NT Reflecting Pool - Mar 9

Institution & Charisma
In the face of the current dialogue about the emerging church or the emergent movement, discussing the reasons for the institutionalization of the church are significantly & relevant. Underlying the discussion, however, is a question I have about why we associate “Institution” with “insincere,” “inauthentic,” or “illegitimate?”

For a “Gen Xer”, institutional sounds impersonal, bureaucratic and sometimes just short of evil or oppressive. Couple this with an “authentic” reading of the church movement in the book of Acts, and it is easy for the skeptics of my generation to write-off any institution, and certainly the institution of “church” as being irrelevant or worthy of avoidance.

So, why did the 1st century church – house churches loosely connected across the Roman empire – become the “institutionalized” church of the 2nd century & beyond? Below are 4 reasons that we discussed that represent more sociological (less “spiritual” answers to the question of institutionalization.

Church Growth – As the early church grew in number and scope, some type of order and structure was necessary in order to maintain cohesion and belonging.

Heresy – Again, this was not a 1st century word, but came about later as the church developed. Early on in the history of the church, there was lots of disagreement and debate about many theologically diverse topics. Along those lines, “expulsion” from the church was not based on statements of belief as much as behavioral practices.

As the original generation of witnesses was gone, the question arose as to how to deal with the questions of what is authentic Christian truth. Who gets to speak authoritatively, particularly about Jesus’ identity – was he human or divine? In this setting, Gnostic claims of secret knowledge or secret information about Jesus grew. The Gnostics mirrored Greek philosophy, that the divine was distinct & separate from the secular, to which the church responded that God was not above & distantly removed from the “dirty” world, but that God was active and operating in the world from creation and continuing through the incarnation.

Social Change – As is true of any grass-roots organization, there is a shift from the 1st generation of original (“charismatic”) leadership to a structural or systematic transference of authority & power.

Frustrated Future Hope – the early Christians urgency & expectation that “Jesus is coming back any day now” shifted to learning how to live in the here & now of a waiting expectation for Jesus’ return. As noted earlier, this reflected a misunderstanding of the “immediacy” and “at hand” apocalyptic language of the early biblical writers, who intended language of priority instead of language of chronology or liner time. Paul makes several references to this about not knowing the “day nor the hour” of Jesus’ return, in order to avert foolish misinterpreting of the priority of kingdom advancement.

Along this shift from the church as a grass-roots, charismatic organization to a organized institution, the cannon of New Testament Scripture became the measuring stick for authentic witness. Though the New Testament cannon wasn’t compiled until later, it already ‘existed’ by the end of the 1st century. The 4th century councils didn’t create the cannon, they just recognized and formalized an already existing authority. They didn’t remove any books from the already existing cannon, they just judiciously blocked the addition of non-corroborated texts from later centuries.

Not only that, but more than any other historical period and writings, there still exists over 500 copies and fragments from as close as 100 AD. By contrast, for the history of Rome and Julius Cesar, there are only 12 fragments and the earliest one is over 800 years removed from the original. This is why the historical integrity of the Bible able to sustain the modern criticism.