Unearthing Church History

We are having such a good time in our adult education program at church this year.  Today a local professor of religious studies spoke about the earliest church fathers; next week she is coming back to talk about Augustine, the one whose tracks we follow.  Most Christians, of whatever ilk, have little awareness of just how extensive our reliance on Augustinian formulations is -- much of what we take as "gospel" truth first came from his pen in the 4th and 5th centuries. 

"Early church fathers?" -- a term that referred first to bishops considered to be direct successors in the apolostic chain from Christ and his original followers but was expanded over the first few centuries CE to include all members of the clergy, it also refers to a select group of early writers.  Most of them, interestingly, were in what today we would call the Eastern Church: Northern Africa and the Mideast.  Many of the struggles over early church doctine had to do with the fact that these men were writing in Greek, a much less precise language than Latin.  And since they were inheritors of the Greek as well as the Christian tradition, the footprints of Plato are sprinkled liberally over early Christian writings.

One of the early debates was whether God had in fact created Christ -- whether there was ever a time when Christ was not.  The Nicene Creed, which many of us repeat in church on many Sundays during the year (and in which we proclaim that Jesus is "eternally begotten of the Father, begotten and not made"), is basically the fourth century formulation of the argument against those who set forth the position that there was a time when the Son was not.  (The debate is known as the Arian Controversy, thanks to Arius, the chief proponent of the losing side.)

We also touched on the development of Trinitarian Christianity.  Contrary to casual Protestant belief (and Protestants like to think that we rely on upon the Bible -- sola scriptura, in the words of Martin Luther -- rather than on the Roman Catholic amalgamation of scripture and tradition), there is no articulation of the doctrine of the Trinity in the Bible.  While all three persons of God appear in the Bible, the co-equal status and relationship among Creator, Son, and Spirit was worked out in the council debates of the third and fourth centuries. 

In other words, we Protestants, regardless of what we might want to think, descend from the traditions of our ancestors in the fairth just as our Catholic brothers and sisters do.