My post the other day generated some comments that draws out the theme of Christian unity and church governance as an aspect of the church’s organic growth. Ben suggested that due to the immanent eschatology of the early church, (i.e., that the Age to Come was going to show up any day), they didn’t spend much time setting up structures that would last, which created a “more vibrant, growing, organic community that would have been impossible to create from the top down.”
Our structures must be designed to empower organic growth. This does start with Eschatology, because it is necessary for Christians to work backwards from the Kingdom of God that is and is to come in order to establish how that Kingdom applies in This Present (Evil) Age.
This presses us to consider how we may live the Life of the Kingdom among our real neighbors – those with whom we have contact, especially in physical proximity. This implies a decentralized network structure is going to have the most tendency for success.
I think, however, that this defies our natural definitions of “top-down” or “bottom-up.” In a sense, the church is always top-down, because we affirm that God initiates creation, initiates contact with humanity, initiates salvation, and initiates discipleship. In Christ, we affirm that God acted to do what humanity could not even have started to do: to destroy sin, death and the Devil and bring the Kingdom of God into contact with our lives in This Age. Anything less is Pelagianism.
Yet, at the same time, in a human sense, this divine initiative produces a high level of unity, enough to maintain a quite decentralized system. This is especially true in the early church.
For instance, Tertullian, writing around 200 CE, argues that the people to whom he is writing are not truly Christians because they have changed the faith that was handed down by the Apostles to them. It’s a clear-cut case in Tertullian’s mind, because all the congregations have remained in the same faith. As he says,
Is it likely that so many churches, and they so great, should have gone astray into one and the same faith? (De Praescriptione Haereticorum 28)
The implication of this quote is a profoundly different view of the church structures than we currently have. In saying this, Tertullian implies that there is no centralized hierarchy to maintain unity, but that each congregation has received the same faith in Jesus Christ unaltered from the Apostles, as guarded by the unifying Holy Spirit.
In effect, he says, “we have no possible way of riding herd on all these people in all these congregations. Yet they all believe the same thing and practice it the same way. How can you explain that, you who claim you have a better grip on the truth than we do?” Any time human beings get together, he says, there is diversity of opinion and some level of disagreement and disunity. So if this were not of God, there wouldn’t be the unity we see here.
I think we can see that by the year 200 or so, Christianity had spread throughout the Roman Empire to a degree that no real regional, inter-congregational structures were possible, necessary or wanted. And yet the Church grew and spread faster in that era than throughout most of the rest of its history.
One final thought: even Caesar, with all his power and might, could not keep his empire united in the early 3rd Century. Society and technology did not allow for it. Yet in the same era, the Church was obviously and completely unified, without a central authority. What does that say to us?
