Twenty texts for twenty centuries

Suppose you knew someone who wanted to read broadly in the Christian tradition. Specifically, this someone requested twenty Christian texts—no more, no less—one from each century of the church’s existence (present century excluded).

What would you assign? Who would be on your list?

For the purposes of this hypothetical, the texts are not supposed to be “the best” or the most influential or the most significant or what have you. Nor need they represent the full gamut or spectrum of Christian faith, doctrine, practice, and liturgy—as if that were possible.

At the same time, while the someone in question is a sharp reader, they are an Anglophone normie, not a polyglot scholar. You’re not, for example, going to assign the Summa Theologiae of Saint Thomas. You’re aiming for reasonably accessible texts by great Christian writers that, together, offer a snapshot of what it means to be Christian; what it means to live as a Christian; what it means to believe as a Christian; and so on.

You could tweak the rules as you please. These are my rules. Here are my answers.

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First century: The Gospel According to Saint John.

Second century: Saint Ignatius of Antioch, Letters.

Third century: Origen, An Exhortation to Martyrdom.

Fourth century: Saint Athanasius, On the Incarnation.

Fifth century: Saint Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ.

Sixth century: Pope Saint Gregory the Great, Homilies on the Gospels.

Seventh century: Saint Maximus Confessor, The Lord’s Prayer.

Eighth century: Saint John of Damascus, Exposition of the Orthodox Faith.

Ninth century: St. Theodore the Studite, On the Holy Icons.

Tenth century: Saint Gregory of Narek, Festal Works.

Eleventh century: Saint Anselm, Cur Deus Homo?

Twelfth century: Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God.

Thirteenth century: Saint Bonaventure, Journey of the Mind Into God.

Fourteenth century: Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love.

Fifteenth century: Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ.

Sixteenth century: John Calvin, Book II of Institution of Christian Religion.

Seventeenth century: Saint Francis de Sales, An Introduction to the Devout Life.

Eighteenth century: Jonathan Edwards, Charity and Its Fruits.

Nineteenth century: Saint Thérèse of Liseux, Story of a Soul.

Twentieth century: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship.

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I will confess, I almost trolled the Prots by leaving out Calvin, Edwards, and Bonhoeffer for Saint Teresa, Saint Alphonsus Liguori, and Simone Weil. That would still be a good list! But I had to be honest. I also somewhat cheated with Julian, whose visions and writing spanned the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Were she to be moved ahead, I would remove Kempis and add Dante or Saint Catherine.

It goes without saying that, for most centuries—though curiously not for all, at least from my vantage point—you could choose a dozen or more texts. It hurts not to include Saint Augustine; but then, neither are there any Cappadocians. The fourth and fifth centuries are rich beyond compare.

It’s clear what I’m prioritizing here: brevity, clarity, piety, devotion, faith, love, prayer, discipleship. With, granted, an emphasis on the person and work of Christ. I also wanted a relative balance between East and West, Greek and Latin. It seems to me that an open-hearted reader of these twenty texts would walk away with a beautiful picture of the meaning of lived Christian faith, told from the inside. I almost envy such a person the experience.

CoC: catholic, not evangelical

For the whole of my academic career, it has been difficult to explain to friends and colleagues who have no prior knowledge of the Stone-Campbell Movement why churches of Christ are not best understood as “evangelical,” that is to say, as part of that rambunctious and dysfunctional family called “American evangelicalism.” Even, for a time, it was hard for me to understand it myself. But I knew it at a gut level and at the level of anecdotal experience. Regarding the latter, for example, I never once heard the term “evangelical” growing up in church; the way evangelical friends would describe their theological assumptions and church practices sounded bizarre and alien to me; and even at the level of guest speakers, popular books, websites, music, and the like, there was usually slim overlap, if any at all.

The difficulty in explanation is made the harder by the fact that, beginning a couple decades ago, mainstream churches of Christ began to be absorbed into American evangelicalism, a process that will reach completion in another decade or two. Walk into a local CoC congregation today, that is, and likely as not you won’t be able to tell much of a difference between it and the neighboring non-denominational or otherwise evangelical church. (The most probable oddity would be a cappella singing or weekly communion, the first of which is already on the wane, the second of which, I fear, is not far behind it.) But the very fact that this registers as a jarring change, that sociologists and historians of American religion see it as a dramatic shift, tells you that once upon a time, and for most of their history, churches of Christ were set apart from evangelicalism as a whole, and thus poorly understood as a subset thereof.

When I was in seminary, surrounded by mainline liberals, I quickly realized that the simplest way to explain the CoC sensibility is to describe it as catholic, not evangelical. Indeed, of those I know who were raised in the churches of Christ who have earned degrees in graduate theological education, not one (of whom I’m aware) has “gone evangelical,” or even magisterial Protestant. They have either remained CoC, or left the faith, or joined a high-church tradition: whether swimming the Thames, the Bosporus, or the Tiber. And no one “in house” is surprised by such a move.

Why is that? Why would going from the lowest-of-low congregationalist, non-creedal, primitivist traditions to the highest-of-high episcopal-creedal traditions make a kind of intuitive, not to say theological, sense? Why would I call the CoC DNA catholic and not evangelical, even though the Stone-Campbell tradition has its origins in frontier revivalism and nineteenth-century American restorationism?

For the following reasons. Each of these is fundamental conviction either taught explicitly or imbibed like mother’s milk from pulpit and classroom in historic churches of Christ (prior to the ongoing evangelical takeover); taken together, they form a kind of unofficial catholic catechesis:

1. The founding of the church is the climax and telos of the biblical story. The church is the point, not an incidental or accidental or epiphenomenal feature of both the Christian life and the good news of the gospel.

2. It is impossible for an individual to be saved alone, by herself, apart from the ministerial intervention and interposition of Christ’s church. In other words, the church is herself the corporate sacrament of salvation.

3. The church is therefore necessary for salvation: extra ecclesiam nulla salus. To be saved is to belong to the body of Jesus Christ, which is the bride for whom he died.

4. “Faith alone” apart from baptism, which is to say, apart from the sacramental administration of the church, is insufficient for salvation.

5. Baptism, in short, is necessary for salvation. Why? Because by its instrumentality God himself acts to cleanse you from sin, unite you to Christ, knit you to his body, and fill you with his Spirit.

6. “An unbaptized Christian” is an oxymoron. To be Christian is to be baptized; to be baptized is to be Christian. The two are synonymous.

7. Public worship in the assembly on Sunday morning without the celebration of the Lord’s Supper is a self-contradiction in terms. When the church gathers on the Lord’s day, she administers the sacrament of the Cross and Resurrection of Christ. If she fails to do so, she has failed to worship in the Spirit as the Lord commanded.

8. In a word, communion is to be celebrated each and every Sunday, where two or three are gathered in Jesus’s name. (And if you missed it on Sunday morning, when everybody gathers again for another service that evening, you step out at a fitting time with others who missed it in order to partake now: better late than never.)

9. It is possible, by apostasy or moral failure, to fall from grace, that is, to lose one’s salvation. In traditional terms, mortal sin is a live possibility.

10. The moral, the spiritual, and the liturgical are utterly intertwined, so much so that they are inseparable. On one hand, nothing is more important than the worship of Christ in and with his body on Sunday morning; on the other, a life of Sunday worship apart from daily discipleship would be an act of self-condemnation. Following Christ is a comprehensive task, demanding one’s all. Everything else is secondary. But it is found in and made possible by thick membership in the Christian community—and only there. Christianity is impossible without the church, for the church simply is Christianity as God instituted it on earth.

11. The life of the early church, for all its faults, is the paradigm of moral, spiritual, and sacramental faithfulness. It is there to be imitated by the saints for all time.

12. The canon within the canon is not, as heirs of Luther and Calvin suppose, Galatians and Romans. Instead, it is the book of Acts together with the Pastoral Epistles. There we see the blueprint for ecclesiology, God’s vision for a lasting society on earth that exists for the praise of his glory in the midst of a fallen world. The leadership structure and overall organization of God’s church is therefore of paramount importance, as is her unity, being the chief object of the Spirit’s will and work, not to mention the high priestly prayer of Jesus himself.

I could go on, but that covers the main themes in broad strokes. I trust these convictions make legible, first, why churches of Christ have always been out of step with evangelicals; second, why those raised in the CoC don’t find themselves, their beliefs, or their practices reflected in American evangelicalism; third, why it’s not unfitting (however odd it may sound) to describe CoC-ers as more catholic than evangelical; and fourth, why it is that folks with CoC backgrounds who go to seminary or pursue doctoral studies in theological disciplines so often find themselves drawn to capitalizing the “c” in “catholic”—i.e., seeing little appeal in the churches on offer between their own movement (on one pole of the continuum) and the great episcopal-creedal traditions (on the other pole). Go big or go home, you know?

Besides, if what you’re after is an authoritative community that makes the church and her sacraments central, both to God’s salvific purposes revealed in the Bible and to the daily lives of the faithful, while giving doctrinal, liturgical, and moral priority to “the early church,” then it makes all the sense in the world that exposure to the church fathers—from St. Ignatius to St. Irenaeus, St. Justin Martyr to St. Cyprian, St. Athanasius to St. Basil, St. Augustine to St. Cyril, St. Ephrem to St. Leo, and so on—would have the simple but logical effect of expanding the meaning of “the early church” to more than the initial apostolic generation(s). That particular marker in time is somewhat arbitrary, anyway, given that the first Christian assemblies were terribly imperfect (hello, Corinth) and that the very notion of a neatly pristine, bow-tied “apostolic age” is possible to conceive only in retrospect, following centuries of debate regarding, among other things, the boundaries of the canon. And since we know that such debate was itself normed by the Rule of faith, which was transmitted orally, and by the authority of bishops, who were ordained in succession from the time of the apostles, then we have no clear (non-question-begging) demarcation between “early” and “late” or “developed” doctrine and practice in the first half millennium of the church. Only consider Lutheran and other modern Protestant disdain for the Pastorals, along with the rest of the “catholic” epistles. They spy “development” already within the canonical New Testament, so they relegate it to “later,” “secondary” status by the slander term “catholic.”

But that just won’t do for a proper doctrine of Scripture or of the church. And if it won’t do, then there are only so many alternatives. One alternative is to remain. Another is to go. The middle options are small beer by comparison.