On the Rights and Limitations of the Individual Congregation[1]

 

Translated by Matthew C. Harrison

 

(Letters to Lutheran Pastors, No. 11, February 1950)

 

 

This contribution to the problem of church is one of those theological Gutachten with which both Lutheran Churches of Australia have striven for a new formulization of what up to this point had been their understanding of the Lutheran Confessions. When we got beyond all differences of theological schools and their terminology we found that a much greater consensus exists regarding the teaching of the Confessions than we had previously thought. To our great joy after exhaustive doctrinal discussions our Australian churches, in which the theologies of Löhe and Walther, the tradition of old Neuendettelsau and the tradition of Missouri live on, may henceforth also declare their complete consensus on the doctrine of the church. The theses of agreement on this doctrine will be officially published very soon. May what is said regarding the rights and limitations of the individual congregation in what follows serve as a greeting from our work, to the brethren in other parts of the world who are working at similar tasks.

 

The discussion of remarks on "Universal Church and Individual Congregation in the New Testament"[2] induce the author to expand on a few of these "remarks" still further and to say something more regarding the rights and limitations of the individual congregation. We appeal to the reader in advance to guard himself where possible from the mistake which we all constantly make, namely to pull the concepts of our modern thought, our theological and sociological categories and perhaps even our familiar terminology, into the New Testament. This is a mistake, which we all unknowingly and necessarily make. For none of us can read the New Testament as though he had not already read it for decades. And yet the Holy Scriptures have the power to become something new for every generation. Thus we ought to strive as much as possible to read it entirely anew. To take an example from the area we are treating, it would a good thing if we were to cease to translate the word _kklhs_a at one time with "church" [Kirche] and then with "congregation" [Gemeinde]. That is a vice or trick of modern theology, or more properly, of sociology. It is not without reason that God's Word uses the same word for that which we call "church," and for that which we call "congregation." And all great churchly translations of the Bible intentionally follow this common linguistic usage. The Greek word "_kklhs_a" is borrowed and rendered consistently as ecclesia in the Latin Bible. It is consistently rendered "Gemeine" by Luther, and "church" by the English Bible. The Luther Bible does not use the word "Kirche," the English Bible uses "congregation" only to render "assembly" [Versammlung] or "tribe" [Stamm] in the Old Testament. Why have we abandoned what all these translations preserved from the original text with the finest linguistic instinct? Much is explained by the fact that today we, for reasons similar to those which induced Luther to replace the word "church" with "Gemeine," do exactly the reverse and say "church" for "Gemeinde," to avoid misunderstanding. But then we ought to do it consistently. When we today, unlike Luther, allow the Lord Christ in Matthew 16 to say that He desires to build His "church," then we must also allow Paul to write to the "Church" of God in Corinth.[3] Otherwise something completely essential in the understanding of the church is lost. We would set a good example by changing the title of this paper. We speak of the rights and limitations of the individual Ecclesia, in order to push back behind the expressions of modern languages to what the

New Testament intended.

 

1.

 

The use of the plural demonstrates that there is such a thing as the individual ecclesia. The New Testament speaks of _kklhs_a  and _kklhs_ai. Every one of the _kklhs_ai is is _kklhs_a in the full sense of the term. There is an identity of essence between the one _kklhs_a and each of the many _kklhs_ai. Linguistic usage and theological thought of later Christianity never forgot that there is no ecclesia without ecclesiae, and no ecclesiae without ecclesia. The Pope of Rome himself still knows this, much as he otherwise seems to have forgotten what the church is. "I acknowledge the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Roman Church, Mother and Governess of all churches" (Sanctam catholicam et apostolicam Romanam ecclesiam omnium ecclesiarum matrem et magistram agnosco), thus must every Catholic office bearer ever and again swear in the Tridentine Profession of Faith (Professio fidei Tridentina). Consequently even for Rome there is not only one ecclesia, but ecclesiae, whose Mother and Governess - whereby the austerity of the infallible Governess delimits the love of the Mother so ready to advise - is the Holy Roman Church. Since, according to the Vaticanum[4] the Pope possesses the universal episcopate, which means direct and immediate episcopal authority over the universal church, not much room is left for the ecclesiae next to the ecclesia (the dear mother gobbled up her daughters). A little room always remains, for instance when the invitation to the Vatican Council of 1869 was issued, and doubtless at the next council likewise invitations will be issued also "to all the Bishops of the Churches of the Eastern Rite, not in communion with the Apostolic See (ad omnes episcopos ecclesiarum ritus Orientalis communionem cum Apostolica Sede non habentes). It is a good Catholic proposition that the Roman Church is Mother and Governess of all Churches, even of the schismatic Churches of the East, even if it today has a meaning other than it had at the time when St. John's in the Lateran, the Cathedral of the Pope yet today, bore the title: "Head and Mother of all Churches of the Earth" Caput et mater omnium orbis ecclesiarum). That the church does not consist OF churches, but much rather shall we say, IN churches, is a proposition no longer understandable with the concept of the church based upon the presuppositions of the modern post-Vatican Council. This truth finally rests upon the New Testament and not Catholic canon law or Catholic dogmatics. It is born of the unconscious theology of faith, which every church has along side its officially formulated dogmatics. In this sense the Roman bishoprics, archbishoprics, the provincial churches, national churches and patriarchates are, according to Roman linguistic usage, churches. No matter how far afoot we may otherwise get from the New Testament, in this terminology at least the New Testament view lives on that the church exists in Churches.

 

The church as the People of God, as the Body of Christ, as the Temple of the Holy Spirit exists in each individual ecclesia and in all of them together. This view of the New Testament lives on in the language of all churches. This also explains the often invoked sentence which begins the Augustana: Our Churches with great unanimity teach (Ecclesia magno consensu apud nos docent).[5] It has often been asked: Who finally are the teaching churches (ecclesiae docentes)? Are they the congregations [Kirchengemeinden]? Are they the territorial churches represented by the subscribers? But these did not yet exist. They were at best in the formative stage (statu nascendi) and parishes in the strict sense did not generally exist in a time in which the civil community [Gemeinde] was completely identical with the ecclesiastical. With the Augustana the Evangelical Imperial estates presented "a confession of our pastors' and preachers' teaching and of our own faith, setting forth how and in what manner, on the basis of the Holy Scriptures, these things are preached, taught, communicated, and embraced in our lands, principalities, dominions, cities and territories."[6] It is clear that the confession is not speaking of teaching congregations. They never existed in the Lutheranism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The parish [Kirchspiel, Pfarrei] is not a congregation something like what Luther describes in his treatise of 1523 That a Christian Assembly or Congregation [Gemeine] Has the Right and Power to Judge All Teaching and To Call, Appoint, and Dismiss Teachers, Established and Proven by Scripture [WA 11,408-416; LW 39,301-314]. We must never forget that such an "Assembly or Congregation" as Luther here had in mind, was never realized in the Reformation. But this is not to say of course that the "congregation" [Gemeine] in the deep sense of the New Testament, which Luther had rediscovered, did not exist. But neither can we speak of teaching territorial churches in the sixteenth century. In the Formula of Concord it is not territorial churches who are speaking, but "electors, princes and estates of the Augsburg Confession and theologians of the same."[7] The Preface to the Formula speaks of that which "in our lands, churches and schools (in ditionibus, ecclesiis et scholis)[8] shall or shall not be taught. And already the standing association of churches and schools (scholae oder Academiae) in the Formula of Concord (compare also Solida Declaratio, De comp. reg. [Rule and Norm], BSLK 833 ff.) shows that the "evangelical" "reformed" church, that is the Churches of the Augsburg Confession, were not thought of as territorial churches. But neither are they congregations [Gemeinde] in our sense. It is the common linguistic usage of the time, as is for instance shown by the title of the great Christological confession of the Church of Würtemberg (Tübingen 1572): A Steadfast Repetition and Fundamental Declaration of the Doctrine and Confession regarding the Person and Both Natures of our Lord and Savior Christ of the Churches and Schools in the Electorate of Würtemberg... Presented by the Theologians of Würtemberg. It is dedicated to the professors, theologians, superintendents, pastors and servants "of the Churches and Schools in Saxony." The Church in Saxony or in Würtemberg consists in the churches there. It is the same linguistic usage which even the Roman Church has continued to maintain and its roots lay in New Testament terminology. The church also according to Lutheran doctrine consists in the churches, the Church of the Augsburg Confession exists in the Churches of the Augsburg Confession.

 

2.

 

If the ecclesia consists in the individual ecclesiae, what then is the individual ecclesia? It is clear that we can only learn this from where this linguistic usage came about and where it has its final theological foundation, the New Testament. Here it should be clear that from this point on we are not justified in reading into the New Testament later ideas of church and congregation. It is perhaps the most important thing in the investigation of the New Testament concept of church, that we first leave at home once for all our concepts of territorial church, Volks-church, national church, universal church, parish, local congregation, personal congregation and whatever they all may mean. For as we understand it, none of this occurs in the New Testament at all. And then we must strive to set aside the prejudices which each of us brings with him from his secular sociology, as we approach the New Testament doctrine of the Church.

 

The thought of western man on the nature of human fellowships [Gemeinschaften] is defined by two great sociological views which have their roots in the ancient world, and which are constantly at odds with each other. The one understands fellowship [Gemeinschaft] from the individual out as the alliance of individuals. Rousseau's[9] doctrine of the Social Contract and the view of the Communist Manifesto[10] on society as "individuals in association" are the consummate expression of this theory. And in spite of its weaknesses which are acknowledged by everyone, indeed in spite of the fact that it ever and again has lead to the dissolution of all human life, it has won a sinister power even over religious minds. It has brought forward the church concept of modern Protestantism which arose in the Baptist sects of the Reformation and in Bucer's Christian fellowship at Strassburg. It ripened among English Congregationalists and Baptists and achieved victory in the Pietistic currents of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The view spread deep into Lutheranism that the church is the congregation [Gemeinde] formed "by reborn individuals joining together," as Schleiermacher's celebrated definition of the church states. In this sense the pietistic-methodistic ecclesiolae [little churches within churches] and ecclesiae of various stamps sought to realize the church in the deep conviction that they were bringing about nothing other than the church of the New Testament. They did not notice that they had in fact read their concept of church stemming from a secular sociology, the theory of a Social Contract, into the New Testament. Never in the New Testament are we told that men are supposed to join a congregation [Gemeinde]. The church was always already there, and men were "added thereto" (Acts 2:41), and this was so also in the cases where, as a result of the preaching of the apostle, what we would commonly call a new congregation [Gemeinde] and what the New Testament calls "the church of God" came to exist at the place concerned. A doctrine of the church ruled by this sociology will never be able to understand what the New Testament says regarding the church as the body of Christ. It will never grasp the unity of the church.

 

We can understand that this view is ever and again met by a different one, which proceeds not from the individual, but from the community [Gemeinschaft] and which understands the church not as the sum total of Christians, but Christians as members of the church. Behind this ecclesiology is hidden another great theory of societal life, which arose from the pre-Christian Orient and forced its way into the intellectual life of European man. It is the doctrine of the community [Gemeinschaft] as a living organism, in which the individuals only exist as members. We find this doctrine in the Catholicism of the East and the West. Indeed the great Russian theologians and philosophers assure us in agreement with the Catholic thinkers of the West that just this is the essence of Catholicism and thereby of Christianity: The truth is in fullness, in the totality. The Romantic-conservative reaction against the Enlightenment and its atomizing of society [Gesellschaft] in the nineteenth century, which lead to the rediscovery of the great super-individual forms of society of the human life, marriage, family, the Volk and state, could not escape drawing this great idea of totality into the Catholic concept of church. Here it was believed that Rousseau and Marx could be countered with a Christian doctrine of society [Gesellschaftslehre]. And it believed that in what the New Testament said regarding the Church as the Body of Christ whose fullness fills all in all [Eph. 1:23], it had found the authoritative confirmation of the sole doctrine of society

[Gesellschaftslehre]. It was not noticed that the Body of Christ in the New Testament is no organism. It was not noted that a doctrine had been read into the New Testament which was not in it. One example will suffice to make this clear. Whereever the Romantic organic doctrine of society defined the concept church, the idea appeared that the truth is found with the entire church, that the catholicity of doctrine would be the guarantee for its truth. This idea can win a fascinating power over souls. It is what gives the Catholic Christian of the East and of the West his unshakable certainty of the correctness of his faith. J.H. Newman the greatest religious intellectual of the English people since Wesley, found peace for his soul in it when he had been shaken by the remark which Augustin once used to prove the error of Donatism which had been limited to Africa: The fearless man judges the world! (Securus judicat orbis terrarum!). A part of the church can err, every part is subject to err. But the church as a whole does not err. Even Lutherans have occasionally been overcome by the deceptive power of this idea. The power which it has exercised over minds since it forced its way into the church in the second century, must not fool us into thinking that it is a primitive Christian idea. It is not found in the New Testament. What proof text would be used to support it? Islam has the same conviction. "My people will never agree with an error." This remark of Mohammed gives the pious Muslim unshakable surety over against all who would accuse him of error. It finally expresses the pagan idea "the voice of the people is the voice of God" (Vox populi vox Dei). This error was overcome for the church of God when the Reformer, looking back on the moment when he stood alone and confessed the sole authority of the Gospel even over the church, over against the authority of the ecclesia catholica, dared to say: Then I was the church! (Tunc eram ecclesia!). No Catholic [Eastern or Roman] can understand this remark. And no theory of an organism can ever grasp what it means for an individual Christian who is a member of the Body of Christ, that the Lord Christ died for him the sinner in a completely personal way, and thought of him when He cried out: It is finished! Thus He is like the shepherd in the parable who, mindful of the one lost sheep, leaves the 99 in the wilderness, and does not rest until he has found the one.

 

3.

 

Why is it that the great sociological systems are necessarily found wanting when it comes to understanding the essence of the fellowship [Gemeinschaft] which is the church? The reason is that this fellowship has a simply supernatural character and therefore is not to be understood on the basis of analogies with natural fellowships. The fellowship which is the church is a result of the working of the Holy Spirit. "For the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God; they are foolishness to him and he cannot understand them" (I Cor. 2:14). The natural man - and this also includes the theologian's old Adam - confuses the Holy Spirit with the spirit of the religious man, or with the common spirit of the religious fellowship. He understands the confession of the faith, for instance, as the expression of private religious convictions or as the expression of acknowledged religious views in a fellowship of men. He makes the distinction, the separation between the confession of the individual and the confession of the totality. He does not comprehend that in the church of God this contrast does not exist. The Credo of the individual and the great "We believe, teach and confess" of the church can certainly not stand in contradiction to each other, if they both confess the faith worked by the Holy Spirit. For "the Holy Spirit... has sanctified and kept me in the true faith. In the same way He... sanctifies the whole Christian church on earth, and keeps it in the one true faith." That my faith is the faith of the entire church, and the faith of the church is my faith, this miracle of the Holy Spirit the natural man does not understand. - And the fellowship of the church is the fellowship of the Body of Christ. Neither does any sociology understand this, though the advocates of the doctrine of the community as a living organism happily fall headlong over the idea of the fellowship as a body, even more than their predecessors in ancient philosophy who loved the comparison of the fellowship with a body. But we remind the reader of what we have said previously regarding the church as the Body of Christ in the New Testament. Not only the ecclesia in its totality, but each individual ecclesia is treated as the Body of Christ (I Cor. 12:27; compare 3:16; 6:19; Eph. 5:30). Never is it said of a "congregation" [Gemeinde] that it is a member of the Body of Christ. The members of the Body are always the believers. Just as according to Luther the Sacramental Body of Christ is truly and essentially, but not locally or quantitatively present in, with and under the consecrated bread, and every communicant receives the entire Body, so also the church as the Body of Christ is not limited to the qualities of earthly-human fellowships. The church is there as the undivided Body of Christ, where a thousand times a thousand and ten thousand times ten thousand stand before the throne of the Lamb. And it is present where two or three are gathered in His Name. The church is not the sum total of churches. The individual church is not an arithmetic fraction of the total church [Gesamtkirche]. The church is not made up OF churches, it consists IN churches.

 

4.

 

From this vantage we understand the dignity which the New Testament ascribes to the individual ecclesia. The individual ecclesia, the "congregation" [Gemeinde] is church. It possesses every predicate which appertains to the ecclesia in toto [Gesamt-Ekklesia]. It has all the rights of the entire church. It lacks nothing which belongs to the church. Each individual church is the flock of Christ, in the same way all Christianity is the flock of the Great Shepherd. Each has been purchased with His precious blood. Each stands like a golden lamp stand before Him (Rev. 1:20). He sees in each the royal priesthood, the holy people. And just as Christ honors each of these ecclesiai - each of the seven churches of Asia receives its own letter through its own bishop - thus the apostles also honor them. Paul wrote not to the Evangelical Territorial Church of Galatia, but to the Churches of Galatia. His letter came to each of them and each read it. The Revelation is designated for the Christians in the province of Asia. The seven congregations [Gemeinden] represent the entire Church of Asia. The church exists in the churches.

 

How did these churches appear? What kind of constitution did they have? Which are the rights of the individual ecclesia? Where lay the limits of its rights? First of all, as we seek to answer these questions, we will not take Jerusalem and the Palestinian Church into consideration because there manifestly particular circumstances ruled. And this Church had an ecclesiastical law in many respects different from that of Christianity which had taken hold among gentiles. We must be cautious not to try to find the same circumstances and arrangements in every congregation of Christianity between Antioch and Rome. As in all areas of ecclesiastical life, also here multiplicity was original, unity came later. But great common outlines are perceptible in the countenance of the various church types. First of all there is the name. The circle of men gathered by the Gospel and the Sacraments of Christ, assembled about the Gospel and the Sacraments, call themselves ecclesia. This is not self-evident. They could also have called themselves "synagogue," which had the same linguistic origin. They could also have chosen various other designations. But they chose this word and used it to express their essence. The Word synagogue, assembly [Versammlung], they left to the Jews, out of whose "synagogues" they themselves had come. They called themselves "_kklhs_a," "assembly," used in the Greek Old Testament, to render the word "qahal," the solemn assemblage of Israel before the countenance of God. Consequently in this word lay the claim to be the true people of God, the Israel according to the Spirit. The Church of Ephesis is the People of God in Ephesis. In I Clement the People of God in Rome write to the People of God at Corinth. Such a self-consciousness did not exist in the synagogue. With this there also comes a difference in constituting or organizing the church. The young Christian congregations brought much with them out of the synagogue: their Bible, their hymnal, a remarkably great portion of their liturgy, surprisingly much also of the sanctifying of the Sabbath along side Sunday as the "Day of the Lord." Where we find the institution of the elders, it proves to be based upon the "council of the elders," the gerusia of the synagogue, though the new name "presbyter" was introduced. But what was changed was the concept of the congregation. In Rome there were many synagogues, but only ONE Church. Every synagogue congregation is an independent corporate body with a single governing body. The Church in Rome however remains one through the centuries, though it gathered in many house congregations and then in many sanctuaries [Gotteshäuser] for the divine service. This ancient usage, like the limitation of the deaconate to the number seven, as we have noted previously, was apparently an imitation of the Church at Jerusalem. Here it is crucial to understand the deepest essence of the individual ecclesia to note that the church is a local church, namely rooted at one place. It had profound meaning when the Christian Bishop did not use his family name as he carried out the official duties of his office, but the name of his see next to his Christian name [Taufname]. The individual ecclesia is the people of God at a definite place. The church is not suspended in the clouds, it exists here on earth. And it exists not in undesignated places, but here! Here in Rome or in Corinth or in Cenchreae. And the believers know where it exists, for it is where they come together. "Jerusalem is built that it be a city where we may come together" (Ps. 122:3). The place of the ecclesia is the place where the people of God is gathered. It is the place of the true presence of Christ in this world, where the Sanctus is sung, which once rang out in the temple at Jerusalem and is sung in heaven. Thus the individual ecclesia, the congregation, becomes the place of the divine presence in the world, the Temple of God, a building of living stones (I Cor. 3:16; Eph. 2:21; I Pet. 2:5ff.).

 

5.

 

The New Testament contains no law on how the individual ecclesia is to be organized [Verfassung]. Neither is it a law that the boundaries of the ecclesia must be co-terminus with the boundaries of the city. Indeed, otherwise the linguistic usage according to which, as we have already earlier noted, the word ecclesia is used also for the house congregation within a city and for the Christians of a smaller or larger (all Achaia!) district encompassing a city would already be impossible. With this we mean to say that there can be no definition of the "place" in the concept of the local congregation. We could say that an individual ecclesia would cease to be what it according to its essence should be, if the number of its members would become so great and its "place" so vast, that a coming together were no longer possible. A "congregation" which no longer can gather to hear the Gospel and celebrate the Sacrament of the Altar, is no longer a individual ecclesia in the sense of the New Testament. It consists of living Christians who on Sunday come together for the divine service, and then entirely of itself, new congregations arise out of it. But there are matters which in the New Testament are not regulated, and consequently may be freely decided in Christianity. The problem of the "place" of the local congregation also appeared in different ways in the great cities in the areas where Paul carried on his mission work, in the seemingly more rural circumstances of Galatia, and in the densely populated regions of the Roman Empire (from which situations alone we have more detailed accounts), and in the rural areas of the East. In cities like Corinth and Rome the congregation was naturally something different than in the regions of the East, where first not only individuals, but princely houses with their people accepted the Christian faith. The same course of mission work later in the west among the Celts and Germans necessarily produced entirely different forms of the individual ecclesia. Who will doubt that the Church of Jesus Christ with all means of grace and all promises had existed in the Scottish-Irish Church, where the cloisters were the focal point of the care for souls. The abbots and great-abbots were the leaders of the individual ecclesia, which coincided with the clan, and indeed so much that the office of Abbot was hereditary in the ruling family (from uncle to nephew as the office of the Katholikos would become among the Nestorians). And again the individual ecclesia appeared differently among the Goths in the great migration, where it coincided with a marching army division, a peculiar "local congregation," and yet the church of God with the Gospel, the Office of the Keys and the Sacraments! And were not the Pilgrim fathers on the Mayflower a "local congregation"? We note these examples only in order to show how impossible it is to limit the individual ecclesia in the sense of the New Testament and dogmatics to the form of the congregation which was possible or necessary in the cities of the Pauline mission, or which in the nineteenth century in Missouri and today in a principal city where the church has been denied, may be the given.

 

What is it then, which binds together all these various forms of the individual ecclesia? It is not the form of organization. It is the fact that in a delimited circle of Christians, who come together into entirely concrete assemblies, the means of grace are administered, and what makes this possible is done. It is namely of the essence of the means of grace that they can only be administered among living persons, from man to man. The Gospel is spoken orally from one man to another man. Baptism can not be imparted in the absence of the one to be baptized. We must gather together to celebrate the Supper. The forgiveness of sins can not be imparted by letter - or only in special exceptional cases. Here is the essence of the Christian congregation, the individual ecclesia. It is the place where everything happens which Christ has bestowed upon His church with the means of grace. Without them it would not happen. There would be no Una Sancta if there were no individual congregation. And therefore the legitimate Christian congregation is the greatest and most glorious thing in Christianity. It is more than the greatest conceivable and most glorious representation of the church in its totality, which could exist. If a genuine ecumenical council were brought together, at which Christianity were ideally to appear without the dark shadows which have thus far been cast upon every council, the council would be nothing over against the divine service of an ever so simple genuine Christian congregation. For no ecumenical council can forgive sins, nor exercise the office of the keys. No Roman council would even claim that for itself, nor would the college of cardinals ever presume to forgive sins.

 

Only from this vantage can we understand the essence of the individual ecclesia, the "congregation," "local congregation," or whatever else we may call the concrete church of God. In the individual ecclesia that happens which is to be done in the church. There is preaching, baptism, absolution, the distribution of the body and blood of the Lord. There are the functions of the ministerium ecclesiasticum, the service of Word and Sacrament instituted for the church. There is exercised what for Luther and the Lutheran Confessions is church governance, the leading of the flock of Christ through Word and Sacrament. What we in modern Christianity have been accustomed to call church governance (the superintendence of congregations and pastors, the gathering together of the congregations into large church bodies with synods, consistories and episcopal offices, and the work of leadership and administration which takes place in such entities), stands without exception not over, but under the congregation as assisting service for it. The exception is the ordination of the pastors through bearers of the office appointed for it. But those who ordain are also nothing else and have no higher rank as pastors. Here something takes place in the life of the congregation which does not belong to it, but its effect is bound to the decisive cooperation or indeed initiative of the congregation. But as for the rest, the following applies: Church governance, properly speaking, belongs to the individual congregation. It is the entity which exercises the potestas clavium which is given to the entire church. This can be done by no synod, no consistory nor the bishop as church regent, but only as pastor and Christian.

 

6.

 

If the individual ecclesia as the concrete church of God, in which the saving dealings of God in this world become reality, has no higher occurrence above itself, what power holds the many individual ecclesiae together? How then does the unity which binds them together, become manifest? Must not the independence of the individual church lead to a false autocracy, to independentism and with it the dissolution of the unity of all the ecclesiae? The answer of the New Testament is unmistakable. The many churches are ONE church, because each of them is the People of God, the Body of Christ, the Temple of the Holy Spirit: "ONE body, and ONE Spirit... ONE Lord, ONE faith, ONE baptism, ONE God and Father of all, who is present over all and through all and in all" (Eph. 4:f.). But where does this Lord of the Church and His authority become visible? He is indeed invisible. Where and how does His authority become visible?

 

It is very interesting that Jewish Christianity at the time could not withstand the temptation to make the authority of the Lord visible. After the dissolution of the college of the Twelve by the martyrdom of James the son of Zebedee, and the departure of Peter from Jerusalem, James the brother of the Lord became the leader of the congregation [Gemeinde]. The noteworthy fact that James' office was occupied successively by other blood relatives of Jesus demonstrates that his authority did not depend upon him being an apostle [though] outside of the circle of the twelve as Paul was (I Cor. 15:7ff). It was based rather on that fact that he was the physical brother of the Lord. Jewish Christianity was on the way to developing a caliphate. The greatest and most consequential attempt to allow the invisible Lord of the ONE church to become visible, is the later institution of the Roman Papacy as the Vicarius Christi. This and all other attempts which have appeared in the history of the Church to make the authority of Christ palpable, e.g. in the ecumenical synods which as representative of the entire church of Christ could not err, the New Testament opposes with the clear doctrine that the authority of the Kyrios in this world is only grasped for the church (but also really there) in His Word. The living and efficacious Word of God, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, is the authority which stands over every individual church as over the entire church, and at which all authority of the church finds its limits.

 

How does this authority come to us? According to the view of the primitive church God speaks to her first of all in the Holy Scripture of the Old Testament, second in the Word resulting from the prophesy worked by the Holy Spirit in that day (Acts 11:28; 21:10; I Cor. 12:28; 14:29ff.; I Tim. 1:18) and third - and this is the most important form of the Word - in the proclamation of the apostle as the eyewitness of Word which had become flesh. Corresponding to these are the three great offices God had given to the church, the "Apostle, Prophet, teacher" (I Cor. 12:28), which represent the order of rank among the teachers who explicate Scripture, lead by the Holy Spirit. In distinction from all other ecclesiastical offices a man is not called to these offices by men. Neither do these offices belong, as do those of the elders, bishops and deacons, to the individual ecclesia. They rather belong to all churches, Christianity in its entirety, and may exercise their preaching office everywhere, as the Didache still bears witness. The offices overlap. Thus Paul was a teacher in Antioch (Acts 13:1) before he began his great activity as apostle. The most important of these offices was that of the apostle - the prophets withdraw behind the apostles (see Eph. 2:20), and the office of teacher soon passes over to the bishops and presbyters (I Tim. 3:2; 5:17). The office of the apostle belongs to a unique generation of history, the generation of eyewitnesses, and possesses in its church-founding functions and in its one-timeness an unsurpassable value and authority. The church of Christ is at its essense ecclesia apostolica, as it confesses of itself in the Nicaeno-Constantinopolitanum. Thus we realize that for the ecclesiae of the earliest times as for the church of all ages, there has been no higher authority than the apostolic Word, especially when the Word of the Lord stands behind it (compare I Cor. 7:10; 9:14; 11:23). Here we must note that this office is in no way limited to the twelve. For the Risen One had also called others into this office, if they were witnesses of the resurrection (I Cor. 15:7ff.).

 

The office of Apostle was then in the church of the New Testament the bond which held together the many individual churches. Nothing is more characteristic for the essense of this office than its relationship to the individual ecclesia. The apostles are not the lords over the faith of the congregation, rather they work for its joy (I Cor. 1:24). They are the fathers of the believers (I Cor. 4:15; I Thess. 2:11; Phm. 10). Although Paul possessed an authority which no other person in Christianity had, he allowed the Church of Antioch to lay hands upon him, though Christ Himself had already sent him (Acts 13:3). Naturally, the Apostle had the right to assemble the co-workers which he judged suitable to the task. He also had the complete authority to install presbyters in the individual congregations which he had founded (Acts 14:23 where nothing is said of an election). But where we can check Paul, there he notes painfully that the congregation has a share in all things. He had ordained his dearest co-worker, his "son" Timothy by laying on hands, after he had announced a prophetic message by the will of the Lord. But he had also insisted that the laying on of hands be consummated through the congregation from Lystra through its presbyterium, and thus it took part in the ordination (I Tim. 4:14; 2 Tim. 1:6). Consequently it was not like later canon law which very neatly separated the rights of the office bearers from those of the congregation, and the rights of the total church from the individual church. Office and congregation were inseparably connected, even when as in the case of the apostle and his co-worker, it had to do with an office which had not been established by the congregation at all. They belonged together in the same way the total ecclesia and the individual ecclesia could in no way be separated from one another. Everything which in the course of later church history was so often torn apart and placed in opposition to each other, is here in the church of the New Testament, still bound together in the unity of the Corpus Christi.

 

The proof that the unity of the ecclesia of the New Testament in the many ecclesiae could be preserved, was the great decision of the apostolic age over the relationship between Jewish Christianity and Christianity which had taken hold among pagan peoples. We rarely consider the greatness of this decision because we can not conceive of it having had any other outcome. The question whether the pagans, who had now become "Israel," had to take upon themselves the law, could not be decided by any individual ecclesia. It effected all. It was the decision over the future direction of the church, because it was the decision for the entire church. It fell to the so-called apostolic council, and its brief, one-time action, on the basis of its ecclesio-legal character, paid off.

 

The later church treated the assembly of Jerusalem as a synod, the prototype of all synods, because it could not conceive that such a decision could be approached in any other way than by a legitimate synod. But a synod still lay outside the purview of the church of the New Testament. Synods first arose in the last decades of the second century, and indeed out of the congregational assembly. the assembly of a congregation, in which guests from other congregations took part - that is the early form of the synod. The assembly of Jerusalem on the contrary is the assembly of the church of Jerusalem made up of the "brothers," the "elders," and the apostles, whose status in this church was verifiable by eyewitnesses. How far the ecclesia of Jerusalem stretched over the boundaries of the city and whether it considered all assemblies and ecclesiae of Israel as part of itself, may here remain an open question. It is in any case an individual ecclesia, which in the prevailing form of constitution assembled with its ruling committee, and not a synod. The representatives of the Church of Antioch take part in the assembly. The leadership is in the hands of James the brother of the Lord, who is the first Bishop of Jerusalem. Paul, Barnabas and their companions, as officially authorized delegates of their church (Acts 15:2), take part in the assembly and deliberate in free discussion and counter-discussion with the Jerusalemites. To what extent in the entire deliberation the whole congregation took part, and to what extent many a matter was dealt with only in the presence of the apostles and presbyters, cannot be determined with certainly from the text. It is clear, however, that the Antiochenes have no franchise. They receive the resolution which they had sought of the Church of Jerusalem which correspond completely to their wish. A delegation from Jerusalem accompanied them on their return and delivered the formal decree which claimed to be composed with the assistance of the Holy Spirit, and thus to express the will of the Kyrios, valid for every individual ecclesia and thus for the entire church of God.

 

In order to understand the importance of these proceedings we must ask whether a reversed situation would also have been possible. Could the Church of Jerusalem, disturbed by the arrival of Antiochene Christians, have sent a delegation to Antioch and brought about a resolution of the church there regarding the position over against the law? That is of course unthinkable. Jerusalem and Antioch are not reckoned alike here, though both are churches of God. Before God Jerusalem is not more than Antioch. All the individual ecclesiae are of the same value as the Body of Christ. But this does not mean a democratic equality in a constitutional respect. It is just as it is within the ecclesia where individual Christians, as members of the Body of Christ, are of the same value, yet, as Paul so clearly says in I Corinthians 12, not all have the same functions. Jerusalem as the mother of the other churches, as the church of the holy city, as the seat of the Apostles, is particularly honored. We only need think of how Paul, while most decisively rejecting all hierarchical claims of many a Jerusalemite, had made clear the special position of this church to his congregation in the most tactful manner (Rom. 15:27). But on what basis, finally, rest the decisions of the congregation of Jerusalem? Not on the prestige of the Church of Jerusalem. Never would the Antiochenes, never would Paul have acknowledged the decision if they had not been convinced of its correctness. And why was it correct? It has been called an apostolic decree, though incorrectly. The apostles, however, do stand behind it with their authority. But apostles could err too. In Antioch they learned this later. The college of the apostles was not promised that it could say of every one of its resolutions: It pleases the Holy Spirit and us! What gives the decision of the apostles here its convincing authority is something else. As they place themselves humbly next to the unassuming presbyters whose names no one knows, and next to the lowliest brothers in the congregation (who certainly had no theological competence, but knew their Savior), regarding a question in which they could still claim the most competence in the church, they bow to the authority which also stands over the apostles. After everything had been told of the wonders God had performed among the Christians of pagan background, which demonstrated their legal equality, James, the strict Jewish Christian, comes forward with the Scriptural proof: "... and all the gentiles upon whom my name is spoken, says the Lord, who does all these things." (Acts 15:17) "The words of the prophets are in agreement" (Concordant verba prophetarum) (15:15). The "glorious company of the apostles" is joined by the "goodly fellowship of the prophets" to put it in the words of the Te Deum, which Luther reckoned among creeds of the church. That is the decision regarding the way the church would go. Who made the decision here? Who spoke? The Church of Antioch? The Church of Jerusalem? An individual church? A local congregation? A bishop? A presbyterium? A congregational assembly? A college of apostles? Indeed, they all spoke, in order or disorder, in clear or unclear ecclesio-legal situations, with greater or lesser authority. But what was decisive was no human word, but the Word of the Kyrios, which comes to all generations of men in the word of His apostles and prophets, at every place where it rings. In building the tiniest local church it builds the entire church of God. For where the "glorious company of the apostles" (gloriosus Apostolorum chorus) and the "goodly fellowship of the prophets" (Prophetum laudabilis numerus) are present, to cite yet once again the great song of praise of ancient Christianity, the entire church is also present, which exists in every local church, and at the same time extends far beyond it: "The holy church throughout all the world" (per orbem terrarum sancta ecclesia)!

 

 

 

Endnotes