CHAPTER 1
CHRISTIAN UNITY IN THE EARLY CHURCH
For nearly the first 400 years of the Church’s history, the Church was a beleaguered minority in the Roman Empire, often drawn together in a fellowship of suffering. This was the period of spasmodic outbursts of persecution, at first from Judaism, but increasingly from the government of the Roman Empire, which came to see Christians as anti-social disturbers of society and a threat to the unity of the Empire. This was also the period of the rise of heresies and schisms, heresies which in their beliefs were inimical to the truth of the Gospel and schisms in which Christian groups split away from the main body of believers, hoping to form ‘true’ and ‘pure’ churches. Gnosticism, in its various forms, challenged Biblical truth by saying that matter was evil and had been created by a secondary, lesser god. This had all sorts of implications for the truth of the Christians’ good news, particularly in denying the Incarnation and the Atonement of Jesus through his death on the Cross. Had Gnosticism won the day in the Church (and there was a claim by some of its exponents that it revealed Christian truth), the Church would have had no message of liberation from sin for all, no Trinity of the Godhead and no supreme good God totally in charge of his world. The Church also had to resist a Judaising tendency, which wished to retain obedience to the Mosaic law as a way of salvation and to place Jesus in the category of a Jewish teacher with no claim to deity (as the Ebionites did). If the Judaisers had won the day in the Early Church, the Christian faith would have become no more than a sect of Judaism, with no message of a universal reconciliation of man and God through the mediation of One who was both Man and God. Unity was a prime concern to Christian leaders of the period just after the deaths of the apostles and before the rise of the great Apologists of the faith. The writer of Clement of Rome’s Epistles to the Corinthians (c.95 AD) makes urgent appeals in his first letter for Christians to submit to approved church leaders who are in a succession of leaders descended from the apostles themselves. Page 20