Can You Hear Me Now?

I have to suppress the urge to laugh out loud when I hear Christians tell me how great it would be if we could only return to the glory days of the early church. They appear to believe that in the first century the church was far better off than it is today, that it knew little of division or false teaching and knew a lot of power and purity. I have to be entirely honest and say that this sort of spiritual nostalgia is horribly misinformed.

The church of the first century was just as dysfunctional and riddled with problems as we are today. Need I remind you of the church at Corinth, a city where the apostle devoted more time and energy than anywhere else? In spite of his having spent 18 months there, the church turned on him, embraced false apostles, wallowed in childish immaturity, tolerated a man sleeping with his step-mother, divided up into factions, and badly abused spiritual gifts, just to mention a few of its problems.

The church at Galatia was in danger of denying the gospel of justification by faith alone and following after legalists who insisted on good works as essential to complete one’s acceptance with God. The church at Philippi, although perhaps the most mature of all in the first century, was still given to disunity and selfishness. The Colossian church had come to close to embracing a false philosophy and had tolerated in their midst a group who advocated the worship of angels.

And if these examples aren’t enough, go read Revelation 2-3 where six of the seven churches in Asia Minor to which Jesus sent letters through the Apostle John were on the verge of coming under severe divine discipline because of their moral and theological errors.

There was also a significant problem in the church in Rome, to which the letter to the Hebrews was most likely addressed. Some evidently were elevating angels above Jesus, the Son of God. The author warned them in Hebrews 2:1 not to “drift” away from the gospel and to be careful lest they “neglect” this great salvation provided by Christ. They had to be exhorted to “consider” Jesus (3:1) and not to abandon their original confession of faith in him (3:6, 14). They were warned lest there be found in some of them an “unbelieving heart” that might lead them to fall away from the living God (3:12). In Hebrews 4:1 the author appears concerned that some in this church might fail to enter God’s rest. And in Hebrews 5:11 he urged them to strive to enter God’s rest lest some “fall by the same sort of disobedience” as those did in the Old Testament.

Simply put, there was a problem in this church, just like there were problems in every other first century church, which probably differed little from those problems that have reappeared in virtually every church in every century over the past two-thousand years. Read more

In the Anglican Church in North America this sort of spiritual nostalgia extends to the supposedly undivided church of the ten centuries before the Great Schism, or East-West Schism, of the eleventh century. These ten centuries are viewed as a Golden Age of the Christian Church. 

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