The Catholicity of Christianity and the Church

Herman Bavinck, 1888

Signature passages, the lines readers know this work by, are set in a pale wash.

Bavinck delivered this address on December 18, 1888, as the outgoing rector of the Theological School in Kampen. Few outgoing addresses outlive the occasion; this one became a neo-Calvinist manifesto.

His claim is that the church is catholic in three senses, a distinction he lifts straight from the church fathers: the church as one unified whole, gathering believers of every time and place, and laying claim to the whole of life. Bavinck cites Cyril of Jerusalem for it. The burden of the address is that grace doesn’t abolish nature but restores it, and the gospel renews the whole of creation.

For Kuyper’s companion statement of the same vision, see his Lectures on Calvinism.

We confess, according to the ninth article of our undoubted Christian faith, the universality or catholicity of the one, holy, Christian Church. What may be the origin and the first meaning of this word is wholly unknown to us. We first meet with it in Ignatius, in his letter to the church at Smyrna, chapter 8; in the Muratorian fragment; and in the writing of the congregation at Smyrna to that of Philomelium concerning the martyrdom of Polycarp (Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 4:15).

By that time, however, it already bears a fixed and generally acknowledged meaning. It seems above all to have come into use in the second half of the second century, when the church saw itself compelled, over against the increasing number of heretics, to maintain its unity. The textus receptus of the Apostolic Symbol does not climb higher than to the close of the fifth century.

In the articles of faith as they were originally known and read at Rome, this further specification of the church did not yet appear. But in the recitations of this Symbol in Spain, in Aquileia, and in Carthage, it is already found. It is not improbable that this description of the church was first taken up in the East and from there passed over into the Western formularies as well. However this may be, in the Apostolic Symbol the catholicity of the church has become the confession of the whole of Christendom.

The chief meanings in which this word is then employed by the Church Fathers may be reduced to three. First, they indicate by it the church as a totality and unity over against the scattered local churches that it contains within itself; while the local church may bear the name of catholic precisely because it joins itself to, and holds fast to, the universal church.

Next, they express by it that the church is one and embraces, without exception, all believers out of all peoples, through all times, and in all places; catholic, then, above all in contrast to the national church under Israel. And finally it is sometimes so called because it possesses, without any defect, the complete tradition, all the dogmas concerning unseen and seen things that are necessary for man to know; because it heals all the sins of both soul and body, brings forth all virtues and good works, and partakes of all spiritual gifts (Cyril, Catech. 18).

This catholicity of the church, thus confessed by all Christians, presupposes the catholicity of the Christian religion. It is built upon the thought that Christianity is a world-religion, which, independent of land and people, of place and time, can embrace every nationality, govern every human being, and sanctify every creature. Now in recent years much has been said about national and world religions. Yet the division of all religions into these two classes runs up against insuperable objections.

In reality no single religion can bear the name of world-religion; nor is it very probable that in this dispensation one religion will ever displace all the others. And judged by its principle, there is by the very nature of the case only one religion possible that is truly and fully universal, that can penetrate and consecrate all men and all things. And what other could essentially come into consideration for this than the Christian?

According as one now understands this universalism of Christianity, one becomes broader or narrower in one’s conception of the church. The relationship in which we set grace to nature, re-creation to creation, determines the largeness of our heart or the narrowness of our affections in the things of the church. In our own age, so fertile in errors and divisions, the upholding of the catholicity of the church and of the universalism of Christianity is of the greatest importance.

I have therefore proposed to myself, on the occasion of the transfer of the Rectorate, to fix your attention upon that Catholicity of Christianity and Church. Permit me to sketch for you in broad strokes, what Scripture teaches in this regard, how it has been understood by the church in its history, and what duty it lays upon us for the present.

It draws our notice, unbidden, that the five books of Moses, which open so loftily with the creation of the whole world and at first embrace all of humanity, run out at last into all manner of minute prescriptions concerning the sanctuary and the priesthood among one small and lowly people. There seems to be an unmistakable disproportion between so lofty a beginning and so cramped an end. Broad and wide is the foundation upon which the legislation given to Israel is raised.

The grand introduction would lead us to expect something altogether different. God creates heaven and earth in six days, sanctifies the seventh day, and blesses mankind. That blessing He later repeats to Noah and his household, after their rescue from the flood; indeed, He makes a covenant with the whole of nature. But then the circle within which God lets His blessings descend grows ever narrower; Shem, Abram, Isaac, Jacob, one single poor and despised people is what He at last chooses for Himself as an inheritance.

And all other nations He lets walk in their own ways. But the broad foundation upon which it rests gives us at once to suspect that this election of Israel cannot be the final end. The centralizing of God’s revelation has precisely as its aim its proclamation and preaching among all peoples. Among Israel itself the revelation is already that which governs all and everything.

A separation of religion from the other domains of life is altogether impossible. All dualism is here taken up into the unity of the theocracy. The law of Jehovah regulates everything and descends into the smallest particulars. Not only the priests, but also the kings; not only the religious and the moral, but also the civil and social and political life is governed by the one law of God. There is here an inner catholicity, a religion that embraces the whole man in the whole of his life.

Thus Israel’s theocracy is already a type of the Kingdom of God that is to come and that will take up into itself all that is true and good and beautiful. Prophecy unveils to us the mystery that Israel’s religion will not remain confined to Israel. The universalistic kernel will break the shell of particularism in which it is still contained.

Now religion and people, the covenant of grace and nationality, church and state, confessor and citizen may still coincide, so that here a separation from the church is not possible except by forsaking land and people; but in the future all nations will be blessed in Abraham’s seed. Law, history, and prophecy each point in their own way toward that glorious future. The day will come when, in the Servant of the Lord, the light of Israel will rise also over the Gentiles, and His salvation will reach to the ends of the earth.

This prophecy is fulfilled in the fullness of time. And here again it is remarkable: just as broad as the basis upon which Israel stood is the foundation wide upon which the congregation is built up. God loves the world, the cosmos, and for that reason He has sent His Son, through whom that world was made. It is so, “world” in the New Testament often has a very unfavorable meaning; then that word indicates the whole organic structure of the created order, as and insofar as it is seized as an instrument by sin and stands over against the kingdom of heaven established by Jesus.

That world then lies in the evil one (1 John 5:19), has the devil for its prince (John 14:30, 16:11), the god of this age (2 Corinthians 4:4). It does not know God and therefore neither the children of God (John 17:25, 1 John 3:1), but it hates them as it hated Jesus (John 15:18, 19, 17:14). It must therefore, with all its desire, be fought and overcome in faith (1 John 2:15-17, 5:4). It is unmistakable that Jesus, and the Apostles after Him as well, feel themselves as it were drawn to the poor and the simple, to the tax collectors and sinners.

There is a fear to be discerned in their repeated admonitions against the seduction that lies for the Christian in the possession of riches and goods, in the cares of earthly life, and in the regarding of the visible things. Christianity is the religion of the cross. The mystery of suffering is its center. The aesthetic enjoyment of the world found among the Greeks is here impossible. A single concept such as that of the cosmos lets us see the chasm that gapes between the Christian and the classical view of life.

But yet the reverse side is not lacking. The cross may cast its shadow over the whole of nature, yet over nature too there rises the light of the resurrection. The kingdom of heaven is indeed, on the one hand, a treasure in the field and a pearl of great price, which a man found and bought for all that he had; it is, on the other hand, also like a mustard seed that grows up into a tree in whose branches the birds of heaven come to nest, and like a leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of meal until the whole was leavened.

The world may be deeply corrupted by sin; yet precisely that sinful world has been the object of God’s love. In Christ He has reconciled it to Himself and has not imputed sin to it (2 Corinthians 5:19). Jesus, who came to earth not to condemn the world but to save it (John 3:16, 17, 12:47), is the light (John 1:12), the life (John 6:33), the Savior of the world (John 4:14), a propitiation not only for our sins but for the whole world (1 John 2:2).

In Christ all things in heaven and on earth are reconciled to God (Colossians 1:20), and under Him they are gathered into one (Ephesians 1:10). The world, which was created through the Son (John 1:3), is also destined for the Son as its heir (Colossians 1:16, Hebrews 1:2). And one day the kingdoms of the world become our Lord’s and His Christ’s (Revelation 11:15). There comes a new heaven and a new earth wherein righteousness dwells (2 Peter 3:13).

More powerfully and more beautifully than in these words the absolute universalism of Christianity cannot be expressed. It knows no boundaries other than those that God may have set in His good pleasure; no boundaries of race or of age, of station or of rank, of nationality or of language. Sin has corrupted much, has corrupted everything; mountain-high is the guilt that it loads upon the human race, and deeply drawn into all the joints of man and humanity and world is the stain that always accompanies it.

But sin cannot be so all-governing and all-corrupting that the grace of God in Christ has not been still far more abundant (Romans 5:15-20). It can restore everything; the blood of Christ cleanses from all sin. Of no one and of nothing, therefore, need there be, ought there to be, any despair. The Gospel is glad tidings not for the individual man only, but also for humanity, for the family and society and the state, for art and for science, for the whole cosmos, for the whole groaning creation.

In order to preach this Gospel in all its riches and freedom, the congregation had to be placed on free ground over against Judaism. A Gospel so rich also creates a people of God that is no longer held together within the boundaries of a nation and a land. In the death of Christ a priest and sacrifice, law and shadow, all that is typical and prophetic in Israel, indeed Israel itself, came to its fulfillment.

Over the cross of Golgotha all things give one another the hand of reconciliation, God and man, heaven and earth, Jew and Gentile, barbarian and Scythian, man and woman, bondservant and free. And on the day of Pentecost the church of the New Testament is born as a proper, independent fellowship, independent of temple and altar, of priest and sacrifice, even of the visible appearance and the bodily presence of Jesus Himself, in whom until then the disciples had found their unity, but whom from now on they no longer know after the flesh.

His departure has been to their profit. In bodily leaving them, He has in truth come much nearer to them through His Godhead, majesty, grace, and Spirit, with which He comes to make His dwelling among them and from which He nevermore departs. However small and lowly, then, this congregation was truly catholic, heir of the future, herald of a joy that shall be for all creation.

But the catholicity of this congregation was very soon put to a serious test. Jesus had limited His preaching, and during His sojourn on earth also that of His disciples, to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. The first congregations in Judea, Galilee, and Samaria were from among the Jews. But presently, on his first missionary journey, Paul also founds congregations of Christians from among the Gentiles.

The Jewish exclusivism that still dwelt in the congregation among many, and from which Peter was first freed by a special revelation, rose up against this. It had to come to a collision when this Judaizing tendency found acceptance among many. It was the first dangerous crisis of youthful Christianity. Paul saw the deep seriousness of this struggle. What was at stake was the catholicity of the congregation, the freedom in Christ, the universal worth of the cross, the riches of the grace of God, the justification by faith alone without the works of the law.

Should there now come, at the very outset, a rupture; should the exclusivism of the false brethren win out over the catholicity of Paul, who precisely in his letters glories in this as the revealed mystery of God, that the Gentiles are fellow-heirs and of the same body, and partakers together of the promises in Christ (Ephesians 3:6)? You know how then, by the unanimous decision of the Apostles, the unity and catholicity of the church was rescued at the convention at Jerusalem.

That unity of the congregations also revealed itself more or less clearly from the very beginning. It has more than once been asserted that a Christian church as one whole does not occur within the period of the Apostles. And certainly, if by that unity one thinks of a well-defined and ordered bond such as appears in the later church, then of that unity nothing is to be discerned. But a certain bond between the various congregations did nevertheless exist from the very beginning.

In the Apostles all the congregations were, and knew themselves to be, one. They did not merely constitute the local council at Jerusalem, but were at the same time overseers of all the churches. Jesus had precisely called and appointed them as the founders of His church. A formal bond may therefore be lacking, but a living and personal bond was present for all the congregations in the Apostolate itself. Hence it is that, as soon as in Samaria the Word of God is preached and there come to be believers (Acts 8:14ff.), the Apostles send Peter and John there, who pray for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit and lay their hands on them.

The so-called visitation journey of Peter in Acts 9:32 sufficiently proves such an oversight on the part of the Apostles. And so closely do all the congregations in Judea, Galilee, and Samaria feel themselves mutually bound that they, if at least the reading of Tischendorf in Acts 9:31, which I believe to be the correct one, are together designated in the singular by the name ἡ ἐκκλησια.

In the congregations that are presently founded by Paul on his missionary journeys, it is no different. Just as the congregations in Palestine had their mutual bond in the Apostles, so the congregations from among the Gentiles have their unity in Paul. There existed an intimate and tender relationship of all to him and of him to all.

He was their founder, he continued to care for them; he visited them again and again in person; he kept up a correspondence with them; he carried the greetings of the various congregations to one another. The one congregation contributes to his support while he labors in another. And the various congregations are summed up by region or by district as the congregations of Judea, of Asia, of Galatia, of Macedonia, of Achaia.

Indeed, even between the congregations from among the Jews and from among the Gentiles there is no lack of all relation and intercourse. The latter held collections for the poor among the saints who were in Jerusalem, and in this for the first time reached out across the former wall of partition to Israel the hand (Acts 11:29, Romans 15:25-28, 1 Corinthians 16:1-5).

These gifts of love served as a proof of gratitude for the spiritual goods of which the Gentiles had become partakers out of Israel; they were an exercise of fellowship and were on the side of the Palestinian Christians answered no less tenderly with many thanksgivings and prayers to God (2 Corinthians 9:12-14). Indeed, the spiritual fellowship that thus existed between the various congregations was more intimate than many a classical and synodical bond of later days. It revealed the unity and catholicity of the church more beautifully and more gloriously than the most splendid regulation.

How, too, would it have been possible that this spiritual bond should have been lacking among the first congregations? The unity and catholicity of the church is a thought that recurs again and again throughout the New Testament. It flows immediately from the unity of God, from the unity of the Mediator of God and men, from the unity of the Spirit, from the unity of the truth, from the unity of the covenant, from the unity of salvation. It is described to us by Jesus and His Apostles and painted as before our eyes under the images of vine and flock, of body and kingdom, of bride and wife, of temple and house.

Jesus prayed for that unity, and He is and continues to be heard in that prayer. However much may be lacking, even in the apostolic age, in the manifestation of that unity, it itself exists and will in its time also come forth into the visible. The congregations of the first century differed in origin, in culture, in nationality, in dwelling place; an age-old past, a wholly different history, a different culture, a wall of partition, a deeply rooted enmity lay between the two of them.

And Jesus has made peace and has created those two in Himself into one new man. And now they are, and know and feel themselves also at first, one by virtue of the love of the Father; through the grace of the Son, who is the Head and Lord of all; in the fellowship of the same Spirit who is poured out in all; one in baptism and faith and hope; one as members of the same body, with all manner of spiritual gifts appointed for one another and working toward the perfecting of the saints; one among all peoples, one in all places, one through all times.

This catholicity of the church, as the Scriptures portray it to us and as the first congregations show it to us, is of gripping beauty. He who shuts himself up in the narrow circle of a little church or conventicle does not know it and has never in his life experienced its power and consolation. Such a one does a wrong to the love of the Father, to the grace of the Son, to the fellowship of the Spirit; he robs himself of spiritual treasures that can be compensated by no meditation or devotion, and impoverishes his soul.

But he who, looking outward over that countless multitude that out of every people and in every land and in every age has been purchased by the blood of the Son; he who feels what a mighty strengthening of faith, what a wondrous consolation in suffering it is to know oneself one with that whole church militant which, from the beginning to the end of the world, is gathered out of the whole human race, that one cannot be narrow of heart, that one does not remain cramped in his affections.

No wonder, then, that the Apostles, placing this unity and catholicity of the church in the foreground, warn so earnestly against all division. Already in the first century there was manifold danger of this. Judaistic and Gnostic, nomistic and antinomian heresies arose and found entrance into the congregations. And now it was indeed necessary that offenses and heresies should come (Matthew 18:7, 1 Corinthians 11:19), also in order to bring the congregation to the consciousness of its unity and to a conscious knowledge of the truth.

But nevertheless αἱρεσις and διχοστασιαι and σχισματα remain sinful works and fruits of the flesh (Galatians 5:20), most earnestly to be avoided by believers (1 Corinthians 3:3, 11:18-19, 12:25). Indeed, even over against those who come forward with such things in the congregations, these have a holy calling.

Over against these disturbers of the unity of doctrine and of the church they have, not so much the right, as rather the heavy duty, to exercise ecclesiastical discipline. The church must turn away from them, let them go, in order that these, thus left to themselves, may come to reflection and to conversion. And so understood, the exercise of discipline is not at variance with the catholicity of the church; rather the reverse.

Precisely because discipline is never, and may never be, unto καθαιρεσις but always unto οἰκοδομη (2 Corinthians 13:10), and thus may never be applied in order to be rid of someone, it is in its whole duration the earnest, praying attempt of the congregation, the last means granted to her by the Lord, to bring back even the obstinate and hardened sinner under the keeping of Jesus. In discipline the holiness, but no less the catholicity, of the church is made manifest.

Everyone who passes over from the New Testament to the reading of the post-apostolic writings is struck by the distance in spiritual depth, simplicity, and power. The conception of the Gospel as a new law is soon prepared. The two lines indicated by Scripture for the view of the world are not equally held fast and carried through. The small Christian congregation, powerless and despised in the midst of a hostile world, had first of all to feel deeply the antithesis with that world.

Faith in the speedy return of Christ and the heat of persecution contributed their part to this. It cannot be denied that the view of the world among the first Christians is in general very dark. The Apologists see in heathen culture a work of the devil. Not only spectacles, but also heathen science and philosophy and art are most strongly condemned by many. Riches and luxury and earthly pleasures are watched with distrust. Marriage is not condemned, but an unmarried life is nevertheless set higher.

A certain inclination toward asceticism soon arises. Contempt of the world and of death becomes the mark of the true Christians. The second and third centuries are full of dualism and asceticism. And when the church became more and more worldly, especially through and after Constantine, that inclination was still strongly nourished among the most earnest Christians. The mighty protests brought against the worldliness of the church by the schismatic movements of Montanism, Novatianism, and Donatism were not heard, or were rejected.

The church did not wish to take the path of asceticism and of separatism. It wished to be a world-church, and it became one. But not without having, within its own circle, acknowledged and taken up asceticism, monasticism, as an element having its own right, on condition only that this did not claim to be the only Christianity, the ideal valid for all, and thus did not itself separatistically deny all right of existence to the lower ideal maintained alongside it.

In this way the qualitative opposition that originally existed between the world and the congregation was changed into a quantitative one. The original antithesis of holy and unholy gave place to that of the good and the better, of moral commandments and evangelical counsels. And there you have the point from which the Roman worldview can perhaps best be understood. It was long before that Roman view took shape, but its principle was already present in the second and third centuries; it has been the driving force of the Roman system, and even now that system is not yet fully developed and rounded off.

But this much is nonetheless clear. The “world” loses more and more, with Rome, the ethical meaning it has in Scripture. The natural is not the sinful, but that which by its nature does not attain to the supernatural. The supernatural is a donum superadditum (added gift). The most consistent Roman theologians deny that original sin is anything positive; it is only negative, consisting in the loss of the donum superadditum.

The condition of the world before or apart from Christianity is therefore really the same as if man had not been created with that gift. That nature, that world, is good, not corrupted, only lacking something which it can also itself never attain by its own power and of itself. Christianity, grace, having entered into the world in order to make possible for us the acquisition of the supernatural, the visio Dei (vision of God), therefore does not reform and re-create the existing order, but only supplements the creation.

Christianity comes transcendently to the natural, but does not penetrate and sanctify it. With this Rome, which calls itself catholic par excellence, has made the catholicity of the New Testament change its character. The catholicity of the Christian principle, which cleanses and sanctifies everything, has been replaced by the dualism that always places the supernatural separately alongside, or rather transcendently above, the natural.

Creation and re-creation remain two independent magnitudes over against each other. Therefore nothing remains but a compromise between the natural and the supernatural, between God and man, believing and knowing, church and world, soul and body, religion and morality, quietism and activity, a continual measuring and fitting and weighing, for example in ethics, of how far nature can and may go and where the supernatural begins.

The Roman system, in its heart Pelagian, is one great system of supplementation; the image of God supplements man, grace supplements nature, the evangelical counsels supplement the moral commandments; but this system also continues within Christianity itself: the Pope is a supplement to Christ, the Mass to His sacrifice, tradition to Holy Scripture, human ordinance to God’s commandment, love to faith, the merits of the saints to the shortcomings of the weak. And the more steps of holiness one ascends in this life, the higher one also climbs in eternity; just as there are different degrees in the punishments, poena damni, poena sensus (the pain of loss, the pain of sense), purgatory, etc., so likewise are there steps in blessedness (Thomas, Summa Theol. III, qu. 95 and 96).

The ranking here on earth has its counterpart in eternity, even up to the hierarchy of the angelic world. And through this development it has now come so far that, just as at first nature was the presupposition of the Christian, now the Christian is only the presupposition of the Roman. The Christian is no longer the content; it is only still the foundation of the Roman superstructure. Christ is the step by which the Pope has climbed to the throne.

It is not difficult to deduce from this how Rome must position itself over against the whole of culture, state and society, science and art. Christianity is according to Rome purely church. In that it is wholly absorbed. Outside the church is the domain of the unconsecrated. The striving must therefore be to make the church rule over everything, and to bring everything under the power of the Pope.

Boniface VIII expressed it clearly in the bull Unam Sanctam (1302): porro subesse Romano Pontifici omni creaturae declaramus, dicimus, diffinimus et pronuntiamus omnino esse de necessitate salutis (furthermore, we declare, say, define, and pronounce that for every creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff is altogether necessary for salvation). To him also, as vicegerent and vicar of Christ, has all power been given in heaven and on earth. His dominion extends by right over the whole world. Now the natural is indeed in itself good, but of a lower order.

Sometimes one would suppose that the natural is, according to Rome too, corrupted by sin; many a time Popes have, for instance, declared that the state owes its origin to sin. But the intimate thought of Rome appears more and more to be that the natural is good but of a lower order. The state is the moon, the church the sun. The state is human, the church divine.

Reason and science are good and uncorrupted and can carry one a good way; Aristotle had in the Middle Ages as great an authority in his domain as Holy Scripture had in its own; but the auctoritas (authority of the church) stands higher. Worldly art is good, ecclesiastical art is better. Marriage is not to be rejected, but abstinence alone answers fully to the Christian ideal. Property is permitted, but poverty is meritorious. The practice of an earthly calling is no sin, but the contemplative life of the monk has nevertheless a more excellent worth.

The catholicity of Christianity is thus indeed maintained by Rome in so far as it wishes to lay claim to the whole world and to bring everything to subjection to the church. But the catholicity is denied in this sense, that Christianity itself must leaven everything like a leaven. There remains an eternal dualism; Christianity does not become an immanent, a reforming principle. That dualism is no antinomy in which the one member cancels the other.

Rome does not annihilate the natural, as the Manichaeans do, but presses it down. It indeed lets marriage, household, property, earthly calling, state, science, art exist, and even grants to all of these, within the circles proper to them, a much wider and freer play than Protestantism does; but it degrades and depresses the natural; it stamps everything with the mark of contempt, the brand of the profane, of the unconsecrated.

Not holy and unholy, but consecrated and unconsecrated is the antithesis in which Rome moves. It materializes the ethical, sees in the natural something ungodly, not because and insofar as it is impure, but because it is incapable of attaining the supernatural. Rome profanes the cosmos. Now the Middle Ages, by the very nature of the case, show this principle of Rome much more clearly than do modern times.

The struggle of Emperor and Pope brings this tendency before our eyes. But Rome does not change. It has never surrendered anything, lets no single pretension go. Indeed, the development of Catholicism into Jesuitism portrays for us better than before the striving of Rome. The Middle Ages remain the ideal to which all Romanists look up with admiration. The restoration of the Thomistic philosophy by the encyclical of August 4, 1879, has set the seal upon this.

Naturally, with such a system Rome has need of a strict organization; the supernatural had, in order to be preserved as such a transcendent magnitude, to be incorporated into a hierarchical church. The supernatural, as a power laid upon the natural, requires an institution that rests in itself and depends as little as possible on men and individuals. The development of both, of dogma and of church, goes hand in hand from the very beginning; the one promotes the other.

And the degeneration of the catholicity of Christianity runs parallel with that of the catholicity of the church. How now the church that we know from the New Testament developed into a church such as Old Catholicism and Rome show it to us is still in many respects shrouded in darkness. This much we know, that from about the end of the first century onward almost everything pressed toward unity and toward centralization.

The loosening of the last bond that bound to Judaism; the isolated condition in which the Christians lived; the smallness of the power they could develop in every domain of life; the fiery glow of persecution that fused them together; the violent assailing of their faith by the official science and philosophy; the heresies and divisions that arose and often found entrance into their own circle; the deeply felt opposition with the whole world of Jews and Gentiles; the brotherly love and unanimity prevailing among the first Christians, all pressed toward the consolidation of all the congregations into that one catholic church, whose essence was shifted from the believers into the institution standing above them, and which received its last and highest development thus far in the declaration of the infallibility of the Pope.

The consciousness of the unity of the church was in the earliest time incomprehensibly deep and powerful. We can no longer think it into ourselves or imagine it, in this age of subjectivism and from our Protestant standpoint. But then men believed firmly, and they could believe it, in a time when there existed but one single church on earth, that separation from the existing church was separation from Christ Himself. He whose mother the church was not could not have God for his father.

Just as little as there was rescue possible outside the ark at the time of the flood, said Cyprian, just as little can he escape who lives outside the church. Hence the strictness of the discipline, hence the hard judgment over haeretici (heretics) and schismatici (schismatics) who, breaking the unity of doctrine and the unity of the church, drifted off on the stream of the most arbitrary subjectivism.

Extra ecclesiam, that is, outside the existing organized church, nulla salus (no salvation), was the common conviction of all the Church Fathers, not only of Cyprian and Jerome, but also of Augustine. Indeed, no one has expressed and maintained that unity of the church more strongly than he over against the Donatists. His lively, idealistic, imaginative personality loved the catholic church with the love of his soul.

He admired in it the grandeur of its organization, the rich articulation of its episcopate, the certainty of its tradition, the splendor of its cultus, the riches of its means of grace; the church was, according to the observation of Reuter, not indeed the central thought, but yet the presupposition of all his thinking and living. And although his doctrine of predestination sometimes seems to break this unity, yet the latter remains in the end standing unreconciled alongside his doctrine of the church.

Outside the church the heretics and schismatics can take everything with them; extra ecclesiam totum potest (scil. habere Emeritus) praeter salutem; potest habere honorem, potest habere sacramentum; potest cantare halleluja; potest respondere amen; potest evangelium tenere; potest in nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti fidem et habere et praedicare, sed nusquam nisi in ecclesia catholica salutem potest invenire (outside the church Emeritus can have everything except salvation; he can have honor, he can have the sacrament; he can sing hallelujah; he can answer amen; he can hold the Gospel; he can both have and preach the faith in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, but nowhere except in the catholic church can he find salvation) (Super gestis cum Emerito sermo. Opera omnia. Paris. 1555. VII. folio 135, column 4).

Augustine can see in the Donatist schism nothing but a denial of the promises of God and of the love toward the church as the one body of Christ.

And on this standpoint Rome still stands. Whatever may have happened, and however irreparably the unity of the church may have been torn asunder, Rome has at all times maintained the thesis that outside her there is no salvation. This doctrine does not indeed occur in these very same words in the official symbols. But councils and Popes have repeatedly expressed it. The fourth Lateran Council (1215) said in chapter 1: una vero est fidelium universalis ecclesia, extra quam nullus omnino salvatur (there is indeed one universal church of the faithful, outside which absolutely no one is saved).

The bull of Eugenius IV, Cantate Domino, 1441, clearly declares that no Gentiles, Jews, heretics, or schismatics will become partakers of eternal life, not even if they died a martyr’s death for the name of Christ. The comparison of the Roman church to the ark of Noah, outside which there is no preservation, recurs again and again. It is found in the Catechismus Romanus (I, 10, qu. 13 and 16) and was repeated as recently as the allocution of December 9, 1854, by Pius IX.

And yet, Rome too has had to accommodate itself in some measure to the history of the church, which became too mighty also for her. In the first centuries of the Christian church it could still pass to believe that outside the one ecclesiastical institution there was no salvation, although even then the absolute identification of Christianity with the church bore a most dangerous character. But history made this belief ever more difficult.

When in the Novatian, Donatist, and Greek schisms thousands broke the bond with Rome; when Arians and Monophysites and Monothelites were by the dogmatic decision of the ecumenical councils excluded as heretics from the fellowship of the one saving church; when in the sixteenth century the Reformation tore a rent through the whole of Christian Europe; and now in this age, now that of the 400 million Christians only a little more than half honor Rome as mater ecclesiae (mother church) and the Pope as Vicar of Christ, now it falls unspeakably hard upon many a moderate Romanist to embrace this doctrine of his church and to reject as appearance and hypocrisy all Christian faith that he observes outside his communion.

Many dogmaticians have therefore sought to soften the strictness of this doctrine. They make for this purpose a distinction between material and formal heresy; between such as err out of error and without guilt, and those who obstinately and on purpose deny the unity of the church and of doctrine.

Support for this distinction they find in the Catechismus Romanus (I, 10, qu. 1), which determines that not everyone who errs in the faith is at once to be called a heretic, but only he qui ecclesiae auctoritate neglecta, impias opiniones pertinaci animo tuetur (who, neglecting the authority of the church, maintains impious opinions with an obstinate mind).

Joining themselves to this, many Roman divines could pass a milder judgment over some erring Protestants, and Pius IX, in his allocution cited above, could limit the thesis that outside the true church there was no salvation by the addition: sed tamen pro certo pariter habendum est, qui verae religionis ignorantia laborant, si ea sit invincibilis, nulla ipsos obstringi hujusce rei culpa ante oculos Domini (but yet it is likewise to be held for certain that those who labor under ignorance of the true religion, if that ignorance be invincible, are bound by no guilt of this matter before the eyes of the Lord); and even the Pope has not ventured to determine the boundaries of that ignorantia.

More important, however, is another point on which Rome seemingly comes into contradiction with itself. The first teachers of the church and synods had unanimously rejected heretic-baptism. Cyprian had still quite consistently said: outside the church there is no salvation, no martyrdom, no baptism (de unit. eccl. cap. 10 and 12). But Augustine drew back from that conclusion.

He therefore separates church and baptism; the heretics are outside the church and outside salvation, but can nevertheless take with them outside her many goods of the church, also baptism, which is and remains indeed truly a baptism, but yet then only serves the recipients unto salvation when they return into the bosom of the church. And so Rome still judges. Now our gratitude for this catholicity would be greater if Rome did not see precisely in that recognition of baptism a proof of her rightful claim upon us and of our inalienable belonging to her.

Our baptism has become for Rome the ground of her coercion of conscience. From the extra ecclesiam nulla salus there does not yet necessarily follow the persecution and punishment of heretics. The union of the church with the state first gave rise to the idea that not murder and manslaughter alone, but equally heresy and schism, are worthy of civil punishments. The Christian state-idea made of heresy a crime against the state.

And even then this idea arose only slowly in the conviction of the Church Fathers. But the compelle intrare (compel them to come in) of Augustine has, against his intention and against his interpretation, borne fatal fruits. Rome has made the persecution and punishment of heretics into an article of the Christian creed. Councils in the Middle Ages have repeatedly given authorization for persecution. Popes have regulated it and called the inquisition into life.

History has made of the ecclesia non sitit sanguinem (the church does not thirst for blood) a mockery. Thomas, the admired authority of the whole of Roman Christendom, declares expressly (Summa Theol. II 2 qu. 4 art. 3) that heretics are not only to be banned from the church, but also to be handed over to the secular princes for extermination.

The Catechismus Romanus (I, 10, qu. 8) prescribes to all Romanists to believe that the heretics and schismatics are in the power of the church, ut qui ab ea in judicium vocentur, puniantur et anathemate damnentur (so that those who are called by her into judgment may be punished and condemned by anathema). And Pius IX condemned, in the Apostolic letter of August 22, 1851, and in the encyclical of December 8, 1864, the thesis that the church would have no power to restrain the transgressors of her laws with temporal punishments.

Thus, then, the catholicity that the Roman church acknowledges in the domain of baptism is taken back with usury. Upon our baptism she grounds the right of inquisition and coercion of conscience. If one considers, moreover, that Rome is irreconcilable, there now exists as much right as in the days of Voetius to cry out with that divine: Nulla pax cum Roma (no peace with Rome) (Pol. Eccl. II 527).

With this mighty system of Rome the Reformation came into collision on almost every point. Usually, in the case of the Reformation of the sixteenth century, one thinks only of a reformation of the church. It was, however, much more than that; it was a wholly different and new conception of Christianity itself. Dualistic was the view of life and the world held by Rome; quantitative the opposition it assumed between the natural and the supernatural.

---

The Reformers, going back to the New Testament, replaced these by a worldview that is in the true sense theistic, and by a qualitative opposition. Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin go together in this. All of them strove to free the whole domain of natural life from the pressure and dominion of the church. They stand in this on one line with the Humanists, who likewise aim at emancipation from the church. But amid that outward agreement, what a difference!

While the Humanists champion the rights of the natural man, who is good and uncorrupted, the Reformers contend for the freedom of the Christian man, who has been freed by the Gospel from the law of sin and death. Rejecting the Roman identification of Christianity and church, they may be called the founders of a weltliches Christenthum (a secular, this-worldly Christianity), as Holtzmann has named it.

The Reformation has not only made us better understand the articles of faith concerning the Son and the Holy Spirit, concerning the church and the forgiveness of sins; it has also restored to honor the first article of our general Christian faith and confessed it with full emphasis: I believe in God, the Father, the Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth. Thereby they discovered and restored the natural in its rights, and cleansed it of the Roman brand of the profane and the unconsecrated. The natural is not something of lesser worth and of lower order, as though it were incapable of any sanctification and renewal, but in need only of curbing and suppression.

It is just as divine as the church, even though it owes its origin not to re-creation but to creation, even though it is not from the Son but from the Father. To this is to be ascribed the fact that the Reformers are also so thoroughly sound in their Christianity. They have so nothing peculiar, nothing strange, nothing exaggerated, nothing unnatural; nothing of that sickly and cramped quality that so often disfigures even sincere Christians; they are ordinary, natural men, but men of God.

It is so, the judgment of the world is with the Protestant in general much more serious than with the Romanist; the morality much more severe, puritanical sometimes and rigoristic. The Protestant indeed believes that sin has corrupted and defiled everything. He confesses that the whole world lies in the evil one and is full of seduction. But at the same time he acknowledges that the natural is not in itself unholy and that it therefore needs indeed to be cleansed but not to be despised or shunned.

Precisely because he combats sin more seriously than Rome, he can also better acknowledge the natural in its worth. The mechanical relation of nature and grace makes way, then, in Protestantism for an ethical one. Christianity is no quantitative magnitude that extends transcendently over the natural, but a religious-moral power that enters immanently into the natural and banishes only the impure. The kingdom of heaven may be a treasure and a pearl; it is also a mustard seed and a leaven.

Thus far all the Reformers are of one mind and go hand in hand. But now there comes a difference. Luther stopped here; Zwingli, but above all Calvin, went further. Repeatedly one can read in Luther sentences such as these: Christus ist nicht gekommen, dass er äusserlich etwas ändere, sondern dass der Mensch inwendig im Herzen anders werde. Mit weltlichen Sachen hats (das Evangelium) nichts zu thun (Christ has not come to change anything outwardly, but that man might inwardly, in the heart, become different. With worldly matters it [the Gospel] has nothing to do).

Trade and traffic are matters wozu man des heiligen Geistes nicht bedarf (for which one does not need the Holy Spirit). Ein Fürst kann wohl ein Christ sein, aber als ein Christ muss er nicht regieren, und nach dem er regieret heisst er nicht ein Christ sondern ein Fürst. Die Person ist wohl ein Christ; aber das Amt oder Fürstenthum gehet sein Christenthum nichts an (A prince may well be a Christian, but as a Christian he must not rule, and inasmuch as he rules he is called not a Christian but a prince. The person is indeed a Christian; but the office or princedom does not concern his Christianity).

Summa, Christus will jedermann bleiben lassen; allein wer vorhin dem Teufel gedienet hat, der soll forthin ihm dienen (In sum, Christ will let everyone remain as he is; only he who hitherto has served the devil shall henceforth serve Him).

Luther thus indeed frees the secular, like Zwingli and Calvin, from the ecclesiastical, but he then leaves it to stand loose alongside the spiritual and sometimes speaks as if the outward is wholly indifferent and incapable of moral renewal. The fault lies in this, that Luther limits the Gospel and diminishes the grace of God. The Gospel changes only the inward, the disposition, the heart, but all the rest remains so until the last day. The dualism is here therefore not wholly overcome; to the true full catholicity of Christianity it does not here come. Re-creation remains standing alongside creation.

And Zwingli, too, was not able to wrestle himself wholly free from the dualism. His view of life and world is indeed a wholly different one from Luther’s. First to renew man, and then through the Gospel the whole of life, state and society and world, is the grand ideal after which he strives with an unshakable trust in the truth.

And practically, in his work of reformation, he showed that he wished to make the Gospel into a reforming and re-creating power of the whole of life. But when he now also tries to set this forth theoretically, he does not succeed. Dualistically there remain even with him flesh and spirit, humana and divina justitia (human and divine righteousness), existing alongside each other.

To overcome that dualism wholly remained the task allotted to the Reformer of Geneva. I do not deny that with Calvin too the emphasis falls on the negative virtues of self-denial and cross-bearing, of patience and temperance. Just as little do I wish to be called an unqualified panegyrist of the work of reformation that Calvin undertook in Geneva and of the manner in which he carried it out.

But it is nevertheless he who, by this his labor, completed the Reformation and saved Protestantism. Calvin traced out the working of sin more broadly than Luther, more deeply than Zwingli. But for that very reason the grace of God is with Luther also more limited, with Zwingli poorer than with Calvin. Here, in the mighty spirit of the French Reformer, re-creation is not a system that supplements creation as with Rome, not a religious reformation that leaves creation intact as with Luther, much less a new creation as with the Anabaptists, but a glad tidings of renewal to all creatures.

Here the Gospel comes to its full right, to true catholicity. There is nothing that cannot and ought not to be evangelized. Not the church alone, but also the home and the school, society and the state, are placed under the dominion of the Christian principle; and with iron will and inexorable severity Calvin introduced that dominion in Geneva.

The German Reformation was therefore a reformation of religion and the preaching office; the Swiss a renewal also of state and society; the former bore an exclusively religious, the latter no less a social and political character. All a consequence of this, that the Bible was for Luther only a source of the truth of salvation, for Calvin the norm of the whole of life.

This new conception of the catholicity of the Christian religion had influence also on their reformation of the church. Rome had bound salvation to her communion, that is, to subjection to the Pope. But the Reformed churches did not shut themselves off, as the only saving ones, over against Rome and over against one another. The Reformation brought another conception of the church.

The church, with Rome identical with the infallible institution standing above men, is again conceived in the New Testament sense as a gathering of true believers in Christ, as the people of God. The church, outside which there was no salvation, was loosed from every form of church and placed in the invisible, in the mystical union with Christ. The unity and catholicity of the church therefore lacked from now on a proper organization, but was the hidden foundation of the whole of Christendom.

As the Confessio Helvetica II, chapter 17, so beautifully confesses it: And since there is always but one God, one mediator of God and men, Jesus Christ, one shepherd of the whole flock, one head of the body, one Spirit, one salvation, one faith, one testament or covenant, it follows of necessity that there is but one church, which we therefore call catholic because it is universal, is spread over all the parts of the world and extends to all times, bound to no place or time.

But this change in the conception of the church gave birth to a very difficult and highly important question: how far can the impurity of a church go and yet it remain a true church of Christ? How is it possible to preserve the catholicity of the church and at the same time to maintain the absolute character of the truth? To give an absolute answer was, on the Protestant standpoint, impossible.

But notwithstanding that both the Lutheran and the Reformed churches claimed to be the true and pure churches, they have nevertheless, broad of heart, acknowledged other churches alongside themselves as churches of Christ. It is so, there was among the Protestant divines a difference of opinion over whether Rome might still be called an ecclesia Christi (church of Christ).

And although a few, such as Polanus (Synt. Theol. p. 535 D), affirmed it, most hesitated and spoke rather of vestigia ecclesiae Christi (vestiges of the church of Christ) in Rome (Calv. Inst. IV.2, 11. Conf. Gall. art. 28), and others denied it very decidedly (Zanchius, Op. Omnia VIII. 81). Further, they denied just as decidedly that the Roman doctrine as such could be saving, for the pure truth is there so mingled with so much idolatry and superstition that it can no longer be a good medicine, any more than wine into which poison has been mixed (Voetius, Disp. II 786).

But notwithstanding, they acknowledged the baptism of all Christian churches, of Greeks and Romanists, of Anabaptists and Remonstrants, as a baptism of Christ, which precisely as such obligated the baptized to the pure confession and to adherence to the pure church. And so far did they apply this catholicity of the church that Voetius even hesitates to reject the baptism of the Socinians, who, as antitrinitarians, were nevertheless held to stand outside Christianity (Disp. III 760).

But more still: it is related that Henry of Navarre, ready for the sake of the French royal crown to renounce his faith, summoned a Reformed minister and a Roman theologian and laid before each of them the question whether he could be saved in both the Roman and the Reformed church. The Roman theologian denied it with respect to the Reformed church, but the Reformed minister did not dare to deny it with respect to the Roman.

Henry thereupon gave the Reformed minister this answer: since your faith has only one testimony, that of Rome, however, the testimony of you both, it is most advisable to embrace the Roman faith. For the truth of this story I do not vouch; but this much is precisely in it, that no Protestant has ever dared to bind salvation to his church. For the Protestants have no infallible and absolute criterion of the boundaries of salvation, such as the Roman church possesses in subjection to the Pope.

On the contrary, this has been the modest and beautiful thought of all, especially of the Reformed, Protestants, that we cannot determine the measure of grace with which a soul, even amid many sins and errors, may still be bound to God, and cannot point out the degree of knowledge that is indispensably necessary for salvation (Voetius, Disp. II 537, 538, 781 and passim).

Through this doctrine Protestantism saw itself compelled to a very weighty distinction, not only to that between faith and theology, which by no means first dates from this century, but also to that between fundamental and non-fundamental articles of faith. Already Calvin (Inst. IV. 1, 12 and 13, IV. 2, 1) made this distinction in order not to legitimate every separation, also presently again from the churches reformed by him.

A certain elasticity in the purity of the ministry of the Word must indeed be assumed on the Protestant standpoint, since otherwise almost all communal life would become impossible and sectarianism would be nourished in the most frightful manner. Immediately there flowed from this another judgment over the heretics and schismatics. The hard judgments of the Church Fathers could no longer be taken over without reservation. It is so, the Lutherans and the Reformed too by no means inquire, in the case of such men, into their subjective conviction; they do indeed believe that heretics err in good faith and that these heretics suppose, according to their conscience, that they may not believe and confess otherwise.

But they remain wholly on the objective standpoint and say after Augustine: male vivitur cum de Deo non recte creditur (one lives badly when one does not believe rightly concerning God). A heretic cannot be holy and pious (Voetius, Disp. III 761). But yet the concept of heresy and schism is greatly weakened. Rome can call anyone a heretic who deviates from the doctrine of the church, and Roman divines can assert that with every heresy the habitus fidei (habit, disposition of faith) is lost.

Protestantism could no longer do this. There is a distinction between doubt, error, heresy. Heresy is now only obstinate error in the fundamental articles, and thereby itself a floating concept. And even then it is not incompatible with true faith and regeneration. Believers too can fall into heresy, can remain living in it, indeed perhaps even die in it (Voetius, Disp. III 758). The name of Christian may not be denied even to heretics, so long as we still acknowledge baptism among them.

And with this there gradually also changed the standpoint that one took over against religious persecution and the punishment of heretics. When with the Reformation the territorial and state churches arose, there remained also among the Reformed for a long time the prevailing conviction that unity of people and unity of religion belong together.

That the magistracy would have no calling in the matter of religion and had not to care for the spiritual welfare of the citizens was a thought that lay far from all the Reformers. Therefore in all the lands of the Reformation one confession was raised to the religion of the state. The confessors of other religions were either banished or tolerated, but of equal rights there was no question. Even the toleration of other religions alongside the recognized one was held to be not a duty, only a concession of the magistracy permissible under circumstances.

And that toleration itself did not exclude that to those tolerated the rights of citizenship were withheld, the practice of religion forbidden, the propaganda prevented, and even the attending of an orthodox sermon might be imposed. Very far is all this still removed from religious freedom in our sense, from equal rights for all persuasions.

To grant to error equal rights with the truth, not in the church of course but in society, came into hardly anyone’s mind. For the truth might not, even in the domain of the state, deny itself; it had also there to make itself count for what it is, that is, for the truth, which is exclusive over against all error. The absolute character of the truth demanded recognition and excluded, in every domain of life, neutrality and indifferentism.

But on one point the Reformation soon broke with the system of Roman heretic-persecution, on that of the coercion of conscience. Rome is the sworn enemy of liberty of conscience. Asserting that all the baptized belong to her by right, she also holds violence permissible in order to lead them back into the bosom of the only saving Mother Church.

The Reformation, however, had to be averse to coercion of conscience, and not yet because it had itself conquered freedom of conscience and religion under blood and tears from the tyranny of Rome; nor because it considered heresy not dangerous, more dangerous even than many crimes; nor again because it held the conscience to be a sanctuary that could not be defiled by errors. But for this reason it was in principle set against all violence done to the conscience, because in this domain God alone is sovereign and no man. God alone can bind the conscience, and no creature may and can arrogate to itself the right that belongs to God alone. Coercion can here be of no avail.

Fides suadetur, non cogitur (faith is persuaded, not coerced) (Voetius, Disp. II 615, Pol. Eccl. II 385ff., 389, 400). No one can be saved by a religion that he holds to be false. And therefore, however much the strict Reformed in this land also requested the maintenance of the placards, never was it demanded by them that one should examine and trouble the confessors of another religion in their conscience or their faith. Expressly the contrary was declared by them. An inquisition is, on the Protestant standpoint, an impossibility.

The history of Catholicism and of Protestantism after the Reformation has not answered to expectation. Rome had indeed suffered in the sixteenth century very grievous and irreparable losses. But the Roman church not only continued to exist alongside the Reformed churches; it also raised itself up vigorously from its fall, it strengthened itself inwardly at the Council of Trent, shut itself off completely over against Protestantism, and thereby cut the ground for good from under all hope of rapprochement.

And in the combating of the apostate heretics it received an unexpected and mighty support in Jesuitism. Embodiment and exponent of all that in Rome was anti-Protestant, this order applied itself with the exertion of all its power to the destruction of the work of the Reformation. Especially by making itself master of education and instruction, it has in many a land checked or pushed back again the reformation, and has sought in the catholicizing of heathen lands a compensation for the ground lost to the Reformation in Europe.

For so many services rendered to Rome, the order had a claim to thanks. And these were not lacking. With however much adversity and disappointment, enmity and hatred Jesuitism also had to wrestle, it knew how to make itself indispensable to Rome and especially to the Pope; Catholicism and Jesuitism become more and more words of one and the same meaning.

In the proclamation of Mary’s immaculate conception and in the declaration of the infallibility of the Pope the order of Loyola has celebrated its highest triumphs. The Christian has so wholly been absorbed into the properly Roman; the catholicity of Christianity and church is bound to a definite place and to a definite person. The Pope with Mary is all in all; it is now plainly declared: ubi Papa, ibi ecclesia (where the Pope is, there is the church) (Jansen, Praelect. Theol. fund. p. 511).

The Reformation, for its part, soon lost its youthful courage and fresh power. After scarcely a century the mighty movement had already come to a standstill. And with the standstill began the decline. In the Middle Ages it had not succeeded for Rome, in spite of all its power and splendor, to bring everything under the dominion of the church; the folk-poetry, the chivalry, the veneration of women, the coarseness of morals, the licentiousness of life, the mockery and unbelief prove how Christianity was often but a thin veneer over the natural life of the people.

But the Reformation, however universal in conception, has succeeded still much less in the Christianizing of life. Art, science, philosophy, political and social life have never properly taken into themselves the principles of the Reformation. Although theoretically overcome, the dualism remained in practice existing in many a domain. Even divines and theological science lived for a great part out of the antique worldview.

Let one also consider well: the Reformation was by no means the only factor of the new history. Not only in the religious and ecclesiastical domain, but also in every other domain of life, before the sixteenth century a longing for freedom, for emancipation had awakened. The great changes in civil, social, and political life; the revival of classicism, the awakening of natural science, the appearance of independent philosophy were so many powers that the Reformation found alongside itself from the very beginning.

And when this dualism after a short time developed into an antagonism, the Reformation, in the circles where it still lived on most vigorously, withdrew dispiritedly and disappointed into itself, and there was born that peculiar conception of the Christian life which I, for brevity’s sake, designate by the name of Pietism.

It was, however modified, that same tendency which in the old Christian church was represented by Montanism, Novatianism, and Donatism; which in the Middle Ages lived on under many sects and monastic orders; which during the Reformation came forward most radically in the Anabaptists and in the seventeenth to the nineteenth century gave itself shape in various religious movements, in independentism and baptism, in Quakerism and Herrnhutism, in pietism and methodism, in revival and Darbyism; and which even now is one of the chief forms in which the Christian life shows itself.

In this way it has come about that the catholicity of Christianity and church, after a history of eighteen centuries, has run out in the Roman church into the light-shunning Jesuitism, and in the Protestant churches into the world-shunning Pietism; phenomena of which it would be interesting, alongside the points of difference, to trace out the sometimes striking agreement.

Both tendencies sin against the catholicity of Christianity and church and are therefore incapable of the reformation to which the present calls us. How indeed have the times changed! In the Middle Ages the church is that which governs everything; we can study no phenomenon from that time but that it brings us along the one path or the other again into contact with the church. The church is the center of the whole of life, as the church building forms the central point of town and of village. In the sixteenth century the church-reformation still steps so much into the foreground of history that it places all other movements more or less in the shadow.

But the powers emancipated from the church at the same time as the Reformation have since gained in strength and influence, and after a short struggle in the past century have come to dominion over almost the whole of Christendom. A new world- and life-view has appeared, which indeed grants to each freedom of belief, but yet, itself loose from Christianity and church, seeks to push these back as much as possible from the whole of public into the private life, and thus wishes to degrade them to sectarian phenomena.

For the greatest part, contemporary culture therefore passes by Christianity and church. We stand before a wholly new order of things. There have arisen powers against which Christianity has never yet tried its strength; phenomena of which the church has never yet given itself an account. There is, for instance, the modern state-idea with its absolute neutrality; the rise of the third and fourth estate, which give so wholly different a shape to society; trade and the money system, industry and the factory system, which have made the social relations so complicated.

And further, in the domain of science, the inductive method, whose application has led to such brilliant results; the belief in the dominion of the law of causality, from which every investigation now proceeds; the emancipation of education and instruction, of lower and higher schools; the so-called independent science, which denies the existence or the knowability of God, contests the credibility of Scripture on every point, overthrows the geocentric and anthropocentric view of the universe, accepts everywhere and always the law of evolution, and from this one principle builds up anew psychology and anthropology, ethics and politics and all subjects, in order then to grant to theology at most a modest little place beside the domain of science.

Indeed, not to be lightly esteemed are the powers that dispute to Christianity and theology and church, I do not yet say the existence, but then at least the catholicity.

Add to this that we ourselves, much more than we perhaps suppose, stand under the influence of that modern view of life. Our outlook on things is in so many ways different from that of the preceding generations. While then the life on this side of the grave was chiefly regarded as a preparation for heaven, it now has its own independent worth. While then the eternity-directed character of morality brought with it a certain indifference toward the life on earth, there has now come in place of this a high estimation of the earthly, a zealous attention to the material interests.

We all go along in the striving to make this life as bearable, as pleasant as possible; to soften the miseries, to lessen the crimes, to make the death rate fall, to raise health, to check public coarseness, to limit beggary, etc. In principle the opposition with the earlier view of life may not exist; yet the things present themselves to us in many ways in a different light.

What position Rome has now taken over against this new culture is known to you. The Syllabus of 1864 took its stand without any concession or transaction over against the modern view of life, and declared that the method and principles of Scholasticism are even now still in agreement with the demands of the time and the progress of the sciences.

Leo XIII, to exorcize the spirit of the age, called up the mighty thinker of the Middle Ages. And everywhere the Jesuits are zealously busy with the reconstruction of theology and politics, of history and philosophy; on every domain they have taken up the struggle and develop a power that only the unsuspecting Protestant or the vehement anti-papist can fail to recognize and underestimate.

We Protestants, however, have no Pope who in the name of all pronounces the anathema over the whole striving of the age. We have no holy Thomas whom we can call up against the storms to which the Christian faith and the Christian church are exposed. And many are too convinced of the truth of the word cited with so much approval by da Costa: Paläologie überwindet die Neologie nicht (Paleology does not overcome Neology), to seek in a return to a long-vanished past the cure for the maladies of the present.

Hence it is, too, that Pietism in one or another form has for many Christians in this century so much that is attractive. Now it does not occur to us to mistake the gift that God in times of decline has bestowed upon His church in men such as Fox and Wesley, Spener and Francke, Von Zinzendorf and Labadie, Darby and Irving, Moody and Booth.

And who would wish to deny the blessing that has often been beheld in such rich measure upon their labor? Admirable many a time has been their zeal, their courage, their faith, and their love. Their protest against the world-conformity and degeneration of the church was not unfounded. They have many a time been gripped by a holy zeal for the honor of God and the salvation of men, or have, withdrawing into solitude, excelled in many Christian virtues.

But there is nevertheless something that is lacking to their Christianity. It at once makes upon us all a wholly different impression from the truly Christian and at the same time thoroughly sound view of life and the world held by the Reformers. The genuine, true catholicity of Christianity is missing. It is so, these sects have not all, and not all to the same degree, drawn the conclusions that would flow from their principles if these were thought through.

They have not gone so far as the Anabaptists, who rejected the whole world, state and society, art and science, theology and church, and conceived of Christianity as a wholly new creation, descending down from heaven as Christ also had brought His human nature thence. But with all of them there dominates nevertheless an unfree, ascetic view of the world and the whole of its culture.

Whether they pietistically withdraw into solitude, or methodistically attack the world and try with violence to conquer it, never is there here a genuine, true, full reformation; only a saving and snatching of individuals out of the world that lies in the evil one; never a methodical, organic reformation of the whole, of the cosmos, of people and of land. There is with all these tendencies indeed an attack upon the details, not upon the center; indeed upon the bulwarks, not upon the fortress itself.

It is no mighty, imposing struggle of the whole church militant against the world in its whole organization as a kingdom under its own prince, but rather a guerrilla war, weakening the enemy here and there indeed but not overcoming him; a struggle that each conducts on his own hand according to his own method and arbitrary will, individualistically, but not organized, and therefore not stemming the stream of life. A striving indeed against single sins, but often leaving the root of all sins untouched.

A rejection of the unbelieving results of science, but no reformation of science from a principle of its own. A withdrawing from public life, but no attempt to reform that life according to the demand of God’s Word. Indeed, all this is many a time rejected outright as worldly. Content if one might oneself serve God in one’s own house or go out for the conversion of souls, one left land and people, state and society, art and science to their own fate.

One withdrew from the whole of life, separated oneself in the literal sense of the word from everything, and went sometimes, worse still, on shipboard to America, abandoning the fatherland as anyway lost to unbelief. See, this tendency has indeed much of Christianity, but it is not the true, full Christianity. It is a mistaking of the truth that God has loved the world. It is capable of combating, of rejecting, but not of the overcoming of the world by faith.

In like manner is it now with this tendency in relation to the church. Whether one, with Labadism and Pietism, rejecting the existing churches as Babel, founds little churches in or alongside them; or whether one, with Baptism and Methodism, shakes off every form of church as too cumbersome and too troublesome for the spreading of the Gospel and, in the form of a disciplined army with beating drum and flying banners, attacks the world, there is always here a mistaking of the catholicity of the church, of the unity of the body of Christ.

Instead of letting the gaze roam wide and broad over the churches, distinguishing between the false and the true, and not overlooking the wheat for the chaff, all churches are with one word and without more declared false, all believers are called to separation, and the separation itself is many a time exalted into an article of faith.

Discipline is then made serviceable to keeping oneself pure, not also to winning back again for Christ the erring and the fallen one. The baptism of the existing churches is rejected or acknowledged only under very great objections; or else the center of gravity is shifted wholly out of baptism into the receiving into membership.

And what is the fruit of all this? Not that the churches are restored, but that their number is increased and the division made permanent. The sectarianism that Protestantism gives us to behold has a dark shadow side. From the beginning of the Reformation it has manifested itself. But never has it flourished more strongly than in this century. Church after church is newly founded. In England one already counts over 200 sects.

In America the number is no longer to be surveyed. The differences become so manifold and so insignificant that they can no longer be tracked. There even go up voices to take up a comparative history of the confessions as a new subject in theology. Worse still is that through this sectarianism the ecclesiastical consciousness wholly wears away and dies out. Nothing more is felt of the distinction between church and association.

That separation from the church is sin is hardly any longer acknowledged by anyone. One leaves a church as calmly as one joins it. If one thing or another in a church no longer pleases, one seeks without any knocking of the conscience another. It is taste that in the end decides. The exercise of discipline becomes in this way impossible, it itself loses wholly its character; what minister still dares in good conscience, except perhaps in very, very few cases, to make use of the form of excommunication?

And the worst of all is still that one, thus breaking the unity of doctrine and the unity of the church, disturbs the communion of the saints, robs oneself of the gracious gifts of the Spirit with which other believers labor at the perfecting of the saints, shuts oneself up in one’s own circle, breeds spiritual pride, strengthens Rome, and offers the world occasion for reproach and for mockery.

By no means do I wish, by pointing to these shadow sides, to mistake the good that is also proper to these forms of the Christian life. Without doubt there lies also in Pietism and in all the religious movements related to it a glorious truth. Jesus Himself indeed calls it to us, that one thing is needful, that we have above all to seek the kingdom of heaven and all other things will then be cast to us; the Heavenly Father knows indeed what we need. The life of communion with God has its own content and is not absorbed in the moral, in the practice of our earthly calling.

Mysticism retains its right alongside activity; activity makes rest necessary again; the Sunday remains here alongside, though then also at the head of, the working days. Even will it in this dispensation surely never come to that harmony and unity which we expect in the future. One-sidednesses continue to cling to churches and persons. Understanding, disposition, and will; head, heart, and hand are with none of us equally governed by the Gospel.

But the religious, the in a good sense ascetic side of Christianity must nevertheless, in order not to turn into all manner of false mysticism and cloistral piety, be supplemented by the moral, by the truly human side. Great, indeed, the faith seems when one, forsaking everything, shuts oneself up in solitude. But still greater appears to me the faith of him who, preserving the kingdom of heaven as a treasure, at the same time carries it as a leaven into the world, assured that He who is for us is more than he who is against us, and mighty to preserve us from the evil one even in the midst of the world.

And is this not precisely the demand of the catholicity of our Christian faith? The Gospel is indeed not content to be one opinion alongside others, but lays claim to be the truth, which by virtue of its nature is in every domain exclusive over against the lie. And the church is no arbitrary association of men for mutual religious exercise, but a foundation of the Lord, pillar and ground of the truth. The world would surely gladly banish Christianity and church from its domain and push them back into the inner chamber.

No greater pleasure could we do it than by withdrawing into solitude and leaving it rest and freedom of movement. But the catholicity of Christianity and church both forbid us to comply with this wish; we may not be a sect, we may not wish to be one, and we cannot be one except by the denial of the absolute character of the truth. The kingdom of heaven is indeed not of this world, but it nevertheless demands that everything serve it. It is exclusive and tolerates no independent or neutral kingdom of the world alongside itself.

Much easier would it surely be to leave this whole age to itself, and to seek our strength in sitting still. But such a rest is not granted us here. Because every creature of God is good and nothing is to be rejected, being received with thanksgiving; because everything can be sanctified through the Word of God and through prayer; therefore the rejection of any creature would be ingratitude toward God, a mistaking of His gifts, and our struggle may never be directed against anything other than against sin alone.

However complicated, then, the relations may be in which we as confessors of Christ in this age see ourselves placed; however serious and difficult, indeed almost insoluble, the problems may be that are laid before us in the social and political domain and above all in science; it would witness to unbelief and powerlessness if we haughtily withdrew ourselves from the struggle and perhaps even, under a Christian appearance, rejected the whole civilization of the age as demonic.

That would indeed be nothing else than, according to the word of Bacon, to wish to please God with a lie. On the contrary, faith has the promise of the overcoming of the world. And that faith is catholic, bound to no time or place, to no land or people; it can enter into all conditions, join itself to all forms of the natural life, it is suited for all times, is profitable for all things, comes to use under all circumstances; free is it and independent, for it combats nothing but sin alone, and there is cleansing for all sin in the blood of the cross.

And if the catholicity of our Christian faith be thus understood, then we can also in the ecclesiastical domain not shut ourselves off, and seek in isolation from the one, universal, Christian church a cure for the miserable condition in which in our century many churches find themselves. Looking at the sectarianism that reigns everywhere, we might perhaps think that the time of the churches is past and that each group of believers had nothing to do but, hoping and suffering, to await the future of its Lord.

There lies indeed in the Protestant principle, alongside a church-reforming, also a church-dissolving element. The one Christian church has fallen apart into a countless number of little churches and sects, of associations and societies. The hope of the Old Catholic von Döllinger for a reunion of all the Christian churches has no other ground than a well-meant but always fruitless syncretism.

But however harmful that endless division may be for the unity of the church and the unity of doctrine, for Christianity it nevertheless does not lay down an exclusively unfavorable testimony. It is a proof that Christianity still lives, that it is a power among the people, that it is a matter that concerns thousands. The riches, the many-sidedness, the multiformity of the Christian faith are made manifest in it. Outward unity has indeed more that is attractive to the eye.

Rome lets no occasion pass to exalt itself over it, and to set its splendid unity over against the dividedness of Protestantism. But beneath this outward unity Rome covers those same differences and oppositions which the Protestant principle leaves free to develop alongside one another. It is therefore no curse, it is to be reckoned a blessing of the Reformation, that it wills no false, untrue unity and lets outwardly fall apart what inwardly does not belong together.

It is a pity enough that the state churches are still always infected with the Roman leaven and seek over against Rome their strength in an outward union of faith and unbelief, which blunts the conscience, corrupts the characters, and makes the ecclesiastical conditions so thoroughly unsound. This is therefore not the smallest gain that the sects, but above all the free churches in this century, have procured for us, that they have conquered freedom of religion also from the state churches, and have made faith and confession free from every bond with the state.

The Christian faith is again, wholly as in the first centuries of our era, thrown back upon itself; it will thereby be not weaker but stronger in the spiritual struggle. For this reason without doubt the free churches have the promise of the future; on this one condition only, that they preserve the catholicity of the Christian faith and of the Christian church.

Earlier theologians made a distinction between fundamental and non-fundamental articles of faith. That distinction was often understood very mechanically. The two series of articles were set loosely alongside each other. The distinction was also wholly confessionally determined; there was just so much fundamental as was expressed in each confession. But applied organically, this distinction nevertheless has its right.

Just as the one universal Christian church appears more or less purely in the various churches, so the one universal Christian truth also finds in the various confessions of the faith a more or less pure expression. There is no universal Christianity above, but there is nevertheless a universal Christianity present within, the dividedness of faith. As little as one single church, however pure, coincides with the universal church, so little may one confession, however purified according to God’s Word, identify itself with the Christian truth.

Every sect that holds its own circle to be the only church of Christ, and reckons itself to be exclusively in possession of the truth, languishes and dies away, like a branch that has been torn from its stem. The one holy universal Christian church, now an object of faith, first comes into being when the body of Christ shall have reached its full growth. And only then, too, shall the congregation come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, and shall it know even as it is known.

---

A note on this translation. I don’t read Dutch. This English text was prepared for Reformed Dogmatika from Bavinck’s public-domain Dutch (De katholiciteit van Christendom en kerk, Kampen: Zalsman, 1888) with the help of AI (Anthropic’s Claude); no copyrighted English translation was consulted. Bavinck’s Latin quotations are kept as he wrote them, with an English rendering in parentheses, his Scripture citations are preserved and linked to the ESV, and the bracketed numbers mark the 1888 pagination. Corrections from readers of the Dutch are warmly welcomed.