Called out by the Lord
by Mike Oettle
A NEWSPAPER
report mentioning a satanist church made me sit up. How can satanists have a
church? For that matter, how can Scientologists have a church
. . . or atheists?
Sadly, the word has been bandied around so much that no-one seems to know what it means any longer. And as for atheist churches – under United States Federal law, if a group of unbelievers registers with the Internal Revenue Service as an “atheist church”, they’re entitled to the same treatment as Christian churches or religious bodies of any other kind, and can have their own “ministers” and “church” buildings, with tax breaks and allowances of various kinds.
How, you ask yourself, can a nation whose coinage proclaims the motto “In God we trust” tolerate such a situation? But then the US is also the nation whose Supreme Court forbade prayers in public schools on the grounds that it contravened the Constitution’s provision barring “an establishment of religion”
The learned
Justices had forgotten (or chose to ignore the fact) that the men who wrote the
Constitution were not against religion – most of them were church-going Christians
– but against the establishment of any particular religion or
denomination.
Okay, so
what is a church, or the Church?
My
etymological dictionary traces the word church back through early forms of
English and Germanic to a Late Greek word, kirikon (kirikon), which was a quick way of saying doma
kuriakon (doma kuriakon) –
the Lord’s house. Kuriakon or kuriakos (kuriakon/kuriakoV) comes in turn from the Greek word kurios
(kurioV), meaning “master” or “lord”.
So while “church” does mean a building, it also quite literally labels the people who belong to the Lord.
It’s used in English to translate the Greek word ekklesia (ekklesia),[1] which originally described a political assembly of the citizens of a Greek city-state (something like an American town meeting). But it acquires its special meaning from the fact that the Greek word means “those who have been called out”.
That learned man Paul, who hailed from a Greek city, called the followers of Christ the ekklesia not because they formed a political gathering, but because they had been called out by God to belief in the saving power of Jesus Christ.
And he used the term to describe God’s people at all levels, from the small groups who gathered in private homes (because they did not yet have meeting-halls or synagogues), through larger congregations to the entire body of believers across (and beyond) the Roman Empire, represented by the meetings of
apostles in Jerusalem.
In fact, Paul was not the first to describe God’s people as an ekklesia – the word’s significance had been recognised by the scholars who first translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek during the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC,[2] for the benefit of the Greek-speaking Jews living in Alexandria.
Whenever the people of Israel were mentioned in the Bible as being gathered for a religious purpose (as in Deuteronomy 9:10 and 18:16) they translated the Hebrew word as ekklesia. In English Bibles this usually appears as “congregation”.
So while it seems a little strange to refer to the God-fearing Ancient Hebrews as the Church, it’s not entirely wrong. Modern-day Jews may call it misleading, but they forget that they belong to their synagogues first and foremost not because they were born Jewish but because they, too, have been called out by God.
Looking at the Christian Church, we can see that it is quite proper to use it of not only the entire body of believers, but also of specific denominations – although one wonders whether some of today’s isolated little sects have any right to the title.
But that’s a question of Church unity.
And Scientologists, satanists and atheists? Well since none of these groups recognises God Almighty as Lord, they have no claim on the title at all – whatever the IRS has to say about the matter.
