Apostasy, Part 2

Read Part 1 first if you haven’t already. This will make more sense in context.

Note: References to Socrates are not to a Greek Philosopher chronicled by Plaro, but to a 4^th century historian of the same name,

Overview

The early church struggled with self-definition. The apostles were sent out to be witnesses of Christ in all the world. This they and the results were remarkable. Success dates from the great Pentecost experience, after which Peter becomes a stalwart, powerful and mature leader. Yet there was much which needed definition – and there were no printing presses, telephones, powered vehicles, etc, etc. to assist in this process. So leadership meetings were difficult and relatively rare and communication was by personal visits, messengers or letters. Much of the New Testament is comprised of some of these letters. Keep in mind that these written letters were “occasional” in nature – that is, written as a thing in itself in response to a need, situation or problem. This is in contrast to some like, say, the Federalist Papers which were written as a body of work, building one upon another or in response to other letters on the same topic, a succession of letters made into one whole. Also, Paul’s preference was to visit with “his” congregations personally, second choice was to send a messenger or emissary, and writing a letter was the third option in order of preference. From this we might infer that if there was something really important for him to address, he might well have done so in person, thus depriving us (and potentially the rest of Christendom of his time) a written record of whatever was going on. [Note also the titillating fact that a version of the Book of Acts has been identified which is about 20% longer than our current book.]

Moral of the story thus far: To our best knowledge there was never a handbook written outlining the doctrines and practices of the church. But if there was such a thing, we certainly don’t have it. And we won’t even slow down to comment on the argument that we don’t need anything more than the Bible, that it is fully adequate. Manifestly untrue. Were it fully adequate, why are there so many creeds, edicts, papal bulls . . . . most using non-scriptural terms to define the faith? Whoops, I wasn’t going to go there,

The histories of the churches demonstrate growing, real differences. What constitutes scripture? [Have you seen a Catholic Bible?] The first known list of scriptural books which make up our New Testament dates from the early 4^th century. Many volumes did not make the cut to get into the official scriptures, although individual churches or movements used them.

I think you get the drift.

Anyway, enter Constantine. It is not our purpose to spend much time on him. But he was Emperor, which counts for a whole lot, and he converted to Christianity. He became unhappy with the wrangling and the “wrestling” in the church over doctrine and decided to do something about it. He called for a world-wide council and told them, essentially, that their behavior unacceptable and that he wanted the squabbling stopped and that no one got to go home until they had solved the doctrinal questions which beset the church.

Some Pre-Nicean Background

With the loss of the apostles and their authority, the church was really a set of congregations. They struggled within themselves and between each other. They were obviously well disposed to each other and did things like share the apostolic letters and post-apostolic letters they had through the expensive and time consuming and problematic process of hand copying. Within the void of leadership we see the emergence of the ‘Church Fathers’ – a group of educated leaders who essentially filled the leadership void because they could write and had scholarly credentials. Many of their writings exist and give us great insight into what was happening, especially in the 3^rd and 4^th centuries of the church.

The training of the day was Greek Philosophy, rhetoric and dialectic. Rhetoric being the art of philosophical debate or argumentation and dialectic being a popular and powerful example of how the rhetoricians argued. In fact, many of these folks traveled around as itinerant teachers or performers, earning a living through their knowledge and rhetoric.

Into this context we have an event which the historian Socrates credits as being impetus for
Constantine to call the Council of Nicea. He describes it this way:

One day [the Bishop of Alexandria] in a meeting of his presbyters and the rest of the clergy under him theologized in a rather showy way on the subject of the Holy Trinity; philosophizing to the effect that that in a triad is really a monad. Arias, one of the presbyters under his authority and not unskilled in dialectic give and take, took the extreme opposite position, just to show how much smarter he was, and replied bitingly to the things the Bishop had said. . . . By constructing his (Arias) syllogisms by this novel reasoning, he attracted everybody’s attention – and with a small spark lit a might blaze.

Here we see the problems with philosophy, i.e., man’s wisdom. The Bishop was being showy, using non-scriptural terms like triad and monad, and Arias taking on the challenge just to outshine the Bishop. They were not motivated to discover the truth and they started a controversy which engulfed the whole church. Constantine said this disunity was improper and led the children of God astray. Thus he called the Council of Nicea to settle the controversy once and for all.

Socrates gives us this view of some pre-council activities:

Meanwhile, not long before the general assembly was to take place, certain dialecticians were addressing the multitude and showing off in controversy. Great crowds being attracted by the pleasure of hearing them, one of the confessors, a layman with a clear head, stood up and rebuked the dialecticians and said to them that Christ and the Apostles did not give to us the dialectical art nor empty tricks, but straightforward knowledge preserved by faith and good works. When he said this, all those present were flabbergasted, and then agreed. And the dialecticians, hearing straight talk, became a good deal more sober and contained. Thus was abated the uproar which dialectic had stirred up.

Well, there were apparently some clear headed people around. Unfortunately they were not among those who were about to make the creeds.

Here is another interesting vignette. It involves Justin and someone identified only as an old man or aged Christian. Justin was a pagan and a philosopher who converted to Christianity and became one of the more influential early writers and teachers in the church. This dialogue goes a long way to illustrate the problem faced in the early church.

In a public forum Justin explains that the main business of philosophy is the search for God. To this the old man questions:

OM: What do philosophers say God is?

Justin: That which always has the same relationships to things, is always the same in and of itself and is the cause of all other things. That is God.

OM: How can such a being be known? If someone told you that there was an animal in Ludia shaped like no other animal on earth with such and such properties . . . and you haven’t seen it, you would at least need to talk to someone who had seen it. [Justin agrees.] Then how can philosophers think correctly about God or say anything true about him since they don’t have any actual knowledge about him, having at no time either seen or heard,

Justin: But my dear old man, God is not to be seen with the eyes as other living things are, but only to be grasped with the mind, as Plato says, and I believe him! According to Plato, God is seen with the mind’s eye; He being the cause of all perceptible things but himself; having no color, no shape, no dimension – none of such qualities as may be seen by the eye, but yet is that which exists beyond all existence; unutterable, indiscernible, yet alone beautiful and good, coming as a direct intuition to properly disposed spirits because of their kinship and their desire to see Him.

Compare this with Matthew 16:16-17; John 17:3.

So the Council was held. Out of came a creed which was more philosophical than scriptural. It passed on a close vote. At the end of the Council, Constantine address the group, restated that the squabbling was to stop and declared the new creed binding on all of Christendom. After all, he says, “it is incomprehensible.”

Hillary, a participant and Christian writer of the time, had this to say:

"We avoid believing that of Christ which He told us to believe, so that we might establish a treacherous unity in the false name of peace, and we rebel with new definitions of God against what we falsely call innovations, and in the name of the Scriptures we deceitfully cite things that are not in the Scriptures: changeful, prodigal, impious, changing established things, abolishing accepted doctrine, presuming irreligious things."

As on observer noted, “Either the Christians became philosophers, or the ancient philosophers were somehow Christians all along.”

Eusubius, a major Christian historian, went to great pains to hail this Council as a wonderful thing and that his employer, Constantine, had done a great thing to bring this to a wonderful conclusion. He defends the use of non-scriptural terms and reassures us that this wall just fine. After all, the council had worked hard and all was arrived at not without careful examination and according to opinions presented and agreed upon in carefully worded “logismoi”.

Logismoi? Yes, an interesting choice of wording because Paul uses this very word when he says revealed knowledge invalidates and confounds all “logismoi: -- that is all calculations of men.

This is in contrast to how the church, led by a prophet, resolves disputes. Let’s go back to one of the disputed ideas in the early church which we considered at the beginning – the problem of circumcision. The church leaders met together and counseled and prayed. Then Peter announced the decision that was given him of the spirit. Acts 15:12 says “Then all the multitude kept silence, and gave audience to Barnabas and Paul, what miracles and wonders God had wrought among the Gentiles by them.”

Conclusion

A brief one, as we are out of time. But the reformation comes along, primarily to correct abusive practices in the church. Luther had 95 theses which he thought needed to be addressed, for example. He had no intention of starting his own church, but he wanted to resolve differences. Gradually, very gradually, religious toleration increased. This paved the way for a new nation to be founded specifically as a place where the gospel could be restored and the long famine of hearing the word of the Lord could be over. (Amos 8:11-12) But it was a near thing. Bringing forth of the gospel “Cost the best blood of the 19^th century” (D&C 135) and the persecutions are not over yet – not by a long way.

But if the Latter-day Saints have been spared this groping in the philosophical half-light, searching for the ideation called God, it is because we have been lead by living prophets and apostles. It is worth remembering that Paul warned Timothy that the church would harbor those who were “ever learning, but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.”

A final note on faith and works – “If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; And ye shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free. . . . If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” (John 8:31-32, 36)

It has been pointed out to me just how derelict I have been in blogging. All I can say is that I am flattered anyone noticed. So in honor of those requests, I am posting my notes for my Friday Night Gospel Study presentation. This will be given July 1.

THE APOSTASY

We have to begin this discussion by setting some background. There are three points I want to make about what was going on in the early church. I will try to make these points in 10 minutes each, leaving 30 minutes for discussion of the central event which crystallized the apostasy and, in my mind, kind of made it official. [Although it had happened long before this, insidiously, it was the Council of Nicea which stands out in my mind as the point in history we can point to which makes it a done deal, no turning back and all the churches thereafter signed up that his creed was the official document of the apostasy. It was not the apostasy, it was just the formal signed declaration which assured they would teach ever after the doctrines of men and reason and not the doctrines of Christ and of revelation.]

It is very clear that from this point forward the churches taught the philosophies of men, mingled with scripture.

Point #1: What is happening in the early church?

The far flung world was made large by the difficulty of communication and travel. Letters took long journeys and replies were slow. Each of the apostles worked diligently to testify of Christ in all the world. [Acts1:8 But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judæa, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.] As we shall see, the apostles initially had a narrow of view of what this meant, but then we are in pre-Pentecost days here and the weight of revelation in the church was yet to come.

A big question in the church concerned the relationship of the church and the gospel to the Jewish and the gentile members. There are three populations in the church:

The Jews living in the area of Jerusalem, the Jews living in the Greek/Roman world, the Diaspora, and the gentile converts, or Greeks as they were often called.

Now here I am giving my view and I am doing it in 10 minutes so it is quick and broad brush, but I think it will help as a context.

The Jewish Christians came up through the Jewish religion. They were the chosen people of God. The worked hard at their religion, which required a great deal more of them than did the pagan religions which surrounded them. [N.B. “Pagan” here means non-Jewish and/or non Christian. Pagan religions were generally polytheistic and imbued nature with religious powers which they respected and celebrated. Pagan does not have the negative connotation that it does today in our ordinarily language, e.g., “sinner” or “reprobate.”]

So here might be the Jewish Christian view of the world. We are the chosen people, we had Moses who gave us God’s law and we live the Law of Moses. Our prophets prophesied of the Messiah to come and that He would come through Judah. The Messiah did come, we are still the same chosen people [after all, the Messiah did come to us] and we keep going as Jews, Children of Abraham and of the covenant, with the now re-instituted and expanded Gospel. Still right, still chosen, still doing the same things only bundled in faith and not the performances of the Law, etc, etc.

Peter was clearly of such a mind as this in the beginning of his ministry as well. He began to change through the revelation to take the gospel to the gentiles, beginning with Cornelius, It is interesting to me that the Lord used the metaphor of Food, non-Kosher we would say today. Peter said he had never eaten that which was unclean. But he was corrected – things thought to be unclean in the past are not so now. By understanding this vision perhaps Peter also begins to understand that not only will the gospel go to the gentiles, to all the world, but that the Law truly is done away.

There were two issues which brought this into clear focus; Circumcision and the sitting at table with gentiles. From a Jewish Christian point of view, new converts needed to be circumcised to keep the Abrahamic covenant [Genesis 17:9-11]. In fact, this did happen in some cases. But in Acts 15 we have the model for the resolution of doctrinal questions in the Church. You go to the Prophet, to the 12, and they discuss it, pray about it and receive revelation.

The gentile convert view might look something like this: This is a new dispensation of the gospel. We believe the message and are baptized as a sign of our covenant with God. We are not Jews nor do we need to be. But the Law of Moses was fulfilled in Christ, but literally and figuratively. We are the Children of Christ, not Abraham.

This set of issues plays its way throughout the New Testament letters and the Book of Acts. If you keep this in mind as you read and study, you will be impressed with just how difficult a problem it was to solve in the actual practices of the various congregations throughout the New Testament world.

Point #2: The Problem of Works

Works #1

Works of the Law of Moses. These are all of the performances, sacrifices and rituals required by the Law to teach the people to look forward to the Messiah and how to recognize him. He would be the fulfillment of the Law. A) He would personally keep all aspects of the Law, fulfill it in his own life. He did all the things required of a faithful Jew of the day. B) He was also the fulfillment of the Law in that He was the Messiah, the sacrifice, the LAMB OF GOD put upon the altar for us. So the Law was fulfilled in reality – not cast aside, but completed.

This was a sticking point in the New Testament church and much of Paul’s writing dealt with these issues. It is important to differentiate between when Paul is talking about these kinds of works vs. when he talks about Works #2 or Works#3.

Works#2

The ordinances, judgments, sacraments of the church are often referred to as works. For example, baptism is an ordinance or sacrament of the church.

The problem here is both simple and very insidious. Here is the simple way to think about these “works.” Is baptism necessary? Yes. Is baptism sufficient? No.

[Acts 19 shows us good intentions are not enough and there are right and wrong ways for baptism, but that is for another day. Joseph Smith commented that you might as well baptize a bag of sand as to baptize someone who was not full of faith and repentant.]

The problem with Works#2 will be discussed in a moment.

So we ask, In what way is baptism not sufficient?

This brings us directly to Works#3.

This version of works refers to personal righteousness, service, charity of heart and “good deeds.”

Are they necessary? Yes.

Are they sufficient? No. [1 Corinthians 13, Section 121:34-46, Matt 7:24ff]

This issue became difficult as a growing worldwide church became large, somewhat contentious over doctrine and as confused as the primitive church over practices. Institutional solutions to problems were solved through synods, conferences, rhetoric, dialectic, heated debate, etc and eventually voted on or decreed by the head of the church or of the government. Many issues and doctrines were not “settled” for 1000 years! Some, like faith vs. works, is still a contentious issue throughout Christendom and we could spend hours on this. [The main problem is those who want to craft a theology out of verses read in isolation and out of context. The New Testament is not a theological treatise and was not written that way and to wrest the scriptures in that way leads to creeds which are an abomination is the sight of God.]

The church in the middle ages became more aligned to procedure and ordinances. You can, after all, keep track of this – its empirical. The issues of faith and good works took a back seat. This lead to abuses [there are always abuses, even in our church, see 121 again. Thankfully, though, we have no “career paths” in the church and release people from leadership and make them followers again to reduce the chances of personality cults, etc.]. The REFORMERS, especially, Martin Luther, set out to bring things back into balance, not to overthrow the church. They wanted, in a sense to bring into balance Faith and Works (ordinances) and Works (personal righteousness).

Point #3: So where did we go wrong?

It is difficult to describe the processes in the early church in any detail. We just don’t know the facts. Most of what we “know” is inferred from history, context and thoughtful speculation. We do know some things:

The testimony of the Savior and the spiritual writings of the early leaders were powerful enough to echo through the centuries and endure to our time.

Devoted people spent much of their lives in service so that we could have the scriptures. This includes the Jews and the early Christians.

The Brethren appear to have more difficulties keeping the churches in line than they did in creating new churches through preaching. Splinter groups, setting up on their own terms but using the name of the church and some of its writings (and some of their own) were a confusion and a distraction.

The church cannot be run according to man’s wisdom. Paul saw that early on and warned against it. Note that he was one of the brightest and most gifted and he knew of the folly of men's wisdom (foolishness to God).

There were constant warnings of apostasy – both individual and institutional. We should not be surprised that the church did not remain.

With the loss of apostolic authority, the loss of direction became an obvious problem. No longer did people act with true authority, but took that honor unto themselves. (Heb 5:4)

Peter really captures these problems in a letter to James:

“They think they are able to interpret my own words better than I can, telling their hearers they are conveying my very thoughts to them – while such things never entered my head. If they take such liberties while I am alive, what will they do when I am gone?”

Well, he was gone and so were the 12. The now leaderless church struggled for identity, direction and guidance. Where was the Moses, the Samuel, the Peter, for their time? Priesthood leadership from ordinary people called of God by prophecy was replaced by scholars trained in classical Hellenistic philosophy, dialectic and rhetoric. The church began to be followers of Aristotle, Plato and other philosophical schools and THE LANGUAGE OF THE CHURCH BECAME THE LANGUAGE OF PHILOSOPHY and SO DID THE DOCTRINES – mingled with scripture.

All this come to a crescendo with Constantine. He became tired of the bickering and “wrestling” in the church and called the church leaders into council and told them they were not to leave until the problem was solved.

What Problem? The problem of a church nearly 300 years old did not know who or what they were worshiping.

We will now take a sneak peak at the Council of Nicea, because it is a living laboratory of how man’s wisdom is foolishness to God.

[The look at Nicea is coming in the next Blog]