What was "the church of God"?

[DCHindley]

Around that very same 1960s era you speak of, I, on the North Coast (Lake Erie), could hear clear as a bell CKLW from Windsor Ontario, on the AM bandwith (800 Megacycles, before someone gave them cycles the honorary name Hertz). I just looked it up and they broadcast at 50,000 watts. You could pick it up everywhere in northern Ohio, the PA panhandle and of course anywhere in Michigan.

Our piddly US 10,000 watt local stations (like WIXY 1260 in Cleveland in the later 1960s) barely got past Sandusky OH or Erie PA. But the nighttime power here was 5,000 watts, which meant that you could hear the more powerful stations in Ontario Canada extra clear, there being less interference. But you also got a little help from "skip" (ionized air in the upper atmosphere that allowed stations over the horizon to bounce their signals over our way).

My father, an electronics wonk from the days he tried to operate a TV & Radio repair shop in the 1950s (I think in Allentown or Bethlehem, PA), bought a multi band short wave radio from Radio Shack (they used to be "cutting edge" in those early days of electronics). We didn't have a proper antenna, just the same wire we had strung between the house and the garage to hook the dog's leash to, was bringing in stations from multiple countries, some really far away (Asia, Europe, Middle East). We could, with the help of tuning and squelching techniques, even pick up single sideband transmissions that could be understood although they sounded like the groans of those consigned to hell. Back then, everyone used SSB transmitters, I think even some CB transceivers. Yes my dad was one of them, whip antenna on his station wagon and all.

Sometimes the signals they call "spurious emissions" (not what one might think) that come from overpowered or jury rigged radios using unapproved crystals, short wave or CB, interfered with regular electronic sound equipment. I remember one day hearing somebody's conversation through the speakers of my dad's electronic organ (the transistors in the thing had picked up the signals) and it wasn't even turned on! The likely suspect was a guy down the street that had a big antenna on his roof for his short wave (or was it a CB?).

True story:

Decades ago, I was"Roaming through the dial" on the AM band late at night ...

CW

AM radio had its charms. When I lived in Orlando & Cape Canaveral in the early-mid 1980s, I had a car that only had an AM radio. I learned to really appreciate old school country artists, especially when I visited places like Apopka and Yehaw Junction. I also heard some pretty interesting black radio stations when folks were into funk and all.

[Irish1975]

In Raymond Brown's entry on "the early church" in the New Jerome Biblical Commentary (1990), he comments briefly on a purpose behind the Pauline usage of "the church of God":

The designation that became the most popular, i.e., ekklesia, "church," plausibly reflects the first exodus, in which Israel came into being, for in Deut 23:2 the LXX rendered qahal, "assembly," by ekklesia to describe Israel in the desert as "the church of the Lord." Paul would use "the church of God" to remind regional Christian communities that they were patterned on and imitative of the church in Judaea. Thus, just as in the case of "the Twelve," so also the various terms of early Christian self-understanding reflect continuity with Israel.

Of course a Catholic scholar would have to give primacy to the ecclesiology of the Gospels and Acts, and therefore he does not recognize "the church of God" as the original source of Christianity. For him there is simply a straight line between the qahal in the OT and "The Church." Paul's connection with the Pillars is glossed over in a generic OT-NT continuity.

[Irish1975]

"The church of God" language had an afterlife in post-Pauline communities as witnessed by 1 Clement, the Ignatian epistles, and the letter of Polycarp. But it is nowhere to be found in the pseudo-Pauline epistles of the NT. In fact, the term disappears early from the NT altogether. And not in Gospels-Acts, or in the pseudo-Paulines, but as early as Romans, where there is no mention of any church whatever until we get to the tacked-on chapter 16. In Romans 1:1-13, Paul addresses an audience of "brothers", "believers", "God's beloved", "called to be sanctified." It would be a perfect fit for him to call them the church of God. But he does not refer to them as a specific church community, oddly. It could be that it just wasn't on his mind, since he has so much else to write about. But I think there has to be a specific reason for the omission.

I don't have a theory, but here is some idle speculation based on 1:14-15:

I am under obligation both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish. So, for my part, I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome.

Why would Paul aim to preach the gospel to a community that is already "called", already famous for their faith, already "brothers"? Maybe they were not, and Romans 1:1-13 is all from a later hand, wanting to frame Romans as an ecclesial epistle, but for their own reasons averse to an association with the Pillars. For if Paul were to acknowledge a Roman "church" as the addressee of the epistle, this would raise the question: by which apostle was it founded? And this may not be a question that Paul's redactor wanted to raise. The suggestion is a little more definite later in ch. 15 with the language about not "building on another man's foundation."

So the Paul of Romans appears to be addressing what he otherwise would have called a church of God, but the appearance feels contrived.