Any attempt to study the development of Christian theories of the church must begin with the origins of the community of faith, described in the Bible, as well as the emerging understandings of the nature and identity of that community. The church has always stressed its historical and theological continuity with the people of Israel; for this reason, we must begin our exploration with the Old Testament.
The Old Testament
How did Israel understand its identity, and how were these understandings maintained by its institutions? The noted American Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann (born 1933) argues that three distinct phases can be seen in Israel's development of its sense of identity and purpose as a people, reflecting the different situations in which it found itself.
The first phase of its existence (c.1250–1000 BC) lasted until the founding of the monarchy under Saul. During this period, Israel existed without a temple, priests, sages, or prophets. Its identity as a people was not defined by institutions but by “a common commitment to Israel's central story.”
The second phase pertained from 1000 to 587 BC. During this long period, which ended with the Babylonian captivity of the people of Jerusalem, Israel was governed by a monarchy. Brueggemann points to four features which ensured that Israel was able to maintain and consolidate its identity:
The temple and its priests provided legitimate and stable leadership over an extended period.
The kings provided essentially secular leadership of the nation while at the same time being committed to the same religious ideas and values as the temple and its priests.
The book of Proverbs bears witness to a group of “sages,” corresponding to the western notion of an “intelligentsia,” who provided intellectual legitimacy to the nation.
During this period, the prophets represented a means of divine guidance at points of particular difficulty or turbulence.
Brueggemann finds that a third model arose after the return of the inhabitants of Jerusalem from their exile in Babylon in 587 BC to the period of the New Testament. In this “postexilic” or “second temple” period, Israel was a much smaller nation, faced with serious problems in maintaining its identity in the face of occupation, initially by the Persians and subsequently by the Greeks and Romans. Faced with the erosion of its distinctive identity in the face of these “universalizing cultures,” Israel sought to find its identity through links with the past. Brueggemann emphasizes the importance of texts during this era, as these provided a means by which the “threatened present generation” could connect up with “the horizon of reference points from the past.”
The New Testament
The New Testament stresses the continuity between Israel and the Christian church, and offers a series of models for understanding the theological identity of the church. In what follows, we shall note five of these models.
The church as the people of God. This image emphasizes the continuity of the church with Israel, sharing the covenant promises made to Abraham. It is thus especially important for Paul that Christians are seen to share the same faith as Abraham (Romans 4: 1–16; Galatians 3: 6–18). The church has been chosen or called to be the people of God, just as God called Israel in the past. “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2: 9).
The church as a community of salvation. This image emphasizes that the church is called into being both in response to God's work of salvation and as a means of proclaiming and extending that work to the world. This theme is evident in the evangelistic imperatives within the New Testament, which speak of the church as the body which is called to bear witness as the “salt of the earth” and the “light of the world” (Matthew 5: 13–16), charged with the responsibility of going out to “make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28: 19).
The church as the body of Christ. This imagery is found particularly in the Pauline letters (see especially 1 Corinthians 12: 12–31). The faith of the individual believer and baptism (Romans 6: 3–5) are understood to secure incorporation into the body of Christ. This corporate understanding of the church is also reinforced by other types of imagery in the New Testament, such as the Johannine image of the believer being attached or connected to Jesus Christ as the “true vine” (John 15: 5).
The church as a servant people. Once more, this image emphasizes the continuity between the old and new covenants. God chose and called Israel to serve him; in the same way, God chose and called the church for service. This theme is reflected in the terminology of the early church for its leaders. The two main Greek words for church leaders are doulos (“servant,” or possibly even “slave”) and diakonos (“someone who waits at a table”). Paul brought this theme into sharp focus when he told the Corinthian Christians that he and his companions “proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus's sake” (2 Corinthians 4: 5).
The church as the community of the Spirit. The early history of the church, as related in the Acts of the Apostles, stresses the presence and activity of the Holy Spirit within the church. The presence of the Spirit enables the church to witness and to grow. For Paul, the Spirit is not merely a theological resource, useful in ministry. Its presence within the church is a sign of the coming of God's new age, and the distinctive role that the church must play in bringing about the kingdom of God on earth. The Spirit is to be seen as a “seal” of the individual's redemption and the church's mission (Ephesians 4: 30).
These, then, are some of the models of the church found in the New Testament. Yet they are not fully developed. The task of enlarging the Christian vision of the identity of the church was bequeathed to their successors by the New Testament writers. In what follows, we shall explore some of the ways in which those successors did this.
