Chapter 23: Clueless about Historic Christianity. When I say that most theologians are clueless when it comes to historic Christianity, I mean they're totally out of touch with what Christianity originally represented. They don't even remotely think like Christians from the ancient Mediterranean world. The basis I have for making that charge is that we still have the writings of the early Christians. I'm referring to Christians who lived shortly after the time of the apostles.
These were Christians who lived in the same culture as Paul and the other apostles and spoke the same language. In other words, we don't have to guess how the early Christians thought. We can know it from reading their writings. We don't have to guess how they understood the New Testament writings. We can read their writings for ourselves.
I have made early Christianity my special field of study for most of my adult life, and I can say unhesitatingly that no one could read anything written by either today's theologians or by any of the prominent theologians of history and mistake it for something written by the Christians who lived within one or two generations of the apostles.
One of the greatest evidences supporting this is that most modern-day Christians who have been raised on the teachings of the theologians find the early Christian writings unexpectedly strange and baffling when they first read them. They are shocked to find that the early Christians knew so little about the cherished doctrines of today's Christianity. "The early Christians got things all mixed up," I often hear.
Yet it never occurs to most modern Christians that the primitive church would find today's Christianity equally baffling and strange. Let me suggest it is not the unlettered and ordinary Christians who lived so close to the apostles who got things mixed up. Rather, it's today's church and its theologians who have things mixed up.
Christians today vainly imagine that if Apostle John were to walk into one of the second-century churches pastored by Ignatius or Polycarp, men whom he had personally discipled, he would feel totally out of place. They imagine he would find that they held to a different theology, had disciplined worship practices, reasoned strangely, and even understood his Greek differently. On the other hand, modern Christians think that if John were to walk into any conservative church today, he would feel right at home.
He would find that 21st-century Western Christians think and reason just like first-century Christians living in the Mediterranean world. He would find that today's Western Christians worship in the same manner as he did and hold to all the same theological beliefs. He would even find that today's theologians understand Koine Greek exactly the way he did. If you think that's the reality of things, all I can say is dream on. Holding fast the faithful word.
The qualifications for an overseer or bishop in Paul's day required that a man not only be sober-minded, just, and holy, but also holding fast the faithful word as he has been taught. Titus 1:8-9. In other words, there was no room in the first-century church for brilliant theological innovators. The Christian faith was already complete in Paul's day. The only thing needed was for Christians to hold fast to what they had been taught.
And that's all the second-century Christians claimed to be doing: holding fast to what the apostles had taught them. The only church fathers they knew were Jesus and his apostles. They equated theological innovation with error. But that's not the way it is today. The men who are held in great esteem by today's church are the theological innovators.
The noted church historian Philip Schaff made the following observation: "The men who next the apostles have exerted and still exert through their writings the greatest influence in the Christian church as leaders of the theological thought are Augustine, Martin Luther, and John Calvin, all pupils of Paul." Schaff intended his words to be a compliment, but they are really an indictment of those theologians and the institutional church that has followed them.
It's interesting that even in his great admiration for these men, Schaff couldn't bring himself to say that they were pupils of Jesus, because the simple truth is that they weren't. In fact, they weren't even pupils of Paul. They were reinterpreters of Paul. They took Paul out of context and made him a teacher above his own master. But I have to ask, if these three men were merely teaching the historic faith, why are they so prominent? Why have they had such influence?
Why are their writings authoritative if they were only passing down what had been taught from the beginning? You see, the whole reason theologians such as Augustine are famous is that they taught things that no one before them had ever taught. If what they taught was merely the historic faith that Christians had always believed, then why can no one produce the writings of any Christians who taught the same thing before these theologians did?
When Luther's opponents accused him of creating a new gospel, Luther tried to defend himself by saying, "There was Ambrose, Augustine, and many others who said it before me." Luther was correct in stating that Augustine had preached a similar gospel of easy believism. However, it was a novel teaching in Augustine's day, and few Christians accepted it. Actually, it demonstrates what thin ground Luther was on when he had to depend on Augustine's teachings as his precedent.
Augustine lived nearly 400 years after Christ. And as we've seen, Augustine was the epitome of someone who thought he knew more than everyone who preceded him. And Luther correctly placed himself in the same class as Augustine. However, Luther was not being truthful in claiming that Ambrose, a fourth-century bishop, had taught the same as Luther. I suppose a person could pull statements here and there from Ambrose's writings to make it look as though he agreed with Luther.
However, when a person reads all of what Ambrose said about salvation, it's quite obvious that he didn't even remotely teach Luther's gospel. For example, Ambrose wrote, "Jesus says, 'He that despises me and does not receive my words has one who judges him.'" Does it seem to you that a person has received Christ's words who has not amended his ways? Undoubtedly not. Rather, he who amends himself receives his word. For this is his word, that everyone should turn back from sin.
So then, of necessity, you must either reject this saying of his, or if you cannot deny it, you must accept it. It is also necessary that he who leaves off sinning must keep the commandments of God and renounce his sins. Who else was Luther able to allege as a proponent of his gospel? The truth is he couldn't name anyone else. Instead, he simply made the false claim that there were many others who taught it. If there actually had been many others, Luther would have named them.
In contrast, when a person holds to the historic faith, he has no trouble citing many faithful Christians who taught the same thing. And he doesn't have to appeal to someone from the class of theologians. He can quote from Christians who lived before the Christian theologians ever arose. Because the faith received from the apostles was so simple, we should question any new dogmas that go beyond the simple faith.
If a continuity of belief can't be traced back to the end of the first century, we can hardly claim that it's the historic faith. Restoring the faith. People who try to defend theologians such as Luther and Calvin soon find that they can't trace the doctrines of such men all the way back to the apostles. These men were not simply defending the historic faith that had always been taught. So their defenders are forced to make the claim that these men were restoring the faith.
That is, their defenders make the absurd declaration that the men to whom the apostles entrusted leadership of the church quickly lost it all. They lost the crucial theological doctrines of the faith. They lost the essence of what Christianity is all about, and they apparently even lost their knowledge of Greek. That's a remarkable claim.
In other words, the men whom Jesus handpicked to establish and spread his church, whom Scripture calls the 12 foundations of the church, did such a poor job that true Christianity didn't last even one generation after the apostles. That's particularly amazing in light of the fact that Luther's and Calvin's gospels are still going strong nearly 500 years after those men preached. Are we to believe that mere men have been able to accomplish what the inspired apostles were not?
Jesus promised his apostles, "Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age." Matthew 28:20. When we embrace the Kingdom gospel that Jesus preached, we don't have to invent any fictitious scenarios about a disappearing church. Kingdom Christians have been around from the beginning, and they are still around today. They don't have to invent fake scenarios, and they don't have to be theological innovators. The Kingdom gospel was the mainline predominant gospel in the second and third centuries.
There are plenty of witnesses to that fact. Although the theologians shoved the Kingdom gospel out of the mainstream of institutional Christianity in the fourth century, there were still plenty of Kingdom Christians around. Kingdom Christians have been the persecuted or marginalized minority ever since the fourth century, but they have never disappeared. There are no famous theologians connected to Kingdom Christianity, and there never will be.
The Kingdom gospel can be traced back to the beginning because it's truly the historic faith.