Critical Mass: Thoughts on Community, Text and Meaning

By Bishop Joseph (Ancient Church of the West) 

The Early Church was a community that preserved content - there was a balance between the apostolic mission of guidance and the interpretation and preservation of the Old Testament through the Gospel of Jesus Christ, around which the New Testament formed. 

Due to the incredible entropy of heresy in the early Church, with Marcion, Arius, the Gnostic Cults, the Church created a creed and a canon, which established a "Christian Scripture", and founded the basis on which Christianity could grow.

The early episcopal system was extremely successful - so much so that it went from being a minority creed to the ruling philosophy of the Roman Empire. The idea of Christian government was a powerful revelation, and it was transmitted out of the Empire, even as it was falling to its enemies, and the newly converted barbarians attempted to imitate and preserve the new Pax Christiana.

Christian culture reached a stasis point from the 5th through 15th centuries, where the basic Christian lifestyle and worldview were the same throughout Christendom, across languages, cultures and traditions. The Roman, Greek and Slavic Churches acted and believed in the same ways as the Armenian, Coptic, East and Western Syriac Churches acted and believed, with differences being held in a very few individual words and their patristic interpretations. They all worshipped the same Christ and held to the same Gospel, which is astonishing when one considers what little communication these communities actually had. 

The Reformation contended that Christian community became more important than the content, the Gospel, and insisted that community serve text rather than text serving the ethos of preservation within the community. 

The Early Modernist proclaimed that the community was to be replaced with content, and thus community was not necessary any more; the individual could be confident in personal understanding and do whatever they personally wanted.

The Postmodernists discovered that without the community, content lost its meaning and was impossible to communicate, thus completely destroying the credibility of the content.

We cannot accept the idea that the Church can function with scripture alone: the method of interpreting it's meaning is through community. Therefore, we must seek to reconnect to the original context of community, the Apostolic Church, so that we can address the postmodern lack of meaning. 

早期教会是一个保存内容的社区 - 指导使徒使命与通过耶稣基督福音对旧约的解释和保存之间保持平衡，新约圣经形成于此之外。

由于早期教会中的异端熵，比如Marcion，Arius，Gnostic Cults，教会创造了一个信条和一个教规，建立了一个“基督教经文库”，并奠定了基督教可以成长的基础。

早期的主教制度非常成功 - 以至于它从少数信条转变为罗马帝国的统治哲学。基督教政治想法是一个强有力的启示，它被传递出帝国，即使它正在落入敌人，而新近皈依的野蛮人试图模仿和保护新的PAX CHRISTIANA（基督教和平世界）。

基督教文化从5世纪到15世纪达到了一个停滞点，基督教的基本生活方式和世界观在整个世界中都是相同的，跨越语言，文化和传统。罗马，希腊和斯拉夫教会的行为和信仰方式与亚美尼亚语，科普特，东和西叙利亚教会的行为和信仰相同，差异只用极少的单词和他们的教父解释。他们都崇拜同一个基督并坚持同一个福音，当考虑到这些社团实际上有什么小沟通时，这是惊人的。

宗教改革认为，基督徒社团比内容，福音更重要，并坚持社区服务文本而不是文本服务于社区内的保护精神。

早期现代主义者宣称社团将被内容所取代，因此不再需要社团解经;个人可以对个人理解充满信心，并做他们个人想要的事情。

后现代主义者发现，没有社团，内容就失去了意义，无法沟通，从而彻底摧毁了内容的可信度。

我们不能接受教会可以单独使用经文的想法，所谓的唯独圣经论：解释它意义的方法是通过社团。因此，我们必须寻求重新连接社团的原始语境，即使徒教会，以便我们能够解决后现代的缺乏意义。