history

Last week I ran across this article, an interview with Tim Keller, in Christianity Today. This week in my blog I decided to look at the questions he was asked, pull a quote from his answers, and share some thoughts.

Q: What are the changes that you see for your ministry?

A: The question is, How do you make sure that not only the particular theological and ministry DNA of the church is such that other people can get ahold of it?

Of all the things Keller said in the interview, this is the one I have the most issue with. While I'm confident that it's not his goal to package Redeemer and ship it out to all kinds of other urban churches (although him referring to sharing the DNA makes me worry a bit), that's what always happens when you do this. Rick Warren told people not to do what he did, but the result was guys in Minnesota wearing Hawaiian shirts. St. Toms in Sheffield, England makes the same argument when you go over there, and yet there are now churches all over the place using the Lifeshapes, holding cluster meetings, and doing all that stuff.

The problem with all this is that no other urban church is in NYC and has the exact same history and cultural conditions of Redeemer. The same goes for Saddleback and St. Toms. Those are unique situations ... just like the church that's buying up everyone else's resources. Certainly there's something to learn from the process and philosophy of ministry, but trying to replicate the DNA just isn't it.

That's why I'm loving the whole Church Unique book.

The other night I watch the D5 joint-interview featuring Bill Gates and Steve Jobs (download via iTunes here). While the two are obviously very differences in their personalities and they exchanged some entertaining barbs, as they sat there on the stage together, either they are amazing actors or there is no bitterness between them. I found this to be incredibly refreshing.

As I mentioned the other day, I've been reading Alan Hirsch's The Forgotten Ways. While it has a few elements of brilliance (there is a blog on the way both here and on the Genesis blog about his "Jesus is Lord" chapter), there is also this incredible bitterness. As a friend put it, according to Hirsch, Jesus said something to the effect of, "Oh crap, what am I going to do now?" when Constantine became a Christian. Flowing out of this is the general idea that the last 1,700 years of Christianity have been a complete waste and we really need to hate our past if we're going to look towards our future (note, this is different than looking at our past with rose colored glasses).

It seems to me that it would be far more productive to celebrate the good things that flowed out of the Church while we had home court advantage. Take for example the number of people who are now with Christ because there was so much freedom to share the Gospel or, more directly impacting us, we have some amazing artistic expressions of faith in the fields of painting, sculpture, architecture, and music (talk about wonderful discussion starters on the kind of faith that would drive someone to produce such works).

At the same time, while honoring our past, we can also say that the Church now holds or is moving towards a different place in the world ... a place where we are on the fringes of society rather than in the center. Given this new place, it should force us to rethink how we do ministry. Given that we're in the transition, this means we'll have congregations of both kinds active in our midst, side by side, sharing the same Gospel together. Wouldn't it be beautiful if we, like Microsoft and Apple, could be different but not bitter?

By the way, don't worry, I'm not going to end my friendly barb that describes Microsoft as the Budweiser of the computer industry, that is, a product lacking character, distinction, and style so it can have mass appeal.

I've been doing a fair amount of reading and digesting lately. First it was Joe Myers', Organic Community, and now it's Alan Hirsch's, The Forgotten Ways. While I'm completely in love with Myers work, Hirsch has me a bit unsure right now. I think there's going to be some great stuff in the book, but it's going to require some serious filtering at points. This brings me to my blog title.

This past week something hit me. Neither emerging groups within the church nor pop-culture have their history straight when it comes to Constantine and the Council of Nicea, and I think the emerging groups, which would include people like Hirsch, are getting their history from pop-culture.

So, what's the pop-culture version? Basically it's that Constantine rigged the Council of Nicea in such a way that it allowed him to turn Christianity into a state controlled religion that would unite the Roman Empire. As a part of this, he picked out the books of the Bible while trashing other gospels accounts that didn't fit his version of Christianity. He also declared that Jesus was God, rather than just an amazing man. So, what can be determined from this is that Christianity is a sham without any legitimate foundation and is all about manipulation and control of the masses.

In response to this, Hirsch and others argue that pre-Constantine, the church had no structure or ritual, but functioned as this organic community where the Spirit ruled and life was amazing. Their goal is to push us back to that state of being Christianity because the problem with it is purely a result of Constantine coming in and establishing order, rules, regulation, and customs (one that Hirsch points to is infant baptism).

So, what's wrong with these views? Well from the emerging Christian side, they seem to forget that early Christian community flowed out of Judaism and therefore, much like Judaism did have order, structure, and customs. You see this well established in Paul's writings where he talks about elders and deacons and other who have specific gifts that are used for building up the body of Christ. In the case of infant baptism, it is discussed specifically by Irenaeus (late 2nd Century), Origen (3rd Century), and Tertullian (late 2nd Century), and implied by Polycarp (late 1st and early 2nd Century) and Justin (early 2nd Century), all of which tells us the infant baptism was happening during the lifetime of the Apostles.

In addition, very early in Church history you have bishops being established in various cities, this includes all of the men mentioned in the previous paragraphs and men like Clement who was the bishop of Rome while the Apostle John was still alive and teaching in Ephesus.

Moreover, things weren't all peachy in the early Church. Before Constantine you'd already had issues with, among others, the Montanists and Novatainists. You also have the over-realized eschatology that Paul challenges in 1 Corinthians and the Apostle John's Epistles dealing directly with a group who'd broken off from the Church and become Gnostics. Then of course you have Arianism which was the reason why Constantine called the Council of Nicea in the first place. He wanted the two major groups in Christianity to sort out a major theological difference on the person of Christ.

So, what does history say about the Council itself? First off, Constantine did pay for it because he wanted the Arians and what we'd now call the Orthodox to get their theology straight. Outside of that, pop-culture's understanding is way off.

When it comes to the books that belonged in the Bible, by the time the Council of Nicea arrive, Paul's letters had been established and passed around as a collection for 225 years and the four Gospels we have in the New Testament had been the only accounts used by Christians for 175-200 years. These well established books were the documents used as the two sides engaged in their theological debate.

As for the deity of Jesus, Larry Hurtado's work, Lord Jesus Christ, clearly demonstrates that Jesus was always considered divine by Christians. When it comes to the Council of Nicea, the debate wasn't about the deity of Jesus, but it was whether Jesus was, in gnostic terms, a demiurge, or if he was co-eternal with the Father. Interestingly enough, Constantine entered the Council on the side of the Arians who, though having the majority position at the Council, we're demonstrated, by Scripture, to be heretical. That's right, the minority ruled (thanks Athanasius).

So, why do I really care about this? Because truth is, there were some major changes that came with Constantine and the legalization of Christianity ... Christianity moved from the margins to the center of society, the culture was Christianized, there was the construction of cathedrals for worship, and appearing "Christian" became politically advantageous. As a result, there was a new understanding of what it meant to be a Christian.

In the Western world today, especially in Europe and the city centers of the US, Christianity is again on the fringe of society. We live in a world that is, spiritually, much closer to the 1st Century than any time since Nicea and there are amazing lessons to be learned from the Early Church on how to share the Gospel in this kind of culture, after all, in the first three-hundred years, the church grew from some 120 people gather in the upper room at Pentecost to somewhere in the range of twenty-million by the time of Nicea.

However, if we have a poor historical understanding, we'll be learning lessons from our glorified delusions rather than those who speak from the past to teach us today. May God grant us clarity in our quest to understand where we've been so we may better understand how to move forward today.