There and back again: My spiritual journey these past ten years, part II

As spiritual matters became more and more important to me, I gravitated to the study of theology and especially church history. I have always enjoyed reading, and my academic studies were in History. So this was a natural direction for me. I began by studying the early church. What I read in the early church fathers and in the works of historians such as Pelikan, Kelly, Chadwick, and other mainstream church historians really rocked my world.

I began reading about the early church with prejudices that were typical of most American Evangelicals. I had this vague notion that the early church was basically Baptist in its faith. Over time, especially after Constantine, pagan elements and other false teachings began to creep into the church. Things got even worse during the Middle Ages, especially as the papacy increased its power over the church and ignorance and false doctrine became more entrenched. I was always fascinated with the beauty of medieval cathedrals and believed that true Christians did indeed exist under the medieval papacy. But I viewed the Reformation as a necessity. Ironically, the Baptist faith I was reared in was in many respects quite different from the faith of reformers such as Calvin and especially Luther. I wasn’t aware of this initially, though if these differences had been brought up I probably would have remarked that while Calvin and Luther got the ball rolling in the right direction, they simply didn’t “go far enough” in the Reformation.

At any rate, as I began to study the early church I discovered a number of things that shocked me. First, as I suspected the early church fathers were passionate defenders of basic, orthodox Christian doctrines such as the Incarnation, the Trinity, the resurrection of Christ, the veracity of the Scriptures, and Christian morality. They also were quite willing to die for their faith. And in a number of cases they did just that. In addition, some of the earliest church fathers either knew an apostle or knew someone who did. Moreover, almost all of them knew the Bible well. For many of them, Greek was even their native language.

I rapidly concluded that the early church was worth taking seriously and that we modern Christians got our ideas about what consists of basic, orthodox Christianity from them. The early church fathers thus had to be what I came to term “generally reliable” or else the foundation of Christianity itself was questionable. After all, if we got our idea about the Incarnation, the Trinity, the death and resurrection of Christ, and the canon of Scripture, about what books were considered as inspired and part of the Bible from men who were as doctrinally as trustworthy as Benny Hinn, then we had a major problem on our hands.

The problem was that the early church and its leaders overwhelmingly held to doctrines that were glaringly different from American Evangelicalism. For example, I read Ignatius of Antioch, who was said to have learned about Christ from the apostle John and was fed to the Lions for his faith in Christ. He repeatedly discussed communion as the true body and blood of Christ. Not only did Ignatius of Antioch believe in the real, substantial, bodily presence of Christ in communion, but he warned against the Gnostics, who apparently viewed communion as akin to a symbol of Christ’s body. In other words, the Gnostics, who denied the Incarnation sounded a lot like modern American Evangelicals! Reading Ignatius of Antioch was a real eye opener for me and marked my initial turn away from American Evangelicalism. I soon found out that Ignatius of Antioch was far from alone and that well before Constantine the early church believed in things about worship, baptism, communion, and other issues that were very un-Baptist.

As a result of all my studies, I went back to study the Scriptures with a whole new set of questions. I should also mention that it was just before this time that I began to question some doctrines that were common in Southern Baptist circles. I have already abandoned the idea that drinking alcohol was inherently sinful. But just before I began reading church history I began having doubts about the idea of that once one came to faith in Christ that one could not lose ones salvation, or “once saved always saved” as it was commonly called. Contemporary worship also increasingly seemed shallow and boring to me, and many of the sermons I heard increasingly sounded like pop psychology. It was reading about the early church and re-approaching the Scriptures with new information and new questions, however, that irrevocably shattered my Baptist faith specifically and my adherence to American Evangelicalism in general.

Through prayer and further studies I soon came to several conclusions that I still hold:

1) The early church fathers had to be “generally reliable.” Individually they could and did error and they were not inspired. Nonetheless, they were serious Christians and to dismiss them was the equivalent of cutting off the branch on was sitting on. The same was true of church history and Tradition in general.
2) The church had and has a lot more authority than Evangelicals gave it credit for.
3) Properly administered communion is the true body and blood of Christ, not a symbol and not a spiritual presence. Communion, or the Eucharist was a means of grace that offers the forgiveness of sins. It was “the medicine of immortality” as Ignatius of Antioch called it.
4) Infants should be baptized and baptism works the forgiveness of sins. Ordinarily, a person cannot be saved without baptism. As with communion, baptism is totally God’s work, not something we do out of obedience, an “ordinance” to please God.
5) Liturgical worship arose naturally out of Christianity’s Jewish roots. It was far from some pagan addition. Moreover, liturgical worship is more orderly, less faddish, less apt to favor one generation’s “style” over another generation, contains more Scripture and more importantly is more Christ focused than anything “contemporary worship” in any of its manifestations has come up with.

If you are familiar with these kinds of ideas and have read any stories of Evangelicals who converted to Catholicism or Orthodoxy, you’d probably say I was pretty typical. In many ways I was, though to even my own surprise I never ended up in Rome or Constantinople.