Knowing the Church Series Part 23
When the Long War Against God's People Began
The separation of humanity into two groups began in The Garden of Eden. It was there that sin that is rebellion against God and the desire to unseat Him from His place as the creator, authority, and judge of all living things. The first group includes all people, as all inherited their first parents' proud and lustful disposition. The second group is those who, by the grace and sovereign choice of Almighty God, made salvation a gift by God-given faith.
When the Long War Against God's People was First Revealed
God's people entered the war against demonic beings as early as Abel, a direct son of Adam and Eve. Abel offered a worthy sacrifice to God because he had become a child of God, but Cain was rejected because he rejected God's command for a blood sacrifice.
Through Abraham, the father of the Jewish nation Israel, God's people began to take the form of a family. Under Moses, Israel received the law, so there would be no doubt concerning God's will. The family of Israel was always divided into two groups: one, those transformed by God's grace, such as Moses, Aaron, Joshua, and Miriam, and others not named, and second, those by biology alone who were left without a spiritual rebirth.
The rebirth of God's children is what the Bible calls the saved remnant. Samuel was a prophet among many, but during his days in the time of the judges, Israel rebelled against God being king. They wanted a king like all the other nations. God permitted the Israel of hypocrites, those who take God's name in vain as they belong to God in name only and not practice, to have their way. God said to Samuel, "Listen to the voice of the people regarding all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me from being king over them" 1 Samuel 8:7.
God had many reasons for allowing the people to have their way, as God allows all sin to find a place on earth to further His perfect will and plan in the world. However, the remnant should never be satisfied to see sin abound, nor should they stand silently by as if it were lawful. There were few godly kings, and not even David said that the kingship was ungodly and we should discontinue the practice. I don't know his reason. Perhaps he did not want to divide the kingdom; neither am I his judge. I understand that the practice was an open rebellion against God, and God never rescinded calling it rebellion.
When the Long War Against God Continued
I offer the following article for those willing to read a ten-page declaration of how Satin continued his Long War Against God. Perhaps you can't read it now, but you could over the following week. I place my stamp of approval upon it, as it is historically accurate as it is Biblically. The article gets at the heart of the problem, even though the author would tell you it is only a taste of the extent to which Satin has harmed the Church that belongs to Jesus Christ.
I do not imply that God is not sovereign or not in control, but that God's people have a responsibility to proclaim and live the truth at the cost of their lives. All twelve of the Apostles of Jesus Christ lost their lives literally. They confronted, criticized, and eventually rejected their Hebrew brothers, and the New Testament declares it before the world. Eventually, Israel will be restored, and all God's promises to them will be fulfilled; God's faithfulness demands it. We, the Church, should be so faithful. The Long War Against God's People roars until today. Are you aware of where you stand?
Read the article that identifies how The Long War against God's People continues against His Church.
The “Polygamous” Church: The Covenantal Short-Circuit in our Kirk-based Theology By Watchman Trent
The last few years have demonstrated a startling fragility in the Christian institutions of America, and the western world more broadly. For months and years after the COVID response was shown to be a hypocritical sham, Christian institutions which had for decades, bullied people with a ‘divine command’ to ‘be in church in person every Sunday’ shamefully prostrated themselves before the COVID closure orders of their One True Lord of the Sabbath, the Almighty State. Likewise, teachers who had for years preached pietistic withdrawal from politics and particularly decried those who involved themselves in (gasp) the Trump movement, publicly marched beside communists and homosexuals to demonstrate their commitment to the woke church and its vicious priests. But enough about 9Marks and Jonathan Lehman, I could multiply examples from every denomination, tradition, movement, and sect claiming the name of Christ in America.
Many people are asking the question why our institutions, in particular our most conservative institutions, are proving so vulnerable to these challenges. More to the point, why are our institutions leaving the Christian Faith and the people of God so vulnerable to what are in many ways far less sophisticated and less intellectually sound challenges than the Christian community faced in the 1960s or 1990s.
There are undoubtedly many reasons for this to be the case. But one, which I will advance here, lies in the definition of ekklesia, and how that truth has been ignored or blatantly mishandled by virtually all of American Christianity.
What you say? How could the church, the common practice of Christians be wrong? Would God allow his people to miss the meaning of a word as basic and fundamental as the meaning of Church? Indeed look at all the success that we have had throughout the centuries.
Well first of all, if you are a Protestant you should not say such ignorant things. If you are sheltering under the right and privilege to return to the Scriptures as the ultimate authority, a right that was purchased by the sacrifices of the Reformers and then repurchased generation after generation since, always with rejection and often with blood, you should know better.
Even in the Old Testament, the prophet Samuel warned the people of Israel that the institution of kingship would lead inevitably to tyranny and oppression. The fact that God used the disobedience of the children of Israel in his plan to raise up the Messiah, does not excuse the disobedience of rejecting God as king. And, if we were inclined to limit this to the Hebrew
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people, our own experience in the West with the Divine Right of Kings and all of its attendant evils should silence our tongues. God allows his people to engage in spectacular structural sins.
But another example is polygamy. There are five covenantal structures in the Bible, five Covenantal units you might say. These are the living spirit (individual), the married couple (and the broader principle-agent relationship), the household (hierarchical teams), the assembly or ekklesia (decentralized organizations from markets to religious movements), and the city or political covenant.
Polygamy is explicitly permitted, and even required in certain circumstances in the Law. The only explicit limitations in the Law are on kings, and then there are certain requirements to provide for the women in question. But the New Testament makes clear that polygamy is disfavored by God, and that it disqualifies someone from leadership.
What is going on here? The five covenantal structures can be thought of as safety nets, with the household, oriented around private property (Thou Shalt Not Steal) serving as the central civilizing institution. In a healthy society, households and the broader marketplace should be organized in such a way that a woman’s labor can produce enough value that she can provide for herself, and accumulate property through her own wisdom (Proverbs 31). But in the ancient world, oftentimes there was not enough liberty, not enough justice, not enough adherence to God’s law by the broader society to make this work. Furthermore, in a world where being cared for by a husband was an absolute necessity, and husbands were in short supply, polygamy was often-time better than the alternatives.
But this is using the sexual relationship, which properly ought to be confined to marriage per se, to solve what is primarily an economic problem, that women’s labor is not valuable enough to keep her from starving. It is using the covenantal structures and resources of one covenant to solve a problem in another covenantal space. And the Bible permits this, given the exigencies of living in a fallen world. What the Bible does NOT allow is for this covenantal borrowing to become normative. If that happens it causes problems. And that is what we are facing here.
Allow me to explain
Ekklesia, is a Greek word for the assembly of the freemen of a particular area or the citizens of a particular city. Freeman and citizen were technical terms, often requiring land-ownership, the ability to trace your ancestry, or some other proof of multi-generational commitment to kith, kin and country to be allowed voting rights, or the right to hold office.
The Greeks had since time immemorial understood this free assembly, to be the natural and inevitable locus of legitimate political authority, in terms of appointing executive leadership,
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writing laws, and judging individual cases, as well as the center of culture, education, and philosophical life. The members of an ekklesia, were also the business leaders and financiers of the community, and so while business deals were rarely (in peacetime at least) formally on the agenda, the hall or amphitheater where the ekklesia met was where the serious commerce of the city was conducted.
Ekklesias differed in their level of commitment to equality and the right to speak, with the modern U.S. house of representatives, with its powerful Speaker and strict agenda rules, serving as one extreme and the modern U.S. Senate with its right to filibuster for extraordinary periods of time, serving as the other bookend. But ekklesias were not, even in their later corrupted Roman incarnations, places where one man stood and taught, with no opposing views allowed to speak and persuade to the contrary on the basis of faith and logic.
The ekklesia was in a true sense, a market-place of ideas. Certain Elders may have had the right to (broadly) set the agenda and have the last word (no small privilege). But no one had the right to advance their opinions without being forced to listen to those of a contrary opinion.
By the time of Christ, the Roman empire had largely suppressed the political elements of the ekklesia, outright denying several cities the right to assemble in public (Act 19:40), and stripping the remaining ekklesias of key rights such as the power of capital punishment (John 18:31).
But the Romans still used ekklesias. In fact they relied on cultural and educational elements of the ekklesia as part of their pacification process. After conquering a city, and brutally removing the existing leadership structure, the remaining notables of the new Roman possession would be organized into an ekklesia. Using the decentralized framework of the ekklesia to innovate, learn, collaborate, and implement, these would-be Roman citizens organized the transformation of their cities, adopting Greco-Roman law, culture, religion, technology, and financial structures in shockingly short periods of time.
As a new generation of Americans learned in Iraq, destroying existing power structures is relatively straightforward, but creating effective, loyal, and stable successor states is an incredibly difficult task. The Romans were masters at this complex process and the centerpiece of their strategy was the ekklesia.1
Given the strategic significance of this social structure; the ekklesia was, as you might expect, heavily regulated. Rome preferred ekklesias with narrow ties to a limited community, small ethnic groups, specific trade associations, with closely held secrets. One form of an ekklesia that was generally permitted was the burial association, whose purported purpose was to gather to
1Indeed, a fascinating historical argument can be made that every successful incident of US nation-building was built on the back of either a jewish or presbyterian assembly.
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practice the forms and rituals by which the members of the association were to be buried. The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox obsession with “smells and bells” similar to the burial practices of the first century makes more sense if for some centuries that was the legal form that prevented them from being arrested. Roman officials were deeply suspicious of ekklesias, viewing them as an inherent danger to the Roman system, as little better than mobs waiting to riot.
There was another form of association that existed in the Roman Empire. Above simple freemen were a class of persons who qualified to be called kurios which can be translated “lord” or “master.” This referred to a person who was the master in his own right, of a household, a city, or a larger political unit. As a person of rank within the Roman empire, the house of such a man of rank would contain at least one lecture hall, from which tutors, whose primary duty was to educate the sons of the kurios, would give public lectures to promote the glory and honor of the house (in greek the oikos) to which they belonged.
When the family involved had political power, the kind that would make them be called titles like kurios, the household buildings would often be used for public purposes. When a family lost political power, (which usually involved the death of all males within the family), certain key buildings such as the lecture halls would continue to be maintained by the public purse and used by scholars and philosophers. Whatever the case, this public or semi-public nature of lecture halls allowed visiting teachers to hold classes with their direct students, subject to the needs of the actual owners or city government.
This is probably the relationship that Paul entered into, he taught in the hall of Tyrannus in Ephesus. The key point here is that this was not an ekklesia, and would not have been investigated as such, but rather would have been a school that met in a Kurios Oikos which was sometimes shortened to kyriake. Indeed the Bible does not call the disciples an ekklesia during the entire time that Paul resides in Ephesus (Act 19). Only after he leaves does the text call them an ekklesia. This despite the fact that Paul was doing everything that the modern church does for YEARS.
It should be noted that certain Biblical commentaries, while admitting that there is nothing in the historical record about Tyrannus of Ephesus, assert that he was probably a teacher of philosophy or a rhetoricist. Without casting aspersions on the writers of such commentaries, it is exceedingly unlikely in Roman society that a teacher of rhetoric or a doctor or professional of any kind would own property in his own name. Those who owned property, did not teach, they hired teachers.2 A
2In addition, Tyrannus, is a derivative of the word kurios, translated into Latin and then back into Greek, and it specifically refers to a person without political superior. This is hardly the name that a professional, dependent on the truly wealthy, would use to rise to prominence.
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successful teacher would not ask or hope to own his own property, he would hope for a life-time grant of funding and housing from the household he served, akin to modern university tenure. But the actual hall would be owned by the wealthy family in question, or if that family declined, by the public purse of the city.
The point to note here is that Rome favored kyriake. The households and the schools they sponsored were both hierarchical institutions, with single patriarchal heads subject to being threatened or killed. If that for some reason failed, the focus on real estate meant that Rome could simply bar the doors of the lecture hall to a particular group, and prevent them from operating. There were schools, operating out of houses of local lords all over the Roman empire, and they would not even be investigated by the authorities that were so concerned about ekklesia. A school headed by a single dominant teacher, meeting in a kurios oikos, was not a threat to the Roman Empire, because it was NOT in any sense, an ekklesia.
Over time, Christianity grew within the Roman Empire, leading to it becoming the official state religion of Rome. While there was much good that came from the attempt by the Emperors to Christianize their empire, there were also significant issues. One of those issues came from the places of worship. One of the things that the Emperors did to consolidate power was to centralize control of religious structures. From the early days of Caesar Augustus, the cult that he started was extremely aggressive at co-opting and buying out other religious structures. While the precise nature of this religious co-option is hard to pin down, almost certainly by the time of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD, virtually all temples in the Roman empire were technically owned by the Roman Emperor. As the Roman emperor was the kurios the master and lord of the Roman empire, all such houses then became a kurios oikos a House of the Lord.
When the empire Christianized, the emperor exercised his legal right of ownership to turn out the old priests and install his new Christian priesthood. In theory this was accompanied by a shift from the house being the house of the Lord Caesar to the Lord Jesus Christ. In practice, the emperor retained legal and practical authority over those houses of worship. While it is likely that there were significant reformers who believed in the shift from Caesar as Lord to the Jesus as Lord, the history of the Roman Catholic Church demonstrates that the mindset of political and religious authority being concentrated in a man here on earth, continued and eventually triumphed over the Christians within the Roman Catholic hierarchy who actually confessed Jesus as Lord.
Meanwhile the word Kurios Oikos, or Kyriake continued on down the centuries. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that it probably created a forgotten Gothic word, which then became the root word of similar Kirk sounding words in Saxon, Norse, Frisian, Dutch, and several varieties of German. By the time of the translation of the Bible into English, Kirk was a Scottish word (the English sounding was church), that primarily meant religious authority or power. It
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focused on the Lord’s House and those who controlled access and conduct inside such a house, rather than on a gathering of people with freedom to think and debate and worship as God required.
Now the inquiring reader might ask why, the translators of the Bible would pick a word like Kirk, rather than a more honest translation? Let us take William Tyndale, the prince of translators. Why did he select Church as the translation of ekklesia?
Oh, well actually he did not. He asserted that ekklesia should be translated as congregation or assembly, a stance for which he was martyred. Contemplate that. One of the key men responsible for translating the Bible into English, believed that telling the people of God that Church was the proper translation of ekklesia was such a betrayal of his Lord that he was willing to die rather than engage in such dereliction of his duty as a translator.
The king of England, a practical ruler, understood the inherent dualism of the terminology of the Lord’s House as he was the technical owner of all church property, with the practical authority to decide which priests and bishops would be funded. He wanted the ambiguity of the Lord’s House to remain in full effect.
Now in America we have, to our forebears credit, largely reversed the pernicious effects of what Constantine started and King James continued in terms of political involvement in the church. Now when one looks at a church building, no one identifies what is going on there with the Government at large or with any particular politician. But we are still left in the position of the kurios oikos, which as I said is something as different from the ekklesia, as the ancient imperial harems were different from a modern company (at least one that does not employ Matt Lauer, Harvey Weinstein, or your average Democrat male feminist).
So let us return to Acts 19, where Paul starts something that looks strikingly similar to the modern american church, and runs it for years. What is going on here?
One of the key issues with folks who do know something about the ekklesia is that they focus overwhelmingly on the rights and privileges of the ekklesia, rather than on the responsibilities and qualifications to be a member. As I said above, members of the ekklesia had to demonstrate that they had some commitment to kith, kin, and community, usually through business or property ownership within the city, military service, or some other kind of mechanism. The Old Testament required immigrants from even relatively friendly nations (such as Edom) to live in Israel for three generations before they could vote or exercise political rights (no anchor babies for them!).3
3 Just to be clear, aside from the need to come with enough money to purchase property (no welfare there either), the requirement not to publicly worship false gods, and the political restrictions there WERE no
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The issue here was corruption of the marketplace of ideas. If someone was economically dependent on another person within the city, then it is not wise to expect them to politically oppose their economic provider. The loyalty culture within households of the day was such that you were expected to support your father and brothers, and the head of your household whether they were right, wrong or crazy. Another point to make is that people who are worried about providing for their basic needs are not really focused on the issue at hand. They lack the time for sustained debate, which requires suffering fools for extended periods of time. You have to be focused on getting the answer to the question, which requires investigating many, many, many false answers. This incidentally was one the original justifications for university tenure. It insulates these thinkers from having to stop working on their calling to go make money.
Jesus, as was His way, goes to the heart of the matter in the Sermon on the Mount. “Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles strive after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you.” Matthew 5:31.
This attitude, of conscious reliance for provision upon your heaven Father, also qualifies a person for participation in an ekklesia, as the monastic communities of the 5th to 8th centuries demonstrate. Interestingly, such an attitude is almost impossible to cultivate without being able to read and have access to the Word of God.
But what do you do if you are not qualified in either a physical or spiritual sense. You are not an independent business owner or a treasured son, you are a peasant, or (in a more modern example) a wage slave, totally economically dependent on a far off Lord or CEO who in all likelihood neither knows nor cares that you exist. Well, then you say become spiritually qualified, lean into God. Well even assuming that those rare souls to whom God speaks directly on a regular basis still exist, they are far too uncommon to build a community around without the ability to read the scriptures. As a practical matter, you MUST teach your people to read the scriptures effectively, which in turn requires a better education than what is found in most schools public, private, and christian alike.
So what if they cannot read? What if they were not fathered, not prepared, not trained? What if they do not know how to dress, how to eat, how to bathe? What if they do not know their own history, let alone the history of the West, or God’s great story of liberty from Genesis to the present day?
immigration controls under Old Testament law. Anyone who could physically get there was welcome. Hopefully that is enough to offend both sides of the American political divide.
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Their fathers should teach them! says the Law of God, and certainly those fathers will be held accountable on the last day. But what if they have no father? What if their fathers sent them off to be catechized by the world and have no intention of meeting their duties as Providers or Priests? What are we to do in the meantime with all these fatherless children.
Well, then you find yourself in a cultural situation analogous to the polygamy scenario. The covenantal structure of the family, weakened by Big Government, Big Corporations, and Big Media, is totally unable to fulfill its obligations under God’s law. Now, it is important to recognize that the specific aspects where families are failing are those which render the children of America unable to effectively participate in a genuine ekklesia as God requires. Without going into all the confirmed and unconfirmed political machinations, I will simply say, that is not an accident.
And into this void steps, the pastor and his Kirk. The issue in Acts 19 was that Paul was quickly rejected by the Jewish community, and apparently not even a single qualified Jewish man converted to the Christian faith. This meant that there was no Man of Peace who could offer Paul a place to live in his household. It also meant that there were no qualified elders (presbyteros) who could serve as the leadership of the new community. Further, the mostly Gentile converts would have no cultural heritage of understanding the Old Testament, which was critical to understanding the Gospel and the message of the Kingdom. They needed a father’s hand.
This is the scenario that virtually every church-planter finds themselves in today. Even if they encounter families who have the financial resources, it would be extremely unusual for the pastor to stay at their homes or properties for any length of time. And they are overwhelmingly dealing with people who are wracked by worry on what they will eat, drink, and wear. By and large they do not have mature adults who are qualified to be part of the ekklesia, let alone men with the virtue to serve in the necessary leadership roles.
So what do they do? Well, they do what Paul did, get access to a hall, and start the necessary of process of doing remedial education. This remedial education must necessarily be done the way a father would, with a strict hierarchical set-up. Indeed the process is less efficient than a true family because one pastor cannot possibly spend the kind of one-on-one time that a father would with his actual children. Remember even Jesus, when engaging in this deep fathering style discipleship, limited himself to 12.
One of the points that I should make, in the midst of what is clearly a critique of the American pastorate at large (thus the Pseudonym), is that these exigent circumstances need not arise from any sin within the actual Servants of God. In fact whenever you see a mass awakening or revival, where large numbers of people with no history of obedience to God come to salvation, you face the issue of the unwashed masses. Whether you are the early Reformers dealing with peasants
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who literally cannot read, or Chuck Smith dealing with Hippies who might technically be able to read, but were so lacking in basic life skills that they were not in a position to effectively study the Bible, you need a fathering teacher to take these folk in hand.
And just as with the polygamy, barring some dramatic reform of the larger society, the Kirk is almost inevitable. Some Father is necessary, and if the natural fail, the spiritual MUST step in.
But like with Polygamy, this technique, this covenantal borrowing is only justified so long as the exigent circumstances continue. Remember that unlike the Polygamous marriage, the Kirk can and should blossom from a single shoot into the full blown vine of the ekklesia. In both of the New Testament examples, Christ and his disciples, Paul and the Ephesian disciples, the Kirk period ended and the ekklesia bloomed in less than five years. This is the power of the Gospel and the new birth, which as Paul lays out so repetitively in Ephesians, allows one to rise above their lowly station, and begin behaving as a member of the household of God, the most royal lineage in all of creation. Ephesians 3:14.
But even in the Old Testament, the Kirk-based period under Moses rule, lasted only for a single generation, that 40 years in the Wilderness. The next leader, Joshua explicitly divided political power, making clear that after the initial round of wars, he was no longer the supreme commander of Israel, and that each household and tribe had the inheritance and the responsibility to serve God. Joshua 24.
One of the things that you must do when you present a new theoretical framework is explain the existing successes, which are usually highlighted and justified by the existing framework. The most recent time that a mass of unwashed people, without church heritage or families that had trained them (at least on some level) to serve God, was the Jesus Movement of the 60s. Most of the strong, effective Kirks that have enjoyed success and the blessing of God through 80s and 90s, were recipients of these unwashed masses.
Calvary Chapel in particular, focused on and became excellent at bringing people to certain basic truths. Their Moses-model, was very effective in taking unwashed hippies and making them into people who exhibited Christian culture. The Kirk worked and worked well, throughout the first 40 years following the Jesus Movement, which began sometime in the mid-60s peaked in 1972 and was largely complete by 1975. During this period the Kirk model may not have followed the full exacting standards of the biblical Ekklesia but it was permissible and on the whole enjoyed blessing from God.
And then the first generation ended.
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By any standard of measurement, we are now more than 40 years away from the Jesus Movement and the exigency it created for fathering relationships to bring people up to the biblical standard of qualification for full ekklesia membership. And now it would appear that in many ways the grace has departed.
“The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent…” Acts 17:30
A final point to make is the great difference between the pastors of the 1960s and those of today in terms of their access to information. In the 1960s an honorable pastor, desiring to find out what the term ekklesia meant in ancient Greece would in all likelihood be limited to two or three commentaries, from an exclusively religious perspective. He would do his due diligence, quietly of course, but he would look for the answer and find none in all of the books that he had available. This would not be his fault, outside of certain specialized libraries (West Point, Berkeley, etc.) the underlying materials and sources likely did not exist in the United States. While there might be works in greek and latin, lexicons with citations to the secular works of koine greek would have been beyond the resources of an ordinary pastor. Even as late as the 1990s, the only widely available greek lexicons were religious resources focused on a specific denomination’s traditional view.
The situation in post 2014 America, where multiple universities have secular greek lexicons available online for free, is quite different. Now any decent researcher can in three or four hours get a very precise understanding of the pre-christian use of virtually every word in the New Testament. And that most certainly includes, ekklesia.
So why are our institutions failing? They are failing because they are built upon a lie. They are built on a lie, that the traditions of the Kirks, driven by single powerful fathering pastors, or even “elder rule” boards that meet behind the scenes and without public comment, are sufficient for all times and all places, rather than being a permissible response to a specific exigency. The truth is that Paul was able to start with greek peasants and slaves, and build an ekklesia in two years, and likely many of the churches, the kirks, could have had a similar trajectory.
In conclusion, then, the time has come for the church planters to depart, the time has come for the kirk to bloom into a full-blown ekklesia, the time has come for judgment to begin with the house of the Lord, for men and their families to set clearly before themselves the qualifications for membership and ministry and pursue those with all their hearts.
The time has come for the Polygamous church to set aside her lovers and devote herself to one husband as a pure bride.
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Maranatha, Come Lord Jesus!
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