Visible and Invisible

Another old article by James Torrance (in the SJT ) runs through his standard criticisms of federal theology, and adds that it was responsible for producing “an unhappy if not false distinction between the Visible and Invisible Church, which lost sight of the passionate emphasis of the Scots Confession and the older Scottish tradition on the view that there is only One Church, the body of Christ.”

He continues: “In the federal scheme, the Invisible Church comprises the elect, known only to God, whereas the Visible Church is the sphere of the penitent, who have made their ‘external covenant.’”  For a time, the notion of a covenanted nation held together the notion of One Church, but “with the fierce division between Protesters and Resolutioners in the covenanting period, and the Secessions of the eighteenth century, the Visible Church began to break up, with the loss of the sense of the One Holy Catholic Church to which all the earlier divines (including the earlier federalists) held so firmly, and an increasing appeal was made to the distinction between the Church Visible an Invisible.  Baptism then becomes a badge of the Visible Church but not of the Invisible Church.”

Another reason why the FV is needed.