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Sectarianism and the search for visible catholicity:
Lessons from John Nevin and Richard Hooker
W. Bradford Littlejohn
University of Edinburgh, UK
Abstract:
Although from its outset, Protestantism has defined the esse of the church primarily by its
invisible attributes, its hidden identity in Christ, to whom it is united by faith, Protestants
have often felt compelled to give clearer visible definition to the church, to distinguish it
from sects or false churches. Unfortunately, such a quest for visible criteria of catholicity
has often tended to reproduce a sectarian mentality, in which these visible boundary
markers become not signs, but grounds, of the church’s union with Christ. In this article,
I analyze how this process unfolded in the thought of nineteenth-century Mercersburg
theologian John Williamson Nevin: beginning with a sharp critique of sectarianism, he
sought more and more for visible criteria of church unity that would exclude sects, and
ended by rejecting Protestant ecclesiology altogether. I then turn to sixteenth-century
English theologian Richard Hooker for resources that might help us avoid this impasse:
namely, a critique of sectarianism that maintains a clear distinction between the church’s
justification and its sanctification. The church’s hidden unity with Christ falls under the
former heading; its quest for historic forms of visible unity under the latter.
Keywords:
church unity, catholicity, sectarianism, Mercersburg, John Nevin, Richard Hooker
W. Bradford Littlejohn, 316 S. Washington St., Moscow, ID 83843
Email: w.b.littlejohn@gmail.com
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Protestantism and the “Marks of the Church”
Protestants have always struggled with the tension between the visibility and
invisibility of the church. By their emphasis on the gospel of justification by faith, they
are committed, it would seem, to the priority of the invisible features of the church:
salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, and grace, faith, and
Christ are all alike beyond the direct reach of our senses. So whatever visible features the
gathered congregation of the church may present to our senses, they ought not to be, it
would seem, the locus of our attention.
And yet, creatures of sense that we are, we can hardly prevent ourselves from
such preoccupation with the visible. From its beginning, Protestantism had to defend
itself against the charge that its church was nothing but a “Platonic form,” and also
against the charge that the myriad of Anabaptist and radical sects unleashed by the
Reformation were truly part of the Protestant churches. Both the solution, and an
intensification of the problem, emerged in the form of the Reformers’ doctrine of the
notae ecclesiae, the “marks of the church.”
While making a distinction between the church invisible and visible, the church in
Christ and the church in the world, the Reformers insisted on in affirming their
ontological continuity.1 Luther’s concept of the justified sinner, simul justus et peccator,
sometimes provided a framework for ecclesiology. The church was at the same time
perfectly righteous by virtue of its union with Christ, but this union, and this righteous
identity, were hidden; as manifest in the world, in history, it was still sinful and failing, a
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corpus permixtum composed of wheat and tares, gradually being sanctified. And yet there
remained certain “notes” or “marks” by which the true church could be visibly
recognized in history. The Augsburg Confession of 1530 established two marks: “The
Church is the congregation of saints, in which the Gospel is rightly taught and the
Sacraments are rightly administered,”2 but some over the next couple decades, wanting to
emphasize that just as true Christians must be characterized by godly life, so must the
true church, added a third, “discipline,” which initially had quite a broad sense, rather
than simply designating excommunication and its precursors.3
Now, these were all fairly useful in giving you a decent idea of where the church
was (although they obviously could not stand alone; they presupposed a Protestant
understanding of what the Gospel and sacraments were): if you saw a minister faithfully
expounding the text of Scripture, and administering baptism and the Lord’s Supper, well
then you could assume that there was a manifestation of Christ’s body; imperfect,
perhaps, but in communion with the Head. But they weren’t so good at telling you where
the church wasn’t.4 How false did a church’s preaching have to be before it could no
longer count as part of the body of Christ? How distorted or rationalistic or superstitious
did its sacramental practice have to be? How lax did its discipline have to be? In response
to Catholic polemic and persecution, many Protestants in the latter half of the 16th
century, particularly among the Reformed, increasingly deployed the notae ecclesiae to
brand Rome as a wholly false church, and in the process, felt the need to lay increasing
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stress on the adverbs “rightly.” Some also tended to redefine “discipline” specifically in
terms of a structure of church government, namely Presbyterianism, without which, it
was suggested, a minister could not rightly preach or administer the sacraments.5 Such a
sharp blade of division, wielded zealously, could quickly be turned upon other
Protestants, as it was in Elizabethan England. The militant presbyterians suggested that
the Church of England was not in fact a true church, despite its Protestant confession, due
to the deficiencies in its preaching, sacraments, and discipline.6 Although most
equivocated and held back from quite following through on the implications of this
charge, others did not, and broke away into separatism. The separatists, in turn, by
application of the same principles, divided and divided still further, particularly once
transplanted into America, thus bequeathing to our country the sectarianism that John
Nevin and Philip Schaff were to lament 250 years later.7
At the same time, many English critics of these Puritans, not content to point out
their unhealthy divisiveness, decided to make similarly exclusive claims for the
superiority of their own episcopal order. By this means, they could claim that these
Puritan sectarians were an unhistorical mutation that did not share in the historic life of
the church. By the 1630s, this trend had resulted in a theology of episcopal apostolic
succession that threatened to unchurch all the non-episcopal Reformed churches
(although it was another two centuries before the Oxford Movement Anglicans finally
took this drastic step).8
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Mercersburg’s Critique of Sectarianism
All of this backstory is instructive for a consideration of the ecclesiology of
Mercersburg movement, since history has a tendency to repeat itself. In what follows, I
will suggest that what began for the Mercersburg theologians as a critique of the scandal
of sectarianism (much like the Reformers’ attempt to distance themselves from the
Anabaptists) risked becoming somewhat sectarian itself, as the pressure increased for a
visible definition of the historical church.
Philip Schaff’s 1844 The Principle of Protestantism set the tone for
Mercersburg’s stinging rebukes of the biblicist sects that dominated America (then and
now):
Any one who has, or fancies that he has, some inward experience and a
ready tongue, may persuade himself that he is called to be a reformer; and
so proceed at once, in his spiritual vanity and pride, to a revolutionary
rupture with the historical life of the Church, to which he holds himself
immeasurably superior.9
Schaff’s critique of sectarianism resonated deeply with his new colleague Nevin,
who had already published some of his own initial polemics on this score, notably his
1843 The Anxious Bench. In a series of writings through the second half of the 1840s,
Nevin was to elaborate this critique, targeting what he saw as the individualistic,
subjective, rationalistic, unchurchly, and anti-sacramental root of American sectarianism.
Many of these critiques were devastatingly effective, such as his essays on “The Sect
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System” in 1849, where he lampooned how all American Protestants proclaimed their
sole fidelity to Scripture, while differing radically from one another and slavishly
following the pet teachings of their various micro-traditions. At the same time, however,
Nevin was seeking to elaborate a positive vision of the church, to answer what he called
“the Church question,” the great question of the age, as he saw it. The goal of this
positive vision was twofold. On the one hand, Nevin sought to articulate the unity of the
church as subsisting inwardly in its union with the incarnate Christ—the church was one
because it was one body, mystically united to one head. On the other hand, though, this
union must not be merely inward, since otherwise what was to prevent all sects from
laying claim to it? It must be visible and historical, the sacraments serving as the outward
instruments of the inward union.
Nevin, however, was rather ambivalent regarding the concept of the “outward,”
due in part to his heavy investment in the philosophical and theological categories of
German romanticism. Such romanticism made extensive use of “organic” metaphors
drawn from the sphere of nature, in contrast to what they saw as the mechanistic
metaphors and concepts which the scientific and industrial religions had injected into
theology. Accordingly, one of Nevin’s favorite critiques of the reigning models of
Christology, soteriology, ecclesiology, and sacramentology in American Protestantism
was that they remained “external” and “mechanical” and therefore “abstract” rather than
“inward” and “vital.”10 Any kind of outward or mechanical conception of the unity of the
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church, therefore, could not be the solution to sectarianism—indeed, both Schaff and
Nevin would often, at this point in their polemics, explain that this was where both
Roman Catholicism and Anglo-Catholicism (which was just getting into full swing over
in Oxford at this time) went wrong.11 And yet the “inward” and “organic” conception
must be at the same time “concrete” and “objective.” Nevin was thus not about to take
refuge in the standard Protestantism notion of the “invisible church,” as this seemed to
him to float free, above history.12
Accordingly, we find him in an 1846 sermon (really something of a theological
essay), “The Church,” wrestling his way toward a new articulation of the church’s
visibility and invisibility.
The sermon begins in a way that substantially resembles the magisterial Protestant
doctrine: the one church has two aspects, which Nevin names “ideal” and “actual” rather
than “invisible” and “visible.” In the first aspect, it is complete already in Christ, perfect
and unspotted, and it will be revealed in this form at the last day. In the latter aspect, it is
revealed in history, incomplete and imperfect, and yet a true and necessary manifestation,
without which the Church would have no reality at all.13 But as the sermon progresses, it
becomes increasingly ambiguous. The church’s unity subsists in Christ, yes, but how are
we united to Christ? Calvin would have answered in a flash: “through the Spirit,” but the
Spirit is almost never mentioned in Nevin’s exposition. But if the Spirit is not the bond of
unity, what is? The question is inescapable. Perhaps we might adapt the Lutheran
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doctrine of ubiquity, in which Christ’s body is everywhere diffused, and thus say that the
Church, wherever it is, is united to him, and thus one and catholic. Otherwise we must
answer, as the Reformed quite clearly did, “through the Spirit,” or else, as the Catholics
did, through the Church—that is to say, that the church today is united to Christ through
the church of yesterday. Nevin’s picture is uncomfortably like the latter: the church is a
stream flowing through history, bearing the life of Christ from age to age, and by union
with this stream, we have union with the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.14
It might seem that such an emphasis on the outward historical continuity of the
church would exclude sects entirely from membership in it; since they err not merely by a
bad theology of the church, but by outright separation from it and willful exclusivism.
However, at this point in his career, Nevin does not quite want to take that step. He
clarifies that the “actual” church, while subsisting in the “ideal” and growing toward
conformity with it, remains imperfect in history, so that “we cannot allow that visible
unity of organization and worship is indispensable to the truth of the Church, in the view
now under consideration. . . . Allow our divisions to be a great and sore defect, they are
still not necessarily such a defect as is inconsistent with the conception of the actual
Church.”15 Here again he critiques the Catholic and Anglo-Catholic conceptions of
visible unity as being too wooden. However, as his polemic against sectarianism
intensifies over the ensuing years, we begin to wonder how much he is still willing to
sustain this charitable judgment. The whole thrust of his 1848 Antichrist, for instance, is
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to elevate the sect system’s aberrant ecclesiology to the level of fundamental credal
heresy.16 In it, he goes so far as to say, “A Sect, on the other hand, stands in no such
organic connection with the Church as a whole. It is the creature in full of private
wilfulness and caprice, not the growth of the true Church life itself. . . . According to this
distinction, Sects as such are always evil, and very man is bound to shun them, as he
values his own salvation.”17
Such judgments, however, necessarily invite the question, “how much separation
from the ‘organic connection’ with the historical church disqualifies one from being part
of it?”; and conversely, “just how much union with it qualifies one to be part of the
historic church?” In other words, we must define the visible boundaries of the invisible
life of Christ. Nevin manages to hold off seriously facing this question for several years,
holding it at arm’s length with token denunciations of Catholicism and AngloCatholicism, and distracting himself with his work on the eucharist and Christology,
which largely absorbed him from 1846 through 1851.
Indeed, to begin to give an answer to the question might seem to risk implicating
himself in the sect spirit as well. For in his 1849 “The Sect Spirit,” Nevin identifies as
one of the problems of the sect spirit an exclusivity which claims for a particular visible
body the attributes of the whole catholic church, which claims the full authority of Christ.
“The sect,” he said,
calls on all men, as they value their salvation, to take refuge in her
communion. She does not simply offer them the Bible, but along with it
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her own tradition also, her sacraments, her ministrations of grace…. This
same feeling she tries to infuse into every soul, that falls within the range
of her ecclesiastical domain; and she exacts from them accordingly, at the
same time, full faith in her separate sufficiency for all church purposes and
ends. She assumes in regard to them the full stewardship of Christ’s house.
She makes herself responsible for their souls, engaging if they do but trust
her guidance and care to see them safe into heaven. She carries the keys of
the kingdoms of heaven, to bind and to loose, to open and shut, at her own
pleasure.18
In short, Nevin contends that, in the midst of fervent opposition to Roman Catholicism,
the sect system tends to replicate its form in miniature. This sketch may be overdrawn as
regards many of the sects and micro-denominations of Nevin’s day—certainly nowadays,
many have become much less exclusive in their claims—but it was a tendency that
certainly did come to fruition in many sects of that era.
Nevin’s Vision of Visible Catholicity
Nevin, then, has argued himself into a bit of a corner by the late 1840s. He is
determined to find a basis for the unity and catholicity of the church that will provide an
answer to the rampant sectarianism and individualism of the age and will draw people
back to the traditions, liturgy, and sacraments of the historical institutional church. Mere
profession of faith in Christ is not sufficient for the catholicity of the church; for then
what need is there for the sects to renounce their ways and pursue visible unity?
Likewise, organic union with Christ by the power of the Spirit is not sufficient, for again,
any sect or even lone Christian could claim this, and who could deny it? The Spirit is
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invisible. Nor, however, does Nevin want to define the catholicity of the church in terms
of a shared institutional structure, which would exclude from the body of Christ all who
are not within it; this, he thinks, would itself be sectarian, not to mention Catholic. He
hopes for awhile that, by the use of the categories of German romanticism, he can set a
course between all of these alternatives, and perhaps, if he weren’t so eager to find a
formula that would exclude sects, he might have succeeded. But eventually, the need to
provide some concrete visible definition to this objective, concrete, historical body called
“the catholic” led him to take a decisively anti-Protestant step.19
This emerges with vivid clarity in his 1854 sermon (again, as much a treatise as a
sermon) on “The Christian Ministry.” Interestingly, and promisingly, this sermon begins
with an extended discussion of the Spirit, as the means by which the gift of Christ’s
presence and power is made available to the church in history.20 Nevin then, however,
proceeds to evacuate this appeal to the Spirit of all its traditionally Reformed meaning,
confining the Spirit’s presence and power in the human agency of the ordained ministry.
Strikingly, Nevin makes the establishment of the ministry to be essentially equivalent
with the establishment of the Church: “It is, by the terms of this commission, identified
with the institution of the Church itself. . . . The Church is a much wider conception than
the ministry. But still they are so joined together that the one cannot be severed from the
other.”21 Obviously, this is a decisive step toward providing visible definition to the
church catholic, but it is also a decisive step away from the Protestant doctrine of the
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priesthood of all believers. But Nevin then goes considerably further: “The idea of the
Church is made to involve the idea of the ministry. The first is in truth constituted by the
commission that creates the second; for it has its whole existence conditioned by an act of
faith in the reality of this commission, and this tested again by an act of real outward
homage to its authority.”22 That is to say, the church does not constitute the clergy, the
clergy constitute the church.
Lest we imagine that Nevin has for a moment carelessly overspoken, he returns a
few pages later to sound this theme again, scored now for full orchestra:
the Church [is] to be considered as starting in the Apostles, and extending
itself out from them in the way of implicit submission to their embassy
and proclamation. They were to stand between Christ and the world, to be
his witnesses, his legates, the representatives of his authority, the
mediators of his grace among men. They were to preach in his name, not
merely a doctrine for the nations to hear, but a constitution to which they
were required to surrender themselves, in order that they might be saved.
The new organization was to be formed, and held together, by those who
were thus authorized and empowered to carry into effect officially its
conditions and terms. . . . The law of derivation is downwards and not
upwards, from the few to the many, and not from the many to the few.23
In fact, he goes so far as to call the alternate view heresy.
This would appear to be Tridentine Catholicism in undiluted form: defining the
esse of the church in terms of a juridical constitution of mediating clergy who dispense or
withhold grace. Moreover, since the church is to be one, so the ministry must be one;
indeed, no minister has authority on his own, only as part of the clerical corporation:
the office itself could be of force only as it retained always the character of
a single body bound together, and in union with itself. As there can be, by
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the very conception of Christianity, but one faith, one baptism, and one
Church, so can there be also but one ministry, and this unity must be taken
to extend to all times and ages, as well as to all lands.24
Thus we have, he grants, the concept of “apostolical succession” and the conception of
ordination “as the veritable channel through which is transmitted mystically, from age to
age, the supernatural authority in which this succession consists.”25 Whether Nevin is
himself aware of the irony that he has now embraced an “outward” and “mechanical”
conception of the church’s unity and catholicity, in contradiction to his earlier polemics, I
am not sure.26 But he does go on to attempt to answer the “sneer” against such a concept
of “tactual communication” by insisting that this is how God always works. Again,
though, mere reception of such ordination is not sufficient; one must remain in
communion with the whole organization of the ministry in order to validly bear its
authority. The logical step from here, and the step that would bring this ecclesiology
wholly onto Roman Catholic ground, would be to insist on a single visible authority as
the locus of this communion, lest divergent claims arise amongst the clergy as to which
party bears the authority of the whole.
Nevin, in fact, does not take this step. Indeed, this sermon was preached as he was
deciding not to convert to Roman Catholicism, as he had been considering for some time.
The concept of the ministry that Nevin has advanced requires that it be undivided, which
it has not been since the Reformation, or indeed since AD 1054, or possibly earlier.
Accordingly, neither the Roman Catholic Church nor any church can lay claim to actually
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having a valid ministry, and thus being the church, based on the criteria of this sermon.
Nevin’s posture in this sermon then resembles that of many modern Anglo-Catholics,
clinging to an ideal fantasy church rather than any actually concretely existing church. It
is perhaps no surprise that while Nevin continued to do some excellent theological work
after this date, his thought turned more and more in a mystical, inward direction. Thus we
have the supreme irony that Nevin’s ecclesiology, beginning in polemic against, on the
one hand, an “outward and mechanical” concept of church unity, and on the other hand, a
subjective “abstraction,” ends in both.
Richard Hooker and the Sanctification of the Visible Church
Given the continuing urgency of the problem of sectarianism in American
Protestantism, is there a better way to proceed, a way to champion “Reformed
catholicity” against sectarianism without becoming sectarian, or Roman Catholic? One
place to look for such a way forward would certainly be the career of Nevin’s colleague
Philip Schaff, who while excoriating the proliferation of sects, never seemed to become
as pre-occupied with them as Nevin grew to be—largely a difference of temperament,
perhaps. In his later writing and remarkable ecumenical initiatives, Philip Schaff was able
to champion visible forms of unity as testaments to and safeguards of the church’s unity
in Christ, rather than sine qua nons of ecclesial identity. However, I would like here to
turn back to the sixteenth century with which we began and draw attention to the
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admirably clear approach offered by English Reformed theologian Richard Hooker.
Though perhaps little known today, particularly to American readers, his fervent
ecumenical vision stands as a beacon for today’s advocates of “Reformed catholicity” to
follow.
Hooker, though certainly himself an advocate of a liturgical, sacramental,
historically-rooted church, constructed his ecclesiology carefully in response to a similar
sort of turn to that which had shipwrecked Nevin. As we saw, many English Puritans and
separatists strikingly resembled the virulently anti-Catholic sects that dominated
American revivalist Protestantism in the mid-1800s, and like these, their search for
visible purity led them to make absurdly exclusive claims about how they alone had
recovered the true form of the church as it had been laid down by the apostles. In
response, some English conformists responded by laying stress on their own visible
continuity with the historic church and developing a theology of apostolic succession,
much as Nevin was to find himself doing in the 1840s and 1850s. Hooker, however,
while a strong proponent of episcopacy, firmly rejected the ecclesiological principles that
both ends of the spectrum shared: the quest for an outward visible boundary that could
identify the extent of Christ’s mystical body, excluding from it other professing believers.
Hooker’s ecclesiology starts with the rejection of this false quest for certainty, and
indeed of the whole notae approach to ecclesiology—although it could be used rightly, it
had become so overused and abused that it was better abandoned, he deemed.27 Hooker
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begins instead with quite a rigorous assertion of the invisible (or “mystical”) and visible
church distinction:
That Church of Christ which we properly terme his body mysticall, can be
but one, neither can that one bee sensiblie discerned by any man… Onely
our mindes by intellectuall conceipt are able to apprehend, that such a reall
body there is…a body misticall, because the mysterie of their conjunction
is removed altogether from sense.28
The visible church, on the other hand, is a “sensiblie knowne company,’ identified by the
“outward profession of those thinges, which supernaturally appertaine to the very essence
of Christianitie, and are necessarily required in every particular christian man.”29
When it comes to the church in its invisible identity, hidden in God with Christ,
the Lord knows those who are his, and we do not. Sure, we can make some pretty decent
guesses based on outward behavior, but in the end, only God knows the heart. There is
simply nothing to be gained, Hooker contends, from going around trying to determine
with any level of certainty who is genuinely invisibly united to Christ and who is not.
And just so, although the visible church is the outward social manifestation of the life in
Christ, there is nothing to be gained in trying to determine with any level of certainty
when it is obeying Him faithfully enough to count as part of his Body and when it isn’t.
From our human standpoint, all we have to go on is “do they profess faith in Christ the
Son of God, and have they affirmed this profession through baptism?” If so, then they are
to be counted part of the one visible church of God. They may be unsound members,
dead members even, but if so, they will be cut off at the last day:
17
If by external profession they be Christians, then are they of the visible
Church of Christ: and Christians by external profession they are all, whose
mark of recognizance hath in it those things which we have mentioned,
yea, although they be impious idolaters, wicked heretics, persons
excommunicable, yea, and cast out for notorious improbity. Such withal
we deny not to be the imps and limbs of Satan, even as long as they
continue such.30
Accordingly, Hooker includes not only Rome, but heretics and schismatics, so
long as they profess Christ and receive baptism, within the bounds of the visible church.
It is not for nothing, on Hooker’s account, that we profess in the Creed that the unity and
catholicity of the church are matters of belief, only dimly perceived this side of the
eschaton—we walk by faith, and not by sight.
This minimalist approach might seem to baptize all forms of sectarianism,
dismissing the importance of any of the visible markers of historic ecclesial continuity in
favor of bare profession of faith. However, equally important for Hooker is his doctrine
of correspondences, that the church outwardly ought to seek to correspond to its inward
reality. “Signs must resemble the things they signify,” he declares, and we might
legitimately speak of the visible church, in his theology, as a sign which signifies the
presence of the invisible. Accordingly, it must strive to manifest outwardly the qualities
which it has antecedently in Christ:
That which inwardlie each man should be, the Church outwardlie ought to
testifie. And therefore the duties of our religion which are seene must be
such as that affection which is unseen ought to be. Signes must resemble
the thinges they signifie. If religion beare the greatest swaie in our hartes,
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our outward religious duties must show it, as farre as the Church hath
outward habilitie. . . . Yea then are the publique duties of religion best
ordered, when the militant Church doth resemble by sensible meanes, as it
maie in such cases, the hidden dignitie and glorie wherewith the Church
triumphant in heaven is bewtified.31
This includes, of course, unity. But like all outward manifestations, such unity is
to be treated under the heading of the doctrine of sanctification.32 In Hooker’s theology,
as in Luther’s, the justification/sanctification distinction maps pretty well onto the
invisible/visible church distinction: as the mystical body, the church is fully righteous in
Christ; as the visible body, it is stained and spotted, urgently needing growth in
righteousness. Hooker, accordingly, is well-prepared to argue for the importance of
historical structures of authority, visible forms of unity, diligent observance of the
sacraments, and submission to credal and confessional norms as the signs and seals of the
church’s catholicity, crucial to its sanctification and well-being. And we must work to
restore them to our churches. But these things do not constitute the church’s being, the
basis of its recognition before God. That is hidden with Christ in God, and our first task is
ensure that we, and those in our own churches, are sharing in this life, not to obsess over
the criteria for other churches to share in it. Meanwhile, we extend them whatever
fellowship we can, and exhort them to grow in truth, unity, and holiness.
1
For a good sketch of the Reformers’ doctrine of the invisible and visible church, the
notae ecclesiae, and other aspects of their ecclesiology, see P.D.L. Avis, The Church in
the Theology of the Reformers (Atlanta: John Knox, 1981).
19
2
Art. VII (http://bookofconcord.org/augsburgconfession.php [accessed May 27, 2014]).
3
See P.D.L. Avis, “‘The True Church’ in Reformation Theology,” Scottish Journal of
Theology 30:4 (1977): 319–45; Jordan J. Ballor and W. Bradford Littlejohn, “European
Calvinism: Church Discipline,” in Irene Dingel and Johannes Paulmann, eds., European
History Online (EGO) (Mainz: Institute of European History [IEG], 2013)
(http://www.ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/crossroads/religious-and-denominationalspaces/jordan-ballor-w-bradford-littlejohn-european-calvinism-church-discipline
[accessed May 27, 2014]).
4
Avis, “True Church,” 334: “The notae ecclesiae is a qualitative concept; theoretically
one can say whether a certain ecclesial body possesses the marks or not. But in practice it
was found to need supplementing by a quantitative one, such as Calvin’s concept that
Rome contained the vestigia of the church.”
5
Theodore Beza was important in this shift (see Takadata Maruyama, The Ecclesiology
of Theodore Beza [Geneva: Droz, 1978]); yet the decisive moves were taken by Scots
such as Andrew Melville and Englishmen such as Thomas Cartwright and John Field (see
Anthony Milton, “Puritanism and the Continental Reformed Churches,” in John Coffey
and Paul C.H. Lim, eds., Cambridge Companion to Puritanism [Cambridge: CUP, 2008],
116).
6
Avis, “True Church,” 337–9.
20
7
See Michael Winship, Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill
(Cambridge, MA: HUP, 2012) for a chronicle of the separatists’ obsession with
distinginguishing true from false churches, and their influence on early America.
8
For a good survey of the High Church Anglican view of the continental Reformed
churches, and the departure marked by the Oxford Movement, see Norman Sykes, Old
Priest and New Presbyter (Cambridge: CUP, 1956).
9
Philip Schaff, The Principle of Protestantism, vol. 1 of Lancaster Series on the
Mercersburg Theology, ed. Bard Thompson and George H. Bricker (1845; reprint,
Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2004), 149.
10
See for instance John Williamson Nevin, “The Sect System, Article 1,” Mercersburg
Review 1:5 (1849), 504, 506.
11
John Williamson Nevin, “The Church,” in J.H. Nichols, ed., The Mercersburg
Theology (1966; reprint, Eugene, OR, 2004), 63, 64; Schaff, Principle of Protestantism,
Pt. II, ch. 2.
12
See especially his later critique of this notion in Nevin, “Hodge on the Ephesians,”
Mercersburg Review 9:1 (1857): 46–82.
13
Nevin, “The Church,” 57–65.
14
See Ibid., 70–71.
15
Ibid., 63.
21
16
See also John Williamson Nevin, “Thoughts on the Church,” Mercersburg Review 10:2
(1858): 169–98.
17
John Williamson Nevin, The Anxious Bench, Antichrist, and the Sermon Catholic
Unity, edited by Augustine Thompson (1843, 1845, 1848; reprint, Eugene, OR: Wipf and
Stock, 1999), 55. Although he distinguishes here between legitimate interimistic
denominations and full-blown sects, he goes on to include most of American Christianity
under the condemnation of sectarianism: “Our denominational Christianity is fairly
responsible for all the mischief of our Sectarian Christianity. We have full right to speak
of the whole indiscriminately, as the Sect plague of our age and nation” (p. 57).
18
John Williamson Nevin, “The Sect System, Article 2,” Mercersburg Review 1:6
(1849), 533.
19
The specific occasion for this step was above all his study of Cyprian’s ecclesiology,
unfolded in four lengthy articles of The Mercersburg Review in 1852 (although we may
well wonder how much of what he found in Cyprian, he was already looking to find). See
especially Nevin, “Cyprian: Second Article,” Mercersburg Review 4:2 (1852), 359–63
for a unequivocal statement of the vision of apostolic succession that was to later appear
in his sermon on “The Christian Ministry.”
20
John Williamson Nevin, “The Christian Ministry,” in Nichols, ed., The Mercersburg
Theology, 350–54.
21
Ibid. 354.
22
22
Ibid.
23
Ibid. 359. See “Cyprian: Second Article,” 361–2 for very similar statements.
24
“Christian Ministry,” 360. Cf. “Cyprian: Second Article,” 365–6.
25
“Christian Ministry,” 361.
26
It is indeed quite striking to compare the frequency with which the word “outward” is
used in a negative context in Nevin’s writings of 1846–50, versus the predominantly—
even overwhelmingly—positive connotation it assumes in his articles on Cyprian.
27
Avis, “True Church,” 339–43.
28
Richard Hooker, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity III.1.2; reprinted in W. Speed
Hill and Georges Edelen, eds., The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard
Hooker, vol. 1: The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: Pref., Books I to IV (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap, 1977), 194–5.
29
Hooker, Lawes, III.1.3, 4 (Works, 1:195, 196).
30
Hooker, Lawes, III.1.7.
31
Hooker, Lawes, V.6.1-2 (The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker,
vol. 2: The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: Book V [Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1977], 33–
4.
32
William H. Harrison, “Powers of Nature and Influences of Grace in Hooker's Lawes,”
in W.J. Torrance Kirby, ed., Richard Hooker and the English Reformation (Dordrecht:
23
Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), 15–18, notes that Hooker’s chief concern in the
Lawes is with the visible church, engaged in the process of sanctification.