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.