Early Church History and the Modern Church: Some Points for Consideration

(Knox, p.184-185) 1. The Church is a missionary Church dedicated to spreading the message of Jesus everywhere. The tremendous enthusiasm of the early Christians for telling the Good News should still be ours today. 2. Christianity is primarily a way of life. The formulation of beliefs came after a dedication to a way of life that Jesus taught. Religion is never simply a system of beliefs. We cannot divorce our way of acting from our faith. We express our faith by acting it out in our daily lives. Faith is a verb, not a noun. There is no such thing as a non-practising believer. 3. The early Church soon discovered that love and togetherness and koinonia were not enough. Faced with the common experience of sin, dedicated to the ideals of Jesus, rules and discipline were needed. Some of these early rules are mentioned in Acts 21: 17-35. The Church today needs organization and discipline no matter how distasteful such discipline may be to some people. If we wish to be identied as belonging to a community we must observe the rules, which are there for the good of the whole community. 4. The early church soon came up against the secular arm. For example, an early Roman court ruled that Christianity was tantamount to an attack against the Roman way of life. Christianity still remains profoundly counter-cultural. Jesus did not bless any culture, form of society or social system. All these are awed subject to sin and in need of redemption. In our time, we as church have to consistently expose the false values that are pervasive in our culture. To be a Christian may often require heroic resistance to false values. A great turning point came for the church in 313CE with the conversion to Christianity of the Roman Emperor Constantine. As a result of this conversion it became popular, or just politically expedient, to become a Christian. The many conversions enriched the liturgy and celebration but because the converts did not receive much instruction, this weakened the Christian Faith. This prompted the early Church to begin dening the key beliefs about Jesus and the faith. The church now heavily tied up with the governing bodies of that time, faces a new danger, that of being too closely allied with the secular arm, with politics and power in high places. The modeling of the church on the secular state (see above) is perhaps the greatest barrier to it becoming the humble ock of Jesus. 5. Given the previous point, the church can expect to be persecuted as it was persecuted in the early years even if in more subtle ways than the violent persecution suered in those times. The heresies of the medieval ages, the birth of other religions, the power struggle between the Church and State that lead to certain abuses such as the infamous Crusades and the Inquisition, casted a dark shadow in the history of the Church.

These and the succeeding challenge brought by the Reformation Movement saw many Church heroes who kept the ame of genuine faith alive. New religious orders who chose to see and respond to the needs of destitute people in far-ung areas such as St. Francis Xavier and the Jesuit priests who ministered to India, Japan and China, and various men and women inspired by the Holy Spirit such as St. Thomas Aquinas, Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Avila and Vincent de Paul introduced reforms and renewal in the Church inviting people to stay true to the teachings of Christ. The church has always produced martyrs who prepared to die for their Christian beliefs and for their commitment to the way of life taught by Jesus. Persecution takes dierent forms in dierent times, but a Christian community genuinely trying to live by the ideals of the gospel can expect opposition that may call for some form of heroism. 6. In the modern era, the Church faced up with problems and challenges of the Enlightenment, of secularism, pluralism, totalitarianism, liberalism, tensions among governments, as well as commercialism and materialism. These eroded Catholic life, thought and spiritual strength. Rather than back down and limit herself to the connes of the cathedral and speak only from the pulpit, the Church became more involved with the concerns of the people. Through Pope Leo XIII, the Church produced the rst formal church social document known as Rerum Novarum (On the Condition of the Working Classes) in 1891. This is a landmark document that gave way to many others that speak of the Church going to where the people are. The high point in the Christian faith during the twentieth century was the 2nd Vatican Ecumenical Council opened by Pope John XXIII on 1962 that called for a total renewal of the Church. Together with many Church documents that follow, this was a call for change - an updating (aggiornamento) of ourselves, to discern the signs of the times. 7. The sweep of church history proves that Jesus is faithful to his promise to be with the church to the end of time. No other group, organization or community has survived over the past two thousand years as well as the church has. This gives us great cause for optimism for the future, as well as condence in the abiding presence of Christ in our lives.