What the Early Church Can Teach Us about Living in This Strange New World
Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Tuesday, August 16, 2022
The Apologists and Augustine both offer a vision of the church in a hostile culture that calls on the church to be the church and on Christians to be constructive members of the wider society in which they are placed. Some might respond that failing to engage in aggressive and direct confrontation looks rather like defeatism or withdrawal. But is it?
Learn from the Ancient Church
Traditional Christians are typically those who take history seriously. We have a faith rooted in historical claims (supremely the incarnation of Jesus Christ and the events and actions of his life) and see our religious communities as standing in a line extending back through time to Pentecost and beyond. Thus, when faced with peculiar challenges, Christians often look to the past to find hope with regard to their experience in the present. Typically, Protestants look to the Reformation, and Catholics look to the High Middle Ages. If only we might be able to return to that world, we tell ourselves, all might be well.
Anyone with a realistic sense of history knows that such returns are at best virtually impossible. First, neither the Reformation nor the High Middle Ages were the golden eras that later religious nostalgia would have us believe. The societies in which the church operated in those periods are gone forever, thanks in large part to the ways in which technology has reshaped the world in which we now live.
If we are to find a precedent for our times, I believe that we must go further back in time, to the second century and the immediately post-apostolic church. There, Christianity was a little-understood, despised, marginal sect. It was suspected of being immoral and seditious. Eating the body and blood of their god and calling each other “brother” and “sister” even when married made Christians and Christianity sound highly dubious to outsiders. And the claim that “Jesus is Lord!” was on the surface a pledge of loyalty that derogated from that owed to Caesar Lamentation for Christianity’s cultural marginalization. That is much like the situation of the church today. For example, we are considered irrational bigots for our stance on gay marriage. In the aftermath of the Trump presidency, it has become routine to hear religious conservatives in general, and evangelical Christians in particular, decried as representing a threat to civil society. Like our spiritual ancestors in the second century, we too are deemed immoral and seditious.
Of course, the analogy is not perfect. The church in the second century faced a pagan world that had never known Christianity. We live in a world that is de-Christianizing, often self-consciously and intentionally. That means that the opposition is likely better informed and more proactive than in the ancient church. Yet a glance at the church’s strategy in the second century is still instructive.
First, it is clear from the New Testament and from early noncanonical texts like the Didache that community was central to church life. The Acts of the Apostles presents a picture of a church where Christians cared for and served each other. The Didache sets forth a set of moral prescriptions, including a ban on abortion and infanticide, that served to distinguish the church from the world around. Christian identity was clearly a very practical, down-toearth, and day-to-day thing.
This makes perfect sense. Underlying much of the argument of previous chapters—indeed, underlying the notion of the social imaginary—is that identity is shaped by the communities to which we belong. And we all have various identities—I am a husband, a father, a teacher, an Englishman, an immigrant, a writer, a rugby fan, in addition to being a Christian. And the strongest identities I have, forming my strongest intuitions, derive from the strongest communities to which I belong. And that means that the church needs to be the strongest community to which we each belong.
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Gender Confusion and the PCA
Earlier this month, the SJC’s ruling was sent to the parties. TE Stephen O’Neill was one of the faithful elders who helped present the case of RPR before the SJC and he joined the podcast to discuss the ruling of the General Assembly in this matter. The SJC is to be commended for its work on this case. The SJC clearly performed a thorough analysis of what MNY presbytery has both done and left undone. The Commission expressed awareness of steps taken already by MNY presbytery to correct the delinquencies in this matter. But the SJC also noted what the MNY presbytery has done so far is “clearly inadequate.”
On “Reformation Sunday” in 2021 a priestess in The Episcopal Church took the pulpit at Trinity PCA in Rye, New York where Craig Higgins serves as senior pastor. The lady paused after reading a portion of Scripture and promising to return to read the rest of the pericope at the end of her “teaching,” she said with a smile.
She went on “teaching” for quite some time. She talked about sin and the grace of God, she warned about self-righteousness and resentment, she asserted American Christians should pay more attention to the teachings of the “Calvinist theologian Karl Barth,” lamenting that Barth’s theology has not caught on in American Churches, and she extolled the freedom that is found in Christ alone to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.
News of what had taken place at Trinity PCA in Rye, NY scandalized many in the PCA.
When a ruling elder from another presbytery raised questions as to how such a thing could be done in a PCA Congregation, the Metro New York Presbytery (MNY) investigated. The representatives of the Session and TE Higgins asserted they take no exceptions to the relevant portions of the standards related to whether a woman may preach in public worship. The presbytery then closed the investigation without finding any basis for charges.
When the Review of Presbytery Records Committee (RPR) of General Assembly examined the Minutes of MNY on this matter, many members of RPR were puzzled as to how MNY arrived at its conclusions. Accordingly and with only one dissenting vote, RPR recommended the matter be referred to the General Assembly’s Standing Judicial Commission, since there appeared to be particularly glaring violations of the PCA Constitution in this case.
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“Teach us to Number our Days”
In Ecclesiastes, the wealthiest and wisest man of all, King Solomon, will compound on the words of Job when he describes the vanity and futility of life. Furthermore, Solomon will detail that the length of our lives, although known to God, is completely unknown to us: “Moreover, man does not know his time: like fish caught in a treacherous net and birds trapped in a snare, so the sons of men are ensnared at an evil time when it suddenly falls on them.” (2)
Life itself is like a whisper spoken into the wind or like a candle, which after being blown out, has lingering smoke for but a brief moment and then disappears forever. The brother of Jesus will later testify to these very realities in the New Testament: “You don’t even know what your life will look like tomorrow.” (3)
As Christians, we are committed to living for the glory of God, but in order to do so, we must effectively evaluate and examine the fragility and fleeting nature of life. In his resolutions, Jonathan Edwards rightly valued the scarcity of time and prayed that the Lord would impress upon his conscience the necessity of viewing our time here on earth with a profound sense of stewardship. With the brevity of man’s days and the eternal nature of man’s soul in mind, Edwards would pray, “Lord, stamp eternity on my eyeballs.” Edwards refused to live for the temporary, but insisted on making this personal resolution: -
What Are the 3 Marks of the Church? Distinguishing between Healthy and Dangerous Consumerism
If we can start to compare our perceived needs with what Christ’s church is actually meant to be, we can start moving towards a healthier understanding of need and avoid destroying the local church for not meeting all our expectations. We all have this natural disposition to be consumers. The question we should really be asking is, are we consuming things that lead to self-fulfillment and self-glory, or are we consuming the means of grace that God himself wants us to receive with glad hearts for his glory and our good?
I love being a pastor. I love being able to preach God’s word and serve his people in so many ways. Yet, over the last ten years in ministry, I have seen an underlying issue in myself, as well as many of the people in the church (not just the one I serve). This is the issue of consumerism.
One of the greatest dangers to the local church today is consumerism.
Consumerism often shows itself when people share with me that they are overwhelmed with church life and need to take a step back. This often means forsaking the regular fellowship with God’s people to seek out some sort of self-realization. The heartbreaking part of watching this repeatedly over the years is the downward spiral that typically follows as people become distant from the worship service and living amongst the people of God.
Not only have I watched people become distant, I have seen them abandon the faith by “stepping back” or “figuring out what they believe.” This saddens me—and many other Christians as well—because it often shows that people aren’t actually consuming the good things God is graciously giving them. Instead, they become consumed by guilt, or worse, they go and consume what the world and the evil one offer.
One of the greatest dangers to the local church today is consumerism. Our culture is heavily driven by a mutual understanding between ourselves and advertisement companies that we all want to want things. It’s as if we have been trained to redefine the word “want” as “need.” Whereas one hundred years ago, people needed food, shelter, and clothing, today we all “need” the latest iPhone, the right outfit, and even the perfect church.
If you have been in the church for even a couple of minutes, it doesn’t take long to identify what people believe the church “needs” to look like and function like. Even more telling is why people leave churches. Often times the perceived “needs” that aren’t being met are things like better music, a more dynamic preacher, more ministries, better coffee, and anything that somehow feeds the consumer’s desires.
Are we aware of the depth of consumerism we bring to the church?
The reality is, most of us are this way. We may have different perceived “needs” that we demand of the church, but the question is, are we aware of the depth of consumerism we bring to the church? If we can start to compare our perceived needs with what Christ’s church is actually meant to be, we can start moving towards a healthier understanding of need and avoid destroying the local church for not meeting all our expectations.
We all have this natural disposition to be consumers.
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