Monday, September 21, 2009

David, David, Whither Goest Thou?

David Bercot is a prolific writer on the subject of the early church. He was driven to the writings of the early church in his early days when he converted from the Watchtower Society to evangelicalism. The doctrinal arguments in the evangelical wing of Christianity led him to look to the earliest documents of the Christian movement, to find out what the early Church believed.
His early works led him to conclude that the early Church was strictly pacifist, non-resistant, with respect to fighting in war, and was strictly opposed to the games and to the theater, embracing strict conventions with respect to modesty in attire, and lifestyle, including the wearing of the prayer veil for women in worship,  thus having a style of life somewhat akin, in his thinking,to the contemporary conservative Mennonites.  The Anabaptist vision was the vision his first edition of Will the Real Heretics Please Stand Up, called folks to.  On the other hand he found unmistakable evidence of the centrality of Communion in worship, an Episcopal form of government, and a commitment to Apostolic Succession, along with a belief in baptismal regeneration, and adherance to the early Creeds of the Church. His second edition of Heretics called all to follow him into Anglicanism of a classical variety, Jeremy Taylor, Hooker,  Cranmer, and so forth.
As a result he and others who were under his influence, of which I was one, decided to practice our distinctive pacifistic and non-conformist Christian lives as a Society within the confines of some of the various 1928 Book of Common Prayer  Continuing Anglican Communions, thereby attaining apostolic succession of a sort, episcopal government, and liturgical worship.
This was an unstable combination, and many of the people attuned thereby to various Catholic issues that were mentioned, began to look at the claims of Roman Catholicism and of Eastern Orthodoxy, precisely because the early Church rested its understanding on a belief in the Church as a visible Institution that would preserve the Faith. The Branch Theory of Anglicanism was not early Church teaching.  Many went on to become Roman Catholics or Eastern Orthodox- my family did the latter.
David had earlier attempted to morph himself and his early associates into an ancient Church, but was shipwrecked at the prayers that were offered by Eastern Orthodox to the Virgin Mary. It was too much for him; he expostulated on a tape,  'why didn't they pray to the Holy Spirit or to Jesus?'
With many going in directions that David found untenable, he re-visited his viewpionts and edited his books anew, and came out with the book that now defines his position The Kingdom that Turned the World Upside Down.  David's thinking had turned away from the Church. He said the Apostles didn't envision that the Church would fall away from the truth and did not make provision for it.  Since in David's view all the historic Churches had erred in doctrine, he opted for Orthopraxy as the touchstone for choosing a Christian Assembly, as long as it somewhat loosely could be said to embrace the Apostles' Creed and the non- supplemented version of the 325 Creed of Nicaea.  And in his writing he began to side in many ways with groups that had been identified as schismatic or heretical down through the ages.  He opted for what he calls a commitment to the Kingdom in favor of a commitment to Church or a Church, a historical and visible Church.  He has embraced then an invisible Church doctrine with various groups appearing and disappearing expressing the spirit of the kingdom though varying quite wildly in doctrine and practice.  He for example includes Quakers, who neither baptize nor take communion.  He includes Waldensians who practice infant baptism.  He embraces Donatists and Novationists who believed that one could only sin once after baptism.  He mentions the Lollards who believed in women preachers and denied the Real Presence in the Eucharist.
Constant in David's thinking has been his commitment to total pacifism and to modesty and simplicity in style of life.  He likes the word 'radical' to describe the sort of Christianity that he believes to be normative.  On the web page he has devoted to his viewpoints, www.earlychurch.com.  He states his chief aim is to promote a personal, obedient love relationship with Jesus Christ.  That is good. We ought to love Jesus, relate to Him personally and obey Him
So, David puts forth an Ecclesiology that is distinctively protestant, an invisible Church ecclesiology, a soteriology that aligns with historical pietism of a personal love relationship to Jesus, and an ethic that is pacifistic and so has an inherent antipathy to any possibility of a Christian bearing the sword or being the one who commnds others to bear the sword, that is to say, to be a politician.

In the Apostles' Creed, there is the statement that  "I believe... in the holy catholic church".
That is a heavy thing to confess, and to do so with integrity. In the early centuries when this Creed appears, as a local or regional baptismal statement of belief, the ideas of catholic and church were full of content, and that content did not include the idea of an invisible Church.  The catholic Church of that Creed, had apostolic succession by the laying on of hands; it had a hierarchical rulership and three-fold offices of Bishop, Pastor and Deacon.  It had a robust Tradition of Prayer facing the East in Assemblies, of the usage of an altar in worship, of the sign of the cross in one's prayers.  It had liturgical baptismal formulae and prayer formulae, as is evidenced in the works of Hippolytus towards the end of the Second Century, and liturgies for ordinations and for all the various aspects of worship.  The Church was viewed to be Mystically and Adminstratively One, and had a doctrinal consensus that united the entire Church as well.  The early Church had a visible Church doctrine.  So that when David says that he embraces the idea of a catholic Church, he must break ranks with what the early Church believed about Itself.
The Early Church believed that the Visible Church would persist throughout all of history and that the gates of hell would not prevail against it. Christ, in His teachings, said as much. Thus, when one begins to state as David has that original faith had been lost and is not fully adhered to by any group, He comes very close to undercutting the veracity of the Lord who built the Church. If the Visible Church did not persist in the fullness of doctrine, then Christ's word ceases to become reliable. David says he believes in the catholic Church but he empties it of Apostolic Content and reconfigures it into an unrecognizable neologism.
This is serious for another reason.  Ecclesiology is a subset of Christology because the Church is now the Body of Christ, and in It is continued the ministry of Jesus Christ on the earth.  Therefore deviations in Ecclesiology become and lead to and are expressive of a heretical Christiology.
In the 5th Century,  there was an assortment of teachings, that said that Jesus Christ was not fully human; it came in different forms-  his humanity was like a drop of water swallowed up in the ocean of the Divine.  He was spoken of as having a Divine Will but not a human will.  He was spoken of as having a Divine Energy but not a human Energy.  Or that the humanity and the divinity were fused so that the body of Jesus was not like ours.  The heresy obtained the name of Monophysitism at a Council of the Church in 451.
David's invisible Church doctrine expresses Christological monophysitism because he denies the full humanity of the Church as the body of Christ.  He denies it in its historical dimension, its persistence through time, and he denies it in its Institutional Dimension, the apostolic succession, the authority of the Church to bind and loose through its Bishops, the authority of the Church in the Bishops to form Councils whereby decisions are made that bind the consciences of the faithful. David's invisible Church doctrine is a Christological monophysitism.
And this leads to the second big mistake in David's reactive thinking concerning the Church. His doctrine of salvation being a personal relationship to Jesus; that is what he wants to foster.  The Early Church did not teach this.  The early Church taught us that we needed the whole of Christ to be saved; we needed not only a personal relationship in communion with the Head of the Church- Jesus Christ; but we also needed to be incorporated into His Body, his very physical human Body, the Church on Earth, through baptism, and we also needed to eat His Body and Drink His Precious Blood, In Holy Communion to be saved.  Davids soteriology, his doctrine of salvation, is also monophysite because he emphasizes the Divine and the Spiritual in salvation in his personal relationship to Jesus, but neglects to mention that we incorporation into His Body to be saved as well. We are saved by the Whole Jesus-  Head and Body, not just the head.
So, my friend David, in order to cleave to his pacifism and the outer forms of separation from the world, has been forced into the embrace of an Ecclesiology and a Soteriology that are heretical- they are monophysite, and reflect negatively on who Christ is, this Christ who IS come in the Flesh.
At the www.earlychurch.com web site the webmaster states that the essential marks of the Church were separation from the world, unconditional love, and obedience to the teachings of Jesus Christ.  As David morphed away from any catholic expressions of the Church, he came to characterize the Conciliar period of the Church  from Nicaea in 325 till the 7th Council in the 9th Century as a time when the Church deviated from its mission of separation love and obedience and focused on incorrectly on right belief.  On the early church web site David does not mention right belief as an essential mark of the Kingdom.  Perhaps that is why he is no longer uncomfortable with such a range of heterodoxy in the groups he extolls. Yet Scripture is not so indifferent to doctrine, and especially the doctrine of the Incarnation.  We learn that the spirit of Antichrist is characterized essentially by unbelief- unbelief and rejection of the Incarnation.  ' We learn in I John 4:1 and following:  ¶  Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.1 ¶ 2  Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God:2
3  And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world."
It is of no small insignificance, then that the ecclesiology and soteriology that David has come to fails to be a confession of the Incarnation, but is a move away from it.  All of Christian life, worship and obedience must be an expression of the Incarnation.  To deviate from that is to allow the enemy within the gates.
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Was the early Church uniformly pacifist, and openly hostile to participation in any government activity that involved the power of the sword?  David thinks so in his reading of the Eerdemans Ante-Nicene Fathers.  I would suggest he has missed a few things.  First of all, the Ante-Nicene writings are not the totality of that which has been recorded from the early Church.  There are also Hymns from the period ; there are also stories of Saints from the period.  There are a number of hagiographic references to soldiers in the ante-Nicene era who were martyred for Christ. They did not eschew their soldiery because of their Faith, though they often gave evidence of finding the work of a soldier odious.  However, the hagiographic literature often records stories of valiant soldiers who were martyred because they refused to offer incense to the Emperor or the the pagan gods.
However, even if we do not consider the hagiography of the early Church we must consider neglected evidence from the writings of the early Church that are recorded in the Eerdemans collection.  In the Syriac documents we have the history of a First Century Kingdom whose king was converted to Christ by a miraculous healing and who made his kingdom a Christian Kingdom, and yet was not in any way instructed by the apostolic witnesses that had come to him to forsake his position of King and bearer of the sword.  This is the account of the Kingdom of Edessa, and the conversion of Agbar at the hands of Thaddeus.  There is perhaps apocryphal encrustations about the account, but it reflects a historic core, that there was a first century Kingdom that was converted to Christ.
Separation from the world did not entail forsaking participation in human government nor the necessary use of the sword as a terror to evil.   Selfless love, the mark of any truly Christian life could be practiced as the head of the State, and as a soldier as well.  The Church in this instance was established and had a different pastoral challenge than when it was persecuted by the State as in the case of the first Centuries in the Roman Empire.  But from the first century, the Church had an apostolic model that separation from the world did not necessarily entail forsaking the governance  that involved the sword.  It was for this reason that there was no protest when at the time of Constantinople there was a change in the demeanor of the State towards the Church.
The Church had an apostolic deposit that knew how to both abound and to be abased.
This is not to say that the Church promulgated a doctrine of just warfare.  The doctrine of just warfare was a corruption brought about at the time of Augustine in the West. However, as the canons of St. Basil makes note, though it may be necessary to act as a soldier in the defense of the helpless, to take a life was necessarily a sin, and required a penance by excommunication for three years.
Finally, to make a case for absolute pacifism as the New Testament teaching, in obvious contrast to the place of warfare in the Old and the governance of Israel by righteous kings in the Old , is to descend into a sort of Marcionite distinction between Old and New Covenants which the Church condemned in the Second Century as heresy.  It is a descent into Marcionite ethics.
If David seriously embraced belief in the Communion of Saints, then his reversion to anabaptism may have never occurred and he might have transitioned to one of the Ancient Churches.  David was once asked what the communion of Saints was and he said he didn't know.  The catacombs give us a clue. There are prayers offered to loved ones on the walls of the catacombs.  The early Church had a vital and mystical sense of being one with the Church in heaven.  Hebrews 12 records the apostle Paul talking about believers having come to the heavenly Jerusalem to the souls of just men made perfect, to an innumerable company of angels, and to Jesus the author and finisher of the faith.  This was Paul's experience put in to words.   The mystical communion of the ancient Church was with Jesus and with His people who are members of Him.  The early Church had a sense of that closeness. That closeness was a first fruits of the restored fellowship that all with have with one another in the Resurrection on the Last Day.  The Church is a fellowship seated in heaven; some of us while seated in heaven still have our feet on earth.
Therefore, the Communion of Saints is the pious practice of asking the departed Saints for their prayers, especially of the Virgin Mary, who is a type of the Church, and through the apostle John the mother of us all.  If David had truly embraced the Communion of Saints, he would not have been shipwrecked because some Orthodox were asking for the intercessions of the Virgin Mary.

When one studies the early Church and looks to history to figure out what the Church ought to believe, one discovers that the early Church did not have such a rationalistic approach to getting at the truth.  The early Church viewed itself as the pillar and ground of the Truth, and not history , nor some individual's reading of it, whether it be a sola Scriptura inductive Bible Student or the Pope in Rome.  The Historic, Faithful, Persistent-in-History Church, the early Church believed was the place where the Truth was preserved.  One did not go dig in history to find the Truth, one went to the Church and received Its teachings.  Consequently, David's epistemology is flawed; it is not ancient Church; it is rationalistically based in philosophy, the historiographical approach to ancient documents.  It is a flawed non-apostolic approach to the Truth.  Philosophy may have its place but unless it brings us to the Church, the pillar and ground of the Truth, then it has failed to serve us.
David knows what the Early Church taught about Holy Communion.  It took Christ's words quite literally.  But for David to know that then to put forth groups such as the Quakers who deny the Body and Blood of Christ, not discerning His Body and Blood in Communion, is a very serious mis-direction.  I am also astonished that he would put forth such groups as the Donatists and Novationists- groups that taught that one could only sin once after baptism.  Does he want to put forth that sort of standard? Is that a reform that anyone can admire?  Isn't our great and pressing need that God forgive us 70 x 7 even as we are called upon to forgive others 70 x7. Is God's calling for us to forgive more generous than his willingness to forgive us?

I found the Church. The Orthodox Church preserved the doctrine of the Apostles.  It has served up millions of martyrs for 2000 years including 45 million in the last century under the Bosheviks.  The Orthodox Russians gave a haven for the persecuted Anabaptists who fled Protestant and Catholic Western Europe.  It has a strong commitment to peace as is evidenced by the Orthodox Peace Fellowship www.incommunion.org   As a Church committed to visible unity, it does not have the luxury of schism as is used by radical Christians who divide and separate from the not-as-pure. It has to practice the parable of the wheat and the tares, and that of the net with the fishes.   Bt the high standards of holiness are lifted up, the Church continues to produce Saints, and the therapeutic regimen to make Saints has been preserved in such a way that is not found in any other Christian Body.  It is a blessing to have 'mystic sweet communion with those whose rest is won', and to have Church structures, if submitted to,  that will take one forward into the depths of Christian sanctification.  The Church didn't disappear to have to be reconstructed from the bones found in historical digs.  Christ did build His Church and the gates of Hell have not prevailed against it.




1 comment:

  1. You say...

    "In the Apostles' Creed, there is the statement that "I believe... in the holy catholic church". "

    This is one of the strawmen of rome, which the Eastern Orthodox is just an arm of. Even in your post you do not use a capitol "C", thus showing it only means "universal", not "Catholic" in today's sense.

    You say...

    ".....and denied the Real Presence in the Eucharist."

    If you are talking about the Transubstantiate (sp?) hearsay, then they had it right.

    As for Bercot, he is a fun read but definitely off base on a few things for sure!

    You read like a very knowledge person, so we pray that your eyes will be opened.

    ReplyDelete