This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

Why It's Essential to Know Your Church History

Word to the wise: This will be a longish post. I want to make the case that a) we modern Christians--and non-Christians for that matter--are huge failures at remembering our family history, b) that this leaves us susceptible to being taken in by false histories paraded as scholarship, and c) the remedy for this failure is to connect with this family history (which, in my view, can only be done in one way).

First, let's talk about our willful and woeful amnesia.

There has been a lot of flash and fire over Dan Brown's book, The Da Vinci Code. The book is a good formula-thriller. It will keep you turning pages. I read it and thoroughly enjoyed it on the level of the equivalent of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. It ain't great literature--it's not meant to be. And it's atrocious history. In fact, there's very little history in it. When it purports to give history, what it gives is fiction.

The sceptical agnostic media have had a field day with the Christian reaction to the book. "Look at them poor saps," they seem to say. "Don't they know it's just fiction!" And then much sniggering takes place behind manicured hands. But the fact of the matter is, some Christians do know it's fiction. What the problem is is that Mr. Brown and others parade his book around as serious history, or at least serious speculative history.

And more to the point, some Christians, perhaps even most, sadly, don't know it's just fiction through and through. Having forgotten their family history, they're taken in by hucksters touting the "newest thing." And when Brown's book gets so much media hype--even an entire hour-long ABC paid advertisement parading as a documentary--it simply cloaks the deception in an aura of all-the-more-real authenticity.

So it is important for Christians--and the rest of the world--to be set straight on the facts of history. Helpfully there are many resources available for that, among them several books available at your local bookstore.

One of the most oft-asserted points about early Christianity is that there was no consensus on Scripture and correlatively no consensus on orthodox belief. But in an article entitled, Why the 'Lost Gospels' Lost Out (props to the newly-illumined Jim ), Asbury Theological Seminary New Testament professor Ben Witherington III notes that:

First, there is no strong evidence to suggest that gnostic Christians vied with the orthodox from the beginning. Even what is probably the earliest gnostic document, the Gospel of Thomas, seems to have come from a period after the New Testament books were already recognized as authoritative and widely circulated.

The Gospel of Thomas, in fact, draws on most of these documents, adding some new ideas about Jesus and about the faith. All other major gnostic texts--like the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of the Hebrews, the Gospel of Mary, and so on--are clearly written in the second and third centuries.

Church Fathers Irenaeus and Tertullian addressed Gnosticism in the second century in works titled Against Heresies and The Prescription Against Heretics. And the Muratorian Canon (a list of New Testament writings from late second century) says this: "There is current also an epistle to the Laodiceans, and another to the Alexandrians, both forged in Paul's name to further the heresy of Marcion, and several others which cannot be received into the catholic Church. For it is not fitting that gall be mixed with honey." In other words, it is historically false to say that the councils of the fourth and fifth centuries invented or first defined "heresy."

No core belief system? So say the "scholars." But Witherington notes some important facts:

Revisionist historians like Pagels also argue that there was no core belief system, later called "orthodoxy," in the first century. This is a strange claim, because anyone who has read the letters of John, for example, knows that discussions about orthodoxy and heresy were heating up in the New Testament period. Paul's letters, too, show distinctions being made between truth and error. By the time we get to the Pastoral Epistles (1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus), there is a strong sense of what is and is not sound doctrine, particularly in terms of salvation and the person of Jesus Christ.

Furthermore, the early church viewed the Old Testament as both authoritative and inspired, as 2 Timothy 3:16 shows. This is an important point in regard to Gnosticism. The earliest churches had already recognized the Hebrew Scriptures as canon, a set of authoritative and divinely inspired texts. Notice how much of the Old Testament is quoted in the New Testament books—all written to edify churches across the ancient world. Gnosticism fundamentally rejected Jewish theology about the goodness of creation, and especially the idea that all the nations could be blessed through Abraham and his faith. When the church accepted the Hebrew Scriptures, it implicitly rejected Gnosticism before it had a chance to get started. Thus we are already at a watershed moment in the development of early Christianity, one that could not allow Gnosticism to ever be regarded as a legitimate development of the Christian faith.

The formation of authoritative apostolic texts, moreover, was already occurring in the New Testament period. We see this in 2 Peter 3:16, which says of Paul: "He writes this same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures … " Even if this text was written in the earliest years of the second century (as some New Testament scholars think), it makes plain that there was already a collection of Paul's letters that were considered authoritative and on a par with "Scriptures."

In other words, by the New Testament period, there was already a core of documents and ideas by which Christians could evaluate other documents. The New Testament documents already manifest a concept of "orthodoxy," or at least criteria by which truth and error could be distinguished. Among the second-century lists of authoritative Scriptures, never are gnostic texts listed—not even by the unorthodox Marcion in about 140. There was never a time when a wide selection of books, including gnostic ones, were widely deemed acceptable. . . .

It is no accident that, in about 180, Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, could already speak clearly and definitively about the fourfold Gospel, specifically citing those of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. He does so as he is opposing things he deems heretical. Thus, already in the second century, he has a strong sense of what amounts to orthodoxy when it comes to the story of Jesus.

Even before Irenaeus, from the middle of the second century, we have the witness of Justin Martyr, the great opponent of Marcion and his aberrations. In his Dialogue with Trypho (160), he calls the canonical Gospels "the reminiscences" of the apostles and says they were read and used in worship in his day. Nothing comparable is said about any other gospels, not even the Gospel of Thomas.

We can say without hesitation that various books that were to become part of the New Testament were already seen and used as authoritative and acceptable in the second century in various parts of the church, both Eastern and Western—and that their listing as authoritative in the early fourth century was without serious debate.

The sad thing is that all of the sources cited by Dr. Witherington are available to us, many online. Because we don't take in these writings as part of our formation in the Faith, and because we are ignorant generally about the history of the Church, we easily get taken in by such blatantly false assertions that somehow the Council of Nicea voted on the divinity of Jesus and on what books should be Scripture--as though both these matters had been unsettled for the first three centuries of the Church.

It's not simply a matter of forgetting our history, it's a matter of taking in that which is not history, not real, not true at all. What difference does it make? All the difference in the world. What if the Church hadn't believed in the divinity of Jesus for three centuries, and then, out of the blue, decided at council to make that doctrinal point official? What would that do to your understanding of the dogma of the divinity of Jesus? Wouldn't it be the case that one could reason, if Jesus' divinity wasn't all that important to the Christians of the first three centuries of the Church, why should it be important to us? And if we let go the claims of Jesus himself to be God in the flesh, then we let go the Gospel and we are left in our sins.

The remedy then is that we must connect again with the history of the Church. We must take it in as the very religious air we breathe. We must let the Church's lifestory permeate our thinking. Because only then will we be able to understand the Church's Scriptures, and only then will we be able to contend for the true Faith. And it follows that only then will we know the kind of Life that Christians down through the ages before us have known.

Part of the insidious nature of this historical amnesia is that it denigrates and devalues the Incarnation. Christianity, disconnected from the past, ceases to be a way of life and becomes merely a set of intellectual assents. And in the world of competitive ideas, any intellectual assent is as good as any other, so long as it's persuasive. But when Christian Faith is connected with the historic life and witness of the Church, then the Faith is not merely mental assent, but is full of blood, bread, sweat, struggle, tears and healing. The Faith permeates our entire existence and is not relegated to mere gnostic secrets.

Some of our present-day brothers and sisters, like Tom Oden and the Ancient Christian Commentary on the Scriptues are getting this. We cannot lay claim to Christianity unless we lay claim to the Incarnation. And we cannot lay claim to the Incarnation if we do not also claim for ourselves the Church which Christ himself founded, the Church of the Apostles.

Indeed, in fact, it's not that we claim for ourselves this historic Church, but that we are claimed by it. I'm still moved by this question. Not "Is the historic Church part of our church?" but "Is our church part of the historic Church?"

I know the answer to the question. Now it's time to move from intellect to life. From assent to an idea, to the struggle of Faith.

Posted by Clifton at May 24, 2004 08:53 AM | TrackBack