The Church: A Symposium - J.B. Watson
INTRODUCTION
HOLY Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation; so runs Article VI of the formulary of the English establishment. It cannot be emphasized too much that Holy Scripture is the sole authority in all matters that concern the salvation of men, and it is equally true that Holy Scripture is the primary authority Governing the personal and corporate life of the Christian. It pleases God to incorporate into the Church each person who receives His Son by faith, and no small part of the spiritual well-being of every Christian is bound up with the recognition of the Obligations involved in sharing with others the common salvation and with the response he makes to the wise ordering by which God has seen fit to set the solitary in families. This being so, it is reasonable to expect that everything the Christian requires to know in order to obey God in these corporate relationships will be found in The Book.
The majority of ecclesiastical writers, however, do not agree that Holy Scripture is the sole fount of authority for Church polity in its local and visible form. They affirm, on the contrary, that such a view ignores the developments in the life of the churches since apostolic times; that it does not take account of the presence of the Spirit in each age and stage of the church’s history; that it denies that the numerous existing forms of church government are parts of His varied guidance, and that it is putting back the hands of the clock to attempt a return to apostolic days for a pattern of church life and order. They give equal, yea, greater regard to sub-apostolic traditions, the writings of the Latin and Greek Fathers and the decrees of church Councils. They interpret Scripture in the light of history instead of interpreting history in the light of Scripture.
It is curious how in things divine the natural mind prefers to accept secondary authority when access is open to the primary source. Why should we base our practice on sub-apostolic times when that of apostolic times is before us? The apostles, divinely inspired, are surely to be preferred to the teachers of succeeding generations who had no such infallible inspiration. Besides, the apostles forewarned their contemporaries of the secret working of evils which would become more manifest in the churches after their day. It is easy to forget how quickly there was departure from the faith once delivered to the saints, and propose to ourselves as a pattern of excellence some later age in which there was deterioration and departure. To treat Holy Scripture as secondary and prefer to follow the intricacies of the traditions of the Church is surely to follow the error of those who in our Lord’s day, by their regard for men’s traditions, made the commandment of God of none effect.
Departure from apostolic principle and practice was, it is repeated, very rapid. They have turned aside quickly out of the way’ was the true testimony of God against Israel when they made and worshipped the golden calf. Nothing is more remarkable in man than his propensity for moving rapidly away from the clearly expressed will of God and adopting as an improvement some self-evolved substitute. The mode of government – pure Theocracy -given to Israel of old did not long satisfy them. They desired, like other nations, to have a visible head rather than retain God as their invisible King. Their request for a king angered God, yet He gave them a king in His wrath and warned them how greatly they would be impoverished and oppressed by their new and self-chosen form of government. The analogy in church history is extraordinarily complete. Not long were the churches of the saints content each to depend upon an invisible Head in heaven, but desired, like other organizations, to have a visible head and Government. Grieved, the Lord did not forsake His own, or withdraw His Spirit, though already in His Word He had forewarned the churches of the ravages and loss they would incur if they so acted.
Is Scripture incomplete ? If not, why should Scripture be treated as insufficient for this so important a phase of Christian truth and life? Is it likely that writings which contain all things needful for ordering the individual believer’s life, will afford only partial and inadequate instruction for Christians in their corporate relationships ? Nay, we are assured that we may turn to the Holy Oracles for all needful instruction to enable us here, as elsewhere, to answer to the will of our Lord.
Therefore, if tradition and history be at all considered let them stand before the tribunal of the Living Oracles. As we see in history the simple churches of the New Testament passing to monarchical forms of government, see individual churches confederated into almost world-wide association, see that association recognized by the State, see its officers formed into a class standing apart from the ordinary Christian community, see ecclesiastical princes exercising jurisdiction over widely confederated communities, see this confederation broken and again broken, and set the sundered portions each arrogating to itself the name of Catholic, let us use the torch put into our hands in the sacred Word to enable us to discern and decide whether these things are developments having Scripture warrant or departures from Scriptural principle.
We start, therefore, from this point: that Holy
Scripture is the supreme and sufficient authority and fountain of truth as to the constitution, nature and polity of the Church. And the enquiry to which this book endeavours to supply an answer is: What 1ight is there to guide a seeker after the Lord’s mind as to his obligations as a member of the company of the saved? Does Scripture teach certainties about the Church and the privileges and responsibilities of the individual within it? Enquiry along this line discloses that a surprisingly large part of the New Testament is devoted to the subject and that the relevant passages lay foundations, state truth and set forth principles upon which may be built an obedience pleasing to God.
This being so, let the mind be formed by the truth set forth in the Scriptures. Let us decline to be impressed by that which lacks the authority of a word of the Lord. Let us cease to be influenced by hoary traditions, by centuries of history, by claims to privilege, by learning, wealth, numbers or social eminence. Let no theory of development through the ever-present guidance of the Spirit be accounted tenable which justifies practices and associations contrary to the Word of the Lord. Instead, let us be ever asking ‘Is there any word from the Lord?’ What word is there concerning the polity, functions, and witness of the companies of believing men and women meeting together in Christ’s Name in this place and that? It is in this spirit that the theme of the Church is approached by the writers who have contributed to this book.
It is essential to a right consideration of this subject that the magnificence of the New Testament concept of the Church be apprehended. In the Epistles to the Ephesians and to the Colossians the view of the Church which is His (Christ’s) Body is set forth. It is there seen as the ideal, invisible, indivisible, inviolable company of the redeemed of the present age. None but the truly regenerate have part therein; none save the elect partake of its blessedness. Failure and defection are unknown to it; into it the pretender and the hypocrite cannot come; breach or division it cannot know. Its unity is unbreakable; its calling and glory heavenly; its relationship to Christ holy and intimate and its destiny bound up in Him in splendor inconceivable.
Through the centuries of our era each marching generation but brings a contribution to it. While historically its members are being called one by one and incorporated into it, in its completeness and glory it is ever before the eye of God. Indeed, it has been in His heart from before all time. From their heavenly vantage-points the angelic orders observe it and are impressed and enlightened concerning the manifold wisdom of it’s divine Architect. Through the swift-ebbing years of this age Christ Himself is its builder, adding stone to stone to this Temple exceeding magnifical, Himself the while abiding that day when at last complete, sanctified, beautiful, spotless, and radiant with His heavenly glory it shall be presented to Himself and taken into the full enjoyment of an eternal association of blessedness, the features of which are at present undisclosed.
It is said that Cologne Cathedral took nearly a thousand years to finish, generation after generation of craftsmen adding each their own parts, spending their lives one upon this, another upon that portion of the vast structure and only the last of them were privileged to look upon it in its completeness. After this fashion are the gifts, given from the Risen Head, being employed in the building of the Church. Each servant contributes his little share and passes on: ‘not one of them has grasped in its entirety the grandeur of the divine Builder’s concept nor seen what the final perfection will be. His duty is but to spend himself in the task assigned to him as a steward responsible to the bestower of the gifts imparted for the perfecting of the saints, unto the work of ministering, unto the building up of the Body of Christ: till we all attain unto the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a full-grown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.’ This perfect (teleios) man is that one new man whose creation is spoken of in Ephesians 2. 15 as the purpose of the death of Christ: it is the Church, the Body of Christ, in its mature perfection.
No circle or federation of visible congregations can express this Church, nor does Scripture ever contemplate them as doing so. Even were all the Christian congregations in the world at any given time included in such an organized, visible unity, that unity would not set forth the Body of Christ. The very term ‘body’ demands organic completeness: it follows that until all the members are historically incorporated and until they are together manifested with Christ in glory, the glory of His return, the Church which is His Body cannot be seen by the world. The aggregate of the saved who may be alive upon earth at a given moment are some-times called in theology the Church on earth. Holy Scripture never so calls them.
What provision, then, has been made for the life of believers considered corporately The New Testament answer to this question is The Church of God. This expression is applied to a company of believers gathered together in the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ in the locality in which they reside, for worship, fellowship, prayer, mutual edification and evangelical witness. This name or title, which is found nine times in the New Testament is on each of those occasions used, we judge, to indicate a local congregation of believers, a conclusion verifiable by an examination of the various contexts. The churches in a district or province are not regarded as being confederated into one union forming the Church of that region, but each congregation is regarded as pre-serving its own administrative identity. So we read of the churches of Judaea, the churches of Macedonia, the churches of Galatia, but not the church of Judaea, etc., etc. Each church is administratively autonomous, subject to no control by outside authority, Synod, Metropolitan or Hierarchy, but directly responsible to the Lord Jesus Christ for obedience to His Word.
But, it will be objected, is it conceivable that the founder of Christianity did not intend His Church to be a vast, powerful, worldwide organization-influencing mankind by its united action and Christianizing civilization by its teaching and example? To such an enquiry the reply must be that Scripture never so presents the Church, never so conceives her purpose, does not legislate for such a society or provide for the ruling hierarchy which such a confederation would render necessary. It follows that either the provisions and directions of Scripture are incomplete or that this idea of the Church on earth is foreign both to Scripture and the mind of God. What, then, is the mind of God as far as the witness of the churches to the world is concerned ? Surely this: That all the world shall be evangelized: that in each place those born anew through the preaching of the Gospel shall become the church in that place: that these churches, their lamp of testimony lit by the Lord, their Spiritual endowments the gifts of His Spirit, their spiritual condition His care, their continuance in being His pleasure, shall be corporate witnesses to His presence, power and grace each in its own place; that through the spiritual labours of those who go forth in obedience to His command a people called out from the world for His Name shall be won.
If it be objected that a form of witness apparently so sporadic and uncentralized cannot hope to achieve the conversion of the world, the reply is that Scripture does not contemplate the conversion of the world in the Church age, but on the contrary clearly teaches that not until the age that succeeds the present, when Christ shall have returned in power and glory, will the world as a whole receive, acknowledge, and serve Him.
If the criticism is made that the plan indicated lacks legislative definiteness, the answer is that divine methods are always such as are practicable only to the spiritual. That is no reason for abandoning them and substituting human expedients whose machinery is obviously designed to make dependence on spiritual resources less needful. All through the Christian age a minority of believers has endeavoured to carry out in corporate life these Scriptural principles. The bitterest and most implacable opposition has come to them, not from the world, but from organized Christendom, that is the system men call The Church. By this powerful organization they have been in turn oppressed, misrepresented, persecuted, reviled, ridiculed, and ignored, but their persistence from century to century has supplied proof of the practicability of the principles they professed.
We hold that Scripture makes no provision for a central authority having jurisdiction over a circle of churches, but that each church should be administratively independent. The internal ordering of each church is to be the care of those within it, raised up and fitted by the Lord for this work. The company of the saved in each place is to be directly responsible to the Lord and His Word in all matters of doctrine and fellowship, but to decrees, creeds, encyclicals, or formularies imposed by external authority they shall not be required to submit. They will dwell in a fellowship of unity one with another, but its bond will be that of a common obedience to the same Lord and subjection to His Word, not that of conformity to decisions laid on them from without or that secured by creeds or governmental forms laid down by representative councils. The unity thus exhibited will be one of the Spirit the effect of which towards the world will be that which only the steady pressure of truth manifest in life can produce.
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The Lord's Supper - edited by David Dunlap
edited and compiled by David Dunlap from the writing of J. B. Watson “This do in remembrance of me.” Wherever, throughout all the world, the Gospel of Jesus Christ has been preached, and men and women have come to a knowledge of Christ, groups of saved people will be found gathered together that they might observe the direction of those words: “This do in remembrance of me.” If a first century Christian could be transported through all the centuries, and set down here in our twentieth century as an observer in some of those gatherings, he would not be able in many of them to discern a single feature that had survived since the first century. So overlaid with human traditions and with priestly assumptions, with alterations of this sort and that, with additions, has the original ordinance become that, sad to say, this would be true. But still, it may be held that even now, in this late hour of our dispensation, such an observer could happen upon companies of people who upon the first day of the week observe this ordinance in a way very similar to that away back in New Testament days. First Corinthians eleven gives the divine warrant for the service of the Lord’s supper, and in chapter twenty of Acts we have a New Testament example of a local church meeting together to remember the Lord in the breaking of the bread. There is surviving to our day a letter from the second century written by Justin Martyr, in which he give details for the breaking of bread which differ very little from the New Testament Scriptures. He says, “We all hold this united assembly on Sunday, because that is the first day of the week, in which God turned aside darkness and matter, and made the world, and because Jesus Christ our Savior on that day rose from the dead.” Later in the letter he says: “On the day called Sunday there is an assembly in one place of all the Christians who dwell in the cities or in the country, and the memorials of the apostles or the writings of the prophets, are read as time may permit.” (Justin Martyr, Apology I, trans. L.W. Bernard,(Cambridge, 1967, p. 61) So that when they came together in the second century they did it on the first day of the week, they came together for the purpose of breaking bread, and they took opportunity in their gathering to minister the Word of God. Now imagine yourself one only yesterday born again, knowing scarcely any thing of Christian doctrine or practice, just as they were in the city of Corinth. Suppose you were to visit such a company of Christians on the first day of the week, and finds them sat down around a simply-spread table which bears two simple emblems—bread and wine. As the service proceeds, the question arises in your mind; why do they do this? If you were to ask a believer after the service, they might say something like this: “Why, we do it because our blessed Lord asked us to do it. On that very night when His heart was as full of sorrow as it was of love, He looked into the faces of His own that were clustered around Him and said to them with longing in his heart: ‘This do in remembrance of me.’ ” We do it because he asked us to do it. This is really, the fundamental answer. You may read tome a foot thick on the Lord’s supper and you will never get beyond this truth. Wonderful it is, after all that the learned men say, to discover that this is still the very heart of the matter.
Lord’s Supper as a Memorial Feast
Now there are other reasons for why we celebrate the Lord’s Supper. It is a memorial feast. When we come together around the Lord’s Table, we come having Himself before our thoughts. At the supper we turn aside for a time from the demands of business life, and family life and turn our inward gaze upon Christ alone. A hundred and one lawful things fill our thought at other hours, but when we take our place at the Lord’s Table we empty our hands and minds of all of these, and Christ fills our memory. At the Lord’s Table memory functions at its very highest level, for there it occupies itself with our Master and Lord. At the Lord’s Table the Holy Spirit is the King’s Remembrancer indeed, for He brings the Lord before our souls in all His glory and fullness from eternal glory to Bethlehem to Calvary and back to His throne in heaven. At the Lord’s Table every eye is fasted on Him. It is a memorial feast. There is still more to the memorial feast. The Lord’s Supper is the Lord’s divine method to drive us back week by week to the center and heart of our faith: Christ. The Lord who knows our needs more than we know ourselves, saw how needful it was to bring us back to the very heart, core and foundation of our faith, again and again. Sunday by Sunday our hearts are set aflame anew by the mighty mystery of Calvary. The world is so full of many voices that might well drive us away the true center of things, but not many days will pass till the Lord’s day comes anew and we fulfill his wish, and memory and mind and thoughts and affection are all brought back face to face with the infinite wonder of Calvary’s most bitter cross.
Corporate Proclamation of the Lord’s Death
The Lord’s supper is an announcement, a proclamation, corporate preaching of the Lord’s death. I have heard Christians say: “I can remember the Lord without any rite or ceremony.” I have heard Christians who neglect the Lord’s Table excuse themselves by saying they remember the Lord every day. I hope they do. I am sorry for any Christian who does not. However, the Lord’s supper is so central to the purposes of God that He has decreed and ordained both that in the dispensation before it occurred and in the dispensation since it occurred, there should be in the world by His people a corporate recognition and proclamation of that mighty event. In Israel year by year, the Paschal feast pointed to the Calvary that was yet to be, and in the Church for more than twenty centuries, the Lord’s Supper has pointed to Calvary. The church corporate shows forth the Lord’s death—the most important event couched between two eternities. The Lord’s death; the death that annulled death. The death that drew the sting of death. The one death, since death entered, that was completely voluntary, but also the only death that has every been undertaken by divine authorization. The death which is life to those believe on Him. Let no man say that he can neglect the Lord’s command: “This do”. For it is an ugly temper in a man’s soul when he assumes to be able to get on without something that the Lord has deemed necessary. It is also a confession of our hope. “You do show the Lord’s death —until he come.” You say: “What is it all about, the death that abolished death? You Christians are no different from other people. You still have to attend funerals.” But when we are gathered together around the Lord’s table, we are saying wait. We are waiting. The first installment of victory over death is already in glory. We are waiting for the trumpet sound and he ancient graves are stirred by his command, and we meet together in the air, to be forever with the Lord. We are saying with one voice, we are saying to an unbelieving world, we are saying to hostile spiritual powers, we are saying to the reinforcing of each others faith, we are saying to the pleasure of our God and Father: “We do this till He come.”
Divine Blueprint for Participation at the Lord Supper
How should we observe the Lord’s supper? At the very birth of the Church, back in the beginning of the book of Acts, the Bible says they “broke bread”. They continued steadfastly in the Apostles doctrine, in breaking of bread, and prayers (Acts 2:42). In the twentieth chapter of the Acts, it says: “And we sailed away from Philippi after the days of unleavened bread, and came unto them at Troas in five days, where we abode seven days. And upon the first day of the week, when the disciples came together to break bread Paul preached unto them” (Acts 20:6-7). I want you to notice that, in order to be present when the disciples came together Paul waited full seven days in Troas. He apparently arrived there on what we would call a Monday morning, and consequently, in order that he should meet all the saints when they came together as was their custom on the first day of the week, he tarried seven days at Troas. When you come together as an assembly, that is, when Christians meet in the capacity of a church, you come together as such on the first day of the week primarily to remember the Lord in the breaking of the bread. They came together as a local church that was formed by the Holy Spirit, to be a witness for Christ in that locality. But that is not all. “The cup of blessing which we bless is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not communion of the body of Christ?” The prayer over which we pray a blessing is a united giving of thanks. When they came together there was a united giving of thanks, for the bread and for the wine. Every Scripture about the Lord’s Supper make this plain, that all Christians present in the Church in a spiritual oneness partook of the bread and the cup.
Spirituality and the Lord’s Supper
Some comment: “You have no priest to administer the sacrament.” Look into the Scriptures and if you find such a person then all New Testament churches will also have such a person. But you will look in vain, for the Bible never speaks of such a person. The New Testament Greek scholar Dean Alford writes: “The blessing of the cup and the breaking of the bread were not the acts of the minister as by any authority peculiar to himself, but only as the representative of the whole Christian congregation present. The figment of sacerdotal consecration of the elements by transmitted power is as alien from the Apostolic writing as it is from the spirit of the gospel.” When a brother rises in this hall some Sunday morning, and gives thanks for the bread, he is only expressing the united thanksgiving of every Christian present. He is not a minister in any other sense than that. One might say: “You do not even have a presiding elder to see that the service is kept in an orderly way.” No, we do not. Look in chapter eleven of First Corinthians and find such a person if you can. You will have to put on a very powerful pair of reading glasses to find even the shadow of such a person, and if ever one was needed, it was at Corinth at that time. Drunken hands were being put to the cup of the Lord in Corinth, and if ever it was needful to reduce all this confusion, it was there. Well, how is order to be obtained. The apostles simply reaffirms divine principles to them. That is all. Let the Holy Ghost send home the Word of God to their hearts, and that will reduce chaos to order. Let them bow their wills to the Word of God, and seek to be guided by the Spirit of God. Brethren, at the Lord’s Table, if the Word of God means anything, we have this: the Lord in the midst of us, the Spirit of God within us, and the Word of God behind us, do we want anymore. It is the body and blood of the Lord that are before us in symbols, and all through the Bible it is the Lordship of Christ that is emphasized, and if only the hearts of God’s people understood what it means to have the Lord in the midst, then they will need neither priest nor presiding elder, but they will have sufficiency in the guidance of the Holy Ghost. When I have put together all that is written about the Lord’s Supper, I have to notice this: a peculiar absence of any rules; what seems to be a deliberate and designed vagueness as to details. You will not find a word in the New Testament as to the composition of the elements. Bread. Read where you will, it is bread. There are some who say that the Lord’s Supper must be celebrated in the evening. The Scripture says: the first day of the week. It does not say any more than that. “As often as you eat this bread…” Isn’t that delightfully free, lifting us above these details? The Lord’s method always required that we should have spirituality of mind. When we fall from spirituality, then we begin to make rules, and to bring in human expedients, to take the place of the beautiful simplicity and spirituality. “You say: This meeting, that seems to have no a leader, does it work?” It does this: it calls for constant exercise of heart on the part of the Lord’s people, and God wants that from us all the time. If we fall into a routine, then the fall is great, all we all feel it. It means a solemn self-scrutiny before we come to the Lord’s supper. It means a sincere heart and our eye completely upon the Lord. It means that we shall come up in the Spirit, on the Lord’s day. Yes, it means all of that. But thank God it does. These are just the things we need to be kept fresh in, and that we need to be kept falling from. Now there is nothing whatever in this simple feast that merely pleases the flesh. No. when we come around that table, with its simple emblems, there is nothing there that will please that which is merely sensuous, aesthetic. No peals of thrilling music, no arched temple full of soft light that come through windows of stained glass, no purple and gold upon the vestments of the priests. No high altar of carved marble, no incense, filling the whole place with its heavy perfume. Nothing of all of this, that is so pleasing to the natural and sensuous aesthetic in man. But if it is only in a barn or a cottage kitchen, or a simple meeting house, where the twos and threes meet, because He said: “This do in remembrance of me”, and do so in all dependence upon Him, in all submission to His Lordship, in all sincerity, seeking to be guided by His Holy Spirit, those are hours nearest to heaven. Those are the minutes when the soul realized the presence of the Lord in a measure beyond all other hours. Then it is that the love of Christ melts our hears and causes our eyes to overflow. Then it is that we look at the man of Calvary, and then it is that we stoop and kiss the Conqueror’s feet. Then it is that we see afresh the wounded hand and side, and say with Thomas, “my Lord and my God!”
Endnotes
J. B. Watson (1884-1955) was the long time editor of Witness Magazine, co-author of “On the Sermon on the Mount”, and a respected Bible teacher for many years in Great Britian.