‘In the visible church, the evil be ever mingled with the good.’ This is a phrase which comes from Article 26 of the Thirty-nine Articles – which considers the ‘unworthiness of the ministers, which hinders not the effect of the sacraments.’
It is the purpose of the Article specifically to ensure that those who receive the sacraments with faith are reassured that the validity of the sacraments is not necessarily undermined by the life or doctrine of those who administer them.
The original intention of the Article was to guard against the Anabaptist tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater – and say that since the clergy were corrupt, the sacraments were best avoided. Not so, thought Cranmer: the benefits communicated by the sacraments depend on the grace of God, not the worthiness or otherwise of the minister.
But the throwaway line about the presence of evil within the visible church of Christ is what grabbed my attention.
For a start this Article – and Article 19 – both helpfully distinguish between the visible church of Christ and the heavenly church. What we see locally (All Saints, Little Shelford in my case) must be distinguished from the heavenly reality. In the local congregation there usually will be both converted and unconverted present. In the heavenly assembly are present all those given to the Son by the Father – all the elect through all ages – and only the elect. It is never helpful to assume, or to allow others to assume, that the earthly church is pure in the same way that the heavenly church is.
Jesus’s parable about the wheat and the tares in Matthew 13 doesn’t in the first instance apply to the church. Jesus says clearly that the field in which we find both wheat and weeds is ‘the world’. But we can still deduce from this that in this present age God does not intend to take everything evil out of circulation in the church. Not yet!
If good and evil exist alongside each other in the world, it should not be a surprise to find them together in the visible church. I deduce one important operating principle for our own day, when within the denomination evil often seems to be very much in evidence: stay in and speak up.
Stay in.
In the face of an increasingly apostate denomination we shouldn’t succumb to a ghetto mentality and withdraw. To establish our own pure church this side of heaven is a pipe dream anyway. It is not our place to weed out all evil as if we were able to do so.
Speak up.
Equally we must not ‘stay in’ and ‘keep quiet’. Instead, acknowledging the evil of the evil, we speak up for the truth and against error and immorality – in whatever setting we can appropriately do so. Article 26 expects discipline to be conducted against those whose evil infects the church; and we should be praying and acting to bring that about as best we can, in a just and appropriate way.