AFTER THE NEW TESTAMENT
At the start of his textbook, Early Christian Doctrines, J N D Kelly remarks: ‘the difference of atmosphere becomes apparent as one crosses from the apostolic to the post-apostolic age.’ Something indeed happened as the New Testament generation left the scene that, though we can hardly miss it, scarcely know how to describe, let alone understand. Suffice it to say of the transition that it’s very important, and that we need to note this ‘difference of atmosphere’.
In a sense, the Church was now ‘on its own’. Its human ‘parents’, the Twelve and Paul, and those who worked with them, were no longer around. It had to make its own way in the world.
After Paul, T F Torrance has shown in The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers, the gospel of grace (grace alone), the only gospel there is, was no longer understood. ‘The most astonishing feature was the failure to understand the death of Christ’ (author’s italics). Repentance, not the death of Christ alone, now became the basis of being saved. Taking up the Cross and following Christ – if need be all the way to martyrdom – became the logic of salvation, not faith: what I should do for God, that is, not what he has done for me. Torrance goes on: ‘Consonant with the failure to apprehend the death of Christ went failure to appreciate the person of Christ. The Cross is the central act in the life and work of Christ. To misunderstand that is to misunderstand Christ, and thrust him into the background. That is just what happened …’. As a result, ‘The Christian ethic was codified, and the charismatic life under the constraining love of Christ reduced to rules and precepts’. The two undermining influences here, Torrence believed, were, on the one side, Judaism, and, on the other, Hellenism (the Greek worldview then prevailing).
The role that Christ and the Holy Spirit were meant to play in Christian initiation and discipleship had been undermined. And this, almost immediately, begin to open up the way for alternative intermediaries to insinuate themselves into Christianity, so corrupting it – as we shall see.