Church History in Plain Language

by Bruce L. Shelley

Answers to Gnosticism Responding to Gnostic Challenges (Ancient or Contemporary) The ancient church points the way for us today, responding to the Gnostics and other efforts to revise or distort Christian thinking with three basic responses drawing from clergy, creed, and canon. By clergy we mean that the leadership of the early church had direct connections with the men whom Jesus had called to himself to be his inner circle; it was a matter of custody: the ones whom Jesus had traveled with and taught for three years had passed on the message and left a written witness to their encounter with Jesus. Identifying with these witnesses is the sure way forward. By creed we mean the early condensing of the basic Christian story and message in a simple narrative summary. While they come from different places with substantially different emphases, the summaries of Tertullian (from North Africa), Irenaeus (from Turkey), and Origen (from Alexandria) are amazingly similar: the basic message of Christianity involved the Father sending his Son to the world to recall, reclaim, and restore it through the death and resurrection of the Son and the ongoing work of the Spirit. This consistent and publicly accessible message is sure. By canon we mean the four New Testament Gospels, which were firmly embraced by the great body of the church within the second century. Early fathers knew of other renderings of who Jesus was and rejected them; instead they held to these four gospels as giving th...