In this evaluation of the fallenness of the medieval church, all Protestants and numerous Catholics agreed. But, opinions were different as to what it was that constituted the fall. Certainly, it was not the simple fact that the church began to be tolerated in the age of Constantine. For some, the essential errors were specifically doctrinal or ritual: the development of the idea of the mass as a sacrifice or of salvation through works. For others, the issue was institutional.
Others have felt that what was basically wrong was the development of a church order centering in the papacy with the disciplinary authority in the bishops. For still others, it was the support given the church by the state and the development of the Christian doctrine of the just war, according to which alliance of church and state was felt to be not only possible but appropriate, making not only defensive war but even the crusade a Christian possibility.
All of these changes were of far-reaching importance; any one of them suffices to support the sixteenth-century claim that the Roman hierarchy had sacrificed its authority to speak for the true faith. But all of these were simply the superficial and very logical outworkings of a more fundamental change. The basic shift in orientation that we most identify as “the fall of the church” was that the Christian community was no longer a community of faith, constituted by the divine miracle of repentance, brought together out of the world and living in the midst of the world with a mission to the world, but that Christendom had been created by the identification of the Christian faith with the total human community in a given geographical area. That geographical area at the time was the Roman empire; later still smaller units could be spoken of as the church.
It is this identification of the church with total society, rendering possible the use of the term “Christendom” to designate a geographical area and a civilization, which constitutes the most characteristic description (and the infidelity) of the so-called Christian Middle Ages. The organizational relationships between the government and the hierarchy, the development of the papacy, and the development of the sacramental system are all the logical outworkings of this fatal alliance.
Thus, from the perspective of the church of believers, there is a certain sense in which we can with gratitude accept the secularization that characterizes the modern age. To the extent that this means Christian faith is being disentangled from a particular civilization, a particular part of the world, a particular social structure, and especially to the extent to which it is being disentangled from identification with the total membership of any one special group or nation, this development “clears the decks” for a restatement of what it means for the church to be in but not of the world.
By this we certainly do not mean that the mounting tide of non-religious or irreligious or anti-religious thought is itself wholesome or saving. We cannot say that the entire process of secularization is wholesome or that we can derive guidance from it for how God wants the world to develop. But at least the dismantling of the misunderstanding of Christendom is to be welcomed. We shall have made progress if we learn to understand the faith no longer as the cultural possession of a given population but, again, as the call to a voluntary community.
One of the obvious implications of the dissociation of church and society is the demand for religious liberty. It has been adequately demonstrated that the believers church movement of the Reformation marks the real origin of the concept of religious liberty. Religious liberty is not only a necessary limitation upon the power of the state; it also marks a voluntary renunciation by the church of any capacity to coerce. Many religious bodies have objected to the authority of the state in matters of religion when it was exercised against them. Yet, it is only from the perspective of the free church that we find Christian thinkers also insisting upon the renunciation of the use of such authority in favor of what they consider to be the truth. But this concern for religious liberty, as important as it has become in our age, is likewise not the rootage but simply the outworking of the disentanglement of the covenant of faith from the natural community.
What is true of religious liberty must be said for the concept of religious establishment as well. The church is not the church of the nation or of the state or of the social order. It is present in the midst of the population and the social order and concerned for their welfare. But, often enough, its contribution is a proclamation of judgment. Its capacity to be the true church is often dependent upon her independence from the powers currently exercising sovereignty. So, in a socially homogeneous community, if there should be no protest against extending to a church the privilege of official recognition, even then it would be wrong.
Conclusion
The testing of the freedom of the church often, if not always, comes at some external point where the circumference of the life of the church comes in contact with the claims of the world. Thus, we may need to speak of the governmental recognition of church, of the issue of religious liberty, of the freedom for the individual to make one’s own choice and commitment. In the same way, we can speak of specific polemical issues as we defend one kind of church practice against another. We shall continue to need to argue the wrongness of the baptism of infants. Yet behind or above or beyond all of this, the fundamental concern in our understanding of what it means to be the free church is the freedom of the Holy Spirit of God to constitute—in every day, in every generation, and in every place—that people of the new covenant whose daily existence reflects the reality that God has come in the midst of humanity to be their God and to make them his people.
1 Matt 3:9. See also Luke 3:8.
2 Matt 3:8.
3 John 8:31–34, 39.
4 See John 8:44.
5 See Gal 3:7-9.
6 Gal 3:26–29.
7 See 1 Pet 2:9–10 and Hosea 1:9.
8 See Eph 3:2–6.
2. The Commission to Bind and Loose
Only two times in the reporting of the gospel story do we find the word ekklesia from the lips of Jesus: in chapters 16 and 18 of the Gospel reported according to Matthew.1 Both times, this is in connection with the authorization given to the gathering of believers to “bind and loose.” The phrase is not a current one in our modern conversation. Yet, for Jesus and the New Testament church, it seems to have been of such importance that part of the definition of the church is that it is where this binding and loosing take place.
To understand the full significance of this phrase in our modern languages we need to use more than one translation. It often happens that in one language concepts can be brought together under one word which requires a choice between two different terms in another language. Where you in Spanish say hacer, we in English must choose between “to make” and “to do.” Conversely, when we in English are satisfied with one verb, “to be,” the Spanish must choose between estar and ser. In a comparable way, in order to understand fully what Jesus instructed the church to do with the use of these terms—binding and loosing—we must make two distinct applications in our modern context.
The Church Is a Community of Forgiveness
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