The Church. The Church’s reality is invisible, and only visible to those with eyes to see; with eyes offered by the faith of Christ. The Church doesn’t have a physical address, per se; it can’t be found at 777 Vatican Way or something. The Church’s only physical address is found in the ground of the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ; but we currently see Him, not with eyes of flesh, but with eyes of faith (just as sure as we love Him, even though we don’t currently “see” Him). The Church is not a result of so-called religious phenomena, but instead its reality comes to it, afresh anew, by its in-breaking reality in Jesus Christ in the triune life. This, among other things, means that purely sociological analysis of the Church is non-starting. The Church has no horizontal reality without first gaining reality from its vertical touchstone in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is not a valent to be handled and touched in the way that the Elks Club can be; not in the way that majestic cathedrals can be; not in the way that beer-stained pubs can be. Jesus Christ, clearly, is the Lamb of God slain before the foundations of the world; viz., clearly for those with eyes of faith. Indeed, the Church is as concrete and blood-saturated as the veins of Immanuel; the Church has concrete extension into the world, and into the lives of bruised reeds, insofar that God freely and graciously elected our humanity to be His in Jesus Christ. Even so, this is not a matter of profane cogitation, but a sacrosanct reality that comes to us even if we don’t want to come to it.
John Webster, offers these words on the reality of the Church:
As the hearing church, the Christian community is wholly referred to the Word of God by which it is established. The church’s being is characterised by externality: it is ‘ectopic’, because its ‘place’ is in the being and act of the creative and communicative God of the gospel. There is, therefore, a certain strangeness about the church as a form of human life. To live as part of the church is to live at a certain distance from other modes of human fellowship and action. Because it is the creature of the Word, the church is not simply an outgrowth of natural human sociality or religious common interest and fellow-feeling. Its fellowship is properly to be understood as common origination from and participation in the presence of the divine self-gift. And because of this, the church is not primarily a visible social quantity but the invisible new creation. Even in its visible social and historical extension, the church is the presence in history of the new humanity which can never be just one more order of human society. The church is what it is because of the word of the gospel, and so it is primarily spiritual event, and only secondarily visible natural history and structured form of common life. Negatively, this means that the church is ‘invisible’, that is, not simply identical with its tangible shape as a human social order. Positively, this means that the church has true form and visibility in so far as it receives the grace of God through the life-giving presence of Word and Spirit. Its visibility is therefore spiritual visibility.[1]
To be clear, Webster is not promoting a docetic notion of the Church; as if the Church is swallowed up by its divine ground in the triune life. But what he is emphasizing is that the Church herself is not to be understood as an end unto itself. What should be understood, is that the Church doesn’t gain its reality from a turn into herself. Just as the humanity of Jesus Christ is grounded from outside itself, in the person of the eternal Logos of God, so too, the Church has her ecstatic ground in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. This ought to keep the Church from thinking she has to do anything other than proclaim the Word of God who funds her. When the Church strays outside of her reality she attempts to create a reality based on her own immanent vision; or we might just speak more plainly: the Church, in this way, becomes an idol funded by its many idolaters.
There are many other implications we could tease out of Webster’s thoughts, but for space constraints the above should suffice.
[1] John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 47-8.