Christian Church – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Christian Church is a term used by some to refer to the whole group of people belonging to the Christian religious tradition throughout history. With "Church" capitalized, the term does not refer to a building. Others believe the term "Christian Church" or "Church" applies only to a specific historic Christian institution (e.g., the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and Oriental Orthodoxy).

The term Christian Church, in the first understanding, which is generally used by Protestants, does not refer to a particular denomination. However, the majority of Christians belong to groups that consider themselves to be the one true church, to which other Christians do not belong. The three largest such groups are the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Oriental Orthodox communion. Thus, some Christians identify the Christian Church with a visible structure (the view of the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox churches) while others (generally Protestants) understand it as an invisible reality not identified with any earthly structure and others equate it with particular groups that share certain essential elements of doctrine and practice though divided on other points of doctrine and government (such as the branch theory as taught by some Anglicans).

The Greek term , which is transliterated as "ecclesia", generally meant an "assembly",[1] but in most English translations of the New Testament is usually translated as "church". This term appears in two verses of the Gospel of Matthew, twenty-four verses of the Acts of the Apostles, fifty-eight verses of the Pauline Epistles (including the earliest instances of its use in relation to a Christian body), two verses of the Letter to the Hebrews, one verse of the Epistle of James, three verses of the Third Epistle of John, and nineteen verses of the Book of Revelation. In total, appears in the New Testament text 114 times, although not every instance is a technical reference to the church.[2]

In the New Testament, the term is used for local communities as well as in a universal sense to mean all believers.[3] Traditionally, only orthodox believers are considered part of the true church, but convictions of what is orthodox have long varied, as many churches (not only the ones officially using the term "Orthodox" in their names) consider themselves to be orthodox and other Christians to be heterodox.

The Four Marks of the Church first expressed in the Nicene Creed are unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity.[4]

The Greek word ekklsia, literally "called out" or "called forth" and commonly used to indicate a group of individuals called to gather for some function, in particular an assembly of the citizens of a city, as in Acts 19:32-41, is the New Testament term referring to the Christian Church (either a particular local group or the whole body of the faithful). Most Romance and Celtic languages use derivations of this word, either inherited or borrowed from the Latin form ecclesia.

The English language word "church" is from the Old English word cirice, derived from West Germanic *kirika, which in turn comes from the Greek kuriak, meaning "of the Lord" (possessive form of kurios "ruler" or "lord"). Kuriak in the sense of "church" is most likely a shortening of kuriak oikia ("house of the Lord") or ekklsia kuriak ("congregation of the Lord").[5] Christian churches were sometimes called kuriakon (adjective meaning "of the Lord") in Greek starting in the 4th century, but ekklsia and basilik were more common.[6]

The word is one of many direct Greek-to-Germanic loans of Christian terminology, via the Goths. The Slavic terms for "church" (Old Church Slavonic [crky], Russian [cerkov], Slovenian cerkev) are via the Old High German cognate chirihha.[citation needed]

In using the word (ekklsia, "church"), early Christians were employing a term that, while it designated the assembly of a Greek city-state, in which only citizens could participate, was traditionally used by Greek-speaking Jews to speak of Israel, the people of God,[7] and that appeared in the Septuagint in the sense of an assembly gathered for religious reasons, often for a liturgy; in that translation stood for the Hebrew word (qahal), which however it also rendered as (synagg, "synagogue"), the two Greek words being largely synonymous until Christians distinguished them more clearly.[8]

The term appears in only two verses of the Gospels, in both cases in the Gospel of Matthew.[7] When Jesus says to Simon Peter, "You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church",[9] the church is the community instituted by Christ, but in the other passage the church is the local community to which one belongs: "If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church."[10]

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Christian Church - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia