Gordon Clark: The Church (The Southern Presbyterian Journal)

1957. The Church. The Southern Presbyterian Journal. 3–4. Oct 9

The Church

The ecumenical movement stresses the concept of the church. It insists on the necessity of the church. It aims to produce unity in the church.  It aims to organize One Church.

In the discussions that attend ecumenical matters we may sometimes find interesting and informative opinions. Views are expressed that are new and puzzling to Presbyterians; or it may be that the views are old and discarded.

The World Council, be it remembered, has been unable to hold a united Communion service, because the churches that are gathered into that organization do not recognize each other as true churches. Some of the participants, however, take hope in the fact that some right beliefs are shared by the divergent groups; and these common doctrines, though few in number, can be used to produce a more perfect union.

But such is not the view of the Greek Catholic, or so-called Orthodox Church. An earlier pronouncement of Metropolitan Anthony has recently been publicized. What is outside the Greek Church, he says in substance, is foreign to Christ's redemption. It makes no difference whether the non-Orthodox have or do not have right beliefs. Purity of doctrine would not incorporate them in the Church. What is of importance is only actual membership in the Greek Orthodox Church.

Now, this is a forthright expression with which we can enthusiastically disagree. It places an organization in the place of Christ. Membership in that organization is the prerequisite of salvation, and right belief apart from that membership is of no use. Instead of an individual recognition of Christ as one's personal Lord and Saviour, ecclesiastical regularity is made the touchstone of true Christianity.

It reminds one of the Anglican bishops who persecuted the Puritans in the eighteenth century. Even the Puritans in their own church. At the time Blackstone, the celebrated legal theorist, reported that though he had heard every clergyman of note in London he did not hear a single sermon which had more Christianity in it than the writings of Cicero, and that it would have been impossible for him to discover, from what he heard, whether the preacher were a follower of Confucius, Mahomet, or Christ; at that time church wardens who had no eye for drunkenness and lechery were filled with indignation at the breach of order committed by a godly minister who might cross a parish line and preach the gospel out- side his own parish. Bishops who could tolerate Arianism, Socinianism, and Deism not only denounced men like Whitefield and Grimshaw, but actually stirred up mobs to stone them.

It is not only the Greek and Roman churches that stress regularity. The leading ecumeniacs of today have very little zeal about sound doctrine. It is membership in a church, a big church, that is the important thing. A small denomination, a splinter group, and particularly a sect that does not belong to the World Council, is beyond the pale. The leaders of the councils may not believe in verbal inspiration, they may repudiate the substitutionary atonement, they may deny the bodily resurrection; but they are indisputably good churchmen and ecclesiastically regular.

Such there are today. Such there were in the eighteenth century. And Christ met the same people in Jerusalem, too.

— G.H.C.