What I Have Learned:
An Account of My Explorations and Ruminations
About the New Testament Church
In the midst of my struggle with the contradictions in my heritage churches and the immorality and heresy I was witnessing firsthand in the Episcopal Church, I became acquainted in a meaningful way with the Orthodox Church. My first instinct was to "run for Antioch." But clearly it was not something about which I had seriously thought. I viewed it in terms of the same Protestant understandings I’d carried all my life: does this particular denomination conform to the apostles’ teachings? If so, then, if I preferred its worship style and overall spiritual life, I could become part of its fellowship.
It was quickly apparent, however, that choosing a church on the basis of preference was little more than transferring a godless consumerist mindset into the realm of church attendance. Furthermore, attempting to persuade my wife to follow me into a very different and therefore uncomfortable church setting, because "I liked it better," was hardly a very solid basis on which to found a household’s unity in the faith.
Furthermore, the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church are not Protestant. If I were to seriously consider joining one of these churches, I could not legitimately do so within a Protestant framework. I had, instead, to take them seriously on their own terms. I might reject those terms in the end, but to force them into a Protestant mold was to distort them into something they were not. I would be encountering an illusion, not the reality.
It was then that I realized I had not taken seriously enough my own search for the New Testament Church. It had been, albeit it naively so, an exercise in finding a church which met my own conceptions of what the New Testament Church was. So even more importantly than taking any non-Protestant church on its own terms, I had to take the New Testament Church on its own terms, and not, as much as I could consciously help it, take it on Protestant terms.
So, to try to, as my heritage churches describe it, "get back to the New Testament Church," I had to identify as clearly as I could what my Protestant convictions were, and illustrate the large problems some of those convictions inevitably created. Having identified those convictions and problems, I could see more clearly what it was the New Testament was saying.
Though there are many important issues to understand when it comes to the essential reality of the Church and her life and service, coming from my own personal history, I had four areas I needed to have settled in my thinking. Because of the contradictions in Protestant teaching, yet those contradictions supposedly having derived from the apostolic writings, I had to understand what the New Testament taught about tradition and its place in the doctrinal life of the Church. I needed to come to grips with the role of the bishop, since it is a ministry which obtains in more than half of all Christian churches around the world, and played a role in the life of the Church from the earliest centuries till the Protestant Reformation. Similarly, because the historical teachings of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, not to mention significant strains of teaching in the Anglican churches, were far different than the Protestant understanding, and because of the intimate connection of the Eucharist and worship, I also needed to understand the Eucharist and its reality. But the most important issue of all, and the one which has taken me the longest to come to grips with, is the nature of the unity of the Church. Is unity an invisible spiritual reality which transcends division? Or is unity something that runs so deep that the visible incarnate reality is the same unity as the invisible spiritual reality?
The answers to these questions are so fundamental, that without them, my search has not been able to, indeed could not, progress.
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Here read the essay The Implications of Contradictions
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Here read the essay The Unity of the Church and the Protestant Problem
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Here read the essay The Necessity of Tradition
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Here read the essay The Antiquity of Bishops
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Here read the essay The Reality of the Lord's Supper
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Here read the essay The Church Is One and Visible
Here read the continuation of the preceding essay The Church: The Body of Christ and Our Being
Here read the continuation of the preceding two essays Where is the Church?
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There is a degree to which these issues are idiosyncratic and relative to my own Christian journey. Other Christians coming from other backgrounds would have a different arrangement, perhaps, though possible some significant similarities.
The conclusions and implications, however, are not merely personal, or relative to my own experience. They are, if I may so boldly dare to assert, universal. All Protestants, at least, will eventually come to the same questions and implications, though their journeys may begin differently. It may not quite be a similar reality to the expression "All roads lead to Rome," but certainly for Protestants, all roads will trace themselves to these implications. The New Testament Church adheres to the Tradition of the Apostles, which has been safeguarded by the Church and conforms with the Scriptural witness. The New Testament Church is served and led by bishops. The New Testament Church believes and lives the reality that the bread and wine of the Eucharist participate by the prayers of the faithful in the reality of the Incarnation, becoming the body and blood of the Lord. And underlying all of this is the reality that the New Testament Church is a visible and spiritual unity grounded on the historic and traceable apostolic ministry and adhering to the teachings of the Apostles.
My studies of the New Testament and the earliest Christians writings cannot by themselves answer the question with which I ended the foregoing essay on unity: Where is that Church? But at last I now have a map to follow.
"The Pilgrim Essays" (continued):
Part II: Starting from Cane Ridge
Part III: The Road to Canterbury
© 2002 Clifton D. Healy