A very fine Protestant ecclesiology

I am thoroughly enjoying this discussion, and I am thoroughly edified by Peter Escalante's explanations surrounding the Protestant definition of the word "church" here. I believe this goes a long way toward defining a Protestant ecclesiology that makes sense of the Reformation history as well as giving us a way to understand "the Protestant Church" moving forward in our own era.

To get straight to it: the corpus christianum on earth is a multitude, not a single political unity. This is why it can be genuinely transnational without being a multinational corporation or empire, and why it can be the principle of many commonwealths. The visible worship assemblies are actions of the corpus christianum, whereby the heavenly reality of that earthly corpus christianum becomes more iconically focused, so to speak. But as I said, a believer is not “more” in the mystical body on Sunday than on Friday.

As Steven has said, I think the idea you’re getting at is actually the corpus christianum. The important thing to note is that the c.c. as such is temporally a multitude, not a politically or para-politically incorporated institution. It underlies household, State, ministerium and worship assembly, and other civic and social forms.

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Protestantism: of course there many movements in the 16th century, but most historians of the time have little trouble in clearly identifying a Magisterial Reformation, and can do so because it enjoyed a remarkable consensus on the crucial points. “Semper reformanda” does not primarily refer to doctrinal revision- the phrase isn’t doctrina semper reformanda- but rather, means that the Christians can always do more to get their act together. It cannot serve as warrant for ever more speculative theology, or for rejection of classic truths. It’s one thing to say that evangelical doctrine is wrong, but quite another to appeal to the Reformation example as warrant for departing from its principles…

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You say “the institution which we call the Church”. Well, with the Reformers, I would say the Church is primarily the union of believers with Christ, a name for the relation of the Person to the many persons (and as Steven noted, this is straight Luther). The visible assemblies are indispensable, but derivative. The visible worship assembly is not an interposed mediator between a believer and the true Mediator. It is rather birds of a feather flocking together, fixed on the Sun of the Word, and winging on the air of the Spirit. You say you can’t square the Protestant conception with the Biblical metaphors; but you then admit that it probably does square with the evangelical doctrine of the mystical body. What you object to is the evangelical distinction between that one Body, and the many visible assemblies, because, it seems, you wish to entirely conflate them. Such a conflation leads of necessity, by the way, to ecclesiologies such as those of Rome, or Witness Lee. And missing in all your explanations of your position is the classic idea of the corpus christianum…

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On alternatives: I think that there really aren’t that many alternatives, and the clearer one is about principles and the more coherent one’s thought becomes, the more one will find himself tracking with one of the handful of possibilities. I am not speaking of airtight systems; I am speaking of basic configurations of first principle, and there really is a phenomenological typology of these. Anabaptism and Rome really do both conflate the visible assemblies and the mystical body, and thus both, predictably, destroy the corpus christianum; and so on. There is a sort of science of these things.

On conflation: I do know you want to make a distinction. It would be helpful were you to recognize that we do not at all radically separate the visible earthly assemblies and the mystical Body of Christ: they share an identical center, the Word, and they are connected in living persons. The crucial difference, I think, is that we think that the way in the which the mystical Body most basically presents itself in the world is as the corpus christianum, which is a multitude; and that c.c. staffs, as it were, the household, the visible assemblies, and the civic orders and offices. It is not itself a polis; it is rather the principle of many commonwealths.

The donum superadditum and the doctrine of man: a foundational difference between Protestants and Roman Catholics

At the heart of the differences between Roman Catholics and Protestants, there are key differences understandings, both in terms of their understanding of the doctrine of God, but also of the doctrine of Man.

Over at Steven Wedgeworth's Wedgewords, Peter Escalante has, in the context of a discussion about civil authority, given a fairly succinct overview of one of the key differences. I'm not fully prepared to engage in a discussion of all of this -- it involves different concepts of man, and different consequences in terms of the doctrine of justification. But I've been following this excellent discussion, and I wanted to pass it along while it was still fresh in my mind.

It involves Rome's understanding of the donum superadditum with regard to the state that Adam was in before he fell. Briefly, Protestants say that man was "very good," and when he fell, it resulted in a spiritual death, and hence, God's imputation of righteousness and union with Christ is what's required to restore man back to his pristine, pre-fall state. Rome, on the other hand (thanks to Augustine's neopolatonism and some refinement by medieval theologians), holds that, not only was Adam "very good," but that he had some "super-added gift of grace" that he lost in the fall, and it is that "superadded grace" that needs to be restored. Hence the "infusion of grace" in Roman doctrine. [This accounts for the difference in which Calvin described man as "spiritually dead," and hence "totally inable" or "totally depraved," whereas Roman Catholics merely believe that man was "impaired" but with an otherwise full capacity to please God with his own grace-assisted works.]

Peter describes it this way:

For us, man originally had connatural beatitude, and when he fell, the reduced and superficial participation in that beatitude still possible to him, in an extrinsic way, was what we call temporal felicity or civic righteousness. But for RC, original felicity was a donum superadditum, and the status of original creation was thus left unclear, with at the very least a strong suggestion that much of what we think of as creation is in fact the effect of the Fall- an anti-Hebraic gnosticism which marred the thought of the ancient Greek church (and modern EO), and Rome too, though a more Biblical countertendency was present in the West and finally came into full victory with the Reformation. Given that the RC think of the New Covenant as the restoration of the donum superadditum, its relation to the temporal is ambivalent at best and hostile at worst. But for us, the New Covenant a) disables the heteronomous and unattainable Law which measured our alienation, and b) grants full citizenship in the Kingdom of God, simply by trust in Christ and union with Him. This means that the reality of original beatitude is poured into the forms of the creational order, and slowly transforms it spiritually, until all things shall be made new.

There are many, many concepts tied up in this one little paragraph, and it would (and will) take a long time to extract the meaning from them. But the one I want to focus on is that, right from the outset of their understanding of man, Protestants and Catholics differ.

John Fesko, in his "Justification," describes this situation with respect to the "donum superadditum":

It seems as though much of the debate over infused versus imputed righteousness hinges upon the presuppositions of each party. The typical Reformed understanding is that Adam was created upright, or righteous, and that God justified, or declared righteous, the initial creation as well as man in his declaration that everything was "very good" (Gen 1:31). We see the Westminster Larger Catechism echo this point when it states that God created man in "righteousness, and holiness, having the law of God written in their hearts, and the power to fulfill it" (q. 17). By way of contrast, the typical Roman Catholic understanding of Adam's original state holds to the necessity of infused righteousness. Roman Catholic theologians typically hold to the idea of the donum superadditum ("superadded gift"). Medieval Roman Catholic theologians, for example, argue that the donum superadditum was a part of the original constitution of man, that it represented his original capacity for righteousness. We see then, from the outset, that man in his fallen state required infused righteousness in the form of the donum superadditum. If man requires infused righteousness in the prefall state, then he would most assuredly require it in his sin-fallen but redeemed state. The original state of man, then, is an issue that must feature in any dialogues over the question of imputation (John Fesko "Justification: Understanding the Classic Reformed Doctrine" Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing Company, pg 372.)

Michael Horton, too, in his "Covenant and Salvation," expands on this concept greatly. "According to the federal theologians, Adam and Eve were never in a state of grace before the fall. Endowed in their creation with all of the requisite gifts for fulfilling God's eschatological purposes, there was nothing lacking requiring a gracious supplement" (194).

If anyone is interested, Horton develops this topic quite extensively, relying on Bavinck's account.

I've looked into this to some degree, and my hope is to discuss it in great detail once I've worked my way through the early church. But it is one of the key differences, and it is one of the distinctions that the Reformers made -- a (very likely unwitting) Roman misunderstanding and accretion that somehow became the law of the land at Trent.

Already and Not Yet

Protestantism did not destroy Christendom: it simply reconfigured it for the better, with the accidental circumstance of having to adjust for retrenched RC opposition to integral Reform.

This is a comment from a writer named Peter Escalante, in comments on a blog written by Steven Wedgeworth, addressed to Darryl Hart.

Hart was writing in response to an article that Steven wrote on the topic of "Two Kingdoms."

This is one discussion that I think is worth having, and it is worth taking the time to do it well. [Paul Manata at Triablogue is giving it a good shot.] As D.A. Carson and others have noted, one of the key discussions that Protestants need to have in our time is on the topic of Christ and Culture.

This is really an older discussion among groups that that sort of break out along lines that Paul Manata outlined in an "Ordinary Means" podcast, on the topic of: "transformationalists, participators, and withdrawalism."

Much more could be said, but I won't say it, because I'm not really much more than an observer at this point. However, I am an optimist by nature, and I believe there is very much good that will come out of this discussion.

Of course, underpinning it all, is the theology that came out of the Protestant Reformation. My calling, as I see it, is to continue to address what Peter Escalante called the "retrenched RC opposition to integral Reform." That's how this all ties together.