restless reformer

Update II:  This is why I read iMonk.

Update: On a related note, friend, co-worker, fellow blogger and published author Wyman Richardson is starting a series on Patristic Summaries. You’ll want to pay attention to this.

I get really weary of every new round of this: “By the second century, paganism had infiltrated the church and corrupted it beyond what Jesus meant it to be. Now it’s time to get back to the New Testament Church.” I grew up with the mentality that the church went apostate by the second century, and only a persecuted remnant survived until the Baptists came along.

Tom Oden’s Paleo-orthodoxy saved me from that nonsense (and simultaneously from Cage-Stage Calvinism).

Trevin Wax has written an excellent summary of the problems with this kind of thinking by reviewing Viola and Barna’s new book, Pagan Christianity. This is excellent commentary by Wax.

I don’t know how anyone can see the first century church as anything other than a great big beautiful mess. To idealize it as the purest expression of the Christian faith before the pagans co-opted it for the next 19 centuries just baffles me.