parresia

thomas howard

"...We were right, and the Fathers were wrong. That settled the matter..."

First, the antiquity of the Church confronts me. As an Evangelical, I discovered while I was in college that it was possible to dismiss the entire Church as having gone off the rails by about A.D. 95. That is, we, with our open Bibles, knew better than old Ignatius or Polycarp or Clement, who had been taught by the apostles themselves-we knew better than they, just what the Church is, and what it should look like. Never mind that our worship services would have been unrecognizable to them, or that our church government would have been equally unrecognizable, or the vocabulary in which we spoke of the Christian life would have been equally unrecognizable. We were right, and the Fathers were wrong. That settled the matter.

The trouble here was that what these wrong-headed men wrote-about God, about our Lord Jesus Christ, about his Church, about the Christian's walk and warfare-was so titanic, and so rich, and so luminous, that their error seemed infinitely truer and more glorious than my truth. I gradually felt that it was I, not they, who was under surveillance. The "glorious company of the apostles, the noble army of martyrs, and the holy Church throughout all the world" (to quote the ancient hymn, the Te Deum) judge me, not I them. Ignatius, Polycarp, Clement, Justin, Irenaeus, Cyprian, Cyril, Basil, the Gregorys, Augustine, Ambrose, Hilary, Benedict-it is under the gaze of this senate that I find myself standing. Alas. How tawdry, how otiose, how flimsy, how embarrassing, seem the arguments that I had been prepared, so gaily, to put forward against the crushing radiance of these men's confession. The Church is here, in all of its antiquity, judging me.

This was written by Thomas Howard, the author of Evangelical Is Not Enough. The rest of this article can be found Here.

*thanks for the article, sweetie.

Posted by jeremy stock at June 7, 2003 08:53 AM