524 THE GERMAN REFORMATION. A.D. 1517 To 15380.
In the ninth century the visible Catholic Church was divided into two rival Catholic churches, —the patriarchal church in the East, and the papal church in the West. The former denied the papal claim of universal jurisdiction and headship, as an anti-Christian usurpation; the latter identified the Church Catholic with the dominion of the papacy, and condemned the Greek Church as schismatical. Hereafter, in Western Christendom, the Holy Catholic Church came to mean the Holy Roman Church.
The tyranny and corruptions of the papacy called forth the vigorous protest of Wiclif, who revived the Augustinian distinction between the true church and the mixed church, but gave it an anti-Roman and anti-papal turn (which Augustin did not). He defined the true church to be the congregation of the predestinated, or elect, who will ultimately be saved.!. Nobody can become a member of this church except by God’s predestination, which is the eternal foundation of the church, and determines its membership. No one who is rejected from eternity ( prescitus, foreknown, as distinct from predestinatus, foreordained) can be a member of this church. He may be in it, but he is not of it. As there is much in the human body which is no part of it, so there may be hypocrites in the church who will finally be removed. ‘There is but one universal church, out of which there is no salvation. The only Head of this church is Christ; for a church with two heads would be a monster. The apostles declared themselves to be servants of this Head.
1 Tractatus de Ecclesia, c. I., “‘congregatio omnium predestinatorum . .. Illa est sponsa Christi . . . Jerusalem mater nostra, templum Domini, regnum celorum et civitas regni magni.”? Then he quotes the distinction made by Augustin, to whom he refers throughout the book more frequently than to all other fathers combined. This important tract was recently published for the first time from three MSS. in Vienna and Prague by the ‘‘Wyclif Society,’ and edited by Dr. Johann Loserth (professor of history in the University of Czernowitz), London (Triibner & Co.), 1886, 600 pp. But the same view of the church is taught in other books of Wiclif, and
correctly stated by Dr. Lechler in his Joh. von Wiclif, Leipz., 1878, vol. I. 541 sqq.
§ 85. ENLARGED CONCEPTION OF THE CHURCH. 0526
The Pope is only the head of a part of the church militant, and this only if he lives in harmony with the commandments of Christ. This conception of the church excludes all hypocrites and bad members, though they be bishops or popes; and it includes all true Christians, whether Catholics, or schismatics, or heretics. It coincides with the Protestant idea of the invisible church. But Wiclif and Hus denied the certainty of salvation, as taught afterwards by Calvinists, and herein they agreed with the Catholics; they held that one may be sure of his present state of grace, but that his final salvation depends upon his perseverance, which cannot be known before the end. :
Wiclif’s view of the true church was literally adopted by the Bohemian Reformer Hus, who depended for his theology on the English Reformer much more than was formerly known.!
From Hus it passed to Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin, who agreed in denying the claims of the papacy to exclusive catholicity, and in widening the limits of the church so as to include all true believers in Christ. But they distinguished more clearly between the invisible and visible church, or rather between one true invisible church and several mixed visible churches.2. The invisible church is within the visible church as the soul is in the body, and the
1 The close affinity has recently been shown by Joh. Loserth, Hus und Wiclif ; zur Genesis der hussitischen Lehre (Prag and Leipz., 1884), and is especially apparent from a comparison of Wiclif’s and Hus’s treatises De Ecclesia. Wiclif’s book exerted little influence in England, but became known in Bohemia in 1407 or before, and the reproduction of it by Hus created a great sensation. The arrangement, the ideas, and arguments of the two books are the same, and often the very language. Comp. Loserth’s Introduction to Wiclif’s De Ecclesia.
2 Luther first used the term ‘‘invisible.’’ Zwingli first added the term *‘visible”’ in his Expositio christiane fidei (1531): ‘‘ Credimus et unam sanctam esse catholicam, h. e. universalem ecclesiam. Eam autem esse aut visibilem aut invisibilem.”’ Zwingli was the only one among the Reformers who included the elect heathen in the invisible church. The clearest symbolical statement of the Protestant doctrine of the invisible and visible church is
given in the Westminster Confession, ch. xxv. (Schaff’s Creeds of Christendom, III. 657).