04. Chapter 3: The Church Grows Inwardly, 33-325

CHAPTER 3 The Church Grows Inwardly, 33-325 1. What Is Meant by the Church’s Inward Growth From the above dates you will see that the things to be discussed in this chapter happened in the same period of time as the things treated in the second chapter. The inward growth of the Church has to do with its doctrine, or be­liefs, and its organization. This is vitally important, for it concerns the truth of God and the system of government within the Church.

Gifted men spent their lives searching out the truths in the

Scriptures and defending these truths against the false teachings of the day. In doing this they per­formed a great service for God and His Church. Certainly we want to know something about these men and about the doctrines, or beliefs, which they championed. We also want to see how the Church de­veloped a system of organization and government.

2. Is Doctrine Important?

Many people today do not like doctrine. They say differences of opinion about doctrine have caused much debate and controversy. They say that the many divisions in the Church have been caused by de­bates about doctrine. Doctrine is not so important after all. What is important is a good Christian life. So runs their argument. The effect of this kind of talk has been very bad. In many churches ministers teach the peo­ple and the children very little doctrine. The result is great ig­norance of Christian truth.

Whenever someone says that doctrine, or a system of truth, is not important, you must be on your guard. The chances are that this person does not mean what he says. It may be that it is not doctrine that he dislikes, but sound Chris­tian doctrine. The theory that doc­trine is not important is not only shallow and foolish, it is also crafty. It is one of the devil’s best tricks. The history of the controversies about doctrine is a very important part of the history of the Church. When we discuss these things we shall want to be very attentive.

3. The Apostolic Fathers Search for Truth

After the time of the apostles the foremost leaders in the Church were the Apostolic Fathers. They were called Apostolic Fathers be­cause they are said to have been taught personally by the apostles. They lived in the first half of the second century. We know the names of five of them. They were Clement and Hermas of Rome; Ignatius of Antioch; Polycarp of Smyrna; and Barnabas, probably of Alexandria. There were two others whose names we do not know.

IGNATIUS OF ANTIOCH
Schoenfeld Collection from Three Lions

You will remember that there was much in the teaching of Christ which for a long time the disciples did not understand. From the writ­ings of the Apostolic Fathers we can tell that, more than a hundred years after Christ, they had not as yet penetrated very deeply into the truth revealed in the Bible. Their conception of Christianity was very simple. They thought of Christ chiefly as the revealer of the knowledge of the one true God, and the proclaimer of a law of high and strict morality.

JUSTIN MARTYR
SchoenfeldCollection from Three Lions But it is important to note that the Apostolic Fathers wanted to know the truth about Christ. They thought and wrote about Him.

4. The Apologists Study and De­fend the Truth The heathen attacked and perse­cuted the Christians. They told many false stories about the Chris­tians, accused them of many ter­rible crimes, and misrepresented the teachings of Christianity. In response some Christians wrote books. Because in these books these writers defended Christian­ity against the attacks of the heathen they are called Apologists. An apologist is one who defends what he believes to be the truth. In order to explain Christianity to the educated and cultured heathen and in order to defend it against attacks, they were compelled to make a deeper study of the Bible. In that way the Church made prog­ress in the understanding of Christian truth. The foremost of these Apologists was Justin. He was born in the ancient town of Shechem in the province of Samaria. There at She­chem was the well of the patriarch Jacob, where Jesus had talked to the Samaritan woman. Justin’s father and mother were both heathen. Justin was an educated man. He studied philosophy and even after he had become a Chris­tian he continued to wear the mantle of a philosopher. While living in Ephesus he was converted by the study of the Old Testament prophets. "Straightway," he wrote in one of his books, "a flame was kindled in my soul, and a love of the prophets and of those men who are friends of Christ. Theirs is the oldest and truest explanation of the beginning and end of things and of those matters which the philosopher ought to know, because they were filled with the Holy Spirit. They glorified the Creator, the God and Father of all things, and proclaimed His Son, the Christ. I found this philosophy alone to be safe and profitable."

About the year 153, while in Rome, Justin wrote his famous Apology. In that same city, per­haps in the year 165, he was beheaded for his faith. For that rea­son he is called Justin Martyr.

Celsus was not one of the Apolo­gists. He was a heathen who was well acquainted with the teachings of Christianity, but he never be­came a Christian. On the contrary, in the year 177 he wrote a book, A True Discourse, against Chris­tianity. Celsus was a man with a very keen mind. He brought all his learning and wit to bear, and used many of the arguments still used by unbelievers today. His was the ablest criticism of Christianity produced by heathenism. It was not until seventy years later that Celsus was answered. But when at last the answer did come, it was overwhelming and crushing. This brilliant apology of Christianity was written by Origen in his book, Against Celsus. You will presently hear more about the Apologist Origen.

5. New and False Ideas Arise In the last half of the second century two heresies (departures from the truth) became a serious menace. They were Gnosticism and Montanism. Gnosticism went so far as to maintain that Christ nev­er dwelt on this earth in human form. Montanism taught that Christ’s promise of the Comforter had not been fulfilled in the upper room on Pentecost, but that the coming of the Holy Spirit was now at hand and that the end of the world was near. Both of these doc­trines were gaining a foothold in the Church. These ideas were entirely contrary to Christian truth. If these heretical ideas had gained the upper hand in the Church, Christianity would certainly have been destroyed. So the last half of the second century was a time of tremendous crisis for the Church. In this time the Church was en­gaged in a life and death struggle.

How keenly the Church felt the deadly nature of these heresies you can tell from the following incident. One of the leading Gnostics was a certain Marcion. He lived in Constantinople, where he was engaged in the shipping busi­ness. After he made his fortune in that business he moved to Rome. He became a big man in the church in Rome. He gave many thousands of dollars to charity, but he also made strong propaganda for his Gnostic ideas, and gained many followers among the members of the church in Rome. Polycarp, bishop of the church in Smyrna, at one time made a visit to Rome. ^­Marcion and Polycarp had known each other very well back East. When Polycarp happened to come across Marcion on the street, he was going to pass on without speaking. Marcion stopped him and said, "Don’t you know me any more, Polycarp?" "Yes," answered Polycarp, "I know who you are. You are the first-born of Satan."

6. A Creed and a Canon Emerge

Out of the Church’s struggle with the heresies of Gnosticism and Montanism came three things: a creed, a canon, and an organiza­tion. All three of these things have been of very great and lasting significance for the Church from that time on down to the present.

THE WORLD IN WHICH THE CHURCH DEVELOPED ITS DOCTRINE The word creed comes from the Latin word credo, meaning "I be­lieve." A creed is a statement of belief. The creed that came out of the Church’s struggle with Gnos­ticism and Montanism is known as the Apostles’ Creed. It is so called not because it was composed by the apostles, but because it is a sum­mary of the apostles’ teachings. No doubt you know that creed by heart. It is the oldest creed of the Church. We still use it today. Now you know its origin. You also know what a creed is. The Church adopt­ed the Apostles’ Creed in order that everybody might know what the Church believed to be true Christian doctrine, in distinction from the false and heretical doc­trines of the Gnostics and Monta­nists. The word canon has many mean­ings. As we are using it here it means "a list." The canon that came out of the above-mentioned struggle is the canon of the New Testament, that is, a list of the books that belong in the New Tes­tament. In its controversies with the Gnostics and Montanists the Church always appealed to Scrip­ture. But already at that time there were many Christian writ­ings. So it was necessary to know which of those writings possessed absolute authority as inspired writ­ings. Out of all the Christian writ­ings then in existence the Church recognized as inspired those which now make up the New Testament. THE CANONICAL BOOKS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT MatthewI Timothy MarkII Timothy LukeTitus JohnPhilemon The ActsHebrews RomansJames I CorinthiansI Peter II CorinthiansII Peter GalatiansI John EphesiansII John PhilippiansIII John ColossiansJude I ThessaloniansRevelation II Thessalonians 7. An Organization Develops The organization that came out of the struggle with the Gnostics and Montanists is the episcopal form of church government. This is a matter of tremendous impor­tance. How important it is you will learn more and more as we go on with our study of the history of the Church. But it should be noted here that the Church from this point down to the time of the Ref­ormation had the episcopal form of government; and that there are several churches today which have this form, such as the Roman Cath­olic, the Greek Orthodox, the Epis­copal, and the Methodist churches. At first the organization of the Church was very simple. The of­ficers were the elders and deacons. The elders were known as presby­ters, since presbyter is the Greek word for "elder." In the early Church the presby­ters, as we shall now call the elders, were all of the same rank. But it was natural that in each congregation one of the presbyters should take the lead. He would be president of the board of presby­ters, and he would lead in worship and do the preaching. The presby­ters were also called overseers. The Greek word for "overseer" is episcopal, from which we get our word "bishop." The title of bishop was given to the presbyter who in course of time became leader of the board of presbyters. So the other presbyters gradually became sub­ordinate to the presbyter who was their overseer, or bishop, and the bishop came to rule the church alone. The Greek word for a man who rules alone is "monarch." For that reason these bishops, who came to have all the authority in a church, were called monarchical bishops.

Churches were first established in the cities. From the cities Chris­tianity spread among the heathen, or pagans, in the country. The con­verts from the country would at­tend church in the city. The city with its surrounding country dis­trict was called a diocese. Then the man who at first was bishop only of the city church became bishop of the diocese, and was called a diocesan bishop.

You may wonder why all these terms (presbyter, bishop, mon­archical bishop, diocese, diocesan bishop, and episcopal) are taken from the Greek language. It is be­ cause Christianity first spread in the eastern part of the Roman Em­pire, and there Greek was the lan­guage generally used.

Just exactly when the Church came to have bishops we do not know. The development of the episcopal form of church organi­zation or government came about gradually. It was a growth. It came about in some cities sooner than in others. Churches in certain cities had monarchical bishops be­fore the church in Rome had such a bishop. Around the year 110 the church in Antioch, from which city Barnabas and Paul had set out on their first missionary journey, had a bishop by the name of Ignatius, and Smyrna had Polycarp as its bishop. Both of these men are said to have been personal disciples of the apostles, and both of them are reckoned among the Apostolic Fa­thers. The first bishop of Rome seems to have been a man by the name of Anicetus. He was bishop of Rome from 154 to 165. By the middle of the second century prac­tically all churches had monar­chical bishops. The bishops were supposed to be the successors of the apostles. That idea helped immensely to clothe the bishops with great au­thority. Ignatius considered the bishop to be the great bond of church unity and the great defense against heresy. To the church in Philadelphia he wrote, "Do ye all follow your bishop as Jesus Christ followed the Father. Do nothing without the bishop." For a long time the churches in the various cities were only very loosely connected with each other. By the year 200 they had become welded into one compact whole. The struggle of the churches with the Gnostic and Montanist heretics had done much to bring this about. In the same way that a number of nations may unite against a common enemy, the churches had united against the heretics. All the churches now had in common the Apostles’ Creed, the canon of the New Testament as authoritative Scripture, and the episcopal form of church government. The here­tics were, of course, outside the Church. They had formed little churches of their own. But the big church was henceforth known as the Catholic (or Universal) Church, and also as the Old Cath­olic Church. Later we shall hear of the Roman Catholic Church. The man who better than anyone else expressed the ideas about the Church which had come to prevail around this time was Cyprian. He was born in Carthage in North Africa around the year 200, and lived in that city all his life. A rich and well educated man, he became famous as a teacher of rhetoric, or speech. In 246 he was converted. Two years later he be­came bishop, and in 258 he was beheaded as a Christian martyr. He wrote, "There is one God, and Christ is one; and there is one Church and one Chair." (By one chair he meant "one center of au­thority.") He continued: "He who is not in the Church of Christ is not a Christian. He can no longer have God for his Father who has not the Church for his mother. There is no salvation out of the Church. The Church is based on the unity of the bishops. The bishop is in the Church, and the Church is in the bishop. If anyone is not with the bishop, he is not in the Church."

8. The Church Fathers Clarify and Publish the Truth The struggle of the Church against Gnosticism and Montanism may be compared with our War for Independence. The controversies inside the Church about doctrine may be compared with our Civil War. The first great doctrinal con­troversy in the Church was about the person of Christ.

We know that Christ is the eter­nal Son of God, the second person in the Trinity, himself God. But at first this was not so clear to the Church. It took the leaders in the Church a great deal of hard study, thought, and discussion to come to a right understanding of the per­son of Christ. That we have the right view today we owe to the long and intense labors of the great Church Fathers. Outstanding among these Church Fathers were Irenaeus and Tertullian in the western, and Clement and Origen in the eastern part of the Roman Empire.

Irenaeus was born sometime between 115 and 142 somewhere in Asia Minor. He was reared in Smyrna. There he saw Polycarp and heard him preach. From Smyrna he moved to Lyons in Gaul, now France, in the church of which city he became bishop. In the year 200 he suffered a mar­tyr’s death. Irenaeus gave much thought to the Scriptural teaching about Christ. The beginnings of a sound doctrine about Christ are to be found in his book Against Heresies

Tertullian was born sometime between the year 150 and 155 in North Africa in the city of Car­thage. This was the city where Cyp­rian lived. Tertullian studied law and practised in Rome. After his conversion he returned to Car­thage, and became a presbyter in the church of his native city. He was a great student of philosophy and history, and had an excellent legal mind. In his understanding of Christ he did not advance much beyond Justin and Irenaeus, but he was very gifted in the use of lan­guage and so was able to state the true doctrine about Christ more clearly and precisely than anyone before him had done. He died be­tween the years 222 and 225.

Clement of Alexandria (not to be confused with the Apostolic Fa­ther, Clement of Rome, who lived a hundred years earlier) was a very able teacher in the theological school in Alexandria. Clement was born in Alexandria between the years 182 and 185, and he died in the year 251 as the result of the tortures he was made to suffer be­cause he was a Christian.

Origen, a pupil of Clement, be­came far more famous than his teacher. He was by far the great­est scholar the Church had pro­duced. A deep and original thinker, he wrote many large and tremen­dously learned books. Both these men, Clement and his pupil Origen, did much through their writings to lead the Church to a better understanding of the person of Christ.

9. The Nicene Creed Proclaims the Deity of Christ The great question which occu­pied the mind of the Church for some three hundred years was whether Christ, the Son, was as truly and fully God as the Father. The two champions in the great struggle about this question were Arius and Athanasius. Both these men were presbyters in the church in Alexandria. At the time when the fierce con­troversy was fast coming to a cli­max Athanasius was still a young man, but Arius was already far ad­vanced in years. Arius was tall and thin; he dressed very plainly. His expression was melancholy and austere, but he always spoke gently. He was a pious man of blameless life and an able preacher. The heathen believe in many gods. Arius thought that to be­lieve that the Son is God as well as that the Father is God would mean that there are two Gods, and that therefore the Christians would be falling back into heathenism. So he taught that Christ, although He is somewhat like God, is after all not fully God. According to Arius, Christ is the first and highest of all created beings. He does not exist from eternity, and is not of the same substance or essence with the Father. On the other hand Atha­nasius taught that Christ is very God.

It should not be thought that this controversy concerning the person of Christ was a debate about an unimportant matter. A question of vital and lasting im­portance was at stake. What was at stake was nothing less than man’s salvation. The two big things about Christ are His work and His person, and these two are inseparably connected. Christ was not a general, a statesman, an artist, a scientist, an engineer, or a big businessman. His work was defined by the angel when he an­nounced: "Thou shalt call his name Jesus, for he shall save his people from their sins," (Matthew 1:21). The value of Christ’s saving work depends entirely upon what kind of person He is. Man’s condition is so utterly hopeless that he cannot save himself. Only God can save him. If Christ is not God, He can­not be our Savior. It was Athana­sius who felt this very deeply. He said, "Jesus whom I know as my Redeemer, cannot be less than God." The Arian controversy raged for a long time and with great violence and bitterness. At last the emperor Constantine called a general council to settle the dispute. This council met in the year 325 in Nicaea, a small town in Asia Minor on the shores of the Bosporus some twenty miles from Constantinople. More than three hundred bishops were present. They met in a great hall in the emperor’s palace in a setting of pomp and splendor. Among the bishops there were those who bore in their bodies the marks of the tortures they had undergone for the sake of their faith during the severe persecu­tions. The emperor sat at the head of the hall.

THE COUNCIL OF NICAEA
Religious News Service The outcome of the proceedings of the Council of Nicaea was that the views of Arius were condemned as heresy. A statement of the true doctrine of the person of Christ was adopted as the faith of the Church. That statement is known as the Nicene Creed. The Nicene Creed is the first written creed of the Church. In this creed the Church confesses that Christ is very God of very God: begotten, not created; co-substantial with the Father. (Co-substantial means that the Son is of the same substance or essence or being as the Father.)

Thus the Church confessed its belief in the most fundamental article of the Christian faith: the deity of Christ. Ever since Nicaea this has been the faith of all Chris­tians. It is the faith today of the Greek Orthodox and the Roman Catholic Church and of the churches of the Reformation. The Council of Nicaea, because it gave utterance to the most fun­damental article of the Christian faith, is the most important coun­cil in the history of the Church.