Dr. Clowney (1917-2005), the former president of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia and founding president of Westminster Seminary in California, was a major figure in the growth of Reformed theology in the second half of the twentieth century. He was the author of numerous books, including The Church (IVP). This White Horse Inn interview was originally broadcast on July 7, 1996.
Very often in our day when we talk about the church and our definition of the church, at least in our imagination, it is different from what people in other generations would have understood by "the church." How do you think that the average person in the evangelical world today would understand the church in a way that would be different from predecessors?
The misunderstanding that comes in, beyond thinking that the church is a building, is forgetting the corporate nature of the church, that the church is the body of Christ and that it's made up of believers. Although that's getting emphasis today too, which is encouraging. I think that the knowledge of the church as made up of members who work together, Paul's analogy of the organic figure of the body, is getting more attention’which is a good thing.
In The Church, you talk about the approach of the World Council of Churches’especially about the model of becoming vs. being, not a company of the redeemed. But today, the church is often seen as a ministry of redemption itself. What is the difference between those two views?
I think the point has often been made that the church is a pilgrim church; it's a church on the way, seeking for a great objective before it with emphasis on the future. The church is becoming; it's looking for what's going to come’I think that's a way of evading the biblical doctrine of the church, evading what we're told the church really is. The church is first of all made up of those who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, who are joined to Christ, and who have been ingrafted into Christ. So the church does have a position; the church is made up of those who are the people of God. They are made to be children of God, people who belong to God because they belong to Jesus.
It's curious that in the older liberalism of the World Council of Churches, their symbol of an ark with a cross in it has been derided to say that the church ought not to be thought of as a little group of the saved floating in a sea of damnation’that the church is to be understood as including everybody and that it is to be defined not by what it is but by what it does. The church is a servant church, and it's been said that the only difference between the church and the world is the fact that the church knows that the world is saved, which presents a view that is completely unbiblical’that everybody is saved, and the only problem is that some people don't know it.
We even hear that the church is the incarnation of God as much as Jesus Christ was. What you're describing as the World Council of Churches in the 1940s and '50s is now making its way into evangelicalism. Do you see that as a potential problem if we don't take seriously the church as the redeemed community? We are redeemed by the incarnation; we aren't the redemptive incarnate Word.
Yes, the church is Christ's, but the church is not made up of christs. We belong because we belong to Jesus. I think sometimes that figure of the church as the body of Christ, as Paul uses it, has been misunderstood. It's been thought that Christ is the head in the sense of the physical top of the body. If I put my hands around my neck, what's above it is my head, and what's below it is my body. And with that in view, it's been thought that the body certainly needs the head; a headless corpse isn't going very far, and the head needs a body. From this, it's deduced that Christ needs the church as much as the church needs Christ. The only presence of Christ in the world is in the church, and therefore the church is thought of as the literal incarnation of Christ, so that he was incarnate first in the womb of the virgin, and then incarnate now in the people of God, the church.
In your book, you also touch on the subject under the heading of the sacraments: "The hierarchy of the church is, in Roman Catholic theology, a sacramental sign, and the church today is a sacrament. Indeed, the very fleshly G. K. Chesterton was affirming the sacramental sense of God's presence in creation when he said, 'Catholicism is a thick steak, a glass of stout and a good cigar.' Spreading the sacramental over the whole creation dilutes its force. If everything is sacramental, then bread and wine are already sacraments before their consecration, and the mystery of the Eucharist differs only in degree from the sacramentality of an incarnate creation."
The Roman Catholic Church has insisted on a sacramental emphasis in salvation, the salvation coming through the sacraments, and the church itself being seen as a sacrament. And in that rather amusing quote from Chesterton, the Roman Catholic Church has also insisted on not only the reality of the universe, but also the symbolic existence of the universe’that it's somehow a mediation of God. It's important for us to recognize that God is the Creator, that he's revealed in his creation, and that there's constantly the reality of God's creation all around us that points to God himself as the maker. But I think the danger comes when we think of everything in the universe as such as being a means of grace, like a sacrament. Creation, however, is not a means of grace. It reveals that God is present, but it does not reveal what grace brings to us’the saving power of Christ's atonement.
What's interesting is that today, Richard Foster for instance, who writes on the spiritual disciplines, is a Quaker who doesn't believe in the sacraments, and has very eloquent books arguing for the sacramental nature of just about everything. In an article he wrote in Christianity Today, he included bread, wine, and water with about fifteen other things. So there really is this tendency, even in circles where the sacraments of the Lord's Supper and baptism have not historically been accepted. There is a danger of trying to go outside of the bounds of God's revealed record of salvation in Word and Sacrament.
Yes, there surely is.
You write, "Tension between ardor and order was already part of the struggle of the early church with Montanism. It continued in the sectarian movements of the Middle Ages. Luther and Calvin opposed Anabaptist fervor with heated condemnation. Orthodox believers opposed the enthusiasts, concerned about the threat that they posed to the order and doctrine of the church. Today we face the same questions. Are critics of the charismatic movement guilty of seeking to quench the spirit?"
I think it's a question we should ask. It's important to understand that the church of God is a triune church. We're warned in the book of Ephesians that we are not to ignore the work of the Spirit, giving diligence to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There's much about the Spirit, and the church is the church of the Father, so it's the people of God. The Old Testa-ment emphasizes the people-hood of those who God claims and redeems. The church is made up of the disciples of Jesus Christ; it's his church, his gathering.
But the church is also the fellowship of the Spirit. I think it's important to recognize that it's never one to the detriment of the other. There's the un-folding wonder of God's great redemption, and we need one to understand the other. Without the Old Testament you don't understand the meaning of the preaching of the kingdom of God. When John the Baptist comes proclaiming the kingdom, when Jesus teaches the kingdom, what does that mean? It's the Old Testament that shows us the background of that. So you have to see the church as the people of God, and from that move on to see that Jesus Christ comes to fulfill all that's promised in the Old Testament, that he's the climax of it all.
It might be a good idea, especially on that line and the other issues we've already raised, if you could give us a run through from Genesis to Revelation’a sort of synopsis of the church in redemptive history.
When Jesus said to Simon Peter, "You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church," Jesus was not using an unfamiliar word. He was using a word that was very well known in the Old Testament: it's the Hebrew word qahal, which is translated as ecclesia in the Greek Old Testament. Jesus was using the term that describes the church as the congregation; that is, those who meet together. But what does it mean that the church is the congregation? It's really an active word; it means the people who are actually gathered. The background of that use by Jesus is in the Old Testament. The gathering in view is particularly the gathering at Mt. Sinai, which is where God brought Israel when he brought them out of Egypt, out of slavery, and brought them to himself and made them his people. From Mt. Sinai he spoke to them the words of his covenant law, that they might be brought together to be his people. In Deuteronomy, this is called the "Great Day of the Assembly." So the church is the ecclesia, the assembly, the gathering, because of the roots back in the Old Testament when God assembled them. God said to Moses, "Assemble to me the people." It's often said that "assembly" means to bring them out of the world into the church; but it means to bring them out of their tents into the presence of God, to stand before the Lord at the foot of the mountain, and there to enter into covenant with him. And so, the assembly in the Old Testament always looks back to the Great Day of the Assembly.
And then Jesus says, "I will build my church, my assembly"’not something new, but something renewed. Because the great story of the Old Testament, of course, is the way in which the people of God sinned against his law. No other nation records its own shame, but the people of God, Israel, did because it's not a story about the people, it's a story about God and how he dealt with the people. So here he establishes his people and his covenant, and they show themselves to be covenant breakers, and then God has to show that his purposes will not fail. And they won't fail for two reasons.
The first is that there is always a remnant left. The great cedar tree of Lebanon will be cut down in God's judgment, but out of it there will come a little shoot. So you have something left, the stump, and then you have a sign of renewal, the shoot, which becomes in Isaiah's prophecy a foreshadowing of Jesus Christ, who is the shoot from the root of David, the branch, and the ensign to which the nations will be gathered. You have this beautiful picture of both remnant and renewal. Jesus says, I come to build my church; I'm going to gather the remnant, the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Their shepherds weren't gathering them, so God said, I'll come myself to gather them, and I will make David my servant to gather them. So Jesus comes as the Lord and the servant, to gather his people together.
That leads us forward to a wonderful definitive view of the church that is not only in Ephesians but also in Hebrews 12: we do not come to Mt. Sinai as Moses did, and to the fear and terror of the fire that came down on Mt. Sinai, but what do we come to? Some-times I think people suppose, "Well, I'm glad we don't have to deal with that. The people of Israel said they couldn't bear to hear the voice of God speaking. We're glad we don't come to that, but now we've got things calmed down, and God's under control." What does it say, though, in Hebrews 12? "Our God is a consuming fire." It does not say that God has been domesticated, but that we're brought more immediately into the presence of the God who is a consuming fire. Therefore it says we must worship with awe because he is the Lord God.
The beautiful picture in Hebrews 12 is the feast day assembly of the saints and the angels: they'll all be gathered together, and there they will be, and there they are. The point is that they are now in God's presence, which gives us a beautiful picture of the church. Where do we come when we worship in the book of Hebrews? We come where God is, to the spirits of just men made perfect, to Jesus, and to the blood of the covenant that speaks better than that of Abel’who was murdered by his brother and whose blood cries out from the ground for vengeance. We come to Jesus Christ, who bore our sins in his own body on the tree, and whose atoning blood cries out for deliverance.
That's why when we come to this mountain, the writer of Hebrews says, we come not to a mountain that is burning, around which people tremble, but to a place of comfort and forgiveness.
Yes, because Israel traveled from Sinai to Zion, and the author of Hebrews says that we've traveled from Sinai to Zion, and we come to the place where God is’not the earthly Zion, but the heavenly Zion.
Do you think that a lot of dispensational teaching today misses the main thread of what you've just laid out so beautifully’the continuity as Moses leads us to Christ?
I'm glad for the progress that has been made in dispensational theology.
I was raised on the Scofield Reference Bible. It said in that Bible that you're saved by works in the Old Testament, by grace in the New Testament; you can't pray the Lord's Prayer because that's praying on legal ground, because it says forgive us our debts on the ground that we've forgiven our debtors: "Lord forgive me, because I'm so forgiving." I can't understand how C. I. Scofield could write that, but it's in that Bible, and even as a kid that puzzled me. But dispensationalists are no longer teaching that; they're teaching grace in both dispensations and that's fine. I think from a Reformed perspective, there's more insight into the structure of the Old Testament, the periods of the history of redemption. So I'm optimistic of people drawing closer together on these matters. But the great division still is between the church and Israel, and that's where I think dispensationalism still misses the point.
How important do you think this is to our understanding of the church? In five minutes you gave us one of the most magnificent expositions of huge blocks of Scripture. That's the beauty in covenant theology’the ability to make sense of these large passages of Scripture by looking at them in their original context and see how God unfolds this wonderful drama throughout Scripture. It's not a bunch of different stories; it's one story centering around the cross, unified from the first promise until the consummation. Do you think if we don't follow this kind of approach of redemptive unfolding that we tend to see all kinds of different messages in the Bible?
Yes I do, and sometimes not even unified messages. We miss the fact that the Bible is a story. We think it's like a casket of gems, where you can pull out memory verses or verses suitable for framing; you just look in the Bible for little nuggets and don't see it as God's story.
You mentioned how some believe now that we are, as the body of Christ, almost a literal revelation of him. How does that play into evangelism? The Spirit and the Word convict; how much are we, as the body of Christ, a part of the conversion process as we share the gospel?
It's the importance of our making Christ known by word, declaring the gospel to people, but of course also manifesting by our lives that Christ's salvation does make a difference; there must be not only the spoken word but there must be fruit in our lives that manifests Christ. That's where I think it's important to realize that although we are not the incarnation of Christ in the world, we are the people of God, and we are the body of Christ in the world. Paul uses the body of Christ figure, not to describe our relations to the world, but to describe our relations to one another: how the hand relates to the foot, or the eye to the nose, or whatever. Nevertheless, the fact that we live in the world as the body of Christ makes us to be lamps of witness in the world, and we are given the Word that we might speak it forth.
So the church really is God's new society and should be something that is set against the paradigm of the culture and its values.
That's right, and that's why I wanted to emphasize in my book that we are the people of God. I used the phrase, "We are the Christian ethnics." We can't avoid ethnicity in the modern world. But the ethnicity of the church is entirely different from the ethnicity of the world, because the ethnicity of the church binds us together in Christ. But we are the people of God in the world and that unites the people who cannot be united in any other way.
