What If We’re Still in the Early Church? A TNT on Whether Religion Gets to Evolve

Bo sent me a meme. That’s the whole setup. An account called Reasoned Reality posting “seven core Christian doctrines invented after Christ died, and the church wrote down the exact dates” — Trinity 325, original sin with Augustine, Anselm in 1098, inerrancy in a Chicago hotel in 1978, the rapture with Darby in the 1830s. I didn’t text him back that night because I was writing notes. Here’s the thing: the premise is right and the execution is a slander. Doctrines do develop. But when you put a date on something and act like it came out of nowhere, you’re announcing you haven’t read it. If evangelicals want to be liberal theologians, be real ones — von Harnack has nine volumes on the history of dogma, agrees the thing evolved, and actually understands why. So we spent the hour on whether religion is allowed to evolve, which turns out to have a whole typology of answers from people with Saint in front of their name. Plus: Bo’s springs metaphor for contextual theology and the postcolonial critique that’s made him rethink it, the LDS question in a town that’s seven-out-of-nine Mormon at one high school, the guy who told Bo that feeding people without praying first makes it filthy rags, and the golf round where Bo asked a retired CMA pastor what good taking the Bible seriously does if you end up at Trump. It got quiet after that.

Highlights from the conversation

What’s actually wrong with the meme. The Trinity is the consensus answer to a long series of questions the New Testament leaves open, argued in philosophical terms not native to the text — which is interesting, not damning. Original sin isn’t hard to imagine once you’ve got Paul’s all died in Adam, all made alive in Christ, a Neoplatonist reading it, a bishop reflecting on his own finitude, and a Donatist controversy demanding pure leaders for valid sacraments. In that context it’s excellent pastoral theology. And Anselm is the exact inverse of the meme’s claim: Cur Deus Homo is an argument against punishment. Satisfaction is a limiting principle on Norman-style revenge. Tripp’s line: if you’re going to put reason and reality in your handle, use your reason and read the history, and maybe don’t bear false witness against Augustine and Anselm — a fairly minimal guide. Also worth noticing: three doctrines from the early church get lumped in with young-earth creationism and biblical inerrancy as if they’re the same phenomenon.
Bo’s springs, and the postcolonial problem. Bo wrote his master’s thesis on contextual theology with Randy Woodley, and his working metaphor is the ten springs at Saratoga: the same water bubbling up from a thousand years ago, picking up different minerals depending on the soil — some sulfur, some iron, some hot, some cold. He prefers it to the seed metaphor, because corn doesn’t take on the characteristics of the soil. Then he had coffee with Randy and Edith Woodley and learned that postcolonial conversation has moved on — contextualization is now read as a colonial project. Tripp’s unpacking, via Spivak: it’s worlding. You arrive, get the indigenous tour, draw a map inscribing new names and new boundaries and new senses of what matters, hand it back, and say look what I made you. The colonizer’s gospel remains the engine encountering the culture.
Does God evolve? Does religion? Tripp’s answer to the first: I hope so. To the second: obviously, and that doesn’t make it good. Things evolve that are fit for a moment and are also perversions — Christianity that turns the eschatological horizon into a technological one, or weds the kingdom to the expansion of markets. But the alternative is worse. Either the gospel is identical with its earliest form, which isn’t the one that’s around, and it dies with the age that birthed it — or there’s something potentially present across historical forms and contexts, and the question becomes what gets selected for and what fidelity looks like. Notice how many arguments are really about when the one true completed final form arrived, so it can be leveraged over everything else. Also: you have a New Testament, which implies there was one already. And the disciples get told by Paul and the Spirit that they’re wrong, and change their minds. You can call that anything you like.
The typology of how Christianity changes. The part Tripp wrote down at midnight. Gregory of Nazianzus: revelation unfolds in stages — Father in the covenant with Israel, Son in the incarnation, Spirit in the church’s ongoing discernment — so the Trinity is an organic unfolding with continuity built in. Augustine: heresies function as occasions that force the church to articulate what hadn’t yet been named precisely, and implicit faith trusts what will eventually be fully known. Aquinas: the articles of faith increase in explicitness over time while the substance is unchanged. The Reformers: reclaiming the gospel means contesting what accrued — which immediately fractures into whether the Reformation went far enough, whether it kept sacraments Jesus didn’t institute, whether it preserved the ecclesiastical structure that undermined the gospel it recovered.
What if we’re still in the early church? Tripp’s three constructive moves. One: a living tradition evolves, and a dead one has a neurotic fixation on the past — and every dogma is simultaneously the end of one dispute and the inauguration of a whole new set of conflicts. Two: living traditions require release of past forms, which looks like betrayal to some and fidelity to the Spirit to others. Three, the one that made Bo sit up: change in Christian theology isn’t justified retrospectively but projectively. The teleological horizon of dogmatic evolution is the eschaton. Behold, I make all things new. The fullness of anything isn’t understood until its end, which means the living tradition of Christianity is a sustained apocalypse, and openness isn’t betrayal — it’s a witness to a horizon revealed and not yet arrived. Bo’s reframe using Saussure: synchronic asks what a snapshot in time believed; diachronic asks how we came to believe it. And Tripp’s thought experiment — in 2,000 years, the church history class notes that in the early church they thought real fidelity was the tradwife.
The LDS problem, and the golf course. Bo has never lived somewhere with this much LDS presence (one local high school: seven of nine students), and he’s working through it in public. Grew up evangelical, where Mormonism was a cult you studied only to poke holes in. Now his four tiny mainline congregations see LDS neighbors as fellow Christians and partners, while the big conservative churches don’t — except that when Bo listens to ex-Mormons in his church’s religious trauma recovery group, it gets complicated. His landing place: contextually, a uniquely American expression of a kind of Christianity, and also you don’t have to be a Christian; be a good Buddhist, a good Jew, a good Mormon. Tripp’s addition from LA, where evangelicals wouldn’t partner with Mormons or Scientologists on homeless veterans because the money was tainted. Plus the man who told Bo that Everybody Eats — the only free lunch in town where you don’t have to sit through a sermon — counts against them, because works not done in Jesus’s name are filthy rags. Which Bo later discovered isn’t Paul at all. It’s Isaiah 64:6. And Paul, as it happens, spends real energy pressuring his churches to feed a Jerusalem church that thinks he’s a heretic, and telling wealthy Corinthians not to eat before the working poor arrive.

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