Archive for category Ekklesia and church
The Holy Spirit as the Feminine Emanation of God
Posted by Dallas Wolf in Ancient Christian Manuscripts, Ekklesia and church, First Thoughts, The Logos Doctrine (series), Theology, Women in Early Christianity on April 2, 2026
In Greco-Roman Christianity, probably because of 2nd century proto-orthodox battles against Gnosticism, the biblical images of God as female were soon suppressed within the doctrine of God. God as Wisdom, Chokmah in Hebrew, or Sophia in Greek, both feminine forms, was translated by Christianity into the Logos concept of Philo, which is masculine and was defined as the Son of God. The theology of God’s mediating presence as female, was de-emphasized. This suppression of the divine feminine went on to include Shekinah, a feminine noun in Hebrew, which uniquely conveys the immanent, relational aspect of the Divine. God’s Spirit Ruach, a feminine noun in Hebrew, took on a neuter form when translated into Greek as Pneuma. The Vulgate translated Ruach into Latin as masculine, Spiritus. God’s Spirit, Ruach, which at the beginning of creation brings forth abundant life in the waters, and makes the womb of Mary fruitful, is now made male.
In spite of the reality of the comforting, compassionate, caring, consoling, healing aspects of divine activity, the dominant patriarchal tradition has prevailed, resulting in seeing the female as the passive recipient of God’s creation; and the female is expressed in nature, church, soul, and finally as Mary, the prototype of redeemed humanity.
Because God as Father has become an over literalized metaphor, the symbol of God as female is eclipsed. The problem lies not in the fact that male metaphors are used for God, but that they are used exclusively and literally. Because images of God as female have been suppressed in official formulations and teaching, they came to be embodied in the substitute human figure of Mary, the only exemplar left to reveal the unfailing female love of God.
It is well attested that revelation is experiential. With that proviso, I can tell you that I experience the Holy Spirit (whether as Chokmah, Sophia, Shekinah, Ruach, or Pneuma) as a distinctly feminine presence.
To me, it is much like the meaning of the Greek word dóxa (δόξα); its definition as “personal opinion” in Greek philosophy morphing into “Glory” as it passes into the Septuagint. So too the Holy Spirit; She is my dóxa, in both respects.
J.B. Heard: The Basis for the Ultimate Reunion of Christendom
Posted by Dallas Wolf in Ekklesia and church, First Thoughts, Theology on March 28, 2026
Rev. John Bickford Heard (28 Oct 1828 – 29 Feb 1908) was born in Dublin, Ireland. He was a British clergyman and graduate/lecturer at Cambridge University (M.A. 1864). His series of lectures at the Cambridge Hulsean Lectures of 1892-93 served as the basis of his book, Alexandrian and Carthaginian Theology Contrasted, published by T&T Clark, Edinburgh, in 1893. Excerpt below is from this work (p. 294):
“If the keynote of religion be God’s general fatherhood, and the keynote of morality be man’s general brotherhood, why may not an accommodation be made on these terms, and an accommodation which will prove the basis for the ultimate reunion of Christendom, on the simple basis of love and loyalty to one Master?”
Never Fully Trust a Translation
Posted by Dallas Wolf in Ancient Christian Manuscripts, Ekklesia and church, Theology on March 28, 2026
Never fully trust a translation of Scripture, regardless of the skill and/or good intention of the translator. “… ἐφ᾽ ᾧ…”.
Understanding Scripture
Posted by Dallas Wolf in Ekklesia and church, Hermeneutics, New Nuggets, Theology on March 28, 2026
For their lack of understanding of Greek, the Romans never fully understood the New Testament; for their lack of understanding of Hebrew, the Greeks never fully understood the Old Testament; for our lack of understanding of both, we fully understand neither.
The Frankish Papacy
Posted by Dallas Wolf in Ekklesia and church, The Holy Trinity, Theology on March 28, 2026
The Frankish Papacy, which lasted from 756 to 857, was a period marked by the dominance of the kings of the Franks over the Roman Papacy. Pepin the Short, Charlemagne, and Louis the Pious played significant roles in the selection and administration of popes, leading to the establishment of the Papal States. This period was crucial in the transformation of Rome’s authority and the establishment of the Papacy as a central institution in medieval Western Christendom.
Bart Ehrman: Short Intro to the NT Canon
Posted by Dallas Wolf in Ancient Christian Manuscripts, Ekklesia and church, First Thoughts, New Nuggets, Theology on March 23, 2026
Bart D. Ehrman (born October 5, 1955) is an American New Testament scholar whose research focuses on the textual criticism of the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the origins and development of early Christianity. He is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author or editor of more than 30 books, including six New York Times bestsellers, and has created nine lecture series with The Great Courses. Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, HarperCollins, 2005, is his most popular New York Times bestseller mass-market book on Christian textual criticism.
The following is excerpted from: A Brief Introduction to the New Testament, © Bart Ehrman, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Note: With reference to the Bible, the term canon denotes the collection of books that are accepted as authoritative by a religious body. [p. 3]
Jesus and his followers were themselves Jews who were conversant with the ancient writings that were eventually canonized into the Hebrew Scriptures.
Thus Christianity had its beginning in the proclamation of a Jewish teacher, who ascribed to the authority of documents. Moreover, we know that Jesus’ followers considered his own teachings to be authoritative. Near the end of the first century, Christians were citing Jesus’ words and were calling them “Scripture” (e.g., 1 Tim 5:18). It is striking that in some early Christian circles the correct interpretation of Jesus’ teachings was thought to be the key to eternal life (e.g., see John 6:68 and Gosp. Thom. 1). Furthermore, some of Jesus’ followers, such as the apostle Paul, understood themselves to be authoritative spokespersons for the truth. Other Christians granted them this claim. The book of 2 Peter, for example, includes Paul’s letters among the “Scriptures” (2 Peter 3:16).
Thus by the beginning of the second century some Christians were ascribing authority to the words of Jesus and the writings of the apostles. There were nonetheless heated debates which apostles were true to Jesus’ own teachings, and a number of writings that claimed to be written by apostles were thought by some Christians to be forgeries.
It appears then that our New Testament emerged out of the conflicts among Christian groups, and that the dominance of the position that eventually “won out” was what led to the development of the Christian canon as we have it. It is no accident that Gospels that were deemed “heretical” (i.e., false) – for instance, the Gospel of Peter or the Gospel of Philip – did not make it into the New Testament. This is not to say, however, that the canon of Scripture was firmly set by the end of the second century. Indeed, it is a striking fact of history that even though the four Gospels were widely considered authoritative by proto-orthodox Christians then – along with Acts, most of the Pauline epistles, and several of the longer general epistles – the collection of our twenty-seven books was not finalized until much later. For throughout the second, third, and fourth centuries proto-orthodox Christians continued to debate the acceptability of some of the other books. The arguments centered around (a) whether the books in question were ancient (some Christians wanted to include The Shepherd of Hermas, for example; others insisted that it was penned after the age of the apostles); (b) whether they were written by the apostles (some wanted to include Hebrews on the grounds that Paul wrote it; others insisted that he did not); and (c) whether they were widely accepted among the proto-orthodox congregations as containing correct Christian teaching (many Christians, for example, disputed the doctrine of the end times found in the book of Revelation).
Contrary to what one might expect, it was not until the year 367 c.e., almost two and a half centuries after the last New Testament book was written, that any Christian of record named our current twenty-seven books as the authoritative canon of Scripture. The author of this list was Athanasius, the powerful bishop of Alexandria, Egypt. Some scholars believe that this pronouncement on his part, and his accompanying proscription of heretical books, led monks of a nearby monastery to hide the Gnostic writings discovered 1,600 years later by a bedouin near Nag Hammadi, Egypt. [p.7]
We have seen that the New Testament did not emerge as a single collection of twenty-seven books immediately, but that different groups of early Christians had different collections of sacred books. In some ways, however, the problem of the New Testament canon is even more complicated than that. For not only did different Christian communities have different books – they had different versions of the same books.
This is because of the way books were transmitted in an age before internet access, desktop publishing, word processors, photocopiers, and printing presses. Books in the ancient world could not be mass produced. They were copied by hand, one page, one sentence, one word, one letter at a time. There was no other way to do it. Since the books were copied by hand, there was always the possibility that scribes would make mistakes and intentional changes in a book – any and every time it was copied. Moreover, when a new copy was itself copied, the mistakes and changes that the earlier scribe (copyist) made would have been reproduced, while the new scribe would introduce some mistakes and changes of his own. When that copy was then copied, more changes would be introduced. And so it went. [p.8]
Most of these differences are altogether minor and unimportant (misspelled words, changes of word order, the accidental omission of a line, etc.). But some of them are of immense importance. Were the last twelve verses of Mark’s Gospel original, or were they added later (they are not found in any of our oldest and best copies)? Was the story of the woman taken in adultery originally part of John’s Gospel (it does not start to appear regularly in copies until the Middle Ages)? Was the famous account of Jesus “sweating blood” originally found in Luke (some of our oldest and best copies omit it)? [p.9]
Unfortunately, we do not have the originals of any of the books of the New Testament, or the first copies, or the copies of the first copies. What we have are copies made much later – in most cases hundreds of years later. [p. 8]
J.B. Heard: The Afterthoughts of St. Augustine
Posted by Dallas Wolf in Ekklesia and church, First Thoughts, Heaven and Hell, Theology on March 19, 2026
Rev. John Bickford Heard (28 Oct 1828 – 29 Feb 1908) was born in Dublin, Ireland. He was a British clergyman and graduate/lecturer at Cambridge University (M.A. 1864). His series of lectures at the Cambridge Hulsean Lectures of 1892-93 served as the basis of his book, Alexandrian and Carthaginian Theology Contrasted, published by T&T Clark, Edinburgh, in 1893. Excerpt below is from this work:
“To discuss all these afterthoughts of theology, sin and salvation, heaven, hell, and purgatory, grace and its two channels, faith and the sacraments, would be to write the history of Augustinianism in its many phases.”
David Bentley Hart: Romans 5:12 “… one of the most consequential mistranslations in Christian history.”
Posted by Dallas Wolf in Ancient Christian Manuscripts, Christian Anthropology -East & West (Series), Ekklesia and church, First Thoughts, New Nuggets on March 18, 2026
David Bentley Hart (born 1965) is an American Orthodox Christian philosophical theologian, cultural commentator and polemicist. An acknowledged expert in koine Greek and New Testament exegesis, Hart published his own translation of the New Testament from Greek. Hart’s Greek basis for translation is grounded in “the so-called Critical Text, which is based on earlier and different manuscript sources (such as those of the Alexandrian Text-type)… but also included a great many verses and phrases found only in the Majority Text [Byzantine Text-type] (placing them in brackets to set them off from the Critical Text).”
See The New Testament – A Translation, by David Bentley Hart, Second Edition, Yale University Press, (C) 2017, 2023.
Romans 5:12
English: “Therefore, just as sin entered into the cosmos through one man, and death through sin, so also death pervaded all humanity, whereupon all sinned;”[1]
Greek: Διὰ τοῦτο ὥσπερ δι᾽ ἑνος ἀνθρώπου ἡ ἁμαρτὶα εἰς τὸν κόσμον εἰσῆλθεν καὶ διὰ τῆς ἁμαρτίας ὁ θὰνατος, καὶ οὕτως εἰς πάντας ἀνθρώπους ὁ θὰνατος διῆλθεν, ἐφ᾽ ᾧ πὰντες ἥμαρτον.
Transcription: Dia touto hōsper di’ henos anthrōpou hē hamartias eis to kosmon eisēlthen kai dia tēs hamartias ho thanatos, kai houtōs eis pantas anthrōpous ho thanatos diēlthen, eph’ hōi pantes hēmarton.
A fairly easy verse to follow until one reaches the final four words, whose precise meaning is already obscure, and whose notoriously defective rendering in the Latin Vulgate (in quo omnes peccaverunt) constitutes one of the most consequential mistranslations in Christian history. The phrase ἐφ᾽ ᾧ (eph’ hōi) is not some kind of simple adverbial formula like the διὰ τοῦτο (dia touto) (“therefore”) with which the verse begins; literally, ἐφ᾽ ᾧ means “upon which,” “whereupon,” but how to understand this is a matter of some debate. Typically, as the pronoun ᾧ is dative masculine, it would be referred back to the most immediate prior masculine noun, which in this case is θάνατος (thanatos), “death,” and would be taken to mean (correctly, I believe) that the consequence of death spreading to all human beings is that all became sinners. The standard Latin version of the verse makes this reading impossible, for two reasons: first, it retains the masculine gender of the pronoun (quo) but renders θάνατος by the feminine noun mors, thus severing any connection that Paul might have intended between them; second, it uses the preposition in, which when paired with the ablative means “within.” Hence what became the standard reading of the verse in much of Western theology after the late fourth century: “in whom [i.e., Adam] all sinned.” This is the locus classicus of the Western Christian notion of original guilt—the idea that in some sense all human beings had sinned in Adam, and that therefore everyone is born already damnably guilty in the eyes of God—a logical and moral paradox that Eastern tradition was spared by its knowledge of Greek. Paul speaks of death and sin as a kind of contagion here, a disease with which all are born; and elsewhere he describes it as a condition like civil enslavement to an unjust master, from which we must be “redeemed” with a manumission fee; but never as an inherited condition of criminal culpability. It has become more or less standard to render ἐφ᾽ ᾧ as “inasmuch as” or “since,” thus suggesting that death spread to all because all sinned. But this reading seems to make little sense: not only does it evacuate the rest of the verse of its meaning, but it is contradicted just below by v. 14, where Paul makes it clear that the universal reign of death takes in both those who have sinned and those who have not. Other interpretations take the ἐφ᾽ ᾧ as referring back to Adam, not as in the Latin mistranslation but in the sense that all have sinned “because of” the first man; this, though, fails to honor the point Paul seems obviously to be making about the intimate connection between the disease of death and the contagion of sin (and vice versa). The most obvious and, I think, likely reading is that, in this verse, a parallelism (something for which Paul has such a marked predilection) is given in a chiastic form: just as sin entered into the cosmos and introduced death into all its members, so the contagion of death spread into the whole of humanity and introduced sin into all its members. This, as we see in Romans and elsewhere, is for Paul the very dynamism of death and sin that is reversed in Christ: by his triumphant righteousness he introduced eternal life into the cosmos, and so as that life spreads into the whole of humanity it makes all righteous (as in vv. 15–19 below, or as in 1 Corinthians 15:20–28).[2]
[1] Hart, David Bentley. The New Testament: A Translation (p.296). Yale University Press. 2017
[2] ibid., p.319
Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM: “Jesus the Prophet”
Posted by Dallas Wolf in Ekklesia and church, New Nuggets, Theology on October 15, 2025
In a homily Father Richard Rohr, OFM, describes the tension between priestly and prophetic tasks—both necessary for healthy religion:
There are two great strains of spiritual teachers in Judaism, and I think, if the truth is told, in all religions. There’s the priestly strain that holds the system together by repeating the tradition. The one we’re less familiar with is the prophetic strain, because that one hasn’t been quite as accepted. Prophets are critical of the very system that the priests maintain.
If we have both, we have a certain kind of wholeness or integrity. If we just have priests, we keep repeating the party line and everything is about loyalty, conformity, and following the rules—and that looks like religion. But if we have the priest and the prophet, we have a system constantly refining itself and correcting itself from within. Those two strains very seldom come together. We see it in Moses, who both gathers Israel, and yet is the most critical of his own people. We see it again in Jesus, who loves his people and his Jewish religion, but is lethally critical of hypocrisy and illusion and deceit (see Matthew 23; Luke 11:37–12:3).
Choctaw elder and Episcopal bishop Steven Charleston considers how Jesus invited others to share in his prophetic vision:
Jesus … saw a vision that became an invitation for people to claim a new identity, to enter into a new sense of community.… Jesus offered the promise of justice, healing, and redemption.… Jesus became the prophetic teacher of a spiritual renewal for the poor and the oppressed…. Jesus was more than just the recipient of a vision or the messenger of a vision. What sets Jesus apart is that he brought the elements of his vision quest together in a way that no one else had ever done….
“This is my body,” he told them. “This is my blood.” For him, the culmination of his vision was not just the messiahship of believing in him as a prophet. Through the Eucharist, Jesus was not just offering people a chance to see his vision, but to become a part of it by becoming a part of him.
Richard honors the role of prophets in religious systems:
The only way evil can succeed is to disguise itself as good. And one of the best disguises for evil is religion. Someone can be racist, be against the poor, hate immigrants, and be totally concerned about making money and being a materialist but still go to church each Sunday and be “justified” in the eyes of religion.
Those are the things that prophets point out, so prophets aren’t nearly as popular as priests. Priests keep repeating the party line, but prophets do both: they put together the best of the conservative with the best of the liberal, to use contemporary language. They honor the tradition, and they also say what’s phony about the tradition. That’s what fully spiritually mature people can do.
Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation – Monday, October 13, 2025
“Christianity is in a pretty poor mess…” ~ Fr. Richard Rohr
Posted by Dallas Wolf in Ekklesia and church on October 6, 2025
Christianity continues decades of decline in the U.S., and the “Church” continues to splinter apart worldwide. Along with Fr. Richard, I think that qualifies as a “pretty poor mess”.
Some background for consideration:
The Christian Nicene Creed[1], the official Statement of Christian Beliefs, states:
[I believe] in one holy, catholic apostolic Church
This was indeed a reality until AD 451. It’s become a wistful faerie tale since then (I submit 1054 and 1517 as additional evidence).
The original language of the New Testament and Nicene Creed is Greek: catholic in Greek is καθολικὴν (katholikén), meaning universal (not “Roman Catholic”!); church in New Testament Greek is ἐκκλησία ((ekklēsía) and translates as “assembly” or “gathering.” In the New Testament context, ἐκκλησία referred to the assembly of Christ believers, not the worldly institution that we know as “Church”. Church is an invention developed by generations of post-apostolic institutional male clerics. It’s actually helpful, I think, that in English we use the word Church, because apostolic Ekklesía and Church are clearly not the same thing.
Many “Churches” claim to embody the New Testament Ekklesía, but in fact often operate with only one or two of the five ministries present in the apostolic Ekklesías (Eph. 4:11 refers). And “worship leader” is not one of them.
The facts speak for themselves:
- There are more than 45,000 different Christian denominations in the world today. That’s up from 33,000 in 2007.[2]
- In 2023, 62% of the U.S. adults self-identified as Christians. That’s down from 78% in 2007. Estimates for 2025 are as low as 57%.
- In 2023, approximately 33% of adults attended church at least once a month. That’s down from 2007, when it was 57%.
- The percentage of U.S. adult “nones”, those having no religious affiliation, has risen from 16% in 2007 to 29% in 2023[3].
New and returning Christians are often encouraged to “Find a Bible-believing Church” and all will be well. “Bible-believing” now has such a plethora of divergent definitions and applications that, today, the term is virtually meaningless. In most cases, it simply implies, “Be like us”! Not helpful, I submit.
I will offer a word of knowledge for the Sunday crowds triumphantly proclaiming belief in “one holy, catholic apostolic Church”. Consider the following simple working definition of insanity:
“Continuing to do what you have been doing and expecting a different outcome.”
[1] Excerpt from the Christian Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed of AD 325/381
[2] Gina A. Zurlo, ed. World Christian Database (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2025)
[3] Pew Research Center, Religious Landscape Study, 2023-24.
First Thoughts 