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Theological Controversy in the Early Church: Three Models

Dr. Donald M. Fairbairn

Robert E. Cooley Professor of Early Christianity It is no secret that mainstream academia is increasingly questioning what we call “historic” or “classical” Christianity. For more than 200 years now, adherence to the classic distinctives of the Christian faith (God’s supernatural intervention in history, the incarnation of God’s Son, the death of that Son as somehow directly affecting each of us, and the literal, bodily resurrection of that Son, among other tenets) has been declining among some scholars and ordinary people alike. And in the twentieth century, certain scholars increasingly argued that this kind of “classic” Christianity was not even the consensus of the church in the early centuries, but rather that it was foisted upon Christendom by the political wiles of emperors and bishops. Now, in the twenty-first century, the results of this recent scholarship have been increasingly finding their way into very influential popular-level works as well. Dan Brown’s 2003 blockbuster The Da Vinci Code alleges that the deity of Christ was decided on by a vote at the Council of Nicaea (A.D. 325) and then forced upon the church by imperial pressure. Just this past spring saw the release of Philip Jenkins’s latest book Jesus Wars—almost as much of a page turner as Brown’s work and thus surely destined to be widely read and hugely influential—which goes into memorable detail on the political machinations lying behind the christological proclamations of the fifth century, most notably the Chalcedonian Definition (A.D. 451). Beneath the engaging details, Jenkins’s fundamental premise is that there was nothing inevitable about the victory of Chalcedonian orthodoxy. The “orthodox” depiction of Christ as God the Son incarnate, fully human as well as fully divine, was simply the view that won out, and it won not “on the merits,” but because of political intrigue. In perhaps the most striking line of the book, Jenkins writes: “Chalcedonian ideas triumphed not because of the force of their logic, but because the world that opposed them perished” (p. 265). What is an evangelical Christian to make of such ideas? How can we respond to the indictment of our “version” of Christianity that they represent? I would like to address these questions by describing and evaluating three general models one could use to understand the complicated interplay of political, theological and ecclesiastical factors that went into the titanic doctrinal struggles early in Christian history. The first model is one that I call “Imposed Consensus.” From the vantage point of this model, there was no consensus about the Trinity or about Christ in the first few centuries of Christian history. Different groups of Christians had radically different understandings, and indeed, they based these understandings on different sets of “canonical” writings. This model sees the differences as so extreme that Bart Ehrman of UNC-Chapel Hill has entitled two of his most influential books Lost Scriptures and Lost Christianities (both published by Oxford University Press in 2003). According to this model, the Christianization of the Roman Empire in the fourth century led to

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substantial imperial pressure to standardize Christian doctrine so as to unify the Empire around a single church. Orthodoxy as we know it today was simply the victor in the struggle for control, and thus there is nothing inherently better about orthodoxy in contrast to heresy. This model—the one that provides part of the foundation for the The Da Vinci Code—resonates very powerfully with our society’s relativistic mindset and its suspicion of traditional authority. The second model is one that I call “Clash and Compromise.” This model—which more-or-less lies behind Jenkins’s Jesus Wars and dominates church history and historical theology textbooks—is not as extreme as the first, but it sees different regions of the Christian church approaching fundamental doctrines like the incarnation in significantly different ways. Most famously, the so-called “schools” of Antioch and Alexandria had different approaches to the person of Christ. In the fifth century, these approaches clashed, and the Chalcedonian Definition that emerged was a compromise between two competing views. Proponents of the clash-and-compromise model often argue that Chalcedon’s primary contribution was negative: it did not try to explain who Christ is, but merely to exclude inadequate ways of speaking about him. This model is not intrinsically relativistic, but it implies that we are not to inquire too deeply into the mystery of the incarnation. When we evangelicals argue that it is sufficient simply to say that Christ is fully divine and fully human, we are unwittingly being influenced by the clash-and-compromise model. In fact, it is not sufficient simply to say this, because one could construe the word “divine” in radically different ways. Is Jesus divine merely in the way the Westminster divines were divine? Is he divine merely in the way that any Spirit-filled Christian is divine? Or is he divine in a different way from any of us, and if so, in what way? These are utterly crucial questions, but the clash-and-compromise model subtly discourages us from addressing them. In contrast to both of these common models, I suggest that in many cases, and certainly in the case of the great controversies over the Trinity and the person of Christ, a better model could be called “Consensus, Challenge, and Re-Articulation of the Consensus.” In my opinion, proponents of the imposed-consensus model have exaggerated the size and importance of the groups the church considered to be heretical. Second-century Gnosticism, for example, was a significant and dangerous misunderstanding of the Gospel, but it was not widespread enough to be considered a “different Christianity” that had to be suppressed by the church. Rather, it was an aberration from Christianity, recognized by the majority of the church to be wrong and dangerous, and thus it was rejected. Likewise, fourth-century Arianism was not as widespread a view as we often think, and the church actually rejected it decisively at the Council of Nicaea within six years of its emergence. But because imperial politics for the next fifty years often favored Arianism, the amount of agreement that existed in the church as a whole was obscured by the emperor’s favoritism toward the Arians. Ironically, it was not political pressure that produced an imposed consensus, but rather, political pressure temporarily obscured a theological consensus that was already there, but that would not become evident until the church had thought through the matter apart from imperial pressure.

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Similarly, proponents of the clash-and-compromise model have significantly overestimated the size of the so-called School of Antioch. My own scholarly work has sought to show that the Antiochene school consisted of only three people (all of whom were condemned by the church as heretics) and that the so-called Alexandrian school actually represented the church’s consensus. The challenge posed by the handful of “Antiochene” theologians (Diodore, Theodore, and Nestorius) prodded the church to articulate its prior consensus more carefully and clearly, but the challenge did not fundamentally alter that consensus or produce any kind of compromise. Indeed, the model of consensus, challenge and re-articulation is the way the church has understood its great early controversies for most of its history. Only in the modern period did the other two models (imposed consensus and clash-and-compromise) see the light of day, and these models say as much about the assumptions of modern researchers as they do about the actual controversies that took place. Unfortunately, however, these two models (especially clash-and-compromise) have influenced the way we evangelicals tell the story of historical theology, and we sometimes unwittingly describe our own doctrine in a way that subtly undercuts that very doctrine. It is important for evangelicals to dig deeply into the historical controversies of the patristic period, to examine both political and theological factors. At the same time, however, it is also important for us to listen carefully for the consensus that lay beneath those controversies. Where there was such a consensus—and I think such a consensus was there far more often that today’s history books would lead us to believe—then that theological consensus commends itself to us as something that we need to take very seriously today.