Tradition · 30

Early Church

The church from the time of the apostles through the first great councils, before the lasting splits of the 5th century and the Great Schism of 1054.

History

Roots

The church began as a Jewish movement in Jerusalem that confessed the crucified Jesus as Messiah and risen Lord. Within a generation it had become mostly Gentile, and its first recorded crisis was about that change. The meeting in Jerusalem described in Acts 15 (around AD 49) ruled that Gentile converts did not have to keep the law of Moses to belong. That decision, and the letters of Paul that argued for it, set the church loose from the synagogue and made it a movement that could spread anywhere.

It spread through the cities of the Roman Empire along trade routes, and east into Mesopotamia and beyond. By the end of the first century there were churches in Rome, Corinth, Alexandria, Antioch and across Asia Minor. They were small, mostly urban, and often suspect. Nero blamed Roman Christians for the fire of 64. Persecution after that was local and sporadic for two centuries: the Martyrdom of Polycarp (mid-second century) is the earliest detailed account of a martyr’s death outside the New Testament. Tertullian’s boast that “the blood of Christians is seed” (Apology 50) captures how the church read its own growth. One widely cited estimate puts Christians at roughly a tenth of the empire by 300 (Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity, 1996, secondary; the figure is an extrapolation, not a count).

Causes of its shape

Three pressures shaped the church’s institutions in its first three centuries.

The first was the death of the apostles. Churches needed a way to know that what they taught was what the apostles had taught. The answer was bishops in succession. 1 Clement (around 96, chapters 42–44) already argues that the apostles appointed leaders and arranged for others to succeed them. Ignatius of Antioch, writing on his way to martyrdom around 110, insists on one bishop in each city, with presbyters and deacons under him, and is the first writer known to call it “the catholic church” (To the Smyrnaeans 8). By the late second century this pattern, the basis of Episcopal Polity, was nearly universal.

The second was rival teaching. In the second century Marcion, excommunicated at Rome around 144, rejected the Old Testament and its God and kept an edited Luke and ten letters of Paul (attacked in Tertullian’s Against Marcion). Various Gnostic teachers offered secret knowledge and a spiritual Christ who only seemed to suffer. Montanus and two prophetesses in Phrygia claimed new revelation from the Paraclete (Eusebius, Church History V.16). The church answered with three tools that every later tradition inherited: a list of accepted Scriptures, a “rule of faith” summarizing apostolic teaching, and the public succession of bishops as a check against secret traditions. Irenaeus of Lyon set out all three in Against Heresies (around 180), listing the bishops of Rome from the apostles to his own day (Book III).

The third was persecution. Empire-wide persecution came under Decius (250) and, most severely, under Diocletian (from 303). The question of what to do with Christians who had lapsed under torture split churches. Cyprian of Carthage argued that there is no salvation outside the one church and that “he can no longer have God for his Father who has not the Church for his mother” (On the Unity of the Church 6). The later Donatist schism in North Africa, over clergy who had handed over Scriptures to be burned, ran for a century.

The imperial church

Everything changed in the fourth century. Galerius issued an edict of toleration in 311, and in 313 Constantine and Licinius granted Christians full freedom of worship, the so-called Edict of Milan (text in Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors 48). Constantine favored the church, built basilicas, and in 325 summoned the bishops to Nicaea to settle the dispute raised by Arius. In 380 Theodosius made Nicene Christianity the religion of the empire, and in 381 the Council of Constantinople completed the creed now called Nicene.

With imperial support came the councils, the great theologians and the fixing of the canon. Athanasius’s Festal Letter of 367 is the earliest surviving list of exactly the twenty-seven New Testament books (Letter 39); North African councils, including the Council of Carthage of 397, endorsed the same list. Monasticism spread from the Egyptian desert at the same time, partly as a protest against a church grown comfortable.

Fracture

The councils that defined the faith also divided the church. The Council of Ephesus (431) condemned Nestorius and backed Cyril of Alexandria’s insistence that Mary is Theotokos, “God-bearer.” The churches of the Persian Empire never accepted it, and the Church of the East went its own way. The Council of Chalcedon (451) defined Christ as one person “in two natures”; the churches of Egypt, Syria, Armenia and Ethiopia rejected that formula as a concession to Nestorius, and became the Oriental Orthodox family. Most historians date the end of the “undivided” early church to these two councils, though Greek East and Latin West stayed in formal communion until the Great Schism of 1054.

Influence

Almost every Christian tradition today claims the early church as its own. The Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches each claim to be its direct continuation. The Oriental Orthodox churches and the Church of the East claim the same, with the line drawn at a different council. The magisterial Reformation appealed to the early church against medieval Rome: John Calvin quoted Augustine constantly, and Martin Luther and Calvin kept the Nicene and Chalcedonian definitions. Radical reformers and later restorationist movements went further back, to the New Testament church, and treated the age of Constantine as the moment the church went wrong. The creed of 381 is still the most widely shared Christian confession.

Key ideas and contributors

Apostolic succession and the bishop. The idea that bishops continue the apostles’ ministry runs from 1 Clement through Ignatius (“let that be deemed a proper Eucharist which is administered either by the bishop, or by one to whom he has entrusted it,” To the Smyrnaeans 8) to Irenaeus and Cyprian. For these writers the bishop was a guarantor of public, checkable teaching, against the private revelations of the Gnostics.

The rule of faith and tradition. Irenaeus and Tertullian argued that heretics had no right to argue from Scripture at all, because Scripture belongs to the church that received it from the apostles (Tertullian, Prescription Against Heretics). In the fifth century Vincent of Lérins gave this its classic formula: hold “that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all” (Commonitory 2). These texts lie behind what later became Holy Tradition in the East and the Magisterium in the West.

Worship and sacraments. The Didache (late first or early second century) gives instructions for baptism, preferably in running water but by pouring if necessary, and for the Eucharist and fasting. Justin Martyr’s First Apology (around 155, chapters 61–67) describes Sunday worship: readings from “the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets,” a sermon, prayers, and bread and wine that are “not common bread and common drink” but “the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh.” Debates over Sacraments in every later tradition go back to texts like these.

The Trinity. Tertullian coined the Latin trinitas and the formula “one substance, three persons” (Against Praxeas). Origen’s On First Principles (around 220) was the first attempt at a systematic theology and taught the eternal generation of the Son, though with a subordinating tendency that both sides of the Arian controversy later drew on. The fourth-century settlement was the work of Athanasius against Arianism, and of the Cappadocians: Basil of Caesarea (On the Holy Spirit), Gregory of Nazianzus (Theological Orations) and Gregory of Nyssa, who distinguished one divine essence from three persons. Its result is the creed of Nicaea and Constantinople (texts). See God and Trinity.

Incarnation and salvation. Athanasius’s On the Incarnation argues that only God can restore humanity, so the Word became human: “He was made man that we might be made God” (chapter 54). That line is the root of the Eastern doctrine of Theosis. The later Christological councils were arguments about how to say this precisely; see Christ and Chalcedonian Christology.

Grace and the church in the West. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) shaped Western Christianity more than any other early writer. His Confessions and City of God set the terms for later thinking about sin, grace and history. Against the Donatists he argued that sacraments are valid even when the minister is unworthy. Against Pelagius he argued that fallen humans cannot turn to God without prior grace; the Council of Carthage of 418 condemned Pelagianism. Both Catholic and Protestant theology of salvation start from Augustine, and much of the Reformation was a fight over how to read him.

The councils. The idea that bishops gathered in council can settle doctrine for the whole church came out of this period, beginning with Nicaea. The council documents, including the canons on Easter, discipline and the precedence of the great sees, are the base text for Conciliarity.

Key controversies

Who is the true heir? This is the controversy behind all the others. Each tradition reads the early church as itself in seed form. Catholic writers point to Irenaeus’s statement that every church must agree with Rome “on account of its preeminent authority” (Against Heresies III.3.2) and to the Roman bishop’s role in disputes. Orthodox writers point to the councils as the church’s supreme voice and to the equal standing of the great patriarchates. Protestant writers argue that the early church was a witness to Scripture, not an authority above it, and that the Reformers recovered patristic teaching that the medieval church had lost (see Sola Scriptura).

Papal authority. The evidence cuts both ways, which is why the argument has never ended. Clement of Rome wrote to correct the church in Corinth, and Leo the Great’s letter to Chalcedon was acclaimed by the bishops (acts). But when Pope Victor tried around 190 to excommunicate the churches of Asia over the date of Easter, Irenaeus rebuked him and the Asians kept their custom (Eusebius, Church History V.24). Cyprian openly resisted Pope Stephen over rebaptism. Chalcedon’s canon 28 gave Constantinople privileges second only to Rome on the ground that it was the imperial city, and Rome refused to accept the canon. See Papal Primacy.

Orthodoxy and heresy. Walter Bauer’s Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (1934; English 1971) argued that in many regions what was later called heresy came first, and that “orthodoxy” was the form of Christianity that won, led by Rome (secondary). Bauer’s thesis has been heavily criticized on its details, but it changed how historians talk about early Christian diversity. Traditional accounts, following Irenaeus and Eusebius, hold that the apostolic teaching was always there and heresies broke away from it.

Constantine and the “fall” of the church. Was the alliance with the empire a providential gift or a corruption? Eusebius treated Constantine as God’s instrument (Church History, Book X). Anabaptist and later free-church writers argued that when the church became the empire’s religion it gave up its pacifism, its separation from the world and believer-only membership. Defenders reply that the creeds were the bishops’ work, not the emperor’s, and that the church resisted emperors repeatedly, as Athanasius did through five exiles.

Infant baptism. Both sides of the modern dispute appeal to this period. Tertullian advised delaying the baptism of small children (On Baptism 18), which suggests the practice existed and that some questioned it. By the third century Origen and Cyprian treat infant baptism as normal, and Augustine’s arguments with Pelagius assume it. Baptists read the early silence and Tertullian’s caution as evidence that the practice was a development. Paedobaptists read the same texts as evidence that it was already established. See Infant Baptism and Believer’s Baptism.

The millennium. Many second-century writers expected a literal thousand-year reign of Christ on earth: Papias, Justin (Dialogue with Trypho 80) and Irenaeus. Origen and later Augustine (City of God XX) read the millennium as the present age of the church, and that reading became dominant. Premillennialists cite the early chiliasts; amillennialists cite Augustine and the creed’s silence.

The Christological schisms. Whether the splits after Ephesus and Chalcedon were about real differences of belief or mostly about words and politics is still debated. Twentieth-century dialogues produced agreed statements between Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian churches suggesting that both sides confess the same faith in different terms; the 1990 Eastern Orthodox–Oriental Orthodox Second Agreed Statement holds that “both families have always loyally maintained the same authentic Orthodox Christological faith” (Wikipedia, Miaphysitism (secondary)). See Miaphysitism and Church of the East Christology.

What remains unresolved

The early church is the shared past of almost every Christian body, and that is exactly why it is contested. The sources are fragmentary for the first two centuries, and the surviving texts were mostly preserved by the side that won. Every tradition can find its own practice in some early text, and every tradition has to explain why other early texts do not fit. The real question is not what the early church did, which can often be shown, but how much authority what it did should carry.