Anonymous Asks (389)

“When did the Church begin?”

Two answers to this question are common among evangelicals. The Dispensational answer is “At Pentecost in the early first century AD.” The answer of Replacement Theology (“RT”) is “The people of God are one throughout the entire Bible.” Since “church” [ekklēsia] means a congregation (i.e., more than one person), the Church can then be said to have begun with the second human being ever saved, perhaps Eve or Abel. Others argue Abraham is “the father of us all”. Either position adds thousands of years to the age of the Church.

If you think the difference is a mere numeric technicality, think again.

Parsing the Implications

Readers who were expecting me to produce evidence for either position today will be disappointed. You can find the Dispensational view set out here and the view of Covenant Theologians here. Today, I’m much more interested in pointing out how much your answer to that apparently trivial question will affect you if you take it seriously and pursue every spiritual angle that naturally follows from it. It will massively change the way you read your Bible. Consistently applied, it will change how you live.

If the Church did not begin at Pentecost, then the Church is Israel and Israel is the Church. There is no meaningful distinction to observe between the two. While believing the people of God are one throughout history offers the promise of a pleasing sense of continuity between Old and New Testaments, that view has other less-desirable implications.

The Church as Israel and Vice Versa

I’m unlikely to catch them all today, but here are a few logical corollaries to rejecting Pentecost as the birth of the Church, some more significant than others:

• If the Church did not begin at Pentecost, “I will build my church” means no more than “I will keep building my church as I have been doing for millennia.” It offers the promise of nothing new or distinct. This seems odd coming from a branch of Christendom that purports to value the Church so highly.
• If the Church did not begin at Pentecost, we cannot take the promises made through the Old Testament prophets concerning national Israel literally. We must either discard them as no longer applicable, or else attempt to spiritualize them and apply them to ourselves today. In theory that should work; in practice few RT expositors attempt it. Thus, we will find little or no value in predictive prophecy concerning anything but the first coming of Christ. Our understanding of prophecies that appear to address the bright future of national Israel will be subjective and personal, and we will have no way to verify it.
• If the Church did not begin at Pentecost, Israel has no distinct national promises or hope. Therefore, the meaning of most Psalms is as personal and subjective as most of the Prophets. We will also have no good explanation for the existence of the imprecatory Psalms.
• If the Church did not begin at Pentecost, we must find figurative meanings for much more than just the word “Israel” if we are to get anything meaningful from the Psalms and Prophets. We must also spiritualize place names like Jerusalem, the Mount of Olives, Azal and hundreds of others, or else ignore them entirely. We will find it is much easier to explain things away than to assign them a spiritual meaning about which we can have no confidence because we simply made it up.
• If the Church did not begin at Pentecost, there is no valid reason for believers to anticipate receiving Israel’s promised blessings while being excused from Israel’s promised curses. They are a package.
• If the Church did not begin at Pentecost, there is no reason beyond personal preference not to practice the Sabbath rest and other aspects of the Law of Moses. There is no hard line in the sand telling us where to stop “legalizing” our faith by introducing into it elements of Judaism.
• If the Church did not begin at Pentecost, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in Acts 2 and elsewhere was essentially meaningless, adding nothing to the experience of the modern believer and signifying nothing new about God’s relationship with his people.
• If the Church did not begin at Pentecost, the presence of Christ as its living Head has no greater significance or intimacy than the pillars of cloud and fire that led Israel in the wilderness.
• If the Church did not begin at Pentecost, the resurrection and ascension of Christ tell us nothing significant about the Church’s mission and identity.
• If the Church did not begin at Pentecost, we have no explanation for the NT institutions of the Lord’s Supper and believer’s baptism, and no reason to prefer them to the practices of the OT people of God.
• If the Church did not begin at Pentecost, the expression “your people” that appears seven times in Daniel really means “anyone and everyone who believes”. So Michael is the great prince who has charge of the Church, and the seventy weeks of Daniel apply to you and me.
• If the Church did not begin at Pentecost, its members at some point in history should either expect to endure the Great Tribulation or else find a way of interpreting the book of Revelation to exclude the Church’s presence on earth during that era. Moreover, if the Church is to go through the Great Tribulation, RT expositors cannot explain what purpose this would serve.
• If the Church did not begin at Pentecost, there is no biblical reason to prefer a Jewish presence in modern Israel to an Arab presence. Some RT adherents argue the world would be better off if the nations re-dispersed Jews currently living in Israel throughout the world.

One Little Difference

Believers concerned about the harsh language sometimes used to hash out our theological differences remind us that Replacement Theologians and other Reformed believers are our brothers in Christ. This is most certainly true. Expressions like “the Rapture heresy” do little to foster unity between brothers and sisters with whom we hope to share eternity.

At the same time, we ought to recognize that even one little difference in interpretation may have theological and practical implications that are far from trivial. There’s no way to get around the fact that Reformed Theologians and Dispensationalists are reading from very different Bibles.