Lord’s Day 21, Chapter 1: The Idea of the Church (2) / Chapter 2: The Election of the Church (1)

The Idea of the Church (continued) However, the Church is not a mechanical, but an organic unity. It is a spiritual organism. The difference between a mechanism and an organism is that, while both are constituted of parts through which the whole functions, the former is assembled from previously prepared parts, the latter grows from a common principle of life. A watch is a mechanism, a tree is an organism. The church is the spiritual body of Christ, it is the olive tree of which He is the root;...