Sword & Trowel 2018: Issue 1
churches. Citizenship, which is a cul- tural entity, determined membership.
How did this harmonise with the evangelical conception of the church found in the Lutheran and Reformed creeds and catechisms? The simple answer, it seems to me, is that the Magisterial Reformers in practice were much too quick to ac- cept a cultural confession of Christian identity as a sound profession of New Testament faith. This flowed from their inability or unwillingness to break with the medieval model by which Europe was understood as a Christian land where all its peo- ple were born into Christianity at the same time and in the same way that they were born into citizenship. Given this view of cultural Christian identity, all the noble language of the creeds and catechisms about the vis- ible church as a company of faithful men dissipated into spiritual unreal- ity. The faithful men turned out to be every person in Zurich, or every Eng- lishman. Richard Hooker, the great Anglican theologian of the Elizabe- than period, stated it quite plainly:
‘There is not any man of the Church of England but the same is also a member of the common- wealth, nor any man a member of the commonwealth which is not also of the Church of England.’
If, however, we do the Magisterial
creeds and catechisms the honour of being taken seriously as biblical and theological confessions when they de- fine the church, we can only conclude that their language is indeed Congre- gationalist in character. The church is made up, not of all those who share a culturally Christian identity, but of
faithful men (the Thirty-Nine Articles), those called, gathered, and enlight- ened by the Holy Spirit (Luther’s Small Catechism), companies of the faithful (Calvin’s Geneva Confession), a holy congregation of true Christian believers (the Belgic Confession). All it required was for these evangelical definitions to be taken fully seriously, and the superficial equation of cultur- al identity with New Testament faith would fall into the dust. Our Con- gregationalist and Baptist ancestors took this step, and thereby, I think, did more honour to the Magisterial creeds and catechisms than their au- thors themselves did. So then, even though the Magiste-
rial Reformation created national state-supported churches in which citizenship and church membership were coextensive, it had neverthe- less sown the seed of the later free, independent, voluntary churches through the evangelical conception of the church presented in the Magiste- rial creeds and catechisms. The only thing needed was for some Christians to believe quite seriously that the church was indeed a company of faithful men, and the whole edifice of culturally determined churches crumbled into theological and practi- cal ruin.
RELIGIOUS LIBERTY Lastly, let us consider religious
liberty. This has always been pre- cious to Baptists, but it did not flower in the immediate aftermath of the Reformation. Generally speaking, where Protestantism triumphed, it became the official creed of that city or nation-state, to which all citizens
page 22 Great Advances Sown by the Reformation
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