If you ask the people I roll with when the Church went wrong, you usually get one of three answers:
- 15 years ago when the Church caved to popular culture,
- 90 years ago when the Church caved to modernity and liberalism,
- 1,700 years ago when the Church caved to violence and/or fuzzy math (1+1+1=1).
I got a new answer this week in a little book--part-scholarly and part-devotional--on the Didache, a second century handbook for converts to Christianity. Tony Jones' The Teaching of the 12 is an extended conversation about the Didache with an oddball group of Christians in Missouri who call themselves the Cymbrogi.
They're fond of the Didache because it's long on a simple ethic of love thy neighbor, and short on doctrine and hierarchy. And that was true, primitive Christianity, they say. But along came Ignatius of Antioch who, on his way to the lions in Rome, spread the idea of apostolic succession as a bulwark against Gnosticism. And so it was as early as 110 AD, when Jesus of Nazareth may yet have been a living memory for some, that the Church traded its birthright for the pottage of heretical head-hunting and bureaucracy-building.
Well now.
It seems as unfair to me to blame Ignatius for the present day Church's bloated arrogance as it is to blame everything wrong in the world on Eve eating the forbidden fruit. I mean, this was a guy who was willingly, even cheerfully eaten alive by wild animals for Jesus' sake.
You know when I think the Church lost its way? That day at the lake when Jesus called Peter, James and John. Peter, what a hypocrite. And all you have to do is attend a Church this Sunday where they use the Revised Common Lectionary to find out what jackasses the sons of Zebedee were.
The Church never fell because the Church was born in sin. Jesus says as much when he declares that he came not to call the righteous, but sinners. This big problem with the contemporary Church is not that we've strayed from our roots, but that we remain firmly planted in the cowardice and cluelessness that characterized the primitive Church.
Oh hey, you know what? I've just blogged my way into another excuse to link to Eliot's now classic takedown of all lapsarian myths!
Reproducing "Didachean Christianity" in the 21st century, no less than repristinating Protestant Orthodoxy or clinging to Tridentine Catholicism, is more fool's errand than faithfulness. It mistakes a museum for the household of God built with living stones.
So by all means let us listen for God's will in the company of the saints. But they're dead and gone. They can only answer our questions obliquely. It is up to us to live faithfully in the present, and no ancient Christian, no matter how righteous, can do that for us.
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