I’ve been reading Henry Chadwick’s history of the early church (thanks, Josh!) and been struck by the relevance of that history for some of the issues facing the church today.

Consider, for example, the so-called new atheists (Dawkins, Sam Harris, et al.) who specialize in arguing against a certain construal of Christianity as though it were the sole legitimate version. I call this the “heads I win/tails you lose” argument since the whole point is to brand one’s opponent as either a raving fundamentalist or a weak-kneed temporizer. Either you accept the most implausible literalistic version of Christian belief, or you’re a wishy-washy liberal sellout and therefore not a “real” Christian.

But as Chadwick demonstrates, the early church was well aware of the difficulties of some of the more literlaisitc versions of key beliefs, as well as the moral issues raised by certain troubling Old Testament passages for the Christian view of God, and resolutely grappled with them. Irenaeus offered a nuanced account of creation and the existence of evil, Clement of Alexandria questioned the idea of a “materialist” resurrection and earthly millenium, and Origen pressed the case for allegorical and metaphorical interpretations of Scripture (too far, some would say).

The point isn’t that we need to accept the answers provided by these early theologians (and, it’s worth recalling that they were writing during a time when church teaching was still in a great deal of flux and some of their ideas would later be deemed unorthodox), but that this style of theologizing and exegesis has as long a pedigree in the church as any, and modern fundamentalism (which itself even gets unfairly distorted by some of its critics) is a relative newcomer.

Another thing that I’ve been thinking about is just how radical a decision the early church made in deciding that the Mosaic Law was no longer binding upon Christians. We talk nowadays about “revisionists,” but, to take our most heated contemporary example, the argument for blessing monogomous same-sex unions looks positively conservative compared to chucking the Law. [Edited to add: Not that the Law was regarded as a bad thing. Rather, it was seen as a temporary expedient, or a “tutor” to lead people to knowledge of righteousness. But what’s striking to me is that Christians would feel free to set aside what were regarded as divine commands.] Of course, this by itself doesn’t settle that particular issue, but it does put into perspective some of the more dire pronouncements about overthrowing thousands of years of unbroken tradition, since that’s precisely what the church did!

Also noteworthy is how some of these early theologians resisted the imposition of a “new law” in the sense of hard and fast rules for Christian conduct. Consider Chadwick’s account of Clement’s discussion of Jesus’ advice to the rich young ruler:

Clement wrote a special discourse to help Christians puzzled about the right use of their money and troubled especially by the absolute command of the Lord to the rich young ruler, ‘If you would be perfect, sell all you have…’ On a rapid reading it might seem as if Clement were merely a compromiser trying to wriggle out of the plain meaning of a commandment. But a fairer reading of his tract shows that he did not see the gospel ethic as imposing legalistic obligations but rather as a statement of God’s highest purpose for those who follow him to the utmost. What really matters is the use rather than the accident of possession. Accordingly Clement laid down a guide for the wealthy converts of the Alexandrian church, which imposed a most strenuous standard of frugality and self-discipline. Clement passionately opposed any luxury or ostentation, and much that he protested to be lawful he regarded as highly inexpedient.

The exposition of the saying to the rich young ruler and several passages in the Paedogogus and Stromateis show Clement acting as a spritual director. It lay in the nature of his view of the Christian life as a progress towards the likeness of God in Christ that he saw it both as a dynamic advance in the comprehension of the nature of Christian doctrine and also as a process of education in which the aspirant would make mistakes calling for penitence. The church he describes as a ‘school’, with many grades and differing abilities among its pupils, where all the elect were equal, but some were ‘more elect’ than others. Accordingly Clement could take a view of the church which allowed room for the resotration of the lapsed and at the same time held the highest demands before all Christians. (p. 98)

Of course, alongside this fairly humane and tolerant ethic we also have the rigor of, say, Tertullian (though it should be noted that Tertullian ended his days outside the church). But the idea of Christian ethics as a way of life leading to a gradual increase in Christ-likeness, while recognizing the persistent reality of human sin and failure, strikes me as a deeply appealing one. And it appears to have significant precedent in the church’s history.