Church History in Plain Language

by Bruce L. Shelley

people of God in history live in a tension between an ideal—the universal communion of saints—and the specific—the particular people in a definite time and place.

the Pharisees, emphasized those Jewish traditions and practices that set them apart from pagan culture.

the Essenes,

Baptism in the infant church was what theologians now call eschatological. It marked entrance into a spiritual kingdom already proclaimed, though still to be revealed in its fullness.

Though he had been educated in the strictest Jewish tradition and had studied under the famous rabbi Gamaliel in Jerusalem, Paul spoke Greek fluently and was familiar with Greek thought and literature. This meant he could express the doctrines and teachings of Jesus, many of which were based on Old Testament beliefs completely foreign to the Gentiles, in ways that the pagan mind could grasp. In addition, Paul was a Roman citizen, which gave him special freedom of movement, protection in his travels, and access to the higher levels of society.

Ancient Stoicism, for example, taught that men achieve tranquility by the suppression of desire for everything that man cannot get and keep.

The temple is holy because it is different from other buildings; the Sabbath day is holy because it is different from other days. The Christian, therefore, is a person who is fundamentally different.

Religion is our belief in God and our effort to live by that belief. Theology is the attempt to give a rational explanation of our belief: it is thinking about religion.

The rule of faith was a short statement of the essential Christian story. While not a fixed creed, it shows consensus on some early essentials.

Church history shows us that Christian theology is not primarily a philosophical system invented by men in the quiet of an academic study. Doctrines were hammered out by men who were on the work crew of the church.

Ebionites. They taught that Jesus was a mere man who by his scrupulous obedience to the Law was “justified” and became the Messiah.

The church seems to have known of these Gnostic gospels and rejected them. The documents may actually include some things that Jesus said, but they were rejected because they leave the wrong overall impression of Jesus.

Gnostics claimed that they had some secret information. Jesus, they said, had passed on this information to the gnostic teachers of his time and had hidden it from the materially blinded Jews who founded the church.

“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.”

Man does not need a teacher. He needs a Savior.

The word for the special place these books occupy in Christianity is canon. The term from the Greek language originally meant a measuring rod or, as we might say, a ruler.

It was not that the church had ceased to believe in the power of the Holy Spirit. The difference was that in the first days the Holy Spirit had enabled men to write the sacred books of the Christian faith; in the later days the Holy Spirit enabled men to understand, to interpret, and to apply what had been written.

Muratorian Canon,

The first Christians believed that the new birth by the Spirit was the indispensable mark of the Christian. “If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ,” Paul told the Roman believers, “he does not belong to Christ.” Baptism in water was the sign.

“Repent and be baptized . . . in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit”

Hegesippus,

Spiritual regeneration and the moral life were not merely one side of Christianity to Paul but its very fruit and goal on earth.

The primitive concept defended by Novatian considered the church as a society of saints; the new view advocated by Cornelius saw the church as a school for sinners.

Apparently around 180 a Sicilian Christian named Pantaenus established a similar school of Christian Gnosticism in Alexandria and lectured there on Christianity as the true philosophy.

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.

Philosophy was a schoolmaster to the Greeks, as the law was to the Hebrews, preparing the way for those who are perfected by Christ.”

Origen

Origen felt no contempt for the simple faith of peasants, but he realized that if Christianity were to succeed in shaping civilization, it must justify itself to the intellect as well as to the heart of mankind.

Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia baptized him shortly before he died in 337.

Prior to Constantine’s conversion, the church consisted of convinced believers who were willing to bear the risk of being identified as Christians. Now many came who were politically ambitious, religiously disinterested, and still half-rooted in paganism.

But orthodox merely means correct; catholic is a word for universal. We might equally well refer to them as Greek Catholic and Roman Orthodox.

The same believers who had been the victims of terrible persecution under Diocletian and Galerius were now demanding that their fellow Christians be suppressed or banished from their churches by the power of the state over disagreements concerning points of doctrine.

homoousios

homoiousios

Salvation for the early church was about more than going to heaven; it was about being united in communion with God.

The word person, however, did not mean to the early Christians what it means today. To us, a person means someone like Tom, Dick, or Harry. But the Latin word persona originally meant a mask worn by an actor on the stage.

God, said Augustine, is like the memory, intelligence, and will in the mind of a man.

In 451 a general council at Chalcedon, not far from Constantinople, affirmed that Jesus Christ was “complete in Godhead and complete in manhood, truly God and truly man . . . in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division or without separation . . . coming together to form one person.”

“A deep instinct,” J. S. Whale once told the undergraduates at Cambridge University, “has always told the Church that our safest eloquence concerning the mystery of Christ is in our praise. A living Church is a worshiping, singing Church; not a school of people holding all the correct doctrines.”

Apollinaris,

the second general council of the church, meeting at Constantinople in 381, effectively silenced the Apollinarian teaching.

Nestorius rejected a popular designation of Mary as the “God-bearer, Mother of God.”

General Council of Ephesus

Nestorius’s followers fled to Persia and founded there the Nestorian Church,

Today the Nestorian Church in the Near East and India still counts about eighty thousand members, and in America twenty-five thousand.

some evangelical believers fall sway to the same failure in doctrine; they seek Jesus as a role model for self-help and ignore the life-giving transformation offered by Emmanuel: God with us.

Eutyches denied the central prerequisite for the mystery of Christ and his mission as Savior and Redeemer.

fourth General Council of Chalcedon.

So against Arius the church affirmed that Jesus was truly God, and against Apollinaris that he was truly man. Against Eutyches it confessed that Jesus’ deity and humanity were not changed into something else, and against Nestorius that Jesus was not divided but was one person.

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.