House Church Discussion List

House Church Theology

The Home Church? It hasn’t changed. But what happened to the Institutional Church?

see Home vs. Institution

Why Theology?

Can’t we just read our bibles?

Paul told the Philippians to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.”1 That can only mean that we each have a responsibility to develop a right understanding of our triune God. While a simple faith is sufficient for salvation, those desiring a deeper understanding of God’s written word need theology to avoid the trap of being misled by a few proof texts offered by an adversary that can undermine a simple faith. A short course in Christian theology can guide the faithful in an accurate and bulletproof appropriation of God’s Word.  

Not all theologians agree on every point. There are many areas of debate among the scholars. But what is offered here is “Christiah” protestant theology, hopefully free of denominational bias.

House Church Theology

House church theology can be described as that branch of Christian theology that centers on the small assembly of men and women that covenant together to follow rule of the living Christ and to be mutually accountable for living the Christian life.

It is the assembly that is at the heart of house church theology, the word appearing 115 times in the New Testament and, unfortunately, translated “church.” in our English language bibles.2  What Jesus meant was “gathered people,” which is how he described it in Matthew 18:20. We have to get this important word right or we’ll be off to a bad start.

The original First Century assemblies were small enough to fit in homes. You can find them in Philemon 2, Romans 16, 1 Corinthians 16:19, and Colossians 14:15. In these small house churches believers could share their lives with the intimacy of “gathered people” with the assurance of Christ’s presence. While many meet in homes, they may meet in a clearing in the woods, a Sunday School classroom, or any other small space where privacy and confidentially are assured.

‘Where persecution always forces home churches underground, small assemblies continue among those who are suspicious that the growth of institutional churches may have been a mixed blessing. Yet the movement to recover the early church continues to grow. Today, even large, modern churches are trying to bring smallness back by encouraging the formation of small groups, sometimes called “cells.” There is a “smaller is better” principle that this site advocates; getting back to First Century worship before all the denominational distinctives and hierarchical leadership took hold.

The Work of Theology

All humans have a theology, even if it may be without any god. Christian theology comes from the Bible in a manner that struggles to make statements of biblical truth that are consistent throughout the whole bible rather than just one or two verses. Those statements are called “doctrines.”

Doctrines did not spin out of the Bible easily. They had to have been tested3 by two thousand years of Christian witness. While we need to make a habit of reading the Bible regularly, an understanding of essential doctrines is also important.

A word of caution: Doctrines are intended to serve the church, not rule over believers. Look at doctrines as signposts of faith intended to protect the Body of Christ from heresies by putting guard rails around Christian discourse.

Essential Doctrines

House church theology embraces the great doctrines of Christian orthodoxy. The essential doctrines are presented in these pages. It is inevitable that some readers may disagree in many areas, and one advantage of publishing theology on a web page rather than in a book is that it is possible here to engage in discussions and to pray that the Holy Spirit will guide us into all truth together.4 You might, therefore, look at this site as a “dynamic book”–one that is in the continuous flux that comes from the interchange of ideas. Is this not so for each of us? As we live through our own experiences, many of our beliefs and understandings change. There are things I have put here that I will regret years from now, so let it be stated right here at the start that it is very likely that much of the material presented here is in error. One can only echo the words of the early house church theologian and martyr Balthaser Hübmaier:5

If I have taught only truth, why abuse me? If error, any man may set me in the right way with the spiritual Word. As man I may very well err, but will be no heretic.

The Source of Theology

The ultimate source of house church theology can only be the Bible.

. But there is a great deal more to the development of doctrine than merely sitting down with the Bible and writing theology, as many modern ideologues have attempted to do. One such author bragged that he had the benefit of “unclouded objectivity” because he came to his subject with absolutely no academic training!

The process of doctrinal development is shaped by the struggles of God’s people over centuries as they struggled to work out their salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12).

The relationship between doctrine and the Canon (Bible) is summarized in the figure above. God works through “salvation history,” producing an inspired record that is used by the Church as a basis for its interpretation of that revelation and to validate its mission. The church documents its understanding by writing doctrines that are colored by its own history and by the gradual resolution of conflicting positions within the church. Those doctrines serve as a source of teaching and guidance for the community of faith. Therefore, doctrines are written by the church, for the church.6

The struggles of the church today are not all new with our generation–most have been worked out before by brilliant and devoted men and women in history. It is for that reason that these web pages are laced with historical references.

This is not to say that theology is static. Far from it. Every generation and culture brings new problems that require new theology. New understandings from historical or archaeological research need to be integrated into our theological thought. The very language in which doctrine is expressed changes, creating a need to rewrite and rephrase. Scripture, of course, has veto power over doctrines, and we need to constantly test our doctrines against the Bible–but it is absolutely essential to keep the history of each doctrine in mind both to understand, and to consider modifications to, Christian doctrine.

The Development of the Canon

The Bible is also called the “Canon” of Scripture because it serves as a measuring rod. The reformers used it to measure the state church, and the modern house churches use it to measure and validate Christian experience and doctrine. The word “canon” also describes the process7 by which material entered the Bible:

  • The Law (Genesis-Deuteronomy).
  • The Prophets (Judges-Kings, Isaiah-Malichi).
  • The Writings (Others, including Psalms, Job, etc).
  • The New Testament witness–the “capstone.”

It is important to view canon as process not only because of historical development, but because each part depended upon, and was compatible with, the part(s) upon which it continued to build. The “house” illustration attempts to convey this point. Nothing in the Prophets contradicted the Law–the foundation that had already been laid. Nothing in in the New Testament contradicted the Old (Mt. 5:17)–in fact, Paul always taught the gospel to the Jews by demonstrating that the Hebrew Scriptures already contained that gospel (Acts 17:2-4, 18:4-5; see also Lk. 24:27).

The canon developed as the community of faith embraced new materials that continued to shape and fulfill God’s revelation in a manner that was compatible with that which had already been revealed, while discarding those books that were incompatible. A prophet’s work would be accepted or rejected, for example, by testing its reliability (Deut. 18:21-22) but also on its compatibility with that already revealed (Deut. 13:1-5).

That the canon has not grown since the Patristic period of church history is therefore not a result of God ceasing to reveal himself (hardly the case–see the doctrine of Revelation). It is a result of the fact that no new material of biblical stature has come along since. The canon is already quite adequate for guiding faith and practice (2 Tim. 3:16-17). Such materials as The Book of Mormon and The Gospel of Thomas are not in the canon because they are incompatible with the material already established–whether they are recent (the former) or ancient (the latter) in origin.

The Apocryphal books warrant a special note. Church fathers such as Jerome (who translated them into Latin) had a very low opinion of these books, and they were not part of the canon as it emerged from the Patristic period. They were appended by the Roman Catholic church in 1546 as a polemic against the Protestant Reformation. It is for this reason that they continue to be rejected by Protestants.

The Shaping of Doctrines

Different denominations, even different churches, have appropriated the Bible in various ways and have ordered their doctrines differently. One might say that they have colored some doctrines with different hues, have altogether denied others, and have developed whole new ones. While some Christians depend on creeds (and house church theologians affirm the great creeds of orthodoxy such as that of Nicaea), house church theology tends to be confessional. We are witnesses to what we believe rather than an institution that places limits on what may be believed for the purpose of excluding outsiders. Several of these historical confessions of faith that have been passed on, especially by Anabaptists, Presbyterians, and early Baptists, and these provide a foundation for the understanding of Scripture just as they provide a way to trace theological thought through the history of the house church movement. Doctrines, in other words, evolve. They are the result of historical trials and events as much as they are the fruits of intellectual inquiry or academic study. It is the conviction of the writer that doctrines cannot properly be understood without studying that history. God has blessed the church with great men who have helped articulate doctrines, just as he has blessed it with theological “villains” who served to bring on controversies from which doctrines emerged. Without an understanding of this history, it is feared that these doctrines might tend to appear as just so much dogma.

A Final Warning

One thing follows from the above discussion. Doctrines are the result of a group’s understanding of Scripture; they should never be allowed to supersede Scripture. As such, they stand before the church as guides to faith and teaching and are always subject to revision as the Holy Spirit guides the community. The house church tends to have a great deal of freedom in its doctrines, perhaps even to the point that many are on the brink of heresy. The best protection against error is to simply take the advice that Paul gave to the Thessalonian church: “Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise the words of the prophets, but test everything; hold fast to that which is good; abstain from all forms of evil” (1 Thess. 5:19-22). The culture wants to influence our doctrines. We need to be careful when we accept innovations and ideas from the culture by constantly comparing our beliefs, teachings, and doctrines against the canon of Scripture. The Epistles show that, even in the first century, many churches failed to perform this test. The situation is surely the same today.

Home vs. Institution

The original New Testament churches always met in homes. In those days the persecution of Christians was intense and groups larger than those fitting in a home we’re in danger of arrest or worse, so all churches were home churches. Over the millennia their faith and practice has not materially changed. But “Christendom” soon took over, and a review of that history is instructive as well as challenging.

What distinguishes home churches is that they strive to take their faith seriously, covenanting together to embrace a common confession of faith and holding each member accountable. Theologians call this “Believers’  Church” to distinguish them from those assemblies that tolerate members whose belief and practice might deviate from their confession of faith.8

When Christianity began to be tolerated Under Constantine’s Edict of Milan, Churches were free to grow larger. This trend exploded under Theodosius II when Christianity became the official religion of Rome and thousands of unregenerate people rushed to occupy the emerging church buildings, mostly financed by the state and administered by state-paid leaders. Many, of course, would join for the wrong reasons. We call these churches “institutional churches.” today. Their services have gradually evolved, and their protocols have taken on the force of “tradition.”

When churches began to break their bonds with the states, their funding shifted to the voluntary contributions of their membership, forcing them to compete for members with other churches, sometimes with  modern marketing methods.9 Buildings needed to be attractive and comfortable with childcare and other amenities. Music and preaching started to take on entertainment value. Church architecture Incorporated a stage, reinforcing the notion that there are leaders and performers in a place of importance with the hoi palloi taking seats as the “audience.”10 Their designs had to make room for video screens connected to computers that can play video clips and put up song lyrics. None of these innovations are objectively evil, but their incorporation by the institutions have taken away the intimacy of the group of gathered people, where  Jesus is has promised to be in their midst and where the following of Jesus’s commands was the top priority.11 Perhaps we need to remember when worship in the Old Testament became human-, rather than God-centered, prompting the prophet Amos to speak God’s words:

21 I hate, I despise your festivals,
     and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
23 Take away from me the noise of your songs;
     I will not listen to the melody of your harps. Amos 5:21, 23

Ubiquitous in the first century and practiced by a remnant ever since, home churches have always been in the background of the Christian faith. They didn’t become prominent, however, until the 16th century when a group of dissenters in Zurich sparked what is now known as the Radical Reformation by meeting Illegally in one of their homes and repudiating the state church of their day.12 The states responded with an extermination campaign where even Protestants and Roman Catholics cooperated in the killing of tens of thousands of martyrs.13 The survivors ended up assembling in small meetings to avoid detection just like their first century predecessors did, and the home church movement was born.

The Author

These theology pages are written by Herb Drake whom, with humility, calls himself a “theologian.” His witness to that title comes from five years of study in a Baptist theological seminary, mostly under the tutelage of Prof. Stanley A. Nelson. His academic degrees are: B.S. in Electrical Engineering, MBA in Management, Master of Divinity, and Master of Historical Theology (Thesis: The Book of Romans, A Believers’ Church Manifesto).

Notes

  1. Philippians 2:12. ↩︎
  2. In the original Greek New Testament, ἐκκλησία” simply means an assembly of people. English bibles translate the word as “church,” which comes from Germanic root meaning “lord,” an unfortunate choice. Contemporary usage often uses the word to refer to a structure for religious purposes. ↩︎
  3. 1 Thessalonians 5:21 ↩︎
  4. John 16:13. ↩︎
  5. Balthasar Hübmaier was a brilliant Christian thinker from Bavaria who was accused of heresy because of his rejection of the state churches. Around 1527, Hübmaier was seized and taken to Vienna along with his wife. He was tried for heresy, convicted, and taken through the streets to the public square. As he was being prepared for the fire, his wife shouted exhortations to him to hold steadfast to his faith. Three days after his execution, his wife was taken to the River Danube and drowned with a large stone tied around her neck. ↩︎
  6. See the Doctrine of Revelation for further discussion. ↩︎
  7. “Process” is not to suggest chronology. Nobody knows the exact dating of each book in the Bible, and scholars believe that the text of the Old Testament was edited and polished in the Second Temple period. ↩︎
  8. In 1 Coriinthians 5:1-2, Paul complains about the toleration of a member’s sinful behavior. ↩︎
  9. See Philip D. Kenneson & James L. Street, Selling Out the Church. ↩︎
  10. Kierkegaard pointed out how easy it is to forget that God is the proper audience for Christiaen worship. Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart, pp. 180-81 (SV XI114-15); reprinted in Parables of Kierkegaard, Thomas C. Oden, ed. ↩︎
  11. See Eller’s essay, On the Risks and Dangers of Worship. ↩︎
  12. THe home was the residenece of Felix Manz. The date was January 21, 1525. ↩︎
  13. The Diet of Speyer,1529 ↩︎