Category: Early Christianity

Tradition and Disruption by David Bentley Hart

Apocalypse, not dogma, is Christianity’s grounds for hope.

Once upon a time, Christianity grew and endured and even flourished over the course of many generations in total and blissful ignorance of any officially defined dogma, any single universally recognized canon of scripture, anything remotely like the systematic or dogmatic theologies of the coming ages of Christendom and after. I would add that, for most of that time, there was no single church hierarchy, and that the apostolic lines of succession preserved in later official chronicles were products partly of what one might call retroactive genealogy and partly of what one has to call pious misrepresentations; but we may leave that argument for another time. The point to make here is that, for the first several generations of Christians, anything so precise as a doctrinal symbol authorized by an episcopal council would have been either a curious superfluity of or ponderous encumbrance upon the faith. There had been divisions among Christians even in the apostolic era; the New Testament bears plenteous witness to this reality – so much so that the reader can easily get the impression that division was far more common than unity among the early Christian communities. But the principal reason that so many confessional and theological differences of such enormous consequence, on matters so basic to the faith, came to light within the church of the empire only well into the fourth century is that Christian faith and Christian hope had long been sustained by something quite different from official confessional unanimity. The differences had always been there, and in many respects were more or less as old as the faith itself; but for most of the time they were scarcely noticed, since the guiding concern of most Christians was not some perennial wisdom or immemorial doctrine handed down from the past, but rather the rapid approach of the Kingdom of God, the Age to Come, and the final advent of Christ as Lord of all things. Apocalyptic expectation – an eager certainty of the imminence of the full and final revelation of God’s truth in a restored and glorified cosmos – and not dogmatic purity was the very essence of faithfulness to the Gospel.

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Western (American) Evangelicalism

I am frequently tempted to describe it as a kind of “Christian Bhakti,” a pure ecstatic devotionalism, as opposed to those more “Vedic” forms of Christianity that ground themselves in ancient traditions. Much of American Evangelicalism not only lacks any sense of tradition, but is blithely hostile to tradition on principle: What is tradition, after all, other than man-made history, and what is history other than exile from paradise? What need does one have of tradition when one has the Bible, that eternal love letter from Jesus to the soul, inerrant, unambiguous, uncorrupted by the vicissitudes of human affairs? In some of its most extreme forms, Evangelicalism is a religion of total and unsullied reverie, the pure present of the child’s world, where ingenuous outcries and happy gestures and urgent conjurations instantly bring forth succor and substance. And, at its most intensely fundamentalist, so precipitous is its flight from the gravity of history into Edenic and eschatological rapture that it reduces all of cosmic history to a few thousand years of terrestrial existence and the whole of the present to a collection of signs urgently pointing to the world’s imminent ending.

David Bentley Hart, Source: David Bentley Hart on American Religion