Getting it right. Regardless of Basil the Great’s concern about the potential dangers of neutrality in matters of faith, those three words—Getting It Right—when they are strung together in that order, are quite possibly the three most destructive words in human experience. Unquestionably, they are the most devastatingly destructive when they are used by religious people speaking of religious belief.
Getting it right matters terribly—as well it should—to godly people. The problem is that the pursuit of “getting it right” frequently turns godly people into ideological storm troopers, which also is entirely logical, since, as Basil knew, what is being sought and defended is the whole of one’s eternity, one’s well-being, one’s “rightness” with God and with the way things are. Most of us, in fact, who are faith-filled, involved, and thinking people accept the pursuit of rightness as more or less an imperative in human life—a kind of responsibility laid upon us by consciousness itself. The difficulties begin to arise when we feel compelled to codify what we have discerned into that amorphous and shape-shifting thing known as orthodoxy. The uber-difficulty is that, having determined what is orthodox, we then feel compelled to defend to the death what we have codified. Sic semper est, as the Romans would say. Thus always it is.
Orthodoxy was an elusive thing in the first dozen or so decades of the Christian movement. From whom and from where, after all, would it come? What we now call the New Testament and recognize as our canon was, in the beginning, nonexistent and, for several decades thereafter, unfixed. Those niggling questions about the Godhead that in a few years would become doctrinal issues were at first either unrecognized or else, having been recognized, were allowed to remain in flux. Yet even fairly early on, there was the stirring of a conviction that getting it right was important—very important, in fact. Hear the words of Peter to the early communities:
Like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For it stands in scripture: “See, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious; and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.” To you then who believe, he is precious; but for those who do not believe, “The stone that the builders rejected has become the very head of the corner,” and “A stone that makes them stumble, and a rock that makes them fall.” They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do. But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. (1 Pet. 2:5–9)
The early followers of Jesus were to form a “holy priesthood,” to offer “spiritual sacrifices,” to build around a “cornerstone,” and to be “God’s own people.” With such metaphors, the matter could not be any clearer, could it?
Of course it could. Those holy ideas had to have body and shape, definitions and specifics. Otherwise, who could possibly know whether he or she was accomplishing them correctly, whether he or she was getting it right?
It would take three centuries, more or less, for the beloved community to translate the almost poetic words of Peter’s apostolic letter into a set of normative, authoritative teachings that the Church could use as an acid test of what it meant to be Christian. And that statement—that codification—would come at a huge price.1
Christian orthodoxy may fairly be said to have begun in Jerusalem and, more or less, on the morning after Jesus’s death. As a kind of proto- or nescient orthodoxy, it resided solely in the hearts and minds of the disciples of Jesus during those first weeks and months. What did he say that day on the mountain? . . . in the boat? . . . outside of Lazarus’s house? They must have wondered these things among themselves and repeated their remembered answers over and over again to each other. Suddenly, the teachings of their rabbi had taken on an immense importance. Had anyone bothered to write them down?
And then, there was the beginning of that other problem, the one nobody could have foreseen at Calvary, but which was the result of their own enthusiasm, their own sureness that this Jesus was God, and Son of God, and Prince of a different and eternal kingdom. For the first twenty years or so, their beloved community—their close confederacy of Jesus-followers—was primarily, or perhaps exclusively, made up of Jews. Those who believed in the teachings and resurrection of Jesus, being Jews either by birth or by conversion, practiced Christianity within the embrace of their Judaism. It was, for them, as if the rituals and observances of Judaism had simply expanded to admit these more recent additions to its concepts and formalities. But things began to change.
Christianity seeped out into a larger world. It seeped in some places, but it was also carried into some other places with evangelizing ardor, albeit carefully and often surreptitiously. The inevitable consequence of the seepage and the proselytizing was that, within just a matter of two or three decades, Christianity fell into the hands and hearts of non-Jews. Jesus-worship became the religion of what some would call “pagans,” and the author of Acts referred to as theosebeis, “God-reverers” or “God-fearers.”2, 3 Christianity, ready or not, had become the totally embraced faith of goyim who had no truck with food laws and prohibitions, who had never seen a rabbi and did not particularly ever want to, and who most definitely had no interest in circumcision, either as a religious rite or otherwise.
It was apparent to all that Jerusalem had a problem, that the beloved community had a problem. Were these Gentiles, these pagans, really Christians or merely look-alikes and wannabes? Every evidence of genuine belief was there in their lives and their conduct. Even the Spirit seemed to be guiding them and revealing God to them and engaging them in the exact same ways that were happening in Jerusalem among the beloved community. Yet these non-Jewish believers were clearly not observing the whole sum of what the fathers and elders and apostles had understood as normative, as necessary, even. Was the uncircumcised brother really a brother? Could he possibly be? And, most poignant of all, if he were, then who is right? Which of us has heard God correctly, for we cannot both be right and maintain such contradictory stances, can we?
The issues grew, and with them the tensions of rightness among godly people, both Jewish and pagan. The result was what is now known as the Jerusalem Conference, though it hardly had so august a naming originally. What it had was much humbler than that. Originally, that is, it was simply a gathering of early Christian leaders from around the eastern Mediterranean world, coming together to meet in the epicenter of first-century Judaism. It was around the year 50 CE, and they had been called there by the Jerusalem community to determine one thing only: Did a Gentile have to become a Jew, through ritual circumcision and other adherences to the Law, in order to be a follower of Jesus? Or, put another way, to be a Christian, did one necessarily also have to live and practice as a Jew?4
The two pillars of the movement, Paul of Tarsus and that intimate disciple of Jesus, Simon Peter, debated this issue before the others who were assembled there. Today we have only two texts—both in the New Testament, and nothing else—depicting that moment in time. The first one to be published was Paul’s own account, retained now in Galatians, chap. 2. The second appeared some fifteen to twenty years later, written anonymously, and appears in the Acts of the Apostles, chap. 15.
In summary, what the Jerusalem Conference determined was that Gentiles were welcomed into the movement and were no longer required to undergo circumcision. They were, however, expected to follow many of the ethical and spiritual practices that set first-century Jews apart from their Roman counterparts. That is, they were instructed to spurn idol worship, steer clear of sexual immorality, and refrain from eating animal flesh still mixed with blood. In sum, though they did not have to go under the knife, they still had to listen to Moses.
In the years immediately following the Jerusalem Conference, the first followers of Jesus who had gathered there began, with greater intention than ever, to broadcast their Gospel. After 50 CE and Jerusalem, they were to spread themselves and their message throughout the Roman world within a matter of only a decade or two. Yet even as they traveled, settled, and resettled, they continued to have the theological and ecclesial chores of trying to create a language capable of conveying the fullness of their new rituals and celebrations, worship and beliefs. Among other things, the Christian way-of-being that was rapidly morphing out of first-century Judaism had to create a canon of its own, a body of Holy Scriptures, a fixity by which rightness in matters of belief and action could be determined.5
The process of discovery ground on for well over two centuries until, as we have already seen and as is the nature of such things, certain doctrinal issues became impossible to avoid. Even among those Jesus communities that strove to focus on practice over doctrine, the issues—and most especially the central, pivotal issues concerning the nature of Jesus’s being—could no longer be shoved under the communal rug. How does one, for example, explain that Jesus was fully God and fully man, all at once? How does one understand that Jesus is God despite the recorded fact that, as Arius so emphatically continued to point out, He seemed to defer, at times, to His Father in heaven? How, for that matter, does one explain or even conceive of three Gods in one? Their Jewish grandfathers and grandmothers in the Jesus way had never had these problems.
What those early Jewish forebears had had, however, was the Jerusalem Conference. Jerusalem had set, if not an arbitrary norm, then at least the only extant model of how to discuss issues correctly, especially potentially divisive ones. As we have seen, it was time now for the world’s Christian leaders to gather once again. The year was 325 CE, and their gathering at Nicaea would become known to later history as both the Council of Nicaea and the First Ecumenical Council of the Church. It was the “Ecumenical” part of that wording that would come to matter almost as much as the place name of Nicaea.
Notes
1. See, most notably, Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971), and Rowan Williams, “Does It Make Sense to Speak of Pre-Nicene Orthodoxy?” in The Making of Orthodoxy: Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick, ed. Rowan Williams (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
2. This should not be interpreted as meaning, as is so often assumed, that Christianity had come among the godless. It had not. In fact, things might have been easier or clearer had the so-called pagans been without prior religious beliefs and practice. It was, instead, the very presence of those operative beliefs and practices that offered the young Church a considerable number of obstacles. There is perhaps no better way to grasp this difficulty than to hear what Maximus of Tyre had to say on the issue of contemporary religious belief.
A second-century philosopher who was typical of his sophist colleagues in his very Greek and very Platonic view of the meaning of God and gods, Maximus left us this summary of the religious tenor of his times: “The one doctrine upon which all the world is united is that one God is king of all and father, and that there are many gods, sons of God, who rule together with God. This is believed by both the Greek and the barbarian” (Maximus of Tyre, Origen: Contra Celsum, trans. with an introduction and notes by Henry Chadwick [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980], xvii).
3. Should the reader wish to pursue the matter of theosebeis further and in its biblical context, the words of the Apostle Paul on the subject may be found in Acts 13:16 and 13:26. For a brief secondary source on the same topic, the reader may wish to see Diarmaid MacCulloch’s monumental Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), 99, or, for a more in-depth study, J. Brian Tucker’s “God-fearers: Literary Foil or Historical Reality in the Book of Acts?,” Journal of Biblical Studies 5, no. 1 (2005): 21–39.
4. Genesis 17:14 had clearly stated that only circumcised males could be God’s people.
5. Interestingly enough, both the Jewish and Christian canons were being formed almost simultaneously, as it were. The Torah, of course, had been long since set in stone, but Jews of the late second and early third centuries CE were still busy trying to establish which of the prophets and minor books were to be added to it as canonical Scripture. At about the same time, Christians were beginning their own exercise of discerning which Gospels were in, which letters were truly written by Paul, and what other documents were to be deemed inspired by the disciples of Christ or the communities that formed immediately around them.