accentuated by the repression of the institutional character of the Church in its official organization. Besides, it is denied that the congregations are bound by the authority of the ‘larger assemblies’ (classes and synods).

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individuality-structure of the institutional Church is not to be levelled down. The boundaries of a civil municipality display the individuality structure of the State, and are dependent on all kinds of factors that have no importance for the local Church. Recall the continual modifications of the boundaries of large cities by the annexation of neighbouring municipalities.

When emphasis is laid on the primary local character of the institutional Church, it should be borne in mind that, according to its internal structure, the local boundaries do not possess the character proper to the territorial boundaries of the State and its component parts. The spatial structure of the institutional Church displays that transcendental limiting character in which the universality of the ecclesia invisibilis should find its temporal expression. The Church of Christ has no ‘territory’ in the political sense of the word, but the territory in which the Church is established is that of the State. The national frontiers separate the different States because the organized monopolistic military power can only be of a territorial character. That is why no government can exercise its office on its own authority within the territory of a foreign ‘sovereign’ State. But this state of affairs does not apply to the Church.

The idea of the spatial universality of the Church in its static and its dynamic conception.

Insofar as they are one in a confessional sense the local Churches all over the world must be in principle viewed as a unity since they are joined by an intrinsic communal bond. This is in accordance with the idea of the spatial universality of the Church in the omnipresence of its King Christ Jesus. This unity is historically founded and dynamical in character. It expresses itself in the formation of organizational bonds between the local congregations culminating in general synods, whose authority over the separate Churches is recognized as a ministry. There is no single ground to be derived from the inner nature of a synodal organization in favour of the thesis that the authority of a synod should be restricted to the territorial boundaries of a State. The coherence between the inter-congregational organiza-

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tion and a national community can only be of a phenotypical character and is a consequence of enkaptic interlacements between the ecclesiastical and the national unity. The idea of spatial universality of the institutional Church as a whole can be internally determined only by the requirement of a community of confession. The external limitation by the difference in language, the impossibility of actual communication, etc., is only variable in character.

Therefore, national groupings of local congregations into a more comprehensive organization can only be conceived as variability types of the institutional structural principle of the Church. The Roman Catholic idea of the latter lacks the moment of dynamic growth from local congregational unities in its conception of the spatial universality of the ecclesiastic whole; for it holds that from the outset the papal centralized hierarchical institution embodies the all-inclusive unity of all the present and future parts of the Church. From the outset the Roman Church presents itself as an ecumenical world-Church and has no room for the thought that the institutional manifestation of the ecclesia Christi must start from the local congregations. This static universalism originates from an absolutization of the ecclesiastical institution. It can be realized only by a centralized bureaucratic organization fashioned on the model of the Roman Empire, and is not really founded in the internal structural principle of the institutional Church.

The full realization of the spatial universality of the body of Christ in its institutional manifestation has not been given in time, but continues to express itself only in the transcendental direction to the eschatological future of the Kingdom of heaven.