I - THE WORD ECCLESIA

Summary

The subject on which I propose to lecture this term is The early conceptions and early history of the Christian Ecclesia. The reason why I have chosen the term Ecclesia is simply to avoid ambiguity. The English term church, now the most familiar representative of ecclesia to most of us, carries with it associations derived from the institutions and doctrines of later times, and thus cannot at present without a constant mental effort be made to convey the full and exact force which originally belonged to ecclesia. There would moreover be a second ambiguity in the phrase the early history of the Christian Church arising out of the vague comprehensiveness with which the phrase ‘History of the Church’ is conventionally employed.

It would of course have been possible to have recourse to a second English rendering ‘congregation’, which has the advantage of suggesting some of those elements of meaning which are least forcibly suggested by the word ‘church’ according to our present use. ‘Congregation’ was the only rendering of ἐκκλησία in the English New Testament as it stood throughout Henry VIII's reign, the substitution of ‘church’ being due to the Genevan revisers; and it held its ground in the Bishops' Bible in no less primary a passage than Matt. xvi. 18 till the Jacobean revision of 1611, which we call the Authorized Version.