ABSTRACT
As previously seen, Earth's ecclesiology in the Romans commentary is marked by a strong distinction between the visible church that stands on the side of human sinfulness and the invisible church that is brought into existence by God's gracious action. The first is touched by the second only as a circle touched by a tangent — the true church does not exist in history but touches it only at a specific point. This sharp division between the visible and the invisible church gave Earth's ecclesiology a Platonic and docetic tendency that came dangerously close to divorcing the true church from history altogether, and it was the corresponding ecclesiology to a Christology that stressed the division rather than the relation between revelation and the historical person of Jesus, a radical distinction that made a true incarnation extremely problematic. Both the Christology and the ecclesiology of the Romerbrief (if one is permitted to speak of the existence of such) were determined by this distinction insofar as they were rooted in the time-eternity dialectic that governed the Romans commentary. Yet, while Earth clearly placed the visible and historical church on the side of sinful humanity and under God's judgment, his thought on the church did not leave the church in time entirely without hope, and he did not in fact completely separate the church in history from the church of revelation.
