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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13700 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025

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For what it's worth there are absolutely Catholic apologists who will argue that the modern day Catholic Church resembles the early church in form and structure. For instance, from Surprised by Truth, a book of testimonies by former-evangelical converts to Catholicism:

[Paul Thigpen:] Second, when I studied the history of Jewish and Christian liturgy, I found that even if we could return to the “primitive” Christian experience, that experience would not resemble most of the Protestant, especially the charismatic, churches of today. The congregations I’d been part of were for the most part assuming that they had recovered a “New Testament” model of strictly spontaneous worship, local government, and “Bible-only” teaching. But the early Church, I found, was, in reality, liturgical in worship; translocal and hierarchical in government; and dependent on a body of sacred tradition that included the scripture, yet stretched far beyond it as well.

[Steve Wood:] During my Calvary Chapel days, I had a very low view of the sacraments; I was almost antisacramental. But when I discovered the true role of baptism and the Lord’s Supper in Christian worship and living, a corresponding appreciation for the role of the Church began to blossom. That’s when I did something really dangerous. I started reading the early Church Fathers firsthand. I had studied some early Church history, but too much of it was from perspectives limited by Protestant history textbooks. I was shocked to discover in the writings of the first-, second-, and third-century Christians a very high view of the Church and liturgy, very much unlike the views of the typical Evangelical Protestant. The worship and government of the early Church didn’t look anything like the things I saw at Calvary Chapel or in my own congregation. It looked a lot more, well, Catholic.

[Bob Sungenis:] Many Protestants claim that the Church of the first three centuries was a “pure” church, and only after the legalization of the Christian faith by the Roman emperor Constantine (in AD 312) did the church become “Catholic” and corrupt. But upon studying this issue, I found that the doctrines of post-Constantine Catholicism are the same doctrines, some in more primitive form, that were held by Christians for the preceding three centuries.

My study of the writings of the Church Fathers revealed that the early Church believed in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, confession of sins to a priest, baptismal regeneration, salvation by faith and good works done through grace, that one could reject God’s grace and forfeit salvation, that the bishop of Rome is the head of the Church, that Mary is the Mother of God and was perpetually a virgin, that intercessory prayer can be made to the saints in heaven, that purgatory is a state of temporary purification which some Christians undergo before entering heaven. Except for the perpetual virginity and divine motherhood of Mary, all of these doctrines were repudiated by the Protestant Reformers. If the Catholic Church is in error to hold these beliefs, then it was in error long before Constantine legalized Christianity. This would mean that the Church apostatized before the end of the first century, when the apostles were still alive! An absurd theory which even the most anti-Catholic of Protestants can’t quite bring themselves to accept.

[Julie Swenson:] John Henry Newman, the famous Evangelical Protestant convert to Catholicism, once said, “Knowledge of Church history is the death of Protestantism.” He was right. My study of the early Church showed clearly that it was Catholic in its beliefs and practices—in fact, it had begun calling itself “Catholic” at least as early as the end of the first century.

Now, most of this is cherry-picking similarities and ignoring differences, or misrepresenting an early church that is a lot messier than this text admits - but nonetheless "the early church looked like the Catholic Church" is a claim that apologists make.

(And who the heck thinks that John Henry Newman was ever an evangelical Protestant?)

Realistically, I'd bet that if you had a time machine, the very early church would not easily slot into any of these confessional disputes. The early church was a scattered, often incoherent mess, and Catholic attempts to, for instance, project an episcopacy (much less a papacy!) back into the early church are extremely implausible. Probably partisans of every tradition would find elements of the early church that feel uncomfortable to them. Unfortunately much of the early church is poorly-known, leaving it something of a blank canvas for later traditions to project their presuppositions back on to.

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