The Free Church and the Early Church: Bridging the Historical and Theological Divide

The Free Church and Early Church: Bridging Historical and Theological Divide. Edited by D. H. Williams. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans. 2002. Pp. 183. $16, paper. The early has been problematic for free churches. Free scholars and layfolk alike have been concerned to be biblical and to accord primary authority to life and witness of apostolic church. Although they have at times made courteous comments about early church, they in practice have vaulted across centuries to Protestant Reformation of sixteenth century, at which point church history, as they conceive it, begins. Hence free churches (with one exception, as will emerge later) have largely left scholarship in early to scholars in Catholic traditions. This useful book signifies a change. Its writers--Baptists, Campbellites and a Mennonite--indicate various ways in which insights from early are being appropriated by contemporary free thinkers. Editor Daniel Williams, a Baptist, argues that free Christians today need resources of ancient in order to construct a uniquely Christian in our present day. Williams uses language of rediscovery and in a way that will be familiar to Mennonites. Among Mennonites recovery of Anabaptist vision has been a potent impetus for renewal of thought and praxis. early hold out a parallel source of renewal for free churches, including Mennonites? Many articles in this book indicate benefits that can come to free churches by learning from early church. One is coherence, especially regarding sola scriptura. The eminent patristics scholar Frederick Norris, who argues that scriptural canon is product of late fourth-century church, asks provocatively: Does it make much sense to say that fourth-century was making very good decisions about Bible but mostly poor ones about everything else? Since canon is situated within church, Norris would have us draw wisdom from other aspects of church's life--episcopacy, councils, creeds and ethical canons. A Mennonite theologian, Gerald Schlabach, in a penetrating study of Augustine, argues that Augustinian themes of grace and caritas can do much to correct gracelessness and blunt voluntarism of free ecclesiology. Schlabach also opens up another theme that deserves more development in this book--the benefits to catholic when scholars schooled in free churches study early church. Schlabach's sensibilities, shaped by Mennonite upbringing and theology, enable him to argue that Augustine's use of force to coerce erring Christians into Catholic represents an aberration from Augustine's own theology of continence--an act of incontinence, not trust, of a pride that was surely subtle but hardly christlike humility that had converted him. Schlabach, who has drunk deeply from Augustinian wells, is nevertheless able, precisely because of his Mennonite roots, to see things in Augustine that are new and profound and have ecumenical resonance. When he invites other free thinkers to engage in the debate that is Augustinianism, I wonder what response he will get. Another contributor, Church of Christ scholar Everett Ferguson, has for many years been at center of worldwide guild of patristics scholars. …