John Henry Newman once said that “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.” Now, I’m certainly not going to claim to be “deep” into early church history after having read Chadwick’s The Early Church (along with a few other books along the way), but I think I can see what Newman was getting at. At least a certain kind of Protestant – the kind that sees little difference between the early church and his contemporary “Bible church” – is going to find a lot that’s hard to swallow in the early church history. The roots of things like Roman primacy, the threefold office of ministry, and Marian devotion may not exactly go back to the New Testament itself, but they certainly appear early on. It’s simply not possible to see everything “catholic” as some kind of late-medieval distortion of the unvarnished pure gospel.

However, I’m also inclined to turn Newman’s aphorism around at him. Reading Chadwick, hardly a radical deconstructionist historian, it’s hard to resist the impression that the “undivided early church” much beloved of C/catholic (including Anglo-Catholic and “evangelical catholic”) apologetics is at least in part an ideological construct. Rather than the serene consensus of orthodoxy, the early church looks more like a tradition in the way Alasdair MacIntyre defined it: “an argument extended through time.” And a fractious, intemperate, and at times violent one at that. Everything was hotly contensted by somebody at some point and there wasn’t any universally agreed upon court of final appeals, be it Bible, papacy, or church council. The boundaries between othrodoxy and heresy were in many cases quite fuzzy, and even “ecumencial” councils like Nicea and Chalcedon had their fair share of critics, not all of whom can easily be dismissed as out-and-out heretics. In some respects the early church ends up looking pretty “Protestant.”