What is a flippin’ church anyway?

I guess that the word ‘church’ conjures up lots of images in most peoples minds. When my oldest daughter was about 7 she was given home work to draw a picture of a church. At that time our church met in her school’s hall so this presented her with a problem. We talked about it and I told her that we believed that the church was the people and not a building, so she drew a picture of lots of people. 

Needless to say it wasn't what the teacher was after! But for many people, even Christians, the building with a spire at the corner of the street is a church. Other people talk about going into the church, meaning someone who has become a priest or minister. Others ask questions of the church, meaning they want to know what the Head Quarters think on a subject. But for most Christians they would tell you that on Sunday mornings they go to church, meaning they go to a service of some kind or other. So is church the people, the building, the HQ or the service, or is it a combination of some of these things?

May I suggest that to begin a brand new journey looking at all of the places we have already been won’t get us to our desired destination. If I plan to go to the USA, looking at my holiday snaps from Greece or my guide book from France, isn’t going to help me at all. What I would need would be a map and guide books of the USA. So to answers my question about what the flippin church is by looking at what it looks like now, isn’t going to help us find the real church. We must begin with the guide book of all guide books, the Bible.

In the introduction I mentioned that the word church is found in 106 verses of the New Testament. In fact ‘church’ isn’t found in the Old Testament at all. But I’m already not telling you the truth. The word ‘church’ isn’t in the bible at all, Old or New Testament! Now before you burn this book as total heresy let me qualify what I mean. The Greek word which we translate as ‘church’ in our New Testaments is ‘ekklesia’, its where we get our English word ecclesiology (meaning the study of the church) from.

I said that ‘church’ isn't in the Old Testament at all, but in fact the word ‘ekklesia’ is found in the Old Testament on several occasions.

In 280BC, seventy two men translated the Hebrew scriptures into Greek.  We call this Greek Old Testament the Septuagint. In this Greek version of the Old Testament, ekklesia is translated as ‘the congregation’ of Israel, as in:

Solomon held the feast at that time, and all Israel with him, a great (ekklesia) assembly, from Lebo-hamath to the Brook of Egypt, before the LORD. 1 King 8:65

God Almighty bless you and make you fruitful and multiply you, that you may become a (ekklesia) company of peoples. Gen 28:3

In the Old Testament, ekklesia is always a name for the people being gathered or identified. Jesus and the apostles would have known this. So when we come to the New Testament its very interesting how the writers use this word ‘ekklesia’ which is found in 115 places in the New Testament. In the King James Version it’s translated into English 112 times as ‘church’ and the remaining 3 times it is translated ‘assembly’.

When we take out a map of the USA to plan a journey we would be foolish if we looked at Alabama and saw that there was a Birmingham there and assumed that the Birmingham in Alabama was anything like the one we have in the West Midlands of England, but that is exactly what many do when we read our bibles, not least when attempt to understand what God means by church. We must not be tempted to read how we experience church now into the Bible's use of ekklesia, but ask “What did Jesus and the Bible’s writers mean when they used the word ekklesia?”, when we come to define church today. To clear the ground and get to this point, we need to first know how we got to where we are today with our translation of ekklesia as ‘church’ and not ‘assembly’ or ‘congregation’.

Flippin’ Translations

If you look in a good English dictionary you will find that the English word ‘church’ is not taken from the Greek word 'ekklesia' but from ‘kyridakon'. What is astonishing is that ‘kyridakon’ isn’t found in the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, it only came into being as a word in the 16th Century! So the English word ‘church’ can’t be translated back into Greek because there is no word in the New Testament Greek that is the equivalent of the understanding of the English word. There are crime novels with less intrigue than this!

If you have never exclaimed ‘flippin’ church’ before, you will most definitely do so now. What on earth is going on? How did we get this flippin’ word ‘church’?

To see what happened we need to look at a time when Christians were indeed killing one another in the name of Jesus, but first lets go back much further to the fourth century AD when St Jerome translated the manuscripts he had, which were in Greek, into the lingua franca of the known world, Latin. The boy done good, so good in fact that until the late 14th century we had no other bibles but the Latin Vulgate, and certainly no chance of having one in English.

Then along came John Wyclif the Master of Bailiel College, Oxford. He set the authority of the Bible against the authority of the Pope, but equally important and more so for our journey is that he translated the Latin Bible into English. Although Wyclif died a natural death in 1384, his followers were violently opposed by those who did not want English language Bibles and so the Roman Catholic church had his body dug up and burned and his ashes scattered on the river Swift. See how these Christians loved one another!

Now Wyclif was a great man of God, but he was only translating from the Latin Bible with all of St Jerome’s errors from the fourth century. Nevertheless, you can just imagine Wyclif writing out the whole thing by hand (it was 70 years before the invention of the printing press) and trying to find the right words. I’m not sure if Wyclif knew that he was setting light to a slow burning fuse to a huge powder keg, but that’s exactly what he did. The fuse burned until 1526 when William Tyndale fanned it into flame with his new translation into English, but using the then (thanks to printing) newly available Greek text. The English bishops objected to the translation into English and so Tyndale, who had been working in Europe for fear of being arrested,  was caught and executed at the age of 42 in 1536 by order of Charles the Fifth, the Holy Roman Emperor.

Now you are probably thinking, this is all very well and good Paul, but you have strayed way away from ekklesia, what is your point? Ah, I’m so glad you asked me. My point is that Tyndale and his contemporaries chose to translate ekklesia as ‘congregation’ and not ‘church’. In fact all of the next generation of translators followed suit. During the reformation in England the word ‘church’ wasn't found in the bibles used, but later King James the First of England wanted a new Bible, authorised by him and that one translated ‘ekklesia’ as ‘church’.

The English word ‘church’ was in common usage throughout this time for the Holy Catholic church and the large organised protestors against Rome, like the Lutheran churches. The word ‘church’ for a local congregation was first used by Theodore Beza in 1556, a protestant, who was a follower of John Calvin. As a Presbyterian, Beza believed in the idea of a catholic church and its hierarchal form of government and therefore chose to support this false concept by using the word ‘church’ instead of ‘assembly’ or ‘congregation’ when translating ekklesia. He understood what Birmingham, England was like and made it a model for what the Alabama city must be like. Thus causing centuries of chaos for visitors going there. If you see what I mean.

But it doesn't matter what I mean. The question we will look a next time is what did Jesus mean when he said "I will build my church"?