Why bother with Orthodoxy?

Why bother with orthodoxy?

The major assumption behind Dan Brown’s best-seller, The Da Vinci Code, was that there were rival forms of Christianity in the earliest Christian centuries and these expressions of Christianity were all equally valid until one particular form (the one that insisted on the deity of Jesus) became triumphant due to the political power of the emperor Constantine in the fourth century.  Whilst Dan Brown’s novel reconstruction has been rightly dismissed as fiction, nevertheless, it is true that there were many different groups in these centuries who were claiming to be Christian, but whose teachings were far from the teachings of the Apostles and the New Testament.  According to Gerald Bray in his book, Creeds, Councils and Christ (IVP, 1984, page 96), creeds therefore arose in response to a pastoral need to define the faith in a memorable summary fashion in an age of theological confusion.  

                 Though the Apostles’ Creed in the form that we now have it dates from about the fifth century, its origins go back much further, namely to the second century in Rome, where a version of it was used to question baptismal candidates on their faith.  According to the Apostolic Traditions of Hippolytus, who was a presbyter in Rome around the early 200’s, candidates were questioned on their belief in God using words that form a large part of what came to be known later as the Apostles’ Creed.  Even before this, in response to the heresy of Gnosticism, particularly those of Valentinus and Marcion, who were active in Rome in the mid-second century, Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyon gave a summary of Christian doctrine in words substantially similar to those of the Apostles’ Creed (Against Heresies, circa 180 AD).  This ‘rule of faith’ was a summary of apostolic teaching in the New Testament and came to be very important apologetic and evangelistic tool, as well as a means of confirming young believers in their faith, as new believers would have been instructed in the doctrines of the creed before baptism.  Some scholars think that the Trinitarian shape of the creed originated in the Trinitarian baptismal formula of Matthew 28:19, which then became expanded to express the details of the Christian faith as it faced competition from Gnosticism and other heresies.     

      

       Certainly, the appearance of the Nicene Creed arose from a need to combat the heresy of Arianism, which in the fourth century threatened the very existence of orthodox or catholic Christianity.  About 311 AD, Arius, a presbyter in the Church in Alexandria, Egypt, put forward the view that Christ was created by the Father and therefore not fully God.  His teaching spread through the church so much that the new emperor, Constantine, called for a church council in Nicea in 325, where the bishops from the East and West rejected his teaching.  However the dispute about the full deity of Christ was not finally over until the Council of Constantinople in 381.  During this whole period from Nicea to Constantinople, Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria personally exemplified the struggle for the survival of orthodox Christianity.  Exiled a number of times from Alexandria during those periods when Arianism seemed in the ascendancy, he maintained a strong orthodox witness chiefly through his writings, which upheld the apostolic doctrines concerning Christ and his divinity.  He illustrated the fact that for the early Christians, right belief or adherence to the teachings of the New Testament, was quite literally a life and death struggle.       

          The reason that Athanasius and others before him, like Irenaeus, struggled in the case of orthodoxy was because they believed the teachings of the New Testament to be the truth.  After all, it is Jesus, in John’s Gospel, who tells us very clearly that he has the words of eternal life, is the Truth (John 14:6), and that the truth sets men and women free.   False teaching or distortions of New Testament teaching don’t set anyone free from their sins and leave men and women still in their sins.  When Paul tells Timothy to remain in Ephesus in 1 Timothy 1:3 to stop false teaching spreading, it is so that the true Gospel can bring all people to salvation (1 Timothy 2:3, 4).  God wants all people to come to a knowledge of the truth, and that means that any distortion of his revealed truth has serious consequences for the spiritual welfare of others.  Therefore, the development of the creeds was a useful tool for advancing the Christian faith by instruction of new converts and defence from false teaching.     

            If right belief was important then for the spiritual welfare of men and women, it is certainly still important now in our generation.  Whilst living in a vastly different age in terms of technological advance and scientific knowledge, our age is as spiritually pluralistic as those first few Christian centuries.  We live in a society where religious ideas are considered a matter of personal opinion and where claims to religious truth are dismissed.  Within Christianity, this prevailing spirit of the age has led to the emergence of various forms of teaching that leave many people confused about what constitutes true belief in Christ.  In short, it is an age of theological confusion and once again real, biblical Christianity needs to be visible and identifiable for the sake of the spiritual welfare of others.  Hence, we need to insist on right belief, on sincere adherence to the creeds and their apostolic doctrines.   

      

          In conclusion, the major success of  The Da Vinci Code has highlighted not only public fascination with Jesus, but also the almost universal ignorance and confusion about who the real Jesus is and what the real Gospel is.  Jesus is the truth and his Gospel proclaims the truth about God and mankind.  The creeds summarize the main points of New Testament teaching and play their part still in preserving and promoting the Gospel.  The church needs them just as much now as it did in those first centuries, not only to distinguish true Christianity from its many false imitators, but also for a clear concise summary of Christian belief to a world in need of Christ, the Saviour.