There is nothing destroyed by sanctification but that which would destroy us. [William Jenkyn. 1613–1685]

And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. [Acts 2:42-47]

Much is made of the early Acts 2 Church, as well as the early Church in general. It has been called the ideal that all Christian should strive to return to. It has been understood to be Church life at its fullest and purest. People have devoted entire books to arguing that the early Church was untainted and uncorrupted by human tradition, and have proposed that if we could just get back to that type of model, that type of simple communal living and giving, that the Holy Spirit would be well pleased and we would be at our most effective. A lot has been said and written about it, and the whole early Church mystique has taken on mythic proportions. It is legendary. It is that ethereal, untouchable and pristine. It was the pinnacle of Church life, and it’s what we need to get back to in order to enjoy the undiluted spirituality that runs rampant in this type of glorious environment.

I see the attraction in that. You have 13 apostles, alive [for a short time], on fire, and spreading the gospel which they heard first hand. It would have been a time of expectancy and excitement, with miracles, signs and wonders, and that daily awe overcoming and soaking through the church. There would have been people that saw Christ before and after his death and resurrection, and I imagine many were great storytellers. There are great and many enviable aspects of the early church and in the context that it was birthed and then grew out of would have made it more so. Because of this, and because it is viewed as the ideal Church in every way, people want to get back to it and resurrect the aforementioned model, hoping to replicate its success.

Which begs the question to those who want to get back to the early church- which one do you want to be like? Do you want to be like Corinth, a permissive, sexually promiscuous, dysfunctional church with incestuous members, out of control worship, and out of control services? How about Galatia? Do you want to model your church after one that had so quickly abandoned the gospel? Do you want to be like the church in Thessolonica, a church that lost the eschatological hope of the new heavens and new earth, a church drowning in grief? How about Ephesus, who had abandoned their first love and who were near to having their lampstand removed by Christ himself? Even John’s letters to the churches show that they all were having huge problems which could lead to their downfall.

We see from the early onset that the Church, while new and brimming with joy, was quick to go astray and become lost, misguided, full of false teachers, and chugged on with wild heresies and heterodoxy. The early church was not a pure, unadulterated innocent. It went off on the wild side from day one, and the Church has spent the time since her inception fending off false teaching and teachers and other enemies of the church. Truthfully, there was never a time when she was not under attack by foes from without and from within, even with the strong hand and firm guidance of apostolic leadership. People look at theological divisions in the church and wish for a time when it was not so, but that time doesn’t exist. Outside of the Gospels, the bulk of the New Testament is spent addressing, rebuking, clarifying, and combating false doctrine and practices.

It was not only that, but there was persecution. People were being beaten, killed, and martyred. There was persecution from both Jewish and Roman leadership, and families were being ripped apart through death and destruction. It is true that the church bloomed in blood, but how many of us would be eager to return to a time when almost the entire apostolic leadership were murdered and the threat of being rounded up and tortured for sport were a constant threat?

People tend to idealize the communal life which seems to have existed for a time in the first Jewish church, but such actions are descriptive, not prescriptive. Nowhere does the bible command or even suggest that Christians should sell all they have and pool it together for the use of all. That was the decision by one community in a certain context thousands of years ago, and we do not see the slightest indication that it ought to be binding or normative for us today. Furthermore, we don’t see that model with any of the Gentile churches. We see them giving in proportions according to the means they had, and not selling all they owned. I suppose one can attempt to make the case that the authentic early church that we ought to emulate is the Jewish one founded in 32 AD, but once Paul got some of his churches going some 20 years later that they had missed the boat, but I don’t think so. We can just as easily make the case based on the gentile model of Church that we should not pool the resources together. And if we follow the pattern of Acts 2, can we rest assured that none of us will be needy, as stated in Acts 4?  Or, will we end up like “the poor saints in Jerusalem” as found in Romans 15?

Another thing that people tend to idealize is the house-church movement, or the act of meeting in homes versus buildings. They point to the early Christians meeting in homes in Acts 2 and suggest that that was the best way to do it. I’m not against the house movement perse, but nothing in the early Church would suggest to us that we ought to eschew meeting in buildings for service.  First of all, not only did they meet in homes, but they also met in Solomons Portico. They met in the temple precincts, as the early chapters of Acts informs us, and they regularly went to synagogue services in purpose-built buildings, as well as met in temples constantly. They also occasionally rented halls, like the Hall of Tyrannus in Ephesus. Later in the first century, as the archaeological evidence makes clear, they met in caves, namely the catacombs in Rome. There is absolutely nothing in the New Testament which either suggests or requires that Christians should only meet in homes, and these sorts of arguments  ignore the differences in social setting, then and now. Christians met in homes, usually of the most prominent members because they were so large and allowed for over 100 people to gather. We’re not talking about 10 people meeting in a trailer, but rather the roman household could be quite large because it was not just a nuclear family. In addition to persons related by kinship, a household could include slaves, freed persons, hired workers, tenants, and crafts or tradespeople. In a sense they were large-all purpose buildings, and we see as early as the first century that many of the homes had in fact been converted to places of worship.

I have no doubt that being there in those early days would have been electric. How could it not? There are so many things which would have made it awe-inspiring. But at the same time  much of what we read about was descriptive, not prescriptive, and we need to look at it that way. Because the early Church existed in a time of transition, we see that in many ways it was quite unhealthy as it fought to move from infancy to maturity, as it struggled to go from instability to stability. For some people, that meant communal living and giving. For some people, that meant living in their own homes, giving to others according to their means, and meeting in all-purpose structures for services and worship. All the time, they battled dysfunction and false teaching within the churches themselves, often winding up on the losing end.  Was it the early church great? Yes, but so is and was the latter-day Church.  Was the early church some wonderful, pure Christian utopia? Not even for a minute. And yet for those who want to return to it, I think the mistake they make is thinking they can recreate this quality of church by pursuing the things they did. We tend to think, “If we just gave ourselves to the apostle’s teaching, if we ate together, if we sold our possessions and shared, then the kingdom would break in again to our churches. ” But this is moralistic at best and infantile at worst. It is not the pursuit of the archaic model that would usher these things in, but the pursuit of Christ. We need to be realistic about that ancient institution, acknowledge its many failings and shortcomings, and I think be grateful and thankful that Christ has matured and thoroughly equipped his Church to be fully-functioning and effective in our present day society.

Pope Benedict XVI has been in the news as of late, primarily for his thoughts on the possible legitimacy of prostitutes using condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS. I’m not especially interested in those article, other than to say that much of the chatter from Christian and secular newspapers has been decidedly hostile and misrepresentative of the carefully conceived and very nuanced position that the Pope has taken. But that aside, it has gotten me thinking about whether or not we can trust the Pope in this matter, or more specifically, whether the Roman Catholics can trust what their leader is saying. I think if I were a Roman Catholic, I would suspend judgement regarding anything any reigning Popes decree in my lifetime, because there is simply no reason for me to trust what they are saying.

There have been hundreds of Popes and a great deal whose private and public proclamations and teachings have openly clashed with each other. They have disagreed with each other. Fought with each other. Excommunicated each other. They have publically taught and defended heresies to the people of the day. They have been publically condemned by ecumenical councils. Pope Stephen VII, after his predecessor Pope Formosus died, exhumed his corpse, cut off three of his fingers, put him on trial where the rotting corpse was tied to a chair and found guilty of several charges. He was then thrown into the river. Some Popes had multiple wives and lovers, had many children with multiple women, and committed murder, rape, and incest. There have been up to three popes ruling at the same time, each condemning the other and teaching that the other Popes were enemies and heretics. We have had 1800 years of Popes, many of whom have engaged in the most immoral of acts and whose character might be described as nothing short of evil. I would imagine that many Popes are burning in Hell right now.

None of those revelations will surprise any knowledgeable Catholic, who would acknowledge that while they are indeed true, that their actions have neither corrupted nor tainted the truthfulness of what the Church teaches. That the miracle of the Church of Rome is that despite centuries upon centuries of hardships and corruption and wicked men at times leading the Church, that she has remained a true and spotless bride in what she teaches and confesses. How do they do that? By imposing the great anachronism known as Ex-Cathedra upon the Church. That is, they would say that the Popes only extremely rarely exercise their power of infallibility. And, of course, any time a contradiction between popes is noted, it is simply alleged that one or the other or both of the popes is not exercising his infallibility. By utilizing this novelty, they can look back thousands of years at the many horrors of the Papacy and say, for example, when Honorius I taught the heresy of Monothelitism and was subsequently condemned by all the Popes and councils for the next three hundred years, that he certainly was not speaking ex-cathedra for the church. Because he had not invoked this,  he could not have possibly corrupted the Church’s teaching and therefore the mysteries of Papal succession and its ability to safeguard truth and doctrine remains unbroken.

That in itself is worthy of further examination, but that’s still not my point. My point is this- how can we trust these Popes? In the past we have had Popes who have taught and rejected the apocrypha, who have taught and rejected the sinlessness of the virgin Mary.  Who have taught and rejected major tenants of the modern Roman Catholic Church. And like I said, they have condemned each other, excommunicated each other, and taught some very, very bad things. At the time these Popes were living and teaching though, they believed they were right, and were seeking to communicate truth to their people and their adherents. They were speaking because they wanted their listeners to understand and believe their words. When Pope Boniface VIII taught that everyone had to be subject to the Roman pontiff to be saved- he meant it, and he wanted those listening to follow it. I could pull a dozen wild and crazy teachings from Popes that any good Roman Catholic would look at and say “But those were his private teachings” or “those were his papal bulls and letters- those were not official ex-cathedra statements.”

But I don’t find that very helpful. The fact of the matter is that Roman Catholics have no way of knowing whether or not what their Pope says in the year 2010 will later be condemned as heresy. They have no way of knowing whether or not a future Pope will condemn and anathematize poor Benedict XVI. They have no way of knowing whether or not the teachings they hear from the Pope about condom use to prevent prostitutes getting AIDS will later be picked apart by future Catholics and embarrasedly dismissed as his private thoughts and not ex-cathedra.  They may distance themselves from him and he may go down in history as one of the many anti-popes. It’s happened before! Popes have called other Popes heretics- why not again? There is no certainty of continuity and there is no assurance that the man will not be a devil.  Like the Roman Catholics of centuries ago who were privy to some false  teaching without knowing it, right now any Roman Catholic has no way of knowing whether or not he is being deceived from the head of their Church any more than those Christians of old knew the were being deceived. That is a very, scary thing, and that’s why I would not throw my hat in with this potential-heretic to be.

“Righteous wrath is no less noble than love, since both coexist in God.”

I thought this was a particularily beautiful song.

Sanctus Real – “Lead Me”

I look around and see my wonderful life
Almost perfect from the outside
In picture frames I see my beautiful wife
Always smiling
But on the inside, I can hear her saying…

“Lead me with strong hands
Stand up when I can’t
Don’t leave me hungry for love
Chasing dreams, what about us?

Show me you’re willing to fight
That I’m still the love of your life
I know we call this our home
But I still feel alone”

I see their faces, look in their innocent eyes
They’re just children from the outside
I’m working hard, I tell myself they’ll be fine
They’re independent
But on the inside, I can hear them saying…

“Lead me with strong hands
Stand up when I can’t
Don’t leave me hungry for love
Chasing dreams, but what about us?

Show me you’re willing to fight
That I’m still the love of your life
I know we call this our home
But I still feel alone”

So Father, give me the strength
To be everything I’m called to be
Oh, Father, show me the way
To lead them
Won’t You lead me?

To lead them with strong hands
To stand up when they can’t
Don’t want to leave them hungry for love,
Chasing things that I could give up

I’ll show them I’m willing to fight
And give them the best of my life
So we can call this our home
Lead me, ’cause I can’t do this alone

Father, lead me, ’cause I can’t do this alone