The Church
The past five articles have opened the door on the history and roots of what we call the church in the world today. We have seen that most of her practices and structures come not from biblical instruction but from pagan religious and philosophical traditions. We traced the spiritual root of Babylonian paganism from Nimrod into the church through Constantine. We saw the influence of Greek thinking (the Prince of Greece mentioned in Daniel) affecting our cultural church practices and theology.
Many believers recognise these shortcomings and wistfully think that if the church could just correct these few things then everything would be ok. However this is wishful thinking based on the assumption that Christ’s church adopted some pagan customs around the time of Constantine and that if we just got rid of the bad ones, everything will be fine. The reality is that Constantine was a Mithra (sun god) worshipping pagan who was quite at home syncretising other religions into his own. Christianity didn’t syncretise pagan traditions into it, Christianity was syncretised into his pagan Mithra worship which he then “rebranded” as the Universal (Catholic) church. Over time Catholicism continued to syncretise more pagan practices into her (Isis became the madonna, weeping for Tammuz became Lent etc etc). But underneath it all, she is still just Mithra (sun) worship rebranded as Christianity, it is not Christianity with some added in pagan bits. Once we recognise what “the church” really is we can formulate an appropriate response.
Did you know that in the Greek New Testament texts, the word “church” isn’t there? The only Greek word in the New Testament translated “church” is “Ekklesia” which in the New American Standard bible is translated “church” (74 times), “churches” (35 times), “assembly” (3 times) and “congregation” (twice).
In the Greek Old Testament (the Septuagint) “Ekklesia” is first used in Deut 18:16 translating the Hebrew word “kahal” which means the “called out” or the “assembly of Israel”, i.e. those who were called out of Egypt to assemble before Yehovah at Mount Sinai. Whereas the English word “church” comes from the old English “kirke”, from which we get our word “circus” where an entertaining “dog and pony show” takes place…
The Greek language does have several words for “church” – but “Ekklesia” isn’t one of them, which means none of the Greek words for church occur in the New Testament!
So how did the word church get into our bibles? When King James sponsored the 1611 King James translation of the bible, he gave written instructions to the translators. Instruction #3 reads:
3. The old ecclesiastical words to be kept; as the word church, not to be translated congregation, &c.
This was a political power play to ensure his control of the country remained intact. King James was both head of state and head of the Church of England (being pretty much a copy of the Roman Catholic system). So if “ekklesia” was translated “assembly”, the Church of England and the king’s control of it as head of “the church” could be biblically challenged (Luther anyone?), hence his edict to translate it as “church”. And so throughout the 500+ year influence of the King James Bible we’ve been using the word “church” ever since.
To get a fresh perspective when you reading your bible, try substituting the word “assembly” for “church”. We really do need to remove the word “church” from our Christian vocabulary.
What to do with Christendom?
It’s a sad fact that over the past 1700 years, no single institution has so consistently cavorted with kings and merchants or shed so much blood of the saints as the institution called the church (whether she be Catholic, Orthodox or Anglican). All of which leads us to Revelation 17:1-6:
Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and talked with me, saying to me, “Come, I will show you the judgment of the great harlot who sits on many waters, with whom the kings of the earth committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth were made drunk with the wine of her fornication.” So he carried me away in the Spirit into the wilderness. And I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast which was full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and precious stones and pearls, having in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the filthiness of her fornication. And on her forehead a name was written:
MYSTERY,
BABYLON THE GREAT,
THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS
AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.
And I saw the woman, drunk with the blood of the saints and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. And when I saw her, I marvelled with great amazement.
Why do you think John was so amazed when he saw her? Because she was purporting to be the “Christian” church!
We continue in Revelation 18:1-6:
After these things I saw another angel coming down from heaven, having great authority, and the earth was illuminated with his glory. And he cried mightily with a loud voice, saying, “Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and has become a habitation of demons, a prison for every foul spirit, and a cage for every unclean and hated bird! For all the nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth have become rich through the abundance of her luxury.” And I heard another voice from heaven saying, “Come out of her, my people, lest you share in her sins, and lest you receive of her plagues. For her sins have reached to heaven, and God has remembered her iniquities…”
Jesus said in Matt 7:15-23 says:
“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thorn bushes or figs from thistles? Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Therefore by their fruits you will know them. Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’”
Chilling words.
I repeat, over the past 1700 years, no single institution has cavorted with kings and merchants or has consistently spilt so much blood of the saints as the church. This “fruit” leads to one inescapable conclusion, that no matter how unpleasant the thought may be, the institutional church cannot be the bride of Christ. The only alternative left us is she is the whore of Babylon (Catholicism/Mithraism) and her harlot daughters (all other aligned churches and false religions), a false bride. There is so little about her that is biblical, she has not honoured Christ in her acts down through history and continues to follow Babylonian sun god rituals – in spite of being warned about this by Luther hundreds of years ago. Her fruits betray her. I am not saying there are not true believers in the church because that is patently untrue, however we must seriously consider the command in Rev 18:4 to come out of her practices, something the church shows no sign of doing (does she celebrate Passover or Eastre? Does she use the cross as a symbol? What level of paganism is deemed acceptable in your fellowship? Christmas? Lent? Nicolaitanism? SUNday worship?…the list just goes on and on).
Any serious reading of the history of “Christianity” whether Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox, Eastern or otherwise will reveal very little of Christ’s teachings and a mountain of paganism, control, political power, cavorting with kings and merchants, bloodletting and relentless persecution of those genuinely trying to follow the teachings of Christ e.g. the Anabaptists.
Every move of God (what some would call revival) has consistently resulted in those involved with the movement being thrown out of whatever church they attended – satan cannot handle the presence of God. The problem is that just as a dog returns to its own vomit, so the new assembly eventually morphed back into a church and then the people wondered where the Spirit of God went.
So how do we get back to what was originally intended? How do we complete the Reformation? Luther started trying to peel back what he called “Babylonian paganism” in the Catholic church and there’s been some progress made on several fronts since then, but we’re still miles away from what happened in New Testament times. As you have seen, the vast majority of what we do in Christendom isn’t in the bible. I’m sure we’ve got great (Greek) reasons why they are good things to do, but they are still not defensible as biblical. I had a brother going on about Lent at one stage and he had great arguments for it even though he admitted it wasn’t “in the bible.” Bit of a fail when it showed up as an abomination in Ezekiel 8 (weeping for Tammuz). My point is, if it’s not in the bible, it’s not sacrosanct and church as we do it is not in the bible.
New Testament Christianity doesn’t work in a church model, with a church building nor with paid clergy, in fact not with clergy of any sort! We have just mentioned how the great moves of God seemed to die and fossilise into church institutions, but there are records of New Testament assemblies where the Spirit moved with powerful miracles consistently over periods of hundreds of years! And these expressions of Christ changed their worlds. Maybe we should start thinking about what they did?
See our next series Toward Reformation…