The Ancient Faith for Today
By Joel Scandrett
Tradition is trending these days. Many churches in recent years have added liturgical elements to their worship. Many younger Christians are drawn to Christian traditions that prize ancient forms of liturgy, sacraments, and spiritual practice. And books like Tish Harrison Warren’s Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life are in demand.
What we see at the popular level reflects a deeper movement that has been taking place for several decades: the turn, or re-turn, to ancient Christianity. Many readers will know Thomas Oden’s Classic Christianity and Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, or Robert Webber’s Ancient- Future series. These works, and others like them, identify a longing in the modern church, a disenchantment with what many experience as a privatized, disembodied, and fragmented way of Christian life. Our faith is too often separated and cut off from our work, our community, our daily patterns of thought and life, and ultimately our sense of identity—who we are as human beings, our nature and our purpose as creatures made in God’s image and living in God’s world.
What is it about the faith of the ancient church that so many find compelling? What antidote does it offer to counteract the disintegrative effects of late modernity? And what alternative does it offer the church today as we seek to walk and grow in Jesus Christ?
The Way of Jesus Christ
What stands out most about the ancient church is its comprehensive, holistic understanding of the Christian faith is a unified and complete Way of being in Christ. This conviction was rooted in Jesus’ acclamation of himself as “the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (Jn 14:6) and affirmed by the apostle Paul’s constant use of the phrase “in Christ”—that through faith, repentance, and baptism, they had really and truly been incorporated by the Holy Spirit into the very life of God in Jesus Christ. And the ancient church followed this truth to its ultimate conclusion: that our union with God in Christ grounds, centers, and encompasses us in every aspect of our lives. Jesus is The Way—both the way to God the Father and our whole way of being in the world. As the eternal Word of God and Head of the church, through whom all things were made and hold together (Col 1:15-20), He is Life itself, He is Truth itself, and He is our entire Way of being and of living. So, asks Leo the Great in the fifth century:
How shall we share in the name of Christ except by being inseparably united to him who is, as he himself asserted, “the way, the truth and the life”—the way, that is, of holy living, the truth of divine doctrine, and the life of eternal happiness? (Sermon 72)
When compared with this ancient understanding of the Christian faith as an all-encompassing way of being in Christ, modern notions of Christian faith often seem partial and inadequate. We may have a “Christian worldview” but does our faith define and shape our entire lives? Our challenge today, both as individuals and as the church, is to reclaim and live into the Way of Jesus Christ, which so deeply shaped the life of the ancient church, such that our lives are rooted and centered, integrated and enfolded, in him.
The Way of His Word
Because Jesus is the incarnation of the eternal Word of God, all that God speaks to humanity is spoken through him and fulfilled in him (Jn 5:39, Lk 24:44). The ancient church saw all of Scripture, both Old and New, as a revelation both by and of the preincarnate Christ. For example, the burning bush narrative of Exodus 3 was understood as both a prefigurative revelation of Jesus Christ (God in the form of a creature) and the preincarnate Christ speaking to Moses—and through Moses to us. As such, Scripture is nothing less than “God’s Word written,” with Jesus Christ as the unifying, integral center and lens through which it is interpreted. And it is through Scripture, with eyes of faith given by the Holy Spirit, that we come to know him.
However, Scripture is not only the way to Jesus Christ, it is also the way to the Triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and all other things in relation to God. Early Christian theologians recognized that a faithful reading of Scripture revealed the intrinsically Trinitarian character of God’s being and works of creation and redemption. Irenaeus of Lyons, writing around 180 AD, states:
The church . . . has received from the apostles and their disciples this faith: in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all things that are in them; and in one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who became incarnate for our salvation; and in the Holy Spirit, who proclaimed through the prophets the dispensations of God, and the advents, and the birth from a virgin, and the passion, and the resurrection from the dead, and the ascension into heaven in the flesh of the beloved Christ Jesus, our Lord, and His [future] manifestation from heaven in the glory of the Father “to gather all things in one.” (Against Heresies)
This early statement or “rule” of faith, and others like them, became the basis for the early Christian creeds, such as the fourth-century Nicene Creed, universally recognized to this day as a definitive summary of Scripture and Christian faith.
The creeds frame not only a right understanding of Scripture, but of our entire world, which can only rightly be understood and inhabited according to the nature and purposes of its Triune Creator.
This view of Scripture, as not only the unique self-revelation of God but also the God-given matrix of meaning through which we understand all of reality, stands in contrast to many contemporary approaches. Whether “conservative” or “progressive,” modern Christians often view Scripture as an isolated assortment of claims about God, the world, and human history. By contrast, ancient Christians were spiritually immersed in the world of Scripture, encountered God in and through Scripture, and inhabited a universe defined and encompassed by Scripture. The story of Scripture was the story of the world, their identity and purpose were found in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and his life was the mold in which their lives were cast.
Are we immersed in Scripture? Are we encountering God there? Do we find in it our purpose for life in the world? One of the great gifts of the ancient church was the monastic tradition, which inherited from Jewish practice the use of daily Scripture readings, or lectionaries, as well as the memorization of large portions of Scripture. Countless generations of Christians have followed their precedent—why? Because when we seek to “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” God’s Word written, we advance in the Way of Jesus Christ.
The Way of His Worship
This Scripture-shaped, Christ-centered, Trinitarian understanding of God and the world also served as the basis for ancient Christian worship.
Writing in the mid-second century, Justin Martyr describes it for us:
On the day called Sunday, all . . . gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read . . . then, when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things. Then we all rise together and pray, and . . . when our prayer is ended, bread and wine and water are brought, and the president in like manner offers prayers and thanksgivings, . . . and the people assent, saying Amen; and there is a distribution to each, and a participation of that over which thanks have been given, and to those who are absent a portion is sent by the deacons. (First Apology)
Here we see, barely a century after Jesus’ resurrection, an established pattern of weekly Sunday worship that persists to this day: the gathered community, hearing the Old and New Testament scriptures read and preached, lifting their voices in prayer, nourished by weekly Communion, and giving thanks and praise to God.
While weekly Sunday worship may seem prosaic to us, the fact that the ancient church gathered on Sunday—Resurrection Day—reveals the foundation upon which the entire pattern of Christian worship was based: the birth, life, death, resurrection, ascension, and reign of Jesus Christ. As such, the Christian year is a continual rehearsal of the life of Jesus and the birth of his church. Annual observance of Jesus’ birth, death, and resurrection were established by the second century, as well as Pentecost and what became All Saints Day. Other holy days and seasons were added in the next few centuries, together with fasts such as Lent and Advent. By the fourth century, the entire Christian year, with minor variations, appears to have been firmly established.
Why was this weekly, seasonal, and annual cycle of Christian observance so important for the ancient church? Because, amid the corruption of pagan Greco-Roman society, in which the powers of religion and empire were arrayed against them, it continuously reinforced their life together in Christ. This Christ-centered, Christ-shaped pattern of life and worship both formed them in the way of Christ and assisted them to abide in Christ.
Today, many Christians are recognizing the need to reclaim these ancient practices for analogous reasons. As our increasingly post-Christian Western society seeks to conform us to its image, these patterns of life and worship help us to remain centered and grounded in Christ. While they should never be confused with the substance of our faith, they can be vital aids to faithfully living in the Way of Jesus Christ.
The Way of His Body
Among the many memorable lines from Robert Wilken’s masterful The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity, this one stands out: “Christianity came into the world as a community, not a casual association of individual believers.” For ancient Christians, to be Christian was to BE the church, living members of the one Body of Christ—because through faith and baptism they had really and truly been united to Christ and to one another in Christ. This conviction of life in Christ as utterly inseparable from the life of His Body can be seen in the early creeds. The Nicene Creed affirms that “we believe in” four things: the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, and “in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.” An essential, integral aspect of ancient Christian faith was the belief in the church as the singular, God-given, Christ-formed, and Spirit-filled means of grace and salvation in the world. And it was in that grace that they knew themselves to be continually united and formed as the Body of Christ on earth.
The Way of Jesus Christ is a way of life together. Yet this is arguably the greatest stumbling block for Christians today, both for their own faith and the potential faith of their unbelieving neighbors. Many of us can recount the abysmal failures of the church, both in human history and in our personal history.
However, without minimizing the real harm that some have suffered, the fact that the church errs and sins should no more surprise us than the fact that each of us errs and sins—because the church is a Body of sinful human beings. The fact that the church really is the Body of Christ is not a claim to its immaculate, sinless perfection. It is to acknowledge that we really are one in Christ, called by God and formed by the Holy Spirit, while also acknowledging that we are a diseased Body, a broken Body, and yes, at times a wicked Body. But with Christ as our living Head, we are also a Body that is being healed—forgiven and forgiving one another, growing in conformity to His image, pursuing His upward call in faith and repentance, and spurring one another on to love and good works.
Today, no greater longing is common to our society than the longing for community—real, true, loving community. And no matter our failures and imperfections, this is what God calls us to be in Christ—his redeemed people, his church. The Way of Jesus Christ is the way of his Body, the new humanity in him, redeemed by the love of God, united across barriers of ethnicity and class and culture, and called to love one another and the world for His sake.
The Way of His Life
The late missiologist Lesslie Newbigin famously asked:
How is it possible that the gospel should be credible, that people should come to believe that the power which has the last word in human affairs is represented by a man hanging on a cross? . . . The only answer, the only hermeneutic of the gospel, is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it. (The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society)
Early Christians understood the Way of Jesus Christ as a human life to imitate in word and in deed. They sought to imitate Christ through personal habits of prayer and repentance, but also through hospitality and care for those in need. Ministries of healing and care for the poor and destitute were embodied ways in which early Christian cared for one another, and by which they exemplified the Gospel in relation to their pagan neighbors. Over time, these practices became the basis for orphanages, hospitals, and other social ministries that so profoundly shaped Christendom.
Tragically, much of American Christianity has become divided in the last century between two versions of the Gospel: one in which faith in Jesus Christ leads to salvation and eternal life, the other in which following Jesus means social action on behalf of the poor and disenfranchised. For the ancient church, such a dichotomy between personal salvation and good works would have been inconceivable. It would be to separate the root of the Gospel from its fruit. “Let your light so shine before all people that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father in heaven,” says Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. Accordingly, the ancient church proclaimed the Gospel through both words of truth and works of love. If the Gospel is to flourish in our time, we will need to heal the modern divide between a faith that we affirm with our lips and a faith we embody in our lives, both individually and as the church. The Way of Jesus Christ is an embodied way that seeks to imitate him in both word and deed.
The faith of the ancient church, which is the biblical and apostolic faith, still offers us a complete way of being in Christ in which every aspect of our lives, as individuals and as the church, is rooted in him and formed according to his image. And it is an excellent way.
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