How the Rest Was One

Spirituality Column #254
September 20, 2011
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

How the Rest Was One
By Bob Walters

One of the great big things largely missing from contemporary Christianity is a coherent understanding of church history.

And by church history, I don’t mean Vatican II, the Billy Graham Crusades, or the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution’s first amendment. I mean the years and decades immediately following Jesus Christ’s ministry, death and resurrection, followed by centuries of doctrinal and church development.

Why, or rather, how, did Christianity thrive in those early years when no modern understanding of popular faith can explain its survival? Jesus wasn’t especially well known. Christians were killed, oftentimes in horrible ways, for the crime of simply being Christian. Jewish scripture was not widely known outside of Judaism. There were no Bibles, and the New Testament was unwritten.

And yet, here were these spirit-filled Christians.

Pagan idols were manmade. The mythic gods provided stories but no consequential teaching. Roman law dictated worship of Caesar. Academics of the day relied on the Greek understanding of evidence and logical proof. Yet here were these Christians, worshipping the living Son of the Creator God incarnate among mankind, revealing the truth of God’s love for His creation, and dying to erase mankind’s sin. How do you explain that?

The thing is … you can’t explain it. What happened in those earliest years of Christianity was that eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus shared what they saw and heard, and in faith followed Christ as their Lord. There was evidence and proof in the hearts of the eyewitnesses, and by the power of the Holy Spirit those hearts continued in faith through the generations of mankind. The Spirit remains with us even now.

It’s not enough for today’s Christian to read the Bible’s Book of Acts (written by the Apostle Luke), memorize verse 2:42, and say, “OK, let’s sing some breezy modern worship songs, feel good about Jesus, and come back to church next week.”

The story of Christianity is magnificent, because Jesus Christ is magnificent.

Those early Christians understood the human heart’s hunger for something infinite, experienced man’s thirst for things that last (immortality), shared the human desire for life beyond death, and found the fulfillment of those truths in their joyous community of Christ, the early church, that’s now stretched forward 2,000 years.

Jesus, our rest, is eternal and infinite … but hard to explain. Knowing where the faith has been can build our hope in where our faith, as one body of believers, is going.

Walters, who knows Christianity is more about where we’re going than where we’ve been, nonetheless recommend’s Alister McGrath’s “Christian Theology” and Robert Wilken’s “The Spirit of Early Christian Thought.” Don’t just “look up” … look it up!