Going Back to the Start
April 2nd, 2009 | by Matthew Smith |I’ve decided to spend a bit of time in my current theological self education looking at early church history. I’ve borrowed an introductory text but before I open it, I thought I’d get down some ideas of my own with absolutely no references to speak of. Let’s see if I arrive at anything similar to what the real scholars say.
Early church history has an important place in the ongoing process of church reform. When I studied our introductory theology subject, we were told that the Protestants broadly rejected Tradition (with a capital ‘T’ to denote the authority of the traditional teachings of the church as Revelation (with a capital ‘R’ to denote knowledge of God revealed to us)). But I’m guessing it was more complicated than that, I think the Protestants were very much interested in Tradition and apostolic succession (the idea that the apostles have handed the mantle of leadership from one generation to the next) but they believed the church had become corrupt so they wanted to get back to the authentic way of being church and to them, scripture was the link back to the first christians.
Since the Reformation, the western world has of course had the Age of Reason, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the scientific revolution, whatever you want to call it and during that period, analytical and evidence based history has developed and more recently, post-modern critiques of the analytical and evidence based histories have been produced, all of which have affected our understanding of the first christians and thus all of which have affected the way we think about church reform.
There continues to be a thread of thought in church reform that seeks to draw upon the early church as a source of the authentic christian expression of church but this way of thinking faces difficulty when it bogs down into historical critiques and alternative readings of the history upon which it is trying to lay a foundation.
With this in mind, I can see that the study of early church history is likely to be loaded with agendas and clashing interpretations of the facts and disputes over the authenticity of historical sources. A far cry from my initial feelings that it would be dry, static and mostly irrelevant – at least I hope so.