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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