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What Does the Apostle Paul Mean When He Says “One Body”?
The Terminology “One Body”
The Apostle Paul uses the two words “one body” eleven times in his epistles. Theologians, teachers, and others have perverted the meaning of the expression, “one body,” through the years, reading into it something not there. They over complicate it to see one of their presuppositions and twist it like a gumby doll.
The word “one” does not always mean “numeric one.” Very often, especially in the New Testament and in Paul’s writings, it means “unified one.” Let me give you an example of numeric one, such as a single or singular person, place, or thing, and then a unified one. One can express unity. The people were one, means they were completely together. I am not a Phillies fan, but if I said the Philadelphia Phillies were one team, I am not saying that there is a single Phillies ball club. I’m saying that the team has unity. That’s how Paul uses the term. It’s obvious he uses it that way.
Usage of “One”
In the English, the word “one” is used 1,967 times in the Bible. In Matthew 5:17, Jesus says:
Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.
That is a usage of numeric one. He is saying, not a single jot or tittle will pass from the law. That incidentally is the first usage of “one” in the entire New Testament. Luke writes in Acts 19:34:
But when they knew that he was a Jew, all with one voice about the space of two hours cried out, Great is Diana of the Ephesians.
This does not mean that this crowd of people had a single voice. They had several voices, but unified voices, so one voice. The Apostle Paul writes in Romans 15:6:
That ye may with one mind and one mouth glorify God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
To the church at Rome to whom Paul wrote, he says, “ye,” referring to its plural members, excluding himself. He says that these many, plural people have “one mind” and “one mouth.” Do you think that only one, single mind and one, single mouth existed in Rome? No. Of course not. Yet, you don’t have people saying that there is a universal, invisible mystical mind or a universal, invisible mystical mouth. Maybe they do in a mind science cult, but this does not exist in the actual, real world.
Usage of “One Body”
Colossians 3:15
Now let’s consider the terminology “one body,” which expresses the unity of each church in its context. I want us to consider Colossians 3:15 first, because it eliminates the concept that “one body” is one universal, invisible body. Paul writes:
And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to the which also ye are called in one body; and be ye thankful.
The Apostle Paul does use the pronoun “we” sometimes and includes himself, but one should not assume that he is saying that he is in the same one body as his audience. When he uses “ye” here, he excludes himself. He says, “your hearts,” “ye are called,” and “be ye thankful.” He could have phrased all this with “we” in it, but he didn’t. Instead, he says, “ye are called in one body.” If this was singular “one body,” referring to a big universal church to which all believers were members, he should not exclude himself, and yet he does. Why? He is addressing the church at Colossae. The “one body” was their church.
The context of this statement in Colossians 3:15 goes back a long ways to say that the church there is neither Greek nor Jew, bond nor free, etc. In other words, they are now no longer separate tribes, but all one there. Paul says, “be merciful, kind, longsuffering, etc. (v. 12), forbear, forgive, don’t quarrel (v. 13), put on charity, which is a bond (v. 14), so that peace rules in your hearts (v. 15). All these factors lead to unity — in other words, “one body.” Paul instructs them in having a unified body, a church with unity, which God and he both want.
1 Corinthians 12:12
The context of 1 Corinthians 12 is that the church at Corinth has many members and, therefore, many varied offices and gifts. The one Holy Spirit (which is numeric one with an allusion to unity, the one Holy Spirit causes oneness) actually creates this diversity in the church by dividing up or assigning varied spiritual gifts to the members. With this kind of variation, how is there harmony, oneness? Well, first there is one Spirit. He can bring oneness, since He isn’t going to contradict Himself.
As an analogy, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12:12:
For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ.
“The body is one.” Here he speaks of the actual human body in a generic sense. “The body” is the human body. Question: Is the singular “the body” here particular or generic or is it an invented usage of the singular, “mystical”? It isn’t particular, because Paul is not speaking of a a particular person’s body. It is generic because every body has members or body parts. Each body on earth has always been one, a defining or true aspect of what it means to be a body. It isn’t a body any more when a finger is over here, an ear is in another zip code, and each toe finds itself in a different county.
The Human Body as a Metaphor
I want to emphasize again. Please pay attention here. “The body” is the human body. Human body. Think anatomy and physiology. The “ankle bone is connected to the leg bone, the leg bone is connected to the knee bone.” The skeleton does not do the skeleton dance if the ankle bone is not in fact connected to the leg bone. All those joints must connect for the body to work in unity. (Take a deep breath.)
What Paul writes actually contradicts the idea of a universal body. Part of a body being a body is proximity. It is all together in one location. “The body” is not a particular human body, but speaks of any and every human body in a generic fashion. Not only is the human body one, but the human body has many members or body parts. “Members” means “body parts.” Paul uses the human body to illustrate the unity and diversity of a church. Even though the body has many members, it is still one, that is, it is still unified. Every member works together. They must because it is one body. This is not teaching a universal church.
Not Singular One, But Unified One
For being such a prominent doctrine among evangelicals, Paul doesn’t ever mention a universal church. If it existed, he could have easily clarified it. What universal church proponents do is take these “one body” passages and the like, which are unity passages, and they read into them a universal church. This messes up the interpretation or meaning of the entire passage by forcing this non-existent concept into the passage. People will very often do almost whatever it takes to get their doctrine into the Bible, that isn’t there on its own.
When Paul implies, “Christ is one body,” there is a sense of “numeric one,” but it still communicating “unified one” as the primary usage here. Body parts still unify, still operate as one, function together, because of the oneness, the unity of the body. The church at Corinth divided over its gifts. Get this. The church at Corinth divided over its gifts. It’s like a body dividing over its various body parts. That doesn’t happen with a body even though it has various body parts. It still works together. That is what Paul is saying!!
Paul is saying nothing about a universal, mystical body of believers. He is talking about the unity of the church at Corinth and in a generic fashion, the unity of every church. Even though each church has many members, it is one body. That is the reality of a body. Each body is one.
People Will Still Argue
I really do assume that people will still argue over this, because their universal body concept is so precious to them for whatever reason. They want to keep that Platonic “all believers” concept intact. It has no practical ramification at all and doesn’t fit what Paul is teaching, but they still call it the prime meaning of these unity texts. While there is no biblical unity (like that of a human body) between all professing believers, they still begrudgingly use it. Meanwhile, they ruin what’s in the text itself to help out a church. Churches lose an important unity text to preserve a false doctrine.
Why do people need to keep this false concept of a universal body? I believe there are a lot of reasons. It isn’t grammar or syntax or the plain meaning of the text. No, it is something outside of the Bible. The chief reason, I believe, and this is an opinion, but with a large sample size, is that people can live freely without constraint to an actual church. They become a free-floating entity beholden to no one and without authority. It is a good vehicle to take for rebellion. It means not submitting to anything but a mystical Christ, who they shape into the Jesus they want Him to be.
I’m going to stop here, because I believe you get the message. This is what each of Paul’s “one body” texts are about. They are about the unity of individual churches. They all happen the same way, just like the unity of a human body in the body metaphor that Paul uses.
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.
Local Only Ecclesiology and Historical Theology
My graduate school required a large amount of theology, which included the branch of historical theology. Before I took the class, I must admit, I had not thought much about the category. I know men introduced historical theology to me at different times and varied manners in other classes, but it became important to me at that time between the ages of 22 and 25 years. Now when I listen to a presentation of a position, I want to hear its history for good and biblical reasons.
I know I’m writing on this subject because of an article I read today (as I first write this), called, “Five Reasons Historical Theology Is Necessary for the Local Church.” The man who wrote it is not local church. I would point out to you, if someone uses “local church” language, he may believe in two churches, universal and local, rather than the biblical one church, which is local only. However, churches need historical theology. They need to know that churches always believed what they believed, because it is the truth. Caleb Lenard in the article gives good reasons.
Examples for Historical Theology
A strong argument for perfect preservation of scripture in the original languages comes from historical theology. Christians believed this doctrine, as read in historical confessions of faith. In a theological way, no one has yet upended that position on preservation. Since this is what Christians have believed, you could call a change, heresy. A new position on the preservation of scripture diverges off the already established belief.
Sometimes I hear the language, “the reformed doctrine of justification.” Did the doctrine of justification originate with the Protestant Reformation? I don’t believe that. Maybe they dusted it off or took it out of the trash bin, but men kept believing it or else no one was saved not long after the advent of the Roman Catholic Church.
Is local only ecclesiology also historical theology? Christians do not have to prove that a majority of believers received and propagated local only ecclesiology. If it is true, scriptural doctrine, then believers should reveal its history, tell the historical story of local only ecclesiology. It is also helpful to show how that other ecclesiology diverged from the path of truth, if local only ecclesiology is true.
Historical Ecclesiology
I would like those with a different ecclesiology to consider the historical problem of a catholic ecclesiology and the bad consequences too. Roman Catholicism affected corrupt thinking on the doctrine of justification and many other doctrines. That did not disconnect with Roman Catholic ecclesiology. Correcting justification and not rectifying the other corrupted doctrines still leaves churches with much bad doctrine. This dishonors God and hurts many people.
Men often will not say, perhaps because they don’t know, that their doctrine is Roman Catholic. They don’t teach the false gospel of Roman Catholicism, but they teach other false doctrines. Those false doctrines lead back to a false gospel. One Roman Catholic doctrine accepted is the Roman Catholic doctrine of the church. Catholic church is universal church. That ecclesiology, a false one, spread in a widespread way to Christians.
Some of you reading right now are nodding your head, “no.” Back and forth, maybe smirking, rolling the eyes. Maybe. Just think about it though. Did you get your ecclesiology from Roman Catholicism? What kind of effect does that have for your life, others’ lives, and for all the other doctrines?
On the other hand, did I get my ecclesiology from mid 19th century landmarkists (see this series, and this one)? Everyone had believed in catholic ecclesiology (just like they denied justification before) up to that point. Local only ecclesiology then arose as a knee jerk reaction from J. R. Graves and Baptists in America. They didn’t like the ecumenism spreading among Southern Baptists, so they invented the local only position to combat it. Is that what happened instead? What is it about Baptists that made them in particular prey in a widespread way to a teaching that the church was only local, never universal?
Catholic Ecclesiology
I wouldn’t believe the local only position if I thought it originated among 19th century Baptists in America. Instead, I believe that looking in the Bible and also tracing history of doctrine supports something different. The universal church view grew from seeds of neo-platonism previous to Constantine and took hold as the predominant ecclesiology only with the state church in the 4th century. The Catholic Church persecuted churches separate from the state church. Those churches existed and they believed the church was local, not universal.
A platonic system of theology, Origen’s allegorical or spiritualizing system, affected everything in the Roman Catholic Church. Sprinkling of infants proceeded from this. A corrupt human priesthood arose. Amillennialism, the view that the kingdom was the Roman Catholic Church, took hold. Hierarchical church government became the norm. Tradition took prominence. The Pope. Transubstantiation.
Roman Catholicism and universal ecclesiology led to the dark ages. It caused regression or glacially slow progress in measurements of living standards. Most people stayed stupid for a long time because of Roman Catholic ecclesiology now embraced by many professing Christians. Satan used it greatly. The Protestant Reformation did not correct all that Roman Catholicism ruined. It embraced or absorbed Roman Catholic ecclesiology and eschatology with few exceptions.
Consequential Regression
Byproduct of Roman Catholic Ecclesiology
Even if there is notable minute progress to which someone might point in correct thinking about issues of life, it is an exception. It is usually a few bright spots mixed into still astounding darkness. Useful scientific discovery overall, subduing and having dominion, came to a stop for over a thousand years because of Roman Catholicism. Wherever it spread, such as Central and South America, left its destructive nature.
Everywhere the Roman Catholic Church took hold still continues a worse place to live because of its influence. It is a byproduct of Roman Catholic ecclesiology, that can’t be separated from its system of interpretation. As I say that, anticipating this argument, I understand that forms of paganism like animism also left the culture in ruins. It wasn’t much worse than Roman Catholicism, and I compare the consequences to biblical Christianity in contrast.
Still today people think “Christian” means Roman Catholic. Evangelicalism is a branch off a Catholic root in the mind of the general population. Every Christian then becomes responsible for the crusades, the inquisition, the conquistadores, feudalism, a flat earth, religious wars, and widespread poverty.
Once the hold of Roman Catholicism was broken, including Catholic state church ideology, the freedom brought astounding progress. People don’t trace that to ecclesiology or even talk about it in history classes, but it is true. When Warren Buffet says that John Rockefeller did not live as well as Buffet’s middle class neighbors, this relates to progress arising from the downfall of a state church.
Wreaking Havoc
The ecclesiology of Roman Catholicism, however, still continues, reeking its havoc everywhere. Globalism itself and its damage comes from Roman Catholic ecclesiology. It is a utopian, universalist concept, that first existed in Roman Catholicism. It stems from the mystical, spiritualistic, and allegorical system of Roman Catholicism.
A religious grounding from the system of Roman Catholicism continues in leftist thinking, which spreads utopian thinking, exerting power over individuals. It has the capacity to return the world to neo-feudalism and another dark age. None of this is true. The trajectory of the American colonies and the first one hundred fifty years of American history changed the world by overturning the influence of universal church doctrine. A nation begins to suffer as it welcomes it back.
I have written about the founding of catholic ecclesiology, the universal church doctrine, many times here (here, here, here, here, and here among other places). I have also written about the history and biblical doctrine of local only ecclesiology, offering that position (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and see these two on English separatism–here and here).
Because of the dominance of a universal church through history through the Roman Catholic Church, in comparison not much local only material exists. The winners told the story. They could destroy anything that countered their viewpoint. You hopefully know the same practice occurs today in almost every institution. Some call the falsehoods, fake news. It is revisionist history based on a system of interpretation similar to what hatched Roman Catholicism.
More to Come
Debunking of Nine Marks Dual Church View: Both Universal and Local Churches, Part Three
Nowhere does scripture make a connection between an earthly church and then a final heavenly church. Neoplatonic Christianity or professing Christianity invented this idea, one borrowed by Jonathan Leeman in his article, The Church: Universal and Local, for the 9 Marks parachurch organization. A believer in a salvific way has a citizenship in heaven and has a seat in heaven in the sense that God reserved it for him, which is like someone seated in Congress without physically being there. Because He saved me and keeps saving me, Jesus anchors me in the heavenly holy of holies. The seating of me and the anchoring of me there does not mean I am there in the present. It is a blessed guarantee of my salvation.
Universal church ecclesiology uses neoplatonic language. It says the true church is all believers, the apparent “universal church,” which manifests itself in a visible church, the local one. It finds reality in the ideal or the mystical. Leeman says the universal church becomes local by gathering. A church is a gathering. A gathering doesn’t become a gathering by gathering. The not-gathered thing is not a gathering. This is also how all of the New Testament reads. It’s not called a gathering or an assembly when it doesn’t assemble. It isn’t an assembly then. The only reason why Leeman talks about the church as universal comes from neoplatonism.
Jonathan Leeman writes a unique ecclesiology. The dual church view isn’t unique, but his attempt to keep an attachment to the literal meaning of ekklesia, “assembly.” 9 Marks and he see the damage of the typical universal church teaching, that becomes easily untethered from the biblical practice of the church, which is only local. The typical universal church teaching creates free agents without accountability, living how they want yet continuing to call themselves Christians.
The attempt to keep congruity between assembly and universal church keeps Leeman in the mainstream of evangelicalism, which loves its universal church. It keeps alive a multitude of boards, conventions, associations, colleges, universities, and other parachurch organizations. Someone can live and work in that parachurch world as if it is Christian ministry without anything like it in the Bible. It is unhelpful, but mainly untrue. Whatever kingdom-like quality Leeman wants to attribute to the church, the mixture of the universal undermines the authority that the kingdom of Jesus Christ possesses.
As one might expect, Leeman’s system of interpretation effects his outcome. He fails to mention, however, his system — amillennialism. That system must see a universal church, which is a synonym with the kingdom. It erases a line between soteriology and ecclesiology. It results in reading his conclusions into scripture.
A Kingdom Argument
Leeman uses a doctrine of the kingdom to argue for a universal church. Some truth exists within the framework of his argument. As a representative of His church, Jesus gives Peter the keys to the kingdom in Matthew 16:18-19. That does not mean the church is the kingdom, which emerges from amillennialism, an eschatology of Roman Catholicism and Capital Hill Baptist Church, Mark Dever, and 9 Marks. The church and the kingdom interrelate like the church and the family of God do.
Leeman says the church provides the way to say who citizens of the kingdom are. He compares church membership to the means of possessing the passport into the kingdom. To know who they are, Leeman postulates baptism and the Lord’s Supper as the means. He says these are covenant signs of the new covenant, so they express the entrance requirements into the kingdom. Nothing in the Bible says this. It is nifty inventiveness to attempt to prove a point, while having nothing to do so. It’s another way of my saying that it’s a stretch by Leeman.
The article further argues the kingdom/church concept with the language of “binding” and “loosing” in Matthew 16:19 and 18:18. Churches are doing kingdom work. They are not the kingdom. They represent the kingdom on earth. God gives the church — churches — heavenly authority to judge who is in and who is out. I’m sure that Leeman knows that doesn’t mean that the church kicks people out of heaven or out of the kingdom.
Jesus characterizes the extent of the judgment of the church in Matthew 18:17, “Let him be unto thee as an heathen man and a publican.” The church regards a person as heathen. He may not be heathen. The man under church discipline in 1 Corinthians 5 proved himself to be a kingdom citizen, even though the church loosed him. The Lord Jesus Christ gives to the church, which is visible and local, the earthly judgment of heavenly or kingdom citizenship.
It’s true that someone, who isn’t baptized, doesn’t take of the Lord’s Table, won’t join a church, doesn’t submit to church leadership, and won’t gather with a church, the church should judge as not saved. Christ gave that judgment to the church. This doesn’t mean the church is the kingdom. It’s been given the authority of the kingdom. The King of the kingdom is Christ and the Head of the church is Christ.
The Bible offers a distinct soteriology and a distinct ecclesiology. They are distinct doctrines. However, they also relate to one another. Church membership requires salvation. However, it also requires baptism. Baptism isn’t salvation. It isn’t a “putting away of the filth of the flesh” (1 Pet 3:21). According to the New Testament, a church can have unbelievers in it, a mixed multitude, and will very often have unsaved church members, who should examine themselves whether they be in the faith (2 Cor 13:5). Most reading here know that church membership is not the same as salvation.
Terminology like church, temple, and body relate to the church. Words like kingdom, family, and saint relate to salvation. You can be in the kingdom, family, and a saint without baptism. To be in the church, temple, and body, you must be baptized. Scripture shows some relationship between terms of the church and of salvation. However, Leeman takes this further than what scripture teaches in order to vindicate his false universal church teaching.
Historical Argument
Leeman attempts to justify the universal church with a historical argument, using the patristics and the Protestant Reformers. He portrays a pendulum swing between an emphasis on the local church then the universal church and then back to the local church, meanwhile both churches existing with his dual church view. He writes the following:
Yet among Baptist groups the risk now would be to shift the weight of the body entirely onto the other foot, where Christians would give all their attention to the local church and little to the universal. Certain strains of Baptist churches, such as the Landmarkists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, would in fact argue that only the local church exists. They would also refuse to share the Lord’s Supper with anyone who was not a member of their own church. Gratefully, such strains were rare.
He charges Baptists with overemphasis on the local church, especially those he calls and others label, “Landmarkists.” He attacks closed communion, unwillingness to share the Lord’s Supper with someone not a member of his church. I would contend that the Landmarkists brought ecclesiology back to scripture and communion back to its “communion of the Lord’s body,” which is local only. Christ gave communion to His church, which is local only.
The Landmarkers rose out of the Southern Baptist Convention, when Protestants shared their pulpits and partook in their communion. Baptists distinguish themselves as separatists. They separate from false doctrine such as infant sprinkling. Further, Southern Baptists allowed modernism or liberalism into the churches and rejected church perpetuity in their seminaries, leading to ecumenism. Landmarkers brought the Convention back to scripture and historic Baptist doctrines.
Leeman uses a kind of smear tactic, because his knowing what readers may have heard about Landmarkism. It’s like calling someone “flat earth” or “election denier.” It’s a rhetorical tactic. It doesn’t make a true historical or biblical point. He assumes people will think Landmarkism is bad, so they’ll associate local only ecclesiology then as bad too.
I agree that men through history believed in a local church, a universal church, in only a local church, and in both a local and a universal church. You can find all of those ecclesiological positions through history. However, we know a church is local. Where is the universal church in scripture and did it develop through history? Did it arise from neoplatonism?
Forced Universal with It “Showing Up”
Leeman says the universal church shows up in churches, which are local. He says that happens when churches cooperate with another in common service or labor for the Lord. Yes, churches all have the same Head if they are true churches. That doesn’t make a universal church. It is a generic church. It is an institutional understanding of church. Each true church has Christ as its head. This is not the discovery of or a doctrine of a universal church.
Churches either fellowship based upon the same doctrine and practice or they separate from one another. When they fellowship, that isn’t a universal church concept. That is just fellowship between two churches, like existed between the Jerusalem church and the Antioch church.
The universal concept of church seems to require churches cooperating. It leads to diminishment and corruption of true doctrine. If there is to be “no schism in the body” (1 Cor 12:25), and the body is universal, then no church should separate from one another. However, “the body” in 1 Corinthians 12 is defined as local in v. 27, when Paul says, “Ye are the body of Christ,” speaking of the church at Corinth. If it was universal, Paul would have written, “We are the body of Christ.” He doesn’t. Schisms exist between bodies. They are not to exist in the body.
The unity that Jesus prayed for in John 17 (v. 22) is found in separate churches that fellowship one with another based upon the truth (John 17:17). Unity is required in individual churches (Eph 4), not between separate churches. Separate churches attempt to have unity like Jerusalem and Antioch tried in Acts 15. True unity requires separation.
Evangelicals like Leeman do not teach biblical separation. They don’t write on it. They talk about church discipline, but they don’t teach on separation from other churches. Their false universal church teaching fuels this, which will mean apostasy for their churches and their movement. Every New Testament epistle teaches the doctrine of separation, which depends on a right view of the nature of the church.
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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