There has been a lot of movement in the past couple of decades towards rediscovering the purity and joy of the paleo-church of the first century. Believers sharing all things in common, daily prayer meetings, miraculous healings, and no lobbies with coffee bars. We reminisce on the fervor and verdancy of this time with a jealous longing and try to replicate its spirit in Seattle suburbs.
But they also didn’t have a lot figured out.
The explosion of Christianity in the Levant and Mediterranean happened in a world that was pitted against it. The first Christians were pioneers in a dangerous landscape, a hostile territory seething with wolves hungry for born again lambs.
They had the in-person teachings of the apostles, and some the letters had been circulated, but the heavy hitter doctrines which are well formed for us were newly hatched, soft shelled, needing vigilance and defending.
It was the frontier of a new world and a new way of thinking, and young Christians were falling off right and left, being swayed by all kinds of weird ideas. Christianity came on the scene in a world where all truth was subject to mutation and eagerly twisted for the satisfaction of carnal desires. That is why Paul and Peter were running all around the Mediterranean putting out heretical fires. Don’t sleep with your father’s wife. Stop having all kinds of sex because you think your sin increases God’s grace; hands off the penis, fellas, circumcision is not required. Peter, Paul, Jude, and John all warn about slithering false teachers that come into the churches corrupting and misleading the believers as it was so easy to do, because orthodoxy hadn’t been hammered out yet.
It wasn’t until the first council of Nicaea in 325 that the whole Arian deal was dealt with and Christ’s divine nature and his relationship to the Father was ironed out. Pneumatomachianism, the belief that the Holy Spirit was not part of the Trinity, wasn’t addressed until fifty years later at the First Council of Constantinople. And Pelagianism, the idea that humans aren’t born sinful and are therefore perfectible in this life, was put down at the Council of Ephesus in 431. While we take all of these things for granted as orthodoxy, they were the ones who wrestled idea into submission in real time.
Today, we certainly have our fair share of false teachers teaching doctrines that are nuttier than squirrel crap, and we use the Sparknotes of creeds like the Westminster Confession as an orthodox quick reference to know exactly what type of nut it is. But the first people to read the letters of the apostles were the first century church to whom it was written, where there was no precedence, nothing codified or established. It was tough.
So a hearty thanks to the the first century church for their nascent belief and rigorous searching for the truth in the midst of corrupting influences, and kudos to the centuries of church fathers who debated and argued over the Holy Scriptures to work these things out for us. Orthodoxy is the doctrinal house that we live in, and the house was built by the early church hewing the lumber, forging the nails, clearing the land and tilling the soil so that we can see the truth of God more clearly.
Thought Butter 