The Church in Frame's Frame, Part II

Part I

The Church is a Family

In the previous post, I argued that the Church is the company of God's eternally elect. But now as we examine the pattern by which God expands his people and thus causes the church to grow, we discover something startling: God's plan from the beginning has been for the Church to grow by means of human families. This fact leads naturally to a tension between the church as we see it and the church as only God can see it: the visible and invisible aspects of the Church.


When God created Adam and Eve, he created them to be the firstborn of a holy race¹:

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground." -- Gen. 1.27 - 28

We often focus on the ruling nature of man, but sometimes lost is the significance of the juxtaposition of vv. 27 and 28: Adam and Eve were intended to propagate the image of God. Their mandate was to create a people who would have fellowship with their creator.

And of course, this mandate was frustrated by the fall. We see this in the dashed hopes of Eve in Genesis 4, when she begets a son by the help of the Lord (cf. 3.15), and yet her son turns out to be an agent of sin rather than the seed who crushes Satan.

And yet, the vision of a holy race is re-promised in 3.15 with the protoevangelium. It is further articulated in the restatement of the mandate to Noah (9.1 - 3).

Most importantly, the vision of a holy race is explicitly articulated in the covenant God makes with Abraham. God intends to create a people for Himself within Abraham's family. Of course, His purposes are larger still. He intends to bless all the nations through Abraham. Some of the Gentiles (Ruth, Rahab) will be incorporated into the holy race through adoption. But at this stage in the development of the people of God, His primary means of multiplying His worshipers is through the family.

This has some important implications for the descendants of Abraham. First, all of the males receive the sign of purity, the sign of cutting away of the sin nature, the sign of circumcision. More importantly, all of Abraham's descendants are ethically obligated to keep God's commands, and not merely by way of external obedience, but from the heart (Rom 2.28, 29, with reference to such passages as 1 Sam 15.22, Hos. 6.1-6). But also, all of Abraham's descendants have a certain right, though not absolute or inalienable, to participate in the worship of the Lord. In fact, nominally, Israel is a people, a race, set apart and holy to the Lord. We may even speak of them as "historically elect" with the clear understanding that this term means "chosen out of the nations and obligated to be holy" rather than "chosen to be a part of God's remnant."

As Israel moved through her history in the OT, her designation as a holy race came into tension with the designation of God's people as His eternally elect. The simple fact was that many of Abraham's descendants themselves were not eternally elect, beginning with Esau. This fact created a problem not merely for systematic theologians but in the reality of Israel's experience. While Israel was normatively obligated to be holy to the Lord, a significant proportion of Israel -- a majority at times -- were idolaters. This was the burden of the prophetic oracles such as Amos. God's response to this situation was two-fold: first, to promise an eschatological age, a New Covenant, in which the heart would be circumcised; and second, to pursue a program of pruning out the branches that did not properly belong to Israel because of their lack of holiness. We can see this at work in the time of the Judges; in the books of Samuel and Kings; in the Bablyonian captivity; and ultimately in the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70. In all of these, God preserved the remnant that He knew to actually be His, and provided judgments that prefigured the eschaton (cf. Joel) to winnow away those who were not.

Israel's theologians had a hard time understanding the tension between God's election and His means of growth. It was easy for them to mis-read their family descent from Abraham as an actual entrance into relationship with God, or for them to place confidence in the performance of sacrifices In fact, one way of putting the Jew/Gentile problem in the early church is that the Judaizing party had come to mistake the plan of growth through a holy race for election itself. More succinctly, they mistook "historical election" for "eternal election."²

Hence, the emphasis on circumcision: if you wanted to be "chosen by God", you had to become a part of the race. This is of course backwards, and Paul refutes it clearly in Galatians 3. Peter also, in his own way, refutes this thinking in Acts 10. Why are the Gentiles given the sign of cleansing and the outpouring of the Spirit? Because they demonstrate the fruit of God's regenerating work in themselves; they are already a part of the holy race.

With the church, now, the growth plan shifts in emphasis. The full extent of the Abrahamic covenant, that he would be the father of many nations, is now implemented much more through evangelism and the fulfillment of the Great Commission. But this fact does not annul the growth of God's people as a holy race, His work through the family. The Great Commission does not set aside the growth plan. Rather, it merely brings adoption to the fore as a more prominent means of growth.

We see this in part in 1 Cor 7.14, in which the families of believers have been "sanctified." Not made holy in the sense of magically turned into believers by virtue of parentage (cf. Luke 3.8), but sanctified in the same sense that Israel as a whole was sanctified: set apart and obligated to be holy. Children of believers are not themselves automatically believers, but they should be. That is to say, from the perspective of human contingencies, the children of believers have every opportunity and therefore have even less excuse than the pagan for disbelieving the Gospel (cf. Rom. 3.1-2).

We see this further in the commands given to families in Ephesians 5. Husbands, wives, children, and parents are all obligated to act in the Lord towards one another. Noticeably absent is any exemption for children who are unbelievers. Paul gives no qualification that children are to obey their parents in the Lord, unless they happen to not belong to Christ. No, the obligation is laid upon all children with the expectation that "this is right." The ethical obligations enjoined upon Israel are also enjoined upon all who belong to the Church (cf. 1 Cor 5, 6).

Even empirically, we see that God calls people by means of families as well as evangelism. Around the world, historically, Christianity has been a family affair. Given the safe assumption that all whom God has effective called have come to faith, it is worth noting that God has apparently chosen to disproportionately elect children of believers.

And finally, the continuation of the plan to grow a holy race is seen in the language employed to describe God's people. They are "children of God", "brothers of Christ", "brothers of one another", "a holy nation."

So within the Church, as within Israel, God's plan of growth by means of family continues. This plan of growth, along with the very real evangelistic problem of pseudo-faith (cf. Matthew 13), creates the same tension in the Church that was present in Israel: the "Church as we see it" is not the same as "the Church as God sees it."

In the New Covenant, the promised Holy Spirit helps to better define the boundaries of the Church, but He has not (apparently) chosen to make those boundaries crystal clear. Our knowledge of the Church, as with many things, is "through a glass, darkly."

The next post will consider our knowledge of the Church by means of various perspectives.

JRC

1. I am indebted to a conversation with Dave Durant for the particular way of putting this. Also present here are ideas from O. Palmer Robertson and John Murray.
2. It also seems that the schools of the Pharisees mistook remnant theology (the notion that God had chosen a remnant by grace) for covenantal nomism (the notion that their status was "in the covenant" unless they fell away by failing to keep the law).