Peter
Leithart has responded
to the responses to his blog post Too
Catholic to be Catholic; maybe
mine was one of them, I don’t know.
He closed
that piece with speculations about what some potential future unity in the
church might look like. And he opened this response with “Given what I’ve seen
of some of the responses, though, it will be helpful for me to clarify and
elaborate briefly the biblical framework I assume for thinking through the
problem of the divided church. That
framework is taken largely from the history of the divided kingdom of Israel as
it’s recorded in 1-2 Kings”.
It does seem
fair to make some comparisons between “the divided church of today” and the
divided nation of Israel in 1 and 2 Kings. He says:
The theological history of 1-2 Kings
gives an overall model for thinking about a church that is genuinely divided;
it explains how I can describe Catholics and Orthodox as brothers and sisters
while at the same time accusing them of liturgical idolatry; in the end, 1-2
Kings (with some parallels from 1-2 Chronicles) gives hope that the division of
the church is not permanent, and that we will all one day share a great
Passover, such as there never was in Israel (2 Kings 23:22).
But one
thinks that Leithart spends too much time with non-Protestants, given that his
definition of the word “church” seems to be shaped by theirs:
The idea is common on all sides of the
divided church that there is in fact no divided church. Some
Protestants unchurch Catholics and Orthodox; on this view, Protestants
constitute the only true, pure church, [the WCF certainly does not say
this] and therefore the line that
divides Protestants from Catholics and Orthodox is not a line that runs through
the middle of the church. It’s instead a
line that runs between church (Protestants) and non-church (everybody else). There are forms of the same idea in both
Catholicism and Orthodoxy, though since Vatican II the Catholic church has
acknowledged that while the church subsists in Catholicism, “many elements of
sanctification and of truth are found outside of its visible structure” (Lumen
Gentium, 8) and has famously recognized that some outside the Catholic church
are “brothers,” albeit separated ones.
While he
notes that the Vatican II version is “altogether too sanguine a view”, “from
the perspective of 1-2 Kings”, he still suggests that “If my church is the only
church, then there’s no tragic division within Christendom, no rent in the fabric,
to tearing of Christ’s body. 1-2 Kings
gives us no such comfort: Christ has been divided in our divisions”.
Two things at this point. Christ is NOT divided. And to see some kind
of “line” that Leithart posits is NOT a historically Protestant way of
understanding “what the church is”. [To be sure, there is a “dividing line”
between truth and untruth, but that continuum is a whole separate category from
what is “church” and what is “unchurch”.]
The catholic or universal Church, which
is invisible, consists of the whole number of the elect, that have been, are,
or shall be gathered into one, under Christ the head thereof; and is the
spouse, the body, the fullness of Him that filleth all in all”…. This catholic
Church hath been sometimes more, sometimes less, visible. And particular
Churches, which are members thereof, are more or less pure, according as the
doctrine of the gospel is taught and embraced, ordinances administered, and
public worship performed more or less purely in them.
There is no
line, and “we” are not the ones who determine who is “church” and what is “unchurched”.
The important thing to keep in mind is, to quote a verse, it is Christ who
builds the church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it, as WCF
25:5 says:
The purest Churches under heaven are subject
both to mixture and error: and some have so degenerated as to become apparently
no Churches of Christ. Nevertheless, there shall be always a Church on earth,
to worship God according to his will.
It is
altogether too “Catholic” to think that there is somehow a line that runs
somewhere, and that’s what determines what is “church” and what is “unchurch”.
Leithart is someone who should understand what the WCF says, and if he is going
to continue to try to remain in the PCA, given his sensitivities, he ought to
at least pay some lip service to this definition of “church”. But instead, he
just makes a huge concession to the “Cathodox” view of what the church is.
Is
he doing this on purpose? Or is he just not capable of making this kind of distinction?
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