Next subheading: "Why I believe the Gospel remained intact." How many denominations or religions do you know that lost all their basic doctrines and ordinances within a century after their founders died? I don't know of any. The conservative Reformed churches still teach today virtually all of the same doctrines found in Calvin's institutes. The conservative Lutherans still hold to virtually all the same doctrines found in the Augsburg Confession.
The conservative Anabaptists of today still hold to the same key doctrines and practices of their 16th-century ancestors. The same is true of conservative Baptists and other groups. Yet we are nearly 500 years removed from the beginnings of those movements. Sure, there have been some changes in all these denominational groups, but the changes have not been in key doctrinal areas or in the primary Christian ordinances such as baptism and communion.
Views on peripheral issues such as the gifts of the Spirit have changed in some of these groups, but not their basic beliefs on salvation, or the Trinity, or the Incarnation, or man's fallen condition. They still baptize and have communion the same way. Spirituality often wanes after one generation, but not the cardinal doctrines and ordinances. When we leave out theological liberals, Baptists today still have the same basic beliefs and ordinances that Baptists did in the last century.
So do the Lutherans, the Methodists, the Mennonites, the Brethren, the Amish, the Nazarenes, the Salvation Army, the Church of Christ, and most other denominations. And here we are talking about mere man-made denominations. Is our workmanship better than that of Christ and his apostles? Check out 1 Corinthians 3:11-15. Our workmanship has withstood the test of time. Do we really believe that theirs didn't? Did they build out of wood, hay, and stubble that didn't even last one century?
Even man-made religions such as Islam and Buddhism have done better than that. Besides, throughout the history of the Church, every major change in doctrines, ordinances, or moral teachings has always been accompanied with some sort of controversy. Invariably, someone in the group doesn't go along with a change, and we have a record of the controversy. The work of every one of the 16th-century reformers was surrounded by conflict with the existing Church and with the other reformers.
Are we to believe that the cardinal teachings and ordinances of Christianity changed within a few decades after the end of the 1st century, all without any conflicts, debates, or dissenting congregations? It would be the equivalent of the entire Roman Catholic Church having changed from its traditional beliefs to those of the Anabaptists, all within a few decades, and all without any controversy, dissenters, or discussion, and without even any record of who introduced those changes.
Today we live in a fast-changing society, a society where change is expected. Change is usually welcome today, but this trend is a new phenomenon in human history. In fact, our society has changed more in the past 250 years than it did in the previous 4,000 years. Before the Industrial Revolution and the political revolutions of the 1700s, people strongly believed in doing things the way their ancestors did them. This was true both in secular and religious realms.
We are so used to change today that we find it hard to believe that any society or Church could exist for a century without change. Yet the beliefs and practices of the traditional Eastern and Oriental Orthodox churches are virtually unchanged from the 8th century. Actually, they have had very little theological change since the end of the 4th century.
Even today, most of the major doctrinal changes that arise within a Church or denomination are generally a result of the modern liberal movements of the past few centuries. By liberal or modernist, I am referring to the movements that question the inspiration or doctrinal inerrancy of Scripture. Yet those movements are fairly a new phenomenon. There was no such movement in ancient times, certainly not in the 2nd-century Church.
Moreover, in any time period, churches under secular persecution are usually not innovators of new doctrines. How much new theology in this century has come out of Eastern Europe or other places where the Church has been oppressed. Through the ages, virtually all of the doctrinal changes and theological controversies have taken place in that portion of the Church that was free from secular persecution.
In fact, when Constantine and Licinius gave legal recognition to Christianity in AD 313, it sparked theological squabbles that lasted for centuries. I am not saying that there was no change between the 1st and 2nd centuries. I am saying that the changes were small, and that they were not in the areas of the major doctrines, ordinances, or moral teachings. This is substantiated by comparing the Church of the 2nd century with that of the 3rd.
There was a small measure of drift between those centuries, but not in the primary doctrines, ordinances, or moral teachings. There were a few minor theological changes, or at least changes in emphasis. There were some changes in theological terminology and in ecclesiastical structure, and there appears to have been more spiritual laxity in the 3rd century. But overall, there is relatively little difference between the two centuries.
Next subheading: "But didn't the apostles predict a major falling away?" Yes, but the apostles predicted there would be a major apostasy right after they passed away. Several people have pointed out to me. And it is true that the apostles did predict that false teachers would arise in their absence. But let's take a closer look at what the apostles actually did say would happen.
Paul told the Ephesian elders, "Be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the Church of God, which he purchased with his own blood. I know that after my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock, and from among your own selves men will arise, speaking perverse things to draw away the disciples after them. Therefore, be on the alert." Acts 20:28-31. And all of these things happened just as Paul predicted.
Teachers did arise toward the end of the apostolic age, saying perverse things and drawing away disciples after themselves. But we don't have to guess who these people were. We know their names. Names such as Cerinthus, Basilides, Valentinus, and Marcion. And we know exactly what they taught, because a sizable portion of the early Christian works are directed against these false teachers. Most of those men to whom Paul was referring taught a form of heresy known as Gnosticism.
The Gnostics claimed to have special supernatural knowledge, Greek gnosis, that the rest of the Church did not have. Gnostic teachings fit precisely what the apostles predicted. For example, Paul wrote to Timothy, "But the Spirit explicitly says that in later times some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons.
Men who forbid marriage and advocate abstaining from foods, which God has created to be gratefully shared by those who believe and know the truth." 1 Timothy 4:1-3. That is exactly what some of the Gnostic groups taught. They had obligatory fasts and diets. Some of them even forbid marriage altogether.
At the end of his letter to Timothy, Paul apparently was referring to the Gnostics when he says, "O Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to you, avoiding worldly and empty chatter and the opposing arguments of what is falsely called knowledge." In 1 Timothy 6:20. Now, Gnosticism didn't reach its fully developed systems until the close of the 1st century. However, the beginnings of Gnostic thought were evidently around in Paul's day.
Several of the early Christians point to Simon Magus as one of the founders of Gnosticism. The apostle John also gave a description of the deceivers that had come forth by the end of the 1st century. "For many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh. This is the deceiver and the Antichrist." 2 John 7. The Gnostics were precisely the ones who did not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh.
Most of them taught that Jesus did not have a real body of flesh and blood. For according to their teaching, an inferior God created our human bodies. So the deceivers and false teachers that the apostles wrote about were the various Gnostic teachers who arose by the end of the 1st century, and they did pull some from the true faith. But the apostles never said the whole Church would fall away.
Jesus declared just the opposite: "Upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of Hades shall not overpower it." In Matthew 16:18. No, the apostles built their work with gold, silver, and precious stones. It withstood both the fiery trial of persecution and the test of false teachers. The apostles had adequately forewarned the Church of what was to come, and the Church was ready for it.