Understanding Roots

I had the pleasure today of beginning to read Jaroslav Pelikan's The Christian Tradition Vol. 1. As someone interested in the patristic era, I have intended to read this volume for quite some time, but other necessary reading always intervened. I hope to read this book somewhat more slowly than most; ike many, I have a tendency to want to "get through" a book. This one I want to digest.

Pelikan begins his book with an examination of the roots of Christian doctrine. This is one of the elements of theology that is often missed in modern systematic formulations. Christianity did not come out of a vacuum the day Jesus ascended to the Father; it has roots in the religious and philosophical world in which it began. Sometimes I think that modern theologians truly believe that theology and doctrine began with their era, and should accommodate the thought of our time.

The primary roots of the Christian faith are found in Old Testament Judaism. Yet much of the early apologetic effort of Christian writers was to contrast their faith with that of Judaism. The earliest Christians were largely though not exclusively Jewish, and NT writers such as James and the author of Hebrews show how steeped they are in Jewish thought. Even Paul, often portrayed as the one who "Gentilized" Christianity, was proud of his own Jewish heritage and education. As it grew as a faith, Christianity began to part ways with its Jewish roots (although some groups, such as the Ebionites, maintained Jewish traditions), and this divide really became vast after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD.

Early Christianity also had to encounter the popular pagan ideas of the time. One of Pelikan's points that I found fascinating was that in this encounter, Christianity began to "re-Judaize." The pagan philosophers thought Christianity was just a new faddish religion of recent vintage, so apologists for the faith dug back into the teaching of Moses and the prophets to demonstrate that this was no new teaching, but was far older than the Greek philosophers. While perhaps the apologists took some liberties with the data, they were right in rooting Christianity back to Moses, and even further.

So much of the modern church wants to find novelty in the way it teaches the Bible. There is a serious lack of historical perspective among many Christians-not just of the early roots of our faith, but even of more recent developments in theology. (Of course, by "recent" I would include the Reformation or the liberal-modernist controversy, not just the latest issue of Christianity Today.) Perhaps if we had such a perspective, we would be less inclined to accept every new teaching that aligns itself with our culture and find the solid truths on which our faith is based.