*Editor’s Note: The views expressed in this series are not intended as an official statement of CBTS or a uniform position of its faculty. This material is offered in the spirit of faith seeking understanding and to encourage further theological reflection. To read more installments in this series, click here: 1, 2, 3.
Jesus Christ claims absolute exclusivity. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6b). If fallen Man would be forgiven of all his sins and receive eternal life, he must believe upon the Savior– indeed, the only Savior– Whom God has provided. The Apostle Peter proclaims that “there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). The witness of Scripture is clear: there is no salvation outside of Christ.
But is there salvation outside the church– when considered as the visible body of Christ? Down through the centuries, many professors of the Christian religion have accepted the following maxim: “extra ecclesiam nulla salus est”– “outside the church, there is no salvation.” The phrase is traditionally attributed to the early church father Cyprian of Carthage. However, as R. Scott Clark notes, “Cyprian probably did not say these exact words, but they do capture his intent and theology received and confessed throughout the history of the church.”[1] In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin speaks of the church as the mother and teacher of Christians, concluding that “our weakness does not permit us to leave the school until we have spent our whole lives as scholars. Moreover, beyond the pale of the Church, no forgiveness of sins, no salvation, can be hoped for…”[2]
The Westminster divines likewise adopted this Cyprianic language. The Westminster Confession of Faith teaches a distinction between the catholic church as invisible and the catholic church as visible. The invisible church is said to consist “of the whole number of the elect, that have been, are, or shall be gathered into one, under Christ the Head thereof; and is the spouse, the body, the fulness of Him that fills all in all” (WCF 25.1), while the visible church is composed of “all those throughout the world that profess the true religion; and of their children: and is the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ, the house and family of God, out of which there is no ordinary possibility of salvation”[3] (WCF 25.2).
A.A. Hodge explains that “our confession intends in these sections to teach further that ordinarily, where there is the knowledge and opportunity, God requires every one who loves Christ to confess him in the regular way of joining the community of his people and of taking the sacramental badges of his discipleship.”[4] If Hodge’s exposition is correct, then the doctrine confessed in Westminster is not significantly different at this point from what the Particular Baptists affirmed in The Second London Confession 26.12: that “all believers are bound to join themselves to particular churches, when and where they have opportunity so to do…”
But there is also a great difference between Westminster and Second London. Baptists, by definition, reject that the visible church is made up of believers and their children. They instead affirm that,
All persons throughout the world, professing the faith of the gospel, and obedience unto God by Christ, according unto it; not destroying their own profession by any errors everting the foundation, or unholiness of conversation, are and may be called visible saints; and of such ought all particular congregations to be constituted. (2LCF 26.2)
However, despite these differences, both confessions teach that the universal church has a visible expression in the world, and that believers are obliged, whenever possible, to join themselves to such an expression.
The foregoing observations naturally lead to the question: can Reformed Baptists, together with the Presbyterians, affirm that there is ordinarily no salvation outside of the visible church?[5] After all, the phrase in question does not appear in Second London.[6] The position that will be defended in these blog posts is that the subscribers of Second London can, and should, affirm the visible church’s necessity, albeit with some important qualifications.
What must be understood at the outset is that we do not affirm the Romanist understanding of this maxim. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that “the Church…both contains and communicates the invisible grace she signifies.”[7] Reformed Baptists deny this, in part because we believe the sacraments are a means of grace only to those who, with faith, look past the sacrament itself to what it represents: Christ’s Person and Work. The sacraments are not then efficacious “ex opere operato”– “by the working of the work.” The Presbyterian James Bannerman agrees, saying that,
In regard to ordinances, the authority of the Church in the dispensation of them is purely administrative; the Church communicating to them no authority and no virtue from itself, but dispensing them solely as the appointed channels through which the Spirit of God conveys a spiritual influence to those who use them in faith, and not as charms to which the Church has imparted grace of its own… Let the Church pretend to exercise a physical and not a spiritual influence in the dispensation of ordinances, and Sacraments become a trick of magic, a fantastic charm, not a spiritual service or a channel of grace.[8]
The Apostle Paul writes of gospel ministers, “What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth” (1 Corinthians 3:5–7). A principle to be learned from these words is that the church and her ministers are meant to point beyond themselves to Christ Himself, Whose benefits are received through faith alone. This means that, contrary to the claims of Rome, the church is not the custodian and dispenser of grace.[9] Her ministers do not have power, by virtue of ordination, to render the body and blood of Christ present on an altar, nor can they absolve the sins of the faithful. In other words, the church does not, by the performance of these rites, infuse righteousness into the soul. Reformed Baptists cannot affirm the visible church as necessary for salvation on these grounds.
Reformed Baptists further deny that the visible church is identical to one visible institution.[10] Historically, Rome has taught that salvation can be achieved only within the visible boundaries of her communion and in subjection to her hierarchy. In other words, she claims that the fullness of the catholic church subsists within her.[11] Pope Boniface VIII declared in Unam Sanctum that: “it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.”[12] This identification of the catholic church as being of one external government has been the position of the Eastern churches as well.[13] The Confession of Dositheus states that: “…the dignity of the Bishop is so necessary in the Church, that without him, neither Church nor Christian could either be or be spoken of.”[14]
While Reformed Baptists deny such an exclusivistic ecclesiology, we should not feel uncomfortable confessing one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. John Gill writes, “this church is but one, though particular churches are many: to this may be applied the words of Christ; My dove, my undefiled, is but one, Cant. 6:9; and this is what sometimes is called by divines, the invisible church.”[15] Joel Beeke and Paul Smalley concur that “Whereas some churches emphasize the visible, institutional form of these attributes, as the Roman Catholic Church does by anchoring them in the pope, we do better to focus on their Spirit-worked and experiential character due to the church’s union with Christ.”[16] According to them, “The unifying catholicity of Christ’s church does not require that all Christians and particular churches be bound together under one ecclesiastical government.”[17] It is this spiritual unity that seems to be one of the truths underlying the story recorded in Mark 9:38–41:
John said to him, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” But Jesus said, “Do not stop him, for no one who does a mighty work in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. For the one who is not against us is for us. For truly, I say to you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you belong to Christ will by no means lose his reward.”
This teaching of Christ would make little sense if He intended the church’s validity and unity to consist in the continuous laying on of hands by the apostles to their successors, in one universal organization. Reformed Baptists maintain that true “apostolic succession” is the passing down of the faith which the apostles taught. This is what Paul commanded the evangelist Timothy by saying, “What you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also” (2 Timothy 2:2).
So if Reformed Baptists cannot affirm that there is no salvation outside the church on the basis of a sacerdotal priesthood or a hierarchical external unity, what can we affirm? We will turn to this important question in the next post.
About the Author
Quinn Privette is one of the pastors of Providence Reformed Baptist Church in West Jefferson, NC. He has been married to his faithful wife, Rose, since 2022, and they are blessed with one daughter.
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[1] R. Scott Clark, “Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus Est,” The HeidelBlog, accessed March 12, 2026, https://heidelblog.net/2010/03/extra-ecclesiam-nulla-salus-est/.
[2] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. 3, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: The Calvin Translation Society, 1845), IV.i.4.
[3] The emphasis is my own.
[4] Archibald Alexander Hodge, A Commentary on the Confession of Faith: With Questions for Theological Students and Bible Classes (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication and Sabbath-School Work, 1869), 427.
[5] This question was recently posed in an online forum. See https://www.facebook.com/groups/1689fellowship/permalink/24693557210345136.
[6] The same holds true for the Savoy Declaration in its version of 26.2.
[7] The Catechism of The Catholic Church, Paragraph 774, accessed March 12, 2026, https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P27.HTM.
[8] James Bannerman, The Church of Christ: A Treatise on the Nature, Powers, Ordinances, Discipline, and Government of the Christian Church, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1868), 226–227.
[9] “Grace is a participation in the life of God…” The Catechism of The Catholic Church, Paragraph 1997, accessed March 12, 2026, https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P6Z.HTM. For more on this from a Reformed Baptist perspective, see John English Lee’s lectures on the subject.
[10] I am greatly indebted to the work of Gavin Ortlund on this point.
[11] Admittedly, since the Second Vatican Council, this teaching has been confused and undermined. “Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience – those too may achieve eternal salvation.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church, Paragraph 847, accessed March 12, 2025, https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P29.HTM.
[12] Bull of Pope Boniface VIII promulgated November 18, 1302, accessed March 12, 2026, https://www.papalencyclicals.net/bon08/b8unam.htm.
[13] The East denies the supremacy of the Roman Pope, agreeing with Cyprian who, according to Louis Berkhof, “maintained the parity of the bishops and ascribed no primacy to the bishop of Rome.” See Louis Berkhof, The History of Christian Doctrines (Grand Rapids, MI: WM. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1949), 234.
[14] The Confession of Dositheus, Decree 10, accessed March 12, 2026, https://carm.org/the-confession-of-dositheus-of-1672#Bishop_is_so_necessary_in_the_Church.
[15] John Gill, A Complete Body of Doctrinal and Practical Divinity: Or A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, New Edition, vol. 2 (Tegg & Company, 1839), 560. The emphasis is my own.
[16] Joel R. Beeke & Paul M. Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, Volume 4: Church and Last Things (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2024), 165.
[17] Ibid., 174.
This blog post is authored by a student of Covenant Baptist Theological Seminary.
