ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CUENet AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION DOGMATICS 2 LESSON 11 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> Thanks for that response. It was helpful. But I've got to go back to Josh's wording of his question. Because he used two words to indicate the same group. And for some reason it didn't sound quite right to me. He spoke of the first disciples and the Apostles as the same thing. Is he correct? What is an Apostle and what is the significance of the Apostles for Christology? >> DR. DAVID SCAER: These are two words which are bandied about, the word Apostle and disciple. And it's really kind of difficult to say that there is one particular definition for either of these words. But let's start off at the primary level. And that is in the first sense, the disciples specifically referred to the 12 whom Jesus chose to be the foundation of the church. The word disciple means a student or a follower. Much of our New Testament comes from the private instruction which Jesus gave the disciples. Some things he taught to the crowds and other things he only taught to the disciples because the disciples were going to be those who remembered the teachings of Jesus and they were going to preserve these things and to record them. By the time you get to the -- already to the end of the Gospel of Matthew, the word disciple has a wider meaning. A disciple means any Christian, anybody who follows Christ. So in a sense, we're all disciples. But let's not be confused. We can never be in the same situation as the 12. In fact, the Gospels quite specifically speak of the 12 disciples as being in a special category which none of us will ever be. The word Apostle also has multiple meanings. An apostle means in a non-biblical sense a person who has an authority. The closest thing we can get to the word Apostle today would be a man who has the power of attorney. Many of us have elderly relatives. And they have appointed younger people to be the power of attorney. They speak for them. They have the authority of those people. The Apostle has the authority of Jesus to speak for him. And so when we recite the Creed, we say we believe in one holy Christian and apostolic church. The Christian church is no different than the apostolic church. But by the word Apostle, we mean to say that the church has been established on the words which they convey about Jesus. Over against Jesus the 12 are always disciples. They are always in the position of learning. But over against the church, that is to us, they are Apostles. So in the church we commemorate many of the disciples of Jesus. But we don't call them disciple. We speak of St. Matthew, the Apostle, St. Peter the Apostle. Now, we can even take this further. Because Paul says that the church is built upon the Apostles and the prophets. Jesus Christ being the chief cornerstone. It will be very tempting to suggest that this is a reference to the Old and New Testament. Except the word order is wrong. It doesn't say prophets and Apostles. It says Apostles and prophets. There the term Apostles means a missionary. Because the 12 original disciples of Jesus, excluding Judas of course bringing it down to 11, they were missionaries. They traveled throughout the ancient world. So for them, they were the authorities that spoke for Jesus. And they were also the first missionaries. The word prophet there means a preacher who traveled around within a number of churches. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***