Was the Early Church Theologically Accurate?

John Piper is maybe the most revered teacher in the Reformed Protestant tradition. He's been a a pillar of the Protestant community for decades and his most famous book, Desiring God,  has sold millions of copies. Even as a Catholic I admire Piper's sharp intellect and his ravenous love for Scripture, both of which put mine to shame.

But with all of Piper's intelligence, prestige and gifting, I was shocked to see an article on his blog titled, Don't Equate 'Historically Early' with 'Theologically Accurate'.

In the article, he argues that we moderns, with our personal New Testaments, are more orthodox than those in the early Church.

Here's more from the post:

"Neither the experiences nor the teachers of the first 300 years of the church are as reliable as the finished New Testament. The church did not rescue the New Testament from neglect and abuse. The New Testament rescued the early church from instability and error.

We are in a better position today to know Jesus Christ than anyone who lived from AD 100 to 300."

Now before I go on, I want to again affirm that I don't mean to bash John Piper, just this idea that he's proposed to thousands of readers. Piper's a wise and holy man who is just making a silly suggestion. I make plenty of silly suggestions myself.

However, silly suggestions are still silly regardless of who proposes them. So what follows is a list of rebuttals not to John Piper but to his curious argument:

First, the Catholic Church authored, compiled, and transmitted the Bible. Every New Testament author was Catholic, along with every other Christian throughout the first 1,500 years after the Ascension. And the Catholic Church was the authority who decided which books actually made up the official collection of Scripture.

(For a fantastic book on this topic check out Henry Graham's Where We Got the Bible which you can read for free online.)

You can't reject the early Catholic Church without also rejecting the Bible we now have.

Consider a similar situation. In a courtroom, a witness's testimony is only as reliable as his character. If he is not trustworthy, then everything he says is irrelevant. In just the same way, the New Testament is only as reliable as the authority who put it together. If you don't trust the Church who compiled the New Testament, you can't trust the content of the New Testament itself.

Second, if you reject the "experiences and teachers" of the first 300 years of the Church, you essentially reject the New Testament. For the New Testament is, outside the Gospels, the "experience and teaching" of the early Church.

The book of Acts chronicles Paul, Peter, and the early Christians wrestling with the implications of Jesus' teachings. Most of the New Testament letters were written by "teachers" to first-century communities struggling through similar issues. So as a whole, the New Testament contains precisely the things Piper claims to reject.

Third, no book, including the Bible, can rescue anyone or anything from "instability and error." A book is dead--dead tress, in fact. It's inaudible, inanimate, and immovable. The Word of God as contained in Scripture needs to be accurately explained and understood for its power to come alive (see the story of the Ethiopan eunuch as an example.) The Bible always requires a person--and, as Catholics believe, a Church--to interpret and transmit it.

The early Christians were overwhelmed with instability and error primarily because of competing interpretations of Scripture. Like today, the New Testament alone couldn't solve their problems--in fact, in a weird way, it was the source of many disputes.

These first Christians needed someone to stand outside of Scripture and act as an arbiter, and as we see in Matthew and Acts, that person was Peter--the Pope, Christ's mouthpiece in the Church. The only force that prevented mass schism and separation was this God-ordained Church, the pillar and ground of truth (1 Tim. 3:15).

Now don't get me wrong. I don't want to idealize early Christians as having it all together. It's clear that the Church has grown, developed, and bloomed since her birth. But I do think in her infancy she had plenty of advantages over us moderns, most obviously her close proximity to the people and events of Jesus' life.

Piper, a fellow admirer of C.S. Lewis, should be wary of the "chronological snobbery" he so often discouraged. Just because we have twenty centuries more than early Christians doesn't mean we are more enlightened, more wise, more holy, more developed, or more orthodox. History doesn't always progress forward, socially or theologically.

In the end, though, the teachings and experiences of the early Church don't compete with Scripture anyways. They fit together like two wings on the same bird or two streams from the same fountain. Neither is better, but likewise neither should be rejected.


(In addition to the Graham book I mentioned above, I also recommend Cardinal John Henry Newman's classic An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. Newman deftly explains how the Church has grown, yet remained the same, comparing it to a great tree blooming from a tiny seed. You can find it the paperback on Amazon or read the eBook or online text for free.)