With the publication of the elemental life, I've started up (or will be starting up) another podcast on the eLife. If you're an iTunes user, you can subscribe to it here. You can also find it on the site, or download it in another reader here. Basically, it's online catechesis, Joe style.

Dr. Jim Voelz has come up a few times at Genesis and in other conversations I've had with those in the Denver area who read my blog. He's a Greek professor at Concordia Seminary in Seward and I think his brain power was once summed up by Saint who borrowed his book on Biblical interpretation and tried to read it.

The book, which is titled, "What Does this Mean?" is casually known among Seminary students as, "What the hell does this book mean?" Saint agreed and I proceeded to tell a story about a conversation I had with Voelz one day where he brought up a point in his book, I expanded on the point, and he looked at me with a bit of shock before saying, "I've never had a student pick that up before!" Saint followed with, "See, that's how smart Voelz is, Joe brags about being able to understand him."

Anyway, now everybody has a chance to understand Voelz on the subject of Biblical interpretation in a new series on iTunesU (click here to download). In the first session Voelz basically lays out all of the issues we face when trying to interpret the Bible and then follows up with four more weeks on a strategy for how to read and understand God's Word.

Obviously if you read my blog you know that, along with vocation, interpretation is a soapbox of mine so I encourage all to download the series and learn from the master.

I've mentioned it here before, but one of the early questions I had to ask myself when thinking about Genesis was, "What makes something Church?" Over the past couple of days I've run into a couple of different ideas on how this question should be answered.

The first of these actually came via Leonard Sweet's "Napkin Scribbles" podcast (click here to subscribe with iTunes) and centered on an invitation he received to join The Beatitudes Society which, as the name would suggest, challenges people to live out the beatitudes of Matthew 5. According to this model, Church is defined by some kind of a moral code, in this case the beatitudes.

The fundamental problem with this approach, be it The Beatitudes Society, Red Letter Christians, or the old school saying, "Don't smoke, drink or chew, or go with those who do." is that it makes Jesus' primary purpose one of teaching ... he becomes the example we are to follow. However, if we look to Matthew 16:13-19, Jesus identifies the Church's foundation in him being the Christ, that is the anointed one of God who came into the world to inaugurate the Kingdom of God through the cross and empty tomb.

This of course doesn't mean that Christians shouldn't hold to a certain set of moral standards, it just means that adhering to a certain morality doesn't make something Church.

Now of course, Matthew 16 is a rather controversial place to go because in it, Roman Catholics find one of their proof-texts for the papacy (16:18). Of course, I chose that passage specifically because it provides a nice transition into another view on what makes something Church.

Today I ran across this article on CNN.com that covers an announcement made by the Vatican which states that "it is nevertheless difficult to see how the title of 'Church' could possibly be attributed to [Protestant churches]". According to the same document, the various Orthodox traditions are better off than Protestant traditions, but are still wounded because of they do not recognize the primacy of the Pope.

While I haven't been able to find the 16-page document online, given the rankings of the various bodies, it appears that Protestants are worse off than the Orthodox bodies because they lack the ecclesiastical structure that is shared by Roman Catholics and the Orthodox. In this situation, something is made Church based upon its organizational structure and a hierarchy of those in pastoral office with, in the case of Roman Catholics, the Pope at the top of the ladder.

So, how do I respond to the proof-text of Matthew 16:18? The verse reads in part, "And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church." The question we need to answer is, "What does 'this rock' mean?" Roman Catholics argue that because the words "Peter" and "rock" are very similar in Greek (and identical in Aramaic) that Peter himself is the rock and at this moment Jesus is establishing the papacy. Others will point to the rock being Peter's confession, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." in verse 16.

Personally, I think the pronouns make the correct interpretation rather obvious because "you" and "this" have different references so "this rock" cannot be Peter unless we have Jesus looking at Simon and telling him that he's Peter and then looking at the rest of the disciples and saying, "And on this rock I will build my church." Furthermore, the rest of Scripture (for example Galatians 2 and 1 Corinthians 1:10-17) affirms that it's the teaching that is central and not a single man or position.

Now, this doesn't mean that you can't have a some kind of hierarchy among pastors, it's just means that it's something that should be done for the sake of good order and by human arrangement and is not what makes something Church.

Rather, as Scripture teaches and the old hymn sings:

The Church's one foundation is Jesus Christ, her Lord; she is his new creation by water and the Word. From heav'n he came and sought her to be his holy bride; with his own blood he bought her and for her life he died.

In other words, what makes something Church? It's people who have hear the voice of Jesus and gather around the means of grace through which Jesus called them to himself.