I’ve had ecclesiastical division on the brain lately.
Several weeks ago, I was invited on a podcast discussing infant baptism. After recording, the host and I chatted for a while longer about how this doctrinal point creates hard institutional lines between traditions. Soon after, I read that some Anglicans, such as Michael Bird, argue for a “dual-mode” approach to baptism, a view that inevitably (and I think understandably) annoys more traditional Anglicans.[1]
When Easter rolled around, it brought with it the annual (and quintessentially Hillsdale) buzz about all the ex-Protestant converts to Catholicism and Orthodoxy. The pope’s death followed close behind, and I was reminded why I myself am not Catholic, most starkly by an interesting dialogue on Francis’s legacy between Ross Douthat and James Martin.
Meanwhile, I’ve also been paying more attention to Gavin Ortlund’s irenic engagement on these kinds of issues, as he voices his hopes for greater Christian unity and revival—the latter of which immediately turns some off from the former. Of a piece with this, Carl Trueman passingly critiqued Ortlund for insufficient attention in his recent book to matters of institutional unity and the closely related subject of the sacraments: these are substantive problems that cannot simply be swept under the rug or ignored.
And that brings me to my provocative title—or to put it in different words, are the low-church types of the world among the few who prioritize catholicity? And does my evangelical tribe only hold this desideratum aspirationally because it lacks its own distinctive theological-confessional depth, not appreciating what it would actually entail? Are the majority of orthodox Christians simply destined to have these hard institutional lines forever in the post-Reformation world?
(These are, I fully admit, enormous questions that are far too big a for blog post, and I’m probably not framing them with ideal articulation, not least because I lack a healthy sense of where these conversations about Christian unity stand in other theological traditions. My impression, anyway, is that those other traditions are usually more interested in policing their own institutions or, at most, they take an interest in their closest neighbors.)
In this and a future post, I’ll propose two historical case studies that have shaped my thinking here, both recorded in Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History: the first is about the celebration of Easter, the second involves sacramental participation.
Among themselves at least, Western Christians may not think too much about the dating of Easter, but it has been a major point of contention at various moments in church history. Greek and Latin traditions have clashed on the observance of Lent and the date of pascha at least since the Normans began conquering Byzantine territories in the eleventh century.[2] In the West, rather famously, the Romano-English community disputed with the established Celtic tradition of celebrating Easter, culminating at the synod of Whitby in 664 where the disparate practices were seen as unfitting.
These disputants at Whitby, interestingly, had at least some inkling that this debate went back to the ancient church, which indeed it did. What they apparently missed (or ignored) was how the ancient church had handled the matter.
That is not to say the ancient actors were indifferent about when to celebrate Easter, as I have discussed elsewhere. In the 190s, the sitting bishop of Rome, Victor, cared so much about this issue that he moved to excommunicate those in Asia who insisted on following the (more Jewish) practice of celebrating Passover not on the proximate Sunday but on the fourteenth of the lunar month. Victor’s policy, however, vexed some of the other churchmen closer to his own orbit: “But not all the bishops were pleased with this. Indeed, they urged him in reply to bear in mind the matters of peace, of unity with neighbors, and also of love. Their voices are on record, strikingly confronting Victor.”
Irenaeus of Lyons was perhaps the most prominent among the displeased clerics, probably because he originated in Asia and knew these communities well. Irenaeus told Victor he should not compel the Asian Christians to conformity, especially when they were following their own tradition that had been in place for generations dating back to the apostolic era.
Asian Christians themselves have disagreed about the precise nature of the pre-Passover fast. “Nonetheless,” Irenaeus points outs, “all of these lived peaceably, and we too remain at peace with each other. The difference over fasting sustains also sustains the unity of faith.” Irenaeus could even cite historical precedent here. A few decades earlier (c. 155?), Polycarp of Smyrna and (bishop) Anicetus of Rome—important to both Irenaeus and Eusebius because of apostolic succession—agreed to disagree on the Easter dating. This significant difference in liturgy and tradition notwithstanding, Anicetus allowed Polycarp to celebrate the Eucharist in Rome, and they parted in peace.[3]
We shall pass over all that this reveals about apostolic succession, as well as the authority of Rome’s church and its bishop. For his part anyway, Eusebius (fl. 300–339) clearly approved of the earlier Irenaeus’ pointed criticism of Victor for the sake of peace. What steps can be taken practically today for the sake of peace is a much harder question, obviously. Someone like me might incline to accept Bird’s dual-mode baptism, but what about something tougher, such as the major divisions over Christological formulae? Or perhaps harder still, what about forms of saint veneration, such as icons? Etc. Etc.
These are all major hurdles, the kind that make a pessimist like myself shrug and say, “Ah, well. Better luck in the eschaton.” Even so, Irenaeus’ irenic approach to Easter reinforces for me that the desire for unity is not necessarily modern, evangelical, low-church, “squishy,” or for the otherwise theologically unserious. In reality, ancient churchmen “bent” important liturgical and institutional lines—lines that other contemporaries thought worthy of enforcement even by excommunication—in the interest of catholicity.
While I favor credobaptism, the historical facts about the Anglican tradition on the subject are still hard to ignore. ↑
James Morton, Byzantine Religious Law in Medieval Italy, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 92–7. ↑
Direction quotations are my own translation, taken from Hist. Eccl. 5.24. ↑