fundamentalism by blunt instrument
This is dictionary.com’s word of the day today. It sounds disturbing, but it means “twilight, dusk”. Hardly as ominous as it sounds. The word comes to us from the Latin, they say, around the year 1400.
It just struck me as odd, and I thought you might be entertained by it. Hard to imagine using it in a sentence, though dictionary.com does give examples. Try it on your friends tonight!
In my earlier post I defended the notion of calling the body of Christ “the universal Church.” My point was based on the idea that the meaning of ekklesia, the Greek word for church, was advanced beyond its original simple meaning of ‘assembly’ (from secular Greek usage) to refer to any body of believers in the Lord Jesus Christ whether they were in assembly at any given point in time or not.
From Eph 1.22-23, 1 Cor 12.13, and Heb 12.23, the data points to something more than a local body. I recognize that some will try to work these passages into a local-only view. I don’t agree with their conclusions but appreciate the valiant effort.
Today I want to contrast the two ideas and address a few other passages that require an additional term in the concept of the church as the body of Christ.
Just a heads up in case you don’t follow Proclaim & Defend every day (you should!)… I put up a post today raising questions about Al Mohler’s recent appearance at Brigham Young University.
I’ve been doing a little study on the term ekklesia recently. That’s the Greek term translated ‘church’ in the New Testament (at least most of the time). The word is important to Baptists because of the prominence of eccliesiology (the doctrine of the church) to the Baptist distinctives.
NAU Luke 7:30 But the Pharisees and the lawyers rejected God’s purpose for themselves, not having been baptized by John.
The word for purpose here is a very interesting word. Thayer defines it this way:
counsel, purpose … especially of the purpose of God respecting the salvation of men through Christ
The latest audio from the GBCvic
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