Quote:
Originally Posted by Evangelical
How do you deal with the fact that theologians like Wallace state there was one church in each city?
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Because of the fact that the word gets translated inconsistently. Where it fits the theology of one church per city, it's translated Church. (And even there it doesn't always work, like the greetings in Romans 16). Where it doesn't fit, it's translated meeting, or assembly. How many ekklesia like the one dismissed in Acts 19:41 were there in the city at that time? Probably several. But there, the word usually gets translated as something other than Church, so as not to upset the current theological construction. And so forth - it appears to be a theology of convenience, of preference.
Where the concept doesn't fit at all, like in Psalms 1:5, the word is ignored as if it weren't even real. Whatever happened to "Christ and the Church in the Psalms"? It (the concept, or theology) apparently does not exist in Psalm 1:5, when I read the RecV footnotes. Yet the word is right there, in LXX scripture. Why are there voluminous footnotes on the church elsewhere, but nothing in Psalm 1:5? Whatever happened to the vaunted principle of first mention?
So, back to your question, what "church" is that there, in the proposed "one church in each city" template? I don't see it in clearly and consistently presented in exposition of scripture. I see human artifice, a slice-and-dice hack job of textual representation. (Not that I've done much better. But I'm not proposing a new Christian polity a la Nee and Lee)
And my point remains from Matthew 16. When Jesus spoke of "my church", it would be understood that there were ekklesia not of Jesus. The word ekklesia was in common usage long before Matthew 16. It had meaning, already. That's why it was used. Jesus didn't invent the term, whole cloth. Yet we typically treat it as such, in these kinds of "recovered church" conversations.