Who's Afraid of the Holy Spirit? (pt. 4)

In the essay The Spirit and Community: A Historical Perspective, Gerald Bray looks at how the Spirit's influence on community has been viewed throughout various periods of church history. He breaks this down into three eras: the early church, the medieval church, and the Protestant church. How does the Spirit function in the area of bringing unity to the church?

In the early church, one of the biggest hurdles was bringing Jews and Gentiles together. It is hard for us to grasp the enormity of this challenge from our modern-day Gentile perspective. But if you were a Jew in the first century, the idea that the pagan world could become full-fledged citizens in God's Kingdom was a radical notion. The presence of the Holy Spirit was critical to breaking down the walls of ethnicity. Bray illustrates by looking to 1 Corinthians 12:13: "For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink." He writes:

Whatever we think of baptism today, we probably do not assume that it will be the means of breaking down social and economic barriers. But for the first Christians, to be baptized in the Spirit was to put off the old man, with its ethnic and social limitations, and to become a new creation in Christ. From the very beginning, Christians were aware that they constituted a new society, a community which was in the world but not of it.

As the church grew and became an established part of civilization, much changed. The newness and fervency that characterized the early Christians was absorbed into structure and ritualism. The Church became the de-facto source of order after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Being a part of this "Church" became a necessity if a person were to be a part of Western culture--and those who were not a part of it were ostracized and excluded. As a result, baptism lost its original significance and became instead a way of gaining entrance to society. The effort to maintain unity in an environment of diluted faith ultimately resulted in centralizing power in the office of the Pope:

...by 1450 the movement towards a declaration of papal infallibility in matters of faith and morals was well underway, even if it was not to be proclaimed officially until as late as 1870. All of this process, it must be repeated, was regarded by those involved in it as the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit in the Church, and interpreted by them as a necessary evolution in the context of the Church's growth and expansion.

This solution to unity would not last, and the restrictions of the Medieval Church were thrown off by the Reformers. The Protestant tradition brought a distinction between the civil and the spiritual--a distinction which Bray calls the "invisible church". In other words, membership in the body was not contingent on the external, but on the internal reality.

The doctrine of the invisible Church is a key tenet of the Reformation, and sets Protestants apart from other Christians in ways which are not always fully recognized. Protestantism, for example, can fragment (as it has) into an apparently endless number of denominations without losing its fundamental unity.
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As the doctrine of the primacy of the invisible over the visible Church began to sink in, many Protestants came to the conclusion that a large percentage of Church members were really not Christians at all. Baptism could no longer be understood as entry into the Christian community in anything but a formal sense.

Bray finds the logical result of the "invisible church" in the practice of the Puritans, who recognized that if outward forms strayed from inner reality they could be dispensed with.

At a deeper level, Puritans of this type are always ready to pick up and go, because in their heart of hearts they know that the perfect Church does not exist here on earth. The best they can do is to minimize the corruption they find, and remain within a particular fellowship as long as it does nothing which offends their sensibilities.

In their effort to establish a society founded on Biblical ideals, they went so far as to move to the New World. But, as Bray concludes: "Even in New England, where every colonist was meant to be a saint, a perfect society could not be established."

So where does this leave us today? The essay seems to be drawing a contrast between the divergent paths of the Church found in history. One is the idea of a unified, centralized, visible Church, manifested in the rise of the Catholicism. The other is the idea of the true, real, invisible Church birthed by Protestantism. The first finds a sort of unity, but sacrifices truth. The second produces a splintering along many lines but seeks to preserve truth. His concluding question is well worth pondering:

We have to admit that keeping the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace has never been easy, and it has seldom been achieved for long outside the confines of fairly narrow groups. What we now need is to ask ourselves whether this is the only kind of viable fellowship which is possible in a fallen world, or whether there is a way in which as Evangelicals we can demonstrate that we really were all baptized by one Spirit into one body.