The Formation of Orthodoxy

Clergy: Structuring Power in the church.

From the beginning of the Church, authority rested primarily with the Apostles, and secondarily with local leaders called bishops, presbyters, and deacons.

Following the death of the Apostles, some widely held doctrines and some existing leaders were challenged. In response to these challenges, the principle of Apostolic succession was formulated to support the existing leadership and doctrines. Irenaeus appealed to the principle of apostolic succession in his refutation of Gnosticism, arguing that the Church's teaching came from the apostles via a publicly verifiable succession of bishops. The Gnostics could not claim this for their teaching, which they held had been secretly conveyed by Jesus to the Apostles, who secretly conveyed it to the Gnostic elite. Read the selection entitled "Priority of the Apostolic Tradition," by Irenaeus, in Kerr, Readings in Christian Thought, pp. 34-35.

Authority in local churches seems to have passed from the itinerant charismatic leadership of the apostles who founded the main churches, and the collegial leadership of local presbyters and deacons, to the rule of individual bishops whose authority was guaranteed by a formal, self-perpetuating clerical hierarchy legitimated by the doctrine of apostolic succession.

Creeds: Defining Doctrine.

If appealing to apostolic succession was one way of establishing orthodoxy, perhaps an even more direct way was the use of creeds. The earliest statements of faith were often statements made at the time of Baptism, and served to differentiate believers from non-believers. Increasingly, however, the content of such statements came to be shaped by theological controversies. The greatest such controversy during the first few centuries of the Church centered on the divine and/or human nature of Christ. (Here is a chart of major views in the Christological controversies.)

Read the selection entitled "Incarnation, Recapitulation, Redemption," by Irenaeus, in Kerr pp. 35-38. Here again Irenaeus is arguing against Gnostics. Note for yourself where Irenaeus alludes to some of the New Testament passages we have read. Also answer the D2L questions about this text.

Also read the Creed of Nicaea (just one page, in the Coursepack, after an article on "the structure of myths" that we skipped; also online at newadvent.org; offline instructor's copy). We will look at this together in class and try to determine what kind of Christology it is affirming and what kind it is rejecting.

Then read Gonzalez, Church History: An Essential Guide, chapter 1.

Notes from class

We looked at two statements on Christology:

• The Creed of Nicaea, produced by the Council of Nicaea.
  • It emphasizes Christ's divine nature: he is of the same substance as God the Father, and "begotten" but not created.
  • This is a rejection of the teachings of Arius, who argued that Christ was the first and highest created being (which is one possible interpretation of Colossians).
  • As we saw, the New Testament's statements about Christ can be interpreted in different ways, and the Creed of Nicaea was a way of deciding officially which interpretation was correct.
• Irenaeus' writing against the Gnostics.
  • The Gnostics said a divine Christ spirit figure descended to the material realm and made use of the man Jesus to preach his message of liberation from the flesh.
  • Irenaeus insisted that while Christ really was divine, he also really did become human. This became the official doctrine of most of the church.
  • Why was it so important to define Christ's nature? We found that Irenaeus thought human salvation depended on Christ being both divine and human because:
    • If Christ was not really human then he did not really suffer death on the cross, but that is essential for the "sacrifice" view of salvation.
    • Part of the human problem is that in Adam and Even humans were cut off or alienated from God, and reconciliation requires some sort of mediator or bridge, which requires divine and human being.
    • Since Adam and Eve's sin, humans are marred by original sin and do not have the ability to save themselves, so God must be the one to take the initiative and save them; but humans are the ones who owe God obedience, so they must be the ones to offer it; a true savior must therefore be both divine and human. (We're reading into Irenaeus' words a bit here; we will see this idea developed further by Anselm.)

Irenaeus defended his doctrine by saying that the truth (including both scripture and a true interpretation of scripture) was handed down and guaranteed by apostolic succession, from Jesus to the apostles to the bishops who rule the churches. Christians have debated whether churches should really be governed by a hierarchy of bishops. They developed three basic forms of church government, which exist in various combinations and permutations:

• Episcopal government:
  • The local churches in an area are ruled by a bishop, who is answerable to an archbishop, who is answerable to a supreme bishop (the Archbishop of Canterbury for Anglicans; the Pope for Catholics; a Patriarch for Orthodox churches).
  • This is characteristic of "high churches" (see the list of Churches, Denominations, and Sects).
  • This view is justified by Irenaeus' doctrine of apostolic succession.
  • Protestants rebelled against this kind of authority, to varying degrees. Some Protestants, however, including Anglicans, Episcopalians, and even Methodists, have episcopal authority structures.
• Presbyterian government:
  • Presbyterians argue that the "bishops" mentioned in the New Testament were really just "elders/presbyters," and that local churches should be governed by collegial groups of elders holding equal authority, without the pastor or any other figure dominating.
  • These elders are elected by the congregation, but the congregation then submits to the elders' decisions.
• Congregational government:
  • Many Protestants felt that the Roman Church had abused its authority, and so insisted that individual Christians and local churches be able to govern themselves. They developed congregational government, in which decisions are made by vote of the members.
  • It is obviously impractical for every little decision to be made in this way, especially for larger churches, so in practice pastors or deacons often end up making most decisions.
  • An extreme form of congregational government is the Quakers' practice of not even having a pastor or any other authoritative leader; instead they seek to let the Spirit guide each congregation to a consensus (the "sense of the meeting") on every decision.
  • Other churches combine various elements: they may rather pray and seek consensus than vote; or they may elect elders while still according the pastor special authority.
  • In recent years some Protestants have been shifting from congregationalism toward presbyterian or even episcopal forms of government, perhaps because they are no longer so concerned with abuses and see some value in having church members under an authority higher than themselves.

{DAY 2}

Canon: Identifying Sacred Texts.

Another way to establish orthodoxy was to designate a canon: a limited number of texts that would be considered authoritative scripture.

The Old Testament

The scriptures of the earliest church were the Jewish scriptures, but the Jewish canon was not firmly fixed in the time of Jesus. The early Church seems to have made use of a fairly broad spectrum of Jewish scriptures, most often relying on a Greek translation (the Septuagint), which contained more books than the strictly Hebrew canon that the Jewish Rabbis eventually settled on. Thus the Roman Catholic Bible contains some books (the Apocrypha) that are absent from the Protestant Bible (which is based on the smaller Hebrew canon).

The New Testament

The Gospels were written in the later part of first century, incorporating earlier oral and/or written material. During the second century, the Gospels (especially Matthew) came to be treated as authoritative scripture.

Paul's Epistles, written in the 50's, were collected and circulated together by the end of the first century.

Thus both Gospels and Epistles were generally regarded as scripture in the second century, but there does not seem to have been any attempt to define the limits of a canon until the end of the second century at the earliest. When lists of canonical books began to appear, they differed over some books for several centuries. Such lists were produced largely in response to internal challenges to the Church's teaching (such as Gnosticism).

• The earliest such list is the Muratorian fragment (probably ca. 170-200). Read the Muratorian Fragment (a two-page item in the Coursepack after the Creed of Nicaea) (another translation is available online; offline instructor's copy). Write up for yourself a list of the books accepted as canonical according to the Muratorian fragment. (Include Matthew and Mark, which we can assume are just missing here because the first part of the text is missing.) Try to make this list match up with the list of the books that are included in the present canon of the New Testament (look in the table of contents in any Bible), and answer the matching question in D2L.
• The first known list that exactly matched the present New Testament was that circulated by Athanasius in his Easter letter to the churches in 367. Jerome later included this same list of books in his Latin translation of the Bible (the Vulgate), and although there continued to be differences over some books for centuries, Athanasius' list eventually was universally accepted.

Traditionally five reasons are given for a book being considered canonical: apostolicity, orthodoxy, antiquity, inspiration, and church use.

Read Gonzalez, Church History: An Essential Guide, chapter 2.

Notes from class

Today we took several observations, from your church visits and the Latin Mass video, and interpreted them in terms of four ideas from the course:

• Authority structures:
  • In mosques, prayer is set up with everyone in rows, all facing toward the Ka`ba in Mecca. This looks very egalitarian, except with respect to gender, and in fact most U.S. mosques are run on a "congregational" model, with members having final control over the hiring and firing of leaders (through their donations, and sometimes through voting as well).
  • At the same time, certain individuals, called imams, do take a special leadership role, and are sometimes set apart not only by standing in front, but also by their manner of dress. In the U.S. the imam of a mosque plays a role similar to the pastor of a congregational church: in principle he is under the authority of the whole congregation, and in principle anyone who knows the Qur'an well enough can fill that role, but in practice the congregation usually defers to the imam because of his religious training.
  • That egalitarianism, with authority accorded to leaders mainly because of their education, is typical of Sunnis. Shiites, on the other hand, believe in something very much like an "apostolic succession" of Imams who lead (or used to lead) the whole Muslim community because they are descended from the Prophet's family and were appointed by previous imams (just like Christian bishops).
  • In the Latin Mass video, and to lesser degree at St. Mark's Catholic Church, leaders are visibly set apart from others by their raised position and their special attire. In the video one lesser leader even bowed to the priest. This reflects the Catholic Church's very hierarchical and episcopal authority structure.
• Soteriology:
  • St. Mark's emphasizes a sacrificial model of salvation with all its images of the cross on which Jesus died. We will see that the Catholic Church also emphasizes that the Eucharist is a sacrifice that saves people.
  • The elevation of leaders at St. Mark's could also indicate that they regard salvation as coming through following leaders. This would be a more Islamic soteriology. But now that we have studied different church authority structures, we can surmise that maybe the elevation of leaders at St. Mark's is more an indication of their episcopal structure than of their sotierology.
• Christology:
  • A local Lutheran church emphasized Jesus' humanity in the sermon, but his divinity in its hymns. We now have the background to explain where both of those ideas came from, in scripture and in the early creeds. Of course, we can still wonder why the pastor chose to emphasize humanity in the sermon, since the church believes in both Christ's humanity and divinity.
• Canon of scripture:
  • In mosques we have seen the Qur'an recited in Arabic, even though most of the congregation does not understand Arabic. Muslims also frequently treat written copies of the Qur'an with special reverence.
    • This is in stark contrast to Protestants, who tend to see the Bible as a source of information that above all must be understood, but who do not usually treat their physical Bibles with special reverence.
    • This could be because for Christians it is Christ's incarnation (his becoming human) and death that saves them, so they show more reverence for Christ and his body and blood (the Eucharist), whereas for Muslims what saves them is God's guidance, in the form of his eternal speech that was "inlibrated" (became a book) in the form of the Qur'an, so they show reverence for the Qur'an.
  • In a Catholic and an Episcopal church we have seen the Bible highly decorated, carried in honor, perfumed with incense, and even read in Latin. This special reverence is not as common in most Protestant churches, which tend to view the Bible mainly as a source of information to be understood.
  • We also noticed that in the Latin Mass one part of the Bible - the Gospel - was given greater honor than another part - a reading from the Wisdom of Sirach. This raised the whole issue of "degrees of canonicity": some books seem to be considered more sacred than others, and some are so much less sacred that they are left out of the canon by many churches:
    • The Wisdom of Sirach is one of the "Deuterocanonical" books that was in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament used by early Christians) and was kept by the Catholic Church, but it was rejected by Protestants because it was not in the Hebrew version of the Bible used by Jews.
    • There were also degrees of sacredness among New Testament books, and disagreements about some of the less important books, for several hundred years. The four Gospels and thirteen epistles attributed to Paul were widely accepted very early, but other books were read in some churches and not others. When people started writing down the whole Bible in one volume, they had to choose which books to put in, and eventually the most popular list of books that emerged was the one all Christians still use today. It includes some books like Hebrews, and excludes others like the Shepherd of Hermas, that were used by some but not all the early churches.
    • Even today, when all Christians agree about which books are in the New Testament, some (such as the Gospels and Romans) get a lot of attention and honor, while others (such as James and 3 John) are not as widely used.

This intellectual process - relating your concrete observations to the history, texts, and concepts from class - is exactly the process you will need to go through for your final papers. Most of you are pretty reluctant to try that kind of thinking out loud in class, but I think that you and your fellows students will all get much better at it if more of you are willing to stick your neck out and try in class, so I will keep asking you to bring up bits of your own observations that relate to a topic we're covering in class, and I encourage you to take those chances. It may feel awkward, or you may feel unsure of yourself, but remember, this isn't about helping you feel better about yourself; this is about stretching your capacity to understand what you see. That won't happen unless you actively try to interpret your observations, and get feedback from me and from the rest of the class, so I think it will help you a lot if you stick your neck out a bit in class.

{DAY 3}

Liturgy: Formalizing Right Worship.

Read Justin Martyr's description of early Christian worship in Kerr, pp. 22-24 (the section entitled "Worship and Witness"). This is our earliest extant description of a Christian worship service.

Note the basic elements of the Sunday worship service:

1. Scripture reading: "Memoirs of the apostles or writings of the prophets."
2. Sermon ("discourse").
3. Congregational prayers.
4. Eucharist:
   • Bread and mixed wine are brought to the president.
   • The president offers a prayer of thanksgiving; the congregation responds with "Amen."
   • The deacons distribute the elements to those present, and to the absent.
5. Offering.

"Orthodoxy" literally means "right worship." The Eastern or Orthodox Churches claim to have inherited a form of worship that goes back to the Apostles. Read the selection by John of Damascus entitled "On the Worship of Images" in Kerr, pp. 72-73.

Read Gonzalez, Church History: An Essential Guide, chapter 3.

(There are no D2L questions for today.)

Notes from class

Today we pulled together some of our field observations, two early descriptions of Christian worship (Justin Martyr, ca. 150 AD, and the Didache, ca. 70-150 AD), and a brief clip of an Orthodox service, to think through several aspects of worship:

• The Eucharist
  • Catholics and some Protestants make this is a part of every Sunday service, just as Justin described, but some Protestants celebrate the Eucharist (which they usually call "communion" or "the Lord's Supper") only every month or less, and some (e.g. Quakers) never have it. This reflects different views on the meaning of the Eucharist, and on ritual in general.
  • A mosque actually has all the same elements of a worship service that Justin described for early Christians, except for the Eucharist. This makes sense, since Muslims believe Christ was a prophet, not a divine figure who died for their salvation.
  • We noted several different interpretations of the Eucharist:
    • It is a sacrifice (Catholics).
    • It is the body and blook of Christ (Catholics, Justin)
    • It is a memorial (Protestants).
    • It is spiritual food and drink (the Didache, the Orthodox use of a spoon).
    • It symbolizes the unity of the Church (the Didache).
    • It celebrates Christ's gift of life and saving knowledge (the Didache).
  • Catholics, Episcopalians, and the Didache have a standard script (a liturgy) for celebrating the Eucharist, whereas many Protestants let the leader say "what's on his heart" and Justin says the pastor gives thanks "to the best of his ability."
• Baptism
  • Justin describes baptism as immersion in water for adults, as a Church entrance requirement. This makes sense in his context, where Christians are a minority (sometimes persecuted), so entering the Church is something that usually happens by an adult's deliberate (and sometimes risky) choice.
  • Baptists and many other Protestants likewise baptize adults (including teenagers) by immersion, as a sign of their decision to step away from the rest of the world and join the Church.
  • The Didache likewise envisions baptism of adults by immersion, but it also allows for baptism by pouring water on the head.
  • Catholics, the Orthodox, and Anglicans baptize infants who are born into Christian families, by sprinkling or pouring a small amount of water on them, thus admitting them into the Church right away. This fits with the typical "high church" view of state-affiliated churches that they are (or should be) coextensive with society: when a baby is born, she automatically becomes part of both society and the church. Some Protestants, including Episcopalians and Presbyterians, likewise baptize infants, even though they are not state churches and do not consider themselves coextensive with society.
  • So infant baptism tends to be found in "high churches" that consider themselves "the" official church in a society, while adult baptism tends to be found in "low church" denominations that consider themselves a separate group distinct from society, that people join voluntarily. See the List of Churches, Denominations, and Sects.
  • Mosques too have a kind of washing (wudu') before their key ritual (prayer), so perhaps there is some "universal why" at work here: perhaps people naturally think that cleanliness is necessary before one can approach holy things.
• Different views of ritual in general
  • Catholics tend to view rituals as itself effecting salvation in some way: baptism, the Eucharist, and other sacraments such as penance can actually bring about forgiveness of sins.
  • Protestants tend to view rituals as physical symbols that merely represent a salvation that has already taken place. As we will learn, this was a reaction against the Catholic church's view of ritual.
  • Quakers reject ritual altogether; we think this represents the logical extreme of the Protestant view that what matters is what happens inwardly or spiritually.