One Church (1957)

by Donald Grey Barnhouse

"if any man truly believes that Jesus Christ is Lord and the Savior of the world, then I must have fellowship with him. I may not be separated from him because I don't like him personally."

What is the true Church? We can come to a little meaning of it by looking at the Greek, which is ecclesia. You all know the word ecclesiastical architecture. What is the difference between ecclesiastical architecture and church architecture? The difference is William the Conqueror, who came over to England in 1066 and brought Latin and the Latin forms to England, where the old Anglo Saxon already existed. The result is that we have two words for a great many things in English, both of them meaning precisely the same thing, although we have taken many words and split them.

Take the word holy and the word saint. They are exactly the same of the translation of the Greek. But holy comes from the Germanic and saint from the French. If you pick up a French Bible it says Saint Bible on the back, and inside, Saint Matthew, Saint Mark, Saint Luke, and Saint John. But a German Bible says Heilige Schriften, Holy Scriptures, and inside, Holy Matthew, Holy Mark, Holy Luke and Holy John. We took the two words and have made holy out of things (the holy communion) and saints for people: the holy Word and saintly people, but they're exactly the same.

In the same fashion, the word church and the word ecclesiastical are exactly the same. Ecclesia is a Greek word which is two words put together, ek and kalio meaning "to call out of." Aristophanes in one of his comedies has a slave having a tooth pulled, ek. If you know what it is to have a tooth pulled (ek), you can understand the first phrase in the meaning of the word church. Ek means "out of." You were rooted one place and you are now uprooted and pulled out of the world. And kaleo is "to call." Ecclesia are those who are called out of the world.

No place in the Scripture is there any universalism taught. Never does the Bible say that God is going to save the whole world. The Lord Jesus Christ flatly divided the destiny of men. He said, "Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels" (Matt. 25:41). Much as we may weep over this fact, and much as we may desire in every wise to thwart men from proceeding away from God, the Scripture says that multitudes will go to the lake of fire, without hope and without God.

I wonder if you realize how strong a fundamental word was spoken by Dr. Toyotome when he spoke of the wrath of God, not merely as an ethical concept, but as God Almighty dealing out His necessary judgment against those who know not God and obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The ecclesia are those of us who are called out of this world. I could never pray, God Almighty save everybody in America or save everybody in Chicago or save everybody in Urbana. I could not pray such a prayer, because I know that not everybody in any locality is going to be saved. The Bible tells us that God is taking out a people for His name. The best definition of the church that is to be found in the whole Bible is in Acts chapter 15 and in v. 14. At the first church council the chairman of the meeting, the first presiding officer in the church, James, the half brother of Jesus, the child of Mary and Joseph, who was presiding, summed up and said in v. 14, "Simeon hath declared how God at the first did visit the Gentiles, to take out of them a people for his name." That's the church, the people taken out for His name.

We must understand certain things about the church. I'm going to proceed to distinguish between two aspects of the church by recounting a story. Several years ago I became very much interested in tape recording. We were amassing quite a library in those primitive days. I was listening to some radio programs. One night I heard one from a watch company advertising the world's most honored watch. And all of a sudden the announcer said, "We are now going to magnify for you the sound of this watch. If you hold it near your ear you could hardly hear it, but here it is magnified a hundred times." And it went click, click, click, etc. He said, "Here is the sound, the smooth-running sound of the world's most honored watch."

Well, I suppose I never would have thought of it again if it hadn't been that a few days later I was in the office of a very famous doctor in Philadelphia. I saw hundreds of tape boxes upon the wall, set on a shelf. I said, "Tom, what are these?" He said, "These are tape recordings," I said, "Of what?" He said, "Heartbeats." I said, "Tell me more."

"Well," he said, "it used to be that when a patient had a heart condition and was in the wards, all the interns had to go through with their stethoscopes and listen to the man, and bump him and listen. The man was hostile to that at 8 o' clock and at 8:15, 8:30, 8:45. The poor fellow had it hard. Now when a man comes in we just put a microphone on his chest and says "Heart beat of Joe Doakes on September 15th, 1952" and we listen. Then we listen again on the same tape. You can get a record and play it. You can hear Joe Doakes' heart on September, October, November, December. In class when you're teaching you can magnify it so they can hear it, the whole thing, very loud. How would you like to hear a perfect heart beat? We have a heart beat here of Bob Mathias, the Olympic champion."

So he turned it on and all of a sudden we heard the announcer telling who it was, what date, and we heard "bloop-doop, bloop- doop, etc." I said, "That gives me a great sermon illustration." I told him about the watch.

When Jesus Christ was here on earth, He founded a church, "bloop-doop, bloop-doop," and men founded a church, "click-click, click-click." Then 300 years later when the Constantinople headquarters of the "click-click" got in an argument with the headquarters in Rome, there was a big fight in the early church, about like the fight between Broadway and Hollywood as to which should be most important in the amusement industry. Well, when you have a big fight you never tell the real reason for it, especially in church matters. Two men aren't going to say, "Well, I don't like the way he runs it and I want to run it. " No, what they do is try to pick out some false doctrine in the other guy. Generally, most divisions in the church are founded on low-lying hypocrisy.

(Incidentally, may I say I started my career teaching history in university and spent too many years reading too many tens of thousands of pages of history, and I know beyond any question that the divisions in the Body of Christ have been generally from the lowest possible motive.)

Constantinople wanted to run the show (it was called Byzantium in those days), and Rome wanted to run it. Pretty soon there was a great church synod. Rome said the doctrine was"click-click, click-click." Constantinople said, oh, no, it's "calick-calick, calick-calick." It sounds the same after it gets started, but they split the eastern and the western church over one Latin word, filioque. The Roman church said the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque), but the eastern church said, oh, no, just from the Father. So you have the Greek Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church. They were "click-click, click-click" and "calick-calick, calick-calick."

Along came Luther and then you had "click-clack, click-clack." Then Calvin came with "clack-click, clack-click." Then there was the Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish "click-clack, click clack." Then there was the Swiss Reformed "clackity- click." The Scotch took it over and then over in England they had the English "clackity-click-clack."

All of them came to America and the Civil War split them all into the northern "click-clack-clickity-cluck-cluck." So much for our denominations. You see how important is the phrase, one church?1

Let me tell you it is "bloop-doop, bloop-doop," etc.; it's a heart. It's not the tape recording of a mechanism. I don't care what "clickety-clack" or "clackity-click" you belong to.

In different circles of the church there are dirty words which are now used. If you believe, as I believe, that you should embrace the whole body of the church, in some circles, they say, "Yes, yes, we believe in interdenominational or nondenominational Christianity." Somebody over here says, "Yes, yes, we believe in the ecumenical movement." Well, these people say ecumenical is a dirty word, and the people over here say interdenominational is a dirty word. But the important thing is whether or not you belong to the "bloop-doop," etc.

Are you alive in Christ? A Christian is one in whom there is the life of Jesus Christ. When you know the life of Jesus Christ is within you, I say to you in the name of God Almighty, then you have at that moment no right to be separated from any other person in whom is the life of Christ.

Here I tread on delicate ground. But I would never be faithful to my calling as a minister of Jesus Christ if I did not tackle this problem and put it before you so your minds and hearts might be stirred to understand that separation in the wrong application of the idea is one of the most grievous sins of our generation.

Just as a hundred years ago there were great arguments and tensions in the church over the sovereignty of God and the free will of man, today the great tension in the midst of Christendom is the tension between separation on the one side and ecumenism on the other side. We've got to understand where these two problems can be brought together and where the solution may be found. Personally, I came within the last half dozen years to the conclusion that if any man truly believes that Jesus Christ is Lord and the Savior of the world, then I must have fellowship with him. I may not be separated from him because I don't like him personally. I may not be separated from him because I think he has some queer doctrines. My most beautiful and loved doctrines may be considered queer by some other people, and I definitely consider that many members in the body of Jesus Christ are all fouled up in their theology and they think I'm fouled up in my theology. I think it perhaps more than they think it, but that's neither here nor there.

We have to agree to disagree on the things that are not essential. If you believe that Jesus Christ is the Lord God Almighty, not only the Son of God but God the Son; if you believe that He came on the cross and was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities, then you are my brother or sister in Christ. You belong to me, and I belong to you. We are one in Christ, because His life is within us, "bloop-doop, bloop-doop," etc. It's a heart. This is the important thing.

A few years ago I said I'm going to get with everybody who truly believes in these things. It has revolutionized my life. I used to stand in one place here with one group, but I said, "I'm going to open my arms to everyone that believes." What did it do for me? It put me on television for the National Council of Churches and got me mixed up with Seventh Day Adventists and Pentecostalists way over on this side. I've discovered beautiful children of God whose heart beats with mine. When we've been down on our knees together praying we have found we were one in Christ. It absolutely does away with the insularity of any particular "click-clack" or "cluck-cluck" or "clickity- clack." You then realize that within the great body of Christ, in the living Word, there is vast, vast room for difference of expression on secondary matters.

Let me give you an illustration of how this works, if you're going to try to obey Christ, who said, "By this shall men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another"(John 13:35). If you try to love everybody who's born again, unfortunately you're going to find some Christians who will kick you in the face for it. They will say, "You have no right to associate with anybody who associates with anybody who associates with those with whom I do not associate."

I wish I could put before you to the utmost that second-degree separation is a sin. "Oh," says someone, "God says come out from among them and be ye separate" (II Cor. 6:17). But I'm not going to let you get away with applying that verse to any phase of the church. If you're honest with the First Epistle to the Corinthians, "come out from among them" was to come out from the temple of Venus and the temple of Jupiter where they poured out libations to the demon gods; where one temple in Corinth owned more than 10,000 prostitutes and sodomites who were sold by the hour to the thousands of sailors and workmen who transshipped the goods of the ancient world across the narrow Isthmus of Corinth.

"Come out from among them and be separate" doesn't mean that you're to say, "Well, my denomination has been raised up by God as a testimony to particular truth." That is a lie. God Almighty never called anybody to witness to one tiny little doctrine, no matter what it is. I'm being very bold. When any man gets up and says, "Well, now, Presbyterian doctrine," or "I'm a Presbyterian, is this," I don't want anything of that. "Now our particular Baptist doctrine," or "the Pentecostal truth," or whatever you want to go on, it is wrong.

You can believe these things, but it's nothing to go off and found a new "clickety-clack" about. Especially if you stand in one place and say, "God has called us in these last days to be a particular witness to this particular truth," I don't believe it. You find in the Bible where God has ever called you to do any such thing. You can't find it.

I happen to be the Editor-in-Chief of a magazine and therefore once in a while I dispose of a few dollars for editorial manuscripts. I'll give anybody $25 editorial fee if you can find one verse in the Bible which says you should be separated from any Christian in the world on any grounds of doctrine. I'll raise it to a hundred. I'll give anybody a hundred dollars if they can find one verse in the Bible which says they must be separated or should be separated from any other member of the body of Christ because of doctrine.

Now let me put a guard around this: I mean separated from any other member of the body of Christ. We should be separated from all Unitarianizing tendencies, from anybody who does not believe Jesus Christ is God. They are not believers; they are counterfeits and they are outside. But anybody who believes that Jesus Christ is God, then we must get together with him. Sure, some of them will believe in certain doctrines that we repudiate utterly.

I was brought up in California as a boy within 50 miles of the headquarters of the Seventh Day Adventists. I was taught as a boy that they had horns and hoofs and were just outside the pale. A few years ago by a set of circumstances that I believe were supernatural I got in touch with some of the leaders. They came to my home and we prayed hours on end together. We began to work out certain things that finally led them to write a 700-page book expressing their doctrines. Beyond any question they're as orthodox on the great fundamentals of the Person and work of Christ as anybody in the world could be. Yet, there are some people who have written tracts against me for saying these people are saved. One man said to me, "Dr. Barnhouse, you don't hate enough." I said, "I'd rather be convicted by God for loving too much than for hating too much if I have to choose between the two."

I believe these people I mentioned have a good many false ideas. I think the idea of keeping Saturday instead of Sunday is a legalism which went out with the cross, and I don't want anything to do with it. And the idea of investigative judgment is a face-saving idea. It was established when the Second Coming of Christ didn't take place when some people said it was going to come. There are a lot of people who have some screwy doctrines, but I'm not going to say they're not saved because of this.

Last summer some of my associates and I went out to Springfield, Missouri. We spent two and a half days praying and talking with the leaders of the Assemblies of God, the Pentecostalists. One of the results is that I'm going back to Springfield in March to hold a week of meetings and preach in the greatest of the Pentecostalist Churches. What did we find? We found total disagreement on 2% of our doctrines and absolute agreement on 95 to 98%. There was a 3% shaded area, but a 95% area of agreement. I am going to grant to anybody the right of 5% disagreement with me. I'll go higher than that, because at the same time, they're granting me the same thing.

This is the attitude which we as believers in Jesus Christ must have. We must understand that when the Lord God Almighty calls us, He doesn't call people who think exactly alike. Even in the Bible it says Christians can believe diametrically opposite things. In Romans 14:5, "One man esteemeth one day above another: another esteemeth every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind."

I'm flatly of the party that esteems every day alike. Next Sunday I begin a series of meetings in Salisbury, North Carolina. I'm going to preach twice every Sunday, every Monday, every Tuesday, every Wednesday, every Thursday, and every Friday in Salisbury. In the next week in Atlanta and then in Chatanooga and then in Birmingham. I'll preach 50 odd times in January. Then I go on to do the same thing in February and in March. My vacation will be over and I'll be back in my church in Easter, having preached about 150 times. All right. Every day alike. To me there's no difference between Sunday., Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday. I believe Sunday is the Lord's Day, Monday is the Lord's Day, Tuesday is the Lord's Day, Wednesday is the Lord's Day, Thursday is the Lord's Day, Friday is the Lord's Day, Saturday is the Lord's Day. I esteem every day alike.

Now, somebody says, "Oh, but I was brought up in a Scotch family when they said you can't whistle on the Sabbath." All right. God bless you. God bless you. Go ahead. Be that way. I'll assure you that the birds sing on Sunday and I think the children of God should be able to also. We should never make divisions on things like this.

There are many, many things on which men can hold absolutely opposite views. I'm not going to ban from my pulpit born-again men who honor the Lord Jesus Christ simply because they do not believe as I believe about prophecy, for instance. If any of you know enough theology to know what I'm talking about, I'm a pretribulation, premillenarian. I believe the rapture is going to take place before the Tribulation, and that the church is not going to go through the Tribulation. I think amillenarianism is the greatest mass of ignorance ever assembled in a single brain. But I get along perfectly well with these people who have so much ignorance in their brain, simply because I know the Lord knows I have even more ignorance in my brain. In John 3:27 it Says, "A man can receive nothing, except it be given him from heaven." In I Corinthians 8:2 it says, "If any man think that he knoweth any thing," even about John 3:16, "he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to know it."

There must be the greatest desire to be one in the body of Christ. God has said that the church is like a human body and shall the eye say, I have no need of the ear? Shall the hand say, I have no need of the foot? Suppose it were all foot, then where would the hand be? And if the whole body were seeing, where would the hearing be (I Cor. 12:14-17)? This means that we all have need of each other.

I know Episcopalians don't recognize my ordination and don't think Presbyterians have been truly ordained, because we didn't have a bishop's hand on our head. I simply say of that, the hand on my head was a pierced hand. I don't care anything else about any human ordination. There are an awful lot of ordained men who are going to be in hell; we must not forget that.

Let me stop and remind you of the fact that while we do not know how many doctors are going to be in hell, or what proportion of farmers or lawyers or teachers, there are only two classes of people in the Bible of whom we know that a great many will be in hell. Isaiah 14 shows us that dictators, the Caesars the Hitlers, the Mussolinis, of the world will be in hell and the Bible tells us in the gospel that many ministers will be in hell. "Many will say in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? And in thy name have cast out devils? And in thy name done many wonderful works?" (Matt. 7:22). These Christian workers were told,
"I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity" (Matt. 7:23). Therefore, it behooves us to be very humble before God and to realize the fact that we are answerable to Him and Him alone. We are not answerable to each other.

Let me warn you against criticizing other Christians. I tremble sometimes when I read how people attack each other as believers. I was shocked to my toes when Stacey Woods told me missionaries in Japan had written and said, "You must not have this Japanese leader speak at the convention, because he belongs to an educational institutional that is 'modernistic.'" Who are men to take the place of the Holy Spirit? I thank God there are born-again people lots of places where you might never suspect there are born-again people. "There are last which shall be first, and there are first which shall be last" (Luke 1300). Those who have been the great critics will find they have disobeyed the Word of God and have spoken where they never should have spoken, and where God Almighty flatly warns that men and women are not to lay their hand against God's anointed or to speak of him.

Each one of us is to be totally yielded to the Lord and answerable only to Him. And God says, I will judge you if you are separatists; I will judge you if you are separate from any member of the body of Christ, for in order for you to separate from any member of the body of Christ, you have to say, "God, move over. Let me sit down here." I look at him and I decide he doesn't fit all the 47 or 63 or 72 or 91 points I have decided make complete orthodoxy.

Any man who criticizes another Christian is usurping the function of the throne of God! I warn you in the name of God, keep your tongues and your pens off of those who are ministers of Jesus Christ. Don't you dare say this man is not a Christian because his emphasis is different from your emphasis. The Bible says we are the salt of the earth. Did you ever stop to think what salt is? If you took a pound of salt into the chemical laboratory, and if it were possible to separate sodium chloride into its component parts, and if it were possible from that pound of salt to get a certain amount of pure sodium, if you took a spoonful of it you'd die immediately. And if it were possible for you to get the pure chloride and you took a spoonful of that, you'd die immediately. Salt is composed of two deadly poisons. If you eat either of them, you'd die. But if you don't put them together and eat salt, you will also die.

Christianity is the sum total of those whom Jesus said, "Ye are the sodium chloride of this earth. You are the salt of this earth" (Matt. 5:13). Christianity is composed of two deadly poisons separate, they kill; together, they are life. The two poisons are theology and ethics.

Take a man who has theology, theology, theology, theology, theology, but who has no ethics. I know men who are as faithful about the virgin birth and the deity of Christ and the atonement as can be, but you can't trust them as far as you can throw a church. I know men who give out Bibles, and yet I saw in an Ohio newspaper three columns wide, "Gideon Sues Gideon." There was the tawdry account of those who were fighting each other in business and suing each other for lying and cheating and stealing. But they met and distributed Bibles to the hotels.

Now, thank God, they're a small minority. I'm certainly not castigating one of the most wonderful organizations in the country, these magnificent men who distribute the Scripture. But I'm pointing out the fact that it's possible to have in it zeal without knowledge and that it's possible to have sodium without chloride. It's possible to have theology without ethics, and on the other hand, it's possible to have ethics without theology.

If you have somebody who has ethics without theology, they may get up and preach God is the Father of all men and all men are brothers, be good, do good, and be kind, God is love. That's nothing but ethics, and there's no theology in it. A man can believe all that and be a lost soul. When someone says, "God is love", what does that mean? It depends on who says it. You girls long since learned that the words "I love you" may be spoken by someone who's asking you to go out in a parked car a few hours, or somebody who's willing to bring home the pay check 40 years. The language and vocabulary of the seducer and the language and vocabulary of tile honorable man in love are the same words. The same vocabulary. I love you, babe. I love you, I love you. Big difference, depending on who says it.

God is love, God is love, God is love. Who says it? If a Unitarian says it, it's Satan speaking. If Dwight L. Moody said it, it's God the Holy Spirit speaking. Now don't forget it. If you read it in Mary Baker Grover Patterson Eddy's books, that is Satan speaking. But if you listen to it from the lips of Billy Graham, that is the Holy Spirit speaking. God is love, God is love. And the one is damnable and the other is wholly spiritual. This we must understand; we must base our decisions on the fact that God has given us one church, which is composed of multitudinous fractions of organization, but it is the life, it is the organism that counts. It is the fact that we belong to Him.

In closing, I bring you in the Gospel of John to three verses. Just simply read them and you will notice that each of the three verses has the same clause in it. In John chapter 8 and verse 31: "Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on Him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." "Then are ye my disciples." What is it to be the disciple, the follower of the Lord Jesus Christ? It is to continue in His Word.

Now go over to John 13:34, "A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another." Listen "By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if you separate into 378 denominations!" Oh no, excuse me, I misread it. That's the wrong translation. And yet this is what the church has made of Christianity. Jesus Christ said, "By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another" (John 13:35).

In John 15:8, "Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit; so shall ye be my disciples." So if you wish to call yourself followers of the Lord Jesus Christ, if you wish to face the fact that He has laid down rules as to what constitutes discipleship, one is that we continue in His Word; two is that we love one another; and three is that we bear much fruit.

1 One Lord One Church One World was the theme of Urbana 57.

One Church (1957)

God's Word

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December 27-31, 2009