• Why Do We Need The Church?  By Jeff Holston
• Paradigm Shifts  By Alastair Roberts
  

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Why do we need the Church?

1. Of the institutions (Family, Church, State) which God has established and through which his sovereign reign is administered, only the Church is trans-historical. Neither the State nor the Family will survive the destruction/transformation of the current heavens/earth and their replacement/completion in the new heavens/new earth. Only the Church survives.

2. The Church is not an invisible entity - it exists in time and in space (now in the present age, and through eternity in the new heavens and new earth) and it's current members are visible to both believers and unbelievers. To deny this is to accept the ecclesiastical equivalent of docetism. Jesus was really just a spirit who "appeared" to be a man, not a real, flesh-and-blood person. NO. Just as Jesus was a true man, true flesh and blood, so the renewed humanity in Christ is a physical reality, not merely a "spiritual" (i.e. non-physical) proposition or limiting concept.

3. Salvation is not (Biblically speaking) a matter, first and foremost, of "how I as an individual get to go to heaven". For one thing, humans were created to dwell upon the earth, and heaven is merely a temporary resting place until God re-creates the new heavens and new earth, and the new earth is where we redeemed humans will dwell, not the new heavens. But more significantly for this discussion, Salvation is, Biblically speaking, union with Christ, which is inseparable from union with Christ's Body. There is no such thing in the Bible as a "stand-alone" Christian. Nor is there such thing as a "proxy" Christian (by membership in a particular bloodline or physical family). Even in ancient Israel, where bloodlines counted for a lot, each Jewish male had to be circumcised, and if this was not done, that man was considered to have broken the covenant and was cut off from his people (salvation is corporate, not individualistic) - he was no longer considered a member of the covenant people of God, no matter how impeccable his pedigree or family tree was. Christians are Christians because they belong to the Body of Christ, which they enter through faith in Christ and by baptism into his death and resurrection. And it is significant that the New Testament scrupulously holds these two points together, meaning that it is impossible to separate oneself from the body of Christ without separating oneself from Christ himself, and thus from faith in Christ.

Salvation is inherently corporate, not individualistic. It is true that individuals believe and are baptized, but they do so in order to be remade together with all of Christ's body, and in union with the Head, as the new humanity in Christ, which is an irreducibly corporate reality, not and individualistic and private one.

4. The family, while important, is not the end or goal of God's work of creation and new creation in Christ. It is the Church which is the Bride that Christ is perfecting, not the family. The family itself is necessarily broken and sinful in many and profound ways, some of which are obvious to us, and others of which we are blind to. The family itself needs to be healed and remolded to become what it needs to be in God's order, and the only institution which can remold a broken family is the Church - the true Family of God. Remember, when Jesus was told that his mother and brothers were waiting to speak with him, he did not stop his lecture in deference to his physical family, but continued by saying "Who is my mother, who are my brothers? He who does the will of my Father, he is my brother and she is my mother!" The Church trumps the family, not because the family is unimportant, but because God never designed the family to rule over or transcend the Church.

The family is designed to support and be supported by the Church, in it's exercise of it's own proper authority - that of bearing the rod of correction. But the family exists in this relationship to the Church in a basic and foundational way, thus the family is not truly restored to it's proper role and importance if it arrogates to itself the prerogatives which God has only entrusted to the Church – most significantly, that of bearing the Keys of the Kingdom. The family cannot admit to baptism or the Lord's Supper on it's own, as this function was never granted to the family as an institution in God's order. Only the Church can admit (or refuse to admit – e.g. excommunication) to Baptism and the Lord's Supper, and this is the function of the Keys of the Kingdom.

This is why a father cannot, while acting merely as a father, baptize his own children or serve his own children communion. If he does baptize them, or serve them communion, he is only able to rightly do so as a representative of the Church, and this implies that he is in submission to the Godly authority which God has established in the Church. If he steps out of submission to this Godly authority, his administration of the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's supper becomes schismatic and sectarian, and he shows himself to be in rebellion against God's lawfully instituted authority in the Church. And if he himself rebels, how can he rightly demand submission to his own authority in the home, when he refuses to submit to the authority of Christ committed into the hands of Christ's representatives in the elders of the Church?

This is what it means when Jesus said to his Apostles (those who would bear the Keys to the Kingdom: the rule and authority committed to them by Christ, and exercised by them at his behest within the Church after Christ's ascension) as they were gathered *together* as the Church on that first Easter evening: "If you (plural, not singular) forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you (plural) retain the sins of any, they are retained." The family has never been granted a similar authority in God's order - the very Keys to the Kingdom of God – only the Church has these.

5. This is why the writer to the Hebrews so solemnly warns his readers not to refrain from meeting together - which meeting together in the NT Church was primarily for the "breaking of bread" (administration of Communion) and always included the preaching of the Word "apostle's teaching and fellowship" and "the prayers" which were in the NT Church the set times of daily liturgical prayer (Morning, Noon, Evening) which reflected the Old Covenant offering of the sacrifices in the Temple in Jerusalem. Those who did forsake the meeting of themselves for the breaking of bread, the apostle's teaching and fellowship, and prayers, did so to their eternal peril, and the writer to the Hebrews says:

4 For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened,
and have tasted of the heavenly gift,
and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost,
5 And have tasted the good word of God,
and the powers of the world to come,

6 If they shall fall away,
to renew them again unto repentance;
seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh,
and put him to an open shame.

Here he clearly speaks of those who had been "enlightened" – (which refers to baptism, the sacrament of enlightenment), "and have tasted of the heavenly gift" (which refers to the breaking of bread in the Lord's Supper). In both cases, he speaks of these things as in the past tense "were once enlightened" "tasted". Thus a part and parcel of the "falling away" to which he refers is not merely an intellectual failing, though it certainly includes this, but more specifically the outward effects in the "falling away" from the community of faith itself, wherein the forgiveness of God is communicated to us in and through those means of grace which are appointed to and committed into the hands of the Church: the breaking of the bread, the apostle's teaching and fellowship, and in the prayers.

6. Christ did not commission the family "go ye (plural) into all the world and preach the gospel, baptizing and teaching all nations to observe whatsoever I commanded you." That command was given to the Church - to the apostles corporately gathered. The family itself is one of the things which must be evangelized and discipled by the Church, not the other way round.

Much more could and should be said, but I close with a very trenchant analogy which was offered by a very astute member of one of the lists of which I am blessed to be a member. NOTE: this response was given to a question which revolved around why the Jew/Gentile issue was so important in so much of Paul's writing in the New Testament - since it seems so peripheral to us today.

I think that this is more about the difference between individualistic salvation and the salvation of individuals in community. In the first way of looking at things, which is extremely common in evangelicalism, the Church is an afterthought. Joining the Church is merely our religious or ethical duty.

W[e must] certainly see the importance of individual salvation. However, individuals are saved as members of something bigger – the Church. In the first paradigm individuals are like marbles that God is putting into His bag; in the second paradigm individuals are like ingredients that God is putting into His cake mix. In the second paradigm it is the story of God's creation of the cake over the course of redemptive history that is central, not the conversion stories of individuals. These 'individual conversion stories' are drawn into the larger redemptive historical story. The story of salvation is not merely a collection of individual biographies, but a larger continuous narrative, into which all of our individual biographies are woven.

I find the individual/corporate dichotomy can be decidedly unhelpful. We don't have to choose one or the other. The human person is inescapably social - a being in communion. Consequently, if God is truly saving individuals, He must save them as part of a saved community.

The whole Jew/Gentile issue [which was so important in so much of Paul's writing in the New Testament] is important if we see it in the light of God's creation over history of a new saved humanity. There is far, far more to salvation than merely being able to stand before the judgment seat of God as individuals. Salvation is the redemption and maturation of a new humanity in Christ. This redemption and maturation has many more aspects to it than mere acquittal on the Day of Judgment. In Christ we are drawn into communion with the Triune God and our relationships with one another are healed and restored. The new heavens and the new earth are established. We are given new responsibilities and privileges, etc., etc. We should always beware of reducing the cosmic dimensions of this message.

Despite the fact that the most important questions in our modern church culture are generally perceived to have to do with whether individuals go to heaven when they die, we should beware of presuming that the apostle Paul and other NT writers had nothing more important on their mind than this.

After I finished this, I found a very good article online by this author, Alastair Roberts , which would many times over repay the time spent reading and pondering the many insights it contains. Please make sure to read this article - it says everything much more clearly and systematically than I've been able to as of yet.

Pax Christi,

Jeff