Understanding the Visible and Invisible Church

In this session, what I want to do is to take us back to the 4th century and try to gain a deeper understanding of the significance of that distinction. I've already mentioned at least in passing about the phenomenon that we experienced in America in the decade of the 60s with the Advent of the so-called underground Church. [00:38:52]

Augustine would include in that little blip outside the visible Church people like the thief on the cross who was converted in his hour of death. He had no opportunity whatsoever to align himself with some visible institution. There was no opportunity for church membership or even for baptism as he hung on the cross in preparation of death. [04:01:56]

The reason for this distinction at this point is that Augustine said that the church is a body, a corpus, as we've already seen with the concept of the Corpus Christi, the body of Christ, but that it is a corpus per mixtum, that it is a mixed body. This was not a judgment that Augustine learned empirically or inductively. [08:37:44]

Jesus speaks of the condition of the church as including a mixture of Tears or weeds, if you will, that live and grow along with the wheat. In fact, though Christ institutes a process of church discipline that involves the expulsion from the membership of the visible Church those who are engaged in Gross and heinous sin. [09:42:56]

Jesus again indicated that it was clearly possible for people to make a profession of faith and do all of the things that are required by the visible Church to enter into her membership. A person can go through a communicant Class, give a credible profession of Faith, receive the sign of baptism, and do all of those things that are required for church membership. [12:43:24]

The invisible Church therefore is invisible to us; it's not invisible to God. Christ knows his sheep; he knows who are authentically his. He can read their hearts just as he read the thoughts of the woman of Samaria and of Nathaniel and all of that. God can read the state of your soul without seeing any external visible evidence of your faith. [14:22:24]

I remember when I first became a Christian and went home to my home church and I had a discussion in the drugstore one night with a friend of mine who had always been an outstanding student. Now he was working on a degree in science at Carnegie Mellon University, and he kind of prided himself in his academic skepticism. [15:13:28]

There are still pockets of our society where there are business advantages and social advantages and other kinds of advantages for being perceived by your neighbors and your fellows as an upstanding Christian. So there are still reasons in our society other than the right ones to give this pretext, and that's always been the case. [18:35:52]

From the first century to the 20th century, there's always been the clear and present danger of unbelievers present mixed together with the real Believers in the body of Christ. Those unbelievers may in fact be head of the church, the clergy of the church, the Bishops of the church, or whatever. That's always a serious possibility. [20:38:28]

There are dark moments in church history, Dark Ages, where the church falls into deep deep corruption and Disobedience so that churches become, as the scriptures suggest, synagogues of Satan where we are fortunate to find the remotest speck or presence of the invisible Church within the visible Church. [22:17:24]

Jesus ever gives, and that's his conclusion to The Sermon on the Mount when he says many will come to me saying Lord, Lord, and he says it's not everyone who says Lord, Lord who will enter the kingdom but those who do the will of his father. And again he says they will come and saying Lord, Lord didn't we prophesy in your name. [25:13:24]

John Calvin struggled with this distinction between the visible and the invisible, and he said yes, the hearts of the faithful are known only to God, but it is not as if the church is to be a corporation of H.G. Wells's invisible men. Calvin said that the task, the principal task of the invisible church is to make the invisible Church visible. [27:50:44]