Quote:
Originally Posted by aron
It seems to me that you overlay current meaning onto ancient text, and create an ontological entity that shouldn't exist in its own right, the creation of which becomes a distortion and diversion.
The word 'ekklesia' predated Christ by centuries. See e.g. LXX, "In the midst of the 'ekklesia' I'll sing hymns of praise to Thee". Jesus didn't invent some new term or idea when He told Peter that He'd build "My church". The focus of the church, or meeting, or gathering, is on Jesus, and on Jesus alone. Jesus is the drawing power, Jesus the Architect and Builder, Jesus the light, Jesus the Shepherd and sole trustworthy voice. "In these last days God has spoken to us in the Son. . ." (Heb 1)
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In the LC, they like to talk about what the church isn't, and say things such as "
the church isn't a building", "
we don't go to church", etc. It seems that Nee/Lee developed a lot of ideas about what the church is by approaching the subject from the view of what the church is
not. That is the wrong approach and it leads to the wrong conclusions.
Take the very premise of the ground of locality - that there can only be one church per city. If we replace the word
church with
assembly/gathering, what the LC is really saying is that there can only be one assembly per city. It's a ridiculous notion, and not even the LC practices this. So this leads us to the immediate conclusion that the word
church has an alternative meaning to LCers, and this meaning is what that the ground of locality is based upon. If we are to view the church as it is found in the bible, any talk of boundaries, territory or 'ground' of the assembly starts to sound strikingly divisive.
It's also interesting to consider certain ideas of the church that were summarily dismissed, ones which
Evangelical has also dismissed. One of which is referring to a building as a church. What is any religious building for? It is for
assembly. That is the one and only purpose of any "meeting hall"/building. So it's not all that erroneous to refer to a building as a church. I'm not suggesting that people should do that, but I'm saying that it's a relatively minor issue if someone wants to do so. Same thing with the phrase "going to church". If we operate with the understanding that the church an assembly (any assembly), then you quickly realize that the saying "going to church" is basically the equivalent of "going to assemble". What's the big deal with saying that? I don't see anything wrong. In essence, a reaction to seemingly erroneous notions about the church caused Nee and Lee to form even more erroneous notions.