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the Church, because this was ably treated in another department of the Seminary in which he
labored.[Lect. on Theol., p. 726.] Shedd in giving his scheme asserts that the Church comes into
consideration in connection with the means of grace.[Dogm. Theol. I, p. 10.] However, he
devotes very little attention to the means of grace and does not discuss the doctrine of the
Church. And the editor of Smith’s System of Christian Theology incorporated into this work the
author’s views on the Church, as expressed in other works.[pp. 590 ff.]
A. SCRIPTURAL NAMES FOR THE CHURCH.
I. IN THE OLD TESTAMENT.
The Old Testament employs two words to designate the Church,
namely qahal (or kahal), derived from an obsolete root qal (or kal), meaning “to call”; and
’edhah, from ya’adh, “to appoint” or “to meet or come together at an appointed place.” These
two words are sometimes used indiscriminately, but were not, at first, strictly synonymous.
’Edhah is properly a gathering by appointment, and when applied to Israel, denotes the society
itself formed by the children of Israel or their representative heads, whether assembled or not
assembled. Qahal, on the other hand, properly denotes the actual meeting together of the
people. Consequently we find occasionally the expression qehal ’edhah, that is, “the assembly
of the congregation” Ex. 12:6; Num. 14:5; Jer. 26:17. It seems that the actual meeting was
sometimes a meeting of the representatives of the people, Deut. 4:10; 18:16, comp. 5:22,23; I
Kings 8:1,2,3,5; II Chron. 5:2-6. ’Edhah is by far the more common word in Exodus, Leviticus,
Numbers, and Joshua, but is wholly absent from Deuteronomy, and is found but rarely in the
later books. Qahal, abounds in Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah. Sunagoge is the usual, almost
universal, rendering of the former in the Septuagint, and is also the usual rendering of the latter
in the Pentateuch. In the later books of the Bible, however, qahal is generally rendered by
ekklesia. Schuerer claims that later Judaism already pointed to the distinction between
sunagoge as a designation of the congregation of Israel as an empirical reality, and ekklesia as
the name of that same congregation ideally considered. He is followed in this by Dr. Bavinck.
Cremer-Koegel, however, takes exception to this. Hort says that after the exile the word qahal
seems to have combined the shades of meaning belonging to both it and ’edhah; and that
consequently “ekklesia, as the primary Greek representative of qahal, would naturally, for
Greek-speaking Jews, mean the congregation of Israel quite as much as an assembly of the
congregation.”[The Christian Ekklesia, p. 7.]
2. IN THE NEW TESTAMENT.
The New Testament also has two words, derived from the
Septuagint, namely, ekklesia, from ek and kaleo, “to call out,” and sunagoge, from sun and ago,
meaning “to come or to bring together.” The latter is used exclusively to denote either the
religious gatherings of the Jews or the buildings in which they assembled for public worship,
Matt. 4:23; Acts 13:43; Rev. 2:9; 3:9. The term ekklesia, however, generally designates the