This is a conversational response to a post over at Ken Schenck's blog, "The war of the 2 natures". As Mr Schenck writes, "After reading about the crazy battles that resulted in what we now call orthodoxy, there seem two possible conclusions: 1) God was behind the scenes making sure the right answers won out or 2) it's all a crap shoot and orthodox Christianity is a sham." I don't think that either of those statements represents the actual situation in which we find ourselves. To make this post accessible I'll back up the conversation enough to be self-introducing ...
Knowing God may be the highest goal of human thought. And there are countless people who have sought knowledge of God in nature, in meditation, from prophets or even from the Messiah, and (in absence of these) from holy texts. But eventually we come to a problem: after we run through all the material that we can learn from those sources, we have some questions that none of our sources directly answers. We may get hints or glimpses. We may get likelihood. We may even get strong probability. But once we have gone beyond what is spelled out by trusted materials, we rarely get certainty. I'll come back to this point as I wrap up.
This isn't a new thought to the modern age; even in the apostolic age St Paul wrote that "we see through a glass, darkly." While that won't stop us trying to see, it rightly leads to humility about the precision of our speculations. It's like the recognition of significant digits in science: it's not right to claim a precision that outpaces our data. (Deeper dive on that.)
With the common claim that "the winners write the history books," is the underlying cynicism justified in the case of Christian beliefs? What do we make of the early controversies in the church?
I'd like to look at some of the ways in which the church has approached questions, going from more conclusive to less conclusive:
- Some questions were addressed by Jesus during his earthly ministry. Almost all Christians consider these to be definitive answers.
- Some questions were addressed by the apostles during their lifetimes. Since they knew Jesus in person, these are often considered definitive answers, especially when the answers were included in the canon of Scripture. Granted, some groups allow variation for how firmly various New Testament writings are accepted, with some groups having different status for the once-disputed books of the New Testament from the days when the canon of Scripture was still under review.
- Some questions are addressed directly by Scripture and there is only one view in Scripture.
- Some questions had clear and widespread support from the earliest church while the opposing view was a late-introduced novelty. There was an ancient test whether beliefs had been held "everywhere, always, and by all," with the understanding that there could be asterisks for outliers, while providing a framework to objectively identify those outliers.
- Some questions are not addressed directly by Scripture, and are instead inferred. These are answered based on a preponderance of evidence from Scripture and compatibility with known facts.
- And some controversies are not answered directly by Scriptures, and the preponderance of evidence is not clean or not conclusive.
From the earlier approaches, the church of Christ has a great body of teachings which are held solidly, without being open to the charge that it's merely a winner's privilege.
In the later categories we get into more contested territory. This tends to happens when we are asking questions that Scripture never directly addresses, for example the relationship of the human and divine within Christ. It is especially problematic when we are asking questions that Jesus never addressed, that were never considered during the apostolic age, and where the earliest church is silent. In these cases we are left with a handful of tangential verses as we try to infer where they lead, with little to no guidance from trusted sources. I'll come back to that.
Mr Schenck notes that "[t]he century between Nicaea (325) and Chalcedon (451) primarily argued over the two natures of Christ". I've mentioned before that I mark Chalcedon (451 A.D.) as the date when the "one holy catholic and apostolic church" became damaged; as a result the answers to those doctrinal questions (and new questions since) have been problematic. (Deeper dive on that.) After Chalcedon, those particular points of orthodoxy were upheld less by consensus and more by risk of excommunication. In my opinion, that is the point at which we ought to have admitted we outran our data, and come back to "seeing through a glass darkly." I would not say that every view advanced on the topic held equal validity; some views ultimately might have been considered out-of-bounds. But there is room for a collegial approach where the School of Alexandria has one view and the School of Rome holds another, on how the human and divine interact.
To go back to the point I mentioned at the outset: We have some questions that none of the holy texts directly answers. We may get hints or glimpses. We may get likelihood. We may even get strong probability. But beyond what is spelled out by trusted materials, we no longer get certainty. The issue to me is not whether the right or wrong arguments won out; it's why we define "orthodoxy" so much in terms of issues that are beyond the scope of what we were given, where there is no indication that either Christ or his apostles considered the question (as we frame it) important. The problem goes deeper than whether we have the right answers to the questions we are asking. I'm fairly sure our relentless pursuit of non-Scriptural questions means we are not pursuing the best questions.
Knowing God may be the highest goal of human thought. But are we pursuing that knowledge through how God has revealed himself, and letting his self-revelation set the curriculum for what we learn? What would happen if we tried? I believe we are called to the theology that Christ has taught, and the orthodoxy that the apostles proclaimed.
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