Featured The Nature of the Church, OT and NT

Does the NT church include OT saints? My grandfather thought so. His position was historic premil. I followed my grandfather in this until I applied to my mission board in 1977, and had to write that I disagreed with their doctrinal statement where it said, "The church as peculiar to the age of grace." At the candidate committee, my friend said I came out after 2 hours, white as a sheet and sweating profusely. His interview only took ten minutes! So, they encouraged me to study out ecclesiology for myself, and I did. Dr. Monroe Parker, our director, was extremely helpful in this process when I spent a day with him, and I eventually came out agreeing with the doctrinal statement and spending 33 years in Japan.

The verse Granddad (and others) most go to is Acts 7:38, "This is he, that was in the church in the wilderness with the angel which spake to him in the mount Sina, and with our fathers: who received the lively oracles to give unto us." However, to make this mean something exactly the same as the NT church is to ignore polysemy--a linguistic term meaning that a word can have more than one meaning. Just because the same Greek word is used in two places does not make them the same. I could literally give 100's of illustrations of this from the Bible. In this case (as Dr. Tom pointed out elsewhere), is the "assembly" (ekklesia, same as "church" elsewhere) of Acts 19 a NT church? Of course not! It's a meeting of the male citizens of a Greek city.

Now, note the following comparison:

"Church in the wilderness"--did not meet on Sundays, did not baptize, were not born again, had no membership, included lost people, etc.

Church at Jerusalem--Evangelism, preaching, baptism, membership ("added to them" in vv. 41 & 47), regular meetings, etc.

 

Good point.

 

No, that's a different question. You can believe there was no church in the OT, yet still believe that OT saints will be gathered with NT saints in Heaven, based on Heb. 12:23, "To the general assembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect."

 

You could probably sign that doctrinal statement.

 

Probably. Maybe. Not part of the conversation.

 

I assume you are referring to the common definition of the "church" (Gr. ekklesia) as a "called out assembly." The word doesn't really mean that in NT usage, though that is the etymology (word origin). But the meaning of a word is almost never based on its etymology. To make etymology equal the meaning is called the "root fallacy" in linguistics, or sometimes the "etymological fallacy," defined as "The notion that the 'true meaning' of a word is the one to be expected from its etymology" (P. H. Matthews, Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics, p. 128).

The church in the NT has a number of characteristics that no assembly in the OT has: meeting on Sunday, doing evangelism because of the Great Commission, regenerate membership, baptism, the Lord's Supper, local assemblies, etc. The OT saints therefore cannot be part of the church.

However, "I will build" is future active indicative. In other words, the future tense means that when Jesus said that He was not yet building His church.

Sorry, but w Cor 10 teaches nothing about the church. The word is just not there. If we are going to talk about ecclesiology, shouldn't the passage at least have the word "church," or "body of Christ"?

And in 2 Cor. Paul wrote in v. 32, "Give none offence, neither to the Jews, nor to the Gentiles, nor to the church of God." So Paul classified the "church of God" as a separate entity from either the Jews or the Gentiles.