Connecting all of the dots

(This is my final post dealing with Dr. R. Scott Clark's On Churchless Evangelicals )

So let’s put these pieces together.

First we are told that if you do not practice infant baptism, you are not in a valid church.

This rejection of the status of Christian children as such introduced (and continues to perpetuate) a principle of radical discontinuity between Abraham and the Christian, i.e. a radical principle of discontinuity in the history of redemption and in the covenant of grace. This principle of radical discontinuity, this denial of the fundamental unity of the covenant of grace as symbolized in the administration of the sign and seal of the covenant of grace to covenant children, is serious enough to warrant saying that any congregation that will not practice infant initiation (baptism) into the administration of the covenant of grace is not a church. The Protestants criticized the Anabaptists on these very grounds. Denial of infant initiation is a denial of the catholicity of the church stretching back to Abraham and it is too much like the Gnostic denial of the unity of the covenant of grace in the 2nd and 3rd centuries.

As such, wouldn’t your “membership” in a non-infant baptizing church be an invalid church membership (assuming for a second that “membership” per se is valid at all)? How can you have a valid church membership in an invalid church? That would be no different than being a member of the mormon church in good standing. It is a valid church membership, just not in a valid church.

Then we are told that if you are not in membership in a church congregation, you are not part of the visible body and therefore not part of the church invisible.

By analogy, the church invisible is composed of those who are, have been, or shall be, members of a visible church. if you’ve never sworn membership vows and confessed a common faith with a congregation, you are not a member of the visible church and if you’re not a member of the church visible, by definition, you are not a member of the church invisible. The former is a prerequisite for the latter.

If you are not part of the invisible church, well then you might be in trouble. Let’s look at Dr. Clark’s definition of the invisible church:

“When we speak of the church invisible, we’re speaking of that great congregation of the elect considered across time and space. It’s a way of speaking of the holy catholic church, that church in all times and places... It transcends congregations and denominations but is composed of elect who are members of congregations. It includes people from every tongue, tribe, and nation.”

I happen to agree in substance with that definition. The invisible church is comprised of all of the elect in all time, and all of the elect by nature will be regenerate and come to faith in Christ as part of the body of Christ. No one who is a Christian is not also elect, and no one who is elect fails to be a Christian. So let’s stop and very carefully put these two pieces together. If you aren’t in the visible church (defined by sworn membership vows in a congregation), you are not in the invisible church and you cannot be in the valid, visible church with a valid “sworn membership” in a church that doesn’t baptize infants. So it is logical to assume that since Dr. Clark considers non-paedobaptist churches to be invalid churches, we can assume that membership in those invalid churches is invalid as well. Therefore if you don't baptize infants you are not part of a legitimate visible church, and not part of the invisible church and therefore not part of the Body of Christ.

So is Dr. Clark stating in a roundabout fashion that if you are not a member in a paedobaptist church, you are not a Christian? That seems to be the argument taken to its logical extreme. All Christians are part of the elect. All of the elect are part of the invisible church. Only members of the visible church are also members of the invisible….

I really can’t believe that is what Dr. Clark is suggesting. I would assume that he considers people like Ken Jones, one of the hosts of the White Horse Inn and a Baptist, people like Al Mohler, people like John Piper to all be Christians. But when you lay out an argument you need to think through the implications, especially when you are teaching in a Christian seminary, and the implications here are troubling when you connect the dots. If you aren’t in an infant baptizing church, you are not in a real church and if you aren’t a member of a real church, you aren’t counted by Dr. Clark among the elect throughout the ages.

Fortunately I rely on the Word of God in matters like these. What matters is having your name in the Book of Life (Revelation 20: 12-15; Revelation 21:27; Philippians 4:3), and not whether you have your name on the membership rolls of a Presbyterian church.

The sum of his argument is taking church traditions of the Reformed flavor and trying to cram Scripture into those traditions. Not all church traditions are terrible things and many of them are not found in Scripture explicitly or even implicitly. But to imply that this particular brand of church tradition is the only possible expression of the church and that this claim is supported by Scripture, when often it is not, is arrogant and damaging to the Body of Christ. To paraphrase Dr. Clark, he can have his church traditions as he desires, and I don’t want them, but he shouldn’t declare himself free to state that only those who subscribe to his traditions are legitimately Reformed or even taken to an extreme that only those who follow his church traditions are even in the Body of Christ.

I have issues with much of evangelicalism, but to assume that the problems we see are limited to those “evangelicals” that Dr. Clark scoffs at and that by being more “Reformed” in church practice those problems are mitigated is both foolish and has in practice not been borne out. The problems that have decimated “real” churches like the Christian Reformed Church and the various Presbyterian groups like the PC-USA had less to do with not affirming the Belgic or Westminster Confessions strongly enough, but instead stems from the church becoming more and more institutionalized, more of an organization and less of a church. In fact, I would and have argued in the past that the reason that the PC-USA and the CRC have gone down the path of liberalism irreversibly and the Southern Baptist Convention recovered is precisely because the PC-USA and the CRC are highly organized, hierarchical organizations. While the Southern Baptist have a myriad of problems and are primarily “evangelical” instead of “confessional” Christians, at least they are not ordaining women and homosexuals and the Bible is still sort of preached in most of their churches.

So let’s see who this sounds like: Highly liturgical. Focus is on the institution. Stringently authoritarian and hierarchical. Formal membership in the visible church a requisite for being an in the invisible church. Infant baptism a prerequisite for being a “real” church. Appeals to traditional confessions.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: Roman Catholicism!

Funny that the guy who claims to be the true blue Reformed guy (and arbiter of who is allowed in the Reformed club) espouses a series of beliefs that sound a lot more like institutionalized Roman Catholicism than like New Testament ecclesiology. Kind of makes you wonder what they Reformed themselves from? In essence we have Roman ecclesiology coupled with New Testament soteriology (maybe not really, but since we are making grand, sweeping generalizations I wanted to get in on the action).

Now I don’t really think that what Dr. Clark is espousing is tantamount to Roman Catholicism. I don’t think we would see Dr. Clark declaring himself to be Cardinal Clark and wearing a mitre. But the slavish adherence to confessions and institutional Christianity, and rigid self-imposed definitions on who is or is not Reformed, from a group that has failed to reform it’s ecclesiology, hardly makes one the champion of being Reformed or reformational. If you buy into the narrow definition of Dr. Clark’s hyperconfessionalism, I guess I don’t qualify as “Reformed” nor would I want to. But since being Reformed is defined by more than Dr. Clark’s checklist, I will gladly claim and retain the title of “Reformed”, a “Reformed” theology that is Biblical and not traditional, a theology grounded in Scripture and not in empty formalism.