One reason I became Anglican

Orthodox Converts, usually still in the cage stage, are fond of saying that their church was founded in 33 AD.

I both love and hate cage stage Orthodox. They’re like children learning how to walk for the first time, convinced they can run. They’re super annoying and endearing at the same time.

But my favorite rejoinder to the whole founded in AD 33 thing is “you mean like every other form of Christianity?”

I’m not aware of a serious form of Christianity (form meaning denomination here) that thinks it’s new (except maybe Quakers). Even Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses think their faith is in some sense ancient. Every version of Christianity thinks it’s the OG (as the sigma simpin kids say). That doesn’t mean everyone is equally correct about that. The great scholar FF Bruce was Brethren, which traditionally didn’t even have paid pastors or staff, doesn’t get any lower church than that. Bruce knew an awful lot about early Christianity, aka the New Testament, and once he was commenting on what contemporary church the Apostle Peter would be most comfortable in. Bruce didn’t quibble, he said something to the equivalent of if the choice was between a Roman Catholic Church and a Brethren church Peter would’ve certainly felt more at home in the Papist church.

That’s a big admission for someone like Bruce to make. But it’s almost certainly true. Post Vatican 2 Papalism is literally removed from Peter (well historically removed anyway, apparently part of the whole point of the keys being given to Peter according to the Papists is that his ghost would essentially still occupy and assist the current office holder, in other words in some sense Peter is still Pope albeit as a force ghost) by nearly two millennium but it looks more like what a first century Jew and convert to the Way would’ve recognized as religion, and as a religion they were relatively comfortable with. But it’s kind of like asking if George Washington would be a democrat or republican in contemporary America, obviously he’d think both were a horrifying departure from the American political tradition he helped create, but he’d definitely be more on the side of the GOP than the DNC. Basically any American from the past would be in the same situation.

All forms of religion have changed, all forms of Christianity have changed. There’s no way around it. In the first century Christians were often Jews, prayed communally three times a day, fasted twice a week, and didn’t venerate images. 700 years later an ecumenical church council argued that not participating in cultic veneration of images meant that you had denied the incarnation and were worthy of hell, or something along those lines. Cultic use of images has been common in Christianity for thousands of years at this point, same for invoking saints. But in the beginning it was difficult to justify praying directly to Jesus. The east can claim less change than the west, but not nearly as much as cage stagers believe. Peter transported to Constantinople 500 years after his death would have seen a Christianity very different from the one he knew. And after the fall of the Byzantine empire there are more changes that happen in the East. But even with all those changes I still think Bruce was right, because change can happen within a tradition and it still be the same tradition and continuum.

The church of AD 33 is gone and there’s no way to reclaim her, and I’ve never felt like anything in Scripture or the best of Christian tradition really indicates that we must. But by finally publicly becoming Anglican I finally feel connected to AD 33 in a real way. Not because I think it’s really all that similar, on the whole it’s not. But because we are connected to the Apostles through the passing on and continuation of the tradition, and we are fully aware that part of why we have a prayer book and a liturgy and a way of life is because the ways of the church need to be passed on. They’re passed on in a living way and that means change. I think Joachim Jeremias is the one who argued that the reason Luke and Matthew have different forms of the Lord’s Prayer is because that prayer was being prayed in the early church. Prayer changes things and prayers get changed in their praying, and that makes the church alive. The most biblical form, the most OG form, of trinitarian prayer is to the Father, through the Son, by the Holy Spirit. When the Arians came along we changed it to remove the possible ambiguity of that formula. Tradition means change not stagnation.

The big traditions of Christianity all seem to get this to some degree, that’s why the cage stage Calvinist and the cage stage Orthodox have so much in common. They are on the fringes of their tradition longing to be in the center, looking for simplicity and dogma within what is really tradition and culture. But you can’t get to the center quickly, it takes time, you have to become different to get to the heart of the faith.

One of my favorite Lewis quotes comes from a letter he wrote to a Catholic convert:

It is a little difficult to explain how I feel that though you have taken a way which is not for me, I nevertheless can congratulate you – I suppose because of your faith and joy which are so obviously increased. Naturally, I do not draw from that the same conclusions as you – but there is no need for us to start a controversial correspondence! I believe we are very dear to one another but not because I am at all on the Rome-ward frontier of my own communion. I believe that in the present divided state of Christendom, those who are at the heart of each division are all closer to one another than those who are at the fringes.”

I think older forms of free church Christianity had this to a much greater degree than contemporary Southern Baptist or non denominational churches, which mostly function as Baptist churches. The Anabaptists in particular had a rich form of public liturgy, even if it looked nothing like the BCP. But as tradition has become so looked down upon within these modern denominations, in large part due to misunderstandings of Sola Scriptura, they have broken from the great tradition. At least that’s the way it seems to me. I couldn’t be Baptist anymore in public and Anglican in private, I needed to know that when I went to worship God I was connecting to something that saw itself in continuum not in disconnection. I could be wrong but I don’t think Anglicanism has ever understood itself to be created by Henry VIII, just as Lutheranism doesn’t see itself as doing anything truly new. The reformations were schisms of course, and new things were being done but we don’t think a new church was made, just new chapters in an ongoing story.

My favorite orthodox joke goes like this:

How many orthodox priests does it take to change a light bulb?

I don’t know, how many orthodox priests does it take to change a lightbulb?

Change?

Always gets a good laugh.

Or another way to do the punchline: what’s a light bulb?

I think the way we tell our story in the west is a bit more honest, and it’s really only cage stagers who are looking for the changeless church of AD 33 anyway. But conversely the low church men of today who think they’re also doing the bare minimum that the early church did are clearly wrong and are part of the disenchantment of the Christian imagination. Ask them to anoint you with oil and see if they even know James commends elders to do this for the sick. The low church isn’t more biblical, oftentimes it’s less biblical and more reactionary. And I think that type of reactionary disenchantment has led to conspiratorial and anti scientific thinking (more on that in a future post).

It seems like what we really need to do, what I certainly need, is a stream of Christianity to swim in. The constant attempts of low church preachers to recreate the environment of the first century through their teaching is incredibly stifling and smacks of serious distrust in God’s work in history. Joining a tradition of Christianity is liberating because it breaks free of the constant cycle of return to the New Testament.

We should always be returning to scripture of course, but within a tradition not outside of one with an attempted view from nowhere. If the low church survives the next hundred years it will be because they embrace their tradition, which has more richness than they realize, and also of course because the Holy Spirit sustains those streams of Christianity. Tradition brings life and connection, it can’t be escaped and should be embraced. That’s ultimately the tradition the New Testament presents us with anyway, a living and active one that continues to this day.