/kjv/ - An online home for Christians

>>342

Why would you post a communist's sayings on Christianity?

Churches are a place where Christians can meet and fellowship. Very necessary.

>>343

Indeed.

Be thou rebuked, O.P.

>>343

>communist

explain?

Oh, and welcome, /christian/, to our little gathering

>>345

Tolstoy? Wow I read it as Leon Trotsky. My apologies.

>a building for which christian to meet is bad

'no'

>an organize organization for chistians to meet and talk about Jesus is bad

'no'

>>348

This. Just because they went to some uber bad church doesn't mean we all have to quit going.

Apologies in advance for any mistakes in this essay.

Part 1 of 5

I'm surprised at you, /kjv/, I would have thought you'd be more sympathetic or open to this idea, at least curious enough to read and comment on the quotes and links, rather than shut the whole discussion down with "no" and "what he said".

There's two possibilities. One, which is based on several recent comments made in threads, is that there is more of /christian/ and /pol/ on this board than /kjv/. And, of course, when I write that, you understand I mean more of /cathodox/ than /reformedorprotestant/.

Unfortunately, that cannot be helped. As soon as this board opened, the 128th post was from unfriendly old /christian/, possibly even the bitter boardVol. By the end of this series of posts, I guess we'll know whether my suspicion has legs or not.

The second is that reflexively, most folks here defend the idea of churches because they are part of one, particularly because they grew up in one, and they've never conceived of a world without them. That may be because y'all recalled when I used the word "church" Hebrews 10:25 and think the OP is anti-gathering, as in "giving up meeting together".

Yet, I would have thought that if /kjv/ was capable of recognising that if "Tolstoy" seemed to be "Trotski", that was because they were both Russian and the quote was therefore from an Orthodox country and perspective, and therefore meant something quite different when he used the phrase "like what churchmen understand by the Church". That is, that /kjv/ would thereby be more sympathetic to the idea that institutions are not what Christ established on earth, that His Kingdom that He spoke so often about was never going to be found in a building or organisation.

See, the two links pull apart the notion of "church" from the original Greek, and note that when Moses said, in Deut 9:10

And the Lord delivered unto me two tables of stone written with the finger of God; and on them was written according to all the words, which the Lord spake with you in the mount out of the midst of the fire in the day of the assembly.

…the word "assembly" is, in the Septuagint, actually "Ekklesia", the same word that gets translated "church" in almost all translations of the Bible, even though, as the LXX demonstrates, the word does not mean "Church" but something else.

The links explain that in ancient Greek, the word meant "those called out from". It was the word used to describe the assembly of Athenian citizens, the parliament if you like, as far back as the 7th century B.C. They were a minority of the Athenian population "called out from" the general population. So, "assembly" is a better word than "church", but not exactly accurate, either.

This is the word that the Gospel translators (or writers, if they wrote in Greek first) used when Christ said "on this rock", euphemistically meaning Peter, "I will build my [ekklesia]". As the LXX shows, the word had not gained a new meaning by the first century A.D., it still meant "those called out from" or, at least, "assembly". Christ was referring to a subset of humanity, "called out from" the world to be His "Church". What, it is clear, He did not mean was that He would build upon Peter an institution or global organisation.

Continued in Part 2

>>368

Part 2 of 5

And, let's face it, this is Protestantism 101. No one here actually believes that an organisation called "the Roman Catholic Church" is the "Body of Christ" Paul refers to. All protestant belief statements are in agreement that the "Body of Christ" is the global assembly of believers. Heck, EVEN the Catholic Church itself believes this, stating so clearly in the Catechism, (though it does still hold out a little in affirming its "first amongst equals" status).

And the early protestants knew this. William Tyndale, author and publisher of the world's first non-Latin printed Bible, recognised that "church" was not a proper translation of "ekklesia" and rendered it "congregation". As this Bible gained currency amongst the English (literate) population, it was undermining the Church of England with its protestant, Calvinist, Reformist, non-conformist ideas and this just would not do. Elizabeth I was the first monarch to authorise an English translation, and we got out of it the Anglo-Catholic Bishop's Bible, which restored "Church" for "ekklesia" except in Matthew 16:18, the "Assembly" which Christ would build on the "rock" of Peter remained an Assembly. But, James I, keen to put all this in-fighting amongst his subjects to rest, negotiated a new translation, of which this board bears the mark, and, of course, the King made sure there were no more assemblies, only Churches.

Thus it has been in English ever since.

"AAAH-HAAAAAAH!!" you'll rightly protest, "this is all moot because Assembly is what Church means anyway."

Yeah, except that, firstly, it doesn't. Firstly, "Church" originally comes from a word derived from "kyrios" meant "ruler, lord" in the older Greek, the first millennium Greek word "kyrikon" which meant "of the Lord", as in "kyriakon doma" -> "Lord's house", which then became the Old Saxon "Kirika", and eventually German "Kirche", Dutch "Kerk", Scottish "Kirk", Old English "Cirice", middle English "Chirche", and, eventually, "Church".

But, you would be right if we were talking in Latin-derived languages: In Latin, "ekklesia" is "ecclesia"; so in Spanish, "iglesia" means "church", and in French, "église". However, the meaning of all these words has been transformed.

So, secondly, few think the word "Church" means "Assembly" anymore, and dictionaries bear this out defining "church" as, variously:

>a building for public and especially Christian worship,

>an occasion of public divine worship, eg; "goes to church every Sunday",

>the clergy or officialdom of a religious body as opposed to the laity, the clerical profession eg; "considered the church as a possible career"

>institutionalized forms of religion as a political or social force, eg; "conflict between Church and State"

>a body or organization of religious believers, as (a) the whole body of Christians, that is, the Christian Religion; (b) a denomination eg; the Presbyterian church; (c) a congregation

The word has been slowly transformed in meaning through common use. We protestants might know that "assembly" is contained within possible meanings of the word Church, but none of us would ever use the word in this way: "church of people gathered to protest outside the state capitol building".

Still, hey, it's just words, right?

Continued in Part 3

>>369

Part 3 of 5

And I was happy to let this thread slide into oblivion until tonight when I saw something that reminded me why words matter.

We who are here all know this because most, if not all of us, are refugees (or interjecting visitors) from /catholic/ … uh, I mean, /christian/. And as individual posts and indeed whole threads there will have reminded you, there are many, many, many Catholics who simply cannot practically distinguish between the "Church" that Christ would build on the rock of Peter, and the institution that is commonly known as the Catholic Church. How many fights were fought over this issue on that board? How many times did you read protestants were heretics outside the Body of Christ primarily because we were schismatics from the Church in Rome. How many times did you read that

Now, this isn't about re-fighting the good fight on /christian/. I don't care anymore that Catholics want to build an exclusive little club on /christian/, which, I think it fair to say, the BoardVol made plain was his preference. Orthodox were more welcome because, it seems most Catholics believe a reunion is inevitable. (I'm not sure most Orthodox would agree, but that's beside the point.)

The reason this matters is that Catholics feel very protective of their institution because they live under this mistaken conception that confuses "Church" (the ekklesia built upon the rock of Peter) and "Church" (the institution headed by a Pope). They call it "her", an institution of great veneration, that they defend sometimes even to the death, for to besmirch or offend "her" is to besmirch the very corpus of God!!

Yet, we protestants don't hold this view. One of the reasons Luther protested in 1517 was because of the abuses by leaders of an institution, leaders who were entrusted with the souls of tens of millions of people who looked to them to guide them on the road to God's salvation, and they were, at best, lax and lazy with that trust, and, at worst, abusing it.

YET, those same Catholics who view the besmirching of "the Church", that institution, as an offense against God Himself, took to this challenge very indignantly, even violently. Wars were fought. Massacres were conducted. All over an institution that was self-preserving the temporal power of the prince of the Vatican.

And before anyone says, "We, yes, but that's ancient history now, Catholics aren't quite so nutty anymore," need only turn to Boston and a hundred other Catholic Archdiocese across the world.

Continued in Part 4

>>371

Part 5 of 5

My point to all this, then, should, I hope by now, be clear.

By misinterpreting "ekklesia" to mean "church", meaning a building, an occasion of worship, the clergy or officialdom of a religious body as opposed to the laity, the clerical profession, the institutionalized forms of religion or an organization of religious believers … rather than "those called out from" the world, officials in those organisations have conducted horrible injustices, both recent and throughout history, in the name of preserving their mistaken concept for the Body of Christ.

Rather than protecting the "ekklesia" Christ was building, they were protecting an organisation that happened to include many members – but not all of them – of the Ekklesia.

I want to be clear that NOT ALL Catholics contend their Church is Christ's "Ekklesia", indeed, many might even emphatically deny it. But, in practical terms, most seem to believe this. Just like I do not think all Catholic hierarchy members, such as pic-related, are complicit in the crimes the film depicts, even by association. Though, I have a deep concern that certain Cardinals are now sunning it in the Vatican when they should, by all that is just, have served time in a state penitentiary. Nonetheless, I don't hold, for example, Bishop Barron accountable for that, nor thousands or millions of others.

SO, when Tolstoy says, "Nowhere nor in anything, except in the assertion of the Church, can we find that God or Christ founded anything like what churchmen understand by the Church" and when Baptist preacher John Foster says, "I am strongly of the opinion that churches are useless and mischievous institutions, and the sooner they are dissolved the better", perhaps now you have a better idea of why.

I am not disagreeing with the author of Hebrews. I am convinced that believers should assemble, be that in a special-purpose building or in a grain field hiding from authorities, that we should gather to encourage each other on to greater works of love and godliness.

I didn't care that /kjv/ disagreed with me, for not all of us are converts who have no particular attachment to an specific organisation we were raised in like I am – I am loyal to Christ above all else, and often to a body of believers, and almost never to a "church" as Tolstoy's churchmen mean it – but I thought it might be a topic of discussion.

After all, I thought maybe some of us /kjv/-ers may be aware of the "home church" movement in China, where the institutions of officially-sanctioned Christianity are corrupted by the government-insisted-upon primacy of the Party above God, or in Korea, where mainline or official church organisations are being slowly corrupted and people are turning to the traditional meaning of Christ's "ekklesia", or even the "home church" movement in the western church in which folks eschew denominational, building-on-a-Sunday "church" in favour of first-century styled gatherings of members of the "ekklesia".

And I half-expected a discussion along these lines.

Perhaps I expected too much.

Drops mic'

>>372

Thanks for posting, interesting read.

Re: the home church movement in china (sorry I don't know how to green text), my grandma gave me a book called "the heavenly man" about a man called Brother Yun who went through great persecution in China to spread the gospel. I haven't finished it because it made me want to re-read a couple of books my mum sent me in the summer last year by Dave Tomlinson (google him he's very controversial) who I think came up through the house church movement in the 80s in the UK and ran a "church" in a pub in the 90s called Holy Joes.

My parents came through the same kind of scene when they were growing up also. I am just starting to come back to Christianity now after my 15 or so years away from it as a teenager/young man thanks to these books.

We attended a church in my hometown when I was younger which I've no idea what kind it was. I'm only just starting to learn about all the denominations and what they mean and how they view different aspects of Christianity. People went nuts in that place, but anyway, at some point I think around 2000 the church leader went "scru dis ish church ain't a building ima outta here" and it ceased to run/exist, I guess taking on the view expressed in the previous posts to a certain extent.

My parents haven't returned since but, although I haven't/don't talk about religion with my parents, am aware my Dad wants to start going to one again where as my ol' ma' doesn't. My told me it was my mum who sent me the Dave Tomlinson books and that he doesn't agree with them at all. I am really looking forward to seeing him (he hasn't been to London since my graduation 2 years ago and lives 6 hour drive/train away) and asking him about his views on theology and stuff, although I'm a bit scared that he might have some very odd views.

Anyway, sorry for the ramble, I actually meant to just say check out the heavenly man book, it you're interested: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Heavenly-Man-Remarkable-Christian/dp/185424597X

Church, like most places, is what one makes of it. In fact, tne typical parish is much less bureaucratic than most institutions.