Church History in Plain Language (Plain Language Series)

by Bruce L. Shelley

they agreed that somehow the pure light of heaven in the soul of man had become involved in this unpleasant business of matter and had to be redeemed.

Gnostics agreed that the “Christ” could not be human. Thus we have what a modern Christian must think a striking surprise. The first major test to faith in the Event was not denial of Jesus Christ’s deity, it was rejection of his humanity.

Many gnostics recognized a kind of proletariat and bourgeoisie of heaven. The lower spiritual class lived by faith and the upper class, the illuminated or the perfect, lived by knowledge. Still a third group, the spiritually disadvantaged, were not capable of gnosis under any circumstances. Some capricious deity had created them without the capacity to “see” even under the best guru.

Gnosticism holds an important lesson for all Christians who try to disentangle the gospel from its involvement with “barbaric and outmoded” Jewish notions about God and history. It speaks to all who try to raise Christianity from the level of faith to a higher realm of intelligent knowledge and so increase its attractiveness to important people.

effort to reconcile Christ and the gospel with the science and philosophy of his day, the gnostic denied the Event and lost the gospel. Just as nineteenth-century defenders of the faith tried to present Jesus Christ in terms of evolution, so the gnostic interpreted the Savior in light of the fascinating ideas of the enlightened men of his day. But the attempt to tie the gospel to the latest theories of men is self-defeating. Nothing is as fleeting in history as the latest theories that flourish among the enlightened, and nothing can be more quickly dismissed by later generations.

Christians rose up to cast out the gnostic heresy, and in doing so they clarified their own orthodox convictions. The best summary of early Christian beliefs is what we call the Apostle’s Creed, to this day repeated every Sunday in many churches.

the Creed affirms belief in “God Almighty.” A later version adds, “Maker of heaven and earth.” Thus, it repudiates the gnostic idea that the created world is evil or the work of an evil god. This material world is good and worthy to be used and enjoyed by man.

Mere Christianity. “God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.”

Modern man sees a red flag because he hears “born of the Virgin Mary”; the gnostic saw a red flag because he heard “born of the Virgin Mary.” This phrase, however, together with the ones about crucifixion and burial, was the church’s way of underscoring its belief in the complete humanity of Jesus.

Christianity redemption came not by some secret knowledge of spiritual realms but by God’s action in history. The Son of God entered time, was born of a virgin, was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and was buried. That is not gnosis; that is Event.

in the Creed, “the resurrection of the flesh,” is aimed at the gnostic. It stressed that man is a whole; he is not divided as the gnostic taught, into a good soul and an evil body. The body, said orthodox Christians, is no burden to be discarded. I...

Man needs salvation not because he is imprisoned in a body but because he willfully chooses his own way rather than God’s way. Man’s evil is not in his body; it is in his affections. He loves the wrong things. This affliction is so deep, so basic to man’s life on earth, that only a special Savior can free him from himself. That is why catholic Christianity insists t...

The Bible contains two portions: the Old Testament, which the early Christians claimed—along with the Jews—and the New Testament, which the early Christians produced—in spite of the Jews. The Old Testament promised; the New Testament fulfilled.

So the idea transferred to a list of books that constituted the standard or “rule” of the churches. These were the books read publicly in the congregations because they had a special authority of God upon them.

Early believers went to exaggerated lengths to make the Old Testament into a Christian book. Their interpretations of Scripture often kept to the historical pattern of promise and fulfillment used by the New Testament writers. But some resourceful writers went far beyond this basic theme. They soon developed a method of interpretation that discovered Jesus Christ and the Christian message all over the Old Testament. We call this allegorical interpretation, because it turns seemingly actual events, such as the crossing of the Jordan River, into a symbol of baptism or some other Christian truth.

Origen, who spoke of the different levels of Scripture: “The Scriptures were composed through the Spirit of God, and have both a meaning which is obvious, and another which is hidden from most readers. . . . The whole law is spiritual, but the inspired meaning is not recognized by all—only by those who are gifted with the grace of the Holy Spirit in the word of wisdom and knowledge.” Christian appeals to allegory infuriated pagan critics of the faith because their case depended on their taking the Old Testament at face value.

the debate centers around the fact that Jews in Palestine in the early years of Christianity had a canon corresponding to the thirty-nine books of the Protestant Old Testament. Jesus referred to this list when he spoke of the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms (Luke 24:44). The evidence seems to indicate that neither Jesus nor his apostles ever quoted from the Apocrypha as Scripture. Beyond Palestine, however, Jews were more inclined to consider as Scripture writings not included in this list of books. The Greek translation of the Old Testament called the Septuagint was especially influential in making known certain books of the Apocrypha because it included these books along with the Old Testament books accepted in Palestine.

Second, certain Christian books were added to Scripture because they were used in Christian worship.

Third, and perhaps the fundamental reason behind a Christian book’s acceptance into the New Testament, was its ties to an apostle.

gnostic teacher Cerdo, who believed that the God of the Old Testament was different from the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. The God of the Old Testament, he said, was unknowable; the Christian God had been revealed. The Old Testament God was sheer justice; whereas the God of the New Covenant was loving and gracious.

Marcion developed Cerdo’s distinction. He held that the Old Testament God was full of wrath and the author of evil. This God, he said, was only concerned for the Jewish people. He was prepared to destroy all other people. In contrast, the Christian’s God was a God of grace and love for all, who disclosed himself in Jesus Christ, his Son. Because he believed that the God of the Old Testament loved the Jews exclusively, Marcion rejected the entire Old Testament and also those New Covenant writings that he thought favored Jewish readers—for example Matthew, Mark, Acts, and Hebrews. He also rejected other Christian writings that appeared to him to compromise his own views, including the Pastoral Letters (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus). So he was left with only a mutilated version of Luke’s Gospel (omitting the nativity stories) and ten letters of Paul. The Apostle to the Gentiles, it seems, was the only apostle who did not corrupt the gospel of Jesus.

By retaining the Old Testament the church scored two important points. First, it insisted that faith for the Christian would have to reconcile both the wrath and the love of God. Marcion’s message was too easy. By eliminating the Old Testament he hoped to make the love of God central for the Christian. But love that never faces the demands of justice is not Christian love. It was not the love Marcion’s hero knew! Paul found in the Cross not only a demonstration of God’s love but a display of his righteousness. Christ’s death, he said, allowed God to be both just and the justifier of all who believe in Jesus (Rom. 3:25, 26). That is the marvel of the grace of God Marcion missed.

Christianity is a historical religion not just in the sense that it comes from the past or that it is associated with a historical character named Jesus. It is historical because it stems from the belief that within history itself, in a particular place, at a particular time, God himself took a hand in human affairs. And that means that living by faith for the Christian includes facing the puzzles of human existence—all of the “why, Lord?”s of life—and still believing that God has some good in mind.

The duties of these leaders varied from place to place, but generally speaking the presbyters taught new converts, led in public worship, and maintained discipline. The deacons assisted the presbyters in every way except perhaps presiding at the Lord’s Supper. Thus the apostolic age knew both a traveling group of Spirit-empowered leaders and a resident group caring for the needs of established congregations.

No one seems to know just how the single pastor, assisted by the elders and deacons, became the widespread pattern within the churches, but we know it did. Several factors probably influenced the trend. Apparently one of the presbyters emerged to correspond with other churches, to handle the funds for the poor, to preach the true faith in the conflicts with heretical teachers, and to administer the Lord’s Supper (or Eucharist). It took some years before Ignatius’ threefold ministry was adopted everywhere. We know, for example, that Alexandria had no single bishop until about A.D. 180.

During the first two centuries most Christians believed that baptism canceled all sins committed up to that moment in the believer’s life. Serious postbaptismal lapses called for special treatment. Three sins in particular—sexual immorality, murder, and the denial of the faith (apostasy)—were considered forgivable by God, but never by the church. The penalty for any one of these was exclusion from the fellowship of the church and deprivation of the Lord’s Supper. Since the Communion, most believed, was a special channel of divine grace, withholding it placed a person’s salvation in peril. Ignatius had called it “the medicine of immortality and the antidote of death.”

Callistus (217–222) readmitted penitent members who had committed adultery. He argued that the church is like Noah’s ark. In it unclean as well as clean beasts can be found. Then he defended his actions by insisting that the church of Rome was the heir of Peter and the Lord had given keys to Peter to bind and to loose the sins of men. This marks the first time a bishop of Rome claimed this special authority.

Cyprian declined, however, in favor of a system of readmission based on the degrees of seriousness of the sins. Leniency, he said, should be extended to those who had sacrificed only after excruciating torture and who well might plead that their bodies, not their spirits, had given way. Those, however, who had gone willingly to make sacrifices must receive the severest punishment. His argument won general approval, so to deal with these degrees of guilt, the church created a graded system of penance. Only after varied periods of sorrow for sin (penance) were the sinners allowed to return to the Lord’s Supper. The bishop extended forgiveness to the fallen, provided they proved their sorrow by coming before the congregation in sackcloth and with ashes on their heads. After this confession and act of humility the bishop laid his hands upon the penitent as a symbol of restoration to the church.

Clement, “the first Christian scholar,” was versed not only in the Holy Scriptures but also in the knowledge of his time, including Greek philosophy and classical literature. He understood the questions and problems of the young people who came from such educational centers as Rome, Athens, and Antioch. They were just as dissatisfied with their instruction as he had been and now sought and found the last and highest wisdom in the Christian revelation.

Clement’s purpose was clear. He seized not only the external garb and forms of expression of the contemporary pagan philosophers but also their problems. If, for example, he discussed the universe and its meaning (cosmology), so loved by gnostics, he did not do it with the intention of proving these ideas wrong offhandedly and then discarding them quickly, but instead he pointed out how the fundamental religious questions about the creation of the world, the existence of evil in this life, and the salvation through the Word, Jesus Christ, found their last and deepest answer in Christian revelation.

The Christian convert often faced a choice between clever, eloquently defended heresy or a dull, narrow-minded orthodoxy. Any informed Christian in a modern secular school would recognize the problem. Clement was determined to offer a third possibility.

Clement makes creation central. God, he believed, had implanted the good seeds of truth in all his rational creatures. The Christian can learn from the Greeks because all truth and goodness, wherever found, come from the Creator.

The Scriptures, he believed, are the treasury of divine revelation. Students, therefore, must see them as a whole. If the apparent sense of a given passage contradicts the necessary convictions of morality or the nature of God, there must be some deeper lesson underneath the surface of the passage. This conviction led Origen into what we usually call the “allegorical interpretation” of Scripture. He held that there are three levels of meaning in the Bible: the literal sense; the moral application to the soul; and the allegorical or spiritual sense, which refers to the mysteries of the Christian faith.

Origen’s overriding concern was to allow the whole Bible to speak for itself, whatever a single text may seem to say, for when the Bible speaks it speaks for God who inspired it. Here Origen scored a telling point against the heretics. The persistent tendency of heresy, whether ancient or contemporary, is to lay hold upon a few impressive texts and to wrench some rigid and erroneous interpretation from these. This Origen would not allow. He wanted the whole Bible to speak, because he knew that what the Bible taught in its entirety are the central Christian truths of catholic Christianity. Origen’s enormous work in the Scriptures was immensely important. It enabled intelligent Christians to believe the Bible and so to remain Christians. What would have happened to Christianity without a rationally interpreted Bible to feed the mind and control the development of Christian thought? Origen saved the Scriptures for the church and thus protected the historical foundation of the Christian faith.

The basis of the Alexandrian’s teaching was always the gospel preached in the Catholic church—but where the church had not definitely spoken, he felt free to speculate. He did this with such boldness that later generations, as well as people in his own day, charged him with heresy. Origen’s vision, it seems, knew no limits. It extended so far as to teach that all creatures including the devil himself would one day be restored to communion with God. Hell would be emptied.

Diocletian has not enjoyed what is called a “good press” in Christian circles because he was the most savage of the persecutors of the church. Judged by the anarchy he inherited, however, and by the revived empire he passed on to his successors, “Diocletian deserves to be ranked among the truly great emperors.”

Ambrose decided to write Theodosius. “I cannot deny that you have a zeal for the faith,” he wrote, “and that you fear God, but you have a naturally passionate spirit which becomes ungovernable when you are excited. I call on you to repent. You can only atone for your sin by tears, by penitence, by humbling your soul before God. You are a man, and as you have sinned as a man so you must repent. No angel, no archangel can forgive you. God alone can forgive you, and He forgives only those who repent.” Ambrose refused the emperor Communion until he had confessed his sin. For a while Theodosius stayed away from church, but in the end he accepted Ambrose’s terms. In front of a crowded congregation he took off his splendid imperial robes and asked pardon for his sins. He had to do so on several occasions until at last, on Christmas Day, Ambrose gave him the sacrament. It required unusual courage to humiliate a Byzantine emperor. Ambrose had hit upon the weapon—the threat of excommunication—which

One bishop described Constantinople as seething with discussion: “If in this city you ask anyone for change, he will discuss with you whether God the Son is begotten or unbegotten. If you ask about the quality of bread, you will receive the answer that ‘God the Father is greater, God the Son is less.’ If you suggest that a bath is desirable, you will be told that ‘there was nothing before God the Son was created.’

He spoke briefly to the churchmen, reminding them that they must come to some agreement on the questions that divided them. Division in the church, he said, was worse than war.

Numbers of Christians in the Near East, however, rejected the work of Chalcedon. They held that instead of the divine and human natures joining to form one person in Jesus, he possessed but one nature in which divine life and human were indistinguishable. This monophysite (one nature) teaching was an important factor contributing to the breaking away of the Monophysite Churches from the rest of Eastern Orthodoxy. Coupled with the decline of the Byzantine power in the outlying areas of the Eastern Empire, monophysite doctrine led to the Coptic Church, the largest Christian body in Egypt today, with a related church in Ethiopia, and the so-called Jacobite Church of Syria, which has most of its adherents in South India.

Augustine also set forth a different understanding of the sacraments. The Donatists argued that the validity of the sacrament depends upon the moral standing of the minister. Augustine said, “No.” The sacrament does not belong to the minister but to Christ. The priest’s acts are really God’s because he has placed the sacraments in the hands of the properly ordained minister. All that is required of the priest is his awareness that he administers God’s grace for the whole church.

In Augustine’s view, Adam’s sin had enormous consequences. His power to do right was gone. In a word, he died, spiritually—and soon, physically. But he was not alone in his ruin. Augustine taught that the whole human race was “in Adam” and shared his fall. Mankind became a “mass of corruption,” incapable of any good (saving) act. Every individual, from earliest infancy to old age, deserves nothing but damnation.

Augustine, like Paul, had been “apprehended” by the grace of God. He entered the Christian faith by what seemed to him catastrophes. The great original catastrophe was his condition at birth, sinful alienation from God. And the only freedom from that catastrophe was a new birth. Augustine bound the receiving of grace to membership in the visible church. He also supported, however, the doctrine that God chooses whom he will and gives them power to serve him, which makes salvation a matter between God and the individual. It was this doctrine, recovered in the Protestant Reformation, that gave the reformers reason to deny that any church could come between the soul and its Maker.

And what about the church and state? Augustine considered the church the only human community that worked for the building of the City of God. The state had its place in suppressing crime and preserving peace, but since the state was based on the power of sin, it must submit to the laws of the Christian church.

several early Christian writers, beginning with Irenaeus in the second century, referred to Peter and Paul as founders of the church in Rome and to subsequent bishops as successors of the apostles. These roots in the apostolic age were important in a day when gnostic teachers appealed to a secret tradition arising from Christ. Many catholic Christians felt that a list of bishops traced back to Peter and Paul was a sure means of safeguarding the apostolic message.

respect for Rome’s traditions, however, did not prohibit able men like Irenaeus and Cyprian from disagreeing with Rome when they felt the church or her bishop was in error. Up to the time of Constantine history offers no conclusive evidence that the bishop of Rome exercised jurisdiction outside of Rome. Honor, yes; jurisdiction, no.

Church organization developed in two important ways: (1) the authority of church councils and (2) the authority of certain bishops over other bishops.

Damasus, the Bishop of Rome, objected to the Council’s action. Does the position of the church and its bishops depend upon the status of some city in the empire? Rome’s preeminence, he insisted, does not rest upon any such historical accident, nor on the decrees of a council. At a synod in Rome the next year, bishops from the West argued: “The Holy Roman Church takes precedence over the other churches, not on the ground of any synodal decisions, but because it was given the primacy by the words of our Lord and Redeemer in the gospel, when he said: ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.’ ” Thus, we have the first mention of the “primacy of the Roman Church.”

Orthodoxy as a kind of Roman Catholicism without the pope. Such an uninformed response is understandable. Christians in the West, both Protestant and Catholic, generally start by asking the same question: How is a person saved? What is the church? Where does religious authority lie? Protestant and Catholic simply disagree about the answers. In Orthodoxy, however, it is not merely the answers that are different. The questions themselves are not the same. Orthodoxy reflects a distinctive history and a unique culture.

An Orthodox believer does not consider these images of Jesus and the saints the works of men but as manifestations of the heavenly ideal. They are a kind of window between the earthly and the celestial worlds. Through the icons the heavenly beings manifest themselves to the worshiping congregation and unite with it. Thus, it is impossible to understand Orthodox worship apart from the icons. In Orthodoxy the idea of image is the key to understanding the ways of God with man. Man is created “in the image of God”; he carries the icon of God within himself.