Lecture 8: Marks of a False Church and Church Government

The lecture, section by section

1. Why study the false church

   Everyone in the room has belonged to more than one church, usually chosen by proximity or family; few have ever asked what makes any of them a church at all. The teachers propose the negative route: define the false church and the parameters of the true one emerge. The question is live, not academic. Patton describes an ongoing web correspondence with Roman Catholics whose standing argument is the count of more than 33,000 denominations: which one is the Protestant church? His answer concedes the difficulty and refuses the shortcut on both sides: a name proves nothing, Protestant or Catholic; your theology has to go before you. And the stakes are generational: whatever church you join, you begin a tradition your children will inherit, so you owe them the ability to test it. Four marks follow, under a word with a rich Protestant pedigree: the marks.

2. Radical exclusivism

   The first mark: churches that locate salvation, or sanctification, or both, exclusively in adherence to their own set of beliefs and practices, sometimes requiring membership in their particular body. What does that deny? Everything the course built first: the invisible church, the catholicity of the body, the unity of all who are in Christ. A local church is by definition a local expression of the invisible body; the radically exclusive church has no concept of anything beyond itself, and its practical message, stated or implied, is that leaving its membership means leaving the body of Christ. Historically, the teachers note, Rome at Trent fit this mark, holding baptism illegitimate outside its administration, though since 1965 the change has been dramatic, from a posture some would have called cultic toward a broad inclusivism.

3. Radical inclusivism

   The opposite mark: churches with no doctrinal statement at all, no dogma except welcome, accepting every belief, creed, and lifestyle without remainder. The problem is definitional: without orthodoxy, what is the gathering defined by? A church is built on what the body of Christ is, and a body defined as everyone has crossed into universalism, which is itself outside orthodoxy. Some of these churches, the teachers observe, exist precisely to bless what Scripture condemns, congregations organized around affirming a lifestyle so that affirmation is the whole basis of their existence; liberal churches that need no Bible and no confession fit here, and some, though not all, postmodern churches. The deeper distinction introduced: orthodoxy, what a church professes, and orthopraxy, what it actually does, a comparison every church, and every Christian, must keep running.

4. Two extremes, one culture

   A chart pairs the extremes trait for trait: the exclusive church is cultic, legalistic, fear driven, intolerant, relentlessly objective, endlessly polemic, the whole ministry a hunt for other churches’ errors, the King James only movement offered as a specimen; the inclusive church is pluralistic, against all rules, bent on removing every fear, subjectively making it up as it goes, and radically irenic, wanting peace at any price. Modernism, generally speaking, produced the first; postmodernism has produced the second, which means doctrinally sound churches are still being moved by culture without noticing, and the swing from one extreme to the other in a generation is exactly why theology must keep re-examining its foundations against Scriptures that do not change. The true church lives between the extremes, and the teachers give the balance its classic words, from Rupertus, a virtually unknown reformer whose one famous line is often misattributed to Melanchthon or Augustine: in essentials, unity; in non essentials, liberty; in all things, charity, and charity here means love.

5. Heterodoxism: when the institution denies an essential

   The third mark is heresy proper: a church that moves outside the pale of orthodoxy by denying an essential, whether an essential of salvation or an essential of orthodoxy. Common cases: denying the sinfulness of man, teaching that man is essentially good; and denying that salvation is by faith alone. The essentials named in the course’s framework: faith alone, the inspiration of Scripture, the doctrine of the Trinity, the deity of Christ, and, to a degree still working itself out today, the exclusivity of Christ. Heterodox means different teaching, as orthodox means correct teaching, and a church that goes on record denying an essential has, on its own record, left the orthodox camp; while some questions, like eternal security, were settled in the soteriology course as genuine intramural debates inside orthodoxy.

6. The hardest case: Rome, Trent, and separated brethren

   Naming faith alone as an essential forces the hardest sentence of the night: it places the Roman institution, a billion professors of Christ, outside the true church, and the teachers refuse to say it glibly. Patton lays out his own struggle in public: he reads Roman Catholic theologians he deeply respects and has no doubt some are believers; his email correspondents ask whether Protestants believe Catholics can be saved, and his answer is of course, because salvation turns on identification with Christ, not with an institution. But the institutional question is different. At Trent, Rome pronounced its anathema on all who hold salvation by faith alone, and the teachers’ judgment is severe: that curse fell not on Protestants but on the gospel itself, and until it is revoked, the institution remains heterodox, and therefore, in the technical sense, a false church, exactly as Rome, in its kinder modern vocabulary, still regards Protestants as separated brethren. Believing the right facts about Christ, they add, is not yet saving trust; the New Testament itself observes that even the demons believe.

7. Institution and individual

   A distinction guards the whole discussion from cruelty: the mark applies to churches as institutions, never as a verdict on every person inside them. Self described evangelical churches that decline to affirm the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity are, on their own record, outside orthodoxy, and yet there may be true believers sitting in them, just as there are members of every tradition who neither know nor care what their institution teaches and belong to it only by habit. And the teachers add mercy in the other direction too: teaching a heresy is not the loss of salvation, or, as Patton says to laughter that he insists is undeserved, he and Rhome are both in trouble, for no one has taught perfectly.

8. Radical imbalance: the misleading ministries

   The fourth mark is the surprise: churches whose doctrine may be flawless but whose life is one ministry to the neglect of the rest. Such a body is not heterodox; it is false in a different sense, claiming to be a church while being something else, at best a parachurch ministry, at worst a misleading one, since people can spend a lifetime in it believing they were part of a church. The tour of specimens, all fictional names: the fellowship club, meet and greet, story time, small groups, and social events, a social club, and nothing wrong with fellowship; the all praise church, a concert and a worship event, and nothing wrong with singing; the signs and wonders assembly, where the practice of the gifts is ninety percent of everything, and the gifts themselves, whatever your position on their continuation, are not the problem, the imbalance is; the fellowship around the word Bible church, an exegetical lesson at every gathering and no other avenue of integration at all, which the teachers press hardest precisely because the Bible is evangelicalism’s defining point, and a lecture series you could replicate with a radio preacher and a box of tapes is a teaching ministry, not a church; and the church of the perpetual altar call, every sermon evangelistic, every event an outreach event. Every one of these emphases is good; any of them made nearly everything produces a false church. The counterexample: a genuinely missions minded church where, as its people say, the preaching pastor’s job is to fill the church and the missions pastor’s job is to empty it, imbalance avoided by design.

9. The program tests itself

   The teachers then run the test on themselves, and the transparency is the lesson. The theology program is deliberately, totally imbalanced: it teaches theology and does nothing else, and that is why it calls itself a program and refuses to call itself a church. The name was debated at length; theological studies fellowship was rejected because it would have been a lie, since the program offers no conduit for fellowship at all, only teaching, and it sends its students to their local churches for everything else. Can you get baptized by the theology program? No, and no one has asked, and the attempted communion service, Rhome deadpans, was vetoed. The difference between a parachurch ministry and a false church is honesty: say what you are. A deep exegetical teaching ministry is a good thing with a parachurch name; the same thing calling itself a church is misleading everyone in it.

10. A model for balance

    What does balance look like in practice? The teachers sketch the model they actually use, offered as one way and not the way. The large congregation gathers for exhortation from the Scriptures and the practice of the ordinances, but balance cannot be created from a pulpit; the primary avenue of integration is smaller groups, called fellowships in their church, where Christ centered lasting relationships form and where the five ministries actually live, with a leader responsible for each, fellowship, worship, outreach, inreach, and teaching, and the standing question at every leaders’ meeting: are we balanced, or is one ministry, even mine, swallowing the others? Alternate avenues of integration and supporting ministries, counseling, education including the theology program itself, surround the structure and push people toward the fellowships. The closing list of key ingredients for any local church: the preaching of the Scriptures, outreach to the lost, true community worship, graceful acceptance, accountability, care and concern for all people, the recognition and use of people’s gifts, and balance in all the ministries.

11. Church polity: the question, and the episcopal answer

    Then the second subject: how should the church organize itself? Church polity has three main representative answers across history, with everything else a hybrid. The episcopal view vests ruling authority in bishops holding universal, national, or regional jurisdiction, with three offices, bishop, priest, and deacon, and the emphasis on the bishop, episkopos in the Greek. Its adherents, Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, the Church of England, Lutherans, and Methodists, make it the majority view of history and of today. Rome’s chart runs from the pope, the supreme bishop with universal authority, through archbishops and bishops with regional authority, to priests, the local authority corresponding to Protestant pastors and elders, down to a congregation holding no authority at all, every arrow pointing downward, with the cardinals a separate elect body assisting the pope and electing his successor. Alongside the whole structure runs apostolic succession: every bishop’s authority traced by the laying on of hands back to the apostles and to Christ’s grant of all authority in Matthew 28, which is also what preserves Rome’s unbreakable unity. Eastern Orthodoxy keeps the succession but no universal head; its authority is the seven ecumenical councils, held to be the interpretation of the Scriptures, with regional authorities beneath. The Church of England keeps succession and only regional authority, claiming to be the true episcopal church washed clean of the papacy, though with its own political entanglements from Henry VIII onward, the crown affirming appointments; the Puritans left precisely because the government of the church, unlike its doctrine, was never purified. Rhome adds the fairness the course practices everywhere: the structure has real strengths, clear leadership, layered responsibility, no one, not even the pope with his council, holding wholly unaccountable power, and its failures do not erase what can be learned from it.

12. The episcopal case weighed

    For: the historical argument, that this is how the majority of churches operated from the first century, and who lightly overrules two thousand years; the biblical argument, that Christ delegated his authority through the apostles, that James held a bishop like authority over the churches of the Jerusalem region, and that the apostles appointed elders and deacons by the laying on of hands, passing their authority on; and the practical argument, that without governing authority heresy becomes commonplace, discipline becomes irrelevant when the disciplined simply cross the street, and unity dissolves, as the comparative disunity of every other system suggests, since the New Testament knows nothing of an isolated congregation. Against: the Bible makes no distinction between bishop and elder, using the words synonymously, a point on which the teachers say all exegetes agree, so a hierarchy built on the difference cannot claim clear biblical teaching, only permissible arrangement; the priesthood has been fulfilled in Christ, as Hebrews argues at length, making the title priest misleading, more so for Rome, whose priesthood ties to the Old Testament function, than for England; apostolic succession rests on the thinnest New Testament support, a vast system drawn from scattered layings on of hands, when something vital for the church’s functioning should have been taught clearly, and, in Patton’s working hermeneutic, God has got to be more clear than that for a doctrine this load bearing; and the system that promises to protect doctrine has, when the top goes wrong, enforced heresy downward on millions, which is precisely the situation Luther confronted.

13. The presbyterian answer weighed

    The presbyterian view, held by Reformed and Presbyterian churches, vests ruling authority in elders, presbyteroi, elected by local congregations, with authority resting never in an individual elder but in assemblies of them: the congregation elects the elders and the pastor, who is himself an elder; together they form the session, the local authority; sessions send representatives to the presbytery, the regional authority; and presbyteries to a general assembly at the denominational level. Election runs from the bottom up while real authority operates at each level. For: the New Testament church plainly appointed a plurality of elders in each city, as in Acts 14, with prayer and fasting; the word elder occurs usually in the plural, suggesting collective rather than individual authority; the people chose their leaders, as in Acts 6, where the Twelve told the whole congregation to select the seven; and Acts 15 supplies the model in miniature, the church appointing Paul and Barnabas to carry a doctrinal dispute up to Jerusalem, where a decision was rendered and a letter sent to all the churches, local, regional, and general authority in sequence; practically, the system holds unity and purity together with checks and balances, and keeps every congregation aware that it is not all there is. Against: the New Testament never quite shows elders holding authority over other churches, and the episcopal reading of Acts 15 answers that the apostles, not an assembly, were the authority there; presbyterian bodies corrupted by false doctrine have forced it downward on local congregations exactly as popes have; and, as with all representative government, actual involvement drifts far from the congregation.

14. The congregational answer weighed

    The congregational view vests ultimate ruling authority in the congregation itself: pastors and deacons are elected and hold delegated authority, while the congregation retains control of major matters. Congregationalists, Baptists, and some Lutherans hold it. The Baptist chart runs upward: the congregation as ultimate authority, pastors and deacons above it holding delegated authority, and a convention above that connected only by a dotted line, possible participation, denominational influence, never necessity. The independent non denominational variant has pastor, elders, and deacons with local authority, the congregation electing or merely influencing, terms of service rotating, and nothing whatever above the local body. For: Christ is the only authority in the church, the head of the body per Colossians 1; all believers are priests, so no authority stands above the individual Christian, though the teachers note the other systems would dispute that inference; the New Testament gives ultimate authority to congregations, the discipline process of Matthew 18 ending at tell it to the church, the church electing the seven in Acts 6 and selecting the replacement apostle in Acts 1; and practically, power corrupts individuals, so the widest distribution is the best check, and every member feels genuinely part of the body, a hand, an elbow, an eye, in the decisions. Against: not all are qualified to lead, which is exactly why the New Testament names a gift of leadership, and a system giving the leadership gifted and the mercy gifted identical authority builds in an imbalance; the New Testament does demonstrate authority in the church, nowhere more plainly than Hebrews 13:17, obey your leaders and submit to them, for they keep watch over your souls as those who will give an account, a verse no congregational theory can simply neglect; equal authority in practice yields indecision, division, and incompetence; and the system, born of modernism’s individualism, tends toward isolation, with no necessary recognition of the unity of the larger body of Christ, leaving unity to individual intentionality.

1. Run the four marks over your own congregation honestly: which extreme does your culture pull it toward, exclusivism or inclusivism, and which ministry, if any, is quietly swallowing the others? What is one correction you could actually help make?

2. The teachers held two sentences together: many Roman Catholics truly love Christ, and the institution remains heterodox until Trent is revoked. Can you hold both without letting either erase the other, and how does the institution and individual distinction change how you speak to friends in other traditions?

3. Which polity does your church actually practice, whatever its official name, and where does authority truly rest when a hard decision comes? Having heard each system argued for and against, what would you now want strengthened in your own church’s government?