Tuesday, November 26, 2019

James D.G. Dunn on New Testament Local Congregations and Ecclesiology


New Testament scholar James D.G. Dunn cautioned readers of Paul and his epistles that, vis-à-vis his ecclesiology, that

because Paul used the term ekklēsia for individual churches, he saw them as independent and autonomous. It is true that the concept of the church as the universal body of Christ does not emerge in the Pauline corpus till the later letters, and may indeed be an elaboration rather than an articulation of his own thoughts (Colossians [Col 1:18] and Ephesians [1:22-23] are widely regarded as post-Pauline). But he certainly did not think of them as independent and autonomous from each other. They each represented Christ, were Christ’s body in their place of residence (1 Cor 12:27); they had a common identity. Not only so, but Paul’s churches had been founded by him; whoever else might have claim to be their apostle, he certainly was their apostle. He was their father in Christ. And he fully expected them to share a family likeness. The gospel which he had preached to them was what all the apostles preached in founding churches (1 Cor 15:11). His repeated appeal in his Corinthian letters to what was true for “all the churches” implied that same shared identity. And that identity included the sense of shared indebtedness to the mother church of Jerusalem, equivalent to the identity expressed in the diaspora Jewish synagogues in their payment of the annual temple tax. Paul did not make much use of the idea of the new groups of believers as “the people of God” (Rom 9:25, 26; 11:1-2; 2 Cor 6:16), but his conviction that they as the called of God (Rom 9:24) had been grated into the one olive tree of Israel (11:17-24) implied a belief in the corporate identity of the believers, Jews with Gentiles, on which the later Pauline letters could build . . . his churches were not isolated communities, each evolving separately like the giant turtles and finches of the Galapagos Islands. They belonged to a network, and the connecting links and strands were maintained and strengthened by frequent comings and goings. Within that context it is highly likely that copies of Paul’s letters became a regular part of that traffic between churches. (James D. G. Dunn, “How the New Testament Canon Began” in William H. Brackney and Craig A. Evans, eds. From Biblical Criticism to Biblical Faith: Essays in Honor of Lee Martin McDonald [Macon, Ga.: Mercier University Press, 2007], 122-37, here, pp. 135-36)

Such flies in the face of some ecclesiologies one encounters from Protestant critics of the Church.