A Baptist pastor weighs in on the question of when the
church began:
“The church didn’t begin at Pentecost, it began when God called Abram out of Ur of the Chaldees. All who believe are descendants of his promise.
Nothing has stopped his church for over 4000 years and nothing can.”
Reply to this sort of thing in 180 characters? You have to
be kidding. It’s one reason certain social media platforms are inferior places
for Christian discussion. They foster snappy rhetorical flourishes, but
discourage nuanced analysis. That doesn’t make them useless, but it certainly
limits their usefulness.
I suppose one might reply, “It depends how you define ‘church’.”
That may get the attentive reader thinking. Or not. So let’s try something
a little longer-form.
The Faith of Abraham
There is a legitimate sense in which one can say it all
began with Abram, one of many men God renamed. Abraham is “the father of us all”,
meaning that his faith is the model for all men and women who have been made
right with God in all times and places. He is “the father of many nations”, as it is written. But is that all the church is: the sum total since Abraham of
those who share a common belief in God and, ultimately, in his Christ?
That can’t be quite right. It’s not how the New Testament
uses the word. It’s not even how most people use it today. And if we are using
a word in a sense almost nobody around us uses it, it is not a crazy thing to
suggest we could think about rephrasing what we are trying to say. At very
least we are not communicating well.
When the average person today asks about your “church”, they
are not inquiring about your spiritual connection with Abraham, even if you
think they should be. Rather, they are curious which faith community you are
part of.
So it’s fine to say that we all share the faith of Abraham.
It’s true, and it distinguishes Christian belief from that of other religions
which may be named. Other religions claim Abraham as their father too, but their adherents do not share Abraham’s faith. Muslims and Christ-rejecting Jews are not part of that sort of “faith community”.
The faith of Abraham is a decent starting point when we are
talking about the meaning of “church”. But that’s all it is.
Faith and Community
There is more to a “church” than mere faith, not that faith
is unimportant. Abraham had faith, but he wasn’t really part of any earthly
community. After all, Abraham himself was three generations pre-Israel. He was
part of a spiritual community spanning millennia, sure, but in this world he
was almost completely alone. He had a believing wife for part of his time on
earth, but even his righteous relative Lot did not stay with him.
It should not be difficult to understand that it is possible
to have faith without community, or to have community without faith. But the real
church requires both.
It will not be news to most of our readers that the Greek word translated “church” is ekklÄ“sia.
It simply means “gathering” or “assembly”. When used in its theological sense,
it means a company of Christians, whether we are thinking across time or in any
particular geographic location. In the book of Acts, it was characteristic of
believers in Jesus Christ that “all who believed were together”. This pattern continued even under persecution. In Corinth there was an
identifiable group of Christian believers called “the church”, and likewise in
Rome, Cenchrea, and all over Europe, Asia and the Middle East. What defined
these churches was not just their common faith, but the fact that they gathered
to share it.
The Importance of Pentecost
Still, if all our definition of “church” requires is Abraham-style
faith and gathering, our Baptist pastor’s comment could pretty much stand.
Unfortunately, he fails to grasp the significance of Pentecost.
In the early first century, almost 1,900 years after Abraham’s body went into one of the many caves in Machpelah, Jesus Christ himself spoke of
the church as still future: “I will build my church.” That should be enough right there, but the writings of the apostles make this even more explicit. The “one body” which constitutes the church could not possibly exist until after Jesus had died. It was
Christ’s death that broke down the
dividing wall of hostility — it made one “new man” of two, so making peace — and his resurrection made it possible for him to become the church’s living head.
Thus the coming of the indwelling Holy Spirit to the people
of God at Pentecost was indeed the beginning of the church as we understand it today.
It’s not just that we have Abraham as our father and faith-model. It’s not just
that we get together to share that faith. The church is what it is because “in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body — Jews or Greeks, slaves or free — and all were made to drink of one
Spirit.” That happened once and for all at Pentecost.
To minimize the
importance of the “new man” that was created there is to fall short of a
biblical understanding of the word “church”. The magnitude of the difference between our current state and that of believing Israelites gathered with others of their kind in the wilderness under Moses cannot be overstated.
No comments :
Post a Comment