How Paleo Is Your Orthodoxy?
A question: how significant should orthodoxy be, and how stringent should the demand for orthodoxy be in the modern church?
Posted
Sunday, September 11, 2005
by
Adam Mattison
Finally, a chance to have your every question about paleo-orthodoxy definitively answered. This is a moment for which you have waited far too long.
The term paleo-orthodoxy was something new to me as recently as a few weeks ago, but, at Brian’s invitation and having taken a little time to become more familiar with the topic, I am now ready to plunge into the mighty stream that is Theoblogian with a few hopefully useful things to say. Orthodoxy is, of course, a wonderful thing, but a subject about which we Protestants are naturally a little touchy. Every believer, after all, wishes to affirm that his faith is the faith of Peter and Paul, but then so much of what we profess runs counter to the first 1500 years of Christian tradition (the
Trail of Blood not withstanding). However, before we launch into a protracted discussion of orthodoxy, paleo or otherwise, it seems useful to begin by asking, what is the big deal about orthodoxy in the first place? There have been moments in the history of the Church when a rigid orthodoxy has been absolutely essential, but have these moments passed us by?
First of all, it seems the most important thing to say about orthodoxy is that to be orthodox is different than to be saved. I doubt that one can be saved and not be orthodox, but it is certainly possible to be orthodox and not be saved. The very fact that there is a distinction between the two is why orthodoxy was so necessary in the early days of the church. I cannot tell who among my fellow human creatures is saved (and sometimes the standard for salvation can seem depressingly low), and indeed can some days scarcely tell if I myself am saved, because salvation is internal. However, at the same time that I am unable to absolutely identify my fellow believers, I am yet bound immutably into this vast organic unity of the Church, and this vast organic unity, whose members I am unable to absolutely identify, are absolutely necessary to my own sanctification. This being so it was and is necessary to have a minimum statement of belief, something external, some public creed to which all members of the church could and can profess and so identify themselves to one another..
In the early days of the young church with apostles running all around the eastern part of the empire, orthodoxy was easy to determine because orthodoxy was simply the authoritative teaching of the apostles. This is not to say that Scripture was insignificant in those years, but rather that the teaching of the apostles included the authoritative interpretation of Scripture. Any dispute or confusion could be addressed to them and they were never far away. This being so, it was less necessary to have a clearly explicated and fully developed orthodoxy than in later periods. The church was very clearly centered around the apostles, but this situation was necessarily impermanent and by the close of the first century all the apostles (with my apologies to Pope Benedict) were gone and their authoritative teaching had been passed into written form.
There were certainly battles over orthodoxy in the NT period, as can be seen from the polemic nature of some of the Scriptures and the many warnings about false teachers therein, but there is scarcely anything of a systematic nature to be found. When orthodoxy truly began to come into its own was after the apostles had gone and persecution had come. Suddenly, membership in the church became dangerous as part of the official policy of the empire, and it became absolutely necessary for believers to know who was really in the church and who was not, and to further know which truths were worth suffering for and which were not, and finally to know what must be reaffirmed by those who had not been able to bear persecution but now wished to return to the church. The first major movement to codify the faith had begun, and the first difficult steps towards developing a comprehensive and consistent theology had been taken.
In 313, Constantine saw a vision in the sky, and soon after the empire which had tried its best to stamp out Christianity suddenly adopted it as its dominant religion. Where the church had struggled before to keep its members faithful, it now had to reemphasize basic creedal truths in order to narrow the door of what had become a necessary passage for those desiring political power, and certainly it can be no coincidence that this political development opened the era of the creeds. With the councils and creeds of this early period, Christianity became much more formal in doctrine than it had ever been before, and such seemingly minor controversies as monothelitism or the filioque passage became major turning points in the history of the church, the effects of which are still to be seen today.
These are but two examples of eras when a narrowly defined orthodoxy was critical to the church, and certainly there is much more that could be said about the history of orthodoxy, but I have neither the skill nor the space to do so now. The astute Theoblogian will of course note that I have not actually said anything about paleo-orthodoxy as of yet, but that will be saved for a subsequent post. It is clear that there have been times on the life of the Church where the need for orthodoxy has been preeminent, and I simply wish to ask here whether this is one of those times. Orthodoxy and ecumenicism are often at odds, and in an era and place free from both persecution and political influences (assuming that we are indeed free of these things, as of course many of our fellow believers world wide are not), it seems worthwhile to ask which should predominate. Can the church today adopt a broader orthodoxy than in years past? Should the pendulum now swing farther towards ecumenicism? If it does, what of our previous orthodoxy remains, and why does it remain? Are you orthodox, and how do you know? Perhaps more importantly, is it possible that I am the only one who is truly orthodox (as I have often thought to myself)? As a historian, I have the enviable privilege of taking no position on these matters, since I am only an unbiased recorder and reporter of the past, but I will leave it to all of you exegetes to go out and solve them for me. Let me know when you have the answers, and look for more on paleo-orthodoxy in the near future, or if you simply cannot wait, check out the series of posts on The Y Blog
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