From the beginning, Christians have faced the challenge of faithfulness
to our Lord Jesus. Jesus himself stated the nature of this challenge in
John 8.32: "If you continue in my word, you will truly be my disciples,
and you will know the truth and the truth will make you free." At the
end of his days Paul, passing on the mantle of leadership in the Church,
put the challenge of faithfulness to Timothy thus: "Guard that which has
been entrusted to you" (II Timothy 1.16). Remaining faithful to Jesus
from generation to generation is akin to a relay race: the race is won or lost in the passing of the baton. The Church succeeds or fails in reliably, truthfully, faithfully passing on the faith once delivered to the saints to the next generation.

The question becomes: how do we measure faithfulness? What guidelines,
what tests, can we apply to ascertain our faithfulness in teaching the
faith in each succeeding generation between the Ascension to the Second
Coming of our Lord?

We do not have to re-invent the wheel at this point. Since this has been the challenge before every generations of Christians, we can learn from the earliest generations how they met this challenge in their time, so we can be faithful in ours.

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My favorite saint has always been Irenaeus. He was the bishop of Lyons,
now in France, in the latter decades of the second Christian century.
The challenge posed to Christian faith in his day came from Valentinus,
a teacher of a the perennial heresy of the Christian faith, Gnosticism.
Valentinus sounded convincing to many people. It was Irenaeus who took
up the challenge of exposing Valentinus' errors.

Irenaeus' response could be called the "three-legged stool" of faithfulness. Each developed in the early Church in coordination with the others; each supports and depends on the other. Take one away and the entire structure collapses.

One leg was the canon of scripture. By the late second century, the
Church had generally accepted a collection of writings as its scripture:
the Old Testament, inherited from its parent faith of Judaism, and what
we now call the New Testament. While this was not an official list as decided upon by an official Church decision, these writings were in general practice looked upon as authoritative writings. Several standards were employed in determining their authority: the length of usage in the Church, authorship, and how early in the Church's history a book had been written.

The problem of Valentinus, said Irenaeus, was that he used for his scripture books of lesser usage or more recent origin, of doubtful authorship. Therefore, his teachings were based on a false authority.
They could not be based on the earliest writings of the Church. The canon of scripture guarded the Church against those who claimed new revelations of God.

Another leg was authoritative teachers, based on a line of succession going back to the earliest authoritative teachers, the apostles. So, said Irenaeus, my teaching is authoritative because I learned it from Polycarp, who in turn had been taught by the great apostle John himself. Valentinus, he said, could not claim such a lineage. His teachers were, in comparison, "Johnny-come-latelies," and thus suspect as authoritative teachers. A line of authoritative teachers guarded the Church from novel, innovative, entrepreneurial teachings and interpretations of scripture. Irenaeus' teaching became the basis of the Roman Catholic teaching of apostolic succession.

The third leg, which guided both the interpretation of scripture and those who taught the message of the scriptures, was the regula fidei, the "Rule of Faith," or what we now call the Creed. While the Apostles' Creed had not been formally adopted as the Creed of the Church, it was established almost completely in its final form by AD 200. It was based on creedal statements used for generations in the Church, some of which can be found in the New Testament. The Creed protected the Church from those who came along, claiming special revelations from God or new, innovation teachings or claiming to know the real secrets of the Bible. Since scripture can be misinterpreted by anyone, the Creed guided and guarded the interpretation of scripture by those called to be its preachers.

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What results when we apply Irenaeus' standard of faithfulness to the
issues facing the Church today? I offer two examples for consideration.

Let us start with the most obvious: the so-called "GLBT" agenda. To be
blunt, it fails. On all three counts. It fails on the first leg: the witness of scripture. To be sure, most who are pushing the homosexual agenda admit the Bible does not offer any support for homosexual behavior. Their tactic instead has been to discredit the scriptures whenever possible, either by revisionist teaching that the few selected biblical passages only applied to a limited range of activity, or discounting the scriptures as the product of a patriarchal, hierarchal, homophobic age.

This argument does not stand muster. As Alvin Schmidt shows in his book,
"Under the Influence," about how Christian faith changed Western culture, homosexual was not an occasional aberration in the ancient world. It was widely practiced. It was often the preferred sexual choice of men, who consented to fathering children only out of the obligation to continue their family line. Early Christian teaching was unanimous in its rejection of homosexual behavior as an acceptable Christian activity.

The second leg of Irenaeus' three-legged stool also rejects the GLBT agenda, because it is not based on the historic teaching of the Church.
Its proponents are, like Valentinus, "Johnny-come-latelies" who cannot
trace their teaching back through an authoritative line of teachers.

And last, the GLBT agenda is not in accord with the Creed of the Church,
its rule of faith. It violates the first article of the Creed, God's purposes in creation, let alone the saving work of Christ or the sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit to transform our lives into walking with the Lord in righteousness.

A second area of consideration Irenaeus' analysis helps us with is evaluating the whole "megachurch" movement, especially in the form of
the fellowship churches that have dramatically increased in popularity
and growth in recent years. This churches root in the tradition of American evangelicalism; I often refer to them as a "kindlier, gentler version" of "Born-again Christianity." They surely give greater place and importance to the scriptures than the GLBT proponents.

But, questions should be raised about these churches on at least two legs of Irenaeus' stool. One is the matter of authoritative teaching. Can the leaders of these churches trace their teaching back to the earliest apostolic witness? Indeed - especially as seen in the icon of the megachurch movement, Robert Schuller - these churches usually hold themselves accountable to no one, no authority except their own, market-driven standard of what "works" to attract the unchurched.

The second issue to be raised about these churches is that of faithfulness to the regula fidei of the Church. Are these megachurches faithful to the Creed of the Church? Many write their own creeds, their own statements of faith. In other aspects - certainly about Baptism and the Eucharist - their teaching and practice is certainly suspect.

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As is often said, we are called to be faithful, not successful. More accurately, faithfulness is success in ministry. To that end we can learn from those who have gone before us and dealt with the challenge of
faithfulness. Among them, Irenaeus holds a foremost place; his three-legged stool still stand the test of time.

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