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The Historical Story of External Factors Perverting the Meaning of Church
The New Testament Meaning of Church
God revealed His Word, which is the special revelation of every and all of His Words by God the Spirit through human authors. Those words communicate plainly the will of God to man, including the nature of the church. The church is what scripture says it is through its cumulative usages in the New Testament. What the Bible says the church is, is what it is, regardless of what occurs in the world or what men may say or have said that it is.
The New Testament shows that in its rudimentary sense, the church is local only. The underlying Greek word, ekklesia, means “assembly.” The church is an assembly. It is always an assembly and that’s what the word means. Even if the New Testament addresses the doctrine of the church in a generic way, a church is still what it is, an assembly. And yet today, people will say and have said that the church is mainly not an assembly, but a mystical or spiritual universal entity, not local or visible. How did this happen? It didn’t start out that way.
Historical Theology
Historical Theology or the History of Christian Doctrine can show the changes in the meaning of words and doctrine. The meaning of ekklesia and the doctrine of the church changed from its usage and teaching in the New Testament. The church changed into something it was into something it was not and is not. More than changing, outside influences through history actually perverted the meaning of church and the doctrine of the church.
The history of Christian doctrine tells a story of external factors. One of the values of historical theology is chronicling the culture of the world, governments, and other societal elements that affected the beliefs of Christianity. External factors have affected the interpretation, meaning, and doctrine of God’s Word. Instead of reading out the plain meaning of the text of the New Testament, people read into the text something not in it. This is another attack on scripture by Satan and the world system.
How Changes Occurred
One of the benefits of studying the history of Christian doctrine is investigating the changes in doctrine and how they occurred. Outside circumstances affected how people understood the biblical writings and their teaching. False teaching also begets more false teaching. A major component to change is fear. The Roman Empire opposed Christianity in the first three centuries and people adapted their belief and practice out of fear. Scripture reveals how that fear can and will modify what people will believe.
In addition, teachers of scripture mix biblical teaching with human philosophies, such as Platonism and mysticism. Through the decades and centuries since Christ, students of scripture allowed the influence of other writings to affect their understanding of the Bible. Traditions sometimes took precedent over sound exegesis of the biblical text. Predominant teachers held greater sway in the minds of people. Powerful men put their thumb on the scale of their preferred scholars and instructors, giving them an oversized impact on contemporary thinking.
Once John finished writing the book of Revelation in the late first century, which completed the New Testament and the canon of scripture, apostolic authority ceased. Scripture stood as the final authority. Also, authoritative leaders were in individual churches, not anything greater than that. The New Testament shows no hierarchy. Pastor and deacons were the only church officers. The pastor presided over their prospective, individual churches, each under Jesus Christ. Individual churches would fellowship with other churches of like faith and practice.
Just Individual Churches
The New Testament shows that churches cooperated with one another in non authoritative ways. They passed around the New Testament books (Galatians 1:2, Colossians 4:16). Churches met together to settle disputes with one another (Acts 15). A church would host and provide hospitality to those traveling from other churches (3 John). Several different churches might send funds to help out another church (1 Corinthians 16:1-3). An individual church would send support to a missionary from another church (Philippians 4).
According to the New Testament, no other church had authority over another church. Jesus was the Head of each church and accomplished that headship through scripture. The demarcation between churches could and did impede the spread of false doctrine. No evidence exists in the New Testament of one church having authority over another. The spirit of the New Testament is serving one another (Philip 2:1-5, Eph 5:21, Matt 20:25-28), not domination over one another.
Authority in Individual Churches
God gives authority to pastors over individual congregations and nothing greater than that (Hebrews 13:7,17, 1 Peter 5:1-3, Titus 2:15, 1 Timothy 5:17). Even the pastors with authority over their individual, separate churches (assemblies) also are themselves under the authority of their churches (1 Timothy 5:19-20). After the end of the apostolic era, this is all someone sees in the New Testament. Apostles had authority greater than one church, but no one else. The apostle Paul still submitted to church authority though, the authority of the single church at Antioch (Acts 13:1-3).
What drew together the churches of the New Testament into unity was having the same Head, Jesus, the same source of authority, scripture, and an identical gospel, means of salvation. Jesus calls His church, “my church,” in Matthew 16:18. He congregation distinguished itself from other assemblies by the means expressed by Him in the Gospels and then through His inspired followers in the rest of the New Testament. Churches could become something less than or other than a church or a true church, like the church of Laodicea in Revelation 3:14-21.
Separate Churches Protecting Doctrine and Practice
When Jesus wanted to bring back a church toward Him, so that it didn’t become a Laodicean church, He worked through individual messengers through an inspired message. He didn’t operate through a greater hierarchical system. One can understand how that having a so-called catholic church with hierarchical authority could bring immediate and widespread false doctrine, heresy, and apostasy. With the head corrupted, everything below it would corrupt too. The autonomy of individual churches could protect the truth using the means given only to individual churches.
Separate churches could protect the doctrine and practice of the church through separation. God gave each church pastors to protect the separate church and church discipline. Church discipline could not operate through anything greater than a single church. It was designed for one church. The Lord’s Table was given to a separate church, which had accountability with its own membership. Body parts function in one location with the witness of all the other parts. Parts of a body do not work together outside of a single locale, which is what “body” itself communicates.
Body, Local
The Apostle Paul in defining the body, didn’t say “we are the body,” but “ye are the body,” excluding himself (1 Corinthians 12:27). That didn’t mean Paul wasn’t himself in a body. He was, even as he says in Romans 12:5. The oneness of a body though is in a particular body, not in bodies spread out all over the globe. Unity occurs in churches, which were given by Christ the means to do so.
With the plain understanding of church in the New Testament, how did other teaching develop through the centuries? This is a story and strongly relates to a few significant factors. Judaism and then the Roman Empire persecuted the first church and then the churches proceeding from that church. Judaism crossed regional boundaries and the Roman Empire was itself spread over the then known world. The Roman Empire was mammoth and with tremendous military and political power. It threatened the very existence of the first churches that started across its empire.
More to Come
The Nature of the Church
As I’ve reminded you in the past, I’ve got several series going, which include the following:
The Moral Nature of God (part one, part two, part three, part four)
Crucial to a Gospel Presentation: Explain Belief (part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, part six)
Biblical Equality and the Societally Destructive Lie of Egalitarianism (part one, part two)
Answering the “Cultish” Wes Huff Podcast on King James Only (part one, part two)
Profaning the Name of the Lord: How Can or Do People Do It? (part one)
I also have some other things in the works, mostly in the idea stage. Maybe I’ll get to them soon. Here are two of those:
A List of Five Great Scriptural Arguments for Premillennialism (Maybe the Best)
The Greatest Causes Undermining the Faith of the Church
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The church is local only. It is not universal or mystical. I could end right there.
Childhood Understanding of Church
I don’t remember hearing about the nature of the church as I grew up in, well, church. It was not a controversy, what the church was. My dad was a factory worker and my parents started into church a couple of years before I was born. I was very into church. If you asked me what a church was, I could have given an easy, basic answer, I believe. I was a blank slate in my own desert island and completely sincere.
As a child, I knew the church was not a building. Not. The little, inside the church are all of the people, I knew was wrong. No, the people were the church. But were they? Nothing was so complicated to say that those people were a visible manifestation of the truth church, universal and invisible. That never occurred to me. If you read your Bible, or read it and just hear it taught week after week, you wouldn’t get a universal church. Somebody had to tell you that. You wouldn’t get it from just reading your Bible. It’s not in there.
Not Universal and Invisible
As few people as really understand the concept of a universal and invisible church, it has an amazing number of adverse effects on many. People barely to never question those effects. If you believe the church is only local, those effects shouldn’t exist. This is how that even people, who grew up never grasping a universal, invisible church concept, will accept things that proceeded from that thing they rarely to never consider.
Christ started only one church. It was not a dual natured church. It never reads even close to that complicated. From a plain reading, no one would get something other than local. Of the twenty-plus times Jesus uses the term “church,” all but one are plainly local. One could not get a universal church out of that one example. The twenty plain usages by Jesus should influence the interpretation of the one less plain. Some usages don’t clearly show the meaning of a word. It does with the word church in about a hundred of its one hundred eighteen uses.
Ekklesia
“Church” is an English word, which comes from a Greek one — ekklesia. Ekklesia means “assembly.” If someone would just consider the actual meaning of the word in the original languages, the few ambiguous usages in the English New Testament would become crystal clear.
An assembly is by nature local and visible. If you can’t see the assembly, then it isn’t assembled. An assembly also by nature must occur in one place, that is at least local.
Once someone knows what a church is, he can then get the right interpretation and application of the passages in the New Testament that use the word. In the utmost way, he will know the meaning of unity in a church. So many do not understand church unity, because a teacher messed up their understanding of the nature of the church. Also, an actual church can obey the passages on separation. For a church to practice true unity, it must also practice true separation.
Effects
Many bad effects come from perverting the nature of the church. The gospel is important. I would contend that the corruption or destruction of the gospel arose mainly from misconstruing the nature of the church.
People will find out in the end the highly detrimental effects on their lives and even their eternities, because they reject the true nature of church. We need a return of true teaching on and practice of the church.
Debunking of Nine Marks Dual Church View: Both Universal and Local Churches, Part One
On 8/25/2022, the organization Nine Marks, started by Pastor Mark Dever of Capital Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC, published on its website an article written by Jonathan Leeman, the editorial director of Nine Marks, entitled, “The Church: Universal and Local” (Click on the article to compare this analysis with the post). Nine Marks, I believe, wants to defend “local” because that is the main emphasis of Nine Marks. In the articles I have read by Nine Marks, they want to emphasize the meaning of “assembly” for ekklesia. That is enough to get major push back from the rest of evangelicalism.
Despite its doctrine of the church, local, Nine Marks teaches a universal church in the above article also as its position on the church, so a dual church view. Is there both a universal church and a local church? This post will begin an assessment of Leeman’s article as to its ecclesiological veracity.
In his first paragraph, the introduction, Leeman provides his definition for a universal church, a contradiction in terms, and for a local church. He calls the “universal church” “a heavenly and eschatological assembly.” You have to admire the point of consistency from Leeman with the meaning of ekklesia in his definition. He sticks with “assembly” through the essay. However, if it is an assembly, how could it be “universal”? Something universal does not and can not assemble. Leeman forces the definition to fit a catholic presupposition.
In Leeman’s summary, the second paragraph, he says the “New Testament envisions two kinds of assemblies.” I can’t argue against an assembly in heaven. Saints will assemble in heaven (cf. Hebrew 12:23). The church is not just any assembly though. The New Testament uses ekklesia to refer to something other than the church, and the King James translates it “assembly,” referring to a group of people gathered together, not a church (Acts 19:32, 39, 41). An assembly in heaven, the King James also calls “an assembly,” because it isn’t a church.
I’ve heard the heavenly assembly called a “church in prospect.” Leeman doesn’t use that terminology, but he takes the essence of that and stretches it into something mystical and for today. He calls salvation the membership for the universal church. All the saints will not be in “heaven,” actually the new heaven and the new earth, until the eternal state. The Bible has terminology for all saved people: the family of God and the kingdom of God. What occurs in heaven is not an ecclesiological gathering. The heavenly assembly does not function as a New Testament assembly.
The practical ramification of a “universal church,” Leeman explains, is “a local church that partners with other churches.” Leeman knows that nowhere does an English translation call the church a “local church.” Every church is local. Assemblies are always local. Churches should partner with other churches, but that isn’t a universal church. Those are still assemblies partnering with other assemblies of like faith and practice.
In his section, “Two Uses of the Word ‘Church’,” Leeman utilizes Matthew 16:18 and Matthew 18:17, the only two usages of ekklesia in the Gospels and both by Jesus. He says the first is universal and the second is local. Since no assembly is universal, he’s wrong on Matthew 16:18. An analysis of every usage of ekklesia by Jesus, most in Revelation 2 and 3, and over twenty times, every one is obviously local. Good hermeneutics or exegesis understands Matthew 16:18 like all the other times Jesus used ekklesia, where Jesus said, “my church.”
Jesus’ ekklesia is still an ekklesia, not something scattered all over the world, but still an assembly. When He calls it “my ekklesia,” Jesus distinguishes it from other governing assemblies. People in that day already understood the concept of a town meeting, a governing assembly. Jesus rules through His assembly and gives it His authority. Ekklesia was also the Greek word translated for the Hebrew congregation of Israel, the assembly in the Old Testament.
Leeman attempts to illustrate his dual church doctrine with two examples from the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 11:18 and 1 Corinthians 12:28.
For first of all, when ye come together in the church, I hear that there be divisions among you; and I partly believe it. (11:18)
And God hath set some in the church, first apostles, secondarily prophets, thirdly teachers, after that miracles, then gifts of healings, helps, governments, diversities of tongues. (12:28)
Leeman says that 11:18 must be local and 12:28 must be universal. Leeman fails to mention a syntactical structure in Greek and English, either the particular or generical singular noun. Singular nouns have either a particular or generic usage. Singular nouns must be one or the other. 11:18 is an example of a particular singular noun. 12:28 is an example of a generic singular noun. The latter speaks of the church as an institution, representing all churches.
Ephesians 5:25 is a good example of the generic use of the singular noun.
For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.
If there is a universal church, then there must be a universal husband and a universal wife. All of these singular nouns are examples of the generic singular noun. “The husband” is still a husband in one particular place or location. There is no mystical or platonic husband. This is how Paul speaks in 1 Corinthians 12:28. If the church in 12:28 is universal, then Paul excluded himself from salvation in 1 Corinthians 12:27, the previous verse, when he writes:
Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular.
He says concerning the church at Corinth, “ye are the body of Christ,” excluding himself. When Paul uses the body analogy, he means something local. All bodies are local. All body parts belong to one particular body, not spread out all over the planet.
Leeman assumes without proving. He does not prove a universal church. He assumes it and then he sees it places in the New Testament where it isn’t. His conclusions do not follow from his premises. In his section on “Universal Church,” being “God’s people” in 1 Peter 2:10 and adopted into God’s family in Romans 8:15 are not allusions to a church or “the” church.” These are salvation terms, not ecclesiological ones.
All 118 usages of ekklesia in the New Testament are an assembly either used as a particular singular noun or a generic singular noun. An ekklesia is always local. In a few instances, the assembly is something other than a church, but when it is used for the church, it is always local. That’s what ekklesia means.
To Be Continued
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