The Roots of the Church in the Old and New Testament – Prof. Nina Sophie Heereman

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4.8 • 873 Ratings

🗓️ 21 April 2026

⏱️ 51 minutes

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Summary

Prof. Nina Sophie Heereman argues that the Church is not a human invention but a divinely founded reality rooted deeply in Scripture, where Israel’s story, the Eucharist, and Pentecost all reveal Christ’s intention to gather a new people of God.

This lecture was given on March 5th, 2026, at Louisiana State University.

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About the Speakers:

Dr. Heereman was born and raised in Germany. Originally trained to become a lawyer and after completing her bar exam, she experienced a deep encounter with the Lord which led her to consecrate her life to the study and teaching of the Word of God. She subsequently attended the ICPE school of Evangelization in India, Banglore, and studied theology in Frankfurt and Rome. She received an STB from the Pontifical Gregorian University, an SSL from the Pontifical Biblical Institute, and the SSD from the École biblique et archéologique française de Jérusalem and the Université de Fribourg. She has taught as a visiting professor at the Collège des Bernhardins in Paris, the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, the DSPT in Berkley, and is currently Associate Professor for Sacred Scripture at St. Patrick’s Seminary & University. Her scholarly interests include a reintegration of Exegesis with Systematic and Spiritual Theology. She is the author of Behold King Solomon on the Day of His Wedding (Leuven: Peeters, 2021), and Athirst for the Spirit (Steubenville: Emmaus Press, 2023).

Keywords: Body of Christ, Bride of Christ, Church, Covenant, Eucharist, Old Testament, New Testament, Pentecost, Salvation History, Temple

Transcript

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0:00.0	So the roots of the church in the Old and New Testament.
0:03.8	Who is the church?
0:06.6	A famous saying coined by a French Catholic priest
0:10.4	towards the end of the 19th century was
0:13.2	Jesus came proclaiming the kingdom of God
0:17.0	and what we got was the church.
0:26.8	This French priest with the name of Loise did not mean to say that Jesus did not intend to found the church, but this is exactly how he has been interpreted for
0:33.6	more than a hundred years. It was quickly picked up as a slogan with the conviction that
0:39.8	Jesus came to inaugurate the kingdom of God, but then Jesus died, went to heaven, and what
0:44.7	the result was not the kingdom of God, but human beings coming up with this fancy idea of creating
0:51.4	a church. So it's a very Catholic, sorry, very partisan anti-Catholic stance.
0:57.0	That, however, really crept into the theologians of the church and has destabilized
1:06.0	the church's self-understanding over more than the last hundred years.
1:11.6	So we had a real, real crisis in the 20th century of the church's self-understanding
1:16.6	because it's had the theologians have been affected.
1:19.6	And there's many theologians who have pushed against this,
1:23.6	but one who was really dedicated his life to this topic was Pope Benedict as
1:29.4	Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger and first Joseph Ratzinger. And a lot of what I'm going to tell you tonight
1:34.9	is simply the synthesis of Pope Benedict's thinking about the church, particularly in answer to
1:42.5	this accusation that Jesus never intended to found a church,
1:47.0	and also of course in the apologetical dialogue with those who don't believe that Christ founded a church,
1:53.0	to show how the church is, the way we understand the church is deeply, deeply rooted in the scriptures.
	...

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