Digging Out the Embedded Church - The Maranatha Community

CHAPTER 1 CHRISTIAN UNITY IN THE EARLY CHURCH
For nearly the first 400 years of the Church‟s history, the Church was a beleaguered minority
in the Roman Empire, often drawn together in a fellowship of suffering. This was the period
of spasmodic outbursts of persecution, at first from Judaism, but increasingly from the
government of the Roman Empire, which came to see Christians as anti-social disturbers of
society and a threat to the unity of the Empire.
This was also the period of the rise of heresies and schisms, heresies which in their beliefs
were inimical to the truth of the Gospel and schisms in which Christian groups split away
from the main body of believers, hoping to form „true‟ and „pure‟ churches.
Gnosticism, in its various forms, challenged Biblical truth by saying that matter was evil and
had been created by a secondary, lesser god. This had all sorts of implications for the truth of
the Christians‟ good news, particularly in denying the Incarnation and the Atonement of Jesus
through his death on the Cross.
Had Gnosticism won the day in the Church (and there was a claim by some of its exponents
that it revealed Christian truth), the Church would have had no message of liberation from sin
for all, no Trinity of the Godhead and no supreme good God totally in charge of his world.
The Church also had to resist a Judaising tendency, which wished to retain obedience to the
Mosaic law as a way of salvation and to place Jesus in the category of a Jewish teacher with
no claim to deity (as the Ebionites did). If the Judaisers had won the day in the Early Church,
the Christian faith would have become no more than a sect of Judaism, with no message of a
universal reconciliation of man and God through the mediation of One who was both Man
and God.
Unity was a prime concern to Christian leaders of the period just after the deaths of the
apostles and before the rise of the great Apologists of the faith. The writer of Clement of
Rome‟s Epistles to the Corinthians (c.95 AD) makes urgent appeals in his first letter for
Christians to submit to approved church leaders who are in a succession of leaders descended
from the apostles themselves.
Ignatius of Antioch (c.35-107 AD), in letters to churches in towns in Asia c.107 AD, is one
of the first Christian leaders to use the term „the Catholic Church‟. He is emphatic that the
unity of the Church can only be maintained by submitting to the rule of the local bishop. „Let
no one do anything,‟ he writes, „which pertains to the Church, apart from the bishop.‟ 13
Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons (c.177-200 AD), sees the unifying force in the church to be „the
knowledge of the truth‟. 14 By „the truth‟ he means the doctrines concerning God and Jesus,
13 This demand to submit to the local bishop is a constant call in Ignatius‟s letters. See Bettenson,
Henry, The Early Christian Fathers, Oxford University Press, 1969, p 40, letter to the Ephesians; pp
42-43, letter to the Magnesians; p 47, letter to the Philadelphians; p 49, letter to the Smyrnaeans.
14 Bettenson, Henry, The Early Christian Fathers, Oxford University Press, 1969, p 89.
Page 14