The church is frequently tempted to step out of her lane, to speak to issues of concern about which it has no divine mandate. Christians are frequently tempted to try to use the visible church as a lever to try to achieve social goals but when we do we corrupt the mission and the marks and thus destroy, were it possible, the very institution they seek to use to achieve their societal goals.

Just before our Lord Jesus ascended to the right hand of the Father, he gave the visible, institutional church as twofold mission: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt 28:18b–20; ESV). The twofold mission of the church is to reach the nations and to disciple the reached. In the Reformation, as the the Reformed Churches corrected the abuses that had developed in the preceding centuries, they articulated the mission of the church in terms of three marks: the pure preaching of the gospel, the pure administration of the sacraments, and the use of church discipline (Belgic Confession, art. 29). Nevertheless, over the last two millennia, as the church serves the risen Savior between his ascension and his return, she has often lost site of the mission and the marks of the church. It is a great temptation for Christians to demand the visible, institutional church to address whatever social ills that concern them most. The question here is not whether Christians should engage the many ills that confront society nor is it whether Christians should engage the culture. The question is how and whether the visible, institutional church is authorized by her Lord to do these things? My case is this: there is simply no evidence that Christ ever intended the visible, institutional church to address the question of predatory lending. Search the internet for the phrase “the church needs to address” and the sentence is completed in any number of ways: mental health, race relations, bioethics, sex etc. Right now, judging by the results produced by Google’s algorithm, “mental health” seems to be cause ju jour.

The Presenting Symptom

The question of payday loans arises because of a tweet today by Christianity Today news editor, Daniel Silliman calling attention to the efforts by black churches in Texas to oppose the spread of predatory payday lenders in predominantly black communities. The story appears in a publication named The Texas Standard, which is affiliated with public radio in Texas. It chronicles the effort by pastors of black churches, who banded together and mobilized the congregations, to lobby the Dallas city council to support legislation to restrict so-called “pay day lenders.”  Again, the practices of the pay day lenders and many other issues besides are topics worthy of discussion and concern. The question is this: has the Lord Jesus Christ commissioned the visible, institutional church to speak to such issues? Had the church such a mandate one would think that it would be splashed across the pages of the New Testament but it simply is not. The absence of any such divine command or authorization is striking.

To address the exegetical elephant in the room. It is true that our Lord himself entered the temple, overturn the tables of the money lenders and he did drive them out of the temple (Matt 21:12–13; Mark 11:15–17; John 2:13–22). Did he thereby implicitly authorize the visible church to regulate predatory lending? Dallas is a great American city but we may not reasonably argue that it is the Lord’s temple. Did the human gospel writers preserve that episode for us with the intent of authorizing the church to regulate the financial industry? Did the Holy Spirit inspire the gospel writers to that end? If so, the churches around Wall Street have been grossly negligent. To ask those questions is to answer them. The Spirit inspired the gospels and the gospel writers recorded that narrative as part of a larger narrative about Jesus of Nazareth. He cleansed the Temple because he is the Holy One of Israel (Ps 78:41–42; Isaiah 5:18ff; 12:6; 17:7). He was illustrating how corrupt the visible church had become and what he would do by his death. He was demonstrating that Jesus is the temple, that he would die and that on the third day he would be raised. He was illustrating the end of the types and shadows and the coming reality that his church would become, by virtue of union with him his temple (1 Peter 4:14; 1 Cor 3:16–17; 6:19; 2 Cor 6:14–16; Eph 2:21). If we may use the cleansing of the temple to justify using the visible church as an instrument to achieve the policy goal of restricting pay day lenders then what shall we do with Jesus walking on water (Matt 14:22-33)? Is that an implicit call for the church to regulate environmental policy? Is the Gadarene demoniac (Mark 14:1–28) grounds for the church to regulate mental health policy? Is the woman the issue of blood (Matt 9:20–22) grounds for the church to regulate public health policy? Of course not. Such inferences are gross abuses of Holy Scripture. They are not far, however, from the way the old theological liberals used Scripture. They made it, as J. Gresham Machen said, a wax nose to be twisted this way and that to justify whatever they would.

The Commission

What we do see in Scripture is a very limited mandate for the visible, institutional church. In case this way of speaking of church is unfamiliar, what I mean is this: the church may be considered in two aspects, as the visible, institutional church and as invisible, i.e., those believers in all times and all places ordinarily found in some visible, organized expression of the true church. Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920) spoke of the church as organization and as organism. Christians as individual believers or in groups, acting not on behalf of the visible church but as Christian citizens of the secular state are free to organize and to advocate for policies that they believe to be beneficial to society. The church considered, however, as an organization founded by our Lord Jesus Christ and explicitly commissioned to reach and teach and explicitly chartered by him to administer the keys of the kingdom (Matt 16:13–20), the preaching of the holy gospel and the administration of the holy sacraments (Heidelberg 82, 83). Christ explicitly instituted church discipline (Matt 18:15–20). We see the apostolic church using this key (1 Cor chapters 5 and 6). We have the example of our Lord’s sending of the twelve to preach (Mark 3:14) and the great commission (Matt 28:18–20). The visible church is clearly and unequivocally commissioned to do these things. We see the apostolic church, through the book of Acts and in the epistles fulfilling this mandate. The Apostles preached the gospel everywhere as it began to spread from Judea, to Samaria, and to the uttermost parts of the earth (Acts 1:8), as our Lord commanded them and us to do. Nowhere do see a command for the visible church to regulate public health or finances. Such things are beyond the charter and competence of the visible church.

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