Surprised By The Early Church (Primitive Church)

The year was 1996 and I was learning to defend my Catholic Christian Faith the hard way! You ask, 'how hard'?

Well consider this, in my class, I sat with a friend who was Jehovah witness, behind me was another friend who was a 'Brahnamist' and in front of me was a Seventh-day Adventist lady and a Pentecostal lady. We all loved each other dearly but also disagreed with each other deeply!

For all our disagreements, all of my friends had at least one point in common; they all agreed that Catholicism can not be true.

I mean, this was a fantastic coincidence. You have to realize that they couldn't agree on anything else except this one claim with unanimity! They disagreed on the nature of God (Trinity, Modalist or Arianism); they disagreed on who Jesus was (man or God or the angel Michael); they couldn't even agree on which bible version to use (Louis second, Louis second revisé or the New World translation). But somehow, their rejection of the Christian Catholic faith was unanimously held and with no appeal! 😅

It is a rare thing to witness such unity among opposing theological viewpoints. This is the environment I had to strive in, every single school day for 2 academic years! The last year was even more interesting as we got one Muslim lady who joined us (But I will leave her for now). 😁

Another thing that impressed me most about my friends was their adamant claim and confidence that their version of Christianity was the true reflection of the "Primitive Church". By 'primitive', we simply meant the early church. The first generations of Christian believers. It was tough discussing with my classmates in an age where the internet and google didn't yet exist in Rwanda. It was even tougher to verify each person's claim for the primitivity of their respective beliefs.

Now that I look back, the irony about all of it is, the Church my classmates were in unanimity against turns out to be the only Church that can actually claim and prove its Christian primitivity. As Dr. Francis Beckwith discovered while he was still the president of the Evangelical Theological Society, the Early Christian Church was a matter of fact the Catholic church.

"Dr. Francis Beckwith held strongly to belief in the Divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, and a number of other theological concepts that nearly all Christians hold in common.

As he studied the early Church, however, he began to realize that these beliefs which are uncontroversial among Christians today were extremely controversial in the first few centuries of Christianity, while questions [about] Mary, the Papacy, the Eucharist, and other issues that divide Catholics and Protestants today were uncontroversial and held by most Christians without debate."

In this video (click here), Dr, Beckwith remembers briefly some of the striking points that stunned him when he was researching the Early Church. I hope you find this 5 min reminiscence interesting!😇