
In Part I of this series, we explored the desire for unity within the Church Universal, even though the membership is incredibly diverse in terms of culture, language, societal status, etc. From an exploration of Scripture, it was noted that the tie that binds us together is our love for one another. This love is shed abroad in our hearts at conversion by the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5). However, it was also noted that the Church must guard against false teachings in order to maintain the pure doctrine that has been handed down through the ages, beginning with the Apostles and continuing to this day. These two defining characteristics, unity and doctrinal purity, have produced tension at times in the history of the Church. Today, Christians must be able to discern the fundamentals around which we may be unified and the doctrinal boundaries which must not be crossed to maintain fellowship.
Modern Christianity is represented by four major groups: Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Protestantism, and Anglicanism. In order to defend our doctrine, we need to understand how it differs from other traditions. To that end, we will give a very brief overview of church history to show the origins of division. Along the way, points of difference will be illuminated to establish the doctrinal distinctives that characterize each of these groups. Eventually, we will trace this development through the Reformers who gave rise to our own theological tradition within the Free Will Baptist movement.
The earliest form of the church is what is referred to as Apostolic. This is the time when the Apostles were planting churches and writing the books that would become the canon of the New Testament. Canon is a word that means “list.” So, when we discuss the canon of Scripture, we are referring to the list of books that make up the New Testament. In the interest of time, further discussion on the development and reception of the biblical canon will be reserved for a future article. For now, we want to understand that the books of the New Testament each have apostolic origins. This means that they were either written by one of the apostles or by someone very close to an apostle. For instance, the Gospel of Mark was written by John Mark who, though he was not an apostle, wrote under the guidance of the apostle Peter. The Apostolic period of the church ended with the death of the last apostle, John, sometime around the end of the first century AD.
The next period after the Apostolic is called the Patristic period. The timeline for this period is from the end of the first century AD to the fifth century AD¹. This period is named after the Latin word for father, pater, and refers to the early church fathers who helped guide the nascent church into the truth that was received from the Apostles. An early example is the Bishop of Smyrna, Polycarp, who was taught directly by the Apostle John. Other church fathers include Ignatius, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Hippolytus. Much of what we know about this period was recorded by Eusebius in the fourth century AD.
It was during this time that the first ecumenical counsels were convened for the purposes of establishing correct doctrine and identifying heresies. “Ecumenical” is a word that means “including all the churches” or “worldwide.” The Council of Jerusalem is a biblical basis for such gatherings. In Acts 15:1-35, we read the account of Paul and Barnabas going up to Jerusalem to meet with the Apostles and elders of the church to settle the matter of whether Gentile converts must be circumcised according to Jewish law. The outcome, of course, was that Gentile converts were not obligated by the Jewish Law or customs.
The first of the Ecumenical Councils of the Patristic period was called by the emperor Constantine I and held at Nicaea in 325 AD. The point of doctrine to be settled involved the relationship of the Son to the Father. As the gospel spread from Jerusalem and Judea into the wider parts of the Roman Empire, it was confronted by a culture that was Hellenistic, or in other words, a culture that was heavily influenced by Greek thought and customs.
We are given a view into this type of culture in Acts 17 where Paul addresses the crowd from Mars Hill. The audience consisted of adherents to one of two philosophical groups, the Stoics and the Epicureans. These two represented the culmination of Greek thought from the previous four hundred years. The defining characteristic of the Greek philosophers was to expound and debate various worldviews. Luke describes the scene in Athens parenthetically in verse twenty-one, “For all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing.”
So, when the gospel message came to these Hellenistic regions and cities, it was met with more incredulity than in the Jewish communities. Speaking of Jesus in the preamble to John’s gospel, we are told, “He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not (John 1:10, 11).” The Jews had a cultural understanding of the relationship between God the Father and His Son, the promised Messiah. The Greeks had no such background and they posed questions to help them understand these matters more deeply. It is interesting that the Scripture says that the world did not know Jesus, but it does not say the Jews did not know him. Rather, they did not receive him, though they should have known him.
So, back to Nicaea, the question about the relationship of the Son to the Father was posed in terms of the origins of Christ. Two preachers from Alexandria, Egypt, represented the two sides. Arius taught that the Son was created by God the Father. Athanasius taught that God the Son was eternally generated from God the Father and was therefore, not a created Being. The council sided with Athanasius and denounced Arianism as heresy. The eternal generation of the Son from the Father was codified in the Nicene Creed as follows:
We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen. We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, one in Being with the Father².
Subsequent Ecumenical Councils over the next several centuries would deal with other doctrines of faith including the Trinity, the two natures of Christ – fully human and fully divine, the two wills of Christ, and denouncing the heresy of Nestorius³. We will return to the councils when we explore the origins of division among various traditions.
Towards the end of the Patristic period, Augustine of Hippo emerged as the most influential theologian since the time of the Apostles. He is credited with writing the first autobiography in history titled, Confessions⁴. Other significant works include, The City of God, On the Trinity, and numerous commentaries on the Bible. The influence of Augustine cannot be overstated. He is the most influential theologian of the church through the medieval period and his contributions still shape modern theology, especially in the Roman Catholic and Reformed traditions. It was not until Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century that anyone could be said to rival Augustine in his impact on Western thought.
There were others who contributed to church doctrine in the medieval period such as Ambrose of Milan and Anselm of Canterbury. Ambrose was a contemporary of Augustine. His legacy is associated with the relationship between the church and state. He advised Theodosius I who established Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire⁵. Anselm lived in the later medieval period. His major contribution was the articulation of the satisfaction view of the atonement. In his book cur Deus homo (Why Did God Become Man?), Anselm argued that since it was man that sinned, it required a man to pay the debt. Anselm gives this as the reason for the incarnation⁶. In addition to being a theologian, Anselm was also a philosopher. He is credited with an original expression of what is known as the “Ontological Argument” for the existence of God. A simplified expression of this argument is: 1. God is defined as that which no greater can be thought. 2. It is better to exist in reality than merely in thought. 3. Therefore, to be that which no greater can be thought, God must exist in reality⁷.
Despite the Ecumenical Councils which provided the Church with unified interpretations and articulations of Scripture dealing with the doctrines of God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the Church, fissures were developing that would lead to division between the Western and Eastern churches. Part of the division can be attributed to politics and cultural differences. Constantine had moved the capitol of the Roman Empire to his new city named after himself, Constantinople, which is modern-day Istanbul in Turkey. Theodosius was the last emperor of the unified Roman Empire. After his death, he divided the empire between his two sons, one in Rome and the other in Constantinople. These would be known as the Roman Empire in the west and the Byzantine Empire in the east. Initially, this division of the empire did not create disunity in the Church, but over the centuries, disputes within the church begged the question of which seat within the separate empires really spoke for the entire Church.
In the early Church, as the gospel spread throughout the world, bishops were appointed at the major cities. These bishops would preside over the several churches within their territories, or bishoprics. Some important bishoprics included Alexandria and Carthage in north Africa, Jerusalem and Antioch in Judea and Syria, Constantinople in Asia Minor, and of course, Rome. None of these bishops exercised authority over the others and there was no hierarchy of power within the Church as a whole. However, in the later medieval period, Rome began to exert dominance over the rest. They pointed to their tradition that Peter was the first to hold the office of Bishop of Rome and as such, Rome was primary. The basis for their argument was from Jesus’ declaration that “{T}hou are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church (Mat. 16:18b).” The interpretation that Peter is “this rock” has been challenged by subsequent theological traditions and there is no historical evidence that Peter ever served in the position of Bishop of Rome.
So, the emergence of Papal Authority in Rome was one source of tension. Another source also had to do with the question of authority. At the Council of Constantinople in 381 AD, the primary questions dealt with the Holy Spirit. That Council resolved, in agreement with the expression of the early Nicene Creed, that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father. Over the years, some versions of the Nicene Creed began to include the term filioque⁸, which is Latin for “and the Son.”
In the West, the term added clarity. For the Eastern churches, changing the wording of an established council was equivalent to changing Scripture. For these churches, the work of the councils was inspired by the Holy Spirit in the same way that Scripture was given to its human authors. Furthermore, they argued that the procession of the Holy Spirit was a distinct quality of the Father. To include the Son would be to confuse the equality of the Trinity by relegating the Holy Spirit to a lower position than the Father and the Son.
There were other important points of dispute over the centuries between the West and the East but they continued in communion until tensions boiled over in 1054 AD. At that time, the Roman Pope, Leo IX, and the Patriarch of Constantinople, Michael Cerularius, excommunicated each other. So, the churches of Eastern Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, and Russian Orthodox split from the Roman Catholic Church.
This was the first major division in the Christian Church and is called by the name of the Great Schism⁹. The history of what led to this break is vast and worthy of additional study. However, for our purposes, we want to identify the start of the divisions of the Church in a simplified version with the goal of identifying our own theological tradition in subsequent articles. In the next article in this series, we will explore the issues that led to the Protestant Reformation.
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1. One of the many differences in the various traditions is the accepted date for when the Patristic period ended. For Roman Catholics, the accepted date is with the death of John of Damascus in 749 AD. Eastern Orthodox traditions believe the patristic period is ongoing. For our purposes, the death of Augustine of Hippo in 430 AD will be utilized as marker for the end of the Patristic and the beginning of the Medieval Church period.
2. For more see Nicene Creed | Theopedia
3. Nestorius taught that Mary was the mother of Jesus but not the mother of God. This teaching called into question the two natures of Christ as both God and human. For more information on the Nestorian Heresy, see The Nestorianism Heresy and Controversy
5. For more information on the emperor Theodosius and his relationship with Ambrose, see https://historycooperative.org/Theodosius/
7. For more see Anselm of Canterbury (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
9. For more see The Great Schism of 1054 and the Split of Christianity
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