4. The Church: Is Orthodoxy the Only True Church?

Trenham’s chapter on the Church contains the claim on which the whole book rests. The Orthodox Church, he writes, is the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, and Protestant bodies are not true churches but religious movements outside it.⁵⁴ He takes care to add that he is not calling Protestants unbelievers or saying that they live in total darkness. He is, as he puts it, “simply making an ecclesiological affirmation”: a statement about where the Church is.⁵⁵

That is a fair distinction, and it should be received in the spirit in which it is offered. But it does not make the claim smaller. If Trenham is right, every Baptist congregation in the world is something less than a church. Section 3 showed that Scripture is the proper standard for such a claim. This section asks what Scripture says the Church is, who leads it, what it is built on, and where Baptist churches came from.

What the Church Is

The New Testament uses the word “church” in two ways, and both are important. Sometimes it means the whole company of those who belong to Christ. God “granted him to be head over all things for the sake of the Church, which is his body” (Eph. 1:22–23). Sometimes it means a particular congregation in a particular place, as when Paul writes “to the Church of God which is at Corinth” (1 Cor. 1:2), or when Jesus sends a separate message to each of seven churches in Asia (Rev. 2–3).

There is nothing puzzling about this. The word “family” works the same way. A man may speak of the human family, meaning everyone who has ever lived, and in the next breath speak of his own family, meaning the people around his table. Both are real families, and the larger is made up of the smaller. No one is confused by the double use, and no one thinks that loving the human family excuses a man from caring for his own household.

Who, then, belongs to the Church in the larger sense? Paul answers: “in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body” (1 Cor. 12:13). The Church is made up of those whom the Spirit of God has joined to Christ, from every nation and every age. In the local sense, the Church is made up of believers who have confessed their faith in baptism and who gather together under the word of God. They pray, worship, and care for one another, as the first Christians did when they “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to the prayers” (Acts 2:42).

The buildings in which a church meets, the order of its worship, and the form of its government are real and important, but they are not the church itself. They are the house, not the family. A family that loses its house is still a family, and Christians who have met in prisons, caves, and fields have been no less a church for the lack of a roof. The church is its people, gathered around Christ and His word.

This answers a charge that Trenham brings against Protestants. He says that many of them believe in an “invisible church” that a person joins simply by praying a prayer, “without any association whatsoever with a concrete church community.”⁵⁶ Whatever may be true of some Protestants, the description does not fit Baptists. Baptists have always insisted on the local congregation: on baptism as the public confession of faith, on membership in a particular church, and on members who are accountable to one another. A Christian who holds himself apart from any church is not practicing Baptist faith. He is neglecting it.

Who Leads the Church

Trenham faults Baptists for congregational church government, which, he says, rejects the government of diocese and bishop that is “rooted in the New Testament.”⁵⁷ To test this, it helps to look first at the words the New Testament uses for church leaders.

Two of those words are “elder” (in Greek, presbyteros, from which “presbyter” comes) and “overseer” (in Greek, episkopos, from which “bishop” comes). In the New Testament, they name the same office. Paul tells Titus to “appoint presbyters in every city,” and in the next breath says that “the overseer must be beyond reproach, as God’s steward” (Titus 1:5–7). In Acts, Paul calls for the elders of the church at Ephesus and tells those same men that the Holy Spirit has made them “overseers” of the flock (Acts 20:17, 28). Paul greets the church at Philippi “with the overseers and deacons” (Phil. 1:1), two offices, not three.

This is not a Baptist reading forced on the text. The Orthodox translation that this review quotes says the same thing in its own appendix on the subject. There the editors call it “an indisputable fact” that the earliest Christians used “bishop” and “presbyter” interchangeably.⁵⁸

That same appendix goes on to argue that each early church nonetheless had one leading presbyter who presided over the others, as James did in Jerusalem.⁵⁹ On this point, too, Baptists can largely agree. Scripture indicates that each church is led by elders, one of whom leads the others and bears final responsibility. Baptists call him the pastor. When Peter was freed from prison, he said, “Tell these things to James, and to the brethren” (Acts 12:17). At the council in Jerusalem, after the apostles and elders had spoken, James gave the decision: “Therefore, I judge…” (Acts 15:13, 19). The letter to the Hebrews tells believers to obey their leaders, “as they watch over your souls as people who will give an account” (Heb. 13:17).

The clearest picture of this leading elder may be found in the book of Revelation. Each of the seven letters to the churches is addressed to “the angel of the Church” in that city (Rev. 2:1, 8, and following), and the seven stars in Christ’s hand are “the angels of the seven Churches” (Rev. 1:20). The Greek word for angel also means “messenger,” and there are good reasons to think these messengers were the pastors of the churches. Each is addressed personally. Each is held responsible for the condition of his church. One is rebuked because “you tolerate the woman Jezebel” (Rev. 2:20); another is told to “remember, therefore, what you have received and heard. Keep it and repent!” (Rev. 3:3). Another is warned that unless he repents, Christ will remove his church’s lampstand from its place (Rev. 2:5). A heavenly angel is hardly rebuked for tolerating a false teacher in a congregation. A pastor may well be.

So the difference between Baptists and the Orthodox is not whether one man should lead among the elders. It lies in two other questions. The first is the scope of his charge. In the New Testament, the leading elder serves a single church whose members he can know and whose souls he must answer for. Rule by one bishop over many congregations is not found there. Timothy and Titus are sometimes offered as examples, since Paul gave each of them authority over elders in a wider region. But they served as the apostle’s traveling assistants, sent for a season and then called back. Paul tells Timothy, “Do your best to come before winter” (2 Tim. 4:21), and he asks Titus to join him at Nicopolis (Titus 3:12). Their work was part of the apostles’ own ministry, not a pattern for a settled office. The second is the source of his authority. Scripture gives the qualifications for an elder, and they are matters of character and doctrine: he must be blameless, faithful in his home, hospitable, self-controlled, and able to teach sound doctrine (1 Tim. 3:1–7; Titus 1:5–9). The church recognizes those qualifications in a man and sets him apart. The first deacons were chosen this way. The apostles told the church, “select from among you, brethren, seven men,” and the apostles then laid their hands on the men the church had chosen (Acts 6:3–6). When the Jerusalem council sent its decision to Antioch, it was the apostles and elders “along with the whole Church” who chose the messengers (Acts 15:22).

An early Christian manual of church order, the Didache, gives the same instruction: “appoint for yourselves bishops and deacons worthy of the Lord.”⁶⁰ The congregation takes part in choosing its own leaders.

What Makes a Church Apostolic

Trenham says that Protestantism is not apostolic because it has rejected apostolic succession, the teaching that true bishops must stand in an unbroken line of ordination reaching back to the apostles.⁶¹ It is worth asking what that line is supposed to guarantee.

Paul gave his own answer in his farewell to the elders of Ephesus. These were men he had trained and appointed himself, as close to the apostles as any leaders could ever be. Yet he warned them: “From among your own group, men will arise who will speak perverse things in order to draw away the disciples after them” (Acts 20:30). If ordination by an apostle did not guarantee the faithfulness of the very next generation, no later chain of ordinations can guarantee it either.

What Paul told Timothy to pass on was not chiefly an office but a message: “What you heard from me among many witnesses, entrust likewise to faithful men who will be able to teach others as well” (2 Tim. 2:2).⁶² A church is apostolic when it holds and teaches what the apostles taught. Consider a seed found sealed in an ancient jar. If it is planted today and grows, the plant is no less genuine for having no unbroken line of gardeners behind it. The life is in the seed. Peter says that believers have been “born again, not of corruptible but of incorruptible seed, through the word of God which lives and remains forever” (1 Pet. 1:23). Wherever that word is planted and believed, a church grows from it.

The Rock

The title of Trenham’s book comes from Jesus’ parable of the two builders, and the Foreword identifies the Orthodox Church as the house built on the rock.⁶³ But Scripture leaves no doubt about what the true foundation is. Paul writes, “no one can lay any other foundation than the one that has [already] been laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 3:11). The rock is not an institution but a Person. A church stands on the rock when it rests on Christ Himself and on the truth about Him.

Trenham is right that Christ wills His people to be one. Jesus prayed for all who would believe through the apostles’ word, “so that they may all be one; even as you, Father, are in me, and I in you” (John 17:21). But notice the kind of unity He describes. It is the unity of the Father and the Son, a unity of life and truth, not of administration. Paul describes it the same way: believers are to be “eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace,” because “there is one body and one Spirit… one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Eph. 4:3–5). Unity of that kind is real wherever Christians share one Lord and one faith, even when they meet in different buildings under different pastors. Unity of administration, on the other hand, has not kept those who share it from dividing, as Section 3 showed.

Where Baptists Come From

Trenham places Baptists in his chapter on the Anabaptists, the radical reformers of the sixteenth century, and describes American evangelicals as sharing “many fundamental Anabaptist tenets.”⁶⁴ The connection is not entirely wrong, but it is incomplete. The Anabaptists and the Baptists share the conviction that baptism belongs to believers. Their histories, however, are largely separate.

Most historians trace modern Baptists to English Separatists of the early seventeenth century. In 1608 a congregation led by John Smyth left England for Amsterdam to escape persecution. There Smyth became convinced that baptism belongs only to believers, and he baptized himself and then the rest of the group, beginning with Thomas Helwys. Trenham gives the year as 1609.⁶⁵ Soon afterward Smyth and some of his followers sought to join the Dutch Mennonites, descendants of the Anabaptists. Helwys and about a dozen others refused and separated from him. In late 1612 they returned to England and settled at Spitalfields, near London, forming what is often called the first General Baptist church. A second stream, the Particular Baptists, grew out of a London congregation founded in 1616. By 1640 both had concluded that immersion was the only scriptural form of baptism, and in 1644 seven London Particular Baptist churches published a confession of faith.⁶⁶

Some Baptists have tried to go further and trace an unbroken chain of Baptist churches all the way back to the apostles. This review makes no such claim. It cannot be proved from history, and holding Trenham to a standard of evidence means keeping that standard here as well. More importantly, the claim is not needed. Baptists do not believe that a church is made true by its pedigree. They believe it is made true by the word of God. The seed was preserved in the Scriptures, and it has never lost its life.

Conclusion

Trenham asks his readers to believe that the true Church can be found only in one historical body. Scripture describes the Church differently. It is the whole company of those whom the Spirit has joined to Christ, and it takes visible form in congregations of baptized believers who gather under the word of God. Those congregations are led by qualified elders, one of whom leads the rest, and they are apostolic when they hold what the apostles taught. They are built on the one foundation that no one can replace, Jesus Christ Himself.

That foundation raises the most important question of all. If the Church is made up of those who are joined to Christ, how does a sinner come to be joined to Him? That is the question of salvation, and it is the subject of the next section.