An Unrequited Love for the Historic Church

I do not stand outside the historic Church because I despise her. I stand outside because I love much of what I find within her, yet cannot call every later development apostolic.

There is a particular accusation made against evangelical Christianity that I feel more deeply than might be expected.

We are told that we are rootless individualists: Christians without a Church, readers without rulers, minds pursuing private illumination while refusing the visible, historic community Christ founded. Sometimes the accusation is sharpened further. Our distinction between outward rites and inward grace, our insistence upon testing doctrine by Scripture, and our willingness to leave an institution that binds the conscience beyond Scripture are said to resemble the ancient Gnostic impulse—a flight from matter, history, authority and ordinary Christian fellowship into a private world of disembodied knowledge.

The charge would be easier to dismiss if I felt no attraction to the historic Church.

But I do.

I love the ancient confession of the Triune God. I love the Fathers when they defend the true incarnation of Christ against those who turned Him into an apparition or a spiritual myth. I love their insistence that the God of the gospel is the Creator of heaven and earth, that the body is not evil, that Jesus Christ truly suffered in the flesh, and that He rose bodily from the grave. I value ordered worship, accountable leadership, Christian discipline and fellowship that extends beyond the preferences of the individual. I do not dream of Christianity as a solitary intellect with a Bible and no obligations to anyone else.

The tragedy is not that I want nothing to do with the historic Church.

The tragedy is that I could stand at her door, confessing my love for Jesus Christ and affirming the ancient apostolic faith, yet still not be received into full fellowship. I would be asked to confess not only the faith once delivered to the saints, but later dogmatic claims that I cannot find within that deposit and cannot affirm without violating conscience.

Mine is not the contempt of a man walking away. It is the unrequited love of one who would gladly enter, but cannot leave his conscience outside.

I Would Willingly Submit

I have no principled objection to bishops. I would willingly submit to a bishop who submitted to Scripture.

That qualification is not a clever means of evading all authority. It is the order established within the New Testament itself. Overseers are commanded to hold fast the faithful word so that they may teach sound doctrine and refute error (Titus 1:9). Elders are to shepherd the flock without becoming lords over it (1 Peter 5:2–3). Paul warned the Ephesian elders that men could arise from among their own number and speak perverse things (Acts 20:28–31). Even an apostle—or an angel from heaven—was to be rejected if he proclaimed another gospel (Galatians 1:8).

Christian authority is therefore real, but ministerial. The shepherd stands under the word he teaches. His office does not make error true, nor does an unbroken succession of hands guarantee an unbroken submission to apostolic doctrine.

I would welcome oversight, correction, discipline and fellowship. What I cannot accept is the proposition that submission to Christ requires unconditional submission to every doctrine an ecclesiastical institution later places beneath the name of apostolic tradition.

That is not rebellion against authority. It is recognition of where authority finally resides.

The Church’s Ancient Confession

Irenaeus provides a remarkable standard by which to test this question. Writing in the second century against the Gnostic schools, he described the faith received by the worldwide Church from the apostles and their disciples.

Its substance is wonderfully recognisable.

There is one God, the Father Almighty, Creator of all things. There is one Jesus Christ, the Son of God, incarnate for our salvation. The Holy Spirit spoke through the prophets concerning the saving works of God: Christ’s coming, His virgin birth, His passion, resurrection from the dead and bodily ascension. Christ will appear again from heaven in the glory of the Father. Humanity will be raised, every knee will bow to Christ as Lord, God, Saviour and King, and He will execute righteous judgment. By His grace He will grant immortality and everlasting glory to the righteous who persevere in His love.

I can confess that faith without reservation.

More than that: Irenaeus says that this was the faith of the Church dispersed throughout the world. Different languages did not produce different gospels. The churches of Germany, Spain, Gaul, the East, Egypt and Libya preserved the same proclamation. The Church held it, he said, as though dwelling in one house and possessing one heart.

Then comes the sentence that deserves far more attention in present debates. The gifted teacher may explain the faith extensively, while another may speak only simply; nevertheless, neither may “make any addition to it,” nor does the simpler believer diminish it.

That is not a celebration of intellectual shallowness. Irenaeus immediately allows the learned teacher to explore the parables, the covenants, the purpose of the incarnation, the inclusion of the Gentiles, the resurrection of the body and the things to come. Theology may unfold the riches of revelation. Intelligence, eloquence and careful exposition are gifts to the Church.

But exposition is not enlargement of the apostolic deposit.

The theologian may draw out what the apostles taught; he may not create new conditions of catholic fellowship. The ordinary Christian who cannot explain every implication of justification, Christology or eschatology is not therefore a lower order of believer. He possesses the same Christ and confesses the same saving truth.

Irenaeus’s rule of faith is broad enough to unite Christians across nations and levels of education, yet definite enough to exclude the Gnostic teachers. They did not merely disagree about secondary details. They introduced another God, another account of creation, another Christ and another salvation. Their elaborate systems did not deepen the apostolic faith; they displaced it.

Here, then, is the question I cannot escape: if I sincerely confess the apostolic faith described by Irenaeus, why is that confession no longer sufficient for full Christian fellowship in churches that claim Irenaeus as one of their Fathers?

When Explanation Becomes an Entrance Requirement

The answer normally given is doctrinal development. The later Church did not add foreign doctrines, we are told; she clarified truths always contained within the original deposit. An oak looks different from an acorn, but it is the organic fulfilment of what the acorn contained.

Some development is both unavoidable and legitimate. The Church may be forced by controversy to define terms more precisely. The Nicene confession did not invent the deity of Christ; it guarded the apostolic witness against interpretations designed to evade it. A later formulation can articulate an earlier truth with greater precision.

But the category of development cannot be allowed to do unlimited work. It cannot simply baptise every later novelty by declaring that the seed must always have been present. A proposed development must demonstrate continuity with the apostolic teaching; it cannot use the authority of the institution that defined it as the sole proof of its apostolic origin.

Otherwise the reasoning becomes circular. The later Church is said to possess authority because she preserves apostolic tradition, while whatever the later Church defines is declared apostolic because she possesses authority.

That is where the door closes for me.

I could confess the Trinity, the incarnation, the atoning death and bodily resurrection of Christ, His ascension, His future return, the resurrection of humanity and final judgment. I could receive baptism and the Lord’s Supper as commands of Christ. I could worship under recognised elders, submit to biblical discipline and stand beside ordinary Christians whose transformed lives display the grace of God more eloquently than many theological books.

Yet that would not be enough. Full communion would also require assent to later dogmatic conclusions concerning sacramental efficacy, the infallible authority of the institutional Church, Marian teachings, the invocation of saints or other claims which I cannot identify as part of the rule of faith received from the apostles.

I am not asking anyone to pretend that these disagreements are unimportant. Nor am I claiming an entitlement to enter a communion while openly contradicting its settled doctrine. The painful point is precisely that the settlement has made the terms of entrance narrower than the ancient confession Irenaeus presented as the common faith of the worldwide Church.

I am not refused because I deny the rule of faith. I remain outside because I cannot confess additions to it as though they possessed the same apostolic authority.

The Historic Structure and the Historic Hope

This tension becomes particularly visible when early Christian testimony is used apologetically.

Catholic and Orthodox apologists frequently appeal to ante-Nicene evidence for bishops, sacramental language and the visible continuity of the Church. The argument carries genuine historical weight. A Protestant should not evade early evidence merely because it makes him uncomfortable. The early Church was embodied, communal, ordered and sacramental in its vocabulary. Any account of Christian history that imagines the apostles followed immediately by a collection of independent modern Bible churches is indefensible.

But the same ante-Nicene period also preserves an emphatically futurist and, in several major witnesses, premillennial hope.

The final chapter of the Didache tells believers to watch for the last days. It anticipates deception, the appearance of the world-deceiver, fiery trial, the heavenly sign, the trumpet, the resurrection of the saints and the Lord appearing upon the clouds. The Didache does not supply a complete millennial system, but its horizon is unmistakably future, apocalyptic and expectant.

Justin Martyr went further. In his Dialogue with Trypho, he confessed a bodily resurrection followed by a thousand years in a rebuilt Jerusalem, while candidly acknowledging that some genuine Christians thought otherwise. His honesty prevents us from manufacturing a unanimous early consensus, but his own conviction could hardly be clearer.

Irenaeus made the earthly kingdom integral to his theology of redemption. The saints would receive the promised inheritance in the same creation in which they had suffered, now renewed by God. He connected the kingdom with the resurrection of the just, the promises to Abraham and the liberation of creation from corruption. This was not an embarrassing remnant of crude literalism sitting awkwardly beside his anti-Gnostic theology. It arose from it. The Creator does not discard His workmanship. The flesh that suffered will be raised. The creation subjected to corruption will be liberated. God’s promises will not evaporate into abstractions.

Augustine later adopted a different interpretation of Revelation 20. Significantly, he acknowledged that he himself had once held a millennial reading and said it could be acceptable if understood in terms of spiritual delights; he recoiled especially from versions centred upon extravagant material feasting. His ecclesial interpretation became enormously influential in the Western Church.

This creates an awkward asymmetry in some appeals to antiquity.

When early testimony supports episcopal structure or Eucharistic realism, proximity to the apostles is treated as powerful evidence of apostolic continuity. When the same period supports a literal earthly reign of Christ, later doctrinal development and ecclesiastical judgment suddenly become decisive.

The rule seems to change according to the conclusion desired.

My answer to this has become simple:

You may claim the historic structure; I claim the historic hope.

Or, put more sharply:

You cannot make antiquity authoritative at the table and obsolete at the throne.

This is not an attempt to turn Irenaeus into an infallible premillennial pope. The Fathers were fallible. Their Eucharistic teaching, ecclesiology and eschatology must all be tested by Scripture. That is my principle in every case. I do not accept Irenaeus’s millennialism merely because Irenaeus taught it, nor reject his sacramental language merely because I am Protestant. I ask which reading most faithfully accounts for the biblical text.

The historical evidence does, however, expose a methodological inconsistency. If the Fathers’ proximity to the apostles is sufficient to bind my conscience at the Eucharistic table, it cannot become irrelevant when they direct our eyes towards Jerusalem and the coming kingdom.

Materiality at the Font, Spiritualisation at the Throne

There is a further irony.

Evangelicals are sometimes compared with Gnostics because we distinguish the material sign from the inward saving reality. We baptise in real water and partake of real bread and wine, but deny that the elements possess saving efficacy in themselves. This distinction is interpreted as embarrassment about materiality.

Yet many within the Augustinian tradition who make this charge spiritualise some of Scripture’s most concrete promises: Israel, Jerusalem, the nations, the throne of David, the resurrection of the saints followed by their reign with Christ, and the thousand years of Revelation 20. Those who insist upon the ordinary sense of these promises may then be described as carnal or crudely materialistic.

Material particularity is defended at the font and the table but treated with suspicion at the throne.

This does not make Augustine a Gnostic, any more than distinguishing outward baptism from inward regeneration makes an evangelical a Valentinian. That is precisely the point. Similarity at the level of one interpretive move does not establish identity, historical descent or a shared metaphysical system. “Spiritualisation” cannot function as a selective accusation, praised when applied to the kingdom but condemned when applied to sacramental efficacy.

Irenaeus’s own anti-Gnostic argument presses in the opposite direction. God’s salvation vindicates His creation. The Son truly entered history and assumed flesh. He physically suffered, bodily rose and will return in glory. The saints will be raised, and creation itself will participate in God’s redemptive purpose. The historic Christian hope is not escape from matter but its deliverance from corruption under the reign of Christ.

I cannot accept the claim that my hope in that concrete consummation makes me less catholic than those who spiritualised it.

Not a Churchless Faith

There are real evangelical failures that must be admitted.

Some Christians do treat the Church as a vendor of religious goods, leaving whenever their preferences are frustrated. Some confuse private interpretation with immunity from correction. Some prize theological information while neglecting love, holiness, patience and service. Some speak as though two thousand years of Christian thought contain nothing worth hearing. Others gather around gifted personalities with less accountability than the historic structures they condemn.

These are serious disorders. They deserve rebuke.

But they are not necessary consequences of sola Scriptura, believer’s baptism, a memorial understanding of the Lord’s Supper or premillennialism. Nor may every conscience-bound refusal of ecclesiastical claims be diagnosed as prideful individualism.

There is a great difference between saying, “I alone cannot be corrected,” and saying, “Every teacher and institution must remain correctable by the apostolic word.” The first enthrones the individual. The second places individual and bishop alike beneath Scripture.

My faith is not churchless. I need the gathered people of God. I need teachers, fellow believers, correction, encouragement, shared worship and the ordinary kindness through which the love of God becomes visible. I have known Christians unable to define justification with precision whose lives nevertheless radiated the truth they had received. I have also encountered that love across denominational lines, including in a Catholic woman whose extraordinary kindness to me in my first job remains vivid decades later. I cannot regard such people merely as representatives of competing systems. They are persons in whom I have seen something of Christ.

That makes division more painful, not less.

Standing at the Door

If Irenaeus stood at the entrance and asked whether I confessed the faith he said the churches had received from the apostles, I could answer yes.

I believe in the one God who made heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, truly incarnate for our salvation. I believe the prophetic Scriptures testify to Him. I believe He suffered, rose bodily, ascended in the flesh and will be manifested again from heaven in glory. I await the resurrection, His righteous judgment and the immortality He will confer by grace upon His people. I confess Jesus Christ as Lord, God, Saviour and King.

I would gladly make that ancient confession the basis of fellowship.

I would willingly submit to a bishop who held fast the faithful word. I would break bread with ordinary Christians who love the Lord. I would listen to the wisdom of the ancient Church and receive correction wherever Scripture exposes my error. I do not ask for a Christianity without history, authority, sacraments, discipline or community.

But I cannot purchase visible unity by speaking against conscience. I cannot call a later dogma apostolic merely because an institution eventually declared it so. I cannot surrender the historic hope of Christ’s kingdom because a later interpretive tradition displaced it. And I cannot treat submission to the Church as obedience to Christ when that submission requires me to affirm what I believe His apostles did not teach.

Perhaps this leaves me vulnerable to the charge of Protestant individualism. If so, I can only answer that my conscience is not autonomous. It is bound—bound to the word of God, answerable to evidence and open to correction, but unable to confess what it does not believe to be true.

I do not stand outside the historic Church because I feel no love for her. I stand there precisely because I recognise so much within her that is beautiful, ancient and true. I hear the Fathers confess the Creator, defend the incarnation, proclaim the resurrection and look for the coming King, and I recognise the faith I love.

Yet the door remains guarded by later requirements they did not place within that ancient rule of faith.

This is not the triumph of independence. It is the sorrow of separation.

I am not standing at the door because I refuse to enter. I am standing there because I cannot enter without leaving my conscience outside.

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