Diversity of beliefs in early church and connection to apostolic succession

[check101]

I’m going to be received into the Church soon, and am excited about it, but I’ve heard some Protestants say that because the early church had such a wide array of beliefs and practices, and that the Catholic Church today does not represent that and so Apostolic Succession must not be representative of the true early church.

Is this true? What is the true development of the Catholic faith?

 

[PaulfromIowa]

the early church had such a wide array of beliefs and practices

What are these divergent beliefs of which you speak?

 

[BartholomewB]

The Church has a history, and that history includes the gradual development of beliefs and practices, within the early Church and subsequently. The Apostolic succession is another part of the same history. The argument that one historical fact somehow delegitimizes another historical fact doesn’t hold water.

 

[commenter]

The early Church did have a big diversity of beliefs and practice. Some groups used different New Testament canons from what Catholics and Protestants use today, and very different theologies from Christians today. Those mostly faded away, though periodically cults try to bring them back.

Essentially one group, those united to the Magisterium, overcame the other Christian communities, Christian scholars, Christian theologies, Christian New Testaments, with wildly different books.

Protestants today are a spin-off from the Magisterium Christians. They accept the Magisterium New Testament, and most of the Magisterium Traditional theology.

 

[fhansen]

Read Jurgen’s “Faith of the Early Fathers”, a three volume set, as a solid start. It’s all pretty much in there. The basics haven’t changed.

 

[Todd_Easton]

Not sure what those Protestants are talking about but Church leaders (Apostles and/or elders, i.e., bishops) meeting together and authoritatively deciding contentious matters, such as mentioned in Acts 15, have played an important role in narrowing the array of accepted beliefs and practices.

 

[ziapueblo]

These people don’t know what they are talking about. The Church is still very diverse in it’s liturgies, spiritual life and expression of the faith. Have you ever visited an Eastern Catholic Church? You should definitely attend Liturgy at one of there are any in your area.

God bless you on your reception into the Church!

ZP

 

[Mintaka]

Even very early, it was easy to tell what was mainstream and what wasn’t. I forget who used it as an argument, but one of the Fathers pointed out that if you went to a strange town and asked for directions to the Catholic church, you would never be directed to one of the weird churches claiming to be Christian but not really being so. You would find a normal Catholic church with a normal bishop teaching normal stuff.

One of the reasons that it took me so long to get interested in the Fathers was that they taught the same stuff I already knew! I did not appreciate them until I ran up against pagan ideas, too.

Most of the controversy in the early Church was either weird occult stuff trying to assimilate some Christian bits because Christ was popular, or Christians trying to get rid of Christian things they found inconvenient (like the entire Old Testament, or Jesus being God). Everything else was just Christians trying to figure out what was going on with the nature of Christ and the Holy Spirit, and that is pretty technical in nature; or it was Christian differences over how to run stuff inside the Church.

Obviously the inter-Christian difficulties did matter, but it is difficult for non-Christians to see them as differences at all. (Which was the subject of a lot of secular mockery when I was young, although now the same secular folks claim early Christian groups were all so widely different!)