What ekklesia means

James Barr is a famous enemy of “illegitimate totality transfer,” but he freely acknowledges that there’s a proper kind of totality. Using the word “ekklesia,” he lists some NT statements about the church (the church is body of Christ, bride, first installment of kingdom, etc.), and says that “the ‘meaning of ekklesia in the NT’ could then be legitimately stated to be the totality of these relations. This is one sense of ‘meaning.’”

What he rejects is the importation of this meaning of meaning into a particular statement: “when we take an individual sentence, such as ‘The Church is the Body of Christ,’ and ask what is ‘the meaning’ of ‘the Church’ in this sentence, we are asking something different. The semantic indication given by ‘the Church’ is not something much less than ‘the NT conception of the Church.’”