THE NEW TESTAMENT CONCEPTION OF THE
CHURCH
AND I say also unto thee, that thou
art Petros, and on this petra I will build My Church (Ecclesia);
and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.”
Our Lord was far from Galilee and farther from Jerusalem when He uttered these
words. He was sojourning in an almost wholly pagan land. The rocks overhanging
the path were covered with the mementos of a licentious cult; and in the
neighboring city of Caesarea Philippi Herod Philip had built and consecrated a
temple to the Emperor Augustus, who was there worshipped as a god.[1] It was
among scenes which showed the lustful passions of man’s corrupt heart and the
statecraft of Imperial Rome seating themselves on the throne of God, that Jesus
made to His followers the promise which He has so marvelously fulfilled.
The
word translated Church is Ecclesia—a word that had a history both
theocratic and
democratic, and that came trailing behind it memories both to the Jews who were then listening to Him, and to the Greeks, who, at a later period, received His Gospel. To the Jew, the Ecclesia had been the assembly of the congregation of Israel,[2] summoned to meet at the door of the Tabernacle of Jehovah by men blowing silver trumpets. To the Greek the Ecclesia was the sovereign assembly of the free Greek city-state,[3] summoned by the herald blowing his horn through the streets of the town. To the followers of Jesus it was to be the congregation of the redeemed and therefore of the free, summoned by His heralds to continually appear in the presence of their Lord, who was always to be in the midst of them. It was to be a theocratic democracy.
democratic, and that came trailing behind it memories both to the Jews who were then listening to Him, and to the Greeks, who, at a later period, received His Gospel. To the Jew, the Ecclesia had been the assembly of the congregation of Israel,[2] summoned to meet at the door of the Tabernacle of Jehovah by men blowing silver trumpets. To the Greek the Ecclesia was the sovereign assembly of the free Greek city-state,[3] summoned by the herald blowing his horn through the streets of the town. To the followers of Jesus it was to be the congregation of the redeemed and therefore of the free, summoned by His heralds to continually appear in the presence of their Lord, who was always to be in the midst of them. It was to be a theocratic democracy.
The
New, if it is to be lasting, must always have its roots in the Old; and the
phrase “My Ecclesia” recalled the past and foretold the future. The roots were
the memories the word brought both to Jew and to Greek; and the promise and the
potency of the future lay in the word “My.” The Ecclesia had been the congregation
of Jehovah; it was in the future, without losing anything of what it had
possessed, to become the congregation of Jesus the Christ. Its heralds, like
James, the brother of our Lord, could apply to it the Old Testament promises,
and see in its construction the fulfillment of the saying of Amos about the
rebuilding of the Tabernacle of David;[4]
or, like St. Paul, could call it the “Israel of God,” and repeat concerning it
the prayer of the Psalm, “Remember thine ecclesia, which Thou hast
purchased of old, which Thou hast redeemed to be the tribe of Thine
inheritance.”[5]
It had been the self-governing Greek republic, ruled by elected office-bearers;
hereafter the communities of Christians, which were to be the ecclesiae,
were to be little self-governing societies where the individual rights and
responsibilities of the members would blend harmoniously with the common good
of all.
The
word with its memories and promises appealed to none of our Lord’s “Sent Ones”
more strongly than to St. Paul, who was at once an “Hebrew of the Hebrews,” and
the apostle to the Gentiles. The term “ecclesia” has its home in the Pauline
literature.[6]
It is met with 110 times within the New Testament, and of these 86 occur in the
Epistles of St. Paul and in the Acts of the Apostles. We naturally turn to the
writings of St. Paul to aid us in expounding the thought which is contained in
the term. When we do so we are entitled to say that the conception contains at
least five different ideas which embody the essential features of the “Church
of Christ.”
The
New Testament Church is fellowship with Jesus and with the brethren through
Him; this fellowship is permeated with a sense of unity; this united fellowship
is to manifest itself in a visible society; this visible society has bestowed
upon it by our Lord a divine authority; and it is to be a sacerdotal society.
These appear to be the five outstanding elements in the New Testament
conception of the Church of Christ.
1.
The Church of Christ is a fellowship
It
is a fellowship with Jesus Christ; that is the divine element in it. It is a
fellowship with the brethren; that is the human element in it. The Rock on
which the Church was to be built was a man confessing—not the man apart
from his confession, as Romanists insist, nor the confession apart from the
man, as many Protestants argue. It was a man in whom long companionship with
Jesus and the revelation from the Father had created a personal trust in His
Messianic mission;[7]
and the faith which had grown out of the fellowship had the mysterious power of
making the fellowship which had created it more vivid and real; for faith, in
its primitive sense of personal trust, is fellowship become self-conscious.
Faith is what makes fellow-ship know itself to be fellowship, and not haphazard
social intercourse.
The
faith of Peter, seer as he was into divine mysteries, and prophet as he
was, able to utter what he had seen, did not involve a very adequate
apprehension of the fellowship he had confessed. He knew so little about its
real meaning that shortly after his confession he made a suggestion which would
have destroyed it;[8]
a thought prompted by the Evil One succeeded the revelation from the Father—so
strangely and swiftly do inspirations of God and temptations of the Devil
succeed each other in the minds of men. The sad experience of Peter has been
shared by the Church in all generations. He did not cease to be the Rock-Man in
consequence; nor has the promise failed the Church which was founded on him and
on his confession, although it has shared his weakness and sin. St. Paul rings
the changes on this thought of fellowship with Jesus which makes the Church.
The churches addressed in his epistles are described as in Christ Jesus. He is
careful to impress on believers the personal relation in which they stand to
their Lord, even when he is addressing the whole Church to which they belong.
If he writes to the Church of God which is in Corinth,[9] he is
careful to add “to them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints”; and in his other
epistles he addresses the brethren individually as “saints,” “saints and faithful brethren,” “all that are in Rome, beloved of God, called to be saints.”[10] The individual believer is never lost in the society, and he is never alone and separate. The bond of union is not an external framework impressed from without, but a sense of fellowship springing from within. The believer’s union to Christ, which is the deepest of all personal things, always involves something social, The call comes to him singly, but seldom solitarily.
careful to add “to them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints”; and in his other
epistles he addresses the brethren individually as “saints,” “saints and faithful brethren,” “all that are in Rome, beloved of God, called to be saints.”[10] The individual believer is never lost in the society, and he is never alone and separate. The bond of union is not an external framework impressed from without, but a sense of fellowship springing from within. The believer’s union to Christ, which is the deepest of all personal things, always involves something social, The call comes to him singly, but seldom solitarily.
Perhaps,
however, St. Paul’s conception of the fellowship with Christ which is the basis
of the Church, comes out most clearly in the way he speaks of the “gifts” of
grace, the charismata, which manifest the abiding presence of our Lord
in His Church and His continuing fellowship with His people.[11] He
enumerates them over and over again. He points to “apostles,” the missionary
heralds of the Gospel; to “prophets,” to whom the Spirit had given special
powers for the edification of the brethren; to “teachers,” who are wise with
the wisdom of God, and have those divine intuitions which the apostle calls
“knowledge”; to “pastors,” who feed the flock in one community. He speaks of
“helps” (ἀντιλήψεις) or
powers to assist the sick, the tempted and the tried; of “insight” to give wise
counsels; of gifts of rule (κυβερνήσεις);
of gifts of healing, and in general of all kinds of service. They are all gifts
of the Spirit, and are all so many different manifestations of the presence of
Jesus and of the living fellowship which His people have with Him.
These
various gifts are bestowed on different members of the Christian society for
the edification of all, and they serve to show that it is one organism, where
the whole exists for the parts, and each part for the whole and for all the
other parts. They also show that the Christian society is not a merely natural
organism; there is divine life and power within it, because it has the abiding
presence of Christ; and the proof of His presence is the possession and use of
these various “gifts,” all of which come from the one Spirit of Christ in fulfillment
of the promise that He will never leave nor forsake His Church. Their presence
is a testimony to the presence of the Master which each Christian community can
supply. It is a Church of Christ if His presence is manifested by these fruits
of the Spirit which come from the exercise of the “gifts” which the Spirit has
bestowed upon it; for the Church as well as the individual Christian is to be
known by its fruits.[12]
This
sense of hidden fellowship with its Lord was the secret of the Church. It was a
bond uniting its members and separating them from outsiders more completely
than were the initiated into the pagan mysteries sundered from those who had
not passed through the same introductory rites. While Jesus lived their
fellowship with Him was the external thing which distinguished them from
others. They were His disciples (μαθηταὶ)
gathered round a centre, a Person whom they called Rabbi, Master, Teacher—names
they were taught not to give to another. They shared a common teaching and
drank in the same words of wisdom from the same lips; but even then they could
not be called a “school,” for they were united by the bond of a common hope and
a common future. They were to share in the coming kingdom of God in and through
their relation to their Master. After His departure the other side of the
fellowship became the prominent external thing—their relation to each other
because of their relation to their common Lord. New names arose to express the
change, names suggesting the relation in which they stood to each other. They
were the “brethren,” the “saints,” and they had a fellowship
(κοινωνία) with each other.[13] This
thought of fellowship, as we shall see, was the ruling idea in all Christian
organization. All Christians within one community were to live in fellowship
with each other; different Christian communities were to have a common
fellowship. Visible fellowship with each other, the outcome of the hidden
fellowship with Jesus, was to be at once the leading characteristic of all
Christians and the bond which united them to each other and separated them from
the world lying outside.
2.
The second characteristic of the Church of Christ is
that it is a Unity.
There
was one assembly of the congregation of Israel; one sovereign assembly of the
Greek city-state. There is one Church of Christ. It must be admitted
that the word Church is seldom used in the New Testament to designate
one universal and comprehensive society. On the contrary, out of the 110 times
in which the word occurs, no less than 100 do not contain this note of a
wide-spreading unity. In he overwhelming majority of cases the word “church”
denotes a local Christian society, varying in extent from all the Christian
congregations within a province of the Empire to a small assembly of Christians
meeting together in the house of one of the brethren. St. Paul alone,[14] if we
except the one instance in Matt. xvi., uses the word in its universal
application; and he does it in two epistles only—those to the Ephesians and to
the Colossians—both of them dating from his Roman captivity. But there are
numberless indications that the thought of the unity of the Church of Christ
was never absent from the mind of the Apostle. The Christians he addresses are
all brethren, all saints, whether they be in Jerusalem, Damascus, Ephesus or
Rome. The believers in Thessalonica are praised because they had been
“imitators of the churches of God which are in Judea,” who “are in Jesus Christ
“ as the Thessalonians “are in Jesus Christ.”[15]
The Epistles to the Corinthians are full of exhortations to unity within the
local church, and the warnings are always based on principles which suggest the
unity of the whole wide fellowship of believers. The divisions in the church at
Corinth had arisen from a misguided apostolic partisanship which implied a lack
of belief in Christian unity at the centre; the apostle repudiates this by
holding forth the unity of Christ, and by pointing to the one Kingdom of God to
be inherited.[16]
He has the same message for all the local churches. However varied in
environment they may be, these local churches have common usages, and ought to
unite in showing a common sympathy with each other.[17]
Besides these minor indications of
the thought, we have, in various of his epistles what may be called its poetic
expression. The Church of Christ is such a unity that it has thrown down all
the walls of race, sex, and social usages which have kept men separate. It has
reconciled Jew and Gentile. It has bridged the gulf between the past of Israel
and the present of apostolic Christianity.
These thoughts and phrases, which
run through all the epistles of St. Paul, lead directly to the description of
the glorious unity of the one Church of Christ which fills the great Epistle to
the Ephesians. Thus, though it is true that we cannot point to a single use of
the word “church” in the earlier epistles which can undoubtedly be said to mean
a universal Christian society, the thought of this unity of all believers runs
through them all. The conception of the unity of the Church of Christ is one of
the abiding possessions of St. Paul in the earliest as in the latest of his
writings; but it is only in the writings of his Roman captivity that it attains
to its fullest expression.[18]
This unity of the Church of Christ
which filled the mind of St. Paul was something essentially spiritual. It is a
reality, but a reality which is more ideal than material. It can never be
adequately represented in a merely historical way. It is true that we can trace
the beginnings of the formation of Christian communities, and the gradual
federation of these Christian societies into a wide-spreading union of confederate
churches; but that only faintly expresses the thought of the unity of the
Church of Christ. It is true that we can see in the fellowship of Christians
the illustration of the pregnant philosophical thought that it is not good for
man to be alone, and that personality itself can only be rightly conceived when
taken along with the thought of fellowship.[19] Apart, however, from all surface
facts and philosophical ideas, there is something deeper in the unity of the
Christian Church, something which lies implicitly in the unformed faith of
every believer, that in personal union with Christ there is union with the
whole body of the redeemed, and that man is never alone either in sin or in
salvation. The unity of the Church of Christ is a primary verity of the Christian
faith: “There is One Body, and One Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of
your calling; One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism, One God and Father of all, Who
is over all and through all and in all.” And because the Unity of the Church of
Christ is a primary verity of the Christian faith, it can never be adequately
represented in any outward polity, but must always be, in the first instance at
least, a religious experience. Its source and centre can never be an earthly
throne, but must always be that heavenly place where Jesus sits at the Right
Hand of God.[20]
This enables us to see how the word
“church” can be used, as it is in the New Testament, to denote communities of
varying size, from the sum total of all the Christian communities on earth down
to the tiny congregation which met in the house of Philemon. For the unity of
the Christian Church is, in the first instance, the oneness of an ideal
reality, and is not confined within the bounds of space and time as merely
material entities are. It can be present in many places at the same time, and
in such a way that, as Ignatius says, “Where Jesus Christ is, there is the
whole Church.” The congregation at Corinth was, in the eyes of St. Paul, the
Body of Christ or the whole Church in its all-embracing unity—not a Body of
Christ, for there is but one Body of Christ; not part of the Body of Christ,
for Christ is not divided; but the Body of Christ in its unity and filled with
the fulness of His powers.[21] It is in this One Body, present in
every Christian society, that our Lord has placed His “gifts” or charismata,
which enable the Church to perform its divine functions; and all the spiritual
actions of the tiniest community, such as the Church in the house of
Nymphas—Prayer, Praise, Preaching, Baptism, the Holy Supper—are actions of the
whole Church of Christ.
The Christians of the early centuries clung to this thought,
and we have a long series of writers, from Victor of Rome, in the second
century, down to Clement of Alexandria and Origen, who tell us that the whole
Church of the redeemed, with Christ and the angels, is present in the public
worship of the individual congregation. The promise of the Master, that where
two or three were gathered together in His Name there would He be in the midst
of them, was placed side by side with the thought in the Epistle to the Hebrews
that believers are surrounded with a great cloud of witnesses; and the
combination suggested that in the simplest action of the smallest Christian
fellowship there was the presence and the power of the whole Church of Christ.
Tertullian pushes the thought to its furthest limits when he says in a
well-known passage: “Accordingly, where there is no joint session of the
ecclesiastical order, you Offer, Baptize, and are Priest alone for yourself;
for where three are there the Church is, although they be laity.”[22]
3. The Church of our Lord’s promise
was to be a visible community.
This note of visibility is
suggested by the word ecclesia itself, and by the whole environment of its
earliest Christian use. The “congregation of Israel” and the “sovereign
assembly” of the Greek city-state had been visible things. The time of the
promise suggested a visible community. It came when the visible people of
Israel had manifestly refused to accept Jesus as the Messiah. His Church was
set over against the Israel which had denied Him—one visible community against
another. The earliest uses of the word ecclesia refer unmistakably to visible
communities. When St. Paul persecuted the “Church of God,” he made havoc of something
more than an abstraction. He haled men and women to prison and confined real
bodies within real stone walls. The churches spoken of in the Acts and in the
Epistles were societies of men and women, living in families, coming together
for public worship, and striving in spite of many infirmities to live the life
of new obedience to which they had been called. They were little societies in
the world, connected with it on all sides and yet not of it—lamps set on
lamp-stands to enlighten the darkness of surrounding paganism. The “gifts” of
the Spirit, which manifested the presence of Christ, were seen at work in the
public assembly of the congregation, and were given to edify a visible society.
The two universal rites of the new
society—Baptism and the Lord’s Supper—show that it was a visible thing. St.
Paul makes it clear that entrance into the Church was by the visible rite of
Baptism, and that he himself had come into the Church by this door. The Lord’s
Supper was a visible social institution, and could only occupy the place it did
in a visible society.
Even the Church Universal, which is
described in the Epistle to the Ephesians, is a visible Church. It is an ideal
reality; but an ideal Church is not invisible because it is ideal. It can be
seen in any Christian community, great or small; seen in a measure by the eye
of sense, but more truly by the eye of faith. For it is one of the privileges
of faith, when strengthened by hope and by love, to see the glorious ideal in
the somewhat poor material reality. It was thus that St. Paul saw the universal
Church of Christ made visible in the Christian community of Corinth. St. Paul
has described the Church in that great trading and manufacturing city of
Corinth, where the rich were very rich and the poor were very poor; where the
thoroughness of character, inherited from the early Roman
colonists, had pushed the sensuous side of Greek civilization into all manner
of excesses, until the city had become a by-word for foul living, and religion
itself had become an incentive to lust.[23]
This
environment had tainted the Christian society. St. Paul saw it all and has
described it. He has made us see the very Love-feasts, which introduced the
Holy Supper, changed into banquets of display on the part of the rich, while
the poor were swept into corners or compelled to wait till their wealthier
brethren were served. He has shown us petty rivalries disguising themselves
under the mask of faithfulness to eminent apostolic teachers. He has depicted
the tainted morals of the city appearing unchecked within the Christian
society. What a picture the heathen satirist Lucian, with his keen eye and his
outspoken tongue, would have drawn of such a community! St. Paul saw all the
frailty, the feebleness to resist the evil communications and the fickleness;
and yet he saw in that community the Body of Christ.
He needed the love that “beareth all things, that believeth all things, and
that hopeth all things,” to make his vision clear—and that is perhaps the
reason why the wonderful chapter on Christian love comes in the middle of this
epistle; but his vision was clear, and he saw the life there with its potency
and promise. He could say to that Church Ye are the Body
of
Christ. He could see it, as he saw the Ephesian Church,
becoming gradually rooted and grounded in
love, gradually strengthened to apprehend with all saints the height, the
depth, the length and the breadth of that love of Christ which passeth
knowledge, and at last filled with all the fulness of God.
All
things earthly have a double element, whether they be of good or evil report.
They are in the present and they are making for the future. They are what they
are to be. It is the same with all things belonging to Christianity on the
human side. We are “sons of God,”
and yet we “wait for the
adoption”; we are redeemed, and
yet our redemption “draweth nigh.”
Those who “have been saved” are enjoined to “work out their own salvation.” So
it is with the Church of God. It is what it is to be. And we are
definitely taught by the very ways in which St. Paul uses the word “ Church “
to see the Church Universal in the individual Christian community.[24] It will be
admitted, however, that ideals are given us to be made manifest to the eye of
sense as well as to the vision of faith. and that a duty is laid upon every
Christian and upon every Christian society to make the universality of the
Church of Christ which is manifest to faith plainly apparent to the eyes of
sense. If the duty has been but scantily performed since the beginning of the
third century, we may find that the neglect has come from abandoning apostolic
methods in favour of others suggested by the great pagan empire of Rome. The
duty of trying to make visible to the senses the inherent unity of the Church
of Christ was always distinctly present to the mind of the great apostle to the
Gentiles, and it may be useful to see how he set himself to the task.
One
thing meets us at the outset. He would not for the sake of an external
universality agree to anything which would set limits on the real
universality of the Church of Christ. The preservation of the liberty with
which Jesus had made His people free was of more importance in His eyes than
the manifestation of the visibility of the universal fellowship of Christians
with each other. Jewish believers were inclined to think that the practice of
circumcision “embodied the principle of the historical continuity of the
Church,” and that no one who was outside the circle of the “circumcised,” no
matter how strong his faith nor how the fruits of the Spirit were manifest in
his life and deeds, could plead the “security of the Divine Covenant,” For this
they could give reasons stronger than are brought forward by many who, in our
own day, insist on different external “successions” as marks of catholicity.
The Scripture had said: “My covenant shall be in your flesh,
an everlasting covenant.” The Saviour himself had been circumcised on the
eighth day. He had never, in so many words, either publicly to the people or
privately to His disciples, declared that circumcision was no longer to be the
sign of the covenant of God.[25]
St.
Paul recognized that to limit “the security of the covenant” to something
defined by what the Jews believed to be the “principle of the historical
continuity of the Church,” would be to destroy the real for a limited, though
more sensibly visible, universality. He bent his whole energies to break down
this false principle of continuity which placed the “succession” in something
external, and not in the possession and transmission from generation to
generation of the “gifts” of the Spirit within the community. This done, he
used his administrative powers, and they were those of a statesman, to create
channels for the flow of the manifestation of the visible unity of the Church
of Christ.
His
ruling thought was to provide that all the various Christian communities should
manifest their real brotherhood in the cultivation of the “fruits of the
Spirit.” The method of carving out a visibly universal Church by means of
regulations affecting organization and external form is not without its
attractions, which are irresistible to minds of the lawyer type and training,
such as we see afterwards in Cyprian of Carthage. It seems a short and easy
method of showing that the whole Church is visibly one. But it was not Paul’s
method. He seems to have thought as little about the special “construction of
sheep-folds” as his Master. What concerned him was that the sheep should be
gathered into one flock around the One Shepherd. He nowhere prescribed a
universal ecclesiastical polity, still less did he teach that the universality
of the Christian brotherhood must be made visible in this way. He regarded all
the separate churches of Christ as independent self-governing societies. He
strove to implant in all of them the principle of brotherly dealing with one
another, and he dug channels in which the streams of the Spirit might flow in
the practical manifestation of Christian fellowship.
Fellowship
(κοινωνία),
word and thought, is what filled his mind. All the brethren within one Church
were to have fellowship with each other. The local churches within a definite
region were to be in close fellowship. The churches among the Gentiles were to
maintain brotherly relations with the Mother-Church in Jerusalem. What this
fellowship primarily meant can be learnt from what the apostle says in Gal. ii. 9.[26]
He tells us that the apostles to the Jews, and he the apostle to the Gentiles,
gave each other the right hand of fellowship,
because they recognized that they had a common faith in the same Christ. It was
the recognition of a common belief in the One Christ, the knowledge that they
all had within them a new faith which had revolutionised their lives, and was
to express itself in their whole character and conduct, that made them feel the
kinship with each other which was expressed in the common name “brethren.” All
down through the early centuries this idea that Christians form one brotherhood
finds abundant expression. Brotherhood
alternates with Ecclesia
in the oldest sets of ecclesiastical canons, while omnis
fraternitas and πᾶσα
ἡ
ἀδελφότης
are
used to denote the whole of Christendom.
The
graceful deference which St. Paul always showed to the leaders in Jerusalem,
who had been in Christ before himself; his anxieties about the welfare of the
poor “saints” at Jerusalem, and his care to provide for their needs; the
letters he asks to be read to all the members of the churches to which they are
addressed, and sometimes to other churches also; the eagerness with which he
communicates the fact that the church he is writing to enjoys a reputation for
hospitality towards wayfaring brethren; the salutations his letters contain
from one church to another, and from individual Christians to the churches; the
messages sent by his assistants; his and their frequent journeyings from church
to church—are all evidences of his unwearied efforts to make the universality
of the Christian brotherhood widely manifest.[27]
He
did more. He grouped his churches in a statesmanlike way so that each could
support the others. His statesmanship discerned the advantages which the
imperial system, with its trade routes, its postal arrangements and its
provincial capitals, gave not merely for the propagation of the Gospel, but for
the fellowship of the churches. Corinth was the centre for the churches of
Achaia, and the second Epistle to the Corinthians is addressed to all the
Christians within that important Roman province. Round Ephesus were grouped the
churches of Asia—Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, Laodicea,
with Troas and others on the coast, and Colossae and Hierapolis in the Lycus
valley. The churches of Macedonia were, in al: probability, grouped round
Thessalonica, and those of Galatia formed another group, although we are not
told what the centre was.
While
engaged in giving visibility to the unity of the churches he had planted St.
Paul was never unmindful that he wished also to see them united visibly with
the churches of Jerusalem and Judea. He had started with the thought of a
visible fellowship between Jew and Gentile, and the union which was symbolised
when Barnabas and he gave and received the right hand of fellowship with Peter,
James and John, was never far from his thoughts. He thought of One Church of
Christ which embraced Jew and Gentile all the world over.[28]
ccccccccccccccccccmmmttttssss
[1]
Compare
Josephus, Antiq. XV. x. 3; Bell. Jud. I, xxi. 3. See also
Schürer, Geschichte
des Jüdischen Volkes (1898,
3rd ed.), ii.158 f.; G. A. Smith, Historical Geography of Palestine, p. 473 ff.;
Wissowa, Religion
and Kultus der Römer (1902),
p.284, n.3.
[2]
Numbers x. 2,
3. In the Old Testament two words are used to denote the assembling of Israel,
q h l and ’ed h; the former is
translated “assembly” and the latter “congregation” in the Revised Version. In the Septuagint ἐκκλησία is almost always always used to translate q h l, and συναγωγὴ to translate ’ed h. Both Greek words appear continually in the later Hellenistic Judaism, and it is difficult to distinguish their meanings; but Schürer is inclined to think that συναγωγὴ means the assembly of Israel as a matter of fact; while ἐκκλησία has always an ideal reference attached to it. Compare Schürer, Geschichte des Jüdischen Volkes (3rd ed. 1898), ii. 432, n. 10; Hort, The Christian Ecclesia, pp. 5-7.
translated “assembly” and the latter “congregation” in the Revised Version. In the Septuagint ἐκκλησία is almost always always used to translate q h l, and συναγωγὴ to translate ’ed h. Both Greek words appear continually in the later Hellenistic Judaism, and it is difficult to distinguish their meanings; but Schürer is inclined to think that συναγωγὴ means the assembly of Israel as a matter of fact; while ἐκκλησία has always an ideal reference attached to it. Compare Schürer, Geschichte des Jüdischen Volkes (3rd ed. 1898), ii. 432, n. 10; Hort, The Christian Ecclesia, pp. 5-7.
[3]
This is the
common use of the word in classical Greek; in the later Greek the word denotes
any popular assembly, even a disorderly one; it is this use that is found in
Acts xix. 41. Dio Cassius uses the word to denote the Roman comitia or ruling
popular assembly of the sovereign Roman people. The ruling idea in the word,
whether in classical or in Hellenistic Greek, is that it denotes an assembly of
the people, not of a committee or council. Against this view compare Hatch, The Organization of
the Early Christian Churches (1881), p. 30, n. 11; and for a criticism of
Hatch, see Sohm, Kirchenrecht
(1892),
i. 17, n. 4.
[4] Acts xv. 16; cf. Amos
ix. 11.
[5] Gal. vi. 16; Acts xx.
28; cf. Ps. lxxiv. 2
[7]
The rock on
which the Church is founded is “a human character acknowledging our Lord’s
divine Sonship.” Gore, The
Church and the Ministry, 3rd ed. p. 38. “In virtue of this personal faith
vivifying their discipleship, the Apostles became themselves the first little
Ecclesia, constituting a living rock upon which a far larger and ever enlarging
Ecclesia should very shortly be built slowly up, living stone by living stone,
as each new faithful convert was added to the society.” Hort, The Christian
Ecclesia,
p.17.
[8]
Matt xvi. 22,
23. The suggestion of the Evil One to Peter, and presented to our Lord by
Peter—the possibility of Messiahship without suffering—met the Saviour at the
great moments of His earthly ministry; at the beginning, in the Temptation scene;
here, when he had the vision and gave the promise of the Church; at the end, in
the Garden of Gethsemane. There are indications in the Gospels that it was the
temptation never absent from his mind. In the form in which it presents itself
to His followers—the possibility of saving fellowship with Jesus apart from
trust on a suffering Saviour—it has perhaps also been the crowning temptation
of His Church and followers. If our Lord alluded to this special temptation
when He said to St. Peter, near the end, “Simon, Simon, behold Satan asked to
have you that he might sift you as wheat,” as is most likely from His
references to His own temptations and to St. Peter’s relation to his brethren,
there is a delicate suggestion of fellowship softening rebuke and vivifying the
promise; Luke xxii. 31.
[9] 1 Cor. i. 2.
[10] Phil. i. 1; Eph. i.
1; Col. i. 2; Rom. i. 7.
[11] 1 Cor. xii.; Eph. iv.
4-13; Rom. xii. 3-16. It is important to notice that St. Paul, in Rom. xii. 7,
makes διακονία
a “gift”
which manifests the presence of Christ, and that this word is used to mean any
kind of “ministry” within the Church. See below p. 62.
[12]
For St. Paul’s
statement about the “gifts’: compare Hort, The Christian Ecclesia, pp. 153-70;
Heinrici, Das
Erste Sendschreiben des Apostel Paulus an die Korinther (1880), pp. 347-463;
Kühl, Die
Gemeindeordnung in den Pastoralbriefen (1885), pp. 42-49
[14]
It ought to be
noted, however, that although we do not find the word “ecclesia” in 1 Peter, we
do find the thought of the unity of all believers strongly expressed in a
variety of ways: “Ye are an elect race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a
people for God’s own possession” (1 Peter ii. 9); and in v. 17 we have the word
“brotherhood” used to bring out the same idea: This word in the early centuries
was technically used as synonymous with ecclesia. See below p. 21. The double meaning
of ecclesia is found in Matt. xvi. 18 compared with Matt. xviii. 17. In the
Apocalypse the unity is expressed in the phrase “the Bride, the Lamb’s wife,”
and the plurality in the “Seven Churches” (Rev. xxi. 9; ii. 1, etc).
[15]
1 Thess. ii.
14; cf. i. 1
[16]
1 Cor. i. 12,
13; vi. 9.
[17]
1 Cor. iv. 17;
vii. 17; xi. 2, 23; xvi. l
[18]
Professor
Ramsay traces a growth of definiteness in St. Paul’s use of the word “Church”
from its application to a single congregation to its use to denote what he
calls the “Unified Church,” and ingeniously connects the use in each case with
political parallels. Thus the phrase “the Church of the Thessalonians”
corresponds in civil usage to the ecclesia of the Greek city-state, while the
phrase “the Church in Corinth,” suggesting as it does, “the Church” in other
places as well as in Corinth, corresponds in civil usage to a universal and
all-embracing political organization like the Roman Empire. Ramsay, St. Paul
the Traveller, pp. 124-7. Whether this be true or not, few will fail to find a
connexion between the wide meaning the apostle puts into the word “Church” in
the Epistles to the Ephesians and to the Colossians, and the imperial
associations of the city from which he wrote. “Writing now from Rome, he (St.
Paul) could not have divested himself, if he would, of a sense of writing from
the centre of all earthly human affairs; all the more since we know from the
narrative in Acts xxii. that he himself was a Roman citizen, and apparently
proud to hold this place in the Empire. Here then he must have been vividly
reminded of the already existing unity which comprehended both Jew and Gentile
under the bond of subjection to the emperor at Rome, and similarity and
contrast would alike suggest that a truer unity bound together in one society
all believers in the crucified Lord.” Hort, The Christian Ecclesia, p. 143.
[19]
“Not in
abstraction or isolation, but in communion lies the very meaning of personality
itself,” Moberly, Ministerial Priesthood, p. 5. “Fellowship is to the higher
life what food is to the natural life—without it every power flags and at last
perishes,” Hort, Hulsean Lectures, p. 194.
[20]
This thought
has been beautifully expressed by Dr. Sanday, The Conception of Priesthood (1898), pp. 11-14.
[21]
Exegetes differ
about the exact translation of 1 Cor. xii. 27: ὑμεῖς
δέ ἐστε σῶμα
Χριστοῦ A few (such as Godet) translate it:
“a body of Christ”; by far the largest number translate: “the Body of Christ”;
many “Christ’s Body,” leaving the exact thought indeterminate. It seems to me
that the exact rendering, a or the, cannot be reached from purely grammatical
reasoning. St. Paul is completing his metaphor or interpreting his parable, He
has been emphasizing the fact that the Christian community at Corinth is an
organism with a variety of parts differing in structure and function. It is a
perfect organism in the sense that there is no necessary part lacking that is
required for the purpose the organism is intended, to serve for its support or
increase or for work. The life which pervades the organism in its totality and
in every minutest part is Christ (Col. iii. 14). The organism is the Body of
Christ.
[22] Tertullian, De
exhortatione castitatis, 7; compare De poenitentia, 10; De pudicitia, 21; De
fuga in persecutione, 14.
[23] Compare Dobschütz, Die Urchristlichen
Gemeinden, Sittensgeschichtliche Bilder (1902), pp. 18 ff.
[24] Compare
Robertson, Regnum Dei, p. 54:—“It (the kingdom of
Christ) is the Kingdom of God in its idea—in
potency and in promise: but visibly and openly not yet. This is St. Paul’s
well-known paradox of the Christian life. Our whole task as Christians is to
become what we are.”
[25] The
principle which underlies the claim generally associated with the ambiguous
phrase “apostolic succession” is so curiously like the demand made by “those of
the sect of the Pharisees who believed” in the, days of St. Paul, that it can
be most naturally expressed in the same language if only a “succession of
bishops” takes the place of “circumcision.”
[26] Gal. ii. 9:
“And when they perceived the grace that was given unto me, James and Cephas and
John, they who were reputed to be pillars, gave to me and Barnabas the right
hands of fellowship, that we should go unto the Gentiles, and they unto the
circumcision.” See Sources of the Apostolic Canons,
where ἐκκλησία
appears in § 1 and ἀδολφότης in §
2; Texte
u. Untersuchungen, II. v. 7. 12.
[27] For universa
fraternitas, see the tract De Aleatoribus, 1; Texte
u. Untersuchungen, V. i. 11; omnis
fraternitas, V. i. 14; compare Tertullian, Apologia, 39;
De
praescriptione, 20; De pudicitia, 13.
For πᾶσα
ἡ ἀδολφότης, see
1 Clem. ii. 4; and Harnack’s note on the passage; also 1 Peter ii. 17.