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The Historical Story of External Factors Perverting the Meaning of Church (part three)
Evidence in the New Testament
As you read through the New Testament, you see early attacks inside and outside of the church that correspond to what happened at that juncture of history in the world. Revelation 2 and 3 provide a good example of how churches in the first century degrade through changes in doctrine and practice in areas appropriate to the occurrences of the time, diverting from Jesus Christ and His commands. The Lord Jesus Christ gave many various means to keep His churches: faithful pastors edifying, preaching, admonishing, warning, and protecting, church discipline, the Lord’s Table, and personal and ecclesiastical separation.
All of the tools for preserving churches intact revolve around the sufficient, canonical words of scripture. The Word of God is like a purifying fire, like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces, and like water that washes away filth. The fire burns away dross, the hammer shapes something ugly into the beautiful, and the water cleanses away sin and false doctrine. All of this keeps a church or churches on track to extend to another generation.
False Tradition and Human Philosophy
Scripture itself never loses its power, but it becomes something different when someone mixes it with false traditions and human philosophy. In the Old Testament, pagan religion from surrounding foreign nations perverted Israel’s doctrine, practice, and worship. In the New Testament, Gnosticism, a collection of religious ideas and systems that emerged in the late first century AD, had a significant impact on the church by infiltrating it.
One can see in the New Testament reactions to proto-Gnostic false teaching that arose during the history of the first century. It reshaped doctrine, especially regarding the nature of God, creation, and salvation. Gnostic beliefs posited a dualistic worldview where a supreme, hidden God existed apart from a malevolent creator deity (the Demiurge), which some Gnostics identified with the God of the Hebrew Bible. They believed that material existence was flawed or evil, leading them to focus on personal spiritual knowledge (gnosis) as the path to salvation rather than faith in Christ’s sacrificial death and resurrection.
First century Gnosticism emerged from various sources, such as Jewish mysticism and Hellenistic philosophy. Scripture teaches its own sufficiency in part to combat adding and taking away from its teaching. The additions and subtractions emerge from the woof and the warp of that historical period.
Platonism
Debates over doctrine early in church history hinged on philosophical issues. These debates did not and would not occur from solely influences of scripture. Teachers familiar with the dialogues of Plato relied on the writings of the Greek philosopher in their interpretations of the biblical text. To recognize how they arrived at their teachings, one must understand how neo-Platonic Greek philosophy mixed into their doctrinal views. Plato represented a distinct view of the world seen in the type of teaching espoused by those hearkening to his ideas.
Church leaders believed Christians could appropriate the world’s philosophy and culture, where this seemed right to them. Augustine of Hippo provides an example, when he writes:
If those who are called philosophers, particularly the Platonists, have said anything which is true and consistent with our faith, we must not reject it, but claim it for our own use.
Plato’s writing contributed to the shaping of early doctrine of professing Christianity, including in systems of interpretation of scripture. The Alexandrian Jewish scholar Philo was a key figure in developing allegorical interpretations of the Hebrew Bible, aiming to reconcile biblical texts with Platonic philosophy.
Schools of Theology
Schools of theology arose, many times organizations separate from church authority. Origen was a student at the catechetical school in Alexandria, which had a strong tradition of allegorical interpretation, and likely studied under Clement of Alexandria who was known for relating Christian teachings to Greek philosophy. Origen didn’t invent allegory but he significantly advanced and popularized it, drawing on the influence of Greek philosophy. He often distinguished between a literal and a spiritual or allegorical meaning of scripture.
Doctrines did begin to change and false ones spread to various churches even in the first century, as seen what occurred in the seven churches of Asia (Rev 2 & 3). John expresses concerns over the doctrine of Christ that reflect the introduction of proto-Gnostic heresies (1 & 2 John). The Apostle Paul confronts Greek philosophy in 1 Corinthians 6, that presented a lax view of sexual immorality. In 1 Corinthians 15 he addresses something undoing the doctrine of the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The Roman Empire
Most professing Christians and churches could not resist the power of the Roman Empire’s embrace of Christian religion and modification to the religious power of the state. The emperor Constantine possessed his own experience of Christianity and then used his position to affect faith and practice. He promoted his imagination of Christianity with construction of cathedrals, Bible translation, and the calling of official councils for discussion of theological issues.
Like a Rome emperor wanted unity in his empire for its resultant strength, Constantine and then others after him pushed for cohesive doctrine and practice across the empire. He organized and structured Christianity around his own aspirations for Christianity. This conformed Christianity beyond the New Testament to a state religion. Doctrine and practice became malleable to the state. The emperor and the state hierarchy used its authority to use its power to mold Christianity according to the same means by which it ordered the political and secular.
Influence of the State
State endorsement brought safety and great influence. It was difficult for small churches to resist the current of state power, getting swept into the flow of its governance and acceptance. Churches could sell their freedom and autonomy for security and prominence. Anyone could conceive of the opportunities that could come with the immensity of the state and the size of its resources.
The state would endorse those with its position and finally punish those resisting it. It published and propagated what it approved. At many different points it would destroy anything in opposition. What remained available was what the state affirmed. During many various periods, the state kept what it ratified and eliminated what it didn’t. This was a means to maintain cohesion.
More to Come
Debunking of Nine Marks Dual Church View: Both Universal and Local Churches, Part Two
The word “church” in the English translation of the New Testament, like Nine Marks wrote in its online article by Jonathan Leeman, means “assembly.” “Universal assembly” is an oxymoron, yet still firmly held by Catholics, Protestants, evangelicals, and fundamentalists against its incoherence and contradiction. Why? How?
Neoplatonism is a philosophical and religious system, beginning with the work of Plotinus in c. 245 AD, that analyzes and teaches interpretations of the philosophy and theology of Plato, and which extended the interpretations of Plato that middle Platonists developed from 80 BC to 220 AD.
Neoplatonism is a non-theistic philosophical spirituality. It became, however, part of institutional Christianity, Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, and then came out the other end in the Protestant Reformation. The universal church is not scriptural. It’s obviously a neoplatonic concept.
With Plotinus, individual souls, the temporal, resided within the soul, the eternal one. The insecurity of the individual souls give undo attention to bodily concerns. Love becomes a lower love, appetite, out of which proceeds moral evil. The individual soul loses unity and goodness. A tension exists in the soul between what is above and is eternal and that below and temporal. Purity relates to the hierarchy from eternal to temporal, the eternal being one and the temporal being individual and particular. Good is a return to the One, which is defined in mystical terms. [Understanding of Neoplatonism taken from a course on Philosophy by Arthur Holmes, video 19]
Augustine thought that scripture was divinely inspired but being part of the temporal, finite world, it was susceptible to corruption. Augustine took this neoplatonism as his explanation of a Catholic church, when challenged by the Donatists. The Donatists claimed the true church was local by which it kept itself separate from communion with the world. For Augustine the true church was spread throughout the world.
The Donatists asked Augustine how that the church could be Catholic or universal if there were unbelievers in it. He answered in neoplatonic fashion that there were two churches, the visible and the invisible. The invisible, the one, was pure, and the visible or particular had corruption. Augustine’s neoplatonic church was spread throughout time and rooted in eternity. This reflects his neoplatonism with purity in the One and the mystical, a kind of ontological church. It is not a church though. A church is visible and local, and as an assembly, it assembles.
According to Peter Brown in his biography of Augustine, Augustine brought to the masses “the esoteric truth of Plato” (p. 221). Augustine was impressed by Ambrose’s rhetorical technique when he delivered sermons, which were carefully modeled on Cicero and influenced by the contemporary exponents of Plato, the Neoplatonists (p. 61). In his writings, Augustine borrowed freely from Plato and Plotinus (p. 486). When Augustine argued (The Works of St. Augustine) for the universal church to the Donatist, he relied on kingdom predictions of the Old Testament, such as Psalm 2:7-8, and a catholic church as the fulfillment, where the Messiah ruled over the world in a mystical manner (Letter 49:2, Sermon 47:17, Sermon 129:5-6). This invented amillennialism as a teaching. From the New Testament, he contended that the seven churches of the letters in Revelation 2-3 are universal due to the symbolism of the number 7 (Sermon 229J:5).
You do not see a universal church in the Bible. This mystical interpretation of scripture corresponds to the allegorical interpretation of Origen beset and popularized in Roman Catholicism through neoplatonic theologians, such as Ambrose and Augustine. They could explain the Roman Catholic Church as the true church, which is also the spiritualized fulfillment of the kingdom prophecies in the Old Testament. This view of the kingdom became called, ammillennialism, which was later systematized into covenant theology.
Reading Plato into the Bible is also eisegesis. Universal church can’t be read out of the Bible, so it is read into it. Instead of taking a singular noun as a generic usage, it imagines a mystical or platonic usage. You can see that neoplatonism affected every doctrine in Roman Catholicism and then Eastern Orthodoxy. It is now borrowed in the teaching of Jordan Peterson among others, who do not present a biblical view of Christianity. It allows for someone to read almost anything he wants into the BIble.
At salvation, God did raise us up and seat us in heaven spiritually, as Leeman asserts, but that is not membership in a universal church. It is adoption into the family of God. A person spiritually becomes a brother or sister in Christ. This family relationship does not depend on geographical boundaries or locality like an assembly does. Someone can have a father, who lives a thousand miles away, and he’s still his father.
Leeman says that the “universal church is in heaven.” If the entire “universal church” is in heaven, then it isn’t universal. It is in a location, whether someone believes that is a church or not. It can’t be universal, if it is in one location.
Leeman also writes that this heavenly church is the one Jesus promises to build in Matthew 16:18. A wrong understanding of “build” contributes to a wrong understanding of the nature of church. The Greek word translated “will build” in Matthew 16:18 is oikodomeo, which is mainly translated “to edify” through the New Testament, so the understanding is “I will edify my church” or “I will build up my church.” The sense of “build” that Leeman gives is adding to the numbers in this heavenly city or church. When Jesus said He would edify or build up His church, He’s saying more than that. He is going to add the offices of the pastor and deacons. He will add the Lord’s Table and church discipline. The Lord Jesus will provide the book of Acts, the epistles, and the book of Revelation. He will give to the church what it needs to prevail against the gates of hell.
At the time Jesus said, I will build my church, there was one church. It wasn’t in heaven. It was in Jerusalem. He would build up that church in Jerusalem, but His church as an institution, which is always on earth. I’m not saying there won’t be an assembly in heaven. It’s just that Jesus was talking about His assembly that functions on earth. The Jerusalem church would reproduce other churches, other assemblies, by fulfilling the Great Commission, which Jesus also added to the church in Matthew 28:18-20 and the version of that in the other Gospels. Each of those churches is still His church.
Leeman must assume that when Jesus says “church” in Matthew 16:18 and means something mystical and heavenly spread out over a large expanse of space and time that His disciples thought that’s what “assembly” (ekklesia) meant. It doesn’t register to him with his presuppositions that they wouldn’t think like Plato, like Augustine and then Jonathan Leeman would. When Jesus a very short while later talks about bringing evidence for discipline of someone to the church in Matthew 18:15-17, that His disciple audience could make that jump from Platonic to Aristotelian in that moment, from the universal to the particular. Were they bringing a church member to a universal church? They were so tuned into Greek philosophy, that when Jesus meant church in Matthew 18 in a totally different way than in Matthew 16, they automatically knew that? Amazing, huh?
To Be Continued
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