In academic circles, it is nowadays unnecessary to prove that the teachings of the Christian churches have a history, that the doctrines of the trinity, of the union of two natures in the incarnate Christ, of the fall and the atonement, of the real presence in the sacrament and of the church itself as the body of Christ were not communicated as a system to the apostles, even by the risen Jesus.
Again it is unnecessary to demonstrate that the growth is in part the result of the incubation of the gospel in a particular environment,1 and not merely the unfolding of an embryonic pattern according to some instinctive or organic principle.
Indeed the prevailing notion seems to be that there was at first no line in the development of doctrine, that for three centuries a plethora of antipathetic tenets and speculations fought to maintain themselves until at last the world proved hospitable only to one variety.
We might say that a teleological theory of evolution has been succeeded by a darwinian one, except that the discriminating forces in the evolution of Christian doctrine are generally supposed to have been adventitious rather than endemic.
In recent years the narrative has been modified to suggest that the multiplication of ‘Christianities’ was accelerated rather than arrested by the Council of nicaea in 325, which is often supposed to have inaugurated the process of unnatural selection which has left us with orthodoxy.
Yet since the majority of these experiments too are assumed to have been abortive, the prevailing story is still one that recounts the destruction of a superfluous harvest, a constrained or guided dwindling from the many to the one.
It is not my object in the present study to deny that the norms of Christian thought, as these have been understood by many since the mid-fifth century, are a product of disparate forces, most (to a human eye) contingent, some extrinsic and none perhaps entirely consistent in its operation.
I do wish to suggest that the concept of orthodoxy is part of the deposit, that so long as a gospel has been proclaimed it has always been accompanied by harangues against false professors. at the same time, i contend that, while there was evidently some difference of belief and much diversity in the expression of belief, there was no unregulated ferment of opinion such as is posited by those who speak of different and competing Christianities.
The episkopoi or overseers,2 who were formidable guardians of a norm which they believed to be that of Paul and the evangelists, were intolerant of locutions or conceits that were not of apostolic provenance; consequently they saw only a polar antitype to the gospel in other systems which, more liberally construed, would 1 For temperate appraisals of the influence of philosophy see Studer (1998), 170–94; ramelli (2007), 959–1092. 2 see Philippians 1.1 and küng (1968), 399–400. 2 Catholicity and Heresy in the Early Church have been discovered to be largely coextensive with their own.
But systems which are mutually reducible are unlikely to remain mutually immiscible. the Gnostics and their dark twins the monarchians answered questions which could not fail to be questions for the episcopate: their premises were frequently alluring, their difficulties unavoidable.
It is not surprising, then, that while episcopal theology owed its shape to the exigencies of polemic, it derived its substance from a common patrimony that olympus, in short, defended itself with thunderbolts forged by titans.
In africa and egypt minor clerics or lay satellites of the episcopate made free use of foreign arsenals, and in consequence were more vulnerable than the bishops themselves to the imputation of heresy in their own time.
Yet, deviants and schismatics, though they remain to this day in the eyes of magisterium, are also numbered informally among the church fathers because it was their husbandry that assisted the germination of a new orthodoxy after the nicene Council of 325.
It was fear of the errors that seemed to be still implicit in this inheritance that led others to propose alternatives to the nicene formula.
In many cases, the only result of strife between sees was a hardening of contradictory dogmas; the peace that was concluded at last, however, represented not the ascendancy of a single school, but a confluence of several, including some that, to all appearance, had been abandoned or exploded before the council of 325.
It was not so much by attrition as by ingestion that a creed matured which deserved the appellation ‘catholic’. of the seven tests proposed by J.h. newman as ‘notes’ or indices of true development rather than corruption,3 he himself attached most consequence to preservation of type and continuity of principle.
Neither is satisfactory, since there is no early Christian movement which is demonstrably unfaithful to the type laid down by Jesus, and there is no hermeneutic or philosophic principle which yielded only heterodox logomachies without enlarging the catholic proclamation.
The test which new man should have accentuated as a ‘note’ of catholicity is the power of assimilation, which extends, as i shall hope to prove in the present book, to the assimilation of teachings which to new man himself seemed aberrant and unworthy of the name ‘Christian’.
In this introduction, I shall first explain what I understand by ‘orthodoxy’ in the early church, and then give a brief synopsis of the evidence that i shall adduce to illustrate the workings of the ecclesiastical loom.
