What is Truth?

In fleeing from a single Pope, the reformers’ doctrines made every man his own Pope.

He is Risen! I am publishing this just after midnight on the holiest day of the Western Christian calendar. It seems appropriate to ask “what is truth” on the very day that “the Way, the Truth, and the Life” was resurrected from the grave. Happy Easter / Pascha.

For those in the Eastern Orthodox church, Happy Palm Sunday (the Orthodox use a slightly different calculation for Easter than we Protestants do.)

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I ended the last post by saying that Protestantism is awash in mutually exclusive, competing claims of truth, all of which the holders claim are inspired by the Holy Spirit. Before I go any further I must make something very clear: I am not in the business of adjudicating competing truth claims here. If you want to argue about pre-destination vs. free-will, I won’t engage because such arguments are unresolvable within the shared structural framework of Protestantism. If you don’t understand why that is, read the previous post on Reformation history. The video below makes a nice summary — after you’ve read the post!

Luther’s answer to the charges brought against him at the Diet of Worms is recorded as one of history’s great mic-drop moments:

“Unless I am convicted of error by the testimony of Scripture, or by manifest evidence, I cannot and will not retract, for we must never act contrary to our conscience.”

However the less well known response of the prosecutor (Johann Maier von Eck) is its equal:¹

“Not one of the heresies which have torn the bosom of the church has not derived its origin from the various interpretation of the Scripture.”

Both Eck and Luther would likely be appalled at a bishop preaching a sermon from the top of a carnival slide inside his own cathedral, but it’s doubtful Eck would be entirely surprised. He foresaw the logical outcome of sola scriptura more clearly than did Luther.

It’s all about the children!

Thus is our situation today. Protestants everywhere read the Bible and, based on their consciences (hopefully influenced by the Holy Spirit) go “shopping” for a church that agrees with them.

It’s not obvious that such religious consumerism is all bad — at least people are seeking something transcendental and vaguely Christian. But the doctrinal free-for-all that characterizes modern American Protestantism has had a disastrous effect on the perpetuation of the faith. Christian Smith has popularized the term Moral Therapeutic Deism to describe the faith he sees in surveying the teenagers of American Protestants:

1. A god exists who created the world and watches over human life on earth.

2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.

3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.

4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when needed to resolve a problem.

5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

This is the god of American Christian teenagers. I strike out the word Christian because whoever that god is, he’s clearly not Christ Jesus, the eternal second person of the Trinity, the God of the Bible.

Protestants are catastrophically failing to acculturate our children in the Christian faith. That’s hardly surprising; we’ve been arguing with each other about what the Christian faith even means for over 500 years with no end in sight. Our kids are throwing up their hands, deciding their parents are loons (a easy belief at age 15 anyway), and taking the lowest common denominator they see: God wants you to be happy and nice so you get to live with him in Heaven. This is a spiritual disaster for our children, a demographic disaster for our churches, and we (my generation) are responsible for it. Can it be fixed?

“But we have a wonderful young man who grew up in our youth group and went on to become a missionary in Sudan with his wife.” And you remember him precisely because he’s an outlier. The surveys bear this out.

Awash in commentary

When you’re unclear about what a piece of scripture means, what do you do? If you’re like most Protestants, your process looks something like this:

1. Ask friends at church what they think.

2. Talk to an elder / pastor.

3. Search online until you find a commentary that agrees with you.

4. Return to the church shopping mall.

Items 1-3 all boil down to the same thing: get advice. At best this is an honest attempt to find truth; at worst it is a quest for justification by finding someone we (and hopefully others) respect who shares our view. As a result, we Protestants are flooded with bible commentary. For the traditionalists: John Macarthur, Ken Ham, Bruce Metzger, Dwight Moody. For those who desire a more flexible scripture: Bart Ehrman, Marcus Borg, James McGrath, and the entire Yale Divinity School.

And this is a wonderful thing! In the history of Christendom, never have so many Christians had such easy access to both the word of God and the words of great scholars regarding His meaning. The proliferation of Biblical scholarship is a vast improvement over both papal encyclicals and congregational scriptural ignorance (which often went hand-in-hand).

In evaluating the relative merits of these scholars and commentators though, we struggle. We are all sinful creatures (“For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God”) which means we are prideful and selfish. Are we “reading from scripture” to find meaning or “reading into scripture” to make it mean what we want? That’s especially tempting when we can all find modern, supposedly respected, scholars (with lots of letters after their names) who agree with us.

Can there be a different way?

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If you really wanted to know what Homer was saying when he wrote the Iliad, what would you do? Unless you want to learn ancient Greek, you would start by reading a good translation of Homer. Then maybe Homer’s contemporaries; other ancient Greek literature; other epic poems. You would try to understand the cultural context Homer’s world and linguistic style he wrote in. And you would likely give greater precedence to what Aristotle and Plato said about the Iliad rather than the current dean of the Harvard College of Humanities (does Harvard even teach humanities anymore?)

If you needed to know what a part of the American Constitution meant, what would you do? You would start by reading the document itself. Then you might read the relevant Federalist and Anti-federalist papers; other things Jefferson or Madison wrote; early Supreme Court opinions by John Jay (1789) or Roger Taney (1836). You would almost certainly give greater weight to both of those than to Justice Blackmun (1970). It’s obvious that Jay and Taney, being closer to the Founding generation, likely better understand their cultural context and can thus provide better insight into their meaning.

Now when you want to understand a Bible verse, what do you do? If you’re honest, your process is a complete inversion of the ones above. You start with your own pastor, then the modern commentators he likes. If you’re really motivated, you might search online, maybe work your way back to Wesley, Calvin or even Luther. And then you will stop, because everything earlier is Catholic. Verboten!

In interpreting scripture, we Protestants ignore the exact people that we would utilize most heavily when interpreting anything else — near contemporaries of the writers themselves. This is a serious mistake.

Building a house on the rocks

Just like we would in interpreting Homer or the Constitution, we can lean a group of on bible commentators known as the “early Church Fathers”, who were much closer to Jesus, both in time and culture, than John Macarthur or even Luther.

The Church Fathers are those great Christian writers who passed on and clarified the teaching of the apostles..

First comes the group of writers who who were alive when the apostles were alive… [and] had some contact with them. The “Apostolic Fathers” lived from AD 50 through about AD 150 and their writings come to us beginning around AD 95.

Following comes a distinctive group of… secular scholars who were won for Christ and then used all their learning to advance the cause of the Gospel. We call these men “apologists” since a major focus of their writings was to defend the faith against Christian heretics, Jewish critics, and pagan persecutors. The apologists wrote from about he year AD 150 through the Council of Nicaea in AD 325. ²

When the “Church Fathers” end is rather nebulous. The book quoted above extends it through AD 800. The more common definition is about AD 500. For this setting, I chose a cutoff of the late 4th century. After 400 AD, imperial and ecclesiastical authority began to merge into the hybrid that would eventually become the Roman Catholic Church. Earlier bishops try to protect the church from the imperial system. Later bishops protect the church’s place within the imperial system. The proximity to imperial power and wealth inevitably corrupted some bishops, so I am choosing to end my focus while the church and empire were still essentially separate.

The Reformation rebelled against the church of AD 1519. But the church of AD 150 was a very different place. Please forgive the long quote, but the world the early church grew up within is important. ³

Somewhere around AD 52, the Roman emperor Claudius heard there was some sort of conflict in the Jewish quarter of Rome. What was probably a conflict between Christian and non-Christian Jews was perceived by the Romans as an internal Jewish dispute. To prevent any possible unrest, Claudius expelled all Jews from the city of Rome, including Jewish Christians. This is why the apostle Paul encountered Priscilla and Aquilla outside of Rome — they had been forced to leave with all the rest (Acts 18:2). This left the Christian community in the city of Rome in the hands of newly converted Gentiles. Those who had been Christian the longest, who knew the stories of Jesus, were now gone. This may have been the occasion for the writing of the gospel of Mark, since Gentile Christians who remained would have needed to know the stories.

The first impressions of the Church on its Roman neighbors were not good. Hearing that Christians ate the body of Christ and drank his blood, some believed they were cannibals. Hearing married Christians call each other “brother” and “sister” led to rumors of incest. …The average Roman would have worried that people who refused to worship the gods of Rome would anger those gods. Ironically, the Christians, who worshiped only one God as opposed to many, were called “atheists”.

You think the modern world doesn’t like us? At least they don’t think we’re an incestuous, cannibalistic, Jewish cult. Continued…

On July 18, in the year AD 64, a fire broke out in Rome and leveled a major part of the center of the city. Coincidentally (or not), the emperor Nero had plans on his desk for a new palace to be built on that spot. Naturally, rumors began to circulate and Nero needed a scapegoat to divert attention away from himself. He blamed the fire on the Christians… thus the first persecution of Christians at the hands of the Romans began. Anyone who admitted to being a Christian was charged with the crime of arson and could be executed. Paul and Peter were martyred at about this time, Peter crucified in Nero’s circus. Though this persecution was limited to Rome and was temporary, the official position of the Roman government was now that Christians were enemies of the state.

In the year AD 81, the emperor Domitian came to the throne and began persecuting the Church. … It was during this time that the apostle John was exiled to the island of Patmos, where he would write the book of Revelation. But even at this time, persecution was sporadic and regional. Christians continued to worship, though at some times and places they had to meet in secret. …

In the early 2nd century, a Roman Governor named Pliny wrote to ask the emperor Trajan for advice about what to do about the Christians. Trajan confirmed that although Christians deserved to be executed, Pliny should not seek them out. If any were accused, he should interview them and ask them whether they were Christians… If anyone denied being a Christian, proving it was as simple as swearing an oath to the emperor, throwing a pinch of incense on a pagan altar, or be[ing] required to curse Christ. If they were not willing, they could be tortured, sent into exile, have all their property confiscated, or sentenced to death, which could come by beheading (if the governor wanted to be merciful), crucifixion, burning, or wild beasts in the arena. The important thing to note here is that, by the 2nd century, we have gone from requiring a crime, like arson, to accuse someone, to simply the name of Christian being a capital offense. Second, we see the use of pagan sacrifice as a test of loyalty to the state.

Marcus Aurelius issued an edict in AD 167 ordering pagan sacrifice in the emperor’s honor as a test of loyalty. Refusing to make such a sacrifice was an act of treason.

Does this sound like a church corrupted by association with imperial power? Or does it sound more like the Reformation-era martyrs who suffered persecution (by Rome Catholics and each other) for the faith?

2nd century Christians persecuted by Rome emperors. 16th century Protestants persecuted by Roman popes. Jan Luyken’s 1685 etchings for Martyrs Mirror.

In our zeal to rid ourselves of Popes, we’ve made everything between the book of Acts and the Reformation suspect. But our church is a direct descendent of this patristic era church. The church fathers grounded their faith in the shared experience of the apostles. We ground our faith in the Bible, but it was the church fathers (inspired by the Holy Spirit) who selected the books to be included in that Bible. We can not separate ourselves from the patristic era any more than we could separate ourselves from the Old Testament.

These teachers helped bring Christianity out of diapers and into adulthood… This great and diverse group of people provides us with a something we desperately need. They are a mighty cloud of witnesses to what the apostles lived and taught… They provided new vocabulary, key insights, and critical clarifications, enabling the Church to more profoundly understand and more clearly express the apostolic truth that these witnesses passed on to us. ⁴

For sola scriptura believers, what the Bible means matters more than ever. Getting it wrong could have eternal consequences, and ignoring such a powerful source of Biblical commentary makes it likely we will get it wrong.

I’m not asking you to blindly follow Thomas Aquinas or the Lateran Councils. We’re Protestants — we don’t blindly follow anyone! However, just as political leaders temporally closer to the Founding Fathers may help us understand the Constitution’s meaning, religious leaders temporally closer to the apostles may help us understand the Bible’s meaning.

We still have the problem of competing truth claims. That’s baked into Luther’s “I stand on my conscience” methodology. But if we allow our consciences to be somewhat shaped by early (pre-Roman-Catholic) church thought, perhaps we can get a little closer to agreement, both with Jesus and with each other. We’ve been building on sand for 500 years when there’s a foundation of ancient church rocks sitting right next to us. Let’s start using them.

1. The Life of Luther Written By Himself

2. When the Church was Young, Marcellino D’Ambrosio

3. Reading the Early Church Fathers: From the Didache to Nicaea, James Papandrea

4. ibid, D’Ambrisio