Acts 9:31 - Church(es)

Mark Wilson emory2oo2 at hotmail.com
Fri Jan 19 16:51:13 EST 2001




>At 2:37 AM -0500 1/19/01, QashishaD at aol.com wrote:
> >Neal, the Biblical and early Church reality was that there was only ONE
> >Church, sometimes spoken of as being "churches" in different locales, but 
>not
> >as being a pluralities of churches. To speak of "churches" would be like
> >speaking of "bodies of Christ," just not a Biblical concept.


I can not quite follow the reason of these statements.

The first part of the first sentence seems fine, but your conclusion (but 
not as being a pluralities of churches) does not seem to follow. I think 
there may be some equivocation here.

Surely there were churches in the NT. And surely there was an understanding 
of the "universal church." But those two concepts are different. One may 
refer to the meeting places; one may refer to the believers in general.

My additional comment would be that even a phrase like the "Church at X," 
where X represents a specific city, there would still be a plurality of 
meeting places (namely, at various residences).

Perhaps if we define Church more fully, there would not be a 
misunderstanding. Such as:

Church.B - building
Church.L - local congregation
Church.U - universal

:o )

Mark Wilson

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