The Church

A Theological and Historical Account

Bray, Gerald

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781493402557
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

Renowned evangelical theologian Gerald Bray provides a clear and coherent account of the church in biblical, historical, and theological perspective. He tells the story of the church in its many manifestations through time, starting with its appearance in the New Testament, moving through centuries of persecution and triumph, and discussing how and why the ancient church broke up at the Reformation. Along the way, Bray looks at the four classic marks of the church--its oneness, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity--and illustrates how each of these marks has been understood by different Christian traditions. The book concludes with a look at the ecumenical climate of today and suggests ways that the four characteristics of the church can and should be manifested in our present global context. This accessible introduction to the church from an evangelical perspective explores ecclesiology through the lenses of church history and doctrine to reveal what it means for us today. Bray discusses the church as a living reality, offering practical ways churches and individuals can cooperate and live together.

1
The Origins of the Church

The Church and the Old Testament People of God

Unlike the world, the Christian church was not created out of nothing. Its beginnings can be dated to the period immediately following the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, who was its inspiration and perhaps even its founder. Whether Jesus deliberately intended to establish a body of followers who would carry on his teaching after his departure has been disputed in modern times, but the belief that he did was universal for many centuries. It is hard to explain why Jesus chose and trained a body of disciples if he had no thought of perpetuating his ministry. The New Testament tells us that it was at the feast of Pentecost, seven weeks after the resurrection, that Peter stood up in Jerusalem and proclaimed that the ancient prophecies had been fulfilled. God’s Holy Spirit was then poured out on the three thousand people who believed his message, and the church as we know it was brought into being.1

The Pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit was understood by those who took part in it to be a fulfillment of the promises that God had made to their ancestors, promises that could be traced back to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Israel itself was the name that God had given to Jacob because he had fought with God and prevailed—an extraordinary statement that demonstrates how privileged Israel’s relationship to God was.2 The biblical accounts do not hide the fact that Israel was closely related to the surrounding nations, some of which were also the offspring of Abraham and Isaac, though they make it clear that these other nations had not been chosen by God. Somewhat surprisingly perhaps, the language they spoke came to be called Hebrew, a word apparently taken from the otherwise unknown Eber (or Heber), who was a great-grandson of Shem, one of the sons of Noah.3 Why this was so is never explained, but the use of this term has never been questioned. For a time, the name Israel was used to describe the ten northern tribes that broke away from the kingdom centered on Jerusalem, which was then called Judah after the name of its dominant tribe. But after the ten tribes were taken into exile, the terms “Israel” and “Judah” merged to the point where they became virtually synonymous, a situation that still obtains today.4

This was the situation that prevailed in the time of Jesus. Israel was a single Jewish nation, based in Palestine but with a significant Diaspora population in both east and west. The easterners were mainly located in Mesopotamia, where they had remained after the Babylonian exile. The Old Testament books of Daniel and Esther remind us that these Jews played a significant role under the Persians, and several centuries later they would flourish again as major contributors to the development of the Talmud, a repository of Jewish learning that is of central importance for later Judaism. But in the New Testament, the voice of this Diaspora community is virtually silent. It is possible that the wise men who came to find the baby Jesus had heard of Jewish messianic hopes from members of that community, but if so, nothing is said about it.5 Babylon is mentioned in the New Testament book of Revelation, but it is generally agreed that this is symbolic and not intended to refer to the historical city. Peter greeted the people he wrote to from “Babylon,” but again, most commentators take this as a code word for Rome as there is no evidence that Peter ever went to Mesopotamia.6 But on the day of Pentecost, we are told that there were pilgrims from what was then the Parthian Empire, the successor state to ancient Persia, and we can assume that some of them must have become Christians at that time.7 But what happened to them afterward is unknown, and we have to say that the eastern Diaspora played no significant part in the emergence of the Christian church.

It was very different with the western Diaspora. This had emerged after the time of Alexander the Great (336–323 BC), whose conquest of the Persian Empire brought Palestine into the orbit of the Greek, and later of the Roman, world. Jews were soon to be found in significant numbers in Alexandria and in the other major cities of the Mediterranean. They became Greek speakers, and within a few generations had translated their Scriptures into that language. By the time of Jesus, they were producing great scholars, of whom Philo of Alexandria (d. AD 50) was the most important. He wrote commentaries on the Bible that were widely read in the early church, though they do not appear to have had any impact on the New Testament writers themselves. Saul of Tarsus was one of these Diaspora Jews, and it was in large measure because of him that the early church expanded into the Greco-Roman world.

In the late nineteenth century it was fashionable to portray the birth of Christianity as a kind of fusion between Jewish and Greco-Roman culture, but this hypothesis is no longer tenable. The New Testament was written in Greek, but the Gospels are clearly centered in Palestinian Judaism. We do not know whether Jesus spoke any language other than his native Aramaic, but even if he could speak some Greek, there is no sign that he ever ministered in it or that he was familiar with Greek literature and philosophy. His teaching can be fully explained within its Jewish context, which is where the surviving records place it, and modern scholars generally respect this. Today, it is the links between Jesus and his Jewish background that dominate academic discussion of the origins of Christianity. Greco-Roman influences were certainly present later on, but they are usually regarded as secondary and unconnected with Jesus himself.

It is now universally agreed that Jesus was born a Jew, that he chose his disciples from among his own people, and that the first Christian believers were for the most part also Jews.8 The Gospels tell us that Jesus occasionally ministered to individuals who were not Israelites, but such cases were exceptional and were perceived as such at the time. When he got into controversy with the Samaritan woman at the well, Jesus did not hesitate to tell her that “salvation is from the Jews,” a statement that explicitly denied the claims of her own religious group.9 He could also be quite harsh toward non-Jews (or gentiles, as they are usually known) who approached him for help, though when they did so, he normally responded to them positively and could even observe that their faith was greater than anything to be found in Israel.10 In sum, Jesus made it clear that he was sent to the Jews and not to others, but when others came to him of their own free will, he did not turn them away.

This approach was to be of particular relevance for the early church. One of the most significant controversies it had to face was whether non-Jews could become Christians without first becoming Jews. The Samaritans, whose beliefs were a kind of syncretistic and primitive form of Judaism, belonged in a special category, and we know that Jesus was prepared to reach out and embrace them to some extent.11 Shortly before his ascension into heaven, Jesus commissioned his disciples to take the gospel to Samaria, which they duly did, but at first the Samaritans were baptized in the name of Jesus only and did not receive the Holy Spirit.12 We are not told why this was so, but it may be that Philip, who evangelized them, thought they were second-class Jews and therefore ought not to receive the full blessing promised to Christians. That is speculation, of course, but we know that it was an anomaly, because when the apostles in Jerusalem heard about it, they rushed down to Samaria and put things right by laying hands on those who had been inadequately baptized.

Their attitude toward gentiles, on the other hand, was distinctly less welcoming. Over the years, a few gentiles had become familiar with Judaism and attached themselves to synagogues as “God-fearers,” so they were among the first non-Jews to be evangelized. Cornelius, a Roman centurion stationed at Caesarea Maritima on the Palestinian coast, was a test case, which is why his story is recounted at great length in Acts 10–11. He was a gentile who was very sympathetic to Jews and had done as much as any outsider could to make himself acceptable to them. An angel of God appeared and told him to seek out the apostle Peter, who was staying in nearby Joppa at the time. Peter, however, was not prepared for an encounter with someone like Cornelius. Before the two men could meet, God had to teach Peter in a dream not to consider anything unclean—a reference to Jewish food laws, but one that could easily be extended to cover gentiles. When Cornelius’s messengers arrived, Peter agreed to go with them, but although he understood that what was happening was of God, he still went somewhat reluctantly. Only when he heard Cornelius’s story did his resistance break down, and he preached the gospel to gentiles for the first time.

Cornelius and his household believed in Jesus, and the Holy Spirit fell on them (which had not happened to the Samaritans), so Peter baptized the entire household. He had been won over by these events, but the members of the Jerusalem church were another matter. When Peter reported back what had happened, they resisted him until he explained the situation, whereupon they accepted it in much the same way that Peter had. But we know that was not the end of the story, because later on, when Peter was in Antioch having fellowship with gentiles there, members of the Jerusalem church appeared and put pressure on him to desist—which he did.13 That provoked a dispute with Paul, which was finally resolved in the gentiles’ favor, though with certain conditions attached. Gentiles could join the church, but they were expected not to offend Jewish Christians by eating meat that had been sacrificed to idols or that had been killed in a way that contravened the Jewish food laws.14

A tug of war was going on at this time between those who thought like Paul and the so-called Judaizers, who seem to have set up a kind of rival mission in order to counteract his “liberal” policies.15 Today, Jewish Christians are a small minority in the church, and much of this ancient controversy sounds petty and irrelevant to us, but its significance should not be minimized. The fear of the Judaizers was that gentile converts would take the church away from its Jewish roots, and they were not entirely wrong to think that. Non-Jews almost never learned Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament, and had little or no feeling for Jewish laws and customs. The Judaizers were wrong to oppose letting them become church members, but they were right to believe that the church could not just walk away from its Israelite inheritance. Somehow, Christians had to come to terms with that ancient tradition, whose promises they claimed to have inherited, without becoming enslaved to it.

The difficulty that Paul had to face was that the church was not just a continuation, in slightly modified form, of ancient Israelite tradition. As Jesus told his disciples, the law of Moses and the message of the prophets were authoritative until the time of John the Baptist, but in Jesus’s ministry a new era had begun.16 Jesus claimed that those who knew how to read the Hebrew Scriptures properly would find that they spoke about him—in other words, that their true meaning would only be understood as they were read in light of the revelation that he proclaimed in his teaching and worked out in his life and ministry.17 He even said that not a single letter of the law would be overturned; it would all be explained and fulfilled by him.18 At the ver...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. The Origins of the Church
• 2. The New Testament Church
• 3. The Persecuted Church
• 4. The Imperial Church
• 5. The Crisis of the Imperial Church
• 6. What Is the Church?
• 7. What Should the Church Be?
• Appendix : The Ecumenical Councils
• For Further Reading
• Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Sources
• Index of Modern Authors
• Index of Selected Names
• Index of Subjects
• Back Cover