Finding Jesus: A Testimony

VI - Church History, I

Deciding on Christianity after a year meant another difficult choice and consideration would follow. I didn't want to follow churches that possessed novel ideas of what the Lord taught or made themselves the arbiter of the truth. One would think the Holy Spirit would not cause confusion in what truly are the doctrines of God. This in mind, I focused on what the early Christians, especially those that knew the apostles or the disciples of them, believed. What did the Church look like to them? What did they understand about verses we argue about now?

The way I decided on an apostolic church was through the first century Fathers. If I could trust God to bring the Holy Scriptures together, I could trust God to not abandon His children in the earliest centuries (considering the canon as we know it would not solidify immediately; the oral tradition had been as important given the Lord Himself taught orally). They would provide me with a lot of information. And they did!

What really enlightened me is how much more significance the early Christians placed in there being a singular church united in what they believed. Not just especially core doctrines, but even in general ones. Just as the Lord possessed only one body, there could only be one overarching church. Within it, we must all be of "one mind". I'll explore these ideas as St. Ignatius of Antioch wrote about them.

St. Ignatius resided in the first century as bishop of Antioch. He would be, along with St. Polycarp, a disciple of St. John the Apostle. His writings would be very definitive in the early church, especially in training, safeguarding, and spreading the faith.

He wrote: "Since, also, there is but one unbegotten Being, God, even the Father; and one only-begotten Son, God, the Word and man; and one Comforter, the Spirit of truth; and also one preaching, and one faith, and one baptism; and one Church which the holy apostles established from one end of the earth to the other by the blood of Christ, and by their own sweat and toil; it behoves you also, therefore, as 'a peculiar people, and a holy nation,' to perform all things with harmony in Christ." [1]

Later in this same chapter, he writes: "I have confidence of you in the Lord, that ye will be of no other mind. Wherefore I write boldly to your love, which is worthy of God, and exhort you to have but one faith, and one [kind of] preaching, and one Eucharist. For there is one flesh of the Lord Jesus Christ; and His blood which was shed for us is one; one loaf also is broken to all [the communicants], and one cup is distributed among them all: there is but one altar for the whole Church, and one bishop, with the presbytery and deacons, my fellow-servants."

One of the key areas of his writing is in the importance of harmony. In the first century, there was a lot of religious chaos. St. Paul in his letters often has to admonish and teach the very people that belonged to churches he established; he had to combat the Jewish Christians that called into question his apostleship due to his reaching to the Gentiles. They had to fight the Gnostics at this time.

Since the Lord did not provide in writing the gospels, He instead gave to them a Church acting as "pillar and ground of truth". [2] Those that continued to be disciples of the apostles, belonging to those same churches, and down the line, would be within the fold of the Church of God. What's more, they would act conciliarly, referencing what they were taught and using what writings were available to them (of the Old Testament and in the writings of the developing New Testament). We can see this at the first council in Jerusalem. [3] The church over the centuries would have seven ecumenical councils, confirming against those that argued otherwise the truths of faith. This is against the Arians and others that argued against the divinity of Jesus; against Nestorius on the Person of Christ; etc.

St. Ignatius, therefore, had much prioritisation on the hierarchy and purpose of the Church in this critical time. He would write a lot about it throughout his epistles, confirming that there is one faith, churches run by priests and overseen by bishops with deacons as helpers (being ones that watch over your souls and gives an account before God), and that "strange opinions" and errors would not have a foothold therein. [4][5][6] They wrote to each other, exhorting each other, reasoning from what they were taught, all to maintain and safeguard the teachings received from the Lord. And over them all would be Jesus as the High Priest and First Bishop. [7]