Teaching the church fathers

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!