I just finished Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written in 731 by the Venerable Bede, who was a Northumbrian monk. (Don’t forget to read the primary sources!) Michael Haykin considers Bede as the last of the Church Fathers.

This is the first of a few thoughts on Bede and his History.

Uniformity of practice.

Pursuit of uniformity in doctrine is not that strange in the contemporary church, though it’s less sought after in some wings than in others. It’s an occasional emphasis in the History, particularly around the Monothelite controversy that affected the whole of the Christian church in the 7th century. Bede reports on the Synod of Hatfield in 680, the council where the English bishops affirmed the orthodox position regarding the two wills of Christ, in order to report their position back to Rome.

But Bede is incredibly concerned about the pursuit of uniformity in practice, and that is a much greater theme in the History. The Monothelite controversy is hardly mentioned compared to the real bees in Bede’s bonnet, which are the dating of Easter and the shape of monastic tonsures.

His disdain for the deviant practices of the British (what we might call Welsh) and the Irish churches runs throughout. He views the Irish Christians a bit more favourably, because they regularly sent missionaries to the various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and some of Bede’s great heroes, like Adamnan, Aidan, and Columba came from the Irish churches. He has no such patience for the British! He can’t stand that they refuse to accept the Catholic Easter, or the Catholic tonsure, and he holds against them still that the British Christians refused to send missionaries to the Anglo-Saxon incomers in the 5th century.

We’re downstream of the Reformation, the Peace of Westphalia, and (in the Anglosphere) the Act of Toleration of 1689. We’re used to a wide variation of practice, to the extent that a strong insistence on uniformity of practice is quite off-putting, perhaps even a red-flag of a disturbed mind. The same could be said for our attitudes to doctrinal uniformity.

But part of the benefit of reading old books is that they expose your assumptions simply by not sharing them.

Would I be bothered if another Baptist church celebrated Easter in a different week? For instance, the elders in that church decided that there was biblical support for the Julian calendar instead of the Gregorian? Or if they changed it in order to appease the consciences of a new minority of Eastern Orthodox believers who are attending the church?

I probably wouldn’t be bothered, because I’m not persuaded that we have to celebrate Easter at all — it’s nowhere commanded in Scripture. But should I be bothered? First of all about the celebration of Easter, secondly about such an easy acceptance of a variation of practice?

Carl Trueman posed a question about the difference in priority between the church’s didactic and doctrinal emphases in the 4th century and today:

“Ask yourself this: if my church put on a conference about how to have a great Christian marriage and fulfilled sex life, would more or fewer people attend than if we did one on the importance of the incarnation or the Trinity? The answer to that question allows an interesting comparison between the priorities of the church today and that of the fourth and fifth centuries.”

Carl Trueman, The Creedal Inperative (Wheaton: Crossway, 2011), 37.

Trueman’s point is — and in the wider context of his book, this is really key — that a deep connection to the history of the church, especially as expressed in the creeds and confessions, roots us in the life of the church before ourselves, and offer a corrective against the myopia and the elitism-of-chronology that is so characteristic of our age. Connection to the history of the church relativises our concerns, by showing that our highest priority was not always considered to be so, even by Christians who loved the Lord as much as or more than ourselves.

None of this is to say that Bede was right about tonsures. For all the historical perspective I’ve gained, I still feel pretty comfortable in my conviction that haircuts are no cause for Christian fissiparousness. But it is to say that I’m less comfortable than I was in dismissing concerns for uniformity as a red-flag. And I admit: Baptists are especially poor on this. The faintest gesture towards uniformity is likely to be taken as an assault on congregational autonomy. The monepiscopal structure of the Western church in Bede’s day was well enough established that the phrase ‘congregational autonomy’ would sound like rank nonsense to him — as nonsensical as the striving for a single liturgical practice and one monastic hairstyle from Galway to Galatia sounds to us.

This exposure to the priorities and emphases of the English church in the 8th century has provoked in me an unsettling question: is my casual appeal to conscience, liberty, and religious tolerance more a product of my context than of the Bible and the historic faith? Is the old trope about being boring if we were all the same just that — an old trope, the bogeyman of Conformity that we were taught so thoroughly to detest as we grew up after the rise of counter-culture?

I need to go and think about this more.

I repeat: read old books.