What the Church Is

The commonest thing said about the word for church is wrong, and it is wrong in a way this course has already trained you to spot. Ekklesia, the sermon goes, is built from ek, out of, and kaleo, to call, and therefore means the called-out ones, and therefore the church is by definition a people summoned out of the world. The theology may be true. The argument for it is an etymological fallacy of exactly the kind James Barr took apart, and Luke supplies the refutation in one chapter. In Acts 19 the word appears three times, of the confused crowd in the theatre at Ephesus, of the lawful civic assembly to which the town clerk refers them, and of the gathering he finally sends home. Nobody in that theatre had been called out of anything.

What the word actually meant in ordinary Greek is an assembly, in particular the assembly of the citizens of a city summoned to do public business. That is why Luke can use it of Ephesus without explanation. And in the Greek Old Testament it is the standard rendering of the Hebrew qahal, the assembly of Israel, the congregation gathered before the LORD, which is why Deuteronomy 9:10 can call Sinai the day of the assembly. The other Greek word that renders qahal is synagoge, which should stop anyone building a doctrine on a supposed contrast between the two.

So when Jesus says he will build his ekklesia, a Jewish hearer does not hear a new institution. He hears the assembly of the LORD, the qahal, and he hears the claim that this man will build it and that it will be his. That is the striking thing about Matthew 16:18, and it is more striking than the etymology ever was. James 2:2 then uses synagoge of a Christian meeting (the BSB prints your meeting), and Hebrews 12:23 speaks of the congregation of the firstborn, enrolled in heaven, where the Greek is ekklesia, so the vocabulary remained fluid for a generation.

The other argument in Matthew 16:18 has to be handled without partisanship, because both halves of the church have overplayed it. In Greek, Peter is petros, masculine, and the rock is petra, feminine, and generations of Protestants argued from the difference that the rock must be the confession Peter has just made, or Christ himself, rather than Peter. Generations of Catholics replied that Jesus most likely spoke Aramaic, in which the same word kepha would stand in both places, that John 1:42 preserves Cephas as the name, and that the sentence addresses Peter directly throughout: you are, I will give you, whatever you bind.

Be honest about where the exegesis has moved. A large number of Protestant commentators now grant that the rock is Peter, on the grammar and the flow of the sentence, while denying that anything about papal jurisdiction or succession follows from it; D. A. Carson states this plainly in his commentary on Matthew, and observes that the Protestant resistance was driven more by reaction to Roman claims than by the Greek. What remains genuinely disputed is not mainly the referent of the rock but whether the promise is transmissible, and to whom, which is the argument of section 4 and not of this paragraph. It is worth learning that a concession on a detail is not a surrender of a position, because a teacher who cannot make small concessions will eventually be caught refusing a large one.

The New Testament does not define the church. It pictures it, repeatedly and from different angles, and Paul Minear's Images of the Church in the New Testament counted ninety-six distinct figures. That fact is itself doctrinal. A reality that needs ninety-six pictures is not going to be captured by one, and most bad ecclesiology is one image carried past the point where it can bear weight.

The body is the image of mutual dependence and of union with Christ. 1 Corinthians 12:12-27 works it hardest: many members, one body, the eye unable to say to the hand I do not need you, the weaker parts indispensable, the whole suffering when one part suffers. Romans 12:4-5 makes the same point more briefly. Ephesians and Colossians add what Corinthians does not, that Christ is the head of the body, Ephesians 1:22-23 and Colossians 1:18, so that the church's growth is growth into him, Ephesians 4:15-16. What the image gives you is that no Christian is optional and no Christian is self-sufficient. What it cannot give you is any distance between Christ and the church, which is why it needs the next one.

The bride is the image of covenant love and of a love that comes from outside. Ephesians 5:25-32 has Christ loving the church and giving himself up for her, to sanctify her and to present her to himself as a glorious church. 2 Corinthians 11:2 has Paul promising the Corinthians to one husband. Revelation 19:7 and 21:2 have the marriage of the Lamb and the bride adorned for her husband. The image carries the whole prophetic tradition of Israel as the LORD's wife, Hosea, Jeremiah 2 and 3, Ezekiel 16 and 23, including its capacity for infidelity, which is a note the body image cannot sound at all.

The temple is the image of God's dwelling and of holiness. Ephesians 2:19-22 has the church built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ as the cornerstone, growing into a holy temple in the Lord. 1 Corinthians 3:16-17 says the congregation is God's temple and that God will destroy anyone who destroys it. 1 Peter 2:4-5 has believers as living stones being built into a spiritual house. This is the image that makes what a church does together an act of worship and makes its corruption a desecration rather than a mismanagement.

The flock is the image of leadership and danger. John 10 gives the good shepherd who lays down his life and knows his own. Acts 20:28-29 has Paul telling the Ephesian elders to keep watch over the entire flock of which the Holy Spirit has made them overseers, and to be shepherds of the church of God, because wolves are coming. 1 Peter 5:1-4 tells elders to be shepherds of God's flock that is among you, not lording it over those entrusted to them, and names Christ the Chief Shepherd. Every leadership question in lesson 5 of this module is downstream of this image.

The people of God is the image that connects everything to Israel, and it is the one section 5 will have to argue about. 1 Peter 2:9-10 takes Exodus 19:5-6 and Hosea and applies the whole vocabulary to a scattered, largely Gentile readership. 2 Corinthians 6:16 quotes the covenant formula, I will be their God, and they will be My people. Titus 2:14 has a people for his own possession. Add to these the household of God in 1 Timothy 3:15, the field and the building in 1 Corinthians 3:9, and the branches of John 15, and the picture is complete enough to teach from and far too varied to systematise without loss.

Two distinctions have organised Western thinking about the church, and a student should know both and know who objects to each. The first is between the visible church and the invisible. Augustine observed that the body of the church as it can be seen contains people who are not inwardly Christ's, which he drew from the wheat and the weeds in Matthew 13:24-30 and the net in Matthew 13:47-50, and he spoke of a mixed body. Calvin gave the distinction its standard Reformed form in Institutes 4.1.7, where the invisible church is all the elect known to God alone, and the visible church is the whole company throughout the world that professes to worship God and Christ, with which we are commanded to keep communion. The Westminster Confession 25.1 and 25.2 follows him almost word for word.

Note what Calvin was and was not doing, because the distinction is constantly misused. He was not saying the visible church is unimportant or optional; in the same book he calls her our mother, a maxim he takes from Cyprian's On the Unity of the Church and quotes at Institutes 4.1.1, and then adds in his own words at 4.1.4 that away from her bosom no forgiveness of sins or salvation is to be hoped for, which is stronger language than most of Calvin's modern admirers would dare. The distinction exists to explain how hypocrites can be inside and how the church can be both perfectly holy in Christ and visibly compromised, without concluding either that the visible body is the whole story or that it does not matter.

Roman Catholic and Orthodox theology object to the distinction and the objection should be heard in its own terms rather than dismissed. The concern is that an invisible church of the elect makes the actual, historical, sacramental, ordered community a secondary phenomenon, so that any believer may judge the visible body against an invisible ideal to which he alone has access. Lumen Gentium 8 handles the same problem differently: the church is one complex reality, at once visible assembly and spiritual community, human and divine, and the church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church, while many elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside her visible structure. The Latin verb, subsistit in, was chosen at the Council in place of the simple is, and the choice was deliberate. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued responses in 2007 explaining that the change acknowledged real ecclesial elements elsewhere without conceding that there are several churches of Christ.

Orthodox theology rarely uses the visible and invisible language at all. Its instinct is that the church is the concrete eucharistic community gathered around its bishop, and that to speak of an invisible church is to speak of something the New Testament does not describe. John Zizioulas developed this at length in Being as Communion, where the local eucharistic assembly, with its bishop, is not a branch of the church but the church in that place. On the question of who is outside, a formula often repeated among Orthodox writers is that we know where the church is but we are not in a position to say where she is not, which is a refusal to answer rather than an answer, and is meant as one.

The second distinction is between the church militant and the church triumphant, the ecclesia militans on earth still contending and the ecclesia triumphans in glory. Hebrews 12:22-23 is its principal text: you have come to Mount Zion, to myriads of angels in joyful assembly, to the congregation of the firstborn, enrolled in heaven, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect. Roman Catholic teaching counts three states rather than two, adding those being purified, and the Catechism at 954 sets out the pilgrim church, the purified and the glorified as one communion. Orthodox theology likewise takes the departed saints to be present and active members of the one church, which is the basis of its practice of asking their prayers. The Protestant confessions generally keep two states and reject the third, and the argument about purgatory belongs to the module on last things rather than this one. What all three hold in common is that death does not remove anyone from the church, and a Protestant who has never noticed that Hebrews 12 puts him in the same assembly as the spirits of the righteous made perfect has not read his own text carefully.

The creed agreed at Constantinople in 381 confesses one holy catholic and apostolic church, and those four words became known as the marks of the church, the notae ecclesiae. Every major tradition affirms all four. They mean substantially different things by at least two of them, and the differences are not misunderstandings that better manners would clear up. What follows gives each reading as its own holders state it.

One. Orthodox theology locates the church's unity in the one faith held by all the local churches in eucharistic communion with one another, expressed conciliarly rather than through a universal primate with jurisdiction; a primacy of honour is acknowledged, a primacy of governance is not, and the schism of 1054 and the events that hardened it, above all the sack of Constantinople in 1204, are understood as a rupture in that communion. Protestant confessions locate unity in one Lord, one faith, one baptism, Ephesians 4:4-6, and hold that this unity is real, already given, and only imperfectly expressed in organisation; the Augsburg Confession VII states the principle that has governed the tradition since, that it is enough for the true unity of the church to agree concerning the teaching of the gospel and the administration of the sacraments, and that uniformity of rites is not required. Roman Catholic teaching holds that the unity Christ willed is visible and structural as well as spiritual, that it subsists in the communion of the churches with the bishop of Rome, and that the separated communities, in the language of Unitatis Redintegratio, possess real elements of the church and are used by the Spirit as means of salvation, while lacking the fullness of that communion.

Holy. All three traditions say the same first sentence and then diverge in emphasis. The church is holy because she is Christ's, set apart, indwelt, and given holy things, not because her members are impressive. Lumen Gentium 8 says the church, clasping sinners to her bosom, is at once holy and always in need of purification, and follows constantly the path of penance and renewal; the Latin phrase is ecclesia semper purificanda. Orthodox writers more commonly say that holiness and sinlessness belong to the church as the body of Christ while her members sin, and resist locating sin in the church herself. The Protestant confessions apply to the church the same logic they apply to the believer: she is holy by imputation and by calling, and is being sanctified, so that her visible impurity is expected rather than scandalous. Every one of the three has to account for the same embarrassing fact, that the holiest institution in the world has a long and documented record of cruelty, and none of them has a formula that makes that comfortable.

Catholic. The word is first recorded of the church in Ignatius of Antioch's letter to the Smyrnaeans, written about 107 to 110, where he says that wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the catholic church. Protestant usage takes catholic to mean universal in the plain sense; the Westminster Confession 25.1 describes the catholic or universal church as consisting of the whole number of the elect that have been, are, or shall be gathered into one, and Protestants who recite the creed mean that and not an institution. Roman Catholic teaching takes catholicity to mean both universality of extension and fullness of the means of salvation, so that the church is catholic because Christ is present in her and she possesses the fullness of the faith, the sacraments and the ministry. Orthodox theology derives the word from kath holon, according to the whole, and takes it to mean wholeness or fullness rather than geographical spread, with the consequence that each local church gathered in the eucharist around its bishop is not a fraction of the catholic church but the catholic church present in that place.

Apostolic. This is where the disagreement is sharpest, and where the same word carries three genuinely different meanings. The Roman Catholic account is that the apostles appointed successors, that the college of bishops in communion with the successor of Peter continues the apostolic college, and that the transmission is real, historical and sacramental, handed on by the laying on of hands in an unbroken line. Lumen Gentium 20 states that the bishops have by divine institution taken the place of the apostles as pastors of the church. The evidence appealed to is early: 1 Clement 42 to 44, written from Rome about the year 96, argues that the apostles appointed their first converts as overseers and gave instruction for succession; Irenaeus in the 180s, in Against Heresies 3.3, argues against the Gnostics by listing the succession of bishops at Rome and saying that a doctrine unknown to that public succession is not apostolic. Dei Verbum 7 and 8 add that what the apostles handed on includes everything that helps the people of God to live holily, and that this apostolic tradition develops in the church under the Holy Spirit, so that apostolicity is a living transmission and not an archive. Apostolicity on this account includes apostolic doctrine but is not reducible to it, because doctrine is disputed and the question is who has authority to settle the dispute. That question is the reason the argument does not resolve.

The Protestant account is that apostolicity is fidelity to the apostles' teaching, which is now found in the writings they left. Where the apostolic gospel is preached and the sacraments administered according to Christ's institution, there is the church, and the Augsburg Confession VII says so in a single sentence that the whole tradition has leaned on since. The supporting argument is partly textual and partly historical. Textual: the New Testament charge to the next generation is to guard the treasure entrusted to them and to entrust what was heard to faithful men, 2 Timothy 1:13-14 and 2:2, and Paul's farewell in Acts 20 commends the Ephesian elders to God and to the word of his grace rather than to a mechanism. Historical: the succession lists are compiled later than the events they record, the New Testament uses overseer and elder of the same men, and Jerome remarked that at Alexandria the presbyters themselves made their bishop. Protestants differ among themselves here more than on any other mark. Anglicans and the Nordic Lutheran churches retain the historic episcopate and, in the Porvoo Common Statement of 1992, described it as a sign of apostolicity rather than a guarantee of it; Presbyterians hold succession to run through the presbyterate; many free churches regard the whole category as beside the point.

The Orthodox account holds with Rome, and against the Protestant confessions, that apostolicity is episcopal and sacramental, and then locates it differently from both. Succession is succession in the apostolic faith, carried by the episcopate as its organ but held by the whole body; a bishop who departs from the faith of the councils has not preserved apostolicity by preserving his consecration, and the Orthodox point to bishops deposed for heresy as proof that the church has always thought so. The 1848 Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs, replying to a papal overture, states the principle at its bluntest: the guardian of religion is the very body of the church, that is, the people themselves. Orthodoxy therefore rejects the idea that apostolicity is secured by communion with a single see, holds that the ecumenical councils and the faith they confessed are the standard, and understands its own continuity as the continuity of that faith in a communion of churches rather than as a line running through one of them. Its canonical structure is a communion of self-governing churches with a primacy of honour held by the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, and the Orthodox regard their own episcopal lines as continuous, which is why they do not doubt their own orders while treating the question of orders outside the communion with deliberate reticence.

How sharp this gets is worth one concrete case. In 1896 Leo XIII issued the bull Apostolicae Curae, declaring Anglican ordinations null and utterly void on grounds of defect of form and intention. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York replied the following year in Saepius Officio, contesting both the history and the reasoning, and the Anglican orders are still not recognised by Rome. Do not use that episode to score a point. Use it to see that these are not three vocabularies for one thing; they are three answers to the question of what makes a ministry Christ's, and the people holding them know exactly what they are saying.

Now the question the whole doctrine of the church eventually runs into. God chose a people, made covenants with them, gave them promises about land, throne, temple and blessing, and the New Testament then applies the vocabulary of that people to a largely Gentile body. What is the relation? Three accounts are live among people who read the same Bible carefully, and each is given here as its holders give it.

The covenantal account. There is one people of God in both Testaments, and the church is the continuation and enlargement of the covenant community rather than a second entity. Its central text is Romans 11:17-24, where Gentiles are branches grafted contrary to nature into a cultivated olive tree whose root supports them; the tree is not replaced, and the Gentile is warned not to be arrogant toward the branches. Galatians 3:29 says that if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise. Ephesians 2:11-22 says the dividing wall is broken down and the two are made one new man, so that Gentiles are no longer strangers to the covenants of promise but fellow citizens. 1 Peter 2:9-10 hands a mixed church the language of Exodus 19 without qualification. Romans 9:6 is pressed too, since Paul there distinguishes Israel by descent from Israel by promise inside the one nation. The land, throne and temple promises are held to reach their intended scale in Christ, who is the true temple, John 2:19-21, and whose inheritance is the world, Romans 4:13. Many in this tradition also expect a large future turning of ethnic Jews from Romans 11:25-26; Charles Hodge and John Murray both read all Israel there as the Jewish people, while Calvin read it as the whole company of Jew and Gentile, which shows that the tradition is not uniform.

The dispensational account. Israel and the church are distinct, and the distinction is permanent rather than provisional. Its central move is that the promises made to Israel about land, nation and throne were made in terms Israel could understand and must be kept in those terms, or God's word to them meant something other than what it said. Romans 11:28-29 says that regarding election they are loved on account of the patriarchs, for God's gifts and His call are irrevocable, which is written of unbelieving Israel in the present tense. Acts 1:6-7 has the disciples ask about restoring the kingdom to Israel and Jesus correct their timing rather than their category. Ephesians 3:4-6 calls the inclusion of Gentiles as fellow members of the body a mystery not made known to men in other generations, which is read as showing the church to be a distinct and previously unrevealed body. The prophetic material about a restored land and temple in Ezekiel 40 to 48 and Zechariah 12 to 14 is held to require a future fulfilment to the nation. Charles Ryrie set out the position's essentials in Dispensationalism Today in 1965, following the fuller system of Lewis Sperry Chafer. Progressive dispensationalists, chiefly Craig Blaising and Darrell Bock in Progressive Dispensationalism in 1993, retain the distinction while speaking of one people of God with distinct roles, and hold that Christ's Davidic reign is already inaugurated.

One verse is read both ways and deserves its own note. Galatians 6:16 closes with peace and mercy to all who walk by this rule, even to the Israel of God. The BSB's even reads the Israel of God as the same people as those who walk by the rule, which favours the covenantal account. The Greek word kai can mean and as well as even, and the King James Version, which is public domain, prints it that way: peace be on them, and mercy, and upon the Israel of God. That lets a dispensationalist read two groups, the believers and Israel. The BSB has no footnote at the verse, and the grammar alone does not force either choice.

The new covenant or progressive covenantal account. The covenants are a progression that terminates in Christ, and the question is not Israel or the church but what happens to a promise when the one it was made through arrives. On this reading Christ is himself the true Israel, which is why Matthew 2:15 can apply Hosea's out of Egypt I called my son to him and why Isaiah 49:3 addresses the servant as Israel while also sending him to Israel, 49:5-6. A note on the BSB here: it prints Hosea 11:1 as out of Egypt I called My son and Matthew 2:15 as Out of Egypt I called My Son, with a capital, and it capitalises Me, My Servant and You in Isaiah 49:3, 5 and 6. Hebrew and Greek have no capitals, so these are the translators' decision to read the Servant as Christ. That is the reading this account takes, but it is a reading: the Hebrew of 49:3 names the servant Israel, and many Jewish interpreters take that as the nation, with the commission of verses 5 and 6 falling to a prophet or a faithful remnant. The capital letters make the Christian case without arguing it, and a student should not take them for an argument. The promises are therefore neither transferred to a Gentile institution nor held in reserve for a national future; they are fulfilled in him and reach everyone who is in him. Hebrews 8 and 10 argue that the new covenant of Jeremiah 31 is in force now and that its community is one in which nobody needs to be told, Know the LORD, because they will all know Me, which is taken to mark a real discontinuity with the mixed community of Israel. Peter Gentry and Stephen Wellum argue this at length in Kingdom through Covenant, and a related but distinct movement usually called New Covenant Theology, represented by writers such as Tom Wells and Fred Zaspel, presses the same logic against the covenantal tradition's treatment of the Mosaic law. Both insist that this is not replacement, on the ground that Israel's promises are not taken from her and handed to somebody else but are kept in her own Messiah.

Now supersessionism, and handle the word carefully, because it is used in at least three senses and people talk past each other constantly. R. Kendall Soulen, in The God of Israel and Christian Theology, distinguished punitive supersessionism, the claim that God rejected the Jews as punishment for rejecting Christ; economic supersessionism, the claim that Israel's role was provisional by design and simply expired when its purpose was served; and structural supersessionism, the habit of telling the Christian story in a way that makes the Hebrew scriptures theologically unnecessary between creation and Christ. The first is repudiated by every tradition discussed above, and Romans 11:1 and 11:28-29 are why. The second and third are genuinely at issue, and covenantal theologians commonly reject the label altogether, arguing that expansion and fulfilment are not replacement and that the olive tree of Romans 11 is precisely an image of continuity. Their critics reply that a fulfilment which leaves no distinct future for the people to whom the promises were made is replacement with better manners. That exchange is the live argument and this lesson does not settle it.

The history is the reason care is owed here rather than cleverness. Christian preaching about Israel's rejection has a long record of use against actual Jewish neighbours, from the adversus Iudaeos sermons of the fourth century through medieval expulsions and blood libels to the twentieth century, and the churches of Europe did not, on the whole, distinguish themselves in the 1930s and 1940s. The Second Vatican Council addressed this directly in Nostra Aetate 4 in 1965, teaching that the Jews remain most dear to God, citing Romans 11:28-29, and stating that they should not be presented as rejected by God or accursed; the Holy See's commission returned to it in 2015 in a document taking its title from Romans 11:29. The Protestant declarations of the same period, including the Rhineland Synod's statement of 1980, made similar moves. A theological claim is not refuted by the misuse it has suffered, and nobody should be argued out of an exegetical position by an accusation. But a teacher handling this subject should know what the words he is using have been used to do, and should be able to say his own position without any of the sentences that did the damage.

What is settled, and it is more than the argument suggests: God has not rejected his people, Romans 11:1; Gentiles are included by mercy and have no ground for arrogance, 11:18 and 11:20; there is one olive tree and not two; salvation for Jew and Gentile alike is through Christ, which all three accounts affirm; and the promises of God are irrevocable, 11:29. What is not settled is whether the promises about land and nation have a future to the nation, whether the church is Israel or is joined to Israel, and what the phrase all Israel means in 11:26, where the BSB's And so renders the Greek houtos, which can point to the manner of the salvation or to its sequence. Learn to state the two you do not hold in a form their holders would accept, and notice that the one you find hardest to state fairly is probably the one you have only ever heard described by its opponents.