Help me think this through

[Chemnitz]

Last night I was reading a bit in J N D Kelly's book on early Christian doctrine and it occurred to me that between the apostolic age and the subapostolic age there was a pretty smooth transition.

Nowadays, thanks to Protestant repristinating movements we have a tendency to think that there was a huge paradigmatic jump between the time of the last Apostle and the assumption of leadership in the church by their successors.

It's almost as though there was a time when the shekinah rested in the form of apostolic inerrancy and infallibility and then there was a time when it didn't and we were left to muddle through fallibly led by men who may or may not have even known what they were talking about.

Kelly doesn't paint that picture though. What he portrays is more the idea of a living church expressing itself according to historical and cultural context and which while fully recognizing that the Apostles had a special authority in the church, had in some way an authority to explicate revelation if not infallibly then at least with full confidence and the expectation that their conclusions would be accepted as orthodox.

Of course this idea was to develope into "succession" as the episcopally governed churches tend to see it.

I guess what I am thinking through is the idea that there may be a middle way between the hard disconnect view of many Evangelicals on the one hand and the view of many hierarchicals that their leadership has somehow had handed onto them a specific charism beyond Word and Sacrament which inheres in their office.

Any comments are welcome.

[judaica]

Last night I was reading a bit in J N D Kelly's book on early Christian doctrine and it occurred to me that between the apostolic age and the subapostolic age there was a pretty smooth transition.

Nowadays, thanks to Protestant repristinating movements we have a tendency to think that there was a huge paradigmatic jump between the time of the last Apostle and the assumption of leadership in the church by their successors.

It's almost as though there was a time when the shekinah rested in the form of apostolic inerrancy and infallibility and then there was a time when it didn't and we were left to muddle through fallibly led by men who may or may not have even known what they were talking about.

Kelly doesn't paint that picture though. What he portrays is more the idea of a living church expressing itself according to historical and cultural context and which while fully recognizing that the Apostles had a special authority in the church, had in some way an authority to explicate revelation if not infallibly then at least with full confidence and the expectation that their conclusions would be accepted as orthodox.

Of course this idea was to develope into "succession" as the episcopally governed churches tend to see it.

I guess what I am thinking through is the idea that there may be a middle way between the hard disconnect view of many Evangelicals on the one hand and the view of many hierarchicals that their leadership has somehow had handed onto them a specific charism beyond Word and Sacrament which inheres in their office.

Any comments are welcome.

I'm not sure if this is what you're asking for (and my source for Church History has primarily been Pelikan, and it's been awhile since I read the book to which you refer) but, in a nutshell I'd have to say that after the major christological and trinitarian controversies were over, it was pretty smooth sailing until around say the eleventh or twelth centuries, when papal claims started to really take hold, and reason became that second leg on which the church was built :(. You had your speculative theologians (Origin, Augustine (when he wasn't fighting Pelegius), ect.), but their speculations were pretty much either left alone, or condemned by general or local councils. Reason, or more aptly philosophy was used in service to the Faith, ie it was used to explain the Faith (think "person" "essence" "hypostasis" ect). But somewhere along the line, this philosophy, this reason, became a source of dogmatic theology. In a way I guess you could say it was no longer a servant, but a master in it's own right. This is why I think Luther took such a hard stance against reason at times. And is a problem the Reformed and Roman Catholics still have today. Historically, Lutheranism didn't have that affinity for reason, they pretty much left things alone, and was willing to leave a mystery, a mystery (the most prominent example I can think of is, is the issue of transubstantiation). EO's have pretty much been the same way. I wish I could say exactly why this transformation took place. The first time I really read about the Church of the Middle Ages, after having read about the Apostolic and Patristic eras, I felt like my jaw would drop. It sounds funny now, but I remember asking myself, "What just happened?" lol. The western Church took a direction I was not expecting. And like I said, I'm still scratching my head as to why exactly. :scratch:

Judaica