Ante-Nicene Ressourcement: Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something True

Last updated on: September 26, 2016 at 4:03 am by Henry Karlson

Ante-Nicene Ressourcement: Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something True 2016-09-26T04:03:53-05:00 Henry Karlson

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One of the reasons many of us turn to the Ante-Nicene Fathers is that we want to learn what Christians believed and taught since the beginning of Christian history. Over time, it is easy to forget or neglect what they understood, and yet, since the transmission of the faith came to us through them, it is important for us to look to what they said and preached to make sure our faith lines up with theirs. This is not to say we must expect our presentation of the faith will be the same, that the interests and concerns we express in our theologizing will be the same as the Ante-Nicenes, because it will not be. We should expect change in such accidents. But our faith should have its foundations in the way the earliest Christians understood and taught their faith. And since over time the Holy Spirit has guided the Church to grow in understanding (cf. Jn. 16:13-15), it should not be surprising that we will have nuances and dogmatic definitions which the early Christians did not explicitly state, but they should at least be complementary to the basic intuitions and beliefs of the earliest Christians. Christian history is the realization in time of what was revealed in the revelation of Jesus Christ, with theology being one of the means that the interior contours of that revelation are made explicit. Due to the nature of the context in which the Ante-Nicene Fathers wrote, they serve as the foundation of this theological project. They wrote with a freshness that many of us do not have in regards the faith and yet also without all the explicit explanations which we now have with us, so in and through them, we are given a representation of the faith which is quite different from the way we have become used to seeing it discussed, giving us a way to re-examine the issues which have developed over the years and consider other avenues or ways we can express them through notions implicit in the earliest forms of theology which have otherwise been ignored.

When looking to the writings of the Ante-Nicene Fathers, we can find irony in the fact that one of the significant questions which was asked to Christians are now asked by Christians to people of other faiths. That question is simple: how can a new, innovative faith be taken seriously? Indeed, another part of the irony is that for Christians today, we are followers of an old faith looking to the Ante-Nicene times to demonstrate the veracity of our faith because of how old and ancient our teachings can be said to be. But when we look back to the Ante-Nicene Fathers, they give support to the value of looking to what is newly stated, so that people could look to what they, a new faith, full of vigor and grace, had to offer.

For us to explore and therefore develop our understanding of the faith by engaging the Ante-Nicene Fathers it might seem as if we are trying to put new wine in old wine skins – that is, as if we are just trying to reconstruct the past and bring it forward to the present, hoping that by doing so, we will have the lively, youthful spirit of the past brought back to us. We cannot recreate the past; we cannot put on the guise of ancient Christians, speaking and talking like them, because the distance in time has brought with it radical changes in us, in our knowledge of the world, and with it, the way we live and act in the world. The past is dead, and we cannot recreate it; if we try to live exactly as Christians did in the past, the world will have no interest in what we have to off.

Nonetheless, we cannot just dismiss the past and ignore it either. We come to the past, seeing the Christian faith is now ancient, but what remains the same, what brings us together with the past itself, is the eternity of truth in God. The shape and form of the presentation of the truth will change over time, giving different complementary presentations of the truth. What was seen and appreciated in the past will give us insight to the truth, but we must not think such theological archeology is all we will need to do to answer our own questions about the truth.

The way Christians were perceived by the ancients as representing a new and questionable faith offered Christians a way to engage the question of truth which pointed out that the notion of how long something was believed to be true does not make it true or false: the truth is truth, no matter when the truth has become known. This insight is an important one for the sake of the development of Christian doctrine: when someone asks “where in the past is such a belief explicitly stated,” that question is usually asked in order to imply that a new belief or practice, by not being explicitly found in the past, must be rejected. But we must say that if it can be shown to be true, it is true, no matter when the truth is discerned. Arnobius, an apologist who flourished at the end of the third century and died sometime in the early fourth century, gave to us an important exposition on this concern:

But our rites are new; yours are ancient, and of excessive antiquity, we are told. And what help does that give you, or how does it damage our cause and argument? The belief which we hold is new; some day even it, too, will become old: yours is old; but when it arose, it was new and unheard of. The credibility of a religion, however, must not be determined by its age, but by its divinity; and you should consider not when, but what you began to worship.[1]

All faiths have a time in which they are seen as new or innovative; Christians in the first few centuries of the Christian era routinely expressed the way in which the Christian faith, though seen as new, presents the eternal truth, while other rites and practices, which had become old, once were themselves new. If what we seek is only what is ancient, then each existing religion will find that there was an older now extinct faith which preceded them. This means each existing religion would have to be dismissed, until at last, we end up dismissing all known religions while believing that the true religious faith has become lost in time. This is why our concern should not be for how ancient the faith is, but what truth it reveals. The implications of this for the development of Christian theology is what we said above: even if we find later generations express the truths of the Christian faith in a more concrete form, defining dogmas which were implicit in the past, this does not mean we should dismiss them if they were not so precisely stated in the past. It is not whether or not the teachings are ancient which is the concern but whether or not they are true; and if we can find they are the proper outcome what had previously been proclaimed and accepted, then the fact that it was expressed in a concrete form later does not undermine its validity. What we must be concerned with is whether not our proclamation is true, not when it can be established it was declared.

And so Arnobius pointed out that pagans who reviled Christianity for its supposed novelties would have to revile their own faiths:

Now as this is the case, when you talk of the novelty of our religion, does your own not come into your thoughts, and do you not take care to examine when your gods sprung up—what origins, what causes they have, or from what stocks they have burst forth and sprung? But how shameful how shameless it is to censure that in another which you see that you do yourself—to take occasion to revile and accuse others for things which can be retorted upon you in turn![2]

This, once again, can also be brought back into discussions on the development of Christian doctrine. Those who revile the development of doctrine should note that their own criticism can and will be taken back against themselves; for no thriving tradition has come to us without said development. All Christian traditions have changed over time. The key is to find what is in accord with the ancient revelation of Christ, and not to find a way to repeat today the earliest ways this revelation was lived out (for that is impossible; we should let the dead bury the dead). To reengage the past, to find the continuity of the faith, is important – but as time brings changes, there will always be novelties which develop. Whether or not they are good and true should be the concern.

[1] Arnobius, Against the Heathen in ANF(6): 461.

[2] Arnobius, Against the Heathen, 461.

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