The "Unchanging" Church

I was talking to one of my fellow pastors today, and he told me about a friend of his who became a convert to Roman Catholicism after reading the works of the church fathers. Such conversions are not terribly unusual (although I think more evangelicals tend to move toward the Orthodox Church), and often result in rather zealous evangelists for their new theological views.

This young man told my colleague that he joined the Roman Catholic Church because he thought it had retained the true teaching of the early church, and in fact that its teaching and practice had not changed in two millennia. Such a view is taught in some Catholic circles, but it is historically naive. Still, it raises a critical question: in what ways do we Christians today have a part in an "unchanging" church?

Part of the issue is rooted in the very nature of the early church. The church from its early days was under sporadic persecution in divers locales. The New Testament was still being written up to almost the end of the 1st century, and the full acceptance of the NT canon would take another century or two. The church's structure was still fluid, and there were few voices of authority to promote orthodox teaching. Rival religions often hung onto the edges of Christianity. There is something in the Fathers to confound any modern church tradition: pedobaptists have to explain the Didache, presbyterians and congregationalists the epistles of Ignatius, and many Christians struggle with the battle between the Jewishness of some writers and the Greco-philosophical bent of others.

I absolutely enjoy spending time reading and studying the fathers of the church. Yet I know that they were fallible men despite their gifts, and that the teaching of the Bible is more important than the teaching of its early interpreters. At the risk of sounding unduly critical, placing authority in the hands of the Fathers is not dissimilar to the way Jews of Jesus' time placed authority in the hands of the rabbis rather than in the Scriptures. Our authority is the Bible; our teachers are the men and women of faith throughout the ages who seek to guide us into truth.

We participate in an "unchanging" church when we hold fast to the Biblical doctrines that were hammered out by those who went before us in an attempt to clarify what the Bible teaches us. There is in this sense an "orthodox consensus" that is centered on belief in God as Father, Son, and Spirit, in Jesus as both fully divine and fully human, in the practice of baptism and Communion (albeit differently understood), and in a firm conviction that all genuine believers in Christ are part of a larger body, one spread throughout the world and throughout the ages. We all share in belief in the early creeds, and that center of our faith holds us together when other beliefs and practices set us apart. There is an unchanging core for Christianity, but it is not found in the fathers; rather, our unchanging center is Jesus Christ as revealed in His eternal Word.