25. Two Thousand Years of Institutional Failure - From Tertullian Forward

The Christian Statement

Volume VI's broader series has traced a thread of institutional failure from Tertullian forward that is worth naming explicitly for the disciple who is engaging someone using church history as a reason to dismiss Christianity.

Tertullian - the man who gave the Western church the word Trinity - ended his life outside the mainstream church, defending a movement whose predictions failed and whose fruit was division. Origen - the most comprehensive biblical scholar of the ancient world - developed allegorical methods that eventually led his followers into heresy. The medieval church sold indulgences, accumulated wealth while the poor suffered, and wielded spiritual authority as political power. The Reformation, for all its genuine faithfulness to Scripture, produced bitter internecine violence among Christians. The missionary movement of the nineteenth century carried the Gospel to unreached peoples and, in many cases, also carried Western cultural imperialism. The twentieth century produced Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who died in a Nazi prison for his faithfulness, and also a German church that largely accommodated the Nazi regime.

This history is real. It is the history of an institution made of human beings who are simultaneously image-bearers of God and fallen people capable of terrible things. The history of the church is not a history of uninterrupted faithfulness. It is a history of the Spirit working through cracked vessels - producing extraordinary fruit in some seasons and catastrophic failure in others.

The disciple who knows this history and can discuss it without defensiveness has a specific advantage in the conversation with the person who uses church history as a reason to dismiss the faith: they can demonstrate that they take the failures as seriously as the critic does, and that they have thought about what those failures mean for the credibility of the faith. The person who defends every institutional failure because they feel that the institution's credibility is inseparable from the Gospel's credibility has confused the vessel with the treasure it carries.

"But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that the extraordinary greatness of the power belongs to God and not to us."

-- 2 Corinthians 4:7 (NET)

The Circularity Objection

At this point the methodologically careful skeptic raises the hardest challenge: if the institution produced the records - the Gospels, the canon, the preserved tradition - then the Jesus being appealed to as distinct from the institution is a creation of the institution. You cannot appeal to the Person against the institution when the institution gave you the Person.

This objection fails at a specific point. The Jesus of the Gospels is not the product of the institution. He is the origin of it. He is an interruption from outside the system - not an evolutionary development of Second Temple Judaism that the early church refined and codified, but a specific, dateable, historically attested intrusion that judged and transformed everything it encountered.

The Pharisees condemned in Matthew 23, the temple cleansed in John 2, the gatekeeping upended in encounter after encounter - these are not what an institution produces when it writes its own founding mythology. They are what an interruption from outside the system looks like when recorded honestly. The canon is the institution's preservation of its own critique. That is not what institutions do. It is what they do when what they received was so much larger than themselves that they could not domesticate it, only carry it.