ORTHODOXY and HERESY in the EARLY CHURCH

It is both frustrating and fascinating to study the theological documents of the early period of the history of the Christian church. To the modern reader it is an era remote in time and place, and the issues which commanded most attention often seem obscure. Even the historical boundaries of the period are difficult to determine. Yet this was the formative age of organized Christianity, and it was during these first few centuries that the rudiments of Christian doctrine were formulated.

Originally composed of a small band of Jewish disciples who proclaimed that Jesus of Nazareth was the promised Messiah, the Christian church developed first within the limited confines of Palestine. For the most part, however, Jews rejected the Christian claim about Jesus, and henceforth the church moved farther and farther away from Palestine, spreading into the wider and more diverse world of Greco-Roman civilization. The books of the New Testament provide practically all the information we have about the history, doctrine, life, and organization of the earliest or Apostolic church. In the book of the Acts and in Paul's epistles, problems of doctrinal definition were already beginning to absorb the attention of the first Christians.

The earliest missionaries of the church ("apostle" means in Greek "one sent forth") were confronted with two major challenges. These arose when Christianity became a self-conscious religious movement, defining itself over against other cultures, traditions, and religions. The first challenge was internal, even inherited, for the Christians had to determine whether they belonged within the Jewish religious tradition, or whether they represented an entirely new departure. The second challenge was posed by the Greco-Roman world of speculative philosophy and practical politics.

The theologians and administrators in the early church period were mainly concerned with these two major challenges of culture and thought, and much of the writing in this period was addressed to the issues resulting from this confrontation. Both challenges were resisted; yet each shaped and molded the church's thought for centuries to come. Christianity did not remain a Jewish sect, though it retained the Hebrew Scriptures as part of the Bible, the New Testament books being regarded as fulfilling ancient history and prophecy. Nor did Christianity relinquish its unique interpretation of Jesus as the Christ, even though Greek philosophy demanded a kind of rational defense which Christian theologians were not always willing to utilize. The Roman political establishment forced the amorphous church to adopt administrative structures for its own institutional organization.

Coming out of Judaism with a deep sense of divine calling as God's chosen people, coupled with a sensitive spirit for individual and social righteousness, early Christianity proclaimed a gospel of love and redemption without fear or favor to all who would listen. The appeal often came through rational discourse and argument; sometimes it was exemplified through mystical experience and ethical action; frequently it issued in a martyr's death.

The period of the early church begins within or immediately follows the New Testament itself; but it is not so easy to say when the era ends or merges into the early Middle Ages. Surely Augustine (d. 430) was the last and the greatest of the early church theologians, but the ecumenical Council of Chalcedon (A.D. 451) pronounced a definitive judgment on the doctrine of the two natures of Christ, and therefore it very much belongs within this period. Even the Athanasian Creed, which summed up the disputes on the doctrine of the Trinity, falls within this early period, although the form in which it has come down to us is perhaps as late as the seventh or eighth century. Western, Latin, theology developed more rapidly than its Eastern, Greek, counterpart, and so John of Damascus (d. c. 750), the greatest of the Eastern Orthodox theologians, fits in the early church period because his views on Christ and the Trinity reflect the Augustinian-Athanasian pattern. So, somewhat arbitrarily as to the calendar, but accurate enough as to the development of Christian thought, we may stretch the period of the early church from post-Apostolic times, that is, after the New Testament, until the mid-eighth century A.D.

Frustrating as this early church period may be in many ways, it is also a fascinating period of theological discussion and speculative dialectic. For five centuries and more, Christian thinkers sought to clarify how they understood the person of Jesus Christ. This task of definition required of them not only evangelistic zeal as they proclaimed the gospel to the faithful, but rational precision as they responded to the criticisms of opponents. What may astonish us as we look back at these controversial and confusing centuries is the highly sophisticated manner in which the early Christians argued with the best...