The Story of Christian Theology

Twenty Centuries of Tradition and Reform

Roger E. Olson

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780830877362
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Christianity Today Book of the Year AwardECPA Gold Medallion AwardHistory is made up of stories--narratives that recount the events, movements, ideas and lives that have shaped religions and nations. Theologian Roger Olson believes that the history of Christian theology should be told as such a story, one replete with thick plots, exciting twists, interesting people and fascinating ideas.In this panoramic work of historical theology Olson vividly recounts the deeds and words of the cultists and apostolic fathers of the second century, the clash between the theological schools of Alexandria and Antioch, the epochal division between East and West, the revolutionary advent of the Reformation and much more, right on up to the dazzling, sometimes dismaying fallout that has continued to shake Christians through the twentieth century. Through it all Olson detects and traces a common thread: a concern for salvation--God's redemptive activity in forgiving and transforming sinful human beings.Evenhanded, refreshingly readable, impressive in its breadth and depth, The Story of Christian Theology is poised to become a standard historical theology text.

PART I

The Opening Act

Conflicting Christian Visions in the Second Century

The story of Christian theology does not begin at the beginning. That is, Christian theology began well after Jesus Christ walked the earth with his disciples and even after the last disciple and apostle died. Theology is the church’s reflection on the salvation brought by Christ and on the gospel of that salvation proclaimed and explained by the first-century apostles.1

The last disciple of Jesus to die was John “the Beloved”—Jesus’ youngest disciple—who died in about 90, although the exact date is uncertain. Reliable tradition—left by John’s own disciples in the second century—says that he died in Ephesus and was the bishop (episkopos, “overseer”) of all the Christians and Christian churches in that region of Asia Minor (modern Turkey). John is a pivotal figure in the story of Christian theology because his death marked an important turning point. So far was we know, no recognized or widely acknowledged apostle survived John. With his death Christianity entered into a new era for which it was not entirely prepared. No longer would it be possible to settle doctrinal or other disputes by turning to an apostle.

The apostles were men and women of early Christianity with tremendous prestige and authority. They were eyewitnesses of Jesus or at least persons closely connected with his ministry or the ministries of his disciples.2 While they were alive, there was no need for theology in the same sense as afterward. Theology was born as the heirs of the apostles began to reflect on Jesus’ and the apostles’ teachings to explain it in new contexts and situations and to settle controversies about Christian belief and conduct.

Of course the apostles left behind writings. John, for example, left a Gospel of Jesus Christ, some letters and the vision he received while in exile on the island of Patmos.3 These apostolic writings were not bound together between leather covers with “Holy Bible” stamped on the front, however, and in 100 the idea of a “New Testament” as a canon of Christian Scriptures was yet undeveloped. That is not to say that no Christians thought of the apostles’ writings as Scripture. Most Christians around that time probably did consider authentic writings of apostles very special in some sense, and occasionally second-century Christian church fathers did quote them as Scripture. The problem was that no single church or even region of Christianity—such as Rome or Ephesus or Egypt—had a complete collection of the apostolic writings, and there was widespread disagreement about which books and letters were genuinely written by apostles.

Eventually the need for a written record and interpretation of the teachings of Jesus and the apostles became so pressing that individual churches, groups of churches and eventually all Christian leaders collected, limited and defined the writings of apostles and people closely connected with them. Thus the Christian Bible, or canon of Scripture, evolved slowly and painfully with much controversy. During the second century, however, that process was only beginning.

The first Christian theologians were bishops and other ministers and leaders of Christian congregations in the Roman Empire. They have come to be known as the apostolic fathers because they are assumed to have been men who knew one or more of the apostles but who were not apostles themselves. Their part of the story of Christian theology will be told in this section. The section will end with a discussion of Irenaeus, the late-second-century bishop who was perhaps the first Christian to attempt to set forth a complete account of Christian theology. Some have called him the first Christian systematic theologian. Between discussions of the apostolic fathers and Irenaeus will appear treatment of a group of Christian thinkers of the second century generally lumped together as the apologists. They were men who attempted to defend Christianity in its infancy against misunderstanding and persecution and in the process often integrated it with a Greek philosophical perspective.

Theology itself—as the search for orthodoxy (theological correctness)—began with the challenges posed to Christian teachings by cultists who presented themselves within the church and to the pagan world as truer or higher Christians than the leading heirs of the apostles. These challenges to the apostolic message and to the authority of the apostles’ appointed successors were so successful in creating chaos and confusion that the rise of formal theological reflection to answer them became necessary. The bishops—who in second-century Christianity simply were overseers of a group of churches in a city or territory—responded to critics and cultists by remembering what the apostles had taught, gathering, preserving and interpreting their written legacies and writing letters and booklets to be circulated among churches. In that process Christian theology was born. With the apostolic fathers theology remained in its infancy and only later began to grow toward maturity with Irenaeus and church fathers after the second century.

CHAPTER 1

Critics & Cultists Cause Confusion

The main troublers of apostolic Christianity in the second century were the Gnostics, Montanus and the Montanists, and the anti-Christian orator Celsus. Others challenged the stream of teaching and practice flowing from the apostles through their appointed bishops, but in the bishops’ eyes these were the primary opponents to be answered and overcome.

Gnosticism is a generic label given to a wide variety of Christian teachers and schools that existed on the fringes of the early church and became a major problem for Christian leaders in the second century. It comes from the Greek word gnosis, which means “knowledge” or “wisdom.”

Gnosticism

One second-century tradition tells of the disciple John’s encounter with a leading Gnostic teacher in Ephesus around 90. Cerinthus may have been one of the earliest Gnostic teachers and troublers of Christianity in the late first century. According to the tradition, John was going into the public bath in Ephesus with some of his disciples when he perceived Cerinthus there. He rushed out of the bathhouse without bathing, exclaiming, “Let us fly, lest even the bathhouse fall down because Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is within.”1

John’s antipathy to the Gnostic teacher Cerinthus was continued by later Christian leaders into the second and third centuries. Why? Who were the Gnostics and why were they considered the main “enemies of the truth” by John and the apostles’ successors in the early church? I will give a brief description of secondcentury Gnosticism and some of its modern heirs and then return to a more detailed discussion of Gnosticism’s teachings at the end of this chapter.

The Gnostics did not have a unified organization, and they disagreed among themselves over many matters, but they all believed that they possessed a special, higher spiritual knowledge or wisdom than that possessed and taught by the bishops and other church leaders of the second century. In a nutshell, they believed that matter, including the body, is an inherently limiting prison or even evil drag on the good soul or spirit of the human person and that the spirit is essentially divine—a “spark of God” dwelling in the tomb of the body. For all of the Gnostics, salvation meant achieving a special kind of knowledge not generally known or even available to ordinary Christians. That gnosis, or knowledge, involved awareness of the true heavenly origin of the spirit within, its essential divine nature as an offshoot of God’s own being, and Christ as an immaterial, spiritual messenger sent down from the unknown and unknowable God to rescue and bring home the stray sparks of his own being that had become trapped in material bodies. They all agreed that Christ did not actually become incarnate as Jesus but only appeared to be human.

This is only a thumbnail sketch of second-century Gnosticism. It will be filled in with more details later. For the moment, suffice it to say that this esoteric form of Christianity presented itself to early Christians as a special message for elite persons and as the truer and higher but hidden gospel handed down orally from Jesus by an inner group of his disciples. Christians certainly could find faint echoes and hints of the Gnostic message in what they heard about the apostolic teachings from their bishops and pastors and in the apostolic epistles that circulated among them. But the Gnostic gospel went far beyond the apostles’ teaching about war between “flesh” and “spirit.”

Many second-century Christians were attracted to this as a special form of Christian truth—higher and better and more spiritual than that taught by the bishops to the unwashed and uneducated masses. Gnosticism appealed to and fostered spiritual elitism, secrecy and division within the budding young Christian church.

In the twentieth century numerous individuals and groups proclaiming themselves “New Age Christians” resurrected the second-century Gnostic message. In fact, echoes of Gnosticism have remained within Christian churches over the centuries, but were muted by official suppression by the Christian emperors and state churches. With modern pluralism and tolerance of dissenting views, as well as separation of church and state, gnosticism has once again reared its head to challenge the apostolic gospel of salvation. Seldom does it identify itself as “gnosticism.” Often it is presented by self-styled esoteric Christians as a purer form of Christianity for genuinely spiritual people who cannot abide the smothering dogma and institutionalism of officially orthodox churches.

As the so-called New Age movement gained momentum in Britain and the United States throughout the 1970s and 1980s, two persons appeared within it to merge New Age thinking with gnostic Christianity: George Trevelyan and Elizabeth Clare Prophet.

Sir George Trevelyan, often known as “the father of the British New Age movement,” wrote popular books such as A Vision of the Aquarian Age: An Emerging Spiritual World View to promote a revival and renewal of gnosticism. He wrote,

A remarkable change is taking place in the intellectual climate of our time. The holistic world view is penetrating our consciousness and superseding the rational materialism which is surely proving inadequate to explain our fantastic universe. Really we are recovering what was called the Ageless Wisdom of the Ancient Mysteries, which knew that the Universe is Mind and not mechanism, that the Earth is a sentient creature and not just dead mineral, that the human being is in essence spiritual, a droplet of Divinity housed in the temple of the body. This vision, once apprehended, lifts the basic fear of death in our death-ridden culture. The body may be destroyed, but the soul/spirit in each of us is deathless and immortal.2

Like second-century Gnostics, Trevelyan did not found a denomination or church but settled for being a teacher of this higher wisdom of the divinity of the human soul.

Elizabeth Clare Prophet, known to her followers as “Guru Ma,” has founded her own distinct religious movement known as The Church Universal and Triumphant. Her message of New Age Christianity almost exactly parallels early Christian Gnosticism. She has plumbed the Gnostic writings known as the Nag Hammadi library found in the Egyptian desert in 1945 and found within them the same basic message as that allegedly revealed to her by “ascended masters” such as Jesus and Saint Germain. In Reincarnation: The Missing Link in Christianity Prophet argues that the Gnostics were the true Christians who inherited and passed on to their followers the higher and more spiritual teachings of Jesus and his apostles such as reincarnation and the identity of the soul with God.3 Prophet’s account of early Christianity is the reverse of that told by most church historians and historical theologians. For her the true heroes and martyrs of the early church were Gnostics like Cerinthus, Valentinus and Basilides, while the heretical villains were the church bishops and fathers who argued against them and eventually contributed to their suppression.4

Trevelyan and Prophet and many others who espouse various forms of esoteric Christianity—often linked somehow with the so-called New Age movement—are showing that gnosticism is alive and well in modern-day Christianity. But it also appears in less blatant manifestations. Wherever people denigrate material, physical existence in the name of “spirituality” or for the same reason elevate the human soul or spirit to the status of divinity, the heresy of gnosticism is encroaching once again on the apostolic message and infecting Christianity.

Montanism

While the second-century church leaders—the heirs and successors of the apostles—saw the greatest danger in Gnosticism, they were confronted as well by a fanatical movement among their followers that seemed to explode out of nowhere. It was known to its adherents as the New Revelation and the New Prophecy and known to its opponents as Montanism after the name of its founder and chief prophet: Montanus.

Montanus was a pagan priest in the region of Asia Minor known as Phrygia who converted to Christianity in the middle of the second-century. No library of his writings like the Gnostics’ has been found. Most of what we know about his movement and its teachings comes down to us from second-century church fathers who wrote against them and from Eusebius, who wrote a history of the Christian church in the fourth century. Montanus rejected the growing belief in special authority for bishops (as heirs of the apostles) and for apostolic writings. He considered the churches and their leaders spiritually dead and called for a “new prophecy” with all the signs and wonders of the halcyon days of the early church of Pentecost.

The problem for the bishops and leaders of the churches was not so much Montanus’s critique of spiritual deadness or calls for revival as his self-identification as God’s spokesman without equal. He referred to himself as “the Mouthpiece of the Holy Spirit” and accused the standard church leaders of chasing the Holy Spirit into a book by trying to limit divine inspiration to apostolic writings. He strenuously opposed any such limitation or restriction and seemed to emphasize the continuous power and reality of inspired utterances such as his own.

Montanus gathered a group of followers around himself at Papuza, a town in Phrygia, and built a commune there. Two women named Prisca and Maximilla joined him, and the trio proceeded to prophesy the soon return of Christ to their commune and condemn the bishops and other leaders of the major metropolitan sees (areas with bishops over them) as dead, corrupt and even apostate. Montanus and the two women prophets fell into trances and spiritual frenzies, speaking in the first-person voice as if God the Holy Spirit were speaking directly through them. In one instance the Spirit supposedly spoke through Montanus about himself: “Behold the man [Montanus] is like a lyre, and I strike the strings like a plectrum. The man sleeps and I wake. Behold! It is the Lord who moves the heart of [the] man.” In speeches Montanus—or the Spirit in him—said to his followers, “I am the Lord God, born among men. I am neither an angel nor a priest. I am God the Father, come to you.”5

For a few decades the church ...