Next subheading: "Weren't the early Christians heavily influenced by Greek philosophy?" One of the most frequently used means of disparaging the early Christians is to accuse them of having taken their teachings from Greek philosophy. It's also one of the most irresponsible. Usually it's made by someone who has read neither the early Christian works nor those of the Greek philosophers.
The accuser is quite unable to show you where, in the writings of the Greek philosophers, they find the same teachings as those of the early Church. Sometimes the persons who make this accusation also claim that Jesus, Paul, and John also took their teachings from Greek philosophers or from the Qumran community. Some of them also assert that Moses took the Ten Commandments from the Code of Hammurabi, and that Daniel took his teachings from the Persian religious teacher Zoroaster.
Actually, there is no more evidence that the early Church took its teachings from Greek philosophy than there is for those other claims. Not only that, the general attitude of the early Church toward philosophy was one of antagonism. Tertullian called philosophers the, quote, "patriarchs of heretics." Hippolytus included the philosophers among the false teachers in his comprehensive work The Refutation of All Heresies.
Now, I'll read you a footnote: "Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria were notable exceptions to the general antipathy of the early Church toward the Greek philosophers." Justin and Clement both believed that some Greek philosophy reflected seeds of truth that God had planted with the Gentiles to help show them the way to Christianity.
However, neither Justin nor Clement based their Christian beliefs upon Greek philosophy; they taught the same things as did those other early Christians who were antagonistic toward philosophy. Finally, it should be remembered that many early Christian writings were apologies written to explain Christianity to non-believers. The apologists skillfully used quotations from the philosophers for the purpose of demonstrating the reasonableness of Christianity to the educated Romans.
For example, in his first apology, Justin pointed out to his Roman readers various resemblances between the teachings of Christianity and the tenets of various philosophers. But in his apologetic work written to the Jews, entitled Dialogue with Trypho, a Jew, Justin quoted heavily from Moses and the Old Testament prophets. In other words, he used the arguments that would have the most weight with his audience. Paul used the very same approach when witnessing to the court of the Areopagus in Athens.
Noticing an altar dedicated to an unknown god, he told the council, "For while I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship, I also found an altar with this inscription, to an unknown god: What therefore you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you: for in him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said; for we also are his offspring." (Acts 17:23-28) It would be rather absurd, wouldn't it, to claim that Paul derived his beliefs from the Greek poets simply because he
quoted from one of them when preaching to the Greeks?
Is the accusation against the early Christians any less absurd? Next subheading: "Didn't they use strange hermeneutical principles?" Another common accusation made against the early Christians is that their hermeneutics were so weird that their writings are of no use to us anymore. By hermeneutics, I mean their methods of Bible interpretation. The accusation against the early Christians is based partly on the fact that they often used Eastern Hellenistic reasoning that is very foreign to us.
But as we've seen, the New Testament writers used the very same type of reasoning. Furthermore, one of the distinguishing features of the second-century Christians is their ultra-literal interpretation of the New Testament. You can point to any commandment or moral teaching in the New Testament, and I can almost guarantee you that the early Church took it very literally and very seriously. Take, for example, our discussion about the prayer covering.
It's the 21st-century Church that has given a fanciful interpretation to the passage in 1 Corinthians 11, not the second-century Church. Their understanding is very literal. Actually, early Christian New Testament hermeneutics closely follow the common-sense principles we have discussed. One, they began with a blank slate. There had been no Church councils or theological battles to influence them. There were no seminaries or denominations.
At the beginning of the second century, there was little Christian literature except for the Scriptures. Their minds were blank slates that the apostles and their disciples could write on. Their understanding of Christianity and the New Testament began with Jesus Christ and his teachings. They always understood Paul and the other apostles in the context of Jesus's teachings, not vice versa. Three, almost without exception, they took every New Testament passage very literally and very seriously.
Four, their beliefs nearly always took into account the whole of what the New Testament teaches on any subject. Five, they leaned heavily on the course of performance of the apostles and the generation of Christians who were taught directly by the apostles. Their whole credo was to hold on to the things handed down by the apostles and not to change them. Six, finally, their understanding of parts of the New Testament do not render other parts of the New Testament void or unreasonable.
As a result, their theology doesn't have nearly as many problem verses to explain away as does Reformation and modern theology. So it's not their hermeneutics that are weird; it's often our systems of interpretation that are strange by common-sense standards. Next subheading: "Do they really clarify Scripture?" One person has raised the question: aren't the early Christian writings just as ambiguous as Scripture? Rather than helping us to understand Scripture, don't they just give us one more thing to interpret?
It's true that the early Christian writings suffer from the same limitations of human language as do the Scriptures. Our modern Christian books have those limitations as well. Yet we don't hesitate to turn to modern books to help us understand Scripture, do we? Likewise, although the early Christian writings contain ambiguities, that doesn't prevent them from shedding important light on the Scriptures. A good example is Tertullian's essay on the head covering that I previously cited.
Not everything that Tertullian says in that essay is perfectly clear. Yet I don't think anyone could possibly read his essay and wonder whether the head covering was a cloth veil or simply long hair. That part is absolutely clear, and that's all we were after. There is a saying: when you're up to your neck in alligators, it's easy to forget the reason you were in the swamp in the first place was to drain it.
Remember, the main reason we were looking at the early Christian writings in the first place was to determine the historic course of performance of the New Testament Church. These writings are also our primary source of knowledge about oral apostolic tradition. And in this, they do an admirable job. But these writings are not some kind of second canon in their own right that we have to thoroughly understand the way we do Scripture. It's not essential that we clarify every ambiguity in them.
Of course, the early Christian works don't clarify every verse in the New Testament. But they do reveal the course of performance of the first few generations of Christians in the key doctrinal areas, in their ordinances and in their application of biblical commands. They also reveal what the primitive Church considered to be the essential doctrines of Christianity.
Through the centuries, many Christians have proclaimed the model "In necessary things unity, in doubtful things liberty, in all things charity." I think we would probably all agree with this credo. But what are the necessary things of the Christian faith? What are the doubtful things? Who decides? Again, this is where the early Christians give us invaluable insight.
If the faith was once for all handed down to the saints, shouldn't we let the disciples of the apostles tell us what things were considered necessary and what things were considered doubtful? If certain doctrines weren't clear to the disciples of the apostles, how can they be any more clear to us? Or are we going to claim that we have special revelation that they did not have?
This is why I steadfastly maintain that we Bible-believing Christians could all be one if we would simply humble ourselves and accept the witness of what historic Christianity really was. It would not mean that we would have uniformity on every belief. Rather, it would mean that we would have uniformity on the essential doctrines and that we would not split over the others because we would recognize them for being what they are: doubtful or peripheral.
Of course, the testimony of the early Christians is pivotal on these matters only if they were faithfully preserving the faith delivered to them by the apostles. How can we be reasonably sure that they were?