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The Future Lies in the Past

Why evangelicals are connecting with the early church as they move into the 21st century.

Last spring, something was stirring under the white steeple of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College.

A motley group of young and clean-cut, goateed and pierced, white-haired and bespectacled filled the center's Barrows Auditorium. They joined their voices to sing of "the saints who nobly fought of old" and "mystic communion with those whose rest is won." A speaker walked an attentive crowd through prayers from the 5th-century Gelasian Sacramentary, recommending its forms as templates for worship in today's Protestant churches. Another speaker highlighted the pastoral strengths of the medieval fourfold hermeneutic. Yet another gleefully passed on the news that Liberty University had observed the liturgical season of Lent. The t-word—that old Protestant nemesis, tradition—echoed through the halls.

Just what was going on in this veritable shrine to pragmatic evangelistic methods and no-nonsense, back-to-the-Bible Protestant conservatism? Had Catholics taken over?

No, this was the 2007 Wheaton Theology Conference, whose theme was "The Ancient Faith for the Church's Future." Here, the words spoken 15 years ago by Drew University theologian and CT senior editor Thomas Oden rang true: "The sons and daughters of modernity are rediscovering the neglected beauty of classical Christian teaching. It is a moment of joy, of beholding anew what had been nearly forgotten, of hugging a lost child."

The conference's Call for Papers likewise rejoiced: "One of the most promising developments among evangelical Protestants is the recent 'discovery' of the rich biblical, spiritual, and theological treasures to be found within the early church." In particular, it said, evangelicals are beginning to "reach back behind the European Enlightenment for patterns and models of how to faithfully read Scripture, worship, and engage a religiously diverse culture."

Baylor University's D. H. Williams, author of Evangelicals and Tradition, testified at the conference to the recent upsurge of evangelical interest in patristics (the study of the church fathers in the first seven centuries of the church): "Who would have thought, a decade ago, that one of the most vibrant and serious fields of Christian study at the beginning of the 21st century would be the ancient church fathers? There has been an opening of new avenues, especially among free-church Protestants, by the almost overnight popularity of bishops and monks, martyrs and apologists, philosophers and historians who first fashioned a Christian culture 1,500 years ago."

This conference was certainly not the first of its kind; in fact, many evangelicals had been looking to the early church for guidance for years. But in some ways, the conference represented a coming of age for a worship renewal movement begun some 30 years before.

Surge Into the Past

If only the man behind the conference, the elder statesman of "ancient-future faith," could have been there to watch the excitement of young and old conferees alike. But Robert Webber of Northern Seminary (and formerly of Wheaton) could not be present. He was in the late stages of cancer. His chair at the conference banquet table was vacant, as colleagues stood to honor his influence on them personally and on the whole church. Weeks after the conference, evangelical Christianity lost its premier ambassador for reengagement with history.

In 1978, Webber had begun his groundbreaking Common Roots: A Call to Evangelical Maturity by throwing down the gauntlet: "My argument is that the era of the early church (A.D. 100–500), and particularly the second century, contains insights which evangelicals need to recover." Twenty-five years later, he could rejoice in the pages of his Younger Evangelicals that they "want to immerse themselves in the past and form a culture that is connected to the past, a culture that remembers its tradition as it moves into the future." Webber observed—with what we now know was not mere wishful thinking—that evangelicals had entered the new millennium by surging into the past.


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Comments

Displaying 1–3 of 17 comments

Wolf von dem Beck

February 10, 2008  1:45am

excellent !

David Armstrong

February 09, 2008  5:27pm

I enjoyed your article. An an evangelical, I grew up with no knowledge of Church history before the reformation, almost as if that was when the Church began. I then fell in love with a Roman catholic girl who I thought I would be able to "educate" about the real faith. It was too my great surprise, not only was she evangelical, but she introduced me to a great body of Christian thought going back to the early church fathers which had been neglected or written off. It has been a major catalyst of growth in my Christian life, rooting my faith in historical origins and giving much expanding insight into scripture, and will be a powerful renewing movement in the evangelical church if we too can leave behind our pre-conceiving notions of pre-reformation Christian faith. Well done on the article.

Ephrem Hagos

February 09, 2008  6:25am

How long is it going to take us before we start right at the beginning? The only way out of the evangelical identity crisis we are facing is to reconstruct backwards the strategies of evangelism as taught and put in place for posterity by the LORD Himself. A natural place to start is at the corner- stone of Paul's ministry to the Gentiles, back to the first Pentecost and the 40-day rehearsal after the death of Jesus. All point to a single common platform for evangelism, viz.: the crucifixion and death of Jesus Christ per se as the greatest "defining moment" of divinity in all power and glory for all times. The complete absence of this currency today explains the series of crisis which evangelical Christians are facing. Continued reconstruction with new insight takes us back to the summary chapters of the Gospels, and to the Great Day of the LORD on the cross with works that continue to witness loud and clear in the light of all the teachings of the LORD. This is discipleship training!

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