In college, during one of our occasional conversations about religion, a Roman Catholic friend of mine asserted she and I basically believed the same things. I arrogantly and ignorantly dismissed her wholesale declaring we were part of two very different faiths. Hers was a religion weighed down by all kinds of unnecessary manmade baggage; mine was a pure untainted relationship with Jesus.
A year or so later one of my professors introduced me to some ancient church documents. Among them were selections from the Apostolic Fathers and the Didache. I remember judging their validity and usefulness by whether or not I agreed with them. For fear of what they might say I similarly condemned, without having read for myself, the writings of St. Justin Martyr, St. Augustine, and others.
Among other things, these scenes of my life demonstrate mine was a faith divorced from church history. Well, at least the history between AD 70 and the 1950s. And at the time I was proud of this. I was proud that my faith was unencumbered by nonessential religiosity and structure. I imagined this left my faith nimble and easily adaptable to the current cultural climate, which in turn better equipped me to share the simple truth of the gospel with those who did not yet know Jesus.
Years later, in an attempt to better understand worship I attended the Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom. I was to my chagrin profoundly impressed by the worship, including much of what I would have formerly classified as periphery and potentially harmful. After the service one of the parishioners loaned me the book Becoming Orthodox by Father Peter E. Gillquist, a priest who had converted from Evangelicalism to Orthodoxy. Of his own spiritual journey he writes,
“For years we had tended to view the Church in its trek through history as a sort of ranch-style structure, twenty centuries long, the foundations being re-laid in each century to reflect the culture at hand. Now, it seems, we were starting to look at the Church as a vertical structure twenty centuries high, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ as the cornerstone.
Instead of having to build new foundations in each generation or each century, we were struggling to see if it were possible to stay with the original apostolic foundation, with that faith once for all delivered to the saints and, in turn, to build a new floor on it for our time, to house the people of our day. We grew less and less comfortable asking, "Are the Christians in the second and third century in our church?" The issue was more the reverse: Are we in theirs?”
After reading this I felt convicted. How could I judge whether or not the Christians in the early church were following the Lord in the best way possible? How could I assume my twenty-something year old wisdom was greater than the accumulated wisdom and experience of the total Church throughout the ages? I was humbled. As an aspiring pastor, I had thought my job was to fix the mess created by all those people long ago, but now I began to think maybe my responsibility was to humbly listen to them as my teachers. I realized in pride I had developed ideas and conclusions about the church that led me unintentionally to forsake the fullness of the “fountain of living waters.” The sad truth was I had joined the ranks of those who had “hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water” (Jeremiah 2:13).
I am now fully convinced of the necessity of and committed to making sure my theology and faith expression is in continuity with the faith handed down once for all by the apostles and their successors. I am eager to sit at their feet and submit to their instruction. I have finally developed a deep desire to “Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it,” and find rest for my soul (Jeremiah 6:16).
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