“There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; One Lord, one faith, one baptism, One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all” (Ephesians 4:4-6)

L. R. Tarsitano—Saint Andrew’s Church, Savannah

The Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity—October 3, 2004

Being a True Church

“There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; One Lord, one faith, one baptism, One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all” (Ephesians 4:4-6).

A friend of mine recently sent me an article written by the assistant pastor of a Canadian community church, outlining the most effective ways to “transition” the members of a congregation and their practice of religion from a “modern” to a “post-modern” consciousness. The author appeared to follow three guiding principles. First, the Christian Church must conform itself to the secular culture that surrounds it. Second, conformity to secular culture will make a congregation grow because an appropriately revised Christianity will not seem alien to secularized people or make them feel uncomfortable. Third, gaining members for a large congregation practicing a revised Christianity constitutes “saving souls.”

If these three principles were true, we would certainly have to ask ourselves, why bother with being traditional, biblical Christians, let alone traditional Anglicans? Why fight the world, the flesh, and the devil, when yielding to them would fill this building, almost instantly, with happy, satisfied religious customers?

But these principles aren’t true, and each of them is a terrible, destructive lie, and we know that they are lies if we examine them at all. For instance, can Christianity and Christian evangelism really be about the gobbledygook of debating “modern” and “post-modern” consciousness? Or, can it possibly be true that we should be trying to make the Church look and sound like the debased and insane world that we find all around us? Logically, too, aren’t there times when we ought to feel uncomfortable in Church, as we bring our fallenness and sin before the throne of a perfect and just God, even as we, also, accept the merciful release of his forgiveness in the Blood of Jesus Christ? For that matter, is it within our power to manipulate our fellow men into salvation, or does it remain unalterably true that only God can save souls and give eternal life?

There is one very good reason for being traditional Christians, and this is it—there isn’t any other kind of Christianity, whole and entire, than traditional Christianity. The Bible is not a book about how to become a Christian, nor is it a recipe book for cooking up a church of one’s own. The Bible is the record of God’s personal foundation of his one and only Church, and in this record God specifies the unchangeable, un-emendable faith, order, and purpose of his Church. A person belongs to this Church that God himself has built and that God himself continues to sustain, or that person is not a Christian.

Now, I want to be very clear. I am not talking about what we call “denominations” in this country. No denomination, large or small, constitutes the Church of God. No human element in God’s Church has any right to claim ownership of what can belong to God alone. Nor am I judging anyone else’s salvation since salvation is a matter of God Almighty’s eternal counsel, and not a matter of my or anybody else’s private opinions.

But while salvation comes by God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ, God’s good and saving will does not mean that every organization founded or populated by Christians is the Church of God and the Body of Christ. A bus full of Christians does not become “a Christian bus,” any more than a building full of Christians is automatically a true and faithful Church. Furthermore, it is not only within our power, but it is actually our Christian duty to identify false claims to be the Church of God. God commands us to make such judgments, even as he gives us the criteria for making them through St. Paul: “There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; One Lord, one faith, one baptism, One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.”

This may be a short test, but it is a tough one, and no group of people, whatever they call themselves, is an exhibit of the Church of Jesus Christ if it cannot pass this test. God may very well love each of its members, but God has made no promise to bless or recognize their organization or to prosper their society if it exists apart from his one and only Church.

Thus, for example, a congregation that does not hold to one Holy Spirit, one Lord Jesus Christ, and one God the Father, the Three eternal Persons of the Blessed and Undivided Trinity, without confusion or inequality of majesty, is a Christian congregation and a legitimate part of the Body of Christ. Similarly, a congregation that does not worship the Eternal Father through the Eternal Son and by the Eternal Holy Ghost is not a Christian church. Christianity is neither a “Jesus religion” nor a “salvation” religion. Christianity is the glorification of the Heavenly Father, who sends the Eternal Son to be made man in order to redeem us by his Blood and who sends the Holy Ghost to dwell in us and to make us alive before him and with him forever.

Nor is a congregation Christian and a part of Jesus Christ’s Church if it holds out any other hope or means of salvation than what God has given and revealed in the Scriptures: the one sacrifice of his Son Jesus Christ, offered once for the redemption of the world. Nor is a congregation of men biblically and completely Christian that does not baptize once and for all, in water, in the Name of the Blessed Trinity. This is the one baptism that God has promised to recognize and to use as the outward and visible sign of his gifts of grace, spiritual re-birth, and eternal life.

Most important of all, the Christian faith is not open to the adjustments of men. It is to the one faith, revealed once and for all in the Holy Scriptures, that all men and all congregations are to submit and conform themselves to be true and living members of the Body of Jesus Christ. It is the Christian’s task to conform the whole world to Jesus Christ, and not to attempt to conform Jesus Christ or his Church to the world.

And beside this clear Biblical test of whether or not a congregation or a person is truly a Christian, there is the practical application of this Biblical test, worked out in the fifth century by St. Vincent of Lerins. It is called “the Vincentian canon” because it is a workable rule for each of us to measure our faithfulness to Biblical Christianity. Vincent said that the faith of the undivided Church, the complete and true faith of the complete and true one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church confessed in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, can always be identified as “that which has been believed everywhere, always, and by all.”

In other words, we know that we are worshipping and teaching God correctly and according to the Scriptures and the Apostles’ teaching when we do so on the basis of what the entire Church of Jesus Christ, throughout the whole world, believed and taught before anyone even thought of going into business for himself and founding a “denomination.” And this Vincentian Canon, along with the Scripture that it applies to everyday Christian living, is the reason for our being traditional Christians, and the reason for our being traditional Christians in the Anglican Way.

The religion taught in our Book of Common Prayer is simply the religion of the Holy Scriptures and of the undivided Church. The faith and practice contained in the Prayer Book is not merely “common” to us as Anglican, but common to the entirety of the historic Church of Jesus Christ. This is the religion we have in common with our Lord, with St. Paul and the other Apostles, and with the martyrs and saints of the ancient Church. We have this faith in English because that is our language, but we what we have in our language is what is the one and only truth that there is to be had and believed in whatever language it is expressed.

Thus, our first task is not to congratulate ourselves (since we didn’t invent this faith—God did). Nor is our main task to make ourselves bigger or more prosperous (since God will do these things in his own good time, when he chooses to do so). Our task is to live and to teach this one permanent truth, come what may: “There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; One Lord, one faith, one baptism, One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.” And if we stick to this task, we will certainly be, by God’s own promise, his true and faithful Church, and we will each undoubtedly be true members of the Body of Christ, his Eternal Son made man. And this is where the true comfort of the Christian religion resides—not in believing an impossible, private “Christianity” of our own, but in having his divine assurance that we are his, and he is ours, forever.