This semester I
have been teaching Church History I, which covers the first 15 centuries, up
until the time before the Reformation, for first and second semester students. I have one section of the course during
the week, with 24 students, and another section on Saturdays with only 11
students.
I have found the
class fascinating to teach so far, and when we’re delving into the theological debates of the era I
am most in my element. As one of my Colombian friends said when she heard I
would be teaching the course, knowing of my love for theology, “Oh, for you that will be pan comido”, that is, “a piece of cake” or, literally, “eaten bread.”
(A lot of things sounds normal in Spanish, but are quite odd when you think
about it.)
The more
strictly historical parts are where I have to work harder to prepare, but it
has been rewarding. I was also helped out in the first couple of weeks by a
visiting professor, Jon Simons, who largely taught during this time and whose
material I have adapted for the Saturday version of the course. Jon grew
up as a missionary kid in Colombia and is studying a masters degree at Wheaton
College in History of Christianity with a focus on the early church. Knowing
both Colombia and church history well, he was a big help in this part of the
class.
One of the most
enjoyable parts of this course is that I am introducing students to a
whole new world. As mostly low-church evangelicals, they have largely grown up
in a world where the church fathers essentially end with the last of the
apostles. An example of such mentality in the church is that when I went to a Christian book
store here looking for books on church history, the clerk was confused, not
really knowing what I was asking for. “Church history?” she said. “Hmmm, I’m
not sure. We have this book on the church here…” and she pointed me to a
theology book by Wayne Grudem on the church and some other popular christian
book related to ministry topics. Eventually we found the right section with a
few titles, but few substantive works. I had to go searching at the Catholic bookstores to find texts
of the church fathers in Spanish.
To give you a
little idea of what we’re covering, here
are the main topics we have covered and some ways I’ve gone about approaching
the topics:
Persecutions in the second and third
centuries and the church’s response: Students
were especially moved by a reading from the “Martyrdom of Polycarp,” where they
could see his unwavering commitment to the faith and take that as a challenge
for the often half-hearted Christianity that we see today. Also, in a Colombian
culture where the family (and especially one’s mother) is perhaps the most sacred
thing in the world, to hear of early Christians encouraging their family
members to stay faithful to Christ unto death was a tremendous challenge for
some. Some students also did a presentation on Ciprian, and we looked at the
tricky issues of how to respond to people who had apostasized during
persecution and want back in the church later.
The second-century apologists: We looked at the positive and negative
contributions of apologists like Justin Martyr in their attempt to show the
plausibility of Christianity in their cultural context. While a lot of people
can see the apologists as being sold out to Greek philosophy, I take a more positive,
yet somewhat critical approach, showing how their approach to culture was
actually quite varied. In this regard I have found helpful some categories from
Dean Flemming’s analysis of Paul in his book Contextualization in the New Testament: at different moments
accepting, rejecting, relativizing, or transforming culture. Thus, it is very
different to uncritically accept certain cultural tendencies (as with certain
tendencies toward allegorical interpretation in an attempt to save the
authority of the Old Testament) than to take a cultural concept and transform
it (as by talking of Jesus as the Logos,
but giving the concept some new Christian conceptual content). I think these
same distinctions have relevance when we look at topics like how the church
took over certain pagan holidays or traditions. From my perspective, if they
transformed the content sufficiently, it’s a legitimate contextualization, not
syncretism.
Early heresies of Gnosticism, Marcionism,
and modalism: For
Gnosticism and Marcionism we looked at the problems of cutting off Christian
faith from its Old Testament roots and accepting alien presuppositions that don’t
mesh with a biblical worldview. Marcionism, for example, rejected the authority
of the Old Testament, seeing the God of the Old Testament as a harsh, vengeful
god not worthy of worship, contrasted with the loving Father of Jesus. My main
goal here has been to show that this is a massive misunderstanding of both the
Old and New Testaments. God’s character doesn’t change between testaments—he always
has been loving and always has taken sin seriously enough to judge it—but praise
be to God that those in Christ don’t have to experience that judgment since
Christ did! On modalism, we looked at it in the context of the development of
attempts to formulate Trinitarian terminology and made some connections with
United Pentecostal beliefs today (a significant church in Colombia, having
around 1.6 million members in a country of 47 million).
The formation of the New Testament canon: The main goal in this class was to give
some perspective to understand the process of recognizing the canon and to
respond to the claim that the early church invented the canon as a tool to
illegitimately suppress minority voices (such as the Gnostic gospels). We also looked at the importance of
the rule of faith (an early version of the creed) as a way of helping discern
between different teachings in a time when the precise definition of the canon
was still somewhat in flux.
The changes that came with Constantine: I used the constitutional changes of 1991
in Colombia as an introduction to get students reflecting on how social changes
that favor the church in some ways are often mixed blessings in others. For
example, evangelicals have had constitutional protection for their religious
liberty, but this has also made the churches more comfortable, opened the door
to growing secularism, and given more freedom to other religious groups
spreading false ideas. The seminary here has also gained government accreditation, but has certain limitations imposed on it as a result. Just as it is hard to say whether those reforms were “mostly good”
or “mostly bad” for the church on the whole, I think we need to move beyond categorical
judgments that say that Constantine totally corrupted the church by making
Christianity legal. The fact is, there were struggles with accommodation and faithfulness nearly every
time persecution waned in the first three centuries. In case we are tempted to
think that the church was pristine until Constantine, all we need to do is read
the New Testament itself…
The development of early Trinitarian
theology and the rise of Arrianism:
The key point I hit on here was how subordinationist Christology which makes
Jesus less than the Father in some way, and of which Arrianism is the logical
extreme in denying that the Son is divine, depends on a faulty concept of what
it means for Jesus to be our mediator. Subordinationism tends to see Jesus as a
mediator between the changeable world and a transcendent, absolute God who
cannot relate to the world apart from a more immanent Son. Philosophically speaking, he
serves as an ontological mediator, which smacks of Neoplatonist philosophy more than a biblical worldview, since in the Bible God's transcendence doesn't create problems for him also being immanent. I
tried to show that the direction of the theological consensus on the Trinity
and the incarnation was to show that this kind of hybrid creature in between
God and man wouldn’t do us any good for our salvation: instead we need Christ
to be a mediator who is both fully human and fully divine, because our problem
is a moral one of separation from a holy God, a problem that only a fully
divine and fully human mediator can solve.
Athanasius’s positive arguments about
Christ in On the Incarnation: My goal here was to introduce them to
the types of soteriological arguments (arguments from the nature of salvation) for
the Trinity that would prove so crucial in the course of forming the orthodox
consensus on Trinitarian theology. I had two groups of students do presentations
on portions of the text. I saw that at least with one student I succeeded in inspiring
more real interest in reading patristic theologians.
Next up will be
the Councils of Nicea and Constantinople and the theology of the Cappadocian
fathers (Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus), followed by
a week on Augustine. While this won’t be a class of pure theological
discussions (and the textbook does a good job on the historical side), these are crucial for understanding so much of what happened in
the early church and how the medieval and later Reformation developments relate
to what happened in that time. While so much of this is new for students, most
are finding it fascinating and finding explanations for aspects of church life or theological ideas that they only
vaguely understood before!
