The Search For The Standard Authority Of The Early Church

31 Pages 7763 Words

owever with Scripture being given such a high authoritative position within the church, the question must be asked, ¡§What was the authority for the church before the Scriptures?¡¨ The reason for such an inquiry lies behind the fact that the history of the church and the history of the Scriptures itself do not identically correlate. The Scripture that we have today, the 27 books of the New Testament, was not available to the early church until the end of the 2nd century, and was not officially recognized until the closing of the 4th century. This is not to deny that the early church had parts of the Scriptures available, for we will see it surely did. But the issue that this paper will ask is, ¡§what was the authority for the early church before the sole authority for the church today, the 66 books of the closed canon, was available?¡¨ It is here that we begin our quest to find the source of authority of the early church.

The Threat: The undermining of the orthodox historical reconstruction
It is without a doubt that the authoritative source of the history of the early church was in the work of Eusebius, the fourth-century bishop from Caesarea, entitled, Ecclesiastical History. In it Eusebius describes Christianity¡¦s first three hundred years that endured external hardships (persecution) and internal threats (heresy) due to the direct result of God¡¦s providential control in history allowing the church to grow in sprite of such threats. Underlying Eusebius¡¦ historiography was the belief that the church began with a single belief system that was the authoritative tradition of the apostles and ultimately Christ Himself. Eusebius called this system of beliefs ¡§orthodoxy¡¨, while any beliefs that later deviated from it he called ¡§heresy¡¨, which in his writings originated from the ¡§Evil One¡¨ . However this historical reconstruction was challenged in 1934, during the hey day of the liberal ap...