The Only Rule of Faith and Conduct

How long does it take people in any kind of group to veer off a course set by the founder of such a group?

Human will is strong, unmanageable, and hubris drives some to seek to imprint their own brand on what someone else had started. Paul endeavored in his day to not succumb to such a temptation; in our day, there are more than a few anecdotes circling about purportedly witnessing the reality of such among us. Someone founds a company, a church, a ministry, leads it successfully toward the attainment of a vision, dies, and in comes Jr. or the next one up and everything changes. The organization loses its soul.

I remember well the so called, third generation rule I first learned of in Bible College: by the third generation, the descendants of a revival have lost touch with its experience and do not share the passion or drive for its distinctives that the revived generation had. Between the founders and the third generation drift sets in. I think we actually see this reality even within one generation, but by the third, it is so unmistakably clear as to be unmistakeable.

Given this proven human trait, I'm puzzled by those who rely on church history to boost their notions of what was a more pristine, and therefore more authoritative, approach to doctrine and practice. They reason that those who lived closer to the first generation must have had a better grasp on the original than those further removed in time. The problem with that approach is that it ignores the reality of what we see before our own eyes-- humans drift, and rather quickly from the original visions of founding leaders.

We have no further to look for the start of such than the New Testament, mostly written by ~65 AD, itself. Virtually all of the epistles and certainly Revelation 2 and 3 are filled with rebukes and admonitions against the drift that was well under way before the Apostles, handpicked by Christ to pass on the faith, were cold in the ground. To give the drifters that followed the Apostles, even those from the earliest days in the first and second centuries, near the same doctrinal authority as the Apostles themselves is nothing but an invitation to play Leapfrog or Whisper Down the Alley with our souls.

 

For the Catholic and Orthodox churches this certainly is a critical issue, but Protestants are not exempt from resting the warrant to state what the scriptures do not on the backs of the church fathers. The faith was once delivered to the saints, and written about by those that did that entrusting. No one else but them is a reliable authority for doctrine and practice. Therefore, the scripture itself stands as the only objective basis for knowing what the unfiltered, untainted faith is and how it is to be practiced.

When I met Jesus personally, in my first few days as a Christian, and I asked him how I could know what was of him, he did not tell me to listen to my elders or even to a line of elders from way back, he told me to look to his Word. Since that experience, and hopefully always, my only rule of faith and conduct has been the Bible. My hope is that you adopt the same perspective.