When We confess the Church to Be Apostolic
I know that this might come as a shock to my fellow baby-boomers, but the Christian church wasn’t founded by the Jesus people in the 1960’s—although their own congregation might have been. Americans often think about the church as though it was founded by Charles Finney during the Second Great Awakening. It was not. Nor was the church established by Jonathan Edwards or George Whitefield during the First Great Awakening. The church was already fifteen centuries old when Martin Luther and John Calvin sought to reform it at the time of the Reformation. There is even a sense in which the church is as old as Adam and Eve and the first family. And Calvin was absolutely correct to affirm that the church existed in its infancy in the midst of Israel before the coming of Jesus Christ. But the Christian church confessed in the Creed was founded by Jesus Christ when he called his apostles to follow him, and is then given a significant Spirit-filled role in redemptive history after Pentecost. When we consider that the church of Jesus Christ is apostolic, this is where we begin.
It is fashionable in those circles dominated by critical biblical scholarship to think of the church as a worshiping community in need of a Messiah–the first Christians supposedly elevated an itinerant apocalyptic prophet (Jesus of Nazareth) to his messianic status and then put pithy “Jesus sayings” back in his mouth. The church was not the fruit of the organizational genius of a group of followers who came to believe that Jesus had risen in their hearts (the so-called “Easter experience”) as they tried to cope with the disappointment they felt once Jesus was put to death by the Romans and his glorious kingdom did not manifest itself as promised. Rather, the biblical record tells us that the church was founded by a Risen Savior who left behind an empty tomb and then appeared to a number of his chosen witnesses the first Easter, confirming that his death on Good Friday was the ultimate triumph over human sin. The church confessed in the Creed was founded by Jesus Christ, victorious over sin, death, and the grave.
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