(Translation of Prof. C. Veenhof’s Om Kerk te blijven)

The confession of the church testifies that we believe the church.

It declares specifically that we do not believe in the church.

We believe in God the Father and in Jesus Christ, His only–begotten Son, and in the Holy Spirit. Saying the same thing in slightly different words, we believe in the triune God and our Lord Jesus Christ.

We do not believe in the church, for the church is a creature. To be sure, it is a work of re–creation, but therefore and always a creature. In the church we find nothing which is essentially one with and therefore comparable to the triune God.

For this reason believers may never put confidence in and reliance upon the church. This they can and may do only in their heavenly Father and their Lord Jesus Christ. All trust in a creature is idolatry; also trust in the creature which is called church.”

And because the church is a creature, it does not make us blessed. It is made blessed (i.e. “saved”) by grace through God on the basis of the merits of Jesus Christ and by the Holy Spirit.

The pretention that a church, and then in its institutional form, can be a saving church is essentially idolatrous. And a church which so defines itself, and which even dares to speak of itself as the only saving church, perpetrates idolatry with itself.

Indeed it is true that “outside” of the church there is no salvation. In His good pleasure God in Christ through the Spirit does His saving work only within the “space” of the church, that is, only in the church and through its ministry.

The church also lives in idolatry when it, to all intents and purposes, forgets that in itself it is nothing and only is what it is and does what it does by God’s grace.

Of course the church is Christ’s church and in Him and through Him overcomes the world day after day. But that does not remove the reality that the church, precisely as in the case of individual believers, can stumble and sin in such a shocking fashion and does this repeatedly. Thus it behooves the church to be humble and to walk in fear and trembling. All self-complacency, all boasting in self, all “triumphalism” must be avoided as the plague. When the church fails in this respect, it is living in idolatry. Then it indeed fails to live by grace and only so may and can live.

Such idolatry manifests itself, for example, in audacious pride which asserts, “The temple of Jehovah, the temple of Jehovah, the temple of Jehovah are we!”² By such idolatrous arrogance the church begins to tyrannize instead of to serve. Such pride is also the source of the legalism, phariseeism, and hard–heartedness of judgment about fellow Christians and those outside of t he church which throughout the centuries has wreaked great devastations in and around the church. It is no less than the compelling force in e very formalistic and legalistic exercise of ecclesiastical discipline together with the excommunication of office–bearers because these have failed to conform precisely to the “ecclesiastical order.”

Likewise is it idolatrous when a church in its specific, historically–conditioned, institutional form absolutizes itself and forgets that in the dispensation between Pentecost and the last day every historically–developed and—determined ecclesiastical institution demonstrates the character of “tentativeness.”

Calvin broke radically with many kinds of idolatry regarding the church, when he designated the church in its organizational form as one of “the external means or aids by which God calls us into communion with Christ, and retains us in it.”³

1 Calvin wrote in the Institutes, IV, 1, ii: “The particle IN, interpolated by many, is not supported by any probable reason . . . For we declare that we believe in God because our mind depends upon him as true, and our confidence rests in him. But this would not be applicable to the Church, any more than to ‘the remission of sins, or the resurrection of the body.’”

2 Jeremiah 7:4

3 This is the title which appears at the head of the fourth book of the Institutes.

Questions for discussion

1. State as clearly as possible the distinction between believing . . . and believing in . . .
2. How would you define the church? Cf. also Belgic Confession, art. 27. What is the meaning of the word “congregation?” From what Latin word does this term derive and how does it thus describe t he intimate relation between Christ and His people?
3. In these days when the visible church is often held in low esteem, do you still find people in danger of believing in the church? If so, when and where and how?
4. Since no visible, institutional church may “absolutize” itself. does it make any difference to which congregation or denomination we choose to belong? Explain.
5. In what sense is it truly Biblical to confess that “outside of the church there is no salvation?”