Tugwell on the Apostolic Fathers

From 'Ways of Imperfection' by Simon Tugwell 

The church has known many different moods in the course of her history.  Sometimes she appears to be very confident of herself and of the value of her message, sometimes she seems rather to be a bit confused and unsure of herself;  sometimes she boldly tells everyone exactly what they ought to be doing, sometimes she gives the impression of groping in the darkness.  And it is not necessarily in her ‘'best' moments, when she is most confident and clear, that she is most true to herself.  There is a kind of unsatisfactoriness written into her very constitution, because she is only a transitional organisation, keeping people and preparing them for a new creation, in which God will be all and in all, and every tear will be wiped away. When she speaks too securely, she may obscure the fact that her essential business is with ‘'what no eye has seen, no ear has heard, nor has it entered the heart of man' . The blunt truth is, as St John says, that ‘'we have not yet been shown what we shall be’. A time of confusion like our own, when people become disillusioned with the church and with christianity, should be a salutary, educative time, when we face the facts.

Christianity has to be disappointing, precisely because it is not a mechanism for accomplishing all our human ambitions and aspirations, it is a mechanism for subjecting all things to the will of God. The first disciples were disappointed because Jesus turned out not to be the kind of Messiah they wanted. Even after the resurrection St Luke shows us how the apostles were still dreaming of a political restoration of the kingdom of lsrael. They had to be disappointed.  When people turn away from the church, because they find more satisfaction elsewhere, it is important not to assume that we, as christians, ought to be providing such satisfaction ourselves; it is much more urgent that we take yet another look at just what it is that we have genuinely been given in the church. We may indeed say that christianity does direct us towards the fulfilment of all our desires and hopes; but we shall only say this correctly if we understand it to mean that a great many of the desires and hopes we are conscious of will eventually turn out to be foolish and misconceived.

It is God who knows how to make us happy, better than we know ourselves. Christianity necessarily involves a remaking of our hopes. And our disappointments are an unavoidable part of the process.